by E. E. Knight
Boots were still a problem. Most of his recruits had come over in civilian duty shoes, fine for the streets of Evansville but no match for the tough field exercises in wet fall weather that Patel put them through.
Hobbled men were no use to anyone. Bad feet made men even more miserable than bad teeth. Southern Command had little in the way of spares after the retreat across Kentucky, so Valentine had to settle for tire rubber “retreads” cobbled together with rawhide lacing, scraps of webbing, and heavyweight canvas for breathability.
The men called them “Kentucky galoshes” and suffered through the inevitable blisters and abrasions, but the footwear protected ankles and kept off trench foot.
Valentine spent long hours recruiting from the soon-to-depart brigade.
A few NCOs volunteered to stay because they wanted to finish the fight in Kentucky. Many were the best of Javelin, and Bloom crossed a few names off Valentine’s list, as she doubted she’d be able to make it back to the Mississippi without them. Others accepted the extravagant promises Valentine made. One or two old soldiers elected to stick because they understood the devil in Kentucky and only God knew where they might be sent when they were “repurposed.” Might as well spend the remaining time until land allotment or pension, riding herd on ex-Quislings.
Of course, beggars can’t be choosers, nor can they expend much mental effort determining the motivations for those willing to help. Valentine was content to take names, get them approved by Bloom and Lambert, and then work out his battalion’s order of battle—without having any of his volunteers “demoted,” so to speak. He did this by creating an on-paper staff company.
One benefit of the rumors in Evansville about the departure of much of Southern Command’s forces was a near panic about what might happen if the Kurians returned, especially with rumors about forces massing in Illinois, or Bloomington, or outside of Louisville for a dash down the old interstate.
So he had volunteers looking to join Fort Seng in any capacity—on the condition that their families would be able to come along if Fort Seng were abandoned. With food running short, Valentine couldn’t accept all the volunteers, and even with enough to feed them he wouldn’t be able to arm them, but he was able to fill out his uneven companies by taking, for once, the cream of the overflowing pail.
Bloom and Lambert both agreed that Southern Command needed some kind of send-off. The only point of contention was whether the piece that remained still be known as Javelin, or if the designation belonged to the brigade proper.
Bloom finally relented, mostly because Lambert had organized the whole party to begin with. If Fort Seng became a monument to the Cause’s attempt to create a new Freehold east of the Mississippi and south of the Mason-Dixon, the tombstone might as well bear the proper name.
The headquarters staff kept the news of the celebration quiet to avoid raising expectations and just in case word traveled to the Kurian lengths of the river, either toward Paducah or in the direction of Louisville. No telling what the Kurians might choose to create in the way of their own farewell.
They detailed a few cooks to roast a pair of pigs and a lamb. Valentine spent the day in the field with his new battalion, returning to see beautiful paper lanterns lining the patio before the great estate house.
“The basement’s full of that sort of crap,” Bloom told him. “The guy who used to live here loved to throw a party.”
Valentine’s recruits stayed off to the side as Southern Command’s soldiers occupied tables and chairs and benches. The two groups tolerated each other. Valentine’s men oddly matched each other in the redyed uniforms they’d crossed over to wearing. Southern Command’s troops had their patched fatigues, spruced up with their new medals and odds and ends picked up in Kentucky, mostly raccoon tails and legworm claw feet.
A band filled the chilled night air with noise. It was a merry-go-round collection of musicians as the players stopped to eat or drink and rejoined as the mood and tempo suited them.
Valentine listened to some soldiers warming themselves around a fire pit with even warmer spiked punch.
“Hope we get repurposed to Oklahoma or Texas—some kind of steer country,” a corporal said. “If I never swallow another mouthful of those caterpillars, it’ll be too soon.”
“You’re forgetting the good lean Kentucky horse meat, Corp. Meals fit for a dog.”
A private leaned back, fingers interlaced behind his head as he reclined. “Soon as I get home to the wife, my johnson’s being repurposed from peeing, that’s for sure.”
“Good woman, that. Puts up with that wood tick of a dick for more’n one night.”
“What do you say, Williams?” one of the group called to a woman idly tossing cards into her helmet. “You think the bride said, ‘I do,’ knowing the triple-A battery Dalrymple here’s sporting?”
“Size is for sluts. Give me a man with a quick tongue.”
The men laughed, even Dalrymple. She added, “I meant interesting conversation, you lunk.”
“Glad we’re getting out of here. Only tongue you’re likely to see otherwise would be out of a Reaper.”
“Home alive in ’seventy-five.”
“Worn-down dicks in ’seventy-six.”
The chatter stopped when they noticed Valentine watching from the shadows.
“I miss the two-for-one whores of ’seventy-four, myself,” Valentine said. Valentine headed for the barbecue spits, purposely altering his course so they wouldn’t have to rise from their coffee and rolls and salute.
He found his old company headquarters staff passing a bottle of homemade wine, with vanquished soldiers tucked out of the way beneath their chairs.
Valentine wasn’t feeling social. He passed in and out of the conversing groups, shaking hands and wishing well, never lingering to be included in a conversation.
He danced once with Bloom, who found his clumsy steps quietly amusing, and once with Lambert, who did her best to hide his offbeat lurches by holding her body so erect and stiff he had to move with her to avoid looking like he was trying to pull down a statue.
The Evansville group—“Valentine’s Legion,” some were beginning to call them, though Valentine himself corrected anyone who used the phrase—had an uneasy relationship with the Southern Command regulars. The average soldier had a low opinion of Quislings—they either ran from danger or knuckled under it when the Reapers hissed an order—and the soldiers preferred to keep thinking about them in familiar terms: as targets to shoot at or prisoners to be counted. So the ex-Quislings were relegated to the “back of beyond” at Fort Seng, a chilly field far from hot water.
If the goal of the celebration was to reconcile the two groups, the party was an unmitigated failure. But the two groups each ate well, albeit separately.
Brother Mark returned in the darkness. The man had a curious sixth sense about when to show up. If there was plenty of food and drink to be had, he was there. Yet he wasn’t a social man. Like Valentine, he seemed to prefer hanging about the edges.
Valentine addressed a long table filled with his old shit-detail company. Many of them were wearing their new stripes and insignia for the first time.
“Be a lot more room for us once the others leave,” Valentine said. “More hot water for everyone. We’ll stick new recruits in your tent-shacks.”
“Be good to have a home at last, sir,” Glass said. His heavy-weapons Grogs were on guard duty while the men celebrated.
It was an unusually optimistic statement from Glass, but odd. He’d grown up in the Free Territory.
“We don’t fit in,” a corporal said. “Across the Mississippi, they put us in camps. Had to display ID all the time, wear prisoner clothes. Deep down it ain’t life under the towers, but on the surface it wasn’t that much different.”
Valentine nodded. “You’re changing that here and now. After you complete your hitch, you’ll be as good as anyone else in the Republics, in the eyes of the law. You can settle wherever you like.”
�
��Can we get our land in Kentucky?” Glass said. “Better land in some ways than Arkansas. People here aren’t so hung up on where we came from.”
“Not for me to promise,” Valentine said. “There’s Brother Mark. Ask him. He can go to the local government and see what they have to say. But they’ve been plenty helpful to us up until now, haven’t they?”
“Reward’s always over the next hill,” Glass said. “Be nice if we could get something on paper.”
Getting back across the river was much on the soon-to-depart contingent’s mind. Valentine had men step up to say good-bye, shake his hand, or say a few hopeful words about wishing him success in the coming winter.
They gave him a present or two as well. One soldier gave him a flexible horsehide case for the new Type Three, having seen him practicing with it on the shooting range. Another gave him one of Karas’ coins, the back carefully polished and re-etched with the brigade’s designation and the dates of the Javelin’s operational activity in beautiful copperplate hand.
As everyone settled down into groups after the eating and drinking, to smoke or play cards or show off valuables they were contributing to Bloom’s “hopper” to buy supplies for the trip home (and for which they would receive a chit in return that, in theory, would restitute them once they returned to Southern Command, probably in near-worthless military scrip), a guard sergeant with the support staff loosened her belt and exchanged a few words with the musicians. Valentine didn’t know her—she was one of the replacements—but he recognized the song as soon as the soldier with the fiddle began to draw his bow.
She sang:
The water is wide, I cannot cross o’er
But neither have I the wings to fly.
Build me a boat, that will carry tow,
And both shall row, my love and I.
A ship there is, and she sails the sea,
She’s laden deep as deep can be,
But not so deep as the love I’m in.
I know not if I sink or swim.
The soprano had a rare voice, sharp glassy tones that carried through the night air. Valentine was reminded of the teenage thug who loved Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange who described a “so- phisto” woman’s singing like a rare bird who’d fluttered into the dive.
A huddled figure caught Valentine’s eye. Alessa Duvalier was listening from just outside of the splashy colorful light of the paper lanterns, perched on a wall with her legs drawn up and clasped to her chest.
Valentine slipped across the party, moving in her direction, while the musicians played the refrain, allowing the singer to catch her breath and more listeners to gather. Even Valentine’s own battalion broke off from eating.
I leaned my back on a proud young oak,
I thought it was a trusty tree.
But first it bended, and then it broke,
And so my love proved false to me.
He joined her on the limestone wall.
Oh, love is fair and love is fine,
Bright as a rose, when first it’s new;
But love grows old, and sometimes cold,
And fades away like the morning dew.
“It’ll never work, you know, Val,” Duvalier said. “I thought you were smart about this sort of stuff.”
She had that pungent, slightly cloying smell of liquor about her.
“Which ‘it,’ my friend?” Valentine asked.
“If you think I’m making another drunken pass at you, I’m not,” she said. “I’ve sworn off men.”
“Switching to women?”
“Ugh.”
“You never could hold your liquor. You want some seltzer? The local stuff’s pretty good. It’ll settle your stomach.”
She pinned him with her foot. “I haven’t finished with you, Valentine. I figured when you recruited all these Quislings, it was just to have them make corduroy roads or clear brush or what have you. You really want to turn this bunch into a chunk of Southern Command? Quisling scum like that?”
Valentine switched to sign language. They could communicate in sign. They used to do it on their long assignment together as husband and wife on the Gulf Coast when Valentine had been working as a Coastal Marine. He could still use it but had slowed considerably. “Keep it down; some of the scum can hear you.”
“I know their kind,” she said louder than ever. “They’re whipped, so they’ll cringe and lick your boots for a while. First chance they get—schwwwwwpt!” She made a throat-cutting gesture with a sauce-smeared finger.
“It’s my throat.”
“Women fall for crusaders. It’s a chance to be part of something big and good. That day out in Nebraska when you convinced me to go help the Eagles . . . I think I fell a little for you that day. A little. Lots of people get twisted by war, turned into something that’s all sword and no plowshare. I like how you think of them.” She waved her hand, gesturing vaguely to the northeast.
“But sometimes,” she said, “you get all messed up about who the victims and the victimsizer . . . victimizers are. These bastards were stealing and busting heads of anyone who objected a couple months ago. Now you have them in Southern Command uniform. You told me once you spent two years hunting down the rapists of some girl you knew, or of the sister of some girl you knew. How many rapists are you feeding tonight?”
“None,” Valentine said. He wondered if he should stick close to Duvalier tonight. Some of the men had heard her. While they wouldn’t loop a noose around her and beat her up, they were perfectly capable of waiting until she passed out and then playing some sort of physical prank that would just make matters worse, especially if Duvalier woke up while someone was inking her face or filling her shoes with manure. “That’s part of the deal I offered. Whatever their old crimes, they get a new identity the day they sign up.”
“Like you’re baptizing. Maybe the people who deserve a new life are the ones in Evansville, not these bastards.”
“Maybe Evansville is happy to have them gone.”
She didn’t respond for a moment, and then she slumped against him. “Oh, Val, I’m so tired,” she said, nuzzling his shoulder. “I’m more tired than I’ve ever been in my life. I want to sleep forever.”
“Were you across the river again?”
“Yes. Checking some roads around Evansville in an old pickup. No sign of that armored Spearhead. But I can’t shake the feeling something’s going to happen as soon as Bloom marches her people out of camp.”
“March out with them,” Valentine suggested. “Take a break. You’ve been going hard for as long as I’ve known you.”
“Can’t. Every time I leave you, you do something stupid and I have to claw you out of it.”
“I’d do the same for you,” Valentine said.
She yawned.
“You’ll sleep tonight. Where do you bunk these days?”
Duvalier had a habit of sleeping in strange spots: chicken coops, dog runs, little scraped-out hollows under rusted-out cars quietly going to pieces on the roadside. It was an act of security gained from long habit in the Kurian Zone: to not be where a Reaper might be poking around, looking for a victim.
“That’s what death is, right? Just going to sleep forever. Unless a Reaper gets you. I wonder if the Kurians can mess with you, you know, even after death. Like it’s hell or whatever.”
“That’s silly.” Actually, it wasn’t. Valentine had seen living bodies, suspended in tanks in a death that wasn’t death, in one great, skyline-dominating tower in Seattle.
“They almost got me this trip. You think my luck’s used up, Val?”
Maybe that was at the heart of her dark mood, drinking, and odd talk. “You’re too smart for ’em,” Valentine said.
Valentine escorted her up to his room at headquarters. Though the room had his name on a piece of cardboard taped next to the door, he rarely slept there, preferring to be in the little bungalow by the battalion.
“Remember crossing Kansas?” Duvalier said as they went up the wide stairs with big
corner landings. “You were always up making breakfast. I woke up and there you’d be, frying eggs in a pan in bacon fat. Then you’d pour in some flour and make breading.”
“It was to prevent you from dining out of garbage bins. The food’s healthier when you cook it yourself. I suppose that’s why I always fried it to hell. Fear of microbes.”
“I thought it was delicious,” Duvalier said, slipping out of her clothes. Which took a long time—she clothed her slight frame in multiple layers.
“Father Max used to say my cooking was made for Lent,” Valentine said. He watched her undress. Not for pulchritudinous reasons; he wanted to make sure there was flesh on her ribs. She was a wanderer afoot, and the long miles left her scarecrow-thin. Valentine admired her knife-cut good looks, but wished she looked a little more like the sleek general’s plaything she’d been during Consul Solon’s occupation than the bony adolescent raising the sheet next to him.
“Make me breakfast, Val. Make me some breakfast.”
“Okay. You stop talking nonsense and get some sleep.”
“Next to you. Like the old days.”
“Sure.”
Valentine climbed into the bed. The queen-size mattress seemed extravagant, but then the estate owner considered anything under king fit only for the hired help.
He’d not lain naked next to a woman since the erotically mobile, lusty Tikka had gathered what was left of the Kentucky Alliance and harried the Moondaggers across Kentucky. Tikka had run through his inventory of sexual tricks, many acquired from an older Ohio doctor of highly specialized obstetrics, in a few marathon sessions that left her energized and Valentine exhausted but both happily relieved of the burdens of the Kentucky retreat during their few hours together.
Last he’d heard she’d returned to the Bulletproof. He hoped she was one of the delegates in Elizabethtown.
He felt some faint stirrings below the waist as Duvalier pressed her slight body against him, sighing contentedly. But the easygoing intimacy he and Duvalier shared wasn’t physical, though they took comfort in the body heat and natural comfort of each other’s frames when traveling together. Their intimacy might be compared to that of a brother and sister, but outside of black-cover gothic erotic romances, few sisters slept next to their brothers with pubic thatch tickling his thigh.