‘It’ll come back,’ said Fred. ‘It can’t be that important anyway. Not when we’re stuck here for the rest of the year. Not to mention the other ninety-nine years stuck in the Army.’
‘You wanted to be a general,’ said Ray suddenly. ‘I remember you telling me that sometime.’
‘Did I?’ asked Fred. ‘Really? Hmmm. That’s not such a bad idea.’
It was six weeks since Ray and Fred had been washed between the ears. They’d each woken later that same day, on their beds, with pieces of paper pinned to their tunics. The pieces of paper had their names on them and nothing else. When they first woke they couldn’t even read, but fortunately their reading and writing abilities had come quickly back to them, along with various skills and background knowledge.
But very few specifics about their previous lives had returned. They’d found their notebooks, but those hadn’t helped much. Fred had relearned his favourite colour and how he took his tea, but Ray found his own notes very cryptic. After reading them, he did feel that Ray probably wasn’t his real name, but he didn’t know what his real name was. Or the significance of the Trustees’ names.
Ray couldn’t even remember anything about being an Ink Filler. Fred had remembered quite a lot about his civilian life in the Middle House. Ray’s was a mystery. Try and try as he might, he could not summon up any memories. Sometimes he would feel as if there was an important memory on the very edge of his consciousness, but whenever he reached for it, it would be gone. It felt almost like a physical pain, a dull ache of lost life.
Fred told Ray at least some of his memories would come back in time, but that was small comfort. When the platoon got together in their rare time off, conversation would invariably come around to everyone’s previous lives. Ray would sit there, silent and still, but listening intently, in the hope that a detail from someone else’s life might spark some memory of his own.
The pain of listening to the others reminisce was lessened as their time off got scarcer and scarcer every day. For some reason, soon after they’d been washed between the ears, the normal training schedule had been accelerated, and it got accelerated again. In the beginning, the recruits were given six hours off a night, and two hours free during the day. That had been cut back to a mere five hours a night and then four, and even that was prone to interruption.
The training had been intense. Ray and Fred now knew how to march moderately well by themselves, with their platoon or with larger formations. They could march unarmed, or march and do basic drills with a variety of weapons, including clockwork-action poleaxes, Nothing-powder muskets, explosive pikes, muscle-fibre longbows, savage-sword and buckler, power-spears, and lightning-charged tulwars. They knew the seventeen forms of salute and the thirty-eight honorifics used in the Army.
They could also use the weapons they drilled with and look after them without injuring their companions. They could manage to present themselves in the basic uniforms of the Army’s main units, though never completely to the satisfaction of Sergeant Helve. They had learned to follow orders first and think about them afterwards.
They were becoming soldiers.
‘You should have remembered more straightaway,’ said Fred. ‘With that silver ring and all.’
Ray dug the ring out of his pocket and looked at it again. He’d woken with it under his tongue and asked Fred about it. But Fred couldn’t remember ever seeing it before, and it was a week before he recalled that a silver coin under the tongue was meant to prevent against washing between the ears.
‘It’s not all silver,’ said Ray. ‘Part of it has turned gold. I think that means something … but –’ ‘I can’t remember,’ finished Fred. He looked over at the scrubby desert to the west. ‘Almost sunset. Maybe Helve’ll let us off when it gets dark.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Ray. He didn’t want time off. Time off meant time trying to remember. He preferred to be busy, to have no time to think at all.
The section was on clean-up detail. The tiles to the southwest, west, and northwest had changed a lot in the last week, and the wind had been westerly, blowing bits of vegetation into the camp. Unsightly leaves had lodged themselves under the buildings and in various corners, upsetting the cadre staff. So the recruits had been unleashed and ordered to clean everything up, the penalty for the survival of a single leaf or whirly-thorn being a fourteen-mile-route march that night in Horde armour (good when riding Not-Horses, but terrible for marching) with Legion weapons and Borderer boots (as Horde boots would render the whole recruit battalion lame if they marched fourteen miles in them).