It is dawn. Another day of battle. I feel nothing.
In the distance, the low, muted roar of tens of thousands of enemy infantry rises from the great empty plain. Our force numbers perhaps two thousand, better armed and positioned but grossly outmanned. Angry-looking storm clouds are gathering overhead. In this calm moment, the world smells of river water and dirt and sighing trees.
Then, with a hollow thwack, the first pulse of an artillery barrage begins. Our cannonade responds in kind.
To my immortal eyes, indifferent to death, this world is like a fantastical dream.
Enemy artillery shells streak like shooting stars through the tendons of primeval, leaning trees, staining their chattering leaves with flame and showering the ranks below with splinters and shrapnel. A drummer hits a staccato rhythm that mingles with the deep bass of thunder. Under a ghostly haze of smoke, men in red coats and tricorne hats feed shot into dragon-mouthed cannons that vomit hell.
Over the firing, a hushing sound grows as the clouds release their water. Artillerymen rush to cover the cannons and powder with sheets of waxed canvas. During the downpour, no cannon can fire. Muskets are equally useless.
I draw my saber. Through the dense leaves, the plains beyond the grove are swimming with greenish shadows. A horde of enemy infantry, stampeding.
What is the first thing?
Lightning flashes, and I am charging out of the grove, joining our sepoy contingent as they maneuver onto the rain-pricked plain. An inhuman howl rises from thirty thousand throats. The men around me fall into formation with the same inevitability as the falling raindrops. Where they land is just as meaningless.
And I find Batuo beside me, defensively wielding a long spear.
I swing the saber, slashing through flesh and rain. Searing bright roots of lightning anchor the sky and a veil of rain drapes itself over chaos. The guns have gone silent, leaving only the ring of steel weapons and the screams of men in triumph or despair.
Dancing over the mud, a pike catches me in the hip. I slash its owner with my saber. With my free hand, I yank the weapon out and keep swinging. I am screaming now as well, adding my own bellow to the thunder’s, feeling the vibration of both in my chest.
Batuo guards my back as a faceless legion of infantry spreads around us, avoiding our weapons as naturally as a school of fish parting around a shark. Still, there are too many, pouring past us toward the grove. Another blade slides over my shoulder. My left arm stops working correctly.
I drop to a knee, still thrusting with my saber. The mud is becoming heaped with bodies of the fallen, forming a monstrous barricade.
“Peter!” screams Batuo.
The monk stands alone, his long, tasseled spear in both hands. His turban is soaked, face streaked with wet soil. His expression is of despair.
“Why must you do this!? What is wrong with you!?”
Rain coursing over my face, I tug my saber across the flesh of another attacker. The punishment and the truth of it are missing from the act. I truly am a damaged machine following its course, the same as these mannequins who are made of meat. I can no longer satisfy pravda—even as I follow its phantom into the depths of death and destruction.
I swing again.
And now Batuo is upon me, fingers laid like stones over my damaged shoulders. He drags me to my knees, his lips against my ear, voice thundering.
“Enough!” he shouts. “This is not who you are!”
Batuo sweeps an arm at the field, crawling with wounded soldiers.
“You cannot fight for a man and call it justice. Your Word transcends humankind,” he shouts.
Shrugging his hands off, I plant a fist in his chest and launch the monk away from me. He falls with a splash, ignoring the war cries and staggering attacks of the final group of soldiers who throttle past.
“What do you know of my Word?” I shout to the mud.
Clutching my saber, I drag myself toward the fallen avtomat.
“I thought you would come back on your own,” says the monk, “if I gave you enough time.”
Batuo lies on his back, eyes open, not resisting. As I approach with my blade out, he betrays no fear on his mud-streaked face, only sadness. The downpour is coming to an end, the main infantry force moving on. Under spitting rain and sunlight, the world is bright and still.
“How do you know me?” I ask, again. “Tell me the truth!”
“The longer our souls are parted from our bodies, the more we forget. And you were lost for such a long time,” he says, sitting up, voice breaking.
“I have never been lost,” I tell him, raising my saber. “Never in my life.”
“What do you know of your life!?” asks Batuo, dragging himself out of the mud and onto his feet. “Peter, we last met thousands of years ago.”
“Impossible,” I say, but my blade is wavering.
“We rode in glory for the Yellow Emperor. You and I shattered the forces of southern Qi and ended their practices of slavery and sacrifice. In service to the mighty Huangdi, we gave the people knowledge and forged the first dynasty of man. I thought…if we fought together again, I prayed you would remember.”
I lower my saber, considering.
“I lost you to her,” continues Batuo. “The mother of silkworms. Wife to our emperor and his equal. Leizu.”
As the name leaves his lips, a flash of recognition ignites in my mind. I remember the hanging in Tyburn.
Leizu.
I sheathe my saber and draw my dagger. Falling forward, I let the point dimple the damp fabric of his robe.
“If you truly know me, then tell me,” I whisper, “what is my true Word?”
Only a handful know this thing. A little girl and a mechanician and a dead tsar. The answer will reveal Batuo as a fraud—and then I can continue to follow my path into oblivion. But the monk only smiles.
“You have no Word,” he says.
“What?”
“Our souls were never written in any language that exists today. When I knew you last, on the banks of the Long River, we called it zhēnxiàng. Roughly, it means—”
Something sparks in my mind, a translation.
“Truth and justice,” I say.
“More or less,” he says, nodding.
The legacy of Favorini is broken. This overwhelming feeling, this urge—the first thing—it is not even called pravda. The first thing is older, more complicated, and harder to know. The ground seems to be crumbling beneath my feet. Desperation constricts my chest, an overwhelming fear mingled with another feeling—hope.
A deeper truth exists, waiting to be found.
The muddy plain swirls in my vision, an open field inviting me to go every direction at once, and none. So I choose one and start walking: east, in the direction of British tall ships that will continue to ferry fresh-faced young men to India for as long as rich old men want more.