The Report

Chen dropped the tube. It rolled across the boards and came to rest against a boot. Neither the man nor the head acknowledged the sound, and that was the worst of it, the way a chair or a lantern does not answer when you startle it.

Then the head's eyes moved. They found him across the desk, and the mouth, the mouth was quite dry and the lips were blue at the edges, opened, and the General spoke to him as if he were a late clerk rather than a courier with a sealed report.

You're late, the General said. His voice came from the head on the desk, and it sounded as a voice does when a man shouts underwater: clear enough, but thick, as though it had come up a long way through cold water.

Sir, Chen managed. He could not look away. He had decided, with the part of his mind that still worked, that if he did not look directly at the thing he might not go mad before he had finished his errand.

I brought the report, the General said, as though correcting a boy who has misremembered a date. The report has been brought. What remains is to finish it. The ridge was taken at the third charge. The losses are the thing that must be counted plainly, without softening, without pride, without any of the lies men tell in victory.

Chen's eyes dropped to the page in spite of himself. The brush was still moving. The writing was the old man's hand, the hand he knew from a hundred ledgers: firm, slanted, the characters thick where the General pressed. It listed names. It listed arrows and spears and the cost of both in cash and in boys.

You should call the surgeons, the General said. They will not come. I have already been to them, more or less, and they crossed themselves and walked away as fast as their boots would carry them. A man can only bleed so far, and then the body, being a practical thing, takes itself in hand, whether the head approves or not.

Sir, your, Chen gestured vaguely at the empty neck. Your head.

My head is on the desk, the General agreed. It is not comfortable. It is, however, in reach, and it is finishing the sentence. A sentence is a duty. A duty is not a thing you lay down the moment it becomes inconvenient to carry. If it were, every clerk in the army would have resigned by breakfast.

Outside, the coughing stopped. Somewhere a dog began to howl at the moon and was quickly hushed. The lamp flickered once and steadied itself, as even a lamp could tell there was work still to be done.

The General dipped his brush. The armored hand did this without a tremor, as though the arm below were merely a cleverly designed tool. Chen understood, suddenly, that the old man was not a ghost. He was worse than a ghost, and more respectable. He was a man who had kept his appointment.