War in Heaven (32 page)

But he held on to life more fiercely than a tiger clasping a young bull in its claws. Four times each day Hanuman's godling brought him his meals, and he always forced himself to eat, even though every mouthful of food burned his throat and stomach as if he had swallowed acid. Twice a day, in the morning and evening, Hanuman sent a cetic to his cell. This man — his name was Daman Nelek — tended Danlo's wounds and taught him various mental arts that he might use to fight the fire of the ekkana poison. Although Danlo tried not to hate Daman Nelek for being a cetic, he drank in his words as if gulping cool water. Night and day he practised tapas and shama meditation and other arts for living with his pain. It didn't really help much, but it was all that he could do.

It was from Daman Nelek that he learned of the events occurring outside his cell. Daman brought the news of the city: in the Great Circle near the Street of Embassies, the harijan had rioted yet again; movements of foodstuffs into the Ashtoreth District had been delayed or blocked altogether, causing the worst hunger in Neverness since the Dark Year; and two of Hanuman's warrior-poets had slipped their killing knives into three of Benjamin Hur's assassins who had killed their friends. And the news of other worlds: on Heaven's Gate, the Ringists had begun a pogrom against those whom they called the wayless, murdering almost a million men and women in a single night; a new supernova — possibly the work of Bertram Jaspari's Iviomils or some dread god — had appeared in the spaces beyond Darkmoon; and of most immediate importance, Lord Pall had commanded the Order's fleet to move against the Fellowship where they gathered around Mara's Star.

"Everyone is expecting a battle," Daman Nelek said as he glued a swatch of thinskin over the oozing burn on Danlo's chest. He shook his silver-haired head in amazement at how well Danlo was healing. Danlo, who had always been quick to recover from any wound, was amazed himself at how quickly his burns and lacerations gave way to new flesh. It was almost as if the ekkana had quickened his whole being and fired his cells into a new state of regenerative possibilities. "I expect the war will be over before Lord Hanuman lets you out of bed. So please try to rest, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. There's no stopping it now."

During the days that followed, Danlo did keep to his bed although he had difficulty resting. Sleep, as he had once known sleep — those long hours of easy breathing and unconscious return to his deepest self — became impossible. Often he meditated for hours to ease his pain. Often he sweated through nightmares and dreams of terrible violence that seemed much more real than any dream. And then, on the evening of 18th of winter, he came awake with a trembling in his belly and blood on his lips. In the chaos of his sleepless sleep, it seemed, in his writhing and working his jaws to scream out 'no!' he had bitten his cheek. He tried to climb out of bed but could not bear the pain of movement. He lay back swallowing his own blood and shuddering at the terrible, iron-red taste of it. He faced the long, dark window, looking for the stars. Only the brightest of lights pierced the foot-thick clary pane: perhaps Bellatrix and Agni and, if the hour were as late as he guessed, even the blood-red radiance of Veda Luz. Or perhaps the faint, almost ghostly lights dancing in the window were only a trick of his vision, no more real than the snowstorms of lights that he could induce by pressing his thumbs against his closed eyelids. He lay back in his soft white furs, and a strangeness fell over him, a coldness and marvellous clarity as if he were lying back in the snow outside and looking up at the bright black sky. For a moment, his pain left him. Or rather, he still hurt terribly, but he didn't mind that he hurt. Pain was the awareness of life, he remembered, and he only thrilled to feel it spreading through him as if he had drunk the purest ice water. And then, suddenly, there in the window — in the deep clary pane or perhaps in the deeper window of his own mind — there shone a star. It was red-orange, the colour of a bloodfruit and almost as bright as Gloriana Luz.

Pain is the awareness of life. Pain inside pain, awareness inside awareness inside
...

Inside Danlo's dark and silent cell, as he lay with his eyes open on infinity, something opened inside him. In a moment of terrible beauty, he felt his awareness spreading out like rays of light into the universe. There came a shimmering interconnectedness of all things, a touching of faraway planets and comets and blazing stars. In truth, the vision that fell over him was not really like seeing at all, as a god might look out over the wonders of the galaxy. It was more like seeing from within, as if he were the seeing part of whatever piece of matter or spacetime in which he found his awareness focused. And even more, it was more like
being
: rocks or ice or blood or starlight or the black diamond crystal of a lightship's shimmering hull. At first, in this vastening outwards into infinity, he became no specific thing, but rather the flow of matter and consciousness inside all things, that truly
was
all things. And yet that wasn't quite right, either, for he was within and without, all at once. And everywhere at once. This marvellous new way of apprehending reality allowed him to move through the Holy Ivi's palace on faraway Tannahill no less than the depths of a hydrogen atom in his own brain. The totality of the experience might have crushed him under like a tidal wave if he hadn't chosen a single place to centre his awareness. At the heart of the 25th Deva Cluster of stars, out near Orino Luz, a single star shone like a great red eye. Mara's Star, it was called, and it illuminated the thirty-two thousand ships of the Fellowship of Free Worlds that waited for the Order's fleet to attack. As if Danlo had himself become this star, his awareness bathed the swarms of ships in an intense, numinous light. And this is what he saw:

The Sonderval, in his prominent ship, the
Cardinal Virtue
, had divided his fleet into fifteen battle groups. Against the redness of Mara's Star, they gathered together around the Sonderval's First Group forming a vast diamond wheel through space. The Sonderval had arrayed five battle groups — the Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Ninth commanded by Helena Charbo, Sabri Dur li Kadir, Aja, Charl Rappaporth and Richardess — in an inner circle surrounded by the remaining nine groups on the outer rim. There, Cristobel and Alesar Estarei were the pilot-captains of the Eleventh and Twelfth groups while nearby, closer in towards the fire of the star, Bardo led the ships of the soon-to-be famous Tenth Battle Group. It was an unprecedented disposition of ships with which to give battle; but then as far as anyone knew, no battle ever fought by human beings in space had been like the one that the Fellowship would fight with the Ringists. The Sonderval had spun his thirty-two thousand ships into a vast, shimmering web of diamond and black nall, while Salmalin the Prudent led perhaps forty thousand ships against him. In the spaces of the Civilized Worlds, no such numbers had ever come together in battle, or indeed for any purpose. And most of the ships were deep-ships or long-ships, fire-ships or gold ships or black ships whose hulls were wrought of purest nall. Only seven hundred and fifty-six lightships, divided unequally between the two fleets, showed themselves like bright diamond needles darting among lesser vessels. During the Pilots' War, only lightships had fought lightships; but as the Sonderval and many others immediately understood,
this
war would be very different.

To begin with, its battles would be much more static. In the Pilots' War, Mallory Ringess had led his sixty-six lightships against those of Lord Leopold Soli in a great running battle across the Fallaways from Ninsun to Gehenna Luz. And even then, commanding the finest of pilots such as Helena Charbo, Delora wi Towt, Jonathan Ede and others, Mallory Ringess had found the close coordination of these few lightships difficult. To lead thirty thousand ships from star to star and keep them together in the midst of flashing diamond and death and windows to the manifold opening in bursts of light would be impossible, and the Sonderval knew this. And so he had devised a different strategy. He would choose spaces suitable to his plan and then provoke Lord Salmalin into a battle. The provocation — Bardo's near-annihilation of a cadre of Ringist lightships — had already been accomplished. It remained only for the Sonderval to choose the site of the coming battle and array his forces wisely, and this he did. As he told Bardo and his other pilot-captains, he would try to adapt the strategy that Hannibal Barka had used against the Romans at Kannae thousands of years earlier on Old Earth.

"We'll lay a trap for the Ringists," the Sonderval told his pilot-captains by light-radio. This was on the evening of the 11th of winter, as time is measured in Neverness. "We'll spin a great web of ships through space with my ship at its centre. And when Salmalin attacks, we'll close on his ships and destroy them."

At Kannae, Hannibal Barka had arrayed his cosmopolitan Karthaginian army against a Roman one much superior in numbers. At the centre, in a curious crescent-shaped formation, he had placed himself and his Spanish and Gaulish warriors, who liked to fight naked except for their long shields. They were brave but ill-disciplined, and almost certain to give way before the great crush of Roman armour massed against them. On either side of these wild men, Hannibal had divided the cream of his infantry: his African veterans, dark-faced men with sharp swords and murderous intentions. On his left flank, he drew up his heavy cavalry, and on his right, his incomparable Numidian light horse led by the Maharbal the Great.

When the battle began, the Karthaginian heavy cavalry began to destroy the armoured knights on the Romans' right flank while on the left flank, Mararbal's horse warriors — the finest in the world — drove off the cavalry of the Roman allies. Meanwhile, in the centre, the Roman legions advanced on Hannibal. They struck like a great steel hammer, using their spears and short stabbing swords to drive into the lightly armoured Karthaginian line. Inevitably, the crescent of Spaniards and Gauls with Hannibal at its heart began to bend backwards and give way. Encouraged, falsely sensing victory, the Romans pushed even deeper into the Karthaginian centre, so deep that Hannibal's African veterans formed two jaws of steel on either side of the excited Romans. At a signal from Hannibal — a blaring trumpet — the Africans began to close on the Roman legions like a lion's jaws on fresh meat. So tightly packed were the Romans into a sweating, blood-thirsty mass that they could scarcely wield their swords or raise their shields. The two arms of Hannibal's cavalry completed the trap. Having driven off or slain the Roman knights and their allies, they wheeled about and fell on the enemy army's rear. Thus having completely enveloped the Roman legions at the front, two sides and rear, the Karthaginians began to slaughter their sworn foes. Sixty thousand Romans died in one afternoon, including two consuls, eighty senators and twenty-nine tribunes of noble birth. The golden signet rings of the fallen Roman knights alone amounted to three bushels in weight. In the history of the human race, it was the greatest number of men killed in a single battle until the wars of the Holocaust some two thousand years later.

Certainly the Sonderval, that most vainglorious of men, hoped to repeat Hannibal Barka's historic victory. But history never repeats itself. The Sonderval had spent his life training to be a mathematician and pilot, not a general. He knew little of leading great masses of men and women trembling with battle-fear inside their black nall ships. His genius lay in applying the theorems of probabilistic topology and piloting his lightship alone through the galaxy's stars. True, he had fought with Mallory Ringess in the Pilots' War and had distinguished himself for his command of the peculiar tactics of warfare in space. And so had some of his pilots and pilot-captains such as Alark of Urradeth and Bardo. But he commanded no such corps of hardened veterans as Maharbal and the other Africans who had followed Hannibal over the Alps into Italy. Most of his would-be warriors were as new to battle as baby foxes born on a bright winter day. And the space of a sun-baked battlefield on Old Earth is very different from the space of deep space out near a red giant star.

And so as the citizens of Neverness enjoyed a night of clear, cold air and great vistas of blazing stars, five hundred light years across the Fallaways the Sonderval drew his fleet into a great shimmering web. His thirty-two thousand ships faced corewards in the direction of Neverness' cool yellow star. As the Sonderval had calculated, it was from this direction that the Ringist fleet must approach. Of course in deep space the words 'direction' and 'approach' have different meanings than they do on the fields of a faraway planet. The Ringist ships wouldn't charge steadily as horses galloping across a dusty plain; rather they would fenester from stellar window to window in hundreds of discrete jumps. And they wouldn't come at the Fellowship's fleet from the east, south, north or west, but would fall suddenly out of thousands of the billion billion point-exits spread out in the black space near Mara's Star. Not even the Sonderval — not even a god — could exactly predict which point-exits these would be. But the great mass of them were concentrated in three great spinning thickspaces half a billion miles corewards of Mara's Star. In the coming battle, these thickspaces would play a crucial role, similar in strategic importance to the Round Top Hills in the battle of Gettysburg just before the Holocaust. The Sonderval arrayed his fleet facing these thickspaces, and commanded his pilots to watch and wait.

There came a moment when the first of the Ringist ships began to fall out of the opened windows throughout the two thickspaces. The lightships appeared first like a sudden flurry of ice crystals falling out of a winter night. Then came gold ships and black ships, thousands of them, and all the other ships of the Ringist fleet. This falling out took more than five hundred seconds, for the Ringist fleet was badly co-ordinated and most of Salmalin's pilots had little experience in the most noble of all arts. The assembly of their fleet into their respective cadres required another five hundred seconds. If the Sonderval had been quick to attack, he might have destroyed the Ringist ships as they fell out of the manifold in their ones and twos and hundreds. But in truth, his fleet was almost as badly coordinated as Salmalin's. He couldn't trust his pilots — other than his lightship pilots — to execute the kind of complex manoeuvres necessary to catch the Ringist ships the moment that they fell out of each window. Then, too, he couldn't have guessed that this gathering operation of Salmalin's ships would take so long. Wisely, he restrained the more impetuous of his pilots and kept to his original plan.