by E. E. Knight
Since leaving Jamaica-gaps in the crew filled with the commodore's sailors-Carrasca had taught Valentine a good deal about the islands of the Caribbean: cays and atolls where some found refuge, larger islands such as Cuba and Cozumel, which fed the appetite of the Kurians. She knew winds and weather, currents and courses, radio procedure and sail setting; she spoke of them as easily as Valentine could describe his old platoons in the Wolves.
"How's the rudder?" she asked the steersman.
"Biting fine. She's a heavy ship. All that steel in this old ice-shover. Wouldn't care to ride this out in the Guideon. We'd have to heave-to."
"She's working. We're shipping more water than I'd like. The sea hasn't worked up much-I'd put it at three meters."
"Four sometimes, Cap," the steersman said.
"Any sign of the coast?" Valentine asked, trying to pierce the rain-filled darkness forward.
"By dead reckoning, it's there," Carrasca answered. "I don't dare get much closer. The best harbors are on the other side of the island, and we can't use them."
Cool and professional. The warm moment they shared that night on the balcony where she admitted her thrill at her command seemed like a childhood game of you-show-me-yours-and-I'll-show-you-mine. Now she just watched him every now and then out of the corner of her eye, as though checking the professional wall between them for cracks.
"Your ships don't land here?"
"Nothing worth landing for, except fresh water or firewood. We hit richer lands. Now Cuba, there's good hunting there, especially on the north coast and in the stretch between it and the Florida peninsula."
"My work is on Hispaniola-the Haiti side."
"Ill get you there. Nothing's going to happen until this blows itself out, Valentine."
"I'll try and sleep. Have me woken if this clears, please."
Valentine descended from the bridge, weaving past a mix of the Thunderbolt's old crew and new shipmates from Jamaica. He went to his cabin, formerly shared with Post, who now lay almost recovered in sick bay, thanks to the skilled teams of Jayport's aged hospital ship. Sea air and sun were speeding his recovery, but the former Coastal Marine was still not up and around for more than a few hours a day.
Ahn-Kha was on the cabin floor. The quarters smelled of Ahn-Kha's horsey odor and vomit, the contents of the Golden One's stomach having abandoned ship when the storm started.
"My David, take out your pistol and put an end to my suffering," Ahn-Kha groaned. He lay on his stomach, with four-fingered hands clasped over his pointed ears.
"Carrasca says it won't last long, old horse," Valentine replied. The motion stimulated Valentine, if anything, though he longed for surcease of the endless sounds of rain, wind, and the ship groaning in the weather.
"It's a new hell each hour."
"What's that?" Valentine asked, dropping into his bunk.
"My people ... say there are four hells. The theosophists need to add one more, the Hell of Motion."
Valentine placed his boots on the floor, tucked them away from Ahn-Kha's head in case the Grog decided to bring up another ten gallons of digestive matter. Best to keep his friend's mind on something else. "They left out a hell?"
Ahn-Kha lay silent, as if gathering his words and putting them into English. "The Golden Ones believe that you must be purified by Hell before gaining Paradise. There is a Hell of Hunger and Thirst, a Hell of Pain, a Hell of Illness, and a Hell of Loneliness. If you suffer deeply of these in your life, you are spared them after death, and reach Paradise that much quicker."
"That's a lot of suffering to reach Heaven."
"By our creed, 'Only through suffering do you grow a soul capable of understanding others, and appreciating the'-what is it-the word for grace of gods?"
Valentine thought for a moment. "Beatitude?"
"I must look that up as soon as I can open my eyes again. I've never heard it. English has too many words for some things, and not enough for others. You take too long in the telling. Your words can never match the music of our proverb-verse."
"I'll work through a King James Bible with you. It'll change your opinion."
"Arrgh. Those tracts, most of them read like the family history of a group of nomad pfump-raisers. One of your theosophists tried to instill in me a belief in my own soul, and me having tasted only the bitter surface of the Hell of Loneliness and Hell of Pain in the time before we met. The fool. As if Paradise could be gained by affirming the divinity of some human. Bah!"
"I've always thought there was more to it than that, my friend."
"My David, if you wish to learn the true path to Paradise, you must read of the Golden Ones' Rhapsodies. Then you will be steeled to torments that must be overcome before a joyful afterlife."
" 'There are four and fifty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them are right,'" Valentine quoted.
"Then what is your opinion of your gods?"
"God? You mean Bud?"
"There is only one? I thought you had two or three."
"Depends who you talk to," Valentine said, sinking into his bunk. On his back, the ship's motion seemed to tilt him headdown first, then feetdown.
"I don't remember anyone calling your god Bub."
"Bud. It's from an old story the top sergeant from Zulu Company used to tell."
"Old stories are the best ones. The bad ones die young. Tell me about Bud."
Valentine sifted his memory. "The sergeant's name was Patel. He was built almost as broad as you, a helluva wrestler, too, and he always fought clean unless someone tried something. Then it was anything goes. But back to the story, before he was in the Wolves, he fought with the regulars, the Guards-"
"Yes, I've seen them," Ahn-Kha said from the noisy darkness. "Good guns, better uniforms, and the best food."
"They can fight when it comes to it. I think when Patel was with 'em they didn't have the nicest clothing. Especially where he was. He said it started while he was watching the ground south of Saint Louis. For a while there, it was trench warfare: the men and Grogs working for the Kurians were trying to blast them out of these hills with artillery. Got so there wasn't a tree standing, but the Guards just kept digging and digging. They'd build little caves of wood with tons of dirt overhead-they were called 'dugouts.' Anyway he was young, and he had this real nervous NCO running the dugout these twenty men were crammed into. The damn Grogs-sorry, old horse-the damn Kurian Grogs started building these rockets they were launching off of railroad rails, and they had enough of a bang in them to collapse a dugout.
"When those babies landed, Patel said it felt like someone picked up the hill and dropped it again. The concussion outside was enough to stop your heart. Well, this corporal starts to lose it-they're in there and it's dark and cold and wet, with the noise and smell of burnt flesh, and as if that isn't bad enough, it seems like any minute they're going to get blown to hell.
"'Get friendly with God!' this corporal starts shouting. 'The time's coming, and you'd better know him! You gotta know God and be on a first-name basis with him to get into heaven. Hurry up, guys!'
"Of course, some of the men just tell him to shut up, but you've always got a joker or two who thinks a nervous breakdown is entertainment, so they start quizzing him.
" 'Praise Jesus!' one hollers, trying to egg him on.
"T'm talking about God, not Jesus!' the corporal says. He keeps looking at the ceiling of the dugout. 'Know him. Love him.'
" 'Okay, what's God's name, then?'
"The corporal doesn't even think about it-he says Bud right away. Some of the guys think this is just too funny to let go.
"'Bud is my shepherd, I shall not want,' one starts to say. They start misquoting stuff like 'Praise Bud!' and 'Bud, bless this stewed rat, which I'm about to eat, and probably puke up again.'"
"Skip the food part," Ahn-Kha groaned.
"Well, after a couple minutes of humor like that, some old soldier yells, 'Shut your Bud-damned mouths, for Bud's frickin' sake.'
"The corporal loses it, says he's not going to stay in there with a bunch of blasphemers, and he heads out of the dugout with the shells and rockets still landing all over the hills. Patel thinks the corp is going to get killed, and so he goes out after him. Patel catches up to him thirty yards away and jumps on him, wrestles him to the ground in the trench, when one of those rail-rockets lands right on the dugout. Kills every man in there, either the blast or suffocation did them in. Patel and a bunch of others, even the corporal, tried to dig out the shelter to rescue them, but no luck. Sure enough, some of the bodies are blue, and this corporal starts pointing at the ones who suffocated and saying 'Bud's mark!' and things like that.
"Patel and this corporal get out of the trenches and are posted with a new unit in western Missouri in the bushwhack ground. This corporal seems sound enough most of the time, but now and then he points out the color blue and says 'the Hand of Bud,' or something like that. One day they're on patrol on a footpath and he just freezes, with his head cocked like a dog listening to a whistle. He says that 'Bud's whispering in my ear.' A couple of the guys pass him, maybe they thought he was taking a leak without bothering to use his fly, and go right into a tripwire that fires this harpoon through two men. Patel said he started to think that old expression about God looking out for drunks, children, and idiots might be true.
"After that, this corporal turned into the kind of NCO that stays behind to watch over the sick and the supplies. Until this one day, there's a beautiful blue sky. So he decides to climb a tree and look at Bud's handiwork. He falls asleep up there, no one knows where he is, they figure this time he's really flipped and run off into the woods. They don't even bother looking for him. Which is too bad, because if they had been dispersed, these three Reapers passing through the area wouldn't have caught all that lifesign in the camp. They went in and killed everyone but the corporal, maybe when he was in the tree talking to Bud, he didn't put out much more lifesign than a cuckoo clock. After that, the corporal pulled kitchen duty at an infantry training school by Mountain Home.
"Patel ended up joining some Wolves who were hunting the Reapers, he made himself useful when they caught up to the bastards, and ended up in Zulu Company.
"Funny thing is, every now and then in a tight situation, I'd catch Patel saying, 'Bud help me' or something like that. I don't think he really believed it, but Patel wasn't taking any chances."
The storm blew itself out overnight. Valentine arose and dressed around the slumbering Ahn-Kha. He checked Post, who slept with his familiar snore in the tiny sick bay.
The indefatigable Carrasca still stood on the bridge. She looked as fresh and alert as when Valentine had last seen her, rocking with the storm.
"That's Haiti, Valentine, dead ahead."
Valentine stepped out onto the wing of the bridge. Something loomed ahead, a heavy presence in the darkness. As the light grew, he could make out mountains coated in green.
"Why the white knuckles?" Carrasca asked, joining him in the open air.
Her words weren't in the cool captain's voice with its self-assured intonation. They tickled his ear like a playful finger.
Valentine looked down at the decorative wood top to the rail where his hands gripped the painted metal. He breathed out, half-laugh and half-sigh. "For over a year, I've been trying to get here in the right kind of ship."
"Worth it, I hope. The commodore thinks you're chasing a rumor. Said it reminded him of the years after the Kurians first came, where ships and men were lost looking for remnants of the old society."
"That's what my father was doing when he ran into a Lifeweaver. This chase is something the Lifeweavers put me on."
She put binoculars to her eyes and searched the coast ahead. "How much do you know?"
"There's something on that island the Cause needs."
She frowned. "The Cause. You sound like Hawthorne of the hasty retreat."
Valentine involuntarily stiffened. Now a row of ghostly bodies lay between them, friends Valentine had lost, talents the world had lost, in the sake of "the Cause."
"I'm sorry," she said, looking away. "You've proved yourself to Jamaica."
"But not to you?" Valentine asked.
"It's the same thing."
Valentine stifled a laugh. He might have said those exact words. Jensen and Carrasca had proved themselves to the Cause by letting him use the ship, the same thing as proving themselves to him. He took his hands from the rail and rubbed life back into them.
Carrasca broke the silence: "Why is it nobody's thought to go get this whatever-it-is until now?"
"We didn't know it was there. It was put there hundreds of years ago by a Lifeweaver. He lived in secret among us, with a few followers. He guessed what the Kurians were planning, but he only knew about the one door. He and his people were ready for what was coming on Haiti, but something happened, they were betrayed, and I don't think anyone survived. One of the followers kept a journal of some kind, more as a record of that Lifeweaver's teachings, but in it was a section about this weapon against them.
"Like a lot of places, there's a resistance against the Kurians. These Haitians are fighting without really knowing what they're fighting. They just know it's evil, and they're doing what they can to protect their own people. They found a cache of weapons in a cave, along with this diary. They made sense of it and somehow word got passed to us. I never knew about it-I just got orders to join up with the Quislings on the Gulf Coast with fake papers and background. I think they chose me because I speak a little Spanish and French. My mother was from the French part of Canada, and I was raised by a priest from Puerto Rico. It took me a year, but I got into the Coastal Marines and managed to get myself posted to the right kind of ship to bring it back. It's a year I wouldn't care to repeat. Now it's like life in the Ozarks is something out of my childhood."
"Is there snow there?"
"Sometimes, in winter. The mountains aren't big enough to be snowcapped year-round. Why?"
"There's a story the people here tell. They think if you go somewhere there's snow all the time, like the north pole, the Kurians can't get you. It's all mixed up with stories about Christmas now, that there's this place everyone is safe from them with plenty of food and electronic toys and no fighting."
Valentine watched a frigate bird float above, drifting on the air currents with only the tiniest alterations to its wing.
"If only. I grew up almost in Canada. It gets colder in the winter than you can probably imagine, and the Reapers still made it up there. They don't come in winter, but we're still not out of it. You go much farther north from there, and the land can't support many people year-round away from the coasts. Just not enough to eat. And the old-timers say the climate is strange now, summers are longer and hotter, but somehow winter is even worse. God knows how the Kurians managed it. There's no safe place, or if there is, they're keeping it to themselves."
She nodded. "Cape Haitian is ahead. What is the plan?"
"The plan is to sail into the port as bold as if we have the proverbial balls of the brass monkey. We have a contact in town who'll get in touch with me. He's on the lookout for a ship from the north. Not sure what happens after that. Maybe we pull out and land somewhere nearby on the coast, and he gets us in touch with the resistance. They load us up, and back we go."
"Will it be that easy?"
Valentine found a smile. "Somehow I doubt it."
* * *
The Thunderbolt rounded Cape Haitian and turned her prow to the town, a cluster of white and gray snuggled into a stretch of flat land with mountains towering behind. The vivid colors of the Caribbean struck Valentine once more: deep blues of the ocean; brilliant blues and whites above; and behind stretches of white sand a green so lush, it hypnotized.
Fishing boats, hardly more than canoes, rocked in the gentle swell. Tall, lean black men threw nets into the water and gathered them again. If they noticed the Thunderbolt, they showed no sign of it. As the ship approached, Valentine observe
d that the fishermen were either naked or wearing stringy loincloths. Wiry muscle glistened under the sun.
A boat with four oarsmen put out from the docks. Its splashing approach scattered seabirds bobbing on the calm surface of the bay.
"Dead slow," Carrasca called into the bridge.
"Dead slow, aye aye," the junior officer there answered.
The bulky ship coasted to a crawl. The small boat cut across the prow, as if blocking the larger vessel's entry. A man in a simple gray uniform stood and put a speaking trumpet to his mouth.
"Que bateau?" Valentine thought he heard.
"What did he say?"
"What ship is that?" Valentine translated.
"I thought they spoke Spanish here."
"Creole French, mostly. Or a form of it. But you can get along in Spanish, too."
Valentine inflated his lungs. "Thunderbolt, New Orleans. May we anchor here tonight? We will buy food," he bellowed, hoping his French would be understood.
"What do you do here?"
"We chase pirates. Have any sailing ships passed?"
"No, not close. Not since before the last hurricane season."
"May we drop anchor?"
The man lowered his speaking trumpet for a moment, then raised it again. "For now. Our officer will come. Do not lower your boat until then."
"Thank you!" Valentine yelled back.
The same four-oared boat brought out the "officer." Valentine watched him make the transition to the Thunder-holt with a fair amount of agility. He wore a similar uniform to his underling, though with gold buttons and a brilliant scarlet sash beneath his pistol belt.
Valentine went to greet him.
"Monsieur speaks French?" the man asked. His features were exaggerated: strong cheekbones, a pointed chin, knifelike nose, wide eyes, and handsome in a sensual, full-lipped way. Unlike most of the Hispaniolans Valentine had observed in the boats, who either had a full beard or were clean-shaved, he wore a mustache.
