The War with the Mein by David Anthony Durham Page A

up from the ghastly stitch work of corpses under which he had lain. The bodies that had provided him lingering warmth were frozen stiff now. The mound was dusted with ice, but it was easy enough to see the charred remains underneath, the ashes kicked away by the wind. The bodies had been set aflame. Around him were many similar heaps.
    The mound in which Leeka had been buried had burned less completely than the others; perhaps in this chance lay the reason he still breathed. All manner of debris cluttered the tundra—blood-fouled, shattered equipment; corpses of pack animals and dogs; portions of men and women. It was a scene of utter frozen desolation, not a moving creature in sight except for a few scavenging birds, the thick-necked, squat carrion eaters of these frigid climes. They had enormous beaks, short and visibly serrated. With a flicker of hope he considered the possibility that he was actually dead and all this around him was the afterdeath. But the world was too terribly solid for him to believe this.
    He might have stood there for some time, supported up to the thighs by the charred remains, had a vulture not landed near at hand and yanked at one of his soldier’s curled finger joints. The thought of killing one or two of them warmed Leeka with purpose. Within the hour he had scavenged a bow and several arrows. He impaled three of them and set the rest circling overhead, crying out their rage from above. It did not take long to understand the task was futile, though. More birds appeared, dropping to the ground each time his back was turned to them.
    He realized there were other creatures about: small white-furred foxes, stained pink around the jaws, a weasel-like creature with a striped black-and-white tail, even a species of hard-shelled insect that seemed impervious to the cold. He killed several of these by touching them. He scorched them with the warmth from his fingertips. Heat. Such a powerful force in this place, instrument of both life and death, of torture and salvation.
    Thinking this last, he set about gathering the supplies to build a fire. It was not easy, weak as he was. He had often to stop and take sips from the water skin wrapped close to his abdomen and to nibble the hard flat bread, the only food he could stomach the possibility of. In the slanting light of the early dusk he fed a growing blaze. He tossed atop it the frozen, singed bodies of his soldiers. He ventured into the dark and cold and dragged back offerings to the flames. Again and again he did this, each time a small journey between extremes. His head reeled when he moved too quickly. Often he dropped to one knee, eyes closed, still, until the spinning stopped. A wind had kicked up again and with its shifting bluster it was impossible not to inhale smoke. Coughing and soot covered, he stayed at the task until the work was completed. His army was not to be food for the scavengers. Better they were freed to the air so that they might blow away and search for peace dispersed far across the Giver’s misbegotten creation.
    Late that evening Leeka huddled near the blaze, his eyes tearful from ash. Grit caked on his lips and stuck to his teeth. Several times gusts of wind brought him the sound of women singing in the distance. Impossible, and yet he heard it with almost enough clarity to pick out individual words and to hum the tune inside himself. What to do now? He tried again and again to focus on this question. He was a general faced with a tragedy; before anything else he must form a plan of action. But he never got further than asking the question before some memory of horror yanked his attention away. Though his mind roiled with scenes of the slaughter, he could not fix one single image in which he had seen one of those enemy men creatures fall. Throughout the work of the day he had not found any of their dead. All the limbs he had collected and tossed to the flames had been from his own men. He found nothing that proved even one of