Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 12, Issue 2

by Jason Fischer

  Percy caught the spider beast with bullets again and again, but the monster shrugged off this mortal insult, finally splitting into two smaller versions of itself just as the first ammo box was running low.

  Two creatures became four, then eight, and then finally Murdoch dashed forward, crushing the attackers under his hooves. In moments, the field was silent.

  ‘We got it,’ Percy said, exhilarated.

  ‘They were only testing us,’ Murdoch said. ‘You were found wanting. Shoot straighter next time, yes?’

  Others came to guard the weakened section of the world fabric. A Spartan hoplite, a samurai from Japan, even a crusader knight in full armour. Percy made friendly with another lost soul, a tallow-faced man with a gun like nothing he’d ever seen.

  He spoke little English. The most he could glean from the man was that he was from a country that didn’t exist yet. The slightest thing in his armoury made Percy’s eyes almost pop out of their sockets.

  There were others like Murdoch, sidling in with their selected champions. The warrior from the future was matched with an Alsatian, a dog of unnatural intelligence that spoke in the man’s own tongue. The crusader was accompanied by a falcon that perched on his shoulder, whispering in the man’s helm.

  ‘Ho, prince of all the horses!’ a voice boomed. Percy saw Murdoch bristle at the challenge, and he pawed at the great serpent that approached him. It rose up, belly swelling and splitting and finally forming into two legs. Two arms fought free of the snake skin until a giant stood before them, a man as perfect as Michelangelo’s David.

  Percy fell to his knees before the awesome sight, but when he tried to look upon the being’s face, his eyes slid across it, unable to fix upon that unnatural blur. It made his head spin to even try, and so he looked down at his hands.

  ‘You are right to kneel before the Lord your God,’ the perfect giant boomed out in a voice like a cannon. ‘For I am the Tetragrammaton, I am the YAHWEH of the old covenant, I am the creator of all and I am what I am.’

  ‘My god,’ Percy whispered, stunned. Then a moment later, he felt the horse’s teeth seize his collar, and he was jerked up to his feet.

  ‘Get up,’ Murdoch said with a sigh. ‘You don’t have to kneel to that noisy thing.’

  The stallion faced up to the God Percy had always been taught to fear, and stamped a hoof, snorting out a horsey challenge. Yahweh loomed above the horse, fingers clenching into world-shattering fists.

  ‘You never created anything that you could not steal from a neighbour,’ Murdoch continued. ‘Hold your noise and bluster, for you are here to attend to your ancient oaths.’

  ‘Resheph,’ Yahweh boomed, and Murdoch startled, toeing backwards from that word. ‘Did you not tell your champion what you have done?’

  The horse shook his head and mane, and screamed out in anger. Yahweh knelt in close, bringing that unwatchable face in towards the angry horse’s snout.

  ‘Resheph, you have engineered the illness in this land. Yours is the hand behind this Great War, and the disease creeping through this soldier’s camp has your stink upon it.’

  ‘Lies,’ Murdoch said, trying to twist away from Yahweh.

  ‘Resheph, I name you thrice. Show your true self, and admit your misdoings.’

  For one moment, the white stallion was gone, and in his place stood a man of similar proportions to Yahweh. He wore the kilt of an ancient Egyptian, and was bronze from head to toe. The man had long hair and a curling beard, and held a shield, spear and mace. Resheph radiated heat like the sun itself, and Percy threw up his arm against it, the sweat instantly wicking away from his skin.

  Then the god-thing was gone, and the stallion was back in its place, shrieking defiance, circling Yahweh as if hoping to deliver a solid kick to his shins.

  ‘Great shining hypocrite,’ Murdoch growled. ‘It was all necessary. I thought the engine of war would sate our enemy, but still they come to unravel the loose thread of creation. I had to bring my champion over somehow.’

  ‘By snuffing out its little life? Very noble of you, horse prince,’ Yahweh chuckled.

  ‘My lord,’ Percy said quietly. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, you’re quite dead, Percy Altschwager,’ Yahweh said, blurred face dancing above the trembling man. ‘How else could he bring a living man to the Underworld?’

  Like in any army, there was a lot of waiting. No enemy showed itself, but Percy got the sense that something at the very horizon was brooding, circling their makeshift camp, watching for a gap in their defences.

  It could have been hours, days, even whole weeks that they waited there. Time felt elastic in this place, and Percy soon discovered that he had no need of food, water, even sleep. There was nothing but endless fortification, card games and the occasional pointless fist fight.

  It was a militia of all ages and nations, with a babel of incompatible languages. Percy got friendly with a Napoleonic rifleman who had a little English. This man passed on the word on to a warrior from the future land that was now French Indochina. Slowly the word spread through the various champions of humanity that gods were real, and had in fact murdered them to bring them over into the land of the dead.

  The gods had come to their chosen champions as totems, animals, lucky charms, even once as a vestal virgin lurking in a brothel. Now, the gods mostly shucked these disguises, walking the grey Underworld as beast-headed men and grim-faced giants. Percy discovered that this was a loose coalition of Egyptian, Canaanite, Phoenician, Roman, and Hebrew deities.

  They had history, these cruel sorcerers. As the waiting soldiers brawled, sometimes the gods would come to blows over points first raised thousands of years ago. Yahweh had a particular enmity with Mithras, a Roman bull-slayer he’d supplanted. They traded blows for hours with no clear winner, and both wandered away bored by the experience.

  ‘Be vigilant,’ Murdoch said, interrupting Percy’s attempt at a grey sandcastle. ‘I hear the enemy sniffing. It may come soon.’

  ‘Who is this enemy?’ Percy said, refusing to look at the horse. ‘Who did you kill me to fight?’

  ‘It was a peaceful death,’ Murdoch protested. ‘You lay down on the shore of Lake Timsah and slipped away. I saw your future, Man. If I didn’t take you, you would die trying to take Damascus. Shattered by artillery, moments after you first fired your gun.’

  ‘But that was my death!’ Percy said, knocking the sandcastle over. ‘Who are you to take that from me?’

  ‘What is your one death?’ Murdoch said. ‘You can save the world here, really save it. I have given you a gift.’

  Percy stood up and put his face right against Murdoch’s, staring that awful horse right in the eye.

  ‘Who,’ he said, ‘am I meant to kill?’

  ‘Chaos,’ he said. ‘The devil. We don’t know what it is, but ever since we dreamt this world into being, it has wanted to end it. Hate me if you want, but I believe you have a wife? A daughter?’

  Percy curled his hands into fists. Was this monster threatening Florence and Dorothy?

  ‘I’d see them live and honour your memory,’ Murdoch said. ‘Save the world, if only for them.’

  ‘You rotten knacker guts,’ Percy whispered. ‘We’ll have a reckoning, you and I.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Murdoch said, amused. Percy looked at the other soldiers, sharpening swords, lurking over their mortars and rifles with a sullen finality.

  Percy realised that ancient Egyptian gods were just like bad army officers. If there was one thing he’d learnt in his short time as an Anzac, it was how to deal with bad army officers.

  It took a bit of doing, but all of the stolen warriors agreed. At a given signal, the entire conscripted force simply downed tools and walked away from the fortifications.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Mithras thundered at his champion, a Teutonic Knight. The crusader was out of his armour, playing football with a Roman gladiator and a Gurkha.

  ‘Having mein smoko, boss,’ the knight managed in broken Eng
lish.

  ‘Get back to your place, soldier!’ Yahweh thundered. He frightened one or two back to the line, but everyone else continued their games of hopscotch, cards and backgammon. Without the need for food or rest, the Napoleonic soldier even organised a mass running race to the Underworld version of Cairo and back.

  By the time the strike was over, Percy and the other soldiers returned to find the gods lurking near the guns, looking down on the weapons with abject misery. That there’d been no petty vengeance proved the gods needed them more than the soldiers needed the gods.

  Percy realised that they’d put everything into this plan. The weapons of the surface world needed human hands to make them work, and this was the only edge they had against their enemy.

  ‘So there’s no way back to the land of the living?’ Percy demanded of Murdoch, who shook his head.

  ‘You and your bogeymen put your heads together, and find a way,’ he insisted. ‘We’ll fight your bloody enemy, but you’d best be planning our way home.’

  ‘But no one leaves the Underworld,’ Murdoch whinnied. ‘You ask the impossible.’

  ‘For a magical being,’ Percy said, re-checking the action on the Maxim, ‘you’re as useless as tits on a bull.’

  No-one knew how long they’d been there. Percy’s second life felt like pain wrapped in molasses, and his memories slowly slipped away from him. The soldiers told their stories with religious fervour, reminding each other how the stories went when they strayed from their own memories.

  ‘Your daughter is Doss,’ the crusader said over a game of gin rummy. ‘Dorothy in full. Mein gott, man.’

  Each day they filled sandbags, carved up stone blocks, and built walls to keep the enemy clear of the loose thread buried in the Canal. The fortifications were halfway between Hadrian’s Wall and the Gallipoli fortifications, and ran for half the length of the Suez Canal.

  On the day they came, Percy was midway through his French lesson, and an alarm went up, an awful racket somewhere between a klaxon and a bugle. He weaved through the other soldiers, quickly gathering up the Maxim gun and his terracotta gun crew. Then Murdoch had them running to the appropriate trouble spot on the wall, covering the miles in only seconds.

  Percy spotted the edges of the horde, rumbling across the plains. They were coming from the north, a mass of creatures numbering in the thousands. The invaders were aping Earth creatures, and Percy saw giant wasps and ants, leaping toads with fangs, wolves and sabre-toothed tigers. Elephants rolled forward, and many were simply blank-faced men and women, lurching forward in a multitude.

  ‘You need more soldiers,’ Percy said, assembling the gun. ‘Many, many more soldiers.’

  ‘We have enough,’ Murdoch said. ‘There is always exact balance between Law and Chaos.’

  ‘Balance? There must be a million of those things!’

  The enemy flapped and flew and leapt and crawled across the silver sands. Percy considered the small assembly of defenders, and the gods lurking at their shoulders seemed smaller now, little help.

  ‘This is Chaos, come for you!’ Yahweh thundered, strolling up and down the defensive line like a general. ‘They will send you to a second death, even worse than this one. Fight, because if you fall, everything ends.’

  The champions of Law stood ready, trembling at the awesome vision. Percy licked his lips, and followed the front edge of the horde with his sights.

  He looked over to the clay Deegan, kneeling on the edge of the fortifications with the rangefinder. The mute facsimile held up five fingers, another five, then four. Percy set the sights at 1400 yards, and slowly worked the elevation crank.

  A rifle fired to his right, and then another. The sallow-skinned future warrior fired a grenade from his futuristic weapon, and it exploded a pack of lions into a tangle of bloody parts.

  The false Deegan signalled 1300 yards, and Percy wound the gun down even further. Terracotta Lawrie brought over more ammunition cans, and Fyodorov held the next belt ready by the feed mechanism. The ammunition shook and hummed a manic tune, more eager than ever to fly.

  1200 yards. Percy wound the crank furiously, and slipped his hands into the firing handles. He pressed down the trigger bar with his thumbs, and the trembling Maxim finally hammered away, shaking in an almost sexual release. The greedy gun ate belt after belt of ammo, and spat out casings that Percy realised were actually bone, not brass.

  He tracked the gun left and right, decimating the front line of that surging mass. Apes fell in a bloody tumble, joined by big cats, dogs the size of ponies, even a knot of rhinoceroses that soaked up half a belt of ammunition.

  Bombs and bullets flew, and then the knights and samurai warriors were out in force, charging into the foe with flashing swords and lances. The monstrous horde surged closer and closer, climbing over mountains of their own dead.

  The company of gods began their assault. Pillars of fire rained down from the silver sky, and a monstrous wave swept across from the Mediterranean, drowning the creatures of Chaos in their tens of thousands. Mithras took to a fiery chariot, and danced across the enemy as a bright sun that burnt everything it touched. An eastern god with a dozen arms joined the knights, becoming a cloud of bloody blades that diced the enemy to red mist.

  None of this was enough. Wasps and great birds of prey dropped down upon the wall from above. Percy gave up on his overheated machine gun, and met a vulture with his Lee-Enfield, furiously stabbing the beast with the bayonet.

  Even as the gods and their champions took down the winged attackers, a rank of mutant giraffes came up to the fortification, heads level with the very top. Their fanged teeth snapped at anyone who tried to drive them away, but they seemed content to wait at the edge.

  Percy looked over, and saw the awful truth. These were siege ladders, with knobs of bone jutting out all over their long necks. Other beasts were using them to scramble up to the top, where they would wipe out the last of the defenders.

  Murdoch put a hoof through one giraffe’s skull, and then the horse-god was surrounded by a new type of attacker. Men and women, climbing over the lip of the crude wall, coming for the gunners with arms open.

  A woman in bonnet and bustle came for the Napoleonic warrior, who suddenly knelt, weeping, gun forgotten. Smiling, the woman gripped his head, twisting until his neck broke.

  Then they came for Percy. He saw his father and mother, his friends from the schoolyard and the fields back home. They crawled over his terracotta gun crew, smashing them into pieces. The Maxim was torn apart by hand, and heaved over the side.

  Percy struggled to load another round into the Lee-Enfield, then stopped. He saw his brother Bernie approaching, smiling widely. He was steering Florence by the elbow. His beautiful young bride, with baby Dorothy held in the crook of one arm, and he knew he’d been a fool to run from her.

  ‘Shoot them,’ Murdoch cried, knocking another knot of people over the wall. Just for one second, Percy saw the forked tongue slithering through Bernie’s lips, and saw the fangs on his smiling wife.

  He put a bullet through his brother’s head, and without hesitation drove the bayonet into his wife’s heart. They fell dead at his feet, rapidly melting into something like a fleshy wax. Percy approached his firstborn daughter, bayonet at the ready, only to find that Dorothy was merely a false knot of flesh on the false Florence’s arm, part of her disguise. He fell back, sobbing as he retreated from dozens of familiar, smiling faces.

  ‘Murdoch!’ Percy cried. ‘We have to go!’

  The horse shook his head, even as he lay about with hooves and tore with his teeth. Percy’s feet touched the far end of the fortification, and there was nothing behind him but the approach to the Suez Canal, and the pure blackness of the loose thread in creation.

  ‘Murdoch, we are lost!’ Percy shouted, driving down a neighbour with a bayonet to the face. ‘Help me!’

  The horse barrelled through the attackers, pausing only to let Percy climb up on his back. Hands tried to pull him down, and he st
ruck with the butt of the gun until the smiling monsters snatched it out of his hands.

  Kneeling low across Murdoch’s neck, Percy gripped tight, urging him onwards with his knees. The horse cleared the far side of the fortification, and then they were down and galloping for the canal.

  ‘What do we do now?’ the horse cried. It was genuinely scared, abandoned by the other gods that even now flashed and roared defiantly behind them, unable to stop the horde from crossing the wall.

  ‘You said that horses can see all things, all times,’ Percy gasped. ‘We need a safer place to keep this.’

  ‘Keep what?’ Murdoch said, as Percy leaned out across the water’s edge, seizing the loose thread in his hands.

  ‘No! You cannot pull on that!’ Murdoch cried, but Percy gave him his heels, urged the stallion onwards. The thread came away from the canal, leaving a long black scar behind it.

  They galloped around the fortifications, pursued by millions of gibbering monsters. A great tear followed in Murdoch’s wake as the thread unravelled creation, a chasm of pure nothing that swallowed up every beast that fell into it.

  ‘We are killing the world for them!’ Murdoch wept, but Percy gripped his mane tightly. His hand bled from the keen edge of the thread, and it was all he could do to grip it.

  They sped across the Underworld version of Egypt, weaving through the shimmering temples. Finally they were upon the plain of monuments just outside of Cairo. There were the pyramids, and the sphinx, alternating between new and decayed, nose crumbling and reappearing.

  The beasts followed them through the streets of Cairo, and would be upon them in moments. Percy looked at the black thread curled around his fist, wincing as some distant enemy tried to yank it out of his hands. He had moments at best.

  ‘There,’ Percy said, pointing at the Great Pyramid. ‘How do you see that?’

  ‘I can see it in all ways and all times,’ Murdoch panted. ‘What of it?’