The Three Lands Omnibus (2011 Edition) (30 page)

Devin took Quentin into the storeroom with him tonight to consult him about the supplies. When it's used as a sickroom, a brazier is placed in there, causing the storeroom to be the warmest part of the hut. Now it's the coldest part, but all of us find ourselves wandering in there periodically to stare at our dwindling supplies.
The fourteenth day of December in the 940th year a.g.l.
Six days' worth of food left. The reason we have lost a day's worth of food is that Chatwin has been stealing food. Quentin, lying in wait, caught him during the night.
Emorian law is amazingly comprehensive. I never would have thought there'd be a law covering the crime of stealing food from one's fellow soldiers when you are all on the point of starvation – but there is, and Carle knows it by heart. He says that the last time he recited it was two days ago, when Chatwin asked him whether such a law existed.
This was the evidence that caused Quentin to give Chatwin the maximum punishment, which is death. Actually, the maximum punishment is a Slave's Death, which is a fate too sickening for me to record here. But we all agreed that Chatwin didn't deserve a prolonged death of any sort, and the council and judge together can commute the sentence to a Free-Man's Death, which in this case meant a blade through the heart.
Quentin gave Chatwin's partner, Hoel, permission to carry out the sentence. Hoel thought it would be easier for Chatwin if he did it. I don't know whether it was; we could all hear Chatwin crying in the storeroom for a quarter of an hour before he reached the point where he was calm enough that Hoel could carry out the execution.
Hoel has been white-faced ever since then. The rest of us, by unspoken consent, decided not to play Law Links tonight. Carle's one comment was that Chatwin had an easier death than the rest of us will have.
The fifteenth day of December in the 940th year a.g.l.
Still six days' worth of food left. We have Chatwin's share to divide.
Carle, evidently feeling that our time is short, has leapt to the end of the Justification of the Law of Vengeance and is now having me memorize the Chara's burdens, the passage he told me about during our trip to Emor. As Carle promised, it is a humbling recital of all the suffering that the Chara endures for the people of his land. The passage ends by talking about the sacrifices that the Chara's subjects should make out of love for the Chara. Carle has been providing no commentary on the passage; he doesn't need to.
The winds have finally started to die down, and Devin again begged to be sent back to Emor. Quentin has refused him again.
The sixteenth day of December in the 940th year a.g.l.
We've been here for eleven days now, and we've been debating whether anyone at the army headquarters will believe that we're still alive. I think that was what made Quentin give in to Devin's request – though Carle thinks Quentin could see that Devin was on the point of disobeying orders and wanted to spare him that dishonor.
There was no lengthy farewell, but all of us ignored the fact that Quentin accompanied Devin to the tunnel and spent longer coming back than one would have expected. Quentin has known his partner since childhood; they grew up in neighboring villages.
Quentin gave Devin a generous portion of the food, so I assume that we have four days' worth of food left, though Devin is no longer here to say, and Quentin has not issued his own report.
The seventeenth day of December in the 940th year a.g.l.
I learned today why Quentin isn't reporting how much food we have left.
"He isn't eating!" I whispered to Carle, having watched as Quentin went from man to man to ensure that we were all eating our rations, without ever picking up any food himself.
Carle was busy licking nut-grease from his fingers. He looked up and whispered back, "It took you this long to notice? He hasn't eaten for three days."
"But he'll die!" I protested. "He can't survive long in this cold."
Carle made no reply except to draw out from the folds of his cloak a small object: it was the lieutenant's seal-ring.
He hid it again before anyone else could see it and said, "He gave it to me this morning so that, if he died suddenly, there wouldn't be any dispute over who was his successor. In the meantime, he's still lieutenant. Short of mutinying against him, there's nothing we can do to stop him."
"But he made us swear—" I stopped, remembering the line of men holding naked blades, and Quentin standing nearby, his sword still sheathed.
"He administered the oath; he didn't take it himself," replied Carle calmly. "It's his privilege to sacrifice himself for the sake of the unit. He is like the Chara to us."
I've been thinking about the lieutenant tonight, with his skin stretched tight across his bones, and his eyes much too bright. He has stopped going outside to check the weather, and he hasn't been on his feet since mealtime. I've also been thinking about Carle, who will become lieutenant if Quentin dies, and who may decide, oath or no oath, that it is also his privilege to sacrifice himself for the unit. And I've been thinking about the passage Carle has been having me memorize, about how the Emorian people should make sacrifices out of love for the Chara.
I'm having a hard time deciding how to do this right.
The eighteenth day of December in the 940th year a.g.l.
The hard part was figuring out how to die. Jephthah was Emorian-born, so he regarded slaying himself as an act of honor, but I kept remembering Fenton's words about how the worst crime one can commit is to kill oneself. I wouldn't want to do anything that would shame me in the eyes of Fenton's spirit.
But allowing death to come to me naturally would be different. If I went to the cave in Mount Skycrest and waited there, it wouldn't even be a painful death. I would probably die of the cold rather than starvation, and Hoel has been saying that it isn't so terrible to fall asleep in the cold and never awake.
But I had to be sure that no one would come after me, so the device I eventually decided upon was to write a note pretending that I had gone unbalanced – that my wits had fled me and that I would be dead soon after I left the hut. I wrote a letter that I hope sounded sufficiently mad about how I planned to swim naked in the snow – some nonsense I blush to think about, since it will be the last communication anyone will receive from me. I hope that it doesn't hurt Carle too much to think that my life ended that way.
I waited until the winds had dropped before sneaking to the door and opening it in the still silence of the night. Carle barely stirred. I worried most about waking Quentin, but he was shuddering and breathing deeply in his sleep; I wondered if he would even be alive by morning. I left the two of them, along with Payne and Hoel, and raced into the snow-frosted world outside. As Hoel had said, it was hard to find the cave under the unfamiliar landscape of snow, and when I got there, I found that the gap was filled with snow that I had to shovel out with my arms before I could scramble into the cave.
The winds blow gently now and then, but there are long periods when the air is still. I hope it will remain that way for the sake of the others.
As it is, I'm surprised that I'm still alive. Part of the reason is that snow blocks the entrance and keeps out the winds, so this cave is no colder than the storeroom. Every hour or so, I shovel back some of the snow to allow in air and a bit of light. I don't know why I bother to do this, but I suppose that keeping alive is more an instinct than anything else.
It is in this light that I have been writing the words in this journal. I suppose I should have flung my journal on the fire and provided the others with more fuel; no one must ever read these words and know what I have done. I must be sure that I destroy my journal before I rest.
It's harder to keep awake in the cold than I thought. With this journal as my pillow, I fell asleep, thinking how nice it would be to escape just for a while from the aching in my stomach.
I awoke to the sound of a whistle: the hunted had been captured alive. For a moment, I lay where I was, feeling the cold floor cutting like a blade through my cloak. Then a shadow fell over me, and I opened my eyes.
It was Carle, standing above me with a wine flask in his hand.
As I pulled myself painfully up into a sitting position, he squatted down next to me and thrust the wine into my hands. The flask was warm: he must have held it over the fire before leaving the hut in order to keep the liquid from freezing. The look in his eyes was such that I dared not disobey, so I swallowed half the liquid before handing it back to him.
He took it after inspecting to make sure I had drunk enough, then said, "You know, you might have considered what it would be like for me, dying without my partner at my side."
"I'm sorry," I said in a low voice.
He grinned then and finished off the wine before sitting down cross-legged beside me. The wind had begun to howl outside again, and I knew without asking that Carle was now trapped in the cave like me. I thought of Devin, and wondered whether he was dying in the winds.
"You just did what the rest of us wanted to do but didn't dare," Carle said. "It takes a brave man to break a free-man's oath."
"I'm used to oath-breaking," I said with my head bowed.
"Only under the right circumstances, though I can't say that your wits always match your sense of honor. Did you really expect that letter to fool us? You're lucky you didn't have the lieutenant searching for you; Payne and Hoel had to pin him down to keep him from coming after you. He'll probably have us all up on charges if we survive, but we're past the point of caring about that."
We talked for quite a while after that. I can't remember everything that we said, but it was mainly about how I had made my decision to break my oath and disobey Quentin. At a certain point, Carle said, "But it's easy enough to find a justification for breaking an order. At his trial, Shepley said that he had tried to capture the barbarian on his own because he wanted to protect the rest of us from danger. He said that he couldn't have known that the capture would go awry – but that's precisely the point. We can never know the full consequences of disobeying orders; that's why it's up to our officials to make such decisions. They have greater experience and skill, and so they can see further ahead than we can."
"That's true," I said, huddling closer to Carle. He had wrapped his cloak around the two of us, and we were drawing upon each other's warmth like autumn flowers seeking the last rays of sunshine before their deaths. "And there's a more positive way to phrase it: we can never know the full consequences of obeying orders. It seems mad to me sometimes, the way that we risk our lives to stop unimportant men who would probably cause no trouble if they breached the border – but we just can't know that for sure. The best path to take is to obey orders, even if it seems that Emor will receive no reward for our sacrifices."
"Then why did you disobey the lieutenant? Don't mistake me; I think you did the right thing. I just can't find the words to say why."
I leaned my head against Carle's shoulder, closing my eyes against the dagger-sharp cold that bit at us. He put his arm around my back, and I felt him reach his bare hand out toward the cutting air in order to pull his cloak closed around me. I said, without opening my eyes, "I suppose it's a matter of instinct. When you threw yourself weaponless at the barbarian, you didn't stop to measure whether what you were doing was right or not. You just knew that Quentin and Shepley were in danger, and you acted accordingly. I think that you have to start with a strong love for the Chara and his laws, and draw upon that when it comes time to make such decisions."
I felt Carle's head move, and when I tilted my own to look up at him, I saw that he was smiling. "So my law lessons to you during the past few days haven't been wasted," he said.
"What?" I replied, blinking rapidly in confusion.
"The Law of Vengeance. You actually paid attention to what you were memorizing."
"Oh." It took me a moment to realize what he was saying. "I hadn't thought of that. Yes, I suppose that says the same thing."
"What law passage were you thinking of, then?"
I seemed suddenly a great deal warmer than I had been before – at least, my ears were quite warm. I ducked my head, but Carle had already read my eyes and was laughing. "Not a law passage," he said. "Something Koretian? Well, go ahead and enlighten me."
"It's religious," I mumbled.
"I promise to eliminate my usual sharp commentary on the subject. In any case, this doesn't seem to be the right moment to ridicule your gods. I suppose you've been praying to them."
"No," I responded quickly. The look of approval I received from Carle emboldened me to say, "It's something Fenton told me during our last conversation. He said that if you truly love the gods and their law, you will know when the right moment comes to offer up your sacrifice. He said that a cousin of mine who is a jeweller had once described the Koretian people as joined together by their love of the gods, like the links of a precious chain."
I expected Carle to say that Emlyn had stolen this image from the Emorians, but he was silent for a long while before saying, "Perhaps the Koretians are more civilized than I'd thought. By the law-structure, if they'd only direct their love to the proper source . . ."
"Perhaps they will some day," I said as I yawned. "Perhaps we'll find some way of persuading them to serve the Chara and his laws."
"Perhaps." Carle's arm tightened around me like a ring encircling another, and sleepily I remembered that we would not be there to help with this battle. But it scarcely seemed to matter, so strong was my satisfaction at having conquered another hard question of the law, and so pleasant was the sensation of being with Carle when this happened.
And so, when I fell asleep a short while later and knew that I was falling asleep for the last time, it seemed unimportant compared to what had happened before. It was thus an anticlimax when I awoke and saw the lieutenant standing in front of us, and behind him Devin and Malise and the rest of the rescue party. I was glad that we would live, but I was even gladder that we hadn't been rescued a few hours before. All of the pain we had gone through seemed worth it, just to have had that one conversation in the cave.