The King's War

by Andrew Stanek

  “Yeah, something’s broken alright,” Harry said. “Come with me.”

  He led Will up towards the farm, but they didn’t go to Harry’s farmhouse. Instead they went to Martin’s surgery. There were no more soldiers standing around it; maybe now that Martin was dead, they didn’t see the point. Harry walked inside and Will followed. They came to a stop in front of his exam room. There was the x-ray machine that Martin had been so proud of, and as far as Will knew, Martin had never used. There was a stack of Martin’s books and manuals that he had cherished so deeply. And there was the table, still red with Nate’s blood.

  Harry just stood there and he seemed close to crying. Will had never seen Harry cry before, and with a start he remembered how Martin and Harry had always sat together in school and chatted in quiet whispers while the teacher had talked, and how they had dug the wells together for hours and hours in both the hot sun and the bitter cold.

  After a long time, Harry wiped his eyes on the back of his filthy coveralls and started to speak.

  “The rebels didn’t kill Martin,” he said slowly.

  “No,” Will agreed.

  “Martin was a good person.”

  “Yes.”

  “He didn’t deserve to die.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “We need to finish your plane, Will.”

  Will nodded.

  “Okay.”

  Chapter 15

  The days after Martin’s death were dreary. It was the deepest part of winter and ominous clouds rolled in off of the ocean, leaving everything in a general state of gloom, but it refused to rain more than a few drops. Instead the clouds were accompanied by ferocious winds that knocked over telegraph poles and kicked up enormous amounts of dust; Will again saw people walking the street with cloths wrapped around their mouths and wearing glasses or goggles to protect themselves. The black market did a roaring trade in paper masks made in the capital, as well as shop safety goggles. Will bought a pair for himself, though his concern was not so much the wind and the dust as the work he was doing in his shop. He was beginning to work on hydraulics for his aircraft, which required him to shape and cut lengths of metal tubing with an old axle grinder he had rehabilitated. This was difficult even when the power was on, and also tended to throw a large number of burning sparks that he had trouble protecting himself from. More often than not, he wished for one of the huge bandsaws or circular saws that they’d had in the capital, but he had no such power tool. He had to make due with hack saws, the lathe, and the grinder.

  Local soldiers from the regiment had slowly returned to the village in the wake of the parade by the King’s Guard. Some had returned faster than others. The tobacco-chewing naval officer was back that very afternoon, his familiar cries of “tools, fuel, spare parts,” resuming the day after, when he was sure all the guards had gone. The other soldiers began to filter back into the village in the days that followed. They could often be seen smoking and drinking moonshine outside the canteen. Small groups of them huddled together, rubbing their hands and stamping their feet, to try to keep the chill out of their bones.

  The returning cold had caused many people to start using their gas heaters again. The gas supply was thankfully more reliable than the power supply, provided you could afford to buy charged metal cylinders at market. Others made unauthorized expeditions up into the mountains and cut down trees, hauling the wood back through the terrible cold to burn in their furnaces at home. One or two people had electric heaters, but the power supply was as sketchy as ever, and Will was sure that this didn’t supply more than a few hours of heat a day. Apparently the output of coal-burning plants that provided power to the canton was still directed towards the factories over domestic uses. If Martin were here, Will reflected, he might have said something about how this meant they needed to mine more coal and build more powerplants. Nate might have shot back that the coal was needed for the King’s factories to keep everything running, to provide the Royal Army with guns and ammunition, the navy with dreadnoughts, the people with tractors and cars. But neither Will nor Nate was here any longer to argue the point, and it did not seem to occur to anyone else. For them, power outages were just a fact of life, something that had always been and probably always would be.

  The number of cases of frostbite and mild hypothermia started to mount as villagers overexerted themselves outside, even in the vicious winds. Their conditions, as well as all other injuries and illnesses, went totally untreated. Martin’s surgery now stood vacant and empty. Ms. Diane had told them that they could go to the canton hospital for treatment, but had not told them how to get there nor supplied them with the proper papers. In the end, no one went.

  Harry and Will hadn’t spoken much since their conversation in Martin’s shuttered surgery, but every time Will went to work on the airplane, Harry wordlessly came out to help him. Will wasn’t entirely sure why they were working so hard to finish the aircraft. Some unspoken understanding had passed between them that it was important that they do this, perhaps because the plane would get them out and away from the village, to where Will didn’t know, or perhaps because if they could see everything from on high, they would finally know the truth that Martin had pursued, or perhaps it was just because Will knew that finishing the aircraft was something that the King and his army didn’t want him to do. Whether the aircraft was an escape vehicle or a surveillance plane or simply a sign of disobedience, Will had started to work on it increasingly fervently. He often worked late into the night and lost half a night’s sleep trying to restore the plane to a workable state, though it was missing so much. It still did not have an engine, and Will doubted he would ever be able to replace the Type 4A engine that the navy had taken.

  Though Will would have liked to spend all his time on the plane, his work was rudely interrupted. At the regular town hall meeting, Ms. Diane announced a new village expedition.

  “The high winds have knocked over several telegraph poles outside the village,” she said plainly. “I remind everyone that these telegraph and telephone lines are lines of communication to both the rest of the canton and the capital and it is our responsibility to fix them immediately. Without them, the military will also have difficulty contacting the capital in the event of an attack. The Colonel has asked me to make fixing these lines a particular priority.”

  Some of the people grumbled that if it was so important to the military, maybe the military should fix the lines themselves. After all, what did they know about fixing telephone and telegraph lines?

  Ms. Diane met these dissenting voices with a very stern look. “We must all continue to sacrifice for the sake of the King’s War,” she said tersely, and then insisted on a second burst of “All Hail King Edward,” at the end of the meeting.

  So that weekend, everyone in the village had risen early to get started on the fallen telegraph poles and repairing the lines. They had bundled up into their warmest clothes, though for some these clothes were very thin indeed. A truck had driven into the village, carrying lines of wire and a handful of tools from one of the canton warehouses. Some people piled onto the back of the truck and waited for it to drive to the work site; those who couldn’t fit on the truck walked after it. As Will put on a third layer, he heard Old Pete - who had been roped into the project - arguing with a still very stern-looking Ms. Diane.

  “I’ve already sacrificed for the King,” Old Pete complained, gesturing to his missing arm. “I’m not going to be able to do much with one arm. Can hardly climb the poles and fix the lines, can I?”

  “We’ll find a use for you,” Ms. Diane said crossly.

  “I shouldn’t be made to do this. At my age? With my one arm?” he barked.

  Old Pete’s son, one of the farmers - who Will had never known well - approached Ms. Diane.

  “Surely you can let him off this one time,” he said smoothly. He offered her a wad of cash.

  Ms. Diane looked at the cash, blinked, then took it and tucked it in her pocket.

/>   “Very well,” she said stiffly. “Since he is a veteran. You go back and drink, Pete.”

  He muttered something that Will did not quite catch, starting with “Back in my day...”

  As he hobbled off, Ms. Diane smirked after him. Will watched him for a second then jogged after the truck and the mass of other people. He, after all, had not paid a bribe and did not want to be accused of not working.

  They reached the work site about half an hour later. It wasn’t far from the village but was elevated slightly, up on one of the nearby hills. Several of the poles along the length of the nearby railroad track had toppled over. The only building on the hillside was a little water tower and shed for re-coaling the hungry locomotives. Will couldn’t imagine it was still very serviceable in this cold, but it was the only shelter from the powerful winds on the whole hillside. Conditions deteriorated rapidly as they tried to right the large telegraph poles and fill the corresponding ditches with wooden props to keep the poles steady. Ms. Diane called for the poles to be cemented, and cement mix had to be brought up from the town along with barrels of water. This was done mostly by means of the truck, but mixing the quantity of cement in improvised tubs proved to be backbreaking to do by hand. Worse still, as they started to mix the cement it began to rain for the first time in weeks. It wasn’t heavy rain; rather it was an unhelpful rain. Everyone could see it was too light to end the drought but at the same time it was just heavy enough to qualify as irritating. It soaked their clothes and made them shiver.

  Someone, intelligently, called for a bonfire to be built under the iron re-coaling shed (which was helpfully full of coal), and they periodically retreated to this bonfire to warm up and dry off. Will was quite convinced that this was the only thing that had stopped half the village from freezing to death.

  They poured the cement despite the rain and covered the trenches with wooden planks to protect it from dilution in case the storm worsened. It was past noon by the time they had finished all this and almost everyone was for quitting, but Ms. Diane insisted that the repair work had to be done today and that the cables had to be restrung and reconnected. Local trees were chopped down, and a second set of props were created to stop the telegraph poles from wiggling in the wind and the loose, unset concrete. The task of actually re-stringing the cable fell to Will, as everyone seemed to think that his education in the capital had prepared him for it. In actuality, Will had learned almost nothing about electrical systems during his training as a mechanic, but he knew he would have to do it all the same. The village had no electrician.

  He climbed the unsteady metal prongs on the poles and spliced the cable from one pole to the next, trying not to look down and promising himself that it would be over soon. Though the wind and the rain whipped his face and back, he managed to fully reconnect the telegraph cable first. Will was passed up a headset from the truck to verify that the line had been reconnected. When he touched the headset’s electrodes to the telegraph line he could hear the familiar regular taps of the telegraph signals, so he knew he had successfully reattached the line - at least in one direction.

  There was more than one telephone line, and it took him hours to reconnect all of them. Each time he put on the headset and verified there was some sort of sound or current before moving on. Mercifully the rains died down and the wind subsided at least a little, making Will’s job somewhat easier. When he reconnected the last line, he put the electrodes to the bare wire and two male voices suddenly burst into life over his headset.

  “...the detail was for Prince Jacob. He’s dead.”

  “Prince Jacob? The King’s brother?”

  “Yes. There was no warning. They dragged him out of the meeting of the national ministry, put him up against the wall, and shot him.”

  “Was there a trial?”

  “They had a magistrate waiting right outside the room to pronounce him guilty of treason, just for the sake of formality. It was the King’s order.”

  “Why did the King kill his own brother?”

  “Disloyalty. Suspicion. Fear. I don’t know. Stuff like that is above my paygrade. This isn’t the first execution this month though, or even the tenth. And I’ve lost count of how many this makes overall. Forty?”

  There was a pause.

  “If King Edward had Prince Jacob shot, then no one is safe.”

  “No one was ever safe. Prince Jacob... I don’t know if this is the reason... but I heard someone say that he argued with King Edward at one of the cabinet meetings about the forest policy. The King wants to restore them, but Prince Jacob said that the land use-”

  “I know. The less that’s said about it the better. If talking about it signed Prince Jacob’s death warrant, then we shouldn’t be talking about it either.”

  “But could he really have shot his own brother over a forest? The rest of the national ministry is terrified of the King. They won’t say a word against him. Now that Prince Jacob is gone, there’s no one willing to talk back to the King... except maybe his sister...”

  Will did not know the details of how he was listening to this conversation, as there shouldn’t have been any ongoing calls on the line he’d just spliced. He put this out of his mind. He was taking too long listening to the chat. The villagers on the ground were looking up at him curiously. Will maneuvered and inspected the wire, trying to make it look as if he was doing something productive.

  “He’s obsessed with loyalty,” the first voice continued. “If anyone so much as blinks at him he thinks that it’s a plot against him. And he doesn’t tell us anything. I could be assembling my own execution detail and not know it. Take my advice. Keep your nose clean. And don’t say anything in company you can’t trust.”

  There was a grim chuckle from the other end of the line. “That would mean I’d never say anything. I don’t trust you either.”

  “If I wanted you shot you’d be dead.”

  “Who’s replacing Jacob?”

  “I don’t know. General Ganymede, maybe. I wouldn’t want to be in his position though. The King’s ministers have a tendency to not live very long.” There was another pause. “How are food production figures looking?”

  “Awful. You didn’t expect them to get any better in the middle of winter, did you? In terms of raw production, I think we’re down to 100g of maize equivalent per person per day. Is there any sign of internal unrest?”

  “None. It looks like the King’s gambit paid off, but I don’t expect to have it work a second time. After we sunk that ship... I really thought... but there’s no sign of movement from the Black Force. Reports from the front are all quiet. No exchanges in the last month.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. All we’d need right now is a rebel attack. I don’t think the ration system could handle it.”

  “We all must sacrifice for the sake of the King’s War,” the first voice said sarcastically. “I’ve got to go. I’ll talk to you later.”

  The line went dead. Will was left staring at his headset. He didn’t understand why he had heard the conversation from the electronic perspective, but then he had never been very good with electricity in the first place. He wrapped the exposed length of wire in the provided insulating tape and climbed down from the telephone pole. All he had heard was running through his mind.

  “Have you finished?” Ms. Diane asked.

  Will nodded mutely. Everyone cheered, and a few burst out into choruses of “All Hail King Edward.” They put out the bonfire and started home, with the people who had piled in the back of the truck getting back a good twenty minutes before those who’d had to walk.

  If Martin had been there, Will would have asked him who Prince Jacob was. But Martin was not there. He’d been killed exactly as Jacob had been.

  That night, around the time the power supply was the most regular, the radio newscaster announced that the Minister of War, Prince Jacob, had been found guilty of treason against the crown and executed. He would be replaced by General Ganymede, previously the commander of th
e King’s Guard. The newswoman expressed high hopes for General Ganymede, and that he would continue to win great victories for the King. After a few intervening stories about the production of a new dam on one of the large rivers, the newscaster also announced that the King had decreed a new land use policy regarding the forests. The King had acted wisely and decisively, she said, to stop rampant deforestation and illegal logging which was leading to rockslides in some cantons. Will’s thoughts flickered to many of the people in the village, who walked up to the forested mountain for firewood.

  The next day, Ms. Diane came up to Will to thank him. The rotary phone that sat in her home and connected her to the capital was working perfectly.

  Chapter 16

  The King’s new decree on land use had little effect on the people in Will’s village, who continued to go to the forest and chop wood apparently unmolested. Nevertheless, there was a severe shortage of fuel in the village as gas and kerosene rations were substantially cut the next month. Many took to huddling in the canteen, where the soldiers had built a firepit and there was nearly always a fire blazing. On some occasions the soldiers could be seen barbecuing cuts of pork, which was a spectacle for some of the villagers. The town no longer kept much livestock, since they had proven too costly to keep in terms of feed and effort during the famine.

  Though Will spent as much time as he could in Harry’s barn and his own shop working on the airplane, the cold was testing the limits of his endurance. The heater he had tried to install in Harry’s barn was now proving unreliable, and his own shop was completely unheated. Will now gave his icebox a sardonic, mirthless grin whenever he passed it. He had never used the icebox in the first place and probably never would. He was sure it was much colder outside than within.

  Will wrapped himself in several blankets as he worked, but he still found himself making frequent trips to the canteen, with its huge number of people and its roaring fire, if only to warm up. On one day in the late winter, Will found himself sitting next to the tall, scrawny soldier again.