‘That’s asking a lot,’ muttered Brevity beside him.
Yedan nodded.
‘Maybe too much,’ she continued. ‘We’re none of us trained as soldiers. We don’t know what we’re doing.’
‘Captain, the Liosan are no different. Helmed and armed doesn’t make an army. They are conscripts – I could see as much the first time.’ He chewed on the thought and then added, ‘Soft.’
‘You saying they don’t want any of this?’
‘Like us,’ he replied, ‘they have no choice. We’re in a war that began long ago, and it has never ended, Captain.’
‘Pithy says they look no different from the Tiste Andii, barring their snowy skin.’
He shrugged. ‘Why should that matter? It’s all down to disagreeing about how things should be.’
‘We can’t win, can we?’
He glanced at her. ‘Among mortals, every victory is temporary. In the end, we all lose.’
She spat on to the white sand. ‘You ain’t cheering me at all, sir. If we ain’t got no hope of winning against ’em, what’s the point?’
‘Ever won a scrap, Captain? Ever stood over the corpses of your enemy? No? When you do, come find me. Come tell me how sweet victory tastes.’ He lifted the sword and pointed down to the breach. ‘You can win even when you lose. Because, even in losing, you might still succeed in making your point. In saying that you refuse the way they want it.’
‘Well now, that makes me feel better.’
‘I can’t do the rousing speeches, Captain.’
‘I noticed.’
‘Those words sound hollow, all of them. In fact, I do not believe that I have ever heard a commander or ruler say anything to straighten me up. Or make me want to do for them what they wanted done. So,’ he said amiably, ‘if I won’t die for someone else, how can I ask anyone else to do so?’
‘Then what’re we gonna die for here?’
‘For yourselves, Captain. Each and every one of you. What could be more honest than that?’
After a time, she grunted. ‘I thought it was all about fighting for the soldier beside you. And all that. Not wanting to let them down, I mean.’
‘What you seek not to let down, Captain, is your sense of yourself. How you see yourself, even when you see yourself through the eyes of the people around you.’ He shook his head. ‘I won’t argue against that. So much comes down to pride, after all.’
‘So, we’re to hold against the Liosan – we’re to hold the First Shore – out of some kind of feeling of pride?’
‘I would like to hear a truly rousing speech, one day,’ Yedan mused. ‘Just once.’ Then he sighed. ‘No matter. One can’t have everything, can one?’
‘I see ’em – coming through!’
Yedan started walking down the slope. ‘Hold back the Letherii until I need them, Captain.’
‘Yes sir!’
The Liosan vanguard burst through the breach with a roar.
Seeing the shadows wheeling above the Liosan, Brevity flinched. Dragons. That ain’t fair. Just ain’t . She turned and made her way down to the Letherii legion.
They were like Pithy now. They had that thing in their eyes – Brevity could not find words to describe it. They’d fought for their lives, but not in that daily struggle to put food on the table, not in those quiet moments when the body surrendered to some illness. This was a sudden thing, a savage thing. That look she saw now, she didn’t know what it was.
But she wanted some of it.
Errant’s nudge, I must be mad .
Sharl had always been the older sister, the capable one. When her mother had wandered off in the way drunks did, leaving them on their own, Sharl had reached out to take in her two younger brothers.
The Shake understood the two sides of the Shore. The drawing close, the falling apart. Those sides lived in their blood, and in all the ghettos where dwelt the remnants of her people the fates washed back and forth, and sometimes it was all one could do to simply hang on.
She had led them out of childhood. But more than that, she had tried to lead them away from something else, something far crueller. The sense of failure that hung thick in the neighbourhood, the kind of failure that slunk through alleys with drawn knives, that stepped over bodies lying in the rubbish. The kind of failure that unleashed hatred upon those who would seek a better life, those who would dare rise above their wretched station.
She had seen a clever boy beaten to death outside her shelter. By his cousins.