by E. E. Knight
The night and the empty road made me nervous. At every moment I expected the blast of a bomb buried in the gravel that filled the potholes between the better-paved sections. Perhaps I’d been too long a guerilla and knew what easy pickings I was.
I relaxed a little as we came into the Maynes county, where the White Palace waited for our return. I was within easy radio distance now, in the event of an emergency.
I came around a wooded bend and suddenly horses surrounded me, their teeth and eye whites bright in the headlights. Only the fact that I was travelling at less than thirty miles an hour saved me from a collision with one or more of them.
A figure astride a horse in the mob flashed by. It was white as moonlight, mouth agape, thin hair streaming. The lathered horse had no saddle, just bloody tooth and claw marks about its neck. Human? The face was human, vaguely. The body was too thin and wasted, a starved corpse like that Gollum character from the pre-Kurian Tolkien movie. But I was tired and needed sleep, and I saw it for only a second while trying to avoid turning a Maynes horse into the next NUC fund-raiser stew.
Now that I look back on it, they were probably horses from the Maynes ranch on the other side of the ridge from the White Palace. As for the rider? I would say it was my imagination, a waking dream, but no other dream has ever made my fur stand on end like that even years later.
By the time we returned to the White Palace, it was well into the morning. The sun would be up in a few hours.
THE BEER GARDEN ON THE CHEAT RIVER
Elaine Maynes had a soothing effect on my employer. Over the next ten days he issued a great many grants of clemency. The petitioners had to listen to admonitions to do better and warnings that eyes would be watching, but something in Maynes’s friendly smiles and handshakes said the slate was wiped clean. We were sometimes cheered when leaving one of the Maynes Conglomerate holdings or while driving out of town. Maynes enjoyed these ducal moments, and he opened one of the armored glass windows just wide enough to wave regally as we motored out of town.
Rather than a grim, glowering pile of muscle, I saw myself turning into more of a mascot for Maynes. Sometimes he’d give away a bottle of bottled-in-bond whiskey for the worker at one of the sites who could guess my weight. He let kids touch my fur, moving from the silkier parts on my limbs to the bristlier fur atop my head, lifting the laughing kids so they could touch. They’d sometimes sit, four or five abreast, across my shoulders and slide down my arms, using my limbs like fire poles.
Old-timers said it was the nicest June in three generations. I had not the experience on this side of the Appalachians for comparison, but it did grow hot enough that I borrowed a clipper from the stables at the White Palace and trimmed my lower leg and forearm hair down to bristle. A veil of thin cloud drawing down from the north made the sun somewhat waxy rather than blazing, but it was still bright enough to make the dewy leaves glitter in the morning. The humidity stayed comfortably low.
I found the drives with Maynes could be contemplated with pleasure. The stops were as distressing as ever, but the drives were something to look forward to, negotiating the difficult, slide-washed roads with quiet green forest chirping with birdsong from the cool shade.
Speaking of the roads, the spring rains had done their damage, with heavy soil and broken trees dumped on the mountainside roads. Sometimes Maynes had to drive back to the nearest town and press-gang a labor contingent to clear a slide. The men enjoyed the work, with either Home or MacTierney using our vehicle to get a lunch and coolers of lemonade and beer for the workmen. Maynes joined in, and he had access to dynamite, so there was good fun when a few sticks were employed to turn a fallen tree into matchwood or blow a boulder into pieces. After the excitement of the explosion, these West Virginians usually let loose with a sort of wailing whoop-hurrah, each trying to outdo the others in making noise, eventually returning to their shovels and draglines reenergized.
Maynes paid very good wages for this sort of day labor, and was usually cheered when the work was done. He accepted it with a regal wave out of his bus window.
We had spent the morning in the eastern part of the Coal Country so Maynes could sign off on some trade agreements—the usual swaps of coal and timber for more finished product from the industrial patches in southern Virginia and the Carolinas. Other members of the Maynes clan had negotiated the terms, but as he was highest on the current bloodline tree, he often had to sign for the Conglomerate. Fifteen minutes of signing papers, a ceremonial toast of recycled water with the Quislings from the Georgia Control, and once back in the Trekker, Maynes insisted that he was done for the day.
Maynes never showed the carousing side of himself at these exchanges. His proclivities were something of an open secret in the Coal Country, but perhaps he was smart enough not to suggest weaknesses that others might exploit. Or he didn’t care for the zipped-up, professional Georgia Control men and women.
“An hour and a half with tight asses,” he said, on return to the Trekker. “Let’s find some food.”
We stopped at a little riverside eatery that was nothing much to look at from the roadside—a plain white storefront with a grease-stained rooftop—but out behind was a wooden sort of beer garden and balcony overlooking the filled-to-the-banks waters of the Cheat River rushing toward their joining with the Monongahela below. Home had recommended it: “The food’s better than average, and they brew their own beer from one of the Cheat River springs. Good brew. They could probably keg it and sell it, but they don’t want the paperwork hassles.”
The owners weren’t just craft brewers; it looked like they were gardeners as well. Peonies and irises were in bloom in flower boxes and beds. The flower boxes had scrolling of stylized barley and hops—fine work, and I instantly warmed to whoever had designed the boxes. I was glad Maynes was in a mood to forget about his duties, and it wasn’t the sort of place where he’d dragoon a woman off to the transport and then let Home take his turn.
We sat outside. They found a metal milk-crate for me and put a small pillow on top—from the stains, it looked as though several generations of dogs had given birth on it—and I was able to sit at eye level with my companions in reasonable comfort. Home was right, as he usually was on matters of food and drink. The owners took as much care with their food and barleywine as they did with their blooms.
Some teamsters with horse wagons, drivers with gum-and-rust diesels parked out front, a quiet middle-aged couple playing dominoes, a group of young mothers whose kids were at the rail tossing buds into the river, and a pair of troopers were all enjoying the weather, beer, and food.
Maynes liked the food so much, he’d ordered a potpie, and while we waited for that, we enjoyed the beer. I’d just finished a large draft of lemonade—the cheapest beverage on the menu; Maynes was happy to buy us all a single beer, but we were on duty—when my ears pricked up and tracked in on the sound of singing.
The sound came out of the Monongahela Forest and the low ridge of mountains beyond the river to the east.
There were about fifteen youths, plus two young adults and an older man in a dungaree version of the simple New Universal Church clean-lined jacket-and-collar.
The youths, despite their layers of flaking sunburn and bug bites, glistened like polished apples. White, straight teeth, even the incipient beards on the young men seemed to be growing according to plan. They wore survival vests, bellows pockets crammed with tools in a vivid combination of blaze orange and optic yellow. They were led by two older young adults, in khaki versions of New Universal Church day wear. The males wore red bandannas and the females white.
Maynes, with his healing, stitched lip, drew a few surreptitious glances from the outing as they fell into a more orderly line outside the garden gate. They stared more openly at me, as though I were a trained bear wearing a conical hat at a child’s birthday party.
“Before lunch break, we’ll have a song,” the female Youth Vanguard leader declared.
The horse teamsters stood to leav
e, but the female Youth Vanguard leader stepped in front of the gate. “Everyone will be so disappointed if they can’t perform for you, friend.”
“Music, too,” Home said.
“Hope we’re not in for a hootenanny,” Maynes said. “Church sing-alongs sour my beer.”
“You nailed it, Boss,” Home said.
“Badges say Cooper’s Point,” MacTierney said. “That’s over the Virginia line. Wonder why they’re poking around up here?”
From what I understand, Kurian Zones frequently probe and test their neighbors. While the histories make much of the coups and consolidations and so on, they were rare. The Kurians would much rather keep their populations content with stories about how bad it was on the other side of this or that border, or blame a shortage of fresh food on the incompetence of the neighboring principality.
“Martins, say the pledge while the others get out their instruments,” the male Vanguard leader said. Though a bit undersized, he had the alert, energetic appearance of a pointer waiting to be released into a field despite what looked like the dirt of the morning’s exertions.
The shortest child at the end straightened and extended his neck like a curious turtle. “We the growing future, in order to form a more perfect Human, commit Justice and ensure Sustainability, provide for equality and promote the superior to secure the Blessings of Symbiotry to our guides and our posterity.”
The youths opened up satchels and extracted a couple of instruments—some bongos, a harmonica, and a small flute joined the guitars and banjo. They broke into a camp song, something about helping hands and feet making light a friend’s burden:
“Friend, helpful hands never pass or flake,
They beckon for a brother’s weight.”
I recognized the music, but not the words. Like many of the more popular Youth Vanguard songs, the sprightly jingle had been reworded in the Free Territory into a tune about eating corn biscuits and peanut butter (“jammers”) on the march:
Corp, pass them jammers down this way
It’s all we’re gonna get today.
“How fit are you, friends?” the female leader asked those relaxing with their meals and beer.
A few of the drinkers and diners gave nervous gulps. Maynes snorted.
The male gave a single, resounding clap. “Give them an example. Remember, we’ve been doing hiking and field craft exercises all morning. And just think of what the soldiers in Mississippi have to overcome!”
It is easy to forget the terror the Youth Vanguard wielded. When relating such scenes, I, Ahn-Kha, witnessed, I am called an exaggerator, a fabulist, even a straight-out liar. There is more evidence than my testimony, my reader, if you can stomach the experience of viewing the photographs and remaining video footage. But that is outside this account. Suffice to say, that at a denouncement from a member of the Youth Vanguard, you could easily have your career wrecked. I have even heard, from those who have seen it, that the Vanguard carried out summary executions—a rarity in the Kurian Zones, where blood and vital aura are conserved for the Reapers and their animating Kurians. But each of the Youth Vanguard leaders carried a black nylon holster along with the rest of his gear, a symbol of trust and authority.
They put their charges through a series of exercises. Maynes ignored it, cracking peanuts and either tossing them into his mouth, or down toward the riverbank, where some local squirrels would race for them.
“You Coal Country people have a reputation of being tough as nails. Let’s see you try,” the woman suggested, smiling broadly.
MacTierney rose to his feet with the others, but Maynes threw a peanut at his ear. As it bounced off, drawing a glance from the target, Maynes shook his head.
The diners formed themselves into a line opposite the youth troop and performed, slowly and cumbersomely, the exercises. One of the drovers broke wind as he bent, drawing some giggles from the children.
“That’s not funny,” a male leader said. “A demerit each.”
The simple calisthenics grew more laborsome. The exercisers panted and sagged.
“What’s the over/under on heart attacks?” Home asked.
The elderly couple stopped. Smiling, they held up their hands as though in surrender. The Youth Vanguard leaders turned solicitous, also smiling, and offered to help them back to their seats.
“You show a remarkable tolerance for idleness,” the male said to our table. “Also, smell. When did that Grog last bathe?”
“That’s just my aftershave, kid,” Maynes said. “From my grandfather’s estate. Eau de Senate Cloakroom. Don’t you like it?”
“Strange that such a healthy and important young man is idling in a beer garden,” the Virginian said.
The wife of the middle-aged man suddenly fell to her knees and vomited up her lunch.
As though given permission by the others stopping, the rest of the exercisers broke off.
“No one told you to stop,” the female Vanguard leader shouted, slapping a hand on her pistol holster. She stepped over to the woman who’d vomited.
“Your system’s better off without all that beer in it. Clean up that disgusting mess. Now!”
She looked around helplessly, and her husband knelt and helped her scoop up the vomitus with their bare hands.
MacTierney, looking a little pale, excused himself from the table. Odd how the bodily functions of another species do not provoke the same visceral reactions. My head spun and I fainted at the birth of my own children, but I once carefully helped replace a pair of popped-out eyeballs that had resulted from the concussion of the bombardment of Big Rock Hill on a man.
“I think you gentlemen should take their places,” the Youth Vanguard leader said.
“Who’s going to—,” Home started to say.
Maynes tossed another peanut into his mouth. “Hey, King, you weigh as much as all of us put together. Go join in. Hippity-hop, now. Let’s see if our Youth Vanguard leaders can do as many push-ups as you.”
“By my authority to protect . . . ,” the male leader began, drawing his pistol from the holster at his waist. It was a mass-produced revolver, probably a .38, hardly a military-grade threat or the sort of weapon a professional assassin sent to kill Maynes might employ, but it was clean and oiled and deadly nonetheless.
I dislike displays of authority above the barrel of a gun. I have never seen anything good come of them. In fact, useless bloodshed is often the result of such exhibitions. I reached out, engulfed the vanguard leader’s hand, and rendered the revolver less dangerous, at least to anyone but its user, by bending the barrel into a pinch-point. The bones in the Vanguard leader’s hands broke rather more easily.
“Why don’t you get your little parade back across the Virginia line,” MacTierney said, sheltering in the doorway with a shotgun aimed. “Take off those scarves, first. We’ve got some people with puke all over their hands who need some rags to clean up.”
MacTierney had shown flashes of empathy before, but this was the first time I’d seen him seriously jeopardize himself for others.
It would have been easier for him to sit and enjoy his barleywine. The chances of any of the beer garden people taking such a chance over him would require high math to express.
In the confusion, most of the clientele slipped away by river path, road, or footbridge across the Cheat.
“The family wonders why I have need of bodyguards,” Maynes said.
• • •
The White Palace was well named. It served not only as the practical seat of governmental power for the Coal Country; it was also the social center for the wealthier Appalachian Quislings.
Maynes avoided most of the social events at the White Palace, and for the few he did attend, he had no need of me. For those occasions, I worked outside during the arrivals and departures, helping attendees and guests of the palace with their luggage. Because of the duration and difficulty of even short trips thanks to the roads, checkpoints, and so on, for most events about half the attendees remained
a day or two. For my work, I sometimes received a tip in the local coin currency used for small exchanges—usually about enough to buy a cigarette or two, had I been of that habit—or pieces of candy from the more knowledgeable about Gray Ones and their legendary sweet tooth. Sometimes I would be given crayons, I suppose so I could better amuse myself by drawing on the walls of the barn, or slivers of soap, old toothbrushes, and other hygiene odds and ends.
I always went to some effort to keep my skin and fur clean using the shampoos, soaps, brushes, shammies, and other excellent materials available for the riding horses, but I don’t think the gifts were a reproach for my personal habits. I could always find use for stiff new bristles on a toothbrush, in any case. Matter always seems to find a home between my longish—compared to a human, that is—toes.
I never saw more than glimpses of what the guests would do for these parties and events. The White Palace had been a hotel of the old world, so it had cooking and laundry facilities to match. They put me to work in the laundry, washing bedding for the guests. I would wrap a pillowcase around my snout to keep out the boric acid and soap flakes used to clean the bedding and work the huge machines that washed and dried fabric.
As I recall, there were four major social events in the Coal Country important enough for Maynes to circulate, sober and circumspect in his sexual drive for a change.
The first one I witnessed was in the spring, at the beginning of May. Heyday, it was called in the Coal Country, but I’ve heard and seen “May Day” elsewhere. Young women would put flowers in their hair—the older women of distinction simply added them to their hats—and men added them to lapels or wove them together into garlands to wear around their necks. Gifts of flowers from one’s apparel were a way of signaling romantic interest. Strawberries were worked into almost everything. The Maynes family even managed to lay its hands on extraordinary rich blocks of European chocolate ready for melting and dipping. Gifts of chocolate-dipped strawberries often symbolized the beginning of a formal courtship.
