Someone called out: “No — he’s not!”
Which made a dozen people — including Rahm — laugh. Rahm whispered to Mantice, who was standing beside him, “That’s Tenuk,” though stocky Mantice knew it was plowman Tenuk being funny as much as Rahm did. They both grinned.
“You speak for the people here,” the mounted man said, which was funny in itself because Kern probably wouldn’t say anything more now. But the man spoke as though he’d heard neither Tenuk’s No nor the laughter. “You are the leader!” While his horse stepped about, he pushed the silver rod into his shirt, reached down, unfastened his sling, and lifted out his powergun — for a moment it seemed he was going to hand it to Kern as a gift.
Rahm had seen a powergun that morning, but not — really — what it could do.
Flame shot out and smacked Kern just below his shoulder. Kern slammed backward four feet — without either stepping or falling: upright, his feet just slid back across the grass — the left one was even slightly off the ground. Blood fountained a dozen feet forward. The horse’s flank was splattered and the animal reared twice, then a third time. Rahm was close enough to hear the meat on Kern’s chest bubble and hiss as he fell, twisting to the side. One of Kern’s arms was gone.
When it hit the ground, Kern’s remaining hand moved in the grass. Kern’s heavy fingers opened, then closed, with not even grass blades in them. Kern’s face was gone too — and half Kern’s head.
The bearded man lowered the powergun from where the retort had jerked the barrel into the air. “Your leader has been killed. So will you all be killed — unless you announce your surrender!”
Rahm felt a vast and puzzling absence inside him. Nothing in it seemed like any sort of sense he could hold to. Then something began to grow in that senseless absence. It grew slowly. But he felt it growing. At the same time, something — a strange understanding — began to grow in the face of the bearded man on his horse, who raised his gun overhead.
Suddenly the man turned sharply in his saddle and barked back at the troops:
“They refuse to surrender! Attack!”
Though he had learned far back to fight well, like many big men, Uk did not like fighting. Uncountable campaigns ago, he’d also learned that little Mrowky actually gloried in the insult, the attack, the pummeling given and received, the recovery, the reattack. Mrowky could make as much conversational jollity at losing in a melee as he could at winning.
Since men — and sometimes women — so often feel obliged to start fights with big men, Uk had grown grateful for Mrowky’s willingness, even eagerness, to jump in when others, to prove themselves, picked quarrels with him in strange towns and taverns. Since people tended not to start fights with runty men like Mrowky (who enjoyed the fight so much), hanging out with broad-shouldered, beer-bellied Uk was a way to guarantee a certain frequency of entertainment — possibly it was the core of their friendship. For both were different enough from each other to preclude close feelings in any situation other than war.
Uk had an expansive, gentle humor he used largely to mask from his fellows a real range of information and some thoughtful speculation, while Mrowky was simply a loud, stupid little man, who’d been called and cursed by just those words enough times by enough people so that, if he did not actually believe they were true, he knew there was something to them. Thus the friendship of the big soldier, who was also smart, flattered Mrowky. Both could complain about each other in fiery terms, starred with scatology and muddied with proto-religious blasphemies.
But they were devoted.
Perhaps some of that devotion came from the knowledge both shared, that their time in the Myetran army had taught them: life in the midst of battle was on another plane entirely from that in which relationships could be parsed (a concept Uk would understand) or parceled out (an idea Mrowky might follow), analyzed, or made rational.
With ten other soldiers, Mrowky and Uk had been stationed just along the turnoff at the common’s south corner. (Other units of a dozen each had been deployed at seven more points around the green.) When the first villagers hurried by, still unsteady from the grating whine of the high speakers and more or less oblivious to the soldiers (basically because they were just not used to seeing soldiers standing quietly in the shadow), light from an opened door spilled over the flags.
A young redheaded woman passed through it as a young redheaded man — clearly a brother or a cousin — came up beside her. They disappeared, displaced by others rushing to join the villagers gathering on the grass. But Mrowky had given Uk an elbow in the forearm; and in the darkness, his breathing had increased to a tempo Uk knew meant the little man now had the grin that said, “I like that girl — she’s hot!”
When the lights had rolled onto the common, Uk and Mrowky had moved up to the edge of the illuminated space, per orders. As, with his microphone, Nactor had ridden out to address the villagers, Uk wondered, as he did so often, just out of sight, whether the populace ever really saw them or not. Just how aware were the stunned and disoriented peasants of the soldiers in their armor, waiting for the word?
In two years, Mrowky and Uk had been through this maneuver seventeen times in seventeen villages. It had taken the first half dozen for Uk to realize that it did not matter whether the villagers surrendered or not; the attack came in either case. Over those half-dozen times, Uk had listened to Nactor’s amplified address, watched the elimination of the spokesman (that’s how it was referred to: though in half a dozen villages now, the spokesman had been a woman), and awaited the final order with a growing distaste — till, by the seventh time, he’d begun to block out the whole thing.
Over the first ten times (which is how many times it had taken Mrowky to learn what Uk had learned in six), Mrowky had watched the process with hypnotic fascination, awed at its duplicity, its daring, its efficacy. But his attention span would have been strained by any more; so now he too gave no more mind to the details than did the other soldiers.
When the attack sounded, you pulled out your sword, moved forward, and began to swing. You tried not to remember who or what you hit. A lot of blood spurted on your armor and got in the cracks, so that you got sticky at knees and elbows and shoulders; otherwise it was pretty easy. The villagers were naked — most of them — and scared and not expecting it.
Among his first encounters, Uk, out of what he’d thought was humanitarianism, had — with some forethought — not always swung and cut to kill. It seemed fitting to give the pathetic creatures at least a chance to live. Three days later, though, he’d seen what happened to the ones who were just badly wounded: the long loud deaths, the maggoty gashes, the bone-breaking fevers, the cracked lips of the dying. After that, from the same humanitarianism, he’d used his skills to become as deadly as he could with each blade swing at the screaming, clamoring folk — who simply had to be decimated.
That was orders.
Indeed, there was some skill to it — like avoiding the flesh-burning power beams lancing through the mayhem from the mounted officers. Best thing to do (Uk had explained to Mrowky a long time back, when the little guy’d gotten a burn on his right hip) was to glance up from the carnage now and then and keep Kire’s horse a little before you, not drifting too far to the left or the right of it — since the mounted lieutenants had the sense (most of them) to avoid powergunning down each other.
You fought.
And you tried not to remember individual slashes and cuts you dealt out to bare shoulders and ribs and necks. (After the diseases and lingering deaths among the wounded in that first campaign, Uk tried for lots of necks.) Sometimes, though, an incident would tear itself free in the web of perception and refuse to sink back into the reds and blacks and chaotic grays and screams and crashes and howls that were the night.