Then, understanding, Uk pushed himself out of the bag to stand in the inverted evening that was dawn. In his brown military underwear, occasionally scratching his stomach, he walked the quarter mile to the casualty wagon.
The men had already finished the grave pit. The wagon detail had found only three Myetran dead around the village — the perfect average for this operation.
“You want his armor?” one asked.
Uk glanced over the wagon’s edge, where — with the two other corpses — Mrowky sprawled, hair plastered to his head with mud, mud dried over one side of his face, neck swollen, purple and black, bulging over the rim of his breast plate. Uk started to say he’d take the armor, till he realized he’d have to take it from the corpse himself. “Naw. Naw, you bury him in it. He was a good soldier. He was a good — ” Uk turned from the cart abruptly, to start back, thinking: Mrowky was a stupid, lecherous pest, who’d talked too loud and too much.
Was Mrowky a bad man? he let himself wonder. Then, thirty meters from the wagon, out loud Uk said: “Mrowky was the best…!” because the concept of a friend seemed somehow such a rare, and valuable, and important thing in the hazed-over dawn by the trees at the edge of this ragged village who-knew-where. He thought (and knew it was true, thinking it): Mrowky would have killed for me. I would have killed for him.… There in the wet road, the fact stopped him, struck his eyes to tears, then, moments on, dried them. He took a loud, ragged breath, and walked back among the morning cook fires.
Some hours later, on a patrol through town, when the dozen of them were a street away from the market common, just across from the well, Uk glanced aside to see the redheaded girl, being hurried by her equally redheaded brother up some low steps and through a shack door. And that’s the woman Mrowky died for, Uk thought. No, it wasn’t fair.
And what about the crazed peasant who’d murdered Mrowky? Would I even recognize him, Uk had pondered, his face once more returned to normal, after that murderous frenzy — ?
Later, crossed-legged on the ground, while he was eating his dinner, Uk was called for guard duty at Lieutenant Kire’s tent. And the lieutenant himself, on going out, stopped in a swag of black, his cloak a dark tongue thrust straight down behind, to ask in the evening’s slant-light: “How’s it going for you there, Uk?”
Clearly the lieutenant had heard the others speak of the big soldier’s loss. “I’m all right, Sir,” Uk answered — and wondered why even that absurdly small bit of concern made him feel better. Perhaps, he reflected, as, in the east, indigo darkened the village roofs, it’s because any and all concern in this landscape — by anyone or for anyone — was so rare.
Only a bit of light lit a few western clouds as Prince Nactor had marched up to Kire’s tent flap; when, outside, Uk heard the altercation within, he did not exactly listen to their converse. (That’s what Mrowky would have done then been back to whisper about it half the night …) Not that it kept their words from him. But while they’d talked, voices rising and lowering, he tried to move his mind years and miles away, to fix on a stream in his own village, with its dark and muddy bank rich in frogs and dragonflies —
Then light fell in his eyes, and Kire was saying: “Go into town, Uk. Take horses and two more men — requisition a portable light from Power Supplies. And bring back some woman of Çiron — ”
Behind Kire, the prince laughed: “Go into town and find a young and pretty one. I really think this should be rather fun — I’m going back to my tent.”
Kire said: “Obey your prince.”
Surprised, the big soldier threw up his fist in salute.
Minutes later, with two other soldiers, their mounts stepping carefully in the dark, Uk rode off between the last of the cook fires, red and wobbling against a black so intense it was blue. One of the riders, the box holding the illuminating filament slung around his neck, reached down now and clicked it on. A beam of white fanned to the left of his horse. (In the bushes to the right, with twigs pricking her thighs and wrists, Naä pulled back in loud leaves — and stopped breathing.) Clucking at his stallion, while some animal thrashed to his right in the brush, Uk glanced over at the beam. “Douse that. We don’t need it.”
The light died.
What had been in Uk’s mind was that the moon’s sliver from the previous night should have grown a bit by this evening. But either the world had moved from crescent moon to moon’s dark, or overcast hid all illumination. Probably they could have used a light, Uk decided, as the horses left the smell of burning for the town’s dark streets. But that only resolved him, out of whatever stubbornness, not to have it on at all.
Really, he thought, later, it was not so much a conscious decision. Rather, as Uk led the other two soldiers through the night village, at a certain point he simply realized where he was going, what he had already started to do, and let himself go on to do it. The lieutenant had told him to bring back a village woman. What other woman should he bring? He knew where this one lived. If he started looking in houses at random, it could take forever. Between the dark shacks of the village, he let his horse take him out of the market square. “…Break her, violate her!” the prince had ordered. Well, he thought, reining to the left, it was only what had already started to happen to her.
In the light from one window, he made out the well, and turned toward where the door to the house should be — yes; there were the steps. He gave the order to dismount, dropped to the ground himself, stepped up on the porch and, with his fist, hammered on the door.
Then he hammered again.
When he struck the door a third time, a voice within, like a child’s, asked: “Yes…? Who — ” so that, when light rose up along the crack in the door, he expected the figure standing behind it to be her.
But it was the boy, his hair coppery in the firelight inside, one braid falling in front of his strong little shoulders, one behind.
Uk pushed the door in. “Where’s the girl, Çironian?”
Stepping back, the boy said, “Sir…?”
“Where’s the girl who lives here… your sister?” Certainly in a village like this, she must be his sister.
“What wouldst thou — ?”
Surprised at his own impatience, with the heel of his hand Uk hit the boy’s naked shoulder. “Call her!”
A girl’s voice came, somewhere from within: “Abrid …?”
The boy’s fearful face looking up at Uk seemed wholly absurd. Behind, one of the other soldiers moved closer.
The frightened boy called over his shoulder: “Rimgia…?”
In the part of the room that, outside the firelight’s immediate range, was shadow, a hanging moved. The girl stepped hesitantly in. The first thing Uk thought was how ridiculously young they both were! Surely this afternoon, when he’d glimpsed them in the glaring street, they’d been older than this …?
Her bright hair, unbraided, was tousled; her eyes looked sleepy — swollen with tiredness? Or was it something else? She came forward, with her face full of questioning.
Uk stepped, reached out, and grabbed Rimgia’s arm. Her eyes came immediately awake, as he said: “Come on! You’re wanted at Lieutenant Kire’s tent.”
Abrid said: “Touch her gently or not at all — !”
While the girl said: “Please, let me get my — ”
Where the rage came from, Uk didn’t know. Really, they were only kids. But he released the girl, turned, and gave the boy the back of his hand, against his cheek and neck. Abrid went stumbling back, and sat down, hard, his head cracking against the wall — sat, blinking, terrified. “I have no patience with a silly boy’s playing at being a man!” Uk growled.