Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 533: Chapter 528: The Cut of It

Location:Obsidian Academy — The Old Armory, Base of the Mountain

Date/Time:6 Ashwhisper, 9942 AZI

Realm:Lower Realm

The armory sounded like work before it looked like anything.

Somebody was hammering at the far end in a rhythm too even to be repair, and under that ran the hiss of a quench trough and the flat slap of bolts of cloth being thrown down on a bench, and somewhere behind both of those a woman was arguing about thread count in a dialect Jayde could follow about two words in three. The room had been a storage hall for sixty years. It had six forges in it, four of them cold, and the two that were lit had made the whole space warm enough that Bai Shu had taken her outer robe off within a minute of coming through the door and had then not known what to do with it.

Meifen had walked straight to the lit forge and stood in front of it without saying anything, and had stayed there.

”You can stop pretending you came for the meeting,” Jayde said.

”I have not stood next to a lit one since I was seventeen.” Meifen did not turn around. ”It smells exactly the same.”

”It is going to smell like that for the rest of your life. I am about to build a great many of them.”

***

The bench had the prototype on it, and the prototype was not a coat. It was a man.

Jayde had laid it out the way a body is laid out, from the boots at the near end to the cap at the far, and it took up the whole length of the bench and a second bench after it, and she had put a gap between each of the three groups.

On him, the things he wore. Boots, two pairs, black, the second still on the last. Socks, six. Underlayers, three sets. Trousers, two. Shirts, three. Field coat. A separate cold-weather jacket that went over it and not instead of it, and a quilted layer that went under both. Gloves. A sun cap and a fitted one that sat under a helmet without bunching. Boiled leather at the shoulders, the outside of the forearms, and down the shin, in overlapping plates so a man could still get his elbow to his own face. A helmet — plain, low, with a leather cradle inside it and a chin strap that let go under load. Smoked glass goggles on a cord. Belt.

On the harness, the things he fought in. A webbing rig that carried its weight on the hips and could be got out of in one movement, hung with pouches: water, three days of rations, the medical wallet, a knife, a whistle, a striker and a stub lamp, and space that was deliberately left empty for whatever Ordnance eventually decided a soldier was going to fight with.

In the pack, the things he could put down. The frame, the spare clothing, a quilted sleeping sack that rolled to the size of a piglet, a tent half that buttoned to another man’s tent half and made a tent for two and was useless alone. Folding spade. Sewing kit, boot grease, whetstone, spare laces. Rain cape.

And all of it was black. Not a dark brown that people would agree to call black in good light — flat, deep, even from cuff to hem, the same black at both ends of the bolt.

Nobody spoke for a while, and Jayde let them not speak.

Meifen got to the helmet first and turned it over and found the cradle inside it, and stood there with two fingers hooked in the leather, working out that the shell never touched the skull at all.

”It floats,” she said, to nobody. ”The whole thing floats. You could take a hammer to this and the man’s neck would still —” She stopped and turned it over again and did not finish the sentence.

Feng Lian had started counting and could not make herself stop.

Shenwei had the pack frame off the bench and up against his own back, wrong way round, with his hand underneath it feeling for where the weight went. ”It is not on the shoulders,” he said. ”It is on the hips. The shoulders are only holding it upright.” He looked up with an expression Jayde had last seen on him in a tunnel. ”Who thought of that?”

”A great many people, over a very long time.”

Ruifen had not touched anything. She had walked to the second bench and was looking at the second kit, laid out identically, and then back down the line at the first.

”They are the same,” she said.

”Every one of them. Down to the laces.”

”No. You are not hearing me.” Ruifen’s voice had gone flat in a way it had not all evening. ”A levy comes with what he owns. That is what a soldier is on this continent — a man who brought his own boots. In that mountain I had four students in one squad, and one of them had a good coat from a good house, and one of them had a blanket with a hole cut in it, and I had to decide which of them stood in the wind, and I decided, and I have not stopped deciding it.” She put one hand flat on the second coat. ”If they are the same, I never have to make that choice again.”

Bai Shu had been looking at the sun cap for a long time, and when Jayde glanced over, she put it down quickly, the way you put down something in a shop.

”Try it,” Jayde said.

”It is not —” Bai Shu stopped. ”I have never owned a hat that was made for a head.”

Hu Bing spoke from the far end without appearing to look at anything.

”The pouches are all front and sides,” he said. ”Nothing behind. A man can lie down on his belly in this.”

”Yes.”

”Nobody has ever designed clothes for me to lie down in,” Hu Bing said, and went back to the wall.

Kiran had not moved from the door and had not said one word, and was writing.

”It is ugly,” Zhong said.

”It is very ugly.”

”Good. Ugly does not get requisitioned by a lord’s son for hunting.” He picked up a sleeve and put it down again. ”Why is the padding underneath?”

”Because a wet outer layer over dry padding dries. A wet padded coat is a man carrying a bucket.” Jayde tapped the seam. ”And because he can take it off without disarming himself, which is the only reason any of it is built the way it is.”

”Fifty-one,” Feng Lian said. She had reached the end of the bench.

”Fifty-three. You have counted the mess tin and the spoon as one, and you have missed the spare laces because they are inside the second boot.” Jayde looked down the length of it. ”That is one soldier. Everything he owns, everything that keeps him alive in a wet valley in Ashwhisper, and every piece of it identical to the man beside him so that either of them can use the other’s without asking.”

***

”And the black,” Ryo said.

He had not touched anything. He had the ledger open and had been waiting for a gap in the talking.

”The objection first. You have had it since you walked in.”

”We cannot dye it.” Ryo turned the ledger around. ”There are eleven provinces we would source from, and every one of them dyes with what grows there. Redwater does a brown. Ironmarch does a brown that is not that brown. There is a black out of the eastern flat that is genuinely black, and there is enough of it to clothe about four hundred people once and never again — and whichever four hundred get it become the real ones, and everybody else spends a decade explaining that they are also soldiers. I have watched clans do exactly that with sash colors, and it took two generations to become a caste.”

”That is the correct objection, and it is the one I would have made.” Jayde put four sewn sheets on the bench and slid them across. ”And it is answered. That is the recipe.”

Ryo did not pick it up. Feng Lian did, and read, and her face went through something complicated.

”This is all Doha,” she said. ”There is nothing on this list I could not buy in a market town. Bark, iron, and — you are getting the black out of the mordant. Not out of the dyestuff.”

”Yes.”

”Every dyer on this continent has had bark and iron for ten thousand years.”

”Every dyer on this continent has also had the wrong order of operations for ten thousand years, and the order is what makes it fast to sun and fast to washing instead of going green in a season.” Jayde did not elaborate on that, and nobody in the room had the standing to make her. ”Two dyers four hundred miles apart will produce the same cloth if they both have that sheet. It works in a village vat. It does not need a guild, it does not need a formation, and it does not need me.”

Ryo had the sheet now and was reading it the way he read contracts.

”Where did this come from?”

”The same place the rest of it comes from,” Jayde said.

He looked at her for a moment and did not ask again, which she noted.

”Then copy it. Openly.” She said it to the room. ”Nail it to the door of any dye house that asks. I do not want it to be a secret, and I do not want it to be a favor, because the day one man owns the black, he owns the uniform, and in thirty years the price of it is a political instrument.”

”You are giving it away,” Feng Lian said.

”I am giving away a recipe for cloth. What I am buying is seven thousand people in eleven provinces who look like the same thing.” Jayde put her hand flat on the coat. ”And that is the whole reason it is black. No clan uses it. Black is what they all call plain — because black is what the mountain is, and every farmer on this continent already knows what the mountain means, and it is not a family.”

***

”Why is it in three heaps?” Meifen asked.

”Because a man does not carry all of it into anything.” Jayde put her hand between the first group and the second. ”This is what he wears. This” — the harness — ”is what he fights and works in, and it comes off in one movement, and it never leaves him. And this is the pack, and the pack goes on the ground the moment anything starts happening, and he expects to come back for it and sometimes does not.”

”Two loads,” Ruifen said slowly. ”Fighting and marching.”

”Fighting and marching, and every soldier in this force will be able to say which one he is in, and every officer will say which one he is ordering, and that is a discipline and not a preference.” Jayde looked at her. ”Half the disasters in the accounts I have read come down to men doing a thing in the wrong load.”

Ruifen was quiet for a second.

”I have seen that,” she said. ”In the mountain. Twice. I did not have a word for it.”

”You do now.”

***

Ryo had stopped at the boots.

”Two pairs.”

”Two pairs, and the second is not a luxury, and I will fight anybody in this room about it. A man with one pair of boots has wet boots, and a man with wet boots has feet for about nine days, and after that he is a cart.” Jayde said it flatly. ”More soldiers have been lost to feet than to any enemy that ever existed. That is not a saying. It is a count.”

”And this?” Bai Shu had the canteen. It was heavier than it looked, and it did not sound right when she moved it.

”That is Eden’s, and it is the most important object on this bench, and nobody in this room is going to believe me.”

Eden took it and unscrewed the base and put the parts on the bench in order: an outer of hard-fired clay, a bed of charcoal, a bed of washed sand, a plug of tight-packed wool.

”You fill it from the top, and you drink from the spout, and it takes about the count of two hundred, and it is slow, and it is fiddly, and every soldier in this force is going to hate it,” she said. ”And it will keep more of them alive than the leather will.”

”From bad water,” Zhong said.

”From bad water.” Eden began putting it back together without looking at her hands. ”You have all just come out of a mountain, and you know what the enemy looked like. Nothing that lived down there killed as many of you as the water at Base Three did in the fourth month. I signed forty-one of those, and every single one of them was preventable by a clay pot and some charcoal.”

The armory was quiet enough that the cooling forges could be heard ticking.

”Forty-one,” Meifen said.

”Forty-one, and I am not going to say their names in a room where I would be using them to win an argument.” Eden set the canteen down. ”The element gets changed every ninety days. It goes in the manual, it goes in the drill, and a quartermaster who cannot produce his change-out record has failed an inspection as badly as if he had lost the weapons.”

***

”And this,” Ruifen said.

She had the last thing on the bench, and it was a small flat oval of soft metal on a cord, and it had nothing on it at all.

”Every soldier gets two,” Jayde said. ”Name, unit, and the year he came in, stamped both times. One stays with the body, and one comes back to the roll.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. Bai Shu had not moved since the case came open.

”So we would have known,” she said.

”Yes.” Jayde did not look away from her. ”Nine hundred people went into that mountain and did not come out, and Eden and I got the list finished in the fourth month by memory and argument and three people who had shared a tent with somebody, and there are names on that stone I am not certain of and never will be. That is not going to happen in this force. Not once, not ever, not for anybody.”

***

”What does one of these cost?” Ryo asked. ”All of it. The whole man.”

”More than the man wearing it has ever owned at one time in his life,” Jayde said. ”By some distance.”

”Properly. I am going to have to write it in a column.”

”Then write it, and look at it, and then multiply it by seven thousand two hundred, and then sit with what that means for a while, because it is the part of this that nobody in the room has understood yet.” Jayde put her hand on the coat. ”There has never been an army on this continent that was given anything. A retainer is paid, and out of the pay he buys his own boots, and if he buys bad boots, that is his affair and his feet.”

Meifen had turned around from the forge.

”So the first thing a recruit learns,” she said. ”Before a drill. Before a word. That somebody spent that on him.”

”Yes. And I want it understood in this room as an expense and not a kindness, because the day it becomes a kindness it becomes something he owes me personally, and that is the first stone of a retinue.” She left it there for a moment. ”It is also the cheapest thing in the entire design. A man who has been handed something worth more than his father’s cart does not lose it, does not sell it, and does not walk away in the second year — and none of those are gratitude. They are arithmetic, and I would rather say so out loud than let anybody in forty years believe I was being generous.”

Ryo wrote the figure down and looked at it for slightly too long.

”It would clothe a village,” he said.

”It will. In about eleven years, in every province, and better than this — and by then the people who make it will be from that village and the money will stay in it.” Jayde looked down the length of the bench at the fifty-three objects laid out like a body. ”That is the second thing this is for, and it is not written in the charter either.”

***

Feng Lian had gone back to the harness and put two fingers into the empty space on it.

”You have left me a gap,” she said.

”I have left you a gap.”

”Then I will fill it now, and none of it is going to surprise anybody in this room.” She went to the end of the second bench and came back with four things and put them down in order. ”Crossbow. Shield. Short sword. Dagger. In that order of importance, and the order is the only part I expect an argument about.”

Nobody argued about it.

”Give them the numbers anyway,” Jayde said. ”Not for this room. For the four hundred instructors who are going to be taught by this room and who were not down there.”

Zhong answered without having to think.

”Eleven days on the Last Line,” he said. ”Every kill inside forty paces was a technique and cost somebody a month of their life to throw. Every kill outside forty paces was a bolt, put there by a Grade 5 who could not have lit a candle with essence, and there were a great many more of the second kind than the first.” He looked at the crossbow on the bench without any particular affection. ”I taught combat on this mountain for fifteen years, and I had never seen that object until she put one in my hands eight hundred feet underground and told me to point it at something. I had no word for it. I still do not use the word without thinking about it first.”

”And the shield,” Feng Lian said.

”The wall on the left held when the right did not, and the right was instructors,” Zhong said flatly. ”I have not enjoyed a single thought I have had about that since we came up.”