by P. J. Fox
This news surprised even Aria. She thought back to what Setji had said about the guilt-driven urge to romanticize squalor. Was fear of toilets really a facet of culture that should be protected?
“I spoke with one householder,” Zerus continued, “who’d stopped construction on a toilet only recently. An astrologer came to his house and told him that he shouldn’t dig any pits at all—for any purpose—or his five year old son would, and I quote, have a bad time.”
“What does that even mean?” Lei queried.
“Devil if I know!” Zerus poured himself more lemonade from the pitcher on the table. Fat beads of condensation ran down its sides, like tears. “Doubt the astrologer knew either!” He shook his head. “Then, another man installed a toilet at a cost of about 6,000 cedi, which is equivalent to about a hundred darics. Well would you believe, his astrologer stopped by and told him that the blasted thing wasn’t fancy enough and would anger the gods.”
“Let me guess,” Pasha said dryly. “The astrologer knew exactly what he should have installed.”
“Was the astrologer also a toilet salesman?” Aria asked, only half joking.
“The new and improved toilet cost 25,000 cedi!”
Aria worked the math out in her head. “So, about 450 darics?”
Zerus nodded. “And of course—of course—one can’t install a toilet during times of festival, or certain phases of the moon. It’s inauspicious.” He gave a rather un-liberal sounding snort.
“But—there are festivals every week!” Aria exclaimed.
“Exactly, my girl, exactly.”
“Construction of toilets is a science,” Lei said, a bit darkly.
Zerus glanced over at her. “You’re a fine one to talk, coming from such a hotbed of superstition-addled fools.”
“You mean Brontes?” Lei asked sweetly. “My father was a diplomat; I grew up in Chau Cera.” Lei, of course, knew very well that Zerus was casting aspersions on her home world. Relations between Braxi and Bronte were, for the most part, agreeable; but the two cultures had never mixed, beyond sharing a religion that they’d come to practice quite differently.
“The same people who happily spend thousands of darics a year on festivals can’t spend a hundred darics on a toilet?” Pasha grimaced.
“I think,” Aria said carefully, “that, in one respect at least, the astrologers might have a point.” Three pairs of eyes swiveled toward her. Zerus, she noticed abstractedly, had a fragment of egg on his beard. “They undoubtedly don’t want to build toilets too far away from their houses, because they wouldn’t be safe for women to use—not at night, anyway.”
It was obvious that no one else had thought of such a thing. Aria was about to tell Zerus—politely, of course—what she thought of that oversight, and from such a feminist mind as his own, when she looked past him and saw the fire. A column of ink black smoke billowed straight upward, undisturbed by wind. At its heart was an ugly orange glow. From this distance, Aria couldn’t tell what had caught fire. Only that the fire itself was much larger than it should be and the smoke seemed to blot out the light entirely.
How could it be so close?
What…was on fire?
Seeing her changed expression, Lei turned. And then Zerus, and then Pasha. No one moved, and no one spoke.
This is it, was all Aria could think. This is it at last.
The end of the world.
A man was running across the lawn toward the house. She watched him come, dazed. He appeared to be alone. Where were the other soldiers? She couldn’t see much from the verandah, but the compound looked almost deserted. There should have been hundreds of men!
He stumbled to a stop, breathing heavily. “Princess,” he heaved, his hands resting on his knees. “Thank God. You need to get inside, and into the basement, as quickly as possible. What men we can spare are warning the others—women, children, slaves who can’t or won’t fight—to come here. The residence is defensible; if you’re safe anywhere, it’s here.”
“Wait—what are you talking about?” Aria felt the earth drop out from under her as she took in his ravaged countenance.
She hadn’t noticed at first, but streaks of soot stained his uniform and his eyebrows were singed. Some far off, academic part of her brain knew that she should be following his advice, but she couldn’t force her feet to move. Nothing he was saying made any sense. She’d been having lunch with Zerus and the girls and hearing about toilets and then—
“Of course,” the soldier said wonderingly, almost to himself. “You don’t know. How could you.”
And he told her.
At around noon one Lance Corporal Jem Baugh, native infantryman No. 1446, 2nd Battalion, 29th Lancers, entered the cantonment to present himself for inspection along with the rest of his regiment. He did so at the behest of his commanding officer and, at first, gave no resistance. Trouble was noted when Baugh, high on bhang—the local word for opium that had been cut with hashish—and exhausted after a night of attending speeches by Brotherhood luminaries, detached from his battalion and refused to reform. Instead, he retreated to the mess house and began preaching revolt.
The governor tried to resolve the situation peacefully. No one knew who fired the first shot. Some said it was Baugh, some said it was one of the Blues, some said it was the governor, himself. That last, Aria rejected. She knew Kisten too well to believe that he’d do anything so stupid. But regardless, that single shot had brought down the wrath of God.
Blues were fighting men from the 29th Lancers; men from the 29th Lancers were fighting each other. News of the mutiny had spread remarkably quickly, so quickly that one or more of the men involved must have been actively involved with the Brotherhood. Rebels from the city, armed with whatever they could get their hands on, had stormed the gates and somehow managed to gain the compound. They were a dirty, disreputable lot. Some of the Blues, having literally quit their bunks to do battle, hadn’t had time to don their uniforms. Which, naturally, only confused matters all the more.
No one knew who was who, the soldier gasped, and men were changing sides every minute. “And now they’re firing the warehouses,” he added.
Aria looked around at her beloved garden. It didn’t seem possible that this peace was an illusion, that the drowsing bees would soon give way to men with guns; that, on a day like today, anyone could die.
“I have to get back.” The man—he couldn’t have been more than Aria’s age, a boy still, really—met her eyes. “Get inside,” he urged her. “While you still can.”
FIVE
Kisten tried to clear his mind of all but the task at hand.
Aria was at the other side of the cantonment, and ignoring her was agony. But he had to. There was more at stake here than one woman’s life. If he couldn’t turn the tide, and soon, thousands would die—and horribly. Every Alliance-born man, woman and child would be slaughtered, along with those unfortunate enough to have helped them. There was no room for collaborators in the Brotherhood’s new world order. Aria was on her own. She had to be. He trusted her, he reminded himself. He believed in her. She could do it. And if she couldn’t…it wouldn’t matter, because he couldn’t leave his post.
Hanafi appeared at his elbow. Kisten had set up his command post on the third floor of the bungalow and he was there now, crouched in front of a window. As well as being the safest spot available, it had the best vantage point. Had the cantonment only been on higher ground, the bungalow would have made an excellent defensive position. It was large for its function, and constructed stoutly of cinderblock. The few windows were barred. In addition to the most obvious point of entry, the front door, there was also a small back door letting out onto an alley that even at midday lay cloaked in shadow. A single messenger, if he knew his job, had a good chance of slipping out unseen.
Kisten chanced another glance out the window, pulling back sharply as a fusillade of laser fire blasted the wall behind him. A few of the mutineers had gained the roof of the mess house and were f
iring on those below, as well as into the bungalow where they knew Kisten waited. Most of the officers had made it inside the bungalow before they’d had to barricade the door, along with a good contingent of Blues.
Those who hadn’t made it inside with Kisten had taken refuge in the adjacent bungalow and in the surrounding barracks. They were communicating by mirror signals because, ill-equipped as they were for this return to the dark ages, the lines had been cut and the generator destroyed. There was no other way.
“Here.” Hanafi handed him a rifle. Settling himself into position and careful to expose as little of his head and body as possible, Kisten took aim and began to fire. He worked slowly, methodically, regulating his breathing and taking his own sweet time in lining up each shot. Beside him, Hanafi did the same. They might as well have been at a firing range. Neither allowed rage, or fear, or the hopelessness of their situation to cloud their judgment.
“Any word?” Kisten asked, almost casually.
As soon as their situation became clear, he’d taken advantage of the confusion and sent messengers from the bungalow: one to the principal garrison in the city, one to a small fort in the hills that had all but been forgotten about during Jhansi’s tenure but was, happily, still populated, and one to warn the other compounds. Considering all that could go wrong, the number seemed woefully inadequate. But where a handful of men might be spotted and captured, one could slip through.
“No,” Hanafi replied. He pulled the trigger, and a man toppled from the mess house roof.
“We’ll have to send more men.”
Hanafi grunted.
“In the absence of definitive evidence,” Kisten said, “we have to assume that they haven’t gotten through.”
Either that, or they had and those left behind had been abandoned to their fate. Isolated as they were from the outside world, the compound’s defenders had no way of knowing how far the pestilence of mutiny had spread. In the meantime, though, their mission was clear: hold the line, as disorganized as it was, and keep the mutineers from getting past them to the munitions depot. Or overrunning them altogether, as seemed to be their intent.
A detachment of Blues was already guarding the munitions depot and, if they were unable to hold it, their orders were clear: under no circumstances could they afford to let that much firepower fall into enemy hands. They’d blow it, and themselves along with it. But Kisten refused to give up hope that help would come. If they could hold out a little longer, just a little bit longer….
Kisten captured a man in a ragged uniform, a former member of the 29th Lancers, in his crosshairs and fired. The man fell flat on his face, sending up a puff of dust. He, too, had been using a long range rifle. If only they were on higher ground! Kisten cursed silently. Divided as they were into sections, the compounds should have been peanuts to defend. Each section could have been easily loopholed—as Kisten was attempting to do now—and held off any number of attackers. But the same walls that should have covered them against a frontal attack were useless against an enemy that could fire down from above.
For that reason alone, any sortie from either bungalow or barracks was destined to fail. As the men rushed their opponents, they’d be sitting ducks. The mutineers could pick them off, one by one, as they fought to gain the first of the walls.
Just as he thought this, a fresh influx of men poured in: more rabble from the capital, if their appearance was any indication.
He heard a cry, and his glance fell downward. Twenty or so paces from the door, a single man stood astride the huddled body of another. The injured man had presumably been an aide of some sort as he wore the tattered remains of a civilian uniform. His protector wore the shreds of what had once been a sergeant’s jacket. They were surrounded by a ring of angry, dirty men waving weapons. A few had guns, but the parade ground was so packed that the rebels were afraid of shooting their own men. The sergeant fought like a cornered tiger, laying about him with his sword after he lost his gun. He’d already killed two of his assailants and Kisten helped him by dispatching two more, but during that time the sergeant himself had taken grievous punishment: blood poured from dozens of wounds and he was beginning to stagger.
The end came as five men rushed him at once. Kisten closed his eyes briefly.
The fighting continued.
“Deliah was going to make a roast,” the Major said suddenly, without looking up. “So that’s one thing I’m well quit of.”
Men who’d never been in battle didn’t understand the need for humor, or the role it played in survival. If Kisten couldn’t have laughed, he would have gone insane. More insane, he amended silently, than he already was. Deliah Hanafi’s so-called cooking had achieved the status of legend in her husband’s regiment; her tenure in the kitchen was a saga of ruined ovens, melted cookware, exploding guinea fowl and worse.
Kisten sat back and reloaded.
His aide appeared at the door. “You’re needed downstairs.”
Kisten had never learned to cook anything, except coffee. If pressed, he’d have to admit that he had only the foggiest notion of how to boil an egg. He wondered now if he’d ever learn.
He followed Motiani down the darkened corridor. Above him, light bulbs sat dead in their sockets. He laid his hand against the wall, feeling the vibration that was men screaming and fighting and dying. It ran like a current straight up his arm. If help didn’t come soon, he knew, they’d all die. He only hoped that others hadn’t made the same realization. They needed to keep hoping, to keep fighting.
One needn’t be a veteran of Charon II to grasp this particular truth. And once the cantonment fell, the rage burning through the compound would spread until it consumed first the capital, and then the province, and then the planet. Otherwise decent men would be goaded into terrible things as the Brotherhood sought to purge Tarsonis of its imported filth.
And then, when the ash had cooled—then, the Alliance would come.
The so-called victors would be crushed to nothing beneath a military machine the likes of which they couldn’t even comprehend. The Alliance would come, and keep coming, until Tarsonis was little more than a slag heap. Decades before the war in which he’d fought, Kisten’s grandmother had grown to adulthood in one of the slums that still remained from when Charon II had been forcibly inducted into the empire.
The survivors had picked through the rubble of that war, salvaging what they could from their once beautiful city and turning it, in time, into the welter of misery known as Dharavi. A place of raw sewage and gang violence and three-sided huts. The slum was itself a ghost and stood as mutely enduring testament to the fact that recovery was only a word.
Kisten met Hewson on the ground floor.
His head was wrapped with a blood-soaked rag and his leg had been immobilized in a crude splint. He could, however, as he’d been quick to point out, shoot just fine. “I’ve told the boys to prop me up over there, by the window,” he said. The “boys,” a couple of enlisted men, were holding the master sergeant upright. His face had developed a waxy, unwholesome cast. Sweat bathed his brow.
“What happened?” Kisten asked, addressing himself to the doctor. That they had one at all was nothing short of a miracle; he actually lived in this house, and had been on his way outside for a nice post-lunch smoke when the shooting began.
“His leg was shattered.”
“And his head?”
The doctor shrugged. “Glancing blow.”
There was no more time for discussion. “We need to send another messenger,” Kisten said, “first to the capital and then, if we can manage it, to the fort. And we need to clear the ground.” As futile as it was, they had no choice: they had to send out another sortie, or risk the mutineers getting past them to the munitions depot.
An officer Kisten didn’t recognize nodded briskly and turned away.
“What about the general?” This from Lieutenant Motiani.
Kisten didn’t respond. He didn’t know. General Bihar could be alive, he could be d
ead. He could be on the moon. He might as well have been on the moon, since no one could communicate. His gut twisted as he thought of Aria. And Deliah, and all the others.
And the children.
Kisten studied the other men in the gloom. They all knew what was at stake, and they all knew that hours had passed since those first messengers vanished into the throng. The next batch was gathering now. Kisten planned to send out the first man as the door was opened, to give him as much cover as possible. His eyes met each of theirs, in turn. He wouldn’t insult them by lying to them; they knew the risks and knew, too, that in all likelihood this was a fool’s errand. Still, they had to fight. The only alternative was to lie down and wait for the end.
Kisten spoke quietly. He’d forgotten that he no longer had the right to command more than paperwork, but so had everyone else. “We have nothing to offer but blood and sweat,” he said. “If we die, and well we might, those who come after us will erect statues—”
“And piss on them!” volunteered some wit.
“No doubt.” Kisten paused. “But what we leave behind isn’t a handful of words on some monument, but the effect of our lives, and deaths, on those we love. Make every second count.”
A brief cheer went up.
The front door opened, and what had been a dull roar became deafening. Kisten turned to the messenger, cursing the fate that forced him to rely on one fallible human being for—for everything. He spoke a few quiet words to the man before letting him slip out into nothingness. Behind him, men shot at each other; men grappled hand to hand in the dust. The parade ground was so thick with humanity that hardly anyone could move, the dregs of Haldon pouring through the gates in a disorganized frenzy. The Blues took good advantage of that tactical error, pressing forward and scything down everything in their path.
The men at the front were pressed forward, inexorably, by the men at the back. It was like watching lambs being driven to the slaughter. Screaming, they tried to turn but found themselves stuck. Those behind, unable to see what was happening but taking the noise as a good sign, came eagerly. Many of them had, by taking pot shots at whatever struck their fancy, expended their ammunition. The Blues were hopelessly outnumbered, but all was not lost—yet. If only….
