by Giselle Ava
“Why won’t you fight?”
Thomas looks up at me. “We’ve been fighting this whole time, Arthur. The question is, why did we keep fighting when all we were doing was punching against a brick wall that’s made of spikes, compounding our losses by the day, sometimes even by the hour?” He looks past me, to the spaces where the men had vanished. “You adopt the same mentality as those men, you start thinking you can meet chaos with chaos and come out with anything but more chaos, that sort of thinking doesn’t work anymore and we’ve seen that. You’ll just end up dead.” He looks at me like he knows something, a stern look, pinched face like he’s smelt something off. “Swift action leads to swift destruction. That’s how we unravelled so quickly.”
What do you know, Thomas? I’m sure I’ve never met him before. He knew Mildred Piper. He knew her well, apparently. I study his eyes; it’s an accusing glare.
You don’t need to have met a man to know him, says the whine.
I know his kind, is what I decide. Careful and precise.
“We’ll bide our time,” Thomas says.
“For invasion,” I respond.
Thomas slides off the desk and, in the corner of the room, Frederick bristles. Thomas is shorter than I am but there’s another few inches of confident air lifting him. “You’re not in charge here, Arthur. You don’t get to make the call. And be grateful for that, because it just might happen that your decision ends in bloodshed, and we can’t have any more of that.”
I stand my ground. Thomas is unbending. You push against him, he’ll just push back. You disagree, he’ll tell you to walk the other way and agree to disagree. I glance at Frederick out of the corner of my eye and Thomas turns around, returning to his desk.
“Everything okay, Walter?” Thomas says.
Walter blinks as though from a trance. “Yes.”
Thomas looks at him and says, “Go grab some dinner.”
Walter nods and glances at me before leaving. It’s only for a split second but it leaves an impression. For that one second, I’m back in the church and the creatures with the red eyes have us surrounded. Did they really look like that, or did I imagine it? Could such creatures exist? And the things they showed us, they weren’t real? Couldn’t be.
And yet…
“Frederick, tell him what we’re up against,” Thomas says, cracking open a packet of peanuts at his desk and sitting once again on the edge, seeming not to pay attention to us.
Frederick steps out of the shadow into the light, halfway between myself and Thomas. “There was a skirmish about fifteen kilometres away at one of our neighbouring outposts. You’ll know the man involved. Horace Brackenbury.”
I do know the man. The image of a corpulent fella obsessed with books and philosophy comes to mind, a man who loves good wine and winning every game of cards.
“What happened to him?” I ask.
“Outnumbered several to one. All captured.”
“Three casualties,” Thomas adds.
“Well Brackenbury ain’t such a great representation of our strength,” I say. “He didn’t fight in the war. I’m not even sure he’s Unkindly, just morbidly obese.”
“Just this morning,” Frederick says, “another group led by a man who’s fought in more wars than both of us, this man led an assault on one of Fortescue’s stations just outside the Plaza. They were wiped out. Obliterated. Several were captured.”
I look from Frederick to Thomas, who bites down on a peanut. You can hear it crack between his teeth. He fingers the contents of the packet and doesn’t look back at me.
“Yeah. People are dying,” I say. “They will keep dying.”
“Don’t lecture me about death,” Thomas says with a sharp glare. There are deep bags underneath his eyes. “You want to know what happened to Mildred? What happened to our revolution? Foolhardiness killed her. What ruined us was soldiers making decisions of leadership. The revolution needs a level head now, not men like you. You want to fight, Arthur? By all means, fight. But fighting ruined us and it will continue to ruin us.”
I look at Frederick.
“We have to proceed with caution,” Frederick says.
“You’re lying to yourself,” I tell him.
Frederick says nothing, just stares back at me. A peanut goes crunch, exploding into minute shards in Thomas’s mouth. He chews on it without looking at me.
I don’t have to listen to this. I turn and walk away, feeling their glares piercing my back. As I walk through the encampment, I spot Willcocks coming my way. He looks at me, white moustache sticking up with more than a finger-pinch of wax. I follow the smell of stew to a large pot underneath a white tarp. Spot fires of people lounge in the area, none I recognise.
I grab some stew and pace.
Who is he?
Who is who?
Who is Thomas?
You already know that.
Why do you keep talking in riddles?
Why do you keep asking dumb questions?
I groan. The stew is hot as it fills me and I let out a sigh of my own, feeling the familiar sensation of the whine in my ears, the red light it emanates. I sit down at the foot of a stone wall with a hooky board on it, rubbery red rings hanging from the hooks.
I look around at the people here and I think to myself, they’ll all die. There’s a spy among us, there are patrols still executing us on the streets. Fortescue knows where we are and the chances are he knows a lot more. And we know nothing, because Fortescue Plaza has gone dark and here’s Thomas doing nothing about it. We’re just reacting, stalling—but what for?
You can practically feel the ground above our heads trembling under the weight of Fortescue’s approach. How badly are we outnumbered?
When you’ve spent so long walking through army barracks, you become accustomed to the sound of flesh on flesh, fists against muscle, grunts with spit flying on mud. I hear this now and I look up, slipping stew between my lips. A young boy follows me as I walk through the encampment towards these sounds. The slap of hard skin. Somebody shouts unintelligibly. The boy’s mother ushers him away from me but I just pretend they’re not there.
There’s a spar going on. Two guys trade blows while a couple other guys look on. One of them has hair and the other one doesn’t, and there’s not much else you can do to distinguish them. As I arrive, the man with no hair drops, his back slapping the rough ground.
“Flimsy bastard,” a guy on the side says, stripping his coat and strolling into the circle. I catch the eyes of the man with hair; it’s combed back and jet-black, slick with grease. His eyes are hard. He shakes off his bloody knuckles and walks out of the circle in my general direction, but he stops before me to grab his coat and shrug it on. There’s a guy with a clipboard, taking notes. Slowly, the guy on the ground peels himself off the concrete and sways.
“Do you fight?” I’m asked by the man who’s shrugging on the coat.
I eat stew. “What are you fighting for?”
“Conditioning. And a little bit of money.” He smiles, revealing a very white and healthy set of teeth. He extends his hand. “Henry Nicholson, biggest bastard in London.” His grip is firm. There’s no metal in his hand but you can see it in his forearms and biceps, and behind his eye, which drifts lazily. “Ain’t much else to do here.”
“I’ve noticed,” I say.
One of the guys in the ring curses loudly and an older gentleman with grey around his temples hunkers down on the edge. “Don’t bang each other up too much, lads,” he says. My eye finds another man in the crowd. He’s one of the guys who was speaking to Thomas earlier. Tall, buzzcut, brows. He notices me. I keep staring at him, distantly.
“Who’s that?” I ask Nicholson.
Nicholson is smiling smugly as he turns. “Roy Stirling.” He throws his bare foot into a boot and then hefts it up onto a wooden barrel, tying the laces.
Roy Stirling, what are you up to?
He lights a cigarette and sticks it between his teeth.
For
some reason, I’m thinking about Frederick. My closest friend. To see him standing there by Thomas Cobbe’s side, like his lackey. What’s he listening to on the other end of that copper wire? What is Thomas Cobbe’s end game? What is he stalling for?
There’s Roy Stirling, he wants to fight.
Here’s Nicholson, a fighter. They’re sparring.
There’s Walter Milne, and Leslie Barrow, and Marianne Hopkins.
My friend from before, now called Dead George.
I’m thinking about Willcocks, or Sir Willcocks to Walter.
And Vanessa. Who is she to Thomas? Who are any of these people to Thomas? Who am I to Thomas? There’s a voice in my ear and it’s saying this:
Thomas is the most powerful figure in the revolution.
I feel a spike of envy, which I quickly choke back down.
“We have to send help,” Roy Stirling had said earlier. I can see him now. I can see those words kempt up in his brain. “We know where they are,” is what he’d said.
“So do you fight?” says Nicholson, his boot thumping the concrete. His other one leaps up onto the wooden barrel and I watch his fingers begin to tie the laces.
“Yeah,” I say in a grunt. “You feeling conditioned?”
He looks at me oddly. “Pardon me?”
“I’m thinking of doing some killing.”
Those Who Fight
There’s a whine in my ear and this is what it says:
You’re really doing this.
Yes. I’m the only one who can do this. I’m the only one who knows how. You can tell me how we failed last time, how foolhardiness killed Mildred Piper, killed the revolution. You can whine there like an annoying red light in my head, but here’s the thing:
There’s a difference between learning from your mistakes and outright avoiding any semblance of them. We can stall here in the place called the Crossroads, a place that Fortescue goddamn well knows about, and we can avoid any and all conflict—and then be obliterated when he sends his armies down here to wipe us out as we sleep.
Or we can fight.
Fight better.
I’m standing in a tent facing the wall and Frederick is on a chair, watching me. Always watching is that man. Always waiting for something. No wonder he gets along so well with Thomas. There’s a steaming mug of tea on the bench beside him.
I drop my shoulders and exhale.
“What went wrong?” I say, almost a whisper. I turn around to face Frederick. The only other sound is a radio tuned to a dead channel, buzzing and slurping at noise.
“I think you know what happened, Arthur.”
“Enough with the mind games.”
“They offered us peace. We turned them down. Half of us didn’t know what the bloody hell was going on. Somewhere along the line was a breakdown in communication. We didn’t know whether to fight, to run, or to lower our guns and stand down. And to be completely honest, Arthur, watching you gives me overwhelming anxiety.”
“But what went wrong?”
“A million things. We’d go mad trying to pinpoint the parts; we can only know the result. Mildred Piper died and the rest of us went down with her.”
“Did I know her?”
“I don’t know, Arthur.”
“But I knew Thomas.”
Breath explodes out of Frederick’s mouth. “Jesus, Arthur, would you slow down?” He scoops up his teacup and takes a sip. It’s green tea, steaming before his eyes. There were peace talks and there was an agreement in place to end the fighting. This I know. But we burned it to the ground—I played some part in this. I must have known Mildred. And somehow Thomas was thereabouts, but we never met, not physically.
I’m trying to picture a world in which the Piper Revolution and Fortescue’s clan come to a peace agreement, trying to picture a world in which the fighting just stops.
You can’t imagine such a world exists, can you?
“Nobody else was there when it happened,” Frederick says. “If I were to place my bets, and to my knowledge, I believe you were there. And I think Mildred was too.” He’s not looking at me anymore, staring through the steam from his green teacup. “There was a conversation, or perhaps something else. When it began, there were peace talks. By the end…” He shakes his head and now he’s staring at me, cautiously tilting his teacup against his bottom lip.
“Thomas doesn’t like you,” Frederick says. “He doesn’t trust you. I know for a fact he wasn’t there in the room where it happened, but he knows something.” Frederick stands for the first time, walks closer towards me. “You want things to wind up differently this time round?” He pauses. “You’ll want to have someone like Thomas Cobbe on your side.”
Frederick walks out of the tent.
I follow him outside, and then move in the other direction with my hands thrust into my coat pockets. I find Roy Stirling sitting on his own outside a tent, smoking a cigarette. He looks up at me and plucks the cigarette out of his mouth.
“I keep seeing you,” Stirling says.
“I overheard you talking to Thomas earlier. If you want to fight, I’m with you. We’ll go straight to this outpost and take it back from Fortescue’s men. Nobody has to know.”
Stirling furrows his brows and stands, chewing on his cigarette. “Who are you?”
“I’m Arthur,” I tell him.
He nods, offering his hand. I grab it.
“Roy Stirling,” he says. “A pleasure.”
The two of us work through the encampment, Stirling leaving a trail of smoke in his wake. Nobody looks at us. We reach Nicholson’s tent. He’s sitting cross-legged on the ground and there are two other men with him, bowls of stew cupped in hands, cards between them. Nicholson has no food; he’s wrapping his bruised hands in bandages.
Nicholson stands when we enter. “I have the weapons.” He crosses the room and opens a trashcan to pull out pistols, distributing them throughout the room. The other two men stand. “This is Percy and Redvers,” Nicholson says, tossing them pistols. “The Lennox brothers.”
I take one of the guns in my hand and observe it.
“Who else do we have?” Nicholson says with fervour.
I tell them I know a couple guys who might fit the bill. We’re walking through the encampment in a loose knot, our weapons hanging from our belts. There’s a man playing piano in the bar, and a blue ghost sitting on a table playing a dice game.
“George,” I say.
George addresses the men at the table. “A moment.”
We step into the shadows.
“Fortescue’s men have been clamping down on a number of outposts,” I tell him. “We’re going to extend our help. Would you like to join us?”
“May I finish the game?” he asks.
I glance at the men playing dice, drunk. “No.”
“You are so very charming.” He looks behind me. There’s Nicholson, Stirling, and the Lennox brothers. And somebody else, entering my field of view. Marianne Hopkins.
“Gentlemen,” she says.
“Could you do me a favour, Marianne,” I say.
She looks up at me, pursing her lips. “Are you going somewhere?”
“We are. Thomas won’t approve but don’t bother going to him about it.”
“I wasn’t planning on it. Can I speak with you, Arthur?”
I frown, motioning for Dead George to go with the others, and follow Marianne to another corner of the bar. Her breath smells of tobacco. She stands on the tips of her toes and lowers her voice. Her sharp clipboard is stabbing my upper ribs.
“I know where you’re going,” Marianne says. “I know what Stirling wants. He has a personal connection to one of the men at that outpost. They are in regular contact. Thomas’s advice against going there is valid—Fortescue’s men have turned it into a death camp.”
“What are you suggesting?”
Marianne shrugs, slipping something papery into my hand. I glance down at the scribbled-down name. John Montgomery. It means nothing to me. She meets
my eye. “This man is Bernard Craxton’s replacement, thanks to you shooting him in the face. They say he witnessed something spectacular not too long ago, something that left him with a soft spot for…folk of Unkindly nature. He arrived at the outpost three hours ago and is currently processing the prisoners. Find this man. Talk to him. You may have something there.”
I look back at the name.
John Montgomery.
The slip of paper disappears inside my pocket.
“My turn,” I tell her, not making eye contact and speaking low. “There’s a spy here that’s been feeding information to Fortescue’s men. I’m sure you already know, but if you know something, or if there are names to take note of, do pass it on.”
“Where did you hear this?” she asks me.
“You don’t need to know that,” I say.
“I see. I will see what I can find.”
“Good.” I step away from her and watch her leave the shadows, disappearing from sight. The piano music stops and there’s a small round of applause. I glance at the man on the piano, Leslie Barrow, and I’m wondering where Walter is.
Roy Stirling leans against the wall nearby. “What did she want?”
I tell him about Montgomery but it’s Dead George who answers.
“I know that name,” George says as we gather round in the dark and Leslie Barrow begins to play a slow, scintillating jazz tune on his grand piano. There are three things we learn from Dead George about John Montgomery. The first is that he believes her. The second is that Montgomery is a scientist who oversaw experimental projects during the war. The last thing, and this thing is what sticks with me, is that Montgomery was part of the tribunal who passed the law allowing the militarisation of people they called Unkindly.
“I don’t like the idea of getting involved with them,” Nicholson tells me. “I see no reason we should shake hands with one of the men responsible for our pain.”
I consider what he’s saying, but there’s something else.
What are you thinking, Arthur?
Walter Milne enters the bar. The tall, bald man would stick out anywhere, but he does now more so than ever. He walks right up to me, stares me in the eye. You look into many eyes when you’re fighting on the battlefield. A man like me has seen the best and worst of humanity, men enraptured by death, by love, by grief, and everything in between.