The Books of the Wars (33 page)

Because of the fumings and self-accusations going on within him, it was quite some time before he became aware of the sounds, smooth or sometimes rasping, but always cold and low. There were only a few isolated singers carrying on the drunken roaring of earlier in the evening. He thought he could pick up the words to "Brampton Hall," slurred and spotted with obscenities when they fit the rhyme.

He recognized the sound: moving metal, metal being drawn across leather or whetting stone or more metal. Almost like the Sea, except for the occasional, musical pingings when someone got clumsy. Rough and pitted metal, grinding like sand or Burn soil; fresh, oiled, and polished, moving like silk against silk, its sound smooth and brocaded in the air. This did not fit in at all. Van-Roark was quite at a loss to find room for this in his preoccupation with Yarrow, so he tried to disregard it.

He walked quickly, ignoring the swelling raspings and his lack of destination. He heard the singing grow louder too and soon spotted a man staggering down the deserted avenue. It was Tapp and he hailed him.

VanRoark ran up to the little man and asked if he had seen Yarrow in the past few days. Tapp was largely insensitive to this, having trouble remembering anyone named Yarrow at all. "Why?" he asked drunkenly, his grinning face less than a foot from VanRoark's.

" 'Cause I think he killed Smythe!" VanRoark was dimly aware of how hysterical he sounded; somehow he was proud of this, for he thought it was the right state in which to be. Tapp looked at him stupidly. Then a smile of forced recognition spread over his dark features. VanRoark got ready for some predictable graveyard humor about Smythe's mother or comparative worth in life. "Oh yeah . . . " Tapp crooned, lifting his right hand.

The middle of Tapp's face disappeared, nose and upper jaw; his lower jaw flopped down against his throat while his yellowed eyes bulged from their untouched sockets.

VanRoark thought the older man's expression unbelievably funny, like an ape trying to mimic human disbelief. The younger man looked back into the eyes and felt himself laughing along with Tapp at his marvelous joke; how wonderful to have a wit that could make a man's death and one's self-appointed vengeance the object of laughter. Lord, how stupid he had made himself look, how utterly brainless, with just a big dark hole gaping between his eyes and trapeze jaw. VanRoark saw that one of Tapp's wisdom teeth was badly impacted.

He vaguely suspected he was thinking all this in the space of less than half a second. It was ended as a faint popping noise reached his ears, and then the razor edge of Tapp's strangled breath cut through his mind, searching for a tongue with which to scream. Blood, dark and oily in the false dawn and torchlight, burst from the wound with astounding force, splattering against VanRoark's tunic, and then was smeared as Tapp tottered forward and fell against him.

VanRoark stepped back from the writhing creature, with its knife shrieks so low he could hardly hear them over the sliding metal and the bubbling of its blood.

VanRoark's mind was a confused blank now, a vacuum like that found in the center of an explosion, a storming, uncontrollable nothing that could do nothing but try to explode some more. VanRoark began his own yelling, trying to shut out the sound and even the sight of Tapp. He began kicking at the body, stamping on it to make it stop living or at least to have it make some human scream, some evidence of human agony. It only turned and twisted in the ground-glass soil, the sharp, gurgling sounds still creeping into VanRoark's ears.

Around him, the sliding noises were increasing as were the poppings. They took on power and definition, became loud and vicious.

Tapp's body moved away from him, but it could have been VanRoark who was moving, running through the suddenly living army. His vision was clouded and tinged with red, but he could still see the men spilling out of the tents. The sound of metal against metal was that of shells being rammed into breeches, swords being drawn from scabbards, weapons being assembled—now all in the hands of the army—and the thousand torches that burst into flame.

VanRoark slammed into some men, kept running, his direction determined only by which of his random, flailing movements met with the least resistance. He understood none of this.

Booming, inhuman wailings came to him from the anchorage. He thought that Tapp had found a way to scream. Then he broke free of the tents facing the Sea and saw that it was the sirens of the steel ships calling to each other. He blundered out into the Sea, knee-deep, and then ran, fell, and crawled back onto the beach. In front of him the army was burning: the flames, the madmen, with their war axes weaving in and out of the torch-fires until he could not tell them apart, hurled themselves outward from the center of the camp, gathering fury as they spiraled outward. The line of savagery gathered up its southern end as it reached the mountains below Brampton Hall, then turned back and joined the north, crashing into the encampments of the rim nations.

VanRoark staggered down the beach, drawn inward by the suction of the brutal flood. He fell again, the army spinning around him, alternating with the Sea, where the ships were beginning to stir. Steam escaped from their hulls and stacks with more hideous screeching, metallic. Diamond searchlights flared on their towers, sweeping the wooden fleets as maggot crews scurried under their brilliance. A sane part of VanRoark struggled to make itself heard before it was utterly swallowed by madness and the shattering night; the army was destroying itself: it was murdering the rim nations.

He spun around: Brampton Hall was burning in the reflected light of the army. Again, and the northern limits of the Burn were in front of him; aircraft, some on fire or with tiny figures clinging to their skins, trying to plunge javelins through them.

The roaring of the battle now became more jagged as the rim nations finally wakened themselves to what was actually happening. VanRoark could see sheets of red-yellow lifting upward and south from where the great lines of field guns were; then dying down, but still burning, for they had not even had enough time to pull the tarpaulins from their barrels. The wall, again, as they fired fragmentation shells set to burst thirty feet from the muzzles.

Rapid chatterings of automatic cannon and machine guns, great, brutal detonations and shockwaves beat his head into the sand as the ships began firing into the wooden fleets or shoreward at the army.

He could no longer hear himself, and he could not tell whether it was because the noise was too great or the middle of his face had been shot off and his voice lost with it.

Huge, infinitely vicious rhythms shook and kicked him, driving him first into the shallows and then lifting him back toward the rim nations.
Am I still walking or have my legs also been shot away and the concussion hurling me through the air?

He felt the airplanes struggling up from the causeway and then turning, some so low they set ships afire and the Sea boiling with their fire-wake; he looked up and saw the bombs falling like ripe, clustered fruit from their wings, as from the limbs of trees. The acetylene light of phosphorus and the billowing, morbidly luxurious clouds of Greek fire and jellied gasoline rose from the army's camp.

The massed artillery on the tanker's decks opened together and a quarter square mile of men disappeared where the shells hit. Everything, everywhere his eye was forced, were fires, fires of every color he had ever imagined or seen on the flags of the army: turquoise and deep opal to blue to white to a hell-blackness from burnings so hot they had no time or energy to squander on ordinary light. Things leaping, being blown into the air, moving as their lives splattered out of them, their limbs blasted away from them as they fell; then more fires and detonations to drive them into the Burn, pounding them into it, breaking their shrieking agony like a sledgehammer against a mirror.

He began running; he still had legs, he thought with a mind that had long since been forced outside of its skull by the weight of the chaos crashing down around him.

He stumbled into the camp, avenues faced and walled with fire. The noise compressed around him, suffocating, collapsing his bones and shoving his eyes into flat disks, fish eyes. All around, running shapes, men who should not have been running, carrying parts of themselves in their hands, trophies of their holy struggle; the sand was slick and glittering with fresh blood and the garbageshreddings of men.

VanRoark lost all orientation; even the thunderous salvos from the rim nations' batteries or from their ships in the roadstead offered no guide, for they seemed to be all around him. Dark, jerking shapes, tanks or even the serpentine forms of the land trains drove though the fires, their howling sirens, guns and engines rising and then falling as they fled.

A pressure, heated far past any temperature, gripped his arm below the shoulder and rested there for a split second; then, when it had burned its way into the bone, pulled.

VanRoark screamed; for a moment he heard himself and nothing else and spun to see his right arm pinwheeling away from him, turning red, then orange, then blue, then white, as it passed in front of and through the fires.

The wound does not seem to hurt,
his mind gibbered to itself;
no, but now I am torn open and through this, all the fury of the battle will pour into me; I will be lost.
The violence erupted inside him; he could
see
the explosions and burning silk of his disintegrating organs.

There is nothing left of me, nothing left but a pierced skin separating one segment of the hell from another.

He saw a man moving like a puppet or character in a badly animated film, from the strobe-light effect of the infinite explosions surrounding him. He was dazed, his eyes clouded to the point of appearing as gray blanks; only his mouth held any sign of emotion, and that was bitterness. He was dressed in the remains of an olive uniform and carried a large pack on his back; from it a dragon's spine of machine gun bullets ran over his shoulder and down into the weapon he was holding. The barrel guard had been lost and the metal was glowing cherry red. The steam from his melting hand drifted around the barrel and joined with the cloud of powder smoke spurting from the muzzle. An unbroken line of green phosphorus tracers streamed from the man and the gun, blanketing and momentarily silencing the rest of the battle, like a hose spraying molten metal onto a blaze.

As the man walked by and above VanRoark, he struggled to his feet, possessed by the idea that he must speak to the man: ask him about his numberless self-deceptions for coming to the Meadows; about the artificial arm he must get when the other had turned to slag; about his barques and battle cruiser and the books in his library.

VanRoark made it but not before the man had almost disappeared into the battle-haze. His voice was lost again; he picked up a broken sword hilt, a severed hand still gripping it fanatically, and threw the lot of it at the man to attract his attention.

Slowly, easily, the man turned back to VanRoark, the smoking green line of shells fanning out from him, swinging around without break or interruption, coming closer, becoming a single planet of green that was transformed to a star filling VanRoark's eyes.

VanRoark fell once again. This time it had been the side of his skull, the right side, that had been ripped apart; he thought he could see the eye rolling away from him, the stump of the optic nerve slapping the ground like a piece of wet gristle.

Ludicrously (it must have been so because he could remember laughing aloud at it) part of his sight seemed to remain with the liberated eye ball. He could see himself, the bloody ruin of his face and the stump of his right arm; and the two eyes calmly, coldly, regarded each other and passed judgment on their relative situations.

He thought it even funnier when, through all the smoke of violence, a gull settled down in front of his right eye. The creature, living in the wilderness, had become too hungry to ignore a feast such as the army was serving up.

VanRoark howled with delight as he thought he could feel the bird take the nerve stump in its beak and rise into the air. He saw his own body, matted and mired with blood, and then more bodies as the bird gained height; then men fighting and a vehicle crashing imperiously through their private war for salvation.

An aircraft shot under his eye, loosed its rolling mass of napalm, silhouetting its bat-wings; then it exploded, falling to earth and exploding again.

He could see almost the whole of the Burn and most of the roadstead, split and scarred with the wrecks of ships and the frantic wakes of torpedo boats. Everything grew diffuse and indistinct; colors expanded and drifted suddenly in impossible ways; encrustations of black and white fires, green tracers and fragmentation shells laced through the Burn's glowing darkness and the Sea. He could see the army collapsing in upon itself, dissolving into its own fire and panic.

A random spray of tracer shells, orange this time, moved upward. He sensed the pressure of the gull's beak lessen and then end entirely. His eye hurtled back down into the Burn, the colors rushing away from a black center, their vague forms becoming vicious shards. Then he saw the inside of the lightless fires and watched, as from yet a third eye, as his vision melted and was splattered all through it.

There was pain, a great deal of it, and blurred streakings of light that were ebon at their centers, white along the bodies and then refracted into rainbow edgings as they drove into the empty eye socket and ricocheted through his skull.

He could recall the background against which the lights moved turning from black to cobalt to silver and then back again; he could recall the sharp soil of the Burn grinding underneath him, how it sparkled in the reflections from the lights. Then it would become damp and hard; small, penitent waves would wash up against him. The salt stung in his wounds but they felt cleaner when they had been washed.

He moved away from the Sea and through the ruins of the camp; the vague and shadowed impressions were now punctuated with single details, unusually sharp against the formations of color; that was mostly gray now. Charred poles and family standards passed above him, their faces and wrought designs torn and brutalized.