Makemin begins relaying questions through me. The man returns my look expressionlessly. After three or four repetitions, I see his mouth beginning to work. He stretches out his lower lip, the upper one is gone exposing crooked teeth, and a hawking, shapeless rasping noise comes retching out. A few minutes of this, and then his rasps end in a short gout of bile that splatters noisily on the ground at our feet. The soldiers step back, releasing his arms, and he totters a little where he is.

Makemin selects a few more, all with comparable results.

“Leave them,” he says finally, gazing around at them with disgust. “Get back onto the road!”

*

Dusk makes everything fluoresce blue around us. I have watched as one head after another swivelled to the right, fixing on the vast shapes that flicker there deep in the trees. The line falters to a stop.

“You mean to say you’re not going to investigate any ruins?” Silichieh asks Makemin incredulously, with no interrogative inflection in his voice.

“We will explore ruins only if that helps us find the enemy.”

Silichieh looks peevishly down, brow crumpled. Makemin, still facing down the white abutment, adds, “There will be all the time in the world once we have beat them.”

He is thinking.

He turns to us and raises his hands in a peremptory gesture of attention.

“Comrades! Don’t let yourself be cowed by what you see and hear! Remember,” his flinted voice clatters against the trees, turns into a knife cutting their noise, “you are soldiers of the greatest empire in the world!”

Each tree whispers secretively to each of us—“... you are soldiers of the greatest empire in the world ...”

“We march now in pursuit of our fleeing enemy, but also with the prospect of a great prize!”

He points down the white abutment.

“That way, there is a place of powerful and ancient enchantment. Spirits wait there to receive us, and offer us their aid in our glorious cause, if only we may overcome the obstacles that separate us! That is what we are struggling for now—a miraculous power, that we will bring to bear on the blackbirds to destroy them here, to destroy them on this island, and finally, to blot them out everywhere, once, and for ever!”

Nikhinoch, at a signal not meant to be seen by many, steps forward and strikes up the Red Earth Chant; the asylum soldiers take it cacophonously up at once, but the din emanates a familiarness that draws the regular soldiers in.

We are marching again. The trees salute us as we go by, whispering “you are soldiers of the greatest empire in the world ...” and showing us glimpses of the ruins far away, buried in the wood. I see blue-white sky through a lacy, rent wire spiderweb; stone tracery, the acute curve of a tower or silo, a bellied-out white expanse looking like bone. The walls groan with exhaustion, longing to split apart, to collapse with a sigh, and rot.