A Mist of Grit and Splinters

by Graydon Saunders

  There’s this excessively long pause. This has all been entirely regular. We’ve all survived Brisket’s expectations about paperwork; we all know it’s so entirely regular you could use it to check level. The Captain’s got a sword they will wear, for impeccable official reasons. If any of the other graul, the traditionalists, decide they want to kill the Captain, they’re going to find it more difficult. Even graul fight better with a weapon under their hand. We’re all in favour of difficult. Having them succeed, that’d be unfortunate.

  No one can say it. Slow ain’t here.

  “Thank you, Sergeant-Major.” The Captain thinks the reasons for our silence are funny. We generally don’t try to understand why. There’s some question if other graul understand why the Captain thinks things are funny. We haven’t got any to consider to ask.

  “Ensign Shadow.”

  “Sir?”

  “Are there sparring options?”

  “Bounce for all the sharpnesses.” Shadow’s got a severely plain pair of sheathed swords in their right hand. Dimensionally, just like the one the Captain just belted on.

  The Captain looks pleased. Brisket looks smug.

  D-Day Minus 373

  Year of Peace 546, Messidor, Fourth Day (Early Summer)

  Fylstan of the Peace-gesith

  I shall be glad to have again a service all of haulage contracts.

  All this gathering has been made with delicacy and care, but not on the part of the graul. It asks skills they do not have.

  This gathering worries them.

  The graul thorpe is not all of the second clearance of Lost Creek, but its area is large for a single thorpe. Thorpes are sized to feed set numbers of persons, necessarily scaled by the persons fed as the requirement of comestibles alters with the ilk of folk. Ophidiform graul do need to eat. Simiform graul need to eat and usually breathe.

  This is a side stream that widens into a pond. There’s a little rock outcrop island in the mouth of the stream. The downstream half of the fifty-hectare pond is the brown and broken stalks of what will be tall reeds again in the spring. Clean water by all reports, chill and mostly silent. One or two bird sounds, out of the reeds. There are trees, but not down to the pond borders; those are everywhere marshy and indistinct. I do not recognize the plants; those rise in clumps, and have dark green leaves sharp as shattered glass.

  The Colour Party of a heavy Line battalion is standing on the other bank, across the little stream. It is not high land, but it is higher. The meadow-flowers have not benefited from the Line marching across them to form a single rigid block of armour and set faces, a rank of four-and-twenty files and the battalion sergeant-major. Behind them is an entire company, complete in militant array. Fifty-five files, the new manual says of a company. More than six hundred Creeks altogether. Their battle-standard is on the little rocky outcrop with their standard-captain. I do not know Creeks well, but well enough. These are not happy whatsoever in their rigid ranks. The spear-points bristle from the back; from the front, the two-metre lengths are hidden. All nothing, against graul, if the Creeks must trust in the strength of their arms. That banner and those Creeks are Thorn Company of the First Battalion, who met above a hundred demons in the Fight Below The Edge and destroyed them.

  The demons, the sorcerers who summoned them, half-a-thousand Sea People battle-constructs, and somewhere closer to ten thousand persons than those seven or eight thousands who were come under arms. Thorn Company’s part was not the whole tale of that battle, and they claim no glory of it. The knowledge of it hovers over them, absent glory; the Line comes rarely into the Peace. A road-march or a canal-march is a thing you avoid, a thing where you remove yourself from the path. The Line goes by, and there is only a small ripple in the Peace, there above the warm road or the dredged canal. This is the Line when it means to see the Peace kept before it. It makes everyone uneasy, and perhaps those of us born in the Peace not less than these newcomers. If you know your knowledge of the Peace to be scant, it cannot be reassuring. An active banner when you have graul senses? I get no more than a faint prickling unease, people and metal and a tinge of what could be sorcery. The air is cool and still and moves over the water more than elsewhere. I am sure the graul get more.

  They have not met the Line before, as itself; the Line carried them up over the Edge, but they were estivating then, and would not remember. ‘Ceremony’ is one sign, and all these graul know it, though they think it means ‘what I do not yet understand’ more than they attach its historic intent. Why someone would present themselves in the mood of that Line company is not something I can explain.

  There’s a bridge to the little islet; one piece of metal like a solid thought. I am invited as a specific witness, as is one of the ophidiform graul.

  There are nineteen witnesses, as a matter of solemn custom. The serving gerefan of the Province of Westcreek, the Peace-gesith, six fylstans, and two members of Parliament carefully do not stand in any sort of sub-group. The graul witness is careful and slow in their movements, and the rest of us carefully do not draw aside from them.

  The Line-gesith has not sent anyone in specific witness. The Colour Party and a company of the First have come, and if our fear of the southern border was in any way less it should all have come.

  “The Line’s witness is the standard of the First.” A Creek voice. Someone I do not know and have not before seen.

  “The Line” and “the Line-gesith” are not the same thing. Come armed, this person must also be of the Line’s witness.

  Everyone save the Captain is clad with the entire formality indicating a long-planned matter. The Captain is wearing a smock, and nothing else. It does not help with looking human; to those aware and close, simiform graul knee and elbow joints differ from human expectation.

  The young Regular in Line uniform beside the Captain pulls an independent’s hat from nowhere and puts it on. They put their hands together above their face and bring them down. The book wasn’t there, and the plinth wasn’t there, and spine of the book clangs on to the plinth as iron dropped on iron in a dull weight of tonnes.

  An open book. The letters swim on the page as though you and the worms crawling inside your eyes are collapsing into divers madnesses, screaming at all times in different notes and cadences. Looking away demands a sustained exercise of will. Looking at the plinth does not help. It reflects no light and fills an onlooker with a conviction of plummeting.

  “Parliament has required that the Standard of the First should not be risked.” Everything about this independent’s voice is conversational, which should never be possible. “The necessities of graul reproduction require that the means of avoiding risk should continue for not less than a year’s time. The Consensus of the Standard-Captains has declined to accept increased risk to their sibling, and has bid the Standard of the First remain in their keeping.”

  It is widely believed that General Chert does not like the Captain. Chert stared Parliament down over the standard, all the same. A hale standard-captain a year on a travel token is less like to die than live, yet may die. Simiform graul give up a quarter of their body mass to gametes if they breed, and come not hale from the water.

  “Nor do any desire for developing graul to endure more risk than cannot be avoided.” The independent sounds less conversational, but only as anyone might sound less conversational speaking of a serious subject. All the graul heads come up, just a little. The Peace-gesith wavers slightly on their feet. The gerefan shift together, and do not know they shift. Nothing to do with the Power and everything to do with the conscious prospect of caring for hundreds of graul children. “To this end, the measure proposed is not a ward but a suasion. Those whose presence is not granted may not come; that which would reduce the achievement of this thorpe’s intent of reproduction shall not happen here.”

  “Does this not coerce?” A question to have it asked in witness. The real discussion took twelve days and five kilogrammes of chalk and more swearing than ever I heard from Clerk
s before. More swearing, and one entire failure of actuarial consensus.

  “A suasion does not determine outcomes. It forbids external influences. So was the Empress bound under the earth.” Entirely conversational in all respects of words.

  It ought to seem utterly ridiculous. The last time someone did this, the blood channels were two metres wide, and there were eight of them. The shattered glass of those was dug up in the time between Laurel and the Commonweal. Dug from under a melt plain and two layers of ruins. “City or temple complex?” will never be decided, not for either layer of ruins. That working, either of those workings, were the effort of covert centuries in preparation and the skill of millennia to enact at the end of generational wars.

  The book sits there, pretending to comely dimensions. The plinth reflects no light and no sound while the wind is stilled against it. I dare not look at the page; the text yet writhes. I dare not look, but I know.

  “We would this thing be done.” Careful pronunciation and the tail-angles of doubt and concern, but the ophidiform graul say it loudly all together. All the witnesses nod at each other. After a decorous time, the Peace-gesith extends a releasing hand toward the independent, who bows in formal response. The single large button on their hat glitters darkly, swept through the bow; the bones demons do not have, broken into decoration. It still seems as though it could not truly be their hat, however it arrived, however it is decorated, until the independent turns the page of the book as anyone might with any other book and smiles at someone near me.

  The Creek who remarked on the Line’s witness smiles back with all the warmth of dawn and a red mist rises as would a fog of blood. The independent reads from the book, and the red mist rattles as might wing-feathers in a turning wind. The words the independent speaks do not kill us.

  When the words end, the mist fades to scraps and coiling and we may see the sun.

  The sun is much moved in the sky; I do not think it the light of some other day, only that time has passed to less remark than customary. This is a conclusion the formal witnesses reach by unspoken consensus.

  A different ophidiform graul, not the one in formal witness, rasps forward over the bridge. They have a beaker in their upper hands. The beaker took six tries; no one in the Second Commonweal had made one before. Some graul venom dissolves ordinary stoneware. Some graul venom dissolves glass. The beaker is made of tantalum. The porcelain sleeve helps if the mix of venoms grows warm.

  Simiform graul can eat anything, still, and the Captain drinks the whole thing, and hands the beaker to the independent.

  It triggers the Captain’s part in the matter. The ophidiform grauls’ contribution has been in the water three seasons to become established. Were it not established, we should not be doing this. ‘Thankfully sessile toothed placenta’ is strictly factual only in ‘thankfully’, but the words come from Laurel’s day and summarize usefully. The adult graul have had to check, and maybe move a few, to make the distribution better through the reeds along the lines of the steady slow current. I have had to read the Hale-gesith’s careful guidelines and translate for the ophidiform graul. Their understanding and their reading do not suffice medical texts, not yet.

  Dry language for a wet fate, all of it.

  Steady current moves the simiform gamete contribution; if those are not moved, the gametes will collectively consume their contributor. The current moves the supply of food, which will need to be added upstream; this area of marsh, all the several ponds, could not be productive enough on its own. Once the gametes unite, the current orients the still-toothy feeding ends of the containers forming new graul to receive that food. The gametes that do not unite will be slowly moved away, which is important; their voracity outstrips their swimming, so they will not return upstream.

  Downstream, someone must ensure that all of the gametes are found.

  Managing the current is important, and there is only one definitive test.

  The Captain walks down into the water where there are neat stairs in the stone. In regular times, they would have thirty minutes before they would need to rise into the air and draw breath. Today, they will significantly dissolve.

  When the water has entirely closed over the Captain’s head, the independent shuts the book with a single sound like one thin dry bone cracking. The beaker is set next to it, upside down on the darkness.

  Let me hasten here away.

  D-Day Minus 359

  Year of Peace 546, Messidor, Eighteenth Day (Early Summer)

  Pennon of the Army of the Western Hills

  “Let us speak as siblings.” General Chert says it half-raising the brandy bottle they are holding in their sword hand. Captain Hank gets up, stops, makes an apparent and distinct decision to pick up their field mug and a canteen, does so, and follows Chert down a kilometre of corridor and up a hundred metres of stairs.

  The request is something standard-captains say to each other. Hank is the duly appointed adjutant of a provisional artillery battalion, not a standard-captain. Hank is the only officer of traditional background assigned to a Wapentake formation.

  There are entire sections of the armoury no one uses, and those sections have parapets like all the others. There is not much view from this unused section other than of the rainbow roof-tiles of the surrounding sections and the blank black walls that rise to the parapets.

  Chert takes three measured swallows of brandy at a contemplative and decorous pace. “Did you ever serve with Creeks?” The ‘before the Second Commonweal’ is understood.

  “No.” Hank’s face does something that could be a smile. “Creeks didn’t join artillery battalions.”

  “There was one or a few in every battalion I served with. Always figured we only got the strong talents.” Strong for a regular person, Chert means; those whom the Line needs and expects.

  Hank makes a sort of silent chuckle. There’s a way that’s factual; by Regular expectations, every Creek Hank met in the Line had a robust talent. Chert’s expectations yet catch on the reality. Hank’s expectations have shifted.

  “Chert, it ain’t your job to not make people angry.”

  “Can’t go making things worse. The Peace — ” and Chert makes a complex sequence of gestures, setting down the brandy bottle to use both hands. Pale lights and strange colours follow Chert’s hands. The Line does not define the Peace; the Line does not defend the Commonweal’s Peace. The Line destroys those who attack the Peace, since before any Shape of Peace existed. Hammer’s annihilation of any opposition permitted the creation of the first Shape of Peace.

  Full-Captain Slow and the Second Battalion’s Colour Party stopped by the armoury this morning. Slow does this whenever there are significant dispatches or concerns about boots or anything else that benefits from direct presence over correspondence uncertain just where the Second Battalion is located.

  A few of the new graul found two sergeants from the Tenth Brigade’s Colour Party trying to get to the Captain. They couldn’t. There was an argument. It avoided becoming a violent argument, perhaps because while simiform graul are deadly fighters, they are nearly hapless against ophidiform graul. Fighting would not have been a sensible course for anyone.

  It is more surprising that the ophidiform graul, new to the Commonweal, refrained from a drastic act. The protection warned Slow. The protection exists around the Captain, the standard of the First, and the graul gestation ponds in their geographically considerable entirety. Slow’s report was curiously unspecific about how this warning arrived. Slow and the Second’s Colour Party showed up quick enough to catch the graul sergeants at a barge landing on Blue Creek. They weren’t willing to say anything, got on a barge, and left. Slow, whose command resides in the Wapentake and not in the Army of the Western Hills, could not command them.

  Hank pours themself a mug of water. It is done with an air of ritual. They toast Chert with it, silently and perhaps without irony. A Regular One with no irony is a rare event.

  “Slow said what, precisely?”r />
  “It is the consensus of the Wapentake that the actions of these simiform graul constitute political violence.”

  “Wapentake ain’t wrong.” Hank isn’t happy about it, but one must face facts.

  “They’re not wrong.” Chert sounds despairing.

  “Slow further noted that an attack by anyone on the Captain in their present circumstances would constitute an act of political violence.” Chert is staring at the sky, and speaking without any particular emphasis. “Since the only persons known to be so inclined are traditionalist simiform graul serving in the Line, it’s my problem.”

  “Slow say that last?”

  “No.” Chert’s hands move again, and stop, and their face sets. Slow is polite and deferential and proper to the point where Chert strives to see it as something other than mockery and sometimes fails.

  “Slow’s got better sense.” Hank sounds amused, but not mocking.

  Chert nods, and takes a slug of brandy.

  “Anything else you can do?” Hank doesn’t sound like they think there is.

  Chert produces a weak laugh. “Orders to not commit murder I know won’t be obeyed.”

  “Think anybody’s getting through that protection?” Hank has their own opinion. Hank asked Captain Blossom about it.

  “Not in less than a year with Laurel returned to help them,” Chert says. Chert’s sorcerous mind considered the protection carefully, once, with the whole of their pennon present and active, and deliberately retains only the conclusions of this observation. Specific knowledge of the protection is dangerous.

  “Crinoline keeps saying they’re territorial.” Chert doesn’t know how to talk about this.

  Hank makes a gesture meant to convey doubt. “They are, but that ain’t this. It’s seen as something close to conquest.”

  “Think Slow would do it?” Chert’s voice has some weariness in it.

  Hank looks startled. “Anybody explain the Wapentake to you?”

  “Pre-Commonweal irregular military tradition. Knives in the dark and a belief in killing sorcerers.” Chert tries not to be dismissive.