by Walter Basho
He failed. When the soldier slid to the left, his foot stuck in the stirrup, and head connected to ground with a crack. The boar caught the now-dead soldier underfoot, stumbled, and lurched forward, its flanks bucking up and throwing Albert several yards.
Albert landed on his back. The flying fall knocked the breath out of him, and he lay immobile. He could hear the boar braying and hoped it was still off its feet as well. He’d been knocked flat plenty of times before, and he knew to let the breath come back to him.
During the long few seconds, he stared at the sky. He saw smoke to his right, at the periphery. He heard fighting around him, metal on metal and screams and howls. He thought of how he’d lost his troops. He lost them today by going wild and breaking ranks, but he’d been losing them for weeks, bringing nothing but terror and killing to them. He located the feeling of all the shame and disgust and dejection in his body: a cold melody in the minor key on his left side, starting where his ear met his jaw and resonating all the way to his thigh.
He drifted from there to thoughts and feelings about Richard: I loved him; it was my fault; it was Richard’s fault; it was all Richard’s fault; fuck Brother Richard, he is a fucking liar and should have never given me this responsibility in the first place; I loved him, though; he never killed, only I did; it’s my fault. Then he noticed that he heard less of the boar. Then his lungs decided to operate again.
He sat up with a gasp. He saw the boar fleeing from the battlefield, dead soldier still in tow. There was a strange quiet in the land around him, nothing but a wordless rush of Baixans in the distance, streaming toward the ruined steel tower. Albert was now close enough to the tower to make out details. Four wide feet grounded it, and stairways rose from those feet up into the tower itself, winding metal that could be climbed. Baixans had gathered on its landings. But instead of trying to mount some defense from the landings, the Baixans rushed them, crowded them, climbed over one another to escape the soldiers of the Islands. They scrambled and clawed at each other. They threw one another from the landings. Between Albert and the chaos at the tower were some Island soldiers floating in air, gently, over the river, sent across by the magic winds of the Adepts.
Albert looked around for his troops. He could see the soldiers move toward the tower in an amorphous scatter, starting a few hundred yards ahead of him and extending several hundred yards beyond. He studied the crowd, trying to discern some grouping or pattern to it, finding none. Some soldiers struggled with one another, or wandered aimlessly, unsure what to do with the screaming innocents around them. Some tried to tend to the Baixans, others to control the crowds. There were sporadic groups of wild Baixans, small perturbations of whirling, green-eyed banshees that would emerge and attack anything nearby. He saw a few explosions in the distance, past the troops, and more flying bodies. The Adepts did most of the work of conquest, he thought, leaving the soldiers to clean up.
He looked around him. He realized that he lagged behind nearly everyone. The huts, tents, and fires around him were still freshly abandoned, food still cooking. A cat came up and rubbed up against his shin. He scratched it gently behind the ears. He heard the noise of the massacre drift away from him.
Suddenly, a group of five wild Baixans rushed forward, their eyes greener than he had seen since the raids just after Richard’s death. They looked in many directions, but moved as one, like a many-headed beast in composite. Albert went to his sword by instinct, but then took his hand away from the hilt, dropped his arms, and stood there, ready to let them sweep over him.
They focused on him and ran at him full-tilt. All the wild packs he had seen in the past had emerged suddenly from the trees: here, in the open, they were less startling but still remarkably fast. He breathed in and thought for a moment about what it would feel like to be torn apart. He thought of his parents and began quieting his mind for death, stilling himself to his breath and body, focusing on what moved directly before him.
The pack kept up its speed until only a few feet from him, then stopped abruptly. They crept forward, snarling and barking, but with a strange air that Albert read as curiosity. The forward-facing Baixan crept up to Albert, sniffing, and Albert could smell them, too. The green permeated them; it sat on their clothes, on their very breath.
“You smell different,” the green ones said in unison.
A calm settled over Albert. He let go of the tension and reaction he had learned from weeks of fighting the wild Baixans. He didn’t feel safe, but he didn’t care any longer. “Different from what?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” the chorus said. “Different.” It smelled, looked around some more. “You were with him. Richard,” it said.
“When you killed him? It was you, wasn’t it?”
The chorus wailed and spun about. Some of the Baixans dropped and pounded the ground, while others tore at their clothes and skin. “It was an accident!” they screamed. “It was an accident.” After a few minutes, the green ones settled down. A new one presented its face to Albert.
“They call you the Dragon,” Albert said.
“They do. That’s what I am. I am the Dragon.”
“In all this mess, I’m glad of one thing,” Albert said. “We’re hurting you. We’ll turn this into a city, and we’ll feed and clothe and teach these people. We’ll make up for what we did. And, when civilization is here, then we’ll be rid of you.”
The chorus laughed at him. “Hurting? Hurting? Not at all, I feel wonderful! I wanted this. I wanted this to happen from the very start.”
The chorus broke apart then from its circle, and re-formed itself around Albert. All five stared at him, green and burning. Albert stared at the one before him, locking eyes. “I’m not afraid of you,” Albert said.
The face laughed again, loudly and joylessly, another bark. Something crept up from Albert’s sternum and began to flush his cheeks. He burned green. A fire spread through him. He closed his eyes and saw the green burning behind his eyelids, looking into his body and mind. Then, abruptly, he felt the green waver, then immediately disappear. He had a moment of cool black relief before losing consciousness.
+ + +
He dreamed of the people in the forest again. It felt earlier than the last dream. He saw two women there, a wise woman and a quick woman. The smart man was sick.
The wise woman said to them, “We can change the forest.”
The strong man, healthy, ruddy, and full of hope, said, “Tell me what I can do.” And she told him to begin cutting down trees.
The smart man, wan but determined, said, “Tell me what I can do.” And she told him to measure a place, a square, where they could grow crops.
The quick woman asked, “What are you doing?” And the wise woman told her to go into the forest and tell the forest what they were doing.
They made a clearing and put vegetables in it. The vegetables got the whole of the sun, because the strong man had cleared away the trees. They made a small house and were happy.
+ + +
He woke up. He looked around; it was dusk. He had slept a long time. The sky glowed with purple and pink and brilliant comforting light, streaming through wispy clouds. He had never seen a more beautiful sunset.
He looked out toward the tower. Plumes of smoke drifted lazily from and around it. He could make out some scattered, tired activity. Defeated Baixans funneled out of the tower in rows, lined up, and sat down in place. He saw a few Island soldiers guiding them. They were teaching the Baixans already. Still figures pockmarked the ground for acres and acres. The figures posed randomly, crookedly, in positions no one living would take.
He sat for a long time, staring at the bodies, living and dead, the terrible ordinariness of people cleaning up after slaughter. When he couldn’t look at it any more, he went back down the hill from where they’d come. He went back to where Cas had been. The camp still burned and smoldered in places. The smoke was heavy. They had covered all of Baixa in smoke, he thought.
He found the place, he
knew that it was the place, but no one was there. “Cas?” he shouted. “Cas, come back, buddy, please come back.” He waited, but heard no response and saw nothing. He shouted again, and then sat down in the middle of the smoldering tents, eyes burning from the smoke. Sister Clare found him, hours later, still calling for Cas.
+ + +
Clare led him back to the camp on the edge of town, to the medical tents. He walked his own body, but Clare took charge of his decisions for a while. He didn’t mind. She had found him ranting and immobile, burned from trying to put out tent fires.
He slept for several days. When he came to, he found himself in a hall with familiar faces. Aengus slept there, only a few cots away. Aengus seemed peaceful. When Clare arrived to visit Albert, she said, “I’ve turned off some parts of his mind that feel pain, just for a while. So that it won’t hurt as much.” Aengus had lost his left arm.
Albert watched Aengus sleep. Clare told him what had happened. A Baixan lumberjack with a wood axe had fought back and had struck off Aengus’s arm. Holden died defending Aengus. The lumberjack died, too. Albert kept imagining climbing into bed with Aengus, to hold and comfort him and help him heal. But he would have probably just upset the wound and made Aengus worse.
After a few days, Albert began spending less time at Aengus’s bedside and more walking through the Old City. The Adepts and troops began building as soon as the battle had ended. They had already built a couple of wooden structures. There was a house of government and a school. The Adepts had begun teaching Baixans how to sit in contemplation and how to resolve inner and interpersonal conflict. They had begun to build a bank, although he had heard an Adept say that they would take their time introducing banking. It was said while the Adept was supervising a group of Baixans who had been drafted into starting the clock tower.
Albert tried to avoid seeing too many people he knew; when he did, he walked the other way, quickly. He had lost his command by tacit agreement. He never showed up for any military activities again, and no one called him to task for that. No one tried to give him an order. One morning, he saw Heather training troops in a militia exercise. He wondered why he found them unfamiliar, then realized they were Baixans.
There were no more attacks of green-eyed savages. No one even mentioned the green attacks any more.
One morning, Clare walked with him. He watched her pained expression as she stared at the changes, at the burgeoning civilization. “You all had a plan for this, right?” he asked her. “Adepts. You knew exactly what would happen. You had a plan all along.”
Clare looked at him, incensed. “They . . .” But then she sighed. “No, I’m a part of it, too. I’m responsible, too. Yes, we did. Of course we did. I think it’s wrong.”
“You just followed Niall’s orders,” he said. “We all did.”
“Did you only follow Niall’s orders?” Clare asked. “We all share the guilt. Niall was following orders, too.” She walked off. Albert saw her a few more times after that, but she avoided his eyes, and he realized it was better to leave her alone.
After a few more days, Aengus awoke. Sister Clare had let go of his mind, but when he talked to Albert his voice and his manner were still peaceful.
“I don’t want you to be upset,” Aengus said. “Holden was really brave, and I was brave, too. And Sister Clare took good care of me.” He smiled.
The path they had cut through the forest, from the beach to the Old City, became a supply route. Baixans began streaming into the city. They began putting up houses, taverns, a market. They cleared out land on the edges of the city for farms. Albert would linger from time to time around the new farms, until he noticed the skittishness of the Baixans working them.
When he didn’t know where else to go, he would go out into the woods. He would lie flat there and listen to the forest. He never saw Niall or any of the Old People. He kept an eye out for Thomas, thinking that they might ship Administrators into the city now that everything was settling down. But Thomas did not arrive, either.
After a few weeks, the Adepts decided the supply road was finished and stable enough for open travel. They began to send back the wounded. They offered Aengus a spot on a wagon, but he refused. “I lost an arm, not a leg,” he said.
On the morning of his departure, Aengus whistled and cleaned the space around his cot, his small kit packed and sitting at the foot edge. He stopped whistling when he saw Albert. “Where’s your stuff?” he asked, but then he knew. “What are you doing? You’re not coming?”
“I’m not coming home yet,” Albert said. “I don’t know what’s back there for me. I don’t believe in it anymore.”
“What is it? What don’t you believe in?”
“I don’t know. I don’t believe in any of it. I need . . . I don’t know what I need.”
“I know what I need, I need you. And you need me, and you’re being an idiot.”
“You need your home, too, more than you need me. I need the opposite of home right now. I’m sorry, Aengus. I really am.”
“You’re always sorry,” Aengus said. “But you never do anything about it.” Albert tried to say more, but Aengus wouldn’t look at him.
When they departed, Albert saw Clare gave Aengus a strong hug and a kiss on the cheek. Albert had never seen affection like that from an Adept. Clare whispered something into Aengus’s ear, something Albert couldn’t hear. Aengus wiped his eyes and nodded.
When Albert got back to his quarters, a book sat on his cot, a thick one with a strong binding. He picked it up and flipped it open. An inscription, a picture, lay just inside the cover. An Adept had drawn it, in the way only Adepts knew how to draw: so precise and detailed that it looked real, like a window into another real world.
It was a picture of Aengus and him. It must have been early in the campaign. They sat next to one another, talking, before a fire. Aengus had his hand on Albert’s shoulder, his eyes closed in a bright laugh. Albert smiled and gazed at Aengus. Albert thought to himself, those boys were happy, then realized he had thought that instead of we were happy.
Underneath the picture was inscribed the words:
If you plan to survive, you will have to learn how to forgive yourself.
The next page also had a picture: Thomas and Albert studying at their desks, at the school. The Albert in the picture quietly focused on the book before him, and Thomas pointed to a page, explaining something to Albert. Sister Clare watched them in the background. The book was from Clare. Beneath the picture, the words:
Don’t forget who you are. I hope to see you again.
He flipped through the book. He saw some familiar sutras, and some new stories. Nothing military, and nothing about physics. Albert put the book in his pack, along with a few small items and the provisions he had prepared, enough to last a week or two. He didn’t worry; he figured hunting would be good. He had a knife and an axe and his sword and his bow.
He walked across the city and started heading the opposite direction from the road and the coast. He walked out of town, farther into the forest. After more than a mile of new clearings and farmland, he finally reached a point where the forest opened ahead of him. The field and rubble of the Old City began to thicken into low brush, then the reach of saplings, ever thicker and thicker. He pulled out his knife to cut a trail. He started walking. It called to him. It was the only place left.
3
The new trip into Baixa began exactly where Niall had started the first trip into Baixa. He faced the same entry into the continent: a continuation of sand beyond the shore into a space between two brushy dunes. The tents to either side of it were peopled differently, but they were the same tents. He tried to picture it all—the coast, the dunes, the entry into the forest—as it had been then, and then he tried to picture it as it had been thousands of years ago. Perhaps some small houses at the shore, he thought, and perhaps a wall where eroded old stones stood now. Perhaps it would look like that again, he thought. Or perhaps not: perhaps it would look like this in a
hundred years, except for the memory of the tents.
The road cut a swath through the forest now, twenty feet wide. Regular patrols of Adepts and troops kept it clear and free of the worst of the forest. It had become a civilization in itself: it bustled constantly with traffic, and merchants had started to live along the road, particularly at the point where the road opened up to the ruins of the Old City. It felt to him like a long, strange city of its own.
When he started the road at the coast of Baixa, he waved to the merchants liberally as he passed them. To a one, they fell to their faces in supplication at his wave. He stopped waving after the third prostration.
The first march into Baixa had taken months: this trip took just over three weeks. Niall arrived at the city outskirts on a sunny morning, with the mist beginning to burn off and the ground beginning to warm.
He approached the river. The main square had risen up on the near bank. There were dozens of new wood buildings: houses, taverns, a hall of government. Not far away, Baixans cleared out fields of ruins and tilled the ground to farm. Niall liked the farms; they had a point.
The ancient metal tower stood across the river, near the square, but opposite it. There was a wide clearance around the tower. The Adepts had begun teaching that it was consecrated ground, to be set apart.
Niall visited the school first. Two Adepts presided there, teaching a large group of adults and children alike. Everyone sat on the ground, silently, their eyes closed. They were trying a new technique, developed just before the attack: wordless programming and instruction, to save time.
It seems to be going well, Niall thought, and one of the instructors thought back to him: Yes.
Why have you come? We weren’t expecting you, one of the others thought.
No plan, just to see our progress, he responded. Just to admire.