“I heard a rumor that you were working for young Kobold?”
“We talked,” said Tom casually.
Pennyroyal nodded, beaming. “Excellent, excellent,” he said. “Well, we mustn’t keep Mr. Lard waiting, must we, dear?” He made his bow and wished Tom and Wren bon voyage, but as his lady friend strolled gracefully toward the waiting ship, he turned and called, “Don’t miss the June edition of The Speculum, Tom! Available at all good newsagents’, and the lead article is to be Spiney’s piece on me!”
Tom waved, wondering where he would be come June. The Speculum was published in several languages and sold aboard all sorts of different cities, but he didn’t think he would be able to buy a copy among the ruins of London.
Chapter 14
General Naga
Twenty miles away, at the westernmost edge of the Green Storm’s territory, General Jiang Xiang Naga stood on a fire step in a forward trench and studied the lights of Murnau through the brass eyepieces of a periscope. An aide twiddled the knobs on the periscope tripod and the instrument turned slowly, showing Naga the neighboring lights of smaller cities and countless suburbs, another Traktionstadt farther down the line.
“New cities are arriving almost daily from the west,” said one of the officers standing in the trench. “Intelligence says that even Manchester, one of the last great urbivores, is moving toward the Murnau cluster. Excellency, they are preparing an attack.”
“Nonsense, Colonel Yu,” snorted Naga, turning from the periscope. “They are trade towns, taking advantage of the truce to come and do business with those fighting cities.”
“Yes, to sell them fresh weapons and supplies!” insisted Yu. “This truce is providing the barbarians with a breathing space; a chance to rearm.”
“It is giving us the same chance,” said his neighbor, General Xao, a short woman with a creased yellow face like an old purse. She smiled. She had lost three sons to the Green Storm’s war, and it was a long time since anyone had seen her smile. “More than a month now, and nobody killed anywhere on the line,” she said. “Even if the townies break truce tomorrow, it will have been worth it. Listen.”
Naga listened. He could hear the low voices of soldiers in the neighboring trenches, the whisper of the breeze in his wolfskin cloak, and faintly, far off, the song of a bird. Was it a nightingale? He wished he knew. He would have liked to tell his wife, when she came home from Africa, “We heard a nightingale singing, right out there on the front line!” But he had been too busy all his life with war to study such things as birds. If the peace held, he thought suddenly, he would learn all about them; birds, and trees, and flowers. He would walk with Oenone in green meadows, and they would point out the birds and blossoms to each other, and he would be able to tell her what each was called…
“There!” he said, and his mechanical armor broke the stillness with a hiss and a clank as it swung him down off the fire step. He clapped Colonel Yu on the shoulder with a steel hand like a Stalker’s gauntlet. “There! That’s what we have been fighting for, Yu Wei Shan. We didn’t go to war because we wanted to smash cities, but because we wanted to be able to hear the birds sing again. And if fifteen years of war won’t do it, maybe we will have to try talking to the barbarians instead.” He waved his arm, indicating the wastelands that lay beyond the wire: the immense shell craters and concrete city-traps, the wrecked suburbs foundering in weeds, the million bones. “We were supposed to be making the world green again,” he said, “and all we have been doing is turning it into mud.”
It was something his wife had told him once. It had sounded better when Oenone said it. Later, in the airship, on his way to the sector headquarters at Forward Command, he found himself longing for her. If she were here, he would find it easier to keep to this difficult road she’d set him on. Half his people thought that he was mad for trying to make peace with the cities, and he sometimes wondered if they weren’t right. But what choice did he have?
The Green Storm was in a bad way. Naga had had no idea how bad until he seized power. Under the Stalker Fang the Storm had always made sure that soldiers like him were never short of food or equipment. But in their own lands everything was falling apart; the people who used to run things in the old League days had all been arrested when the Storm took over, and the young fanatics who had taken their places didn’t know how to do their jobs. In the liberated zones that Naga and his comrades had fought so hard to clear of mobile cities, no one seemed to know what crops to plant, or how to arrange the plumbing and transport systems in the ramshackle new static settlements. No one knew where the money was to come from to pay for anything. Stopping the war would help; the old administrators whom Naga was releasing from the prison colonies of Taklamakan might know what to do, but the task was huge. Too huge, Naga sometimes felt, for an ignorant soldier like him…
Still, he knew that if he could talk to Oenone, she would soon soothe all his doubts away. The white sky slid past his window. He dozed, and he could almost smell her, and feel the warmth of her small body. Where was she? he wondered. He wished that he had not let her volunteer for that mission to Zagwa. But she had wanted to go, and he could think of no one more likely to bring the Zagwans over to his side than little Zero, with her unwarlike ways and that quaint old god of hers.
Forward Command was a disabled Traction City, squatting on a low hill north of the Rustwater behind defensive walls built from its own cast-off tracks. It had been part of the Storm’s front line during the battles of the previous year. Now that the Traktionstadts had been driven back beyond the marshes, it was turning into a full-scale settlement; clusters of civilian houses were sprouting on the slopes below the city, and in the fields around them some kind of root crop seemed to be failing miserably. Wind turbines dotted the steppe, flailing their long arms like idiot giants.
A gaggle of officers waited on the docking pan, fussing around a dark-skinned servant girl whom Naga vaguely recognized. He could tell from twenty yards away that they had bad news.
“Excellency, word has come from Africa…”
“This is your wife’s servant, Excellency, the mute girl, Rohini…”
“She arrived on foot at the Tibesti Static, out of the desert, all alone.”
“Your wife, Excellency—her ship was jumped by townie warships a day out from Zagwa. The Zagwans must have betrayed her, Excellency. Lady Naga is dead.”
Later, in one of the citadel’s council rooms, she told him everything; how three townie airships had ambushed the Nzimu, how her crew had fought to defend his wife, and how they had been overwhelmed. She wrote it all laboriously out on papers that an aide read aloud.
When she was a little girl, Cynthia Twite had dreamed of being an actress. Her parents had both been actors; arty, Anti-Tractionist types from the Traction City of Edinburgh who had fled their home for what they imagined would be an idyllic life in a static in Shan Guo. They had always encouraged their daughter to dress up and perform, fondly believing that she might be a star one day. And how right they had been!
Good, tolerant people that they were, they had been taken aback by the sudden rise of the Green Storm. “Not all city people are barbarians,” they kept telling Cynthia, rather plaintively, as ferocious Green Storm slogans crackled out of the loudspeakers that the new regime had erected all around their settlement. But Cynthia thought it all very exciting; she enjoyed the flags and uniforms, and the warlike songs she got to sing at school, and she loved the Stalker Fang, so strong and shiny. She soon grew tired of hearing her mum and dad moaning, and reported them to the Storm as Tractionist elements.