by Trish Mercer
An hour later after the Administrators’ messenger left, the Shin household was bustling.
Upstairs Shem and Peto held up debris while Mahrree sifted through the drawers still trapped under the remnants of the roof to find clean clothing and bags. Jaytsy was in the kitchen packing whatever kinds of food that remained and would travel well. Perrin was in the study surrounded by officers the messenger had tracked down and sent to the lieutenant colonel’s house.
Major Karna, Lieutenant Rigoff, and Sergeant Major Neeks nodded at the instructions they received, again.
“Sir,” Karna tried to assure him, “trust us—we can handle this. Finish your preparations and be on your way.”
Shin sighed. “I know, and I do trust you. But I feel like I’m abandoning Edge when it needs me the most. It’s just . . . this is such an inopportune time to be leaving. Three weeks, my mother’s insisting, but I’ll try to get back sooner—”
Sergeant Major Neeks cleared his throat. Rarely had anyone ever heard Grandpy say something important without clearing his throat first. “Lieutenant Colonel,” Neeks started in his slow drawl, “with all due respect, the ‘inopportune’ time to leave would have been four days ago. But now your Rebuild Edge Plan is in place, and we have plenty of work to keep each soldier busy and out of trouble for a long time. The major has a plan for doling out the grain reserves, Rigoff has organized the effort to evaluate what food is left in the village, and we can certainly hold down the fort until you return in three weeks. You give my regards to the general, and get out of our hair.” He smiled firmly.
“Sir,” said Lieutenant Rigoff, “I have a concern about your house. Perhaps we should shift the schedule and get yours completed as soon as possible. I can have a detail of men here this evening to finish clearing it out, then begin rebuilding the roof in the morning.”
“I appreciate the thought,” Shin told him, “but there are other houses in greater need. If we can just span the hole with a canvas tarp, we can close off the upstairs until I return. Keep to the schedule. I don’t want anyone to think I’m getting special privileges.”
“So let them think it!” insisted Neeks. “Your family needs to be safe. Let’s get this house secured in your absence, Lieutenant Colonel.”
“It’s the least we can do, sir,” Karna agreed.
“Again, I appreciate the thought,” the lieutenant colonel said evenly as Zenos appeared at the door to the study, “but I think just posting a guard during the day and maybe two at night, as allowed by the Administrators, will suffice.”
“You don’t have to do that, sir,” Zenos said. “We’ve got it all figured out already.”
Perrin turned to him. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“Mahrr—Mrs. Shin and I,” Zenos corrected himself.
One of Perrin’s eyebrows rose at Shem’s slip of familiarity. Each of the soldiers knew of the closeness between Zenos and the Shins, but still there were limits to be observed.
Rigoff and Karna exchanged glances, and Neeks shook his head reproachfully at the younger sergeant.
Zenos didn’t see it. “We discussed it when we were in the bedroom,” he told his commander, “and I was helping her with her clothes.”
Rigoff choked and Karna coughed nervously.
The colonel’s other eyebrow went up.
Neeks’s head shaking increased.
Somehow Zenos missed it all. “You won’t need a guard at night. I’ll sleep here while you’re gone,” he grinned innocently, “and take care of whatever your bedroom needs.”
The lieutenant colonel went positively rigid.
Neeks muttered, “Zenos, Zenos, Zenos . . .”
Rigoff and Karna glanced at each other anxiously.
“Sergeant Zenos,” Shin said in an eerily calm manner, “exactly what are you planning in my absence?”
Zenos cocked his head, puzzled by his best friend’s odd demeanor. “To do what you would do?” he squeaked. “Take care of needs?”
The commander’s expression remained wooden.
The master sergeant was still perplexed. “May I . . . get the coach now?”
“Coach?” Shin spat. “What coach?”
“The fort’s coach?” Zenos shrank a little under the furious glare. “Could use the airing out, really. Had it for more than ten years and I don’t think it’s ever been used. For Mrs. Shin to start loading?”
Shin squinted. “I don’t need a coach!”
Zenos swallowed. “But she and the children do.”
Comprehension hit both men like the sunrise.
On Shem’s face, it first glowed amused with a smile, which turned into abject horror.
On Perrin’s face the effect was reversed. He began to grin in relief as Shem paled.
“Ohhh, sir,” Sergeant Zenos said tonelessly, a bead of nervous sweat breaking out on his forehead. “You thought I was going to . . . stay with, with . . . your family while you were away? Do what you would do in the bedroo—Oh no, sir! No, sir!” He flushed redder than any man ever had.
Perrin began to chuckle and his men relaxed. A few looks were exchanged along the lines of, Never was anything to worry about, right?
“Sorry, Zenos. The suggestion that you were going to stay with my family shocked me,” Perrin said. “But they’re going with me? I think I need to sit down for a moment . . .”
---
An hour later, as the coach drawn by four horses left the Shin house, the two sergeants watched it head south meandering as fast as it could through the rubble-strewn roads. When Neeks saw all that Mrs. Shin and her daughter had shoved hastily into bags, he thanked the stars again he never married.
“Should be an interested two days’ and one night ride,” Neeks said to Zenos as they walked back to the fort. “Two teenagers locked up in the coach with their parents, and Mrs. Shin insisting the lieutenant colonel would be more comfortable down with them rather than up with the soldiers watching for danger.” He shook his head and laughed softly.
Zenos chuckled as well. “None of his family has ever been to Idumea, and he’s been avoiding going there for years. I don’t know when I’ve seen him more anxious.”
“Oh, I do. When he thought you were planning to move in with his wife!” Neeks elbowed him.
“Ah, don’t remind me,” Zenos agonized, reliving the embarrassment. “That was terrible. I can’t imagine he even thought I would consider such a thing. He’s probably just not thinking clearly, certainly surprised about the news of his father, and his mother requesting they go to Idumea. Yes,” Shem decided, “he’s just a bit overwrought, imagined the worst—”
“Well, I suppose that’s how he got to be a commander,” Grandpy said.
Zenos still shook his head.
Grandpy Neeks gave him a sidelong glance. “You have to admit, though—you’re always over there. It’s just a little unusual. People may . . . think things.”
The master sergeant furrowed his brow. “Think what?”
What neither the lieutenant colonel nor the master sergeant fully understood was that those who served for an extended amount of time in the fort occasionally communicated about the relationship. Not with words, but with looks, especially when Shin sent Zenos to his house on an errand or with the message that the commander would be coming home late. It was never more than Karna exchanging silent questions with Rigoff as Zenos bounded down the stairs of the command tower, or Neeks scowling after him, then sending one of his meaningful squints to whoever was in the tower with him.
Their eyes always said the same things to each other: It’s all right, isn’t it? Have you heard anything worrying? Something the lieutenant colonel should be told?
It wasn’t that they doubted Mrs. Shin. It’s just that . . .
Well, there was something about Shem Zenos. No one could put their finger on exactly what it was, but then again his behavior was never less than exemplary. Maybe it was because Zenos seemed to be so pure, and no man was that pure.
He never drank, neve
r swore, never played dices, and in his free time if he wasn’t at the Shins he was at the Cottages hanging out with the widows, of all people. Not just Mrs. Peto but all of her friends—fixing their fences, building them sewing tables, and sampling their newest recipes. He even spent many hours at Rector Yung’s, helping him to fix up the old place and tending to his garden. Zenos was faultless: charismatic, sweet, handsome, and seemingly perfect.
Which only meant that something was seriously wrong, but they just hadn’t discovered what yet. It was almost as if there was another side to him, but just like the back sides of the moons, they could never hope to see what it was. So, like all good soldiers, they kept a careful watch, waiting for him to finally slip. No man was that good, without some secret part of him being bad.
But on the other hand, all of this had been going on for years, and no rumors of anything unsuitable had ever surfaced, so the senior soldiers didn’t worry about it and generally ignored their concerns.
Until awkward and unguarded moments suddenly popped up, such as referring to Mrs. Shin by her first name, and realizing that maybe Lieutenant Colonel Shin had his moments of doubt as well. Otherwise, why would he have assumed the worst intentions about his best friend?
The road the two sergeants walked was relatively free of foot traffic, since most of the village was moving rubble. Now was a perfect time, Grandpy thought, to maybe get a peek at the other side of a moon.
Neeks smiled amiably. “Sergeant, how old are you now?”
Zenos looked at him as they headed north to the fort, not sure why he asked the question. “Thirty-four, beginning of the season.”
“And you’ve been here for what, thirteen years now?”
“Almost fourteen. At the end of Planting.”
“Fourteen years,” mused Grandpy. “Lots of time to see lots of things, right?”
“I suppose,” Zenos said, still sounding lost.
Neeks almost chuckled. It was just that Zenos was so . . .
Well, naïve wasn’t the right word. It was if he simply didn’t notice things, or pay attention to what everyone else did. And Neeks wondered that Zenos hadn’t married yet. Mrs. Shin always had her eye out.
Poor Milo Rigoff hadn’t been at the fort for five weeks when Mrs. Shin, upon meeting the lanky officer, developed a gleam in her eye and told him she knew the perfect girl for him. And Mrs. Shin was rather put out, Neeks assumed, that Karna found himself an interesting young woman without her assistance. More than once Grandpy had caught Mrs. Shin’s attention, and the busybody was always ready to tell him about another one of her mother’s lonely friends, but Neeks put an end to that every time with, “If she’s not army issued, she’s not for me.”
Mrs. Shin was likely still trying to find Zenos a female. Or so Grandpy assumed.
Zenos noticed women, Grandpy was sure of that. It was hard not to. There was a steady stream of them on the road to the fort. Since the land tremor activity had gone down, but not completely. Neeks had noticed the parade of women had grown over the years. Maybe when the fort expanded to two hundred fifty men, so did the hopes of the women, both young and not so young. Edge may have been just a small village with only five thousand people, but the soldiers never complained about lack of company.
Even now as they walked to the fort Zenos nodded politely to what Grandpy would consider a sultry and silky young woman who approached from the opposite direction. Grandpy surreptitiously watched Zenos’s eyes as they got closer. Neeks definitely saw a spark, then Zenos’s eyes traveled down to the low-cut neckline on the young woman’s dress which left little for a healthy man to imagine, and Neeks was sure Zenos was a very healthy man. Zenos’s face flushed with what seemed like shame at having lingered at her ample cleavage, and he looked at the ground, probably not even noticing the slit on her skirt that revealed her leg all the up to her thigh when she walked.
The girl misinterpreted Zenos’s meaning and grinned flirtatiously, but Zenos kept his eyes on the road as she passed them. The young woman’s expression turned disappointed as Zenos refused to look up, but Grandpy nodded courteously.
While she wasn’t interested in the older man, she nodded politely back.
Grandpy’s thoughts churned. Maybe Zenos thought he already found himself a woman . . .
When the girl was sufficiently behind them, Neeks cleared his throat again. “How is it, Zenos, that after all these years in the army, you . . .” He faltered, unsure of how to finish his thought suitably, but still get his meaning across.
“Yes?” Zenos asked, looking at him askance.
“Well, on your days off, you’re not in the market enjoying a drink, or chatting to some beautiful young lady. I have a hard time believing that what they might call a ‘ruggedly handsome man’ like you can’t find someone to . . . talk with.”
Zenos smiled sadly. “None of the women here are the kind I would like to talk with,” he said, missing Grandpy’s insinuation that no conversation was implied. “I’m a little particular when it comes to women, I suppose.”
“Doesn’t have to be a long-term commitment, Sergeant. Many of these women aren’t looking for a long conversation—”
Zenos sighed. “Well, maybe I am. Things have changed since I first came here. It’s getting harder to find nice women.”
“Nice women like Mahrree Shin?” Neeks said with a hint of accusation.
Zenos’s eyes flared at him, then softened. “Yes, like Mrs. Shin.” He took a deep breath. “Grandpy, she’s so much like my sister. And the lieutenant colonel—he’s the brother I should’ve had. They remind me a great deal of what I left behind. I’m a family man, and they’re my family. That’s all.”
Grandpy had stopped walking, forcing Zenos to pause and pivot to face him. Neeks didn’t say a word, but folded his arms and gave the master sergeant a look.
Zenos knew what he was implying. “Even if I wanted one, I’d never have a chance, Grandpy,” Shem said quietly. “She’s completely devoted him. And so am I.”
Grandpy stared him down for another half minute, but Zenos held the gaze intended to determine just how honest the younger man was.
“You better be,” Grandpy said coldly.
“He’s the entire reason I’m in Edge, Grandpy. I promise.”
Realizing that was about as clear an answer as he would get, Grandpy nodded once. “Make sure it stays that way.” Then, as if the last exchanged had never occurred, Grandpy unfolded his arms and continued walking to the fort, Zenos falling in next to him.
“Well then, ‘family man’,” Neeks drawled in his lazy tone on to another subject, “you might want to recommend to the Shins to lock up that daughter of theirs for the next ten years. She’s quite a developing young woman, isn’t she?”
Zenos rounded on him. “How dare you talk about Jaytsy Shin that way? She’s only fourteen!”
It would take a lot more than that to rattle Neeks. “Taller than her mother already, although that’s not saying much,” he chuckled. “But Zenos, I’ve seen some of the soldiers noticing her. The colonel’s dark eyes and her mother’s features?” Neeks shook his head. “I’m warning you, Sergeant, that girl’s getting attention when she comes to the fort.”
“She’s just bringing her father a meal or a clean undershirt.” But Zenos was visibly disturbed. “That can’t be,” he decided. “She’s only a girl. Up until a few years ago she still sucked her thumb when she was nervous.”
“I thought Mrs. Shin said she’d celebrate her 15th birthday in Idumea?”
“So?”
“Many girls get married at sixteen and seventeen.”
Startled, Zenos said, “What would a soldier want with a sixteen-year-old girl?”
Neeks sighed loudly. “Zenos, Zenos, Zenos . . . How is that you’ve been in this army for so long and are still so . . . so . . .” He searched for the right word. “Innocent?”
Zenos regarded him for a moment, puzzling out his meaning, and scowled when he understood.
&n
bsp; “I choose to be, Neeks. And I really wish I could stay that way. But it’s getting a lot harder. Sometimes it feels like the world’s out to get me.”
---
There’s a great deal of romantic mystique that accompanies riding in a coach behind four fast horses on the way to a huge city and an unfamiliar place. If that mystique lasted more than five minutes, the trip would be pleasant enough.
But when three occupants of the coach become ill from the rocking before the coach even leaves Edge, two days and a night may seem like a very long journey.
And it was.
Under different circumstances it might have been exciting. They might have remembered to take books to read or paper to write on. But instead each of the riders in the coach was left to wonder what lay ahead, besides the headache and nausea of being bumped around unpredictably.
After an hour of head-banging, Peto discovered how to hold his body limply enough to roll with the jostling instead of fighting it. His mind wandered to Idumea and meandered its way through what he imagined would be crowded roads and narrow houses to the one place he hoped circumstances and time would permit him to see: the new kickball stadium.
Sure, he was worried about his grandfather. And in a way, it was Relf’s fault Peto was thinking about the massive arena right now. General Shin went on and on last year about the enormity of the structure, so that Peto was hanging on his every word, while his father just sneered.
“Why would fifty thousand people want to be crammed together in one place?”
Peto tried to remember how his grandfather responded to that. Something about Perrin’s cynicism, lack of appreciation?
Pangs of guilt hit Peto. Were those some of the last words he heard his grandfather speak, but now he couldn’t even remember them?
Nah, he concluded. It’s not like the High General could be snuffed out that easily. No, he’d be fine, maybe even take Peto himself to see the arena once he regained his strength—
Peto glanced over to his father sitting across from him and staring out the window, brooding so intensely Peto felt the air around him grow heavy and dark.
Perrin Shin never wanted to go back to Idumea, but now their entire family was rushing to the hated place. The Shins wouldn’t be making this journey unless . . . unless—
Peto couldn’t bring himself to think about the awful reasons, but instead sighed wretchedly about being such a selfish grandson.
---
Jaytsy, seated next to her brother, stared out her window but her thoughts were solidly in Idumea and the dress district her grandmother told her so much about.
It wasn’t that fashions interested Jaytsy that much. But it would be, well, interesting to see what others were wearing. Maybe she could find skirts and tunics that were bright and bouncy, but still fitting her parents’ idea of modest. Maybe she and her grandmother could go—
Immediately she was ashamed. There she sat fantasizing about shopping in the fashion center of the world, Idumea, when people in Edge were struggling to clean up, her grandfather might be near death, and her grandmother was so consumed with worry that she actually ordered the Shin family to Idumea.
And all Jaytsy could wonder was if silk came in orange?
She miserably stared out the window.
---
Across from Jaytsy sat Mahrree, too lost in her own thoughts to notice her daughter’s eyes filling with shameful tears, or to notice that her son was unusually quiet.
A part of her had always wanted to see the city, just to understand what all the fuss was about and why her in-laws always pressed so hard for them to visit. She wondered if everything Perrin had dismissed about Idumea was entirely accurate. He could take things a little far sometimes.
Then again, she couldn’t shake from her mind that Idumea was founded by the six men who murdered the first Guide, Hierum.
Then yet again, even though evil men had begun it, surely not everything was tainted by their influence. Some of it had to be fine, because she knew of good people who came from there, her in-laws included.
And now she knew why they’d kept popping up in her thoughts all morning; it was as if the Creator wanted to give her a little warning, and she was grateful for it.
But what would they find when they finally got to Idumea, sometime later tomorrow?
Mahrree tried to shove that worrying idea away, only to find another ready to take its place: she was headed straight for the city that housed Chairman Mal and the Administrators.
Over the years, Mahrree had tried to swallow down her own anger with their ever-increasingly controlling tactics, and found ways to subtly skirt the teachings of the Administrators with her students and children.
But what if she came face to face with one of those men, and he saw the disdain in her eyes? Surely one or two might come by the home of the High General at some point. At least she knew a little about each man, thanks to what she had to teach her students about them.
She never thought she’d be almost grateful for the fifteen minute government appreciation lecture she was required to deliver each day, included in the teachers’ scripts which she normally ignored. Along with reciting the dry homilies which emphasized dubious improvements to the world and the need for loyalty, she also had to read out loud about the backgrounds of each of the Administrators. Naturally, Mahrree was suspicious about those, and intrigued that the author of the scripts had, behind his name, the curious words “public relations.”
At first, Mahrree’s students were almost genuinely interested in the tales of each man, but by the time they reached the sixth Administrator, several boys pointed out they had heard the story before.
Mahrree had to agree the similarities of their backgrounds were opportune. All twenty-three men had been conveniently raised in poverty, suffered great hardships, lost one parent or both, worked up to three jobs twenty or more hours a day to afford a university education—although they must have reckoned time differently back then—and then later made an amazing discovery, or single-handedly fought and killed a Guarder, or rescued a woman/child/kitten in distress and was so moved by the experience that he now wanted to rescue the world.
One remarkable Administrator—the only one Perrin said was worth more than a sliver of silver, Dr. Brisack—even made a great discovery about the effects of noxious gases on the human body while fighting a Guarder near a bubbling mud volcano in order to rescue an old woman who was holding a kitten.
The woman was a widow, naturally. And poor. And it was raining. And then it turned to a blizzard, naturally.
After reading that story to her skeptical students, Mahrree concluded the words “public relations” meant “professional, if unoriginal, story teller.”
Perrin had merely scoffed at the story. “I’ll bet Brisack hates cats. And old women. And snow.”
Mahrree grudgingly had to admire the calculated manipulation of the Administrators to assure the citizens that they were “one of them.” The students were to share the stories with their parents, and after that year all the citizens felt some odd kinship with the Administrators.
She wasn’t surprised, then, when Relf Shin later read through the scripts she showed him, raised an amused eyebrow and said, “So Giyak’s parents drowned when he was just thirteen? How tragic. Perhaps I should tell Gadiman to investigate the old people that live in his mansion that he calls Mother and Father.”
Remembering Relf Shin’s words brought Mahrree’s thoughts back to why she was in the coach, which was shockingly quiet considering it held four Shins. She glanced around and noticed each member of her family stared gloomily out the windows.
She sighed. The day had started out rather promising. Well, except for raccoons stealing her stockings, and her dismal evaluation of their food supplies, and facing her ruined bedroom . . .
All right, nothing about today had been going very well.
Still, she tried to think of something mundane as the fields flashed past, but instead othe
r concerns filled her mind, keeping her from seeing anything but blurs. She watched her husband, hoping he might give her a comforting wink, but he seemed exceptionally sullen as he scowled at the window.
There were a few things Perrin and she never discussed. When she occasionally attempted to bring up those subjects, Perrin would send her a calculated glare which meant just drop whatever she was trying to express, and she always did. But now, thinking about what happened with the High General, she couldn’t.
What would happen if someday Perrin went off to stop a raid or investigate a threat on the edge of the forest and never returned? What would their family do in the event of his . . . no longer being there?
Even though all the gold and silver hidden in the cellar would undoubtedly provide for them, she could never bring herself to ask him. Nor did he ever bring up the topic himself.
But a competing concern was the fact that Relf Shin was only two years away from retirement, and that a new High General would be appointed.
If they reached Idumea and found the worst had transpired, a replacement would be named in the next few days. Chances of it being Perrin were slim. He was only a lieutenant colonel and had enjoyed that ranking for nearly eight years since it was two rankings away from general.
He didn’t want to be High General. He rarely said that to Mahrree, but she could read it in his eyes. They grew even darker and more brooding when Relf and Joriana visited each year and told their son about Idumea and their expectations.
One small part of Mahrree wondered if there even was a real emergency in Idumea, or if this wasn’t some elaborate trick Perrin’s parents were playing in order to get him to bring the family to see them. But Mahrree quickly dismissed that thought. As sneaky as her mother-in-law could be at times, she’d never drag her son away from a real disaster in Edge unnecessarily.
Still, Relf Shin had been actively campaigning for his son to become a High General ever since Perrin enrolled in Command School at age eighteen, but Mahrree couldn’t imagine a life away from Edge. Even though the topography of Idumea, with its massive hot pools, intrigued her, it could never be home.
But as the coach raced south, she couldn’t ignore the dread that she might be rushing to her new home. She had even hurriedly packed Perrin’s dress uniform littered with medals and ribbons, not really sure why.
She watched Perrin again, trying to discern what he might be thinking, but he just glowered out the window.
---
Perrin knew his wife was looking at him, but he wasn’t in the mood for one of her “What are you thinking?” conversations. She didn’t understand what every man knew: there were times he just needed to let his thoughts wash over him.
And so he sat, mile after mile for hours, mulling over two thoughts.
The first: How would he react when he came face to face with Administrators he’d successfully avoided for sixteen years? Masking his contempt from eighty miles away was easy. But in the same room as them? A bit harder.
The second thought: Mother, why’d you wait so long to send for me?
---
Two men sat in the dark office of an unlit building.
“Not that I would ever profess belief in an intelligence greater than mine,” Mal said, “but I dare say that Nature had a far better idea than I did for revisiting Lieutenant Colonel Shin. Magnificent set of circumstances: Relf, hanging limply on the edge of death, and his son rushing to Idumea, unsure of what he’ll find. I can almost taste the tension!”
Brisack chuckled. “Every now and then the random forces in nature seem to almost gain a consciousness to conspire together for a remarkable result. We couldn’t have done it better ourselves.
“I must admit, I’m looking forward to bringing our boy Perrin home for a while.” Nicko clasped his hands on his lap and sighed. “So many more possibilities now, and so many more friends for him to get to know . . . I can hardly wait.”
Chapter 6 ~ “This is another reason why I hate Idumea.”