The March North

by Graydon Saunders

  At the pause, I get a child coming up to me; I’m at the head of the table, so it’s possible to come up to stand beside me. Kid looks nervous, and maybe twelve.

  “Captain, why did you get into a real fight with the other graul?”

  “Would no one tell you, or did they say they didn’t know?” Grue snorts, and the kid looks nervous and surprised, now.

  “Didn’t know.”

  “Do you know what heretic means?”

  I get a head-shake.

  “A heretic is someone who is wrong because they disagree with what everyone believes is right.”

  The kid’s face twists up with thinking. “Really wrong?”

  “Not testably wrong”, Blossom says. “It’s about what people believe, not what they can prove.”

  That, well, it moved the confusion. Not the same as not helping.

  There’s a worried parent about five metres back, but they’re not interfering.

  “Laurel made us to fight, but we think, too. So graul can disagree.”

  A nod. Not the nod of understanding, but the kid doesn’t see anything wrong with what I said.

  “Am I a monster, or a weapon?”

  That gets a look of total affront, and a “people!” response.

  I nod. “If it can really talk, it’s people.” There are hundreds of special cases, it’s a continuum, there are things like Halt’s howdah, but that’s the rule you learn when you’re a child. “All the graul alive come from the graul Laurel made. All of them were made to fight, and not for themselves; to fight for the wizard who made us. We serve the Commonweal now, but what graul think they are still comes from Laurel’s time in the Bad Old Days, and a bit more than two-thirds think we’re monsters and the rest think we’re weapons.”

  “Do you think you’re a monster?” A doubtful voice.

  I shake my head. “I think I’m a weapon. Most graul who think they’re weapons leave it at that; their service belongs to the Commonweal, and the Commonweal gets to strike its enemies with them, the way you could strike an enemy with a sword.”

  “But you don’t?”

  “I think I’m a weapon in my own hand; serving the Commonweal is a choice I made, something I decided to do, rather than a law of nature for which I have no responsibility.”

  “Really traditional graul think they are monsters, and don’t serve in the Line; they keep the forests and manage boats on the river. No-one gets through the graul townships off the roads, that’s what they think Laurel made them for. Less traditional graul and graul who think they are weapons often serve in the Line, but as troopers or sometimes in authority, if it isn’t too much; a Sergeant, but not a Sergeant-Major.”

  Disbelief, and some spluttering.

  “Old beliefs don’t have to make sense, they just have to not be a big problem. Changing beliefs is hard work, and there’s always all that other work you have to do right away.”

  A heartfelt nod, then another and another.

  “When the Line offered to send me to Officer’s School, I said yes. The Line were surprised; they always ask, if they think you could do well with a warrant of commission, even if no graul had ever said yes. I was a little surprised at myself, and all the other graul were some mix of surprised and angry.”

  “Why say yes?” The parent almost moves forward then.

  “I couldn’t have told you, back then, but mostly because if you’re going to serve something, you should do it as well as you can, not as well as someone else expects you shall.”

  A thinking look. Brief thinking look, the kid comes out of it still looking curious, so I keep going.

  “The other graul, Sergeant-Instructor Prowess, is deeply traditional, almost too traditional to serve in the Line. They think my accepting a warrant of commission was wrong, and a threat to all graul, because it meant graul didn’t always serve properly.”

  “The only way a traditionalist could see to fix that would be to kill me; that would mean that graul as a whole would get rid of the…defective graul, so other people” — humans, who have the sorcerers — “could let graul go on existing.”

  “Isn’t that crazy?”

  “All graul have a belief that serving well is the only reason we exist, Laurel put that in us when we were made. It’s strong, like thinking your family is important.” Never mind how many ways humans define family.

  “Prow’s view is extreme, most graul wouldn’t agree, but we’re not human. We’re people, but different things are important to graul. Even humans aren’t the same everywhere. I have to explain different things here in the Creeks than I did with the Eighth Brigade.”

  A quick nod. “Why not kill them, when they were trying to kill you?”

  “I didn’t have to, to keep Prow from killing me.” Plus Prow’s an able instructor who benefits the Line, but there’s a limit to how much argument-from-utility you give twelve year olds.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  There’s a dash back to the parent, and a fast, quiet, and gesticulated explanation delivered moving away.

  “How often have you explained that?” Wake sounds nothing more than honestly curious.

  “In my head? To the dark?” I manage to smile. Wake isn’t asking about what happened to Prow.

  I wave in the vague direction of over there, where the kid went. “That’s the first person who has asked.”

  Wake produces a completely human smile. I have no idea how Wake does it. You take Wake for a bricklayer, or maybe a guy who does architectural pottery like roof tile and gutters. The Independent is effectively invisible.

  “After five hundred years, I have an explanation for why, when the Foremost were nearly all graul, the Line has had so few for so long.”

  Halt’s knitting needles only click when Halt wants them to. They’re quite silent now. “The standards, and the Hard Road, and the graul, were Laurel’s tools. The Line didn’t know what it was, but it knew it wasn’t Laurel’s.”

  Wake looks rueful.

  “I thought, well, what could Laurel know of necromancy? This new trick would be easy enough to get around if the low-talent soldiers using it were dead.” Centuries of practise can make art out of a “that was a stupid thing for me to conclude” look. “What Laurel did not know of necromancy made a short list, and here I am, in the Commonweal.”

  “Are not we all in service of it?”

  Wake looks at me; Halt looks at me. Thousand of years and millions of dead look at me.

  Even so.

  “Isn’t that like asking the hinge-pins in the lock gates if they serve the canal?” Since the Shape of Peace, Blossom wavers into pure enchanter, without any evident cause. There now, suddenly entirely eerie.

  “You’re more like the geography. The water goes where the geography puts it, even with canal building.”

  Blossom doesn’t argue the point, though Grue looks more amused than usual.

  “The Standard-Captains are more like hinge-pins.”

  In the old Commonweal, there were four Independents living for every Standard-Captain there had ever been. In the Second Commonweal, the ratio is over ten to one for the Independents, and it may not drop much.

  “And the river?” Wake goes right on being completely canny.

  I make a small gesture, meant to indicate the whole room. “Them. All of them, in their generations. Over time, the river determines the geography, just as in the present, the geography creates the river.”

  The child on the far side of Grue turns over, makes a noise — young graul don’t do that — and subsides. Grue indulges in some hair-stroking.

  Wake finishes a tumbler of the happy-beet-stuff, sets it down. “Someone here, a mother of several children, asked me if I would be able to fight in defence of Westcreek Town. They were updating the defence plan, after the Second Commonweal came into being.” Wake’s head shakes a little. “I said I would do as I could, if matters came to that pass.”

  “Some of us are non-combatants.” G
rue’s voice is quiet.

  “That entirely new thing”, Wake says. Back in the Bad Old Days, Wake once fought Halt to a draw, if you define “draw” as both parties withdrawing in good order.

  The nibbles come round.

  The plate for our table has a little bundle of sections of rose stems on it, maybe fifteen centimetres long. Someone’s getting around to the flower garden pruning, or harvesting rose hips, but either way, it’s a kindness. One of the kids leaning on Grue isn’t quite asleep, and looks extremely puzzled at the crunching noise.

  The parents of the children piled against Grue come collect them; Wake and I stack chairs. The happy-beet-stuff and some of the nibbles mean Grue cooked, so Grue wanders off to join the clump of people watching Blossom and Halt scour the kitchen with excessive force. Most of the watchers are holding a cast iron or copper pan or two safely away from the scouring. Scouring is mild; it looks like there’s an angry storm god trapped in there. Having Halt and Blossom on the same rotation means there are nights the dishes get done very abruptly, and with sterile thoroughness.

  The Creeks consider the weather too cold for sitting outside, but there are little clumps of them out in the plaza to look at the stars. I think it’s a lovely night.

  Radish wanders by. Radish hasn’t been in Westcreek Town much, been all over the Creeks for the Food-Gesith, toting up storage spaces and who’s still short of canning jars.

  Turns out that was one of Radish’s neeves, asking the question. Wants to thank me for the thorough answer; I tell Radish it was a good question.

  Halt drifts out, stick tapping, and I again miss how the persistent camp chair gets there. Wake drifts out of a clump of the builders Wake’s been teaching how to make fired clay houses, one big dome you fire all in one go. It’s a lot quicker than sawn stone blocks, and sturdy enough to suit the Creeks. They still have questions, and Wake looks happy to answer them.

  Grue and Blossom arrive together, arm in arm. They’ve got stem-glasses and a glass decanter full of something pale and faintly shining.

  Radish’s head shakes, rueful or astonished or something else, looking at the decanter. “I won’t tell you you’re crazy, but…” and Grue and Blossom chorus along with Radish, quietly, “but not before the kids are in bed!”

  Radish laughs, and says “Thanks again, Captain” and wanders off. Radish has a lot of kin in Westcreek Town.

  Someday soon I should get one of its senior members to explain to me precisely what this political cabal I’ve joined does.

  Halt produces a small glass of black currant brandy, and a smaller jar of pickled demon heart. Blossom will eat that sometimes, but clearly not tonight; Blossom and Grue have got the Mead of Poetry, out of Split Creek three days past. Halt looks entirely calm at the prospect of a militant enchanter and whatever subtle thing Grue is drinking it, a confidence I envy Halt.

  Wake has a big fired clay mug of beer, the same beer the Creeks all around are drinking.

  I’ve got a glass mug with a lid, courtesy of Halt’s glass shop, one that can stand to be filled with dragon’s blood. That takes a little planning, and some glass kegs, but at least the stuff doesn’t go bad. The Captain’s House has plenty of cellar space.

  Everybody clinks the rims of whatever they’re drinking out of; Halt’s chair gets quietly taller, to accommodate this. The townsfolk don’t watch, really don’t watch, not the not-watching that makes your eyes itch. No-one proposes a toast.

  The Commonweal isn’t being attacked tonight.

  I’ve survived worse.