The House of Saint Glinda 12 page

“No wonder this place is uninhabited,” said Burny once.

“It didn’t used to be. The Quadlings lived here,” Liir pointed out.

“It’s one huge stinkhouse. Any locals still preferring this to the rest of Oz must be cretinous. Or subhuman. En’t our old Wizard done them a favor to clear them out?”

BUT WORM-CLODS AND MOSQUITOESwere hardly enemy combatants, and the Seventh Spear knew things could get worse. Ithad to get worse, or why were they being asked to suffer the indignity of this climate?

They gained an uncharacteristic hummock of land, a half mile across, from which the ground water had drained, more or less. Commander Cherrystone gave them permission to peel off their boots and air their feet. Eighty men scratched between their toes, where the itch was most maddening; flakes of wettish skin billowed before being borne away. It almost looked like snow.

Commander Cherrystone spoke about their mission.

“By my reckoning, we aren’t far from the outskirts of Qhoyre,” he said. “Common talk in the City treats Qhoyre as a provincial backwater, and compared to Oz’s capital, it is, of course. But it has a distinguished history of its own, predating annexation by northerners. In the modern times, there’s usually been a Viceroy stationed here to oversee. Not now. Were things calmer, we would have expected someone dispatched from Government House to serve as a translator of the native tongue, Qua’ati. We’ll do without, I’m afraid. Unless I have a secret linguist among my fine young men?”

No one volunteered.

“As I thought. It’s an ugly tongue but not hard to pick up, I’m told, if you work at it. I’m sure some of you will find yourselves fluent in a matter of weeks, and that will come in handy in due course.”

Thematter of weeks stumped them. Also, in due course . Was this some sort of permanent billeting? To what end?

Commander Cherrystone explained. It seemed that the Viceroy had been abducted, and his wife had disappeared, too. No one in Qhoyre admitted to knowing who was responsible, but the indifference of the natives to the situation was unsettling to the Scarecrow’s cabinet back in the Emerald City. Quite offensively the Quadlings behaved as if life ought to go on much as normal, whether with a Viceroy or without one.

The job of the Seventh Spear was to befriend the locals, keep the public order, and-best-case scenario-identify and punish the perpetrators. If the Viceroy and his wife could be found and rescued, all the better, though he wasn’t an indispensable civil servant, apparently-otherwise he’d not have been saddled with such a hardship assignment. In any case, the brief of the Seventh Spear didn’t extend to recovery of the Viceroy; showing some muscle, however, was paramount.

“We’ll move into the city, reclaim Government House, and restore order,” he said. “There may be some bloodshed, men.”

They nodded and clutched their weapons.

“Let us bow our heads and put our holy mission of right governance in the sight of the Unnamed God.”

This, so far as it could be said for a fact, they did.

DISAPPOINTINGLY, THEIR RECLAIMING of Government House involved no bloodshed at all. The toothless old woman who had set up a loom in the eastern verandah merely handed over a rusty key that had been dangling on a string around her neck. For one so plump and wrinkled, she took off at a jaunty trot. Before nightfall a cohort of youngish teenagers, possibly grandchildren, appeared in the street to haul her loom away. They left a large tray of aromatic rice, still steaming, and they tossed red blossoms on the verandah floor that, in the moonlight, looked like splashed blood.

Thus a military skirmish fizzled into a social call. The establishment of dominance proved all the more elusive because the native culture was one of deference, hospitality, and bonhomie. “This is going to be harder than I thought,” said Commander Cherrystone.

Being built large enough to be pretentious and commanding, Government House could just about domicile the entire company of the Seventh Spear. There was a lot of work to be done in terms of general upkeep, however. Cracks in the plaster, mildewing whitewash. The garden had run to seed and was a total embarrassment. How longhad the Viceroy been gone? Or had he simply been a hapless steward of government property?

For a good price, the locals supplied acres of mosquito netting, which the men slung from hooks in the ceilings in the local fashion, cocooning each small grouping of cots. For extra protection, lengths of netting were nailed up at the windows, and a webbed arcade was erected from the kitchen door to the latrines at the back of the garden. In their smalls the men could walk to relieve themselves at night without fear of being bitten alive.

Some of the soldiers picked up Qua’ati, as Commander Cherrystone had predicted they would.

IT NEVER SNOWED in Quadling Country. The swamp forests held in the heat. Time seemed languorous and unchanging. How many years had they been there? Three? Four? They’d reopened a school and built a kind of surgery to augment the work of the local doctors. Some of the men had moved out of Government House, informally, and were consorting with Quadling women. This was forbidden during a campaign of occupation, but Commander Cherrystone looked the other way, for he had a common-law wife of his own by now and he hardly cared to enforce an inconvenient standard.

Liir worked mornings in Commander Cherrystone’s outer office. He copied documents, he filed, he recommended which of his peers needed punishment for various minor infractions. As often as not Commander Cherrystone was absent from the inner office. Liir could go in and smooth down the crinkled months-old newspapers in which the shipments of Gillikinese wine came wrapped. He read about the Scarecrow’s unfortunate accident involving that beaker of lighter fluid-what a horrible twist of fate, that it wasright there !-and the subsequent elevation of the Emperor. “Would’ve liked to be invited tothat investiture,” said Commander Cherrystone, coming in on Liir as he jerked upright from his perusings.

“Old news is better than no news,” Cherrystone remarked ruefully, about once a week. “Still, maybe it’s better to be marginalized. You don’t get noticed, and there’s a liberty in that, eh, son?”

“You’ll want a bottle of the Highmeadow blanc in the water well, sir, if you’re having guests at table tonight.”

“You remember everything. I’d be lost without you. Can you see to it?”

“I will.” He already had.

Once a small crate of perguenay cigarettes arrived. “Bless my sweet bankers, I must’ve made another killing,” said the Commander, reading a note. “Those Shizian accountants are wizards; they can make money out of a massacre of mice. Try one, Liir, you won’t find better.”

“I’ve no skill at that, sir.”

“It’s not much fun to smoke alone. Put down those charts till later and join me on the verandah.” It sounded like an order, so Liir obeyed, willingly enough.

The smoke of dried perguenay was nutty and gamy both, hardly disagreeable, though taking perfumed heat into his lungs made Liir cough. “Ain’t it grand, the life,” said Cherrystone, propping his boots on the seat of another chair.

“You could get used to this if you were an ironsmith. Bit roasty for me, though.”

“You learn to love it. So. Liir. What do you hear from home?”

Liir was unused to personal conversations with his peers, and this blunt question from his boss unnerved him. He was glad to have smoke in his lungs; he held it there while he thought what to answer. “Precious little.”

“Sometimes the less you hear, the more precious it becomes.”

Sentimental math problems were beyond Liir. “I follow my work day to day, breakfast to bedtime, sir. That’s my life, and it’s enough.”

“You’re a good lad. You’re shaping up. Don’t think I don’t notice.” Commander Cherrystone closed his eyes. “I would’ve been happy for a son like you, but my fond Wendina only gave me girls.”

“You must miss them, sir.”

“They’re girls,” he said neutrally, and his point was beyond Liir. They’re girls, so why bother? OrThey’re girls, so of course I miss them, don’t be daft.

“Since we’re chatting, I wonder if it’s bold to ask a question of you, sir.”

“Ask away.”

“If you had children, how could you stomach storming the castle of Kiamo Ko and carting off the widow and children of Fiyero?”

“Oh, back to that! Fair enough; you’ve earned the right. It was another time, another country-perhaps another me, Liir. When you’re off on a posting and your family is left behind, they loom in your daily reflections with a…a size, a significance…and the thought of them gives you courage in times of doubt. I didn’t like the maneuvers at Kiamo Ko, I’ll have you know that right now. But I like being a man of my word. I like doing my duty. As I see you do, too.

“Besides,” he added, “I did my best to delegate.”

“Do you remember seeing Nor? The little girl?”

“She wasn’t a tyke, she was growing up. I saw her. She was brave, if that’s what you’re asking. Quite possibly she didn’t understand what was going on.”

“Quite possibly.” What a phrase. Of course she didn’t understand it: how could she? She’d been raised on a mountaintop by a widowed mother and a half dozen spinster aunts. What could she know of military maneuvers?

“I see it still gives you pause.”

Perhaps less pause than it once had. Waiting for fate to intervene was hardly taxing, Liir realized. “I think of her from time to time.”

“You probably harbor a youthful resentment against me. It’s all very normal, my lad. You were young at the time, and what could you know of duty and honor?”

“I am not sure, even now, I know what honor is.”

The Commander was silent for so long Liir felt perhaps he’d been rude, or that the Commander thought his remark was rhetorical. But finally he opened his eyes and said, “How would it seem to you to be promoted to the rank of a Minor Menacier?”

Liir felt himself blushing. “I don’t deserve it.”

“You deserve it, son. You deserve the honor of it. I’m not a wordsmith, I can’t define the concept of honor. But I know it when I meet it, and I see by the look on your face you do, too.” He grinned almost sheepishly at Liir. His teeth were yellowing in this climate.

WORD ARRIVED THAT THEnew leadership in the Palace was displeased with laxness at Government House, and requested the prompt execution of the Seventh Spear’s original mission.

Commander Cherrystone turned to Liir. Although chilly politeness often still marked their exchanges, there had come to be some measure of regard on both sides. Liir was often disdainful of Commander Cherrystone for his complicated moods-now a front for the Palace, now a critic of the system-but Liir practiced loyalty and obedience, virtues the Seventh Spear espoused and he shared. And he was grateful for the promotion, and the smarter braid on his dress habillard.

Some of the fellows resented the promotion, but they saw the point. Liir was unusually circumspect for a young man. Not in any obvious way a dangerous loner, Liir kept to the margins, befriended other soldiers only so far as was fitting, and he didn’t consort with the Quadlings beyond what the work required. He was the model of a military man at the start of his career, so far as anyone could tell. And since he had no social links with Quadling circles, he was a natural to enjoy what confidences might arise working in the Commander’s office.

“Sit down and let me rehearse an idea with you,” said Cherrystone one afternoon. Liir remained standing.

Bengda was a small community twenty minutes southwest of Qhoyre on the broad flat river known as Waterslip. In the days before the Wizard had mucked up the water table and wreaked havoc with a centuries-old way of life, the Bengda district had thrived in one of the few dry areas, humps of sandy hill on either side of Waterslip. A bridge between the cliffs had spanned the river. Over the years, with the harvesting of trees, the soil eroded, though. The hills lost height and subsided into the muck. Little by little the Bengdani villagers either left or took to the bridge. Now the hamlet of Bengda supported itself by exacting a toll from the ferries and commercial fishing vessels that used Waterslip as a highway between Qhoyre and points south.

“Entirely improper, of course,” said Commander Cherrystone.

“Surely they’ll stop if you threaten them with a fine?” asked Liir.

“They might and they might not. I hate to give them a chance to knuckle under, for it’s worth more to us if they resist. Can you sniff around and find out if they would?”

“I’m not the man for that job,” said Liir stiffly. “Begging your pardon, sir, you have more pull in that department than I do.”

“If I start talking, I’ll plant ideas in their heads.” The Commander spoke wearily. “It’ll work much better if it happens below ranks. Your expertise is needed, Liir. Can you put it about among the men that this information is of interest to me?”

Liir did, and came back a week later. The residents of Bengda were stroppy, at least by Quadling standards, but they would probably cave if presented with an order of prohibition or a bill of tax.

“That’s no good, then.” The Commander rubbed his elbows. “What they’re effecting is a kind of extortion of river merchants, really. Perhaps I could charge them triple all that they’ve collected since we’ve been here. That would beggar them and they’d have to resist. Find out, will you?”

Liir returned and said that, begging the Commander’s pardon, he couldn’t really learn the answer to so specific a question without tipping the Commander’s hand. “Tip, tip, that’s the point!” roared the Commander, so Liir tipped.

The reply came back that the extended families of the Bengdanis would manage to come up with the triple penalty and that the bridge dwellers would stop levying the toll.

“Damn,” said Commander Cherrystone, and he had Liir send out a formal censure of the Bengda bridge dwellers with a public declamation and a request for a penalty twice what had already been posted as the triple penalty.

Bloody hell no, said the Bengdanis, in Qua’ati, of course. At least not yet.

They paid up what they’d collected and made no promise as to when the exorbitant balance could be expected.

“That’s that, then,” said the Commander. “Make sure the whole district knows about their resistance, Liir. This has to get back to the City or my reputation is, like everything else in this Quadling quagmire, mud.”

Liir did what he could, talking against the Bengdanis at the mess hall, the local gin pavilions, in the latrines even. It was uphill work now, for the Seventh Spear had become lax, and many men tended to think their Commander was getting high and mighty, not to say unreasonable. “He could just fork over a third of his own salary to his concubine, and she could find a way to get it to the Bengdanis,” they said. “Why scapegoat those poor buggers? Why make life so miserable?”

“It’s not ours to make life miserable nor to avoid misery when it’s required of us,” said Liir. “Have you whole lot gone to ground here? That says little about the military discipline we learned.”

“Lighten up,” they answered.

COMMANDERCHERRYSTONE TOOKLIIRunder his arm and gave him the assignment to burn the village right into the river. “Tonight,” he said.

Liir’s face was stony. “Sir,” he said, “you know as well as I that it’s almost impossible to set anything alight in this climate. The moisture seeps into everything.”

“I’ve sent to the Emerald City for provisions to help,” said the Commander. “I’ve got six buckets of the tar of pulped Gillikinese maya flower, which would burn in a monsoon. Once night falls, you can paint the struts and supports of the bridge with it. Begin with the beams nearest the ends of the bridge, and paint high. Toward the center, paint low, closer to water level. Light the ends first-simultaneously-to create walls of fire on each approach, so the Bengdanis can’t escape that way. They’ll be crowded toward the center, and there’ll be time for them to consider what to do, to call for help, before the lower-lit struts burn up enough to imperil them.”

“Who will come to their aid?” said Liir. “They’re twenty minutes from Qhoyre.”

“In twenty minutes someone will hear them and, just as important, someone will arrive in time to witness their distress. That’s the important bit. I’ll see to that if we synchronize our timepieces.”

“Arrive in time to witness? Not to help?”

“Liir, it’s a bridge. They can jump into the water.”

“Commander. Begging your pardon. No one swims in Waterslip at night, and rarely during the day, either. There are deadly water eels in the depths, and alligators that feed nocturnally.”

“I didn’t settle them there,” said the Commander. “Do I detect a note of insurrection in your voice, soldier?”

“I don’t believe so, sir,” said Liir. He was troubled, though, as he turned away.

So that there could be no possibility of a warning leaked to the Bengdanis, the campaign would have to commence at once. Liir conscripted Ansonby, Burny, and several others. Learning a trick or two from the high command in the Emerald City, Liir didn’t tell them the nature of their mission. They were to dress in dark clothes and to wear mosquito-netted caps, to smudge their faces with mud, and to tell no one what they were doing.

“It’s about the kidnapped Viceroy, I think,” Liir invented, when someone pressed him. “There’s been a lead. We’re going to smoke out the kidnappers. But we can’t give them a lick of warning or they’ll scarper.”

Sunset, with its usual caramel-orangey smear, was quick. The night creaked in on the wings of countless wakeful insects churring. An audience of billions.

“DETAILS TO FOLLOW, fellows, but first things first: This is a secret mission.” Liir and his companions huddled by the flatboats he’d commandeered for the exercise. “You’ve been chosen because you have girlfriends here. You’ll want to get back to them quickly as possible and hop into the sack with them. My advice is to try something new tonight. Make it memorable for you both, so if there’s a call for alibis, you’ll be prepared.”

“But fraternizing is frowned up,” said Ansonby.

“I mean if the Quadlings cry for scapegoats, you’ll be covered. Anyone needs advice in the sex department, ask Ansonby. Tell them about position six, Ansonby.” Liir winked. “It’s known as Choking the Mermaid in some quarters.”

He wasn’t fooling anyone. Liir was suspected of sexual ignorance, and he had a reputation for an old-fashioned reticence about such matters. The fellows looked unhappy.

“If we’re supplied with alibis,” said Burny after a while,“what about the fellows who en’t?”

“Tough luck hits us all,” said Liir. “Sooner or later. Maybe they’ll duck it this time. Maybe we will, too. Come on, we’re moving out.”

Once it grew dark, the mosquito problem drove most Quadlings into their stilted huts, though the odd canoe or flatboat sidled along. No one paid much attention. With the sky moonless at this time of the month-no doubt the Commander had already figured on this-visibility was reduced, helpfully.

A half mile north of Bengda, Liir signaled the boats in. He gestured at the rickety community cantilevered over both edges of the bridge, a hive of windowed light and the noise of supper and chatter. Then he explained the mission.

Burny was the first to speak. “Folks might die,” he said.

“Not sure on that score, but I believe that’s taken into account. Regrettable, but there you are.”

“But women and-and children,” said Burny. “I mean, what’s children got to do with tolls or paying taxes, or refusing to pay them? En’t they blameless an‘ all that?”

“Are children still blameless if they’re going to grow up to be the enemy? I’m not going to discuss this. We’re not taking a class in moral philosophy. We’re soldiers and these are our orders. Ansonby, Somes, Kipper, you do the far end; we rest will start on this side. Here’s the supplies-tar, brushes, a flint when you’re ready. Knives.”

“What’re the knives for?” asked Burny.

“Carving your initials in the supports. You moron, what do you think the knives are for? Use them if you need to. Are we ready?”

“I can’t do this.”

“We’ll ask the Unnamed God for the successful completion of our mission.” Four seconds of silence. “Let’s go.”

They poled the flatboats forward and then nudged their way among the villagers’ fishing boats, which as usual were tied in a long barricade beneath the bridge to prevent night traffic from sneaking through toll-free. The soldiers got a shock when they roused an old Quadling grandfather from the bottom of his boat, probably avoiding his scold of a wife. They clapped their hands around his head and bound his mouth tightly. Then they tied him in a burlap sack and dumped him into Waterslip.

Commander Cherrystone had chosen the hour perfectly, for the children of the settlement were fed but not bedded down, and as the soldiers set to smearing the tar pitch, they could hear the shrill laughter, the tired crying, the occasional lullaby filtering down through the rush-matted floors above their heads. The noise made a suitable cover, were any needed, for the quiet work of arson.

Their retreat would have to be swift, Liir knew, not only so that they would go unnoticed by fleeing Bengda villagers, but also so that his men would be spared the witnessing of what was bound to be ugly. All tyrants were harsh, but fire was more ungovernable than most.

He mouthed, “Set. Right. Light.” With trembling hands both teams reached for the oil-soaked rags, which were balled by net wire. The men impaled the rags on the end of their swords, and struck their quickflints. The length of the sword allowed each soldier to reach high enough to light the tar his mate had already smeared into place.

One team finished faster than the others, since Ansonby in his haste whipped his sword too swiftly around. Perilously, the clot of burning rag dislodged early, but Ansonby ducked, and the rag hissed into the river.

It was neat, a job well done, and both flatboats were eighty feet back before the timbers truly caught and the night became annealed with the light of hell. The river reflected the crackling timbers, the shuddering bridge, which almost at once seemed to be gateposted with pillars of fire thirty feet tall. Good strong stuff, that maya flower tar! Then the screams, the dropping timbers, the burning water.

They were to have been fully away by now, and some other contingent was to come upon the sight, to report it objectively. But the flatboats got snared bankside in the knotted roots formed by ancient, shadowy sedge trees. Besides, the men couldn’t stop looking. They could see Bengdanis running from window to window, house to house, and climbing up the mildewy thatch of their roofs. Some threw furniture in the water and tried to leap upon it; a few were successful, though Quadling furniture, mostly woven rush, was known neither for its strength nor its buoyancy.

One clump of thatch fell lazily through the blackness, like a falling star extinguishing itself, or a burning alphabetic vowel swallowed by watery silence, or a firebird plunging into a suicidal dive in a dark nameless lake.

Drunk on metaphor, thought Liir: that means it’s time to scamper. “Guess we better go. We mess up this part of the job, guys, we’ve messed up the whole thing.”

“Whatwas the point of this?” asked the one called Kipper.

“Campaigns are devious; that’s why they’re called campaigns and not ballroom dancing lessons,” said Liir, but his voice sounded odd. He leaned his whole weight against the barge pole and began to move out. “The beds of your lady friends are cold tonight without you, lads, and if you’re not back in time there’ll be someone else to take your place before dawn. You know it better than I. Look sharp-”

He himself looked sharp, casting an eye around to make sure nothing was coming upriver from the Bengda bridge. How could it, unless it was a river monster disturbed by the conflagration and rising in rage? No boat would ever leave from that bridge again, nor be prevented from passing under it, either; it was falling, timber by burning timber, and its population with it, as he watched.

A man and a woman on the near side, which was collapsing haltingly into the burning water, had grabbed a child between them. Her clothes were aflame and the parents or neighbors tore them off. All their mouths were open, though Liir couldn’t distinguish one human scream from all the others. Then the parents braced themselves as upright as they could against the sloping structure and began to swing the girl, arms and legs, to fling her free of the burning.

Liir was reminded of a game he’d played when he was what, seven, eight?-when Irji and Manek had swung little Nor like that, and then swung him, too. But it was into a bank of snow in the wintery heights of the Great Kells, at Kiamo Ko; it wasn’t to save his life, or hers. It was for fun.

The girl twisted as they let go, and her arms reached back, as if she could will herself to swim through the night air and return to the arms of her parents. The fire behind them caught up with their legs and ran up their backs as she hovered like a naked girl bird, gilded red-bronze in the light. Then she crashed into the water. The efforts of her parents had worked this much: she landed beyond the pools of burning oil in which everyone else had fallen.

Liir leaped from the boat, hissing over his shoulder “Back to base! That’s an order!” He didn’t turn to see if he was obeyed. In vain he looked for the girl. He didn’t see her. He didn’t see if she had swum ashore, or if she had sunk, or if she had swum back into the fiery liquid to join her parents in their immolation.

GOVERNMENTHOUSE WAS LOCKED down with tighter security than he’d ever seen it, but Liir had no trouble signaling to the night watch and getting in. Despite instructions to the contrary, Ansonby and Burny and the others weren’t out canoodling with their local girls; they’d taken refuge in the barracks. The company of their mates must seem more consoling. And Liir observed thatno one was off the premises that night. The other soldiers must have been alerted not to stray. For defense of the post? For their own safety? That meant the guys assigned to the mission would have been the only ones outside of military protection. Liir saw it now. They’d have been sitting ducks, isolated from each other, naked in bed with native women when and if the news spread and a retaliation was launched.

“The hero of the hour! Where’ve you been?” asked Somes.

Liir started to say something about the girl. He hadn’t been able to find her, partly because it had been hard to train his eyes on the scene. It seared too brightly to be able to read.

“We’ve been fortifying ourselves with whiskey and patting ourselves on the back. The bridge is history! Come in for a rousing welcome.”

“History. History. In a flash,” said Liir. “Need to get something first.”

He ducked along the upper verandah that looked onto the central courtyard, keeping back in the shadows and out of sight of men lounging by the fountain below. It only took him a moment to grab his satchel, the few things he’d stored in his trunk at the foot of his bed. He put his dress boots on the windowsill: a kind of symbol, he supposed, that he’d jumped. Everyday boots would serve well enough. Then, the old, mildewing cape and the broom on his back, a corked flagon of fresh water slung over his shoulder, he made his way lightly down a back staircase and through the dry goods pantry. Then over the wall, literally and figuratively.

WITH THEWITCH’S BROOM, he had the means to travel swiftly, but his heart was so heavy that he couldn’t imagine lifting off the ground-or if he did, only to reach a height suitable for throwing himself from his perch.

He walked, and took no pains to conceal his tracks or silence his footfall. North, as far as he could tell. He corrected his trajectory by checking it against the movement of the sun, and if one day he wobbled too much to the west, the next he would likely wobble easterly.

It was early spring when he left Qhoyre-spring by the calendar, not by the growing season, for in the marshlands, rot and flower and fruit and seed and rot happened simultaneously all year. Long ago the climate had become a second skin from which he couldn’t extract himself until, weeks on, his path began to climb, and now and then his foot landed on a hillock of dry grass.

He’d expected some crocodile to snap off a limb while he slept, a marsh cat to take a swipe at him, but the only creatures that seemed aware of his presence were the mosquitoes, and he yielded himself to them without complaint. He imagined them bleeding him dead, a thousand bites a day for a thousand days, until from the inside out he would have dried up entirely. Then-another way of flying!-a strong gust might come along and begin to worry a fleck of skin, and his whole being might toss itself like a scatter of midges in the air and disappear.

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 784