Amber hadn’t spoken to the man enough to be able to tell. With Isak… well, it was hard to tell there too. One moment he wasn’t much different to any other young man, but it took only a heartbeat to switch to either traumatised recluse or blank, empty shell.
I guess the same could be said about me, though, Amber reflected as Carel approached him, his scabbards and baldrics in hand. They each cleaned and sheathed a scimitar in silence, the weapons sliding home with a whisper before Amber pulled the baldrics on and tightened the straps.
‘Man was good,’ Carel muttered.
‘Aye. Seems like a waste now, doesn’t it?’
Carel caught Amber’s arm. ‘It wasn’t, and you’ve got my thanks. Without that duel we’d have had to threaten and probably fight our way through. I don’t want Isak unleashing that sword’s power any more’n he has to. Little bastard’s never known when to stop.’
‘When to stop?’ Amber said in a hollow voice, looking back at the man he’d spared. ‘Then let’s hope he learns one day.’
He raised his voice, turning to the handful of bearded Menin watching him intently. ‘What are you waiting for? Sound the advance!’
CHAPTER 36
General Lahk slowly unfastened the embossed buckles of his jacket and eased it off. The stink of rancid wool and unwashed skin filled the sleeping half of his tent, but he’d long since grown used to that. His linen undershirt was greasy to the touch and he pulled it up over his head and discarded it on the bed. Slumping down in his campaign chair, he began to unbuckle his greaves and unlace the high cavalry boots before wearily tugging them from his legs.
He sat for a moment with his feet on the edge of the bed, looking up at the peaked roof of the tent. It took him a while, but eventually the white-eye general heaved himself up again and stripped off his leggings so he was naked. It was chilly in there, but even the northern parts of the Chetse lands were far further south than back home, where snow would be coming soon — these plains and valleys had never been covered overnight by a white blanket. Outside was dusty scrubland dotted with patchy clumps of brown grass. What little rain fell vanished almost immediately into the parched ground.
Lahk ran his fingers over his body in his nightly inspection. Once he’d finished checking his body for the ticks and infections that plagued every soldier, he opened the small box beside his chair. Inside was a mirror, several rolled pieces of cloth and a clay pot. He raised the mirror briefly and stared at the face reflected in it: white-eyes, weathered cheeks and uneven eyebrows; the lump of his nose and broad, muscular jawline common to his kind; the scar on his cheek that most white-eyes had in one form or another.
He picked up the candle illuminating the inside of the tent and brought it closer, staring into his own eyes, following the circle of his white irises and the small black dot at its heart.
Not so different to any other man’s eye, Lahk thought to himself, and yet it means so much.
He touched the gold ring in his ear, an ornament he’d not cared for until recently. As a white-eye his skin healed quickly and earrings were an annoyance, but despite all that, Lahk had taken to wearing the single ring of rank normally left packed and forgotten in his belongings. It was a reminder of home, of the tribe he’d left behind — though most of those he knew and respected were with him now.
He unclipped the ring and set it on the table, wiping away the slight trace of blood on his earlobe. It would be half healed by the time he woke up, but this was as long as he’d ever been away from the tribe that was his entire life. Lord Bahl had not been one for conquest, and his faithful general had been kept largely within Farlan borders.
He’d been made a marshal for reasons of political etiquette as much as anything, and he felt little affection for the manor or the lands he owned. It was the grey streets of Tirah he missed, the cloud-wreathed spires and besieging forest beyond. He had his orders still, but the cause was a remote one for a man so used to the certainty and strength of Lord Bahl.
He picked up the mirror again and inspected the scars on his neck. The skin was red-raw where his cuirass, dented by a halberd a week back, was rubbing. He was loath to ask the smiths to beat it out again; that it rubbed against his tender scar tissue was not a good enough reason to distract them from their more vital work.
With the mirror he followed the line of jagged scars, running from his neck, branching around his shoulder, then spreading down over his chest and stomach in a long fern pattern. Another scar, two fingers thick, ran down his shoulder and back before it merged again with the other at his hip and ran down the buttock, with more strange fern-spreads, then tapering until it reached his calf, where it ended.
The scar was old, darker than his flesh, with whitened cracks crossing it where the skin was dry. It had been years since Nartis had so savagely rejected him as Lord Bahl’s Krann, but he could still remember the white-hot pain, as if a strip of his skin had been ripped off his body and discarded. And then he’d smelled the burnt flesh..
With the patience of many years’ practice, Lahk began to daub wool-grease onto the worst parts, centred on his neck and hip, moving in turn to the other scars on his body, feeling an echo of each one as he reached it: the chunk of flesh gouged from his thigh in the Great Forest beyond Lomin; the small scar on his bicep which was the only trace of an axe blow that had broken his arm and pained him to this day.
The litany of injuries continued: his cheek, pierced by the steel-shod butt of a spear that had broken two teeth. White-eye bones healed — some had been forcibly mended a dozen times or more — but teeth didn’t grow back. Sword-cut to his forearm, here; a knife-wound up his ribs, there, that had notched two of them. The dark circle above his hip was an arrow-wound, innocuous in size, but it had caused terrible damage within and the healers had only just managed to save his life that time. His kneecap, spilt neatly across the middle; his ankle, shattered by a lance; another arrow wound to his thigh… Even the fingers he was using to massage in the ointment had suffered. His little fingers had been broken four times between them — the one on the left hand had fared worst and now barely moved; nowadays it was usually splinted to its neighbour. Even his knuckles were scarred and ugly with use.
His kind didn’t age as quickly as normal humans, yet as each day ended, General Lahk felt the years more heavily: the slow, stiff ache in his shoulders, the dull clunk from his shoulder socket whenever he drew his left arm right back, the gnarled and twisted toes, with every nail ridged and bruised.
Everything hurts, Lahk concluded, easing back into his chair and ignoring the cold that raised goose bumps on his flesh. Am I lucky or foolish? I’ve served longer than almost any other — as long as Suzerain Torl, and I don’t envy him his body. I’ve seen the discomfort, and even shitting pains him.
The thought made Lahk look down at his crotch. The one I always forget.
He took a little more ointment and pushed his penis aside. Even that was scarred, the faint white line down its side marking where a sword had sliced, missing the groin artery, but tearing away one ball, leaving his sack looking even uglier than most: a small, misshapen lump half-covered in hair.
He stopped as the weight of damage drained the strength from him. He’d only once seen disgust on a whore’s face, but the hurt of it remained with him still. The woman he kept in Tirah was cheerfully unbothered by any sort of disfigurement, but it was her presence in the dark of night that made him pay her house bills, not the sex.
Gods, he thought, I’ve never even met a white-eye female — and my brother’s been as useless as me when it comes to bringing new life into the Land. ‘Are we only good for killing?’ he said aloud, though the empty tent never gave him any answer.
My body’s a record of service — sometimes I think it belongs to the army. Maybe one day Quartermaster- General Kervar will ask for it back. Would I complain? No other man can be this damaged. Each time they patch me up and send me back out, because I’m the fool who does not say no, who does not complain or argue. For thirty- five years I’ve been first to be tended by the healers. Any other soldier would have lost his arm or leg and been pensioned out — or be dead of his wounds, more likely — yet here I am, still fighting.
He sat back and reached into the box once again, this time withdrawing a cloth roll. Fumbling a little, he fitted a small porcelain pipe and ivory stem together, then withdrew a tiny black lump from a pouch, placed it in the
