A Mist of Grit and Splinters

by Graydon Saunders

  Might not be ready now.

  Got everybody issued hose. Machine-knit thick and smooth. Fibre’s some water-plant from the Lower Third. Tankard insists the wool ones’ll be here for the twelfth of Vendémiaire.

  Spend two whole mornings checking fit; hose means a shorter shirt and you have to wear it. Mustn’t have creases. What might itch a little in uniform’ll make you bleed under armour. Spend the afternoons running up and down stairs. Could push wheelbarrows in empty towers but Meek views stairs as opportunity.

  Today, I’ve got the whole Colour Party in a big room in the armoury in shirt and hose with a blanket over; the working parts of the armoury tend cool. It’s two levels, or maybe three; the stack of ingots is down there with the armour-focuses, back of some obdurate walls. Armourer teams are down there on this side of the walls. We’re up here with the clothing parts.

  The Colour Party’s lined itself up, order of files, rank number in the files. Couple more tick marks. No clear expectations, and folk not from the Second. Guessing formal’s not like to harm.

  Slow mimes a coin flip at me.

  “I can hear Meek.” Meek’s off with Fierce. Slow knows what I mean.

  I’ve got armour. I’ve got what goes under, due replacing. Can only sweat through it so many times before the salt rots it.

  I go first.

  Tankard’s got a deputy and a team lined up with boxes to handle the kit issue. Tankard’s explaining the process. Saves me the trouble of checking fit and explaining at the same time. Tankard being firm’d stick to glass.

  Start there; confirm you’re wearing your newest pair of broken-in field boots. Anything in your pockets or tucked down your bodice comes out, anything around your neck comes off. Arming pants first, with the broad belt loose. You do six squats, you put your feet on the marks, you twist, you hold still while the quartermaster-person gets the suspenders set right and punches the retaining straps for that exact buckle position. Suspenders first or the broad belt won’t work right, you can’t get it laced right with tension on it.

  You move over one, you cinch the broad belt what you hope is comfy-snug and lift your knees to your chin five times each alternating. If the broad belt ain’t comfy, you fix it. Tank emphasizes that point. Get asked if you’re pleased with the fit of your bodice. Top of the broad belt might conflict with the bottom edge of the bodice, the which you do not want.

  Used to be a thoroughness question. Everybody wears the illusion kind now. Material supply’s gone awkward for bodices. Can’t have anything magical on you in the field; the Bad Old Days sorcerer might use it. Had to send a few recruits for tattoo-removal after the oath. I have an auntie in a collective that makes bodices; I get bodices for Festival. They fit excellent. Two years from now, when the illusion kind have made it into the Corner? Auntie listened; Auntie’s collective applied to the armoury.

  Move over one more, get your arming jacket, put it on. Do the six martial motions like you mean it, put your hands over your head, touch your toes, stick your arms out sideways and twist from the waist and the knees. Keep your arms out and wait while this spot’s quartermaster-person adjusts the side-laces, each side of your waist and under your upper arms. Do the motions again. Laces get tweaked, motions.

  Last spot; gauntlet liners, helmet liner, armour smock. Nobody looks dignified in a helmet liner. Has to fit.

  Keep going, waving at Tankard and tugging on the gauntlet-liners. Stand in the big square of copper wire. Five-millimetre-square wire, looks like.

  Couple of the apprentice armourers do something. Not a focus. Shimmery faint copper colour rises up from the square. Smells like scorched cinnamon.

  “Everything inside?” Which is silly, in a five metre square.

  I don’t say ‘of course’, I check. Make sure I’m centred. Give the apprentice a nod. If this is the armour-focus, it’s different.

  Little motes of light settle on me, one on every knuckle, across my wrists, round my elbows, over my eyes. From the tickling sensation, knees and spine and hips. The idea of the suit of armour fills in between them.

  “Could you perform the six martial motions, please?” The other apprentice.

  I do that; the apprentice signs ‘working’. They waggle a hand level. “About halfway.”

  I do squats and sweep kicks and the six martial motions again. I stretch my hands over my head; I touch my knees to my nose, left-right, or nearly.

  The illusion of armour’s heavier. Not quite so heavy as the real thing.

  I do some kicks, a change of facing, and one iteration of one of Block’s all-the-types-of-punches drills. The illusion feels real, for weight. Doesn’t make any noise with itself. That’s more wrong than it feels like it ought to be. Smells like I don’t know what. Boiled. Awkward.

  “Fit’s done,” the first apprentice says. “It’s about ten minutes.”

  “Don’t touch the sides,” we say together.

  Standing in armour’s familiar. The illusion’s close enough. First’s focuses, an armourer has to tweak the fit specific, altering the illusion. This asks less of the armourers for fit. Ain’t seeming quicker.

  Anybody got questions for the Armoury Gauge? Tankard squints at me. Tough. Tankard official-works for the brigade we haven’t got. Two layers of paperwork that might get done. In practice, Tankard’s running half the armoury, everything not specifically artillery and some as is. So far as the Colour Party knows or cares, this is a quartermaster visit to be issued armour. So Gauge it is.

  Might-maybe someday find out who Tankard couldn’t bear to bury.

  What happens if you bump the field? Cultivator, former weeding team member. Usually ‘Vate’ because ‘Cult’ won’t do.

  “The five metre cube is light,” Tankard says. “Nothing to it. Stay inside or start over.”

  Someone gets a couple ticks for asking sensible questions about washing and mending the hose; do you gotta put rocks in the toes to dry them, what can you darn this with, have we got that, and so on. Tankard’s assistant says they haven’t got the darning run out to packets, and gets told we’ll take a spool per file and toss those on the wheelbarrows with the other common kit. You can see the assistant get the idea; they sort of glance at Tankard and look at Slow, who signs Do it.

  Quartermaster’d much rather hand out maintenance stuff in per-file kits than per-trooper. I woggle the focus around until I’ve just got Tankard. Duckling, Tankard.

  Tankard, Duckling. Something like a double-sized mess-tin. Nothing heavy.

  Thanks, Tankard.

  Quartermasters, or maybe Old Line quartermasters, have this preference for sturdy wooden boxes and iron-bound chests and caskets. It does keep stuff secure.

  One of the apprentices waves at me. There’s a set of greaves and vambraces floating half outside the cube. I take the step and grab the ends sticking through the cube. Put them on, right where the illusions are. The straps are woven tapes and d-rings and a loop-back and a keeper, instead of leather and buckles. Stand up, look up, stick my arms up. The suit slides down over me, settles, matching the fading illusion exactly. Roll my shoulders, look up — an apprentice moved — and grab the helmet just as it sinks to the level of my face. Have to lace the lining into it.

  Step out of the cube.

  Listen up.

  Heads come up. Attention sharpens in the focus. Veterans wouldn’t lift their heads. Getting there.

  The Armoury’s Gauge staff are skilled. You’re going to be running in armour. They won’t. If you don’t trust the fit, ask me, ask Captain Slow.

  Wait.

  One queue by files. File closers, when your file’s been fitted, up fifty flights of stairs at the run, loop the tower, come back, draw armour bags, and practice packing. When you’re all packed, call me or Captain Slow.

  One queue means twenty-odd minutes per file. Three files per hour means a long day for the whole Colour Party. I’m looking across at what might be the armourer team clerk. They nod at me.

  Tankard?
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br />   There’s a mess-room —  a lighted arrow floats in our awareness; close your eyes, it’s still there — that way down the hall. They’re expecting to feed you lunch. Tankard passes me and Slow the time tick for when the mess-room thinks lunch starts.

  Tankard makes a passing motion back to me.

  Anybody more than an hour back in the queue, fifty flights at the run, loop, and return. Once there’s no more than two files in front of you, stay till you’re fitted. Stop off in the mess-room as required for water. Stick to the active privies. There are twelve on this floor.

  Nobody’s looking surprised.

  File-closers, this is practice, not endurance training. I want no one puking or fainting in their shiny new armour.

  Twenty-six intonations of Sir come back.

  Any questions?

  Silence.

  Colour Party, proceed as directed.

  The back files start rolling up their blankets. The focus’ got the file closers discussing who gets which starting stairs.

  Slow’s headed over toward the apprentices and the copper squares on the floor. I get the issue line. Tankard’s moved over back of the issue line and hauled out some unrelated paperwork. Their field desk is out of scale with everything else. I get a moment of being part of a demonstration or an explanation, someone somewhere in the future explaining how the Line works with a scale model.

  Working decently efficient.

  D-Day Minus 994

  Year of Peace 544, Vendémiaire, Twenty-fourth Day (Early Fall)

  Duckling

  An adci works by mass. Padded mass, circular ax, result’s closer than you’d expect. So we do adci drills in armour, by the each on a post.

  The armour stops the small mistakes, but an adci’s for breaking armour. Usually only one person per platoon winds up with a serious head injury. Nigh-always head; sometimes kneecap. Somewhere in there the idea that you can’t wait for the bounce comes along. Never want to dance with whoever said ‘dancing with the rebound’ in the manual. Dancing’s ever so much friendlier than axes and angular momentum. Can’t move too much; you’re going to do this in ranks.

  Can’t grind up the recruits. Once you’ve got as much out of the post as you will, everybody practises adci drill against illusions. The new standards will blur the form; the old ones gave you an image of your comrade, busy fighting an illusion of you. Blurring the form’s not so useful; you can recognize everybody in your file and your adjacent files a long way off by adci style. It feels like fighting ineptly sculpted versions of one another, which does nothing helpful for the focus or anyone’s composure. There’s nothing in the Standard that knows about fighting, or how a body moves; it can’t be summoned up.

  The Captain says none of this bothers graul; graul will charge each other’s illusions with pikes with pain transmission turned on as regular, repeated drill. Duty entirely exceeds the personal. Not so with Creeks.

  The standard can create random illusions; simple solids or taken from a set. We do adci drills on randomly appearing images of faces, robust ones that bounce the adci like steel plate. The illusion happens across the whole range of space you can practically hit with an adci, ground to three metres up, and the distribution is vaguely plausible for opposition that’s trying to live through killing you.

  The faces are people faces. We lose a few and we almost lose more, finding out that smacking faces with axes requires conscious decision.

  We don’t drill pikes. We don’t intend to fight with weapons. You’d lug pikes only if you were sure you needed them. We don’t drill trying to use javelins for spears over the shoulders of the first two ranks. You can stab somebody with a javelin but not fight with one, shaftplant’s not sturdy and the javelin points aren’t edged enough for slicing, not past rocking in the wound. Slow don’t like this; not fond of it myself. The March left us sure there’s ways past the focus.

  Teaching spears waits for later. Adci first; made to be what you use if you have to use something. Shields; to fight you mustn’t die. Javelin; the fancy throwers’ll get those out a couple kilometres and they come down hard. Mostly think of that for sticks but a Null trying to close through a kilometer and a half of regular javelins shan’t enjoy their day.

  Long as we spot the Null. That part’s important.

  Authority-and-commission eats last. Slow and I have time to go around with spears. It helps.

  Meek hands me tonight’s ration bag. It works better to open rations at night; most of it gets eaten without having to be repacked for movement. We can clear the camp much better than we can clear a march bubble. Cuts down on risks from whatever might blow in on the wind.

  Meek waits for Slow and I to get on the outside of a couple litres of water. Just the Colour Party; no provisional part-captains. Not a frequent arrangement.

  Bubble’s tight, wheelbarrows are somewhere flat; Meek had to admit we were practicing slopes too much after a bunch fell over in barracks. Rain falling not too hard. Shouldn’t alter the route.

  “You off tonight?” Meek’s addressing Slow in conversational tones. “More like a war-sword score.”

  The spear match went nine-seven in Slow’s favour. Best I’ve done, instance four.

  Slow shakes their head at Meek. “Duckling did well.”

  “We ain’t all done well enough for road building.” Meek’s definite.

  “We have no more time to do better.” Slow’s more sad than anything. “I dare not suppose the next sailing season shall be as empty of landings as this one proved.”

  Thread 5

  Slow’s memoirs

  Once the battalion could latch by banners we could undertake to exercise the focus.

  By custom, the first such exercise undertaken is canal-marching. There was in the Creeks for some centuries only a single territorial company, and in consequence the expectation of the Line performing canal-dredging and road-maintenance tasks was not general. The First’s creation had sufficed such canal work as there is to be done by the Line into future years.

  The Fight Below the Edge had made it clear we required a road along the Edge. The practice had hitherto been to pass goods and people up the Creeks to the West-East Canal; that canal, being geographically central, neither suffers threat from disturbances on the borders nor announces settlement. It and the several Creeks are also capacious beyond any present economic need. In addition to this, the heights of land separating the watersheds of the four creeks are not inhabited; are not less weedy than the average; and are not so short a distance that the greater time and distance of water transport renders the unease and effort of a land route less costly. Once the requirement becomes movement of troops, rather than an economical movement of goods and persons, the location of the road is more important than the inconvenience of its creation.

  The inconvenience of the Edge Road’s creation was not slight. The lack of habitation in those places the road must go removed risks to others, but not to ourselves; the weedy nature of the ground, the sparseness of existing surveys, and the conflicting needs of the route would have presented difficulties to an experienced battalion. For the Second, not knowing how to use the focus overshadowed all of those other difficulties entirely.

  Edge Road was begun in the west at the Doubtful Pass into the Fourth Valley of the Folded Hills. That pass has seen only occasional foot-traffic by small numbers of resolute persons, but it has been surveyed and it seems likely that it shall in future come into regular use. It is fortunately placed about twenty kilometres north of the town of Longbarns, which is itself some ten kilometres north of the Edge. The Edge rises before the sharp fall of land, so that someone standing on the peak of the Edge looking northwards might expect to see with their eyes some twenty kilometres inland. There being there no trees to climb along the Edge, twenty kilometres is about the range of casual passive observation from which we wish to keep the road. That the Line might wish to move all of Longbarns made no difference at this time; the effort was not there to apply.

>   Bridging the West Wetcreek so near the Edge is neither desirable nor required. Making the road down from the Doubtful Pass to the nearest marked landing — a landing which had not previously been more significant than two bollards and some hope — would require a day, and no very effortful day, of a battalion fit for service. We were two décades at it, making the road four times. The fourth iteration met the requirements of the Lug-gesith’s regulations.

  Rather than wait for barges to be available to shift the battalion across the West Wetcreek, we marched up to the bridge in Westcreek Town and east along the West-East Canal and back south along Blue Creek. It is much simpler to start from the landing than to find the landing across rough country, and the west side of the Lower Blue has received much more habitation than has the east side of the lower West Wetcreek. We had had an offer of a new survey to be conducted while the battalion mustered into a state able to make use of it. I had replied that if there were surplus surveyors available, could they be sent Below the Edge. The Second could find its way, or make it; Below the Edge was entirely unmapped aside from those narrow portions the First Battalion had marched over. The survey as ordered included the parts of the Edge below the valleys of the Folded Hills, and those I particularly desired should be surveyed as our ignorance of those places was complete.

  It was an ignorance that the Line must wait on the efforts of others to amend. An operational Second could have traversed those new borders of the Commonweal; we were not, and could not. The First was required in its position of guard, as was the Fourth of the Twelfth. Surveyors, already well-used to proceeding with discretion in wilderness, would have to suffice the Commonweal’s need.

  The Second’s ignorance of bridge-building we could amend by our own efforts. Custom’s strong caution regarding a slow introduction to focus-use has merit; we lost three files dead getting from Blue Creek back to the West Wetcreek, and four more files dead or down in result of various weeds. I cannot but regret those deaths. Regret has nothing to do with necessity. With no knowledge of when the Sea People would next arrive and no reason to believe they would arrive in one place — I expected the surveyors to find them already landed somewhere below the Edge to the south of the Folded Hills — having the Second operational swiftly was entirely necessary.