Mitchell Smith - Kingdom River

"Yes… See that people are careful with her. She carries to fight left-handed or with both hands. And there're parry-marks on the hilt of that scimitar – but no scars on her face, no scars on her sword arm when she reached up to undo the thing's harness." Salutes from the two cavalrymen guarding his tent. One of them had eased the chain catches on his breastplate slightly.

"Johnson Fass."

"Sir!" A more rigid attention by Corporal Fass.

"Getting too fat for that cuirass?"

"No, sir." Hurried fumbling to tighten the catches.

"If we had a sudden alarm, Corporal, and you mounted to fight with that steel hanging loose on your chest, then one good cut across it with a saber or battle-ax would break your ribs like pick-up sticks."

"Won't happen again, sir."

Sam walked on. The young commander had spoken – unheard, of course, by the hundreds of dead buried beneath the hill. He wondered how many such disasters it would take, before the corporals stopped saluting…

"About our guest, Margaret; I want people mindful that if she kills someone, I can only send her away. And if someone kills her, it means difficulty with Boston. So, no attempted love-making, no insults exchanged, no discourtesies, no duels on duty or on leave. Let the officers know that's an order."

"Too bad," Margaret said, "because it's going to be a temptation. What the fuck do those New Englanders have in mind, sending us a girl like that?"

Sam stopped by his tent's entrance. "What they first had in mind, was to make us wonder what they had in mind."

"Right."

"And Margaret, I thank you for not mentioning it was a bad beginning, for her to find me drunk… Now, I need some sleep. And Lady Weather keep the Second Regiment's dead from visiting my dreams."

He put back the tent's entrance flap, and ducked in.

Margaret started to say, "They would never – they loved you," but Sam was gone inside. And just as well, she thought. My foolish mouth would have hurt him more.

No lost cavalry troopers came to his dreaming.

Sam dreamed of being a boy again in their mountain hut… and his Second-mother, Catania, was reading to him from an old copybook traded out of the south for twenty sheep hides. She read to him often, fearing he might take to the mountains' signs and tribe-talk instead of book-English.

"'… There were a few foreign families come to the prairie, Germans, Baits, Hungarians. But they were not felt as foreign as they might have been in cities or small farming towns, since all of us had come to the prairie as foreigners to it, so in Western-accented English or Eastern English or Southern English – or in English hardly English at all – we made do together, and were Americans.

In time, we were to master the rough grasses, the black earth beneath, though it cost us all our lives to do it. The sky we never mastered. We were too small, too low. We were beneath its notice.

… One Sunday, we took the wagon the long, rutted road to church, and in church, in the last row of benches, I saw for the first time a sturdy, small, blond little girl, her hair in braids. She was wearing a flour-sack dress with little blue blossoms on it – not as nice a dress as my sister's – and she was to become my friend.'"

His Second-mother stopped reading then, and put the top-sewn copybook away. Her eyes, in the dream, were the gray he remembered; the scar down her cheek as savage; her hair was white as winter.

"What happens?" Sam asked her.

"Sweetheart, always the same things happen," his Second-mother said. "Happiness is found… then it is lost… then perhaps found again. And the finding, the losing, and the perhaps, is the story."

…Sam woke, saying, "Wait!" aloud – though for what, he wasn't certain.

A voice from outside and a courteous distance said, "Sir…?"

Sounded like Corporal Fass.

Sam called, "Just a dream, Corporal," and got up off his cot.

There was no more time for mourning, for considering his stupidity in sending a man like Ned Flores to lose a fight. No time for more vodka. The young Captain-General, that almost- never-defeated commander, must get back to work.

Ned wouldn't much mind the missing hand. He'd have abright steel hook made, to wear and flourish with a piratical air, like the corsairs in that most wonderful of children's Warm-time copybooks.

Sam stepped outside the tent. Afternoon, and the morning wasted. "Fass!" What in hell was the other man's name?

"Sir?"

"Colonel Voss to report to me."

"Sir."

"The Rascobs as well."

"Sir – the brigadiers rode out of camp a while ago. Rode north."

And no good-byes. The old men were still angry. And were about to be made much angrier.

"Chancellor Razumov, have you read this?" The Lord of Grass, at ease on a window couch in the Saffron Room of Lesser Audience, shook sheets of poor paper gently, the slight breeze disturbing the prairie hawk that perched on his other forearm.

"Yes, my lord." The chancellor, very fat, still made an easy half-bow of continued attention. Tiny bells tinkled down the closure of his yellow robe.

"And your opinion of our fugitive librarian's report?"

"Accurate, from what we know otherwise. It describes minor – though formidable – rule, ruler, and ruled. Certainly to be taken into account as they lie along the Khanate's southern flank, and might disturb your movement against Middle Kingdom. Still… perhaps not so formidable, lord, since the librarian writes they've lost a skirmish to the Empire, apparently just before his message left their camp. A Light-Cavalry matter, but still a loss."

"Yes… Perhaps a loss, perhaps not." The Lord of Grass exchanged glances with his hawk. The open window's autumn sunlight, dappled through figured fine-cotton curtains, seemed to stir across them in a chill breeze.

"Certainly a defeat, my lord, according to accounts, according to the Boston people as well."

"A defeat, but perhaps not a loss. Tell me, Razumov, how best does one prepare winners to continue winning?"

"By the victories themselves, lord."

"Oh, no. Victory's lessons are few – but defeat's are many. Something we might well keep in mind… I believe our commonsensical Captain-General of North Map-Mexico has deliberately made a false demonstration to us of his apparent limitations in command… and at the same time has taught a hard lesson to his army, particularly his Light Cavalry – our principal arm, by no coincidence. He has taught them a painful first lesson in the uncertainties of war."

"An expensive lesson, surely. We understand there were heavy losses."

"And so, all the more effective." The hawk shifted on the Grass Lord's arm. "Though, since the loss was so heavy, I suspect it will be quickly followed by a triumph in revenge."

"But lord, is the young man that clever?"

"Perhaps not, Razumov. Perhaps only that sensible… This damned bird has shit on my sleeve."

An Entry… As I have been appointed the role of historian, librarian, and informational to the young Captain-General, I feel it behooves me – what a Warm-time word! 'Behoove.' Its dictionary definition, of course – but also perhaps as in shoeing a horse, preparing for an action, a journey? So much we will never know…

Still, as occasional historian of Lord Monroe's rule, it behooves me to make my entries on our army's inferior paper, then bind the note-books myself. Clumsy. Clumsy work.

There came a scratching at my tent-flap fairly soon after the New Englander's descent – a sight (seen over the ranks of uneasy soldiers) to remember. It was all childhood's horror stories come to life, though concluding as only a small girl swaggering with a sword. Her huge Made-beast left there, crouched and moaning, apparently resting from its long flight.