18

Once, and only once, Father told us about the battle in which he won his captaincy.

At that time, twelve years ago, he had already risen to become a sergeant in command of a cohort of thirty-six spider scouts. Sergeant is the highest rank to which a man of his birth could aspire. The desert garrison was part of a string of small forts put in place to guard against the incursions of barbarians, desert bandits, and the merchant-mercenaries called Shipwrights who raid villages for slaves and supplies. One day, outside an isolated village on the edge of the Sand Desert below the Bone Escarpment, the vanguard of an unknown force brushed the web of scouts.

A hundred years ago, when the last emperor was murdered, the empire of Saro splintered into the three kingdoms of Saro-Urok, West Saro, and East Saro. Many rival princely clans fought among themselves across the imperial homeland, each hoping to claim a kingdom.

After surviving an assassination attempt, Prince Kliatemnos heeded the advice of his wise elder sister, Serenissima, and set sail across the Fire Sea. With their three younger sisters and many ships full of soldiers and refugees, they made landfall in the dusky and mysterious land of Efea with its beautiful women and magical masks. Kliatemnos married the last living daughter of the old Saroese imperial house, but it was his elder sister he named as queen to rule beside him. Together they overthrew the luxury-loving Efean monarchs who did nothing but drink beer and write poetry all day, and they buried the temples of the fraudulent Efean diviners and their vile superstitions beneath mounds of dirt and crushed rock.

Five generations later, Father identified the advancing army as the Silver Spears, elite forces under the command of the king of West Saro. Like the king of East Saro and the king of Saro-Urok, he was a descendant of one of the rival clans, all of them cousins of the royal family of Efea and still squabbling over the corpse of the old empire like jackals over bones.

Father’s captain dismissed the report as impossible, for before that day, armies from old Saro who invaded the new kingdom of prosperous Efea always came from the Eastern Reach through its rich agricultural lands. They never attacked out of the north through the bone-dry desert. He ordered Father to strike aggressively at the enemy because he was sure they were bandits who would be easily driven off.

The desert garrison had not the numbers to turn back a massive invasion. All they could do, Father said, was hold their ground defensively and take their losses for long enough to give messengers time to reach the king and call the main army into play.

He commanded the defense with such skill—for the main army had time to be alerted and march to the rescue—that he was rewarded with a captaincy. We never heard one word more about the highborn Patron captain, although we suspected our father had killed the man to stop him from dooming his troops to a complete slaughter. Of the 512 men garrisoned at the five desert outposts, 128 survived. Father remembered the exact numbers, and the day he told us the story he recited their names in the form of a praise poem.

Even when you face defeat, he told us, you must not falter.