Salt (19 page)

‘We’ll rush them,’ I cried, trying to ensure the words carried, howsoever muffled by my mask. ‘We’ll attack! Try to keep to a bunch: if we run as a line they’ll have more of a target. But if we all rush at once, we can overpower them with our numbers.’ Only numbers were any use in this conflict. But I could not impress the plan upon the furthest of the gathered people. The fear twitched in my belly that when I rose and ran forward only a few would follow, and we would be easily cut down. But note this: my fear was not that I would be killed, but that the plan would fail. Fear in battle is a strange thing. Let nobody tell you they face battle fearlessly, for the greatest of warriors feels that abdominal commotion, that simultaneous tightening and loosening. But the fear becomes displaced, away from personal injury and death, and onto larger questions.

I was prepared to stand up and forward the change towards the shuttles, when I noticed people dropping into positions over the cavemouth. Two snipers had taken position behind the lip of rock, and without pause they began targeting the shuttles. This drew the fire from the Senaarians, and suddenly, my blood pounding so loud it
sounded like a great machine in my ears, I stood up. The people rippled upwards beside me until we were all standing. I lifted my spar, and started running.

And a crowd followed. We started over the few hundred yards of salt desert, the grains giving under our heels. It was only the sloppy running that is possible over loose-grained salt, but we were making towards the shuttles.

I was screaming, as we all were. Many brandished their clubs or stones over their heads, and I felt my spar become heavy and deadly with my rage, filled with the power to kill. Ridiculous, in truth, that a man might think a simple lump of plasmetal the equal of armed and armoured soldiery, but this is the way adrenalin takes a fighting man. The men by the shuttles, torn between two targets, reacted without cohesion. Some focused their fire on us, and needles began whipping amongst us. People dropped straight down when hit, or else fell backwards with their legs kicking forwards.

Many people dived to earth in death or injury between the water and the shuttles, but a group of us had almost reached the Senaarians, had come close enough to see the fearful eyes of the enemy. With maybe fifteen metres to go there was a shift in the dynamics of our band. Being untrained, we were, after all, a system governed by chaotic logic, whose courage wavers between killing and self-preservation according to an algorithm difficult to determine, and the evanescent common will that held us together suddenly failed. It is a strange thing to watch, because on the surface there is no change: indeed, if anything, we had surmounted the greatest difficulty. Covering the first stretch of ground was the most dangerous, and now that we were within striking distance the Senaarians would have found needleguns more difficult to wield. But it is not a matter of logic. At one point the adrenalin keeps the soldiers mostly in the fight dynamic; and then at the next, with a mysterious flip down, they find themselves with the overwhelming inner urge towards flight.

We broke and ran; even those few at the front (as I was) sensed it, glanced round, and had to lurch backwards. I could hear whoops of joy from the Senaarians, and the rate of fire increased. More people
fell, screaming and crying, or else fell without a cry, never to get up again.

A fury took me. I began screaming, yelling at the loudest pitch. ‘To me!’ I howled. ‘To me! Forward, forward!’

After the initial spurt, the urgency of the retreat diminished. Some, of course, sprinted all the way back to the water but others slowed, turned. Their heads were ducked down, out of the way of the whistling deadly needles, but they saw me. And the switchback started to take hold. Still I was yelling ‘To me! To me!’ I raised my spar. A needle went through the outer part of my thigh, clean through (as I later discovered) but I did not even notice until afterwards.

‘Back! We have them! We
have
them!’ I yelled, the odd-sounding phrase sounding perversely right to some deep part of myself (as if we were actually taking ownership of them). And, just as suddenly as we had fled, we found ourselves advancing once more. Again screaming, a more ragged formation.

Several Senaarians had left their cover to chase after us, to provide better firing platforms; and two of those had been picked off by the snipers over the cave mouth. We were on their bodies almost straight away, two women wrenching their guns from them, another man turning one corpse over to pull free the ceremonial sword. The other soldiers were running from us now, scattering back to the shuttles to take cover. And we came down upon them, howling and full of rage.

I was running so hard, I remember, that it was difficult for me to pull up straight when I arrived at the shuttle, and I collided bodily with the metal of the shuttle hull, and was knocked a little backwards. But we were on them now: people falling back with needles in their faces, but others battering the soldiers with our weapons, or pinning them with our captured rifles. I myself took my spar to one man, and the pleasure of striking him with it removed me from myself; there was a timeless period of intensity, unlike anything else I know, and during it, all I was doing was bringing the spar down, and I was yelling, was (the spar seemed to have got itself lost) punching and throttling with my bare hands. Somebody’s face was very close to me (the memory itself is a little dissociated, and I can’t quite remember
how I got to this position), and I was ramming my palm hard against its yielding features, its eyes rolled upwards and white, blood coming from several places.

The next thing I remember, with the conscious deliberation of true memory, is the shuddering as the shuttle began to rise into the air. This, I remember, intensified my rage, to think that we were losing the shuttles. What had happened was that the cave advance party had returned and rushed us, and that the extra bringing-to-bear of firepower had forced a way through. Most of the remaining Senaarian soldiers retreated inside the shuttles, and they pulled away into the sky. Only a few wounded and a single fighting man (except he didn’t last long without the shuttles) remained.

And then I was sitting, gasping, on the salt: conscious of blood all over my leg, and blood all down my front, but unsure which blood was mine (and there seemed to be a pain somewhere, I was not sure where) and which was from other people. The area between the cave and the water was a mess of fallen bodies; some cursing and moving, others lying quite still. By now, everybody had heard the commotion, everybody from the settlement was coming, and soon there were people everywhere. A man helped me to my feet, and a woman came by with some water (I was very thirsty, either through my exertions or my loss of blood) which I sipped through the straw in my mask. And the sun went down in a glory of red and gold, and the field was all dark as people limped from it. Somebody brought out trolley lighting and, as I went away towards the hastily inflated medical tent, they were going about the floodlit field, checking the dead.

I spent an hour inside, sitting, letting the sensations drain out of my body. I felt bitter that the shuttles had got away. Eventually a medical-rotation came to me, and I stripped, although my only wound was on my thigh. He bandaged me and I dressed again in the blood-stiff clothes.

I could not face sleeping in the dorm for some reason. And I had no partner to share with, nor did I want to seek somebody out. I intended sleeping in the diplomatists’ office, being by myself. And it was there, in that office, that I discovered the whimpering Rhoda
Titus, hiding behind the desk. She shrieked when I turned on the light, and shrieked some more when I came towards her. ‘Please don’t kill me, don’t kill me’ she kept saying in the common tongue. I sat watching her until she calmed down and stopped making noise, then I turned off the light and lay on the floor to sleep.

I am sometimes asked whether we anticipated retaliation. But you must understand that it is not a leader’s job to waste his energies in pointless soothsaying. God orders the future in his own way, and a leader must learn to
respond
to events, not sit about like an old wise woman, attempting to anticipate them in the entrails of animals. Preparedness is everything. And, with our great success building our reputation all about the shores of our sea, we did prepare. I promoted jean-Pierre, and put him in charge of building up our defences. Historians of the counter-patriotic type (the Alsists used to say that I suppressed all public discourse of which I did not approve, but how untrue!) have criticised me for not following the raid on Als through with more thoroughness. I can say, before God and with truth, that I had my suspicions but would it have been lawful to flatten Als? No war existed between us; the only provocation was the children, and they had been removed.

I prayed, and I received my answer, my consciousness of Grace. Make Senaar a strong citadel of God, I heard; and so I did. So I have done.

There was a certain sinking of my spirit, a curving reflex action of the soul away from people. I became bitter, angry at the world’s people, almost at the world itself. It was as if some part of my being had tasted too much sweetness in the euphoria of battle and now I revolted. It was not that I had killed people, not even that I disgusted myself because I had enjoyed killing, although perhaps a small part of my nameless rage was to do with that. It was that, for an instant, in the belly of the battle, I had wanted the other people who were fighting with me to cease to be people, to become instead automata, to become mere extensions of me. I wanted them to do what I told them to do, whether they wished it or not. I wanted, perverse as it seems, to
own
them, to possess them, to have them. At the time I experienced frustration that they were not doing what I wished, and my frustration took the hierarch’s bent of wishing them somehow, metaphysically,
under
me.

At the time I barely noticed that this was happening in my soul; but afterwards, by myself and not wanting a partner, I fell to thinking about it. I dwelt on it, perhaps, and grew revolted with myself. I decided I had the seed within me to become a rigidist, as the common talk styled me; and worse than that, I had the capacity to become a hierarch.

And then there was the issue of Rhoda Titus. I woke on the morning after the raid, and she was still in the diplomatist office. She was sitting like a frightened child in the corner of the room, her hair disarrayed, her blotchy face scrunched up. Her eyes were shut, and she seemed somehow to have fallen asleep in that awkward position, with her knees up in front of her and her hands clenched together resting on her feet. I watched her for a while, with a weird detachment, but then got up and went through to wash without waking her. I think she finally woke to a sense of panic, because I heard a dog’s yelp as I rinsed my face. I put my eyes round the doorjamb and saw her curled in the corner with her eyebrows up against her hairline.

My lack of compassion for her should perhaps have alerted me to the change in myself. I had little thought for her, but evidently (with hindsight) she was in a state of terror. She had, as she saw it, been abandoned in the camp of the enemy, with no means of making the trek to the other hemisphere where her own people lived. Perhaps she feared torture or death (many of our people had died in the raid, after all; and she might have feared our rage). Whatever, she was too afraid to come out of the little office. She later told me that she had sometimes shrunk through the door, pressed herself up against the wall, and come a few metres down the corridor, but that the sight of somebody or other had sent her scuttling back where she had come from. She had drunk and relieved herself in the tiny toilet pod attached to the room, drinking the water out of the toilet pan itself (so low she had sunk from her former pride).

I, on the other hand, spent two days in my thoughts. There were angry meetings of people, coming into being and drifting apart all over Als; people were full of high words about the terror that these Senaarian soldiers had inflicted upon us, and people were eager to repay death for death. I took little part in this but instead wandered about places where people were not. I avoided the farm spaces for fear of running across Turja (so absurd had my relationship with her become!), but I spent a while operating the excavation machinery that was opening up new tunnels and smoothing out new caves deep
in the mountains. The workers allotted to this had been caught up in the general mood of outrage at Senaar, and so were doing what most people were doing; abandoning their rotas, planning revenge and reprogramming the Fabricants to turn raw materials into weaponry. On the second night there was a large gathering outside, people crowding about a communal fire that burnt green in the chlorine, along with its fiery whites and yellows. Individual after individual spoke up to denounce the murderous actions of the hierarchs. It suited me that everybody gathered in this way, because I was without desire for human company and it made it easy for me to avoid them. I operated the machines, or allowed them to follow their pre-programming, and sat in the cabin in the glow of electric lights, letting the wombish hum of the grinding technology envelope me.