Seasons of War

boys, and each of them as frightening as the next. If the young Balasar Gice hadn’t taken that particular story to heart, if he had not thought This will be my work; I will make the world safe from these things, how would it have gone? Who would Little Ott have been if he hadn’t followed Balasar out to die in the desert? Who might Coal have married? What would Mayarsin have named his daughters and sons?
    He heard the attack before he saw it. There was no form to it - men waving knives and axes pouring toward them like a handful of dried peas thrown against a wall; first one, then a few, and then all the rest in a clump. Balasar called to his men, and a rough shout rose from them. It was ridiculous. He should have won. This band of desperate fools didn’t know how to fight, didn’t know how to coordinate. Half of them didn’t know how to hold their weapons without putting their own fingers at risk. Balasar should have won.
    The armies came together with a crash. The smell of blood filled the air, the sound of brawling. And more of them came, boiling up out of the ground and charging down the streets. The humiliating pain made Balasar’s every step uncertain. Every time he tried to stand at his full height, his knees threatened to give way beneath him.
    All the ghosts that had followed him, all the men he had sacrificed. All the lives he had spent because the world was his to save.
    They had led to this comic-opera melee. The streets were white with snow, black where the dark cobbles showed through, red with fresh-spilled blood. The men of Machi and Cetani ran through the square barking like dogs. The army of Galt, the finest fighting force the world had ever seen, tried to hold them off while half-bent in pain.
    It should have been a comedy. Nothing so ridiculous should have the right to inspire only horror.
    They will kill us all, Balasar thought. Every man among us will be dead by morning if this doesn’t stop.
    He called the retreat, and his men stumbled and shuffled to comply. Street by street, the archers held back the advancing forces with ill-aimed arrows and bolts. Footmen stumbled, weeping, and were dragged by men who would themselves stumble shortly and be dragged along in turn. The sky grew dark, the snow fell thicker. By the time Balasar reached the buildings in the south of the city that he’d ordered taken that morning, it was almost impossible to see across the width of a street. The snow had drawn a curtain across the city to hide his shame.
    The army of Machi also fell back, retreating, Balasar supposed, into their warm holes and warrens and leaving him and his men to the mercy of the night. There was little food, few fires, and a chorus throughout the black night of men weeping in pain and despair. When Balasar dragged himself away from the little fire in the cooking grate of the house in which he’d taken shelter and relieved himself out the back door, his piss was black with blood and stank of bad meat.
    He wondered what would have happened if he had stayed in Galt, if he had contented himself with raiding the Westlands and Eymond, Eddensea and Bakta. He wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t tried.
    He forced himself through the captured buildings until it became too painful to walk. The men looked away from him. Not in anger, but in shame. Balasar could not keep from weeping though the tears froze on his cheeks. At last, he collapsed in the corner of a teahouse, his eyes closing even as he wondered whether he would die of the cold if he stopped moving. But distantly, he felt someone pulling a blanket over him. Some sorry, misled soldier who still thought his general worth saving.
    Balasar dreamed like a man in fever and woke near dawn unrested and ill. The pain had lessened, and from the stances of the men around him he guessed he was not the only one for whom this was true. Still, too hasty a step lit his nerves with a cold fire. He was in no condition to fight. And the rough count his surviving captains brought him showed he’d lost three thousand men in a day. They had been cut down in the battle or fallen by the way during the retreat and frozen. Almost a third of his men. One in three, a ghost to follow him; sacrifices to what he had thought he alone could do. No word had come from Eustin in the North. Balasar wished he hadn’t let the man go.
    The clouds had scattered in the night. The great vault above them was the hazy blue of a robin’s egg, the black towers