The Dragons of Babel

by Michael Swanwick

  "I have no idea what you're talking about," Will said shakily. Then, gathering his courage, "Nor whose side you are on."

  One centaur snorted in disdain. A second struck the insignia on her chest and cried, "We are the Fifth Amazons — the brood mares of death! Are you a fool, not to have heard of us?"

  But the third said. "It does not matter whose side we are on. The rock people come, the dwellers-in-the-depths from the Land of Fire. Even now they climb toward the surface, bringing with them both immense heat and a fearful kinetic energy. When they arrive, the ground will bubble and smoke. All of this" — she swept her arm to take in all the land about them — "will be blasted away. Then will the battle begin. And it will be such that all who stand within the circuit of combat, no matter what their allegiance, will die."

  "Come away, Antiope," said the first, who was older than the other two and, by the tone of authority in her voice, the sergeant. "We were told to clear the land of any lingering noncombatants. Our orders do not require us to rescue idiots."

  "What's this?" said the second. She knelt. "A child—and a girl!"

  Will started forward, to snatch Esme away from the centaur. But the other two cantered sideways into his path, blocking him. "Look at her, Sergeant Lucasta. The poor little bugger is as weary as a kitten. She doesn't awaken, even when I pick her up." She handed Esme to her superior, who held the sleeping child against her shoulder.

  "We've wasted enough time," Sergeant Lucasta said. "Let's go."

  "Should we douse the fire?" Antiope asked.

  "Let it burn. This time tomorrow, what fucking difference will it make?"

  The second centaur packed up Will's gear with startling efficiency, stowed it in leathern hip-bags, and started after her commander. Then the youngest of the three seized Will's arm and effortlessly lifted him onto her back. She reared up and hastily he placed his arms around her waist. "My name is Campaspe." She grinned over her shoulder. "Hang on tight, manling, I'm going to give you the ride of your life."

  So began their midnight gallop. Up hill and down they sped, past forests and farms. All the world flowed by like a billowing curtain, a thin veil over something vast, naked, and profound. Will tried to imagine what lay beneath and could not. "Will all this really be destroyed?" he asked. "Is it possible?"

  "If you'd been through half the shit I have," Campaspe replied, "you would not doubt it for an instant. Rest quiet now, it's a long ride." Taking her at her word, Will lay his cheek against Campaspe's back. It was warm. Her muscles moved smoothly beneath him and between his legs. He became acutely aware of the clean stench of her sweat.

  "Hey! Sarge! I think the civilian likes me — he's getting hard!"

  "He'll need to mount a stump if he expects to stick it to you," the sergeant replied.

  "At least he won't need any petroleum jelly!" Antiope said.

  "That was... I didn't..." Will said hastily, as they all laughed.

  "Oh, really?" Campaspe's eyes and teeth flashed scornfully. She took his hands from around her waist and placed them firmly on her breasts. "Deny it now!"

  Horrified, Will snatched his hands away, almost fell, and seized Campaspe's waist again. "I couldn't! The Nameless Ones forbid it!"

  "It would be bestiality for me too, little ape-hips." she laughed. "But what's a war for, if not to loosen a few rules here and there? Eh. Sarge?"

  "Only fucking reason I know."

  "I knew a gal in the Seventh who liked to do it with dogs," Antiope said. "Big ones, of course. Mastiffs. So one day she..." And she went on to relate a story so crude that Will flushed red as her jacket. The others laughed like horses, first at the story and then at his embarrassment.

  For hours they coursed over the countryside, straight as falcons and almost as fast. By slow degrees, Will grew accustomed to Campaspe's badinage. She didn't mean anything by it, he realized. But she was young and in a war, and flirted out of nervousness. Once again he lay his cheek against her back, and she reached behind her to scratch his head reassuringly. It was then that he noticed the brass badge on her shoulder, and twisted about so he could read it. An image had been worked into the badge, a thin line of moonsilver that glimmered clear and bright by the light of Selene, showing three sword-wielding arms radiant from a common point, like a three-limbed swastika. Will recognized the symbol as the triskelion of the Armies of the Mighty. And he was in their power! He shuddered in revulsion and fear.

  Sergeant Lucasta, galloping near, saw this and shifted the slumbering Esme from one shoulder to the other. "So you've caught on at last," she said. "We're the wicked baby-eating enemy. And yet, oddly enough, we're the ones clearing you away from an extremely dangerous situation, rather than your own fucking army. Kind of makes you think, don't it?"

  "It's because he's a civilian, right, Sarge? Not much sport in killing civilians." Campaspe said.

  "They can't fight and they can't shoot." Antiope threw in. "They're lucky if they know how to die."

  "Fortunately they have us to do all those things for them." Sergeant Lucasta held up a hand, and they slowed to a walk. "We should have joined up with the platoon a long time ago."

  "We haven't missed em," Antiope said." I can still see their spoor."

  "And smell their droppings," Campaspe added.

  They had come to a spinney of aspens. "We'll stop here for a bit and rest," the sergeant said, "while I work this thing through in my head."

  Campaspe came to a halt and Will slid gratefully from her back. She took a thermos of coffee from a harness bag and offered him some.

  "I... I have to take a leak," he said.

  "Piss away," she said carelessly. "You don't need my permission." And then, when he started into the woods. "Hey! Where the fuck do you think you're going?"

  Again Will flushed, remembering how casually his companions had voided themselves during the night, dropping turds behind them even as they conversed. "My kind needs privacy," he said, and plunged into the brush.

  Behind him, he heard Campaspe say. "Well, la-de-da!" to the extreme amusement of her comrades.

  Deep into the spinney he went, until he could no longer hear the centaurs talking. Then he unzipped and did his business against the side of a pale slim tree. Briefly, he considered slipping away. The woods were his element, even as open terrain favored the centaurs. He could pass swiftly and silently through underbrush that would slow them to a walk and bury himself so cunningly in the fallen leaves of the forest floor that they would never find him. But did he dare leave Esme with them? Centaurs had no bathroom manners to speak of because they were an early creation, like trolls and giants. They were less subtle of thought than most thinking creatures, more primal in emotion. Murder came to them more easily than spite, lust than love, rapture than pity. They were perfectly capable of killing a small child simply out of annoyance with him for evading their grasp.

  Esme meant nothing to him. But still, he could not be responsible for her death.

  Yet as he approached the spot where he had left their captors, he heard childish laughter. Esme was awake, and apparently having the time of her life. Another few steps brought him out of the aspens, and he saw Sergeant Lucasta sitting in the grass, forelegs neatly tucked under her. playing with Esme as gently as a mother would her own foal. Will could not help but smile. Females were females, whatever their species, and whatever their allegiance. Esme was probably as safe with these lady cavaliers as anywhere.

  "Again!" Esme shrieked. "Please, again?"

  "Oh, very well," Sergeant Lucasta said fondly. She lifted her re volver, gave the cilinder a spin, cocked the hammer, and placed it to the child's forehead.

  "Stop!" Will screamed. Running forward, he snatched up Esme into his arms. "What in the name of sanity do you think you're doing?"

  The sergeant flipped open the cylinder, looked down into the chamber. "There's the bullet. She would have died if you hadn't stopped me. Lucky."

  "I am," Esme said. "I am lucky!"

  The centaur snap
ped the cylinder shut, gave it a spin, and all in one motion pointed it at Esme again and pulled the trigger.

  Snap! The hammer fell on an empty chamber.

  Esme laughed with delight. "For the sake of the Seven!" Will cried. "She's only a child!" He noticed now, as he had not before, that Campaspe and Antiope were nowhere to be seen. This did not strike him as a good omen.

  "She has the luck of innocence." Sergeant Lucasta observed, holstering her revolver. "Twenty- three times I spun the cylinder and fired at her, and every time the hammer came down on an empty chamber. Do you know what the odds are against that?"

  "I'm not very good at math."

  "Neither am I. Pretty fucking unlikely, though. I'm sure of that."

  "I told you I was lucky," Esme said. She struggled out of Will's arms. "Nobody ever listens to me."

  "Let me ask you a question, then, and I promise to listen. Who is he" — she jerked a thumb at Will — "to you?"

  "My papa," Esme said confidently.

  "And who am I?"

  The little girl's brow furrowed in thought. "My... mama?"

  "Sleep." said the centaur. She placed a hand on the girl's forehead and drew it down over her eyes. When she removed it, Esme was asleep. Carefully, she laid the child down in the grass. "I've seen this before," she said. "I've seen a lot of things most folks never suspect. She is old, this one, old and far from a child, though she thinks and acts as one. Almost certainly, she's older than the both of us combined."

  "How can that be?"

  "She's sold her past and her future, her memories and adolescence and maturity, to the Year Eater in exchange for an undying present and the kind of luck it takes for a child to survive on her own in a world like ours."

  Will remembered the lie he had told the lubin and experienced a sudden coldness. The tale had come to him out of nowhere. This could not be mere coincidence. Nevertheless, he said. "I don't believe it."

  "How did you come to be traveling with her?"

  "She was running from some men who wanted to rape her."

  "Lucky thing you chanced along." The sergeant patted the pockets of her jacket and extracted a pipe. "There is only a limited amount of luck in this world — perhaps you've noticed this for yourself? There is only so much, and it cannot be increased or decreased by so much as a tittle. This one draws luck from those around her. We should have rejoined our companions hours ago. It was good luck for her to be carried so much farther than we intended. It was bad luck for us to do so." She reached into her hip bags and came out with a tobacco pouch. "The child is a monster — she has no memory. If you walk away from her, she will have forgotten you by morning."

  "Are you telling me to abandon her?"

  "In a word? Yes."

  Will looked down on the sleeping child, so peaceful and so trusting. "I... I cannot."

  Sergeant Lucasta shrugged. "Your decision. Now we come to the second part of our little conversation. You noticed that I sent my girls away. That's because they like you. They don't have my objectivity. The small abomination here is not the only one with secrets, I think." All the while she spoke, she was filling her pipe with tobacco and tamping it down. "There's a darkness in you that the rookies can't see. Tell me how you came to be traveling by yourself, without family or companions."

  "My village cast me out."

  The sergeant stuck a pipe into the corner of her mouth, lit it. and sucked on it meditatively. "You were a collaborator."

  "That oversimplifies the matter, and makes it out to be something that was in my power to say yea or nay to. But, yes, I was."

  "Go on."

  "A... a dragon crawled into our village and declared himself king. It was wounded. Its electrical system was all shot to hell, and it could barely make itself heard. It needed a lieutenant, a mediator between itself and the village. To... give orders. It chose me."

  "You did bad things, I suppose. You didn't mean to, at first, bur one thing led to another. People disobeyed you, so they had to be punished."

  "They hated me! They blamed me for their own weakness!" "Oh?"

  "They wouldn't obey! I had no choice. If they'd obeyed, they wouldn't have been punished!" "Go on."

  "Yes, okay, I did things! But if I hadn't, the dragon would have found out. I would've been punished. They would've been punished even worse than they were. I was just trying to protect them." Will was crying now.

  For a long moment the sergeant was silent. Then she sighed and said. "Killed anyone?''

  "One. He was my best friend."

  "Well, that's war for you. You're not as bad a sort as you think you are, I suspect. In any case, you're neither a spy nor an agent provocateur, and that's all that really concerns me. So I can leave you behind with a clean conscience." "You can what?"

  "You're far enough from the epicenter now that you should be safe. And we'll never rendezvous with our platoon unless we ditch the luck-eater." She unholstered her gun and pointed it at the sleeping child. "Shall we try the monster's luck one last time? Or should I shoot it up in the air?"

  "In the air," Will said tightly. "Please."

  She lifted the gun and fired. The report shattered the night's silence, but did not awaken Esme.

  "Lucky again," Sergeant Lucasta said.

  Summoned by the gunshot, Campaspe and Antiope trotted back to the spinney's edge. They received the news that the civilians were to be left behind without any visible emotion. But when Will bade them farewell, Campaspe bent as if to give him a swift peck on the cheek, and then stuck her tongue down his throat and gave his stones a squeeze. Antiope dumped his gear at his feet and playfully swatted him on his aching bum.

  The sergeant, too, leaned down as if to kiss him. Will stiffened involuntarily. But instead, she said. "Listen to an old campaigner: Trouble will follow you so long as the child is in your care." She straightened. "Keep the lodestar to your left shoulder, and then at dawn walk toward the sun. That will take you east — there are refugee camps just across the Great River. Best not dawdle."

  "Thank you."

  "Let's go, ladies — this war isn't going to fucking well fight itself!" "The cavaliers cantered off without so much as a backward glance.

  Will gently shook Esme awake, shouldered his pack, and took her hand. They walked to the dawn and beyond, ever eastward. When Esme tired, he picked her up and carried her. The sun was still low in the sky when he could carry her no longer. Ranging away from the road, then, he found a junk car in a thicket of sumac and made beds for them on the front and back seats. For a time, he slept.

  In the village, before driving him out, the lady elders had made Will a bundle of sandwiches and placed a cantrip on his knapsack to alert and alarm him should anybody meddle with it in his sleep.

  So now Will found himself sitting bolt upright, fully awake and staring at his knapsack Saligos de Gralloch had opened the driver's side front door and had both hands buried to the hilt in it. He grinned like a hound. "You’re up, young master. That's good. There don't seem to be any gold in here."

  "What happened to your stickfellas?"

  "We had a tailing out. I had to kill them. Lucky I chanced on you — otherwise I'd be all by myself."

  "Not luck," Will said. "You broke a pin or button in two when you first found the child and hid half among her clothes, against the chance of her slipping away from you. Then, today, you followed the other half here."

  "That's very sharp for one who's just woke up." Saligos said appreciatively. "I note, however, that you didn't say 'my daughter,' but 'the child.' So you're not her father after all. I know my peasants. There's got to be some gold on you somewhere, even if it's no more than a single coin to lead you back someday to the crock you buried out behind your croft."

  "Nope. Sorry"

  "That's too bad." Casually Saligos removed his belt. "You interrupted something yesterday. So, before I make sure as you haven't hid the stuff somewhere about your person, I'm going to tie your wrists to the steering wheel. You can watch while I do
her — he nodded toward Esme, still asleep in the back seat — "good and hard."

  Will felt the dragon darkness rising up in him, and this time, rather than fighting it down, he embraced it. letting it fill his brain, letting its negative radiance shine from his eyes like black flame.

  The lubin's lips curled back in a snarl. Then he gasped as Will lunged forward and seized him.

  Will squeezed the creature's forearms. Bones cracked and splintered under his fingers." "Do you like it now?" he asked. "Do you like it now that it's happening to you?"

  Saligos de Gralloch squirmed helplessly in his implacable grip. The lubin's lips were moving, though. Will could not hear him through the rush of blood pounding in his ears. Doubtless he was pleading for mercy. Doubtless he whimpered. Doubtless he whined. That was what he would do. Will knew the type only too well.

  First the dragon-lust turned the world red, as if he were peering out through a scrim of pure rage, and then it turned his vision black. When he could see again, Saligos de Grallochs mangled body lay steaming and lifeless on the ground beside the car. Will's fingers ached horribly, and his hands were tarred with blood up to his wrists. The lubin stared blindly upward, teeth exposed in a final, hideous grin. Something that might be his heart lay on the ground beside his ruptured chest.

  "Papa?" Esme, awakened surely by the sound of what he had done, cranked down the back seat window, and poked out her head. "Are you all right?"

  Sick with revulsion, Will turned away and shook his head heavily from side to side "You should leave." he said. "Flee me — run!" "Why?"

  "There is something... very bad in me." "That's okay."

  Will stared down at his hands. Murderer's hands. His head was heavy and his heart was pounding so hard his chest ached. He was surprised he could still stand. "You don't understand. The dragon left a bit of himself in me. I can't get rid of it!"

  "I don't mind." Esme got out of the car. careful not to step on the corpse. "Bad things don't bother me. That's why I sold myself to the Year Eater."

  He turned back and stared long and hard at the child. She looked so innocent: golden-haired, large headed, toothpick legged, skin as brown as a berry. "You don't have any memory," he said. How do you know about the Year Eater?"