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

by Walter Blaire

  When Sethlan woke up next, it didn’t seem like much time had passed. The tub had leaked away half its water, and the remainder was black with soot, blood and soil.

  Nana was by the sink, holding a box of lice-powder. “I think the evil bitches are jumping!”

  “That’s the Haphan stuff,” he told her. “It goes on like talcum, and you hardly notice the burning. But your pretty dress!”

  “It’s not supposed to be pretty. But what about it?”

  “It’s all wet. The dust will cake, and not spread.”

  “Out!” she cried. “Get out! Go dry off and get dressed. You have thought of everything, haven’t you? Booby-trap yourself with these little monsters. And now the bitches are starting to bite.”

  Sethlan discovered he was able to stand. He grabbed the bottle of wine off the floor and carefully tottered away.

  He was not quite himself, but he had never felt so clean and relaxed. The bed in the main room exerted a physical pull on his body. Whatever was in the bottle didn’t dull him; it only made him...distractible. He had been drunk many times, even daily, and this wasn’t it. He liked the feeling of flitting from thought to thought, leaving them unpolished, letting them bloom like flowers without his attention so they were different when he turned back. He felt none of the discontent with himself that he would have expected, living with such half-thoughts.

  With close concentration he pulled on trousers and undershirt, and then the narrow window called him over to watch the mid-day street through the slats of the shade.

  “You have thought of everything, la,” Nana said as she came around the corner. She was naked, covered in a light sheen of lice powder. She rolled her eyes as he stared at her.

  “Fair is fair, isn’t it? See how I keep my good humor.” Her voice was grim. She gestured to the bed and sat down with him. There were no chairs in his apartment, not even against the roll-top, as the prior tenant had broken them all. The mattress rocked when she climbed up and folded her legs, her back straight.

  “You are thinking about Nana’s body?” Nana asked.

  “No. I saw the bed move.” He wondered what sort of mechanism held the mattress up. “Do you think there are springs?”

  “Hmmf. That’s charming.” Nana touched her breast, the blood-breast, and brought her hand up in the Closed Eye Opening. “Do you see me?”

  “I see you,” he answered. “How do we know the blood-breast from the milk-breast? By convention it’s the left, but we can never tell which child is nursing.”

  Her hand opened again. This time she used low, throaty witch-talk: “Thine ears and eyes open, child.”

  The voice froze him.

  “Thou’rt at the knee,” she told him. “Thou art teachable. Do you see me?”

  “Yes.”

  ~What happened?~ the Voice demanded.

  “I will lead you. Will you be led?”

  “Briff, yes,” Sethlan said.

  ~What is she doing with her hands?~

  She made the mudra of the Patient Mother, and nodded as he straightened and cocked his head.

  “There is a manleader in Ville Emsa,” she said. The Falling Beam brought the words home with force. “There is a queen for Sessera.”

  ~Sethlan!~ The Voice sounded panicked. ~There is a lock in your mind! It’s closing me out!~

  Sethlan tipped his head unobtrusively. “My mind is crowded with—”

  “Clear thy mind!” The sharp syllables in the Deep Tongue startled him. “I must know you are mine.”

  With a shocked exclamation, the Voice faded away. She waited until he was still. She said:

  Am-a truly as I am,

  When a young maid dissever:

  Cut the neck-meh, peel it back,

  Inside you find a lever.

  Sethlan stared, unable to speak. He knew that rhyme in a different language, and the memory drew him back.

  “Your name?” she asked him.

  “Vercetorix,” Sethlan said.

  “Vercetorix, do you believe a woman will lead a man?”

  “From my earliest days,” he answered.

  “Through long practice, neh? You were an animal for five years before you found your soul, isn’t that right?”

  “Like every other,” Sethlan allowed, uncomfortably. “Faster than some.”

  “And whose hand fed you? Who kept you warm? Who could get close?”

  “You.”

  “Not me,” she said. “Your Momma, or your loving sister. A woman.”

  “Yes.”

  “So through long practice, you know a woman will lead a man.”

  The thought returned to Sethlan. “There is a manleader in the city?”

  She paused, seeming uncertain, and then shrugged. “More to the point, the Haphans have gathered twelve field armies around Ville Emsa. Two million fighting men. A higher concentration than we’ve ever seen.”

  “We’re in great danger from the South,” he said. Some part of him felt concern. He knew should feel shocked by Nana’s information, but between the wine, the teaching mudras, and Nana’s body, he was lucky to understand it at all.

  She made the Cleansing Broom. “The South shall be led. I am not afraid of the South. They are part of us, it is like a laugh fearing an angry frown.”

  “They have new strengths.”

  “Who has?”

  “The Tachba. The Southies. They are getting…wise.”

  When he finished telling her everything he knew, she asked, “How are they learning this? Have they cared about writing before?”

  “Not in any polite sense, no.”

  She watched him for a long, evaluating moment.

  “I told you a truth, and you told me a truth,” she said. “I bathed you, I brought food and wine. The wine was spiked. A little.”

  “You brought food?”

  She sighed. “You were never really under my compulsion, were you?”

  When she said it, it sounded true. But his firming mind would not put it down just yet. He knew that sometimes a dashta could state something, and it would take root and become a fact in the man’s mind. “Don’t try that. I was under your compulsion, but I have always been willing.”

  “Oh?”

  “You put me in a spell. There was a geis in that Spring Wine, and it made me think…thing-to-thing. I always look through a matter using the school discipline. But for a moment, I jumped from thought to thought, and I was completely satisfied with each half-completed thought as I abandoned it.”

  “A geis!” She smiled, and then stood and retrieved the picnic basket from the roll-top.

  “I felt young, young but old,” he finished. “I felt young in thinking, but old in thought.”

  She handed over a pod of blandfruit, and then a hunk of cheese, and piece after piece of bread, until he was finally chewing too much to speak.

  “I imagine,” she said, “that in time’s fullness, you’ve shared some last words with a dying soldier on the front? With their poor shortened life leaking out? Those pitiable scrags make no sense to a useful man, because as their reason leaves them, they will tell you anything. The boots call it a confession. The dead-talk.”

  “So I was dying?” he asked. Her face turned so serious that he almost apologized for asking.

  “No, you weren’t dying, Sethlan. But I have heard many confessions. Dashta-meh, and I sometimes hear nothing but confessions. If the life is gone in ten ticks, then I have ten ticks of speaking to an unguarded soul. You see, those dying boys think like I think.”

  Sethlan thought about the hurried, desperate voices he had heard, the minds behind them so instantly, fearlessly strong, and so untroubled by detail. “It’s so…insufficient.”

  “I make do,” she said drily. “There are connections when you jump. You can stagger like a madman from notion to notion and somehow keep your balance.”

  Sethlan frowned at the idea of a madman in his head.

  “The word you’re looking for is ‘surprising,’” she added. />
  “I’m sure you’re right.” He would not agree with her fully, not yet. The tampered wine made him doubt everything. He wanted to mull it over a beer, with Diggery talking to provide a background hum. Then he would be able to keep the whole thing in view.

  “In the wine, I put what we call parapraxis, or the slip. It’s from the family of leaper herbs. It does nothing by itself, but it leads you in a certain direction. You were exhausted, and I was listenable, so you were suggestible. When I gave you a big truth, you kindly gave me back the same.”

  He stopped chewing. “I did, didn’t I? I couldn’t shut up, I didn’t even try. I am sorry I burdened you, whether you’re a poisoner or not.”

  She blushed. The high color glowed through her clear skin and spread down her chest. She forced a laugh and spread her arms. “And I’m not being a little unkind now?”

  “Don’t get up,” he said quickly, when she shifted her weight. Had he stared too long? “Give me your hand.”

  She extended it palm down, and he closed his fingers over its small warmth, feeling her knuckles shift minutely under his thumb. Her palm was warm, and as he held it he could feel, it seemed, the chain of bone and muscle leading up her arm.

  He chewed at her complacently, using the fading remnants of his madman’s imagination to perceive how her hand led to her arm, to her shoulder, to her neck, and the V of her chin. There were her small lips and large eyes. At this precise moment he felt serene, even slightly desirable.

  She blinked when he didn’t let go. “Does my hand feel different? Your fingers are cold, neh? Can you eat one-handed?”

  “More of your incomplete thoughts.” he said. “I’m thinking about your hand, through and through.”

  Nana didn’t answer but her brow wrinkled, and soon Sethlan felt self-conscious. He wondered how she did that, when she was the naked one, but he did not let go. Her hand felt too right in his hand, and perhaps she felt that way too.

  “What is a hand?” she said finally. “But you shall not hold anything else!”

  He opened his mouth to contradict her and was interrupted by a brisk, official knock at the door. She was off the bed in a trice, disappearing down the short hall to the bathroom.

  Sethlan opened the door and needed a moment to place the officer’s face. It was Hopala from the club, and the club felt a lifetime away.

  “Colonel Trappia’s compliments, and would you join us at the 314th?” Hopala looked worried. “I’m sorry but it’s quite serious.”

  “What, la?”

  “The South has produced more of your dreadnoughts to shell our line. Southie ground troops are attacking in broad daylight, under a heavy barrage of the ship-shells.”

  “What!”

  “I believe we’re losing our new trench, captain, and maybe a few old ones.” Hopala abruptly sagged against the doorframe. “In fact, the South is on the verge of breaking through.”

  III

  Induction Day

  Travelogue: On the Shaping Walk

  Between the northern winters, training accidents, errors with the baxxaxx, and general misadventure, a cohort of twenty boys may winnow down to six young adult men. Still too many for a stable household. There might be two other generations of twenty boys generating chaos in the compound, but the adult men are more dangerous and destabilizing than these herds of children. With their speed, strength, and their methods of settling differences, even the simplest misunderstanding invariably leads to a blood-bath.

  Before the Haphan colonization, these young men had to be spent, and thus rose the tradition of the shaping walk. On shaping walks, the young men are alone together without adults or sisters, and for the first time they make their own decisions. Different from just wandering the forest singing night songs, these travels require sustained preparation and ongoing thought. Deeply polluted Tachba take numerous ill-advised risks and end up starving in the forests, freezing in high mountain passes, or singly attacking heavily armed parties of other Tachba. Thus are the least steady, least attentive youths removed from society, and only the most thoughtful and controlled return.

  In modern times, the eternal front performs the same winnowing function as the shaping walks, but the tradition has not disappeared. Indeed, it is more dangerous now than ever because the new goal is to return with a pretty young wife from some distant family compound. The young men must fight through crowds of other suitors even before their courtship can begin.

  (Childhood: Soft’s last day)

  Young Nana

  On Soft’s last day, Nana borrowed Phajaja’s boots for her trip out of the compound. Relli and Chasza heard the soles crossing the wood floor, and intercepted Nana before she could leave the kitchen.

  “Going out?” Relli said.

  “Out-geh, on a forest walk-la?” Chasza glanced around to see if anyone noticed her tough-talking.

  “Chassie,” Nana said, “was you a boy you’d be the blood-fed.”

  “Let’s help her find the forest!”

  Relli and Chasza picked at her with birdlike interest for the whole endless walk to the palisade gates, leveling with her and sharing advice as only sisters could. It seemed that the problem with Nana was her wild, white, unmanageable hair. But more than that, she didn’t tend to her clothing. And she should wear more of it, because there was the problem of all her showy skin. Also, what was her fixation on wearing boy’s boots?

  Nana suffered in silence. She knew, at bottom, they didn’t hate her. They actually admired her and were envious of her right of passage into the forest. They were lovely girls who could never be merely cruel, but they had stumbled on a way of stinging her by being kind. And that was well worth exploring because they knew, on some level, they’d never otherwise wield the power to hurt others. It would be out of the scope of their lives.

  By fourteen years old, Nana could easily explain and deflect any behavior, but doing so required her attention. Nana had no interest in being engaged, not on this day, of all days. When she finally passed through the gate she felt like she had escaped the compound, or worse, been chased out. There were so few in her family she could endure, and this worried her because she was only fourteen, with nothing ahead of her but years of the same.

  The forest stirred with active quiet. Leaves bent with the breeze; trees shrugged in the wind. Here the world steadfastly ignored Nana and her wardrobe choices. It went along its business of adjusting and accommodating, a vast unkempt system of compromise. In the distance she heard brief animal calls with the spaces between filled by the sound of a fast-moving brook.

  As her family warned, the forest did communicate, just not how they thought. Nana had only to pause every few hundred steps and re-tune her ears to the forest choir. Any off note, and she would change direction, or climb a tree, not that she ever needed to. Though the boys were terrified, the only dangers she’d found were easily avoided or far away. Besides, nothing ever bothered Nana when she had Soft on her shoulder. The whole forest, and its entire predatorship, apparently found her killkrack repulsive.

  Two years of mothering had not softened the creature in the slightest. Nor had he been gentled by the kicks and horrified screams of the people it ambushed in the dark corners of the household. Nor even when Papa chased him into the attic with his carbine after he stole Rulle from the cradle. He walked the walls like a giant insect. He fell on Relli and Chasza from the rafters because he adored their screams.

  When Soft stalked up to her cot at night, she never knew if he would curl up beside her, or explode into a frenzy of tooth and claw. His face was too small to give that kind of cue, and besides, at different times of the month, his eyes and mouth showed at different parts of the confusing body.

  The parts of his pelt which weren’t spiked chitin were covered with bristling, scratchy close-packed feathers that worked like a dartboard to catch and trap the claws of his many forest enemies. Between his malevolent face, the chitinous bald-spots, and the recessed wing cavities, he was hard to look at and near
ly impossible to love. But he was hers, and this was what made the day sad. Nana was returning Soft to the forest.

  “Yes, you’re a horrid little beastie,” she murmured. “Do you understand you’re going home?”

  He seemed to, in that he rattled his hind legs and gnawed softly on her ear. He had grown too big to crawl into her hair, small comfort, so he perched on her shoulder with his hollow, egg-piercing claws sunk to her very bones. If that wasn’t unpleasant enough, he was as heavy as a sack of turnips and he rocked with each step on the uneven path. But why would Nana complain about the discomfort? There was no point. Soft had never shown her a moment’s consideration his whole life.

  “Your old home is just through this copse and around the big rock. We’ll see if your tree trunk is still there. It was so nicely rotted.”

  In fact—and perhaps she was only imagining it—the creature did seem to be calmer. Jullie, one of her mother’s old friends from the Gullard family, told her that killkracken never strayed far from their birthnests. According to lore, a killcrack emerged from its chrysalis with its memories already filled, its understanding of place confirmed by months of grubhood. The nearby trees and streams were already etched indelibly in their minds, and killkracken could be confused if they were carried out of their habitats.

  In Jullie’s opinion, Soft had no choice but to be a malevolent spirit of destruction. The world was not right for him at the family compound. All around him were trees that didn’t exist, and flowing streams that never ran with water. What he expected was never what he found. Clearly, Soft lived in a land of killkrack dreams where he could act without repercussion. Who would stay sane under those circumstances?

  “If anybody asks what came of you,” Nana whispered, “I’ll say I gave you your mind back. The part that kept you from being kind and gentle. You’re like a little Tachba after all, aren’t you?”