The Half-Made World (76 page)

His voice slowly rose into audible registers, quavering, sounding as if from a great distance. His hand tightened in hers as if he knew she was there, as if at last he desperately wanted her to be there.

“. . . again,” he said. “Once again. Dying once again under the stars, alone. A cause that is always failing and faltering. Another lost battle, and another.”

Liv felt an urge to reach for a pen and notepaper. Instead she clutched at his hand—no longer cold, now tense and feverishly hot—and leaned in close.

“And every time, I promise myself again to the cause, to the stars, to the future. And I come back down the mountain colder and less human. I hardly know my daughter, my wife. Everything changes on these nights. Oh, it’s hard to go on. . . .”

He spoke as if he was repeating himself, mouthing the lines of some speech—as if he were finally forcing out words he’d been holding mutely inside for years.

Creedmoor came crawling closer. Liv raised a hand, and he held his distance.

“Death and rebirth. I thought this time might finally be the last. I went up the mountain. . . .”

CHAPTER 51

THE GENERAL SPEAKS

~ 1878 ~

The General went up the mountain in the early days of spring, when the snows receded. Birch and pine breathed cool life into the foothills. There were vibrant purple pine-flowers underfoot. The white topknots of fat shy quail whistled through the underbrush. A clear and cold quality of sunlight. He took the time to comment on those matters to Master Jodrell, who was taking dictation on a sheet of paper flattened over the rusty lid of their ammunition case. The General sat stiff-backed on his shooting stick; Jodrell crouched at his side.

“Don’t write that down, Jodrell. Don’t write that down.”

The boy paid the flowers, the pines, no mind; that troubled the General. A man should have a sense of nature and of beauty. One might so easily become less than a man, in those desperate last days of the Republic. Striking from the shadows, hiding in the alleys, the remnants of a great cause might become monsters. And on the mountain’s barren peak, and in the troubled darkness beneath, it would be easy to forget. . . .

It took an hour for the General to finish dictating his letter. He addressed it to his daughter, and to his granddaughter, whom he’d never met. It was impossible for him to write to his wife—the General was not brave enough for that—but he hoped one letter would do for them all. He promised them: This is the last time. This is
truly
the last time. The end is in sight. In the halls of Kan-Kuk’s people . . .

Kan-Kuk himself stood among the trees, some twenty feet away, still and tall and thin as the pines, gnarled and bone white as birch. Watching with disapproval. Silent as a stone. The secret was for the General alone; the General was their confidential agent in the matter. The General shivered under the gaze of those dawn-red eyes, and changed his mind. “That’s enough, Master Jodrell. Pack it away and come along. No need to write to them, eh, when we’ll see them all soon enough?”

But the next morning, as they passed up into colder hills, over bare stony ground, as Kan-Kuk strode on ahead, the General called for the boy Jodrell again and sent him away down the mountain, carrying the letter, and certain other papers, and money enough for a new life.

“And Jodrell. Tell my wife . . . tell her that if we come back, we bring hope. Tell her if we do not come back, there is no hope. The world will devour itself as it always has. Tell her to take our people from the world. Go west. She will understand.”

Maybe Kan-Kuk noticed Jodrell’s absence; maybe he didn’t. The General was not sure that Kan-Kuk distinguished among the men. In any event, Kan-Kuk never said anything.

It occurred to the General later, as they navigated a difficult creek bed, that he should have sent some message of more
personal
affection. But it had not crossed his mind at the time, and he could spare no more men.

There were twenty-four of them—not including Kan-Kuk. A small party. Deerfield and Darke had been trappers before they’d come into the service of the Republic. There was banditry in Mason’s past. Now that the last remnants of the Republic were reduced to hiding in the hills, men of that sort had come into their own.

The General had sent the remainder of his forces on to Broad Kills, there to make camp, to await his return, and should he not return, to prepare for exodus. These twenty-four had split off at Dunhayne, gone south, traveling by night, hiding by day, through lands under the shadow of the Line. They’d passed for long miles through hills looking down on the tracks, and watched the Engines of Dryden and Gloriana and Arkley pass each other, again and again, with terrible regularity, cutting across the plains with contemptuous, monstrous ease. . . . They’d gone up into hills where brave men had once panned for gold, for dreams; hills that were now hacked up, ground down, burned over by the greedy mining machines of the Line. They’d gone without their uniforms, in simple buckskins and furs, and the patrol of Linesmen that caught them creeping across the blasted black plain in the shadow of Dryden Station took them for ordinary bandits and got overconfident. The General lost only two men: Boone and Caldwell. They were pursued for a while by a larger force, but they evaded it, went to ground in the hills, moved again only when they were sure their pursuers had lost interest. They passed southeast out of the lands of the Line without further incident.

They forded the freezing Shayle.

They lasted out the winter in Huntsville, where the mayor was friendly to what was left of the cause—though of course, they never told him Kan-Kuk’s secret, and the General never gave his own real name or rank, but claimed to be only a former Captain, and before that a tailor, now looking to retire in peace.

Linesmen came poking around the town like hungry black wolves, and the mayor and all his people lied to their faces:
There ain’t no strangers here
. Eventually the Linesmen went away. A kind and brave show of solidarity. In the privacy of his attic room, the General grew misty eyed and sentimental regarding the virtues of ordinary folk.

Kan-Kuk absented himself from their company, his alien kind not being welcome in town. Maybe he went and burrowed himself into the earth for winter; maybe he went stalking the cliffs in the snow and wind. The General didn’t know. As the weeks went by, the General began to wonder if Kan-Kuk had ever existed, had ever come to him like a ghost out of the dark hills and rumbled:
You are chosen
. To wonder if he’d never gone as in a dream following Kan-Kuk away from the dead and the wreckage of the battlefield and into the hills above Asher, which the men said were haunted, and down into the warrens, and into the beautiful and ancient cities
beneath
the warrens, where white faces and long thin bodies like veins of marble surrounded him, and probed him, and drank him in with their unearthly blood-warm eyes, and tapped stonily at him as if to see if he were
hollow,
and whispered secrets to him in the harsh and grating voices of fairy-tale ogres. He’d begun, in fact, to settle into the rhythms of Huntsville’s life, to forget the burden of his destiny, to think of himself as a man among ordinary men again. . . .

But Kan-Kuk called for him again in the spring. He woke at midnight to hear the echo of Kan-Kuk drumming on a river-rock, out beyond Huntsville’s edge. He gathered up his men. The sharpshooter Sam Hart, who’d lost an eye in the fighting at Onakha, stayed behind with a local woman, and the General swallowed his sorrow and pride and envy and gave them both his blessing.

—
Come away, General.

—Is it time?

—It is.

—Do you remember when you first came to me?

—It was only moments ago, General.

—Forty years for me. More than that. A lifetime. Long enough for a civilization to come and go.

—I remember.

—I lay on the field of battle after Asher. Wounded in the shoulder by a lucky shot and bleeding badly. Under the stars, in gorse and briars, by the bridge. Our first defeat. It might have been the end of us. The death of the Republic, before it was born. I told myself it would not be. It would not. I called on all my will and . . . And then you came to me. At first I thought I was mad.

—You
are
mad, in your way. That’s why we chose you.

—Beneath your warrens there was a city. I have not forgotten. And we made a deal.

—Yes. I gave you what strength I had. I helped you make the world over.

—You did.

—I warned you it would not be enough.

—Forty damn good years, though. Or near forty.

—Now it’s time, General. You owe us your services. We have waited long enough.

—
Too long. I know.

—Come home.

—Why me?

—You know why.

—You’ll give me the weapon?

—Not a weapon.

—What then?

—You’ll see.

They went up out of Huntsville, and through ancient woods, just a few miles west of the ruins of what had once been Founding, the first colony in the West. They went up into the foothills north of Founding, looking for a particular sullen hunchbacked mountain by the name of Self’s Mount.

—There. And beneath it.

—I am an old man.

—You promised. We gave you forty years.

—I honor my promises. But I am an old man, and frightened.