The War with the Mein by David Anthony Durham Read Free Book Online Page A

decided to take what action he could.
    Leeka roused his army from the cocooned warmth of the fortress of Cathgergen. He marched them out into the slanting light of the northern winter, across the glacial skin of the Mein Plateau. At the eastern edge of the Mein is a vast tundra called the Barrens, undulating and irregular, treeless both because of the wind-lashed nature of the place and because what woodland there once was had been harvested centuries before. Travel across it was difficult at the best of times. In midwinter it was especially perilous. Sleds harnessed to teams of dogs cut tracks before the army, pulling along the bulk of camp supplies and food, enough to sustain their five hundred human souls for at least six weeks. The soldiers marched on their own heavily-booted feet. They wrapped themselves in woolen garments, with outer shells of thick leather, their weapons secured to their bodies to facilitate movement. They wore mittens made from the tubed pelts of rabbits.
    They got as far as the outpost at Hardith without unexpected difficulty. They camped around the earthen structure for two days. This was much to the bewildered pleasure of the soldiers stationed there, men whose official duty was to supervise traffic on the road but whose real struggle was that of daily survival and extreme isolation. The outpost marked the western edge of the Barrens. Farther to the west the land dropped into a series of wide, shallow bowls in which patches of fir woodland remained.
    Three days beyond Hardith a blizzard swept down from the north and attacked their huddled mass. It pounced on them like a wolverine, pinned them to the ground, and tried to tear them apart. They lost the road and spent an entire day trying to find it, to no avail. The snow piled into high, serpentine ridges that rolled like ocean waves and made navigation impossible. They could not chart the passage of the sun, nor spot any of the night’s stars. Leeka instructed his men to progress by dead reckoning. This was a tedious process that left the bulk of the army standing still for long periods, never a good thing in such conditions.
    Each evening the general tried to choose a campsite near natural protection, a ridge of hills or tree cover, as they now found stands of pines in the hollows. Soldiers hacked fuel and built windbreaks. Once the campfires were strong enough, they dragged whole trees into the flames. They stood around these explosive furnaces, their faces red and sweating from the blaze, eyes stung with smoke even as the wind howled at their backs. No matter how big the fire during the early evening, it had invariably faltered during the night, ashes and charred bits of wood swept across the snow-scape by the wind. On breaking out of the frozen crust each morning the soldiers spent hours finding one another under the drifts, digging out, and prodding the dogs to motion.
    On the twenty-second day they woke to a brutal wind blowing down from the north. Ice crystals screeched sideways and struck skin like hurled fragments of glass. They had barely put the old camp behind them when one of the scouts stumbled back to the main column and asked to speak to the general. He had, in fact, nothing concrete to report. The land ahead was flat as far as he could ascertain. He believed they had moved out onto a gradual slope that would bring them to Tahalian. But there was something that troubled him. There was a sound in the air and in the frozen ground beneath him. He had been able to hear it only because he was alone, outside of the noise of the moving army and beyond the sleds. As he returned past the sled dogs he could see that they heard it as well and were troubled by it.
    The general spoke close to the man so the wind would not steal his words. “What sort of sound?”
    The scout seemed to have feared this question. “Like breathing.”
    Leeka scoffed. “Breathing? Don’t be mad. What’s the sound of breathing in weather like this? Your ears are