“Yes, nasty business all around, lads.” (More scratching; some soft cursing.) “Until a young girl pulled a sword from a tree. Until a queen rose to power and sent her champion out to bring peace and prosperity to the land. And then there was only one crown, one God, and one nation. And that nation was called Dominion.”
Here he would smile with a sort of rugged paternal pride. “For a thousand years, we’ve held fast. Despite treachery and idolatry, despite foreigners and radicals worrying at our heels. Despite even these damned Hinterlanders—who slew the Virgin Saint herself, who despise our very way of life!” He shook his head, dolefully. “How many times have we gone to war with them, and settled for sniveling treaties, slick promises from soft-handed diplomats? Not this time, buckos! This time let us have victory or death! Let us, gathered here”—I could never tell if he was faking it, or if he was genuinely choking with tears—“Letusbe the Last Crusade, my boys! For crown and country!” (There was a separate tally for this phrase, which the Colonel deployed at least once a day despite the fact that no one had actually worn the crown for a century or so, as Dominion was now a republic.)
A beat or two would pass while everyone ran the numbers, followed by perfunctory applause and furtive shuffling, as a great deal of cigarettes and pornography changed hands.
Then we would string up flags and pose for photographs in front of whatever little village we’d liberated for crown and country.
I had formed the idea, from the little newsreels that played before films at the theater, that the new citizens of Dominion would applaud as we passed, weeping with gratitude and tossing fistfuls of poppy petals, but they only watched us, silently, with eyes like thrown stones.
Every now and then they approached me, speaking rapidly in one of the many languages of the Hinterlands: Shvalic in the east or Merrish in the south, or the musical, gapless speech of the Roving Folk, who lived everywhere, on horseback. But I would shake my head—only the Mothertongue was taught in Dominion schools—and they would recoil, as from a stick that had turned out to be a snake.
I wondered if I really looked so much like them. If the mother my father never mentioned had been one of them, some nameless Hinterlander girl he met during the last campaign. If she was even now standing in the crowd, watching me through the gaps between rifles.
I tried not to look at the townspeople, after that.
My sleep suffered. My dreams became torturous circles, looping back over the same battles again and again, with slight, disquieting variations, interrupted only by the anxious grinding of my own molars. In the morning my hands shook so badly that I struggled to tie my own laces or button my own coat, although they were always perfectly steady when I raised my revolver. I thought often of my father, not with my usual pity or disgust, but with a treacherous, wormy sympathy.
“Think of your girl back home,” Colonel Drayton advised, cliché-ly. I thought of flaxen hair, of mailed fists, and eyes like judgment day. My breathing eased.
Drayton clapped me on the back very hard and said, “See, lad? It’s all worth it.”
I found myself repeating those words like a prayer. I believed them, or at least believed that I believed them—until we reached the southern coast.
Our enemies had fallen back and back until there was nowhere else to fall back to. The ones who would surrender had surrendered; what remained were the ones who never would. Who no longer hoped for victory or mercy, but only blood.
They were dug in now among the dunes, waiting for us. We might have starved them out or waited for the fleet to fire on them from the seaward side. But the public was tiring of the war, and Colonel Drayton had beenasked to provide a decisive victory. So there we were in the pale dawn: running the leather straps of our holsters over our shoulders, affixing our service knives to our belts, laughing in the urgent, overloud way of young men who can taste their own deaths in the backs of their mouths.
I snapped my revolver into its holster—a Saint Sinclair Mark III, finest product of the finest army in the world, accurate to thirty paces—and looked out at the shadowed figures waiting for us in the dunes. Within an hour or two they’d all be dead, along with most of the men beside me.
I couldn’t see, suddenly, how it could possibly be worth it. How lowering, after all this marching, to discover I was still my father’s son.
They found me six hours later with my throat half cut, so that my breath bubbled obscenely through my trachea. Poor Colonel Drayton lay beside me, service knife still gripped in one cold hand, and a neat black hole burrowed directly between his eyes.
The following week was a grim haze of needles and stitches and medics with distant, resigned expressions. Someone turned on a wireless so we could hear Minister Rolfe’s speech, thanking us for our noble and worthy sacrifices in the name of crown and country. I laughed, and it was such an unpleasant sound that they sedated me. The fever set in some time that night, and I thought, with no small amount of irony, that I might die for my country after all.
And then I dreamed of you.
I’d dreamed of you many times, as a boy and after, but you were always two-dimensional, a character from a storybook rather than a person.
Now you were so real I could see the lines tanned into the corners of your eyes, hear the wet rattle of your breath. Your teeth were filmed with blood.
“Owen,” you said, and your voice was deep and cool as still water, “come back to me.”
Then you said, “Please,” and that cool voice caught and hung on the word, and I thought I would do anything at all—live or die or burn in hell—if you asked it of me.
In the dream, I answered you. The medics told me later it was the first word I’d spoken since the dunes, the first time any of them thought I might live.
I said, “Always.”
The fever burned out within a week, but the dreams lingered.
They were almost always of you, though you did not speak again. I saw you kneeling, head bowed so that your hair parted in two bright wingsaround the back of your neck. I saw you astride a rangy blood bay, the two of you moving in eerie, perfect synchrony, like a single animal. I saw you by firelight and leaf-light, moonlight and sunlight and, once, bizarrely, by the spectral, electric blue of a searchlight.
Sometimes, of course, my dreams were merely the senseless, anxious dreams of a coward: looking for my father and not finding him; trying to hold a pen with curled, blackened fingers; calling out the names of two children I’d never met and knowing they wouldn’t answer.
Sometimes, too, I dreamed of home: the long gray summers of Queenswald, when mold bloomed overnight and moss burst green between every cobblestone; the quiet winter evenings with my father, both of us reading, nearly content; those eager spring mornings in the grove, waiting forUllabeneath the yew.
That’s where I went when they finally let me out of the hospital. I took the train straight from Cavallon to Queenswald. An elderly, jowly man offered me his seat, which puzzled me until I recalled that I was still wearing my red service jacket, with the Everlasting Medal of Honor gleaming dishonestly on my chest. Other passengers regarded me with fond, vaguely paternal expressions, rather like the ones in my childhood vision. I found they made me a little sick, now.
