Valentine's Rising (21 page)

“Help me, you bastards,” Ahn-Kha gasped. Valentine felt something give.

Valentine heaved at the lifeless hand, terribly limp in his. She began to move. He prayed she didn't have compound fractures in her trapped legs; she'd end up looking like Narcisse, even if she wasn't paralyzed.

Anxious arms helped him bring her up out of the water. Valentine laid her out on the mound of dirt pushed up by the bulldozer.

“Work the breach, back to work,” Xray-Tango shouted. The men and a smattering of prisoners started relaying sandbags. The bulldozer backed off and approached again from a new direction, digging into the ground.

Valentine saw none of it. There was just Styachowski, pale and limp beneath him, blue-faced and mottle-cheeked. He cleaned the froth from her mouth.

“Push on her legs and get the water out of her lungs,” someone suggested.

Ahn-Kha knelt next to Styachowski, panting, water streaming from his body.

Valentine lifted his ear from Styachowski's chest. “That doesn't work,” Valentine said, bending back her head. “Get a blanket, a dry one.” He turned her head up, explored her mouth with a finger, and put his lips to hers. He forced air into her lungs.

“Get a medic, too,” Xray-Tango shouted at the soldier going for a blanket.

“Ahn-Kha, push on her chest, here,” Valentine said, indicating a spot. “Don't be gentle about it.” He pressed his lips to her cold mouth again.

The Golden One worked her heart.

“Should we rub her hands and feet?” Xray-Tango asked.

“No,” Valentine said between breaths. He was too busy to explain that it would draw blood away to the skin. She needed it in her brain, not her limbs.

Minutes in the wet dark passed, or perhaps just seconds. Hours? The only thing that mattered to Valentine were breaths, air into Styachowski's flooded lungs. Whatever time it took to run and get blankets had passed; the soldier returned with an armload.

Her eyes fluttered and opened. She coughed and heaved. Valentine rolled her on her side, and a mass of water and vomit came up. He held Styachowski through a series of wracking coughs, pulling blankets around her.

“Styachowski?” Valentine said as the coughing ebbed. Behind him the bulldozer was pushing the mountain of sandbags back into place. Valentine heard a beam snap and winced—he hoped that wasn't one of the Quickwood supports smashed.

Styachowski turned her face to see who was holding her. “God, Val—” she began. Valentine pressed his lips to hers, shutting her up. Xray-Tango turned away, perhaps embarrassed, and began to shout orders to the men helping the bulldozer. Valentine released her from the kiss.

“Dreams,” Styachowski said.

“What's that?”

“Dreams,” she said, and gathered herself. She burped, and glanced up at Valentine apologetically. “The wall fell on me, and I had dreams, or something. It was warm and pleasant, like I was being held by my mother as a baby. Then I woke up and you were there. Except my legs hurt.”

A medic knelt at her feet. He ran his hands up her right leg, gently rolling it. He repeated with the left, and Styachowski cried out.

“There's a break. I don't think it's bad. Simple fracture; I don't feel any protrusions. We've got to get her on a stretcher.”

“
Hsssssssssss
!” Styachowski sucked in air, closing her eyes. “It's throbbing. Am I bleeding?”

The medic splinted her. “It's the fibula, I think. Her knee's tore up, too. Abrasions.”

“No, you're wet, you're not bleeding,” Valentine said after looking at her legs. “Not badly. Bring the stretcher here.”

The medic finished fixing the splint. Valentine took her shoulders and the medic her legs, and lifted her onto the stretcher.

“The infirmary at headquarters,” the medic said to the men who took up the handles. “There's no hurry. Don't jog her.”

“You can go too, Le Sain,” Xray-Tango said, appearing at his shoulder. “Your captain there has things in hand.”

“The breach?”

“God knows.”

“Then I'll stay.”

 

Like a close-fought battle, or a football match where the lead changes hands, the issue hung in doubt until the next morning, when once again the water stabilized. Then it fell, at a pace that could almost be measured with the naked eye.

“I wonder if something gave way farther down the river?” Post said, eating bread and cheese with dirty fingers as they sat together on a ready pile of sandbags.

“Some old Corps of Engineers dike,” Valentine said. “Or Pine Bluff landing is underwater now.” He was too tired to care about the whys; all that mattered were the whats. And the big what was that the water was going down.

The men were asleep in the mud all around, heads cushioned on sandbags or backpacks. The scattered groups of prisoners slept in huddles, like wallows full of pigs.

“You going to check on Styachowski, sir?”

“We should see about reorganizing the men. Work out some shifts. Wish we'd get some fresh bodies from the other side of the river.”

Post stretched his arms and yawned. “They have problems of their own. The River Rats are flooded out.”

“River Rats? I've heard that before, somewhere.”

“The boatmen who work the barges and small craft. They've got a little town over there, from what they tell me. A couple of bars, music and girls included, a slop-house. Bona fide red-light district, sounds like. Some of the other soldiers go across for a good time, or to do a little black-market trading. They smuggle, too, of course.”

“The soldiers or the River Rats?”

“Both, I suppose.”

“I was wondering where Xray-Tango got his coffee,” Valentine said. “Being in the Caribbean spoiled me. I've got a taste for the stuff, now.”

“I'm ready to go back,” Post said. “You're probably right. I'll never find her.”

“Southern Command's not dead yet. There's Styachowski to think of, too.”

“Go check on her, if you like. Ahn-Kha and I'll hold the dike.”

 

Styachowski was asleep, her leg already in a cast, and after speaking to a nurse about her Valentine made himself comfortable. She was the only one occupying a bed in the infirmary; the real field hospital was on the other side of the river, in the old library. The nurses were keeping busy bandaging bashed fingers and wrapping sprains. A ruptured man groaned as the doctor probed his crotch.

Valentine made the mistake of putting his feet on her bed. The next thing he knew he was being kicked in the leg.

“Colonel,” Styachowski said. “You're snoring.”

He massaged the bridge of his nose until his eyes felt like focusing again. “Is it light out? How's the pain?”

“Better. They gave me a shot and I went out like a light. Codeine or morphine, I think. It's morning now. We're still in the dispensary, so I guess the levee held.”

“The water was receding last night.”

“New Columbia lives.”

His stomach growled. “Aren't they going to feed you something? Wait, I'll go myself.”

After retrieving bread, honey, and some kind of cooked cereal from the headquarters kitchen, he returned to Styachowski.

“You broke a leg once, sir?”

“No. It wasn't for lack of trying.”

“You limp. I thought maybe—”

“An old wound. Line of duty.”

Styachowski nodded. “You'll have to tell the story someday.”

“When you're better.”

“That'll be the day. I'm always down with something. If it's not a cold I've got a fever.

There was a long pause in the conversation while they ate. Valentine had never shared a meal in silence with a woman before. She probably needed to sleep again. “Can I get you anything before I go, Wagner?”

She shook her head, and Valentine relaxed a little, seeing her respond to her assumed name even under the influence of the painkiller. “No, thank you, sir. There is one thing though.”

“What's that.”

Styachowski glanced around the infirmary. “What's the policy here? Do they shoot the crippled horses, or send them . . . somewhere else?”

“Don't be silly. You're not getting out of my outfit that easy. I'm not going to let anything happen to anyone in my command. Especially to someone hurt doing her duty. The battalion's not going anywhere without you.”

She sank back into her pillow. “Thanks, Colonel.”

“I'll see if I can get you put back in your tent. You'd be more comfortable there, I think.”

“Thank you, sir. But not just for that.”

Valentine arched an eyebrow; she blushed and buried her face in her mush bowl.

 

“You wanted to see me, General?” Valentine asked

Xray-Tango thrust a curious, umbrellalike apparatus into the ground. It was a five-foot pole with four arms projecting from the top. At the end of each arm hung a string with a washer tied to the end. The spear end, currently buried in the dirt of what had been an underpass, was tipped with metal.

Styachowski was back in the tent she shared with a female sergeant. The ground had dried up, and the river was down feet, not just inches. Mrs. Smalls was expected to deliver within hours. Men still worked the levee, but life was returning to what passed for normal in Consul Solon's Trans-Mississippi KZ.

Xray-Tango smiled. “I hope this isn't a bad time. I'll try not to keep you too long. Technically, I'm off duty. I keep what used to be called ‘business hours.' ”

“Curtiz said that, but he told me that I could find you here right now. I'm used to coming immediately when sent for. I'll be in first thing tomorrow, if you'd rather, General.”

“No need. Unless you had plans for the evening.”

“Maybe a trip to the screen center.”

The south side of the river had two common rooms with projector screens, one for officers and the other for enlisted ranks. The soldiers lounged on everything from club chairs to old sofas watching the impossibly vivid colors on the pull-down screen. Valentine had put in an appearance at the officers' screen center and learned about the designer of a new riot bus, a biography of a woman who had produced an astonishing sixteen children, then an inspirational speech by a colonel who had won a brass ring in the rugged mountains in what had been West Virginia. He left to walk past Xray-Tango's headquarters and poked his head in the enlisted room, where a video of dancing showgirls on a Memphis stage had the packed soldiers drooling. An advertisement for a reenlistment bonus all-expense-paid trip to Memphis played immediately following. He hadn't gone back since and didn't intend to.

“Give the popcorn a miss. I think the butter is reclaimed machine oil.”

“If you don't mind me asking,” Valentine said, “what are you doing?”

“I started out as a section chief on the railroad. I still like to survey. You do anything to clear your head, Le Sain?”

“I swing an ax. To cut wood. I like turning big ones into little ones.”

“I would have guessed music. Something artistic. There's a look in your eyes that makes me think you're the creative type. For Christ's sake, at ease, Le Sain. This is a chat, not an ass-chewing.”

“Music's a good guess, sir. My mother used to sing. I had a little . . . recorder, that's what it was called. A recorder I'd play. Since you said this is just a chat, can I ask what that thing is, sir?”

“It's called a
groma
. It's an old Roman surveying tool. They used it to make straight lines. Works good for corners, too, but it's best for staking out roads.” He leaned over, hands on thighs, to eyeball the lines strung with washers at the end, comparing them with the shaft. When he was satisfied that it was level, he sighted down the
groma
and waved a private holding a flag over a step to the right.

“No fancy optics,” Xray-Tango went on. “The Romans built their roads straight, using that doohickey.”

“They were great road builders, weren't they?”

“Yes. The old United States interstate system only built about half the miles that the old Roman network had. If you leave total lanes out of account, I imagine. They would have caught up, if they'd lasted as long as the Romans.”

“Kur took care of that,” Valentine said, keeping his voice carefully neutral.

Xray-Tango waited for another twitch to pass, then signaled to his private to place the little red-flagged stake. “You've had the usual indoctrination, I suppose.”

“It varies from place to place.”

“What's your wrist-cuff crib on it?”

Valentine had heard the Kurian catechism so often he was able to repeat it without thinking, half believing it. It had been drilled into him, twice weekly, at the community center meetings and Universal Church lectures in his time in the Zone. “Our planet was dying. War. Overpopulation. Pollution. Disease out of control. Mother Earth had a cancer called the human race. They came in and restored balance, brought order to the chaos. Kur did for us what we couldn't do for ourselves. Over half the population has proper food, shelter and health care now; everyone in care has access to the doctor. There are even dentists in a lot of places. New Orleans, for example. In Natchez we had to go to a plumber to get a tooth taken out.”

“You know the words. You ever think about it?”

Valentine looked around to see if they were being overheard. “I think history gets written by the winners. The Old Regime had its problems, but they made some beautiful stuff. How many engines they built fifty or sixty years ago still run? Lots. If Kur makes anything that wonderful, they're keeping it to themselves. What's made now is clumsy by comparison, even when it works.”