The Ironclad Prophecy

by Kelleher, Pat

  It had become his cloak, his home, his bed, his temple. A cocoon, perhaps. He felt he was changing. But into what? Gone was the old Mathers, the Mathers that had stared at the tank in that Norfolk field and felt it haul up the fears and horrors from the bottom of his soul. That man had been asphyxiated with every breath of the petrol fruit fumes that had ultimately freed him. Even now, its vapours numbed the pains he felt in his abdomen, the pains that fogged his mind. In here, he could think more clearly.

  Sat at his right hand, Clegg hunched forwards over the steering wheel as he peered out of the driver’s open visor. Mathers watched him, single-mindedly engaged in his task, and allowed himself a beatific smile. His crew were loyal, unquestioning. Had they not all shared in the Sacrament of the Fumes, their perceptions of the world around them transformed by its Grace, the truth revealed to them all on that Pentecostal fuel day? But one of the Ironclad Temple had lost his way, lost his faith, and been seduced by life outside these armoured cloisters. The disharmony among his disciples was troublesome. He didn’t need a Judas. Mathers wondered how best to deal with him. Of course, he must be given a chance to regain his faith, to repent his actions and reject the life outside. Being a member of this crew was a gift, albeit a gift that demanded sacrifice, and the others felt that Perkins wasn’t sacrificing enough. Yes, Perkins should have a chance to recant and do penance. But if he didn’t, Skarra told Mathers what he had to do.

  He stared out of the visor of the driver’s cabin. As the ruddy vegetation rolled past, he lost himself in the cacophony of the tank. The engine sang psalms, like a host of mechanical angels, each noise producing colour, shapes and smells that blended and combined in arcane forms that seemed to him to be on the verge of unveiling meaning and knowledge.

  He was jolted out of it by a bright flash. There it was again. Bright blue, with an aftertaste of sour limes. He pulled on the Ivanhoe’s brake levers and ordered Clegg to let the engine idle in neutral. He peered out through his visor in the direction the flash had come from.

  It appeared the infantry had seen it too. They all held their rifles at the ready, straining to hear over the tank’s chuntering.

  “What’s going on?” Mathers demanded.

  “Flashes – looked like the chatts’ electrical lances – and an explosion, possibly a Mills bomb.”

  There was a crashing and snapping as if something large and bulky were moving through the jungle with little regard for it, or little impedance from its vegetation. In another place, a world away, it might have been another tank crashing blinkered and uncaring through the undergrowth.

  A deep, booming howl ripped the air, overlapped by a high-pitched squeal, the flavour of sarsparilla and carbolic. One of the infantrymen winced.

  “That was a chatt, I’ve heard enough of ’em die to know it,” said the tall Fusilier.

  The older, bullish one with the large hands gave orders. “Mercy, Porgy, Napoo, scout forwards. See what’s going on. Don’t engage. Come back here and report.”

  Mathers watched them and their urman guide vanish into the undergrowth.

  The sound of something flailing in the jungle continued for a short time. Several more high-pitched squeals punctuated the thrashing, before the sounds were lost in an explosion and diminished until the stutter of the Ivanhoe’s engine drowned it out.

  ATKINS HEARD HIS name called faintly and from far away, but he wasn’t bothered. He was warm and safe. He wanted to stay here in the peaceful dark but then he remembered Flora. For a brief moment, he was content to bask in memories of her – her eyes, her smile – and then he remembered what he’d done. Shame flooded in, washing away the contentment, and he began to hurt. He deserved to be punished. He deserved pain. The more he listened to the voice and the nearer he drew to it, the more he hurt. The next time he heard his name called from afar he struck out for it, struggling for the surface, and with each wave of pain he thought only one thing: Flora.

  Atkins opened his eyes and saw a female face staring down at him, lined with concern.

  “Flora?”

  “No. It’s Nellie. Remember?” The FANY turned and looked at Gutsy, who was peering over her shoulder. “He’s suffering from commotional shock.”

  “Things came out of the trees,” Atkins croaked through dry lips, struggling to get up. “A black, oily smoke.”

  “Well you seem to have done a bang up job of taking care of them,” said Gutsy.

  “One of them,” Atkins pointed out. “The rest took the chatts.”

  Gutsy shrugged. “Then I don’t think they’ll be back. I reckon we’ll be safe here for a while.”

  Atkins looked around. A thin greasy black film, like an oil vapour, covered the part of the glade obscured by the smoke. “In that case, we’ll make camp here for the night. Porgy, Chalky, Pot Shot. You’re first on sentry duty.”

  Atkins looked around and saw Chandar, who was squatting close by, chittering to itself. Evidently, its carapace had protected it from the worst of the blast.

  Across the way, he saw the tank, half hidden by the undergrowth like a stalking beast. The tank crew were huddled together, muttering among themselves, Mathers in his rain cape and mask, sitting in-between the front track horns, holding court. Every now and again, one or another of them would flash an acrimonious glance at the Tommies.

  As they settled down to sleep, another deep bass rumble made the ground beneath them vibrate and an ululating howl, that made them all shiver and huddle closer to their fires, cut the twilight.

  Above them, half glimpsed through the canopy of leaves, the alien stars came out and the Sky Web of GarSuleth began to sparkle in the dark.

  INTERLUDE FOUR

  Letter from Private Thomas Atkins

  to Flora Mullins

  20th March 1917

  My Dearest Flora,

  We went for a bit of a nature ramble today with the tank lads. It didn’t go so well. The tank got stuck and I was attacked by insects.

  Still and all, I had a happy time wandering through the woods, thinking how wonderful it would have been if you were here. Would a nature ramble agree with you in your condition, do you think? I don’t expect your Aunt lets you out of the house much.

  Of course, all good things must come to an end and I came to a bad one right enough, banging my noggin. Out cold, I was, but I dreamt of you, so that was a bonus. It was just a pity that I had to wake from it so soon.

  I write this now by fire light as we are camping out in the wilds. Not that Gutsy notices, he can sleep anywhere. I hope that tomorrow we can return to the comfort of our dugout. There’s a thing you thought you’d never hear me say. And here’s another, what I wouldn’t give for a pair of me mam’s knitted socks. I can’t darn to save me life and my last pair has got more holes than I’ve got toes.

  Ever yours,

  Thomas

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “That Wind Blowing...”

  CHILL DAWN JUST tinted the pallid sky with vermillion smudges, like roughly smeared lipstick on a “lady typist’s” damask cheek. A thick, low fog had settled in the early hours, sinking down into the trenches, drifting sinuously through the valley and blanketing the veldt.

  Everson chewed his bottom lip and felt the old familiar mixture of thrill and fear, as he walked along the duckboards from bay to bay along the fire trench, giving encouragement to weary soldiers who had withstood two days of attack and stood it with courage and fortitude. Even though losses had been lighter than he’d expected, here and there he noticed gaps beginning to open in the front line. Another day of assaults and he might not have the men left to close them.

  His thoughts turned to Lance Corporal Atkins and his mission. There was no way of knowing how they were faring. No matter how much he wanted to, he could not depend on them now. He was resigned to fighting with what he had and determined to hold out here as long as possible.

  After all, there was nowhere else to go.

  Every man was Stood To on the fire steps, looking over the p
arapets and down their rifles towards the enemy, in expectation of a dawn attack.

  High above, on the hill-top on the valley side, a lone light twinkled its iddy umpty message from the observation post to the HQ below.

  A runner darted through the communications trenches, calling out in a low voice, “Lieutenant Everson?” and was passed along from bay to bay by weary, hungry soldiers.

  Everson heard his name. “Over here, Barnes. What is it?”

  The private handed over a scruffy stub of folded paper. “Message, sir.”

  Everson unfolded the grubby sheet, read and reread the hastily scribbled note, and shook his head in disbelief. “It’s not possible.”

  THE PAST COUPLE of days had meant little sleep for anyone, least of all the medical staff. Captain Lippett had worked long hours in the surgical tent ceaselessly cutting, sawing and sewing, and Sister Fenton, organising the orderlies and the urmen volunteers, seemed indomitable and tireless. Edith Bell was tired. The demands of the wounded were constant, from the small, frequent and easily answered requests for water or a smoke to the anguished pain-spurred appeals that only God could now fulfil. All she wanted to do was fall on her little bed and sleep, but not yet. She strode briskly through the fog, over to the compound, to check on her coterie of shell-shocked men.

  “How have they been?” she asked the sagging sentry, who shivered in the dawn chill.

  “Quiet as the grave, ma’am. Not a peep.”

  “Nothing? Nothing at all?” A hint of suspicion tinged her voice.

  “Not so as I heard,” he said, as he unbolted the gate to let her pass.

  There were those amongst the men who couldn’t tolerate any kind of confined space, not the hut or the dugout, who slept in the open as best they could with their tremors and nightmares for company. Letting a soft smile spread across her face, she went to the first pile of bedding to check on the patient. The crude mattress was unoccupied, its blanket thrown aside as if in haste. At this discovery, she merely raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  As she went from one to another, she found the bedding heaps of straw-filled mattresses were all empty. That in itself was unusual. Now she was becoming perturbed. Where were their occupants? Her heart racing, she scanned the compound once more, as if to be sure of her eyes, before heading across to the hut with a rising sense of urgency. She pushed the door open. As the pale light from the doorway cut through the interior gloom, the silence that met her only increased her sense of alarm. The self-absorbed muttering, the yelps of alarm, the constant scuffling and thrashing that usually greeted her were absent. Blankets lay abandoned on the floor. The hut, like the compound, was empty.

  Her mind racing, she turned and made for the dugout where some of the men huddled for comfort. In her haste, her feet slipped on the crudely constructed wooden steps and she slithered to the bottom, almost losing her balance. She recovered herself and fished in her trouser pockets for a box of Lucifers. Regretting the use, she struck one. The sulphur-bright flame flared and flickered, chasing away the chill gloom. The acrid smell of sulphur hung in the still air about her, clinging to her hair and stinging her nostrils. She held the dwindling match aloft. The dugout was as empty as Christ’s tomb on Easter Sunday.

  The guttering glow could shed no light on the mystery, but a shrivelled knot of fear formed in her stomach. She shuddered, dropping the match as she rushed up the steps, trying to quell the irrational panic that rose within her.

  “They’ve gone!” she cried. “They’ve all gone!”

  EVERSON HEADED ALONG the fire trench to the bay where Sergeant Hobson was stationed. By the time he found his old platoon sergeant, the rumours were already beginning to spread. Being a good platoon sergeant, he’d already heard them.

  “Is it true, sir?” Hobson asked. Everson had known him since training and the man was a fount of practical knowledge and experience, and had been his right hand man on the Somme through the bloody summer of 1916, but he doubted if even Hobson had seen anything like this.

  “Apparently. The message from Hill OP is that the Khungarrii have vanished overnight. Just melted away. Their whole army. At least, that’s what it looks like.”

  The sergeant coughed and looked uneasy.

  Everson knew the sound well enough. “Out with it, Sergeant.”

  “I don’t like to say it sir, but isn’t that exactly what happened to us? There one minute, gone the next?”

  “I had the same thought, Sergeant. But it can’t be that, can it?”

  “The way our luck’s been running recently, I wouldn’t like the thought of them chatts running round the bloody Somme on our return ticket. If I allowed myself to think of that, I’d fair bloody weep with the injustice of it, sir. But one thing you can be sure of, if we’ve thought of it the men will have, too.”

  “Yes. Best keep them Stood To, Sergeant, until we can find out exactly what’s happened. The last thing we need is a damned mutiny. Maybe there’s some other reason, some Khungarrii high day or holy day, perhaps.”

  “Then again, maybe the buggers have got a trick up their sleeves, sir?”

  “There is that. Either way, I don’t like it, Sergeant. I’ll send Tulliver up for a look-see when the light’s better, but for now I need to know what’s going on out there. I want you to take a patrol out, see what you can find. Take Poilus with you.”

  The Sergeant grunted an acknowledgement, glad to be doing something, and went along the first five bays, picking one man from each.

  “Wilson, Draper, Cox, Monroe, Carter. With me.”

  The men fell in behind him and they worked their way to a spare bay. They pulled up lengths of duck boarding fixed with rope handles for just this eventuality. Leaning a ladder up against the revetment, Sergeant Hobson led the party out over the parapet, four of the privates carrying the duckboards. They made their way over the churned battleground towards the wire weed, hidden by the drifting mists.

  Hobson stepped over the twisted, broken bodies of fallen chatts, blackened crusty ichor drying on their cracked carapaces.

  The once-bright field of poppies lay trampled and crushed. Here and there, one or two had escaped the melee and still stood erect, their crimson petals unfolding defiantly like bloodied flags in the early morning sun.

  The wire weed had begun moving sluggishly in the thin light, its tendrils drawn by the fallen bodies nearby. The party lay lengths of duckboard across the writhing thickets and crossed hurriedly, not wanting the grasping vines to catch them.

  Even as they tottered unsteadily over it, they could make out the shapes of bodies, both chatt and human, drawn down and enveloped deep within the entanglement where the weed punctured them with its thorns to leech the nutrients from the corpses.

  Beyond the wire weed, Hobson led the party past the partly-charred body of a battlepillar rising from the fog like a beached whale. Thrown catastrophically from their mount, the bodies of its riders lay broken and scattered around it. A blackened hole gaped in the side of its scorched armour, from which drifted the rank smell of partly cooked offal. Shrieking flocks of najib birds squabbled and tore at the flesh, dispersing resentfully as one of the soldiers threw a stone at them.

  Hobson set off at a stooped run, using the low mist banks as cover, followed in short order by Poilus, Monroe, Carter, Draper, Cox and Wilson. They were some twenty yards beyond the wire now. He held out an arm and gestured for the men to drop down.

  Where Hobson expected the tube grass to obscure their view, they found it trampled and flattened by the huge army that had occupied the veldt a day previously. Through the mist, he saw the shadows of hastily dug earthworks that the Khungarrii had been working on the day before, great heaps of spoil thrown up like breastworks. It looked as if they might have been settling in for a siege and digging their own system of trenches, or else a mine. But why abandon it, if indeed they had done? Hobson wouldn’t put it past the buggers to be hiding underground ready to swarm out over them, just as the bloody Bosche did.

  Car
ter squinted into the mist beside him. “Bloody hell, it looks like they really have done a bunk.”

  “You don’t think they’ve really been whisked off to Earth, do you?” asked Monroe.

  Draper shook his head. “Don’t see how. It was Jeffries with his black magic got us here in the first place. Known fact, that is. Why would that bastard conjure ’em back and not us?”

  “Spite? Fun? Who knows? Necromancing bastard like that. Just because he can, probably. What do you think, Sarn’t?”

  “I don’t, son. I’m just paid to follow orders and so are you.”

  “Well, I haven’t been paid for over three months –” Cox chirped up.

  “Don’t worry, lad. If I hear you grouse about pay again, I’ll give you a thick lip on account,” said Hobson. “That Jeffries is a blackguard of the first order, but I don’t think he’s responsible for this. Our job is to find out what is. How many bombs have you got?”

  The men consolidated their Mills bombs. They had eight. It wasn’t a lot, but they needed to check out what lay beyond the earthworks.

  “Monroe, Wilson. Bombers. The rest of you on mop up. Hand them your bombs. Ready?”

  There was an exchange of determined glances and curt nods. Cautiously they walked across the No Man’s Land to where the chatts had been encamped. They sank down on their bellies and crawled towards the long line of crimson spoil, using the thinning fog as cover.

  When they got to within thirty feet of it, Hobson tapped Monroe and nodded. The party rushed to the earth wall and hunkered below its lip. It was about four feet high and ran for thirty or forty yards. Hobson nodded again and Monroe threw a grenade over the lip. The explosion came seconds later and they felt the wall shudder as dirt showered down on them. Nothing else happened.

  With a well-honed howl of fear and rage, they leapt over the earthworks to confront whatever faced them.