by Mick Farren
Burn the witch!
Burn the witch!
Burn the witch!
The first fire was taken directly from the Zhaithan sacred flame. While a prayer was offered up to Ignir and Aksura, a bundle of oil-soaked rags on the end of a Mosul pike was thrust into the hemispherical bowl mounted on the tall, tapering pylon. When the rags were thoroughly ignited, the pike was carried to the pyre and applied to the wood. Rumor had it that, now and again, a merciful executioner would rapidly strangle the victim before they burned. Either that was a lie, or no mercy had been shown in Gaila’s case. The kerosene caught with an explosive sigh and a first eager fireball, and then, as it took a fuller hold, Argo had his last glimpse of Gaila contorting against the chains that held her, before her helpless figure was hidden by the conflagration. The flames burned orange, and the black smoke rose to stain the already-grey sky. A capricious wind suddenly swirled a loose smoke vortex down and directly into the square, filling the village with the stench of kerosene and burned flesh. The assembled villagers coughed, and some actually gagged, but the Ministry men refused to dismiss them. At that moment, Argo Weaver knew he could no longer stay in this place. He knew he had to run, he had to go north, he had to try and make it across the now-stalled-and-static battle lines where Carlyle of Albany was still managing to hold back the Mosul advance. Argo was as aware as any fourteen-year-old could be aware that the odds were probably against him making it. More likely he would be picked up by a patrol or lose himself in the wilderness, but at fourteen he didn’t play the odds, and even if he did, what did he really have to lose? With a teenager’s optimism he pictured himself finding one of the secret ways through the Mosul lines which, according to rumor and hearsay, would bring him to the free territory of the Kingdom of Albany. He saw himself, brave and dashing in the uniform of the Albany Royal Guard, in the vanguard of the long-awaited advance that would put Hassan IX to total rout and push him and his unholy legions back into the Northern Ocean, or perhaps, somewhere in the woods or wilderness, he would make contact with the partisans, the guerrillas of the resistance, the ones whom the Mosul called bandits. On a sudden impulse, he began swinging down out of the branches of the old oak. He did not care if he was seen; he just wanted to be away from the smoke and the stench, the cringing villagers. Will called after him in surprise. “Hey, Argo, where you going?”
Argo looked up and realized that he was never going to see Will Steed again. “I’m going north, Will. I’m going north.”
Will wanted to know what he meant, but Argo was already on the ground and slipping away between two buildings. Once clear of the village, he hurried, heading for home, but when the house and barn were in sight, he remembered that his stepfather would not be back from the village, and Argo did not want to be there when Herman Kretch returned from the burning. If he had not been drinking already, he would undoubtedly start. Argo changed direction and began walking more slowly in the direction of what the boys called Hunchback Hill. The high ground provided him with a view of both the village and his home, and as he squatted down on the short grass, settling himself to wait, an unbidden but very clear and absolute feeling came over him. He was looking at the two places, really the only two places that he had ever known, aside from the journeys in the old days to market at Bridgehampton, and he was looking at them for the last time in this prelude to his departure.
The Ministry men must have finally dismissed the villagers, because Argo saw a small swarm of dark figures moving away from the cluster of houses and other buildings that constituted the center of Thakenham. With the strange insight that seemed to have overtaken him, Argo realized that he truly hated the people among whom he had been born and raised. He hated their submission and their willingness to surrender, and the way they could watch, so ragged, drab, and unmoving, a horror like the burning of Gaila Ford without doing or saying anything except coughing and grimacing when the smoke billowed too thick or the stench of death became too gaggingly unbearable. With the natural intolerance of youth, he could feel nothing but contempt for the way that the villagers would endure anything, even slavery in all but the name, in order to survive, and how they lacked the courage to stand up to their oppressors and die with some degree of dignity and while shreds of honor still remained.
The Mosul had come soon after Argo’s eleventh birthday. The invasion force had landed near Savannah on July 5th ’96 by the old and now-forbidden Mother Goddess calendar, and, on that hot summer day, the world had changed 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 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 his armed might to the north, in the direction of the rich lands between the Appalachians and the ocean. The Southland Alliance, although doomed, had bought time for the Republic of the Carolinas and the Virginia Freestate to marshal their troops and to mount a more concerted defense. For seven bloody months, 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, but an armada of troopships, under steam and sail, continued to bring what appeared to be limitless divisions of battle-hardened men and inexhaustible supplies of munitions. The ships of the Flame Banner shuttled back and forth across the Northern Ocean from Cadiz and Lisbon and other ports in conquered Hispania, protected from the privateers of the Norse Union, the small but effective Royal Albany Navy, and the pirates up from the Caribbean by formidable escorts of ironclads. It appeared that all of Southern Europe, if not North Africa and Asia Minor, was being stripped of men and machines to feed Hassan IX’s megalomaniac conquest of the Americas.
The outcome was probably inevitable. Volunteer farmers, miners, and merchants, a few mountain men, hunters, and traders, and their mostly amateur and inexperienced officers, were no match for Hassan’s highly disciplined and religiously motivated blitzkrieg. The men of Virginia might be brave and strong, they might be crack shots, and, one on one, as they had so often and proudly boasted in the early days of the conflict, worth any ten Mosul, but they had gone to war with a fatally imprecise idea of what manner of foe they faced. Two hundred years of carnage might have come and gone since the Mosul, originally 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. Somehow the people of the Americas had felt immune to the danger. They had become too safe in their supposed isolation and too confident of the broad protection of the ocean. Many of the American settlers’ parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents might have crossed the seas as a direct result of the Mosul terror, but even that had not equipped them to face down the most murderous and implacable war machine the world had ever had the misfortune to see, or to defeat the Mosul’s iron discipline, fanatic religious motivation, and honed battle tactics. Through the spring of ’98, the tide of conflict had turned against the defenders, until, fighting little more than desperate rearguard actions, and constantly regrouping as their numbers were decimated, they had fallen back on Richmond for the last battle of a war that seemed to have taken on the towering melancholy of a grand and tragic opera. On May 10th, all hope for Virginia and the Carolinas had gone with the wind as the last stand had collapsed to relentless shot and shell followed by butchery and fire.
In Thakenham, the war had seemed to happen in a number of phases. At first, life had seemed strangely routine and eerily close to normal. The majority of the men might have gone off to the September start of the war, boasting that they would be home well before Solsticetide, but the cows still had to be milked, the eggs collected, the hogs slopped, the bread baked, and the beer brewed. Dogs st
ill barked, babies still cried, roofs leaked when it rained, and eleven-year-old boys roamed the woods and fields playing soldier and wishing they were men already, so they could go off gloriously campaigning like their fathers. In the beginning all had been optimism. The headlines of the broadsheets and the wireless broadcasts had always trumpeted imminent victory and continued to promote the happy certainty that the Mosul would be driven into the sea by the end of the year, but some of the volunteers’ letters home were less sure. They had hinted that the fighting was far more grim and a lot less decisive than the official reports wanted it to be. By October, the first casualty lists had been posted on the public notice board in the village square, but, since none of those listed were Thakenham men, no one paid them too much mind. As the days grew shorter, and the lists of the dead and missing grew longer, however, the atmosphere changed. The official reports now stressed the heroic rather than the victorious, and those, like Argo’s mother, who were capable of reading between the lines of the propaganda, knew that which was already bad was rapidly turning worse.
Even blind optimism had to cease when the casualty lists were no longer posted, the broadsheets were no longer distributed beyond the confines of Richmond and Lynchburg, and the wireless played music more than the repetitively grim war news. Although the fighting never passed through their village, the residents of Thakenham had heard the sound of the guns in the distance, at first from the south, but then moving up and past them, and finally booming from the north. Exhausted soldiers, in small groups, squads, and companies, had trudged up the Bridgehampton Road on their way to whatever place had been selected for their next attempt to contain the invaders. Argo had stood beside his mother with a hand on her shoulder as the ragged lines of retreating men had tramped through the village. He had looked for his father among the walking wounded, but his father had never come. At the start of the retreat, the columns were still organized by regiment. Argo could tell that by their uniforms and collar tabs, but, as the enemy front rolled deeper and deeper into Virginia, and company after company, and battalion after battalion, were wiped out by the iron Teuton land-crawlers, the savage Mamaluke cavalry, the jogging columns of implacable Mosul foot soldiers, and the Dark Things that no one dared name, the squads became cobbled together from all the survivors who could be rounded up and sent back to the lines. Now old men and boys only a couple of years older than Argo were being sent to face the foreign invaders.
One late afternoon, a group of about forty men had passed through town, and Argo had recognized that some were wearing the patches of the 9th Virginia. He ran up and grabbed one of them by the torn sleeve of his tunic. “Hey Mister, do you know Jackvance Weaver?”
The soldier had looked at him with a blank, ghost-haunted stare. “I don’t know no one no more, kid.”
“He was in the 9th Virginia.”
The soldier quickened his pace, wanting to get away from Argo and his questions. “I told you, kid. I don’t know no one.”
“He’s my father.”
The man halted and looked down at Argo. He sighed and shook his head. “Kid, we’ve got good men scattered all the way from here to hell, and most of them are either dead or on their way to Richmond, which is the next best thing. My best advice to you is to stop hoping. It’s maybe the dead who should be grateful.”
Around the time of this encounter, the people of Virginia had started looking for a miracle. To the north was the Kingdom of Albany, with supposedly large and quite formidable forces massed on the banks of the Potomac River. In the snug and smokey inns, in parish meeting rooms, and around the home fires the same question was asked over and over. “Why doesn’t Albany come?” It was asked the loudest by the cowards and slackers, the ones like Herman Kretch, who had remained safe at home while others like Jackvance Weaver did the fighting and the dying. “Why doesn’t Albany come?” What Herman Kretch did not know, or anyone else in Thakenham, and only a very few in all of the lands that were under threat or had already fallen, was that Albany was not going to come. General James Dean, known simply as the Old Man, who, after a long and distinguished career exploring and mapping the interior, had taken command of the Army of Richmond, had met in secret with King Carlyle II and his staff and had come to a logical if desperate decision. Even with a fresh army from Albany added to Dean’s battle-weary troops, Richmond could not stand. “Why doesn’t Albany come?” Because at best they might turn a futile final battle into a few more weeks of equally futile final siege. In the long run, such a move could only increase the numbers of the dead. Richmond could not be rescued, and Carlyle would save his strength for an attempt to stop Hassan at the Potomac.
The night that Richmond fell, church bells all through Virginia had rung for an hour, in an eerie peal, and then stopped. It was like a signal. No more. All motion ceased for about five days, as though the world was holding its breath. In that last terrible month, the last time they were allowed to call it May, even spring itself seemed to pause and wait while a steady and unrelenting late-winter rain had fallen. And then the first Mamaluke column had ridden into the village. Thakenham had been lucky. The previous night they had sacked and burned Coster’s Mill, indulging to the full in all the rape and murder for which they had become notorious. Swarthy and stone-faced, the hard horsemen with their spiked helmets and eagle-beak noses were seemingly sated and too hungover to engage in yet another orgy, and they had simply posted the orders of occupation and moved on. A few days later the priests had come, along with their retinue of Mosul soldiers and the men from the Zhaithan Ministry of Virtue, to begin setting up the frightening network of spies and informers that maintained the political and philosophical Mosul armlock on their subject peoples.
Suddenly more columns of men were on the move, details of chained prisoners, guarded by detachments of armed and whip-wielding troops, going in both directions, some headed north to perform slave labor under the direction of Teuton engineers digging trenches and bunkers on the Mosul side of the Potomac, while others were driven south to Savannah to work on the construction of the citadel that would be Hassan IX’s capital in the new world. And it was from one of these starved and wretched prisoners that the first word had come that both Jackvance Weaver and Hank Ford had been blown to pieces by Mosul cannon as they had taken part in the final stand before the gates of Richmond. Then and only then had his mother cried, and only in private, away from the spying eyes of the other villagers.
As Argo sat on Hunchback Hill, reflecting on all that had gone before, a half-formed vision came to him, unbidden, for no reason he could fathom. The face of a girl appeared to his inner sight, a girl with red hair and the kind of skin that freckled when it was too long in the sun. Argo did not know the girl, but she was not exactly a stranger. She had the familiarity of a dream dreamed more than once, or some glimpse of encounters and adventures to come. Argo set no store by stuff like prescience and prophecy, but he simply recognized, with the most certain and matter-of-fact intuition, that he would see the red-haired girl again, either in dream or reality. Kretch and his mother had now been home for some time, and smoke was rising from the chimney of the house, but Argo continued to sit, clasping his knees and thinking. He decided it would be better to wait until well after dark before he went back inside. If his stepfather was drinking ’shine, the possibility existed that he would have drunk himself unconscious if Argo delayed his return. Thus Argo continued to sit until the moon rose, and only then did he slowly descend the hill. Unfortunately, he had failed to delay long enough. The moment his weight caused the porch to creak, his stepfather was snarling in the doorway. “Defy me, would you, you little bastard? Get in here.”
The razor strop lay in full view on the kitchen table, right beside the lamp. The message was plain. Somehow Herman Kretch had found out that Argo had been to the execution instead of cleaning out the ditch by the top field, and now a beating was inevitable. The razor strop was his stepfather’s favorite instrument of discipline, and when he swung it at Argo’s b
ared buttocks it hurt like hell and left welts like the mark of a brand. Argo inhaled deeply and took comfort in the fact that it would be the last thrashing that Kretch ever inflicted on him. Without a word, he turned on his heel and started back for the door, but his stepfather immediately wanted to know what he was doing. “Where are you going?”
Argo looked back, slack-faced and sullen, failing to understand. Surely it was obvious? “To the root cellar, sir.”
Usually his stepfather conducted this kind of punishment down in the root cellar in comparative privacy, but it appeared that tonight he had a greater humiliation in mind. Maybe unpleasantly inflamed by the execution and the ’shine he had put away in the aftermath, he had added cruelty on his mind. “Right here, boy. You’ll take your medicine right here.”
Argo could hardly believe what he was hearing. The beating was going to be carried out right there in the family kitchen, in front of the big stone hearth and in full view of his mother and sisters? “No!”
“What did you say, boy?”
Argo saw the looks of horror on the faces of the women and shook his head. “Not here.”
“Right here.”
Argo’s mother got to her feet. “I’m taking the girls outside.”
Kretch glared at her. “The hell you are. You sit right back down there, or it’ll go worse for the boy.”
His mother summoned a nervous defiance. “You can make me sit here, but the girls don’t need to watch this.”
“They’ll learn what to expect when they’re bigger and maybe decide they can defy me.”
Argo’s mother gestured to Mathilde and Gwennie. “Outside, girls.”
“You want me to have his papers revoked? You want them to see their precious brother marched off in chains to a labor camp?” Kretch’s threat was no idle one. Argo only remained in the comparative safety of Thakenham because Kretch had used his collaborator’s clout with the Ministry of Virtue to ensure that Argo was not sent off to forced labor in Savannah or set to digging trenches beside the Potomac. Argo’s mother sat back down again with a face like stone and gathered the girls to her. Content with his victory, Kretch turned his attention to Argo. “Shuck those britches, boy, and grab your ankles.”
