Feast and Famine

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The old man’s face had been unreadable at first, gaunt with too little sleep and too many cares, but then a tiny twitch had come to the corner of his mouth and he had said, “Morning, Mornen.”

  An uncertain ripple of amusement had eddied through the room. It had been clear that everyone there would prefer Mornen swiftly dead so that they could get on with the business of losing the war.

  “Te Sora province, wasn’t it?” Lowre had said, apparently more than happy to take all the time he wanted. Possibly sentencing a man to death was the nearest he was going to get to a break. “How long ago did the royal line die out there?”

  Mornen had not answered, unsure why he was being examined before his execution, but some functionary had leant close and given Lowre the answer.

  “So long?” the prince had mused, in the utter silence that by then had taken over the hall. “Lawless three generations then, and it is our shame that we did not take it in hand sooner. And you must have been just a child when your father decided that he had robbed and bullied enough to call himself a prince.”

  One nameless noblewoman had decided that was a joke. Her harsh bark of laughter in that silence would no doubt haunt her to her dying day.

  Mornen had held his peace. He knew the truth, or what he wanted to believe was the truth: Te Sora had been a nest of villains for as long as anyone could remember. Their victims were the peasants, the farmers and herdsmen, who were still desperately scratching an existence from the bitter earth, between raids and thefts, fire and the sword. Mornen’s father had gathered his own band of bravos, to be sure, and set them on any other bandit leader in the province, but he had done it because someone had to restore some kind of order, and the Monarch had abandoned them to their fate. That his father had been something more than a mere robber-lord was Mornen’s article of faith.

  “It seems somewhat beside the point now,” Lowre had told his prisoner. “Te Sora is beneath the black and gold, and so shall we all be if we do not meet the Wasps with a grand army, and not just a rabble of individual retinues. You are not a prince, Mornen Corneles.”

  Still Mornen had been silent but Lowre had promted him, “Answer me: you are no noble, you are a peasant in borrowed robes. Speak.”

  And Mornen had looked the man in the eye and said, “It’s true, and do your worst.”

  “Oh count on that,” had come Lowre’s grim response. “Your people suffer under the Empire, Mornen, but they are subjects of the Monarch and the Commonweal, though they may not have known it ere now. They will fight, if the right stick comes to stir them.” His face had been impassive, a statue’s. “But my Mercers tell me that your father did his ill work well, in winning their love. They will fight for you,”

  Mornen had just stared.

  “You will return to them, as they languish beneath the Empire’s boot. You will stir them, you will rouse them to follow you. You will bring every able-bodied man and woman that can be spared to our great muster at Derosaka come spring. This war has gone on long enough!”

  Abruptly the old man had been standing, spear-straight, the very image of warlike authority. “We have let the Empire run rampant over the Monarch’s sovereign lands for six years. Now the full force of the Commonweal will cast them back. It must.” His eyes, that had been scanning the assembled war-leaders, had returned to Mornen. “And you shall do your part.”

  And Mornen had replied: “Why should I do this?”

  Prince Lowre Cean had smiled, equally devoid of malice or humour. “Because you are a loyal servant of your Monarch and your Commonweal, Prince-Minor Mornen Corneles, and you will fight for your father’s dream.”

  After that there had been no choice. What good being made a prince if his province and people were in the hands of the enemy?

  *

  There was a hierarchy of misery amongst those under the black and gold heel. Mornen and his fellows were on the lowest rung, it seemed, but the man locked inside the wagon was something grander.

  Mornen’s three fellow sweaters, slaves not so much to the Empire as to the wagon’s uneven passage, were a mixed bag. From the way the slavers talked about them, it was plain they’d bought their workers cheaply and brought them along solely for this purpose. When their destination was reached, when the man inside the wagon was delivered to their betters, Mornen and these three wretches would be sold on somewhere, for whatever poor profit they would fetch.

  At night the slavers made their own fire and their own camp, and their bound charges were able to talk in low voices, though none of them had much to say. Tadeusz was a dark, broad-shouldered Bee-kinden, so short that he would barely reach Mornen’s chest. He was the strongest and the hardiest of them all, did the most work and complained least. His eyes, when they lit on their Wasp masters, were coals of loathing. Chained on the same side as him was a young Roach-kinden man, the sort of rogue Mornen would have picked for cheating at dice or stealing livestock. He had his kinden’s white hair and a rover’s sun-touched skin and, of all of them, only he could manage an occasional smile. He gave his name as Arden Wil.

  Last for wagon duty was a man of mystery, a rangy, wild creature of no kinden Mornen knew, wiry body stripped to the waist and his red hair long and matted. He was gagged with iron, a bizarre clamp that held his jaw entirely shut, and so he had little to contribute to their meagre moonlit conversation. He muttered all the time, though, a constant undercurrent of mutiny. He could only suck his food from between clenched teeth, but a cold and watery stew was all the slaves were fed, so he missed out on little. Wil called him Ceccy.

  These, at least, were Mornen’s comrades in adversity. The man in the wagon was prisoner nobility, a prince behind bars. What he had done, Mornen had no idea, but the Dragonfly soon understood that the entire purpose of the slavers’ journey was to pass this man on to their superiors back in the Empire proper. The slavers themselves taunted the man, telling him he’d be hoist in Armour Square, whipped and beaten and then put on the crossed pikes. The Empire, it turned out, reserved its true loathing for its own failures.

  The Wasp inside the wagon was an angular, dark-haired specimen of the breed. He would be tall, Mornen guessed, save that the space within the wagon was cramped, allowing him either to sit or to crouch. His hands were bound palm-to-palm before him and wound about with cloth, preventing him from using his sting. As the wagon rattled and shook the prisoner cursed and swore, and he would bring his long face to the hatch to glower impotently at his warders or, for scowling emphasis, even stick his whole head out of the square-cut hole in the wood.

  The second night, with the Fly-shackles slowly giving in to his tortured clawing, Mornen had put his back to the wagon-side and hissed at the man within until he had his attention. “What’s your story?” he had asked.

  The Wasp’s face had shown at the hatch, colder than ever by moonlight. “Lieutenant Valken, Fourth Army,” he had spat. “That’s all you’ll get from me, ‘Wealer.” Despite his captivity, despite his bloody destiny, his position in the society of the wretched was a superior one, and he obviously felt it deeply.

  *

  The road from Lowre Cean’s hall back to Te Sora had been a long one, but being a newly-minted prince apparently entitled him to a horse. They had given him a sword, too, a proper noble’s blade, two feet of hilt and two feet of blade. It had seen much use and the enamel of the guard and grip was chipped and ruined, but he had not taken issue with it.

  Instead Mornen, Prince-Minor Mornen Corneles as he had somehow miraculously become, had set off for Te Sora as soon as he had broken his fast. Partly the plight of his people had driven him, partly the utter despite of the assembled nobility. They had said nothing, there had been no outcry when Lowre had made the announcement, but their collective hatred had made him feel as though winter had come sudden and early to Lowre’s hall.

  He was to go amongst his battered, broken people and make an army of them. They had fought the Empire once, to the best of Mornen’s limited resources, and possi
bly the Empire had not quite noticed that they were there. Now they were suffering the occupation, enslaved, beaten, robbed, raped. To those that remained, to those who had escaped the eye of their new masters to the extent that they could still manage to eke a living from the earth, their prince was returning.

  Lowre’s orders had been unambiguous: Mornen was to round up every one of them who could hold a spear, take them from their land, deprive their families of their strength, rip them from everything they knew so that they could be another drop of blood in the Monarch’s grand army. In return, Mornen’s father’s usurped title would be the truth. Mornen would be a prince and, by the retrospective magic of royal decree, the son of a prince. A bandit’s ambition would become a noble’s reality. The Mornen’s red sun would rise at last.

  He had not been sure that he could do it; he had not been sure what else he could do. Lowre had kindled in him a fierce flame, a belief that the Empire must be resisted, and yet surely he did not have the right to demand that his poor, abused people should be forged into a weapon for that resistance.

  The horse had taken him ever closer to home.

  *

  The day was ruinous, the track worse and the journey relieved only by the blackened spectres of two burnt-out farms. Mornen was young and strong and, though his father had stolen a crown, he had not lived the life of an idle princeling. Still, every joint ached, every tendon creaked. The work, even a mere handful of days of it, was ruining him. He knew that he could not last much longer.

  The others, who had been doing this since before he joined, slogged onwards. Ceccy grumbled and growled behind his gag and Tadeusz knuckled low and put his shoulder to the wagon to keep it on track. Wil was the worst-off. Twice he stumbled and fell as they progressed. The slavers got him to his feet with a crack of the whip the first time, but the next time it was Mornen hurriedly hauling him up before their masters could notice. The young Roach-kinden shot him a worn-out smile of thanks.

  And that night Mornen realised he was almost through the Fly-shackles and that he could be gone, then and there, the rope’s poor knot slipped, the leather severed: a flash of wings and off into the midnight where the Wasps’ daylight eyes would never find him. Now! Go now! The slavers were arguing about something around their fire. They might not even notice until the morning.

  Mornen looked over his fellows: Ceccy and Tadeusz slept. Arden Wil was awake, staring up at the stars.

  He owed them nothing. Even if he accepted the mantle of a prince’s responsibility, which so many princes had shirked, these were not his people. They were probably not even Commonwealers, and as for the Wasp in the wagon...

  He felt as though another day of this would kill him, as sure as if it cut his throat and left him by the roadside. He found that was the sticking point, though: no general call to an all-encompassing nobility but simply the hard grind he had shared with them. How much worse would it be for the three of them if he left them to it, three men doing what had been four men’s work? Who would catch Wil the next time he fell? They were strangers to him, and yet they were the only companions he had.

  He inched his way over, a caterpillar-hunch at a time, until he had his back to the wagon between the gagged man and the Bee, and then with gentle prods of the elbow roused both of them. Tadeusz woke instantly and silently, eyes glittering back at the moon. The other man grunted and tried to swing at Mornen with his shackled hands. One of the slavers glanced over and half-rose, but then something his fellow said caught his attention, the disputes of slaves suddenly beneath him. Mornen caught the words, “...never get an opportunity like this again...”

  “Listen to me, lads,” the Dragonfly prince said in a low voice, not looking at his fellows. “I’m leaving.”

  They were all of them very still, save for a slight shifting from within the wagon that suggested Valken was listening too.

  “I can slip these bonds, right now or any time,” he murmured. The arguing about the fire was intensifying, sounding like four men trying to convince one.

  “And you’re telling us this, because...?” came Wil’s soft voice.

  Mornen looked at them. Their manacles would not yield to any power of his. At least three of the Wasps had the heavy iron key, though, and they seemed to use it interchangeably.

  “What would you do, if you were free?” he asked.

  Ceccy had an instant response to that, for all that none of it was in words.

  A shrug from Wil. “I’d do all sorts of things, if I had all the things I haven’t got.”

  “And you?” Mornen pressed the stocky Bee-kinden.

  “Don’t know,” came the thoughtful response. “My home’s under the black and gold, long time now. Nowhere to go, me.” He cocked an eyebrow at Mornen. “You’ve got suggestions, no?”

  “Come with me and fight the Empire,” Mornen told them all. “The Commonweal’s building a great army. It’s sent me to fetch troops. Join me.”

  “You’ll free us if we slave ourselves to you?” Wil’s tired smile was back.

  “No slaves in the Commonweal, Wil.”

  “Yeah, I heard that before.” the Roach-kinden returned with another careless shrug.

  “I so swear,” Tadeusz stated flatly. “I will come with you and kill Wasps for you. I swear it, by my city, by my queen.”

  Mornen nodded. He glanced at Ceccy and realised that, for the first time since they had been so rudely thrown together, the man was awake and silent.

  The gagged man nodded, just once. To Mornen’s surprise Wil nodded with him, as though he had been waiting for Ceccy’s decision.

  Mornen bowed his head thoughtfully. “Right then. They come to us in the morning. If I make my move right then I’ll get the key to you before they know what’s what. After that you’ve got to unchain yourselves – who can work their damned locks?” for he was Inapt himself: the mechanisms and machines of the Wasps were a mystery to him, even the simplest of them.

  “Here,” Tadeusz nodded.

  “Right.” Lifting his bound wrists Mornen knocked softly on the wagon side. “And how about you, Lieutenant Valken, Fourth Army?”

  “Go to the pits,” came the quietly measured response. “It’s just the kind of stupid plan one of the lesser kinden would come up with. I have faith in imperial justice.”

  Mornen shrugged, feeling at best ambivalent about that. Then he heard the slavers approaching and bowed his head in feigned sleep.

  There were five of them, burly Wasp-kinden men in the black and gold tabards and closed helms of the Slave Corps, the most hated and reviled uniform that any man had ever donned. Mornen had heard that even the regular Wasp army spat on the slavers, but still they were always in the vanguard, keeping pace with the imperial advance so that they could pick over the choicest morsels of Commonweal flesh.

  “Look at it,” one of them said. “Think what’s waiting there. It’ll be easy.”

  “It won’t work. They’ll catch us,” another complained, the one dissenter the rest were still trying to sway.

  “Have you any idea how big the Lowlands is. We’ll have tendays to spare before they realise we never arrived, and by that time we’ll be living it up like generals. Money can buy you anything in the Lowlands, anything.” Mornen recognised that man’s voice – this was the slavers’ sergeant, as they called their leader.

  “It’s a big war. They’ll assume the Commonwealers got us or something,” the first speaker put in. “Happens all the time.”

  “And them?” the dissenter indicated the slaves.

  “Sell ’em,” the sergeant stated. “In Helleron or in the Empire, who cares? Sell ’em to the Scorpions, sell ’em to a mine. Nobody cares what a slave’s got to say.”

  The wavering slaver took a deep breath, sounding hollow within his helmet. “What about him.”

  Mornen was keeping his eyes down but he knew from the very tone that they meant their prisoner.

  “Sell him will you?” the dissenter continued hotly. “Officer, he is. He
’ll know. It’ll get back. They always believe an officer. Crossed pikes for deserters, always.”

  “Nobody’ll care,” the sergeant started, but one of the others interrupted with, “We’ll have to kill him then. No tales from dead lips.”

  There was a thoughtful pause and Mornen pictured the five of them looking at the dark hatch, or perhaps Valken’s face peering out. Then the slavers were returning to their fire, murmuring in low voices, now five conspirators united.

  After a surprisingly long time there came a dry voice from within the wagon. “Dragonfly-kinden,” it said, “I may have had a change of heart.”

  Mornen smiled to himself. “Swear,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Swear to me. Swear you’ll turn on your own. Swear you’ll fight for the Monarch.”

  “Death on you, you pox-rotten mongrel bastard!” Valken hissed.

  “Swear, or stay.”

  “What’s a Wasp’s word worth, though?” Wil murmured. “Let him rot there.”

  “You heard him, Lieutenant Valken, Fourth Army,” Mornen said. “What’s your word worth? It must be worth something or you’d have given it freely already.”

  There was a sullen pause that became longer and longer, until it seemed that dawn must find them before Valken’s response did, but at last the Wasp’s quiet, flat voice said, “I swear on my honour, and if that’s not good enough for you then to the pits with the lot of you.”

  *

  On his way home his mind had been full of his problems, that was his excuse. There had been days of trekking over all manner of countryside, keeping to the woods where he could, unsure of whether he had passed the mobile border between free and occupied Commonweal. He saw a few Wasps, far off, and little enough of anyone else.

  When the slavers had ambushed him he had been given just enough time to draw his sword and call on his wings. The horse had reared as he kicked out of the saddle, and the two searing bolts of gold fire that had been meant for him had instead taken the poor beast in the neck, killing it outright. Furious, Mornen had dived down on them, intent on taking his revenge. They had scattered before his blade but, as he had paused in the air, a whip had curled about his ankle and he had been yanked from the sky by a third slaver. Then the first two had bundled onto him, and pinned him down.