“Fornicatress! What is that?” A familiar figure is glaring in horror at a toddler in ragged blue pyjamas. If the child were eating raw meat, it could not merit such ghastly dismay.
“It’s hideous! Unnatural! Where did it come from? No, no, don’t tell me—this house is filled with likely men. I shall simply seek out the one who is broken and bleeding and know him for the idiot who took you to his bed. Or was it mine? My bed? And how did you birth it so quickly? Eh? Answer me that? No nine months for you, you unmarked harlot, no indeed, scant hours to produce another malignant brat! If I look around I will no doubt find the shell it hatched from. You’re a demon, is what it is! A thing from the red inferno, where dwell incubi and satyrs and women with the legs of spiders, all coddled in a fetid mist! Oh, poor Rao Tsur, married to a sulphurous, rutting fiend! It wouldn’t be so bad if she could cook, but as it is . . .”
“Imbecile! The child is yours, as you well know, and born two years ago. Yes, it was. Oh, for the love of . . . Must you declare your poverty of mind to the entire house? Yes, I see you must. You named him Jun, and gurgled at him like a river toad when you should have been attending to the spices. No customer was served for months but must admire the little thug. He spat at them. Vomited. Threw things unmentionable after them as they fled. A salesman like his father, yes, to hurl our clientele headlong, heaving, out into the road. Thus we live in penury and want. Yes. Penury and want. And, oh, yes, Rao Tsur, whose refined palate cares not for my kitchen’s product any more than his empty heart has love for his enduring wife, the child is mine as well. We slept together, you and I. I say slept. In fact we copulated. Yes, you may well look abashed, it was no great matter. It barely counts. All that huffing and puffing and I swear I would have done better by myself!”
“Oh, indeed? Mistress of Onan, is Veda Tsur! Soloist! Luxuriant! And yet if I recall her spine was arched, presenting those unmentionable breasts to dread advantage, and from her open mouth proceeded such a racket as to sour milk and burst the eardrums of cats!”
“Hah! You admit it! You pounced upon me! Dark, your passions, Rao Tsur, when there was I, peaceably recalling my days of virtue. Oh yes, I’m sure I screamed! Quite likely, I called out for help! And no wonder, me being belaboured with that appalling cudgel you call a—” Her husband’s eyes grow very wide, and Veda Tsur comes sharply to a halt. She has hit that naked space in a crowded place where every conversation stops at once and yours inexorably continues, slewing secrets into a loud silence. I once said “starkers from the waist down, of course, but no one noticed because of the feathers” in a lecture hall full of my professors. I’d been talking about dinosaurs and birds and evolution, but try telling that to a hundred hooting dons.
Veda Tsur shuffles. She looks at her feet. And she lets fall from her wide, welcoming lips a sort of girlish giggle of embarrassment. Rao Tsur too shifts uncomfortably. The Katiris stare. Short of a rain of frogs or the sun rising in the north, there’s not much to top this, even now. Rao Tsur mumbles something like “Yes, well” and actually cannot think of anything to say. Awkwardly, he puts an arm around his wife and gathers up the wayward child which was the object of their debate, and quite a few others emerge from under boxes and blankets and scamper to complete the picture, until Family Tsur is fully assembled. And then, most impossible of all, Rao Tsur places a kiss upon the cheek of Veda Tsur as if they were just now stepping from a marriage service and he is afraid she will fly away if he does not occasionally soothe her and hang on to her. There is a frozen moment, then a snort from the aunt, and then the whole courtyard falls apart in a roar of laughter and cheering, like an explosion. It is the first laughter I have heard since the end of the world. (Nervous laughter and evil laughter do not count.)
Amid the laughter there is clapping, and the clapping becomes a rhythm, and the rhythm becomes a dance, and Rao Tsur by some strange coincidence is at this moment next to Leah. He seizes upon her, and Veda Tsur by way of revenge must have me, and Rao trumpets that she is making off with the hero of Fudin, and that just because I hit an idiot in the head and saved her life, she will now leave him for ever, and good riddance, faithless wench, may she bear me fine upstanding demon children. At which Veda asks tartly if Rao is not even now clutching that buxom doctor to his chest? And does he imagine she will gladly suffer his inexpert fondlings? She will run off with a handsome shepherd, and then where is Rao? Alone with his stupidity! And anyway, what nonsense! But even now they can’t stop grinning at one another.
And so it goes, around and around, clap clap clapclap clap, laLAHlalalaLAH . . . lahdahdahDEE-YA! until a string is stretched across some empty cases and begins to twang and zoom, and a row of empty bottles goes ping, pang, pong and pung, and voices are making up the rest of the orchestra, hmmhhhmmaahmm, a-hooahomm, and it’s a regular rock-and-roll hoedown, only with makeshift mandolins and xylophones, and not much in the way of skiffle until Tobemory Trent starts playing tortoiseshell and bone. And when the first dance is done, there is a brief moment for the aunt, in all humility, to kiss me on both cheeks in front of the whole crowd and pat my face and tell everyone that anybody who wants to pick a fight with me will answer to her, because if Rao Tsur, saffron merchant of Fudin, says I am a good man, and if Veda Tsur is content that my lady should dance with her husband, then that is good enough on any day for her, even if I had not—according to unimpeachable sources known to her personally—punched in the head a noted idiot in an effort to safeguard the lives of the people of Fudin. At which another great cheer goes up, and it is louder, for behind us is Zaher Bey, pint-sized titan and romantic lead, and sometime debater of the Jarndice Caucus club. And also, it emerges, funky-chicken instructor to the people of Fudin, the mysterious pirates of Addeh Katir and the remnant forces of the Combined Defensive Operational Force 8th Battlegroup, G.W. Lubitsch pro tem commander. So we get funky, together, and if anyone thinks Gonzo and Leah and Jim and Sally and I, or any of the others, is less than a friend, that person forgets about it, because we’re all chums together, and drunk as well.
In the morning, the war comes back, like dandelion seeds.
THE EAST WIND brings it, winsome and inexorable. The wind flickers and jiggles excitedly, rolling over the hills and dusting the forest. It is friendly. It is obviously, appealingly soft. It is Disney Dust. For miles and miles, from here all the way to Lake Addeh, perky motes and jape-some spirals flicker among the trees and fall into rivulets and streams with a noise like hot ash into snow. We stand on the long balcony and laugh, and nod good morning to one another. Today will be a good day. And then, as it draws closer, there is a sudden gust, and then another, pungent with animal smell, strange in the back of the nose and mouth, and there are birds, in their thousands, fleeing. No one kind predominates. They are not arranged in orderly flocks or even families. Swans lumber, geese flap, sparrows (or something very like them) flitter, all in one great avian mass of fear; one enormous, moderately cooperative exodus.
They crap on everything, evacuating their bowels the better to evacuate themselves. The second part of our war begins with a torrent of guano.
The Stuff rolls on towards us, and starts to change. It reaches the border of the lands we have defined for ourselves, the place of our safety, and divides around as if on a curtain rail. Wrapping around our border is a curdling shadow, from which proceed the cries of devils and the howling of the damned, or at least loud, unpleasant noises which make your hair stand on end and fill you (like a departing swan) with the desire to relieve certain internal pressures. All around me people are doing things of importance. Zaher Bey’s pirate-monks are moving with determined efficiency, calming and reassuring, herding Katiri civilians further into the castle. Gonzo’s guys—his core guys, Jim and Sally and Samuel and Annie—are rousing the others and bringing them up to speed. Leah and Tobemory Trent have gone professional, are talking triage prep and ad hoc transfusions, leaving me to watch the onset. I watch.
The Stuff is ragged and wispy. It is encountering some press
ure or energy at our circumference, and responding to it. Things are happening at the meniscus: familiar shapes are appearing—armed men, vehicles, guns. They shimmer and collapse into one another, getting more solid. Some of them are ludicrous or awful. A small group charges across the border, Iwo Jima style, brothers in arms. They are too close together, weirdly awkward, and as they turn, I see that they are conjoined, all seven of them. The sergeant’s hand on his corporal’s back, urging him on, melds smoothly into the uniform and the spine. The soldier behind, supporting the sergeant, is merged with him at the hip. They struggle, scream and tumble, bringing down the others. They are an image to be seen from one side, not real men at all. They die, probably because they have not enough hearts between them, and slump to the ground, where a corpse-carpet is forming, the familiar exterior decor of modern skirmishing. I can hear the bullets whizzing, though there is as yet no one to fight. This is not an attack. It’s atmosphere. It’s war as a condition, war as furniture. We are under siege by a notion of war.
A monk, next to me, looks down in mute surprise as a bullet wound blooms on his chest. He dies calmly, maybe even affronted, but not appalled or screaming. The soldier next to him is different. He exhales a choking gas, a stink of battery acid, and with it part of a lung. He would scream, but this expression has been taken from him, so he just stares at me in horror, and I tell him I know, I know, it hurts, and you are dying. I know. I am here. He stares at me, and I cannot tell if he is thankful or if he simply cannot believe I am so damn trivial as to imagine that makes it any better. He dies while I am blinking.
A hand falls on my shoulder, rough and invasive. I slip it, twist. A flash of snaggled teeth and a whiff of halitosis. I hit out, block a weapon, push him away. He is gone. Shadowman. I crouch, ready. Nothing happens.
Up the hill, soldiers are attacking. Bad generalship, perhaps, but they are making ground. Vasille’s tank opens up, and limbs fly, slapstick. Hah. But now the enemy has tanks too, rolling up the hill, commanders looking out the top, Patton-style, and when Gonzo blows the tracks off the first one, and Vasille splatters it across the landscape, it appears that Patton is fused to the tank from the hips, a man-tank chimera. Samuel P. throws up. No one laughs at him.
It’s a game or a dream; wave upon wave, uncoordinated, endless; lethal but stupid. We fight. We die. We live. They go again. Nowhere is secure, nowhere is particularly under threat. Shadowmen flicker in corridors, half-complete, half-imagined; sometimes they kill someone, sometimes they loom and lurk and wait to be eliminated, like the guys in red shirts on Star Trek (the original one, not the later ones where no one was safe). In the infirmary there are extra patients appearing from nowhere. They cannot be healed. They just sit there and scream. Stretchermen we don’t have bring wounded we never knew, each time putting them in the same spot. The first soldier in bed three (it’s a packing case with a rug on it, but it’s bed three) has a head wound. A moment later, another is laid on top of him and they are for a moment both there, one superimposed on the other, and then the first is gone—and with him the bandages Trent slapped on that cut—and instead there’s a kid with a spurting leg, bleeding out, and then a moment later he has both injuries, and then he’s dead, and then they bring in another one and it’s a woman and then another, and another.
The sun comes out. The wind changes. We fight on. Shadowmen flail and die, and are not replaced. In the sunlight, in the ordinary world, they look pathetic: hulking, ugly brutes without advantages. Bullies. Bandits. Veda Tsur, spattered in grime and weeping, slams the last one to the ground with a copper saucepan, and Rao beats him, methodically, until he dies like a broken fly. He tried to take their children. Jun is clinging to his father’s arm, adding his weight to every blow.
In good order, and because we are very angry and afraid, we counter. We sally forth. Sallying has gone out of fashion in recent years, because it doesn’t work very well when you have gun emplacements, and anyway no one really lays siege in the traditional way any more; they blockade and they assail, but more usually they go house-to-house, because sieges kill civilians before they kill soldiers and this kind of thing is, broadly speaking, bad. It’s okay to kill huge numbers of civilians by mistake, of course, but killing them on purpose is illegal, slap-on-the-wrist time. We sally because, hell, we’ve earned it. Vasille leads, Bone Briskett brings up the rear and in the middle are an improvised mechanised infantry of hyped Ford Focuses (Foci?) and armoured RVs.
The lower slopes are a charnel house. Everything is dead. We drive through. The forest is better. The first hundred metres or so is jellied and burned. After that, it’s almost normal. The trees have been shot up a bit. One or two sheep have expired. We cruise. We do not get attacked. It rains, water. We dismount. We walk in the forest. It is nice. Leah and I hold hands. I transfer my gun to the other side and feel very protective. We lean against a pine tree and admire the flowers. We smell air which is not filled with awfulness. We live.
My radio clicks, once. It is the alert, but not the enemy action signal. It means I have found an interesting thing, approach with caution. The first click is followed by seven more in quick succession: one of the pirate-monks has the bearing seven position, to the south-south-east. We—Leah, Samuel and I—have five. We move downward.
The pirate-monk is standing at the edge of a forest clearing. He has chosen his location carefully, so as to be invisible to most of the clearing while able to survey it himself through a stand of bracken. We move up.
In the glade is a man, on a horse. He is tubby, and the horse is unkempt. His hair is matted and charred, and his arms are mired with sweat and grime. He is not a creature to inspire lust. The horse is brown or chestnut or one of those other technical terms horsepeople use to make it clear that they know stuff other people don’t; the freemasonry of the hoof. “Horsepeople” is apt here, and this guy can choose his own damn nomenclature. Because he is not, in fact, a man on a horse. He is a man and a horse. A centaur, although . . . not. Centaurs, in stories, are natural horsepeople. They are born that way, made by Zeus or some other holy Fimo-kiddie, sculpted buff and ready to rumble. Deep voices and beards, testosterone stink. This one looks as if he has been welded or grafted. He looks like the compound wounded soldier in Leah’s infirmary, or the tank commander who was part of his tank. He is not doing centaur sorts of things either. They are usually to be seen playing musical instruments or running about looking noble. This one looks confused, and he is digging a hole. He bends all the way over his front hooves, and lifts a shovelful of earth out of the ground. The hole is maybe a foot deep, but he has reached the maximum extension of what must be a curiously shaped spine. The next sweep of the shovel barely scrapes the soil.
He growls, and his front legs bend and he kneels, horse fashion. This is apparently uncomfortable, and unstable, because as he leans down to dig again, he falls over. He struggles for a while on his side, then rolls to his feet and starts again, and again. And then he throws the shovel away, and lays a slender, wrapped package in the hole. It is a person-sized package, if the person were small, or truncated. He picks up the shovel again, fills in the hole and stumbles away. He walks as if he is not used to having four legs: front left and back left move together, and he has to roll his weight onto his right like a sailor so as not to fall over, and then the reverse. He coughs, and spits a clot of blood onto a nearby fern. Perhaps his tubes are not properly lined up. It seems an uncertain proposition whether he can eat anything which will sustain him; which stomach does he use? What can it digest? We watch him wander off, and we are ashamed a bit that we don’t offer to help. On the other hand, we haven’t shot him either, which was a possibility, given that he was a completely impossible, alien object in the middle of a dangerous place at a dangerous time. That sort of thing usually gets shot at. Oh yes. Pillars of virtue over here. We don’t look at one another.
The monk walks into the glade. Without fuss, and absolutely without disrespect, he digs up the package and unwraps it. His pirate-ness
is in abeyance. Today he is just a monk, and very tired. Under a layer of oilcloth is a crochet blanket, and inside that is a child, or a foal. She is quite small. The transformation here has been less successful. She is—was—a horse with two legs, and arms ending in hooves. She clutches a small stuffed donkey. Her face is long and equine, with wide, black eyes. The monk nods, and buries her again, with his hands.
. . .
ZAHER BEY and Nq’ula Jann are taking council. I suppose, in a sense, it is a secret council to which everyone is invited. Zaher Bey is a wanted man, after all, and therefore his councils are perforce concealed things, but we are all allowed to know about it and contribute and listen in. Indeed, this is the essence of it. The question before the meeting is What just happened? and by and large we are in agreement that it’s a jolly good question and one which needs answering before it happens to us. This has acquired a muttered urgency because—aside from the strange and the ghastly outside—there is a creeping rot within us too. It’s more than a little bit difficult to recall the names and faces of the Gone Away. It can be done. It isn’t impossible. It’s just the difference between lifting the suitcase empty and lifting it full. And this invasion is, if anything, more horrible than the last.
This is where I first hear “Reification” in connection with the Go Away War, and I hear it because Zaher Bey is demanding to know what the hell it is. If I were not on guard against revealing that I had a rather large part in What just happened, I could tell him. Never let it be said that sociology is a useless discipline. Still, Nq’ula seems to have the concept well in hand.