Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Ten Close Engagement

 

 

The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.

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

 

 

It was an uphill slog to the next Reiver hideout in the lower reaches of the Appalachians. We were struggling up a rocky valley with poor footing for the horses, a narrow field of scree and boulders so hazardous that we decided to dismount and lead them rather than ride. The rushing stream made conversation difficult without shouting, so we were a mostly silent crew as we climbed up into the higher foothills. One had almost to admire their stamina, or desperation, to seek out such a difficult sanctuary, but then perhaps word had gone before us, so this isolated fastness may have seemed to them like their best chance of escaping our justice. The more fools they.

Beryl, at the head of our narrow column, called a halt by holding up her hand, then reached over toward the sorrel mare that she was leading, calmly took a rocket launcher from her saddle, and fired two HE/Magnesium missiles over the low parapet from which the stream tumbled. “Ambush,” she turned and mouthed in my direction, by way of explanation.

I arched one brow towards her, and laid my hands on a similar set of weapons readily-available and slung from the saddle of my own mount. None too soon, as it turned out, since I saw the first head pop up above the stone and fired two more missiles in quick succession, at least one of which set the peeking head on fire, hopefully including any fellow Reivers lurking nearby. We were in a tight spot if they gathered enough men together to rain down murderous levels of lead, so I quickly took up two more rockets, just in case. Explosives were the only weapon we had which could reliably shoot around corners, and even that took a steady hand and a sure eye for an imputed trajectory.

In the interim, Beryl had taken off running up the slope toward the gap, a rocket launcher in one hand and two rifles in the other. She was over the top quicker than one could say ‘Harry’s Brass Balls!’ which I know because I said it, cursing like a Sergeant as I ran upslope — considerably more awkwardly — after her. Her disappearance was followed promptly by an HE/Mag flare of light and explosion and then an almost instantaneous fusillade of rifle fire. It sounded like she’d emptied her magazine, but then there was another HE/Mag flash and bang, and then another riff of improvised rifle fire, this time slightly slower and more sporadic as she evidently chose her shots from amongst whatever targets were on offer.

I finally reached the top of the valley and poked my head over the rocky ledge to see very many male bodies lying still on the ground, some in charred gobbets and bits, with Beryl taking her ease on a low-lying boulder beside the path.

Other than the bodies strewn about, the scene would have been idyllic, a mountain meadow profuse with wildflowers of many hues and sizes, including a broad swath of yellow jonquils, as bright and cheery as the bloody corpses were depressing.

Beryl took it all in stride, saying, offhandedly, as if she were remarking on the weather, “It’s a beautiful spot, isn’t it? It looks like these fellows were the guards before the gate, so there must be quite a few more somewhere not too far away. They’ll probably know we’re here by now.”

I allowed as how that were probably true with a shrug and wry moue. “Well, in the larger sense, I suspect almost all of them know by now, at least as far as Georgia, possibly even South Carolina. If they had any sense at all, they’d go into another line of business before we catch up to them.”

She smiled. “But it’s the ultimate male fantasy, money for nothing, and your ‘chicks’ are free. The psychic price of forcing people into slavery has always been indolence on the one hand, and the habit of cruelty on the other. Once that wicked paradigm has been established as ‘normal,’ it’s very difficult to eradicate the habit.”

“True,” I admitted. “Shall we wait for the others? Or shall we take care of their ‘hidden valley’ on our own?”

“They’ll be at least five minutes getting over the top behind us, burdened with the luggage as they are, so why don’t we just busy ourselves with seeing what the lay of the land and disposition of our targets might be while we wait?”

I grunted in response, and so we took off across that bloody beautiful meadow as rapidly as possible, although I was pretty sure from the feel of things that we weren’t under any sort of immediate observation. Beryl probably had a better idea, but she wouldn’t have cared. She tended toward impulsive action, or perhaps ‘inexorable’ would be a better word, like gravity — which never sleeps — or entropy, which does.

 

 

Neither of us being utter fools, we crossed the meadow very quickly indeed, then ducked into the woods rather than following the trodden path. Even I could feel the presence of lurkers, but their attention seemed focused elsewhere, and was definitely not directed toward us, although one might have imagined that we’d be very high on their list of worries.

It didn’t take long to discover the reason for at least one negligent watchman, because we found him off in the woods digging frantically in the dirt. We watched from cover until his pit was big enough, whereupon he knelt down and began to scrabble with his hands. At that point, I figured that he was getting ready to do a bunk, probably with valuables purloined from his fellow thieves, so I put one of my knives through his brain. I knew that Beryl would approve, and I… I was resigned to do my duty.

We spent the next few moments flitting through the trees as silently as smoke, discovering one by one the half-dozen self-styled ‘Reivers’, formerly on guard duty, to be in sorry states, either running away or cowering in thickets, conditions they soon found only temporary, since none lived long enough to repent.

Beryl, of course, was serene, meting out death with no more thought than breathing — or so it seemed — then greeting our comrades warmly when they straggled across the meadow and found us sitting comfortably on a likely patch of duff and litter beneath a loblolly pine, legs crossed in a sort of lotus position, arms akimbo, smiling as the women sought us out and there we were. I was a little uneasy, even then, but not so it showed where the troops might see.

The men in the camp were little better organized than had been their naughty lookouts, and we both stood aside and let the women of our troupe of merry pranksters have their fun, joined toward the end by the former slaves themselves, who turned upon their former masters with ferocious savagery once the battle — such as it was — had turned against the Reivers, attacking them with clubs of firewood, weapons dropped from enervated hands, and rocks scrabbled from the ground, even with their ankles still hobbled by short lengths of chain, or with their wrists still bound together in pairs to make it difficult to rebel or flee on their own initiative. I found it particularly poignant to see the exultation on their faces as their first blows struck home, the wild movements of their arms as they took their own first opportunity to revenge themselves upon their captors, the murderers of their loved ones, the destroyers of their homes and friends. If some were more than slightly vicious, who could blame them? Not me, in any case, and I supposed that it must have been a therapeutic catharsis for many, a formal reclaiming of their personal integrity and power. Idly, I wondered if the medical psychiatric profession — a specialty not much in demand of late, but not completely unknown — would ever consider it a recommended clinical treatment, and in that very instant I saw the cruel logic behind Beryl’s policies, which tended toward a merciful and primary concern for the victims of these preening thugs, but offering very short shrift for the perpetrators of these systematic outrages on human dignity, civil society, and the social contract. I began to think of her actions as something more like gardening, selecting the choicest fruits for nurturing, pruning down the unruly shoots, sculpting the future of the human race as surely as we ourselves had brought into being the very types of wheat and corn and animals which now shared the Earth with us.

Once the last men were dead, or slightly before, I set out through the camp freeing the women from their bonds, whatever they were, and ministering to their scars and wounds, kissing away their hurts and starting them on the road to healing. Then I gathered up a quantity of the victuals the Reivers had reserved for themselves and began preparing a communal meal for all of us, soon helped by other women, rescuers and former captives both, as we all struggled toward familiar amity.

It turned out to be delicious, a first communion shared in the free and open air, a paschal meal of celebration and gratitude during which we most of us counted blessings as well as losses.

 

 

Beryl sort of took over after that, in a completely bloodless coup, since she’d more or less officially become our Field Commander and General of the Army, though I was still her nominal superior, at least in rank. I’d been seconded, though, to a Headquarters Staff that existed entirely on paper, in yet another improvisation. I could hardly take much — if any — umbrage, since my original ‘organization’ and rank had been an almost complete fabrication based on guesswork, a little research, and an awareness of the limits of the tenuous communication networks still functioning within the Horticultural Corps proper. Beryl maintained that fiction — at least in part — but made no attempt at all to explain the reversal of our rôles. Such was the force of her personality that no one questioned her de facto authority at all.

I wasn’t all that bothered. I’d had a surfeit of military life already, especially command, and the new Beryl had the ruthlessness required for a protracted war against the Reivers, the Barbary Pirates of our era. She was tireless, and the new ‘infection’ she’d carried back with her from the Underworld quickly spread through our ranks, surprisingly infecting the horses as well, which made for an assault force that Óðin himself would have been proud to number amongst his Valkyries, mounted on coursers that could almost fly, and which had lent figurative wings to our conquest of Virginia, first the entire Piedmont and western slopes of the Appalachian mountains — where the Reivers had their strongholds and had done their most extensive looting  — and then down through the Tidewater region, where the fortresses of the Horticultural Corps still held sway, in some cases arrriving just in time to prevent another treacherous assault by bands of Reivers who still thought that their murderous conniving was a strategy that led somewhere other than death, a belief we were at pains to refute with a practical demonstration.

Hampton Roads was one focus of her effort, or what remained of it after being submerged by a combination of the rising sea and the subsiding land surrounding Cheaspeake Bay, which was still slowly slipping into the crater left behind by the impact of a two-mile wide bolide around thirty-five million years ago, toward the end of the Eocene. The large habor, and its surrounding drydocks and shipbuilding facilities, were a key part of her overall strategy, since they still had a small shipbuilding infrastructure there, and her ultimate goal was to conquer the world, which would require some sort of Navy.

The individual fortresses in the area had all capitulated and submitted themselves to her overall command, not least because the more connected of them had been aware of — and almost powerless to stop — the encroaching Reivers, who’d grown so powerful in the Piedmont that their expeditions had become large enough to actually besiege the individual fortresses and starve the residents out, despite the armed resistance of the resident Horticulturists. We’d been specialized so far in our war against the plants that we’d lost almost all knowledge of human warfare, a trade which Beryl had proudly resurrected as the prime mission of the New Horticultural Services.

The North American Command — my spur-of-the-moment self-serving invention — was well on its way to becoming a reality, and I still had my salvaged typewriter and a large supply of silkscreened forms. I was quite the busy beaver, coördinating the many fortresses that now housed the first citizens of our burgeoning new nation. Luckily, my enhancements had made me the fastest and most accurate touch typist the world had even seen, as far as I knew, although I could hardly wait for us to reïnvent or rediscover computers and laser printers, which I’d seen only in old catalogs, although it stood to reason that there must be at least some stored in forgotten warehouses and not already salvaged for parts to maintain our failing radio networks. It’s funny how quickly things go to Hell without a robust civilian infrastructure, so I was doing my best to build one for North America — to start with. Beryl had broader ambitions.

Using the American Occupation of Japan as a model, because the Americans had faced a similar problem — an entrenched military culture whose elite members had had a lot of trouble seeing beyond the ends of their collective noses, and so hadn’t realized that their plans for domination of the Pacific had been doomed from the start. The USA had nearly twice the population of pre-war Japan and at least a hundred times the natural resources available, so despite some early successes the Japanese fell steadily behind, and were already losing the war even before they had two atomic bombs dropped on them, demonstrating the futility of further resistance rather dramatically in American eyes, although it failed to impress the Japanese leaders all that much at the time.

The American accomplishments during the war were especially noteworthy, though, considering their involvement in two essentially separate wars at the time, one against the European Axis powers on the Western Front, one against Japan in the Pacific, and fulfilling the rôle of principal arms supplier to most of the Allied powers, including the Russians on the Eastern Front, who bore the brunt of the actual fighting against Germany, and had so frightened the Japanese Empire with their ferocity during their invasion of Manchuria that the atomic bombs made a good excuse to surrender to the Americans in order to forestall a planned Russian invasion of the Japanese Home Islands and probable execution of the Emperor and his entire family, since the Russians had prior experience with royal dynasties and had developed a sovereign remedy for them.

One thing, however, I quibbled with: “Beryl, why do you never allow the Reivers to surrender any more? We had good luck with Becky and most of the rest, didn’t we?”

“It’s not worth the trouble,” she brusquely replied.

“But Becky….”

“Becky turned out alright, I agree,” she cut me off, “but Thomas Jefferson, himself a slaveholder, recommended ‘extirpation’ of slaveholders — in the nicest possible way, of course — because the ‘boisterous passions’ and indolence engendered in the slave-holding classes rendered them unfit for living in a free society. He said, in fact, ‘Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?’ Becky had the great advantage not only of filling a relatively peripheral rôle in the particular band we largely exterminated, but also of being immediately recruited into the only life that she was truly fit for, military service, but without the discipline and raison d’être inculcated into the hearts and souls of soldiers, that it is their privilege and honor to place their bodies between their loved ones and the desolation of war. We keep Becky — and the other ‘recruits’ — in hand well enough, but too many of them would tax our own resources and make the corps as a whole unstable. Lincoln recognised, as did Jefferson, that the tradition of slavery had infected the American South — and because Lincoln’s plans for reconstruction were never really implemented  — having been coöpted by the corrupt Johnson administration — the real Reconstruction, the salvaging of hearts and minds, was never implemented, the taint of slavery persisted, and everywhere that that pernicious culture migrated — for hundreds of years after slavery was supposedly eliminated — it corrupted politics and morals. In the South, especially, clever analogues of slavery were quickly invented to provide the ‘free ride’ that a slave-holding society thought was their specious ‘right,’ blighting the lives of countless millions for many generations. It’s very clear in retrospect that the worst villains of the then-‘Master Race’ should have been hanged immediately, their fate serving as a reminder to future generations that there are some ‘sins’ that can never be forgiven.”

“But….”

“But what?” she cut me off again. “Surely you’ve noticed that the ‘new’ slavery was ‘reïnvented’ right where it began in what became the United States of America, Virginia, an ‘innovation’ made by one Anthony Johnson, himself a freed slave, ironically enough, thus demonstrating that the lure of ‘easy living’ at the expense of others is a powerful motivator, once one has been coarsened by experience and then seen the ‘benefits’ possible when one is on the other end of the whip. In that greedy disregard for his fellow human beings he was similar to the late and unlamented Tourmaline, who actively worked to perpetuate the same sort of brutal criminal enterprise which had subjugated her to begin with.”

I shut up then, but couldn’t help but feel that Beryl had been changed by her own experience of being treacherously murdered from behind in more ways than just the one. Of course, I had too, when I finally admitted it to myself. When she’d been killed, I’d promptly slaughtered each and every one of the Reivers who’d already surrendered — not exactly my finest hour — but where I’d been impelled by rage, Beryl seemed to have made her own decisions in a spirit of thoughtful insight into human nature.

Sometimes, when I looked at her, she seemed to me the same old Beryl, the woman who’d become my dearest friend during our adventures, but then she’d turn, and in a certain light, or with a certain glance, her eyes glinted with an eerie spark of emerald fire, and I’d percieve the supernatural underpinnings of her corporeal existence with some sort of second sight, and then she seemed as alien and frightening as a rattlesnake. ‘Or perhaps a dragon,’ I thought. ‘Vipers are far less lethal.’

 

 

Many of the women couldn’t ride, so we stayed in the Reiver camp for more than a week while the former hostages healed and practiced the skills needed for life on campaign whilst their necessary changes progressed as well. It was a happy time for most of them, although many still grieved the loss of loved ones to the Reivers, but the fact that the perpetrators of these many outrages were dead — in some cases by their own hands — and witnessed at least by most, brought some measure of closure to the majority of the captives, and Beryl had a unique ability to inspire a sense of dedication and — it must be admitted — rage in our civilian army. The fact that they’d all experienced firsthand the savage brutality of the slavers may have made the former slaves predisposed to wipe the perpetrators off the face of the Earth, but Beryl focused that inchoate desire for revenge into a weapon of laser-like precision, whilst the changes wrought by the new ‘infection’ she’d brought back from the Underworld whetted that weapon into implausible sharpness. The transformation of the former slaves was brought home to me very graphically during our last days in the Reiver camp, when I saw some of the new women taking up the chains which had formerly bound them and shredding them with their bare hands, their faces grimly exultant as the iron and steel links either snapped with a sudden metallic ping or stretched creaking into a thin constriction like wire and parted. Some few of them had already learned to be careful not to cut their hands as the metal deformed, since shards created as the links of their former chains failed sometimes flew out with considerable speed. One of them — she’d named herself Alecto, so I suspect that she’d been numbered amongst the officer’s wives — hadn’t broken her own chains, which were of the finer sort, made from tempered steel, but had instead fashioned for them a handle of straight-grain hickory, turning the symbols of her former captivity into a multi-strand flail of chain with which, she said, she intended to drive the Reivers straight to Hell. Esprit de Corps? We had that in plenty.

Beryl approved, of course, and soon she and Alecto were almost inseparable, which made me faintly jealous, although I really had no reason to be by then, since I often hung back from the final assaults, as I said, grown weary of dealing death. But both Alecto and Beryl exulted in it, often overwhelming the Reivers in close combat, and the sight of Alecto swinging her bloody flail like a scythe, disarming and decapitating Reivers in wholesale lots, paired with Beryl, who performed similar feats with her bare hands more quickly, sometimes, but not always, aided by a long knife, quite often terrorised the Reivers into panic, so they were cut down from behind as they fled in terror, unable to outrun either of the pair, even when the Reivers were on horseback and these two on foot, a revolution of the wheel of fortune indeed, from what they’d seen as Fortune’s cap to trodden beneath her feet, reduced to their component parts like so many bloody broken dolls. Once, just once, since few of the Reivers managed any coherent actions after seeing them at their work, I saw a Reiver shoot himself through the roof of his mouth with his own rifle as they approached, making a fine mess of his brains, having evidently concluded that any further resistance was futile, so had decided to spare himself the trouble of being butchered by women who were obviously unprepared to offer any sort of mercy.

I asked Beryl about this, after it had become obvious that it was a tactic, “Why this emphasis on bare-handed slaughter? Wouldn’t it be safer to kill them from a distance, perhaps from cover, with rifles and crossbow bolts, as we did before?”

She smiled. “It’s all meant to hasten their fear and panic, of course, coöpting the mystique of the Maenads of Bacchus, the women who tore men to pieces with their bare hands, and even their teeth, when they dared to spy on them or attempted to interfere with their sacred rites. Then too, it calls to mind the Furies, the Erinyes, coëval with Aphrodite, whose divine mission it was to punish those who’d foresworn their sacred oaths by tearing them to pieces in very painful ways, although one supposes that this may have been at least partially a metaphor objectifying the torments of a guilty conscience. They were relatively minor deities, as Goddesses go, but even the greatest of the Gods feared their power if any false oath brought them under their authority and so led to their merciful attention.”

“Merciful?”

“Amongst their many other names,” she said patiently, “the Greeks called them the Eumenides, ‘the kindly ones,’ in reference to the closure they brought to those who most desperately needed forgiveness for their sins.”

“So dying is an act of contrition, then?” I could be dense at times, as you may have gathered by now, after listening so patiently to my long story.

“Of course it is,” she answered, “by long tradition. One speaks, after all, of ‘paying one’s debt to society’ when subjected to capital punishment, the lex talionis, ‘a life for a life,’ thus balancing the scale of Justice by apportioning the tally weights.”

A sudden vision overwhelmed me then, of Persephone in royal regalia as the Queen of the Underworld, the woman whose whim decided who would drink of the River Lethe and go down to oblivion, and who would be crowned with eternal life and bliss, another avatar of the High Priestess, who also sits in judgement. And if She was Beryl, who was I, the Fool? I suppose I must have been all along, since it was either foolishness or fate that brought me to where I was today. I asked her, “What then, is to be my fate?”

She reached out to me, smiling, and embraced me warmly, lingering with her cheek next to mine, the sound and feeling of her breath in my ear transporting me to a place I’d never been before, held safe within the circle of her arms. She whispered, for my ear alone, “You are to be the mother of our many children, of course, creating life in the wilderness, fulfilling your true destiny, dark Tiamat of the vasty Deeps who first made order out of Chaos, who first spread burgeoning life upon the land, green Gaia, golden Demeter, deathless Zoë, eternal Chava, the Mother of All Living.”

As proposals go, it wasn’t half bad, but…, “By ‘our many children’,” I asked suspiciously, “do you mean yours and mine, or is this some sort of general benevolence on your part, the sort of vague blessings which rain in equal measure upon the wicked and the just?”

“Sapphire, my very dear,” she whispered in my ear, her breath warm upon my hear and neck, her words inside my head, “Lapis Lazuli of my heart of hearts, You cut me to the quick,” she intimated in faux horror. “When, I ask you, have I ever stopped loving you?”

I pouted. “Well, when you were dead, it seemed like you’d abandoned me….”

“Ahhh, but I had no personal choice in the matter, and then I dreamed, didn’t I? And in my dreams, I dreamed of you.”

“Wellaway, you silver-tongued witch, you, that’s certainly what you said, when you came back, but I was devastated for quite some time thereafter, and even when you returned, you’d changed in ways that seemed incomprehensible to me. ” I paused, remembering my sorrow. “But then, I don’t imagine there’s many girls ever had a lover come back from the dead to woo her, so one has to make allowances… one supposes.”

“Only one that I know of, and I would certainly be the one to know then, wouldn’t I just? I’m sorry that I hurt you, although I do have to plead exigency, since I somehow failed to plan for having that silly bastard shoot me.”

I smiled, and perhaps she felt my smile, since her cheek was pressed to mine. “I suppose you would know better than I, since I’ve never personally had the great pleasure of encountering any ressurrected Goddesses other than you, although of course one does hear tales.”

“Rumors and innuendo only, as I’m sure you’ll admit, and certainly not lately, since I believe that I’m the sine quā causā nōn of this generation.”

“I do know that I’d be lost without you, so you’ll get no argument from me.” By this time, she was kissing my neck and ears, and I was neither in nary position nor mood to argue in any case, since my whole body was saying yes!

 

 

I rode with the troops into North Carolina, relocating our minimalist ‘Headquarters’ because we were still having trouble with long-range communications, since the Horticulturist issue radios were pretty much limited to line-of-sight and we were surrounded by mountains and hills of every descrption. Beryl had three companies of counter-insurgency shock-troopers by then, all of them recruited directly from amongst the former slaves. Not one of them felt the slightest misgiving over Beryl’s General Order One, ‘No Reiver will survive the battle.’ I could see their point, although it still rankled sometimes. Maybe my father had been right about me; I was just a sentimental fool. “Get on, girl!” I said to that same large roan gelding that had carried me to Beryl’s relief almost a year and a half ago, by now transformed into a sort-of mare and heavily pregnant, as I was now myself, so I sympathized with her weary sighs from time to time. We’d both be giving birth come Spring, and I at least could hardly wait.

“So…” Beryl drawled, “Howevuh did you like Nahfuk?”

“I swear you do that just to irritate me!” I snapped at her. “Just because we’re in North Carolina, you don’t have to talk like a Southern Belle!”

“Moi?” she said in mock innocence. “I just prefer to cultivate an authentic air of Southern hospitality to be a comfort to those already condemned. There’s no sense in being needlessly cruel through sounding anything like a damnyankee before I put a bullet through their brains. This way, they have the comfort of being ministered to by an outstanding exemplar of modest Southern Womanhood, the epitome of an intellectual integrity, moral deportment, and domestic refinement of which all America might feel justly proud.”

“By ‘ministered to’ one presumes that you mean ‘slaughtered’,” I said darkly.

“Well, yes,” she admitted, “yet a comforting angel am I, none-the-less. Their own actions condemned them, and our immediate mission is conquest, not proselytizing.”

I had to give her credit there; many of her most recent new recruits might have preferred to shoot their former masters in the gut and then let them linger on for days in agony, but she’d ordered that the coup de grace be given immediately when the Reivers weren’t killed outright, which wasn’t often, since the newly-transformed tended almost instantly to be as quick and accurate as the rest of us. “Okay,” I agreed with her on that at least. “It’s true that you’ve strongly discouraged cruelty, especially amongst those whose experience was particularly dreadful.”

She nodded. “It never pays to press an opponent to despair, since that breeds desperation, which makes life needlessly difficult for all of us.”

“Desperation‽” I asked, astounded, “What on Earth do you call killing them, then‽”

“Relief,” she said. “Surcease from pain? Death is many things, and an honorable death can be an escape from one’s own conscience, especially when that death atones in some small measure for one’s sins. We all of us have a personal responsibility to heal the world around us, and sometimes that healing best takes place when our absence is guaranteed.”

Well, that seemed like a fairly reasonable précis to me, actually, now that I thought about it, and I’d already seen Reivers who’d killed themselves when we’d caught up with them, sometimes — not often — before a single shot was fired. And it wasn’t as if we were hauling around an entire civil society with us, with judges, juries, defence attorneys, prisons, and the like. What in Harry’s Hell were we supposed to do with villains of the nasty sort these so-called Reivers seemed either to attract or become? Have them cross their hearts and promise to be good until we came back to pick them up for trial? The ‘drumhead’ court martial was invented for situations just like this, and if our proceedings were somewhat less formal, we also had the advantage of being able to pluck information straight out of their brains, if necessary. Even if each and every one of them weren’t particularly guilty of their collective crimes, the ‘felony murder’ rule in American jurisprudence dates back through England to the time before William the Conqueror, so the penalties leviable for the felonious acts involved in their concerted efforts to murder, enslave, rape, and loot legally and morally adhere to every participant in any of their actions. It wasn’t as if enslaving women, and some few men, was a secret known only to a few, nor was it possible to maintain that the civilian populations of the fortresses they’d breached and looted had some sort of secret death wish. “True,” I admitted. “One is known by the company one keeps, when all is said and done. So being only a small part of an entire band of pirates is no mitigation at all, unless one can make a credible case for having been impressed.”

“That particular case,” she said, arching one perfect brow at me, “would be difficult to prove, considering that we’re surrounded by endless wilderness in which almost anyone might easily slip away and hide. Shanghaiing unwilling participants is difficult when one doesn’t immediately set out to sea.”

“Sweetheart,” I whined, uncharacteristically disinclined to bandy words, “I don’t want to argue any more. You’re right; I’m wrong, and I’m tired and cranky and I have to pee. Are we coming to a place where we can stop riding for a bit?” The forest floor around us looked uninviting, because there was neither ready access to water for the horses nor forage, other than a scrubby underbrush that didn’t look at all good for their digestion. What I didn’t say, of course, was that the heat and the motion of that damned horse between my legs was also making me so damned horny I could scream.

Beryl was instantly attentive. “Of course, my sweet darling. Gumball tells me that there’s a open grassy clearing near a quiet ‘crik,’ as they say locally, not quite three hundred yards ahead of us. Will that do?”

“Of course it will, my dear. I’m not unreasonable,” which of course was completely untrue, but I liked to maintain a fiction of self-flattering equanimity, when in fact I was becoming increasingly broody and cranky — not necessarily in that order — but it was bad enough feeling fat and ugly and incredibly aroused all at once without adding unattractive personality traits. I still had some pride at least, and I did my best to live up to my own self-image of who I wanted to be, even if I fell somewhat short of perfect conformance to my inward ideal from time to time. Whatever benefits the fungus had given us all in terms of strength and stamina, they didn’t extend to maintaining a sunny disposition twenty-four hours a day. Unlike my former self, a very young man whom I barely remembered as being indolent at best, and groggy in the mornings, even after ample sleep, I could wake up instantly ready to fight or flee, but that didn’t guarantee that I’d be cheerful about it at all.

Beryl rolled her eyes, a tacit refutation of my bald exaggeration which I studiously ignored. I really was quite weary, and really had to pee, not to mention those… other things.

With a cluck of her tongue, Beryl picked up the pace of her mount, which of course instantly transmitted the impulse toward speed to the rest of our troop, and two of our outriders rode instantly forward at a full gallop along the line of our march to search out the path ahead whilst we followed after.

Beryl, as usual — or it might have been Gumball — since it wasn’t but a few longish moments before we came upon the clearing and stream that she’d mentioned. It was beautiful, dappled sunlight through the trees marking the eastern bounds of the open meadow, a stream running off-center along the sunny side to the west, and lush green grass and wildflowers spreading a carpet of lovely green. The woods around us here were relatively open, with very little underbrush to to obscure the forest floor, so I surmised that they were climax species, adapted to survive periodic fires to clear the understory. Although it was clearly natural, it was so lovely that it might have had a crew of gardeners working two shifts a day to prune it to perfection.

“Ooh!” I exclaimed in awe, “Let’s live here!” I told you I was feeling broody.

Beryl smiled and answered me, “Soon, Sweetheart, or soonish, at least. I’ve got a little matter of world conquest to get well underway before that happens, but it shouldn’t take too much longer. We’re already self-sustaining, and leaving new and improved Horticulturist outposts behind us to handle mopping up and prevention operations. As soon as we restore long-distance communications, we can profitably handle strategic planning from a headquarters complex, perhaps from that Fortress outside Charlotte, or maybe Raleigh—Durham. I would like to wind up in Hampton Roads eventually, but it’s not really critical to our success.”

I hadn’t liked the Hampton Roads area at all, although actually seeing the Atlantic Ocean was amazing. It had been hot and muggy all the time we’d campaigned there, though, and I didn’t fancy having to carry around a damned fan around all day, and fancied the prospect of actually living there even less. “I don’t like Virginia Beach,” I said, “It was thirty-six degrees or hotter the whole time we spent there, and my clothes were sticking to my body well into the night. It’s the most miserable place in the world, as far as I’m concerned. If we can’t live here, maybe we could head west to California. I understand it’s wonderful out there, at least from what I read in the library back home.” Then I had a thought, “And it would be a window looking toward the Far East and Russia, and you know that we’ll have to guard against them eventually, especially if our own physical and mental enhancements spread more rapidly than our political hegemony does.”

From the look on Beryl’s face, that notion hadn’t occurred to her, so I was particularly pleased to have brought it up. She might be better at many things than I was, but my brain was always working, and I’d spent a lot more time doing research in the library than she ever had. That’s one advantage of being a habitual daydreamer, more inclined to contemplation than action, and having a natural skill with words and crafting clever stories that had, in a sense, created the rôle that Beryl now fulfilled. Beryl had exactly the combination of charisma and physical prowess to make her a perfect leader, but even leaders depended upon advisors from time to time to let them know where their followers ought to go. Indeed, it was my opinion that most of the historic failures of ‘leadership’ had originated in quondam ‘leaders’ who’d got too big for their britches and had led their followers — the hapless citizens who’d mistakenly depended upon their wisdom — into utter folly through the strength of their magnetic personalities. From my own admittedly informal study of history, it sometimes seemed that the great mass of people were barely more thoughtful or prudent than lemmings.

Beryl, in the meantime, had helped me down without comment other than a smile and a kiss as she set me safely on the ground. Then she walked with me toward a handy copse of trees with a small thicket of berry bushes that shielded most of it from public view. From somewhere,, she magically conjured a bucket of clean water and a handful of soft towelling, then wandered off a bit to give me some privacy. I do love that woman!

 

 

I was feeling very chipper as we strolled back into the open meadow, having been relieved of several of my most pressing needs. We were hand-in-hand, having abandoned any pretence of being anything other than lovers. In a company of ‘women’ who were mostly widows, but including at least some number of former husbands and sons, we didn’t stand out at all as exceptions to a general rule, since many of us had formed new alliances based upon proximity and personal need. Dealing death on an almost-daily basis makes one particularly cognisant of the fragility of life, and of the virtues of seeking love from ‘across the crowded room,’ even if one’s ‘true love’ is absent, whether temporarily or forever. Life is for the living, and loving is an integral part of life. Soldiers in general are pragmatists, accommodating themselves to the situations they find themselves in whether of their own choosing or not. It comes with the territory, since very few of us actually prefer an occupation which involves being shot at from time to time. “Have you given any thought to a name?” I asked, referring to the not-so-distant future.

“I haven’t,” she said. “It’s my own belief that, since you’re doing almost all the work, it’s entirely your personal decision. I trust your judgement completely, assuming, of course, that ‘Edna’ and ‘Hortense’ are quite off the table.” Here she laughed, as did I. I wasn’t quite a fool. Traditional names in the Horticultural enclaves followed a rather simple pattern for both boy babies and girl babies, being primarily the names of common minerals for boys, and gemstones for girls. My own former name, ‘Crete,’ was a little odd, but was a more-or-less uncommon nickname for the very uncommon name, ‘Concrete,’ which was stretching the notion of a ‘mineral’ by quite a bit, even if typical of my father’s rough-hewn and completely prosaic former nature, as stolid and brittle as a mixture of sand, random gravel, and Portland cement could possibly be.

“I’ve been thinking of breaking the traditional mold and naming our child ‘Iris,’ after the flower, although I know that it’s a departure from tradition. It’s time, I think, to begin incorporating the living world into our new traditions, as opposed to perpetually celebrating dead things or pseudo-life. Of course it sounds a bit like ‘Isis’ as well, in subtle homage to her divine origins, and Iris herself is unambiguously a Goddess in her own right, the divine Messenger and Justicar of the Gods, although not nearly as well-known as the flower which bears her name.”

Beryl smiled. “I love the way your devious mind works, you know, always thinking and scheming on many levels, all at once.”

“Well, I like to plan ahead,” I said, modestly enough. “The future rarely takes care of itself, I’ve found.”

“I suppose it doesn’t hurt that Iris was the sovereign leader of the Erinyes either,” she said, “and personifies mercy as well as justice.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I replied smiling. “We ourselves are Furies, cleansing humanity of a lasting stain upon our honor on many levels, but hopefully tempered somewhat by as much a spirit of mercy as mere vengeance. The ‘Reivers’ were, in some ways, the Horticulturists writ more crudely and with a more destructive brush, since the Fortresses were for generations plundering the land which was once our common heritage — and within which we’d all once lived, rather than simply raiding our immediate surroundings for loot — of all its stored wealth and sustenance with no regard for ownership or rights. The Reivers extended their rapacity to include human beings as well as human artifacts, but this was a difference at least partly in degree, not entirely in kind. We saw that in the manner in which at least some of the Horticulturist ‘foraging parties’ back home engaged in wanton destruction of the homes and businesses they looted for food. One imagines that if, through some miracle, the original inhabitants were still living, at least some of those self-styled ‘foragers’ wouldn’t have let mere ‘ownership’ stand in their way. Horticulturist leadership paid very little attention to means, and success was measured only by how much valuable stuff was returned to the fortress, whether it were food, drink, or luxury goods. Pirates all were we.”

Beryl smiled. “You do have a way of cutting to the heart of things, Sweetheart.”

I smiled back at her, then traced the delicate line of her jaw with my fingertips. “It’s these damned hormones,” I said, “they color everything I think and feel lately. I don’t know exactly whether it’s a new level of reality, or whether it’s always been there, just waiting for me to notice. Mostly, I tend toward the latter belief, and have proof of it in you.”

“In me?” She knit her brows together slightly, looking wryly amused. “Pourquoi?”

I winked back at her. “They call the wind ‘Mariah,’ of course. All things truly powerful are feminine at the deepest level of reality, chaotic and destructive at times, but also orderly and nurturing, sometimes both at once, both cruel and kind, tempestuous at worst, but as gentle as a zephyr when approached in all due reverence. My Tarot cards were the first clue, but then you came along with a deeper connection to that psychic underpinning of the world from the start, but it was your descent into the underworld and eventual resurrection that finally demonstrated the truth that the cards had only hinted at, the existence of a ‘soul’ — for lack of a better word — that transcends life and death.”

She looked at me wide-eyed for a good long beat, and then she laughed out loud, full rich laughter that sprang straight from the belly, loud and strong and true, and I laughed with her, then laughing we walked back through the happy camp.

 

 

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

Copyright © 2012-2013 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved