Ink of Ages Fiction Prize

After the Siege

Taam's hurried bootsteps echoed like miniature war drums through the empty streets of Seuiyeung. The city's garrison had miraculously fended off a rebel force almost twenty times their size for over eight months; perhaps the commanders were still alive …

His heart skipped a beat. A row of thirty-six corpses lay in the plaza outside the city's magistrate complex. The relief army was too late.

The officers' bodies had been treated with a peculiar form of respect by the rebels, arranged neatly on the ground of the courtyard and left with their armour and rank armbands. They looked oddly like a dry set of brushes laid out on a desk.

Taam swallowed hard as he approached the corpses. The first several faces he saw were thin and bony, with sunken eye sockets that stared back at him. No gaping wounds were visible – their bodies seemed intact at a glance. The rebels must have executed them all via strangulation only a day ago, before the wolves and carrion birds that were becoming ubiquitous to the Central Plains could begin their work.

He crouched down to closely inspect another one of the bodies and immediately gagged as an appalling reek flooded his nostrils. The corpses were older than he'd thought.

Taam's eyes watered as he turned and spluttered, trying to avoid spraying phlegm over the deceased officer. He staggered back up to his feet to escape the pungent odour and regain control of his breathing. Drawing a deep breath, he descended again to examine one hand of the officer. At this distance, he could see the patches of grey marbling on the skin, and felt coldness emanating from it. Grimacing, his eyes shifted to the face. His stomach sank.

The hero that lay before him was his old mentor, General Cheung. Master Cheung Tsun, an obscure provincial who had become an official on merit alone, only to be relegated to obscurity for his refusal to curry favour at the Imperial Court. The man who had imparted on Taam and his cohort a sense of righteousness and justice, and who had now given his life in service to the Tong Dynasty.

A prickling sensation spread from the back of his neck to his cheeks and down his arms. His breath hastened. He ignored the horrendous taste of putrefying gases in his mouth and squinted to keep his eyes focussed.

Despite the bloating around the general's eyes, his face was still marked with deep strained lines. Even in death, he remained as stubborn as ever. Taam was sure his last words would have been some pithy utterance.

"Have you found him?" someone spoke from behind. Taam glanced over his shoulder, stood up and nodded, taking a deep breath of fresh air. Sunchuen plodded towards him, shaking his head. "How late were we?"

"From the smell, maybe two or three more days? But if anyone had bothered to relieve the siege earlier, in any of the months before" – Taam clenched his fist, digging his nails into his palm – "they most certainly would have survived."

"For some commanders, it turns out that personal interests supersede duty." Sunchuen sighed. "Loyalty to the dynasty means nothing to far too many."

"And then you have General Cheung," Taam said with a grim smile, "completely halting the rebel advance southwards."

"Yes, tying up rebel troops for the whole campaign season, saving our agricultural heartland and, by extension, the dynasty – we shall make sure he's remembered for that."

"How did the garrison even hold on for that long? Their surrounding governors basically robbed them of most of their supplies months ago."

"A ludicrous number of strategies I suspect." Sunchuen shrugged. "Anyway, their bodies seem in rather good condition. I'm surprised no crows have arrived to feed on them."

Taam gazed towards the sky, expecting some scavenger to make itself known. The squawking of carrion birds was absent. He glanced back at General Cheung and his skeletal hands. "I feel as though there isn't much left here to sustain them."

Sunchuen stepped forward to peer at the corpse and grimaced. "That is rather unsettling, they must have …" Sunchuen's voice trailed off. He narrowed his eyes. After a pause, he asked, "How many soldiers were originally assigned here again?"

"Umm, General Cheung initially brought six thousand eight hundred troops with him."

"And the civilian population?"

"Originally around fifty thousand were on the census I think?" Taam furrowed his brow in thought. "But surely a large proportion would have fled prior to the final siege."

"Yes, I've read the reports from neighbouring counties. With the refugee figures they each give, that leaves about twenty thousand Seuiyeung residents still unaccounted for."

Taam once again scanned his surroundings. The ornamental trees which flanked the plaza, already without leaves in mid-autumn, had been deprived of most of their bark and limbs. The rectangular patches of dirt in which they had once grown were thoroughly churned up. Not a single hint of green was visible. The city seemed as though it had been devoid of life for a while. "So you're saying … there should be twenty thousand civilians here? I mean, where could they have—"

"No, that can't be right – there must be some way to establish what happened." Sunchuen drew his mouth into a straight line and bit his lip. "General Cheung must have maintained civilian records somewhere in the magistrate's complex. Another squad can tend to the bodies here; we ought to investigate."

The two marched through the gate of the magistrate's complex, making their way to the smallest of the buildings. The doors of the office stood partly open before them, though the interior remained dark – someone must have filled in the windows. Taam stepped inside first, and immediately brought his armoured sleeve up to cover his mouth as the stench of urine hit him like a wall. "What the … that’s just not …"

Sunchuen wrinkled his nose as he followed, muttering indistinctly to himself as he turned left to begin grasping for a desk and a set of documents. Taam waited several more seconds for his eyes to adjust and nostrils to acclimatise, before squinting at the tables on the room's right side. No sheets of paper lay in sight.

A loud crash behind him caused Taam to twist around. Sunchuen was rummaging through the cupboards with characteristic speed. "Any luck on that side?"

Another moment of frantic searching punctuated by a sudden thud, and Sunchuen spoke again. "This is weirdly the only document I could find at all," he said, brandishing a yellowish sheet with a dense black scrawl of characters, "but there's a substantial amount written on it. I need to step outside to read properly."

"Sure." Taam managed a nod as he refocused his attention on searching the office himself. Why was there so little paper here?

Something grunted on his right. Taam swore and recoiled, reaching a hand towards his sword. His eyes swept towards the source of the noise.

Then he saw a body. No, a living person. One still clad in ill-fitting armour. The soldier was slumped back against the corner of the office, partially obscured by a chair in the shadow. His arms were limp by his side, and his legs appeared set in a crooked position – their immobility over at least a day would explain the smell of urine.

This soldier looked as gaunt as the executed officers, with skin stretched tight around his skull as his mouth struggled to form coherent syllables. "Food, water," he finally gasped. "Please."

"Oh! Of course, of course …" Taam rummaged around his satchel for his rations. He felt a flush of blood creep across his cheeks – obviously someone who had barely survived an arduous siege needed sustenance, and not just a silent inspection of their features.

He retrieved a disc of meatloaf-stuffed bread with his right hand and held it out in front of the soldier, whose mouth dropped open. When the soldier's arms didn't move to take it, he edged closer, attempting to place it in the soldier's mouth. The soldier took two rapid bites, the second of which caught Taam's fingers.

"Aiyah! What the …?" Taam yelped and evacuated his hand. Stifling curses under his breath, he flicked his wrist and examined the skin of his finger. A small drop of blood welled out of the incision; he'd have to patch it up later.

The soldier mumbled something that resembled "sorry" as he wolfed down the remnants of the stuffed bread in his mouth.

"No, my apologies," Taam said, trying to ignore the stinging pain on his finger. "I should have given you something immediately."

There was no reply. Taam took the opportunity to ask, "May I ask how your garrison managed to hold out as long as it did? You deserve to be honoured as heroes for what you achieved."

The soldier's jaw came to an abrupt halt. His eyes widened and darted up towards Taam's bitten hand, then back down at the ground again.

There was a moment of silence. "Can I maybe then ask how you evacuated the civilians?"

The soldier winced and made a noise with his throat. Taam frowned. "Or simply … what happened to them?" The soldier continued to avert Taam's gaze. His chin began quivering. "Please, I just want to know what happened in this city. General Cheung was my mentor several years ago."

A flicker of recognition flashed across the soldier's face. He swallowed and finally croaked out something that made sense. "We ran out of food, so we ate horses, birds, rats, insects, tree bark, leather, paper … because we hoped someone would come and help us in time. Because we could do nothing else."

Taam flared his nostrils. The surrounding governors, and possibly even the Imperial court, had left this garrison to starve to death whilst it had defended the entire southern half of the empire.

"But no one came. Not in time, anyway. And, so we …" The soldier sighed heavily.

"So you … what?" Taam could feel his stomach knot. Had they resorted to—?

"Cannibalism," Sunchuen muttered from behind as he stepped back into the office, frantically shaking his head. "The civilians must have turned on each other. That's the only explanation. But even so, Taam, General Cheung's achievements outweigh what happened to the civilians …" He noticed the soldier on the ground.

The soldier's neck moved slightly in what he suspected was an attempt at shaking his head. His head tipped back slightly, and he stared at them with dull eyes. "No. It was your mentor who commanded us to eat them all: the women, the old men, the children."

The soldier's eyes closed shut. "And we obeyed. That's how we saved the dynasty."