by Mick Farren
Urman shook his head. “Not yet. We’ve so far managed to bury the reports as lacking confirmation, but we can’t go on doing that for very long. Confirmation’s getting harder and harder to avoid or plausibly deny. These bastards are a fact of life.”
For once Jesamine found herself in agreement with Phaall. The human side of the Mosul war machine was sickeningly ugly, but that they also made use of ghostly and supernatural dark forces made something deep inside her being cringe with a very fundamental horror. She knew about the small paranormal army of Dark Things and their attendant Mothmen that were now quartered out on the perimeter of the camp. She had never seen them, and, indeed, they were extremely secret and extremely off-limits, but at night a strange glow radiated from the pens where they were confined that could not be hidden or explained away. Everyone on the south bank of the Potomac knew the unthinkable things were there, and, from the way Phaall was talking, even the officers feared and loathed them.
Phaall looked hard at Urman. “Could your men take out these Rangers?”
The major all but squirmed. “Normally I’d say yes, but with a demon involved, I really don’t know. How the hell do you go about capturing or killing a demon?”
Fragg nodded. “He’s right. None of us knows what we might be up against. We need to call in a few experts, but that means a request to Savannah, and that’s the last damn thing we want.”
The captain, a subordinate of Fragg whom Jesamine knew as an ineffectual bully called Munz, fresh from across the ocean, spoke for the first time. “Could we not bring in one of our own Zhaithan people to neutralize the demon? Still keep it in the family, so to speak, but get some help with the dark side?”
The others looked at him as though he was retarded, but Fragg was the first to put their contempt into words. “Are you out of your mind, young captain? You tell the Zhaithan any damned thing, and it goes straight back to Savannah. We don’t have any bloody Zhaithan in the family. That’s a contradiction in terms. Invite in the Zhaithan, any Zhaithan, and that’s the fox in the fucking henhouse, boy.”
Phaall finished his lager and signaled for another. “Even if they could be trusted, which they can’t, they’re fucking useless. They’re really good at scaring old women and burning heretics, but confront them with a genuine tooth-and-claw enemy, and they’ll sure as shit get directions from the Deities to be someplace else that’s well out of the line of fire.”
Phaall’s beer was set in front of him, and he leaned back in his chair. Preparations were being made for the twins to perform. “My best advice to you, young Captain Munz, is to keep your mouth shut until you know what you’re talking about. Right now you can watch Mai and Leah do what they do. Pay attention. You might learn something. And while you’re watching, reflect how the twins are something else the Zhaithan would like stopped, except, if they tried it, they’d have a bloody mutiny in the Potomac Officer Corps.” From Munz, he turned his attention to Flagg and Urman. “As for the rest of us, gentlemen, we might be best advised to let these Rangers and their alleged demon become someone else’s problem. Maybe our first consideration should be to cover our own rear ends.”
Almost on cue, the round of applause that greeted the appearance of the blond twins followed his words. Even though Jesamine had seen the performance dozens of times before, she dutifully turned her head to watch, reflecting with bored amazement how the men never tired of the same routine. The twins’ hair was teased out, and their pink-white bodies were draped in the kind of diaphanous chiffon scarves, pale blue in this instance, that Jesamine and Kahfla privately and laughingly called “gift-wrapping.” The pair slowly unwrapped each other, undulating to the sound of beaten tablas. When the only remaining scarves were down around their hips, they embraced, and as they kissed, and each identical sister’s hands fondled the other’s breasts, every male eye in the mess was on them.
ARGO
Bonnie clapped a hand over Argo’s mouth and hissed into his ear. “Freeze. Don’t move so much as a muscle.”
He had woken to a sound that had infiltrated his sleep like a warning, but that he had not consciously heard. At first he could not see anything except Bonnie’s face close to his, but he knew from the urgency of both her tone and her breathing that something was seriously amiss, and this was no overture to fresh rapture. He also knew enough to do exactly as he was told, and as she slowly removed her hand, he made no sound and willed himself to sink, as low and invisible as possible, into their bed of leaves. Very slowly she wordlessly pointed, and for the first time he saw the moving shapes between the trees, some fifty or so yards away, although it was hard to judge the exact distance. Argo had no idea how long he had slept, but the moon was still bright, and he was able to make out the shapes of men moving in single file. He could see that they wore the round cooking-pot helmets and the baggy tunics of Mosul foot soldiers. Their rifles were slung over their shoulders, and they moved as though footsore and weary. Nothing about them indicated that they expected to encounter anything dangerous or even untoward in this part of the Virginia woods, especially a runaway boy and a strange, armed young woman. One by one, they passed in the distance and disappeared from sight, but for a long time, Bonnie remained prone and stock-still, and Argo did the same, although he was able to move his head enough to see that she held her pistol in her right hand. Finally, after what seemed to Argo like fifteen or twenty minutes had elapsed, Bonnie slowly got her feet. “I think they’re gone.” She sniffed the air. “Since they arrived in these parts, the Mosul have taken to smoking like ducks to water. You can smell the tobacco on them coming and going.”
Argo also got up, and Bonnie grinned at him. “You did okay there, kid.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“And that was exactly the right thing to do. Most people only see movement in the dark.”
“You think that was a Mosul patrol?”
“More like an infantry company on a night march. Those bastards looked shagged out and dragging. A patrol is usually a bit more alert.”
Bonnie was holstering her pistol, and Argo had to ask the obvious question. “Would you have shot it out with them if they’d seen us?”
“How many of them do you figure there were?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a dozen.”
“I thought there were more, but, okay, say it was a dozen.”
“Okay.”
“And between us we had eight shots before we had to reload, so if we scored with every shot and they all missed, there would still be four left when we were done shooting. Right?”
“Right.”
“So we’d be fucked.”
“Right.”
“And with the Mosul, it’s a real good idea to keep one bullet for yourself, because you absolutely don’t want to be taken alive by those fuckers.”
Argo lowered his eyes, thinking of Gaila Ford, the fire, and the torture that must have gone before. “I know that much.”
Bonnie stretched, looked up at the moon, and sighed. “It’s hardly worth going back to sleep now. I figure we might as well move on.”
She pulled out her flask, took a hit, and offered it to Argo. “Breakfast?”
He swallowed a slug of the John Daniels and returned the flask. “Can I ask you something?”
“Depends on what it is.”
“What have you been doing since you left Thakenham?”
She laughed. “You mean how did I get like this?”
“Something like that.”
“I’ve been fighting the bastards, kid. I’ve been fighting them every way I can.”
Argo could hardly believe what he was hearing. “You’ve been up in Albany?”
Bonnie busied herself straightening her clothes and kicking away the leaves so the telltale signs of their bedding down were not quite so obvious. As he watched her, Argo felt a little odd, as though the most important night of his life so far was being erased like it never happened. Bonnie, on the other hand, didn’t seem to notice. “You’ve
been under Mosul occupation too long, kid. They want you to believe the only fight is along the Potomac. There’s plenty more going on than that.”
“There is?”
“Why do you think that the bastards don’t go into the Appalachians or can’t hold the Shenandoah Valley?”
“I never heard any of that.”
“That’s because the Mosul Information Ministry doesn’t want you to hear about it.”
“So there are really folks still fighting in Virginia?”
“More than you might suspect.” She looked around as though calculating which direction to take. “Can you walk and talk at the same time?”
“Sure.”
“So let’s move.”
As they walked through darkness and on into the dawn, Bonnie unfolded a picture of the world that was totally at odds with all that Argo had believed over the last two years and all he had heard through the filter of Mosul propaganda. He had been led to believe that the invaders had an iron grip on all the lands south of the Potomac, west of the ocean, and east of the Wilderness, but, according to Bonnie Appleford, much had slipped through the fingers of that iron grip, and the hills were alive with pockets of stubborn and sometimes formidable resistance. The core of this opposition was in the Appalachians, where well-organized partisans, with weapons supplied by Albany, but very much a law unto themselves, controlled the high ground and made hit-and-run forays on enemy positions, turning total Mosul occupation into a practical impossibility along the Blue Ridge and in large areas of the Shenandoah Valley.
“The Mosul don’t like mountains, just like they don’t like cold—that’s why the Swiss maintain their neutrality. It’s why the Mosul have never been able to run over the Saami and come down on the Norse from the far north, and that’s why they had to fall back when they confronted the Russe under Joseph the Terrible.”
Argo had frowned. “Russland doesn’t have mountains.”
“But it has plenty of cold.”
Big things were planned for the coming winter. Hassan IX was fully expected to launch his assault across the Potomac at Albany, but the Appalachian partisans intended to come down in force and snap at his rear. The only problem was that they lacked a unified command structure. What had made them guerrillas also made them hard to coordinate. The bearded and buckskinned mountain men, and the trappers out of the interior with their flowing hair and necklaces of bear teeth, would chance unbelievable odds and fight like savages with gun and knife, tooth and nail if need be, but they were resolutely incapable of following any orders that did not fit in with their perceptions of how the fight should be fought. The war bands of the aboriginal nations had rigid internal discipline, but, without an encyclopedic knowledge of historic blood feuds and vendettas, no commander could ever really predict when two parties from different tribes might suddenly refuse to cooperate because of some long-held grudge that might go back a hundred years or more. Even the survivors from Virginia, the Carolinas, and the Southland Alliance, who had decided, when all was lost, to take the fight into the hills, came with their own set of problems. Although the partisans were nominally under the flag and the strategic control of Albany, many were still hearing the old cry of “Why doesn’t Albany come?” No matter how many times they were told of General James Dean and the secret meeting before the fall of Richmond, where the terrible and pragmatic decision was made that Albany would hold the Potomac and not rush down into Virginia, they were distrustful of Carlyle, Kennedy, and anything that might emanate from the Albany General Staff.
“And then, of course, there are the bandits.”
Argo had looked at Bonnie in surprise. “Bandits?”
“Sure, kid. Bandits.”
“I thought bandits were just what the Mosul called the partisans.”
“Hell, no. There are bandits. Country horse thieves like the Bush family, who suddenly became patriots, outlaws like the Blind Rebels or English John and his boys, who started to fight the Mosul because there was nothing left to steal. Displaced moonshiners, psycho barn burners, out-of-work bank robbers like the Presley Brothers and their mad old patriarch, weird-ass, cousin-marrying hillbillies who only hate the Mosul marginally more than they hate each other, city gangs like the Sicilian Bloods and the Richmond Shamrocks who found their cities burned around them. They’ll all fight because that’s all they know, but they’re mainly in it for the looting, and you never want to turn your back on them if you can help it.”
As Bonnie talked, she seemed to Argo to constantly vary in age. One moment she was a wild and wilful teenager who treated the entire war like one great adventure, and the next she was grave and thoughtful, experienced way beyond her years.
“Communication and coordination is the real problem. With so many different groups, each with their own agenda, and each with their own ideas of how to fuck with the Mosul, it can become close to impossible to mount any kind of concerted effort. In fact, it can be a full-time job just figuring out where everyone’s at in the geography.”
Argo found himself walking beside her in silence, partly listening as she described this swashbuckling and chaotic sector of the war, and partly just staring at her and the way the dappled sunlight through the overhead leaves touched her face. He could scarcely believe what had come to pass the previous night. Did he feel any different? So much was different, and events were moving at such a dizzying pace, that it impossible to tell. He wished that he could talk to her about it, tell her how he felt and try to explain his confusion, but she had said nothing, and he did not feel comfortable raising the subject when the stuff that she was telling him about was so much more important in the fullness of the world. Yet it had been his first time, and that had to mean something, if only to him.
“Yeah, kid, communication. That’s the big headache. We have a few NU wireless sets from Albany, and, at the opposite end of the scale, windwalkers and wisewomen, but its really a mess. Thank the fucking Goddess for Yancey Slide.”
“Who’s Yancey Slide?”
“You never heard of Yancey Slide? No, I guess you wouldn’t have. Not in Thakenham. Yancey Slide, Argo, is a walking miracle. He seems to have the ability to always turn up where he’s wanted. He speaks a couple of dozen languages, including aboriginal dialects. And he can shoot the eye out of a pigeon with a pistol at a hundred fucking paces.”
“You sound like you like him.”
“You don’t exactly like Yancey Slide. There’s even those who say he’s a demon. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the story’s good in that it seems to spook the Mosul and scare the Zhaithan, who are much more into that stuff, what with their Dark Things, their Mothmen, and their Seekers.”
Argo stopped. They’d been walking almost nonstop since before dawn, and he was tired, but mainly he wanted a straight answer to his next question. “The one thing I don’t understand in all this is what you’re doing, Bonnie. I mean, you talk as though you’re one of the partisans, but here you are wandering around the forest on your own.”
Bonnie also halted, grinning as she turned to face Argo. “Having doubts about me?”
Argo avoided her eyes. “No, but you did tell me not to trust anyone.”
“Very good, kid. You’re starting to learn.”
A sudden resentment flared inside Argo, rooted, as far as he could tell, in the fact that events of the previous night seemed to be being treated as though they had never happened. “I wish you’d stop calling me kid.”
“Okay, Argo Weaver, I’ll tell you what I’m doing wandering around the forest. I’m part of the partisan communications net. I guess you could call me a courier, and right now I’m on my way to rendezvous with Yancey Slide.”
“You’re saying you’re actually on a mission for the partisans?”
“That’s right, I’m on a mission.”
Now the resentment threatened to consume him. “So why are you taking me along with you? Just because we knew each other once? Just because you found me wandering in the woods? If you’re
some important courier, won’t I just slow you down? Or am I just a diversion that you’ll dump when you get bored with me, or when you get closer to the action?”
A sudden look of sadness passed across Bonnie Appleford’s face for the first time since they had met. “I was told to bring you, Argo.”
Argo could not believe what he was hearing. “Told to bring me?”
“This is complicated.”
“Why don’t you try to explain? I’m not as stupid as I look. I may not know too much, but I have survived two years of the Mosul.”
“My orders to meet up with Slide came telepathically, via a wisewoman. Can you accept that?”
Argo nodded. “I guess so. It’s kind of weird, but I know such things exist. I know the Mosul use dark forces, so I guess you guys can, too. Yeah, I’ll buy it.”
“Well, she told me something else as well.”
“About me?”
“She said I would meet a man-child who I would make into a man.”
Argo was suddenly in the grip of complete and violent emotion. A part of him wanted to hit and hurt Bonnie, while another wanted to cry like a baby. The end result was that he blurted out the first thing that came into his head, and then felt like a total fool. “But I thought you liked me.”
“I do like you, stupid.”
“But you would have done the same whether you liked me or not. You would have fucked me because the wisewoman told you that you would.”
Again the look of sadness. “Yes, Argo, that is absolutely true.”
“So whether you liked me or not made no difference?”
“This is not the time to be thinking like that.”
“No? You want to tell me how I should be thinking, because I’m fucked if I know.”