Flying the Storm

by Arnot, C. S.

  “Vishapakar,” said a voice behind Aiden. Startled, he spun round to see that it was only Tovmas.

  “Dragon-stones,” continued Tovmas. “These two guard the lake.” He gestured at the flat-calm disc behind him.

  “I see,” said Aiden, clearing his throat and trying to recover some dignity. “Who put them here?”

  Tovmas shrugged, smiling slightly. “Nobody knows. They have been here, and by many other springs and lakes, for thousands of years. Long before Christianity; long before written words.”

  “So…what are your men doing?”

  “They are praying. Praying that the great dragons keep them safe tomorrow. Maybe in the West you have forgotten what it is to pray, no?”

  “I know what prayer is,” replied Aiden, deflecting the taunt.

  Worshipping wings he could understand; they had a purpose. Standing stones? Not so much.

  Tovmas sighed, as if trying to explain something to a difficult child. “We Armenians are a religious people. We have prayed through every famine; every disaster; every war ever to cross this land, and there have been many. But sometimes prayers go unanswered, yes?” Tovmas bent to pick up a small round stone. “In the last war, Armenia’s prayers fell on deaf ears. The God of the Christians did not listen. Terrible things happened to this country, to her people.” He turned to face the lake. “So, when the new ways didn’t work, people turned to the old ways.” Tovmas threw the stone out into the lake. The little splash sent ripples racing across the mirror-flat surface, disturbing the perfect reflection.

  “And what about you?” asked Aiden.

  Tovmas paused, considering the question. “I believe in respect. I respect the old gods, the vishapakar and the others; just as much as I respect the new. It can’t hurt to appease them all, can it?”

  Aiden smirked. “I’m familiar with betting wide”.

  Tovmas walked a little way and then sat down on the grass, his legs crossed. He was surprisingly nimble for an older man. Aiden followed, choosing a rounded boulder to sit on. He picked up a small stone of his own and threw it. The splash was satisfying.

  “I learned one thing from the war,” continued Tovmas. “Everybody prays when they are scared. Sometimes they don’t know who to: a childhood god, their mother even. They just pray. I don’t know why.”

  “There are no atheists in foxholes,” quoted Aiden, though he couldn’t remember where from.

  “Yes!” said Tovmas, smiling. “You see?”

  Aiden nodded. He wondered if maybe he should start believing in something himself. It seemed to be the fashionable thing to do.

  Fredrick had joined the pair, sitting down in the grass. He seemed untroubled by the behaviour of the militiamen. They were scattering now anyway, spreading out across the meadow and producing food from their packs. A couple were starting a fire with kindling they’d brought from Ashtarak. Fredrick pointed at them.

  “That a good idea?” he asked Tovmas.

  Tovmas just shrugged. “We are almost ten kilometres from the slavers’ camp,” he said. “Even if they could see the smoke, I doubt they’d think it was anything unusual. There are many shepherds’ camps in these mountains. If they flew over us, though, then we’d be spotted with or without a fire. Your aircraft is quite visible.”

  This didn’t please Aiden. If he hadn’t felt exposed up on this mountainside before, he certainly did now. In the air, he could defend himself, but down here he was just a sitting duck. He suddenly wanted the fire put out, even though Tovmas didn’t seem to think it was a problem.

  Tovmas was watching him. “Let them have their fire, they’ll keep it small.” Somehow, though it wasn’t said, he understood Tovmas’ full meaning.

  Tomorrow, they could be dead. Let them have a fire.

  Who was he to tell them they couldn’t?

  Aiden ran his hands through the grass by his sides, idly pulling out shoots. It something he’d always done when he was young, on summer afternoons that stretched lazily onwards into the haze. It calmed him. He let his mind drift. He remembered people; friends he had spent those endless sun-squinting days with; faces he hadn’t seen in a long time. Snatches of conversation and glimpses of pasty skin burned pink in the sun. Straightforward times.

  If they could see him now, if they could see the trouble he got into, what would they say? They would probably have stories of their own, as mad as his, no doubt. He looked over at the huddles of militia and the dragon stones. Not quite as mad, maybe.

  The meadow was dead quiet. Even the militia’s chatter had died. The only sound was the breeze washing across the grass in lazy waves. He closed his eyes for a moment, enjoying the peace.

  It was getting cooler, and he was getting hungry. “I’m going to make some food. You want anything?”

  Fredrick shook his head, and produced a full bottle of vodka, holding it aloft.

  “Ah,” said Aiden. “Where’d you get that, by the way?”

  “I must have stuffed it under my bunk weeks ago. Don’t remember doing it. I’d been wondering why I was getting backache in the mornings.”

  Aiden sat down by Tovmas and Fredrick once more, bowl in hand. Tovmas was cleaning his rifle on a blanket, and Fredrick just watched the lake, occasionally swigging his vodka. The whole meadow was peaceful. The militia were in their little groups, some around the fire and some spread out on the grass, just eating, smoking and quietly talking.

  “So,” said Fredrick finally, “do you reckon your daughter is down there?” He waved his bottle in the vague direction of the slavers’ camp.

  Tovmas continued cleaning his rifle. “No, I don’t,” he replied. “It’s been a week since they took her. I don’t imagine they keep their slaves there long. From what the villagers said, the fortress at Kakavaberd is a kind of staging post, where they hold slaves until they have enough.”

  “Enough what?” asked Fredrick. Aiden munched his rice, listening.

  “Enough slaves to make the flight to market worthwhile.” Tovmas began reassembling his rifle. It was impressively quick.

  “So what’s she like?” asked Fredrick.

  Tovmas looked at him suspiciously. Rifle reassembled, he de-cocked it with a click. “My daughter?” he asked.

  Fredrick nodded, taking another swig of his drink.

  Tovmas set the rifle down, hesitating for a moment as he thought over the question.

  “She is very smart. She always was. You only ever had to show her something once, and she could do it better than you. I taught her as a child: taught her how to read and write, taught her English, how to cook, how to hunt, how to help the sick. But she overtook me when she was still young, you know? I’d been a soldier from the age of fourteen, until just a year before she was born. War does not teach you much that you would want your child to know.

  “So, by the time she was twelve, she knew everything I could teach her. I was thirty-seven, with the useful knowledge of a teenager. They had a name for it in the infantry. Arrested Development. The brass could see that it was going to be a problem when all these conscripts were finally discharged. We were only used to the company of men, entering middle-age with the social development of a fourteen-year-old.”

  Fredrick snorted quietly.

  “They’d known about the problem for a long time. I mean, when a war lasts thirty years, it becomes everything that most people have ever known, myself included. They worried society wouldn’t remember how to function after so long. And they were right. Look what happened after the Armistice: the collapse of the Union, the breakup of the Asian Territorial Concord. World economies had come to rely on war, and they collapsed catastrophically. Whole countries dissolved into anarchy.” Tovmas began rolling his blanket up. “I tried to raise her free of it all. I failed.” He strapped the perfectly rolled blanket to his pack.

  “You raised her on your own?”

  Tovmas nodded. “Her mother died giving birth.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Fredrick.

  Tovmas shook his he
ad. “I don’t need sympathy. It was a long time ago, now. She is twenty-one years old.”

  Aiden finished his rice. The three men sat, gazing at the lake and the mountains.

  “What will you do, once you rescue her?” Aiden asked finally.

  “I will make sure this can never happen again. To any Armenian. Somebody has to make us into a country once more. It’s the only way we can be strong enough.”

  Night fell around them as they sat in the mountain meadow. All chatter had stopped, but nobody slept. The militia’s fires died to embers slowly as the sky deepened above them, and the silver of the stars grew brighter. Then, when the night was at its deepest, Tovmas stood and gathered his men.

  They kicked dust over their fires and moved off down the mountain, silent as shadows.

  7.

  Kakavaberd

  Tovmas rested his elbows on the cool rock and lifted the binoculars to his eyes.

  He guessed that there was still an hour until dawn, but the diffused light was enough to make out the long wall and squat towers of the old fortress. The foremost tower, built onto a sharp outcrop of rock, had the dim light of a dwindling campfire at its top, and in the flickering glow Tovmas could make out the hump of a sleeping sentry. The only entrance, a crumbling gap in the stonework, lay at the foot of that tower. The rest of the tenth-century wall was frustratingly intact and required the crossing of a wooded ravine to reach.

  He reassured himself: this had to be the only sensible way to get into the fortress, since it was built atop a mountainous spur, approachable on only one side. Tovmas had considered climbing from the deep valley floor on the other side of the crag, having his men scale the rocky cliffs to come up behind the fortifications, but the danger of losing men to falling or to being caught out on the exposed rock faces did not appeal to him: the militia were hardly trained fighters, let alone mountaineers. Tovmas much preferred his current choice of perch which, on the rim of the hills overlooking the fortress crag, allowed him to see right into the raiders’ encampment.

  Great gorges yawned on either side of the fortress, the northern one rimmed with jagged cliff faces that peered across the vast ravine and over the Kakavaberd crag. Tovmas shifted his binoculars to the right, and squinted at the boulders lining the top of the cliffs. There he could see his rocket team setting up their throwaway tubes amongst the rocks. Neither of them had fired one before, but Tovmas had explained their operation as clearly as he could.

  He hoped they’d make the few rockets they had count. However, now that they were in position, he could move.

  His legs protested as he stood up: the overnight hike down from the landing site had left him aching in places he’d forgotten he had. He sighed; he was getting too old for this.

  He took the radio the pilots had given him from his pocket, and pressing the transmit button he whispered in English, “We’re moving to the fortress now.”

  “OK,” the pilot murmured in Tovmas’ earphone.

  Tovmas checked his rifle’s magazine and cocked the weapon, leaving the safety on. He signalled to the rest of his men, the sixteen who were to attack with him, to follow as he clambered past the boulder and silently began moving down the hill. The group of militiamen stood up from their resting spots and spread out behind him, following as quietly as they could manage.

  This, Tovmas knew, was the most dangerous part of the plan. They had to cross three hundred metres of open ground, exposed on the grassy ridge leading out to the crag, in order to reach the wall. If they were caught out here, the casualties would be terrible.

  His pulse quickened and the familiar thrill of anticipation crept outwards from his stomach. The temptation to simply run to the wall was enormous; the steep downwards slope urged him on, and the nagging sense of exposure was getting hard to control. Tovmas knew he had to restrain himself, if not for his own sake but for that of the men following him. He stolidly continued his rapid and quiet walk, and if his pace quickened at all, it was impossible to tell.

  The grass beneath Tovmas’ feet was dry and it rustled slightly as he walked. He cursed the dry weather. He could feel his heartbeat in his throat, and the rushing of blood in his ears was deafeningly loud. Surely, between the dry grass and his pounding pulse, the sentry would hear him?

  His foot struck the loose pebbles of a patch of scree, and he froze as two or three of the small stones tumbled off down the slope, bouncing and clattering loudly. The men behind him froze as well, and some of the more experienced ones crouched with their weapons up and ready. Tovmas’ eyes flickered as they scanned the shadowy fortress wall ahead. By now it was within two hundred metres, but he could see no movement. The dim light of the campfire was obscured now as they had descended past the level of the tower. After a few tense seconds, he gingerly took a step back up the hill, off of the loose scree. Feeling with his feet, he eventually found a path around the stones. His men followed in single file.

  The sky was getting worryingly light, turning from purple to deep orange as they walked on. High, feathery cirrus clouds above him had turned salmon-pink as the sun’s rays touched them. Tovmas knew it was a matter of minutes before the sun would break over the Geghama Mountains to their rear, illuminating the crag and the fortress wall for all to see. He hoped desperately to be inside by then.

  As they drew closer, the sentry’s tower on its outcrop grew taller, and dread writhed in the pit of Tovmas’ stomach. It was so imposing, so sinisterly still that he couldn’t take his eyes off it, and at every step he expected to see the dark silhouette of the sentry’s head appear over the battlement, exposing them at their most vulnerable.

  And yet it didn’t happen. No sentry appeared, and no alarm was raised. Tovmas and his sixteen men had reached the foot of the tower’s outcrop, just a few metres from the tumbled-down gap in the wall. He shepherded his men into a file around the head of the ravine on one side of the outcrop, ready for the attack into the raider’s camp. The man at the front, a big man named Lernig, was braced against the stones, ready. Tovmas could see the big man’s face was steely, but his eyes were tellingly wide.

  Seeing that all were in place, Tovmas fished in his pocket for his torch. Praying silently, he flashed it three times in the direction of the rocket team. Then he tapped Lernig on the shoulder.

  The big man hurled himself through the gap, and Tovmas and the rest of the men followed in twos and threes. Inside, they spread out and tucked themselves behind boulders and tumbled pieces of the wall, not moving more than a few metres from the gap. The interior of the fortress was no more than a large grassy hill, littered with stones from long-gone buildings, intermingled here and there with the tents and lean-tos of the slavers. Tovmas knew from his recce that there was an anti-aircraft gun near the top of the hill and a makeshift landing site on the far side for the slavers’ aircraft. The rocket team was to target those first.

  Still, nothing moved in the camp. Tovmas sent one of the smaller men, Magar, to climb the ladder to the sentry tower. Another man covered the lip of the battlement with his rifle, should the sentry finally make an appearance. So far, so good, thought Tovmas. But where were the rockets?

  Just as that thought crossed his mind, there was a blinding magnesium flash and a ferocious boom at the top of the hill as a fiery plume of dirt and smoke exploded into the sky. The sentry, wakened by the explosion, threw himself against the battlement, staring open-mouthed at the summit.

  Then the man covering the battlement shot him in the jaw.

  The rifle shot was an ear-splitting crack. A burst of pink spat from the top of the sentry’s skull, shimmering gruesomely as it was caught in the rays of the rising sun. Magar, still some way from the top, carried on regardless as the warm mist settled on his face and arms, and the limp form of the sentry with his ruined, flapping head tumbled past him.

  The slavers were awake now, their shouts of alarm echoing from the hill and the walls, and as the first movement was spotted amongst the tents, Tovmas and his sixteen men sighted their
weapons and opened fire.

  Rifles cracked and shotguns boomed. Bullets tore through tent sheets, splintered wood and bit into the flesh of many of the slavers as they stumbled from their shelters in panic. Tovmas loosed burst after burst at anything that moved, revelling in the precise destruction and drawing a deep pleasure from the screams that marked his hits. He embraced the joy of it like an old friend, welcoming it back into his bones as he brought death to the groggy and terrified slavers.

  It was a familiar sensation, one he had tasted through countless terrible fights in dark jungles and blinding deserts, like some lingering demon that welled up to possess him when there was blood to be spilled and lives to be taken.

  These men had stolen from him his only child, the one thing he had left, and now they felt his wrath. He wanted nothing but to destroy them all.

  The militiamen fired until their magazines were empty, and as they paused to reload the first return shots cracked down from the hilltop. Even though the rising sun was without doubt in the slavers’ eyes and the militia were deep in shadow, their shots were beginning to find their marks.

  Tovmas was fumbling for a fresh magazine when Lernig, who was sharing a boulder with him, was struck in the neck. The big man slumped senselessly at Tovmas’ feet, his dark blood soaking into the dry grass. Tovmas could see by the gaping exit that the shot had severed Lernig’s spine. White pieces of vertebrae poked from the wound.

  For a moment he could do nothing but stare. His blood lust had gone as quickly as it had come when he realised that he was starting to lose men. Men who trusted him. Men who were relying on him to keep them alive.

  A second Ashtarak man was hit, this time in the hand as he aimed his shotgun up the hill. He stumbled backwards, clutching his ruined hand. His friend reached out to pull him back, but the screaming man was caught in a hail of gunfire. He twitched and jerked awfully as several bullets thumped into his chest and limbs. Blood spattered the stones of the wall behind him. His legs gave way and he crumpled into the dirt, dead.