‘As for us, well, we leaned our bloodied pikes against the plinth of the toppled monument facing those broad steps, sat down in the wreckage, and discussed the weather.’
THE SUN HAD SET. THE BOY, AWAKE AT LAST, TOTTERED INTO THE Khundryl camp. He held his arms as if cradling something. He heard the woman’s cries – it was impossible not to – and all the Khundryl had gathered outside a tent, even as the rest of the army pushed itself upright like a beast more dead than alive, to begin another night of marching. He stood, listening. There was the smell of blood in the air.
Warleader Gall could hear his wife’s labour pains. The sound filled him with horror. Could there be anything crueller than this? To deliver a child into this world. By the Fall of Coltaine, have we not shed enough tears? Do we not bear their scars as proof?
He sought to roll over in his furs, wanting none of this, but he could not move. As if his body had died this day. And he but crouched inside it. Born to a dying mother. Who gathers round her now? Shelemasa. The last of the surviving shoulder-women. But there are no daughters. No sons with their wives. And there is not me, and with this child, this last child, for the first time I will not witness my wife giving birth.
A knife pressed against his cheek. Jastara’s voice hissed in his ear. ‘If you do not go to her now, Gall, I will kill you myself.’
I cannot.
‘For the coward you are, I will kill you. Do you hear me, Gall? I will make your screams drown out the world – even your wife’s cries – or do you forget? I am Semk. This whole night – I will make it your eternal torment. You will beg for release, and I shall deny it!’
‘Then do it, woman.’
‘Does not the father kneel before the mother? In the time of birth? Does he not bow to the strength he himself does not possess? Does he not look into the eyes of the woman he loves, only to see a power strange and terrible – how it does not even see him, how it looks past – or no, how it looks within? Does not a man need to be humbled? Tell me, Gall, that you refuse to see that again – one final time in your life! Witness it!’
He blinked up at her. The knife point had dug deep, now grazing the bone of his cheek. He felt the blood running down to drip from the line of his jaw, the rim of his ear. ‘The child is not mine,’ he whispered.
‘But it is. You fool, can’t you see that? It will be the last Khundryl child! The last of the Burned Tears! You are Warleader Gall. It shall be born, and it shall look up into your face! How dare you deny it that?’
His breath was coming in gasps. Do I have this left in me? Can I find the strength she demands of me? I … I have lost so much. So much.
‘This is our final night, Gall. Be our Warleader one last time. Be a husband. Be a father.’
A feeble, trembling hand fumbled with the furs covering him – he caught its movement, wondered at it. My own? Yes. Groaning, he struggled to sit up. The knife slipped away from his bloody cheek. He stared across at Jastara.
‘My son … did well by you.’
Her eyes went wide. The colour left her face. She shrank back.
Gall pushed the furs away, reached for his weapon belt.
Summoned by a mother’s cries, Badalle walked with her children. Saddic stumbled at her side. They were all closing in, like an indrawn breath.
The army was on the move. She had not believed these soldiers capable of rising yet again, to face the wastes ahead. She did not understand the source of strength they had found, the hard will in their eyes. Nor did she understand the way they looked at her and Saddic, and at the other children of the Snake. As if we have been made holy. As if we have blessed them. When the truth is, it is they who have blessed us, because now we children will not have to die alone. We can die in the arms of men and women, men and women who for that moment become our fathers, our mothers.
But, here in the Khundryl camp, a new child was about to come into the world.
When she arrived, the clawed warriors surrounded the birth-tent. She saw the corpse of a horse nearby and walked over to stand upon it.
Her children saw and they faced her, for they knew what was coming. Looking down, she met Saddic’s shining eyes, and nodded.
Badalle awakened her voice. ‘There is a mother this night.’
Warriors turned to her – they had no choice. She would make them listen, if only to give them the one thing that she had left. Where it all began, so it ends. This is what I have, the only thing I ever had. Words.
‘There is a mother this night
In the desert of dreams
Beneath stars burned blind
And soldiers must march where
She leads them on the dead trail
By this truth we are all bound
Past the bodies left in the ditch
She looks up where we fail
And the sky is without end
Follow her for the time of our birth
Is a birth still to come
There is a mother this night
Who leads an army of children
What will you ask of her
When dawn awakens?
What will you demand of her
That she would give
If only she could?
There is a mother in the night
For a child lost in the dark’
Faces stared up at her, but she could make no sense of what she saw in them. And she could barely remember the words she had just spoken, but when she looked down at Saddic he nodded, to tell her that he had them, gathered like the toys in the sack dangling from one hand. And when he is a man, he will write this down, all of this, and one night a stranger will find him, a poet, a singer of tales and a whisperer of songs.
He will come in search of the fallen.
Like a newborn child, he will come in search of the fallen.
Saddic, you will not die here. Not for many, many years. How do I know this? And the woman who sleeps in the other room – who has loved you all her life – who is she? I would see that, if I could.
The mother’s cries were softer now.
A man appeared. Walked through the silent crowd that parted from his path. Strode into the tent. Moments later, the mother inside was weeping, a sound that filled the world, that made Badalle’s heart pound. And then, a small, pitiful wail.
Badalle sensed someone standing near her. She turned to see the Adjunct.
‘Mother,’ Badalle said, ‘you should be leading your children.’
‘Did you truly think I would miss this?’
Sighing, Badalle stepped down from the carcass of the horse. Reached out and took the Adjunct’s hand.
She flinched as if stung, stared down at Badalle as if in shock. ‘Don’t do that,’ she said.
‘Mother, when will you let yourself feel?’
The Adjunct backed away, and moments later she was gone, lost in the crowd. If it made a path for her, Badalle couldn’t see it.
‘There is a mother this night,’ she whispered, ‘but to her the stars are blind.’