Thaddius led the men by example and hand signal. They climbed up the far side of the hill, and within a short while were slipping down behind the armed rebels, who had taken up positions behind large rocks and downed trees. But those bulwarks protected them only from bullets fired from below. At Thaddius’s signal, his tiny force attacked. There were eight rebels, not six. One of them got off a shot, which tore through the wrist of one of the ex-slaves. But the bayonets did their dirty work, and in a few short moments the Confederates were all on the ground, bleeding into the dirt.
The wounded slave grinned at Thaddius in spite of his injury. “I ain’t had so much fun in years,” he said. “Y’all get to do this every day?”
“Not quite like this,” Thaddius replied. “But if you can handle a gun as well as you do that bayonet you might could find a place in this army.”
“Be a little tricky with but one wing,” the man said. “But I’ll gladly give it a try.” He took a musket from one of the Confederate corpses and balanced it on a boulder, sighting down it toward the copse of trees. As Thaddius had hoped, the rebs there had grown restless and were creeping toward the riverbank, where they figured they would have easy pickings at those stuck in the water.
“Let’s see what you can do,” Thaddius urged. He helped himself to a gun and the other men did the same. The former slave fired first, and his target dropped. The others began firing, and the Confederates, all in the open now, were disposed of quickly. By the time Thaddius and his men came down from the hill, the rest of the Federals and freed slaves were out of the water, wringing out their clothes, stamping their feet, and helping themselves to weapons and ammunition from the rebel corpses.
Will Riker liked the tale because it demonstrated a trait that Thaddius Riker had in common with William Tecumseh Sherman, and one that he hoped he had as well—the ability to look unconventionally at a difficult situation and find a unique solution. Most leaders wouldn’t have abandoned their guns and attacked a larger force with lesser weapons. But without that creative response, the story of Thaddius Riker might well have ended in that cold, slow Georgia creek near Garner’s Ridge.
Maybe that was what he needed with Felicia, he realized. The two had talked for hours the other night, after they had made their peace. Since then he had seen her a couple more times, but usually in groups. They had touched a few times, hands coming together, but there had been little forward progress in the direction that Will had decided he wanted to go. He still didn’t know if it was what Felicia wanted, but he was more convinced than ever that it might be. He just needed to find out. And since he didn’t know quite how to go about it, he needed a creative way to force the issue.
As he got ready for bed, and then later in his bed as he tried to find his way to sleep, he worked on coming up with just that.
Chapter 18
Sometimes in the evenings as the suns drifted one by one toward the horizon and the winds churned through the twisting streets, the atmosphere in The End was that of a carnival, loud and joyous and full of color. Kyle walked the streets on one of these long twilights. A couple of blocks from home he encountered a crowd spilling out of buildings, jamming the sidewalk and overflowing into the street. Kyle shouldered through the mob, alternately smelling perfume, sweat, roasting meat from a nearby spit, and alcohol on breath and in bottles. Ahead the laughter was raucous and shouts rang out, whoops of delight and encouragement. He couldn’t quite tell what they were shouting about so he kept going through the crowd, past the mostly adult men and women, human and otherwise, who composed it. When he was finally near the front he could see the source of the commotion.
In a small clearing—the crowd was just as dense, or more so, on the other side of it—two Cyrians faced one another, bare-chested, their loose cotton slacks belted at the waist. They were big and muscular, though one had an enormous roll of flesh that hung over his belt, and both were tattooed, with brilliant splashes of color, yellows and reds and peacock blues and a green that reminded Kyle of forested mountainsides back home, snaking across chests and arms and backs. A fight,Kyle thought, but the two men were smiling, grinning like drunken fools, and Kyle realized they were drunk but not fighting. This was a different kind of competition altogether.
A streetlight, rare in The End, cast a circle of illumination over the whole scene. The taller of the two Cyrians, the one with the flat stomach, pulled back his own hair, which fell below his shoulders in thick waves. Where his ear was—no, where his ear should have been, Kyle realized—there was instead a flap of skin that looked like a shaven cat’s ear, punctured by at least a dozen gold hoops all the way around the rim. Kyle decided the fellow must have surgically altered it, since every other Cyrian ear he’d noticed had looked just like human ears. The crowd loved the ear, though, and responded with gales of laughter and shouts of joy. Kyle wondered what he’d missed so far, before he’d been able to see what all the excitement was about.
The second one, with the gigantic gut, had a bald head and Kyle could see both of his ears. They were studded and pierced but otherwise normal. This man smiled broadly, and then opened his mouth wider, and wider. When it seemed like his head would split open, he stuck out his tongue—or unrolled his tongue, to be more precise,Kyle thought. It was at least thirty centimeters long and bright red, and when he wagged it at his opponent it seemed to be prehensile. At the end of it—which was forked into three distinct points—were three silver rings. The man stiffened his tongue and held it at its most extreme distance, then raised his arms. The crowd, understanding the gesture, quieted, and then the man clapped the tiny rings together as if they were chimes. The bell-like tinkling floated over the crowd, and then was lost again in the thunderous roar of approval that followed.
Now, glancing away from the main event, Kyle saw that money was changing hands. He had thought this was a fight, initially, and in fact it was a kind of contest. And these people were betting on it. He didn’t understand the rules and couldn’t be sure how to tell the winner or the loser, but the man with the tongue had certainly made some points. As he scanned the crowd—many of whom, he realized, were similarly tattooed and pierced—he recognized a couple of faces. Jackdaw, a human who lived in his building, a man with golden brown skin, a thick, long shock of straight black hair and a beard that strangled his neck and chin like a malevolent hand, stood across from him, on the other side of the contestants. Next to him was Cetra ski Toram, a native of Hazimot but from the nation of Muftrih, half a world away. She was ancient, with cobalt blue skin and long white hair and sunken eyes that always seemed to be looking below the surface. Kyle had never seen her smile but she was doing so now, mouth open in a grin that revealed just how few teeth she had remaining. Behind her stooped form was Michelle, who had never told Kyle her last name, if she even had one. She caught Kyle’s gaze and waved. He returned the wave, but then she was lost again in a new uproar.
Kyle returned his attention to the combatants in the clearing, and saw that the tall one with the long hair was raising his right shoulder, already huge and bulbous as most Cyrian shoulders were. But this man worked it up, higher and higher, lowering the opposite one at the same time, until his shoulder was higher than the top of his head. The crowd fell silent, awed by the spectacle. There must have been a hundred onlookers now, and not a whisper could be heard.