He left them to their japes. War is absurd. Those men had lost friends in the last five minutes, and yet had forgotten it for a moment: woodsmen and farm boys once again, joking now about whether their friend’s balls had dropped.
And everywhere it was similar. People were playing out what were possibly the last moments of their lives as if they didn’t even matter. A woman darted past one of the mundane warrior Nightbringers under Antonius Malargos’s command. The warrior was smeared with blood, and he’d just sprinted across the fields to get to this chaos, death all around. His bloodlust was running high. She surprised him as she burst out of that tent. Did he slash?
Her life would be changed or ended in a decision that wasn’t made in his head but in his arm—or perhaps it was a decision that had been made in his heart in the months and weeks before this day. And he would be changed forever by this fraction of a second.
He would know himself to be the kind of man who murdered unarmed women, or the kind of man who hesitated where others did not.
He hesitated—and two souls were saved.
But everywhere it was the same. As if something in the human heart longs for chaos and finality, however violent.
The dregs of the Blood Robe army and its camp followers had been pushed into the river, and were still being pushed as Kip and his men approached.
The once-pristine water ran brown and red, churned mud and men returning to mud. The bank was so clogged with bodies you couldn’t see the ground for a hundred paces. Many men can’t swim, and almost none can when you strap half again their weight in armor to their bodies. Most of them had realized it when they reached the riverbank. But others panicking behind them had pushed, pushed relentlessly.
They’d shoved and stabbed and slashed and trampled each other.
And the Nightbringers had fallen on them pitilessly—desperate for vengeance on all these men who’d tried to kill them, who’d taken their homes and livestock and neighbors, who’d killed and pillaged and despoiled their hard and happy lives. Kip’s army fell on all these men, most of whom had thrown away their own weapons in order to run away faster, only to find no escape. All these men—but not men only.
The camp followers were huddled here, too: the crippled and sick and old and the traders and the merchants and the wives and lovers and their children and all who hope to live on the leavings an army produces.
It is impossible to spare the innocent and the partly innocent hidden at the back of the mob when you’re pushing the whole damned lot into the river, stabbing and trampling any who resist. Hard to spare them, even if you’re trying. Kip wasn’t sure most of his men were trying.
Some of the camp followers, not weighed down by armor or greedily hanging on to goods, would escape by swimming. But many had drowned already. It was only Kip’s arrival and a massive roar from Tallach that brought a relative quiet.
Finally Kip’s officers could make themselves be heard and obeyed. With a few moments to breathe and think, the survivors surrendered and Kip’s men left off their killing.
The survivors were seized and enslaved.
The Blood Robes and their followers looked no different from much of Kip’s army, and Kip’s men had a cast to their faces that said they’d be damned if any of these captives slunk away in the night and turned up at their fires later, claiming to have been on their side all along. So they notched their ears immediately, here, over the bodies of their comrades.
Smiths would later cauterize the flesh. Notches first.
The Nightbringers would leave the slaves here, give or sell them to the people of Dúnbheo. Otherwise, the captured would slow down Kip’s army, and serve it poorly. They would gladly become spies against their new masters.
But the Nightbringers wouldn’t be able to get rid of all of them. There were exceptions; there always were. One of Kip’s men would come forward. He had four children. His wife had been killed by the pagans. His extended family killed. He needed a new wife if he was to keep fighting, would take a slave if she hadn’t been roughed up too much.
There was no saying no to that, not without Kip’s alienating his own people. You could ask a man to die, but when he bared his heart to you, you couldn’t deny him what he and his fellows saw as justice.
As the dawn yields to day, one exception gave rise to others. One attempt at justice gave a hundred excuses for injustice. Other men need wives, too, sure, milord!
Forbidding the rape of captured women had taken a number of hangings to enforce—those hangings had raised eyebrows, too, letting Kip know he was treading a dangerous line. It had come down to explaining that they weren’t being hanged for raping slaves, but for disobeying a direct order. That made sense to the men in the nonsense that was war.
But a leader can get away with only so many nonsense orders before his men doubt his judgment, and that was poison.
And the unintended consequences piled up.
Having forbidden the rape of the slaves only made them more appealing as wives. One man somehow got permission to marry a slave wife four separate times. No one was sure what happened to the first three; Kip suspected murder but couldn’t prove it. Kip had the man gelded and relieved of his hands, then notched and sold.
Kip was revered. It made him uncomfortable. It was a fool’s gold. It wasn’t real. It was an image they projected onto him. But some images are more helpful than others. They still saw how young he was, some of them.
Kip couldn’t let himself be revered as some kind of holy child. Children could be fooled. Those who were too coarse to understand how love and obedience can be paired needed to learn fear.
So Kip had reinstituted the old tradition of the Year of Jubilee. It had been subverted before by the Ilytians and thence in the rest of the satrapies, but it was at least an established principle—it had a history—and the good or ill of it all came down to enforcement.
If one is to barter against human nature, one might as well make the best deal one can. The Year of Jubilee came every seven years, at which time slaves were freed.
They’d found a mention of which year it had last been celebrated and from there decreed that the tradition had lapsed rather than been broken. Thus, a slave-wife taken now would be freed five years hence on Sun Day. As a free woman on that day, she would be free to divorce her husband then. Any children she bore would be hers to take with her, and the husband would be liable to give her one-tenth of what he made in a year or a goat, whichever was more.
‘This is the best I can do?’ Kip had asked Tisis.
‘During a war, when passions are hot?’ she’d said. ‘This is better than I thought you’d get.’
His idealism had also meant his army got a fraction of what they might have for selling the slaves. Each slave’s contract now stipulated they would be in servitude for only five years. Every trader used that fact to bring the price down, though Kip knew that none of them intended to free the slaves in five years. He couldn’t free the slaves immediately lest they take up arms against him again; he couldn’t keep the slaves himself; but the slaves he sold would be slaves forever—unless Kip lived, and unless he won, and unless he was around in five years with enough power to enforce his will.
How did I become a slave trader?
And why was he so idealistic, when Jubilee had been tried and had failed before?
It wasn’t just that Kip had grown up in Rekton, where they had no slaves and the institution didn’t seem to fit naturally with all the people under Orholam’s being equal. It was more than that. Every slave woman he looked at reminded him of his mother: bereft, cast off, disgraced, despised, vulnerable to abuse and thereby somehow a lodestone to those who would abuse her. Her saw her in every enslaved woman’s face.
I couldn’t help you, mother. I couldn’t heal you. But maybe I can keep these women from being hurt as much as they would be.