THE BONE AND THE ANVIL - The Marching Season
The bugle sounded at four in the morni
The bugle sounded at four in the morning.
It wasn’t a clean, brass notes kind of call; it was a choked, spit-clogged blare that died halfway through the third measure because the trumpeter’s lips were frozen to the mouthpiece.Kian was already awake.
He’d been awake since three, listening to the rain turn from a drizzle into a hard, needle-like sleet that rattled against the canvas of
Tent 31 like handfuls of river gravel.Across the muddy gap between their pallets,
Orlo was sitting up, his massive, dark-skinned shoulders bare to the freezing air.
He was pulling a pair of stiffened wool socks onto feet that looked like iron shovels.”You’re making that noise again,” Orlo grunted without looking over.
His voice sounded like dry oats sliding down a chute.Kian swung his legs off his straw.
His chest hurt.
Not the sharp, blinding tear of open meat, but the deep, sickening ache of scar tissue pulling against fresh muscle every time he took a full breath. “What noise?””That clicking in your teeth.
You do it when you’re thinking about running.””I’m not running,” Kian said softly.
He pulled his boots on.
They were grease-soaked leather, salvaged from a dead teamster behind
Cormac’s clinic, three sizes too big and stuffed with dry hay at the toes to keep them from slapping against his heels. “Running gets you the dogs.”Orlo snorted, a sharp burst of grey steam shooting from his broad nose. “Running gets you a rope if
Ostrander catches you first.
Get your pack.
Quell’s on the line already.”Out on the parade grounds, the mud had frozen into jagged, iron-hard ruts that tore at the ankles.
Two hundred men from the 27th
Vanguard were attempting to form three ragged companies, their heavy wool coats dark and slicked with sleet.The rain had soaked through
Kian’s coat within two minutes, settling into the wool until it weighed forty pounds on its own.
Add the wooden ruck—loaded with thirty pounds of river stone, an iron trench-tool, a rolled canvas half-tent, and two wooden tent pegs—and every step felt like sinking into wet clay up to the shin.To
Kian’s left stood
The poacher’s son looked smaller than he had in the tavern, his freckles standing out pale against a face the color of skimmed milk.
He was chewing nervously on a dried turnip root, his jaw working in quick, jerky twitches.”Fifteen miles,” Garth muttered, his voice shaking so hard his teeth clicked against the root. “They’re doing fifteen today.
Up the ridge road, past the old quarry, and down through the shale-cuts.
My dad said three men broke their knees on the quarry road last winter.
Just… snapped ’em right in the ice-ruts.””Keep your head up,” Kian murmured, adjusting the rough hemp strap where it bit into his left collarbone. “If you look at your boots, you miss the holes.””Look who’s giving advice,” a voice sneered from three paces behind them.Felix
Brocke stepped into line.
He didn’t look like he’d been sleeping in
His wool coat was dyed a deep navy, lined with shaved sheepskin at the collar, and his boots were oiled leather that squeaked softly as he walked.
He carried no wooden ruck; a hired camp-follower—a hollow-cheeked kid no older than twelve—stood three feet behind him, bent double under the weight of
Felix’s iron-framed pack and spare boots.”The eastern rat thinks he’s an instructor now,” Felix said, loud enough for the men in the fifth file to hear.
He pulled a silver pocket watch from his waistcoat, clicked it open, and snapped it shut with a sharp clack. “Five silver groats says the dog drops before we hit the quarry marker.
Who’s taking it?”A couple of the high-born recruits near the front of the company laughed—a thin, forced sound that died quickly in the bitter wind.
Nobody took the bet.
They were too cold, too miserable, and the smell of
Quell’s stale tobacco was already drifting down the line.Quell came out of the fog like an old iron barge cutting through river-scum.He didn’t wear a coat.
Just his grey leather jerkin, open at the throat to show a patch of dark, scarred skin, and a heavy ash-wood staff held in his right hand.
His eyes were small, red-rimmed, and wet from the sleet.”Company!” Quell roared.
He didn’t use a horn.
He didn’t need one.
His voice hit the line like a kick in the ribs. “Left… turn!
By the file… double-time…
MARCH!”The column lurched forward.The first three miles were always the worst.
The body hadn’t warmed up yet, the boots were still stiff from the night’s frost, and the wet wool of the trousers rubbed against the inner thighs until the skin bled.
Men stumbled instantly.
A debt-debtor from the southern valleys caught his toe on a frozen ridge of clay and went down hard, his wooden ruck cracking against his spine with a dull thud.”Get up, you swine!” Sergeant
Ostrander’s voice boomed from the flank.
A iron-tipped pace-stick cracked across the fallen man’s shoulders. “Up!
I’ll have the rear-guard drag you by the heels!”Kian didn’t look back.
He couldn’t.He locked his gaze on the back of
Orlo’s neck—a thick, dark pillar of muscle that moved with a slow, swaying rhythm, like an ox hauling an ore-cart up a grade.In.
Out.Kian leaned forward, lowering his center of gravity the way he’d learned in the canal-trenches.
In the cuts, if you tried to walk upright while hauling three hundred pounds of wet clay on a barrow, the mud took your knees out.
You had to stay low.
You had to drag your feet close to the ground, sliding them through the muck rather than lifting them.”You’re… you’re keeping up,” Garth gasped beside him.
The poacher’s son was breathing through his mouth now, his dried turnip root dropped somewhere back near the two-mile stone.
His face was slick with a combination of freezing rain and greasy sweat. “Felix…
Felix is watching you…”Kian didn’t glance at
Felix.Felix was running near the front of the officer-cadet file, his stride light, his iron-shod boots barely touching the mud.
He looked clean.
He looked like he belonged on a horse.Let him watch,
Kian thought.His ribs burned.
Every time his left foot hit a frozen rut, a needle of pain shot from his hip up into his armpit, where
Cormac’s stitches were still pulling at the fresh scar tissue.
But behind the pain, deep in the small of his back, something else was happening.It was the canal-memory.
Three years of sixteen-hour shifts in water up to his knees.
Three years of carrying sixty-pound pine logs on one shoulder while an overseer counted the paces with a brass whistle.His body knew how to suffer.
It didn’t panic when the lungs began to burn.
It didn’t scream when the thigh muscles turned to lead.
It just went dark inside, closing down until the world shrank to four inches of frozen earth directly in front of his toes.At the seven-mile marker—a moss-covered stone post near the abandoned lime kilns—a boy from the weaver-towns collapsed.
He didn’t trip; his legs simply gave out, folding under him like wet paper.
He lay in the slush, his hands clutching at his throat, vomiting a thin, yellow foam.”Leave him!” Quell’s voice barked from the head of the column.
He didn’t even turn his head. “The rear-guard will pick up the stragglers!
If you stop to help him, you carry his ruck!”Nobody stopped.
Garth wavered for a second, his eyes widening as he stepped over the boy’s outstretched hand, but
Garth’s elbow with a sharp, hard pinch that made the poacher jump forward.”Don’t,” Kian rasped. “You’ll die out here.””He’s… he’s just a kid,” Garth choked out.”So are you,” Kian said. “Keep moving.”They hit the quarry climb at eight miles.
The road narrowed, turning into a steep, wind-scoured ledge of grey shale that hung over a two-hundred-foot drop into the river-gorge.
The ice here was thin, invisible under a layer of wet slush.Felix slowed down.
His high-born stride, so graceful on the flat parade grounds, was worthless on the shale.
His soft leather boots slipped every three paces, his ankles twisting awkwardly as he fought for balance.
The hired boy carrying his heavy pack had lagged fifty yards behind, panting like a winded hound.Kian passed him.He didn’t do it with a burst of speed.
He didn’t look at
Felix’s face, nor at the fine blue mantle that was now dark and heavy with sleet.
He simply maintained his slow, shuffling canal-stride, his bare toes—visible through the holes in his burlap-wrapped boots—gripping the shale with an instinct born of three years on the slippery wooden catwalks of the timber-dams.”Watch it, dog,” Felix spat, his face pale, a smear of grey mud across his clean chin where he’d caught himself on a rock.
His breath was coming in ragged, high-pitched gasps.Kian didn’t answer.
He didn’t even blink.
He kept his head low, his eyes fixed on the grey shale two feet ahead, his rhythm unbroken.Beside him,
Orlo let out a low, rumbling noise—a sound that might have been a laugh, or might have just been a cough from his ruined lungs.”Five groats,” Orlo muttered under his breath, his huge boots crushing the shale into powder. “I think the little lord owes someone some silver.”The column moved on into the white mist of the upper crags.
Behind them, down in the dark mouth of the quarry, the sound of the rear-guard’s whips began, steady and rhythmically cruel, counting out the miles for those who had fallen behind.