"Joke indeed! The only bleeding joke around here is . . .is"—he fumbled thickly for the proper words—"is that we are here." Satisfied that his point had been made, he took another pull on the sack and flourished his saber in the wet air. Then his voice fell again. "You know, young sir?" He looked up abruptly. "Your name, if I may be so forward?"
"Amon VanRoark." The youth bowed slightly to the drunk. "And yours?"
"Second Lieutenant Tapp, lately of the kingdom of Cynibal and servant of his Imperial Majesty, Bourn-mouth the Third, Conqueror of Worlds, Liege of Creations. Also lately running from charges of treason relating to the disappearance of the steam frigate
Tori-man
and its subsequent reappearance under the flag of the free city of Enador." He drank again from the leather sack, smacking his lips with delight at the foul brew. "And also, my sir, a wanderer, a man of vast passions and laughter and loneliness." Now his voice was soft and dreamy, as if he fancied himself possessed of a poetic soul. Impressed with his own depth of feeling, he lost the thread of his conversation. "Where was I, sir?" he blurred at VanRoark.
"You were Tapp, man of vast—"
"Ah yes, that Tapp. Indeed I was . . . am. You see, I am a wanderer, I've seen many nations, and none of them, and heard at my mother's side the tale of my father marching to the Meadows with all the lads of great Cynibal beside him. And how he never came back, and how, in some way I
still
cannot understand, I should be happy for him in that."
A curious shade of water-reflected silver and shadow crossed over his rutted face, drawing VanRoark nearer, quite against his better nature. Then the little man sighed again and set his voice into a new, solemn tone. "And then, you see, sir, ten years ago a man came to Cynibal all dressed in fine white. And he spoke to us, to me, and he said there was going to be a war at a place called the Meadows, and how, if we wanted to save our souls, we had to go and fight there. Now, young sir, I remembered perfectly well that three of my forebears had set off on just such a venture, probably even heard the same things and had the same hopes. But I had never
heard
the men who had spoken to them. And though I knew all this, I also knew beyond all doubt that
this
would be our last gesture in time.
"So I ditched my commission, which was getting a little hot anyway from the
Toriman
row, and left my bawling old lady and several other broken hearts, to travel west with some fellow lunatics. It took about a year, overland and by Sea, but at last we made it to a place called the Burn. It's a very old place, you know, and I was told that one of the false-Armageddons had been fought there. Ghastly place, sir, all burned and blasted, and the mountains look like they had been melted once. You think the Belt is dead? It'sa flaming paradise compared to the Burn. Lord," he muttered, shaking his head and taking a drink, "a flaming paradise.
"But there were others like me there, a whole bleeding army! All come to do old Evil and Time their last." Then, even more slowly, "And, sir, when we marched from the Burn to the Meadows you could
feel,
sir, you could
feel
God moving with us! Two million men maybe—I don't know just how many—and all around us there were . . . were . . . " He began fumbling again, trying to pull thoughts and memories from places his mind had hidden them in, lest they run wild, raging about and turning the sane parts of him rotten. " . . . lights, moving lights . . . and creases of shadow floating around us, but we could still feel them pressing in on us. God! How powerful we felt, so bleeding full of Right and Good and all the . . . Godddd, sir!" Tapp yelled, low and savage. "They were there! The whole bleeding lot of them, sir! I saw them!" He slammed his fists into his eyes and began moaning, only bothering to make the curses understandable. VanRoark wanted to leave, for he was at once terrified and embarrassed by the man; but he stayed and after a while the man was quiet, put the saber into its scabbard and threw the empty wine skin into the stagnant water. VanRoark rose and helped the little man descend the conning tower; his hands were cut by the rusted metal and the red flowed darkly into the saliva Tapp had drooled onto them. He began mumbling apologies to both VanRoark and God, begging VanRoark to take him away from the pens to a nice dry gutter where he might sleep it off.
Moved by the knowledge that here at last was a man who had been to the Meadows and, more importantly, was journeying back there again, VanRoark dragged him back to the cut-rock streets of Charhampton and dropped him into a room which the inn's landlord had thoughtfully provided for drunken members of the caravan. He left the man snoring peacefully, but later that night, when the house was awakened by screaming, he knew that it was Tapp; VanRoark dared not move from his bed or open his eyes until another drunk had silenced him.
They crossed the Trextel River the next day and continued southward between the Greenbelt and the somewhat less rugged coastline. Tapp had joined them.
It took them two months of traveling to reach Enador, on the south bank of the Talbight Estuary. The traveling was relatively pleasant, or as pleasant as their world would allow it to be. Tapp, being almost continually drunk, did very little to maintain the company, but from him streamed an incredible succession of lies and legends, stories ranging from amazingly accurate recitations from Cynibal's treasure books to equally amazing tales of virility in her brothels. His grand gestures and inflated oratory easily caught the ears of the young men from Raud, with their own dreams of piety and pornography, so Tapp was never without enough liquor to fuel his memory. VanRoark did not question him about the Wars again, much as he would have liked to, for he feared it would break the mood of their traveling as they followed the end of summer south.
Besides a growing affection for this man with the deep olive skin and jaundiced eyes, there arose another feeling in VanRoark. For so long he had been empty, content only to gather small bits of a dubious past and to move through his existence with little real trouble or thought. Then he had fatally begun to assemble the old fragments into understandable patterns, patterns which the "words" of Timonias had blasted into a picture of history.
But this was a scar and did nothing to fill up his merely earthly existence. Now he began to surround it with conceptions of life such as he had never come to before.
Always to his left was the Sea, bright and glittering and forever restless. To his right, the Greenbelt with its dust and poisons and the gunmetal mountains behind it: always dead, eternal, unmoving, except to crumble into finer dust. The Sea was just as eternal, but its timelessness was one of life, not death. How curious that he had never really noticed the life teeming in the Sea, the flying fish and dolphin that cut through its surface and flew over it, the white of its surf and beaches. He looked to the Greenbelt and saw its diseased ironbushes and saltgrasses, a large wolf spider eating another wolf spider.
Once, when they had camped on the straits that separated the mainland from the Isle of Oromund, he had walked out onto the sterile expanse of the Belt. It was dusk, the only time of day that the land acquired anything faintly resembling beauty, a desolate lunar beauty. He stopped and in the half-light spotted a brilliantly colored bug by his foot; most of the Belt's inhabitants were either a dirty tan or dun color, but this one was garishly marked in turquoise and yellow stripes, its legs booted in white and a hood of the same color running up its many-jointed neck and mantis head. VanRoark bent down to examine the creature, and then walked quickly back to the camp, much sicker than he thought he should have been.
The cannibalism of the wolf spiders was to be expected in such a detestable looking breed. But the wondrously colored bug had twisted its long neck over its body and was calmly, methodically disemboweling itself; the opal wings were easily spread so that its jaws might reach its vitals sooner. It was the careful, infinitely methodical feeling of the self-dissection that bothered VanRoark; trapped on the world, or at least ignorant of the Sea, the insect was committing suicide, an act that either implied intelligence in a very primitive life form, or merely the dictate of instinct. It was this last thought and its implications that drove him back to the Sea and Oromund's shadowed hills.
The Sea, though, was always full with that which lived and moved and functioned and was clean. There, life was not scarred from radiation or dying from birth because of disease or starvation; nowhere else on the earth did such life exist, and as VanRoark walked beside it, saw its storms for the first time beating upon its own washed beaches, instead of silted, filth-clogged harbors, his spirits rose. The Wars faded and cooled in him; he kept traveling only because of the Sea and because there was no reason at all to return home.
VanRoark did not find out that Tapp was dying until they had reached Enador. The weapons that had been used at the Meadows by some men, while not fatal, had given him radiation poisoning. He had lived through the initial dose as he had through the Wars themselves, but it had left behind a small unpredictable cancer. The only outward manifestation of it, aside from the pain and the vomiting of blood, was a bleeding ulcer on the back of Tapp's neck. It had briefly flared after the Meadows, and then subsided, only seasonal fluctuations and the lightly stained collars reminding him of its presence. Now it had grown, round and angry, dribbling pus and reddened lymph down his neck. Tapp took this to be an indication of his impending end; thus the liquor, and the journeying to the Meadows—again.
VanRoark found a richness in the tangle of Tapp's motives such as he had seldom seen in the world. Why was he going to the Meadows? he would ask again when Tapp was sober. And in time Tapp said that he was going to avenge his father's death, to find glory, or booty, or make his death a bit less painful than the doctors had prophesied, or to fight in a holy war, a jihad that had been declared against a human enemy and not creation. Of course, beyond all of this lay the things he had said and remembered in the submarine pens, things that still managed to creep out of their hiding places for a moment to turn his eyes to the ground and to make his hands pick nervously at the bleeding wound in his neck.
He seemed to like the jihad fiction the best, for he could play up an equally false cynicism against it. "Right, then, 'Roark," he would sometimes command, his saber in his right hand and the other clamped upon VanRoark's shoulder, "off to the Meadows to fight for the Prophets with their glittering eyes, and thousands of the Faithful behind us! Ah, grand it'll be, us sweeping the Infidel before us, circumcising them on the run!"
Van Roark would support him with questions of the spires, harems, and other attendant treasures that would fall to them once the Meadows were crossed and the unknown lands north of them captured. He still feared to let Tapp slide down into his memories, yet half hoping that he would.
They stayed at Enador for a week, waiting for a ship to carry them south; the rather doubtful location of their destination didn't trouble them much. Although when they inquired at chandleries, cartography shops, or along the waterfront, they got either a rough laugh, a glob of spit at their feet (at which Tapp's ulcer would blaze deep scarlet and his hand would start moving for the saber's pommel), or a patronizing smile. At least people had heard of the Meadows.
Enador was still one of the few places left on the eastern coast of the world that could still lay any claim to wealth or power; chiefly, her riches came from the Sea, upon which she still carried a reasonably active commerce, and her slow cannibalization of the remains of the Dresau Islands. The Islands had died soon after they had sent their last fleet to fight at one of the false-Armageddons; but her sailors had left a lot behind and now only Enador had the ships and the desire to pick the bones. The two river monitors which allowed Enador to control the Talbight Estuary all the way to Donnigol were armed with Dresau guns, powered by Dresau engines, and fueled with oil that had lain in storage tanks outside of Duncarin for centuries.
But even so, Enador's stance was as precarious as any in the world, perhaps more so in view of the land and sea areas she aspired to control. Too often were the monitors lobbing shells into the rebellious primitives of Svald or Larine when the lizards and hooded basilisks from the Enstrich Marshes swam or crawled north and their eyes could be seen from the city's walls.
Regardless of all this, Enador was still the trading center of the known world, and as such she almost always had a fair amount of commerce in her roadstead and harbor. VanRoark noted that many of the ships were scavengers, dealing in the remains of worlds long dead, like those that brought the guns and sheet steel from the Dresau Islands, the fortresses of Charhampton and the Armories.
As the world drank more and more blood from the bodies of its predecessors and gnawed more deeply into their putrefied flesh, the scavenger ships were forced to sail farther outward, to the fjords and bays of the anonymous northlands or to the Old Nations to the west and south past Ihetah-Incalam. VanRoark and Tapp left the party of hunters and began looking for ships journeying to such far points.
Inside a week they had paid passage on a barque of two thousand tons, the
Garnet
; her master was going to the Meadows, as were they, because of the calling of the prophet. But he reckoned no further than the concentration of military equipment that would surely be found there. A light-fingered crew of sufficient delicacy would be able to garner a rich harvest of small arms and explosives before the Holy became wise. And, who knows, they were sailing to a place of great tradition and antiquity; even if no army was being gathered there, the place should offer more than enough in salvageable material to make the voyage highly profitable.
So they sailed on board the
Garnet
with her mob of greedy half-wits and two others who were merely halfwits, in Tapp's initial judgment. The first, a tall emaciated man named Yarrow, who spent most of the voyage spitting his rotting lungs over the side, was an undiluted fanatic; he delighted at spouting Scripture from any one of a hundred holy books and prophesying a glorious end for the four of them. VanRoark knew that his words were taken with fair accuracy from the very same books which had been Timonias' silent and neglected forerunners; but to hear the grand words clothed in Yarrow's grandiloquent and affected posturing, his theatrical tone, destroyed for the moment all the grimly wonderful completeness of the Meadows. What was supposed to happen there was reduced to a sordid collection of meaningless gestures. Both Tapp and VanRoark avoided this man and let him vent his righteous furies upon the crew.