Chapter Six
The tent flap moved again, but this time Nika didn’t bother sitting back up. He’d made himself comfortable. It was easier with General’s pillows instead of prisoner’s pillows. Cole side-stepped into his tent, having to lean and peer over the low table’s edge to even see Nika. Nika raised his brows by way of greeting.
“What was that line, from the chorus of that poem, 'Such Is The Soldier's Life?”
Cole thought a moment. “That's a song not a poem. 'Marching all day, lounging all night, such is the rowdy, doughty soldier's life.'”
Nika nodded, scratching his chin. “Oh, yes,” then fell into silence.
Cole waited. “Comfortable?” he asked.
Either Nika shrugged, or he might have just been working himself more into the pillows. “You were late to dinner. I had to make festivities all by myself.”
The shallow bowl Cole's cooks had provided was completely emptied of food but for one large, lone turnip sitting like a sun-bleached stone in the center. Cole poked a finger at it. Nika elaborated, “It’s a rock. I don’t even know if it was cooked at all. You ought to do some work on the cooking they’re doing for prisoners.”
Picking it up, Cole hefted its weight, turning it over for inspection. “I think it is a rock.” He shrugged replacing it in the bowl. “I ate with my men today; it wasn’t so bad.”
Nika eased himself up from the pillows. “I didn’t say you had bad cooks. The rest of it was delicious. I think it even had a carrot in it that had almost made it all the way to being cooked. The cooks at the Academy were always stingy with carrots on bivouac missions.”
Cole smiled, fatigue showing through his eyes in spite of it. “They just didn’t like cooking carrots. They’re a pain in the ass. Always either soggy or uncooked.” He began to seat himself. “I’m sorry I’m so late. I hadn’t anticipated how many kinks would come up in setting camp today.”
Waving him away from sitting down, Nika frowned impatiently. “Of course you didn’t; it was your whip of a Lieutenant that did all the anticipating. Your tardiness is all the more reason to skip straight to the dessert.”
Cole stood, indulgent smile on his face, and retrieved the bottle from its case by his bed, along with two glasses. “I remember you once calling this custom the only mercy in what was otherwise a feast of torture, so of course it came too late...”
As he set down the bottle, he looked down into the full glass of water sitting by the bowl, see the half-buoyant strings of saliva still trailing through it. He stopped mid-motion, eyes filling with fury.
Nika frowned right back at him. “What shall you do? Make them not be angry? There are far worse things...”
But Cole didn’t listen. He picked up the glass. “Guard!”
Nika fell silent, as he must. The guard hardly gave Cole time to finish his call before he was inside, with ‘sir’ and a sharp salute. His face suffered a fractional twitch, seeing the glass in Cole’s hand. Nika knew that the guard would be able to feel Cole’s fury. When he showed anger, it was unmistakable, his whole demeanor radiated with it. Sometimes you worried he would shake apart, so ill contained his fury – his true fury – seemed to be by his body.
But this was Cole some years distant from the Cole who shook with anger. He only seemed chilled – and his cool calm took the temperature of the whole tent down with it. He held the guard under his gaze for a long moment, then lifted the glass to his lips.
The guard broke first. “Sir!”
Cole raised his brow in query, and the guard fell silent. He looked at the glass, then back again. “Is there a problem?”
The guard hesitated. He wavered; but not quickly enough. Cole raised the glass again, and again the guard stammered as if to stop him.
“I am thirsty. I am in my own tent. Can you tell me, soldier, why should I not drink water served in my own tent? Perhaps you doubt its value?”
The guard opened his mouth, but as Cole lowered the glass, shut it again. He could say nothing for his own defense, and Cole’s look told him that he would say nothing. He stepped forward, and the guard refused to meet his gaze, staring sternly off into the distance. Cole pressed the glass into the guard’s hand, searching until he could force the guard to meet his eyes.
“What is served in my tent is mine, my hospitality, as if passed from my own hand, and it reflects upon me. Next time, I hope you think better of me.”
He held onto the glass for a few moments longer. When he finally let go, the gesture made the guard totter. Cole stepped back again, dismissing him. “Bring in the pitcher, and another glass.”
The guard snapped another salute, sweat upon his brow, and left the tent. They heard his compatriot’s question outside, and his footsteps pounding away to carry out his orders. Cole sat down, his anger leaking away from him. Nika frowned at him. “You realize he was showing loyalty. You shouldn’t rebuke a man for loyalty. It was an act of only petty vengeance. What do you expect of them, Cole?”
Cole looked up, his body eased, but his eyes still full of anger. “Better. I expect better.”
“We fought a war,” Nika snapped back, “It was–”
He stopped as the guard returned. Cole waved him in, taking the pitcher and glasses from his hands. They didn’t look at one another, but Cole hesitated, and Nika watched, before he dismissed the guard without further comment.
“It was a long–”
“We fought a war,” Cole interrupted, filling the glasses. “We fought a war, and what troubles me is that I still don’t know why.”
Nika's frown grew stormy. “Deh’s vei, would you stop interrupting me?”
“Isn’t that blasphemy? Is it First Year again?”
Ainjir didn’t understand blasphemy, and Cole was no exception. They had cast down their heathen gods; the idea of unholy words seemed laughably quaint. Once, he and Nika had laughed together – this time, though, Nika took him seriously.
Dipping his fingers in the water, Nika brought his hand up, wiping it across his lips to clear his sin. He did it hardly pausing, in a gesture so fluid as to be graceful even in haste, and so alien to the Dominicus Galen who Cole knew that his own lips parted in amazement. Cole meant it as a jab, but Nika hadn't flinched.
“They fought, and they fought at the front, without tents and guards and glass,” Nika hissed, “and it was too long and too bitter for you to expect them to forget in a day. It is not important, and neither is your… pampered feelings.”
Nika had forgotten the words – whatever he meant to say was probably much worse than ‘pampered feelings,’ but he was out of practice, speaking Ainjir. Cole had heard it in his first words, in the return of soft but precise consonants.
“I certainly did not fight from a tent – did the Dux Comidri? He was certainly hard to spot from the even the front of the Ainjir lines, so I suppose you’ll have to take my word for it.”
That struck; the green flecks in Nika’s eyes stood out in the dim light as they widened, fixing on him furiously – but whatever words he had, he swallowed. His mouth – opened to strike back – filled with breath, and closed, along with his eyes. Nika capped his fury.
Unlike the ritual for blasphemy, this, at least, was an unpracticed skill. Still, had Cole a coin for every time he seen such a thing, he would be a beggar. Nika's eyes opened again and held him steadily, but the emotion in them was so buried they might as well have belonged to a stranger. The shock hit like ice water, or a stab to the heart, and it was all Cole could do to hide his own reaction.
“I saw you. Kinsael. Merrywood. Til Amach.”
Cole's thoughts flashed unwillingly to those places – every one, of course, a place he had entered the fray personally. At Merrywood, without meaning to. He should have known better than to test Nika like that. The stab he'd felt became a wrenching turn, and he passed a hand over his face as if trying to remember; in truth, seizing the moment to recover his expression.
How he would've liked to ask where Nika had been! How his heart beat at the danger of it, even though it was long passed! How close they'd come to seeing one another... and what had happened to stop it? He might not have seen Nika, but had Nika chosen not to be seen by him?
Why?
There wasn’t time for sentiment, or even the larger question; he stifled the thoughts, shifted his attack, but clumsily in his haste:
“What key actions to witness! Such a defender of the faith! You know, I had assumed they simply hadn’t let you near the battles, on account of your disowning – or did your father not have time to tell them he exiled his deviant, heretic son?”
Nika's whole body tensed, but as usual with subject, Cole could hardly guess which part made him angry. To Cole, there were plenty of good options, but on this, on matters of family, they had never seen eye-to-eye. To bring it up at all was a wild fist thrown in the dark. He could never tell from whence it would be returned.
Nika's teeth hardly parted enough to let words through. “Cole, if this is a questioning, let it be about things I have done, not him.”
“Why? It was very relevant to the last time I saw you – determined to leave, pleading in unanswered letters for your family to do the same. The only cause I see for you to fight for the Comids is that perhaps he promised forgiveness – maybe even return to the fold – in exchange for leading the faithful hordes. It’s a logical line of questioning.”
“You who have turned your back on your family couldn't know!” Nika growled, but again – that foreign gesture – tried to hold down his anger, bite back his words. “Cole, do not pick at this–”
“Who did best?” Cole interrupted, watching him twitch. He leaned in. “Who bloodied his sword on enough heretics to earn his regard?”
Nika launched himself over the corner of the low table that separated them, hands catching Cole's uniform before he could get his own hands up for defense. Even as Nika did it, he knew his mistake – attacking the General in his own tent was solid idiocy. He certainly couldn't stop it mid-air, though. Cole slammed into the ground, while Nika's own leg slammed into the table. (The gesture was solid idiocy for a number of reasons, not the least of which being how much that had hurt).
“Tacshe!”
Cole's hands had gone automatically to Nika's wrists, and now he dug his fingers in to the bone, snarling right back at him. “Then tell me why!”
“Why what, Cole? Why I fought for my people and you fought for yours? Is that not enough?” Nika leaned over his chest, pushing the breath out of his lungs.
Cole had to gasp to get enough air to shout back. “Why you dragged your 'people' through a war you couldn't win!”
Attacking the General in his own tent was still stupid, but it didn't seem to matter anymore. Nika wrenched a hand out of Cole's painful grip and punched him in the face with such force little spatters of blood from his broken lip decorated the rug beneath them.
Cole retaliated by shoving Nika's already bruised leg back into the table, earning him no more than a grunt of surprise, a chance to take a gulp of air, and a withering glare. Though Cole twisted his trapped arm, Nika's free one struck out successfully at Cole's ribs. Cole struggled to block Nika's assault while he got his body more conveniently arranged (namely the leg that was trapped folded beneath him, that felt like it was tearing itself out of his hip socket needed to go somewhere else). Nika had no intention of allowing it.
Letting go of the wrist in his hand, Cole used his blocking arm to grab a punishing load of skin on Nika's side, and twisted it. Nika's assault paused long enough that, using Cole's throat to hold himself up, his newly free hand slammed into the joint of Cole's elbow, collapsing it before the twisting got too bad. Cole copied the elbow gesture to free his throat, getting one arm around Nika's ribcage as he fell, in preparation to crush it. Nika still had the advantage of free legs, and on one side the help of the table, so Cole's attempt to roll them over and use his body weight to help crush were thwarted. Still, it was at the expense of him being able to take advantage of better mobility, so Cole kept trying, all the while squeezing tighter.
Nika shoved an elbow into his ribcage, but it was too hard to get in around his interfering arms, thwarting most of the damage. His way blocked, he focused instead on getting Cole to let go before he started to truly lose his ability to breathe; however, this, too, grew frustrating as his already bruised ribs shouted with pre-existing pain more and more loudly at him. Cole couldn't get Nika turned over, but if Nika could hold out against the pain, he'd eventually get free of the bear hug.
'Eventually' though, meant that Cole still had the advantage. Eventually, his guards would come in. They would stop the fight. Nika would be taken outside and brutally murdered by angry soldiers, if the way his escorts treated him was any indication of the army's sentiments towards him. Eventually, this would be true.
As they wrestled further though, plates clattering on the table, little growls of rage and pain coming from them both, 'eventually' didn't seem to be happening. The guards were not rushing in; there were no angrily-shouted commands to desist. Nobody bashed Nika over the head and dragged him unconscious to his ignoble death. Nika began to wonder about 'eventually'.
Cole had put them in a position where whoever could out-wait would win, short of either of them causing massive irreparable damage to the other, and as bitter as their fighting might be, neither was going to start biting off ears or gouging eyes. Nika held out a little longer, simply to be an irritation, and to work out some of his own frustration by beating Cole's ribcage, then reached a hand up and tapped the ground near Cole's ear. Cole paused, but didn't let go.
“Eh’ Dehus, Cole, this isn't First Year.” He tapped the ground again and Cole released him.
“Can't be certain, always, that a surrender is a surrender, thanks to you.”
Nika lifted himself to his knees, taking heaving breaths over the protestations of his ribcage. Cole, too, lay on the carpet, working his jaw and letting his arms rest. They looked at each other. Fighting like that – that, also, was too like Academy days, feeling too much the same, too much unchanged. With Cole's help, Nika made it back to sitting upright, where he wiped the sweat from his forehead and grimaced. “You should've thought of that when I surrendered to you in the first place.” The quick look of deep concern that passed over Cole's face made the low blow worth it. “Even I curse the day I decided a 'false surrender' was a good tactic to resurrect. Where are your guards, Cole?”
Cole shrugged, righting himself in turn, but Nika's glare told him that there would be no funny business with this one.
“I left Guy outside to watch them.” As Nika's expression darkened, Cole began to prepare himself for another, slightly-less-deserved assault. “They have an alarm-word if something had really gone wrong.”
Nika shot him a glare that could have caused small birds to fall dead from the sky. “Fatue. You are so full of shit, Cole. So unbelievably full of shit.”
Cole had the decency to look embarrassed. Nika checked the burn under his shirt, already purpling into a massive bruise. He hissed at the pain, thieving one of the glasses from the table for a long drink. Cole rubbed the side of his face, which was fixing to swell. Nika reached into his pocket and threw him a packet of his own comfrey paste with a frown. “You deserved it. I should hit you again. How stupid can you be to tell your guards not to come in if you are attacked? What if you'd been hurt? There are ways to keep a man from crying out and you know that I know them.”
Cole supposed his swelling jaw didn't count as 'hurt'. Cole carefully unfolded the packet, looking at each fold as if it were a piece of his own developing thought. Nika rubbed a raw spot on his arm against the water glass, then ritually cleaned his lips of blasphemy again, grumbling miserably.
“Fuck.”
He put his face in his hands, elbows on the table. Cole finished what he was doing and set the paste aside.
“What happened?”
Nika paused. Cole carefully kept from looking at him by fiddling with a thread on his sleeve. Several times he thought he heard Nika start to speak, but nothing was said. Cole needed to apply pressure, at the beginning. Now, Nika could have ignored him, could have tried to throw him off the scent, but for all that he had seen that was new – concern for blasphemy, stifling emotions – Cole was counting on something deeper.
“Abban,” Nika said.
Abban – Abban was Nika’s youngest brother, about eight years his junior. One of only two brothers, out of Nika’s seven siblings. Cole had met him once, at graduation: a very small, very curious, eight- or nine-year-old. The same dark eyes and dark hair as Nika, and their father, had watched Cole carefully, his every move compared to Nika’s, and every one found wanting.
He would be at most, ten, when it started. That was young to be a soldier, but Cole had seen that and younger among the dead. Nika’s tone could only mean one thing.
And maybe Nika was right, fundamentally – Cole had no siblings, his mother was dead, and he and his father had – perhaps mutually – spoken less and less, until there was nothing at all to say. As eldest son, Nika was responsible for them, for raising them, for protecting them, and it had not been his choice to leave them for the Academy. But, especially after being cast out, Cole never understood Nika’s fierce attachment to his family, though he supposed it wasn’t his siblings’ faults that their father had disowned him. Cole did remember, as the war loomed, staying up those nights haunted by Nika’s pen scratching over paper, begging, begging, to at least be safe, be away, be with each other, if not him, and always: ‘take care of Abban, he’s the youngest, you must help him grow.’
Cole put the memory away; he didn’t need to be angry right now. “And the rest? Your sisters...”
Though he dreaded the answer, Cole wasn't sure whether he was relieved when he received it.
“I have done all I can for them,” Nika said. He looked at Cole as if through the veil of the dead. “They’re safe.”
Watching Nika hold to his strength while so wounded overwhelmed even Cole's bitter anger at the wound. Not able to face each other, for the moment, they could at least touch, with Cole's hand on Nika's shoulder, feeling the rise and fall of his breath.
“Eha!” Nika said, emotion slurring the syllables together. “Fuck, Cole, wasn’t wrong with you? What if you had gotten hurt? How can you be such an idiot? How can you just – you can’t, you can’t just act as if everything is like it was at Academy – things have changed. Things are different.” He finally looked up, frown etched into his face. “You fucking… stulte... you risk – you can’t risk…”
Eyes searching Nika's face, Cole could see him begin to fall. The growing red in his eyes, the hard press of his brows, the way he pulled in air so desperately it seemed he had been running for quite some time. It was anger, yes, but anger and fear – anger and fear, and none of it for himself. For himself, just so much pain.
“Risk what?” Cole asked, and twitched a corner of his mouth up in a smile. He ducked his head, as if it would disguise his leaning in. He just didn't want his voice to be easily heard.
“You would never hurt me, Nika.”
Nika's eyes hardened. “I fucking tried, didn’t I? The fucking war wasn’t enough?” but Cole’s plan had worked. He had drawn Nika back to the old ways, just as Nika had feared he would – though Nika gave himself credit that it had taken more than seeing Cole’s stupid, rock-solid face to do it. It was too sure, too the same, too much the buffer, the shelter, the standing stone it had once been, and with such safety in view – and such sheer physical pain and exhaustion – Nika threw himself on it like a penitent at a priest.
Nika wasn’t a very good penitent. “De’s futu’rissmus mei, you fucking – your instinct! Your fucking instinct! You can’t know – you think I have a plan, and you just trust it won’t harm you? Because instinct – idiotic, fucking… eha! I can’t control everything, Cole, I can’t keep people from getting hurt. What would happen if I incapacitated you? What would your army do – your precious soldiers? Your… Guy, what would he do? You would forget them, just like that? Put yourself at risk? I can hurt you… I can…”
But what Nika could or couldn’t do was lost, as he turned his attention elsewhere, striking out for a distraction, something that might shake Cole back, so that Nika himself wouldn’t break.
“You hobble Guy with his rank to feed your arrogance. You know better; the way you use your power, you need allies on equal footing with you.”
“I guard Guy with his rank,” Cole murmured. “He isn't yet strong enough to withstand promotion.”
“Like any of us were,” but that was the wrong thing to say. The noise Nika made was both scorn and sorrow, the final break; he could no longer distract himself from his fault.
Cole moved his hand from Nika's shoulder to the back of his neck. He drew him in close enough he could brush his lips against his cheek. “Abban wasn't your fault.”
Nika let himself be pulled. Cole's head leaned against his. Cole could hear the working of his throat, the ragged breath. He could feel his working jaw, the grinding teeth. Cole squeezed his neck and felt him shake, bruised and scratched hands twitching limp in his lap. He felt the tear touch his ear, and run soft and slow down between their cheeks, though the voice the spoke was hard as iron.
“All of this is my fault,” Nika said. “Abban is dead because I am a fool. I was not good enough. For any of them. They all died because I was not good enough. They are all my fault. You cannot make exceptions for ones hoped against.”
Cole gripped harder, pressed more tightly, until he finally felt Nika's hand go up to his shoulder and press in return. He rested his forehead on Nika's shoulder, and felt Nika rest on his. He ignored the wetness that struck his shirt to his skin, and the gentle shaking of Nika’s shoulders. Cole waited, berating himself until he felt again that provoking Nika into a fight had been the right thing to do.
Master of ruses, Nika never hid. Mast of feints, he couldn’t even lie. What Nika truly had, and had always had, was focus, and brutality, ironic as that seemed with him weeping on Cole’s shoulder over his soldiers and his little brother. Though Nika himself adopted it, it was really a sort of slander – with obvious roots – to call the depth of his planning and his unwavering attention to his goals ‘ruses and feints.’ But, however slanderously put, his weakness lay in his strengths – Nika never let go of a problem, meeting all obstacles with pitiless violence. Whatever issue, root or seed, he dug it out for examination, evaluation – elimination, if necessary. Sometimes, though, the issue lay within him, and that meant he tore in himself with the same unwavering, relentless, pitiless brutality he did everything else.
If ever Cole needed to distract him – if he was ever to have any hope of unraveling any of Nika’s plots – the best way was to turn him against himself. When they had been lovers, their fights were common, and back then, they had seemed worth it, premised on serious issues, meant for serious, passionate discussion. When they had been lovers, fields of dead, among the Nika’s little brother, hadn’t lain between them.
This news was at once shocking and to be expected. There had to be something, and something very serious, to call Nika into the war, but Cole hadn’t really expected quite… that. He hadn’t expected Nika’s family to be involved at all. With typical forethought, Nika had told them to go into hiding even before he had even decided to leave himself. Cole hadn't really thought, all other possibilities left open, Nika's family wouldn't listen to him. Nika's unchanged love for them had convinced Cole they who had disowned him wouldn't be so foolish as to discount his advice.
Cole felt an old coldness, old spike of scorn, rise in his chest, but now wasn't the time.
Grief didn't last long. Cole felt Nika beginning to still, and it drew him suddenly back to the present with a panicked heart. Nika was right that he had acted on his instinct, that he had assumed Nika wouldn't hurt him because his gut told him so. Or rather, his heart had hoped so. Five years of anger and separation and death and destruction, and Cole's heart seemed not to notice. Instead it fluttered and beat and told him that if he let go he might never get to hold on to him again.
That was too much. He moved his hand up and buried his fingers in Nika's hair, turning his face to brush his jaw, taking in with a deep breath a smell of dirt, of blood, and a hundred living memories, too vibrant to be past. Now Cole felt doubt banging against his chest – now his instinct warned him – and his heart shook, and cowered away while he desperately hoped.
“I’m sorry,” he said, a world in the words.
Nika's hand brushed his jaw, coaxing open his eyes with warm breath on his ear.
“Thou thief of time, thou mischief maker,
That takest from me to give back torn and broken
All the pieces of life, life, what once was separate whole,
Now twined and doubled, as we are together,
And halved once thou dost part.”
The whispered words seemed more a memory, too much of their past to be of their present. Cole's pained eyes searched the face beside his, mouth working to find something to say, but remaining empty. Nika brushed his cheek again, looking over the face before him as if checking for unwelcome streaks of dirt, a misplaced hair, or spot of food. The smile that crossed his broken and still swollen features seemed not to notice his own bruises.
Its fading finally wrenched words out of Cole. “You remembered.”
Nika let out a quiet laugh. “It's the only stupid poetry I can remember right. You wrote it for me. I can't forget. I...” his face collapsed, and he looked down before gathering himself back up and looking into Cole's eyes. “I tried to.”
Cole showed no disappointment, if that's what Nika had expected. Instead his hand held more securely, blue eyes locking onto Nika's so surely that it seemed he might not look away again. Cole brought his legs up so that he knelt, gaze holding steady. He moved his hands to Nika's jaw, drawing up his face. It was Nika's turn to feel exposed and examined, as he gently brushed over a broken lip, a swollen cheekbone, a split eyebrow. Gracefully, Cole leaned down and pressed his lips to Nika's.
Through the palm resting softly on his neck, he could feel Nika's pulse push harder as he drew away. He watched the green-flecked eyes blink open, and catch on his as if they'd never closed. Cole smiled, watching the blush rise into Nika's face.
“Nothing has changed,” Cole said. “How could it?”