The Books of the Wars (29 page)

Presently, though, they began rounding more headlands, and weaving through a patchwork of islands and archipelagos. The sun shifted, until it rose astern and then on to starboard, over the land. The wind had also shifted and now spilled off the burning cliffs.

Here the territories were utterly unnamed and not even Smythe had the slightest notion of what flags might have flown over the infrequent ruins, or in the service of what gods those hulks might have sailed. But Tapp knew—some of it, anyway. The little man began to come on deck more often, to pace nervously up and down, his eyes flickering between the land and sky.

Every so often he would see something he thought he remembered from eleven years ago, and would scratch furiously at his wound until it bled; and if he did remember he would run for Smythe or VanRoark and point to it and tell how he had passed this very spot so many years ago. But he never seemed quite as sure as he would have liked to have been. He continued to pick at his neck and then he would have to raise a bucket over the side and wash the pus and blood off his hand. By this time the ruins, the devastated factory or church had been left behind.

VanRoark really began to worry about Tapp for, besides his sudden nervousness, he had once again stopped drinking, before sunset anyway. The pain of his disease, which the liquor had previously hidden, now served to once again increase his agitation and brittleness. But unlike the other times, Tapp continued to abstain. VanRoark would ask him if he was looking for anything in particular, some landmark perhaps. Tapp would murmur something indistinct and then move off, away from the younger man.

He continued to drink fairly regularly at night, though, when the ship would heave to along the unfamiliar coast, its jagged outline sometimes spotted with strange luminosities. Then Tapp's voice would come flowing richly out of the darkness: not with the old, quixotic ravings, but a doggerel song, over and over again, with the same words.

"Set amid the thorn trees . . . " The words were slurred but still recognizable.

" . . . her towers soaring high, her sullen flags defiant against the cobalt sky, old Brampton Hall, deserted, wounded, left to die, by allies who turned and fled at Evil's battle cry.

"Then the lads of Brampton Hall, their rifles in their hands, stood and fought the darken'd hordes that strode upon their lands. So here's a cheer for Brampton Hall! Yet her stone walls stand to strive and hold the fall of night against the fall of man!"

The memory of the revelations he'd had about Tapp during his drunk began to fade in VanRoark; the man had become more nervous, admittedly, but it was not like the dread he had shown near Cynibal. It was anticipation, unconnected with any real fear or despair. It seemed once again that perhaps a man like Tapp could fight at the Meadows and fight well.

VanRoark eventually got around to asking Smythe about this Brampton Hall. The librarian ran his hand through his thin straw hair and said that the only thing he could recall was legend.

There had been a battle, he said, a great one which had finally annihilated a power named Salasar or something like that, the power which had resisted utter defeat for almost a millennium. In commemoration of this battle a memorial had been established. Understandably, for the war had been fought in very strange ways, the monument soon became a shrine, the object of a great many pilgrims. A town grew up around it, one in which a great soldier, Thomas St. Clair Brampton, eventually settled and founded a dynasty. The land was barren and hostile, but his descendants, living by the talents of their swords and minds, established a powerful nation. The name of their home, Brampton Hall, was given to the whole territory.

Now, from there it was very dubious, Smythe pointed out. Supposedly, at one of the false-Armageddons, Evil had actually routed the forces of mankind and broken out of the Meadows, raging about and threatening to engulf the entire world. It was stopped at Brampton Hall, whose families, ironically, had declined to go to the Meadows in their lordly contempt for the prophets and their attendant promises and plans. By this time, the armies had reformed and were able to drive Evil back to the Meadows, there to fight another agonizing draw. Brampton Hall itself was virtually wiped out in the holding action, her people for the most part dead or dying and the rest scattering in disgust as far away from the Meadows as possible.

VanRoark waited until Tapp was reasonably drunk and as close to his old moods as he had been for weeks, and then he told him of the librarian's tale. "Ah, true, the lot of it." Tapp sighed. "Except of course, it could do with a bit more to it, more substance, you know. I'm telling you this all straight down because I've seen the Hall. It's built on the mountains overlooking the Burn; I guess it was that battle they sang about that made it that way, so bad and all." Tapp took a thoughtful pull on his bottle, and said, more to himself than VanRoark, "Then I wonder what the old Meadows look like." He closed his eyes and took a much longer drink as he began to remember.

He resumed after the liquor had burned itself out in his throat, speaking very quickly so as not to allow himself too much time for thinking of the Meadows. "Oh, you'll love the Burn, Amon; at least you'll see a ruin with real character, real substance: great stone and steel walls, feet thick, and iron hammerbeams where the roof used to be, each one almost as thick as this tub here."

"We're going there? I thought the Meadows . . . ?" VanRoark trailed off weakly.

Tapp grinned and reached back to scratch his sore. "This Burn is where our army is gathering. Can't very well have us show up piecemeal, without any organization or anything. You weren't listening very well to your prophet when he told you that part."

"I guess not," VanRoark answered back, at ease again in Tapp's company. "But now it's my turn to wonder: I wonder where Evil is gathering."

"And then you weren't listening to that part either."

The grin faded a bit from VanRoark. "Which part?"

"The part where he, whoever he was, called Evil. We could hardly have the Meadows without an Opposition, you know."

VanRoark was getting confused; he had not thought very much about Timonias lately and all that he could dredge up was a vague collection of impressions, even more incomplete and fragmentary than when he had first begun to forget, across from the Isle of Oromund. "He
also
called Evil to the Meadows, the same person?"

"Right." Tapp was not in the least upset by this, which only served to further VanRoark's distress. "Look, you must remember your Timonias calling to those other types too." Indistinct shapes, terrifying in their very lack of definition turned and heaved just below VanRoark's comprehension.

"I don't know; I don't remember."

"When I heard my man—Lord, I can't even remember his name! Old, decrepit sort, I think—eleven years ago, I'm almost positive that he appealed to both sides. I can't see how he could have helped but do that because, remember, the thing he told you about was History and how it had to end. Well, the Opposition is as much a part of that ending as we are, so doesn't it seem right that he should just state the facts and let each man take his pick? That is the whole idea behind the thing, you know."

"All right, maybe Timonias did say something to them. I don't know, but if he did, then it must mean that he could have been the chosen of Evil as well as Good. The distinction of what
he
was would have lain in
our
hearts and not his." Why, VanRoark asked himself, did Tapp seem to be getting more relaxed and natural as the progress of the argument led to some conclusions that had him approaching a near-panic?

Tapp calmly nodded that, yes, that seemed right.

"Then maybe, if Timonias was talking to us all—both them and us, I mean—he would have used the same words." VanRoark was talking very slowly now; how strange that he had never asked himself this: "Then it could mean that
we
are Evil, going to its army! Tapp, what if that's true?"

Tapp shrugged and took another drink.

VanRoark was now desperately trying to find ways out of the corner he had argued himself into. "You were there before, Tapp; how did it seem?"

"Seemed good enough for my tastes."

"But you're not sure, you could have been wrong . . . ?" VanRoark had almost said,
You could be betraying me.

"Amon." Tapp raised his hand to VanRoark's shoulder to calm him, but changed his mind and only touched him lightly. "When I went to the Meadows for the first time it was with the full intention, as far as I could tell, of fighting on the side of Good; that's all. I heard the words, as much as anyone could hear such words, and I left to pledge my soul on the side of Light and God; if the same words are used for the Good as well as the Evil, then it's up to every man to sort out their real meaning, for himself, in his own heart and mind. The army you go to, the men you will die beside, they will be of the same substance as yourself; and if it turns out that you have come to the army of Night, it will be simply because that is what you are and to change that would be impossible. Like I said, though, I believe we are joining the right side."

"But you're still not absolutely sure," VanRoark fairly croaked. "Why are you going back if you're still not sure what you might die in the name of?"

Tapp smiled drunkenly at him. "I will die in the name of what I am, nothing else." He looked at VanRoark for a moment, as if trying to decide whether or not he should keep on speaking. "And what I am now, I think, is neither Good nor Evil. I think, I hope it's Brampton Hall; if I die in the name of that, then this trip and the years spent before it will have been right."

VanRoark waited, expecting some explanation of this remark; when none came and Tapp began drinking again and softly humming his song, the younger man gave a short cry that might have been rage, and ran forward, away from him.

Now it was VanRoark who spent most of his time below, in his hammock, going topside only during the night or early hours of the morning. He had absorbed so much, found so much that was confusing and frightening in people, been surrounded by the reality of the Great Abstractions brought jarringly to earth, devoid of any certainty as to their true identity. The ordered systems he had constantly tried to construct, first around the Sea and then around the infinitely elusive natures of Smythe and Tapp, were now reeling and crashing down upon each other and on top of the new, hideous uncertainties that Tapp had planted in his mind. His consciousness had been stretched from the empty sterility of the Greenbelt to the larger, more nebulous agony that was the entire world; this consciousness had acquired ruins, haunted ones. Questions he should have asked about himself years ago, or forgotten forever, came flooding in on the wake of his distress.

But strangely, the falling, colliding fragments eventually brought him a numbed peace. As they sailed northward he felt washed out; not clean, but nearer to the ordered, hollow confusion of death, the cleanliness of the shroud. He honestly wondered if he should ever feel anything again, ever experience another emotion to the bottom of his soul.

As a child, VanRoark had often sat on the breakwater of his home city and watched the tanners' hawks hunting the more sluggish terns and sea gulls which, in turn, hunted the fish that lived near the wreck-littered entrance. They were fairly large birds, molted white on the belly and underside of the wings, and a leathery tan on top. Exceedingly graceful, they would ride the winds for hours at a time, only moving their wings to gain an occasional few feet of height. When one had picked out a target, it would drift above it, all very easily and relaxed, and lift one wing in a languid roll; when the hawk was on its back, with its body pointed down about fifty degrees, the wings would suddenly be snapped in tight and it would fall. The easy, near-sleeping grace would become blurred with speed and violence; the talons would strike just behind the gull's neck, the power sometimes ripping the whole skull from the body.

The day was something like that, he thought later; they had been moving back into temperate latitudes and the old
Garnet
was behaving herself uncommonly well. He had been on deck, absently talking with Smythe, congratulating their good fortune at the progress of Yarrow's illness, for it meant he could only rarely indulge in his impassioned speeches.

It was after the noon meal (weevilly hardtack and salt pork which had the prettiest little beetles living in it; the crew saved them and occasionally ran races). The lookout on the mainmast called down that there was a curious dot on the southern horizon. Then a pause; the dot was above the horizon and seemed to be slowly growing. All eyes swung aft, but everyone's bodies—except for Tapp and Smythe, who sprang for the ratlines and began to climb—were frozen.

VanRoark caught sight of the object, perhaps ten miles astern; then it was a hundred feet aft, abeam, and then forward, diminishing again.

It had been an aircraft, with longer and more graceful lines than the tanners'. VanRoark shut his eyes as soon as it had gone and examined the instant: not more than seventy feet off the water, triangular wings that were bent upward at their tips, a single sharkfin at the tail, dull black on the belly, wandering bands of olive and sand topsides. There were gaping holes in her near the wing roots that rounded into exhausts aft; and when she had been directly abeam of where VanRoark stood, the majestic silence of the craft's passage had been shattered by a rolling thunder that beat against his body, shook the
Garnet
's sails, and almost knocked Tapp and Smythe into the Sea.

Tapp was yelling hysterically from his perch: "Did you see that? Did you see her? Christ! Did you see her?"

Then his tongue got wrapped up in itself as it tried to get out years of anticipation in five seconds.

Smythe was pleasantly dumbfounded in his thoughtful climb down to the deck. He said nothing then, but at dinner, when he could fit in a word between Tapp's endless and amazingly sober ravings, he said that it had been a bomber, a shade under two hundred feet long, capable of exceeding the speed of sound (VanRoark did not entirely understand that), and the last of her kind were supposed to have crashed and burned five centuries ago. He had had only a glance at her colors, but he could identify parts of at least three different national standards. There were two more he could not place. Smythe stayed up very late that night, something he had never done. Prager later told VanRoark that near dawn Yarrow had come up to the librarian, apparently unable to contain his decaying throat any longer on the subject of the plane. Smythe had beaten the living hell out of him.