A Few Good Men

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  This was why Nat was always the one to talk first. He’d sound people out by degrees, always taking the next conversational step in a way that he could backtrack from and deny everything. I can honestly say not a single person of those who disagreed with us had any idea that he didn’t agree with them as well.

  “This is all going to erupt, too, isn’t it? When the fight becomes open?” I said.

  “I think so,” he said. “Tolerance and laissez-faire have limits and people tend to get swept up in larger movements, and I think our war will set fire to the entire world. There will be war in these woods, in these farms. There will be people hanged and farms set ablaze. There was in the first revolution and there will be again. Human nature doesn’t change that much.”

  And when I looked as I felt—like I was bringing death to paradise—he said, “Don’t worry, Luce. It will be better when it’s done. Not perfect, but for most people it will be better.”

  And on the way back home, sitting in a grove of some tree that was not pine—the only tree I knew on sight—sharing a lunch of cheese and walnuts, I’d asked him, “How come these massive trees? If history is right, even three hundred years ago nothing grew here, because of the biophage bacteria. But these look like they’ve been here for millennia. Does history lie or—”

  “Nah,” he cut off a piece of cheese with his knife. He didn’t smoke when we were in the middle of the forest, probably afraid of what a careless ash-flick might do, but he always looked like he wanted to, like his hands were restless and he didn’t know what to do with them. “It’s just that in the USA, before the fall, they’d developed faster-growing trees: for paper, for furniture, even for landscaping. For some reason those seeds proved hardier than the natural ones. When the bacteria consumed themselves and vegetation could return, it came back very fast. I suspect in twenty years the problem will not be allowing the regreening to occur, but keeping the trees in check enough for fields to be planted and for humans to establish some sort of traffic between populated areas.” Then he’d laughed. “But I suspect the seacities can use the wood, and making wood furniture a fad beyond the richest households shouldn’t be all that difficult either.”

  I often remember that lunch—just the two of us under the trees, hours of broom-flight in each direction from any human—as one of the more perfect moments of my life. And even though the world was going to hell in our absence, for the three months I helped Nat scout resources in the northern North American continent I was happy as I’d never been before, not even when I was young and thought I lived a charmed life.

  It couldn’t last. I think I knew it even then. I knew that the world would intrude, probably in painful ways, soon enough. Knowing it put an extra golden glow on those days. We weren’t together all the time. For one, young volunteers poured into the farm, camping at the edge, and Nat often spent mornings trying to teach them the arts of war, whatever those were. But most afternoons we were together and when we were “home,” as we’d taken to referring to the Longs’ place, we helped with farm chores, and I think one of the proudest moments of my life was when Mr. Long looked up, seeing me help load one of the servo-wagons to take corn back to the barn for storage for winter, and said, “You’d not make a half-bad farmer, son.” Weird to be so proud of that praise. And odd to be so stung by the rumination that followed, “Of course, even with robots, farming is not something you want to do alone. Else you become like that good old boy Rogers, him who talks to his pigs.”

  But the sense that the golden time was coming to an end rushed in on me with greater speed the closer we got to winter. Perhaps it was the chill in the air, the fact that most of the trees-that-weren’t-pines were standing naked, looking vaguely forlorn and like they were holding their arms up for mercy to the sky. Or perhaps it was the sense that something this good couldn’t last.

  Before I knew anything was wrong, or precisely what might be wrong, I noticed that Nat sometimes looked worried when he read something in his portable holo reader. Since this usually happened after a trip to a relatively large settlement, I asked him if those were news gems, and he’d tell me no. But he never told me what they were. It was weeks before I found out that they were news gems of a sort, but the kind that was passed amid Usaians and which had internal news of our organization, which is to say news of my seacity which was now, openly, under our control.

  But Nat didn’t tell me, and those last two weeks, the most exciting thing going on in my life—despite all my misgivings—was our preparation of the Fall Festival, the big self-made entertainment in our area, hosted by the Longs in one of their outlying barns. This year, possibly at the suggestion of Nat, who knew how much I’d enjoyed reading the plays, it was to be a staging of Midsummer Night’s Dream by the ancient Shakespeare, adapted and changed to Glaish, of course, but still much the same play, and not a bad one to welcome the shorter days and colder nights we knew were coming, nor the storm of blood and pain most people didn’t know yet loomed over them.

  Nat’s and my part in the entertainment consisted of—helped by the Longs’ brood, who were to be rewarded by being allowed to pad the numbers of forest fairies in the play—helping to clean the cavernous empty barn, setting out the stored benches for people to sit in and devising the decoration and lighting of the stage. Nat painted scenery too, for the first time giving me a glimpse of his ability to suggest an entire forest, or a brilliant night sky with a few old boards, a few dabs of paint and a few lines drawn just right. Goldie, of course, helped both our efforts and the play, the night it was staged, by getting in everyone’s way, licking faces at the most inopportune moment, and, once, getting tangled in an array of lights we’d just put up by chasing some small creature—a rat or a squirrel—behind the stage. It had all ended with Goldie covered in lights and looking offended in his dignity because we couldn’t stop laughing at him.

  Then, on the night, everything went well until the last act. Then, as Hippolyta and Theseus wed in brilliant if makeshift grandeur upon the stage, and Nat and I sat side by side on a bench, trying to ignore that the old man and his pigs were sitting behind us and keeping up a lively conversation, even if we could only hear one side of it, someone came into the auditorium.

  I wasn’t aware of it. We were laughing at the fact that the players—Jane being Hippolyta—were doing their best to ignore Goldie even while he put his paws on their shoulders and tried to lick their faces. Someone leaned over Nat and said something.

  His laughter stopped abruptly, and he turned. The person leaning over him was in full broomer attire and the first thing I thought was that she looked too old to be a broomer. Not that she looked . . . Well, she was slim, and clearly in good shape, but that close it was impossible not to notice that her face looked weathered and bore upon it the marks of living far more than twenty-some years, or even thirty. Her hair might have had some white in it, but that was impossible to tell, because it was the exact same color as Nat’s. And that was the second thing that hit me—how much she looked like Nat.

  Even before Nat turned and said, “Now? Mother, what is so urgent?”

  Revolution

  We’d found out what was so urgent moments later, around the Longs’ table. And none of us were laughing. Though Nat was smoking for the first time outside our bedroom upstairs. And even his mother’s reproaching look as he lit a cigarette from the end of the other didn’t make him slow down. Instead he smoked nonstop and paused only to ask questions, “What do you mean the twelve have taken charge and Father is in jail? Father is one of the twelve.”

  It is not right to say that Nat’s mother was a lot like him only a lot more polite and calmer. Nat himself was almost always polite and, I’d found in these months, infinitely calm and patient, even in the face of that tantrum I threw over my own weakness but aimed at him as though it were his fault.

  It is right to say though that Nat could lose his calm suddenly and startlingly and that his mother seemed to become calmer and more patient as he did. Perhaps beca
use she knew her son and acted as a counterweight to him.

  “Yes, but, Nat, you see, since your sister . . . That is, there have always been two factions in the twelve. Those who believe that the principles must be applied even when they work against us, and those who feel we must ignore the principles until . . . until we restore our country, and only then applied, and that the principles won’t come into being unless they’re imposed . . . dictatorially from above. And when Abigail . . . Well . . . Mark Mirable was elected in her place and—”

  She paused while Nat gave vent to his feelings about this person, in language I’d never heard him use. Like Ben, he wasn’t usually even insulting unless the circumstances were intense, and I’d never heard him be profane. Mrs. Long, who’d come in with us, insisting it was her duty as hostess to forego the post-entertainment party for the sake of making us coffee and serving us cookies while we talked, had looked at Nat openmouthed, proving it wasn’t just my personal knowledge of him that was insufficient. Betsy Remy though, didn’t turn a hair, just waited till he slowed down and started repeating himself and said, “Just so, Nat. And you see, he thinks that with the war started, it’s important to make sure the loyalty of everyone in Olympus is to the right people.”

  “That again?” I said, and was rewarded with an even look from Nat’s mom and the slightest of smiles. Unlike Nat, who inherited his dark eyes from his father’s side, she had blue-grey eyes which gave an impression of immense calm. “Quite so, Lucius,” she said. And the way she pronounced my name and looked at me made me feel like she’d been in my life since I was very small. Which I suppose she had been. At least, I had vague memories of her in the background of my life since I’d known Ben or maybe before. But she made me feel as if I’d never been sent away, as if the years in prison had never happened. “And I find it just as tiresome as you two do— No, Nat, don’t tell me how much more than tiresome you find it. I’ve been telling you since you were two that swear words are not an extension of your vocabulary but a show that you’ve run out of vocabulary, and while in some circumstances one can’t help it, really, enough is enough.” Nat shut up, looking like a little boy put in his place. In any other circumstances it would have made me laugh. “But your father opposed this nonsense. He would. He said we’d start witch hunts and run people out of the island or confiscate their property and destroy their livelihood over their private opinions when hell froze over. And so they put him in jail, accused of sympathizing with the dissenters, and there will be a People’s Trial in two days, and I must tell you that People’s Trials were never anything our people did, but I didn’t tell them so, or they’d put me in alongside him, and I couldn’t let that happen because I had to come and tell you. You must come back and you must stop all that nonsense.”

  “Mother,” Nat said. “Other than springing Father out of jail and bringing him here, I don’t see what you think we could do.”

  “Your father and James,” she said, and looked flustered. “Well, you know your brother, Nat. We couldn’t stop him. Not—”

  “I know,” Nat said, looking worried. “I know. But what do you expect us to do, other than springing them out? Damn it, Mother, we’re not magicians.”

  She looked pained at his swearing and folded her hands on the table in front of her. “I have a plan,” she said. “But it will require the Good Man— That is, Lucius, if you—”

  “Anything I can do, of course,” I said. “Though I have no idea what that would be.”

  “No. But I will explain. And at any rate, I’ve been telling Sam for a month it’s time you boys came back. We need you, no matter how much wonderful work you’re doing out here. And I know it’s wonderful. I’ve read the reports. But we need you at home, now. Nat, your regiment is fully in the war. And Lucius, we need your authority in place.”

  Impossible not to say yes. Impossible not to go along with her plan, even when it turned out we needed to get some of our young volunteers, registered and trained in the last few weeks, a raw body of teenage boys with more willingness than ability to fight to come with us, to face down the revolutionary guard who had taken over my palace and was running roughshod over the rights of those people whom I couldn’t help but feel were mine to defend.

  “Jan and Martha and some of Jan’s guard will help too, but you’ll need the numbers,” she said. “And, I’m afraid there will be . . . well, you can’t help unpleasantness in this situation, can you?”

  We’d assembled the volunteers hastily. We’d packed our belongings. Just before we left, in flyers, not caring to keep our journey as quiet as Betsy had kept hers, Nat had pulled me aside. “I’m leaving Goldie here,” he said. “We’ll pick him up after the war.”

  I said, “He’s your dog. Why are you telling me this?” because I couldn’t ask him what he meant by we, much less by after the war.

  He shrugged. “I know we’ll miss him,” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “But I really think he’ll be safer here. Yes, there will be skirmishes here too, but the Longs will look after him and he’ll have freedom to roam around. Back home, I’m afraid that someone will avenge himself on him while our backs are turned. If I were Mother, I’d send the little kids out here too, but I guess that’s more complex. But it’s not likely that Goldie will forget us, or pick up bad manners, or eat poisoned berries, or whatever mother would worry about with the little ones. Anyway, I thought you’d want to come say goodbye to him for now.”

  I wanted to come and see Goldie for what I was afraid might be the last time. I didn’t know if I had any right to feel like that, but for the last three months, he’d been our constant companion every evening, always at our heels when he wasn’t terrorizing the neighborhood with the Long boys. And over the time since I’d gotten out of Never-Never, he’d slept on me at least half the night, since he was a fair dog and insisted on dividing his attentions equally between Nat and me.

  Though I knew Nat was right, it was tough saying goodbye to the hound of valor. And if I hid my face in his fur, and if it was a little moist afterwards, well, we all know Goldie liked to lick faces, and anyway, I wasn’t young enough or stupid enough to cry over losing the company of a dog that wasn’t even, really, mine. Even if I mourned the passing of the golden summer and the happiest—perhaps the only unadulteratedly happy—months I’d known.

  More Than One Way to Win

  I don’t know at what point in our journey back Nat and I got separated and set on radically different paths. Not physically. At least not until we landed. There were five flyers brought back, most of them filled with young volunteers with two months or so of training at most. On the other hand, they were young volunteers who’d handled a hunting burner—and on occasion bow, since they were often used near human habitation, in the territories—from the age of five or six and they were young volunteers who’d helped fill the larder and keep their home safe from man and beast their whole lives. On the whole, I’d take them over any number of trained but less hardened troops.

  Nat and Betsy and I were on the same flyer. And this was when I first became aware that Nat’s preoccupations, his abilities and his focus were somewhat different than mine.

  Not that this had been completely obscured from me during the last three months. For one, while I’d been helping with farm chores, Nat only occasionally joined in them. Instead, he’d spent a lot of time at home training the young volunteers we’d gathered from the various outlying farms and who’d made their way to one of the Longs’ fields, where they’d camped in large tents. I had a vague impression he was training them, but I never went to see what was going on. I, myself, had never been trained in the formal art of war, and it seemed more useful for me to muck out the pigsty or milk the cows, or even to fetch and carry for the Longs.

  And Nat was always at all the meals, sitting by my side, keeping up a barrage of often inane conversation with Mrs. Long, Jane, and occasionally even me. And he always went to bed when I did, lying across the attic from me, past that mostly closed curtain, in th
e warm summer air that flowed between the two open windows at each end, more often than not plunging into some philosophical discussion with me, one of those conversations for which there is no beginning and no end and which I understood belonged to the adolescence of normal human beings. Having never had a proper adolescence, I enjoyed that bantering of ideas, that examination of the universe, of good, of evil, and of the possibilities of humanity that I’d never gotten to experience before. And, of course, Nat and I had flown off together to scout more farmsteads. And we’d spent time together in projects like setting up for the Fall Festival.

  With so much time together, it was easy for me to discount the time we spent apart and to assume he was just doing Nat things, things in which I had no interest.

  Not that I mean he was doing anything secretive or shameful, or that he wasn’t perfectly open about it, or even that I should have felt stung when I realized how different his preoccupations were from mine. And yet, I did feel stung when on the way back he spent the entire time on two links, talking to people I didn’t know or barely knew.

  After a while, listening, I realized one of the people was someone in his “regiment.” I assumed it was the training unit of the Usaian youth that he’d practiced with. Someone he addressed as “sir” and of whom he asked respectful questions and to whom he listened with rapt attention. Later on and over time, I’d find that someone was a gentleman by the name of George Herrera, who would go on to become a famous general. At the time, all I could do was look at Nat, who took terse notes in one of those little disposable electronic pads used for memos and who spoke what was, to me, a foreign language. When he was not talking to Herrera—I don’t know if the man was a general at the time—he was on the link with one of the young men we’d recruited, a twenty-year-old by the name of Liam Chen, from a farm on the far reaches of the repopulated area. I remembered Liam because his parents weren’t even Usaians, and yet he had instinctively agreed with all of our principles, and two days after our visit had arrived at the Longs’ farm, on a broom, with all his possessions in a backpack.