Monsters of Men (2 page)

For her,
I think back, all my feeling about her behind it.

And I think her name–

Viola.

And Angharrad leaps forward into battle.

{VIOLA}

Todd,
I think, riding Acorn through the mash of people crowding across the road, each of them trying to run away from those awful horn blasts in one direction and the bombs of Mistress Coyle in the other.

BOOM!
goes another one and I see a ball of flame coughed up into the sky. The screaming around us is almost unbearable. People running up the road get tangled with people running
down
the road and everyone gets in our way.

Gets in the way of us getting to the scout ship first.

The horn blasts again and there’s even more screaming. “We have to go, Acorn,” I say between his ears. “Whatever that sound is, the people on my ship can–”

A hand grabs my arm and nearly yanks me off the saddle.

“Give me the horse!”
a man screams at me, pulling harder.
“Give it to me!”

Acorn twists around to try to get away but there are too many people in the road crowding us–

“Let go!” I shout at the man.

“Give it to me!”
he screams.
“The Spackle are coming!”

This surprises me so much he nearly gets me off the saddle. “The
what
?”

But he’s not listening and even in the dying light I can see the whites of his eyes blazing in terror–

HOLD!
shouts Acorn’s Noise and I grip even harder on his mane and he rears up, knocking the man away and leaping forward into the night. People scream to get out of our way and we knock more of them over as Acorn ploughs up the road, me holding on for dear life.

We reach a clearing and he charges on even faster.

“The
Spackle
?” I say. “What did he mean? Surely they couldn’t be–”

Spackle
,
Acorn thinks.
Spackle army. Spackle war.

I turn to look back as he runs, back to look at the lights coming down the distant zigzag hill.

A Spackle army.

A Spackle army is coming, too.

Todd?
I think, knowing that I’m getting farther away from him and the tied-up Mayor with every hoofbeat.

The best hope is the ship. They’ll be able to help us.
Somehow,
they’ll be able to help me and Todd.

We stopped one war, we can stop another.

And so I think his name again,
Todd,
sending him strength. And Acorn and I race up the road towards the Answer, towards the scout ship, and I’m hoping against hope that I’m right–

[T
ODD
]

Angharrad runs after Morpeth as the army surges down the road in front of us, brutally knocking down any citizens of New Prentisstown who happen to be in their way. There are two battalions, the first led by a screaming Mr Hammar on horseback and a less shouty Mr Morgan leading the second behind him. It’s maybe four hundred men in all, rifles up, their faces twisted in screams and yells.

And their Noise–

Their Noise is a monstrous thing, tuned together and twisted round itself,
roaring
as a single voice, like a loud and angry giant pounding its way down the road.

It’s making my heart beat right outta my chest.

“Stay close to me, Todd!” the Mayor shouts from Morpeth, pulling up to my side as we ride on, fast.

“You ain’t gotta worry bout that,” I say, gripping my rifle.

“I mean, to save your life,” he says, looking over. “And don’t forget your end of the bargain either. I’d hate for there to be any casualties from friendly fire.”

And he winks at me.

Viola
, I think right at him, sending it to him in a fist of Noise.

He flinches.

And he ain’t smiling so much now.

We ride after the army thru the west end of town, down the main road, past what can only be the wreckage of the original jails the Answer burnt down in their biggest attack before today. I only ever been down here once, when I ran thru it the other way with Viola in my arms, carrying her down the zigzag road when she was dying, carrying her into what I thought was safety, but all I found was the man riding by my side, the man who killed a thousand Spackle to start this war, the man who tortured Viola for informayshun he already knew, the man who murdered his own son–

“And what other kind of man would you want leading you into battle?” he says, reading my Noise. “What other kind of man is suitable for war?”

A monster,
I think, remembering what Ben told me once.
War makes monsters of men.

“Wrong,” says the Mayor. “It’s war that makes us men in the first place. Until there’s war, we are only children.”

Another blast of the horn comes roaring down at us, so loud it nearly takes our heads off and it puts the army off its stride for a second or two.

We look up the road to the bottom of the hill. We see Spackle torches gathering there to meet us.

“Ready to grow up, Todd?” the Mayor asks.

{VIOLA}

BOOM!

Another explosion just up ahead of us now, sending smoking debris flying high above the trees. I’m so scared I forget the state of my ankles and I try to spur on Acorn like I’ve seen in vids on my ship. I curl forward from the pain. The bandages that Lee – still out there somewhere, trying to find the Answer in the wrong place, oh please be safe,
please
be safe – the bandages he wound around my feet are good but the bones are still broken and for a minute the agony flashes all the way up my body, right to the throbbing burn in the band around my forearm again. I pull back my sleeve to look. The skin around the band is red and hot, the band itself still just thin steel, immovable, uncuttable, marking me as number 1391 until the day I die.

That’s the price I paid.

The price I paid to find him.

“And now we’ve got to make it worth it,” I say to Acorn, whose Noise says
Girl colt
back to agree with me.

The air is filling with smoke and I can see fires burning up ahead. People are still running past us in all directions, though fewer and fewer as the town starts to thin out.

If Mistress Coyle and the Answer started at the Office of the Ask, marching towards the centre of town from the east, then they’d already be past the hill where the communications tower used to be. Which is the most likely place where the scout ship landed. Mistress Coyle would have turned around and taken a fast cart to get there, to be the first one to talk to them, but who would she have left in charge?

Acorn presses ahead, around the road as it curves–

And
BOOM!

There’s a flash of light as another dormitory goes up in flames, reflecting the road for a shining second–

And I see them–

The Answer.

Lines of men and women, blue
A
s written across their fronts and sometimes even painted on their faces.

And every one with guns pointed out–

In front of carts loaded with weaponry–

And though I recognize some of them (Mistress Lawson, Magnus, Mistress Nadari), it’s like I don’t know them at all, they look so fierce, so focused, so scared and brave and committed and for a second I pull back on Acorn’s reins, too afraid to ride towards them.

The flash of the explosion dies and they’re plunged into darkness again.

Forward?
Acorn asks.

I take in a breath, wondering how they’ll react to seeing me, wondering if they’ll see me at all and not just blow me right out of the saddle in the confusion.

“We’ve got no choice,” I finally say.

And just as he readies himself to move again–

“Viola?” I hear from out of the darkness.

[T
ODD
]

The road outta town reaches a wide clearing bounded by the river on the right, with the massive crashing of the falls and the zigzag road down the hill direcktly in front of us. The army roars into the clearing, Captain Hammar in the lead, and even tho I’ve only been here once, I know there were trees here before, trees and small houses, and so the Mayor musta had his men clearing it all this time, making it ready to be a battlefield–

As if he knew this was coming–

But I can’t stop to think about that cuz Mr Hammar is shouting “HALT!” and the men are stopping in formayshun and looking across the clearing–

Cuz there they are–

The first troops of the Spackle army–

Fanning out into the open ground, a dozen, two dozen, ten dozen of ’em, surging down the hill like a river of white blood, torches held high, bows and arrows and some weird long white stick things in their hands and there are Spackle foot soldiers swarming round other Spackle riding these huge white creachers, built wide like a bullock but taller and broader and with a massive single horn shooting out from the end of their noses and the creachers are covered in heavy armour that looks like it’s made from clay and I see that a lotta the Spackle soldiers are wearing it too, the clay covering their white skin–

And there’s another horn blast so loud I swear my ears are starting to bleed and you can see the horn with yer own eyes now, strapped to the backs of two of the horned creachers up on the hilltop and being blown by that huge Spackle–

And oh, God–

Oh, my, God–

Their
Noise–

It comes tumbling down the hill like a weapon on its own, cresting across the open ground like foam on a raging river, and it’s coming right for us, pictures of their army cutting us down, pictures of our soldiers being ripped to pieces, pictures of ugliness and horror that you could never describe, pictures–

Pictures that our own soldiers are sending right back to ’em, pictures rising from the mass of men in front of me, pictures of heads torn from bodies, of bullets ripping Spackle apart, of slaughter, of endless endless–

“Keep your focus, Todd,” the Mayor says, “or the battle will take your life. And I, for one, am more than curious as to what sort of man you’re going to turn out to be.”

“FORM A LINE!” we hear Mr Hammar shouting and the soldiers immediately behind him start spreading out. “FIRST WAVE READY!” he shouts and the men stop and raise their rifles, poised to rush forward at his command as the second wave lines up behind ’em.

The Spackle have stopped too, forming an equally long line at the bottom of the hill. A horned creacher parts their line in the middle, a Spackle standing on its back behind a u-shaped white thing that looks like it’s made of bone, half-again as wide as a man and mounted on a stand on the creacher’s armour.

“What
is
that?” I ask the Mayor.

He grins as if to himself. “I think we’re about to find out.”

“MEN READY!” Mr Hammar shouts.

“Stay back with me, Todd,” the Mayor says. “Keep out of the fighting as much as you can.”

“Yeah, I know,” I say, heavy feeling in my Noise. “You don’t like to get your hands dirty.”

He catches my eye. “Oh, there are going to be plenty of dirty days ahead. Don’t you worry.”

And then “CHARGE!!!” Mr Hammar screams at the top of his lungs–

And the war is on.

{VIOLA}

“Wilf!”
I yell, riding over to him. He’s driving an ox-cart, out in front and off to the side of the first line of the Answer, still marching down the road in the smoky gloom.

“Yer
alive
!” Wilf says, hopping down off the cart and scooting over to me. “Mistress Coyle tol’ us yoo were dead.”

Anger fills my stomach again over what Mistress Coyle tried to do, at the bomb she intended for the Mayor and how she didn’t seem to mind that it would take me with it. “She’s wrong about a lot of things, Wilf.”

He looks up at me and in the light of the moons, I can see the fright in his Noise, fright in the most unflappable man I’ve ever met on this whole planet, a man who risked his life to save both me and Todd more than once, fright in the one man around here who’s never afraid. “The Spackle are comin, Viola,” he says. “Ya gotta get outta here.”

“I’m riding to get help, Wilf–”

Another
BOOM
rips through a building across the road from us. There’s a small blast wave and Wilf has to hold on to Acorn’s reins to keep standing up. “
What the hell are they doing?
” I yell.

“Mistress’s orders,” Wilf says. “To save the body, ya sometimes have to cut off the leg.”

I cough from the smoke. “That sounds
exactly
like the kind of stupid thing she’d say. Where is she?”

“Took off when that ship done flew over. Riding fast to where it landed.”

My heart jumps. “Where did it land, Wilf? Where exactly?”

He motions back down the road. “Yonder hill, where tower used to be.”

“I
knew
it.”

There’s another distant blast of the horn. Every time it goes off, there’s yet more screaming from the townsfolk running everywhere. I even hear some screaming from the army of the Answer.