by Ann Chatham
Seven my ghost counted; seven I cared not. Once, maybe, but no longer.
We cannot fault each other our natures, the shaman had said. The truth of his words had followed me since, a haunt closer than my very heart. But he was gone, his short-lived Karthian Rebellion over. ‘Rebellion’, for the Empire twisted the tale after it failed to stop the story from spreading. Plenty still saw the truth—or the one that suited them best. But the distinction was pointless; they all fought the same never-ending fight. It was the only one there was.
Then steel sat cold against the back of my neck, a star resting one menacing point, threatening the entire weight of its bright glory against my vertebrae. But I was motionless beneath the steel, and only watched the flames, their warmth failing to distract me from the endless snow within.
“Arms out to the side, slow-like,” the voice behind the steel grunted. A boy’s voice.
My old ghost said to feign obedience, then shift sideways and back, grab the arrogant wrist, fling its owner over, tuck my arms under his throat, and laugh while his boots burned in the flames.
I did not have enough fire for such a commitment to life, but neither did I lift my arms to the side.
Four more boys rose from the grass’s darkness, camouflaged like it, faces covered with scarves, blades dull. I gazed between their eyes, and none held mine.
“All right, then,” the voice behind me growled, frustrated. “Don’t move.”
The blade remained poised while another boy, carefully watching me watch him, leaned down slowly and then like a snake snatched my pack away. He crossed the fire and emptied it. Food, blanket, kindling: each item—as few items as there were—they scrutinized with pretend authority, though clearly they did not know what they were looking for.
“Weapon?” another one asked him.
He shook his head.
“Search him.”
I stood.
“I did not tell you to move!”
I began removing my clothes.
“You think this is some game, old man? I’ll cut you down right where-”
“Shut it, Duryne.”
The speaker—their leader—watched from across the fire. I went down to my skin. The wind explored me like it used to and I held my arms out wide, welcoming its chill. I added my sigh to its own, like old lovers staring up at the ceiling of a darkened cave, wishing we could have done better.
A boy stooped and examined me, not quite willing to search with anything but his eyes.
“No knife,” he said. “Not even a damn stick.”
They looked at me, the flames’ fingers flicking across their hidden faces. Those same finger-flames revealed me entirely, yet still the boy-leader asked it.
“Who are you?”
His question rolled in my head until there it transcended, shifted, out of his nervous voice and into the ambassador’s—confident, and demanding.
“Who are you?”
She had no eyes for this freshly dead man at my feet—my first ‘gift’ to the Empire—or even for my silver-etched blade yet wet with his blood. She stepped over the body like it was a lump of earth, a thing that only the feet were left aware of; she had more important matters to deal with above the mud.
She stopped before me and waited while her robes, garishly bright and unfeeling as lacquered flowers, swayed still. She knew I heard her question. She knew the answer. But I had to say it.
“I am a servant of the Empire.”
The ambassador brought her smooth, straight fingers together, and her lips pressed down into a stretching smile.
“Who are you?” Duryne repeated, and I blinked back into the windswept hill.
Who was I? Half a dozen words or names or titles entered my mind, but my bloodless heart said all were wrong, and I had no answer.
“He is someone... different,” the boy-leader said for us all.
In another life, maybe, I could have been his captain and would have cuffed him for such an assessment, simplified beyond usefulness. But in this case I did not think there was a more important distinction between them and me. Between everyone and me.
“I am Grent,” the boy-leader said.
I dressed and began returning my things to my pack, carefully and precisely.
“And you are crossing Vransia.”
Vransia. Yes, the name wrung it all together; names had that power. I remembered the dark eyes and thin hair, like dying grass, of these boys. I remembered the eager faces listening among Vransian Great Halls as the ambassador preached of prosperity and progress to be found in the Empire’s embrace while I stood behind, then only a member of the Third Elite Guard, and a group of idealist Vransian farmers with scythes and homemade pikes attacked our inn, and I cut the heads and limbs from four of them myself.
The men I killed could have been these boys’ grandfathers. Great Grent the Gardener; Papa Duryne the Stable-boy.
“Vransians are only farmers,” I said.
Even boy-leader Grent bristled at that. “Once, we may have been,” he said. “But the Empire took that from us.”
“And now you think to take it back, hopes resting upon boys in the night questioning old, unarmed travelers.”
They shifted, but Grent steadied them with some wiser person’s words. “Steel is but the weakest weapon in the Empire’s employ.”
“You are the first and last defense of the Empire,” the ambassador had confided in me. “Yet a defense only. Great in its moments, but therein lies the extent of your worth. Do not so readily over-value a sword.”
I had nodded, because she was right.
And I nodded now to the boys’ blades. “Yet you have taken it up easily enough.”
“The Empire forced us,” Duryne growled.
Grent shook his head at me. “Do you know what happens here, every day? Do you understand what has been taken?”
I held him in my gaze, frozen like I was inside: the blizzard, the march, the falling one by one, and the quiet covering of the snow behind. I heard the hammers in the forge-caves, the flutes over the wooded hills and the hunt-calls running with the plains-bears.
Denied your identity—the shaman’s words.
I sighed, and breathed again.
“Yes,” I finally answered.
Grent blinked.
The snow called.
“It is time I go,” I said.
“Go?” Duryne scoffed. “You were not given permission to come, and now you think to go?”
“Will you stop me?” I asked.
His head jerked with the apparent ridiculousness of the question. “We are five fighters to one unarmed old fool.”
“You are not five fighters,” I said, “but seven, and farmers.”
The boys stiffened in silence. After a moment, Grent nodded to the dark, and two bow-boys stepped into the firelight, shaking their heads in disbelief.
“Will you come with us?” Grent asked. “Our parents—our leaders—would be interested in speaking with you.”
“You ask like he has a choice.” Duryne’s hands wrung his sword’s hilt.
Vividly I saw that if I turned away he would rush me, and I would twist and take his sword, cut him down and then the others, adding their young lives to my past.
“Every moment has its choice,” I said.
And that moment lagged, until the boys shifted beneath the foresight of my truth.
Then I offered my pack to one and held my wrists together before me.
“I imagine you do not trust me to walk freely,” I said, “nor wish me to know the way.”
Grent nodded, a grateful gesture not of acknowledgement but of deflating relief.
I was bound, blindfolded, the fire was smothered, and they led me away. The wind blew. I shivered gratefully beneath its cold, seeing the snow it carried waiting for me ahead and behind.
* * *
The last time I had volunteered to be captured, sixteen others were with me. When we surrendered to the Empire’s Men, still my soul sought to screa
m; they had no right, no ability, and smugly tied my bonds, thinking me bested. My enraged heart slammed against my ribs, seeking release, but for my chieftain and my people, I contained it. I learned to hide the humiliation of being bound within the anticipation of seeing our trap sprung. Even so, I was always grateful for the blindfolds; I could feign submission if required and did not have to act for anger, but I knew the lie of our ploy sat too earnestly within my eyes.
The Empire’s Men had covered my lying eyes that last time, too, and I was sure my blade would soon bathe in their blood.
They led us stumbling through the forest. Though every root and rock our feet alone could have traversed safely, we humbled our pride and stumbled, because the Empire’s Men would not have believed otherwise.
And while we stumbled, Adhai soared far overhead, her screech nearly imaginable above the unseen canopy, almost drowned beneath the grunting, cursing, scuffling of tied feet; but we each heard it. And our chieftain followed Adhai, for Adhai followed me.
Late into the night, the Empire’s Men marched us. When they finally forced us to sit, I smelled the late lilacs, heard the distant hidden fall, and knew the wood we were in.
Now we would wait, and when the grayest light of predawn bled into itself, when the Empire’s Men had succumbed to sleep or were so drained with a night-long vigil that they were regardless weakened, our people would come. Two would creep in first like night-newts, cut our bonds, return our blades, and while the Empire’s Men woke and raised alarms to our people charging from the front, calling their counterattacks against the forest or plains or cliffs or rivers or wherever in our sacred land they thought themselves safe, we the freed prisoners would come from behind.
Each time it happened that way.
But that night, as the Empire’s Men drank merrily by their fires, laughing loudly—singing, even—the scorn of doubt wrung my numbed wrists.
“They do not act like Empire’s Men,” my nearest companion breathed. “They are unconcerned.”
I cocked my head, listening hard up into the night, searching for Adhai’s courageous cry.
A body plopped down beside me, drunken voice attached. “Hey, lookit this one!” it called back to the fires. “Listenin’ for the damned hawk, are ya?”
I froze. He shifted as if reaching behind, and I sensed a form held up before my blindfolded face.
Adhai’s form.
I clenched, and an uncontrollable gasp escaped my lips. The Empire’s Man laughed. My fist closed around a clump of dirt, and his fist crunched across my cheek. My companions stiffened.
“I’ll tell ya somethin’.” The voice oozed closer. “A secret. Ya bastard barbarians ain’t the only ones with ‘em.”
The stench of his sweat and liquor and leather was smothering.
“Ain’t that right, men? Secrets, that is! We got our own secrets!”
The Empire’s Men laughed.
“Ya think we don’t know ya tricks? Ya still think ya chieftain’s comin’ to save ya? Well, I think it’s ya chieftain who needs the savin’. That ravine we passed through, that’s no place to get surrounded in. No, we won’t be worryin’ about him, not any of ya barbarian bastards—not ever again!”
I was young, full of hate, and my heart could not contain the maddening beat anymore. When my rage erupted in screams and I thrashed against my bonds, letting the anger ignite my limbs, send spittle from my lips and curses from my heart, my experienced companions hissed at me to be silent. When my foot found the face of the Empire’s Man holding Adhai, when the Empire’s Men began to beat me, maybe my companions called, “Not now, young one!” or, “Patience!” but all I heard was Adhai’s silence, my people’s screams echoing across sharp-sided stones, and the Empire’s Men using my rage to beat us all into unconsciousness.
* * *
The Vransian boys took me east along the hill’s crest. I heard their steps, smelled their sweat. One ran ahead, presumably to inform whoever it was we were going to meet.
When we left the hilltops, the breeze became light with the scent of grazed grasses. The air warmed, and my boots hit the hard-packed earth of a well-worn path.
I sensed the building before we entered it. A door swung open, relieving its warm dried-grass must into my nostrils before I was ushered in. The door was closed quickly behind.
I sensed I was surrounded.
“I apologize, but the blindfold must remain,” an older but polite voice informed. “A precaution to our identities.”
My ghost would have laughed, but I was not capable of such derision.
I was forced to sit.
“Tell us,” the voice began, “how does an old, simple man, too dark-haired and dark-skinned to be birthed anywhere but far from here, come to be travelling alone through our land?”
“It is not your land.”
Angry mutters.
“This is Vransia,” the voice retorted.
“Part of the Empire,” I stated.
Louder anger.
“All right, all right.” I imagined the voice holding its hands up. “For now, maybe. But you have not answered our question.”
“Is it yours to ask?” And, I thought, is it mine to answer?
“This is Vransia, senile fool,” someone exclaimed. “Our land, our home, and you will tell us your business!”
I sighed. No, they did not deserve derision. Nothing did anymore. We were all the same. Separated across unsailable seas, isolated within impassable peaks; fighters, farmers, emperors, ambassadors: people would ever be the same.
“Maybe it is best the Empire holds sway now.” That last slipped from my lips, and I earned shouts that took a full minute to quiet.
“You show little fear for your situation, old one,” the voice observed.
I considered that a moment. “I believe I have passed such in my life.”
Someone scoffed. “You think yourself above fear?”
“No,” I shook my head. “I feel much beneath it.”
They did not know how to respond to that, and I did not help them. They would not understand, people like these... people. One task remained to me. The mountains called to my bones; their ice was in my breath. The shaman had woken me again, and the snow was waiting.
“He’s a gods-blasted spy!” a boy asserted. Others agreed.
“And you were kind enough to bring him here,” the voice said, cutting them off.
I felt their eyes.
“Will you not tell us who you are?” the voice asked. “Your intentions here?”
It seemed a final offer of sorts. A shiver closed in around me, and I welcomed its embrace. “I am but a shadow, waiting to rejoin the dark.”
They muttered amongst themselves. A new voice, hoarse in some unknown apprehension, carried to my ear.
“I would see his eyes, Jansen. There is something in the way he holds himself...”
My blindfold was torn away, and I blinked against the oily glare of lightly lidded lanterns. I was indeed inside a giant barn, bales of hay and sacks of grain stretching up and back into darkness. Gathered around me were two dozen men and women, some young like the boys who had brought me, others older, and older still.
And the oldest, his face bloodless as a dried leech, stared at me, while the rest stared at him.
“Franstet, what is it?” they asked worriedly.
Old Franstet found his voice right as I noticed his missing arm, hewn cleanly at the shoulder.
“I know you,” he said, the words crumpling him resignedly.
I felt no pity, but neither did the anger that had sent me racing north from that Karthian massacre, nor did the self-hatred at all the Spirits I had stolen come back to me, facing this man now, a past victim of mine.
A single drop of blood upon my bones.
He raised his remaining arm and pointed, shaking beneath the weight of his unchosen fate, for he did not understand that it was only by our choice that the world ever happened to us.
“Here,” he condemned, “is an
Empire’s Man.”
And I sighed, because once, he had been right.
* * *
The ambassador had said so as well, but fondly, grinning as I helped her from the rubble of her inn-bed and the mess of Vransian bodies, the rest of those farmers fleeing their failed assassination with what limbs and lives they had left.
“Through and through—” her eyes shone like the pale moon— “you prove yourself. Here is a true Empire’s Man. And now—” she tore the badge from the dying soldier against the wall and pressed it into my hand—”an Empire’s captain.”
I stoically dipped my head, believing myself immune to her praise. I was working my way through their ranks just as planned, earning their trust until my vengeance would be meted out.
The Summer Slaughter, the Vransians came to call it. I remembered now. A few murderous men killed, and the people turned the tale to heroic martyrs.
My ghost called it self-defense, and it had been, but now in this barn full of rage, I said nothing.
They threw me to my feet, punching, pushing, smacking, and as they screamed for my blood I imagined how they once were, tilling their fields, pausing beneath a breath of wind or thanking a passing cloud for its shield against the sun, returning home for food and family.
But the Empire had not done this to them; they had done it to themselves.
The blizzard wailed in my heart.
They slammed me up against a timber; new ropes tied me to it. My rough-hide shirt was torn away and they paused, for the lantern light was more honest than hilltop flames and clearly revealed the scars already adorning me. I felt their shameless stares across my miss-colored stripes and spots, their eyes searching for meaning in this artist’s palimpsest canvas.
But only I understood that the artist would ever be unfinished, and unsatisfied.
The pause ended as humanity won out, and their shouts and threats and promises pounced anew, full of hatred and pain and loss for a world that I had once been as willing a part of as they.
The whip struck, hot enough to burn me back to the first lash decades past, to that forest where I awoke to its fire with a scream and found myself tied to a tree, torches tickling my feet. The Empire’s Men laughed and struck again, and I screamed like a skewered boar, and then in rage for screaming at all. My head drooped, and I saw my companions watching in steady silence, faces bloodied and bruised.
