by Mick Farren
ARGO
Argo and Bonnie walked in silence for a long time and might have remained silent for even longer if the woods had not started to thin, the forest giving way to open country that would make any continued lack of conversation impossible. The noncommunication between them was not one of either anger or resentment. It was simultaneously simpler and more complex. Argo was completely overwhelmed by all the revelations that Bonnie had so suddenly dropped on him. He was not sure why Bonnie was so quiet; maybe he had offended her, or perhaps she was simply giving him time to digest all that had happened and all that he had learned. Before the Mosul had come, he had been nothing more than an ordinary kid. Not dumb exactly, but hardly anything special. Then the occupation had made his life as narrow and circumscribed as the ditch at the north end of the top field. The only contrasts to the drab round of grim deprivation and his stepfather’s bullying were the moments of exceptional horror, as when the news had come that his father was dead or when Gaila Ford had been burned. Now, suddenly, in the space of just a few hours, doors to a wholly unknown world of both hope and danger had seemingly opened to him. He had not only lost his virginity, but he had discovered that he was being talked about by wisewomen and being deliberately brought to meet a being who was alleged by some to be an actual demon. The thoughts that raced through Argo’s head had no starting place and certainly no conclusion. How? Why? What? He could not even frame the questions. He had no place among wisewomen and demons. He had known he would do it with a girl sooner or later, but he had never imagined that it would be anyone like the wild Bonnie Appleford in leather and buckskin with a knife and pistol at her hip and who knew all about the darkest workings of this world and maybe the next. Yet Bonnie had once been like him, maybe not exactly the same, but close enough, and she appeared to have made that transition. What Argo did not know was the cost she might have paid, and what it would cost him, and what would he use for the payment, when he was really nothing but a runaway kid from Thakenham.
He felt like he was about to go round again in the whole circle of thought when Bonnie spoke for the first time in maybe an hour. Her voice was soft and sympathetic, as though she understood his confusion. “Argo?”
“Yes?”
“Are you okay?”
He took a deep breath and nodded. “I guess so.”
“I know I gave you a lot to chew on.”
“You certainly did.”
“You had to know sooner or later.”
“I’m not blaming you.”
“I know this is easier to say than do, but we’re going to have to cross open country soon, and you’re going to have to put all those thoughts to one side. You are going to have to be alert and ready for anything. You’re also going to have to do exactly as I tell you without question or argument.”
Now that Argo was looking at his surroundings rather than blindly taking his direction from Bonnie, he could see the change in light where the trees ended. For most of the morning they had been moving into an area of forest that seemed much less frequented by humans. The tracks and the pieces of debris had dwindled and vanished, and Bonnie seemed to be leading him into parts where not even the Mosul went, but open ground was another and more daunting matter. “Can we cross open country without being spotted?”
“We can follow hedgerows and use the natural lay of the land. We’ve got a good chance as long as we don’t skyline ourselves or do anything too obvious. Of course, if we run into a troop of cavalry, or anything really bad, we’re fucked, but, with foot patrols and the like, open country is kind of a two-edged sword. They may be able to spot us, but we can also see them coming a long way off.”
The two of them kept going until they reached the edge of the trees, and then they paused, crouching in the shadows and staring out across the rolling fields. After a couple of minutes, Argo once again looked to Bonnie for a lead. “You think it’s safe to make a move?”
“You see anything?”
Argo shook his head. “Not a damn thing.”
“Me, neither.”
“So?”
Bonnie stood up. “What the hell? We can’t stay here all day. There’s a fuck of a lot of country, and the even the Mosul don’t have unlimited manpower. All we can do is play the odds.” She pointed. “You see that hedgerow at the other end of this first field?”
Argo nodded. “I see it.”
“We’ll make for that, and then follow it for cover.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Just keep your eyes peeled and sing out if you see anything.”
Moving in the open after being so long in the woods felt strange and exposed. The sky was suddenly very large, and the sun seemed dangerously bright and hard on the eyes. Argo wondered if this was how forest creatures felt when they had to move across open ground. After walking for about fifteen minutes, all the while expecting a Mosul patrol to appear out of nowhere, they reached the comparative cover of the overgrown and untended hedgerow that, as Bonnie had predicted, grew on either side of a man-made ditch with a sluggish stream of muddy water in the bottom. “It looks like no one has tended these fields since the invasion.”
Bonnie nodded. “I think you’re right. It feels like the Mosul may have run off the cattle or whatever might have been here and then just left it. Does it feel deserted to you?”
Argo again looked around, but this time he also listened. “No smoke. No sounds. Not even a dog barking.”
She pulled a crumpled, hand-drawn map from her pocket and studied it. “I wish I had a proper, more detailed map, but according to my reckoning, if we keep going in this direction for a couple of hours, we should hit a stream, and then once we’ve crossed that, we’ll be back into woodland after only another mile or so.”
“And what then?”
“We’ll be back under cover, and Slide should have left some kind of sign for us.”
Argo frowned. “Sign? What kind of sign?”
“With Yancey, you never can tell, but we’ll know it when we see it.”
They started moving again. The sun was high and warm, and Argo slipped out of his jacket and slung it over his shoulder. The day was turning hot, one of those early autumn days that are a complete reprise of summer and could make one forget about the winter to come. He would almost have been able to enjoy the experience if it hadn’t been for the constant sense of danger, which was reinforced yet again after they had been following the overgrown ditch for maybe twenty minutes. They came upon a rusting steel plough and the skeleton of a dead mule half hidden in the long grass. The mule’s skull was pierced by a plainly visible bullet hole. Argo stared down at the remains and thought of all the farm folk who had vanished from around Thakenham. If he really was special, he had a responsibility to all of them. “It would seem that the Mosul were here a very long time ago.”
“So maybe we’re okay.”
“I wonder what happened to the farmer.” Argo spoke without thinking. He had failed to remember that Bonnie’s father had been one of the farmers from Thakenham who had died at the hands of the Mosul.
A look of iron-hard bitterness crossed her face. “They probably took him away to hang or burn him in front of his family. The bastards had a real talent for dragging honest men from their work and murdering them.”
Argo realized that he had stirred up a whole mess of bad memories, and felt like a bastard himself. Once again he didn’t know what to say, and the discomfort of silence again descended on them as they left the legacy of Mosul murder and continued on their way. To make matters worse, Bonnie paced ahead as though she didn’t want to look at him. As they walked, they still saw no sign of any human presence, although a considerable population of fat grey rabbits hopped and skittered for cover as they approached. Around Thakenham, the food shortages had caused all game to have long since been shot or trapped, and Argo took this abundance of wildlife as a further sign that the land across which they passed was devoid of people, hostile or otherwise. He would have mentioned this positive
observation to Bonnie, except that to speak right there and then, in the wake of his previous blurted stupidity, seemed like an intrusion. He could see that her shoulders were hunched, as though she was hugging a weight of pain to her chest, and it was not until they found the stream almost exactly where Bonnie had predicted it would be that her mood changed and the pall of horror lifted.
Argo was not totally certain that it was a stream at all. He was uncertain where the divide came between what was a stream and what was a small river. The merely snaky line on Bonnie’s rough map was a quick-flowing expanse of sparkling water that cut a deep gully between banks of sandy soil and exposed boulders and wound between tall overhanging trees and tangles of bulrushes and wild iris on the outside of curves where the flow was less strong. Bonnie found a spot where the bank was only a couple of feet high and sat down. She leaned forward, splashed water on her face, and then pulled two strips of beef jerky from her pocket. “You want one of these?”
Argo smiled, mainly from relief, although he was hungry and had been wondering for some time when someone was going to bring up the subject of food. “I certainly do.”
She handed him one, and he took it and bit off a chunk. “Thanks.”
Bonnie stood up and looked around. Still no indication of trouble presented itself. “How long is it since you took a bath?”
The question took Argo completely by surprise. “What?”
“I was wondering how long it’s been since clean water touched your body.”
Argo shrugged awkwardly. “I don’t know.”
“It’s got to be at least four or five days, though. Right?”
“I suppose so.”
Only a girl could see a stream and immediately think about bathing. She pointed to a tall oak with low branches stretching out over the stream. “Could you climb that?”
“Of course. Easy.”
“So shinny up it and see what you can see. If there’s nothing, you can keep watch while I get cleaned up, and then I’ll do the same for you.”
Argo dropped his coat, jacket, and bag, pulled his pistol, and swung himself into the lower branches of the tree, climbing until he reached a vantage point where leaves did not obscure his view and he could see all around. Bonnie called up to him. “Anything?”
“Not a damned thing.”
“Okay, then.”
Before Argo could even climb down, Bonnie was stripping off her clothes, dropping everything carelessly on the riverbank except for her knife and pistol, which she positioned with some care. Then she splashed out into the stream and let out a protracted gasp. “Oh, fuck.”
“Is it cold?”
“A little, but it feels so fucking good.”
At the midpoint, the water came up to her waist. Argo could only suppose that the depth was a result of the recent rains, although his mind was hardly engaged by the subject of the comparative depths of streams and rivers. Bonnie was only a few feet away, naked as a jaybird, splashing cold water on her full, firm breasts and apparently washing away the black cloud of memory that had descended on her after his tactless remark. He felt himself in the stiffening grip of excitement. He was, after all, only a teenager, who already knew how good sex can feel, with his first lover flaunting herself in front of him.
She squatted down so only her head showed above the surface and ducked under altogether, only to emerge a few seconds later, bubbling and gasping. “Damn!” She stood up, water streaming down her body, and when she raised both arms, elbows high, to push her wet hair out of her eyes, Argo all but groaned. Bonnie must have known the effect she was having on him, because she looked at him and laughed out loud. “You’re not watching out, you’re watching me.”
“I can’t help it.”
Bonnie was the wild and wilful teenager again, the one who treated everything like a great adventure. “Oh, shit. Come on in. There’s no one around. We can’t be afraid all the time.”
Argo marveled at how she could so precipitously shift her moods and personality, but he needed no second urging to dump all sense and responsibility and join her in the water. He stripped off his clothes as fast as he could, hopping on one leg as he fumbled to get his pants and boots off at the same time. Once naked, he jumped headlong into the water, sending up a wave of spray. The two of them sported together, gasping and giggling, grabbing each other and simultaneously splashing and frolicking like children, but also touching each other with the bold intimacy of recent sexual partners, delighting in the mindless sensation of their own heated bodies in the cold water. Bonnie slid an audacious, exploring hand between Argo’s legs. “My, my.”
“What?”
She put her mouth close to his ear. “You shrunk when you hit the water.”
“That’s what happens.”
“If you say so.”
Now she actually licked his ear. He could feel her nipples, hard from the cold, brush his arm. “So a little while in the sun will fix it?”
But as she said the word “sun,” a shadow fell over the water. Argo felt it more than saw it, and spun round, almost losing his footing on the rocks and pebbles of the streambed. A tall stranger stood on the bank where they had left their scattered clothes. His black shirt and pants were covered by a long canvas duster that hung open to reveal a matched pair of strange bone-handled, flat-sided pistols like no weapons Argo had ever seen before, one in a shoulder holster and a second at his hip. The hilt of a sword protruded from behind his left shoulder, suspended from a shoulder strap, in easy reach of the stranger’s right hand. It looked oriental to Argo, although he knew nothing about swords from the Far East. As the figure stared down at the naked couple, the thumbs of his gloved hands were hooked in the tooled leather of his gun belt, but his face was hidden by the broad, turned-down brim of his black hat. His very presence seemed to chill the air. From his position of disadvantage, all Argo could see was that the man smoked a thin cheroot, gripped in his teeth and jutting from the corner of his mouth. His invisible eyes looked Argo and Bonnie up and down as though he could see clear through to their hearts and minds, and then he slowly took the cheroot from his mouth and spat out flecks of tobacco before speaking in voice that sounded as though it came from the grave. “You should have both continued to be afraid. Now the two of you are quite dead. You know that, don’t you?”
THREE
CORDELIA
The city was laid out beneath her like an intricate and fascinating model. The castle alone was a wonderment with its tiny towers and battlements and the green of the pygmy trees in the central courtyard. All round the structure, little matchbox vehicles moved along miniature streets, and the sun shimmered on the water of a scaled-down river. The airship, simply known as the NU98, had taken off from the army field at Grover’s Mill, some forty minutes by fast automobile north of the city, near where the Taconic and Mohawk rivers had their confluence, and when it passed over Albany, enough time had elapsed for it to gain some considerable altitude before it reached the center of the capital. Phelan stood behind Cordelia as she peered delightedly out of the smooth mica windows that ran in a narrow strip along each side of the gondola, and it was not until the city had fallen away astern, and the NU98 was moving down the valley of the Taconic, that she looked back at him and spoke for the first time. Cordelia’s voice, in the normal run of her life, rarely took on a tone of awe, but it did now, and she was not ashamed for Phelan to hear it. “You love this, don’t you?”
He nodded, his face grave. “Yes, I do. I really love it. It’s such a shame that it took the threat of war to put us in the air. Man has always dreamed of flying, but it’s only come to pass because we want to use it as yet another means for killing each other.”
“That’s a strange statement for a military man.”
“I’m not a military man, I’m a flier.”
“But you wear the uniform.”
“I have to. There’s no other way that I’d be able to fly.”
“But you’d be willing to drop bombs on the enemy, i
f that’s what it took.”
“I didn’t say I was a pacifist. I know the Mosul have to be stopped. I am quite prepared to drop bombs on their armies, or even on their cities and factories, should it come to that. It’s just that, having felt the freedom of the skies, I regret that our first ventures in air have to be acts of destruction.”
Cordelia was seeing an entire other side to Phelan that she had previously not suspected, and she felt somehow touched. She had previously judged him to be a stiffly correct but probably somewhat shallow young officer. He did his job, and, off duty, might be a transitory source of fun, but, up to that point, she had considered him totally lacking in any real emotional depth. Apparently this was not the case when it came to riding the silver, cigar-shaped airship into the blue. Among the towering cloudscapes, he had at least a part of the soul of a poet. She suddenly wanted to make love to Phelan Mallory right there in the gondola of the NU98, in his territory, high above the earth. For all she knew, it might have been the first time such a thing had ever been attempted, except she could see that it was totally impossible in the current context. The gondola was nothing more that a single long cabin constructed from wood and aluminum, approximately rectangular, but tapering to a point at each end like the bow of a ship to minimize wind resistance, and a full crew was aboard: a steersman, a navigator, an engineer, a radio operator, plus a bombardier and two gunners who were little more than passengers like Cordelia, since, on this short excursion to Manhattan, the NU98 carried neither mounted guns nor explosives. The only part of the gondola where a couple might find a certain degree of privacy was the small chemical toilet in the rear, and, if she and Phelan went in there together, the other men would be well aware exactly what they were up to. She knew that Phelan was far too upright to indulge in any such extreme outrageousness while his men grinned and nudged each other, no matter what delights she might offer him or what appeals she might make to his sense of erotic history. It was a shame, but she could do nothing, so she turned and again stared out of the window as the airship proceeded on down the Taconic Valley, with the Catskill Mountains on one side and Heights of Hudson on the other. She had to be content with watching the way that the flying machine cast its elongated, early-afternoon shadow across the tops of the trees and the open fields as it passed over them.