The Books of the Wars (23 page)

"I, myself, have not gone to the Meadows. I have, instead, chosen to await the end in my own house, surrounded by my writings and my thoughts. Strange, though I can apparently view the situation with gratifying coolness and objectivity, I could not bring myself to swear allegiance to either side; it could well be that this apathy (that is the wrong word) will be rewarded with eternal damnation. Or it could be that my eldest son, a turret captain on the battleship
Eringold,
may save me (and what of my other two sons? I suspect that they have joined the enemy, but I must not think of that). I have no idea of what shall become of me or of this thing called my soul, and, in the end, I really do not care. Like the authors of
Survivors
and
Eric,
I am tired; I feel that I have long overstayed my time on earth, just as I feel that earth has itself overstayed its proper time."

When the bleeding ship entered the harbor, Moreth drove his sword hilt into the ground and fell upon the blade.

Forty percent of the city's original population had stayed behind, immobilized by confusion or the hopeful emptiness such as had afflicted Moreth. Most of those who had not taken their own lives by that time slowly made their way down to the harbor to see the ship, not to greet her, for they knew that her survival meant that time was to continue and the grinding agony of previous ages would once again be multiplied.

She was named the
Havengore,
after another cruiser which had fought at a previous false-Armageddon; now she was as tragic as her namesake must once have been for they were both, in their time, the lone surviving great ship of once-powerful fleets.

The first
Havengore
had finally contrived to die an honorable death in a battle which, if it did not accomplish all that it was intended to, at least offered an appropriate death to all who fought there. Yet, so disorganized had the battles become that now there were survivors, men and ships even more confused than those who had never gone to the Meadows; they were the ash-men spoken of in
Survivors
and
Eric.
They had heard voices which had instilled in them an absolutely unshakable conviction that
this
, finally, was to be the last act of mankind. They had seen things after which a man had almost no choice but to die. They had fought alongside angels, against demons and devils; and when the noise and smoke had settled, they found themselves alone on the Meadows. The armies had vanished as one would have thought, leaving only their equipment behind to show the survivors there had indeed been a battle. They also left behind pain and despair and hopelessness that was beyond words.

It had taken eight months for the battered cruiser to sail home, dropping off men along the coast, stopping now and then to jury-rig some particularly desperate repairs. She brought five hundred of the Republics' men with her, men who were still trying to decide if they had in some way failed to act in the manner which had been expected of them, or if they had been deserted by their commanders.

She slid past the breakwater at three knots, her twisted and mutilated hull leaving a multitude of small wakes in the quiet water. "B" turret was gone and the bridge immediately behind it had been caved in. The wing of the aircraft which had rammed the ship at that point jutted out over "A" turret, bent and warped from the fires which had welded it to the decks. Three holes of varying diameter could be seen at the waterline; the crane at the stern was bent down until its tip trailed in the water. She was scorched in many places from fires and most of her secondary armament appeared to be out of commission. Two of the seven Republics'flags hung uncertainly at three-quarters mast.

It was very quiet. Not even the sea gulls called any welcome to her; most of them had left with the fleet, a year before. Only silent people, who looked as if they had not slept for months, stared out at the ship and at men who looked distressingly like themselves. The loudest noise was the falling of water as the
Havengore
's pumps tried to limit the ship's portside list to five degrees.

They all wondered what they should do now. Cry, suicide, accuse someone, anyone? But men could be seen working aboard the cruiser, caring for her, trying to ease her spin; they brought her through the harbor, heading for the shallow water which flanked the mouth of the Goerlin River. The engines were stopped and the remaining anchor let down. By dusk the
Havengore
had settled into the sand on a roughly even keel, the water about ten feet above the waterline.

By noon of the next day they had taken the dead off the cruiser and most of the living; some of her original crew had elected to stay with her, for a while at least.

The shock over the failure of the Meadow War lingered over the city and its reduced population for more than a year. Then, quoting reassuring verses from Scripture or just swearing, the people began to reorganize, giving the city some semblance of its former life.

Aside from the stunted renewal of trade and farming, two great projects came to occupy the city. The first of these was the building of a great cathedral. The predictable reactions to the War's failure would have hardly seemed to have pointed in such a direction, but, with time, as people became accustomed to the world which they were now forced to live in, as they heard even more clearly the wind howling through empty houses and across the lonely earth, they were thrown back upon their initial faith. Perhaps the War would have ended time if they all had gone to the Meadows? Perhaps there were undetected flaws in those who went which prevented a successful conclusion to time?

Besides, when you could bury your life under a slowly growing mosaic proclaiming the glories of the Creator, the taste of your hopes seemed a little less bitter. Eventually some of the men who had seen things which they were sure would cause madness came to look upon those memories as miracles, divine gifts to be treasured for their splendor. The speculations on a failure on the part of the deity grew progressively weaker as the cathedral became a symbol of continuing heavenly favor.

The church was built on top of a small hill, to the west of the city walls. From its steps a road of marble slabs was laid, through the Artillery Gate, where it met the Avenue of Victories with its columns and monuments to ancient battles; then straight down to the harbor and the Sea past the breakwater.

It was quite a splendid road and found a great deal of favor with what still remained of the commercial and landed aristocracy. It became something of a ritual to take one's family out of the city on summer evenings, up to the cathedral to inspect its glacial progress, to comment on some particularly beautiful piece of stained glass which had just arrived from Ihetah-Incalam or wrought iron from New Svald. They stayed there talking with their friends because it was cool and the smells of the inner city could not reach their nostrils. But mostly, they waited for it to get dark, so on walking home, they could not see the dirty, deserted city and harbor.

They seldom visited the harbor anymore and even the briefly revived sea trade soon began to wither. The city became more insulated from the rest of the world, carrying on its chief business within itself, venturing outside only to secure certain luxuries it could not manufacture domestically. The last steel merchantmen had vanished long before the fleet had sailed to the Meadows, but even then a sizable collection of wooden steam and sailing ships had helped to tie the city with such distant points as the Dresau Islands and the crumbling petrochemical establishments of Cynibal on Blackwoods Bay. Now most of these were gone too, partly because the city's great men no longer saw much reason to journey abroad, and also because the War had effectively removed the old technologies and wealths which had made trade worthwhile. Everywhere in the world, only the merest shadow of what had been remained; and what had been was precious little in the first place.

Aside from the cathedral, the only real activity to be found was at the Old Navy Dock. From there a feeble but steady stream of small boats and rafts sailed the short distance to where the old cruiser was still aground. The reconstruction of the ship was looked upon with a good deal less sympathy than was the cathedral by most of the city. Most of the people who had been to the War remained with the ship as did many of the old sailing men who, although they had not gone to the Meadows, found more comfort in working with armor plate than with glass and ornamental iron. Less than a third of the War's veterans devoted themselves to the new cathedral, but along with them were virtually all of the non-seafaring folk who had stayed home, looking now, perhaps, for a convenient way to prove that they too had found a commitment to the Creator and therefore should not be forgotten when the
real
Armageddon was finally called.

In ten years' time they had laid the foundations and the floor of the nave; the cruiser had also shown much progress and was approaching a marginally seaworthy state, but then only the people directly connected with her really cared. True, there had been a rather ugly confrontation between the aged naval officers who had laid claim to her and the officials of the municipal government who suddenly perceived some advantage in having the only steam-driven, steel warship on the coast (excepting, that is, Enador's two river monitors). The issue was resolved when two five-inch shells landed in front of the cathedral; the only casualty was a draft horse, but the point was made.

The seafarers said they were going back to the Meadows, if they could find them, to join other stragglers and fight against still more stragglers. The city was glad to be rid of the rusting hulk and her crew of fanatics. In the eleven years since the cruiser had returned, and thus alerted the eastern shorelands of the world to the failure of the War, the messianic, all-consuming faith that had first sent them to the Meadows had become less and less fashionable. Even the memories of what some men had seen faded; eventually they passed from the stage of memory to lapse back into the form of Scriptural allegory, back into the turns of phrase they had worn before assuming concrete form, for a little while, on earth.

The cathedral now not only allowed one to feel a bit less pain—working on the cruiser could do that—but also inspired new thoughts of a reassuringly familiar and distant character. The cruiser would, within the foreseeable future, sail back and try to die again; but the cathedral, with its eternal immovability, its artistry, was comfortably removed from the brutal reality that seemed to keep trying to re-impose its rule over the earth.

It was in the early fall when the great ship staggered past the breakwater, heavy black smoke from low-grade fuel oil pouring from her stacks. There were no flags, no crowds to see her off as there had been twelve years ago. Her existence was quickly forgotten; the city continued its policies of conscious and unconscious contraction, encysting itself from its fellow, similarly encysted city-states, with only the cathedral growing.

The cathedral itself was finished within a hundred years of its beginning, two decades ahead of schedule. Of course, its building had virtually ruined an already frail economy; but at least its magnificence could blind the eye to the decaying walls and buildings of the city, the silted-up harbor, so that now it was no longer necessary to wait until night to go home.

There was a compensation of sorts; the building was quite rightly considered to be an engineering and artistic triumph of its age. From all around the edge of the world came pilgrims traveling to the town for all the endless reasons that force men to undertake such perilous journeys.

So, despite its efforts to insulate itself from the rest of the world, the pilgrims kept the city tied to Enom and Iannarrow, and to the Meadows. According to the wanderers, two calls for Wars in the Meadows had been sent out during the century in which the church was being built. Both had apparently served to end creation only for those who went and the city's populace took a certain smug pride in their having avoided these abortive Armageddons.

But the Wars continued, by now apparently an indistinct series of skirmishes, fed by the survivors of the main battles and by those whom the prophets could still convince that the Millennium was at hand. On occasion, the western horizon flickered red-orange and the votive lamps in the cathedral would swing embarrassingly when there was no draft.

Amon VanRoark's father had grown up with the cathedral, first as an apprentice mason, journeyman, and then as a sub-deacon; therefore it was not so very surprising that he turned out a great deal like it, solid, comfortable, absolutely secure in the idea of eternal time. He found it quite easy to ignore the ramblings of disreputable pilgrims and the lamps swinging ever so slightly during mass. The passage of survivors or new men hurrying to the Meadows, the smoke stains of ships below the horizon, even the occasional glitter of silver in the sky and the far rumblings of aircraft high above failed to shake his faith in the rightness of the way things were.

Considering that his wife was of virtually the same mold, it was something of a puzzle that the young Van-Roark did not grow up along similar lines. Whether it was the insidious influence of the colony of pilgrims that always surrounded the cathedral, or simply an unusually active imagination, the boy preferred the unknown shadow-lands of the past and its remains. The Old Navy Dock with its ruined factories, the old launches and tugboats awash at their moorings, fascinated him much more than the cool, majestic quiet of the cathedral and its liturgical library. The boy spent too much time on the north side of the harbor and along the banks of the Goerlin River, where still more wrecked shipyards and foundries stood, to be socially acceptable.

The disorganization implicit in the world, with the still-usable remains of advanced technologies existing in the middle of cultures determined to sleepwalk themselves into a standing grave, lent an almost surrealistic air to the world, to VanRoark's eyes at least. It was almost as if time, getting ready to finish its assigned purpose, had somehow gotten fouled up and was now trying desperately to get itself sorted out. When he thought of things like this, a very painful feeling came over him: the feeling of desertion that had first prompted the work on the cruiser and the cathedral.