Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

Then at the battle of Tetsenok the Parliamentarians somehow turned the Whole Earth Army Tactical Group advance into a retreat. Arnie Tenebrae was not surprised. She had smelled defeat on the wind that morning.

“There is someone out there who wants me,” she said. Doubt began to infest her command, doubt and the wavering of commitment. Arnie Tenebrae did not accept this doubt. How could there be doubt in the living presence of the personification of the Power Cosmic?

Yet at the next staff meeting Lieutenant Lim Chung asked, “Why are we fighting if we don’t gain anything?”

Arnie Tenebrae did not feel the need to answer. Later she had Lieutenant Lim Chung taken far out into the forest, stripped, spreadeagled between two trees, and left to the elements and time.

After the battle of Hill 66, when the Parliamentarians overran the Whole Earth Army’s entrenched positions despite the latters’ invincible field-inducer weapon systems and invisibility fields, a whey-faced farmboy with a truce flag on his back came blundering into the Tactical Group rearguard command headquarters. Arnie Tenebrae listened patiently to the Parliamentarian’s terms of surrender. Then she asked two questions.

“What is your name?”

“Trooper MacNaughton Bellewe, No. 703286543.”

“Who is your chief of staff?”

“Marshall Quinsana, ma’am. Marshall Marya Quinsana.”

Marya Quinsana. Well well well.

Arnie Tenebrae did not have her rejection terms sent back on Trooper MacNaughton Bellewe’s flayed skin, as she had intended. The boy was released alive and whole at the edge of the battle zone with a salutation from general to general in his hand and a string of shrunken heads tied to his belt.

After Hill 66 Arnie Tenebrae was quiet and dangerous. So another Cosmic Principle had entered the drama. The Avatar of the Avenger. Marvellous how all human strife and conflict was a symbolic enactment of loftier struggles between the Powers Cosmic so that every moment of the present was merely a fragment of the past repeating itself over and over again. Now the stage was set, the Gotterdammerung could fall, the Last Trump Blow and it would be her against Marya Quinsana: Vastator and Avenger as it always had been and always would be.

Donohue’s Ridge, Dharmstadt, Red Bridge: three crushing defeats in as many, months. Arnie Tenebrae spent much time alone in her tent crosslegged on the floor meditating upon herself. Lieutenants and captains hurried about, little mice busy with reports of surrender, massacre, annihilation. They meant nothing. Human puppets must jig to the drums of the gods. Arnie Tenebrae’s hands fluttered on the dirt floor-lrumdrumdrumdrum. She and Marya Quinsana, they were the drummer girls, drumdrumdrum.

She called all her remaining forces to her, less than two regular divisions, and withdrew them to the heart of the haunted Forest of Chryse to prepare for the final conflict.

There was a wall. Built of old grey stone, mortarless, high as a man’s waist, it did not look very important. But it was important. As with all walls, it was what was on either side of it that gave the wall meaning; whether it was a wall that shut out or a wall that shut in or a wall that merely separated. On one side of the wall was a field of potatoes, morning misty, grey, and cold as an old potato. In this field stood Bethlehem Ares Steel Transport Dirigible BA 3627S Eastern Enlightenment , powered down, empty, hatches open, cold fog swirling around its landing pods and into its open hatches. On the other side of the wall stood the Forest of Chryse, the Ladywood, oldest of all the world’s young places, where St. Catherine herself planted the Tree of World’s Beginning with her steel manipulators. The trees pressed close to the wall, leaning over the perimeter, dense and dark as the stones. Their branches reached toward the open potato field, in certain places their roots had tumbled sections of the old dry stone wall, yet the boundary persisted, for the boundary between forest and field was older than the wall that commemorated it. It was an exclusive wall, built to keep the world out of the forest rather than the forest out of the world.

That was to prove to be important to the three men with backpacks threading through the outmost fringe of trees. Their first footfalls on the tree side of the wall made them men without state or station; exiles. They heard their explosive devices destroy the ’lighter, the blast oddly muffled by the trees, and they were glad, for now they could not go home again. The smoke of the burning rose from the potato field like an indictment of guilt.

In their first hours they found many signs of the passing hand of man: small heaps of grey wood-ash, animal skins half gone to rot and leather, an unsightly litter of tin cans rusting to forest brown, but as their course drew them away from the wall toward the heartwoods the touches of humanity grew fewer. Here the mist seemed to defy the sun, lingering in damp dells and hollows, and even the sun itself seemed remote and impotent beyond the ceiling of leaves. The forest clung to itself, absorbed in a great root-dreaming, and the three men walked warily between the world-old trees. Here no bird sang, no vixen yelped, no jaguar mauled, no wombat grunted: not even the voices of the men disturbed the dreaming.

The exiles camped that night under huge beech trees older than the memories of any man. The moonring glittered incredibly high and remote in the leaf-patterned sky, and the campfire seemed very small and foolhardy; drawing the dark things out of the woods to hover around the edge of the darkness. Rael Mandella Jr. sat watch and held the darkness at fire-length by reading extracts from the books his father had given him before the escape.

“Take them,” he’d said. “They’re for you, do with them what you will. Read them, bum them, wipe your ass with them, they’re for you. For all useless years. I give them back to you.”

Page after page was filled with arcane mathematical propositions written in his father’s beautiful hand. They were his transpositions of Dr. Alimantando’s workbooks, his life’s labour. They meant nothing to Rael Jr. He stowed them in his pack and sat staring into the dark until Sevriano Gallacelli relieved him.

That night the exiles dreamed an un-dream, an anti-dream of emptying in which the symbols and allegories of the dreaming mind were drained away, leaving only exhausting vacant blackness, like empty eye sockets.

The next morning the three men marched through a pavilion of light held aloft by pillars of oak. Shafts of green sunlight shone through the canopy of leaves, rippling and dappling like green river water as the branches moved in the wind, but not one rustle of the great arboreal commotion reached the forest floor. Even the exiles’ trudging footfalls were swallowed up by the thick soft leaf-mould. In the afternoon Sevriano Gallacelli discovered a crashed reconnaissance helicopter impaled on a tree. Its crew lolled from open hatches, dead so long their eyes had been picked out by silent magpies and green moss had grown on their tongues. A small hole, thin and straight as a pencil, had been melted through canopy, pilot and main engine.

“Lasers,” said Sevriano Gallacelli. Sufficient epitaph pronounced upon the old tragedy, the three men pushed on toward the heartwoods. Until then no word had been spoken that day. In the successive hours they came upon many memories of war and outrage: streamers of ripped parachute silk waving gently from the branches of a stand of elms; a combat-fatigued skeleton with a fern growing out of its grin; charred circles in the trampled leaf-mould of deepwood clearings; bodies perched in the forks of branches, peculiar weapons propped at the ready. Toward evening they came upon the grimmest memento mori: at a path’s crossing, the forked limb of a tree thrust into the earth, impaled upon its tines, human heads, eyesockets empty, lips torn away by weasels, skin peeled into shreds and tatters.