Authors: Walter Basho
Aengus gave a little smile to Albert. He looked more relaxed than he had in a while.
Albert smiled back for a moment, and then said to Aengus, “We’re ready. We’re ready to wipe them off the face of the fucking world.”
Aengus stared at him in shock, then turned away. “We should stay alert,” he said.
They had gotten so deeply into the forest that everywhere was just the forest, all around them and forever, as deep as it was going to get. They hacked through brush up to their chests. The canopy above covered them for miles and miles. No one had seen the sun for weeks now.
During the day, Albert and Aengus didn’t look at each other, didn’t talk. At night, they grabbed and gnawed at each other with desperation. Their tent was like a small burning box where everything they felt and feared each day could burst out. In this container they could only damage each other. Albert clung to Aengus with every nerve, and Aengus to him. They desperately needed to be like everything around them, vast and chaotic, cruel and seething with life.
They finished. Aengus pushed himself away from Albert. “I don’t want to feel like this anymore.” He broke into sobs. “I want to go home.”
“I don’t . . . what did I do?” Albert said, and then, as an afterthought, “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t . . . you’re different now. You used to be tender. You used to need me. Now all you need is to feel like a soldier, and a citizen. And you want to kill. You
crave
it, when did you start
craving
it? I miss you. You’re right here, but I miss you. You don’t have to be like this.”
“You aren’t making any sense. This is me. What do you want? Do you want me to pretend that we’re still farm boys, or in school? I act like a soldier because we’re soldiers. I act like I do because we’re surrounded by thousands of Baixans, who kill us as soon as we drop our guard. Did you manage to notice that? I’m acting how we have to act. We have a mission.”
“
You
have a mission!
You
do. You want to chop your way through all this. I don’t have a mission. I don’t know what any of this is for. Deep down, I don’t think you do either. I think you just want to become some sort of war hero and impress everyone, so that you can go home and make Thomas love you.”
Albert just glared at him.
“Because you love him, and you’re always going to, and . . .” Aengus stared at the top of the tent, at his comfort spot, tears running down his face. “. . . and I knew. I knew that very first night. I knew this was a stupid decision, and I kept right on making it.”
Albert didn’t know what to say. Aengus was wrong, he thought. Thomas had barely occurred to him in the past weeks. His mind had reduced itself to two recurring thoughts: the memory of Baixans tearing Richard apart, and his fantasies of revenge, his dreams of expiating his guilt and sadness on the bodies of Baixans, piled in the streets of their Old City. These thoughts ran through his mind over and over, constantly, like a wheel. But he couldn’t share something so terrible with Aengus. He couldn’t stand seeing him suffer. He drew Aengus close. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I just want to go home,” Aengus shuddered.
The fourth day after they buried Richard, not long after sunrise, they found themselves at the top of a hill that looked down into the Old City of the Baixans.
Neither Albert nor Aengus had ever been to London. They had never seen an Old City. It was vast, starting where they were and spilling down for miles into the valley below them. The city consisted of ruins, metal and stone, as far as the eye could see. It was a skeleton, a mammoth body almost fully decayed. Trees interrupted the ruins, growing through them. A river flowed in the distance, through the middle of the city. Around it, and in pockets beyond, the Baixans had built new villages, many of them resting on the more solid bits of the ruins, topping the old stone with ramshackle arrays of hovels. Albert could see some smoke coming from fires down along the river. The villages were sleepily coming to in the quiet morning. It looked less like a battleground, and more like just an old place where people lived.
They found some spots in the nearby ruins to camp. They had grown up among ruins and found them familiar. The Old City was simply more of it, melting into the ground a century at a time, smooth to the touch, pockmarked with grasses, and heavy in places with trees. These outskirts felt like a weird variegated space, not forest, but not really city either. They leaned against some walls that rose out of soft, thin grass and moss. They put down the tents again. Albert hammered in the tent-posts solidly, as if for the last time. Troops gathered wood and water. The Adepts set up some different tents this time. They were longer, and more beds inside them. Albert knew what these were for, but said nothing to Aengus.
It took hours to establish camp. The sun began to set. A crowd began to gather in the center of the camp. Everyone knew, on some level, what was about to happen. No one wanted to be alone. Soldiers stared at the fires, poked at them, whispered in one another’s ears.
“Do you think we’re too visible?” Aengus asked Albert.
“I get the feeling it doesn’t matter if we’re visible or not,” Albert said. He then saw Sister Clare across the way, sitting quietly and unusually separated from her fellow Adepts. Clare held a box and was staring intently at it. Albert approached her.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello, Albert,” Clare said.
He took a seat, cross-legged, near her. They sat quietly for a while.
“There’s shame in what we do here,” she said.
He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t agree with her, not after Richard. He wanted to burn the trees and raze the villages before them. But Clare had been his teacher, and he hated to see her sadness. He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder.
She reacted, pulling away. “It’s all right, Albert,” she said. “I’m fine.”
He had focused on her intently, and it took him a moment to realize that they weren’t alone. He looked up to see Niall, all belly and chest, staring down at them. “Clare, are you all right?” Niall asked. “There’s a man-boy here, just thought you might want to be aware.”
“I’m fine, Niall,” Clare said. She rose and walked away.
Albert stood as well, and looked at Niall. “What are you on about?” he asked. He felt a bit like a fight.
Niall shrugged. “I was just saying hello, boy,” he said, and walked away.
The night was empty of any Baixans or monsters. It contained only the terror of the troops of the Islands.
In the morning they rose, bleary. Few had slept. They left the tents where they were. Half of the Adepts would go forward, and the others would stay behind with a small retinue of troops. The rest began to march. They marched quietly, in an order and rhythm that was now ingrained.
They wound through the ruins, using the old remnants of buildings to give them cover. The terrain grew more difficult as they advanced, and they spread out more and more. Gradually, it became less a march and more a broad flow of furtive troops. They tried to surround the enemy as much as they could, mutating from a solid column to a broad fan.
Aengus kept with Albert, as did Sister Clare, one of the few Adepts who moved forward with troops in the front lines. They marched with Heather, who was from Over-town and a year older than Albert, and Holden, a blond with big arms, freckles, and a sneer. Holden took nothing seriously, and he and Aengus got into joking banter readily. Holden would offer a remark; Aengus would smile warmly; Holden would blow out a raucous laugh. Albert watched them and saw the old Aengus, the Aengus from Eden-town.
If they end up together, fine
, he thought.
Aengus deserves to be happier than I can make him
.
They had been walking for several miles, settling into an automatic pattern, moving as one body, unthinking, lost in movement and perception. Then Aengus pointed ahead, and they all followed his arm and gaze. They saw a strange, jagged tower of iron in the distance, across the river. They drew closer, more mindfully now. Albert started to make out details of the tower, its latticework structure and the places where it was broken.
The dark masses that surrounded the tower began to come into view as well. Albert could now count the camps of people, hundreds of people, scattered about in groups of tents, milling about fires. From a quick and admittedly nervous assessment, Albert figured it was nearly double their troop count.
“This might be tough,” he said under his breath.
Aengus looked at him, then said, “These aren’t military camps, though. These are just villages, aren’t they?” He paused, then said in shock, “There might be children. What if there are children?”
“Hush,” Albert said. “The children here are just Baixans. We’ve had to kill them before.”
Aengus stared at him in creeping, horrified recognition. Albert felt a swell of contempt, but let it pass, and said, with as much compassion as he could muster: “You didn’t notice, did you? It’s always just a bunch of wild things with terrible eyes. You didn’t notice.” He put his hand on Aengus’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry we’re here, Aengus. I just want you to survive.”
Aengus said, “I won’t do it. I won’t do any more of this.”
“I thought you’d kill a thousand Baixans for what they did to me,” Albert said. “Do you remember that?” It was the worst thing he could say, the most effective means of destroying anything Aengus and he might have held for one another.
I’m good at that, at least
, Albert thought.
I’m good at killing things.
“Look,” he said, “Terra Baixa attacked us, and they will attack us again, don’t you get that? Didn’t all this time marching through this chaos impress that on you? Until this world is civilized, we aren’t safe. That’s why we’re here.”
Albert could feel air between them, the chasm between him and Aengus. He turned away and started checking on the other troops.
They waited. Albert had to tell Holden to shut up exactly once. Finally, Sister Clare locked eyes with Albert. “Everyone is ready. Here comes the signal.”
From behind them came a flare from the Adepts, signaling the attack. Holden let out a shout; Heather echoed him. Other voices joined in. They ran through something that used to be a door, or a window. Right now it was their gateway to war.
Albert shot out toward the camp before him, sword drawn. He wanted to fight. He wanted to kill everything, to claim all this violence for himself, to change everything around him.
He ran toward a group of four Baixans gathered around a fire topped by a pot hung on a cast-iron frame. They didn’t notice him; they were staring at the Adepts’ flare. By the time they registered his presence, it was too late. He slashed across one on his left and kicked the pot over onto two others, splashing its scalding contents over them. Albert turned to the one on his right while the scalded ones screamed.
He saw a young man screaming at the sight of his father’s death. Albert noticed that the scalded two were likely the mother and a sister. He had just attacked a family making their meal. The young man scrambled across the fire, surely burning himself in the process, and dove to cover the rest of his family, to protect them, but also just to hold them. Albert looked into his eyes. They were just eyes.
He remembered his mother saying:
I guess you could call it ‘soldier’? We didn’t have a word like that. It’s different from what we have here. We were just a bunch of people with weapons and a goal.
And he imagined his father saying:
What is ‘warfare’? We didn’t have ‘warfare.’
He let himself see what was happening, the world that was going on outside the veil of his anger, and he let himself see the horror of himself within it all.
The scalded ones were trying to compose themselves. The one who took the bulk of the cauldron was doing better than the one who got the glancing splash; that one still stared at her legs and panted as if they had been cut off. The young man grabbed a burning log and swung it at Albert to keep him away. Albert pitched back a few steps, almost losing his footing, and then sat down firmly on the ground. He bowed his head down and said, “I deserve to die. Just do it.” He managed to say it in Baixan.
The young man could have easily cracked the limb across Albert’s head and ended it, but he didn’t. When Albert looked up, he saw him and his family stumbling into the distance.
He looked around. Some ways off, in the air, he saw a wave of Baixans flying, as if swept up and thrown by an invisible hand. He saw ahead of him many rows of tents, more stove fires, more slaughter. He heard a shout and saw Aengus and Holden rushing forward, to his left, about two hundred yards away, meeting three Baixans at the next set of tents. He leaned over, hunched on his knees. He looked at the ground and it spun.
Albert yelled to them, “Stop! We have to stop.” No one heard him. There was too much distance and noise between them. He tried to stand, but felt too dizzy. He tried to listen to his breath and compose himself. Every nerve shouted at him, every fear stood between him and his breath. He remembered a refrain Sister Alice taught them—
I am on fire, I am calm
—and he repeated it to himself.
After a minute or two, he found the calm to stand and run forward. Someone had started setting the Baixan tents aflame. It hadn’t rained for several days, and the tents went up quickly. The first few had lost their inhabitants already. Two cats leapt from one just as Albert passed. Both of them looked at Albert with annoyance and scurried away, sure of their footing and direction in all of this human confusion. He could still hear Aengus and Holden, and he could see Sister Clare and Heather a short distance away. The magic box Sister Clare held shone a bright gold. She appeared to be immobilizing Baixans so that Heather could easily disembowel them.
He started to call to them, but interrupted himself with a racking cough from the smoke spewing from the tents. Then, out of the smoky fog, the nearest burning tent put forth a big and clearly unhappy human.
The man was enormous. Albert stood ten feet tall, and he barely came to the top of this one’s chest. The man wore a dirty, half-torn tunic and muddy breeches. The breeches bunched up and surrendered all hope of coverage before even reaching his calves. Patchwork hair of all colors peppered his face, his beard roughly the same length as the hair on his head, none of it enough to be called anything more than unshavenness. He hunched over with the weight of his own body, and with what seemed to be an overwhelming disorientation and fatigue. His eyes glowed the weird green of the savages, but not as livid; the glow was dirty and faded. He burst from the tent with a confused roar. Albert jumped back to give him room and prepared to strike, then stopped. The big man stopped with the roar and appeared to be nodding off.