Chapter 34: Neville – Spittle
Neville’s two hundred soldiers haltingly entered the dense Frontier woods. Their fear burned into Neville’s back. He led; Manó was at the rear. When he left Fabec, Neville sent Leather Head to Tuen and Vincent to Debur.
‘Me?’ asked Vincent. ‘Go back to Debur?’
‘I need you to look for Thaila,’ said Neville. ‘She is the Eslarian baker’s daughter.’
They were in Neville’s office in Fabec. He called Vincent and Leather Head separately to give them instructions.
‘I know very well who Thaila is,’ said Vincent, ‘but why do I have to go back to Debur? I chose Fabec. Don’t you see? I chose the Mouth of War over Henrique. I know what you think of me, Captain, but this isn’t fair.’
‘What I think of you is that I can trust you,’ said Neville.
Vincent was unconvinced.
‘Since that day I made a joke about the Accident,’ he said. ‘From that day on you’ve despised me, but I’ve changed.’
‘You haven’t changed one bit,’ said Neville, ‘and I don’t despise you.’ He raised his hand before Vincent could protest. ‘I saw what you did afterwards. I saw you following Leonard and apologizing. You bought him a beer.’
‘It was cider,’ said Vincent.
‘You bought him cider.’
Vincent moved his weight from one foot to another.
‘But, Captain, you’ve always picked on me during training. Bushido of the soul and all that stuff.’
‘You thought I was picking on you because you thought I despised you,’ said Neville. ‘Now that you know what I know, go back to your memories and see if I was really picking on you.’
Vincent kept moving his weight from one foot to another. He seemed to dance to a rhythm of his own.
‘Vincent, I need someone I can trust in Debur.’
‘You know Olivier could have taken her to Tuen by now,’ said Vincent.
‘Leather Head is going to Tuen.’
‘I could go to Tuen.’
‘You know Debur. Leather Head is from Tuen.’
Vincent kept asking questions. What should he do if Olivier wasn’t in Debur? Should he then go to Tuen or should he come back to Fabec? Neville left those decisions to his discretion. He had too much to worry about already. The hardest part was to choose the two hundred men who would follow him to the Frontier. Not one person in Fabec was prepared for the colors of the south.
They followed the Loefern from Fabec. There was an old railroad that began on Patire’s side of the river then disappeared where a bridge should have been and reappeared on the Baynardian margin. They followed the ancient tracks all the way to the Frontier woods, where the trees were quiet and didn’t sway to the wind with as much abandon as trees from other parts would. To go over the Frontier bridge, they had to be so close to the Blood that they could see, between the trees, the deadly mists of the Land of the Banished. In winter, the meeting of the Loefern with the Blood was a voiceless scream like those you can’t let out in nightmares.
Here, Maëlle’s colors were undeniable. They loomed over the darkness in Neville’s men like scorpions ready to sting. Why was Neville bothered by the colors? Why did he see them in the Frontier but not in his men? What about himself? His black bow conversed with the Frontier shadows, the dark wood clicked in answer to the snaps and groans coming from the trees that were old enough to have seen the Empire.
Neville didn’t know if the Frontier people saw them as friends or foes, if they even cared. What did the Frontier think of the War? About this cracked Franária, about anything at all? Did they see themselves as Franish? Did they care about the eagle? Neville thought it better not to encounter them and left the road as soon as they crossed the bridge.
They hiked difficult paths squeezed between the old trees, thick roots, and slippery rocks. All the while, the Land of the Banished whispered mysteries from across the Blood. Winter was thicker there. It cut through wool and leather with an acid breath, explored the skin with curious fingers. Everything in the Frontier seemed alive. Rocks resented being stepped upon and slipped away from under their feet, trees twisted their twigs, disgusted by steel and darkness. Roots moved like fat snakes, tried to get hold of Neville’s arm and Manó’s foot. One of them snapped suddenly and hit a man on the head, nearly cracking his skull.
‘It is true, then,’ said Manó. ‘Darkness gives life to things.’
‘No,’ said Neville, ‘it steals life from things.’ What made things alive in the Frontier was color. Darkness was what Neville and his men carried.
The Land of the Banished kept the soldiers awake at night. The darkness beyond the Blood spoke of trees swallowing men in their sleep, of winter enveloping them in ice cocoons. It reminded Neville of the things Lecoeurge told him about the Frontier. Every now and again, he felt something breathing on his neck.
Yet all that fear was for nothing. They came out of the Frontier unscathed. Their greatest enemy was winter: whips of snow, icy whirlwinds, liquid fog. At each storm they had to stop, find shelter under rocks, hugging each other and praying to stay alive. Only the mad traveled in the Franish winter, but Neville had no time for sanity. One winter in the mines of Anuré could be deadly. Neville had to reach Lencon in time to save Maëlle and the Eslarian.
Winter, too, Neville’s soldiers crossed unscathed. They seemed to be protected by an invisible force, colder than ice. Maybe the darkness of the Mouth of War had become part of their bodies.
‘The woods have eyes,’ said Manó on the third day in the Frontier.
Neville also kept an eye on the spectre that followed them day after day: a tree, black like absence, with leaves so pale that they shone at night in an eerie, deathly green. Maëlle had seen that tree, she’d told Neville about it. Was it the same tree that she saw and that moved in the wake of Neville’s small army, or were there several trees like that in the Frontier?
When they left the Frontier, the tree lingered behind. Neville and his men reached Lencon, a village protected by a palisade built in the shade of the first Oltien. At the edge of the mountain range, the road forked: take it right and you reach Beloú and the Mouth of War, go left to the Halls of Snow, home of Fulbert and Margot of Patire. Lencon was the last Patirean post before the Frontier, with only one wooden watch tower and gates ajar. Lencon was not afraid of an attack. The War hadn’t come this far south in over three hundred years.
The watch died with a black arrow in his throat. The other fifty soldiers resisted but didn’t last. Neville’s men cut through them like hot iron on butter. Not one Baynardian was injured.
‘Death is on our side,’ said Neville.
‘Lucky us,’ said a soldier.
Luck? That was a massacre. Neville recovered an arrow, shook away the skin and leather from the tip. Lencon’s soldiers fell too easily, but their deaths were slower than torture, slower than chocolate melting in a child’s contented mouth. People died in Lencon the same way they died in the Mouth.
Neville heard a hoarse scream and ran. An old man was kneeling by a boy trespassed by a sword. The boy had not yet finished rolling his eyes in death, and the soldier pulled back the sword to sink it in the old man’s belly. The hoarse scream choked on crimson and the soldier pulled the sword yet again to kill a woman who ran away.
‘Manó!’ shouted Neville.
The soldier froze mid-strike and blinked, confused. He seemed to have just woken up from a dream. He stepped on something soft and almost lost his balance, then he wrinkled the white scar on his forehead as he saw the little boy’s arm under his boot.
‘Soldiers of Fabec, to me,’ shouted Neville. ‘To me!’
The warriors came out of a death trance, blinking like they were waking up from a dreamless sleep.
‘What have I done?’ Manó whispered at the boy’s corpse.
‘What have I done?’ Neville asked. That kind of death, unbridled and slow, belonged in the Mouth of War.
Like a mad dog’s spittle, it had leaked out of the Mouth in Neville’s wake. But it ended there. Neville would find his mother and Thaila’s father then they would all go back to Fabec and take death back to where it belonged.
‘Captain,’ said a soldier. ‘The slaves aren’t here.’
‘We’re late,’ said Neville. ‘The slaves are already in Anuré.’