by Robyn Bennis
On his way out, he kissed the woman who lay snoring in his bed, and left his last gold lira on the pillow next to her. Outside, the smoke was oppressive. It drifted in from the manufactories east of Arle and shrouded the entire city in gloom. Even worse, it clung to everything, covering the inn’s expensive mahogany siding with a layer of soot.
The noonday street was clogged with carriages and carts, all going in the same direction. Bernat looked for the nicest covered carriage and hailed it.
“Sorry, my lord!” the coachman called back. “I’m hired.”
Only then did Bernat notice the men lying in and atop the carriage. Indeed, there were men in all the carriages. There were even men in the carts. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Casualties from the battle,” the coachman said. “They’re comin’ in by the trainload. Ain’t a coach to be had, I’m afraid. Army’s hired ’em all.”
“Then how am I supposed to get to the semaphore office?”
The slow progress of traffic was taking the coachman out of earshot. He raised his voice and said, “It’s only a few blocks that way, my lord. You might resort to walkin’.”
Bernat set off in the indicated direction, but not before giving an indignant snort. Three blocks later, his shoes covered in mud, he arrived at the semaphore station. It was quite a large office, and bustling with clerks. The one nearest the door stood hunched over his desk, scribbling on a slip of paper. Without looking up, he said, “Be with you in just a moment, my lord. The battle’s got us a bit busy handling dispatches for the army.”
Bernat sighed. “Why even have battles when they’re such a vile inconvenience to everyone?”
“Words of wisdom, my lord, words of wisdom.”
“I mean, don’t get me wrong,” he said, though the clerk gave only a cursory impression of listening. “I’m not one of those silly pacifists who seem to be popping up everywhere. I only mean that if we’re fighting a war over Quah, they ought to hold the battles there, oughtn’t they? It’s only fair. It wouldn’t even be such a terrible burden for Quahnics, for they must certainly be used to this sort of thing by now.”
“Only fair, my lord.” The clerk finished writing and looked up at Bernat. “And what can I do for you?”
He was sure now that the man hadn’t been paying attention, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t so important that the common people listened—only that they agreed. “I must send a message to Lady Hinkal, staying in the palace at Kuchin. It’s very important.”
The clerk licked his finger and pulled a fresh slip from his drawer. “Arle to Kuchin costs twelve dinars per letter,” he said.
“That much?”
“Sorry for that, sir, but it is one of our busiest lines, and the cost of materials for semaphore towers being what they are these days … and, by God, if you saw the wages the signal operators are demanding, citing the current labor shortage, as if that excuses…” The man seemed suddenly to remember himself. “Sorry, my lord. What would you like the message to say?”
Bernat looked into his purse and gave it a shake. A few small coins jangled against each other. “Better keep it short,” he said. “Just make the message, ‘Mother, send money.’”
The clerk jotted it down and counted the letters. “That’s nine silver rials so far,” he said. “And how would you like to sign the message, my lord?”
Bernat looked into his purse again and frowned. “Just leave it unsigned,” he said. “She’ll know who it’s from.”
Once Bernat had handed over most of the money in his purse, the clerk stamped the slip PAID and said, “It’ll probably be afternoon before it’s sent, and tomorrow at the earliest before you can get a reply. There’s a huge backlog, and the horse couriers are having a hard time getting through the streets.”
Bernat pointed at the ceiling. “Horse couriers? But there’s a semaphore tower on top of this building. It can’t be only for show. I saw it signaling yesterday.”
“Yes, my lord, but the smoke’s too thick today to get a message through, so we have to send a rider to the tower outside town.”
Bernat sighed and said, “This is the most horrid day ever.”
* * *
“WHAT DO YOU mean, no billets are available?”
The quartermaster looked at Josette and Jutes as if they were stupid. She was a stocky auxiliary lieutenant, sitting behind a desk piled high with ledger books and stacks of paper.
“I mean,” said the quartermaster, “that I cannot provide you with billets, because there are none available.”
Josette had once expected fellow auxiliary officers to treat her better than her male comrades, but experience had long since taught her differently. “Lieutenant Bowden,” she said, for this was not her first battle with the Royal Aerial Signal Corps’s quartermaster’s office, and she knew most of her enemies by name. “We passed empty barracks on our way in.”
“Which are reserved for all the convalescents we’re expecting. You may not have noticed, but there’s been a battle.”
Josette pointed to Jutes, who was propped up in the doorway. “You may not have noticed, but we were in the middle of the damn thing. Granted, we only played a small part, being bayoneted and bludgeoned on the front lines, while you were back here, fighting with a ferocious quill for God, Garnia, and bureaucracy.”
The quartermaster looked up at Josette’s bloody uniform, then back down at her paperwork. After sorting a few pages into their proper piles, she said, “If we provided quarters for every bugger who escaped from the hospital, we’d have none left.”
Josette leaned over the desk. “Indeed, because they’d be filled with airmen. One might even argue that this is the sole function of airmen’s quarters: to be filled with airmen, however much that state of affairs may inconvenience you. As we are airmen, and as we are convalescents, we require quarters.”
This time, the quartermaster didn’t even look up from her work. She only thumped a ledger and said, “That ain’t what it says here.”
Josette stood where she was for several seconds, trying to formulate a plan of attack. None occurred to her, so she turned and walked out of the quartermaster’s office, defeated again. Outside, she stopped to plan her next move. As she pondered, she heard the whine of an airship’s steamjack out on the airfield. She could barely see the ship’s silhouette through the smoke blowing in from the city, but it sounded like Captain Emery’s chasseur, the Ibis.
Jutes cleared his throat, interrupting her train of thought. “Sir,” he said, “if I may have your leave, I’ll be heading back to the barracks now.”
She arched an eyebrow. “I thought I was the one with the head wound,” she said. “There aren’t any quarters for us.”
“No, sir,” he said. “But I’ll be bedding down anyway. If anyone comes along, saying they’ve been assigned to my bunk, I’ll tell ’em there’s some mistake and send ’em to the next one. Ain’t exactly my place to say, sir, but if I was you, I’d do the same thing.”
“And what happens when there are no spots left, and they figure out what you’ve done?”
Jutes shrugged. “Begging your pardon, sir, but in this army it’ll take weeks for them to figure that out, and by then we’ll probably be assigned to another ship anyway.”
He saluted and turned toward the barracks. The officers’ quarters were in the same direction, so she helped him along. On their way, they saw the Ibis’s enormous, cigar-shaped envelope loom out of the smoke overhead, on its way west. Ibis was low enough that Josette could hear the bustle of half a dozen crewmen running about on her crowded hurricane deck, which was the wide wicker gondola hanging under the ship, a third of the way back from the nose.
Josette cupped her hands around her mouth and, at a surprising volume for her small frame, shouted out, “Ibis! Fair winds!”
Captain Emery’s head appeared over the railing. He shouted back, “Dupre! Congratulations on your victory!” Ibis was already passing out of earshot. Emery waved and then returned to
his station.
Josette frowned. “Was he mocking me?”
Jutes looked surprised. “Sure he wasn’t, sir.”
Josette mulled it over for a few paces. She’d served with Emery several times. They’d even graduated in the same class at the Royal Aeronautical Academy, back when women had to pass themselves off as men to get in. He had never said a word to give her away, though he could have done, nor had she ever known him to resort to mockery. “But he wished me congratulations on my victory. Congratulations for what?”
“The word around the army, sir—which I will surely back up, seeing as how I was there—is, it was your doing that turned the battle,” Jutes said. “General Lord Fieren was shy to attack the Vins, what with them holding that rocky hill. Overlooked the path of our advance, see, and it would’ve been hell on the ranks, with all that rifle fire coming down from it. I been in the infantry, sir, and I can tell you he was right about that, at least. Anyway, he tried scraping those Vin skirmishers off with artillery, and by sending our own skirmishers up the slope, but the damn Vins had nice cover up there and wouldn’t budge, so he resorted to sending Osprey in to clear them out.”
Josette sighed. “But we didn’t clear them out, Jutes. I crashed the damn ship.”
“Not crashed, sir. A hard landing, to be sure, but not a crash. Or, if it were a crash, you crashed her prettier than I ever seen. Brought her down like a barrel o’ bloody bricks, right on the heads of them Vin skirmishers. Bloody Vins didn’t know what bloody hit ’em. All they knowed is all of a sudden they was underneath half an acre of canvas.”
It had been a damn fine piece of work, now that she thought of it. A crashed airship, unless all its bags of buoyant luftgas were completely obliterated, didn’t want to come down in one place. It wanted to be blown by the wind, bobbing along the ground at unpredictable intervals. But she’d wedged Osprey’s tail into the rocks, so that it had pivoted down to land atop the skirmishers. To them, it must have looked like the sky was falling.
“And it stirred those skirmishers up real nice,” Jutes said, grinning wide. “And we made a damn fine account of ourselves, if I may say so, sir, being less than twenty airmen against a hundred hard soldiers. Don’t know how long we could have kept it up—prob’ly not long—but we kept ’em busy long enough for our men to get up the hill in force.”
She scratched around the edge of her bandages. “And so what if that’s true? I wasn’t even awake for most of it.”
Jutes shrugged. “Not for the last part, sir. But you was still the cap’n, even then. I hear the newspapers are all calling it ‘Dupre’s miracle.’ Saw one paper saying—now how was it they put it?—‘Auxiliary Lieutenant Dupre accomplished, by pluck and daring, what all General Lord Fieren’s fancy stratagems and tactics could not.’”
She didn’t like the sound of that. Not at all. It meant trouble. “And they’re saying all this because I crashed my ship and set fire to it?”
Jutes nodded eagerly.
And now she finally understood what was going on, and that things were even worse than she’d thought, for she’d been sold out by the goddamn newspapers. Some of the news sheets were pro-government, while others were more critical, but every last one of them loathed General Lord Fieren, the architect of the army’s campaign in Quah. Or rather, the architect of the army’s dismal fighting retreat across Quah, a territory which had been taken from the Vins at the cost of so much Garnian blood only a decade earlier. Since then, Garnia had defended it against multiple attempts to retake it by the Vins, against opportunistic attacks from Brandheim, and even against Quahnic revolt, and Garnia had won every time.
But even in victory the army was beginning to wear thin, and this war wasn’t going quite as well as the ones before. Shortages of equipment, experienced officers, and men fit to hold a musket had all conspired to make it much less fun to read about in the newspapers—or so she’d gathered.
In fact, the battle that brought Fieren south to Arle had been his first outright victory against the Vins since the latest war began, and would surely prove a great morale boost for the army and the country at large. Faced with such a victory, it should have been impossible for the papers to condemn Fieren, but they’d managed to do it by giving Josette all the credit. All of which meant that her career would be quietly demolished if the public ever lost interest in her.
Judging by their past infatuations with war heroes, she’d be lucky if she had a week.
3
AS THE FIRST light of dawn crept over the windowsill of his hotel room, Bernat lay in an empty bed, somewhere between sleep and alertness, waiting and hoping for a knock on his door that would bring the semaphore reply from his mother. As dawn grew brighter and anxiety slowly won out over slumber, he finally opened his eyes and stared at the plaster ceiling. At length, the bell towers chimed out the hour.
Ten o’clock. Dreadfully early. Surely no one with any sense would be found out of bed at this hour. But he couldn’t sleep for worrying, so he rose, dressed, and went downstairs. After breakfast, with too little money for real entertainment, he passed the time by reading the morning paper in the hotel’s stylish parlor. Whenever the front doors opened, he looked up to see if it was a semaphore messenger with his money, and each time he lost his place and couldn’t remember a thing about the story he was reading.
“You know, that same newspaper had an article the other day. They said women ought not to be allowed in the air corps at all.”
If not for the thick Sotrian accent, Bernat might have taken the gentleman sitting across from him for an inhabitant of Arle. He wore the white robe and tight embroidered cap popular among tradesmen and other petite burghers in this city—popular here because they were popular in the neighboring land of Sotra, and the locals still thought themselves half-Sotrian, though it had been centuries since Arle sat inside those borders.
“I beg your pardon?” Bernat asked.
“That woman all the papers are talking about,” the Sotrian said. “They didn’t even want her in an airship before. You Garnians are so damn fickle. I think if I ask any person on the street out there, they can’t even tell me why you’re fighting Vinzhalia in the first place.”
Bernat had never been burdened with excessive patriotism. National pride was a habit better suited to the commoners, and simply wasn’t proper among the ruling class. But propriety was one thing, and this jackass giving insult to his country was another. He put his paper down and said, “We’re fighting them, sir, because they are a bunch of godless royalists who scheme to take our lands, rape our women, and destroy our very way of life.”
The Sotrian frowned. “Putting aside the question—purely incidental, I’m sure—of how the disputed territory of Quah fits into this analysis, are Garnians not royalists as well?”
Bernat turned his nose up and sniffed with infinite indignation. “We are monarchists.”
“What’s the difference?”
Bernat had no idea, but he made an educated guess based on what little he did know. “A monarchist governs for the benefit of the commoners, selflessly blessing them with the superior wisdom found in those of noble birth. A royalist, on the other hand, is a godless usurper who schemes against the peasantry, taking their land, raping their women, and destroying their very way of life.”
“I see,” said the Sotrian. He stroked his small beard. “I must, of course, bow to your superior wisdom on this subject, except for one small matter. I assure you, the Vinzhalians have a god.”
“Well of course they have a god, but they don’t have the God. Their god is one of those wretched pagan affairs, with goat horns and three eyes.” Bernat waved a hand at his forehead in vague illustration. “You call that a god? Of course not. If you came across it in the countryside, you’d end its life out of pity. You’d have to be a true fool to kneel down and worship it.”
“Honestly, sir, in the course of my life I have become half-convinced that one god is as good as another.”
Bernat sighed at
the man’s stupidity. “One god as good as another? Would you say the same about…” He searched for an analogy, and found one when he glanced at his feet. “Would you say that one pair of shoes is as good as any other? Of course not.”
The Sotrian nodded, apparently nearing enlightenment. “So … your God is like a superior pair of shoes, and their God is an inferior pair?”
“Exactly!” Bernat said.
“And this is why you must kill them? Over their poor taste in footwear?”
“Yes!” Bernat said, and then, “No. Not just because of that. It’s … it’s complicated.”
“I’m beginning to appreciate the complexity, sir. I feel quite a fool now, for naively assuming the whole affair was over Quah’s considerable mineral wealth.”
Bernat racked his mind, trying to come up with a way to explain it that was simple enough for this man to understand. “Let’s say you come across a man in the street, wearing a rotten old pair of shoes.”
“Shoes with goat horns and three eyes?”
“Precisely. And you happen to have an extra pair of much better shoes.”
“Which, if I remember my Garnian theology,” the Sotrian said, “would be the personification of the sun, birthed from the mouth of the world, and advised by a pantheon of deified saints?”
“Indeed. Very nice footwear, you see?”
“That is surely beyond question, sir.”
“Well?” Bernat asked.
“Well what, sir?”
“Wouldn’t you give your extra shoes to the man whose own shoes were dilapidated and festering with eyeballs?”
“I might,” the Sotrian said. “But what if he didn’t want to take them? Should I force the matter, even to the point of killing him?”
“Well it’s hardly our fault, if that’s what it takes to put the man in a decent pair of shoes!” Bernat said, raising his voice, though he didn’t mean to. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, sir, I believe that semaphore is for me.” He rose, bowed to the Sotrian, and went to the front desk, where a boy had just delivered a folded semaphore slip.
