The Books of the Wars (30 page)

VanRoark could feel a quickening, a compression of time about him that did not leave enough room to speculate on the Great Abstractions. He managed to look upon the uncertainties as things that fate had already decided for him. The Wars were still going on, he was sure of that now, and he was going to them. They were near now too, within human reach. The simply human took precedence and he wondered if, when men were trying to kill him, he would be able to stand and, presumably, try to do the same to them. Glory began to infect his mind.

The captain, who listened quietly and calmly with his ferret eyes and quick, nervous gestures to Tapp's uncontainable enthusiasm, was also moved. On the one hand he was rather disappointed to see such a powerful machine going to the Burn and the Meadows (even Tapp naturally assumed that the plane was going to join the same side as they), for it meant that removal of "cargo" from its present owners would be that much more difficult. Ruins were so much easier, no self-appointed patriots or saviors clinging to things which were almost useless to them but could turn a fair profit in the hands of an intelligent man.

However, the fact of the plane's being in operational condition had inflamed the captain's limited imagination. When Tapp had gone spinning off into the darkness and Smythe had followed behind, he dreamily explained to VanRoark the marvelous possibilities this situation presented to the circumspect businessman. If things as large as that aircraft were to be found gathering at the Burn, then why not steel ships powered by steam or even more marvelous things? There were twenty nations gunning for Enador and her monitors and steam frigate, and the man who delivered the proper ship could name his price.

As the evening wore on—VanRoark stayed even though he was both repelled and bored—the idea of piracy predictably arose. VanRoark could see the schemes and plans wiping aside the profit and loss sheets that had recorded the captain's dreary trade in rusting guns and stale explosives: a great battleship, her skeleton crew of fanatics sleeping the night; boats putting out from the
Garnet,
muffled oars, knives and metal wire around the crew's throats; then a new command for the captain, with all the world at his feet.

VanRoark left him to retire; naturally, he was unable to sleep and would have gone on deck, but he figured the deck belonged to Tapp and Smythe that night. Instead, he spent the night dreaming, half-awake, his ears still ringing from the aircraft's howling and the patchwork of insignia disrupting the smooth flow of her camouflage, the sun white on her glass, her exhausts yellow-red.

Once, just as he was dozing off, he heard a thumping and thought the sails were being shaken by the passage of another ship; he asked Prager about it in the morning and was told that it was probably only Yarrow hitting the deck.

Five days after the camouflaged bomber had flown past them, Tapp spotted five glittering beads hanging below the sun, white chalk marks trailing behind them to the horizon. They looked at them now with less fear, and the crew hardly cringed when the dim, rolling report of their engines drifted down through the clear air. The captain brought his glass to bear on the formation, but it was so high above them that even he could see nothing more than a blinding metallic radiance.

The planes were over them for half an hour before they were lost from sight and their trails gently dispersed. Once again, VanRoark felt time shrinking and compressing; even the languid, peaceful passage of the formation reduced tomorrow to the next minute and the end of the world to tomorrow.

The first ship passed them the day after the formation; Tapp was by now beside himself with anticipation, checking and endlessly rechecking his memories of the nations that had made up his army with the now prouder recollections of Smythe.
Lord,
VanRoark thought as she passed less than a quarter of a mile to port,
how lovely she is! How old and proud!
All battle gray in black trim, two twin turrets fore and aft, two stacks, a high bridge like a castle's keep, and a clipper bow plowing up the cyanogen water and turning it white; the pendent numbers 2470 were painted on her bridge and transom. The captain read out her name,
W. Lane. So curious,
Van Roark thought again,
that so beautiful a ship
("Lord, 'Roark, look at 'er, must be turning thirty knots!")
should carry so dull a name,
especially when the wrecks of his world bore names like
Amethyst
and
Jewel
as they careened about the Sea.

Smythe hypnotically recited his usual list of particulars, armament figures, speeds, the nations she might have sailed for and how the ships of her type had acquitted themselves in storms and battles past. VanRoark saw only the fine, long sweepings of her lines and how cleanly she moved through the water, and the silken pennants that trailed for a hundred feet or more behind her masts.

Then she was gone. The
W. Lane
had given no acknowledgment of the
Garnet
's presence, had not even dipped a flag or displayed a signal lamp. But this bothered no one. Smythe, Tapp, and VanRoark were satisfied with her physical presence and to be reassured, again, that such things still existed. The captain and crew of the
Garnet
were relieved that the destroyer, so Smythe had termed her, had taken no notice of them; they welcomed the anonymity, for it meant that capturing her or one like her would be that much easier. The captain wondered how it would feel to have a steel deck under him and not have to worry which way the corrupted winds might be blowing at the moment. "
W. Lane,
" he rolled the name over in his mouth. Really, he would have to change that straight off. Only Yarrow was in any way irritated. He called it a sin for men to so treat their own creations that they handed ownership of their souls over to them.

VanRoark was rather disappointed when nothing was spotted the next day, nor on the one after that. He wondered if they had not, through some fantastic coincidence, stumbled into an area where the aircraft and ships just happened to be in their endless wandering, or if they had blundered onto one of the Sea's old graveyards, rife with ghosts and flying Dutchmen.

The coast was smooth and regular now, with the cooler water canceling the possibility of coral reefs. The scarcity of rivers or turbulences made sand bars a rarity too. They sailed at night, when the star or moonlight allowed. It was about midnight when Tapp's yelling, a little hoarse from all his fulminations, began shaking the
Garnet.
Men tumbled out of their hammocks and grabbed cutlass and ax, thinking they were under attack.

VanRoark ran on deck to find Tapp halfway up the foremast ratlines, pointing wildly at a rising headland to the northeast. "What is it?" he called up.

"Look, 'Roark, over there, on top of that rise. See it? See it?" Tapp waved in the direction of the coast;

VanRoark squinted but could see nothing. He tried again, this time moving back and forth slightly, to silhouette anything against the stars. He began to make out some skeletal structures, bare beams and irregular walls separating themselves from the larger darkness of the headland. "I see it now. What is it?"

"Brampton Hall, 'Roark!" Tapp fairly screamed.

"You said it overlooked the Burn, where the army'd be." VanRoark was vaguely aware of the delighted hysteria that was creeping into his voice too.

"On the north side of it. Soon as we round those cliffs we'll see them." A pause while Tapp's eyes swept the ruins again. "Brampton Hall!" he exploded.

Smythe came on deck, tucking his shirt into his trousers and wiping the sleep from his eyes. VanRoark pointed out the outline of the building. "Goddamn," he muttered thoughtfully.

Most of the crew was up, leaping about the deck or through the rigging, absently rigging flags of truce and weapons, not one of them really having any idea of what they should do. Yarrow, for once, was dead quiet.

VanRoark recalled the trite novels of his boyhood, what few there had been, and thought that now it would get very quiet, like the flowing peace of the tanners' hawks before they hit. But the night was underlaid with small, distant hummings and roars. As they moved northward, rounding the headlands, the noises grew more emphatic, first absorbing the gentle slap of the Sea against the
Garnet
's hull, and then intruding upon normal conversation. Vivid, sharp eruptions of sound began to break up the monotone, lacing it through with violence and power.

The headlands where Brampton Hall itself rested rose against the welkin to become a rather sizable line of near-mountains curving away and rounding up into the north, where they dissolved into the horizon. Cradled between these hills and the Sea was the army. Even Tapp was struck silent. It looked as if the
Garnet
were sailing directly into a star cluster, whose brilliance shimmered out to them across the surface of the calm Sea. Lights, more than VanRoark had ever seen, tapestried the dark earth with everything from the cold, unwavering shine of electrical bulbs to the rainbow shades of altars and votary lamps. Shapes and colors, nothing more than moving specks of blackness at this distance, hovered around the lights, occasionally separating themselves as fire shone through silk or upon burnished armor and was then reabsorbed.

A sudden call from the lookout shattered the spell. In their fascination with the glittering Burn, almost no one had noticed that the bay to which they were now sailing was filled with sailing boats and steamships. As they lowered the main and foresails, proceeding only on staysail and jibes, they saw fire-reflected shapes on the water as well as on land. The standard navigation lights of white, orange, and pale blue swept out from the coast to meet them on the hulls of five hundred sailing ships. Most looked to be as miserable as the
Garnet,
but others lay tall and proud, their gilt work fresh-painted, their hulls slick in the water, their brass cannon clean and warm in the lights.

VanRoark caught a low whistle from the captain and an order to edge the
Garnet
over to port. VanRoark looked to his left and saw gray walls rising from the Sea, walls with anchor chains stuck into them and pendent numbers of white and gold. Their superstructures were dull in the army's light and they towered above the
Garnet,
sharply outlining themselves against the stars. Van-Roark thought he spotted the
W. Lane
and was amazed at how much larger were the others moored near her. Specter shapes in white and light tan moved upon the warship's decks: turrets, forest-masts with strange wire tangles wound about them, and flags stirring tiredly in the light air; fine lines and ancient metals passed by him as they moved toward the beach.

The captain recovered his senses after a while and, much as he might have liked to pick out his future command then and there, deemed it wiser to anchor and await daylight before he made any concrete plans. The hook was let down about a half mile offshore, between a four masted schooner from the Isle of Oromund and a destroyer like the
W. Lane
, which still chose to carry the standard of the long-broken North Cape Confederation.

Tapp decided to get drunk and spent most of the night on the quarterdeck, sitting on the wheelhouse, singing "Brampton Hall" and other old songs until he passed out. The crew would have shut him up but when any of them advanced upon him, he would only swing out his saber and sing all the louder. His fingers were wet with liquor and his own blood.

VanRoark and Smythe climbed to the maintop and for hours silently looked about them and through the universe they had entered, the ships and the roarings. They saw, past the gray ships to port, a single, unbroken line of stone that might have been the facing for some quay or causeway of undetermined length. More lights moved up and down this wall, some descending from the night and slowing to a stop, others rolling along it with increasing speed until they bulleted free and screamed off, their flight marked by the deep whistling of Smythe's first sighted lone bomber—and then by the far burble of the second formation.

Around three, when the false dawn was beginning to take hold behind the encircling hills, a fog crept in from the Sea, shrouding and softening the lights, blurring and confusing distances, wrapping the
Garnet
up inside the army's universe. Shapes and shadows of ships and aircraft, their activity now much diminished and the lights reduced in number, moved toward them with liquid delicacy and then receded, dancing about the old
Garnet
and her plotting crew. VanRoark guessed they still had more than an hour to go before dawn, which the mist would obscure for another hour anyway, and decided to turn in along with Smythe. Tapp had been unconscious for quite a while and was peacefully sprawled on the deck, his sword in one hand and an empty liquor tin in the other.

No one saw Yarrow during the night and he was not on board the next morning. The captain figured that the fanatic must have slipped overboard in the fog and made it ashore before any of them were up. Tapp did not entirely discount the possibility that the crew had murdered him for the jeweled holy books he had once said he was carrying with him. VanRoark surprised himself at how little emotion he felt at this thought—and even at the humor—for at least the poor old fool would have died where he wanted to, the absence of an Heroic Struggle Against Evil being but a minor omission in Yarrow's pilgrimage. But then, thought VanRoark, progressively more amused with this line of conjecture, perhaps he had put up a brave fight, and if the captain and crew of the
Garnet
were not as evil as Salasar was supposed to have been, they were not, by the same token, possessed of snow-white souls; and if they were then, in some measure, sworn to the flag of Night, it would mean they had defeated the adherent of Light. So it appeared that yet another Armageddon, one smaller than most, had been bungled. At least Yarrow, whether he was among his fellow believers on this world or the next, was happy.

VanRoark thought that what he had seen the previous night would have insulated him in some way against what he might see in the light of day. While he was lying in his hammock and later getting dressed, he tried to prepare himself to be disappointed by the reality of the army. In a way he was, for the steel ships numbered only nine and not a thousand, and parked atop the stone wall, now revealed as a causeway that stretched from the beach to the horizon, were not more than twenty-five aircraft of varying sizes.