The first fighters out of the gates and onto the ankle-deep fake turf that day were a series of seven criminals condemned to die for the entertainment of the 180,000 watching them from the stands. Two of them appeared to have had some athletic training and knew how to handle their anachronistic edged weapons; the other five could only wildly flail the air around them when it came their turns to fight, turns which consequently passed very swiftly, for they quickly took the fatal blow while the crowd ate roasted sunflower seeds and mocked the combatants' inadequacies. The worst performer in the lot was a portly man the master of the games had armed with a section of lead pipe and brass knuckles; he had no notion of how he should defend himself with these implements of street warfare so popular with Garden City's nighttime gangs. He did know some of the wellborn faces in the stands above him. The instant he was released from the gate he ran to the balustrade and called to a man among the spectators. His former friend turned away rather than acknowledge the condemned man. The doomed combatant recognized a dowager in a cluster of elegant ladies; she pretended not to hear when he called her name; she looked to her companions and, a smile fixed upon her face, pretended to have a conversation with the nearest one of them.
"Lucy! Lucy!" the fat man cried. "David!" he called to the man, as his opponent ran toward him.
The other contestant soon cornered the fat man in the curve of the arena wall. The feeble combatant collapsed upon his haunches and screamed aloud for mercy. I closed my eyes while the crowd booed the fat man's cowardly death.
The last two contestants left standing were the two experienced men, both of them carrying a knife and a metal bat. They fought hand to hand for the better part of an hour, wounding each other several times and boring the crowd that had come to see men die, not to hear the clanging of metal on metal. When at last one of them succeeded in battering the other to the ground, the mob called for both of them to die because the men had wearied the gigantic crowd. The emperor obliged the mob and promptly ordered his City Guardsmen to shower the two men with bullets.
Spectacles had always been horrific; even when they had been computer-generated productions they had been frighteningly bloody. Luke Anthony made them real and fatuous at the same time. After the bodies had been dragged away, there appeared two midgets who battled each other with oversized clubs. When they were both dead, a dozen blinded horses were set upon by hungry mountain lions and jaguars. For the finale the emperor had his men push a high carbon filament walkway into the arena from the top of which he shot the wild cats with a hunting rifle. He had a good vantage point atop this artificial hill, and his soldiers drove the beasts toward him with the noise they made from the edge of the arena. As I had learned at Progress, Luke Anthony never had to fire more than once at each animal after he had it within his sights. After the big cats were dead, the game master released tall flightless ostriches from Africa into the arena. Luke Anthony shot them with smart sabots that expanded into crescent-shaped heads that would swiftly slice through the animals' long, narrow necks with horrific effect. The crowd went insane with approval at this grotesque beheading of the confused creatures. Several women yet attempting to impress the emperor clapped with such enthusiasm they knocked their neighbors from their seats.
From where I sat I could see Father complaining to his wife and knew without hearing his words he was declaring it was a disgrace for an emperor to perform in the arena, a place normally reserved for criminals and paid thugs.
"His father, Mathias, would never have done this!" Father would be saying.
My legitimate brothers were situated near Father, their new wives next to them, and they grudgingly nodded to whatever the general was saying. Their hearts were not in their actions or in the gruesome events unfolding before them. The two of them never showed much enthusiasm about anything while Mr. Golden's very wide daughters were nearby. Like most of the real Pan-Polarian men in the Field of Diversions, my half brothers were pleased when the performance was concluded and they and none of the people they knew had perished with the other victims of the afternoon. They would wait to celebrate those happy results until they were in the company of their mistresses, women whom I suspect were much prettier than the daughters of Mr. Golden. But then, nearly any women would be.
A year and a half after Father's terrible day in the palace antechamber, the emperor remembered (or someone reminded him) that the general was in the city. Luke Anthony summoned Father to his presence in one of the gardens on the palace grounds that had been converted to an exercise space. The emperor put aside the epee sword he was fencing with long enough to say to Father, "We need you to go to Britain for us. There is some unpleasantness there."
Having made such an enormous effort to address an affair of state, Luke had a servant wipe the perspiration from his face, and he returned to his training.
The unpleasantness in that distant northern land was a massive rebellion that had begun among the people and had spread to a brigade stationed in the far north of that island province. Another uprising had occurred on the island during the previous year because of a famine, and Jerome Perlman, who ran both the City Guardsmen and the day-to-day operations of the imperial administration, had sent Britain bombers full of napalm to appease her hunger. Rebellious citizens and the land's brutal winters in a time of failing electricity sufficed to make any soldier posted there unhappy in the best of times; in the fourth year of Luke Anthony's rule, someone in government-perhaps the emperor or some of his friends, but must likely Jerome Perlman himself-had helped himself to the army payroll, leaving the soldiers unpaid for five long months and unable to feed their families or to buy charcoal to warm their homes after their generators had ceased to run. As Father oft said in his characteristically understated way: "Even good troops get out of sorts when they see their children starve." The soldiers in Britain positioned immediately south of Edinburgh had now gotten so out of sorts they had killed most of their officers and were pillaging the nearby farms to support themselves.
To suppress this revolt, the emperor went so far as to equip Father with a bundle of letters bearing the imperial seal. "We are promising them they'll get paid," explained Mr. Perlman, to whom had fallen the task of explaining the details to Father before he set out across the North Atlantic. No additional forces or money could be spared for the mission. There was trouble in the Far East, as there was always in that portion of the Empire, Mr. Perlman related to us to explain the paltry resources he could give us.
"You may have to read the letters to them, General Black. I doubt any of them can read proper English anymore, though, ironically, that is where the language originated, don't you know?" were Mr. Perlman's last words of advice to Father before showing the general the palace door.
Father, Medus, Helen, and I-our entire expedition force-traveled across Mexico to Tampico, where we took a diesel-powered ship across the ocean to Cornwall, and from there rode a truck north to Scotland, the homeland of the northern rebellion. To a woman like myself, who had spent most of her life in the sunny Middle East, England was a wet, cold land of bogs and fogs, the most inhospitable land I had ever seen, or so it was until I saw Scotland. Some cleared farmland exists on the southern part of that second nation. There some hardy grain flourishes and the natives raise some excellent livestock. Immediately north of that same region one finds the smoke-filled provincial capital Edinburgh, the most aromatic city for its size I have ever visited. The rest of the nation is a fen of green thickets in the summer and a block of ice in winter, and the farther north we traveled, the worse the cold weather became. What exactly the mutinous soldiers were pillaging from this frozen countryside that was of any use to them was a mystery to us. A second mystery was why the Empire was defending this wasteland when the only people who wanted it already dwelt there.
By the time we arrived at Edinburgh the mutineers had abandoned their siege of the city and were too sick with hunger to travel farther south or to continue fighting. Two well-paid and loyal brigades remained on the island, o
ne stationed at York and the other at London. Upon arriving in Britain, Father had ordered the provincial governor to use these loyal troops to seal the rebellious legion in the northern wastes without engaging them in battle, thereby assuring that the mutineers would either surrender or starve to death in the cold. A final brutal snowstorm struck before we arrived in Scotland and had prodded the famished men into making the obvious choice. They meekly gave themselves up to Father the day he rode into their camp at the head of a dozen cavalrymen he had collected in the south.
Before his terrifying experience inside the antechamber in Garden City my father would have immediately arrested the leaders of the revolt and put them to death; next the old General Black would have had the men in the ranks draw lots, and he would have executed one in every ten of them. Nearly dying had changed Father. He walked unannounced and unescorted into the heart of the rebels' camp, climbed the crest of an earthen wall, and holding up the letters from Luke Anthony he spoke to the men in the thunderous orator's voice gentlemen soldiers learn as schoolboys.
"Citizens of Pan-Polaria," he said to them in a pidgin Syntalk they would understand, "I am General Peter Black. I have come from the emperor, the father of the nations. Like any good father, our emperor is saddened to learn that some of his children have strayed from his family. So great is his love for you who have disappointed him he has sent me across the world to tell you this: come back into the army, return to your posts, and no one will be punished. I swear by all the good things that remain in the universe that his word-"
A soldier holding an assault rifle in his hands ran from the crowd that had gathered around Father. The general stopped in midsentence to heed him.
"We killed the other toffs, and now I'm going-," began the soldier, but his comrades tackled him from behind and disarmed him.
"Let him up! Let him up!" Father commanded. "Do not harm him!"
Father hurried to the astonished soldier and put a hand on the rebel's shoulders so he could look directly into the man's eyes.
"My friend, you whom the goddess Sophia loves," said Father, "I am only a man, as you are. Yes, you could kill me. Any one of you could strike me down any time you wish," he proclaimed to the others. "Should you do so, the emperor will send more men in my stead, men who will bring armed divisions marching behind them. The emperor will send as many men as many times as it will take to destroy you. A far better course for you would be to negotiate a settlement with me. Do this and you will not bring a dire fate upon yourselves and your families."
To a man, the mutineers thought Father had fallen to them from heaven. They selected a delegation from among their three thousand members to confer with the general while Father sent a messenger to London with orders to bring food from the imperial warehouses. A handful of surviving officers crept from their hiding places in the besieged city of Edinburgh after they learned of Father's arrival. They would be of no utility to us, as the rebellious men refused to take orders from them. The rebels told Father their former leaders had stolen what little money had arrived in their district, and that they, the rebels, would rather die than follow such thieves again. After three long weeks of talking and waiting, the brigade commander to our south in York sent us some money and twenty-three truckloads of food. With full stomachs, the mutineers became more open to Father's demands; they agreed to elect a delegation to return with us to Garden City and there make their complaints directly to Luke Anthony To our regret, Father assented to this plan before he knew what shape this delegation would take. The rebellion's leaders returned to Father's tent the morning after their final conference and announced they had chosen a group of no less than five hundred men to make the long journey to North America in our company.
"Why not send the whole bloody brigade?!" Father asked, showing the rebels a little of the old Peter Black's anger.
The men replied it was all five hundred or nobody. The various groups within their ranks did not trust each other-the Boers did not feel secure about the Turks, those with Latin blood hated the local Celtic soldiers, and so on-and so they had chosen someone from every ethnic group and every religion to give fair representation to everyone concerned. Seeing no other solution, Father reluctantly promised them they could travel with us.
"This cannot end well," he told me in confidence. "The emperor is likely to see them as an invading force of assassins rather than a delegation. He is apt to slaughter them for rebelling and me for not punishing them. We will have to send messages ahead to make our way smoother, Justa," he said, and ran his hand across his bald head. "Perhaps Mr. Golden can bribe someone again."
"He will want something in return, sir," I said. "Your army in Turkey buys coal oil, like every other military unit does. In the event of a shortage, the commander can make an auxiliary contract with the fuel factors. You are the commander, Mr. Golden is a factor, and we could have a shortage...."
For the first time since he had been stricken in the palace, Father laughed aloud.
"Justa," he said, "you have been too long in Garden City. You now think as they do. Whom will Mr. Golden contact on our behalf?"
"He will know without our telling him," I said. "I expect it will be this Mr. Perlman; he seems to have his finger in whatever business the emperor is doing his best to neglect."
We dispatched an encrypted message to Garden City and began our long trip south with the five hundred soldiers at the first sign of the spring thaw. Because the men's transports were no longer operable, they were afoot, and as some of the roads in Britain had not been maintained for many years and were that spring rivers of mud, our return journey took much longer than the trip north, which had been on the frozen ground of winter. We could not obtain a ship to carry us directly to Mexico and had to sail across the Atlantic to North Carolina. By a lucky stroke of fortune Father heard from a merchant we met on the highway in northern Alabama that a farmer in the vicinity of Gadsden had captured an enormous boar in a pit. Out of curiosity, we made a detour to the hill country and inspected the peculiar animal, which was being kept inside a cage the farmer and several of his neighbors had fashioned out of cables and steel bars. The bristly creature was as large as a cow, and had enormous tusks growing in curls that reached above its eyes. It was a creature from myth, I commented to Father, though in fact it was a product of the vast wilderness that decades of neglect had created in southern Appalachia. While we examined it, the wild pig's great size and fearsome looks combined with my mention of mythology to inspire a plan in my mind.
"What are you going to do with it, sir?" I asked the farmer claiming ownership of the boar.
He was a simple man whose pride was greatly swollen by the attention he was getting. Hundreds of travelers, he boasted, had stopped in the past fortnight to have a look at his prize.
"I shall sell it to the fellow what runs the spectacles in Birmingham," he said. "He pays top price for big pigs."
"In Birmingham?!" I said. "You should sell it to the emperor. He will put it in the Field of Diversions in Garden City. He'll pay more than any small-timer here in Alabama. Stay put, please."
I ran to our lorry and got one of the letters Father had carried to Britain. I stuck a bit of the red sealing wax over the mouth of its envelope and presented this note to the illiterate farmer as a commission from the emperor giving General Black the right to collect any interesting animal specimens he might find. The farmer and his comrades gasped when they saw the seal on the creamy white paper.
"The emperor will dispatch a messenger with money to pay you as soon as we reach Garden City," I told him. "He is a wonderful man-and one day he will be named a god. He will be very pleased with you."
The bumpkin insisted we take the giant boar with us that very day. Some of the soldiers from Britain loaded the beast's cage onto a railroad car. The load was so heavy we needed twenty-eight men to heft the creature onto the flatcar it would ride all the way to Mexico.
"Whatever did you want that thing for?" Father wanted to know after we to
o had boarded the railway train. "The farmers hereabouts say it has eaten men. Right down to the marrow, they say. We can't use it as food. Even our mutineers won't touch meat that's been fed on human flesh."
"Luke Anthony will love it," I said. "We'll feed it apples and corn cakes five times a day; it cannot get too big."
"Why would the emperor want it?" asked Father. "The thing's a damned pig! It's nearly as ugly as that damned crocodile I killed in Egypt."
"Honestly, sir," I said as we rode along, "don't you see? Luke is going to slay it in the arena. The rumor mill says he is wild about ancient myths. Do you remember how Hercules slew the Erymanthian boar?"
"You are running ahead of me," said my father. "What do this Hercules chap and that strange-sounding pig have to do with young Luke?"
The word humming about Garden City at the time of our departure to Britain was Luke Anthony had developed a fascination with the supposed son of Zeus and Alcmene. Insiders in his court whispered about the capital that when the emperor exercised among the athletes he kept on the palace grounds, he sometimes carried a club as Hercules had. Since this particular aspect of Luke's behavior was at this juncture of his life a private vice and not one of the public outrages he would later practice, it was a subject that caused much laughter in the better houses of the city's suburbs. I am discomforted to think I may have, in a small way, nudged the emperor in the direction of his later excesses when I directed Father to give him the huge boar. At the time, I thought the pig ruse was the cleverest thing I had ever done, especially when I urged Father to send another message ahead to inform Luke Anthony of our magnificent find.
A company of City Guardsmen met us at the railway station the day we entered the capital. They loaded the creature onto an enormous truck that conveyed the boar to the Field of Diversions a full three days before all five hundred of our party reached the city. The emperor immediately received Father in one of the dining chambers in the heart of the palace and allowed the vast delegation from Britain to camp in one of the city parks, where he provided them with food and drink. At the reception he gave Father, the one occasion I was allowed to accompany the general into the emperor's presence, Luke Anthony could speak of nothing other than the gigantic pig.
The Martian General's Daughter Page 10