A single runner in hat and cape knocked on the great gates of the City, stepping back until he could be easily seen from the embrasure. The guard, squeezing uneasily through it, shouted down.
“Who wishes to pass through Ainjir's gates?”
His voice had a sing-song quality, an up-and-down set of notes attached to the end of important words that he drew out far and long, and it rang off the ground, as though he shouted from right beside the runner. Everyone knew who wished to pass through Ainjir gates already. Like stopping at the edge of the Ring, though, no army entered without answering.
Which worked just as well, because Guy was still fussing his uniform. They had put him on a horse. There was some truth to the prejudice that a foot soldier on a horse was like a farmer on a boat, which adjoined the prejudice that a farmer on a boat was like a wig set on a monkey. The monkey wasn’t any more useful for it and by looking more like a man, made the men share in its foolishness. Unfortunately, shows with monkeys in various wigs and costumes had become quite popular as diversions for the nobility, being as they were a favorite of the Prince, so without a staunch knowledge of nautical workings, the only recourse was to amend that a foot soldier on a horse was like a foot soldier on a horse. Having seen Guy, though, further elaboration wasn't needed.
Nika did better, as basic horsemanship was taught in the Fourth Year at Academy, in an attempt to pluck out the cavalry officers from the rest (which caused enough contention as it was), and the Comids were fond of riding. Still, the dichotomy was only exacerbated by their proximity as Guy had to put every fold in order to his tedious personal standards, in spite of the fact that the very movement of the horse ruined them, making him do it all again. Stopping at the gates meant he had plentiful time to be tedious.
The runner slapped a fist over his heart, as if beating his response out of his lungs. “The Army of Ainjir wishes to pass its gates. Laden with prisoners, fresh from victory, her honorable children return to her great city.”
Nika had his hands tied – albeit in a purely ceremonial fashion – which he used as an excuse to do all of his directing with kicking (it would not be suitable for him to be seen ordering about men of the Ainjir army, he said – why kicking was an acceptable substitute he refused to explain). Being already arranged in parade form, they were at the center of the division between those selected for decimation and the regular prisoners, and therefore too far away to see. Regardless of his full freedom of voice, he had kicked Lo until he borrowed an officer's field glass to keep an eye on the runner. Lo could see his tiny fists wailing about as he did the appropriate ceremonial gestures to get them admitted. These Lo described with the forced pride of one who is trying to defend the idyllic, pastoral beauty of shepherding with two sheep noisily copulating behind him.
The runner's response to the porter was just as scripted, though less sing-song. Each of them spoke with the burr of Old Ainjir under their tongues, until it came down to the real business they needed to contract.
“And who is with you?” asked the porter, surveying the lines stretched out behind the runner.
“Two-hundred and forty eight enemy personnel and three companies of the Provost.”
The Porter, with some shuffling, laid his paperwork on the ledge so his quill would write while awkwardly keeping his elbow over it – his hand was holding the ink pot – to keep it from being blown off. He didn’t have his usual help – they were having staffing issues today. “All right – the designations of those units, number of the dead, and the number of animals with you?”
“Yes, the first company – ah, oh – I forgot – one other, uh....” The messenger put his hand over his heart again, and half-assed the traditional sing-song. “Also the captive General of the Army of the Comid Republic and his surrendered arms.”
“Ha,” The porter shuffled his papers. “Glory's Nuts, son – did you forget anything else important?”
“Er...” the messenger shifted his feet. “No, I don't think so.”
“No other officers of rank, hm?”
The runner shook his head.
“None at all?”
The runner hesitated... and shook his head.
“All right then. Bloody good one to get if you're only getting one. Do get all that other information to us. You've got a parade to run.” The Porter glanced out at the army standing on the field, bright with dress uniform and glittering over with flags, before he turned from the window and disappeared.
“Yes, sir!” said the runner, pleased to be finished. Now he could take off his stupid hat.
“The runner's starting back, sir,” Lo said.
“Don't call me 'sir'. Guy, are you ready?” Nika shifted on his horse (which shifted in Lo's grasp, perhaps out of an abundance of caution) to stare at Guy.
“No,” said Guy, staring sullenly at his coat. “I look a mess.”
“At least you got the damn sailboat off your cheek,” Nika grumbled. He didn't like parades (this one, in particular, he felt he wouldn't like).
“Is it really gone? You wouldn't pull a prank on me now, would you?” Guy rubbed his cheek.
“As my dying act, no – I would pull a much better prank than that, one which would probably involve not parading to my death,” Nika responded, but Guy still nervously mashed his cheek under his palm. Nika kicked Lo. “Tell him he has no sailboat on his face.”
“You have no sailboat on your face, sir,” Lo dutifully intoned. Nika, Heary (on the other side), and he all exchanged a glance whose meaning was clearly 'not that you would recognize General Cole's drawing as a sailboat, anyway.'
“Not that you'd know it was a sailboat anyway,” Guy grumbled to himself. They all straightened up in their saddles (or shoes).
“Do you think there's any chance General Cole will show up before we reach the Prince?” Guy asked, eyes firmly fixed on the spectacle of the gates to Ainjir's capitol city making their slow way upward to allow them in. The toodling of triumphal horns, no doubt impressive once close up, made its weird way out to them.
“To save you from having to be the sole representative of Ainjir Military?” Nika shot him a quick, sympathetic grin. “It's 'Brigadier' Cole, and no,” Nika said, not quite able to mask the grimness in his voice. “He'll be busy keeping war crimes from being committed in your name. He won't be there.”
Lo and Heary looked back at Nika; they had moved on from ribald posturing about the two Generals' involvement to the sort of ballad-appropriate, long-lost-love, syrupy sympathy that every soldier liked, but didn't admit to liking until the fire had almost gone down and the ale run out. It was difficult to tell what Nika was thinking, not that it stopped them from speculating.
“He'll be there,” Guy said, certainty in his voice as the sound of the lieutenant's voice – final in a chain of voices – ordering the first row of men to march, drifted towards them. “He'll be there, before the end.”
“That I don't doubt,” Nika said quietly.
They watched the crowd of men break off in rows, like fish in schools, or seeds from a puff-flower, making space before their distance seemed to drag the next row forward. At this distance, the set of condemned prisoners was hardly separable from the Ainjir around them, marching in time as part of the rows of soldiery as the Ainjir were. Nika smiled.
“Sir,” Heary began, but Nika's smile turning to a frown quickly cut him off.
“They'll be looking for anyone and everyone they can condemn as a sympathizer; they'll want more and better blood than mine to spill for these offenses,” Nika growled. “Your mother will haunt me for your ‘sirs’.”
“Well, then won't they go for General Cole?” Heary asked. “How can we be sure he's not been arrested?”
“No,” Nika responded, “They'll be looking for anyone but him, at first. Clap him in irons too soon, and they'll have a revolt.”
Both Heary and Lo responded, though it was Lo who said it: “Right, they will.”
Nika let out a lopsided grin, balancing himself upon his horse as they prepared to move. Already they could hear the roaring, somehow worse for its being contained. Flashes of battles in box-canyons came to him, the eerie and displaced echoing of the Ards, retreats cut off by rivers, where the noise grew louder if only because at the moment of realization of the trap, the mind no longer imagined that the sound had anywhere else to go. The first of nightmares, the unfinished battles, the peculiar loss of control over consequences that led to the dissolution of the bonds of leadership all had the echo of that roar in them; it was only upon hearing it alone that Nika realized what the curious noise had been that gave pitch and volume to those fearful moments.
The horse started forward with lurch and roll and Nika and Guy became members of the swaying crew. Now the motion was inevitable as a charge. Guy felt the precarious seat to which he was so ill-suited tilt beneath him, and Nika felt the lack of control a simple loop of rope around his hands could cause. They both heard the volume rise as the first of the lines crossed the gate.
What did they bay for, these city hounds? They were not the dogs of war Nika was so used to moving amongst; they did not carry the safe, undoubted rule that one bit only for the throat, if one was going to bite at all. He didn't know what they would bark for, why they would cheer or howl or yelp when they had always been so far from anything of consequence. The little lifetime that was the length of a war had already happened, and like passing through a single long voyage, he didn't understand why anyone would still speak so loudly of needing to reach its end, while sitting safely arrived. It was the figurative journey that they still spoke of, not recalling the individual miles passed, in hopes that out of the end could be squeezed some further truth.
Their figurative war involved justice. His real war had not.
That was contained in the collective roar, echoing closer and closer out of the tall city gates. The effrontery, that someone would try to carve out of Ainjir, what every Ainjir already had: the idea of a country, a space in which each person met was someone else whose mind was enclosed by the same river, forest, and mountain that yours was, even if one never left the safety – the superiority – of the city. Symbolically, in passing the gates of the Capitol, they invaded Ainjir from some vast 'outside', renewing the breach of trust that the rebellion had been all over again.
The hounds howled in ceremony, the drums beat martial tunes in homage, the people hissed and spat and writhed in pantomime. Not realizing that the breach had begun well within the country's borders, not really aware that at no point did any strangers invade – not, in truth, able to encompass the actual length and breadth of the country in their minds at all–
They raged at an idea they had never properly understood. Even Guy frowned, to hear their seething, the flash of bloody battle coming before his mind as well. There was nothing there to feel except relief that it was over, and for some reason he had come back to find that everyone still wished for him to be angry and frightened as they were.
But it changed tone at the walls, sloughing away their haunted thoughts. The sun shone brighter, for bouncing off the tall, weathered stone of the city, the light as trapped as the noise. It was blinding to suddenly see a scene incomprehensible, of tall buildings standing like siege towers, of crowds packed peacefully, roiling with cheers rather than smoke and fear, of ribbons, cloth and greenery, and the jeweled spray of the fountains...
Then they passed the gates, and the sky rained flowers.
“Do you think...” and the Prince paused, for the Prince had taken to pausing at significant junctures in his speech, making the words pregnant as so many mistresses, “... that I should greet from my left, or from my right?”
A monkey in a wig chittered and scampered noncommittally from upstage center to downstage center.
Everyone else was quite dour. His guard stood behind him in their full finery, which was hot, difficult to maneuver in, and unhappily inhibited their ability to actually defend their liege lord, which their Captain had assured them they may very well need to do at the presentation of prisoners. In a gesture which truly pissed off their Captain, the Prince had also insisted, because they possessed the proper uniform, that he be attended only by his own Guard, with no addition from the Capitol Guard.
And though the two guard outfits worked together so occasionally as to make any collaboration of dubious worth, in truth, little could have pissed off the Captain of the Capitol Guard more than having an exceedingly dangerous prisoner presented to the Prince while only guarded by his own finery-crippled Royal Guard. Unless that was to have both sets of prisoners marched through the city at once, leaving his forces so over-stretched guarding the route and managing the execution square that, even if the Prince would've let him, he could not afford to dispatch the most nominal of sentinels to stand uselessly on the Royal Dais.
However, General Hammerlynn outranked him, and with the rest of the Council gone, there was no level-headed body to which to appeal. Only a fool would actually account the Captain of the Capitol Guard as a mere 'Captain', his specific duty making him the accepted authority on all martial happenings in the city, but, unluckily for the Captain, only a fool had showed up to do so.
Martial politics, however, were best left to martial persons, which the Prince Regent was not. He was happy to cede control of operations to General Hammerlyn while he busied himself getting dressed and procuring a monkey with a wig to amuse him during the tedious triumphal parade. He was informed there were quite a lot of prisoners, though General Hammerlyn, may Fortune be his mistress, had done his utmost to reduce that number by double-, nay, even triple-timing his march across the Namera Plain. It didn't take any sophisticated political mind to realize that General Hammerlyn's focus was not the glory of the realm, but the Prince was not apt to waste much of his time thinking on it. Though he had heard a rather amusing story of what one General Ghent had done upon hearing of General Hammerlyn's arrival, and the resultant bill for damages.
“I think it should be my left, don't you?”
Querying the air, the Prince turned his left side towards the hundreds of soldiers passing by, dutifully and on cue, turning their attention and salutes towards their ruler. One of the unfortunate circumstances of it being a triumphal parade, was that rather than surrounding himself with favored and distracting flunkies, he was obliged to bring only the most important figures with him to the dais. Normally he would at least have the fun of General Durante of the Academy Council, and a few of his father's ornery old ministers for him to argue with, but the ministers were, for the most part, back with his father, awaiting his death and thus their retirement, and Durante was off in some bloody jungle, no doubt blissfully unaware of what damage was being wrought in the military's name. So it fell to his distracted sister, the incompetent General Hammerlyn, the sweating Royal Guard, and the new ambassador from Adineh, who was, curiously enough to the Prince, both female and capable. The dais, except for the monkey, was short on amusement.
After a few long minutes of staring off to his right, the Prince decided that presenting his best side wasn't worth a neck cramp, or staring at General Hammerlyn's sweating hands for that long. Craning his neck the other way to undo the cramp meant putting up the pretense of wanting to speak with his sister, because if the Prince could make himself look foolish stretching, then soon every courtier in the country would be doing it, and they would be the laughingstock of the Six Nations (as undoubtedly, the Ambassador from Adineh would pass it around). His burdens were heavy indeed.
“My dearest sister,” he began, inserting one of those pregnant pauses entirely naturally, as he failed to have anything to say to her, at least of interest. (Well, everything he said was interesting to those of the proper rank. It was exceedingly unfortunate that his sister was technically not of the proper rank to adore his every word).
“Oh, please, Diarmaid, why did you ever have to begin leaving those pauses. Speaking to anyone at all has become so tedious as to be prohibitively so.” She brought a white-gloved hand up to forehead and rubbed it.
Well, he could take a hint. Leaving her with a nasty glare he faced again the soldiers on parade, looking like so many lines of ants. That his sister didn't want to speak to him was nothing new, but that she was curtailing her usually more open manner of saying so was truly a sign of the shift in power accompanying their father's unmistakably terminal illness. He couldn't have hoped for a better consequence – taking her away from their father's side as he died prevented any of those nasty, last-minute deathbed plots that were so often the downfall of princes-become-kings and, as a bonus, grief seemed to have plucked some of the barbs from her tongue.
Still, that the entire city around them was celebrating (ah, and he waved – he had been forgetting to do so and there was a hearty cheer from his subjects that made the effort worthwhile) while she very pointedly wore her bright, funerary yellows (with tiny, tiny red buttons, for loyalty to the Prince Regent, you see) hadn't escaped his notice. However, what good could her uncouth displays do her now? Exile north with their sickly father had robbed her of important Capitol court connections, and now, returning as almost a stranger and with no social or political function to draw her into prominence, anyone would believe whatever he chose to say of her and her sundry oddities. His sister had always been retiring. Well, now she would be retired.
That thought gave him some pleasure, which be bestowed upon the masses in the form of a general smile. Another wave wouldn't hurt, so he did that too. They roared in approval.
“Sire.” He had a guard at his side, as something unfortunate had happened to his personal herald in receiving General Cole's refusal of knighthood, which meant the honorifics had been simplified somewhat to compensate. “Er... Your Highness... um... at your pleasure: that was the end of General Hammerlyn's forces, and er...” he pointed one red-gloved hand out, held flat, because maybe pointing before the Regent was uncouth, “that is the beginning of General Cole's.”
It was very much in spite of himself that the Prince sat forward in his seat, scooting eagerly to the edge. “Oh my, General Hammerlyn – are you sure they captured the same army that you did?”
He needn't look up to notice the General's face gone red, looking as if his stiff, proper posture was so much of a strain he couldn't breathe. In truth, the Prince rather loathed the man, as one always loathes the petty and double-dealing, but he was eminently useful. The Prince's blow was only what he deserved, given that as his prisoners and men had marched by unclean, looking as miserable and long-delayed as the Prince had felt watching them. Their lines had bowed in the middle, as the prisoners cowered, limped, or dropped behind, the proper soldiers hardly better.
General Cole's lines ran straight as arrows. His men looked washed, rested. They saluted with a snap, and smiled gracefully at the flowers and laurels and cheers. The crowd, noticing this, roared louder and more happily. Even the prisoners, as they seemed to watch the city go by them, marched easily and in time, as if the soldiers were merely an escort, the shouting of the crowds hardly reaching their ears.
That was the proper way a triumphal parade should be conducted. That was what Hammerlyn lacked. Dignity. A sense of pomp. If an enemy looked brow-beaten and defeated, then one has tyrannically over-mastered him, and granted his cause power in sympathy. If an enemy looks too proud in defeat, then he will inspire cruelty and pettiness among the subjects. But that proper mix – that scene of a defeated and valiant foe – that was what Ainjir needed. Cole was one of the few that understood – one of his many meritorious features.
“Do take note, Excellency Hawath; it was General Cole who represented us in our most recent conflict.”
He never forgot that she was there, but even in being conscious of her standing somewhere behind him, it seemed as if her voice were a materialization, her presence a cold breeze. He pictured her speaking, as he knew it to be so, with that tight, genial smile on her flat face, corners of her lips turned just like the edges of her eyes, studiously inoffensive, and endlessly amused. Ready to turn offense into a joke, and a joke into a war. He hated capable Ambassadors.
“So noted, Your Highness.”
He felt the change of the heat of the sun on his ear that signaled her bow, just in the proper depth and deference for her rank, and resisted the urge to shiver. Whatever had inspired Adineh to send a female diplomat was a dark and uncomfortable thing indeed. If his country had been in any sort of state to refuse her appointment to his court, he would've. Alas, it had not been so, during the long rebellion.
But with the war over, and General Cole returned victorious, Ainjir would have power in the Six Nations once again.