Yet these men and women worshipped the captain.
Narad was jealous of them all. He’d not even met the captain yet, and he wondered what he would see in this Scara Bandaris to make sense of this killing of Deniers, and this whole damned war. Narad had grown up on a farm lying just outside a small hamlet. He knew the reasons everyone gave when hunting vermin – the rats brought disease, the hares ate the crops and riddled the ground, and so all that slaughter was necessary. He knew that he should think of these Deniers in the same way, as an infestation and a threat to their way of life. Even rats minded their own business, but that didn’t save them; that didn’t stop
them
from being a problem; that didn’t keep the beaters and their dogs away.
He sat on a log outside the tent he had been given. Every now and then he would look down at his hands, and then quickly away again.
It wasn’t murder. It was mercy.
But he was an ugly man now and the world was just as ugly, and this face wasn’t his and if this face wasn’t his then neither were these hands, and yesterday was someone else’s crime. He wondered if that girl had been beautiful. He believed that she had. But beauty had no place in this new world. This world that Haral had delivered him into. This was Haral’s fault and one day he would kill that bastard.
He looked up, his eyes catching movement from the trail. A man had appeared, astride a mule.
Others took note, and Narad saw Bursa approach. The corporal caught Narad’s eye and a hand waved him an invitation. Narad straightened, feeling the weight of his sword at his hip, a weight he had always liked but never quite felt comfortable with, but it was there now and it wasn’t going away. He made his way over to Bursa’s side.
The stranger had not even paused upon finding the camp, and by his dress Narad could see that he was highborn, although his mount and the stained boxes strapped to it suggested otherwise.
Bursa, with Narad now on his left, positioned himself directly in the stranger’s path, forcing him to rein in.
It came to Narad suddenly that the trail this man had come from led straight back to the Deniers’ camp. His eyes narrowed on the stranger’s bland, utterly fearless expression.
‘You wander obscure paths, sir,’ said Bursa, hands on his hips.
‘You have no idea,’ the stranger replied. ‘Cleaned your blades yet? I see that you have and so must acknowledge your discipline. You wear the livery of Urusander’s Legion, but I suspect he knows not what you do in his name.’
The challenge of this left Bursa momentarily speechless, and then he laughed. ‘Sir, you are mistaken—’
‘Corporal, I have just ridden from Vatha Keep. I have been Lord Urusander’s guest for much of this past month. The only “mistake” here is your assumption of my ignorance. So I ask you, since when does Urusander’s Legion make war upon innocent men, women and children?’
‘You have, I fear, been somewhat out of touch,’ Bursa growled in reply, and Narad could see the anger bubbling up, a fizzling froth that this stranger seemed blind to, or indifferent.
Narad put his hand on the grip of his sword.
The stranger’s eyes flicked to him then away again, back to Bursa. ‘Out of touch? What you are touching I want nothing to do with,
corporal
. I am returning to my father’s estate. It is regrettable that you are in my way, but as I have no wish to share your company I will continue on.’
‘In a moment,’ Bursa said. ‘I am under orders to make note of travellers in this area—’
‘Whose orders? Not Lord Urusander’s. So I ask again, who gives orders to Urusander’s Legion in his name?’
Bursa’s face was reddening. In a tight voice he said, ‘My orders came by messenger from Captain Hunn Raal not three days past.’
‘Hunn Raal? You’re not of his company.’
‘No, we are soldiers under the command of Captain Scara Bandaris.’
‘And where is he?’
‘In Kharkanas. Sir, you ride in ignorance. An uprising is under way.’
‘I see that,’ the stranger replied.
Bursa’s lips thinned into a straight, bloodless line. Then he said, ‘Your name, please, if you wish to pass.’
‘I am Kadaspala, son of Lord Jaen of House Enes. I have been painting your commander’s portrait. Shall I tell you how much I see in a man’s face when studying it day after day after day? I see everything. No dissembling evades my eye. No malice, no matter how well hidden, can hide from me. I don’t doubt you are following Hunn Raal’s orders. The next time you see that smirking drunk, give him this message from me. It will not do to imagine that Lord Urusander is now little more than a mere figurehead, to be pushed this way and that. Manipulate Vatha Urusander and he will make you regret it. Now, we have the measure of each other. Let me pass. It’s getting late, and I ride in the company of ghosts. You’ll not wish us to linger.’
After a long moment, Bursa stepped to one side. Narad did the same, feeling his heart pounding in his chest.
As the artist edged past them, he turned to Narad and said, ‘I can see the man you once were.’
Narad stiffened, biting back his shame.
Kadaspala continued, ‘But all I can see is this. What was inside is now outside. I feel sorry for you, soldier. No one deserves to be that vulnerable.’
He then rode on, through the camp and the crowd of other soldiers – all of them silent and hooded, as if cowed by this unarmed boy of an artist. A few moments later, he disappeared into the far end of the clearing, where the trail picked up once more.
‘Shit,’ Bursa said.
Narad wanted to ask a question, but seeing the expression on Bursa’s face silenced him. The corporal had paled, looking to where the artist had gone, and in his eyes there was confusion and something like sick dread. ‘Captain told us to sit tight,’ he muttered. ‘But Hunn Raal’s
whore
said—’ He stopped then and glared across at Narad. ‘That’ll do, soldier. Back to your tent.’
‘Yes sir,’ Narad replied.
Moving quickly, eyes on the log lying in front of his tent, Narad reached up to brush the lines of his broken face, and for the first time, he felt fear at what his fingers found.
* * *
Drought had dried the field and the hoofs of horses had driven like mattocks into the soil, tearing up the grasses until nothing was left alive. Master-at-arms Ivis walked from it covered in gritty dust. His leathers were stained, his jerkin sodden under his arms and against his back. Behind him the brown clouds of dust were slow to settle over the clearing and the troop he’d been training had all retired to the trees, desperate for shade and a rest. There wasn’t much talk left in them: Ivis had driven that out. Some were crouched down, heads hanging. Others were sprawled on the grassy verge, forearms covering their eyes. Armour and half-emptied waterskins were scattered about like the aftermath of a battle, or a drunken night of revelry.
‘Take what’s left of that water and cool down your horses. Those animals need it more than any of you.’
At his words, the men and women stirred into motion. Ivis studied them a moment longer and then turned to where the warhorses stood beneath the trees. The only movement that came from them was the swishing of their tails against the swarming flies, and the occasional ripple of their sleek hides. The beasts looked strong, stripped down of all fat. As the Houseblades moved in among them, Ivis felt a spasm of sadness and looked away.
He didn’t know if animals dreamed. He didn’t know if they knew hope in their hearts, if they longed for things – like freedom. He didn’t know what looked out through their large, soft eyes. Most of all, he didn’t know what teaching them to kill did to them, to their spirits. Habits and deeds could stain a soul – he’d seen enough of that among his own kind. He’d seen broken children become broken men and broken women.
No doubt scholars and philosophers, puttering in their cosy rooms in Kharkanas, had devised elaborate definitions of all those intangible things that hovered like clouds of stirred-up dust above hard and battered ground – things nobody could really grasp or hold on to. Ideas about the soul, the hidden essence that knew itself, but knew itself incompletely, and so was doomed to ever question, to ever yearn. No doubt they had arguments and defences, built up into impressive structures that were more monuments to their own brilliance than stolid fortifications.
He remembered something his grandfather used to say. ‘
The man patrolling his prejudices never sleeps
.’ As a boy, Ivis had not quite understood what Ivelis had meant by that. But he thought he understood now. No matter. The philosophers dug deep moats around their definitions of things like the soul; moats that no animal could breach, since animals spoke the wrong language and so could never argue their way across. Still, when Ivis looked into a horse’s eyes, or a dog’s, or a felled deer’s in the last moments when the beast shudders and blinks with eyes filled with pain and terror, he saw the refutation of every philosopher’s argument.
Life did more than flicker. It burned with fire. He knew it to be a fire for the simple reason that eventually it burned itself out. It ate up all the fuel it possessed, and dimmed and waned, and then was gone.
But were life and soul one and the same? Why the division at all?
Anyone could draw circles in the dust, but in the greater scheme of things, it made for a pathetic moat.
His Houseblades had pushed away their weariness and were attending to their mounts. Saddles were pulled off, brushes drawn. Hands stroked down the length of muscles, felt along tendons and brushed bones under stretched hide. The animals stood motionless: Ivis never knew if they but tolerated the attention, or were comforted by it. He’d seen mischief in animals, but none of them could smile. And always, their eyes were but wells of mystery.
Corporal Yalad moved up alongside him. ‘Sir, they wheeled with precision, didn’t they? Never seen anything so perfect.’
Ivis grunted. ‘You want compliments, corporal? Maybe even a kiss? Go find that maid you keep rocking up the wall back of the stables. I’m the wrong man to make you feel good, and if I wanted a conversation I’d find someone with more than half a brain.’
Yalad backed a step. ‘Apologies, sir.’
The captain knew that his foul mood was the subject of plenty of barracks talk. If no one knew the cause of it, all the better as far as Ivis was concerned. It just made them work harder trying to please him, or at least avoid a dressing down. If they knew, they’d think him mad.
There was something in the air, in this summer heat, that felt … wrong. As if malice had a smell, a stink, and even the hot winds blew through it and left it untouched, and the sun could not beat it down and all the ripening crops could not burn it away.
Days like this were making his skin crawl. He’d seen lone riders skirting the estate grounds, cutting fast and hard across Dracons land. He’d caught the faint smell of bad smoke, the kind of smoke that came from burnt clothes, burnt possessions, burnt hair and flesh – but never enough to be entirely certain, to even so much as sense a direction or possible source.
He had taken to watching sunsets, wandering out into the trees or drifting along the forest’s edge, and in the failing of light he found moments of frightening stillness, as if even in a held breath some breath was lost, the faintest exhalation, smelling of something wrong.
If all life possessed a soul, then perhaps it too was a burning fire, and just as life burned out when it had used itself up, so too did a soul. But maybe it took longer to wink out. Maybe it took for ever. But just as life could sicken, so too could a soul – sometimes one could tell, if there were eyes to look into, if there was an easy focus to that wrongness. When he walked through the dusk, along the forest’s dark line, he thought he could feel the land’s soul – a soul made up of countless smaller souls – and what he felt was something sickening.
Ivis turned to Corporal Yalad. ‘Round everyone up and head back. Walk the horses on to the track, then everyone dog-trot up to the gate. Shake out those muscles. Everyone cleans up before mess.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘I’ll be in later.’
‘Of course, sir.’
The forest, preserved by an edict from Lord Draconus, ran like a curled finger between hills, following the line of an ancient valley’s riverbed. Its tip, where it was thinnest, was at this field’s edge, where it stretched to almost touch Dracons Hold. If he walked northward, up the track of that finger, the forest thickened, and if one persisted in the simile, spread out to form the hand where the valley opened on to a floodplain. This was the forest’s ancient heart.
It had been years since Ivis last ventured there. Few people did, as Draconus had forbidden the harvesting of its wood or the hunting of whatever animals dwelt within it. Ivis had been instructed to patrol its edges on a regular basis, but at random intervals. Poaching was always a risk, but the punishment was death and that punishment could be carried out by the patrols, and this discouraged the petty hunters and wood cutters. But the real deterrent was the Lord’s own generosity. No one starved on his lands, and no one had to brave the winter without fuel. It was, to the captain’s mind, extraordinary what was possible when those people who could do something, did. He knew that not everyone appreciated it enough. Some poachers just liked poaching; they liked working outside the laws; they liked secrecy and deceit and that sense of making fools of their betters.