The March North

by Graydon Saunders

  I start talking, as calmly as I can, and not all that loudly. Rust’s translation is what they’re going to be able to make sense of, anyway.

  “I am a Standard-Captain of the Line of the Commonweal. I serve the Law of the Commonweal, and none living. It is not given to me in that law to admit armies, nor the soldiers of armies, nor the survivors of armies, who had sought to invade, into land of the Commonweal.”

  “That law permits you to come without arms, and to petition for entry, but I tell you as surely as death comes to all living, if you believe women are given in trade or purchase you shall not be admitted nor could you prosper.”

  A lot of harm, before we hanged them all.

  Rust finishes repeating that in the speech of Reems; there are a few amazed shouts from the mass of Reems guys, and Rust adds a couple sentences of clarification. They start to get a rather desperate and wild look, and maybe it’s enough outside their experience to stop seeming like a parley.

  One Platoon comes as close to condensing behind me as it can manage.

  Toby looks willing to take Spear-guy’s spear away and use it for Spear-guy food, slowly; Twitch looks bored. Spear-guy looks wit-stuck, trying to take in the whole of One Platoon, that certainly has the shades of women in it.

  The mass of Reems guys start looking less militant and more afraid of ghosts. Lots of warding signs and frightened looks.

  “If you do not wish to return to Reems, you must make peace with the land here. It has wits, and wakes, and perhaps it has work for you.”

  Perhaps it will devour you all. Or it could make you wives from shapes of birch and alder and you can be an old myth, but you are not coming into the Commonweal.

  Rust translates the spoken part.

  Spear-guy’s forehead touches the ground.

  An obesiance to the Archon Rust says. It would have to be.

  Spear-guy gets up, and turns, and walks away, everything in stance and manner

  expressing indifference to incineration.

  Chapter 33

  The half-company of Reems guys is still there as we pull out half an hour later.

  That’s quick, and no breakfast until the first rest, but my feet are itching.

  We aren’t over the crest of the pass southward before the Reems fortress succumbs to a rippling in the ground, and the quarry-flat we had been camped on fills back in.

  Hard to tell at the distance, but I don’t think the Reems guys were devoured. Knocked down, but not devoured.

  Rust is route-finding, and trying to balance easy and rapid and south, all together; it mostly works.

  Skirting yesterday’s battlefield wasn’t easy, the whole rise up to the south side of the pass is everywhere at least one of blasted, burnt, and fought over by demons. Lots of shredded horses and shredded Reems guys and bad footing. One notable stretch has a long drift of steel armour, ripped into strips and tangled up together like nesting razors. It moved when the focus-edge pushed it.

  The mostly clear path took us through the blast zone where the Master Gunner got whoever was running the big Reems joint enchantment.

  That one went off in the air, and there’s a couple kilometres of shallow crater. Halt noses Eustace over for a look right in the centre of it, and there’s a crackle and hiss of dissipating enchantments, followed by a leaping green and purple fire.

  “Copper and gold”, Blossom says, looking over. Blossom’s been looking deeply pleased ever since we got a good view of the shape of the crater.

  Eustace catches up. You’d never guess the howdah has the least volition; it sits there looking ornately inanimate. Still haven’t figured out what it uses for eyes. I’m only half-sure Halt is pleased; despite it being a busy three days, I’m not sure I know Halt well enough yet to be sure pleased is what’s showing, faintly, through Halt’s face.

  The waggon-loads of wounded go in the middle column of waggons; if there’s no road, it’s not especially more work to manage a wider firm surface. No sense in irritating the conscious terrane by road-building, even the obviously temporary kind. We hit a lot of really firm turf and a couple of flat sections of sandstone, and even the two or three sections under trees never approach narrow enough terrain to risk trapping a waggon.

  Whether this is a thank-you or the sensible decision that we’re not especially digestible, I’ll take it.

  It wasn’t anywhere near as tough I had expected to get the guys from Three with the critter-spine problems to ride on stretchers. They’re keeping a brave face up, sometimes collectively, but I can tell they’re getting worried. Nothing would be wrong if their bodies would actually work. The medics keep trying to look hopeful, but it’s slipping.

  I’m keeping my guesses back of what Laurel gave us for teeth. Get them home, first.

  That’s not going to be today. I think the pass-peak and the big fortress was well east of the wall, and we’re heading nearly due south.

  Over the saddle of a minor pass, there’s a steep descent into what I’m probably allowed to call a river valley. The river’s low with high summer; there’s braided water and heaped-up gravel, some of it three or four metres above the current water.

  We set up camp in the middle of the gravel; there’s room, if we go more rectangular than square, and low river is not no river. Better than the usual ditch, and I’d rather not fuse any of the terrain into walls. Shifting some gravel around into something like flatness should be less objectionable.

  Sliding ourselves through the night under concealment ought to do it. Out of anything except an heroic bowshot from the banks, and a vengeful sorcerer is more of a worry than troops. Extremely unlucky troops to have been in the right place; we’ve come more than a hundred kilometres today over a shape of mountains that wasn’t under the sun yesterday.

  A sorcerer might just be able to find us. An active standard is detectable, and moving is haste is surely active.

  I have Halt, Rust, and Blossom treat the possibility seriously; pretend you’re a One-of-the-Twelve level sorcerer from Reems, out for vengeance. Whatever you’d expect from that, keep it from happening, quietly.

  It was an educational instruction.

  Rust lay, apparently comfortable on smooth rocks, head on saddle, hat over face, and you’d have to be paying careful attention to realise that the mountain-jays and the blackbirds and after nightfall the owls all kept having short fits of looking for something. You’d need good eyes or the focus to realise it went out a long way.

  Blossom sat down at a worktable that folds out of the side of the battery commander’s waggon with some copper rods and some silver wire and put a shiny thing together. Then the Part-Captain had a couple files of artillerists stick some engraved and inlaid steel tent stakes around the perimeter of the camp, evenly round an ellipse at all thirty-two compass points.

  There was some fussing when it became apparent that Rust’s disembodied awareness was returning periodically to be bodied, and not quite in a way the shiny thing understood. Blossom adjusted something, Rust sat up, entered into a brief discussion of esoterica with Blossom, and then lay back down.

  Pretty much what you’d expect.

  The gentle, unthreatening darkness will talk to Halt, in entirely comprehensible words. They were still chatting amiably away when I condensed back out of the standard around midnight, having checked up on One Platoon and updated the battalion diary.

  Some of the drovers may still be shuddering. I’m not sure I wouldn’t be, myself, if I ever let myself think about it for any length of time.

  Morning is quiet; we do a proper cooked breakfast and a kit check. Throwing a wheel loses time and drops the injured.

  One fewer injured to drop; lost one of the demon-bit injured in the night. They go in the ashes-barrel with due ceremony and into the standard to a rueful welcome.

  The living are holding together pretty well. Can’t say they’re not as tired as I expected, but the Company is dealing with it better.

  All of them will have put in a hard day’s
work with something that grants a simple focus, a plow, a dredge, lumbering, making bricks, anything like that, and you put the day in and you’re tired and you wake up in the morning doing pretty well. Not a lot different from putting in a day’s work just with muscles.

  Part of that, maybe most of that, is that the simple focus has a limit; you can’t get more than a fixed amount of the Power into it, and if you have, and try to use, more than that, you get an obvious overflow effect that keeps the simple focus from working.

  Line standards will take everything you give them. There’s no limit; you can kill yourself with the drain. It happens from inattention much more often than from desperate circumstances.

  Nobody did that. All that catch was good for something.

  Living and dead crushed attacks by demons, sorcerers, toxic critters, and veteran infantry, spent an uneasy night, and then put in a day of hastened marching, pulled into focus without having time to notice they were still tired. Today, nothing will keep them from being woozy-tired in ways they don’t feel in their muscles.

  Even the dead; the dead still think of themselves as having bodies, bodies with muscles that get tired.

  You see various stretches, people rolling their shoulders or rotating their arms, and looking baffled because there’s no ache to it. It’s talent-tired. Something an Independent would know, or veterans, but new to the Creeks.

  More than one unit of the Line, new from an actual battle, has had its morale crack from being talent-tired. It’s been described as all the bad bits of being drunk, or the early stages of being poisoned.

  The artillerists, veterans all, make a point of explaining. Halt gives a good deal of implausibly grandmotherly advice. Rust points out, once, that it’s a much better feeling than losing.

  Blossom has the good grace to look as much abashed as is consistent with a Part-Captain’s dignity when Dove — who looks like someone who got green wine, and is combining drunk and poisoned — asks outright if Blossom’s ever been talent-tired. Blossom certainly isn’t now, something as may trouble the shades of Reems sorcerers variously finely-divided.

  The camp goes right on pulling itself together. Blossom’s wards haven’t gone off, Rust hasn’t found anything, and whatever Halt found to chat about with the enveloping darkness, Halt hasn’t felt it necessary to mention any of it.

  That was a day.

  A day indeed, Sergeant-Major.

  Twitch has Toby running One through the same mend-and-maintain routine. It looks like it’s helping.

  Coping with talent-tired and the ghosts of worn uniforms might keep them from thinking about what kinds of conversations they’ll have if I get them home.

  Rust looks flatly annoyed, so much so that the ghost-horse noses Rust in worry. Rust is as talent-tired as the rest of them, with as good a reason, but has far too much practice with the state for that to be it.

  Where are we, Captain? A nice hot hardwood fire, this one, a couple hundred metres upwind somewhere.

  I take a chance, and run the viewpoint of the focus up about half a kilometre. From there, and the still-considerable height in the mountains, I’m fairly sure I can see the distant shadow of the Folded Hills and a faint shine from Westcreek’s headwaters marshes.

  We’re at least a hundred kilometres west of where I thought we made camp.

  Didn’t notice anything. Rust’s not at all happy. I’m just glad no one is likely to make an actual fire out of old wet boots.

  Polite of the terrane.

  It’s raining when we march into Headwaters.

  Chapter 34

  No one knows why the Captain’s House is down in Westcreek Town. The tradition has it that the Line just got that far and stopped, but everyone admits there’s no historical support for the tradition.

  From the house-foundations, it’s more likely the Foremost put it there in Laurel’s time, and the Foremost weren’t much for writing stuff down, being illiterate. It makes history difficult.

  My take is that Headwaters, however much closer to the traditional centre of the Commonweal and however defensible, is built on a pile of cobbles in a swamp. It’s a productive swamp, and one of the things it produces are biting bugs that would give skeletonising Eustace a brave honest try. The Creeks who live in Headwaters mostly manage, but the other Creeks consider them an excessively stoic lot.

  It’s not that big a pile of rocks, as towns go, but it’s a large swamp. You march up, all right, and run out of ground before you get there. Then there’s seven kilometers of causeway creating a sort of one-banked canal where it isn’t tarred timber bridges meant to be burned defensively.

  The folk of Headwaters town test a bridge by lot every ten years. Fifty-odd years ago, a bridge being tested didn’t light on the first try in the rain. There was a complete change of civil government: grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those replaced, born after the event, speak of the non-ignition as a bitter personal embarrassment.

  Captain, Rust.

  Mind the butterflies.

  I get a wave, cheerful enough.

  The whole remnant battalion is cheerful enough, marching through the rain. Keeping the focus up enough to ward the rain off would risk shearing the bridge-truss timbers as we went through them. Breaking step for a bridge is enough like difficult for today.

  It’s still summer, and it’s warm lowland rain, and almost half of them aren’t dead.

  Even the dead still able to complain are going home. The line of march has spread out, so that One Platoon is leading. Anyone watching will notice their feet disturbing no puddles and the rain splashing back up through them, but from a couple hundred metres out they are not obviously dead to the sight of eyes.

  No regular barracks in Headwaters; not enough space on the pile of rocks to put in something that would be used so seldom. There are a couple of warehouses in the keeping of the Food-Gesith on the swamp side of town, used for a couple of décades every year. By custom and expediency, those are available to the Line for quartering when they’re not full of barrels of whiskey and wheels of cheese headed over the Folded Hills. There’s a whole extra floor on the hospital, too.

  Over the second, relatively short, bridge puts us five kilometres out of town.

  There’s an active standard in Headwaters.

  It’s been three days; just enough time to get anybody over the Folded Hills, in a hastened march, but not enough time if the news of invasion had to get to them first.

  Captain; Halt, Rust. Did you send any fast invasion messages?

  Halt is beside me; I get a head-shake no. Rust’s no drifts back as a wisp of warmth in the warm rain.

  Toby’s doing the challenge and response. What gets up to me from Headwaters comes through clear.

  Iron Bridge, Second Heavy of the Seventieth. Report.

  “Report” has the emphasis you expect from generals when the duty sergeant’s dead.

  Invasion threat in abeyance.

  Battalion not fit for continued operations.

  First Company, one hundred twenty up, forty five down, one hundred ninety dead, ninety one dead yet serve. Experimental Battery, ninety eight up, fifteen down, one hundred and seven dead, seventy two dead yet serve.

  Records of the last three days are sliding out of the standard and forming copies of themselves over in Headwaters, and everyone can feel that, even when they don’t know what it is.

  Listen up. The general of the Army of the Iron Bridge is in Headwaters. That odd feeling is the general asking the standard what you did.

  There’s a pause, good for a couple hundred metres of marching, from the battalion and from the general, too.

  Iron Bridge, Second Heavy of the Seventieth, All. Well Done.

  Tired spines straighten around me. Even Halt gets the ghost of grin.

  Privately, I get Report to the pennon once you get them to put to bed.

  Chapter 35

  “Put to bed”, between having had a whole company’s worth of space left for us by the General’s as
sociated colour party, delegation to Blossom and Twitch, and prompt response by the hospital’s doctors, entirely able to see our arrival, count, and remember the thumb rules relating dead to injured, goes quick.

  Which sends me off looking for the general.

  A standard is a place to live. A good one; it’s not as though the roof can leak, and if I believed in survival of the soul I’d burn incense to whoever put in the bathtub. Plus the metaphysical nature of the closet space and pantry shelves. You’re not expected to have guests, or at least not more than one or two at a time. Battalions get one job at a time.

  A signa is more like having a public hall; a brigadier has a planning staff, and can hold meetings in the signa without the battalion commanders having to go outside and get the maps rained on.

  A general, well, a general doesn’t have anything to do with assembling the focus; the focus can’t usefully get bigger than a brigade. If it isn’t useful, the Commonweal won’t accept something that’s plain trappings of rank. So in practical terms a general is a battalion commander — it’s called the army colour party, formally, but functionally it’s a heavy battalion — only that battalion’s standard is referred to as a pennon, and usually the battalion, so everybody knows it’s the general’s.

  If it weren’t for the associated army, it’d be the best job in the Line.

  So unlike a brigadier, you know you’re meeting a general outside. In this case, in the Headwaters Civic Formal Garden, which you get all to yourselves.

  There are two expected kinds of general; the one that could have been an Independent and is still sorcerer enough to last notably longer than the regular run of men, and the kind that are relatively low talent and proverbially stubborn. This general, who goes by Chert, is one of the first kind.

  Battalion commander, Full-Captain if you’re being very formal, Brigadier, and General are all appointments, in the Line; the rank is Standard-Captain. So in law and custom, when we’re off by ourselves, the Standard-Captains of the Line are equals, a band of brothers.