Spanners - The Fountain of Youth (25 page)

“My point is this
: if we’re to win the battle, we must raise the Devil’s army. And if we’re to raise the Devil’s army, you must be willing to go in league with Judas, and do such ignoble things that you’ll become the fiercest punisher the world has ever known. Your burial of Adam is just the beginning, and you’ll eventually do things that would cause Judas himself to shudder. Do you understand?”

“No, sir,” said Balthasar.

Juan took the top off the deep fryer and listened to the oil bubble for a few moments. Part of the grease was popping out of the container and spackled Balthasar’s pants, and he stepped back. Juan didn’t step back, and didn’t flinch as the droplets of oil fell on him. Instead, he focused on his hand, took two deep breaths and then plunged his arm into the oil. The grease sizzled around his arm, snapping and popping as they cooked his skin, but Juan clenched his jaw and kept his hand in the tank. After a few moments he withdrew and then presented his arm to Balthasar as if it were a piece of meat to be eaten.

Balthasar was aghast
and couldn’t intuit how Juan wanted him to respond. Juan’s arm had already begun to heal, but it was still just a mass of raw, corroded flesh.

“Again, I speak, and even
act,
in metaphors,” said Juan. “What needs to be done will become clear as we begin our journey. What I need from you is to know that you will continue to
do
what
needs
to be done to raise our army, even if it means plunging your hands into the ether of Hell itself. Will you do this?”

“Of course,” said Balthasar.

“Martyrdom is easy,” said Juan. “Will you plunge your hands into the fire to place
others
in Hell though? Not the purgatory of dull darkness to which you’ve sent Adam, but
Hell
?”

“I don’t follow you
, sir,” said Balthasar, “but I’ll do what needs to be done.”

“I understand that I must be sounding like a whirling dervish of the apocalypse, spouting nonsense,” said Juan, “but let me put it baldly
: in order to raise our army, we must do some cruel, cruel things, and you are tasked with organizing this. You’re going to create Hell in a microcosm, and when the souls we’ve trapped cry out for mercy, you must not waver. You must have the strength of Judas and the resolve of Cortés and be willing to punish these souls for a century, for a millennium, and for eternity if need be. Can you do this?”

“I will do this,” said Balthasar.

“Good,” said Juan, patting the fryer. “You’ll create a place of cruelty not because you enjoy it, but because you must. You’ll create a Hell so dark and unending that the demons of the earth will hear it and eventually come to our side.”

/***/

The team drove west over the Arizona desert caravan style, with Blur taking over for Cannon, and then Drayne taking over for Blur. Cannon had been driving too erratically for the other vehicles to keep up, so Balthasar had radioed him to stop and then had Blur take over. Cannon was hurt by the switch, but after five minutes he calmed down, went into the backseat and took a nap.

After another hour
, Blur radioed Balthasar and said that he needed a break himself; though he was recovering well from his fight with Phoe, his burns were deep and had taken away his energy. Balthasar instructed Drayne to take over and once again their caravan of trucks drove through the desert together.

Another guard
chauffeured Juan because he hadn’t yet learned to drive, and Balthasar drove his own truck alone, with the modified tank in the back. He had engineered the deep fryer to be much sturdier, and in addition to being able to cook he had given it the option to freeze, increase in pressure or become a vacuum at the press of a button.
This tank will be Hell in microcosm, but we won’t need to run it for eternity, even if Juan thinks otherwise,
thought Balthasar.
This tank will be such a dark place that they’ll relent in hours, obviating the need for extended punishment, let alone eternal suffering.

/***/

They entered the Navajo nation just before noon, and Balthasar couldn’t help but be bewildered by history’s strange treatment of his former adversaries and their adjoining tribes. When Balthasar’s people had set sail for the New World, they were out to conquer, but at least the conquistador’s message was clear:
we’re here to defeat you; if you should fight back and kill us, you will not be defeated.

But religion added an odd twist to the advent of the conquistador; the presence of priests justified any and all brutal actions against the natives but also complicated things later. Killing a knife-wielding natural who didn’t share your language was easy, but what happened when the natural put down his knife and became an obedient Christian? What happened when the natives began to intermarry and give birth to baptized children?

Balthasar had pondered these things for several decades and had even worked for the Bureau of Indian affairs back in the late 1800s, but never in his wildest dreams had he imagined the Indians would live such a paradoxical existence as they did now. They were marched from their homes to the worst lands on earth, and when the lands were found to have minerals they were told to move aside once more. Tribes cut in half by the Mexican border became a case study in extremes, with those to the north becoming rich off casinos but dying daily of diabetes mellitus, and those to the south being paragons of health but staying as a permanent underclass.
But the world is full of paradoxes just like this, due only to discordant cultures,
thought Balthasar.
After we take over, there will be one culture and the world will make more sense.

They stopped
at a rundown gas station in the middle of nowhere and saw a boy tending to a cage full of white doves.

“
They’re not Navajo, but this is where their kind resides,” said Juan. “Do you remember him?”

Balthasar remembered the boy quite clearly; he had been tending to bird
s when they had first met. Five hundred years later, the boy was still tending to birds.

“They called him
Koriuaka
,” said Balthasar. “
Parrot
in Arawak.”

“
Koriuaka,
” repeated Juan. “I remember; he served as our translator and though we treated him harshly, he still has his youth, so he can’t be too bitter.”

They surrounded the
youngster, and he paid them no mind. Juan whispered the boy’s name, and the kid looked up with eyes glowing faintly with fear, and they glowed again when he saw Juan’s face. The kid froze for a moment and then tried to run, but he was caught by Cannon and held up with his feet dangling.
He’s an immortal who’s lived longer than we have,
thought Balthasar,
but right now he acts like a frightened child caught throwing stones through a church window.

“We’re not here to hurt you, Koriuaka,” said Juan. “The past is the past. All I want to do is talk with your council. Can you call them in?”

The boy wouldn’t speak.

“You’re the mouthpiece, boy
; this is what you were put on earth to do, so bring them in. If you don’t do this, I’ll find them all on
my
terms,” said Juan. “Do you understand?”

The boy nodded and Cannon let him go. The boy paused to think for a moment
, and then went back to tend to his birds.

“Give me four days,” said the boy. “They can’t make it here on short notice.”

“You have two days,” said Juan. “We’re on a schedule, and if they’re not here in two days, there will be consequences.”

/***/

Two days later, Balthasar drove twenty kilometers south of Highway 160 to the Valu-7 motel on Highway 191. Blur had been managing his injuries well so Balthasar tasked him with implementing the plan, and most importantly, with keeping Cannon under control. If everything went haywire they would rely on Cannon to wrangle everyone by force, but until then, they needed stealth. Blur and Drayne would be all that was necessary; there were only five members of the council, six if you counted the boy with the white birds.

And we meet in a Valu-7 meeting room, rented for twenty dollars an hour,
thought Balthasar.
This is an odd place to raise an army.

Juan sensed Balthasar’s reluctance to enter the dingy room and whispered in an old dialect of Spanish that only they could still understand.

“
This place may be unassuming
,” said Juan, “but so were the Mount of Olives and the Bodhi tree that shaded Gautama Buddha. Humble places change the world; in fact, change comes from nowhere else.”

Three men and two women were sitting at the tables, modestly dressed and dark-skinned from working sunny fields as day laborers. Balthasar knelt in the middle of the room
facing the five council members who were seated; he thought he might remember them from five centuries ago but their faces were now rough, not from injury but from hard living.
They’re immortal but choose the difficult life
, thought Balthasar.
It’s been said they do this to hide; to stay “off the grid,” as it were. They hide from the world like Adam, but more so.

“
Esteemed Council of the Arawak nation,”
said Juan in Arawak.
“I am honored by your presence.”

“
We doubt that,”
responded a man in Arawak, whom Balthasar now remembered to be their chief.
“We doubt that very much.”

“Five hundred years of burial changes a man,” said Juan with a smile.

“Indeed it does, and if it were up to me, you’d have been in the ground for another five centuries,” said the chief, “and not just for the torture you committed on our kind. You broke our culture apart, and before that you destroyed a score of other cultures to reach us. Now I understand you’ve regained our jewel, the Fountain, and then you lost her, which is a good thing.”

“We didn’t
lose
her, she was
stolen
from us,” said Juan, “and the man who has stolen her, Adam Parr, has made no effort to reach out to you. So it appears that we’re both without the one thing that we want.”

The council spoke amongst themselves in an obscure Arawak dialect that Balthasar couldn’t understand.

“Adam is a friend of our people, and though he may not be on our side, he isn’t actively out to
destroy
us either,” said the chief. “We’d rather have the Fountain in his hands than in yours.”

Juan smiled and then thought for a moment before speaking.

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Juan, “for though Adam is much more friendly than I, his vision for the future doesn’t include you.”

“He saved us from your cruelty five centuries ago,” said the chief, “and though we need no more saving, at the very least Adam leaves us alone.”

“That he does,” said Juan, “and will continue to do so while you pick strawberries for a dollar per hour.”

The chief once again commiserated with his compatriots in the unintelligible Arawak dialect; this time there was much hemming and hawing, and one member got up and tried to leave in a huff before being calmed down by one of the other members.
I wish Juan would end this pointless discourse,
thought Balthasar.
Our guards are at the door and the council’s fate has already been sealed.

“This is the life we choose,” said the chief to Juan. “We live like ghosts and have taken a vow of freedom
: no family, no property and no attachments of any kind.”

“Sounds like most spanners,” said Juan, “existing eternally but only in the shadows, living forever but without consequence.”

“Did you call us here to insult us?” said the chief. “If so—”

“I called you here to grant you mercy!” yelled Juan.

There was a moment of stunned silence while the council absorbed what they had just heard, too shocked to laugh at Juan’s apparent naiveté. They didn’t fall back into their Arawak dialect, and merely looked at the chief to speak.

“
You
… come to grant
us
mercy?” said the chief, still too shocked to make light of it.

“Yes,” said Juan, “and you’ll get only one opportunity. Kneel and swear your undying fealty to me right now
, and I’ll give you great rewards.”

The council didn’t speak and once again looked at the chief.

“We don’t understand—” said the chief.

“I’m about to take over the world, with your Fountain as
queen. There will be a place for her tribe as my personal detail, protecting me, fighting for me and doing my general bidding. If you bow to me right here, right now,
and swear to get the remaining members of your immortal tribe to do the same
, I’ll allow you to exist under me. If you fail to do this, I’ll punish you
immediately
and for eternity.”

Two members of the council got up and stormed out but were greeted by Cannon, who took them both by the
ir shirt collars and threw them back into their seats. The chief’s eyes glowed dimly, and then he looked at Juan.