March in Country (29 page)

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Authors: EE Knight

BOOK: March in Country
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Now that he could get a better look at the horses, he decided the duns were Kiger Mustangs, a tough breed, surefooted, agile, and durable. After 2022, a good many horses had gone feral and multiplied on the plains, and over the generations the cream of those rebroken to saddles were called “Kigers.”
“I don’t know you,” the officer said, from under an impressive walrus mustache. “But come in peace.”
“A rhapsody in your name, chief,” Ahn-Kha said. “I have been years south of the Missouri River and in S’taint Lewee. I hear my relatives now live under the protection of the one called the Gray Baron.”
“Your English is excellent, civilized one,” the officer returned.
“Thank you, chief. You call the Gray Baron your chief?”
“I do.”
“I understand there has been fighting. I wish to be among my kind and see if any of my family still live. Will you allow me foot-pass upon your lands?”
“Fortune blesses you, civilized one,” the officer said. “We’re on our return trip. Feel free to follow.”
“Another stanza to your rhapsody, my chief,” Ahn-Kha said, pawing the earth in front of the officer’s horse to clear his way.
“One request, however,” he said. “No shooting. Makes the geros nervous.”
“I’m sorry my chief, what is this word, ‘geros.’ Your warriors?”
“Yes, them. Oh, what’s the word in your language? Gray Ones.”
“Of course. Geros. I shall remember that, chief. If we do see game—”
“This is a patrol, not a hunting party. Leave it be. Discipline, civilized one.”
Ahn-Kha flashed his teeth. “No shooting, chief.”
“That slave armed?” the other officer asked.
“He has a small knife. He can be trusted.”
“Don’t cuff him about where the geros can see. In the Baron’s command, no one is struck except by punishment after trial. Understand?”
Ahn-Kha nodded.
“Follow on, then. The man in charge of the tail is Sergeant Stock. If you have trouble, go to him.”
They let the column pass, then fell in about twenty feet behind Sergeant Stock.
Valentine took a second look at the NCO as they passed, keeping his head down and some hair in his face. He had seen the sergeant’s face before. Something about the heavyset brow and cool eyes.
Stock . . . Stock.
Stockard
. Graf—a lieutenant in the old Free Territory Guard. Molly’s husband, the father of her child.
Valentine hardly noticed the miles passing as he stared at the man’s back. He’d never met him, just seen a picture or two when he visited Molly a few years back while hunting down Gail Post. He’d been missing in action since Solon’s takeover, presumed dead. Molly was collecting a tiny widow’s stipend of money, and since there was a child, food and housing benefits.
The Gray Baron’s stronghold impressed Valentine, even as a work in progress.
Stronghold was the only word for it. It was larger than a stockade, but not quite a city. The old maps would have put it west of Kirksville in northern Missouri, but this stretch of country was one of the wildest in the nation, and the old infrastructure could only be traces between burnt farmsteads and overgrown towns.
The stronghold was nestled against a protective line of heavily wooded hills with the broken rooftops of a ruined town to the north. Dust rose from some workplace in the ruins and faint mechanical sounds carried in the dry prairie air.
Valentine thought the architectural style might be called “fire-base in skulls, with church behind.”
A vast killing ground of a thousand yards or more yawned in front of a network of log bunkers and weapon pits covering a low rise of earth surrounded the complex of towers, buildings, water tanks, and chimneys the Grog column approached. A high, nearly bare tree with an observation post like an eagle’s nest looked out over the road approach to the south, a sawed-off church steeple with a blockhouse of railroad ties and sandbags watched the land to the north. Valentine could only presume there were other pickets in the hills behind.
“No barbed wire?” Valentine wondered.
Ahn-Kha, who’d been talking to the Grogs at meals and breaks, gestured with an ear, sweeping the front of the stronghold: “There are hidden pits all along in front of the battlements. They might seem to give cover, but many have false bottoms. Tunnels lead back to the entrenchments. Warriors sneak down under any enemy caught or sheltering in the pits and stab up. Or they’re built to be flooded with gasoline and set ablaze. They have many explosives to drive off legworms, or so they claim.”
They fell silent as they passed through the “gate”—a wrought-iron trellis rigged for electricity. The officer leading their column paused to say a few words with a lieutenant who stepped forward. Presumably, anyone coming in at night was searched under the hundreds of LED spotlights. Valentine made a show of hesitating to pass under—as an ignorant Scrubman might—and Ahn-Kha sent him sprawling with a shove.
“Grog hittin’ a man,” a sentry said.
“Ain’t like us,” his corporal said. “Watch it, Goldie. Hey, Stocky, keep your camp follower in line.”
The gate watchers, who seemed more like idlers than sentries, got a laugh at that. Valentine wondered if the Gray Baron kept his men deceptively undisciplined, or if this was an unusually free-and-easy Kurian Zone camp. Even the most backwoods Arkansas militia unit showed more discipline on winter exercises.
“Sergeant Stock, see to it our kite-tail gets properly billeted,” the officer told Stockard. “Usual post-patrol liberty when you’ve turned them over.”
“Sir,” Stock replied. He picked up a field phone near the gate and scribbled something on a clipboard.
They waited, listening to insects and the buzz of conversation from the men at the gate, who treated their arrival as a chance to show off beautifully rolled cigarettes in virginal white paper. Valentine sat, dispiritedly, with his back to Sergeant Stock, but he walked around in front and took another look. He could see, up a little hill, a big structure but didn’t want to lift his head and gape.
A man in a plainer, unstained uniform and two Gray Ones appeared. The man had a small bamboo pointer, otherwise none of the trio were armed. The Gray Ones wore cargo-pocket shorts and thick canvas vests with the same vertical prairie camouflage. The human entered into negotiations with Ahn-Kha, offering a four hundred silver-dollar bonus if he joined a group of “Baron’s Own” Golden One warriors. Ahn-Kha did his humble trader routine and said he hoped to sell Valentine here rather than to “those Kansas double-talkers and lead-coiners.”
“You give a good price, all prisoner come here,” Ahn-Kha said.
“Such facility with English! I can almost guarantee a quick promotion to officer.”
“Will think it over, chief. I wish to sell this one, then find a bed and food.”
The recruiter for the Baron’s Own, who held the nebulous rank “officer candidate” laid down the law for Ahn-Kha about visiting his kind. Without membership in the Gray Baron’s forces, or swearing to the First and Second Understandings—it was with that casual remark that Valentine learned what the Golden One articles of surrender were called—Ahn-Kha would be treated like any other potentially hostile tribesman, Gray or Golden, who might wander in out of the grass.
Ahn-Kha agreed not to leave the Golden One sub-camp save under guard, to obey any command by one of the Gray Baron’s officers that did not endanger his or another’s life, and to refer any disagreements with his own kind to one of the Gray Baron’s officers before matters escalated into violence.
“May I endure three more hells in life or death if I break my word,” Ahn-Kha said, in the proper Golden One manner.
They walked through the stronghold, the officer and Ahn-Kha in front, the officer candidate beside him, still mentioning the honors and rewards that would go with membership in the Baron’s Own. Valentine led on a line in the middle and the two Gray Ones trudging behind, with Sergeant Stock bringing up the rear, as usual.
At last Valentine had a chance to look around.
The stronghold was a great wheel, pivoting around a green, planted, and landscaped central campus made out of an old, heavy-timbered megachurch.
Valentine had seen his share of rural megachurches, but whoever had built this one was a visionary. It reminded him a little of a snapping turtle sunk on a muddy hillock with its nose raised high to catch a gulp of air. Two outbuildings formed the creature’s legs; a sort of ski jump of a steeple rose between overlooking what must have been a courtyard with a fountain; and the worship area itself formed the plated arc of the turtle’s back.
Brick, structural steel, thick interlocking slate on the roof and canopy rigging to keep off the worst of the summer sun, heavy beaming and concrete-wrapped terraces of decorative prairie earth built up to the roof—this Baron had chosen his headquarters well. Nothing short of a heavy artillery barrage would put much of a dent in that monstrosity. Valentine wondered how many could be gathered under that titanic roof.
Of course the Gray Ones had added their own touches the original architects never intended. The decorative garden beneath the steeple sprouted monoliths of bones, skulls, and captured weapons. Victory columns, Valentine guessed. Female Grogs scrubbed their broods in ample pooling space of the fountain’s spray. An aged attendant skimmed dirt out of the sluices and others waded to the fresh flow at the top to fill jugs and jars.
The Gray Ones had also added their own fetishes. They didn’t go for brass idols, but rather markers like over-thick spears or harpoons with knot work and mixtures of leather and wood dangling from spars that reminded Valentine of pictures he’d seen of medieval samurai warriors with banners attached to their armored backs. There were bones, teeth, dried fingers, and even a preserved penis or two among the tokens of triumph.
Valentine had never seen the like in the Kurian Zone proper, where discretion about bodies both kept things hygienic and the populace settled. The men who handled bodies were typically selected and supervised by the Church, with a doctor or nurse on hand to add an air of medical authenticity. Only in the worst New Orleans slums were bodies left for discovery by rats, or those eager to plunder a corpse for its socks and hair. The Gray Baron was essentially saying
death is our business
, with a display like that on the doorstep of his headquarters.
There was an old pre-22 chain hotel that looked like it served as quarters for NCOs, judging from the men coming and going and lounging in the pleasant spring sunshine, eating or playing games or reading or cleaning guns. Small armies of servant Grogs worked in shacks nearby, polishing and resoling boots, laundering and patching uniforms, even shaving and cutting hair for the men. The Gray Baron’s men had it good.
Valentine got a glimpse of the alleyways of the Gray One quarters. He’d never seen Gray One urbanization before, and he wished he was at liberty to take a better look. From a distance, their ghetto reminded him of a creative child’s stack of blocks. Prefabricated housing trailers were grafted on, dug in, suspended over, and bridging older human single-family homes into what looked like a haphazard pile, but probably had something to do with chiefs and sub-chiefs and their clans. The ghetto clattered and buzzed and smoked. There was electricity in most housing, but for water it looked like the residents had to use troughs and pumps set out in the yards of the older human houses.
Back in the hills behind the headquarters megachurch, Valentine saw a few more elegant houses, presumably the Baron and his main lieutenants lived there, several barns of various types, and an expansive training area on the distant hills. He saw groups of Gray Ones, antlike in the distance, moving upslope and down, crossing various sorts of obstacles, breaking up and re-forming like waves striking rocks, and some hand-to-hand tussles.
Of the Golden Ones he saw nothing; though up by the dust and clatter in town he did see the giraffe necks of cranes and a vaguely pyramidal structure rising next to them.
Before he could get a better look at the distant, dust-shrouded construction, Valentine was brought before a little cinder-block building with a sod roof. GUARD AUXILIARY MONGO STATION ARRIVALS read the stencils on the door lintel. It had a hand-painted sign out front as well:
ABANDON ALL HONOR, YE WHO ENTER HERE—AND RETIRE RICH
. Even the doormat had a legend, Valentine noticed, but the letters were mostly obscured by mud.

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