Impatient with his procrastination, Luterin said, “Are you going to give me an answer to my question?”
“You will answer it yourself very soon. All I will say is that you will display great courage…” “But?”
A smile that pleaded forgiveness. “Because of your nature, young man. You will find yourself both sinner and saint. You will be a hero, but I think I see that you will behave like a scoundrel.”
He had recalled that conversation—and the tapeworm—all the way down to Isturiacha. Now he had become a hero, could he dare to be a scoundrel?
As he sat there, drinking but not singing, Umat Esikananzi grabbed him by the boot and pulled him forcibly nearer the fire.
“Don’t be glum, old lad. We’re still alive, we’ve played the hero—you especially—and soon we’ll be back home.” Umat had a big puddingy face rather like his father’s, but it beamed now. “The world’s a hor- ribly empty place; that’s why we’re singing—to fill it up with noise. But you’ve got other things on your mind.”
“Umat, your voice is the most melodious I ever heard, including a vulture’s, but I’m going to sleep.”
Umat waved an admonitory finger. “Ah, I thought as much. That fair captive of yours! Give her hell from me. And I promise not to tell Insil.”
He kicked Umat on the shin, “How Insil had the rotten luck to get a brother like you I’ll never know.”
Taking another swig of yadahl, Umat said cheerfully, “She’s a girl, is Insil. Come to think of it, she might be grateful to me if I took you by the scruff of your neck and made you get a bit of practice in.” The whole group roared with laughter.
Shokerandit staggered to his feet and bid them good night. With an effort, he made for his own pitch, close by a cart. Despite the stars overhead, it seemed very dark. There was no aurora in these latitudes as there so often was in Kharnabhar.
Clutching his canteen, he half fell against the bulk of his yelk, which was staked to the ground by the tether burnt through its left ear. He went down on his knees and crawled to where the woman was.
Toress Lahl lay curled up small, hands grasping her knees. She stared up at him without speaking. Her face was pale in the obscurity. Her eyes reflected minutely the litter of stars in the sky above them. He caught hold of her upper arm and thrust the canteen at her. “Drink some yadahl.”
Mutely she shook her head, a small decisive movement. He clouted her over the side of the head and thrust the leather bottle in her face. “Drink this, you bitch, I said. It’ll put heart in you.”
Again the shake of head, but he took her arm and twisted it till she cried out. Then she grasped the canteen and took a swallow of the fiery liquor.
“It’s good for you. Drink more.”
She coughed and spluttered over it, so that her spittle lighted on his cheek. Shokerandit kissed her forcibly on the lips.
“Have mercy, I beg you. You are not a barbarian.” She spoke Sibish well enough, but with a heavy accent, not unpleasant to his ear.
“You are my prisoner, woman. No fine airs from you. Whoever you were, you are mine now, part of my victory. Even the Archpriest would do with you as I intend, were he in my boots…” He gulped at the liquid himself, heaved a sigh, slumped heavily beside her.
She lay tense; then, sensing his inertia, spoke. When not crying out, Toress Lahl had a voice with a low liquid quality, as if there were a small brook at the back of her throat. She said, “That elder who came to you this afternoon. He saw himself going into slavery, as I see myself. What did you mean when you said to him that your Archpriest gave the only judgement possible?” Shokerandit lay silent, struggling with his drunken self, struggling with the question, struggling with his impulse to strike the girl for so blatantly trying to turn the channel of his desires. In that silence, up from his consciousness rose an awareness darker than his wish to violate her, the awareness of an immutable fate. He threw down more liquor and the awareness rose closer.
He rolled over, the better to force his words on her.
“Judgement, you say, woman? Judgement is delivered by the Azoiaxic, or else by the Oligarch—not by some biwacking holy man who would see his own troops bleed to serve his ends.” He pointed to his friends carousing by the camp fire. “See those buffoons there? Like me, they come from Shivenink, a good part of the round globe away. It’s two hundred miles just to the frontiers of Uskutoshk. Lumbered with all our equipment, with the necessity for foraging for food, we cannot cover more than ten miles a day. How do you think we feed our stomachs in this season, madam?”
He shook her till her teeth rattled and she clung to him, saying in terror, “You feed, don’t you? I see your wagons carry supplies and your animals can graze, can’t they?”
He laughed. “Oh, we just feed, do we? On what, exactly? How many people do you think we have spread across the face of this land? The answer is something like ten thousand humans and ahumans, together with seven thousand yelk and whatever, including cavalry mounts. Each of those men needs two pounds of bread a day, with an extra one pound of other provisions, including a ration of yadahl. That adds up to thirteen and a half tons every day.
“You can starve men. Our stomachs are hollow. But you must feed animals or they sicken. A yelk needs twenty pounds of fodder every day; which for seven thousand head comes to sixty-two odd tons a day. That makes some seventy-five tons to be carried or procured, but we can only transport nine tons…”
He lay silent, as if trying to convert the whole prospect in his mind into figures.
“How do we make up the shortfall? We have to make it up on the move. We can requisition it from villages on our route—only there aren’t any villages in Chalce. We have to live off the land. The bread problem alone… You need twenty-four ounces of flour to bake a two-pound loaf. That means six and a half tons of flour to be found every day.
“But that’s nothing to what the animals eat. You need an acre of green fodder to feed fifty yelk and hoxneys—”
Toress Lahl began to weep. Shokerandit propped himself on an elbow and gazed across the encampment as he spoke. Little sparks glowed in the dark here and there over a wide area, constantly obscured as bodies moved unseen between him and them. Some men sang; others abased themselves and communicated with the dead.
“Suppose we take twenty days to reach Koriantura at the frontier, then our mounts will need to consume two thousand eight hundred acres of fodder. Your dead husband must have had to do similar sums, didn’t he?
“Every day an army marches, it spends more time in quest of food than it does in moving forward. We have to mill our own grain—and there’s precious little of anything but wild grasses and shoatapraxi in these regions. We have to make expeditions to fell trees and gather wood for the bakeries. We have to set up field bakeries. We have to graze and water the yelk… Perhaps you begin to see why Isturiacha had to be left? History is against it.”
“Well, I just don’t care,” she said. “Am I an animal that you tell me how much these animals eat? You can all starve, the lot of you, for all I care. You got drunk on killing and now you’re drunk on yadahl.”
In a low voice, he said, “They didn’t think I would be any good in battle, so at Koriantura I was put in charge of animal fodder. There’s an insult for a man whose father is Keeper of the Wheel! I had to learn those figures, woman, but I saw the sense in them. I grasped their meaning. Year by year, the growing season is getting shorter—just a day at either end. This summer is a disappointment to farmers. The Isthmus of Chalce is famine-stricken. You’ll see. All this Asperamanka knows. Whatever you think of him, he’s no fool. An expedition such as this, which set out with over eleven thousand men, cannot be launched ever again.”