The Shasht War Read Free Page B

barely big enough for one regiment. We have to have more space."
    Well, I'm glad you have an excuse. But couldn't you send someone?"
    "I had to see you."
    "Oh, Thru."
    Eventually they sat together in her room upstairs, wrapped in a sheet, backs against the wall while the sun threw long setting beams through the window onto the opposite wall.
    "Did you know that this day last year was the day we left Tamf for the last time? Old Tamf, the way it was." Her voice caught. There were tears on her cheeks.
    "No," he whispered. "I didn't. I haven't kept track, too much to do."
    By the Spirit, their whole world had changed since that day. Lovely old Tamf had been burned to the ground by the invaders.
    "It seems a long time ago now. Another world."
    She rested her head on his shoulder. "Sometimes I think it will never end. We will be forced to live like this forever."
    "Yes, I know that feeling."
    "I want to pretend that we're in the old time, before they came, before the war."
    "Yes," he said, bending his mouth down to kiss her lips.
    They tried not to think about the war, just for a little longer.
    Later, she told him about her trip down from Lushtan, using the coast road through Suffio to Twist in the Braided Valley.
    "We brought six donkeys loaded with bandages, splints, and dried herbs for poultices."
    His eyebrows bobbed up and down as he thought of all the work involved in making that much bandage.
    "Sad to say, but we'll probably need them."
    The war and its grim consequences was hard to shut out for long.
    "They will come again, everyone says so."
    "There have been raids all the way to Awn Annion. Sometime this summer they'll land an army," Thru predicted. "We will have to fight them again and defeat them so utterly that they are forced to flee this part of the world."
    "Have you seen them?"
    "Myself, no. But one of my regiments caught some raiders fair and square, before they could even burn the town. Killed some of them, too."
    "I have heard that the wolves are helping the watch."
    "Thanks be to the Assenzi. They have roused all the wolves, 'tis said. They helped warn the villages on two occasions."
    "Do you have enough food?"
    He laughed. "Barely, it's Highnoth rations for everyone these days. But none have died of starvation. We got through the winter. We ate turnips more than bushpod, but we ate."
    Later, they went out in search of a meal and stopped in at the Whiteflower Inn. They dined on bushpod pie and crumbly beeks, a Sulmo specialty, and washed it down with some thin ale.
    "What happened when you took Simona to her people?"
    Thru's face grew solemn. He had fond memories of the human girl who had lived among the mots for a while the previous year. The circumstances in which she had returned to her own people had not been auspicious.
    "The men can never be trusted."
    "I know." She was still watching his eyes.
    "They took me captive. They tortured her."
    Nuza was left appalled at this thought. Indeed, the ways of men were hard to comprehend.
    "I met her father. He helped me to escape. He is not like the rest of them, I think."
    Afterward they strolled along the lane, enjoying nothing more than each other's company and the lush scent of the gardenias that were in bloom throughout the Outer Ward.
    They spent the night in her room on Whiteflower Lane.
    "I have to leave early in the morning. I left Ter-Saab in charge, and he's capable enough, but I should be there."
    "Of course. And I will be here. We will build a new hospital."
    "How I wish I could be posted here."
    "Hush, my darling, don't talk anymore," she said, sealing his lips with her own.

CHAPTER THREE
    In the early morning they took breakfast at the army kitchen by the South Gate. It was simple food, bushpods and meal mush, but there was plenty of it. Thru ate with a mind on the long march ahead of him.
    "I wish this didn't have to be the way," he said, holding her hand like a drowning mot clutching at water weed. One night together seemed but an instant in time.