The Tyrant's Novel

by Thomas Keneally

  Young Hugo Carter, who had frankly disliked the long claustrophobic crawl along a thousand-meter L-shaped pipe when we were in training, was also honest with me about how he hated the mask and gloves. They added to his feelings of being forgotten by God, by all but his indulgent mother back in the city. Besides, he murmured to me, we're the ones who use the damned gas. They use mass immolation.

  Carter and I provided a seasoning of city Mediationist boys to ranks considered too heavily Intercessionist. The southern Intercessionists were popularly looked on as hayseeds and cannon fodder. They came from a background of folk superstition and religious fundamentalism. Many were only chancily literate. But they deserved—in my experience of them—a little more respect. They had kept solidarity with us in our struggle against the Others, even though there were a majority of Intercessionists across the straits as well, in the opposing army—indeed, among the officer corps.

  Southerners had, however, begun to complain, as taxis from the front delivered their dead young men in coffins, octopus-strapped to the vehicles' roofs, that we secular, urban, take-it-or-leave-it Mediationists were letting them carry the burden of casualties. It had until then been very easy for people like Carter and myself to become officers or to get exemptions. We could plead a special area of expertise, or say that our studies added to the strength of the state. In a sense it was more important than anything we could do militarily. But because of all this Intercessionist complaint, in the year Hugo Carter and I were conscripted, no excuses were accepted, no commissions were available. We were two students of humanities. What did we have to offer a state with such an ancient and complex culture except our lives?

  Carter and I, with the same birthday, and from the same faculty at the university, stuck together, but we rather got to like the southerners, with their casual, earthy humor which escaped the net of orthodoxy. They were brave and practical young men. On good evenings, drinking coffee round the campfire, we felt the normal solidarity of untried troops. Our training was the usual banal stuff, relayed in a thousand tales of a thousand wars—crawling, lunging, presenting weapons for inspection, throwing one grenade to find out what the experience was like, counting one-two-three until the NCO told you to duck down behind the wall of stone. Such technicians of death were we! Considerable esprit. Considerable amounts of banter. You city types aren't such bastards as we thought. And, You pig-fucking hicks aren't so bad either. The army is an education, if only you survive it.

  We stood on disputed ground—these oil well regions and islands had been ceded by an earlier government to the Others, but we had no doubt that this earlier accommodation had been nothing but that, an adjustment made under superior political, diplomatic, and military force. Thus, between the redneck Intercessionists and the most religiously casual Mediationists, we had no doubt that this country of tall reeds, sand dunes, eroding granite, and oil wells was our inheritance, to be retained.

  Carter and I had arrived on the Summer Island front in time to be put to work on the latest national triumph—a thirty-mile canal which ran through the sand dunes and reed beds right across the island, a mile wide. Though mere infantrymen trained in the use of the trench mortar, we were put to work on placing steel reinforcements along the banks, and then carrying stones from a nearby hill to make the bottom of this vast ditch uneven for a potential, wading enemy. At the southern end of the island, many of the reed beds which had been studiously drained during the days of the British Mandate after World War I were now flooded to make similar barriers—wide, shallow pools, requiring attackers to wade towards the assault.

  After our work on the canal, we went to defend the southern marshes, living in superbly crafted bunkers amidst the dunes and the scattered granite outcrops. Between us, Carter and I made up a trench mortar team led by an Intercessionist corporal who had been in the army for years and who rather loved having two city boys at his mercy.

  The bunkers we lived in behind the trench lines were a physical sign of the contact between Great Uncle and his soldiers. Many were equipped with bunks, and they were sturdy since, comfortingly, Great Uncle did not want casualties. Heavy casualties might yet win him the war but lose him the peace. That was one of the reasons our French-built Gazelle helicopters were sometimes seen to drop over the marshes, on the other side of the straits, five-gallon drums which we knew to be mustard gas cocktails fitted with a burster charge.

  More interestingly we sometimes saw professional-looking, more shapely bombs descending from the bays of our aircraft. To save our lives, Great Uncle was dropping gas and nerve agents and committing a war crime against the Others. We were forbidden to speak about this knowledge, and everywhere we went we were meant to have gas mask at hip in case the dosage accidentally came our way. But the weak prevailing wind of the straits, generally from the west, favored us when it came to mustard gas. That didn't mean the Others could not, if they chose to, destroy a battalion of us with a little canister of tabin nerve gas, if they had it in stock. Tabin tended to be denser, so the gossip had it, and to stick more to the place where it was dropped, penetrating even the ground on which the Others lay.

  Every late afternoon we were shelled from across the straits—again dependent on the stocks of shells and missiles the Others had to hand. Most of us sheltered in the bunkers at these times. Hugo Carter and I surprised ourselves by our calmness under these projectiles as large as 122 millimeters. We believed in our cement roofs in the same way we believed in our mothers, even allowing for the fact mine was dead. We were ready at our officers' commands to emerge and take up position by our dug-in guns and tanks should the shelling be harbinger to an assault. We got quite used to this thunder—again, I amazed myself in that regard. Generally, the Others left the oil wells to the north of the island alone—for they hoped, by defeating us here, to inherit them.

  It was the first assault which was a great shock to Hugo and me. They came in small dinghies and were seen in the first light of day crossing a broad swath of shallows in breathtaking numbers. By not preparing us with cannon, they had nearly stolen a march. Carter and I were in our trench and by our mortar within seconds, hauling the tarpaulin off, and calibrating its trajectory at the corporal's orders. The zealous Intercessionist youths whom the Others chose to breed came rabidly ashore, purple bands around their foreheads, immolating themselves willingly on our mines. This was, in its way, an astonishing savagery they imposed on their own. They allowed young bodies to be torn to gobbets of flesh on the promise the heavenly and perfected body would be divinely reassembled in the world after death. The better trained regular army came on behind, walking in the path made by the martyrs. They knew the low granite island top behind our trenches would give access to the oil well roads, and so they came en masse at our positions. Carter and I were relieved to be able mindlessly to keep feeding the trench mortar, but then, because it was not a sophisticated instrument, our corporal told us to cease, the enemy was too close, and to grab our weapons. I closed my eyes as I fired at the lines of men sixty yards away, not wanting to know anything. I continued thus for ten minutes, concentrating on my task, reloading magazines with eyes open, shooting blind. Many others, I'm sure, did the same, yet some good fortune attended our blinkered firing, because it became apparent we had beaten the Others back. God help them, said the corporal, showing fraternal feeling for a moment. It's just a pause, someone said. It's just a pause.

  Next morning, about the same hour, they came back in apparently bigger numbers. We emerged from our bunkers wearing our gas masks. Gradually, because of heat, most of our fellow soldiers took them off, given that the Others were not wearing them in the first place.

  Their martyrs were pathetically willing again, and Hugo began weeping for them as we served the trench mortar. But we could not make their regulars depart as they had on their previous attack. They captured a section of trench on the flank of the granite hill, so that all of us had to withdraw to the secondary line of fortifications. I could tell that our officers consid
ered this serious. In the afternoon they were able to land their artillery, which fired all that following night. It was a scale of fire I had never heard before, and we huddled now in our mothering cement, pitying the men on watch in the trenches.

  Deprived of rest, I felt mad, deranged, jangled. As Carter and I, the night having turned cold, huddled against the jolting wall of a bunker, I asked, Did the air force drop gas today?

  If they hadn't, we both wished they had. We knew that if they kept on firing and sent their men in under the protection of the guns, we would be forced out of our hole to face it all.

  We were all in our positions by four-thirty in the morning, an august and terrifying moment in which the sun rose before the straits, blinding us with glory and terror. A heavy artillery exchange began, during which we were required to remain in the trenches, all our senses ringing and juddering inhumanly. The tanks from both sides joined in the orchestra. Though both our French and Russian suppliers had equipped them with sophisticated land-computing sights, these were beyond the understanding of most of our tank men, who simply surrounded their vehicle with a bunker and fired away like fixed artillery pieces. Yes, yes. I could rave along about such subtleties of our conflict, the Others and us, the southern Intercessionist yahoos incompetent with their tanks, but Carter and I, city-slicker nominal Mediationists, were no better anyhow, timorously feeding our trench mortar and hoping that it was an instrument of sufficient death. Our bombers were all at once there, no more than a few hundred feet above us, dominant as the artillery eased and as the Others came roaring forward. As Carter and I and the corporal took our positions, I saw the steel canisters descend from the bellies of the bombers. They might have been smoke bombs to obscure the battlefield—though I knew they were not that, for what was the purpose?

  The use of gas is a crime against the conventions of war. And yet some of my fellow citizens had taken the risk of removing one dangerous commodity, phosphorus, from these bombs, and replacing it with another volatile entity, mustard or nerve gas, or a blessed cocktail of both.

  Our corporal called to Carter and me as we fed the mortar, Your masks! Put on your masks, for God's sake! The wind was sluggish from the west that dawn, but the profile of the granite mound behind us caused it to skitter in a little eddy there. Our corporal knew this. Intercessionists, being chiefly country people, understood these subtleties of breeze.

  Get your masks on!

  I put mine on. Mine's in the bunker, Hugo yelled—rather I half read his lips as saying that. Yet he could not go for it. An officer would see him as fleeing and would put a bullet in his head. Whatever was in the canisters our planes had dropped, it seemed to barely add to the weight of the air. There was screaming all over the battlefield, but that is quite normal. The corporal and I wore our gas masks, and I looked through the lenses at barefaced Carter and envied him the clearer air he breathed, the lack of obstruction.

  It became apparent that the Others were withdrawing to the positions they had left that morning. What I was aware of was a curious noise in the new, hollow silence; human animals, having tested the M16 against the AK-47, the American 122-millimeter howitzer against the entrenched Russian T65 cannon, were now filling the sky with the same orphaned howl. My hands burned, and I lifted them to the eyepieces of my mask and saw that they were red and blistering, exactly as they felt. I saw then as I swept my masked head to left and right that our trench was an abattoir. There were dead and living horrors, the disemboweled complaining about the spillage of their organs, or reconciling themselves to it; the beheaded and delimbed who made no further complaint, and the defaced, a man whose visage was now bleeding steak containing perhaps one horrific amazed eye. Everywhere in the trench and for hundreds of miles beyond it, mewling and calls for rebirth were heard, screams and invocations to a God who had been asked for something cleaner and swifter than had been given.

  My hands, I said. They itched crazily and I waved them in air to cool them.

  What? asked Carter. He could not hear me distinctly through my mask. He was, however, distracted by the state of his own hands. He sat red-faced at the bottom of our trench, and began sneezing. He drew a bunched hand down the length of his nose, as if to clear the nostrils. Then he dragged the hand into the shadow of his left shoulder and hunched forward, shivering. Officers and NCOs ran along the trench telling those of us who had masks to keep them on. I saw a blister forming on Carter's cheek. I stopped rubbing my hands since it made skin come away. I got permission to go to the bunker a hundred yards back and fetch Carter's mask. I ran, cursing away at my hands, and looked in a pile of military gear for his mask.

  When I skittered back with it in my smarting hands, the masked corporal was leaning over Hugo, swearing at him tenderly. Private Carter raised his welted face to me. His eyes had swollen closed. Flesh had begun to fall away like a beard from his blistered cheeks. I tried to put the mask on him but he shook his head with what I thought of as the irritable stubbornness of a man in temporary pain. When he persisted a while I realized he was not only blinded but had lost all reason. The corporal hammered me on the shoulder. Give it up, he told me. Carter vomited and began to convulse. An officer came up to me and said through his mouthpiece, Shoot him! I looked stupidly at the officer, mask to mask. Isn't he your friend? I heard the officer ask. It's a cocktail this time. Indeed, Carter seemed to be choking. Froth had formed on his lips. The officer leveled his pistol and thunderously shot Carter dead. The air was punctuated now with similar mercy shots, both sides of the line exercising the same compassion, though they would no doubt spare some of their treatable cases to ship them to hospital in Switzerland, and show the world how Great Uncle violated international agreements.

  We were stood-to throughout the day, but there were no further attacks by the Others. In our section of line we treated our hands with soothing blister cream, donned white gloves, helped the wounded back to ambulances, buried the dead, and in a gully behind the line, beneath the small scarp for which the Others had been trying, we made a pile of the unsightly and unlucky dead whose nervous systems had been attacked by the nerve agent which had accidentally fallen amongst our regiment. The bodies we had removed to the gully, some seventy, were—and this was thoroughly understood—not to go home. A special team wearing white clothing appeared to attend to the ultimate total consumption of Carter's and the other bodies, burning them in a white-limed communal grave.

  That night the enemy withdrew, in boats small and large, across the straits. We did not at once occupy the wing of the island they left vacant—it was vastly contaminated with mustard and tabin. The officers moved us to a safer part of the line, where, maskless and gloveless, we sat at ease, disbelieving all that had happened and still full of a grief which had not yet come to focus itself. Gentlemen, a colonel told us as we sat on the ground in a mass, we have survived, and not without the great help of certain agents dropped from planes. We have sustained lower casualties than the enemy. You have seen some of your more negligent comrades perish accidentally. You are, let me make it absolutely clear, to deny all knowledge of this. You did not see it happen. If you say otherwise, you will pay the penalty and your unpensioned body will be sent home in a black coffin. Be aware—you did not need to suffer death yourselves, but all because a merciful regime has separated you from it by the special application of these chemicals and other agents.

  It has to be said that this point seemed perfectly reasonable to the regiment in the midst of which I sat, and to me as part of that multicelled unit.

  So, said the colonel, your friends are all officially not dead but taken prisoner. You will comfort the parents of the men you were friendly with. Any mother or wife who turns up at the Ministry of Defense with a complaint that her missing son is dead will be traced straight back to the one who said so. You've been blessed, boys, under God. Stay blessed. I will interview you individually over the coming week and ensure you are willing to keep this compact.

  Why would I not be willing, Mrs. Cart
er, to tell you that your son was a prisoner? What would you rather I had told you? That his flesh melted before my eyes?

  It was as this true tale burst forth from me in what I saw as the last month of my life that I perceived the answer, there in the colonel's speech.

  I had only to tell the truth to that serial nuisance of my life, Mrs. Carter, I had only to ask her pardon for the long, well-meaning, state-advised deceit. And it seemed so easy to say what had not been said before, and so wholesome not to take this pretense to the grave. A mercy to me, a mercy to her. The colonel had said it would take only a mother or a wife turning up at the Ministry of War, asking was the story true, to ensure that the source would be traced back, and the former soldier punished. It could not be counted McBrien's fault, or his wife's, that I became suddenly reckless with Mrs. Carter, loading her with the real news, saving the remnant of her life from the vigil she'd been keeping for the better part of six years.

  I called Mrs. Carter, and she was so grateful and excited I almost hung up.

  I'm so sorry I didn't get a chance to offer my condolences personally at the funeral of your dear wife, she said. I was waiting to do so, but they told me you had been overcome. I can understand that.

  I told her I wanted to come and see her now. It was the first approach I had made since the one following my return home from the front, during which I told my consoling lie. I could hear the mounting excitement in her voice. I, the bereaved, who had survived the battle of Summer Island but had lost a wife, was coming as a peer to compare grief with her whose son was amongst the great unnamed of the POW camps over there. I, who had had all the luck and the beautiful actress wife and a fledging repute, would now approach her as an equal in loss. I feared, of course, that I would be greeted with a table groaning with pastries and biscotti. We would eat the feast of grief together—worse still, she would see me gorging myself for no purpose, the pain still there whatever the skill of the patissier.