Seasons of War

by Abraham Daniel

  As dawn touched the eastern skyline, Balasar put on his uniform and walked among the men. The morning’s cook fires smoked, filling the air with the scents of burning grass and wood and coal filched from the steam wagons, hot grease and wheat cakes and kafe. Captains and footmen, archers and carters, Balasar greeted them all with a smile and considered them with approving nods or small frowns. When a man lifted half a wheat cake to him, Balasar took it with thanks and squatted down beside the cook to blow it cool and eat it. Every man he met, he had made rich. Every man in the camp would stand before him on the battle lines, and only a few, he hoped, would walk behind him in his dream.

  Sinja Ajutani’s camp was enfolded within the greater army’s but still separate from it, like the Baktan Quarter in Acton. A city within a city, a camp within a camp. The greeting he found here was less warm. The respect he saw in these dark, almond eyes was touched with fear. Perhaps hatred. But no mistake, it was still respect.

  Sinja himself was sitting on a fallen log, shirtless, with a bit of silver mirror in one hand and a blade in the other. He looked up as Balasar came close, made his salute, and returned to shaving. Balasar sat beside him.

  ‘We break camp soon,’ Balasar said. ‘I’ll want ten of your men to ride with the scouting parties today.’

  ‘Expecting to find people to question?’ Sinja asked. There was no rancor in his voice.

  ‘This close to the river, I can hope so.’

  ‘They’ll know we’re coming. Refugees move faster than armies. The first news of Nantani likely reached them two, maybe three weeks ago.’

  ‘Then perhaps they’ll send someone here to speak for them,’ Balasar said. Sinja seemed to consider this as he pressed the blade against his own throat. There were scars on the man’s arms and chest - long raised lines of white.

  ‘Would you prefer I ride with the scouts, or stay close to the camp and wait for an emissary?’

  ‘Close to camp,’ Balasar said. ‘The men you choose for scouting should speak my language well, though. I don’t want to miss anything that would help us do this cleanly.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Sinja said, and put the knife to his own throat again. Before Balasar could go on, he heard his own name called out. A boy no older than fourteen summers wearing the colors of the second legion came barreling into the camp. His face was flushed from running, his breath short. Balasar stood and accepted the boy’s salute. In the corner of his eye, he saw Sinja put away knife and mirror and reach for his shirt.

  ‘General Gice, sir,’ the boy said between gasps. ‘Captain Tevor sent me. We’ve lost one of the hunting parties, sir.’

  ‘Well, they’ll have to catch up with us as best they can,’ Balasar said. ‘We don’t have time for searching.’

  ‘No, sir. They aren’t missing, sir. They’re killed.’

  Balasar felt a grotesque recognition. The other men in his dream. This was where they’d come from.

  ‘Show me,’ he said.

  The trap had been sprung in a clearing at the end of a game trail. Crossbow bolts had taken half a dozen of the men. The others were marked with sword and axe blows. Their armor and robes had been stripped from them. Their weapons were gone. Balasar stepped through the low grass cropped by deer and considered each face.

  The songs and epics told of warriors dying with lips curled in battle cry, but every dead man Balasar had ever seen looked at peace. However badly they had died, their bodies surrendered at the end, and the calm he saw in those dead eyes seemed to say that their work was done now. Like a man playing at tiles who has turned his mark and now sat back to ask Balasar what he would do to match it.

  ‘Are there no other bodies?’ he asked.

  Captain Tevor, at his elbow, shook his great woolly head.

  ‘There’s signs that our boys did them harm, sir, but they took their dead with them. It wasn’t all fast, sir. This one here, there’s burn marks on him, and you can see on his wrists where they bound him up. Asked him what he knew, I expect.’

  Sinja knelt, touching the dead man’s wounds as if making sure they were real.

  ‘I have a priest in my company,’ Captain Tevor said. ‘One of the archers. I can have him say a few words. We’ll bury them here and catch up with the main body tomorrow, sir.’

  ‘They’re coming with us,’ Balasar said.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Bring a pallet and a horse. I want these bodies pulled through the camp. I want every man in the army to see them. Then wrap them in shrouds and pack them in ashes. We’ll bury them in the ruins of Udun with the Khai’s skull to mark their place.’

  Captain Tevor made his salute, and it wasn’t Balasar’s imagination that put the tear in the old man’s eye. As Tevor barked out the orders to the men who had come with them, Sinja stood and brushed his palms against each other. A smear of old blood darkened the back of the captain’s hand. Balasar read the disapproval in the passionless eyes, but neither man spoke.

  The effect on the men was unmistakable. The sense of gloating, of leisure, vanished. The tents were pitched, the wagons loaded and ready, the soldiers straining against time itself to close the distance between where they now stood and Udun. Three of his captains asked permission to send out parties. Hunting parties still, but only in part searching for game. Balasar gave each of them his blessing. The dream of the desert didn’t return, but he had no doubt that it would.

  In the days that followed, he felt keenly the loss of Eustin. Somewhere to the west, Pathai was falling or had fallen. The school with its young poets was burning, or would burn. And through those conflagrations, Eustin rode. Balasar spent his days riding among his men, talking, planning, setting the example he wished them all to follow, and he felt the absence of Eustin’s dry pessimism and distrust. The fervor he saw here was a different beast. The men here looked to him as something besides a man. They had never seen him weep over Little Ott’s body or call out into the dry, malign desert air for Kellem. To this army, he was General Gice. They might be prepared to kill or die at his word, but they did not know him. It was, he supposed, the difference between faith and loyalty. He found faith isolating. And it was in this sense of being alone among many that the messenger from Sinja Ajutani found him.

  The day’s travel was done, and they had made good time again. His outriders had made contact with local forces twice - farm boys with rabbit bows and sewn leather armor - and had done well each time. The wells in the low towns had been fouled, but the river ran clean enough. Another two days, three at the most, and they would reach Udun. In the meantime, the sunset was beautiful and birdsong filled the evening air. Balasar rested beneath the wide, thick branches of a cottonwood, flat bread and chicken still hot from the fires on a metal field plate by his side, their scents mixing with those of the rich earth and the river’s damp. The man standing before him, hands flat at his sides, looked no more than seventeen summers, but Balasar knew himself a poor judge of ages among these people. He might have been fifteen, he might have been twenty. When he spoke, his Galtic was heavily inflected.

  ‘General Gice,’ the boy said. ‘Captain Ajutani would like a word with you, if it is acceptable to your will.’

  Balasar sat forward.

  ‘He could come himself,’ Balasar said. ‘He has before. Why not now?’

  The messenger boy’s lips went tight, his dark eyes fixed straight ahead. It was anger the boy was controlling.

  ‘Something’s happened,’ Balasar said. ‘Something’s happened to one of yours.’

  ‘Sir,’ the boy said.

  Balasar took a regretful look at the chicken, then rose to his feet.

  ‘Take me to Captain Ajutani,’ Balasar said.

  Their path ended at the medical tent. The messenger waited outside when Balasar ducked through the flap and entered. The thick canvas reeked with concentrated vinegar and pine pitch. The medic stood over a low cot where a man lay naked and bloody. One of Sinja’s men. The captain himself stood against the tent’s center pole, arms folded. Ba
lasar stepped forward, taking in the patient’s wounds with a practiced eye. Two parallel cuts on the ribs, shallow but long. Cuts on the hands and arms where the boy had tried to ward off the blades. Skinned knuckles where he’d struck out at someone. Balasar caught the medic’s eye and nodded to the man.

  ‘No broken bones, sir,’ the medic said. ‘One finger needed sewing, and there’ll be scars, but so long as we keep the wounds from festering, he should be fine.’

  ‘What happened?’ Balasar asked.

  ‘I found him by the river,’ Sinja said. ‘I brought him here.’

  Balasar heard the coolness in Sinja’s voice, judged the tension in his face and shoulders. He steeled himself.

  ‘Come, then,’ Balasar said as he lifted open the tent’s wide flap, ‘eat with me and you can tell me what happened.’

  ‘No need, General. It’s a short enough story. Coya here can’t speak Galtic. There’s been footmen from the fourth legion following him for days now. At first it was just mocking, and I didn’t think it worth concern.’

  ‘You have names? Proof that they did this?’

  ‘They’re bragging about it, sir,’ Sinja said.

  Sinja looked down at the wounded man. The boy looked up at him. The dark eyes were calm, perhaps defiant. Balasar sighed and knelt beside the low cot.

  ‘Coya-cha?’ he said in the boy’s own language. ‘I want you to rest. I’ll see the men who did this disciplined.’

  The wounded hands took a pose that declined the offer.

  ‘It isn’t a favor to you,’ Balasar said. ‘My men don’t treat one another this way. As long as you march with me, you are my soldier, whatever tongues you speak. I’ll be sure they understand it’s my wrath they’re feeling, and not yours.’

  ‘Your dead men are the problem, sir,’ Sinja said, switching the conversation back to Galtic.

  The medic coughed once, then discreetly stepped to the far side of the tent. Balasar folded his hands and nodded to Sinja that he should continue. The mercenary sucked his teeth and spat.

  ‘Your men are angry. Having those shrouds along is like putting a burr under their saddles. They’re calling my men things they didn’t when this campaign began. And they act as if it were harmless and in fun, but it isn’t.’

  ‘I’ll see your men aren’t attacked again, Sinja. You have my word on it.’

  ‘It’s not just that, sir. You’re sowing anger. Yes, it keeps them traveling faster, and I respect that. But once we reach Udun and Utani, they’re going to have their blood up. It’s easier for ten thousand soldiers to defeat a hundred thousand tradesmen if the tradesmen don’t think defeat means being beaten to death for sport. And a bad sack can burn in resentments that last for lifetimes. All respect, those cities are as good as taken, and we both know it. There’s no call to make this worse than it has to be.’

  ‘I should be careful?’ Balasar said. ‘Move slowly, and let the cities fall gently?’

  ‘You said before you wanted this done clean.’

  ‘Yes. Before. I said that before.’

  ‘They’re going to be your cities,’ Sinja said doggedly as a man swimming against the tide. ‘There’s more to think about than how to capture them. It’s my guess Galt’s going to be ruling these places for a long time. The less the people have to forget, the easier that rule’s going to be.’

  ‘I don’t care about holding them,’ Balasar said. ‘There are too many to guard, and once the rest of the world scents blood, it’s going to be chaos anyway. This war isn’t about finding ways for the High Council to appoint more mayors.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘We are carrying the dead because they are my dead.’ Balasar kept his voice calm, his manner matter-of-fact. The trembling in his hands was too slight to be seen. ‘And I haven’t come to conquer the Khaiem, Captain Ajutani. I’ve come to destroy them.’

  The first refugees appeared when Otah’s little army was still three days’ march from the village of the Dai-kvo. They were few and scattered in the morning, and then more and larger groups toward the day’s end. The stories they told Otah were the same. Ships had come to Yalakeht - warships loaded heavy with Galtic soldiers. Some of the ships were merchant vessels that had been on trade runs to Chaburi-Tan. Others were unfamiliar. The harbor master had tried to refuse them berths, but a force of men had come from the warehouse district and taken control of the seafront. By the time the Khai had gathered a force to drive them back, it was too late. Yalakeht had fallen. Any hope that Otah’s army might be on a fool’s errand ended with that news.

  In the night, more men came, drawn by the light and scent of the army’s cook fires. Otah saw that they were welcomed, and the tale grew. Boats had been waiting, half assembled, in the warehouses of Galtic merchants in Yalakeht. Great metal boilers ran paddle wheels, and pushed their wide, shallow boats upriver faster than oxen could pull. Boats loaded with men and steam wagons. The low towns nearest Yalakeht had been overrun. Another force had been following along the shore, hauling food and supplies. The soldiers themselves had sped for the Dai-kvo. Just as Otah had feared they would.

  Otah sat in his tent and listened to the cicadas. They sang as if nothing was changing. As if the world was as it had always been. A breeze blew from the south, heavy with the smell of rain though the clouds were still few and distant. Trees nodded their branches to one another. Otah kept his back to the fire and stared out at darkness.

  There was no way to know whether the Galtic army had reached the village yet. Perhaps the Dai-kvo was preparing some defense, perhaps the village had been encircled and overrun. From the tales he’d heard, once the Galts and their steam wagons reached the good roads leading from the river to the village itself, they would be able to travel faster than news of them.

  It had been almost thirty years ago when Otah had traveled up that river carrying a message from Saraykeht. The memory of it was like something from a dream. There had been an older man - younger, likely, than Otah was now - who had run the boat with his daughter. They had never spoken of the girl’s mother, and Otah had never asked. That child daughter would be a woman now, likely with children of her own. Otah wondered what had become of her, wondered whether that half-recalled river girl was among those flying out of the storm into which he was heading, or if she had been in one of the towns that the army had destroyed.

  A polite scratch came at the door, his servant announcing himself. Otah called out his permission, and the door opened. He could see the silhouettes of Ashua Radaani and his other captains looming behind the servant boy’s formal pose.

  ‘Bring them in,’ Otah said. ‘And bring us wine. Wait. Watered wine.’

  The six men lumbered in. Otah welcomed them all with formal gravity. The fine hunting robes in which they had come out from Machi had been scraped clean of mud. The stubble had been shaved from their chins. From these small signs and from the tightness in their bodies, Otah knew they had all drawn the same conclusions he had. He stood while they folded themselves down to the cushion-strewn floor. Then, silently, Otah sat on his chair, looking down at these grown men, heads of their houses who through the years he had known them had been flushed with pride and self-assurance. The servant boy poured them each a bowl of equal parts wine and fresh water before ghosting silently out the door. Otah took a pose that opened the audience.

  ‘We will be meeting the Galts sometime in the next several days,’ Otah said. ‘I can’t say where or when, but it will be soon. And when the time comes, we won’t have time to plan our strategy. We have to do that now. Tonight. You have all brought your census?’

  Each man in turn took a scroll from his sleeve and laid it before him. The number of men, the weapons and armor, the horses and the bows and the numbers of arrows and bolts. The final tally of the strength they had managed. Otah looked down at the scrawled ink and hoped it would be enough.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Let’s begin.’

  None of them had ever been called upon to plan a battle before, but each
had an area of expertise. Where one knew of the tactics of hunting, another had had trade relations with the Wardens of the Westlands enough to speak of their habits and insights. Slowly they made their plans: What to do when the scouts first brought news of the Galts. Who should command the wedges of archers and cross-bowmen, who the footmen, who the horsemen. How they should protect their flanks, how to pull back the archers when the time came near for the others to engage. Their fingers sketched lines and movements on the floor, their voices rose, became heated, and grew calm again. The moon had traveled the width of six hands together before Otah declared the work finished. Orders were written, shifting men to different commands, specifying the shouted signals that would coordinate the battle, putting the next few uncertain days into the order they imagined for them. When the captains bowed and took their poses of farewell, the clouds had appeared and the first ticking raindrops were striking the canvas. Otah lay on his cot wrapped in blankets of soft wool, listening to the rain, and running through all that they had said. If it worked as they had planned, perhaps all would be well. In the darkness with his belly full of wine and his mind full of the confident words of his men, he could almost think there was hope.