The King's War

by Andrew Stanek

  “Let the soldiers forage for their own food!” one man shouted.

  “They have been doing,” Harry grunted from next to Will, though of course no one heard him.

  Ms. Diane endured this barrage for a few moments and made frantic motions for calm.

  “I cannot force you to do this,” she reassured them. “But if you would like to give up part of your food, on a strictly voluntary basis-” she placed extra emphasis on the last three words “-then I’m sure the Colonel and the regiment would appreciate it. The army is starving too. We all have to continue to sacrifice for the sake of the King’s War.”

  By the end of the meeting, people had stopped shouting, but many were still muttering darkly at what they thought about the idea of giving up part of their food to the military.

  “So it’s come to foraging,” Martin said with a sigh as he rose from his seat. He was one of the few people who wasn’t starving, but he didn’t look any happier than the rest. “I guess I knew we’d get here eventually, but it doesn’t feel good to have hit bottom. What do you two think?”

  “It’s a way to get food,” Harry grunted as he flipped through the pages of the booklet, pausing at a picture of a goose. “People need food.”

  “I know that,” Martin shot back. “I meant about the soldiers.”

  “Soldiers need food too.”

  Martin emitted a heavy sigh. “They should have sent you to the capital instead of Will, Harry. You could have become a philosopher.”

  Harry shrugged.

  “I wonder if Nate’s doing alright,” Martin continued. “He said he was going to transfer to the naval base but I haven’t heard a word from him. Have you?”

  Will shook his head and squinted up at the sky. “Nope. I haven’t heard from him. I don’t think the military’s in good shape. They haven’t been conducting many flights recently.”

  As they exited the town hall, Will stopped in front of the canteen. The soldier leaning against the back of the military truck was there.

  He saw Will staring.

  “You need something, friend?” He called. “Tools, fuel, spare parts. Army surplus. Cheap. I got food, too, if you need food.”

  Will approached him. “You always say army surplus, but you’re in the navy, aren’t you? Your truck’s in navy colors and you’re wearing a navy uniform.”

  The man shrugged. “Yeah, so, what’s it to you?”

  “We don’t see as many sailors around here. You getting your rations in the navy?”

  “Yeah, we’re doing alright,” he said, squinting at Will. “There’s fish out in the deep water and we can go catch them. No one else can do that.”

  “Why can’t we go fish?” Martin said from behind Will.

  The soldier gave Martin a strange look. “Fishing’s banned for civilians, friend. Those waters are mined.” He jerked his thumb towards the coast. “There are rebel gunboats out there too. Our ironclads and dreadnoughts can’t come running every time some idiot in a fishing trawler bumps into the Black Force.”

  Martin couldn’t seem to think of anything to say to this and fell silent.

  “Do you know a guy named Nate Larson?” Will asked. “He’s a friend of ours - he comes from this village.”

  “Yeah, I know him,” the soldier said with a shrug. “He transferred in a few months ago. What about him?”

  “He doing okay?”

  “Yeah, he’s fine. He was in a support regiment before this so they got him working the maintenance detail, but hey, maybe he’ll get lucky and get transferred to a ship once he gets his sea legs.” The man grinned. “Anyway, you going to buy anything?”

  Will bought a set of sparkplugs for the man’s trouble.

  Sunday came around soon and Will woke to the sound of a handful of trucks lining up outside the town hall. Everyone in the town piled into the backs of the trucks; most people began to look through their booklets as the trucks rumbled to life and drove them away. Some soldiers outside the canton watched the trucks go; the villagers and townsfolk jeered and yelled insults as the soldiers disappeared into the distance. Will had seated himself between Harry and Martin in the back of one of the trucks. While Will started to flip through the booklet, looking at pictures of certain plants and berries, Martin turned to Harry.

  “Hey Harry, I’ve been thinking,” he said.

  “You think too much, Martin,” Will said with a small smile. Martin ignored him.

  “If we can’t get water from the river, do you think we could get it from a well? I read in one of my books that there are underground aquifers and streams all over the place. Maybe we could find enough water underground to irrigate the fields.”

  Harry shrugged. “I guess,” he said. “The one well we got doesn’t have so much water in it,” he added. “I think it’s running dry too.”

  Will looked a little put-out. “It’s a question of digging more wells to look for water, though, isn’t it?”

  “I guess,” Harry repeated. “My dad used to say that you could find a well with a stick. Dousing.”

  “Really?” Martin said with surprise.

  “Yep. That’s what he told me. It would tell you where to dig when you were near water.”

  “How does a stick tell you where to dig?”

  Harry shrugged.

  “Well, anyway, I think maybe when we get back to the village, we should start digging wells. I’ve marked a few places on the map where I guessed there might be aquifers, and if did hit one, we could start irrigating. There are other ways to get water too.”

  “Like what?”

  “Uh, you can basically still water like the soldiers still moonshine. Take ocean water, stick it in a still, and it’ll condense into clean water. The salt’s left behind.”

  “You’d need a heck of a big still to get enough water to farm with.”

  “Right, but you don’t need water to do it. All you need is coal. And we can mine more coal, but we can’t make more rain fall.”

  Martin continued to talk about his ideas for ways to get food and water, which included filtration systems he’d read that they had in the capital, and new-fangled fishing techniques that were used in some of the rivers around the coast and dynamiting to try to find aquifers. His string of ideas was cut short when they finally arrived at the mountains. They all piled out of the back of the truck and each person was given a sack. They slowly started to spread out across the forest. Every so often someone would yell if they sighted something they could identify from the booklets they’d been given, or if they found a large number of edible berries or mushrooms. Will, for his part, found nothing, but stuck close to his friends. Harry didn’t seem to have spotted anything either. At one point he tore off a part of a nearby leaf and chewed on it but quickly spit it out, then wiped his hand on his coveralls.

  After perhaps half an hour of searching, Martin called them over.

  “Look,” he said. He pointed out into the forest. There was a rabbit about twenty meters away, digging with its front paws. Martin flipped open his booklet and gestured to an illustration of a rabbit therein.

  “Did you really need the booklet for that?” Will asked sardonically.

  “I was hoping that it would tell me how to catch it, but it doesn’t say anything about what to do once you find the rabbit.” He frowned at the book. “If I had a gun, I’d shoot it. I guess we’re supposed to make a trap or something?”

  As he spoke, the rabbit darted off at surprising speed.

  “Let’s follow it,” Martin said enthusiastically. They started to jog after it, but Will immediately saw how foolish this was. The rabbit was much faster than they were.

  “Maybe we should stick to the plants and berries,” he said, but Martin continued after the rabbit. Then, suddenly, he stopped.

  The rabbit had been caught in a rope snare - a rope had looped around its haunch and hoisted it off the ground. It was struggling against the snare, but the rope had bound it tightly in what looked like a complicated knot. Will was a
t once impressed by the complexity and, simultaneously, the simplicity of the trap. It was only a loop of rope but it had somehow succeeded in catching the animal alive; he was not entirely certain how it had caught the rabbit.

  “Whose snare is this?” he asked, inspecting it. “It doesn’t look like something anyone from the village would have made. I think it would take an experienced hunter or trapper to set a snare like this.”

  “Best leave it,” Harry said calmly.

  “But it’s my rabbit,” Martin complained.

  Will put one hand on Martin’s shoulder. “Harry’s right. If someone else caught it, it’s not ours to take. Let’s go.”

  Martin looked from one to the other of them and sighed. “Fine. Let’s go. Maybe there are more rabbits this way.” He pointed up the mountain and they continued to walk.

  The trees started to thin after another half-hour or so of walking. When the treeline gave way, a large facility appeared in the distance - one with high concrete walls and barbed wire running along the perimeter. Will started curiously towards it.

  “What’s that?” he asked, peering at it.

  Martin tugged him back towards the treeline. “It’s where the mountain people live,” he muttered. “You know. It’s a prison. Where they send criminals. We shouldn’t be here. We’ve come too far up the mountain. Let’s go.”

  He turned and started to leave, but Will ducked back behind a tree and watched with a sort of morbid fascination. In the distance, he could barely make out a group of people chopping down trees at the far end of the facility, just outside the walls. They were surrounded by armed guards. As he watched, two of the guards seized a man and began to drag him in Will’s direction, although they were very far away. They steadily got closer and closer until they were maybe twenty or thirty meters from Will, who fell prone but continued to watch with astonishment. The two guards were wearing uniforms and caps much like the army equivalents, but in different colors. The man they were dragging was stripped to the waist and clad only in a pair of weather-beaten tan trousers and crude wooden sandals. His back was badly gashed and scarred, as if he’d been whipped, and it had a number of angry cuts and horrible bruises intermingled with old injuries.

  “It’s that man, Garrett,” Martin whispered urgently. “You remember - he’s the one they exiled up here for stealing.”

  Will nodded silently. Garrett was weeping. The wind carried some of his voice. He was sobbing.

  “No, no, I swear, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t take it.”

  One of the guards whipped him with the butt of his rifle and Garrett fell to his hands and knees. Then the guard drew out a pistol.

  Will winced and looked away. The report of a single gunshot echoed through the forest. When Will looked back again, Garrett was dead. The two guards laughed. One of them produced a cigarette and a shiny silver lighter and started to smoke as Garrett’s blood colored the ground.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Martin whispered.

  Will nodded in agreement and the three retreated back down the mountain as quietly as they could. They did not discuss the incident and did not go running after any other rabbits. Each collected a few mushrooms and roots that resembled those in the guide to show for their efforts and sat in silence on the trucks at the end of the day.

  As they rode back to the village on the trucks, with some of the villagers discussing how many berries or how many roots they had found, a strangely familiar sound like the roar of a distant lion began to fill the air. Will looked towards the sky and saw a sleek metal arrow zooming across it, slow at first, but later faster and faster, trailing a thick stream of white smoke as it went and disappearing with tremendous speed. Several of the townsfolk looked at it curiously.

  “What was that?” Martin asked.

  “I think it was another rocket launch,” Will answered.

  When they got back to the village, everyone returned to their own homes. Ms. Diane badgered them to give food to the soldiers as they went, but all she received was some very dark looks in return. Only Harry answered her call, giving his whole bag, though he hadn’t found much in the way of food to give. That night, the radio talked about another successful rocket test launch by the military’s Strategic Rocket Command, which constituted both a tremendous technological achievement and great cause for celebration for the nation. Of course, as his stomach rumbled, Will knew that there would be no celebration.

  Chapter 8

  They went back up into the mountains the next week and the week after, though Will was sure to stay far away from the prison camp where the “mountain people” were exiled. Each week Harry donated his findings to the military. No one else did. Sentiment was certainly running against the army. Few liked the idea that they were being asked to give food to the army. Even though many of the townsfolk had friends or family in the military, as Ms. Diane reminded them, everyone seemed to think that the meager findings they had foraged was their own. Martin’s suggestions that they dig for water were not acted on - he brought it up with Ms. Diane, but she insisted that the foraging trips were the best way to find food.

  Despite the expeditions to the mountain, belts were getting progressively tighter, and Martin’s warnings about malnutrition and starvation became urgent and dire. Ms. Diane looked more ragged and run-down by the day. However, at the first regular town meeting of the fall - just as it seemed most obvious that the crop would fail - she entered the meeting with a broad smile. After the usual cries of “All Hail King Edward,” which were weak and half-hearted, she broke into an announcement. Her voice was tinged with excitement and, unless Will was quite mistaken, hope.

  “I have some very good news,” she cried. “We’re going to get rations this week.”

  A wave of whisperings and mutterings broke over the meeting, some skeptical, some excited.

  “The King has authorized the army to release grain from its emergency reserve, which is only meant to be tapped in the event of an enemy offensive,” she read aloud. “This is grain that we have produced and sent to them over the years and they have stockpiled in military granaries in the capital in the event of an emergency or a disaster, such as this famine. Starting tomorrow, the army is going to begin delivering rations to us. Let us all thank King Edward for his wisdom and benevolence in creating this reserve and allowing the army to release it to us to avert starvation. All hail King Edward!”

  Many people joined in, shouting “All hail King Edward!” with more energy than they had at the start of the meeting. Others had crossed their arms defensively, looking skeptically from one to the other.

  “Do you think there really is a reserve like that?” Martin said.

  “We did send them two-thirds of our grain and then some for years and years,” Harry answered. “Makes sense to me that they would have kept some for emergencies.”

  “But the soldiers have been coming down here to buy or beg for food for months,” Martin argued, still frowning. “If they had an emergency reserve, don’t you think they would have tapped it?”

  “She said it was held in military granaries in the capital.” The memories of the capital, the huge steel buildings that had scraped the sky, the stores, the trains, the universities, the people, swept through Will’s mind. “They could easily have kept a million tons of grain in the capital,” he said. “In fact, I bet they would have. It is the most advanced city in the world, after all. The things they’ve done there are amazing.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Martin said. “If the army had a reserve, they would have used it by now. I’ll bet you a jar of moonshine and my best syringe that they don’t bring us grain tomorrow.”

  But Martin was wrong. The next day an army train rolled up into the station from the capital, and uniformed members of the King’s Guard began to stack huge sacks of grain onto the platform - an entire month’s rations in a single trip. Every bag was adorned with the military seal. Many people, some of whom had not eaten for a week - or had only eaten roots and leave
s - thanked the royal guardsmen profusely. Sentiment towards the soldiers seemed to have completely reversed in a single day. A few people tried to hoist some of the soldiers onto their shoulders and carry them around, singing “All Hail King Edward.” There was a celebration that night with food made out of hastily baked bread and corn meal from the huge sacks. No one stopped a few of the members of the local regiment who snuck off with a bag of wheat to turn into grain alcohol. By the end of the night, Will was feeling in very good spirits. Harry, however, was frowning.

  Later that night, Will and Martin volunteered to help Harry load sacks from the train station onto one of the trucks and ship them to the village storehouse. When they got to the store house, Martin cuffed Harry on the shoulder.

  “Why the long face?” he asked. “We’ve got enough food now.”

  “It tastes wrong.” Harry said plainly.

  “What do you mean?” Martin asked.

  “I’m glad we got the food but it’s not ours. Ms. Diane said that they were giving us our own food back. The stuff we sent to the army for years and years, and they stored up. But this isn’t our grain. It tastes funny.”

  “How does it taste funny? Grain is grain.”

  Harry shrugged.

  “Well, maybe it’s grain from a different part of the country,” Martin said. “Or maybe grain just starts to taste different after you store it for long enough. Goes stale, like bread.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Harry grunted.

  “Whatever. It’s food and we’re not gonna starve,” Martin said. He picked up one of the sacks and heaved it over his shoulder, moving to take it to the storehouse, his hand over the army logo. Suddenly he stopped and frowned. He threw down the bag into the headlights of the truck and stared at it.

  “What’s wrong?” Will asked.

  “It feels strange,” Martin said. “The army logo, I mean. I thought it was weird that the army would have reserves and wouldn’t have used them... if the soldiers were starving...” he trailed off and bent down over the sack of grain, running his hand over the material of the sack. His hand stopped over the flag. He dug his finger nails into the stitches around the national logo, the familiar colors of green, red, and gold, and he started to tug. It tore off. Underneath, there was another very familiar logo, colored black and blue. Will had seen it before, hanging disrespectfully upside-down behind the bar in the canteen, taken by the army as the rightful spoils of war and victory. It was the flag of the Black Force. Martin recognized it too.