Blood & Tears

Chapter 2-2

The man replied, but Isandor didn’t hear it because a number of people ran past at such speed that one crashed into the soldier with the torch, and stumbled before regaining his balance. The soldier yelled at him and the skinny youth ran for the truck. From the sounds and rocking, he had climbed onto the trailer. The goats scrambled and bumped into the side rail.

“Hey, you!” Milleus shouted. “Get off! You’re scaring the goats.”

Isandor opened the door on his side. “I got to go and help him. Stay here.” He jumped onto the grass.

A couple of other youths had arrived, and while the soldiers fought his mates, the youth on the trailer inserted his hand in between the cover and the mesh sides. The goats were bleating and jumping around trying to get away.

Isandor grabbed the youth by the back of his coat. He yanked. The youth lost his grip on the trailer and fell back.

Isandor jumped onto the railing to shield the goats with his own body. “Get away from my goats.”

The youth scrambled up, looked as if he was going to fight, but then his mouth fell open. “The . . . the Queen’s champion?” He spoke the southern language and those words took Isandor back to a time he’d almost forgotten. Flying on the back of an eagle, a time when his only worry was Carro’s unusual behaviour.

Yes, he had won the medal, and that had been the beginning of all this misery.

“I’m Isandor,” he said, and his voice sounded strange even to his own ears, having spoken Chevakian to all others except Jevaithi for so long. “How did you get here?”

“Like everyone else, on the train.” He used the old southern word for train, one that had been in use at the time of the old king.

“What train?” Isandor used the Chevakian word.

“The one that brought us here. You didn’t come on the train?”

“No, we came with a Chevakian farmer. These are his goats.” He grabbed the bars of the railing. The press of the warm and hairy bodies against his hands was comforting. They had become his goats as well.

“We came on the train, and the Chevakians put us here.”

“How many of you?”

“All of us. The whole camp.”

Isandor let his eyes roam the hillside dotted with tents. There were thousands of people here.

More even. Now he understood. Milleus had assumed the camp was for refugees from the Chevakian border regions. But it was for southern refugees.

“Why did you flee?”

“There was a massive explosion. They say the Knights messed with the Heart of the City, and the Heart took revenge. Some say there was a war. Some say the Knights did it on purpose.”

“Hey, guys!” Another youth called out to his mates some of whom still jostled with the Chevakians. “Hey, come here, guys. The Queen’s champion is here!”

A couple of people came running out of the darkness. A boy of about ten, a girl and a young woman. They looked dirty, pale and emaciated. Their furs were filthy and matted.

“We all thought the Knights had killed you,” a girl said. She was about Isandor’s age, but her face was scabbed and oozing fluid. Her eyes were wide with pure adoration.

Isandor felt sick. While he had been eating well and frolicking with the Queen, the people of the City of Glass had suffered a terrible disaster. The next moment, panic clawed at his insides. Mother. Where was she?

More people came running towards the Chevakian convoy. “The Queen’s Champion is here!” The shout was repeated by people across the grassy field. “The Queen’s champion! The Queen’s champion!”

“Go back to your tents immediately!” a Chevakian soldier shouted. There were only two soldiers, and at least thirty southern people. Isandor recognised the emotions in their faces from that night in the Outer City. They were hungry, desperate, frightened, bored, all recipes for a riot.

Isandor didn’t want to start a riot. He wanted to know where his mother was.

One of the Chevakians from the truck convoy joined the soldiers, and yelled at the southerners, “If anyone touches any of us, I’ll shoot.”

Isandor shouted at the southern youths. “Go, before there is trouble.”

The group made a half-hearted effort at retreating, but didn’t go very far.

Chevakian men gathered next to Milleus’ truck. Isandor remained in the shadow, feeling their angry gazes on him.

One man said, “So Destran gives all this to southern scum while we have to wait outside and get nothing?” Isandor recognised the driver of the truck in front of Milleus’.

“And why close off the road?” another said. “That is the most stupid thing I could think of doing.”

The first man said, “Why isn’t there a camp here for us? We have nowhere to stay.”

“And no money to pay for their expensive inns,” another added.

“Now you people here, listen.” The grumblings grew quiet at the sound of the clear male voice of a Chevakian soldier. He looked to be of senior rank, with glittering buttons on his uniform.

“I’m going to have to ask you to turn back. I don’t know how you got in, but—”

“We made a hole in the fence, that’s what,” Milleus said.

The soldier looked at him, briefly raised his eyebrows, and went on, “You have to leave for your own safety. There was a disaster with sonorics in the City of Glass, and these people have fled—”

“We have fled, too,” a woman said, and some people cheered.

“These people are contaminated and a risk to your health.”

“Any more of a risk than starving to death?” someone yelled.

Several others agreed.

“You have to go back the way you came,” the soldier shouted over their voices. “Turn your trucks around immediately and go back the way you came. Follow the Mekta road into the city.”

“Where we will find what? Have you got something set up for us, too or is this just another way to keep us out of your hair? This camp looks good enough for us.”

“We can’t allow you to go through here. Return where you came from. That is an order. Disobey and you risk being fired at.” The soldier’s voice rose.

“Come on, mate, you wouldn’t really shoot at a fellow Chevakian.” This soothing voice was Milleus’, and he pushed his way through the group. “That is against the army’s mandate.”

The officer turned his head to him, swallowed visibly, clutching his gun. “Who are you?”

His nostrils were wide, and his chest moved fast.

Isandor knew the type; he’d seen them in the lower ranks of the Knight officers. They had some responsibility but didn’t have the experience or aptitude for higher command. They were used to having their orders obeyed and panicked when they were not. He wished he could tell Milleus to watch out. Such men could do strange things at no notice and this one looked at the end of his rope.

Milleus put his hand on the man’s shoulder and said some quiet words that Isandor couldn’t hear.

The officer’s eyes widened. He sprang into a military salute. “Honoured to meet you, sir.”

Milleus said something else.

The officer listened, and then said, “The command won’t like that, sir.”

“No,” Milleus said. “They probably won’t, but they’ll like the alternative even less.”

The man nodded and they spoke more. Milleus gestured at Isandor to get into the truck. By the skylights, it looked like Milleus was actually going to convince them to let the convoy through.

Isandor made his way towards the truck when there were fast footsteps and more Chevakian soldiers arrived. They spoke to their comrade and Milleus.

Milleus protested.

One of them said, “It’s our orders to keep the camp sealed and remove these people.”

“Let’s be realistic. There is nowhere for them to move to,” Milleus said, his voice calm. “The road is blocked with too many people still arriving. People out there are angry and hungry. Let us pass through to clear up the jam. Seal the fence afterwards.”

And so it went on. Milleus argued in favour of common sense. Someone in the Chevakian army had given the order to remove the Chevakians from the camp, and some soldiers thought it was all right to interpret that as letting these people out on the other side of the camp, and others said it was not.

Over their heads, Isandor noticed that southern people were gathering further down the hill. Some were pointing at him.

Another group of Chevakian guards arrived and tried to shoo the southerners back to the tents. Isandor heard shards of shouting, some mentioning his name. Milleus was still talking to the other Chevakians.

A scuffle broke out further down the hill.

“Be calm! Don’t fight!” he shouted in his own language over the heads of Milleus and the soldiers. His voice sounded thin on the wind.

Voices shouted back. “Champion, champion.”

“Don’t fight. They will kill you!”

“Champion, champion, champion!”

Now several of the Chevakians civilians of the truck convoy turned to Isandor.

“That’s one of them,” Isandor heard a woman say.

“What is he doing here?”

“I saw him with the old man.”

“He’s the one who gave us milk.” This was a child’s voice. “I like him.”

Down the hill, the scene descended into chaos. Isandor spotted a man in a Chevakian uniform beating a refugee on the ground. Some southerners threw rocks at that soldier. Other Chevakians went after the rock-throwers. Most of them ran up the hill to the shelter of the Chevakian trucks, where Isandor spotted one man clambering in the back of a trailer, and one crawling underneath the vehicle. Another climbed on top of the wood stack. The truck’s owner who had been tending the boiler yelped when he found a stranger behind him.

Chevakian soldiers walked past the column inspecting each truck. They caught the southern youth hiding in the trailer, dragged him down and kicked him.

In all that chaos, Milleus came back to the truck in great angry strides.

“Get in,” he said to Isandor.

“But they’re beating up my—”

“Get in. Now.”

There was no arguing with that voice. Isandor climbed into the back, where Jevaithi put the gun aside and clamped her arms around him. Her skin was clammy and cold.

“The people in the camp are all southerners,” he whispered. “They’re refugees from the City of Glass.”

“Oh!” Her eyes were wide, but she said nothing else. She stared into the distance and he could only imagine what she felt.

“Don’t be afraid,” he whispered.

“There will be Knights.”

“If there are, they’ll have me and Milleus to deal with, but I haven’t seen any.”

“You don’t understand what they can do if they don’t get things their way.”

“We’ll be fine. Milleus is with us.” But he understood very well. He knew what the Knights could do. The pain of having his very essence sucked into an icefire sink was not something he’d forget easily. Now that the Chevakian barriers had failed, they were no longer immune from icefire.

He kissed Jevaithi on the lips.

From his position, he could see four or five Chevakian soldiers, walking past the trucks. One yelled and swung his baton, clanging it against each truck. “Move, move, move! Turn back!”

The truck in front jerked forward in a cloud of steam, stopped with squeaking brakes to avoid running over a youth who was being chased by a couple of Chevakian guards, and then completed the half-circle and went off back up the hill. A couple of southern youths chased after it and jumped onto the back.

Chevakian soldiers ran after them and tried to pull them off. One of the youths fell and was besieged by Chevakians. A fight broke out.

Milleus had started the engine.