The West Is Dying

by David C. Smith

  Why can’t I let myself die?

  What am I?

  A whore?

  A whore.

  So why can’t I let myself die?

  She groaned to herself, “Oh, Thameron, as long as I believe in myself.…”

  I believe I’m a whore.

  Men should piss on me, men should vomit on me, women should beat me and shove sticks in me, oh, Thameron, what am I, why am I here, I can’t believe in the truth anymore, I can’t believe anymore, I can’t believe, it was a lie, I’m a lie.

  I shouldn’t be me but I am I am I am I am

  She sat in the alley and became someone else, changed at last, lost at last that simple, noble, somehow wise and honest and innocent confidence in herself, the truth of herself. Changed and lost it and so disowned herself, and made herself ready to accept whatever life pushed at her without fighting back with belief, belief in herself, belief.…

  * * * *

  If she slept that night, she did not know it. As dawn came and as the sounds of people moving in the early morning awakened her, Assia left the alley and went into the street. There were already crowds, although it was hardly daylight, and shortly she understood why: the troops were gathering to board ships for their journey to Abustad. Assia followed the people who moved toward Elpet’s dockside mall.

  There, mounted officers were keeping the throngs under control as the legions filed together in the frosty air. Already the first of them were marching down to the wharves; above the heads in the crowd Assia could see, far away, the blue pennants and golden flags of Athadian warships waiting to receive them.

  She made her way through the press, attracted to the warmth of the fires, for stone troughs had been set around the wide mall and were filled now with burning tinder and firewood. At one end of the wide mall, away from the formations of troops and the collecting passersby, Assia saw the loose congregation of camp followers. She paused as she felt a knot curl in her belly.

  For here was her chance of escape from the city, a chance for food and warmth, despite whatever humiliation might also come. Armies on the march meant that a cadre of followers marched with them—women, most of them, and young boys from the streets, looking for protection (those not already taken into the tents of some of the commanders), and the whole odd assortment of anyone who would do errands and tend to horses and weapons, the hangers-on needed to help with food in return for some of it, and all of the many who would act as nurses or surgeons one day, wine-getters the next, but eventually become human grease for war machines or fodder for catapults.

  Yet it meant warmth and a chance for food. And the opportunity to get away from this city and the memories here of her father and his pig of a companion.

  Assia walked ahead. Fearful yet acting fearless, she boldly joined the prostitutes crowded around one of the fire troughs. There were spits over the fire; meat was sizzling.

  “What’s this?” yelled a hag. “Out of the way, you little bitch!”

  “Oh, but she’s a darling little thing,” cooed another, next to her, wrapping an arm around Assia’s shoulder. She was an older woman, not much younger than the hag, yet well painted, with bright red cheeks and full lips. “And look at the size of them!” she exclaimed, pressing a bony hand against Assia’s vest. “She’s coming with me, I’ll take care of her!”

  Assia stared at her with resentment. It was an old trick—assault by one, effusive friendliness by her partner, and both of them out to dupe the unsuspecting. Assia had done it herself at Ibro’s.

  “You’ll come with me, won’t you, you darling little thing?” asked the friendly one, pushing her face close, poking her beak of a nose into Assia’s cheek.

  Assia started to back away and bumped into someone else. She looked up into the features of a tall, gaunt man—skeletal, blond, with rouged cheeks and heavily painted eyes. He smiled at Assia and bent close to give her a kiss; Assia, caught between him and the cooing woman, couldn’t escape. He pressed his painted mouth hard upon hers, forced her lips open with his tongue, and slobbered something warm into her mouth—drool? wine? semen?—and down her throat. Then he moved on, cackling like a bird, laughing and laughing.

  Assia sneered and wiped her lips with the back of one hand.

  Trumpets blared across the mall.

  “Don’t mind him!” fussed the cooing woman. “What’s your name, little darling? I’m Laril.”

  There was nothing else to do. She might not get aboard the ship, otherwise. “Assia,” she answered softly.

  If this company of women and followers were well known to the commanding officers, then she was guaranteed passage.

  “Well, little Assia, you stay with me and you’ll be all right, you understand? We’ll take care of you, you just stay with me. I know all the right people, and you’ll be treated with some respect, my dear, you’ll be treated very nicely indeed.…”

  Half the women and other assorted hangers-on were left on the docks when the last of the ships let out their sails toward midmorning. But Assia was aboard, in the company of fifty other prostitutes, quartered below decks. She was fed nothing but was, after all, assured of her transport to Abustad and assured, as well, of continued existence, howsoever be it a meager existence in the ragged train following the Athadian march toward the Low Provinces.

  PART SEVEN

  NEW CHAINS

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  The march of aggression into the neutral Low Provinces, caught between the hegemonic Emarians and the colossal, unyielding Salukadians.

  In the frosty breath of a midwinter morning, they thundered down out of the hills to astonish and attack yet another village of lowlanders: Emarian cavalry two thousand strong and General Kustos’s full legion. He had ordered his men to take and hold every village fronting the wide Tuveski Forest. Three weeks of the campaign—three weeks of luts awwa—lightning strikes—that in their shock and surprise did not deserve even the name of combat—had brought Kustos seventy leagues into the provinces.

  But resistance was now increasing. The lowlander villages, normally fiercely jealous of one another and proud in their isolation and self-reliance, had united as one against the Emarians. Kustos and, farther west, Cyrodian had witnessed their advances gradually slow the more deeply they penetrated the provinces. And they had met their greatest resistance in the Tuveski region, populated as it was by hardy men and strong women.

  Outposts stretching behind, to the Emarian border, had secured the westernmost of the conquered territory. The most recent word from Cyrodian, two days to the southwest, assured General Kustos that control had been achieved from the border of Omeria to the great forests that marked the perimeter of the Tsalvian lowlands.

  But here, this morning, in the Tuveski, Kustos was confronting resistance that would have made even the monster Cyrodian doubt the sense of continuing the advance.

  Midwinter—with snow-covered fields, icy rivers, hail descending in frozen bolts—and the forests, black and in shadows, deep with maddening cold, became a nest of deadly traps for the Emarians. Kustos soon found that it was impossible for his lines to move forward in customary fashion. He ordered his separate companies and platoons, little more than reconnaissance units, to continue forcing their way through the crusted snow, one and two men at a time. The horsemen walked their snorting mounts carefully upon ice-covered streams. Men in single file climbed the hazardous hillsides that at any moment might release a small avalanche of ice, mud, and rock.

  And in the frosty breath of a midwinter morning, in those frustrating forests and foreign hills, Kustos listened to the death screams of his men, his companies and platoons as they failed. Some fell through the ice and drowned within freezing waters. Others were buried alive under hillsides of loosened snow and mud. But most of them—by far, most of them—were slain by the invisible craftiness of the resourceful lowlanders.

  Tree limbs hidden in the snow jumped to life to impale men with rusted field scythes hidden in their branches. The snowy ground gave wa
y underfoot and dropped howling Emarians into pits filled with sharpened poles. Boulders dropped from nets in trees. Farm implements sharpened into razors sprang through the brittle air to rip out throats, savage bellies, and slice through arms and legs. Iron poles and steel balls, suspended by cords in the treetops, swung down in deadly arcs to stab or brain slow-moving soldiers. Packs of wild dogs and wolves, encaged and starved to the edge of death, were let loose upon stragglers, who were eaten alive, all of them torn open and their remnants, their parts and twitching hands, spread freely under a delicate snowfall.

  Screams. And more screams. And the killers, right there, only a short distance away, remained unseen, so thick was the forest, so heavy the ice and snow, so rocky and steep the hills and outcroppings, the home of the defenders.

  By mid afternoon, Kustos called a halt to the advance. After conferring with his retainers, the general decided to withdraw from the forest and set up barricades in the fields through which they had come. The horns sounded retreat.

  But traps not triggered during the advance came awake as the troops moved out. More screams; more deaths; more drops of blood, frozen as they struck the air, dappled the hoary white ground of the Tuveski Forest.

  General Kustos, only a short distance from safety, within sight of the open fieldland and sloping hills beyond, was struck suddenly by a sharpened knife. It had been attached to a pole and fixed by a taut rope to a tree; Kustos’s horse had tripped the line of it, a boulder wrapped in chain fell behind a bush, and the pole jerked, the rope snapped, the knife struck. Kustos cried out as the razor edge caught him just below the throat and sliced across his shoulder. Warm blood poured uncomfortably down the inside of his cold armor.

  Not realizing how badly he had been wounded, Kustos waved away helpful retainers and continued his retreat into the fieldland. As dusk came down and the men built helpful fires, a count was taken, and it was reported to General Kustos that the day’s failed advance—a debacle—had cost him fully a quarter of his men. The corpses, thousands of them, had been dragged away for food by wolves and other scavengers or lay hidden in the snow-silent, ice-secret forest of the Tuveski.

  And not one enemy had been sighted.

  * * * *

  When General Cyrodian arrived at Kustos’s encampment two days later, he was surprised and confounded to find that the Emarians had gained no ground whatsoever against the defenders of the Tuveski; and he was more irritated than concerned with General Kustos’s injury, even though Kustos, as a result of it, had become quite ill. The wound had swollen and turned black. It had been loosely stitched and compresses and ointments applied by the army physicians, but these had done nothing to alleviate the general’s pain or begin the healing process. He suffered from a continuous fever, and as a result, Kustos drank steadily: warm wine sweetened with roots, which variously invigorated him or subdued the pain to an extent that it was manageable.

  Cyrodian immediately saw his opportunity to take charge of Kustos’s legion and do with the Tuveski what he had done in the southern stretches. “Can you do anything more for him?” he asked of Kustos’s physicians, and when those chirurgeons and leeches replied that the severity of the wound and the intense cold thwarted any progress they had hoped to see, Cyrodian suggested that General Kustos’s recovery might be accelerated were he removed to the capital. The physicians reluctantly but, under the circumstances, sensibly agreed.

  That very evening, the night of Cyrodian’s arrival, a protesting General Kustos was placed within a covered wagon made hospitable with blankets and foodstuffs and, escorted by a guard of a hundred cavalry, began the long westward trek back to Lasura.

  That same evening, Cyrodian met in Kustos’s tent with those retainers and commanders who had stayed behind. He learned from them what had occurred to the first invasion force and suggested a counter-strategy.

  “We burn the forest. Work day and night,” was his order. “Put these men in three shifts. Begin felling every tree you find. We’ll have everything a quarter-league deep leveled in a couple of days. Then we set fire to it. The winds will do the rest. We follow behind in the ashes and count the bodies. Am I understood?”

  The sheer common sense of this strategy impressed the Emarians, but the enormity of the plan was unsettling. This was among the oldest forestland in the world.

  To which Cyrodian said: “Then what the gods have done, let us undo! We want these bastards to know who’s here, don’t we? We want them to know who we are. We want them to know whose boots are on their necks, don’t we? And whose fists are at their throats?” He clenched a furry hand and showed it all around.

  In the morning, the legion began felling trees.

  * * * *

  However, before the plan for firing the Tuveski could be carried out, Cyrodian received a summons to report back to the capital and present himself to Nutatharis. The message arrived in camp by a lone rider coming from the south; he had intercepted Cyrodian’s forces there and, told by them that the general had moved north, he had come in a roundabout way.

  The letter from Nutatharis predated the wounding of General Kustos; nevertheless, its instructions were not obviated by that man’s condition. Report to me at once, King Nutatharis ordered Cyrodian; winter has set in, and we cannot hope to gain more territory now without severe damage and loss of life. Nutatharis had, apparently, gained all that he had desired this far into the campaign, that being a very substantial region of the Low Provinces. The land already gained could be held without his two chief generals remaining in the field; it would be better for Cyrodian and Kustos to retire to the capital and plan strategy with Nutatharis.

  Unspoken in the order was the intimation that the king did not want these men waxing independent while away from the throne. Nutatharis’s iron leash on their collars was a short one.

  Grumbling, Cyrodian decided to answer Nutatharis’s request by doing as instructed. He told Kustos’s officers to refrain from firing the Tuveski until they received word to do so from either Nutatharis or himself. Then he set off, alone by choice, on horseback, westward.

  It took him five days to reach Lasura, and even though he had traveled quickly, he had not overtaken Kustos before arriving in the capital. There, General Cyrodian found King Nutatharis very disturbed because of Kustos’s severe injury.

  “He should have returned here at once!” Nutatharis complained. “He is dying! The fool! Do I value his life more than he does?”

  They sat at table with wine; it was late in the evening, and large fires burned in the great fireplaces at opposite ends of the hall.

  “The wound is not so severe,” Cyrodian reminded Nutatharis. “Kustos is a soldier. If a soldier can’t—”

  “The wound has festered for more than a week,” Nutatharis told him. “His chirurgeon is incompetent. He treats life as lightly as General Kustos does. He’s useless. I’ll have him cut apart for my dogs to eat.”

  Slyly, Cyrodian suggested, “Even if Kustos is incapacitated for the winter, there are others under your command who would relish the chance to show their abilities and take the place of General Kustos.”

  Nutatharis was quite aware that when Cyrodian spoke, he spoke with two voices. Truly he had been raised in the ways of the great throne at Athad, under the tutelage of ministers and councilors skilled in the maneuvers required in that soft place. So he asked Cyrodian directly, “Do you yourself wish to take greater command of my army, Cyrodian?”

  “You could make a worse choice than elevating me to Chief General of Emaria.”

  “Deciding who, if any besides myself, should have command over my army is but one of my concerns, Athadian. I know your history in sending men to death and managing tactics on the field, and you are first in these abilities. But I have a second reason for keeping my lines where we are in the provinces. I am anticipating developments in Erusabad, and sacrificing further companies of Emarian men is not required for that.”

  Cyrodian was intrigued. “Then the Salukads have moved into the ci
ty?”

  “They will do it within days. I’ve received word from King Huagrim.”

  Cyrodian frowned agreeably. “Then that could be only to our advantage.”

  “But this—” Nutatharis reached inside his tunic and withdrew a document “—could prove to be to our disadvantage.” He opened the folded parchment and displayed it, but he did not pass it to Cyrodian.

  Cyrodian was not pleased when he saw the mark and seal upon it. “From my brother?”

  “Indeed, my friend.”

  It was a writ of capias, signed by Elad and sealed with his official imprimatur.

  “For me?” Cyrodian growled, stretching to reach for the document.

  “He orders me to have you returned to Athad. He knows that you have taken refuge in my court, and he wishes you returned at once on criminal charges.”

  “Criminal charges?” Cyrodian laughed. “After both of our criminal enterprises, my brother’s and mine, he left me die in a wasteland, to be eaten by animals. Criminal charges?”

  “This writ charges you with plotting the death of your mother—for murdering your queen by proxy.”

  Nutatharis had stated the charge very calmly; now he watched with hawk eyes for Cyrodian’s reaction, and the king glanced at his guards stationed in the hall, ready to order them forward should Cyrodian create an incident.

  The huge man did not deny the charge. He moved back in his chair and rested his large forearms on the table. He flexed his fists, his rage held in. The veins of his arms were taut ropes. His muscles were those of a great bear or caged lion.

  Finally he asked, looking Nutatharis in the eyes, “What do you intend to do?” There was an urgent, disquieting edge to his voice.

  “Do?” Nutatharis answered, in control. “I can do nothing. This writ never arrived. I have not received it.” He tilted the parchment toward the flame of an oil lamp resting on the tabletop. The flame crawled upon the paper and ate it. Nutatharis released it, still burning, and the writ fell as black ashes onto the polished marble.