by Camilla Monk
She saw, and it was too late to stop the sobs shaking my frame over my mother, Nerie, all the blood behind my eyelids in my dreams at night, over a sorrow that ate me whole and whose depth I couldn’t fathom. Without a word, Gemina unfastened my mask, took it off, and wrapped her arms around me. She smelled good. Her perfume almost completely covered the scent of death that clung to her clothes. She didn’t speak; she just held me while I cried the pain out, shed an old skin I could never wear again anyway.
After I’d calmed down, I lay in silence, my head on her lap while she caressed my hair. “Sometimes I envy you, you know,” she whispered. “There’ve been so many times in my life when I wished I was a man.”
“It’s easier than being a girl,” I replied, unsure whether I was speaking the truth or if my bravado was merely meant as a pillar to my resolve.
“Well.” She sighed. “A girl certainly wouldn’t get celebrated as you were tonight.” Her chiming laugh filled the tent. “You’ve been out for almost two days, young hero. A lot of wine has been drunk since, in the name of”—she deepened her voice comically— “the invincible Silverlegs who gutted Parthicus like a fish.”
“Victrix says I didn’t kill him,” I countered tiredly.
“Rumor has him between life and death. His legions retreated and walled themselves inside the Castraviemna for the winter. Until he either dies or recovers, the Lorians are orphaned of their chief. They can’t march on to Nyos as things are.” She squeezed my shoulder. “Clearchos could have lost everything. You saved him in more ways that he’ll ever care to acknowledge.”
Saved him… “But wouldn’t you have been happy if he had lost?” I asked, sensing I was grasping blindly at bonds that were too complex for me to understand.
Her hand lingered on my shoulder, stroking it absently. “There have been moments in my life when I hated him so much it consumed me from the inside. But I’ve been at his side for twenty years now. You could say he’s become an old habit of mine.”
I wanted to ask if she thought he might love her a little, but I feared that would be prying too deeply into their business. I held my tongue. We settled back into comfortable silence until the flaps of my tent rustled from some intense fussing right outside.
Victrix’s angry hiss reached us. “He doesn’t give a shit about your bottle. I’m telling you he’s practically dead. The only thing keeping his guts in is Gemina’s bandage.”
Hastius’s cheerful bellow covered his recriminations. He tapped the tent’s wall. “Hey, Silverlegs, are you too dead to drink?” Meanwhile, a deep hum I recognized as Vatluna’s objected that if my bowels were pierced, the wine would piss out.
Gemina sighed, reaching for my tunic. “All dumber than mushrooms… Here, I’ll help you slip it on.”
The offer was a minor humiliation, but I was glad for it anyway. The gash in my side still hurt like hell, and even with her assistance merely shrugging on my tunic was a torturous process—and a practical reminder to earn enough money to buy myself an orichalcum lorica next time.
Gemina took my mask with a sorrowful smile. My tears had dried and left no trace on the iron. Silverlegs didn’t cry. She helped me fasten the leather lace, and once we were done, she parted the tent’s flap. “He needs to rest. I want you out of here in five minutes.”
The three of them slipped inside one after another, until there was barely any room left for me and I had to rest my feet on Vatluna’s ample lap—to Victrix’s apparent outrage.
Hastius took a sip from his bottle of spice wine. “Mathula cried, you know. I tried to comfort her but—”
I managed a weak groan. “Please. This is going to be about your cock again. There, I said it for you. She sucked it, rode it and sucked it again.”
He feigned surprise, before taking another huge gulp from the bottle. “I simply thought you might want to know that she—”
Vatluna slapped his back with his four-fingered hand. “Stop pestering him with that. You know he doesn’t care for women.” The tone was jovial, but I didn’t miss the mournful purse of his lips after he’d said this—or the way he shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut, as if inwardly bemoaning some immense loss.
Clearchos had been busy… and although his lies would lift a considerable burden off my shoulders, I fought a pang of bitterness. Even now, I couldn’t be my comrades’ equal; I could be no more than a spado.
I sighed and reached for the bottle with a rasp of agony. After Hastius had placed it next to my hand, I considered silently for a moment, debating with myself whether a wounded warrior could afford a rare moment of playfulness. Having made up my mind, I pushed my mask up a fraction to bring the bottle to my lips and managed a glum cheer. “To my balls.”
Victrix remained of marble, but Luna and Hastius were still laughing about it a week later.
34
Winter came.
Emboldened by the fall of Nyos—and increasingly pleased by Clearchos’s military contributions—the Overseer ordered him to help the Western Legions hunt down the Lorians in their winter camps. We made another attempt to take the Castraviemna. This time the gates fell under Hastius’s Serican bombs, and the barracks burned with men still inside. In these walls that reeked of charred flesh, we searched every corner for Parthicus. He wasn’t there.
He became a ghost. Reports would come that he had been seen during a raid against old Spurius’s Thirteenth food convoys, that he was there when reinforcements from the Seventeenth were ambushed in a ravine and the surviving men were found roaming the plains, blinded, like the barbarians in the north sometimes did to punish their enemies. The Overseer sent orders from Cispirina for us to pray to Aus and wipe out every last Lorian from the Lacustra until we found Parthicus.
I killed, killed until I felt as numb as the frozen soldiers Clearchos ordered me to slay every day. I no longer looked at their faces or cared. They were slow, tired, and all it took was a swipe at their throat, or a strike upward between the scales of their lorica and into their warm beating heart.
By the time the snow began to melt, there was still no border between the two halves of the empire, only a grim battlefield which stretched from the outskirts of Nyos to the scatter of small lakes and ever-red woods surrounding Palica. Our legion had almost doubled in size and Clearchos was richer than ever. He rewarded us generously: my old chain-mail shirt that Parthicus had pierced was long gone, replaced by a feathered lorica made of the sturdiest and smallest steel scales Rascius could forge.
Toward the end of the third moon, the first crusamantes bloomed, stirring shyly under the trees after their long winter sleep. News came that the last of the Lorian Legions had retreated east once and for all. The Lacustra had been conquered, and Clearchos received an invitation to station his weary troops in Palica, the city of flowers. We marched southeast, beyond the marshy plains, where the Inland Sea shattered into a hundred silvery lakes, and the water and the sky met everywhere you looked, until a pinkish haze grew along the horizon’s line: the scarlet pines of Palica.
•♦•
On the eve of our arrival there, I pitched my tent under the boughs of one such scarlet pine. It was one of the many perks of having my own tent: the freedom to plant it wherever I damn pleased—preferably away from everyone else’s. I crawled out of my nest a little before sunrise and feasted on pine nuts while the rest of the camp still slept. In the dim light of dawn, the forest looked more purple than red, but a few hours from now everything would be bathed in the reddish hue of the sun filtering through crimson leaves. Hastius said it was something in the soil that did that to all the plants. He was probably right; under the damp bed of pine needles, the earth was the same deep red, with veins of ochre.
Once I’d soaked my breakfast with a few gulps of cheap wine cut with water, I fastened my mask. Gemina had been right to wonder if she’d ever see my face again; Silverlegs’ iron gaze had become a part of me. I almost never removed it, except to eat and sleep. As weeks pas
sed and men died, new recruits came who never saw my face. It was for the best—it didn’t escape me that some of the boys in our troops were growing a beard, when my own chin was meant to remain smooth. Or maybe that didn’t matter, and the truth was that I was just trying to hide from Victrix, and the way he looked at me in the rare moments when he caught me unmasked. Like Arun, like Servilius. Like he saw a girl.
I gave a final tug to the leather laces holding my mask in place, grabbed my sword and strolled to the nearest stream. The crisp morning air was rife with the scent of sap and smoke, and I loved nothing more than those stolen moments spent alone in the silence, listening to the many whispers of the woods. I splashed my arms and neck with icy water and gave a quick scrub to my belly without removing my tunic, all the cleaning I could afford when anyone might see me.
Speaking of which… A faint crack came from somewhere to my right. I tucked my tunic back under my sword belt, sighing. “You’re about as discreet as a loxodonte.”
Victrix emerged from the shadows, a smug smile on his lips. “And my tusks are much smaller, but I smell better.”
“Hardly.” I snorted as he sat by me, to emphasize my point. When his hands feigned to reach for the hem of his tunic in response, I groaned. “Please don’t. I never want to see your ass again.”
“Then don’t challenge me to wash again. Because I will if you do.”
“Everything is always a challenge to you,” I replied, letting myself fall on a bed of damp blood grass. I was a challenge. Had become one since that first night in Nyos when he’d tried to kiss me. The edges of our friendship had blurred since, and the easy camaraderie had turned into a secret game of hide and seek I neither wanted to win or lose. Because either way I knew it’d hurt.
My fingers grazed the red-tipped blades absently as, above us, the moons faded away in the pink morning sky. “How far are we from Palica?”
“Ten leagues. We’ll reach the northern gate in the afternoon.”
“Hastius says we’re not needed there, but it’s all politics…” I mused, gauging his reactions from the corner of my eye.
“Well, Palica is under control. The Overseer has three entire legions stationed there, and it’s the farthest—”
“The farthest the border has ever been pushed; the Eastern Empire is just a stump now. If Varalius doesn’t sign a peace treaty, Sepira is next, then Loria,” I droned, repeating Clearchos’s speech from the night prior. “I know all that. I’ve heard rumors that the Overseer himself is there with the young emperor. Is it true he’s asked to see Clearchos to congratulate him personally?”
Victrix’s smile grew guarded. “I don’t know anything about that. But all mercenaries who fight for the West are blessed by Aus, so, who knows?”
Blessed by Aus… I sat up and tossed a pinecone in the water, watching it ricochet once with a splash before getting carried away by the current. “Do you believe in all this stuff about the Overseer? I heard that he descends directly from Aus, so that makes him divine.”
“What do you think?” Victrix asked.
“I think it’s all bullshit,” I spat, suddenly awash with an anger whose roots I couldn’t pinpoint, a sense of betrayal that had been simmering in me for months, since I’d seen the priest kill the divine water in Nyos. “There were never any gods to begin with. No one is looking down on us or playing with our fate, and Aus is just the same kind of cr—”
Victrix’s fingers flew to the cold lips of my mask, silencing me. “Easy, birdshit. Times are changing, you know, and there’re things you can’t say once we’re in Palica.”
I let out a derisive chuckle. “I thought Aus was just and kind?” Surely the people who had been allowed to flee Nyos with nothing but the tunic on their back would agree.
Victrix shrugged. “Aus is only as kind as his priests.”
Figured. I sprang to my feet and dusted red grass blades from my trousers. “I’ll go pack.”
He followed me closely, and once we were concealed from prying eyes by a curtain of low-hanging branches, his fingers grazed my wrist in attempt to catch it. I swiveled to free myself. Undeterred, he reached around my waist to stop me, moving closer until our chests threatened to touch. It was a well-rehearsed play between us, one Victrix never seem to tire of. His head would dip, I’d dodge, refuse him like always, and when his cheek brushed my hair, like it was now, he’d sigh and murmur, “Won’t you let me have just one, Silverlegs?”
“You know damn well I won’t,” I grunted, pushing him away.
Today’s almost gentle nudge used to be a ruthless shove, but my resolve had been wavering as of late, whereas Victrix’s never did. Silverlegs didn’t want this, bristled at the very idea of giving into the demands of a man. She was Victrix’s equal and no one’s mollis. But the tiny part of me I concealed underneath my mask was afraid to look him in the eye. They were a nice gray after all, the color of the rain, especially when he wasn’t angry—which wasn’t often. Sometimes, alone in my tent, I wondered what would happen if I let Victrix kiss me just once.
As usual, I shook the thought off and gave a friendly punch to his shoulder. “Ask me again on your deathbed.”
The corners of his mouth curled into a cocky smirk. “You know I will.”
•♦•
Looking back on it, it sounds silly—and perhaps cruel—but after I became a member of Clearchos’s Legion, I never failed to experience a thrill of power and pride when we crossed villages like the one I’d fled almost a year ago. We rode and marched through the bloodred woods, our army a sluggish column of a thousand men, half as many horses, two dozen carts, and of course, some fifty bleating ibexes.
A secret smile stirred my lips when a cluster of thatched roofs and a panache of white smoke appeared at the edge of the forest. Opening the procession behind Clearchos’s gray stallion and Irius, flanked by Victrix and Hastius, I sat straighter in my saddle as we rode past fields where farmers spread manure in preparation for spring sowing. I knew it stank and their back hurt, and I, vain little nutsack who’d flown away from my own pile of fuming shit, reveled in the frightened glances they threw at us.
Farther down the road, the moving fog unveiled an odd-looking scarecrow impaled on a wooden pole on the outskirt of the village. I sidled my mount and heeled it to a small trot to get a better look, followed by Hastius.
This was no scarecrow. The body was too damaged to identify a man or a woman, but this mass of discolored, rotting flesh was a human being. The neck had been craned for the sharp pole to surge through the cadaver’s mouth, its jaws distended by a silent scream while the empty eye sockets looked up blindly to the sky. The skin was blistered and wrinkled all over, a thousand shades of red and purple. I stared, an unpleasant shudder cascading down from the back of my throat to the pit of my stomach. The punishment seemed cruel, even to me, who had slashed a countless number of throats and washed torrents of blood from my hands and tunics.
I turned to Hastius, whose single green eye was set on the impaled figure, an unusual gravity weighing down on his features. “It wasn’t the villagers who did this, right? Western Legions?” I asked.
He nodded. “They think it’s the only way to cleanse evil, boiling water.”
I breathed out a sigh of disgust. “After…?”
“Before. Nothing keeps the herd walking straight like boiling a few sinners alive.”
“It’s the same thing they did with the divine water. It turned normal after that priest threw boiling water in it.”
Hastius’s lips quirked in a wry smile. “See? It works, then.”
Back in the convoy, Clearchos was looking too. I wondered what he could be thinking, when his own face had been burned in a somewhat similar manner? I searched his gaze as I steered my horse away but found only stolid gray, the color of the ashen sky. If he disapproved, he gave no sign of it.
I couldn’t shake off the sight of that body as we progressed across the plain toward Palica. All the bloodsh
ed of our battles did sometimes keep me up at night. I’d try to close my eyes, and everything was so red that staying awake in the embrace of darkness seemed more inviting. The scent, too, never really left me, permeating my clothes, clinging to the brownish crust under my nails. Yet there was a peculiar horror in the idea of one’s flesh blistering and peeling from bones in a slow, excruciating death. Like a seed in my stomach, my unease budded and grew as the soaring stone walls came in sight, standing defiantly on their rocky island amidst the tumultuous waters of the Utur—a river I’d been told found its source in the West, in the eternally white peaks of the Pirinae chain that barred the way to Cispirina.
The Western Empire had crushed and conquered Palica the Opulent after years of fighting and it had no intention of giving it back: two camps flanked the city on each side of the Utur, enclosing nearby villages inside jaws made of stake walls and deep defensive ditches. There was no way in or out of Palica, unless you wanted to take a dive in the icy waves crashing on the shores below.
Ahead of us, the northern camp’s well-guarded gates cracked open a fraction to spit out a small group of equites. No more than ten men—emissaries, then. One of them carried the Western Empire’s standard floating from his spear, but the design looked a little different; against the indigo blue, moons and interlaced branches of sigillaria were now supported by an upturned palm painted in gold.
“What’s with the arms? Are they different in Palica?” I asked.
In front of me, Clearchos replied, “It’s a recent addition. Aus’s hand, cradling the world.”
“Oh, changing times, changing times,” Hastius sing-sang.
A graying centurion went in front and rode up to Clearchos, who waved for our convoy to stop. His order reverberated down the snake’s spine, sending men and carts alike to a shivering halt. The horses’ breath fogged the air and their hooves stomped the ground anxiously. I tightened my hold on my reins, watching Clearchos trot to the envoy.