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

by Walter Blaire

  Momma could always be found there, even though she hadn’t stirred a pot for years. They were pouring out tea and melting bukeweed in it, slowly growing as potted as the men. Through the kitchen door, which had been left open, Nana saw that even the main gate to the compound was unguarded. As if, were they infiltrated and killed in their sleep that night, so be it.

  Momma glanced at her with dilated eyes. “Nana Surpriser, Nana Small-Mouth. Nana-nana-na. So my Gole gave you a hug before he ran away?”

  “Yes,” Nana said. “He loves me more than you.”

  The table fell silent. Momma stared at her incredulously, and then gave a snort. “Why yes, Surpriser, I was going to complain bitterly, thank you. Now that I’m chastised, I have no plans for the rest of the night.”

  “You could visit the men.” Nana accepted a mug of spiked tea and let its sour smell fill her nose. “One stroll through there, and you’ll find out what your woman-parts are for.”

  “And probably your not-just woman parts too,” she chuckled. “Has my Nana been made a woman?”

  “Not as far as I know. Momma? They are very angry.”

  “An’ fuck well they should be, little queen, rolling over for a band of thieves just because of some big trucks and guns. Let them hate themselves for a good long while. My little boys are gone.”

  “An’ here’s to twelve more years with the next batch, may they not be biters in the womb,” Jullie cried, raising her tea.

  They all tossed their cups back.

  Nana’s sisters, whispering fiercely, dared each other into visiting the men. Nothing could happen if they linked arms and passed through singing, they claimed. And wasn’t it about time to try out some of their woman parts for sizing?

  Jullie rolled her eyes and followed them out. “I’ll keep ‘em from bothering the colonel,” she promised.

  Old Hennie was Momma’s executive in the compound. She sat nearest the fire, looking so old, with her eyes focused on the past. “La a husband-meh for but three days, though he were a boy I’d known for…was it up fifteen years? I’d known him up fifteen years, him-being from the other side of the hill. A nasty rat of a boy, la’d a fine strapping man and all it took was time. He rose into a gorgeous man like a bun in the oven. We were married, and he tossed me on the bed like a dirty sheet.” She gave an evil cackle. “We had three days and nights. Forty-five years haven’t knocked those three nights out of my head. He was inducted on the fourth morning, drawn away to the great monster, shot to pieces in the trench and covered with dirt. From him I had eighteen fine lads and a few pretty girls.”

  “Oh, certainly I’m a silly factory bitch to complain, considering everything I have,” Momma said. She glanced at Nana and her stoic expression slipped away for a moment. “When the truckie pulled in, I wasn’t walking out into the yard. No—I was upstairs in the attic, hiding Brinnie, Rulle and the rest in the linen. So they wouldn’t be taken too.”

  “They’re not old enough,” Nana said gently.

  “Well, I said I was silly.”

  “Gole said he loves us all,” Nana said. “And wants us to remember him.”

  Momma nodded.

  “Gole only ran back to the waif because she was so cruel to him,” added Hennie kindly.

  Thinking back, Nana had to agree. She wondered now if she could have been so firm with her little berserkers, knowing this day would come. Perhaps that was why the sisters were drafted into raising the boys…the mothers quickly lost all heart for it. She wondered if Gole knew, despite all available evidence, how much Nana loved and cherished him.

  “Training men is all about the unkindness,” Hennie continued. “Without the whip, they turn feral.”

  They listened to the squeals of Nana’s sisters from the great room.

  “In fact, maybe Nana would miss her calling if she was just a common pharmacienne.” Hennie took the teapot back to the fire for more heat. “It seems she was born to terrify men.”

  Momma’s eyes swiveled to Nana questioningly.

  “Hennie is right,” said Nana.

  “Since when is Hennie right about anything?”

  “Since I heard her just now. I think I’ve known for years. I don’t want to stay here and see this play out again. Momma, I think my heart would crack.”

  “You have a slight heart,” said Momma stiffly, as if wounded. “But I also know you will be useless with the next set of boys. I’ll have to train up Rellie or Chasza. When the Indies come, we lose the boys and the sister.”

  “Momma, would you bring back Gole and Japha and the rest, if you could?”

  Her eyes widened. “Little queen, is that what you’re thinking? Have you turned utterly mad? So you slog over to the Haphan training fields, or you wander into Ville Emsa. You won’t find Gole or anybody in all those millions. Do you comprehend how many little boys are playing soldier? You will never see your brothers again.”

  Nana stared at her hands, clasped around the mug. Bukeweed turned nauseating when it grew cold, and she had barely sipped hers. “Maybe I won’t. But the boys can write in the Haphan mail. I’ll know their units. I can track them on the train schedules.”

  “Put them paid, girl,” said Jullie. She had returned from the great room, and Nana’s sisters took perches at the fire. They were subdued, perhaps shocked at what they’d found. “Listen to your Momma, Nana.”

  But Momma grasped Nana’s hand, her fingers surprisingly soft for someone who could be so fearsome. “You would send some writing to your Momma, too. Anything you should discover.”

  “She’ll have to be a right killkrack if she’s to have a twig’s chance in the fire,” said Hennie, who then laughed at herself. “I heard of a slight girl once sent to the Dashta Sisterhood in Ville Emsa. She was permitted to train herself to their design, all the old tricks to steer violence out of men. Girls with that training make the best dashtas.”

  “A dashta,” Momma murmured. “A dashta will be able to learn what she needs to know.”

  Hennie leaned in. “When my husband went, I almost went too. I wanted to go, so I could keep him safe. But before I could get away, I found I was pregnant, and I’m not the sort of woman who can travel…and then I went factory. He would have disapproved anyway; we talked about it. We talked so much.” Her words turned clearer and more sober as she spoke. She gave Nana a decisive look. “Girl, you will find a chivalry unit. The Observers, the Planners, or the Head: they are the eyes, the mind, and the will of the army. They have all the good rumors. You might even find the boys eventually, or do some other sort of good.”

  Jullie had been listening with growing disapproval. “If you think your heart is breaking from sending your brothers away, just wait until you see what happens to them at the front.”

  Momma shook her head. “We’re being useless. Nana, go to sleep. Let us all go to sleep, and bar your doors against the men tonight.”

  She squeezed Nana’s hand, waking her from a slight trance. The bukeweed, from only a few sips, had left her not giddy but exhausted. When they all stood, Nana impulsively hugged her mother, a long hug that she was loath to break.

  That night she dreamt about Gole, running himself to death before a terrifying fire. The ground was broken and he kept falling. At the end, he was prostrate and exhausted when the magical flames finally caught him. For the rest of her dreams that night, he only spoke with flames in his mouth.

  The next morning, Nana left home.

  Book 3: The Queen

  I

  The Conspiracy

  Travelogue: The Trench Pantheon

  Trench life, with its four weeks on, four days off rotation, quickly becomes the only world the soldiers know. Many soldiers, long on the front, will have no conception of anything outside this existence. They fill the trenches with everything that seems missing: gods and omens, luck and fate, intentionality. Agency.

  The pantheon of trench gods rises out of the Tachba’s credulous nature and the war itself in all its unpredictability. Swirls of dust l
ook like striding spirits. Piles of dirt are whittled into evocative shapes by shrapnel. Corpses are blown into organized stacks by detonations. Bodies zigzag through the air like demented wights, illuminated in flashes, waving dead arms and kicking dead legs, held aloft by the barrage and never seeming to fall to the ground. The occasional clean-outs: eviscerated men who flee from the middle of an explosion and go minutes before they know they are dead. The rare fuckwhats: they keep fighting for several minutes after decapitation.

  The Haphans dismiss these stories as rumors, knock-on effects of the Pollution. Very few will acknowledge that in a war with a trillion incidents per day, any one-in-a-billion fluke is technically possible. To the Tachba, however, the trench is the mystical locus of Grigory IV. It is the fiery gate through which entire city-sized populations of humanity violently convert to the spirit world, leaving behind their love, fear, and anger to fill the air. To a people created for war, the trench is the only reasonable place for ancestors, magic, monsters, and gods to stalk the earth.

  (Imperial Archives: Beating Culleyho)

  Colonel Sandor Luscetian, 36 years after Landing Day.

  The mountain people of Ed-homse very nearly defeated us. We, the Haphan Empire, very nearly thrown back by tribes of mountain Tachba! They accounted for more Haphan casualties than the rest of the colonization effort combined. Add insult to injury, and it wasn’t our superior weaponry, organization, intelligence, morality, or social duty that defeated them.

  It was love and lies.

  One of our line officers had been not-so-cleverly captured during a mountain ambush. He had then cleverly fallen in love with their difficult, brilliant queen ‘Fat’ Culleyho. We had then even more cleverly deceived our man—into protecting her from us. That’s how you sink a manleader: you subvert her friends. Our officer convinced her she needed to beg us for peace, when in fact she could have named her terms.

  She stepped in front of a Haphan firing squad as part of the peace deal. She believed it would protect the children of Ed-homse. Her only stipulation was to die by laser rather than strangling, because the Tacchies hate to be strangled.

  Culleyho, such a damn fine queen. Barely a woman, and still as idealistic and bubbly as a little girl. I met her at the talks, and came away thinking, God save us if she grows up! God save my lurching heart from her next quick grin. God save our Local Emperor, should this woman ever think past her narrow ambition to save her mountain people.

  She was an effervescent, lovely young woman, a natural leader. But she believed too wholly in the vaunted Haphan reputation for integrity, and the firing squad was her sad end. Tachba do not suspect lies, and lies are the food and drink of Haphan politics. If the Tachba were paying attention, we just gave them another dubious bit of progress to mimic.

  Now, Ed-homse is imploding for lack of leadership, and the Haphan Expeditionary Force has its next next objective.

  Sessera.

  This is a season of heartbreak, it seems. We Haphans enjoy Sessera. The rules of propriety seem to be magically lifted, there, and it’s nearly a vacation retreat. Reputable Haphan families summer there, for all love.

  The territory is walled off from its neighbors by natural features—a desert, the mountains of Ed-homse, a wide river. Their land is bountiful, which means Sesserans spend less time on internecine family conflicts for resources. Knock-on effect: They’re cleaner, better kept, more self-aware, more self-effacing. The average Sessie is almost like a Haphan child. Teachable, worth improvement, throws the occasional tantrum.

  Certainly they are mere Tachba, but Sessera is high civilization compared to the violent, primitive southerners. In fact, the Sessies already have an established border war with the Southern kingdoms. They themselves keep the South from overflowing and rampaging into their territory.

  Because we took Ed-homse first, we can turn ’bout face and enter Sessera behind their strongest lines of defense. The Sessies built fortresses against us for the inevitable war, big installations that would take months to reduce. They’ve concentrated all their stolen and mimicked weaponry there. If we attack those strongholds, we’ll be facing our own artillery, almost. Thanks to Culleyho, we’ll be going around all that, thank you very much.

  (Next entry.)

  In a stroke of good luck, Sessera turns out to be mere weeks away from folding.

  I met their Queen Baff once at a diplomatic dinner in my role as representative of the Duke, my uncle. I must say, the Queen was a charming and amusing hotpot who seemed to be magically able to string my officers along.

  These queens, the reasonable ones, they see the writing on the wall when the Haphan army approaches. They remove themselves rather than force their people into a losing war. Still, I was put out. It struck me dumb to hear she’d taken poison.

  I needn’t have worried about losing Sessera as a holiday destination. Even as we subjugate it, the violence stops during the frequent Tachba holidays, and Haphans can circulate freely so long as we don’t come in great numbers and we don’t step on any toes. Since we’ve been sending missionaries at them for years, a fair number of Sessies can even read. Read!

  Which means we can share The Promise on paper, like civilized overlords pretending to dominate civilized subjects. The Promise has utterly destabilized what remains of the indigenous Sesseran leadership, and every day more Sessies flood to our side, demanding citizenship in the empire.

  At my Uncle’s level, in the Gray House, there is now even talk of arming the Tachba to fight for us. At one time I would have laughed at the idea. Now I say, have at it! We can provide equipment, low-level weapons, uniforms, and training. Nothing fancy. Certainly no flying machines. They are expensive to risk, and they fail too frequently these days. But artillery? Grenades? Machine guns? There is no limit to what we can teach these voracious fighters about making war on our behalf.

  Here is The Promise:

  Sessera (and Ed-homse, and Sheflis, and the rest of the territories) will serve and defend the Haphan Empire as faithful clients. Hapha will study the Tachba Pollution and find a cure.

  There’s nothing more to it. It works like magic, like flicking a switch. These prodigious killers revert into tractable children, happy and hopeful. The Tachba were bred to be controlled, and now we hold the leash.

  The only place The Promise does not work is in the Moon Kingdoms. In the South, they confuse servitorship with slavery and won’t even let our emissaries cross the Sesseran frontier. The south is tropically warm and food is bountiful, and it swarms at peak density with Tachba who see no need ‘to submit to another twisting’ at the hands of newcomers from the sky.

  Consequently, the South is a never-ending welter of blood and suffering. They have enormous concentrations of population—you can’t call them proper cities. The southern Tachba constantly outgrow their resources and devour themselves, only to bloom again out of the rubble.

  Those primitive Southerners are not important. In a matter of months we will own most of the continental north, and our pet Sesserans will wall off the south. Then peace will prevail. In the Haphan cities, our army camps will convert back to the universities they were designed to be. I will go back to school and earn my fluid dynamics degree. We will crawl out of the primitivism that almost overwhelmed us. We’ll say good-bye to soldiering forever!

  1

  Gawarty

  “Welcome back, welcome back, gems of the empire.” Tawarna stood behind his desk, looking terribly stooped and thin to Gawarty. “I hope your ride in was not taxing.”

  “That’s new.” Gawarty nodded at his father’s arm. It was bandaged and tied against his waist, so that the general worked one-handed.

  “Caught a zinger.” The general smiled crookedly and glanced at Sethlan. “What do we call them, captain? Uncle Nestor took an interest. Eh?”

  “Yes, sir,” Sethlan said. Behind him, Diggery rolled his eyes.

  “I beg your pardon,” the general continued. “I believe I remember a recent promotion. Congratulations
to you, Haut Captain!”

  “Thank you, sir.” Sethlan glanced self-consciously at the temporary badge pinned to his breast. The trenches were no place for glittering epaulettes, so the line kit version was a small red patch which took a sharp eye to notice. “I haven’t got the silver knucklebones yet. We’re always at the front and it doesn’t make much difference out here.”

  “I’m sad to say I can’t agree,” the general replied heartily. “For you Tachba, rank is a crucial distinction that generates pride and confidence among the boots. We Haphans also know how every promotion elevates the spirits of our servitors. For me personally, it simply warms my heart to see your service recognized.”

  Sethlan only said, “Yes, sir.”

  Gawarty glanced over curiously. Rather than diminishing the captain’s stiffness, his father’s generous speech had the opposite effect. The general noticed, but seemed unwilling to retreat into the distance of politeness or rank.

  “It has been a difficult few weeks,” the general assayed. “Getting a patch sewed on is the least of your worries.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  General Tawarna ambled around the desk, unable to straighten due to his tied arm. His shoulders slumped, his head bowed—he looked like a man defeated. “I still hope to have this finished up for the solstice, so you can have some leave. I can only imagine how tired all of you must be.”