Mitchell Smith: Kingdom River

A messenger-pigeon had reached Better-Weather, and he'd come, down with headquarters' Heavy Cavalry, come quickly, but still arriving two days too late. Troopers of the Second Regiment of Light Cavalry lay scattered through high grass for almost a Warm-time mile down the valley from Please Pass.

Sam Monroe walked through tall brown stems still brittle from last night's frost. Death had come in Patchy-fool Autumn, the eight-week summer ended two weeks before. Dead troopers lay here and there, almost hidden in the grass except where low mounds of the slain showed – Light Cavalry's hide-and-chainmail hauberks hacked by the imperial cataphracts' battle axes.

More than three hundred dead within sight of his encampment on the near hill, and dozens more lying out of sight to the east, where the village stood, ridden down as they'd spurred away. It seemed to Sam Monroe there would certainly be at least four hundred dead, when totaled.

Though the villagers had been spared the empire's usual rapes and murders, valuable squash and pumpkin fields had been trampled, their last harvest destroyed. Farms had been burned or battered – pine-plank buildings feathered with the cataphracts' arrows, doors smashed in, the furnishings axed for campfires.

The valley fields were quiet now, excepting only a raven's occasional croaking, only the dawn wind's murmuring through the grass. A cold wind, almost freezing, with Daughter Summer dead. Sam's soldiers believed Lady Weather would be weeping sleety tears for her, as Lord Winter came walking south from the Wall.

The imperials' commander had already recovered his killed and wounded, taken them back south through the pass, heading farther south of the Sierra Oriental to what would certainly be a triumph in Mexico City for the Empire's first victory against the North.

Not a great battle – only a clash of cavalry along a mountain border. But Sam Monroe's army had lost it. The charm of always winning was broken.

The Heavy Cavalrymen not digging john-trench, tending horses, or guying tents, were watching from the hill as he walked through the grass from corpse to corpse; Sam could feel them watching… He knew so many of the dead. A small army was full of familiar faces – even though the chill afternoons had still been warm enough to spoil these, begin to swell them with rot in the army's brown wool and leather.

He knew a number of these troopers – and all the officers, of course. He'd saluted them in battle many times as they'd poured past him to trumpet calls in a flood of fast horses, shining steel, and banners.

Sam walked through the grass, visiting this one… then another. The women were the worst. If it hadn't been for the women, he would not be weeping. They lay, slender bones broken, soft skin sliced, faces – some still beautiful – astonished at their deaths. Where bright helmets had been beaten away, gleaming drifts of long hair, black, red, and golden, lay in broken grass.

He visited the dead for a Warm-time hour, then went back up the hill as the picks and shovels were brought down to bury them.

Two Heavy Cavalry corporals were posted as guards just beyond ear-shot of his tent (wonderful Warm-time phrase, 'ear-shot'). They saluted as he passed. Sam saw Margaret had brought his breakfast to a camp table by the tent's entrance.

"Sir, please eat." She stood watching him. "Done is done." A favorite saying of hers.

"The wounded?"

"Mercies found the last of them, eleven WT miles east. They've started bringing them in." She saw the question in his face. "Fifty-three, sir. And Ned Flores. He lost a hand… left hand."

Sam sat at the table. The breakfast was scrambled chicken eggs, goat sausage, and tortillas – almost a Warm-time breakfast out of the old copybooks, except the sausage would have been pig, the tortillas toasted bread with spotted-cow butter.

"You have to eat."

He took a sip of hot chocolate. "Thank you, Margaret."

Margaret turned and marched away, her boots crunching on the last of morning's frost, her rapier's length swinging at her side.

Margaret Mosten, old enough to be an older sister, always served his breakfasts. Always served every meal. She would come riding up to his horse, on campaign, with jerk-goat or crab apples for his lunch. Boiled water, safe from tiny bad-things, for his leather bottle. No food came to him, but from Oswald-cook by her hand.

Her predecessor, Elder Mosten, smelling something odd in chili, had tasted Sam's dinner once along the northern border by Renosa, then convulsed and died.

"To you – only through me," his eldest daughter, Margaret, had said, then resigned her captaincy in Light Infantry, and come to Sam's camp to take charge of it with a much harder hand than her father's had been.

Though that fatal chili's cook had hung, Margaret had ridden back to Renosa, inquired more strictly, and left four more hanging in the square – the cook's wife for shared guilt, and three others for carelessness in preparation and service.

"That many," Sam had said to her when she returned, "and no more."

"The cook and his wife were for that dinner;" Margaret Mosten had answered him, "the others were for our dessert."

So, as with many of his followers, the burden of her loyalty leaned against Sam Monroe, weighed upon him, and tended to make him a short-tempered young man, everywhere but the battlefield.

He could take bites of the breakfast tortilla, but the sausage and eggs were impossible. He must not – could not – vomit by his tent for the army to see.

"Too young," they'd say. "What is Sam, twenty-six, twenty-seven? Too young, after all, for a grown man's work. All that winning must have been luck."

And Sam Monroe would have agreed it had been luck – the good fortune of having the Empire's old, incompetent generals for enemies; the good fortune of having fine soldiers to fight for him; and what had seemed the good fortune of being born with battle-sense.

But battle-sense had led to victories; victories had led to ruling. And ruling had proved a crueler field than any battleground, and weightier duty.

It seemed to Sam, as he tried to eat a bite of eggs, that his will, which he had so far managed to extend to any necessary situation – as if a much older, grimmer, and absolutely competent person stood within him – that his will, his purposes, had turned him into that someone else, a man he would never have liked and didn't like now.

The proof lay beneath the hill, in dead grass.

But even that grim and forceful person had not come forth this morning to eat goat sausage and eggs.

Margaret came back, her sturdy bootsteps quieter; the light frost was melting under the morning sun.

"Sir…" With official business, "sir" was all the Captain-General required. Sam had early decided that honorifics promoted pride and stupidity; he had the south's imperial examples.

"The brothers," Margaret Mosten said.

"Lord Jesus." He ate a bite of sausage to show he could, then took deep breaths to quiet his belly. The Rascobs had to be spoken with, but a little later would have been better. "Will they wait?"

"No," Margaret said. "And it would hurt them to be told to."

That was it for the sausage. Sam took another deep breath and put down his two-tine fork – silver, a spoil from God-Help-Us. "I'll see them."

"You should finish your eggs."

"Margaret, I don't want to finish the eggs. Now, send them up." Odd, when he thought about it. Why 'send them up'? The camp was on high ground, but level. His tent was only 'up' because he gave the orders.

Different bootsteps, stomping. The Rascobs appeared side by side and saluted – a fashion that had settled in the army after the early days in the Sierra. It was something all soldiers apparently loved to do.