The Year of Our War Read Online Free PDF Page B

him onto the destrier’s neck. In reality I am not that strong. I grabbed his belt and dragged his body on the ground while the horse shied sideways. I beat my wings but I still couldn’t heave him up. Eventually I had to dismount and tie him to the saddlebow with his own sword belt. It seemed to take a long time, I glanced at the tunnel mouths every second. I became covered in feather fragments and his blood, which was soaking through and turning the chain mail into one big clot. The aftereffects of cat and adrenaline grew oppressive. I thought of what it means to die, which raised feelings I didn’t understand. “You’re a noble charger,” I sniffled at the mare. “Black is the proper color, don’t you think? I think his tomb should be black marble. Come on, now let me return you.” The death-scent didn’t disturb her, but she was aware of the stickiness as rivers of blood drained down her sides. I talked her into a trot, but the movement jarred Dunlin’s corpse. The corpse stirred and murmured. He was alive!
    “Rachiswater? My lord?” No answer. I ripped his cloak, bundled it under his head as a cushion. What should I do? Lowespass—the fortress! I wrapped the reins in my hand, pressed a filed spur to the mare’s flank. She ran like a Rhydanne.

CHAPTER TWO
    F or fifty kilometers around Lowespass the land is as battle-scarred as Tawny’s flesh. Lightning can remember when it was green undulating hills, seamed with darker hedges and patches of woodland; the only graze a pale gray promontory on which Lowespass fortress would later be built. Now the fortress is over a thousand years old, and its earthworks fill the valley. The moat is made from a redirected river, the outer walls take in the whole crag. The stables and arms depots are entire villages.
    This is rampart warfare—Lowespass is sculpted, the ground churned up. There are six corrals, some with multiple entrances and holding pens; palisaded tracks, ditches, mounds, ashlar walls, some with iron spikes. All act to slow the Insect advance, and soldiers are constantly rebuilding them, changing them, as little by little, they are overthrown.
    Lightning is familiar with every centimeter of ground. He remembers the construction of even the oldest embankments—five-meter-high ramparts now like lines of molehills, and trenches that are now shallow and grassy. The earth has been dug up and the valley remodeled, not once but again and again, so I think that in Lightning’s memory the land itself seems to move—to throw up artificial banks and crease into hillforts, white scars soon sprouting green—to sink artificial pitfalls and flood-land of its own accord.
    Fyrd train in the tortured landscape which one generation prepares for the battles of the next. They cull Insects and clear the Paperlands. We call Insect pulp “paper,” but it doesn’t have all the properties of paper; it is rigid, inflexible, and the Insect spit that holds the chewed paste together has a fire-retardant effect. Our wooden buildings are burned when abandoned to stop the Insects chewing them, but Insects use anything they can find; fabric and bone as well. The fyrd wield axes and set patches of pitch-fire to clear Paperlands, but it doesn’t burn easily.
    Lowespass terrain is like a board game—three-dimensional, in marble and green velvet. This land we’ve lost to the Insects, and won again, and lost—so many times. Dunlin knew that it was originally farmland, as tranquil and productive as the golden fields of Awia. But I could never make Dunlin appreciate how long ago that was. He was incapable of sensing the vastness of time that had passed since then, although he trod every day along roads that ran through the living rooms of deserted villages and over ramparts raised from the bones of the Fifthland fyrd. Dunlin was adamant that the land could be occupied peacefully again, if only it was reclaimed. We strive for that, of course, but perhaps if we won, the fyrd’s screams