by E. E. Knight
“Val, that’s a diaper bag. I’ve seen plenty of them,” Ediyak said.
“Diaper bag?”
“Southern Command, for use of,” Duvalier said. “They gave one to Jules when she got out of the hospital after you inflated her.”
“It’s a messenger bag, Ali.”
“No, sir, she’s right,” Ediyak said. “I saw plenty of them back at Liberty. It’s a diaper bag. They came in cute pink and baby blue. You got green if you had twins.”
“Doesn’t say anything on the inside about diapers,” Valentine said stubbornly. “Just a pattern number.”
“Well, look it up in a supply catalog. It’s a diaper bag.”
“It’s not a diaper bag,” Valentine grumbled.
The women exchanged a glance and a smile.
Valentine continued to see Fort Seng’s fixtures and equipment dribble away, allocated for return to Southern Command by the hatchet men, who were loading up the trucks as though they were Vikings loading their ships on an English beach for the trip back to the fjords.
He decided to make his stand at the artillery park when a little redheaded bird he’d put in charge of keeping track of their activities told him that was on the agenda for the next day. Valentine dressed in a mixture of military uniform and legworm leathers, complete with Cat claws, sidearm, and sword.
Bee, seeing how he dressed, took the precaution of adding a trio of double-barreled sawed-off shotguns to her array, thrust through her belt like a brace of pirate pistols.
With that, he headed over to the artillery park. Duvalier, who’d been lounging around headquarters on an old club chair in a warm, quiet corner, threw on her overcoat and followed him out the door.
Valentine fought yawns. He’d had a long night.
A copper fall day greeted him as he followed the marking stones and path logs serving as steps to the north side of the former park, where the emplaced guns squatted in a quarrylike dugouts area tearing up the ground around a trio of chicken-track-like communicating trenches linking the guns to their magazines.
Duvalier fell out of the procession as Valentine descended into the dimple in the natural terrain that served for the artillery positions.
Valentine saw Southern Command’s artillerymen lounging around the fire control dugout.
Brage clearly wasn’t the expert here; he stood apart while one of his hatchet men went over the guns.
“Good morning, Sergeant Bragg,” Valentine said.
“That joke never gets old, does it?” Brage said. “What kind of getup is that?”
“New model Kentucky uniform.”
Brage ignored him and looked over the guns. The three big howitzers were Moondagger heavy artillery that had been captured at what was now being called the Battle of Evansville Landing. The old Moondagger iconography had been filled in and modified with black marker to make a winking happy face—the dagger made a great knowing eyebrow.
Someone with fairy-tale tastes had named the big guns by painting the barrels: Morganna, Igraine, and Guinevere. None of the knights were present. Perhaps Arthur had led them off searching for the Holy Grail.
The squinty hatchet man artillery expert tut-tutted as he inspected the guns.
“Can’t use these howitzers,” decided the sergeant, whose name tag read McClorin. He gave Igraine a contemptuous pat. “Half the lug nuts are missing. Tires are in terrible shape. You’d swear someone had been at them with a knife. Can’t have the wheels falling off. What are we going to do: drag them home, put furrows in this beautiful Kentucky grass? The state of these guns . . . You should be ashamed of yourself, Major—beg your pardon, sir. Those soldiers of yours playing cards all day?”
The grinning gunners looked abashed.
Valentine’s oversized satchel pulled hard on his shoulder. Naturally enough, it was full of lug nuts and sights. They didn’t clink, though. He had taken care to wrap them in pages torn out from the New Universal Church Guidon.
“Thank you, Sergeant McClorin. Thank you very much,” Valentine said. “I will remember your name.”
“Big-caliber guns are more trouble than they’re worth. Need special trucks to haul them and a logistics train a mile deep thanks to those shells. Our factories would do better to crank out more sixty mortars instead of trying to hit these tolerances. A good reliable sixty’s what you need to hit-and-run in the field, or an eighty-one if you’re looking to make life miserable for the redlegs in some Kurian post.
“Besides, it never fails: We just set them up to cover the highway coming down out of Memphis and the Kurians get word, and next thing you know harpies as Hoods are coming out of the night like mosquitoes. No, sir. Fixed fortification guns are plain stupid.”
Brage made a note on his clipboard. “Think you’ve put one over on us, Major? Southern Command needs shells just as much as it needs tubes.”
You petty, petty bastard, Valentine thought. Good thing he hadn’t brought Chieftain or one of the other Bears along. Brage would be tied into a decorative bow right about now.
Valentine pointed to Bee, who was digging for fat, winter-sluggish worms in the wet soil at the top of the wood steps leading down to the ready magazine.
“We keep the magazine under lock and key. All that work with concrete and reinforcing rods—we don’t want it wasted with carelessness. She’s in charge of the key. Hate to think where she hides it.”
“I can see the stories about you are true, Major,” Brage said. “You’d start a pissing match with a camel.”
Duvalier was suddenly in the gun pit. She’d swung in on one of the barrels like a gymnast and landed so lightly nobody noticed her.
The master sergeant reached for his pistol.
“Keep that weapon in its holster, Sergeant Bragg!” Valentine growled.
Brage lifted the gun anyway and Valentine slipped in and grabbed his wrist, getting his body between Brage and the butt of the gun. The master sergeant was stronger than he looked and put a leg behind Valentine, but as Valentine went down he twisted, getting his hip under Brage’s waist so the two touched earth together, still fighting for the gun. Valentine somehow kept the barrel pointed at dirt.
Another hatchet man drew his gun. And watched it fall to the dirt, his nerveless hand dropping beside him, twitching not from muscle action but from blood emptying from the severed wrist. Duvalier’s sword continued its graceful wheel as she pinned the next sergeant with the point of her knotty walking stick. She brought the sword up, edge crossing the wooden scabbard with Brage trapped between as though his neck were lard ready to be worked into biscuit batter.
Sergeant McClorin put his back to the gun he’d condemned, aghast.
“This is—” another hatchet man said.
The gun crews were on their feet.
“Shut up, Dell,” the man with his neck scissored between Duvalier’s scabbard and razor-edged sword blade said.
The sergeant who’d lost his hand had gone down to his knees and had picked up his appendage. He pressed the severed end to his bleeding stump, pale and growing paler.
Valentine put his knee into Brage’s kidneys. “Call off your dogs and I’ll take care of my Cat.”
“Fuckin’ trannies!” one of the hatchet men said. “Save it for the enemy.”
Bee loomed from the top of the sand-and-slat wall, assault rifle pointed into the trench.
“Graaaawg?” she asked.
Depending on circumstance, the word might mean help, need, or distress. Bee put the barrel between the two unengaged hatchet men.
“Good, Bee. Safe,” Valentine said, releasing Brage. “Medic! Call a medic,” he shouted toward the fire control dugout. One of the audience ducked back inside.
“Beeeeee!” Bee agreed.
“I’ll have you both on charges,” Brage began.
“You drew first, Sergeant. I was defending a member of my command who posed no threat to anyone.”
Duvalier looked Brage in the eye. “Just try it. Throw your weight around. Someone else’l
l be carrying that clipboard by the time a Jagger gets here, and you’ll be scattered across the country-side in easy-to-carry pieces.
“You all heard me,” Brage said, looking around for support. “She threatened me.”
“Let it go, Brage,” McClorin said. “Goebler’s about to go into shock.”
“I’m fine,” the one-handed man said. “Should I put my hand in ice or what?”
“Keep pressure on the stump and put it above your head,” Valentine said, ripping the field dressing he had taped to his weapon belt off. He picked up Brage’s dropped pistol and tossed it up and out of the trench and then moved to help the wounded man.
Duvalier released her captive. He had a sizable stain running down his right leg. “You,” she said, taking a quick step forward and holding her blade pointed like a spear. “The one who called us trannies. Come over here and lick your friend clean.”
“Stop it, Ali,” Valentine said. He turned his attention back to Brage. “I think you all might want to return to Southern Command now,” Valentine said. “Colonel Bloom is perfectly capable of organizing a retreat.”
“Not a retreat,” Brage said. “A reallocation of assets.”
As it turned out, there was no immediate fallout from the blood shed in the dirt next to Igraine. Valentine had a half-dozen witnesses ready to swear Brage threatened Valentine and pulled his gun first. All the rest that followed was necessary to prevent the death or injury of Southern Command personnel.
Only Pencil Boelnitz, who’d heard about the scene one way or another and regretted missing it, brought it up after Colonel Bloom’s query was closed. Lambert shrugged and told him: Service with David Valentine gives no end of future anecdotes—but rest assured he’s even tougher on the enemy.
Valentine kicked Duvalier’s information about the new Northwest Ordnance movements up to headquarters at the next, and what turned out to be final, staff meeting.
“Not my problem anymore,” Bloom said. “We’ll be gone in a few days.”
“Thank you for seeing the work to the fort through,” Valentine said. The brigade had worked hard at finishing setting up Fort Seng as a working base—and, in a typical military irony, wouldn’t be around to take advantage of the comforts they’d installed.
“Now that word’s got out that we’re doing a last dash home, everyone wants to get going as soon as possible,” Bloom said. “You sure you don’t want us to bury half that Angel Food around the joint, just in case you have to blow it up quickly?”
“We’ll be able to handle that. Did I get any volunteers to stay?”
“Aside from your devoted shit detail, you have a couple skutty types who know they’ll do time in the brig as soon as we get back to the Jaggers. Wouldn’t trust them any farther than I could smell ’em.”
“The Bears are staying, suh,” Gamecock, the officer in charge of the three four-man Bear teams, said. “I took it up with the boys. Consensus is the Kurians are going to hit you as soon as the rest of the brigade leaves. They figure it’s the quickest way to get back to fighting.”
“How about the Wolves?” Valentine asked Moytana, the captain in charge of the Wolf company that had scouted for Javelin.
“I’m under direct orders to return,” Moytana said. He had the slow, assured drawl of a long-service cowhand.
“What can you leave us?”
“That’s up to the bone pickers,” Bloom said, referring to Valentine’s grim-faced hatchet men who’d been inspecting captured vehicles and gear since they arrived, sorting the salvageable wheat from the chaff that would be left to Valentine to make of what he would.
Valentine rubbed his fresh-shaven chin. “Since this is the last meeting of this particular staff, I feel like we should have something.”
“A cake?” Bloom asked.
“I was thinking some of our friend’s doughnuts.”
“The nut at the gate?” Bloom’s clerk asked. “They’re good doughnuts, but you have to hear his sermonizing about Kur and the elevation of mankind.”
“Might want to roust him for a few days, so he can’t count us walking out,” Moytana said.
Valentine and a corporal went to get doughnuts. They took bicycles down to the entrance to the base. Bee loped along behind. Some idlers were watching the Kentuckians build small, heat-conserving homes on the other side of the old Evansville highway running west of the base.
“Mind if we take a sack?” Valentine asked the missionary.
“One to a customer, sir. Did you read that literature I gave you?”
“Fascinating stuff,” Valentine said. “I have eight friends. One to a customer means I need eight doughnuts.”
“Oh, that makes sense,” the missionary said, reaching into a shelf in his bakery van. “Did you get to the part about the select gene rescue and propagation?”
“No.”
“A well-formed man like you would do well to try out. And don’t worry. Less than three percent end up castrated.”
“That must have been in the fine print.”
“You know, this is an evil land. Best leave it to escape what is coming. The punishment.”
“Punishment?”
“I take no joy in it. It’s heartbreaking. But the fools will persist in their folly.”
“True enough. How long will you keep handing out doughnuts?”
“Until it begins. There will be a sign, a sign from the sky. Beware the evil star! Take it to head and heart, friend and brother. There’s a shadow of death over this land. It’s flying closer and closer.” He handed Valentine a bag so greasy that the paper was next to transparent and went back to scanning the sky.
“I don’t suppose you know what direction the danger is coming from.”
“The worst dangers blossom in one’s own bosom. Look to your heart, friend and brother. Watch the skies, my friend and brother. Watch the skies!”
Lost in the sleep of the exhausted that night, Valentine dreamed he was back in Weening.
The last time Valentine had stopped in Weening, they were using the Quickwood tree he’d planted as a maypole, dancing around it every spring. One of the local preachers accused the family who organized the event of being druids.
Valentine had placed the seed there years ago. What Valentine wanted were some specimens of Quickwood tucked away here and there throughout the Ozarks, just in case—a Johnny Appleseed of resistance to the Kurians.
The tree he’d planted in Weening would be mature in another year or two, if what Papa Legba had told him on Hispaniola about the tree’s life cycle was correct. It would be producing seeds for others to distribute.
That was the essence of his dream. The young coffee bean- like Quickwood seeds were dropping off the tree and rolling into the brush while he and Gabby Cho stood waist deep in the nearby stream. The seeds turned into scarecrows, and the scarecrows divided and turned into more scarecrows, all of whom stood in the fields and woods around Weening, all subtly turned toward himself and Cho as they shivered, naked and exposed in the river.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Repurposed.” Southern Command doesn’t call it a retreat, or abandonment, or evacuation. Word has come down from on high: What’s left of Javelin is being “repurposed.”
General Martinez calls it a part of his “new approach” to the war against the Kurians.
Admittedly, General Martinez was, is, and continues to be a controversial figure. What the precise proportion of malfeasance, malpractice, and misjudgment went into his tenure as the Southern Command chief general is the object of some dispute. There are still those who maintain that Martinez’s only fault was to see to the welfare of the men under his command first and foremost, only fighting when it was absolutely necessary.
But a wise man knows that in life, absolutes vanish like a desert mirage, receding into an unknown distance before it can be quantified.
At Fort Seng, the men don’t reveal much of their thoughts. They carefully pack souvenirs picked up on the march—both the conventional, l
ike some of Karas’ old Kentucky coin or one of the short, curved ceremonial knives of the Moondaggers, and the odd: buttons, bits of coal slag, commerce stamps with elaborate imagery, Kurian newspapers with their jumbled and misleading accounts of the fighting, bar coasters from the rail towns outside Lexington, even bits of legworm leather with dates of battles stitched into them. One musically inclined soldier has an entire portfolio full of sheet music. He was struck by how many of the same popular tunes were sung in Kentucky, with altered lyrics or harmonies to give the ditties a local tone.
“Gone-a-homer,” an Arkansas tune reworded in Kentucky, was adopted by the troops and reworded again to capture the bittersweet nature of defeat—a defeat that meant you’d live to go home to spouses and sweethearts. Beat, whupped, kicked out: These words weren’t spoken aloud but found their way into the song.
They were making vests and long johns out of the polyester felt Valentine had brought. It was good-quality material, warm even when wet and so light you hardly knew you were wearing it. They had some doubts about durability, so they were adding coverings and liners made out of old uniforms or Evansville tenting.
The workshop was churning out bush jackets and fatigue pants in “Evansville timber”—a mottled camouflage that was a light bleach wash of the dark uniforms the Evansville militia wore. Then they dabbed it with two colors of camouflage in a vaguely leopard-spot pattern. Of course there were variations that came from a small group of people working long hours at a fast pace. Sometimes it streaked and ran into tiger stripes; other times the pattern was so tight and tiny it resembled a sort of houndstooth.
The end result might not have impressed a discerning Old World eye, civilian or military, but Valentine was oddly proud. Once again, the uniform was one of Ediyak’s designs. A big overcoat with drawstrings at waist and sleeves hung to midthigh. Beneath it was a padded riding vest of the insulating felt and canvas with plenty of utility pockets, and beneath that their uniform shirts. Trousers had reinforced knees and seats and a removable felt liner, but it turned out the buttons meant to secure the liner weren’t comfortable, so they were removed and replaced by hook-and-eye loops.
