The climb was short, and soon they walked through a forest of palm trees. The fallen fronds crunched under their feet. A few minutes later, Kartholome brought them to the edge of a slope above a large valley. He indicated with a wave that this was the view he had brought Melio to see.
Melio stepped beside him, wrapped a hand around a palm trunk, and looked out over a compound of buildings and clearings, water tanks and training fields. Military units marched through maneuvers in one area. In another, soldiers sparred with wooden swords. In still another archers shot at distant targets. Men and women filed in and out of the buildings. A line of wagons pulled in and people began to unload them, passing the crates into the gaping mouth of an enormous storehouse. For the second time in recent days, the sigil of the league blazed out at him, this time burned into the slanting roof of the warehouse. The leaguemen, it seemed, wanted even the heavens to see their prosperity.
“What is all this?”
“This is what the league gets up to in private. This is where they train their army.”
“The Ishtat?”
“No, no. That’s on Lavren. This is Sire El’s little project.” Kartholome propped his foot up on a root and leaned on his thigh, continuing to survey the scene below them. “The league started a breeding program years ago. The idea was that they could make quota slaves themselves instead of having to collect them from around the empire. The Fanged Rose let them take over the Outer Isles to do whatever they wanted. Sort of compensation for Dariel blowing the platforms to bits. The last eight years they’ve been hard at it, but they were breeding even before that. Ever wondered why the Ishtat are so loyal to a bunch of cone-headed freaks? The Ishtat are loyal because they’re part of the family. Each and every one of them, Melio Sharratt, was fathered by a leagueman and a concubine herself bred for the purpose.”
Melio’s gaze snapped over to him.
“You heard me,” Kartholome said. He ran his fingers down his beard and then gave it a tug. “It’s quite a regime they have set up. I don’t know much about it-just what some of the Ishtat let slip when drunk and disgruntled with Papa. Seems that all the leaguemen are descended from just a handful of founding members. They breed children, and select some of them to have their heads bound. Those become leaguemen. Others they make Ishtat. Others become workers and all that. Some get discarded. Heard about worse things, but you don’t even want to know the details.”
Melio did not want to know the details, the logistics, the methods of such mass impregnation. Yet he could not help thinking about it. He saw storehouses of beds, leaguemen moving from one to another, a woman in each, babies crying beside them. He hated the thought. Leaguemen raising children like livestock, while he and Mena had not made their real love into a child. He still wanted nothing more than that. By the Giver, if she had only allowed it when they had the chance!
“I see you’re thinking about it,” Kartholome said. “Don’t. Like I said, the Ishtat are raised on another island. These guys are a newer thing, not the same bloodline. Sire El’s army. They’re from quota stock, born and raised for it. If they don’t show an aptitude for fighting, they’re sent away as regular quota. Or they used to be sent as quota. That’s all changed now.”
Melio asked, “So what are they training for?”
“Good question. Answer: any eventuality. To the league it doesn’t really matter who wins or loses, because they know that either way they’re the real winners. If that’s all that matters to you-if you don’t have a sliver of morality in your body-well… it’s easier to adapt. No qualms and questions to wake you at night, you know? These soldiers may help take over the Other Lands. They may be given something to do in the Known World. I think it all depends on what happens with the Auldek invasion.”
“Any chance they’re being trained to help protect the empire?”
Kartholome turned a withering look on Melio. “I think the league has decided that the empire’s days are numbered. Maybe the Auldek will finish it. If they don’t manage it, Sire El’s boys will finish whatever’s left. Either way…” He slid his fingers down his beard again and let the fate he pulled from it loose on the air.
All three men heard the running feet at the same time. Geena bounded into view. She slid to a halt and wiped her ginger hair back from her forehead before saying, “We have a problem. An Ishtat patrol found our boat.”
Clytus cursed.
“Gets worse. They saw me.”
The plan they came up with was simple. Geena smirked disapprovingly at it, but she took up her post without a word. Using the point of Kartholome’s fishing knife, she made a small cut in the flesh just above her knee. She smeared blood up and down her leg, and then she sprawled across the path as if she had fallen. Melio and Kartholome hid behind trees off to one side. Clytus sank down behind a root network on the other, draping a few palm fronds over him for good measure.
It’s mad to do this, Melio thought. We’re not at war with the league. I could approach them and explain… what? That the queen had sent him to spy on them? Would he convince them that he had not seen or would not report what was clearly in view? If he named himself he would die just the same as if he did not. He had not fully understood it before, but he was so pressed up against the league’s private parts that nothing he could say to them would explain it away. What the league was doing was deeply wrong. Witnessing it put him at war with them, whether he declared it or not.
The men arrived at a jog. Melio heard their feet grinding the coarse sand, pressing fronds flat. One of them demanded that Geena stand and face them. She answered that she could not stand. She had hurt her ankle. Twisted it running away from them. The soldiers moved again, assuring her that she was in for more hurting if she tried anything.
Melio slid one eye out from behind the tree trunk. Two Ishtat soldiers stood near Geena. They had their swords out. Another had stopped a little way down the path, looking nervous. Geena clutched at her ankle in pain, her face a mask of fear. The expression looked absurd to Melio. She would never quiver that way. She would never let her jaw drop like that or lean forward in that manner, surely offering a view of her breasts. The Ishtat did not know her, though. Melio pulled his head back behind the tree.
The soldiers demanded to know who she was, if she was alone, how she got here, what she was up to. Geena answered their questions in a pitiful, trembling voice that Melio could barely recognize. He was not sure if she was a terribly good actress or a terribly bad one. He guessed it depended on what things one expected to come out of the mouth of a distraught young woman. She was sputtering and circuitous and even sounded a little insane. Piecing together what she was saying was as confounding for Melio as it must have been for the soldiers. But it gradually took shape.
She had been on a fishing boat, she explained. She and her father and brother. They were working the channel when a league galley ran them over. So stupid of them! Of her brother, she meant. Stupid, stupid to be in the way of the big ships. She told him they shouldn’t taunt the big ships, but he did.
Nice use of the truth, Melio thought. Exaggerated, adjusted, but with a twisted kernel of fact in it. She had them listening, which was strange in itself. Ishtat did not usually let people talk much. They should have pinned her to the ground beneath a savage knee and fanned out in the woods. Ask questions later. But they didn’t. These soldiers weren’t the sharpest.
“Melio was so stupid!” Geena wailed. “I hate him! I’m glad he fell in.”
Melio glanced at Kartholome, hoping to share a wry smile at the use of his name. The pilot did not seem to be listening. He stood with his back plastered against a palm trunk. One of his arms was a flat paddle at his side; his other had unbuttoned his shirt and was fumbling on his abdomen as if he already feared an injury. His gaze fixed on something in the distance, and his lips silently mouthed something. He had gone gaping, as Hephron-a boy Melio had trained with-used to say of younger boys who showed their fear. Melio cursed himself for getting so far into danger with nothing but a dagger on him and without even men he knew he could trust. Stupid indeed.