The March North (23 page)

Getting back to Westcreek is bad.

That there are dead is not a surprise; that made it to Westcreek Town with the first barge down the river, days ahead of us. Various attempts at a rough count, likewise. No list of names.

No one in Westcreek expects the dead, or some of the dead, to be visible; the dead don’t expect their loved ones to pass right through them. Failed embraces have living
friends standing in for the dead, who find themselves offering spectral patting motions. Sometimes there are no living friends, and the spectral patting has to suffice.

It takes an hour, the first time, to get through the shrieking and crying. There will be several other hours, as people arrive from progressively further away. Blossom discovers that the artillerists had more social success in
Westcreek Town than Blossom realised, and that the battery’s list of dead is wanted with urgency.

No missing. They’re all known dead — all of whom are officially ashes in barrels and not demon digestions — in a Commonweal hospital with a known prognosis, or right here in shape to march. That’s a better thing than anyone else here realises, except maybe Twitch. Don’t think Twitch has ever had to
tell someone that the Line has no idea what’s become of their child.

Four days later, there’s a memorial garden a hundred metres wide, centred on the sunny south end of the turning basin that joins the east canal and the Wet Westcreek and the public docks have moved from the south end of the turning basin to the north. Fuller’s Mill is still where it was; that relatively narrow plot of land might
suit what Toby thought was appropriate, but one twenty-fifth of the Creeks’ population has had a year’s worth of deaths from causes other than age for the whole Creeks happen to it. Surviving parents have a lot of grief to work through, and it’s catching.

The flanking trees will go in come springtime; the argument about what species, and how many, and where, isn’t going to be settled this month.

The combined length of the mirror-flat memorial stones, each a metre high, is more than the hundred metres; they’re set at the top of an embankment, with turf above and dry stone wall below, and the two embankments angle out from the standard-shrine in the middle. It’s some hard, dark, crystalline rock; however skilled the teams with the rock-saw foci are, they’d have been the next six months getting
the names written in with chisels. One of the dead asked Blossom, and another had a word with their uncles doing the bronze-work. The end-scroll on the left of the front of the roof of the standard-shrine hides a drawer, just big enough for the spoon.

The dead have mostly been wise enough to point out, when asked about the memorial, that’s it’s for the living, not them, not really, but there’s
always that one small thing.

Blossom did use the spoon, and the handwriting on the dark granite matches the barrels, way out on the far end of the left arm. That was Toby; public memorials often start at the shrine, and alternate outward, but Toby knew the Line tradition, along with what had happened to the Eighth and the Eighteenth. No-one in Westcreek Town could cope with one of the shades of
the dead asserting
wouldn’t want anyone thinking we thought we were special
, with all the other dead nodding along behind.

Grue is astonishingly good at dealing with a weeping, ranting, this-emotional-pain-is-unfamiliar Blossom. Losing people you’re responsible for hurts. If it didn’t, the Line wouldn’t give you a warrant of commission.

If it stops, they take the warrant away.

The barrels got
sawn up with extreme care and went name by name into private memorials. The ashes of the dead, artillerists too, are in the pair of raised flower beds running north-south, on either side of the walkway from the water up to the standard-shrine. Those have been mulched over, waiting for spring. No-one wanted to plant those in haste, months to first frost or not.

Everybody in the Line fits along
the wall-walkway; everybody who wants to witness from the Town wouldn’t fit on a bet, but the basin full of barges could hold two brigades, which for numbers is a bit short of what it does. Parents and siblings and orphans get the walkways beside the flowerbeds.

I read the roll. Two hundred and seventy-eight living, two hundred and ninety-seven dead. Not all of either group are here. Of all the
Line who are here, all the living answer and all the dead condense into visibility.

There had been some half-objections to my part in the ceremony, that couldn’t quite make it into clear words, before Radish had stood up, looked around, and said “Captain’s as good a Creek as anybody” into the slow silence that had followed Radish standing. It wasn’t Radish’s sergeant’s voice; whatever it was,
the argument stopped before it really started, and didn’t come back.

Three hundred names, fifteen hundred seconds, a scant half an hour. A brigade takes a whole day, and that doesn’t seem long enough.

I march the dead into the standard; I’ve got a minute or two to thank them. Most of them will be letting go; some of them go, misting into nothing, as they’re thanked. Nearly all of Blossom’s artillerists
quietly head off to tube one and their self-appointed training role. Twitch is determined to stick until, in the immemorial tradition, the outgoing battalion Sergeant-Major might brief their successor.

Can’t say I’m surprised. “Shan’t haunt your signa, sir” is near enough to too much; all I can manage is to clap Twitch’s shade on the shoulder. “Good work, Sergeant-Major” moves through the shape
of my face, but I can’t get it audible, even in here where audible is notional.

Twitch might manage it; the standard, as a standard, won’t last, there’s no way to transfer it from the First Commonweal to the Second. The welcome to the dead in this memorial could well be deep and wide enough.

I condense back out, with an armful of rolled farewell letters, neatly tied together by files and platoons.
Then it’s another reading of names, and handing letters over.

The letters for a brigade are four trips. First time I was ever in a standard.

We march off in silence; the last foot is off the memorial well before the wail goes up.

Up, around, over the broad bridge, north a bit to the barracks. Most of the population of Westcreek Town is still at the turning basin, docking one careful barge at a
time; “drowned at the memorial service” is nothing anyone wants to write on a tombstone.

“This is the last time I get to insist that you listen, so I’m going to use it.”

Half a chuckle.

“You’re alive. Your homes, your families, the people of the Creeks, are safer than if we hadn’t marched north. That’s the good.”

All the good we get.

“The bad, well, it was bad. Not the recommended introduction
to demons, hostile armies, cogitoxins, combat critters, wizard-war field conditions, or appropriate offensive odds.” Fire-priests, now, that was the right introduction to fire-priests, but let’s not dilute the point. “A battalion of regulars would have found that a tough job, and you did it.”

Much to my surprise.

“Which means you’re over-strained in ways that don’t show, just like picking up
something too heavy. This is your head, not your back, but it’s the same kind of thing. War sends you mad, and you return to the Peace, and then you doubt yourself in both.”

“What you need to do is talk. Talk to one another, who know, talk to the loved ones who are worried about you; they won’t understand where you’ve been or how there’s madness involved but they understand they care about you.
If you need to, wander down to the memorial and talk to the Sergeant-Major.”

Some jobs you can’t get out of by dying.

“Talk to me, talk to the Part-Captain, if nothing else works talk to Halt” — a laugh, but some of them will — “but don’t keep it shut inside. You’re a social species, you’re not good at killing each other. It should bother you. Most of those guys from Reems didn’t have any better
choices than to carry a spear for the Archon, and no, it wasn’t fair; just their rotten luck, much as it was your good luck that means you’re alive.”

Too kind to most of the army of Reems, and likely all of the Iron Guard. Better for the troops.

“Drink if it means you can talk; if you’re drinking so you
don’t
talk, that’s bad. Anybody notices somebody doing that, tell me, and I’ll see what can
be done.”

Deep breath. I’m looking at a lot of surprised faces. There’s an extensive set of side-courses at Senior School for those of us who lack a natural understanding of the human condition. Which means we’re never afterwards sure if we got it right or not. Not getting any appalled from Blossom isn’t inherently reassuring.

“Once you’re dismissed, the Second Heavy Battalion of the Seventieth
Territorial Brigade, Wapentake of the Creeks, ceases to exist. It belongs, as its standard belongs, to the Line of the First Commonweal. Presuming the vote carries, we’re going to be in the Second Commonweal by winter.”

“You’ll be of the Line, but not
in
the Line; retired reserve, and no-one will call you into the Line unless we’re retreating on Westcreek Town.” That gets me some grim looks.
There are ways that could be a recoverable situation, but no-one in this company will have those as their first thought.

“General Chert wants the Fourth of the Twelfth back; I am tasked with raising a battalion in the Creeks.” Because going straight to a brigade wouldn’t work. “If it’s work you want to do, if you go home and talk and think and decide the Line is what you want to do, I want you
back for that battalion.”

Even with all of them, cadre’s tight.

“If that’s not what you want, you can do nothing, and stay in the retired reserve. Or you can resign, as at any time not under arms in the field.”

You don’t ask if there are any questions, but there’s that pause, so you can spot the troubled faces and ask them what the problem is. There aren’t any. Not many of them thinking about
the future today.

“It was an honour to serve with you.”

“First Company, Second Battalion, Seventieth Territorial Brigade, dismissed!”

They march off in good order. By the time I’m off the marching ground, the first little dribs and drabs are starting to come back, and before long it’s all of them. I get a couple of dinner invitations, questions about whether or not I will show up for the memorial
dinner next déci, and then Radish.

“Here to resign, sir.”

Don’t think Radish planned the
sir
; that looks like nervousness.

“Resignation accepted. Sorry to lose you, Radish.” The formal forearm clasp is pure reflex on Radish’s side. Radish may have thought I missed all the talking-it-over-with-Dove. Losing both surviving sergeants — Dove’s going for sorcery training, unless there’s a way to out-argue
good sense, Halt, and Blossom all together — will make things more difficult, but not half as difficult as no established Senior School is going to, by and by.

“Sarge?” One of Radish’s file closers; too surprised to swear.

Radish’s head shakes. “My dad always said I should figure out what I was good for, and do that. The Line ain’t it.”

There’s a sort of wordless objection.

“No, serious. If you
can get the demons out of your head, great. It’s a job worth doing, but I’ll be the rest of my life forgetting what that was like. I doubt the Captain wants to have to deal with me going shrieking mad into the focus the next time.”

That can happen. It’s not a help.

I pitch my voice up. “The focus doesn’t work if you don’t have your heart in it. The standards can’t take what you don’t give. Which
is why we’ve got the Commonweal, and not something even worse than the Bad Old Days.”

There are nods, and thinking looks, and Radish looks some combination of embarrassed and relieved.

“If you want to go forward with the Line, great. The Line’s going to need you. If you figure it’s time for another job, you did
this
job better than anybody had a right to expect.”

This next bit is a Sergeant-Major
thing, but I’ll have to do.

“Sometimes, when it gets bad, you’ll hear the Part-Captain or the Sergeant-Major say that it’s time to fight so we do not shame the Foremost.”

Who didn’t have anything to do with the Line of the Commonweal, and, if they still exist, might not know we do, but never mind. Hardly anybody’s standing in the Line for the sake of facts.

“It got more than that bad.” Much more.

“In, or out, or just don’t know, you’ve all served the Line so the Foremost would call any of you comrades, and be proud. Remember that.”

I go to most of the dinners. It’s a risk; Senior School table manners are acceptable by definition but human social politics are murky, and the Creeks are not descended from the same social tradition as anywhere else I’ve been. Nothing obviously dire happens.

Catching wasps out of the air and setting them outside might have achieved the status of a party trick; it hasn’t offended anyone.

The letters get written, the artillery ones first. Those need to make it back into the First Commonweal. Blossom rides them up to Headwaters; if you let them run, it takes the horse-things under an hour, one way. Grue’s been commuting between hospitals, growing people’s limbs and eyes and the occasional nose back on, and even if there had been an ordinance against going that fast on a public road,
the first re-grown hand would have won Grue an exception.

Blossom sends a few other letters off while in Headwaters; the demon-bits in jars show up in Westcreek Town four days later. Those, packed with gibbering care, will have passed the barge-load of plain shot and standard-red shot going up the West Wetcreek. Blossom’s shot-factory has generally stood down for lack of iron, but can scrounge
enough to send a set of forty of the hot reds back up the river by the end of Thermidor. The factory-folk are asking questions about other kinds of enchantment, and saying things like “beats canning time” in tones you may need to be a Creek to fully comprehend. Blossom comprehends well enough to recognise that the factory staff like making shot.

The hot reds go with detailed performance lists;
four of them go with a note to Crinoline Blossom has me countersign, that if they’re used at a shorter range than the specified twenty-five kilometre minimum safe distance from anybody the Line is sworn to protect that Blossom will haul Crinoline’s shade back into the world and make it witness to the devastation.

Crinoline might know Blossom’s no kind of necromancer, doesn’t know Blossom, might
not heed the warning at its proper weight. I sign in good conscience.

There’s a trickle of newly-intact troopers, all the rest of Thermidor and into Fructidor. Grue waves this off; it’s when one of the doctors Grue’s been teaching gets some toes back on a stevedore that Grue’s pleased. Grue’s muttering about how getting the maimed to grow new limbs isn’t all that difficult, really, would be much
more convincing if anyone, including Blossom, could understand more than a third of the specific muttering at any given time.

Grue and Blossom’s individual saddle-cases have more than a household’s goods in each of them. It ought not to be surprising, having carried my half of a half-tonne of paper out of the Standard of the Creeks. They get offered one of the doctor’s houses across from the hospital,
and turn it down; someone else would have to move, it’s too small for either, never mind both, laboratory spaces, and they’d much rather have stable-space for the horse-things.

The lab space wins the argument for them, and they wind up taking Fuller’s Mill; it’s been unused long enough to go at the tax price, too old to be in use, too new to really consider tearing down, no direct gean holding,
no way to argue against someone better able to pay the taxes having it. Toby would have chortled.

Most of the town are embarrassed that they’re surprised two Independents can afford to take up the property. Grue has been getting other use out of the general inability to remember that they’re both much older than they look. Been somewhat more restrained about it than a starving weasel presented
with fifty ducklings, if a tactful somewhat. Blossom says something indulgent about Grue’s appreciation for a population in which to be of average height.

Blossom agrees to make several milling concerns some complex gears, and gets tons of old, broken, some of it outright scrap, machinery in return, and turns that into a carding and spinning setup for wool off of Eustace. It was an impressive
process, not very loud, but if you were close enough it shone through stone walls.

Halt appeared, settled right back into the same tiny cottage, before the end of Thermidor without anyone noticing the mechanism of Halt’s return. Eustace spent a day or so being pleased, and then a décade and a half being offended over being sheared. Halt’s sheep-shears look like they’d scarcely do as embroidery
snips, but the wool comes off of Eustace in great rasping swathes.

Get the wool off most sheep, and they look leggy and fit. Get the wool off Eustace and the impression of sheep is much diminished. Eustace shows a basic hide colour a shade of purple like a bruise about to split and the great sinews of the neck bulk in an entirely unsheep-like way. Knowing, it gives away the inner jaws; if you
don’t know, it looks unnatural.

Before the end of Thermidor is in time to vote; that is held on the last day of Thermidor, and Halt, very solemnly, enters the Westcreek Town voter roll with a date of birth of “the memory of man runneth not to the contrary”.

Joining the Second Commonweal passes easily; there isn’t much grumbling about the composition of the resulting new Parliament. Most of the
talk is worry that the Food-Gesith will have a worse problem than anyone can solve.

Halfway through Fructidor, the apple picking has hit a frenzy; it’s an excellent crop year, and everyone’s determined to get all of it into the longest-term storage that can be arranged. Mostly that means canned; canned would normally mean running out of jars, but the glass-making collective Halt started back in
the spring has fixed that. They ran night and day for a couple months, but they’ve fixed it. So now it means finding enough sugar, and no one planted extra beets this spring.

A traveller in Westcreek Town learns of this, sets down a battered satchel, and somewhere between demonstrates and teaches a six-kettle method for getting sugar out of river reeds. Halt, passing by with an Eustace-load of
apples for the town cider press, reinforces some cautions but declares the method sound. A décade later, the technique has spread north and south and three creeks over. Grue spends some days rushing about teaching a simpler test for when the stuff has gone wrong; it’s very close to the test for blind drink, and there are already Creeks who know that.

At the start of Vendémiaire I find myself sharing
a barge up to Headwaters with this same traveller. Remarkably phlegmatic, the kind of sorcerer who sits out in the rain out of philosophical indifference to the weather.

You can generally be sure sorcerers like that didn’t grow up farmers. Doesn’t keep this one from having a breadth of conversation.

The new Shape of Peace is going halfway between Headwaters and the actual start of the Folded Hills,
up on a rise where a broad dike of hard dark rock has worn down slower than the land around it. There’s nothing but a road-house there as a fixed structure; there’s a lot of tents and a gang of Independents has been all over stretches of the rock with chalk lines.

I have no part in the ritual, other than to witness. And maybe to provide warning of disaster by dropping dead, right then and right
there.

Thirty-two of the former Wapentake have come, armoured, calling themselves a colour party while the standard remains in its memorial shrine in Westcreek Town. I can’t begrudge them the desire to stand witness for their dead.

Chert and the three signas, one pennon, and fourteen standards of the Army of the Iron Bridge have not come. They need to stay right where they are, holding back the
swarming creatures of the Paingyre or the risk of Reems.

All those who will be Independents in the second Commonweal can, and must, and have come. Short of two hundred, a third fewer than what the rough seventh of two thousands would give us. Departing from the Shape of Peace is just as deadly to Independents as Standard-Captains; I am surprised at so many taking the risk.

All the standards, the
banners of companies, the individual tubes of artillery, anything associated with the Standard-Binding down to the warrant of a Staff Thaumaturgist, all are made so that they may not be pried away from the Shape of Peace. No-one wanted to deal with a battle-standard that had been taken over by an enemy, with the idea of a standard escaping into the understanding of the Commonweal’s enemies, and
the best wits in the Commonweal have worked for five hundred years to make that impossible.

No one’s had the flash of brilliance to show the way around it; the allegiance of a standard cannot be changed.

What can be done is for the existing Shape of Peace to repudiate them, to cast them out. The date and time has been set with great precision, the vote taken in Parliament and the full ritual set
to be followed in The City Of Peace.

It explains why the Independents doing the physical set up for the ritual have eleven clocks. It would be unusually embarrassing to be late.

There are six new standards; the signas can wait, the standard-captains of individual battalions can survive with transit tokens, the company banners can wait, the artillery tubes can be done without in the present pass.
There’s some hope that the nine-layer tubes are really bound to Blossom, and will come over as Blossom does, but if they do, they will be the only artillery in the Second Commonweal at the moment of its first existence.

Those six new standards are sitting beside the bundled standards of the Eighteenth, outside where those will be emplaced, next to Chert’s pennon, Crinoline’s battalion standard,
and the existing signas of what is about to become the Army of the Second Commonweal. Each of the other standards have the Standard-Captain’s possessions and certainly the Standard-Captain next to them. Everyone knows to stay outside.

Like the active battalion commanders, I have a replacement travel token. Mine is a ceramic cap for a long shot, only with — I am assured — different runes. This
might be a compliment.

The ritual itself is short and quiet and looks like the most important thing is making sure everyone picks up their part of various lengths of chain in the right order. There’s a lot of paper, lists of Independents, sealed scrolls of names from the existing Shape of Peace, piles of contracts, lists and rolls of members of Parliament, township clerks and judges and anybody
else oath-bound for a term of office. Blossom, Halt, the guy from the barge, the newly-elected Peace-Gesith, who is not a Creek, and the equally new Speaker of the Parliament, who is, stand at the points of the pentacle.

The Peace-Gesith and the Speaker are stand-ins, for the Law and the Peace; they don’t get personally bound into the Shape of Peace. Halt and Blossom and the fellow with the satchel
will be, if it works.

I’m surrounded by worried faces; nothing feels broken, I’m not dizzy, everything moves. Sitting up isn’t happening just yet. It feels a lot like losing a shoving match with foci. My original travel-token is physically intact, but you can tell it’s dead. The new one’s live.

Hope the memorial holds its dead.

I get told, later, that there was one moment, just after the ritual
had clearly worked, that Halt looked obviously relieved. I don’t see that. I get to my feet in time to see Blossom and Grue leaning on each other and talking about how they have to stop doing things like this.

One of the Independents says, loudly, “Wait, nobody died?” There’s a mass laugh, Independents, witnesses, new members of Parliament, everybody.

After that everything starts moving again.

Parliament swears itself in. Six or seven Independents run some tests, to be sure the Shape of Peace we’ve got is the one they expected. A member of Parliament obviously more brave than sensible utters a falsehood, and waits to recant until their trousers are obviously on fire. Putting out the fire, first aid, and a general outbreak of congratulatory glee follow.

I go right on feeling like I’ve
been smacked with a plank, but I can move.

Parliament has gone straight into swearing-in judges, appointed clerks, and everybody else whose office ceased with the change.

Twenty or thirty of the Independents lapse into the shapes of swift things, and scatter. If the new standards worked, they can come back less swiftly than if they didn’t.

Most of the Independents head back down to the road. They
aren’t going far, but long custom has Independents staying away from the business of Parliament. Parliament existing as chalk lines on bare rock is not seen as a reason for the custom to change. There’s a lot of fading hey-we’re-alive chatter that settles into a discussion about transport; the Creeks stayed distant in the first Commonweal because getting goods over the Folded Hills is hard, and
that hasn’t changed. If it was obvious how to change it, it probably would have been by now.

I stay put. If the standards didn’t work, the plan calls for Blossom, who has made a working standard before, creating a new one in the presence of the now-existing Second Shape of Peace. I get to take that standard and head over the Folded Hills and try to hold the furthest possible ridge line.

There
will be no shortage of volunteers.

Grue and Blossom come by. Grue hands me a turned maple-wood mug of something that smells like blackberries and anger.

“It’s good for you. Don’t eat the mug, there’s more.” I have to smile back at Grue, a careful social smile, and I do drink it. The last time I ate the mug just because I was hungry, I was eleven.

Whatever it is, it helps. Grue can’t have got
actual rest in the blackberries, but whatever is in there is a good substitute.

I’m about at the bottom of the mug when Halt comes up with the fellow with the satchel. They are, I think they are, having a discussion about the transition of names, between the two Shapes of Peace. One of the things that makes a Commonweal a good arrangement for the Independents is having their true names safely
behind the Shape of Peace. More secure than secrecy, though it still isn’t polite to ask a sorcerer what their name is.

“All secure?”

Halt produces an indescribable expression of contentment. “If my name had changed, or been lost, we would already know.” There’s a pause, and you get the impression Halt is tallying up memories. “It would have been quite spectacular.”