Mulaghesh says nothing.
“Continentals fear you, General,” Signe says. “They fear Biswal, especially. And they fear those cannons. And now you’re all in the same place. I think their concerns are quite valid—don’t you? So it’s wise that someone has to keep an eye on you. It might as well be me.”
I do not envy Lalith Biswal. He made what was likely the most difficult choice of his career, if not the whole of the Summer, and I believe no matter what he chose he knew he and his soldiers would be punished for it—if they survived, which he surely thought unlikely.
Perhaps history will one day be a better judge of him than you or I shall be. For though the Yellow March was likely the very thing that turned the tide during the Summer of Black Rivers, such was its nature that we cannot ever acknowledge that it actually happened.
—LETTER FROM CHIEF OF ARMED FORCES GENERAL ADHI NOOR TO PRIME MINISTER ASHARA KOMAYD, 1722
Mulaghesh sits at the window of her spacious room, staring out. The view is gorgeous—Voortyashtan is like a wall of fireflies below her—but she cannot bring herself to enjoy it. Not after that conversation.
Just what in the hells have I gotten myself into?
She walks back to her bags, rummages about, and takes out something wrapped in an old scarf.
Mulaghesh is not an eager neophile, but she knows efficiency when she sees it, which is why, unlike many commanders her age, she took the time to train in firearms. Her favorite is this particularly vicious little piece of technology: a short, thick, snubby little contraption called a “carousel,” which earned its name because of its cyclic design of five little barrels each containing one shot, rotating to the next with each squeeze of the trigger. The carousel is much easier for a person with one hand to load and unload than most other weapon systems, as you just need to pop off the empty barrel cylinder and pop on a full set. She hasn’t used it on a live target yet, and frankly hopes she never has to, but she places it on her nightstand, just in case.
She lies down on the bed. Tomorrow, she’s decided, she’ll go to the last place Choudhry was seen: Fort Thinadeshi.
She shuts her eyes and tries to listen to the waves outside.
Don’t forget where you are. Don’t forget where you are.
***
Mulaghesh wakes at 0500, grabs a portfolio for notes, commandeers one of the few telephones in the SDC headquarters, and phones Fort Thinadeshi. The tinny voice of an on-call sergeant answers, surprised: they expected her, but not this soon. She’s in luck, though, as General Biswal is present at the fortress, having returned from a tour of other installations in the region, and can indeed make time on his calendar for her. “Provided the car can make it down to you in time, General,” adds the sergeant.
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“Well, there’s really only one road down to the city from the fortress, and it’s a little…variable in quality. It’s the only road in the city that will tolerate an automobile, but even then it’s a stretch.”
“So don’t bring any cups brimming with hot tea, is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s about the cut of it.”
“Great.”
When the auto arrives it’s hard to believe there’s a functional vehicle underneath all the mud and moss and sprays of gravel, which stick to the sides like barnacles on a ship. She’s happy she wore her fatigues rather than her dress uniform. “Holy hells,” she says when the driver hops out. “I damned well hope the wheels stay on.”
Then she looks at the driver and does a double take. He’s a young man, short but fit with a well-trimmed beard. He would be considered quite handsome were it not for his rather weak chin. But there’s something familiar in his face, especially in the way he’s grinning at her.
He gives a sharp salute. “Morning, General. Ready for the trip up?”
“I know you,” she says, stepping closer. Then in a flash, she has it. “Damn. Sergeant Major Pandey, isn’t it? From Bulikov. Is that you?”
His grin practically glows, pleased and proud. “It is, ma’am. Happy to see you again.”
She remembers him a little more than some of the other soldiers she had under her command in Bulikov: he was captain of the barracks rowing team, which practiced in the summer on the Solda, much to the displeasure of the Bulikovians. And she remembers he was a wickedly talented swordsman, sparring with a liquid grace that even Mulaghesh, who was no slow hand with a blade herself, found remarkable.
“You went and got yourself all grown up, I see,” she says. “What in the hells are you doing all the way up here?”
“Mostly driving, ma’am,” Pandey says. “Turns out there aren’t too many soldiers up here knowledgeable with automobiles, so I’ve been stuck with this noble duty.”
Instinctively she looks Pandey over, checking his arms and legs for a sign of injury, his cheeks for any hint of malnourishment, his teeth for any sign of scurvy. He’s not yours anymore, she thinks. He’s Biswal’s now—or, perhaps, he’s his own. “Well, I hope you’ve honed your skills. I need to get up the cliffs and quick, but I’d like to do it in one piece.”
Pandey throws open her door. “The road is a vasha string, General,” he says, referring to the Saypuri instrument, “and the auto my bow. I’ll give you a grand performance.”
“If you can drive half as well as you can talk, Pandey,” she says, climbing in, “I expect I’ll be fine.”
Ten minutes later Mulaghesh watches out the window as Voortyashtan lurches by, the auto pitching and yawing like a boat in a storm. She spies tents and yurts and ditches and alleys, makeshift structures that can hardly bear the brunt of the wind. Standing throughout this disordered sprawl are tall, curious stone formations, tottering, misshapen cairns that run in lines along the Solda. Something about the cairns disturbs her, but it’s difficult for her to say what.
“It’s like a damned refugee camp,” says Mulaghesh.
“It would be similar, General,” says Pandey. He points at one of the cairns. “Were it not for those.”
“What do you mean?” She looks closer at one as they drive underneath it. It’s much taller than she’d anticipated, twenty or thirty feet, but she spies the suggestion of human features on the bulbous top of one towering cairn: the shallow dimples of eyes, the soft bulge of what could be a nose. She examines the others in the distance, searching for the divots of shadow at their tops, and sees the same.
“Statues,” says Mulaghesh. “They’re statues, aren’t they?”
“They were, once,” says Pandey. “Rumor has it they guarded the Solda, greeting those who floated down to the old city, passing through the gates.” He nods at the two peaks along the river. “The change in climate’s been none too kind to them.”
She imagines what they might have once been: tall, human figures dotting the shores, perhaps splendid and regal, now beaten and twisted into something barely recognizable, staring down forever at a missing city. “What must it be like, living in the shadows of these things?”
They come to the clifftops. Fort Thinadeshi broods on the horizon like a storm cloud, immense and dark and gleaming wetly, so covered with cannons that it resembles a vast porcupine. “I suppose the shtanis are used to living with threats hanging over their shoulders, General,” says Pandey.
“Shtanis?”
“Oh. Um. It’s what we call the locals here, ma’am.”
Mulaghesh frowns. The word puts a bad taste in her mouth, or perhaps it’s the sight of the fortress looming ahead.
As they approach the first perimeter of fences, Mulaghesh looks northwest of the fortress and sees a curious installation not more than two miles from the fort’s walls. The structure looks bland and benign, a dull, small concrete creation, but it’s got twice as many fences and watchtowers as the rest of the fortress’s perimeters.
“What in the hells is that?” she says. “That’s a damned truckload of wire sitting around it, whatever it is.”
“I believe they’re considering expan
sion, General,” says Pandey. “Or so I’m told. Haven’t made much progress, though, or so it seems.”
She nods pleasantly, fully aware that this is a cover story—though she can’t tell if Pandey knows that. That little gray button of a building, she suspects, must be the extraction point for whatever ore they discovered out here.
“What brought you here, Pandey?” she asks. “After Bulikov you could have gone anywhere.”
“Well, when General Biswal took command here, I couldn’t resist. He was your old commander, wasn’t he? It was an education serving under you, ma’am. I suppose I wished to continue it.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well…” Pandey struggles for the words. “It seems like there are only a few of the true old heroes still serving today. When they retire, so much history will be forgotten with them.”
Mulaghesh looks out the window toward the fir-dotted hills, stark and looming under the gray skies, and tries not to think of the first time she saw countryside like this. “What a pity that will be.”
***
Fort Thinadeshi—named after the famed innovator Vallaicha Thinadeshi—is one of the oldest military installations on the Continent, half coastal fortress, half military base. Sporting an immense coastal battery, precipitous battlements, tangles of wire fences, and a sprawling barracks, there is something both grimly majestic and crudely improvised about Fort Thinadeshi, all things for all situations, for all situations are found and met here in Voortyashtan. What a grand and noble mess it is, thinks Mulaghesh as the auto putters through a gate, the dark walls towering over her.
She imagines what Sumitra Choudhry would have thought of it. She thinks back to when she read Choudhry’s files aboard the Kaypee with Pitry. The girl served eighteen months in the Saypuri Military, a common practice undertaken to improve one’s odds of Ministry recruitment. During her time in uniform she received a Silver Star and a Golden Stroke for “Distinguished Service” during an “altercation” when a Continental charged a checkpoint.
Mulaghesh was experienced enough to parse through these neutral phrases. She shot and killed someone, she said aloud, when someone really needed her to do it. She glanced at the Silver Star notation. And she got injured doing it.
Yes, Pitry said. Took a bolt to the left shoulder when a Continental charged a checkpoint, just above the collarbone. Nearly killed her. But she managed to get the shot off after she’d been injured.
She pulled off a killshot after being critically injured? She’s either a hard case or lucky.
From what I’ve heard of her, General, he said mildly, I rather think it’s the former.
They park and Pandey leads her into the headquarters, whose interiors are dank and tomb-like, yawning hallways and tiny, tunnel-like stairways. This part of Thinadeshi, she realizes, was built mere years after the Kaj took the Continent, and is so out of date it’s almost mind-boggling. As someone who’s been part of the planning and construction of multiple installations, the many glaring flaws—this staircase too tight for evacuation, those windows too large and exposed—come leaping out to her, almost causing her to cringe.
“Where are we going?” asks Mulaghesh as they climb up a winding staircase. “I thought Biswal was here.”
“He is, ma’am,” says Pandey. “He’s in the nest, just above us.”
“The what?”
“The nest. The crow’s nest, sorry. General Biswal is, as he puts it, a visual thinker, so he likes a view.”
Mulaghesh is about to ask him to please clarify his damned self when gray light comes spilling in from above, and they emerge into a rounded, glass-walled room like something you’d find at the top of a lighthouse. She glances to the side and has a moment of vertigo when she realizes how high up they are, the battlements sprawling out three hundred feet below her.
“General Biswal,” says Pandey. “General Mulaghesh.”
Mulaghesh looks around. She realizes this chamber—which must be the topmost spire of Fort Thinadeshi—has been converted into something like a makeshift office, with a small desk facing east. Stuck on the windows before the desk are numerous maps of the region, many of which she finds familiar. The wall of colors and images confounds her eyes so much that it takes her a minute to realize there’s someone seated at the desk, wearing a bright orange headcloth.
He grunts and slowly swivels in his chair, turning to look at them.
Mulaghesh’s world seems to spin around her.
He is not the man she remembers. There’s some remaining suggestion of the broad-shouldered, powerfully built man he was once, but he’s got more around the middle now, his carefully manicured beard is now bone white, and small, delicate little spectacles now balance atop his nose.
But his eyes are still the same: still pale, pale gray and somewhat deep-set, as if viewing the world from deep within himself.
General Lalith Biswal smiles—a somewhat forced gesture—and stands. “By the seas,” he says. “By all the seas, Turyin! Turyin, is it really you? How many years has it been? Are you really somewhere in that old woman’s body?”
“I could ask the same of you,” says Mulaghesh. “I remember now why I don’t catch up with my former colleagues. They remind me of how damn old I’ve gotten.”
He shakes her hand and his grip is the same, the fingers of a person meant either to build things or break them. Then, to her surprise, he gently pulls her into an embrace—a gesture of affection she’s never witnessed from him before.
“I don’t care,” says Biswal. “I wish I’d seen you more often.” He holds her by the arms and stares into her face, like a father reviewing a child home from boarding school. “It helps me fight the feeling that I’m a fiddly old man wondering if the past ever really happened.”
Mulaghesh tries to return his affection, but it’s difficult: her left arm hurts, and her right one is making a fist, something she can’t stop. He somehow smells the same: a masculine but not unpleasant musk, dashed with the scent of juniper berries and pine. Yet the faintest ghost of this aroma brings a thousand memories with it: the smell of smoke, ash, rain, animal dung, rotten food, and putrid meat, and with the scents come the sounds, the distant screaming and the mutter of the flames.
Don’t forget where you are, thinks Mulaghesh. Don’t forget where you are.
Biswal releases her. “Sergeant Major Pandey, you’re dismissed. It’s not appropriate for the young to witness the commiseration of the old.” He smiles brightly at Mulaghesh. “How about some tea? After all, up here is the farthest we can get from the problems of this unsightly shithole.”
***
“As the wise man says,” Biswal says, pouring her a cup, “when the shepherd lies down with his goats, he finds himself listening to them. And soon, who are the shepherds and who are the goats?”
The wind rattles the windows. Mulaghesh tries to tell herself that the swaying sensation she’s feeling is her imagination. She definitely doesn’t want to believe that the tower they’re in is actually moving. “You think of the Voortyashtanis as goats?” says Mulaghesh, watching steam languidly massage the brim of her cup.
“No,” says Biswal, pouring his own. “I think that’s giving them too much credit.” His voice hasn’t changed: it’s still low and husky, like the low groan of a ship’s timbers. He still talks the same way, too, like he’s reluctant to speak but determined to carefully say his piece. Having a conversation with him was always like having a conversation with a bulldozer, slow and indomitable.
“So what’s the situation?”
“It’s simple on the surface. Minister Komayd wants to build a harbor, yes? Open up the Solda, change the Continent forever, yes?”
“Yeah?”
“The problem is, this plays into local politics, if I can even use such a civilized term. Old rivalries, perhaps.” He points to the maps on the glass wall. One features color-coded regions along the Solda and up in the highlands. “There are two types of Voortyashtanis here, Turyin. Those that live in the h
ighlands and those that live along the river. The ones along the river are rich and fat and happy. They have the best pastures and charge everyone an arm and a leg to cross the Solda. Those in the highlands, well. They have it tough, they always have, and they’ve always fought for better land.”
“So?”
“You have the reasonable response. So? So what does this backwater nonsense have to do with the harbor? Who cares about these bumpkins? Well, unfortunately, if we want the harbor to work, we’re going to have to live with these people. And if we open up the waters, who will we disturb?”
Mulaghesh grimaces and nods. “Ah.”
“Yes. The river tribes wish to acquire new lands in order to relocate their settlements and farmland. The only decent land available, however, belongs to the highland tribes—in fact, it’s the only arable land they possess. So this leaves the highland clans very upset. The sort of upset that makes you raid military rail shipments, steal a bunch of riflings and explosives, and go to war. The sort of upset that makes you pillage and burn settlements along territorial boundaries. The sort of upset that makes you put a bullet through the face of the previous commander of this damned region. That kind of upset.”
“That’s pretty fucking upset.”
“You have no idea,” he says. “I’ve been here about a year and a quarter now, and I’ve got upcoming negotiations with the tribal leaders to try and get them to stop killing one another. Not to mention us. My hopes are not high. Good choice wearing your fatigues, by the way. Don’t distinguish yourself as an officer at all, if you can help it. Thinadeshi seems secure, but it’s still a combat outpost. There are lots of hidden people in the hills all too happy to reward your decorum with a bullet.”
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