Surrender None

by Elizabeth Moon

  That night he insisted that their temporary campsite be set up as neatly as the old one. No one argued. Fori lopped a sapling to make a handle for the shovel blade, tied it snugly, and began digging the jacks trench. They would have no fire, but they ate their beans (cooked the night before) from bowls, with spoons. Even plain beans tasted better that way, not scooped up with fingers. Almost before he said anything, the correct tally group had gathered up bowls and spoons to wash them in the creek by the camp; when they were done, everyone stripped down and bathed.

  The full measure of what he had accomplished became obvious when they met the other Stone Circle

  group the next afternoon. They had come out of the wood, and angled between some brush-covered hills, and down a crooked stream bed. The other group had a guard out to meet them—that much Gird could approve— but they could smell the camp long before it came in sight. He noticed that his men wrinkled their noses as well. He had not intended to bring them in as a formal drill, but they began to fall in step, rearranging themselves into a column.

  They came into a space set off by a rocky bluff on one side, and house-high thickets of pickoak on the others, to find unkempt men lounging around a smoking fire. Someone had stretched a line between two trees, from which flapped something intended as laundry, but Gird could not recognize one whole garment. His own troop fairly strutted into the clearing, and came to a smart halt without the command he forgot to give. The others stared at them, wide-eyed as cattle staring over a gate. The one who seemed to be the leader, a redhaired man whose sunburnt nose was peeling, stared as hard as any. Then he got up from his log.

  “I don’t believe it. Diamod, you said these were farmers?”

  Diamod smirked. “I said these were farmers who had learned soldiering. Was I right?”

  “You—and you must be Gird.” The man came forward, looking Gird over with interest.

  “I’m Gird, yes.”

  “And you were a soldier?”

  “Years ago I was a recruit. Then a farmer. Now—what you see.”

  The man looked along the column, and swallowed. “What I see is hard to believe. How long have you been training them?”

  Gird squinted, thinking. “Since late-plowing time. I was finishing plowing the day it happened.”

  “I didn’t tell him everything,” Diamond interrupted.

  “And you did that much that fast. Can you teach us?”

  “I might, aye. But there’s more than just marching in step.”

  “Swordfighting, of course. Or do you use spears?”

  Gird laughed. “We don’t use swords or spears—where would we get them?”

  The man’s face fell. “But—what do you fight with? Not just sticks, surely.”

  He had not intended this kind of entrance, or a display of the other things he’d been teaching his men, but this was a chance he could not overlook.

  “Aruk!” he said. Behind him, twenty-four sticks came up, to be held stiffly in front of each man. Gird took a step forward, clearing the necessary space, and said, “Form—troop.” This was tricky; they’d only been doing it right a few days, and it looked anything but soldierly if someone forgot. Properly, it took them from a column to the parade formation in smart steps and turns, each pair coming forward and spreading to the sides. It might have been wiser to simply face the column right or left and pretend that was the same maneuver—but if this worked, it was far more impressive. He did not look around; he wanted to see how these others reacted. From the even tramp behind him, and the heavy breathing, they were doing it right. From the faces in front of him, it looked professional.

  Now he turned, as neatly as he could, and looked at his troop. They had all made it into place, still with sticks held vertically before them. Now came the interesting part. He gave the commands crisply, and the sticks rotated: left, right, horizontal, vertical, all moving together in an intricate dance of wood. No one was off-count today; he was proud of them.

  “But—” the redhaired man said. Gird spun around to him.

  “You fight with a sword?”

  “Not very well yet, but—”

  “These sticks are longer than swords. You can’t fence against a sword, no, but you can poke with it—just as you’d poke cattle through a gap. D’you think soldiers are harder to move than cattle, if you hit them right?”

  “Well—no. But I thought—”

  “If you want to learn from me—what’s your name, anyway?”

  “Felis.”

  “Felis, if you want to learn from me, the first thing is to clean up this stinking camp!” He had not quite meant to be that rude, but a gust of wind brought the foulness thick into his lungs.

  “But what’s that got to do with—”

  “Yes or no.”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  Gird glared around at the men in the camp, most of whom were sitting up more alertly now, sensing a fight coming. Two were not; they lay against the rock face, with another crouched beside them.

  “What’s wrong with them?” Gird asked, pointing.

  Felis glanced that way, then shrugged. “Sim has some kind of fever, and Pirin has the flux—”

  “And you ask why the stink matters! Didn’t you have jacks where you came from? Didn’t the grannies teach you about any of that?”

  Felis flushed dark red. “We don’t have any tools, hardly, and it’s not so easy out here away from the towns—”

  Gird snorted. He felt good, the righteous anger running in his veins like stout ale at harvest. “You thought soldiering was easy? You thought fighting a war was going to be easy?” His sergeant had said something like that more than once—he had the rhythm right, anyway. Felis glared at him, but said nothing. Gird went on. “You ask any of these men—Ivis, or Diamod—if we had more than this when I started. You ask them if someone can smell our camp from as far away.”

  Some of the men were standing now, coming forward slowly. Gird could not tell if they came in support of their leader, or from curiosity. Felis looked around, seeking support.

  “There’s no way—we don’t have good ground here, for digging jacks and such. It’s hard enough to find enough to eat, and—”

  A taller man intervened. “So what would you do, stranger, if you had command here? Or is it all talk?”

  Gird raised his brows ostentatiously. “Do you want us to show you? Or had you rather live like this?”

  “Show us!” Felis spat. “Go ahead—let’s see what you can do.”

  “Your people must help,” Gird said. Felis shrugged.

  “I won’t make them. You can try.”

  “You’re giving me command?” There was a moment’s absolute silence, on everyone’s indrawn breath. Felis paled; his jaw clenched. Then he spread his hands.

  “For one day, for what you can do. I’ll be interested. Of course, we’ve nothing to share for supper.” Gird was sure that was a lie, but he smiled.

  “We brought our own, and enough for return,” he said. Then he turned his back on Felis, taking that chance, and dismissed his own men “—to your tally groups.”

  Raising his voice to reach all the men in the camp, he said, “You have two bad problems. The first is your jacks, which is making you sick with its filth. No need to ask where it isn’t—but you need a good deep trench far away from the creek.”

  “The ground’s all rocky hereabout,” said the tall man. “We can’t dig it with our fingernails.”

  “Fori.” Gird put out his hand, and Fori handed him the shovel blade. “Here’s a shovel, if you can put a handle to it. Anyone here can cut a pole, or—”

  “I’ll cut a pole,” said the tall man. He turned on his heel and stalked off. Gird watched him for a moment, then went on.

  “What do you have to carry things in?” he asked the group at large. After a moment’s silence, someone pointed to the kettle on the fire, and a large wooden bowl. Gird smiled at them. “That’s more than we had,” he said. “We had no kettle. But we don’t dir
ty a kettle with filth. Triga, I’ll want some baskets. Any of you men know how to make a basket?”

  “A man make baskets?” asked one with a low whistle. Gird put out his hand to stop Triga (and Triga’s arm was there—predictable as always) and said “Don’t laugh; Triga’s a good enough soldier to know that supplies help win wars. Learn from him; we need baskets to haul that stinking waste into the hole you—” He nodded at the tall man who had cut his pole and was bringing it back, “—are going to dig for it.”

  “I’m not moving any of that filth!” snarled someone across the firepit. Gird heard mutters of agreement, and the amused chuckles of his own men.

  “Move the filth, or move yourselves,” Gird said. “It’s killing you—and you know it.”

  “That’s not all,” came Ivis’s voice from behind him, “he’ll have you bathing, and if you get a cut, he makes you scrub it out with soaproot. Besides, nobody wants to eat in this stench. Just get rid of it.”

  Gird grinned at his people, and walked over to the firepit. The kettle on it gave off a thin steam, but he could not tell what was in it. The overall stink was too strong. “What is it?” he asked the man tending the fire.

  “Grain mush. It’s been grain mush for months, ’cept when someone snares a rabbit, or finds a berry patch.”

  “No bread?”

  The man squinted up at him. “You a housewife? I never learned to make bread. Besides, it takes things we don’t have.”

  “You’ll get them.” Gird patted the man’s shoulder, and left him peering backwards, stirring ashes instead of the fire.

  Now for the sick men. He knew he’d been lucky that none of his own troop had sickened yet. Although he’d tried to nurse his mother and Mali, he knew very little of the healing arts. Cleanliness, of course—everyone knew that the fever spirits thrived on foul smells and dirt. They grew fat and multiplied on what made healthy men ill. It was nearly impossible to be clean enough to keep them all away (his mother had insisted that even a speck of old milk left in the bucket could feed enough spirits to ruin the next batch) but the cleaner the better.

  The stench worsened as he neared the sick men.‘ One of them had red fever patches on his cheeks; his breath was labored, almost wheezing. His eyes were shut, and he didn’t pay any attention to Gird. The other, pale and sweating, had vomited; the man with him was wiping his face clean. Gird felt a tug at his sleeve, and turned. Pidi, almost as pale, had come up beside him.

  “I picked some breakbone weed on the way—it might help for the fever. But I didn’t bring any flannelweed.”

  “Boiling water,” said Gird. “See if they have another pot, and be sure you get the water well upstream.” Pidi went off, and Gird forced himself to squat down beside the sick men. The caretaker glared at him.

  “Ya canna’ do aught for ’em. This’n’ll die by morning; feel his head.” Gird reached out to the fevered man, whose forehead felt like a hot stone—dry. “And this’n, bar he stops heaving, he’ll go in a day or two. He’s lost all he can, below, and I can’t get ’im to the jacks we got, let alone the jacks you say you’ll dig.”

  “You know flannelweed?” Gird asked. The man shrugged.

  “I’m no granny, with a parrion of herbs. What be you, man or woman?”

  Gird took hold of his wrist and squeezed until the bones grated; the man paled. “Man enough, if strength makes men. But I’d be glad of a woman’s parrion of healing, if ’twould save lives. Have you sought a healer?”

  “Aye. Felis brought one from the vill, a hand or more of days ago, when it was just Jamis here. But she was like you, all twinchy about the smell. Said we’d have to clean it up afore she could do aught. So’s Felis told her what he told you, and she huffed off, about holding her nose.”

  Gird let go of the man’s wrist, and picked up the rag sodden with vomit. “This’ll do him no good here, but to make him heave again.” He tossed it away, and turned back to the sick man, who was staring at him with the frantic look of a trapped animal. “If we can find flannelweed, and get you to a clean place—I’ll try, at least.” He made himself touch the man’s hands, filthy as they were, and managed not to flinch when the man clutched at him.

  “Please, sir—please—”

  “I’ll try.” Gird looked at the sulky caretaker. “You can go clean up; I’ll get my people to carry them.”

  “You’re welcome to it.” The man stalked away, clearly furious, rubbing the wrist Gird had bruised.

  Gird looked around. Herf, in the tally group for camp chores, had picked up the stinking rag on a stick, and was carrying it toward the stream. He could hear the solid chunks of the shovel at work somewhere among the pickoaks. Ivis came up.

  “Are you going to want to move them? I can have someone cut poles—”

  “Yes, and I’ll need a bucket of clean water, if you can find one. Does anyone but Pidi know flannelweed?”

  “I’ll ask. Those rags on the line aren’t really clean, but they’re cleaner than that—” Ivis pointed to the sodden rags under the two men.

  “We’ll need them, but not here. No sense in dirtying them now.” Gird unhooked the sick man’s fingers from his hand, one by one, and stood up. Pidi was coming back down the slope with a bucket of water—had he had to go all the way up to find clean? Triga, Gird saw, had a cluster of men around him—presumably he was making a basket and showing them how. Artha—who, Gird wondered, had told him?—was carefully scooping ash from the cool side of the firepit into a sack of some kind. The cook looked furious, but wasn’t interfering.

  Gird went to look at the stream, and shuddered. It looked as if hogs had wallowed in it, and it smelled worse. All along the banks, except at a crossing, were the uncovered remnants of a long encampment. Flies swarmed over them, rising in a cloud when he came near. Some of the filth had fallen into the stream and was far too wet to shift easily. It had been foul so long that rocks in the stream were slimed with luxuriant green weed, its brilliant color clear evidence of the steady supply of filth. It would be best to move the camp entirely, but he could not do that by himself.

  “Gahhh.” Diamod had come up behind him. “This is worse than I recall. But perhaps you’ve changed my nose for me.”

  “It’s a damned shame,” said Gird. He was angry again, but this time with a slow, steady anger that would burn for days. “It’s hard enough to think of fighting the lords, with their soldiers and their weapons. We can’t be fighting ourselves, too. There’s no village this bad; these men came from better. They should know.”

  “So did we, but we didn’t do it until you made us. Be fair, Gird, when you were a boy, did you do more than your father demanded? Or your sergeant?”

  “I grew to a man,” Gird said, growling, and forcing away the memory of his boyhood sulks. Had his mother really had to threaten beatings to get him to clean the milk pails? Had his father clouted him more than once for leaving muck on the tools? He sighed gustily. “True, I was the same way. But now—they’re men, they should know better.”

  “Teach them, like you taught us.”

  “I wish I could move the camp. Now. This moment.” Diamod grinned. “Tomorrow, maybe: the way you’re going, you could do that.”

  Gird stared moodily at the mess near his feet. “We can’t move all this tonight. Ashes, I suppose for the rest.” He turned and called Artha. “There may not be enough—but try to spread ashes on all of this. Up-stream and down. Don’t step in it.”

  “No, Gird.”

  On his way to see how the trench was coming, Gird passed Triga, who held up one of his “fast” baskets, a flat, scoop-shaped affair. “Gird, it might go faster if we had something like a hoe, to scrape the stuff right into the basket.” A solution creating another problem, Gird thought, but one of the local men looked surprised and said “We have a hoe—course, it’s just wood—”

  “Fine,” said Gird. “Triga, I don’t think we can move it all tonight, but see what you can do with that.” Triga nodded, not sulky at the moment. It had
to be eating frogs, Gird thought, that made a man so touchy on some things so reasonable when given a problem to solve.

  The steady thunk of the shovel led him to the trench diggers. The tall man who had cut the pole for the shovel handle was jabbing the dirt with another, pointed pole to loosen it for the man with the shovel. Four others—two of Gird’s, and two locals—were picking out rocks ahead of the shovel. The trench was deep enough, and reasonably straight, but it would never hold the accumulation on the banks of the stream. This would do for current and future use.

  “Fori—” Fori was on the shovel at that moment; he looked up. “We’re going to need another hole for the old stuff. Not a trench; just a pit. Let’s put it farther back in the wood, away from this.” Fori nodded, and shouldered the shovel. The other men looked from Gird to Fori, and back to Gird. “Artha’s got the ashes; I told him to go ahead and use them where they are, but he can get more.”

  “Does Triga have carriers yet?” asked Fori.

  “Yes, and a hoe for scraping up.” Gird glanced up at the sky; it wasn’t long until sundown. “We can’t finish tonight, but we can get a start on it.”

  The tall man leaned on his pole and looked at Gird. “You remind me of my da. He was always one for starting a job now.”

  Gird smiled. “I was just thinking of my own da.” He turned away, sure that Fori could handle that little group by himself. By now, Pidi should have hot water—and he’d forgotten that he’d sent Ivis to find someone to find flannelweed. And where were the food tally groups?

  Back in the clearing, he noticed a controlled activity. Pidi crouched over a bucket of steaming water, chatting with the local cook, who looked much less sulky. Felis, of all people, was gathering the dry rags off the line. Ivis, Cob, and Herf were crouched near the sick men; a stack of sticks had appeared by the firepit; and much of the clutter of the campsite was gone, replaced by clumps of gear that he suspected were not really organized. But it looked better, and he could walk across the open space without tripping over bits of wood and someone’s rotted boot. His own men and the locals were moving about as if they had something to do and were doing it. The cook waved to him, and Gird veered toward the firepit.