Seasons of War

put the knife to his own throat again. Before Balasar could go on, he heard his own name called out. A boy no older than fourteen summers wearing the colors of the second legion came barreling into the camp. His face was flushed from running, his breath short. Balasar stood and accepted the boy’s salute. In the corner of his eye, he saw Sinja put away knife and mirror and reach for his shirt.
    ‘General Gice, sir,’ the boy said between gasps. ‘Captain Tevor sent me. We’ve lost one of the hunting parties, sir.’
    ‘Well, they’ll have to catch up with us as best they can,’ Balasar said. ‘We don’t have time for searching.’
    ‘No, sir. They aren’t missing, sir. They’re killed.’
    Balasar felt a grotesque recognition. The other men in his dream. This was where they’d come from.
    ‘Show me,’ he said.
    The trap had been sprung in a clearing at the end of a game trail. Crossbow bolts had taken half a dozen of the men. The others were marked with sword and axe blows. Their armor and robes had been stripped from them. Their weapons were gone. Balasar stepped through the low grass cropped by deer and considered each face.
    The songs and epics told of warriors dying with lips curled in battle cry, but every dead man Balasar had ever seen looked at peace. However badly they had died, their bodies surrendered at the end, and the calm he saw in those dead eyes seemed to say that their work was done now. Like a man playing at tiles who has turned his mark and now sat back to ask Balasar what he would do to match it.
    ‘Are there no other bodies?’ he asked.
    Captain Tevor, at his elbow, shook his great woolly head.
    ‘There’s signs that our boys did them harm, sir, but they took their dead with them. It wasn’t all fast, sir. This one here, there’s burn marks on him, and you can see on his wrists where they bound him up. Asked him what he knew, I expect.’
    Sinja knelt, touching the dead man’s wounds as if making sure they were real.
    ‘I have a priest in my company,’ Captain Tevor said. ‘One of the archers. I can have him say a few words. We’ll bury them here and catch up with the main body tomorrow, sir.’
    ‘They’re coming with us,’ Balasar said.
    ‘Sir?’
    ‘Bring a pallet and a horse. I want these bodies pulled through the camp. I want every man in the army to see them. Then wrap them in shrouds and pack them in ashes. We’ll bury them in the ruins of Udun with the Khai’s skull to mark their place.’
    Captain Tevor made his salute, and it wasn’t Balasar’s imagination that put the tear in the old man’s eye. As Tevor barked out the orders to the men who had come with them, Sinja stood and brushed his palms against each other. A smear of old blood darkened the back of the captain’s hand. Balasar read the disapproval in the passionless eyes, but neither man spoke.
    The effect on the men was unmistakable. The sense of gloating, of leisure, vanished. The tents were pitched, the wagons loaded and ready, the soldiers straining against time itself to close the distance between where they now stood and Udun. Three of his captains asked permission to send out parties. Hunting parties still, but only in part searching for game. Balasar gave each of them his blessing. The dream of the desert didn’t return, but he had no doubt that it would.
    In the days that followed, he felt keenly the loss of Eustin. Somewhere to the west, Pathai was falling or had fallen. The school with its young poets was burning, or would burn. And through those conflagrations, Eustin rode. Balasar spent his days riding among his men, talking, planning, setting the example he wished them all to follow, and he felt the absence of Eustin’s dry pessimism and distrust. The fervor he saw here was a different beast. The men here looked to him as something besides a man. They had never seen him weep over Little Ott’s body or call out into the dry, malign desert air for Kellem. To this army, he was General Gice. They might be prepared to kill or die at his word, but they did not know him. It was, he supposed, the difference between faith and loyalty. He found faith isolating. And it was in this sense of being alone among many that the messenger from Sinja Ajutani found him.
    The day’s travel was done, and they had made good time again. His outriders had made contact with local forces twice - farm boys with rabbit bows and sewn leather armor - and had done well each time. The wells in the low towns