March in Country (34 page)
Authors: EE Knight
Valentine wondered if Snake Arms’s comment was a plant, to make him anxious. Or perhaps it was a warning about crossing the Gray Baron.
If he hadn’t seen him in his command car, Valentine would have suspected the Gray Baron was a creation, a boogeyman developed by the Kurians to keep both their Grogs and soldiers in line.
Ahn-Kha was true to his word, as always. Two nights later Valentine was awoken by the discreet scratch of Patches. The ratbit had a little pack made out of a zip-up eyeglass case, and in it was a pad and paper.
Valentine had spent some time thinking about the vulnerabilities of the Baron’s human/Gray One legion. For the first message, he just passed word of the supplies he needed them to gather from Brostoff’s forward Wolf base. They might not be able to spare guns, but they had plenty to eat and drink ...
Valentine puzzled out why there were no Grog overseers. Men ordered, and sometimes struck men; the Grogs did the same for and to their own kind.
He had plenty of time to give it thought, under the orders and the implied threat of short whip, knotted rope, or crop in the hands of some ill-tempered NCO.
He’d seen, all too often, one race or species used to supervise another. It focused the subject people’s animosity in the right direction—at least in the tyrant’s terms—at a powerful tormentor. Every shortage, every injury, every illness could be blamed on the people charged with policing. The group on top had to be fiercely loyal to the existing order, or they’d fall—and a bloody, hard fall it would be.
Seemed crazy of the Gray Baron not to use this system on his human forced labor. But instead, a few men and women with clipboards and kepis kept quiet watch, little brutality required.
Probably the Gray Baron wanted to make sure his fighting Grogs didn’t get any ideas about pushing men around. In Valentine’s experience, all Gray Ones considered themselves superior to puny humans, most of whom weren’t even as strong as a prepubescent youth.
Valentine wondered if the Gray Baron wasn’t sitting on a throne of sweaty dynamite. If only he were more sensitive to the unspoken currents among Grogs—he might be able to find an ambitious revolutionary among the Deathring Tribe.
Over the next two days, Valentine paid more attention to the young people he saw in camp. Teenage and preteen humans and Gray Ones worked together, dressed alike in either green or blue overalls, putting up utility poles, working in the kitchens and laundry. They looked healthy, intelligent, and strong—they reminded him of the Kurian Zone propaganda posters where everyone had firm jaws and full heads of hair.
The cooperation between the younger humans and Gray Ones was the closest thing to symbiosis Valentine had seen. The juvenile Gray Ones did much of the heavy work, with the human youths directing and checking and correcting. But when not engaged in work, the roles were reversed and the Gray Ones ate first while humans served and poured, with humans cleaning their ears and nails and teeth, making sure the bedding was clean and the chamber pots empty. Perhaps to the teens, the Grogs were glorified, highly trainable pets that needed care, and to the young Gray warriors, the human allies were their slaves once the enforced egalitarianism of action was over.
The Baron’s stronghold didn’t feel like a Kurian Zone. The elements were there, a survivor at the top with absolute power, his close advisors and guards just below, then the common herd scratching for any kind of advantage or notice to climb up the next rung of the ladder.
Valentine had his chance to step up a rung with the Warmoon Festival.
It was his first time inside the old megachurch that served as the Baron’s headquarters. He was, to his surprise, the Baron’s new champion human bare-handed fighter, and despite his lowly status as forced labor, he’d won a front-row seat at the festivities. Even more oddly, Sergeant Stock was to lead his small party, which consisted of a teenage girl who had finished studies at the top of her class in the stronghold’s school and a Youth Vanguard military track student commander who’d travelled all the way from a little town near Buffalo on Lake Erie to join the Baron’s forces.
Again, a less Kurian Zone establishment could hardly be imagined. It reminded him of some of the older, forgotten corners of Southern Command, where staff inspectors were rare and the men built a little military world they liked. There were captured weapons and pieces of uniform hung on the timbered walls, hunting-lodge style.
Trying to get out of the press of flesh moving for the big central arena, he stepped off the corridor and into a sort of museum-cum-trophy hall. Some of it was a little gruesome. There was a collection of human scalps in one case, an early souvenir of the Deathring Tribe. Valentine saw some photos of piles of corpses, bodies lying in the streets in front of apartment buildings, one plummeting to earth after being tossed out by corpse-disposal teams, what looked like a wild band of ravies victims, shot down Goya-like and frozen in time and space, white eyed and screaming, in a photographer’s flash.
The only time you ever saw photos of corpses were in Church museums featuring the sins of the Old World, such as the Nike and Coca-Cola corporations’ slaughter of laborers in the sugar plantation killing fields of Cambodia or the murder of the Tutsi nation in central Africa by a New York diamond consortium.
Valentine guessed that the genesis of the Baron’s organization was a body locator and gravedigger’s unit, judging from some of the pictures and souvenirs in the first cabinet.
The “Warmoon” to the Gray Ones was the first crescent moon after the vernal equinox—the fang that signaled the start of the season when their obscure cosmology looked favorably on fighting.
Snake Arms found him looking at some early Gray One weaponry and armor, much of it cut from car parts and old utility tools.
“Future father of my child!” she called. She was dressed, if you could call it that, in a costume made out of silk patching, snakeskin, feathers, and lines of beads, both atavistic and glamorous somehow. She had multiple, thick layers of makeup on, giving her face an otherworldly whiteness.
“Baby come?” Valentine asked.
“Just kidding. Women don’t know so fast, you know.”
“We go again now?”
“What are you, punchy? You don’t want to be seen arriving late under the Baron’s nose.”
He kept glancing down at her costume.
“Like it? The enlisted ranks do. It’s what keeps me in my trailer with some of the other wives. If they hauled me to the officers’ whorehouse, I think there’d be a riot.”
“Top come off, you’ll see riots plenty,” Valentine said.
“I have to get backstage. See you later.”
Valentine caught up to his group and they entered the big auditorium.
Perhaps next to the Memphis Pyramid’s stadium, it was the largest indoor structure Valentine had ever entered. Unlike the Pyramid, smoke hung heavy in the air and it smelled like a pig show.
The main auditorium of the old church reminded Valentine of a gigantic pup tent. Thick wooden beams, six of them, rose to the ceiling, where skylights admitted the evening light at the pinnacle. There was a balcony—one part glassed in, presumably for the families with small children when it served as a church.
Valentine was surprised to see the cross still there. It was a simple one, made of the same thick, wrought-iron bolted beams of the ceiling, and it hung down at an angle over the congregation, making Valentine think of a set of last rites he’d seen performed by Father Max over a dying woman in his youth. He’d held the cross before her face at just that angle. Whether that had been the original architecture or a recent change Valentine couldn’t tell.
There was too much activity to look at.
The Gray Ones, for the most part, filled the lower level. The church’s pews had been turned into benches to better accommodate them. A few clan leaders of the Deathring Tribe had their own furniture brought in, or perhaps it was permanently placed there, waiting for them, great perches like oversized Roman chairs.
The human soldiers inhabited the balconies, emblazoned with painted battalion symbols and specialist patches. The iconography was fierce, colorful, and oddly Midwestern, featuring hawks and foxes and coyotes and an out-of-place cobra. More humans sat upon the old altar riser, which projected out into the pews, though that part of it was empty for now.
Valentine marked the Gray Baron from his seat off to the Baron’s right on the main floor. He sat in a plain, high-backed chair, flanked by two flag bearers, human and Gray One, the Grog with what looked to be a red-and-black checkerboard design with a few spiky icons stitched in the square’s contrasting color, and the human holding the other, the modified tricolor of the Iowa State flag, featuring a pair of sharpened parentheses crossing each other—the locked bull horns, he’d heard them called, but it might also be stolen from a pre-2022 Chanel handbag.
Valentine thought he looked like something out of another age. He could see this man sitting on a smoky Tatar’s throne or commanding some cut-off Victorian regiment in Afghanistan.
He had a heavy, sloping forehead and a mountain spur of a nose hooked like a hawk’s talon. But even the oversized nose was nothing compared to the Pancho Villa mustache. It was like a curtain obscuring his upper lip and the sides of his mouth. It made his expression rather difficult to read; Valentine couldn’t tell if he was smiling or frowning.
A network of scars crisscrossed his face as though a maniacal game of tic-tac-toe had been played with an assortment of scalpels. Valentine had enough battle wounds to know they couldn’t have been accidental. Unless the Gray Baron had stuck his head into an oversized lamprey’s mouth, someone in his past had made a point of cutting him up into shreds.
Flanking him, discreetly behind the flags, were three Reapers.
Valentine had never seen Reapers like this. They were fleshy—he thought fat Reapers didn’t exist, it seemed the Kurians drained off calories along with the
vital aura
the Reapers transmitted. Despite the bellies and love handles, their faces shone hard and alert, yellow eyes watchful of the few empty square yards in front of the Gray Baron’s throne. Rich red, white, and black war paint striped their bodies in a series of Vs, and their claws and a band across their eyes were a deep blue.
vital aura
the Reapers transmitted. Despite the bellies and love handles, their faces shone hard and alert, yellow eyes watchful of the few empty square yards in front of the Gray Baron’s throne. Rich red, white, and black war paint striped their bodies in a series of Vs, and their claws and a band across their eyes were a deep blue.
The Gray Baron had a woman next to him, a rather hard-faced brunette with an athletic build. Her hair was piled up tight atop her head, bound together by a pair of stilettos in Asian hairstick fashion. Valentine wondered if the blades were just for show. She had her own stool, but chose to drape herself over the back of his chair, playing with his hair.
Next to the Gray Baron on the stage was a feeble-looking old Grog gone white and bent—Danger Close, Valentine guessed. He tried counting bullet wounds in the thick old hide and stopped after nine. He was attended by a bevy of six she-Grogs, wives, daughters, concubines, or some combination. They all carried little ceremonial working blades, like the skinning knives native tribes of the Arctic north use to separate seal blubber from skin.
A few Golden One representatives watched the celebration, stone faced. They stood apart from both the humans and the wild Grogs. The celebration was like some fantasy of a black mass. Grog warriors ran up with linked bags of netted heads, tossing them so the line hung over the massive cross at the front of the church.
A gong sounded, and the auditorium began to go quiet. From somewhere behind the curtained “stage” Valentine heard kettledrums pound slowly, a deep and thrilling sound that touched you in the pelvis. It grew louder, or perhaps the crowd grew quieter, and then the Gray Baron led Danger Close out on the platform projecting near the center point of the auditorium.
“My brothers ...” he began.
Danger Close repeated the words in a Gray One dialect Valentine more or less understood.
The Gray Baron kept it brief. The most auspicious season for war had begun.
Danger Close translated, but not exactly. He expressed the same sentiments, but in a Gray One idiom.
This would be another year of building and training. They would venture regularly to Springfield and the Missouri River, even to the outskirts of Saint Louis, yet fighting only when another sought to fight. Otherwise they would be peaceable, friendly, even helpful. A Gray One clan with a broken water tank? Fix it! Illinois bandits stealing cattle or goats? Drive them off and return the livestock. In time their legion would be thought of as a two-headed dragon, not just because one head was human and the other Gray One, but because one head was smiling upon friends, the other biting and rending enemies. Then would come a time of alliances, and in a very few years, the strength to whip the true enemies, the humans of the Ozarks. Addled by fevers, radiator-still whiskey, and backwoods religious monomania, an army with patience to gather and strike would crumble them like a hollowed egg.
They finished to applause and Grog stomps of approval.
Then some Gray One storytellers spoke, giving anecdotes of the importance of treating the seasons with respect. Not all could fight even at the best of times, and those who’d already won great glory fighting might wish to take a season off and enjoy their wives and increase their herds and teach youngsters the stern tasks of warfare so that they might survive to win their own glories and wives.
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