Salt (26 page)

But I remember the first sounds of the bombardment. The banging, crumbling sounds of detonation in the distance. One followed another, and then another, and another, on and on. I remember thinking, initially, that it was some freak sudden pulse in my own chest. Then I focused, listened again. There is no mistaking the sound of heavy-duty ordnance. It is a sub-grumbling roll, punctuated by booming, thudding folds of sound. I sat hypnotised by this sound, I really did. It was like an enormous door being repeatedly slammed far, far away, in hell.

Then some shameful part of myself kicked upwards through the ice with its adrenaline. Yes, there can be no doubt that the sound of this pounding, grisly thumping excited me. The prospect of war excited me. That must have been it. Some part of me lit and ignited with the thrill of war. That must have been it. A war-eros. I scrambled out of the back of the car and ran to the top of the dune in whose lee I had battened down.

The horizon to the west was red, but not with the south-north-reaching span of actual sunset. It was a localised ellipse of colour, and more orangey, and with a filtered sense of green as the chlorine spouted from its salt. Fire over the horizon. Out of the car, the air cold on my skin, the sound of the barrage was thrillingly louder, registering in a more visceral manner. I stood watching the display for perhaps half an hour, at least until the ground-trembling detonations had ceased, and there was only the sight of vivid fiery colour leaching into its little patch of sky.

I got back into the car and squeezed my way through to the driving cabin. For the first time in however many days I called up the satposition on the dashboard for I wanted to know where it was that had been so bombed. I suppose I suspected it might have been Als, but I did not know. But the satposition was blank. I checked the other programs of the dashboard, but they all worked, and when I called up
a diagnostic on the satposition it told me that no satellite was responding. This was something. I reasoned that, had there been an attack on Als, the first action of the attacking power would be to disable our two satellites. But this was more than mere raiding; this was warmaking.

Even without satposition, of course, there could be little doubt where I was. I had travelled north by north-east for days; the sun had risen to the right and back of me. There could be no settlement apart from Als. Unless some unknown enemy had decided to bomb empty desert for an hour, for no reason, it could only be an attack on the east bank of the Aradys.

I started up the car, and turned her about, heading towards the still glowing piece of the horizon sky. And the worst of it, if you press me to say it, is my sense, looking backwards, that my time of spiritual purity in the desert was nothing but anticipation: that I was doing nothing except unknowingly marking the time before war claimed me. That is the worst of it, and the memory takes on an unpleasant sensation because of it. That my life before I began killing was no life, only the antechamber of a life. Because that hints that killing has been my whole life.

The essence of warfare (allow me to pass on this secret of soldiering) is
height
. With this we find ourselves drawn back to the very roots of the business of war. In its earliest forms, warriors would seek to raise themselves above their enemy by mounting a horse [
intertext has no index-connection for a%x‘48000horse’ suggest consult alternate database, e.g. orig.historiograph
]. The strange mythos that used to attach itself to this beast back in my old country was, I am sure, purely to do with the added height it gave. Since then warriors have concentrated on raising themselves: by occupying the higher ground; by castles, and then by siege-engines larger than the castles; by air-machines, and then jets, spacecraft, and so through to modern warfare. If
you command the space above your enemy you command your enemy.

Consequently, there was little doubt in my mind as to the way to proceed in this new-minted war with Als. When we first raided Als, we were able to inflict the devastating blow that we did because we commanded the air. Whilst the Whisper hid all ground communications, one of our satellites – it had been secretly fitted with bolt weaponry, although its warmaking capabilities had been successfully hidden from the other ships during transport (it is important to keep some things hidden, even from friends) – swung into position and collapsed both Alsist sats. Within seconds of the wind dying down we were airborne, our brave pilots flying supersonic at superatmosphere, into the darkening north. The first planes sighted and fixed targets within minutes of leaving the atmosphere, and dived back into the air like swimmers in a pool of clear dark water. Detonations were delivered to precisely the marked places. One of the hardest tasks I faced (I can confess now) was knowing exactly which targets to specify in Als. This was made more difficult by the fact that Alsists do not, exactly, have public buildings: which is to say, each building is equally public, or equally private. Moreover, there has been no concerted public planning in Als, only the obvious use made of larger natural phenomena (mountains and so on) and then a higgledy-piggledy accumulation of little buildings and little greenhouses and little desalination facilities and so on. It makes the ethical choice of bombing sites harder, but leadership is about hard decisions and it achieves nothing to be womanly about these sorts of decisions. I took a lightpick to the screen and marked crosses against the sites I wanted. It did strike me at the time (perhaps the rhetoric of my own speeches had inflated my mind with a more exalted manner of thinking) that crosses were actually neatly appropriate to the matter in hand. Some Alsists would die, but theirs would be a sacrifice for the greater good: theirs would be lives placed down to pave the road to Peace. I did not think – and still do not think – that the Prince of Peace himself would find my analogy at all out of place. And besides – have
we
not suffered in this war? Have we not lost loved
ones, ones loved more dearly than anybody, than self? Have I not suffered?

The barrage took a little under twenty minutes. One sweep of planes would come down, bundle out their detonations and then sweep away on prearranged avoidance flightpaths, although the counter-attack was so unexpected that the Alsists had no defensive planes in the air, and the intensity so devastating that they were unable to mount any sort of anti-offensive. Still, it was good practice for our pilots to go through these motions of avoiding imaginary counter-attackers, swooping low, then springing up and regrouping. Each set of planes emptied their loads over the town, and then flew back, leaving it blazing. We did not lose a single plane, a single man. No operation in military history has been so swift, so crushing, and so without loss to the operating side.

I watched the whole thing, sat-relayed, from the newly constructed Captain’s bunker (the stone was still fresh with paint; the smell of that not-unpleasant ethyl odour). I felt such pleasure, such pride pushing outward from my breast! I remember thinking then that our language ought to have a single word meaning joy-to-be-Senaarian.

I covered most of the distance towards Als in that night, but tiredness came upon me and I stopped, battened down and slept. In the morning I continued, and reached the first signs of devastation in the early afternoon.

Indeed, to begin with I came across a series of wilderness houses which were untouched, and I wondered if I had dreamt the night before. I did not stop, nor disturb the inhabitants (I had no desire to talk to hermit-people, as I suppose they had no desire to talk to me). But the little saltstone or treated-fabric huts, some no more than pits in the ground roofed over, and all with crude walls east of them with trailing trapezoid banks of salt leaning against them (none of these people would be bothered with clearance); these sparse huts with the
desert salt pressed to a road between them, at least looked like normality. I might have thought nothing was wrong, that the hellfire and curtain of flame from the night before had been a sort of dream, were it not for the great block of dark smoke that stood out sharply from the white sky. This was where my eye was, most of the time; and towards it I drove. A huge plume of smoke, kinked massively two-thirds of the way up, bowing down in middle air as if in prayer.

And so I pressed on. By early afternoon I drove into the ruins of Als.

The road that led down to the water had been broken up, and was now landscaped with a series of craters. Large pieces of saltstone had been danced by the blast into tumbled shapes. I pulled the car off the road, and made my way past greenhouses, all of them popped like balloons. I was able to travel perhaps five hundred metres before the passage became unworkable. I had still not seen anybody.

I climbed out of the car, and the first thing I noticed was the smell. Even though I was wearing a mask, the smell made its way to my nose. There was no quelling it. A stench of carbon, a fireworky smell. I stepped past the shelled greenhouses, stopping from time to time to look inside; but the picture was always the same. If a pool, parched and cracked stone; if a growing space, churned earth-and-salt, with perhaps the occasional plant wilted in the chlorine.

And the chlorine was everywhere, roiling about my feet, serpenting amongst the fragmented buildings. There was, I realised after a little while, something of a drift to the aimless flowing of the yellowy gas; it was more liable to flow down the incline towards the water than anything else. So much poison liberated by the bombing. The detonations must have broken up the sodium and oxidised it but at ground level the oxygen was thin, and even after chlorates there was much of the gas left to meander. It was foul stuff.

I made my way to the open space by the water, and saw that precision detonation had collapsed the mouth to the women’s dorm. That shocked me. I hurried there, and tried to move some of the blocks, but (I noticed) people had been there before me, and all the smaller stones had been shifted several metres away. But why had
they not brought in cranes or larger machines to move the larger blocks? I shouted through what few cracks there were, but my voice was muffled by my mask and the cracks were black as hopelessness.

I stood away from the rubble, and turned to look about. An entire city (I was thinking – and this I remember absolutely) destroyed, and all its people. It seemed a thing to spark a rage that would never die, but the space where the rage should have been was a suffocating kind of sadness. I fought myself, struggled to let my anger come out. The lake, blanketed wholly in the dead yellow of the chlorine gas, was too ugly to be a symbol of mourning.

And then I felt a jab in my back-ribs. I reasoned it was a Senaarian soldier, come to finish the job of killing Alsists (and, I remember thinking, it was foolish of me not to expect that there would be enemy patrols working through the ruins). And my mind went cold. What I mean when I say that is cold in the superconducting sense. Thoughts slotted into place, switches flickered. I would clearly have to pretend to surrender, or he would shoot me then and there. But surrendering – say, raising my arms – would precede turning around, and once I faced him, I would be able to assault him. Imprisonment would be the same as death, evidently; so death was no counter-incentive. But the hierarchical mind is that imprisonment is to be preferred to death (and why not when life is already an imprisonment?); and this fact alone would give me an edge. And so, my hands were in front of me, and I pulled the only thing to hand – my vodjaa bottle, tucked into my belt – and hid it as best I could behind my hand. I raised my arms half-cock, and turned around.

It was no Senaarian facing me, but a man called Bosjin. I recognised him despite his mask, because he had little hair and a rubywine-mark on his forehead in the shape of a puppy. He was holding a needlerifle at my guts. I felt a sudden relief and then, when the gun wasn’t removed, an equally sudden veering towards panic. Then he angled the rifle away, and nodded, and my panic drained away.

‘We’ll be moving out of the open now,’ he said. ‘It’s not easy here, not free.’

‘Senaarian patrols,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

And so we moved back, clambered up the rubble that was now the mouth of the women’s dorm (stopped as a corpse’s throat in asphyxiation), and along the ridge. We were soon behind a wrinkle of the mountain, out of view. Here we stopped.

‘It is Bosjin,’ I said.

He grunted. His snout-face jerked up and down in a nod. ‘Petja’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘I watched you come on. I nearly shot your life away, from here.’ He gestured with the rifle through a tiny cleft. ‘Only the mask dissuaded me. Of course, the enemy wear masks also, but theirs are a military make and cover the whole face.’

‘Why have you not brought in lifting equipment?’ I asked him. ‘To clear away the entrance to the women’s dorm?’ Bosjin stared at me. ‘I was in the deep desert last night,’ I said. ‘I heard the bombardment, and I have just come. But if the Senaarians sealed in the women, then they may still be alive. Surely we should attempt to take them out?’

He nodded. ‘So you were not here. I was surprised to see you wandering about. There is a camp of the enemy to the south, and sometimes they come up here to look at the water, or do whatever it is that they do. And you do not know about the women’s dorm. Come.’

He beckoned me to follow with the rifle’s long tongue, wagged it away to the left, and we climbed higher up the outcrop. Over a ridge, and I saw that further detonation had utterly broken the crown of the women’s dorm. We pulled ourselves low over the rock to the very lip of the place. ‘Some people saw the mouth of the cave collapse, the entrance down there,’ Bosjin said. ‘They rushed to try and pull away the rocks. But we saw them; in the nighttime, we saw them from the curtain of fire away behind them.’ He stopped, nodding his head. ‘Anyway, we saw them and called for them to stop, to come up here.’

I peered into the gloom. There had been much fire in that place,
and everything inside was blackened; the black of the fire damage, and the yellow-brown of burnt salt in long swathes. ‘How many died?’ I asked.