In the Ruins (Crown of Stars 6)

They stood silently as the army passed. After a time she began to think they were like the mosaics seen in churches in Darre, figures with kohl-lined eyes and magnificent robes frozen forever against a backdrop of open woodland. Only once did she hear one speak.

“I pray you, I’ll do anything for a piece of bread for me and my child.” A skinny young woman clutched a slack-eyed, emaciated child to her hip as she twitched her rump awkwardly to attract the notice of the soldiers.

Bysantius strode forward before any man could step out of line. He slashed at her face with the quirt. She cried out and retreated up the slope through dry grass that crackled around her. A man emerged out of the woods from behind a stand of prickly juniper. He was tugging up the drawers under his tunic as he sauntered back to join the rest, but before he’d gone three steps a woman appeared.

“You never gave me what you promised!” she shouted.

He didn’t even look back. “I took what you offered, whore!”

Men sniggered, but glanced nervously toward their sergeant.

Bysantius stuck his quirt into his belt and drew his knife before the soldier could step down onto the path. “Pay her what you promised.”

The soldier—he was young and cocky—pulled up short, eyeing the knife. “I’ve nothing to pay her. I eat what the rest of us do, when it’s handed out at night. I’ve no coin, as you ought to know, Sergeant. I’m to be paid with land.”

“Then you’re a thief.”

The column staggered to a halt as soldiers poked and pulled at each other, turning to see the confrontation.

“Thieves are punished with death, by the lord general’s order. Any man who takes without permission is a thief.”

“Here, here,” said the man, extracting a crust of bread from his sleeve, “no harm done.” He turned, tossed the bread at the woman, and hurried back into line, his face red and the rest hooting at him. The woman scrabbled in the dirt and, scooping up the crust, ran away into the woods.

“Get on!” Bysantius added a few curses, sheathed his knife, and strode up the line brandishing his quirt.

Hanna, too, had stashed away a bit of her last night’s meal, nothing more than a bit of dry cheese, the last cut off a round. She fished it out of her sleeve and hissed.

“Tss! Here, you!” The young woman with the child had been weeping, huddled on the hill. Hanna tossed the cheese at her, but the wagon jerked forward and she stumbled to her knees and then scrambled to get up before she was dragged, and by the time she got herself stable again, she had lost sight of mother and child.

She was, therefore, doubly hungry that night, but as she ate the thin gruel out of the pot she couldn’t regret what she had done.

“Mind you,” said Sergeant Bysantius, coming over to crouch beside her, “the infant will die a day later rather than sooner. You’re just prolonging her misery.”

“Perhaps not. You can’t know what will happen. Why are all these refugees on the road?”

He scratched his neck. It was a mark of the general’s respect for the sergeant that he had been given command of the rear guard, but the dry and dusty conditions, the constant kick of dust all day long, had caused his skin to rash. “Nothing good, I’m thinking,” he said. “Nothing good.”

Years ago she, Liath, Hathui, Manfred, and Wolfhere had ridden east into the rising sun, traveling toward Gent. On that ride she had seen streams of refugees fleeing the Eika invasion. They had come on carts and on foot, leading donkeys or carrying crates that confined squawking chickens. They had hauled children and chests and sacks of withered turnips or baskets filled with rye and barley. The road, damp with rain, had churned to mud under the crush of so much traffic. Yet, despite their desperation, those Wendish refugees had not had the despairing, hopeless look of Arethousa’s wretched, fled from what every man and woman in the army referred to always and only as “the city.”

For days, stories passed up and down the line, but in the end even these rumors and purported eyewitness accounts could not prepare them for their first sight of “the splendid daughter of the sea,” the great capital city of the empire of Arethousa. Chained to the wagon, Hanna could not see as the vanguard of the army reached a distant rise. The entire unwieldy column staggered to a halt as the men in the front seized up and the ones behind pushed forward to clamor for news.

That news swept through them like wind. She leaned against the wagon’s tailgate with eyes closed and let the rush pour over her. It was so good to rest.

“… only the walls survived …”

“You’re a fool to believe it. Have you seen?”

“Nay, but it’s what they’re all saying!”

“So did the refugees, poor cattle. Doesn’t mean they’re right. A giant wave! Tssh! Let’s go—”

“Stay in line!” The sergeant’s quirt struck, variously, wagons, flesh, and the dirt. “Stay in line! Don’t break ranks!”

She opened her eyes. The soldiers leaned forward like hounds straining at their leashes, quivering, anxious, eager to race forward. But they held their ranks. A rider in the red tabard that marked the imperial scouts galloped back along the line of march and pulled up beside Bysantius.

“General Lord Alexandros desires your attendance at a council,” said the man. “I’m to command the rear guard in your absence. He says to bring the Eagle.”

The rider looked around, seeking her, but because days of dust had veiled her pale hair, he didn’t mark her. He dismounted instead and handed the reins to Bysantius, who smiled grimly and shouted at the guards to unlock Hanna’s leg irons.