Terminus

by Tristan Palmgren

  Her breath burned. Her pulse beat against her ears.

  She was not the only one to have paused. Not far away, a company man clad in mail looted the dead too.

  Abruptly, he crashed to his side. His victim had only been playing dead, and had swept the soldier’s feet out from under him.

  The stranger rolled and stood, sword in grip.

  Fia charged. The stranger saw her in time. He raised his sword to block hers. He caught the edge of her blade, but he didn’t have the strength to blunt her momentum. Both of their weapons crashed hard into his shoulder. He staggered.

  He slammed his foot on hers. She grunted, but didn’t otherwise react. He brought his knee between her legs, to the same result. She kept her weight on his weapon, pressing him backward. He refused to let go of his sword. So long as he kept trying to force her off, she didn’t just have his sword pinned, but his hands as well.

  That was all the opportunity the other company man needed. He levered himself to a seat. Fia didn’t see his blade slide into the stranger’s back, but heard a crack of splitting bone.

  At once, the stranger’s legs folded. Fia stepped back out of his way as he fell.

  The company soldier was dressed in mail, his neck hidden by an aventail. Armor like that marked him as wealthy. She caught a glimpse of his face under the basinet’s open visor. One of Antonov’s corporals.

  He struggled to rise. She lent him a hand, taking care to look down, keep the metal brim between her eyes and him. She wasn’t sure he’d seen her. She moved ahead before he could.

  The town’s gates had been jarred wide enough to admit horses. She stepped between them. The heat of the fires burned her eyes. Two soldiers ran out of a battered home, smoke pouring after them. The fires delineated the streets that had been looted from those that hadn’t. When the company was done looting, they started the fires.

  Some soldiers had herded the old women and men and children into a pocket between houses and the wall. They cowered against the heat of the spreading fires. Hostages and ransoms to sort through. Revulsion tickled the back of Fia’s throat, a taint of the memory of leaving Saint Augusta’s.

  Only two bodies lay on the ground, both men. Blood blackened the earth underneath one of them, but the other had no visible mark. She paused by the latter, unsure he, too, wasn’t baiting her.

  Then she practiced the motion of stabbing. Adrenaline fired her muscles. It made her act before she knew what or why. The fact of what she’d done was just reaching her. The pain, too. She had started to walk with a hobble. When the soldier had stomped on her foot, he’d left a nasty developing bruise, maybe worse.

  When she looked back, she saw the rest of the bodies. Most of the defenders, such as there were, had died by the walls and gates. A laugh choked her. When she’d entered the gates, she had stepped beside one without realizing. Some were mangled by trampling, others had wide, gaping wounds carved by blades or pierced by lances.

  She understood now what had made this raid so significant that Antonov would time it with the comet's zenith. Even in an age of brutality, news of this would shock people.

  It was all a part of the message. Good business needed a firm footing. The next time Antonov’s Company passed through this region, its lords would think carefully about the terms of their contract, about payments in arrears and terms unfulfilled.

  She stepped across a ditch at an awkward angle. Pain spiked up her bad foot. A shadow beside her shifted.

  Instinct seized her. She side-stepped and ducked. She’d been just in time. The enemy’s sword slammed off her helmet, deflected by the brim. Her vision flashed.

  She lashed her good foot backward. Her heel landed in someone’s mail-protected stomach. Another wealthy man. An iron glove glanced off her armored shoulder, cracked into her cheek.

  Left elbow, her inner voice said.

  She drove her left elbow backward, then up, into a neck.

  Another spear of pain jabbed her ankle. She tumbled, taking an awkward step. She pivoted, drove herself shoulder-first into her assailant.

  The blow was just as hard on her as on him. Her breath stole away. He shoved her, hard. She stumbled away. Falling would have been the end of her. She kept her feet, and, before he could recover enough of himself to make another move, leapt into him, tackling.

  She didn’t know what happened to her sword. The next time she was conscious of holding any weapon, it was her dagger. She crashed atop him, and crawled over him.

  She straddled his armored chest. He struggled, grabbed her by the side of her chest, and tried to push her off. He was too late. She flipped up the birdlike beak of his visor, and sank her knife under his chin.

  She rolled off. She was not wearing armor quite so heavy as his, but somehow still found it difficult to move. She could not breathe. Big red blotches, like afterimages of flame, rolled around her.

  She did not faint, did not lose consciousness, but she did not come back to herself for some time. When she found her way back to awareness, she was back in the company’s war camp… in the stockade.

  She sat heavily by the wall of sharpened stakes, opposite the other captives, a pair of drunkards. She felt along her cheek, and the throbbing purple bruise she couldn’t see but knew was there. The pain hadn’t yet struck her, only registered the fact that it was coming.

  The company’s guards took her to Antonov that evening, as the sky turned orange. Her escorts pulled her to his open air “court” in front of the pavilion. She arrived as the two drunkards were hauled off to their whippings.

  One of Antonov’s corporals, acting as prosecutor, read the charges. The most serious was not running to war, but the theft of the crossbowman’s armor. But there was a litany of others: endangering men and officers, theft of another man’s rightful wartime booty, conduct unbecoming a guest of the company.

  The corporal was one of the same men who, earlier that day, had ignored her in Antonov’s pavilion. Fia blew air through her lips. “‘Rightful wartime booty,’” she said. She hadn’t taken anything other than the sword. She didn’t even know where it was. Someone had taken the opportunity to accuse her of stealing something she would be indebted to return.

  To answer the first charge, she unbuckled her armor and let it slide to the grass. Her stitching was intact. She had not even gotten blood on it.

  A handful of other soldiers and corporals had gathered, but they were only an audience. All matters of justice in his company, down to life and death, rested with the captain. Antonov was grave as he listened.

  Antonov asked the corporal, “I think any reasonable verbal contract for the repair of the armor would leave her in full custody of it until the job was finished, don’t you?”

  The corporal’s mustache twitched. He did not dare answer the question as he wanted. “I see. For the other charges?”

  “Dismissed. She saved an officer. By that officer’s account, she earned anything she took.”

  A deep and dangerous moment of silence followed. The other men looked to each other through the gathering darkness, anxious for each other’s thoughts. Fia kept her gaze focused on Antonov.

  The corporal said, “As the Captain wishes.”

  Antonov announced, “There will be a conference tonight. Outside my pavilion. Mandatory attendance for all officers and contracted men-at-arms. Other men invited to attend as able.”

  As their small audience dispersed, Fia didn’t move. Antonov made as if to depart, but stopped. Fia tilted her head, the question unspoken.

  He prodded her shoulder. “I’m not going to be speaking to them. You are.”

  She had not realized, until he’d touched her, that she must have torn a muscle there. All her pains were catching up with her. It took all her effort not to hiss.

  Antonov said, “They’ll never accept you as a fighter unless you tell them what you told me, about the art of soldiering. They probably won’t then, either. But it’s one of the reasons I’m allowing you this chance.”

 
She swallowed. “The other reasons?”

  “The bruise on your cheek. The blood on your sleeve.”

  She looked down. The fighting seemed like a dream from which she was now awakening. The cloth on her tunic was so dark and sticky that it had matted to her wrist. It had taken Antonov pointing it out for her to notice. She did not know where the bruise on her cheek had come from.

  She did not take the time to change before that night’s meeting. Her body remained at a remove. She had twisted her right ankle stepping in a ditch after the fight. Of all the stupid reasons to be limping, she’d found one of the stupider. But the pain wasn’t so bad. She felt it only distantly, when she moved her shoulder, or stepped on her right foot. She was still lost in a haze of adrenaline, ready for battle. Or flight. It was not too late to get away.

  The decisions she’d made had become mysterious to her, lost in a red haze of adrenaline. The battle, she realized, hadn’t ended. She was still fighting it.

  Antonov’s pages stoked a vast bonfire. Fia paced in front of it, hobbled by her ankle. The pain would catch up with her. Already she felt it crawling up the back of her skull.

  Fia was accustomed to seeing these fires only from a distance. They were lit only for company business, such as divvying plunder. She stared into it, willing the words to take shape. They wouldn’t come. When she looked away from the fire, her night vision was so far gone that all she saw was a horizon of shifting shadows.

  There was some part of the old Fia that had held on through today. Not just Fia the laborer, Fia the slave, or Fia of Saint Augusta’s. It was the Fia from before she’d seen her family wither black because she’d been too young to bury them. Somehow that girl had followed her all the way here, through the exhaustion and humiliation and bloodshed.

  Looking at the legions of shadow-soldiers stretching as far as her imagination was willing to see them, that Fia shriveled up, went away.

  “Going to war is a holy act,” Fia said, just loud enough to force them to be still if they wanted to listen.

  When they did, she repeated those words, and then what she’d told Antonov. “You tear your skin, you break your bones. You lose yourself again and again and again. If you don’t die on the battlefield, then you leave most of your living self behind anyway.

  “You live more lives in one week than other men – and women – imagine in all the time they spend breathing. They don’t know what brotherhood is because they have never shared it with a soldier.

  “It makes you privileged. Every campaign is a pilgrimage. With each mile you walk to the next battlefield, and each scrap of yourself purge away, you find something new underneath – things that other men couldn’t in a thousand years of Purgatory.”

  Her inner voice had waited for that moment to help her find the words. No one, she was sure, had told them this before. No one had told her. She looked into the fire again until the world became a void about her.

  It didn’t matter if there were a thousand men in the dark, or just one. Their silence was that of a thousand men listening. If there were not a thousand men here now, then there would be, and soon.

  She had not, would never, run away from this.

  “You’re a special class of man. You deserve better than the shit and suffering this world has given you so far.”

  She watched the fire for so long that her eyes burned. She turned away, back to the darkness that she knew on faith alone was populated.

  “And you need to make that understood.”

  Part Two

  The Company of the Star

  4

  Meloku did not have many people to speak with these days, and was not often at a loss for words. But she did not have the words to explain what she was seeing, even to herself.

  From the comforting distance of her projected maps, the raiders’ advance cavalry looked like a plague of insects. Her satellites’ sensors saw it all. Their formation was deceptively disorganized, jagged peaks and valleys. They raced towards an equally disorganized, strung-out line of men and women. The latter were civilians, racing for the safety of the monastery gates ahead.

  The “peaks” of the raiders’ formation reached their target at the same moment, slicing through the line. Then the order behind the cavalry’s formation became clear. Their uneven formation was deliberate. They’d made wedges. The horsemen quartered the refugees into neat sections, driving them one away from each other. The riders fashioned herds. They guided their victims like animals.

  Meloku sat in her cramped workspace, elbow on her desk, her chin on the heel of her palm. She felt disconcertingly safe. Information from her satellites and eavesdroppers poured through her neural demiorganics. She augmented the abstract data with images projected on her desk and walls: satellite maps of fields covered in smoke, fires, another cavalry formation whirling in wicked synchronicity.

  Very little of what she saw on this plane surprised her any more. She had seen too much of it, and often closer than this. It was not the shock and rapaciousness of the raid that disconcerted her. Nor the brutality. She could see the infrared splotches of spilled blood only if she looked closely, count the bodies only if she cared to. The raiders killed mostly to make statements, anyway. They fed themselves by taking captives, not making corpses. There were more profitable sufferings than death.

  No, what had surprised her was the speed. The evening before, the Company of the Star had been thirty-five kilometers away. They must have covered the distance overnight. They hadn’t come alone. A wall of infantry trailed only a kilometer behind. That was a speed she found scarcely credible.

  She scanned northward, focusing her satellites’ sensors on a line of horse and mule-drawn carts. A train of stolen animals, goats and sheep and cattle, trailed behind. The company’s booty. It, too, had moved quite a distance. It was as though she’d skipped a day forward. Only their army of camp followers was missing. A hasty satellite survey found them straggling fifteen kilometers behind.

  She asked, “Dahn, what the fuck is going on?”

  Dahn sat at the other side of their shared quarters and office. He hadn’t moved a millimeter for three hours, but he had no trouble snapping out of his trance the instant she’d said his name. One of the many gifts of his sleek demiorganic body. He looked to her projections.

  “The usual?” he suggested.

  “Not that.”

  Reluctantly, as if fighting inertia his body kept him from feeling, he pushed himself out of his seat. His bare feet had fingers as long as those on his hands. They were meant for zero gravity grappling. His skin was azure-blue this month, highlighted with emerald streaks.

  Years ago, Meloku had dreamed of having a body like his. He was one of the living planarship Ways and Means’ crewmembers. She’d spent half her life trying to become like him. Out of her reach now. Meloku, Ways and Means and all its crew had been exiled here, to this world, and it no longer had the resources to spare to manufacture demiorganic bodies.

  Jealousy still panged from time to time, but she believed – she had been convinced – she was needed as she was: fully human. Ways and Means needed her here, on the surface. She could fit in like none of Ways and Means’ crewmembers could. She was to study these people.

  Ways and Means would be here for the next twelve hundred years, at least. It needed people on the surface who would look and feel human to the natives. It hadn’t brought many other unaltered humans with it. Meloku wasn’t on speaking terms with the others like her.

  Dahn crossed the five paces that separated them. Everything in their quarters was compact, compressed. Workspaces jammed into corners. Her bed was a retractable cubby. Her exercise equipment unfolded in a stall.

  Dahn was a distinctly chilly and uncomfortable roommate. He and Meloku had worked together for nearly a year, and she still hardly knew him. He set his hand on the back of her chair. His demiorganic eyes were sensitive enough that he must have read the images from across the room. Hell, he could have read them off the re
flections of her eyes. He’d come over here to humor her.

  He asked, “The army’s baggage train?”

  “Look at it.”

  Fifty-two carts and wagons trailed after the Company of the Star, all guarded. It was a treasure convoy to rival a king’s. The condottieri, and the Company of the Star in particular, numbered among the wealthiest people in Italy.

  They had no base. They carried all they owned with them. They more they acquired, the more of a problem it became. On her satellite views, the carts thronged with soldiers, antlike in their hundreds.

  Dahn asked, irritably, “What of it?”

  She said, “There weren’t half as many treasure carts the day before. Or as many men.”

  His gaze went briefly dull as he flicked through data. He looked back at her. “Yes, there were.”

  She ordered her neural demiorganics to lace with their quarters’ NAI, and then to compile her collected observations of the past week. She collected a data package, readied it to send to Dahn.

  She stopped when she got a glimpse of it.

  He was right. The treasure train hadn’t changed. According to the data she’d just retrieved. Not according to her memory, though. She’d been sure, absolutely positive, it had been smaller.

  Dahn had no body hair, but he could still arch his brow. He said, “You’ve been shut inside with me for three days. Watching these things affects you more than you realize.”

  “I know my limits. I’ll be getting out for some exercise soon enough.” On the maps, seen through satellites, these events looked so small, distant. Her memory was imperfect, human, fallible. But…

  Dahn said, “Most humans who think they know their limits are lying to themselves.”

  Meloku blew air through her lips, bit back her answer. She turned back to her desk.

  He was right. It wasn’t just being shut inside that was getting to her. The remove at which she watched events like this mattered less and less. She’d been in the field too often to know what the shapes and symbols were hiding. None of what she was seeing seemed abstract.