Yuen glanced at him sharply. “How do you know their content?”
Daae shrugged sadly. “I read them when I was living in the private barracks too. When you are young, a few hours’ punishment drill in full kit is not too high a price to pay for a dream.”
Menelaus said, “Well, these stories were written by a half-breed Beta-Gamma crossover named Gibson. When an author of a cheaplie could paste in previous text without rewrite, he did. Since, as I said, the aiming camera survived, most of the dialogue was taken word for word from Hermetic D’Aragó’s last words; but the surrounding events were all fiction cobbled together from other sources. And the ending of the story, ‘So I lived happily ever after,’ was the way Larz of the Gutter ended all his fictional exploits.”
Yuen said, “But Larz described what the Judge of Ages looked like!”
Menelaus said, “He described the face of the actor who portrayed the Judge of Ages in the wirecast version of the story, when it was later made into a play.”
Yuen said, “And how would you know that?”
Menelaus looked sheepish. “The Judge of Ages has often appeared in paintings and statues and animations. The Witches made a lot of pictures of him. You’d be surprised at how little one resembles the next, almost as if someone were trying to divaricate the visual information across history. At one time, I set about compiling a large collection of such images. It was for a monograph I never wrote concerning data degradation.”
Yuen said, “Of a fictional character? Such a monograph would seem to serve no military purpose.”
Menelaus looked mildly offended. “As you say, sir.”
Yuen said, “But why change the name from Bretchlouder to Quire?”
Menelaus said, “The decadence that causes and is caused by the death throes of a culture always aggravates sexual perversion. Being a ‘breech-loader’ in the days when the book was written had an indelicate second meaning, and Gibson, the author, no doubt thought it best to name his character Quire, the old word for ‘veteran-citizen,’ rather than a name that might raise a snicker.”
Daae said, “Beta Anubis, why do you assume that the man who killed the Hermeticist D’Aragó was not indeed the Judge of Ages?”
Menelaus shrugged. “Because I do not believe in the Judge of Ages. Permission to speak freely?”
“Granted,” said Daae.
“This Judge of Ages, if he is a real man, must have the flaws and shortcomings of a real man. He has no more power than I do to win the battle we face. We can look to no help for him, even if he were real. Right now the gate is weakly held, but not for long. As soon as the Blue Men realize Kine Larz—or whatever his real name is—is a fake, they will fall back from the doors. But even my suggestion, sir, requires the aid of the Witches.”
Yuen said, “Witches, bah! They are despicable cowards! The day when I kiss a Witch will come sooner than the day Witches and Chimerae could ever fight shoulder to shoulder against a foe!”
Daae (to whom the Witches were a legendary menace rather than recent or potent one) spoke in a voice of dry irony. “Gargle with wine to sweeten your breath, then, Proven Alpha Yuen. For here come the Witches in all their numbers.” And he raised his finger and pointed.
The rotund bulk of Melechemoshemyazanagual the Warlock of Williamsburg was gliding up the wintry slope toward them, adorned with an acre of black and scarlet silk, and the sephiroth, sigils, and trigrams glistered with many colors. His face was half-hidden beneath his headgear, a cone a foot and a half high. Despite his bulk, the obese man made no noise at all as he approached, and he seemed, somehow, to leave no footprints behind him.
With him were thirty others: the whole population of Witches in the camp.
10. Joint Command
Even at a distance, the difference between the nobles and the commoners of the Witch Era was clear: The Coven leaders were women unusually tall, and they walked with the stiffness and care of great age. The same genetic tinkering and geriatric treatments a Witch enjoyed from before her birth until after she was an octogenarian stimulated growth patterns in totipotent cells throughout her long life, whereas the commoners used up their entire supply of totipotent cells before birth, and the timing mechanisms in the human body allowed for no more growth, no more youth, after adolescence. The growing patterns that kept them young kept them growing throughout life.
The crowd of Witches stopped at the foot of the slope, and only seven figures came forward: Mickey and six others. The women elders carried charming wands cut from willow trees from which dangled skulls of rodents and small birds.
Four of the figures were ancient women seven or eight feet tall, with features as dignified and withered as old statues, and hair as white as snow, wearing hoods even taller. These crones loomed over Mickey. They wore sable and dark blue regalia, worked with images of crabs and carrion birds, and their peaked hoods hid all but their wrinkled stern mouths.
The fifth woman, the one in white, was a maiden who looked to be in her late teens, but she carried herself with the poise and dignity of a mother: a forty-year-old soul in a fourteen-year-old body. She was five feet high or less, dressed a simple dress of white cotton trimmed with peach satin, and she wore her hair in a snood.
The final witch, as tall as her sisters, was garbed in scarlet, pink, and dark red, buxom as a Nymph, though stouter, and her peaked hat was wide-brimmed.
The Witches of lower ranks were no less splendidly dressed. A hunter wore a wolfpelt at his shoulders and a uniform of Lincoln’s green, a husbandman wore designs of grain stalks and hayricks, a vintner wore grapeleaf patterns adorning purple, the mason’s garb was bedecked with the triangle and square of his order over a pattern of red bricks. From the time of the Nameless Empire were factory hands whose uniforms were woven with a pattern of cogwheels and smoke clouds; from the same era, an apothecary wore robes adorned with serpents and birds, and an alchemist’s dress was a pattern of spiral molecular chains woven about with formulae in ancient letters.
There were a dozen members of the feared Demonstrator caste here too, wearing cloaks of flayed and cured human skin-leather, feces wiped in the hair, and their faces painted horribly with black ink, and about their necks clattered the tiny fingerbones of dismembered children: several sported a bone or needle piercing the septum of his nose, or the flesh of cheek, earlobe, or lip.
The crones, as they came upslope, by way of greeting, uttered yips and yowls, owl screech and wolf howl somehow both ridiculous and horrific to hear.
Mickey stepped forward, pointed his wand at Menelaus, and beckoned, “Beta Sterling Xenius Anubis of Mount Erebus, I charge and summon thee to approach.”
Menelaus turned his eyes toward Daae. “Sir—”
Daae said, “Speak for us. Yuen, go with him, and repudiate any word of his not in keeping with the honor of the Alpha gene-Caste.”
The two men trudged forward in the snow, and Menelaus drew his hood close to his cheeks, either from the cold, or hoping to hide his expression. Menelaus would have been free to talk to Mickey and arrange terms, had Yuen stayed back out of earshot.
Mickey turned and turned again, and drew a large circle on the snowy ground with his staff. “Here is my circle of Power! Within it, all who walk tread lightly on their Mother Earth, leaving no trace when they die; and all goods are held in common; and all class-enemies, all enmities, inequalities, and patriarchy must be left outside, and cannot pass my ninefold wards! I call upon Jadis and Jahi, Phoebe and Prudence, Sabrina and Samantha, Willow and Wendy, to watch the sacred bounds!”
Menelaus went up to him, stepping into the circle, and said softly, “Uh. You do know all those people watching your sacred bounds are, um, made up from kiddie pixies and texts and toons, right? Make-believe?”
Mickey drew himself upright, which thrust his belly out even farther, and the scowl on his face was like a line drawn in a pie pan filled with raw dough. “Many records survived from the Days of Fire—the Final Archive listed nine hundred thousand references
to the beloved Witch Hermione alone, not to mention Gillian Holroyd and Glinda the Good! Would you have us believe that the ancients devoted so much emphasis, effort, and attention to what they knew to be merely idle fictions?! Next you will claim that the warlocks Klingsor and Castaneda are unreal!”
One of the She-Witches, a towering and hatchet-faced crone as thin as a rail, tramped forward on long angular steps to reach the side of Mickey, and stood like a black minaret next to a dark dome.
“The spell is incomplete!” she said. And with her charming wand she drew a cross in the snow. “Depart the circle, trample this cross, and reenter.”
Menelaus said, “But, begging your pardon, ma’am, we Chimerae don’t believe in things like that.”
She pushed back her hood and bent her thin, gray face down toward Menelaus. She had shaved her scalp in an Irish tonsure, shorn over the head from ear to ear, leaving a patch of white dangling from her brow and a hem hanging from the back of her skull. “The gesture is significant! It shows our freedom from superstition!”
Yuen sidled close, his footsteps like those of a panther. He spoke in clear and unaccented Virginian (which, in his time, was still a living language), “It is known among our Kine that this cross is a symbol of an unarmed and dead man. Chimerae slur only armed and living men, able to retaliate.”
The crone favored him with a reptilian stare. “I am not armed, and I live, and yet it insults me if you do not step on the cross and blot it out, to enter the circle.”
Yuen’s face was colder and his one eye more unwinking with fury than normal even for him as he stamped the mark in the snow angrily with his foot, but he did not step within the circle. “Our age was the first in all history to be free of trumpery and priestcraft and all the deception of hope in afterlife. I will not betray that heritage. Gladly I trample the long-dead superstition you hate, but likewise I scorn the long-dead superstition you serve.”
She opened her mouth to object, showing her oddly narrow yellow teeth, but Mickey said in his jovial voice, “Come, Grandmother, we are proposing alliance, not a friendship. Copulation partners need not like each other: the man gives seed and the woman outlives him. Is this not the way of life? These are those who outlived our race. You do not know them, but they come from my days, when they outnumbered us, and their strength was terrifying, but so also was their honor. No spell will hold them in any case. If the Earth is sacred, is not all ground sacred? It is not our way to avoid confrontation, and outwait, and outlive?”
This seemed to mollify her.
Menelaus said diplomatically in Virginian, “We are, of course, curious about the opinions and concerns of all gathered here, but time harasses us all: can we not address our plea for alliance to the commanding officer of the Witches?”
Yuen said, “They are from different times and continents, and live in anarchy, having nothing in common but their superstitions.”
Menelaus said in Chimerical, “They are influenced by the shadow each one casts. The one with the greatest shadow will draw the others. That one there—” He nodded at the youngest witch present, the one dressed in white. “Ask to be introduced to her.”
Yuen said to Mickey, “You! Introduce us to the maiden.”
There was a reaction from the gathered Witches, a glint in the eyes, a sharp intake of breath.
Mickey said ceremoniously to Yuen and Menelaus: “Your leader can see partway beyond the veil, to know she whom we hold highest, though she walks with humblest garb among us.” Mickey now bowed very low. “She is the youngest but also the eldest of us. We call her Fatin. We are not certain of her coven, cell, or sept or assignment. She is eldest and speaks last. What she says, none dares unsay.”
Fatin stepped forward. “Call me Fatin Simon Fay. I am of the Delphic Acroamatic Progressive Transhumanitarian Order for the study of Longevity. The Order also experiments in altered states of consciousness, including the stimulation of lateral-format pattern-seeking modes that do not develop naturally in women until after one hundred and twenty or one hundred and forty years, and which were, in times past, mistaken for senility, or dismissed as women’s intuition. The human race would not even be aware of these ulterior forms had the limitations of the man-imposed so-called normal life span been accepted! The Giants, for all their vast intelligence, can neither plan as far ahead as we, nor can they see the patterns of events we see. They regard what we do as witchcraft, but that merely betrays the inflexibility of their thinking.”
Yuen said, “You are an unwed girl?”
Fatin, who was probably (despite her looks) considerably older than Yuen, narrowed her eyes at him. “I am pre–sexually active, yes. We have dispensed with marriage customs. We regard the word ‘girl’ as a deadly insult. You must say ‘living organism each with his or her or its place in the ecologic web not superior to any other.’”
“You are an unwed organism no better than a bug?” Yuen said, “And yet you command the Witches?”
Fatin said stiffly, “We don’t have ranks like that. The elder advise the younger. But since I come from the age when the Simon Families were still intact, that makes me eldest, so my advice carries more weight than anyone else’s. I am the one who decided we had to throw in with you.”
Yuen said, “Why?”
Fatin said, “Two reasons. The first is because Melechemoshemyazanagual had a bad dream.”
Mickey said solemnly, “I have flown in a vision in the shadow of the hawk, and I have seen that the lands to every side of us are empty of life. And yet there is a power in the sea that will surpass us all. I saw the moon drip blood, and from the south came one the shapen like unto a tower with neither top nor foundation; but I also saw a figure adorned as a judge before an execution, riding a pale horse, and a pale wand deadlier than any sword was in his hands, and voices cried out from below the earth, prophesying doom.”
Yuen said scornfully, “So! You managed to get one of the medical coffins to produce hallucinogenic mushrooms? Did the Nymphs help you?”
Fatin said with girlish sternness, “These are subconscious images betraying a pattern of data our conscious minds cannot yet grasp. Melechemoshemyazanagual comes from a generation that learned what neural modifications to make in a man to give him the lateral-thinking and pattern-recognition skills my generation first discovered in transoctogenarian females. The images are symbolic and primal. He tells us something you have not realized. The Judge of Ages walks among us. He is someone here in the camp.”
Daae had come up on cat-silent feet behind Menelaus, and now startled him by making a small noise of satisfaction. “Some here realized it.”
Menelaus said, “Miss, what is your second reason? You said there were two. You have one other reason for agreeing to help us?”
Mickey bowed his head and said, “If I may answer that, Maiden Fatin?” She nodded. When Mickey raised his head, his eyes glittered. “You Chimerae are so proud of your freedom and ferocity that you forget who came before you, and you forget from whom you learned it! I am from Williamsburg, and the roots of that town are ancient indeed!”
Daae said, “So? What does that mean?”
Mickey lifted his double chins proudly, and the sunlight, peeping through the snowy clouds, glanced off the rim of his fantastic hat so that it gleamed like a crown. “It means we Witches love our freedom no less than you Chimerae, and are no less willing to die fighting for it.”
11. On One Condition
Menelaus looked at Yuen and spoke in Chimerical. “Loyal and Proven Alpha? What do you think?”
Yuen nodded reluctantly. In Chimerical he said to Menelaus, “That was well said. Even among the lesser breeds, I see that the greatness which in us is perfect exists in them in an inchoate, crude, and unformed foreshadow.” In Virginian, he said, “The General Command of the Commonwealth agrees to accept your alliance—”
Fatin raised her wand. “Not yet! We offer it only on one condition. If we defeat the Blue Men, the Tombs will be in our hands, yes?”
&
nbsp; Menelaus said in a tone of exasperation. “Oh, come now! Are we going to start talking about who gets how much loot from the treasures buried here? All that stuff belongs to the people in the coffins! People like us!”
Fatin gave him a cold stare. “It is not the treasure of the ages I demand, albeit I would be right to demand it. It is the Judge.”
Mickey looked surprised and turned to Menelaus with a helpless shrug. This was something he had not anticipated.
Yuen scoffed. “You think he is real?”
Fatin said, “I think he is the worst criminal of all human history, and the enemy of man. That is our demand. If we help you fight the Blue Men, and if victory comes, and the Tombs are ours, my demand is that we find and unearth and unmask the Judge of Ages, and burn him very slowly on the sacred fire for his deeds. Since you, with your mind that is darkened and blind, call him a fiction, you have no reason to refuse.”
Yuen said, “Very well. We agree.”
Menelaus looked uncomfortable, but said nothing. He glanced over his shoulder at Daae.
“The posthuman is beyond retaliation,” said Daae thoughtfully. “The Chimerae agree.”
Yuen said jovially, “Then we are of one mind! We overcome the Blue Men, who have victimized us all, then we find and destroy the Judge of Ages, whom we all despise. Whether he is real or not.”
12. Promotion
Daae said. “Then it is decided. We must send messengers to the Hormagaunts and the Nymphs to gather their folk as well. And Beta Sterling Xenius Anubis—”
“Sir?”
“I hereby issue you a field promotion from Lance-Corporal to Corporal.”
The Hermetic Millennia Page 40