March in Country (10 page)
Authors: EE Knight
Valentine had time for only a brief word or two with Colonel Lambert about what he’d discovered before he was thrust back into the affairs of training the battalion and improving Fort Seng.
He learned a little more about Pellwell. They chatted over tea during an after-dinner cards, charades, and chess session at headquarters.
The tea was out of a small supply left to him by a grateful mother. Most of the talk came from Pellwell.
Victoria Pellwell’s grandfather was Southern Command’s “very first Bear.” The first to survive the transformation the Lifeweavers attempted on the volunteers, that is. She told him he was actually the third to go through the ordeal, which made him a very brave man indeed. Still, it was not a perfect case study. Her grandfather permanently lost the ability to speak, save for being able to bark out a word or two now and then that had nothing to do with the matter at hand.
For all that, he served twenty years as a Bear, surviving horrific wounds. As a child, she remembered him mostly pointing and grunting. He’d collected a formidable collection of Grog artifacts: weapons, tools, even a skull or two, and had a sort of dreadful candy bowl made out of a Gray One’s oversized palm that he kept filled with butter toffee. “That’s where I caught the exomorph bug, looking at his collection,” Pellwell explained.
“Whatever happened to him?” Lieutenant Gamecock asked. The commander of Fort Seng’s three Bear teams had been interested enough to leave a poker game and start lurking about the edges of their conversation. He made it very clear that he wasn’t eavesdropping, only listening with interest and perhaps too shy or too sensitive to barge in until a decent gap appeared.
Pellwell seemed to welcome the question. Gamecock was handsome enough, with rugged features and a real fighting bird’s brush of thick hair atop his head. That, combined with his old-fashioned South Carolina charm and cadences, made most of the women of Fort Seng lick their lips and throw their shoulders back when he approached. Perhaps he was just sniffing out the newest female addition in search of a fresh conquest.
“He was killed when Consul Solon came in, with our town’s militia. At a little place called Viola, east of Mountain Home.”
“Wait, you’re Broadsword’s granddaughter,” Gamecock said, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Yes, Broadsword, that’s what they called him. He had this patch like a sword where your names are usually stitched.” She looked down at a spoon she’d been toying with, absently twisted it into a corkscrew while talking. Valentine watched her cover it and attempt to pull it straight.
“Honored, ma’am,” Gamecock said. Valentine decided it wasn’t an act. Like most Bears, it took a lot to impress him.
Maybe that’s where she gets the strength, Valentine thought. The modifications the Lifeweavers had done to certain members of the human race, making them a better match for the Reapers and other tools of the Kurian Order, seemed to get passed down, sometimes in diluted or scrambled fashion, to their descendants. Bear blood was tough on women. None had ever survived the transformation. The genes didn’t cross over to offspring, or if they did, it often ended in tragedy. From what he knew, most weren’t even born alive. Valentine had known only one female Bear, a friend of his and Colonel Lambert’s named Wildcard. She’d died helping the resistance in Alabama.
With that, Valentine went gloomy. He gulped his tea and made his excuses, leaving Gamecock to finish the evening with Miss Pellwell.
He found Duvalier softly snoring on his bed and quietly stripped to his underwear and crawled in beside her. She mumbled something about a mule in her sleep and pressed up tightly to him, back-to-back, without waking.
The next day, Brother Mark supervised the trials of the ratbits, per Valentine’s two challenges.
Brother Mark was an odd sort of man. He had a loose-skinned, basset-hound face and the dog’s permanently mournful expression. Though part of Southern Command, he wore black civilian clergy attire. He seemed condemned by life not to fit in anywhere. He’d been a churchman, a very high-ranking one, before undergoing his own personal awakening and fleeing the Kurian Order, taking a brain full of secrets and queer abilities with him.
There were rumors all over Fort Seng about him. Valentine had heard it said that Brother Mark slept on scrap wire and broken glass, that he ate only food that up to an hour ago had been living, and that he could read minds of men and Reapers alike. Valentine knew the truth about some of it.
As to the sleeping on glass and scraps, Brother Mark had taken up residence in an old tack room of Fort Seng’s stables—once the residence of the pleasure horses of the wealthy and connected of Evansville. His mattress had been tossed down on a floor littered with odds and ends and he always slept in his clothes. “A habit of quick escapes,” he’d once said.
As to the fresh food, Valentine knew from many shared meals that the churchman hated the smell of rotting food—fish turning particularly disgusted him, though he liked it better than anything if pulled fresh from the water and fried within the hour. Which reminded Valentine, he’d promised Brother Mark a morning’s stream fishing, now that the winter had broken. Valentine preferred lake fishing, the mixture of crafty selection of site and bait taking into accounts variations on water, weather, and season appealed to the gamester in him.
That left the mind reading. Valentine had his doubts, but Brother Mark was like the bayous he’d explored in Louisiana. You never knew whether the next turn might bring you to a shotgun shack and still, a gator-choked mud-isle among a colonnade of bald cypress, or a graceful, five-column estate. One thing was certain—he had a power to sense the activity of Kurians and their mental connections with their Reaper avatars. Valentine had a bastardized, low-wattage ability along those lines. He’d evidently been born with it, but where his “tingles” were little more than an uneasy feeling or a spectral chill, Brother Mark’s senses were as fine-tuned as an air-control radar.
Now the barn was home to a couple of riding horses, milk cows, a few stalwart oxen used mostly for hauling timber, and storage for the fort’s sheep and goats and growing chicken coops. Plus the ratbits, who were already filching eggs. Brother Mark slept there, Valentine suspected, because it allowed him to be near headquarters and to camouflage his own lifesign. Perhaps Brother Mark emitted some special signal, like a high-power transmitter, that he wished to jam during the night hours when the Kurians were at the peak of their powers without sunlight to confuse their signals.
He’d counted Valentine his friend ever since the planning for Operation Javelin, when Valentine had been, rather unwillingly, paired up with the churchman. The upper ranks had been trying to forge a team, and it didn’t look good to have someone always alone, never sharing a table at dinner, hovering at the perimeter of casual conversations.
Brother Mark had been pathetically eager for friendship. Still was, though he hid it better these days. Though he wasn’t Valentine’s favorite person, he felt a sympathy for him. In his younger days, Valentine had been a bit of a loner and an outsider, hungry for anyone to talk to, and overdoing it when someone actually did. Now Valentine relished his moments alone, when he had a few consecutive minutes to think, rather than constantly putting out fires while juggling the issues of a practically cut-off military mission.
The men didn’t exactly go to Brother Mark for counsel, but he liked to work alongside them. He drew out even the most taciturn and started them talking. No confessional, no back and forth questioning, his methods were closer to psychiatric free association, only instead of a couch, they were often leaning on shovels together.
In any case, he was impartial, so Valentine’s two tasks for the ratbits, by daylight and by night, gave Brother Mark a chance to work his magic with Valentine.
The first task involved the ratbits stealing a big bottle of aspirin from Captain Patel’s quarters overnight. Patel, thanks to years of running Wolves back and forth across the old Ozark Free Territory, had bad knees and took aspirin morning and night to help with the pain. Patel didn’t know the ratbits were coming, but if anyone could sense something creeping up on him, it was the canny old Wolf. His knees might be going, but his ears and nose were still sharp as ever. Patel used aspirin by the handful, and there was every chance some would be used and therefore all the more likely to rattle.
Valentine and Brother Mark were eating in the big garage of the estate house that had been converted into the dining hall. It wasn’t nearly big enough to seat the whole battalion, but by eating in shifts and taking the food out to tents over a thousand men could be served in three hours.
The men were sitting at an inside table with a few other officers when Pellwell appeared. She was chewing a piece of bubble gum, and loudly snapped it as she set down a half-empty bottle of aspirin.
“Well, that’s proof,” Gamecock said.
“That Patel was sleeping soundly in his own bed in the middle of a fort,” Valentine said.
Pellwell snapped her gum again. “Want to know what book was on his bedside table? They spelled the title with Scrabble pieces for me.”
Knowing Patel, it was one of his wife’s raunchy paperbacks. She was supposed to join him at the fort this spring.
He returned the bottle to Patel, eating with his company officers and NCOs two tables over.
“Sorry, Captain. You were part of the ratbit exercise,” Valentine said.
“I thought I heard a rattle,” Patel said, opening the bottle and taking out three tablets. “Slept with the window cracked. Never could stand stale air. I thought the breeze did it.”
“Look for little tracks on the sill,” Valentine said.
For the second test, Valentine let the target know the ratbits were coming. The ratbits were to somehow wreak havoc with the function of one of the artillery pieces, without causing permanent damage, of course.
So he stood at the observation post on the hillside that sheltered the three guns—Morganna, Igraine, and Guinevere—from Evansville and the Ohio River. Brother Mark stood beside, watching and waiting. The cannon-cockers were standing guard over their communications equipment, magazines, and stores, ready to spring into action when Valentine gave the signal.
“Wonder how she’ll do it, if she hasn’t done it already,” Valentine said.
“I never like a woman who chews gum loudly,” Brother Mark said. “What do you think, Major Valentine?”
Valentine shrugged. “I’ve never had trouble getting along with the Miskatonic people.”
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