Thus was Guardsman Ylo toppled from the giddy peaks of the aristocracy to the rat-eat-rat world of the common foot soldier. From all-night dancing to all-day marching. From fine wine to sour beer, and silk sheets to bedbugs. From sweetskinned debutantes in rose gardens to toothless harridans who took all his money and kept telling him to hurry up.
With thanks to the Gods for each new dawn, he accepted his fall from grace and set to work to survive the brutish, penniless, mind-crippling life of a legionary.
The standard tour of duty was twenty-five years.
Always at Winterfest the Imperial Archivist named the year just ending. No one was very surprised when he proclaimed 2995 to have been the Year of his Majesty’s Ninetieth Birthday. By then the Yllipos were all dead and forgotten.
And 2996 turned out to be the Year of the Great-grandchild. The superstitious and those who knew some history were already starting to worry about the coming millennium, but 2997 was destined to be known as the Year of Seven Victories.
The troubles began in Zark. A few days after Winterfest, the emir of Garpoon received an ultimatum from the caliph and appealed to the imperor for help.
The emir had very little choice in the matter, as the Imperial ambassador was holding a sword under his chin at the time, but such fine points of diplomacy were of no concern to a common foot soldier. Five thousand strong, the XXth Legion marched south to Malfin and embarked. Ylo learned then that he was just as prone to seasickness as any other imp and that there were worse experiences than a forced march in winter.
After four weeks at sea, he disembarked at a large city, which might possibly be Ullacarn. It was very hot and had palm trees. The mountains to the north were perhaps the Progiste Range. The XXth formed up and marched away along the coast, maybe heading for somewhere called Garpoon.
The hot, arid country was hostile and unfamiliar. The rocky hills were full of cryptic wadis that could be full of djinns.
Ylo had no illusions about heroism or glory. He knew the odds against a tyro surviving his first battle. He knew that even those odds were vastly better than the chances of a simple legionary ever winning as much as one word of praise from his centurion, let alone recognition from the officers. He admitted to himself that he was terrified, and would be perfectly satisfied if he could just conceal that terror from his companions.
The best he had to look forward to was another twenty-three years of this.
He survived the first day’s march. And the second. On the third day he found himself in the Battle of Karthin.
Karthin eventually ranked as the first of the year’s seven victories, but it was a very narrow win. Proconsul Iggipolo held to the standard belief that Zark was one huge waterless expanse of sand; he knew that djinns were red-eyed barbarians who fought on camels in the brightest sunlight they could find. He therefore marched three road-weary legions into a swamp, an evening thunderstorm, and the caliph’s trap.
Bogged down in mud by their armor, the imps soon learned that djinns fought very well on foot and could conceal ten men behind every clump of reeds. Sunset failed to halt the slaughter, and dawn revealed Ylo’s maniple isolated, surrounded, and hopelessly outnumbered.
Honor, politics, and even discipline had vanished in the night. Hunger, terror, and exhaustion were unimportant. Survival was all that mattered. The morning was a foggy blur of noise and blood, sword strokes and the screams of the dying. The maniple shrank steadily. The centurions and the optios fell; the standard disappeared. A tesserary shouted commands until he took an arrow in the throat, and after that it was every man for himself, and no one seemed to know which way was home.
Whether he had tripped or been stunned or had merely fainted, Ylo never knew. He lay facedown in a bloody ooze for a long time, keeping company with the dead. That was not cowardice, and he was far from alone in his collapse. Imps rarely made great fighters. They were never berserkers, as the jotnar often were, nor fanatics like the djinns. They did not covet martyrdom, as elves did in their darker moods. They lacked the suicidal stubbornness of fauns or the stony stamina of dwarves. Imps were just very good organizers, with a driving urge to organize everyone else as well as they had organized themselves.
Eventually Ylo realized that he could still hear the beating of his heart. Then another beat, as well. And a bugle! He was very tired of the swamp. He rose from the field of dead, lifted a sword from a nearby corpse to replace the one he had lost, and decided fuzzily that he was too weak to carry a shield. He trudged off through the mud, heading for the drums and those twenty-three more years.
He had lost one sandal; bare skin on arms and legs was blistered raw by the sun. His sodden tunic was rubbing holes in his skin, something heavy had dented his helmet so that it no longer fitted properly, yet none of the swords, arrows, and javelins that had been directed at him had penetrated his hide.
The sky was blue; the fog had faded to patchy ghosts haunting the vegetation. The first Ylo saw of his salvation was the top of an Imperial standard advancing toward him, the four-pointed star shining. in sunlight. Then out of the mist and the bulrushes below it came a wall of legionaries, driving a ragtag mob of exhausted djinns before them.
Ylo was on the wrong side of that mob. Either courage or blind panic spurred him into life. Yelling like a maniac, he struck down a couple from behind, plunging into the free-for-all, clawing his way toward the impish standard. He would certainly not have made it, except that a murdering, screaming horde of djinns appeared out of nowhere at his back like a tidal wave and swept him up.
The shield wall collapsed before the onslaught. Ylo was borne forward, all the way to his objective, the standard. He arrived as a javelin felled its bearer. Two years of training stamped certain lessons on a man’s bones, and the first of those was that standards were sacred. Without conscious thought, Ylo dropped his sword, caught the falling staff with both hands, and raised it erect.
And thereby became a hero.
2
Even as a terrified young man clung grimly to a pole amid the raging clamor of the Battle of Karthin, a woman lay quietly dying a hundred leagues or so to the north, beyond the Progiste Mountains.
She knew that she was dying, but she didn’t mind any more. It was time. She had been rather surprised to see the dawn and would be even more surprised to see another. Meanwhile she was in very little pain. Slow-moving shafts of sunlight in her cottage kept her company. The busy sounds of the forest outside were like familiar friends coming to visit, pausing to chat among themselves before they bowed under the lintel—breezes moving through the branches, the chattering of the stream over the rocks, buzzing insects, the impudent call of parrots.
Her name was Phain of the Keez Place. She was very old. She could not recall how old, and it didn’t matter. She had even outlived her cottage, for the roof had a serious sag to it, and the walls had more windows now than they’d had when Keez had built them, many, many years ago.
Keez was long gone, so long that she could hardly recall what he had looked like with his silver hair and his stooped back. She could remember him in his youth, though, strong and graceful as a young horse, bringing her here to show her the place he had found, with its stream and its giant cottonwoods soaring to the sky. She could recall the eager, anxious look on his big, smooth face as he waited for her decision; the relief and joy when she said yes, this place would do well. Very clearly she could remember how right it had felt, and how she had decided to be kind and not make him suffer more, for his longing was so great—and hers no less. Now! she had said, sitting down and pulling him down beside her. Yes, now!
She remembered how his strength had delighted her—that first time under the sky especially, and uncounted later times under the roof, too. But there had never been another time quite like the time when they’d first lain together in the sunshine, right here, making this their Place.
It had been a good Place. Here they had loved; here she had brought forth sons and daughters—four shed borne and four shed reared, not many women could say as much. Here Keez had died, but easily, without pain. Here she was dying. The forest could have it back now, and thank you; she was done with it.