Conflagration

by Mick Farren

  “Virgil Dunbar, you have my surrender.”

  Dunbar swung down from the bay and limped towards the Mosul leader. As he approached, Ab Balsol reversed his sword and offered it hilt first with a stiff bow. The tall Mosul’s left arm hung limply by his side, and the sleeve of his uniform tunic was torn and dark with blood. Seemingly the general had not come through the fight unscathed. Dunbar shook his head. “Keep your sword, sir. I don’t require it.”

  As a military escort surrounded Balsol and his commanders, ready to march them away, Jesamine suddenly found it hard to believe that the contest of armies was all over and that she had survived. Here at Newbury Vale, the forces of Hassan IX had been brought to the field and utterly routed. The news would resonate through Hispania and the Land of the Franks, and all the other slave nations across the ocean. The Zhaithan and the Ministry of Virtue could never shut down the underground grapevine, no matter how many unfortunates were publicly flogged for negativism, or tortured and hung as seditionists, defeatists, heretics, or Norse agents. She could imagine the unrestrained joy she would have felt had she learned that the Mosul were not invincible while she had been slaving for Mamaluke and Teuton, on her back or on her knees. Right there and then, Jesamine could hardly contain herself from shouting with angry and triumphant delight. Only the supremely sobering effect of the battle’s ghastly aftermath stopped her. The men of Albany and their allies had paid a terrible price for their victory. Although their casualties in no way approached the fearsome death toll of the Mosul, Jesamine bleakly wondered how many previously familiar faces she would never see again.

  And then a familiar face appeared in her field of vision. At first she thought that she was dreaming or facing a newly created ghost. “Oonanchek?”

  He moved stiffly. “It is I.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  Oonanchek shook his head. “I am fine. Just a little battered. There are many who are worse.”

  Oonanchek’s face was streaked and smeared with war paint, and grimed with smoke and powder, but he was clearly alive. He was also alone. Jesamine was suddenly alarmed. “Magachee?”

  “She is alive.”

  “Wounded?”

  Oonanchek smiled reassuringly. “Do not concern yourself. She is unhurt.”

  “Thank the Goddess for that. Where is she?”

  “At the new camp that is being made. I go there myself now. I just wanted to see Balsol surrender.”

  “You’re going to the camp right now?”

  “No one should stay in this place where the Mosul made their stand. Too many confused spirits continue to linger.”

  “I just want to convince myself they’re really dead.”

  “But now you have seen it, you should depart.”

  Faysid Ab Balsol was being marched away under heavy guard. He was being taken to the Albany camp that was in the process of being established at the other end of the valley. He would very aptly have to traverse the full length of his chosen battlefield as the daylight faded, and the night closed in. If he had managed to hold out until the darkness, he might have saved his army and slipped away, but now he would have to pass the piles of bodies, the great funeral pyres that were being built for the Mosul dead, and witness his own men being organized into disposal squads. The piles of wood and debris were being liberally doused with petroleum, and would soon blaze in the night, ready for the Mosul bodies to be pitched onto them by these detachments of prisoners. The Mosul had used the flame as their symbol, but now it was going to consume them, proving, Jesamine supposed, that the fire belonged only to the victor. She was well aware that thousands of the enemy dead were only unfortunate conscripts, no better than slaves to their Mosul masters, but she was not yet ready to be forgiving, or provide excuses for fallen foes. She could only take the attitude of, fuck them, they deserved it. Somewhere in the gathering dust, a lone Albany voice was singing, accompanied by a weeping harmonica.

  In the valley below, lads

  In the valley below

  I coughed out my young life,

  In the valley below.

  She and Oonanchek fell in behind the guard party, and followed it towards the mouth of the valley, the point where Dunbar had launched his first attack. Jesamine glanced at Oonanchek. For a moment their eyes met, but then both of them looked quickly away. After the fear and anxiety, and all the excitement and adrenalin of the day, she had suddenly, in an unchecked, animal moment, wanted Oonanchek, in the most wanton and shameless way she could imagine; not with Magachee, not as the mystic threesome of their now severed takla, but as strong, all enclosing, hard-driving, penetrating man. For a wild instant, she craved a clawing, writhing release from the impossible weight of carnage and tension. She wanted to be held, and fucked, and to let it all out with wordless keening and sobbing screams, and she knew that in the same second he had felt the same, but then the moment was passed and propriety prevailed, and also the realization that, afterwards, life would have to go on. After catharsis, reality would still remain. Magachee would be betrayed. The takla would be compromised, and the two of them would rise from their rut unable to face each other. Jesamine let out a long sigh, not caring what it revealed. Argo, Raphael, and Cordelia were riding a little way off. “I think it would be best if I went to join them.”

  Oonanchek nodded. “You should do that.”

  ARGO

  The aftermath was strange. Argo wasn’t sure how he had expected the victory would be celebrated. He knew the civilians would be dancing and drinking, and cheering crowds would throng the streets when the word reached Albany, but there on the battlefield, where reality had happened and was still happening, triumph was a very different matter. He supposed that once upon a time, his farm-boy fantasy would have been storybook excess like the old-time Vikings; a lavishly pagan victors’ feast at which oxen were roasted, naked women danced, and entire barrels of beer consumed by sweating warriors—but he already knew too much and had seen too much to believe such myths. In the officers’ mess, no one danced, few sang, and even when they did, it was a rising chorus of melancholy that quickly faded. A valley night-mist clung to the ground, mixed with the black gasoline smoke, and the stench from the fires at the other end of the valley where the enemy dead were being burned. If he walked out of the mess tent, the pyres were plainly visible, and, accordingly, he had decided not to walk outside the mess tent. Not that inside was much better. The men and women were shocked and exhausted. Some drank to heal the shock, and kill the very real physical pain. Others simply stared at a bottle in front of them, processing the ghastly chaos of the day. Many were bandaged, or limped with the help of canes or improvised crutches. Most had not bothered to change from their blood- and smoke-stained battle dress. The fight had been hard won, and the real moment of exultation had been back on the field, when the Mosul broke and ran. As the tide of combat had so precipitately turned, amid the hand-to-hand confusion of the late afternoon, they had, all together, yelled their shout of victory from the bottom of their lungs and from the primal depths of their beings. Now, hours later, in the dark of that first night, jubilation had been replaced by disbelief and disgust at the terrible toll of destruction, as the cost was now being tallied.

  New arrivals brought fresh names to add to the roll call of the lost, and these were met by dour stares, groans, and curses, and the mood grew increasing morose and drunk. News came that an entire gun crew had been wiped out by a Mosul direct hit, one of the first guns into the valley, one of those who had pounded the western ridge. As the names of the dead were repeated, the artillery colonel who had been their commander rose to his feet, and, with great deliberation and precision, hurled an almost full bottle of good Norse scotch, from his private store, hard at the nearest support pole with enough force to smash it. Then he took a deep breath and, with a strained and shaking control, requested a replacement from the mess orderly. “I seem to have destroyed the last in a fit of rage, I believe, at the random nature of death.”

  An RAAC flying of
ficer, an observer from one of the Odins, walked in and was immediately barraged with questions. “How now, young Flying Officer? What of the enemy?”

  “What are the Mosul reinforcements doing? Are they still coming on?”

  The flying officer dropped into a chair at an empty table, threw down his helmet, goggles, and gloves. He unstrapped his sidearm and laid it beside them, holding up a hand as if to ward off all the impatient demands for news. “A moment, gentleman.” He turned to the orderly. “A whiskey, if you please, Jeeves.”

  The glass was placed in front of him and the flying officer drank it down in one. “You had better give me another.”

  This was too much for a stout, red-faced infantry major. “Damn it, man. Don’t tease us like some coy fucking virgin. Are the Mosul coming or not? Will we have to go through the whole bloody business again in the morning?”

  A certain resentfulness existed between the infantry and the airmen. The infantry viewed the Air Corps as privileged glamour boys who sailed way above the muck and bullets, while the infantry bled and died, and fought the war the hard way. For their part, the RAAC considered the very act of taking a piece of imperfect machinery thousands of feet into the air to be more than enough proof of their courage and endurance, let alone swooping low over the Mosul lines to drop their bombs or gather information on enemy positions. As the orderly poured the airman his second drink, he looked slowly round at the anxious, assembled faces and smiled. “It seems to be good news, my friends.”

  “So tell us.”

  “The relief column has stopped. They’ve been halted since before sunset. They could have just stopped for the night, but they could be stopped in preparation to get the fuck out of Virginia. It’s impossible to tell. All I know was that whoever was leading the column was in no hurry to bail out Faysid Ab Balsol. They weren’t exactly marching to the sound of his guns. Quite the reverse. As soon as Balsol made his stand, they noticeably slowed down.”

  The news that the relief column was not coming at them in double time caused a measure of relief and orders for fresh drinks, but the mention of Faysid Ab Balsol prompted the flying officer to question to the room. “What became of that bastard?”

  “What bastard?”

  “Faysid Ab fucking Balsol. What happened to him after he offered his sword to Dunbar?”

  A youthful lieutenant who had lost most of his platoon in the first advance snorted angrily. “He’s probably hung up by his thumbs someplace, before they hang him properly.”

  But he was corrected by a more experienced, long-serving captain of cavalry. “Quite the reverse, dear boy. He is most likely being formally wined and dined by the generals.”

  The young lieutenant was shocked. “I don’t understand.”

  “They don’t hang or torture supreme commanders, lad. It would set a dangerous precedent.” The cynical observation elicited a fresh snippet of news from another newcomer. “On the subject of hanging and torturing, the intelligence boys have a dragnet out for surviving Zhaithan. Seems like they’ve been trying to slip away disguised as Mosul grunts.”

  One bit of scuttlebutt coaxed out another. “I heard some irregulars brought a bunch of Zhaithan in a while ago, and handed them over to Slide.”

  This produced some knowing and decidedly evil smiles. “Slide will know what to do with the Zhaithan. At least Hassan’s butcher boys won’t be dining with any generals.”

  CORDELIA

  The prisoner sat on a straight-backed folding chair with his hands lashed behind his back. When Slide had roused Cordelia, he had told her that the man “believes that he’ll be tortured, and I’ve done nothing to set him straight.” Now Slide walked round him with the studied deliberation of the practiced interrogator. “I’ll speak very slowly so I don’t have to repeat myself. I am not of this world, Zhaithan, and if I feel like it, I can fuse your fucking cortex, and have you contorting on the floor until your spine snaps. You want to put it to the test?”

  The prisoner’s eye was blackened and his lip was cut. He had been captured by irregular guerrillas, hard men with flowing hair and necklaces of bear teeth. He’d been trying to slip away, disguised in the greatcoat of an infantry private, but he had made the mistake of hanging on to his expensive, handmade Krupp sidearm, and it had betrayed him. The guerrillas had slapped him around for a while, as punishment for his deceit and noncooperation, but had held off from shooting him out of hand. Since the invasion, the guerrillas had lost a lot of comrades to the gallows and torture chambers of the Zhaithan and the Mosul Ministry of Virtue, and no one would have blamed them if they had exacted a measure of swift revenge, but these mountain men knew enough to realize that a high-placed Zhaithan could provide a wealth of information if a way could be found to pry it out of him. Thus they had beat the man a little more, and then brought him to Yancey Slide, working on the principle that, if anyone could crack a Zhaithan, it was Slide.

  Cordelia was not quite sure why Slide had decided to rouse her from her sleep to come and look at this prisoner. She had been deep asleep. Her body was bruised and aching after her fall from the gelding, and she was exhausted from the turmoil of the day. Her first reaction on being shaken awake was a string of obscenities. Her second was to demand to know what the hell was going on. Slide had handed her his flask.

  “We have a prisoner. A high Zhaithan.”

  The information and the offer of a drink had cut through Cordelia’s bleary fury. She took a pull from the flask and coughed. “We do?”

  “It has fallen to me to interrogate him. Dunbar thinks that I might be able to wring some nuggets of truth out of him.”

  Cordelia took a second drink. The liquor tasted strange, probably some outlandish concoction of Slide’s. “And where do I come into this wringing?”

  “I want you to put on a fresh uniform and come with me.”

  “You want me to help you interrogate this bastard?”

  Slide produced a flame from the tip of his index finger and lit a cheroot. “I suspect you may have a talent for extracting truth.”

  Cordelia had seen the flaming finger trick too many times before to be impressed. She also wasn’t sure how she felt about his last statement, but she climbed stiffly from her bed, crossed the tent to the washstand. Slide sat down on her vacated bed with the cheroot in the corner of his mouth, and watched as she splashed water on her face. She had no problem being naked in front of Slide. He wasn’t human, so it didn’t count. “How highly placed?”

  “What?”

  “This Zhaithan, how highly placed?”

  “He’s a Fourth Adept.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “By the tattoos just under his armpit. They all have them, and they’re updated every time they’re promoted. He could well have been one of Balsol’s top Zhaithan.”

  “In that case, he won’t crack easily.”

  “That’s why I need your help. You can sniff the metaphysics coming off him.”

  Slide could put things oddly, but Cordelia always understood, as she did when he continued. “I’m fairly sure you won’t be impeded by any moral complexities.”

  “You mean you won’t hear me complain that doing unto the Zhaithan as they’d do unto others would make us as bad as they are?”

  “Something of that order.”

  “Unlike my three companions, who still retain a few scruples?”

  “Exactly. So make yourself as formidable as you can. We are playing the Zhaithan at his own game.”

  She selected a crisp new riding habit and dressed quickly. After she had pulled on her boots, Slide nodded approvingly, and offered a final suggestion. “Wear your riding gloves, and bring your crop.”

  Cordelia could feel herself warming to this new and unexpected task. She was far from sure that it was a healthy warmth, but she went with it. If nothing else, being present at an interrogation would be a kind of payback for what she had suffered at the hands of Her Grand Eminence Jeakqual-Ahrach. “I have the perfect thing.”

/>   She had put on her blue glasses, even though it was dark, and Slide had nodded.

  The night seemed less about blue sunglasses once Slide had led her into the isolated tent where the Zhaithan was tied to the straight-backed folding chair. The bound prisoner’s bruised face was dirty and glistened with sweat, his eyes were bloodshot. He was stripped to the waist and, in addition to his face, his body showed marks of where he had been punched and kicked immediately after his capture. Two of his captors stood on either side of him. The irregulars were big, weatherbeaten mountain men in boots and buckskins, with aborigine tattoos, and rifles held in the crooks of their arms. They looked eager to use the butts of those rifles on the Zhaithan, but Slide dismissed them. “I think Lady Blakeney and I can take it from here.”