Mark of Calth

by Edited by Laurie Goulding

  ‘Gun up,’ he said, filling his bag with recharges.

  They hesitated.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘These poor souls don’t need guns where they are going. We need them more. Besides, these are new patterns – Crusade issue, brand new, just two or three years old, not like the re-furb crap they handed out at Numinus. We’re lucky. Where we are right now, these are the best and newest weapons we could get our hands on. So get your hands on them.’

  They helped themselves. Bale had to get the pistol for Katt, and persuade her it was all right to touch it. That is was ‘okay’ to touch it. ‘Okay’ was an odd word, but Oll Persson used it, and they had learned that it meant ‘all right’.

  Oll stood to one side, and smelled the wind. He thought about what he had just told them. We’re lucky. Where we are right now, these are the best and newest weapons we could get our hands on.

  ‘Very damn lucky,’ he said softly to the wind. ‘Who made sure we’d wind up here?’

  Oll Persson and his fellow survivors upon the battlefield of Diurnus

  [mark: –?]

  The trumpeters sound, booming up from the invisible valleys below, they all know that there are better places to be.

  ‘Can’t you make another hole?’ asks Zybes, wiping rain off his face.

  ‘A hole?’ Oll asks, frowning.

  ‘A cut… With that knife of yours? This isn’t a good fix to be in, is it? Don’t pretend it is.’

  Oll Persson shrugs.

  ‘It’s not as bad a fix as Calth.’

  There is something else he was going to say, but he bites it off. The trumpeters sound again – ominous, like cosmic punctuation.

  ‘I can’t just cut where I like,’ Oll says, making a motion with his hand as if the athame is in his grip. ‘It doesn’t work like that. I have to be in the right place, and make the right cut. Places touch each other in the oddest ways. I cut through the skin of one and we’re into another.’

  They are all looking at him.

  ‘It’s complicated. It’s not even an exact science. Someone taught me the rudiments a long time ago.’

  ‘Who?’ asks Zybes.

  ‘How long ago?’ asks Katt, which is a better question.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ replies Oll, not answering either of them. ‘The point is, it’s not an exact science. And the someone who taught me the rudiments… also told me it was a terrible thing ever to have to do it, that it was something no one would choose to do unless there was no other choice.’

  ‘Because lives depended on it?’ asks Bale.

  Oll shakes his head.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘much more important than that.’

  He starts walking again, crunching up the scarp in the dying light. He knows he has said too much, and that he has discouraged them. The veteran soldier in him – in fact, there are several veteran soldiers in him – knows better than that. In a ‘fix’ like this, a decent commander does not spit on morale. He cannot take back what he has already said, but he could cheer them by saying more, cheer them or distract them.

  ‘The winds,’ he says. ‘That’s the key to it. That’s the key to any voyage, as any seafarer will tell you. You follow the winds, follow where they blow.’

  He glances back at them.

  ‘Not these winds,’ he says, raising a palm to feel the cold mountain air run between his fingers. ‘I don’t mean how the air moves. I mean the primordial winds, the winds of the empyrean, the winds that keep the ever-ocean tossing and thrashing.’

  He starts walking again.

  ‘I use the Romanii names,’ he says, ‘because they’re the ones I was taught. Right now, we’re following Africus, following where that wind blows. It’s a south-wester. That’s why the Romanii called it Africus. But the Grekans, they knew it as Lips, and the Franks, they called it Vuestestroni.’

  He looks back at them again.

  ‘See?’ he asks.

  Krank raises his hand, like a child in a scholam class.

  ‘Yes?’ asks Oll.

  ‘My question would be, what are Romaniis?’ says Krank.

  Oll sighs. He wonders if they have time for him to answer that, and he doubts it, because they do not have any time for anything at all.

  ‘Never mind,’ he says.

  ‘So… we follow this wind, this Akrifus,’ says Bale Rane.

  ‘Africus,’ Katt corrects.

  ‘Yeah, that,’ says Bale. ‘We follow this wind to… where?’

  ‘To the place where we make the next cut. To the next place where the skin between worlds is thin.’

  ‘Providing the trumpeters don’t catch us first?’ asks Krank. He laughs, a piping ha-ha-ha that the breeze lifts away.

  ‘Pretty much,’ says Oll.

  [mark: –?]

  They sleep under a fold of rock near the summit of a ridge. Oll sits watch. He wants to push on, but he can tell how tired they are. They need food. They need water that does not taste like blood. They need sleep. They need a good, clean cut that will take them away from the trumpeters.

  Oll does not think of them as trumpeters. Last time he met anything like them, creatures of a similar breed, it was multiple lifespans ago in the Cyclades, and they were called sirens. It is just another word, no better than trumpeters, no worse. The only thing Oll knew then, and Iason agreed at the time, was that the creatures did not come from the Cyclades. They did not belong there, no more than the trumpeters belong here. They were from an elsewhere that had nothing to do with this world or any other. They were like a damp or a rot that had leaked through a wall from outside.

  The noises they made, they would drive a man mad if he had to listen to them for long. They would make him forget himself, make him forget–

  [mark: –?]

  Oll wakes up. He does not know how long he has been out. An hour? Just a few minutes? The others are still dead to the world. It is as cold as a tomb’s vault under the rock. It is dark, and there is no sound except the pattering of the rain.

  He had been dreaming. The remnants of the dream are still hooked in his mind, like splinters in skin: hard, fresh sunlight on moving water; light dappling; the sea green like glass. The ship is a proud ship and will be remembered for so long that it becomes a myth. There is an eye painted on the prow, a common mark in those days. All the galley warships in the Middle Sea had them.

  There is laughter from the deck. Oll feels the hot sun on his bare, tanned back. He can hear Orfeus playing the sort of melody that would keep out the noises of the sirens.

  It is a good life in that dream, that memory. They were better days, a better adventure than the one he has embarked upon. This new, unmarked journey, knifing a route from world to world, it will not be remembered. It will not pass into myth like that long sail to Colchis and back. This journey will not even be remembered long enough to be forgotten.

  It might be more important, though. It might be more important than any adventure he has undertaken in his life.

  His lives.

  Oll realises he was thinking of it as his last journey, his last adventure. He realises he is expecting it to be the final exploit of his life, the closing act, one last brave outing in the twilight of his time. Except, by any means of measurement, he is supposed to live forever; unless some agency stops his life.

  So, why is he thinking so fatalistically?

  The last splinters of the dream are still there: the eye on the prow of the boat, staring and hard, beautiful and kohl-edged, like Medea’s enchanting eyes, but terrible too. A single eye. These days, that mark means another thing. He saw it in the last dream he had, the dream where John came to him and showed him Terra on fire. That cursed eye is why this will be his last adventure.

  ‘Damn you, John,’ he whispers.

  He gets up, rubbing his hands, his arms. They have to get moving, push on. They have
been down too long. They are getting too cold, too damp, losing too much core temperature.

  And the trumpeters have gone quiet. That is not a good sign.

  ‘Get up!’ he says, trying to rouse them. His hands are numb. It is so dark.

  ‘Get up, come on!’ he cries. ‘We have to push on.’

  No one is stirring, except Graft, who activates at the sound of Oll’s voice.

  ‘Trooper Persson?’

  ‘Wake them all up. We have to move,’ Oll says.

  Something skitters on the stones out in the darkness.

  Oll’s hands are numb, but he takes up his rifle.

  ‘Get up!’ he cries. Still no one stirs. He aims in the air and fires a shot.

  ‘Wake up!’ he says.

  Now they have.

  [mark: –?]

  They are all cold and wet, and scared, woken from unfriendly dreams to an even unfriendlier reality. Katt is crying, but it is the cold not the stress. Krank is tearful too, because he has had enough of it all and it is nasty. Oll urges them up the slope, over the back of the ridge.

  There are things on the scarp behind them. Trumpeters, Oll guesses. Even trumpeters know that it is sometimes most productive to stay quiet. The damn sirens knew that too.

  The ridge is a black hump ahead, suggesting better light beyond. Dawn, maybe? They crest it, and see a paleness, a pale blueness, in the sky behind. They go over the ridge. Oll has Bale lead the way, and takes the tail spot himself, swinging back to watch for things pursuing them. Parts of the darkness move, but not so much he can make a target.

  ‘God help us,’ he says. He does not doubt God’s plan, because he is a man of faith, but sometimes he thinks God has put them up to all of this. All the holy books, all of them from every creed he has ever studied, they are full of stories about souls being made to suffer and endure, just so they can attain salvation.

  This is his time to be Job, his time to be Sisyphus, his time to be Prometheus, to be Odin, to be Osiris. This is his time to endure.

  What is more, it is not even his own salvation he is suffering for.

  Oll thinks he should not have to be tested any more, not after the life he has led.

  They go down the slope and onto the back of the next scarp. It is much lighter; a pre-dawn glow makes the sky ahead of them translucent like smoked glass. Oll has a sudden, bright feeling that they are close to where they need to be. It is like seeing a single star low in the sky on a lightless night and realising there is something to navigate by.

  He glances back. There are trumpeters on the ridge behind them. They are huge bipeds, swollen and heavy, with long counterbalance tails held up, swishing the air behind them. Their throats rise into heads like floral blooms or pitcher plants, like fleshy mechanisms that part and extend and broaden. They begin to make the noises again at the dawn sky. The volume is incredible. The strange, wet flanges and crests of the heads move and bunch to modulate the expelled notes.

  ‘Push on!’ Oll yells at the others.

  The noises make them falter – the noises and the sight of the things along the ridge. Oll knows that look. Soon they will not be able to think. Where is Orfeus when he is needed? Some beeswax, even?

  He plants the stock of his old rifle against his shoulder and fires at the trumpeters. He sees them whinny and flinch as his shots spark against their leathery, feathered flanks. He does not think he can kill them. He just wants to make some noise. Bale, Krank and Zybes turn and start shooting too, following Oll’s lead. Soon, four las-weapons are cracking away up the ridge at the trumpeters. Zybes cannot hit anything, not even horrors that big, but Bale and Krank, who’ve never seen actual service, are fresh out of Founding Basic and have been gun-schooled. Their shots are clean, decent, neat.

  It is not the hits that Oll wants, anyway, it is the noise. The squeal and crack of four infantry weapons up close could drown out, or at least disrupt, the effect of the trumpeting. Make a noise, like Orfeus did.

  They keep shooting. After a few minutes, some of the trumpeters turn, belly-heavy, and waddle out of sight behind the ridge, stung too many times by the annoying las-shots to want to stay. The others follow.

  Like cattle, Oll thinks. Like cattle, turning away as a herd, a collective. The hooting dies away behind the ridge.

  He cannot shake the thought of them as cattle. Cattle suggest grazers, herbivores, and that suggests a darker possibility. It suggests something the trumpeting is supposed to keep at bay.

  It suggests a predator.

  [mark: –?]

  Oll cuts a hole, and they step through. It is hot on the far side. Dry heat, like an oven, a bright sky that looks like it has been painted blue and then sandblasted. They are on a road, a dry and dusty track.

  They walk for about ten minutes, long enough for Oll to realise he knows where they are.

  He sees the first of the dead tanks, a burned out T-62, and knows they will see a lot more if they keep walking. In the space of one long, hot day right at the burned stump of M2, the regional despot lost a mechanised brigade and an armoured brigade. One hundred and fifty tanks and hard-shell vehicles.

  ‘Why here?’ he asks out loud.

  ‘Who are you asking?’ replies Zybes.

  ‘What are you asking?’ asks Katt.

  Tank shells and metal wrecks line the road and the wadi beyond. The air smells of smoke and burned oil. Oll wants answers, but there is no one to ask. There is nothing but dry bones.

  Zybes calls out. They go to him.

  There is a trailer on its side in the ditch. There are plastic jerry cans of water, warm in the sun, food packs, bedrolls. Whatever was towing the trailer was hit so hard only lumps of it remain.

  This is why.

  They are dry already, and warmed, from the sun. They load up with the supplies they can carry, loading the water cans onto Graft.

  This is why.

  ‘Good luck we came here,’ says Krank.

  Oll is looking at something.

  ‘Someone’s luck,’ he replies, not turning from what he has seen.

  He is staring at the remains of another battle tank. The treads are gone and the wheel farings are bent. The hull’s blackened and scarred, and the turret has been half ripped off like a can that has had its lid gouged away.

  There is a mark on the side, just under the 18th Mechanised emblem. It could just be a curious little shrapnel scratch, because it is damned near indecipherable, but it was scored into the metal after the hull burned, showing bare steel through the caking of soot.

  It is a word – a name maybe, but not a human one.

  M’kar.

  What does that name signify?

  And who thought to inscribe it there?

  [mark: –?]

  They stay for a few hours in the sun, moving along the dead road between the corpses of war machines. Oll checks his map and his compass, and discerns the next place.

  ‘Not far this time,’ he says.

  ‘You were here, weren’t you?’ Katt asks him.

  Oll wonders whether he should answer, and then he nods.

  ‘Where is this?’

  ‘They called it 73 Easting,’ he says. ‘The greatest armoured battle of its time, they reckoned.’

  ‘Which time was that?’ she asks.

  He shrugs.

  ‘Which side were you on?’ she asks.

  ‘Does it matter?’ he replies.

  ‘You must have been on the side of the winners,’ she decides.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re alive and all of these machines are dead.’

  ‘Okay,’ he nods. Okay means something different now. He looks at her, squinting in the desert light.

  ‘Just so you know; my being alive doesn’t have much to do with the outcome of any battle. I’ve lived through things on all sides, one tim
e or another. My life isn’t predicated on victory. I’m just fond of it. And I’ll chase after it when I can.’

  ‘What is your life predicated on, then?’ she asks.

  ‘Just… being alive,’ he says. ‘I don’t seem to be able to lose the habit, and it’s hard to take from me.’

  He looks back at her. Her eyes are dark-lined and big. They remind him of someone. Medea, of course. That crazy witch. So beautiful, and full of so very many difficult questions, just like this girl.

  ‘It’s hard to take from me, but not impossible,’ he says.

  ‘You’re some kind of immortal,’ she says.

  ‘Some kind, I suppose. We refer to ourselves as Perpetuals.’

  ‘We?’ she asks.

  ‘There are a small number of us. Always have been.’

  ‘Should you be telling me this?’ she asks.

  Should I? Oll asks himself. I’ve never really spoken of it to anyone, not anyone who wasn’t like me. But I’m standing in my own distant past, in a place that no longer exists, and I’ve got a long way to go before I can rest. A very long way. I’m telling the secrets of ancient Terra to a girl who won’t understand them, and who will never be found or known, and certainly will never be believed.

  Under this blue sky, in this desert wind, looking into eyes that should have belonged to a witch from Colchis, or at least been drawn on the prow of a Cyclades warship, what secrets am I really giving away?

  ‘It’s okay,’ he tells her. ‘I think I can trust you.’

  ‘What kind are you?’ she asks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What kind of immortal?’

  ‘Oh,’ Oll says. He has never been required to answer that before. ‘The ordinary kind,’ he says.

  [mark: –?]

  When he cuts the hole this time, just before dusk, the desert wind gets up at 73 Easting, and the dry bones in the dead hulls start to rattle and fidget. The dead are sensing something, and it is not Oll and his companions.

  Oll knows that the dead do not feel much. There are only sensitive to a few things. Things that do not have human names.