Mathers braced himself. You could never be quitesure of the reaction, but he heard the great six pounders coming to bear behind him, and Clegg running up the engine so it sounded like a throaty growl. That usually did the trick. Behind his chainmail mask, Mathers smiled. He enjoyed this next bit.
The warrior stopped, his eyes wide with fear and, while still a full twenty yards away from the ironclad, gave a great cry, threw up his arms and dropped to his knees, genuflecting until his forehead touched the ground. Behind him, his fellows did the same, hardly daring to look upon them.
Then from his position of supplication, he spoke. “We have been expecting you. Your coming has been foretold.”
Mathers hadn’t expected that.
CHAPTER SIX
THEY WERE RUNNING with hatches and pistol ports shut now. Inside the tank, it was stifling, with only the four small festoon lights illuminating the compartment. The stench of sweating bodies, engine oil and rendered animal fats filled the small space, along with the ever-present hallucinogenic fumes from the engine. The men breathed deeply of it, oblivious to all but the petrol fruit fumes; each lost, momentarily, in their own little internal worlds. They might have been in an opium den but for the noise and the infernal juddering as the tank lumbered along the uneven ground. With his visor shut, Clegg had to use his look-stick in order to drive.
“What’s going on? Have the natives bought it?” asked Norman.
“Yeah,” he said. “Now pipe down ’til the Loot gives us the signal.”
Norman winked. “Looks like we’ve got another performance coming up, boys.”
“Good, we haven’t had any decent scran for ages. I wasn’t going to eat that fungus muck they was dishing out before we left. God, what I wouldn’t give for a nice bit o’ mutton.”
“Speak for yourself,” barked Reggie. “Give me a nice fillet steak any day.”
At the back, by the starboard gear levers, Alfie watched small close-knit ripples of red emanating from the vibrating engine and saw each man glowing with a faint aura. He shook his head to disperse the sight as he had tried many times before. The coloured patterns remained drifting in his vision like the stubborn after-images of a star shell. He didn’t like much about this stunt. Everything in his gut told him they shouldn’t be doing this, but do it they did, each time more brazenly and more confidently than the last.
On their first encounter with an urmen enclave the natives, thinking the tank was Skarra, this world’s god of the underworld, prostrated themselves before it and treated the crew as holy men. The crew went along with it in a bemused manner, because it suited their purpose. They rather liked the idea. Too much, it seemed. After months of subsisting on half rations and whatever vile local stew the mongey wallahs came up with, it was a relief to be feted for a change.
Reinforced by the euphoria and confidence imparted by the constant inhalation of the fumes, they were soon exaggerating and expanding the act until it was like a carnival sideshow. Norman, the ex-music hall actor, painted their rain capes with magic symbols and did a few conjuring tricks. At first it was just a jolly, but as the weeks went on their attitudes were tempered by the fumes, and as their side effects took hold, they began to half-believe the act themselves.
Alfie felt a sharp rap on his turtle shell. Jack was staring at him. He looked around to find Frank, Cecil and Norman staring across the engine at him.
Norman stepped up to him and put his mouth close to his ear in order to yell over the sound of the engine.
“I’ll say this once. We’ve got a chance to be something here, to be someone. Don’t you dare muck this up for us.” He poked Alfie in the shoulder to emphasise his point.
Alfie was a little taken aback. He glanced at each of his crewmates in turn. They looked at him with expectation. They wanted his compliance. Alfie, disappointed in his mates but more so in himself, gave a reluctant nod.
Norman held his gaze a little longer, pointed to his own eyes and then at Alfie, “I’m watching you,” before turning back to his gun.
OUTSIDE, MATHERS TURNED around and, with an expansive gesture, held his staff aloft, like Moses before the burning bush, and bowed low before the tank. The ironclad wavered gently in his vision, an effect of the fuel fumes, although it seemed to him that the tank was breathing, its sides expanding and contracting, a fact he now accepted as quite natural.
He wheeled smartly to face the front, his rain cape whipping around him as he turned. He had them in the palm of his hand. He raised his staff like a Regimental Sergeant Major on a parade ground and nodded at the urman. “Lead on. Skarra, god of the underworld, will follow.”
The urman backed slowly away on his knees before getting to his feet and walking back into the jungle with his companions, casting fearful glances behind them. The warriors before him slipped into the undergrowth and vanished from sight, only to re-emerge tens of yards further on.
BEHIND HIS MASK, Mathers took a deep breath and began to march imperiously behind them, ushering the way for his god. Behind him, the armoured juggernaut kept up a stately pace as they entered the jungle.
The undergrowth closed in about them, the shrubbery and saplings groaned and snapped, giving way under the rolling plates of the Ivanhoe. Mathers was aware of shapes in the undergrowth surrounding them. Quick, fleeting, almost insubstantial. More urmen. He pretended not to notice, keeping his steady pace.
The noise of the oncoming tank quelled the chatters and whoops of unseen beasts and the high boughs shook as creatures, startled by the unworldly noise beneath, took flight through the canopy.
The tank took no heed. An air of death, of lifelessness, surrounded it, striking trees and ploughing over stricken trunks as if gorging itself on the life that fell before it. That life should flee it or be crushed beneath it seemed only right and something the urmen expected from a god of the underworld. No wonder they melted into the undergrowth, reappearing only to offer a brief benediction and a direction, unwilling to approach for fear of their very lives being sucked from them.
All the time as he walked, Mathers could hear the tank muttering to him in its mechanical growl, whispering encouragements and dark truths, pattering out half-perceived homilies, making promises, soothing with words of power. It filled his head with such concepts that it began to pound, luring him with talk of other spaces, other realms. Ideas so profound that he couldn’t hold them in his mind and they slipped from his consciousness, leaving only a vague sense of loss and shame as though he had somehow disappointed it.
So rapt was he by this communication that he scarcely noticed the slavering creature with matted fur and great long limbs, all angles and joints, as it swung screeching down towards him, teeth bared. He felt nothing. No fear, no anger, just a complete disinterest. Then his god, Skarra, the god of the underworld, spoke, its words a brief staccato chant of death. The gangly beast, its momentum stilled in mid-air by the abrupt invocation, dropped to the jungle floor, dead.
His primitive escorts froze as the machine gun burst ripped through the air, but seeing the beast die they bowed and bobbed towards the Ivanhoe before moving off, emboldened by the protection now offered by the crawling god.
Mathers looked down at the body, its long limbs twisted and snapped beneath it. He cricked his neck, cleared his throat, gathered himself and walked on for what seemed like hours, but he had no way of telling. Time seemed to expand and contract. The only constants he had were the jungle and the iron murmurs of Skarra.