The Gone-Away World (36 page)

In the morning, the war comes back, like dandelion seeds.

T
HE EAST WIND
brings it, winsome and inexorable. The wind flickers and jiggles excitedly, rolling over the hills and dusting the forest. It is friendly. It is obviously, appealingly soft. It is Disney Dust. For miles and miles, from here all the way to Lake Addeh, perky motes and jape-some spirals flicker among the trees and fall into rivulets and streams with a noise like hot ash into snow. We stand on the long balcony and laugh, and nod good morning to one another. Today will be a good day. And then, as it draws closer, there is a sudden gust, and then another, pungent with animal smell, strange in the back of the nose and mouth, and there are birds, in their thousands, fleeing. No one kind predominates. They are not arranged in orderly flocks or even families. Swans lumber, geese flap, sparrows (or something very like them) flitter, all in one great avian mass of fear; one enormous, moderately cooperative exodus.

They crap on everything, evacuating their bowels the better to evacuate themselves. The second part of our war begins with a torrent of guano.

The Stuff rolls on towards us, and starts to change. It reaches the border of the lands we have defined for ourselves, the place of our safety, and divides around as if on a curtain rail. Wrapping around our border is a curdling shadow, from which proceed the cries of devils and the howling of the damned, or at least loud, unpleasant noises which make your hair stand on end and fill you (like a departing swan) with the desire to relieve certain internal pressures. All around me people are doing things of importance. Zaher Bey's pirate-monks are moving with determined efficiency, calming and reassuring, herding Katiri civilians further into the castle. Gonzo's guys—his core guys, Jim and Sally and Samuel and Annie—are rousing the others and bringing them up to speed. Leah and Tobemory Trent have gone professional, are talking triage prep and ad hoc transfusions, leaving me to watch the onset. I watch.

The Stuff is ragged and wispy. It is encountering some pressure or energy at our circumference, and responding to it. Things are happening at the meniscus: familiar shapes are appearing—armed men, vehicles, guns. They shimmer and collapse into one another, getting more solid. Some of them are ludicrous or awful. A small group charges across the border, Iwo Jima style, brothers in arms. They are too close together, weirdly awkward, and as they turn, I see that they are conjoined, all seven of them. The sergeant's hand on his corporal's back, urging him on, melds smoothly into the uniform and the spine. The soldier behind, supporting the sergeant, is merged with him at the hip. They struggle, scream and tumble, bringing down the others. They are an image to be seen from one side, not real men at all. They die, probably because they have not enough hearts between them, and slump to the ground, where a corpse-carpet is forming, the familiar exterior decor of modern skirmishing. I can hear the bullets whizzing, though there is as yet no one to fight. This is not an attack. It's atmosphere. It's war as a condition, war as furniture. We are under siege by a
notion
of war.

A monk, next to me, looks down in mute surprise as a bullet wound blooms on his chest. He dies calmly, maybe even affronted, but not appalled or screaming. The soldier next to him is different. He exhales a choking gas, a stink of battery acid, and with it part of a lung. He would scream, but this expression has been taken from him, so he just stares at me in horror, and I tell him I know, I know, it hurts, and you are dying. I know. I am here. He stares at me, and I cannot tell if he is thankful or if he simply cannot believe I am so damn trivial as to imagine that makes it any better. He dies while I am blinking.

A hand falls on my shoulder, rough and invasive. I slip it, twist. A flash of snaggled teeth and a whiff of halitosis. I hit out, block a weapon, push him away. He is gone. Shadowman. I crouch, ready. Nothing happens.

Up the hill, soldiers are attacking. Bad generalship, perhaps, but they are making ground. Vasille's tank opens up, and limbs fly, slapstick. Hah. But now the enemy has tanks too, rolling up the hill, commanders looking out the top, Patton-style, and when Gonzo blows the tracks off the first one, and Vasille splatters it across the landscape, it appears that Patton is fused to the tank from the hips, a man-tank chimera. Samuel P. throws up. No one laughs at him.

It's a game or a dream; wave upon wave, uncoordinated, endless; lethal but stupid. We fight. We die. We live. They go again. Nowhere is secure, nowhere is particularly under threat. Shadowmen flicker in corridors, half-complete, half-imagined; sometimes they kill someone, sometimes they loom and lurk and wait to be eliminated, like the guys in red shirts on
Star Trek
(the original one, not the later ones where no one was safe). In the infirmary there are extra patients appearing from nowhere. They cannot be healed. They just sit there and scream. Stretchermen we don't have bring wounded we never knew, each time putting them in the same spot. The first soldier in bed three (it's a packing case with a rug on it, but it's bed three) has a head wound. A moment later, another is laid on top of him and they are for a moment both there, one superimposed on the other, and then the first is gone—and with him the bandages Trent slapped on that cut—and instead there's a kid with a spurting leg, bleeding out, and then a moment later he has both injuries, and then he's dead, and then they bring in another one and it's a woman and then another, and another.

The sun comes out. The wind changes. We fight on. Shadowmen flail and die, and are not replaced. In the sunlight, in the ordinary world, they look pathetic: hulking, ugly brutes without advantages. Bullies. Bandits. Veda Tsur, spattered in grime and weeping, slams the last one to the ground with a copper saucepan, and Rao beats him, methodically, until he dies like a broken fly. He tried to take their children. Jun is clinging to his father's arm, adding his weight to every blow.

In good order, and because we are very angry and afraid, we counter. We sally forth. Sallying has gone out of fashion in recent years, because it doesn't work very well when you have gun emplacements, and anyway no one really lays siege in the traditional way any more; they blockade and they assail, but more usually they go house-to-house, because sieges kill civilians before they kill soldiers and this kind of thing is, broadly speaking,
bad.
It's okay to kill huge numbers of civilians
by mistake,
of course, but killing them
on purpose
is illegal, slap-on-the-wrist time. We sally because, hell, we've earned it. Vasille leads, Bone Briskett brings up the rear and in the middle are an improvised mechanised infantry of hyped Ford Focuses (Foci?) and armoured RVs.

The lower slopes are a charnel house. Everything is dead. We drive through. The forest is better. The first hundred metres or so is jellied and burned. After that, it's almost normal. The trees have been shot up a bit. One or two sheep have expired. We cruise. We do not get attacked. It rains, water. We dismount. We walk in the forest. It is nice. Leah and I hold hands. I transfer my gun to the other side and feel very protective. We lean against a pine tree and admire the flowers. We smell air which is not filled with awfulness. We live.

My radio clicks, once. It is the alert, but not the
enemy action
signal. It means
I have found an interesting thing, approach with caution.
The first click is followed by seven more in quick succession: one of the pirate-monks has the bearing seven position, to the south-south-east. We—Leah, Samuel and I—have five. We move downward.

The pirate-monk is standing at the edge of a forest clearing. He has chosen his location carefully, so as to be invisible to most of the clearing while able to survey it himself through a stand of bracken. We move up.

In the glade is a man, on a horse. He is tubby, and the horse is unkempt. His hair is matted and charred, and his arms are mired with sweat and grime. He is not a creature to inspire lust. The horse is brown or chestnut or one of those other technical terms horsepeople use to make it clear that they know stuff other people don't; the freemasonry of the hoof. “Horsepeople” is apt here, and this guy can choose his own damn nomenclature. Because he is not, in fact, a man
on
a horse. He is a man
and
a horse. A centaur, although . . . not. Centaurs, in stories, are natural horsepeople. They are born that way, made by Zeus or some other holy Fimo-kiddie, sculpted buff and ready to rumble. Deep voices and beards, testosterone stink. This one looks as if he has been welded or grafted. He looks like the compound wounded soldier in Leah's infirmary, or the tank commander who was part of his tank. He is not doing centaur sorts of things either. They are usually to be seen playing musical instruments or running about looking noble. This one looks confused, and he is digging a hole. He bends all the way over his front hooves, and lifts a shovelful of earth out of the ground. The hole is maybe a foot deep, but he has reached the maximum extension of what must be a curiously shaped spine. The next sweep of the shovel barely scrapes the soil.

He growls, and his front legs bend and he kneels, horse fashion. This is apparently uncomfortable, and unstable, because as he leans down to dig again, he falls over. He struggles for a while on his side, then rolls to his feet and starts again, and again. And then he throws the shovel away, and lays a slender, wrapped package in the hole. It is a person-sized package, if the person were small, or truncated. He picks up the shovel again, fills in the hole and stumbles away. He walks as if he is not used to having four legs: front left and back left move together, and he has to roll his weight onto his right like a sailor so as not to fall over, and then the reverse. He coughs, and spits a clot of blood onto a nearby fern. Perhaps his tubes are not properly lined up. It seems an uncertain proposition whether he can eat anything which will sustain him; which stomach does he use? What can it digest? We watch him wander off, and we are ashamed a bit that we don't offer to help. On the other hand, we haven't shot him either, which was a possibility, given that he was a completely impossible, alien object in the middle of a dangerous place at a dangerous time. That sort of thing usually gets shot at. Oh yes. Pillars of virtue over here. We don't look at one another.

The monk walks into the glade. Without fuss, and absolutely without disrespect, he digs up the package and unwraps it. His pirate-ness is in abeyance. Today he is just a monk, and very tired. Under a layer of oilcloth is a crochet blanket, and inside that is a child, or a foal. She is quite small. The transformation here has been less successful. She is—was—a horse with two legs, and arms ending in hooves. She clutches a small stuffed donkey. Her face is long and equine, with wide, black eyes. The monk nods, and buries her again, with his hands.

.                           .                           .

Z
AHER
B
EY
and Nq'ula Jann are taking council. I suppose, in a sense, it is a secret council to which everyone is invited. Zaher Bey is a wanted man, after all, and therefore his councils are perforce concealed things, but we are all allowed to know about it and contribute and listen in. Indeed, this is the essence of it. The question before the meeting is
What just happened?
and by and large we are in agreement that it's a jolly good question and one which needs answering before it happens to us. This has acquired a muttered urgency because—aside from the strange and the ghastly outside—there is a creeping rot within us too. It's more than a little bit difficult to recall the names and faces of the Gone Away. It can be done. It isn't impossible. It's just the difference between lifting the suitcase empty and lifting it full. And this invasion is, if anything, more horrible than the last.

This is where I first hear “Reification” in connection with the Go Away War, and I hear it because Zaher Bey is demanding to know what the hell it is. If I were not on guard against revealing that I had a rather large part in
What just happened,
I could tell him. Never let it be said that sociology is a useless discipline. Still, Nq'ula seems to have the concept well in hand.

“It is the making of an idea into a thing, Prince of Men,” replies Nq'ula,
v. formal,
because this is not merely council, it is performance. Zaher Bey is turning a refugee plethora into an entity of its own: the Shangri-La Survivors, and in order to do that, he has to give them a stake. Gonzo offered flapjacks (and normality) in exchange for allegiance. The Bey is trading in
answers.

Nq'ula lectures and theorises, and the Bey makes like he doesn't understand a word of it, which endears him to the rest of us. And if anyone has anything to add to what Nq'ula is saying, that's fine too, because we're all in this together, and two heads, or two hundred, are better than one. Nq'ula looks around, and notes that everyone is paying close attention. His friend makes a face suggesting that his explanation is not sufficient unto itself, so Nq'ula goes right ahead and unpacks it a bit.

“If you would be so kind, conjure before your mind's eye the image of a florid and uncouth man of the prehistoric wilderness.”

Zaher Bey screws up his face and devotes himself to his task. There is a pause. Nq'ula taps impatiently. I look around. Exhausted though we are, everyone is concentrating on the shared image of our distant ancestor.

“If you are ready?”

“I am.”

“Very good. What is most obvious about him?”

“Why is it, Nq'ula, that your explanations always involve me feeling like an eight-year-old?”

“Possibly, Prince of Men, it is the nature of learning.”

“I think not.”

“That, alas, is often the case.” This gets a bit of a giggle. The Bey as intellectual underdog. “Leaving the long brown envelope of home truths sealed for the moment, however, let us return to our Cro-Magnon friend. So?”