Truth

From where he sat, Paske could pick the darker darkness of her sleeping form. The man who'd joined them had wandered into the night. How far? He couldn't be sure. Pulling the cape in closer around his shoulders, he held a hand up before his eyes. The shake said more about his weakness than the cold itself. Cold ate into the heart of him. Cold rode his teeth until they no longer chattered, they just clamped together, burning into aching misery. But the shake that ran in irregular bursts up his spine, or settled in his hip joints so his legs seemed somehow detached, that came from weakness more profound than anything he had ever imagined possible.

If he had just one moment. Just one. And the strength to stand and cross the distance to where she lay, he would have clubbed her there with any rock, or stick, or with bare fists…. He watched his fingers tremble. He didn't have the strength of a newborn foal. Even if he could pretend his limbs were his own to control, they would not carry him past the fire.

The anger that came with the realization burned as deep as the cold. His lip twisted into a sneer and he would have cried for the shame of it, but a step from behind shocked him from his vicious reverie.

"You can tell me what's not written there." Dragan dropped a fleece saddle cloth to the stones and sat down on it, close enough to speak in hushed tones. "Or what's been washed away."

"Why would I tell you anything?" The damage done to his throat when he was gagged had worsened with the appalling dryness of his ride. His voice crackled like twigs on gravel, the taste of blood rose on each breath, and the effort of speaking sent his foggy brain into a spin.

Dragan held up the flask of water. The temptation to lunge for it was more than Paske could bear, and the ability to reach beyond him. All he managed was a groan and a mistimed snatch.

"Yes, you can have it. I want to know how much of what you told her is true."

His captor didn't risk the water; he held it steady while Paske drank, his own feeble hands no more than guides on its way to his mouth. There was nothing to say that would save him. And no way to know what might damn him on the spot. He shook his head; "What do you want? I'll tell you whatever you'd like to hear."

"Just the truth. I'll judge whether I like it or not."

Paske knew how little of the text on the scrolls was readable, and making sense of it out of order and context would be near-on to impossible, but Dragan must have read enough to have raised real doubts. Paske nodded. The faint heat of the fire was pressing his heavy eyelids. They wanted to close. His mind was a fog of pain and dissociation. He wished for the strength to fight. He wished for the strength to slash and punish. He wished for the strength to turn his wit and charm into a weapon. But all he had was a thick tongue, a parched throat and the will to stay alive.

"It's all true," he said at last. With that said, the weight of consequence seemed to burst like a bubble. He had no more say in his life or death and a laugh stuttered from his chest. He motioned again for the flask, his eyes barely open, slurring like a drunk. "It's all true." He swallowed, tipped his head back and gargled away the dryness. "And more. Are you going to kill me now?"

"Tell me the 'more'."

"More. How long have you been on the front? Why wouldn't you know anything I can tell you? Are you all as stupid as you look?"

"Maybe."

"I don't want to go over that mountain. Is anything I say going to stop that from happening?"

Dragan was silent. He held the flask again, generous with the water, anxious to make the sharing of this information smooth.

Paske could see no love in the expression of the big soldier, but there was a complex confusion that might have suggested reluctance. Or was it the moving firelight? Paske dropped his forehead onto his wrist and rubbed, smearing away a recent scab. "There's more. For the last twenty years, numbers on the front have been falling. You'd have seen that. Weapons are better; each year there are fewer men with experience on the line; young men die faster." He shrugged, indifferent to the facts. "We could scale back the campaigns; battle strategy could have been better." He raised his face and smiled, "But we've gotten so good at ridding ourselves of you all, it seemed a shame to stop."

Hatred moved on Dragan's face now, but his hands stayed steady, holding the flask in easy reach.

"The middle classes love a story of war glory. They love to hear how our brave men suffer for the love of them and their empire. The nobles love to hear they're safe; secure behind a wall of flesh and blood." Again he laughed. "And every decent man wants to know that the slums and the ghettoes are being drained of life. Every decent man alive wishes fire and destruction on the nests of them, huddled in their filth around our cities. Leeching and fornicating and breeding"

His vehemence drew a hoarse cough, and Dragan pulled the flask away, letting the paroxysm pass before he offered the drink again.

"You're not like them, are you?" There was something clean about the big man. He didn't cower like the ranks of veterans usually did. He didn't limp or twist when he moved. There was almost a nobility in his flesh, albeit earned more than born by nature, and the idea came that maybe this man, like Paske himself, was the victim of cruel fates. "Where were you born?"

There was no answer. Maybe shame; such things were not easy to discuss. Paske's eyes were heavy, dry and thick with scum that blurred his sight. The water, for all it soothed his raw throat, did little to ease the thick inarticulateness of his tongue. "I've fallen too," he said softly, speaking to the echoing depths as much as to Dragan.

"There's more," Dragan prompted.

"Yes." He nodded, and the movement sent his head spinning wildly. He caught his brow in a weak hand and sighed. "The husbandmen," he mumbled. "The cities are getting hungry. The population of good citizens is growing and we are running out of room to live comfortably. The craftsmen build more cities but we can't find the food we need. The farms, you see. Pressures are building. Unrest." He shook his head and tried to look clearly at Dragan. He needed to assess the impact his words were having. In the firelight it seemed that this man understood. He seemed to grasp the implications; the stresses.

"Too many of the poor men from the farms have been drawn in to the military."

Dragan nodded, and the acknowledgment drove him on;

"You understand? You know what must come, now?"

There was silence still, his captor staring coldly at the fire, chewing hard on his own thoughts. "Second sons are being sent out into the wilderness." Again he laughed; the irony of high-born men being shaken down the line just to keep the top in place struck him as poetic justice. Those who had judged him and sent him down would themselves end up lower on the caste than he was. For the last time he drank deeply.

"We need the surplus, you see. If we haven't enough to feed ourselves, what can we trade with Verdan? We have no mines."

* * * * *

The words were slurred and mumbled, and probably would not have made much sense if Dragan hadn't felt the echo of each syllable deep inside. What little he'd read in the scrolls he had no desire to trust; a smattering of words he knew in a rash of those he didn't, and that in parts and pieces. He had read some of it aloud to Freya, and she'd seen no more proof in it than he had.

But Paske was full to brimming with the love of his own wisdom. What wasn't written was far more important than the fantasies of a few deranged liars, telling tales to suit themselves about battles they had never seen. What mattered was his hatred of generations of men whose crime was to be born among lesser mortals. There were no lies in his loathing. It was a simple truth and one he felt needed no explanation or excuse. He and his like were ridding the empire of its lowest life, and he was proud of the work of his hands.

And Dragan had known it. For years, with the healing peace of the pastures easing the horrors of the battlefield from his mind, he had reasoned through the way the world worked. He himself had chosen the best and strongest bull calves and castrated the rest, knowing he would keep the best herd while only the strongest and finest bred. He himself had selected the weakest, the oldest, and the lame when he chose the next beast for the table. He understood the rationale.

And with the faces of men he'd known suddenly so clearly there before him in the firelight, he was sickened to his stomach.

He knew too, the truth about the need for men on the land. The call for fleece, for stock and crops was growing all the time and the pressure to provide the demands of the tariff meant many good farms were losing their breeding stock and seed crops to the taxman. The land needed men to work it, and the cities were going to send them.

Because they needed to trade.

Paske had droned into silence and Dragan ground his teeth over the obscene cost of it all. Everything was as it had always been, longer than anyone could remember. The strong governed; the weak went to war.

Not just the weakest, now, but a generation of husbandmen had been sacrificed to maintain this precarious balance. His breath was coming harder as he thought, his stomach churning over realizations that made him want to puke.

He shook the flask they both held, shocking the officer back from the fugue into which he'd slipped. "What do they want?"

Paske stirred, but it was getting harder for him to hold his head up. Freya had stopped his wound bleeding, but he needed a physician. In a field hospital, with all the herbs and instruments on hand, his injuries might not have been fatal. Here and now, they were. He shook; constant spasms of shivering ran through him and despite the cold in the air, his skin was hot to touch. He would be lucky to see the sunrise.

"Who?" he managed, but it was a hoarse whisper.

"The Verdan. Why do we have to defend against them? What are we protecting?"

Dragan did not expect the shock of laughter. Paske looked as if he might have thrown his head back for the simple joy of what he had to say, but weakness and fever had crippled his responses. His mirth was a choked and bubbling thing, an ugly sound. "Nothing!" He reached for the flask, struggling to direct it to his lips and coughing when he breathed liquid in with his chuckles. "Nothing. We trade our excess crops for their steel. They have no need to take anything."

Steel. The steel of weapons? They traded weapons to use in the war.

Dragan stood.

Looking down on the man at his feet, he briefly debated the means of a quick death. He had no heart in himself for outright cruelty, but no kindness pleaded on Paske's behalf. He opted instead to pull the officer to his feet. The way they had climbed was steep, barely more than a cliff-face formed of rubble. Dotted with rocky outcrops and rain-scoured washouts, it was a wide expanse of death. Cold. Exposed. And contemptuous of weakness. He'd lived on mountainsides like this for fifteen years.

Holding Paske by the shoulder of his borrowed tunic, Dragan moved him to the edge of the small flat on which they stood, grabbed the seat of his breeches, lifted him easily, and pitched him down the mountain.

Squatting by the fire, he stared at the flames and past them to where Freya slept.

He checked the progress of the stars. He should be waking her for her watch, but he had no need for sleep. Let her rest.

From the document cylinder he drew the scrolls, and one by one he fed them into the flames.

Freya could sleep. At sun-up they would move, but he had yet to decide in which direction. He had thrown away their hostage and he was burning what little evidence they had. Morning would be soon enough to tell her that.

He rubbed at his chin. It was not just a question of proof, even if Freya had imagined she would need Paske or his scrolls. Together they were well enough known to give any message to the troops credibility. If they were to go. No, it wasn't proof, and if Paske had died in his bedroll and the scrolls lay safe in their cylinder it would make no difference to anyone. But it felt better. Somehow destroying the evidence made the horror less stark. Their lives had been no more than surviving an atrocity; their skills, far from being a valued commodity, were just annoying techniques that had kept them alive.

On the front lines tonight and tomorrow men would fight and die. And for nothing.

But he was finished with it. He had served his term and survived. He had earned his small piece of safety and by all the festering demons he wanted to take what he had earned and enjoy it. If he went ahead with Freya and they spread the word along the line, that every man there was the victim of a cruel system that played their lives for chips, the war might end. It would.

And thousands of angry men would be looking for blood and revenge.