The wind whispers through the dead grass
Echoes of a world forgot
The wraiths of past troubles heed not
The perils of our day
Old World, by Ang Xi
‘How things change in so short a time, Jai,’ the general said, drawing his blade and examining the edge as the Crimson Guard around him followed suit.
The young officer nodded, his expression grim. He had not smiled since that moment they had emerged from the snaking valley and spied the field of Jalnapur. It had been a spirit-crushing sight. They had left for their illicit conference with the two forces at a safe standoff, not quite equal, but close enough to ensure that no senior officer on either side would do anything stupid. The two armies had sat glowering wearily at one another across that dreadful river, but nothing had been moving.
The view on their return had been vastly different.
Where the Jade Empire had had the numerical edge over their opponents, now the armies of the western empire filled the world with their men, animals and artillery. Things suddenly looked bleak for Jai and his general. And as they had returned to the scene of battle, the fight was already underway once more with fresh vigour and strength. Granted the bonus of new men from home, the west was pressing the attack with a vicious will, and the forces of General Jiang were fighting a defensive battle now.
Jai had wondered in that moment of shock whether the entire sojourn in the dead lands had been a cunning ruse to pull the senior commanders away from the army long enough to allow a huge reserve to be brought in and committed by the enemy. After all, the westerners could break through at any time the way they were pushing, and it was seemingly pure chance that the command party had managed to return in time to find the battle ongoing. They might well have arrived to find their forces broken and retreating.
Jiang had been the one to stamp on that notion. He knew himself to be a good reader of people and believed General Cinna to be genuine in his desire for a peaceful solution. Moreover, they had all seen the sudden and heart-warming resurrection of the fraternal bond between Jai and Dev, and neither of them could imagine Jai’s brother having lied to him with such brazen ease.
No. Cinna and Dev were not behind this. It was simply unfortunate timing. And it put everything now into jeopardy. What hope there was that Cinna could remove potential enemies among his command and defy his own emperor now seemed to be infinitesimally small. That huge number of men arriving from the west would require senior officers at high level and, like Jiang’s force, the new commanders would not be hand-picked for sense and loyalty as were the original army.
Jiang and his men had rushed down to their command post to find nervous officers, unable to find an adequate solution to the sudden shift in power. The westerners were adaptable, had initiative. The officers of the Jade Empire – even the best of them – had trouble with sudden changes in their rigid thinking. The enemy had pushed to take the bridge twice already in the past two days and had almost succeeded both times, denial of the bridgehead costing both sides dreadful numbers. The bulk of the eastern officers now believed this fight to be over. Jiang had realised that his own chances of defying an emperor and changing the world were now diminished to almost naught too. He would have to fight a desperate defence instead, and the only thing that would now save them was the arrival of their own reinforcements. But that in itself would end all hope of peace, for then they might win the war, but Jiang would lose control of it all. It was a dreadful situation. Hundreds of years ago a famous monk had asked the question ‘What does a man choose when faced with a lake of fire before him and a precipice behind?’ It had never seemed more apt to Jai and the general now.
Jiang had done the only thing he could. He had prepared to defend their position against superior odds until the new army arrived, and hoped that there was something he could do once that happened. He had, in effect, stepped back from the lake of fire and thrown himself over the precipice, hoping to find a handhold part way down.
The other officers had been disapproving of the new direction of their general’s plan, though none had been able to suggest an alternative when asked. And so Jiang had taken a leaf from the military sketchbook of his opposite number. Where Cinna’s forces had fortified and trapped their end of the bridge, while Jiang’s had kept theirs clear for the movement and access of troops, now the westerners were infilling their pits and clearing the obstacles, while Jiang had men desperately digging pits and moving barriers into the way. A complete reversal.
And now, eleven days after they had returned to Jalnapur, it seemed the enemy were about to make the next true attempt to break the Jade Empire’s forces – probably on a scale that would make the previous attempts look like mere exercises. Jiang had watched them from the observation point, eyes hawk-like as he took in every nuance of what was happening across the river. It was all done rather subtly, with just the gentle shifting of units, but Jiang was not fooled. There might be only a slow shuffling and swapping of units, but a keen eye could see that the result of the general rearrangement was that the fresh, new heavy infantry were now close to the bridge, heavy horse behind them. Jiang had distributed the orders he’d had prepared for days in anticipation of this moment and had beckoned to Jai and his Crimson Guard. The young man had frowned in surprise.
‘Our world is threatened, Jai, and our men quake with fresh fear. Whatever heart we can give them, it is our duty to do so. We will join the defence of the bridge.’
And so they had ridden forth from the command post as the orders the general had disseminated were effected, walking their beasts down the slope and onto the causeway with the full unit of the Crimson Guard, frightening and impressive, at their shoulder, face masks immobile but with red-painted teeth bared for battle.
As they had moved across the plain towards the bridge the reality of what was happening had impressed itself upon Jai. The cannon placed sporadically across the eastern bank thundered their smooth-chiselled death at the enemy, belching fire and black smoke with the blasts, the artillerists instinctively recoiling with each shot, aware that no matter how skilled they were, there was always at least a small chance of a misfire. But it was happening remarkably rarely these days. The men at the machines were now experienced enough to fire the missiles in their sleep and could spot an imperfection in the great stone balls at a single glance. Moreover, the cannon with any potential faults had long since fallen apart. Now only terrible luck resulted in a misfire.
With a sound like a giant stamping angry boots, the cannon pounded the enemy again and again, jettisoning their deadly loads over the heads of the nervous soldiers.
The enemy were far from idle either. Their weapons didn't have the range of the Jade Emperor’s cannon, and could only reach a certain distance across the battlefield, but wherever they could reach had become a field of twisted and mangled bodies.
Carnage. Just like their first few weeks here.
Jai felt his spirits sink that little bit further as the near end of the bridge came within sight. For months now it had been clear, the road solid if pitted with divots caused by enemy artillery, the once-beautiful white stonework of the bridge itself now greyed and brown and with barely a pace of it undamaged in some way. But it was what had been done by their own men in the past few days that brought a lump to the throat. As long as that access to the bridge had remained clear, the statement had been made: ‘We still intend to cross that bridge and win.’
Now there was no access. The statement had changed. Now it was: ‘We intend to stop the enemy crossing that bridge.’
A trench had been cut across the near end. Unlike the one the westerners had made, full of spikes and death, this one had been cut in a ‘U’ shape around the bridge, ten feet wide and as deep as the men could make it. Now the river ran around the end of the bridge, effectively sealing it off. And, given the speed of the current, it would be a dangerous torrent even for a man in underwear, let alone a man in armour.
The eastern bank of that moat-like trench had been given additional defences, with sharpened stakes jutting from the lip out towards the water, preventing anyone from climbing out of the torrent. A small fence of sharpened stakes had been constructed behind it, and archers and infantry positioned appropriately. And there, among the crowds of men gathered ready to repel any attack, standing amid smeared mud, blood and bone where men had fallen to enemy artillery over the past few days, were the rocket troop. Jiang’s last throw of the dice.
Jai shuddered. Rockets were unpredictable and perilous at the best of times, and he had no idea what the general had planned, but whatever it was it would be desperate and horribly dangerous.
‘Here they come,’ the general said, dragging Jai’s attention back to the bridge itself.
He and the Crimson Guard, and Jai too, had dismounted five hundred paces back, leaving their mounts in a guarded corral. Horses were just an inconvenience in this sort of situation.
‘They’re moving slowly,’ Jai noted, watching the gleaming steel wall of imperial might stomping towards them, swords clattering against the bronze edges of their shields in a threatening rhythm.
‘They don’t want to endanger their own,’ the general said. ‘Shields up!’ he bellowed. All across the bridgehead, men raised their shields. Carefully placed burly soldiers lifted the supports of specially constructed roofs and angled them into position, slotting the great timber legs into the sockets prepared in the ruined ground. Jiang was no fool and had prepared.
A sensible commander pounded the enemy with artillery before committing his men.
The first blow struck one of the timber roofs and the thing paid for all the hard work in that one moment as a dozen men owed it their lives, the great stone ball of the imperial onager bouncing off the heavy slats and careening away into the dirt. Men off to the side scurried out of the way.
But it was not the only blow to come, and not all of them would be so easily dodged. Jai could not help but wince each time a missile struck. Sometimes they came down between the heavy temporary roofs, and when they did the sounds were indescribable. The ninth shot to strike the central area where the two officers waited was the first to destroy a wooden roof. The enemy shot had been angled differently, and instead of glancing off the timbers and shooting away into the periphery to become the problem of other men, it struck hard, shattering timbers and slats and punching through to cause mayhem beneath. The heavy stone ball crushed two men on impact, one dead instantly, the other gasping out his last few moments from a ruined chest. Further men suffered the agony of flying splinters from the ruined roof, which were almost as bad as the missile itself.
The one reprieve during the barrage was that the enemy had forgone the use of burning pitch in those dreadful earthenware jars that exploded on impact. They could not afford to engulf in flames the world into which they sent their men. Still, the iron bolts and heavy stones came thick and fast and killed many in dreadful ways.
Then, as suddenly as it had started, the rain of missiles stopped. There was no time, nor cause, to rejoice, though, for the screams and thuds and cracks and cries were instantly replaced with the bellowed war cry of the enemy as they picked up speed and ran towards Jai and the rest. What could they hope to achieve?
Eastern archers began to loose their deadly rain now, nocking, drawing and loosing in perfect unison in a graceful dance of violence, swarms of arrows arcing up from the bank to either side to rain down upon the charging enemy as they came into range. Men fell, but not enough of them to make a difference. Their shields studded with shafts, they still came. It was only when the howling, furious faces of the western soldiers were perhaps forty paces from the moat that their plan became clear. For a moment, Jai had thought they had produced their own roof against the Jade Empire’s arrow storm, but quickly he realised that what he’d taken to be a roof was, in fact, a floor.
Bellowing men suddenly picked up extra speed, racing ahead of their compatriots, carrying those great timber boards. They neared the ditch, some of them dying to arrows and falling by the wayside, but numerous enough to proceed even with heavy losses. And as they reached the end of the bridge, they threw forward their burden.
It was a timber ramp perhaps fifteen feet long, which neatly reached across the water. Jai felt his throat constrict at the sight. More were coming behind as well. Two more wooden ramps were brought forward and hurled across the gap.
Desperate men at the front of the defensive line tried to reach through their own fence of stakes to push the timber bridges into the water with the curved sickle blades of their ji polearms, but it was too difficult, and already the infantry were beginning to cross. They paid little or no heed to the fact that they were rarely running on stone or timber, but mostly on the bodies of their compatriots who had fallen to the arrow storm from each side. More western soldiers fell with every heartbeat, but there were so many of them on the bridge now that it was like trying to use a net to hold back a wave.
Jai braced himself, though he was far from the front, a dozen men between him and immediate danger, men of the Crimson Guard to his side. The meat-grinder of battle began a moment later, and Jai was aware of it not by the sounds, which hardly changed, but by the sudden lurch backwards as the men in front were thrown against him.
Never had the difference between the two empires been so ably demonstrated. The heavy infantry of the Jade Empire lunged and swung with their ji in perfect symmetry as though demonstrating on a parade ground, their weapons forming a sweeping barrier of steel, whirling and deadly and yet with a beautiful and graceful precision. The soldiers of the western legions met the glinting thrashing machine with a wall of shields and short blades, the great rectangular boards taking the brunt of the eastern assault as chips and shards of wood and bronze were ripped away and sent through the air. Then the value of the western form showed as those short blades began to lance out like vipers between the shields, finding openings and biting into flesh. Within moments the Jade Empire’s front of whirling death began to fall apart. Jai had never been so acutely aware of the dangers of such rigid formation. To the casual observer both forces must seem as disciplined and ordered as the other, but the westerners were so adaptable, so individual, despite their wall of shields.
The ji-wielding footmen – those who still lived, anyway – backed off or leapt aside to make way. The Jade Empire’s heavy swordsmen moved in to take on the western shieldwall, their swords held high in readiness for the first form of all sword combat, the attack of the west-facing stork, their three-pronged parrying knives held low and ready. The two forces met with a crash and clang and the scrape of metal on metal, and the world became a mass of figures, obscuring the details for Jai, further back in the press.
Somehow, as though the soldiery instinctively knew to avoid a general, Jiang was not pushed back the same as Jai, and the general was waving his sword in the air, exhorting his men to greater heights of bravery as the Crimson Guard joined the front ranks to lend their specialised veteran killing arms to the fray. They would need all the help they could get. The tide flowing across the bridge seemed unstoppable. Whoever was in charge of this attack, Jai thought in the struggle, it was not Cinna. This man had no care for the men under his command. He saw them as disposable assets and was willing to throw them away in droves to achieve any kind of victory. The westerners were dying in their hundreds. In their thousands, probably. Dozens at a time plummeted over the sides of the bridge clutching the arrows that had pierced their chests, limbs, necks, faces. Others screamed and went down to be mercilessly trampled by men they had called brother mere hours ago.
Jai knew his own general, like Cinna, would never have thrown away such a huge number of men in the hope of a win here. But then Cinna had not had such large numbers to commit at the time. Would he have been any different now?
This was not the time for pondering what might have been. Jai grunted as a boot came down hard on his foot in the press. Ahead, he could just see the faces of western soldiers bellowing the jagged, incomprehensible names of their gods as they cut their way forward. The men of the Jade Empire were not giving their lives or ground easily, though, and were fighting hard for every pace, killing westerners in droves. The world was now constantly flecked with blood, and tiny flecks of matter that no sane man would examine closely. Muscle, bone, cartilage, teeth, fragments of iron and leather and flesh. It was not hard to see the front of the fighting through the haze of gore, for there was so little space in which to struggle that the dead were piling up underfoot and the frontline mêlée was rising to such a height as to be visible over the heads of others. Now they were struggling to fight inside the wooden shelters and the structures were removed, one way or another. One somehow made its way back among the enemy to act as strengthening timbers for their temporary bridge.
Jai found himself in the depth of battle quite suddenly as the soldier two men in front vanished with an agonised cry and a burst of crimson, and the man in between lasted mere moments, a spear thrust from some unseen source punching through his scale shirt, sending tiny bronze plates out in a shower and impaling him neatly. The spear almost took Jai with it as it emerged from the man’s back, and he dodged to the side just in time.
The world became a blur of combat. Jai had trained for years in the best academy in the Jade Empire, and he knew the forms better than most, but this was not a dance of blades with adherence to form. This was butchery and savagery with little time to think or plan. Yet it was as he parried and leapt, swung and thrust, that Jai realised the value of the Ishi masters’ training. For all that he had no opportunity to plan his attacks or consider the appropriate defence, he became oddly aware of the fact that instinct was doing it for him. The forms and their many variants had become a memory within his body itself so that it anticipated without conscious thought, pirouetting through the slaughter with delicate movement.
A soldier, snarling his harsh western words through bloodied teeth and a barrage of spittle, launched at him, a sword driving straight for his heart. Before Jai had even realised he was doing it, his body had bent into the defence of the reluctant crane and the enemy blade had swept through the air beneath his armpit. His own sword came down in the attack of the mindful scorpion. His blade, angled seemingly impossibly in the press, punched down into the neck of the man’s breastplate, finding the notch in the throat and carving through his organs. Any amateur would now lose his sword, buried deeply in the man’s armour as he fell away, but Jai was no amateur. Almost casually, he walked up to the falling corpse, whipping the blade free and whirling in the attack of the seven-eyed demon to take the head neatly off another man and then carve into the throat of the man behind. His red-coated sword came free as the man fell and caught the advancing sword of another, lifting it and then dropping into the attack of the unexpected viper, plunging into the same armpit he had just exposed. Forms upon forms, each one making a widow and filling the air with blood. The world was blood. Life and death: blood. All was blood. Jai was in danger of finding joy in the simplicity of it – something his tutor had avidly warned him against.
Briefly, in this display of deadly prowess, he caught sight of General Jiang, who was now involved in the fighting himself, and Jai recognised a fascinating and inventive combination of two offensive and one defensive forms, allowing the senior commander to dispatch two opponents in a single move and still be in position to block a spear that sought his head. Jai had no time to truly consider it, but there could be little doubt that Jiang had the skill of an Ishi master himself, and Jai would love – or would he hate? – to face the man in a duel.
The killing went on seemingly forever, as though the world were ending around them, which in a very real way it was. Jai was aware of the sun’s progress across the heavens and the gradual darkening of the sky as he spun and stabbed, fought and parried. Occasionally, he found himself hauled back out of danger by a lesser officer and realised he had fought almost to exhaustion. Each time he rested as men before him died, and then, after he had counted off enough heartbeats, he took a deep breath and joined the fray once more.
They were losing. There was no doubt about it. Over three hours of struggling at the bridge end, throwing seemingly endless numbers of men at the enemy, they had given ground to the tune of some hundred paces. It didn’t sound much, but it would be enough. A hundred paces meant that the enemy were now managing to pour from the bridge onto the bank with increased ease and in greater numbers. It also meant that the front line of the fighting defence had been stretched and had given way to both sides near the river bank.
Jai heard his general’s voice calling his name and, delivering an expert thrust to an exposed throat, pulled back, allowing men to pour into the gap he left and hold the line. As he pushed back through the ranks, seeking General Jiang, Jai could see the next step in their defeat taking place. The collapse of the defensive line at the riverside was allowing the enemy to slip past in increasing numbers and they were making for those units of archers who poured death down upon the men crossing the bridge. Already the torrent of the great Nadu ran pink with blood, and bodies were visible like logs in storm water, washing away into the distance, some caught in eddies at the edge. But fewer men were toppling into the water with every heartbeat as enemy infantry found units of archers and laid waste to them. Western cavalry were now coming across the bridge too, and their arrival would cause fresh hell for everyone.
Jai knew that his general had plenty of units in reserve, and some of these would even now be racing forth to head off those men ravaging the archers, but with more pouring across the bridge all the time, things were looking bleak. Moreover, the enemy troops that had been committed to the push were the late arrivals, fresh and spoiling for a fight, while every man on the eastern bank was tired and soul sore.
‘Jai!’
He followed the voice and found General Jiang standing in a small clearing, surrounded by men, a medic tying a tourniquet around his thigh. It was neither the wound, though, nor the press of men, nor even the sense of defeat in the air that struck Jai. What immediately grabbed his attention and held it was the rider. The man was dusty and travel-worn, and still astride his horse even while addressing a senior officer on foot, which was not appropriate etiquette. Moreover, the man’s face was a picture of horror and misery, matched only by the general’s.
‘What has happened?’
‘The reserves are not coming,’ Jiang said in a hollow, quiet voice.
‘What?’
The general waved away the medic and limped over to Jai, indicating the rider in passing.
‘Our friend here just delivered the glad tidings at the most opportune moment imaginable. The relief force reached Yuen but there they stopped. They have rebelled against the Jade Emperor. Can you believe that? Here are we fighting a war we don’t want on his behalf and the men he sends to make sure we keep doing it rise up against him. They turned around and marched on the capital. There will be civil war at home, Jai.’
A strange mix of ideas washed through Jai. He wasn’t sure that he was that disappointed with the idea of a change in emperor. It might be terrible for the empire, but it could be good for the Inda. It might also…
‘Does that mean we are free to negotiate with the westerners?’ he asked urgently.
Jiang snorted. ‘We would have been. A month ago it would have made all the difference. But these new commanders over there? See how rabidly they press the attack, heedless even of their own high losses? These men are not here to negotiate. All they might accept is surrender, and that with only adequate humility and executions.’
‘Then what do we do?’
The general straightened. ‘We deny the enemy this bank for as long as we can in order to save the army. I am not an autocrat, and I will not tell my men to commit to any action when I cannot for myself say whether I approve of it. What happens now is down to the conscience of each individual.’
Jai became aware suddenly that a number of officers were closing on them, pushing through the crowd in response to the general’s call. ‘Signal the rocketeers,’ Jiang told his signaller. The man hauled a great red flag into the air and waved it.
Jai frowned, still wondering at the value of rockets in this situation.
There was a long, odd pause among the Jade officers, the sounds of battle somehow dulled by expectation. And then it happened. With a ‘crump’, the eastern end of the bridge seemed to contract oddly. Then, with a boom that made the ears of all present ring, the entire eastern end of the structure, some seventy paces long, detonated. Shards of white stone hurtled into the air in every direction, escaping a roiling, boiling cloud of red flame and black smoke. Men were vaporised by the score in the explosion.
Jai and all the other officers stared in shock as the black cloud gradually dissipated and the last of the debris – stone and flesh – came down into water and onto land like heavy, grisly rain.
The bridge was now uncrossable. Seventy paces of the structure were utterly gone, even the pylons upon which it had stood destroyed down to well below the water’s surface. The surviving western troops were milling about on the truncated crossing, some falling into the water in the press, many rolling around in screaming agony, burned and maimed by the explosion and flying shards of stone. The damage was appalling.
‘Sir,’ one of the officers said in a breathless voice, ‘what have you done?’
‘I have bought you all time to live. The enemy are coming. We are beaten. And the empire needs you all. The reserve army has rebelled against the emperor and raised a usurper. He has yet to show green eyes, so the old emperor still lives. That means there will be war at home. Each of you must look to your men and to your duty. You all took an oath to the emperor, but we have also all seen the madness to which his policies have led. You alone can decide whether you cleave to your oath or whether you seek a new path. I will not decide for you. But in a matter of hours that enemy force will begin to cross in earnest, for we shall no longer hold against them. We cannot, else we all die and our land will be torn apart. Gather your men to your signals and leave the field. Go east and there decide which banner you will seek, but go there now before the westerners cross. I feat there will be no quarter given by their new commanders when they do.’
Jai watched the horror of the news sink into every man in that gathering as General Jiang limped from the circle and began to move back along the causeway. What was left of the Crimson Guard who had been fighting alongside him in the press – some two hundred, all that remained of a force once twice that size – gathered protectively around their commander. The Crimson Guard took no oath to the emperor, purely to their general. They were loyal even beyond death. Jai hurried after him, thoughts churning.
‘Sir—’
‘Jai, you must choose your path now,’ the general said over his shoulder without turning.
‘My path is with you.’
‘Your service to me is done, Jai.’
‘Where will you go, sir? Who will you support?’
General Jiang stopped and turned, and Jai felt shock at the look of defeat and utter hopelessness on the man’s face. ‘Support, Jai? No one. Who can I support? The emperor who started this entire mess, who will demand my head for my failure? Or the usurper raised by my enemies – men who wish nothing more than to see me fail? No. I cannot go back. The Jade Empire is closed to me no matter who wins control of it.’
Jai shook his head. It was true and clear, of course, but he’d never considered what it would be like for the man not to be able to go home.
‘South, General. To my father. To safety.’
‘No, Jai.’ Jiang gestured back over the bridge. ‘The enemy will want my head. They will seek me out above all others to take as a prize for their insane emperor. I will be hunted like a beast and they will be relentless. And no matter how much a man tries to disappear, he will always leave a trace. Your father told me something along those lines that day in the monastery. No. If I go south and seek your father, all I will do is lead the enemy to his door. Always, since we came here, I have been pushed in different directions, and now is no different. I cannot go south. To both east and west men will seek my head. I must go north.’
‘Then I will come with you.’
‘No, Jai.’ The general wagged a finger at him. ‘This is my fate, not yours.’
‘Now you sound like my father.’ Jai sighed. ‘But whatever fate has in store for you, General, I share it. I know that. I have known it since we first came here. You ride north, and I ride north with you. Perhaps we will find sanctuary with this Sizhad. Whatever the case, I have no wish to face an uncertain future on my own.’
Jiang stood for a long moment, then finally nodded. Around them, they could hear three distinct groups of sounds. On the bridge was angry, belligerent dismay as the westerners, halted in their victorious advance, struggled to pull back and put together a new plan. Close to the water was the ongoing sound of battle, where westerners who knew they were trapped there either attempted to take as many archers as possible with them or tried to flee the scene, only to be caught by those reserves who had come forward to protect the missile units. And finally horns were beginning to sound as flags waved across the battlefield, summoning units to muster, their commanders desperate to flee the field before the enemy came again.
‘Very well, Jai. Then you and I and my men here will seek our future in the mountains to the north. We will have to ride hard, and I will rely heavily upon your knowledge of the land – especially as we near your home – in order to throw enemy pursuit off our scent. I have no pressing desire to see my head separated from my shoulders just yet.’
Fate, Jai pondered, as they hurried back to the small corral where their horses waited with those of the guard, was a curious thing. He had been taken from the Inda by marauding Jade Empire soldiers, brought up as one of theirs and then sent back with them to invade his own lands. And now here he was in his homeland again, no longer serving the Jade Empire. And though the westerners were ascendant on the far bank, recent experience had taught Jai not to revel in such comforts, for had not the easterners been in that very position just weeks ago? Somehow Jai felt that fate was not yet done with him, nor with the general with whom he had thrown in his lot. There were moves to play out yet in this game.
Suddenly he found himself wondering where, in all this nightmare, Dev was.