by E. E. Knight
The Green Mountain Boys still had their senior officer, General Constance, who'd begged off the party because of a broken ankle. He looked like Santa Claus without the beard, sitting with his leg extended.
"Thought we had a bit too much of an easy time getting here," Constance said. "Thing is, if a trap's been sprung, where are the jaws?"
"Have you decided on a course of action?"
The cheery, red-cheeked face frowned. "If I had, I'd be a fool to tell you now, wouldn't I?"
"I don't blame you for not trusting us," Valentine said. "We're all wondering what's going to go wrong next."
"They've got a twist on us, that's for damn sure," Constance said. "Masterful, suckering us out like this. Masterful. They've set us up. Now I'm wondering how they're going to knock us down."
With that unsettling thought, Brother Mark got a promise from Constance not to act without first consulting Javelin's headquarters.
Under blindfold again, they were led back to the pickets. But Valentine knew the sound of a camp being packed up when he heard it.
Full daylight washed them as they returned to camp. Valentine looked around at the hills and mountains of West Virginia, black in the morning glare. The only sounds of fighting were from birds, battling and defending in contests of song and chirp as squirrel-tail grass waved in the wind. How long before the shells started falling?
The Kurians usually came off the worse in a stand-up fight. But this was above and beyond, even for their standard of deviousness.
He checked Brother Mark back in, gave Nowak's adjutant a report of his estimation of the situation in the Kentucky and New England camps, and returned to his company. After passing along what little news he had, he entered his tent and slept. Bee sat upright at the foot of his bed facing the tenthole, snoring.
* * * *
Valentine's first captain in the Wolves, LeHavre, once told him a story of a Kurian trick, where they emptied a town and filled it up again with Quisling specialists who pretended to be ordinary civilians. The Kurians had done something similar here, on a much larger scale, involving even the partisans and the underground. Or perhaps used agents posing as them.
Valentine dreamed that he was in that town, walking down the center of the main street, frozen statues on sidewalks and in doorways and shopwindows watching him, their heads slowly turning, turning past the point their necks would snap, turning full around like turrets.
"What brings you here, missionary" one of the reversed heads asked.
Valentine woke to find Ediyak shaking his shoulder. "Some kind of emissary from the Kurians, sir. Thought you might like to see it."
"Is Nowak back?"
"I don't know, sir."
His platoon just coming off guard detail was skipping a chance for both breakfast and sleep to catch a glimpse of the Kurians' mouthpiece.
When Valentine got a look at him, all he could think was that D.C. Marvels had an evil twin. The mouthpiece rode in a jointed-arm contraption on the back of a Lincoln green double-axle flatbed wrecker, modified for high ground clearance. Loudspeakers like Mickey Mouse ears projected from either side of the truck cab, and a huge silver serving cover, big enough to keep a turkey warm, rested over the hood ornament.
What really caught the eye was the contraption mounted on the flatbed. Valentine thought it looked a little like a stick-insect version of a backhoe, suspending a leather wing chair where the toothy shovel should be. Gearing and compressors appropriate for a carnival ride muttered and hissed at the base.
Valentine marked an insignia on the truck, a crescent moon with a dagger thrust through it, rather reminiscent of the old hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union.
"That's an old camera crane, I think," Rand said, wiping his glasses and resettling them on his nose. "Big one."
The mouthpiece himself wore a plain broadcloth suit over a white shirt and a red bow tie, though the suit had apparently been tailored to fit a pair of football shoulder pads beneath. He wore a red-trimmed white sash covered in neatly arranged brass and silver buttons, with a few dazzling diamond studs here and there. Jewels glued into the skin sparkled at the outer edge of each almond-shaped eye. Close-cropped curly hair had been dyed white, fading down his sideburns to two points at either side of a sharply trimmed beard.
He flicked a whiter-that-white lace hankerchief idly back and forth, his hand moving in the dutiful measured gestures of a royal wave. With his right he worked the crane and the chair, rising and dipping first to one side of the flatbed, and then sweeping around the front to the other side.
"I am the Last Chance," the mouthpiece said. Valentine noticed a tiny wire descending from a loop around his ear to the side of his mouth. It must have been a microphone of some kind, because the mouthpiece's words boomed from the speakers, startling the assembled soldiers. "For credentials I present only the mark of my obedience and the tally of my offspring."
He lifted his beard. A sliver bar, widened and rounded at each end in the manner of a Q-tip, pierced the skin at the front of his neck just above his Adam's apple. Then he made a sweeping gesture with brass-ringed fingers at the sash.
"The holy balance represents the duality of existence. Life and death. Good and evil. Order and chaos. Mercy and cruelty. Wisdom is knowing when to apply each and in what measure and Grace how to accept each in submission to the will of the gods, who see horizons beyond our the vision of human eyes."
He gave his speech in the measured, rehearsed manner of a catechism. Valentine wondered how long it had been since the mouthpiece had thought about those words.
Valentine found Moytana standing next to him. "Silver buttons are children who entered Kur's service; gold are children who had children of their own who took up the dagger. The cubic zirconium means someone who died in the Moondaggers."
"Lot of kids.'
"Tell you about it later," Moytana said.
"He doesn't look old enough to have brought up that many soldiers."
"They start fighting at thirteen or fourteen, whenever the balls drop," Moytana said as the mouthpiece blatted something about the kindness of the gods giving them a last chance.
"Who in this assembly of the disobedient is in authority to speak to me?"
He spoke in a stern but kind tone through the speakers, with a hint of suppressed anger, making Valentine feel like a third grader caught putting a frog in the teacher's pencil drawer.
"That would be me," Colonel Jolla said, stepping forward.
"I wonder. You have the face of one who has lost a bet. You look like—what is the phrase you swamp-trotting crackers use?—you look like the 'bottom of the barrel.' And not a good barrel at that."
"Where's Captain Nowak? Why hasn't she returned with your terms:" Jolla asked.
As the mouthpiece dipped, Valentine noticed a golden-handled curved blade with an ivory sheath resting in his lap.
"Oh, but she has."
He worked the joystick and swept his chair around the front of the truck, removing the silver serving cover. Nowak's head was spiked, literally on a platter, her insignia, sidearm, personal effects, and identification arranged around her head like a garnish.
"She chose not to let her womb be a nursery of my greatness. As in her arrogance she took the counsel of her head rather than that of her body's blessed womanly nature, we took the liberty of ridding her of its burden."
He swung his chair around, turned the winged leather. Valentine saw gold leaf painted on the exposed wood at the front and tiny Moondagger symbols painted precisely on the nailhead trim. The mouthpiece fixed his eye on Ediyak.
"I trust others will not be so foolish."
"You killed a soldier under a flag of truce?" Jolla said.
The mouthpiece laughed. "What new folly must I expect from men who would have women do their fighting? I made her an honorable proposal of motherhood. Let that be a lesson to you. Do not send women to speak in a man's place again. Besides, she is not dead, just free of the body whose duty she refused in the
first place. Tell them, sexless one."
Valentine saw him press a button next to his joystick. Nowak's eyes opened.
"I live," Nowak's head said. "If you want to call it that." Valentine noticed her voice came through the speakers. Clearly Nowak's, though the words sounded forced.
Some of the soldiers backed away. The more ghoulish craned their necks to get a better view.
Nowak's eyes rolled this way and that. "Well, hello, Jolly. You look intact this morning."
Valentine searched for the mechanics of the trickery. You needed lungs, a windpipe, to speak. A head couldn't just talk. This was some bit illusion by a Kurian or one of their agents.
He just wished real-looking blood wasn't slipping out of the corner of Nowak's mouth as she spoke.
"Tell them our terms," the mouthpiece said. "You must remember. I whispered them to you often enough on the ride up as you rode in my lap. First, obedience—"
The eyes in the severed head blinked. "First, obedience to the order to lay down your arms and a solemn pledge to never resist the gods again," Nowak said. "Second, a selection of hostages, one taking the place often in assurance of future good conduct. Third, a return to the squalor of our bandit dens on the other side of the Mississippi, taking only from the countryside such as needed to sustain the retreat."
Her voice broke. "This is your only alternative to horrors and torments everlasting. The grave that gives no rest is my fate, for my willfulness," Nowak's head said, bloody tears running from the corners of her eyes.
The Kurian Order always provided plenty of evidence for your eyes. After a lifetime spent trusting your senses . . .
"You men may save your families by giving up your arms." A faint, low drumming carried up from the town. Must be some massive drums must be to make that deep a noise. "Women, shield your children from Kur's wrath by offering up your bodies to our commanders."
Valentine wondered at that. Was the mouthpiece so used to giving his last-chance speech that he failed to notice he was in a camp full of soldiers?
"Listen to him!" Nowak shrieked.
"You've got a long drive ahead of you, prance, if you want my boy," Cleo Bloom called from the back of the crowd. "He's six hundred miles away."
The chair rose and spun toward the sound. The mouthpiece fixed her with a baleful eye. "No matter. We'll simply take one from a town between here and Kantuck. We will let the mother know the willfulness, the arrogance, the insolence that demanded his sacrifice."
"Twisting tongue of the evil one, begone!" a commanding voice said in a timbre that matched the amplified speakers. Every head turned, and Brother Mark stepped forward.
Brother Mark stared at the head on the front of the hood and Nowak's features fell still and dead, the eyes dry and empty.
The chair descended again, sweeping forward just a little. The men next to Brother Mark retreated to avoid being knocked over. The two stared at each other, the mouthpiece's hand on the hilt of his dagger. Valentine sidestepped to get nearer to Brother Mark.
"Don't let this one fill your ears with pieties," the mouthpiece said. "He's expecting you to die for a cause. Futility shaped and polished to a brightness that blinds you to the waste. Honor. Duty. Country. How many millions in the old days marched to their doom with such platitudes in their ears? Wasted potential. It is for each man to add value to his life. Don't let wastrels spend the currency of your days."
The crane elevated him to its maximum extension.
"Our divine Prophet's Moondagger is still sheathed," the mouthpiece boomed through the speakers. The drums in town sounded in time to his pauses. "Do not tempt him to draw it, for it cannot be put away again until every throat in this camp is cut."
"We're volunteers," Valentine said. "We've all seen how lives are counted when Kur is the banker."
The crane lowered the mouthpiece.
Valentine stood, arms dangling, relaxed. He opened and closed his right fist, warming his fingers.
"Your face will be remembered. You'll regret those words, over and over and over again, tormented in the living hells."
"Can I borrow that?" Valentine asked. He whipped out his hand, raked the mouthpiece under the chin, came away with the silver pin—and a good deal of bushy black beard.
"Outrage!" the mouthpiece sputtered, eyes wide with shock. Blood dripped onto his white shirt.
Valentine, keeping clear of the extended crane arm, cleaned his ears with the silver pin and tossed it back into the Last Chance's lap, where it clattered against the curved dagger.
"Thanks," Valentine said.
"You'll writhe on a bridge of hooks. You'll roast, slowly, with skin coated in oils of—"
"Is that part of the living hells tour, or do I have to pay extra?" Valentine said. He called over the shoulder at the brigade: "That's how it always is, right? They hook you in with the price of the package tour, but all the worthwhile sights are extra."
The soldiers laughed.
"Here's my moon. Where's your dagger?" someone shouted from the back of the mob. Because of the crowd, Valentine couldn't see what was on display.
"You have until dusk to decide," the mouthpiece said, pulling his chair back toward the truck. The drumming started again.
The mouthpiece's flatbed rumbled to life. It backed up, turned, and rocked down toward the picket line. Some stealthy Southern Command hooligans had hung a sheet off the back of the flatbed, with ASS BANDIT—PUCKER UP! written on it in big block capitals.
The rest of the assembly laughed the Last Chance out of their camp.
Had this Last Chance ever ridden off to the sound of raucous laughter? Valentine doubted it.
Outside of the color guards and bands, no officer had ever quite succeeded in getting any two Southern Command soldiers to look alike in dress and hair, even for formal parades. They etched names of sweethearts in their rifles, sewed beads and hung tufted fishing lures in the caps, dipped points of their pigtails in tar, and stuck knives and tools in distinctly non-regulation snakeskin sheaths. But David Valentine had never been more grateful their mulish contrariness.
Chapter Nine
Decision: One of the vexations with writing histories concerning the Kurians and their intentions is the lack of records as to their thoughts and plans. In previous wars, there were government archives, speeches, even laws and commands that offer some insight into enemy intentions. Debriefings of the captured and memoirs written after passions had cooled also offer particular, if limited, insights.
The Kurians left nothing like that.
At best, we have the guesses from those under them. Church archons, generals, civil administrators. Sometimes the order of events give some clue as to priorities.
For example, in the Appalachian Catastrophe in the summer of '77, some argue that the Green Mountain Boys (itself a misnomer, as many of their numbers were made up of formations active in upstate New York and even western Pennsylvania) were the real target of the ruse, for they were the Moondaggers main concern. Others say they were attacked first because they had the shortest trip home.
Assorted lies, threats, promises, and deals from the Kurians are equally unreliable, for whether they were kept or canceled depended very much on the character of the individual Kurian lord and what sort of situation he found himself in when bargaining with his friends and enemies.
The reader, alas, is left to draw his own conclusion from events as experienced by the human side in the struggle. So were commanders in the field in that fateful summer.
* * * *
The brigade HQ tent had an unusual number of soldiers buzzing around with the busyness of bees in a flower garden. They'd found something to do in its immediate vicinity, camouflaging lack of purpose with energy. Valentine told a couple of sergeants to find something to keep them busy.
The only idler seemed to be Red Dog, snoring after an anxious night at the fringes of the camp, whining whenever he was brought to the defensive positions facing Utrecht.
Bloom opened the me
eting with her usual blunt style.
"Hit them hard now," Bloom said. "Can't let them just draw blood. We're in as good a shape as we'll ever be."
Valentine checked the corners and under the tables. If there was ever a good time for a Kurian agent to plant a bomb, now would be it. Some captains and Duvalier would be running the brigade.
"The same could be said of the legworm clans and the Green Mountain Boys," Brother Mark said. He looked exhausted from his efforts against the Last Chance and spent most of the conference with his eyes closed, rubbing his temples.
"What are your thoughts, Valentine?" Jolla asked.
"I wonder if they sprang their trap too early. Were I arranging a trick like this, I'd have these hills filled with my army. We'd be listening to the man in the whirly chair with one eye on the hostiles."
"Reliable troops have always been the Kurians' Achilles' heel," Brother Mark added. "They've got their elite cadres and the Grogs, but they've had problems with mutinous formations unless they're carefully controlled and properly motivated. Church archives are full of it. In more ways than one."
Jolla turned a clipboard, showed them two pages of taped-together flimsies. "Southern Command has confirmed your promotion to colonel, Bloom. Congratulations. We should have a toast. Carillo, won't you bring in some glasses?"
"How about a rain check, sir," Bloom said. "Let's get the men moving before they have too much time to think about how far they are from home and family."
Jolla ignored her. "GHQ also promoted Colonel Seng to general in recognition of his achievement."
Carillo slipped in with a bottle of real black-labeled Jim Beam and a stack of thumb-high leaded glass vessels.
"Seng arraged for six barrels of very good bourbon for the men. The connection from the distillery gave us a few cases as a bonus. Came with a card, signed 'a patriot.' I wonder if he's sweating whether he left fingerprints on it. Pour everyone a neat, would you, Carillo?"
The meeting was taking on a dreamlike quality. Valentine knew the bourbon was real enough; one of his platoons had met the distillery smugglers.
