Emerson · Stonemarch Depot, Mercer State
1723
In the sixth week at Stonemarch, Caleb decided to leave and told only Brice. Emerson knew before the evening was out. Caleb’s marks kept him comfortably above the line and his disciplinary record was clean. By Stonemarch’s standard half the intake had more reason to fear dismissal than he did. Without warning he decided that he could not get through the course. Once that was settled, he prepared to leave as carefully as he prepared for inspection.
That evening the barracks smelled of grease and wet wool. Brice kept his voice under the scrape of boot brushes. “He’s packed,” he said. “You wouldn’t notice it unless you looked but he could be out of that bunk in forty seconds.”
“Why?”
“He won’t tell me. Every time I ask he makes a joke good enough to get me laughing. Last night he started one about his brother and didn’t finish it.”
Brice was not smiling now. Emerson had known him for eight years and still did not know what to say when the jokes stopped.
“It’s the march,” Brice said.
“He can finish it.”
“I know.”
“Tell him that.”
“I have.” Brice scrubbed both hands over his face. “He thinks I’m being kind. The more I argue, the less he believes me.”
Emerson glanced toward Caleb’s bunk. The rolled blanket lay beside the pack close enough to gather up in one movement.
“He’d rather go beforehand than climb onto the wagon in front of us,” Brice said. “He’s thinking about every face he’ll have to pass on the way to it.”
Emerson could think of nothing he might say that Caleb would believe. He wanted Caleb’s bunk still filled at the end of the course and had no idea how.
The endurance march fell on Saturday. They had been dreading it since the first week. Twenty-six miles in full kit. There would be no rest. It was the only exercise in which the squad was forbidden to help.
No recruit could shoulder another man’s pack or steady him with a hand. A wagon followed the formation to collect those who fell out. The sergeants announced the exercise without any sign of caring who would finish. Nobody in the intake called it the wagon. It was the ride, spoken with a contempt that sounded too much like fear.
“They’ve devised it badly,” Brice said on Friday night.
“It’s meant to sort us.”
“Then it sorts us badly.”
He lay on his bunk with his boots still on, tapping the bedframe. Across the room Marta drew a length of thread through a loosened pack strap.
“Six weeks they tell us to not leave anyone at the wall,” Brice went on. “Then someone changes the exercise and now we’re meant to watch them fail.”
“Maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere,” Emerson said.
“What? That we can obey contradictory instructions?”
Marta looked up. “My uncle spent two winters at Cainwatch.”
“Did they explain anything to him?”
“He had to visit every waystation on the old north road twice a season. Three stations and if something went wrong in a storm the nearest help might be a day away.”
Her needle paused above the strap.
“He went alone whatever the weather. The rest of his squad had a wall to hold.”
“What’s at the stations?” Brice asked.
“A stove with dry wood stacked beside it. Whoever lives nearby, if they’re still alive.”
Brice’s boot went still.
“Better to learn here whether you can manage it,” Marta said.
“That’s a far better argument than the one we were given.”
“You weren’t given an argument.”
“Exactly,” he said, folding his arms behind his head. “Anyway, I mean to be a nuisance.”
Marta went back to her stitching. Emerson knew better than to ask what he meant. Emerson’s own strap had begun to loosen on his shoulder. He tried fixing it but the two stitches had already parted and the leather was lifting between them.
Marta glanced up from her needle. “That’ll go before the tenth mile.”
“It’ll hold.”
“It won’t. I’ll do it after this one for your Saturday’s bread portion.”
“All of it?”
“I don’t sew for crusts.”
Emerson thought of the waxed thread hanging above his mother’s bench and of his father in the good chair with a strap across his lap. Nobody in that house paid anyone for strap work.
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“I’ll do it myself.”
Marta shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
He took the needle from his kit and sat under the lamp with the pack across his knees. It had always looked easy from across the kitchen. The leather was stiff with six weeks of sweat and he missed the old holes. He pulled each stitch tighter than the last until the seam bunched into a hard ridge the length of his thumb. It took him an hour. With the gate opening at four he could not spare it. When he put the pack on to try it, the ridge settled on his shoulder. It would wear flat on the road. He set the pack down before Marta could look at it.
Brice spent the rest of the evening on an invented history of the sergeants. He delivered it from the end of Caleb’s bunk where Caleb sat with his hands between his knees. According to Brice, Sergeant Volt spent years disputing Sergeant Harwin’s claim to the affections of a woman neither of them had met. Their rivalry supposedly explained every unreasonable order ever issued at Stonemarch. The story had long since outgrown what little sense it started with. Brice kept going anyway. He sketched the rival claims in the air while the barracks lamp hissed behind him.
“Volt takes her silence as encouragement,” he said.
Caleb looked up. “Why would he?”
“Harwin sent the longer letter. There was more of him for her to refuse.”
“That’s a dreadful argument.”
“It’s served Volt for fifteen years. You ought to hear his case for making us run before breakfast.”
He told it without a smile. Before long Caleb was laughing hard enough to fold over his knees, and Brice waited for him to recover.
“You’ll take the inside line tomorrow beside me,” he said in the same solemn voice. “Don’t argue or you’ll spoil the story.”
He got up and went to his own bunk flicking Caleb’s cap off the bedpost as he passed. Caleb caught it before it had dropped a foot. He stayed where he was, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand.
They set out at four in the morning. Lantern light slid over the packs ahead of Emerson as the recruits passed through the gate with the wagon behind them. Past the last fence the road climbed into the hill country and the wind came down off the Ironspine to meet them. The first ten miles weren’t too difficult for him. His kit had weighed the same for six weeks and he had walked farther than this for pleasure. By the fourteenth mile he regretted those thoughts.
Sweat went cold under his coat whenever the wind found his collar. The ridge he had sewn had not worn flat. It rubbed through the skin at his shoulder and shifting the pack only found a new place to hurt. At the eighteenth mile mark a recruit fell back toward the wagon. Emerson knew him and nearly called out. He had never imagined that man would end up falling out.
The wagoner slowed without stopping. The recruit caught the sideboard and hauled himself aboard. He kept his face turned away from the others. Nobody spoke to him. For the next mile, Emerson heard little but the tread of boots and the wagon following them.
Somewhere near the twentieth mile he lost track of the countryside they were marching through. The road passed beneath him in stretches that left nothing in his memory. He watched the heels of the recruits ahead and stepped into their footprints. Kira stayed five paces farther up the formation. He caught sight of her pack every now and then between the moving shoulders.
Brice was behind him. Whenever the wind dropped, his voice carried forward. Brice talked for twenty-six miles. He spoke quietly to Caleb who walked the inside line a yard away. Emerson caught only scraps of it over the crunch of soles on gravel and the clink of loose buckles.
The sergeants’ feud filled much of the road. When Brice exhausted that subject, he turned his attention to the bread. He claimed the crust proved the depot baker was putting old boot leather in it. Nothing Brice said had been funny since the fourth mile. Whenever his voice faded, he would start again and somehow that made the road seem less empty.
Caleb halted twice. Brice did not reach out. He merely continued the story while Caleb bent down to catch his breath. He left room in it for Caleb’s breathing to settle. When Caleb took another step, Brice went with him.
After twenty-two miles a mounted sergeant rode back along the formation. The smell of horse sweat reached Emerson as the rider drew level with Brice. “Do you ever shut up?”
“Not reliably, sir.”
The sergeant looked at Caleb’s gray face. Then he looked at Brice whose lips were cracked and whose stride had begun to drag. A yard still separated them as it had since they left the depot eight hours earlier. Brice resumed his story of Sergeant Harwin’s supposed domestic arrangements. The mounted sergeant rode on without opening his book.
Caleb finished the march.
Four minutes later a surgeon was crouching in front of him with two fingers against his wrist. Caleb sat and folded beneath the weight of his pack until the man told him he could remove it. The wagon rolled in behind them carrying nine recruits. Emerson counted them while lying on the grass. His feet throbbed too hard for him to think about standing. Under the strap his shirt had dried into the raw place on his shoulder.
A pale cloud drifted above him. He watched it until his breathing eased. Somewhere to his left Brice was still talking. Caleb answered him too quietly for Emerson to make out the words. Then Brice laughed.
Six more recruits left that week. Caleb stayed. By the following Wednesday his blanket no longer waited beside his pack. Nobody else had noticed the change.
Neither Volt nor Harwin appeared to know what Brice had done though Harwin’s home life suffered through twenty miles of invented scandal. The sergeants went on saying three hundred. The official account of the sixth week recorded two hundred and seventy-two. Caleb’s name appeared among those who passed the endurance march. Nothing in the record mentioned Brice.
At first Emerson had put the whole business down to Brice being Brice. On the night after the march Emerson asked him about it. “Why Caleb?”
“What?”
“You didn’t have to spend the whole day trying to convince him.”
The barracks smelled of damp wool and boot grease. Brice lay still for so long that Emerson thought he’d gone to sleep. “He’d already decided he couldn’t finish,” Brice said at last. “Once a man settles on something like that, someone has to argue with him.”
“You still haven’t answered me.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”
Emerson waited.
“The answer’s worse,” Brice said. “I’d rather leave it.”
“Tell me.”
Brice turned onto his side. The bedframe creaked beneath him. “I know what it’s like to be the worst man in the room. You work it out for yourself and then you spend your days waiting for someone whose judgment matters to confirm it.”
“You aren’t.”
“Em.” He said it without anger and Emerson fell silent.
“I’ve been waiting for that most of my life,” Brice said.
Emerson stared into the dark between their bunks.
Brice rubbed his eye. “When Caleb started packing, I could see him thinking the same thing. I couldn’t stand to leave him alone with that thought. I’d rather him fail the assessment because his legs gave out or something. Not because he’d decided he was too weak to finish it.”
Emerson tried to find an answer that would not sound like pity. None came.
“Don’t make a solemn business of it,” Brice muttered.
“I won’t.” Emerson smiled.
“I’ll deny the whole conversation and you know I lie better than you.” Brice snorted into the pillow. “Go to sleep, Em.”
Emerson kept it to himself through the four weeks that remained. He watched Brice finish last on the runs and fail to clear the wall without a hand from above. Brice’s name would never have appeared on the list of thirty-one. Yet their squad had not lost a recruit since the third week. No other squad in the intake could say the same.
Emerson thought about those two records together. He wondered what a sergeant would make of them. Emerson could not explain why that bothered him. He only knew that Caleb’s bunk was still occupied.