The Books of the Wars (32 page)

The man heard this, or part of it, and for the first time put down his gears and miniature screwdrivers. "What?" he said, looking at VanRoark.

The younger man was immediately conscious of a slip in courtesy. "Well, I meant that the rest of the army has its weapons, of course, but they've also got other things; they've got their women and their musicians and entertainers. I think some men even brought their whole families, kids and all. And their shops and stalls, like a whole city was just dropped right down here and was setting up to stay forever."

"They could do that," the man said sourly. "We don't have these things. I know that. All we got are guns, and you know why?"

VanRoark shook his head, no, he did not.

"Because that's all they left us, dumb-ass!" he hissed unexpectedly, jabbing a finger in the direction of the army. "All those bleeding bastards left was the guns we could hold. Everything else, every good or beautiful thing we ever tried to set up in this world, they managed to queer or tear down.

"You know where I come from?" He did not wait for an answer. "How the hell could you, it doesn't even have a name any more! All you'd have to know is that it was dying and with all our power we couldn't do a thing about it. Every time we poked our hands outside of our lands because we needed some oil or some ore or even some clean water, they jumped us, from the front if they had the guts, but usually from the back. Sneaking in at night and slashing some dude's parachute and then repacking it all nice and careful, or putting some sort of bomb into one of our ships."

The man sank back against the cracked tires and wiped the sweat from his bald, bronzed skull. "Okay, man, you've heard my genealogy; get back to your army before you really ruin my afternoon."

VanRoark got up and began walking away, but could not resist asking a question: "Why are you here?"

"To die." The other shrugged, bending back over his work.

"This is the army of Right and Good and all. That's what your prophet said, didn't he?"

"I don't remember what the old bastard may have said. I'm here just because I'm sick and tired of all this, that's all."

"Not for Brampton Hall?"

"Never heard of it."

But that was a week after he had seen Brampton Hall for himself and had already begun to guess that this was what would be told him should he ever venture into the rim nations' camp.

They had reached the ruins of Brampton Hall by one in the afternoon, the army having smeared itself into a mass of indistinct rippling movements, edged by the slag-covered mountains and the camouflaged rim nations. In front of them soared the walls and blasted towers of the Hall, remnants of chain mail banners still flying from warped iron flagpoles. It was as huge as Tapp had said and for the first time in all his travelings, except when he had sat alone in the maintop with nothing but the Sea and a shadow ship below him, had he felt such peace. This was doubly strange, for the Hall, a term which included a whole complex of buildings and walls along the spine of the mountains, had obviously been the scene of a great struggle. Bullet holes, nearly eroded smooth but still recognizable, were splattered all over the walls; iron roofing beams of incredible size twisted down from their mountings as if some fantastic heat, like that of Blackwoods Bay, had made them bow before it.

VanRoark walked with Tapp into the main compound, almost a quarter of a mile square. Grass was growing there; not anything green or vaguely suggesting complete health but, still, an enormous change from the scorched sterility of the Burn and the slagged-down mountains. Mosses reached up the chipped and shattered walls along with a stunted form of ivy, trying to heal their wounds.

There were even bits of stained glass remaining in the arched windows of the Hall itself, fragments suggesting family crests or the lives of great men. VanRoark marveled at this especially, until he saw that the glass was almost seven inches thick.

Although there were traces of the ancient battle in the Hall—someone's femur bone was crushed into calcium dust just under the tarn and VanRoark spotted some unwholesome relic, unrecognizable in its centuries of rust and decay—the peace remained. They walked back down to their camp, a third-hand tent they had bartered away from some drunken louts from Howth. The dark, ill-defined shapes VanRoark had sensed when Timonias had spoken to him again arose beneath his consciousness, but they were different, carrying with them more sadness than exultant triumph.

In all, they were at the Burn for about two weeks. Further tours of the army's main body revealed little other than that the riotous confusion was being constantly multiplied as men straggled in from the Barrens to the east or as more sailing ships dropped anchor in the clogged roadstead. A week after they arrived, a large tender, gray and somber as the fog banks from which she had silently emerged that morning, put into the anchorage, her scurrying brood of torpedo boats dashing around her at forty knots. The seabird and dolphin crests of the dead Dresau Islands were enameled on her bow, but she flew no flags other than the usual signal banners.

However, two things of real importance were discovered. First that Timonias was still on board his cancerously white ship, probably accompanied by whatever priests might have bothered to come to the Meadows. The cruiser was still close inshore, lying neither with the glut of wooden sailing ships nor with the ships from the rim nations clustered along the causeway.

Even compared to the infrequent stirrings of the steel ships, the merchant cruiser was a ghost ship; not once had VanRoark seen a single living person on her decks, a single wisp of steam escape from her funnel, a single flag hoisted in response to some shoreward signal. When he questioned someone on this seeming desertion, they would inevitably just smile and say that Timonias was on board and what more did one need to know?

He wondered if this lack of watchfulness had prompted the
Garnet
's men to make any expeditions for loot. But the barque was no longer at her anchorage and VanRoark quickly ceased to think about her.

The second thing was his rediscovery of Smythe. He had been walking westward along the no-man's-land between the rim nations and the army, toward the foot of the causeway and the parked aircraft. To his right, a wrecker crane had been drawn up alongside a large armored troop carrier; one of its engines had been removed and several men were working on it beside the tank. One of them was Smythe.

VanRoark moved over and watched quietly, remembering his clumsy conversation with the artilleryman just the other day. Eventually plates were secured again and torqued down; the wrecker lifted the engine over the open hatch and then lowered it gently from sight. Smythe turned from the vehicle, wiping oil from his blackened hands, and saw VanRoark.

He was smiling, obviously enjoying himself; VanRoark asked him under whose flag he had found such employment. They talked lightly for a while, walking down to the Sea under the long wings of the aircraft, their distorted reflections flowing on the aluminum and glass.

The next two days VanRoark spent with Smythe and the men from a nation of which he had never heard. The things he used to feel and think at Sea when they had passed the ruins, or even back home when he had wandered along the Old Navy Dock, were remembered. The fears about exactly which army he had joined once again receded before the memory-forms of pilings and bollards that used to hold battle cruisers against the dock.

At dusk of the second day they walked along the causeway, over the drawbridge, and then westward almost a mile, so they could feel the rush of warm air as the aircraft landed or departed; the noise and vibration shook VanRoark and his mind. A violence he had never sensed rumbled within and sent him rising off the world with the green, tan and black mottled craft. When they came in very low over the Sea, over the anchored fleets, he could see their shock-waves rippling up from the water, crashing against the causeway, and then beginning again on the northern Sea.

Smythe told him again how ships like those, but infinitely greater, had once journeyed to the stars he now saw above the eastern horizon—but that was legend.

On the third day VanRoark could not find Smythe; none of the men he had been working with knew where he was, but VanRoark spent the day with them, pulling the turret from a tank and cleaning mechanisms whose workings he could not even guess at.

He finished sometime around six in the evening and left for his tent. One of the men suggested he move away from the army and into one of the rim nations' camps. "Hell, he's closer to those lovely tents where he is now," said another.

"Well, yeah," the first man grinned, "but I think the army's lads are getting a little restive, you know?"

VanRoark did not.

"Well, the whole army is just getting a little tense as far as we're concerned. They think our ships and machines are more the Devil's than their God's. And Timonias and his mates out on their ship don't seem to be helping the situation one way or the other. We need some help; those dudes have got us outnumbered at least a hundred to one and almost every night a couple of them come sneaking across the strip. Christ, most of this stuff's at least four hundred years old and shot to pieces with age and things we could never set straight. Now we got them cutting wires and dumping sand into the petrol. Just like the old days, they tell me; a few nights ago some of them tried to jump the crew of one of our destroyers, pirate her, for crissake!"

"What happened to them?"

The joker answered now: "They found out which ship they came from, an old barque from Enador or someplace, and escorted her out to Sea. Our ship came back with a couple of empty shell casings and no more barque." A short laugh, and then much lower and more savage, "Stinking bastards, stinking pirating bastards!"

"That's part of it too, mate. A lot of the camp isn't too happy about friendly little sinkings like that. They're talking too much over there about things they don't understand."

VanRoark thanked them for the warning and walked slowly back to his tent, the army's lights and colors growing more sinister and menacing; now that he looked it did seem that a lot more attention was being paid to weapons than when they had first arrived. Gryfons were conspicuously draped in light mail and shod with steel-clawed slippers. It could not be that the army was moving on the Meadows, because then the rim nations would have known too. Besides, such an occasion would have been one for celebration and last feasts. This was entirely too businesslike. Most likely, though, it was only his imagination.

Tapp did not return that night and VanRoark assumed he was merely off on some particularly elaborate binge. He could not sleep and spent quite some time debating on whether the camp's quiet was normal or extraordinary. Around two in the morning he decided to try to find Tapp and ask him about what the army thought of the rim nations.

The camp did seem unusually quiet, but it was a broken, fractured quiet cut up only by the rough singing of drunken men. Between the songs of battle and love there was nothing, not even the wind from the Barrens. He looked south to the ruins of Brampton Hall, half expecting to see spectral lights and vapors hovering about them.
Working yourself up into a proper frenzy, Van-Roark,
he thought.

When he couldn't find Tapp, VanRoark decided to look for Smythe. He passed through the sleeping army and across the strip to the rim nations. There too, the quiet was almost oppressive, but there was no drunken singing, only the sandy crunch of a patrol's boots.

He headed down to where he thought Smythe had his tent, near to the line of armored troop carriers where he had first spotted him.

The tent was set back toward the riverbank and it stank, for Smythe had been dead for more than a day; his throat had been slit and the blood had collected in the tent's waterproofed bottom, crusty and granular like the Burn's soil. VanRoark lit a small lamp that was hanging from the middle of the tent frame, and stared at the body. Even in his savage, brutal world, with death and the corpses of nations lying all around, he had never really seen a dead man. Most curious, it did look like Smythe, and the more he looked the more fascinated he became with the exposed arteries and collarbones; it had been a sloppy job.

Then he reached down to touch the dried blood and stiffened flesh; the eyes, which had followed the aircraft and sorted out their allegiance, were now gray and clouded. Smythe? He had been alive; now he stank. If any insects still lived in the Burn they would be boring into him, eating him.

VanRoark stared harder, his eyes starting to water and the top of his brain collapsing. New forms arose in his consciousness, indistinct but pulsing with anger and frustration. And wrapped up in the center of them was Yarrow, spitting his corroded lungs into the Sea. Why? No answer, but Yarrow was there with his holy books and a blade smelling of incense and olive oil.

VanRoark crawled out of the tent, his mind reeling and fighting with itself, wanting at once to get to Yarrow and then asking itself,
Why Yarrow? Why not one of the rim nations' men or one from the army itself? Or Tapp? Or suicide?
He had not even looked to see if Smythe had had a knife in his hands.

He was back in the middle of the army, gradually slowing down as the anger moved back from its first wild ravings. Anyway, Yarrow could be on board the cruiser with Timonias and the rest of the holy men. But then again, if he had done it to Smythe, in return for the beating he had got on the
Garnet,
then he still might be around. The beating and Smythe's apparent defection to the rim nations—that would have been enough to send Yarrow off the deep end.

Could he still be ashore, and if he was, how was he to be found among the army's millions? Inexplicably Van-Roark began wondering if he was going through all this because he only thought that one should be properly outraged at the death of some man, or whether he felt any real anger over the death of the man who was Smythe. Why hadn't he alerted others in the camp? At least they might have helped in the search for Yarrow.