The Side of Right

In Sharant, the trumpets blow for returning heroes. Heroes missing limbs and heroes missing eyes, heroes on horseback and heroes on sledge. Heroes in bronze and heroes in torn and bloodied cloth. There were a lot of the latter, and many limbs left frozen on the mountain are clad in the same rough-spun linen. Sitting high upon his mount, the general beams, armor gleaming in the noonday sun while people pitch red Yumang flowers into his path. The blossoms crush underhoof and paint the stones crimson.

I found a ring in soil where no crops will grow. Copper, hefty; a curving symbol that I do not recognize wraps around the outside of it: a man’s ring and a woman’s symbol.

The field is barren. Salt soaks deep and blood still deeper. The winter winds push the dust around stalks of scraggly scrubgrasses that persevere despite the poison.

***

“Buo Kshan, fetch the guests another round of wine.” Uncle Hirpyua peeled Leumotza roots into a wide wooden bowl, dropping the tough skins into a bucket for the goats.

“Another one?”

“Yes, another one, go on now.” He jerked his head toward the back of the dinner-house and Buo Kshan started, then hesitated, looking at his uncle with a lack of surety that, had he been a year younger, would have bordered on insolence.

“Go on!” Hirpyua said again, this time jerking his peeling knife toward the door, and he leaned in conspiratorially. “Make them happy. We can afford it. The longer they stay, the more they spend.”

***

I drop the ring into my pocket and it clinks against a silver coin.

In Sharant, generals dine with the Shar. They regale the cabinet with tales of courage and valor in the face of bitter odds. The spirits were on their side–the side of right; the side of the victors.

I trip over a stone as I return to the house. I sprawl and scrape both knees, catching myself only before my face can collide with the earth. I curse and spit and I clutch at the two circles of metal in my pocket, assuring myself that they are still there. They are there, warmed by my body heat and utterly solid–utterly real.

The foreigners, with their round faces and wide eyes, their long, neatly tied beards and deep pockets, spent much in their stay in the little village--coins from here and stones from there, all stamped with a different face and in different shapes--and indeed the village could afford it. But trouble breeds trouble, and it was not long before the Sharantin arrived to fight their war and make sure that the little village could not afford to harbor foreign horsemen again.

“Damn the damned spirits. Damn the gods. Damn the ancestors,” I whisper, and curl my knees to my chest, seeing the face of my brother in my mind, at once laughing and jovial, and still as a grotesque statue, the white of that chipped stone marred only by scarlet. I see the stomach of Mollo Jyomr, pregnant with the burgeoning mass of his organs while the rest of his skin shrank nearly down to the bone. I see Little Efreun, stumbling from her family’s home just as the smoke began to roll, falling against a tree as her bleeding eyes stared sightlessly, heedless of the dangling, torn skirt of her dress or of the bruises that banded the backs of her thighs like garters. Her necklace, a pretty thing that her father gifted her when he returned from trading in Sharant, was gone, though she could not have admired it any longer in any case.

I turn and push myself to my feet, going to kick the stone that got in my way, and stop when I see the fingers and the painted nails. The hand was frozen solid as ice. It was a man’s hand–a Sharantin hand by the paint on the nails. What little heat there had been in me trickled away to nothing even as the tears froze on my cheeks. There might be good meat on it once it thawed. Enough for a stew, at any rate.

In Sharant, a young man sits with his head bowed nearly to the table as his wife prepares bread for the oven. A new statue of General Chong-Yomtse casts a shadow through the window that once felt the best light of the morning. The young man is tempted to go outside and search the offerings at the statue–to take the coins, the sacks of meal, the saltfish, the dried peppers–to take those donations for the conquering general and live upon them himself–to damn the army’s “benevolent providence...” its cripple payments... its hush money. "Here, don't tell anybody what we took from you. Have some money." He misses his home. He joined the army to raise his station, but now he only wants to go back to the fields. He would, if he could grasp a plough or wield a spade. A spade was a better tool than a spear. He could no more do those things, however, than he could make the bread that his wife kneaded. He still felt his fingers sometimes. They felt frozen and stiff.

Across town, a widow still weeps when she tucks her child into bed at night, knowing that tomorrow may well be the day when she cannot afford to feed him. In the prison, a man barely older then a boy shits into a bucket even as fever threatens to pull him into it. He ran while others died. In the court, General Yomtse admires a new necklace that hangs around his neck as a trophy. It was fashioned in his own hometown.

“Uncle?” The word chokes in my throat like a weasel barely peeking from his hole. It is afraid to come out. No—it is afraid that it will not be answered.

“Buo Kshan,” the voice, so unlike my uncle’s usual booming tone, grates from under the pile of bedding like the rasping of dried grass in the foothills. At once I both loosen and tense.

“How are you feeling?”

There is no answer for a long time, then the rasping voice speaks up again as I set the pot on the fire. “I am feeling.”

I don’t respond to this–only go about my business of filling the pot with snow and building the fire into something hot and focused on which to boil my scavenged haul. I will throw in some cubed Leumotza and it shouldn’t taste any different from a stew of wild pig.

“What did you find?” The rasping voice asks after a long moment.

“Some meat,” I say, hunkering on my haunches and stirring the pot with a stick. My own stomach aches with hunger and my head swims as I push myself to my feet. “And this.” I hold out the soldier’s ring and my uncle takes it, only a gaunt hand and a gaunt eye.

“Gold?”

I shake my head. “I don’t think so.”

He puts it between his teeth and bites, wincing as the hard metal doesn’t budge. He spits. “Salty.”