The Humbled (The Lost Words: Volume 4) (12 page)

Not the ideal country for army passage, she mused. Most of the traffic went farther east, toward the two rich estates. The Kerabon and the Marock made the northern and western reaches of the Barrin estate trickier to cross, because you would need ferries. They were excellent for hauling grain to the capital, but not when thousands of men and women and frisky horses needed to cross to the other side. Which made, yet again, the enemy force’s decision to trample here all the more curious. They could have gone farther south and followed easy roads. Or gone farther west, where it was more boring, but without wide rivers to impede the journey. This stubborn, inefficient arrow-straight pilgrimage of death was quite unsettling.

Maybe the enemy had no idea of the terrain they were following. Maybe there was a dire urgency to their march. Or maybe something worse, something she could not even imagine. A thousand questions, no answers. Well, she would have some soon.

She had asked for her old military life back. Now she had a war that even Vergil himself would have found crafty.

As she watched the troops deploy, her thoughts strayed away to another realm, where her son was. She was wondering how he was faring with his Caytorean wife. Was he fighting court intrigue? Was he fighting real battles, just like her? Was he entertaining fat lords in some opulent mansion, discussing trade and lying about his feelings? She had not had any news from Athesia in months. Her return to the realms was wrapped in half a year of lost time.

I could be fighting a wrong war against the wrong enemy
, she thought. For that matter, she had no idea what was happening in Somar either. Who was in charge of the realm, really? Who
led the Southern Army, if it still existed? Were the Kataji still infesting the capital, refusing to budge?

How can there be an army coming from the north? There’s nothing there
.

Oh, now the convoy had noticed the Eracians. There was a certain urgency to their pace now, as fast as mules and donkeys and the hairy cowlike creatures they had could move pulling big wagons behind them. Mali signaled the rest of the force to start moving. Finley and Alan pretended to have come to the same conclusion on their own and ordered their own would-be regiments after her. The force of twenty thousand strong left its own impression in the Barrin plains. The veil of dust became a solid cloud.

There was no fighting. The enemy convoy was quickly surrounded, its one-hundred-fifty-odd souls huddling in their carts and around them, waiting.

Mali dismounted, hitching her trousers up. Her arse itched from sweat, and frankly, she wanted to take a dump. She had not squatted in two days, and she was feeling rather constipated.

She stopped about a stone’s throw away from the lot, studying them hard with what she hoped were still healthy eyes. Red faces, blistered by the sun. Haggard faces, as weak as any she had seen in her life. Frightened goats were bleating insanely, pulling on their tethers, the women and children around them trying to calm them down. Ducks and other birds were beating their wings against the wire cages.

There were a few men in the lot, mostly with pale long hair. Some looked quite foreign but not unlike folks she had seen from Eybalen or Sigurd. Others belonged in any nearby village. People just like the Eracians, except they were not.

Mali spotted another strange thing. Most were dressed too warmly for the weather. They absolutely stank.

“So what do we have here?” Finley asked, coming closer.

“Identify yourselves,” one of the mounted women barked. No one responded.

“Maybe they don’t speak our language,” Alexa said, frowning hard.

The silence among the foreigners was oppressive. You would expect them to plead or curse or threat, even in their own tongue. But not doing anything of the sort made her wonder what kind of madness she had stepped into.

“Anyone speak any foreign?”

A few men and women muttered unhelpfully, but no volunteers stepped forward.

Mali realized this could be a rather awkward interception. Asking questions, yes, but were they any good if no one could understand them? A northern army, coming from nowhere, with bloody people who couldn’t speak Continental. Bloody Abyss. Fuck.

She turned toward her horse, opened one of the saddlebags, and produced a water bladder. She drank in long, slow gulps. The water was tepid and not very fresh, but they would reach the river soon, and if there weren’t too many bloated bodies floating in the shallows, they would refill their rations. After the Crap Charge, she felt invincible. Almost.

Someone spoke, but it wasn’t in Continental.

Mali stoppered the bladder and wound the rope tightly round the neck, then knotted it twice and shoved it back into the saddlebag. She looked at the terrified crowd in front of her, all of them wearing those hot, heavy white clothes. “Anyone said anything?”

“This one.” A rider pointed with her spear.

There was a woman in the lot, short, pudgy, freckled so much she had more freckles than real skin. Her hand was extended, aiming at Mali’s horse. Then, she spoke again. Mali didn’t quite catch the words, but she understood the intention.

“They want water?” Meagan retorted.

“Might be,” Mali agreed. She took the waterskin out and shook it. That word again. “Enta,” that’s what she thought she heard.

The short foreigner stepped out of the crowd. Men and women sighed with surprise, drawing blades. A collective gasp rippled through the enemy lot, followed by more curses from the Eracians.

“Easy now!” Mali tried to boom in her best commander’s voice. “Steady. No foolish things. They are not armed. Stand down. I said, stand the fuck down!”

The last few stubborn soldiers sheathed their weapons and moved back, easing the tension. Only one lad remained, glaring hard at the short woman, his sword raised and poised.

“Could be a trick,” he said, licking his lips.

“One of yours, Alan?” Mali asked, approaching the footman.

The bald colonel growled. “Private, get back before I have you whipped.”

Mali stepped next to the soldier, but not quite so close he could swing and accidentally hit her. “Boy, put that away.”

“Don’t like this shit,” he moaned.

“No one likes this shit,” she agreed. “But you will like it less if you end up dead ’cause of subordination.”

That got him listening. He turned his not-so-bright face, glared at Mali, finally figured out her rank, and quickly retreated. Mali knew he would need careful watching afterward.
Soldiers like him turned nasty when drunk, and they didn’t seem likely to forget a slight.

The short woman had not backed away. Either she was oblivious to the danger or very brave.

Mali came quite close to her, fighting the smell of her unwashed body. “You want water? Don’t you have any of your own?”

But the freckled foreigner was not listening. She moved down the convoy, five carts away. Mali approached, shadowed by her officers. In the back of the wagon, there were several children, lying down, all looking very tired. They might be delirious or barely conscious, she realized.

Mali looked at Alexa. Her friend made an all-too-knowing face. “Gordon, get me a dozen skins, full.”

Her captain was too dazed to argue. Soon enough, his soldiers brought forward several heavy goatskins. As soon as she had her pudgy fingers round one, the short woman clambered into the cart, with surprising agility for her bulk, and trickled water down the throats of those children. One of them snapped away; another moaned weakly.

“Fuck,” Alexa said in a quiet voice.

“Yes, fuck,” Mali agreed. “Our enemy.”

Alan was there, his moustache hanging like a pair of curved knives. “What do you propose, Colonel?”

Mali looked away. The landscape was screaming its lust for revenge. The scarred fields, the ruined hamlets. Even the road itself was scarred with tragedy. There was some strange, unknown threat looming over Eracia, maybe all of the realms, and she didn’t have the slightest clue what was happening.

This convoy belonged to the enemy, she realized. For all practical purposes, it was a legitimate prize, a succulent target for her soldiers, and they would get to share the spoils,
including the women in the lot. That’s how it went. There were no rules in war, and no mercy. She, of all people, knew that to be the truth. She needed no reminders.

But seeing those parched children broke her conviction. Damn.

She had no idea what was happening. But burying these one hundred fifty nameless strangers in the fields would give her no answers. Instead, instead…fuck. What would she do now? How could she sort this mess out? Let them be? So they could calmly trudge down the road and settle down on Eracian soil, with its people evicted or butchered? Let them be, so they could alert their own troops of a local army shadowing them from behind? Ignore them? Kill them all?

Why would an army—no, a nation—leave its own country and come here, to her realm? Maybe they were going somewhere, fleeing an even greater danger, risking everything to save their lives? If so, could she blame them for that? Nothing of this made sense. Nothing.

Fuck
, she wanted to scream, but colonels didn’t do that.

Intercept, ask questions, learn about your enemy, that was what she had ordered this morning. Well, they had captured a bunch of enemy troops, even if they had turned out to be women and children. Mission accomplished, without any losses. What remained was to crack the secrets of their foreign language and weed out the necessary information.

“They come with us,” Mali blurted, cursing herself. There, it was done. She had said it.

Alan’s brows shot up, making up for their earlier frown. “Excuse me?”

She stepped close, their noses almost touching. “Do you wanna kill some children? Then go ahead. Be my guest. You do it.”

He breathed hard through his nostrils. “You are one serious cunt,” he growled.

Mali was undaunted. “I will take that as a compliment. Now smile. We’re in this together.”

Alan bit his lower lip. “All right. We’re in this together.” He stepped back. “Fine,” he announced loudly. “Get them up with the supply train at the back. Watch ’em carefully so they don’t escape. We’re gonna try to learn who they are and what they’re doing here.”

One of Alan’s majors was not happy with the decision. “What are we going to do with all those other convoys like this? Are we going to capture every one of them and then get them to follow us?”

There’s a thought
, Mali mused. “We need to figure out what is happening. Until we do, we won’t just randomly kill people if they’re not posing any threat. If they raise arms against us, yes, we kill them, but if they surrender peacefully, we spare their lives.”

“So we harass their supply lines, is that it?” Alexa wondered.

Mali nodded, groping for a plan. “Yes. For now. We cannot possibly engage their main force, but we can make sure their rear is weak and exposed. Might make them reconsider and slow down.”
Then, they turn against us
. “Meanwhile we send fast riders to the other realms, try to warn them of this monstrous army. Buys them some time so they prepare some kind of a defense.”

“What are we going to do with all the other captives?” the major insisted.

Send them back?
“We’ll figure something out,” Mali said. “Until we know better, no rash decisions.”

Soon, the drama dissipated. Several soldiers remained to watch the foreign women give water to their children, but most moved away, disgusted and confused and worried.

Mali stayed, masticating her own doubts and wild ideas. She had fought ugly skirmishes in her past, but none so crazy as this one. You were not supposed to encounter unresisting, quiet women and children with sunburns and suffering from thirst on your first engagement. It just wasn’t right.

But this was only the very first of her worries, she realized, not even sure how big the trouble really was.

Lord Karsten would probably not exercise the same sympathy, she thought, not after the enemy army had destroyed his county. What if all the Eracians were killed or expelled by the foreigners? Did their plight not count? Was she not supposed to be fighting for their lives and freedom? Guilt was trying to smother her. She almost gave in, only the flimsy knowledge that murdering unarmed people was dead wrong stopping her. Whatever the outcome, killing that freckled woman would solve nothing.

She went back to consult her officers about the next hop of their hunt, the image of the short, stocky foreigner dribbling water onto a child’s cracked lips haunting her.

CHAPTER 9

T
here were four of them together in the monarchical chamber. It was a bit crowded, but Sonya decided she would endure it. After all, a defender of the realm must bear sacrifice for her own people.

“There’s the question of industrial output,” Guild Mistress Delphine said. “We must make sure that we can match the general’s demand.” Then, she bent over the desk and wrote something on a thin strip of paper and handed it to Sonya.

Sonya carefully read the text, then handed it to Giselle and Sinead. The two mistresses almost touched their heads as they leaned close. Finished, Sinead placed the slip above the candlewick. It caught fire, and the paper curled, turning black. Just before the flame touched her lacquered fingernails, the head of the builders guild let go of the burning parchment. It dropped into the metal bowl holding the fat red taper, joining a dozen crisps lying there already.