The field where the Battle of Kinjai took place three hundred years ago lies not far from my home. Nothing now remains visible of the battle’s depredations. It is a wide expanse of tall grass that slopes down toward the land around it, like a cake fallen on one side. Orchards and farmland encircle it now.
Not a tree grows upon it, just acres of long, flowing grass that is green in the warm months and brown in the cold. The grass seems almost to whisper to itself as the wind blows over it. I can hear it as I lie in my bed each night.
When I was a young girl of ten years or so, Father would take me out to the battlefield sometimes, after my lessons were done for the day.
“See, Sekuri,” he told me once, pointing toward the front of the plateau. “This is where General Changan made his last stand with his troops before they were cut down by the Yanji. Higher up is where we lost our mages, who were protected in the rear,” he said. “That small rise to the north is where General Ruzan started his cavalry charge, but sadly, it was not enough. The Yanji sorcerers won that battle and the war, and it took us, all the Sahren people, over a century to defeat them and regain our freedom. What lesson can be learned from this?”
Father was very fond of asking me that question when he recounted history—I had known he would ask it from the moment he brought me to the battlefield and started to speak. I had noticed, even at my young age, that my older sister never anticipated the question. So I tried to think of an answer to the inevitable query before Father asked it.
The plateau was good, clear land for a battle; there was nowhere an army could hide for miles around. Had the Yanji tried to attack from the rear, the cliff would have been too high for arrows, and even levin-bolts might not have reached that high.
“There is no cover for anyone on the plateau, and our army was weak and outnumbered. They should have attacked the Yanji in secret, in small numbers, disrupted their supply lines, damaged their weapons, slain key officers. Instead, they tried to attack as a full army, and they couldn’t maintain the attack. They were half-starved by then,” I said, remembering the history I had been taught.
“Yes,” Father said. “The generals, despite the army’s wretched state, were still arrogant enough to think they could defeat an army four times their size, with tired troops, using outmoded tactics of honorable combat against those who were dishonorable. The deeper lesson is, ‘Know your enemy, and know your people.’ If you know your enemy well, you will know better how to defeat them.” He shook his head. “We do not know how many unnamed people died in that battle or who they were; all we have are the names of the generals. But with only generals, there is no army. Remember that, when you grow old enough to lead troops, my daughter. Know and remember the people who fight for you, too. You might have to order their deaths, and they deserve better from you than for you to think of them as pieces on a shamati board, yes?”
“Yes, Father,” I said slowly. Then I turned to him. “Does that make you sad, to know them well and have to send them out to fight?”
“It makes me very sad,” he replied. “And it makes me a better general, I hope, because, if I must send my people to death, I want very much for it not to be a pointless death. And I want to make very certain that I seek all possible ways of preserving them before I conclude that sending them to death is the only way to succeed.”
I nodded. Suddenly, it felt to me that being a general was a terrible, frightening responsibility, and I wasn’t sure I wanted it.
Today, I can hear the battlefield’s grass whispering in the wind as I stand with my mother and sister at Father’s funeral. Our hair is unbound, as is the hair of every soldier present. It whips against our faces, catches in armor, tangles about us in a flurry, as wild as grief can be.
It is eight years since the day Father spoke to me about knowing the troops well. I took his words to heart. The troops stand around us in a great crescent in their chain and leather armor, and I can name every one of them, and even some of their wives, husbands, and children. I am not old enough to be a general yet, but I can feel that the day will come. I do not wear armor today, but I feel the weight of their lives on me as heavily as if they were steel pauldrons on my shoulders. It is Father’s bequest to me.
The priests in their saffron robes light sticks of pungent incense and chant funerary chants in a sonorous, beautiful harmony so deep I can feel it vibrating in my bones. Then the oldest priest bows low and hands Mother the torch. In a shaking but determined voice she offers a prayer and lights the funeral pyre, the final duty of a general’s beloved. The flames roar up in a rush as the tinder burns, thrashing above the kindling in as great a frenzy as our hair and quilted silks. Above it all, I hear the rustling of the grass on the battlefield as the cold wind blasts at us.
My people are not given to the luxury of poetic expressions. But it feels to me in this moment that the battlefield grass quivers in the wind like the hair we unbind in grief—as if the earth, in its own way, mourns for those it holds in its embrace.
Renee Whittington is a children’s blindness rehabilitation assistant living in Houston, Texas. She and her husband live in a home filled with entirely too many books—Hurray for eBooks! She has worked as a secretary in a parole office, as a medical transcriptionist, and as a summer intern at NASA’s Johnson Spacecraft Center for several years, a long time ago. “Strands of Grass” is her first professional fiction sale. She has also been published in Teatime in the Oleander Garden: A Collection of Poetry by Southern Women and in Mediphors magazine.