Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

She stared at them blankly, the foot soldiers of the Salmae’s army, those glorious, exultant bringers of justice. They sat in their huddles, spears leaning haphazardly nearby: Grasshopper-kinden and Dragonflies in padded cuirasses that were dirty and torn. Many were wounded, and she saw at least two who must have died overnight.

They looked frightened, she realized. They were tired and abused, men and women who had no taste for this conflict, but had been brought to it anyway, sore and bloodied and unwilling. It struck her that some of them probably had family and friends in the village that had been burned, or in places like it, and they had not been able to defend them or get them away to safety. They none of them want to be here. The revelation, in the face of the frenzy she had felt before, was shocking.

And how many had she consigned to death by not warning Alain of the trap? Was that costly victory really worth it?

‘This has gone on long enough,’ she said, and went off to seek out Lowre Cean.

When she arrived at his tent she found him sitting up in his hammock, dressed in a crumpled white silk robe. There was a bowl in his hand, two jugs at his feet, one lying on its side, already empty.

‘Morning, Maker Tynise,’ he addressed her, with a slight and melancholy smile. There had been no guards nearby. If she had been an assassin, she could have slain him right there, and walked out leaving his followers none the wiser. She briefly wondered if that was his intent.

She sat down, cross-legged like a schoolchild, and gazed up at him. ‘Prince Lowre, there is a question I have to ask you – and then a request, after that.’

‘I thought as much. I’d expected you sooner, but you seemed to be so… so caught up in this…’ His hand made a vague gesture encompassing a world of skirmish and conflict beyond the cloth walls of his tent.

‘You are a war hero,’ she said flatly.

His smile turned sour and he shrugged, before hooking another bowl from beneath the hammock with one bare foot. He stooped to reclaim it and the full jug, then divided the remaining wine between the bowls, with some juggling, before eventually handing her one of them. Had she not been watching carefully she would have taken him for a drunken clown, save that he did not spill a drop.

The wine she drank was the colour of blood, dry and sharp. After a mouthful, she repeated, ‘You are a war hero,’ almost accusingly. ‘They all say so. When the Wasps came, you commanded an army, and of all the Commonweal tacticians, you alone slowed the Empire down. You commanded at Masaka, when the Sixth was destroyed. In the Lowlands a man like you would be found at the heart of things, a statesman and a leader. When times of trouble come, such a man would be the man persuading others, rather than having himself to be persuaded.’

‘Ah, the war,’ he sighed, as though he was just catching up with her first words. ‘You’ve had war in the Lowlands, of course. For two years, was it? But then the Wasps had learned a lot of lessons after they finished with us. They had no idea, poor fools. I think, if they’d truly understood the size of the Commonweal, just how many of us there were, they’d never have started. It was a mad venture, and we outnumbered them massively on many of the battlefields, especially at the start. What could they have thought when they saw the size of a true Commonwealer army?’ He raised one white eyebrow at her, and she looked back at him uncertainly.

‘Contempt,’ he pronounced precisely. ‘Because if they had ten thousand, and we had a hundred thousand, still they had real soldiers, and we had… farmers, tradesmen, labourers. We depended on men and women whose lives were spent tilling the land, who had the next harvest to worry about, whose hands reached for the hoe and the rake, not the spear.’

She made to retort, but he silenced her with just a small motion of one hand. ‘I was at the Monarch’s court when news first came of the Wasp invasion. We had known that they were seizing the cities at our south-eastern border, of course, but we had the castle at Shol Amen, that had never been taken, and we… we had not believed it was possible, that those hill tribes would even dare to step on to the royal earth of the Commonweal. I remember…’ He drank, eyes looking into a lost past. ‘I remember how the Monarch called for his greatest seer, and demanded to know what response the crown should make to such impudence. She said… she said there were one million reasons to surrender and only one reason to fight. One of us, it might even have been Felipe Shah, asked her what that one reason was. “Freedom,” she replied. The Monarch ordered that we should resist the Empire to our last breath. He was a bold man. His daughter, who is Monarch now, might not have done the same.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Tynisa admitted. ‘Surely there is nothing greater to fight for than freedom?’

‘One million reasons,’ Lowre intoned solemnly, before draining his bowl. ‘I had a son, you know. My son, my Darien. He was a hero. I planned the battles, but he fought them. He even continued fighting after the Treaty of Pearl. He would never accept that we had lost. They killed him, of course, as they always do. My bold and dashing son. And all the men I led, in my victories,’ he spoke the last word with an unexpected bitterness and force, ‘where are they now? How long do you think I kept them alive, after all, after victory turned to ashes? All those farmhands and smiths and woodsmen and artisans, with spears in their hands. All my clansmen, my Mantis warriors, my nomads. All the many many who followed my banner.’

He turned his aching red eyes on her, for a moment appearing such a fierce figure that she felt a shock of fear run through her.

‘I have known so many people during my long life, Maker Tynise, and most of them I led into a just war, for a good cause. What, as you say, is sweeter to fight for than freedom? Surely freedom is worth any price? But one million? One million? Can you even conceive of that number? Nobody asked the seer what the one million reasons to surrender were: men and women and children, families, communities, friendships, all that would have been saved had we simply bowed the knee to the Empire. If I could do it over again, I know what I would counsel.’

‘But the Empire may come again,’ she insisted. ‘It may come against the Lowlands again. Are you saying that you… that we should simply surrender?’

He just stared at her, the empty bowl dangling loose in his hand. ‘Ask Felipe Shah how he feels. Ask the Monarch for her thoughts. We were there, and we saw it all, from beginning to end, and all the fine nobles’ sons and daughters who buckled on their armour to the tune of a just cause and then never came back; all the village men and women whose lives would hardly have changed, tilling the earth for their prince or for some Wasp governor, but who instead we mustered up and gave spears to; all the idealists, the reformed thieves, the fierce warriors, who followed us, and believed us. I remember them all, every one. Of all the people I ever knew, the dead far outweigh the living. And they are dead before their time, before their children could grow, before they could even have children. We murdered a generation on the battlefields of the Twelve-year War. We extinguished a score of noble lines and a million lives. And we lost. And you ask me if freedom was worth it?’ His bitter smile, out of context, could have been taken for humour. ‘I led all the people I ever knew onto one battlefield or another, Maker Tynise. And in the end, here I am, and where are they ?’

‘But this…’ She was off balance now, and the only thing she had to cling to was her purpose in coming here. ‘These brigands, surely this is a…?’ But she found that she could not now utter the words ‘just cause’.