In the ringing silence that followed, I very distinctly heard Little Magic mutter, "Well, fuck."
My demigod son never swore, even lightly. I turned to look at him, scowling, only to see that his eyes were glowing a brilliant, lambent yellow. As I watched, he collapsed onto his rear end, hugged his knees, and set his chin in the hollow between them, staring at the former Gormless as the glow spread to his entire body. I hurried over to him. I wanted to touch him, to embrace him, but I didn't know what would happen if I did. As a compromise, I asked urgently, "Eos? What's wrong, son?"
Not looking at me, he said haltingly, "Bor. Row. Ing. Quint. Hi. Ding. This. From. Mo. Ther."
"What? Why?"
He turned his head slowly and looked at me, his expression infinitely sad as he ground out, "Root. And. Branch."
What I had just done exploded into my consciousness: I had, for the first time, openly disobeyed my Goddess, though that had not been my intent. Not at all. I had not extirpated the Gormless as I had promised her; not only had I freed them, I had made them citizens of the Commonwealth. "And this is a really big branch," I said slowly.
Eos nodded, and went back to mortgaging his future so that he could save our new citizens from his Mother's Divine wrath.
Chapter 11
We made camp where Little Magic had collapsed, and where he remained, glowing. I tried to have my men pitch a tent around him, but he lifted a hand and turned the fabric to dust. Apparently, he had to remain open to the sky.
Later, in another tent I usually used for supplies, I met with Marcus Tremblay and asked him what the hell was going on.
He sat in a ladderback chair from one of the wagons, still the picture of aged dignity, but I'd had him re-clothed in something our quartermasters called BDUs, tough olive-colored outfits with pockets galore on the pants-legs. Marcus Tremblay was explaining why he'd been send to meet us. "The Scholars considered us the least useful of the Gormless. There are close to fifteen hundred of us here. They sent us to meet you halfway, expecting we would slow you down and kill at least a few of you. If nothing else, they thought you softhearted enough to make some effort to contain and avoid us. They would be rid of a drain on their resources, one way or another."
His frail old hands curled into fists. "They told us that if we refused, they would kill our families. And… they made examples of some to prove it. My grandnephew, who was blinded in a Weaponry Scholarship exhibition last year, was one of them."
I stared at him, horrified. "How old was he?" I asked.
The old man's mouth twisted. "Eight when he died. He wasn't even a participant in the exhibition. He was injured when an inept participant missed the training dummies and shot his starcaster into the crowd."
My own hands clenched into fists, so tight my knuckles cracked. Bastards! I'm sure my expression must have been frightful, for Tremblay's eyes widened. I stood suddenly and stalked out of the tent. Upon finding Puck, I ordered her, "I want you to break off a third of the ground army. Faunlets, Tauras, Centaurs. Gather up these poor schmucks and escort them to the remains of Abbott. Give them enough supplies to see them through until we gut Wayko. Find places to quarter them, and set a platoon to stand guard. The rest of you, catch up with us later."
To her credit, the Faunlet didn't ask any questions. She just snapped to, saluted, and said "Sir yes sir!" before hustling off. She left me thinking about our son, Lysander, and what might yet happen to him if the Scholars were allowed to continue to raid the "Beastkind" for food. Faunlets were goat-like from the thighs down, after all, and for those without scruples, that might be enough to make them animals.
❖
Just outside the ruins of an old farming community called Ross, not more than 10 miles north of Waco, we finally encountered the Greeplings.
These were the human/greep composite beings I had once hypothesized might exist, and worried about having to comfort. I need not have worried. We found just three alive, huddled in an old pole barn next to a field of red clover. They were elderly, and not of sufficient mentality to have stolen men to catalyze reproduction; and by that point they were too decrepit for motherhood, had we even been willing to comfort them.
The Step Through had not been kind to the greep drovers. Whereas the cavalry had fused with their mounts to become the exotic Centaurs, and the cowboys and cattle became Minotaurs, the Greeplings were a deeper, less aesthetically pleasant mix. They were hexapods, like the Centaurs, but there the resemblance ended.
Their arms were small and of limited use, with three large fingers, one opposable, tipped by small hooves rather than nails. Their skins were mostly hairless, with the exception of curly, thick fleece where humans ordinarily had hair, but their back halves were far more greep than human, except that they were more robust than the greeps we had collected for our farms. They shared the long, skinny tails of the greeps.
Their feet ended in flat pads rather than hooves. They had multiple breasts like most animals, though theirs had never been used; and their faces were a travesty of humanity. They were wide like a human's, with the binocular vision of an omnivore, but it looked like someone had grabbed their nostrils and pulled the whole centers of their faces out, as if they were malleable clay. This formed huge noses and short snouts. They also had large, curling horns like a greep ram's.
I think that when the Wold had merged these greeps and their drovers, It had tried to make them as beautiful as any other dimensional traveler, but it hadn't taken. It didn't take nearly as many people to herd large numbers of greeps as it did cattle. I suspected part of the problem with their composite merging had been that too few humans had been stretched too thin among too many greeps, producing these poor wretches. I had difficulty thinking them as human, as one of the new races; but I supposed they had to be at least cousin to humanity, and it wasn't their fault it hadn't worked out for them as it had for the Tauras and Centaurs.
Worst of all, they were, well, stupid. Not as brainless as a greep, but so far below the human norm that they could not speak. This was probably also partially due to the structure of their tongues and throat, which were much more greep than human.
I soon understood why they were so few. They had been steadily preyed upon by the Waykans; indeed, they seemed to have been among the first victims of the cannibals, if I read the signs correctly. I suspected that it was attacking the Greeplings that had allowed the Waykans to practice their blitzkriegs on the Tauras and other so-called Beastkind races, and that it was their placid demeanor and low intelligence that had encouraged the Waykans that it was acceptable to prey on them.
The Greepling herds had been vast at one time. Now they were all but extinct.
When we finally made the eldest greep understand why we were there, and that we wanted to know where the rest of them were, she nodded her ram-horned head sadly, pushed back her straggly gray hair, and pointed out into the clover field. Not understanding, we walked out into the field until she stopped and kicked at something in the dirt. It was a Greepling skull, half-buried.
My people scattered across the field and found the bones of literally thousands of Greeplings, many half-sunk into the soil, indicating significant age or perhaps a clumsy attempt at burial. We also found stacks of dozens to hundreds of disarticulated arm and leg bones, all clearly scored with cutmarks from the stone tools used to strip away the flesh.
Using the skills I'd learned during our excavation of the garbage mine near Hamiltown as a teenager, I spent the next day carefully excavating the individual the elderly Greepling had shown me first. During the process I discovered a discarded stone knife, a large, broken chert flake lodged in one of the cervical vertebrae, and dozens of tiny sharpening flakes.
There were cutmarks inside the muzzle, showing where the tongue had been removed, and much of the skeleton was gone, including the long bones, the pelvis, the scapulae, and the ribs: any of the places where there would have been substantial amounts of meat. No doubt they had also taken the liver and perhaps other o
rgans as well. There were also cutmarks on the remaining vertebrae — upper and lower alike — suggesting that those who slaughtered the Greepling had also taken the backstrap or brisket, whatever they cared to call it.
That was just one individual. As I said, there were the bones of thousands. The Greeplings hadn't been smart enough to fight the Terran raiders of Wayko, nor fast or agile enough to avoid them. Greeps are mid-sized herd animals that depend on their numbers to protect them, like flocks of passenger pigeons or schools of fish. They're not fast runners; nor are they large enough to overcome a human physically, as a canny bull or a Centaur could. They had not thought to migrate away from the killing fields; even if they had, the Waykans would have chased them down.
Killing them must have been like shooting fish in a barrel. I wondered how many years it had taken for the Waykans to all but wipe out this herd. Probably not many.
The bones I studied were completely clean of flesh, suggesting they had been exposed to the elements for a while, and were starting to break down into bone meal. That Greepling had probably been killed within a year or two of the Day of Ruin. Greeps and Greeplings are rather delicate creatures, so I suspected all these remains would be gone within a hundred years. The fact that they were half-buried suggested that the local branch of the Rio Brazos had dropped a least one load of sediment on the field during one of its big floods, which occur every ten years or so.
I felt heartsick at what had happened to these cousins of humanity, and hoped that there were other Greepling herds elsewhere in the world that hadn't suffered their fate.
That left us with what to do with the three surviving Greeplings, as I couldn't just leave them there. The elder one, whom I named Hannah, made it very clear what they wanted: she took my flint knife from my belt, put it to her throat, and slowly drew it across, though without cutting herself. The other two looked at me and nodded. They wanted to die, but didn't have the courage or capacity to do it themselves.
I gently took my knife back from the old Greepling, and said, "No. I will ensure you live out the remainder of your life in comfort. I'm going south to kill the people who killed your people; and when I return, you ladies will go with me back to my home, where you will be treated well."
Hanna stared at me for a long time, and I wondered if she understood what I'd said. Then she gave me gap-toothed smile, and I knew she did. The other two just nodded again.
I appointed a small, mixed detail of Pixies, a Faunlet, and a Centaur to stay in Ross to protect the Greeplings, and we proceeded on to Wayko, which was very near now. When I came back through weeks later, I kept my promise, carrying the poor old Greepling women in wagons back to Icarus Township. Hannah, Blue, and Rhapsody, as they were soon named, were taken in as full members of the community and cared for, becoming special friends of the Memegwesi and the Cobbers. The old Greeplings learned to smile, be happy, and do simple things in the gardens. They lasted three years before they passed, one after the other within a week.
I can only hope that the last few years of happy memories those simple ladies made overwhelmed the two and a half decades of privation, depredation, pain, and hiding they had endured previously. They still had their sad days, so I doubt it; but I can hope.
❖
Puck and her soldiers caught up with us the day after we discovered the Greeplings, and not long after, we were faced with another group of healthier Gormless numbering nearly 500. While they could have caused us a little trouble, they promptly surrendered, just as their compatriots had. Worried that they might include a few healthy Scholar spies, I had Shakira and her crew pop off a series of Cyclone-B bombs over their encampment. I'm glad I did: about a dozen of the Gormless fell and seized to death, foaming at the mouth. Some no one recognized; they were obviously Waykan spies slipped into the Gormless column. But seven of the dead were relatives or friends of other Gormless in the group, who were horrified at the results. As best we could figure, they had violated the dietary strictures of their people by eating the Scholars' food.
When we explained why those Gormless had died, their people fell into a deep depression. We had just entered the former city limits of a moderate-sized town called Elm Mott, which lay at the northernmost reaches of the Scholastic Empire of Wayko. The three hundred or so inhabitants, none of whom were Scholars, surrendered to us after a brief negotiation, and we spread out into the surrounding area, which suggested a much older town before the Day of Ruin.
We were able to bivouac the captured Gormless in a series of intact fieldstone houses, a store, and a civic center, though we had to leave another portion of the Faunlet and Taura infantry behind to care for and guard them. By then, I had decided that was a good idea. There was no telling what we might find in Wayko proper, and I didn't want my "Beastkind" citizens coming across the slaughtered remains of their own people during the conflict and subsequent occupation.
We continued to advance, and finally encountered the true army of the Scholastic Empire of Wayko in the city near the old University, on the eyeway just past the ornate remains of a place called the Kollins Street Bakery. It had apparently been built with little metal, as it was still mostly intact. The army of Scholars was spread in a pugnacious clump numbering about a thousand, approximately the same number as my own people. My group looked much smaller due to the many Dixies and Pixies, one of whom could account for maybe a twentieth of the weight of a skinny Terran. The Waykans thought my Air Force was humorous, because they didn't know what was in the clay pots they carried strapped to their bodies. Nor had they yet encountered bricksies and kicksies.
I stepped to the front of my ranks, and strolled forward a dozen yards or so under a while flag. Nothing the Waykans had could pierce the enameled armor I wore, so I wasn't too worried about perfidy. The white flag wasn't a call for a truce; it was just to show them I was willing to parley. When I stopped, I called out, "I would speak personally to the coward who sent the crippled and elderly against my army!"
My words echoed across the ruined city for half a minute before a brute of a man in armor similar to mine pushed his way forward. "I am General Bruce Carrington, Scholar of Military Philosophy! You call me a coward, but you are a perversion of nature who mates with animals and fills his army with livestock!"
He didn't have Little Magic's amplification, but he had a big, shouty voice, so his words were audible to my entire army. I heard them muttering, but I had already warned my people not to respond. I replied, "Most of those you call livestock are human beings with full sentience, many of whom began life as normal baseline humans," I announced. "They were transformed through no fault of their own when they crossed the Caul into our world. They are neither animals nor livestock, and you know this. Which means you also know that eating of their flesh is cannibalism, a deviance my Goddess Aurora cannot abide."
"Fuck your Goddess Aurora!" the brute shouted, and his army cheered.
Apparently Little Magic did what my father called "turning the speakers up to 11" (something the A-Team loved to do with their band), because my next words pounded the Waykan army with an almost physical force. "MY GODDESS HAS TASKED ME WITH EXTIRPATING THE CANNIBALS OF THE SCHOLASTIC EMPIRE OF WAYKO, ROOT AND BRANCH. YOU WILL ALL DIE TODAY."
For ten seconds, the Waykans were silent; and then, as one man — and they were all men — they laughed at us.
I knew they would. That was the signal for the Air Force to start their attack. Several hundred small clay pots, each with Cyclone-B pellets in one chamber and water in another, fell from several hundred feet up. Somehow, my genius father had rigged the fragile wall between the chambers of most of the bombs to break 50 feet above the ground. As they fell, the pots spewed a stinking gray cloud that settled down from above and continued on to the ground as the Waykan soldiers, every single one, started to twitch and spasm.
Every Goddess-damned one of them was a cannibal.
We didn't have to fire a shot. And we didn't have time to watch them die. We went on to the greater slau
ghter, where the non-combatant Scholars awaited us just a mile or so away. We met with the remaining Gormless at the University, who had been warned ahead of time by runners, and passed their families back to a group of Taura, Faunlet, and Pooka warriors who would take them back to Elm Mott for the moment. We also had them capture as many of the Scholar children under the age of ten as they could, but that proved nearly impossible.
We then surrounded the campus of the former university, and we camped, waiting for the next day. The residents of the Scholastic Empire no doubt watched our campfires all night, and wondered what had become of their army.
In the cool gray dawn, I slipped away to perform the deed that would damn my soul to hell, while Puck and my other officers led the army into the campus from all sides, constricting in the same way we'd used against the Alfas of what had then been called Scarborough Faire. By the time they had managed to concentrate the Scholars on the old football field, with the willing help of the remaining Gormless, I had returned from my grim task. I stood before the Scholars in my bloody armor and begged them to send us their children, so they wouldn't be harmed in the battle to come. They refused. With a heavy heart, I told them that they would all die today.
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