March in Country

by EE Knight

  “Who is Two-Mouth?”

  “A great man. Killer of Red-Blanket, chieftain of the Deathring Tribe. Conqueror of the Golden Ones. Ruler of Rails-between-the-Rivers.”

  “The Gray Baron,” Valentine said.

  “In too many words,” Ahn-Kha said. “But when the Gray Ones get around to talking, talk they will.”

  “Why did they desert?”

  More burbling words and emphatic gestures.

  “They were part of a rail crew. They thought they were supposed to fight, not lay ties and iron,” Ahn-Kha said. “They’re young warrior Grogs, they want a tally of enemies, not a record of track laid. Since they couldn’t fight, they fled. But Two-Mouth has a standing reward for deserters and any and all humans.”

  Valentine questioned the humans himself. They were two groups that had met up while fleeing the Great Plains Gulag. They’d struck the Missouri River and followed it southeast, and were planning to turn due south and head for Southern Command’s forces once they dried and smoked some of the Missouri’s famously oversized catfish. But the Scrubmen had smelled the drying fish and taken them prisoner.

  “So, the Gray Baron has a taste for human prisoners,” Valentine said.

  “We must endeavor to bring him some,” Ahn-Kha said.

  “Like the first time we went into Omaha,” Valentine said.

  “Only this time, you get the cuffs.”

  “You’ll need a woman along,” Duvalier said. “I’m still young enough that they won’t put me to digging ditches.”

  “We’ll establish two camps,” Valentine said. “A far one and a close one. Frat, you’ll be in command of the far camp. We’ll probably need to stockpile Grog trade goods to ease the journey across Missouri. Like the Scrubmen said: sweets, liquor, weapons. Some fireworks and matches might not go amiss, either. Grogs love fireworks at their celebrations. A chief that can put on a good fire show has many friends.”

  Frat nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  He turned to Duvalier. “Ali, I want you to set up a close-camp. Hopefully Ahn-Kha will be free to do a little roaming. Make contact with him and set up a communication chain back to Frat.”

  “Sure.”

  “Keep Pellwell and the ratbits with you. I may need them,” Valentine said.

  She made the same face she made when he had a bad case of morning gas.“You’re kidding, right? Her? She’ll get us both killed.”

  “You’ve had it in for me from the first, Red. What’s that all about?”

  “You big-idea college fucks get people like me killed, that’s why. Running down rumors, looking for docs that don’t exist, counting baby legworms when we should be setting charges.”

  Ahn-Kha, with his shorn hair and wounds from the fight with the Scrubmen, looked the part of a Grog trader. He wore a pair of saddlebags on each vast shoulder with his most valuable “merchandise.” Valentine, weighted down with simple trade goods on a carrying pole and wearing filthy rags taken from dead Scrubmen, followed. As a token of belonging to Ahn-Kha, Valentine wore an old license plate painted white and hanging from his head vertically. Ahn-Kha had made himself a leather wristband with the letters and numbers burned into it.

  “Good to be working with you again, old horse.”

  “I could say the same, my David.”

  “If this goes to shit, you beat out of here, okay?”

  “I’ll run with you on my back to the Missouri River if that happens.”

  At first, Valentine thought the distant smear might be a legworm. Then he saw heads bobbing among the brush, appearing and disappearing through the gaps like targets in a carnival shooting gallery.

  “Our Baron’s guys, do you think?” Valentine asked.

  “Almost certainly,” Ahn-Kha said. “A band of Gray Ones would not stay so tightly in line.”

  Valentine watched the bobbing heads for a few more minutes. There were men at the front and the rear of the column, it looked to be no more than two or three, with a hundred Grogs or more in between. Two of the men, presumably the officers, rode horses. Valentine couldn’t tell the breed with certainty at this distance, but they looked like tough, squat mustangs.

  The men wore a vertical-striped camouflage, ranging from a buttery tone at the lightest to a rabbitty brown. He’d seen the pattern a few times on his previous trips into Iowa, when he’d wandered as a rather vengeful exile shortly after Blake had been born and relocated to Missouri. It was equally effective in light woods as prairie. Instead of helmets, gray kepis with another band of the camouflage material running around the brim sat on their heads.

  The Grogs wore smocks or vests made out of the camouflage as well, probably ponchos or tenting repurposed for oversized Gray Ones’ heads and shoulders. Big, bolt action rifles proportioned like Kentucky squirrel guns with oversized stocks hung by short straps around their necks in the human stock-up, muzzle-down fashion, allowing the Gray Ones to use all fours on the march.

  Valentine noted that their rifles had some kind of latch attachment and rest so they didn’t bump and chafe on the march. Good officers, these.

  “At least this Baron grants them their stride,” Ahn-Kha said. “Remember in New Orleans, the way men were always trying to make them walk upright when marching? They can do it, but it is not a natural gait and is fatiguing.”

  “They cover more ground per minute this way. Those officers are really puffing to keep up. The Baron should put his men on bikes.”

  “Perhaps you can suggest that when you meet him,” Ahn-Kha said.

  “If we’re lucky, he won’t ever notice us,” Valentine said. “Your call, old horse.”

  “I see no signs of wounds or fighting,” Ahn-Kha said. “They seem well fed and well rested. Dirty, looks like. See the pollen crusted into the sweat stains. I would say they have been out a few days. Perhaps they are on their way back in any case.”

  That was the real danger in contacting opposing forces. Valentine had heard stories of surrendering men being shot outright, if the opposition didn’t feel like taking the trouble to secure, feed, and transport prisoners.

  Ahn-Kha checked his weapons, squatted and stretched, and cleaned each ear with his tiny end finger. “My teeth clean?” he asked Valentine, showing his prominent near-tusks of a well-matured Golden One.

  “I remember the dentist visiting the old Razorbacks and saying he needed machine tools to do you,” Valentine said. Ahn-Kha rinsed his mouth with wet sand morning and night, if he could find it, and used baking soda and a brush when it could be had. “Yeah, they look great.”

  “Nothing puts my Gray Cousins off like a bad set of teeth,” Ahn-Kha said. “Let us empty tracks.”

  “Make tracks,” Valentine corrected. Ahn-Kha was more nervous than he let on, he only flubbed his English when preoccupied.

  Ahn-Kha hailed them.

  Valentine wondered what they would think. A scarred, bitten Golden One with shorn hair leading an equally scarred human dressed in Scrubman rags.

  “Peace, peace, I call peace,” Ahn-Kha said, approaching the soldiers. He carried his rifle by the barrel so that the butt faced the troops, a friendly gesture to Grog eyes.

  Valentine waited for the order to deploy or ready weapons, nerving himself for a wild flight, but it didn’t come.

  The officer turned up the corner of his mouth under his kepi brim and Valentine relaxed. A little. Perhaps the officer found this an interesting diversion in a dull patrol. Valentine noticed that both he and his sub-officer, and the two human NCOs, all had full beards or mustaches. Strange for Kurian Zone troops. They were usually fit and trim and cleanly cut as a recruiting poster.

  Now that he could get a better look at the horses, he decided the duns were Kiger Mustangs, a tough breed, surefooted, agile, and durable. After 2022, a good many horses had gone feral and multiplied on the plains, and over the generations the cream of those rebroken to saddles were called “Kigers.”

  “I don’t know you,” the officer said, from under an impressive walrus mustache. “B
ut come in peace.”

  “A rhapsody in your name, chief,” Ahn-Kha said. “I have been years south of the Missouri River and in S’taint Lewee. I hear my relatives now live under the protection of the one called the Gray Baron.”

  “Your English is excellent, civilized one,” the officer returned.

  “Thank you, chief. You call the Gray Baron your chief?”

  “I do.”

  “I understand there has been fighting. I wish to be among my kind and see if any of my family still live. Will you allow me foot-pass upon your lands?”

  “Fortune blesses you, civilized one,” the officer said. “We’re on our return trip. Feel free to follow.”

  “Another stanza to your rhapsody, my chief,” Ahn-Kha said, pawing the earth in front of the officer’s horse to clear his way.

  “One request, however,” he said. “No shooting. Makes the geros nervous.”

  “I’m sorry my chief, what is this word, ‘geros.’ Your warriors?”

  “Yes, them. Oh, what’s the word in your language? Gray Ones.”

  “Of course. Geros. I shall remember that, chief. If we do see game—”

  “This is a patrol, not a hunting party. Leave it be. Discipline, civilized one.”

  Ahn-Kha flashed his teeth. “No shooting, chief.”

  “That slave armed?” the other officer asked.

  “He has a small knife. He can be trusted.”

  “Don’t cuff him about where the geros can see. In the Baron’s command, no one is struck except by punishment after trial. Understand?”

  Ahn-Kha nodded.

  “Follow on, then. The man in charge of the tail is Sergeant Stock. If you have trouble, go to him.”

  They let the column pass, then fell in about twenty feet behind Sergeant Stock.

  Valentine took a second look at the NCO as they passed, keeping his head down and some hair in his face. He had seen the sergeant’s face before. Something about the heavyset brow and cool eyes.

  Stock . . . Stock.

  Stockard. Graf—a lieutenant in the old Free Territory Guard. Molly’s husband, the father of her child.

  Valentine hardly noticed the miles passing as he stared at the man’s back. He’d never met him, just seen a picture or two when he visited Molly a few years back while hunting down Gail Post. He’d been missing in action since Solon’s takeover, presumed dead. Molly was collecting a tiny widow’s stipend of money, and since there was a child, food and housing benefits.

  The Gray Baron’s stronghold impressed Valentine, even as a work in progress.

  Stronghold was the only word for it. It was larger than a stockade, but not quite a city. The old maps would have put it west of Kirksville in northern Missouri, but this stretch of country was one of the wildest in the nation, and the old infrastructure could only be traces between burnt farmsteads and overgrown towns.

  The stronghold was nestled against a protective line of heavily wooded hills with the broken rooftops of a ruined town to the north. Dust rose from some workplace in the ruins and faint mechanical sounds carried in the dry prairie air.

  Valentine thought the architectural style might be called “fire-base in skulls, with church behind.”

  A vast killing ground of a thousand yards or more yawned in front of a network of log bunkers and weapon pits covering a low rise of earth surrounded the complex of towers, buildings, water tanks, and chimneys the Grog column approached. A high, nearly bare tree with an observation post like an eagle’s nest looked out over the road approach to the south, a sawed-off church steeple with a blockhouse of railroad ties and sandbags watched the land to the north. Valentine could only presume there were other pickets in the hills behind.

  “No barbed wire?” Valentine wondered.

  Ahn-Kha, who’d been talking to the Grogs at meals and breaks, gestured with an ear, sweeping the front of the stronghold: “There are hidden pits all along in front of the battlements. They might seem to give cover, but many have false bottoms. Tunnels lead back to the entrenchments. Warriors sneak down under any enemy caught or sheltering in the pits and stab up. Or they’re built to be flooded with gasoline and set ablaze. They have many explosives to drive off legworms, or so they claim.”

  They fell silent as they passed through the “gate”—a wrought-iron trellis rigged for electricity. The officer leading their column paused to say a few words with a lieutenant who stepped forward. Presumably, anyone coming in at night was searched under the hundreds of LED spotlights. Valentine made a show of hesitating to pass under—as an ignorant Scrubman might—and Ahn-Kha sent him sprawling with a shove.

  “Grog hittin’ a man,” a sentry said.

  “Ain’t like us,” his corporal said. “Watch it, Goldie. Hey, Stocky, keep your camp follower in line.”

  The gate watchers, who seemed more like idlers than sentries, got a laugh at that. Valentine wondered if the Gray Baron kept his men deceptively undisciplined, or if this was an unusually free-and-easy Kurian Zone camp. Even the most backwoods Arkansas militia unit showed more discipline on winter exercises.

  “Sergeant Stock, see to it our kite-tail gets properly billeted,” the officer told Stockard. “Usual post-patrol liberty when you’ve turned them over.”

  “Sir,” Stock replied. He picked up a field phone near the gate and scribbled something on a clipboard.

  They waited, listening to insects and the buzz of conversation from the men at the gate, who treated their arrival as a chance to show off beautifully rolled cigarettes in virginal white paper. Valentine sat, dispiritedly, with his back to Sergeant Stock, but he walked around in front and took another look. He could see, up a little hill, a big structure but didn’t want to lift his head and gape.

  A man in a plainer, unstained uniform and two Gray Ones appeared. The man had a small bamboo pointer, otherwise none of the trio were armed. The Gray Ones wore cargo-pocket shorts and thick canvas vests with the same vertical prairie camouflage. The human entered into negotiations with Ahn-Kha, offering a four hundred silver-dollar bonus if he joined a group of “Baron’s Own” Golden One warriors. Ahn-Kha did his humble trader routine and said he hoped to sell Valentine here rather than to “those Kansas double-talkers and lead-coiners.”

  “You give a good price, all prisoner come here,” Ahn-Kha said.

  “Such facility with English! I can almost guarantee a quick promotion to officer.”

  “Will think it over, chief. I wish to sell this one, then find a bed and food.”

  The recruiter for the Baron’s Own, who held the nebulous rank “officer candidate” laid down the law for Ahn-Kha about visiting his kind. Without membership in the Gray Baron’s forces, or swearing to the First and Second Understandings—it was with that casual remark that Valentine learned what the Golden One articles of surrender were called—Ahn-Kha would be treated like any other potentially hostile tribesman, Gray or Golden, who might wander in out of the grass.

  Ahn-Kha agreed not to leave the Golden One sub-camp save under guard, to obey any command by one of the Gray Baron’s officers that did not endanger his or another’s life, and to refer any disagreements with his own kind to one of the Gray Baron’s officers before matters escalated into violence.

  “May I endure three more hells in life or death if I break my word,” Ahn-Kha said, in the proper Golden One manner.

  They walked through the stronghold, the officer and Ahn-Kha in front, the officer candidate beside him, still mentioning the honors and rewards that would go with membership in the Baron’s Own. Valentine led on a line in the middle and the two Gray Ones trudging behind, with Sergeant Stock bringing up the rear, as usual.

  At last Valentine had a chance to look around.

  The stronghold was a great wheel, pivoting around a green, planted, and landscaped central campus made out of an old, heavy-timbered megachurch.

  Valentine had seen his share of rural megachurches, but whoever had built this one was a visionary. It reminded him a little of a snapping turtl
e sunk on a muddy hillock with its nose raised high to catch a gulp of air. Two outbuildings formed the creature’s legs; a sort of ski jump of a steeple rose between overlooking what must have been a courtyard with a fountain; and the worship area itself formed the plated arc of the turtle’s back.

  Brick, structural steel, thick interlocking slate on the roof and canopy rigging to keep off the worst of the summer sun, heavy beaming and concrete-wrapped terraces of decorative prairie earth built up to the roof—this Baron had chosen his headquarters well. Nothing short of a heavy artillery barrage would put much of a dent in that monstrosity. Valentine wondered how many could be gathered under that titanic roof.

  Of course the Gray Ones had added their own touches the original architects never intended. The decorative garden beneath the steeple sprouted monoliths of bones, skulls, and captured weapons. Victory columns, Valentine guessed. Female Grogs scrubbed their broods in ample pooling space of the fountain’s spray. An aged attendant skimmed dirt out of the sluices and others waded to the fresh flow at the top to fill jugs and jars.

  The Gray Ones had also added their own fetishes. They didn’t go for brass idols, but rather markers like over-thick spears or harpoons with knot work and mixtures of leather and wood dangling from spars that reminded Valentine of pictures he’d seen of medieval samurai warriors with banners attached to their armored backs. There were bones, teeth, dried fingers, and even a preserved penis or two among the tokens of triumph.

  Valentine had never seen the like in the Kurian Zone proper, where discretion about bodies both kept things hygienic and the populace settled. The men who handled bodies were typically selected and supervised by the Church, with a doctor or nurse on hand to add an air of medical authenticity. Only in the worst New Orleans slums were bodies left for discovery by rats, or those eager to plunder a corpse for its socks and hair. The Gray Baron was essentially saying death is our business, with a display like that on the doorstep of his headquarters.

  There was an old pre-22 chain hotel that looked like it served as quarters for NCOs, judging from the men coming and going and lounging in the pleasant spring sunshine, eating or playing games or reading or cleaning guns. Small armies of servant Grogs worked in shacks nearby, polishing and resoling boots, laundering and patching uniforms, even shaving and cutting hair for the men. The Gray Baron’s men had it good.