The Noble Warrior (The Empire of the North Book 1)

by Brendan DuBois

  The soup was hot and spicy, and Armand winced as he ate, the injuries from the beatings still burning and throbbing. Tompkins said, “Looks like you got tuned up some, Armand.”

  “Yeah, I did. By one of Imperial Security’s finest.”

  “What were you trying to keep from them?”

  “The names of two people they thought they were traitors.”

  “How long did you last before you gave up the names?”

  Armand put the spoon into his empty bowl. Back home, this would have been an appetizer. Now it was his meal for the day. Armand thought of all the times he had complained about his meals to either Mother or one of the cooks, and felt a quiet sense of shame. To Tompkins he said, “I’m not sure. Maybe a half day, a bit longer.”

  The young teacher surprised Armand, by gently tapping his knee. “You did well. I gave up after just a very few minutes, the name of another teacher who passed me some forbidden pamphlets. For that I’m still ashamed. The two people you named… do you know what happened to them?”

  Armand got up, went to the boxcar, where empty bowls were being stacked. “Only one. Executed. Head on a pike outside Government Square.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Yeah, and I’m sure he was, too.”

  With the dishes and empty cauldron brought back, they were hustled back into the boxcar, and again, the jerking and thumping as the locomotive began to gain speed. Armand had ridden on a train several times before, of course, but always in a first class car reserved for the nobles. Never could he have imagined that he would have ended up here, from a time that he had his own train cabin, with a soft bed with clean sheets and gourmet meals served on silver and crystal… to this.

  He was back in his bunk, eating the last of the cinnamon bread, having earlier given a piece to Tompkins. He wiped at his face with his handkerchief. Armand thought again of the beatings, the betrayal, the death of Windsor Senior and Martel, and found himself surprised at his reaction. He thought he would be weeping from all the emotions storming through him.

  But his eyes were dry.

  The time for weeping was over.

  It was time to start surviving.

  And to find out how and why he was betrayed.

  At some point the lights dimmed and went dark, save for one bulb by the stall that served as a bathroom. The gentle rocking motion of the train made him sleepy and he curled up on his side, pulled the thin and smelly blanket over him. The pleasant taste of cinnamon bread was still in his mouth. In the darkness he thought of his younger sister Jeannette. So he still had at least one friend back in Toronto. Armand rolled so he was facing the wooden wall. It was rough and slatted, and he could see the passing scenery through gaps in the wall. There was a partial moon, enough light to illuminate the wide empty fields and the few forests that seemed to fly by as they traveled west through the empire.

  He shivered under his thin blanket, briefly saw a light, out there in the distance. Who or what was out there, showing a light? A farmhouse? A military fort? Another in the chain of prisons that the empire maintained out here for those who had sinned? He tried to follow the light as the train sped, but it was soon lost to view, and then Armand fell asleep.

  Sometime during the late morning the train stopped again, and once again, they were led out to stretch their legs. The meal this time was oatmeal. Armand sat with Tompkins and looked out to a slight rise of land. “Tell me, what do you think that is?”

  ‘That’ being a spot about a hundred meters away, a small hill that was clustered with wrecked machinery of a type Armand had never seen before. There were long metal barrels, rusted hulls, and tracks of a type of chain mail. The metal was rusted and burnt and shrubs and a few trees were growing through the mess.

  “That?” Tompkins said, squinting his eyes, peering out. “Looks to me like war machines.”

  “From the War of the World?” Armand asked. “I didn’t think the fighting reached this far north. I mean, I know some of the suburbs around Toronto were hit hard… but not out here.”

  Earl wiped at his lips with the back of his hand. “There are lots of things we don’t know. The War of the World went on for decades in many places at many times. So many places that we’ve forgotten about. For all we know, that little hill over there was a decisive battle in the defense of the old country. So much we don’t know. Like names, for example. What was this place called before it became an empire?”

  “Canada, something like that.”

  “True. Good on you. And do you know why so little is known about the scope of the War of the World?”

  Armand scraped the bottom of his metal bowl. “I have a feeling you’re going tell me.”

  That brought a laugh. “True. My student teacher instincts come to the fore. Come, this is a nice change. A student who will actually listen to me without looking at the clock. We know so much about what life was like a hundred or so years before the War of the World. Of places like France and Amerka and old England and even older empires, of Roma and Greece. But the time up to and including the War of the World… almost nothing. Why?”

  “Because the recordings were burnt,” Armand said. “The machines they had they recorded and transmitted information… they were burnt.”

  He nodded, like a young hungry crow sitting on a tree branch. “That’s right. They had elaborate machines, built like the finest crystal. Beautiful to look at, beautiful to use, able to do the most amazing feats of recording and transmission. But oh so delicate. One hard push, one special kind of bomb, and the crystal was shattered, the recordings lost, here and everywhere else in the world. A spasm of destruction that destroyed what was probably millions of books, millions of photographs, all lost forever. The old ones had the information of the entire world at their fingertips, the ability to listen to music while they walked, to talk to anyone on the planet in seconds. But in one war-filled day, it was all gone.”

  Armand thought of a lecture from a Jesuit priest, and a delicate glass vase, shattering on the classroom floor. Tompkins crossed his legs, let his spoon fall back into his bowl. “You may not believe this, but once I found a scrap of an old newsjournal, some decades before the war, which talked about their libraries. How some of their libraries decided it was no value to have real books of paper. So to make room for their recording machines, books were being thrown away, burnt, tossed in dumps.”

  Astounded, Armand said, “That’s crazy.”

  “It surely was. Which is what they did was so ironic. We know so much of ancient history because everything back then was written and preserved in papers and books. But for those years leading up to the War, and the War itself… almost nothing. A blank. For the machines that stored and transmitted the information were all destroyed. Oh, there are pieces here and there. Old books, a few of the older newsjournals, scraps of information. But it’s trying to understand a speech from another room, when all you can here is the odd word and phrase.”

  There was a shout, up the line. “Hello,” Tompkins said. “What’s that?”

  A man in an orange jumpsuit was running away from the train, heading to the hill with the wrecked machinery of the old ones. He ran desperately, legs pumping, arms flailing, and there were shouts from the other prisoners line up and down the railway, urging him on.

  Armand quickly stood up, and so did Tompkins, though he said, “Don’t move, don’t move at all, don’t give other guards an excuse.”

  “Do you think he has a chance?” Armand said, standing up on his toes, trying to get a better view.

  “Damn, I can’t believe he’s made it this far,” Tompkins said with awe in his voice.

  The man kept on running, there were more shouts of encouragement, and then two guards were in pursuit, unlimbering their carbines as they ran. The escapee made it to the slope of the hill, just a score of meters away from the first bits of wreckage, and Armand said, “There’s cover. Look, there’s cover. If he makes it that far, he just --–“

  A gunshot, t
hen another, and then a third, and the man crumpled to the ground, like a marionette whose strings had suddenly been severed. There was a muffled groan from the other prisoners, and guards were now pushing them back onto the boxcars, faces set, carbines out. Armand climbed back up and helped Tompkins up as well, and he looked and saw two guards now at the form of the dead prisoner, tying a rope about his ankles, and then dragging him back to the train.

  “Procedure must be followed,” Tompkins said, bitterness in his voice. “Each boxcar left Toronto with sixteen occupants, and each boxcar will arrive to the Authority with sixteen occupants. Some dead, most alive, but all they will care about is that the numbers matched.”

  That night Armand was dreaming of what it had been like, before he had gone to Potomick with Father and had set in motion the whole change of events. The dream was of a fine meal and then climbing into bed, and then the bed changed shape, the sheets now filthy and torn, grabbed around him, and the fine meal had curdled into something foul, something that had to be vomited up. There was a shout, gasp, and a thud, and Armand woke up, realizing he wasn’t dreaming anymore.

  On the straw-covered floor next to his bunk, the thinner of the Patterson brothers was coughing, a hand to his throat. Standing next to him, rubbing his fist, was his bunkmate Tompkins Earl. He looked to the younger brother and said in an innocent voice, “Sorry about that. Sometimes I sleep very lightly, and when I heard you come by, I overreacted. My sincere apologies.”

  The brother stood up, spat on the floor, and stalked off. Armand felt chilled, knowing what Tompkins had just prevented. “Thanks,” he whispered, “thank you very much.”

  Tompkins winced as he rubbed his hand again. “That was very good bread, you know. The best I’ve had in a long time.”

  “But how did you know --–“

  He climbed back up to his bunk. “Get back to sleep, Armand. Tomorrow we arrive at the Authority. It will be the first in a very long series of days.”

  Armand went back to his bunk and tried to sleep, but it was impossible. He looked through the cracked slats of the boxcar, to see if there were any lights out there, but all he saw was the night.

  To be continued….

  # # #

  Brendan DuBois of New Hampshire is the award-winning author of twelve novels and more than 100 short stories. His novel, "Resurrection Day," won the Sidewise Award for Best Alternative History Novel of the Year.

  His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, nd numerous other magazines and anthologies including “The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century,” published in 2000 by Houghton-Mifflin. Another one of his short stories appeared in in "The Year's Best Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection" (St. Martin's Griffin, 2005) edited by Gardner Dozois

  His short stories have twice won him the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and have also earned him three Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations from the Mystery Writers of America. Visit his website at www.BrendanDuBois.com.