Fiction River by Fiction River

Author:Fiction River [River, Fiction]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: WMG Publishing Incorporated
Published: 2016-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

***

After the machine ploughed the whole battlefield, it turned about and trundled over it again, smoothing everything down. The whole process took two days and a half, and then it rose like a puffseed and vanished beyond the iron grey sky, and the League was gone.

I went home.

There was weeping and shouting and arguing, and outrage spread across the land at what had been done. Every battlefield all across the wide world had been ploughed like ours, but not all the people were outraged. Not all the people of our world need to bury their dead at home; for them, the League’s ploughs had been welcome, a last service done. For us, and folk like us, they were an abomination.

The woman who told us the news, the woman with the dead and frozen face, whose name I later heard had been Juliya, had laid herself down in front of the plough. Because, said her friends, she wanted her ghost to seek out that of her son and keep him company in his wanderings.

She and her son had much company, and I don’t think anyone’s ghost felt lonely after the ploughing of the battlefield. I did not join them, though.

Instead, I sold my house and my shop, and when the record keepers completed their map of the battlefield, I purchased a copy on good, brown vellum, and took it to the Landsmen’s office across town. We searchers had begun on the side of the battlefield closest to camp and spread out, then worked inward. The unsearched area, where my Viro must have lain, lay in a certain wide spot, between the center of the fighting and the beginning of the hills. The Autarch was selling the land, the ploughed and “cleaned” land, and I purchased that wide spot.

Saffiya was with me, and Amenet, and other women from my town who never found their men. We pooled our money and bought that entire unsearched stretch of the battlefield, where our sons and husbands and brothers and fathers went under the plough. That plot came cheap for its broad expanse; no one else wanted to buy that stretch of red-mud land, no matter how the Autarch exhorted or begged.

We built a big house, and a bigger shop, with partitions for all of us. Amenet’s family herded sheep, and the meadow that grew the next spring was wonderfully lush and green. My daughters spin the wool, and I weave fine cloth. We get by.

Our hearts have healed, all of us—myself and my daughters and Amenet and the other women with us. Our men are buried at home, and their spirits rest with us.

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