Mulaghesh remembers the sight of a four-year-old child standing alone in a field at night, his face alight with firelight and glistening with tears, screaming for his mother. They marched on and left him there, perhaps to live, perhaps to die. Such a thing did not matter to them.
Figures staggering from burning homes, their nightgowns ablaze, stumbling through the smoke like ravaged puppets. The screams of livestock as Yellow Company herded them through the streets to be slaughtered for their next meal. She remembers the monotonous butchery, killing those they couldn’t keep and leaving them to rot, the air so thick with flies. Better to rot than feed Continentals.
An errant memory skitters through her mind: a terrified horse charging into a child’s chain swing and hanging itself. This huge, graceful creature thrashing helplessly in the mud. She and the rest of Yellow Company walked on as if this occurrence were nothing of note.
In three weeks they destroyed eight villages, and once word got out that a rogue band of Saypuris was speeding through the heart of the Continent’s farmland, all the other villages quickly became abandoned.
By the time Yellow Company reached the gates of Bulikov, the city was slowly realizing that Biswal and Yellow Company had single-handedly destroyed two-thirds of their future food stores in a span of weeks. If a siege began now they could only last a handful of days. Their only hope was that the Continental army would return and crush Yellow Company.
Bulikov’s hopes rose when they saw the Continental army on the horizon. But the Continental forces were not returning to deal with Yellow Company: rather, the Continentals were in full flight, General Prandah at their heels. Over the past weeks the Continental troops had seen the columns of smoke north of them and understood that their homes were being destroyed. They’d begun to desert in droves, morale decaying with each passing day. Then General Prandah had pressed the advantage and pushed the wavering forces into a complete rout.
Sandwiched between General Prandah and Yellow Company, the Continental army was utterly destroyed. Within hours, Biswal stood before the gates of Bulikov and demanded that they open. And open they did, creaking and crackling.
But before he could take a single step in, Colonel Adhi Noor arrived, leapt off his horse, and struck Biswal on the chin.
Mulaghesh remembers it like it was only last week: Noor, sweating, stained with smoke and blood, standing over her fallen commanding officer and crying, “What have you done? By all the seas and stars, Biswal, what in all the hells have you done?”
***
Like all officers under Biswal, commissioned or otherwise, Mulaghesh was brought before General Prandah himself and questioned extensively.
“What was Biswal’s goal in his expedition?”
“To destroy the Continent’s resources, sir.”
“And is that why you killed the Continental villagers? Were they a resource too?”
“They were the enemy, sir.”
“They were civilians, Sergeant.” Prandah, of course, did not accept Biswal’s promotion of her to lieutenant.
“We felt it made no difference, sir.”
“Why do you say that? When was this decided? Who decided this?”
She was silent.
“Who decided this, Sergeant?”
She struggled to recall. The days were a blur, and she could no longer remember which decisions were hers and which ones were an unspoken choice by the whole of the Company.
“What do you mean, it made no difference, Sergeant?”
“I…I think I meant that there was no difference between the soldier and the civilian keeping that soldier on their feet, sir.”
“There is a difference, Sergeant. It is the same difference between a soldier and a raider, a murderer. And neither you nor Biswal have any right to decide otherwise.”
She was quiet.
“Did all of the soldiers agree to the March?” asked Prandah. “Did no one resist?”
She was aware of her face trembling. “N-No…”
“No? No what?”
“Some…some objected.”
“And they wouldn’t participate?”
She shook her head.
“What did they do, these soldiers who would not participate?”
She did not speak.
“What did they do, Sergeant?”
And suddenly she remembered, as if it’d all been a dream or something that had happened so long ago: Sankhar and Bansa, standing before Biswal and saying they would do no more, no more of this, and Biswal slowly looking them up and down, and suddenly calling her name.
And this realization, this bright, brittle memory, formed a tiny crack inside her, and suddenly she understood what she’d done, what they’d all done, and she burst into tears and sank to the ground.
From somewhere she heard Prandah’s voice, speaking in horror, “By the seas, she’s just a girl, isn’t she? This soldier is just a child.”
***
The Saypuri Military chose complete disavowal. Perhaps taking a page from the Worldly Regulations, the Saypuri commanders decided to simply never admit that the March had happened. Yellow Company was far too large to lock up and throw away the key, and Saypur desperately needed manpower to maintain their control of the Continent. In addition, some commanders commended Biswal’s accomplishments: he’d won the war, had he not? He’d ended nearly three years of bloody conflict in hardly more than a month.
Biswal was reassigned on the Continent to other, less-glamorous duties. Mulaghesh had no such privilege. She wondered what they would do with her when her service ended. Dishonorably discharge her? Abandon her on the Continent? But in the end their verdict, most likely inadvertently, was the cruelest one possible: they sent her home, with modest honors.
Home. She had never expected to ever see it during the Yellow March. But returning to Ghaladesh proved to be no different than walking the ruined countryside of the Continent: it was strange, intolerable, distant, and muted. She could not adjust to the easy, thoughtless way of living. Her mouth took issue with spices, with salt, with properly cooked food. It took her more than a year to learn to sleep in a bed again, or how to live in rooms with windows.
She tried her hand at jobs, at marriage. She proved to be a miserable failure at all of them. She began to understand, bit by bit, that the devastation she’d wrought did not end on the Continent: perhaps there was some secret place inside her that she’d never known was there, but she’d put it to the torch, too, and only now in civilian life did she realize what she’d lost.
And then one day, drunk in a wine bar in Ghaladesh, she was staring into her cup and thinking about how bitter the idea of tomorrow had become when a voice said over her shoulder, “I was told I’d find you here.”
She looked up and saw a Saypuri Military officer standing behind her, dressed in fatigues. She found she recognized him: he was the one who’d punched Biswal, who’d been there when Prandah had interrogated her. Noor, she thought his name was. Colonel Noor.
He sat down next to her and ordered a drink. She asked why he’d found her.
“Because,” he said slowly, “I think you, like a lot of veterans, are having trouble adjusting. And I wanted to see if you’d like to reenlist.”
“No,” she said violently. “No.”