Salt (30 page)

First, Convento fought us in the air, and I am man enough to admit they fought us well. We lost all our craft save two, and those two returned home with severe damage, such that it was a miracle, or a testament to the skill of the pilots, that they made it back at all. There were grumblings amongst the people at this; the word went round that I had been fooled by the ease of our first battle into complacency in the air. But the truth is that Convento suffered losses almost as great as ours, and that air supremacy was granted to neither of us. There were some ground scuffles as well, with the reinforced base at Als.

But the war with Convento lasted the length a war should last: within three weeks I was meeting the President of Convento in Yared, and signing protocols that ended hostilities between us. We were both honourable peoples. Convento agreed to allow us a military base on the site of former Als (necessary partly to deal with repeated terrorist attacks from the mountains to the north, and partly to facilitate the harvesting of salt eels and other crops: there was quite a scarcity of food at this time). In return we agreed not to fly west of the seventh longitude, not to conduct any military operations in Conventon territory and so on.

The vice-President confided in me (because, indeed, these great statesmen are ordinary people as well, and we chat and gossip as
much as any housewife) that many in Convento were anxious about the spread of Alsists in the mountains north of the Perse. They were now nothing more than bandits; they had taken to stealing food, raiding travellers, and generally aggressing the area. Indeed, I harboured the hope that at some future date Convento might join forces with us in flushing them out of their mountains. Without air cover (and the few planes we had left were mostly occupied in supplying the base with necessaries) it was a low, tortuous and dangerous mission.

Things were not helped by the fact that a second cadre of terrorists had established themselves somewhere in the south. With the negotiation of peace with Convento, and the occupation of the ruins of Als, the war was effectively over. It was a matter of great frustration that there were so many Alsists who refused to digest that fact. Of course, they could have signed a treaty and rebuilt their city (probably with a policing force of Senaarians, but the enforcement of law and order could only have benefited them). Instead they chose to carry their grudge.

I remember calling jean-Pierre into my office. He had led men with distinction in the short-lived hostilities against Convento, but now I had a more onerous task for him. ‘My friend,’ I said. ‘We have won the war; it is merely that the enemy have refused to accept the fact. We must make them accept it.’

I remember his smile – his smile! Oh, bear with me, if I become a little emotional. The very memory of him is enough to wet my eyes. I place in the record links to images of him, standing attention in full uniform. Connect with these links, and you will see what I saw on that day.

‘Great Leader,’ he said. ‘These anarchists must understand the Will of God, and if they do not understand it I shall make them understand.’

‘I can depend upon you,’ I said, clasping his hand. ‘Senaar can depend upon you.’

He went north the following day, flying with four planes and a complement of fresh troops, with a mission statement to keep the
eastern seaboard of the Perse pacified. Did I think of him as my son? The comparison with another holy relationship between Father and Son is surely not blasphemous. Sometimes I am awake in the small hours, and once I was in a chapel during the Morning Whisper, having spent the night there, and I actually spoke the words aloud, hoping to reach my Creator. Sacrifice! Sacrifice! Why
must
this be the principle of the spiritual in this universe? But the silence, the pure clean silence of the crypt, is answer to me. If I falter, as flesh sometimes trembles, then in my soul I know that only in sacrifice is there truth.

I remember standing in an office overlooking the airfield, as jean-Pierre made his way, his handsome face rictusing with grins as he laughed with his comrades, striding over the field towards his plane. I watched as the plane swept in the air and ferried him north.

I never saw him again.

We operated at night to begin with, stealing south and mining the Great Dyke that bore the brunt of the Whisper. That Senaar had left the great stretch of this dyke unguarded surprised me, but then again it was a lengthy construction indeed and perhaps it would have required too many soldiers to guard it all. We left the explosives buried in the structure, like maggots sleeping in meat.

North of the dyke there were scrubbier lands, where saltdomes poked through the topsalt, and were slowly worn to strange shapes. Since our cloaks stood out in this terrain I did not stay long.

We pulled back to the cars and took our daily meal. Listening to ether traffic, we reasoned that the Alsist sats were still not operating as they might. I took our squad of fifty-four, with double rations, and marched south-west. When the Whisper started at our back, we hurried to the next dune and dug ourselves into the lee side, with our cloaks wrapped about us. We were like animals, natives of the planet. In a day we reached a broad press of hardened salt, where many
wheels had squashed the grains together into a road. There was little cover hard by the road, so we were forced to pull back thirty metres or so. Still, we only waited half an hour before a convoy of three grumbled over the horizon and started up the road.

I ordered the first truck stopped with a sodium-grenade, fired from a pole (so simple yet so ingenious). Its cab windows broke with the explosion, and let the fire in. Somebody toppled out of the side doorway, but they were burning so fiercely they merely fell to the ground. One of the trucks behind stopped, and its complement piled out with their needleweapons firing. The other pulled off the road, and made slower progress in the unmarked salt, grains spewing out from its spinning back wheels. I ordered the grenade to stop that truck, although the launcher missed with her second and third strike; meanwhile I ordered everybody to charge. We covered the ground quickly, firing needles in continuous bursts. My left-hand cover fell, simply doubled forward with a
nugh
sound and collapsed on the salt. In the silence of the day I could hear the needles swish past; and they glinted in the sun, like rays of light in an optical diagram. One hit my hand, and carved a way in along the length of my little finger: it hurt a great deal more than the more serious wound I had received at Als.

Why am I telling you about this raid in such detail? There was something about it; the sunshine so bright and pure, perhaps. The vision (I can shut my eyes and the image will come to me as if newly fished from bright water) of the great trucks stalled, jolting and swelling with perspective as I ran towards them. Of the maskless Senaarians ducking their heads back out of the way, round the snout of the car, trying to stay behind cover. But they were a small force, and we were forty-four. Three of us died, and one (a man called Sebestyen, like the mountains) received two needle wounds to the lower abdomen. His pain was bad, and there was little we could do. Two offered to drag him on his cloak back to the car, where he could lie and recuperate; which was no small offer, since they dragged him for a day and a half, stopping at every Whisper to bury him and themselves, and then starting again, and on one occasion being
buzzed from the air, and having to turn him over (his shouts of pain, they said, were severe) and themselves to hide under their cloaks. They dragged him all that way and finally he died anyway. Afterwards, I spoke to one of them, and he said he was most worried by the way the blood from Sebestyen’s wounds kept spilling on the salt, bright red on bright white, and the two of them kept kicking salt over this trail and hoping it didn’t show from the air.

One truck got away, revving noisily, rejoining the track and speeding over the northern horizon; and one truck was wrecked. But we took the third, and a group of twelve of us turned it about, and drove south; the rest fell back. Surely, after ten minutes, we saw two dots in the air to the south, and voices coming croaky over the com ordering us to stop and surrender. So we jammed a seat-brace against the acceleration foot-button, and tumbled out of the car. Then we rushed to the nearest western dunes, and threw ourselves down with our cloaks as camouflage to watch as the enemy destroyed their own car. The explosion was magnificent.

The plane made a pass over us, but could not locate us against the salt, and turned away. From here we marched our force to the west, and came to the spinal railway track that connects Senaar and Yared. This was the point of our attack, to destroy the railway terminus in Senaar, and to this end we placed our trays of explosive carefully, so that they hovered over the track itself (we had to tear down the windshield covering), and then sent them scooting down the track at two hundred kilometres per hour, to detonate in the centre of the city.

Freed of our packages, we made swift time heading west. By ill fortune we were spotted from the air. Again, we lay down in camouflage, but the plane flew low anyway and began strafing our positions, and so we were forced to clamber up and deflate our balloons, and jump to the east.

The plane followed us, of course, but our various jumps were scattered so that it could not target a group. Of the twelve who had driven with me in the car, three were killed, and one died when his manpack malfunctioned and dropped him down head first. I found his body; his head was flopped over on his shoulder as if he were
asleep. We were concerned, of course we were, at the implications of this but our manpacks were too vital to our method of making war to give up using them.

We regrouped, and broke into several groups. The first, the one I joined, skirted east of the Great North Road, coming down the way until we reached outbuildings and northern suburbs of Senaar itself. Here we deployed the most curious-looking of our weapons of war, devices that had been modified from child-toy software in our car Fabricants. Small fusion detonators, suspended from balloons and fitted with tiny fan-motors. When we inflated the balloons, the things would hover three metres from the ground and begin slowly to drift along. These surely do not sound like very practical weapons of war: how slowly they travelled, how easy they would be to dispose of, to dismantle. But we set a fuse of thirty minutes and let them drift away, buzzing like insects. Then we hid, crouched behind a large storage shed. At exactly twelve minutes we detonated the charges we had planted days before in the Great Dyke itself. We were many kilometres from the dyke, and on the northern outskirts, but we heard the billowing
whump-whump
of the detonations clearly. Then we waited. I closed my eyes, imagined a rushing of military services to the east, thinking the dyke was under attack. I imagined planes whirling through the air.

It was minutes before the Evening Whisper was to start, and we hurried away, dashing north-east from the roads and into the dunes to bury ourselves into the lee side. The slipping, abrasive eddies of trillions of salt grains as I wriggled my way under the soil, and safety. And then?

Then, our balloons floating down streets, over parks, perhaps knocking against the walls of buildings, and skidding along with the fan-blades rattling ineffectually against the blocks. But then the Whisper, the air scurrying with jewel-sharp tiny salt grains, the breached dyke letting through a more vigorous scouring wind than normal, and people cowering inside. Nature bursting our fragile balloons, filling the rigid structures with tiny holes and letting the ordinary air suck inside. Dozens of devices settling to the ground,
tossed and kicked by the wind perhaps, rolling into gutters, or setting up in the ground-jambs of walls.

The explosions coincided with the height of the Whisper. I heard nothing, buried away in the body of the salt itself, but even had I been outside, I would have heard nothing against the rage of the Whisper itself anyway. And, in the dark, we stole away until the horizon to our south only glimmered with red from the damage we had done.

Four months, nearly. How many engagements did we fight? I cannot number them. How many hundred Senaarians killed? Was it as many as a thousand? I cannot number them.

I think back and try to arrange these memories into a dry account, but the events speak so indistinctly, and my associations so powerfully. It is not what I did, I sometimes think, but what I felt these doings
meant
in my life. Though there is no reason why you should have the same sense of significance, unless I can put it out to you, and even then, there is no passage into another’s head. That is a sober observation, and not one I feel a happiness about. But I say it from a certain position. I try to reach you, perhaps, and at the same time I can never reach you. I will tell you, for instance, about the surprise raid. We lay in wait, south of the city, to fall upon a trade car bound for the south coast settlements, to fall on it as eagles. And then we were detonating the underlying saltstone in great blocks to block the way of the car, and suddenly Senaarian soldiers were pouring out from the back, and taking cover in the nearer dunes. That was a fierce needlefight. It was dusk, shortly before the Whisper (and we had reasoned that the driver would be tired and thinking about battening down). In the end, I ordered us to pull back. I decided not to jump straight away, and I am not sure why; perhaps I feared a trap. So we fell back over the dunes, a dozen firing from positions, a dozen scurrying back with their heads below their shoulders, those dozen squirming about as soon as they cleared the peak of the back dune and taking up the fire to cover their colleagues. We went back a good kilometre that way, with fierce fire. I think I assumed that we would fight until the Whisper started,
and then the enemy would give up. But they foreclosed that, and instead sent up a shrapnel device, that lit up like a firework, except that the blades of the explosion were needles also, and they rained down over us. People were deflating their own balloons then, and I need give no order; I pulled my own cord and heard my own engine whine to pump the air out of my bladders, and then the jet fired and I was lurched sickeningly skywards. We saw a second shrapnel device explode, but beneath us, and they are designed only to shower downwards upon the place beneath; it was such that from above the burst had some extraordinary beauty. It littered the carpet beneath with fragments of light itself, except that the carpet was the air, and then the salt, and the embers died slowly. We came down slowly, as if being dragged through some torpid element, as a ship’s anchor through a treacly sea. By the time we hit the ground again the Whisper was beginning, so that we fell into a cloud of buzzing salt, and had to struggle to bury ourselves. I was badly grazed by that Whisper, I remember.