Emerson · Stonemarch Depot, Mercer State
1723
Emerson failed the wall in the eighth week. It took him four attempts to see what he was doing wrong and nine more to stop doing it.
The climb itself had stopped bothering him by the sixth week. The count was the problem. Under the count all twelve recruits of the squad had to be over the wall before Sergeant Volt called time. That meant every man at the top had to reach back down for the next climber before the climber was ready.
Emerson kept waiting to see a hand. He lost maybe half a second each time. He would swing astride the top plank and turn toward the recruit below. Then his arm would stop, and it would not go down until he could see someone to catch.
By the time it did they were too late.
The squad ran it again. By the eighth attempt nobody had anything left.
He would have preferred a complaint. Instead, eleven tired recruits stood around him breathing through their mouths while he stared up at twelve feet of rough timber. Sap stuck to his palms. Every time he wiped the sweat off his face, he smelled the resin and in the quiet he could hear every one of those eleven breaths.
For the first time in his life, he understood that they could fail because of him.
Volt sent them over a ninth time and then a tenth. He said nothing about what was wrong. Emerson could not believe the sergeant had missed it so Volt had to be waiting for him to find it himself.
“Again.”
On the eleventh attempt the tall recruit from Iron Port spoke up loudly. He had an earth affinity and an uncle he still swore had reached Advanced and he thought both facts were worth repeating.
“Same man every time!”
No one argued with him.
Emerson’s hands shook against the planks on the twelfth climb and his pulse pounded in his ears as he hauled himself to the top. Then he sat there and waited for proof again.
Afterward Kira found him bent double at the foot of the wall with his hands on his knees.
“You’re looking,” she said.
“I have to look.”
“He’s coming up behind you because that’s what the rest of us are there for. Put your hand down.”
“And if he isn’t there?”
“Then you’ve reached for nothing and we run it again.”
There was no impatience in it. She was winded from twelve climbs too, but she said it the way she might have told him where to put his feet.
Emerson straightened up. She was already walking back to the start.
“You keep trying to be right,” she called over her shoulder. “Just be fast.”
On the thirteenth attempt Emerson hauled himself astride the wall and pushed his hand down into empty air.
His stomach clenched. He had committed before he knew whether anyone was there and for a second, he nearly pulled the arm back.
A hand clamped around his wrist.
He braced his heels against the planks and heaved. The recruit scrambled past him close enough that a boot struck his thigh.
They cleared the count with time to spare. The shout from the other eleven sounded almost like a cheer and Emerson stood among them with his aching arm hanging at his side.
Sergeant Volt made a note.
That night Emerson lay awake under his blanket and tried to find a position that spared his shoulder.
You keep trying to be right. Just be fast.
Being right had its uses. That week it had kept two men from taking a wrong turn and the squad usually left the counting to him.
But Kira’s advice had gotten them over the wall. He could still feel the grip on his wrist where he had expected no one to grab.
He was seventeen and two weeks from the end of training and the answer he found in the dark seemed comprehensive. His hesitation was a weakness that the good soldiers had already gotten rid of.
He would have to do the same.
Stonemarch had spent eight weeks teaching him that without ever saying it out loud. No comment on Volt’s sheet rewarded the right decision if it came after the count ended. Every drill shortened the space between an order and an action. He had seen it in the eight movements of loading, which Harwin drilled until they could do them asleep. Emerson supposed that one day there would be no room left in that space for doubt.
It was easy to see why. That afternoon the whole squad had cleared the wall.
The next morning was the last day of the eighth week. The sergeants marched the intake onto the eastern slopes and split it in two.
The ninth squad got the hill above a sheep track. It was a low hump of turf with gray stones scattered over the top. Along its north side the slope folded in on itself deep enough to hide a crouching man.
Volt stood among the stones with his book open.
“Ninth squad is holding the ground. Fourth squad takes it. When I call a man dead, he’s struck off the roll and he sits.”
Kira had already taken the stone nearest to the fold. Emerson settled behind the stone beside hers with his musket across the top and the wet soaking into his knees. The grass gave off a sour green smell where twelve pairs of boots had crushed it.
The fourth squad came straight up the track in a staggered line. The ninth squad presented and the flints snapped along the mound. Volt pointed at two of the attackers and they sat down where they stood. The rest kept coming.
Emerson counted them and came up short.
He looked at the staggered line.
Kira was already off her stone and going down the north side.
Heads came up out of the fold below her. Four men were climbing fast for the stone she had left. Emerson saw them in time. Her stone was an arm’s length from his and somebody had to fill it. But the line on the track was still coming. If the fold was the feint and he left his place, the front would be one musket thin.
He waited to be sure.
A recruit from fourth squad came over three paces from him with his musket already at his shoulder. The flint snapped on an empty pan.
“Forger,” Volt said. “Dead.”
Volt’s pencil went once across the page.
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Emerson sat down in the wet grass with the musket across his knees. The cold came through his trousers.
Below him Kira had her musket on the first man out of the fold before he found his feet. Hobbs threw himself down behind her empty stone. Volt called two more of the fourth dead at the edge and one on the track. The rest of the attackers formed short of the stones and stayed in place.
The ninth squad held the hill without Emerson.
When the horn sounded from the depot, Volt closed the book.
The ninth week passed so quietly that by its end Emerson could hardly say what had filled it. Word came that they would finish the following week. Three hundred names were still on the roster but only two hundred and sixty-four men were left in the barracks. No one cheered. Up and down the room, men looked over their kit as though they had only just remembered that finishing meant being sent somewhere.
Emerson did the calculation on Wednesday. Thirty-six gone. On their first morning Volt had stood in the rain and told them sixty would not finish. He had said it like a man who had seen it happen too many times to be wrong. The true figure was barely more than half that. Emerson brought it up with Marta while she mended a seam. She usually knew what the sergeants left unsaid.
“He says sixty every year,” she said. “My uncle heard it and I’d bet the man who built that wall heard it too.”
“Then it isn’t true.”
Marta pulled the thread tight. “Did you believe him?”
“Yes.”
“Then he lied.”
“That doesn’t mean it had to be true.”
“It frightened three hundred recruits that day.” She bit off the thread. “You’re the only one still checking and counting. You want it to be right, Emerson. It always has to work.”
He watched her put the needle away. Her meaning was plain enough but he could not see why understanding it meant he had to agree with it.
That evening the tall recruit from Iron Port told the uncle story again. He told it at the stove where everyone was drying their stockings and this time the uncle had been thirty-six with twenty-four years in the quarry when they rated him Advanced. Emerson had stopped listening to that story weeks ago. The numbers kept changing. It was the same voice that had shouted Same man every time! at the wall.
“He was forty-one,” he said.
The recruit turned. “What?”
“Your uncle. At the assessment he was forty-one with eighteen years in. Now he’s thirty-six with twenty-four.” Emerson heard his own voice. “He keeps getting younger and working longer.”
Somebody laughed. The recruit took two steps and shoved him hard by the shoulder. Emerson spun into the end of a bunk. The frame caught him across the mouth and he tasted blood before he felt the split. A corporal was in the doorway before either of them moved again. He looked at the blood on Emerson’s chin and then at the recruit’s open hands.
“He shoved me,” Emerson said.
“Did anyone see it?”
Emerson looked along the bunks and nobody looked back. Brice was busy with his laces.
“Then both of you,” the corporal said, “will clean the floor and racks in the washhouse.”
They scrubbed until the lamp burned low and kept to opposite ends of the room. The water found the split in his lip every time he wiped his face on his wrist. The recruit never said a word to him.
On Thursday Caleb asked him whether he thought the postings were already decided.
“Probably.”
Caleb smoothed a fold. “Do you think they decide by how well we’ve done?”
Emerson remembered the woman with the burn scars telling him that what he could do belonged in a list. Their squad had not lost anyone since the third week and none of the sergeants seemed able to explain why.
“I expect they count how many men each garrison needs,” he said. “Then they send them according to the men they requested.”
Caleb nodded and went back to the fold. It took Emerson most of the evening to understand that Caleb had wanted to be reassured. By then the conversation was long over.
They finished at Stonemarch in the tenth week with rain dripping from their collars. Two hundred and sixty-one of the three hundred stood on the parade square. The last week they lost three recruits. Two went the ordinary ways, one with an ankle broken on the wall and one with a fever. The boy from the eastern farms was different. He packed his kit one night and at the next morning’s roll call nobody answered to his name.
Before the oath the depot’s commander came out to speak to them. Emerson had seen him maybe twice in ten weeks and never heard his voice. Each time he had been a figure at the far end of the yard with an officer at each side. He was a lean man in his early thirties, younger than Emerson had expected for the post. He walked over the wet stones of the square as though he had measured them beforehand. A plain backsword hung at his hip. Only the hilt caught the eye: a cage of dark steel closed over the grip, beaded with rain. He stopped in front of the first rank. His eyes went to their boots before they went to their faces.
“Ten weeks ago you came through that gate standing like confused recruits.” He did not raise his voice. “Most of you still do. Where your feet are decides what your hands can do. The wall taught you that. The ground won’t always be yours. Know where it is before you need it.”
He looked down the rank, then he stepped back and nodded to one of his officers. The slab he stepped off had rocked under every boot on the square since the first week. Now it lay flat. Emerson could not have said when that had happened.
“That’s Commander Ludwig Stein,” Marta whispered from the rank behind him. “When Oliver Stark comes through, the whole depot bets on who’s stronger between the two of them. My uncle lost a month’s pay that way. Stein used to fight any recruit who’d step into the ring, back before he had the Depot. Hardly anyone lasted.”
Sergeant Volt turned his head an inch. The rank went still. A captain Emerson had never seen did the rest of the ceremony reading from a card. Rain spotted the paper, and the Mercer crest on Emerson’s shoulder darkened as the water soaked through.
The oath was four lines long. Neither God nor crown appeared in it, and every promise it asked for could be kept with a man’s hands. It bound them to the State, to the road, and in the same breath it pledged them to the work and to the men beside them. The first muster had sworn those words when Mercer was three hundred mercenaries and a debt. Emerson had expected the oath to feel bigger in his mind. Instead he heard himself finish a line while someone behind him was only halfway through it. The wet wool under his chin smelled sour.
Afterward they stood waiting for permission to move. Under his ill-fitting tunic his mother’s repair to his belt was still holding. Emerson found Kira and Brice at the edge of the square with their kit at their feet. The next four hours were theirs and he tried to remember what he used to do with them.
“So that’s it,” Brice said. “We’re soldiers.”
Emerson opened his mouth.
“Don’t.” Brice raised a hand. “We signed a form. That makes us men who signed a form.”
“I was going to say we’re soldiers.”
Brice lowered his hand. “Oh.”
Rain pattered on the kit bags between them.
“Well,” Brice said. “Now you’ve spoiled it.”
Kira laughed loud enough to turn heads across the square. Emerson was smiling before he thought to look at her. She carried her kit and set off toward the gate as if nobody were watching. He grabbed his bag before she could get too far ahead.
The postings went up outside the quartermaster’s office three days later. Emerson found his name on the second reading. He read the word beside it twice before he let himself think about the distance.
9th Regiment, Cainwatch.
He had hoped for the 1st Regiment at Felsberg. Instead, he had a four-day march north to a mountain garrison and a winter patrolling the border. He thought of Marta’s uncle alone on the old north road with the nearest help a day away. The Light Infantry Regiment kept no garrison of its own. It lent its men wherever Mercer ran short and this winter Cainwatch ran short. Its Commander was Oliver Stark, the man from Marta’s story, and he was said to be away as often as his soldiers were.
Caleb’s name was nine lines below his, and beside it was 3rd Regiment Iron Port. Marta and Reiner filled the next two lines, both going to the same coastal posting. It would be warmer there. A man could also find a tavern in Iron Port a lot more easily than on a mountain border.
Marta found out about ninety seconds after Emerson did. She spent the next quarter of an hour making sure he appreciated it. “Iron Port,” she said. “We’ll be eating fish while you gnaw on snow.”
“I’m pleased for you.”
“You sound heartbroken.”
She walked backward in front of him. Emerson only knew one other person who made a habit of that.
“Admit you’re jealous,” she said. “Say it and I’ll stop.”
“Will you?”
Marta’s grin widened. “For a little while.”
Reiner gave his own verdict four minutes later on the barracks steps. “It’ll be hot in summer, though.”
Emerson could find nothing wrong with that and no comfort in it either.
“Felsberg’s for men who’ve earned an easy posting,” Sergeant Volt said behind him. “You haven’t.”
“No, Sergeant.”
“You’ll have plenty of time to be bored in the cold. Somebody’s going to get frostbite in the first fortnight and it may well be you.”
Volt turned away. At the foot of the steps he paused.
“Ninth squad held together, though. Whatever you lot did, keep doing it.”
Emerson watched him go.
Back at the board Kira found her own name beside the same word and grinned. A mountain border meant weather that might try to kill her.
Brice found his a little farther down and looked at it for a long moment. “Four days’ march,” he said. “Well. At least it isn’t another wall.”