A Brother's Secret

by Andy Graham

  “We’re talking about real people, not philosophical constructs, sir.”

  “Real people cause real damage.”

  “Clever theories about why we should not take them in are just window dressing, distractions from the real issues of other people wanting what we want: stability.”

  “I said no, Chester.”

  “If you would read the analysis again, it states that legalising these people would save on policing and monitoring costs.”

  “Chester.”

  There was an edge to his voice. She pushed on, caught up in her own enthusiasm, her determination not to lose. “Why not give them swipe cards and a legal status? Make them an active part of society? They would pay back in many ways long-term, not just financially.” Or does the demonising of the foreigner appeal to something baser inside you?

  “Reread the analysis. I think you’ll find you may have misinterpreted some of the details. I think you read ‘would save on’ when you should have read ‘would add considerably to’.”

  “I know what I read—” Chester’s eyes narrowed. “Who did you pay to change it?”

  “Pay,” he said, smirking, “or encourage?”

  “Bribes and threats are not honourable solutions.”

  “Neither is feckless leadership when faced with a threat to our great nation. Foreigners are more useful to me on the other side of the border. When they live here, the distinction between them and us gets blurred. That makes it harder to maintain a simple narrative. People feel safe with simple. As a military officer you should understand that. The immigration policy stays. Dredge the Buckets again for more recruits if you need them. In the meantime, remember your duties as military commander. You still work for this government, which means, my dear General, you work for me. Dismissed.”

  Chester saluted, her blood running hot when he flipped a casual salute back. How dare he, a civilian, defile the traditions he had no right to?

  “Now, if there’s nothing else?” He pulled a screen over and started tapping on it. He flipped through images on the window-screens with a speed which left her slightly seasick. Chester was half-way to the door when he spoke. “Though it occurs to me that I may be able to take another look at the policy.”

  “Sir?”

  “The changes you made to the military boosted voluntary subscriptions, adding to the annual conscription. Am I correct?”

  She nodded slowly. Where are you going with this?

  He steepled his fingers and sat back in the one chair in his office. The five window-screens now showed identical blood moons floating crimson in a sea of black. One hung directly behind his head. The glow on his skin and the glint of red on his teeth made him look like a vampire straight from the Old Tales. “I’m not sure I would have used that as a reason to allow you some of your other changes—”

  “Then it is fortunate you are neither the ranking officer of the military nor president, sir.”

  He took a deep breath in. Steadied one twitching hand with the other. “You want more soldiers—”

  “Legionnaires.”

  “Puppets.”

  “How dare you!”

  “Listen to me.” He raised a warning finger. “The Pregnancy Directive. The one-child policy. It has stood for too long. Additionally, some relatives of mine have fallen foul of it. I find myself in the unusual position of being unable to help. The president has already dismissed the idea of a change in the law, but she has underestimated the public mood on this.”

  He was lying. But why? Changing the law would eventually give her the troops she craved, but what was in it for him? “And your proposal is?”

  “I would insist on at least two children per union and include penalties for fewer and bonuses for more. That combined with conscription would give you an army in a generation, Chester. You and the president are close. Need I say more?”

  The VP flipped through the camera feeds until he found the one he wanted. Spring sunshine washed through his office, the flood of light warming him. It drove away the memories that nipped at him. He punched a button on his screen. One of the window-screens crackled and an image of Chester appeared limping down the corridor. Her armed peacocks followed her in perfect sync, feet clicking on the ground like an officious metronome. If there were ever any trouble, would they be able to do anything in those ludicrous uniforms? Swords as well as rifles, what next? Horses and chariots?

  Chester had to be reined in; she was beginning to be as much trouble as Prothero. He could put up with her obsession for resurrecting Brettia, the country that had birthed Ailan, in return for a more efficient army. He was going to need loyalty and numbers for his plans, and her combination of fear and favours seemed to be working well. But this? Her badly disguised power grab was another matter. And once Chester had been ‘encouraged’ to play ball, he had a list of others to take the bat to. President Laudanum. David Prothero. Rose Franklin. Highest on that list was her son, Ray.

  21

  The Angel City

  After a rough chopper ride where sci-captain James hurled three times, once covering Ray’s boots with breakfast, a hike through a mountain forest with more insects than leaves did nothing for the legionnaires’ moods. The occasional twitching branch and unnatural pocket of silence which followed them up the mountain only made things worse.

  “Clumsy bastards,” Orr said. “Thought you mountain folk would be quieter trackers.”

  “Some noise is useful to flush out the prey,” Brooke replied and that was the cue for James to puke up what food was left in his stomach. From that moment, the banter between Nascimento and Orr became more bitter, Brooke’s put-downs more acerbic. After a lengthy argument revolving around the words ‘dick’, ‘Bucket Head’, ‘Nasty’, ‘Cloud People’ and countless variations of ‘fuck’, Brooke pinned Orr to one of the large white rocks dotting the slopes. Aalok sent her to march with the sci-captain. It gave Ray the chance to escape James, who looked, as Nascimento had pointed out, ‘as if he had just thrown up his own arsehole’.

  At one point, Ray thought to surprise one of their stalkers. The unresponsive figure turned out to be a wooden statue. Bearded and bare-chested, it had odd looking carvings all over its broad body. In one hand it held a rock. The statue was fiercer in its stillness than many of the posturing thugs with their cartoon-like bestiality they’d all run into in the past.

  They walked, scrabbled, slipped and trudged closer to the Donian capital. The closer they got to the Angel city, the more statues they saw: men, women, children, even the occasional dog, fierce and patient. Then the sun started its slow fall to the horizon, the ground levelled out and the tree line stopped. A few scarred stumps struggled out of the crisp white ground beyond the forest’s border. Past that was a wide expanse of open grass cut toenail-short. Towering above, on top of three large, terraced semi-circles was the Angel City.

  A crack of sticks behind them announced the arrival of their watchers. They were barely visible in the gloom. Some were on foot, others in the trees. One dangled from a branch, hanging one-handed.

  “At last,” said Orr. “My grandmother could’ve made less noise dragging her coffin out of her grave than this lot.”

  The Angel City was balanced on a large plateau. One side was walled off by a sheer rock face up, the other hung precariously off a sheer rock face down. A palisade loomed high around the village. Carved spikes glared at the sky. Spaced out between the spikes were motionless figures. Some were no more than heads. A few had helmets on. Watching. Waiting. Around the base of the palisade was another ring of statues. Some stood, most knelt. As different as they were to each other, they had some features in common. They were twice the size of a normal person, carved naked, and their faces were contorted into tortured expressions that sent a chill up Ray’s spine. “Not into guests here, are they?” he said.

  “It’s not big enough, that’s why,” Nascimento replied. “There’s no space for anyone else. It’s more of a shed than a city. Where’s the rest of it?�
�

  “Underneath us,” Aalok replied.

  “Great,” Nascimento muttered. “Tunnels. I’m not built for tunnels. Is that where the angels live, Brooke?”

  “Something lives down there, Jamerson, but not them. The angels that go down those tunnels don’t come back. Neither do the people.”

  The expression on her face killed Nascimento’s retort.

  “We’re still in Ailan, right, not Mennai?” Ray asked.

  “Technically, yes, but you may want to keep comments like that quiet,” Aalok answered. “The Donian tribes took shelter here during the Great Flood and never left. They didn’t take kindly to having their ancestral lands carved up arbitrarily when the legions came knocking.”

  Brooke’s face was impassive.

  “You’ve all been briefed. Remember, when we get in there, follow my lead.”

  “You’ve been here before, sir?” asked Orr.

  Aalok nodded. “About fifteen years ago.”

  “Sixteen,” said Brooke, so quietly Ray wasn’t sure he’d heard it.

  “We go in, make our request to enter the mountain, and I mean request, Orr,” Aalok acknowledged the other man’s scowl with a raised eyebrow, “and hope we can get out as quickly as General Chester seems to think we can.”

  “If she says it’s possible, don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to. She’s a clever fucker,” said Nascimento. “Practically won the Second GTC on her own. Should’ve been made field-marshal by now.”

  “‘Marrying the modern military to the glory of the past.’” Orr did a passable imitation of Chester’s voice and limp.

  “If you two are talking about your general,” said Aalok, “I suggest you do so with respect. Any questions?”

  They all shook their heads.

  “Let’s go.”

  A creaky wooden ramp ran up to the hill fort, cutting through the terraces. A deep trench in the first terrace had traces of a thick black liquid on its sides. A matching trench in the second was filled with garish flowers that were out of place in the frost. None of them needed Brooke’s warning not to get too close.

  The planks bent and warped as they walked. “There’s a fucking pit underneath us,” said Orr, peering through the cracks. “And it’s got big-arse spikes at the bottom.”

  Nascimento moved over to the edge of the walkway, trying hard not to obviously walk on tiptoes.

  As they approached the top of the narrowing ramp, Aalok spoke to his squad. “Every time the 10th Legion has been here before, we’ve been invaders, enforcers or executioners. We’ve always had numbers on our side. Now there are only six of us and we need the Donian people’s help. Remember that. Behave accordingly.”

  The gates were bolted and barred. Orr’s finger hovered over the safety on his rifle as an older man and woman stepped from the ragtag group of waiting people. The rest of what Nasc muttered was an ‘unwelcoming party’ watched. One man tossed a rock from hand to hand. Lying on the ground between the villagers were several large dogs, their triangular ears twitching. Above and behind the legionnaires, most of the figures that had been watching from the top of the palisade turned out to be hollowed out wooden statues. Sitting in and between some of those statues were more Donian people, armed with anything from bows and spears to rocks and what looked like old, bullet-firing rifles.

  Aalok laid his weapons at the feet of the couple. The rest of the squad followed suit. Orr, eyeing the people around them, was more hesitant.

  “Captain Aalok,” said the Donian man who stepped forwards. He had the weathered, thick-fingered look of a man who had worked outside all his life. “The years have been kind to you. And you’ve been promoted. Not to major, though. Your old demons still haunt you?”

  “My demons are some of my oldest friends. You’ve been promoted, too, Karaan.”

  “Selected. Not promoted. We earn our place here.” He stroked the white handle-barred moustache embedded within his greying beard. “We’re not so lost to your art of genetics that we believe the skills of leadership are passed on from parent to child.” The tone of voice was probing, challenging.

  “My father was a nurse, my mother a teacher,” Aalok replied. “Some of us still have to earn our place.”

  Karaan nodded, conceding the point. The man who had been playing with the rock stood up and his dog rose with him. The villager’s face was the colour of a winter morning with a sneer to match. He couldn’t have been much younger than Brooke but the stubble across his head showed more white than anything else.

  Nose to nose, he eyeballed each legionnaire in turn, a gleam in his pink-tinted pupils. He smirked when James took a step backwards, and smiled broadly when Orr moved forwards to press the rim of his helmet into his forehead.

  The woman standing next to Karaan called out words Ray didn’t understand. The Donian man backed down, muttering something Ray hoped he hadn’t understood. The ghostly-skinned man made an elaborate, mocking bow to Orr, and moved on to Brooke. He waved his hand in front of her face. Her vision never wavered. He whispered something into her ear. She didn’t react. He spat on the ground in front of her feet and, when she still didn’t move, he made to kiss her on the cheek.

  She spat in his face. “Get your hands off me.”

  He wiped the spittle off his skin, teeth bared. Dodged Orr’s clumsy grab for him and twisted away. The hackles rose on the dog’s neck as a shiver ran through the watching crowd. The older woman yelled something. The villager smirked at Orr and swaggered back to his friends, dog by his side.

  “Back in line,” Aalok said quietly. Orr was fuming. Brooke, once more, stood as still as one of the Donian statues.

  “Are you here to kill us?” Karaan asked, smoothing his beard into a fine point. Ray got the impression the gesture was to hide his smile. “Or return one of our children?”

  “We have a request,” replied Aalok.

  “Yet another request from the government of Ailan. We are popular at the moment. Yet this time it is sent by an armed squad of special forces rather than ambassadors and scientists. Diplomacy at its finest.”

  The man who had been taunting them spun the rock in his palm. “Lambs led by liars.” He threw the rock to one of his friends, who plucked it out of the air without looking at it.

  The woman standing to Karaan’s side whispered something in his ear. Above her green eyes, a multitude of steel clips of all shapes and sizes glinted in her grey hair. Karaan nodded and turned back to Aalok. “I have not forgotten the debt of your people but it appears I have forgotten my manners. Please, follow me. We have heat and a hearth.”

  “And we seek meat and water,” Aalok replied formally.

  A smile flashed across Karaan’s face. “You look like one of us and you still remember our customs. It is good to see you, Reza.” He looped his arms around Aalok’s shoulders and led them away from the closed gates. “Come,” he looked at the legionnaires with hard eyes, “the Rivermen have a special place in our hearts here.”

  The Angel City was a strange mix of old and new. It was completely alien to Nascimento, who was Gate born, bred and bled. But for Ray, elements were familiar: the scratched up dot-matrix notice board, weather-vanes and wood piles. Like the people of Tear, the Donians had a central fire, where they now gathered under a sky scattered with stars. Unlike Ray’s village, many of the trees were behind bars. Some of the heartwood trees even had roses entwined around the blackened, vertical struts. Ray looked for Brooke to explain the need for cages but she had disappeared. Aalok was deep in conversation with Karaan and Kaleyne, the woman who had been by the older man’s side at the gates. Through the flames, the Donian man that had been forced to back down stared at them, only breaking his gaze to spit in the fire. Orr returned that glare.

  “Let it go, Baris,” Nascimento said.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” Orr replied. “I’m not sure any of you do. You Gate-born look down on us from the Towns. Who do the Free Towns look down on? My home. New Town is still the butt of all the Bu
cket jokes, even though it no longer exists. Those of us who are alive get it from all sides, all the time. Where I was from, unless you’re ripping someone off, you’re being ripped off. If you don’t fight, you don’t get.” He jerked a thumb across the fire. “What that kid is after is plain in any language.”

  Ray took some food from a village boy with a tangle of black hair. A wolf carcass was being turned by a crooked-legged spit dog in his wheel. Ray wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be a message or not. Aalok had told them that the villagers didn’t always use dogs to turn the spit. Stubborn teenagers had been known to be sentenced to a spell in the wheel. Better that than on the spit, Ray reasoned. Orr waved his plate away and Nascimento grabbed it. “Who do you look down on?” he asked Orr through a mouthful of piping hot meat.

  “Depends on my mood.”

  Nascimento opened his mouth to reply, but Brooke returned at that moment. Her hair was damp, her top button undone. For once, Nascimento and Orr kept their mouths shut. One was absorbed in the food, the other in the brewing tension opposite.

  A bunch of kids started playing tag with a hard ball. The rules seemed simple: hit the other kid with the ball, don’t let them get the ball. The game regularly descended into a pile of rucking bodies with someone stuck at the bottom. A few younger children were playing the same game with a ball of wool. For all their ragged coordination, it seemed no less violent. Ray caught what he hoped was a stray throw at his head, tossed the ball back and nudged Brooke. “You have a nice time, catching up with old friends?”

  “Leave it.”

  “Just asking, Brooke.”

  “That’s what you call yourself now?” It was the villager with ice-coloured skin, his voice thick with bitterness. “Your own name not good enough, so you take one of theirs?”