Scorched Earth

by Tommy Wallach

  “Of course.” Paz felt the urge to apologize but suppressed it; she had nothing to apologize for. “One thing before you go, though. I’m looking for someone. A tanner who goes by—”

  “You think we don’t know what those are?”

  The voice came from behind them, somewhere in the darkness; two soldiers materialized behind the cindery tips of their cigarillos. Paz recognized them from the Alehouse.

  “Can I help you gentlemen?” Juan said.

  “No, but we can help you,” said the younger of the two soldiers. He had an unhealthy pallor and was probably half a dozen drinks deep.

  The other soldier looked like the kind of man who enlisted because he wanted the excuse to hurt people. “Those rings on your girl’s face are disciplinary tattoos. Protectorate gives ’em out to Sophian sympathizers.”

  Paz looked desperately to Juan. She should’ve kissed him; that might’ve made all the difference now. Only, something strange was building behind his eyes, an unseemly sort of mirth that finally erupted as boisterous laughter, surprising her and the soldiers in equal measure.

  “You think I give a shit?” he said. “This ain’t the Descendancy, and it ain’t Sophia, either. I couldn’t care less which country this girl calls home. Besides, if the rumors are true, you boys just got finished slaughtering a bunch of innocent women and children. So I don’t see how you’re in a position to judge anybody.”

  “Innocent?” the older soldier said, teeth bared in an aggressive travesty of amusement. “We’ll show you innocent.”

  The younger soldier took the cue and grabbed hold of Paz’s arm. It didn’t hurt, but she started screaming bloody murder anyway. As she’d hoped, Juan immediately leaped into action, flooring her assailant with a single punch; unfortunately, the boy pulled her down with him as he fell. The older soldier reached for his sword, but Paz kicked him hard in the shin, which gave Juan time to close the distance between them. The two men grappled; Paz had to roll to the side to avoid being stepped on. Juan’s thick boot landed just inches from her nose, and she found herself staring at a mark branded into the leather.

  “RP,” she whispered, just as Juan deftly flipped the older soldier to the ground and mounted him. The fight devolved into a messy, indecorous affair of half-landed punches, torn clothes, and grunts. It reminded Paz of the way Frankie and Terry used to wrestle.

  “What in hell’s going on here?”

  Another Protectorate soldier arrived from the direction of the tavern, this one sporting an extra couple of ribbons on his breast: an officer, then. Juan and his sparring partner tried to find their feet with some measure of dignity.

  “He punched Ollie,” the older soldier said. “And she’s got disciplinary tattoos.”

  “So do you,” the officer replied.

  Paz hadn’t noticed the word tattooed around the older soldier’s wrist—inebriate.

  “Not like those, though. They only put those rings on Sophians.”

  Paz knew it wouldn’t do any good to deny it. She rose to her feet, hoping to look as much as possible like a penitent standing chastened before the Dubium. “He’s right,” she said. “I fell in with a bad crowd in the Anchor for a while. It’s why I moved out here. I wanted to start over.”

  She smiled angelically and watched the officer melt. “Please accept my apologies on behalf of the Protectorate,” he said. “It’s been a, uh, difficult week.”

  “Of course. I completely understand.”

  “Good.” He glanced at the older soldier, who was helping a woozy Ollie to his feet. “Let’s forget this ever happened, eh? Next round’s on me.”

  The three men headed back to the public house. Paz went to Juan and used the hem of her dress to stanch the blood dripping from his nose.

  “I’m sorry about that,” she said.

  “Don’t be.”

  “I just have one more favor to ask and then I promise I’ll leave you alone forever.”

  “Does it involve any more fighting? Because I’m not sure I have it in me.”

  “No more fighting, I promise.” She wiped away the last bit of blood, then leaned forward and gave Juan a tender kiss on the cheek. “I just need to know where you got your shoes.”

  * * *

  Paz rode hard for the next three weeks. She’d wake long before sunrise and go for four or five hours at a stretch, until her every pore was seeping sweat, then find a shady spot to nap away the afternoon. She’d start up again when evening fell and ride until either her body or her horse cried uncle. Though she’d stop briefly in the towns she passed to make sure she was still going in the right direction, she didn’t partake in any unnecessary conversation; she’d learned her lesson in Oleanna.

  The township of Cody was announced by a sign at the side of the road advertising a population of 980, amended to 981 in flaking red paint. Paz tied her horse to an acacia outside the town limits and entered on foot. It was midday, and some kind of market was on in a quaint square bordered by flower boxes. At least a hundred people strolled among the stalls, each one tended by a sunburned farmer or thick-armed craftsperson. Crates gaudy with ripe fruits and vegetables competed for the eye’s attention with ceramic bowls finished in kaleidoscopic glazes and brightly polished iron tools. Paz palmed a peach while the vendor was haggling with another customer and brought it straight to her mouth. The juices exploded beneath her teeth, overflowing, dripping off her chin, eliciting an involuntary groan of pleasure: She couldn’t remember the last time she’d tasted something so delicious. In fact, the experience of eating it was so purely ecstatic that her first thought upon looking up and seeing the face of her quarry across the square was that she must be hallucinating—some sort of peach delirium.

  She blinked hard. When that failed to expunge the impossible vision, she closed her eyes and dug her knuckles into her eyelids, rubbing vigorously. But once the phosphenes had dissipated, she was faced with the same view as before: the Wesah warrior who had killed Gemma and beaten Paz to within an inch of her life, done up like a typical Descendant woman going to market of a morning—in a knee-length blue cotton shift, with a shiny black ribbon in her hair and a wicker basket over her arm. Her companion, a slightly pudgy man with a round, good-natured face and a dramatically receding hairline, was easily recognized from Juan’s detailed description—the notorious RP. He and the Wesah woman walked through the square arm in arm, like any other couple in love.

  Paz took another bite of the peach, thinking how much Clive would’ve appreciated this surreal turn of events, and fell into step behind them.

  4. Clive

  THERE WAS A POINT AT which pain could no longer reach you. It was as if you’d been knocked unconscious; the world could go on beating you all it wanted, but you wouldn’t feel a thing. Clive realized he’d reached that point when he saw the soldiers coming toward him and Burns across the pasture. He’d lost his parents, his little brother, and his faith all in the space of a year. Now the love of his life and his lifelong best friend had been taken from him in a single blow, and Flora was off somewhere in the mist on her own. What was his freedom even worth now? What did he have left to live for?

  The journey back to the Anchor seemed to last forever. They were traveling with Chang, his honor guard, and another fifty or so soldiers, and though Clive and Burns had had their ankles shackled, they were somehow expected to keep pace. By the end of the first week, Clive had developed the sores that would remain his most effusive companion for the rest of the journey, that would make sleep so slow to come and the days so slow to pass. He and Burns were kept at opposite ends of the formation during the day and in separate tents at night, ostensibly so they couldn’t conspire against the Descendancy any further. Clive did his level best to get himself killed—hurling invective at the soldiers, dragging his feet, pretending to wake up screaming several times a night to interrupt his captors’ sleep—but it was no use. After what he’d done in the Bastion—murdering his fellow soldiers in order to free Paz—Clive had become a sy
mbol of the sheer malevolence that threatened the Descendancy; the Grand Marshal needed his execution to be a spectacle.

  Clive could remember seeing a lamb just after its shearing, quivering in this unexpected and inexplicable new chill, bleating with confusion. He was that lamb now, defenseless, shorn of anything and everything that had mattered to him. He’d put all his hopes and faith in Paz, and she’d betrayed him. He still found it impossible to understand, so much so that he sometimes began to doubt what he’d seen—Gemma lying cold and bloodless on the grass, and Paz kneeling over her, knife in hand. And yet what other explanation could there be but the obvious one: Paz had killed Gemma.

  It didn’t bear thinking about. Nothing did anymore. He tried to keep his mind as blank as possible, watching, as if from a great distance, a young man marching silently and inexorably toward death.

  * * *

  It was nearly a month before they reached the Anchor, but the sight of the capital looming on the horizon like some great misshapen toadstool brought no comfort to Clive’s heart. He’d long since stopped thinking of it as home, and now it promised something far worse than painful memories and a sense of wistful dislocation. The detachment passed beneath the Southern Gate, bursting into the hum of city life, of beggars and pickpockets, artists and artisans, children just finished with their school day and drunkards already a few ales deep—familiar and strange at once. Clive couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off; a nervous energy seemed to radiate from every face, every storefront, every tree. This was wartime. This was the threat of extinction. Every act and every action took on existential proportions. You were either helping to save the Descendancy or else speeding its destruction; there was no such thing as neutrality anymore.

  The soldiers peeled off for the Bastion, leaving Clive and Burns alone with Chang and his black-suited honor guard. People genuflected as the Grand Marshal passed, or shouted brief and ecstatic encomia.

  “They missed me,” Chang mused.

  “They’re tellin’ you what you want to hear,” Burns said.

  “No. That’s you telling yourself what you want to hear. I have this city in the palm of my hand.”

  Chang marched them straight to Annunciation Square, which was bustling with the morning’s commerce. A line of pillories had been set up at the western edge of the plaza, just in front of a jeweler’s shop. Only two were in use, and the holes in the unoccupied stations made a perfect row of unsettling, unblinking eyes.

  “You’re putting us in the stocks?” Burns said.

  “We have to show you off a bit,” Chang replied. “To build up the anticipation.”

  Clive didn’t resist as two members of the honor guard unlocked his manacles and fitted his neck and wrists into the pillory. When they lowered the top, he half expected it to take his head clean off. They removed the shackles from his legs next; at least now the sores on his ankles would have a chance to heal.

  “Look there,” Chang said, once Clive and Burns were both firmly secured. He pointed at an empty section of the square, where a couple of men appeared to be measuring something out with string. “Do you know what they’re building?”

  “A giant statue of you pissing on an annulus?” Burns guessed.

  “A gallows. Your gallows. When I decide the time is right, everybody in the city is gonna watch you swing from it.”

  Chang headed off across the cobblestones, stopping every few feet to glad-hand some merchant or another, his honor guard sticking close behind him.

  “He’s a fool,” Burns said.

  “He’s not the one in the stocks,” Clive replied.

  “But he didn’t kill us. He should’ve killed us.”

  “Did you not hear the bit about the gallows?”

  “I’ve been advising him, you know. The whole way back from the tooroon. About how to handle the war that’s on its way.”

  Clive craned his neck so he could look Burns in the eye. “Why the hell would Chang want your advice? He hates you.”

  “We hate each other. But we both want what’s best for the Descendancy, and he respects my judgment. As he fucking well should.”

  The crowd moving through the square had already begun to notice the new prisoners; their glances conveyed a combination of morbid curiosity and distaste. A group of kids ran past, then circled back around a few seconds later. One of them picked up a loose stone and tossed it to himself, considering his options.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Burns growled. The children all scurried off, but Clive didn’t take any consolation in the victory. His neck was already beginning to chafe. The chimes of Notre Fille tolled the hour. Night was coming. When darkness fell, and the shine started flowing, who knew what these so-called civilized people might be capable of?

  * * *

  Five bells, and the sky started to lighten. Clive didn’t remember sleeping, only waking with a start over and over again—at a piece of cobblestone ricocheting off his shoulder, or a drunkard urinating on his feet (the warmth of it almost welcome), or a couple of streetwalkers shouting about how much they were looking forward to watching him die. Burns was snoring lightly; according to him, real soldiers learned to take sleep where they could get it.

  Seven bells, and the Anchor began to come to life. Street vendors set up their stalls; shopkeepers flipped the signs in their windows. The stray dogs of the city, who’d spent the night skulking around the pillories like vultures, retreated to their kennels and hideaways. Clive could smell the coffee brewing at Grimaldi’s Café.

  Nine bells, and the square finally looked full; these harried men and women were all on their way to some important job or another, so only had time to fling a cursory gibe or desultory gobbet of spit in the general direction of the pillories. One called out to Clive by name; the two of them had gone to school together but had never much liked each other. Clive pretended not to notice.

  Eleven bells, and the gallows construction crew arrived. Four men set to work hammering and sawing, occasionally throwing guilty glances over at the poor souls in the stocks. They seemed to be taking their time; Clive wouldn’t have put it past Chang to have directed them to work as slowly as possible, so as to draw out the psychological torment for his prisoners.

  One bell, and the lunch hour came to a grudging end. Children were compelled to give up their games of tag and follow their exhausted mistresses back to the schoolhouse. Men scraped their plates into the public waste boxes around the edge of the square or just onto the ground, where the leavings were set upon by the dogs, who’d returned for just this bounty. Satiated and jolly, the citizens of the Anchor put off returning to work by dawdling at the pillories, making all manner of threats. Clive was roused from a daydream of Paz by the sharp snap of a leather belt across his calves; even through the fabric of his trousers, the sting was excruciating.

  Three bells, and the sun revealed itself to be the cruelest tormentor of all. Clive could feel the back of his neck and hands burning; they’d begin to peel come nightfall. And though he was starving, the thirst hurt a hundred times worse. Thirst like lust, like ambition, like any want that could be fed and fed and yet never diminish. He imagined standing beneath a waterfall with his mouth wide open, taking in an entire river’s worth of water and still wanting more.

  Five bells, and the first cool breeze ruffled its way through the ornamental trees and topiaries of Annunciation Square. The men at the gallows called it a day; their half-finished construction lay like a conquered beast at the center of the plaza. A madman stopped by to lecture Clive and Burns for nearly an hour, gesticulating wildly and pacing with the limitless energy of a young preacher, until his gibberings about the end of the world almost began to make sense.

  Seven bells, and at last the sun dipped below the skyline. The gas lamps were lit, while candles flared to life in the windows of the tall apartments that surrounded the square. A group of teenagers took turns throwing rotten vegetables at the pillories. Clive licked the tomato pips from his face and was grat
eful for every one.

  Nine bells, and something like peace descended on the square. Couples strolled across the cobblestones arm in arm. A fiddler played a mournful rendition of “What a Weight,” glancing forlornly at his violin case whenever people passed. Outside Grimaldi’s, diners were finishing up their meals, sipping contentedly from white porcelain teacups.

  “Someone’s coming,” Burns said.

  A group of silhouettes clarified as they passed beneath one of the gas lamps. The one in front was tall and broad, his uniform aglitter with medals: Chang. The four strapping figures beside him were members of his honor guard. The other silhouette was short and slim, and moved with a pronounced wariness Clive would’ve recognized from a mile away.

  “Clover?” he said.

  “Clive?”

  His brother ran to him, as if they might embrace, but of course the stocks made that impossible.

  “How are you—how did you—” Clive realized he hadn’t expected ever to speak to his brother again. But he remembered the promise he’d made to himself, if he ever did get the chance. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Clover, I’m so sorry.” The tears spilled down his cheeks; he wasn’t physically capable of wiping them away. “Back in Sophia, I wasn’t thinking straight. I can’t believe I hurt you.”

  Clover shook his head. His eyes glistened in the moonlight; his voice quavered. “I can’t believe I didn’t trust you about Irene.”

  “That wasn’t your fault. None of it was.”

  There was so much to say, too much, but here came Chang, standing between them, speaking over them. “What a lovely reunion,” he said. “I’m pleased to see the two of you getting along.”

  “As if you care,” Clive said.

  “Oh, but I do. See, if you hated each other, all my leverage would go right out the window.” Chang turned to Clover. “I’ve decided to let you and your father go, but on one condition: both of you work for me now. You will shout your loyalty to me and my government from the rooftops, or I’ll hang your brother from that gibbet over there. Do you understand?”