by Mick Farren
Argo did as he was told, trying to think of nothing, trying to forget that his mother and sisters were right there to witness his exposed humiliation. He stared straight into the fire as Kretch slapped the strop into his palm as though testing it, even though, after all the other times he had used it, no testing was needed. Argo was determined to give the man as little satisfaction as possible, even if it prolonged the punishment, but he could not help but gasp as the first blow seared his taut skin. As blow followed blow, to Argo’s blurred and tear-distorted vision, the flames of the log fire leapt with each searing cut of the leather and each wide-burning stripe. The flames danced before him just as they had danced around the chained form of Gaila Ford before they had consumed her. After what seemed like an eternity, his stepfather finally tossed the strop onto the table. “Pull up your pants, boy. That’s your medicine for tonight. Remember it the next time you get an urge to ignore what I tell you.”
The fabric was rough on his throbbing flesh, but Argo again tried to hide the hurt. His mother was on her feet, bustling the girls out of the room. As Argo buckled his belt, Kretch jerked a dismissive thumb. “Now thank me and get out of here.”
Argo stared at the floor, unable to look his stepfather in the face, but he stubbornly shook his head. “No.”
Kretch actually laughed and poured himself a drink. “Well, you’ve got some stones and no mistake. You want the same all over again?”
“No, sir.”
“So thank me and get to your bed.”
“I knew Gaila Ford.”
“We all knew Gaila Ford, boy. We knew her, and now she’s scattered ashes, and good riddance as far as I’m concerned. She wasn’t the first, and she won’t be the last. Now thank me for your beating or get those breeks down for a double dose. It’s your choice.”
Argo wished he had the strength to endure a second thrashing just to show the bastard he couldn’t be intimidated. But he knew a second time around, Kretch would whip him bloody. With the taste of gall in his mouth, he spoke to the wood of the floor in a monotone. “Thank you, sir. Thank you for my beating.”
As he fled from the room, Kretch crowed after him. “You can’t win, boy. You know that, don’t you? You can’t win.”
Argo lay for the longest time in his narrow bed, blanket thrown back despite an early autumn chill, his flesh throbbing but a cold resolve hardening to the point that it couldn’t be denied. This was the night that he would not only run from Thakenham, but kill Herman Kretch in his bed while he slept. He only slipped from his bed when the house was silent, and Argo was certain the rest of the family slumbered. He took the big canvas satchel that he had used for his schoolbooks before the Mosul had come and closed the school, and moved silently through the house, gathering what he thought he needed to survive in the wild: spare shirts and socks, beef jerky and hard crackers, a slab of cheese, the old water bottle that had belonged to his father, a lighter and spare flints. Finally he had taken the pistol and all of Kretch’s ammunition from the hiding place in back of the linen press. Leaving his boots and bundle by the door, and moving silently in his stockinged feet, he had slowly climbed the stairs and gone to the bedroom where Kretch and his mother slept.
From the doorway he pointed the pistol. He cocked both hammers, but before pulling either trigger he had paused. In theory it had all seemed so easy. A hundred times, Argo had pictured himself standing over his stepfather with the twin barrels pointed true and unwavering as he slowly squeezed the trigger. Except he simply could not pull even the first of the twin triggers. So many factors crowded in: the womenfolk alone, the hue and cry that would follow him as a murderer rather than just a boy runaway, the very fact that perhaps he was not ready to take the life of another human being. He knew he was not, in the end, going to shoot Herman Ketch. He might feel like a traitor to his own anger, but he knew he could run but not yet kill. He lowered the pistol and carefully released one hammer and then the second. He hurried down the stairs, stepped into his boots, shrugged into his jacket, hooked the satchel over his shoulder. His last move was to stick the pistol in his belt. He might not be able to kill Kretch, but he would steal his gun, the gun that meant so much to the drunken bastard. Argo Weaver opened the door and stepped out into the night. A dog barked in the distance.
CORDELIA
Lady Cordelia Blakeney had paid a seamstress a full forty shillings for the alterations to her new uniform. If judged according to the most stringent interpretation of the dress regulations of the Royal Women’s Auxiliary, it fitted a little too snugly to the most crucial parts of her body, but RWA officers like Cordelia, assigned to permanent posts in the capital, either at the War Office or the Headquarters of the General Staff, were permitted some considerable laxity in matters like dress regulations and overnight passes. The Kingdom of Albany might be at war, but that did not mean the social waltz and romantic entanglements in and around Albany Castle and the court of Carlyle II had been completely discontinued. Indeed, they had actually taken on an increased sense of immediate urgency. In wartime, the sense of living for and in the moment was a kind of heightened reality that came with the knowledge that, without reason or warning, death might snatch the moment away and leave nothing but grief on one side of the affair and oblivion on the other. The young men came and went with dizzying if delicious rapidity, moving on a five-stage circuit between the royal castle at Albany, to the field headquarters at Frederick, the great port of Manhattan, the equally crucial base at Baltimore, and the front itself. Only a week earlier she had been consoling her cousin Daphne, who was devastated to the point of hysteria after her current lover, a captain in the Intelligence Corps, had been lost on a mission across the Potomac. This week, Daphne was sufficiently recovered to be pursuing a major in one of the newly formed tank regiments.
Cordelia checked herself in the full-length mirror in the ladies room on the second floor of the War Office building. The delegation from the Norse Union had arrived, and First Lieutenant the Lady Cordelia Blakeney wanted to look her best. Although field green was not the most flattering of colors, it was the best that could be done in wartime, and it did not do a total disservice to her red hair and pale skin. Unfortunately, her stint as driver for Colonel Blackwood had put her a little too much in the late-summer sun, and, even now that her duties put her back inside the castle and the War Office, a dusting of freckles still covered her nose. She knew some men found freckles cute, but she would have preferred her complexion to be a flawless porcelain. That, however, was not possible. The rules of the RWA might be fairly lax, but the use of excess makeup was frowned upon among junior officers, no matter how highborn. All in all, though, Cordelia was fairly pleased with herself. Her buttons and insignia gleamed, her epaulets hung just right, her tunic nipped in her waist to perfection, and the tighter-than-regulation pencil skirt left only a minimum to the imagination of any Norse naval commander or Air Corps major. She twisted around for a glimpse of the backs of her legs. Silk stockings were scarce, and she wanted to be assured that the seams of the ones she had were straight. She hoped that at least one of the Norse officers had enough unscrupulous practicality to bring a supply with him, along with the good Scotch whiskey they usually handed out as gifts. The Norse were rapidly emerging as the possible saviors of Albany, perhaps of all the Americas, in much more than just Scotch and silk stockings. Although in Europe they maintained an uneasy peace with the Mosul Empire, with the English Channel as the dividing line between their conflicting spheres of influence, the Norse were moving closer and closer to an open alliance with Albany to halt Hassan IX’s invasion of the New World.
The Norse were far fewer in number than the Mosul, and controlled a great deal less territory, but they had technology and heavy industry, and that gave them an increasing edge. The Mosul, strangled by the constraining coils of their disgusting religion, failed to progress. The Zhaithan priests were hard-pressed to tell a scientist from a heretic, and that completely stifled all research and innovation. The foundries o
f Damascus and the Ruhr turned out cannon and musket twenty-four hours a day, but they produced only crude quantity, and nothing to compare with the sophistication of the repeating rifles being developed in Birmingham and Stockholm or the keels of the submarines being laid in the shipyards along the Clyde. The courtship between Albany and the Norse was a slow one, but progress was definitely being made. Already the prefabricated parts of Norse gasoline-powered tanks were being delivered to the port of Manhattan by cargo ship and assembled in a huge, roaring factory complex in the city of Brooklyn. Norse Air Corps instructors were training the crews of Albany’s first small squadron of airships, and cadres of officers from Albany were attending advanced command schools in London and Stockholm, learning to apply the use of these new weapons on the battlefield and in naval tactics on the high seas. The wedding of Albany and the NU was inevitable. Their people came from the same stock, and shared culture and customs. Many spoke an approximation of the same language, and the two nations could only move closer together in the face of the common threat. On a personal level, Cordelia only hoped the process would be considerably faster.
She emerged from the ladies’ room into a busy second-floor corridor and ran straight into Coral Metcalfe. Cordelia and Coral had been friends since they had been little girls. The two had gone to different schools and been separated, except at holiday times, through their teen years, but now their war work caused them once again to move in the same circles. Metcalfe was a chronic gossip and something of a ladylike slut, although Cordelia, with her record of conquests, was hardly one to judge. On this particular morning, Coral seemed especially excited. “Have you seen them yet?”
Cordelia did not have to ask whom. She was well aware that Coral was talking about the newly arrived Norse delegation. Coral was very taken with everything Norse, particularly young English-speaking officers. “No, not yet. Have you?”
Coral Metcalfe nodded enthusiastically. “I managed to tag along with the reception committee, and, oh, my dear, there are a couple of real dolls among their number.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Cordelia smiled. “I’ll be there later when they meet with the king and Jack Kennedy.”
“Lucky you, you’ll get to speak to them.”
Cordelia nodded. “Or die trying.”
Coral looked at her watch. “Got to go, darling. I’m in trouble already.”
With that, Coral Metcalfe hurried away. The girl always seemed to be late for something. She had been late all her life. She also reminded Cordelia that she, too, was supposed to be somewhere and had better not linger. The morning promised to be deary. It would be spent filling manpower reports and approving supply requisitions, but by noon she would be on her way to the castle for the start of the vital conference between the Norse Union delegates led by Vice President Ingmar Ericksen and the king and his ministers. Cordelia had wangled things so she was one of the squad of RWA girls who’d be there to fetch things, organize the distribution of papers and the spreading of maps, but, above all, to look decorative and put the Norse officers in the most pleasant of moods. The king wanted a consignment of the highly secret Norse rocket bombs, while the girls of the RWA, with the possible exception of that little prig and professional virgin Pamela Stanley, simply wanted the Norse.
Leaving nothing to chance, Cordelia signed out of her office at eleven forty-five and took the public tram the five blocks to the castle. The war had brought a considerable social leveling to the Kingdom of Albany. In the old days she would rather have walked than take the trolley, but now she grabbed one of the brass rails and swung herself onto the rattling, clanging, slow-moving conveyance as though she’d been doing it all her life. With their backs to the wall, the people of Albany faced a grim reality, and no room remained for the putting on of airs. As the trolley car rattled up Mason Street, the sky was overcast and promised rain. Cordelia had neglected to bring a raincoat, but she did not let that dampen her spirits. Even if the skies opened, some officer would undoubtedly be gallant enough to drape his trench coat over her shoulders to protect her from the weather. Nothing was more attractive than a damsel distressed by a downpour. As she rode the trolley and anticipated the afternoon and evening to come, Cordelia stared at the passing streets and reflected on how one could never mistake Albany for anything but a city at war. The high percentage of uniforms on the sidewalks, the army trucks and the drab green military steamers that jammed the streets, the recruiting posters and patriotic billboards that had replaced most commercial advertising, all told of a people in a high order of military readiness. But Albany was also a city with a certain optimism. In the dark days after the Battle of Richmond and the fall of Virginia and the Carolinas, a desperation had been in the air, a sense that it was only a matter of time before the Mosul rolled on over Albany. But then the enemy had been halted at the Potomac, and everyone had breathed again. Two years of stalemate had not been easy. Albany threw everything it had into the war effort, galvanized by the knowledge that the Mosul attack could come at any time, but with the domestic military buildup and the tacit support of the NU, a feeling had spread that, when the Mosul came, as, without doubt, they sooner or later would, Albany would be in a position to repulse their assault, and the essential spine of their invasion could be broken. If that happened, it would only be a matter of effort and resolution to push the invaders back the way they had come, down through Virginia and the Carolinas and ultimately into the sea.
Cordelia dropped off the trolley in front of the Calder Street gate of the castle and showed her pass and identity card to one of the military policemen standing guard. Before the invasion, before the war, she, her family, and the other highborn of Albany, had thought of Calder Street, with its iron portcullis guarding the dark and narrow tunnel through the high stone wall, as the tradesmen’s and servants’ entrance, its use somewhat beneath their aristocratic dignity. But that was definitely no longer the case. During the panic over the possibility of Mosul suicide attacks that had swept the capital in the first months after the landings in Savannah, it had been decided that the Grand Gate, flanked by its statues and carved lions, was too open and vulnerable, and it had been closed and sealed for the duration. All who had business in the castle, even visiting dignitaries and the king himself, had, from then on, come and gone through Calder Street.
Like so many of the dire imaginings in those early days, the anticipated suicide attacks had never materialized, but the custom of using the tunnel had remained, as had the squads of MPs, the hastily erected sandbagged gun emplacements, and the twin multibarreled Bergman guns that were capable of sweeping the entire length of Calder Street with a deadly and sustained hail of one-inch cannister shot. Rumor also insisted that land mines had been laid beneath the flagstones that could seal this single public access in a chain of massive explosions, and each and every time Cordelia passed though the dark space, she could not help wondering if she really was walking over a ton or more of explosives, nor recalling that the fact that she, just like everyone else, was now using the same route to enter and leave a Castle that was foremost among the last solid symbols of freedom and equality in the Americas.
Before the war, Cordelia had been little more than a child, a spoiled aristocrat brat with a title and a self-centered petulance who believed she had a right to anything and everything she might demand. Before the danger had brought its sobering dose of hard reality, she had lived on whim, caprice, and an overbearing belief in the complete and unquestionable superiority of her class. The horrors of those early days, especially the fall of Atlanta and the example of the hideous fate that had befallen that unfortunate city’s ruling class, had been a lesson in survival that had mercifully been quickly learned by lady and servant alike. The Mosul atrocities had made it painfully clear to Lady Cordelia Blakeney, her friends, relatives, and all of those like her, that their airs, graces, and hereditary lineage would not save them from the shot and shell, nor from the rape, pillage, and fire that would
inevitably follow. As the tales of the hanged, the burned, and the gruesomely impaled were carried north to Albany, the whole of the nation’s social structure saw, with a terrible clarity, that to continue as they were would be to court as sure and certain a doom as had destroyed all the lands to the south.
With a weird irony, the arrival of the Mosul hordes had saved the Kingdom of Albany from itself. Without the external threat of foreign invasion to unite them, the country had been tottering closer and closer to the edge of revolution with the reeling determination of a self-destructive drunkard, and Carlyle I, the father of their present king, was perhaps the self-destructive drunkard in question. In the early part of his reign, he had been sufficiently dashing that his self-indulgent extravagance and narrow autocratic perspectives had been dismissed as nothing more than youthful swagger, but as he grew to full maturity, it had become clear that neither his attitudes nor his behavior were going to change. Even the aristocracy knew in their hearts that the elder Carlyle was a stupid man, only concerned with the maintenance of his own power and position, although to voice such knowledge was to court charges of treason and sedition. Queen Diana, with her good works, worthy causes, and apparent consideration and compassion for the poor and needy, had, for a long time, been able to mitigate the spreading dislike of her husband, but, after her death, after the well-liked Diana had been one of the hundreds of victims of the influenza epidemic of ’84, nothing remained to prevent the inevitable head-on clash between Carlyle I and his subjects. The elder Carlyle had been a strange combination of stubbornness and fear. On one hand, he believed that his place on the throne was a divine gift from the Goddess, and that none had the right to question his actions or to challenge or question his decisions, but, on the other, he lived in constant terror that his own people would force him into exile or worse, in the same way the people of Virginia had overthrown their monarchy more than half a century earlier. He was never able to see that, at best, he held power by an unwritten compromise and unspoken transaction that a king could only lead, and the people would only follow, if all were assured that the direction taken was ultimately for the good of the country as a whole.
