Blood and Mud

Chapter 37: Chapter 37

Good day to you all, gents. Sorry for the delay in Chapters, but I wanted to bring my writing to a new level. I will also probably go back and edit the previous Chapter; do not worry; the story will remain the same, but i think I owe myself and you to write them better. Thanks, and enjoy the new Chapter.

You smell an army before you see one.

We came over the last ridge straight into it — woodsmoke and wet wool, horse and horse dung, and underneath all of it the sweet rot of latrine trenches dug shallow and dug upwind. That told me more about the West Border Army’s officers than three weeks of dispatches had.

Then the valley opened.

Grey canvas from the river to the treeline. Someone had started laying the camp out in proper blocks and had clearly given up on the idea somewhere around the fourth cohort, because past that it was just tents wherever tents would fit. Smoke stood over the basin in hundreds of separate threads that blurred, at this distance, into one flat haze, so you couldn’t tell whose fire was whose.

I had read the number. Two hundred thousand, replenished, the largest concentration of Imperial infantry since the Hollow Years. I have written numbers like that, in another life, in a hand that didn’t shake, with fingers that were not fourteen years old.

Writing it and looking at it are unrelated activities.

Down there were men who would die in the swamp without ever learning the name of the thing that killed them.

We rode down.

The central avenue was wide enough for four wagons abreast, and it cleared ahead of us anyway. Men saw the banner first, then the captains, and then a great deal of very urgent business began happening at the sides of the road.

Nobody spoke while we passed. That’s the part I’ve never got used to — not the staring, the silence. A ring of quiet travelled with us down the avenue and closed up behind us, conversation starting again at the edges like a held breath let out. One boy carrying a water bucket forgot he was carrying it and stood there letting it drip onto his own boots until we were well past.

Ten Bud Burst Captains riding in a line. I don’t blame him.

The command pavilion sat at the heart of it, ringed by the Goliath trebuchets, their throwing arms cranked down and lashed like sleeping animals. General Kaelus stood outside in full plate, which in that heat was either discipline or theatre. He had a face that had lost several arguments with edged weapons and won all of them anyway.

Miklas saluted. Kaelus returned it.

”Captain.” His voice came out of him the way a cart comes over gravel. He gave Commander Erula a nod with actual deference in it. ”Commander. Your sweeps held. Supply lines are clean. Take the eastern flank. We move at dawn.”

”Understood, sir.”

That was the entire conversation between the commander of the West Border Army and the officers of the 7th Legion. I liked him immediately.

His eyes went over me once on their way to something else. Not past me. Over. The way you glance across a table to check whether the salt is there.

We pitched on the eastern flank, and once the lines were staked Miklas sent me to the central quartermaster for whetstones and oil.

I left the bastard sword in my tent. Partly because hauling a runic weapon out to collect sharpening stones is the kind of thing that gets you laughed at by people whose opinion I actually care about, and partly — I’ll be honest — because the scabbard is longer than my leg and I have never once walked anywhere with it on my back without looking like a child carrying her father’s coat.

So: leathers, and the Veriti knife strapped to my thigh, and no armour worth the name. I was three-quarters of the way through the regular camp, doing arithmetic on their grain distribution — four collection points where six would have halved every queue — when a hand closed on my shoulder and pulled.

I went down in a puddle. Cold, and deep enough to soak through to the hip.

”Watch where you’re walking.”

Four of them. Infantry, off duty, ration ale on their breath strong enough to taste from where I was sitting. The one who’d grabbed me was tall and about three days past needing a shave.

”You lost?” He looked me over the way you’d look at a stray dog that had wandered into the mess. ”Followers’ camp is down past the latrines. What are you, twelve?”

I sat in the water and thought, unhelpfully: twelve.

I know what I look like. I check sometimes, in the water barrel outside the mess when nobody’s using it. Small. Bruised in the ordinary places. A face that has not once in this life been taken seriously by anybody who didn’t first watch me hit something.

Then the other thing arrived, which is not courage and has never been courage. I am simply very bad at letting things go.

I got up. On the way up I looked at their feet, because feet tell you everything. The tall one was standing with his knees locked and his weight on his heels. Two had their thumbs tucked inside their fists. Padded jacks, no mail — they’d come from their tents, not from the line.

I brushed the mud off my knees and gave them my very best smile. It’s a good smile. I’ve practised.

”I’m Lieutenant Elvit, 5th Cohort, 7th Legion,” I said, bright as a feast day. ”So if you don’t step aside, I’m going to have to break your jaw.”

The tall one laughed until he had to put a hand on his knee.

”A lieutenant,” he said. ”They’re recruiting out of the orphanages now—”

He reached for my collar.

I didn’t go for the knife. Drawing steel on Imperial regulars is a court-martial whatever the provocation, and Miklas would have had to stand there in the square and listen to them read the charges out.

So I opened the Bud instead.

The heat came up through my chest and down both arms, and it hurt, it always hurts, like swallowing something too hot too fast. Then the world slowed by about a third.

His hand was still travelling toward my collar when I stepped inside it and drove the heel of my palm up under his chin.

His teeth came together. I heard it. He went over backward into the mud with his eyes already rolled white and lay there with one boot twitching.

The other three didn’t move. I watched them try the arithmetic and fail it.

”Get her—”

The second came in with a wide right hand telegraphed all the way from the shoulder. I ducked under, caught the wrist on the way past, and kept it going in the direction it already wanted to go. Then my knee into his ribs. Something gave in there that shouldn’t have. He sat down hard in the water breathing in a way I didn’t much like the sound of.

Two left, and they came at once, which was the first sensible thing any of them had managed. I took a fist across the cheekbone for it — clipped, not clean, but enough to put white across my vision and remind me that I am fourteen and weigh about as much as a full sack of grain.

I kicked the near one’s knee out sideways and put my elbow into the back of his neck as he dropped. He went in face-first and stayed there, which worried me slightly, so I hooked a boot under his shoulder and rolled him over so he could breathe.

Then there was one.

He had his fists up. He was also backing away, which is a difficult combination to do well.

I let the smile come back and tilted my head at him.

”You can leave,” I said, ”or we can find out how a kneecap comes apart. I’ve done the numbers. It isn’t complicated.”

He looked at his friends — one unconscious, one breathing wrong, one on his back in the puddle. He lowered his hands. Then he turned and ran, and he ran for a long time; I could hear him going between the tents well after I’d lost sight of him.

I let the Ember out. It leaves the way a fever leaves, all at once, and puts you down cold and shaking and furious about nothing in particular. I stood with my hands on my knees until that passed.

Two knuckles had split. My cheek was already coming up. The tunic was finished — mud down one whole side, blood at the cuff, and not mine.

The requisition order was floating face-down in the puddle. I fished it out and shook it and read what survived: the seal, most of the quantities, and the word whetstones gone entirely to a grey smear.

Three tents down on my left, a cook had stopped stirring his pot to watch the entire thing. When I looked at him he resumed stirring with enormous concentration.

I put the smile back on. I’ve found it’s easier to keep it on than to keep putting it back.

The quartermaster sergeant took one look at the paper and one look at me and issued twelve whetstones and two jars of oil without asking a single question.

I think I liked him even better than the general.