Stands a Shadow (24 page)

Ash had overheard that the place itself was called Whittle Bay, a broad cove within the larger sweep of Pearl Bay, which was located on the eastern coastline of Khos. It was a pretty enough location, with its hills to the west and the high peaks of mountains both north and south, and the rocky, gull-covered island out in the greater bay. In many ways the scene reminded Ash of northern Honshu, though it was spoiled somewhat by the stink of the army deployed across the beachhead, and by the closer press of thousands of camp followers, who had accompanied the invasion force all this way to Khos, like Mistress Cheer, in hope of making a profit.

The fleet lay at anchor out in the clear deep waters just beyond the coastal shelf of the cove. Its ships bobbed in tight formation, looking weather-beaten even from here, with spars and masts missing or hanging broken amongst wrappings of sails, some of the hulls listing too far to one side. The work was hardly slackening with the falling twilight. It seemed that a great deal still required unloading before the army could set forth in the morning.

Ash rested as best he could. His cough was worse today. Every now and again his limbs would shake as if from some inner chill, though his clothes were blessedly dry for once, and he kept the oiled cloak wrapped tight about him, and refused to stray long from the warmth of the fire.

Occasionally Mistress Cheer would cast him one of her pointed stares. He would groan to himself and climb to his feet, before wandering around the camp with his sheathed sword in his hand for show, scowling at the soldiers and non-enlisted men camped all around their small oasis of perfume and stockings and girlish laughter.

As the sun finally set, Mistress Cheer put the women to work with sharp claps of her hands and practised words of encouragement. They were hardly the only prostitutes on the beach – far from it – but still, soon enough, a long line of soldiers stretched from their little camp as they waited their turn, drunk and boisterous on this foreign beach far from home. Ash maintained order within the camp itself as the girls took turns leading the clientele into the tents, their business brief.

His mind was barely on the job. To the south, where the ground rose up towards the ruins of the burned village, he could see the palisade and tents of the Matriarch’s camp, with her standard flying high. It seemed to call to him each time he turned his attention elsewhere.

There was little trouble with the men that evening. It was late when the women’s calls for respite grew loud enough for Mistress Cheer to acknowledge them, and to declare an end to business for the night. A number of drunken soldiers still awaited their turn, but their complaints died quickly at Mistress Cheer’s glare and the hard, silent farlander by her side.

Rather than preparing for sleep, the girls set about having a small party instead.

Ash was weary after the long day. He excused himself, and with reluctance left the warmth of the fire, and found a spot on top of a nearby dune and huddled down in his cloak where he could keep an eye on them, but remain alone. With his sword lying by his side, he studied the lights of the distant camp of the Matriarch, the lie of the moonlit land around it. He looked for movement amongst the many fires that were merely glimmers from here. He wished he had his eyeglass with him; even a pair of eyes younger than his own.

Ash coughed once more, spat phlegm, wiped his mouth dry. Clouds were drifting in from the north, ponderous and heavy. More rain on its way, maybe. They would obscure the waxing moons and make a darkness of the land beneath them.

A good night for it
, he thought to himself.

‘See something of interest up there?’

He smelled her musky perfume even before she sat down on the sand, and fixed her dress over her legs as the coarse seagrass flattened beneath them. Ash looked at Mistress Cheer as she settled a flask of rhulika in his hands.

He nodded a grateful thanks to her, taking a long drink to warm himself.

‘Easy. It’s the last of it.’

He returned the flask with a brief smile. ‘Thank you. It has been some time since I last had a proper drink.’

Behind them, the squeals and laughter of the women rang out from their small, firelit hollow in the dunes. A breeze played through the fringes of Mistress Cheer’s hair. She fixed her shawl tighter about her head.

‘Tell me again what it was your previous employer did?’

Ash tapped the flask in her hand with a fingernail.

‘Alcohol?’

‘He shipped a small fortune of it here. Would hardly let me touch the stuff, though.’

It was a poor lie, Ash thought. He couldn’t tell if she believed him. Cheer looked away, her eyes dancing with the lights of the campfires. Singing and laughter drifted with the breeze; people elsewhere in the dunes celebrating in high spirits.

Over it all they could hear the rhythmic wash of the sea.

‘We’re a long way from home,’ she said to him sombrely.

Ash gave a slow nod of his head.

She turned to look at him again. ‘Some more than others, I suppose. Do you ever miss it – Honshu, I mean?’

‘Yes. Sometimes.’

‘Of course you do,’ she said in what sounded like self-admonishment. ‘Of course you do.’

He saw that the cloud mass was nearing the moons now. It would be getting dark soon, dark enough to prowl.

‘You know, you have the saddest eyes I think I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen my fair share of them, in my time.’

Ash’s forehead wrinkled in a frown. He felt an urge to rise and walk away from the woman and her prying talk. But then she shifted over to press against his side for warmth. He found that he liked the feel of it enough to stay where he was.

She studied his expression, waiting for him to say something. He had no words for her, though.

‘Well, I feel my bed calling. Time the girls got some rest too.’ She rose and brushed the sand from her dress. ‘Aren’t you tired?’ she asked, and he heard the heat in her words, the unspoken offer.

His eyes lingered on the curves of her body beneath her dress. He wished very much that he could accept it.

‘I think I will stay up a while, and watch over the camp.’

She covered her disappointment by looking down at the sand.

‘It’s the scar, isn’t it?’

‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘Really. I am just tired.’

She nodded, not believing him.

‘Goodnight, then,’ she said as she turned away, and trudged down the slope of the dune.

He waited a full hour to be certain the girls and Mistress Cheer were soundly asleep. Some fires continued to burn amongst the dunes, small groups of people talking as sparks rose upwards with the smoke. On the beach, the work parties laboured on through the night with the supplies still being brought to shore.

It was a risk, to leave the women without protection. But a risk he would have to take.

Removing his heavy cloak and picking up his sword, Ash stole out into the night.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Surrender and Be Free

‘I have to go,’ Bahn told his wife as he tied down the last of the equipment to his saddle.

Marlee nodded stiffly. Behind her, in the evening shadows, a man on crutches hobbled past in the otherwise empty street, a flap of skin hanging where his foot had once been. The man was in a hurry, as though pursued by the sounds of the tower horns that wailed across the city to announce the departure of the last of the troops.

‘Remember what I said, now. Get a message to Reese. Let her know she can come and stay here with you. Tell her I’m sorry I haven’t been to see her.’ Bahn suddenly ran his fingers through his hair. He recalled the last time he had seen his sister-in-law; her quiet voice explaining how her son had left the city. ‘Sweet Mercy, I haven’t even been to ask after Nico. How long has it been now?’

‘It’s all right,’ soothed his wife behind him. ‘I’ll tell Reese. She’ll understand.’

Her words failed to assuage him. Bahn had felt a certain responsibility towards Reese and her son ever since his brother Cole had deserted them.

He cinched the leather strap with a final sharp tug, putting his frustration into it. He inspected his work, then took a deep breath before turning to face his wife.

‘Time to go.’

Marlee nodded without expression. She was maintaining her composure for the sake of them both.

He’d felt awkward around his wife these recent weeks. He’d found that in her presence his guilty conscience would often make him think of the girl Curl, and it made him uneasy in his wife’s gaze, as though she might somehow see through him.

Now he stared hard into her eyes, unflinching. Marlee clasped her arms around his neck as he held her slim waist in his hands. Their noses touched.

‘I love you,’ he told her.

‘And I love you, my sweet man.’

Her eyes shone with the beginnings of tears.

He held her to him tightly, crushing her against his armour. He did not wish to let her go.

I don’t deserve this woman
, he thought bitterly.

The children were already asleep inside. Bahn had kissed his sleeping infant daughter on the forehead, had shared a few words with his bleary-eyed son tucked up in bed.

He couldn’t shake what he’d seen in the streets on his hasty return home. People had been lining the thoroughfares as columns of soldiers and old Molari marched for the northern gates, cheering them on as they passed by, forcing good-luck charms and parcels of food and bottles of spirits into their hands. Some had cried at the sight of them, old men even, stirred by the determined expressions of the soldiers and the knowledge of what they all marched towards.

We can do this
, Bahn had thought as his own emotions soared with the collective spirit of the crowds.
If we stand together we can get through this
.

But then, cutting through the backstreets to make better progress, he had passed countless people rushing with their belongings towards the harbours, hoping to find safe passage off the island, and he had watched them pass with something of envy in his heart.

On the walls, fresh graffiti was painted as though in blood.
The flesh is strong. Surrender and be free
. The work of Mannian agitators, resurfacing in the city now that it was truly vulnerable, and the majority of its forces were leaving.

Standing with Marlee in his arms, Bahn once more felt the urge to grab his wife and shake her and say,
For pity’s sake, take the children and find a way out
! But they were words for him alone, for he could never bring himself to say them. Not to Marlee, his pillar of strength, this woman whose father had fallen on the first day of the siege in defence of the city. She would say no, absolutely no, and then she would think less of him as a husband, as a man.

‘Look after them,’ was all he could say amidst the soft thickness of her hair.

‘Of course,’ she breathed. ‘And promise me you’ll be careful.’

‘I will.’

And despite their words of reassurance, they kissed long and hard and desperate, as though they would never see each other again.

On the still-smouldering hilltop, Ash stood amongst the ashes and debris that were the remains of a small fishing village, and stared down at a line of severed penises laid out in the gloom like a children’s forgotten game of half-sticks.

Close by, the charred corpses of their owners lay contorted amid the rubble of a collapsed stable. Ash had glimpsed smaller bodies lying amongst them; children and even infants.

Of the women, there was no sign.

Not for the first time in Ash’s long life, it struck him how death smelled the same no matter if it was man, zel, or dog. Ash had seen such things before in his days with the People’s Revolutionary Army. The long-running war of his homeland had burned the compassion from many men’s hearts. Friends had become unhinged with loss or simply callous and hardened like himself, while those men already tainted with cruelty within had revelled unfettered through a landscape of war where the normal bounds of decency no longer applied.

It had broken his heart the first time he’d witnessed such an atrocity; an anguish almost akin to the heartbreak of a beloved’s infidelity, though much worse than that; like a great lie at the heart of the world, suddenly exposed by shocking vivisection.

‘This is not your war,’ Ash told himself aloud in the darkness of the night.

He almost expected to hear the voice of Nico in admonishment. Those were Khosians lying there in the rubble. The whole country, the boy’s family included, faced slavery or the same fate as this.

Nothing came to Ash, though, no voice of conscience or disembodied spirit, only the vague unsettled feeling that he was as much a part of this as anyone, whether he chose a side or not.

The brief gap in the clouds closed above his head, and pitch blackness enveloped him. Sheathed sword in hand, face and hands blackened with soot, Ash turned his back on what lay there in the darkness.

He held a finger against a clogged nostril and blew it clear, then stepped beyond the ruins to the edge of the hill, where he lay on his belly on the coarse grass and looked down on the glowing tents of the Matriarch’s camp below.