Emerson · Felsberg, Mercer State
1723
His mother had his belt on the workbench when he came downstairs. Emerson stopped on the bottom stair. He had hung it on the hook beside the door the night before, the same as every night for four years. Now the buckle lay under her hands, turned toward the window. The kitchen smelled of leather dressing and of the coal smoke that had long since worked its way into the walls. He was seventeen.
“It’s fine,” he said. “It isn’t broken.”
“Not yet.” She pressed a thumbnail against the buckle’s tongue. “Worn thin along here. Another season and it gives. Then you’ll be the soldier holding up his trousers in front of a sergeant.”
“They’ll issue me a belt.”
“When they get around to it. Until then, you’ll have this one.”
She settled a narrow metal brace against the worn tongue and took up her hammer. A pair of small rivets would hold it in place. Emerson recognized the repair. He had seen it on garrison kit all his life. Sometimes a soldier passing through town wore it without knowing whose hands made it.
The hammer struck twice. He knew that sound as well as her voice. At eight he liked finding her work among the marching men. At seventeen he watched her bend over his own belt and understood that she had spent his whole childhood making sure other people’s sons’ equipment would hold.
“Ma.”
“Nearly done.”
“I’m going to be all right.”
Her hands stopped. He wished she would look at him. He was less sure he could stand it if she did. She tested the repaired tongue with her thumb, then held the belt out. He took it from her carefully.
“You’ll be something one day,” she said.
He almost asked her what. The answer had been there for most of the year. When he lay alone in bed at night with the house quiet around him, it seemed a reasonable thing to want. Down here while his mother was waiting for him to put on his belt, he could hardly imagine saying it.
I’m going to be the best one they’ve got.
He was never the best at anything. A soldier’s wage would give him a living, but he wanted more than a living. He wanted to walk into a barracks one day and hear men who had never met him say his name. He kept it to himself. His mother would not have laughed at his dream.
He fastened the belt. She watched until he pulled it tight then lowered her eyes to the bench.
“Go on,” she said. “Your friends are making a nuisance of themselves in my street.”
He lingered until she reached for another piece of work. In the front room his father sat in the good chair by the window with the leg stretched out before him where it lay every morning. Emerson stepped over it without looking down.
“Don’t hurry,” his father said.
Emerson was out the door before it occurred to him to answer.
Coal smoke drifted up the lane from Anvil Row and a hammer rang out somewhere below. Kira was kicking a loose cobble back and forth with a boy from two doors down. She wore her good clothes, which apparently meant she had decided they were fit for enlisting in. A fresh scrape showed on the toe of one shoe. Brice sat on the low wall with his arms folded. He had the patient, aggrieved look of someone who lost an argument twice.
“She’s going to ruin them,” he told Emerson.
“They’re my shoes,” Kira said.
“Your only pair.”
“Then they’ll be ruined shoes that have been somewhere.”
Kira trapped the stone under her foot and sent it back to the boy. When she finished, Emerson noticed how close she had come to his height. She had passed Brice some time ago and always reminded him. Her dark braid was tied in a hurry. Loose strands clung to her cheek beside the mole beneath her left eye. At nine she tried to scrub that mark off with a rag. Emerson still remembered how furious she was when it stayed.
Strangers sometimes looked at her twice. Emerson knew her face too well to wonder what they saw in it. The bump at the bridge of her nose still marked the fall from the Halvards’ roof. Her crooked smile sat higher on the left and it usually meant she was about to suggest something Brice would object to. She was smiling at him now.
“Finally! We thought you’d changed your mind.”
“My mother had my belt.”
“Did she mean to keep you home?”
“She was mending it.”
“Then you have no excuse for falling behind.”
She was already walking down the lane toward Anvil Row. Emerson followed before he thought to ask why she always got to set the pace. He had been following her since they were eight. Now and then he wondered what it would be like to walk beside her. He thought about it whenever she did something ordinary, like pushing her hair away from her mouth while she talked to him. Then he would catch himself watching the movement and miss what she said.
There had been moments when he almost told her and each time, he found a reason to wait. He knew how to be her friend. What he did not know was how to win that friendship back if he told her and she did not feel the same. For now, a few paces behind her was close enough.
Brice took a little longer to leave the wall. Emerson waited for him and they went down toward the harbor together. When he looked back, Kira’s father had stopped splitting kindling in the Sterbens’ yard and stood with the hatchet hanging from his hand.
The recruiting office occupied an old granary two streets back from the docks. Grain dust still lodged between the floorboards. Its dry smell mixed with damp wool as the recruits crowded in. At first they were careful not to brush against one another, but soon there was no room to avoid it.
There were perhaps thirty of them. Emerson knew five by name and another dozen by sight. Felsberg was a big city yet nearly everyone waiting with him had gone to one of the three schools. Someone he knew laughed loudly at a joke near the door. Kira joined the line without hesitation. Brice went behind Emerson.
At the far end of the room the recruiting sergeant sat under a window. His hair was gray at the temples and two fingers were missing from his left hand. He pinned each form with the heel of that hand while he wrote then turned the paper around without looking down to guide it. Emerson watched him take eleven recruits before Kira reached the desk. The questions never changed and neither did the sergeant’s voice. To him they were the summer intake and another would come along before the first snow.
“Name?”
“Kira Sterben. Seventeen.”
The pen scratched across the form. “Affinity?”
“None.”
He turned the paper toward her. “Sign here, with your initials beside it. If you can’t write put your thumb mark in the box.”
Kira bent over the desk. She signed without reading the form and held the pen back out to him before the ink was dry. Emerson watched her step aside. He admired how little stood between Kira wanting a thing and doing whatever would make it happen. For years he tried to learn that from her as though it were a habit he might pick up by standing close enough.
“Next.” The sergeant drew a fresh sheet from the stack. “Name?”
“Emerson Forger. Seventeen.”
“Affinity?”
“Fire.”
The pen stopped. The sergeant looked up. “What level?”
“Ordinary, sir. I can light a fire without a flint. Hold a flame for a while.” Under the man’s gaze, even that sounded like a boast. “My grandmother had it stronger.”
“I asked what you had, lad. Not whether you were proud of it.”
Heat crept up Emerson’s neck.
“My grandmother had it stronger,” someone said near the door in a high prim voice.
Laughter ran down the line behind him. Emerson knew the voice. It was the boy who laughed loudly when they came in. Emerson heard that laugh across a schoolroom for years. The sergeant had gone back to the form. He did not look up.
Emerson did not turn around. Kira had stepped aside to the end of the desk and she was watching him. Anything he said would only give the boy more. He kept his eyes on the paper and left the laugh at his back. Most of the boys laughing were bound for the same intake.
The sergeant made a different mark on the form. “You’re seventeen. The instructors will care more about what you can do at three in the morning when you’ve had no sleep and it’s raining. There’ll be a man shouting orders in your ear while you do it.” He pushed the paper across the desk. “Sign.”
Emerson took the pen. Kira’s fingers had left a smudge of ink on the holder and the wood was still warm from her hand. He wrote his name more carefully than he had written anything in months. His hand was less steady than he wanted and he pressed too hard at the end. When he added his initials, the nib scratched loudly enough for him to hear it over the voices by the door. Then it was done.
He had expected signing his name to feel like a door shutting behind him. Instead, the sergeant checked the form for missing entries and pulled it back across the desk. That was all. For a moment Emerson saw nothing but his own name on the sheet. It looked no grander than it had on a school form.
He wanted the name to become something worth remembering. Men would speak of Emerson Forger as they spoke of Borka or Ignis. Boys perched along the muster wall would search the marching companies for him. He believed the distance between himself and men like that could be closed through enough effort. He stepped away from the desk and looked back. Only then did the weight of what he had done begin to settle in.
“Next.”
Brice did not move. He stood one pace short of the desk looking at the form. His thumb rubbed against the side of his forefinger.
“Next,” the sergeant repeated.
“Brice!” Kira said.
“I know.” His voice was quiet. “I heard him.”
The conversation near the door faded until the room seemed to turn toward Brice. His hand lifted as though he meant to reach for the pen, then fell back to his side. His thumb rubbed against the edge of his forefinger, again. The sergeant waited.
Brice looked at the form then at the door. For a moment, Emerson thought he might leave. Until Brice stood there, Emerson had never truly considered that someone might. Kira stood next to Brice. For once she had nothing to say. He took a breath and then stepped forward.
“Name?”
“Brice Schlaus.”
He gave his age. When the sergeant asked about an affinity, he let out a short laugh with no amusement in it. “No. Nothing like that.”
The paper turned toward him. He held it down with his free hand and signed. Brice finished before he looked up. By the time he reached them, his usual grin was back.
“That’s us, then. Soldiers.”
“Not yet,” Emerson said. “We’re recruits who signed our names on a paper.”
“You might let me enjoy it until they hand me a shovel.”
Kira snorted. After that Brice’s grin came more easily. The sergeant had already called the next recruit.
The three of them walked out into wet gray light. A cart rattled past the end of the street while its carter shouted for room. Farther off, the harbor masts swayed above the roofs and the wind brought the smell of tar up from the docks. Emerson put a hand to his belt. His mother’s repair sat snug beneath his coat while his name stayed behind on a sheet of paper in the granary. His mind kept going back to the pause before Brice stepped forward.
He almost didn’t.
He and Kira had walked up to the desk without hesitation. For them the matter was settled years ago. Brice stood there long enough to reconsider it. Emerson took the hesitation for something his friend would have to get past. He had seen Brice’s thumb working against his forefinger but he believed the grin that came after.
Kira turned in the street and began walking backward in front of them. It was only a little less alarming here than on top of the muster field wall. Emerson glanced past her at the cart’s departing wheels.
“Say it,” she said.
“We said it when we were eight,” Emerson replied.
“Say it now that it counts.”
Brice sighed. “I’ll be standing nearby.”
“You’ve put that in writing now,” Kira told him.
“Then I’d better hope they keep you within reach.”
Her smile softened before she turned to Emerson. “Your turn.”
He looked at her and thought, eight years and she’s still the same yet entirely different. She could bring him back to that wall with a few words. He remembered wanting to be like the men who marched beneath it. He wanted it so badly now that the thought of failing was harder to bear.
Kira waited, walking backward through the damp street in her scuffed good shoes.
“I’m going to be one of them,” he said.
“Good.”
She turned and faced the harbor. “Camp’s in three weeks. Try not to be slow.”