Tearing Down The Statues

by Brian Bennudriti

  “Implying there are others here not yet seen.”

  “Don’t get carried away!”

  The Recorder scurried from beneath the table. She tried to keep up with him; but he moved quickly and with a purpose. The burnished nickel restaurant sign betrayed the kitchen’s dimly lit entrance; and steel chairs honked against the floor as he shoved them roughly from his way. He kept on till he was standing before the kitchen doors themselves and was within earshot. There were the clinking and rushing water sounds of men inside preparing some sort of food. He stood and listened, inhaling nervously and shutting his eyes and hoping.

  After a moment of silence and unclear murmuring from the room, the bang of closing oven doors, a voice sang out.

  “You wiry, thin little man – what would you know of sausages? You might as well strangle the poor fellows out there as feed them those wretched, mangled blasphemies you’ve manufactured! Haven’t they suffered enough?”

  Misling’s eyes opened and shone like a tiny child at Christmas, blinking in the brightly colored lights. He grinned ridiculously and stood perfectly still, savoring the fat old man’s voice.

  “Your casings have split, as perhaps should your head for wasting such beautiful treasures. And the heat of the oven…what in the world are you used to cooking, you backwoods uncultured wreck of a cook? The shepherding of good sausages is in low heat and patience, much like the great lovers will say of women. It is fortunate for those poor wounded fellows I am here to set in order your efforts!”

  Cristoffel saw what was happening and grinned. It was beautiful. The Recorder stayed motionless a moment longer to bathe in the relief and the resolution, letting it warm him like sweet oil soaking into bread, then pushed open the doors to step inside.

  Farmilion was stirring his steaming water and frowning at the split casings, while the thin fellow beside him covered in smoke and dust peered hopelessly into the pot. The Recorder heard none of what the other fellow said and instead, watched the tiny man happily. When Farmilion looked up and saw Misling, his cheeks and rumpled forehead softened and colored like rose petals.

  “My dear little professor! You have come back to me!”

  The words brought incredible relief to Misling as they hugged, the Recorder quickly realizing that Farmilion had an awful limp now and was bandaged about his right hip with dark red stains showing through the cloth. Farmilion didn’t want it mentioned, and with his eyes drew attention away from his injuries. The Recorder sniffed, savoring Farmilion’s smell and the feel of his belly as he patted it with his open palm.

  Farmilion puffed his big lips out at Cristoffel, “And you’ve a girl!”

  Misling pointed at her, “She kissed me.”

  “Did she, now?” Farmilion raised a white bushy eyebrow, his thunderous laughter warming like steaming cider. Smacking the assistant on his shoulder, “Why are you just standing there?! Can’t you see they’re thirsty?”

  23 YOU CAN’T CHOOSE YOUR FAMILY

  The evening light was dwindling as Grebel sat on the rooftop, his legs dangling over the guttering and overlooking the plaza. He was watching the filthy Red Witch tower in the dimming light and was alone till Misling wandered from the fire escape to join him. Grebel grinned.

  “Well, there’s the table-kicking firecracker! How was the celebration?”

  Squatting beside, his legs crossed, Misling joined him. “Happy. Farmilion is explaining again what happened to him at Balcister.”

  “He turned left; and the other guy turned right. I heard it. Twice. And the other one stayed back to eat berries.”

  Misling only nodded, not wanting to elaborate on how many times he’d heard it so far. Grebel was sucking sausage grease from his fingers and Misling watched him do so. It drew Grebel’s attention; and he sort of shrugged to the side to eat the last of it in peace. The Red Witch tower was still and quiet; and from this distance it looked like poorly crafted stoneworks.

  “I don’t normally speak with creeps like yourself, little guy; but I’m giving you my firecracker special dispensation. We’re in a big toilet bowl right now; and everybody else is just gonna pile on now. Gonna get bad – you and yours ought to get out of here and keep on going.”

  “Are you staying?”

  He gave a disgusted look, indignant that he’d be asked, “There’s somebody I’ve gotta pull out of this mess before he makes an ass of himself.”

  Misling nodded, “Young Talgo.” Grebel didn’t answer, but rather just sucked his teeth and watched the misty plaza. When he felt the Recorder staring, he looked up, irritated.

  “Ask it.”

  Relieved at the permission but still waiting on something, Misling looked only like someone waiting on the floor to give way. The two of them were eye to eye for a moment, Grebel growing more annoyed.

  “Get on with it, you painted shlong. If you’ve got something to say, say it.” Misling knew exactly what he was on about, but only looked on patiently as there was no need to ask. The flatsman was asking it himself. “Why the Talgos. Right?”

  He picked something off his boot, “I don’t know, man. I’m stupid. Somehow, getting in the middle of wherever they are always seems to be the right thing to do.”

  “A poor and unpardonable excuse.”

  Eyes widening at the affront, “What did you say to me?”

  Misling looked to the rubble to avoid the eyes of one of the most powerful men in the world, one who’d commanded the forces of an apocalypse and killed millions in war. “Because you have chosen a place for your guilt does not absolve you of it.”

  “You mouthy little rodent…”

  “Please.” Misling turned to him. “I have lived five times over.”

  Grebel stared, as most did with this Recorder when he said things like this. He wasn’t a man accustomed to such directness and was perhaps just as likely to shove Misling from the roof as answer. “Yeah.”

  Grebel well knew he was speaking now not to a brown-eyed young man with a nervous stutter and an awkward manner, but the eternal Record and uncountable generations to come. It was breaking him.

  “Yeah.” He nodded slowly, and bit his lip a couple of times before at last jutting his lower lip idly, like he’d answered himself on whether it all mattered at this point. “So, I was going in to see the Old Man once at the worst of the Rupture, when everything was burning…standing by the snakes and straightening my uniform. I’d just left the previous Warmaster’s command room and had found the guy play acting in some kind of costume. I’m not making this up – he was shadow boxing and reciting lines or something with his staff handing him props. Un-freaking-believable. The Old Man was next in line, so I was hoping…I don’t know.

  “There was this thread poking out of a buttonhole on my shirt; and I was trying to spin it around the button rather than try and snap it. He noticed stuff like that. Funny I still remember. I was worried the button would come off all the way. Anyway, that’s what I was doing when the big doors opened.” Grebel’s voice was ponderous and sad. This wasn’t something of which he’d spoken; and it was coming unstuck roughly. “The women who came out, not all were old and toothless. Some were even pretty. There were maybe twenty of them; and I remember it was like a funeral – the way they looked. Midwives, I found out later. He’d just told them to poison and choke the Rauchka newborns but not enough to kill. That’s how far the crap with the clowns had gone. This one white-hair comes right to my face and says, ‘there is no forgiveness for this’”.

  Grebel shook his head, “You’d have thought he’d be in there mad, throwing things after telling people to do something like that. You know he was chuckling. I asked permission to enter; and he was bouncing a ball on his foot and kicked it to me.”

  “Yet you go to shelter his grandson.”

  “You can’t choose your family, chief.”

  Misling raised an eyebrow thoughtfully, “You did.”

  The old soldier glared, a vein pulsing on his temple, “So he’s still spinning that ball in
his hands like a little boy when we’re at the big map; and he goes through the most incredible tactical plan I’ve ever heard. It was pure genius; and I knew it was unbeatable as soon as I looked at it. He’d just ordered the maiming of infants and was saving the world now. It was Sarling. It’s how we kept Sarling and turned the war.”

  Grebel shrugged, asking not of this Recorder but of those to come who would hear his words nonetheless, “What was I supposed to do?”

  Misling let it get quiet again. Voices distant enough to be only murmuring were coming from the plaza where a pack of teenagers stood around the Red Witch tower, as many had throughout the day intrigued by the challenge and question of the black bell at its top.

  “You are not alone in following, Grebel Lant. There is powerful momentum to Talgo.”

  “Maybe.” The old soldier had drifted back into his thoughts.

  Misling’s painted forehead crumpled curiously, “Was he working with the Augur?”

  “Nahh. He told me to bomb it.”

  “’Is the Talgo mystique a tool of or product of the Augur, or perhaps its master’…have you heard that question, Grebel Lant?”

  “I’ve heard it; and it’s crap. Look, don’t get deep on me, chief. You lucked out today and got somebody back. That’s not gonna happen again. Tomorrow, you’ll wake up and think none of it was that bad and isn’t this an adventure. You’ll think maybe just go pick a little at any leftovers from your trip here; and it all feels important…that you’re the only one that can make a difference. I know it well; and it’s a good way to wind up with a mouth full of mud and a hole in your back. The very thought is occurring to about two million people right now while we’re talking. Get your people and scoot.”

  “Yet you chose to try. And still do.” Misling gestured in the direction of the atrium below where the lifestation was.

  Frowning, “Everybody wants to leave a mark, right? I just don’t want mine to be a scar.”

  A little girl’s voice, “Ask him about the clown prince.” Misling jerked his head in shock to see the little girl from the barley fields sitting cross-legged next to him, hugging herself. Grebel hadn’t heard and did not see her. She wiggled her eyebrows at him and smiled.

  Hesitating, steadying himself, “Did you…” She was still there, not a memory – not in Mast. There. “Did you know the Rauchka clown prince, Laoka?”

  He chuckled, “Yah. I knew him. Idiot; but he was a good guy. Could burp his way through ‘The General’s Blade’. That always cracked me up.” Grebel was smiling, looking off into his own dim record. Misling saw the barley-field girl as real as the ledge and the night sky and was puzzling at her implication.

  “What was he like?”

  “Had a way of getting people to do things for him. He hung out with an old Malthus twig and picked up some of their tricks, especially when the Old Man really started going after him. You know what he told me one time? I’ll tell you this, you let me know if it’s possible.”

  Grebel chuckled idly, still not seeing the girl and not realizing Misling’s growing realization, “We were lit one night. Absolutely lit, swimming under this hideous Salt Mystic statue in the Fountain City when he tells me the old buzzard hid things in the Record…like traps. He said they get triggered sometimes to right the ship when we make a turd of things. And get this…he said he was one. Is that possible? Could she do that?”

  The Recorder stared back, uncertain, “It may be.”

  “Hmm.” The barley-field girl was grinning, like she’d thought of an inside joke. Her nose was pink. Misling noticed her nose was pink.

  “Would he have attacked Alson like this? Would he hire the Red Witch?”

  Shaking his head, “Not ever, chief. Not in a million years. He was a softie. That Malthus twig I told you about – a fossil losing his memory. Couldn’t’ remember to wipe his own butt at the end; but Laoka did everything for him, like a son. Weird and sweet, right?” Grebel noticed Misling suddenly examining something, something below him perhaps on the ledge. “What are you looking at?”

  “The iron ring. The…Ring.”

  “You’re losing me.”

  “That is what he wanted us to see in the reading: the Rauchka all over the pattern leading to the Rupture but nowhere at all now…hiding in plain sight and fighting to hold back the tide.” He glanced to the girl for her to confirm; but she was still only grinning. “He was letting them know he is back.”

  The old soldier shook his head, “Okay, I don’t know what just happened to this conversation. Look, you want to know who hired the Red Witch? Nobody. Nobody hired them. It’s momentum, chief. You said it. No conspiracy, no evil master mind. Bad momentum.”

  Grebel stood, rubbing his hands together to warm them, bowing his head in ponderance. Nothing in his face or manner showed he felt clean of fault in any of this. At last, he shook his old head with some finality, “And both sides just let it ride till here we are scraping it off our shoes. Shame.”

  “Yes, as before. And the clowns are all that have been standing against it, maybe for a generation or more.” Misling squinted, looking at nothing and trying with his very soul to understand how his strange friend could embody not the long-dead Salt Mystic, which maybe he’d never believed anyway, but rather the clown prince, Laoka with all the ridiculous history against the Old Man that entailed. He was to admit years later in explaining these events, that it wasn’t so much what Grebel had said or Ring’s knowledge of the Recorder creed that persuaded him what he now knew…but unbelievably, that farting noise and wiggled fingers at the statue of the Iron Eye outside the cave city. Somehow that made it make sense.

  Grinning slightly, but entirely disagreeing and all but turning to leave the Recorder there on the dim rooftop, “Revin’s talkshow all over again. Great. If that pinches it off for you, chief, then good for you. A pipe dream; but good for you. Maybe we all should have stood against it. How about you leave it to them, then, and get your fat little friend out of Alson and up in the woods somewhere?”

  “But what does the Augur have to do with any of this?”

  “The Augur didn’t start any of it.” The barley-field girl answered when Grebel didn’t and before she vanished again into the twilight- before the old soldier stood to part ways from the Recorder for the last time. “It’s just where it’s all going to end.”

  24 CLASH OF THE FLEETS PART 1

  The apocalyptic battlefield of Spenecia spread like a prophet’s vision, with screaming battlesuits and ramships already smashing into each other. Searing orange explosions the color of tigers flashed and dimmed in thick clouds of white and gray smoke; and midnight blooms of Black Fire swelled to the sky, then fell back to the scorched earth. To many in later generations, even those not yet born at the time, images from this conflict came to be familiar and primal. Students of war marveled at the speed with which Peri marshaled her defense forces and the collision of traditional strategies with innovative new means of fighting. Weapons and methods that had long been agreed as illegal went into full play; and larger than life characters stomped through the battle stories with vigor. It was a day of shame and of majesty; and to those later generations, certainly the root and beginning of their suffering.

  The Flatsmen fleet led by Thessany had trundled to the farmhouses and cropfields of Spenecia in an open-mouthed arc of war engines and quicktanks with battlesuits on the outer wings and ramships swirling like hornets in the center, his arsenal ship following behind and sheltered. They found Peri’s defensive fleet there already, laid out in a wedge aimed like a bullet at them with skirmishing ramships leading. First hand accounts from the day describe those hesitant few moments when the two forces faced one another as haunting and wicked, like the world was about to do something it shouldn’t and each side wondered at the sheer force of arms their enemy had brought to bear. In fact, what actually kicked off the first volley was white-haired Mervyn Loelto, one of the Old Man’s guardians and confidantes who should have been rocking before a fire somewhe
re humming to his new great-granddaughter with the tiny purple birth mark on her arm, but instead rode an armored wanoa right into the no-man’s land between them all and pointed his freshly polished carbine into the sky. Strangely, the Alson and the Flatsmen commanders waited till the ancient fellow with the uniform a bit tight and his arm shaking had signaled before they launched.

  If Alson fell here, they would vanish from the Record; and they well knew it.

  Thessany

  “Once I find Peri, this little puppet show is over. Know what I mean, boys!”

  Thessany laughed and raised his volume as he stepped to the full size viewscreen like a museum mural full of tanks and cannons and dying soldiers, yet still only the opening movements of a larger arrangement, “You hear me, you flower chewing, perfume wearing cross-eyed’s?! Where is the crafty little shrew!?”