Shaman's Crossing

“Then you think the rumors are true? That the plague comes from sexual congress with the Specks?” My brother, usually so calm a fellow, was horrified. I found myself creeping closer to the window. At that age, I had no personal experience of sexual congress at all. I was shocked to hear my brother and father bluntly speaking of such perversions as coupling with a lesser race. Like any lad of my years, I was consumed with curiosity about such things. I held my breath and listened.

“How else?” my father asked heavily. “The Specks are a vermin-ridden folk, living in the deep shadows under the trees until their skin mottles from lack of sunlight, like cheese gone to mold. Turn over a log in a bog and you’ll find better living conditions than what the Specks prefer. Yet their women, when young, can be comely, and to those soldiers of low intellect and less breeding, they seem seductive and exotic. The penalty for such congress was a flogging when I was stationed on the edge of the Wilds. The distances were kept, and we had no plague.

“Now that General Brodg has taken over as commander in the east, discipline is more lax. He is a good soldier, Rosse, a damn fine soldier, but blood and breeding have thinned in his line. He made his rank honestly and I do not begrudge him that, though some still say that the king insulted the nobly born soldier sons when he raised a common soldier to the rank of general. I myself say that the king has the right to promote whomever he pleases, and that Brodg served him as well as any living man. But as a ranker rather than an officer born, he has far too much sympathy for the common soldier. I suspect he hesitates to apply proper punishment for transgressions that he himself may once have indulged in.”

My brother spoke but I could not catch his words. My father’s disagreement was in his tone. “Of course, one can sympathize with what the common soldier must endure. A good commander must be aware of the privations his men face, without condoning their plebeian reactions to them. One of the functions of an officer is to raise his men’s standards to his own, not to make so many allowances for their failings that they have no standards to aspire to.”

I heard my father rise and I shrank back into the shadows under the window, but his ponderous steps carried him to the sideboard. I heard the chink of glass on glass as he poured. “Half our soldiery these days are conscripts and slum scrapings. Some see little honor in commanding such men, but I will tell you that a good officer can make a silk purse out a sow’s ear if given a free hand to do so! In the old days, any noble’s second son was proud to have the chance to serve his king, proud to venture into the wilds and drag civilization along in his footsteps. Now the old nobles keep their soldier sons close to home. They ‘soldier’ by totting up columns of numbers and patrolling the grounds of the summer palace at Thares as if those were true tasks for an officer. The common foot soldiers are worse, as much rabble as troops these days, and I’ve heard tales of gambling, drinking, and whoring in the border settlements that would have made old General Prode weep with fury. He never permitted us to have anything to do with the Plainspeople beyond trade, and they were an honorable warrior folk before we subdued them. Now I’ve heard rumors that some regiments employ them as scouts, and even bring the females into their households as maids for their wives or nursemaids for their children. No good can come of that mingling, neither to the Plainspeople nor us. It will make them hungry for all they don’t have, and envy can lead to an uprising. But even if it doesn’t come to that, the two races were never meant to traffic with one another in that way.”

My father was gathering momentum as he spoke. I am sure he did not realize that he had raised his voice. His words carried clearly to my ears.

“With the Specks, it is even more true. They are a slothful people, too lazy to even have a culture of their own. If they can find a dry spot to sleep at night and dig up enough bugs to fill their bellies by day, why, then they are well content. Their villages are little more than a few hammocks and a cook fire. Little wonder that they have all sorts of diseases among them. They pay them no more mind than they do to the shiny little parasites that cling to their necks. Some of their children die, the rest live, and they go on breeding as happily as a tree full of monkeys. But when their diseases cross over to our folk, well…Well, then you have just what you have heard from that scout: an entire regiment sickened, half of them like to die, and the plague now spreading among the women and children of the settlement. And likely all because some lowborn conscript wanted something a bit stranger or stronger than the honest whores at the fort brothel.”

My brother said something I could not quite hear, a query in his voice. My father gave a snort of laughter in reply. “Fat? Oh, I’ve heard those tales for years. Scare stories, I think, told to new troopers to keep them out of the forest edge of an evening. I’ve never seen one. And if the plague indeed works so, well, then good. Let them be marked by it so all may know or guess what they’ve been doing. Perhaps the good god in his wisdom chooses so to make an example of them, that all may know the wages of sin.”