David Drake - Balefires

"Oh, then youare a missionary," de Vriny exclaimed, glad to find a category for the puzzling woman. Her disgusted glance was her reply. "Or a student of religions?" de Vriny tried again.

"I study religions only as a doctor studies diseases," Dame Alice said. She looked at her companions. Their eyes were uncomprehending."I…" she began, but how did she explain her life to men who had no conception of devotion to an ideal? Her childhood had been turned inward to dreams and the books lining the cold library of the Grange. Inward, because her outward body was that of an ugly duckling whom everyone knew had no chance of becoming a swan. And from her dreams and a few of the very oldest books had come hints of what it is that nibbles at the minds of all men in the darkness. Her father could not answer or even understand her questions, nor could the Vicar. She had grown from a persistent child into an iron-willed woman who lavished on her fancy energies which her relatives felt would have been better spent on the Church… or, perhaps, on breeding spaniels.

And as she had grown, she had met others who felt andknew what she did.

She looked around again. "Captain," she said simply, "I have been studying certain-myths-for most of my life. I've come to believe that some of them contain truths or hints of truths. There are powers in the universe. When you know the truth of those powers, you have the choice of joining them and working to bring about their coming-for they are unstoppable-or you can fight, knowing there is no ultimate hope for your cause and going ahead anyway. Mine was the second choice." Drawing herself even more rigidly straight, she added, "Someone has always been willing to stand between mankind and Chaos. As long as there have been men."

De Vriny snickered audibly. Trouville gave him a dreadful scowl and said to Dame Alice, "And you are searching for the god these rebels pray to?"

"Yes. The one they call Ahtu."

From the score of firelit glades around them came the thunk-thunk-THUNK of axe and wedge, then the booming native laughter.

"Osterman and de Vriny should have their men in position by now," said the Colonel, pattering his fingertips on the bridge rail as he scanned the wooded shore line. "It's about time for me to land, too."

"Us to land," Dame Alice said. She squinted, straining forward to see the village the Belgian force was preparing to assault."Where are the huts?"she finally asked.

"Oh, they're set back from the shore some hundreds of meters," Trouville explained offhandedly."The trees hide them, but the fish weirs-"he pointed out the lines of upright sticks rippling foam tracks down the current- "are a good enough guide. We've stayed anchored here in the stream so that the villagers would be watching us while the forces from the canoes downriver surrounded them."

Muffled but unmistakable, a shot thudded in the forest. A volley followed, drawing with it faint screams.

"Bring us in," ordered the Colonel, tugging at the left half of his moustache in his only sign of nervousness.

TheArchiduchesse grated as her bow nuzzled into the trees, but there was no time now for delicacy. Forest Guards streamed past the Hotchkiss and down the gangplank into the jungle. The gunner was crouched behind the metal shield that protected him only from the front. Tree boles and their shadows now encircled him on three sides.

"I suppose it will be safe enough on the shore," said Trouville, adjusting his harness as if for parade instead of battle."You can accompany me if you wish-and if you stay close by."

"All right," said Dame Alice as if she would not have come without his permission. Her hand clutched not a pistol but an old black-bound book. "If we're where you think, though, you'll need me very badly before you're through here. Especially if it takes till sunset." She swung down the companionway behind Trouville. Last of all from the bridge came Sparrow, grimy and small and deadly as a shark.

The track that wound among the trunks was a narrow line hammered into the loam by horny feet. It differed from a game trail only in that shoulders had cleared the foliage to greater height. The Baengas strode it with some discomfort-they were a Lower Congo tribe, never quite at home in the upriver jungles. Trouville's step was deliberately nonchalant, while Dame Alice tramped gracelessly and gave an accurate impression of disinterest in her physical surroundings. Sparrow's eyes twitched around him as they always did. He carried his hands waist-high and over his belted revolvers.

The clearing was an anticlimax. The score of huts in the center had been protected by a palisade of sorts, but the first rush of the encircling Baengas had smashed great gaps in it. Three bodies, all of them women, lay spilled in the millet fields outside. Within the palisade were more bodies, one of them a naskari with a long iron spearhead crosswise through his rib cage. About a hundred villagers, quavering but alive, had been forced together in the compound in front of the chief's beehive hut by the time the force from the steamer arrived. Several huts were already burning, sending up shuddering columns of black smoke.

Trouville stared at the mass of prisoners, solidified by fear into the terrible, stinking apathy of sheep in the slaughtering chute."Yes…"he murmured appreciatively. His eyes had already taken in the fact that the fetishes which normally stood to the right or left of a well-to-do family's doorway were absent in this village. "Now," he asked, "who will tell me about the new god you worship?"

As black against a darkness, so the new fear rippling across faces already terrified. Near the Belgian stood an old man, face knobbed by a pattern of ritual scarring. He was certainly a priest, though without a priest's usual trappings of feathers and cowrie shells. Haltingly he said, "Lord, l-lord, we have no new gods."

"You lie!" cried Trouville. His gloved fingertip sprang out like a fang. "You worship Ahtu, you lower-than-the-apes, and he is a poor weak god whom our medicine will break like a stick!"

The crowd moaned and surged backwards from the Colonel. The old priest made no sound at all, only began to tremble violently. Trouville looked at the sky."Lieutenant Osterman," he called to his burly subordinate, "we have an hour or so till sunset. I trust you can get this carrion-" he pointed to the priest- "to talk by then. He seems to know something. As for the rest… de Vriny, take charge of getting the irons on them. We'll decide what to do with them later."

The grinning Fleming slapped Baloko on the back. Each seized one of the priest's arms and began to drag him toward the shade of a baobab tree. Osterman started to detail the items he needed from the steamer and Baloko, enthusiastic as a child helping his father to fix a machine, rattled the list off in translation to a nearby askari.

The evening breeze brought a hint of relief from the heat and the odors, the oily scent of fear and the others more easily identified. Osterman had set an overturned bucket over the plate of burning sulphur to smother it out when it was no longer needed. Reminded by Trouville, he had also covered the brush of twigs he had been using to spread the gluey flames over the priest's genitals. Then, his work done, he and Baloko had strolled away to add a bowl of malafou to the chill. "Thank you, Lieutenant," which was all the praise Trouville had offered for their success.

The subject of their ministrations-eyes closed, wrists and ankles staked to the ground-was talking. "They come, we let them," he said, so softly and quickly that Trouville had to strain to mutter out a crude translation for Dame Alice. "They live in forest, they not bother our fish. Forest here evil, we think. We feel god there, we not understand, not know him. All right that anybody want, wants to live in forest."