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‘You are not entirely alone,’ Galar Baras pointed out.
She smiled, but her eyes remained fixed on the dry earthen floor. ‘I walk no reasonable path. The fewer that remain, the more easily we find ourselves lost.’ She drank again. ‘But this womb is red and sweet. It bears the colour of blood, but is quick to lose its warmth. It enlivens the mind, in the instant before it dulls every thought. It licks the cunt, only to take all feeling away. For all that, I am eager for the insensibility, so easily mistaken for lust.’
‘Yet you berated Wareth for his cowardice,’ said Dathenar.
She scowled. ‘No wonder Silchas sent you packing.’
Prazek spoke. ‘We have stood guard upon many a bridge, Dathenar and me. Lofty our presumption of stout diligence, our capacity to fend either approach.’
‘But the river runs past,’ Dathenar said, ‘with mocking indifference. Such is the fate of those who guard the civil, this span of bold traverse upon which peasants and kings will walk, each in their time. Stand in vigil, even as the stone and mortar rots beneath our boots. You would share pity before death’s distant bell? Be on with it then, commander. The river’s surface ripples with black and silver, a commingling of despair and hope.’
‘And what lies beneath that surface, alas, is anything but clear.’
Galar Baras
stared at the two men, one to the other, and then back again as each spoke. Their voices possessed a cadence. Their words carried him frail as a leaf upon a stream. Glancing down, he saw desolation in his lover’s eyes.
‘Pity,’ she finally said, as if tasting the word yet again. ‘It suffices. But I keep my tears in a jug. You’ll see me astride my mount on the day of battle. I will not shy from that fate.’
‘We have spoken nothing of fate,’ Prazek said.
‘By its utterance the word invites,’ Dathenar observed.
‘Surrender,’ said Prazek, ‘by another name.’
‘Yet it awaits, a promise to the future, in which all power is yielded. To swim or drown beneath a reckless sky.’
‘I’ll order the advance when such is required of me,’ said Toras Redone. But her red eyes were glazed, her lips wet. ‘You three will command a thousand each. You will array your eight cohorts into a flattened wedge and march to close. I expect we’ll hold a flank—’
‘I will advise Lord Anomander that we take the centre,’ said Prazek.
She lifted her gaze with an effort, studied him. ‘Why?’
‘Should our side prevail, sir, it may be necessary for our flanking allies to turn on us.’
Toras Redone let her head tilt forward again, until she was peering at the jug on her lap, or her hands that held it as if it was a baby. ‘Now there is a fate unanticipated – forgive me my addled mind. Of course we take the centre, as we will be the wild beast with blood in its mouth. Cut-throats and thugs, sadists and murderers, our iron shrieking its own thirst. None of you can rein that in, can you?’
‘It’s not likely,’ said Dathenar, resuming his pacing.
‘Would that Hunn Raal returned to us,’ she then said, ‘with yet more wagons loaded with fatal casks. We could make husks of the armour, again, and take every hand from every sword. And,’ she lifted the jug and kissed its broad mouth, ‘begin anew.’
Galar Baras wanted to weep. Instead, he said, ‘Some other discarded or neglected segment of the population … but none comes to mind, alas.’
Prazek rose as if bidden by some unseen signal from his friend, who moved to draw back the tent flap, and as he stepped into the dull light beyond he said, ‘Well, there’re always children, though the armour might need refitting.’
The two men departed.
Toras Redone coughed, and then asked, ‘Did I dismiss them?’
In every way imaginable, sir. ‘I would depart too, sir, to oversee the preparations of my cohorts.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘as I am too far gone to even fuck right now.’
Without your will or your leave, Toras, there is nothing I could find to make love to. It may seem a fragile agreement, with you sodden most of the time, but I will hold to it nonetheless.
He waited a moment longer, if she would speak again, but then saw that her eyes had closed, her breaths now slow and deep.
The commander cannot see you now, as she communes with her jug of tears, with not a drop spilled to the world.
