The Company

by K. J. Parker

  Teuche clearly wasn’t wild about the idea, but he could see that it had to be done, and that his father was in no fit state to do it. He whistled up the dogs, put some rope in his pocket just in case he did meet any soldiers (if the dogs ran ahead, they’d give him away; once he got up on the top he’d put them on the lead, just in case) and set off up the course of the dried-up stream. It wasn’t the shortest way, but he figured he could keep out of sight behind the high banks on that side, if there turned out to be soldiers on the moor.

  The stream bed ran down the steepest side of the hill, but Teuche was young, fit and in a hurry. Because he was keeping well over to the lower side, in the shade of the ninety-year-old copper beeches his great-grandfather had planted along the top of the bank to act as a windbreak, he could neither see nor be seen, and the wind in the branches made enough noise to mask any sound he made, though of course going quietly had long since been second nature to him. It took him no more than an hour to reach the gate in the bank that led from Pit Mead into Big Moor. There he paused, pulled himself together, and peered over the gate to see what he could see.

  To begin with, he had no idea what they could be. They were far too dark to be sheep, too big to be rooks or crows. If he’d been a stranger to the neighbourhood he might well have taken them for rocks and large stones; not an unusual sight on the top of the moor, where the soil was so thin and the wind scoured more of it away every year. But, thanks to his great-grandfather’s windbreak, Big Moor was good pasture with relatively deep, firm soil; there were one or two outcrops down on the southern side, but none at all in the middle, and these things, whatever they were, were everywhere. His best guess was that they were some kind of very large birds; geese, perhaps.

  At first, they only puzzled him; he was too preoccupied by what wasn’t there, namely the sheep. He curbed the impulse to run out into the field and look for them. If they weren’t there, it might well mean that the soldiers had got there first and were down out of sight in the dip on the eastern side. By the same token, the sheep might be down there too, though they only tended to crowd in down there when they needed to shelter from the rain. He couldn’t decide what to do for the best, and as he tried to make up his mind, he considered the unidentified things scattered all over the field; not sheep or rooks, not stones, and there had to be hundreds of them. Thousands.

  He stayed in the gateway for a long while, until he realised that time was getting on, and he still didn’t know where the sheep were. Very cautiously, he climbed the gate and dropped down as close as he could to the bank, where he’d be harder to see. His idea was to work his way along the bank as far as the boggy patch, where he could use the cover of the reeds to get far enough out into the field to spy down into the hidden dip. It was a good plan of action. In spite of his anxiety, he felt moderately proud of himself for keeping his head in a difficult situation.

  The first one he found was lying in the bottom of the narrow drainage rhine that went under the bank about a hundred yards down from the gate. Because of the clumps of couch grass that edged the rhine, he didn’t see him until he was no more than five feet away. He stopped dead, as though he’d walked into a wall in the dark.

  The man was lying on his face, his arms by his sides, and Teuche’s first thought was that he was drunk; passed out and sleeping it off in a ditch, like old Hetori Laon from Blueside. He noticed that the man had what looked like a steel shell that covered his top half, from his neck down to his waist, and under that a shirt apparently made out of thousands of small, linked steel rings. Then he realised that the man’s face was submerged in the black, filthy water that ran in the rhine. He ran forward to see if he could help, but stopped before he got much closer.

  He’d never seen a dead man before. When Grandfather died, his mother had made him stay out in the barn; when he was allowed back inside there was no body to be seen, just a long plank box with the lid already nailed down. Maybe as a result of that, he’d always imagined that a dead body would be a horrifying, scary sight; in the event, it was no such thing. It looked just like a man lying down - a man lying down drunk, even, which was comedy, not tragedy - but he could tell just by looking at it that it wasn’t human any more, it wasn’t a person, just a thing. Teuche wasn’t afraid of things. He went closer.

  He knew the man must be a soldier, because of the steel shell and the ring shirt. From the available facts, he worked out a theory. The soldier had been drinking; he’d wandered away from the rest of the army, fallen asleep sitting against the bank, somehow slid over and ended up face down in the rhine, where he’d drowned without ever waking up. It struck him as a sad thing to have happened, sad and stupid but understandable. Something of the sort had happened to a tinker last year out over Spessi, and the general opinion had been that it had served him right.

  But he didn’t have time for any of that now, he reminded himself; he had to find the sheep and get them down into the combe. It occurred to him that the soldier’s friends might be out looking for him, so he carried on down the bank towards the reeds, keeping his head below the skyline. He’d nearly reached the outskirts of the wet patch when he made the connection in his mind, between the dead man and the things he’d seen lying in the field.

  Once the idea had occurred to him, he felt stunned, as though he’d just stood up under a low branch and cracked his head. If the grey things lying in the field were all dead men . . . but that couldn’t be possible, because several thousand human beings don’t just suddenly die like that, all together at the same time, out in the open fields.

  But, he thought, they do, if they’re soldiers, in a war. That’s precisely what happens. He knew all about the war, and wars in general. He’d always liked hearing stories, both the old ones about the heroes of long ago, and the more up-to-date ones about how our lads were slaughtering thousands of the enemy every day, in victory after victory. It was almost impossible to believe, but maybe that was what had happened right here, on Big Moor; General Oionoisin had managed to catch up with the enemy and cut them to pieces, right here, on our top pasture . . .

  He tried to think about the sheep, but he couldn’t. He wanted to go further out into the field, to look at the bodies, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it, in case some of them were still alive, wounded, dying. Shouldn’t he try and do something for them, in that case? But the thought made him feel sick and terrified; the last thing he wanted to do was actually go near them, dying, as if fatal injury was something contagious you could pick up by touch. Nevertheless, he crept out from the fringe of the reed bed and walked quickly and nervously, as though he was trespassing, up the slope towards a clump of the things clustered round a gorse bush.

  There were five of them. They all had the same steel shells and shirts; one of them had a steel hat, with ear flaps. It hadn’t done him much good: there was a wide red gash in his neck, through the windpipe. The blood was beginning to cake and blacken, and the last of the summer’s flies were crawling in it, weaving patterns with their bodies. The man’s eyes were wide open - he had a rather gormless expression, as if someone had asked him a perfectly simple question and he didn’t know the answer. There was another gash on his knee. His right hand was still clutching a long wooden pole, splintered in the middle. The other four men were face down, lying in patches of brown, sticky blood. Teuche noticed that the soles of their boots were worn almost through. A little further on, he saw a dead horse, with a man’s body trapped under it. There was something very wrong about it, but it took him quite some time to realise that the body had no head. He looked round for it but he couldn’t see it anywhere.

  He tried to think what he should do. His first duty was to see if there was anybody he could help; but there were so many of them, and besides, what could he do? Suppose there were two or three, or five or six or ten or twenty or a hundred men lying here still alive, capable of being saved, if only someone came to help them. That made it too difficult. One man, one stranger, and he’d feel obliged to get him down the
hill, somehow or other, back to the house, where Mother and the other women would know what to do. Just possibly he could manage one, but not two; and if there were two, or more than two, how the hell was he supposed to know how to choose between them? Besides, he told himself, these people are the enemy. They came here to kill and rob us and take our land. They deserved it. More to the point, he had to find the sheep.

  He reverted to his original plan of action, though he knew it had been largely overtaken by events: down to the dip, where he found no live enemy soldiers and no sheep. That more or less exhausted his reserve of ideas, and he felt too dazed and stupid to think what to do next. After a minute or so wasted in dithering, he climbed up on the bank beside the southern gateway, where he knew he could get a good view of the whole of the river valley, from Stoneyard down to Quarry Pit. Of course, that wasn’t Kudessin land; it belonged to the Gaeons, Kudei’s family, but he knew they wouldn’t mind if he went on to it to get his sheep back.

  But there were no sheep; no white dots, only a scattering of the grey ones, stretching down the valley until they were too small to make out. That’s it, then, he thought: the sheep have gone, the soldiers must’ve taken them after all. He knew without having to think about it that that was really bad, about as bad as it could possibly get. He tried to feel angry - bastard enemy coming here, stealing our sheep - but he couldn’t. After all, the enemy had been punished enough, General Oionoisin had seen to that, and what good had it done? Thirty-five acres of dead meat wouldn’t make up for losing the sheep. Then he told himself that the government would probably pay compensation, sooner or later; it stood to reason that they must, because otherwise it wouldn’t be fair. You can’t have armies come on to your land and kill thousands of people and steal a valuable flock of sheep and not expect to pay for it. The world wouldn’t work if people could behave like that.

  Anyway, he thought, there wasn’t anything he could do, so he turned round and walked back. The light was beginning to fade and he had trouble getting the dogs to follow him; he’d let them off once he’d left the reed bed, since there didn’t seem to be any immediate danger, and now they were sniffing at the dead bodies, completely fascinated. He wondered if the soldiers had got the Gaeons’ flock as well. He knew, or he was dimly aware, that in the time since he’d left the house and climbed the hill, the whole world had changed completely and for ever, and naturally the idea troubled him. He knew that his father had borrowed money to buy the twelve pedigree ewes and the twelve acres at Lowertown, and that this seasons’ lambs were supposed to pay off the loan, or the interest on the loan (all he knew about the business was what little he’d managed to gather by listening at doors and under windows), so they were in trouble to some degree. If the soldiers had robbed the Gaeons as well, maybe also the Pollons and the Alceses and everybody else in the district . . . The thought made him wince. If everybody was suddenly taken poor, what would happen? It was all very well assuming the government would pay for the sheep, but if all the sheep this side of Faralia had gone, money would be useless, because there’d be no sheep to buy to replace the flock with, no flock meant the loan wouldn’t get paid back, and then where would they be? Then another terrifying thought struck him. What if it had been their own side, Oionoisin’s men, who’d stolen the sheep? Would the government pay if it was their men, or would that count as contributions to the war effort, requisitioning and therefore perfectly legal? He had no idea how any of it worked, and that was incredibly frustrating. He found he was walking very fast, recklessly so; if he wasn’t careful, he’d turn his own ankle over in the dark, and that really wouldn’t help anyone.

  He reached the top of the lane and realised he couldn’t see any lights in the windows of the house. He had no idea what that meant, but it couldn’t be anything good. He stopped by the yard gate, trying to decide what to do. He wanted to run straight to the back door and yell for his parents, but if something really bad had happened, and there were soldiers about . . .

  (This, he thought, is what it must be like if you’re a wild animal. People have it easy, now that there aren’t really any predators left to hunt them. But rabbits and hares and deer must be like this all the time: danger everywhere, every movement and every moment of standing still a potential disaster. The strange thing was, the longer it went on, the calmer he felt: not a good calm, like midday break at haymaking, lying exhausted on top of the rick looking up at the clouds; more a sort of numbness, combined with vastly sharper senses. For some reason, he felt ashamed of himself for it.)

  He took the long way round, skirting the vegetable garden, crossing the stream, edging right round the perimeter of the cider orchard so he’d have the poultry houses as cover as he approached the back door. He shoved the dogs in the woodshed and closed the door on them: one less thing to worry about.

  At the back door he stopped again (but it wasn’t indecision, panic, blankness of mind; he stopped to listen, gather intelligence, before planning his next move). He couldn’t hear anything; if there were soldiers in the house, he’d expect to hear them, crashing about, stealing things, drinking the beer. Or else they were drunk already and sleeping it off. He decided it’d be safe to open the door a little.

  “Who’s that?” His father’s voice, in the dark.

  “Dad?”

  “Teuche.” He heard the scrape of a tinderbox, saw a little flare that became the glow of a single candle. “Where the hell have you been? Your mother’s been worried sick.”

  “It’s all right,” he said, and realised that was a lie. “There aren’t any soldiers, at least I didn’t see any.”

  “Better safe than sorry,” his father grunted, and the candle went out again. “The sheep. Did you find them?”

  For a moment he had no voice. Then, quickly and concisely as he could manage, he gave his report. The sheep were gone, and Big Moor was full of dead bodies.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” his father asked.

  “Dead bodies,” he repeated. “I think there must’ve been a battle. I didn’t count them but there were a lot of them. I think they were all dead,” he added, hoping that at least was true.

  Dad didn’t say anything for three or four heartbeats. “The sheep,” he said, and his voice was disturbingly low and quiet. “Did you look in Gaeon’s field? They may have . . .”

  “They weren’t there, Dad,” he said, as gently as he could. “Nor Southside. I got up on the bank and looked down. If they’d been there I’d have seen them.”

  “Yes, but it was getting dark,” Dad said (and Teuche thought: why’s he being wilfully stupid?). “You could easily have missed them, specially if they’ve strayed up under the cover. That’s where they’ll be, you mark my words.”

  He didn’t reply to that; he found it embarrassing. You could-n’t make the bad stuff better by pretending it hadn’t happened. “I don’t think we need sit here in the dark,” he said. “If there’d been any soldiers—”

  “You shut your face,” Dad snapped. “Only a bloody fool’d show a light, draw those buggers right here to us. You shut up and bide quiet, and then we’ll go look for the sheep in the morning.”

  So he felt his way across the back parlour to the wall, where he knew the end of the settle was, sat down against it and rested his head against the side rail. The last thing he expected to be able to do was sleep, but he’d hardly closed his eyes when he felt something nudge his shoulder, and heard his father saying, “Come on.” He looked up and saw the back door was open, a wedge of middle blue visible between the door and the frame, which told him it was just before dawn.

  “We’ll take the dogs,” Dad said quietly. “We’ll need them when we find the sheep.”

  The blue of the sky was thinning, and veils of early morning mist blanked off their view of the hill. They followed the dried-up stream; his father hardly said a word, which suited Teuche very well. He was ashamed of his own feelings, contempt and disgust; surely Dad had believed him when he’d said he’d looked for the sheep, s
o why was he pretending that finding them would be easy? He’d never known his father tell a lie, but now he seemed to be lying to himself, which was the worst kind of deceit. Pointless, he thought: he’s just making it worse for himself, when the moment comes when he’s got to accept what’s happened. Only somebody stupid would do something like that, and weren’t they in a bad enough mess already?

  “Go steady,” Dad said, as they came up on the gateway. “If we go rushing in, we’ll only spook them.”

  He wanted to say: Dad, there aren’t any sheep, just a lot of dead soldiers. He’d been brought up to tell the truth, hadn’t he? In which case, why was he afraid to do so now? He felt as though everything was getting out of hand, coming apart, just when they most needed to stay sharp. Above all, he thought: it’s not fair, it should be him being calm and sensible, not me.

  Dad looked carefully up and down the line of the bank, then scrambled over the gate. In spite of everything, Teuche couldn’t help admiring his father’s grace and agility, exceptional for such a big, heavy man. He’d heard people saying he’d been a fine dancer when he was young, though of course he didn’t have time for that sort of thing any more.

  The ball of the hill was wrapped in soft grey mist, just beginning to burn off as the sun rose, so they couldn’t see the bodies from the gateway. For a moment, he wondered if Dad would refuse to go out into the field to look for them: nothing here, he’d say, we’ll cut back round the side and go down over Gaeons’ after the sheep; and that’d be ridiculous, the sort of thing that happens in dreams, where you’re shouting something important and obvious and nobody believes you.