Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling

He glanced at Nero, who nodded encouragingly, though the Fly did not know what he was going to say.

Salma was not entirely sure of that himself. What scared him was that they were now all listening, waiting for it. He looked from face to face: at the Fly gangers still clustered together, the escaped slaves, the bandits, their leader Phalmes with his arm about Sfayot’s eldest. The pair had slept together the night after the defence of the village, but Sfayot himself had not seemed to mind. ‘He’s strong that one, in lots of ways,’ the Roach-kinden had said of Phalmes. ‘She could do worse for a while.’

‘You’ve followed me this far,’ Salma began to address them. ‘I didn’t ask you to. I didn’t ask to be your guide or your leader, but here we are, all of us, and it seems to me we cannot go on like this. We cannot just drift aimlessly and finally end up beached somewhere not of our choosing. We need direction. Thus far you have looked to me for that. So from now, if you will let me, I will accept the mantle you have offered. I will offer you leadership, purpose and direction. Let me tell you what direction I would be taking you, though. Then you may not wish to continue with me, but we will see.’

He left a pause there. How did this come about? He had no answer but, as he said, here they all were.

‘Sfayot,’ Salma indicated, and the Roach-kinden man nodded. ‘If we came across more of your family, you would want to help them wouldn’t you?’

‘Of course,’ the Roach said. ‘No question.’

‘Of course,’ Salma echoed, ‘because they’re your family. We all understand that. So tell me. ’ He looked over at the Fly youths and singled one out. ‘Chefre, if we ran into more of your gang, you’d want to look after them, surely?’

She nodded cautiously, saying nothing. They were close-mouthed, that lot.

‘You would,’ Salma confirmed, ‘because there are ties and obligations. That is what makes us who we are. And Phalmes, I have spoken to you. I feel I know you. You cannot escape who you are or where you come from. If we met a Mynan on the road, a man of your city, you would aid him. You would have done so even before you fell in with us. Can you deny it?’

‘I cannot, nor would I,’ Phalmes said clearly, though wondering where this was going.

‘Family,’ Salma stressed for them. ‘Family is family, whether it’s blood, or brotherhood, or citizenship, or even kinden. And we look after our family, and they look after us. I used to think that family was a Commonweal thing, and that only my kinden really understood it. But that was just because I did not understand what held the Lowlands together. Family. ’

He paused, bracing himself for the mental leap he would have to make.

‘We are all part of the largest family in the Lowlands, and it is a family that grows larger every day. It was never small, but it has never been as large as it is now. That family is the dispossessed, the victims, the cast aside, the ill-used. Look at us all, from different lands and different cities, different trades and races, and yet we are all family, and there are thousands of brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts, children who are our family, and who now need our help. Our help against the men who would do this to them.’ His sweeping gesture took in the burned Wayhouse, the cremation pyre. ‘They are our enemies. Let us become theirs.’

‘Just what are you talking about?’ Phalmes demanded. ‘We can’t exactly take on a Wasp army!’

‘Can’t we?’ Salma said, and the certainty in his voice shook them. ‘We can attack their scouts, take their supplies, aid their victims. We can strip the land so they go hungry. We can nip at them and draw a tiny bead of blood, a hundred ways. We can force them to change their plans, because of us: divide their forces, hesitate, falter. Or that is what we shall do if you follow me. We can take the war to them, without ever meeting them on the battlefield.’

Some of them were aghast at the idea, some were keen, most were simply bewildered. ‘I shall give you tonight to consider all I’ve said,’ he told them. ‘Anyone who wishes to find their own path is free to do so. Those who are still with me in the morning will have cast their lots in with me. In the Commonweal there are men called Mercers who ride the roads and keep them safe. Those who stay with me shall become my new Mercers.’

And he turned from them and headed for the Wayhouse. The others had made their camp in and around the broken building, and those that wished to go could do so without feeling that he was watching them.

Salma slept easily that night. He had met the burden of his responsibility, and his conscience was clear.

When he awoke it seemed very quiet beyond the drape. He knew what that must mean. He rose and dressed slowly, then took up his staff. Finally, he pushed the drape aside with the point of the staff and went out into the stark dawn light.

They were all there. Not one of them had gone. More, they had been joined by someone new.

She was there, radiant with her own light even in the sunlight, glowing with rainbows, and gazing only at him. Grief in Chains and Aagen’s Joy — and who knew what other names she had gone by — had come for him.

He could only imagine how it had seemed to Phalmes and the others, this vision striding in with the first rays of dawn — a sorceress, a mirage, and here for Salma only. It must have seemed like a sign for them, the final augur in his favour.

As she approached him now, he felt blinded by her beauty. Her lightest touch on his arm thrilled him. ‘I’ve found you at last,’ she said.

‘How?’ he asked.

‘You came so far for me,’ she whispered. ‘How could I do any less for the one I love?’

Food was arriving, in cartloads, in baskets, in handfuls. Men and women who had tilled their own land, or the land of those that had owned them, were heading out now daily to reap vacant fields. Children swarmed through abandoned orchards like locusts. Farmhouses were raided with the thoroughness of the truly hungry. When they found the hastily abandoned country seats of the rich in their isolated estates, they climbed the walls and broke down the gates, coming back with armfuls of expensive delicacies or coal for the fires. Traders and peddlers threshed and ground, while artisans built the clay ovens to make bread. Hunters came back dragging their kills or driving errant livestock.

Nobody was eating well but nobody was starving, and Salma could have asked for no more.

‘So what’s your next move, lad?’ Nero asked him.

‘Our next move is to move, then to keep moving,’ Salma said. ‘Otherwise we’ll exhaust what’s around us. We’re still just scavenging, though on a greater scale. The bulk of these non-combatants need to find sanctuary, and Sarn or Collegium remain our best chances.’ He watched the woman Grief in Chains as she moved through the people. She spoke to few of them, barely even acknowledged them, but her shining presence changed them as she passed. Just looking at her brought a smile to Salma’s lips, and he knew it would remain the same however dark the times became.

She called herself ‘Prized of Dragons’ now.

‘News has been short from westwards,’ Nero reminded him. ‘And that army north of us can only be heading for Sarn.’

Salma nodded. ‘And yet what option do we have?’ He looked at his hands. It was something Stenwold did, when he had difficult decisions to make. ‘Sfayot! Phalmes! I need to speak to you!’ he called out.

The Roach and the Mynan came over, and it was clear that both of them had been expecting something from him for a while.

‘We’re moving, tomorrow,’ Salma informed them. ‘Sfayot, you must take the needy onwards, at your own pace, gathering and foraging as you go.’