The Books of the Wars (31 page)

But in themselves, each of them represented more power than any great nation his home world might be able to muster. As he forgot their numbers and concentrated upon individual examination, VanRoark became aware of just how much the night and then the fog had distorted distances and proportions. The
W. Lane,
the smallest of the nine, now appeared even greater in the crowded anchorage while the largest, a battleship of incalculable destructive power, loomed over the sailing ships clustered near her, and cast her morning shadow far out to Sea.

They were towed ashore in the
Garnet
's longboat along with one or two members of the crew who had honestly decided to throw their lot in with the army. The captain was still on board, briefing his chosen spies for their preliminary tasks.

Close inshore, they passed by the armed merchant cruiser that had brought Timonias to VanRoark's city. The rust was still scabbed about her plating and the gun tubs still marred the graceful lines. There were four other converted merchant ships moored around Timonias' ship, all in varying states of disrepair. The largest was also in the best shape, a tanker only a little smaller than the battleship farther out in the anchorage. The gloss black hull contrasted sharply with her spotless white topsides. As they rowed past her, VanRoark could see that her broad decks had been cleared of pumps and transfer pipes; a twin line of big field guns began aft of the forecastle, broke around the forward superstructure and then continued aft, their barrels and recoil mechanisms shining with preservative grease.

There was almost no surf and they landed easily. The crew stared at what lay before them and then pushed hurriedly back to the Sea and the
Garnet.
Before Van-Roark, Smythe, Tapp and the two who had deserted the
Garnet
sprawled the army: colors, colors swirling and dancing at every hand. Armored men mounted on horses with silken covers galloped back and forth before them, maces and lances held in their gleaming hands, silk pennons trailing from their crested helmets.

Tents fanned out in a random manner from the beach, redoubling the riot of colors with their gay patterns and designs; before many stood a staff or an ensign of some great family or nation or noble order. VanRoark could pick out at least twenty identifiable standards from where he stood, and Smythe said that of those he could place, at least half were of nations he had thought dead or scattered past recalling: the dolphin and seabird crests of the Dresau Islands naval aristocracy; the star constellations of the lands of the House of Raud; the mailed fist and pegasus of Mourne, ringed with a circlet of black oak leaves in penance for some ancient, forgotten wrong; the horse mane and sun disk devices of Larine's barbarian nobility; enameled, chain mail banners from the mountain kingdoms of Iannarrow, Enom, Howth; lion, unicorn, and hippogriff painted shields before the tents of men from Mountjoy and Kirkland and Kroonstadt; the anchor and osprey flag of Enador could be seen flying among a thousand others. VanRoark turned back to the harbor and picked out the low riding form of one of the city's river monitors.
Goddamn! Even the capitalists are here,
he thought. And for every one he could identify there were a hundred that were beyond even the librarian's knowledge.

They walked slowly up from the beach, swimming through the colors and press of bodies, for the types of men easily outnumbered the crests and colors they had first seen. It was like a city fair, when such things were still being held; never in all the world, not even in Enador's brawling markets and wharves, had he sensed such activity and apparent purpose. Here, a thing was being
done,
men were at work on things and not sitting on their fat asses waiting for something to walk up and club them to death.

Lord! The air itself was as alive and electric as the torrent of colors and people. VanRoark felt his head lighten and his joints partially dissolve as they walked, first down one avenue lined with stalls peddling newly-caught fish and lobster, then down another where large, especially gaily colored tents had rather tough looking women standing beside them, even at this hour of the morning. Tapp considered the tents closely, grunting approval when he caught the eye of someone he liked—and then groaning at his lack of money. VanRoark supposed that even the Army of Justice and Light was still made up of normal men who had to live while they were waiting. Smythe had already disappeared into one of the tents.

They walked south along the seaward edge of the camp, pavilion after bright pavilion passing to their left, great, heavily carved sailing ships riding at anchor on their right or careened up on the beach having their bottoms scraped. Gradually, the camp sites thinned out as they climbed up into the mountains toward Brampton Hall's ruin. It was about noon and they were almost to the summit of the headlands when they stopped for a lunch of black bread and cheese that VanRoark had purchased on one of the market avenues. Prices were much steeper than they had expected. After hassling at several shops and idly pricing items they could never afford no matter what their normal price—things like pistols or chain mail shirts—VanRoark correctly guessed that Enador had sent one of her precious river monitors to guard her merchants, not to die in the name of God or Creation. When they talked to Smythe later in the week, he confirmed that Enador's commercial ventures, along with some of the other trading nations and cities present, went further than selling inanimate goods. That was why most of the shops and brothel tents were near the shore, for they could be more easily protected by the guns of their guardian ships.

These ideas depressed VanRoark more than he thought they should have. After all, was he not a jaded traveler, a wanderer who had left all this world had to offer him to go and seek his just end? But the organization, the emotionless calculation of it all really upset him for a time. Tapp, on the other hand, was fairly philosophical about the whole thing, arguing that if a fellow wanted to make some honest gold out of the end of the world, then who was to say he was wrong? None of this did much to counter VanRoark's recurring doubt that he had come to the right army.

But now they turned on the mountain's slope and, panting from the climb, stared at the carpet the army spread before them. The flat blurring colors and planes they had seen from sea level were now tilted upward, swirling, turning, colliding like buckets of dye suddenly dumped into a whirlpool. As they looked down to the north and northeast, they could see the nondescript, bland horde of tents and shelters in which men like themselves were forced to exist because of their inability or refusal to submit to Enador & Co.'s gougings.

As the density of the camps grew, so did the colors. First a single stripe of red or orange silk, or perhaps a small family banner sewn to a canvas wall, a hereditary suit of mail, ancient and oiled, gleaming by a doorway.

Then came the close packed heart of the army, its random, directionless avenues with their chromatic floods and harsh flashing metal; men mounted on strange beasts, gryphons and other winged creatures that flew above the bazaars and among the myriad flags. There was life compressed, even as time had become compressed for VanRoark, consuming and rioting with itself as if it had to satiate its last desires, before leaving for the Meadows.

There were no priests dressed as the two thought priests should, black and somber as befitted their mission in all this. Nor was there anything which might be taken for a church or temple. Tapp, however, said he had spotted several private shrines inside various tents.

The colors began to dull and fade out as the army once again began to thin out to the north; but instead of simply dying out, the tents and encampments ended abruptly; there was a stretch of several hundred feet and across that VanRoark could dimly make out the priestly dignity of canvas-shrouded field artillery and armored vehicles. They stood at the foot of the mountains, which curved east, and then straight north in a huge semicircle; the northern edge, instead of looping back and closing with the Sea, was split by a river gorge and then appeared to die away into grasslands. More formidable ranges, olive and dark gray, defined the horizon far past the grass plain.

Drawn up between the river and its delta were the tanks and colorless tents of what the main body of the army called the rim nations, for they lived at the edge of the world and, presumably, at the edge of chaos. Tapp said they were the lads of Brampton Hall, and they were not going to the Meadow Wars—they had merely come home. Then he laughed and VanRoark wondered if it was a joke.

At the eastern edge of the army, where the mountains dipped to allow the river to pass, there were four or five long, olive and tan camouflaged vehicles; they were articulated and made up of many separate cars. Tapp called them land trains and said that the longest of them stretched for more than a thousand feet. Moving westward along the border of the army were massed the artillery of the rim nations and their armored trucks and tanks; even at this great distance from them, hulking, brutal forms were clearly visible, even the red and purple flags flying from their masts and aerials. Small figures in tan and black walked in front of them or crawled over their vast exteriors.

The ranks of guns and vehicles were broken at irregular intervals by command tents and temporary buildings, again spined with radio masts and disk antennas. So strange, VanRoark thought as he looked at them, distance dissolving as it had in the fog last night; they were so quiet and firm beside the main body of the army and its erupting life. Soft, rippling colors blazoned on flags of a hundred different nations, and heritages lived below him, even though they awaited the signal to end Creation. Then north, across the hard crystalline soil that gave the Burn its name, the rim nations, almost sleeping, were strangely touched with the sadness of ruins; it was so quiet over there, no sounds drifting up to them over the blare of the army's shops and whorehouses.

The guns and tents, in loose order like tombstones, ambled westward until they reached a point about a third of a mile from the beach. There the aircraft of the rim nations (he was already beginning to identify them as something apart from the army) waited, one or two moving out of line, briefly catching the sun on their polished hulls and wings; they taxied out onto the horizon-reaching causeway. Tapp said it had been built by Brampton Hall, though for what reason he could not guess.

There was a bridge-like structure piercing the causeway two hundred yards from the beach, most probably to let the ships north to the Meadows. They rolled out over this, and then gained speed as their wing roots or tails burned pale yellow. Finally, the rim nations sent some noise up into the hills.

VanRoark followed the pathetically few aircraft as they tumbled westward and then lifted free, gaining sudden grace once they were rid of the earth. Their sound smothered the sea-roaring of the army and for a moment there was only the ground which he stood upon and the shining, silver bobbins streaming across the sky for some unknown purpose.

The ships he had seen last night and that morning, the five gray warships and three merchant cruisers, the tanker with its decks crammed with artillery, were moored nearest the causeway; flags dipped from ancient masts as the craft took off from the causeway, and the infrequent flashings of signal lights winked under their shadowed superstructures.

VanRoark thought at first that the ships and the encampments of the rim nations were already dead; but the planes and signal lamps showed that that was not yet true. They were only tired, sick with age, and traveling toward a resting place that seemed to be forever receding from them; thus the sadness. They had been running so very long.

A week after they had climbed up the mountain to Brampton Hall, he had chanced to wander across the dividing strip between the main force of the army and the rim nations. There had been very few persons around, at least compared to the eternal bustling of the army. He had walked up and down the rows of tanks and big guns, and when he counted them there did not seem to be so many.

There had been a man leaning up against the tires of a howitzer's split trail carriage, the watchworks of its sighting mechanism disassembled on a white sheet in front of him. He was naked to the waist, lean and deeply tanned, but that could have been his natural body color; either way, the contrast to his blue eyes was most striking. There was a tattoo of an armored Death, mounted on a pegasus, on his left forearm, and under it the words,
656th Airborne—the Devil's Own.

They talked of inconsequentialities for a while, the price of women and swordfish steak, the lack of any life on board Timonias' old cruiser.

VanRoark mentioned the man's tattoo and asked where his planes were.

"Crashed on the way here. Probably still there in the, uh, North Cape Confederation's old lands; it's cold up there. We didn't think we were going to make it down in one piece, 'cause see, we got into these fjords. Walker set us down all right, though. We lost him a while back in the Barrens." His voice was slow, he was paying much more attention to rebuilding the sight than talking.

"How long ago was that?"

"Around ten, eleven years," he answered absently.

VanRoark was taken back a bit by this; he may have heard the call for the same Armageddon that Tapp had. "And you've been traveling since then to get here?"

"Around that, a little less, though, 'cause we got here about four months ago. And even then, we didn't spend that much time moving. The worst part was fishing all we could out of the water and then finding enough fuel for our tractors. We even rigged one up with a steam engine." He laughed a little at that.

VanRoark waited but apparently the man had nothing more to say on that particular subject; he kept working on the sight, carefully recoiling a small spring back into its gauge casing. "Don't you have anything else besides guns?" VanRoark mumbled more to himself than to the man as he glanced down the ranked barrels of howitzers and long rifles, steel cables rigged from breech castings to muzzle brakes to correct temperature warping of the bores.