by Oisin McGann
‘Because,’ he smiled as he squeezed past her, their knees brushing against each other for a moment, ‘if my riding was as good as my word, I would not have fallen off my horse.’
With that, he touched his heels to the mare’s flanks, waved, and galloped off down the trail. Riadni waved back and then realised she had never asked him his name. She made her way home at a slower pace, thinking about the boy and the group that he had given his life to. That evening, for reasons she didn’t even want to admit to herself, she asked her mother to make her a new dress.
Benyan Akhna rode into the Hadram Cassal camp in time to see Lakrem Elbeth walk into one of the caves. With a reflexive look up into the sky, he dismounted and led his mare to the corral, which was simply a fenced-off cave that kept the animals out of sight of aircraft. He lifted off the saddle and blanket, unbuckled the bridle and carried them down to his camouflaged tent, which squatted with several others near the three covered lorries under their own camouflage webbing. Only senior members of the group enjoyed the cool, sheltered, but limited space in the caves. He thought about going after Elbeth and telling their leader about his meeting with Mocranen’s daughter, but decided against it. He had been ordered to keep away from the farms and villages. Nobody had said anything about bumping into tomboys in the hills. The memory of her lush, deep brown hair framing dark, almond-shaped eyes brought a smile to his face once more. He would dearly love to see that sight again, but chances like that did not come along twice in a lifetime.
A herd of mountain cattle was kept nearby; the youngest members took turns watching over them. Benyan would have his shift this evening. The scrawny, agile cattle served to explain movement around the caves and were particularly useful for covering up the tracks of the horses. It was a pity that their meat tasted like well-worn sandals.
Benyan had been with the Hadram Cassal for a little over six months. He was one of the youngest in this group and was still proving himself to the experienced fighters. Every morning, he and the other recruits ran up into the hills for miles with backpacks full of rocks. He had to learn to load a musket blindfold and shoot from horseback, to fight with his hands and feet, with a knife, sword, belasto and other weapons. He drilled, ran assault courses, tended the horses and the mountain cattle, and in the evenings he and the other recruits had to cook, serve and clean up after meals. The late evening was spent in prayer or reading from one of the three books of Shanna. It was a hard life, but he was growing strong and quick and soon he would take his place among the other fighters. Perhaps he would even have his chance to join the martyrs.
Changing from his riding boots into some soft-soled shoes, he thought again about the girl. He was supposed to have given up any thoughts of life outside the order, but now he could not get her out of his mind. He had to be careful, if he let thoughts of her get under his skin, he would lose his edge. A good warrior had to be able to clear his mind, to fight and kill without compunction.
A year ago, he would not have thought himself capable of any of this. He had been the son of a schoolteacher. He did not hate the Altimans, he even admired them and wanted to go and spend some time in their cities and see how they lived. He wanted to learn their science and maybe even get to fly. He had met few Altimans in his life, and the ones he had met were interesting, well-travelled people.
But a year ago, a factory in his town, run by Altimans, had burned down. The factory had employed over two hundred people, mostly women, including his mother. There had been a lot of accidents there, they made pots and pans and other metal parts and there were huge presses that stamped tin and steel into shapes and people got hands and arms caught and crushed in these machines. Despite constant complaints, nothing was done to make the factory floor safer. The managers did not care; new employees were easy to find in Bartokhrin.
But when people started holding strikes in protest, the plant started to lose money. One day, a fire broke out and the workers could not get out fast enough; there were not enough doors and windows and many of those were locked or barred.
Fifty women died. Benyan’s mother was one of them and Benyan and his father were devastated. His father found the managers and told them that he knew about the insurance on the factory and that he could prove the fire had been started deliberately. He wanted them to face up to what they had done and to try and make it right for the people who had been injured and those who had lost loved ones.
When the managers would not listen, Benyan’s father went to the Altiman government. Then the managers started listening. His father’s body was found in an alleyway in Victovia, the Altiman capital. His family was told that it looked like a mugging that had ended in murder. But the muggers had not taken his father’s wristwatch or his rings.
Benyan was an only child and he was brought to live with his aunt and uncle. It was his uncle who talked to him about Bartokhrian history. For centuries, Altima and its enemy, Traucasis, had invaded Bartokhrin from one side and the other, ravaging the country and its people.
Now Bartokhrin had its own government, guided by the Church of Shanna, but was still controlled by Altima and a servant to its trade. Instead of invading armies, they had their land slowly being eaten up by mines and factories owned by faceless men in distant cities. A land starved by other countries of its farmland and raw materials had been reduced to serving those countries like a tramp begging for crusts.
Benyan had listened to their history with a growing hatred and when the godless Altimans flew their planes over his town, delivering destruction to the innocent people who lived there in revenge for the martyrs’ attacks on Victovia, sixteen-year-old Benyan Akhna became one of scores of young men joining the order of the Hadram Cassal.
He drove the memory of Mocranen’s daughter from his mind. He was a warrior, a servant of Shanna and the order. Crawling out of his tent with his sword, he drew the curved blade from its scabbard and took up a defensive stance. With swift, smooth movements, he practised his exercises in the cooling breeze of the late afternoon. He was a warrior, a servant of Shanna and the order. He needed nothing else in his life.
Worship three times a week, Riadni thought, but only one rest day. It didn’t seem a fair trade. She stood in the lines with her mother, and the other women on the left side of the churchground. It was raining, but that did not matter, Monday worship had to be celebrated under an open sky. The men were not allowed to wear their wide-brimmed hats, which would have made sense, but women were permitted bonnets to protect their wigs and face-paint. Like so many her age, Riadni had little respect for the rituals of her religion; most of which seemed unnecessary and some downright daft. The sermon came to an end and the priest, Brother Fazekiel, stepped down from his platform and strode purposefully towards the back of the churchground, a look of thunder on his face.
Riadni looked towards the back and there, standing in the last line of the men’s half, were four individuals who must have slipped in after the start of the service. They were dressed in shabby, mud-stained riding clothes and toting pistols in low-slung holsters, which they were trying to hide beneath their hats. Everyone could tell they were from the Hadram Cassal.
‘Have you no respect!’ the priest roared, as he came up to them. ‘Bringing weapons here? You make a lie of everything Shanna teaches us with your violence. Don’t bring it into my churchground!’
Fazekiel was an imposing figure, tall and thin, and blessed with a rich, booming voice. He was over sixty years old, but still had sharp, piercing eyes and a vigour that belied his age. The crowd closed in around the men from the Hadram Cassal, knowing a good row brewing when they saw one. Riadni was startled to see that the boy she had run into was one of them. She wished she knew his name. Craning her neck discreetly to get a better view, she wracked her brains to come up with some way to get his attention. This was a difficult proposition, considering girls were not even supposed to make eye contact with men outside their family.
The eldest of the four rebels, a hatchet-faced man with weathered skin and
eyes that seemed to have no white to them, raised his hands in a placating gesture to the priest.
‘We’ve just come to worship, Brother. We don’t mean any harm.’
‘Come to look for more young men to commit mortiphas for your cause, more like,’ Fazekiel snorted. ‘You do as much harm to the people of this town as you do to the Altimans. Tell Elbeth he’s not welcome here, nor anyone else who thinks killing gets things done.’
‘Why don’t you let the people decide that for themselves?’ the other man asked. ‘They might have different ideas. We all know where you stand, Brother. You’d try and reason with the enemy. We think they’ll take more convincing.’
Riadni listened impatiently. When the service was over, the women were supposed to leave the churchground first, while the men would wait in their positions until it was their turn to go. Outside the gate, the men and women would fall back into their family groups and she might have a short time to talk to the young rebel as the older women stopped to gossip.
‘You don’t convince anyone of your right to a free existence by convincing them that you threaten theirs,’ Fazekiel argued. ‘If an Altiman walked into an eating house in Kemsemet and killed everyone there, would we think him a hero with a genuine grievance, or a monster with bloodlust? And why is it only the young men are giving their lives for your cause? Why do we not see Elbeth, or any of his like, committing mortiphas for the Hadram Cassal? Just like the Altimans, your old men send the young ones to do the dying.’
Riadni was sure that if she could let a lock of her hair slip from under her wig just as she passed the row of men at the back, it would seize the attention of every man who saw it, but she would only glance up at one, that would be enough to goad him on. Carefully she slid a finger up under her hairpiece as if scratching an itch, pulling a few strands of her hair free of its pins, but tucking them loosely under the edge of the wig. Her mother cast a suspicious look sideways at her.
‘Preach all you like on the churchground, Brother!’ one of the other fighters exclaimed. ‘But it takes action to get the job done! You can’t compare the Altimans with civilised folk. And they don’t walk into eating houses; they bomb them from the clouds!’
People started speaking up, some in support of the rebel, others taking the priest’s side. Riadni used the disturbance to try and peer over the heads of the congregation. She knew she was being a bit obvious, but she didn’t care.
‘Riadni!’ her mother hissed. ‘Behave yourself! What’s got into you?’
The hard-faced man who had spoken first marched up to the podium and turned to face the crowd. The other members of the Hadram Cassal followed him.
‘How many bombs are we going to let them drop before we do something about it?’ he demanded. ‘I’m looking for men with the courage to stand up against the forces of oppression and fight for our people’s freedom! Men with the courage to show the Altimans that every Bartokhrian life they take will have to be paid for tenfold!’
There were cheers from some of the crowd – mostly the men. Riadni was shocked at the way they had upstaged the priest. It was a violation of everything she knew, but she also drew perverse pleasure from seeing the sanctity of their religion cast aside. These men were right in what they were doing. The people needed to be woken up. Fazekiel’s peaceful protests and marches were getting nothing done. The Hadram Cassal was taking the fight to the enemy. They had fire in their veins and Riadni felt it too. Up at the podium, Fazekiel was trying to reason with the crowd.
‘Would you give the Altimans the excuse they need to send their machines up into our skies? Don’t be blind! Don’t let these men weaken us by turning us against each other! The Altimans kill us because they think we are animals to be put down, and how can we convince them otherwise when we send assassins to kill their women and children? Shanna will judge us all and murderers will be the first to be cast down!’
‘Shanna is with us!’ the leader of the rebels cried. ‘And it’s not murder when you’re at war! You can leave our fate in the hands of those who would talk our country to death, or you can give your support to the men who will drive the Altimans from our soil for good. The decision is yours!’
There was another cheer of approval. The two factions in the crowd were throwing taunts and insults back and forth and in the midst of it all, Riadni could see the boy with the blue eyes standing proudly with his comrades. The rebels, their job done, filed out between the male and female halves of the congregation. They walked up past her and with a flick of her finger, she let the lock of hair fall across her face, but two bickering women pushed in front of her and the boy did not see. She swore under her breath and could only watch helplessly as the men walked out the gate of the churchground, leaving the seeds of rebellion sprouting behind them in the rain.
Chamus was in the railway room, running the trains around the circuit. The models made enough noise to break the silence in the house, the low hum and soft clattering disturbed the hush and kept the whispering in his head at bay. He wasn’t supposed to be there without his grandfather, but it was a Monday and everybody was out. His father and grandfather were at the workshop and his mother was at the office, where she did the accounts for the company, and the housekeeper only worked in the mornings. He was home from school, excused because of a terrorist threat. It had turned out to be a hoax, but they had all been sent home anyway – just to be on the safe side. He often wondered why his school had been targeted all those months ago in the first attacks, but he had been told that the Fringelanders hated the pilots like Commander Ellese, who flew for the Altiman air force. The air-force bases were well guarded, the school’s airfield and its budding flyers were not.
As his eyes followed a train around its track, his gaze fell on his grandfather’s drawing board in the corner of the big room. He kept it at home for sketching out ideas and there were some sheets of layout paper sitting on the sloped surface. Always interested in seeing the ideas that might someday become real flying machines, Chamus skirted the model railway and sat down at the desk. The drawings were not of an aeroplane, at least not any plane that Chamus had ever seen. It didn’t even look like an aeroplane part. It was cylindrical, perhaps part of a bomb, except that there was a section in the middle that, according to the notations, was lined with lead. Lead was the kind of material you avoided on an aircraft. It was too heavy, and weight was a vital concern when designing a machine that had to leave the ground for a living.
He leafed through the half-dozen pages, looking at the different variations and views of the device. There was a scribble that showed the cylinder connecting to a canister of compressed air, which made it look like it was supposed to spray something, a liquid or a powder.
On one page there was a note about dispersal, which could be about explosives, but then on another, his grandfather had scribbled some chemical formulae and Chamus knew enough about chemistry to know the elements didn’t make up nitroglycerine, or any other explosive he had heard of. As far as he and his classmates were concerned, how to make things blow up, dissolve, rot, or otherwise self-destruct was all chemistry was good for. That and making beer, which they had tried once and been violently sick after tasting the results.
There were some photographs lying to one side of the desk and he picked them up. One showed a man wearing a white suit that covered every inch of him, including his head, with a plastic faceplate to allow him to see out. He was holding a small beaker full of what looked like silver-white powder, but Chamus couldn’t tell what it was. The other two photos were of a glider that he recognised; it was a craft that his grandfather had designed. This one had been painted black and did not even wear any insignia, as if it was waiting for the paint job to be completed.
There was a sound at the front of the house – the front door opening. Chamus heard his grandfather’s voice and hurriedly put the photos and drawings back as he had found them. He rushed to the control box and turned off the model railway, then flicked the light switch off. There he
waited in the shadows, preparing his excuse in case his grandfather came in. He did not hear his dad’s voice, maybe Grandad had come back early on his own. There was no way to leave the room without walking down the corridor and past the drawing room where his grandfather was.
His ears peeled, he listened intently. He heard two more voices, but didn’t recognise them. Carefully avoiding the creaking floorboard just beyond the door of the room, he crept closer to the drawing room. His grandfather was having a conversation with two other men in the room; Chamus could just make out what was being said.
‘… just like to know who’s in the loop, that’s all,’ his grandfather was saying.
‘We understand, Thomex, but the whole thing depends on everyone knowing only what they need to know,’ said a man with a heavy north-coast accent, ‘the less you know about the other members of the group, the better.’
‘Besides,’ a second man spoke up in a high, reedy voice, ‘you want to keep your part in this very quiet. It’s only fair to expect everyone else to want the same.’
‘That’s different, Balan,’ Thomex came back. ‘Everyone else isn’t expected to build the damned thing. My reputation and my life are at risk working with this stuff and the same goes for anyone I bring in to help me. What I want to know is who knows enough to blow the whistle if things get tough.’
‘Very few people know of your part in it,’ the northern-accented voice said calmly, ‘and they are all in powerful positions, untouchable.’
‘And you two, of course. Any other well-informed lackeys I should know about?’
‘No,’ the man named Balan replied tightly, ‘just the two lackeys you see before you.’
‘A likely story,’ Chamus’s grandfather retorted. ‘These powerful, untouchable people, they do their own typing, do they? Serve their own tea and crumpets? Somebody’s always around to take care of the little things and they’re the dangerous ones, the ones you don’t notice because they’re part of the furniture. I’m putting my arse on the line and I don’t want to lose it because some toff lets the cat out of the bag giving his secretary dictation, you follow?’