Conflagration

by Mick Farren

  Argo glanced at Riordan and, not for the first time, wondered what kind of reports the crippled Sergeant of Horse turned in on him, to whom, and what details they might contain. Argo knew that The Four were not only watched for their own protection, but because, on a number of levels, The Four weren’t totally trusted. Albany folk had deep misgivings about anything even remotely connected to the paranormal, and were uncomfortable with even talk of the Other Places. The new Americans who had settled along the eastern seaboard of the massive and barely explored continent were materialists in a material world, living in the immediate temporal reality. It was totally understandable. To the west of the settled Kingdoms, Commonwealths, and Republics was a vast interior of great rivers, deep forests, deserts, endless grasslands, and snow-capped mountains. The aboriginal confederacies, tribes, and nations were well-versed in the Other Places, ventured on other planes and in other dimensions, and had quickly recognized the paranormal dangers posed by the Mosul; the horror of the battlefield Dark Things, and all the other hideous conjurations of the Zhaithan that they used alongside their more conventional weapons. The comparative newcomers from across the Northern Ocean had, on the other hand, left their ancient knowledge and former beliefs back in the old world. The Mosul invasion had forced them to reluctantly reconsider the old ways, but they still had serious reservations about those among them who practiced the invisible arts, even if it was in the cause of Albany and the freedom of the Americas.

  Argo turned his horse and faced his minder. He gestured to the fields and woods all round them. “I’m back in Virginia, Sergeant of Horse.”

  “I’m well aware of that, Major Weaver, but aren’t we here to be setting its people free?”

  “Until less than a year ago, I was one of those people. Our village was small, just a couple of hundred people, but we had our share of Zhaithan hangings, and men and women burned in the fire for no other reason than they helped the sick, and some collaborator denounced them to the Ministry of Virtue.”

  The Mosul had come to the Americas soon after Argo’s eleventh birthday. The invasion force had landed near Savannah on July 5th ’96 by the old calendar and, on that hot summer’s day, the world he’d known as a child had vanished forever. The Mosul had immediately established multiple beachheads, and then fanned out to cut through the courageous but disorganized forces of the Southland Alliance in a matter of just days. Within a month, Atlanta had fallen and, with Florida cut off and the infamous treaty concluded with George Jebb and his gang of traitors in St. Petersburg, Hassan IX had turned his attention and armed might to the north, and the rich lands between the Appalachians and the Ocean.

  Riordan grunted. “I know the people in Virginia had it hard.”

  Two hundred years of carnage had come and gone since the Mosul, the descendants of merciless tribal nomads from an area to the east of the Black Sea, had advanced into Europe with fire and sword, and formed their unassailable alliance with the Teutons of Germany and the Mamaluke warlords in North Africa, to subjugate the Land of the Franks, the city states of Italia, and all of the Hispanic Peninsula. The immigrant peoples of the Americas should maybe have taken warning from the Mosul conquests in the old world, but the Northern Ocean was comfortingly wide, and they had believed that it would protect them in their hard-won isolation, and make them immune to the danger. They had grown too confident, however, in their geographic safety, even though many of the American settlers’ parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents might have crossed the seas as a direct result of the Mosul threat. When the enemy had landed, they had been no better equipped than the Franks, the Italians, or the Hispanians to resist the murderous onslaught of the most implacable war machine the world had ever had the misfortune to see, and they had been driven down to defeat by the Mosul’s iron discipline, fanatic religious motivation, and honed battle tactics.

  Argo stared out across the Virginia landscape. “I knew one of the women who went to the fire. I knew her really well. She was a friend of my mother, and she’d helped nurse me when I was sick. I hid in a tall tree with some other boys and watched her burn.”

  Riordan said nothing, and Argo knew he was losing control in front of the older man, but he was momentarily unable to check himself. “And the drunken bastard who denounced her could well have been my stepfather. His name was Herman Kretch, and he turned her in because she refused to fuck him.”

  “I hope you took care of him.”

  Argo thought of the night when he’d stood over the sleeping man with a loaded pistol, but had been unable to pull the trigger. He bitterly shook his head. “I was too young. I just ran away.” He sighed. “I think someone else did it, though.”

  “Just as long as the bastard got his. That’s what counts.”

  Argo indicated the horizon to the west. “Our village was called Thakenham. It’s over there somewhere, but I haven’t heard a damn thing of my mother and sisters since I ran off.”

  Riordan looked where Argo was pointing. “That’s the way of it, boy, with families divided by war. Not knowing can be a terrible thing, but you’re far from being the only one.”

  Argo remembered how for seven bloody months of his eleventh year, battle after battle had raged, and at the height of the terrible Winter Campaign of ’97 it had actually seemed as though the Mosul would be pushed back. The boys of the village had felt a mounting excitement as more and more optimistic rumors had circulated up from the front. But then an armada of troopships, under steam and sail, brought what appeared to be limitless divisions of men and horses and inexhaustible supplies of munitions, and the tide of conflict had turned against the defenders. Fighting a series of desperate rearguard actions, they had fallen back on Richmond, for the last battle. On May 10th, Richmond had fallen, and all hope for Virginia and the Carolinas along with it.

  Argo shook his head. “It’s getting harder and harder to remember my sisters’ faces. I’m not sure I’d recognize them anymore, and I know they wouldn’t recognize me.”

  Riordan let out a short sigh, part sympathetic and part impatient. “Maybe, after the coming fight’s done, you’ll be able to get yourself some leave and ride over to this Thakenham. Find out for yourself what’s happened to them?”

  Riordan’s mention of the battle that could now be only a day or so away jerked Argo out of his wallow of boy-child self-pity and back into the immediate moment.

  “You think this next fight will finish them?”

  The Sergeant of Horse nodded. “If we don’t fuck up.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Aye, lad. It’ll be the end of the Mosul in Virginia and the Carolinas, but it won’t be half as easy as some imagine. I heard there were Mosul reinforcements coming up from the south, and it’ll go hard for us if they get here in time to link up with the sons of bitches we’ve followed down from Richmond.”

  After the two long years of stalemate and occupation, towns and villages like Thakenham accustomed themselves to living under the heel of the Mosul boot, while Albany alone faced the invaders across the Potomac. As Mosul subjects, the boys and girls, like Argo Weaver, had gone through the motions of learning to worship the twin gods Ignir and Aksura, and obey the vast complexity of Zhaithan laws and regulations, as taught by the grownup collaborators, and reinforced by the threat of the punishment stool and the long cane. Times, however, had changed so swiftly and so violently once he’d escaped from Thakenham, he had managed to shut off most memories of how it had been. Caught up in such high adventures, and swimming in the actual flow of history, he had been able to put away the small boy who tried to deal with the daily terror of Mosul rule. Only this return to the lands where he had been born and raised, and the comparative inactivity of the slow advance had allowed it all to come flooding back.

  Argo turned in his saddle so he was facing the older man. “Sergeant of Horse…”

  “Major?”

  “Would you happen to be carrying that bottle you usually have with you?”

  Riordan glan
ced up at the sun. “A trifle early, young sir, to be starting on the hard stuff?” Riordan never missed a chance to remind Argo of his comparative youth and inexperience at both soldiering and drinking. “Something ailing you, boy?”

  “Memories, Sergeant of Horse. Coming so close to home seems to have let them off the leash.”

  “Memories, huh?” The crippled sergeant must have felt a twinge of battle-hardened sympathy because he reached into his tunic, produced a half-pint pewter flask, and handed it to Argo. “Have yourself a shot, young Major. Memories can be a damned nuisance, and they can get in the way of what matters at the worst possible time.”

  Memories, however, were not the only damned nuisance. Argo’s dreams had also been a problem. Over the last week or so, a new and sinister cycle of dreams had taken control of his sleep. Senseless and surreal, they had brought repeated, but wholly inexplicable glimpses of brilliant white figures, seeming composed of little more than near-blinding light, that had left him with an uneasy aching in his head that only strong drink seem able to cure.

  JESAMINE

  Jesamine held her arms straight out in front of her. Her hands were loosely bound with a length of soft scarlet cord that was part of the ritual. The air in the wickiup was thick with the sweet, pungent smoke that curled up from the bed of hot coals in the upturned Mosul helmet. Her honey-nude skin glistened with sweat in the orange glow, as did the darker bodies of her two companions. The lodge was small and the three of them crouched close. The faces of Oonanchek and Magachee were within inches of her’s, and she could feel the slow exhalations of their breathing. Oonanchek had erected the wickiup especially for the event, ensuring that the hallucinations that drifted in and out of the wreaths of smoke were harmonious and benign, and the three naked figures, one male and two female, were completely in tune one with the other. The last fifteen nights had not been without their occasional fears and moments of intensity, but they had also been one of the most pleasurable times Jesamine had ever experienced. Inevitably, though, it was an interlude that was about to end. All three of them knew that, and the ritual through which Oonanchek was currently taking them was designed to sever the temporary takla that had held them so intimately during the journey south. With the takla dissolved, Jesamine could return to The Four fully prepared for the conflicts to come.

  Magachee caressed Jesamine’s arms and then moved behind her to massage her shoulders. Oonanchek picked up the hunting knife from the blanket beside him, and Jesamine fancied she could see her own reflection in the polished steel blade. She looked proud, serious, and darkly beautiful, although maybe that was also hallucination. The two Ohio chanted softly as Magachee reached forward and cupped Jesamine’s breasts with her hands, and Oonanchek raised the knife to Jesamine’s proffered wrists. Orders were being shouted in some other part of the camp, reminding her of the violent outside world to which she was preparing to return, and Oonanchek, sensing the momentary distraction, paused for a moment before inserting the point of the blade beneath the red cord that bound her, but then, with a swift, upward stroke, he cut the cord, and Magachee spun it quickly off Jesamine’s wrist, at the same time, speaking softly in English.

  “You are free, sweet Jesamine, to return to your primary companions, to The Four, to your true takla.”

  Impulsively, she turned her head and kissed Magachee. She found herself suddenly clinging to the young Ohio woman with the long black hair in an unexpected display of emotional need. “But I don’t want to go back to them.”

  Oonanchek stroked her hair. “We all have our duty, just as we all are subject to our destiny.”

  Jesamine took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. “Oh, I’ll do what I have to do, if only because I have my pride, but I would still rather stay here and dream with you forever.”

  Oonanchek’s voice was kind but stern. “We, too, give up our dreams and face the fight.”

  Jesamine nodded sadly. “I know.”

  “But the Quodoshka will be with you.”

  “The Quodoshka?”

  “You will know.”

  The briefest of fleeting visions passed through the interior of the wickiup: a vague, pale shape like that of a loping wolf. Jesamine took a deep breath. “I will know.”

  Knowing she would learn no more, there and then, she concentrated on the future. Returning to The Four was not going to be easy. The others, especially Argo and Cordelia, clearly disapproved of her spending her nights in the camp of Chanchootok and riding by day with the warriors of the Ohio, rather than in the ranks of Albany. She was a major in the Albany Rangers, and she wore the same uniform as Cordelia, but she rode among the fringed and beaded buckskins and the elaborate horned and feathered war bonnets of the aboriginal horseman. She could not explain to the other of The Four how she felt more comfortable among the original inhabitants of this new world, or that the other Americans, the ones whose ancestors had come from across the Northern Ocean, were a little too similar to the Teutons for her ever to be at ease with them. She could try to tell them but she doubted that even Argo and Cordelia would understand, and knew for sure that the others of the Albany elite with whom she was forced to associate never would. Their ingrained prejudices were too strong. Of course, the Americans were not cohorts of the Mosul, they chose their own leaders, they did not share the Teutons’ inventive cruelty, and they did not own slaves, but, although they would invariably deny it, their inborn snobbery would never totally accept the outsider or the foreigner as an equal. The whispering about Jesamine had started almost as soon as she had arrived in Albany. Even when she had been a heroine, one of the saviors of their King, she had been aware of the strange looks and the slightly condescending way in which the courtiers and government officials spoke to her.

  When the Mothmen, the formidable controllers of the Dark Things, had come out of another reality and attempted to assassinate Carlyle II, at the investiture that had followed the Battle of the Potomac, The Four had beaten off the attack. Before that all-too-public incident, the existence of The Four and their unfathomable paranormal abilities had been a closely guarded secret of the Albany High Command and the handful of individuals, like Yancey Slide, the sorceress T’saya, and the Lady Gretchen, who had helped them find each other in the first place. After being forced, however, by the conjuration of the Zhaithan high priest Quadaron-Ahrach, to battle his Mothmen in front of half the army, plus most of Albany’s royal court and political aristocracy, the secret of The Four was obviously out. The only alternative was to turn them into a nine-day, morale-boosting sensation. Jesamine called this time of fame and accolades “the honeymoon.” Suddenly The Four were Albany’s wonderful new weapon against the paranormal iniquities of the Zhaithan. Nothing was too good for them, and they could do no wrong. Invited to parties and galas, and all but put on display, they were the temporary toast of the town, recognized and applauded in the streets of the capital, and with their pictures in The Albany Morning Post and The Albany Banner. Jesamine had been dazzled and swept along. But then The Banner had run those lurid headlines that showed her the unpleasant underbelly of transient acclaim. Leading with “Slave Girl Jesamine’s Odyssey of Shame,” the cheap and lurid tabloid had told its own highly melodramatic story of her past life. The newspaper had described with relish how, born into poverty in the mountain outlands of the Mamalukes, she had been carried off in a slave raid and sold into prostitution as a featured, house-available whore in a knocking shop on the Cadiz waterfront. The Banner had gone to some trouble to point out how her caramel complexion, large dark eyes, and straight silky-black hair had made her a choice prize for the barbaric horsemen who were the Mosul’s staunchest ally in Northern Africa, and then salaciously noted that it was these same attributes that had caused her to catch the eye of the cruel Teuton, Colonel Helmut Phaall, who had taken her as his chattel-concubine and carried her in chains to the Americas.

  The story pretended to evoke pity for the poor native girl who had been the pathetic sex-victim of the evi
l Mosul, but the tawdry text, and the drawings that accompanied it, served no purpose but cheap and obvious titillation. The Banner had even unearthed the tale of how, in the Cadiz brothel, she had received ten lashes for clipping the purse of a Mamaluke underofficer. A prominently featured artist’s impression of the beating had showed her hanging shackled in a Moorish dungeon, being flogged by a subhuman Mosul brute. In actuality, she had been bent over a chair in the whorehouse parlor, with a select group of customers paying top dinar to watch the spectacle, and the thrashing had been administered by a strong-armed madam with a lethally flexible, split-tip, rattan cane, but The Banner preferred drama over truth, and, once the paper had gone on sale, the passersby in the street still stared, but they no longer applauded.

  Jesamine had wondered often how The Banner had come by its information. Cordelia Blakeney had been her closest confidant, but she could hardly believe that Cordelia, even when drinking, would have blurted the gruesome details to a reporter. When they had first met, as prisoners of Her Grand Eminence Jeakqual-Ahrach, a strong affinity had existed between them. It had intensified when they had first come to Albany and, with Argo and Raphael, forged the final links that enabled them to operate as The Four. That Jesamine had been sexually drawn to Cordelia was stating it too strongly, but a degree of girlish attraction had figured in the mix.

  Once, though, Cordelia was back in her own familiar environment, the relationship had gradually but inexorably changed. Cordelia was the inevitable belle of her own personal ball, and, equally inevitably, Jesamine had become an exotic accessory, a prop in the growing and deliberately cultivated legend of Lady Cordelia Blakeney, War Heroine and Woman of Mystery. Cordelia had taken to the idea of fame with an unbridled relish, and shamelessly courted the spotlight. Celebrity had caused a widening gulf between them and Jesamine might have felt totally adrift, a stranger in a strange city, had Argo not been there for her. She and Argo had become lovers almost as soon as The Four had found each other, and the relationship had been intense and passionate. They were both in an alien and unfamiliar environment, and also the center of crass and unfeeling attention. Jesamine and Argo had found they could depend on each other when the voices grew too loud and the public whirl too hectic. Argo had needed someone to nurse him back to health after being wounded during the fight with the Dark Things in the tunnel on the Potomac, while Jesamine needed someone to provide her with some sense of permanence and integrity and insulate her from Cordelia’s circle of bright young party-goers, decadent aristocrats, and conniving social climbers. In their private interludes she and Argo had the much-needed mutual therapy of being able to laugh at it all, and pretend that it was them against the rest of the world.