by K. J. Parker
“Take a leak,” Kunessin replied. He made his way to the door as quietly as possible, though he trod on someone’s ankle and banged into the sharp corner of a box. He’d forgotten to find a hat, but he didn’t go back for one, in case he woke anybody up.
Outside, the wind was up. In the pale glow of the lantern, he could see the rain; it was practically falling sideways. Something else he’d forgotten: boots. He squelched through the mud across the yard, up the dune and over to the jetty, half blinded by the rain. He figured that if he kept close enough to the left-hand rail that he could feel it brush against his leg, he’d be all right, so long as he went slowly and carefully. He climbed up on to the ship, put the lantern down and found the pile of bean sacks. They each held a hundredweight, he remembered that from the specification, but the wheelbarrows were ashore, in a lean-to next to the cattle pen. That reminded him: they’d forgotten to feed the pigs.
He swung a sack up on to his back, and staggered under the weight. Earlier, he’d seen Muri carry two of these sacks, one on each shoulder. Aidi could lift a three-hundredweight anvil on his own, and Fly was even stronger. He’d heard somewhere that it all depended on which body type you were: some people can build muscle easily, some can’t. He shifted the weight as far up on to his neck as he could make it go, and tottered on to the gangplank.
Another thing they’d neglected to do was clear the cow muck off the ramp. True, the rain had washed some of it away, but the result was a deep, even coat of slurry. It hadn’t been much of a problem going up the slope; going down was another matter entirely. He slipped and came down hard on his backside eight times in fifteen journeys, but at least he didn’t end up in the water, like the brood sow. Small mercies.
Next, he had to find somewhere dry for the beans: easier said than done. The lean-to had a roof of sorts, but it was jammed full, as he discovered when he looked in there (that was when he dropped the lantern and broke the glass). Mostly by feel, he found the stack of planks they’d piled up to use on the jetty next morning. He used a dozen to cover over the sacks, and weighted them down against the wind with loose bricks from a collapsed wall. By this stage, he really didn’t feel like feeding the pigs; the crushed barley meal was in the lean-to, and he didn’t have a bucket, or a knife to open a sack with. His eyes were full of rain, and at some stage he’d trodden on a nail sticking up out of one of the jetty boards. He eventually found a bucket in the heap of jumbled gear in the yard, and used the edge of a sharp stone to worry through the stitching on the sack. The pigs were pleased to see him, at any rate.
When he got back inside, the fire had gone out. He crept back to his place on the wall, crawled down inside his wet clothes and tried not to shiver.
“You were a long time,” Dorun whispered.
“Got lost.”
“You’re very wet.”
“Yes.”
“You smell of cow.”
“Fell over in the yard. Go to sleep.”
There was a hole in the thatch directly above where he was lying, and a continuous trickle of rainwater fell on him all through the night and pooled in his crotch.
Chapter Eight
Captain Kudei Gaeon was the first man in A Company to win the coveted Bronze Crown for exceptional courage in the face of the enemy. He tried to refuse the award, but was eventually persuaded to accept by his comrades in arms, all of whom went on to win the same honour before the end of the year. Ironically, the engagement which led to Captain Gaeon’s award was a relatively minor affair . . .
On the second day after the battle, they crossed the bog. Aidi protested that there had to be a way round it, even though Teuche told him he’d seen the map and there wasn’t. Muri insisted on going first, but his weight was a problem. He tried to do all the right things - treading on clumps of reed or the edges of the couch grass tussocks - but at every fifth step he went in up to his thigh, and the others had to fight their way over to him and haul him out. Teuche lost both his boots dragging him out of a black pool of slime he’d staggered into after sliding off a tree root. After that, he gave in and agreed to follow on behind, treading only where the others had gone.
Fly took the lead after that, being the lightest. It was Teuche’s turn to carry Kudei, so he went in the middle, with Aidi to help him. At first they stopped every hundred yards; then every fifty; then every twenty; then every ten. After an hour, they ground to a halt and slumped where they were, hanging on to tussocks to keep their balance. None of them could talk for a long time. Finally Aidi, retching out a word at a time between gasps, said, “We’ve got to leave him. Otherwise, we’re all screwed.”
Teuche said, “No.”
“Aidi’s right,” Fly said. “If we carry him, we’ll just run out of strength, one by one. Besides, he’s good as dead already.”
“I’ll carry him,” Teuche said. “If I have to stop, you press on without me.”
“Teuche, you’re being stupid,” Aidi snapped; and Muri looked away. “You can’t carry him any more, and we’re not going to try. No point all of us dying here.”
“I said I’ll carry him,” Teuche replied. “You three keep going. Really, no hard feelings. You’re quite right, all of you. Just let me keep going as long as I can.”
There was a long, painful silence. Then Aidi said, “All right, then, if that’s your decision. But we can’t wait for you. Fly?”
Fly nodded. Muri didn’t say anything. “Good luck,” Teuche said. “I hope you make it.”
They left him then, and stumbled for another hundred yards before collapsing. When he could speak, Fly said, “We ought to go back.”
“No,” Aidi said.
“Yes, we should.” Fly’s face was covered in black mud, from the last time he’d slipped and gone sprawling. He looked like the clown in a travelling pantomime. “Get real, Aidi, we’re none of us going to make it out of here. I saw the map, this stuff goes on for miles. We’re exhausted, we haven’t got any food—”
“Yes, thank you,” Aidi snapped. “I’m well aware of that, thank you ever so much. There’s no need to ram it down my throat.”
“If Nuctos was here, he wouldn’t let us split up.”
Aidi scowled horribly. “If Nuctos was here, none of us’d be here, because Nuctos can read a bloody map. But Nuctos is back with the column being cooed at by pretty young nurses, and we’re here. All right?”
“All right.” Fly held up his hand for a truce. “We’ve had it, agreed. So, I don’t want to die thinking the last thing I ever did was leave two of my friends behind.”
“Fine.” Aidi sounded too weary to talk. “You go back and join them. Like you say, it hardly matters.”
“We can’t split up,” Fly shouted back. “We ought to be together.”
Aidi shook his head, like a cow trying to dislodge a buzzing insect. “You can sit down in this shit and die if you really want to. I have other plans. You can go back, or you can come with me and find a way out of here, on condition you stop talking. I’m getting just a bit sick of the sound of your voice.”
Fly turned away from him. “Muri,” he said, “you can see, can’t you? We’ve got to go back for them.”
Muri looked at him, and Fly was shocked at the expression on his face. His eyes were red and swollen, and tears had cut lines in the silt on his cheeks. “I don’t know, Fly,” he said. “I think Aidi’s right. We can’t just give up.”
“You listen to him, Fly,” Aidi said. “He’s got some sense.”
“Besides,” Muri said, “Kudei’s not going to make it. We should’ve just left him back in the wood. If we hadn’t been trying to carry him, we wouldn’t have worn ourselves out.”
Fly looked at him for a few seconds. “If Kudei hadn’t got cut up holding them off at the bridge, we’d all be dead,” he said. “We owed it to him.”
“Pointless,” Aidi said furiously. “The whole thing’s a fucking comedy. If Kudei had run when he had the chance and left us, he’d have got through, reached the cavalry before the
y took off, and be safe and dry back in camp right now. Instead, he’s got to be a big hero and get himself carved up, we’ve got to be big heroes lugging him all this way, and now we’re all going to die slow and miserable in this shithole. If I had the energy I’d piss myself laughing. And now you want to throw away the only slight chance we’ve got by going back for them. Give me strength.”
“Muri,” Fly said urgently. “That’s Teuche and Kudei back there. We can’t—”
“You go, then,” Muri yelled. “I’m staying with Aidi. He’s not stupid, like the rest of you.”
Fly froze; then he shrugged, slowly and elegantly. “All right,” he said. “I guess that constitutes a democratic decision. We leave them. I just hope you two can live with that.”
“Chance’d be a fine thing,” Aidi replied quietly; then, more conciliatory: “It doesn’t matter, does it? You’d rather die knowing you tried to help your friends. I’d rather die knowing I’d done everything I could to stay alive. You don’t want to feel bad, and I don’t want to feel stupid. Go back if you want to. We’ll understand. Or stay with Muri and me. It won’t make any odds.”
Fly seemed to have run out of things to say. He sat down on a tussock, his legs drawn up awkwardly under his chin. “Or we might as well just stay here,” Aidi said. “It’ll be dark in an hour or two anyway.”
Fly laughed. “Listen to us,” he said. “Doesn’t matter what kind of a mess we get ourselves into, we just can’t help bickering. Fifty thousand enemy soldiers out there, and we still manage to be our own worst enemies.”
“Speak for yourself,” Aidi said. “I don’t bicker, I just try and make sensible suggestions. If you’d all listened to me in the first place . . .”
“Don’t start,” Fly warned him. “Teuche couldn’t have known.”
“Fuck me, you can’t help defending him, can you?” Aidi tried to prop himself up on his elbow, slipped, and went down on one knee, splattering his face with mud. “In case you’ve forgotten, I warned him. I said, Teuche, there may be archers in that wood, we ought to take the long way round. No time, he said—”
“Quite right too,” Fly interrupted. “The heavy cavalry were right on top of us, remember? If we’d stayed out in the open like you wanted, they’d have slaughtered us like chickens.”
“For crying out loud,” Muri wailed, and they both stopped and looked at him. “Like Aidi said, it doesn’t matter any more,” Muri went on. “But we’re still alive—”
“For now,” Aidi muttered.
“We’re still alive,” Muri repeated loudly. “We’ve still got a chance. We can get out of this. Like my dad used to say, there’s no such word as can’t.”
Aidi rounded on him angrily. “Just goes to show how stupid he was, then,” he said. “This isn’t getting the ewes to load or pulling the cart out of the mud; this is it, the end, the one we don’t get out of. If you can’t face up to that, you’re even more stupid than you look.”
Muri tried to jump up, but instead he sank up to his knees, tottered and sat down, sending up a thick spray of black mud. Aidi burst out laughing; then, delicately as a crane fly landing on water, he straightened up, nudged with his feet to find firm standing, leaned forward, caught Muri’s arm and pulled him upright. “You’re a clown, Muri,” he said. “Now, let’s get moving while we still can.”
He let go of Muri’s arm, grabbed a handful of couch grass and hauled himself up to the tussock, then took a long stride forward, just managing to get his foot alongside the next one. The tangle of top-root took his weight; he paused to balance, then launched himself forward again. Fly tried to follow in his footsteps, but his legs were too short, and he went in above his knee, swearing and struggling until Muri dragged him out by his collar, like a dog carrying a puppy.
“We aren’t making a very good job of this,” Aidi said. “Come on, we can do better. What we need . . .” He paused, and looked round. “What we need is that.”
That was a tree branch, blown off a dying elm, lying ten yards or so to their left. “Muri,” Aidi said, and Muri plunged into the mud - there were no helpful tussocks - bent at the waist, grabbed a sparse handful of rushes and pulled himself across the surface (‘One way of doing it,” Aidi commented loudly); with a tremendous effort he managed to reach a large stone and hauled himself along by that; by his third stretch, he got a hand on the branch, towed it towards him and flopped on to it.
“That’s the idea,” Aidi said. “Now, can you get it over here?”
Muri hoisted himself round so that he was lying lengthways along the branch, then stretched for a handhold, edging along the branch until his fingers hooked round the stone he’d used on the way out. With his other hand he gripped the branch so that, when he pulled on the stone, the branch came with him. Aidi, meanwhile, had waded out a long stride on to a small tuft of reed. As Muri dragged himself across the mud, he reached out, caught the end of the branch and pulled; but he couldn’t get a firm enough grip to do any good, and his foot slipped off the reeds and deep into the mud. “Shit, I’m stuck,” he moaned. “I can’t move. Fly . . .”
Fly was already on his way, flat on his face in the mud, creeping forward an inch at a time; he was light enough to get away with that without sinking. When he was close enough, Aidi wriggled sideways and sat on his back as he dragged his leg out of the mud and back on to the tuft. Muri meanwhile had nudged the branch another few inches closer, so Aidi could reach it. He pulled, and the branch and Muri came across relatively easily.
“That’s the idea,” Aidi said. “Now we take it in turns. Muri, see that tussock over there?”
Still squatting on the reed tuft, Aidi pushed the branch towards the tussock, until Muri was able to scramble off the branch and on to the thin ledge of root; then he pushed the branch back, Aidi scrambled on to it, and Fly pushed him along to join Muri. Before Aidi pushed the branch back, he took off his belt and wrapped it round the end. “Now we’re in business,” he said proudly. “Come on, we can do this.”
He was right about that. They took it slowly, one tussock at a time; it gave them each a chance to rest and catch their breath without the risk of being left behind. By nightfall, when they were lucky enough to find the roots of a beech tree, they’d covered three hundred yards. They hunched up with their backs to the trunk, closed their eyes and immediately fell asleep.
It was bright daylight when they woke up. “I can’t move.” Aidi said.
“No such word as can’t,” Fly replied. “Still, I know what you mean. I think I’ve pulled every muscle in my body.”
Muri groaned, then shifted round and dragged the branch towards him. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got this far.”
Fly was looking back, across the ground they’d covered the day before. “If you’re looking for Teuche and Kudei, forget it,” Aidi said. “If we only just made it, what sort of a chance do you think they had?”
“I think you’ve already made that point,” Fly said. “Actually, I was just wondering if we’ve come the right way.”
There was a long silence; then Aidi said, “I looked at the map . . ”
“So did I,” Fly replied. “And that’s the rising sun, which is east, and we should be heading straight into it. But we’re not.”
“Just a minute,” Muri growled, but Aidi spoke over him. “The shortest way through the marshes isn’t due east,” he said. “There’s a spur of dry ground—”
“Due east,” Fly said firmly. “Starting from where we came in. You’ve been steering like we came in on the road, but we didn’t.”
“We were level with it,” Aidi said defensively. “And besides, at that stage we were all just following Teuche.”
“Yes,” Fly replied. “But when we left him, we held too far south. Which means, if we carry on along this line, where we should be coming out of the bog, we’ll only be just over half the way through. We need to change our line.”
“You’re forgetting something, both of you,” Muri said. “There’s the river.”<
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“All right, so we’ve got to adjust a bit,” Aidi snapped. “So we’ve come a bit out of our way. Big deal. If it wasn’t for me—”
“Muri.” Fly wasn’t listening to Aidi any more. “What did you just say?”
“The river,” Muri said. “If we head due south, we’ll meet the river.”
Fly laughed. “And the thing about fast, shallow rivers is, their beds are firm, stone and gravel. Muri, you’re a genius.” He swung his head round and looked straight at Aidi. “Well?”
Long silence; then Aidi said, “Good idea.”
They went south. It was hard going. The couch tussocks were fewer and further between, and just before noon the branch broke, as Aidi was launching himself off it. He landed badly, going in up to his waist. Muri yelled at him to get on to the half-branch closest to him, but instead he tried to crawl out, and got himself comprehensively stuck. By the time the other two managed to pull him free, the half-branch (the half with the belt wrapped round it) had been trodden deep into the mud, and was lost to them.
“It’s all right,” Fly said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
Hardly said with ringing sincerity; and Aidi tried to make out a case for it being Muri’s fault, because Muri had been kneeling on the branch, dragging Aidi out of the mud. Muri didn’t reply, but Aidi and Fly had a brief but furious argument about it, cut short by a violent squall of rain.
The loss of the branch slowed them right down. They used what was left, but without the belt to drag it with it’d have been easier to crawl, and in the process Muri hurt his back so badly he could barely move.
“For crying out loud, Muri,” Aidi yelled. “Now what? If you think we’re going to carry you . . .”
“Leave me,” Muri replied.
“Don’t be fucking stupid.”
“You left Teuche.”
That shut them all up for quite some time; then Aidi said briskly, “It’s not the same thing at all. Kudei was past saving, and Teuche decided to be a hero. You’ve just done your back. Besides, two of us aren’t enough. We need three.”