I learned the word attrition from this man.
The recruiter offered his chickens in exchange for another son to fill the ranks.
“What use is a boy in a land without eggs?” he reasoned.
But my father shook his head and said: “You have taken both my sons from me and given me only meat in return. I have a daughter left, who may choose to go with you or not, as is her liking, but of boys there are no more to take.”
The recruiter frowned. “My King does not approve of women fighting.”
My father shrugged, a half-dead smile on his chilblained face. “Then you have no business here.”
“No,” I said very quietly. “I want to go. I will cut my hair and bind up my breasts and wear a heavy helmet—but I will go where my brothers have gone, and I will fight where they would have fought, and it will not be as though we were together, but it will be near enough to it that I can sing to their shades under the branches of I cannot say what trees.”
My father and my recruiter stared at me, the one grief-ridden, the other appraising. “Kin may not be denied,” I answered my father’s gaze, my own cast toward the earth.
They cut my hair together—in those days it was very thick, and I lay against a stump while they took turns hacking at it with a rusty ax. I bound my breasts by myself, for modesty’s sake. The recruiter put his own helmet on my head—it had a chin guard, and sat heavy as guilt on me. I vanished down the walk. I asked the recruiter if he thought I looked like a boy.
“You look fit to make widows,” he said, laughing cheerfully, and thus I took my soldier’s n
ame. We walked toward the hills, and the sun rose high in the sky.
It was not a full year before I took my first breath in the thick of the Five-League Fog, before my chest swelled up and burst like a drum struck with a knife.
In the Garden
THE BOY’S FOREHEAD WAS CREASED LIKE A WELL-READ PRAYER BOOK. He studied the moss, his shoulders stiff, and picked nervously at his fingernails.
“My father has sent many such men out into the world, and they have come back with all manner of soldiers trailing after them like baby quail. They all look very fine in their uniforms, and I have been promised a scarlet cloak of my own when I am grown.”
The girl’s face remained smooth and implacable as still water. “It is only a story,” she said.
“My father’s wars bring aqueducts and roads and bathhouses to barbarians.”
“I am sure that is true.”
“One of my tutors is from a conquered land. He tells me that he loves the Palace, and his thick, silken robes, and his children are happy.”
“I would not doubt such a man. You do not need to tell me these things.”
The boy frowned more deeply. His palms itched. The sky was a deep gray, stitches of night blue showing through the rough linen clouds.
“Sometimes I climb the persimmon tree to watch the officers muster,” the girl confessed quietly. “They are handsome, and so tall. I did not think boys could grow to be so tall. The helmets blind me in their rows.”
“One day I will wear one, and a long, curving sword besides, and no one will bring roosters for me.”
The two children were quiet for a moment, and the dull disk of the sun cast fitful shadows on the stones, like hands which cannot quite grasp. The girl watched the boy play with his purple bracelet, watched him avoid her eyes. As grackles and lost, bewildered seabirds wheeled and cried over their dark, bent heads, the girl thought it best to simply continue, as a soldier will when he has forgotten all save the hill before him, and his own heavy feet.
THE
SOLDIER’S TALE,
CONTINUED
HIS SKIN CAME OFF IN MY HANDS.
I never saw the King—I did not expect to, yet a tiny part of me, the part which imagined him leading his troops with raven plumes blown back from a silver helmet, was disappointed. The King cloistered himself in his castle, it was said, surrounded on all sides by rivers, one white, and one black. It sounded like a child’s story, and in the days to come I wondered if there had ever been a King, if we were not simply marching and fighting and digging and eating horrors of worm and centipede and mud to keep starvation at our backs because someone, somewhere, had once simply dreamed of a King with a golden crown.
I am sure that someone, somewhere, has told that King’s tale. I am sure it was grander than mine. I am sure it was an important tale, full of history and pageantry and grave consequences for the whole countryside. I am just a soldier. I do not know those tales.