Salt (32 page)

The enemy had built a number of large camps, and fully enclosed them in wire. Criss-cross wire fencing twenty metres high surrounded them, and the wire was heat-releasing, such that a light touch would only scorch but with prolonged touch the heat would build until your flesh cooked. And from the wire fences, they had hung wire ceilings, presumably because they had encountered our manpacks in the south and thought of Alsists as grasshopper folk who might spring away if unprevented (even though only my troop had possessed the packs). Inside the camps were built parodies of towns: barrack-like living grounds, warehouse blocks where work was required for eight hours a day. Hundreds of Alsists lived there now. It was a mere prison and was patrolled by a tight force of soldiers as guards: but each (there were five when I returned to Als) was enormous, covering many hectares. The effort and labour that had gone into this exercise was astonishing. That Senaar would do so much, in order to achieve so little (they shipped away a harvest of salt eels to feed their increasingly hungry peoples in the south, I know, but these must have been our world’s most expensive salt eels), it amazed me. Of course, there was more here: they wished to isolate and tame the people of Als, and thence to turn Als into a portion of the body of Senaar by the northern sea. Perhaps, some day, they might hope to turn the whole of our world into a limb or a portion of the body of Senaar.

Eredics flew the worst wounded of us straight into the mountains north-west of Als. There my cataracted lenses were cut away, and new
plastic lenses inserted. Skin was cut away too, but there was less that could be done about it and my radiation-induced cancers. It was Csooris who was on the rota to perform this medicine upon me, but she told me that the old way of rotas was changed now. The War meant it had to be.

‘It is a shame,’ I said. ‘Rotas are a fair way. They are free.’

We were in a portion of a deep mountain crevasse, ceilinged with rubble fallen from above and wedged. Lighting was industrial, with great cables about the floor, but the medical area had been cleaned and sterilised, and there were rooms caddied up against the naked rock.

Csooris fussed about my face, and finished post-op swabbing. She was so close that I could examine her wounds in great detail. Her face was healed now from its burns, and some of the front had been patched with new skin, although there was no hiding the novelty of this part of her face. To the sides, where it mattered less, her skin was marked and puckered by the old burning, so that along her neck and under her ear, onto her cheek and up to where the artificial hair started seemed made not of face-skin but of anus-skin. Still, as long as she faced me, and with the tug of old acquaintance, I did feel some sexual urge for her. In the field, I had mostly been having sex with Salja but I had grown weary in the latter days, with the cataract and the whole sickness of fighting.

‘Do you have many offers for sex now?’ I asked.

She snorted. ‘Few enough.’

‘I would offer, when my wounds have healed.’

She was washing her hands in a medical soda-wash, away in the corner of our little booth. ‘Some of your wounds will never heal,’ she said. ‘The cancers are not only floating on your surface now, but have sunk into your depths.’

I was silent for a while, contemplating this. ‘At least I have lived,’ I said.

She came over to me again, as if not having heard what I said. ‘Yours is no uncommon thing,’ she said. ‘Perhaps there is some comfort in that. Most of us will die this way.’

‘And most Senaarians too,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘It is our world. Still, we live for a while. We have children. Perhaps that is the point.’

I blinked my eyes, slowly, but the scars were already healing. I could feel them as slight ridges on my cornea. ‘At least some radiation sickness can be cured,’ I said, blinking again. ‘Although I am sorry to discover that my chlorine-lenses did not protect me from the cataracts.’

‘Nor are they supposed to,’ she said. ‘Nor could they, I think. They only keep the chlorine from stinging your eyes.’

‘Must I still wear lenses outside?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yes, of course. Your eye is the same; it will still be irritated by the chlorine.’

I lay down again, sleepy, but she slapped my torso. ‘You cannot sleep there, Petja,’ she said. ‘If you are tired, go sleep on the cave floor outside. This is needed for some other patient.’

Grinning, I got up and pestered her for a kiss, but she was stronger than I, and I was sore with my operation. ‘Still,’ I said, as I pulled on my clothes, ‘it is good to see you again.’

‘I am glad you are not dead,’ she said. But she did not smile.

‘Do you remember what your Lucretius said?’ I asked. ‘Dust falling forever. I think of that, from time to time. It is a way of explaining the universe. Did he have much to say on the matter of war, your Lucretius?’

But Csooris was not to be drawn. ‘I have no time for reading these days,’ she said, curt.

Then, as I was readying myself to go, she said, in a lower voice.

‘There have been rumours, about you.’ Then, after a pause: ‘You talk about the people you fought with as “yours”.’

At this I was silent.

‘Many say that you always were a hierarch and a rigidist. That you were this way even on the voyage, and that now you dream of setting yourself in power at the top of a ladder of hierarchy. That you order people about in war as if they were slaves, as if they were belongings.’

I breathed slowly in.

‘War,’ I said, ‘is a weird prism, through which all is distorted, I think. I say things in war that would revolt me in peace. I never was a rigidist, all those times before the war.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Csooris, turning from me. ‘Nobody doubts that. Of course, during the war you will be praised. Nobody doubts that this is an efficient way of making war.’

‘But,’ I said, ‘you will never have sex with me?’

‘No,’ she said simply, as she busied herself with something out of my sight.

I left then, and slept for several hours. But later that day I discovered that what she said was true. Many people disdained me, some even spat at me or rushed up to strike me. But many also clustered round me, offered me rations (it was a kind of money, because rations were so scarce; they were ‘buying’ the right to talk to me, but I was so hungry I did not even recoil at this perversity). And all these people thought of me as somebody with the talismanic power to strike a blow against the Senaarians.

I was a sort of god. A war idol.

And it made me feel sick-tired, a depression in my bones. Or perhaps all I felt was a response to the operation, or to my growing inner sickness. It occurred to me that I had been so ready to die, and that this was where my battlefield happiness and purity-of-mind (
vernou
) had come from; and at that same time, with the jarring of a joint going out of socket, it occurred to me that now I was amongst people again, that purity was being polluted. I spent the evening talking with a group of about thirty, many of whom were friends of mine, and I wanted to be able to look forward to more of these in the future. And so my readiness to die diminished, and so my purity-of-mind greyed. That night I slept in a cot in the side of the mountain, matted with a sack filled with soft plastics, and I had some sex with a woman, little older than a child. But the act was no longer the act of release from the body, the prelude to battle: it was the act that tied me to a certain life, a certain living. Three days later I led my (so – possessive) group of
guerrillas out to kill Senaarians on the site of old Als; but I did so with a sense of the irritation of having to do this thing. Yet still I did it.

It has been two years. So long? Surely not so long. I have lived, for those years, in the war-room longer than any other room. But our war has been glorious, and God and freedom have prevailed. There were those who doubted, but doubters never thrive.

Ours is the strongest, the proudest of nations. Ours is the strong right hand God has chosen to shape His new world. But war is terrible, and we have all suffered. All have suffered, from the lowest to the highest. All of us must pray to God to have the strength of will to ask that terrible question: was the price worth the payment? Is even as glorious a victory as ours a thing worth buying with so many of our finest pearls?

But this war has been a necessary thing. Nobody can doubt that. I look to the salt now, the salt that surrounds us all, and I pray to God to tell me what the landscape
means
. I used to think that Salt was a place of tears, but now I think differently. If the salt were to lose its savour . . . ? This war has been the savour in our meat. Without it, life would have been the dull round of planting and reaping, of giving in marriage and giving birth, of growing and dying. But the war has given us interest, excitement; it has rendered the meat more palatable. And, like salt to the body, war is essential to the body politic. Then I can again give praise to God, that He has
seen fit to so perfectly emblematise our life. Our planet is a rebus in God’s text.

It has been a year and a half since my jean-Pierre was taken from me. A sniper’s needle took him: how cowardly, the sniper’s serpent task! To lie in the shadows, in the distance, and to poison the Eden. I was furious for weeks afterwards. I broke the furniture in the war-room in the rage and fugue of my grief. I howled like an animal. My generals fled from me in terror, and I broke wood from the table’s edge with my bare hands. And afterwards (the memory is almost too painful for me to relate) I sat in the bathroom en suite to the war-room proper. I sat on the floor, in the unforgiving strip-lighting, and I stared at myself in the floor-ceiling mirrors on the far side. What a sorry thing I was, how old, how pale, how grotesque: and yet I possessed life, and the young, the beautiful jean-Pierre did not. I think I was not entirely rational. My enemies say that I ordered the immediate poisoning of the whole Perse Sea, the nuclear detonation over multiple sites in the Northern Mountains. If I ever ordered anything so destructive, and so certain to bring damaging retribution from the two other Perse nations, then my generals wisely ignored it. But I cannot believe I would say such things. I did not believe my leadership would be capable of such ill judgement. Instead, I believe that my enemies in Senaar have been spreading poison about me. Of course I would do nothing so foolish as to destroy valuable items in the war-room.

But the grief was real.

I had authorised the construction (at great expense, because new software for the Fabricants had to be carefully devised, and the first attempts revealed terrible flaws in the programming) of some mountain attack craft. The problem this difficult northern terrain provided was extreme: our sats told us little, our cars and trucks could not travel over it, our aircraft provided neither the necessary reconnaissance nor efficient platforms for warfare. This meant that we sent a succession of foot patrols into the area; an area known by the enemy much more accurately than by us. It is not surprising that
we suffered heavy casualties. And so I ordered the creation of a craft deft enough to be able to negotiate the ways of the mountain, but sturdy enough to stand up in combat. At great cost, we developed a low hovering craft with heavy lower shielding. It is known as the Senaar Military Craft VII, or SMIC 7. It will finally finish the war – a war we have already won, over and over, but which refuses to die. But the program has not been problem free. We produced four SMIC 7s before we discovered difficulties in the engine that resulted in the distressing explosion I am sure you have seen on the Visuals. And so we redesigned the craft, and brought them into service six months later than we wished.

And this, this ridiculous flaw in Fabricant software, caused the death of my beloved jean-Pierre. Had he possessed the new craft, he would have patrolled with them. Lacking them, because of this flaw, he was forced to continue patrolling on foot.

He set off shortly after the Morning Whisper (I have his subordinates’ reports by me at this moment), and marched for three hours through difficult terrain. At fourth hour he encountered a group and exchanged shots, but our fire-power being superior the enemy cadre withdrew. Of course, my jean-Pierre followed (was he tricked? Did these devils deliberately lead him on? Entice him into a deeper, darker part of the mountains? We can put nothing from our minds, no suspicion is too tenuous). He brought up his men in quick time, and they chased the enemy through awkward-lying land. Then jean-Pierre (recklessly, according to one under-lieutenant, reasonably according to the other; but neither of them understand the bravery of jean-Pierre as do I, the perfect bravery, the perfect purity), then jean-Pierre followed the enemy into a rock culvert, and came into heavy crossfire. The reports do not specify whether the men on the ground assumed it to be an ambush. Nor do they give any sense of the immediacy of the moment, the sudden hot realisation of danger, the silent flash of needles through the sunny air.

I feel myself closer to his Soul when I relive it.