Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (37 page)

The other men looked at one another. “Do you suppose he’s right?” the Captain asked Trouville.

“He could be,” the slim Colonel admitted with a shrug. “They might well have told him all that. He’s not much better than a nigger himself despite the color of his skin.”

“He’s right,” said Dame Alice, looking at the fire and not at her companions. Ash crumbled in its heart and a knot of sparks clawed toward the forest canopy. “Except for one thing. Their god isn’t new, it isn’t new at all. Back when the world was fresh and steaming and the reptiles flew above the swamps, it wasn’t new either. The Bakongo name for it is Ahtu. Alhazred called it Nyarlathotep when he wrote twelve hundred years ago.” She paused, staring down at her hands tented above the thin yellow wine left in her goblet.

“Oh, then you are 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 and knew 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.

The
Archiduchesse
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 an askari 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.”

The native paused, turning his head to hawk phlegm into the vomit already pooled beside him. Dame Alice squatted on the ground and riffled the pages of her book unconsciously. She had refused to use the down-turned bucket for a stool. Sparrow paid only scant attention to the prisoner. His eyes kept picking across the clearing, thick and raucous now with Baengas and their leg-shackled prisoners; the men and the trees beyond them. Sparrow’s face shone with the frustrated intensity of a man certain of an ambush but unable to forestall it. Shadows were beginning to turn the dust the color of the noses of his bullets.

The priest continued. The rhythms of his own language were rich and firm, reminding Dame Alice that behind Trouville’s choppy French were the words of a man of dignity and power—before they had brought him down. “All of them are cut men. First come boy, no have ears. His head look me, like melon that is dropped. Him, he hear god Ahtu calling do what god tell him.

“One man, he not have, uh, manhood. God orders, boy tells him… he, uh, he quickens the ground where Ahtu sleeps.

“One man, he only half face, no eyes… him sees, he sees Ahtu, he tells what becoming, uh, is coming. He—”

The priest’s voice rose into a shrill tirade that drowned out the translation. Trouville dispassionately slapped him to silence, then used a rag of bark cloth in his gloved hand to wipe blood and spittle from the fellow’s mouth. “There are only three rebels in the forest?” he asked. If he realized that the priest had claimed the third man was white, he was ignoring it completely.

“No, no… many men, a ten of tens, maybe more. Before we not see, not see cut men only now and now, uh, again, in the forest. Now god is ripe and, uh, his messengers….”

Only a knife edge of sun could have lain across the horizon, for the whole clearing was darkening to burnt umber where it had color at all. The ground shuddered. The native pegged to it began to scream.

“Earthquake?” Trouville blurted in surprise and concern. Rain forest trees have no deep tap roots to keep them upright, so a strong wind or an earth tremor will scatter giants like straw in the threshing yard.

Dame Alice’s face showed concern not far from panic, but she wholly ignored the baobab tottering above them. Her book was open and she was rolling out syllables from it. She paused, turned so that the pages opened to the fading sun; but her voice stumbled again, and the earth pitched. It was sucking in under the priest whose fear so gripped him that, having screamed out his breath, he was unable to draw another one.

“Light!” Dame Alice cried. “For Jesus’ sake, light!” If Trouville heard the demand against the litany of fear rising from the blacks, guards and prisoners alike, he did not understand. Sparrow, his face a bone mask, dipped into his shirt pocket and came out with a match which he struck alight with the thumb of the hand that held it. The blue flame pulsed above the page, steady as the ground’s motion would let the gunman keep it. Its light painted Dame Alice’s tight bun as she began again to cry words of no meaning to any of her human audience.

The ground gathered itself into a tentacle that spewed up from beneath the prisoner and hurled him skyward in its embrace. One hand and wrist, still tied to a deep stake, remained behind.

Two hundred feet above the heads of the others, the tentacle stopped and exploded as if it had struck a plate of lightning. Dame Alice had fallen backward when the ground surged, but though the book dropped from her hands she had been able to shout out the last words of what was necessary. The blast that struck the limb of earth shattered also the baobab. Sparrow, the only man able to stand on the bucking earth, was knocked off his feet by the shock wave. He hit and rolled, still gripping the two handguns he had leveled at the afterimage of the light-shot tentacle.

Afterwards they decided that the burned-meat odor must have been the priest, because no one else was injured or missing. Nothing but a track of sandy loam remained of the tentacle, spilled about the rope of green glass formed of it by the false lightning’s heat.

Colonel Trouville rose, coughing at the stench of ozone as sharp as that of the sulphur it had displaced. “De Vriny!” he called. “Get us one of these devil-bred swine who can guide us to the rebel settlement!”

“And who’ll you be finding to guide you, having seen this?” demanded the Irishwoman, kneeling now and brushing dirt from the fallen volume as if more than life depended on her care.

“Seen?” repeated Trouville. “And what have they seen?” The fury in his voice briefly stilled the nightbirds. “They will not guide us because one of them was crushed, pulled apart, burned? And have I not done as much myself a hundred times? If we need to feed twenty of them their own livers, faugh! the twenty-first will lead us—or the one after him will. This rebellion must end!”

“So it must,” whispered Dame Alice, rising like a champion who has won a skirmish but knows the real test is close at hand. She no longer appeared frail. “So it must, if there’s to be men on this earth in a month’s time.”

The ground shuddered a little.

Nothing moved in the forest but the shadows flung by the dancers around the fire. The flames spread them capering across the leaves and tree trunks, distorted and misshapen by the flickering.

They were no more misshapen than the dancers themselves as the light displayed them.

From a high, quivering scaffold of njogi cane, three men overlooked the dance. They were naked so that their varied mutilations were utterly apparent. De Vriny started at the sight of the one whose pale body gleamed red and orange in the firelight; but he was a faceless thing, unrecognizable. Besides, he was much thinner than the plump trader the Belgian had once known.