Old Green World (12 page)

They stood for what seemed like a very long time, in silence, as the sounds of battle seemed to drift away from them. Albert eased his stance and looked at the man, who panted and murmured. The man struggled to stay awake, like someone drunk past looseness into blind stupor. In his delirium, he had changed from a threat to someone soft and vulnerable, his mouth open, his eyes wavering and sad, his swaying body in need of a catch. Albert felt an overwhelming need to protect him.
Who is driving them?
he thought.
The Dragon isn’t a forest sickness. It’s an Adept trick, but it killed Richard. Is Niall doing it? Are they all doing it? Why would they do it?

After a few moments, Albert tried to rouse the big man gently. “Hallo, sir? All right?”

The man moved his lips, murmuring, with a bare deep purring coming out. His eyes were closed now.

“All right, buddy? What’s your name, buddy? I’m Albert.”

“My name’s Cas,” the man mumbled, in Baixan. Then his eyes snapped open with a new green intensity. “Drop your weapon, boy!” he screamed. “I’m going to slice you from your neck to your cock and rip the hole open wide and eat you out from the inside, you little pecker. I’m going to cut off your head and use it to, to piss . . . piss and, and spew in . . .” He lost most of his intensity mid-sentence, and his eyes darted about in confusion. But his eyes stayed open, and he said, half whimpering, “Drop your weapon. Drop it, so I can cut you with my sword.” Cas held a limb, about a foot and a half long and about three inches in diameter.
This is the miracle of civilization
, Albert thought.
Deluded by our masters and knocking each other with sticks.

Albert wouldn’t hurt Cas. He wouldn’t hurt anyone ever again. “Sure, buddy. Whatever you say.” He dropped his sword to the ground. “Maybe you could gut me in a little while, sir. Maybe we could sleep for a bit first? It’s all right if you want to.” He took a tentative step toward Cas, and another once he noticed that Cas had nodded off again. With each step he took without consequence, he drew a little closer, with a little more speed, until finally he stood at Cas’s chest.

The giant chest heaved with the work of staying upright in the midst of all that confusion. Cas smelled a bit, but not as bad as Albert had feared: unwashed, rank mostly with his own sweat. They were close enough that Albert could hear his breath. Albert admitted to himself, with shame, that he wanted him, more than a little. He knew he was making stupid decisions and went right on making them.

“It’s all right, Cas. You don’t have to keep fighting,” he said, and put his hand against the unshaven, red face.

Cas’s eyes snapped open and green again. He yelled and swung his limb at Albert, who tried to evade it, but still caught it on his shoulder. Albert’s right arm went numb, and he staggered back. Cas went for another blow to his head. His second strike was broad and clumsy, and Albert dodged it easily.

Cas roared and rushed for Albert, who grabbed a handful of dirt and pebbles and threw them in his face. Cas not only reared back in surprise, but dropped his limb altogether. Albert picked it up and bashed it into the big man’s gut, hoping to be forceful enough to take him out, but not so harsh as to damage him. He bent over, and Albert made a second tentative blow to his head. That knocked him out.

Albert turned Cas over on his side, cautiously, in case he went green again. When he remained still, Albert came down to a resting kneel. Albert’s shoulders hunched forward. He rested his head on Cas’s shoulder. He could wake up Cas and save him, Albert thought. They could head to the forest and sleep in a tent. They would live a life with their own minds for themselves, and a love that was uncomplicated: a life where everything wasn’t ruined.

He kissed Cas on the head. “I’ll come back,” he said.

He stood and oriented himself again. He couldn’t hear any of his troops. He saw something bearing toward him, a soldier on a mount. The mount wasn’t a horse. He ran to it.

It was a soldier from the Green Island, broad and red-faced, riding a boar. Albert had seen big boars before, but none of them as big as this one: it stretched at least twenty feet from the head to the tail. It had been groomed, which somehow made it look far more awful. It had a harness and a saddle, and the rider wore full armor and acted as if riding a boar into battle were something completely normal.

Albert kept his sword in his sheath, but took the bow from his back. He yelled at the soldier. “Stop! This isn’t a battle, this is a slaughter. This is wrong. We have to stop.”

The mounted soldier stared at him for a moment, dumbfounded. He then growled and began charging. Albert began to nock an arrow, but realized the boar and rider were too fast. Albert put away his bow, swallowed, and realized he had to be ready. Everything needed to happen smoothly.

As the boar came down upon him, he dove to the left side, opposite the soldier’s sword arm. He didn’t fall, which pleased him. He lunged for the back of the saddle, hoping to pull himself onto the boar.

He caught the saddle with a firm grip, but failed to sweep himself up as elegantly as he’d imagined. The running boar dragged him alongside for several feet, while the soldier attempted to strike at Albert. He took a couple of angry swipes with his shield arm at Albert. Albert was lucky: his awkward angle alongside the boar made him difficult to strike.

Albert’s arms burned with the weight of his dragging body and the effort of pulling himself onto the boar. He threw his legs up a couple of times without luck but finally hooked his foot on the boar’s flanks. As he climbed up, the soldier threw his shield in frustration, hoping to maneuver himself better against Albert.

Albert pulled himself snug to the soldier and tugged at the soldier’s helmet. As Albert had hoped, it lacked a buckle and came right off. He could see the soldier’s tangled hair and reddened neck. The collar of his chest armor rode low on his neck. Albert wanted to try to talk him down, one last time, but all he could get out was “Stop.”

The soldier raised his sword and poked randomly behind his head with it, hoping to stab Albert. Albert grabbed the arm. He bent the wrist back from the arm until he thought he would snap it right off, like the limb off a boiled chicken. The soldier screamed and dropped the sword. Then Albert pushed him off the boar, trying to get him away without hurting him.

He failed. When the soldier slid to the left, his foot stuck in the stirrup, and head connected to ground with a crack. The boar caught the now-dead soldier underfoot, stumbled, and lurched forward, its flanks bucking up and throwing Albert several yards.

Albert landed on his back. The flying fall knocked the breath out of him, and he lay immobile. He could hear the boar braying and hoped it was still off its feet as well. He’d been knocked flat plenty of times before, and he knew to let the breath come back to him.

During the long few seconds, he stared at the sky. He saw smoke to his right, at the periphery. He heard fighting around him, metal on metal and screams and howls. He thought of how he’d lost his troops. He lost them today by going wild and breaking ranks, but he’d been losing them for weeks, bringing nothing but terror and killing to them. He located the feeling of all the shame and disgust and dejection in his body: a cold melody in the minor key on his left side, starting where his ear met his jaw and resonating all the way to his thigh.

He drifted from there to thoughts and feelings about Richard:
I loved him; it was my fault; it was Richard’s fault; it was all Richard’s fault; fuck Brother Richard, he is a fucking liar and should have never given me this responsibility in the first place; I loved him, though; he never killed, only I did; it’s my fault.
Then he noticed that he heard less of the boar. Then his lungs decided to operate again.

He sat up with a gasp. He saw the boar fleeing from the battlefield, dead soldier still in tow. There was a strange quiet in the land around him, nothing but a wordless rush of Baixans in the distance, streaming toward the ruined steel tower. Albert was now close enough to the tower to make out details. Four wide feet grounded it, and stairways rose from those feet up into the tower itself, winding metal that could be climbed. Baixans had gathered on its landings. But instead of trying to mount some defense from the landings, the Baixans rushed them, crowded them, climbed over one another to escape the soldiers of the Islands. They scrambled and clawed at each other. They threw one another from the landings. Between Albert and the chaos at the tower were some Island soldiers floating in air, gently, over the river, sent across by the magic winds of the Adepts.

Albert looked around for his troops. He could see the soldiers move toward the tower in an amorphous scatter, starting a few hundred yards ahead of him and extending several hundred yards beyond. He studied the crowd, trying to discern some grouping or pattern to it, finding none. Some soldiers struggled with one another, or wandered aimlessly, unsure what to do with the screaming innocents around them. Some tried to tend to the Baixans, others to control the crowds. There were sporadic groups of wild Baixans, small perturbations of whirling, green-eyed banshees that would emerge and attack anything nearby. He saw a few explosions in the distance, past the troops, and more flying bodies. The Adepts did most of the work of conquest, he thought, leaving the soldiers to clean up.

He looked around him. He realized that he lagged behind nearly everyone. The huts, tents, and fires around him were still freshly abandoned, food still cooking. A cat came up and rubbed up against his shin. He scratched it gently behind the ears. He heard the noise of the massacre drift away from him.

Suddenly, a group of five wild Baixans rushed forward, their eyes greener than he had seen since the raids just after Richard’s death. They looked in many directions, but moved as one, like a many-headed beast in composite. Albert went to his sword by instinct, but then took his hand away from the hilt, dropped his arms, and stood there, ready to let them sweep over him.

They focused on him and ran at him full-tilt. All the wild packs he had seen in the past had emerged suddenly from the trees: here, in the open, they were less startling but still remarkably fast. He breathed in and thought for a moment about what it would feel like to be torn apart. He thought of his parents and began quieting his mind for death, stilling himself to his breath and body, focusing on what moved directly before him.

The pack kept up its speed until only a few feet from him, then stopped abruptly. They crept forward, snarling and barking, but with a strange air that Albert read as curiosity. The forward-facing Baixan crept up to Albert, sniffing, and Albert could smell them, too. The green permeated them; it sat on their clothes, on their very breath.

“You smell different,” the green ones said in unison.

A calm settled over Albert. He let go of the tension and reaction he had learned from weeks of fighting the wild Baixans. He didn’t feel safe, but he didn’t care any longer. “Different from what?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” the chorus said. “Different.” It smelled, looked around some more. “You were with him. Richard,” it said.

“When you killed him? It was you, wasn’t it?”

The chorus wailed and spun about. Some of the Baixans dropped and pounded the ground, while others tore at their clothes and skin. “It was an accident!” they screamed. “It was an accident.” After a few minutes, the green ones settled down. A new one presented its face to Albert.

“They call you the Dragon,” Albert said.

“They do. That’s what I am. I am the Dragon.”

“In all this mess, I’m glad of one thing,” Albert said. “We’re hurting you. We’ll turn this into a city, and we’ll feed and clothe and teach these people. We’ll make up for what we did. And, when civilization is here, then we’ll be rid of you.”

The chorus laughed at him. “Hurting?
Hurting?
Not at all, I feel wonderful! I wanted this. I wanted this to happen from the very start.”

The chorus broke apart then from its circle, and re-formed itself around Albert. All five stared at him, green and burning. Albert stared at the one before him, locking eyes. “I’m not afraid of you,” Albert said.

The face laughed again, loudly and joylessly, another bark. Something crept up from Albert’s sternum and began to flush his cheeks. He burned green. A fire spread through him. He closed his eyes and saw the green burning behind his eyelids, looking into his body and mind. Then, abruptly, he felt the green waver, then immediately disappear. He had a moment of cool black relief before losing consciousness.

+ + +

He dreamed of the people in the forest again. It felt earlier than the last dream. He saw two women there, a wise woman and a quick woman. The smart man was sick.

The wise woman said to them, “We can change the forest.”

The strong man, healthy, ruddy, and full of hope, said, “Tell me what I can do.” And she told him to begin cutting down trees.

The smart man, wan but determined, said, “Tell me what I can do.” And she told him to measure a place, a square, where they could grow crops.

The quick woman asked, “What are you doing?” And the wise woman told her to go into the forest and tell the forest what they were doing.

They made a clearing and put vegetables in it. The vegetables got the whole of the sun, because the strong man had cleared away the trees. They made a small house and were happy.

+ + +

He woke up. He looked around; it was dusk. He had slept a long time. The sky glowed with purple and pink and brilliant comforting light, streaming through wispy clouds. He had never seen a more beautiful sunset.

He looked out toward the tower. Plumes of smoke drifted lazily from and around it. He could make out some scattered, tired activity. Defeated Baixans funneled out of the tower in rows, lined up, and sat down in place. He saw a few Island soldiers guiding them. They were teaching the Baixans already. Still figures pockmarked the ground for acres and acres. The figures posed randomly, crookedly, in positions no one living would take.

He sat for a long time, staring at the bodies, living and dead, the terrible ordinariness of people cleaning up after slaughter. When he couldn’t look at it any more, he went back down the hill from where they’d come. He went back to where Cas had been. The camp still burned and smoldered in places. The smoke was heavy. They had covered all of Baixa in smoke, he thought.