Kindling (Flame of Evil)

by Mick Farren

  Argo shook his head. “No.”

  “So? Are you just going to stand there?”

  She unbuckled the belt with its gun and knife, then knelt down and placed them on a level part of the nearest tree root so they were in easy reach. “Is it okay if I take this side?”

  “Sure. I don’t mind.”

  “So, lay yourself down. There’s nothing else to do.”

  Argo lowered himself down onto the bed of leaves, but remained sitting. Bonnie gestured to his gun. “You’d better do something with that if you don’t want to blow your balls off in the night.”

  As he slipped the pistol into the top of the bag, leaving it within reach just as Bonnie had done with hers, his stomach growled. He let hunger override his more complex emotions. “You said something about an apple?”

  “You think I’m Eve in the Bible?”

  “No, but you offered me an apple earlier.”

  “That’s right. I did.” She produced a slightly bruised Golden Delicious. “Here, kid, knock yourself out.”

  Argo bit into the apple, pleased to be eating, and also pleased to have something to do. “I wish we had a fire.”

  “Are you cold?”

  Argo shook his head. “No, not really. Not yet. I just like to look into a fire.”

  This was only partially true. He remembered the fire that had burned Gaila Ford, and he remembered the fire that last night in what had been his home, when his stepfather had been beating him. Some fires he liked, but there were others that he hated. Fire could be both a friend and an enemy. But that had been so since the dawn of time.

  Bonnie sighed. “I know what you mean, but a fire would tell everyone for miles around that we were here.”

  “I know that. I was just wishing.”

  Bonnie pulled a metal flask from her jacket and offered it to him. “Take a hit on this. It’s almost as good as a fire, both for the body and the mind.”

  Argo uncapped the flask and took a tentative hit. It was not what he had expected. “This isn’t ’shine.”

  “You’ve drunk ’shine?”

  “Enough to know that this isn’t it.”

  “That, kid, is old-fashioned sipping whiskey from before the war. It was made by a Mr. John Daniels, who used to ply his trade in Lynchburg before the Mosul ruined everything. He called it Old Number Seven, and there isn’t too much of it left anymore, so go easy.”

  Argo took a second sip and gave the flask back to Bonnie. The liquor made his head momentarily spin. Bonnie drank herself and then replaced the cap on the flask and placed it down beside her. “Lay back, Argo Weaver. We should get our rest when and where we can.”

  Argo finally lay back, but he was careful not to make any kind of physical contact with Bonnie. She smiled and then laughed. “Don’t be shy, Argo. Cuddle up close. The nights are getting cold, and we should share the heat. Believe me, you don’t have to be a gentleman with me.”

  He moved a little closer. Bonnie raised herself up on one elbow and looked down at him. A shiver ran through Argo that wasn’t from the chill of the night. Bonnie smiled again, and her face softened. She brushed his hair out of his eyes. A half-moon was showing through the trees, and he realized that Bonnie was beautiful when she was not acting tough. “Have you ever done it with a girl, Argo Weaver?”

  He tried to sound nonchalant. “Sure, lots of times.”

  He knew he had failed miserably when she immediately disbelieved him. “Oh, yeah? Who with?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Always the gentleman?”

  “That’s right.”

  Bonnie was suddenly a teasing teenage girl again. “You’ve never done it.”

  “I have, too.”

  “You’re a bloody liar.”

  “I am not.”

  “Oh, yes, you are.”

  “You promise not to laugh at me?”

  “I won’t laugh.”

  Argo turned his head away. “I am a liar. I’m a liar and a virgin.”

  Bonnie reached for the flask. “With that combination going for you, we’d better both have another drink.”

  “I thought good whiskey was hard to find?”

  “This may turn out to be an occasion.”

  They both drank from the flask, and then Bonnie leaned close to Argo and gently kissed him. Their lips lingered, and gentleness was replaced by a pressing insistence. Their tongues intertwined, their mouths pressed harder, with a primal hunger, and Argo’s hands were on Bonnie’s body. She helped him by slipping out of her uniform jacket and unbuttoned her undershirt. Her breasts were pale in the light of the rising moon as he fondled and kissed them. Unbidden, her hands were inside his pants, stroking and fondling in return. Her breathing was quickening, and Argo realized that Bonnie was not only doing him the supreme favor, she was also satisfying her own needs and apparently becoming as aroused as he was. In some respects this revelation frightened him more than his first idea that she was merely taking pity on his callow inadequacy. He was suddenly responsible for ensuring her pleasure, and he had no idea how to accomplish this and only knew what to do in the broadest sense. He felt her hips rise slightly as she eased down her buckskin pants. He knew that this was going to be it, that novice first experience that he was going to remember for all of the rest of his life. Free of the confining leathers, her thighs, as pale under the moon as her breasts, spread beneath him, and she used her hands to ease him inside her, at the same time breathing hoarse words of endearment into his ear, coupled with a certain passionate instruction. “That’s right. That feels so good. That really feels good.”

  At first the movements of his hips were slow and tentative, as he told himself in elated amazement that, after all the imagining, this was it, this was how it really felt. How much better to be doing this with someone like Bonnie, rather than an ignorant Thakenham farm girl who might be just as clumsy and ignorant as he was, and to be guided to all the right moves and responses by a voice that came from deep in her throat. “That’s right, sweetness. So nice. So nice and so easy.”

  But an urgency inside Argo could not be content with nice and easy. As one of Bonnie’s legs circled his waist, his thrusts came harder and faster. Rational thought and sensitive intentions deserted him. He was nothing but a selfish and driving animal. Bonnie was panting and making small mewing sounds, and, when she now spoke, the words came in breathless fits and starts. “Oh, Argo … baby … that feels … wonderful. Oh … yes! But please … slow down. Please slow … down so I … can enjoy it … too.”

  But Argo could not listen, even when her voice became less husky and more insistent. “Slow down, boy.”

  “I’m not … a boy.”

  “Oh, yes … you are, and you need … to slow down.”

  But Argo could only cry out. “I think I’m going to…”

  His climax came well before he would have desired, even before he could speak its name, and, in the seconds after, as his breath came in harsh bursts and his senses reeled, he feared that Bonnie would treat his failure to sustain with both disappointment and contempt. He could only babble excuses. “I’m sorry. I fucked up, didn’t I? I just couldn’t hold it back.”

  Instead of pulling back from him as Argo would have expected, she held him even tighter, cradling him in her arms and kissing him to stem his guilt. “My dear, sweet Argo. It was your first time. Did you think you could be a great lover with no experience and no knowledge of the game? It’s lucky for you I have the wise-woman’s protection.”

  “Protection?”

  “Against me getting knocked up, stupid.”

  For a time, they lay side by side until the chill of the night on their damp bodies caused them to pull the blanket and coat over themselves, but it wasn’t too long before Argo felt desire stirring again. Bonnie felt his rekindled excitement and laughed. “That’s the great thing about you young men. You recover so very quickly.”

  This time, Bonnie took him by surprise and slid down his body to take him in her
mouth. She brought him to a state of gasping, undulating excitement and then straddled him so, this time, she could control the speed of his response. The moon had risen almost to its zenith, and Argo gazed up at her in awe as her marble body rhythmically rode him, her spine alternately arching and relaxing, her eyes closed and face fixed in ecstatic and transported, loose-lipped concentration. When it was over, they seemed to have exhausted both themselves and all possible conversation. They fell asleep quickly, and the next sound that Argo heard was the faint crunch of boots on dry leaves and the snap of a twig in the mid-distance.

  CORDELIA

  The conference in the Round Room of the West Tower had adjourned for refreshments and, as far as Cordelia was concerned, not before time. She was well aware that politics were important, but so much politics had flowed back and forth in the last few hours that her head was starting to spin. The high point of all the talk, as far as she was concerned, had been when Field Marshal Virgil Dunbar had risen to speak. His address to the delegates seated at the round table and all the other onlookers, aides, and guards, like Cordelia herself, crowded around the walls, had begun as a simple report from the Potomac front. He had described the extensive preparations that had been made. The huge earthworks that had been raised, reinforced with steel and stone, all along the north bank of the river. He had thanked the delegates from the Norse Union at length for the breechloading field guns, the airships, the improved wireless communications, all of which would give the kingdom of Albany a fighting chance when the Mosul assault finally came. But then, with an increasingly grim demeanor, he had warned the assembly that despite their high morale, more advanced technology, and superior weapons, the army of Albany could in no way match the sheer, overwhelming numbers that the Mosul could put into the field.

  “We could go on killing them day after day, night after night, until the river is so choked with corpses that Hassan could advance over his own dead, and they would still keep coming.”

  Having delivered both the good and bad news, Dunbar then waxed unexpectedly eloquent for a normally taciturn and practical military man.

  “As the day of confrontation approaches, it is not only Albany that stands at the crossroads of its destiny. What we do here may shape the fate of the entire world and dictate the path of history for the next thousand years. We live in terrible times, and a terrible task faces us. If we cannot rise to this desperate moment, if we cannot hold the line and, once and for all, turn back the tide of this horror that already holds one entire continent in its monstrous grip, we may see all of humanity fall to the powers of evil. We may see liberty itself consumed in the flames and the light of hope extinguished for centuries to come.”

  A spontaneous round of applause had followed this impassioned conclusion to Dunbar’s address, but then the delegates had fallen silent as Vice President Ingmar Ericksen had risen to his feet to speak on behalf of the Norse Union. From the start, his tone had been regretful. The NU would not take the final step and declare war on the Mosul Empire, despite all the hopes on the part of the king and Jack Kennedy that, in so doing, a second front would be created. Without either the passion of Dunbar or the wit and urbane reason of Jack Kennedy, he methodically explained how, while technologically advanced and unarguably having the advantage in both sea and air power, the Norse Union had neither the numerical advantages nor the command of landmass enjoyed by the Mosul Empire. To openly declare war would be to court disaster. The Norse Union could put up a costly fight, but, in the long run, there was very little that they could do in a state of declared war to prevent the Mosul from crossing the English Channel. The clipper port of Bristol, and the naval bases at Portsmouth and Plymouth, would certainly be taken, and the great provincial capital of London would be placed in dire peril. He went on to explain how his generals had made it clear that, if the NU went to war with the Mosul, far from establishing a second front that would lighten the pressure on the conflict on the Potomac, it could in fact prove, in the long run, to be to Albany’s fatal detriment, since much-needed supplies and munitions would have to be diverted from the Americas to this new theatre of combat in Northern Europe.

  Oddly, as Ericksen rejected Albany’s ultimate goal for the conference, Cordelia sensed very little disappointment among the representatives of Albany. Kennedy, Dunbar, and the king sat poker-faced and solemn, but hardly crushed by disappointment. She suspected that this meeting was primarily for show and that all the major decisions had been thrashed out in private much earlier. This seemed even more likely as Ericksen went on to outline what the Norse would do as an alternative to a head-on declaration of war. The right of passage on the high seas would be rigorously enforced, and, where the Mosul convoy routes between Cadiz, Lisbon, and Savannah crossed the sea lanes used by Norse Union clipper ships bound for Cape Horn and the Far East, any obstruction of their merchant shipping would be treated as an act of hostility and be met with overwhelming retaliatory force. To ensure that the Mosul would fully understand this, the great Norse battleships the Odin, the Drake, and the Covenant, supported by the cruisers Victory, Bjorn, and Freida, plus a free-roaming wolf pack of submarines and their attendant supply ships, would be deployed in the Northern Ocean, while a fourth cruiser, the Cromwell, supplied from Manhattan and Baltimore, would be stationed in international waters off the Chesapeake Bay to keep the Mosul from establishing a second supply base almost on the front line at Norfolk Harbor. Perhaps more important, the Norse would increase the volume and expand the scope of the materiel they were supplying to Albany under the lend-lease deal, and it would include more submarines and airships, and, in the future, the previously denied rocket bombs, along with Norse advisors to train Albany crews, would be made available. Cordelia knew that all this, especially the rocket bombs and the submarines, was probably what Kennedy and the king had really wanted in the first place.

  As Cordelia took her turn at the buffet, helping herself to a glass of cranberry juice that she spiked with a fairly powerful shot of gin after assuring herself that Colonel Patton was otherwise occupied and would not immediately bust her for drinking on duty, she found that, quite by accident, she was standing next to the prime minister, a discovery that caused her to attempt to salute and curtsy at the same time and almost spill her drink in the process, something that would never do for a titled lady and commissioned officer in a very public place. Jack Kennedy had merely smiled. Maybe young women becoming confused and undone was something that happened to him all the time. Even in his late seventies, and leaning on his cane, the man still had an overwhelming aura of power and potency.

  “Do I know you?”

  Cordelia shook her head. “No, sir. Not really.”

  “You remind me a lot of an old friend.”

  “An old friend, sir?”

  “A lady called Dulcimer Blakeney.”

  “My mother, sir.”

  “Then you must be the Lady Cordelia.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You were just a child the last time I saw you.”

  “I’m not a child any longer, sir.”

  “So I see.”

  Stories had been whispered about Kennedy and her mother for as long as Cordelia could remember. The Prime Minister’s eyes twinkled, and Cordelia felt her heart flutter. Would she dare an affair with the formidable but equally notorious Jack Kennedy? He was more than old enough to be her father. Indeed, he might well be older than her father. To compound the sense of incest, he had, in all probability, if the venerable gossip was to be given credence, slept with her own mother.

  “Can I assist you with anything, sir?”

  “No, my dear, I am still able to help myself.”

  The flutter came again. I’ll wager you are, you magnificent old goat.

  “Perhaps another time.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  With a final twinkle, Kennedy turned away and was instantly engaged in conversation with Vincent Corleone of the United Workers. The moment of temptation was over, and Cordelia
still did not know what she would have done, or what sins she might have agreed to, had it continued. She might have followed Kennedy and hovered on the fringe of the conversation looking demure and gorgeous, but that would have probably come under the heading of what Patton had called “trying to become the center of attention,” and, without looking around, she knew that the RWA colonel was somewhere in the room waiting for one of her aristocratic underlings to commit some kind of transgression so she could fall on them like the wrath divine. Cordelia decided that she would content herself with her illicit, but fortunately undetected, drinking on duty and leave it at that. She looked around to see what else she could see during this social break in the conference and discovered that a very tall and very blond Norse Air Corps captain, the same one who had looked at her on his way in, was standing right behind her with the expression of a man who wanted to start a conversation but was not sure of exactly the right opening line. He could only be one of the ones that Coral Metcalfe had described as “real dolls,” and Cordelia decided that she would give him all the encouragement he might require to get him started. “Do you have everything you need, sir?”

  The captain blinked. He seemed a little surprised. “Everything I need?”

  “Food? A drink? I’m not exactly a waitress, but part of my duty assignment is to see that you gentlemen are kept happy.”

  The captain raised a glass that looked like it contained Scotch and soda and smiled. “I have a drink, but I’m extremely happy to be talking to you.”

  Cordelia placed his accent as Irish and decided that he had a smooth line in charm, tempered by just the right degree of shyness. “So you don’t need anything?”

  The captain glanced in the direction of Kennedy and Corleone. “Are you part of the prime minister’s staff?”

  Cordelia shook her head. “No, I’m just a humble lieutenant attached to the War Office.”

  “You and Prime Minister Kennedy seemed to be on quite intimate terms.”

  “He knew my mother rather well.”