March in Country (31 page)
Authors: EE Knight
“Give it here, Pappy,” Fat Daddy said. Valentine wasn’t sure they were even watching.
Pappy grabbed it and brought it over to Fat Daddy in his bunk. Beach Boy—though Valentine didn’t know the name yet—took it, smelled it, and insouciantly popped a chunk in his mouth before handing it to Fat Daddy.
“Naughty boy,” Fat Daddy said. He tasted it. “This is good stuff, new meat. Hey, Boy, new meat needs a name.”
Beach Boy made a great show of licking his lips. “Scar.”
Valentine liked the work. Maddeningly so.
He spent his days working with excrement, or drying it and then transporting it to the fields, rather.
It was filthy stuff for a man as fastidious about his own cleanliness as Valentine, filling a trailer with liquid “hot honey” and raking it out into a field to dry with other organic waste in the sun. The better job, in some ways, was taking the dried version of it, known as “brown sugar” out to the fields, though in spreading it some dust would get up and you’d have to spend the day with a rag tied around your face and the uncomfortable thought that you were blinking feces out of your eyes. There it was turned into quick-growing heartroot, or other more traditional Midwestern vegetables and grains—there were even paddies for rice. Most of the heartroot was broken up and added to scraps for pig feed or to granary leavings for the chickens the Gray Ones kept in little household coops or vast stacks in the pole barns.
The work was done by men because Grog warriors would not be stained by such duty, fit only for slaves. So the men of the forced-labor group, a collection of criminals, last-chancers, and sold-off Grog slaves of dubious origins such as himself, did work no warrior would take up, and the few Grog females in the Baron’s stronghold were too valuable to sully with such labor.
Valentine followed orders, took his three hots and a cot, and waited in absurd, smelly happiness. They ate their meals outdoors, in the sun in good weather, under a tent or inside available transport in bad. He felt his body toughening under the dawn-to-dusk days, and there were no worries beyond his being recognized. There was a part of him that hated responsibility, the endless choices between bad outcomes that came with military life, the paperwork that no one ever read, useful only to the creators of file cabinets and document storage boxes.
His work wasn’t limited to agriculture. Anything having to do with shit would cause an officer or a Grog chief to call in the forced-labor group. Valentine and Pappy were sometimes called into the Grog Quarter to deal with a stuffed-up toilet drain. He’d crouch to walk under lofted housing, or pass through alleys just wide enough to allow two Grogs to face each other and squeeze through. He smelled delicious steak and vegetable kabobs being cooked on tiny charcoal stoves and took cover when raucous games of throw-and-block or breakgrip burst out of multihome courtyards and into the streets, paths and alleys. He smelled tobacco and hot iron and apple-wood smokers. The Gray Ones loved pine and orange oils in their homes to cover the scent of a stopped drain.
“They also slosh around a lot of oil and burn it when the she-Grogs go fertile,” Pappy said. “Grogs theyselves don’t cause too much trouble about mating if there are no eligible females about, as long as they don’t smell ’em. But if they get a whiff, it’s Katie bar the door, ’cause you’re about to get plugged in like a surge protector.”
He also saw the Golden One quarters. Many still lived in tents, but more permanent housing formed of bricks reclaimed from the town and the output of a new Golden One-run sawmill was going up. Their quarters were laid out with more precision than the Gray One piles of housing, but each Golden One had less space. A whole family of six would be put into just a half basement.
Valentine felt for them. It was never fun to sleep in the same place you cooked.
Once, when their spreader flatbed broke down near headquarters, Valentine got a look at “the model.”
It was on display in a peaceful garden, and as nobody seemed to mind him wandering within sight of the disabled truck, he went into a little Grecian temple, or maybe it was a small theater or music platform, and took a look at the wooden blocks carefully arranged on the three-dimensional plan.
The Baron had something grand in mind for his headquarters. There would be columns worthy of the Romans, a pair of arches that modernized the famous one he’d seen in pictures of Paris to include friezes of Grogs on one side, humans on the other—the Gray Gate and the Golden Gate, and, dwarfing all else, the Missouri Throne.
When his officer for the day called him back to the others, Valentine asked him about the pyramid.
“Going to take years to build, if it ever gets done at all. Even with all these Golden Ones going at it full-time. You wouldn’t believe the hour cost in moving a city’s worth of giant bricks into a single pile, Scar.”
It would sit atop a staired Aztec-style pyramid, and the officer told him it would be visible, in some directions, from twenty miles away. The Baron could communicate with the Kurians from the top of it by reading the stars and planets. Or so the officer said.
Some days, Valentine saw Sergeant Stock out doing calisthenics on the athletic field near the forced-labor dugouts. A near mountain of dirt and gravel stood at the edge of the field, for emergency washout repair to the patched-together camp road network after a bad rain. Stock was one of a few who ran up and down the gravel hill, sometimes carrying a dummy gun, trying to keep his footing.
One morning, it was Ahn-Kha there, sitting atop the gravel mound, eating an orange from a bag of them.
Valentine got permission to try and cadge a couple of oranges from his old master, and trotted out to the hill.
Ahn-Kha made him go through the effort of climbing, sliding, and reclimbing the gravel pile.
“There is a difficulty, my David,” Ahn-Kha said.
“What’s that?”
“I have spoken to a few old friends, and last night I met with the Speakers of the Castes. They will not take up arms against this Baron. Here.” He passed Valentine an orange.
“He has them working like slaves!”
“Yes, he has them working, but he has kept up his part of the bargain. When they surrendered, there were to be no reprisals, no mistreatment, we were to live within his sight and build in return for our keep. It was all laid out in the First Understanding, and then when that was completed successfully, the Second Understanding became law. None would be sent off to the Kurian Zone, and any generations to come would choose whether to live in his domain or depart. His execution of the bargain is faultless.”
“They can’t wait to help his army, or the Iowa Guard. The Kurian Order, in effect.”
“My people were defeated, my David. They accepted more generous terms than they would have received from other Gray One tribes or the Iowans.”
“Well, did you at least get a count?”
“Some seven thousand and two hundred. There were losses in the fighting, and some managed to flee into the sand hills to the west rather than be taken. But those number in the hundreds, mostly those without family to think of.”
“What would your Speakers like?”
“Like? I do not know that ‘like’ signifies. They will uphold their end of the bargain as long as this Baron does.”
Anger surged up in Valentine. He’d travelled all these miles, killed, sent himself naked into the Gray Baron’s camp, when he might as well have stayed in Kentucky, for all the good it would do. Stiff-necked—
No, that wasn’t right. It was his fault for thinking he could steer history, the way he tried steering one of the Tennessee boats they’d stolen.
“What if the Baron doesn’t keep his end?” Valentine asked.
“The peace and captivity would no longer be valid. They would be only too glad to go to the soft green hills of your Kentucky.”
Valentine spent the rest of the day disgruntled and itchy.
With Ahn-Kha’s help, he was fairly sure he could escape. Ahn-Kha still hadn’t formally accepted a price for Valentine’s sale, so he could demand his return at any time. Though the men on base were few in number, Valentine guessed fewer than a hundred were in camp at any one time, with a few dozen more strung out on the rail lines and back north in Iowa. The Golden Ones wouldn’t rise and the Gray Ones couldn’t. The Gray Baron was their chief’s-chief, their warlord, and they liked it that way.
That night, Fat Daddy picked the wrong moment to humiliate Valentine.
Maybe because he’d seen Valentine eat an entire orange without saving half as an offering to the Lord of Dugout 3.
“Forget it, Pappy,” Fat Daddy said from his usual prone position, rippled as a sea lion sunning itself. “Have Scar take the piss pot tonight.”
“I don’t mind, Big—,” Pappy began.
“Give those knees a peaceful easy,” Fat Daddy said. “Let the Groggie’s pet handle it.”
“I don’t mind,” Valentine said.
The worst part was he had to kneel down; Fat Daddy’s joined bunks sagged so with the man’s weight in it. Kneeling and leaning forward with the sawed-off water bottle made his bad leg hurt.
Beach Boy giggled as Fat Daddy filled the bottle. Disgusted, Valentine felt the plastic go warm in his hand.
“Give him a tap,” Fat Daddy ordered.
Valentine pulled the bottle away.
“Don’t you hear right, son? You’re slower than a wooden Indian. I told you to tap it off. Now me sheet’s all soiled.”
“Ah-ah-ah,” Beach Boy said, waggling his finger in Valentine’s direction from behind the garden-slug form of his protector.
For a man who had taken the whole group’s soap ration, his bedding was remarkably dirty. Valentine threw the contents of the warm jug into Fat Daddy’s face.
For a full ten seconds Fat Daddy remained frozen, as though his brain couldn’t quite absorb the splashed urine as well as the sheets and his shirtfront.
“You cunt!” Beach Boy spat.
“You’ll regret that!” Fat Daddy bellowed, a rising tide of flesh coming for Valentine.
Valentine’s only regret was that he didn’t leave a few ounces for Beach Boy’s concealer-coated face.
He backpedaled and bounced off the chest of one of the other laborers, who’d gathered to get a look at Scar’s humiliation.
“Excuse me,” Valentine said, but the man shoved him toward Fat Daddy.
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