Julian Comstock

by Robert Charles Wilson

  * The food items, not the waiters.

  * As Palumbo had, long since, though I do not hold a man’s girth against him.

  * The quotation from Psalms is authentic, although it would never have been allowed into The Dominion Reader for Young Persons.

  * Calyxa had not refused the Champagne as consistently as I had.

  * The Chinese were officially neutral in the War in Labrador, thereby doubling their supply of potential customers.

  * This light attracted flying insects in brigade strength, and they swooped back and forth as if bathing in it. Before long a number of bats joined in, drawn by the plentiful prey. It was as if another Feast was being conducted in the air, now that our own dinner had concluded.

  † A fairly succinct description of the situation in Labrador as I remembered it.

  ACT FOUR

  A SEASON IN THE LAND GOD GAVE TO CAIN

  THANKSGIVING, 2174

  God has chosen the weak things of the world, to confound the things that are mighty.

  —First Corinthians 1:27

  1

  I will not exhaust the reader by narrating every incident that attended on our dispatch to Labrador, prior to the triumphant and tragic events surrounding the Thanksgiving season of 2174. Our departure, that is, and not just Julian’s; because the recalled-to-battle order proclaimed by Deklan Conqueror also included Sam Godwin and myself.

  In short I was compelled to leave my wife of a few months, and my brief career as a New York City writer, and to sail off to Labrador as part of the staff of Major General Julian Comstock—and not to one of the pleasanter sections of Labrador, such as the Saguenay River, but to an even more inhospitable and unwelcoming region of that disputed State, on a mission the true purpose of which was to turn Julian from an awkward potential heir into a silent and untroublesome martyr.

  In mid-October we left New York Harbor on a Navy clipper and sailed north. This was a weathery time of year in the Atlantic, and we survived a ferocious storm in which our vessel was tossed about like a flea on the rump of an irritable stallion, before we rendezvoused with a fleet of ships under Admiral Fairfield off the port of Belle Isle (now in American hands).

  The Union Navy is not as powerful a political entity as the nation’s two great Armies, to which it is attached as a nautical wing; but just lately it had harassed the Mitteleuropans more effectively than had our land-based forces. Deklan Comstock, in one of his few genuinely useful strategic initiatives, had declared a comprehensive blockade of European shipping in the waters off Newfoundland and Labrador. This had been attempted before, with disappointing results. But today’s Navy was larger that it used to be, and better equipped to conduct such an ambitious project.

  I was aboard the flag-ship of the armada, the Basilisk, during the famous Battle of Hamilton Inlet. The Dutch had been aware of our movements, for an enormous battle-fleet is a difficult thing to disguise; but they had mistakenly assumed that we meant to attack them near Voisey Bay, from which they export the nickel, copper, and cobalt ores that are mined so abundantly in Labrador. (The many small islands and waterways in that region make Voisey Bay a haven for blockade runners even when it’s under heavy surveillance.) But we had been given a bolder objective than that. We put in for Hamilton Inlet instead; and while the Dutch were hunting us farther north our guns silenced their fortress at the Narrows, and we quickly reduced their artillery emplacements at Rigolet and Eskimo Island. Because the Dutch defenses weren’t braced for us, we suffered relatively minor casualties. Of the twenty gunships in our flotilla only one, the Griffin, was altogether lost. Five others suffered damage the ship’s carpenters were able to repair; and our ship was altogether untouched, even though we had been in the vanguard of the battle.

  A detachment of the First Northern Division was sent ashore to occupy and restore the captured forts. It was a grand day (and sunny, though chill) when we saw the Sixty Stars and Thirteen Stripes rise above the Narrows, signifying our command of all shipping through that mile-wide bottleneck.

  Ahead of us lay the immense body of water called Lake Melville, which was fed by the Naskaupi and Churchill River watersheds. To the south rose the gray, blunt-toothed Mealy Mountains—a daunting sight when not obscured by cloud. Invisibly distant were our true objectives: the Dutch-held towns of Shesh and Striver, and the all-important railhead at Goose Bay.

  Julian and Sam were occupied during much of this time with military planning and consultations with Admiral Fairfield. But on this particular afternoon Julian came up to where I was “planking the deck”* and joined me.

  It was the antique explorer Jacques Cartier, Julian said, who had called Labrador “the land God gave to Cain.”† “Though it was colder then, of course,” he added. “It’s not as barren as all that nowadays—though I would dislike to be a farmer here.”

  “No wonder Cain was so sullen,” I said, pulling my duffle coat more snugly around me, for the wind was harsh and cutting, and the sailors on watch had hunkered down among the rope coils where they could swear freely and smoke pipes. In fact the land was not literally barren: it produced rich crops of black spruce and white birch, balsam fir and trembling aspen; and in the chilly shadows of those trees lived caribou, and such hardy creatures as that. Waterfowl were plentiful, I had heard, in the warmer months. But Labrador’s forests were bleak, and the land in general was not a welcoming place for the Race of Man. “At least we’ve cut back the Dutch, and lived to tell about it,” I said.

  The three of us—Sam, Julian, and I—understood that this expedition wasn’t meant to be survived, at least not by Major General Comstock. But Julian argued that any campaign, even the most apparently hopeless, might turn on a small contingency and produce unexpected results. Usually this observation worked to buoy my spirits. But today, despite our recent naval victory, a little of November had crept into my soul. I was a long way from home, and apprehensive.

  If I expected Julian to repeat his reassurances, on this occasion he did not. “The worst is ahead of us,” he admitted. “Admiral Fairfield has orders to land the infantry at Striver for an attack on Goose Bay—and Goose Bay won’t be easy pickings. They’ll know we’re coming—their telegraphs must already be chattering.”

  I looked out across the windy gray waters abaft of us. “It’s not myself I’m afraid for so much as Calyxa. She’s alone in New York City, she’s already earned the enmity of Deacon Hollingshead, and for all I know she may have offended other authorities in the meantime.”

  “She has my mother to defend her,” Julian said.

  “I thank your mother, but I wish I could do the job myself.”

  “You’ll be back at Calyxa’s side soon enough, if I have anything to do with it.”

  Deklan Conqueror had banked on Julian’s youth and lack of experience to make him an easy target for the Dutch. But the President had almost certainly underestimated his nephew. Julian was young, and many of the troops he commanded had initially balked at taking orders from a yellow-bearded boy. But Julian had covertly arranged for copies of my pamphlet to circulate among the literate soldiers, who read it aloud or summarized its contents for the non-readers, and his reputation had grown accordingly. Nor was Julian as ignorant as Deklan Comstock might have hoped. Under Sam’s tutelage he had long studied war in the abstract, and during the Saguenay Campaign he had been able to compare theory with practice. “Perhaps we’ll return to Manhattan in triumph,” I said.

  “Yes, and force my uncle to find a more prosaic way of killing me.”

  “We’ll outlast old Deklan Conqueror,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Sam believes we will.”

  “I hope he’s right. In the meantime, Adam, look at you, you’re shivering—shouldn’t you be in your cabin recording the heroism of the hour?”

  My cabin was close enough to the bilge that fresh air was often desirable, no matter how cold it might be. But Julian was right. I had agreed to keep a narrative of events for publication in the Spark. The Fall of Eskimo Island
would make an exciting episode, with little need for dramatic exaggeration. “I will,” I said. I had already produced many thousands of words. I hoped they would be in some sense useful. But none of them would float the Basilisk if she were holed below the waterline, or deflect for a moment the enemy’s missiles.

  I left Julian on deck. He continued to stand at the taffrail, gazing back toward the Narrows as if lost in his thoughts. His eyes were shadowed by the brim of his Major General’s hat, and his blue and yellow jacket flapped in the chill wind off the Mealy Mountains.

  Once the Narrows had been secured we sailed for Striver, a town on the north shore of Lake Melville.

  We found a handful of Dutch warships anchored there. They were formidable craft, heavily armored and heavily armed; but we came hard at them in the first light of dawn, and before their anchors were well up we had already sheered their masts with cannonfire and put a few dents in their armored flanks.

  The Basilisk took heavy fire that day. I sheltered with the infantrymen belowdecks, while the sailors fought above; and I was present when a solid shot struck us amidships. Such a projectile could not penetrate the plating that protected the Basilisk’s engine room and boilers, but it could and did pierce the wooden hull just where we sat. I wasn’t injured in the explosion, but huge splinters speared several men who were situated near the bulkhead, and a freshly-drafted Kentucky lease-boy suffered a crushed skull, which spilled his brains out on the deck, and was fatal.

  After that I could hear nothing but the sound of the artillery battle and the screaming of the wounded. The Basilisk fired one cannonade after another, both shot and shell, from its big guns. At one point I risked a look through the newly-created “window” in the side of the ship, but I could see nothing save the hull of a Dutch vessel very close by—and I ducked back hastily when the business end of a Dutch cannon, still smoking, hove into view. Several times our vessel shook in the water like a palsied dog, until I was certain we must have lost our engines; and I fully expected the deadly waters of Lake Melville to rush over us in an icy flood at any moment.

  But that was only the stink of the blood and the gunpowder making me giddy. Eventually the battle ended. Then Julian himself came down to the hold where the infantrymen were huddled, to tell us that we had conquered the enemy and taken control of the harbor.

  I went up with him to survey the results.

  Smoke still hovered over the lake, for there was no wind to dispel it. The sky was overcast. One of the Basilisk’s masts was down, and a gang of sailors was busy casting the remnants of it overboard. The damage we had sustained was not critical, but other ships in our small armada had been more severely hurt. The Christabel was burning steadily, and the Beatrice rode perilously low in the water.

  The Dutch had had the worst of it, however. Of the eight ships defending the town of Striver fully six had sunk, with only fractions of them showing where their hulls rested on the stony lake-bottom. The two still afloat were mastless and gouting black smoke. We sent out boats to pick up survivors.

  Basilisk and her sister vessels had also placed a few strategic shots among the buildings and warehouses at the foot the town’s main thoroughfare, an action that caused white flags to be sent up where the defiant Mitteleuropan banner had lately flown, signifying a wholesale surrender. “We’ve reclaimed a little piece of America, Adam,” Julian said. “The homeland is enlarged by a few square miles.”

  “I don’t know how you can be cynical, after winning such a battle.”

  “I’m not cynical. The victory was tremendous, but it’s Admiral Fairfield’s, not mine. I’ve done nothing useful on this expedition except drill my men on the quarterdeck. But that’s about to change. This is where we land the infantry.”

  He explained that all the footsoldiers in our flotilla would go ashore this day. Two entire divisions would soon follow, if the troop-ships were on schedule and our garrisons continued to hold the Narrows. When the army was landed and assembled Julian would lead it to Goose Bay by road, while the Admiral and his flotilla shelled that town from a distance and kept the Dutch defenders busy.

  I promised I wouldn’t get in his way, if I could help it.

  “You’re not in my way. Don’t you know you’re one of my most trusted advisors?”

  “I don’t recall giving any advice, as such.”

  “It’s not your advice I value so much as your sensibility.”

  “You give me too much credit.”

  “And you’re my friend. That’s a scarce commodity in the circles we’ve moved in lately.”

  “My friendship at least you can rely on. And my Pittsburgh rifle, when it comes to fighting on solid ground.”

  “It’ll come to fighting soon enough,” said Julian, turning his face away as from an ugly truth.

  More than two thousand additional infantrymen were landed at Striver over the next several days, ferried in from bases in Newfoundland under the Admiral’s protection. All the Dutch soldiers in Striver were taken captive, and sent back in the emptied troop-ships to the War-Prisoner encampments on the Gaspé Peninsula. Harmless citizens of Striver were advised to stay indoors, if possible, and a strict curfew was imposed. On our part, discipline was stern enough to prevent the sort of large-scale theft, rape, pillage, and arson that local citizens invariably find distressing. We didn’t lack for provisions, since the rail line had been recently extended from Goose Bay, with Striver acting as an alternative off-loading point for European goods bound for the interior of Labrador. The Stadhouders like their luxuries: dockside warehouses yielded slabs of smoked fish, barrels of uninfested wheat flour, huge wheels of odorous cheese, and similar interesting items.

  I walked with Julian among the newly-arrived troops a few days after we landed. I had been assigned the rank of Colonel for the duration of my re-enlistment, mainly to justify my presence on Julian’s immediate staff; and I was just another faceless officer to most of these men, though several of them had read my Adventures of Captain Commongold and might have recognized my name had I announced it. Julian himself, of course, was famously recognizable by his rank, his youth, his yellow beard, and his immaculate uniform. Men saluted him or attempted to shake his hand as we walked down a rank of bunks that had been installed in an empty stable. Daylight came through a gap in the roof made by an artillery shell, and Julian stood in that shaft of cold illumination like a saint in a painting. He had mastered the art not only of appearing confident but of generating confidence, as if courage were heat and Julian was a hard-coal stove. It made his men better and more loyal soldiers, because they had come to believe in him as a military prodigy. I expect they would have tugged his beard for luck if that impertinence had been allowed.

  I looked about the sea of faces surrounding him, hoping to catch sight of someone from our old Montreal regiment. Lymon Pugh would have been a welcome presence, but I didn’t see him. The only face I did recognize was, perhaps unfortunately, that of the larcenous Private Langers, who had not advanced in rank since our last meeting. When I approached him he turned his cadaverously thin body away and tried to escape; but the crowd was too thick for that maneuver to succeed.

  “Private Langers!” I called out.

  He stopped short and turned back. At first he was intimidated by my new rank and station, and tried to pretend I had mistaken him for someone else; but he relented at last and said, “Is that Sam Samson around somewhere? I hope not. You were always decent to me, Adam Hazzard, but that old man had me pummeled for being a crook—he seems to have no faith in me at all.”

  “His name is Godwin now, not Samson, and he’s on Julian’s staff; but I doubt you have anything to fear from either one of them. Neither Sam nor Julian are disposed to hold grudges. I expect you’ll do fine, if you keep quiet and don’t shirk from battle. In any case you seem to be in excellent health.” Though his nose sat a little more crookedly than I remembered it. “Are you still selling battlefield trinkets?”

  He blushed at the question and said, “Non
e to sell right at the moment … don’t mean to rule anything out, of course …”

  “I hope you don’t continue to rob the dead and swindle the living!”

  “I’m a reformed man,” Private Langers said. “Not that I’m averse to a dollar here and there, honestly extracted.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “About being reformed, I mean. I’ll pass that on to Sam and Julian.”

  “Thank you very kindly, but please don’t bother them on my behalf … I’d just as soon remain anonymous. Tell me, Adam—I mean, Colonel Hazzard—is it true what they say about this expedition?”

  “Hard to say, since I don’t know who ‘they’ are, or what it is they’re supposed to be saying.”

  “That we have a secret weapon to use against the Dutch—something deadly and Chinese and unexpected.”

  I told him I knew nothing about it, if so; but I’m not sure he believed my disclaimers.

  Later, in the command quarters we had established in upstairs chambers of the house of the former mayor of Striver, Julian was philosophical when I told him Private Langers was among us. “If Langers is a reformed man then my uncle is a Philosopher. But as long as Langers can carry a rifle he’s as good as the next soldier. I’m more interested in this notion of a secret Chinese weapon.”

  “Is there such a thing?” I asked hopefully.

  “No. Of course there isn’t. But it might be useful to morale if the army believes there is. Don’t spread that particular rumor, Adam … but don’t discourage it, if you hear it.”

  The next day I walked through camp once more. I found Private Langers and a number of other infantrymen gambling at dice in an alley behind a looted tavern. They didn’t notice me, and I didn’t disturb them. Perhaps it didn’t matter if they wasted their money, I reasoned. They might be dead before much longer, and wouldn’t be able to collect their back pay, much less spend it sensibly.