The night so full of squealing, and the scent of fresh blood.
They watched her do it. The whole camp. They didn’t react. Just listened as Biswal told them these two were deserters and cowards, which Yellow Company would not tolerate. Could not and would not tolerate, not at all. “Those who will not make war upon our enemies,” he told them, “are also our enemies.”
She wiped her blade on her sleeve. How bright the blood was.
“And we will treat them as such,” said Biswal. He turned around and went back into his tent.
Signe and Mulaghesh sit in silence in the boat.
Signe asks, “How old were you?”
“Sixteen.”
“By the seas…”
But she tells Signe that that’s not an excuse. She knew it was wrong. These children trusted her. But if they’d deserted, and led the Continentals to Yellow Company, then it would have all been for nothing. Every awful thing they’d done would have been for nothing.
Or perhaps…Perhaps Mulaghesh simply didn’t want for the March to end. It was all she knew by then. If Bansa and Sankhar left, then the spell would break.
But the spell broke anyway, when the Summer ended.
How she wished to die then. Out of the service and adrift in the civilized world, she couldn’t tolerate what she’d done. She tried to bait the world to kill her, to do the thing she had no courage for. But it wouldn’t. Life went on; it just kept happening.
She tries to tell Signe what a curse that is, to keep living. To have nothing happen to you at all.
But then one day Colonel Adhi Noor was there, offering her a way back into the military in that rundown wine bar, the air full of the stink of smoke and moldering wood. And suddenly she thought she might be able to make it up to everyone. She couldn’t erase the past, but maybe she could keep it from happening again. Some young men and women, Continental and Saypuri, never made it home because of her. The least she could do was make sure others didn’t fall to the same fate. It’d be a way to make the dead matter. A way to put back some of what she’d broken.
Forty years of training. Forty years of trying. All smashed to pieces in the Battle of Bulikov. And then Shara Komayd whispering in the dark by her hospital bed, telling her about allies and generals and promotions….
Everything was supposed to change then. But it didn’t. The higher she went in the world, the more useless she felt. These analysts and officers and politicians described the spending of a life with the cold, clinical language of a banker. So far from the front lines, far from the churning, wet earth and the night full of screams. It all just kept happening, only now she didn’t see it in person.
But even though she was now so far away from it, she began to dream of it more and more, awakening in the night wet with sweat, the sounds of the Battle of Bulikov still ringing in her ears. And her arm ached and ached, yet no medicines would dull it. Some of the doctors suggested, somewhat politely, that perhaps the pain was not in her body, but in her mind. In other words, perhaps it hurt because she needed it to hurt.
One day she visited a military hospital—the first time she’d seen front-line troops in some time. And all those young men and women lay in bed, looking like they’d been chewed up by some machine….Yet every single one of them struggled to salute her. She was a general, after all.
And suddenly the pain in her arm was unbearable. As if she had knives in her elbow, sawing into the bone, needles grinding up through her marrow and splintering her humerus like termites. She knelt alone in the staircase of the hospital, white with pain, sweating and gritting her teeth and trying not to scream, not to call to the doctors and say cut it off, cut this thing off of me, cut it out of me now, now, now.
She passed out. Some orderly found her there, lying on the stairs, looking like a corpse. When he woke her he asked if something was wrong. She said yes.
Something was wrong. And now she knew what it was.
What a gutless lie it all was. The battles kept happening, and she was just as helpless as she’d always been. For all her medals and for all her power, she wasn’t making a lick of difference in the lives of those she commanded. Soldiers and civilians alike were still dying. And she couldn’t let herself forget.
“So I ran,” says Mulaghesh. “I didn’t know what else to do. It hurt to stay. I was lying to myself and to everyone else if I stayed. So I went and hid myself away on a beach.”
But it didn’t help. Every night she woke up with battle echoing in her ears, and every morning her arm hurt.
Until one day she got a letter from the prime minister. Deadly little Shara Komayd, the woman who brought down countless governments and officials—even those of her own country, in the end. And somehow Shara knew the three words that would bring Mulaghesh crumbling down too, that one wish Mulaghesh had fervently hoped to fulfill for so many years, the words scrawled on a piece of paper and brought to her by a sweat-soaked Pitry Suturashni…
“A way out,” Mulaghesh says. “She was offering a way to do what I’ve always meant to. To help make things change. And, by changing, to make everything matter.”
“Here? In Voortyashtan?”
Mulaghesh is silent as she stares out at the black waves. “Yes. I think so. If Voortyashtan can change, then anything can change. Right?”
Signe says nothing as she adjusts the tiller.
Nothing is everlasting. Nature has proved this to us again and again. Not even the Divinities were everlasting, for they too fell just as the mountains themselves surely will one day.
If I leave anything behind in this world, I hope it is my work. I hope the streets I helped pave and the water I helped pump and the stone I helped carve speak not my name, but the name of innovation, the name of progress, the name of hope.
The world may not go on forever. But that does not mean we cannot try to make tomorrow better.
—LETTER FROM VALLAICHA THINADESHI TO UNKNOWN RECIPIENT, 1652
Over the years, General Lalith Biswal has developed quite the delicate nose for smoke, an olfactory palette more refined and developed than the tongues of the most accomplished oenophiles. He can tell in one sniff, for example, if the smoke he’s smelling is coal smoke, charcoal smoke, or wood smoke; and from there he can determine the wood type, be it teak or oak or ash, as well as if the wood in question has been seasoned properly or if it’s green wood.
Right now, as he walks through the smoldering ruins of the insurgents’ camp, he smells rather a lot of wood smoke, most of it green—but it would be, as the woods are now alight in the east. But he can smell other aromas in the smoke as well—paper and hot metal, broiling soil and gunpowder.