She drew hard on the stick, looked eastward to the distant camp of the Bolkando. No fires. Even the standards tilted like the masts of some foundered ship. I fear we won’t be enough, not to do what the Adjunct needed, what she wanted. It may prove that this entire journey will end in failure, and death .
Brys came out of the tent to stand beside her. He took the stick from her fingers and drew on it. He’d begun doing that a few weeks past, seeking, perhaps, to calm his nerves in the wake of his nightmares. But she didn’t mind. She liked the company.
‘I can almost taste the thoughts of my soldiers,’ he said. ‘We will have to kill and eat the last horses. Won’t be enough – even sparing the water to make a stew … ah, if we could have scavenged, this might have succeeded.’
‘We’re not done yet, my love.’ Please, I beg you, do not answer that with yet another sad smile. With each one, I feel you slip further away .
‘It is our growing weakness that worries them the most,’ he said. ‘They fear we won’t be fit to fight.’
‘The Perish, if anything, will be even worse off.’
‘But they will have some days in which to recover. Besides which, Aranict, one must fear more the Assail army.’
She lit a second stick, and then gestured with one hand. ‘If all of Kolanse is like this, they won’t have an army.’
‘Queen Abrastal assures me that Kolanse continues to thrive, with what the sea offers, and the fertile valley province of Estobanse continues to produce, sheltered from the drought.’
And each night the nightmares take you. And each night I lie awake, watching you. Wondering about all the other paths we could have taken . ‘How have we failed her?’ Aranict asked. ‘What more could we have done?’
Brys grimaced. ‘This is the risk when you march an army into the unknown. In truth, no commander in his or her right mind would even contemplate such a precipitous act. Even in the invasion of new territories, all is preceded by extensive scouting, contact with local elements, and as much background intelligence as one can muster: history, trade routes, past wars.’
‘Then, without the Bolkando, we would truly be marching blind. If Abrastal had not concluded that it was in her kingdom’s interest to pursue this – Brys, have we misjudged the Adjunct from the very beginning? Did we fall into the trap of assuming she knew more than she did, that all that she had set out to do was actually achievable?’
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
He reached over and took the new stick of rustleaf. ‘On whether she has succeeded in crossing the Glass Desert, I suppose.’
‘A crossing that cannot be made.’
He nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Brys, not even the Adjunct can will her Malazans to achieve the impossible. The world sets physical limits and we must live by them, or those limits will kill us. Look around – we are almost out of food and water. And this land has nothing to give us, and just as the farmers and villagers all fled or perished, so too are we faced with the same, hard reality. The country is destroyed.’
He seemed to be studying the sky. ‘My father was not an imaginative man. He could never understand me and Tehol – especially Tehol. Our brother Hull, well now, he started out as the perfect eldest son, only to be pronounced dead in the eyes of Father.’ He was silent for a few moments, smoking, and then he resumed. ‘Beyond all the tutors foisted upon us, it was our father who insisted on delivering his one lesson. Even if it killed us, he would teach us the value of pragmatism. Which is, as I am sure you well understand, nothing more than a cogent recognition of reality: its limits, its demands and its necessities.’
Aranict cocked her head, wondering at the direction of his thoughts. ‘Beloved, of all men, the name of Tehol does not come to mind when I think pragmatic .’
He glanced across at her. ‘And what of me?’
‘In you, yes. You are a weaponmaster, after all. I never knew Hull, so of him I cannot say.’
‘So, you conclude that of the three Beddict brothers, I alone absorbed our father’s harsh lessons in pragmatism.’
She nodded.
Brys looked away again, this time to the southeast. ‘How far away, do you think, lies the coast?’
‘Proper marching, three days – if the queen’s maps are at all accurate.’
‘Oh,’ he murmured, ‘I am sure they are.’
‘It’s almost dawn,’ Aranict said.
‘We will not march today, my love.’