by Mick Farren
Raphael could see no way in which the scene on the other side of the river could be related to high-flown ideas like honor and chivalry. Maybe Dunbar knew better, but Raphael had learned enough in the ranks to believe that such things were delusions of officer vanity. Melchior, maybe marching with the Mosul army but more likely dead, had never talked of honor and chivalry. Raphael could see no way in which they could apply honor and chivalry to the walking wounded who still stumbled, lost and probably demented, in among the ruins and the stinking dead. Or the prisoners with their Albany guards, who were excavating the long trenches that would be the mass graves, or the Virginian scavengers who searched through the wreckage of battle for small valuables, hardly bothering the ghoulishly well-fed buzzards and ravens. A single Dark Thing flopped a few times, then flagged and deflated. The corner of Raphael’s mind twitched. The Other Place was still there. A victory had been won, but not the war, and sooner or later they would need him to go back there. Slide must have noticed his instant of revulsion, because he put a hand on Raphael’s shoulder and started to steer him away from Dunbar. The field marshal noticed the move and smiled wryly. “That’s right, Yancey. Take the boy away. Let the old soldier ruminate in peace on the changing times. They tell me the king is coming, and the boy needs to be ready. I hear he and his companions are to be decorated.”
Directly they were out of earshot, Raphael glanced at Slide. “After all that’s happened, he still calls me ‘boy’?”
Slide smiled. “When you’ve been around as long as Dunbar, you call almost everyone ‘boy.’”
Overhead, another rocket bomb climbed noisily to heavens in order to fall silent and then drop on the decamping Mosul.
JESAMINE
“So how are you feeling, Argo Weaver?”
Argo’s voice was weak, and, although he struggled to sit up, he failed to manage it without Jesamine’s help. He grinned lopsidedly as she plumped the field hospital pillows and tucked them more firmly behind his head. “I’m alive, but I’m not sure that’s the good news.”
“You’re missing all the celebrations, boy. They say the temple bells in Albany have been ringing for four days nonstop, and no one in the city has drawn a sober breath in as long.”
“I think the bells in my head have been ringing for about the same period.”
“What do you expect? You were unconscious for two whole days.”
She poured him a glass of apple juice from a jug that stood on the locker beside the bed. “Here, drink this. It’ll make you feel better.”
Argo took the class but only sniffed it. “The nurses keep telling me how it’ll do me good. I’m getting to hate the goddamned smell of apple juice.”
“You must be on the mend. You’re starting to curse and complain.”
Argo sighed. “Maybe it’s like you said. I’m missing all the celebrations.”
The field hospital had been set up in a schoolhouse a quarter of a mile or so from the manor and the railhead that had been specifically converted for the purpose. Argo shared a ward in what had once been a schoolroom with nine other officers. The room still sported a blackboard on one wall, on which the more ambulatory patients scrawled lewd comments on the supposed sexual proclivities of the better-looking nurses. Each bed was surrounded by optional screens, which, right then, were drawn shut to give Argo and Jesamine at least an illusion of privacy, although when Jesamine had drawn the screens soon after she had arrived for her visit with the fallen, it had drawn a good deal of shouted ribaldry from the other officers, which she found herself thoroughly enjoying. To be desired and courted was refreshing after a lifetime of enforced availability.
“If you reach inside the bottom of the locker, you’ll find a little additive for this apple juice.”
Slightly surprised, Jesamine did as instructed, and, just as Argo had predicted, she found a glass fruit jar behind a small pile of books. “’Shine? You’re laying in a hospital bed crocked on ’shine?”
Argo poured a stiff shot into his apple juice. “Makes it easier.”
“How do you expect to get better if you’re swilling that rotgut?”
“I took a hit to the brain, not a bullet in the chest. Besides, I’m still sleeping most of the time.”
Jesamine still thought it sounded like craziness, and shook her head. “Where do you get the stuff anyway?”
Argo laughed. “You think a field hospital doesn’t have its fixers and its black market? You ought to see what some of these boys get hold of.”
“I don’t want to think about it.”
Argo proffered the fruit jar. “You want a belt, partner?”
Partner? Was that what they were? Since the battle in the tunnel there had been no chance to talk with Argo about what had gone before. She glanced round like she thought a nurse might come in and catch them drinking, but then shrugged. Argo certainly seemed stronger and more animated than when she had first walked in, as though laughter and companionship were actually speeding his recovery. “Ah, what the hell. Why not? We’re heroes, aren’t we?”
Argo winked. “So I hear.”
As Jesamine mixed herself a moonshine and apple juice, she noticed Argo looking her up and down. He was definitely on the mend from his hit to the brain. Caught, he smiled sheepishly. “I like the uniform.” Jesamine smiled and posed. “They made me an honorary captain in the RWA. Can you imagine that? Concubine girl is now an officer and lady.”
“Does that mean you outrank Cordelia?”
Jesamine shook her head. “Cordelia was made a captain, too. In fact, she found a way to get a dressmaker to come down from Baltimore and fix up our uniforms just right.”
Jesamine turned, displaying the quality of the tailoring, and Argo nodded. “It shows you off very nicely.”
Cordelia laughed. “It shows off my ass is what it does.”
Argo patted the bed. “Come and sit beside me.”
“I’m not sure I can sit in this skirt.”
“You’ll find a way.”
Jesamine perched on the edge of the bed and crossed her legs. Again she was conscious of Argo watching her moves. On the other hand, he was still very pale, and Jesamine hoped he was not putting on an act for her benefit. Jesamine was very fond of Argo Weaver, she had decided. More important than that, though, she trusted him. He was solid, and she felt a kinship with that solidity. She and Argo were the solid central axis of the Four, the midpoint between Cordelia’s flamboyant and intuitive showboating and Raphael’s concerned caution. “Seriously, Argo. Are you okay? I mean for real?”
Argo sighed and slowly nodded. He reached out a slow hand and rested it reassuringly on her knee. “I’m fine. I mean, I nearly burned out back there, but the strength is coming back. Right now I feel a hundred percent better for seeing you.”
“Do you want to talk about what happened back there in the tunnel?”
“When that thing from hell fell on me?”
“When that thing from hell fell on you.”
Argo looked away. “No.”
“No because you don’t want to remember, or no because you’re not ready?”
Argo closed his eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it because I don’t even have the words to describe it.” He abruptly opened them again. “We still know next to damn all nothing about the Other Place, Jesamine. We have to invent an entire new language to so much as talk about it.”
“I know that.”
“In fact, even though we’ve been through so much, we know damn all nothing about each other.”
She was suddenly very aware that Argo’s hand was still resting on her leg, pale white over honey gold. She covered it with her own. “We have a great deal to learn on both counts.”
Argo gently stroked her leg. “You think it would be wrong…”
Jesamine shook her head. “No.”
“… to indulge in a little mutual education?”
Jesamine leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. “I already told you. No, I don’t think it wou
ld be wrong. It might even be therapeutic for both of us.”
She straightened up and unbuttoned her tunic. She found herself charmed and amused by the way in which Argo’s eyes widened. The white silk slip that Cordelia had given her scarcely hid her breasts. “Do you really think you’re strong enough for the excitement I have in mind?”
Argo smiled a smile that was openly indecent. “Just be gentle with me, captain.”
“I’m still concubine girl, baby. Only now I’m the one who decides who tastes the sweeties.”
CORDELIA
Over the past two days, mountain men and partisans had begun mixing with the uniformed officers in the command tents as they came in from a fight on another front that neither Cordelia nor any of the Four had even known about. As it had been explained to her, on the second day of the assault, a Mosul flanking force of cavalry, infantry, and a dozen battle tanks had moved west, along the south side of the river, far enough inland to be concealed from Albany scouts. The plan had been for them to move some ten miles upriver, where the Potomac was comparatively narrow, with thick forest on either side, and way beyond the concentration of Albany defenses. The Mosul force was to make a crossing, advertising the fact as little as possible, and then circle back to attack the defenders from the rear. Fortunately, Dunbar and Kennedy had anticipated exactly such a tactic well in advance. The woods had been mined, pits dug on all the logical trails, and a force held in reserve ready to meet the Mosul before they even made it across the river. Unable to spare regulars from the main Potomac wall, the units to counter any flanking attack were specially recruited mountain men and partisans, companies of irregulars who had moved in from the Blue Ridge, the Shenandoah Valley, and the Appalachians, reinforced with Rangers and a large war band from the Montreal Nations led by Naxat himself. The force had been small in number but big on firepower and deadly ingenuity, and with the Mosul cavalry hemmed in by trees and undergrowth, and the fighting machines “about as useful as tits on a bull in that country,” as one grizzled hillbilly had put it, the enemy had been turned and sent back downriver in time for the rocket bomb attack and to join the general rout as bearers of more bad news.
Cordelia had heard that, in the city of Albany, they were dancing in the streets, but here at the front, in the big tents that housed the mess and the map room, the atmosphere was more one of concern. Albany had saved itself, but in so doing had also sustained a terrible beating. The natural inclination of everyone present, from Dunbar on down to the Rangers guarding the entrance to the tents, was to go after the retreating Mosul horde and complete the process of destruction, exacting a terrible retribution for the Mosul’s two centuries of fire and conquest. Even Cordelia knew, however, that this was simply not possible. Even after their bloody losses beside the Potomac, the Mosul still had an enormous army that could be augmented at any time with the dozens of town garrisons that were spread strategically across the countryside of Virginia and the Carolinas. Albany had thrown everything it had into holding the line at the river and, in the holding, had close to exhausted itself.
The general prediction, as reflected by the small blocks and flags on the big map table, was that the Mosul would pull back, probably no farther than Richmond, and laboriously regroup. Winter was mercifully on its way, and the Mosul did not operate well in the cold. If their supply lines could be disrupted, they could be kept freezing and hungry in occupied territory where food was already scarce. The civilians in Virginia would be starving, too, but such was the price of war. Already stories were coming in of uprisings in occupied Virginia, and also of terrible reprisals when those uprisings failed. Against such a background of disruption and unrest, Hassan would be slow to regather his strength, and if the main Mosul concentrations could be harried by hit-and-run raids and weakened by aerial rocket attacks, no action would be needed until the spring. In the spring, though, Albany would have to ride out on the offensive. They would have to cross the river and take the fight south to the enemy.
As far as Cordelia was concerned, spring was a long way away, and right there and then all manner of strange and exotic allies were moving into the weary but victorious Albany camp, and as a captain with no designated duties, and also a bona-fide heroine of the Battle of the Potomac, Cordelia was able to see and mingle with them in all their unkempt glory. Cordelia rather enjoyed being a heroine. She had no idea how long it was going to last, and she had resolved to make the most of it while she could. She was aware that stories were already circulating of how she, of all the Four, was the risk-taking daredevil, and she had privately begun to think of herself as Captain the Lady Cordelia Blakeney, Girl Ace of the Other Place. To make her joy of self-importance and celebrity complete, she had been told in confidence by a major on Dunbar’s staff that the king, who was already in Baltimore and on his way to the front, would be decorating, her, Argo, Jesamine, and Raphael. Seemingly they were to receive the Golden Order of the Bear, and she rather fancied herself as a GOB. The medal was gold, with a very elegant purple-and-gold-striped ribbon, and she knew it would look just fabulous on her new captain’s uniform. By an extremely deft combination of flattery, bribery, and deceit, she had caused a dressmaker to be spirited down from Baltimore to create a selection of uniforms and battledress for her and Jesamine. The designs had been entirely Cordelia’s. Jesamine really did not have a clue beyond sheer veils and ankle bracelets. She had totally thrown away the RWA dress code to the point of styling the tunics of both the ceremonial and formal wear in the sharp, wide-lapeled style of the Rangers. That was what Argo and Raphael were wearing, and the Four should at least resemble each other. Especially when they came before the king.
Cordelia was well aware that she was using frivolity as a retreat of her own. It provided a refuge from thinking too much about all that had happened to her since she had boarded the NU98 for a day trip to Manhattan. During the fight in the tunnel, she had surprised and more than marginally frightened herself. She had never suspected she was possessed of such a wild and exulting ferocity, or that she was capable of enjoying the tactile feel of victory with such unseemly wantonness. Previously such teeth-grinding gratification had been reserved for the bedroom (and the backseats of some High Command staff cars), and she could not help but wonder if the exuberant delight she had enjoyed, since the dawn of puberty, in copulation and all of its possible refinements was maybe just a sublimating outlet for the warrior rage she was now discovering in herself. After much private reflection, she concluded that this was not the case. The joy of sex and the joy of destruction were two completely different emotions. Maybe linked, intertwined, and far from separate, but originally coming from two different places in the new and previously undiscovered depths of her psyche. The clincher in this internal argument was that, since the fight in the tunnel, she had walked around in an overheated condition of nearly constant desire. If sex was merely a substitute for the thrill of the kill in the Other Place, surely she should have been in a state of high satiation, and that was certainly not the case.
And, the Goddess only knew, more than enough objects of desire were crowding the Albany camp by the Potomac now the battle had been won, and Cordelia found herself one of the very few women amid a plethora, and seemingly infinite variety, of men, although she had heard that girls from the small sector of newly liberated Virginia were coming over the river by the boatload. Cordelia only had to look around the map tent to observe a cross section of the Albany male and his allies. Gentleman adventurers and tattooed Montreals rubbed shoulders with hussars from good families and bearded frontiersman from the interior, throwbacks to berserker Viking ancestry, with maybe the genes of a grizzly bear added to the pool some cold night. Not only was the selection of men exciting and varied, but it was spiced by the presence of an almost unbelievable selection of living legends. In addition to Yancey Slide, who, despite a growing familiarity, still caused strange things to move deep inside Cordelia, strange, unnatural stirrings that left her undecided as to whether they were nice or unplea
sant, names from legend seemed to be all over the command post and the officers’ mess. Bearclaw Manson was still around, having remained to see the outcome of the battle instead of vanishing back into the unknown. Cordelia knew Manson by sight, just as she knew Naxat and Chanchootok. With others, she needed names to be put to the hard, scarred, and weather-beaten faces. Members of English John’s gang had been pointed out to her, although English John himself had refused to set foot in Albany until Carlyle II granted him a pardon for an alleged piracy and kidnaping from some ten years earlier. The Presley Brothers had been identified for her, along with Tommy McTurk, the absurdly overdressed Cassius Marcellus and his highlanders, and the Grisham boys, with their ivory-handled pistols and blue sunglasses.
Cordelia found herself basking in the admiration of leaders, heroes, and household names. She had been propositioned by the mighty and ogled by backwoods pathfinders in furs and buckskins, men who refused to be separated from their long rifles and looked like they had neither bathed nor seen a woman in at least six months. To a man, they had all been too close to death and needed her gift of life, and she entertained them all in her fleeting fantasies, imagining herself being wined, dined, and creatively debauched in a general’s private railcar or having a reeking, bearded hulk bending her forward over the barrel of a cannon while she kicked and cursed and he rammed her like a beast from behind under a starlit sky with rocket bombs screaming overhead and bursting in the distance. The only blemish on this perfect world of temptation and attention was that Cordelia could not quite bring herself to succumb. At the most crucial of moments, she hesitated or made her excuses. The last time she had engaged in sex had been in consummation of the Four, and the return to it being for nothing more elevated than her own chills and thrills of idle excitement was a step that daunted her. She did not believe that the Four were locked in any kind of quadrilateral marriage. They had not gone into combat in the Other Place forsaking all others. She also did not think the bonds that secured the commonality of the Four would be shattered by any healthy knickers-ripped howling in a railcar or over a hard iron cannon barrel. But somehow Cordelia still hesitated.