‘I saw her body.’
‘By the Firstborn,’ he said. ‘I’ve failed him again.’
I took the seat he’d offered. ‘I think we both know where the blame lies, Commander.’
If you were watching close enough, you could have seen a break in the façade, an angry crack in his false surface of regret. But then in fairness, I knew what I was looking for.
‘Sons of bitches at Black House,’ I spat out this last with sudden and honest venom, the first display of emotion I’d allowed myself. ‘How long are we gonna let them do it? Roland wasn’t enough – they had to send someone after his little sister too?’ I slammed my fist down on Pretories’ table, sending sheets of paper floating to the ground.
‘Black House,’ Pretories agreed after a moment. ‘Sons of bitches.’
‘It wasn’t your fault, Commander,’ I said, adopting his mournful pose. ‘It was mine. I was too slow in getting to her, and too slow in coming to you.’
‘As you said, Lieutenant. We both know where the blame lies.’
‘I’ve been no friend to the Association these last years, I know that, and I’m sorry. I was . . . I was afraid,’ I said slowly, drawing it out. ‘I have people to protect. You know I used to wear the gray. I’m in their books, a loose end they’d be happy to tie shut. I’ve got to be careful – I can’t stretch my neck out.’
‘And now?’
‘Seeing Rhaine’s body . . .’ I shook my head bitterly. ‘Same as her brother. Twelve years and nothing’s changed – we’re still nothing to them. They take everything we got and step on us if we make a noise. Someone needs to answer for her, for her and for Roland.’ Strictly speaking, that last wasn’t even a lie. ‘I’m with you from now on, wherever it takes me.’
I wasn’t sure how far Pretories was swallowing my sudden shift in allegiance. It didn’t exactly fit with my reputation as a man whose sole concern was his own back. But of course, the less he trusted me the wiser he would be to fake it. Better to have me close, where he could keep an eye on me. ‘With the Throne threatening our future, we need the support of every veteran we can muster. The march isn’t for a couple of days, but of course there are ways to get involved before then. Check with one of the men at the front desk, they’ll direct you as needed.’
That was the end of the conversation, but I stayed where I was.
After a moment, Joachim clarified his dismissal. ‘If there’s nothing else then, Lieutenant . . .’
‘I’m afraid there is something else, Commander.’ I swallowed hard and looked at my lap. If I had a cap I’d have taken it off my head and worried it between my hands. As it was I just tried to give that impression. ‘There’s something I should have told you the last time I was here. I should have told you, and I didn’t, and I’m sorry.’
‘Go on.’
‘I’ve had to do things I’m not proud of since I left the service. I don’t suppose that’s a surprise for you to hear.’
‘I’m aware of how you make your living, Lieutenant. And not in any position to judge.’
No, you bloody well aren’t. ‘But doing what I do, it means I hear things that not everyone else does. The word on the street is that the syndicates aren’t happy with some of your recent developments. This march you’ve planned, it’s got people riled. Wasn’t so long ago the veterans marching in the streets meant blood in the gutters for anyone who got in their way.’
‘We aren’t in that line anymore – the Veterans’ Association is one hundred percent legitimate, a duly registered organization advocating for the rights of its members.’
‘Would the Courtland Savages agree?’
He waved that away. ‘The Courtland Savages can do whatever the hell they want, so long as they do it in Courtland. They set up a shop around the block from us – I can’t have them selling in front of the damn headquarters. Hroudland and his boys went over to talk to one of their higher-ups – there weren’t any problems. They told me the issue was settled.’
‘That’s what they told you.’
‘Spit it out, Lieutenant. Equivocation is unbecoming in an officer.’
‘I’m not being coy with you, Commander – I don’t have anything solid. Just whispers. Of course, whispers can turn concrete when you aren’t looking.’ I leaned across the table, like I was offering a secret. ‘You know the Savages work for the Giroies.’
‘What of it?’
‘Memory serves, you and Roland put a fair number of Giroie boys in shallow graves.’
‘Roland was my brother, and the greatest man I’ve ever met.’ It rolled off his tongue smooth as chocolate. ‘But he was misguided. The Association has no business going after the syndicates, however objectionable their activities may be. Our business is our people, making sure the government doesn’t screw us any worse than it already has. Whatever . . . unpleasantness was between us and the Giroies was put aside long ago.’
‘That shot you took at them, it knocked them back from the front ranks. They’ve been scrambling for footing ever since. I imagine that might be the sort of thing they’d remember.’
‘It’s been more than ten years since we were cross. Why start making trouble now?’
‘Yeah, you’re right. They seem like a nice bunch of people. I could send word their way – maybe they could come round for coffee and cake.’
Pretories was not a man for humor. ‘I appreciate the warning,’ he said slowly, ‘and certainly hope you keep me abreast of any further developments. But beyond that . . .’ He built his hands into a pyramid, elbows leaning against the table. ‘Our organization is at the most critical point in its history since the death of Roland Montgomery. I can’t afford to expend resources in ancillary theaters.’
‘Of course. Do what you think is best.’ I propped myself out of the seat. ‘I’ll keep my ears out, let you know what I hear. And if there’s anything else, Commander, anything you need, make sure to contact me.’
He rose quickly and put one hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s good to have you back in the fold, Lieutenant. Remember: what we do, we do not just for us, but for those that have been taken – for Roland, and for Rhaine. The justice of the Firstborn is slow, but certain. Those responsible will get their due, have no fear on that.’
Something fierce brushed across my face. If Pretories had been watching me rather than pontificating, I think the game might have been up right there. ‘You’re damn right they will,’ I said.
When I left the speaker was starting up again, on the dot for his one-thirty performance. I waited around for a few minutes to see if he’d ad-lib something, but it was hot as hell, and he didn’t, and I split.
20
I’d been crapping blood for half a week when the lieutenant sent me to the wards.
This was a few months after Beneharnum, before I had met Roland, when I was still a private and had nothing more to think about than following the man in front of me. The front was still relatively fluid, the planes of Nestria not yet strangled by hundreds of lines of fortified trenches. The Dren had suffered some setbacks in the east, and were retreating a hundred-odd miles, tightening up their interior lines. We were marching forward to meet them.
It was my own fault, my own damn fault, and I’m not saying otherwise. But I’d never seen cherries before, let alone eaten one. And they looked ripe enough, a crimson flock weighing down their boughs. And we’d been walking through orchards for a solid afternoon, and I’d been three months on mealy biscuits and wormy meat – and I filled my stomach so high that a sharp sneeze would have coughed up a pit.
I paid for it soon enough, soon enough and hard, the tart flesh of the fruit turning to poison, sending me retching and sprinting for the bushes. After a few days it stopped. After a few more days it started again, worse this time, a lot worse. I couldn’t keep down water, let alone hard tack. I ached all the time, but in a distant way, and I was having trouble with my eyes – if I focused on anything too long my legs started to shake and I needed to sit down. I couldn’t s
it down, of course, but I damn sure needed to.
So it was my own fault, like I said, but still the lieutenant didn’t look happy when he said it. I’d just rejoined the ranks after my third shit of the day, rust-red water leaking out of my bowels, a fist of jagged metal in my insides.
‘I think you need a rest, Private,’ he said to me.
As usual Adolphus had taken the step behind me, and he slapped my back to show off my vitality. I did my best not to stagger from the blow. ‘Come on now, Lieutenant,’ Adolphus said nervously. ‘He’s not so bad as all that. He’ll be all right once he gets a few hours’ rest in him.’
This was an errant lie, obvious to anyone who spared a glance in my direction. In a week I’d lost a newborn’s worth of body weight, and I wasn’t a fat man to begin with. Tearing off my trousers during that last go round I’d felt the imprint of my ribcage pushing out against my skin.
‘I’m fine, Lieutenant,’ I said, holding my hands behind my back so he wouldn’t see them shake. ‘Just a case of the squirts. No reason to send me up. I can still handle a trench blade.’
The lieutenant was a decent fellow, good at his job and still possessed of some remnant of humanity despite the hell we’d all gone through – that was probably why the Firstborn decreed he’d die six weeks later, casualty of a Dren bowman, picked off during some meaningless skirmish that never made it into the history books. He knew what sending me up meant, had held off doing it in the vain hope I’d recover. Still, there was only so much he could overlook. ‘You’ll be fine, Private – a few days off your feet and you’ll be right as rain.’ But he didn’t meet my eyes when he said it, and neither did anyone else as I grabbed my few belongings and got ready to head to the back of the lines.
No one but Adolphus, who squeezed my shoulder and told me that everything would be fine, that he’d stop by and see me later. I was just glad he didn’t try and hug me. Adolphus was always something of a hugger, and in my injured state I wasn’t sure I could take it.
It was a rest day. That was the way we moved – two days on and one day off. We weren’t exactly sprinting through Nestria. On the march our baggage train extended miles and miles behind the infantry, artillery and equipment sharing road with the material indulgences of the officers and a sub-army of merchants, whores and servants keen to fill the needs of the largest horde of men the region had ever seen. It took me a solid hour to reach the wards from my post, though admittedly my pace was slowed by my stomach’s insistence that I leave a memento behind every bush and tree.
Our battlefield hospice met, perhaps even exceeded, the high standards of competency that reigned throughout the Allied military machine. A canvas tent stretched over thick wooden poles, a hundred-odd collapsible beds – the whole thing small enough to be packed into a few mule-drawn wagons. The operation was overseen by a handful of drunkards and dolts with perhaps six months of medical training between them. In theory it was meant to serve as a triage station – the lightly wounded patched up and returned to the lines, the severely injured stabilized and sent to recuperate further afield. In practice, few survived to go home.
Two men sat at a table underneath the awning, playing cards and drinking from an unlabeled bottle. They were out of uniform, and dirtier than doctors should be. My arrival in their midst was not the cause of any great commotion – a solid minute passed before either thought to react.
‘Name and rank,’ one asked finally.
I gave it to him.
‘What you want?’
One would think that was a fair bit obvious, but I didn’t have the energy for sarcasm. ‘Lieutenant says I’m on rest.’
‘Yeah?’ Not exactly brimming with interest.
It was too much effort to answer.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked finally, grudgingly.
‘Got the shits.’
‘You been eating cherries?’
I nodded.
He swatted away a fly and shot his comrade a look. They shared a laugh. ‘You dumb fucking infantrymen. Don’t you know they ain’t ripe yet?’
I wanted to set my hand into his unwashed hair and pull his face down into the wood, watch his nose come apart in my hands. See how much help his partner did him then. As it was I could barely stand, couldn’t talk, and even thinking about sudden motion sent unhappy waves through my stomach. So I just nodded again.
He pulled over a ledger and pointed at an empty spot. ‘Sign here,’ he said, ‘or make your mark.’
I barely managed the former.
He closed the ledger and set it aside. ‘Grab a bed. We’ll bring some soup by later.’ He slapped a high card down against the table. His partner let loose a pretty good stream of invective, for a civilian. After a few seconds of forgetting I existed the first turned back up to me, vaguely annoyed to discover I’d yet to follow his order. ‘Either you’ll ride it out or you’ll die,’ he said, by his tone not strongly invested in the outcome.
That was about the way I figured it too. If it was the former, I promised myself the good doctor and I would have another chat, under different circumstances.
We’d been marching for an odd week, and there hadn’t been a real battle for twice that, but still a good half of the beds were in use. Boys down with the flux, or having fallen prey to any of the various rotting maladies courtesy of the mass of whores that traveled with us, an army only slightly smaller than our own. Most of the patients looked near dead, too weak to scatter the bands of flies that flocked over wounds and open orifices. Some of them I felt certain were so, the corpses yet to be removed by a less than compulsively diligent staff.
I scanned around for a cot that looked cleaner than the rest, but they were pretty uniformly vile, so I dropped myself onto one in the back corner. The beds were composed of the same material as my armor, rough and callous as a camp follower. The bugs had gotten to it just the same, perforating ochre-sized holes in the boiled leather, their attentions as effective as a crossbow bolt. A line of nits marched in admirable formation up the strut and toward the burlap sack serving duty as my pillow.
The orderly came by, a Nestrian, native to the country, one of that proud race whose freedoms I had killed to protect. ‘Liquor?’ he asked in mangled Rigun, and tilted a glass jug of yellow liquid towards me, the rim stained by what I hoped was only dirt.
I shook my head.
He shrugged and downed my ration. I turned myself towards the wall and passed into a fitful sleep.
My dreams were bitter and clouded, and they hung thick as smoke, staying with me even when I lurched up from bed and sprawled my way to the nearest outhouse. Contra the doctor’s promise, no one came by with any soup.
I was ripped firmly back to consciousness by screams and cannon fire. Night had fallen. The only illumination in the tent was provided by a heavy lantern set on a pole in the center. Its light didn’t reach me, but towards the front I could make out the frantic movements of the staff, broken out of their lethargy by an unexpected rash of casualties.
They’d attacked at supper, making us pay for our hubris, for thinking we could stroll toward the Republic without forward pickets and scouts clearing the way. They hit us that night all across the front, the entire retreat revealed to be a feint, our optimism premature and quickly ended. The Dren were proving better than us when it came to grand strategy. The Dren were proving better than us when it came to virtually everything.
The rest are scraps of images out of order, dealt from a shuffled deck, my illness and their own nightmarish quality breaking chronology.
A limbless boy, nubs of flesh waggling at me, begging for someone to kill him, the doctors too busy or foolish to oblige him.
A blood-spattered saw next to stacks of arms and legs set atop each other like children’s blocks, so high that the nurse has to stretch to add another.
The two doctors who’d signed me in, the younger white as the bone he’d been cutting, slack-jawed at the horror, the elder trying to slap him back to consciousness, three sh
arp retorts without effect.
Them doubling up on beds by the end of the night, waking from a stupor to find a corpse beside me, too weak to roll him off my slab.
A man across the aisle pulling at my shirt, pleading for something, his voice stolen by a sucking chest wound. Getting more animated as he slips away, his pleas violent and unanswerable, having to near break his hand to get him off.
The orderly stripping the bodies, rifling pockets, picking off wedding rings and prayer medals. He sees me looking and brings a dirty finger to a guilty smile.
The screams, an untidy hymn of misery, voices dropping away from the chorus, silenced forever.
Many other things also, things that kept me up late into the night, that keep me up today.
The next morning I hobbled my way back to lines, and when the lieutenant came out to inspect us he slid his eyes over my shaky salute like I belonged there, and I thanked Melatus and every one of his siblings for it.
A day or two after, I managed to start keeping down water, and a few days after that I could eat solid food. I have never swallowed another cherry, and feel confident I will die in that same state.
The Association orator could talk about honor, he could talk about pride in country and the nobility of sacrifice. As far as I’m concerned, war is shitting out your insides while boys die in the dark around you. Everything else is storybook fantasy, and you can leave it there.
21
Wren was out back, hunched up in the thin line of shade provided by the wall. His spindly legs straddled an empty beer crate, and he was flipping a knife into the ground.
I reached down and picked it up. Double-edged, four solid inches – standard issue during the war, though I’d long lost track of mine. Another gift from Adolphus, or his Association chums. ‘Say thank you.’
My back was against the sun, and he squinted up at me. ‘For what?’
‘For providing you with a roof, and food while you sit beneath it.’
Tomorrow, the Killing (Low Town 2) Page 12
