Page a Day: Sixteen

            Time slewed back to normal. It was Marcus, the captain of the column’s final third. There are only two others of that rank – his brother Julius in the center, and Jerem Cozak himself, who leads the van. How he had reached me in that time I do not know. He had been marching six squads forward.

            He grabbed my left arm, shifted it back and forth. My screams did not discourage him. “Two or three ribs,” he said. “Shield-arm broken. You still have the other.” He frowned as the wind picked up, nodded. He took off his cloak and tore from it a bandage for a sling. He rose when he had tied it off. “Keep the pace,” he said. “Or you’ll kill us all.”

            Meno stayed where he lay. The crunch I heard had been his head hitting rock, with all the force of the smilodon’s leap behind it. He sprawled at my feet, guts pouring from his stomach. On its turn, the cat’s rear legs had also disemboweled him. Beside me, Marcus bawled an order. As one, the Never-born turned and started up their distance-eating trot. No one picked up Craytus either. I turned with them, and sped.

            The rest of our march, I mostly do not remember. We could not have gone far. The Historians of my city used to say that there are both machines and chemicals inside our blood that dull the pain of illness and injury, but that the effect is temporary. I never thought it would actually matter. 

            The smilodon did not return, though I often glanced above or to the rear. Thrice I tripped and fell – which meant that the Never-born had to pause and help me up. Their hands held with grips of steel. We kept to the boulders the whole way, crossed glacial rivulets from further up. Down, and down, and down, into what seemed a bowl. We must have passed scrubs and smaller trees as we neared the timberline, but I did not know it. The afternoon sank swiftly into dusk.

            When the boulders stopped we came abruptly into a copse, a small forest never cut by men. Any of these evergreens I could have wrapped my arms around three times. Their boughs hung strangely low and thick, nearly touching the ground, heavy in the swiftly falling snow. Soon we came to three or four glades, meadows large enough to host all the Never-born, but still sheltered by that living wall of pine.

Page a Day: Fifteen

            Behind me, Marcus bellowed orders. In long formation, every third squad is archers, but they would have no room in the cleft. Other than his fading shouts and the movement of men in light marching kit, there was no sound. I learned then that Never-born fight as they march, in rarely broken silence.

            The smilodon met my eye, and sprang upward from its crouch.

            The ranger named Meno stepped between us. It was his sword that had cleared its scabbard. I never thought of mine till the battle was long over. I probably would have dropped it or tangled it in my belt.

            But even Meno had no opportunity. I had said that the smilodon leapt from thirty feet away – but that, dear reader, was only one leap.  It was on Meno like the wind, like a rage, like the fire that becomes explosion. A forepaw caught his head, another his shoulder. All the weight and force of the smilodon came against his chest. The air whooshed from his lungs, and when he fell there was a sickening crunch. I had put up my hands in a foolish gesture to protect my face. There came the tang of blood again, and that smell that means men have voided bowels and bladder. A hand came from behind to grasp my neck, urged down.     

            And then some sledge, some boulder, some great fist of god smashed my left elbow against my chest. My head whipped back, and I fell against whatever soldier of the Never-born had come up from behind. I glimpsed swords to my right and above, black against the sky, short in the style of the old city guard. Marcus bellowed further orders. The smilodon snarled again. And, just as I regained my balance in an awkward crouch, whirled and leapt away, favoring its right front leg. Arrows ticked against the rocks where it had been: one, two, three. They seemed very, very slow. 

            A hand caught beneath my arm, lifted me. There came a voice. “Stand. The storm will kill you too.”

Page a Day: Fourteen

            Dead. That word keeps recurring to me, insisting that I have not suffered most. Pain is privilege granted to the living. Of the three the smilodon gored, only I survive.

            We were hurrying through another boulder-field. A blizzard howled down just behind us, dropping as we did. I was last in line, but never last of all. Each day Jerem Cozak posts two Never-born fore and aft of the column, men light of foot and quick of eye, to guard against rear attack.

            I did not know what danger he suspected, and so I cursed them daily. For in their frequent contact with the column they urged me to hurry on. They who never stopped to rest and in their ranging likely doubled any distance I ever managed. They were not kind. The Never-born are never kind, or cruel.  They simply do not understand why I am so different from them, so unfit and terrified.

            The rearward pair had just rejoined the column, to report to Marcus their captain, and then were lingering to be certain that I kept the pace. Jerem Cozak never liked it when our column stretched so thin.  We jogged single and double-file between boulders the size of houses, on paths themselves of rock or gravel. My lungs ached from altitude and my knees hurt from jouncing and my brain burned with curses for Jerem Cozak and all his men.

            I barely knew when I passed a new boulder, let alone that death was creeping near. The first sign of danger was the thud of one of the rangers falling to the ground. It sounded like someone dropping a heavy bag of seed. Then there was the other ranger’s deep shout as I turned and the quick rasp of a sword clearing its scabbard – and a snarl that would have stopped a demon in its tracks. I smelled blood on the wind. My hair stood on end.

            The ranger named Cratyus lay dead or dying, sprawled on the snow-dusted ground not thirty feet behind the rest, his throat cleanly torn open, head nearly severed and rolling loosely on the hill. Atop him stood the smilodon, gathering to pounce again, its feline shoulders higher than my waist, coarse fur tawny and grey in the shadows between the rocks. It snarled again, showing two curved canines as long as my head was tall.

Page a Day: Thirteen

On the tenth day,

            A smilodon gored three men. I was one of them. It struck so swiftly I could scarcely believe it happened. And I wouldn’t have cared anyway. To some degree, I still do not.

            My days fill with exhaustion and ache and hellish despair. Dead on my feet, the Never-born say, and laugh whenever one of them asks “What other way could there be?” Their energy astounds me. We march before dawn. We march after dark. We march uphill through mountain passes. We tramp down through gorges and ravines, though each day we climb higher than the last. We grope through fields of boulders that lay like labyrinths on the slopes. 

            We hack through tangles of fallen timber, at first of the kind whose broad leaves were just beginning to form – and now those whose needles remain ever green. We have spent three separate days climbing the beds of streams, with chill waters tumbling around the boots of a thousand Never-born. Each carries his own armor, which itself weighs half a man, as well as cloak and tent and rations and other gear. Most also carry shovels, for reasons Jerem Cozak has not disclosed.

            I only carry a quarter-pack, no armor, and bring up the rear regardless. Before my city fell I was a merchant. The most I ever carried were my bags of seed, and half the time I paid an urchin to carry one or two of those. And the worst climb I’d ever had had been the stairs that led up from the harbor, the famous thousand steps of Ariel.

            Yet we have reached heights that took the air from my own lungs, and where each stride took twice as long. My legs and arms are always either wood-stiff or screaming sore. Each morning Marcus stoops by the light of the fire and cuts open the blisters on my feet. I count myself lucky to stay awake through a meal, and twice I’ve fallen asleep mid-step.  I write now only because a storm has stopped us dead.

Page a Day: Twelve

            He beckoned to me, and I came up beside him, and looked down into the valley, and gasped. For the floor of that great valley, with its many kilometers of farms and streams and woods, was covered by the pure mist of the White Swarm, filling it higher than the treetops, swirling from mountain wall to mountain wall and extending in every direction. My mind filled with questions.

            “The woman in the Well,” I asked. “The one who woke us. Who was she? Where is she now? What does she have to do with all of this?”

            “An ally,” he said, “who goes where she wills. You may meet her at the Temple if you choose. Now your allies are three: I and she and they.” He nodded to the White Swarm in the valley.

            “And them, I think.” I pointed to the men behind me. “Who are they? Why are they here?”

            “Say that they were never born.  You are greater than any one of them, but together they are superior to you. Yet even the Swarm cannot say all you will accomplish.”

            My eyes narrowed. “You’re very hard to understand,” I said. “You say that our enemies will destroy us, but you act as though we will succeed instead. You said that I might leave, but now you imply that I’m with them. They look like an army, and you said that you bring war. Well, why don’t you command me, and see if I obey?”

            He turned, eyes flashing. “Go to her, and she will command you. But stay if you will, because I myself am the command. These men hear me, and go where I am going.”                   

            “Do you remember anything at all?” I asked. “What’s happened, these last ten years? Why are you fighting, if we cannot win? Where are you taking these men?”

            He pointed then, with his right hand, up into the darkness that was falling across the east. “Into the wilderness,” he said, “into the highest mountains, where not even eagles dare to tread. Will you follow me?”