“Try this on for size,” shouted Ed Gallacelli. He heard the ’lighter engines roar into take-off and he suddenly felt happy for no reason that he could discern. From his sleeves issued a stream of dense black smoke. Before the cloud enveloped him he glanced over his shoulder to see the airship bank up and away from Steeltown, heading north.
They were gone.
He was glad.
Slipping heat-goggles over his eyes, Ed Gallacelli closed with the security men and ran around, kicking asses and balls in utter invisibility until an unscheduled wind blew and blew his smokescreen over the horizon.
“Oh, dear,” said Ed Gallacelli sheepishly. “I surrender.” He raised his arms. Instantly fingers were seen to tighten on MRCW firing studs. “Oops. Sorry.” He gave a clenched fist salute. “Long live Concordat. Amen!” He began to laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh because the smart security man had taken off his helmet and it was Mikal Margolis and he should have known all along and wasn’t it the best joke of all, better than the tricks he’d kept hidden up his sleeve and then the squad commander gave an order and twelve laser beams spat out and bathed him in flames and did not stop firing until the ashes began to blow away on the treacherous wind.
52
After the battle of Yellow Ford, Arnie Tenebrae built a pyramid of heads outside her command tent. The Parliamentarians had been routed, fleeing across rice paddies shedding weapons, helmets, uniforms, wounded in their panic to escape the tiger-painted demons loping tirelessly in pursuit. She had ordered her death’s head commandos to decapitate any dead or wounded and bring the heads to her. The pyramid was as tall as Arnie Tenebrae. She looked at the grinning heads of ploughboys, riksha mechanics, ’lighter pilots, tin miners, college students, insurance salespersons, and a certain unclean madfire blazed up in her. That night she painted her face in the semblance of the deathbird and as she injected herself with morphine from the medical supplies the deathbird of the dark places rose before her summoning, and told her in shrieks like those of a tortured man that she was the Avatar, the embodiment of the Cosmic Principle; Vastator, the Destroyer, Leveller of Worlds, Slayer of Gods, She who Cannot Be Predicted.
Yellow Ford, Hill 27, Elehanua’s Ferry, Harper’s Barn: the wings of the deathbird scattered the Parliamentarians like chaff.
“Boys against men,” she told her commanders. “Hundreds to one they outnumber us, yet we reap them like rice!”
She knew her captains feared her. They were right to do so. She was mad, she sought bodies to throw on the altar of destruction, she thought she was a god, a demon, a dark angel. They were right to think these things about her. They were true. Victory followed victory.
“Our field-inducer weapon systems makes us invincible,” she declared to her staff after the Battle of Sakamoto Junction. Her captains and lieutenants knew that she meant that it was Arnie Tenebrae, Vastator, that made them invincible. They began to fear that she was right about that too.
Then at the battle of Tetsenok the Parliamentarians somehow turned the Whole Earth Army Tactical Group advance into a retreat. Arnie Tenebrae was not surprised. She had smelled defeat on the wind that morning.
“There is someone out there who wants me,” she said. Doubt began to infest her command, doubt and the wavering of commitment. Arnie Tenebrae did not accept this doubt. How could there be doubt in the living presence of the personification of the Power Cosmic?
Yet at the next staff meeting Lieutenant Lim Chung asked, “Why are we fighting if we don’t gain anything?”
Arnie Tenebrae did not feel the need to answer. Later she had Lieutenant Lim Chung taken far out into the forest, stripped, spreadeagled between two trees, and left to the elements and time.
After the battle of Hill 66, when the Parliamentarians overran the Whole Earth Army’s entrenched positions despite the latters’ invincible field-inducer weapon systems and invisibility fields, a whey-faced farmboy with a truce flag on his back came blundering into the Tactical Group rearguard command headquarters. Arnie Tenebrae listened patiently to the Parliamentarian’s terms of surrender. Then she asked two questions.
“What is your name?”
“Trooper MacNaughton Bellewe, No. 703286543.”
“Who is your chief of staff?”
“Marshall Quinsana, ma’am. Marshall Marya Quinsana.”
Marya Quinsana. Well well well.
Arnie Tenebrae did not have her rejection terms sent back on Trooper MacNaughton Bellewe’s flayed skin, as she had intended. The boy was released alive and whole at the edge of the battle zone with a salutation from general to general in his hand and a string of shrunken heads tied to his belt.
After Hill 66 Arnie Tenebrae was quiet and dangerous. So another Cosmic Principle had entered the drama. The Avatar of the Avenger. Marvellous how all human strife and conflict was a symbolic enactment of loftier struggles between the Powers Cosmic so that every moment of the present was merely a fragment of the past repeating itself over and over again. Now the stage was set, the Gotterdammerung could fall, the Last Trump Blow and it would be her against Marya Quinsana: Vastator and Avenger as it always had been and always would be.
Donohue’s Ridge, Dharmstadt, Red Bridge: three crushing defeats in as many, months. Arnie Tenebrae spent much time alone in her tent crosslegged on the floor meditating upon herself. Lieutenants and captains hurried about, little mice busy with reports of surrender, massacre, annihilation. They meant nothing. Human puppets must jig to the drums of the gods. Arnie Tenebrae’s hands fluttered on the dirt floor-lrumdrumdrumdrum. She and Marya Quinsana, they were the drummer girls, drumdrumdrum.
She called all her remaining forces to her, less than two regular divisions, and withdrew them to the heart of the haunted Forest of Chryse to prepare for the final conflict.
53
There was a wall. Built of old grey stone, mortarless, high as a man’s waist, it did not look very important. But it was important. As with all walls, it was what was on either side of it that gave the wall meaning; whether it was a wall that shut out or a wall that shut in or a wall that merely separated. On one side of the wall was a field of potatoes, morning misty, grey, and cold as an old potato. In this field stood Bethlehem Ares Steel Transport Dirigible BA 3627S Eastern Enlightenment, powered down, empty, hatches open, cold fog swirling around its landing pods and into its open hatches. On the other side of the wall stood the Forest of Chryse, the Ladywood, oldest of all the world’s young places, where St. Catherine herself planted the Tree of World’s Beginning with her steel manipulators. The trees pressed close to the wall, leaning over the perimeter, dense and dark as the stones. Their branches reached toward the open potato field, in certain places their roots had tumbled sections of the old dry stone wall, yet the boundary persisted, for the boundary between forest and field was older than the wall that commemorated it. It was an exclusive wall, built to keep the world out of the forest rather than the forest out of the world.
That was to prove to be important to the three men with backpacks threading through the outmost fringe of trees. Their first footfalls on the tree side of the wall made them men without state or station; exiles. They heard their explosive devices destroy the ’lighter, the blast oddly muffled by the trees, and they were glad, for now they could not go home again. The smoke of the burning rose from the potato field like an indictment of guilt.