Conflagration (12 page)

“How goes the day, Captain?”

The crewman’s battle suit was so stained with sweat, oil, and soot, Argo was surprised that Dunbar could tell the man’s rank. The tank captain pulled off his goggles, and they left circles of pale skin around his eyes. “The enemy charge has been contained, sir.”

“That’s extremely good news.”

“The Mosul are falling back, but falling back in good order.”

“Are we pressing them?”

“A lot of units are catching their breath, Field Marshal. Turning them back was hard.”

“I understand, but we can’t wait too long, Captain. We can’t wait too long.”

“The lads all know that, Field Marshal. They won’t wait.”

“I’m glad to hear it, Captain.”

The captain mopped his face with a rag. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, I have to find a fuel lorry before I get back into it.”

“Carry on, Captain. You are all making me proud.”

The captain dropped into the body of the machine, and pulled the hatch closed. The engine started, and the cavalrymen tightened their grip on their mounts as it clanked away. Dunbar turned in his saddle and met the eyes of his staff. “We have to get Albany moving again, gentlemen. We need one last effort before the sun goes down. I can’t allow Balsol the generosity of night.”

RAPHAEL

Mosul dead were everywhere. They carpeted the valley all the way back to their own forward trenches where the survivors were now bracing themselves for the next Albany attack. Some lay slumped, and others hideously contorted, mouths silently screaming, clawed hands frozen by death in the act of clutching for dear life. Others only remained as pieces of sundered flesh, severed legs, or unrecognizable torsos in the rags of blood-soaked uniforms. But for the strangest and most elaborately twisted fate, Raphael might have been among them, and not following Virgil Dunbar as he rallied his weary troops to make one final effort to finish Faysid Ab Balsol. Dunbar himself had seemed shocked when he saw the terrible extent of the carnage, and Raphael was one of the few who heard him utter what would later be his best known observation. “Next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained.”

But the battle was not yet gained, and Dunbar rode among his men, with his staff, and the wider retinue that included Slide, Raphael, Argo, Jesamine, and Cordelia, behind him. Morale was high, but the men were tired. They would do their duty, but with a grim determination, giving all of their final reserves. Make or break, this would be the last push, or they would know the reason why. While a front line of riflemen and Bergman nests kept the remaining Mosul either pinned down or jumping, scattered units were being reassembled, and, where the casualties had been high, new ones formed from survivors. Ammunition was being resupplied, and the motor vehicles rearmed and refueled. Some men were eating and others avoided food, believing that it was bad to take a bullet on a full stomach, and depending for sustenance on their gin ration. Gin had been issued in most regiments, and, where it hadn’t, men had broken out the final stashed bottles from their kit. Even Argo had found a bottle of sipping whiskey, and ridden up beside Raphael and offered him a drink. The bottle was already a third empty and Argo’s voice was slurred.

“We’ve come one fuck of a long way, Major Vega.”

Raphael accepted the bottle and took a serious swallow. “We have indeed, Major Weaver. And I hope we still have a long way to go.”

Argo laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “You should be drawing all this, partner. Preserving it for posterity.”

Although Argo didn’t know it, Raphael had stopped once and attempted to sketch what he was seeing, but Slide had chided him, patting him on the shoulder and moving him along. “The battle isn’t over, young Vega. There will be plenty of time to sketch the dead later.”

Argo cantered ahead and Raphael followed. All round them Albany was making its move. The engines of the fighting machines were in gear, and some were already moving forward. Infantrymen fixed their bayonets. Few orders were being shouted. The entire force was advancing as if by organic mutual agreement, and the Mosul trenches were the only objective. The cavalry streamed ahead; Albany regulars with lance and saber, the proud and furious war bands of the Ohio, and irregulars like the Appalachian partisans, the mountain men, and trappers out of the interior, and former bandits like English John and his boys, and the Presley Brothers with their mad old patriarch, who had started to fight the Mosul because there was nothing left to steal. The horsemen, however, did not have it all their way. The infantry ran hard on their heels, with the lumbering fighting machines bringing up the rear. As his entire force proceeded with a will, Dunbar sat on his horse among his aides and said nothing. He was not about to interfere with the process.

The army moved as a surge of men, a rising tide building to high water. No reserves were being held back, everyone was going to the show. No man wanted to be left out of the fall of the Mosul in Virginia. Scattered fire came from the Mosul front line. A handful of cannon had been assembled and half-hearted and poorly-aimed shells burst in front of the Albany advance, but the pace only quickened. Some units had broken into double time, and a strange wordless roar came from the men of Albany. The first cavalry units were almost at the Mosul trenches. Mosul officers were screaming at their men to repel the attackers, but something seemed to have snapped. At first the Mosul ranks merely stood mute and seemingly paralyzed, but then one or two climbed the crumbling walls of their trenches and began to run. A few at first, but then in increasing number, the Mosul broke ranks like a great dam bursting until a flood of men was pouring down the valley, fleeing from Albany, looking for any way to escape.

A great cry of jubilation went up. “
The Mosul have broken!
They are running!”

Some men halted and embraced each other. Other pressed on, caught up in the fury of the moment, charging after the bolting Mosul, looking to exact fatal revenge.

“The Mosul have broken!”

JESAMINE

Dunbar and all of those around him rode in dour silence towards the tattered flame banner that hung from a broken flagstaff. With the onset of the evening, the earlier breeze had dropped, and the once-feared flag hardly moved, drooping like a torn and smoke-stained rag. Faysid Ab Balsol waited beneath it with a handful of his surviving officers. The dead lay piled and contorted all around them as though the standard was the focus of a desperate final stand. These last remnants of their foes were silhouetted against a setting sun that had been made a blood red orb by the smoke that hung in the air, and they cast grim and elongated shadows. The Mosul general was tall. Even stooped in defeat and leaning heavily on his scimitar, he towered over the others around him. He must have been all of six-feet-five or -six, and his elaborate helmet with its flowing chain mail and plumed spike added even more inches. Jesamine, who was riding a few horses’ length behind Dunbar, as close as she was able to maneuver herself, calculated that Ab Balsol had to be of equal parts high-born Mamaluke and blood Mosul, the perfect symbolic scion of Hassan’s empire, and she wondered how the man could be feeling at that moment. For two centuries, the invading armies of the Mosul Empire had experienced precious few reverses. Their only real setback had been the ill-fated expedition into the snows of the Northern Plains, when they had ridden against the Saami and the Russe, only to be forced back by Joseph the Terrible into that legendary retreat through the deadly Russland winter. Now, in the space of a single year, they had twice been soundly beaten in the Americas. Jesamine was surprised the Mosul general was allowing himself to be taken at all, and had not killed himself when all was so obviously lost. The banner was slowly lowered, and Faysid Ab Balsol pulled his sword from the ground. Dunbar reined in his borrowed mount and spoke for all to hear. “Faysid Ab Balsol, I demand your unconditional surrender.”

“Virgil Dunbar, you have my surrender.”

Dunbar swung down from the bay and limped towards the Mosul leader. As he approached, Ab Balsol reversed his sword and offered it hilt first with a stiff bow. The tall Mosul’s left arm hung limply by his side, and the sleeve of his uniform tunic was torn and dark with blood. Seemingly the general had not come through the fight unscathed. Dunbar shook his head. “Keep your sword, sir. I don’t require it.”

As a military escort surrounded Balsol and his commanders, ready to march them away, Jesamine suddenly found it hard to believe that the contest of armies was all over and that she had survived. Here at Newbury Vale, the forces of Hassan IX had been brought to the field and utterly routed. The news would resonate through Hispania and the Land of the Franks, and all the other slave nations across the ocean. The Zhaithan and the Ministry of Virtue could never shut down the underground grapevine, no matter how many unfortunates were publicly flogged for negativism, or tortured and hung as seditionists, defeatists, heretics, or Norse agents. She could imagine the unrestrained joy she would have felt had she learned that the Mosul were not invincible while she had been slaving for Mamaluke and Teuton, on her back or on her knees. Right there and then, Jesamine could hardly contain herself from shouting with angry and triumphant delight. Only the supremely sobering effect of the battle’s ghastly aftermath stopped her. The men of Albany and their allies had paid a terrible price for their victory. Although their casualties in no way approached the fearsome death toll of the Mosul, Jesamine bleakly wondered how many previously familiar faces she would never see again.

And then a familiar face appeared in her field of vision. At first she thought that she was dreaming or facing a newly created ghost. “Oonanchek?”

He moved stiffly. “It is I.”

“Are you hurt?”

Oonanchek shook his head. “I am fine. Just a little battered. There are many who are worse.”

Oonanchek’s face was streaked and smeared with war paint, and grimed with smoke and powder, but he was clearly alive. He was also alone. Jesamine was suddenly alarmed. “Magachee?”

“She is alive.”

“Wounded?”

Oonanchek smiled reassuringly. “Do not concern yourself. She is unhurt.”

“Thank the Goddess for that. Where is she?”

“At the new camp that is being made. I go there myself now. I just wanted to see Balsol surrender.”

“You’re going to the camp right now?”

“No one should stay in this place where the Mosul made their stand. Too many confused spirits continue to linger.”

“I just want to convince myself they’re really dead.”

“But now you have seen it, you should depart.”

Faysid Ab Balsol was being marched away under heavy guard. He was being taken to the Albany camp that was in the process of being established at the other end of the valley. He would very aptly have to traverse the full length of his chosen battlefield as the daylight faded, and the night closed in. If he had managed to hold out until the darkness, he might have saved his army and slipped away, but now he would have to pass the piles of bodies, the great funeral pyres that were being built for the Mosul dead, and witness his own men being organized into disposal squads. The piles of wood and debris were being liberally doused with petroleum, and would soon blaze in the night, ready for the Mosul bodies to be pitched onto them by these detachments of prisoners. The Mosul had used the flame as their symbol, but now it was going to consume them, proving, Jesamine supposed, that the fire belonged only to the victor. She was well aware that thousands of the enemy dead were only unfortunate conscripts, no better than slaves to their Mosul masters, but she was not yet ready to be forgiving, or provide excuses for fallen foes. She could only take the attitude of, fuck them, they deserved it. Somewhere in the gathering dust, a lone Albany voice was singing, accompanied by a weeping harmonica.

In the valley below, lads

In the valley below

I coughed out my young life,

In the valley below.

She and Oonanchek fell in behind the guard party, and followed it towards the mouth of the valley, the point where Dunbar had launched his first attack. Jesamine glanced at Oonanchek. For a moment their eyes met, but then both of them looked quickly away. After the fear and anxiety, and all the excitement and adrenalin of the day, she had suddenly, in an unchecked, animal moment, wanted Oonanchek, in the most wanton and shameless way she could imagine; not with Magachee, not as the mystic threesome of their now severed
takla,
but as strong, all enclosing, hard-driving, penetrating man. For a wild instant, she craved a clawing, writhing release from the impossible weight of carnage and tension. She wanted to be held, and fucked, and to let it all out with wordless keening and sobbing screams, and she knew that in the same second he had felt the same, but then the moment was passed and propriety prevailed, and also the realization that, afterwards, life would have to go on. After catharsis, reality would still remain. Magachee would be betrayed. The
takla
would be compromised, and the two of them would rise from their rut unable to face each other. Jesamine let out a long sigh, not caring what it revealed. Argo, Raphael, and Cordelia were riding a little way off. “I think it would be best if I went to join them.”

Oonanchek nodded. “You should do that.”

ARGO

The aftermath was strange. Argo wasn’t sure how he had expected the victory would be celebrated. He knew the civilians would be dancing and drinking, and cheering crowds would throng the streets when the word reached Albany, but there on the battlefield, where reality had happened and was still happening, triumph was a very different matter. He supposed that once upon a time, his farm-boy fantasy would have been storybook excess like the old-time Vikings; a lavishly pagan victors’ feast at which oxen were roasted, naked women danced, and entire barrels of beer consumed by sweating warriors—but he already knew too much and had seen too much to believe such myths. In the officers’ mess, no one danced, few sang, and even when they did, it was a rising chorus of melancholy that quickly faded. A valley night-mist clung to the ground, mixed with the black gasoline smoke, and the stench from the fires at the other end of the valley where the enemy dead were being burned. If he walked out of the mess tent, the pyres were plainly visible, and, accordingly, he had decided not to walk outside the mess tent. Not that inside was much better. The men and women were shocked and exhausted. Some drank to heal the shock, and kill the very real physical pain. Others simply stared at a bottle in front of them, processing the ghastly chaos of the day. Many were bandaged, or limped with the help of canes or improvised crutches. Most had not bothered to change from their blood- and smoke-stained battle dress. The fight had been hard won, and the real moment of exultation had been back on the field, when the Mosul broke and ran. As the tide of combat had so precipitately turned, amid the hand-to-hand confusion of the late afternoon, they had, all together, yelled their shout of victory from the bottom of their lungs and from the primal depths of their beings. Now, hours later, in the dark of that first night, jubilation had been replaced by disbelief and disgust at the terrible toll of destruction, as the cost was now being tallied.