The Books of the Wars (34 page)

He had thought the machines different from the men, with their filth and tattooed arms. But both had apparently died in the same ways: the smooth skins were bitten into by cold or flaming metal, wrenched away from the skeletons, and the guts of plastic or copper or blood or brain would be knocked loose, spilling through the wound like vomit from a drunk's mouth. The debris dried where it caught on the skin or poured upon the ground. He crept past a tank which had excreted its crew through a gaping hole in its forward parts; in turn, the concussion had torn the crew apart, allowing their own interiors to partially escape them.

A piece of silk, embroidered with swords and basilisks, came into his left eye; it was still flying proud and upright, pathetically arrogant to the wreckage that lay all around it.

Slivers of gray rested in the roadstead behind him. All that was left of the wooden fleets was a tangle of splintered masts, burned flags and rigging. A few shapes, silver or dull green, were piled up on the causeway.

Were they all dead? There was no sound, not even the crunch of sand or some victorious cry from the seabirds as they moved from one meal to another. Nothing: only his breathing, sharp and edged like broken glass—like Tapp's had been.

After the background had shifted from light to dark and back again several times, it abruptly became a flat gray that never changed; a noise finally worked back into his mind, a low purring as vague and ill-defined as the shapes that had moved before him.

The gaping hollowness in him, which had allowed the fires and then the charred silence to move freely in his body, was demarcated by a single bright coil of wire. Then a straight line and more coils until they defined the emptiness with their tapestries. They pulled the edges of the wounds together; the humming grayness was not shut out entirely now, but it was split up and filtered through the wires. A strange coldness welled out from the spiders' webs. Colors began reconstructing themselves in the blank spaces between the sound and wires. Cautiously, feeling crept back into the web-works where his eye and arm had been; the colors moved in with it. The pain had almost died by now except for short eruptions that compacted the light into nothing. The cold became comforting to him even when the pain was nearly forgotten.

The trouble with building from the webs was that he always had to begin with them, for there was nothing else; when he opened his eye to the uniform gray of the world he could see wire profiles of men moving in front of him. In time, the profiles became three-dimensional as more wires conformed to the shapes of faces and limbs.

The colors he had seen when he was blind now moved outward and fastened to the external frameworks, set, shifted, and reset.

He was in a room about eight feet square and seven feet high. It was the uniform gray of unpainted metal, featureless except for a washbasin in the near corner, a door set in the wall opposite to where he lay, and a metal cabinet that might have been a desk; neat welds joined the metal panels of the compartment. There was a window, he thought, on the wall next to his bunk; but he could only see a wavering slice of dawnlight playing up and down on the door.

VanRoark looked down with his left eye toward a plaster wrapped right arm; he should have lost that. He could feel bandages covering the space where his right eye should have been. A very slight motor vibration could be felt through the walls and the whole room itself sometimes bounced unexpectedly. Presently a man entered; he was tall and fairly old, probably in his early sixties. He wore a tan blouse and trousers that once might have been the uniform of some nation. He was bald, white hairs growing thinly on the side of his rounded, heavy skull.

He looked at VanRoark briefly; the younger man tried to speak but found that he could not. The man opened the desk cabinet and unrolled two flexible cables; their heads were snapped into sockets on a metal plate set into the plaster cast. For the first time, VanRoark felt warmth in the space where his arm had been; it poured upward, flowing past his shoulder and then outward to fill his whole body.

The madness of the wire frames evaporated. VanRoark fell asleep, a dark, soft burrow in which there were no dreams, no struggling colors, nothing but the warmth and rest.

* * *

"You've been out for quite a while; almost three months." The bald man's voice was deep, but not quite as deep as Tapp's had been; VanRoark noticed that his jaw had not moved when he spoke the words. "How do you feel?"

"Fine," a voice croaked; VanRoark supposed it was his.

"You hardly look it, friend. You came very close to dropping off completely, you know." VanRoark nodded that he did.

There was a moment of awkward silence. "Look, my name's Cavandish. I'd shake hands with you and all but I can see you're a little inconvenienced."

"Amon VanRoark, sir."

"Then, Amon, I guess you wonder exactly what is going on here." Cavandish looked embarrassed with himself at this. "Damn, I can't help falling into stupid understatements and clichés. At least I've relieved you of the responsibility of saying 'Where am I?"'

VanRoark tried to smile. "All right, where am I?"

Cavandish chuckled politely. "Right then. You're on a land train heading east. You see, when the army broke up, we had a lot of trouble getting out and . . . "

The thin smile faded from the old man's immobile jaw. "No one knows. It just looked like the army suddenly took it into its head that the rim nations were either defiling the purity of their mission with their ships and tractors, or maybe they even thought that we were the army of Evil and they could save themselves the walk to the Meadows by getting us then and there.

"I really don't know about it, Amon. I've been told of the armies surviving the Meadows, even after being momentarily defeated by whatever showed up under the Opposition's flag; but I've never heard of anything like this—this suicide. The bastards just turned on us." The tone of voice was still fairly calm, but VanRoark noticed that the man was methodically grinding one fist into a meathook palm. "Oh, by the Lord, we gave them a proper fight. No Abstractions, no allegiances to Good or Evil or any garbage about ending the world, just a good honest round of murdering and finally a chance to face those bastards who'd been slowly sucking the rim nations white. Right in their stinking faces." Cavandish sighed helplessly. "Well, anyway, we were just about the last vehicle out of the Burn. Lord! You should've seen the bodies. I'd never imagined that the army could have attracted so many men until I saw the dead. Thousands! Millions, for all I know. It sounded like someone popping popcorn, with the tires grinding up their bones.

"We were just getting clear of the mountains, trying to keep up with the only other train to make it out and a couple of fast tanks, when something set off the real fuel carts. So while Maus and I tried to get them unhooked and rolling back into the Burn before they really touched off, the rest of our informal group scattered.

"Things got a little dodgy then because the train's power linkages were all fouled up from the battle. We dragged ourselves out along the ridges and set down in back of some ruins."

"Brampton Hall?"

"If that's what it's called. Mainly, we just hid up there, letting go a few discreet rounds once in a while when it looked like something unfriendly might be trying to climb out of that bone heap to get at us. By the third day we had the train fixed up and we also found you. Christ, man! You looked dreadful, like Death himself crawling up to get us. Maus wanted to put you out of it right there, but Kenrick, doctor to the last, loaded you up and patched you together as best he could."

"There are others here?"

"There were five, but Maus took a dart just as we were pulling away from those ruins and the poison got to him. Lyndir and Zaccaharias got the fever about a month ago, from vampire bats, Kenrick said. Corwin died when we ran into a mounted patrol going home to Mountjoy. And poor old Kenrick just went mad one day, started muttering all kinds of stuff about springtime and a girl named Gold or something. I found a note later saying he was going Home—he capitalized it, like it was a country or something—and that was the last I knew of him." Cavan-dish shook his great head slowly. "Ah, poor old Kenrick, you might have enjoyed him, Amon."

VanRoark felt the silence descend again. "Were we the only ones to make it out of the Burn? Did they get all of the rim nations?"

He waited a second before Cavandish roused himself. "Almost," the old man drawled slowly, sadly. "A lot of the regular army got off, but I suspect they had taken care to leave before the shooting started. But no, they didn't get us all. I was up in that Hall of yours, watching them while Maus and Zaccaharias worked on the train, but—and somehow this makes me feel good—we just scattered." He threw his arms apart, fingers almost touching the walls of the small cabin. "I guess some headed back home; others just ran out of fear, but still more out of disgust. Amon, I could see the faces of those men as they rode out of the Burn; I've never seen such bitterness. Man, all they wanted to do was run! Run so fast that the only thing they could taste would be their own blood when their lungs burst or when their planes had crushed them flat with the acceleration.

"And I could see that others were moving out to the north, to the Meadows. About seven planes made it off the causeway and five of them headed north. Some torpedo boats and even one of the smaller destroyers managed to get under that bridge and they followed the aircraft. I could see dust trails of trucks and tanks and motor artillery moving north, stopping as they forded the river and then starting up again on the other side."

VanRoark looked up to the old man; his face was the color of copper ore. "Are we headed for the Meadows, sir?"

"No." Cavandish stared out the window that VanRoark could not see; he rubbed his hands over his eyes. "No. We're going east now, to Blackwoods Bay."

"But Cynibal's wiped out; there was a war."

"I'm going there to find some fuel, trying to get enough to get me home." Cavandish glanced slowly around the room and then returned his eyes to Van-Roark. "Did any of the men you might have talked to, men from the rim nations, tell you why they were there at the Burn, and why they wanted to die?"

VanRoark remembered Yarrow first because he had offered the loudest and most involved explanations for his conduct; then Smythe and Tapp, moving back and forth uncertainly between God, the Devil, and Brampton Hall. He remembered the artilleryman with the armored Death on his forearm. "They said they were tired."

"And that, Amon, is what I am. I came to the Meadows because, somehow, it promised peace. And a flaming lot of that it gave me! Traveled for five years to get there, and for what? To see my finest friends shot to pieces or catch some godawful disease that let them bleed to death on the inside; to see the last shining bits of metal my nation and others had hoarded away for this single moment destroyed by the same pack of bastards that had been out to get us before any holy missions had ever been proclaimed.

"Christ, Amon, if they want to fight at the Meadows after what was done to them, then I salute them because they've a lot more patience than I do. At this moment I am sick of everything! I just want to move with my train, just move and never really be anyplace." Cavandish thought this over for a second and then decided to be amused with himself. "Ravings of an old man, Amon. We'll see you tomorrow and get you out of bed." Cavan-dish unplugged the cables from his cast and reeled them back into the cabinet.

The color faded from Cavandish's image and the skin dissolved from his face to reveal the wire framework; the room was reduced to a gray monotone, outlined and supported by single threads of drawn metal. Then even the wires unreeled back into someplace beyond VanRoark's perception and he guessed that he slept.

* * *

VanRoark awakened to the same sequence of wire frameworks and growing colors, but now it was quicker and more like simply opening his eyes. He saw that Cavandish had attached two more tubes to his cast; he felt curiously whole and ready to start getting around again.

As he waited for the old man, he thought about his arm in the cast, absolutely sure he had seen it shot off; strangely, he thought the space where his right eye had been felt filled instead of empty with vaporous blood. Then there was Cavandish himself; VanRoark liked the man already, but why had his jaw not once moved all the while he was speaking to him?

Cavandish came in, disconnected the tubes and told VanRoark to get up; that he was all right for the moment. For a second, as he rose, the colors blurred into the monotone and their wire skeletons reemerged, stark and shining against the gray. Then the wire was overlaid with liquid flowings; he was standing up, Cavandish smiling tiredly at his side.

They moved unsurely through the door and then turned left, walking down a narrow corridor past three similar doors; all were dogged shut. At the end of the corridor was another door, this one on the right, and VanRoark could feel cool evening breezes drifting through it.

"All right, now. There's a ladder right below the combing and from there it's about ten feet to the ground. Watch that cast, and tell me if you think you can make it." VanRoark grasped a railing on the outside of the corridor wall and swung himself outboard until he could find the first rungs. He was quite surprised at the near absence of pain and his strength.

"How long have I been out?" he cried up to Cavandish.

"About four months. It's winter now up north, you know."

VanRoark was not ready for this and almost lost his balance. When he banged his cast into the steel wall of the car he did not feel any real discomfort.

He stepped off the ladder and looked up and down the length of the land train. To his left, to the east he judged from the sun, were three cars like his own, painted a dull sand and olive. They were essentially just boxes, unpierced on this side save for ventilator slits, about forty feet long and perhaps twenty feet thick. Two wheels, each at least twelve feet in diameter, supported each side of the box. Forward of these cars was the control vehicle; this was much larger, twice the size of the passenger cars. A sheet of glass, canted outward about ten degrees, wound around the forward edge of the car. There was a railing bordering the stepped, two-level roof of the car. An artillery piece, draped in heavy canvas, was mounted near the forward edge of the car's roof.