by K. J. Parker
He stopped, halfway between butts and firing point, and laughed. The hell with it, he thought.
Pilad was shooting second detail, so he was standing behind the line, in with a bunch of other fellows. As Teucer walked up, he noticed that Pilad was looking away, standing behind someone’s shoulder, trying to make himself inconspicuous. Teucer reached the line, turned and faced the target; like the time he’d had to go and bring in the old white bull, and it had stood there glaring at him with mad eyes, daring him to take one more step. Even now he had no idea where the courage had come from that day; he’d opened the gate and gone in, a long stride directly towards certain death; on that day, the bull had come quietly, gentle as a lamb while he put the halter on, walking to heel like a good dog. Maybe, Teucer thought, when I was born Skyfather allotted me a certain number of good moments, five or six, maybe, to last me my whole life. If so, let this be one of them.
Someone handed him his bow. His fingers closed round it, and the feel of it was like coming home. He reached for the ninth arrow, stuck point first into the ground. He wasn’t aware of nocking it, but it got on to the string somehow. Just look at the target: that voice again, and he didn’t yet know it well enough to decide whether or not it could be trusted. He drew, and he was looking straight down the arrow at a white circle on a black background. Just look at the target. He held on it for three heartbeats, and then the arrow left him.
Dead silence, for the impossibly long time it took for the arrow to get there. Pilad’s uncle Sen walked to the target with his armful of flags, picked one out and lifted it. Behind Teucer, someone let out a yell they must’ve heard back in the village.
Well, he thought, that’s forty-five with nine; good score, enough to win most matches. And still one shot in hand. Let’s see what we can do.
The draw. He had a lovely draw. This time, he made himself enjoy it. To draw a hundred-pound bow, you first use and then abuse nearly every muscle and every joint in your body. There’s a turning point, a hinge, where the force of the arms alone is supplemented by the back and the legs. He felt the tip of his middle finger brush against his lip, travel the length of it, until it found the far corner. Just look at the target. It doesn’t matter, he told himself. It matters, said the voice. But that’s all right. That helps.
He’d never thought of it like that before. It matters. And that helps. Yes, he thought, it helps, and the arrow flew.
It lifted, the way an arrow does, swimming in the slight headwind he presumed he’d allowed for, though he had no memory of doing so. It lifted, reaching the apex of its flight, and he thought: however long I live, let a part of me always be in this moment, this split second when I could’ve shot a hundred-yard possible; this moment at which it’s still on, it hasn’t missed yet, the chance, the possibility is still alive, so that when I’m sixty-six and half blind and a nuisance to my family, I’ll still have this, the one thing that could’ve made me great—
Uncle Sen walked to the target. He wasn’t carrying his flags. He stood for a moment, the only thing that existed in the whole world. Then he raised both his arms and shouted.
Oh, Teucer thought; and then something hit him in the back and sent him flat on his face in the grass, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe, and it hurt. He was thinking: who’d want to do that to me; they’re supposed to be my friends. And then he was grabbed by his arms and yanked upright, and everybody was shouting in his face, and Pilad’s grin was so close to his eyes he couldn’t see it clearly; and he thought: I did it.
He didn’t actually want to go and look, just in case there had been a mistake, but they gave him no choice; he was scooped up and planted on two bony shoulders, so that he had to claw at heads with his fingers to keep from falling off. At the butts they slid him off on to his knees, so that when he saw the target he was in an attitude of worship, like in Temple. Fair enough. Arrows nine and ten were both in, clean, not even touching the line. They looked like a bunch of daffodils, or seedlings badly in need of thinning. A possible. The only man living. And then he thought: they won’t let me pull my arrows out, and they’re my match set, and I can’t afford to buy another one—
And Pilad, who’d been one of the bony shoulders, gave him another murderous slap on the back and said, “Nicely, Teuce, nicely,” and with a deep feeling of shame and remorse he realised that Pilad meant it; no resentment, no envy, sheer joy in his friend’s extraordinary achievement. (But if Pilad had been the shooter, how would he be feeling now? Don’t answer that.) He felt as if he’d just betrayed his friend, stolen from him or told lies about him behind his back. He wanted to say he was sorry, but it would be too complicated to explain.
They let him go eventually. Pilad and Nical walked with him as far as the top of the lane. He explained that he wanted to check on the lambs, so he’d take a short cut across the top meadow. It’s possible that they believed him. He walked the rest of the way following the line of the hedge, as though he didn’t want to be seen.
It was nearly dark when he got home; there was a thin line of bright yellow light under the door and he could smell roast chicken. He grinned, and lifted the latch.
“Dad, Mum, you’re not going to believe—” He stopped. They were sitting at the table, but it wasn’t laid for dinner. In the middle of it lay a length of folded yellow cloth. It looked a bit like a scarf.
“This came for you,” his father said.
He said it like someone had died. It was just some cloth. Oh, he thought. He took a step forward, picked it up and unfolded it. Not a scarf; a sash.
His mother had been crying. His father looked as though he’d woken up to find all the stock dead, and the wheat burned to the ground and the thatch blown off.
“I shot a possible,” he said, but he knew it didn’t matter.
His father frowned, as though he didn’t understand the words. “That’s good,” he said, looking away; not at Teucer, not at the sash. “Well?” his father said suddenly. “Tell me about it.”
“Later,” Teucer said. He was looking at the sash. “When did this come?”
“Just after you went out. Two men, soldiers. Guess they’re going round all the farms.”
Well, of course. If they were raising the levy, they wouldn’t make a special journey just for him. “Did they say when?”
“You got to be at the Long Ash cross, first light, day after tomorrow,” his father said. “Kit and three days’ rations. They’re raising the whole hundred. That’s all they’d say.”
It went without saying they had records; the census, conducted by the Brothers every five years. They’d know his father was exactly one year overage for call-up, just as they’d known he had a son, nineteen, eligible. It would all be written down somewhere in a book; a sort of immortality, if you cared to look at it that way. Somewhere in the city, the provincial capital, strangers knew their names, knew that they existed, just as people a hundred years hence would know about Teucer from Merebarton, who’d once shot ten with ten at a hundred yards.
He wasn’t the least bit hungry now. “What’s for dinner?” he said.
He woke up out of a dream, and all that was left of it was someone saying, he must’ve had eyes like a hawk, and then he remembered: what day it was, what he had to do. He slid off the bed, found his clothes and wriggled into them by feel, because it was too dark to see.
The idea was to leave the house before anyone else was awake. Nice idea, but Teucer had always been clumsy. He sideswiped a chair with his thigh, and the chair fell over, and something that must’ve been on the chair clattered on to the flagstones, making a noise like chain-making at the forge, only a bit louder. He realised that it was his bow, quiver, knapsack and tin cup. He lowered himself to his knees and groped on the floor till he’d found them all. The noise he made would’ve woken the dead, but there was no sound from the other room. Mum and Dad would be wide awake, so presumably they’d guessed what he was doing. Well.
He’d put his boots in the porch the night before, the sa
sh stuffed into the leg of the right boot. He wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to wear it yet; in theory, he knew, you were a soldier from the moment it was handed to you (so when he shot the possible, was he already a soldier?) and so he guessed he was entitled to wear the damned thing. But old men in the village who’d been in the service told all sorts of blood-curdling stories about what happened to raw recruits who broke the secret laws of military protocol. There were, he knew, thirty-six different ways of wearing the sash: only five of them were correct, and two of those were reserved for twenty-year men. Unfortunately, either the old men hadn’t specified, or he hadn’t been paying attention. He fished it out, shoved it in his pocket and put his boots on.
The sky was cloudless, before-dawn deep blue, and it had rained in the night so everything smelt sweetly of wet leaves and slaked earth. He walked up the yard, stopped by the corner of the hay barn and looked back. He knew this moment. It was one of the best, getting up early and walking round the fields to see if he could shoot a couple of rabbits, maybe a fox, a deer if he was absolutely sure nobody was looking. On such days he’d always stop and look back at this point, just in case there was a rabbit sitting out on the edge of the cabbage bed. No such luck today. He grinned, turned easily and walked on, taking care to make no sound, out of force of habit.
Pilad and Musen were waiting for him by the oak stump on the top road, silhouettes against the blue sky. Musen was wearing a hat and a scarf, which seemed a bit excessive for the time of year. He nodded as Teucer came up, grunted, “All right, then?” Pilad was eating an apple.
“Where’s Dimed?” Teucer asked.
Pilad shrugged. “Shacked up, probably. Last taste of home, that sort of thing.”
“Do we wait?”
“No chance.” Musen stood up. “Catch me getting in trouble because he can’t be arsed to get up in time.”
Teucer glanced at Pilad, who nodded, threw away the apple and rose to his feet. “He’ll catch up,” he said.
On the way to Tophead, Pilad told them the latest from the war; Pilad knew these things, though nobody knew how. By all accounts, it wasn’t good. General Belot had crushed the enemy Third Army in the foothills of the mountains, which was all very well; but it turned out that the incursion was just a feint, designed to draw him away while the enemy unleashed their main offensive, which was headed straight at Choris Anthropou. Right now, there was no army in being between them and the capital, which was why they were scrambling all the levies and reserves in the north-east and rushing them south to block the way. Nobody expected them to turn back the invasion, no chance whatsoever of that; the idea was simply to buy time for Belot to get back across the sea and sort the buggers out for good. Whether even he would be able to do that was uncertain; it was a stupid time of year to be crossing the sea south to north; there wasn’t time to hug the coast round, and sailing across the middle with the summer storms just starting, you could end up anywhere, very likely the bottom. This time, it looked like Belot had been taken in good and proper—
“Don’t say that,” Musen interrupted. “Belot’s the best, there’s no one like him. He’ll get there, don’t you worry.”
“No one like him except his brother,” Pilad replied. “That’s the point.”
“What if he doesn’t get here in time?” Teucer asked.
Pilad shrugged. “They still got to take the city,” he replied. “If they can’t carry it by storm, there’ll be a siege. That’ll give old Senza plenty of time to get here and do the business, so I guess Forza’s putting everything on being able to bash his way into Choris damn quick. Don’t suppose he’d take that chance without he’s got a damn good reason. They reckon he’s got some kind of new weapon. But they always say that.”
They’d reached the stile at Clayhanger, where they were joined by the Lower Town contingent. Interestingly, Dimed was with them, which tended to support Pilad’s theory. Someone said that the Higher Town boys would meet them at the brook, and the West Reach crowd would be waiting for them at Fivehead. Lamin’s mother had sent them a large basket of freshly baked honeycakes, with instructions to leave the basket at the Truth & Patience. “Does she want paying for them?” Musen asked with his mouth full, and nobody could be bothered to reply.
Sear Hill is the highest point south of the Lakes. Teucer had been that far out twice before, both times on droves, taking cattle to Southanger market. He recognised the blunt sugarloaf profile of the hill and knew where he was.
“Don’t talk soft,” Musen said. “That’s not Sear; Sear’s fifteen miles away, due east. That’s Cordinger, and over there’s the Wey valley.”
“Right,” Pilad said. “And in that case, we should be standing up to our ankles in the river.” General laughter, and Musen pulled a sad face. “That’s Sear, and just over the skyline’s Southanger. We’ll be there in time for dinner.”
And they were. The muster was on Southanger Yards, the flat plain just outside the town where cattle were penned for loading on to river barges bound for Ennea and Choris Anthropou. Appropriate choice; when they got there, the whole plain was covered in sandy-white cotton tents, fifteen feet by ten, pitched in streets. The smoke from the campfires set Anser off coughing while they were still five hundred yards from the camp gates; they were burning coal and foundrymens’ charcoal, and the air was thick and oily. They knew where to go because there was a queue, about a hundred men with bows and knapsacks, lining up to get through a small gap in a fence they could easily have climbed over. Welcome to the army, Teucer thought.
Pilad got talking to some of the men in front of them, East Riding men from over the other side of Sear. They were all wearing their sashes; the wrong way round, too. Teucer quietly suggested pointing this out, but Pilad only grinned. The queue moved painfully slowly when it moved at all. They were all hungry, but they were reluctant to break into the provisions they’d brought from home for fear of spoiling their dinner. The East Ridingers must’ve been there considerably longer. They were munching on bread and cold meat, and passing round big stone bottles of cider. Suddenly they were called forward; they passed through the gate and disappeared, as though they’d been eaten.
A very short man in a very big green coat was sitting on a stool in the gateway. “Next,” he called out. Nobody moved. “I said next,” the short man shouted. “You there, where’s your sergeant?”
You there, who turned out to be Notker from Lower Town, shrugged and looked helpless. Pilad sighed and moved to the front. “That’ll be me,” he said. “We’re from Merebarton. My name’s Pilad.”
The short man studied a sheet of paper. It had been folded many times, and the writing was very small. “Where?”
“Merebarton,” Pilad said. “Just up from Coopers Ford on the South road.”
“Got you.” The short man looked surprised, as though the existence of Merebarton was too bizarre to credit. “Says here, twenty-six men.”
“Are you sure?” Pilad said. “There’s twenty-eight of us.”
The short man stared at his paper, then looked at Pilad; then very slowly, like a man throwing dust on his father’s coffin lid, he felt in his pocket, produced a little brass travelling inkwell, unscrewed the lid, put the lid carefully down on the ground, put the inkwell down beside it, felt in his other pocket, brought out a little bit of hazel twig with a nib served on to it with bootmaker’s twine, leaned forward, dipped the pen in the ink, found his place in the paper, pressed it hard against his knee, scratched something out and wrote something in. “Twenty-eight,” he said. “Is that right?”
“That’s right, yes.”
The short man nodded, then carefully reversed the procedure, with the tucking away of the inkwell as the final step. “You’re late,” he said.
Pilad didn’t even blink. “Sorry about that,” he said. “We got held up. Bridge down at Redstone.”
The short man clicked his tongue. “Through there,” he said, without the slightest indication of where there was. “See the master-at-a
rms, then the quartermaster.”
They moved through the gateway. As soon as they were through, Teucer asked, “Where’s Redstone?”
“No idea,” Pilad said. “Right, over there, I guess.”
Nobody seemed to mind that Pilad was now their sergeant, whatever that meant. Pilad had spotted the East Riding crowd who’d been in line ahead of them; they were now standing in another, even longer line that led to something Teucer couldn’t see. The Easterners were, Teucer noticed, very quiet and subdued; also, they’d taken off their sashes.
The queue was to see a large, bald man with three teeth, sitting on a wooden box. He grinned at them. “Who’re you, then?”
“Merebarton,” Pilad said. “That’s—”
“I know where it is,” the bald man said. He didn’t have any papers. “So where’s the rest of you, then?”
“We’re it,” Pilad said. “Twenty-eight.”
The bald man shook his head. “Merebarton,” he said. “South Riding. Thirty-two men. Where’s the other four?”
“Everyone’s here,” Pilad said. “There’s nobody left in the village but old men. Really.”
The bald man sighed. “No skin off my nose, boy,” he said. “But your mates are going to catch it hot when the proctors come round. All right, over there, where you see the big tent. You get your kit, and someone’ll point you to your tent.”
“Thanks,” Pilad said. “When do we get dinner? We’ve been walking all day.”
“Suit yourselves,” the bald man said with a shrug. “You brought your three days’ rations, didn’t you? Eat ’em soon as you like, for all I care. Right, move along.”
“You know what,” Teucer said, as they stood in line outside the quartermaster’s tent. “This isn’t how I thought the army would be like. It’s, oh, I don’t know—”