“Four years?” Toris said incredulously.
Lembon nodded. “We have sent everything to stop you. We’ve lost two thirds of our male population. All we have left now are the cripples and the inept.”
Toris looked at the map.
“Invaders?” he said, not quite believing it. “We’ve been told that you were attacking us.”
“No, young soldier, that is not the case. Your legions marched forth, killing man, woman, and child. Our queen paid and rallied all our allies to amass against you. You and I are all that is left. Your king died this morning over there,” Lembon said pointing to a far-off hill. “My queen died fighting him.”
Toris looked stricken.
“I wish you well, soldier,” Lembon said, handing him the map. “Take it, show your people what really happened here.”
He left without a final word.
Walking back through the village Toris grew up in, he was keen not to draw any attention to himself. He had removed his armour and placed it in a large sack slung over his shoulder. He wore a monk’s cowl to cover himself with the map in his hand. Now, very worn, he had showed it to every town, village, and hamlet between the battlefield and here, telling people what had really happened and that they were now kingless. But with no other soldiers returning, he didn’t want to come back in his garb with pride and joy that he had fought and survived the war when no one else had. So, with his head bowed, and trying not to let his armour rattle too much in the sack, he walked through the quiet streets of women and children as he saw his father struggle to lift the wheat sacks he hadn’t sold that day into the cart.
“Need a hand there, mister?”
Toris spoke normally, although his voice was rugged and heavy, his father stopped, turned ever so slightly to meet its owner.
“Just heading home, stranger. Need a lift?”
“Please.”
Toris lifted the last of the wheat sacks into the cart with ease.
His father let out a tear as he walked around the cart and climbed up, and sitting together, he held his son’s hand firmly, not wanting to let go.
The Art of War
Brian Staveley
In all his forty-seven years, General Dakash has never set foot inside the imperial gallery. He tells people this is because a warrior’s place is the battlefield or the arena, fighting for his own name and the glory of his emperor. He tells people that he has no need to see the newest painting of him, no need to bask in the grandeur of the most recent sculpture. I was there, he says. I lived it.
This is both true, and not true.
He fought his first duel at the age of sixteen. Everyone expected him to die, including Dakash himself. The Mad Bull was older, stronger, the veteran of a dozen bloody fights. When he said he planned to cut Dakash apart one piece at a time, Dakash believed him. He couldn’t sleep for weeks. He barely ate. When he wasn’t trying to train, he stared at the wall, rehearsing the possibilities of his own annihilation. He considered running away. The other bhanti ran sometimes, if there was a fight they knew they couldn’t win. Usually, if they made it over the walls or past the gate, they were brought back in chains and fed to the lions.
Even now, thirty-one years later, he can remember stepping out of the cool, subterranean darkness into the blinding light of the ring. He can remember the sun like an anvil on his face, the weight of his blades in his hands. He can remember the sound—so loud it seemed solid—pouring from ten thousand eager throats. He can even remember the Mad Bull striding into the ring, muscles and mustache oiled, each of his blades half again as long as those Dakash held.
What he cannot remember is what happened next.
One moment, he felt ready to vomit up his own heart. The next, he was standing over the Mad Bull’s body, soaked in blood, a severed head clutched in his left hand.
His own unlikely survival terrified him almost as much as the prospect of his death. The other bhanti tried to talk to him about it, about what happened in the ring. What came over you? they asked. You were not yourself. You were inhabited by a god of war. They meant the words as praise, but Dakash could only feel an awful, twisting unease.
He grew up knowing he could not trust the world. When his parents saw he was a large child and strong, they sold him to be trained as a bhanti. Inside the camp, the young warriors betrayed one another daily—stealing food, sabotaging weapons, smearing the drinking troughs with shit to make the others sick. The owners in their seaside palaces would make bargains to see one fighter saved, another slaughtered, according to their own favorites and the whims of the crowd. It was not an accident that the Mad Bull fought with longer blades. Dakash learned early that the only person he could trust was himself.
And then that self became unknown to him. He felt like a man shipwrecked in the ocean. For days, for weeks, for a whole lifetime he had been holding on to a fragment of shattered mast, trusting it to keep him afloat, only to find it turn to stone in his grip. The danger and strangeness were no longer just outside of him, they were inside, too. The ugliness he’d known his whole life had grown in him like an organ.
Death would have been better, but he was too frightened to choose death, and so he continued to fight, continued to lose himself in the violence, continued to wake to awful slaughters he could not remember having wrought, continued to lose hold of himself, continued to kill and to win.
Eventually, he caught the eye of the emperor, who bought him, made him his personal champion, set him free, elevated him to the commander of the Raven Guard, decorated him with the armor of a Manjari General. At some point, the great artists of the empire, keen to curry favor with the throne, began to paint Dakash. Sculptors sculpted him. People came from Uvashi-Rama and the Vrishan Hills, Gosha, and the coast of the Ghost Sea to see him fight in the arena, and they went to the imperial gallery to see the depictions of his duels and battles.
Dakash never goes to the gallery.
He spends his time, when he isn’t fighting or training to fight, as far from blood and battle as he can get, in a hillside villa above the city given to him by the emperor. There are vines there that he cultivates, and fruit trees. Even on hot days, there is a breeze. He trains with his sword or his bow on a large open patio, but the movement and effort feel more like dance than like fighting. He has killed, according to some accounts, over seventy warriors. He remembers killing none. The gaps in his memory terrify him, but for thirty-one years, what has terrified him more is discovering what fills those gaps. He’s aware that it must be bloody, ugly. He’s seen the bodies he leaves behind. As long as he doesn’t have the memories, however, he can believe that the violence belongs to someone else. He can remain a man who raises grapes, who picks fruit, who sits on that patio in the evenings and watches the swallows carve their passage through the air.
Then, on one of those evenings, as the warm air is just going vague and pink, a shape approaches up the twisting road, broad-shouldered, broad hipped, a woman from the village at the foot of the hill that he knows well. Her name is Runya. She has a single mole high on her right cheek, and she can recite from memory all three epics. She sells his fruit in the local market and, sometimes, when her servants are picking it, filling wooden crates, then loading those wooden crates into wagons, Dakesh and Runya spend an afternoon together in his bed. Sometimes she spends a night.
On this evening, however, she comes alone—no servants, no crates, no wagons. When she arrives at his patio, she fixes him with her dark gaze and tells him something beautiful and awful: I am pregnant with your child.
His child.
He tries to imagine what this means, what it will mean. His own childhood was synonymous with fear, bafflement, suffering, desperate perseverance. He did not want to have a child because the world is cruel, and worse, because he fears he himself may be cruel. How can he be trusted to rear a child when he does not know his own mind or recall his own life? How can he trust himself?
Runya sits on the low stone wall, takes a peach from a ba
sket, considers it a moment, then puts it back.
“What do you want to do?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Do you want to raise the child together? Or shall I raise him on my own?”
“Him?” This, too, he cannot imagine. “How do you know?”
“I know. So, what do you want to do?”
He shakes his head again. When the only good things in the world were grapes and swallows and occasionally Runya’s warm brown skin under his fingers, he could bear his own brokenness. How will he bear it if he has a son?
Runya watches him, one hand resting on her belly.
“You are not a bad man,” she says.
She does not say, You are a good man.
“I am not sad to have you as the father of this child.”
She does not say, I am happy, but she does reach out to him in the gathering dusk and put a hand on his knee. It would be enough, that hand, if he were a whole person. It would be more than enough. There is tenderness in her touch, and strength, and bravery—good lives have been built on less—but it is not Runya he fears.
He stands up, too quickly.
Her hand drops away.
“Can you come back tomorrow?” he asks.
She is angry—he can see it in the tightness of her face, in the way she wraps her hands around her middle once more—but all she says is, “What will you know tomorrow that you do not know today?”
The imperial gallery is the private collection of the emperor, and for hundreds of years it was closed to all but the empire’s most august citizens. Just before Dakesh’s birth, however, in a gesture of civic magnanimity, the emperor opened the doors. Now, as Dakesh approaches the fountains fronting the building, as he walks between the massive sculptures of the snakes, grubby children race around his feet. Women and men, with enough coin to spend an afternoon away from their work, loiter beneath the willows beside the ornamental ponds. It is a fine summer day. Shifting leaves sift the sunlight.
Dakesh feels awful, hot and cold at the same time. His legs are weak, as though he has just recovered from a long illness. It is hard to hold a thought for more than a few moments. Sweat slides down his chest and back, soaking his tunic. He runs a hand through his thick black hair, and it comes away dripping wet.
The stairs are wide enough for an army to mount twenty men abreast. The general feels the way he feels when going to battle, only worse. There are battles inside, but these, unlike all the other fights of his life, he will actually see. The blood will be paint, the bodies marble, but he will remember them when he leaves the gallery.
He passes beneath the gilded, fifty-foot wings of a raven with the head of a man and the tail of a snake, steps from the sunlight into shadow and pauses. He does not have to do this. Unlike that fight against the Mad Bull all those years ago, he can simply leave. His villa is waiting high on the hill. Runya is waiting, his unborn son restless inside her womb. He closes his eyes, wipes the sweat from his brow, takes hold of his courage, and moves deeper into the vaulted space.
It is not difficult to find the room that bears his name. He had no idea it would be so large, no idea there was so much art. Twenty or thirty people occupy the space. They move between the works, pausing occasionally to exclaim at a particularly gruesome detail. He catches snatches of names he remembers: foes long dead, battlefields silent now, swaying with grass or wheat. From the doorway, he can see snatches of color in the great, gilded frames: flags waving above soldiers with spears, fires raging, red everywhere. He can still leave, but he does not. A sculpture stands just inside the door. Like a man in a nightmare, Dakesh steps forward, one stride, then another, until he is standing eye to eye with himself.
He was younger then, slimmer, stripped to the waist for his duel. His muscles strain inside the stone as he lifts a larger man from the ground with the two knives he has buried inside his stomach. The dying man is torn half open. His eyes are squeezed shut against the agony of his own ending, his teeth bared in a silent, unending scream. Dakesh is open-mouthed as well, but instead of screaming, he is smiling, or laughing, marble face a mask of bliss. The general stares at it a long time, then turns away.
For half the afternoon, he moves through the gallery, from one piece to the next. They are all different, and all the same. Here he is riding down a the last of the Saddha Usurpers. Here he is strangling a man with his bare hands. Here he is, ignoring the knife lodged in his shoulder as he smashes a man’s skull to bloody pieces with a fragment of stone. In some poses, he is obviously victorious, in others, he looks close to death, but in every single one he is grinning, laughing, roaring with delight as he rips the life from his foes.
By the time he leaves the gallery, Dakesh has been clenching his hands so long that they ache. His back hurts from standing motionless. He can think only one thought over and over again: A stranger lives inside me, an awful man I do not know.
When he reaches his villa, the moon hangs above the vines, a slender crescent. It will ripen with the grapes. He sits on the patio watching it traverse the sky, rising, then falling in its ancient arc. He wants nothing more than to sit here, to watch that moon rise with his son, to drink with Runya the tart first pressing of the year’s wine. Instead, when the light bleeds into the sky, he goes inside, finds a quill and two pieces of parchment. The first he addresses to the emperor.
If ever I have served you well, my lord, if ever I have brought you glory, please see to it that this, my villa, my wealth, and all my land passes to Runya the fruitseller.
The second note is even shorter.
If ever he asks, please, tell your son his father was a winemaker, gentle and foolish, of no particular repute.
Hero of the Day
Nathan T. Boyce
Golfrey peered out into the dawn air, the morning fog settling on the meadow below. The poor fools following the bastard child of King Francis, God rest his soul, deserve everything coming to them today. Today, history will record the day King Menschel defended his crown.
The king and his captains met in the middle of the field with the potential usurper and his men. As if there was any point of this. If any of this could be averted with words, things would not have gotten this far. Golfrey looked at the king’s lords flanking him and wondered, not for the first time, if his father knew about his existence.
His mother captured his dreams of his future when she spoke of Duke Welton’s visit to the small, poor farm village in her youth. She wasn’t naïve enough to think anything would come of it, and the purity of farm girls were often over-estimated. But she was very proud that of all the girls in town he chose her, even if only for a night. Every time she went to tell the duke of Golfrey, his guards would not give her audience. His mother remained poor but happy until the croup took her lungs last winter. She beamed in pride at her son when she passed, whispering with her last breath how noble he looked, just like his father. Today, Golfrey was going to prove his blood line.
He looked beyond the meeting of commanders where the opposing army gathered, a crowd of rebels about to meet their fate. Did they expect to take the field with only twenty cavalry? The king’s horsemen alone numbered over one hundred. The thundering stampede of death would turn the tide this day.
Golfrey scratched at his chest through his wool tunic. His faded red blazon almost a pink compared to every other archer he stood beside. Their gold lions gleamed against the bloody background while his mewled in a placid yellow. The boys got him good on that one. He looked down at his hands. His blisters had healed from the concentrated lye they told him to use. It was supposed to get his uniform cleaner than the queen’s under britches.
He did not imagine his service in the king’s army to go so wrong. He was nobility after all, if not by title, by blood. He longed for his place with the footman, where glory and promotion, maybe even a title he earned on his own, could be claimed with skill of the sword and courage in battle. So what if he had missed when sheathing his sword
. No one is perfect. It wasn’t his fault his line sergeant stood behind him while the Duke Welton inspected him. It was a clean wound, right into his thigh. A few stitches and the sergeant could tell the brothel maids any tale he wanted.
If Golfrey were honest with himself, he did not excel in arms training. The bruises and cuts even with the wooden practice swords in the daily sparring proved to him how dead he would be if he were still among those footman he looked upon now.
The king and his commanders galloped back as the opposing leaders did the same. The banners blowing behind the king, glorious red and gold, claimed the land and its people. The might of the true king and his men.
Damn! His bootlace was untied again. Golfrey bent down to fix the loose ends, and his bow slid off his shoulder and into the dirt in front of him. He reached in reaction to grab it, the suddenness of his maneuver causing the strap for his quiver to slide down his other arm. He let his arm looped all the way through quickly, freeing himself from the restraining strap, and he tied his boot. Grabbing his bow, he stood. The strap, now around his waist, slid down all the way to the ground with the weight of his quiver.
Sigh.
No wonder even these archers made him the butt of every joke. Quickly, he stepped out of the loop and picked up his quiver, slinging it back in place.
“Sorry, Bart.” Golfrey apologized. Banging his gear about while getting adjusted.
The flagged arrow whizzed uncomfortably close to his ear, its streamer sailing behind with the red and gold challenging the oncoming would be king and his army. A ploy, intentionally short to take the advancing footmen by surprise as the hail of arrows cast their bodies down.
The cadence of the drums startled Golfrey as the sharp staccato notes burst into the air. The footmen on his right all readied shields and swords in reaction to the commands given by the taught leather’s call. The armored cavalry behind them gave no indication as to where they would move on the battlefield once the charge began.
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