by Mick Farren
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Other Novels by Mick Farren from Tor Books
Copyright
ONE
ARGO
Argo Weaver stood in the doorway of the bedroom and pointed the pistol at his stepfather. The two-shot horse pistol, with its long twin barrels and two hammers, was heavy, but his hand was steady and his aim did not falter. Argo Weaver’s stepfather snored softly. To say that his mother slept next to the man was an exaggeration. She slept in the same bed, as she had done since Argo’s father had been confirmed killed, but she was turned away from the man, as far from him as was physically possible to be and still remain under the same covers. When Argo fired, she would wake screaming. She would be terrified. She might even be spattered by her loveless husband’s blood. The effect on his mother, as Argo could picture all too clearly, would be devastating. He had imagined the scene he was now acting out a hundred times since the man called Herman Kretch had come to their house. He would cock both of the pistol’s hammers. He would slowly squeeze the first of the triggers, and, in the flash and report, payback would be exacted for all the cruelties large and small that Kretch had inflicted on Argo, his mother, and his sisters. Over and above the personal, to murder Kretch while he slept would also serve as a just punishment for the crime of being a collaborator.
With his left hand, Argo eased back the first of the hammers. The double click-click was loud in the night, and the tone of his stepfather’s breathing changed for a moment. He shifted position slightly, but did not wake. Argo waited for a few moments, just to make sure, and then slowly cocked the second hammer. The pistol had been made by George and James Bolton of Jamestown. That information was engraved on the left-hand barrel, and it was dated according to the old Mother Goddess calendar, the use of which had been forbidden since the Mosul occupation and the coming of the men from the Ministry of Virtue. According to his stepfather, it was a type of small-bore, double-barreled pistol known as a “cuckold’s special.” Although, as far as Argo knew, Kretch had never used the gun since he came to their house, he liked ostentatiously to clean it, sipping ’shine and acting the big man. As he ran a strip of oiled rag down one of the barrels and tightened the dual spring mechanisms with a small screwdriver, he had explained to Argo why the weapon had been given such a name. “You shoot her, and then you shoot him, and then, if you feel like it, you reload and shoot yourself.” But Herman Kretch was not the kind to shoot himself. He held his miserable life in far too high regard.
With the pistol cocked, Argo again took aim, but his finger did not immediately go to a trigger. This was the point beyond which his imagination was increasingly less clear. After the shot, he knew he would run, but what of his mother and two sisters? Herman Kretch was their sole support. The large, raw-boned man with the pot belly, red face, and muttonchop side-whiskers might be a bully, a braggart, and an occasional drunkard, but, for the three women Argo would have to leave behind, life would become close to impossible without him. The Mosul, the Ministry men, and the collaborators who ran things in the occupied territories showed no kindness to the widows and orphans of their defeated enemies and had scant tolerance for those who did. Herman Kretch might be a swine as far as Argo was concerned, but he was not a liar. He had made it very clear when he had proposed marriage to Argo’s mother that it was not to be a union of love or even affection. He wanted a strong woman to cook and clean for him, to fetch and carry, and to warm his bed. That she was good-looking only made it an added plus, and that she came to him with three children presented no real problem. Argo, Mathilde, and Gwennie were of an age to be useful, and it made them a source of unpaid labor in these dark times when the conquered worked from morning to night and, even so, barely survived. They were three pairs of extra hands to be exploited in the fields, to help with the livestock, and clean up in the workshop where Herman Kretch repaired boots, shoes, and other leather goods for the Army of Occupation. Argo’s stepfather not only kissed the boots of the Mosul, but he mended and shined them, too, along with their saddles and harnesses. He was equally pragmatic and open about his collaboration. “Hassan IX and his Mosul will take it all in the end. Carolina has gone, and the Virginia Freestate, too. Albany can’t hold for long on its own. We may not like it, but Hassan is the future, and we better buckle down and get used to it.”
Without even Kretch to protect them, his mother and sisters could all too easily become three more refugees in the woods and wild places, wandering aimlessly without papers until they starved or worse. Although the worst of the atrocities that had occurred in the direct wake of defeat had been mitigated, the woods were still full of deserters, fugitives, the displaced, and the migrant crazy, as well as the regular Mosul patrols (who fired first and rarely bothered to ask questions), the Indians, who moved like ghosts, and the ghosts themselves. Under Mosul rule, women on their own were vulnerable from every side. Without even the meager rights accorded to the males among subject peoples in the Empire of Hassan IX, carpetbaggers and scallywags could seize their homes and property. The young and comely might simply disappear to serve as an officer’s concubine or in the bordellos, cribs, and joyhouses of Savannah and Newport. The old would find themselves driven out to die in the rain. Rape was still a popular pastime among the Mogul grunts, the Mamaluke troopers, and Teuton uhlans, although they were now restrained by their captains from the pillage and razing of all but the occasional village or small town. Worst of all, any woman could be fingered as a witch on the most flimsy pretext and hanged if they were lucky, or put to torture and then burned alive if they were not.
The entire chain of events that had led to Argo Weaver standing over his stepfather with a loaded gun and a murderous if wavering resolve had started when, earlier that day, the Ministry men and priests of the Zhaithan had burned Gaila Ford for heresy. The execution by fire of Gaila Ford was by no means the first witch-burning in the village of Thakenham. Even with a population of less than three hundred, the place had still apparently harbored a major complement of women who were deemed by the Zhaithan Ministry of Virtue to constitute a threat and abomination to the Twin Deities, Ignir and Aksura. The burning of Gaila Ford, however, had been invested with a certain significance. The villagers had talked of nothing else for the two weeks since she had been taken, denounced with full ritual by the Masked Informer, and arrested by the Ministry men backed by a squad of Mosul soldiers from the garrison at Bridgehampton. The collaborators expressed a general opinion that it was a miracle she had survived for so long. Those, like Argo, who had as little to do with the Mosul as they could, held their silence and contained their anger. Argo had known Gaila Ford well. How could he not? Her husband, Henry, and Argo’s father, Jackvance Weaver, had gone to the war together. They had enlisted in the same company of the 9th Virginia Freestate Volunteers and had by all accounts died together in the final doomed attempt to hold the Mosul
horde at Richmond. Ford had been what was called a handsome woman. She was too mature to be taken as brothel fodder to Savannah, but even Argo, at just fourteen, was well aware that she turned the heads of many men and set them to wondering what she did in her cottage of an evening, all alone, widowed and childless but still obviously in her prime. That alone might have been enough to get her denounced, but worse still, she made it clear to all, in deed if not in word, that she still considered herself a freewoman of the Americas and not a second-class subject of the Mosul Empire.
A number of men had proposed marriage to her just as Herman Kretch had made his overtures to Argo’s mother. Without children to consider, she had dismissed these offers out of hand. Apparently she wanted nothing to do with the cowards, gimps, and snivelers who, for their own reasons, had avoided the call to serve. Argo suspected that she might have wed either Jed Pett or Struther Broad, the only two men to return to the village alive, but seemingly neither of the shattered survivors had asked her to take them. Gaila Ford had been well liked by most. She rarely complained, seemed capable of remaining cheerful in impossible situations, and had proved a tower of strength during the winter sickness a year and some earlier. Any one of these qualities would have brought her to the attention of the Ministry of Virtue, and the entire list was more than enough to bring her finally to the flame. Argo loathed to agree with the collaborators, but it really was a miracle she had remained alive and free, at least in her own mind, for as long as she had.
The wood of her pyre had been piled at the north end of the village square, in front of where the church of the Mother Goddess had once stood, and where the Mosul now had their fire tower. The priests of Zhaithan were great believers in lessons taught by example, and the entire village would be assembled in the square, by force if necessary, to witness the prolonged and agonizing death. The only exceptions would be the children and teenagers under fifteen. This was not because the priests or the Ministry men sought to preserve any childhood innocence. They had simply learned by experience in their two centuries of conquest that children were too unpredictable and could be a potential for disruption of the solemnity of the ritual putting-to-death. The younger teenagers were excluded for similar if slightly different reasons. The priests also knew that the boys and girls already passing through the confused rage of puberty were one of the deepest repositories of resentment against the occupation, and if any futile protest was to occur, it would be the young who triggered it. Too full of life fully to grasp the true and absolute reality of death, they were less easily deterred by the muskets and bayonets of the soldiers.
Not that the young of the village could really be prevented from watching the burning of Gaila Ford. It was just that they would not be standing with the adults. Instead, they would be peering through gaps in the shuttered upper-floor windows of the houses around the square. They would be squatting precariously on the thatch or tile of the higher roofs or wedged between trunk and bough of the taller trees. Argo was among the latter. He had hidden himself, along with Will Steed and Jason Halfacre, in the big oak at the other end of the village street from where the flame would be lit. The three of them were in place well before the villagers began to gather and the collaborators checked the parish rolls and the lists of residents to see that none were deliberately staying away. The checking was hardly needed, however, since the morbid attraction of the brutal spectacle was more than enough to overcome any principled and dangerous boycott of the execution. Even those whom Gaila Ford had nursed through the two great bouts of winter sickness would stare transfixed as she died.
Argo’s stepfather had specifically forbidden him to go anywhere near the square or the burning. “The rules are the rules, boy, and, while I personally think it might be an education to you to see the Ford woman get what’s coming to her, the rules come first.” Accordingly, Argo had been dispatched with a shovel and a rake to clear the dead leaves that were clogging the ditch at the north end of the top field. In a charade of obedience, Argo had headed for the top field with the designated implements, but only remained by the neglected ditch long enough to hide the tools in the long grass before heading for the village to where he had arranged to meet Will and Jason. He took the long way round so he would not accidentally meet his father along the shorter route. He considered going to watch the burning as an act of open rebellion, but he was still doing all he could not to be caught. Under normal circumstances, Herman Kretch would not have given a damn whether Argo watched the execution or not, but ever since Gaila Ford had been denounced, his behavior had been tense and strange. He had seemed more angry and impatient than usual, and Argo had wondered about this. Herman Kretch was not one to be unduly upset by anything like a witch-burning that did not affect him directly, and Argo could only suppose it was nothing more than coincidence. Then, just two days earlier, he had overheard two women gossiping as they waited on the interminable line for their weekly flour ration. A story was apparently circulating that his stepfather had been the Masked Informer who had denounced Gaila Ford, and he had done it because she had rebuffed his advances when he had gone to Ford’s cottage one ’shine-drunk night, looking for an alternative bed partner to Argo’s mother. Argo hated his stepfather but still found this hard to believe. And how could these women know? The identity of the Masked Informer, with hidden face and in the shapeless robe that dragged along the ground and disguised physical build and even gender, was supposed to be known only to the priests. Argo tried to listen longer, but the women had seen him and lowered their voices.
The tree that the three boys had selected was a tall and venerable oak on which village lovers had, in happier times, made it a practice to carve their linked initials. It was at the opposite end of the square from where the execution would take place, and it afforded them a better view than that of many of the adults on the ground. Argo, Will, and Jason had arranged to be in position early, well before the majority of the villagers had arrived, so they would not be spotted clambering into the high branches. They had lain and stared through the late summer foliage as the square rapidly filled with drab and ragged people who seemed to carry their air of defeat around with them like a collective shroud. As the crowd entered the square, the men went to the right and the women to the left. He saw his mother and stepfather dividing and going their separate ways. The onlookers were strictly divided by sex, and even couples had to separate until the burning was over. This segregation was enforced at all Zhaithan gatherings and assemblies. Argo had never understood why this had to happen, and no one older had ever been able to give him a reason, but many things ordered by the Mosul conquerors had no discernable reason except maybe to degrade and humiliate those under their rule. The women in the square far outnumbered the men, but that was the way of it in the wake of the terrible slaughter that had come with the Mosul invaders. The Mosul also tended to take their time where subject peoples were concerned, and, by Argo’s estimate, the crowd had been kept standing in silence for at least a half hour before Gaila Ford was finally brought out from the two-storey building on the northwest corner of the square that, in the old days, had been the constable’s station and the village lock-up but was now draped with the black flags and the red flame insignia of Hassan IX and served the local office of the Ministry of Virtue.
Many who had been held by the Ministry men for a full two weeks had to be carried to their deaths, but Gaila Ford emerged walking, wearing the paper shift and headdress of the condemned heretic. She had undoubtedly been repeatedly tortured during her imprisonment, but, although plainly weak and unsteady, she seemed determined to go out standing tall. A red-robed priest kept pace on either side of her, and two lines of soldiers flanked her as she was led to where the wood was stacked around the base of the iron A-frame and the metal ramp that led up to it.
Abomination!
Abomination!
Abomination!
Abomination!
Abomination!
Abomination!
For a moment she
faltered. One of the priests gripped her arm to steady her, but she shook free. With what had to be the very last of her strength, Gaila Ford was plainly demonstrating to them all, including her anonymous betrayer, that she had not been broken, even by the Ministry torturers. Argo could feel tears welling up in his eyes, but he quickly wiped them away before either Jason or Will noticed. She mounted the ramp that led to the hideous scaffold of blackened metal, and then stood in front of the instrument of her destruction, motionless, with her back to the chanting crowd. The two priests followed Gaila Ford up the ramp. One quickly turned her around while the other beckoned to a pair of already-designated Mosul soldiers to come and secure the chains at her wrists, waist, and ankles that would hold her in place for the consuming fire. Her arms were stretched above her head and her legs pulled apart so her body conformed to the up-pointing triangle of the scaffold. Gaila Ford neither resisted nor made any further protest. She had gone to her end with all the dignity that she could summon, and now she seemed resigned. Once her chains were locked, a third soldier moved forward with a red-painted can of kerosene. He thoroughly doused the wood at Gaila’s feet and then splashed the last of the flammable liquid down the front of her body. As it soaked into the heretic’s shift, the paper became close to transparent. She was plainly naked beneath the ritual garment, and the crowd fell silent at the sight until the Ministry man signaled curtly for the second phase of the death chant as the priests and soldiers moved back from the pyre and left Gaila Ford alone with her fate.
Burn the witch!
Burn the witch!
The chant was hesitant at first, but, under the grim gaze of the priests and soldiers, it grew in baleful intensity, as though the villagers were being forced to beg for their own oppression.
Burn the witch!
Burn the witch!
