Finished

By the fourth watch the report was nearly done. The General's hand had slowed, as a scribe's hand slows at the end of a long night. It had been writing for a very long time, longer than a hand ought to write, even one attached to a man with a head on his shoulders.

There is one more line, the General said. Add it, and make it plain. The campaign is over. Tell the quartermaster to feed the prisoners before he feeds the horses. Horses forget themselves quickly; prisoners remember every bowl you deny them, and one day they will be in the cities.

Chen wrote it. He watched the General dip the brush for the very last time. The hand made the final characters carefully, as a man does when he knows the words are his own and will not be edited by anyone living, and the brush moved a little more slowly than it had an hour before.

Then the armored hand set the brush in its rest. It did this with great care, the way a clerk closes a ledger at the end of his life's work, and the brush clicked against the porcelain of its dish as if it too knew it had been set down for the last time.

Well, the General's head said. That is that. A neat word, that. That is that.

The eyes on the desk looked at Chen. They were not angry, and they were not afraid. They were the eyes of a man who has handed in his paper and is waiting, without impatience, to be dismissed.

You may leave, the General said. And Chen, who had begun to think the old man would write until the camp itself rotted about him, found that he wanted to say something. He could not think what a man says to a head on a desk.

He bowed instead. It was the least he could do for a commander who had kept his own counsel, and his own appointment, at a cost most men would have resigned over before the first noon.

When he stepped back out into the camp, the two guards were still on the bank, and nothing in the outer dark had changed. They looked at him, and he shook his head once, and one of them let out his breath in a long, slow way that might have been relief or might have been pity. Chen never asked which, and neither guard offered to tell him, and after a while the three of them simply sat there together and watched the east go grey.

He carried the report to headquarters before the dawn, walking fast and holding the tube under his arm as if it might catch cold. The clerk there read it, nodded, stamped it with the great seal, and said the General would be pleased when he heard. Chen did not tell him the General was pleased already. Some duties, he had learned that long night, are finished by the man who holds them, and no one else need ever know the manner of it.