The man said dully to his hysterical daughter, “Davi, you go with these people. Be a brave girl.”
“No!” she shrieked. “They scare me!”
Clement jerked the girl out of the man’s grip, and handed her, flailing and screaming, to the soldier behind her. The father uttered a shout and flung himself after her. A sharp crack on the head, and he fell. The old woman, released, cried bitterly, “We will never forget this!”
Out in the yard, which was crowded with war horses, they dumped the screaming child into the closed wagon, where her cries revived those of the other children previously snatched from other farms where other farmers had offered the same outraged, disbelieving resistance. It had become a routine. So far Clement had managed to convince the families of her seriousness without killing anyone. In Sainna, the parents would have begged her to take the children so they’d have one less mouth to feed.
“That’s fourteen kids,” said the sergeant in charge of guarding the wagon.
“Mount up,” said Clement.
“Mount up!” cried the captain, and the signal-man led the way, with his lantern.
It was a gorgeous, soft night: Spring’s swift bloom had given way to summer; winter’s bitter winds and drifting snow were nearly impossible to remember now. Stars crowded the sky, and Clement could almost imagine what the Shaftali found to love in this unforgiving land. The children’s muffled cries settled to whimpers, and Clement could hear bird calls, and a din of frogs at the pond they were passing. She pretended to herself that she was serene enough to appreciate this lovely ride. Forty children for forty dead soldiers: a grueling night.
She had let the people of Watfield and the surrounding countryside wait for retribution. Immediately after the fire, the local Paladins had been mustered, and for a long time had hovered just outside the city, where they made themselves a nuisance by interfering with lumber deliveries. Occasionally, Ellid, to boost morale, had sent out a company of angry soldiers to fight with them. When Cadmar, Gilly, and a select company of soldiers had ridden out to begin the tour of the garrisons, they reportedly had enjoyed a brisk clash of arms as they passed through the Paladins’ perimeter. Now, nearly a month after the fire, the Paladin alert had relaxed. That night, Clement and her detachment had slipped out of the city unnoticed, and so far had done their work unhindered.
Clement could not predict how long it would take for the Paladins to converge on them, or how much the presence of children would inhibit them from attacking. The attackers would probably try to force the soldiers to abandon the wagon, and Clement had trained the detachment accordingly. The soldiers had enjoyed the play-acting, which was easier and more interesting than clearing rubble. Clement had needed the distraction, for she felt that she lived in the shadow of doom, and Gilly was not there to jolt her out of the dark mood with his acerbic commentary.
They rode into an empty farmstead. The soldiers searched the house and reported bed-covers flung back and clothing tossed about. After they were on the road again, the captain rode up beside Clement and said, “I suppose there’s a farmer galloping ahead of us on a fast horse.”
In the past, farmers could have warned their neighbors or summoned help using bells that were hit with iron poles, but they had long since been broken of that habit by Sainnite retribution. Clement said, “Farmers don’t have fast horses. They’re probably running from farm to farm in relay. Let’s hurry our pace, skip a couple of farms, and see if we can get ahead of the alarm again.”
By this method, Clement’s detachment managed to acquire a couple of more children, but then they found only empty beds again.
“Signal fire,” the captain said in disgust.
Clement had also noticed light flaring on a hilltop, and knew that soon several more scattered hilltops would be aflame. “Return to Watfield,” she said. “Quickly. No need to spare the horses now. And let’s hope no one in town notices the signals.”
In the city, her soldiers broke down the doors of two and even three houses at once. Even though Clement insisted that they take only one child from each household, the total quickly mounted by ten, fifteen, twenty more children before the forewarned parents began hiding their children from the soldiers in cellars, woodsheds, and attics. The soldiers, forced to extricate cowering, hysterical children from dark and cluttered places while holding back and sometimes fighting desperate parents, began to lose their tempers. Clement, supervising from the street, heard reports of blood spilled, of a child injured. She listened to the city rousing: dogs barked as a ripple of door pounding and warning shouts spread down the streets from her operation. “How many recruits do we have?” she asked the sergeant in charge of guarding the wagon.
“Recruits!” He laughed as though he thought she was joking. “Thirty-six.”
“Close enough to forty. Signal-man! Retreat to garrison!”
The night was no longer quiet. From the water gate Clement could see a distant beacon, its flames subsiding now but still bright in the distance. The roused city echoed with the angry clangor of pots being banged. A mob had gathered at the garrison gate, and all watches had been mustered to guard the wall. Periodically, Ellid’s bugler sounded a signal, which received an orderly answer from each of the scattered companies. The signals told Clement that there had been some few skirmishes, but so far no emergencies.
Clement was feeling very tired. The signal-man told her the time; soon dawn light would start to extinguish the stars. Clement rubbed her face vigorously and shouted at the stable sergeant, “How long does it take to change horses?”
“It’s hard to get the harnesses buckled in the dark, lieutenant-general,” he said apologetically.
At last, the fresh horses were in their traces, and they were led down the ramp onto the barge, pulling the wagon load of children behind them. The wheels were secured. As the wagon swayed with the movements of the water, Clement could hear children whimpering again. They would quickly learn not to cry, just as Clement had, when her soldier-mother came to take her away from the only home she had known.
The barge was loose; the dray horses on shore leaned into the traces. Clement watched until the barge had been towed through the water gate and was picked up by the river’s sluggish current. It would reach a garrison down river by mid-afternoon, and from there the wagon would travel to the children’s garrison. She turned away, sighing with relief. Her operation had been a success.
Some six days later, the gate remained blocked by a restless crowd that banged their pots and uttered ugly shouts every time the garrison bell rang. Food supplies came in by the water gate, but three times, Paladins had cut barges loose from their tow-horses to be carried away and eventually wrecked by the slow current. Now, as far away as the western borders, lumber mills refused to sell at any price if they suspected the lumber was going to Watfield garrison.
“We can’t manage without wood!” In a temper, Commander Ellid paced Cadmar’s quarters, stepping over and around the clutter of sleeping pallets and gear. Most of the garrison’s officers were sleeping in Cadmar’s quarters at night; four companies slept in shifts in the hallways, and Clement slept with half a company in her own room, while another half occupied it in the daytime. Since the fire, solitude could only be found out of doors.
Clement got up from Cadmar’s table, where she had been going over the duty roster, and took Gilly’s book of maps from its shelf. “We’ll send a company from another garrison to take over a lumber mill,” she said. “Show me where the wood is coming from.”
They discussed logistics, and Clement wrote an order in her own hand, which she had done a lot of lately. The harried company clerk arrived, mixed a fresh bottle of ink and trimmed several pens, and left again with a sheaf of paper under his arm. He was not doing duty as a scribe anymore, for he was the only person in the garrison who could cipher well enough to produce reliable measurements for the building plans. “No workers,” grumbled Ellid, still in a temper. “No materials, no facilities, no plans—” The
door opened to admit an aide carrying a tray. “—no edible food!”
Clement glanced at the unappetizing mess the aide set down on the table. There was a distinct smell of scorched potatoes.
Ellid continued, “And in these conditions I’m to rebuild a garrison in three months time? I can predict now that we’re spending the winter without a roof over our heads.”
Clement said, “I would apologize that my operation has made yours more difficult, but since there’s been no more rocket attacks, it seems justified.”
“You did what you had to, lieutenant-general.” Ellid sat down to stir a spoon in what passed for stew, then picked up a lump of bread instead, with no butter, of course. “No kitchen,” she muttered. “But my old cook would have managed, by the gods!”
Clement hacked open a lump of bread and dropped brick-hard pieces into the watery stew to soften. She was weary of other people’s complaints. Even in the garden, where she worked sometimes to repair the damaged beds and coax the summer flowers into bloom, her fellow gardeners could be heard whining to each other.
“No information?” asked Ellid after a while. Perhaps it had occurred to her that Clement, also experiencing her share of difficulties, had no one to complain to.
“No information,” Clement said. “No one in Watfield admits to knowing anything about the rocketeers. No one claimed the bodies. The Paladins themselves were taken by surprise; that’s all I’m certain of. It took an entire day for them to muster. If they’d known about the attack beforehand, they would have mustered already.”
Side-by-side, they forced themselves to eat the wretched stew. Ellid finally said, “Better an old enemy than a new one, eh? At least we can anticipate the Paladins most of the time. But these rocketeers, they’re a different kind of people. Do you remember, when we first came here, how angry we used to get because these people didn’t fight like we expected them to?”
“I was nine years old,” Clement said. “But I remember my mother was pretty outraged. That was a strange time.”
“In Sainna, soldiers fought soldiers. Same tactics, same style.”
“Well, we’re never going back to Sainna, are we? Even if the wars are over in that country, no one would be glad to see us return. After thirty years in exile we’d look like an invading force to them.”
“The wars were never over in Sainna.” Ellid lapsed into a silence, perhaps reflecting gloomily, as Clement was, on their equally untenable situation in Shaftal.
Their silence was interrupted by a gate guard sent to fetch Clement. “A group of gray-hairs want to talk to someone about the children. They want to negotiate their return, they say.”
“You can’t go down there, lieutenant-general,” said the gate captain. “They’ll tear you apart, and it’ll be on my head.”
From the watch tower, Clement surveyed the surly crowd below. She saw people in neat, close-fitting clothing that advertised their leisure and prosperity. She saw laborers in longshirts and breeches with padded knees. She saw young people flirting or playing games of dice, and she saw old people who had brought chairs to sit in. Many of the people waved strips of white cloth on which were painted messages no one on the wall could have read. Baskets of bread were being passed overhead, from hand to hand. Clement caught a whiff of it, and watched with ravenous fascination as a man took a steaming loaf and tore it into pieces to distribute to his friends.
Clement could see no children. Most of the old people appeared to have gathered close to the gate. The siege gate was still closed, and no one could see in, so the people below looked up at the towers. “Lower a ladder,” Clement said.
“Lieutenant-general!” the captain protested.
She gave him a look, and he turned briskly away to shout commands. She stripped off her weapons and insignias, and, when the ladder was lowered, climbed quickly down. Someone threw a turnip at her, but with shouts and shoving the crowd seemed to get its hotheads under control. Clement set foot on stone, and turned to find herself surrounded by old people, who showed no sign of being disconcerted by her arrival in their midst. “What’s your rank?” asked one, and another said, “Do you speak our language?”
“I’m told I speak it perfectly,” said Clement. One of the three people closest to her looked uncomfortably familiar. A painted strip of cloth was wrapped around her neck and hung down the front of her shirt—a farmer’s work shirt, extravagantly gathered at the shoulders to allow free movement of the arms. The old woman said to the others, “This is the one who took our children. She’s an officer.”
There was a silence. The crowd surged, but then subsided. An old man said, “It was a stupid thing to do.”
“So was burning the garrison,” said Clement.
“Our children had nothing to do with that!”
“I was told you wanted to negotiate,” Clement said impatiently. But someone had already jabbed the man with an elbow.
The woman said, “You look famished. Would you like some bread?” She waved a hand in the air and one of the baskets of bread made a swift journey to them. Somehow, though Clement meant to refuse, she had half a loaf in her hand. One bite, she instructed herself, but could not make herself stop before three.
These were very canny people. “The children,” she said to them, “Are no longer here.”
“What!” they cried.
“They haven’t been here for six days. Shout their names and bang your pans all you want; they can’t hear you.”
“Where are they?”
Clement leaned against the ladder, with one arm wrapped casually around a rung. These people might not realize it, but the soldiers above were poised to raise the ladder, with her on it. She took another bite of the excellent bread. “What will you offer?”
“Take us instead.” The woman gestured at the crowd of gray heads.
It was the second time this old woman had offered herself in place of the child. And it revealed just how little she and her fellow Shaftali understood the Sainnites, for it had not even occurred to them that the children might be more than mere hostages. Clement replied, “I’ll trade for the rocketeers. One child for useful information. One child for every rocketeer, delivered to us alive.”
“They are children!” said one of the people in disbelief. “They are not weights on a scale. They are children!”
“They are weights on a scale as far as we are concerned. Is that all you have to tell me?”
The woman said with unconcealed frustration, “We can’t just deliver these people to you! We don’t even know who they were! One market day, they were in the crowd: strangers, loudmouths with strange ideas. A few days later, your garrison was attacked. That’s all anyone knows.”
“Oh, I doubt it,” Clement said. “Well, I appreciate you making this effort to meet with me.” The impatient man uttered a sardonic snort and was jabbed with an elbow again. “If anyone wants to talk again, you can ask for me by name—it’s Clement.”
She started up the ladder, but paused to add over her shoulder, “Maybe you’d better clear the gate. We don’t really want to shoot you, but we will if we must.”
The mob began banging their pans again, and continued long after Clement had safety reached the tower. The remains of her loaf was distributed to the guard, one bite at a time, as long as it lasted. Clement wished she had managed to bring up the entire basket.
Whatever impression Clement had made on the townsfolk, there was no particular result. The crowd at the gate did not dissipate. Everyone in the city now seemed to be wearing those printed strips of cloth. No one came to the gate asking to talk to her. Perhaps no one actually knew anything useful about the garrison’s attackers, but it seemed more likely that no one was willing to be publicly identified as a traitor.
A message from Purnal, who commanded the children’s garrison, eventually arrived. It confirmed the safe delivery of the children, then lapsed into one of his lengthy vituperations, full of dire predictions of what would become of the Sainnites now they had be
come baby thieves. “What idiot dreamed up this bizarre plan?” he wrote. “Did anyone even try to think of what might result?” She only read the one page of his jagged, angry handwriting, and then threw the entire missive into the fire. Cadmar had always done the same with anything that came from Purnal, while commenting that Purnal’s brains were in his leg—the one that had been cut off.
Chapter 9
All that remained of the spring’s plague was a flea in a bottle, which Zanja chanced upon one day, in the bottom of a clothes chest, underneath a pile of winter clothing that she was layering with strewing herbs to keep away the moths. Hard red wax sealed the cork, but the flea hopped vigorously in its prison. Karis never mentioned the flea, and Zanja never asked about it.
Winter snow had barricaded the household, but now the scattered neighbors regularly came calling, and the road that could be glimpsed from the apple orchard had become a busy thoroughfare. Karis worked long days at the forge with two local youths who served as her casual apprentices. Emil and Norina wandered Shaftal, J’han remained deep in the south with the Juras. Medric read books and wrote letters all night, and slept during the day. Leeba spent entire mornings or afternoons with her friends. It was quiet.
Early in the summer, Zanja, Karis and Leeba traveled to a fair in the nearby town. A company of players performed one drama after another, shouting their lines over the hubbub of hucksters, jugglers, musicians, and peddlers. Leeba spent her pennies on exotic candies that she immediately gobbled up, and ran wild with a giddy mob of her friends. In the tavern, people who rarely traveled to town lined up to stand drinks for Karis and ask for advice, having brought with them the evidence of their difficulties: withered leaves, unsprouted seeds, underweight babies, the mummified remains of aborted livestock, fistfuls of soil, vials of water, examples of weeds that they could not eradicate. As Karis listened, considered, talked, and politely took an occasional small sip from her constantly refilled cup, Zanja ingratiated herself into a group of traveling merchants who had left their stalls to the care of their underlings, and had come in to escape the heat.
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