“You’ll make a Machiavelli yet!” Fraden said approvingly. “So far, it’s as simple as a game of three-dimensional chess. But now comes the finesse, or so Willem fancies it. Because he’s set up a triple-cross—he double-crosses Moro, using me, wipes out the Killers and the Brotherhood, and then, in the confusion, somehow gets rid of me. Our little bodyguard will be his herogyn-heads. Dig? He figures that after the dust clears, everyone’s dead but him.”
“I’m getting a headache,” Sophia said. “Won’t all this come out his way?”
Fraden laughed, “You’re forgetting the quadruple-cross,” he said. “Sometimes the easiest thing to do is let your enemies concoct the plot and then just pull a couple of aces out of your sleeve at the last moment. Saves brain-strain. And I’ve got two aces in the hole. First of all, with all the Brothers dead, and me technically a Brother, I may just be able to use whatever Killers are left…”
“That’s a pretty long shot to gamble your life on!” Sophia said, her lower lip quivering. “I couldn’t stand it if… Er, after all, it’s probably my life too…”
“Two aces,” Fraden said, holding up two fingers. “Count ’em, two.”
“And just what is this second strategic gem? A pocket fusion bomb? A bulletproof vest? Clean living?”
Fraden laughed. “Nothing so esoteric as… clean living,” he said. “It’s nothing any more arcane than the good citizens of Sade themselves!”
Fraden stared across the table, past the radio transceiver, at the sallow, half-smiling Brother and his four nervous-looking Killers. Apparently Brother Andrew was in on it all, he thought, but these Killers aren’t. No wonder they’re up tight. Here they are in the middle of the enemy camp, and they’ve just heard their little tin god offer to surrender!
“Well?” Moro’s voice boomed, impatiently over the radio.
“Now let’s see if I’ve got all this straight,” Fraden said into the microphone grid. “You’ll surrender on condition that I grant you and your Brothers safe passage off the planet and send for the necessary ships? But I’ve got to formally accept your surrender in the Stadium on Fain Day. That sounds just fine and dandy to me, but what’s this business about me supplying two thousand victims for this Torture Pageant thing?”
“We shall seal the treaty with the greatest Pain Day Torture Pageant in all history!” Moro said. “Since it shall be the last Torture Pageant that the Brotherhood will enjoy, we will go all out to make it the best ever. I promise you that on this Pain Day, the art shall reach its zenith! Do not forget that the Animals, no matter what the… situation, expect a great treat on Pain Day—it is the only opportunity they have to stand on the other side of the Great Choice, to give Pain and receive Pleasure. If you plan to rule Sangre, it would not be wise to disappoint them on the first day of your rule. Besides, think of your own pleasure! I promise you an exhibition the like of which—”
Fraden fought hard to suppress his mirth. Moro had it all ass-backward! I’m supposed to need those “victims” there, not him! I should be talking him into it. But the swine is so hot to have a big torture-party that he’s forgetting why he’s supposed to “let” me supply the victims in the first place. Some plotter!
“Okay, Moro,” he said, “it sounds like so much fun that you’ve talked me into it. It’s a deal. Just one minor detail—as President of the Free Republic, I should of course be permitted an… er, honor guard. Four, five hundred men should do nicely.”
“What! Out of the question!”
“I don’t get it, Moro,” Fraden said slowly. “Why not? You’re not planning some trick, are you? After all, you’ve got nothing to worry about—it’s all on your turf. Unless you’re pulling a fast one, you’ve got no reason to refuse me—”
“Er… perhaps a token number,” Moro broke in hurriedly. “I have no objection to, say, fifty men.”
Fraden was having trouble deciding who was more transparent, Moro or Vanderling.
“A full hundred men or no deal,” he said. “After all, I’m the President of the Free Republic of Sangre. Without at least a modest hundred-man honor guard, I’d look like a piker.”
“Very well,” Moro said grudgingly. “I’ll not quibble.”
“Very sensible,” Fraden said. “See you on Pain Day. Out.”
Brother Andrew got up, led his Killers out of the hut with the look of a hungry cat about to devour a particularly dull canary.
My, my, my! Fraden thought when he had left. I’m surrounded by sharpies and assassins! Everyone’s out to take advantage of poor little old me. And the old Romans used to throw lions to Christians!
Yessir, all does come to he who sits and waits. Willem and Moro have busted themselves conniving a whole series of Byzantine plots. Sure saves me a lot of effort. All I have to do now is make one little minor adjustment in the whole can of worms, and by the time Pain Day’s over, Willem and Moro will have neatly connived themselves into oblivion, and I’ll be in the catbird seat.
He laughed aloud. With enemies like these, he thought, who needs friends?
The deep red Sangran sunset seemed to be like some heavy liquid, bathing the grubby huts, the filthy, narrow streets of Sade in dark venous blood, transmuting the streets and hovels and alleyways into a grotesque landscape of burgundy highlights and long, brooding black shadows. In the waning red light, the scuttling shapes of the occasional scrawny Sadians in the half-deserted streets seemed like furtive, shy vermin of the night, figures of cowardly, ghoulish menace.
Bart Fraden shivered, despite the omnipresent heat, glanced to either side of him at the six guerrillas guarding him with snipguns, and cursed his over-active imagination.
But as he loped hurriedly down the offal-strewn streets, past the open doorways of hovels where lemur-eyed women, tight-lipped men, hollow-chested children with hunger-bloated stomachs stared half-threateningly at him and his armed guard, he knew that the foreboding appearance of the city was more than a mere trick of the light. Sade was like some great festering pustule building up pressure for an explosion. His agents had told him this, before he had seen it with his own eyes, and he had temporized for more than a week, fed into the rumor mill the promise of some vague Armageddon on the impending Pain Day, but knowing all the while that if Pain Day was to be a victory instead of a disaster, he would have to go into the city, focus the ominous rumors he was spreading into a carefully timed moment of calculated mass action. To do that, to have a properly-primed mob in the right place at just the right time, hundreds of Sadians would have to be given the word directly from the horse’s mouth, to insure sufficient redundancy so that the word that would finally be spread through the city would be spread accurately.
And with the city a jungle of starvation and solitary cannibalism, the only place he could find a crowd to speak to was the Public Larder.
It was not fear that Fraden felt as he moved past hovels, piles of garbage, lumps of ordure, grisly little heaps of cracked bones painted pale red by the twilight There was little to fear—the Sadians were too cowardly to attack armed men, and besides, the rumor mill had spread his mystique even to the city. And with Moro fully expecting to have his head three days hence, they would not he bothered by Killer patrols.
Yet still the city filled him with dread and loathing. The omnipresent filth, the odor of decay, the scattered people on the streets scuttling through the city like carrion-crabs in a boneyard, the tension that hung over the place so heavy you could taste it… And the horrid center of it all, the bowels and stomach and cloaca of Sade—the Public Larder…
They reached the street on which the large, windowless building squatted, dark and gross in the twilight, and Fraden’s stomach fell as he heard the sounds of many shrill voices haggling like fishwives’ from within, the sounds of sawing bones, heavy blades on flesh and wood. His nerves stretched piano-wire thin as he saw dozens of scuttling figures silhouetted in the orange light streaming through the open doorway. As the rotten stench drifted across the street to him, he thought f
or one insane moment of giving the whole thing up, anything but going in there…
Don’t be an imbecile! he told himself. You gonna throw away a whole planet over an upset stomach?
Gritting his teeth, with his guards surrounding him, Fraden loped quickly forward, and he was inside the Public Larder.
The place assailed him like a mailed fist; an avalanche of monstrosity engulfing him through all his senses. The cavernous, smoky room was filled with milling people, hundreds of them, and they all seemed to be screaming at each other at once. Heaped crazily against the far wall was an enormous pile of intertwined, naked human corpses, fish-eyes staring mockingly in all directions. A great pool of congealing blood oozed out from under the mound of bodies, dry and crusty at its periphery, scabbing the gray stone floor. Like a horde of ants, a steady stream of men were dragging corpses from the pile, diffidently unraveling the maze of intertwined, stiffening limbs, hauling the bodies over to great wooden tables where others proceeded to hack them to pieces with cleavers—Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! Knives sawed through bones with a horrible grating sound that set his teeth on edge. A sound that mingled with hundreds of raucous voices, all arguing over human arms, legs, choice cuts of meat, as each table was the center of a wildly gesticulating clot of Sadians, many holding limbs and chunks of meat in one hand while grabbing for more with the other.
And the stink of the place! The rank odor of filthy sweating bodies, old blood, meat already beginning to go bad, a sickly, rotten stench that mingled with the smoke of the flickering torches to form a visible miasma of decay and loathsomeness.
Fraden felt acid vomit sting the back of his throat, choked it back with a terrific convulsion of his throat muscles. Fighting for control, he made his way behind his screen of guards to a table roughly in the center of the room as curious Sadians clutched at him, jostled him, followed in his wake.
“Make way f’y’President!” one of his men shouted as they reached the table where, amidst a hollow-eyed little mob, a sallow-skinned Sadian was phlegmatically sawing the arm off the body of a withered old woman.
“Clear y’table!” the guerrilla ordered, and a dozen Sadians clawed at the corpse, pulled it away to disappear into the large, tightly packed crowd that was beginning to coalesce around the table.
Shaking, weak-kneed, Fraden scrabbled to the table top, stood in a shallow smear of blood, looked out over the sullen-eyed crowd, the tables littered with butchered and half-butchered bodies, the great pile of gray corpses…
He felt the spasms rising in his gut, closed his eyes tightly, trying to fight if off…
And in that moment, the murmurs of the crowd ceased, became a guttural, echoing chant: “BART! BART! BART! BART!”
Fraden felt a moment of abysmal self-disgust, then steeled himself, consciously, purposefully, eyes still tightly shut, and gave himself force ably over to the chanting, the sound of his own name shouted by his people. He grabbed for the sound, clutched at it, slipped, and then he was riding it, above the offal, above the blood, above his own nausea, above all save the visceral, mindless glory of his name being chanted by his people on his planet in the universe of which he was the center… Mine! Mine! Mine!
“BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART!”
He opened his eyes, and yes, it was all a vague haze! All of it—the bodies and the blood and the stink. He looked down, saw a sea of eager, waiting, chanting faces. He kept his eyes tunnel-visioned on that sea of anonymous faces, not daring to look at anything else, and at last he felt his nausea burn finally away, evaporated by the animal heat of his people pulsing up at him.
He held up his hand for silence and he spoke.
“Y’know what day is three days from today?”
“PAIN DAY! PAIN DAY! PAIN DAY!” the Sadians howled, and there was a terrible, wolfish frenzy in the sound that he did not understand, that curdled his blood.
“Pain Day! Pain Day!” Fraden screamed, shouting above the voice of the crowd. “But not just any Pain Day—Death Day! Death Day for the Prophet and the whole Brotherhood of Pain!”
Now the Sadians were quiet. They looked up at him eagerly, expectantly. He had to be careful now. He wanted a mob on Pain Day, a mob that would listen only to his voice, a mob he could command like an army—not an uncontrollable horde.
He lowered his voice, spoke almost softly. “Pain Day will be the day of final victory,” he said. “And there’ll be a place for you in that victory. On Pain Day, you and I and the People’s Army will kill the Prophet and the whole Brotherhood!”
They’ began to shout, scream, chant: “Long live the Free Republic! Kill y’Brotherhood! BART! BART! BART!”
“Wait!” Fraden roared. “Wait! Wait! There’s more!”
After a few minutes of continued tumult, he had relative silence again.
“I can’t tell you the whole plan,” he said. “We need secrecy. But I can tell you what to do and when to do it. You’ll hear strange sounds in the Stadium on Pain Day—the sounds of gunfire. And that’s the signal! When you hear the sounds of gunfire in the Stadium, all of you, every single man, woman, and child in Sade, storm the Stadium! Don’t worry about the Killers—they’ll be taken care of. Don’t worry about getting into the Palace Compound—the gate will be smashed open. When you hear gunfire, storm the Palace Compound, break into the Stadium! And when you get there, I’ll be there to tell you what to do. Me! You’ll get the word straight from me! And I promise you, that word will mean freedom for all Sangre and death to the Brotherhood, death to the Killers, death to—”
His voice was drowned out by a great roar. “Death t’y’Killers! Death t’the Brotherhood! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!”
Futilely, Fraden tried to call for silence, to remind them to spread the word. But it was no use; they were beyond listening to anything.
The Public Larder had become a churning chaos of gesticulating, twitching, jumping madmen, working themselves up into a mindless frenzy, screaming “KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!” over and over and over again in one voice, the voice of a single, blood-crazed carnivore.
Fraden got down from his table, hesitated, then stepped into the maelstrom, tightly surrounded by his armed guards.
They’d spread the word, all right, he knew. Three days from now, the whole city would be ready to tear the Stadium apart with their fingernails if he gave the word. The trap was set.
Moro and his Brotherhood would be killed, and when Willem thought he was in control, when the army had broken in, when the ’heads surrounded them and Willem tried whatever he was going to try… The whole city would burst in on them, loyal only to him, to their Hero, to their President, to the man who was giving them their ghastly treat, ready to do his bidding, eager to rip to pieces anyone he pointed his finger at.
Three days from now, Sangre will be mine, all mine!
Now, in their screaming frenzy, the Sadians were yanking corpses from the tables, swarming over the great pile of bodies at the far wall like a maddened nest of termites. Bare hands tore off limbs, brandished them as banners. Here a man ripped a gobbet of flesh from a mutilated corpse with his teeth, screaming and slavering all the while. They began to pummel the corpses, kick them, toss them about like beanbags, tear at them, claw them, rip them to shreds as if the pathetic bodies were live, hated Brothers, as if, somehow this moment were the climax of the Pain Day to come. And all the while, the shrill “KILL! KILL! KILL!” echoed from the high, smoke-obscured ceiling as the flickering torchlight illuminated a scene that seemed wrenched from the nether bowels of hell.
Fraden felt the nausea welling up again, stronger now, well-nigh irresistible. He pushed his guards forward, faster and faster.
“Come on, come on,” he grunted through constricting throat muscles. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
Savagely, almost gleefully, the guards cleared a path through the screaming, frenzied Sadians with the butts of their guns.
And at last they were outside, and the riot in the Larder was an ululating echo
at the far end of the dark street, the offal stink a bad memory in the back of Fraden’s nose. The comparatively fresh air of the city hit Fraden’s gut like a pile driver.
He lurched away from his men, retched, began to vomit. He looked down, saw that he was adding his own gorge to an awful mound of amorphous slop out of which a human skull projected whitely. Utterly sickened, he vomited again, and it splattered wetly off the naked bone.
He retched and sobbed and couldn’t tell one from the other. It’s worth it! his mind screamed into the darkness. It’s worth it! It’s worth it! It’s worth it! A whole bloody planet!
The spasms finally stopped, and he looked up into the cold black sky. Stars stared back at him unmercifully, icy pinpoints of light in the big, big nothing.
“Damn you!” he muttered in defiance of he-knew-not-what “It’s got to be worth it!”
The guerrilla camp was dark, quiet, somnolent as the crimson Sangran sun set behind the western mountains on the eve of Pain Day. The waning light etched a pitiless black and burgundy chiaroscuro of empty barracks, stripped armory huts gaping useless and empty, patches of earth burned dead-black by countless cookfires, bits of debris scattered unthinkingly about the area—the portrait of a place used up and now freshly abandoned, Bart Fraden thought as he stood near the doorway of his hut, looking out over the nearly empty camp.
The People’s Army, virtually the entire force, had already been moved into position in the hills that rimmed the plain on which Sade stood, ready to move quickly into the city in captured trucks, less than twenty minutes away from the Palace Compound itself. With the army were the two thousand “victims” that Moro had called for—ordinary Animals or bandits mostly—being armed with small locally made knives, concealing the knives in their loincloths, being told only that they were part bf a complicated battle-plan, and being convinced of it by the sight of the entire People’s Army encamped on the margin of the Sadian plain, ready to roll.
The Men in the Jungle Page 24