I scanned the crowd again for the face of the bandaged soldier, saw so many bandages, so many wounds and dirty, frightened faces, found the man again. I fixed on him. “How many here will follow me?”
“What are we going to do?” the bandaged man asked.
“There's a large gun on a hill below us. It's going to help Beys sink Lenk's ships. We need those ships. We need to capture that gun.”
Pitt's face wrinkled again, this time in genuine anguish. I bent down again and shook his shoulder firmly. “You've come here for a reason,” I said. “Beys will never give up, will he?”
“I don't know what Beys will do,” Pitt said.
I picked up the phrase the fleshy, bearded man had used. “Beys has led you into mortal error.”
Pitt closed his eyes and took a deep breath, brows squeezed together. “If the ships are sunk ... What can we do?” I asked.
“They won't need the gun. 15 can destroy most of the ships by itself.” Pitt's face gleamed one last time with esprit de corps. “Lenk slipped his ships into the harbor when our steamships were out to sea. Beys came back as soon as he heard, and Lenk ordered his ships out of the harbor. But Beys pushed them up against the bight north of the peninsula, and now, the ships are as good as sunk.”
“Beys will never give up,” I repeated.
A quiet fell over the crowd. Those attached to Lenk knew the truth of this, and the soldiers of Beys and Brion were absorbing the implications.
“Ser Brion did this?” voices among the gray and tan uniforms asked. “He poisoned the silva?” Heads shook, and bitter whispers passed.
Pitt roused himself, making a decision with a quick spasm of his body. “There was a rebellion two years ago. We felt the ecos might have been profaned. We warned him and his Caitla Chung, but then Brion brought us the food. We were hungry.”
The crowd absorbed this information in silence. I examined the faces, trying to find where the river of consent and passion would flow. A wrong word, a jarring phrase, could shatter this crowd like a crystal vase. The Brionist soldiers would be beaten to death, the battle would resume, and I would be able to accomplish nothing. I thought of common sufferings and deep fears.
“No more food,” I said.
“Join us!” the bandaged man shouted.
The crowd coursed around me, arms raised, hands gripping in the air. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. The crowd had become one, and was ready to absorb more.
32
The gun, Pitt informed us, was approachable only by the dirt road. The fog north of the peninsula was already thinning, patches of ocean and a few ships revealed, and morning was giving way to noon. We had Pitt's fifty soldiers and, keeping well behind them, fifty of Lenk's troops, all of them now following me.
I considered the situation carefully. If we put the gun out of action, Beys's steamship could still cause considerable damage to Lenk's fleet. With four ships sunk in the harbor, having taken the 43 down with them, there were ten vessels still in the fog, at severe risk.
The situation was also clear to Pitt. He sat on a rock at the bottom of the hill road, just below a detachment in place to guard the road. The detachment had already exchanged a few words with Pitt and recognized him.
I sat beside Pitt. Kristof Ab Seija, the bandaged man, stood behind us.
“I can talk to them some more,” Pitt said, “but I don't know what good it will do. They're a special crew. They take orders directly from Beys and no one else. After the steamships, that gun is his pride.”
“We don't have much time,” I said.
The gun blasted a great gout of flame and smoke from the side of the hill. The shell flew out over the water, sounding like a huge shoe grinding boulder-sized gravel. Seconds later, kilometers away, an explosion answered like the same heavy shoe dropping.
“It can shoot seven kilometers,” Pitt said. “Maybe more.”
“We may have to kill them,” Seija said.
Pitt lowered his face into his hands and rubbed his eyes. “It's not easy,” he said.
“To kill them?” Seija asked.
“To be a traitor,” he replied sharply, and looked up at me, eyes pleading for some sort of inspiration. I had put myself into this position; I could not back down now.
I listened intently to the conflicting messages inside me, trying to find that conviction of invincibility I had known before.
My neck hair tingled again. Interest. The word that described so much and explained so little. I heard more voices coming from the flat between the hills, mostly female.
The bearded man, Hamsun, ran up to join us. The detachment farther up the dirt road began to mill restlessly, weapons raised, sensing something was about to happen.
“Women,” Hamsun said, out of breath, panting heavily. “From Naderville. Older women coming back. Now that the fighting. Has stopped.”
In a town or city as small as Naderville, everybody should know everybody else. They had shared mutual grief and misery; I tried to imagine the depth of the social connections, the influence some people might wield. Beys might have been a true aberration, his support shallow; the dull calm on the face of the man in the flatboat could as easily have been numb acquiescence.
And now the women were here, perhaps the mother or wife of that man. For a moment I felt lost in this new sympathy. All the energetic loathing I had carried left a confusing vacuum.
“Ser Pitt,” I said, “can you explain things to the women? Bring some of them up here?”
“You want them to go up the road first?”
“Mothers, sisters, wives,” I said.
Pitt stood. “I'll try to explain,” he said. “I know some of the gun crew. I know their families.”
Yanosh is trying to absorb this. “So you became a general,” he said. “You learned how to move the masses.”
His words are ironic, perhaps a little disbelieving. “Pitt and I walked with the women. We walked up the road. The soldiers could not shoot their own women.”
“You told them about the food,” Yanosh says.
“It was more than food,” I say. “It was exhaustion, and thirty-seven years of frustration and recrimination and misery. And now the profanation of a sacred thing.”
“That is what I have the most trouble understanding,” Yanosh says. “How could anyone revere such a thing as the ecos? Wasn't it part of their misery?”
“No,” I say, not knowing exactly how to explain. Yanosh will never see the ecoi as they were. Nobody will ever see them again.
The women walked past the guards and the chain barrier and up to the gun. Lenk's troops stayed behind; they were not necessary.
The gun crew were not the devoted warriors Beys might have hoped. They succumbed rapidly to the pleas of their wives and mothers, and radioed for instructions to 15. Beys could not explain the fluxing to his soldiers, nor why they should continue supporting Brion when the sustenance of their homeland was rotting.
The gun did not fire again. Beys had lost his constituency, and word was spreading against Brion.
Pitt sat with me afterward, and the captain of the gun crew joined us in the shadow of the big weapon, looking out across the ocean at the steamship and Lenk's bottled-up fleet. The captain tossed his hat down into the dust beside the massive wheel. “I have two young ones,” he said, glancing at me like a shy, frightened child. “My wife didn't come here with the others.” He swung his hand at the women on the road and surrounding the emplacement. “If they're still alive, where will they go? What will they eat? I tried to speak with Beys, but he hasn't answered the radio since we stopped firing.”
“Is there a boat?” I asked.
“On the beach,” the captain said, pointing down the hill.
The launch had once served the government's needs on the northern side of the peninsula. Less fancy than Brion's launch, or Chung's, it still had a fully charged set of batteries and a sturdy electric motor. Pitt stepped aboard with me, carrying a radio from the gun crew. Hamsun followe
d. Seija would stay behind to keep the peace between the Lenk troops, the gun crew, and the rest of the Brionist soldiers, many seeing their wives and mothers for the first time in days.
On the beach beside the launch lay wilted gray devastation. The beachfront thicket had died. A balloon had dropped the last of its green larval seed-mothers and now lay half-collapsed on the spit of black sand and lava gravel nearby, pushed at by slow, persistent waves. The new, young seed-mother had taken residence in a tangle of phytids the night before and had immediately enslaved them, to protect itself against whatever weather there might be. They had formed a small shelter over its delicate green body, and in the middle, beneath the canopy, it grew and sent forth broad flat green folia, spreading wide in the afternoon sun.
The balloon's wrinkled, rapidly deflating bag rolled back and forth in the low surf. As we prepared to board the launch, the green center beneath the dry, crumbling protection of the phytids exploded and threw out tiny corn-kernel grains. They immediately pushed probing tendrils into the dirt and wet sand.
Pitt regarded the new ecos with disgust. I did not bother to tell him what it was; we had little time.
The steamship sailed in a tight loop four kilometers offshore. The last of the sailing ships that had dropped off Lenk's troops and shelled Naderville had gotten themselves into a tight situation, bottled up in a bight that stretched seven kilometers north from the peninsula. It was obvious from the steamship's threatening posture and strategic position that if they tried to leave, they would be shelled, probably demolished. But for the time being, no action was being taken. The sailing ships could not shell 15 at its present distance from them, but it could certainly fire on them, and Beys seemed to be weighing his options.
Hamsun and Pitt insisted that they be allowed to run the boat. “You need time to think,” Pitt said. His deference made me nervous. Again, all my confidence had fled. The way Pitt looked at me made my stomach churn.
I dreaded the thought of meeting with Beys. I knew his kind of evil would rise above any small talent I might have at persuasion and politics. He would know I was no prophet; he might simply shoot me, or order me shot. I did not fear that, however. Death seemed the least of my worries.
I hoped Shirla was on board, and Randall. On the other hand, I was uncomfortable at the thought of her seeing me in this new, false role, of diplomat and putative avatar. She would instantly know it for the sham it was. If Beys saw her reaction, he would know, then, also.
And yet—what could Beys do? He could kill us. He could fire on the sailing ships. But Lenk and the Khoragos were not in the bight. Without support from Naderville, Beys was nothing more than a pirate. His strength would rapidly wane.
The situation in Naderville was far from stable, however. Brion could reappear at any moment, from wherever he was hiding, and draw his people back together, back to their accustomed ruler and ways. He was far better at playing his role than I could be. Beys might be in touch with Brion; the pair of supposed opposites might again be drawing lines of force between them, north pole and south, on the brink this time of regaining not just Naderville but all the other human settlements as well.
Pitt had told the steamship that we were approaching, and that I was aboard to parley. He stood beside me on the prow; Hamsun piloted the boat from the stern.
“Will he blow us out of the water?” Pitt asked.
“I was just about to ask you the same thing,” I said. “I feel sick to my stomach,” Pitt said. “So do I.”
Pitt squinted up at me. “The general is a powerful man,” he said. “I think he'll squash me like a bug.”
“What does he believe in?” I asked.
Pitt frowned. He was a thin, weary bureaucrat in a uniform that no longer seemed to fit him. His long wrists hung out of the sleeves, and he clasped his bony hands together tightly. “A few hours ago, I would have said he believed in Brion and Naderville. In bringing rational planning and thought to Lamarckia. I was a student in the academy before my enlistment began and the call-up put us all in uniform. I didn't see any duty away from Naderville ... I stayed here and watched things change. Brion became more aloof. Beys more prominent. I did not disapprove. Should I have?”
I shook my head. If I could not judge Brion, surely I could not judge this man, or any like him. The confusing vacuum persisted.
No right, no wrong, only forces of nature, like winds blowing us back and forth. My stomach knotted tighter. We were less than a kilometer from 15. The steamship had slowed. She had dropped a sea anchor to maintain her position. Pitt rubbed his nose and said that was a good sign.
“15's given us permission to put alongside,” Hamsun called from aft.
Pitt arranged his uniform and smoothed back his hair, blown about by the sea breeze. The smell of ammonia and flat staleness was apparent even this far from shore; on the land it must have been awful.
“Some of us worshipped Hsia,” Pitt said. “It wasn't her fault she couldn't feed us. Some thought she did what she could, that we had just overstepped our bounds. That's why so many were upset when Brion said he was going to make her fruitful, he was going to change her. Brion almost lost everything then. But he brought the food down the canal in ships, and we had been so hungry for so long ... The rebellion ended before it really got started.
“The last two days ... I don't know. I've lived here all my life. The thicket silva's been here for millions of years, so they say. I think if I were someone else, I'd cry. How could Brion have done something like this?”
I could not give any useful answers.
The launch pulled alongside the steamship and a gangway was lowered level with our deck. We lashed the launch to the gangway and climbed the steps. A narrow-faced man with a short stiff cap of brown hair greeted us stiffly at the rail.
“General Beys is busy now. He'll be with you shortly.”
We were taken forward, past the big forward gun, sea-based twin of the gun that had been rolled up the hill. It must have taken immense effort to make such weapons, and yet, they had not saved 43 from being sunk by primitive xyla-wrapped cannon. I could not fathom the reasoning behind such a military buildup. Had Brion or Beys anticipated a major showdown at sea?
The bristle-haired man introduced himself as Major Sompha, then sat us under an observation canopy erected in front of the forward gun. “Is it as bad as it looks?” he asked softly, nodding in the direction of the mainland. From where 15 floated, the stretches of silva looked pale and irregular, the sharply defined boundaries turning ash-gray as the day progressed.
“It's all changing,” Pitt said.
“What's the worst of it? We haven't heard much.”
“The food,” Pitt said. Hamsun described the situation in the storage barns. Major Sompha took it with as much stoic calm as he could muster, but it obviously hit him hard. He asked about his family in Naderville.
“Some are coming back into town, but...” Hamsun shook his head. “Are you with Lenk?” Sompha asked me.
“No,” I said.
“He says he's from the Hexamon,” Pitt said. “A lot of people believe him.”
Sompha nodded, putting facts together and drawing his own conclusions. “I think General Beys believes him,” he said. “Why let you come here, otherwise? We're waiting for nightfall, and then we'll sink Lenk's ugly fleet one by one.”
“There's no food,” Pitt growled. “What good will it do to sink the ships that might take some of us away, or bring food from Tasman or Elizabeth?”
“Lenk wouldn't do a thing for us before,” Sompha said.
“I need to know if there are two people on board,” I interrupted, my patience ending. “A man and a woman. One is named Shirla Ap Nam, the other is Erwin Randall.”
“The hostages,” Sompha said. “They're here. Beys is keeping them below. Maybe he is worried about you.” He shrugged and left us sitting out of the milky sunlight, in the shade of the canopy.
An hour passed, and Sompha returned with glasses of water. He st
ood with us for several minutes, grimly staring across the water at the ash-colored shore. “Looks like a huge fire hit it,” he said. “Do you think it's happening everywhere?”
“It will,” I said.
“We'll put in to the harbor tomorrow morning, after we sink these ships, if it's clear,” Sompha said. “I need to see things for myself.”
An hour later, he returned again. The distant shore appeared creamy white in the late-afternoon light. The sun crept toward the western horizon. Within the bight, the remains of Lenk's fleet had anchored.
To the men and women on those ships, I thought, it must seem as if the world was ending. They'd probably try to break out in an hour or so, and chance that Beys's monster would miss a few, not be able to track them down, or that they could return sufficient fire to put the steamship out of action. I imagined myself on one of those ships.
“General Beys says he's ready to meet with you now,” Sompha said. We stood and Sompha placed himself in front of me. “If you are the judge, from the Hexamon, I need to tell you something now. My wife and I were ordered to take in three children from Elizabeth's Land,” he said. “We were ordered to. We have taken good care of them.”
We looked at each other for a long moment, and then Sompha turned away, murmuring, “I just wanted you to know that.”
He led us to the bridge, up a steep companionway and around an outside passage to cabins on the upper deck. Sompha opened a door, and an imposing dark woman, taller than I and probably stronger, stared at us with sharp clear eyes, then stood aside.
General Beys sat at a table within the cabin. All was painted white, and the table was set with a white cloth. A glass pitcher of water and several cups had been placed around the table, and folding xyla chairs drawn up.
Beys looked at the men beside me. “You're Rank Two Suleiman Pitt. I don't remember this man's name...”
“Hamsun, sir. Tarvo Hamsun.”