by Mick Farren
Slide took the perpetual cheroot out of his mouth. “What are you saying, boy? You’re eager to get in to your first fight? You think you’re ready to mix it up?”
The mockery was back in Slide’s voice, and Argo didn’t like it. “I know I can’t keep up with the Rangers, but I’d sure like to be able to defend myself.”
Slide conceded that Argo had a point. “You’re right, Argo Weaver. That G and J Bolton cuckold’s special in your belt is going to be worse than useless in a firefight.” He turned, but the Rangers were already forming up to move out. “Nothing can be done about arming you right now, but as soon as we get a pause, we’ll have you checked out on a shotgun or a carbine, so you at least have a fighting chance. In the meantime, let’s move. For a while, at least, you will have to keep up with Rangers.”
The Rangers set a tough pace, and after the first hour of tramping through the rain, Argo began to suspect that what set the Rangers apart from other men, even other soldiers, was not their valor or their training but their infinite tolerance for discomfort and tedium, hunger and lack of sleep. Ever since he had run away from Thakenham, Argo had been going without food for long periods and also not finding all that much time to sleep. Although the Rangers had fed him, the news of the airship crash had come just as he was hoping to close his eyes. The merry-go-round had started up again, and now he found himself soaked to the skin and part of a forced march into an immediate future that was shaping up to be both desperate and dangerous. On the other hand, he in no way mourned the passing of his previous life. Indeed, Thakenham and its people, with their fear and poverty and their passive acceptance of Mosul brutality, seemed like a million miles and a thousand years away. Argo could no longer see himself in that context. A part of him might want to fall out of the line and curl up at the base of the nearest comforting tree, but he entertained no desire to go back to his old life. In fact, despite being wet, cold, and weary, he was also quite pleased with himself. In less than a week, he had made good his escape, and, admittedly more by luck than judgment, he had penetrated to the very heart of the fight against the Mosul in occupied territory. Bonnie had taken his highly unwanted virginity, and he now appeared to be under the protection of no less a being than Yancey Slide, who, if all was to be believed, held high-powered telepathic conferences with the elevated of Albany. Could he in any way have done better? The idea of being one of the mysterious Four was extremely daunting, but even that extended the promise of more curious and exotic adventures to come.
As Argo fought off tiredness and forced his aching legs to keep moving, he covertly observed how the Rangers were holding up. They marched with an easy rhythm that looked set to carry them to the end of the earth if need be, but their faces were strangely blank, as though locked in their own thoughts. Argo’s best guess was that they had the knack of retreating into their own minds and distancing themselves from the external discomforts of the grueling march. Argo tried to do the same. Certainly he had plenty to occupy his mind when he felt himself flagging. For instance, right at that moment, he could ponder how Yancey Slide was able to move through the heavy autumn downpour without getting wet. Argo had first noticed this anomaly about twenty minutes into the march, but the darkness had made it hard to be absolutely certain. As the rain eased down to a drizzle, though, and as the first grey of dawn began to show in the eastern sky, he could see quite clearly that Slide had been walking in the rain for hours, and not so much as his cigar was damp. He seemed to have placed an invisible barrier between himself and the weather at a discreet, half-inch distance from the fabric of his clothes, the tips of his gloved fingers, and the low crown of his wide-brimmed hat. All that gave him away was a faint halo shimmer where the droplets of precipitation evaporated to nothing when they touched the magickal shield. That Slide could manage to keep the rain off him with such seeming lack of effort was more than enough to push Argo over the edge into fully believing that Yancey Slide was a demon or some kindred entity not of his world.
RAPHAEL
After standing in the rain for some forty-five minutes waiting for an officer to show up, the arrival of three infantry majors in a captured Army of Virginia steam car had transformed the idle ranks of wet and gloomy replacements into a hive of shouting activity. Underofficers had removed the screws from the boxes of rifles on which the recruits had sat for the duration of their journey up from Savannah, and each man was being armed for the first time since he had set foot in the Americas. Normally this issuing of weapons would not have taken place until they had arrived at the front and been assigned billets on the line. The Mosul did not trust their Provincial Levies with weapons while they were still on the way to the front, but the crash of the airship constituted a recognized emergency, and the replacements needed to be armed so they could be drafted into the search for wreckage and survivors. The fear of an uprising or mass armed desertion was outweighed by the need of the moment. When the lids of the boxes had been removed, they saw that they were being given breechloaders and not the hated muskets. Maybe not the brand new Krupps for which they had hoped, but at least reconditioned Teuton cartridge-and-ball guns. Time was when the squad had worried that they were not going to be given guns at all, and to see them was a relief in itself since it constituted at least a tentative promise that they were not going to be directly assigned to human-wave charges and unarmed suicide squads whose only function was to use up enemy ammunition. The breechloaders were not, however, going to be given to them without a ration of Melchior’s gallows humor. “Each man kiss the Twins before he gets his weapon.”
Melchior expected each man to kiss the tin dog-tag on the chain around his neck, on which was stamped his name and serial number, and that also carried the image of the Twin Deities Ignir and Aksura. These had been issued at the very start of basic training along with the first cotton uniform and the Yasma. The recruits were supposed to wear the tokens until death.
“Kiss the Twins before you touch the bamsticks, lads, for these are dead men’s guns you’re taking, my boys, scavenged bamsticks gathered from the battlefields where the fallen no longer needed them and reconditioned for your replacement use of. So each man kiss the Twins before he gets his weapon.”
Melchior grinned as each man took his rifle with extreme caution and a few hesitated superstitiously before grasping the stock or barrel. Raphael could see more method in the underofficer’s madness. The squad was treating the weapons very carefully. The idea had been planted in the conscripts’ minds that their rifle was a sacred object and not to be misused or mislaid. The ammunition was handed out with less ghoulish ceremony but more urgent instruction. “Live rounds, ten per man. I don’t say make every shot count, but, if called on to open fire, at least attempt to frighten the enemy, and, above all, don’t load before ordered. You all hear me? If I catch one of you silly bastards with one up the spout before you’re told, it’s a formal flogging. You all got that?”
With what Raphael was learning to recognize as the stop-start irrationality of large armies, all the fuss and panic with which the rifles were issued and ammunition dispensed suddenly dwindled to nothing. The underofficers had done what was required of them. They had armed the men and revved them up to go hunting these on-the-run Norse fliers, but now they were forced to idle and wait while orders were debated. He could see why, according to Melchior’s cumulative utterances, underofficers considered themselves the superiors of all commissioned officers up to at least the rank of colonel. The three infantry majors, as far as Raphael could read their body language from a distance, could not agree on the best way to implement the search and had apparently been given no detailed orders. A waft of their conversation had been enough to let slip the information that some Teuton colonel of engineers was on his way with men of his own, but he might not show for an hour or more. In the meantime, the three majors seemed more afraid of committing to a course of action with which the colonel might find fault than allowing any survivors of the crash to escape. The underofficers from t
he various transports waited together in a separate group, showing their contempt for the majors’ indecision as openly as they dared.
Eventually the pressure to do something outweighed the fear of doing the wrong thing and orders were given. The men from the trucks would advance into the woods in separate squads, but once they were in the trees they would fan out into a long, single skirmish line and sweep through the forest in the direction of the crash site, deployed to search and capture. Once the majors had given the word, the underofficers hurried back to their respective trucks to put the plan in motion. Melchior was already shouting to his squad when he was still ten paces away from them. “Form up, lads, single file, rifles slung and unloaded. This is it. Your first taste of action, and since you outnumber the enemy at least twenty to one, it’s a nice, easy walk in the woods, if you can manage not to be shooting each other.”
CORDELIA
They were caught completely without warning. The rain had fallen away to little more than a drizzle, and the first streaks of dawn were showing somewhere to the east over the unseen ocean. The trees around them were tall pines, and to be in among them was like being inside a pungent, resin-scented cathedral where the thick trunks rose like supporting pillars as far as the eye could see and the overhead canopy was sufficiently dense and high to prevent extensive undergrowth. Visibility was better, and they hadn’t seen hair nor hide of the Mosul for maybe an hour. Cordelia was starting to believe that the worst was over for them, and that they were on their own in this stretch of woodland, but then the flash had come, the puff of smoke, the first report, and a musket ball had slammed into a nearby tree trunk, smashing bark with a blood-chilling crack. The second and third shots flashed, and then the firing grew into a ragged volley. Somehow the Mosul had anticipated the route they would take and had managed to position themselves so they were already lying in wait for the survivors from the NU98.
A high hissing sound filled the air, so close to Cordelia that she knew it was the passing of angry, fatal slugs of lead and copper. The men were reaching for their pistols. Coburn had his carbine up and was firing into the billow of smoke that marked the Mosul position, pumping the ejector of his gun after each shot and screaming abuse as he fired. “Fuck you, you bastards! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Meanwhile, Phelan was attempting to shout over him. “Everyone down! Take cover! Get down!”
Cordelia needed no such order. When the first shot was fired, she dropped instantly to the ground and then wormed her way to the shelter of a nearby tree trunk. Only then did she draw her borrowed revolver and wonder what to do with it. Cordelia had not realized that combat would be quite so fast and so highly chaotic. She had fondly imagined there might be a form of foreplay during which the participants might brace themselves and decide a course of action. Maybe that was how it was during formal battles, but in the woods and on the run, the firefight had blazed out of nowhere, without preamble or warning. Everyone, including Phelan, had dived or slid into some kind of cover, but Coburn, clearly furious at what was being done to them then, and all that had gone before, including the destruction of his beautiful airship, was still on his feet and firing. Phelan shouted to the engineer. “Get down, man! Hold your fire! You’re just wasting ammunition.”
Like most warnings in the field, it came moments too late. Coburn spun round, his gun flying from his hands and flecks of blood spraying from the right side of his chest. He dropped to his knees, crying disbelievingly in a voice of surprise and shock. “Oh shit, oh shit! They’ve killed me!”
The second bullet hit him in the back and pitched him forward. Seck made a dive to try and pull Coburn into cover but had to duck back when bullets kicked up pine needles all around him. Phelan was shouting again. “Leave him, man! He’s dead, goddamn it.”
Around the moment that Coburn was shot, Cordelia realized to her horror that these Norse aviators had never been in an actual firefight before. They were as much novices in the realm of flying bullets as she was. They had maybe trained for such a contingency but had never confronted the real thing. They might even have been through a crash landing before, but they were complete neophytes when it came to ground combat. They were all blazing away at where they believed the Mosul positions might be, except for Hodding, who was already reloading, Cordelia herself, who was not prepared to so much as raise her head, and Phelan, who was still trying to get his men under control. “Hold your fire. Hold your damned fire. There’s nothing to shoot at. Wait until the bastards show themselves.”
When the fliers stopped shooting, so did the Mosul, as though one of their officers had given the same angry order as Phelan. In the quiet after the gunshots, Cordelia heard the whinny of an unhappy horse. The idea of a horse took her quite by surprise. She had imagined they were facing a detachment of foot soldiers. Cavalry had not occurred to her, although it made perfect sense. A troop of cavalry could have moved fast through the woods to cut off the survivors’ retreat if the Mosul were truly determined to take them. At that point, a chill gripped Cordelia’s stomach. In the context of the Mosul, if you said “cavalry,” the next word was automatically “Mamaluke,” and, all through her childhood and school days, the Mamalukes had been the subject of an entire canon of gruesome horror tales. At first it had been nursery screams at fables of how the Mamalukes drank blood and ate babies, and later it was the dormitory tales, told after lights out, breathless schoolgirl whispers of multiple rape, foreign objects, and brutal perversions, with the bound, stripped, and helpless victim murdered afterwards unless she was extremely attractive, and then she might find herself carried off to be used and debased in endless sexual slavery. The standard advice to the woman confronted by Mamalukes was always to save the last round in her pistol for herself. Cordelia suddenly found herself having trouble with her grip on reality. She had managed to accept the storm and the crash of the airship. The escape through the woods had been unpleasant, but that, too, was simply another part of the adventure, and everything would be alright in the end. The deaths of the two crewmen had given her pause, but she had still been alive and could continue to hope. At the prospect of Mamalukes, something inside her went into violent denial. This could not be happening to her. It was not written in the Lady Cordelia Blakeney’s destiny that she should save the bullet for herself. She was special, she was exceptional, and she was definitely not the kind to be raped, sodomized, and murdered by Mamalukes. Surely even a Mamaluke would recognize that she was too much of a prize to be killed and cast aside. Yet how would they know? She was soaked and muddy, and her clothes were torn. Right then she was a prize in filthy disguise who could easily be overlooked.
Cordelia was so shocked to catch herself considering playing the whore to save her own skin that she spoke out loud to herself. “Are there no limits to how much of a slut you’ll become if it means your miserable survival? Does honor mean nothing?” She thought about this and decided, when considering the alternatives, it did not mean that much. “Honor is for the living, so what’s so damned dishonorable about staying alive?”
“What did you say?” Phelan was close enough to have heard her speak.
Cordelia didn’t even have to think of something plausible to tell Phelan. “Did you hear that horse?”
Phelan nodded. “Yeah. What do you think about it?”
“That could be dismounted cavalry in front of us.”
“Or just a mounted officer and a squad of infantry.”
Cordelia liked the sound of the last statement. It greatly diminished the chances of Mamalukes. “You think so?”
Phelan tried to be reassuring. “I only heard one horse.”
Further discussion was cut short by a voice from the Mosul positions, amplified by a megaphone of some kind. “Airmen of the Norse Union, your resistance is pointless. You are outnumbered, and the imperial forces of Hassan IX are positioned both in front and behind you. You cannot escape.”
Cordelia quickly glanced back the way that they had come. She could see no sign of Mosul
behind them, where they had just walked through unscathed. Earlier, in the dark and rain, shortly after they had left the immediate area of the crash, Mosul had been everywhere. At Phelan’s command, they had all lain prone in the wet leaves while lines of searching Mosul swept the forest. Some passed only a few yards from them, so close that Cordelia had managed to make out one or two faces. The soldiers hunting them looked like raw recruits, holding weapons that were still awkward in their hands and moving so nervously that they could clearly spook at their own shadows. The fugitives had crawled and couched and held their breath, protected by the noise of the downpour and the poor visibility, until the enemy all seemed to be behind them. From that point on they had not seen hide nor hair of their foes and were starting to believe they would have no more trouble until they reached the river and had to negotiate the Mosul lines in order cross into friendly territory. It was only then, with their vigilance somewhat relaxed, that they had walked into the ambush.
Cordelia hissed to get Phelan’s attention. “I think he’s lying.”
“What?”
“I think the Mosul with the megaphone is lying. I don’t believe there are more of them behind us.”
“What are you saying?”
Cordelia decided it was time to take charge. “I think if we pumped all the fire we could into them, and then ran back the way we came, we might be able to give them the slip in the confusion.”
The Mosul with the megaphone tried a fresh approach. “Airmen of the Norse Union, you have no reason to fear us. Once we are assured that your incursion into our sovereign territory was accidental, we will return you unharmed to your own people. The Norse Union and the empire of Hassan IX are not at war.”
Phelan looked towards Cordelia. “Do you believe him?”
“I don’t have to believe him. I’m from Albany, and I am definitely at war with the empire of Hassan IX.”