Ten minutes before the time colonel Vijay has given for moving out, I stalk from the house to find the Aux waiting. Neen sits on his pack, checking clips, his face sewn back into shape. Haze and Rachel have their heads close together. To my surprise, Haze still wears his scalp bare to the sun. His braids are longer than I remember. As for Franc, she’s chewing a sliver of wind-dried meat thoughtfully.
Probably working on a better recipe. It must be great to have your life simplified to knives and food.
Mind you, I can talk.
The surprise is two villagers standing beside her. One is a girl about Franc’s age, wearing a woollen dress, tied at the waist. Her feet are bare. The rope round her waist makes her breasts look bigger than they probably are.
The other is a boy of a similar age. A leather bag hangs from his shoulder and a large knife juts from his belt. His beard is thin and blond. He obviously thinks he’s coming with us. As does the girl, I realize.
‘Who are these?’
‘Villagers, sir,’ says Rachel. She looks at Haze, who shakes his head.
‘Neen?’ I ask.
‘Kyble said . . .’ Standing, Neen makes himself start again. ‘Sir,’ he says, ‘Kyble says taking them is the price of her hospitality.’ He hesitates. ‘She said you would know this already, sir.’
‘She said I’d know this?’
‘Yes, sir. Says your voices would have told you.’
‘Wait here,’ I tell them, and they’re still waiting when I return with the colonel fifteen minutes later to tell the two villagers they can come with us. Strange the things that can change your mind.
Colonel Vijay left the final decision to me. Operational matters, he calls it. Apparently, those are my responsibility. So I stand there, inside the house, while Kyble runs through her reasons.
We owe her, that’s one.
The second is that Pavel’s now on the move, taxing villages. We’ll need these two to help us find him. Her third reason is that one of them will save my life before I leave this world.
‘I’ll save my own life,’ I tell Kyble.
She frowns. Luck’s a whore, she tells me. She’ll smile one minute and cut your throat the next. It doesn’t do to throw favours back in her face. That’s not how Kyble puts it – but it’s what she means.
‘We can’t take them,’ I tell her.
The colonel nods back when I glance towards the door.
‘Nineteen years ago,’ says Kyble, as his fingers touch the handle, ‘the Fist billeted here. Ten men in all, two . . .’ She puts her thumbs to her head, indicating braids. ‘And eight like you.’
Nothing like us, I want to say. But it would be a lie.
‘When they left,’ she says, ‘they left those two, in the bellies of twins from this city. Young girls,’ Kyble looks at me. ‘Good girls . . .’
‘What happened?’ asks Colonel Vijay.
‘After the soldiers went?’ Kyble makes the sign for throats cut.
‘But they spared the infants?’ He sounds surprised.
‘They ripped them from the women.’ Kyble’s voice is hard. ‘And they would have ripped the guts from the infants. I stopped them . . .’ She sighs, turns to me. I don’t want to see this woman plead. Women like Kyble don’t plead.
‘You’re old,’ I say. Colonel Vijay thinks I am being cruel.
‘I’m dying,’ Kyble replies.
‘Your voices told you?’
She snorts. ‘I don’t need my voices to know the obvious.’
‘And when you’re dead there’ll be no one to protect those two?’
‘See,’ says Kyble. ‘I knew you’d understand.’
The man is called Ajac, the woman Iona . . . They are younger even than Franc, or Neen, a whole lifetime younger than me. Kyble gave them their names after she buried their mothers.
‘You’re cousins, right?’
They nod.
‘Thank god,’ I say. ‘I’ve had it up to here with brothers and sisters. OK, these are my rules. You do what you’re told. You stand, you fight, if necessary you die. Break any of those and I kill you myself.’
I look at them. ‘Right?’
‘That’s it?’
‘There’s another,’ says Neen, slotting a clip into his rifle, and climbing to his feet. ‘Whatever it takes, that’s what we do.’
Stalking over, he inspects them as if he is General Jaxx himself.
‘You’re not in uniform,’ he says, ‘but you’re still in the Aux . . . I’m your sergeant and you do what I say. This is my lieutenant,’ he says. ‘I do what he says. And that,’ he says, nodding at Colonel Vijay, ‘is our CO. We all do what he says.’ His glance checks with me that he has this right.
He has.
‘Sir,’ says the girl.
Neen tells her to call him sergeant.
‘Sergeant,’ she says. ‘What happened to your face?’
‘Believe me,’ says Neen, ‘you don’t want to know.’