by Hal Duncan
Carter could have found a seat in some other cabin of the gondola, of course, but he wouldn't give the blackshirt the pleasure. Not bloody likely. These scoundrels think themselves invulnerable because they stand for progress itself— the inevitable victory of the future—but it's this arrogance will be their downfall, Carter's sure. Beneath the sculpted steel of rhetoric lies a fatalism born of moral bankruptcy that drives them onward to their own destruction. Nothing is in truth inevitable. All it takes is one good man to draw a line.
“The famous Captain Carter,” says Pechorin. “You look exactly like your photographs.”
Carter looks out of the window once again, at the clear carved vision of Jerusalem stone, pink and gold, domes everywhere, coming closer now as the zep-pelin makes its approach.
“They say the Kurds love you the way the Arabs worship Lawrence.”
“They exaggerate,” says Carter.
“The Hero of Mount Ararat. The Sword of Yerevan. I should have thought your General Allenby would have made you colonel by now.”
A twitch of jaw muscles, gritted teeth—Carter says nothing. There's no way this man can know the silenced shame that's dogged his every step beyond the churned mud of the Somme. A single mistake, an error of judgment—no, an act of unpardonable brutality. I'm sendingyou to the East, Carter. I think you might be more at home among the Arabs. Spoken in clipped tones, with narrowed eyes, an unspoken accusation of barbarian.
He never quite went native the way Lawrence did, but then he's never quite felt the same sense of belonging to this land, to the desert and the mountains. Still… ten years of Carter and his men fighting side by side with the Armenis, the Azeri, and the Kurds… The Sword of Yerevan…
“Believe me, Captain Carter,” says Pechorin, “we should not be at war, you and I; we should be brothers-in-arms. If the English only—”
“I rather think,” says Carter, “we'd make damned poor allies, you and I.”
“We are not so different,” says Pechorin. “We both understand that mercy is a luxury in this world. We are not so different, you and I.”
Nodding a smile at him, Pechorin pushes past the Turks and out of the carriage into the corridor crowd.
It seems curious, reads Hobbsbaum's strange scrap of… history?, that while many of his most celebrated victories—Yerevan, Baku, Majkops—were largely symbolic rather than of any great effect in terms of the larger struggle, such leadership qualities should go unrewarded. If his questionable breeding had no negative effect on his promotion to captain, why then should the following ten years—the years which saw his most breathtaking military successes—not result in further promotion for this “sterlingfellow”? Why didhe rise no further in the ranks? There is one intriguing speculation as regards the death of a young private who served under him in France, one Thomas—
Messenger. Carter snaps his head to one side, away from the page, looking out into the busy corridor of Arab and European businessmen, then away from there also as one face, framed by braids and yarmulke, turns in curiosity. Carter stares at the paneling across from him, the Art Deco veneer so sleekly lacquered he can almost see his own reflection in it. He does not shake or swallow, far too in control of himself for that, always far too in control. But he closes Hobbsbaum's little notebook and places it back in his pocket beside the letter. This isn't the only disconcerting entry in the book, but it's the most personal, the most private. He had ordered the Messenger boy shot—was it three, four days before the Big Push?— for desertion, cowardice in the face of the enemy. A summary execution on the front lines, because the men had to know such things would not be tolerated, and because…
He does not quite articulate the thought. Because the boy's brown eyes haunted his sleep as much before that day as they have in the ten years since. He does not quite articulate this, thinks instead of his fury at the weakness, the softness, the cowardice of the boy.
He stands, pulls his kit bag down from the railed rack over the seat and slings it over his shoulder, pushes out into the corridor, into the jostle of crowd waiting to disembark the zeppelin, to walk down the gangplank into the Ben-Abba Airfields as the sun rises over the Holy City of Jerusalem.
THREADS OF HISTORY
“Palestine, 1929,” says Fox. “Four hundred and sixty-ninth Parallel. Eon X-seven.”
He unclicks the latches of the briefcase and opens it, flicks crib sheets round the table to us all, thick wads of pages stapled in the top-left corner. I scan the top page of my set of notes, highlighted, underlined and circled here and there, the odd arrow or three with a handwritten READ THIS!—not so much bullet points as armor-penetrating missiles. Puck's—I crane my neck for a peek—are all pretty colors and dainty fonts. Fox knows his team of terminal wasters all too well.
“This operation is going to need us all,” says Fox. “Joey, you'll be on villain.”.
Joey slumps in his armchair, glowering like the god of hangovers. Considering the traitor of traitors has betrayed more men than there are countries, more countries than there are causes, more causes than there are realities, it's not like he's got reason to complain.
“As ever,” he says. “Whatever.”
“Anna, you'll be out on the flank. Wild warrior queen role. Should come naturally to you.”
Anaesthesia nods, a keen itch to the twitch of her smile. Hell, I think, without Don's deep dark voice to soothe her savage breast, she'd still be out there flaying the munchkins even now, ripping the adamantium armor off their backs. And, with the enemy all holed up in the Circus these days, we're overdue a little action.
“Don, Puck, I'll need you as deep-cover backup—old soldier, native guide, you know the score. Puck?”
Fox clears his throat.
“Puck…”
Puck waves a hand in the air—yeah yeah—his eyes tracking the butt of the barman who's distributing our drinks around the green baize table in Club Soda's back room. He touches fingers as the man hands him his long vodka, smiles sweetly. I kick the flirty fucker under the table, get a petted lip in response. My horny little hustler, Ariel to Joey's Caliban to Fox's plotting Prospero, he drives me crazy, you know. Certificates, straitjackets and all.
“Of course,” says Fox, a smidgeon of stern schoolteacher stressing his voice, an undercurrent of pay attention… “I'll be doing my usual rogue. And Jack'll be the main man.”
He smiles his most charming and disarming smile—disarming being the right word, I should say, considering how phrases like loose cannon and going off half-cocked all tend to congregate around me.
“You'll love this, Jack,” says Fox. “Into the valley of death, the fires of hell and all that.”
“Peachy,” I say. “Snickety-snak, a snack for Jack.”
I think of the aroma of angels flame-grilled in their armor, and I lick my lips. Icky, you think? Maybe; but there's no mundane metaphysique of flesh and blood for me, none of that nice neat cradle-to-the-grave of linear life. An avatar of chaos with an adamantium constitution, I got bitmite babies as the black dust of my blood; and a growing boy needs his food.
“So what exactly is the gig?” I say. “Go on. Excite me like a fire engine. Like a big red fire engine.”
I cock my head to one side and make puppy-dog eyes at Fox.
“Believe me,” he says, “it will.”
I lean back in the leather armchair, prop my glinting gray steel, spring-heeled jackboots (from the short-lived Mohock Summer of London's ignominious past) up on the green baize of the poker table. Tight tartan dress trews (from the Home Guard of the Free Scottish Republic), black, gold-buttoned and braided tunic (of a Lithuanian airshipman), red and white silk of a Soviet Nippon pilot's scarf flicked round my neck and over my shoulder—I do love my slapdash attire of stolen military apparel, each garment belonging firmly in a previous century and to a different timeline. Threads of history, I call them.
“Hit me,” I say.
“We're going after the Book of All Hours,” he says. “The final draft.
”
Joey chokes on his White Russian, mutters crazy like a fox and whole new meaning in between the splutters. I have to admit my ears are pricked.
“Not the original?” I say.
“The original is history,” says Fox. “But history repeats itself. Books have copies, or they survive in extracts, quotations, in the works of others. Fragments.”
The Book is in bits, I know, worse bloody nick than yours truly, Jack Fragged. Blown to the far corners of the Vellum. I have vague memories of trying to patch it back together, Fox and Finn and me, in another thread of time that just ended snapped and frayed. It didn't work out too well.
“Thing is,” says Fox—he reaches into his briefcase—”we have fragments of the Book turning up all over the Vellum now. Copies and counterfeits. Have you looked in a hotel-room drawer recently? Because it's not the Gideons you'll find there. Then we've got this”—a ring binder that flops open as he drops it, showing poly-pocketed photos of gravings—”and this”—a pile of rough-edged sheets of skin tied together with string, the top sheet splattered almost totally black— “and even this.”
He dumps a battered paperback on the table, a copy of Liebkraft's Macro-mimicon, spine broken, cover curling at the edges.
“I got that in a secondhand bookshop,” he says. “Chap behind the counter told me an interesting story. Said there's a different error in every copy. Every print run, every edition, a different error in every copy. And they say that if you put them all together, all those errors, eventually what you'll get is the real Macromimicon.“
“Keen,” I say.
“Not keen, Jack. Not keen at all. Liebkraft's fiction describes a Book, and a world in which that Book exists. And somewhere in the Vellum, believe me, there will be a fold matching that world, with that book in it, the Book of All Hours.”
“Sure, sure,” says Joey, “we've all read Escher. The Bootstrap Hypothesis. This is Metaphysics 101. Cut to the chase.”
“I thought I had the only one,” says Fox, “the original. I thought it was the original that mattered, but once you start changing the Book, once you start editing it, the final draft is all that matters, the one that… sorts out all the errors. The one that takes those rewrites and abandoned drafts, and ties all the loose threads together, neat and tidy.”
“So?” I say.
“So, we have intel that the Circus knows exactly where and when to find the complete, revised and corrected final draft, the Book in as pure a form as you'll find in any fold. They're going after it, and we have to get there first.”
“How reliable is the intel?” says Anaesthesia.
“Cabinet minister,” says Puck. ‘Alpha-level access to the Duke's own bedtime reading. And a taste for rough trade.”
He arches an eyebrow at me with the flirtiest, dirtiest smile. Rough trade with a smooth butt, I think. An oh-so-dreamy, peaches-and-creamy, Puck and me getting orgone-steamy, seamy—
“Jack,” says Fox.
“Jawohl!” I say.
“Are you with us?”
I take a drag on my hash cheroot, blow out a plume of smoke.
“All the way, Foxy baby. Palestine, ‘29.”
A GREYHOUND OR GAZELLE IN LINEN
14th March, he writes in the journal. I had thought that von Strann would meet me at the airfields but it appears I was mistaken. Instead I was met by a young Arab boy as I walked down the steel gantry from the mooring tower, down into the crowded harbour-yards of docks and warehouses that comprise the Ben-Abba Airfields. It is an irony to call these places “fields,” for they remind me far more of the many ports that I have visited in my time, the squalid throngs, the noisy mob of stevedores and airshipmen, and everywhere the smell of trade and industry, fuels and perfumes, human sweat and waste, cargoes gone rotten. Unlike the airfields of more civilized climes where one at least is led or driven to a terminal, to be nodded past barriers and along corridors by lazy customs officials with a cursory glance at one's papers, before being plunged into the milling masses, here the guards stand with their rifles ready at the very bottom of the bloody gangplank, trestle table to one side strewn with the undergarments of some hapless fool who's insulted them with a bribe too small to make up for his blustering manner. Here they march round the stevedores, beckoning them to open this crate or that even as they load them on to the carts and guttering lorries. And, with no division of mooring fields between passenger and freight, as soon as one has run this gauntlet one is in the thick of it, standing on dusty gravel ground surrounded by dazed travelers and waving relatives, servants with placards in Roman, Arabic or Hebrew scripts held up high as they shout out the names displayed on them. One makes one's own way to the terminal past the hawkers offering dubious hotels and dubious pleasures. And, as one leaps to the side to avoid being run down by some lorry laden with bleating sheep and beggar boys hitching rides on its hoardings, for all the confusing sights and sounds, it is the smell that one feels truly engulfed by. It is a smell ranker and deeper than the scents of any Mediterranean bazaar, one that crams the nostrils with a nauseating insistence. Petrol and excrement and worse. The only “fields” that it reminds me of are the fields of war, with their reek of guns and blood.
I say that the boy who met me was an Arab but as he wound his way through the crowd, calling my name, bounding towards me like an over-excited pup, I could see that he was not pure Bedouin by blood, but rather a half-breed of some sort, his skin more coppery than the swarthy Arabs and his features more refined, a greyhound or gazelle in linen, white loose-fitting shirt and trousers. He reminded me of [Carterpauses, pen held over the page] you, Anna, actually, and I must confess, what with the disquieting nature of Samuel's letter and the scraps of notes sent with it, I rather felt myself overcome with foolish emotion for an instant. I'm sure now it was only that certain uncomfortable memories had been dredged up by this insane note of his, or that the heat and the fumes had got to me a bit, tired as I was by the long journey, but at the time, I have to be honest, something quite undefined but deeply disturbing struck me.
He pauses again. I have to be honest. The phrase strikes him as something of an irony in this ten-year-long letter of confession, now become a journal in its constant failure to ever actually confess, its endless digression into what he's done, and is doing now, and has still to do. He began it as an explanation of why he had not yet returned, but how he would, oh yes, of course, he would. Because he loved her, loves her still. He still believes that.
Anyway, he writes, the strangest thought occurred to me—that this was, in fact, a girl in boy's dress—before he reached me and I spotted the first wisps of beard on his chin. I am ashamed to say that I was clearly in a daze from all the hustle of the airfields, for he literally had to grab my sleeve and pull me to the side, out of the streaming crowds, toward the corrugated-iron wall of a warehouse, where the mob was less bothersome.
The door creaks open and Carter looks up across the wide expanse of dusty wooden floorboards stretching lengthways down the attic studio toward the door boxed in a corner. The boy waves, smiling as he closes the door behind him.
“Tamuz,” he says. “I come from theEyn… the Baron.”
Carter leans back against the corrugated iron, cap in one hand, the other raking fingers through his hair, squeezing the bridge of his nose. He squares the cap back on his head, stands up straight and looks at the lad. Can't be more than seventeen. Eyes darting to the pistol at Carter's hip and to the pips on his tunic, the cap. Carter smiles to himself, snaps a salute at the boy.
“Captain Jack Carter,” he says.
The boy beams a grin, gives a slapdash salute back, chest puffed out.
“This way, Carter Bey.”
“Lead on.”
The boy beckons him round the side of the warehouse building and toward the terminal, waving away the younger, smaller boys who would be yammering at Carter for money and attention without this native guide already in his service. It does make him cringe inside a little but the salu
te is a trick that always works. Sometimes a cigarette from a silver case works better, but it's the same principle; treat a young man as a soldier and he'll run round the world for you and back.
“I understood von Strann would meet me here himself,” says Carter.
“It is not good, not time,” the boy calls over his shoulder.
“But you're taking me to him, yes?”
“It is not good, not time,” says the boy.
“I need to see von Strann.”
Carter grabs him by the shoulder but the boy slips out of grasp and away, turning and stopping in his tracks. He seems to search for words of explanation, then remember something. Reaching inside his shirt, he draws out an envelope.
“From the Eyn,” he says.
As Carter reaches for the letter, the boy takes his hand and draws it in toward him, under his shirt, laying Carter's palm flat on his bare skin. Carter jerks his hand away but when he sees the hurt, offended look in the boy's expression, the curt comment he was set to make about bloody decorum dies on his lips.
“From my heart to your heart,” says Tamuz, as if explaining to an idiot child, as if Carter is the one without a sense of proper conduct.
——
There's an awkward moment as Carter takes the letter from the boy, before he touches it to his own chest.
“From your heart to my heart,” he says, and Tamuz nods at the restoration of etiquette, the completion of the ritual exchange. He starts off again, waving for Carter to follow him, to keep up.
“Read as you walk, Carter Bey. It is not time.”
Carter dodges after him, through a convoy of old men with wheelbarrows of oranges, skirting a group of women in scarlet-trimmed purple burkas, and opening the envelope, sliding the letter out, as he strides and weaves. More bloody letters. More bloody cryptic nonsense.
“Where are we going?”
They push deeper into the mob, even thicker here where the white block of the terminal building lours over them, close now, families and individuals, porters and hawkers streaming in and out through the glass doors, pushing past each other. Tamuz stops to let Carter catch up, then plunges them both on into the shadowy space inside, still morning-cool and crisp, filled with travelers and their echoes but somehow, in the functional minimalism of its high ceiling and concrete floor, feeling all the more cavernous and empty for it.
