Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Nine Shock Tactics

 

 

Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content.

 — Sun Tzu, The Art of War (c. 512 BCE)

 

I was confused, angry, frustrated, anguished, all at once. Beryl was alive, except that she wasn’t really, or at least didn’t seem to be. She didn’t even remember her own name, but somehow remembered me as a dream, but not even a dream, because she didn’t know what the dream meant. Neither did I.

In some ways, it was harder being around this woman who looked exactly like Beryl — but wasn’t the same woman that she’d been — than it had been knowing that she was dead, because the new Beryl was poking holes in my own memories of who she’d been, with this new Beryl melting slowly into my memories of old Beryl and the other way round as well. I couldn’t tell exactly where the new one started, or where the old one left off, and the blurry boundary between them was foggy at best, and getting foggier. We’d had a history, good and bad, and all that history had been erased by her ‘pseudo-death’ as cleanly as if it had been hacked off by an axe.

Some days I even doubted that she was Beryl, but then I’d look at her hands and could trace the familiar lines and folds of them even with my eyes closed. As far as I could tell, she still had the same fingerprints, or at least I seemed to remember the general pattern of loops and swirls on every fingertip, and the irises of her eyes held exactly the same rete — I was very sure about that at least — because I could have drawn them in her sleep.

“What does it mean, to ‘remember’ someone?” the woman who looked like Beryl asked me. “What does it mean to ‘forget?’ I think that I remember you; I know I dreamed about you, but I don’t actually know what it all means. Doesn’t the fact that I dreamed about you mean that I remember you? Exactly how is dreaming different from remembering?”

She had me there. Her questions often made my head hurt just thinking about them. In that, she was almost just as irritating as the old Beryl. “I don’t exactly know the answer to that, Beryl.” She insisted that she was Beryl, and always had been, as soon as I’d told her what her name was, yet another of her irritating habits. “I think that there is a difference, but I’m either not sure exactly what that is, or don’t know exactly how to explain it.”

“There’s no use being cross,” she said smugly. “Just admitting that you don’t actually know speaks volumes.”

I rolled my eyes, a gesture that she obviously understood, but refused to acknowledge other than with an almost invisible fleeting smirk. Sometimes I fantasized that this was all an elaborate hoax that she’d cooked up in combination with Gumball, except I don’t think that Gumball had a dishonest bone in his body… or any bones at all, actually, now that I thought about it. We’d already been here for a week beyond my original schedule, and everyone but me seemed quite content with things as they were for now. The women had organized hunting parties to bring in wild game for drying into jerky and many baskets of pine nuts and acorns, preparing stores for the coming winter in addition to the fresh green things they found here and there, so everyone was happy and productive, as far as I could see, although I chafed a bit to hunt down more of the Reivers before they managed to hurt anyone else.

 

 

Today we had a breakthrough. We were arguing about something; I don’t even remember what it was, except that I thought it was a good idea and she thought otherwise.

When I asked her why she was so adamant, she said, “I don’t know; it’s just a feeling. Why don’t you ask those damned tarot cards of yours?”

I stared at her, incredulous. “What did you say?” I hadn’t touched my deck for weeks, not since that time I’d been looking for a clue about where her body was. All her stuff was gone, as far as I knew, vanished when her body went missing, possibly tossed out, or perhaps scavenged when no one claimed it, so it seemed unlikely that she still had the deck I’d given her. There’d been quite a bit of confusion at the time, and none of the same sense of urgency that having former actual prisoners in hand entailed, with physical wounds and psychic traumas to take care of, so anything was possible, but even still, she’d seemed to remember so little….

“I said, ‘Why don’t you do a reading, then?’ You always had such luck with those before.”

I narrowed my eyebrows at her, a familiar feeling these days, when I was talking to the new Beryl, because she drove me crazy. “In the first place, that’s not what you said, but close enough, and how do you know that in the first place. Was it part of your ‘dream?’ or was it something else?”

She looked at me suspiciously. “What do you mean by ‘something else?’ What else is there but dreaming?”

That set me back a bit, but then I’d never been all that familiar with empirical solipsism, which is kind of what it sounded like. On the other hand, it certainly seemed like a fairly logical perspective for someone with Beryl’s recent history. While I was familiar with her past, Beryl was not, having somehow sprung to life, as it were, fully-formed, from the wreckage of her former body. What for me was a vivid memory of an ongoing and continuous reality was for her a mere ‘traveller’s tale,’ a fantastic account of something impossibly exotic and probably untrue. “You’re absolutely right, Beryl. You’re in a unique position, ascended from the Deeps alive, fully-formed, like Aphrodite on the half-shell, with no infancy, no childhood, nor youth to weigh you down with neither memories nor expectations. That’s why I was surprised to hear you talk about my past.”

“I knew you in this ‘past’ you talk about?” she said warily.

“You did,” I said. “We’d spent quite a bit of time with each other before you died.” I fished out my own deck of tarot cards and picked one at random, showing it to her at the same time I looked at it, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

It was The Star, Demeter pouring out blessings upon the Land, the Eleusinian Mystery again, since Demeter, called Isis in anient Egypt, and her daughter, the Kore, Persephone — who was swallowed up in the earth and rose again triumphant — were at the very heart of it.

The tree behind her is the Tree of Knowledge, since the ibis, sacred to Thoth, the God of Knowledge, rests in its highest branches, and thus recalls the three stages through which the initiate must pass, τελετή (teletÄ“) Purification; μύησις (myesis), the Closing of the Eyes to focus on the world within, releasing the Kundalini force to rise through the spine and promptly expand into universal enlightenment; and finally ἐποπτεία (epopteia), The Beholding, opening one’s inner eye to the more profound and external reality of the inward spiritual experience, manifesting that reality in one’s daily life, and becoming a part of the Mystery of Eleusis, a celebrant rather than a spectator. Many are said to have shouted for joy upon reaching this crescendo of awareness, or wept tears of infinite compassion for all those yet denied the sacred knowledge.

“So, that’s you, Sapphire,” she said, delighted, “the Star, balanced between the waking world and the Great Sea of the Unconscious.” She smiled at me. “I told you we were dreaming.”

She was probably right. As far as I could tell, we were smack dab in the middle of the ancient Attic month of Βοηδρομιών, Boedromion, harvest time, when the green fields were being reaped and the grains winnowed, the very season in which Persephone descended to the Underworld to rule over the dead until she rose again in Spring, anciently Μουνιχιών, Mounichion, when Ἄρτεμις — Artemis Agrotera, Potnia Theron, ‘Artemis of the Wilderness, Mistress of Animals, Great Huntress of the Stars, and somewhat pardoxically  — for an ever-Virgin Goddess — as Εἰλείθυια, Ilithyia, the special protector of women in childbirth — was celebrated. Then again, Artemis was always especially concerned with any woman in peril from any man, and there’s almost always a man involved somewhere at the start of every pregnancy, if not necessarily afterwards.

“Maybe,” I said. “You’ll notice that her foot doesn’t sink into the water, so she remains aloof from the world she cares for. Perhaps that’s my problem; existential alienation and despair.”

She looked at me again, more shrewdly, “Perhaps,” she said. “You never did immerse yourself too comfortably in daily life, but how profoundly can one actually despair when one has such remorseless purpose as you’ve had, trying the save the entire world from the consequence of sin?”

“More dream-awareness?” I asked.

“That’s all there is,” she said.

 

 

After that conversation I tried to maintain a certain level of calm for the next few days. It seemed clear that there was something of the old Beryl somewhere deep inside the new Beryl, but it hurt me that she was simultaneously so familiar and so much a stranger, both at once, sometimes within the same sentence, switching back and forth between the two states from one moment to the next, in a bewildering confusion of love and loss, at least on my part. Beryl seemed somehow to be above any petty concerns like past or future, and just floated along in her own private cloud, almost always either smiling and gracious or ethereally dispassionate, like some kind of Quanyin Goddess of the American South.

Then, something happened to disturb my uneasy equilibrium. It started with a whistle.

We’d stationed a couple of the newly-freed captives up in the old outpost at the entrance to the valley, and I immediately looked up to see them waving a red flag, the signal we’d agreed upon to indicate strangers moving up the creek that flowed out of the valley. Quickly, I dispatched a runner to fetch the big woman we planned to use as our ‘beard,’ a passably masculine voice to lull any passing Reivers into a false sense of security.

She showed up with Becky, which was a good thing, since she was the only available ‘expert’ on this particular Reiver hideout. “Hi, Sapphire,” she said, “What’s up?” Did I mention that we were a little informal, here on the trail?

“We’ve probably got some Reivers coming up the trail,” I said, “and it wouldn’t hurt to send out a couple of our better scouts to see if any of them are trying to bypass the sentry post.”

“Okay,” Becky said. “I’ll stay here with Chrys to handle the gate.”

We’d partially rebuilt the stockade, with the help of Gumball and his wrecking gang, but we weren’t figuring on staying here for the long term, so we hadn’t put a lot of effort into it. “I’m going to mosey downstream a little,” I said, “to flank them if I can.”

“I’ll go with you,” Beryl said. “I’d like to see these Reivers of yours.”

That took me a little aback. “Unh… there’ll probably be fighting….” Somehow, I didn’t think of the new Beryl as a warrior lately, since she seemed more like a saint, or something. “Are you sure you’re ready for that?”

“Of course,” she said. “What could possibly go wrong?”

 

 

We found a hiding place beside the stream, on the other side from the trail, behind an enormous toppled oak tree which provided cover against anything smaller than an HE missile, which the Reivers tended not to use, since they preferred to keep potential slaves alive, and usually chose their shots with rifles. “Here they come,” I whispered, barely breathing. It was only a short while before a typical Reiver column came up the trail, keeping a wary eye on their flanks, or so they thought, with a small mounted vanguard followed by the bulk of the slaves on foot to act as cover for the main body of troops, all of whom were on horseback and carrying rifles at the ready. Whether they’d heard rumors of our expedition, I didn’t know, but they seemed more cautious than the first gang we’d encountered.

Just then, one of the gang behind the slaves decided to whip one of those who were having trouble keeping up. Beryl turned to me quite calmly and said, “You might want to look out for my back while I take care of the asshole and his pals.” With that, she made a perfectly astounding leap across the stream, somehow landing in on the rear of the horse said asshole was riding, whereupon she simply twisted his head off, grabbed his gun and whip, then turned around on the horse in an astonishing display of equestrianism and shot each and every one of the leaders as fast as she could pull the trigger, which sounded like fully-automatic, except that these rifles didn’t have that option. It was incredible to watch, and she didn’t even seem to be exerting herself that much, but she was at least ten times as fast and strong as I was, and I was very fast and very strong. I did manage to kill a few of the outliers, but Beryl handled almost all of the main body of them in roughly three seconds, so quickly that those without a gun already aimed and ready to fire, which was most of them, never had time to fire a single shot, either in anger or desperation.

I called to her when she turned back to wink at me, “If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One….
I am become Death,
The shatterer of Worlds,” I was in awe.

“Oooh! A literary quote! How lovely! There’s a sniper working his way up behind you, so you might want to take care of him; you have the better shot, about six-thirty-five.”

I whirled around and saw him, mostly-concealed by shrubbery, and shot him dead. “Thanks so much, dearest friend.”

“It was my pleasure, sweet lady, and that’s the lot of them, I think. Shall we tend to their captives?”

“We should, I do believe. Pardon me if it takes me a few seconds longer to cross the stream than you managed.”

“The real question is, are you crossing the stream, or does the stream cross under you? I personally find it’s quicker to assume the latter. You really ought to try it sometime.” Then she slid off the horse she’d commandeered so spectacularly and walked up to the captives, quickly stripping off their chains and tending to their hurts with a kiss, something I’d never seen her do before but it seemed to work, since those who’d been in pain suddenly began to smile, and then to talk, and then jabber all at once as they realized that they’d been delivered from bondage, just shy of the very moment their captors had chosen to barter them for supplies and fancy goods.

“Ladies, and you few children,” I addressed them formally as I walked up the bank of the stream toward them, lugging along our packs. “Welcome back to civilization. I have food and drink here, if any of you are hungry, and you’re free now, completely free, although I don’t know whether your former homes survive. Your captors and tormenters are dead, at least, and will never trouble you again, so I hope that you can be content with that, as much rough justice as we can presently arrange.”

One of them, a beautiful young woman whose left eye had been gouged out and seared with a hot iron, from the look of it, came forward and said, caught between sneering and despair, “And what are we to do whose children have been raped and murdered? What are those of us pregnant by the men who killed our husbands and sons supposed to feel, now that we’ve been ‘rescued?’ What about those many who’ve been mutilated? Are there any magic tricks in those bags of yours to heal the pain we hold inside?”

“No, not really,” I said without quibbling, “but I can offer in partial mitigation the fact that your physical wounds will be completely healed, including your eye, my dear sister, and any other physical wound or scar will be erased completely. Further, any baby borne by any one of you will be so transformed as to make the question of paternity rather beside the point, since little or nothing of your rapist’s genetic heritage will remain behind to trouble you. I, for example, look nothing like my father, although I’m told that there was once a strong family resemblance. I do, however, look quite a bit like my mother, but my mother perfected in me, since I can recognize who I used to be in who I am now. The same mutagenic process which is healing your wounds right before your eyes evidently works primarily with material from the X chromosome — or so it seems — and will selectively pluck out the very best bits of them to ‘reshuffle the genetic deck,’ as it were, to create a new genotype for you, far more ‘fit,’ in a genetic sense, to carry on your personal heritage. The same process will occur in any fœtus you’re presently carrying, and will result in the very ‘best’ possible result from all the material available, causing ultimately the sort of notably superior bodies that Beryl and I inhabit, and you’ve seen what we can do.”

Although I didn’t have access to scanning electron microscopes and the materials needed for genetic studies, I did have access to my Tarot deck and whatever psychic abilities I now possessed, so I knew that what I told them was more-or-less true, although I couldn’t actually demonstrate its accuracy in any ‘scientific’ way.

Beryl immediately added, “Actually, since you’ve been healed by me, a little more ‘selection’ is going on inside you. Quite recently, I died, and was rebuilt from scratch using the very best and most current natural ‘technology’ borrowed from the fantastically adaptive plants which were our former common enemies, and your healing bodies will incorporate these adaptations as well, so you’re quite likely to outstrip the current abilities of my friend Sapphire here, although she’ll be catching up eventually. You’ve been brought forth from out of bondage with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great visions, and with signs and wonders.” She smiled benignly, very much like a saint, or perhaps a Goddess. “As for babies, please think of me as your co-mother, since your babies will be partly you and partly me, which isn’t entirely a bad thing.”

This astonishing speech was the longest stretch of words I’d heard from Beryl’s mouth since her… change, although she was never all that ‘chatty,’ unlike me. “Unh…. Umm…, what she said…,” I said eloquently. “She’s far more knowledgeable than I am.”

She turned to me and arched one perfect brow. “I’m very pleased to hear you admit it,” she said. “Although you’re perfectly charming, you do tend to ramble on at times.” I think she smiled then, but I almost missed it; it was very quick.

“What do you mean by transformations?” that same woman said angrily. “What have you done to us?”

“Personally, nothing,” I said calmly. “In general, though, the world has caught up with humanity and decided to end the conflict between the plants and ourselves in the most œconomical manner, which has turned out to be changing us, since the world is a very big place, and we human beings are just a small part of it. The physical healing and surcease from physical pain you’ve been given by us will accelerate your process of adaption to the larger world, but that adaptation was and is inevitable, because the spores of transformation are in the very air you breathe, so the only way to avoid it is to stop breathing entirely, if you’re actually worried about stopping it.”

Many of them hadn’t stopped muttering while I was speaking, and even now were giving me dirty looks, building up to a nasty crescendo inspired by the one-eyed malcontent. I felt like shooting her.

“Be at peace!” Beryl intoned serenely. “Even within the walls of your so-called ‘castles,’ the air in every room carried these spores, and it was that which caused the so-called ‘plant infections’ that carried the death penalty within the paranoid ranks of the Horticultural Services and the citizens they supposedly protected. If you want to complain about us — your saviors and benefactors — being high-handed, think about the millions murdered over the years to protect ‘racial purity’ and preserve Humanity über alles. In simple words, don’t be silly.”

‘Harry’s Balls! I wish I knew how she does that!’ From her first word — which had been uttered quietly, without fuss — silence had prevailed, as if a switch had been flicked that lit up a big sign that said, ‘Be Calm!’ “In some ways,” I added, “the Reivers are us, writ more crudely, perhaps, but the cruelty was always there. My own mother was murdered by my own father when she showed signs of ‘infection,’ and to general applause. They actually held a little ceremony in which the Base Commander awarded him a small decoration for immediately reporting her to the ‘proper authorities’ and seeing personally to her immediate execution. He wore it on his dress uniform for formal occasions. Does anyone here think that what he did was right? You’re all infected now; should we hand you a pistol so you can all take turns blowing each other’s brains out?”

I let a few seconds go by before suggesting helpfully, “If there are any of you who’d prefer not to be either healed or free, if you head far enough south, there are still Reivers there who I’m sure would be glad to oblige you until we catch up to them. With luck, you’ll infect quite a few of them before they discover your own infection and kill you, but since you appear to prefer slavery and death to living, you might think of it as a time-limited term of public service.” I looked around the group of them. “Any takers? We have quite a few horses to spare, so you could ride down to captivity in style.”

Beryl looked at me and subtly rolled her eyes, but didn’t say a word.

Neither did the malcontents.

“Still sullen?” I asked them, “or are you beginning to see the wisdom of not looking gift horses in the mouth? I think it’s fair to say that — although we’ve rescued a lot of women from the Reivers in our expedition — you’re the first who didn’t seem all that happy about it. In fact….” I took out my tarot deck and shuffled them, but before I could draw a single card, Beryl held up her hand.

“Ladies, I perceive that you have a hidden agenda. Are you going to confess your many sins or must we do this the hard way?”

One-eye had a panicked look on her face before she broke and ran. “Run! All of you!”

It didn’t do them any good, of course. Their changes hadn’t progressed far enough to make any real difference at all, so we had them captured and trussed up within a very few minutes, even counting the time spent finding enough rope to hold them without hurting them. We let them stew a bit before I talked to them, with Beryl standing by to listen to what their thoughts were saying on their behalf.

“Are you comfortable?” I asked politely. “You needn’t panic at all,” I added, since some of them were doing exactly that. “I assume your former captors have hostages and that they’ve threatened to kill them unless you betrayed us into their hands, am I right?”

They said nothing, of course, but Beryl gave me the nod. “We can do this in any of several ways, but it would be far more comfortable for all of us if you simply ‘spilled the beans,’ because then we could let you go and you could take care of such intimate things as urinating without someone going along to wipe your fanny, and eating without someone having to feed you with a spoon. Believe me when I say that no one really wants to do that, but we can’t have you running around loose and plotting to betray us to your former masters, none of whom — at least locally — are in any position to either listen to secrets or act upon any information you may wish to tell them. Soon enough, the men who are holding your loved ones as surety for your behaviour will be dead, and your loved ones will be safe, but all this could happen much more quickly and easily if you simply let us know exactly what sort of pressure you’ve been subjected to, and where these men are waiting. They will have let you know this, of course, even though it’s probably a backup plan, since I’m guessing that their primary plan was to have you somehow hinder us long enough for them to kill us through treachery and deceit, as was their usual practice when murdering the armed men of a fortress before they looted it and raped or killed the women and children. So let me guess, they’ve hidden themselves somewhere to the south…” I saw Beryl cast her eyes toward the north for just a fraction of a second… “…the north…” I thought about the way we’d come… “…lurking behind those rocky outcrops near the woods where we defeated the other Reivers.” Beryl gave me a nod and took off running toward the camp, presumably to gather up a few volunteers from among the more seasoned veterans.

“Now, ladies,” I said, “you have a choice. We’re sending off a small raiding party to defeat the men holding hostages — a capital offence, by the way — so if any of you wish to help, now’s your chance, since your assistance might well help us to save the lives of more hostages. Rest assured that all these men will die. We rarely offer quarter to slavers in general, but show no mercy at all to those contemptible cowards who hide behind women and children in an effort to preserve their worthless lives. No man who preys upon either women or children can ever be trusted, so we eliminate the problem of recidivism through decisive action, and of course we don’t actually need them at all, nor do we care for them as either pets or decorations, so we see no particular downside to simply snuffing them out whenever we encounter them. Mind you, I’ll think no ill of you if they’ve managed to terrorize you into doing nothing at all, but the lives you might help save will be those of the hostages, not the slavers at all. Their lives are forfeit by default, and so too any who prey upon women or murder children.”

Beryl, who was passing by with a small team of volunteers on horseback, used that moment to level her rifle at the one-eyed woman and shot her dead. “That might simplify things,” she said. “She’s been working with them for some years, serving as a decoy to worm her way into fortresses, and of course recruiting the women for this particular ploy though intimidation and threats.” Then she sang, “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.” Then she smiled benignly, as saintly as ever as she rode on by.

I blinked. I hadn’t been expecting that, from Beryl, no less, Miss Floats-Above-It-All. I cleared my throat and said, “Does that change anyone’s mind about coöperating?”

Evidently it did, because there was a sudden babble of voices, plaintive exculpations, hysterical apologies, pointing fingers, and patent horror on many faces.

Eventually, I got the story straightened out. As far as their individual stories went, they all made sense, and I took the precaution of doing a quick reading on every one. They were actually slaves, brutalized into submission by their ‘owners,’ amongst whom One-Eye was numbered, and one of the worst, to hear the women tell it. According to the word amongst the slaves, she was a former slave herself, but had managed to kill the leader of the group who’d captured her after ingratiating herself into his bed on a regular basis. One night, she’d plunged a table knife into his brain, commandeered his weapons, and through a combination of guile, stealth, and finally a sudden assault, had managed to kill every male in the group. Instead of freeing her fellow captives, though, she’d simply taken them as her own and had used them, along with the wealth already collected by the band of Reivers she’d just snuffed out, to negotiate her way into a sort of partnership with another band. The leader of that band had evidently been quick to grasp the potential of a decoy that no one would ever suspect of duplicity, and especially not one as clever as Tourmaline — that’s what her name had been antemortem — had turned out to be.

Once I was satisfied that I was leaving no hidden serpents behind in our nest of rescued women, I chose someone likely to take charge whilst I was gone, then picked up a selection of weapons and followed after Beryl and her raiding party, unwilling to risk her death again, if I could possibly help it. Besides, I was their commanding officer, wasn’t I?

 

 

It felt good to be on my own again, the way I’d started my adventures, or almost so. The rugged Virginia back country was beautiful in a way that the area around the Castle never was, greener, with trees and rocks that both of them reached impressive heights, where low hills breaking the soothing monotony of the midwestern plains had been the exception to a general rule. Whilst walking through the high grass had been merely hot and dusty, especially in the standard-issue suit, riding on horseback through the dappled sunshine filtered by the forest canopy overhead, accompanied by the sound of rushing water over the rocks and rocky ledges of the stream was an exercise in pure pleasure. If I hadn’t been pursuing a war party, with unknown observers possible, if not likely, I might have broken into song. So I simply listened to the sounds around me, concentrated on being aware of the world at large, and rode on as quickly as I could without lathering my mount, a handsome large roan gelding with a sure foot and an easy gait.

I’d been aware of Beryl’s presence ahead of me, and even felt when she became more cautious, so the sudden fusillade of gunshots didn’t take me by surprise. None-the-less, I clicked my tongue and gave him a little kick of my heels, so he broke into a trot and I turned him slightly upslope from the faint path by the stream, intending to gain some altitude above the firefight going on ahead, just in case. He fought the bit at first, unhappy to leave the path — horses love to go where other horses have been before — but I shushed him with another nudge of my heels and urged him on and up. “Get on, boy!” I said quietly, and he put his mind to the path I’d urged him on. He trusted me more than he didn’t, so was content to follow my inclinations, since he was well-aware that I was sure protection against his natural enemies and always had a treat or two in my pocket, a greedy fellow, but refreshingly honest about it. It would be a cold day in Harry’s most miserable Hell before I let him down.

About ten minutes later, the shooting slowed, then stopped, but I didn’t let down my guard, moseying up the back of a low ridge that lay between me and the site of the conflict, although all was silent now. I couldn’t hear talking either, so I dismounted, took my rifle and two crossbows, with a quiver of bolts, and took a more-or-less direct path up the ridge until I could peer over the top and down toward where Beryl and her small squadron were still present, if strangely silent. Looking down the slope, I could see the problem. Evidently the main band of Reivers had kept a largish group of slaves in reserve, and the men were hiding behind their portable human shields. ‘Tch, tch,’ I thought to myself. ‘These men are obviously unfamiliar with the Laws of War, which expressly forbid any such cowardice.’ Well, as an enfilade of one, I wasn’t half bad, so I began by shooting the two who seemed to be the most authoritative with crossbow bolts through the back of their heads, reasonably unobserved, since the main body of the Reivers had their attention concentrated forward, toward Beryl’s small party, whilst those two men were holding back from the front line, as best befitted craven curs. Smiling at my good luck, I quietly reloaded, got my rifle up and ready, and then shot another quarrel into the air one-handed, so Beryl could see it. Then I started shooting Reivers, being reasonably careful to hit my targets who, when they realized that they were under attack from behind, whirled around, many of them necessarily rising from where they’d been crouched behind their captives. This was a mistake, of course, since Beryl’s cohort took care of a good half of them quite nicely, whilst I took out the rest. It was over very quickly after that, since the only real difficulty lay in managing to avoid hitting the captives, who’d wisely decided to throw themselves on the ground and cower, several with hands over their heads, faces pressed into the dirt in terror. “Hey, Sweetie!” I called down the hill, when all seemed quiet. “Is that a gun I see in your hand? Or are you just glad to see me?”

She shouted up to me, “It’s not a gun, as well you know; it’s a rifle, and a surprisingly good one. I take it the Reivers are rapidly receding into history?”

“They are, already beyond this horizon in fact, and rapidly fading from memory, although I can’t exactly say who amongst us were the more successful in our recent revisionism.”

“I think it was a group effort, in every way,” she said as she walked up the hill towards me. She looked particularly lovely. “We held their attention long enough for you to flank them, then you returned the favor for just long enough for us to extract them from behind their hostages, hopefully without any uneccessary loss of life.”

“Other than their own, I don’t think so, although I can’t fully vouch for their behavior before I arrived,” I said, as she approached.

She raised one brow, by now very near. “Their own lives hardly count, since they were forfeit from the start.”

“They might not have realized it, though.”

She shrugged. “There are very few limits to ignorance. Some people will believe the most astonishing blather.”

“True. What I actually meant, though, was that they might well have killed one or more of their hostages during the lead-up to this police action on our part, possibly to enforce the unwilling compliance of non-combatant civilians in their craven attempt to shelter behind the women we’ve just rescued, hopefully without any further loss of innocent life. Certainly, the woman in charge of the attempt to gull us in ‘false flag’ espionage and treachery was murderous in the extreme, so it seems fairly unlikely that her associates were any less brutal.”

“Birds of a feather, one supposes.”

“Indeed. Vultures one and all, but nothing pertaining to Isis, I think, although Set rather comes to mind.”

She smiled an enigmatic smile, de rigeur for all the very best angels these days.

“Might I have a private word?” I blushed as I said it.

“Of course,” she said. “Shall we explore the area looking for… stragglers?”

I didn’t answer but led the way up and over the ridge to where I’d left my mount. He seemed awfully glad to see me, probably discomfited by the sounds of the skirmish. At last, I turned to her and said, “I’ve been an idiot, Beryl. I don’t know how much you remember of our lives before your… resurrection, but I made up an imaginary husband to give myself a reflected status if I met any regular Horticulturist soldiers, but I’ve finally realized that the notion makes no sense, since any ‘husband’ of mine would rather quickly be transformed into a ‘wife,’ of sorts.”

She smiled. “Well, ‘tangled webs’ do rather come to mind.”

Her easy agreement both did and didn’t surprise me. On the one hand, she seemed to be uncannily familiar with a fairly common idiom, although perhaps the ability to speak English at all was the greater miracle, since she was both fluent and witty, which implied a depth of understanding that seemed unlikely, given what I’d thought might be the consequences of traumatic amnesia. In short and long, she was as pretty a puzzle as could be. “How much do you remember of our lives before you… changed?”

She laughed. “Resurrected, you mean?”

“Yes, that,” I confessed.

“Nothing, and everything, all at once,” she said mysteriously.

“I… What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that almost everything anyone ever whispered to the wind is mine, including the first cry of every newborn child, the dying breaths of ancients, soft oaths, heartfelt curses, and screams both of ecstasy and pain. What would you expect of Persephone, the terrifying Goddess of the Underworld, the ever-virgin Kore who promises everything but always fails to deliver, simultaneously the barren Bride of Death and the lusty Mistress of the fertile fields? What’s the point of paradox if you can’t have fun with it?”

I noticed that her eyes looked somehow green through some peculiar trick of the light, although they’d always been dark before. “I don’t understand,” I said.

“You will.”

 

 

Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2012-2013 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved