Iron Triumph, Cochalyon
history of the Iron Triumph - Arathalian, 200yrs.
So, today is the two-hundredth Iron Triumph!
Congratulations! Are you celebrating, Talton? I apologise; this is the hundred-and-ninetieth festival I have missed. Perhaps I shall attend the next. We shall see.
I have read a great deal about the procedings. Morbid curiosity of a sort, I suppose. A great parade of costumed fae and beasts, and day-long firearms displays, and evening fireworks on Cripley's Hill ... it does sound extravagant.
The real event was rather more spectacular, of course. Never mind; we shall hold another eventually.
It is sad, I think, that none of the original combatants are alive in Talton today for this illustrious bicentennary. I exclude myself from that reckoning, of course. As a matter of fact, in light of this unfortunate loss of posterity, I thought it might be interesting to remark upon how your attitude to the Iron Triumph has slowly changed these last two hundred years.
Call it my contribution to your historical archives. Ascalain, I understand, is a very dreary sort.
You may not know this, but for the first few years after your victory, there was no Iron Triumph. You were all rather busy rebuilding houses and starving and suchlike.
The very first Iron Triumph was one of those which I attended. You are aware of that, of course. I wish the parade had been longer in those days, but your forebears were understandably nervous about conveying fae too far around the city. It was starting to look quite habitable again, as I recall.
You would be surprised at how much I recall.
In any case, since that one year and with only a few scattered exceptions, necessity has forced me to follow the history of this great tradition only in books. As I mentioned before, the change in your attitude is quite remarkable.
For the first twenty years, your writers treat it rather sombrely - with relief, of course, and with fair mention of gratitude to those bizarre gods of yours, but still very sombrely. There seems to have been a lot of talk of vigilance and preparedness and all that familiar Army rhetoric.
Some fifty years after that, it appears that some of the sombreness had died along with those moth-eaten old veterans, and there was more of a focus on gratitude.
Earlier this century, I began to read more about some sort of Ferrean destiny mixed in with the usual 'o sweet iron!' claptrap. The very last parade I participated in - ah, what fun we all had that day! - certainly had a lot of flag-waving and singing by the roadside.
And now? Let me set down the latest quote that has caught my eye.
'The Iron Triumph,' says your A. N. Alleyn, 'is a symbol of Ferrean hope, courage and supremacy - a timely reminder that no misfortune is enough to lay our great city low. We have already faced and destroyed the most hideous enemy that history could provide; what greater ills can the future possibly bring?'
I will save comment on that mysterious 'timely' reference. No-one ever seems very willing to indulge my political curiosity. It is the second remark that has attracted most of my interest - and, I admit, my jealousy. Who was this other most hideous enemy, and when did you destroy the wretched fellow?
Let us stop teasing one another. You have never had a greater foe than I. And I, gentle merrymakers of the bicentennary, am not destroyed yet. You have foregone that precaution year after year - two hundred years in all.
Once upon a time, your ancestors could hardly sleep soundly for thinking that I still waited under the city I had levelled. It seems fitting that one of your generation's poets has recently written a pretty little nonsense calling me 'Lucalyon's Nightmare'.
But was that wise, to relegate me to the dream-world so soon? You are forgetting already, as I knew you would, and it delights me to see it.
I am more than your past. I am your destiny, Talton.
I should not distract you from the celebrations, though. Let us all share one of those rousing Triumph toasts: to the future!
Cochalyon autumn cond.
There was a crimson, ochre and gold wing-flare on the hilltop, half-startled and half-belligerent. Then the wings simply wilted earthward, loose feathers spinning and fluttering on the same journey but more slowly, ghosting like autumn leaves.
Cochalyon, shading his eyes to stare up the hill, was too dizzy and too weary for sudden flight - for sudden anything. He was sick on the roiling Flow, lost in the swirl of ambient magic with leeching iron, exhausted. And Espayon, his invincible crutch, had just died on that hillcrest.
He dropped to his knees and folded his wings defensively over his head as more shots rang out. His body was too mazed and numb for grief, but his spirit wasn't. Not yet. He wept on the inside ...
... and when he opened his eyes it was all just memory again, colour in pictures, ghost-art. The slip had been shorter this time. The full-scale chaos of the Flow disruption subsided every time his own magic subsided; that was happening more and more often as autumn wore on.
Cochalyon could still feel the ghost-pains in his wings, or where his wings would have been. They were only jutting nubs of bone now. He couldn't reach those properly, or they'd have come out too. And if there'd been a way to lay physical hands on the seasons, he'd have shredded them up like so much paper centuries ago.
Out of old, old habit he glanced back over the fading memory-art in his mind's eye. Of course he felt nothing. Outside those tangling, choking fits of the Flow that seized his mind, spirit and body, the emotions simply would not come to his call any more. He could still recognise the junctures where he should grieve or pine or flush warm with affection, but it was like hearing instructions in an unknown language.
He felt nothing. If only he could say the same for his body, shipwreck of the seasons that it was. Nothing had changed this year. They would let him spend another winter, crystal-clear and iron-cold, waiting without hope to die before the rending spring.
When he moved to stand - simply out of boredom - another flush of magic swept back through his limbs, redoubling the iron-dissonance and letting the next turbulent swirl of the Flow snatch him up again. It still ached - it always ached - but it wasn't the spring screaming and it wasn't the summer burning.
Mind and body fell away. And Yurahaina was watching him soberly, a dead woman living.
"I will not ask you to swear to anything," she said softly. She wore the discordant ironwings only for show. Flight was not in this Queen's psyche - either kind. "You are no child and no subject of mine, Cochalyon."
He was a fool, he was a dreamer, he did not know men, he did not know iron. Pity ruled a statesman who should have known so much better. "I'm with you to the end and beyond the end, Yurahaina. So long as your family rules, I will stand with you and stand by you. I do swear it."
"Whatever is left of my family," she replied quietly, and then looked to the east - to the darker peaks of the mountains. "I am afraid. The iron winter is coming."
"Not yet, Yurahaina. Not yet."
When Cochalyon opened his eyes again, he was staring at the iron, lying on the floor with one arm outflung in front of him.
He wasn't alone any more, either. One of the researchers sat by the door of his cell, scribbling in charcoal on a sheet of paper, a stamped wooden box beside her.
Cochalyon knew what those meant. On his darker days, he gladly traded dignity for the contents, bowing and scraping to the bitter iron-bloods. This, however, was not one of his darker days.
"Are you awake?" the moon-faced researcher asked. She was small and still quite young, though he was no judge of such things. Once upon a time, he might have been.
She also assumed, like most researchers, that he was 'sleeping' most of the time through autumn. Cochalyon raised himself on his steely-aching arms, sitting cross-legged where he'd fallen, and waited out the retreating swoop of sickness in silence. By next week or the week after, winter would have driven away the last of the fits and the worst of the pain.
The rest of the pain was permanent.
"You look awake," ventured the researcher, putting down her charcoal. "You are, aren't you?"
Cochalyon had practised long and hard to screen all kinds of things out; a squeaking man-child was no trouble. He sedulously pored over the last ghost-art memories instead, soothed by the repetition, hunting without real aim for waking emotion.
The researcher started rustling around, dislodging some of the sketches from her lap. Cochalyon looked over incuriously at his own back profile - rounded shoulders, falling hair, a shadowy crosshatch of backbone under the skin and bones pushing through the skin. His face was appearing in hints and feather-lines on another sheet.
"Here we go," said the round-faced girl, removing the lid from the wooden box. She grimaced faintly as she removed a wood-turned jar, its rim dark with what was certainly not wine, and gingerly set it down. "Fwah. Can I talk to you? Or would you rather drink first?"
It was a gruesome temptation, as always, to kill the magic for a while - to swamp the pain in his body with the giddy, chilly numbness of blood or iron. But even after all this time, it was a last resort that only the limits of desperate agony ever warranted. He didn't feel guilt, but he remembered it should be there.
"No?" the girl asked gently, speaking as if to a child. "You don't want it? Is there something else you want instead?"
"Nothing," said Cochalyon, and the flat, uninflected sound of his voice was strange to him as always, because you make everything sound like a stage production, Cochalyon!
Arathalian was speaking half in apparent exasperation and half in amusement, his child-strides swift to keep up with Cochalyon's longer, stronger walk. The tunic of the Quicksilvers looked strange in miniature as always, but Arathalian still walked like a soldier in all his guises. "What's wrong with saying 'at first light'?"
"Full-scale war is no time to be prosaic," replied Cochalyon with equally amused exasperation. He knew perfectly well that Arathalian -knew- that, but this was an old game. Arathalian pretended to be a simple, plain-speaking youth who knew little about leading; Cochalyon pretended not to notice that he was pretending; Arathalian pretended not to notice that Cochalyon was pretending not to notice he was pretending ...
"'With the daaawn,'" Arathalian said in a sepulchral tone, or as much so as his soprano voice allowed. "'We leave with the daaawn.'"
"You're small enough for me to paddle in that shape, you know." Cochalyon shook his head as he looked down at the moon fae, the ease of his genuine friendship never mixed with total trust. One day, he knew - they both knew - if the world was fair and the men of iron fell, politics might no longer allow for real friendship.
"Would that be politic?" The moon fae paused for a moment, looking skyward as a brilliant green-and-yellow shape began to spiral down overhead. "Ah. News."
It was Espayon - Cochalyon could recognise him almost at once from the wingspan. With an arc of his spring-glowing pinions and a rather grandiose swoop, the Steelbreaker swirled down and landed before Cochalyon with a last flare of buoyant magic.
"That was quick," observed Cochalyon.
"I flew too low," Espayon replied unhappily. "I got confused. Damned iron in the rock! And all these idiotic fake wings aren't helping, either!" He jerked a hand southward, indicating the encampment and presumably the moon fae scouts within.
"Espayon, when my father first explained to you that he was making you a 'diplomatic emissary', did you stop to ask him what that was?"
"Gah," came Espayon's eloquent reply. "I don't care who hears it - you'll never convince me those things aren't ridiculous."
"You can talk," replied Arathalian, amused. "I thought you were a parrot before you dropped lower."
Cochalyon grabbed a handful of Espayon's flaring green feathers. It was for show, of course - just like Espayon's exaggerated role as Outspoken Militant - but that didn't make it any less necessary.
"Blood and iron -" were both in front of his eyes again when he opened them. The sanguine jar had been moved closer to his face, the smell of its contents blending with the smell of the iron floor and iron walls. The researcher girl was still there, but she had gone back to sketching.
Once again Cochalyon sat up, slowed again by the afterflares of pain and disorientation from the churning Flow. Once again the researcher stopped her sketching and looked at him.
"You can suit yourself, of course," she said, "but drinking that might clear your head a bit, eh? Or would you like something else?"
"I want nothing."
"Are you quite -?"
"No. I want nothing. I want not to be. I want to be Unmade." A very long time ago he'd wanted things like 'freedom', 'escape', 'home', but it was too late for those to make any difference at all now. "When will you do it? I know you know how. After all this time, you must have learned."
The researcher looked unhappy, but unsurprised. He said it often to certain people - to those he could sense, with his very last relics of personal insight, might be inclined to do something about it.
"I want to ask you about Lucalyon, if I may," she replied with a soft smile, ignoring the remarks. "Tell you what - I'll talk, and if you feel like answering, go ahead and answer, okay?"
There was still one emotion that occasionally came when Cochalyon called for it.
"You speak to me with respect, iron-blood," he warned from deep in his throat, rising further onto his knees. "Not a child. Not a pet. You'll give me that if you give me nothing else."
Her expression shifted instantly to fear. Cochalyon paused to remember which feeling was supposed to come next.
"I'm sorry, sir," she said in a low voice, reverting to the human honourific. "I'm very sorry."
He picked up the wooden jar of blood. For another moment he considered drinking, but when he glanced back at the researcher, he could see the pity almost shining from her eyes as she watched.
Taking the jar by the neck, he threw the contents of the jar at her, staining her startled face crimson and streaming dark rivulets down the sketches in her lap. He was about to throw the jar as well, for good measure, but Tathrinnas snatched the spear from his hand.
"Men!" she snapped. "You're not flying anywhere. Stay put and hold your temper. There'll be plenty of iron-bloods for us all to choose from yet."
He let his arm drop and his gaze drop, grudgingly. Who could deny the latter absolutely true?