“Good. Now come on.”
The two of them turn and walk around the hill, where the smoldering ruin of a town sends a great column of smoke into the sky.
A string of lights glows through the smoke.
Please take me away, thinks Mulaghesh. Take me away from all this….
The darkness of the tunnels floods back in.
“—nough trucks for us to use,” Pandey is saying. “Terribly difficult getting around here, as I’m sure you noticed.” They round the corner, and the elevator up appears. “Well. Was it everything you expected, General?”
Mulaghesh does not answer. Pandey, a little troubled, flips the switch. The elevator begins grinding away, and they slowly rise.
When they come to the top, she says, “Excuse me for a moment, Sergeant Major.”
“Certainly, General.”
Mulaghesh walks out, slowly paces around the dock until she finds a spot where no guards can see her, leans up against the wall, and vomits.
***
The ride back to the fortress is quiet and solemn. Pandey is not half so cheerful anymore.
“Did you see Bulikov, General?” asks Pandey after a while.
“Did I what?”
“In the mines,” he says. “Did you see the…the Battle of Bulikov?”
She is silent for a long while. “No.”
“I…I see,” he says, embarrassed. “Never mi—”
“But I did see…something. Just not…that. This happened to you, too, Sergeant Major? You saw the Battle?”
“Y-yes. When I first went into the mines, yes, ma’am. I saw it happening again, like it was happening right in front of me. But I saw it outside of myself. Does that make sense? It was like I was watching myself. And you. You were there. Before the onslaught, and the flying ship…”
“I remember. Is this common? Have these…I don’t know, flashbacks happened to anyone else?”
He shakes his head. “Very rarely. I don’t think many wish to discuss it. But it only happens, I think, to those who have seen combat. A lot of it.”
They drive along in silence. Mulaghesh wishes she knew something of the Divine. Was there something of Voortya’s that made this possible, this…memory bleed? What is it down there that wakes up these images, these visions, and sends people plummeting down into them, forced to witness (or rewitness) horrors?
She watches as a shrike flits up to the top of the barbed wire fence and hangs the headless remains of a field mouse on one of the spikes. The image of corpses impaled on stakes flashes before her eyes. The thinadeskite in the charcoaler’s hut.
What’s the connection? What does thinadeskite have to do with all this?
“Mostly all I do here in Voortyashtan, General,” says Pandey, “is drive. But, do you know, somehow this is still my oddest assignment yet?”
Though she doesn’t say so, Mulaghesh fervently sympathizes.
***
Come 1800 hours that evening, General Turyin Mulaghesh—recipient of the Jade Sash, the Pearl of the Order of the Kaj, the Star of Kodur, and the Verdant Heart of Honor—is quite definitely very drunk, wandering the cliffs north of Voortyashtan with a half-empty bottle of wine and her stomach swilling with several foul concoctions she purchased at some sea shack in the city.
She isn’t the only one here: all along the narrow path she spies lovers, grumbling drunks, and tiny campsites crowded with silent, hollow-eyed men. She passes one old man leaning on a walking stick and staring out at the evening sky, and asks him what all these people are doing out here. He simply makes a wide gesture indicating the sea and the hills and returns to his silent watching.
Lonely places draw lonely people, she thinks as she walks farther north, the fort on her right. They echo inside us, and we cannot help but listen.
Mulaghesh keeps walking, past the tiny camps, past the couples lounging on their furs, past one man quietly sobbing in the shade of a tiny, leafless tree. She takes a deep sip of wine, tries to convince herself that it makes her feel warm, and keeps walking.
Perhaps I am still plodding on in the Yellow March, she thinks. Me and Biswal, wearily holding the banner…
She takes another sip of wine. Almost gone now. She doesn’t know where it came from, but she wishes she’d brought more.
She almost speaks aloud the familiar refrain: Woresk, Moatar, Utusk, Tambovohar, Sarashtov, Shoveyn, Dzermir, and finally…
“…finally Kauzir,” she finishes. The little town just outside the gates of Bulikov.
She remembers the names of the towns still. She always will, she knows. They’re written on the inside of her skull. She’ll go to her grave still knowing them, even though the towns themselves no longer exist. For Yellow Company visited each one of them during the Summer of Black Rivers. And every home, every building, every farm, every single sign of civilization in each of these villages was put to the torch.
She stares out to sea, remembering.
***
Biswal told them over and over again it was to be a civilized, strategic procession. “We’re here to eliminate resources,” he told them. “No more. Burn the farms and the Continental front lines will grow weaker and weaker.”
But it quickly became such a hard thing, executing a civilized war. The people in these villages did not evacuate quietly, no matter how much Yellow Company ordered them to. They did not simply watch as Yellow Company burned every last remnant of their lives. Rather, they fought: men, women, and children. And Yellow Company fought back.
She remembers waiting, crouched in a wheatfield, the sights of her bolt-shot trained on a window in the second story of a farmhouse. Just below, on the ground, one of her soldiers lay bleeding, a small arrow sticking from his collarbone, one hand pawing at it, trying to pull it out. She waited, waited, and then in the window a figure appeared with a short bow.
A girl. Maybe thirteen. Mulaghesh didn’t see, because her finger was already pulling the trigger, already sending eight inches of steel hurtling at the girl, who just…
Dropped. As if she never were.
She can’t remember what happened to the wounded soldier. Died, probably. A lot of them died, at first. Until somewhere around the town of Sarashtov, when Yellow Company stopped asking the Continentals to surrender and evacuate, stopped giving them warning at all. Too many of their own soldiers had been lost to a lucky farmer with an axe or a child with a bow and arrow. Yellow Company began simply sneaking in during the night, setting the thatched roofs alight, and rounding up the livestock in the ensuing chaos.