by E. E. Knight
The radio had a bullet hole in it but somehow still functioned.
"Are they on their way here?" Valentine asked.
"Not sure, sir." He plugged in an extra headset and handed it to Valentine.
"I don't know some of the reports; they're in another language. All I speak is bad English and worse Spanish. But they're also communicating in English. I think that's their headquarters, here—"
"Group Q," a crackly voice said. "What is the status of the reprisal against the Mammoth?"
"Gods be praised, we are hitting them, brother," a clearer voice reported back. "There is much shooting. Q-4 is in their camp now. Sniper fire has delayed them dynamiting the remaining livestock."
Valentine smiled. Legworms took a lot of killing. He wondered if the Moondaggers knew just how long-lived a Kentucky feud could be.
"Is that you, Rafe?"
"No, brother, he has been wounded. Even the boys here can hit a target at two hundred meters. They vanish into the woods and hills and the trackers do not return."
"Where's that signal coming from?" Valentine asked, not familiar with this style of radio. "Is this Group Q in the Green River lands?"
"No, sir. Due north, a little northeast toward Frankfort. I'd say it's coming from the other side of our column. This is the channel the radio was on," Preville said, punching a button.
"Patrol L-6. L-6, you are overdue at Zulu," a clearer voice said. "Report, please. Patrol L-6, report, please. We are listening on alternative frequency Rook."
Valentine looked at the dashboard of the command car. A card with L-6 written on it stood in a holder.
"Guess they didn't get off a report after all," Valentine said.
They listened for a few more minutes. They heard complaints about blown-up bridges and roads filled with cut-down trees. A mobile feuling station had been blown up.
Kentucky, it seemed, had finally had enough of the Moondaggers.
"I want to talk to the prisoner," Valentine said.
The prisoner had a scuffed look about him. His eyes widened as he saw Valentine approach. Valentine looked down. His uniform was something of a mess.
Valentine cleaned his blade off on the man's shoulder.
"I'm not going to hurt you," Valentine said. "All I want is a news report."
"News report?" the Moondagger said.
"Yes. You know, like on the television. You've watched television."
"Allchannel," the Moondagger said.
Valentine smiled, remembering the logo from Xanadu. "Yes, allchannel. It's the Curfew News. Give me the highlights from Kentucky."
Realization of what Valentine wanted broke over his face like a dawn. He raised his chin.
"The worm herders. They fight with us. Our Supreme, he says to give a lesson, but from that lesson we must give five more lessons, and then fifty. So now we must call in many more re-erforcings. Much fighting everywhere—here one day, there another. I am diligent, I am peaceable, I follow orders only."
Valentine tried to get more out of him: places, clans, the nature of these "re-erforcings," but he was just an youth taught little more than to follow orders, line up to eat, obey his faith, and of course shoot.
"Let's get him back to headquarters. Give him a little food and water. He looks like he could use it."
"I pass my test," the prisoner said.
"Come again?" Valentine asked.
"The Gods, always they test us. Both with blessings and misfortunes. Either can lead you from the righteous path."
"On that, we're agreed," Valentine said.
"I was afraid that you would kill me and I would not be taken to higher glory by the angels of mercy. I still have a chance to make something of my death."
Valentine felt like slapping some sense into the hopeful, young brown eyes. A little understanding, please, David, he heard Father Max's voice say, sounding just as he had when Valentine complained as a sixteen-year-old about his first and second year students' haphazard efforts with their literacy homework. What would he have become, had he been raised on Church propaganda as though it were mother's milk?
He left the prisoner and his disquieting thoughts, and plunged into planning a route back to the brigade.
* * * *
With the column under way again, Valentine sought out Brother Mark.
"Is confession a specialty of yours?" he asked.
Brother Mark took a deep breath. "It's not a part of my official dogma, no. But I believe in unburdening oneself."
Valentine sat. "There's a demon in me. It keeps looking for chances to get out. This damn war keeps arranging itself so I don't have much choice but to free it. I just came back from a little ambush in Green River clan territory. I did . . . appalling things."
"You want to talk sins, my son? You will have to live lifetimes to catch up to my tally."
"Killing wounded?"
"Oh, much worse. I believe I told you some of my early schooling and work at the hospital? Of course. After my advanced schooling they posted me to Boston. I did well there. Married, had three kids. All were brought up by their nannies with expectations of entering the Church in my footsteps. Poor little dears. There was a fourth, but my Archon suggested I offer her up. Parenting effectiveness coefficients for age distribution and all that. Middle children sometimes grow up wild in large families."
"I'm sorry. So you left after that?" Valentine asked.
"Oh, no. No, I gave her up gladly and took Caring out to dinner on the wharf to celebrate afterward. My bishop sent us a bottle of French champagne. Delicious stuff. I became a senior regional guide for the Northeast. The Church keeps us very busy there. There are a lot of qualified people employed in New York or Philadelphia, Montreal and Boston, and down to Washington. High tech, communications, research, education, public affairs—the cradle of the best and the brightest. They require a lot of coddling and emotional and intellectual substantiation. You can't just say 'that's the way it must be; Kur has decided' to those people. You have to argue the facts. Or get some new facts.
"So I became an elector. Myself and the council of bishops helped set regional, and sometimes interregional, Church policy. How old could an infant be before it could no longer be offered up for recycling? What was the youngest a girl could be and have a reasonable expectation of surviving childbirth? We listened to scientists and doctors, debated whether a practicing homosexual was a threat to the community even if he or she produced offspring. High Church Policy, it was called, to distinguish ourselves from the lower Church orders who spent their days giving dental hygiene lectures and searching Youth Vanguard backpacks for condoms. My glory days.
"They taught me a few mental tricks. Most of it involved planting suggestions in children to prove reincarnation, giving them knowledge they couldn't possibly have obtained otherwise. In an emergency I was taught how do induce hysterical amnesia. That's why amnesia is such a popular plot device on Noonside Passions, by the way. We've found it useful for rearranging the backgrounds of people who've engaged in activities that are better off forgotten.
"Better off forgotten," he repeated, taking another drink. "Then I lost my wife."
"I'm sorry."
"I was too. Caring was a wonderful woman. Never a stray thought or an idle moment. Her one fault was vanity. After the third child she put on weight that was very hard to get off. She wanted a leadership position in the local Youth Vanguard so she could travel on her own, and you had to look fit and trim and poster-perfect. She didn't want more pregnancies and of course you wouldn't catch me using black-market condoms, so she went to some butcher and got herself fixed.
"Of course matters went wrong and she had to be checked into a real hospital. Age and the source of her injuries . . . well, the rubric put her down for immediate drop. The hospital priest had more doubts about her case than I did. I signed her end cycle warrant myself. If there was any part of me that knew it was wrong, it stayed silent. I am almost jealous of you. You have a conscience which you can trust to giv
e you pangs. Doubts. Recriminations. I've no such angel on my shoulder."
uDid you regret it later, then?"
"I'm not even sure I do now. She was so conventional, I'm sure she was happy to be useful in death. No, I didn't come to regret it. Not even after Constance, my middle daughter, killed herself rather than marry that officer. It was the strangest thing. I was at a rail station. A brass ring's mother had been put on a train, and he had enough weight to argue it with the Archon, and he sent me, because as an Elector and a regional guide I had enough weight to get someone taken off a train and the nearest porter who didn't genuflect promptly enough put on."
He took another drink.
"The next car had a group of people being put on. They had to know. There was one girl in a wheelchair. She must have been sixteen or seventeen. When you get to be my age, youth and strength take on their own sort of beauty, Valentine. She had so much of it she almost shone. I wonder what put her in that wheelchair. The lie that day was that they were going to work on factory fishing ships, but I think most of them knew what the railcars meant. This girl was laughing and joking with the others.
"Just an ordinary girl, mind you. Beautiful in her way. I looked at her tight chin and bright eyes, saw her laugh with those white teeth as she spun her chair to the person behind—she had a green sweater on—and I thought, what a waste. What a waste. Suddenly all the justifications, all the proverbs from the Guidon, it's like they turned to ash, dried up and illegible, at least to my mind.
"If only I'd learned her name. I want to write an article about her. Something. I want her to exist somewhere other than my memory. But if I give her a name—well, that just seems wrong. Any suggestions for what to call her?"
"Gabrielle Cho."
"That has a certain ring to it. Certainly, my boy. Someone special to you?"
"She was."
"Very well. She'll become a part of our documentation. We'll try to tell the truth as best as we can for a change."
"So a girl in a wheelchair you didn't know made you give up . . ."
"Twenty-eight years in the Church. What's counted as a good lifetime now."
"How did you make it out?"
"From that point on it wasn't hard to plan my escape. I had travel cards, staff, and best of all, I was in no hurry. I could choose my moment." He straightened his back, jamming a hand hard against his lower spine. Valentine didn't need his Wolf-ears to hear the creaks and cracks.
"How do you perform, what do you call them, powers?" Valentine asked. "Like at the Mississippi crossing, or when you connected with the Kurian through Red Dog?"
"It's not the easiest thing to explain. You've got to remember, everything you see, smell, touch, it all gets passed into your brain. You can't see certain wavelengths, hear certain sounds, because your brain has no coding information. Much of it is simply planting new coding information into the target's brain. Of course the Kurians—and the Lifeweavers—can do the same thing. Every day, when they have to appear to us. It comes so natural to them they don't have to think about it any more than we do breathing."
Valentine nodded.
"As for me, it gives me a terrific headache. I hope your Cabbage fellow has some aspirin to spare."
Valentine watched Brother Mark totter off, wondering that the aging body didn't give in to despair.
Chapter Thirteen
The banks of the Ohio, October, the fifty-fifth year of the Kurian Order: The long retreat ended somewhere southeast of Evansville.
The events of the first week of October 2077 are still a matter of dispute among historians. Clever shift or desperate flight? The Moondaggers juggled their forces with the energy and ferocity for which they were famous, cutting off each sidle by the spent Javelin brigade, shifting troops down the Ohio or up the Tennessee until the retreat ground to a halt near a small heartland city that seemed to grow more by virtue of nothing else within an easy distance than any particular advantage of situation or resource.
The Moondaggers accomplished all this even with their supply lines snipped and chewed, responding with harshness that to this day leads to a fall blood-moon being called a "Daggers moon" all across Kentucky.
In a last gambit, the column turned almost due north, hoping they Moondaggers would not expect a movement toward Illinois. But the ploy failed and the Moondaggers found the brigade trapped on the south bank of the Ohio. Both sides dug in and prepared for the inevitable.
The camp is not well-ordered. Sandwiched in a fold of ground hiding them from both eyes in Evansville and the Kentucky hills, the only advantage to the position is that both flanks are more-or-less guarded by the river, and the rear is a long stretch of muddy ground pointed like an extended tongue toward Evansville between the loops of the Ohio.
A pair of the city's dairy farms are now under occupation. One serves as headquarters and the other as a field hospital. The previous night the brigade was lucky enough to catch a barge heading upriver. A quick canoe raid by the Wolves later, the barges engine was in their possession, along with the cargo. The raiders were hoping for corn and meat; instead they found a load of sorghum, sugar, and coffee.
So the morning camp now smells of fresh coffee, well-sweetened and creamy, thanks to the dairy cows. The chance to get the brigade across in the darkt and confusion of their arrival evaporated as Evansville's tiny brown-water navy took up positions and shot up the tug. So the men went through the tiresome task of building breastworks and digging ditches. Each man wondering if the long chase is done, if this is the last entrenchment.
Not enough are in any condition to care.
* * * *
The men joked that they weren't in the last ditch, simply because the last ditch was full of muddy Ohio river water and collapsed every time they tried to deepen it.
This bit of river had one advantage, however. The Kurians who ran Evansville evidently feared attack from their neighbors up the Ohio or across the river in Kentucky, for the river loops in front of the city and the waterfront were a network of mines, obstacles, booms, and floating guard platforms that constantly shifted place. Only Evansville pilots knew the route that would take watercraft safely through the maze.
According to Valentine's Kentucky scouts, this was the one stretch of river where they wouldn't encounter artillery boats and patrol craft. The Kurians of Evansville clung tenaciously to their ownership of these river bends, squeezing every advantage they could from their control of the loops by exacting small tolls for passage up to the Ordnance or down to the Mississippi.
He thought it might just be possible to slip across the river and disappear into the woods and hills and swamps of poorly controlled southern Illinois, where at least he and the Moondaggers would be met by equally hostile Grogs in the form of the Doublebloods. But Evansville's flotilla of tiny gunboats and the news that more craft of the river patrol waited on the far bank downriver stifled that hope.
Touring the defensive positions with Colonel Bloom, exhausted and bloodless in the passenger seat of her command car and able to do little more than nod, he found himself giving in to despair. Their situation grew worse, practically by the hour.
The Moondaggers had reinforced their left, ready to defend his most likely breakout alley, and the Wolves reported sounds of troops being gathered for a knockout blow from the right.
A boxer's stance, poking him from the left as the right readied to lash out.
* * * *
Valentine was woken from a sleep that wasn't amounting to much and requested to report to the command tent.
He entered, still buttoning his uniform coat thrown over his leg-worm leathers.
Several Guard officers had already gathered, and more were coming. Tikka and another grizzled legworm rider were taking turns slicing hunks of cheese with a knife and alternating bites of the cheese and hard biscuit.
All eyes were on a boy of thirteen or fourteen, stripped down to his underwear, who stood drinking a steaming beverage and shivering, with blankets wrapped ar
ound his bony shoulders and feet.
"Thought you'd like to hear this kid's story," Rand said. "We pulled him out of the river when we were setting fish traps."
"Pulled nothing," the boy said. "I swam the whole way."
"Story time," someone guffawed.
"When are you boys comin'?" the wet and muddy boy asked. He'd slicked his body with Vaseline or something similar to ease the swim.
"Coming?" Bloom asked.
"You're with the liberation, right? Underground says that all of Kentucky's rising. We're listening on the AM radio. Some of us made crystal sets. They took the transmitter at Bowling Green and are talking about all those Moondagger throats that got cut at their supply depot south of Frankfort."
"How do we know you're telling the truth?" Duvalier said.
The boy looked shocked, as if his long swim across the river should be proof enough.
"There's street fighting in Evansville. Some of the OPs came over to our side. Hit the downtown armory. We burned a representative when it ran into the mayor's city house. They're looking for its bones now."
"You say Kentucky is rising?"
"Of course. We thought you were part of that."
Valentine felt hope, real hope, for the first time since the catastrophe at Utrecht.
"Are we part of it?" Valentine asked Bloom.
"If we're not, we sure as hell will be by dawn," Bloom said.
"What else can you tell us?" Valentine asked the boy.
His eyes were so bright and white in the gloom of the headquarters tent, Valentine was almost hypnotized as the boy looked around. "Except for the river guard, there's not much in the way of troops in town, just some riot police holding the Kur Pinnacle. They called up most everyone they could trust from the area into the militia and sent them across the river. Hospitals in Frankfort and Lexington and Louisville are bursting with wounded. The Ordnance is mobilizing; they're skeered legworms'll be crossing the Ohio and into their state. My chief says to tell you that he's got boats and a couple of old barges. We can rig lines from the bridge and get you across if your guns can clear the river."
