Salt (24 page)

And so I strained forward, peered through the thickened plas of the upper windshield to take in a resuscitating glimpse of the open sky, just visible squeezed between the bloc-shaped tops of the Yared clutter. It was breath to me.

And so I was quick in wanting to get away from there. I went through to the back of the car, and Rhoda Titus was sitting on the bunk. The bruises on her neck had tanned to a paler blackcurrant colour, as if drifting inwards and fading. I sat opposite her. ‘You wanted to come to Yared, and I have brought you. Here is the Spinal Railway terminus, and it will take you to Senaar.’

She moved her mouth as if to say something, then stopped. Then, as if dragging the words from a very deep place, she whispered: ‘Thank you.’

I scoffed. ‘I have no desire for the “thank” of the hierarchy,’ I told her.

She flinched tinily at this, but said nothing. There was a pause, and it swelled into a silence. Then she stood up, pulling her overcoat tightly about her body, perhaps to be sure of covering the rip in the undershirt. She went through the lock and opened the back door. The chlorine scrubs whined into action. With her right hand bunched at her breast, and her left hand over her mouth, she hopped outside. I followed her and stepped out of the car. My mask clicked up into place.

She stood in front of me for a while, breathing visibly through her nostrils. The corners of her nose bulged and sucked in with the effort. Then she dropped her hand from her mouth.

‘I put salt there, afterwards,’ she said, in a hurry. ‘After you did it and I was outside, I scooped salt inside myself. I did it.’

Then her hand clapped back over her mouth, and her nose registered the effort of taking in a lungful.

I turned from her and climbed back inside the car. The door shut, the chlorine scrubs briefly whined on, finishing their jobs. I went through to the cab, warmed up the drivepole, started the engine, and drove away.

There was some difficulty in obtaining the water that I needed to continue my wanderings in Yared. I stopped and went into a few buildings, talked to a few people; but monies were wanted, and when they realised that I was from Als most of them turned and walked away. I was prepared to deal in barter-monies with people for these necessary things, but few would talk to me for long. Afterwards, I realised that this had to do with the acceleration of events elsewhere, and the first intimations of war between North and South. At the time, I felt only anger. I spent the night parked in the suburbs of Yared, and in the predawn (in the half-hour before the Morning Whisper, when I assumed people would be battened down) I drove to a water tank and tapped it. In fact, as I discovered, the Morning Whisper is weak in Yared, partly because of the earthworks (salt-works?) constructed east of Senaar, partly because of the lie of the land around the sea on that coast. But nobody noticed me taking the
water, and I left it splashing onto the hardened salt of the road, puddling and slowly drinking in the baked salt underneath. By midday I was driving in the emptiness north of the place.

And so my little narrative comes to the war. Historians of conflict are often snagged up in trying to trace back through events to the first cause, the
casus belli
. But we all know, we the people, that there is only one point at which our attention needs to be fixed. War is a terrible thing though glorious, and it is a thing of many deaths. As with any death, the just thing for a society to do is to allocate blame. This is why societies have courts of justice; I speak as the Supreme Justice of Senaar. I understand justice.

And there can be no doubt that whichsoever way they are cut, the trail of events leading to war implicates Als as the criminals. It was they who wickedly imprisoned the children, they who resisted a lawful operation of seizure (supported by the courts) with murderous force, and they who exacted a terrorist revenge on the civilians of our nation. At each stage we, the nation of Senaar (of whom you can feel genuine pride) responded with strength and restraint. After we had rescued our children, there was a national day of celebration. It is still a day kept in our calendar for celebration, although I rejected a motion to have it as a holiday, because I considered the loss in work revenues unjustified. But now I shudder a little to think of that day; to think of the spiderlike Alsists squatting in their camp, watching our joy with bitterness and bile.
It was barely a week later that the first device was detonated in Senaar.

The precise sequence of events remains unclear, but certainly at least two, and possibly more, Alsist planes flew down under cover of darkness, landed in the desert east of the dyke and buried themselves under the salt. Then they sent single backpacked individuals amongst the streets. Critics have attacked me for not sealing the city to prevent such retaliation, but how can you seal a city as great and populous as Senaar? To put a seal upon our mouth is also to seal our eyes, our ears; it is the seal of death. We are, after all, a trading nation; trade is the blood in our bodies. People come and go from all over the Galilean basin, and even occasionally from the North, although it was true, even before the war, that relations were strained. Anyway, when these infiltrators first trod our pressed-salt roads, nobody took notice of them. They looked like any one of five hundred solitary traders; people who made their way by boat or car, or along the Spinal, with goods strapped to their backs, to try and sell in the more lucrative Senaarian market. For the price of a half-day licence they would set themselves up in the secondary Market Square, sell at their best price, and make their way out of the city as soon as the Whisper died down. (The law was that they had to be beyond the original borderline; although this was changed as the city grew. By early evening there would be hundreds of people bedding down under plastic sheets wherever they could pad down the salt to make themselves comfortable.)

It was into this harmless band that the Alsists infiltrated themselves; going so far as to purchase licences, to hawk their goods all morning, and then to rubberneck their way about the sights of the city in the afternoon, as if they were real one-day traders. I find it hard to imagine myself into their heads, their duplicity, their knowledge that the innocents they wandered amongst would, soon after their departure, be lying wounded, bleeding, dead.

They planted about a dozen devices in public buildings; the courtroom, Parliament, the major concert hall. The first explosion happened in the late evening, giving the cowards time to slink out of
the city under the cover of our own laws and to rejoin their planes out east. They were doubtless airborne under the confusion as more explosions burst amongst us and our attention was diverted.

How well I remember the brutal chaos of that night. By fortune, or God’s Grace, there was no concert in the hall although most nights saw some recital or other. But in the event the only person killed was a janitor, an Eleupolisian as it happens, who kept the venue clean and slept under the stage (he was killed, I seem to remember, by a slab of stone being forced down by the explosion and squashing him). But the enormity of the sound is something difficult to convey using only words. It woke me, and I was asleep half a mile from the building. I was shelled from my sleep like a pea from a pod, and within minutes I was fully dressed and talking with under-Captains and civilian ministers by screen whilst my valet was getting the car ready to take me over town.

To begin with, it was not clear exactly what had happened. Flames were leaping from the roof of the concert hall, sucking up our precious oxygen, burning in exotic colours in the chlorine and oxygen. People had been drawn from their beds, or from their work (half the population had settled into routines of working in the dark hours to avoid the higher levels of radiation, especially if their work involved being outdoors). My imperial car and its troop worked through the crowd to confront the rubble of the entrance hall, the ghastly snake-flames, the black clouds of smoke blotting out the starlight and lit only by their own flames from below; a hellish scene.

There was no doubt, of course, as to who had perpetrated this atrocity, although it is worth noting that the Alsists did not claim responsibility. Indeed, although no historian doubts their guilt, I believe that they never have. It is not their way, of course, to admit that actions have consequences, or that the manly thing is to take responsibility. Perhaps they deny it still. And, of course, the particular villain, the person who actually trespassed and planted the bomb, has never been caught or even identified. Although we can gain some small satisfaction from knowing that, given the high level of Alsist casualties, particularly in the early portion of the war, these criminals
almost certainly were killed. Some day I too will go to greet my Maker, and then I shall ask him to grant me the whole sight, to see how His justice was enacted.

Emergency services in those last few pre-war days were in the same state of unpreparedness they had been ever since foundation day. What else? We had not needed them before. And so it was a minor division of army soldiers who were drafted in to put out the fire and to start to set the rubble to rights. But no sooner had I stepped out of the imperial car to address an impromptu speech to the hastily assembled Visualcast cameras, than there was another sound: a mighty
smack
noise followed by a deep bass rumble that hung on the air for a very long time. This was the second device exploding outside the secondary barracks, knocking in the outer wall and murdering nearly a dozen people.

After that they came with a sickening rapidity. The courthouse bomb did little more than break the triple windows and allow a deal of mess from outside in over the floor (there was a minor case being prosecuted in the cheaper court-hours, and a lawyer was killed; it was lucky there was no more damage). The Parliament bomb did more structural damage; most of the windows were smashed, and one of the two towers was so badly cracked that it had to be demolished. Another bomb pulled out a hole in a main clean-water tank, and weeks of precious desalination was wasted. Another broke walls in a dormitory where only half the sleepers inside were fitted with nasal filters; many choked to death, and even some of those with the filters panicked and mouth-breathed to their deaths.

By now, everybody in Senaar was awake, and the streets thronged. I had fallen back on my private dwelling (I reasoned that no public building was safe – although my under-Captains were adamant that my home be thoroughly checked by military experts in bombmaking before I was even allowed out of the car), and from there I made a series of Visualcasts to calm the population. Despite my anger at the atrocity, I was fiercely proud of my people also. The army never lacked for willing volunteer helpers; volunteers, mark you! People happy to work without any form of recompense, to clear away rubble,
to pull people out of the damage. The hospitals introduced a standardised billing system as a mark of respect, even though hospital profits were severely limited as a result.

By the morning, the will of the Senaarians had crystallised. Justice. This assault upon our city, this rape of our prize buildings (erections that symbolised the civic purpose and pride of our nation) had to be answered. I called a dawn meeting of all higher officers, and the meeting stretched throughout the day. In the corner we had several netscreens relaying the shock of Senaarian netprogrammes and news-keepers; but also the alarm that these attacks spread throughout the whole of our world. Galilean nations, broadly speaking, were as thoroughly outraged by the Alsist terrorism as were we; our alliances in the South could be depended upon, because they were built on sturdy foundations. But responses to the news from the North were less sure. Newscasts reported the atrocities, of course, but wove webs of uncertainty about the facts, and gave the impression that all this was remote from Perse concerns. When we contacted diplomatic officers in these northern states – and I spoke personally to the Agent for Convento – we were met with the blank wall of suspicion that the success of Senaar had built up. They said many things, mostly to do with the unproved nature of Als’s guilt in these crimes; but the truth of the matter was that the Northern states were fearful of Senaarian imperium, and would do anything to try and break our increasing power. It is hard, I know, for us to comprehend the fear that our success, our closeness to the Will of God, sets in the hearts of less successful, less devout nations. A bitter lesson to learn in the ways of politics. But this was the point: Convento and Smith were less interested in the rights and wrongs of the matter (and which wrong could be more clearly elaborated than terrorist atrocity against the innocent?), and more interested in political manoeuvrings.

Very well, then, I resolved. Alone. It seemed to me that both Convento and Smith underestimated the strength of our will, but this was a problem to which we could return later. I breakfasted, and changed into dress uniform, before returning to the meeting of the senior staff. It is important to create the right impression. Indeed, I
caught a glimpse of myself in the polished stone of the corridor outside the meeting room: my buttons shone bright as torch-heads, the dark blue of the uniform swam in the gleaming stone mirror of that wall. My soul took a little electric jolt of pride and confidence. And so I went into the war meeting. Perhaps this seems a little vain to you, but believe me. As a man who has devoted his life to the Prince of Peace, it is no small thing to me to commit men to war; men who have families, children, who worship God, and some of whom will surely die. It is essential, vital, that this be done, but the leader who does this is only a man, a man with compassion. At these times we judge the leader by the strength of his will, under God, but everybody is human.