Whistling Past the Graveyard (18 page)

“And
you
were there for much of that, Guntha. This very sword sang its song in the greatest battles of all time.”

“Ah, friend Jeks, you miss my point,” he said. He sipped his wine and shook his head. “It is
because
of all those battles, it is
because
of all the good that has been done with sword and gun and airship that I sit here, old and disgruntled and…yes…drunk. It is because of the quiet of peace that I feel so cheated.”

“Cheated?”

“By myself. By our success. I never wanted to die the way my father did—an old man drooling down my chest while his great-great-grandchild swaddled him in diapers. Nor would I want to live on in ‘retirement,’” he said, wincing at the word, “while my sword hangs above a hearth, a relic whose use is forgotten and whose voice is stilled.”

We sat there, both of us staring into the fire.

I took a breath and held out his sword. He looked at it the way a man might regard a friend who has betrayed him.

“Better I should break it over a rock than let it fail in a pointless battle.”

“Take it, Guntha,” I said softly. “I believe it still has one song left to sing.”

His hand was reluctant, but finally he did take it back and slid it with a soft rasp into its sheath.

“What song is left to old men, Jeks?”

“Tomorrow.”

He shook his head. “You weren’t listening. Tomorrow is a slaughter and nothing more. We will rise and put on our weapons and gear, and then we will die. No one will write that song. No victory will be won. It will be a minor defeat in a war that will pass us by. We are small and peripheral to it, as old men are often peripheral things. No, Jeks, though we may wet our blades in the dawn’s red glow, there is nothing…” His voice trailed off and stopped. Guntha drew a breath and straightened his back, staring down in his cup for long moments as logs crackled and hissed in the fire. “Gods,” he said softly, “listen to me. I am an old woman. The wine has had the better of me. Forget I spoke.”

“Do you say so?” I asked, cocking my head at him.

He forced a smile onto his seamed face. “Surely you can’t take my ramblings seriously, old friend. Nor hold them against me after we’ve drained our cups how many times? Who am I, after all? Not an odwar or a jeddak. A dwar I am and a dwar shall I die—though…” he paused and looked around at the men who slept under rough blankets on the wooden walkway behind the parapets of the small stone fort. “Truly, for a warrior what greater honor is there than to have been the captain of men such as these? Surely none of
my
songs would have ever been sung had it not been for the company of such as they.”

“One might say so of all heroes, Guntha,” I pointed out. I took the wineskin and filled our cups.

“Not so. John Carter needs no company of men to help him. Even old, he is stronger than the strongest.”

“He is not of this world,” I reminded him. “Besides…how many times has he been captured during his adventures? How many times has his salvation relied on others? On warriors? Even on women and men from other races? The great Tars Tarkas has saved his life a dozen times.”

“Just as John Carter saved his,” Guntha fired back.

“Which only makes my point. What man is a hero without another warrior or ally at his back?”

“Like you and me,” conceded Guntha, then gave another nod to the sleeping soldiers. “And these creaky old rogues.”

“Just so. And it is because men need other men in order to live long enough to
become
heroes that I am able to write songs. Otherwise…no one would be alive to tell me the tales that
become
my songs.”

“And I thought your lot made it all up,” Guntha said, though I knew he was joking.

“We…
embellish
to be sure,” I said unabashedly. “All heroes are handsome, all princesses beautiful, all dangers fell, all escapes narrow, and all victories legendary. You, for example, are taller, slimmer, and better looking in my songs.”

We laughed and toasted that.

“But see here,” Guntha said, warming to the discourse, “surely there is another kind of hero in songs. The hero whose tale is sung over his grave.”

“Ah, you speak of the tragic hero who dies at the moment of his fame. Is it a death song you crave now, Guntha? Since when do like sad songs?”

“Not all death songs are sad. Some are glorious, and many are rallying cries.”

“They are all sad,” I said.

Guntha shook his head. “Not to the fallen. Such songs are not melancholy, Jeks. Such songs are perhaps the truest hero’s tale for they capture the warrior at the peak of his glory, with no postscript to tell of the dreary and ordinary days that followed. There are many who would agree that a hero should never outlive his own song. I know I would have no regrets.”

“I would have one,” I said.

“Eh?”

“If you were to die in such a glorious battle, you know that I would be by your side. Our men, too. We would all go down together, our blood filling the inkwells of the songmakers.”

“So what is your regret?”

I smiled. “I am just arrogant enough to want to outlive our deaths so that
I
would be the one to write that song.”

Guntha laughed long and loud. Some of the sleeping men muttered and pulled their blankets over their heads.

“By Iss, Jeks, you’ll have to teach your ghost the art of crafting songs.”

We laughed, but less so this time, and then we lapsed into a long silence. Guntha and I looked out beyond the battlements of our stolen outpost, past the glow of torches, into the velvety blackness of the night. The moons were down now and starlight was painted on the silks of ten thousand banners and a hundred thousand tents. Cookfires glowed like a mirror of the constellations above. Guntha went and leaned on the wall and I with him, and we stared at the last army of the Pirates of Barsoom. Three hundred thousand foot soldiers and a cavalry of five thousand mounted knights.

Resting now, waiting for dawn.

It was a nice joke to call them pirate scum and a rabble army, but the truth was there before us. It was one of the greatest armies ever assembled, and it marched on Helium and the lands of the Warlord. Would our lands go down in flames? We told ourselves “no.” We had learned long ago to believe that John Carter, Jeddak of Jeddaks, would find a way to rally and respond and soak the dead soil of Barsoom in the blood of even so vast an army.

I knew that this was the core of Guntha’s despair. He wanted to be there, he wanted to be with the Warlord when the true battle came. Even though he believed that his next battle would be his last, he wanted that battle to matter, to mean something. To be legendary.

We were a nuisance who took this fortress by luck and audacity, but as Guntha said, we would be swatted before the sun was above the horizon. We would not see the Warlord’s fleet of airships fill the skies from horizon to horizon. We would not be there when the last—truly the last—great battle of our age was fought. We would already be dead. Forgotten, buried in the rubble of a fort that still stood only because it was inconvenient to take it from us in the dark. There would be no moment to shine, no glory, no notice. There would only be death and then a slide into nothingness as memories of us were overlaid by the songs that would be written about the real battle.

“Perhaps the Warlord will come with the dawn,” I said. “The messengers we sent were well-mounted.”

He gave another weary shake. “No. They would need to fly on wings to have reached even the most distant outposts. Had we an airship…but, no. John Carter will come, and he will come in all his might and wrath, but our song, my friend, will have ended long before.”

“You would never have made a songmaker,” I said. “You don’t know how to write an ending to your own tale.”

“Ha,” he laughed, “and that is what I’ve been trying to tell you all evening.”

-2-

Guntha woke me at the blackest hour of night. Only cold starlight washed down upon him as he crouched over me. For my part I came awake from a dream of battle.

“What is it?” I cried. “Are we beset?

My sword was half-drawn from its sheath when he caught my wrist. “No, sheath your sword, my friend,” said he. “Just listen to me for a moment and then I’ll let you rest.”

“Speak then,” I said quietly, mindful of the men who slept around us.

“What I said earlier…they were weak words from an old tongue, and I ask that you forgive them.”

“There is nothing to forgive.”

“Forget them, then. I spoke from old age and regret, but as I lay upon my blanket I thought better of my words, and of my life. To blazes with death songs and glory, and to Iss with the ego of someone to whom the Gods have granted a thousand graces. I said that I was a Dwar and by heaven I will die as one. Not as a hero in some grand song, but a simple man doing a simple job for which he is well-suited. A loyal soldier for whom his daily service to his lord is both his purpose and his reward.” He took a breath. “I have had my day, and there need be no more songs for me. None to write and none to sing. Not for me, Jeks, and not for us. The song is over. All that remains is to do one last day’s honest work and then I shall lay me down with a will, content that I have not betrayed the trust placed upon me.”

I was tempted in my weariness to make light of so bold a speech at such an unlikely hour, but the starlight glittered in his eyes like splinters of sword steel. And all the shadows re-sculpted his face so that as he turned this way and that he was two different men. Or perhaps two different versions of Dwar Guntha. As he turned to the right it seemed to me that I looked upon a much younger man—the young dwar I met in the dungeons so many years ago; and when he turned to the other side, the blue-white starlight transformed his face into a mask as of some ancient king. Neither aspect betrayed even a whisper of the doubt or weakness that had been in his voice scant hours before.

I sat up and put my hand on his shoulder. “Dwar Guntha,” I said, “you would have made quite a singer of songs.”

He chuckled. “Don’t mock me. It’s just that I had second thoughts after I lay down.”

“Tell me.”

“If we are to die tomorrow—or, today, as I perceive that dawn is not many hours away—then at least let us satisfy ourselves to usefulness.”

“I don’t follow.”

“What would you rather do, Jeks? Be an insect to be smoked out of the cracks in these ancient walls and ground under foot…or die as a fighting man?”

“You ask a question to which we both know the answer. The latter, always."

“Then when the sun ignites the morning, let us not wait for death behind these walls. Let us ride out instead.”

I smiled. “Ride out?”

“Aye! A charge. We might make the upland cleft, where the slopes narrow before they spill out onto the great plains. It’s a bottleneck and we could fill it. With our thoats, we could make a wall of spears.” Guntha slapped his thigh. “By the gods I would bear death’s ungentle touch, but I will not
—can not—
bear it without blood upon my steel. Even if my blade breaks on iron circlet or skull beneath, then let it break thus, red to the hilt.”

“Ride out?” I asked again. “Sixteen against one hundred thousand?”

“Better than sixteen quivering behind battlements they don’t have the numbers to defend.”

“We wouldn’t last a minute.”

“And,
ah!
—what a minute it would be.”

“No songs,” I said.

“No songs,” he agreed. “The only song that need be written today is that of John Carter, Jeddak of Jeddaks, as he fills the sky with ships and rains fury down upon this pirate scum. This is it, you know. This is the last battle. Even if we survived tomorrow
—
and there is scant chance of that
—
war is over for our generation. Once this army is crushed, then there will be peace on Barsoom. Peace! And it was our swords, Jeks, that helped to bring about such a glorious and blessed and thoroughly depressing turn of events. No…let us ride out to our doom and the dooms of those who first oppose us. The Free Riders of Helium, sailing to paradise on a river of pirate blood.”

I laughed. “A singer of songs, indeed!”

We smiled at each other then. Dawn was coming and we both knew that only one last sleep awaited us now.

“I’ll go wake the others,” said I. “I think they will be pleased!”

And so they were.

-3-

Dawn did indeed come early, and with it the silver voices of a thousand trumpets. My head ached with the hot hammers of the wine-devils, but I was in my battle harness before the pale sunlight clawed its way over the horizon. Before the first echo of the trumpets had yet had time to reach the distant mountains and come back to us, we swung open the gates to the outpost and the Free Riders rode out into the dawn.

Such a sight it must have been, could I have but seen it from a lofty perch. Sixteen men in heavy armor from another age. Spears and lances, warhammers and swords, polished and glittering

The pirates scrambled to meet us, the pike men and foot soldiers grabbing up pieces of armor even as they counted our numbers and laughed. Had I any thoughts of surviving the day I, too, might have laughed; but I knew a great secret that they did not. We were sufficient to our purpose: plenty enough men to die.

We raced to the upland cleft, which was a natural fissure in the red rock through which only half a dozen horses could pass at once. The footing was bad and you needed a trailwise thoat to navigate it at the best of times. All other passes were much stepped or littered with boulders, which forced the army to funnel into the pass. Hence the reason they had stopped for the night. We did not flatter ourselves that that great monster of an army had paused for us.

Dwar Guntha rode before the company, his ancient sword held high.

A dwar from the pirates cupped hands around his mouth and bade Dwar Guntha to surrender.

“Surrender, old man! Beg for your life and my jeddak may spare it!” he taunted.