“It is done,” Fedor said, before the count was two-thirds complete.
“Lieutenant, escort the hostages to their homes to pack. Each must take two days’ water, and two weeks’ dry food. Clan head, you will provide us with a sack of grain for every ten persons in your village. You will provide quarters for our men at the point closest to your grain stories. If there is any resistance, we will kill all concerned. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, my lord.”
Fedor stood proud, but the officer speaking to him turned his beast and rode off without even bothering to acknowledge his acquiescence.
Arrogant bastards.
A soldier seized Kei’s arm and dragged him further away from the assembly with the other hostages.
Two soldiers apiece came up beside them. “Move—you have to get ready,” one told him in clumsy Darshianese and then his guards marched him between them to his home. Kei had long ago decided what to take, but still had to actually pack since it would seem suspicious to be ready. His clothing and personal effects were no difficulty. The medical supplies were more of a problem. “What is this?” one of the men wanted to know, picking up a bottle of nitre distillation.
Kei explained it in simple words, as if to a child. “It’s medicine for wounds. It’s deadly poison, so you mustn’t drink it.”
The soldier put it down hastily. “Do you think we should let him take it?” he asked the other, older man.
“Can’t see how it will harm anyone but himself. Prisoner, if you or anyone else harm themselves, or come to harm, your fellows will suffer the same fate as you, do you understand?”
“Yes, sir. I take responsibility for all such matters.”
The older of the two soldiers nodded. “All right. If you want to pour poison on yourselves, that’s up to you. Hey, you can’t take those!”
Kei spread the surgical kit out. “Can they be kept safe if I need them? They can do no harm if you keep them.”
“I’ll make arrangements with our medic and seal the things up. Better give me that poison stuff too.”
Kei had expected this, but he hoped the medic was a reasonable man. If he needed the things in a hurry, a delay could be fatal.
The bandages and ointments were passed without comment, so he was ready in a very short time. His hands shook, and he clenched them into fists at his side. No amount of preparation could ready him for being taken from his home under guard. The two men guarding him seemed reasonable, but he detected a lot of hostility from the other soldiers, contemptuous looks thrown in the direction of the villagers—even some fear, which was odd, considered how badly the Darshianese were outnumbered.
He was taken back to the square where his fellow hostages were also assembled. He felt their fear, and saw it in their eyes. He tried to look reassuring, because that was what he did as a healer. He won a slight response, lips a little less tight, but not much else. Not surprising.
The lieutenant spoke to the other officer, who nodded. The lieutenant carefully noted down the name of every hostage, and had Fedor sign the list. “Fedor of Ai-Albon, your mark on this document shows you have agreed these men and women stand as your bond of good behaviour. Retribution for any crime against Kuprij will fall first on them. You may say a brief farewell on behalf of their families.”
Even knowing in advance what was coming, many people wept, but Kei was proud that no one broke down or shamed those who had to go by begging them to stay. Fedor stood stiff-backed and looked every inch the clan head as he clasped the hand of each hostage and kissed their cheeks.
When he got to Kei, Fedor’s eyes were awash with tears. “My son, my nephew,” he said so quietly they were the only ones who could hear. “I wish there was some other way.”
“There isn’t, my father. I’ll wait for the joy of seeing you again—and the rest of my family.”
“As will I.” He hugged Kei tightly. “Gods, you are so like Keiji, but you remind me of my sister too. It hurts to let you go.”
“I’ll be back, father. I promise.” Kei made him let go—he couldn’t handle Fedor’s pain and his own, if he was going to stay calm. His control hadn’t been the same since the day Myka and the others left. Kei suspected something had broken inside him then, but there wasn’t anything he could do except try and stop people aggravating the injury.
There was so much he wanted to say to Fedor now the time had come, so many things he wished he could do. He had trained Misek and Meis as much as he could to act as healers, but they could still only handle the bare basics. If there was a serious outbreak of illness, or another kiln explosion, people would die because he wasn’t there. He bit his lip from saying as much. Lori was too young to make this journey. Lori’s adopted brother was much better able to handle it.
There was no time left. The lieutenant’s patience was at an end, and without further ceremony, Kei and the others were marched out of the village. Kei didn’t know whether this was an ending or a beginning, but it was as painful as birth, and as much cause for grief as dying.
Hope was the only comfort they had now.
~~~~~~~~
Jozo was pleased. “Another annexation gone smoothly, eh, Arman? In two weeks we’ll be at Kislik, and you can turn back towards home.”
Home, Arman thought dully. He had no home now. “Doesn’t it strike you as strange it’s been so easy? These curs today didn’t even make the pretense of a protest. It feels wrong.”
“Come now. What are a couple of hundred simple, superstitious barbarians like that going to do when they see a thousand of Kuprij’s finest come over the horizon? They’re too busy shitting themselves to fight.”
“Yes, but if the Darshianese were to attack Utuk—”
“Which the gods forbid,” Jozo quickly interrupted.
“Which the gods would never allow,” Arman agreed impatiently, “but say they did, even the smallest child would stand to defend the city. None of them seemed to care.”
Jozo swept his hand around. “Would you want to die for this? Utuk’s a proud, ancient city. This is just farmland.”
“As you say. I’m going to take a guard and ride on ahead. I don’t want to be near these people.”
“All right. Arman...I know you grieve, my friend. But this hatred, it’s not like you. It’s not the spirit that makes a good general either.” Jozo’s eyes were kind, worried for him.
“Don’t tell me how I should feel. So long as I do my job to Her Serenity’s satisfaction, no one will have a complaint. She’ll be pleased to have her empire expanded.”
Jozo shook his head. “Very well, if that’s how you want to play it, I won’t press you. I’ll see you at the camping grounds at noon. Maybe you should see if you can hunt us up some meat. I’m tired of eggs.”
“Perhaps.” Arman turned his beast, and signalled to his men. He had to get away from these cursed Darshianese.
He ordered his guard to stay well back from him. He didn’t expect any danger, but if he were entirely honest, he didn’t really care if an attack came. It was hard to care about anything any more. The only emotions he felt were grief and hate, and the latter only in bursts. Most of the time, he felt dead inside. He wanted to
be
dead. He avoided Jozo as much as he could, and had no interactions with his men except the necessary acceptance of meals, or receipt of information. Contact with other people made him ache, because they were not—
He couldn’t even think the name without his vision blurring with tears. He couldn’t use his knife any more, because of the teeth marks on the handle and what they meant. He avoided his diary and the pale blond locks stored in its cover with the last message to a mother, as yet unaware of a loss that was choking Arman to death. When he lay on his pallet at night, more often than not, his hand drifted to touch a slim, warm shoulder that wasn’t there any more.
It drove him to long walks at night around and around the perimeter of the camp, desperate for the physical exhaustion that would let him sleep without dreaming of smiling bright eyes, or hearing again the last, agonised breaths. Every blond head in the camp caught his eye, every clear, light voice drew his attention. He could simply not school himself not to look or be fooled for that tiny moment in time.
He was neglecting his duties. Jozo had come the closest yet to a complaint about it today, and then only in the mildest way, but if they were in the middle of a serious fight, Arman would be a major liability. Not even for the honour of his name could he bring himself to care.
His thoughts turned to the village they had taken over today, and he gritted his teeth in disgust at the calm way the people had given up their hostages, as if their children and their brothers and sisters were nothing to them. Savages, every one of them, unfeeling, incapable of deep emotion, without honour or decent creed.
That...what was the cur’s name? “Fedor,” he spat. Hadn’t even hesitated to push his son forward. It would serve Her Serenity better to cut all their throats, so they stopped being a burden on the Empire. The gods forbid the blood of Prij and Darshianese ever mixed. The barbarians were an offence against nature. Even their colour marked them as defiled.
But that made him think of purity and innocence, which led him back to the subject never far from his mind, and the callous Fedor and his worthless village slipped out of his thoughts.
Once he returned to Utuk, he would ask Her Serenity to relieve him of the necessity of ever setting foot in this cursed land again, and perhaps then he would begin to heal. It would at least mean he would never look at these dark-eyed murderers again.
Kei wondered if he would ever again know what it felt like to not be exhausted and hungry and thirsty. After nearly three weeks on the move, his whole world had narrowed to the simple task of merely keeping up right and moving. The first few days were raw hell for all of them. He had to treat and bind blisters the size of tuktuk eggs on all their feet, and sleeping on hard ground, wrapped only in thin army blankets and each other for warmth against the frosty clear skies, meant they started each day more tired than when they went to sleep. Their escorts weren’t cruel, and moderated their pace to fit the weakest members of the group, but they were still relentless, keeping them on their feet from dawn to dusk, with infrequent breaks, inadequate water and indifferent food. This on top of the anxiety and the fear everyone felt, and which Kei had to endure ten times over.
As they grew used to the hardship, things were a little easier, although they were all worn very thin. No one spoke as they walked, needing the energy just to keep moving. The rainy season had started, and there were days when all they could do was trudge through the mud and the wet, protected by their oilskins. It seldom rained all day, and there were only two nights when they’d had to sleep sitting up, a single piece of oiled canvas over their heads as shelter. It could have been so much worse. At least they weren’t bound or chained, and the escorting soldiers, while on the whole not being particularly friendly, did what they could to help the hostages survive their ordeal. A couple of them, those who spoke slightly better Darshianese, even lingered to talk to them after the communal evening meal. From them, Kei learned his first words of Prijian, and encouraged the soldiers to keep teaching them the language. The hostages were determined to take every scrap of advantage passed to them, to learn what they could of their enemy, and most of all, to survive. Even those with him he heard weeping quietly into their hands at night, were determined to get through this and one day go home.
Kei and Fedor had tried to choose the toughest, the strongest and the most stable of the available adults to carry out the role of hostages. Kei had known every one of them all his life. Peit had even seen him being born. Urki had given him his first kiss and told him she would marry him—although when he was five, and she seven. At twenty, Kei was the baby of the group, but as clan head’s son, even if only by adoption, and as healer, he found himself their unofficial leader. It was a role with which he was uncomfortable, but it was inevitable they would turn to someone to take the position. To him Peit was a more natural choice, but even he deferred to Kei. He couldn’t argue with them over it without causing them more distress.
Because he picked up Prijian quickly and was careful to cultivate any sign of friendliness shown towards them, the soldiers treated him as the spokesperson for the hostages. The increased interaction meant he learned even more of the language, which wasn’t that different from Darshianese in structure and even in some of the words. The coincidence intrigued him. The difficulty with Prijian was that it was so bound up with the highly stratified, that there were many words for the same thing, with different intonations conveying quite different meanings for the same word, often with insulting effect. He wasn’t exactly learning Prijian at its purest or most elegant from the soldiers, who were all illiterate and as superstitious a group of men as one could ever meet.
Their religion baffled him, and the fatalism about everything being down to the whim and will of apparently capricious deities was frustrating. It was a subject which occupied his thoughts a good deal on the apparently endless march, offering some distraction from his physical misery. He couldn’t understand how apparently rational humans could honestly believe cutting a bird or an urs beast’s throat would alter the mind of one of these supposed super beings, nor why no one questioned why two people making the same sacrifice with the same wish, should get such different results. What kind of society did the Prij have that was sustained on such a basis?