Chapter 328: 328: Four Roads one Destination
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The night along the two forest borders tasted like iron cooled too fast. Dew beaded on the edges of spearheads and ran down the lacquered plates of armor in slow threads that disappeared against black chitin.
Thousands of bodies at rest breathed in a rhythm that made the ridge feel like a single chest drawing in forest air and letting it go again. Orders crawled through the ranks in whispers and fingers. There was no shouted command. There did not need to be. The camp had been built to move without voices.
Before dawn the four thousand chosen to march peeled away from the great body of the army like slivers from a seasoned log. Each left in its own direction. Each wore a different shape.
Skall’s thousand went by the marsh road where the border river lost its argument with the land and flattened into swales, reeds, and underfoot water that did not shine even when the light found it.
They wore canvas leggings greased to the knee and reed sandals that spread the weight of each step so the mud sighed instead of sucking. They put out their cookfires by kneading wet moss over the coals and then burying the moss as if it had not existed.
Every fourth ant carried a spade across his back, the handle wrapped in rough bark so it could not glint. Skall walked at the front. He walked at the same pace whether the ground was firm or the mud tried to claim his legs up to his mid thigh. He kept it steady even when a man lost a sandal and swore softly as leeches tasted his ankle. The line did not bend or swell. It flowed.
Their signal work was simple. A knotted cord hung from Skall’s belt. He tied and untied knots with one hand as they went. One knot meant prepare to halt. Two meant halt. Three meant spread.
He tied them fast and correctly even when the mud rose and fell under his feet. It was said that in siege he could tie the same cord to a tree and read the ground’s tremble through bark and fiber and know when a tunnel was about to collapse. In the marsh he used it to feel how the army’s weight changed the water under them and adjusted the line before the ground gave way.
By noon they had found a ribbon of higher ground that did not look higher from a distance but tasted like it underfoot. They cut reed mats and made a causeway that would float through the worst of it and leave nothing anyone behind them wanted to follow.
When an ant slipped and went waist deep, three hands lifted him without a splash. When a snake coiled in a pocket of clear water, Skall pressed his spade into its neck and the head slept forever. They ate cold root and salted meat and kept moving. The marsh gave them leeches and silence in equal measure. Skall accepted both. He did not change pace.
Far to the south and a little east, Oru’s thousand disappeared before they had fully left the main camp. They wrapped their plates in dull cloth and wore narrow strips of bark along their forearms to break the shine of movement. Oru went ahead alone, or else it looked that way from behind. He drifted, and the ground did not argue with him.
When he crossed running water he followed it upstream until the current hid his scent and then stepped out onto dry stones where claws would not print. His signals were slivers of carved twig stuck into rotten logs at angles only his captains would notice, a bone ring shifted from finger to finger, a strip of moss turned pale side up to warn the next runner of a soft place under the leaf mold.
He ate when the day was wrong for eating so that he would not be seen when others expected a cookfire. When the wind rose he raced it along the edges of hollows so that the smell of his men was pressed down into fern and root instead of lifted to the canopy.
Once he halted the whole line with a raised hand no one saw except the one who needed to. A boar had bedded down in a seam of grass thirty paces ahead. He turned the thousand in a long curve around the animal and they moved away without waking it. The boar snored and dreamed of mud. Oru forgot the boar the moment the wind changed.
Yavri’s thousand took the old caravan cut that ran like a scar through scrub and into a country that stopped pretending to be gentle. They marched in six files across and kept those files close, so close a spear butt could pass down the line without striking an ankle. She had them carry their shield plates on their shoulders as if they were slabs for a roof they meant to raise at a moment’s notice.
Every twenty steps a hand lifted one plate from one shoulder and slid it across to another so no one felt the same weight too long. She timed those transfers by watching the swing of hips instead of counting. Her men had drilled it until it felt like music they could hum without making a sound. She kept her water master close and reduced the allotment by a measure that would not be noticed until the third day.
She knew the third day was when men failed their thirst without realizing that was the reason. At a bend in the road she halted them, took a spear, and walked to the side to test the sand’s depth with the butt as if she had always meant to do it there and not five steps before. It sank faster than she liked.
She marked that place with three gravel chips, all the same size, laid in a line that meant shift left. She did not look back to see if her captains had read it. If they had not, her voice would have set the line anyway. She preferred that they read.