Salt (29 page)

The third plane was back, its belly black as it reared up over the fire: it had swooped low from the sea and then climbed sharply over the battlefield. For a moment it stood there over the flames, frozen,
and then it was away above us with a roar that sounded like rage. At close quarters the plane could do nothing without injuring its own men, but if we pulled back or tried to regroup it would punish us.

It was then I shot up the flare, and it howled in my left ear as it rocketed up. Time to jump away. This was the worst moment, because the manpacks had not been tested, and none of us knew really if they would work. We knew the theory: that we should lean in the direction we wanted to go (and lean away from the water if we didn’t want to be dropped in the sea), and hold our hands in front of us to avoid having them burnt by the blast behind. But after I tugged my balloons into life, and whilst I waited for them to pump out the air and take away some of my weight, there were three or four seconds when a terror came over me. Somehow, dying in battle did not seem so terrible as dying in a botched flight, as tumbling from the sky and squashing on the ground. The terror froze me, but the system was automatic. Tugging the balloon motors set the manpack into timed life, and there was nothing I could do. I felt the balloons lighten me; I remember distinctly the pressure of my feet against the soles of my shoes diminishing.

Then, there was a shrieking, howling, and I started to scream. My stomach compressed within itself, and I felt like vomiting. My head whined and I gulped. But only then did I realise that the ground was far away, that the air was hissing past my head. I looked down and saw my feet, curled a little in towards each other. And between them I saw the battlefield, laid out like a general’s toy. The line drawn by the water at one end, and the corrugations of the dunes at the other. And between, all the damage we had done: the blotches of black smoke edged with the fire, just visible underneath; the scattered bodies like rabbit droppings, littering the ground. A few of the dots were still running. But then I looked up at the still-glowing horizon and the luminous sky above it, and then sideways at the darkening air, and I saw that it was dotted with other flying soldiers.

I cheered with a sudden overwhelming elation; cheered aloud.

Coming down was a more deflating experience. By the time I started dropping, it was quite dark; several kilometres further east
with the force scattered over many places. But we checked the compass, and made our way towards the cars. For me, this was the hardest part of the operation, because my foot was now hurting badly. Perhaps the flight had made it worse; perhaps I had simply not noticed how bad it was in the adrenalin of battle. I limped, and made slow progress, and by the time I was back at the cars almost everybody had arrived.

I remember that walk through the dark very well; because even with my painful foot, and even with an uncertainty in my breast about how many of us had survived, and whether Senaar was even now gathering themselves to strike at us with a counter-attack; despite all this, I was aware of a wonderful, near-religious sensation in my belly, a growing feeling that I could best describe, I suppose, with a word I have used little with respect to myself and my feelings:
peace
. There was something alien about this contentment, but it grew there anyway; and when I arrived back at the car, and was challenged, I felt it swell and blossom inside me.

We had lost seven people, killed or wounded. Or, to be precise, killed and wounded-then-killed, because anybody wounded too greatly to jump with their manpacks would certainly have been killed eventually. Whichever, we never saw those seven again. But, although we prepared for it, there was no counter-attack that night.

I pulled off my boot, and treated my own wound with simple wadding. There was no question of regenerating the flesh, and we had gladly put the habits of civilisation behind us. Instead I wadded my foot and put the boot back on it. I took off my jacket, and my topclothing, to see if there was anything I could do for my skin. But it was grazed all over by the Whisper, all red and looking rather inflamed. I decided the best thing was to leave it, and so I replaced my clothing. My warsuit had been rendered a little ragged by the wind but was wearable. I toured the cars for a bit, and everybody talked to me in excited, low tones.

Eventually, I went inside one of the cars and lay on a bunk. Despite the painful tingling of my body on the side I lay upon, I fell asleep easily. What I remember of that sleep is that I dreamt. I dreamt of the
Devil. He was a tall thin man, with a nose so small as to be little more than a crease, but with great eyes, and thick eyelids like blankets of cloth that slid down over his eyes. He was dressed in a scarlet coat and scarlet kilt, and was as white as salt. In the dream I was knelt at his back, pinning up the hem of his skirt, and I was struck by how powerful his calves were, and how the hair on his legs ran in perfect lines, like iron filings caught in the lines of force of a magnet. When I stood up, I found myself (although I did not move round him, and he did not turn about) face to face with him, and he smiled. It was a fearful smile. I said to him, ‘Now I must ask you for my payment,’ as if I were a hierarch, and he laughed and said that in his Utopia there was only exchange, barter, monies. ‘And you understand this already,’ he said, ‘because it is who you have become. You understand that I pay you in pleasure, and that you return the exchange and pay me with your pain. This way we are both satisfied.’

It was an unsettling dream.

In the morning, after the Morning Whisper, we moved the cars east.

We were, there can be no sort of doubt around this, unlucky at the start of the war. The Alsists struck during the Evening Whisper which, I freely concede, I did not expect. Theirs was an ill-disciplined but large force, and it caused a great deal of damage in an initial ground attack. But an indication of how ill-discliplined the Alsists were in all military affairs is the time-lag before they deployed their air forces. Instead of co-ordinating these with their attack, they waited several hours before bringing them in. I sometimes think that their error here was the result of shoddy thinking; the ground forces wanted to use the cover provided by the Devil’s Whisper (which was good thinking), but the air force could not fly low in such conditions. But, instead of coming in as soon as the Whisper died down, the Alsists decided to wait until it was fully dark, as if they were
afraid of attacking during even the merest twilight! Given the ease with which any large flying craft can be detected, during day or night, this was poor thinking indeed. And it cost them dearly.

There are no Visuals of the initial attack, but the footage of the air battle is justly famous. I have been praised for my foresight in putting the full force of Senaar in the air, but the truth of the matter has less to do with my foresight and more to do with the Will of God. I remember the first reports coming through, garbled (because transmission through the Whisper is always difficult) but decipherable. At first it was not certain who was attacking us, whether Convento had launched an assault or whether it was Als, but either way we needed air support for the beleaguered.

Senaar is some sixty kilometres east of Als, and the Whisper dies out of our air minutes before it happens there, so I was able to order our planes into the air before the assault was completed. I knew that some of our planes had been destroyed on the ground, although not how many; but I acted as if we had lost all air support, and acted with dispatch. The planes flew north, skirting the retreating edge of the Whisper, and making difficult turbulent progress (our pilots are the best) at supersonic speeds.

What happened on the battlefield during this time was that the ground troops, encountering greater resistance than perhaps they had anticipated, withdrew as soon as the Whisper died away. For over an hour there was quiet, and our troops regrouped, putting the fires under control, and sorted out their casualties. Then the Alsists attacked again, this time from the air.

Their superior numbers initially overwhelmed the one surviving Senaarian craft, even though they were poorly weaponed and their pilots had no experience of war. The truth, in fact (and perhaps this will put an end to the pointless arguments that circle around this issue) is that our pilots were not initially certain whose the planes were. The first assumption was that they belonged to Convento: not a reason to drop guard, of course, but an explanation.

The planes I sent up there came on the scene shortly after the base plane had been severely damaged (it landed and all but one of the
crew escaped with their lives). The sight of a superior force filling the air gave the Alsist crews the terrors. They fled, flying south over the night desert, and our pilots pursued. You will certainly have seen the Visual-enhanced footage of this battle, a glorious one. But try to picture it as it was seen by the pilots. Thrown into battle from nowhere, flying halfway round the planet at speeds many times that of sound, and then immediately engaging the enemy. Seeing them disappear from the orange-lit air over the still-burning camp, where the spotlights played on them, into the utter darkness of the south.

And you give chase! Of course you do, because you are noble warriors for the spirit of Senaar! You follow them on your instruments . . . the same instruments that are recording everything for Visual companies back home. They dodge and scatter, but there are more of you and you are better pilots. And so you press home the inevitability of the situation: that is one definition of war, I suppose. You pull up towards the rear of one of the enemy, the acceleration weighing you against the back of your pilot’s seat; and you feel the beautiful click as the weapons fix themselves, and the spiritual roar of them firing. Twin spires of light reaching through the darkness towards the blot of darkness, hidden in darkness, that is the enemy. Perhaps you close your eyes in prayer.

And there is light. And a tumbling of wreckage, falling to the endless levels of Salt below.

Some historians call the engagement the first battle of the air; but why must we name these things? I commend you: unload the Visuals on your netscreen and watch them again. Never forget your history!

I was wary of using the cars, thinking that they could be easily followed from sats, but luck preserved us. The Senaarian satellites had been disabled by the Convento build-up to war and by the time they
were operating again, we had safely buried the cars in the desert, north-east of Senaar.

We deduced the disabling of these satellites on the second day of driving south. There was a lot of traffic in the air for us to monitor, indeed. Most of it was Conventon, as they reported increasing Senaarian build-up on the east bank of the Aradys. They reported the battle over and over again, and it was from them we learnt of the destruction of the few Alsist aircraft. But this we could have deduced anyway, because towards the end of the afternoon of the second day we came across a gigantic spoor of blackened metal, stretching like a God’s smudge over the pure white of the deep desert salt. It did not require much time to find that this was the wreckage of one of these planes. Parts of it had been melted and reformed in bizarre, artistic shapes: the work of a blind chance sculptor that I nevertheless found exquisite. Beautiful and pregnant with death. Other parts of the wreckage were almost untouched, except that they had been ripped into uneven shreds and fluttered over the ground from a height. We found some bodies that were only charred skeletons. Another body had had her skin tanned as if from the sun, but she had no chin, and her brown teeth seemed forever biting the empty air. We found nobody we recognised.

Some said to bury these dead, but I insisted we hurry on. My original plan had been to move south until we attracted the air forces, and then to try and meet them with missiles, but it had been a thin plan, and would most likely have resulted in our death. I now reasoned that we would have some days before the Senaarians could fix their sats, and that we could use that time to move the cars south, and base them under the salt. Now, I reasoned, Convento would enter the war, and we would be able to act as guerrillas and attack the Senaarian hometown and the chain of supplies. This seemed to me an excellent way to make war, because we would be able to damage a great deal of Senaar, and to kill many Senaarians. Beyond that, I had little thought.

And so we moved on, passively monitoring the sometimes contradictory but generally clear reports of war developing between Senaar
and Convento. From time to time we heard the boom of jets passing away to the west, moving south to north or north to south. But we never saw them, nor they us.

And so we moved on, and mostly our wounds healed, and we were ready to fight again. Some abrasions stayed stubborn, open and bleeding. There were patches of my skin that were forever itchy, it seemed; and I was sunburnt; as were we all. Stretches of over-skin (
hörerparm
) would come away, as transparent and ghostly as lizard castings. One night, I remember, I discovered a mole on the back of my neck that I had not noticed before, and that had never troubled me before; but once I started scratching at it, it became more and more itchy, and it spread blood all down the back of my shirt. I slept little that night.

Eventually, we parked the cars in the lee of a long dune, twenty kilometres north of the Senaarian dyke, and we dug them into the great dune by hand. We wedged ceiling boards into the body of the dune, and then we cleared the salt away underneath with power shovels, to make a tunnel. We forced the cars in, and then filled them about with salt again. When we were finished, it was nearly time for the Whisper, so we retreated to the cars and the Whisper finished our work for us, by smoothing down the rough edges we had left on the dune, and licking the shape about us.

War with Convento finally broke out, with the official withdrawal of Conventon diplomatic staff from Senaar. Now, some people have accused me of being ruthless in war, but understand this: in all the war we prosecuted with Convento, we acted with honour, because our enemy did. Convento is a religious nation, and it obeyed the rules of war. We fought, we killed theirs, they killed ours, but at all times we knew that we could respect our opponent. Not so Als: Als was never a nation at war, but a rabble of bloodthirsty terrorists. And perhaps you think I use the word
terrorist
lightly, but of course not.
Convento fought us on battlefields, usually the barren salt. Als fought us in our own streets and homes, killed civilians and soldiers without discrimination. Convento fought a war because their government debated and declared a war. Alsists fought simply because it was their bestial nature to fight. There never was any debate in the Alsist government, or declaration of war from the Alsist authorities, because Als never had government, authorities or civilisation of any kind. Now, surely you would agree that I cannot call the Alsists soldiers; or I would be compelled to call every madman individual with a grudge a ‘soldier’; every murderer and criminal would claim that they were at war. Of course, an individual cannot declare war; only a government can. It is of the greatest importance to law, to order, that we distinguish these two things.