Beacon Fires Burn

September

         The general was a hard man with no smile and lots of teeth. He was tall, broad-shouldered and built as solid as a door, every inch on him muscle and bone but his guts. He had, however, the reputation of a snake: light on his feet, impossible to put down, utterly quiet in the charge, and as sly as the devil himself. He had also the singular propensity to grimace at everything he saw, and grew a thick moustache to better hide this unfortunate fault, though the men in camp and on the march spoke of it often.
         One year, some time after I had met him, our regiment was tasked with the destruction of an encampment set up along a nearby hilltop, and I was attached, naturally, as senior advisor scouting to the major for the duration. The general made an unexpected appearance at the front two weeks after our last assault had been pushed back, stomped past a table of cartographers and myself, into the major’s tent, into the officers’ latrine, found the poor man in a rather indelicate disposition and – to the shock and horror of almost everyone – dragged him out into the muster. “You are,” he had said, “late.” That is all I remember him saying. What I will never forget is his face.
         I first met the general on a Sunday. It was raining. There were five of us then and we stood at attention in single file, in crisp, new uniforms and with freshly polished bronze buckles and steel caps and new, black leather wrapped around our scabbards. We all stood in accordance to rank: I was second to last, as junior officer, and Thomas stood to my left as aide-de-camp. Daniel and Bossley were to my immediate right. They were brothers and had served with distinction in two prior engagements – one at the cost of his eye, the other his hand. I had no direct combat experience. Thomas, by his own admission, had never left the tents. The general that day wore his face well. He glowered under that neatly-groomed moustache, and paced up and down the line of us. Every so often he would turn his head and look to the left – our right – at where she stood. At the time I knew nothing of her other than her sex and her rank. She stood farthest from me. That was not inconsiderable. Still, I did not know what to make of her and, I think, neither did the general. He leaned towards us, hands behind his back, and puffed out his cheeks. When he exhaled, his moustache jumped. It was as frightening as it was ridiculous. None of us laughed.
         “You are,” he began, “the finest officers available to me not already attached to a company on short notice.” He paused then, very distinctly, and waited. The rain filled that silence, monotonous and strong and steady. I was drenched to the bone, shivering, and cold. Thomas beside me had caught his tongue between his teeth to keep them from chattering together. But the rain did not touch the general. He straightened, shoulders rolling, water rolling off him too, and grimaced. “You are,” he said, “orphans.
         “Lieutenant Peters,” he looked at Thomas, “was a former supply officer in good standing under Colonel Frederickson. You,” his flat eyes wandered to me, “were among the best in your class. You, and you,” he looked now at the brothers, “served with commendation.” I watched his eyes stop on her, watched his lips purse, and then watched him turn away. I noticed then he had in his hand a riding crop behind his back, and tapped it against his shoulder-blade when he was in deep thought – or so I imagined. He tapped it now, two little pats. “Colonel Frederickson was promoted posthumously and his successor did not want you. You could not secure a commission. You, and you, were only acting officers and thus have no place in the natural order of things. And you,” here he turned again to face us – more appropriately, to face her – and said, “You led your platoon to suicide, and thus have found yourself without men to command.”
         I cannot recall now what I felt then upon hearing those words. It must have been horror, or revulsion, or disgust. This was, after all, my first impression of the men with which I was to serve, and the woman who would lead us. But if it was horror, I hid it well. My face has always been hard to read – not because I am close-minded, or cold, but because a slight asymmetry draws my mouth down when it should go up, and up when it should go down. Therefore, if I was repulsed, no one was the wiser.
         She, to her benefit, said nothing. I have met officers since who would have spoken out against the general for saying what he had, and I have met officers since who would have vehemently denied their own cowardice. She did neither. She took the criticism quietly. It had, after all, the ring of truth to it.
         “Winter is coming. In a month’s time, the campaign will dig in around the river south of here and we will fortify ourselves. Division does not plan to let the enemy rest easy. You may all consider yourselves henceforth intelligence officers under my direct control. You will disrupt, sabotage, and otherwise deny the enemy means of supply and armament until spring, and if I see you all alive then it will have been a good three months. There is a town twelve miles to our shoulder. You will start there. See it done.” It was then the general pivoted on a heel, threw his shoulders back, and stalked towards a carriage waiting nearby. Its metal-rimmed wheels were spoke-deep in mud, and the two draft horses tethered to it strained like women giving birth.
         He had not dismissed us. We stood in the rain at attention as the carriage pulled away, in the middle of that muddied field, and fallow farmland stretched out around us. A few lonely, long-abandoned shacks leaned drunkenly to our rear. Though there had been, for a time, a breeze, there was none now. A bird caterwauled overhead, turning circles. I could trace his shadow on the ground, and did. He did not linger long.
         Thomas was the first to break rank. I saw from the corner of my eye – I dared not turn my head – his shoulders drop, followed by his chin, his arms and chest go slack, and his mouth relax. His hair was wine-dark and curly, and had been matted flat to his scalp. I did not call out to him; wisely, I remained silent. A thunderclap on the horizon, and the gray flash of lightning in the cloudy dusk, shook us. Thomas startled like a rabbit and all but bolted. He took two quick steps out of line, his head turned towards the sound, and reached for the sword at his hip.
         “You were not dismissed,” her voice was clear but casual and curiously quiet. It was the first I had heard her speak, and I was again not quite sure what to make of her. She did not sound like a killer, and sounded even less like she were capable of leading men to kill. The words did, however, stop Thomas. He froze mid-step and guilty, and would not look at us, but quietly rejoined the line and drew up his chin, put his shoulders back, and squared his feet. We stood that way for another hour at most. The rain had faded to a light, unhappy drizzle by that time. It was then that she calmly adjusted her collar, pulled it up against the sudden chill in the evening air, and left towards the shacks behind us. Thomas was first behind her, the brothers following, and I pulled up the rear.
         The inside of the old shack was surprisingly warm and pleasant, if you could ignore the stale smell in the air, and the mildew on the walls. The door gave easily against her shoulder; the hinges did not creak and the jamb, on closer inspection, looked new. A small lamp had been set on a table in the center of the single room and it glowed steadily, casting a sick, hazy yellow halo of light. She stepped in and to the side. Thomas trailed her, uncertain, and the brothers each took up a place to either side of the door, just inside the room. I waited in the doorway. She sat down on a moldy cot. It creaked under her weight and its rotted frame threatened to give. She leaned forwards, nodded at the floor.
         “Sit.”
         No one did, but that was forgivable. I stepped into the room, pulled the door shut behind me, and leaned back against it; it did not buckle as an old door might. I think I must have crossed my arms over my chest, tucked a thumb under the leather baldric strung from my shoulder to hip, and tried very hard then to look fierce and worldly and wise. It was not a look, I am sure, I managed with any authenticity. I was fresh out of the academy – baby-faced and cleanly shaven, soft in a way that no one else in our little group was. I wanted desperately to be taken for a soldier. It was true what the general had said: I had been unable to secure a commission in any active company, but it was through no fault of my own, and was no reflection on my soldiering abilities. I am no great leader of men and never will be, but even then at that young age, I was passable. My family connections – or lack thereof – were what had sunk my career. My father, a debtor, was widely known to have ruined our familial prospects and the financial returns of another house. He had loved horses and dogs too dearly in his time. It was his failure, and not my own, that black-listed me from honorable military service.
         We stood in silence. I cannot say with certainty what it was the others were thinking, but I was proud and young. I bristled at the injustice of this assignment, my first and quite probably (to me, then, so it seemed) my last, at the lackluster speech in the rain, at the insult done to me there, at everything in that small, dingy room – the woman, the crippled brothers, and Thomas, who mirrored me too well, but was a coward. The lamplight, still smoking hazily, flickered.
         “Sit,” she repeated. I do not know why, but this time we – for the most part – obeyed. Perhaps it was the patient reason in her voice: she ordered no one and sat herself with her elbows on her knees, easy and at ease. To not sit down at such a gentle request seemed beyond rudeness, and even if we were the chaff of the army, we were still officers and had a moral obligation to civility. Thomas sat first, cross-legged at her feet, and I followed in a slouch up against the door. One-eyed Bossley dropped into a crouch, and only Daniel remained standing. It was he who had lost his left hand, and he concealed the stump in a long, folded sleeve. He did not stand to spite her, though I did not know it then; his left leg was heavily scarred and his knee stiff. Running was beyond him in bad weather.
         “The general,” she began when we had all settled, “may be many things, but he is no liar. Every man under my command has died – to a man. The sooner you understand and accept this fact, the sooner it is we can move on and do our job.” There was little emotion in her voice; if she had mourned the men who had died following her, she gave no indication. I must have choked for I remember that Daniel’s good hand came down hard, and cuffed my shoulder. “Our job,” she continued, not sparing either me or Daniel a look, or anyone else for that matter, “requires some discipline. That means a cover story, for those of you who haven’t pulled short straw before. We stay here until we’ve worked out everything and the army’s moved off.” She reached up and carefully unclipped the iron bars on her collar, fastened the pin, and closed the little badge in her fist. Then she set it down on the ground before her, and it caught in the dull lamplight, glittered.
         “You may,” she murmured, an odd quality to her otherwise quiet, pleasant voice, “call me Kate.”
         I never did, and I never will. It was not her name, and I think of all the characters she played in the years we soldiered in the dark, this one was least convincing of them all. Kate, as she told it, was the youngest daughter of three and hailed from one of the many nameless, smoldering villages the army had passed on its way north. She had sensibly, with her family, taken – or was to take, then – refuge in Havenshire, the city nearest us, but her father had been drafted and her mother gone of plague and several weeks buried. Her sisters suffered various unmentionable, terrible, or merely tragic, fates. Kate, as she told it, was a survivor: hardy, determined, capable, but simple. She was not one to ask questions, had the honest charm of a farmer’s daughter (I am sure Daniel must have cuffed me again at some point during this exchange, for I swore then she had no more charm than my late uncle) and was – above all else – absolutely trustworthy. I hated Kate from the moment she thought the creature up, and donned her face; it was placid and calm, not unlike a cow, and did not change: not in love, or anger, or fear, or disgust, or laughter.
         Everyone who ever met her loved her. I said this, and it was no lie. Everyone who ever met her did love her, but very few men ever saw her as she was, and not instead as some construct, half-formed, malformed, or incomplete. I have said that I hated Kate from the moment I met her. This is also true, but she was not Kate so far as I was – and am – concerned. I hated an imaginary thing. The real woman I did not meet for many months, but when I did, I fell for her as many had before me. It was unavoidable; we all fell for her after our own fashions, in our own ways. I am sure Thomas loved her most dearly, but sometimes too I would catch Daniel sitting in the dark, back to whatever meager fire we had allotted ourselves that particular night, watching her as she slept. There are things you cannot ask in daytime of honest men. I would catch him in the dark watching. I left it at that.
         For my own part, I chose the name Tobias, after my late uncle, and kept much else of my story the same. I saw no reason for grand deceptions and convoluted plots. I was Tobias Kent, fresh out of the military academies of the north, unable to secure a commission in the army of my choice, and so turned mercenary in search of better prospects elsewhere – Havenshire, conveniently. Daniel and Bossley were to serve under me, fellow mercenaries, their names also unchanged. Thomas, too. I think she was impressed; it was not unheard of in those days for deserters, discharged men (honorably or not) and criminals to form up under colors and fight in company. Any man could, with enough gold in his purse, buy a captaincy and legitimacy for his merry band of thieves.
         It would not be easy, of course. We had not been allowed to draw rations before meeting the general in that soggy field, and our supplies were limited to what little we wore, or had carried with us. This totaled to some swords, boots, belts, buckles, a lamp, our uniforms and, smuggled in under that flimsy cot, a single, ominous hackbut. It was at once a beautiful and horrible weapon – the barrel etched in silver, the wood stock well-polished mahogany, the firing lever worked with gold and the leather strap for wearing ornately tooled: dancing bears and swooping falcons, spinning end over end from hook to butt. Still, it was useless without powder or shot, and we had neither. We had no food, had only a little wine pooled between us in a crackling skin, and a handful of coins: mostly gold, some silver, and a few of the new brass mint thrown into the mix, mostly the latter of Daniel and Bossley’s pockets. They had also on them the paper notes enlisted men were often given in lieu of pay, but we burnt those. They were useless, and would only give us away.
         We left the following morning. Our first night together had been uneventful – we all withdrew to our own corners to sleep, though she took the cot, and I don’t think we spoke more than five words together to one another after our plans had been finalized. Bossley and Daniel diced for awhile, quiet, and Thomas scraped his name into the mold growing on the walls. Me, I crossed my arms behind my head, laid out by the door, and tried to sleep. Bossley had pulled first watch, and Daniel second – I was third, with Thomas following. She was, in theory, free from watch duty, but I question whether or not she slept at all. At any rate, I slept heavily and woke easily, and my watch was dull and lazy in the small hours of the morning. When it came time to wake Thomas, I did, though he complained bitterly and curled in on himself until I put my boot into his side – and even then, he only stood grudgingly, scrubbing sleep from soft eyes with baby-fat fists.
And then – too soon – I was up again. We gathered our things, dulled our collars and scuffed our boots. Bossley took that magnificent hackbut and laid it across a shoulder. Thomas strapped our meager little wineskin across his chest.
         We struck out for Havenshire.