Schisms

by James Wolanyk

  Still, their minds seemed as healthy as they could be, under the circumstances. Quartermasters freshly dispatched from Golyna were rushing through every encampment, replacing buckled, warped, and punctured equipment using the kator’s baggage train. A new round of rosi chalam consorts cycled into the hilltop tents, taking up the posts of their beleaguered comrades. Lodge acolytes cleared the mess halls of dried rations and spent the afternoon rolling fresh barrels into position. And although it was a small comfort, the last of the refugee masses had been cleared for northward transportation the previous morning, leaving the valley’s camps free of babes’ cries and starved, withering bodies. She spent that morning making her rounds, smiling where she could, exchanging cheek-kisses with the young scribes who’d spent weeks in the trenches and bogs with eastern fighters.

  The position’s largest risk, as far as Anna could discern, was its distance from the nearest tunnel. With the front line still shriveling, there hadn’t been any safe way to allow Shem to form new sites—his body was too weakened, even with regular infusions of his draught. And when she pondered that strategic flaw long enough, considering if they might dose Shem heavily enough to march him here, if he would survive a fresh tunnel’s formation, if—as one commander had suggested—it was prudent to allow another Huuri to replace Shem, and so on, she found herself suddenly unclear of what Shem was.

  “Kuzalem!”

  She turned to find a lean, silver-haired man standing near a cluster of shrub-laden tents, waving her nearer like an impatient hawker. He was an older man, though a broad and hearty frame suggested he’d survived the greater part of his life on boiled rations.

  “Our briefing is running late,” the man said, waiting for his attendants to peel open the flap of the largest tent. “I’ll have my unit see to your things.”

  Such intrusions had become the norm rather than the exception. Anna followed their prompting, filing into the smoky dimness of the tent and sidling behind its rows of shadowed fighters, drawn to the illuminated pulpit at the head of the gathering. One of the few open chairs sat between a pair of burly Hazani fighters. The days of power and privilege were long gone, she considered as she settled in, though there was some relief in that.

  “With the state’s succor, this meeting will be a brief affair,” the silver-haired man said, having taken his place at the head of the gathering. His voice was lower, graver before the assembly of fighters. “I know many of you have matters to attend to and time is short. The next anticipated push from Volna’s main host is in two weeks, though they could decide to stall between here and the rivers. Our own support battalions should arrive within a week. Whatever stand we make, as you may assume, is measured in the divide between days. That being said, grant me the depths of your attention. Our shared understanding will mean the difference between extermination and resistance.” He gestured to Anna’s section of the tent. “In the interim, our ranks have been bolstered by reinforcements from the heart of Golyna. Their presence honors us. Among their unit are scribes and irregular specialists.” As he said this, several of the more vocal tribesmen in Anna’s unit growled. “Our foreign reinforcements will serve as a wing of Viczera Company and will be headed by Gideon Mosharan.”

  Anna bit back her protests. The tent’s collective silence only scratched at her more intensely. Had nobody heard their plan? Her unit had never needed a formal commander, never wanted one. Her influence had always been enough to hold it together, but perhaps it was time to acknowledge the points once made in her council’s chamber: Give us a proper leader. Anna fought to steady herself and listen to the words from the officer’s still-moving lips, but it was a daunting task. Gideon Mosharan?

  Then she understood.

  In Golyna’s mind—the Council’s mind, she supposed—there was safety in his breed. Even a defected Nahoran was still a Nahoran.

  And as the officer continued to speak, her mind grew slower. It was drowning in something primordial, something buried long ago in the flats around Malijad. It was deeper than death, than a loss of control, than hatred. It was the sheer corruption of it all, hollowing out her trust and good intentions like termites in deadwood. Those with wicked aims would always find completion. Gideon Mosharan vying for his control of the unit, given credence by his own people, and Mesar ceding his soul for an ideology. For himself, perhaps.

  When Anna’s focus returned, the officer’s assistants had nailed an enormous map onto the far wall, presumably laying out the valley and its surrounding terrain. She saw the others writing in leather-bound journals and unfurling scrolls.

  “Now, then,” the officer continued. “Here are the battle positions.”

  For better or worse, there was no time to live in her head.

  * * * *

  Anna’s unit dined with the other fighters in the rearmost encampment, gazing out at the dark tufts of Golyna’s spires to the distant north and east. She wasn’t certain that the city was prepared for the burden it was receiving. There were hardly enough resources for the Halshaf foundlings, let alone the recent influx of refugees from the plains and northern coast. Even the unofficial camps operating south of Nahora, tucked into mountain passes and deep within the tundra caves, had seen their latest requests for numbing pulp ignored.

  “Perhaps it would do you all well, lending your light to them,” Yatrin had said as the kator pulled away from Golyna, resting a hand on her shoulder. “Your spirit is with the innocents, not with our blades.”

  Anna had only shaken her head. “I have nowhere left to lead them.”

  She didn’t want to say that death trailed her, either, though that was also true. Perhaps yet another perception Bora would’ve warned against, but impossible to ignore, difficult to divorce from her view of the world and its logic of horrors.

  “This is one of the better emplacements,” a lip-licking Hazani tinkerer explained to Anna, ladling a second strip of boiled lamb into her bowl. He did the same for Yatrin and the Alakeph fighters sitting nearby, then passed the steaming pot along their line, sending it toward Ramyi and the other fighters in their dugout. “To the south, you often can’t rise to your feet or look upon the faces of your friends. Their marksmen are watching for the ripples of bodies and coverings, you know.”

  It was hard to believe that such places could hold degrees of goodness. There had to be fifty or sixty of them clustered together, brewing in their own bitterness and heat, pacing around like animals in their excavated clay cages. And if just a single shell caught the wind and fell in the perfect way. . . .

  Anna set her bowl down, overcome by a pulse of nausea, and listened to the old tinkerer’s account. With her eyes shut she heard everything in the dugout—spurts of laughter, eager spoon scrapes, light flits of Orsas and flatspeak and river-tongue flowing together like old fever dreams once induced by Hall-Mother Yursal, her most severe tutor. The tinkerer and his ilk had to be the most damned among them. They’d followed the columns without blades or shields or roofs, carrying on with painted smiles and the laughter of madmen from defeat to defeat, all the while expecting to return home someday.

  In the late afternoon, one of the rare times of day in which the region and its forward lines weren’t prone to being struck by Volna raids, Anna joined the others in bathing by the river. There were well over a hundred of them, though the encampment hadn’t seemed any less guarded nor full as they’d made their way into the eastern woods. The women went downriver and the men upriver, separating around a thrust of granite that spilled out into the water and nearly halved its flow, before setting their clothes on the banks and floating under stretches of juniper shade. The sun had almost set but the air was still hot, still possessed by a pall of chalky turmeric. Ramyi waded out into the deeper rushes, a wispy golden figure amid the twilight, rubbing her arms and neck as she watched the salmon stirring in the water’s dimples. And as Anna listened to the laughter—near, far, young men, old women, sisters and fight
ers—she wondered how many moments of innocence were left in the world. She wondered if the bathing spot in Bylka still stood, and if the villagers still went and how often, and if her mother or father ever looked at it and thought of her.

  It wasn’t often that she thought of them.

  Anna noticed Yatrin as they were walking back. She eyed the scars and burns across his upper back. Slipping past a press of barefoot, soaking fighters from the plains, Anna reached his side. “Why didn’t they make you commander?”

  He’d been chuckling at a comrade’s remark when she approached. At her words he frowned, muttering something in parting to the other man, then nodded at her. “Come again?”

  “Did you know they’d make him the unit’s commander?”

  Yatrin looked ahead. “There are delegations we don’t witness, Anna.”

  “You did know,” she said quietly. “That should be your role, Yatrin. You’ve proven yourself.”

  “You’re biased.”

  “We all are. You, me, the Council.” The ensuing silence, abrupt and fleeting though it was, lowered Anna’s voice. It was delicate enough to hear the claps of dueling cannon volleys rolling out of the western hills. “I can’t trust him.”

  “You’ll need to,” he replied. “That’s service, you know. We need to award faith to those above us.”

  “Faith?” Anna whispered. Yatrin only smiled. There were truly some divides too severe to be understood, it seemed. “Forget it,” she said gently, taking his hand as though their embrace had materialized without intent, without any doing at all. “I need to ask something of you.”

  His grip weakened.

  Anna glanced around at the crowd; it had thinned since leaving the river, dividing into clumps and strung out over a league over so. They were relatively secluded now. “It’s about Ramyi,” she explained, still measuring her voice. “Yatrin, she can’t stay here when it begins.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Here. In this encampment. When Volna comes, she can’t be here. I made a promise to somebody that she wouldn’t be here.”

  “Here?” Yatrin asked. “Where should she be?”

  “Anywhere except here.”

  Yatrin’s eyes hardened into the same shape they took with everybody else. Razors—chipped, flaking, rusting. “She’s a scribe, Anna.”

  “She’s a child.”

  “So were you,” he said. “And you made your way through it. Everybody has to. A basic truth is known for those who do not.”

  “Do you really think I made it out, Yatrin?”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it.

  “I’ve always been there,” she said quietly. “I don’t care where she goes. You can take her into a cave, or on a caravan to the coast, or into the stars, for all it’s worth. But she can’t be here for the fight, Yatrin. She just can’t.”

  “What do you worry about? That she’ll die?”

  Anna couldn’t resist a laugh at that. A short, mechanical, defeated laugh. “Yes. She’s a little girl, born into blood. She never had any choice in this. How is this any less than a mortal sentence?”

  “Do you think death is the end, Anna?”

  Her lips were quivering again. That old, childish habit. “The girl I know will never be born again.”

  “And soon we’ll pass on,” he said easily. “Here, on a bed of silk and cotton? What does it matter, really? Would you not grant comfort to this world by infusing it with your light?”

  “Enough of it.” Anna drew in a sharp breath, composing herself as they came within sight of the first encampment’s ridges. “Infuse your light by taking her, Yatrin. Your light can’t leave. Not yet.”

  “She’s a stubborn girl.”

  “Take her anyway. She doesn’t know what’s best for her.”

  He groaned. “Is that a scribe’s burden, Anna? You know what all of us ought to do, yet we never strive for our own heights? We never see the truth of this existence?”

  Her eyes prickled, but she wouldn’t yield. “I only know that Ramyi deserves existence.”

  “Just her?”

  “Just her,” she agreed. “I’ve seen how she behaves at Hedilam, and you’ve seen it before that. We both know she isn’t suited to combat.”

  “Few enter this world prepared to kill,” Yatrin replied. “But she has improved.”

  “You don’t want death on your hands.”

  “It’s on nobody’s hands, Anna,” he said. “This is a war. This is killing.”

  “And this is what I ask,” she hissed.

  “I won’t promise anything,” Yatrin said flatly. “When the time arrives, we’ll know what to do.”

  “Perhaps you will.”

  “You’ll fight beside me.” He stopped, halting Anna in mid-step. “If we all make the sacrifices we’ve pledged, then she won’t need to run anywhere.”

  And to that she could only soften her shoulders and take his hand and nod, for the dead did little beyond slumbering.

  * * * *

  That night there was no sky, only leaves and burlap netting. The dugout was a mass of blackness and glossy droplets, flashing eyes and wet teeth and glass bottles alike, all shimmering amid the gloom like pearls slathered in tar. Several officers were visible due to the luminescence of Anna’s runes alone. Other tables had pockets of weak, amber-tinted light, which spilled from the few lanterns the encampment’s officers had deemed necessary for dining. Beyond that there was a policy of dimness, of concealing their huddled masses from the world entirely. A single sliver of light was a threat, after all; if they were close enough to be seen, they were close enough to be shelled.

  But it was nothing new or harrowing to those surrounding Anna. These were the best days they’d had in months, she imagined. They had fresh, plentiful rations, an infusion of battle-ready reinforcements, and the most advantageous holdout on their side of the plains’ twin rivers.

  Not that they seemed unaware of their fortune. Most of the veterans, even those with southern blood, were quick to pour their wine and quicker to send each other into fits of choking laughter, all red-faced and easy in their chairs. Several of the younger Nahoran fighters were perched on the stools and tables near the Alakeph unit, trying their luck with Ramyi and the Halshaf sisters through a great deal of hand gesturing and spine-straightening. But for all their attempts, the girls treated it as little more than a game or spectacle.

  “That’s how you imagine our bonded life?” Melura, a Hazani girl, asked through spurts of laughter. She playfully pushed away her suitor, resulting in another wave of howling from the others. “I’ve heard more sensual tales about milking goats.”

  The suitors were no younger than Anna, yet their courting seemed crude, almost bestial. It was the drama of it, she reasoned. It had to be. It was all so safe, so controlled, so insincere. Once, such simple pleasures might’ve delighted her too.

  But life was too brief for anything that didn’t hurt.

  She glanced to her left and noticed that Yatrin was—and perhaps for some time had been—staring at her, his lips soft and generous. It was so pure she couldn’t resist returning the gesture, letting whatever errant words or impulses that had survived the afternoon bleed away. In their place she found herself wondering what she’d done to earn his affection, to secure his trust. Nearly nothing, when she really examined it. Perhaps that was what made it so invaluable.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asked.

  Anna drank her wine and smiled. “Very little.”

  “Little is more than nothing.”

  “I’m thinking about gratitude.”

  “Well, I’d say that’s a remarkable coincidence, then.” Yatrin shifted in his chair, facing Anna and letting his eyes soften to dark, gleaming buttons. “Anna, you asked something of me today, but I wanted to ask something of you in return.”

&
nbsp; She lifted her cup, letting the rim hover near her lips.

  “It should arrive at the proper moment,” he continued.

  “I don’t like surprises,” Anna said.

  “It’s not a surprise,” he said softly. “Not if you’re as aware as I know you are.”

  Her next words snapped to her tongue just before a forceful, cutting eastern voice rose from the far end of their table. “Kuzalem—I must confess that your presence frightens me.”

  The dugout’s chuckles and glass-clinks evaporated. There was only the faint crescent of light playing across the old man’s forehead, settling into golden creases and flickering over his small, wayward teeth. Gideon Mosharan wore a grin that did little to ease the edge in his words.

  Anna noticed how many oil-drop eyes had turned on her. “I didn’t think the old breaker himself was frightened by anything.”

  “Oh, come now,” Gideon said, still flashing those needle-eyes in the darkness. “Such great pride overwhelms me when I imagine commanding the Southern Death, of all people.” Whether it was wine or his training in subterfuge, the man’s tone was nearly impossible to decipher. It drifted between irreverent and emotional, restrained and bombastic. Whatever the case, it drew the gathering’s full attention. “And yet, such force can never be handled reliably,” he added more softly. “That what must be what burns the blood of Volna. It puts a spark in our own lines, doesn’t it?”

  “I speak for all of us,” Anna said, casting a pointed look at the breaker, “when I say that we’re honored to share this valley with our fellow fighters.”