But there was a thing which VanRoark had never really had; thus it could not have been lost and thus it could not truly hurt him. This thing was History; he had known of it, but Cavandish had possessed it, more than Smythe ever had, and when he spoke of the old countries, of the star-nations, and of the rim nations, now all gone or cracking into dust like the badlands around them, it hurt him tremendously. The train had a small library, really nothing more than a jumbled collection of pornography, technical literature, and history that its previous crews had brought with them and left aboard, or simply forgotten in the chemical toilets. The history, perhaps the most incongruous section of the library, was explained by Cavandish in that, before the Burn or the failure of previous Armageddons, the rim nations had naturally had a great interest and pride in their heritage. If one must know the past to know the future, it was reasoned, then perhaps the study of past days could yield the answer to setting the world right again.
VanRoark read the old, disintegrating books, some of them of enormous antiquity, that Cavandish said had been brought back from the stars when some man's family had come home again; others were of the more popular sort, luridly illustrated but still perhaps containing some fragments of truth. He forgot his new arm and the eye that sometimes showed him the page in the reversed, red-tinted shades of infrared, the barren land, the world on which there might be nothing but the train, and submerged himself in the grand deeds and high aspirations of the past. He rediscovered the hope and grandeur that Smythe and the rim nations' planes and ships had hinted at, safely tucked away in the unreachable past, beyond even the world's immense talent for corrupting things. There the nations remained, inviolate, the sketches of their flags and devices seeding his mind for greater meanings; the few ships, the rotting, decaying merchant cruisers and destroyers that should have been sunk out of simple mercy a hundred years ago, became great fleets and navies. From the ruined fragments of the systems he had progressively erected and then seen destroyed grew a new one, more fragile than all the rest but more awesome, for it was composed of the stuff of nightmare and legend; he learned to dream again, a thing that had not been done in his family for generations.
Cavandish saw this happening and warned him against it. "Amon," he said, his lips opened not more than a quarter of an inch, "stop this reading; stop the thinking, like I have. You must keep your mind blank or at least unformed. Let the random glories of my dead nations rattle around; that's fine. But don't let them have too much company, for they'll grow and soon you'll own them as surely as I did."
Again, as in many times in the past weeks, VanRoark did not understand what the old man was talking about and was much too respectful to ask for an elaboration on the obvious. So he read and thought and noticed that, warn as he might, Cavandish could never really bring himself to actually limit the reading.
As they moved to the southeast he could sense more and more the stirrings he had felt at Admiralty Square, with Smythe on board the
Garnet,
at the Burn, becoming the past. And late one night, when Cavandish was below in the control car, in the green instrument light, navigating the train over an ancient road, he stood atop the car gripping the forward railing. It was cold that night; the sky was clear and the half-moon turned the ragged clouds that had sprung up all around the horizon to a luminescent white. It looked as if the world around them was on fire; VanRoark wrapped one hand tighter around the railing and the other around the barrel of the repeating cannon and felt the cold fire-wind sweep around him. He owned that wind, he thought, the wind that blew out of dead, frozen burnings that had once driven men to incredible heights and then made them continue to fight against a creation that had turned on them and their Creator.
Now he owned the wind and the past and the rim nations, and the stars and the suns around which they had been founded; he owned the steel and the old hands which had worked it into such wondrous shapes, just as completely as Cavandish ever had. He breathed deeply and his wind smelled of bitter metal, cordite, papers and printer's ink.
They found the bomber two days after they had crossed the Talbight River. They were moving through what might have been a sizable forest but which was now nothing more than a collection of blackened and charred stumps. The land train shouldered them away easily but their crunching made VanRoark think of the ground he had walked upon at Brampton Hall with the ancient bones just beneath the surface. The ground was like ash; a long, dirty plume of gray and black trailed behind the train.
VanRoark was steering and it was Cavandish who spotted the line of splintered trees that marked where the plane had landed. They corrected course to the north slightly and then drove down the avenue; soon, there were deep trenches where the landing gear had dug into the soft earth.
VanRoark went into near ecstasies when he first saw the ship; now it was not something foreign, the creature of someone else's imagination, but a thing with which he felt a common heritage. So did Cavandish, even though his artificial jaw and fear of belief contrived to make it almost impossible to spot.
They approached slowly. The plane's camouflage pattern seemed to be of the usual type, molted green and tan topside and flat black on the underbelly, although the black seemed to extend far past the midline in some spots.
It was an uncommonly beautiful craft: a high T-shaped tail set at the end of a gently tapered hull; long, sharply swept wings, now drooping without the air under them, engines buried at the roots. The port gear had partially collapsed and the ship leaned to that side.
As they got closer, VanRoark could see that the ship's underside had originally been painted a light gray; the black was from the fires which had been built under her. Pieces of her crew's mutilated bodies were stuffed into the engines' air intakes and exhausts. "Our world," Cavandish murmured with his ventriloquist's voice, "and our rim nations." They circled the ship and then stopped before the shattered windscreen and nose.
"I think they were at the Burn. Rather less dignified than a death fighting by the sides of archangels and demigods." VanRoark looked at Cavandish with his right eye. "My apologies. That wasn't very funny, was it?"
They buried what they could find of the crew and cleaned some of the blood and ash from the ship. Van-Roark thought of the structure he had built in his mind from his Sea musings and the old books; it did not crumble or break as these others had. He could feel it getting stronger and growing thorns; he could feel the acid welling up into his mouth. Once or twice he caught Cavan-dish glancing up from his work and looking at him.
VanRoark was no longer young, and the dead had none of the evasive cynicism of Smythe or Tapp; the bitterness and hatred was real now and it grew in power as he kicked the bonfire's debris away from the ship's belly.
They picked out some markers, machine guns from the waist and tail turrets, spent rocket casings, an oxygen bottle and mask, and left the next morning.
The train headed southeast again; Cavandish detached one of the empty fuel cars but elected to keep the rest for what he could find in the tanks along Blackwoods Bay. They spoke to each other hardly at all now; Van-Roark even stopped his readings. Many times, Cavandish looked as if he were about to try to penetrate the screen; but he always stopped, withdrew his hand, put the book back on the shelf he had just taken it from, or simply said that the story he was about to tell was not worth hearing.
Once, though, he kept on looking at VanRoark. "And now you are like me; maybe even a little worse because you have captured your history from the dreams of other men. You really don't know how we could be as miserable and as just as the army . . . and as vengeful." He touched his jaw. "And you can somehow, just as I still do, either reconcile or just ignore the grotesqueness of things like this. We see them as marvelous creations. And so they are, but you've felt the horror of them too, conjuring all sorts of dreadful fantasies around them.
"And none of this is really correct. They're not glorious or ghastly; they are only the sorry creations we were forced to throw up against the world.
"Ah, VanRoark, I could talk for the rest of my life to you, trying to explain, and you'll still drive yourself into the ground hating everything but the memory of the rim nations and what had gone before them. I've been doing that for years." He looked up and VanRoark supposed that the old man was trying to look parental, which was wrong. "You see?" he asked after a second.
"Yes, I think so," VanRoark answered and smiled, for he did at least see that Cavandish was right on one point: VanRoark hated him.
VanRoark would be almost amused at it during the few times he'd step back and listen to the undying bit of cynicism left in him. But there were few times indeed; the cynicism which had maintained itself free and clear from any real taint was now entrapped in the wires of his bitterness, trussed up like salted meat hung out to be cured and hardened.
He hated the arm this dead Kenrick had given him, and after a while he hated the life which had come with it. Why had they not allowed him to die at the Burn? Then he would have been free of this mess.
But the hatred did fill him with a satisfaction that had only been approached by his feelings of the Sea. The thorn garden made fertile by the rim nations' corpses had armored itself, even against the things which were of themselves like Cavandish and the eye and arm and the train.
VanRoark had naturally considered killing the old man; and once again, he was more amused than appalled at himself that he could think of such an alternative as being "natural." But it would have been pointless, beyond the simple fact that he doubted if he could do it.
Ah, then I shall let my arm do it,
he thought,
for that is hardly mine. Idiot!
came his reply.
You are not ready for thoughts like that. Monstrous thoughts like murder, fine—you've seen enough of that—but don't turn to nonsense like that to justify yourself, yet.
He left. They were only three hundred miles to the western end of Blackwoods Bay, by Cavandish's reckoning, and VanRoark knew that the land was as hospitable as it would ever be. Winter was beginning to break up, although it should have been still immovably entrenched by the calendar.
The burned forests where they had found the bomber had once covered great tracts of the countryside; this stretch of territory, running from the southern shore of the Talbight down into the vague borders of the Old Nations, still had some semblance of normal life. Before the radiations and plagues had stunted it, the wood had been composed of ironwood trees. Their indestructible trunks, bare of limbs, towered above the blighted ash and dwarf-oak which had replaced them. Many had been burned in piebald patterns by the flash from distant bombs, some with the shadows of men or birds on them like the cliff faces outside Charhampton's submarine pens.
The train had easily smashed its way through the small trees and, by nightfall, its forty foot wake traced to the horizon. Cavandish had brought up the vehicle and coiled it around one of the ironwood trunks, this one at least three hundred feet high. VanRoark thought it looked like a huge serpent, like the one on his finger.
Now if there are signs to be fulfilled, they have been. I have seen the rockets, or at least the air ships; I have seen the serpent, the lances and the knights who held them at the Burn. And the queen?
Perhaps he had known her in the old diplomatic quarter of his city; or perhaps she was Cavandish's, the one to whom the night sky had been given.
He could just club the old man and take the train; it would net him a fortune in a place like Enador or Howth. He could operate every part of it, including the automatic cannon, even if he had only a basic idea of exactly what made everything go. But it was no good; he wanted to be rid of the train just as much as he wanted to be free of his eye and arm and Cavandish.
He packed a few things the old man had given him, some food and optical tissue for his eye, and an automatic pistol with five loaded clips.
VanRoark left the coiled train several hours before dawn. His cloak was pulled tightly around him against the morning chill; he found it still astounding that his right arm should feel the cold, that the touch of the coarse fabric could warm it.
Mount Soril had come back into his mind by dawn and he moved northward, away from it, with only a vague idea that he should go to Enador. Protected by his new knowledge, he would scornfully enter into the sordid dealings of that city.
I'll become rich,
he thought, when his cynical self had become sick of the argument. And this would allow him—
to wander,
the histories said to him.
To drown yourself in pity for dead things,
the cynicism said, having lost all patience.
* * *
It took him about two more months to reach the lands of the great trading city-state. He had effectively silenced that annoying bit of himself which had been plaguing his beliefs since Admiralty Square; the thorn garden had grown to fill up his empty consciousness instead. There was no more room left for it.
He had never been through the countries of Enador before, but he thought that from the stories of its wealth and power it should have presented a more prosperous aspect than it did. Not that it differed from the usual landscapes of the world; on the contrary, only the crests on the ruins served to distinguish them from those of previous empires. He passed along the Talbight, seeing only very few small fishing craft, made of reeds; there was no indication of the surviving river monitor.
He asked the people he met in the crumbling and decimated villages if this was indeed a city of mighty Enador. It was, they would answer absently, transfixed by the blued gauntlet showing under his cloak and the swiveling tube where his right eye should have been. VanRoark then lost all interest in Enador and plunged into a fine fit of cursing against Kenrick and Cavandish and their steel and glass. If only they had just saved him, he might have passed himself off as the victim of an honorable war, if such things ever existed, or speak truthfully: that he had been maimed at the Burn in the service of God. And those that knew, those who had heard the prophets or tales of them, would nod knowingly at him, acknowledging his miserable but still gallant fate.