The Half-Made World (59 page)

Morton’s little party were on a scouting mission. The beast of the forests had been coming north at nights, raiding New Design’s livestock.

(Not-quite-deer and almost-turkey: that was the best of the local stock. What Morton wouldn’t give for a decent mutton!)

In the last year, the beast had killed three herdsmen and a guard. In the year before that, two boys and a schoolteacher. In the year before
that
. . .

Eyewitnesses said the beast was like one of the oaks, come to life, bristling with claws in place of leaves, feeding on blood, not rain; that it was like a great serpent but also like a bear, or a man, or a machine. It must have come east from the farthest-out west, where things did not yet hold to their proper forms, and that was all Morton would say about
that
to a lady.

The mission of Morton’s party—and there were other scouting parties out in the forest, to the west and east—was to track the beast’s movements back to find its lair. They weren’t planning to engage it; once they’d found the monster’s lair, all of New Design’s fighting men would come back with torches and bows and the few precious rifles.

Morton’s party had stopped at the stream to refill their canteens, and in hope that the monster might have watered there itself, and that they might pick up its trail. They’d seen Liv there by the pool; they’d thought at first she was one of their own, one of the women of New Design, somehow lost. Then they’d wondered if she was some shifter or sylph or naiad, hence the bows at the ready, for which Morton apologized.

“Creedmoor is hunting your serpent-monster,” Liv said.

“Maybe he’ll save us the trouble, then. Maybe the monster will take care of him for us. Either way, we had best head home.”

It hadn’t even occurred to Liv that Creedmoor might be overmatched. She felt a sudden vindictive thrill.

They walked for three days. The forest remained unchanging. The oaks remained serene. They came across more of the mutilated deer, the savaged trees, but the monster’s spoor was old, the corpses rotten; nevertheless, they hurried on past.

They came to New Design at noon.

It had high walls made of logs of solid oak, painted with red pitch. Before the walls, there was a wide and waterless black moat. Tree-tall wooden watchtowers overlooked the moat. On the other side of it stood a town of low log huts. Thin trails of woodsmoke rose into the sky. Turkey wandered the muddy tracks of the streets, and the deerlike animals whined and honked uneasily in their pens.

The men and women of New Design dressed in furs and buckskins, or simple worn shifts, or threadbare scraps of ancient uniforms; they dressed like border bandits, but they held themselves like honest folk.

No single house stood above the others; nothing, save the watchtowers, exceeded a single story. Nothing was ornamented. The impression was of a rigorous and severe democracy and fraternity—though later Liv would wonder if the absence of stairs was more due to a shortage of metals and nails and competent carpenters.

“New Design,” Morton said. He waved an arm at it.

Morton turned to the General and stared into the man’s blank eyes. “We built it in your honor, sir. That you should come to it at last in such a state . . .” And he broke down and sobbed. Singleton and Blisset stood by, pale and awkward, while the townsfolk came slowly over the moat’s wooden bridge and gathered round.

Liv stuck close to Singleton and Blisset as the townfolk called out,
“Who is this? Morton, what is this?”

Singleton gathered himself, clapped for attention, and shouted, “Hey! Hey! Stand back! Show some respect! This is the man! This is General Enver! He is! I swear it, I swear it by the fucking
Charter
! Stand back!”

“Do you know what you’ve brought us, ma’am? Can you understand?”

Liv admitted that she could not, that she was a little confused. The Mayor cleared his throat and tried to explain. . . .

After the battle of Black Cap Valley, many of the Republic’s surviving forces deserted; the true believers did not. The true believers fought on against the Line, though they knew they were doomed, and every battle after that was a rout, and soon they weren’t even really fighting battles, but striking like bandits from the forests and hills; the true believers fought on because the Republic wasn’t like the other petty border states and fiefdoms and kingdoms and freetowns and the like. It was not a mere organ of power—this the little town’s Mayor Hobart, who was also President Hobart of the Republic, explained to Liv as she sat on the bare wooden chairs of his bare wooden office—it was the instantiation of an idea. The idea was a good idea. It gathered new lives around it. It outlasted mere mortal lives. The idea was a machine that would go of itself.

For the content of that idea Hobart referred Liv to the Charter, which she could see, if she made an appointment, and if she promised to handle the old paper carefully—they had no paper mills out here.

Like everything else in New Design, the Mayoral and Presidential office was made of oak, unvarnished; worn smooth in places by years of handling, rough and knotty everywhere else. One wall was lined with old books—works of military history and political philosophy. The other rough walls were enlivened with the red rising-sun flag of the Republic, and the bloody black flag of those who fought on after the Black Cap disaster, and a variety of battle standards. All were moth-eaten, singed, bloodied, torn and faded, and now, with the passage of decades, reduced to mere decoration.

The Mayor—and President of a Republic that was in merely geographical terms no larger than the one little town, but of far greater moral and world-historical significance, he said, far greater—was a young man. Handsome. Tall and clear eyed. Bushy black beard on a strong jaw. He wore a suit; he was the only man in town Liv had seen in a suit. It was perhaps the only such article for a hundred miles. A quite smart dining suit, though very old, of an unfashionable cut and threadbare in places. A little short in the leg. An ordinary item of clothing back in the world; out here, it was a badge of office as splendid as any king’s scepter.

“I’m not a phi los o pher,” Hobart told her. “We’ve got ’em out here. Philosophers, that is. Fine as any in the world, if not finer. Good men. But I’m a practical man, which is what’s needed now. In fact, practicality is, as I’ve always understood it, a fundamental underlying principle of the Charter. But I’m not the man to explain it to you. To give you the deep thinking.”

Hobart wore a gold pocket watch, not unlike the one around Liv’s neck. Like Liv’s, Hobart’s watch was dead, and its hands were still, though unlike her own it was silent.

“True believers!” Hobart banged the table. “My father among them, rest his bones.” He gestured out the window. There was a graveyard of bare wooden poles out among the oaks on the south side of town. “The true believers fought on. General Enver fought on! Harried the Line however he could. My father was with him. At the battle of Wolf’s Drift, he lost a leg and a hand. My father, that is. Came back to my mother in bloody bandages. Hobbling. Done with fighting and he was luckier than most. Brought this bloody battle standard with him.”

The President held the cloth of a red flag gently in his fingers. He’d quite clearly told this story many times before. His voice boomed and was somehow both conversational and theatrical; he was a good speaker. As Liv had been led through New Design, someone had pointed out two broad oak stumps in the town’s heart: Speaker’s Corner and the Whipping Post. She could picture the President standing up on Speaker’s Corner hollering about battle standards and blood and noble forefathers.

Something in Hobart’s confident manner slipped as he fingered the threadbare cloth and for a moment he looked—ashamed? He turned back to Liv and set an expression of grave resolve.

“The General? He kept right on fighting. Deeper into the forests, hiding, striking where he could. My father dreamed of going back to him, crippled as he was.
I
dreamed of joining him, though I was only a child. But we heard the news. The victories grew smaller and smaller. The rump of the Republic’s forces dwindled and dwindled. And one day, the news stopped coming and we knew the General was dead. Lost in the mountains somewhere. Dead in a lonely place with his last few men. Or so we believed, though it seems we were wrong! Quite wrong! But we believed it at the time. I don’t think we were wrong to believe it even now. You can’t fight forever. You can’t let the fighting become everything. A man must
build
as well. But where was there a place for us in the world? Our lands run over by the Line, those bastard black Stations rising over the hills. Or falling into banditry and chaos, seduced by the Gun. The Republic was built on certain
principles,
Mrs. Alverhuysen. I don’t know if those principles are widely understood all the way back in the northeast, in, ah . . .”

“Koenigswald.”

“That’s right. There in the old North, the world is long since made and ordered, and perhaps you may take it for granted.”

He scowled, as if to show what he thought of that. “But here we must treasure our principles. Ours are principles that flourish in peace, where men are strong and wise and free, but falter in war, and chaos, when men are frightened and corrupt. But there was no such place left in the world. So we came out here. Far out beyond even the Line’s reach. To build. Those of us who kept the faith. Those of us who had read the Charter, and seen its wisdom. Children like myself, of course, I take no credit for my father’s wisdom in leading us out here. My mother and me, that is. I was only a child when we came here. But I remember the dangers we faced. How we found each other; the signals by which we knew each other, back when we were in the old world, when we had to hide. My father was a Secretary of the Preliminary Society that met in secret to plan this exodus. To purchase our store of goods. To plan our way. To plan how we would live. They were soldiers, you understand; they had to find those who could build a town. A community. To find those who shared their vision. How do you lead a whole chosen people into the wilderness,
in secret
? And I remember the dangers along the way. . . . No doubt you have stories, too, Mrs. Alverhuysen.”

“Yes. Not like yours. I was brought here by an Agent of the Gun. He made it seem comparatively easy.

“Mr. Hobart . . .”

“President, please, or Mayor.”

“President Hobart . . .”

“
Mr.
President will do.”

“You are no longer secret here. The Gun will be on you soon. I warned your Captain Morton. Mr. Creedmoor will come for us. The General is very valuable to his masters. I believe the General knows something very important to them. And somewhere behind him are the men of the Line.”

“We’re ready for one Agent of the Gun, Mrs. Alverhuysen. Don’t worry. Do you think we’ve built nothing in our years here?”

“You are only men; he is something more. Mr. President—”

Hobart stood, leaning forward, knuckles on the desk, eyes flashing. “Men can do great things, madam. We’ve built great things. And there are those among us who think we’ve been hidden here too long. There are those here who’d say, build in peace, but build for strength, for
war
if you must. Those who’d say, we are the last bearers of the Charter. The last of the Republic. We were not made to dwindle in obscurity. We were made to be a beacon for the world. I am among those men, madam. And now you’ve brought our General back to us. What is that, if not a sign?”

Hobart sat again and smiled slyly, and drummed his fingers on the desk. “We’re ready for one little lackey of the Gun. We’ll deal with him. Then we’ll see. Then we’ll see, indeed.”

“His masters no longer speak to him, Mr. President. Their voices cannot reach out here. He is no less dangerous for that—but perhaps he can be reasoned with. He is not loyal to his masters, and he does not wish to reenter their service. Perhaps we can offer him a deal, appeal to his vanity. . . .”

Hobart’s face had gone so dark with fury that she was quite taken aback, and lost the train of her argument.