by Tom Kratman
“The corporal was fairly new, but among the tribune’s decorations were three wound badges, the close combat badge, the Cazador tab, of course, and the Cruz de Coraje en Oro con Espadas.
“And, despite that, I had to have them both shot.
“No more,” Carrera said, shaking his head firmly. “I don’t want to have to do that ever again. Ever. Again.
“Because,” and Carrera’s finger shot out at Senator Robles, “Eros mocks Mars. Love knows no ages, nor sexes, nor conditions. It accepts no bars. And people brave enough to fight and maybe die for the Republic are not going to be dissuaded or deterred by our occasional firing squads. The most those do is encourage discretion.” He shrugged. “Usually…imperfectly.”
Carrera held his hands up, palms facing and parallel, roughly six inches apart, and said, “But, you know, deterrence always seems to fail by about that much.”
Senator Hurtado used her hand to hide an embarrassed smile.
“So what do you propose, Duque?” Parilla asked, though he knew perfectly well what Carrera intended. And really didn’t approve.
Speaking slowly and very deliberately, Carrera answered, “I want to raise a regiment—a small regiment, I think; not many will be suitable for the conditions I have in mind—of married male homosexuals.”
Someone—Senator Cardenas, Carrera thought—shouted out from the benches, “This is impossible, Duque! You are going to make us a laughingstock among the nations of the world. Raising a regiment of queers; married queers? Impossible. And I shudder to think what the church will say.”
Bright eyes flashing, Carrera answered, “It is possible, Senator. It’s been done. It can be done again. And I intend to do it.”
“But to what purpose, Duque? We don’t need them. I don’t want them. They make my fucking skin crawl!” Cardenas shuddered.
Carrera hesitated before answering. “No pun intended, but I find them a little, ah, distasteful, myself. But, Senator, as I said, just two weeks ago I watched two good soldiers shot by firing squads for mutiny. Their crime was that they were of different ranks, fell in love and…did something about it. They weren’t the first we’ve had to shoot, either. You know that.
“They died well, those two. I want them to be the last. This is a way, a chance anyway, for them to be the last.”
Carrera looked around the Curia, gauging support. He didn’t think he had it. He said, “Senators…if it doesn’t work…what have we lost? Some money for training. A few buildings we could always use for something else. Some uniforms. Let me try this…please?
“Besides, I need them for something else.”
“Eh?” Cardenas asked. “What? What else?”
Carrera’s eyes lit again as he answered, “I want to raise a regiment of women.”
* * *
Later, in his own offices beneath the Curia’s main floor, Parilla sighed, “They voted against you, Patricio. On both questions. No money for your Tercio Gorgidas or Tercio Amazona. Even Hurtado voted ‘nay.’ ”
“I’d be proud of them,” Carrera admitted, then scowled, “if I wasn’t so damned annoyed that they balked me.”
“What are you going to do?”
Carrera’s mouth twisted before he answered, “When I turned over the bulk of the legion’s assets to the Senate, you know I openly kept quite a bit for discretionary funds.”
Parilla smiled. “Yeah, I told them you would. I think they were secretly relieved to be able to balk you without frustrating you. I also made you a deal, even against my better judgment.”
Carrera’s left eyebrow shot up. “What kind of deal?”
“If you can make these regiments worth a damn, on your own ticket, the Senate will recompense your discretionary funds.”
“Best you could do, huh?”
“Better than I really wanted to do,” Parilla admitted.
Chapter Two
To sleep, perchance to dream.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Maria:
I’d had it pretty plush as a little girl. I didn’t even suspect just how plush until much later.
My family lived in a big white stucco house, a few miles west of Punta Cantera. We had a maid, a cook, two cars. My mother needed the maid, too, given the sheer size of our house. Maybe by South Colombian standards we weren’t quite rich. Certainly we weren’t more than distantly connected to the oligarchy that ran Balboa from shortly after Belisario Carrera’s revolt against Old Earth until quite recently. Still, we lived better than about ninety-eight percent of the people of our country.
My earliest memory—and I can’t really remember how old I was then—was of sitting on my father’s lap watching television. Two men, one brown, one black, were fighting. I didn’t care about that, of course; sitting on Daddy’s lap was better than playing with my dolls, trying on new clothes, or even ice cream or candy. I only paid attention to the fight because it seemed important to my father.
Suddenly the brown man on the TV threw down his hands saying, “No mas. No mas.” Daddy went into a towering rage at that, putting me on my feet so he could pace and fume. I remember him using words like “disgrace,” “ashamed,” and “coward.” He used some other words, too, that I’d never heard from him before. Come to think of it, I’d never heard some of those words from anyone before. I guess I must have been really young.
* * *
There were a lot of things on the television worse than that when I was young. I was maybe seven when I walked into the living room and saw my mother, even paler than she normally was, staring at the screen while biting her finger so hard blood started to drip. Mama was crying.
I asked what was the matter, but she just shook her head while continuing to stare at the screen. Then I looked and I saw the bodies, and the parts of bodies, and the blood.
At first I thought it must be a movie. But Mama never would have cried over a movie, not her. And, when I looked from the screen to her face, I saw tears running.
“Who would do this?” Mama asked of the air, her hands flailing about, helplessly. “Who would do such a thing? Even when we were invaded, twelve years ago, they tried not to kill regular people. This…monstrous…thing; they intended to butcher innocent folk.”
Then she realized I was really there and picked me up and carried me out of the room.
She was too late, of course. I already had an idea of what had happened. And I thought then, as I think now, that the most important lesson I’d learned since starting school was that when someone hits you, you have to hit them back. Hard. As hard as you can.
* * *
It was maybe a year and a quarter later before we finally did hit back. I got to watch that on television, too, with Daddy and my brother, Emilio. Mama wouldn’t watch. Emilio was enthralled. Daddy was mostly just interested.
I know now why the images on the screen were green and grainy. At the time I didn’t. I’m not sure Daddy did either. And there wasn’t really that much to see, just bright green flashes on a long steep ridge somewhere they called “Sumer.” I didn’t know where that was.
The man doing the talking seemed really nervous, and it was hard to make out his words over the other sounds. Sometimes he’d turn his camera around and show what was happening in the other direction, but when he did you could see even less, just the outline of a hill being lit up by flashing lights.
I fell asleep on Daddy’s lap before much of anything really happened.
* * *
It wasn’t so long after that that the country began to really change. Neither Mama nor Daddy were too happy with the changes.
What changes? Oh, I don’t recall that I’d ever seen a soldier in my life except on TV or at the movies. But, more and more as time went on you would see them everywhere. Some even came to school sometimes to talk to us. And they had parades in the streets pretty often, too.
* * *
In any case, I knew and cared little enough about all of that back then. My world was one of school, friends, bea
ches, parties and shopping. The latest hit love song was much more important to me than the fact that an army was growing around us.
The first time I ever really saw the legion was when the Second Infantry Tercio paraded down Via Hispanica. It was on a day when my mother had taken me shopping for clothes at a boutique near the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora. We had only just arrived at the door to the store, I having delayed things by successfully talking mother into buying me a new pair of shoes at a different establishment as well as two new music discs at yet another.
Hey, helping Mama spend Daddy’s money was my job.
The parade itself was very well stage-managed, it seems to me now. Traffic was stopped in both directions for maybe half a mile. That was as far as I could see, anyway. Then smoke appeared as if by magic, a screen of billowing thick gray fog, all across the street. Someone started throwing these little bombs into the smoke. They whistled and then blew up, something like the sounds I’d heard on the TV, coming from Sumer. By that time, I was also able to recognize them from the war movies my little brother Emilio watched whenever he could. I, assuredly, had no interest in war in general or artillery in particular.
Then the pipes started, loud and shrill, and the first rank of the Second Tercio appeared, marching through the smoke and the explosions…as if marching into a fight. I think that was the effect they intended. It was…impressive. It impressed me, anyway.
When the boys went into their parade step—a sort of modified goose step, actually—people on either side applauded and the girls nearly swooned. Some of the men and boys marching really were handsome. And there was a power in their tread that I’d never experienced before.
I was fairly mesmerized for the moment. My mother just pulled me away into a store, tsk-tsking about what her father would have said had he been there to see it. No one, hardly, in our social class would dream of joining the military, back then, and certainly not an infantry tercio. We were all very much above that sort of thing. Mama’s whole family explicitly despised the legions. Daddy’s was a bit more ambivalent about them.
* * *
My father was a businessman, self-made for the most part. He’d started life with very little besides determination, some brains, some guts. I remember him, when I remember him, as being very handsome, very dark. My mother was a rabiblanca—a “white ass.” She had been something of a debutante, from one minor branch of an old, old family.
My mother’s family never liked my father. For one thing, he absolutely refused to take anything from them, a position my mother supported him in for the sake of his pride. For another, he just wasn’t from one of the old families that usually ran our country. That stain passed on to myself and my brothers and sister. Our grandparents never cared for us as much as they did the other grandchildren. Besides we were too dark from Father’s side of the family.
Still, Mother and Father did everything they could to make it up to us. We went on vacations regularly, attended the best schools in the City. Today I shudder to think of how much money they spent on me and my three siblings. We were probably as spoiled as any four kids growing up anywhere. And I? I was the apple of Daddy’s eye, certainly through age fifteen. Whatever I wanted, and I recall that once that had even included acting classes, I got.
Age fifteen? Yes, that’s when everything changed. The big change? I discovered boys. In particular, I discovered one boy.
Juan was simply gorgeous; tall, muscled and olive. He was curly haired, with green eyes framing a patrician nose. Yumm. His family was as old as my mother’s. Juan’s age? Eighteen. When you’re fifteen, eighteen looks very mature and attractive indeed.
I saw him first when I went with some friends to the beach at Santa Clara, east of the Ciudad. I was sitting under one of the palm-thatched huts that dot the beach, just chatting with my girlfriends, when Juan came into my view. He looked good in a bathing suit.
So did I; I guess. Juan came over to introduce himself and my girlfriends thoughtfully made themselves scarce. We talked, made some arrangements, met again in the City. Met again. Met again.
He could sweet-talk a girl. I wasn’t short, he said; I was “perfection in miniature.” I wasn’t too dark, no, I was…let me think. Oh, yes, “the shadow of beauty on a moonlit night.” Oh, that was a good one. He told me I was beautiful, often enough, with enough of what sounded to me like sincerity, that I began to believe that to him I was beautiful, not merely pretty. I was his “Heaven and Earth.” My eyes, his stars. My body, the paradise he yearned to enter.
He said he loved me, too.
I decided Juan was the one. The usual thing—err, things, actually—happened. I won’t pretend I didn’t like it. Even the things I didn’t much like for themselves I loved doing with him…for him. I didn’t even mind that some of those things hurt.
But then the only slightly less usual thing happened.
* * *
“Madre de Dios! What is the matter with you, Maria?” My mother stood, arms folded, at the door to my bathroom where I knelt, head in the toilet.
I had hidden my pregnancy for a couple of months, too afraid to disappoint my parents. Rising to my feet, I answered, “Nothing, Mother. I just don’t feel well.”
“Yes…of course…you don’t feel well.” Uh, oh. Mother wasn’t buying.
She looked me over very carefully. Then she slapped me right across the face. “I wonder…do you suppose your bra is getting too tight, little one? Do you think maybe you need a larger size school uniform?” She hit me again, knocking me to the floor, then screamed, “Who was the boy, you cheap little tramp?” When I didn’t answer, she pulled me to my feet by my arm. Then she twisted my arm behind my back and bent it. I screamed.
She forced the truth out of me. I wasn’t as used to pain then as I later became.
Oh, sister, was there a scene at my house that night. Father screamed at me, slapped my face, too. He’d never done anything like that before, never even raised his voice to me. Mother had always disciplined the girls.
Mother, on the other hand, just cried continuously, moaning about the shame of her daughter being a “cheap puta.” It wasn’t until quite a few years later that I discovered from my sister that Mother had been three or four months pregnant with me when she’d married Father.
Daddy called Juan’s parents, demanding that he marry me. They said Juan denied being the father. They said that if Daddy couldn’t control his “little whores” it was no concern of theirs or of their son.
Naturally, my father went wild at that, but since Juan’s parents hung up and took the phone off the hook there was no one to take it out on but Mother and myself. Finally, I ran to my room in tears.
* * *
The next day I took off from school to find Juan, since his parents weren’t accepting any calls from me. I was so sure he would want to elope right away. There wouldn’t be any point in detailing all the places I looked for him. Suffice to say that I did find him. I wished I hadn’t.
He’d already found a new girl, was with her, in fact. No time waster was our Juan. When I tried to get his attention he turned his back on me. When I insisted, he said—and he said it out loud, so everyone could hear—that the baby could possibly be his, but since I would “go to bed with anybody, the odds were against it.” Then he announced that he wanted nothing further to do with me because I was trying to pin this pregnancy on him. I ran out, again in tears.
The son of a bitch knew I’d been a virgin.
Well, my parents were no happier that I hadn’t gone to school. Still, the big thing was the baby.
“I am taking you to the doctor and you are going to abort that little bastard inside you,” Father said. So much for devout Catholicism.
“No, I’m not,” I answered. “It’s my baby and I’m keeping it.”
“Then you’ll keep it elsewhere,” Father threatened. “I won’t have your bastard in this house.” Mother said nothing. With Father in charge she was able to just keep crying.
“The
n I’ll GO!” I shouted back as I stormed off to my room.
* * *
I went to bed that night brokenhearted. Even then, even with the exhaustion of tears, I couldn’t sleep. Juan didn’t want me, had used me and thrown me away like old toilet paper. Daddy and Mother were ashamed of me; so ashamed they wanted to destroy my baby. They’d do it too, I thought. They’d make me do it.
That I just couldn’t let happen. I might not have Juan. I might have lost my parents’ love. But I had my baby. Already I could see her—I was sure the baby would be a girl—see her smiling face, hear her laugh, watch her clap her hands in innocent joy. No. No one was going to take my baby away—or hurt her. I got up and began to quietly pack a few things: Some clothes, whatever little money I had saved when I wasn’t too busy spending it on clothes, music, shoes, or jewelry. I packed a family picture. I took, too, the emerald ring I’d been given on my fifteenth birthday, my quinseñera.
I also raided the refrigerator for half a dozen olives, the big gray ones that are about the size of a plum and are said to taste something like real Old Earth olives. Mother kept a couple of trees out back, green-trunked and gray-fronded, but those would have been too bitter. Standing in the kitchen, thinking of her olive trees, I considered for a moment taking some of the tranzitree fruit that grew in her garden as well. Green on the outside, red on the inside, sweet and deadly poisonous; the tranzitree fruit would have been a quick way out.
I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t just my mess of a life at stake.
I crept out of the house, as quiet as a mouse, sometime before dawn. As quiet as I’d been, my little brother, Emilio, met me at the foot of the staircase.