And the truth was that the goddess was alive in the world. No city that had her temple had ever fallen. Even if one was occupied for a time, that wasn’t the same as fallen. The roaches hated her because they were made by the dragons to seem like they were human, but they were really the servants of the lie. It didn’t count when you killed them.
Coppin stumbled and Jerrim steadied him. A voice called from behind: Coppin’s name, then Jerrim’s. Drea was climbing up the rope ladder to the wall’s top, a basket bouncing against her hip. She was a small woman, brown as a nut with bright eyes and a gap in her teeth when she smiled, and everyone know that she and Jerrim were in love except for her and Jerrim. Coppin, for instance, didn’t have doubts.
“Brought some bread,” she said when she reached them, holding out the basket. “Had extra.”
“Thank you,” Jerrim said, taking it from her carefully so that their hands brushed each other’s.
“You can bring me back the basket later,” she said.
“I will.”
She smiled, nodded once to Coppin like she was agreeing that yes, he was there too, and went back down the ladder. Jerrim watched her go with a longing that was almost palpable. Coppin took the basket and opened it. The bread was fresh anyway. So that was good.
“She’s what we do this for,” he said around a mouthful of the stuff.
“What?” Jerrim said.
“This,” Coppin said, and held up the spear. “Being guard. Risking our lives to protect people like her. The whole city of them. Truth is, I’ve got nothing against the roaches as roaches go. Until they crossed the Severed Throne, I didn’t care about them one way or the other.”
“Me too.”
“If they all just went back where they came from and didn’t come back, I wouldn’t chase after them. Would you?”
“Not me,” Jerrim said. “Heard the other army’s left Nus heading this way.”
“They’ve been saying that for weeks. It hasn’t been true yet.”
“But what if it is?”
“We’ll kick ’em in the nuts and send ’em to work the farms, same as we always do,” Coppin said. It was what he always said, and Jerrim gave his usual chuckle in reply. Both the bravado and the appreciation of it felt different this evening, though. Thinner somehow. It reminded Coppin of the feeling at the back of his throat before he got sick. Not the actual illness so much as the announcement that something unpleasant was coming. It wasn’t in his throat, though. The whole city felt like that. Maybe the world.
“Think they’ll come this far?” Jerrim asked.
“Elassae they or Sarakal they?”
“I meant Sarakal, but either, I guess.”
“Maybe. Yeah, probably before the end of summer. It won’t matter, though. They’re roaches. We’re destined to win.”
“Yeah.”
They reached the station house, a room the size of a toolshed bound to the inner face of the wall. Arrows and bolts were stacked there in cylinders of twenty each. Hand axes for cutting lines if an enemy tried to climb. Long spears with hooks at the bases of the blades for pushing back ladders. The pair looked at it all for longer than they usually did.
“Strange not hearing them,” Coppin said again.
“Yeah.”
Marcus
I believe that history is a listing of atrocities and horror,” Kit said, gesturing widely with a cup of wine, “not because we are evil, but because history is itself a kind of performance. And we are fascinated by those events and characters which are most unlike our essential selves.”
“Wait,” Marcus said. “Just wait. You’re saying… are you saying that the whole blood-drenched history of the world—war after murder after war—says something good about humanity?”
Cary’s voice came from outside, lifted in a simple melody. Lak’s rougher, less practiced notes rose up around them to an odd but pleasant effect. The smell of nearby coffee and distant stables harmonized as well. Like a single green meadow in the ash fields after a forest fire, Palliako’s estate had become a small place of calm in a vast and implacable chaos.
The peace was an illusion created in the gap between understanding that trouble was coming and the appearance of banners on the horizon. Anytime the approaching enemy arrived even an hour later than expected, there was a limn of hope that maybe something unlooked for but not unwelcome had happened. Maybe this time the storm would turn aside. That the hope was doomed didn’t make it less precious.
“The truth of history, I can’t speak to, but the version we tell? I think yes,” Kit said. “I can’t see how any history could be complete and accurate. To be told at all, it must be simplified, and every simplification means something, yes? What we leave in, what we leave out, and how we choose tells, I suggest, a great deal about the teller.”
“I suggest you’re drunk,” Marcus said, laughing.
“It seems to me that what makes us human is our ability to create a dream and live within it. History, I think, is storytelling that begins, ‘Here is a thing that actually happened,’ but after you’ve said that, you’re constrained by all the same rules of technique and structure that a playwright or a poet labors under. Which was why I said that history itself is a kind of performance. Consider.” The actor held up a finger. “Why do you suppose there are no plays about good people being kind to each other? Thoughtful lovers who, in the face of adversity or misunderstanding, have a conversation between them?”
“Because they’d be terrible stories,” Marcus said, laughing.
“I agree,” Kit said, “and why is that?”
“Because nothing would ever happen.”
“It would, though. People would be thoughtful and kind and gentle and resolve their hurts and confusions with consideration and love. Those are things. They happen. And they seem like nothing. Thoughtfulness and kindness and love, I contend, are so much the way we expect the world to be that they become invisible as air. We only see war and violence and hatred as something happening, I suggest, because they stand out as aberrations. In my experience, even in the midst of war, many lives are untouched by battle. And even in a life of conflict, violence is outweighed by its absence.”
“That’s going to be a hard apple to sell all the men and women who’ve died hard in the last few years,” Marcus said. “Seems more likely to me that violence and strife catch the attention because ignoring them leads you down a short road. I’ve walked a lot of battlefields that had boys who’d have lived another few decades watering them. I’ve made my gold working at war and death, and I haven’t often gone hungry.”
“But war’s not the same as death, is it?”
“The one involves the other, Kit.”
“I disagree. War, I think, only involves a particular manner of death. Everyone always dies. It’s the price of being born.”
Marcus laughed. “All right. I don’t know anymore if you’re drunk or I am.”
Kit scowled, his beard bunching at the cheeks, as he stared into his cup. “I can’t judge you,” he said, “but I’m fairly certain I am.” A fly buzzed past them, and then away. Cary began her song again, and Lak joined in more gracefully this time. “I am afraid, Marcus. I’ve come to love the world, and I feel we’re on the edge of losing it. We won’t, will we? We can’t have come all this way through so many fires only to lose, can we?”