Gears of War: Anvil Gate (15 page)

Adam held out his hand. Marcus hesitated, then took it, and they walked around the gardens. Marcus could identify most of the tree species, and with their proper botanical names at that. It was pretty damn impressive for a little boy.

My son. What’s he going to be like when he’s my age? I don’t recall ever being like him
.

“Don’t worry, he’ll be fine when he starts school,” Elain said. She could read Adam like a book. “He’ll make friends. I feel guilty sometimes that we didn’t give him a brother or sister.”

“Never too late,” Adam said.

Elain just swept past the comment as if she hadn’t heard it. She didn’t even blink. “Come on, Marcus,” she called. “Time for lunch.”

That evening, after Marcus was asleep and while Elain was taking a bath, Adam went to his study and settled down at his desk to listen to the radio. It was less distracting than the television. He could let the information wash over him in the background while he worked. The important details would leap out at him and demand his attention when necessary.

Vasgar did.

Adam put down the folder he was working on and sat back in his chair to concentrate.

“
… and President Ilim has resigned. We’ll bring you more details when we get them, but Vasgar’s official news agency, Corisku, is saying that he stood down before a vote of no confidence. He was widely expected to lose that vote, of course, so let’s go over to our East Central correspondent to discuss where that leaves Vasgar and its neighbors. It’s a nonaligned state, and that raises some interesting questions ….
”

Adam got up and walked across to the world map on the wall. It was covered with pins and notes—random comments, reminders, even scribbled diagrams—to mark places of concern to him. There was Vasgar, a long corridor sweeping along the borders of Kashkur, Emgazi, and the Independent Republic of Furlin. If Vasgar didn’t hold its neutrality, the strategic map of the Eastern Central Massif would change drastically, and for the worse as far as the COG was concerned.

He took the packet of colored pins from his desk drawer and pushed them into the map at various points along the borders to mark the strategic cities and installations he suspected might be listening to the news of Vasgar just as carefully as he was. Almost as an afterthought, he searched for a speck on the map high in the mountains to use up his last pin.

It was a fortified city called Anvegad.

It had been a harsh winter. Now it was turning into a bad summer. Bai Tak wondered how long it would be before he had to give up on his herd and find work in the town.

He followed his last surviving cattle further up the hillside as they searched for grass. They grew more bony and wretched with every passing week, and it was getting harder to find decent grazing for them. His only option would be to slaughter some and dry whatever meat they were carrying for the winter. It wasn’t much. But he could sell the hides, and the bones wouldn’t be wasted either.

Maybe it’ll rain. Maybe I should wait. But I’m not going to ask for help from the village—not yet
.

His wife, Harua, was working further down the hillside, taking advantage of the tinder-dry vegetation to get ahead with collecting firewood for the winter. She was bent double under a wicker pannier full of branches, struggling to hack a dead tree into more manageable pieces. Bai let the cattle find their own way—they
were in no hurry—and half-ran, half-skidded down the hillside to give her a hand.

“Come on,” he said, drawing his machete. “Stand back and let me do it.”

“It’s only because I’ve got this stupid little girl’s blade.” She brandished her cutting tool, a smaller version of the one all the men carried. Women needed theirs for self-defense and kitchen duties. Only men needed the heavier blade for slaughtering animals or—occasionally—fighting marauding Shaoshi clans from across the Pesang border. “Why can’t I have a proper one like yours? This isn’t heavy enough.”

“I’ll buy you one when we have the money.”

“That’ll be never. As soon I’ve filled the fuel shed, I’m going to find some work in the town. Cleaning. Maybe even cooking.”

Bai was appalled. It was the ultimate admission of failure to provide for his family. If he let his wife take a paid job, everyone would talk. Everyone would say he was a no-good, bone-idle bastard who made his wife do two jobs while he lazed around watching his herd die on their feet. He couldn’t let that happen. It would bring shame on Harua, too, for choosing a useless idiot for a husband, and if anything ever happened to him, she’d find it hard to get anyone else to marry her. The responsibility for getting them out of this crisis was his alone.

“Can you manage to look after the cattle as well as everything else?” he asked. He shielded his eyes against the sun to check where the herd had gone. The cows were standing around listlessly, gazing back at him as if they were waiting for him to come up with a better idea than the parched scrub they’d found. “If anyone goes to town to find work, it’s me.”

Harua took off her bandana and wiped her face with it. “Every herder’s suffering the same. You won’t find men’s work down there.”

“I will if I look hard enough.”

Harua grinned and cupped his face in both hands. She shook him a little, like he was a child she was teasing.

“You’re always so determined,” she said. “That’s why I picked you and not your cocky brother.”

But Seng—cocky or not—had done all right for himself. He’d served in the army, fighting for the Coalition of Ordered Governments, and what looked like modest pay to those city people in the west was a fortune back here. Seng had saved enough to set up a company exporting traditional Pesang clothing and build a really nice house with plumbed water. Bai would have followed him into the army if he’d been taller and he hadn’t already married Harua.

And not just for the pay. For the honor
.

Harua wanted him to stay home to run the farm. He couldn’t really argue with that, especially as the land was hers. He was also a few centimeters below the COG regulation height, even for a Pesang. That had disappointed him more than anything.

“Okay, I’ll go today,” he said. “It’ll only take me a few hours to walk into town. I’ll stay a couple of days and see what work’s going.”

Harua looked more resigned than relieved. “If you end up working in town,” she said, “I still want a baby. I can’t manage the farm as well when the baby’s small.”

“If I get a job, you won’t have to. I’ll make enough to get help.” He knew she didn’t want to abandon the farm. The land had belonged to her family for generations. “It’s only while we wait for the drought to end.”

That was optimistic talk. But it beat looking at those starving cows and counting down the days to ending up just like them. At least he was doing something, taking action instead of hoping for some unseen force to bring the rains.

It took him three hours to pick his way down to the valley floor and join the rutted track that was the main road to Narakir. Trucks and oxcarts passed him in both directions, kicking up clouds of pale dust that hung in the air like a fog. The town wasn’t as busy as usual. He made his way to the square, expecting to find at least a few traders there who might be looking to hire help, but there was just someone selling fabrics and an awful lot of scrawny goats and sheep in temporary pens waiting to be sold. Nothing for him there, then; he decided to trawl the inns and workshops. He’d need to find somewhere to stay the night anyway.

Bai wandered into an open shed where a strong smell of animal piss made it almost impossible to breathe, even for a man used to living alongside cattle. It was the local tannery. Preparing leather was a backbreaking, dirty job, but he thought that if he started with the least popular work, he’d stand more chance of finding a vacancy. Tanners used urine for soaking the fresh hides—it turned them a soft, creamy white—and dog or fox shit for tanning them. It wasn’t most people’s first choice of career.

But when his eyes got used to the dim light, he realized that most of the men working on the hides were fellow farmers. He wasn’t the only desperate herdsman with the same idea, then.

“Welcome to the perfume emporium, Bai.” Noyen Ji heaved a pail of piss into a wooden butt. “Can we interest you in a bottle of our rose essence?”

“Don’t suppose you need an extra pair of hands here, do you?” Bai made a quick mental list of the other workshops he could try next, starting with the blacksmith. “I’m willing to do anything.”

“Sorry, friend. You could try the laundry up at the monastery, though.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Bai spent the afternoon trudging from building to building, asking the same question and getting the same answer. Times were hard. Everyone was showing up looking for work to tide them over until things took a turn for the better. And each time Bai crossed the square, he noted that the number of miserable-looking animals in the pens was dwindling. He couldn’t see the point of getting a few coins for your animals when you could eat them yourself. The fruitless afternoon depressed him so much that he decided to take a break at the inn. He had enough money for a pot of tea, and he could make that last for hours with the free top-ups of boiling water.

In a few hours, he could think of something else. He couldn’t go back to Harua and admit he’d failed again. He had to return home with a job.

Yes, tea always made things look a lot brighter. He wandered
down the street toward the tattered red silk pennant that flew from the inn’s upper balcony, glancing into the windows of the buildings he passed. On one of the walls, there was a peeling and faded poster that caught his eye.

He’d seen it many times before but on this occasion it reached out and stopped him in his tracks. The words on it were printed in very poor Pesan, as if the person who’d made it didn’t understand much of the local languages. The meaning was clear, though. The image of the smiling, healthy foreigner in his smart military armor, holding out a hand of friendship, was saying what a great career it was in the COG’s army, and how welcome Pesangas were to serve in it. There was even a special regiment for them.

I’m too short. And Harua would kill me if I enlisted, anyway
.

Bai walked on, somehow feeling the poster was aimed at him personally today. His father had served in the COG forces, and he raised Bai and Seng to understand that soldiering was an honorable living. Pesangas came from a warrior tradition; part of that tradition was to aid allies. The COG was respected, and it hadn’t needed to invade Pesang to get the hill tribes’ support for its war against the UIR. Bai was shocked when he first heard that nations did that—that they rolled over like beaten dogs and did the invaders’ bidding. They should have driven them out. You could only fight alongside those who respected you, and those who you respected in return.

Bai could have used a big dose of self-respect right then. He opened the inn door, found a table, and sat down, suddenly realizing how exhausted he was. A radio was chattering in the background while a bunch of old men gambled with dice.

“Don’t tell me, tea and jug of hot water,” the waiter said. “But you look like you need a plate of rice.”

“I need a job more,” Bai said. “Anything going?”

“Nah. I could use someone to wash the dishes when I close tonight, though.”

“Okay. Can I sleep on the floor?”

“If you sweep it first.”

“Done.”

It was a start. Bai hadn’t gone looking for work since he was a kid. He needed to get back in the habit, and this was as good a way as any. It didn’t bring him any closer to going back home tomorrow with good news for Harua, though. Somehow, he’d set himself a deadline and felt duty bound to stick to it. It was more for himself than for her, he suspected. He sipped his tea and paid no attention to the radio.

He didn’t care much about politics, especially beyond Pesang, but the knot of men sitting around the ancient radio set was growing one by one, and they were frowning in concentration. Bai was curious. He listened to the broadcast. It was in Tyran—he could understand a lot of it, even if he found speaking the language hard—and it was talking about the situation in Vasgar.

Vasgar was hundreds of kilometers away, but there was nothing between Vasgar and Pesang except mountains, so that made them neighbors.

“The Indies are going to invade, mark my words,” one of the old gamblers muttered. He kept his eyes on the dice. “They’d better stop before they reach our border, though, if they want to hang on to their balls.”

“And heads,” said another. “They wouldn’t get far without those.”

Everyone laughed. No army had ever invaded Pesang. They said every foreigner was scared shitless at the prospect of encountering a Pesang hill-man with his machete, and believed they could never hear Pesangas coming until it was too late. Bai didn’t quite see himself as menacing, although he wasn’t afraid to use his knife.

Did it really matter how tall he was?

No, this was stupid. Harua would go mad if he so much as
thought
about it, but he did. He thought of that poster, and how the white-faced recruiting sergeant had measured him and told him he was just a bit too short, but he couldn’t stop thinking that it was worth one more try if the war was coming this close to
home again. He’d been a little boy the last time anyone had talked this way.

“Where’s the nearest recruiting office now?” he asked, knowing someone would answer.

One of the men sitting by the radio slurped his tea from a saucer. “Paro,” he said. “Why, you getting all patriotic?”

The words just fell out of Bai’s mouth. He didn’t even think about it. “I’m going to sign up.”

There was a silence around the room. Bai could hear a dog yapping in the distance.

“Me too,” said another man. “In case these Indies get ideas. Anyone know where we can get a ride?”

“My brother drives a truck,” said another man. “I’ll go get him.”