IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume VI: The Rift
Chapter 24 The Changing of the Year
Friday, January 1, 2709 Midnight. The same elders who assessed the sky for
Christmas give us the nod, now. This
time the moon, having waned some days from the half-point, has to rise a
certain number of fingers up into the sky, making the never-thawing peaks below
it glow a chill blue-white. Only those
familiar with the heights on the horizon can say how many fingers. And only they have digits of the proper width
to tell. Middle of summer and the
night feels bitter cold. We move towards
battle better equipped than formerly, though, what with so many contributions
of coats, blankets, ponchos and serapes. (Last year I spent New
Years with the family. Uncle Salim
brought his whole four-generation brood, and the home-brewed barley-beer. My little sister’s husband had an accordion.
My nephew danced with a glass balanced on his head, squatting so low in his
kicks that he seemed a child in height; the glass splashed some but stayed put. Hard to believe that half of them have died.) I rise, straightening
slowly, shoving myself upright against my body’s protests. I accept my aches as an appropriate preview
of the hell awaiting me. I always
thought it a trite sentiment, to hope to bring as many of the enemy with me as
I can; I never guessed what it'd feel like to actually mean it. (Last year I spent New
Years losing my virginity–oh, terrifying joy!
I thought for sure that lightning would strike me down the very next
morning. But when the sun shone clear and
warm, I figured that God had bigger fish to fry than me.) Makhliya assesses me where
I lean against a boulder. Without a
word, she reaches into her skirt pocket and pulls out a leaf. I can read in her face that she thinks this
the worst thing in the world for me—in the long term. But I take the greenfire anyway, staring
evenly at her staring at me. We both
know the score—I’m in no shape to fight otherwise. The bitterness of the leaf tastes sweet to
me, as the energy tingles down my throat and up my brain and soon I can muster
up the soldiers that Cyran has assigned to me. (I have no idea how I spent
last New Years. But whatever I did,
Jamila still hasn’t forgiven me. Oh,
she’ll be sorry when I’m dead, that she never even told me! Or maybe not.
Maybe I’d better not find her after my tour of duty. Maybe, if I live through this, I’d better
keep right on marching into another life.) Makhliya gestures Suleya
forward. The woman doesn’t look me in
the eye when she gives me her rifle, softly says, “Protect Baruch and Rogan for
me, please!” and hurries away swiftly. I
see that she has made a patchwork red cross on her coat, front and back, and I
ache for her. Does she have any idea how
useless that is? I won’t be the one to
tell her. I swallow down my
displeasure at the band under my command–Cyran has ordered mostly children to
take the lead. But e has the unenviable
job of seeing the most strategic course, regardless of instinct. Our child-warriors have survived this long
only by mastering stealth. Let the
lead-footed farmers and miners and ranchers follow after we’ve expended the
element of surprise. (Last year I spent New
Years down in the mine, where it’s always midnight. Gabir smuggled in a couple bottles of the
homemade stuff. We took a break then and
there, thumbing our noses at the boss and all his foremen, and didn’t get any
work done that night. The day-shift was too hung-over to notice.) As we get our gear
together, I take out the cigarette packet that Alysha gave me, tap one out for
myself, and hand another to Kiril. She
glares at me, but she lights it up.
“Smoke fast,” I say. “We have
some ways to go before the enemy can smell our tobacco, but not forever.” (I spent my last New Year’s
scouring a rich man’s trash for anything that I could take home to feed my
family. When the wife saw what little I
brought home for our “feast” she wept and struck me, and said that I had to
make up to the boss, say anything, do anything, just get hired back again. I couldn’t tell her that he fired me because
I punched him, because he’d gotten me alone behind the cannery, promised me a
raise, then yanked down my pants and tried to use me like a whore. I just looked at her, and the hungry kids, and
I nodded.) Ready to roll. Except that I still move like an old
woman. I catch Makhliya before we head
out and say, “One more leaf. I am, I
mean I really am beat.” She nods,
face expressionless, and pulls out another, this time much more slowly, which I
slip into my mouth before Kiril can see.
I remember the dust that D’Arco offered me and swallow back a throatful
of bitterness. (Last New Year’s me and the
rest of my band snuck into a farmer’s root cellar, just to get out of a
thunderstorm, and oh my Lordy what a mass of food he had down there! Piles and piles of potatoes, cabbages,
squashes and turnips, bags as tall as me and twice as heavy full of beans, a
barrel of beer and another of cider, a big ol’ round of cheese the size of a small
table, whole shelves full of a dark rainbow of preserves, and hams and sausages
hanging from the rafters–oh I thought I’d died and gone to heaven! And I thought for sure the farmer’d shoot us
when he came tramping down the stairs, but he just shouted, “Happy New Year!”
and opened up the tap himself.) I hear the music long
before I see or smell the camp. Now we
use the former “Signing off-duty” signal to say, “trap”–the meaning that it
will have for us forever after. Sanzio D’Arco’s
down there, and I remember how he relaxed discipline to cozen us before. (Last year I spent New
Year’s in boot camp, carousing with a whole battalion of my new best friends,
astonished to hear our thrice-cursed drill sergeant singing his drunken lungs
out, as happy as the rest of us, and I felt good, so good, to know that I
finally belonged.) I lead my folks the long
way around towards the rear, but we won’t go the whole way. Sanzio will expect us to get directly behind
them on the road, if we don’t waltz into a frontal attack. I can smell disturbed earth that way–not the
pounded dust of too many boots on a dirt road, but unearthed soil that till now
hadn’t seen the open air–land mines, curse him!
But here, though the ground seems less hospitable, we can still herd
them forward into the arms of the rest of our own army, or back into their own
handiwork. And the band plays on. (Last year I spent New
Year’s hiding for my life in an old hollow log, shivering and hungry, praying
with all my soul that I’d find Cyran’s Children soon.) Alysha has brought another
band around to the other side, on Cyran’s orders. And now all we can do is watch. She won’t shoot until she hears gunfire, per
our arrangement. I won’t fly over the
camp–Sanzio will watch for that.
Instead, strapped into my flit yet unencumbered by phony wings, I float
up to the top of a lone sponge-tree, gingerly holding onto a branch in between
the thorns more to steady myself than support me. I can see much better from here. I see the musicians in the center of camp,
and some men swigging from bottles around them, but I don’t think they’re the
same bottles that we sent them. And I
see the barest tips of gun-barrels poking from the seeming-casual piles of
sleeping-bags and gear on which they lean. (Last year I played for the
Sargeddol New Year’s Ball, all spiffed up in a starched new uniform that
scratched when I moved, with sleeves much wider than the more practical
field-wear–sleeves that interfered with my fingering, till I pushed them back,
grown accustomed to the rough ways of the barracks. Only when the Major turned purple and all the
ladies blushed in unison did I realize the enormity of my gaffe. But nobody could reprimand me while the music
played. I tell you, I played so many
encores that night I thought my fingers would split on the strings!) I drift back down to the
ground, cat-foot it to my people, and whisper, “Come on!” We’ll strike the periphery and implode in on
them. Just over this rise... WhuPWHIRrrr! One of my kids flies foot-first up into the
air, caught in the kind of trap that we’d set back in Cumenci–strung up in another
sponge-tree. Only this time her momentum
hurtles her into the thorns, and she sticks where she hits, screaming. Of course I have to fly up to try and free
her. Of course they’ve posted snipers to
watch for that very thing. But in the
dark–but no, we have no dark! Explosions
burst around us, as men hurl molotovs made of the selfsame liquor that we left
for them, lighting up the night and slashing us with flying glass! So the sharpshooters have at me, and I have
no recourse save to shake my head violently to whirl out my long hair like a
puff of smokescreen so very glad that I felt too tired to braid it up
proper! And sure enough, I feel a couple
bullets tear right through it–so very, very, very glad that I’ve gotten so
skinny! I cut the girl
loose–somebody I don’t recognize–and it takes several hard yanks with my heart
in my throat to pull her from the thorns, with her screaming in my ear every
time, but I get her loose and drop with her bleeding in my arms. But the gunfire tells
Alysha to close in on the other side.
And at my signal Kiril takes the rest of my band forward, out of
molotov-light, while I take off to hide the wounded girl till we can get her
back into camp, once I’ve assessed that her wounds don’t bleed all that much. “Put me down,” she
says. “I can fight.” “You sure?” I can feel her shuddering in shock. But when she nods I don’t argue. Spongetree’s astrigent; she might really be
up to it. And if not, here’s as good a
place to die as any. So I swoop down
long enough to get guns for both of us, and join the fray. We shrill battle cries as
we run in shooting, looking ghastly in our blood. But the girl I rescued doesn’t make it very
far before a gunshot takes her in the throat.
I keep on fighting–she killed two of theirs before going down herself,
so that’s good enough. In short order everybody
runs out of bullets with no chance to reload, so our rifles become clubs and we
batter each other like maniacs. And
nobody thinks, just brute reflexes swinging dodging roaring swearing kicking
shrieking in pain. Nobody thinks save
me–and I can’t stop. I see Sanzio in the
distance. Our eyes meet. The blows rain
down on me and for an instant my mind goes back to his torture and I almost
start to curl in on myself–but no, I can hit back! I pound several soldiers away before I can
look beyond myself again. Then Cyran bursts in on the
camp with the main force, and gunfire goes off, and it’s all ours–all my band
has to do is keep the enemy from reloading–which puts us also in the line of
friendly fire. We wrestle when we have
to, we let blows knock us to the ground so that we can grab feet, trip them,
drag them from the ammo-boxes, anything!
Some reach their bullets anyway. A rifle-butt knocks stars
into my head—I feel my body tumble head over heels and come to rest face-down
in the dirt, and I can’t make it get up, though I still hear fighting in a
distant way, sounds splitting my head like firewood, percussion after
percussion. At last I sit up, reeling
without even climbing to my feet, in dizzy pain, but I wipe the blood out of my
eyes and I see something that no one else can look up to regard. Cyran and Sanzio D’Arco face off with each
other, guns raised, aimed at each other like duelists in the middle of the
camp, ignoring all the chaos tumbling around them. I hold my breath, waiting for the inevitable
shots, wondering who will fire first. But neither do. Both drop their arms in eerie simultaneity,
glaring at each other, the light of burning tents illuminating the hurt, the
betrayal naked in their faces. And I just
sit there and gape. Cyran whistles the retreat
even as Sanzio signals his trumpeteer to make the same call. But we were winning! And the government soldiers fall back onto
the road with no land mines after all, just dug-up spots to feint us into the
side-attack where the expected us. And
our people melt back into the wild, and none of this makes sense. Who am I to question
Cyran’s decisions? E must have hir
strategies in place, with intelligence beyond the portion that I’ve gathered
for hir. I can hardly even make
decisions for myself after that thump to the skull. Oh lord–I don’t want to go
back to how it went the last time I suffered a concussion! But this time I never went out
completely. I’ll have a sore head and
some frustrating grogginess for awhile, probably nothing more. Ever-faithful Tanjin soon fights to my side
to help me out of there, my brain seeming to swell with pain till it feels
about as wide as my shoulders. Idiot! My stupid long hair didn’t save me. Sanzio must have ordered his snipers to come
close and miss–he wants me alive, remember?
He must have heard of the grueling schedule I’ve kept. He knew I’d be flying on more than levitation
by the time we attacked. He wants to
make me a nervous wreck–to push me into greenfire paranoia. Oh Kief, Kief, Kief! I find myself sobbing uncontrollably,
thinking of how his legend ended, but I don’t say his name out loud, I don’t
have words left, just this wailing pain.
Tanjin doesn’t have to understand to hold me close, to let me lean on
him. I’ve tamped it down to sniffles by
the time we stumble into camp, but I hear him tell Makhliya, “For God’s sake
ground her–Cyran won’t argue with a medic.” I lie on my slowly rotating
quilts, that nameless girl’s blood still on me, turning ‘round and ‘round in
pain, floating just a few inches above all the hurt in the world. Did I really see Sanzio and Cyran staring at
each other with that aching kind of love that makes you want to die? I blink and see Lufti
kneeling beside me. “Stars burned in
through your eyeballs and exploded out the back, eh? Huh, I know what that’s like!” He strokes blood off my face with a damp rag,
his young eyes brimming with sympathy.
“We can’t be gods forever, you know.
Castor and Pollux must’ve figured out that I can read and name them, but
they don’t know how much of their secrets I can spy out, too. Sometimes they
have to climb down from the heavens.
Sometimes they just want a beer together, like old times, before
everybody went to war.” I have no possible way to
reply to that, other than to smile at him, murmur, “Thanks for caring, lad,”
and close my eyes. (Last year, on New Year’s
Eve, admittedly after a few drinks, I
stormed into the private quarters of the
Chief of Security, where at least I found him relatively sober and sensibly in
bed, his purple mantle hung upon a hook.
I demanded a vacation, and if possible a transfer afterwards, one last
chance to hang my own mantle up for good.
I waxed insubordinate when he grinned and shook his head, and when I ran
out of cusswords in the Charadocian tongue I added a few I knew from Stovak. He merely chuckled all the
more, and said that I plied my trade far too well for a transfer, but he’d see
if I could get some light duty for a little while. So I took a month off, wishing that I dared go
visit my family, but instead I climbed a mountain, while the summer sun made
treacherous inroads in the permafrost and turned all my footing suspect,
climbed without back-up, till every muscle burned like purgatory searing my sins
away. I could happily have died up
there–cheating the Rebels of my blood. Instead I climbed back
down, still quite alive. They’ll have
their chance someday, no doubt. |
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