Mitchell Smith: Kingdom River

The brigadiers, Jaime and Elvin Rascob, were twins, scarred and elderly at fifty-eight – both tall, gray-haired, gray-eyed, baked brown and eroded by weather. Elvin was dying of tuberculosis, caused by poison plants too small to see, so he wore a blue bandanna over mouth and nose as if he were still a young mountain bandit and sheep-stealer.

"We just rode in." Jaime Rascob's face was flushed with rage. "And saw what comes of sending Light Cavalry where infantry should have gone."

"Told you, Sam," Elvin said, the south's blue cotton fluttering at his mouth. "Heavy Infantry to hold the pass – Light Infantry to come down the hills on them. Would have trapped those imperials, maybe killed them all. Told you." Dying, Elvin was losing courtesy.

"Ned thought he could deal with them." Sam stuck his fork in the eggs and left it there.

"Ned Flores is a fool kid-goat – a Light-Cavalry colonel! What the fuck does he know about infantry situations?" Courtesy lost entirely.

"It was your fault, sir." Jaime's face still red as a rooster's comb.

"Yes, it was my fault." Sam looked up at two angry old men – angry, and dear to him. "Scouts reported only a few hundred imperials, and from the careful way they came, with no great force behind them. So, it seemed to me that Light Cavalry, with room to run east if they had to, could handle their heavies without our infantry to lever against. I was wrong."

"Three hundred dead," Jaime Rascob said.

"That's incorrect. It will be nearly four hundred."

"Goodness to Godness Agnes…" Elvin, through his bandanna – certainly a Warm-time copybook phrase. "Almost three out of every four troopers dead. And we told you!"

"Elvin – "

"Jaime, I'm just saying what everybody knows." A statement definite, and with the weight of years as well, since he and his brother were each old enough to have been their commander's grandfather.

Squinting in morning sunlight, Sam pushed his breakfast plate a little away. The smell was troubling.

A mistake. He noticed the colonels noticing; an exchange of glances. He picked up his fork, ate a bite of eggs, then another. Took a sip of chocolate. "Do we know the cataphracts' commander?"

"Voss says it was likely one of the new ones, probably Rodriguez." Jaime didn't sound convinced, though the Empire, slow at everything, had begun to allow promising younger officers commands. Michi Rodriguez was one of those 'Jaguars.'

"Whoever," Jaime said, "he whipped Flores with just six hundred heavy horse."

"Less."

"Not less, Elvin," his brother said. "Three squadrons, at least."

Elvin didn't argue. Any argument with Jaime Rascob ended only after a long while.

"Still a damn shame." Elvin cleared his throat behind the bandanna. "We could have bottled them in Please Pass, maybe killed them all."

Sam chewed a bite of sausage and managed to swallow it. "My decision to let them come through. My decision to send only Light Cavalry down to deal with them. My fault." The breakfast was hopeless – one more bite and he would be sick for all the camp to see. The young Captain-General, who'd never failed, vomiting his breakfast while troopers rotted in the mountain grass.

"You got too big for your bitches," Elvin said, certainly not the correct Warm-time phrase. The old man took little care with them, rarely got them right.

"It's a mistake I won't make again." Sam took a sip of chocolate. A smell of spoiling was rising from the valley.

"We can't win every fight, Elvin." Jaime gave his brother a shut-up look.

"For sure not campaigning like this!" Elvin coughed a spatter of blood into his kerchief, turned, and marched away into the camp. His brother sighed, and followed him.

Sam turned on his camp stool to watch them go. Two tough old men. Both wore heavy double-edged broadswords scab-barded aslant down their backs, the swords' long grips wound with silver wire. Elvin stumbled slightly on the uneven ground. Half a year ago, Portia-doctor had reported he was dying. She'd heard bad sounds in his lungs when she'd thumped him.

It had been a difficult examination. Elvin had thumped her in return, then attempted a kiss.

"He's just a boy," she'd said to Sam, "in an old man's body."

"Then he's younger than I am, Doctor."

"Yes, sir. In many ways younger than you are."

Portia-doctor had apprenticed in medicine under Catania Olsen, which said everything in North Map-Mexico – and south in the Empire as well. Portia had learned as much as that dear physician, four Warm-time medical copybooks, and seven years of hard experience could teach.

She'd been pretty those years ago, a sturdy young woman with dark brown hair and eyes to match. Now, the army work and civilian work had worn her. And losing Catania to plague at Los Palominos had worn her more.

Howell Voss, commanding the Heavy Cavalry, called her "the noble Portia," looked for her in any group or meeting, and was thought by a thoughtful few to have been in love with her for some time.

"Why doesn't he just tell her so?" Sam had once asked his Second-mother, after an officers' evening asado.

"Because," Catania Olsen had said, tightening her mare's saddle girth, "because Howell has lost an eye, and fears being blind and a burden. And because he believes that Portia is very fine and good, and that he is not."

…Sam sat and watched the Rascob brothers walk away down the tent lines. The other, grimmer Sam Monroe inside him began to consider inevitable replacements for the two of them, certainly following Elvin's death. Jaime's replacement, then, would of course destroy him.

'Fools do top with crowns, and so bid friends farewell.' A copied Warm-time line, and very old.

The Captain-General of North Map-Mexico pushed his breakfast plate a little farther away, took a deep breath to calm his stomach, and sat at his camp table with his eyes closed, not caring to watch the Sierra's shadows – lying across a wide, meadowed valley lightly salted with flocks of sheep – slowly shorten as the sun rose higher.

Bootsteps. No one in the army seemed to walk lightly. "You didn't finish your eggs."

"No. I've had enough, Margaret."

"Oswald-cook goes to some trouble with your eggs. Herbs."

"Oh, for Weather's sake. " The Captain-General picked up his fork, reached over, and took another bite of eggs.

"Sir, there's no winning forever. You don't have to be perfect." It was a burden-sharing she often practiced. At first, it had annoyed him.

Margaret stood in bright, chill morning light, watching him eat two more bites of egg. "They had room to run."

"Yes – if they'd run, instead of fighting." Sam put his fork down a little more than firmly. Margaret took the plate, and went away.

It was a great relief; he was tired of people talking to him. He stood to go into his tent… get away from distant murmurs and the troops' eyes, their unspoken concern – concern for him, as if he were the party injured. They were wearing him away like constant running water. Wearing that lucky youngster, Small-Sam, away – and so revealing more and more of the present Sam Monroe. Someday, they might be sorry…

He pulled the tent flap back – then let it fall, turned, and walked out into the camp, stepping on his morning shadow as he went.

The mercy-tent was the largest the army raised – but not large enough, now. Wounded lay in a row by the entrance – silent as was the army's pride, though Sam saw some mouths open for cries unvoiced. He went to those first, and knelt by stained raw-wool blankets. He knew many.

He spoke to them in turn, and most – those in least agony – could listen, even make reassuring faces to comfort him. Two of them tried to make jokes.