The March North

by Graydon Saunders

  Like the active battalion commanders, I have a replacement travel token. Mine is a ceramic cap for a long shot, only with — I am assured — different runes. This might be a compliment.

  The ritual itself is short and quiet and looks like the most important thing is making sure everyone picks up their part of various lengths of chain in the right order. There’s a lot of paper, lists of Independents, sealed scrolls of names from the existing Shape of Peace, piles of contracts, lists and rolls of members of Parliament, township clerks and judges and anybody else oath-bound for a term of office. Blossom, Halt, the guy from the barge, the newly-elected Peace-Gesith, who is not a Creek, and the equally new Speaker of the Parliament, who is, stand at the points of the pentacle.

  The Peace-Gesith and the Speaker are stand-ins, for the Law and the Peace; they don’t get personally bound into the Shape of Peace. Halt and Blossom and the fellow with the satchel will be, if it works.

  I’m surrounded by worried faces; nothing feels broken, I’m not dizzy, everything moves. Sitting up isn’t happening just yet. It feels a lot like losing a shoving match with foci. My original travel-token is physically intact, but you can tell it’s dead. The new one’s live.

  Hope the memorial holds its dead.

  I get told, later, that there was one moment, just after the ritual had clearly worked, that Halt looked obviously relieved. I don’t see that. I get to my feet in time to see Blossom and Grue leaning on each other and talking about how they have to stop doing things like this.

  One of the Independents says, loudly, “Wait, nobody died?” There’s a mass laugh, Independents, witnesses, new members of Parliament, everybody.

  After that everything starts moving again.

  Parliament swears itself in. Six or seven Independents run some tests, to be sure the Shape of Peace we’ve got is the one they expected. A member of Parliament obviously more brave than sensible utters a falsehood, and waits to recant until their trousers are obviously on fire. Putting out the fire, first aid, and a general outbreak of congratulatory glee follow.

  I go right on feeling like I’ve been smacked with a plank, but I can move.

  Parliament has gone straight into swearing-in judges, appointed clerks, and everybody else whose office ceased with the change.

  Twenty or thirty of the Independents lapse into the shapes of swift things, and scatter. If the new standards worked, they can come back less swiftly than if they didn’t.

  Most of the Independents head back down to the road. They aren’t going far, but long custom has Independents staying away from the business of Parliament. Parliament existing as chalk lines on bare rock is not seen as a reason for the custom to change. There’s a lot of fading hey-we’re-alive chatter that settles into a discussion about transport; the Creeks stayed distant in the first Commonweal because getting goods over the Folded Hills is hard, and that hasn’t changed. If it was obvious how to change it, it probably would have been by now.

  I stay put. If the standards didn’t work, the plan calls for Blossom, who has made a working standard before, creating a new one in the presence of the now-existing Second Shape of Peace. I get to take that standard and head over the Folded Hills and try to hold the furthest possible ridge line.

  There will be no shortage of volunteers.

  Grue and Blossom come by. Grue hands me a turned maple-wood mug of something that smells like blackberries and anger.

  “It’s good for you. Don’t eat the mug, there’s more.” I have to smile back at Grue, a careful social smile, and I do drink it. The last time I ate the mug just because I was hungry, I was eleven.

  Whatever it is, it helps. Grue can’t have got actual rest in the blackberries, but whatever is in there is a good substitute.

  I’m about at the bottom of the mug when Halt comes up with the fellow with the satchel. They are, I think they are, having a discussion about the transition of names, between the two Shapes of Peace. One of the things that makes a Commonweal a good arrangement for the Independents is having their true names safely behind the Shape of Peace. More secure than secrecy, though it still isn’t polite to ask a sorcerer what their name is.

  “All secure?”

  Halt produces an indescribable expression of contentment. “If my name had changed, or been lost, we would already know.” There’s a pause, and you get the impression Halt is tallying up memories. “It would have been quite spectacular.”

  The list of mighty things bound by Halt’s name since the First Commonweal came into being is long enough. Having everything Halt has ever bound break loose at one time could be described as spectacular, though I’d describe it as other things.

  Grue hands Halt a glass of something; it smells like pear brandy. Halt murmurs “thank you, Grue dear”, points, the usual Independent chin lift, at the guy with the satchel, and says “Oh, and Captain, this is Wake.”

  The forearm clasp on introduction is automatic.

  Wake. First of the Twelve to fall to the Foremost. Considered third in power, after Halt, who brooks no rivals, and Shimmer, who is mad with a terrible madness.

  Wake, whose might as a necromancer is not equalled, is not provided with a peer known to history.

  Guy goes right on looking like an itinerant bricklayer, complete with having a grip and a half.

  Grue hands me a refill.

  Chapter 41

  The standards worked.

  Even for the Eighteenth, the standards worked, and the dead abide together, waiting, before they are successfully emplaced.

  It took the Independents a day to get there, and a day to set up, but those two days are entirely quiet; none of the creatures out of the Paingyre show the least interest in climbing the Folded Hills, and the Army of the Iron Bridge has nothing more to do than march toward the Eighteenth’s emplacements. Two of the seven Independents responsible for the ritual get subsumed into it — not part of the plan. The subsumed Independents stick around and go weirder than the dead of the Line, but Halt and Wake each proclaim the thing stable.

  The combination of the wards on the Folded Hills and the escarpment back of the Lily Swamps cuts communication with the First Commonweal; we can’t tell much more than that the ward on the escarpment went up. Anything else would require a messenger, with the short way through the mass of creatures and the known long way over the Northern Hills and through Reems.

  The pivot back to the Folded Hills works; Chert is sure enough that the Line got everybody out ahead of the creatures from the Paingyre to be sleeping.

  The lack of battalion standards makes things difficult; once it gets behind the ward-line, the Line ought to be building roads or terracing fields, two of the three heavy battalions per brigade. Making a road with a whole brigade is like trying to stir your coffee with a shovel, and leveling fields is worse, you wind up cooking the soil. Chert keeps the colour party on the ridge, and sends the Tenth, Twelfth, and Twenty-Second into the Folded Hills whole and entire.

  There are four valleys, all roughly parallel, all running north-northwest to south-southeast. The most distant from the Creeks, and the two closest, all drain away southeast; the second-most distant is higher, narrower, and doesn’t drain out of itself. The resulting long narrow lakes are deep and cold and full of large long-necked creatures, fangy-faced and hungry. Makes that valley less of a settlement priority.

  Each brigade takes a valley and starts putting in a canal; big fused dams and canal-scale rock cuts is using a shovel as a shovel, something you want a whole brigade for in regular times.

  Won’t do anything for transport between the Hills and the Creeks, but it’s a start.

  Half the Creek weeding teams — they flipped coins — head into the Folded Hills. After harvest is usually their slow time, but anything they can do to get fields established in the Folded Hills is a help. Some of the displaced — we can hardly call them Foldies; the general hope is that the individual valleys will develop useful names — arrive in the Creeks with crated-up machinery and boo
ks.

  The first group of standards work, but they can’t last, made with wood and ink instead of refractory metals. If it was plain iron, we wouldn’t have a problem; iron is short but not “can’t find fifty kilos” short. The list of metals and additives isn’t short, and Chert has every geologically inclined Independent available, plus a few hobbyist school teachers, out looking. Blossom gave the general a schedule in days from when the last ingredient arrives, and it’s a lot of days.

  I get to feeling useless shifting paperwork, find a servicable spear thrower in the Captain’s House arms closet, make some javelins, and put my name down on the Troubling Critters list. People and sudden work in the Folded Hills have all manner of creatures moving, and the Creeks side of the hills is the long, gentle slope, with substantial stream valleys to follow straight into the West Wetcreek.

  It might not have been a good idea. Eventually I go out with whole files of the self-designated colour party, it’s effective, we suffer no significant injuries despite the cruncher, my companions conduct themselves with due seriousness, and it is a clear material help to the Peace. The bad idea part is how ineffective it makes pretending to be human.

  The next bit of immediately relevant paperwork to come through is a note from Chert. Chert’s got a Sergeant-Instructor volunteering to come into the Creeks and assist with raising the battalion. I’m to send the fellow straight back if I don’t think that will work out.

  That’s a strange thing for a general to say, or to think needs saying. It makes sense when I see the guy; Prowess, who is an excellent arms instructor but who is also a deep traditionalist. Traditionalists don’t approve of my career path.

  I make no effort to avoid the inevitable sparring match, or fuss much that it’s with spears. The Line’s notion of spears are simple two-metres-of-shaft things with a twenty centimetre blade you can slash with and a plain butt cap, no attempt at a mace or a spike. They’re mostly training weapons, and spikes aren’t worth the damaged feet.

  We’ve got a bit of an audience, along the training ground wall; I get the feeling they can tell Prow’s not especially concerned to make this look like sparring. Between standards like this, the traditionalist notion of propriety won’t have a problem with killing me. That’ll correct the terrible error of any graul accepting a warrant of commission, and the traditionalists will all sleep better.

  Should word of my death reach them someday.

  Fighting another graul is interesting. Going carefully defensive and relying on stamina won’t work. Even if you get left alone the whole time, sometime in the next three days someone’s going to make a mistake. Given that you decided to be an idiot, it’s probably already you.

  You can try to get inside their physical responses; get them out of position enough that yeah, they know it’s coming, but can’t actually move fast enough to avoid it. With weapons, this would work a lot better if there were substantial differences in reaction speed amoung hale graul. Mental speed differs plenty, and if you’re quicker-witted than another graul commander it’ll work fine, but not in a straight fight with spears.

  You can get try to reach further into the future, and try to get a couple attacks and counters ahead. It’s never clear if this is going to help, because you eventually have to do something to gain advantage, and that will be only a little while in the future, and just as obvious as anything else a little while in the future.

  If you’ve got a lot more practice than the other graul, if you spend most of your days working out with weapons and teaching fighting, and you’ve been doing that for about twice as long as the graul you’re fighting has been alive, you can just about guarantee that you’ve got a bit more depth on the future and less lag between your awareness and your response. Not enough to be showy about it, but enough that it’s overwhelming likely you won’t make the first mistake and that you’ll be able to exploit that mistake effectively.

  From the way the first thirty seconds go, Prow gets less and less sure of that bet, much less sure than anybody ought to be to make a bet on a real fight. Everything’s that’s not the fight is falling away from Prow, one single murderous intention.

  And there goes Prow doing the starfish, nerves locked and breath tight and spinning, back down, over the grass. Grass or no grass, you do that face down and your nose might never be the same. Prow’s spear doesn’t make it halfway to the wall.

  Prow comes to a stop, and gets some focus back across the eyes, and makes a first attempt to sit up. Sitting up feels like a completely bad idea, because Prow stops and lies back down limp and looks — if you know what you’re seeing — panicked.

  We don’t have ribs, strictly. If you ask a natural philosopher we don’t have bones. Straight up into the lung-box like that, hit right in the struts, is about the only way to disable a graul by hitting them. Letting all the ichor out, torso crushing, or tearing limbs off don’t properly count as disabled, besides being really tough to do in recoverable ways.

  Prow’s breathing ok. Gotta watch for that. A metre-twenty of spear haft for lever back of the butt-cap is a hard hit.

  I walk over, and Prow’s eyes are tracking me. Graul don’t concuss but that doesn’t mean landing on your head can’t hurt you.

  “How?

  “Sir?” Under the circumstances, not enough of a pause there to get started on the disappointed look.

  Besides, Prow can just about inhale enough for one syllable at a time.

  “The future is a surprising place, Sergeant-Instructor.”

  Which is nearly certain, yes, I can see it move through Prow’s face, to be understood as I’ve got a way to lie, that I can make another graul see what isn’t going to happen. Which would be very difficult indeed. It’s a lot easier to change your mind in the past.

  Meaning I can do the one, and not the other, but still, it’s surprisingly easy to do.

  Really a pity you have to spend a continuous month in the focus and cursing your bad decisions to figure out how to do it. More of a pity that the reach back isn’t very deep.

  I give Prow a hand up. Prow takes it out of pure need. Prow’ll be recovered in three days. Maybe five. Fit for duty at the end of travelling back to the Twelfth.

  I make it clear to Prow that back to the Twelfth is precisely where the Sergeant-Instructor is going. I can see various traditionalist notions of propriety and the part of Prow’s spine that knows I’m a real Standard-Captain locking up as bad as Prow’s lungs just did, but Prow says “Sir” and means it before moving off.

  Wouldn’t want Prow’s instruction style around Creeks even without the murder and mutiny issues.

  Chert’s reply to my message about returning the Sergeant-Instructor includes the news that Prow returned fit for service. It also had the Twelfth’s betting pool results, probably to explain why I’m getting a thank-you note from a file closer in the Third of the Second of the Twelfth. That shows up a décade later.

  One of the Creeks leaning on the stone wall along the south side of the practice lawn watches Prow shamble off, and looks at me. “Didn’t realise the Line did that.”

  I shrug. “The Line don’t. Folks in the Line, it’s not unknown.”

  I can see it running through the slow nod, the slow nods of the Creeks on either side of my questioner — since, well, folks in the Line remain folks.

  The nodding fades out, and I get looked at with more thought. “Glad to see you don’t mess about with it.”

  Might be the first real smile I’ve ever let a Creek see. “If it’s worth doing, do it.”

  Real laughter, from all of them, by sorrow and despair.

  Chapter 42

  At the end of Frimaire, I find myself in the refectory kitchen next to Wake. I’m peeling parsnips; Wake’s grinding spices.

  Creeks are a practical people; give the graul something sharp, figure out that the Independent is an entirely sound pharmacist, if no comfortable cook, and set the Independent to powdering spices, so there’s real work and no-one has to be troubled abou
t what ancient power cooked dinner.

  It’s not a feast, in the sense of extra food, but the Creeks tradition has it that the last décadi of the month is the day to combine dinner and conversation. People try to not be travelling, everyone plans for dinner to take longer, and there’s a big gap for tea between the food and the nibbles.

  Very Creeks; social chatter is acceptable at planned times.

  Enough people not from the Creeks have been coming through that there are signs beside the lettuce root tea, pointing out that if you’re not from the Creeks the stuff will kill you.

  To a first approximation, anyway: Halt appears to like the stuff. Various Creeks, fully aware wood-lettuce is a cumulative toxin, have finally stopped worrying about it creeping up on Halt.

  Which means our quiet corner table has a pot of the stuff, a pot of coffee, and a jug of something cold that tastes of joy and citrus. Grue swears there’s nothing in it but water, beets, time, and a “minor exercise of the Power”. Everybody in town has tried it; there have been some spectacular faces. About one in four like it. One in four in Westcreek Town is three-thousand some-odd; Grue is going through three tonnes of beets a décade, making the stuff.

  Wake makes a sharp distinction between eating and talking; Halt seems determined to eat, when Halt eats, as quickly as possible because one must never knit and eat at the same time. Blossom eats with one hand, mostly, and scribbles things on a notepad with the other. Grue eats slowly, looks happy, and radiates contentment. By the end of the meal, there are usually three or four sleepy children piled up against Grue. Grue’s current record is eleven; seven of those were three-year-olds, and their mothers expressed effusive thanks for the quiet hour. Blossom asserts that better three-year-olds than the pile of ocelotters they get at home; the kids have already been fed.