There were about ten planes left, not counting the giant transport which now sheltered the train; most had been flattened where they were parked. But two had made it to the causeway, past the drawbridge; they sat there on their collapsed gears, still straining to lift their dead crews and cold fires to the Meadows.
VanRoark walked over the area where the army had been encamped, along the charred lines that might have been avenues where the shops and whorehouses had stood. Brampton Hall was still there on the headlands, marking the graves of the army and rim nations. Occasionally he came upon one of the family or regimental standards that had survived the desert's heated wind and the gales that moved in from the Sea. The enameled banners of chain mail were still bright when lifted out to the sun.
Near late afternoon, though, VanRoark became bored and depressed with the Burn; it was as though only a thin cloth had been drawn over the tangled wreckage, and any move he might make would crush a skull or put a broken sword hilt through his boot. On the surface it was a fairly clean place, with just enough ruin poking through to interest one; it only sickened him to know what lay below.
He went back to the train to get some dinner from its inexhaustible stores. He also had a little wine from a keg that had been marked as Zaccaharias'.
Toward evening VanRoark felt relieved of his depression and judged himself to be fully willing to set out for the Meadows the next day. But something was needed, the beau geste he had so desired when be had left his home city. He hit upon the idea of a dinner; many of the old histories he had read on the train had mentioned that this had often been the custom of warriors before a battle. The great halls would be strung with standards captured in past victories; the deeds of dead men would be recited to inspire the still-living; there would be singing of the company's songs with all their fine proud words of triumph edged and polished like a bayonet by the wine.
VanRoark began poking about, all the time keeping a full cup of wine with him, and soon found an irregular piece of aluminum sheeting, about five feet by fifteen. He dragged it back to the train and set it atop seven or eight oil drums he had come across on a beached landing craft. He brought up more drums, smaller ones from the hold of the same craft, and set them around the ragged table.
He sat down at the head of the table, the dried meats and synthetic bread in front of him, the wine keg at his right hand. The sun had only been up for about eight hours and, despite the fact that it should have been early summer, a few stars were already beginning to appear in the east's dark shading.
The wine had been improved by its years of waiting. VanRoark began to feel the old battle-joy of the dead warriors rising from his stomach. He remembered the bustling, professional happiness of the army.
He must have fellows, companions with whom to exchange vast lies and sing the battle songs. He looked about desperately; the only thing living, of course, was the Sea. Amethyst flashings of dolphins and marlin dancing beside the sullen wrecks and the causeway could be seen. One could hardly invite
them
to supper; anyway, aside from the practical considerations, what did they know of the affairs of men? Had they ever been scarred? Had their beautiful, fragile armor ever been torn to pieces by the bolts of archangels or fragmentation bombs?
It seemed to him that the Sea and all the life it had protected from the horror of the land was a thing of bitter mocking. For a moment the vicious humor of the ocean died within him and he looked down to watch the white surf washing against the beach, futilely trying to wash it clean again; every wave carried back a small cargo of rust and rotting bone into the dark, living peace.
Such thoughts were not for him, though. Perhaps years ago when he had sailed on the
Garnet,
or in the future when the bitterness of the rim nations had softened enough to let him feel, but not now.
Ah! Cavandish. He shouldn't be cut out of this.
The old bastard was finally getting to the Meadows and any life which might still be clinging to his bones and his mechanical voice would find salvation, or at least silence. Cavandish would know so much better than the fish or their Sea, for he had certainly been scarred. The bronze jaw, eyes of glass and steel, the arm, all of these showed they had tasted their own blood, drank it in huge gouts; it meant they were human. The fish might have been hurt, but not forever; inexorably, the Sea would heal them, set them right. The calloused scars of men seemed to give them a special vision. They had seen the true nature of the world, and that knowledge had deprived them of the delightful fantasies of life forever.
VanRoark went into his own car first and put on his old automatic, a clean shirt and, after a moment of thought, the reliquary hand.
He had a hard time with all this, wrestling the skeleton out of the first crew car. Eventually he got Cavandish onto the oil drum at his right hand; the shaft of a vanished battle standard was driven into the ground and the man's skull set atop it. There was still enough connective tissue on the spine to keep him from collapsing like a child's set of jackstraws.
Cavandish was soon arrayed like the warrior he had wanted to be, or at least as VanRoark conceived him as wanting to be, with a bandolier of cartridge cases and a semi-automatic rifle taken from the control car's small armory.
The table was still relatively barren. Cavandish told VanRoark to sit down, but the wine would not let him. Soon there were eleven more corpses in various stages of decomposition sitting around the crude table. At least, VanRoark reflected delightedly, he had gotten members of the rim nations and the army to sit down together. Ah, the comradeship of battle!
The armories of the train were almost emptied as he dressed the cadavers in anti-fragment vests, bandoliers, pistol belts, rifles with fixed bayonets. How martial they all looked with their heads propped up by metal or wooden poles; how profoundly their gaping wounds reflected the things they had seen.
As it was nearly dark, VanRoark emptied some petrol out of the end fuel car and set blazing tins on the table. His store of synthetic bread and Zaccaharias' wine was almost gone after he had laid sufficient portions before each man.
"But then," a trooper from Kroonstadt said in a cavalier manner, "none of us will be needing food again, will we?" A small lizard briefly appeared in his right eye socket and VanRoark took this for a knowing wink. A hearty roar of approval went up from the men, army and rim nations alike.
He sighed and leaned over to Cavandish. "This is how it always should have been. Just men, together. . . ." He waited for an answer; none came.
It was night; by the third hour of darkness VanRoark was quite drunk, but he assumed that much of the trouble he had in figuring out the words to the songs had more to do with the drinking of the other men than with his own mind. Mostly, he preferred to lean back and enjoy the singing and comradely trading of insults, and perhaps an occasional aside to Cavandish. He felt quite the elder warrior, who knows he has only one last battle to fight before his courage has been justly and honorably run.
By the fourth hour of night, the pageantry of his arm had stirred to life. He almost regretted that the original hand had been left on his bunk, for he sometimes felt that it was from the star on its palm that all the hunting parties and great ships received their light. But apparently the rust-light from the petrol lamps was enough for them: he could see the waters rolling under the quick hulls of frigates and battleships, extreme clippers running before dull silver storms for harbors no bigger than the eyes of a beetle; the mounted men with their attendants on foot, their ladies riding sidesaddle and their falconers at the ready; great castles and mountain fastnesses studded and plumed with flags like knights. All seemed to be somehow marching downward into the delicate wickerwork of his right hand.
And when he moved the hand, it held fire or its own cold, savage reflection on the underside of the plane's wing, the desert patterns of the land train, the clean, liquid peace of the Sea or the stars and galaxies above.
Near the end of this fourth hour he found that his hand held storm clouds along the northern horizon, turned almost white by the brilliant sky. As the clouds moved to the east and south, it began to appear as if they contained lightning. VanRoark looked closer, hardly noticing that the singing and joking had almost died away.
The clouds covered half the northern sky now and he could see they were being illuminated from below.
VanRoark got up from the table and stumbled forward a few feet. As the cloud cover climbed higher above the horizon, the vague illuminations began to play against a larger screen: green, pale blue, red, and orange burnings flared up from over the edge of the world. A particularly violent explosion lifted its roiling head above the northern mountains, turning the plain-lands and the Sea yellow-white. Seconds later, the sound and even a trace of the concussion hit them. "Our Wars," someone whispered in the flickering darkness behind him. "Our Wars," another repeated.
He adjusted both eyes as best he could and found them reporting only garbled, distorted images; he was sure his drink-warped senses were magnifying the whole thing beyond any touch with reality. The noises were soft—he could hear the whisperings of the men over them—but they seemed ready to break his skull open. The battle's lights were plastered over the back of his head; his vision narrowed until all he could see was the burning storm cloud and a thin bordering of stars and clear sky. His mind began to spin uncontrollably. He knew that the light was dim and the noise no more than that of a light breeze—but they crashed through his eyes, turning his brain into a whorled pulp and his limbs to rubber.
"They're still going, Cavandish!" he yelled back to the old man. "The ships I saw, they were really there! The Wars are still on for us." He turned to the group. "Should we leave for them now?"
"For the Wars?" Cavandish asked coolly; the rest were silent. Aside from the pale flashings of red or orange on white bone, there was little evidence they had ever seen the Wars.
"Where else, old man?" VanRoark replied frantically. The wine took hold more firmly; as he whirled back to face the Wars he could see the ground rushing up at him. It was possible to see the individual grains of sand tremble ever so slightly from concussion.
He thudded down on his left side, unable to move his head more than a few degrees and seemingly paralyzed over the rest of his body. Before him the horizon kept increasing its blisterings of fire and cloud-shadowed light. Then he remembered what was supposed to be going on at the base of the explosions, and struggled to regain his feet; he could not.
From behind his back a new voice placed itself against the troopers' silence and the far whisperings of the Wars. VanRoark knew it belonged to none of the men he had seated at the table, but it still sounded familiar.
It is human,
he thought madly, and then asked himself why he should make this observation.
Ah, VanRoark,
he thought, for speech seemed to have temporarily deserted him too.
You must have been expecting an archangel, the guardian of the Burn's dead and Brampton Hall. But they would have no need of angels,
he told himself in answer.
"They are still on," the voice crooned, as if it had just noticed the spectacle. "Our Wars.
"
Our Wars!
" the voice suddenly shrieked. "Our stinking, bleeding,
bastard wars!
"
Van Roark began to place the voice, mainly in that it was, to a great extent, not a voice. Of course it depended on words now, sounds like those he could fashion in his own throat, but behind them hovered shapes, great and terrible. The play of detonating light on the back of his skull now had the shapes dancing before it, illogically seeming to cast distorted shadows of themselves over the explosions. Again, the shapes seemed to have been known to him, but they were broken and warped from what they had once been.
They had been Timonias'.
He saw the parchment structurings of creations, shredded and charred past recognition, floating inside the words, as he saw an occasional glowing of a rocket's flight in his hollow head.
But all this is impossible. I am much too drunk; soon the voice will go away and then, tomorrow, we can follow it to the Meadows.
The voice did not go away; it spoke to him, now cooler than it had been in the outburst of a moment ago. "You see them, VanRoark? The men are still coming to them; we could still see the vapor trails of aircraft, still might have seen the ships had we traveled up the coast. They're still coming, the men! And you know what that means?" There was some trace of a grating sob behind the voice, like that of the girl at Mount Soril. "It means that this, like all the others which have gone before it, isn't working! All the hopes of finally putting some sort of finish to this filthy world have been betrayed again!
"And when they have ended, and the Meadows are left for a little while before the prophets and the armies come again, some poor bastard who lived through it will have to write another
Book of Eric,
another
Survivors.
Lord, VanRoark, do you have any idea what is going on there, what must be going on . . . Lord, Lord!"
VanRoark tried to wag his head, yes, lie did understand.
Now the voice was unaccountably touched with satiric malice. "Ah, you realize? Fine!
"You bleeding bastard! How could you conceive of it, with the ravings of idiots and the possessed, tales out of moldering books, and your own childish imagination? Great ships and great men, that's what you see—even after you saw how men fight and how they die, here at the Burn, even then you still see men, straight and true, neatly disposing of their odious foes.
"And besides them, you
must
see the angels, the supernatural made natural for an instant to battle on the side of Justice and Light. You see them as men, no doubt, men of huge stature, dressed in robes of light or fire and swords made of stars in their hands. You see them both walking untouched, unscarred, through the carnage of their divine purpose."