Chapter 552 - 551: In the Mud, in the Dark

Chapter 552: Chapter 551: In the Mud, in the Dark

Location:Seven Peaks — North Camp

Date/Time:TC1857.02.16 – TC1857.02.19

Four hundred and nine faces at night, lit from below by lamps set on the ground, do not look like a crowd. They look like a wall with holes in it.

Raven had been given a box to stand on and had refused it, which meant that from where she was standing she could see perhaps the first sixty of them clearly and the rest as shapes and lamplight and the shine of augmented eyes going in and out as people turned their heads. The mud was over her ankles. It had rained for two days, and the north camp had no drainage worth the name, because nobody builds drainage for a place that is supposed to be temporary and has been temporary for two and a half years.

Sera Vahn stood at the front with her hands behind her back and did not introduce her.

"Most of you know who I am," Raven said. "Some of you have never spoken to me, and that’s my fault and not yours. I’m going to tell you something your commander made me come up here to tell you, and she was right to, and I’d probably not have done it on my own."

Nothing. The whole camp breathing.

"I’m going to sit down with the Unified Federation this year. I don’t know when, and I don’t have a plan for it that I’d call a plan. I’ve got three other governments to manage first, and the Federation is the one I understand least." She made herself say the next part at the same speed as the rest, because slowing down would have been a way of asking to be forgiven for it. "The only thing I have that the Federation wants is you. Every one of you they’d like back, or want punished, or want quiet. So when I go into that room, you are on the table. Not because I put you there. Because you’re already there, and I’d rather you heard that standing in your own mud than found out about it afterward from somebody being tactful."

Somewhere out in the dark a man said something short in a Federation dialect, and somebody else told him to shut up.

"I’ll tell you the two things I can promise, and then I’ll take questions until you run out or I fall over. One. I will not trade a single one of you for anything. Not for the Compact, not for the bore, not for a Federation signature on any document that has ever existed. If that closes the door, then the door stays shut, and I’ll find another one." She waited. "Two. I will tell you what’s been offered. Every time. Before I answer it, not after."

A woman near the front with a burn scar down one forearm said, "That’s not a promise. That’s telling us how you’ll lose."

"That’s correct."

"Then say what you’d do if they made it the price of the whole thing. Everything. The war, the ground, the lot. Us for all of it."

Raven had come up the hill with an answer for that and had spent the walk deciding whether it was true, and had decided it was, and it had not made her feel any better.

"I’d say no."

"Even if it cost —"

"I’d say no, and then I would have to go and explain to a great many people why I did, and some of them would be right to hate me for it, and I would do it anyway." She looked at the woman. "You can decide whether you believe me. I can’t make that part easier. I’ve got no way to prove a thing I haven’t been asked to do yet."

***

The questions ran an hour and a half.

They were not the questions she had prepared for. She had come up the hill braced for anger pointed at her — for you brought us here, for you knew this two years ago, for the whole familiar shape of a room deciding she was the problem. She could have taken that. She had more practice than she cared to count at standing still while a room worked out what it thought of her.

What she got instead was a camp arguing with itself, through her, using her as the place to put it.

What table? Who else sits at it? Do we get to send somebody? — that was Maren Holt, from halfway back, and it landed hard enough that somebody repeated it forward to people who had not heard.

Does the Empire know we’re here? — and Raven said yes, in writing, since the summer.

If forty of us walk out tomorrow, does the unit still get its name? — and Sera Vahn answered that one herself before Raven could, and said yes, and said it in a voice that ended the question.

And then somebody at the back said, loudly, that anyone who left was doing exactly what the Federation said they’d all do the first time it got hard, and a hundred people made a noise at once, and Raven understood about ninety seconds too late what she had actually done to them.

She had told them all that they were an asset. She had not told them what she would trade for. She had left a blank space exactly the size of the question, are you worth it, and they were now filling it in about each other.

***

It went off at some point after midnight, and she did not see the start of it.

She had gone down to the mess lines with Sera Vahn to be visible and not to be talked at, and the first she knew of it was the sound — not shouting, which a camp makes all the time, but the specific flat crack of a trestle table going over, and then the noise four hundred people make when they all stop talking at once.

By the time she got up the row it was thirty or forty deep and moving.

There was no line in it. That was the thing she would think about afterward. It was not the leavers against the stayers, because nobody had left yet and nobody had a list; it was men and women who had slept next to each other for two and a half years hitting each other over a thing none of them could name, in the dark, in a churned lane between tents, with a brazier going over and a lamp smashed and somebody’s washing line coming down across the whole of it.

She could have stopped it in about two seconds.

She stood there with her hands open at her sides and did not, and it was one of the harder things she had done that year, because every instinct she had built across a great many lifetimes was telling her to put a wall of something between these people and end it — and the moment she did that, this stopped being the Anvil Corps’ camp and became a place where an outsider decided when the fighting stopped.

Sera Vahn went into it.

She went in without raising her voice, which was worse than shouting. She got a fist into the back of somebody’s collar and pulled and the man came out of the crowd sideways and sat down hard in the mud, and she was already past him. Her left leg drove her through a gap two people wide that had not been a gap a second before. She took an elbow across the mouth and did not stop.

"Hands down."

That was the only time she raised it.

It did not work all at once. It worked in a ring, spreading outward from where she was standing, and behind the ring people were still going at it, and Raven watched the commander of the whole camp walk into her own unit’s brawl and put it out by being physically in the middle of it, one arm at a time.

The mud helped her and hurt everybody else. Nobody could plant. Men went down who had not been hit, and got up filthy and furious and swinging at whoever was nearest, and the whole thing had the ugly slow quality of a fight underwater — no distance in it, no room to draw back, everything happening at the length of a forearm. A tent guy rope came out of the ground with three pegs still on it and half a canvas wall sagged into the lane and made the space smaller.

Somebody’s lamp oil had gone into the mud and caught, and burned in a thin blue sheet the length of a stride, and went out, and the smell of it stayed for an hour afterward.

Kira Desh was in it, obviously. Sling and all.

She was not hitting anybody. She had got herself between two men who were, with her good arm across one of their chests and the strapped one held up and out of the way, and she was shouting into a face six inches from hers, and then somebody came through from the side, and the strapped arm went into the fence rail with all of both their weight behind it.

Raven heard it from ten paces.

***

Mira set up in the mess tent because it was the only place with light, and worked until the sky went gray.

Nineteen people. Two broken hands, both from hitting somebody rather than being hit. A man with his scalp opened on the corner of a trestle who would not say who did it and did not appear to know. Four ribs across three people. A great deal of mud in a great many places it should not have been.

And the bone under Kira Desh’s right socket, which had been a clean break three days ago and was now something else.

"It’s a mess," Mira said, in a flat voice, drying her hands. "It’ll knit. It’ll knit crooked unless I open it and set it properly, and if I open it she’s twelve weeks instead of six, and she does not go north with the bore crew under any circumstance."

"And if you don’t open it?"

"Then it sets crooked, and the socket sits crooked on it for the rest of her life, and that arm never takes a full load again." Mira threw the towel in the basket. "Which would have mattered a great deal less last year. Hester Varden came to me at the turn of the year with Rhys Jessop and a boy called Idris Tull and a drawing I did not believe. Then the three of them made a hand. Not fitted — made. There’s steel in it, and there’s blood in it, and it knows where it is in the dark, and it is stronger than the one it went on after."

Raven put her back against the tent pole and took a moment with that.

"How many can they do?"

"One a month. Between the three of them, one, and they lose weight doing it." Mira was already turning back to the lamps. "More of them are starting to show whatever it is Varden showed, and nobody knows yet whether that means six of them by winter or three of them forever. What I know is that a crooked bone will not carry one."

"So the choice isn’t six weeks against twelve."

"No. It’s twelve weeks against never being able to take the thing her own unit is about to be able to give her, and she has not been told that, and it is not going to be me who tells her." Mira did not turn around. "She wants to go north with the bore crew. She’s young enough to think an arm is a thing you spend. She’ll want it at fifty. Somebody who isn’t her age needs to be in that conversation, and it isn’t going to be me, because I’m the one holding the knife and she’ll hear it as me protecting my own convenience."

Elias Rowe was sitting on a crate at the tent flap with a cloth against his eyebrow. He had not been in the fight; he had been pulling people out of it, which was how he had acquired the eyebrow.

He looked up when Raven came past.

"I’m going," he said.

"All right."

"Not because of tonight." He took the cloth away, looked at it, and put it back. "Tonight is the argument, not the reason. The reason is that you said the word table and I have a mother who thinks I’m dead, and there is going to come a morning when somebody in a room reads the whole roll out for a purpose I don’t get a vote on. That’s not a thing I’m willing to be within reach of."

"That’s a sufficient reason."

"Your commander said that. Word for word." He started to laugh and it turned into a wince. "Is that a thing you teach?"

"No. She got there first, and I’ve been copying her since about the second year."

***

Thirty-one left over the following two days.

Sera Vahn had said forty and possibly sixty, and she stood in the command tent on the third morning with the list in her hand and looked at the number for a long time before she said anything about it.

"I was wrong."

"You were wrong, low," Raven said. "That’s the direction you wanted."

"That’s the direction I wanted, and it isn’t the one that matters." She put the page down flat. "Thirty-one is nine fewer than the lower number I gave you, and every one of them is a person I told a room I could hold. Nineteen in the medical tent. One arm that might be permanent. And the fight wasn’t about leaving, Commander — I want that in the record, and I want it in my hand, not yours. My people did not fight about whether to go. They fought about whether the ones who go are cowards, and they invented that question themselves, in one night, because you gave them a shape with a hole in the middle of it."

Raven took that without moving.

"Go on."

"You told them they were an asset and you told them what you wouldn’t trade them for. You did not tell them what you would trade. So every one of them spent the night working out what they were worth to you, and there was no answer available, so they asked each other instead, and that is not a question four hundred people can ask each other politely at one in the morning." Sera Vahn had not raised her voice at all. "You did the honest thing, and you did three quarters of it. The last quarter was the part that hurt to write, and you didn’t write it."

"What’s the last quarter?"

"What you will put on that table. In order. Where they can read it." She pushed the list across. "They don’t need the answer to be good. They need there to be one. A person can live standing next to something terrible. Nobody can live standing next to a blank."

Raven picked the list up and read the thirty-one names, all of them, which took a while, because she had promised herself on the way up the hill two nights ago that if this went badly she would at least know who it had gone badly for.

"I’ll have it by the end of the week," Raven answered. "The whole of it, in order, on one page, and it goes to the lines and not to me first. And Sera Vahn — the next time I do three quarters of something, do what you did just now and do it sooner. Don’t wait for nineteen people in a tent."

"I did do it sooner." Sera Vahn met her eye. "I did it on the hill. I said, ’ Say it in front of them, ’ and I stopped there, and I stopped there because I’d got the thing I wanted and I didn’t want to push my luck with you." She let that sit exactly long enough. "So that’s mine. I’d like it in the record next to yours."

***

The bore crew went north on the fourth morning: ten engineers, Alek Voss at the head of them, Maren Holt with three crates of formation crystal she had not been given permission to take and had taken, and Silas riding with them because he had refused, in front of witnesses, to send anybody to do a thing he had not managed to do himself.

Kira Desh was not with them.

She had chosen the knife. Twelve weeks. She had made the choice in about forty seconds once somebody actually put both futures in front of her and left the room, and Mira had opened it that afternoon, and by the time the crew formed up she was sitting outside the medical tent in a chair somebody had carried out for her, under a blanket, watching the column go.

Alek Voss stopped in front of her on the way past and said something Raven did not hear.

Whatever it was, Kira Desh nodded once, and put her good hand out, and he took it.

Then the column went down the north road toward eleven hundred kilometers of open country, and the camp behind them was three hundred and sixty-eight people, and the lane where the fight had been was still churned to the depth of a boot, and nobody had filled it in.