Kindling (Flame of Evil)

by Mick Farren

  Long, Chanchootok, and Naxat walked in together, side by side, and acted as heralds for the people that everyone there had really come to see. The Norse delegation was some twenty strong. Apart from Vice President Ingmar Ericksen, whose craggy face Cordelia recognized from pictures in the Albany newspapers, she didn’t know any of their names, but except for the Vice President, who was somber in a formal morning coat, they all sported somewhat dashing military uniforms, long, belted coats with decorations and shoulder boards, that were a mixture of the field grey of the Norse Army, the dark blue of its formidable Navy, and the lighter blue of the small but growing Air Corps. Cordelia observed that Coral Metcalfe was quite correct. Some of the younger officers were “real dolls,” and her appraisal was already being reciprocated if Cordelia was any judge of men. A blond Air Corps captain was looking directly at her with the hungry expression of one who has traveled a long way without the company of women. It was not, however, the moment for even the most mild and silent flirtation. All other eyes were now on the arched entrance of the Round Room as the final three men walked in. To the left was Prime Minister Jack Kennedy, to the right Field Marshal Virgil Dunbar, and, in the center, the king.

  The three most powerful men in the room constituted an odd contrast one from the other, both visually, right there and then, and also in terms of their respective but completely different backgrounds. The venerable Kennedy, with his broad shoulders and carefully shaped mane of white hair, had fought tooth and nail with the king’s father to preserve Albany as a parliamentary democracy. Although he now walked with a silver-topped cane, a truculent cigar jutted from the corner of his mouth and he radiated dogged and unrelenting energy. Dunbar, who had been imprisoned by the old king for much the same reasons that Kennedy had fought him, had a similar energy, but was cooler and more introverted. He walked with a limp after a Mosul sniper had nicked him in the leg during an overly exposed surveillance of the enemy lines. The king himself walked straight and with a reserved formality. He had the whole weight of the war thrust on his shoulders at the age of just twenty-seven, but, in his simple, unadorned, but immaculate uniform, his high, polished riding boots, and with his light brown hair neatly combed to one side, he carried the burden with a quiet dignity and determination never to reveal what the responsibility might be costing him, except for a certain strained pallor he could do nothing to disguise. Carlyle II led by example and seemed outwardly confident that, if he held himself intact, his people would follow him to either victory or an honorable defeat.

  By the time the three had reached the round table, the others designated to sit there had found their respective places and stood beside their high-backed leather chairs. The king seated himself without any theatrical display and indicated with an unassuming gesture that the others should do the same. “Mr. Vice President, my lords, ladies and gentlemen, shall we all be seated and see what can be done to extinguish once and for all this flame of evil that has burned its way to our borders?”

  RAPHAEL

  “Fire!”

  Thirty hammers of thirty unloaded muskets clicked in unison.

  “Reload!”

  Powder—wadding—ball—wadding—use the ramrod—replace.

  “Take aim!”

  The hard butts of thirty muskets were raised in unison to the shoulders of thirty conscript trainees.

  “Fire!”

  This time only twenty-nine hammers came down together. One was a fraction of a second late, and every one of the thirty trainees knew it was Pascal, one of the three Franks in the company, who had fallen behind. As the squad stood rigid and motionless, muskets still in the firing position, Gunnery Instructor Y’assir advanced on Pascal, stood in front of him, and looked the boy up and down. “You fired late, maggot.”

  Pascal responded with the training school bellow that he knew was expected of him; no point in compounding the crime of firing late with the equal offense of a faltering reply. “Yes, Gunnery Instructor! I fired late, Gunnery Instructor!”

  “And what do you do when you fire late, maggot?”

  The response was again a familiar bellowed ritual. “I become a traitor to the Deities and the Emperor, Gunnery Instructor!”

  “And what is the only fitting fate for a traitor, maggot?”

  “Death, Gunnery Instructor! Death is the only fitting fate for a traitor, Gunnery Instructor!”

  “I can’t hear you, maggot!”

  “Death, Gunnery Instructor! Death is the only fitting fate for a traitor, Gunnery Instructor!”

  The one thing that the company of conscript trainees knew was that Pascal would not die. Although executions were hardly a rare occurrence on the training camp that lay outside the ruins of Madrid, the boy would not be killed for a moment’s hesitation in one of the most routine and fundamental of drills. If that was the punishment for every such infraction, Hassan IX would have no army left to fight.

  “Company, lower arms!”

  In a snap, three-part motion, the trainees brought their muskets down to their sides and stood at attention, stiff as their own ramrods. Y’assir walked slowly along the line of young men, some of them little more than boys, then turned and walked back again until he was once more standing in front of the unfortunate Pascal. Without warning, his good right arm shot out and a clublike clenched fist struck the conscript just above and exactly between his eyes. Pascal went down like a felled tree. One moment he had been standing, and the next he was laid out on the parade ground at right angles to the line formed by his companions, blinking, looking stunned, but making no sound.

  “On your feet, maggot!”

  Pascal blinked once more, shook his head, scrambled to his feet, and rejoined the line. A newcomer might have expected that the drill would have continued, but the conscripts knew that, with Gunnery Instructor Y’assir, nothing should be taken for granted. Y’assir was the hardest of hard men, full Mamaluke, cold and unbending, once upon a time one of the Mu-Kadar, the Immortals, the pampered elite. He had only been brought back across the ocean and assigned to the post of gunnery instructor after a saber cut from a Virginia cavalryman, received at the Battle of Richmond, had severed the tendons in his left arm, rendering it useless. No longer able to fight or even ride, the Mamaluke compensated for what he saw as his fall from grace, his loss of glory, and his failure to die in the service of Emperor by an unrelenting and specific brutality. Although he was too much of a professional to ever voice his bitterness, it was plainly expressed each time he disciplined a recruit. He punched Pascal a second time, in exactly the same spot on his forehead, but Pascal must have had just enough warning to brace himself for the second blow. He merely staggered back and then quickly rejoined the line, but blood now flowed from a cut above his nose. Without comment from Y’assir, the drill continued.

  “Reload!”

  Powder—wadding—ball—wadding—use the ramrod—replace.

  “Take aim!”

  The muskets leveled as one.

  “Fire!”

  This time thirty hammers again clicked in unison.

  “Reload!”

  Powder—wadding—ball—wadding—use the ramrod—replace.

  “Take aim!”

  Y’assir could keep this up until the shoulders of the trainees were black and blue.

  “Fire!”

  The trick was to make the moves without thinking. If you thought about it, you fumbled. Raphael Vega let his hands go through the drill while he thought about the drawings in the hidden notebook concealed beneath his mattress in the barracks. Although forbidden by both military regulations and the dictates of the Zhaithan, Raphael Vega drew because, in the training camp, the officers and the instructors like Y’assir did everything they could to break the will and destroy the minds of the conscript trainees. Once upon a time, Raphael Vega had been an attractive fourteen-year-old with olive skin, fine features, and straight black hair that, no matter how much he combed it back, fell into his dark brown eyes like a raven curtain. The young girls
had started treating him to hot, dramatic glances, and many had predicted that he would be a handsome man. All that had changed, though, when the Mosul had taken him for a conscript. No more girls, no more hot looks, and, with his head shaved, his eyes seemed to harden and his features take on a uniform coarseness. Whether he would ever be a man, handsome or otherwise, was also extremely debatable. The Mosul did not want men; they wanted automatons who would advance when ordered into the fire of whatever enemy confronted them, without hesitation, fear, or question. Raphael Vega would let himself be turned into a Mosul soldier. With Hispania long conquered and decimated, he could do nothing about that, but he was not going to allow himself to be transformed into a thing without a brain. The drawings were where he hid his individuality and concealed his freedom of mind. His art was his medium of rebellion, a means of maintaining his identity under the harsh discipline meted out by Y’assir and his other superiors, and the constant Zhaithan religious indoctrination. When he had first come to the camp, he had drawn more openly and even circulated scrawls of naked women and mythic beasts among his barrack mates. Then he had been caught, and ten savage strokes of the formal cane that left him striped and bloody had cured him of that, and also taught him that the Zhaithan Ministry of Virtue even had its spies and snitches, known as zed-hunters, in among the raw recruits. After the caning, he drew strictly in secret, and trusted no one.

  “Reload!”

  Powder—wadding—ball—wadding—use the ramrod—replace.

  “Take aim!”

  The muskets leveled as one.

  “Fire!”

  Pascal was again slightly slower than the rest, but this time Y’assir chose to ignore it. Blood had run down into the Frankish trainee’s eyes from the cut on his forehead. Maybe the gunnery instructor wanted the company to become accustomed to the sight of blood on their companions.

  “Reload!”

  Powder—wadding—ball—wadding—use the ramrod—replace.

  “Take aim!”

  Raphael aimed at an imaginary target.

  “Fire!”

  The drill was a pantomime, conducted without ammunition, for one simple reason, and everybody knew it. The training camp was presently suffering from a shortage of powder. Even the fact that they were using the old-fashioned muzzle-loading muskets was the result of yet another supply problem. Hassan IX might rule an empire that stretched from the Indus to Hispania and the Northern Ocean, but it was an empire that was far from efficient in anything but the practice of terror and oppression. The movement of supplies was a constant and labyrinthine foul-up. The Mosul were conquerors but hardly organizers, and such organizational skills that might be found among the defeated and subject peoples were either ignored or severely hampered by the hidebound distrust of the Zhaithan priests, who viewed science, technology, and even the simple art of logistics as hell-spawned abominations and only tolerated them on the most grudging and material sufferance. Like the old saying went in the subject nations that had boasted railroad systems before the coming of the Mosul, the trains now never ran on time, if they ran at all. The grand alliance with the Teutons should, in theory, have put some of this to rights. The Teutons were skilled engineers, and, within the Mosul domain, they were the masters of heavy industry, but it was common knowledge that the Teutons’ fatal weakness was that they were far too fond of power and authority. They could be seduced by strength. That was why they had voluntarily allied themselves with the Mosul in the first place and made their rape of Europe possible. It was also why they had allowed the Zhaithan to infiltrate their society, bringing as it did the chaos of distrust and holy repression under the guise of order and religious uniformity.

  Despite the Zhaithan spies and zed-hunters, the conscript trainees in Raphael’s company had heard a wide-enough selection of horror stories about Mosul foul-ups. Not even the Ministry of Virtue could keep soldiers from complaining and spreading rumors. They had heard the whispers in the night and grouching on the forced marches about how entire regiments had starved on the Asian Front while perfectly good food had rotted less than a hundred kilometers away, awaiting transportation that never came because it had been ordered to the wrong place. Y’assir himself had made it clear that maps were not to be trusted unless they were of Teuton or even enemy origin. The worst stories, however, were those of the human-wave assaults, employed extensively in the invasion of the Americas, in which the front ranks were not issued with weapons at all because the inevitability of their deaths was so absolute. The trainees all prayed that they would be furnished with modern Krupp breechloaders before they shipped out for the Americas. A modern weapon was a fairly definite guarantee that they would not immediately be placed in the front lines of a “forlorn hope” suicide squad the moment they arrived at the front. Y’assir had come as close to promising them as he came to promising anything except punishment and death that they were supposed to be so armed, and thus they had some chance of surviving at least their first encounter with the enemy. On the other hand, he made it clear that, in the Provincial Levies, what was supposed to be, and what was, were two very different things. “It could well be that the guns intended for you boys will be left standing on some loading dock between here and the Ruhr for the next three months. Or, even if they do arrive, you’ll find you’ve been issued with the wrong ammunition.”

  When Y’assir finally dismissed them, the trainees stumbled to their barracks, too tired to do anything but fall into their bunks. The sun had set and the interior of the barrack room was quite dark. Some lit the stubs of candles that were the only light permitted to them after sunset, while others just flopped on their mattresses with exhausted sighs and groans. Some sat hunched on their bunks and blindly turned the pages of their pocket-sized copies of the Yasma, the holy book of Zhaithan, that were issued to all recruits when they came to the training camp, and, as Raphael knew well, was the only book they could own on penalty of dire punishment. Indeed, the Yasma would have been the only book permitted in all of the empire if the priests completely had their way, but that was something beyond even the cruel and fanatic capabilities of the worshipers of Ignir and Aksura. Raphael hated the Yasma, with its rules and its ancient tales of hideousness and carnage, the deities and the demons, the interminable lists of rules and regulations and the equally endless genealogies. He would have simply lost the book had it not been one of the items regularly checked during the gunnery instructor’s routine inspections, and woe to any trainee who could not produce his copy of the Yasma. He even had to regularly fan through the pages to make it look as though he was actually reading the accursed texts.

  The short interval between dismissal and lights-out was the only time that the trainees showed any kind of personality. Through the rest of their waking hours they moved as one, and with their shorn heads and rough cotton uniforms, they looked as alike as it was possible to make them. In their preparations for bed, they showed small idiosyncrasies. Renaldo obsessively inspected his hair and toenails. Pablo stared at his lit candle stub as though looking for some kind of answer or inner reason, or maybe trying to hypnotize himself away to someplace out of the training camp. The four trainees from the Lowlands gambled compulsively. The quartet stuck to each other like glue, and in every available moment they pitched copper coins or rolled dice, and had an elaborate system of memorized credit and debit, so nothing was ever put on paper. Pascal was usually talkative, but on this night he simply lay facedown on his bunk after bearing the brunt of Y’assir’s practiced ire for the whole of the long, hot day. Raphael would have liked to have vanished into the latrine and drawn for a while. A portrait of an imaginary girl with caramel skin, huge eyes, and dark hair had lodged in his mind, and he wanted to get it down on paper, in this case the blank back of a supply requisition form he had filched while no one was looking. He had no idea where the pictures in his head came from, and he never knew when they might vanish. The girl’s face was somehow, in some mysterious way, important, but, since he had been caught and caned, h
e had become extremely circumspect with his drawing. He had no desire to feel the burning cuts of the formal cane ever again if he could in any way help it.

  “Lights out!” All too soon, Underofficer Beg, Y’assir’s immediate deputy, had screamed from the barrack room door, and the trainees snuffed out their candles. After that the only light came from a small iron brazier on the top of a tall tripod: not a heating device, but a reminder of the presence of the gods. Even in the darkness the Zhaithan refused to release their grip. Raphael had no recall of falling asleep. The next thing he knew was a violent hammering that he thought at first was inside his head but then realized was being created by a squad of underofficers led by Beg who were rousing the trainees with their batons, tipping them out of their bunks, upending the rough straw mattresses, and screaming.

  “Out! Out! Out! Quit your snoring and start roaring!”

  Outside, the dawn had yet to break. One of the Lowlanders had the temerity to ask what was going on, and, amazingly, he received an answer. “You’re all shipping out, maggot. Out of here, across the ocean, and off to the front to be blown to pieces. And are we glad to be rid of you little bastards.”

  Raphael wanted to protest. How could the training be over? He did not feel trained. He did not feel like a soldier, but in the Mosul legions, no one protested.

  JESAMINE

  Jesamine woke to the sound of the call to prayer and the subsequent bustle of the waking camp that was just outside the blackened ruins of the Virginia town that had been called Alexandria. She had only slept fitfully that night. The flesh of her bottom still smarted from the colonel’s late night ministrations. Drunk on schnapps and lager after early-evening hours spent in the Teuton officers’ mess, Colonel Helmut Phaall of the 4th Engineers, the man who owned her body, if not her soul, had taken a mind to thrash her soundly with the same quirt he used on his charger Wotan, inflicting some fifteen slow and lingering stripes with the plaited leather before forcing her to her knees to finish him in the manner that had, for some time, been his preferred method of consummation. The colonel had gone to some lengths to explain that the beating in no way constituted a punishment. She had neither transgressed nor displeased him, and the pain he was so liberally meting out was purely for his own amusement, and, in keeping with her abject and lowly station, she should willingly suffer the chastisement with good grace and in the eternal hope of finding favor in not only his eyes but in those of the All-seeing Twin Deities. Colonel Phaall had, at the same time, however, made it quite clear that she was free to moan, gasp, whimper, or sob, just as long as she didn’t “wake up the whole damned camp.” He had absolutely no objection to hearing her suffer. Indeed, it was the perfect complement to the visual spectacle of her bare body twisting and her muscles clenching and contracting with each cut of the whip.