Gatefather (11 page)

“She was a memorable woman,” said Wad.

“When are we going to Drabway?” asked Ced.

“As soon as I can make arrangements for a proper shop for you. In the right part of town.”

“Good. Because I've got unfinished business here.”

“What kind of business? Your teacher says you've learned all he can teach.”

“But I haven't learned all that I can learn. Besides, even though I'm no kind of treemage, I've come to know this wood … intimately.”

“You want time to say goodbye to the trees,” said Wad.

“More or less. To tickle their branches. To touch the buds and leaves of spring. Nice thing about being a windmage—I can touch a million things at once.”

So Wad gated to Drabway and within a couple of days he had rented a shop that once belonged to a baker who ran afoul of one of the rich families of the city. He only had to promise that nobody would make bread there. Otherwise the price was right and the place was alongside a wide and busy street, so it would serve Wad's purposes just fine. Ced's, too.

But as he performed these errands in Drabway, his mind kept returning to Ced's dreams. Because Wad had lied—he had thoughts of Anonoei all the time, waking and sleeping. His dreams were more like memories—Anonoei enticing him, or cuddling with him, or taunting him, or … but no, they weren't really memories. They were
like
things that had really happened. But always she said the same thing. “I'm here for you. Will you be here for me?”

He couldn't recall her ever saying that exact statement, though it was the implicit bargain between them. Why did it keep coming back to him, waking and sleeping?

It was like the way Anonoei called to him when she was facing Bexoi, before she fell silent. Not an actual call, but a feeling, an insinuation into his thoughts.

I'm here for you. Will you be here for me?

Was she alive? Was her ka calling to him from Duat? What could she possibly need from him, now that she was dead?

Maybe what he was feeling was those little bits of her that she left behind. Her outself, her ba, fragmented like a gatemage's gates. Danny North had been able to talk to Wad's own gates, to access his memories through them. Were Anonoei's bits of outself still talking to each other, still reaching out to talk to the people she had known and cared about?

Or was it the absurd idea that Anonoei's sons had told him—that Anonoei was still inside Bexoi's body? But that's not how manmagery works, the whole ka moving into the one possessed. That was Set's move. And while it might be hard to know which of Anonoei's sons was the more insane, it was reasonably certain that they were neck and neck, and way over the finish line.

They believe she's still alive because they want it to be so. And so do I.

I didn't love her enough to still be obsessing about her on my own. I didn't realize it, I thought I simply missed her a little, but Ced is dreaming too, and he didn't know her all that well and could hardly miss her. But dreams of her being trapped inside a box, beating on it to get out, but when he opened it, there was only a dead thing or a monster or something. What were the last scraps of Anonoei trying to say? What did they need, that would be within Wad's power to give?

 

5

Buck Harward's career had gone just fine up till now. He made a good impression on people at the Point, and while he wasn't sure which of the two generals he had served as aide was now looking out for him, it was obvious to Buck and everyone else that somebody was bringing him along. He made lieutenant colonel ahead of anyone else in his class, though not so early as to set a record. The real proof of someone's patronage was the kind of assignment he kept getting: at age thirty-five, he had already served three tours in combat zones, two stints in the Pentagon, and one with NATO.

Now he headed a Combined Arms Battalion, consisting mostly of recent trainees who had never seen combat. Because they were training in mountainous terrain in West Virginia, he assumed that they were preparing for possible future operations in Taiwan. He found this encouraging—
this
administration, at least, was not going to let China get away with gobbling up its neighbors. And Buck Harward would be in the thick of it with men he had trained himself. If he screwed up there would be no one to blame but himself—but he was fine with bearing responsibility. Because if he succeeded—brilliantly, he hoped—then the credit would all be his. That would help a soldier who hoped to end his career as Army Chief of Staff—or higher.

But one of the problems with commanding a training battalion within a hundred miles of the Beltway and five miles from Interstate 81 was drop-ins—VIPs who wanted to get a sense of what the Army was doing or vent their opinions or have a photo op with guys in tanks. And Buck Harward knew better than to complain about this—not to his superiors and not even to his underlings. Politics was an essential part of soldiering, today and in every other era. If Hannibal had understood that better, he might not have had to end his days in exile from Carthage.

Buck was teased sometimes because he spent so much time reading about the great strategists of history—not just Hannibal, but Alexander, Pyrrhus, Scipio, and Caesar. Learning from their successes and their failures, Buck struggled to find the balance between caution and boldness, but had recently come to realize that there was no perfect balance. Victory went to bold, cautious generals—if they were also lucky, or faced incompetent enemies. And the longer their careers, the more their enemies learned to use their own strategies and tactics against them.

Alexander had the right idea—conquer and move on, and when your men will no longer follow you on wars of conquest, die young and live forever in legend. If Alexander had died as a fat old man, he would certainly not have such a glorious reputation. Likewise, if Hannibal had been good at politics and stayed in Carthage, Scipio probably would have beaten him and had no choice but to bring him back to Rome to be strangled after Scipio's triumph. Even setbacks could be viewed as lucky, depending on what you hoped for.

I hope for everything, Buck admitted to himself in moments of candor. I want the name of Buck Harward to stand among names like Omar Bradley, George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, Ulysses S Grant. Or, if he was lucky enough, George Patton, Stonewall Jackson, George Washington, or Robert E. Lee.

Or Hannibal. Hannibal would be nice. And if he could perform brilliantly in Taiwan, against the high-tech hordes of China …

Meanwhile, there were more VIPs today. They had not been scheduled. They just showed up—but they were accompanied by the Army Chief, which meant that they were not just some senator's family.

But what a bunch of hicks. They looked presentable enough—their clothes fit and looked businesslike—but the moment they opened their mouths, Buck thought he might have stumbled into an old episode of
Andy Griffith
or
Beverly Hillbillies
. There were three of them, a married couple in their early forties, Alf and Gerd North—really,
Gerd?
—and a thirty-something nephew named, of all things, Thor.

Buck heard one of his staff try to joke with Thor about his name—could he see his hammer?—and Alf North cut off the conversation with, “Thor doesn't work with carpentry.” Which suggested that these people never saw movies or read comic books.

“What can I do for you?” Buck asked the four-star when he ushered the hillbillies into his office.

“I want you to understand that the North family is very important to us and they are to have full access to everything.”

Buck waited a moment, but since the four-star didn't clarify, he had to ask. “What level of security clearance are we talking about here, sir?”

“Full access to everything,” said the four-star.

The Norths were looking out the window, as if this conversation was boring them.

“Yes, sir,” said Buck. “But there's a lot of everything. What is it that you want to see, Mister and Missus North?”

“We need to look at a tank,” said Alf. The way he said it, “tank” seemed to have three syllables.

So Buck started to delegate one of his men to set up a training tank. The four-star interrupted. “Not a trainer. Top of the line. They've studied the engineering specs for the M1A3, and that's what we need to show them. In operation, fully fueled and with ammunition.”

“Yes, sir,” said Buck. “Live fire demonstration?”

“Whatever the Norths want to see.”

Buck looked at the Norths. Mrs. North was looking at him skeptically. Alf lazily turned toward him; Thor kept looking out the window. “We won't know what we need to see,” said Alf, “until we're in the presence of a working tank.”

“It might be safer at first
not
to have live ammunition,” said Mrs. North. Gerd.

“I was hoping to see them blow things up,” murmured Thor.

“Plenty of chance for that later,” said Alf. “Try not to act like a twelve-year-old.”

The rebuke sounded stern, but Thor turned to his uncle and grinned mischievously. “I'm up to twelve?”

“Barely,” said Gerd. Then, to the four-star: “Can we please get on with this? All this empty talking wears Alf out.”

Since most VIPs were all about empty talk, this surprised Buck. What in the world would these hillbillies do that
wasn't
just talk?

The four-star insisted on coming along. At first Buck wondered if this meant that he didn't trust Buck; then he came to understand that the four-star was more than a little worried about what the Norths thought of him. Who
were
these people? Buck had never seen them as talking heads on the news—he would have remembered their hick accents—and if they were associated with some university or think tank, the four-star would have said so.

As they walked out to where a fully-fueled M1A3 was rumbling onto the asphalt, Buck tried to find out more about what the Norths' connection with the military might be, but the four-star shut him down at once. “No questions, Harward,” he snapped. Then, more gently, he said, “Soon enough you'll understand.”

As the tank came closer and grew louder, Alf North suddenly seemed to be filled with energy. He walked briskly toward the tank, getting directly in its path and striding toward it as if he meant to jump on. It was not a safe thing to do. The driver should have seen him coming and stopped the tank—crushing civilians was not generally regarded as a legitimate training exercise—but the tank didn't even slow down.

And then, when it was only a foot and a half from Alf North, it lurched to a stop. Alf seemed not to be aware of what a close call he had had. He reached out a hand and rested it on the metal of the front of the tank.

Meanwhile, the driver bounded out of the vehicle and rushed over to Buck. “Sir,” he said, “I tried to stop it twenty yards back, as soon as he came out toward us, but the damn thing wouldn't stop. I thought he was roadkill for sure. And then it just stopped by itself. I have no idea what caused—”

But then the driver seemed to be aware of the fact that Thor was chuckling. “Sorry,” Thor apologized. “But when Odin wants a machine to run, it runs, and when he wants it to stop, it stops.”

“Odin?” asked Buck.

“Family nickname,” said Gerd North. “Which we never use in front of outsiders.”

Thor looked abashed. “Sorry,” he said.

There was nothing going on here that needed Buck's eyes—he listened to them talk but watched as Alf—or Odin—walked around the tank, his hand never losing contact with metal, though he did move it up and down, touching everything as he passed. At one point, it seemed to Buck that the man's hand pressed into the metal of the turret, but within a moment the illusion had passed.

Then the tank started to move forward again.

“Hey!” shouted the driver. But Gerd's hand flashed out and touched his elbow and the driver staggered. “Ow!” he cried. “What did you—”

One of the crew stuck his head out of a hatch and shouted, “What the hell!”

“It's all right,” said Thor.

And the four-star immediately shouted, “It's all right, soldier. Stay at your post.”

The tank rumbled on, going through some maneuvers, with Alf walking directly behind it, his hand on the back almost as if he was pushing a six-year-old who had just got the training wheels taken off his bike.

“This is so…” But the driver saw the hard look in the four-star's eyes, and fell silent.

The tank stopped. The engine stopped.

Then it started again.

Then stopped again.

Buck had never heard the engine of the M1A3 stop and start so cleanly. In fact, as he listened he thought the engine sounded cleaner and smoother. Less rumble and roar, more hum. More like music.

Alf stepped back away from the tank. It started to rotate swiftly on its axis, a maneuver that was hard to learn, since it required perfect balance between the left and right tracks. And the turret rotated the opposite direction so perfectly that to the observers it seemed not to be moving at all, as the tank moved under it.

Then the direction of movement changed abruptly. Alf stood with his hands in his pockets, watching. And then not watching, as the tank sped up and began to make a wide circle across the pavement. Faster. Faster. The M1A3 was not supposed to go at full gallop like this during training—it caused too much damage to the equipment. It was something you did only in combat, knowing that the mechanics would work it over before you had to take it into combat again.

The circle grew tighter, spiraling inward, as the tank began to move faster than Buck had ever seen any tank move. The tracks' tolerances had long since been passed. But nothing seemed to be going wrong.

Once again, the tank headed directly toward Alf, this time at a breakneck speed. Once again, it came to an abrupt stop right in front of him.