The King's War

by Andrew Stanek

  “What’s the rebel flag doing on our rations?” he asked, mystified.

  Will could not answer him.

  Chapter 9

  The drought continued into the fall and the usual harvest produced nothing more substantial than a few undersized grains and kernels for the village to eat, but with the military ration deliveries, it didn’t seem to matter. Trains were arriving regularly now, with a large load of grain offloaded at the station every few weeks. Will did not tell anyone about their discovery about the patches, though he continued to check bags of grain. At first, all of the bags had the military crest sewn over the rebel flag. After a few shipments, the texture and material of the bags changed, and the military patch could no longer be torn off.

  Everyone else worked on in blissful ignorance. The market stalls still did a roaring trade despite the return of government-provided food rations. Farmers who had nothing to do in their fields learned other trades or practiced minor professions, however small or silly, and went to sell goods rather than food at the stalls. Prices generally dropped. The captain visited the market stalls more and more frequently now, though he never paid for anything, instead demanding payment in exchange for turning a blind eye to the thriving trade in contraband. By in large the soldiers seemed quite pleased with this arrangement, as they could buy grain and sell moonshine on the market. Their still continued to run merrily behind the canteen.

  Harry, for his part, remained concerned about the lack of rain and voiced the opinion that without water they’d never be able to grow anything again. Not many listened to him. With food in good supply, no one took Martin’s suggestion that they use groundwater to irrigate the fields very seriously either. Martin and Harry found some old hand-powered augers and digging equipment in the village shed and started digging in the fields. No one helped them but no one stopped them either, and Will gathered that they hadn’t met with much success in digging a new well. He eventually took pity on them and repaired the town’s only gas-powered auger and bought a new bit for it; with this their work went much faster, but they still didn’t find the water supply that Martin had hoped for. As the year trended towards winter and the ground got harder, digging became a tougher task than before.

  Homeless children were also sighted in the village again; Will hadn’t heard of one in town since he’d seen Mack toss one out of the canteen years ago. Now they were back in force, running down the streets in groups of two or three, picking pockets and grabbing fruit from the stalls (which was often expensive, given that the town didn’t have its own orchard). Ms. Diane seemed to have abandoned the idea of putting them in orphanages and looked initially at a loss when confronted with the problem. The army solved it for her. Perhaps at the captain’s request, the Colonel sent a few guards from the regiment to stop them from ransacking the town. Every time the homeless children were sighted, the soldiers would chase them out of the village. On occasion the soldiers caught them. Will didn’t know what the army did with them, but he was sure that they didn’t exile them to the mountain because they always came back. Martin took pity on them, sometimes calling the children into his surgery and giving them their shots, shoes for their bare, dirty, feet, and better shirts to replace the rags they wore. Some of the black market merchants told him that this wasn’t his responsibility; he reminded them what Ms. Diane had said about everyone’s duty towards the children, and Ms. Diane in turn praised him for his humanitarianism.

  Will continued to quietly work on the airplane. The frame was complete. The two wings and cockpit were made of light wood that he had scavenged and bought at market. The rest of the airframe was mostly wood with metal components, some of which he’d shaped with the lathe more for the sake of using the lathe than out of any mechanical necessity, but he was sure Nate would be happy to hear he’d made use of it. He’d bought some old wheels from a farmer with a broken down truck and installed them successfully as landing gear, and Will’s home-built airplane was finally starting to look like an airplane. Now every time he went down to Harry’s barn, where he stored the plane, Harry tersely grunted that it looked like a plane. Will hadn’t finished the propeller yet, but that was only a matter of time. However, it was missing something - something very important. It needed an engine. It was easier said than done to get an engine. There were none on the market and Will could hardly just strip one off of one of the tractors; moreover, as an aircraft engine, it had to have particular qualities. Light and powerful were preferable, and it would have to fit in the space that Will had reserved for it.

  Somehow, word had gotten out that Will was building an airplane. Will had never made a particular secret of the fact and people had taken a vague interest in the project. On occasion, acquaintances would come up to Will to ask how it was going and he’d give some of the details. He started to ask around, telling everyone he was looking for an engine. One fall day, a soldier approached him in the canteen. It was the tall, scrawny soldier, the same one that Harry had given food when he’d come asking for it, and who had saved Will from arrest on the night the propaganda had fallen on the field. He looked like he had a little more meat on his bones since they’d last spoken. Perhaps the military had started receiving rations shipments as well.

  “Hey,” the scrawny soldier said, plopping his drink down on the bar and taking the seat next to Will. “I heard you were looking for an engine.”

  “I am,” Will answered.

  The soldier frowned into his drink. “Word’s getting around you’re building an airplane. It’s probably pretty hard to come by an engine that’ll do the job, though I guess it depends on the plane. But look - I heard that the army had an experimental flier, a single-engine fighter with a propeller, that crashed a few years ago. They scrapped the plane and they hauled the engine wreckage to the junkyard.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the scrapyard, miles outside the village, where Will had sometimes gone to scavenge parts. “I was talking to one of the old timers about it. He said the crash pretty much wrecked the structure but the engine block looked intact when they scrapped it. It had a Type 4A engine. Could you use that?”

  Will thought about it. He’d only ever seen the Type4A engine block when he was at school in the capital - a six cylinder engine, about a thousand CCs, with a double carburetor, a large bore and a short stroke length, and a slim bottom end.

  “Yeah, I could use it,” Will said finally. “I might have to tweak my plane a little to make it fit, but it would work perfectly.”

  “Well, it’s somewhere down at the junkyard. All you’ve got to do is find it. Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They don’t usually scrap engines like that.”

  “Thanks for telling me,” Will said. “But why are you helping me?”

  The soldier took a sip of his beer.

  “I really think I would have starved to death if you and your friend hadn’t given me that food. I feel like I owe you one - or more than one. “

  “Are you getting regular rations now?”

  He frowned.

  “Yeah, we’re getting regular rations now, more or less. It’s still on and off sometimes but we’re getting enough to eat. But in the winter and the spring, I don’t know how to describe it. The captain basically said there wasn’t any food and it was up to us to find it on our own. I couldn’t believe it. We’re right on the front line, you know,” he added. “If you climb the guard tower on our base and stare east, you can see the Black Force positions. I kept thinking, ‘what if an attack comes? How are we supposed to fight if everyone’s off base looking for food?’ Then when the famine got worse and I hadn’t eaten for a while I started thinking, you know, ‘forget the Black Force. This is gonna be what finishes me.’”

  “What’s the situation been like on the front? I’ve got a friend stationed at the naval base.”

  “The front has been quiet for us,” the soldier repeated frowning. “But you never know when the shooting is going to start. Like when the Black Force sent over those leaflets.”

  “I
don’t think I ever got a chance to thank you for saving me when that happened-”

  “Don’t mention it. Like I said, I owe you one. Maybe more than one. You said your friend is in the navy? The front’s been quiet for us but word on the grapevine is that it’s been heating up for them. They’ve been conducting more and more patrols. There are two navy dreadnoughts out there now. And U-Boat command said they were going to step up operations in rebel-controlled waters. Is your friend a submariner?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, that’s about all I know about what the navy’s doing,” the soldier said with a shrug. “Sorry I can’t help more.”

  “No, you’ve helped me plenty already. Thanks for the tip about the engine.” Will put a few bills down on the counter and gestured to Mack. “He’s drinking on me today,” Will said, gesturing to the soldier. Mack nodded.

  Will thanked the soldier again, got up, and left.

  The next day, he walked down to the junkyard. It was a fairly long walk, particularly because he was towing a handcart behind him, but without the cart he couldn’t possibly haul a type 4A engine back to the village.

  It was a fact of life that all the trash that society produced had to go somewhere, and for Will’s canton, that somewhere was the junkyard. It had the most incredible pile of trash that Will had ever seen, the contents ranging from rotting old wood to spoilt food to diapers to horse carts to gas stoves. This stuff had been piled into mountainous structures, testamentary to the general ability of the King’s factories to produce things that would ultimately be thrown away. The heaps of trash were ringed by a wooden fence. There was no attendant for the junk yard; people just came here to dump trash and that was the end of it. As he approached the yard and stared up at the mountains, Will wondered how he would possibly find anything.

  He rolled up his sleeves and began to tread across the sea of junk. There were any number of broken down mechanical apparatuses that might have interested him on a different day, but none of them were the Type 4A engine he needed to complete his airplane. He started to pace around the junkyard. With everything arranged into huge piles, he might never find the engine. If he’d been smarter he might have brought a shovel. As it stood, every time he saw a glimmer he had to move the rancid trash with his bare hands, and the glimmer always turned out to be some piece of scrap or iron that he wasn’t looking for, occasionally coated with a healthy mixture of refuse.

  As an hour or two passed, Will got the strange feeling he was being watched. He kept spinning around only to find rodents or small flocks of birds were the only other living creatures in the junk yard. Then, as he dug through a stack of old books, he felt a rustling by his pockets. He grabbed at the sensation, and his hand closed on a filthy arm. Will turned to see that he had seized the arm of a homeless boy, grubby, with dirty cheeks and palms, dirty everything, wearing rags and a new shirt and sandals made from grass. He was perhaps twelve or thirteen, with dark, darting eyes, and messy, matted hair. The boy yelped as Will saw him and tried to escape, but Will held him.

  “Were you trying to pick my pocket?” Will demanded.

  The boy didn’t answer and continued to try to break free of Will’s grip, struggling, but he was not strong.

  “You want these?” Will asked, pulling several bills out of his pocket. “You can have them. Just help me find what I’m looking for.”

  The boy immediately stopped struggling.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  “An engine. A type 4A aircraft engine.” He described the engine in detail from what he remembered from the capital - the bottom end, the cylinders, the heads, and the rough size. “If you can find it for me, I’ll give you all the money I’ve got on me. Have you seen anything like that?”

  The boy slowly nodded. “I’ll have to look around a bit, but I’ve seen stuff like that. Follow me.”

  He started to lead Will over the piles of junk. Though many of the piles looked the same to Will, huge heaps of multicolored and indistinct trash, the boy seemed to know where he was going. Still, traveling over the uneven heaps was difficult.

  “What’s your name?” Will asked as they crossed a load of old fruit and broken-up box crates.

  “Brandon.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “We’ve lived here for years.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Me and the others,” Brandon said. His eyes flickered towards Will. “You know, me and the other homeless boys.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  “I dunno. Lots. More than a few.”

  “And you all live in this junkyard, together?”

  “We don’t live together,” Brandon said. “We either live alone or in little groups of... a few. Three or four. Most of the others aren’t here. They went to town.”

  “You mean to my town,” Will said. “To steal.”

  Brandon shrugged. Will glanced out over the maze of trash.

  “Why do you live here? It doesn’t look like a great place to live. There’s rats and birds and all kinds of uh,” he looked down at a pool of standing liquid that he delicately stepped around, “stuff that doesn’t look like it’s good for you.”

  “We can’t live in the villages or the fields,” Brandon said. “People chase us out. We can live out in the countryside, if it’s warm enough, but it’s too cold for that now. You can burn a lot of this stuff.” He gestured to some nearby scrap wood. “And the fire will keep you warm and scare away the rats. You can also make shelter out of it. If you go out and live in the canton, you might get rained on, and that’s bad. It hasn’t rained for a while, though,” he added. “Sometimes we can also find stuff to sell.”

  “Didn’t anyone ever try to take you to the orphanages?” Will asked.

  “Orphanages?” Brandon repeated blankly. “You mean the schools? Last year, some of the officials from the canton came by and took a bunch of us to a school out in the country. They tried to teach us.”

  “And you left?”

  “They stopped giving us food.”

  “Oh.”

  “And the teachers weren’t nice. They tried to beat us when we wouldn’t learn and had us make shoes.” Brandon shrugged. “I actually didn’t mind making shoes. It turned out handy.” He pointed down at his home-made sandals. “I made these.”

  “But, they’ve started distributing rations again, to our village at least,” Will said. His voice was a little breathless, as he was following Brandon over a hill of hardened mud impregnated with scraps of decaying paper and leather. “Maybe they’ve started giving out food at the orphanage too-”

  Brandon was shaking his head. “This was before the famine. They never gave us enough food.”

  “Why?”

  “I dunno. I heard the teachers talking once. They said that there wasn’t enough money - you know, from the canton, to fund the schools, and they weren’t getting food shipments. That’s why they tried to get us to make shoes,” he added. “So they could sell them for money and use the money to buy food. See, I learned a lot in school.” He gave an odd kind of a smile. “I learned how the world works.”

  They walked another distance in silence. Brandon came to a halt near an engine, but after inspecting it, Will quickly determined it was an old four cylinder Type 2 tractor engine, much too heavy to put on an aircraft and unsuitable for his purposes.

  “That’s okay,” Brandon said with a shrug. “Maybe it’s one of the others.”

  He started off in a different direction and Will followed him.

  “How did you become homeless?”

  “My parents died. In the last famine.”

  “Um... sorry,” Will said. “How old were you?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “And from then on, you spent your whole life in this junkyard?”

  “Yeah. Except for when I went to the school, but that didn’t last long.”

  “What are you going to do when you grow up?”

  Brand
on shrugged. “The same, I guess.”

  They continued on in silence for a while.

  “Do you want this - this engine? Whaddya call it?”

  “A Type 4A aircraft engine?”

  “Okay, well, why do you want it?”

  “I’m building an airplane.”

  Brandon looked at him blankly.

  “You know, an airplane.” Will pointed towards the sky. “They fly past sometimes. The military ones. The most advanced ones have swept wings and big propellers.” He made a whirly motion with his hand.

  “I know what an airplane is,” Brandon said. “I’m not stupid. I just didn’t think they built them in town.”

  “They don’t. When I finish mine, it’ll be the first time someone in the village has built one.”

  “Oh. Why are you building an airplane?”

  Will looked up and sighed. “I don’t really know why. My dad really wanted to build one. When I was little, younger than you are, he used to tell me about how he wanted to fly through the air, like the birds.”

  “You going to take your dad on your plane?”

  “No. He died when I was young. Not as young as you were though. I didn’t become homeless. I’d almost finished school when he died, and my grades were good, so they sent me to the capital to study as a mechanic.”

  “Oh. I was wondering what would happen if I finished school.” Brandon kicked aside a rock.

  Will gave a small chuckle. “No, that doesn’t happen to everyone who finishes school. I was the only one from the village to go to the capital.”