Though his parents had named him Micah Carter, when he left home he was forever after Carter Micah, abandoning like all other Vinlanders and Europans who traveled abroad the tradition of placing the family name after the personal name, instead of before. After reaching the training camp of the Green Standard Army on Taiwan Island, however, he seldom heard either of his names, irrespective of order.

In the camp, he was only and always “Tejas.”

There was never any confusion, though. Carter always knew when someone was addressing him. It might be…

“Damn your eyes, Tejas, what in the rutting hell kind of throw was that supposed to be?”

…or it could be…

“Tejas, you have got to be the stupidest pile of dung I’ve ever seen.”

…or even…

“Only oxen and inverts come out of Tejas, boy, so which one are you?”

…but Carter always knew they were talking to him.

Still, he didn’t feel singled out for the privilege. All of the other men in the unit received the same treatment. The Arabian with the large ears was called, imaginatively, “Ears.” The tall Rossiyan with the speech-impediment was called “Spitter.” The African with the pox-scars dotting his cheeks and forehead was called “Moonface.” And so on, and so on. They had come from all corners of the Earth, from all of the nations who pledged allegiance to the Dragon Throne. They were the sons of clerks and school teachers, of miners and farmers, of bureaucrats and beggars. Nearly all of them spoke Official Speech, along with their native dialects and tongues, but some of them had accents so thick that their words were all but unintelligible, and may as well have been some foreign language. In the cloud-flyer that had brought Carter across the wide sea to Taiwan Island had been men from all over Vinland, from Khalifa in the west, and from Fusang in the south, and despite the widely varying shades of their skin and the Babel of languages they spoke, all of the men shared something in common: they had all grown up in the shadow of the Mexic Dominion, which squatted in the midst of their three nations like a canker.

Carter had been raised in a township surrounded by nothing but land in every direction. The largest body of water he’d ever seen was barely a pond, a widening of Ten-League Creek just outside of Duncan proper. When the cloud-flyer passed over the ocean, an endless plain of white-flecked blue that stretched to the horizon in every direction, Carter had been struck dumb. He’d never known that the Earth could contain so much water.

Now he was on an island surrounded on all sides by sea, and it seemed to him sometimes as if he would never leave, the rest of his life spent on this hard and unforgiving ground. Of course, in those dark moments he rarely considered that the rest of his life would be too long a span, so he hardly worried about being bored.

“Come on, you worms, my grandmother can run faster than that!”

Outside the grounds of the Green Standard training camp was a mountain, and though it was not the tallest on Taiwan Island, it was far from the smallest, and so Carter was sure that whoever had named it “Peaceful Hill” had been employing irony, or perhaps had just been a master of understatement. Every day since they had first arrived in the camp, and been given their uniforms, their kits, and their colorful new sobriquets, they had been forced to run from the gate of the camp to the top of Peaceful Hill and down again, without pausing for rest or water.

Carter had no fear of war, since he was reasonably sure that the daily run was going to kill him.

Just when he reached the point when he thought he might be able to survive the run, his muscles built and toned to the point where they could take the strain and continue to place one foot in front of the other, and his lungs able to draw another breath without breaking into dry, rasping coughs, the rules were changed, and instead of running in a light cotton shirt and shorts they were required to make the circuit in full combat fatigues and boots, with a full pack strapped on their backs.

Some of the other recruits grumbled that they’d hardly be required to run in fatigues and full pack on Fire Star, considering the red planet’s thin atmosphere would require a surface suit and the low gravity would make a full pack no kind of burden. But when the drill instructor heard their grumblings, those recruits were invited to make a second daily run, this time instead wearing one of the surface suits that the camp had on hand for demonstrations. And though the surface suits were well-designed for use on the red planet, they were somewhat less well-suited for Earth’s heavier gravity and thicker atmosphere. Those that managed to make it up the hill and back seldom grumbled again.

“Tell me, recruit, are you trying to hit him or seduce him? I can’t tell.”

If the drill instructor with his colorful nicknames was a hard taskmaster, compared to their combat instructor he was as soft and gentle as a nursemaid.

“It is given to me to instruct you in the arts martial, but it makes no difference to me if all of your bones are broken to dust in the process. Better not to send a man into combat than send one ill-prepared to fight.”

Master Singh had been a member of the Akali Sena, the elite battalion of Sikh warrior-saints from the nation of Hind who were more commonly known as the Immortals. Singh had served in the early days of the Second Mexic War with distinction, fighting in close-quarters with the Mexica on the surface of Fire Star, until a Mexic fire-lance doused him with burning liquid magnesium, which seeped into the rents cut into the fabric of his surface suit by a Jaguar Knight’s obsidian-edged club. The Jaguar Knight had fallen before Singh’s saber, as did the other Mexica who had wielded the fire-lance, but by the time Singh was able to seek medical attention the fast-burning magnesium had done its work on his flesh and bone. Hidden beneath the starched fabric of his green shirt and pants was a ruined landscape of burned flesh, but even if Singh kept his burns and scars concealed, he could not hide the stump of his left arm, extending less than a hand’s-breadth from his shoulder. Singh had received an imperial commendation for gallantry in combat, helping to secure victory that day while a torrent of liquid magnesium burned through the skin and bone of his arm.

With his commendation and his wounds, Singh could have also taken a pension and retired, returning home to Lahore to live out his days in comfort with his wife and children. But Singh had felt that he still had service he could perform, and secured a post as combat instructor on Taiwan Island.

Like countless recruits before him, Carter had come to wish that Singh had taken the retirement, instead.

“May almighty God and the memory of all the gurus give me strength, but I cannot imagine what that was meant to be. Did you intend to block the blow, recruit, or invite him to dance?”

And at night, when the day’s drills were done, and their meager meals consumed and cleared away, the men were sent back to their barracks to clean floors and walls until they were spotless, to launder their fatigues and polish their shoes with boot-black. Then, when the camp’s drummer beat out the All Quiet, they used what little strength was left them to crawl onto their cots and drift into dreamless sleep. In only a few hours, long before the sun rose, they’d be rousted from their beds by the thunder beat of All Wake, and it would feel as though their heads had just hit the cots only moments before.

Carter did not recall the last time his muscles didn’t ache, the last time he wasn’t covered in bruises, the last time he felt rested. Suddenly, a life of riding tractors on the neighbor’s farm didn’t seem so bad, after all.

What worried him, though, was the nagging thought that this might be the easy part.

---

PREVIOUS CHAPTER: Hexagram 6
Contention
Below Water Above Heaven
Heaven and water operate in contrary ways. In the same way, the noble man in conduction business carefully plans how such things begin.

NEXT CHAPTER: Hexagram 8
Closeness
Below Earth Above Water
There is Water on the Earth. In the same way, the former kings established the myriad states and treated the feudal lords with cordiality.

Return to Index.

Chapter 7 of Three Unbroken by Chris Roberson. Copyright © 2007 Monkeybrain, Inc. For more action from the Celestial Empire don't miss The Dragon's Nine Sons.

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