Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

“There!” he said, and his mechanical armor broke the stillness with a hiss and a clank as it swung him down off the fire step. He clapped Colonel Yu on the shoulder with a steel hand like a Stalker’s gauntlet. “There! That’s what we have been fighting for, Yu Wei Shan. We didn’t go to war because we wanted to smash cities, but because we wanted to be able to hear the birds sing again. And if fifteen years of war won’t do it, maybe we will have to try talking to the barbarians instead.” He waved his arm, indicating the wastelands that lay beyond the wire: the immense shell craters and concrete city-traps, the wrecked suburbs foundering in weeds, the million bones. “We were supposed to be making the world green again,” he said, “and all we have been doing is turning it into mud.”

It was something his wife had told him once. It had sounded better when Oenone said it. Later, in the airship, on his way to the sector headquarters at Forward Command, he found himself longing for her. If she were here, he would find it easier to keep to this difficult road she’d set him on. Half his people thought that he was mad for trying to make peace with the cities, and he sometimes wondered if they weren’t right. But what choice did he have?

The Green Storm was in a bad way. Naga had had no idea how bad until he seized power. Under the Stalker Fang the Storm had always made sure that soldiers like him were never short of food or equipment. But in their own lands everything was falling apart; the people who used to run things in the old League days had all been arrested when the Storm took over, and the young fanatics who had taken their places didn’t know how to do their jobs. In the liberated zones that Naga and his comrades had fought so hard to clear of mobile cities, no one seemed to know what crops to plant, or how to arrange the plumbing and transport systems in the ramshackle new static settlements. No one knew where the money was to come from to pay for anything. Stopping the war would help; the old administrators whom Naga was releasing from the prison colonies of Taklamakan might know what to do, but the task was huge. Too huge, Naga sometimes felt, for an ignorant soldier like him…

Still, he knew that if he could talk to Oenone, she would soon soothe all his doubts away. The white sky slid past his window. He dozed, and he could almost smell her, and feel the warmth of her small body. Where was she? he wondered. He wished that he had not let her volunteer for that mission to Zagwa. But she had wanted to go, and he could think of no one more likely to bring the Zagwans over to his side than little Zero, with her unwarlike ways and that quaint old god of hers.

Forward Command was a disabled Traction City, squatting on a low hill north of the Rustwater behind defensive walls built from its own cast-off tracks. It had been part of the Storm’s front line during the battles of the previous year. Now that the Traktionstadts had been driven back beyond the marshes, it was turning into a full-scale settlement; clusters of civilian houses were sprouting on the slopes below the city, and in the fields around them some kind of root crop seemed to be failing miserably. Wind turbines dotted the steppe, flailing their long arms like idiot giants.

A gaggle of officers waited on the docking pan, fussing around a dark-skinned servant girl whom Naga vaguely recognized. He could tell from twenty yards away that they had bad news.

“Excellency, word has come from Africa…”

“This is your wife’s servant, Excellency, the mute girl, Rohini…”

“She arrived on foot at the Tibesti Static, out of the desert, all alone.”

“Your wife, Excellency—her ship was jumped by townie warships a day out from Zagwa. The Zagwans must have betrayed her, Excellency. Lady Naga is dead.”

Later, in one of the citadel’s council rooms, she told him everything; how three townie airships had ambushed the Nzimu, how her crew had fought to defend his wife, and how they had been overwhelmed. She wrote it all laboriously out on papers that an aide read aloud.

When she was a little girl, Cynthia Twite had dreamed of being an actress. Her parents had both been actors; arty, Anti-Tractionist types from the Traction City of Edinburgh who had fled their home for what they imagined would be an idyllic life in a static in Shan Guo. They had always encouraged their daughter to dress up and perform, fondly believing that she might be a star one day. And how right they had been!

Good, tolerant people that they were, they had been taken aback by the sudden rise of the Green Storm. “Not all city people are barbarians,” they kept telling Cynthia, rather plaintively, as ferocious Green Storm slogans crackled out of the loudspeakers that the new regime had erected all around their settlement. But Cynthia thought it all very exciting; she enjoyed the flags and uniforms, and the warlike songs she got to sing at school, and she loved the Stalker Fang, so strong and shiny. She soon grew tired of hearing her mum and dad moaning, and reported them to the Storm as Tractionist elements.

After they were taken away, she went to live in a government-run orphanage at Tienjing. From there she was recruited into the intelligence wing, and then into the Stalker Fang’s private spy network. That was when Cynthia discovered that she had inherited her parents’ love of theater. Putting on disguises, adopting other names and voices and mannerisms, these were the things she most enjoyed, and she knew that she did them very well. Her only regret was that she could never claim the applause that she deserved. But it was tribute enough to watch the tears trickle down Naga’s face while he listened to all the dreadful things the townies had done to his wife.

Naga had probably never wept in public before. His aides and officers looked quite appalled. Even General Dzhu, who had hatched the plan to kill Lady Naga and helped Cynthia to infiltrate her household, looked uneasy when he heard his old friend sniffling and saw the tears drip off his chin. In the end, he cut short Cynthia’s performance. He had arranged Lady Naga’s death because he wanted to shock Naga out of his silly notions of peace with the cities, not to destroy him.

“Enough!” he said, holding up his hand to stop the man who was reading out Cynthia’s words. “Naga, you should not listen to any more of this. Two things are clear. We cannot trust the Zagwans. And the truce with the Tractionist barbarians must end. My division is ready to attack tomorrow, if you command it.”

“And mine,” said several other officers, all at once.

“Destroy All Cities!” shouted another, seizing on a Green Storm slogan from simpler times before the truce began.

“No,” said Naga angrily.

There was a mutter of surprise from everyone in the chamber. Even Cynthia had to remember she was playing a deaf mute and stop herself from crying out.

“No!” the poor fool said again, thumping the tabletop with his mechanical hand. “Oenone would not have wanted to see the world go tumbling back into war on her account.”

“But Naga,” insisted General Dzhu, “she must be avenged.”

“My wife did not believe in vengeance,” said Naga, trembling. “She believed in forgiveness. If she were here, she would say that the actions of a few townies in the sand sea do not mean that none of them can be trusted. We must continue to work for peace, for her sake.” He looked straight at Cynthia, who modestly averted her gaze. “What of this girl? What reward can we offer her? She has been brave, and loyal.”

Annoying, having to wait while someone wrote down his question on a piece of paper before she could scribble her answer. She allowed herself a little smile as she wrote it, and it pleased her to think that everyone else in the room thought she was smiling because she was such a good, loyal girl.