by E. E. Knight
“Thirteen. Unlucky,” Valentine commented.
“Don’t worry now. Still plenty of prisoners. Much work to do. For now, they take only hurt and bad sick. This big state. I come from Indianapolis. Six years ago, bad drought, many farms die. Other Bloodmen from hills in south came, stole people. Then they fed on us in army.”
“That’s a hard piece of luck. This is a sweeter situation. That’s why I came.”
“Yes, sir. Duty with a future, here.”
They continued north, almost to a little finger of a hill separating river from city, and reached their camp. It was a former city block now called “Dunkin Do,” according to the old sign propped up among the rubble. The street had not even been cleared yet, and among the bulldozer tracks there were little piles of debris in hummocks, but it was still preferable to the mountains of shattered concrete elsewhere in the city. The block was circled by nine-foot posts, and rolls of barbed wire had been left out to rust in the rain.
“Was to be prison camp, sir,” Greer said. “For after last push this year. But you can use.”
Valentine wondered if this wasn’t another warning from Xray-Tango that any nonsense would convert him and his men from allies to inmates in short order. He and Post trailed Greer around as he pointed out the water taps, already flowing, and the sewer outlets.
“Provisions tonight, sir, uniforms tomorrow, maybe stoves and fuel day after,” Greer said. “Here’s paperwork, sir. I fill some, you do rest, please, sir. Mostly just signatures. Officers can billet in garage, or stay in tents with men, up to you.”
“Garage?” Post asked.
“You see soon. Underground parking. Like bunker, you know? Meet others. Good food, good times.”
“We’ll drop by,” Valentine said. “Let us know when happy hour starts.”
Greer’s owlish eyes rolled skyward. “Happy hour, sir?”
“Never mind. I’ll be here tonight, getting the men settled in.”
They watched the men file into the camp, followed by the wobble-wheeled wagons. Jefferson cursed a blue streak, trying to get his team around a clump of reinforced concrete, its rods threatening horse leg and spoke alike.
“Questions, sir?”
“Who’s in charge of supplying us?”
“Commissary Sergeant Major Tucker, in Quonset hut behind headquarters. Good man. Answer all questions. Usually answer is ‘yes.’ ”
Tucker was more than just a good man. He appeared that evening like a horn of plenty, playing a sprited version of Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy” on a silver concert flute. He showed up in the shotgun seat of a roofless, antiquated Hummer, interrupting the men as they were setting up their tents in military rows.
“General’s orders,” Tucker shouted, pointing with his flute at his cargo. “Fresh bread, fruit and veggies just up from the Gulf. Spring potatoes, winter cabbage, first peas and even apples. We’ve got beer in cask, but before I can issue that, we need to see what kind of workers you are.”
The men forgot they were in the heart of an enemy camp enough to start cheering as he handed out the bounty. Cured side meat lay in baskets revealed as eager hands took the food.
“Whee-ooh, y’all need the showers rigged pronto, boys,” Tucker said. “Ever heard of field hygiene?”
“We’ve been on the road for three days,” Valentine said, stepping forward to help hand out the foodstuffs.
“You’re up from Louisiana, they tell me.”
“Sergeant Tucker, the smell’s unfortunate, I know. They need some washtubs and soap more than anything.”
“Coming tomorrow, sir.”
“I’m only about half armed as well. I’d like to see that rectified.”
“Guns are a problem, sir. You’ll get a few for marksmanship, to familiarize yourselves with our models, but we don’t have enough to arm all your men at the moment.”
“That’s unfortunate. Suppose there’s an emergency and the camp has to turn out to defend itself?”
“We have contingency plans, sir. When y’all are properly integrated into the general’s command, you’ll be outfitted, but there’s too much work to do here for now. You’ll be in reserve a few months at least . . .”
“Months! I thought the fight was coming sooner than that.”
“I can’t say, sir. Those were the general’s orders; he was specific about it.”
Valentine recovered his mental equilibrium. “I haven’t been fully briefed yet.”
“Sorry you had to hear it from me, sir. But be glad for it; you’ll have a better time back here. Those boys up north are dug in like ticks on a bear; burning them off isn’t going to be a summer picnic. If you saw the hospital you wouldn’t be so willful about it.”
Months. Valentine spent two hours trying to fall asleep, staring at the silhouette of the Quickwood center pole in his tent. Using Quickwood to form their tents seemed as good a way as any to hide the material in plain sight.
Such a small thing, the Quickwood beam. But it was the source of all Valentine’s hopes. He saw some of the men touching it as they passed, some with a reverence that brought to mind odd bits of mental flotsam about medieval pilgrims and alleged pieces of the True Cross, others caressing it as though it were a lover in passing. Even Post, who’d never shown any other signs of superstition, would give the tent-pole a double rap with his knuckles whenever he passed it in Valentine’s tent.
The ruse might last six days, but more than a few weeks was out of the question. Sooner or later some fool would let something slip, a face would be recognized despite the shorn heads, an assumed identity would be dropped. There would be questions, and then, when he didn’t have answers, more questions. From what he’d seen of the docks and warehouses, they were well guarded against any attack he could mount, armed as he was, even with his Bears. The Quickwood had to make it to Southern Command, where it would be used to kill Reapers instead of hold up waterproofed canvas. But if he simply decamped and marched across the river, his chances of ever seeing the Boston Mountains were negligible.
Realizing sleep was impossible, he rose, dressed and found an ax. He wandered around the camp, nodding to the men on firewatch, until he found piled cords of firewood. David Valentine split fulls into quarters and quarters into kindling until he could drop into his bunk, body soaked with sweat even in the cold night air, muscles aflame, fretful thoughts finally beaten into numbness.
Chapter Six
The Arkansas River, February of the forty-eighth year of the Kurian Order: Part of the defense strategy of the Free Territory was simple inaccessibility. Southern Command tore up railroads leading into the Ozarks, broke roadbeds down, wrecked bridges, let forests grow over airstrips, and flooded bayous long since drained by the Corps of Engineers. As part of this strategy Southern Command rendered the Arkansas River unnavigable by destroying locks, sinking snags and pulling down levees, blocking invasion by water east from the Mississippi and west from the old river port on the Verdegris east of Tulsa. Four hundred feet of elevation from the Mississippi to Fort Smith were made impassible to anything other than shallow-draft traffic, thanks to the sand-clogged river and vigilant Guards at Arkansas Post and Fort Gibson. While both strongpoints changed hands several times over the course of the Free Territory’s star-crossed history, they were always eventually won back.
Until now.
In their months of occupation the Kurians have opened the river to some traffic between Little Rock and the Mississippi; small barges are again making the ascent to supply the armies still fighting in the mountains. But Nature takes her part in the conflict as well: a wet winter, early spring and heavy rains have raised waters to levels not matched since the floods of the nineteen twenties. The last controls, hydroelectric dams at the Jed Taylor and Dardanelle Lock & Dams, were destroyed as Southern Command fled to the mountains, leaving the river open to flooding. Only the fact that the levees were destroyed years ago, siphoning some of the water away in secondary floods, has saved the new masters of the Ruins so far.
But the river is rising.
The irony of the situation was not lost on David Valentine. He drove his men, enlisted and officers alike, in an exhausting war against the swelling Arkansas River. A wall of sandbags was the battle line. On the one side of the miles of sandbags, pumps and drainage ditches were the war materials of Consul Solon’s military millstone, now grinding Southern Command into chicken feed. On the other side swelled a God-given natural disaster waiting to strike a blow for their Cause potentially more damaging than even batteries of heavy artillery with the town in their sights could hope to do.
Nonetheless he threw his men’s bodies against the river. Even Ahn-Kha stood waist-deep in cold water, hardly stopping to eat, plunging his long arms again and again into the base of the levee, digging sluices for the pumps.
The endless labor inured his men to living hearth-to-hearth with the Quislings. When Tucker and his men handed out new AOT uniforms—a mottle of sea greens and browns, some with the look of reclaimed and redyed clothing about them—Post brought them in groups before Narcisse, who marked their foreheads in a vaudou version of the anointing of the ashes. She smeared them with a red paste and flicked them about the head and neck with a powdered white feather, chanting in her Haitian Creole. Even Styachowski submitted to it in good humor, after Narcisse explained to her and Valentine that it was just for show: The paste was winterberry with a touch of poison sumac to give it a tingle. Narcisse promised the men that the ritual would help them fool the enemy, guard their tongues and curse any who deliberately gave away their true allegiance so that any reward given by the Kurians would turn to ash and their hearts’ blood to sand. Valentine watched M’Daw’s face as he underwent the anointing; there would be a brass ring for him and land of his choosing if he were to go over to his old masters, and it would be so easy. So very easy. Just a word or two in the right ear at the wrong moment. The healthy respect for Narcisse’s powers M’Daw had gained when she changed the old Quisling’s bowels to the biological equivalent of a fire hose showed itself when he jumped at her touch as though she carried electrical current.
Valentine had considered assigning someone unobtrusive but reliable, like the Texan drover Jefferson, to keep an eye on M’Daw, but the old Quisling had been as willing as any on the march, and complained not at all. Valentine was inclined to trust him. Keeping track of worries in the current predicament was like following individual ants pouring from a kicked-open hill.
Mrs. Smalls was the only one excepted from the ceremony, though Narcisse ministered to the pregnant woman as midwife and cook. She and her husband were confined to their tent. The baby had dropped, and they were expecting it to be born any day.
Valentine had Mrs. Smalls on his mind as he paced back and forth at the drainage ditch, watching the next two truck-loads of sand and bags make their way to the waiting shovel-wielding prisoners.
“Your shift was over a half hour ago, sir,” Styachowski said. She passed him a hot cup of roasted chicory coffee, sweetened to a syrup with molasses. The mixture had been passed around as the closest thing to real coffee they could make in quantity.
Valentine gulped and looked through the steam at Styachowski. Even dripping wet she managed to look neat, though there were circles under her eyes, made worse by pallid skin and close-cropped hair. Styachowski had been tireless at the riverbank, still working when men twice her size dropped in exhaustion.
“I can go a couple more hours. Do two more dry in your bunk, Styachowski.”
“I can—”
He swiveled his gaze to the prisoners. “Hey, you two there, don’t pack ’em like sausages, or they’ll burst under pressure.”
“Sorry, sir,” the prisoner with the shovel replied. He wore a faded Guard uniform with POW stenciled in orange across his back and down his pant leg.
“Sorry, Styachowski, you were saying?
“Nothing, sir.”
“Then move along. I’ll cover your duty.”
“Neither of you ever quit,” Styachowski said, looking down at Ahn-Kha. The Grog grasped a seventy-pound sandbag in each hand and stuffed them at the bottom of the levee. “He’s like a machine; I don’t worry about him. You, on the other hand—”
“Can take care of myself. As you said, I spend my time shouting, not moving earth.”
“Then why do you have mud up to your neck?”
“Clumsiness.”
“I’ve seen you walk across a two-strand rope bridge without breaking stride. I doubt it.”
“You’ll spend eight hours in your bunk, Styachowski. That’s an order.”
She lifted her chin and opened her mouth—her cropped hair would have bristled were it not wet—but no sound came out for a second. “Yes, sir,” she finally said. She waited to turn; Post and a corporal were trotting along the rim of the drainage ditch.
“Sir,” Post said excitedly. “We’ve got a big bulge up next to where it’s reinforced on that old park bench. “It looks like it’ll give way any minute.”
“Take Rodger’s squad and shore it up,” Valentine said, leaning around the wide shoulders of his lieutenant to take a look.
“It’s in Captain Urfurt’s section,” Post added quietly, referring to the Quisling responsible for the length east of Valentine’s. “He’s dealing with a broken pump, hasn’t noticed it and none of his prisoners are anxious to bring it to his attention. Know what I mean?”
“Shore it up, Will.”
“But—”
“I’m not used to giving orders twice,” Valentine said, his voice not a shout, but not conversational either. He’d never raised his voice to Post before, outside the din of battle. He rounded on Styachowski like a bar brawler who’s felled one opponent and is looking to loosen some teeth in another. “Speaking of which, why aren’t you in your bunk, Styachowski?”
“Sir,” they both chirped, backing away to obey.
Valentine raised his mug. Some artist had painted a yellow star on it, and added “We Build New Columbia: Crossroads of the Future” in neat brushstrokes before glazing it. The incessant rain had already chilled the coffee. It tasted like dry leaves and old gum.
A whooping shout of joy came from his section of levee. Valentine saw two bedraggled men—the one with a hat belonged to his group, the other had the orange POW stenciling. Both men had skin the color of milk chocolate, long, handsome faces and similar silhouettes as they embraced.
Valentine had feared a moment like this. “Ahn-Kha,” he said as he trotted over to the pair.
“Lord bless, Dake, I knew you made it out of the pocket. What gives, slick?” the one in the POW fatigues said.
Valentine thought his soldier’s name might be Abica. Dake Abica sounded right in his head.
He heard Ahn-Kha’s squelching footsteps behind. “You there, Abica,” he shouted, as a sergeant hurried to interpose. “Come over here.”
Abica put a hand on the arm of his relative—
“Alone!” Valentine shouted. “Ahn-Kha, keep an eye on that man.”
“Be cool, Clip,” Abica said. He approached Valentine.
The sergeant, a former supply clerk named Roybesson, joined him, instinctively placing herself facing both Valentine and Abica.
“Sorry, sir,” Abica said. “That’s my brother Cli—Clipton. Third Cavalry regiment, light artillery. He’s smart and—”
“I don’t need his Q file, Abica,” Valentine said. “Roybesson, if those two speak again, you’ll wish you’d been bit with Ravies Six. Got me?”
She blanched but answered quickly enough. “Yes, sir.”
“Sir, we could—” Abica began.
“Private, we’re going to talk to your brother in my tent. You, me and Ahn-Kha. If you don’t do exactly as I say, Ahn-Kha’ll kill your brother and you’ll spend the rest of our time here in a tiger cage. Near the dike, so if it breaks we’ll get a nice loud warning before you drown.”
Abica’s eyes flamed, and Valentine stared until Abica dropped his gaze to his feet.
“We go about this right, your brother will be in your tent with you tonight.”
The private and his sergeant both unclenched their legs at that. Valentine forced a friendly smile. “We’ll need some playacting out of you first, Abica.”
The form read:LIMITED PARDON
This document grants provisional immunity for any and all previous offenses against the Kurian Order. By signing it the pardon applicant renounces, completely and irrevocably, its former affiliations, begs forgiveness for its crimes, and asks for the privileges and benefits of fellowship in the human community.
I, ___________________________________________, seek a place within and protection of the Trans-Mississippi Extended District. I agree to obey the orders of my lawful superiors who will take my life forfeit if I violate this oath.
Sworn this (day)______ of (month)______, (year)_____.
Signed:_______________________________________
Witnessed: ____________________________________
Recorded and sealed: ____________________________
A lined-off empty space in the lower right-hand corner waited for a cheap foil seal.
Valentine sat at his field desk, a slightly warped office table resting unsteadily on the plywood floor of his tent, hating himself for what he was about to do. This bit of playacting was the only alternative, and if it went wrong—
Cross that bridge when you come to it. The form, placed with a dozen others like it on a clipboard complete with tied-on ballpoint pen, rested next to an oversized shot glass.
The POW, his eyes shaded from the single bulb by his thick brow, stood before him. Abica stood behind, his sergeant just outside the tent. Ahn-Kha rested on his knuckles, a little stooped over in the confines of the wood frame and canvas. The drizzle outside grew heavier and lighter in fits, reminding Valentine of the sound of gentle surf on the Texas coast.