Emerson · Felsberg, Mercer State
1724
The runner read his list to the barracks row at seven in the morning on a wet day. Rain beat on the slates overhead and the row smelled of the coal stove and of boots set too close to it. Since the parade, Emerson and the others had done little but move crates. Emerson was fourth on the list, two places behind Kira. Brice was ninth, and behind Emerson he made a small noise that did not sound like relief.
“Muster hall at eight,” the runner said, and left without explaining.
“That’s either a good list or a bad list,” Brice said.
“It’s a list.”
“There’s no such thing as a list, Em. Lists are good or bad. That’s what a list is.”
At eight they learned it was a good list, at least on paper. The next two weeks gave them time to change their minds. When everyone was in, the muster hall held sixty soldiers from their own unit and four other units. Their wet coats steamed in the close air. Emerson figured out what they had in common before the captain said it. Nobody in the room had served over a year.
“Honor guard,” the captain said. “The Head Marshal is holding a demonstration on the twenty-third. You’ll escort delegates and hold the line wherever you’re posted.”
A hand went up behind Emerson. “A demonstration of what, sir?”
“Of something.”
The captain did not smile.
“You’ll know when everyone else does. What matters is that foreigners will walk into a Mercer installation. Every one of them will spend the day forming an opinion of this State from the way the soldier stands.” He looked over the room. “You’re wondering why it’s you and not the senior companies. It’s because you’re new. I’d rather have soldiers who still care whether they’re standing straight than soldiers who stopped noticing years ago. That isn’t an insult. Use it.”
He picked up his gloves.
“That’s the job. You are furniture with opinions. Nobody will remember your face. Everybody will remember whether the line was straight. Dismissed to Sergeant Mosley.”
Ceremonial drill was the worst thing Emerson had ever been asked to do. It meant standing on a marked line in the yard for fifty minutes in a position that was uncomfortable for any human body. A sergeant walked the rank the whole time hunting for a bent knee or a chin that had dropped a quarter inch. Gulls walked the top of the wall and screamed at nothing. Nobody was allowed to look at them.
At twelve minutes his shoulders started to ache. By the half hour the ache had moved into the arches of his feet, and feet were what brought men down. The first two days men went gray in the face and folded at the knees. The corporals dragged them out and stood them up again in the second rank, where it mattered less.
On the third night Kira lay on her bunk with her boots still on. “It’s the eyes,” she told him. “Pick something far away and look at that. Look at anything close and it starts to move.”
“Everything’s a wall.”
“Then look at the top of the wall.”
“I look at the inside of my own head,” Brice said from across the row. “There’s more going on in there.”
“That’s why you swayed.”
“I did not sway.”
“Mosley wrote you down.”
“Mosley writes everyone down. He’s got a book with all our names in it, and next to mine it just says sways.”
Emerson laughed into his pillow. Afterward he lay awake and went over the turn in his head. He matched his heel and the set of his shoulders to the count until sleep caught him somewhere around the fortieth time through. Early in the second week Mosley moved him from the fourth rank to the front, where the delegates would pass. Emerson spent an embarrassing part of that evening quietly pleased with himself.
The kit inspection came on the nineteenth, and so did the ceremonial over-tunics. They were cut in three sizes and none of them fit anybody. Emerson’s tunic caught across his shoulders. The seam drew tight as a strap on its last hole whenever he reached for the collar. In the fourth rank nobody would have seen it. The delegates would pass the front rank close enough to count the stitches.
“Anyone got a bigger size?” he asked down the row.
The tall soldier from Iron Port held his up to the lamp. “This one. Swear on my uncle.”
“I’ll trade you.”
“I’m tasked with lighting the stove this week.” He folded the over-tunic across his arm and kept hold of it. “Light it at five every morning and it’s yours.”
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Emerson thought about the cold boards at five and then about the front rank. They shook on it in front of the whole row.
Emerson buttoned the new tunic in the daylight and lifted his arms. It caught across his shoulders in the same place. At the end of the row the soldier from Iron Port was fastening Emerson’s old one. He did not look over. It was the man who had shouted Same man every time! at Stonemarch. Emerson had taken his word anyway. He squared the tunic at the foot of his bunk and kept his mouth shut. He had shaken on it in front of all of them.
Mosley worked slowly down the row inspecting their kits. He was neither big nor loud, and he had never needed to be. He stopped at Emerson’s belt and held it up to the window. The row went quiet. After somebody’s bunk creaked and stopped, Emerson could hear the man beside him breathing through his nose.
“Who did this?” He said it quietly, and it carried to the end of the row anyway.
Emerson’s stomach dropped. It was a field repair on a belt he had bought himself, and he was about to wear it in the front rank before the foreign delegates. He had been so pleased about the front rank that he had never once thought about the belt.
“My mother, Sergeant.”
“Anvil Row?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
Mosley grunted. He tested the riveted brace with his thumb, exactly the way Emerson’s mother did.
“I’ve had this on three belts,” he said. “First one back in o’nine.”
He laid the belt back on the bunk and squared it where it had been.
“It’ll hold. Leave it.”
The sergeant moved on down the row. Emerson stood at the foot of his bunk and rubbed his thumb over his knuckles. He did not touch the belt until Mosley had finished the row. Then he picked it up carefully, the same way he had taken it from his mother across the workbench in August. For twenty years his mother’s hands had helped hold the army together one strap at a time. Nobody in the Coin Office or the War Office even knew.
Felsberg changed in the last four days. Deep-water hulls filled the harbor under colors Emerson knew only from books. They rode lower in the water than anything that worked the Mercer coast. Ashmore’s ships arrived on the nineteenth. A Concord flotilla dropped anchor offshore on the twentieth and stayed out there.
“That means something,” Brice said.
“What?”
“I don’t know yet. But it means something.”
On the twentieth Emerson spent six hours posted at the head of Anvil Row. The air smelled of coal smoke and hot iron the way it always did. Hammers rang all down the row, and one of them had a rhythm he could pick out of a hundred. A Joyce attendant stood there watching the open forges. Then he said something to his companion and both of them laughed. It was the laugh of a traveler who found the place smaller than the stories. Emerson’s face went hot. He stayed at his post.
The Scale delegation arrived on the twenty-first, and that silenced the barracks row. Scale had discovered the Arcanum Forge and held it alone for sixty-eight years. Nobody announced anything, but by evening anyone in Felsberg with any sense was sure what the demonstration would be. Emerson heard it four times that day from four people who each swore it came from someone reliable.
Mercer had built one.
On the night of the twenty-second Corporal Brenn was the only man in the barracks who did not seem excited. He led Emerson’s team and had eight years of years of service, which was a great many by the standards of their section. He was broad and red-faced. A full mustache covered his upper lip. He sat on his bunk with his blade across his knees. The whole corner smelled of oil. For forty minutes he cleaned a sword that did not need cleaning.
“You don’t think it’s good news, Corporal?”
Brenn did not look up from the steel. “I think it’s news.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.” He turned the blade over. “Sit down. You’re looming.”
Emerson sat.
“You know what a demonstration is? It’s when you’ve got something and you’d rather people knew about it than found out about it. The Head Marshal’s decided Mercer is safer with everyone knowing than with everyone guessing. Him and Warden Lenz at the War Office, anyhow.”
Lenz. The name caught on something from a long way back, and Emerson could not find what it was.
“That sounds like good news.”
“It might be.” Brenn sighted along the edge and set the sword down. “But you don’t stand something like that on a table in front of eight nations and then take it back. Whatever that room decides on the twenty-third stays decided. It’s the forever of it I don’t like, not the thing itself.” He wiped his hands. “Sixty-eight years Scale had it to themselves. The rest have spent all that time telling themselves it can’t be done without a Crimson Scar stone. Tomorrow they find out it can.”
He started putting his kit away.
“Everybody in that room is going to go home with the same thought, lad. It won’t be how nice for Mercer.”
“What will it be?”
Brenn looked at him properly for the first time. There was nothing grim in the look, only a tired kindness.
“Why not us?” he said. “Get some sleep.”
They woke up at four in the morning on the twenty-third and formed up in the dark. A small rain was coming in off the water, too light to hear and cold enough to find its way into everything. The yard smelled of wet stone and the harbor. The over-tunics still did not fit. His mother’s buckle was holding. Kira stood two places down the line without moving at all and kept her eyes somewhere past the wall, the way she had taught him. She could hold that all day and think nothing of it.
“For the record,” Brice muttered from Emerson’s other side. “If I die of standing up, I want it written down accurately.”
“Noted.”
“Not gave his life in service. Stood up until he died.”
“Quiet in the line!” Mosley said from somewhere behind them.
By seven the streets outside the installation were filling with more people than Emerson had expected. Their voices ran together into the steady roar a crowd made past a certain size. He could feel it through the packed ground, the way he had once felt the marching through a stone wall when he was eight. At a quarter past eight the noise changed. It did not get louder, only more orderly. Two places down, Kira lifted her chin a quarter inch.
At half past eight the gates opened, and the continent began coming in.