Movement Four — The Men With Swords, and the Man Who Begged

I want to tell you about the men with the swords, because I think it would be easy, hearing all of this secondhand, to imagine them as something simpler than they actually were, and I don't think that would be fair to any of us — not to them, and not to whatever this account is trying to accomplish.

They were not cruel men, in the plainest sense of the word, though I understand entirely why you might expect me to tell you they were. They were men doing a task someone above them had decided needed doing, in the particular flat, practiced way soldiers do things they've been ordered to do enough times that the doing of it stops requiring any real decision at all. I watched one of them — young, or young enough that the roughness in his face hadn't yet fully hardened into whatever it was clearly becoming — wipe his blade against his own trouser leg with an economy of motion that told me this was not the first blade he'd wiped clean that morning, and would not be the last before the sun finished its climb. There was no relish in it. There was also, and this is the part I think matters most, no hesitation. Somewhere between the first killing and whichever number this one had become, hesitation had simply stopped being available to him, worn away the way anything is worn away by enough repetition, the way even the kindest hand grows callused if you ask it to hold the same rope for long enough.

I don't think that makes them villains, exactly. I want to be careful here, because I think it would be simpler, and considerably less honest, to hand you a story with clean edges — men who were monsters, doing monstrous things to men who were innocent, and nothing more complicated underneath it than that. I don't believe that's what I was watching. I think I was watching what time does to people who are handed the same terrible task again and again without ever once being given the chance to put it down. Arrogance, yes — I could hear it in the way orders were given, the particular bored, unbothered rhythm of men who no longer needed to raise their voices to be obeyed. But arrogance born from repetition, I think, rather than from any deeper appetite for cruelty. I don't say that to excuse anything. I say it because I think it's true, and because I think the truth of it is worse, in its own quiet way, than a simpler story would have been.

I understood, somewhere in the murmured exchanges around me, why we were there. Slaves — war-slaves, taken from wherever this particular conflict had originally been fought, put to work mining something out of ground that clearly hadn't wanted to give it up easily, and judged, apparently, to have failed at the task in some manner severe enough to have earned this. I didn't know the specifics. I'm not certain the specifics would have changed anything about what I felt, kneeling there, listening to the particular hollow finality in every sentence spoken around me.

There was a man near the front of the line — I couldn't see him clearly, not with my head still swimming and my focus still fighting to hold steady, but I could hear him with a clarity that made up for whatever my eyes were failing to give me. He was begging, at first, the same broken, repetitive begging I'd been hearing since I first opened my eyes. And then, somewhere in the middle of it, the begging changed shape.

"The gods will avenge every one of us," he said, and his voice had found something in that sentence that the begging hadn't managed to give it — not strength, exactly, but a kind of borrowed certainty, the sound of a man reaching for the one thing left that no chain could take from him. "Your empire will not save you from what is coming to claim it. You cannot kill devotion. You cannot chain what a god has already promised."

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Nobody answered him directly. One of the sword-men laughed, low and short, the specific tired laugh of someone who had heard some version of this same speech more times than he cared to count, and gestured, without any particular urgency, for the next in line to be brought forward.

"Every morning," another voice said, closer to me this time, older, roughened by whatever years of this same work had done to it, "it's a different god. Yesterday it was three of them, arguing among themselves about whose turn it was to intervene. The morning before that, a man swore his god had already forgiven every one of us and was simply waiting for the killing to finish before saying so out loud." He said this not cruelly, I thought, but tiredly, the way you'd describe weather you'd long since stopped being surprised by. "I used to listen for the names. I don't anymore. There are too many, and none of them have ever once shown up to collect what they were promised."

A younger voice, somewhere near him, said nothing in reply, only exhaled, long and slow, the specific sound of someone choosing silence because silence required less of him than agreement or argument either one.

I understood, listening to the two of them, that this exchange too had happened before — not this morning specifically, perhaps, but some near cousin of it, traded back and forth between the same two men across however many mornings just like this one had already passed beneath that sky. There was no cruelty in the older voice, not really, only the particular flatness of a man who had simply run out of room to feel anything sharper than tired about a task he no longer had any power to refuse.

I found myself wondering, listening to that man's certainty carry itself all the way to the end of his own sentence, whether the god he was calling on existed at all. Whether the devotion itself was real, in any sense a soul from the Between would recognize as real, or whether it was simply the last shape a frightened man's mind knew how to fold itself into. I don't know the answer. I want to be honest that I still don't, even now, even having lived through everything that followed. I only know that the certainty in his voice didn't waver, not once, all the way to the very end of it — and I have come to believe, in the long years since, that this, whatever else it was or wasn't, was its own kind of proof of something. I'm simply not certain what.

One of the sword-men crouched down in front of him, then, close enough that I could hear the low murmur of his voice even over the general noise of the place, though I couldn't make out every word of it. What I caught was gentler than I expected, though gentleness, in that context, was its own strange, uncomfortable thing to witness. "Maybe he's listening," the soldier said, of whichever god the man had been calling to. "Maybe he isn't. Either way, you won't be here to find out, and I won't lose any sleep over it either way, because I've stopped believing sleep and guilt have anything to do with each other." He straightened again, unhurried, and gestured, the same small economical motion I'd already watched him use a dozen times that morning.

The begging man's voice caught, just once, on something that might have become a sob if there had been time left for it to finish becoming one. And then there wasn't. I heard the particular short, final sound that I had, by then, already learned to recognize without needing to see it, and I understood that whatever devotion he had been leaning on, real or imagined, had not, in the end, changed the shape of his last morning even slightly.