The Eternal Front: A Lines of Thunder Novel (Lines of Thunder Universe)

by Walter Blaire

  “What’s a COA?” Diggery asked.

  Tejj rolled his eyes. “Course of action.”

  “Then why not just say ‘course of action?’” Diggery snapped. “Anyway, the South can’t have new artillery. They don’t do new things. They barely do old things.”

  Tejj shrugged. “Nobody knows what to believe, which is why they won’t write it down on paper. It’s a trench rumor, or an Observer having a hallucination, or Colonel Goldros with another suspicion.”

  Sethlan took a chair. “More likely, a Haphan line officer made a report. He can’t properly be questioned by us, but he also can’t be ignored.”

  “Did you see those boots on the street earlier, with the barrage interdiction gunners following after them?” Tejj asked. “They are the 113th Sheflis Skirmishers, a light infantry regiment, but they are being sent to make an assault on this hill…where’s that map? Here it is, and here’s the hill. It’s a real hill, a big pile of granite. Can’t be reduced by bombardment.”

  “Why are we in love with hills all of a sudden?” Diggery broke in.

  Annoyance flickered across Tejj’s face, but the helpie had high self-control. “It’s elevated ground. If we own it, we could see into the southern trenches. We could study their rearward process, track their supplies, count their reinforcements. For shooting, we could enfilade their trench and hit them from the side, and force them to dig all new trenches. I expect the hill will be well defended.”

  Diggery said, “And when South loses the hill to us, they will call down those imaginary artillery shells we want to see?”

  Tejj started to answer, then glanced over Sethlan’s shoulder. The table turned silent.

  A cool palm slid over Sethlan’s cheek and cupped his chin. Nana’s thumb ran over his rough face, reminding him he needed to shave. It was one more thing that would help him be an officer again.

  “What’s with Captain Cephas over there?” Diggery asked. “Or should I say Captain Cry-face?”

  “Diggery,” she said simply, like an admonishment, and left it at that. She turned to Sethlan. “Will you speak to the new transfer, Captain? He misses his men, but won’t admit it. He wants to drink himself to death, but we need him. He is brilliant and well-controlled. He needs your advice.”

  Sethlan flinched at the idea. Conversing with strangers on the subject of guilt and loss was outside his fence. It was altogether new, in fact. Simply not done. Tachba men didn’t…ruminate. But the role of the dashta was to break patterns, and Nana wanted him to try.

  She waited for his thoughts to catch up. Her knees shifted under the hem of her dress. Her other hand rested on his. He noticed all of this.

  “Please?” She tilted her chin. “Make a dashta’s life easier?”

  “Yes,” he said. “When I get back. We’re visiting the front tonight.”

  “Not now, but in a week or two, right before he realizes he’s bored. I’ll let you know. His name is Coralaphan Cephas.”

  Sethlan nodded. He would remember that name.

  She leaned close. The scent of her hair evoked the smoke, sweat, and liquor of the club. She whispered, “His name is Axachatax.”

  She stood.

  “Nana—you’ll miss me when I’m gone?” he blurted.

  “We need some fucking transportation,” Tejj snapped. He leapt to his feet and dragged Diggery away from the table.

  Sethlan fumed at himself. Putting Nana through another question. Humiliating.

  Her entire purpose was to urge the stupefied officers of the Observers back into danger, and he knew he leaned on her heavily. Yet she always gave him an honest answer. Or seemed to. Either way, it could not be easy for her.

  She pushed her hair from her face and met his eyes. “Yes, Sethlan. I will miss you.”

  ~Judas goat,~ his mind sang.

  She turned away to mother someone else. Sethlan watched her go, bemused and already doubting the flash of guilt he’d seen in her face.

  II

  The Visitor

  Travelogue: On the Baxxax

  Among all the animals on Grigory IV, the baxxaxx are the ones that best withstood millennia of Tachba caretaking. These leathery, indestructible behemoths are the meat, draft, and cavalry animals of the continental north.

  Baxxaxx are anomalously geometrical, in every way but personality like a line of oblong boulders perched on tiny poles. Six jointless peg-legs support eight segments, more or less, just a few inches above the ground. The intermediary segments have vestigial legs which are considered rare delicacies, because they do not grow back when butchered.

  Visitors to Grigory IV may see a field of sleeping baxxaxx and think ‘civic art project,’ until one of the creatures shudders to life and undulates toward them to investigate. As the contraption draws near, the tiny outer eyes become apparent on the front-facing shell. When it draws too near, the entire facial shell hinges open like a nightmare, into curved scythes which can reap several bodyweights of field grass per day. Behind the face-scythes is the baxxaxx’s true face: a gaping mouth of flat, grinding teeth, two more inner eyes, large and expressive, and the sphincter through which it shoots its caustic saliva.

  Many outside observers believe the baxxaxx is a synthetic food animal, created by the unknown progenitors specifically to supply the Tachba with an inexhaustible source of protein. This theory is highly disputed due to the baxxaxx’s temperament and saliva, but both sides concede that the primary value of baxxaxx is their high volume of nutritious meat. The animals are butchered frequently and repeatedly, but not too far, lest they die. After a traumatic process involving trickery, cornering, tying down, and hacking with axes, the butchered baxxaxx is released back to the fields for a “fill in” season.

  With each year of life, the baxxaxx become incrementally less pleased with all things human. At peak antipathy, the meanest specimens are penned apart from the rest and used for war. These fighting mounts are called “lowbacks” from the notches that form in the carapace after a lifetime of strategic butchery. Riders use these notches as defensible stations from which they tug grapnels that control, barely, the baxxaxx’s direction as it lunges across the landscape. After years being butchered, the animals need only to be pointed toward a suitable enemy for the roles to be reversed.

  As for breeding, most of the creatures never figure out how (see: the Story of Sorrell, the Most Famous Baxxaxx).

  (Childhood: The Throwback)

  Young Nana

  We announce the happy news of a new female in the Naremsa Family Line.

  The Naremsa Family is honored since before thought and paper, and all who love Naremsa will love the new child, a Slight girl born Haut March 25, two years past. She has survived the early Pollution which proves she is crafted to live. The hopes and dreams of the Naremsa Family are entrusted to her small heart.

  The world will call this child Nanatique Naremsa, but she is named Briff.

  Nana is serious. She is able but not given to speech. She helps her mother and her brothers. She lights her father’s eyes.

  The Slight.

  Even as a child of eleven, Nana knew she was slight.

  The other girls in the family compound stuffed themselves at every meal and glowed with zaftig health and humor. Next to them, Nana was pale and diminished, sometimes too nauseous to even keep down a bowl of slosch.

  The other girls’ wide hips overhung their chairs. Their asses mercilessly walloped the walls, doors, and cupboards of the multi-family compound. Nana shimmered like a mirage in the shadows. The other girls were bell-shaped, as sturdy and graceful as boot stretchers. Nana was woven from straw.

  At puberty, the family girls would change. As their muscle developed, their hips would close, and the girls would achieve a matchless Tachba grace. The compound would fill with otherworldly beauties who trailed longing and death behind them. These young women would attract young men, even to the remote and isolated Naremsa compound. As the young men accumulated, they would inevitably fight. Blood would dark
en the path to the compound gates. The men would happily spill it for the young Tachba women.

  But the fey magic of these girls would not last. Before long, the glorious creatures would turn into polluted factories.

  The female pelvis didn’t close during puberty so much as temporarily tighten. It was designed, and not very well, to swing open during childbirth. The untethered cartilaginous hinges eventually weakened and wore through. They would tear during delivery, or even from a sudden movement, and finally calcify at menopause. Childbirth was very survivable for Tachba women, it was the womanhood itself that killed.

  But Nana was slight, and this would not be her future. Nana noticed her difference early and soon learned the dual meaning of the word. Slight: she was slim-hipped, and would remain so. The Slight: she was not really a woman.

  A slight girl was infertile, a throwback, a dead end. The safest course for a slight girl was to die before her parents. Without the love and protection of her family, she was meaningless and expendable—if she stayed nothing more than a slight girl.

  If she was to be more, a slight girl could attempt one of three paths through the world, none of them easy.

  She could be a pharmacienne, and concoct drugs, medicines, effectants, poisons, and cures out of herbs collected in the country. A pharmacienne slight girl could remain with her family but still enjoy some freedom of movement. She would be too valuable to casually murder, no matter how offensively rare and novel she might seem to the new strongman, should the family’s circumstances change.

  If not a pharmacienne, a slight girl could be a dashta, a woman who managed groups of men so they could work together without coming to violence. At one time, dashtas had been outlawed by the Haphans until it was discovered that the Tachba could not function without them. Now the Haphans tolerated dashtas, but they were not recognized in chains of command, and they could not congregate without direct Haphan supervision.

  Finally, in the pre-Haphan era, Nana could have been a manleader. She could have risen out of a collection of dashtas, and run a town, or even built a minor empire and named herself queen. When the early Haphans subjugated a Tachba territory and desired to remove all organized resistance, the first thing they did was execute the manleaders.

  On each of these three paths, a slight girl had no choice but to stay watchful. She quickly learned how to gain deep understanding, to reflexively gather levers to use on the people around her. It was for her own safety.

  To prepare her for this life, Papa sat with Nana every night and tested her on every detail of the family compound. It was Nana’s duty to observe, and somewhat less so to obey. He asked questions she couldn’t properly know unless she ignored propriety, and yet he still punished her when she broke convention. From this, Nana learned very early that Papa only needed the semblance of obedience. She was never to be deflected from gathering what she needed, or from achieving her own goals. She only couldn’t be noticed doing so.

  The firelight sparkled in Papa’s eyes as he asked, “How are the baxxaxx?”

  “Today we have news! The lowback mount we call Bezach took a bite out of Gole. Gole wandered up to the old monster when no one was looking and tried to hug it! He lost six ounces on his thigh. Old Grueff brought the pharmacienne from town, and she said Gole won’t walk normally for a month.”

  “Flesh in the mouth of a mount,” Papa prompted.

  “Baxxaxx suffer from our flesh. We love to eat them, but they can’t eat us, they can only kill us. Apart from oar beetles, we are not eaten all that much, are we, Papa? We are just surprised or killed.”

  “Heart of my heart, thy words wander,” Papa rumbled, in the Deep Tongue.

  “Bezach bit Gole and drew sick. The baxxaxx started streaming pus from every crack. The pharmacienne from town gave it sour milk, and it vomited up the chunk of Gole’s leg. I pulled the chunk out of the bile and washed it. No one thought it was a good idea to sew it back on Gole.”

  “Where is it now, this piece of your brother?” Papa asked.

  “I have it under my pillow.”

  “Oh dear. You have a chewed-up hunk of your brother under your pillow?”

  “To remove blood from linen, you mix chew-weed and amelyn in equal portions. Steep them in water and scrub it into the cloth.”

  “Your brother’s flesh, Nana. It’s under your pillow.”

  “To make decaying flesh aromatic and palatable, apply a marinade of yogurt and batistic vinegar. I peppered it with hot cabbage shavings, and now I wake up hungry!”

  “What I’m getting at,” Papa said with more urgency, “is what in Yod’s name do you intend to do with your brother’s thigh?”

  Nana had an answer for even this. “It’s four years to his shaping walk. That is when he leaves the compound to become a man, papa. I will stretch and cure his skin, and then tattoo it with the Naremsa emblem.”

  “But, why?” Papa insisted.

  She watched her papa for a moment. “Decoration,” she confessed. “Gole will have a nice decoration to wear on his shaping walk.”

  That wasn’t the truth. Papa easily penetrated Nana’s lie. His hand crept around her waist and pulled her closer. “To think I have such a clever, loving daughter. Gole doesn’t deserve you. I wish I had had a piece of dried skin, when I needed it.”

  “I only hope he stops at one piece of skin.”

  “Yes.” After a moment, Papa was ready to continue. “Now, what was the wet nurse cackling about in the kitchen? We all heard the uproar.”

  Nana had gathered that as well. “She says she needs two more breasts, and she asked Old Grueff to lay hold of some during his next town visit. No more than two.”

  “Saucy woman! I almost married her.”

  “She says you would never have been able to reach her womb, ‘not for lack of trying.’ What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know at all,” Papa said, and Nana easily penetrated the lie.

  The two of them could chat for hours.

  Nana balanced on Papa’s knee, half facing the fire. Behind them was the tremendous hubbub that resulted from having four family lines in the same compound.

  By tradition, the final training session of the day was in the hall after dinner. Naremsa boys mixed with Naremisas, Neramas, and Gullards in a free-wheeling scrum of sweaty torsos and hair-deep dagger cuts. Around the edges, the girls of the compound practiced their embroidery, which is what they called deeply stabbing their fingers as they stared at the lurid swarm of sweating boys.

  Nana’s brothers were in that chaotic mix. Boys whose knees she kissed when they tripped. Boys to whom she taught language while their Pollution had them vibrating with the desire to escape the room. She loved her little berserkers. At least, she hoped she did.

  They heard a sharp wail from the end of the hall. Nana leapt to her feet.

  Gole’s dim-witted twin brother, Grulle, had been jostled onto a blade. The dagger protruded from his stomach as the other boys carried him to a table. Gole limped beside him, tapping the handle, saying something that made Grulle laugh.

  Pulling the dagger out of Grulle was high theater. Screams and gouts of blood. One of the kitchen women applied a poultice and a bandage. She told Grulle to stay still for thirty minutes and was disregarded.

  Grulle slid unsteadily to his feet. Before he could even stand alone, his brother Gole dropped to a knee and punched the wound. Down went Grulle, vomiting in an arc. The crowd of boys loved this. From the floor, Grulle dug his thumb into Gole’s bandaged thigh. Gole screamed and collapsed, crying and laughing at the same time.

  “Attend,” Papa said, drawing her back from the play. “What is the real story of Gole’s bite? And your black eye? No lying, now.”

  “Service, papa,” she said, reluctantly. “I shall tell you.”

  The real story was not flattering.

  During a writing lesson, Gole punched Nana off her stool and fled the room. When she awoke, she searched the compound without luck until he limped back to her with the
chunk of skin and muscle taken out of his thigh.

  “Stop bawling, you little scrag. Running away from mere words on a page! Fleeing from service! What do you get for that?”

  “I got bited!”

  “Think with words! For your animal cowardice, you were bit. Bezach must hate you.”

  Gole was horrified. “Bezach loves me! When I grow up, he will be my lowback!”

  “Do we bite the things we love? Do we hit them? Do we hit our sisters and knock them to the floor? Look at my eye, Golephan. Look what you did to my eye!”

  “I—” Gole gulped convulsively. “I failed…to master…myself? I am better…than that?”

  “What do you do, Gole, when you hit your loving sister?”

  She kept a stern face despite his adorably conflicted expression. He loved her. He repented of striking her. He found her anger terrifying on an existential level: Nana could disappear his hurts with a kiss. He needed her.

  But at the moment she was also his enemy, and he was polluted.

  Nana watched closely. She had to be alert, as her black eye reminded her. Gole’s little brain would soon tire of weighing alternatives. The Pollution would suggest something pragmatic, which Gole might decide was a good idea.

  There.

  The idea glimmered across his features. A hardness. It would be something like: Gole should simply strangle Nana and hide her corpse under the bed where she’d never be discovered. Mama would never ask him where Nana went, so he would never have to confess. Then he could return to the stable and kill that fucking baxxaxx.

  The Tachba Pollution distorted everything. Nana watched closely until Gole organized his mind. Nana’s murder was weighed and dismissed. He even overcame his revulsion toward girls and kissed her swelling eye. Then he kissed her cheek over and over again.

  “I’m sorry! Sorry! Sorry! Nana, really I am.”