Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter One Opening Salvo

 

 

All war is deception.

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

 

Maybe it was the years of chemical warfare initiated by suburban homeowners, maybe it was an alien invasion or maybe Darwin was right and it was just the logical result of genetic drift. No one knows how it happened. I don’t care. I kill them. I’ve got a flamethrower on my back, a machete in my belt, and my name is Crete. I’m a Horticulturist, one of the front-line soldiers in the war against the weeds.

The nights are long on watch duty, also cold and lonely, filled with darkness and slithering, deadly vegetation constantly seeking a chink in the castle’s security. They tell me it used to be simple, a little weed killer in a spreader, a couple of squirts of spot weed killer, then lay back on your deck to enjoy your lawn. The old videos show people frolicking on neatly trimmed fields of green. They thought nothing of wearing the thinnest of coverings as they casually strolled, hand-in-hand, through parks, chewed on blades of grass and built their houses of vegetative materials. How strange and idyllic it must have been, back in the golden years of humanity. I almost wish….

 

 

“Crete!” Captain of the Guard Glass had rounded a corner on the castle battlements and caught me leaning against the steel plate wall. When I jerked in surprise, he continued, even angrier. “Daydreaming again! I’ve caught you, haven’t I?”

“Aye, Captain,” I hung my head in shame.

“What if the weeds had attacked? Your position would have been overrun. You would have died. Worse yet, your failure might have meant the end of this enclave.”

“I’m sorry, Captain. I wasn’t thinking.”

“No. You weren’t thinking.” Pulling a walkie-talkie from his belt, Captain Glass called for a replacement. Then his harsh glare softened. “I should never have allowed your mother, may she rest in peace, to let you read all those books. Now you think too much, just like she did.”

“I’m sorry, Father.”

“I know, Son.” The older man ruffled his son’s hair affectionately before allowing himself to resume a stiff, military bearing.

A moment later, another young man in the uniform of the Horticulturists rounded a corner and saluted.

“Assume Crete’s watch” he barked out his order with punctilious formality. “Crete, report to detention.”

 

 

The line of sullen men, ten in all, stood by the heavily fortified steel gates with drooping heads and shifting feet as they listened to the huge man with scars crisscrossing his face pacing before them.

“Listen up, meat,” Lieutenant Forge bellowed. “This is a dangerous job. The most dangerous job any of you will ever undertake. You’re going out into the ‘Wilds’ to gather food.

“For most of you, this is a punishment detail. That means most of you are screw-ups. Well, you can’t afford to screw up out there. If you do, you’ll die. Worse, others might die instead of you. If you don’t think you can work as a member of a team, step forward and you’ll be marched back to detention until you can be given alternative punishment.

“Excuse me, Sir,” a thin blonde boy, barely out of his teens piped up. Crete could guess what he was going to ask and was not disappointed. He would have considered asking himself if his father hadn’t already told him.

“Yes, soldier?”

“What’s the ‘alternative punishment,’ Sir?”

“Lashes…,” he said simply…

The group murmured.

“…and banishment,” he went on, matter-of-factly.“ Bottom line is, either way you’re leaving the compound. You can do it as part of a team, with at least some chance for survival, with the possibility of helping to contribute to the survival of your community, or you can do it on your own — and die.”

 

 

We wore the standard issue gardening uniform; assorted supplies in a survival pack, flamethrower and steel armor with a rebreather, a hundred and fifty pounds of the best protection our scientists could come up with, but it was miserably heavy and hot. Not an inch of bare skin existed, though, which was an absolute requirement. The glass visors were so darkly-tinted that they reflected like a mirror, to protect against being blinded by the actinic radiation from violent explosions. Only the number codes, stenciled in large print on our chests and backs, identified us in any meaningful way.

Lieutenant Forge was number one. I was number seven and the boy who had asked about alternative punishment, his name was Silica, was number eleven. The numbers were an indication of our ‘Wilds’ training and experience. Dad had taken me out once to burn away some especially aggressive creepers that kept blocking a sewer exhaust. That gave me more experience than four of our group and less than three. You might wonder why the numbers only went up to two digits. The answer was simple, no one had ever survived service amongst the Horticulturists for long enough to make larger numbers necessary.

Lieutenant Forge’s instructions were very simple. “Stay together, flamethrowers on and aimed away from anyone else, fry anything that moves or looks green, and I mean anything.”

The weeds in front of the sally port still smoldered and stunk from the napalm burn. Until recently, a burn would give us a chance to get well through the gate and set up before a full-force attack could be initiated. It was supposed to guarantee at least a hundred yards before the really bad weeds, but lately they had been shooting poisonous homing burrs into the area as soon as the fires died down. Some of the burrs were fast-growers and sprouted creepers right on the protective suit, but most seemed to be burrowers. If they found something metallic, they would burrow into any cracks or crevices until they found soft human flesh and then consume it. I had only seen that once. Even after flaming the man, trying to burn off the plant, he had continued screaming and jerking. It wasn’t pretty.

When the flames were almost out, the gate opened just wide enough to allow us to slip through one at a time. We formed into a rough double line, weapons drawn, scanning the ground and sky. It was a clear day with puffy blue clouds. Below us was scorched earth, not brown and vegetation free, but black and partially crystallized from repeated incineration. In the distance, but not distant enough, were the weeds; bright green and constantly moving. Everyone jumped as the gate slammed shut behind us. We were really on our own now.

 

 

“Deploy missile.” We were about fifty feet from the quivering slithering wall of green and almost a mile from the castle. So far, we had been lucky, as if we were in the eye of a storm. Not even a homing burr had attacked us yet, but we knew that would never last.

“Aye, Lieutenant.” Brick responded. He was a tall man, but thin, the only other man beside the Lieutenant to have more than two expeditions. He unstrapped a bazooka from his back and mounted it on his shoulder. With a quick check for authorization from Forge, he shouted, “Fire in the hole,” and fired first one and then a second missile into the foliage. The flame bloom was nearly blinding, even though we had turned away and were wearing our tinted protective gear, because they loaded those missiles with a lot of magnesium and HE, to make the resulting blast as hot as humanly possible.

I know it had to be my imagination, but I swear I heard a high-pitched scream of pain as the missiles ignited. We rushed through the opening, bypassing the larger fires and jumping over the rims of the craters formed by past foraging expeditions. I could hear the swishing sound as they came. As soon as the initial plume of flame had died, the homing burrs attacked and we were in a free-for-all fire-fight.

Four and Eleven were down immediately. Apparently, the burrs had learned a new trick. They’d somehow managed to coördinate their efforts well enough to target single humans.

At Forge’s instruction, Three and Five hosed down Four with flame while Nine and I did the same for Eight. We tried a couple of short bursts, hoping to burn them off before they could do any damage. It worked, but new burrs covered them almost as soon as we got the first batch burned off. The second time it was clear that we were going to roast Eight alive if this happened again. We could smell the beginnings of burnt flesh already.

I think it was Five who figured it out first, at least he was the one who shouted above the din for us to burn the burr on top of Eight’s head. We tried aiming for just that one burr, but it had a tougher exterior than the others and didn’t burn off. More burrs were already covering portions of his suit and it was unlikely that he could stand yet another full flaming.

Eleven must have known that too, because he violated protocol, yanking off his helmet and throwing it away. We stood there stunned, waiting for the burrs to swarm over him. But instead, they swarmed off towards the helmet.

“Snap out of it! We still got incoming burrs!” Forge screamed and we went back to dishing out mayhem.

About a hundred yards into the alley of flame, Forge called for two more missiles. They cleared another aisle and we moved forward. It took five sets of napalm missiles to make it through the kill ring. We camped for the night in the center of yet another missile blast crater. Guards were set at the perimeter of the encampment and lights were shielded to keep away any inquisitive plants. I don’t know about the others, but I was asleep instantly.

 

 

Eleven died during the night. No one saw it, but a creeper managed to make it into his suit. It sucked him dry, crushed his bones and left only a few drops of blood on the bottom of the suit.

Some of us wanted to blame the perimeter guards, but Forge wouldn’t let us. He gave a brief speech about duty and responsibility, told us this was why we needed to keep our helmets on, and got us marching again. We didn’t even bury him. We didn’t even say his name as we walked away, leaving what was left of him behind like yesterday’s garbage. As we marched, weapons drawn, trying to watch everywhere at once, I said my own personal goodbye to Silica, a man I’d barely known, but a good soldier nonetheless.

 

 

We were now in an open area. Forge called it a pasture and said it was safe — at least as safe as anyplace outside the walls. We thought it was spooky. It just wasn’t right. There were no walls, just waving green everywhere we looked — except for the circle of blackened, scorched earth around us.

“About a mile from here is a town,” Forge told us. “When we get there, we split up and check each building. We’re looking for canned goods or anything else that’s sealed. Check each item carefully. If the seal is broken, even the slightest, burn it. If it’s intact, we take it back. And remember, if it moves, burn it. Don’t think, don’t wait, burn it.” Then, as we watched aghast, he marched off into the waist high grass without burning it first.

We looked at each other, afraid to follow and unsure what to do. There was a light breeze and the grass whispered around Forge as he walked. He turned abruptly as he heard the click of nine flamethrowers being turned on at once.

“Flame off, ladies. If we flame these fields we’ll have an uncontrollable fire. It’ll burn down the town we’re trying to scavenge from.”

“But you said…”

“I know what I said. I said move anything that moves. If you see a creeper in the grass, flame it. If you see homing burrs, flame them. If you see a pseudoshark, flame it. Just don’t flame the wheat grass.” With that he turned and continued his march through the grass.

We shrugged, formed into a line and marched nervously after him. After getting elbowed by Five and Seven, Six called out to him, “Sir? What’s a pseudoshark, Sir?”

 

 

I was learning to hate marching. It wasn’t the walking; it was the boredom. It gave me time to think. I was wondering why there were no homing burrs, no creepers or any of the other forms of deadly vegetation that surrounded the castle. It was as if the weeds knew we were in the castle and was laying siege to it — to us. Did weeds think like that? Did weeds think?

I knew the official answer; Dad had told me enough times. Weeds responded reflexively to movement, to heat, to the existence of chemicals only present in human bodies, whatever, but they didn’t think. They had grown up around the castle because of our presence. Lethal weeds like those which surrounded the castle weren’t present in the open plains where our detail was walking now because there were no humans there, and they couldn’t spread into areas where there was no food supply. The pseudosharks came into sight before I could figure out why the official answer didn’t quite ring true.

We were interrupted by movements in the tall grass. Instantly, every flamethrower was aimed in that direction. I couldn’t make out what it was, but I remembered Forge’s instructions before we left, “Fry anything that moves!” and apparently so did everyone else. Only Forge’s bellowed “No!” prevented us from flaming them.

“What in the name of Harry Harrison are those?” someone called out, it was difficult to say who, because the radio links made almost everyone sound the same, scritchy and distorted. ‘They’ were gray balloon-like things with shiny silver ridges extending from end to end and they wandered around on the ground as if they were foraging. Mostly, you could only see them because the shiny silver ridges poked up above the wheat grass. Once you got closer, though, you could see that green vines trailed from them back to what looked like a twenty-foot tall dandelion, complete with a yellow flowering crown.

“Are they pseudosharks? They look gray and oval like the pictures,” someone else said.

“If they were pesudosharks we’d be flaming them, wouldn’t we?” Someone said angrily.

“Don’t take the Prophet Harrison’s name in vain!” another voice exclaimed piously.

“Don’t tell me what to do, you little snot!”

“Shut up!” That last was shouted by Forge. I recognized his voice, at least. “Nine, I don’t want to hear the Prophet’s name spoken in vain again. Six, yes, those are pesudosharks. All of you, you don’t flame pseudosharks, ever! They’re mostly napalm. Where do you guys think we get our reserves from?”

“So what do we do with them?” someone asked. However Forge did it, telling those voices apart from each other, I didn’t have the knack.

“Think of them as an especially deadly version of a mobile watermelon. They’re not completely root-bound, like most plants are. They can move around to the length of their vine, usually about fifty feet. We take out our nets and trap them. The only tricks are not to flame them and watch out for those fin-like leaves that grow out of their backs. They’re razor sharp, and can cut a man to pieces in a heartbeat.”

“If they have razor blades on their backs, how do we net them?”

A couple of the others murmured, “Good question.”

“You lay the nets on the ground and one of you acts as bait to entice the pseudoshark onto it. Then two others run around it and yank the net around it, making sure not to pull the net too high, so it can’t slice it with its fin. Pull it to the end of its tether, cut the tether, and then tie it off so it doesn’t ooze napalm, then wait for it to die. Usually takes about five minutes. Does everyone understand?” He didn’t wait for a response. “Good. Deploy in teams of three. I’ll stand watch. I want three dead sharks in ten minutes.”

It actually wasn’t as hard as it looked. The pseudosharks were dumb. It took about three tries to find that, if we moved slowly enough laying the net, they wouldn’t charge, so all the guy being the ‘bait’ had to do was to stand fairly near the net and then flap his arms around until it noticed and started stalking him.

I was elected to act as bait. Actually, I got told I was bait, but since I was the smallest of the three of us, it made sense. I just stood between the nearest pseudoshark and the net and waved my hands. I didn’t even need to make noise.

It was surprisingly quick, almost as fast as a homing burr. I bolted as fast as I could backpedal. It was going to be close, but I thought I could make it, until I tripped on the net.

Ten and Six grabbed the net and tried to pull me to safety, but it was a forgone conclusion now. I wasn’t going to make it. I was dead; I just hadn’t finished dying yet.

Forge was running toward us, screaming something. Ten was closest and he understood first. He stopped tugging at the net and stood still. Then, Six did the same.

I was quietly muttering Harrison’s Last Verse when the pseudoshark veered toward Forge. It was almost funny when I could think about what happened next. Just like a cartoon, it reached the end of its tether — about two feet from Forge — and bounced back. Then, it kept jumping at him, trying to reach Forge even though it was clear that it couldn’t. Dad once talked about a dog that his grandfather had that used to do the same thing. He had some videos of ‘the Good Times,’ before the plants went psycho, and I saw it once.

Forge just stood there laughing at it and waving until I was back on my feet. “Are you ready to try again?” he called out to me.

When I had swallowed my fear and nodded, he froze. Taking my cue from him, I began yelling and waving. It took a moment, but the pseudoshark noticed me and charged. This time it worked. After some quick net work by Ten and Six, we had caught ourselves a pseudoshark.

Looking about, the other teams had each caught one too. Strangely, all the other pseudosharks had disappeared.

As I ran to cut the connecting vine, Forge turned to check on the others — and then just disappeared. One moment he was standing less than twenty feet from me, the next he was gone, sucked down into the earth.

We ran to where he had been standing. When we got there, we found an eight-foot deep pit. At the bottom of the pit was a gaping maw with more rows of teeth than I could count. In the center of those gnashing teeth was Forge’s upper torso, bouncing around as more and more of it disappeared.

“What the hell is that?” I asked.

“Damned if I know. Don’t matter. We gotta get Forge out.”

“Are you crazy? Look at him. He’s already dead.”

“So what do we do?”

“We burn it, just like Forge told us to do,” Two said, running up to us. “We burn it.”

Nine flamethrowers began torching the thing that had burrowed underneath to take Forge. For ten seconds there was a constant sea of flame at the bottom of the pit. When Two ordered us to halt, the rows of teeth were still there, gnashing away at the charred bones that were all that was left of our troop leader.

“Harrison’s Word! How do we kill that thing?”

“I don’t know, but look. It’s going away.”

The teeth were covered over by a thick greenish membrane and then it was gone.

“What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know,” Two said with a worried look. “Call it a giant burrower for all I care, let’s just take the pseudosharks and get out of here before it comes back.”

We grabbed the shark carcasses and started a fast march away. That’s when another hole opened up immediately in front of us. It had instantly swallowed up Two, Three, Four, Five and Six. It would have taken me too, if Eight hadn’t pulled me back from the crumbling edge of the precipice.

The four of us who were left began flaming the giant burrower, but all it was doing was turning our dead fellows into cinders. It didn’t seem to be bothering the burrower at all.

“What do we do?”

“I don’t know. Ask Seven. He’s in charge now.”

“What?” I looked around, but he was right. I was the most experienced person left. Harrison’s Word, were we in trouble. I thought fast.

“Dad says… said… never to run from an enemy. It will just chase you down and kill you. Either way you’ll probably die, but if you stand and fight, at least you’ll die a hero.”

“Great. We’re already fighting — and losing. We need more.”

“More. More. That’s it! More.” I looked around frantically. There was still one shark left. We were in luck.

“Quick. Toss the pseudoshark into the pit.”

“What?”

“Toss it. Now! Do it!”

Ten grabbed the net and tugged it toward the edge. It was almost there when the edge crumbled. With a scream, he dropped to the waiting maw below. His scream cut off almost immediately.

Before I could say anything, Eight and Nine bolted, back toward the castle. They made it about fifty feet — I watched them — right into the center of the pseudoshark flock. They were dead before I could turn back to the giant burrower.

I was alone. Clearly, a plan was needed. First, I considered giving up the scavenging foray and returning to the castle. If I made it, I could at least advise the families of my platoon-mates that their sons died bravely.

Ending the mission didn’t bother me. We had left a cache of missiles just beyond the worst of the weeds so I’d have enough of them, but the image of firing missiles while flaming homing burrs and creepers, all with my hands full of pseudosheep, just did not go over well. I realized that I would never be able to fire missiles and flame weeds at the same time, even with my hands free. That meant that even if I was able to find food and raw material, I’d never be able to make it back to the castle.

If I couldn’t go back, I needed to do the impossible. I had to find a way to survive amongst the vegetation. This would be a good trick, when I couldn’t even afford to go to sleep without risking being sucked dry by a creeper like Eleven.

I had no idea what I would find there, but my only hope was to get to the village. With luck, maybe I could hide from the weeds there, at least until another scavenging party came by. But to get there, I had to make it past the giant burrower.

Dropping to the ground, I got my feet behind the shark and kicked at it until it fell into the pit. Scrambling to my feet, I quickly stuck the flamethrower over the edge and shot a quick burst before rolling away from the pit as fast as possible.

Before I could roll clear, I was tossed away by the huge blast. I couldn’t hear anything and the world seemed unwilling to stop shaking. Struggling to shake off the concussion, I crawled back to the edge of the pit, which was a lot bigger now.

At the bottom of the pit was the giant burrower, or rather parts of it. It was definitely dead and it was definitely a plant. It looked like the plants were still mutating, because this was something new.

Checking the fuel level on my flamethrower was depressing. I had less than an eighth of a tank. None of the flamers from my now deceased team members had survived either. If I was going to survive, I had to catch another pseudoshark to refuel my flamethrower, but the only way I knew how to do it required two additional people — people I didn’t have.

Standing just out of reach of a conveniently located fuel supply, I tried to decide what I could do. I was fairly certain what I had in mind wouldn’t work or we would have been told to do it that way in the first place, but I didn’t see too many other options. Using some of my dangerously dwindling supply I flamed the connecting vine on one of the pseudohsarks about half way between it and the huge, dandelion-like central plant.

My hope was that my burst of flame would neatly cut the vine in half at a point where there was not enough napalm to allow it to explode. If it worked, the pseudoshark, disconnected from its root system, would die and I’d have the napalm supply I needed. Instead, the flame ignited the vine, which burned like a fuse in both directions.

I debated running out to the edge of the vine and stomping out the flame before it reached the pseudoshark, but it was moving much too fast. My only alternative was to throw myself to the ground and pray the blast wouldn’t kill me.

The blast from the pseudoshark I had tried for rolled me back at least ten feet and left me with ringing ears and a dull headache. Then the second blast hit and I was knocked unconscious.

 

 

When I came to, the first thing I noted was the dirt and plant parts covering me. I screamed and struggled to my feet, brushing it off. That’s when I realized that I was deaf. I hadn’t heard myself scream and I couldn’t hear myself yelling as I confirmed that I could no longer hear.

I hoped my hearing would come back eventually, but I was more concerned about the devastation I had caused. Where the dandelion had been was a huge pit, maybe fifty feet in diameter and twenty feet deep. I could see a few roots wiggling and squirming at the bottom of the pit, trying to slide back into the ground. Where the pseudoshark I’d tried to capture had been was a smaller hole, probably about ten feet wide and four deep. Looking further I could see several smaller craters where other pseudosharks had blown up, but at the far side of the large crater there were two pseudosharks weakly flopping about on the ground.

I staggered around the various cavities in the ground to reach them and by the time I did, they were still. I tapped them a couple of times to see if they were still alive, but they were nothing more than inert bags of napalm now. Each had a trickle of napalm leaking from the end of its vine so I knotted them off and tossed them over my shoulder.

I had ammunition and I was still alive. Judging from the position of the sun, I had about two hours to find someplace safe before nightfall and if I didn’t get moving soon, I would probably be burrower food. There was only one choice. I headed off in the direction Forge had said there was a village, where I could see a strange sort of oblong mountain, almost like an upright domino, in the distance, with jagged foothills on either side.

 

 

Growing up, I had explored every nook and cranny of the castle and had thought it huge. The village was much bigger. It seemed to go on forever, filling the horizon even before I was near enough to see the end of the tall grass I had been walking through. More impressive was the way it went up — and up. Dad had always described villages as small and quaint, whatever that was. This was anything but small. I wondered if this was an especially big village, not that it mattered very much. The sun was going to be down in about two hours and this was the only place I’d found were I could get away from the weeds.

The first homes were set far apart with tall grass, trees and vines covering them. Many were partially demolished. As I moved closer to the village, the houses moved closer together and seemed to be in better shape. I passed several more dandelions, but steered well clear of them.

When the buildings started to change shape from pointed roofs to flat ones, after what seemed like many miles of walking, the grassy road changed to blacktop. The blacktop was buckled and overrun with weeds — small ones, not the killer weeds. Initially they were everywhere, but by the time I made it to the what must have been the center of the village they were few and far between and the buildings had changed shape into enormous towers of what looked like grey stone laid so carefully that I couldn’t actually see any joints. There was still the occasional killer-sized dandelion growing in the grassy areas Dad had told me they used to call ‘parks’ and, less frequently, I’d see large holes in the ground that I assumed were from some sort of giant burrowers, although the edges seemed curiously even and rectangular.

I selected the tallest building — which I eventually realized was the ‘mountain’ I’d seen from far off and now felt a little foolish about being so naiïve as to think that — I could find and climbed as high as I could before it was too dark to see, reasoning that I’d be well above the range that the plants could sense me, and would have a good lookout position where I could see all around me. Every few floors, I’d go to one of the huge windows and look out. The windows themselves were amazing — glass, or something like it, from ceiling to floor, an astonishing weakness that instantly identified them as dating from before the War — and I was hesitant to even approach them. The view through the glass kept getting more and more impressive the higher I got, and the building itself seemed warmer, and the light seemed brighter, so I finally approached close enough to one wall of glass that I could see all around that side of the building. I was trying to fight a sense of vertigo as I stood next to the edge of what looked like a cliff, kept from falling only by something I could barely see, but the outside world was truly wonderful. I could see other, but smaller, clusters of buildings in the distance. Looking far off to the west from my perch up in the sky, well above the smaller buildings around me, I could even trace back the path I had taken by the signs of recent burning and explosions, even at this distance. Almost over the horizon was a large expanse of green, but all I could see of the castle was the encroaching mound of plants laying siege to our… make that… my… former home. I realized I must be imagining it but, if I stared long enough, that distant green carpet seemed almost to seethe ominously, imperceptibly slithering, shifting, as it collectively jockeyed for the best positions from which to assault the walls and narrow gates that pierced the stone walls.

Suddenly feeling really tired after my long trek, and then the climb up what seemed like endless flights of stairs from the street, I went to lie down on the carpeted floor on the other side of the building, staring off to the east, away from home, but it was a long time before I finally succumbed to sleep.

 

 

The next few days were extremely busy. It was time to do what I could to assure my own survival, at least long enough to debrief another scavenging party regarding what had happened to mine.

After eating my next-to-last survival ration for breakfast and refilling my flamethrower, I began searching through this building and those nearby. I needed to decide where I would live and then make certain that I had what I needed to survive. Creature comforts would be nice, but more importantly, whatever site I chose needed to be near food, water and the other essentials of life.

I thought heat might be a problem, but the sun beating in through all the glass made the building downright hot during the afternoon and early evening and the concrete structure surrounding the glass seemed to hold the heat well into the morning. Maybe if it were the heart of winter, I’d have a problem, but that was at least four months off, more than enough time for the next scavenging team to arrive.

Food came from all the canned goods lining the aisles of what must have been one of the ‘supermarkets’ we had been sent to find. I’d almost passed it by, expecting something to mark it, the smell of rotten food, flies, I didn’t know what. Instead, it was just a storefront less than a block from where I was living. The name didn’t even say ‘supermarket’ and I had no idea what a ‘Klegelmeyer’s’ was, so I almost passed it by. In fact, I would have, if it weren’t for a movement I caught out of the corner of my eye. Just as I was passing the through the doorway — which displayed a large red sign with the letters ‘IGA’ on it in white — something skittered around a corner and disappeared inside the store.

Training took over immediately. Flamethrower drawn, I scuttled into the shadows and slowly crept up on the entrance to the store just like Father had drilled me to do. His words came to me, “Suffer not a weed to live.”

At the door I stopped to reconnoiter. Nothing was moving, but there were rows and rows of boxes and cans. It was like I’d died and gone to heaven. I actually forgot about the weed for a moment as I stared in wonder at more food than I had ever seen, but sanity instantly returned as something moved near the back of the store.

Carefully, I snuck from aisle to aisle, peering back into the dimly lit rear of the store, looking for the stem and root of whatever was in there. I could hear faint scurrying sounds, but nothing moved.

Whatever it was, I knew it wasn’t going to be a greenie. Chlorophyll would be useless in that dark environment. My best guess was a fungus, but none of them had turned traitor yet. In fact, they were currently the main source of food at the castle.

Having reached the end of the rows of shelving, I looked back. The front door seemed a long way away. If a weed attacked, I was unlikely to get out that way. With a deep sigh, I started down the row before me, figuring that one row was as good as another.

I passed box after box of cereals with flashy colors so bright they were visible even in the dusky light half way to the back of the store. At the end of the aisle, the light was so dim I could just make out gray shapes. A light was going to be a necessity or I would be blundering blindly into whatever had to be back there. Besides, I could always hope that whatever was back there would be blinded by the light.

It took only a moment to dig a flashlight out of my survival pack. To make certain it wasn’t me that was blinded, I turned and aimed my flashlight back down the row I had just come through, closed my eyes and turned it on. Then I slowly opened my eyes to let them adjust.

Flamethrower in one hand and flashlight in the other, I jumped out into the aisle that stretched from one end to the other of the back of the store. I expected some kind of weed, but what I saw was nothing but boxes and shelves. Nothing crawled towards me. Nothing flew towards me. The floor didn’t crumble beneath me. My first thought was, ‘Boy, what a letdown.’ Then my brain kicked in and I breathed a sigh of relief.

I carefully shone my light in every corner I could find. I knew I’d seen something, but where had it gone? If there was a weed less than a block from my new temporary home, I needed to know. It was a matter of self-preservation.

Clipping the flashlight to the flamethrower, I cautiously slipped from aisle to aisle, expecting a huge green tentacle to push past the cans and boxes at any minute, yanking me off my feet.

After the third aisle, I was trying to guess where the inevitable attack might come from, and how I might succumb — crushed by the boxes of corn flakes, beaten by the cans of beets, or it might even catch up to me by the ketchup. It’s amazing how fast boredom can set in — even when you’re facing eminent death.

Whatever had been stored in the odd containers at the back of the store was now rock-like and black, except for the multicolored mold that coated the walls of the white chests. They had glass tops that rolled from one side to the other, opening up the interior, which was filled with cylindrical tubs of some sort. The aroma wasn’t too pleasant, although it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. Along another wall was a stainless steel free-standing closet, the the doors were like windows, with what used to be clear glass in metal frames. Inside, there were row after row of plastic containers of what looked like milk, but they looked and smelled like they’d all spoiled so long ago that only the faintest traces of something cheesy remained. I picked one up and dropped it through clumsiness, since my hands were encumbered by my heavy Horticultural gloves. The plastic split into a million dusty pieces, and the contents looked like cheese, but not any kind of cheese I recognized. Curious, I took off one glove, so I could investigate further.

I’d just knelt to taste it — it didn’t taste bad, despite the pungent smell — when I heard it, a faint scratching sound off to the right, followed immediately by a deep sinking feeling in my stomach. I had my flamethrower facing down as I knelt. It had the drop on me. Without moving anything but my eyes, I peered into the dim corner from which the sound had come.

It was small, whatever it was, just a blur of movement along the edge of the my vision. Quickly, I raised my flamethrower and aimed toward whatever it was….

It was a rat! It was alive! I could just barely remember the last time we’d had rats to eat, but it was gone, and I couldn’t risk burning piles of real food, food that the next group could carry back and store until the next successful foraging expedition, even for a roasted rat.

 

 

I slept that night on the bare vinyl of a room on the thirty-seventh floor facing west. It wasn’t as soft as the carpet in the room above, but the building was hot enough that the cooler flooring was welcome and I liked the view, I’d decided, now that it seemed slightly more likely that I might actually make it back home. It would make it easier to see the next team of Horticulturists when they came this way as well, so I could warn them about the few plants I’d seen in the village and tell them where the ‘supermarket’ was, and that there was more food available in that one store than even a dozen foraging parties could carry away. My own pack was full again, with beef! in blocky cans, round cans of peas, corn, potatoes, and even spinach, and seven glass bottles of some sort of fizzy water that they called ‘Evian.’

 

 

When I finally woke up, I had trouble opening my eyes and I felt like I’d just taken a beating. Every muscle ached, and I panicked until I managed to pry open my eye lids, which seemed to be almost glued shut with some kind of crusty film. It was well past noon, since the floor near the windows was already flooded with sunlight, and it was already getting back towards being almost uncomfortably warm.

I struggled to my feet and found my pack, opening another bottle of water so I could wash out my eyes. I used more water from the bottle to wash a foul taste from my mouth, spit it out on the floor, and then staggered to the window, anxious to see if another party of Horticulturists were already on their way. The view back our track seemed unchanged, however, which meant either that no one had set out yet, or that they’d encountered few, if any, hostile plants along the way. I wasn’t counting on that at all, considering the level of opposition we’d met during our own foray beyond the encircling wall of plants, so I figured that I was on my own for now.

I could have just sat here waiting, but my father had drilled a sense of duty into me that wouldn’t let me be idle for long, despite my occasional lapse into daydreaming, so I decided to do my best to guide any foraging party to where I knew that there was an enormous cache of food just waiting for them by laying out a trail, with notes along the way.

After painfully descending the stairs, I went back to the ‘Klegelmeyer’s’ to pack up as much food and water as I could carry, intending to carry at least a small cache of rations out far enough into the outskirts of the village to relieve any party that might be in trouble so far from home. I’d do this as many times as I could on all the likely approaches, and had already used some of the boxes from the store to make crude signs with the Horticulturalist symbol — two crossed machetes — on them to mark the spots.

The ‘Klegelmeyer’s’ had a ready supply of small-wheeled carts available, so I used some rope I’d found on something they called ‘Aisle 6’ to link together six of them in a sort of ‘follow-the-leader’ train and filled them up with food and water bottles. I brought several bottles of the cheese as well, since it smelled really good, now that I’d gotten used to the smell, although I had to be careful not to break the brittle plastic bottles.

Six carts was about all that I could handle, even on the smooth blacktop streets, since I was still stiff and sore from spending my night on the floor, but I imagined being welcomed as a hero, if I could somehow figure out how to haul my train of little carts all the way back to the castle. Maybe there were other stores with more practical carts somewhere along my path back to the outskirts of the village, since these would obviously never work once I reached the edge of the smooth blacktop roads.

It was slow going, and a hard grind, making my way back the way I’d come, because my arms and legs were getting more painful with every step and I was short of breath. The wheels of the little carts kept getting caught in cracks as the roads got worse, threatening to overturn them all, until I finally just sat down panting in the middle of the blacktop street, weary beyond really caring whether a plant found me and ate me or not.

It seemed like the sun was setting early, because it was getting dark….

 

 

When I woke up the sun was just rising, and I automatically turned to face it, feeling its welcome warmth on the skin of my face, since I seemed to have forgotten my helmet somewhere. I felt a lot better now, and I struggled up from where I’d sprawled beside my carts, seemingly unharmed. The rest must have helped quite a bit, because the carts seemed lighter now, and the soreness in my arms and legs had disappeared, so I trudged off down the road, until the road got so rough that I couldn’t really move the carts at all, even when I tried to take them one at a time. Those small wheels just seemed to sink into every crack and soft spot, so I looked at the houses around me, trying to find one still in good shape, with an intact roof, and no visibly dangerous plants around.

There was one just up the road with a covered porch, so I carried my stash of food to it one armload at a time until I’d emptied all six carts, then I stacked them all inside the door, which wasn’t locked, and the interior didn’t look like it had been disturbed by anyone, so I jammed one of my cardboard signs into the crack of the door and dusted off my hands, satisfied that I may have saved someone’s life. Any foraging party that made it this far would have enough food available to simply turn around and bring it back to the castle. I knew for a fact that I’d stacked up more food than I’d ever seen come through our gates before, so I felt quite pleased with myself as I began walking back toward the ‘Klegelmeyer’s’ for more food and water. I left the carts where they were, since there were lots of them in the store, and I thought that I might be able to find a better cart if I kept my eyes open on the way back, but I took the rope, reasoning that it might come in handy.

For some reason I was feeling quite cheery as I strode off down the road, and soon felt so energetic that I actually began to jog along, looking intently from side to side until I happened to see a sign several hundred yards down one of the side roads that said, ‘Sunset Nursery Supply.’ Looking closer, I noticed that there were a number of low carts in the yard behind the sign, surrounded by a fence that looked like it was made of thick string.

Curious, I ran down the side road toward the ‘Nursery Supply’ store, arriving just a few seconds later. The carts looked like they’d be perfect, low to the ground and fairly broad, so they wouldn’t tip over, and the wheels were fat. The only trouble was that they were behind the fence, which was taller than I was, what I’d thought was string was some sort of coarsely-woven metal, and there was some sort of metal box on the gate obviously intended to keep it shut. Frustrated, I gave it a shake, but it must have been rusty or something, because it simply fell apart when I tugged at it.

I opened the gate and walked inside. The carts were perfect, in fact. It was obvious that they’d been designed for something exactly like what I had in mind, because each of them had a longish handle with a ring on the end just about right to put your hand through to pull it, and they also had a hook on the back end that you could drop the ring of another cart into, making as long a string of carts as you had. I had six, even after looking all through the grounds, but that was lots better than what I’d had before, so I was soon trotting down the road with a train of low carts rattling along behind me, every one of them much larger than the little carts from the supermarket. I felt like I was on top of the world. The sun was shining, I was on my way to pick up enormous quantities of food for the people back at the castle, and I felt strangely energized, happier than I’d ever felt before.

When I got back to the Klegelmeyer, everything was just the same as I’d left it, so I immediately began loading up my new train of carts with food and bottled water, happy to be busy despite my solitude.

It seemed like I’d been working for just a few minutes when I realized that I’d stripped the food from half a row of shelves, the one called Aisle 3, which held mostly canned vegetables, and had made a good start on the bottled water as well. My new carts seemed sturdy enough that I’d piled the boxes rather high, so I used my rope, and more rope from Aisle 6, to tie them down firmly, pleased once more when I discovered that the new carts had special smaller hooks along the top rails that seemed designed to fasten ropes to, one near each corner and one in the middle of each side.

It wasn’t long before I was trotting down the road again, pleased by how easily my train rolled along, and how nicely they tracked one after the other, since the long handles actually steered the front set of wheels, so the carts had not the slightest tendency to drift off to one side or the other, as the first carts had, and I actually started running, so was back to my chosen storehouse almost before I knew it. In fact, it was a little difficult to stop, since the weight of the carts was pushing forward from behind me as I tried to slow down too quickly, and the steering action of the handles worked to my disadvantage when the carts behind pushed on the carts ahead, causing the handles, which had been so useful when moving along at speed, to turn into a serious liability, trying to turn the wheels to one side or the other, which almost made my whole train fold up like a piece of string. I had to act quickly, speeding up again, then slowing down more gradually, until I had the train back under control and had come to a safe stop.

By that time, I’d overshot the house by almost a cross road and a half, so I had to turn the train slowly in a wide loop to return back to my storehouse at a more sedate pace.

For the first time, I was glad that there was no one looking on, because I felt a little foolish. I should have foreseen the problem in the first place.

 

 

It took four days to move all the useful items from the Klegelmeyer to the house, by which time it was stuffed almost full of cans, bottles, and unopened boxes of the same from the storeroom at the back of the supermarket.

Oddly enough, I was working so hard that I didn’t feel all that hungry most of the time, but I was also getting so sweaty that I soon stopped wearing my protective gear entirely, except for the lower part of my suit, preferring to work without even a shirt, so that the breeze could help to dry my skin. I did eat quite a bit of the cheese, though, and drank a lot of water, and that seemed to be enough. I was eating better than I ever had back at the castle though, so maybe it was just the fact that food was so readily available that explained my relative lack of appetite. Back home, I remembered being hungry all the time, anxious for the next ration to be passed out, but here all I had to do was to stretch out my hand, so I didn’t worry about food at all. I remember my dad saying once, ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder,’ which had never made sense to me, until now, when I finally realized that the phrase must have referred to food.

 

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

Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved

Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Two Flanking Maneuver

 

 

There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare.

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

 

It took me three days to find another supermarket, since I’d been looking for the familiar ‘Klegelmeyer’s’ sign. Even the red and white ‘IGA’ sign hadn’t done me any good, and I finally figured out that I had to look more carefully at the front windows, which usually had smaller signs on them that referred to food, although there were other subtle clues as well. The second store was ‘Nathan’s Market & Deli,’ whatever that last word meant. Maybe it was an abbreviation for ‘delicious.’ I didn’t much care, once I’d found it.

Since I’d pretty much stuffed my first storehouse full, I decided to do a little recon, seeking out alternative routes into the village with a view towards using the same ‘forward cache’ strategy to cover as many likely entry points as I could. Now that I had the trick of finding them, ‘supermarkets’ seemed to be almost ubiquitous. In many areas, there was one near almost every intersection of roads as soon as I got well away from my huge tower, which I’d made my base of operations, since I figured that most foraging parties from the castle would be drawn, as I’d been, straight toward it.

I spent a lot of time exploring — it must have been several weeks, but I couldn’t bring myself to care what day it was, since every day was pretty much the same here in the village, find a supermarket, find a safe storehouse for the food on a main road into village, then move the food into position — and eventually found the mother lode of all supermarkets right in the middle of a huge expanse of blacktop near the outskirts of the village. It wasn’t marked with any clear indication that it was a supermarket, not even the little clues that I’d discovered in the central village, so finding it was pure luck. There were lots of flat-roofed buildings just like it all around this part of the village, but it just drew me toward it for some reason, maybe because the huge expanse of blacktop marked it out as being somehow special, since most of the flat-topped buildings had much more modest areas of blacktop near them, and sometimes none at all. It was locked up tight, of course, but the judicious use of a little napalm took care of that, shattering the heavy glass of the doors, and I simply kicked away the metal bar at the bottom of the former door that was all the barrier that was left behind.

Inside, it was like forager heaven; what seemed like endless rows of floor-to-almost-ceiling shelving stacked high with boxes and boxes of canned and bottled foodstuffs. Even with my new train of heavy-duty carts, it would take years to empty out this place, although I’d have to figure out some method of lowering the food safely from the higher shelves, since I couldn’t safely climb down the shelving with a box filled with cans, and if I simply tied them to one of my ropes, I’d have the problem of climbing down to release the rope, and then ascending the stacks of shelving again.

Then I had another thought; there were hundreds of these flat-roofed buildings all around the outskirts of the village, some of them had to contain food, but more than that, maybe some of them contained things that might help us beyond mere day-to-day survival.

The only trouble with this idea was that I didn’t know what I was looking for. I was beginning to think that what I’d been taught about the plants wasn’t really true. They supposedly weren’t intelligent, but they seemed to have been clever enough to kill almost every member of a team of humans armed with the best technology we knew of. They were supposedly ‘drawn’ to humans based on their need for certain nutrients that human bodies contained, yet I’d seen plants here in the village, where there were very clearly no people at all, except for me. There weren’t very many plants, but they were here, and they hadn’t seemed particularly anxious to get those ‘special’ nutrients from me. In fact, as far as I could tell, they’d totally ignored me. The facts were that — judging from what I could actually see — the hostile plants were clustered around the castle, not the city, so maybe it was the people in the castle they were after, not just people in general.

In fact, the whole picture looked a little whacky. Just outside the ring of hostile plants, there were what looked like endless fields of wheatgrass. Call me crazy, but wasn’t bread made from wheat? Why were we sending young men off to die in an attempt to forage in a distant village when there was enough wheat to supply a hundred castles sitting just beyond our front gates?

With that thought in mind, I left most of my carts where they were and walked out onto the blacktop. Choosing a direction at random, I set off to explore the warehouses, equipped only with my flamethrower, a small prybar that I’d found in one of the supermarkets, and the bottom half of my protective armor, which I was wearing. One direction seemed as good as any other, so I headed north, pulling only one of my carts.

Most of the buildings were more or less anonymous, having at most a small sign on the door, like ‘SmithCo’ or ‘Roberts & Leland,’ although a few had the same sort of thing painted near the top of one or more walls, so they didn’t seem worth the trouble of breaking through the doors to find out what was inside.

Eventually, I found a building that said, ‘Hemmings Hardware Supply,’ which seemed a likely prospect, but the front door didn’t open, despite using a rock to pound off the front door handle, and then my prybar to wreck the mysterious innards of what must have been a pretty good lock, until I remembered a road sign that I’d seen lying on the ground several blocks away, where the roads were buckled up and it was difficult to maneuver even my sturdy new carts. It had looked heavy, since it still had a cylinder of some sort of rock attached to the bottom of the steel pipe the sign was mounted on, so I trotted down the road with my cart to where it was, levered it up onto the cart, and walked back backwards, towing the cart and the sign pole using both hands on the handle of my cart, because it was awfully heavy.

It was effective, though. I simply left it on the cart and took a run at the door, pushing the cart and the end of the pipe with the rock on it into the door. The first run bent the door. The second tore the locking mechanism from the frame, leaving the door open, and hadn’t affected my cart at all, so I was very pleased. Brute force beats brains almost every time.

I was even more pleased once I got inside, although it took quite a few days to make sense of what I’d found. I had several different sizes of pry bars, heavy hammers, some metal wedges, and a set of ropes and some things the ropes were woven through in a particular order that would — according to the picture on the package — let me raise and lower heavy objects easily, in short, a foraging kit designed for the obstacles I’d encountered thus far.

Walking back to my super-supermarket with my new load of tools, I was feeling pretty smug about the day’s accomplishments, already envisioning being able to lower the heavy bundles of boxes they had stored on the higher shelves without having to cut open the straps and plastic wrap and lower one box at a time, so I wasn’t really looking exactly where I was going when I realized that right in front of me was a medium-sized burrower, about as tall as I was, but greener, a lot bigger around, and with more creeping vines around it than I wanted to count just then, since I was frozen, trying not to move an eyelash, much less a finger. Not so long ago, I’d seen larger versions of this thing eat Lieutenant Forge, my squad leader, plus seven of my fellow Horticulturalists, so I wasn’t exactly optimistic about my chances of making it back in time for my triumphant salvage operation on the world’s largest cache of food.

‘Oh, crap!’ I thought. ‘Harrison’s Bloody Ass! At least I’ll die quickly.’ I’d cleverly left the upper part of my protective suit and my helmet back at the tower, and didn’t even have my flamethrower on me, since I’d left it back at the super-supermarket so as to make more room for goodies. In short, I didn’t have very many options left.

The burrower didn’t have eyes, so I couldn’t exactly know whether it was looking at me or not, although it was clear that it was aware of every movement, because every time I shifted position, even slightly, it would turn a bit, or the vines beneath it would move, rustling with a dry breathy sound like the wind through the wheat grass we’d walked through at the beginning of my adventure.

At last, the burrower reared up on its vines, fully displaying its gaping maw, filled with multiple rows of teeth, the exact same sort of teeth that I’d seen grinding up Lieutenant Forge, and he’d been wearing full armor at the time.

I did the only thing I could think of. I had a bottle of that pungent cheese in my wagon that I’d brought along in case I was delayed and got to feeling peckish, so I quickly picked it up and threw the whole bottle into the thing’s ‘mouth,’ thinking that it might distract the creature long enough that I could get away.

No such luck. My big chunk of cheese disappeared into its gullet as quickly as an extra ration of sugar might vanish into the mouth of a hungry child. It opened its mouth again, obviously wanting more.

At this point, I improvised, since I didn’t want to offer it my arm, so I said clearly, as if speaking to a child, “I’ve got lots more, but you’ll have to follow me. I’ll give you more cheese if you do.” I felt stupid, of course, talking to a mobile plant, but they say that drowning men will clutch at straws.

The beast said not a word, of course, but it seemed slightly more attentive and a tiny bit less menacing, so I took a chance and set off back toward the big super-supermarket, where I’d seen a larger row of the same sort of metal and glass cabinets I’d found cheese in at all the smaller markets. “Come on!” I said, feigning a bravado I didn’t really feel. “Don’t dawdle. I haven’t got all day!” and walked off as if I took green monsters for walks every day.

And off we went; modern man and ancient nightmare. For some reason, I remembered my mother telling me a story,

‘But while he was seeking with thimbles and care,
A Bandersnatch swiftly drew nigh
And grabbed at the Banker, who shrieked in despair,
For he knew it was useless to fly.’

That pretty much summed it up for me. My mid-size ‘burrower’ was a baby bandersnatch.

By the time we got back to the flat-top supermarket, the bandersnatch was getting restless, and it didn’t like going inside the building at all, but it cheered right up when I opened the glass-front cabinets at the back of the market and tossed it a few bottles of cheese. There was other stuff in there, but it just looked moldy, with a sort of fuzzy black and green color that didn’t look appetizing at all. The bandersnatch didn’t think so either. Say what you will, it had good taste. I just hoped that it wasn’t saving me for a snack later.

 

 

Over the next few days, the bandersnatch became my constant companion, an uncomfortable relationship — for me at least — since I wasn’t exactly sure how the bandersnatch would feel if I ever came up short in the cheese department. Luckily, every supermarket I’d found so far had a cabinet with at least some bottles of cheese, so it was simply a matter of remembering to keep a good supply on hand when we went out foraging. My beast seemed happy with one bottle in the morning and one in the late afternoon, so I always kept at least four on hand in the cart I took with me when I went out searching, which also carried my new breaking in and salvage kit. I decided to haul around the top half of my suit as well, and the helmet, just in case. My brush with death had spooked me a little, but not enough to persuade me to return to the ‘Burn it first! Then try missiles!’ philosophy of the Horticulturists, since I was beginning to be fairly certain that they’d brought at least some of their misfortunes on themselves. I didn’t actually wear the top half, of course. Despite the slight chill, wearing the whole outfit was stifling, and I felt lots better with it off. It chafed as well, and drove me crazy with itching the few times I’d tried it on after the first few days I’d spent without wearing it all the time. I reckon they’d had trouble finding one that fit properly, since I was on the small side for a Horticulturist, and had been putting on a little weight since I began eating regularly here in the village, despite my current schedule of fairly strenuous physical activity.

I still tried to get back to my tower regularly to sleep, because the warmth it held for quite a while after sunset was comforting, and because it allowed me to keep a general eye on the areas around the village. I’d also found a flat-top building with sections devoted to clothing and blankets by then, and finally added the bottom of my suit to all the stuff I hauled around, rather than wearing it, because it was a major inconvenience hooking myself up to the urination device, and I had to take it off to crap in any case.

It had been a little over a month since I arrived, although I found it difficult to pin down the days, since one day seemed a lot like another without the weekly rhythm of mandatory Chapel services to punctuate the week, when we studied the Word of Harry and heard general announcements from the Leadership of The Castle. In that month, perhaps a little more, my life had undergone a drastic change, from what had seemed like a justifiable terror in an extremely hostile world to a relatively peaceful existence in which at least some of my former nightmares had turned out to be — if not completely innocuous — much more manageable than they had appeared to be before.

My bandersnatch, for example, appeared to have a proprietary interest in my safety, which had surprised me when it had chased off another bandersnatch which had evidently approached too closely. If it had been a dog, one might have expected furious snarling, growls, and barking, but of course their agitated interaction was initiated, performed, and finished in eerie silence, except for the dry rustling of the leafy vines which formed their peculiar ‘legs,’ and the grinding of their prominently displayed teeth.

There had still been dogs in the castle when I was young, so the bandersnatch’s behavior was strangely familiar, but it was also unsettling. It was obvious to me by now that my bandersnatch possessed some level of intelligence — at least enough cleverness to recognize its ‘meal ticket’ — but it also had feelings of some sort, although I didn’t know whether those feelings were of affection, or jealousy, or something so completely alien that I wouldn’t recognize it.

 

 

“Hey! Gumball! Let’s go!” I talked to my bandersnatch a lot, since there was no one else around to talk to, and I didn’t want to be one of those crazy people who talk to themselves. In the castle, that was a quick way to ‘volunteer’ for a foraging team. Surprisingly enough, though, he paid attention when I talked to him, which gave me the illusion, at least, that he was part of a somewhat one-sided ‘conversation.’

It may have been my imagination, but ‘Gumball’ — I’d named him after a device I’d seen in one of the supermarkets, which had multicolored round balls of something inside a big glass globe with a sign on it that read, ‘Jumbo Gumball’ and then a smaller sign under it that said, ‘$2.00’ — was getting smarter. Lately, all I had to say was ‘Cheese, Gumball,’ and he’d rustle over to the cart and cleverly pick up the satchel that I was using to carry cheese bottles in, since they tended to be fragile. He’d carefully carry the satchel over to wherever I was at the time, so I’d make a great show of looking for the exact bottle I wanted to give him, and then toss it high up in the air so he could rear up and catch it on the fly. He seemed to enjoy the game and, frankly, so did I.

I was over on the eastern side of the village, and I’d been feeling a little out of sorts since early that morning. I was a long way from my tower, still looking for the elusive answers to questions I still didn’t know enough to ask. I’d found a lake inside a field of tall grass, although there were blacktop walkways, mostly cracked and broken, that wandered around through the grass and then circled the lake completely, which was equipped with a low wall and rusty iron benches, as if they’d had sentries on duty, ready to repel whatever it was that the lake had been home to.

I felt a little leery, walking next to it, but didn’t see anything to worry about, although the lake itself was very murky, and might have concealed almost anything.

Suddenly, an enormous sort of vine with long brownish-green leaves heaved itself out of the water, flopping from side to side as it wormed its way toward me and Gumball.

“Watch out, Gumball!” I shouted as I quickly turned to grab my flamethrower, but Gumball was already gnashing at the nearest leaves to good effect and, as if by magic, was soon joined by half a dozen of his fellows, who all seemed to delight in gobbling down huge chunks of leaves and stem.

By the time I got my flamethrower ready to fire, the tentacle vine had withdrawn into the cloudy water and Gumball and his former fellows were immediately aware of each other in a hostile manner. Not for the first time, I thought of dogs, except that rustling leaves were a poor substitute for growling.

“Play nice, guys!” I cried out. “Gumball! Cheese!”

Gumball shook himself, making a particularly angry-sounding rustle, then slithered off to fetch the satchel, suspiciously, I think.

His dark suspicions were confirmed when I tossed him a bottle, followed immediately by a bottle each for my rescuers, and then another bottle of cheese for Gumball, to demonstrate that he still had pride of place. “Gumball, honey,” I said soothingly, “these guys helped us a lot, so they really deserve a little treat, don’t they? And besides, it might be handy to have a few pals around if we ever get into trouble again, wouldn’t it?”

He grumbled, well, his rustling seemed like grumbling, but tolerated the other bandersnatches when they brought up the rear of our procession, since I had to find another supermarket. I’d brought what I’d imagined was at least a week’s supply of bottles for Gumball, and a few for me, but with seven maws to feed, they wouldn’t last that long.

It didn’t take long to find a supermarket, either, since I’d developed an ability to spot a likely candidate from several intersections away, so was able to walk directly to one, as likely as not, once I stood in the middle of a road and looked from one end to the other.

Sure enough, there seemed to be a supermarket about three roads down, so we all trotted off to stock up on cheese.

This one had been looted, unlike every supermarket I’d discovered so far. The shelves were stripped of everything edible, but for some reason they’d completely ignored the glass-front cabinets that usually contained the cheese bottles.

‘The more fools, they!’ I thought to myself. “Look here, Gumball! There’s forty or fifty bottles of cheese in here, for you and your little pals!” I refilled my satchel, and then found a few boxes that I could carefully stack my new cache of cheese in, so we could travel on without fear of running short.

Gumball didn’t deign to comment, of course, but he seemed quite mollified as we headed out the door and further east.

 

 

We hadn’t been walking long before I started noticing things, houses that had clearly been broken into with savage disregard for any future use to which they might have been put, and plants… everything green had been burnt to black, and a large group of craters told me that they’d even burned a dandelion!

I felt a sudden twinge of sympathy for Lieutenant Forge. He was definitely of the ‘burn it if it moves’ school of thought, but even he had limits. He would have been angry, I think, at the wanton destruction inside the village, although I no longer believed that it would burn down completely if part of it caught fire. Every one of these pillaged houses might have been put to better use, though, and the wanton destruction of plant life was pure folly, especially inside the confines of a city in which the plants, by and large, didn’t go out of their way to hurt anyone, and otherwise did whatever it was that plants did, grow, I presume, and some of the seemingly dangerous plants were quite useful, like the dandelions, without which the Horticulturists wouldn’t have any napalm with which to burn things. Who were these guys anyway, a troupe of traveling idiots? Napalm didn’t grow on trees! I had a good notion to give them all a good talking to!

Just then, however, I heard a squawk from my helmet, which was still in my cart with the other stuff, and then a voice, although I couldn’t make out the words. Suddenly, I realized the precarious position we were in; if any of those fire-happy clowns — now positively identified as Horticulturists — happened to see my green entourage, they’d probably burn me right along with Gumball and his pals on general principles.

Quickly, I turned my cart around, called Gumball, and then hightailed it back the way I’d come, at first followed by my seven friends, but Gumball and a few others managed to pull ahead, racing ahead of me back toward familiar territory, where I was intimately familiar with almost every street and building.

Too late! I heard a tinny shout through the headset in my helmet, and then the familiar sound of a rocket launcher some ways behind us. “Gumball! Scatter! Hide!” I screamed, and ran down a side road as quickly as I could, which was pretty fast by now, but not faster than a missile, despite their slow start.

With a flash of light, and then a wave of heat, followed immediately by a very loud explosion back at the intersection I’d just left, I was knocked off my feet and came up hopping mad. I grabbed my helmet and put it on, then keyed the talk circuit and screamed at the gang of clowns, “What in Harrison’s Holy Hell do you morons think you’re doing?! You could have killed me!”

There was at least a minute of garbled chatter before one of the sorry sons of bitches managed to focus long enough to say, “Who is this?”

“This is Lieutenant Forge, of The Castle Horticulturists, and who the Hell are you, young ladies?” One advantage of being a daydreamer is that I recognized an opportunity when it’d been handed to me. As lowly ‘Seven,’ sad remnant of a foraging party, I’d have no clout at all and would likely be impressed into service with the dopes, then sentenced to lashes at least for ‘dereliction of duty’ when we got back, because I was ‘out of uniform,’ and finally sent out through the local gate alone, if I made it back at all. I knew for a fact that Forge and all the rest of our expedition were ‘missing in action’ at most, since only I survived, and I hadn’t told anyone. The helmet radios were short range only, since any foragers who got into serious trouble were on their own. If they couldn’t extricate themselves, they were dead, as witness the great majority of our party.

After a few minutes more of stupid chatter while everyone tried to talk at once — proof positive that there was no officer in charge — what seemed like the same voice came back, sounding surer of himself by now, “I’m Six, of The Citadel Horticulturalists. What are you doing in The City, and what were those rolling plants? Where are you? Come out and show yourself!”

That I wasn’t about to do, since I wasn’t wearing my suit, as protocol required, and the stenciled number Seven would instantly betray me as someone he could push around, so I resorted to military intelligence, “Consider yourself on report, Six, and the lot of you stand down and gather in the middle of the street so I can take a look at you. Quite frankly, I don’t feel confident that I can rely upon your uncertain level of discipline to keep you from hysterically firing off another missile at me in your general confusion.” Two could play at that game, and I had missiles too. Careful to conceal two of the HE variety behind my back, one preloaded in my bazooka, I peered back around the corner. They were there, and gathered into a loose sort of squad, as I’d ordered, but held their weapons at the ready, at least three rocket launchers. “I said, Stand down! ladies. I’m not saying it again.”

Another peek told me that they had no intention of doing that, so I fired off one of my missiles over the houses to where they were, and then jumped out and fired the other straight at them, fairly confident of success in eliminating at least the nuisance that I saw, although I couldn’t be sure that there weren’t more of them lurking somewhere in hiding. I didn’t stop to see the result, but ran back down the road to my cart, grabbed the handle, and beat feet down the parallel road and back toward my familiar section of the village. On the way I keyed the transmitter again and said quite calmly, “I told you to stand down. Any comment?”

After a few moments, there’d still been no reply, so I risked going back to the road several intersections closer to the city and carefully looked back. I saw no one still standing, not that that meant much. Even dolts can take a hint when it’s been presented in words of one syllable or less.

I thought about going back to check for survivors, but then decided against it. The risks were too great when compared to the potential rewards. At best, I’d be able to salvage any missiles they had left, but I already had quite a few to spare. At worst, they’d be prepared to ambush me, which would of course be fatal.

I took off the helmet and threw it back in the cart, then called out as loudly as I could, “Gumball! Guys! Where are you?!”

After an anxious wait, Gumball came out from wherever he’d been lurking, and then two more of the hangers-on, then three, and finally I had my seven bandersnatches back again, which I considered a fair trade for two of my stash of missiles. ‘Harrison rewards the quick and the clever,’ I thought, an aphorism often dwelled upon in Chapel, ‘and punishes the slow and stupid with chastisements of hellfire!’ I gave them not a further thought, other than as a cautionary tale.

 

 

I hadn’t gone but about halfway back towards the center of the village when I realized that I’d been wounded in the explosion after all, because the crotch of my Levi’s was damp with blood. There wasn’t much, so I knew whatever it was hadn’t hit an artery, but it concerned me enough that I stepped up the pace, wanting to get back to my tower, where I’d left my first aid kit — one of my first acquisitions from Aisle 6 at Klegelmeyer’s, but one I hadn’t needed, or so I’d believed. In all my time spent foraging, I’d never so much as broke a fingernail, much less experienced a wound. ‘Oh, well, live and learn,’ I thought.

The trip back was uneventful, but I never did feel safe enough — knowing that foraging crews from other fortresses frequented my village — to drop my Levi’s and look. Being ‘caught with your pants down’ was another aphorism often featured in the sermons, and not with any hint of understanding, but rather harsh judgement and contempt, which was meant to teach us that iron discipline overrode even necessary bodily functions.

It was full dark, without even a moon to navigate by, by the time we reached the tower, but I was familiar with every obstacle in my neighborhood, so we went straight up the stairs, taking them two at a time in my case, and my bandersnatches doing whatever they did with their vines, but keeping up with no difficulty. We exited the staircase on the thirty-seventh floor, where Gumball and his pals felt most comfortable. They quite liked being inside now, at least in this particular building, because they could sun themselves to their heart’s content — if they actually had hearts — basking in the sunlight through the windows, and then simply moving to the other side of the building as the day wore on. I’d set out large tubs of water for them, once I’d realized that even slightly droopy leaves meant that they were getting dehydrated, so they had everything they needed, except for cheese, of course, which I doled out as rations, and the odd lake monster.

First things first, of course, so I drew fresh water from the firehose near the stairwell. It was fed from a large rain collection system and cistern on the roof, so I had what amounted to an endless supply of water close at hand, although I’d felt foolish when I discovered this, about two weeks after I’d moved in. I’d made countless trips to haul water from a stream about three roads over toward the west, because I liked having a supply on hand, but how was I to know? None of the other plumbing worked — I’d looked in the bathrooms and what was identified as a ‘Break Room’ on this very floor to be sure — so I’d never tried the fire hoses until I’d thought about using them to make lifting straps for the food and other items I stored in the tower, reasoning that with straps and a long length of rope, I could haul things up quicker than I could climb the stairs. One lives and learns, as my mother told me once. one lives and learns.

In any case, I had my wound to look to, now that I’d watered my bandersnatches and had a full bucket of water handy for washing up. It wasn’t at all painful, just uncomfortable, and the sticky blood on my new Levi’s was annoying as well.

Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to discover that I’d been infected by the plants. I’d had plenty of exposure, what with lying unconscious after the dandelion and its pseudosharks had exploded, leaving me covered with plant parts and dirt, or even during our struggle with the lake monster. The suits were pretty good, as long as there was a buddy nearby to flame you if a plant managed to attach itself, but they weren’t perfect, and of course I hadn’t been wearing mine at all lately. Back in the castle, you were supposed to get washed with flame, and then disinfected with powerful poisons, before you took off your suit, but I hadn’t had that luxury. My condition wasn’t at all unknown, but babies who’d contracted it in the womb were discarded at birth, thrown over the walls for the plants to take care of, and their mothers with them.

In the meantime, I had to make another trip downstairs, so I could walk over to Klegelmeyer’s and visit Aisle 5, Feminine Hygiene — which I’d hitherto ignored — because I seemed to be menstruating, the perfect ending to a perfectly wretched day.

Gumball wanted to go, of course, although all of them were a little lethargic after dark, but a few bottles of cheese took care of that, so off we trotted, happy campers all. What the heck, misery loves company.

 

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

Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved

Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Three Envelopment

 

 

Appear weak when you are strong,
and strong when you are weak.

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

 

Aisle 5 was a foreign land, containing an array of products I’d never heard of, much less imagined ever having to use. I knew that my mother had menstruated, because my father would make crude jokes about it, and it was a regular topic of conversation amongst the Horticulturists, who were all of them men, of course, but I had no clue about exactly what it entailed, other than that women did it, and that it was something ‘dirty,’ or at least my father thought so.

Faced with the reality, it all seemed rather commonplace. I wound up opening packages, because the wrappers rarely showed what the contents actually looked like, and quite often featured flowers — which seemed ironic, given that my condition was evidently spread by the plants — but the interior leaflets were much more explicit, so I was quickly able to figure out the basics, even by flashlight, and decided that I needed to use tampons, since pads would never work, even pads with ‘wings.’

I quickly selected quite a few large packages, one in each size and style they had on offer, because I didn’t want to try them out in the middle of the supermarket, nor in the dark.

At the last minute, I swept up a selection of almost everything else in the aisle, just in case I’d forgotten something I might need eventually, since I was an amateur at this sort of thing, having never actually seen a woman unclothed, much less touched one, and had certainly never sat down with my mother for the talk.

When I got back upstairs, I took my stuff up to the women’s room on the floor above, since I knew they had a much nicer facility, including floor-to-ceiling mirror walls in one corner, opposite the windows on the eastern wall, which were translucent, so you couldn’t actually see through them, but they supplied abundant light during the daylight hours. For tonight, I simply arranged my stuff on the long counter opposite the stalls, where they had three sinks — inoperable, of course — but plenty of counter space and shelving the appeared to be designed to hold a supply of toiletries, which seemed a perfect place to keep things in a central location.

Before I left, I stripped off my clothes to take a close look at my body in the large mirrors.

It was a surprise; I knew that I’d been gaining weight, but hadn’t paid much attention to how I was gaining weight, which — now that I was paying attention — seemed preferentially-distributed around my hips and thighs, with minor increase on my chest. If all this had happened in a little bit more than a month, I’d have to re-think my clothing choices again, because it was obvious that I’d need one of those brassiere things, and probably clothes made to accommodate the peculiarities of women’s bodies, except for the obvious difference, of course.

Luckily, I’d already found a big flat-top building that had all sorts of clothes, so I could easily try on different sizes, but I probably couldn’t bring them here for the long run. Though cozy, my tower was way too visible and utterly indefensible, so I’d have to find a new home eventually.

My mind went first to those square burrower holes I’d seen when I’d first entered the village, since I doubted that anyone would dare to crawl down one who’d seen what the big burrowers could do. I’d have to see if my trick with the cheese could win me any friends on that front, but it seemed well worth a try, since I got on well with the smaller versions I was calling bandersnatches. Unlike the dandelions — who had seemed rather stupid — the one burrower I’d encountered was pretty darned clever, so I could easily imagine that he was Gumball grown up, but with a bad attitude undoubtedly aggravated by living in an environment in which people were perpetually trying to kill it. I could sympathize, since my own condition was an instant death sentence in any fortress controlled by the Horticulturists, so I felt no particular loyalty to them. Call me callous, but I can take a hint. Anyone who fires high explosive missiles at me isn’t destined to be my friend, and when that’s coupled with immutable laws which declare me an abomination to be instantly extirpated by any citizen who happens to see me, well, let’s just say I’m not terribly sentimental.

 

 

Very early the next day, while it was still dark and the bandersnatches were grumpy about being rousted from their usual nighttime torpor, I began my move. First I cheered up my friends with a ration of cheese each, and then I used my ropes and pulley things, together with my firehose straps, to lower my possessions to the bottom of the stairwell, then strung together all my carts to load as much as possible in one train. I left behind most of the food — other than the cheese of course, the key to bandersnatchish hearts and minds, and hopefully equally persuasive for burrowers — because food was easily replaceable. In fact, I’d spent the last month or so establishing caches of the stuff all around this half of the village, so all that really remained to do was to take down the signs that I’d provided for the benefit of those who were now my mortal enemies. I took the tools, my cache of weapons, and everything else that seemed immediately handy, then locked the door behind me, although it hadn’t been locked before.

There was a U-shaped desk in the main hall of the tower where someone had thoughtfully left a set of keys to the front doors in one of the drawers. I’d discovered this quite some time ago, but it was only a curiosity then; now it was part of my disguise. Most of the buildings I’d found had been locked, but this one had not, so I hoped to disguise my exact habits for at least a little while longer, in case the Horticulturists from the Citadel came looking for me.

Soon enough, I was running through the dark, followed by my train of carts and flanked by my leafy friends, who loved to race ahead and to the side of me, somehow able to anticipate even sudden changes in direction. Above us was a thin sliver of moon, just waxing, I think, although I wasn’t keeping careful track. Its light did little to chase the darkness, hardly more than did the stars twinkling in the clear night sky. To the east, where the most immediate dangers lurked, there was a faint looming increase of light near the horizon, yet not nearly enough to properly be dawn.

Soon, the house I’d used as my first storehouse appeared to my left, and I ran up upon the porch to snatch down my sign and ensure that it looked as uninhabited as its fellows. I took the sign with me, because — in my folly — I’d signed it with my name, at the time still proud of what I’d done for those who now planned to kill me for my pains. To be perfectly fair, though, they didn’t actually realize that this was their intention… yet. I knew better. I’d seen my father throw my screaming mother and her newborn baby from the wall, so I didn’t look for mercy there.

Then I ran off to the west, where I’d located my second storehouse, because it too was on a main road into the village, and so only slightly less likely to be discovered than the particular way I’d stumbled upon. I still didn’t know where the ‘town’ that Lieutenant Forge had described was, but imagined that there must be a road somewhere that connected it to my village.

Soon enough, I had another sign as prize, and had tidied up around the house to make it as nondescript as the first. The rest would have to wait, because it was getting on toward true dawn, and I wanted to visit my flat-topped building full of household items and clothes before it became light enough for anyone to notice us as we raced through the darkness. I had a plan.

 

 

In the back of the building, there was a large machine evidently used for the storage of trash, and it was there that I stored the top and bottom halves of my protective suit, retaining only the helmet, and that only for its radio, since it might be useful to be able to listen in upon the communications of my enemies. At the rate my body was changing, the suit itself seemed unlikely to be of any further use in the very near future, although I didn’t discount the possibility of highjacking a larger protective suit sometime, one with more room for my growing chest and butt, but this didn’t seem at all likely, since the Horticulturist Command didn’t allow women outside the walls, unless they’d thrown them over. Say what you will, though, the suits were a sovereign protection against any but the most concerted flamethrower attacks, although not much help at all against well-aimed HE missiles, as the late and very much unlamented Six and his crew from the Citadel had discovered to his cost.

That task accomplished, I returned to the interior of the store, where I studied the displays very carefully. They had plastic imitation people dressed up in some of the clothes, evidently so people could see roughly what they’d look like wearing them. I wanted to look as little like a Horticulturist as possible, in case any word of the faux ‘Lieutenant Forge’ had gotten back to the Citadel. Luckily, my new ‘developments’ had made this almost a foregone conclusion, so I decided to dress as much like the imitation women in the displays as possible, reasoning that this would certainly confuse any pursuers, since it sure confused me.

In the castle, men and women had rigidly separate rôles and manners of dress, and it was a matter of pride among the Horticulturists especially to ignore their comings and goings, since they were regarded either as mere servants to the military class, and so beneath notice, or as the exclusive property of one particular man, in which case it was dangerous to pay attention to her, because her husband might call you out or — if that man was an officer — simply order you to take your ‘turn’ at foraging.

Unfortunately, female clothing had changed since these particular clothes were made, so most of it was much more brightly colored and more delicate than was usually the case in the keep, and the skirts and dresses tended to be much shorter. On the other hand, they were much more practical as well, since I had no idea how wide my hips and thighs would wind up, and full skirts draped over almost anything. I wasn’t fully developed up top either, but evidently this was a problem I shared with many real women, since there were several sections devoted to ‘padded’ bras and to ‘bust enhancers,’ obviously designed to eke out less than stellar ‘assets’ with artifice.

It didn’t take too long to outfit myself with several outfits that would be at least marginally acceptable in the keeps and simultaneously disguised my shortcomings, but then I found the jewelry displays and instantly changed my plans.

One of the indications of status among the women was the amount and value of the jewelry they wore, and there were buckets of the stuff in the cabinets in one section of the store. I decided to pose as an officer’s wife — let’s say a Major — from somewhere out west. I could be vague about this, since no one expected women to be clever. In the castle, at least, they weren’t even allowed to go to school. The only problem was that almost all the nicest earrings were designed to hang in holes pierced in one’s earlobes.

Well, least said, soonest done, as my mother used to say. After searching behind the counter, I found a drawer astutely labeled ‘Piercing Supplies’ and promptly pierced my own ears, judging the placement by carefully studying my magnified reflection in a special mirror they had right on the counter. I wound up with three holes in a row down the length of each earlobe, which was the current fashion amongst the officer’s wives, since it allowed them to wear more jewelry without being ostentatious. It hurt just a bit, but I was a soldier, and fairly tough, despite my size, and as bloody-minded as the roughest soldier. Show me something to defy — even pain — and I’d thumb my nose at it and laugh for scorn.

The ‘operation’ done, with what they called a ‘piercing gun,’ and with ‘starter posts’ encumbering my ears, I simply cleaned out the entirety of the fine jewelry counter, from silver, to gold, to pearls and precious stones. My haul quite filled up a rather capacious purse, and joined the matching leather luggage on the first of my carts, which also held the HE missiles as well as my clothes and furs. Did I mention the fur department? Never mind. The incongruity of my dainty underthings, elegant clothing, and ready supply of high-tech weaponry amused me, none-the-less. It was getting on toward winter, and I sure as Harry’s Hell wasn’t planning to freeze my new ass off. I liked that mirror so much that — after only a second’s hesitation, because it was both large and delicate, I added it to my growing pile of ‘beauty products’ as well.

On the way out, I passed the cosmetics and perfume counters and cursed, “Holy Harry!” I’d completely forgotten, of course, being an amateur at all this, but one of the many clues that distinguished the wives of officers from the ordinary women of the keep was their habitual use of cosmetics and scents.

Sighing, I went behind the counter and started first on perfume, since that seemed easiest, finding several that smelled nice, I thought, and were also very expensive, so I added another purse filled with exotic bottles in fancy cardboard boxes to my load, then walked over to the cosmetics counter with something approaching trepidation. Clothes were one thing, everybody needs clothes, and these clothes were designed for bodies shaped like mine, but this was one more baby step beyond my former comfort zone.

Harry was smiling down from Heaven on me, obviously, because there laying right on the counter were a number of dusty pamphlets entitled, ‘Your Color Signature,’ which I promptly fell to reading.

I was a ‘Light Spring,’ I decided, or maybe a Cool Summer, since I had light blue eyes and a very fair complexion, so I simply dumped a lot of stuff in the recommended colors into another very expensive handbag, together with the pamphlet, a vast number of recommended brushes and special tools for enhancing one’s eyes, nails, and what-have-you, as well as a much more extensive hardbound book on beauty I found behind the counter. I’d never actually seen a book that wasn’t one volume or another of Harrison’s Holy Scriptures, so it was almost shocking to see an entire book devoted to just one aspect of women’s fashions. On a hunch, I ran back to the luggage department and found that there were, in fact, special cosmetics and jewelry cases, which I promptly added to my matching set of leather luggage. I decided then and there that my imaginary husband was a General, at least, since I knew that there wasn’t a single woman in the castle who had anything even remotely like my trousseau. The very idea of using leather to make luggage instead of soup was so incredibly extravagant that it would take a General Officer to pull it off, and I knew from talking with my Dad that the various keeps were extremely isolated from each other, so the names and ranks of officers more than a hundred miles away were matters of almost pure conjecture, or were based upon rumors passed down through so many widely varying accounts and channels that almost anything would be believed with sufficient evidence to back it up, and great wealth was the surest indication of very high status. My greatest danger, I thought, should I be ‘rescued’ from my bereft abandonment, would be from a conspiracy of my fellow wives to murder me for my jewelry and ‘modern’ fashions, so I wanted to make very sure that they were overawed from the start. With that thought in mind, I went back to the perfume and cosmetics counters and simply swept everything they had into a large selection of handbags and cases, and piled the lot into another of my carts with a view toward presenting them as gifts to those among the wives who treated me well. I had piles of jewelry, so I could easily afford to give some of it away as well. Popularity is always nice, and it’s nice to be nice.

Of course, I had no immediate intention of being ‘rescued’ at all, but it was my ultimate fall-back plan if it looked like I might be captured instead. For high-ranking women in the castle, there was no better defense than being offensive towards one’s social inferiors, and I’d noticed that particular groups of them had formed their own centers of power, even within a social system that officially denied that women could have any legitimate power at all.

 

 

It took me seven tries before I managed a decent manicure, and my nails were still a bit on the short side, but they were growing apace, somehow relating to the growth of my hair, which was ridiculously rapid. It was already down to my shoulders, and I bitterly regretted not stocking up on fancy shampoo and conditioner, because long hair, I’d discovered, was a major pain-in-the-ass, so I’d taken to wearing a shawl, just to have something to protect my hair against the wind and sun, lest it become hopelessly snarled and tangled. There was shampoo on offer in the fancy hotel in which I was living now, in tiny bottles, but it was cheap stuff, not up to the job at all.

My fantasy of giant ‘burrower tunnels’ had proven to be a major disappointment as well, because they were clearly made by humans, and had pairs of strange metal stairs on either side of yet another set of stairs leading down to two huge tunnels at the bottom of them. The only real difference between the stairs was that the center set had landings, and were made of that curiously smooth stone, except for what looked like brass edges on the outer portion of the tread. The outer sets were entirely made of metal, and were narrower, but had no landings at all. I theorized that they were provided for servants, so that they didn’t impinge upon the stately progress of their betters, but what it was that people did down there was a complete mystery, because there was nothing there worth seeing, and nowhere in particular to do anything.

I was seriously considering another foray back to my clothing store, where I’d actually seen the exact sort of conditioner and shampoo I really needed, and there were other things that I was reading about in my book that seemed like they’d be awfully nice to have as well. I’d never realized, for example, the critical rôle that exfoliation played in any serious beauty regimen, and that proper ‘moisturizing’ each and every night before going to sleep was absolutely necessary. The heart-healthy and skin-healthy habit of eating plenty of fresh vegetables, though, was sadly beyond my reach. I’d never even seen a fresh vegetable — unless you counted the wheatgrass in the fields, which one really couldn’t, because wheat was a ‘carbohydrate,’ decidedly inferior —and canned goods were somewhat deleterious to skin tone and optimal health and beauty, according to my beauty book. Drat!

 

 

I still kept up a regular schedule of patrols in the early morning, toward the east, before foragers would be likely to have crossed the distance from the citadel, trying to discover whether any more foragers had made it into this portion of our village, and had managed to retrieve all my signs in the south and west as well, over the course of one long week, as well as making certain that any remaining evidence of my activities was hidden, or at least obscured. I took the time to bury Six and his companions as well, although I couldn’t be certain that no one had escaped, but I doubted that anyone had survived, since their supply of missiles was simply lying in the road, so I thriftily took them. Better, I thought, to have them simply disappear without a trace than to show up bearing signs of combat, which would raise questions, of course, at some level I might not like to have notice me yet. It was very good practice in coping with skirts as well, although I wore a style just below the knee for burial duty, and my normal attire these days was what they called a ‘maxi,’ the closest they had in the way of what women in the castle wore on a day-to-day basis. I wasn’t bothered, since my skirts and dresses were clearly superior to anything I’d seen back there, and I’d been practicing my arched eyebrow look of sympathetic condescension to handle any adverse comment. I had the book to back me up, after all.

I was fairly convinced, on the other hand, that I’d missed the town Lieutenant Forge had told us of entirely, because I saw no signs at all of foraging in the neighborhoods toward the west.

C’est la vie, as my mother told me once upon a time. You pays your money and you takes your chance. I don’t know where she came up with all that stuff.

 

 

There came a day, of course, when I heard the faint sound of HE missiles exploding off to the east, first two in quick succession, and then another two, so I knew that another foraging party was coming to try their luck, just now breaking through their kill ring of hostile plants. No wonder they were hostile, considering the collective bad attitude of the denizens of these armed enclaves of human purity in a world that was much more flexible.

Well, we’d see what hospitality we could show them, here in the big village.

I’d been preparing for this day for a long time, and had laid my plans with care. I’d been carefully cultivating the plants, taking cuttings from the dandelions, and feeding my seven bandersnatches with enough food to let them reach their full potential. I had plenty of food to spare, so they were feeling pretty frisky as we walked out on the beaten path that previous scavenging expeditions had made, following the traces of previous foragers, as was usual amongst the inmates of the two keeps I’d seen, and I had no reason to think that any of them would be even slightly more creative, since their perpetual warlike hostility towards what they perceived as an encroaching enemy discouraged any but the most instinctive conservatism.

I called to my bandersnatches as we neared my small plot of dandelions. “Gumball! Guys! Go hide!” and they cheerfully trotted off, finding exactly the right position of concealment on their own before wriggling their way beneath the surface of the ground, each of them near a dandelion, with its associated entourage of reapers. Careful observation had taught me that the reapers, which the Horticulturists foolishly called ‘pseudosharks,’ were specialized to harvest the grass nearby for grain, which the dandelion used to nurture its own developing seeds. It was a tradeoff, as usual among the plants. The dandelion provided protection and nutrients for the grass by means of its deep taproot, and the grass sacrificed some of its seeds to help the dandelions propagate themselves, thus extending both their ranges, and guaranteeing long life for future generations. The bandersnatches, of course were the plant equivalents of gophers, which useful animals the Horticulturists had exterminated as ‘nuisances’ almost fifty years ago. The decisive Horticulturist ‘victory’ over the gophers was still being taught to the troops as an example of what progress might be made in their war against the weeds. They’d failed to note, of course, that gophers were excellent ærators of the soil, which plants needed, and also served to bring up valuable minerals and manure to the surface, where it was available for germinating seeds.

At some point in their history, the Horticulturists had obviously forgotten the very meaning of their name, which succinctly described their original rôle as caretakers and nurturers of plants, because plants were necessary for human survival and, in very fact, some plants were — or at least they used to be — entirely dependent on humans for their growth and propagation. Lately, of course, the plants had been adapting to both the loss of support and the active hostility of homo sap. Back in the olden days in the USA, there was an early horticulturist who said, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately,” which I think presents the point rather well. We’re all of us social creatures, like almost every living thing, with sometimes hidden links and relationships that connect us to the entirety of life and everything living. We actually couldn’t even live without a healthy microbiome of bacteria, archaea, and fungi living inside and on our bodies, and in fact the cells of our bodies are outnumbered by bacterial cells by ten to one, although they make up a fairly small percentage of our weight, because their cells tend to be tiny in comparison to our own. In some ways, we were simply handy hosts for other creatures, to whom we offered valuable services, like walking around and gathering food, in return for which they helped us to digest them, as well as protecting us against other forms of microscopic life. Of particular interest to me were the various species of lactobacillus that helped to keep my new vagina healthy by producing hydrogen peroxide, a type of natural antiseptic that’s also very handy — in concentrated form — for removing bloodstains from clothing. Wheels within wheels, an unbounded and gossamer web of necessary relationships that permeated the real world, as opposed to the fantasy kingdom of the Horticulturists in which mankind — with an emphasis on man — ruled supreme and solitary as the one and only ‘crown of creation.’

How do I know this? You might well ask, but it was actually easy; I found a ‘library.’

You’d be surprised what you can find out in a decent library, and I’d found a great library. It filled a building almost as big as the entire castle, six floors of books, books, books, and more books in a basement level that must have been for storage, since the aisles were narrow and appeared little used. Of course, I figured out a lot of this stuff on my own as well, extrapolating from what I already knew when combined with new knowledge I’d gleaned from the library, and I’d just barely scratched the surface of the scope of what people used to know, but our current situation isn’t nearly as unique as you might think.

But back to business. My first task was to retake this part of the ‘city’ — that’s another thing I’d learned in the library; this is a city, not a village — for the ‘good guys,’ namely me and my new pals. I couldn’t allow a bunch of hooligans wearing ‘uniforms’ to terrorize our neighbors and the neighborhoods, no matter how free they’d been to do so in the past.

 

 

They were coming. I could hear them on the helmet radio, cursing at the disgusting notion of actually walking through green grass that brushed their legs as they passed. One of them kept up an undercurrent of muttered curses as he approached, “This really gives me the creeps!” he said, then “Watch it! Was that a burr?” only to finally be commanded by their officer to keep silent and alert as they approached their target.

It seemed to be a typical crew, so I assumed that they hadn’t been sent especially to seek me out. From my own limited experience — foragers didn’t tend to survive multiple missions, which was probably why the ‘volunteers’ were most often social misfits or soldiers caught in one infraction of the rules or another, so it was comforting to realize that these were ordinary sad sacks and goofballs — When they reached the outer edge of the tall wheatgrass, they fanned out in the approved skirmishing formation, too widely-spaced to be taken two or three at a time by a well-timed assault, yet close enough to support each other with flamethrowers if one of them became trapped in any one of a number of clever snares the plants had come up with lately.

As expected, they became wary when they saw my plot of dandelions, but greedy as well.

“Wow!” one said, “There’s a whole bunch of napalm, just waiting for us to take it.”

“Right!” said number One, obviously in charge and pointing as he spoke. “Six and Seven, deploy your net over here. Eight, you’re up for playing ‘bait.’ Nine and Ten, you do the same for that one, with Twelve as your decoy. Move!”

From my place of concealment inside a partially-ruined house, I could see the whole deployment, and I had to admire the efficiency with which they worked. My own former comrades had been much less organized. Despite that, I couldn’t help but sympathize with the guys who’d been assigned as ‘bait,’ since I knew well that the slightest misstep could result in death, once the dandelions had become aware of their hostile intentions.

The so-called ‘napalm’ the reapers used was actually concentrated hydrocarbons distilled by the dandelions to furnish the necessary ‘fuel’ for their activities, since mere hydraulics couldn’t manage the level of speed and dexterity that the reapers required. It was a different system than the muscular contractions usual in humans and other animals, but it was extremely effective, as anyone could see, since the reapers were easily capable of very rapid movement within the scope of their tethers — which one might think of as external arteries and veins — that connected them to their main bodies, the dandelions themselves, which performed the photosynthesis and sexual reproduction that held the whole system together. But the Horticulturist procedure in these situations was to take all the reapers, or ‘pseudosharks,’ as they called them, which of course led to the eventual death of the plant, since without the reapers to bring in seed, the dandelion couldn’t ferment and distill more hydrocarbons to replace them and so eventually starved.

Ever since human beings had essentially abandoned the world, shutting themselves away in the equivalent of military monasteries which functioned as cancers on the Earth and parasites on the past, the plants had been expanding their reach to take over rôles formerly performed by humans, specifically cultivation and pest control, and humans had been pests — at least as far as the vast majority of life on Earth was concerned — for a good number of years by now, especially to the plants, preferring to loot abandoned food cultivated and preserved by humans who’d still worked for a living.

‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these,’ as one of those books had said, obviously recognizing that the green plants, which transformed energy from the Sun into the very stuff of life, were the true foundation of creation, to whom we all of us owe our very lives.

Speaking of which, the two teams of Horticulturists, six young men in all, were in position, and it was about time these boys gave something back. ‘Now, Gumball!’ I thought.

With a pleasing level of coördination, gaping pits opened up beneath both teams and they were gone in a heartbeat, then the pits almost instantly closed up again, filled in from below to forestall any possible counterattack on my bandersnatches, although they were big boys now, and probably well able to take care of themselves, since I’d been telling them bedtime stories about Horticulturist tactics.

With commendable courage, One, and the two men remaining from his former command, retreated only slightly, then made a break for it, avoiding the dandelions completely and making an end run around the ruined houses, gaining the relative safety of the street, where I’d left one of my lovely carts piled high with food, and a few mementos from the last gang to penetrate the city.

I could almost hear the wheels grinding in One’s mind, as he calculated the risks of going forward with a greatly-reduced scavenging force — with the clear evidence of danger right before his eyes —versus their chances of getting back through the plant wall besieging The Citadel with a large cache of food. Luckily for his men, he chose the prudent course, took my cart, and turned tail and ran off with his figurative tail between his legs. But he took my poisoned apple as well, because the great majority of the food I’d left for him — or whomever had shown up in his stead — were very many bottles of that very flavorful ‘cheese.’

Not to worry, though, I had plenty, having discovered through the magic of the local business directory — a reference copy of which useful tool was in my library — a milk bottling plant, where there was a lifetime supply.

 

 

I whistled up Gumball and his pals, who were still hiding beneath the earth, “Gumball! You guys! Up and at’em! Let’s get moving!”

With a roiling of the splodgy dirt, the Bandersnatches rose up from deep underground, carrying the inert bodies of the six Horticulturists, hopefully unconscious merely, but one took one’s chances, burying people alive, even people in protective suits.

Quickly, I moved amongst them stripping off their helmets and suits as quickly as I could, which was pretty darned quick, and throwing them into a handy pile. Two were only winded and weak, three more were unconscious, but looked healthy enough, whilst one was cyanotic, so I gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as quickly as I could manage, then checked his pulse at his carotid artery. No joy. I gave him a couple of good thwacks with my fist, and started chest compressions instead, but took the time to force a little chewed up cheese between his lips to boot. It couldn’t hurt, and it would do him a world of good if he managed to get it down.

After a few minutes, the cyanosis began to clear up, and then he took a shuddering breath. ‘Oh, good,’ I thought. ‘I’d hate to lose one after going to all this trouble to complete my set.’

All solicitude, I brought a cooling drink from the other wagon I’d brought with me, commiserating with them about their difficulties with the bandersnatches. “I’m so sorry that you were frightened, but my pets tend to be rambunctious around strangers, and they have a proprietary interest in my dandelion garden, so of course when you tried to steal a reaper, they were annoyed.” I went on in that general vein.

“Reaper?” one of the more clever finally asked, bewildered.

“I believe that you may know them as ‘pseudosharks,’ but I assure you that they’re ‘reapers,’ and I should know, bcause they’re mine. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that it’s not nice to steal from other people? especially when they’re looking?”

“But… But you can’t own one of those vicious monsters!”

I take it back. He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer after all.

I curled my lip in exquisite contempt — I knew that it was both intimidating and enticing, because I’d practiced in my mirror — and said, “I can and do. If you persist in being dense, perhaps another visit to the root zone might convince you. Of course, since I’ve confiscated your little suits, you might wind up somewhat the worse for wear, but it’s entirely up to you.”

“But you can’t do that!” one of them yelled. “They’re our property!”

“I see you have a twisted sense of who owns what, my dear. They belonged to the Horticultural Corps, and you had them on loan, as it were. You may have thought that they belonged to you before you invaded my city and disturbed its perfectly innocent flora, but they’ve been confiscated to partially offset the fine.”

“Fine!? What fine!?” another expostulated, likewise somewhat dim.

I sighed, to let him know that he was being obtuse, and that it annoyed me. “The fine levied against criminals, of course, and wanton vandals, or do you deny that the burned out houses and plants in this area are the work either of you, or of your former comrades? Would you prefer that I simply kill you? As I said, I could arrange that very easily, and it would be wondrously beneficial for my garden.”

“I’d like to see you try! There are six of us, and only one of you!” said one beligerently. He made as if to attack me.

This was going a bit too far, though, so I leapt to meet him and threw him to the ground with a bit more force than strictly necessary, although I was only using one hand. “Listen to me, crêtin,” I said with considerable menace. “This is my city, and I make the rules. If you don’t like it, you can waltz yourself right back to your so-called ‘Citadel,’ where you’ll either promptly die in the attempt to reach it, or will manage to get in long enough for them to throw you back over the wall because you’ve been infected by intimate contact with the plants. You’ll notice that they didn’t bother trying to dig you up; I did, and if this was a mistake, I can easily rectify it.” I gestured in the general direction of my bandersnatches, “Look around you. All six of you together couldn’t even muss my hair if you’d like to fight me, although I’d be very angry if you made me chip a nail. How far do you think you’d get arm-wrestling with an angry bandersnatch?” Here I turned to address Gumball directly, “Sweetie, would you mind terribly showing these men your teeth?”

Gumball promptly rose up to his full height, almost forty feet by now, and smiled. Well, I knew that he was smiling, but I doubt my prisoners found it at all comforting, since the difference between a bandersnatch’s happy face and his angry face is rather subtle.

“That’s my good boy,” I cooed as I moved to stroke his vines the way I knew he liked me to. Gumball was still my very most favorite, and well he knew it. “I’ll let you know, however, if any of them turn out to be surplus to requirements.” I said this for their benefit, of course, not Gumball’s, since our rapport was far more visceral and instinctive than mere words.

“Well, ladies?” I said. “What’s it going to be? The easy way, or the hard way?”

“But what about our… the suits? We can’t walk around without some form of protection.”

“Of course you can’t, my dears. You’ll find that my lovely bandersnatches and I are the very best protection imaginable, whereas those filthy suits of yours are an open invitation to revenge in the form of a murderous assault. Believe me, you’re far safer walking around in your underwear with me than you would be in those silly suits. There’s a marvelous clothing store not far from here where we can get you outfitted in more practical clothing, since it’s a little chilly. We’ll get just the basics for now, I think, and we can always go back when we see how you’re shaping up.”

“What do you mean by ‘shaping up’ exactly?” the belligerent one said, a little more diffident now,

“Didn’t you listen? You’ve been ‘infected’ by the natural world, which has always been contagious, but that process has been accelerated of late, prompted — as I understand it — by a general acceleration of both plant and human evolution by strong ‘selection pressures,’ a concept you’re going to have to take on faith for now, until I introduce you to the library, but I’m sure that you’re all familiar with the nearly instant executions of infected individuals as soon as the symptoms of infection are discovered.”

There was a general shuffling of feet, as well as stricken expressions on the faces of the few who hadn’t figured it out by now. “Does that mean that…?”

“It does.” I cut him off. “Within the hour, you’ll begin to feel ‘out of sorts,’ and within a day you’ll be visibly ‘sorted,’ although the full transformation takes several months. About a month from now, you’ll experience your first menstruation, unless you manage to get yourself knocked up by then.” I let that sink in for a bit, then added, “I wouldn’t actually advise that, since your internal organs will still be developing, so it doesn’t seem like it would be entirely safe, although no pregnancy is without hazard. I’d recommend waiting for at least six months for everything to settle down to regularity, but then I’m naturally cautious.”

“But how could that happen?” one asked, another of the stupid ones.

“You could,” I said as patiently as I could manage, “have an ‘accident,’ as they say — either through careless masturbation or through nocturnal emission in your dreams — or any one of your future ‘sisters’ could do the job properly in a trice, so I recommend that you avoid sleeping flat on your back, if possible, stay out of other peopole's beds, and wash your hands quite often — which is always a good idea in any case — and you should try to resist the urge to ‘fool around.’ Both males and females have been designed by millions of years of evolution to enjoy sexual activities, to seek them out — especially during periods of maximum fertility — and to be easily persuaded to completely ignore the higher wisdom offered by their brains once their basic instincts are involved. You’ll have the best and the worst of both worlds, maximum libido, maximum pleasure, and maximum vulnerability to very long-term consequences.”

“Pardon me, Ma’am, but how do you know all this?” That was the clever one again. I was starting to like him.

“Because I’ve gone through the same infection,” I said, “and know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“But Ma’am,” he said, “you’re beautiful!”

“Thank you, soldier, but I’m fairly sure that you’ll turn out looking very pretty as well. I think it’s designed into the genetic package we’ve been given. Survival of the fittest, you know, and we’ve been designed to be very ‘fit’ indeed.”

“But…! You were a man!? I don’t believe it!”

I laughed. “Actually, I still am, in at least one minor detail, so take a good look, boys, because you’re looking at your future.”

“So what are we supposed to do then?”

I smiled impishly, another thing I’d practiced in my fancy mirror. “It’s simple, really. We’re going to conquer the world.”

 

 

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

Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved

Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Four Fifth Column

 

 

The supreme art of war
is to subdue the enemy
without fighting.

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

 

The secret was to remove all the magnesium and most of the HE, because we didn’t want either sterilizing fire or even too much heat, just dispersive force, to spread the spores as widely as possible, and to do as little damage as could possibly be managed.

We were all of us perfectly capable of doing these modifications on the fly, of course, since flamethrowers and shoulder-fired missiles were our standard-issue weapons, and we could field-strip and repair either weapon blindfolded. We had to be, because a score of fifty out of sixty possible points in the practical examinations covering those very tasks were a mandatory part of our basic training requirements for graduation, and twelve points of those sixty were awarded for blindfolded disassembly and reassembly of those two weapons.

Unfortunately, this physical dexterity didn’t uniformly translate into equal facility in performing ‘field maintenance’ on their mental attitudes for several of our new recruits, two of whom had fallen into a black humor over their reduced circumstances and imagined loss of social status, even though the only society for which that actually mattered would be suicidal to approach. To me, this seemed profoundly silly. You might as well worry about the weather conditions on the Moon, or try to calculate exactly how quickly you’d have to flap your arms to have a good chance of flying there to see.

“Look,” I said to the two sad sacks, “right now, you’re a danger to all of us. If you persist in your crazy ‘plans’ to go ‘back home,’ you’ll never make it through the gates without going through a contamination inspection, and even at this early stage, the symptoms of infection by the plants are obvious. They’ll kill you out of hand, but worse, you’ll draw their attention to the fact that there are ‘wild humans’ living out here, and their inevitable course of action post-discovery would be to mount an expeditionary force to seek out and destroy us all.”

“But they might be able to help us!” one of the pair said, Chert, he was, and not even the stupidest by half. “Our doctors might know of some sort of cure for this abomination!”

“Believe me,” I said, “the only ‘cure’ they’re going to offer is endless freedom from the dreary task of breathing, and the wonderful opportunity to fertilize the ring wall of death that surrounds every keep held by the Horticulturists with your broken body. Haven’t you ever seen what happens to anyone with visible signs of hermaphrodism? Has the Citadel become so dainty and fastidious that their public executions are performed in private?”

“But those people deserved to die, because they’d neglected their sworn duties, or had been harboring mutinous thoughts!” the idiot protested.

“Oh, really? Well, then you two must have done the same, then, didn’t you? Since you’re obviously infected, you simply must have been doing one or the other, and your presence in your party, with the high number you formerly wore, strongly suggests that you were caught out in some infraction or another, which rather proves your point, doesn’t it? Why don’t we just hand you both machetes so you can chop each other’s heads off for your separate traitorous derelictions of duty? I’m afraid you’ll have to be very careful about the timing, though, and promise not to flinch, since it would be very awkward to beg for help with your throat cut, and I’m not at all sure that a slow and painful death wouldn’t provide a good morale booster for those of us with any sense, so you couldn’t count on me for the coup de grâce.”

“Don’t be an ass, Chert,” the smart one added, almost equally scathing. He — or rather she — was calling herself Beryl now, having quickly seen the logic of my own sketchy prophylactic strategy, although neither of us were terribly optimistic about our ability to pull off any long-term interaction with our former friends and allies. Still, she’d turned out quite nicely, and had an innate fashion sense that I thought was rather better than my own, if truth be told. “We’re all in the same soup, and we’ll all drown separately if we don’t all swim together.”

“But…,” he said, obviously starting off on another silly complaint.

“ ‘But,’ nothing!” I screamed at him. “Shut up and soldier! You’re still under military discipline here, so no more whining and malingering.”

“But, you’re planning to infect the entire Citadel!” he whined.

“Indeed I am, and indeed we will, together with the Castle and as many other of the failing Horticulturist strongholds as possible,” I said implacably. “I fully understand that some people might be hurt, but The Citadel and The Castle are both on the verge of collapse even now, about to be toppled by the plants that besiege them, probably accompanied by enormous loss of life, either through direct assault or starvation, since foraging is rapidly becoming either completely or essentially impossible to sustain because the casualties inherent in forays through the ring walls will inevitably outstrip the ability of the community to replace them. It’s only a matter of time before the plants manage to cut off all access to the outside world through new weapons in their arsenal, the sticky burrs, their emerging ability to coördinate their actions, not to mention the giant burrowers, which will eventually be able to undermine and topple the walls. If that happens, everyone will die, including the children and the human race entirely, or at least our local variety.”

“But what can we do to defeat the plants on our own?” Chert said, still unwilling to see that the game had changed while he wasn’t looking.

“Everything…, and nothing,” I said. “ ‘We surrender…,’ would be a good start, since the plants have overwhelming strength and resources available and we’re ultimately entirely dependent upon them, since they take care of transforming the Sun’s energy into useful forms for us, so the entire enterprise of ‘trying to beat the plants’ was schizophrenic to begin with, something like plunging a knife into your own heart because its constant beating was keeping you awake at night.”

“Surrender?” Chert asked, frightened by the thought.

“Surely you’ve noticed,” Beryl said, “That the plants aren’t particularly hostile toward us any more, other than that creepy thing in the lake, but it seems anxious to eat anything that comes along, not us in particular.”

To say that I was pleased by Beryl’s words would be grossly understated. She went on, “The world here in the city isn’t perfectly safe, of course, but it’s not implacably vicious the way it is around our former homes. Don’t ask me how it happened, but the plants are sensitive to how we feel about them, and pretty much mind their own business as soon as they figure out that we mean them no harm.” I studied Chert with some care. “By ‘surrender’ I mean giving up our own hatred toward the plants and seeing them for what they are, fellow creatures and inhabitants of our world, and the only truly necessary part of it, as far as we’re concerned, because almost all the food we eat is, or was, derived from plants. Even the few meat products we find unspoilt in the supermarkets are herbivores, although I’ve never actually seen a pork, or a beef, but they must have been commonplace at one time, before the current war erupted. Just a few miles beyond the ring walls, the world still abounds with wheat and other grasses, whose seeds were once commonly used to make bread, and can still be used so, because humans and grasses were never at war in the old days. In fact, the opposite was true, because humans took care of most true grasses, and protected them from other creatures which sought to exploit the same œcological niches, so wheat and corn thrived at the expense of dandelions and burdocks.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Chert said, bored already. “You’ve told us this fairytale before, about how the early horticulturists went crazy before, and went to war against every form of life that didn’t seem immediately useful. So what’s all that stuff got to do with us?”

I tried again, “You know how some soldiers are about their gear? always polishing it, fiddling with it, going way beyond reasonable and prudent maintenance and care into obsession? As if there were nothing in the world more important than how well their fatigue boots were polished, or how sharply-creased their dress trousers were? As if having their underwear ironed might make a difference as to whether or not their brains got eaten by a burdock burr? Or whether they were sliced into ribbons by a dandelion ‘pseudoshark?’ ”

“Yeah? So?”

“So, it’s a fairly common human reaction to high-stress environments, we develop obsessive ‘compulsions’ which give us the illusion of having control of our lives. At some point, for whatever reasons, humans became obsessive about dandelions, burdocks, and other ‘weeds,’ which put pressure on all of them either to change or die, and in the process seem to have become obsessive about us. They survived — we can see that — but I haven’t been able to find anything in the library that explains why or exactly how they were so successful, although there were a lot of people warning about this grave danger or that as we humans evidently released chemicals and something called ‘radioactivity’ into the environment, and at least some of them warned about the dangers of genetic mutations — damage to the fundamental structure of living things — so whatever it was, it went way beyond obsession and well into madness.”

Chert looked like he was going to say something stupid, but our conversation was interrupted by the distant thuds of three HE/Mag missiles going off in quick succession, which served to distract us all.

“Well,” I said, “it looks like Chert will have an opportunity to test his theory rather sooner than we expected.” I looked Chert in the eyes and said, “Well, Chert, how’s it going down? Do you want to walk out to greet your former companions with a friendly smile and a white flag? Or do you want to hang out here with us?”

He seemed startled by the stark and sudden opportunity to choose, and a look of panic flashed across his face as he thought about the actuality of confronting the prospect of disclosure rather than the fantasy of rescue. Perhaps his changes had already started to improve his thinking, because he said quite quickly, with no dithering at all, really, “I think your advice was best.” I’ll give him credit for the fact that he was able to keep most of his usual sullen resentment out of his voice.

I smiled to show that there were no hard feelings and said, “Good! We’d all of us miss you, you know. Every largish group needs a cautious voice to present the alternatives fairly.”

At that, he blushed and said, “I’m not sure it was an alternative as much as wishful thinking.”

“Well,” I answered. “It’s nice to have at least one optimist in every group as well. Too many realists makes for gloomy outings.” I gathered up my biggest duffle and said, “Speaking of which, it’s time to arrange our next encounter with the Horticulturists, and I’d prefer not to kill them. They can’t help being what they are, and some of them might have been pals of yours at one time, although I don’t doubt that they’d cheerfully kill you if they saw you and realized who you were right this very minute. I know that my own father handed my own mother over to the execution squad without a moment’s hesitation, and then stood calmly by as she was thrown down to her death from the top of the outer castle wall, but of course your own experience might differ. My own exposure to the military justice system was limited by my youth and then by my immediate dispatch on a doomed foraging expedition when I was just seventeen years of age. My father had arranged that as well, so if marriage and parental concern don’t count for much, I wouldn’t depend on casual friendship for anything special.”

 

 

We were all of us armed with crossbows and a good supply of quarrels, which seemed a good compromise between efficiency and lethality. Crossbows were intuitive enough for anyone clever enough to aim a flamethrower that they didn’t require special training, and unless the victim was extremely unlucky, we could probably save their life by feeding him a bit of cheese, which tended to accelerate all types of healing. I’d discovered this early on, although I hadn’t actually realized it until after I’d already begun to depend on it. I never said that I was the smartest guy in the room. If I’d been smarter, I’d never have been caught being idle on watch, and probably wouldn’t be out here at all, but I can’t say that I’m devastated about it, since I’d also figured out that being on the outside looking in was a lot safer than being on the inside looking out. In fact, as far as I could see, the wise guys who’d managed to sidle their way into all the cushy jobs in the castles were the saddest sacks of all, because they were all fighting each other for the privilege of being the last man standing when the plants overran the various fortresses around the world, which wouldn’t be long, I thought, considering exactly how dangerous they’d become even since I was a child. I remember cheering crowds standing by the gates as the courageous foraging parties marched out, but that didn’t happen any more, since very few of them came back, and the general officers had long since stopped taking turns.

 

 

We could almost feel them coming through the wheatgrass on the outskirts of our city, so we had plenty of time to deploy before they marched into view. I was visibly alone in the middle of the road when they finally appeared, and they stopped dead in their tracks, staring at me, before one of them, their Number One, walked forward.

“Who are you?” he asked, deep suspicion radiating from him, his face hostile, his tone arrogant, and his demeanor contemptuous, “and why aren’t you in a protective horticultural suit?”

“I’m not wearing one of those silly suits because I don’t need to. We’ve developed a vaccine which prevents hostile reactions from the plants, and you’re trespassing in our domain, so we’d appreciate it if you left, although we might be willing to trade for food, if you’ve brought trade goods of any sort, precious metals are always nice, although we’re also interested in shoulder-launched missiles.”

“We take what we need to survive!” he shouted angrily. “We certainly don’t bargain with women!”

“The more fools you are, then, because you’re at our mercy just now, and would do well to remember it.”

Now he was really ticked off. “Number Five! Burn her!”

One of them ran off to one side slightly, in a flanking position, the approved tactic for burning plants when taken by surprise.

It wasn’t a surprise to me, of course. ‘Gumball! This one’s almost edible!’ I thought, ‘and he’s got a lot of yummy volatile hydrocarbons on his back as well.’.

Quick as a flash, the ground dropped from beneath them both, then closed up again as quickly as Hades putting the snatch on Persephone, but neither of them were nearly as pretty. They were, however, just as gone.

The other guys were flummoxed, and had just started to bring their weapons up when I shouted, “Stand down! At ease!” in my very best Drill Sergeant voice.

Confused and appalled by the sudden disappearance of their officer, they did as they were told.

‘Gumball! Spit’em out!’ I thought. ‘You can eat the dandelion juice, since they stole it anyway.’

Up they came, both of them as naked as jaybirds, or so I imagined, since I’ve never actually seen a jaybird. Gumball was getting more clever by the day, so I let him know that I was very pleased, but told him to stay underground, just in case any one of our new prisoners got any bright ideas.

“Now,” I said, “Does anyone still imagine that bullying ‘the girl’ is a good idea? If so, the squad of sharpshooters behind you are quite ready to make it very difficult for you to sit down for many weeks to come, and that’s only if you manage to walk back home with your ass shot halfway to Harry’s Holy Hell.”

They’d just started to turn around when I shouted, “Eyes front!” then waited until they’d complied with my order. “Now I know you men find it a little strange to be taking orders from a woman, so I’m going to cut you a little slack. I’m sure you’ve heard about what happened to the last crew as well, and are understandably worried. You needn’t be. You’re all going home — if you don’t tick me off — and you’re going back with as much food as you can reasonably carry, so you’ll all be heroes. Not only that, but we’ll personally escort you through the defenses erected by the plants, so there shouldn’t be any further deaths.” I let that sink in for a bit, then asked, “Are there any questions?”

One of them worked up the nerve to ask, “Begging your pardon, Ma’am, but who are you? You talk like you’re part of the Horticulturist forces, but there are no women in the ranks.”

“You’re mistaken,” I said calmly. “On the West Coast, we’ve made several discoveries that have finally turned the tide in our long war against the plants, and I’m living proof. My husband is General Granite McKenzie, commanding the Vancouver Horticulturist Seventh Field Army, and I’m Lieutenant General Sapphire McKenzie of the Vancouver Women’s Horticultural Auxiliary Corps, the V-WHACKs, as we’re affectionately called back on the island.”

“V…Vancouver?! Isn’t that in Canada?!” my quasi-prisoner exclaimed.

I smiled. He didn’t look particularly reassured thereby. “Why, yes, it is, Soldier, but as you probably know we’ve had a joint command structure for almost two hundred years.” I smiled more pleasantly. “I don’t foresee any particular difficulties in accommodating the local idiosyncrasies of your small garrison.” I smiled again when I saw him blanch.

“But where’s your husband now!?” he said anxiously, as if any husband of mine could possibly control me.

“He’s gone ahead to liaise with New York Horticulturist Command, of course, and left me here to ‘hold the fort,’ as it were, in preparation for the full integration of the East Coast into our overall North American command structure.” I smiled again. There are few things more discomfiting to the military mind than the prospect of foisting change upon local structures from above. The fact that the superstructure of my Continental Army was completely fictional didn’t bother me at all, since I had access to many manual typewriters and had taught myself to use one using a book from the public library. It had been surprisingly easy to pick up the necessary techniques, and the addition of a plentiful supply of completely bogus forms that I’d run off at a local silk-screen shop gave me all the specious authority I needed. I was actually looking forward to my first meeting with the people from the Citadel so I smiled mysteriously for the benefit of all. ‘Life is filled with ironic reversals,’ I thought, ‘six months into my new life, I’ve gone from planning how to escape discovery to plotting the overthrow of the culture I was born into. How time flies when you’re having fun. It just goes to show that Carl von Clausewitz was right when he said that the best defense is a good offense, although he put it in somewhat more nuanced terms, since he tended more toward subtlety than bold declarations. Be flexible was more like his real approach to warfare. “Every attack becomes weaker as it progresses” was one of his real maxims, and never commit everything to one attack, but retain as much over as is necessary for an orderly retreat, but this commendable caution doesn’t lead quite so easily to pithy generalizations.’ The man was still staring at me, obviously mired in sexist presumptions, so I said, “Well? What are you waiting for? You’re dismissed!” Then I called out to Beryl, “Major Farquhar! Would you please collect the weapons of this sorry crew, and arrange a secure bivouac area for them until we can see them on their merry way tomorrow?”

“Our weapons, Ma’am?” another of them said.

“Did you not clearly hear me say, ‘Dismissed!’ Soldier?” I scowled at him in particular, but included them all in my general disapproval, especially the two naked guys. “Major Farquhar will sort you out, and not one of you can be trusted with weapons just yet, since you don’t know enough to distinguish our plant allies from our enemies. Your number One, however, should consider himself on report for ordering an unprovoked assault on a woman and a superior officer.”

He had the good sense to look frightened. Officers broken in rank did poorly in the general scheme of things, not that I had any real intention of carrying things that far unless provoked again.

Beryl strolled out into the road, dressed in a truly stunning ‘boho’ outfit from one of the upscale ‘department stores’ located near my former lodgings in the tall building, and chastized them, “I don’t know why I should bother with any of you, considering your sorry lack of discipline, but General McKenzie has evidently decided to treat you with compassion. I’m not quite as forgiving, though, so if any of you speak again before you’re spoken to, I’ll have a Sergeant stop by to give you a few stripes to think about. Am I making myself clear?”

“Yes, Ma’am!” they said in chorus, trying to look like soldiers.

“That’s better,” she said. “Now, if you’ll lay your weapons down on the road where you stand, you’ll find ample accommodations and food arranged for visitors over in that small dwelling.” She indicated an undamaged home just a hundred feet or so back in towards town, one of the ones I’d used to stash provisions in before I’d changed my plans, as it happened. “I’ll send a Sergeant by later to see if any of you have any needs beyond the obvious, but feel free to open and eat any of the provisions stacked in the rooms, with the usual caution not to waste anything that might help any of your citizens when you begin hauling it back for their use. There are beverages as well, but stay away from anything with alcohol in it, since we don’t want to have to rescue you from any trouble you might get into. We have a latrine arranged in the back yard, and ample bathroom tissues available, so please don’t go without. Remember to wash your hands. Any questions?”

“No, Ma’am! Thank you, Ma’am!” they said, a little more raggedly than they’d managed for me. I’d have to speak to Beryl about the proper attitude and deportment for officers. It’s all a matter of arrogance, that and the aura of menace one has to affect, of being ready to punish people without warning and without remorse. I’d had a good exemplar in my father, but most people weren’t quite that lucky.

 

 

The journey back to The Citadel was almost anticlimactic. The surrounding dandelions weren’t particularly clever, but they knew enough not to annoy the bandersnatches, and we made the men load their threatening ‘suits’ in with the rest of the booty from their expedition, so we waltzed right through and out onto the terrible plain of half-melted rock and ash which surrounded the castle. The sight depressed me, especially after having lived in freedom for many months. We stopped, and I handed over my forged authorization papers to one of the inmates, telling him to convey my apologies to his commander, but I had pressing business elsewhere. I wasn’t particularly worried about them, since we’d given them four of my wagons, each one of them piled high with food, as a consolation prize. One of our new gals had found a ‘warehouse’ — the proper name for those flat-topped buildings — with several dozen of them on hand, so I wasn’t worried about running out, and the four they had now could be used on their outward expeditions, for which we’d arranged to provide an escort, to keep them from getting up to any further mischief which might annoy the plants, and thereby set back my long-term plans a bit. The first infections would be setting in within a day or two, primarily amongst the officers and their dependents, unless I missed my guess, since they usually had first dibs on the choicest items retrieved from outside the castles, and my lovely cheese would qualify as choice, once all the ‘goodies’ had passed inspection.

 

 

Before leaving the copious vicus of the Citadel and its environs, we — Beryl and I alone — took a small detour upwind of its imposing walls, sending the others back with a cheerful wave of our hands, prompting me to make a mental note to salvage some lacy hankies from one of the better clothing stores back in the city. There was a gentle breeze from the west, which seemed fitting, somehow, and it was there in a clearing just behind the tallest dandelions and burdocks that we fired two missiles into the air, which made the plants nervous, of course, but they soon perceived that we meant no harm and settled back to their normal wary watchfulness.

Watching from the ground, we saw that our modifications to the propellent and the timer had been almost perfect, because the reduced charge set off a small explosion — more like a pop — just below the level of the highest plants, effectively shielding it from observation from within the citadel, but none-the-less reduced the cheese in the payload to minute particles of cheese dust, which puffed out like infinitesimal dandelion seeds before being caught by the wind and carried back toward the fortress, quickly dispersing into near invisibility.

“Well,” Beryl said, “That’s one down, in any case.” She began to pack up our gear and I helped. It wasn’t difficult, since the two missiles had been a large portion of the load.

“Probably, ” I finally answered her, our duffles packed up and already walking back toward the rough path home. “We’ll be back tomorrow, though, to ensure that the local command structure is fully aware of the ‘new orders’ regarding plant infections from ‘Central Command.’ I’d hate to seen any more innocents thrown from the wall we’ve just made more-or-less irrelevant. Many will find it difficult to cope with the transition from the old certitudes to the new reality, so I worry about the short-term consequences, even as I precipitate the inevitable onset of the future.” I grimaced as I thought about all that could possibly go wrong. “If you’re going to foment revolution, it helps a lot if you’re both cruel and callous to start with.”

“Yeah, well,” she said, staring off toward the open fields that surrounded the ring wall of beseiging plants, “the first thing that sharing a table in the enlisted mess taught me was that you eat what’s set before you, ’cause there won’t be anything better coming along later.”

I glanced at her with one eyebrow raised in wry apology, feeling chastized. “Sorry. I can assure you that the choices I had as the child of an officer were similarly circumscribed, although I admit to enjoying a slightly better menu. At the time, it didn’t seem particularly luxurious, but I suppose that I didn’t bother to wonder about what anyone else was eating either, so I’m not whining.”

“Okay,” she agreed. “Even as an enlisted member of the Corps, I had a better choice of eats available than the civilians did, so I guess we’re both guilty of profiting from the inequities we were born or stumbled into.”

For some reason, her admission cheered me up again. “Well, if what we’re doing succeeds — and I think it will in the long run — we’ve started down a path of freedom and reconciliation for all of us, not just the officers or the Horticulturist Corps in general. Once the people can leave their prisons behind, there’s a whole continent out there where we’ll be able to grow our own damned food instead of stealing it from people long dead, and it will be much more difficult to keep people in bondage of any sort, because all of them will be able to walk out the gates they’ve been hiding behind and have a good chance of making some kind of living on their own.”

Beryl looked sceptical. “Do you really think they will? We’ve lived as scavengers for so long, the idea of actually working for a living might not be all that attractive to many of our people.”

“Maybe not, and there are ample provisions in store to sustain them for quite some time, but the most adventurous will, and most importantly the ‘rugged individualists’ who chafed under regimentation and restrictions, which is probably what most pioneers have been like over the years.” I shrugged. “It’s a way of sorting people with minimal impact, because the people sort themselves.”

“But what do you get out of this?” she asked.

‘Crap!’ “I don’t really know,” I confessed. “Mostly, I’ve just been improvising, trying to stay alive, and to make sure that I have some way of surviving tomorrow.”

“Your plans seem rather elaborate for ‘just surviving,’ aren’t they?”

I laughed and said, “Well, I’ve always been prone to over-thinking, plus — after I was infected — I seemed to be able to reason things out more clearly for some reason. It was like I could see, or maybe feel would be a better word, connections between things that had seemed completely unrelated before.”

Beryl nodded. “I’ve felt the same way. Before I began to change, I just figured that the story the Horticultural Corps told us was true, that the plants had ‘revolted’ for some reason, so it was our duty to ‘destroy the rebels,’ which seemed as likely an explanation as anything, but then, without the slightest transition that I noticed, the whole story just…fell apart, and then seemed utterly, almost laughably, false, and I suddenly understood exactly what you were saying about the Corps bringing the whole sorry mess we were in toppling down around their own ears. Harry’s Hell, if I’d been the dandelions, I’d have been ticked off too.”

“It’s not just the dandelions,” I said confidently. “One of the ‘perks’ of being an officer’s child was that my Dad would sometimes pass on rumors that usually circulated only amongst the officers. The burdocks weren’t any problem at all, for example, just ten or twenty years ago, but now that’s changed, as you know. Further south, there’s supposed to be a plant called a ‘kudzu’ that’s even worse than the dandelions. It’s still a bit too cold for them to survive and thrive in our winters, but down there, they can supposedly grow fast enough to topple a castle wall overnight, pulling it apart with what they call ‘vines,’ something like blackberry vines, I guess, but without the thorns.”

“You’re joking!” Beryl exclaimed.

“Not that I know of, although I’ve never actually seen them. The local command believed it, though, and I see no particular reason not to believe it.” I thought for a minute, trying to remember what I’d heard. “They use mostly poison down there, because the kudzu has a big heart or something deep underground, so if you burn them, they’re already sprouting up again almost before your back is turned on them.”

“Whoa! Like zombies! Salad of the living dead!” she said, almost delighted.

I looked at her closely. “The crazy thing is that the damned things are edible, almost like a potato, or so they say, but they have to douse them with so much poison before they’re dead enough to stop strangling people that they’re too toxic to eat by the time they’re passive enough to cook. How in the world did you know that?”

“I already told you, Sapphire dear. Have you forgotten already? I’m understanding things differently than I ever could have done before. I’m even starting to feel how you communicate somehow with your bandersnatches. It… tickles… somehow inside my head, and every once in a while — not very often so far — I can even see, or think that I see, what they’re seeing, although I can’t even guess how they do it, because they don’t seem to have any eyes.”

The hair on the back of my neck rose up. “I feel it too, more often, I think, than you do, but then I’ve been changed longer than you have too. I wondered if I was imagining what I thought I was envisioning about the bandersnatches, though, because I’ve always had a pretty active imagination.”

“Not me,” she said cheerfully. “I was pretty much down-to-earth and boring.”

“I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear you say that….” Then I stopped speaking when I realized what that might have sounded like. “Not that you’re boring, of course, but that someone else was experiencing the same strange sensations that I was. I’ve been a little worried about the possibility that I might be crazy, because I didn’t dare say what I was experiencing. At first I thought that they could hear me, just Gumball at first, although I couldn’t figure out what the bandersnatches used for ears, but then I realized that they could figure out what I wanted them to do even when I didn’t actually say anything. I finally realized that they could hear me even when I didn’t actually speak, which means that I can ‘talk’ to the bandersnatches, for example — or I think I can — and they ‘listen’ to me, even when they’re underground.”

“I had that impression, right from the start, but wasn’t quite sure whether you were the nutcase or I was.” She grinned at me.

I grinned back, to show her that there were no hard feelings. “Oh, you can’t help that. We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad….”

She looked at me suspiciously. “Why do I have the impression that you’re making fun of me?”

“Oh, but I’m not at all,” I said quickly. “It’s a quote from a book I found in the library. I liked it because it featured talking plants, but it was realistic, since some of the plants weren’t friendly at all. On the other hand, it was hopeful, because everything turned out all right in the end.”

“They had books about intelligent plants?”

“Quite a few, actually, and some of them were quite frightening, like The Day of the Triffids, which seemed quite similar to our situation here, except that armed gangs of male thugs crept around trying to enslave one group of survivors or another, which seemed silly, since the plants were the real danger. Half the damned book was spent either quarrelling or escaping from any of several crazed groups of human beings, with very little attention being paid to their common enemy, the poisonous triffids.”

“But isn’t that almost exactly what we have here?” Beryl asked me. “We don’t have armed gangs walking around, sure — it’s too dangerous — but what in Harry’s Holy Hell are the officer corps and the city leaders other than an organized gang looking out mostly for themselves? When’s the last time you heard anyone talk about actually fighting the plants, or trying to win this endless war? We live like rats, sneaking around on the edges of the world inhabited by plants, daring only to sneak out to snatch bits of food, which we proudly bring back to the nest while the biggest rats take all the best stuff. You don’t see them volunteering for many of the dangerous assignments, do you?”

I blinked in surprise. I’d thought about that myself; aside from the Looies — who just barely qualified as officers — just a tad more elevated in status than the Sergeants, who often had considerably more real power, none of the officers walked out through the sally ports these days, and of course the civilian Castle officials never had, at least not that I knew of.

“You’re right, of course. They’re in exactly the positions that the ‘gang leaders’ in the story sought for themselves. In fact, the book addressed the problem of scavenging as a way of life, since it’s unsustainable in the long run. Eventually, we have to grow our own food or we’ll all starve.”

“Duuh! Just now figuring that out? Most everybody knows that, but nobody can figure out how to manage it in the face of the dangerous plants, and our ‘leaders’ are too timid to try. They’ve all got cushy jobs, and people to wait on them hand and foot, so why should they rock the boat?” She paused, looking me up and down and then said, “That’s why we like you, you know, and follow your lead, for the most part, because you actually lead instead of just ordering people around like most of the officers back home. When the scavenger crew from the Citadel arrived, you didn’t tell someone else to confront them, but told us all to hide while you put your own ass right on the front line.”

“Well, it didn’t seem right to ask you all to face up to what might be a fight between you and your former pals. It wouldn’t have been right.”

“Since when do officers worry about what’s ‘fair,’ much less ‘right?’ ” she asked wryly, not expecting any answer. “Not only do you never ask us to do anything you wouldn’t do, you explain what’s happening, and what you’re thinking, before you commit us to anything.” She stuck her tongue in her cheek for a moment. “In fact, as armies go, our small band of sisters is a hell of a democracy.”

I blushed.

 

 

The City looked odd from this direction. Where my ‘square mountain’ had stood out against the skyline approaching it from the west in the morning, with that vast expanse of glass still in shadow, approaching it from the Citadel meant that the glare of the sun on glass made it obvious that it had been made by human hands, and it was partially concealed behind quite a few lesser buildings most of which had their own windowy glare, so the entire settlement instantly resolved into unambiguous human artifice, not nature, which made me feel a little foolish, in retrospect.

We’d been jogging along for quite some time, trying to catch up with the rest of our party, when we heard the first of a closely-spaced series of unmistakeable HE explosions, which could mean only one thing, Horticulturists, probably from the Castle.

“Harry’s Stainless Steel Balls!” I shouted, already lengthening my stride. “Let’s go!” I hoped to hell my crew had sense enough to stay out of harm’s way until we got there.

As we ran, I did a mental inventory; all we had in the way of weapons was one rocket launcher with no rockets — ‘Note to self: Never use all your ammunition!’ — and the knowledge of where we’d stashed a cache of missiles. The rest of our crew had the crossbows and plenty of bolts, but if those idiots from the Castle were using napalm and rockets, they’d be hopelessly outmatched until Beryl and I got there.

In desperation, I cast ahead for any trace of Gumball and his pals, but I couldn’t sense their presence at all, and then I almost wept for grief and rage when I thought that they might have been killed by the Castle creeps.

I didn’t weep, though; I ran faster.

 

 

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

Copyright © 2012-2013 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved

 

 

Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Five Frontal Assault

 

 

If you know both yourself and your enemy,
you can win a hundred battles without jeopardy.

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

 

As we reached the edge of the tall grass I motioned Beryl off to the right side while I took the left, knowing that she was well aware of our need to assess the situation from as much concealment as we could arrange.

I crawled through the grass to as close as I could find without revealing myself, but could see no one on the road leading back into town, other than the remains of what must have been a bandersnatch on the sidewalk, about three blocks down, surrounded by the debris and scorch marks typical of HE/goop explosions. You can always tell, because the magnesium in the goop mixture leaves behind a white residue that covers everything, and the explosive, of course, blows stuff up. If that bandersnatch was Gumball, somebody was going to be in a world of hurt.

I crept back toward better cover and made my way over toward Beryl. She had binoculars, which I admired, probably left over from her former HC kit. I’d seen some in one or another of the department stores, but hadn’t been thinking of reconnaissance at the time. I waited patiently until she’d wriggled her way back to cover before speaking to her. “I saw nothing untoward,” I said quietly, “but clear signs of some sort of engagement. One of those missiles went off in the middle of the road we left from and killed a bandersnatch.”

“Same here,” she said, “except I didn’t see that. If they follow normal procedures, they’ll hightail it back home as quick as they can.”

“That’s my guess as well,” I replied, “in which case we ought to try and intercept them on their way out of town, since they might have taken some of our people prisoners.”

“Flanking?” she said.

“I think so. I’ll take the right hand, since I explored it thoroughly when I first arrived, and left a cache of missiles. I’ll take the launcher as well, since I think I can travel with it quicker than you can yet.”

“Will do,” she said, and headed back the way I’d already checked out.

I had a bit of time to spare, waiting for her to get into position, so I tried to focus on feeling where Gumball was, and everyone, which I hadn’t tried before. I wished that I’d thought to bring a tarot deck along, because I found the cards useful in meditation, since I could pick and choose those that felt most appropriate to my purpose, and then try out different relationships between the pieces of whatever puzzled me. Trump eight, Strength seemed most appropriate, the complement to trump one, the Magician. Both cards represent spiritual power and relationships, but the Magician implies ‘power over,’ while Strength is more like ‘power with,’ which is how I felt about Gumball and his friends. Then I rifled through a mental collection of the cards, but my attention was quickly caught by the five of swords, which shows a reversal or usurpation of power, possibly associated with deceit or unethical conduct, which seemed almost perfectly congruent with the present situation. ‘Well, treason is what you make of it, isn’t it?’ I thought. ‘When the system is corrupt, and oppresses those it rules over, we have a duty to rebel in pursuit of greater liberty for all. The close proximity of water, though, implies that the solution lies in the unconscious.’ I reached deeper and felt a stirring. ‘The Queen of Cups! I’m on the shore of an ocean, contemplating the depths, symbolized by the covered chalice I hold in my hands as well as by the deeper waters before me.’ I tried studiously to ignore the fact that it also represented nurturance and motherhood in all its many ramifications. Time enough to think about that later, since I was bound to act now. ‘Times and tides…, ebb and flood…. Go with the flow,’ I thought.

Then I heard a click from Beryl, and became the wave.

I was across the gap between the tall grass and the nearest house in two and one half seconds. I know, because I counted, and I could see Beryl out of the corner of one eye, not much behind. I was aware of her even as she disappeared around the corner of the house and we started running toward the other edge of town, listening carefully for any signs of their party, whatever it consisted of. I stopped for an instant to pick up a crossbow, a quiver of bolts, and a small satchel of missiles I’d stashed some time ago, part of the remainder of my salvaged horde, plus some of those I’d ‘liberated’ from the Citadel crew who’d been ambushed and transformed, one of whom was now the lovely Beryl and almost as dangerous as I was. I hoped that the other members of our little gang were being cagey, as we’d practiced, but was still worried about Chert, who was still working on choosing a less revealing name. ‘Well, they say that the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully,’ I thought, so I sincerely hoped that Chert had been inspired by mortal fear to dissembling creativity.

We hadn’t been running for more than five minutes before we heard women’s voices cursing — bless their clever hearts — still invisible, but no more than a block or two ahead.

I put on a bit more speed, trusting Beryl to do the same, and managed to set myself on a side street in time to see Beryl run past on the next street over, stop, and then come down the street toward me. We couldn’t actually risk using the missiles, at least not until we’d sussed out their relative positions, but we could certainly focus their attention.

At a nod, we both poked our heads around the corner long enough to get off one quick shot each with our crossbows, and then we both took off back the way we’d come, so as not to be there when they came to investigate. I was pretty sure that their effective force would have been diminished, since I knew that I’d got my target in his kneecap and he was hors de combat. I suspected that Beryl had managed the same general effect, but it didn’t matter in the long run.

As we ran back down the side streets, I pondered my next move. Seeing a metal staircase affixed to a building, I came to a sudden decision and leapt up to catch the railing at edge of the bottom of the stairs, which ended well above street level. Swinging over, I went up three flights — making as little noise as possible, but not too careful, because I knew that the suits made hearing anything other than the radio a bit dicey — and lifted the window there, breaking the lock in the process. I looked down at Beryl and shrugged, leaving the next decision to her, since I was soon to be out of touch.

She waved a half-salute and ran back the way we’d come, trusting me to get their attention while she got herself into position.

I climbed in, finding myself in what appeared to be a residence, since there was a bed, a dresser, and some sort of video display. I wasn’t all that interested, though, and quickly opened a door on the other side of the room, finding myself in a hall. I chose a direction at random, seeing that there was a turn at either end of the long hall, ran down and around the corner, finding myself in another hall lined with identical doors, all of which had numbers on them. I chose 405, kicked through the door when I found that it was locked, then found myself in another room looking almost the same as the other, except there was a different picture on the wall.

I wasn’t interested in anything other than the window looking out on the street, so I ran over to it and looked cautiously down toward the street. This side didn’t have a stairway, which suited me perfectly, since I had a clear view of six Horticulturists in suits looking around, two on the ground, with our women behind them, who were in turn guarded by two guys in suits with flamethrowers pointed at my friends.

That ticked me off, so I unlocked the window, opened it quitely, and shot the two guards with two quick bolts through the back of their kneecaps. They wouldn’t be walking away from this, no matter how the fight went overall.

They must have made some sort of noise on the radio, because their number one turned around, saw me, and raised his own rocket launcher.

I made a quick decision and shot him through the throat with another bolt, since I didn’t want him burning down my city, and figured that losing the boss, plus the two invalids, might make the rest of them easier to intimidate.

It didn’t work the first time, since another guy raised his flamethrower, but I shot him too — not quite as fatally — through his right shoulder, and noticed that Beryl had hit him from behind with another bolt through his knee, so he dropped as well.

In the meantime, our girls had handily grabbed the rocket launchers from the backs of their former guards, so by the time the rest had finished turning back to see what was happening, they found the situation somewhat changed.

Four of their party of ten were on the ground, and obviously in no position to get up, although three of those were still visibly alive. The six still walking were faced with a small gang of credible opponents — their former prisoners — right in front of them, two of them armed with the most powerful weapon in the HC inventory, and one looking down on them from very good cover, also armed, with another armed assassin somewhere behind them. Wisely, they decided that discretion was the better part of valor and ostentatiously dropped their various weapons, including two rocket launchers, then raised their hands.

Keeping the crossbow aimed directly at one of them, held now with one hand, I gestured toward my own head, tapping it, then pointed at the six of them.

They were fairly quick to understand, removing their helmets and dropping them on the ground, so I called down to them, “I accept your surrender. Step away from your weapons and lie face down on the road; someone will be with you shortly.” Then I called down the street, a little louder, “Beryl, if you have a bit of the good stuff handy, try dosing up the dead or dying guy and we’ll see what happens. It may not be too late to save him. I’ll stay up here to pick off anyone with a mind to break their parole. Do you guys understand?”

They nodded, looking a little pale. Not that I blamed them; one minute they’re sitting on top of the world, with a new source of food, possibly important prisoners, and the prospect of a triumphant return; then the next, ignominious defeat at the hands of a couple of women, painful injuries to some, and horrendous blows to each and every one of their masculine egos to put the final flourish on their utter and abject failure. The poor dears. I almost felt sorry for them.

“Then sit tight while my companions see to your wounded and dying. I’ll wait here, just in case….”

 

 

It didn’t take that long, but I got a little bored perched up in a window, so when they were all nicely bound I took a bit of rope from my duffle, lowered my stuff to the ground — not wishing to test the deceleration limits of the HE missiles — and swung my legs over the ledge. I quickly manoeuvred until I was hanging from the ledge by one hand, then dropped heavily down to the street. The soles of my feet hurt a little, since I was wearing plain walking shoes rather than combat boots, but I was otherwise raring to go.

I picked up my stuff and walked over to where Beryl was working on their leader, who now had his helmet off so I could see his face.

I pressed my tongue against my lower teeth as I struggled to control myself with truly mixed emotions. It was my father, the man who’d raised me; the man who’d betrayed my mother to his superiors and then stood calmly by when she was thrown to her death; the man who’d sent me out into the world to die; and here we were, our rôles in life reversed. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

 

 

Beryl was giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and I was very glad that it was her and not me, so I watched until he coughed up blood and started breathing on his own; she’d evidently spat some cheese into his mouth — a sovereign remedy for most things that ailed one — and then kept him alive long enough for the stuff to begin its work of healing.

She looked up at me and responded to my curt gesture, backing away from him.

“Well, Captain, ill-met by moonlight, I see.”

He looked up at me, incomprehension flooding his face.

“I imagine that you must be finding it difficult to speak just now, so I’ll keep my questions simple. Did my officers fail to identify themselves to you? Nod your head if so, otherwise, consider yourself under arrest for mutinous assault on a superior officer, disobeying a legitimate order from a superior, treason, and whatever else I can think of between now and your formal court martial.”

He blanched, obviously frightened, but didn’t dissemble, for which I had to give him credit; he might have been a cruel and heartless taskmaster, a callous martinet, and an all-around first-class jerk, but at least he was honest.

“You engaged” I said, “in a firefight with my immediate command, and in the process murdered at least one of our liaisons with the plant kingdom; were any others of them harmed?”

He shook his head and one of the others spoke up, “Begging your pardon, Ma’am, but the rest of those monsters ran away somehow. we chased them, but when we turned a corner they were gone.”

I felt an immediate sense of relief, but schooled my features to dispassion. “Who fired the missile which burned him alive?”

“I did,” he answered, “begging your pardon, Ma’am, but ‘him?’ ”

“Him,” I said, “and all of them very helpful, until you came along.” I included his companions with a dismissive gesture.

“I don’t understand, Ma’am,” he said.

“No, I suppose you don’t.”

 

 

I had two of the women escort our prisoners off to the same holding area I’d had set up for the foraging party I’d sent back to the Citadel, since we already had a latrine dug. Before they left, I let them know that they were on their honor to refrain from trying to escape, since they were being held by their own forces, not an enemy, and had neither the duty nor the right to return to their own outpost. Another benefit of being an officer’s child was that I wasn’t completely hopeless as a barracks lawyer. I’d been drilled on military history, customs, and deportment since I was very young, so it was ‘in my bones,’ so to speak.

My father was still unable to speak, so he wasn’t in any position to argue. I wasn’t worried about them in any case, since two women would be more than enough to handle them, now that the men had been disarmed.

As soon as they’d marched off, I talked with Beryl about the Castle. “They must have exploited everything worth taking in the town they were using as a larder for them to have chanced setting off into the unknown,” I theorized, “so they’ll be back.”

In which case, shouldn’t we pay them a visit with a couple of our modified missiles?

“I’d like to avoid that until we’ve had a chance to put some of our transformative cheese into their food supply. The ærosol is too chancy, since it will hit the people who work outside — that is, the lowest on the totem pole — before it affects the ‘upper classes,’ so I’m afraid of setting off mass murders amongst the general populace before the transformations hit the officers and makes the maintenance of ‘purity’ moot.”

Beryl thought about this for a minute and then said, “Let’s go find Gumball and his remaining friends. All we need is a plausible ‘delivery’ of the food to the area outside the gates, and if we’re ‘killed’ before we make the actual gate, someone will be sure to haul in our leavings.”

I stared at her in awe. “What are you these days, a mere Major? Remind me to bump you up to Colonel, at least, or perhaps a Brigadier. In fact, take your pick; the pay’s the same, either way.” I grinned for both of us, since our notional ‘army’ paid no salary at all.

“Oh, Brigadier, of course,” she said cheerfully. “Brigadier Beryl has a pleasing sound, while Colonel Beryl sounds like a tongue-twister gone bad. Young children would challenge each other to say it three times fast and then laugh when it got mixed up with ‘cannibal,’ or something equally silly.” Then she looked at me sideways and said, “On the other hand, ‘Cannibal’ Farquhar sounds bloodthirsty as hell, and might enhance my fearsome image.”

“Let’s do both, then,” I said laughing. “As a Brigadier, you’ll obviously have been a Colonel at some time in the past, and that’ll give us the opportunity to spin fantastic tales of adventure and derring-do for you. Colonel ‘Cannibal’ Farquhar and the Curse of the Swamp Thing, or maybe ‘Cannibal’ Farquhar in the Caves of Despair…. We’ll make a fortune off the serial publication rights alone!”

“Why do I have to be the heroine in all of them? What about ‘Star’ Sapphire and the Deadly Encounter? In fact, I think we should have a whole line of titles aimed at different tastes. So far, we’re ignoring the romance marketplace entirely! We could have my stories be adventure stuff, and then have yours be breathless kisses and mushy whispers in the dark! We’ll split the main genre markets between us and clean up big time! I can see it now; ‘Star’ Sapphire Meets Her Match, followed by Star’s Rendezvous, and then Fifty Shades of Blue, to match your eyes. We could even come out with a clothing line as well, with a ‘hook’ like that.”

We both laughed at that, as children do, letting go of the oppressive fear that had dogged us during our own pursuit of our friends and allowing pure joy to reënter our lives and suffuse our spirits.

“But before we can retire in luxury on the proceeds of our book and clothing sales, we have to find our other friends,” I said. “I can still feel their terror, although they feel safe where they are, deep underground. Let’s go a little uptown, where there’s a shop I know of.”

Beryl looked puzzled, but was willing enough to follow my lead as we jogged off toward an eclectic little bodega where they had all sorts of spiritual supplies on offer, from candles to herbs, and from books to tarot cards to altar supplies.

It was relatively nondescript, a tiny little store well off the major boulevards, but it stood out from the rest because of a notable lack of ostentation, the only real clue to its nature being an odd symbol woven into a circular window pieced together with individual shards of stained glass above the narrow entry door. After quite a bit of searching through the library, I’d discovered that it represented the eye of the Egyptian God Thoth, a Moon deity who was associated with wisdom, justice, the sciences, and writing, a heavy burden for one God to carry.

Beryl was intrigued as we walked through the door into the dark interior, although it was too dark to see much at all. “What is this place, anyway?”

“It’s called ‘The Witches’ Familiar,’ but it sold all sorts of stuff, from what they called ‘yoga mats,’ to various herbs, to ‘occult supplies,’ one of which we’re looking for right now.” I rummaged around behind one particular counter, the general layout of which I remembered from exploring it before my flashlight gave up the ghost. “Here they are!” I said. “Let’s take a couple of them outside.”

We walked out to the sidewalk again, into the sunlight.

“Here we have a deck of tarot cards,” I explained, holding one of the Rider-Waite decks out to her. “It’s a meditative tool that represents a compilation and juxtaposition of many different Western mystical traditions. I have another back at my hotel room, but these particular decks are commonplace, and it’s the one I know the most about, so it’s the one I use.”

Beryl took it, but looked puzzled, which made sense, since I’d never told her about them before. In fact, I’d only discovered their existence through the library, when I’d been searching for some sort of explanation for what I was experiencing with the Bandersnatches, but especially Gumball. The whole notion of being aware of things one couldn’t see with one’s eyes or feel with one’s hands was so completely contrary to the Horticulturist worldview that I’d kept it a close secret, even from my resurrected companions, but after our recent talk, I wanted to share my thoughts about the cards, so I began, “They were invented, I think, as gambling tokens, almost like dice or dominoes, but much more complicated, and since gamblers tend to be a superstitious lot, they quickly became associated with fortunetelling and ‘luck,’ then ‘fate,’ and then other imponderable qualities and things. They’ve been around in one form or another for more than fifteen thousand years since their beginnings in ancient China, but soon became so popular and standardized that one could find them all around the world. At some point — sources disagree on this — they began to be used as memory aids, possibly springing from the use of the same technology to produce what were called ‘devotional cards,’ pictures of various Gods, Goddesses, Saints, and so on, all of whom had very clear associations with any of a wide range of ideas, and one can, in fact, find packs of ‘divination’ cards with depictions of Gods and Goddesses — even Saints and Saintesses — in this very shop.”

“Surely you don’t believe in fortune-telling! That’s…!”

I looked at her owlishly, ducking my head a little to partially hide my smile. “Not at all, although I believe you were going to say something like ‘silly women’s superstition….’ I believe in solving problems as quickly and decisively as I can. The cards are a stylized method of examining and thinking about a lot of possible outcomes very quickly and picking the one that seems most likely. Think of them as a primitive ‘data processing computer,’ like we had before the War, but with a completely manual interface powered partly by the psychic powers of the user’s mind, something like an abacus, only far more versatile.” I paused to stare at her. “If one has ‘extra-sensory’ powers — and it’s very clear that at least the two of us have experienced something way outside the realm of ordinary experience and perception — why not make use of a tool which has been refined for just that purpose over a thousand years or more?”

She started to open her mouth, then closed it.

“Exactly so,” I said smugly. “Now watch and listen.” I quickly opened my new package and rifled through it, looking for the three cards I’d examined mentally before I ran after our captured sisters. “You can look at the same cards from your own deck, if you’d like, but please don’t touch mine. I understand from at least some of the books I’ve read that it’s a bad idea to allow other people to touch your cards, although I suspect that at least some of the problem is psychological, like having someone grab your toothbrush by mistake in the washroom. Even if they don’t stick it into their mouth, it makes you feel a little icky when you put it back in your own mouth.” I shook my head, remembering more than a few times experiencing exactly that scenario back in the Barracks, and a few interactions that were far more disquieting. Anyway, here’s the first card I thought of, Strength, which shows a woman embracing a lion, a type of large carnivore we don’t have around these parts any more. The interesting thing about the card is that the lion seems to be smiling at her, and there’s a mathematical sign above her head that represents infinity, an utter lack of boundaries. That sign is seen on only one other card, The Magician, whose posture represents the first principle of alchemy, ‘As above, so below!’ and demonstrates the interconnectedness of all things. The woman in the Strength card represents the same principle, and wears the flowers that the magician points to as a girdle on her own body, showing that she herself is fruitful, that she and the animal share the same essential nature, and that both she and the lion embrace each other in a loving and mutually-supportive relationship.

“Like you and Gumball!” she cried out, struck by sudden enlightenment.

“Indeed,” I said. “Exactly like Gumball and I. If we were to create a modern tarot, a woman and a bandersnatch embracing might evoke the same feelings and ideas that this card is meant to carry, in part that when a woman is centered in her own power, she is capable of almost anything and has nothing to fear, but the symbolism doesn’t end there. The Strength card also represents the Hebrew letter ‘tet,’ the ‘serpent,’ which refers — indirectly — to the Shakti power that lies at the base of our wombs, the Goddess power of giving birth and creating new life, the so-called ‘Kundalini’ power that has the potential to open us up to the entire Universe in a spirit of love and generosity.”

“Shakti?” she asked, succinctly. “Kundalini?”

“Those are the ancient Sanskrit terms, but the mere names don’t really matter, because the whole point of naming them is to allow yourself to think about them and learn to evoke and control them, just as we’re trying to learn how to fully utilize our connection to the bandersnatches.” I reached out to lightly touch her hand with one finger. “When I touch you, for example, don’t you feel something there that wasn’t there when you were just a man, something both more powerful and more intimate? If I touched you in exactly the same way with a stick, wouldn’t you be instantly able to tell the difference in perception? It’s the same way that we can touch the bandersnatches, but we can feel the life inside them somehow, where we couldn’t have done so in quite the same way before.”

“Okay,” she nodded, but still unsure. “But what do these cards have to do with any of this?”

“In every religion or philosophy, there are visible symbols that somehow concentrate the essence of particular beliefs — or facts — within that system. So a Roman Catholic might feel a certain power associated with a rosary, or a crucifix, beyond the mere materials used to make it. These things become infused with a higher, or at least more particular, meaning than the physical object might seem to imply. In Sanskrit, these sorts of visual representations are called ‘yantras,’ which means exactly an ‘instrument’ or ‘machine,’ and are purported to offer both a shorthand method of focusing the attention and of bringing about certain spiritual experiences.”

“So your ‘Strength’ card both depicts a feminine method of relating to the larger universe and a method of creating an awareness of that relationship inside yourself!”

“Exactly!” I said. “The infinity sign above the woman’s head symbolizes that power, I think, and shows that she’s particularly aware of it when she’s touching another living thing, but the ancient philosophers had identified the source and ultimate center of that power as arising from the base of the spine, essentially the womb, and as essentially feminine, the force of creation itself and the agent of every movement or change.”

“And we’re looking to mobilize that power to help us find our friends!”

“Just so. While it may be ‘chance’ that led me to select that card, it was also luck, because it was exactly what I needed. Whether or not it’s some sort of weird prophecy or magic, it’s what I want, so I can use it as a tool to help me in my quest.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding. “So what comes next?”

My next card was the Five of Swords,” I pulled it out to show it to her. “Notice the subtle imagery, which shows a windswept landscape of threatening clouds on the shore of an ocean, with one individual looking at two others — one of whom seems distracted, whilst the other appears to be grief-stricken — while behind their backs he’s taken possession of all the swords. Taking that image as a clue to further thought, I instantly realized that we’d been betrayed or defeated in some sudden manner, and that we needed to act quickly or we’d lose everything. The ‘storm’ was upon us, and we needed to recover the initiative.”

“Which we did!” she said.

“We recovered. If you think of us as being represented by the two figures on the shore, we turned around and saw the theft of our metaphorical ‘swords,’ and so were able to recover the initiative by instantly responding in a coöperative manner. You’ll notice that in the image, the two figures are preoccupied with their own problems, so if we’d been looking for guidance, it would have been there, but it’s not a prescription, just a graphic depiction of a problem common to similar situations, more of an emergency checklist than a ready-made solution.”

“Okay,” she said. “I can see that, but did you draw another card? What did it say?”

I laughed. “It didn’t say anything; it’s just a piece of cardboard, after all is said and done, but it contained a powerful suggestion.” I held out the card I’d picked. “It was the Queen of Cups, which depicts a woman at the peak of her power. She’s sitting on her throne at the very edge of the great ocean which stretches out beneath her feet. In fact, she already has one foot in the water, and her robes may, or may not, be wet, which instantly reminded me of the story of King Cnut of Denmark and England, who is said to have demonstrated the limits of merely human power by setting his throne at the edge of the sea, where it was quickly inundated by the incoming tide. Since she’s already wet, it shows that she’s no Goddess, standing aside from Earthly limitations, but an ordinary woman with great responsibilities. She’s holding a cup in her hand, but it’s covered, which suggests that the gift she carries is hidden, certainly from others, and perhaps even from herself, because it’s guarded by winged figures like the Cherubim which guarded the Arc of the Covenant in the Bible. Exactly what that means is a mystery, although it may be that she herself carries the Holy of Holies within her very being, but it’s a conundrum, as invisible to our everyday perceptions as the depths of the sea are hidden from our sight.” I paused, then added, “All-in-all, it seemed like a very good omen.”

Beryl thought about that for a long moment, then said, “So the ‘answer’ is inside us, but it’s also out in the world.”

“Something like that,” I said, smiling. “Ain’t nothin’ easy. Let’s go find Gumball and his friends. I’m sure they’d like to see us.”

“But how do we do that? I can feel them hiding, just as you say, but I can’t tell where they might be!”

She was a little agitated, as might be expected, since I was in the same boat, but hoped that together we might work it out. ‘Two heads, they say, are better than one…,’ I thought.

“In the Sepher Yetzirah — an ancient book of spiritual philosophy — the Hebrew Letters, and thus the Tarot Trumps, since they’re psychically equivalent, are assigned three-dimensional directions.” I quickly picked out The Hermit, The Chariot, The Moon, and The Devil and fanned them out. “These four cards represent the cardinal directions, but beneath the surface of the Earth.” I indicated each in order, “North, East, South, West.”

She looked at them, puzzled.

“If I’m right,” I explained, “these will help us to focus our unconscious awareness of their location into tangible knowledge. Just think of our friends, then think of the directions shown by the cards, now choose one.” I presented them again, “North, East, South, West. The Hermit, The Chariot, The Moon, or The Devil.”

After hesitating, she reached out and pointed toward The Moon card. “This one?” she said, more than slightly unsure of her selection.

“Can you explain your choice?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “It just looked… right for them, somehow.”

I smiled. “It’s the same one I would have chosen,” I said, “and I’ve been thinking about these things longer than you have, so it seems clear to me that we share more than a simple ‘infection.’ First, of course, is that the card looks right to me as well, but also it’s the right direction for other reasons. We’re visual creatures, and pictures can… resonate… with our intuition more easily than words sometimes. That’s why churches and other holy places more often than not have symbols on or in them, prominently displayed, instead of a bunch of written words. There’s an old saying, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words,’ so that deck of seventy-eight cards you’re holding is worth at least seventy-eight thousand words. Not a full-length novel, but at least a novella, maybe more, because the information in it is very densely packed, with many layers of meaning piled on top of each other.”

“What did you mean by ‘the right direction’ exactly?” she asked.

“Well, quite a few things, actually, which is the advantage of thinking in pictures. First, the two parties of foragers we know of came from the east and from the west, so it seems likely — after our mutual insight — that the bandersnatches might have been worried about those directions. Second, and perhaps most important, the bandersnatches are somewhere between plants and animals. They obviously have leaves, so photosynthesis is going on, but they move around and have teeth, so they obviously eat things as well, and are ‘animals’ at least in the sense that they’re filled with intelligence and volition.. If you were a plant, which direction might you lean, considering that we’re in the northern hemisphere?”

“South? Toward the Sun?” she said hesitantly.

I positively beamed. “Too right!” I said, then added, “but the card itself is right, too! The ‘Moon’ in the card is a very curious affair, half Moon, but half Sun, and it seems to be raining some type of energy on the ground, and certainly the bandersnatches live comfortably both in and out of sunlight. Further, the dogs, or jackals, whatever they are, seem frightened, so they could easily stand in for our bandersnatches.”

“But isn’t that just chance?”

“Of course it is, but part of intuition is being open to suggestion. Almost any card might have led us in the same direction if we thought about it long enough. It’s like the ‘babble effect’ one hears sometimes in a crowd of people. Everything is jumbled, but then you’ll hear something that’s suddenly coherent and realize that it’s pertinent in some way you hadn’t even thought of. The only thing that’s changed for us, for those who’ve gone through the complete transformation, is that we’re sometimes hearing other voices from other rooms.”

“It’s really real, then?” she asked.

“It is,” I said, wrapping her hand in mine. “Shall we be on our way? With two of us paying close attention, we should be able to find and rescue our frightened friends very soon.”

She smiled. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Hey, Babe!” I grinned. “We’re all we’ve got right now, the first true citizens of a brave new world.”

We started walking south, toward the Sun.

 

 

Gumball and company were lurking to the south of us, and were very glad to see us, although they had to be coaxed out from under the foundations of a very large bank. It took the both of us looking around in all directions — I was convinced that our perceptions worked both ways, and that the bandersnatches were as aware of us as we were of them —and talking to them to convince them that we were completely alone before they finally roiled up out of the pavement like green bubbles out of a pot of very thick soup. As it turned out, it wasn’t all that hard to find them, once we were walking in the right direction, because they’d made a hell of a mess out of the street and sidewalk when they’d finally ducked underground to hide.

They were like children sometimes, as naïve as toddlers, who are convinced that they become invisible when they cover their own eyes. I couldn’t help but smile.

Of course, they were a lot bigger than the average toddler, so it’s a good thing that they were generally quite cheerful, because I’d hate to see one in the midst of a childish tantrum.

On our way back, the five remaining bandersnatches — including my precious Gumball! — were so happy that they caromed around the street like a bunch of hooligans, so I had to have strong words with them before they broke too many plate glass windows. Whatever it was that the stores and offices contained, it wouldn’t be much improved if the rain got in, so I wanted to keep our new city as nice as possible.

To distract them, I tried to hold an image of the warehouse we’d discovered with the garden supplies and convince them to go look for it, so they could do something useful with their enthusiasm.

Well, they all thought that was a great idea and were off like a shot, rolling down the road like giant tumbleweeds.

“You know,” Beryl observed as we walked along behind them, “it’s curious that your round friends are so friendly toward humans. Since we stopped trying to kill them, the dandelions sort of ignore us, but these creatures seem awfully anxious to please, for some reason. Is it your charming personality?” She smiled to let me know that it was a joke, because I tended toward intensity sometimes.

“Nah,” I assured her. “Gumball and his friends — or at least their distant ancestors — have been living close to human beings for many thousands of years. The ancient inhabitants of the Americas actually cultivated them for their nutritious seeds, so they’ve been bred to thrive in close association with people.”

“Really? They don’t look anything like the plants we see on the sides of canned food, or at least none that I can remember.”

“I saw one once, a close relative anyway, but it was on a bottled alcoholic drink called a ‘mint julep,’ all of which were confiscated by one of the top officers. Anyway, the mints are typically aromatic plants used for flavoring, mostly, but these had particularly nutritious seeds, and not much scent at all. I looked them up in the library, but they’re called ‘Salvia hispanica,’ — one of a large number of examples of a subtype of the mints called ‘sages’ — that the ancient native peoples called chian, which meant ‘oily,’ referring to the oil that the Nahuatl people extracted from the seeds. I don’t know exactly when they started moving around, but I did find one reference to people keeping them as pets even hundreds of years ago, so it must have happened a long time before the present day.”

Beryl looked at me and shrugged. She was obviously unimpressed with origin stories. I could partly sympathize, since the present was hard enough to handle on its own without worrying about exactly how it got that way.

‘Oh, well,’ I thought. ‘You can’t win’em all.’ “Anyway,” I said, “that’s enough theory for now. Let’s get going on the new prisoners, then work on neutralizing the Castle, now that we’ve recovered some of the key players on our team.”

 

 

“I’m not looking forward to this,” I said, as we walked back toward the eastern suburbs.

“What? Facing down your father?”

‘Harry’s Name! How does she do that?’ “Yeah, but mostly going back to dealing with what looks like a perpetual revolution against every hive of Horticulturists on this continent, and then probably the world. I hadn’t gone quite so far in my thinking to imagine that all this —” I gestured to include the known universe “— would be my life’s work.”

She smiled at me and said, “Well, it beats knitting, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know, Beryl…,” I mused aloud, “…that old rocking chair is starting to sound pretty good to me now, just sitting by the fire and knitting sweaters by the yard….”

She looked elaborately puzzled. “I don’t think they measure sweaters by the yard, dear. Perhaps you’re thinking of scarves.”

“They will my sweaters,” I said with misplaced confidence, seeing as how I didn’t actually know how to knit. ‘How hard could it be?’ I thought. ‘Surely there’ll be a book on knitting in the library….’ “Remind me to learn how to knit,” I said. “Now that I think about it, I used to see women knitting all the time, back at the Castle, so it might be an excellent enhancement of our cover story.”

Gumball and company chose that moment to find us, so of course we had to make a detour to share their moment of triumph. It wasn’t far out of our way, since the garden supply warehouse was on the eastern side of town, and we really ought to have a few spares on hand, since they were so handy when we wanted to move large quantities around, and we were bound to leave at least one more of them behind when we delivered food to the Castle, which we had to do in any case, and very soon, since we already knew that they were desperate. Sending a Captain out to lead a foraging expedition was simply unheard of. That’s what Looies were for.

 

 

My father was on suicide watch by the time we left, later that same day. I had to give him credit for that, because he’d seen himself as threat to others as soon as he’d noticed the changes, and had instantly tried to escape, running straight toward the dandelions in hopes that they’d kill him before he infected his men. Unfortunately for his plan, by then the changes had gone far enough — they were amazingly quick after any sort of major injury, almost as if the dying body recognized the benefit and embraced the changes — that the dandelions no longer perceived him as a threat, and so did no such thing. Coral — Chert had finally chosen a name — had told me that he was actually chasing the reapers around trying to throw himself on their razor-sharp fins when she caught him. Go figure. Not that I’d forgiven him for my mother’s death, of course, but still….

 

 

It was a sunny day, not too hot, with a hint of breeze to keep us comfortable as we walked toward the Castle, following the traces of a path my father and his squad had trodden through the grass on their way out. I finally got to see the famous ‘town,’ the one I’d missed completely, but it wasn’t much. It looked a lot like the suburbs of the city, but had a water tower and a tiny main street with a few shops and a restaurant spaced out along exactly three blocks and that was it, except that it was actually called ‘Main Street.’ I guess they’d had to convince themselves. Everything moveable had been ‘salvaged,’ of course, including the copper wire and plumbing in the walls, even under the floor, so it didn’t look anything like the sort of place you’d actually want to live in. I vowed then and there not to ever allow that sort of vandalism in our city.

Beryl was obviously thinking something along those same lines, because she suddenly said, “You know, from the viewpoint of human civilization as a whole, the ‘salvage’ expeditions look a lot more like pests.”

“Yeah,” I said. “This was obviously a lovely little community once. I don’t suppose that the former residents would appreciate what’s been done to it.” A lot of the destruction seemed wanton; every window had been broken, for example, or at least every one I’d seen so far, and quite a few of the houses and shops had been blown to smithereens and burned by what must have been HE missiles.

Beryl sighed. “It’s so much more obvious here than it was back in the city…, I suppose because the swath of destruction encompasses the whole town instead of just one neighborhood. It’s embarrassing to think that I was a part of it.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “if we’d either of us really excelled at the military mindset, I don’t suppose that we would have been sent out on punishment details to teach us a lesson, so it’s kind of fitting, don’t you think, that those who chafed most against the whole Horticulturist enterprise are those who aim to bring it down entirely.”

 

 

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

Copyright © 2012-2013 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved

 

 

Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Six Psychological Warfare

 

 

The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.

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

 

“Harry’s Holy Balls!” I cursed, as an HE missile flew at us quicker than I could think, the warhead at first barely visible as a black dot in the center of a ring of fire as it arced down from the top of the Castle wall and then expanding as it closed on our position. ‘Gumball! Now!’ I screamed mentally, or as near to it as I could, and then we were instantly weightless and falling as the ground collapsed beneath us and everything went dark. I couldn’t move and there was an oppressive stench of methane — or something organic and rank — that nearly had me gagging. Our expedition to my former home wasn’t going quite as smoothly as I might have wished.

Naturally, that’s when the rolling started and my queasy feeling turned to outright nausea as I was tumbled around the interior of what felt like a very big sack full of leaves and dirt. My eyes had closed, of course, at the first hint of grit, but it was still getting up my nose, in my ears, and I could just imagine the state of my hair by now. I couldn’t even move my hands and arms enough to try to cover them. “This is definitely not one of my favorite moments,” I somehow managed to think whilst my head — and all the rest of me — was quite literally in a whirl.

My lungs were almost bursting when Gumball finally spit me out onto the grassy prairie and I instantly clapped my hands to my face and eyes, trying to brush away the dirt from my mouth and eyes as quickly as possible so I could breathe and see — in exactly that order — without either choking or harming my eyes.

“Harry’s Words! Sapphire,” Beryl said. “What happened to you? I thought you were supposed to stay hidden.”

It took me a few moments to get myself back into working order, but then I said, “Sorry, so did I, but I forgot the first rule of Horticulturist strategy; Whenever you see something odd, blow things up. When you were swallowed up in the earth, they fired off a bunch of HE missiles at random, I think, one of which happened to be aimed directly at me!” I looked up at her and noticed that she looked awful, dirty and disheveled despite her protective suit, and only then figured out that I must look a lot worse. I looked down at my clothes as I struggled to my feet and saw that they were torn almost to shreds as well as filthy and winced. I’d really liked those slacks, and the blouse had been a perfect complement to them before my journey through the center of the earth. I grimaced slightly. ‘Scrapes and bruises are one thing, and a little dirt I could have taken in stride, but those trigger-happy fools have simply destroyed one of my cutest outfits! Hanging’s too good for them,’ I decided. “I think, however, that I can safely say that I know exactly how you felt the first time this happened to you.” I did my best to smile, although it felt a lot like I still had dirt in my teeth.

She looked at me for what seemed like a long time before she said, calmly enough, “Considering as how we had no idea what was happening, and thought that we were about to die, I doubt it.”

“Well, that’s a point,” I admitted, “but seeing an explosive missile streaking directly towards one’s head must be similarly disconcerting, and I had several moments of sheer terror when I almost fell into the maw of one of Gumball’s larger cousins at the beginning of my adventures, long before I found Gumball and his friends.” Then I reached out and took her hand. “Look, let’s not fight about this. It was just a joke, because I was frightened by my sudden and unexpected danger, and had to say something, which turned out to be stupid, as usual. You were incredibly brave to volunteer to jump in with both feet, as it were, knowing exactly how frightening it would be.”

She looked at me with a suspicious frown, but slightly mollified. “It was, wasn’t it?” she said sourly, “but at least I didn’t get dirt in my nose. You, on the other hand, look a perfect sight.” Then she smirked, and I knew I was forgiven.

“And me without any speck of makeup handy within fifteen miles…,” I lamented, putting on a bit of a show. “Harry’s bouncing balls! I don’t even have a mirror.”

“Oh! You poor dear! I don’t imagine you remembered to pack a change of clothes either, tch, tch, tch,” she clicked with just the tip of her tongue. “On any journey, a woman should at least plan ahead for unexpected changes in plans. It says so right in your Book.”

“Well,” I said, slightly irritated by her lack of sympathy, “I didn’t expect to find myself eaten by Gumball, along with half a ton of dirt, and then spit out like baby barf, so next time I’ll try to remember to bring along the proper outfit.” I paused, pouting, but then admitted, “It does seem that there were a few thin spots in my fabric of deceit, but we’ll clean all that up in the rewrite.”

“Rewrite?” she asked.

I answered blithely, “As Helmuth von Moltke once said, ‘No plan of battle survives first contact with the enemy.’ He also said, ‘Strategy is a system of expedients,’ so military campaigns have obviously been operating with the same general flexibility for more than six hundred years. It’s all in the recovery, as they say, but we did very well with your brilliant idea of enticing them with a faux ‘heroic return’ marred by last-minute tragedy, since they took the bait. I regret the damage to my outfit a bit, because it’s difficult for me to find slacks that fit my hips, but there are plenty more to choose from, back in the city.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s all in growing up at the tender mercies of a hidebound officer who had a stick so far up his ass that he killed his own wife when she failed to ‘measure up’ to his high standards, and then did his very best to do the same exactly thing to his son, except he threw him out the door instead of over the wall. You’ve obviously been brainwashed by the notion that officers matter. Their troops have no such illusions, as a general rule, since the ‘temporary setbacks’ of the officers usually turn into ‘permanently dead’ for their troops. Last I looked, it’s hard to recover from dying.”

“Yeah, well, you’ll notice that he did his best to kill himself as well, so neither one of us can fault him on consistency, even if he does have a stick up his ass.” I looked at her slyly…

…and we both laughed.

 

 

I made Beryl take the point position on our march back home, not because there was any danger, but because she kept sniggering at the sight of my bare butt, since my formerly-cute outfit was now shreds and tatters, and the seat of my pants had mysteriously vanished entirely. It was embarrassing as well as drafty, and her jovial attitude about my predicament didn’t help at all. When she started singing Sweet Betsy from Pike, though, she really got my goat.

“If I never hear the words ‘and she showed her bare arse to the whole wagon train’ again,” I’d finally complained, “I’d be just as pleased. It’s just one verse, not part of the chorus, and I’ve never gotten ‘tight’ in my life.”

‘Still and all,’ I’d thought, ‘if this little episode were the only blemish on an otherwise perfect day, we could use a lot more just like it.’

We’d fired off a couple of our modified missiles just before sunset, when the smoke and fire from the rocket exhaust been well-hidden in the glare of the setting Sun, and then endured a fairly uncomfortable overnight bivouac, but had been at least slightly cheered by our confidence that the Castle would soon go the way of the Citadel, so at very least the potential enemies in our immediate vicinity were growing less numerous. Today, Pennsylvania, tomorrow the world.

I’d sweetened the trap with a little more honey as well — in addition to our ‘abandoned’ food supply — with a nicely-typed set of ‘orders’ from our ‘North American Command’ which detailed the broad outlines of our plans to relieve the local outposts and supply food to all the surviving inhabitants of the Northeastern Autonomous Region with the ultimate strategic goal of reïncorporating the region into the North American Command and restoring both local and regional civilian control.

‘That ought to have lit a fire under the hierarchy, at least,’ I thought, ‘ since they’ll foresee their cushy little racket coming crashing to a halt and be anxious to clean up their collective acts lest they be caught out in court-martial offences. It might make life a little more tolerable for the ordinary citizens until some sort of democracy is restored.’

 

 

We were making good time headed back toward the city when I felt some sort of weird disturbance to the south, which was strange, because I’d never felt anything like it before. It was a sort of creepy feeling, a restless itch at the back of my mind, like when you’ve forgotten something but can’t remember what you’ve forgotten, or like a premonition, but more urgent. As usual for me recently, I rifled through my memory of the cards and instantly fixated on two. I called to Beryl, “Hey, Sweetie! I think we should change our plans.”

She stopped and turned around, looking at me as if she thought that I’d finally lost my last marble. “Plans? What plans? Pretty much everything we’ve done so far has been spontaneous reactions to external events; brilliantly executed, no doubt, but decidedly off-the-cuff.”

I was taken aback, but only slightly. “Well, here comes another off-the-cuff improvisation, then, because I just felt a strange disturbance away down south of us, and the first cards that came to mind were Death, the Thirteenth Trump, and the Seven of Wands, both of which suggest some sort of challenge and eventual change.”

“Disturbance?” she asked.

“A sort of hostile feeling, like in the ring walls of plants around the castles, but more intense.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“No,” I confessed, “but I suspect, given the general level of animus and the timing, that there’s at least one castle to the south, and that the inhabitants, like the prisoners in the Citadel, are getting hungry and have launched a more desperate foraging party than usual. If so, they’re going to follow the main roads, as soon as they find them, and wind up in our city.”

“And your plan is?” she said sceptically.

I blinked. “Plan? I thought we should go see what was going on, so we can be prepared, of course.”

“And then?” Her brow was arched. “If we’re caught, looking like two desperate ragamuffins, do you suppose that you’re well-prepared to pull off your haughty imitation of a Canadian officer’s ‘wife?’ If we have to run away, don’t you think that your ‘southern exposure’ is going to strike anyone as just a little odd? ‘Oh, yes,’ you’ll blithely say, ‘the bare-assed look is all the rage in Vancouver these days….’ Let’s get real, honeybear. We both have a duty to warn our sisters first, and then make careful plans that take the safety of our little community into account before you go haring off like Prince Valiant with his Singing Sword to save the day.”

I was startled by her vehemence, but she did have a point. Before I managed to destroy whatever credibility I had, I said, “You’re absolutely right. I wasn’t thinking clearly. Thank you for pointing it out. First, we have to go back and warn our friends, and I can only plead my lack of experience with mysterious psychic premonitions to account for my foolish desire to go see if it was real before I made a compete fool of myself.”

“No worries about that,” she said ambiguously. “Just the sight of that huge ass of yours will grab their attention something wonderful.”

“Just for that,” I said, “you can look at it all you want while you try to catch me!” I took off running, back towards the city and our friends. Gumball was very pleased, since he thought it was great fun to roll along at speed instead of poking along, even at a swift walking pace, and I was fairly confident that I could outpace Beryl, since I’d had the advantage of several months of changes on her, not all of which had been wasted on developing my admittedly ample ass. I had at least a hundred feet of lead on her before she managed to get moving, both of us running flat out, but she never did manage to catch me.

She was ticked off about it too, and managed to catch me a good swat on my bum, even though I tried to avoid it. Obviously, she was catching up with me on some levels. I’d have to watch my step with all the new women fairly soon, since I could no longer count on mere strength and speed.

 

 

However little I trusted my own niggling nudge of awareness, the others were alarmed enough to begin making plans for guerrilla actions against an advancing force of unknown size and composition, so I went to talk to our prisoners of war.

They were a disheartened bunch, all of them experiencing changes that they recognized as precursors to the end stages of infection, though none were nearly as depressed as my father. He always had been inclined to take things seriously, which I supposed was a good thing in an officer, all in all.

“Well, Captain Glass,” I said to him when I saw him, still handcuffed to a beam in his sleeping quarters, “have you taken sufficient advantage of your time of quiet contemplation to accommodate yourself to your new reality?”

“I have not,” he answered sullenly. “Whoever you are, you’re not who you claim to be, and you have no right to keep me prisoner.”

I laughed. “I have every right, Captain, force majeure, if nothing else, not to mention the fact that you’re no longer fit for duty according to the terms of your former service in the The Castle branch of the Horticulturist forces. You might as well admit the fact that you have no remaining right to lead your former command, as you yourself tacitly conceded when you tried to kill yourself.” I looked him up and down. He already had fairly prominent breasts developing beneath his military-issue masculine tunic, and would soon require a brassiere. “So, Captain, are you reconciled to your changes, or are you going to be a pill about it for the foreseeable future?” I looked him steadily in the eye and added, “If you are, perhaps we’ll have to arrange a more permanent accommodation. I dislike having to dedicate any soldiers in my unit to guard duty, and I’m well aware of the Horticultural Corps prohibition of either provisional release on parole or the equivalent using the procès verbal. I’m sure you’re well aware of the only alternatives likely to be effective, so would you prefer to be hung, or shot?”

He began to bluster, bless his black heart.

“You can’t do that! I’m an officer…!”

“…Who’s just refused the direct order of a superior in time of war,” I continued with no bluster at all. “You’ve failed to comprehend both my patience and your position in the grand scheme of things. To put it bluntly, I’m getting tired of your pathetic posturing and mutinous attitude, and have put up with it only through a desire to see exactly how much trouble it’s going to be to bring our wayward outposts to heel under a reïnvigorated Central Command structure.” I frowned, for his benefit, and then added, “I’m beginning to think it might be simpler just to reduce these rebellious outposts of iniquitous luxury and corruption to rubble and rebuild our forces using local recruits with more of a sense of morality and patriotic duty.”

That finally fazed him. He blinked and said, “You’d kill everyone?”

“Of course not,” I said brusquely. “Civilians, and any soldiers who surrendered immediately would be spared, of course, pending their reënlistment in our ranks, but I can’t leave nests of malcontents and traitors in my rear as we advance toward the northeast, and eventually sweep down the coastline towards whatever remains of the Tidewater Regions of the Southern coasts and eventually Florida. Unfortunately, since my husband carried off the bulk of our forces with him into New York, I don’t have sufficient strength to permanently billet a portion of my detachment to handle guard duty, so any renegades would have to be dealt with summarily.” The scope and mission of my imaginary army had grown along with its paperwork, so I had a large portfolio of communiques and orders ready-to-hand to back up my specious plans. Although the initial impetus behind it was an improvisation, I’d actually elaborated the idea based on a book that I’d remembered reading in my father’s own small collection of military history books, although I’d refreshed my memory in our local public library. It was about the British Double-Cross System of double agents during World War II, which had been so successful that the Germans actually stopped sending spies across the Channel, lest they draw attention to the faux-spies being run from MI5. I have no idea why it was in there, since there had never been any question of espionage on the part of the plants, nor any point in having it, as far as I could tell, but I’d modelled my own operation after Operation Fortitude, which had created an entire Allied Army out of thin air and the trappings of bureaucracy. Although the props had been very thin indeed, the flurries of intercepted cables and ‘accidental’ newspaper accounts, combined with judicious ‘information’ about a top secret operation, convinced the Germans that a massive troop movement was planned in one area while the real preparations were being made for another. They’d been caught ‘flat-footed,’ as it were, although the fact that the Russians were whipping their asses badly on the Eastern Front at the time had doubtless contributed to their general confusion.

“So, Captain, what’s it going to be?” I asked. “Rededication to your bounden duty or a general court martial? Take your pick.”

I could see the conflict in his eyes when he said, “I’d like to hear more, if I might be permitted to enquire.”

“Ask away, but don’t take any more time than you have to.”

“I’ve noticed that you seem to have plants actually working with you, almost as if they were intelligent. Is that true?”

“That was two questions, but they amount to the same thing. Yes, the plants are ‘intelligent,’ in that they have purpose and volition, but many of them aren’t very clever at all. You wouldn’t go far wrong if you think of them as ranging from the intelligence we see in the old ‘cows’ we read of in the history books  — that is, not very smart at all, or at least primarily acting through instinctive behaviors — to that of dogs, who tend to be distinct individuals with ‘personalities,’ if you will, and the ability to form cohesive plans to obtain desired goals, even if those goals are fairly simple.”

“But that goes against…!” he almost shouted….

How well I remembered that ponderous absolutism. I cut him off. “Please don’t waste my time. You — and those who advised you — were mistaken. In the North-West, we’ve come to terms with the fact that we made serious mistakes in our early dealings with the plants, and have now made peace with them, although not in any formal sense, with top-hatted dignitaries signing documents. As far as we know, not one of the many plants we’ve discovered has any inclination to wear any sort of clothing, much less fancy hats and formal dress. What they do have is the ability to be useful — if inherently tacit — partners in the task of accommodating ourselves to a peaceful life on Earth, so we encourage the diversity of plants around us, and are very reluctant to declare any of them as being ‘surplus to requirements.’ That was the primary mistake the early Horticulturists fell into, of mistaking short-term benefits for long-term sustainability.”

“Alright, so the plants are supposedly on ‘our side,’ but are you? What are your intentions regarding the inhabitants of The Castle, and The Citadel I’ve heard of. Are we to be absorbed into some of North American Co-Prosperity Sphere? Will we have to pay tribute to our masters in Vancouver?”

“Not that I know of, although, to be perfectly fair, I’m only involved in the military end of things. I assume that you’ll pay taxes eventually, but we haven’t worked out any mechanism of civilian governance that can offer any services worth paying taxes to subsidize. I know we’d like to get the trains running again all across North America, but it will be a huge undertaking in time and effort to put the tracks back in order. I’m quite sure that it will take years, especially across the Rockies, although river crossings whose bridges have collapsed are also a vexing problem. Our most immediate concern, though, is to establish control of our borders, because we’ve heard rumors of a Brazilian-Argentinian Empire in South America that’s rapidly advancing through Mesoamerica and into Northern Mexico, as well as a resurgent Russian Empire, which of course could threaten us from the north, as well as flanking us from both the east and west.” These dangers had all been spun from cobwebs and morning dew, of course, but my own experience can’t have been unique in the wide world, so something like it was almost bound to have happened somewhere, and South America and Europe were very big places, with plenty of room for almost anything. Somewhere, somehow, there were real dangers to match my inventions, and from my own experiences in The Castle, plus my readings in world history, it’s horrifically simple for human societies to slide from enlightened democracies and patrons of all the civilized arts to totalitarianism and near barbarism.

“Are you serious?” He seemed stunned to hear that any major civilizations had either survived or were staging a comeback.

“I’d never joke about anything as serious as the security of what remains of the North American Alliance. In fact, I’ve just received word of a largish party of unknown armed men advancing from the South. While I can hope that they’re honest citizens come to lend a hand in our current state of disarray, I fear the worst and am preparing for it. Hence, my current urgency.”

My father, bless his military soul, at once snapped to attention and saluted, his doubts and suspicions subsumed in current need. “I’m at your service, Ma’am!”

I blinked. “I must say that I’m surprised, Captain, to see you change your mind so quickly.”

“Ma’am! I’m honor-bound to protect the inhabitants of The Castle, Ma’am, no matter what they think of my current state of infection. Whatever your ultimate intentions, I’m convinced that you have the immediate goal of protecting the people whom I would die to serve, Ma’am, so I have no choice.”

‘Damn that man to Harry’s Holy Hell!’ I thought to myself, struggling to maintain an impassive countenance. ‘Just when I get a good sneer on towards my father, he goes and pulls a heroic stunt like this that might have brought tears to my eyes, were I not trying so hard to dissemble.’ “Your courage does you credit, Captain. Would you like to volunteer to assist in scouting out this new threat? As you can see, we’re short-handed, and especially lacking in those with experience in the field. Your overall familiarity with the area might be of real help.”

“You’d permit me that much freedom?”

“You look like a man of your word, Captain, and I pride myself on being a shrewd judge of character; I accept your word without reservation. We’ll leave in the morning. Dismissed.”

He snapped to and saluted. “Yes, Ma’am!”

I saluted in reply, saying, “Tell Brigadier Farquhar that you’ll need full field kit, Captain, and I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow.”

 

 

We met up with our intruders on a bluff above a river. That is to say, we were on a bluff above what I knew to be the Savage River as it ran through the Appalachian foothills down towards the Potomac and eventually its bay, toward the westernmost strip of what used to be Maryland, but what the locals called it I didn’t know. They were below us, doing their best to follow the river north. Our horizons were diminished from what they were before the endless war against the natural world, the vast expanses of the USA before it disintegrated were almost unimaginable now, because all we could see was the local landscape, wherever we happened to be huddled within high walls. Growing up, I’d never known that the City we’d so recently inhabited was there, much less had a name, despite being within a day’s march to the north-east, and even the nearest town we used for a larder had no real name, because there was only one, as far as we knew, ‘The Town.’ Our real horizon had ended at the ringwall of plants that had hemmed us in, and few looked beyond that grim frontier for anything but the slim pickings of our former civilization.

“Is that them?” Beryl asked.

“I’d guess so, and from the looks of them they’re bandits.” Indeed, they had pack animals, horses, I think, although I’d never actually seen one, and were lugging along what looked like several town’s worth of loot, including people in chains, either prisoners or slaves I guessed, since they were badly dressed for the weather, which was chilly, since it was getting on towards Fall weather, whilst their captors were warmly jacketed with a type of closely-fitting cap which could be folded down to cover their ears. There were fifty-seven bearing arms, mostly rifles, so clearly they meant to kill people, not plants. This looked complicated. Assuming that the captives were innocents, how were we to extricate the villains from the flock of them, or vice versa? Our best weapons were the HE missiles, but they were crude at best in separating our obvious hostiles from the civilians they had close.

Beryl said wryly, “Notice anything about the captives?”

Taking a closer look, I suddenly saw. “Most of them are women.”

“Exactly. I think I’m going to enjoy this.” She grinned a particularly feral grin.

I looked back toward the captives. “I think I will too.”

 

 

Our first problem was the rifles, although we did have crossbows, which had the advantage of silence, so the first order of business was to get our hands on at least a few of them. I had the beginnings of a plan already and started squirming back from the edge of the bluff. “Up the river a bit, where the gorge narrows, might be a good spot to ‘borrow’ a few of those rifles.” It not only narrowed, but the roar of the rapids there was loud enough to cover even any stray gunshots, so it made a perfect ambuscade.

“Good plan, ” she said, also backing off the edge. “Their point men will be vulnerable while the captives are fairly safe toward the rear, even if things get a little wild as they turn the bend.”

“Exactly. If we work it right, we should be able to take out a dozen or more before the rear knows what’s happening. If we work it right, they’ll begin to retreat, whereupon we can throw a few rocks on any groups of warriors who present themselves, and so take out a dozen more.”

 

 

The roiling torrent before us was almost deafening as we lay concealed behind a group of large boulders beneath the cliff. To the left, there was nothing but more boulders and more river. To the right, the river swept around the edge of the cliff, with only a few handspans of good footing, so we thought the men would be dismounted, since there was every chance that a few of their mounts might bolt in the noise and the confusion, especially once the ruckus started. “Hsst,” I alerted my small party as I saw the first man back around the edge of the cliff, the reins of his horse in hand. Per plan, we waited, hunkered low, but what followed wasn’t what I’d expected. It looked like the entire retinue of captives followed right behind the one scout, which meant that the main body of hostiles was still behind them.

“Change of plan,” I whispered to Beryl. “We’ll wait to see the first group of hostiles around the edge of the cliff, and then take out the point man as well as the first new hostiles to turn the corner.”

“On the point guy,” she whispered back, and wriggled back a bit to get into a better position.

I let four mounted men through and then let fly four arrows as quick as I could manage, which was pretty quick, because the last man had just begun to fall with an arrow through his eye when the first hit the ground. Of course, I’d had four crossbows ready, so it was just a matter of picking them up and pulling the trigger. In the meantime, Beryl had done the same to the point man and had returned to cover the narrow path beside me. I waved my hand as a signal to the two I’d left stationed on the top of the cliff, so I assumed that they’d let loose the deadfalls we’d arranged to cover the back trail. “Is the point guy in a position where we can safely lay hands on his weapon?” I asked Beryl as I quickly reloaded my four bows.

“Not really. He fell into the river and was swept away, taking his rifle with him, worse luck. The damned fool had it strapped across his back. His mount is safe, and has saddlebags, so there may be some ammunition left, but your four look like the best bets for rifles. They at least had their weapons ready, undoubtedly in contemplation of killing any prisoners who tried to run. Arrogant bastards, I reckon. The guy on point wasn’t worried at all.”

I hadn’t seen any faces poked around the corner yet, so I assumed that the main body of troops were busy either ducking for cover or trying to climb the cliff to get at the ambushers above them, who were ably led by my father, now calling herself Opal, whom I suspected had a similar notion, despite the change in plan. “Cover me,” I said. “I’m going for the rifles.” I took two of my crossbows with me, just in case. ‘No guts, no glory,’ I resolved.

I had my weapon ready as I closed on the dead men, whose mounts were milling around restlessly, probably frightened by the smell of blood. As I approached the river, though, I saw the nose of a beautiful reddish-brown horse out of the corner of my eye, just now becoming visible on the trail as it skirted the base of the cliff. With a sigh, I raised the first of my crossbows and waited the split second before a human head became visible, then loosed another quarrel. I noted with some pride that I’d pierced his eye, just as before, snatched up the four rifles from where they lay, then took up the reins of the horses, whom I’d known only as ‘props’ in stories, and led them back toward the boulders.

None too soon, as it turned out, because another rider appeared at that very moment, this time bent low in his saddle to interpose the body of the horse between himself and any danger, the prick. “Coward!” I cursed at him, though I don’t imagine that he heard it, because my second bolt had him through the eye before he responded, and the river itself made hearing anything other than the sound of water crashing over rocks nearly impossible. Beryl got the next to pop his head around, but not before he’d got off a few shots with his rifle, all unaimed, because he’d learned from the fate of his comrade not to peek before firing. She got him in the kneecap, though, straight through to his hamstring, so he instantly toppled off his mount, pulling the quarrel from where it had lodged in his saddle while I took care of his head from behind.

After that, there was a bit of a lull, of which I took advantage by rescuing the remaining horse. I signalled to the two women at the top of the cliff to begin a strategic retreat back into the woods and downstream while I walked toward the captives, who looked very unsure of themselves, but they were still restrained by chains and other bindings, so were at a real disadvantage if they’d tried to escape. “Greetings, and peace to you,” I said. “Do you wish to be released from bondage? We are free women here, and have no patience with villains and slavers, as you may have noticed.”

One of them, a big burly sort of woman who bore the marks of many beatings, as well as what seemed to be a vicious brand burned deeply into the flesh of her upper arm, said, “We would, but there are many more Reivers behind you.”

“Not quite so many more,” I said, “since my companions on the cliffs above us have buried at least some fraction of them with a landslide of rocks and boulders that will at least have inconvenienced them. I plan to kill them all, if that’s any comfort to you, but would appreciate your help if you’ve a mind to seek revenge on those who’ve wronged you.”

The burly woman said, “Yes!” and held out her wrists, which were tied with some sort of brown rope that I assumed was leather, which I’d heard of, and had actually seen as leather belts in the shops back in the City.

I cut them with my machete, the prototypical weapon of the Horticulturists which I still carried, because I’d drilled with it for years and was familiar with its heft and handling. I looked down at her ankles, which were fastened together with a length of iron chain that were attached to two iron bands that had been riveted each ankle. Seething with fury, I knelt and tore the chain asunder with my bare hands, plucking out the rivets from the bands by levering them apart with my thumbs, until her legs were free, if still cruelly inflamed and scarred by the chafing of her bonds. “I have an ointment,” I told her, which will completely cure these physical wounds, but it has side effects which include the plant infection, if you’re familiar with it.

Her eyes were wide, torn between astonishment and fear at my display of angry strength. “I am,” she said, “but after my experiences among the ‘humans,’ I’m not terribly worried about it. In our old fortress, we used to kill those who’d been infected, but we’ve all be exposed to the wilderness for so long that we’d never be accepted back in our former home, even if it still existed.” Her eyes brimmed over with tears, suddenly confronting the loss of almost everyone she’d known and loved.

My heart went out to her as I said, “What’s your name, Sister? You’re among friends here, and as safe as we can make it.” I motioned to Beryl to free the rest of the captives as expeditiously as possible, which she commenced doing without a word. It almost scared me sometimes, how much we thought alike.

“Chalcedony Price,” she said. My husband was a Captain in the Horticultural Service, but he was killed in the first assault by the Reivers.

“Chalcedony,” I said, “I’m Sapphire McKenzie, the leader of our little expeditionary force. My friend here is Beryl Farquhar, my second-in-command, and you’re as safe as we can make it now, and will be safer still, and very soon.”

“How can you be sure of that?” she asked, reasonably enough.

“Because these so-called ‘Reivers’ are an undisciplined mob, but we are soldiers. They don’t know it yet, but their position is hopeless, and will not escape the justice they deserve.”

“What do you mean by ‘hopeless?’ They’re men, they outnumber you, and I see only five women here.”

I smiled. “But such women, and there are a total of six more women in two parties on the cliffs above us who have issue-HE missiles, plus the advantage of gravity. As soon as they made the craven decision to drive their captives before them, they were doomed, since our primary worry had been how to extricate you from their custody without exposing you to lethal fire.”

“You’re Horticulturists? But how?” She was wide-eyed, since she would have known only men enrolled in the East Coast Horticultural Service.

“Not every region of North America is as sexist and hidebound as your local forces seem to be down here. We’re from Vancouver, on the other side of the continent, and things are somewhat different there.” I smiled to let her know that they were better, even though my new and improved Horticultural Service had only as much reality as the Land of Oz. Perhaps I should have named myself Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. ‘Nah!’ I thought. ‘Pink is so not my color!’

She seemed to be at a loss for words, so I gently prompted her, “What happened here?”

“The Reivers happened, is what happened. They tricked us into opening our gates to give them the shelter that they’d begged of us, and then slaughtered almost all the men before looting our former home and taking those of us they didn’t manage to murder with them as slaves and whores for their use.” She spat upon the ground in her rage.

“Then they’re dead men, Sister. The laws of hospitality and military order are clear on this. I presume that they’re deserters from some fortress to the south of us, and so used their familiarity with Horticulturist protocols and language to gull you.”

“They did. They had two of them dressed up in foraging suits who claimed to have been overcome and driven away from their home fortress by an incursion of plants, but of course it was a lie. Their first act was to set off a bomb which destroyed the main gate, and then they immediately took over the armory, which of course was right next to the inner bailey and undefended, since we’d never imagined a human enemy in addition to the plants. The main body of them rode in from cover immediately, and proceeded to kill most of the men and loot our homes and fortress of anything that looked valuable to them — especially weapons and ammunition — and then burned the rest.”

“Are there any amongst you familiar with rifles?”

“I am,” she said proudly, “and these two men here behind me, although they were enslaved for their skills in gardening uniform repair. They needed to keep their decoy suits in good enough shape to be believable when they came knocking at the gates of their victims, but had no particular skills of their own besides trickery and lying.”

“Then take these rifles and any others you find, and look through their packs for ammunition. If we’re going to kill them all — as we must, I think — we’ll need all hands.”

“You trust us without sureties, or even questions?” she asked, eyes wide.

“Why not? Your plight is obvious; your feeling toward your former captors equally plain, so I’m fairly sure you’re on the side of righteousness, and if not, I’d best know it quickly.” I paused for effect. “And besides, we have no time to lose. Be ready when they come along the cliff, and I’ll be back.” With that, I ran down to the rushing river and walked in, picking my way along the bottom until I found a clear path downstream, then I let the current take me.

 

 

It took all of my considerable strength to keep from tumbling in the cataract or being hurled upon the rocks, but as I swept past the raiders — Reivers, she’d called them — I could see that they were still in disarray. There can’t have been more than forty of them left, although I hoped that those vanished were buried under the rocks and dirt I could see piled up against the cliff where there’d once been a path and not climbing the cliff to try and flank us. The way looked impassable for horses, which limited their options. If they wanted to move forward, they’d have to abandon their mounts, which cavalry is always reluctant to do, but they’d be equally vulnerable if they tried to go back, because my ambush party was hopefully making its way along the cliff-tops to prepare another ambuscade if they tried to retreat. They were, even if they didn’t realize it yet, in a cul de sac of our choosing, not theirs. ‘No matter, though,’ I reasoned. ‘Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof. The corollary, of course, is to avoid over-thinking when you’re already committed.’ I made my way toward shore as quickly as I could once I was well past their ragged group of horses and men. There was a wide meadow here, and the hint of a forest nestled up against the bluff, which had been perfect for my purpose. I appeared to struggle up the rocky margin, then ran for the woods as if in panic, making a great show of fear to draw their unkind attentions.

They’d seen me by now, of course, and four of them were riding toward me, whether to kill or capture me I knew not, although of course I didn’t care. “Gumball!” I screamed. “Rise and shine! Time for breakfast!”

They were almost on me, riding hard, and I held up a smallish ‘lady’s’ dagger in a pathetic show of defiance as they thundered toward me. I could see the sneers and anger on their faces as they came, and one had raised a rifle when Gumball and three of his pals erupted from the ground beneath the hooves of their horses, instantly toppling three of the riders from their saddles, with the other only escaping by a superb bit of horsemanship that I had to admire, even as I threw my lady’s dagger to catch him square in the middle of his back. It might have been small, but it was long enough to sever his spinal cord when thrown with sufficient force and accuracy. He’d have been better off if he hadn’t turned his back on me. Then I brought out my machete from beneath my skirt and began to walk down the beach behind my round friends. Of the three who’d fallen there was no trace, of course, and I picked up the single rifle that had escaped the general wreck, now fallen where it had left its owner’s nerveless hands.

One of the remaining horses was obviously in trouble with a broken leg, whinneying and thrashing about in panic, which I was sorry about, but these things happen in war. I used my machete to give him the mercy stroke, cleaving his brain before he had much time to suffer.

I glanced up the rocky margin to see what the self-styled ‘Reivers’ were up to, but they’d all abandoned their mounts and most were trying to clamber over the landslide to escape the green death rolling toward them, while a few tried shooting Gumball and his leafy pals, which wasn’t a good idea, because it irritated them, so our pet ‘burrowers’ all picked up speed. Our cavalry crew, it seemed, had never seen what a ‘blitzkrieg’ Panzer attack can do to unarmored troops, nor did they have the stomach to be real soldiers, and so had fallen almost instantly into disarray.

‘So much for the art of war in these troubled times,’ I thought, as I laid myself down into a prone shooter’s stance with the rifle they’d kindly furnished me, focusing on picking off the raiders as they scrambled over the rocks. Some jumped into the river, presumably to drown, since this was a very rough stretch of the Savage River, which had been well-named. On the other hand, they’d abandoned their weapons by then, which was all to the good. The more rifles we wound up with, the better. I did my best in the meanwhile to ensure that there weren’t many left to press forward toward Beryl’s position, but had to stop at thirty, since I’d run out of bullets. I had to trust that she’d organized the captured rifles into some sort of welcome for the remaining Reivers, who’d be at a disadvantage going upstream, because there wasn’t room for more than two abreast at any point along the river path before them, so Beryl on her own could probably have handled them even with the crossbows. Adding rifles to our armamentarium made the final result inevitable. She had the advantage of good cover, plus backup, even if the former captives were no help at all, while the raiders would be completely exposed as they came out from behind the cliff with no ability to bring any combined or flanking force to bear, a textbook example of defeating the enemy in detail.

 

 

The next day wasn’t at all pleasant. Seven of the self-styled ‘Reivers’ had thrown down their arms and were found cowering on the rocks between Beryl’s position and mine, where Gumball and company couldn’t get at them, and so were taken prisoner, which meant that we had to deal with them. I wasn’t looking forward to it, since there could be only one outcome. We had no prisons, nor prison for that matter, and I had no intention of marching around with a group of men in chains, a twisted parody of the captivity they’d enforced upon others. Still, there was plenty of precedent for drumhead court-martials in time of war, and I was perfectly willing — if not exactly eager — to take this unwanted responsibility upon my own conscience.

We made a small production of it, although we didn’t have a drum, and Beryl took notes so as to maintain the formalities of our actions.

I began the proceedings, saying, “This court-martial is convened on Julian Day 26 Lakh 4,733, in the region of the Savage River in the State of Maryland under the authority of the Combined North American Horticultural Forces. You men are charged with desertion in a time of war, cowardice, insubordination, waging war on civilian populations, and with treasonous assault and murder upon senior officers, your fellow troops, and civilians, as well as with forcible rape under color of authority and sundry other offenses. The penalty for these crimes is death. Do you plead guilty, or not guilty?”

Some of them blustered, whilst others merely said that they’d been forced to participate, which was duly noted by Beryl in her capacity of recorder.

“Chalcedony Price, can you identify these men as the perpetrators of the crimes with which they’ve been charged?”

“I do, Ma’am, each and several, to my certain knowledge.”

“Are there any other witnesses?” I asked.

There were, of course, the entirety of the group of former captives, who each testified that these were, in fact, the men involved in the crimes mentioned, that they’d appeared under false identities and had taken the fortress by treachery, that they’d seen no evidence of coercion on the part of the raiders, and so on. I’ll spare you the tawdry, and sometimes horrifying, details, but I allowed each of their victims ample time to make their individual stories known and set into the permanent record.

My father was on the panel, of course — ironically as the junior officer — but our decision was unanimous. In the long tradition of the Horticultural Service, the sentence would have been death by hanging, but we had neither a handy gallows nor the will to donate a valuable rope to the cause, so we simply stood them on the edge of the river and shot them, letting the river take their bodies away from our sight. Perhaps the rushing water would wash away their many sins.

 

 

“Have you heard of any other bands of Reivers, Chalcedony?” I asked the next day, as we headed back to her former home. There may have been survivors, although she didn’t have much hope, and I avoided pointing out that if there had been any foragers out, they might have survived. In any case, they all deserved to see their dead buried properly instead of lying exposed to the elements. We were all mounted now, although I wasn’t exactly comfortable on horseback. It was certainly a novel perspective, riding with one’s head so much further from the ground. I could see the attraction, though.

“From what I overheard among the men,” she said, “there was at least one other band that they knew of, although they weren’t allies in any sense, or so I understood, since they mentioned several skirmishes between their separate groups, squabbling over spoils. They were from farther south, I think, because they called them ‘Mosby’s Raiders’ when they didn’t call them ‘bushwhackers’ or vulgar names.”

I nodded. That made sense from what I’d learned in the library, as well as my father’s military library. The old South had never had an easy relationship with civil authorities, especially Federal civil authorities, which the Horticultural Service was — at least in theory — although the service had been splintered into more-or-less separate fiefdoms in recent years. “Where there are two, there are bound to be imitators out for easy pickings and a life of relative luxury, so I think we have to regard it as a potential insurrection at least, if not a fait accompli.”

“I’d never heard any rumor of such bands before they appeared at our gates, or we might have been more careful.”

“They’ve probably overrun the Virginia fortresses, then, or most of them. Do you know how far your radios worked? Were you in communication with any other fortresses?”

“We were in sporadic communication with most of the Chesapeake Bay fortresses, depending upon the time of year and day, and with a few fortresses in the northern Tidewater region of Virginia, but that was the extent of our knowledge. There were few direct contacts between our scattered forces, though, as the potential risks were seen as exceeding any possible reward.”

I nodded. “That makes sense. I understand from Beryl and Opal that their separate fortresses had no contact with each other, despite being only a few day’s walk from each other. Both were located in valleys which limited the range of their radios, so your own situation is understandable. I gather that the original long-distance communication between the scattered units of the Service were originally carried over wirelines, so when these were abandoned or destroyed, both fortresses were completely isolated.”

“It was much the same here,” Chalcedony said. “We still had the original wireline equipment in the control room, despite continuing pressure by our repair crews to salvage the system for the parts. My guess is that there were links along the system that depended upon external power.”

‘Dang! This woman was awfully clever.’ “I’d never thought of that,” I admitted.

“Well, I had the advantage of being married to…. Never mind,” she said, her face wracked with sudden anguish, “that’s over now.”

I reached out to touch her hand. “I’m so sorry. I wish we’d come south sooner.”

“So… do I,” she managed to choke out, before bursting into tears.

 

 

As it turned out, there had been a foraging party out, so we found them wandering through the ruins, still stunned after several days, their homes destroyed and their loved ones either dead or missing, listlessly digging through the general wreck without hope. Unfortunately, there had been only two happy reunions when we encountered them, and even those were tempered by the general misery of all involved. I had Gumball and his friends convince the local plants that the resident humans were no longer hostile, so that was one problem off their plate, but I had no idea whether they could survive on their own, so like every bureaucrat, I called a meeting.

“Citizens, soldiers, you’ve come to a critical point in your lives. As you now know, all the returnees have been infected with the so-called ‘plant infection,’ although I can now inform you that it isn’t carried by the plants at all, but by a very specialized fungus, almost like a mushroom, that was, I believe, developed by human scientists to help our species survive in these troubled times.” This was pure ‘spin,’ since I had no such knowledge, but the notion made the whole thing easier to swallow for most people, including me, so why not feel good about what seemed to be inevitable? Half of human history seems to have been created by ‘spinmeisters,’ Manifest Destiny, Lebensraum, the Chosen People, the British Empire, why not mushrooms?

There was a buzz of protest before Chalcedony overawed them. “Quiet! This fungus — mushroom — whatever it is — healed me of terrible scars and deep infections from where I’d been whipped, branded, and chained! It brought back more than one of us from desperate sickness that might easily have been fatal, and most importantly, the plants no longer have any quarrel with us, so we can walk around in the open air without protective suits and flamethrowers. If human scientists did these things, don’t we at least need to listen to this woman, who evidently knows more than we do, and is a prime exemplar of what this so-called ‘disease’ can do on our behalf. I personally saw this woman break the chains that bound me with her bare hands, so can testify to her strength, and I can feel myself becoming stronger day by day, so I know it’s not a fluke, that these benefits are available to all of us, and will help us to defeat the Reivers wherever we encounter them, and we will encounter them, because this woman and her companions are intent upon wiping them off the face of the Earth. I’ve already seen a dozen women utterly defeat the armed men who did this with nothing more than their bare hands — plus an arrow or two, and maybe a few knives — and I intend to help them! The men who murdered and raped your loved ones are dead! Stone dead at their hands, and you can read the transcript of their court martial for yourself, which contains our sworn testimony concerning their crimes. We know who our real enemies are, the enemies of every civilized human being, and those are the lawless human murderers and thieves who now menace us on every quarter. We know that there is at least one similar gang to the south of us, the self-styled ‘Mosby’s Raiders,’ and there are almost certainly more of them, so we all have to stand together now or face extinction.”

‘Dang!’ I thought, ‘she’s awfully good at this! Maybe I can give her this part of my job and concentrate on soldiering.’ Glancing over to Beryl, I saw that the same thought had obviously occurred to her.

One of the men who’d returned from foraging asked, “But what about the plant’s long war against us? Doesn’t that count?”

“It was never the plant’s war; the very concept is ludicrous. It was our war against the plants, and even that was a conflict instigated by greedy humans, who’d filled the environment with so many poisons and chemicals that the plants finally fought back. We’ve been fighting for several hundred years on behalf of a relatively few avaricious human beings who collectively robbed us of our friendly Earth, that plants and animals that fed us in perfect safety for many thousands of years, and even the plants and animals that depended on us for their continued existence, with no more regard for the rest of us than the vicious Reivers had for our lives and property.”

Beryl looked at me and grinned. “I like this woman,” she whispered. “Let’s keep her.”

I nodded my agreement and whispered back, “Let’s do.”

 

 

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

Copyright © 2012-2013 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved

 

 

Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Seven Envelopment

 

 

To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.

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

 

Beryl was singing softly a cappella,

Carry me back to old Virginny.
There’s where the cotton and corn and taters grow.
There’s where the birds warble sweet in the spring-time….

She had a surprisingly sweet voice, and was able to hit her notes perfectly, even when being carried along on horseback at a gentle trot, but still….

“Oh, for crying out loud, Beryl! You’ve never been to Virginia before.”

“So? Here we are south of the Mason-Dixon Line, embarking on a glorious military expedition to put down a rebellion, so what better tribute to the long heritage of a grateful nation?”

“Well,” I said sourly, “in the first place, you might try a song that wasn’t popular with the slavers and didn’t glorify the institution of slavery.”

“Really?” she said?

“Really,” I answered. “Listen carefully to the lyrics sometime. You’d be better off with The Battle Cry of Freedom, which was popular with the Union side, which was basically ours, back in the ancient days.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard it. How’s it go?”

I sang the first verse,

Yes, we’ll rally round the flag, boys,
We’ll rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom,
We will rally from the hillside,
We’ll gather from the plain,
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.

“Say, that’s not bad,” she said, “and how very appropriate.”

“It is. The chorus is rather nice as well,

The Union forever,
Hurrah! boys, hurrah!
Down with the traitors,
Up with the stars;
While we rally round the flag, boys,
Rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.

I didn’t do too badly either.

“It does seem more rousing,” she said, “and we’re certainly tracking traitors. Okay, you’ve convinced me. Now who has the harmonica?”

I laughed. “Dang! I must have packed it with the piano!”

Beryl grinned at me and said, “I know, you left them both in your other purse.”

“Well, I must have, along with a comfortable bed, hot and cold running water, and an indoor toilet.”

“Harry’s Word, Sapphire, I do wish you’d remember that purse just once. You seem to keep all the good stuff in it.”

“Yeah, well, it clashed with my outfit. I do like to look put together, even on campaign.”

“True,” she said with just a trace of sarcasm, “When you’re riding off into mortal danger, it helps if you have the consolation of knowing that you’ll make a beautiful corpse.”

“Not exactly,” I said archly. “The Book says that looking your best is the foundation of confidence for a woman, and that both physical and inward beauty are positive forces for change in the world. People listen to beautiful people, and both of us were just made to be listened to.”

She rolled her eyes, obviously unconvinced. “So you’re saying that feminism is dead, long live sexism?”

I glowered at her, in a nice way, of course. “Of course not! In the first place, ‘sexism’ is somewhat beside the point when we’re all converging on a single sex, if that’s what you want to call it….” I trailed off, caught up in a… notion. “Maybe a blended sex would be a better way to describe it, since we have no idea, really, if these forms are stable. What happens, for example, if one of us gets pregnant? For that matter, what happens during menopause, if any? In normal women’s lives, these things imply both physical and physiological changes, but do our remaining male parts somehow smooth those over?”

“They haven’t done squat for menstruation,” Beryl said, “I can tell you that. If anything, it’s got to be worse, because I never once heard my sister complain that her balls hurt when she was ‘hormonal.’”

“Well, there’s that,” I conceded.

“Tell you what, I’ll knock you up, then you knock me up, and we can compare notes.”

I was shocked, but then embarrassed. “What?!” I exclaimed eloquently, blushing.

“Well, you brought it, up,” she said. “There’s an old saying, ‘If you can’t stand the heat, keep well away from the fire,’ and it certainly applies here. You’re all about sex appeal, and nothing about sex, all about the tease, and nothing about delivery.”

That shut me up, shut me up good and proper. I urged my mount forward, away from my accuser, feeling trapped for some reason, although this journey south had been my idea.

 

 

The next few days were difficult, because Beryl deliberately stayed away from me, which is difficult to do in a group of only a few dozen women, so of course everyone noticed and avoided saying anything, fearful of being asked to choose sides, I suppose. I know I would have been, so I guess I couldn’t blame them, but I tracked her down anyway.

“Major-Jeneral Farquhar, I’d like a word in private,” I said and turned my mount toward the nearest hills, which rolled down the long length of the river valley we were following south. From time to time, we’d seen evidence of the Reivers, in two cases a small huddle of slaughtered women’s bodies which made me wish for the power to resurrect the men we’d executed so I could kill them again, but with more attention to detail.

She followed, and we rode along in silence for ten to twenty minutes before she said, “What do you want, Sapphire?”

I reined in my mount and wheeled to face her, so she stayed her own mount, still facing me. “I want our friendship back,” I said, “to start, and I want your love as well, but if you’ll stop to think a bit you’ll see — I think — that we can’t actually do that right here and right now.”

“Why the Hell not?” she said, really pissed off. “We’re both adults.”

“We’re also officers in an army of our own invention, and you’re familiar enough with the regulations of the real Horticultural Services to know that any outward show of intimacy would be ‘prejudicial to good order and discipline,’ so we’re trapped in our legend, until we can rest from this campaign.” I cursed violently, “Harry’s Bouncing Blue Balls, Beryl! I’m supposed to be married, so an ‘affair’ between us would be a court-martial offence!” I was shouting by now, furious with myself as well as her, since I was trapped in a net I’d woven for both of us. Suddenly, I stopped and hung my head in shame over my stupid outburst. “I apologize, Beryl. My own lies have turned around and bit me on the ass, and now I’ve offended you, for which I’m desperately sorry.”

She glared at me for an entire second before she smirked and said, “Funny you should mention ‘blue balls,’ Sapphire, since I’m not at all sure the condition applies to either of us these days, and since your ‘husband’ has all the reality of the Easter Bunny, I can’t quite work myself up to worrying about him catching us at anything untoward. Mind you, from a lay viewpoint — the marriage laws not falling within my former military speciality — I strongly suspect that your ‘marriage-of-convenience’ could be easily annulled on grounds on non-consummation, without even touching upon the complete and utter non-existence of the lucky bridegroom.” Then she pondered the situation for a few seconds. “There may be a problem, however, with serving the poor fellow with notice of your divorce or annulment proceedings, since he seems to have skipped off without leaving a forwarding address, the unfeeling cad.”

“Yeah, he has been a bit of a disappointment in the sack, now that I think of it, which has nothing to do with balls of any kind, blue, green, or otherwise,” I said as my pretty mare moved restlessly beneath me. “I wasn’t actually thinking of that, in any case. It was just something forceful to say, although I’m sorry it wasn’t very ladylike.”

Beryl laughed out loud, but it didn’t bother me, because that was my old Beryl. “Sweetie, you’re the most naturally ‘ladylike’ former guy I know. It’s okay to get ticked off from time to time.”

“Yeah, well, I’m feeling a bit of rage coming on right this minute. Three of Swords; just over that ridge.” I indicated the direction with a quick shift of my eyes. Beryl was familiar enough with the deck by now that I sometimes used it as a sort of shorthand when I felt any disturbance in our vicinity. She, on the other hand, usually said what she felt straightforwardly. Different approaches to the same increased awareness, I suspect, but had no theories that could explain it. Since coming south, though, we’d both been more sensitive, without any external cause that I could think of. Oddly enough, though, the other infected women in our group weren’t similarly affected by external events. It was either a mystery or we two were ‘special’ in some way.

“You’re right,” she said, immediately wary, but just as careful not to show any outward sign as I had been.

“We’re a bit exposed, I think, one disadvantage of running off in a snit on one’s own, for which I apologize.”

“Never mind, dear, all is forgiven. There’s nothing like contact with the enemy to make one’s priorities instantly obvious.” She smiled at me, which made me feel much better, despite the physical danger I sensed coming towards us.

“Do you want to take them? I think it’s just three or four of them, but I could of course be wrong.”

She rolled her eyes. “You? Wrong? Bite your tongue,” she said. “I can feel them too just now. They’re calculating exactly how fine it would be to teach us exactly how to show a proper respect toward our ‘betters,’ preferably on our backs, although one of our admirers would like to fuck us in the ass, which goes to prove that he’s not naturally gallant.” Beryl could be startlingly precise in her intuitions, a feat that I myself could never manage.

I reasoned it through. “A scouting party, I think, low on the totem pole, so anxious to have a little bit of ‘fun’ before the bosses take their turn.”

Beryl smiled a particularly sinister smile. “I’d love to give them a turn or two, Sapphire dear, so do please remind me to bring along a proper spit.”

“I think we’re well-prepared with skewers of one sort or another,” I said, “so why don’t we mosey on in that direction pretending to be easy targets?” I had a rifle with me, concealed by a spare saddle blanket, and a crossbow with two dozen quarrels, one of which was ready to launch, so didn’t feel particularly vulnerable. Despite our recent acquisition of firearms, I still preferred the crossbows, because they didn’t advertise their deployment to everyone within a mile or so. Just in case, I gave Gumball a little mental whistle, cautioning him to keep himself out of sight and underground. It never hurts to have a well-hidden reserve force ready to hand, as a part of the overall strategic battle plan, since the appearance of weakness where there is strength can serve to draw out a poorly-prepared force. The best form of defense is attack, as von Clausewitz once famously observed.

 

 

Of course, as von Clausewitz also observed, “War is such a dangerous business that mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst.” My own mistake was not killing our gruesome trio instantly. Instead, I’d thought to interrogate them and so distracted myself long enough for their main body to surround us. So here we were, hiding in a pile of rocks with a gang of hostile idiots shooting at us. Oddly enough, though, I felt fairly cheerful, and our rocks held many clumps of white and purple sweet alyssum which filled the air around us with a marvelous perfume, like warm sweet honey mixed with amber. Other than the random gunshots, it was a lovely day. “When you speak of this in future years, dear Beryl, and you will, please remember to be kind,” I said.

“Honey,” she said, “if we survive, I plan to spend every spare moment kicking your ass, so I won’t have time to carp about minor details.”

“Oh, goodie,” I said smiling. “That’s one load off my mind at least; luckily, my ass is very well-padded.” I took a quick reflective glance out from our position to where the new Reivers were lurking, what looked like thirty or more, and all taking potshots at us from time to time, mostly to harrass us, one supposes, since they had little chance of hitting anything, to judge by how badly their shots were aimed, if one could even dignify them with the word. Of course their first few were rather more accurate, but a few well-placed headshots had discouraged them from taking better care, and I had a mirror or two available as primitive periscopes so we could easily keep track of them without exposing ourselves to hostile fire. I’d actually seen one aiming for my mirror, but had quickly disabused him of the notion rather permanaently. This had the unfortunate side effect of making them all duck for cover as soon as the first hint of it appeared, which made my covert reconnaissance somewhat less effective. To my mild embarrassment, I hadn’t brought them along for that purpose at all, but I do like to ensure that my hair is nicely arranged.

“How’re Gumball and the boys getting along?” Beryl asked offhandedly.

“Having a little trouble sneaking up,” I said, “because quite a bit of the soil around here is thin stuff over shattered bedrock, so they’re worming their way in by degrees. On a brighter note, the hostiles behind us are lurking behind logs over a nice thick loam soil beneath which two of our rotund friends lie hidden, so they’re toast any time we want them to be.”

“Oh, that is cheery news,” she said.

“And with all the racket they’re making, I suspect that Opal and the rest of our friends will be by to check on us soon.”

“Harry’s Brass Ass!” she swore. “You know that means we’ll have to get ourselves out of this on our own before they arrive, don’t you? I’d never live it down if ‘the Cannibal’ had to be rescued by a bunch of raw recruits, will I? Fuck’em all to Harry’s Green Hell! We’re going to have to kill’em all now.”

I sighed. “I suppose you’re right,” I admitted, thinking. “Let’s start off with a bit of razzle-dazzle and then a hook right to catch them from the side.”

“Sounds good to me,” she said and got all set to move.

‘Gumball!’ I suggested, ‘Would you please arrange to have your friends eat the men behind us and toss a few trees around?’ I liked to be as polite as possible under fire; it was part of my mystique. I immediately heard a lot of noise behind us, the eerie groan of deep roots being torn asunder and then the sudden wind of tall pines toppling, their branches sending out a rush of air in all directions as the rugged trunks that had lifted them toward the light now carried them quickly down into the darkness of the forest floor. “Now!” I said unnecessarily as the two of us ran back to engage the besiegers to our rear, quickly slaughtering them in their confusion and fear before they’d fully grasped that the banshees were in their very midst with long and bloody knives. Pausing only to gather up their weapons, we ran to the right, still cloaked by the remaining forest shade and the cloud of dust that had been blown into the air by the falling trees, until we saw the heads of their comrades, still looking toward the forest and the commotion there, all unaware that they were missing all the fun. Sadly, they’d never have any more fun at all as we both fired our bolts into the back of two separate heads, then took care of another four with well-thrown knives. They died without a sound and we rushed uphill, toward their horses, which we’d heard but hadn’t seen behind a thicket of shrubby trees up the slope to the side of the rocks where the main body of the Reivers still lay hidden, evidently excited by the noise, since they were firing toward our former position, which made a perfect cover for us as we burst in upon two sentries, who’d been stationed to keep care of the horses. They weren’t doing a very good job of it, and soon they weren’t capable of doing anything, as both had broken necks.

At this point, we paused to take a quick look at their luggage, which happened to include half a dozen HE missiles and launchers. With a smirk, Beryl appropriated two sets of them as I picked up both the rifles the sentries didn’t need any more. She clucked her tongue, almost exactly like a horse champing — which I thought was awfully clever of her — and I shot one of our besiegers through the back of his head just as she fired one of the HE missiles toward the main body of them, quickly firing the other toward another clump of them behind another pile of rocks.

After having been extremely annoyed by them for several hours, the twin explosions were very satisfying, and the fact that the remaining Reivers succumbed to an anxious urge to exit the vicinity of the scattered clumps and rivers of burning thermite was even better, since we both used the opportunity to pick them off one by one with their own rifles as they tried to scurry away.

That left one group that we knew of, behind the rocks flanking us upriver, and they had evidently come to some sort of decision, since the first we actually saw of them was a rag that could have been white — at one time — frantically waving above their clump of rocks as one of them called out, “We surrender! We surrender! Don’t kill us! Don’t kill us, please!”

“Too late for most of you,” I called out. “What makes you special?”

“We’ve got gold! Lots of it!”

“But if we kill you, we’ll have all that with no effort at all,” I said reasonably, my voice raised just enough to carry. “Not that we care all that much for gold, although it does make charming jewelry. It’s a pain in the ass dragging too much of it around, though. What else have you got to offer?”

There was a distinct pause before the same guy answered. “I know where all the other Reiver camps are within two or three hundred miles.” They’d evidently heard of who we were and what we were up to. ‘Alas, there’s no honor amongst thieves,’ I thought. “So?” I said. “We’ll run into them soon enough, and then they’ll be dead too. We don’t take slaves, and have little use for prisoners. You’ll have to do a lot better than that.”

“I know most of the passwords,” the same fellow said. “I can get you inside their defenses, and possibly save the lives of their slaves. I know that you’re rescuing slaves, so that’s got to be worth something to you.”

He sounded smug, which irritated me. “Don’t get too cocky, asshole,” I said. “Our reputation precedes us, as you yourself demonstrate, and almost anyone we catch will be eager to make the same offer without any of the trouble of hauling you around. If you’d really been paying attention, you would have released your prisoners voluntarily and either hightailed it out of the region in hopes of escaping our justice or thrown yourselves on our mercy, what little of it there is for slavers. You’ve rather squandered that opportunity by doing your best to kill us, and your recent change of heart does you little credit, since the only immediate alternative is death, and may still be, which sharply limits my conviction of your sincerity. Our main party is coming up behind you, and some of them are former slaves. I’m beginning to believe that it might have a salutary effect on morale if we simply gave you to them to do with as they will, in which case your heartfelt pleas might tend more toward an easy death than mere continued life.” ‘Holy Harry! When did I turn into such a cold-hearted bitch?’ I thought, and then remembered, ‘Oh, that’s right. When I’d first seen the terrible scars the Reivers had left on Chalcedony’s abused body; when I’d eventually heard how they killed her husband and infant son right before her eyes, laughing all the while.’ “Throw out your weapons,” I finally said. “I’ll decide what to do with you directly.”

They tossed their rifles over the the tops of the rocks behind which they were still cowering, so I said, “Now stand up and show yourselves, with the understanding that if we discover that any one of you remains in hiding, we’ll kill the lot of you immediately for violating the decidedly one-sided terms of your unconditional surrender.” I heard Beryl start to giggle, only half-muffled. ‘Okay, so I was doing a little theatrical performance. Results in battle quite often depended upon showmanship as much as force-of-arms. Of course, Beryl’s audible glee enhanced her own reputation as a cold-blooded killer as well, so it was all to the good.’

And it turned out to have been well-played, in fact, because the talkative one shouted out to some hidden comrade in a different set of rocks as he himself stood up with his hands well in the air and no weapons on his person that I could see. “Virgil, get your sorry ass out here with the rest of us!”

Pretty damned quick I had a ragged lot of half a dozen men in front of me, hands in the air, and I walked over toward them with my machete in hand whilst Beryl covered me from the rocks. One of the men had a whip coiled on his belt. I suppose that he was Virgil, since he was the one who’d been hiding apart from the rest, but the sight of that whip was good enough for me. I flicked out my blade and had his head off his body in the time between two heartbeats. “Just so you know,” I said dispassionately to the rest of them as the corpse fell to the ground in two parts, “beating or maltreating prisoners is a court-martial offense, and your pal here was just found guilty and adjudicated on the strength of the bloodstains on that whip of his. Any of the rest of you carry whips? If so, please step forward and take your turn.” I said this with scornful menace, but in truth I was getting sick and tired of killing people. Unfortunately, murder seemed to be my stock-in-trade, and I had a necessary rôle to play.

No one really moved or said a word, although the talky guy kept moving his eyes to look first at the body, then the head, which had rolled off a few feet to the side, with a sort of horrid fascination. ‘Good,’ I thought. ‘Keep’em on their toes.’

“Gumball!” I yelled, purely for their benefit. “Breakfast!”

Gumball rolled up from behind them, so I said, “You men might want to step out of the way quite smartly, unless you want to be fertilizer as well.” The look on their faces as Gumball trundled by was quite gratifying; how pride goeth before a fall. One lost control of his bowels, which was distasteful, but we can’t all be true warriors. I suppose that’s why these crêtins relied on treachery and reserved their proudest efforts for abusing and/or slaughtering innocent women and children. On general principle, I pierced one of them through the eye with a foxy dagger. He hadn’t looked quite frightened enough, and his eyes had been darting around as if looking for a chance to escape, not to mention the fact that he’d been the one who’d speculated about how nice it would be to fuck us up the ass and I’d felt the taint of his former thoughts even in the midst of his fear. “He had a shifty-eyed look,” I explained, “and didn’t look at all contrite.” The rest immediately did their best to look very humble indeed.

Talky guy turned rather pale and lost his lunch as Gumball rolled over Virgil and the shifty-eyed guy, although it actually wasn’t at all gory, since both bodies and one head had simply disappeared when Gumball rolled on by. Gumball had thoughtfully left my dagger behind, as shiny and polished as a riverine pebble after rain. ‘Thank you, Gumball,’ I intimated. He almost purred, or at least that’s what the rustling of his leaves and vines reminded me of. ‘How on Earth did I ever get so lucky?’

 

 

The first thing I did, of course, was feed our new prisoners a bit of cheese, so I didn’t have to worry too much about them trying to escape. Whatever other horrific sins might be attributed to the Reivers, they were first and foremost the very bottom of the barrel when it came to misogynist thugs and rapists amongst whom no woman other than a self-loathing masochist with a morbid wish for degradation and death would consider finding refuge in a million years, so we made sure that they knew that they were beginning a journey from which there was no escape, other than an eventual demise, of course. That sobered them up a bit, and in their eyes was cruel punishment, whatever their opinions might be a year from now. I didn’t particularly care, and let them know that they wouldn’t get a second chance to escape in any case, if they had any belated misgivings about their bargain, because I’d set the burrowers on their trail, and intimated that they could smell out a particular person from a hundred miles away with no trouble at all, which may have been a slight exaggeration, but they, of course, had no way of knowing that.

In the end, I set the talky guy to drawing maps off by himself, with his former comrades assigned as secondary sources in two separate groups, so they each of them furnished a ‘quality control’ group for the other. The talky guy — he’d turned out to be named Beauregard, however unlikely and inappropriate the name seemed for a black-hearted villain and pirate — seemed to have the best innate sense of proportion and distance, and was turning out quite creditable maps and descriptions of the Reiver camps he was aware of. I named him ‘Becky,’ after Tom Sawyer’s inamorata, although we were a very long way from the Mississippi River. I named them all after ancient characters from the old stories, so their distinctive names reminded us of their origins, and so set them apart from the rest of us, despite their rapidly-improving looks. We even had a Mehitabel, so I told her that it means ‘God Rejoices,’ although the character I’d really had in mind was the promiscuous feline girlfriend of a cockroach. Rebbeca, of course, is another Hebrew name, and means either ‘captivating’ or ‘earth,’ depending on which portion of the human language tree it really came from originally, and may have been the name of an ancient Assyrian Goddess. Eventually, I told Becky the whole story, or several stories, actually, although this entailed a bit more story-telling than I particularly cared to do. I was feeling generous, though, because the transformed Becky was trying very hard to be as good as possible, either frightened by my carefully-cultivated legend or perhaps a natural inclination. I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, though, because she was far more diligent than any of the rest, and seemed at times to be genuinely remorseful to have ever associated herself with the Reivers.

Eventually, their crimes might be forgotten, but not soon, perhaps not even by this generation, and the tradeoff seemed worthwhile, since someone was bound to get hurt eventually if we rode into many encampments without knowing anything about their fighting strength and defenses. We were heading into territory of which we knew almost nothing other than what was on the antique maps I’d carried with us from the library back in the City — most of it hundreds of years out of date — and what these former Reivers were telling us. Mountains hadn’t moved, or at least not much, but I knew that the coastlines had changed by quite a bit, dense forests had grown where cities and farmland once prevailed, streams and rivers had changed their courses, and most of the cities had been abandoned, as far as I knew from the few remaining records of the initial stages of the war between the Horticulturists and the rest of the natural world.

 

 

The forest was beautiful here, but strange. The area around The Castle — and the City I’d finally discovered — was mostly flat, or flattish, comprised of deposits left behind by ancient oceans, then scraped flat by glaciation. It was primarily prairie as well, grasslands with hidden copses of willows and other water-loving trees nestled into creek-beds and river valleys. Here, in the bottomlands of a river valley surrounded by worn mountains, there were huge oaks, walnuts, yellow-poplars, tulip trees, sycamores, and other hardwoods, with a scattering of pines. From my perspective, it was more than a little spooky, and it didn’t help that we were following a trail mapped out by Becky toward a putative Reiver hideaway. Becky, about twenty feet ahead of me, stopped dead and wriggled a hand held carefully behind her back. I readied my crossbow, one of three I carried, although I also had a rifle.

Suddenly, a man’s harsh voice broke the forest silence, “What the fuck are you doing out here, girlie?”

Becky started, obviously truly frightened despite her knowledge of the area and her expectation that we were about to encounter a sentry. “Oh!” she cried, and made as if to run away from the sentry, slanting back slightly to the side of our position, carefully avoiding the temptation to look at us.

‘Good girl,’ I thought, prepared for any hostile action. ‘Now let’s see what the mean guy has to say for himself.’

Right on schedule, he burst out from a thicket conveniently placed right where his voice had come from. “Get back here, slave!” he shouted as he ran toward us after Becky, which pretty much sealed his fate. I put a bolt through his head and he dropped like a stone, looking, I hoped, as if he’d tripped over something and fallen, perhaps hitting his head. Beryl, of course, kept running, dodging off from one tree to another in order to keep as much of her covered as she could, the better to pantomime a woman fleeing for her life.

Evidently, she was doing a good job, because another sentry took off from the same thicket, only this one was carrying a rifle and shouted, “Stop! or I’ll shoot!” before he spared a glance toward his comrade. “Robert?! Are you hurt?” he said as he ran up, a touching display of concern which moved me not at all, because he joined ‘Robert’ in death a second later, still ten or twenty feet short of where he might have noticed that the back of ‘Robert’s’ head had developed an unsightly growth.

Then we waited. Becky had told us that they usually posted two sentries per location, so that they could take turns for any needed breaks or naps, so I was fairly confident that there was no one left behind, but it didn’t hurt to be a little cautious. To amuse myself, I took a quick pick from my mental deck, ‘Judgement’, and upright, an auspicious omen, considering…. I moved carefully to my left — away from where Becky lay half-hidden, and thus a distraction — and crept up on the thicket as stealthily as possible.

The stench was incredible, especially after our long journey through the fragrant woodlands. ‘Robert’ and his accomplice hadn’t had the most fastidious of personal grooming habits, and it became quickly obvious that they hadn’t even bothered to move to another thicket before attending to their bowel movements. ‘Better off dead,’ I thought, shaking my head in disgust before following Robert’s path out of their former outpost, waving my hands in the air as insurance against nervous recruits. “All clear,” I announced, then added, “You did well, Becky,” as she walked back toward the thicket, followed by another thirty members of our band of sisters.

“The next sentries are up on that ridge, or were the last time my former band of Reivers passed by on a trading expedition. Last I knew, they couldn’t even see this outpost, because their primary task was to catch any slaves who might try to escape, so their attention was directed away from the world outside. They depended on hearing the sound of a gunshot from one of their outlying sentries to give them ample warning, because they took their positions as the natural masters of all they surveyed for granted, and so couldn’t imagine anyone more dangerous and deadly than they were.”

“The more fools they are, then, ” Beryl said quietly. “Let’s just go call on them, why don’t we?”

“Let’s do!” I said brightly. “I’ve been just itching for a little diversion.”

 

 

We left the horses behind when we climbed the back of the ridge, because we were already experienced enough with them to know that horses talked to each other when they smelled — or saw, or heard — other horses, which would be an unfortunate beginning for a surprise attack. They were hobbled in a wooded clearing with two of of the new volunteers to guard them from any harm. We hadn’t seen any predators yet, but Becky had assured us that ‘panthers,’ evidently a type of very large cat, sometimes prowled these woods, but were wary of humans, because the Reivers hunted them for their skins. It was odd to think of animal predators, odd to think of large animals at all, because they’d pretty much disappeared up in our little corner of North America, other than the feral jackal-dogs which still ran free in the City, but it was comforting as well to think that the beginnings — or remnants — of a balanced environment still lingered in parts of North America. There were more pines up here, but still a scattering of the same hardwoods we’d seen at lower elevations as well, so the forest was more vertical up here in the mountains, but not completely unfamiliar.

At the crest, I halted our party whilst I and Beryl went ahead to reconnoiter. They hadn’t even cleared the vegetation from above their ‘guard post,’ so it was easy to obtain a good view of it, as well as the second ‘guard post’ on the opposite side of their valley. “What do you think, Beryl? Crossbows to take out the three below us and then a few HE missiles to discourage the other guards?”

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” she said, matching actions to her words and polishing off the three guards with three quick shots from her three bows. “I’ll arrange the rest of us and let you have the honors for the three over there.” With that, she wriggled her way back down to where our main party rested.

In the meanwhile, I studied the situation. They had a small fortification protecting the entrance to the valley, but it was only a stockade, so wasn’t set up to deter an armed assault from behind their lines. They were really beneath contempt, since their worldview seemed to encompass only themselves, potential victims, slaves in chains, and other Reivers, of whom they might be wary, but were accustomed to see as fellow ‘masters’ who shared a common commerce in human beings and habits of treachery, murder, and theft, if not friendship. The notion that there might be ‘top predators’ who might prove dangerous to them had obviously never crossed their venal minds. ‘Ah, well, to work withal,’ I thought as I heard Beryl sidle back up to my side. I had three launchers ready, so used two on the other guard post and then immediately used my rifle to take out the four guards manning the stockade, then started on any Reivers I saw walking around. Beside me, Beryl started doing the same. The HE explosions had eliminated any possible element of surprise, so there was no point in wasting time, nor any requirement for stealth, since the missile trails pointed straight back to our position, on almost unassailable high ground, and we were perfectly situated to command the entire encampment, since the stupid slavers had deliberately designed this emplacement to completely control the killing ground below, forestalling any possible rebellion by their slaves, of course, but setting themselves up as patsies at the same time. One could almost pity them.

Pretty soon, there was no one moving around except the bewildered about-to-be-former ‘slaves’ and a few of the Reivers who’d gone to ground behind whatever shelter they could find. One had the audacity to gather up a bunch of ‘slaves’ to act as ‘human shields’ — a separate violation of The Laws of War — but a well-placed crossbow bolt from Beryl soon discouraged that tactic. Then another held up a stick with an improvised ‘white flag,’ which of course revealed his position, so down went another. “There’ll be no consideration given,” I called down, “and no negotiations, so you might as well disabuse yourselves of the notion that we’ll talk to you, or that any of you will walk away scot-free. If you surrender unconditionally, and indicate your capitulation by immediately walking out into the open with your hands in the air and then lie face-down flat upon the ground, you’ll be taken into custody to await trial, but only if there are no more cowardly attempts to hide behind your captives. Anyone attempting to escape will be killed immediately.”

One of them walked out, almost immediately, and said loudly,before lying down, if that was ever his plan, “I’d like to speak to the man in charge.” He seemed far too arrogant — probably one of the leaders — so I killed him.

“Is there any part of ‘lying face-down’ that any of the rest of you don’t understand?” I said loudly, but calmly. “You’ll notice, I’m sure, that the man who didn’t understand my words is now lying flat, none-the-less.” I paused for effect. “ANd now, you will walk out into the open and lie down right this very minute, as I’ve already suggested, or you will die, quite possibly in terrible pain.” Actually, I thought this unlikely, since we usually managed to hit their brains, which seemed a fairly pleasant — or at least very quick — way to die, if die one must, although of course we’d had no reports from the ‘other side’ of the experience to verify the fact, but in the intimidation business it rarely hurts to point out the negative side of failure to obey a lawful order. Despite my contempt for the so-called ‘Reivers,’ I had no particular desire to be cruel.

Beside me, Beryl noticed that one of the men now straggling out had evidently forgotten to leave his weapon behind, and in fact was attempting to conceal it. Her rifle barked just once, and he was just as horizontal as the first one, albeit for a different reason. She looked at me and shrugged.

“Perhaps,” I said, “Some of you haven’t managed to figure out what ‘unconditional surrender’ means. This is not the occasion to discuss the terms of your cessation of hostilities, and you are not soldiers covered under the conventions of the laws of war. You’re criminals, and are being taken into custody by the lawful authority of the Horticulturist Services of North America, not dispatched to an interment camp until some soi-disant ‘war’ of your own imagining is over. It’s time to lay down your arms, come out into the open, and lay down with your hands outstretched, or die. I personally don’t much care either way, so it’s entirely up to you, but you will be horizontal within a very few moments, one way or the other. You have the good example of quite a few of your erstwhile comrades to lead the way, as it were, but of course they won’t be adding their voices, now forever stilled, to the conversation.”

After a few moments, the remaining Reivers began to trickle out from hiding, most of them lying down immediately, obviously nervous, but one sauntered out with a show of bravado, sneering, his thumbs hooked in his belt as if he were on parade. He had the bad luck to have a whip on his belt, so of course I shot him too. “To reiterate,” I said irritably, “when I say ‘Hands in the air’ it means exactly what it sounds like, and specifically doesn’t mean ‘exposed to the air,’ or ‘out of your pockets.’ You will either keep your hands well up above your heads or you will be assumed to harbor hostile intentions and/or a concealed weapon with very predictable consequences. When lying down, you will keep your hands outstretched above your heads until you are searched and told to stand.” I rolled my eyes over towards Beryl, ‘Morons!’ I mouthed.

She nodded. “Crêtins, rather,” she said aloud. “I’m fairly sure that it’s a genetic defect.”

“Is every man jack of you either dead or lying down in plain view?” I called out loudly once again, reasonably enough, I thought, considering my mood.

There was a fairly extended silence until one of them had the nerve to turn his head and answer, “Far as I kin tell, but I’m not sure where every livin’ soul of ’em might get to. Y’all took us by surprise.”

“Are you their leader?”

“No, Ma’am, I sure ain’t. He was one of them you done shot.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Be so good, then, as to persuade any listeners who aren’t visible and lying down that it’s in their best interest to surrender, or we’ll set the dogs to track them, and I can guarantee that they won’t like that.” I mentally apologized to Gumball and his friends, but thought that simplicity was better than trying to persuade them of the existence of ‘monsters’ who might seem as if they were sprung from out of nightmares. Speaking of which, I said silently, ‘Gumball! Would you mind knocking down the structure at the end of the valley?’

“You might hear a loud noise in a moment or two,” I said, “but please don’t be too terribly alarmed. Our ‘dogs’ are rather more rambunctious than any dogs you’re likely to have seen before.”

It wasn’t but a few moments before Gumball and two of his pals came knocking at the gate, which instantly collapsed as they passed under and through it, leaving most of it in shreds and tatters.

“Lie still!” I shouted as several made as if to gather themselves up to flee in terror, and shot a couple of rounds into the dirt near them to encourage compliance. “They won’t harm you unless I tell them to, and they can outpace a horse at full gallop, so you wouldn’t have even the whisper of a chance to escape, not to mention that we have a dozen sharpshooters available to shoot you down like dogs if you turn tail and run. You’re all of you at our mercy, not your own devices. Please don’t forget it, as faux-heroics will avail you nothing but a rather messy death.”

They quieted down, but were clearly very nervous.

“Now you,”I said to the man who’d answered me at first, “stand up with your hands in the air as much as possible; I won’t shoot you if you have to put a hand on the ground to help you stand, but keep any such movement brief and broad to allay the suspicions of your captors.”

He did, with commendable grace; the life of a horseman encourages lower-body strength.

“Now call out, as loudly as you can, to any survivors who might remain at large. Tell them to instantly come out of hiding with their hands in the air and ‘come on down,’ as the saying goes here in this Great State of Virginia.”

He was prompt, I can give him that. “Jackson? Travis? Any of you boys alive up there? If you is, you just take a look-see at what she’s fixin’ to set on your trail. You’all’d just as well come on down an’ face the music.”

“Barkley? I’m all that’s left. Jackson’s daid, ’n Thadeus too, burnt up they is like yer goddamned pinecones.”

“Can’t be hepped. You come on down heah, and keep your fool hands up. This here woman’d jest as soon shoot’ya as look at ya.”

He was right about that last remark. I’d heard enough stories of what life had been like as a slave to last me a very long lifetime, and now I was going to hear more; I wasn’t looking forward to it. “You’ll be humanely treated, I give you my word, but you will to tried and sentenced for your crimes, whatever they turn out to be, so if you have anything to say in your defense, start thinking about it now.”

“Yessum,” he mumbled.

 

 

The rest of the unit arrived through the ruins of the stockade shortly after Gumball and company rolled through, so Beryl and I began following the trail down toward the Reiver’s prison pen.

We were about half way down when there was a sudden rifle shot from behind us and time seemed to stand still as I whipped around and caught the bastard with two quick shots through the head, the last as he fell dead from the first. I wheeled back and saw that Beryl was down, and dropped to my knees beside her, my mind already calculating the nature of her injury, a shot through the left femoral artery which was pumping blood at an alarming rate. I reached into my belt pouch and pulled out a chunk of our magic ‘cheese’ and slapped most of it on the wound itself, but took a mouthful, chewed it up, and spit it into her mouth, after which I tore off most of my blouse to make a tourniquet to slow the bleeding long enough for the cheese to begin its healing work, or so I hoped, but it wasn’t working terribly well. “Harry’s Holy Hell, Beryl! If you die on me I’ll haunt you! I swear I will!”

Her eyelids fluttered open as she said, “Don’t you have that backwards, dearest? If I die, I’ll be haunting you, not the other way around.”

“Nitpicking will do you no good,” I said, tears trickling down my face. “When I aim to do a thing, I do it, as you well know, so you’d just better survive or you’ll be sorry.”

Beryl laughed, which I considered a very good sign. “It’ll take more than a cowardly shot from behind to kill me,” she boasted. “I trust that your current leisurely posture means that the dirty little coward is dead.”

“It does,” I admitted, “twice over, although I’d be sorely tempted to bring him back to life so I could kill him again, if it were possible.”

“That’s okay, as long as he’s dead. Damn!” she said, glancing down, “I quite liked that outfit on you; made you look quite fetching I thought.”

“What? this old rag?” I said modestly.

“Well, I liked it.”

“I do too, especially since most of it is busily keeping most of the blood inside your body, where it belongs.”

She laughed again, an even better sign. “Well, there is that,” she said. “Remind me to find you another cute outfit when I feel more like traipsing around through the shops. My treat.”

“Yeah, yeah, big spender,” I said.

“All the currency we really own is time, my dear, and it’s precious beyond measure.”

“You must be feeling better,” I said, “if you have enough energy for philosophy.”

“I’m always philosophical,” she said. “You should always be prepared with a few piquant bons mots in times of danger. It builds character.”

“Like weightlifting,” I said.

“Exactly! Use it or lose it,” she said, then she closed her eyes.

 

 

I carried her down the hill, weeping. When I reached the bottom, I gently laid her down and called two of our volunteers over to take care of her. Then I picked up my rifle and addressed the prisoners. “Unfortunately, after your surrender, one of your number treacherously ambushed us from behind, killing one of my officers, thus violating the terms we’d agreed upon. Sorry,” I said, raised my rifle, and then shot them all as fast as I could pull the trigger, which was very fast indeed.

 

 

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

Copyright © 2012-2013 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved

 

 

Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Eight False Flag

 

 

Even the finest sword plunged into salt water will eventually rust.

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

 

Killing didn’t help me. I looked at the bodies, grotesquely impotent in death, and it didn’t touch my grief at all. I felt… empty, but not sorry at all about them. Whatever they might have become, they had been evil in life, and it was their collective wickedness that had culminated in Beryl’s death. The man I’d killed up on the mountain was a plug-compatible equivalent to all of them, and if he hadn’t been there it would have been one of them. The only guilt I felt was that I was still alive and Beryl was dead. I went through an explosion of scenarios in my head, obsessively trying to figure out what I’d done wrong, what I could have done — if only I’d been looking behind us… if only I’d walked ahead… behind… on the other side of her… anything…! — that would have left Beryl alive and laughing again, because it was my fault, all my fault, my arrogance, my stupidity, but Beryl had paid the price.

From somewhere, I felt someone tugging at me and I spun on them, furious. “What in Harry’s Holy Hell is your problem?!” I snarled. It was Becky, one of them and I almost reached out my hands to choke the life out of her for daring to intrude… before I stopped myself. I closed my eyes. Then I opened them and said, “I’m sorry. What was it that you needed?”

“Ma’am,” she said, “I’m sorry to intrude, but we need your help, I think, with some of the victims; they’re in a bad way, some of them, and you’re the best healer that we have.”

I snorted. “Just my luck! I’m the best killer as well. How typical of the world’s biggest fuck-up!” Then I relented and said, “Very well, show them to me. I’m sorry that I snapped at you.”

“It’s fine, Ma’am. We all of us know how much she meant to you. I don’t blame you at all… for anything.”

“Thank you, Rebecca. I appreciate your concern, but let’s take care of the living right now; they need my help much more than I need my grief.”

“Thank you, Ma’am. They’re over here, in the slave pens. They’re afraid to come out, and of course many of them are so terribly injured or ill that they can’t come out. We were able to break most of the chains they’d been hobbled with, but a few were either too much for us or so deeply embedded in their swollen flesh that were we afraid to do anything, because we might harm them in trying to do good.” The anguish on her face was quite plain, so I was convinced that Becky, at least, had been able to fully reëngage with her own humanity.

She led the way to the most dismal and putrid area I’d ever seen. The stench alone might kill someone, and I immediately saw that many of the former slaves were gravely ill. Most had septic open wounds from vicious whippings and heavy blows, not to ignore the branding and scarification which seemed deliberately intended to make them seem little more than cattle, their humanity stripped away by madmen with no slightest trace of pity or compassion — several looked indeed as if their extremities were gangrenous, with bottle flies and maggots visibly feasting on their decaying flesh — “Quick!” I said, “Fetch my medical pack!”

“I have it ready, Ma’am. I knew you’d want it.”

“Bless you, Becky,” I said, and started taking out sealed bottles of our magic cheese. I handed two to Becky and told her, “Chew up a small mouthful and then spit some of the liquified mixture into the wounds of the most desperately ill, then get the rest of it into their mouths somehow, assisting them if necessary so it can help them to heal more quickly. The enzymes in your own saliva will help to start the process of breaking it down into substances which can penetrate the lining of the stomach and intestine, so don’t be afraid to chew it thoroughly. If they’re unconscious, massage their throats to help them get it down. As long as the quantity is small, it won’t hurt at all if a little goes down the ‘wrong pipe,’ but try not to let them choke.”

Becky started crying for some reason. “Thank you, Ma’am. I won’t let you down,” was all she said as she hurried off toward one of the most severely injured.

I chose another, but not without marvelling at how much Becky had changed since I’d first met her, transformed for the better, I think, perhaps even healed in her troubled soul. I knelt down by a woman who was conscious, but terribly weak, and gently laid my hands near a festering wound caused by a branding which had burned her left arm almost to the bone, from what I could see. I was vaguely consoled by the knowledge that the sadistic monster who had done this to her was surely dead. “Rest easy, sister,” I said to her. “You’re free of those evil men forever now, because we killed them each and every one.” Then I gave her a bit of cheese to swallow and smeared a healing paste of cheese and my saliva mixed on each of her deepest wounds and scars. “This medicine will help heal your wounds,” I told her, “but it actually tastes rather nice to boot, and it will eventually heal all your scars as well, so you’ll be beautiful again, with no visible blemishes left to remind of this horrible experience. If you’re hungry, just this little will be fairly filling, but we’ll have more food and drink prepared soon, so don’t worry about the selection for now.”

She nodded her assent, but seemed too weak to speak, so I moved on quickly to the next woman.

The next hour or more was pretty much endless repetition of the same general interactions, with the only real distinction being how badly our patients had been maimed by those wicked, wicked, men, and those few whose bonds were so deeply embedded in their flesh that I had to cut them to remove their shackles, plus a few with clear signs of life-threatening gangrene, with a sweetish, almost liquid, pus oozing from layers of their deepest tissues. Those I worried about the most, since I knew that in traditional medicine, amputation might have been required, something I didn’t know how to do, and worried that even if I did, my ‘magic’ cheese might fail to regrow a missing limb. Eventually, any lingering sense of guilt over killing the prisoners simply evaporated. I’d become so familiar with the end result of their remorseless brutality that I could feel, or at least intuit, the cruel intention behind each visible lesion, could vividly imagine the covert savagery that had caused the visible wounds. Some people deserve to die, and when I told their captives that not one of the men who’d so cruelly tormented them could ever hurt them again, the first hints of hopeful looks on their faces — where once had dwelt despair — were both justification and reward enough.

 

 

By the time I left the slave pen, and had made all the arrangements necessary to see to the comfort of the former prisoners, it was very late in the afternoon, getting on toward evening, and the valley floor was already in shadows. The sky had that peculiar translucency that only appears near dusk, or just after dawn, when one feels as if there are stars out there, somewhere, that one is looking up and out into deep space, and the stars are somehow present in one’s consciousness but invisible to the eye. I was lost. I turned to one of the new recruits — I couldn’t remember her name — and asked, “Where’s Beryl?”

“Beryl?” she said, mystified.

“Brigadier General Farquhar,” I explained.

She blinked, still puzzled. “You mean the woman who was killed?”

I closed my eyes for a moment, struggling to maintain my composure. “Yes, that’s her,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I saw them taking her over toward that stockade.” She pointed toward a sort of inner keep, a partially-fortified shelter within the area enclosed by the valley walls and the stockade fence across the entrance to the Reiver’s stronghold.

Whatever they’d planned to use it for, it had played no part in our assault upon them, because they’d been caught flat-footed, for the most part, and were overwhelmed within a matter of moments. I walked toward it, then inside where there was only a bare dirt floor, apparently raked clean, but it was empty.

Puzzled, I walked back out and saw another new recruit scurrying by with an armload of bedding, presumably to make our rescuees more comfortable for the oncoming night. “Soldier, where are the bodies of the Reivers?” I thought perhaps she’d been taken wherever they’d been lain, which would be an understandable mistake.

She paused and said, pointing with one temporarily-free hand, “They were over there near the stockade wall, but two of those giant green things appeared out of the earth and gobbled them up.” She was clearly frightened of them, which was understandable.

“Bandersnatches, they’re called ‘bandersnatches,’ and they’re harmless, unless I tell them otherwise. Was there a woman with the other bodies?”

“No, Ma’am, I don’t think so, or not that I noticed. They were all men as far as I could see, and dressed in that ragged style they affect. Could I go now, Ma’am? They need these things for the sick women….”

I was taken aback. Since when did my personal issues take precedence over the comfort and care of persons in my charge? “Of course,” I said immediately. “Go on then, our guests need you more than I do.”

She nodded and ran off toward what was evidently the field hospital. “Yes, Ma’am, and thank you!” she called over her shoulder as she hurried toward a jumbled array of prostrate patients and a few attendants, amongst whom I saw Becky, which pleased me. My ragtag ‘army’ was starting to take on the cohesiveness and discipline of a real armed service, and was beginning to pulse with an inner life of its own.

With a guilty flush of chagrin, I managed to bring myself back to my present task, which was to find Beryl’s body so I could give her a proper burial, if nothing else. She must be somewhere..

 

 

It was quite dark, but not as dark as my mood. Oddly enough, the evening was actually very beautiful — even I could appreciate that, foul temper and all. the stars had appeared one by one, and then by scores, between one blink and the next, as they do on the best of nights, and the translucent sky was now a darkly purple haze ablaze with lights that seemed almost close enough that one could reach out and touch them, but Beryl’s body had disappeared, just as her life had ebbed after losing so much blood. It was as though the earth itself had opened up and swallowed her, and I had lost her twice. I was bereft, frantic, distracted, because I couldn’t see her, touch her, to say my final goodbyes.

I could only speculate that in the confusion of so many bodies — both the dead Reivers and those of their captives who’d died in the slave pens before we took over the camp — Beryl had been mistaken for just one of the other bodies, which meant that the bandersnatches had probably… disposed of her, but everyone I’d talked to either didn’t remember her at all or remembered her being set aside from the others, but even those reports differed in significant detail from one story to the next, with one mentioning her being placed next to the keep, another on the ground near the creek which flowed down the center of the valley, and yet another placed her at the head of the valley, near the trail which led to the heights of the second outpost — the one we’d destroyed with HE missiles — so I despaired of ever discovering the truth. I’d tried working with my imaginary Tarot deck, but there were no answers to be found there either, which was spooky. Each time I drew even a curtailed spread, the readings were muddy and confused, as if I weren’t connecting to reality somehow.

I’d tried summoning the bandersnatches as well, but they didn’t know what I was on about. Not all of them were quite as bright as Gumball — himself strangely gone missing —, and usually folowed his lead, but they were as independent as any wild thing might be, at least when they wanted to be, or when they weren’t thinking about being a part of the gang of them, which was almost any time that Gumball wasn’t around, so they were no use at all. I’d been trying to contact Gumball too, of course, but he seemed to have wandered off somewhere and wasn’t responding, which was also odd, and very unsettling.

In the end, I went off to the corral where we had the horses penned and singled out my own sturdy mare for grooming. I wielded the currycomb to good effect, as her mane had gotten tangled during our journey, and the touch of her warm hide was comforting, reconnecting me to the world of the living all around me. After combing out the tangles, I used a coarse length of cloth to rub her down, which she enjoyed almost as much as I did. When I’d lived back in The Castle, if anyone had ever told me that I’d be doing this someday, caring for an animal ten times or more larger than I was, I’d have told them they were crazy, yet here I was surrounded by horses, so familiar with them that I recognized individuals and knew most of their names. ‘Familiar…’ these animals did seem almost like family to me, a wider notion of intimate relationships and mutual dependency than I’d ever thought possible. They carried me around, but in return I made sure that they had water and good things to eat, but most importantly, I think, I protected them all from any danger posed by the local predators. ‘Animals…’ ‘anima…’ the soul, or those who possess one. ‘Spirit…’ the same word, referring ultimately to breath, respiration, breathing. I was fairly confident that Gumball had a soul, if anything did, because he had emotions, albeit fairly simple ones. I didn’t see him ever penning a treatise on philosophy, but then I didn’t know anyone at all who might, including me. Of us all, of every one I knew, Beryl…, but now she wasn’t.

On a whim, I left off mucking with my mare — her name is ‘Buttercup,’ by the way — and I went to where my bags were stored and rummaged around until I found my physical Tarot deck. I shuffled them several times, and was astonished by the pure sensation of the physical deck in my hands, a luxury I’d completely abandoned on our campaign, because my mental gymnastics seemed more convenient, then laid out a simple Celtic Cross spread.

The first card represented my present situation, of course, but it was surprising, one of the Major Arcana, The High Priestess, who represents women’s holy mysteries, as well as feminine strength and power. She wears the Crown of the Goddess Isis, which represents the Moon and the Divine Mother, both flux and constancy, and the river of life flows from beneath her robes, touched — or controlled — by the Crescent Moon. In her hands, she holds the Scroll of the Law, the Torah, and she sits between the Pillars of the Temple, Boaz and Jachin, balanced between severity and mercy. Within the Temple, there are clustered pomegranates, symbols of burgeoning life and fecundity, but also of the boundary between life and death, because Persephone, the Kore — the Maiden at the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries, seated in the Holy of Holies — ate pomegranate seeds to seal Her authority as the Queen of Life and Death, and so She alone has the power to pass freely between the chthonic halls of the underworld and the sunlit meadows and fields of the living Earth, Her footstool.

It was humbling, especially after my performance earlier that day, during which I’d sent several dozen men down to Hell, their own personal la Belle Dame sans Merci.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried — ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!’

I drew the second card, that which troubles me.

It was The Tower, of course, another Major Arcanum representing the catastrophic overthrow of complacency and false pride, failure, but also true enlightenment. The Heavenly fire which destroys the tower is heavily pregnant with the one of the matres lectionis, the mothers of literacy, the smallest letter in the Hebrew alefbet, the Yod, echoing the many seeds of the pomegranates on the first card in a circular cycle of destruction and rebirth.

Taken together, they neatly summed up my present situation. This whole strange trip had been my idea; my own meddling in a scheme of things that had existed in my own part of the world for at least a hundred years that I knew of. On the other hand, I’d been been kicked off my butt by intimations of terrible change wafting up from the South, which I now saw as the malign aspect of the Reivers, the catalyst which would have led to the destruction of my comfortable notion of the world in any case. Indeed, my own society held the seeds of its own death in its own heart; the contempt toward all things feminine — and women in general — that was endemic in the fortress culture, which glorified men and relegated almost all women to their primary service as breeders of more men to replace those lost to the plants. In its own way, it was a type of enslavement, except our slaves came pre-branded, unmistakably second-class citizens, their ‘manhood’ cut away.

Hesitating, my hand trembling, I drew the third card, the base. It was The Moon, yet another of the Major Arcana, reversed; deception, great loss through criminal activity, yet underlain by emanations from the divine power, the Yods again, heavenly fire kindling the mind, impelling it to embark on its journey between another set of pillars toward the mountains of enlightenment. In another symbolism, they represent the Kundalini power which alone makes every change possible, the coiled scorpion or serpent of Scorpio, the Zodiacal sign which rules the passions, sex, control, death and loneliness, betrayal. Had I betrayed Beryl? I had; I knew it now. I’d allowed my ego to dictate my actions when I should have listened to my heart. Looking at the physical card, the hair at the back of my neck rose as I saw a sudden resemblance of the wolf and the dog depicted at the entrance to the trail toward the distant mountains as Gumball and his friends, half-wild, half-pet, guardians of the soul during its progress towards eventual apotheosis. They too look toward the light, toward the heavenly fire of consciousness, and are at the beginning their own journey.

Turning back toward the deck, I drew the fourth card and placed it deosil, the Five of Cups, another card of loss and disappointment, but in the recent past. One of its many layers of meaning was the death of a marriage, certainly apropos, but also overseen by the Moon, the essence of constant change. Every loss is an opportunity for positive change, if you allow it, or so they say, although I didn’t see what that eucatastrophe might possibly be. Perhaps, like the shrouded figure depicted on the card, I’d turned my back on it, ignoring the bridge and road that led toward better prospects, but perhaps the imagined safety of the keep on the other side of the river was a enticing way-station on the road to the Mountains of Madness, where unknown terrors await, or perhaps those mountains behind it were only the gateway to the afterlife, if any.

Irritated, impatient with myself, with all I’d done that had led me to this place and time and situation, I dealt the fifth card, another Major Arcanum, Death, reversed and at the zenith, the potential outcome, grief, despair, the utter loss of hope. I shut my eyes. ‘What did I expect?’ I thought. ‘Why flay myself with endless rehearsals of what I already know?’ I dealt the sixth card none-the-less, the future, the great unknown, the rest of the adventure. It was Strength upright, the single card whose image had burned itself into my brain when first I’d discovered it when I took my first Tarot deck from the dark interior of that shop. I’d spread the deck, just to look at it, and that card had somehow floated out of the deck and displayed itself on the ground before my feet, as if it marked my path for me. A woman clothed in white is embracing a male lion, whether comforting it or controlling it is left to the querent. Above her head floats the lemniscus of John Wallis, the everpresent ribbon of eternity that threads through our lives and allows us to see and touch it, if we dare. She is the High Priestess displaced from her throne, stripped of the solemn robes of her temporal authority, laid bare in the wilderness and in her shift, with only her spiritual power to guide and protect her. She is girdled with roses, the strength of her deepest desires, and crowned with leaves and flowers, the emblems of life eternal. Looking carefully at the lion, I saw that it was Gumball as well, his steadfast playfulness evident in his posture and ardent gaze. Without caritas, without a constant heart and love, strength means nothing; it’s by our works that we are known for what we are. Facta non verba. Acta feminum probant. Taking all in all, it was a hopeful sign.

I studied the spiral core of the spread for quite some time, balancing what I knew with what I hoped to know, and then I turned to the Straight Path, the road ahead of me. I drew the seventh card, the beginning of the journey. It was the Queen of Wands, Beryl, in a word, the beginning and end of all my journeys, but this Beryl was filled with life, surrounded by lions, symbols of her noble nature, as if I needed to be reminded; even dying, her life’s blood leaking from her body, despite all my efforts to stanch the flow, she’d laughed and joked with me, easing my transition between life with her and life without her. Like the King of Pentacles and the King of Cups, alone amongst the Sovereigns, she carries two symbols of her worldly and spiritual authority, in her right hand the rod of chastisement, a simple wooden staff, but even that rough stave is suffused with life, because it blooms. In her left hand, nearest her heart, she carries the sunflower of love and life, itself echoed in the tapestry above her head. She reminded me too of my own mother, before my father had betrayed her to death. Even when they’d thrown her from the wall, she was noble and forbearing, declining either to curse or beg for mercy, as so many did, proud and valiant to the last, even as she was roughly manhandled and pushed over the edge of the wall, then fell silently from my sight. Although the memory of her courage made me weep afresh, despite the healing passage of time, I was also very proud of her. I do wish I’d known her better, but of course as Crete, I hadn’t had much contact with her, since I’d been sleeping and eating in the Barracks since I’d turned twelve, and even before had rarely seen her, except at mealtimes, and once when she’d nursed my back to health after I’d fallen ill with influenza; I must have been around eight, or so. All I really remember is being miserable.

My father hadn’t been sympathetic towards my grief at all. He’d claimed that being sick was a sign of moral weakness, and that I should be glad that she was no longer in a position to spread her pernicious notions of sympathy and compassion within our ranks. After she’d been murdered, years after, in fact, he’d said that it had been her own fault, because she was too soft, as evidenced by the fact that she’d wept when another woman, her friend, had been hurled from the wall after her own infection was discovered. I don’t know who he’d thought that he was fooling, since she’d died because he’d reported her infection to the authorities, not through some mysterious confluence of the adverse stars and moral weakness.

As beginnings go, it wasn’t terribly auspicious, but I couldn’t think of any way to deal with it just now, so I forged ahead. The eighth card was the Knight of Wands, reversed, representing conflict and discord in the outside world, with an unhealthy dose of paranoia. His robes are yellow with black salamanders emblazoned on the fabric, symbols of his fiery nature, since true salamanders are creatures of the fire. To accentuate his alignment with the Classical ‘element’ of fire, his crest is fiery red, and streamers of firey cloth form a sort of scarf or favor fastened at the gorget of his armor. I didn’t know what to make of it; before Beryl’s death, I would have instantly fastened on the Knight of Wands having some reference to Beryl, because her nature, both fiery and generous, was very much like his. Our current punitive expedition against the Reivers, of course, would explain the conflict, so perhaps I was reading too much into a single card.

I resolved to finish the reading before engaging in too much speculation, so dealt out the ninth card, the position of my hopes and fears. It was the Ten of Cups, abundance, perfect love, and peace — bitter irony. Who knew the cards had a sense of humor?

I wasted no more time thinking, but rather tore off the last card and laid it flat, the Queen of Cups, who sits by the sea of the preconscious mind — indeed, she dips her right foot into the brine and the hem of her robe is wet with it — contemplating the Chalice of Immortality, Cerridwen’s Cauldron, the Fount of Rebirth, in which is held all human knowledge and experience, just a drop of which potent quintessence is sufficient to impart the ability to talk to birds and men in their own languages, to discourse with poets and philosophers, and to change one’s shape to fit one’s mood, the Living Waters that Juan Ponce de León sought in Florida and failed to find. Like almost everything else worth looking for, the object of his quest lay within his own heart and mind, but it didn’t do me any good at all. I thought I’d held my real question firmly in mind, but the reading had hared off in what seemed like a hundred different directions, and then wandered into the swamps and gotten bogged, so I was no closer to an answer than before.

I cursed bitterly, “Harry’s fucking balls!” and stomped off through the camp and out to the ruined gateway of what used to be the stockade at the entrance to the valley. At least it was before Gumball’s fellow chia pets had torn it down and left a jumbled pile of splintered wood behind that was once a high palisade of thick pine logs buried in the rocky ground. The ground wasn’t doing too well either. I could see what used to be a trench cut into the solid rock now shattered into miscellaneous rubble. I suppose it had been the foundation for the posts, since if it had merely been anchored in soil, the Bandersnatches could have simply tipped it over like they had the trees at the beginning of this so very decisive engagement.

I looked down the valley for a bit. It was surprisingly beautiful, and even more strange that I was still capable of seeing that beauty. Then I felt ashamed and deeply shamed, I wept outsde the camp. I wept for my loss, for my stupidity, for Beryl and the loss of all her hopes and dreams, now forever unrealized, and then I wept…, for what I didn’t know. After some interminable period, I stopped weeping. ‘Life goes on,’ I thought, ‘or so I suppose.’ I turned back toward the camp. There were still things that needed doing, women so recently freed from slavery and degradation that their problems dwarfed mine by comparison, despite the physical healing now barely started, thanks to the Gift of the Fungi, as I sometimes called it. I couldn’t let my own problems impact too badly on the others, so I resolved to place their needs uppermost in my mind.

 

 

There was plenty to do, and plenty of needs to be met. My first order of business was to explain how they were being healed by the good agency of the natural world that they’d been taught to fear, and showed them how strong they’d be when that healing was complete by taking one of the slaver’s heavy chains and breaking with a quick snap of my hands. “The men who hurt you are dead,” I told them, “largely by my hands alone, but you’ll need not fear any man in future, because the natural world now works within and through you to help defend you against any further assault or interference.” I’d seen the freshly-butchered shank-bone of a pig on my wanderings through the camp, which was shabbily-maintained, so I’d gone to fetch it from the sort of unsanitary open midden where I’d seen it before I’d started my little talk. I said, “You’ve all seen the women in our troop, right? Did you think it odd that we had no men?”

One of them said, rather sourly, I thought, “Not really. All the men we’d ever seen since they’d killed our husbands and sons either didn’t care or actively encouraged their ‘transactions,’ so we expected no help from anyone, but then we’d never thought of women as warriors, so if anyone was going to avenge the murders of our families, our friends, our children and friends, it would have had to be women, not that we’d looked for any such help.”

“I apologize then, for our tardy arrival,” I said. “Since our communications failed, we’d had no word from other fortresses, so assumed they were in the same straits that we were, trying desperately to hold fast against the encroaching plants, but then we made a discovery, quite by accident, of the fungal transmutation you’ve all of you benefitted from, as have we all. As a byproduct of that transformation, we discovered that the plants no longer thought of those us who were transformed as their enemies, and so left us in peace, or at least made no overtly hostile actions against us, so we’ve had the liberty to regroup and think about our scattered comrades. This small punitive expedition was part of a somewhat less ambitious exploration of a continent which was merely unfamiliar to us at the time, ‘scouting out the land,’ if you will, until we met with the first party of these slavers, these so-called ‘Reivers,’ and determined that they were our enemies.”

“And just how did you determine that?” she said suspiciously.

“Quite simply,” I said. “They were driving women in chains, so it was perfectly obvious to us that the only real difference between those women and us was that we were free and they were bound. At the time, we were were armed only with the typical weapons of the Horticulturist Services of North America, HE missiles, flamethrowers, machetes, and — our own innovation — crossbows. We saw that they had rifles, so we determined to take them away from the slavers and free the women.”

“Just like that?” she asked, still sceptical, perhaps even incredulous.

“Just like that,” I told her. “Of course it helped that we were smarter, quicker, and stronger than they were, but we defeated them mainly with our natural cunning, not brute force of arms. In fact, we were badly ‘out-gunned’ by their force, and less numerous besides, so of course they had no real chance against us.” I grinned at her, but for the benefit of them all.

“What happened to them?”

“We held a military trial of all those left alive — which wasn’t many — and whose captives were able to testify against them. We assumed that they were deserters from the Horticulturist Service, since they carried standard issue weapons, for the most part, and had portions of official uniforms amongst their belongings, so they were found guilty of heinous crimes against civilians under color of authority and immediately executed, since we had no facilities for imprisoning any of them. The ones whom we determined were not personally culpable, but merely caught up in the general lawlessness as a matter of survival, we transformed, reasoning that their own self-interest would switch their allegiance, since the Reivers would be far more likely to try to fashion stronger chains than to admit any sort of women into their ranks, and would in fact be more inclined to try to kill them outright, because they’d be an existential threat to the outlaw hierarchy.”

“What do you mean by ‘threat’?”

I picked up my shank bone in one hand and snapped it in twain by way of demonstration, then said, “I mean that in any society in which ‘might makes right,’ our new breed of women would quickly rise to the top, so those men who weren’t complete fools would realize that if anyone was going to be enslaved, it would be them, rather sooner than later. Even rape takes on a different character when one is as likely to walk away pregnant from any forced sexual assault as would be the theoretical victim, so I doubt that there are many women who entertain fantasies of being rapists to begin with.” I thought about that for only a moment before I added, “Actually, now that I think about it, and reflecting upon my own monthly cycles, I suspect that any theoretical woman rapist would be more likely to walk away from the encounter pregnant than her female victim, if ever the impulse arose, since our level of sexual desire tends roughly to correspond to our level of fertility. Although we’re all of us theoretical hermaphrodites, our ‘male’ parts are just barely worthy of the name, much more like an enlarged clitoris than a penis, so any woman attempting to ‘get off’ without the enthusiastic coöperation of her partner is probably more likely to impregnate herself than her putative ‘victim,’ with all the accompanying risks of birth defect or miscarriage associated with a complete lack of genetic diversity.”

“Will we be able to do that trick you did with the bone? Will we be able to snap chains with out bare hands, as you and your companions did when you freed us?”

“You will. For now, I’m quite a bit stronger, but only because my changes have had time to develop over a longer period.” I smiled for all of them and added, “You may also be interested to know that the fungal infusion of genetic material seems to enhance the very best genetic qualities you possess, so not only will your scars and other injuries fade to nothing, but you’ll grow more beautiful with every passing day. I myself was rather plain before my exposure, but my looks are now considerably improved from what I was before.”

My interrogator wasn’t satisfied, though. “You said that you’re faster; how much faster?” she asked me pointedly.

“Quite a bit,” I said, “but I’ve never actually measured my speed or reaction time.”

With that, she suddenly threw a stone straight at my head. I hadn’t noticed her clutching it, and she’d obviously had it ready, but I snatched it from midair. “There’s no call for violence!” I said, more than a little pissed off.

“What?” she said, as if people threw things at each other every day. “You said you were quicker than any of the Reivers, and I just wanted to see how fast you really were.” She pursed her lips. “You’re pretty fast. This scar,” she pointed at her arm, where a rapidly-healing ‘T’ was branded on her arm, “was given me by the leader of this band of Reivers when I managed to hit him with a very sharp stone. It stands for ‘Troublemaker,’ but he had a scar almost as big on his ugly face.”

I thought I vaguely remembered him as the first guy, the arrogant one, the one who’d sneeringly wanted to ‘speak to the man in charge,’ despite being held at gunpoint by the two women who’d gotten the drop on him from their own damned guard post. “You’ll be pleased to know then, that he’s undoubtedly dead. I killed him, I seem to recall, because he wasn’t following my very specific orders to surrender, took a condescending tone with me, and sounded like a jerk who’d be tiresome to have around. I wasn’t feeling particularly charitable at the time.”

She laughed. “That sounds like him alright.”

“You’ll notice as well that there are no self-styled ‘Reivers’ left alive within this valley, so if he was present when my companion and I attacked, he’s definitely dead.”

“So you aren’t planning to take over from where they left off?”

“Haven’t I said so? Why on Earth would we go to all the trouble to strike off your chains and eliminate every sign of bondage if we had any inclination to perpetuate this corrupt and inhumane travesty of the law in any way? Both the Canadian and United States Constitutions outlaw slavery in any form, in Canada since 1833, although the USA took a bit longer, until 1865. The notion that the scattered outlaws and brigands who prey upon the trust and sometimes weakness of our citizens can alter the laws of our two nations by mere force of arms is laughable, and they are even now feeling the heavy weight of law, as supported by the armed services of our two lands and now prosecuted with renewed vigor. All those here present who imagined that they were above the law have now paid the ultimate price for their treasonous and cowardly assaults on our outposts and fortresses, and for their ensuing murders and cruel mistreatment of innocent civilians, right here, in this place. We intend to do the same to every nest of these vipers we encounter, and to diligently seek out the last refuges of those who seek to hide.”

“Big talk!” she scoffed at me.

“Talk? Do you hear any debate from the felons who formerly controlled this compound? Perhaps you’re in contact with their ghosts through your crystal ball? Thus far we’ve wiped out at least three largish bands of these violent criminals with just two dozen women. Once we really get started with more local recruits and with better knowledge of the terrain and potential hideouts, I don’t doubt that the rest of the region will be all that difficult. Would you like to put something other than your mouth on the line? I’m quite sure you could make a real difference that way, and with the sturdy courage you’ve shown with a simple rock, just think how much fun it would be to have a rifle in your hands with a group of other women beside you, dangerous Furies and Harpies all, raining Hellfire and damnation on all enemies of our two great nations, but especially those vicious cowards who dared to target women and children.”

She was taken aback for a moment, I could tell, but the fact that I was quite willing to put a deadly weapon in her hands obviously demonstrated a level of sincerity that no mere words could possibly convey. I could see her mind working, but not for too long. “I would,” she said. “Where do I sign up?”

“Right here, and right now,” I answered, then I smiled. “It’s only a formality, you understand. Your word is good enough for me, and if you become pregnant, all you have to do is ask to be released from your service, since our primary responsibility is to reclaim this tortured land of ours for all the citizens thereof. ‘They also serve…,’ and all that stuff. We’re also changing the overall position of women in our new nation, since soon enough — eventually — we’ll all of us be responsible for the next generations.”

Then I turned to all the rescued women and former slaves and said, “I don’t know what your own situations are, whether you have loved ones who may be looking for your return, and we are not a ‘press gang’ who have any inclination to ‘shanghai’ you for our own purposes. If you want to go home — if you have homes left to go to — you’re perfectly free to do so. If you want to join us on our campaign, you’re free to do that as well. We take freedom seriously, and we intend to restore civil freedom for all of us, not just one more-or-less monolithic group of men with arbitrary power over the rest of us. While a ‘State of Emergency’ might have justified that for a few years, the emergency seems to have lasted for hundreds of years, and the problems got worse, not better, under the dubious leadership of a bunch of men who supposedly knew the ‘proper methods’ of dealing with all possible threats.”

Unlooked for, I felt the pain of Beryl’s death grip my heart like an iron fist. It was then, just then, when Beryl would have chimed in with a few well-chosen words and slammed the point home in a way I wouldn’t have thought of in a millions years.

‘Get a grip, girl! These women are depending on you!’ I set my jaw and ploughed on, “In fact, when you think of it, that overly hierarchical structure, where every substantive decision was made by the oldest man not quite senile enough to be ‘eased out’ of his position of authority, undoubtedly contributed to the strategic and tactical weaknesses that the bandits — the self-styled ‘Reivers’ — exploited with fatal consequences for many of your loved ones and friends.”

“What do you mean by that?” one woman shouted out, her voice gone shrill with anger.

“I mean that the late and unlamented ‘Reivers’ who once controlled this camp had a hierarchy quite similar in overall concept to that of the fortresses; an opaque command structure answerable to no one; absolute authority over life and death decisions with no recourse or appeal possible; and a general contempt for women, who were always second-class citizens or worse in the fortresses, with some few of them relegated to the status of unpaid ‘whores’ at the beck and call of the troops, and most cast in the rôle of servants.”

“Our men weren’t anything like those monsters!” another woman shouted.

“Of course they weren’t,” I soothed their feelings, “but the system itself was vulnerable to exploitation, because it concentrated too much power in the hands of too few men, which made it easy for a few very bad men imagine setting up a similar system with themselves at the top of the heap.” I paused to let that percolate through their heads, then continued, “so the Reivers — who seem primarily to be deserters from the Horticultural Services, and so were very familiar with the military protocols and jargon — just eliminated their requirement to do anything at all for the people they once protected, and adjusted their sights from looting abandoned cities and towns — as do most of our ‘foraging parties’ — to pillaging fortresses already relatively well-supplied with the fruits of other people’s labor and effort, with the added benefit of enslaving their pick of the most beautiful women and raping them at will.”

“But we had husbands, sons….”

“I’m sure you did,” I said. “and I’m sure they loved you well, but enlisted men weren’t free to marry at all, were they? Barracks life isn’t exactly conducive to a happy home-life, but ‘everyone had to make sacrifices for the common good,’ didn’t they? The men who weren’t lucky enough, or smart enough, to be officers, and the women who weren’t smart enough, or lucky enough, to attract the attentions of an officer, had to make do with sordid encounters in quiet corridors and rooms, with the ‘gift’ of a bit of extra food held out from the general pool at the end of a foraging mission as their reward.”

“But…,” the first hothead started to say, the one who’d chucked a rock at my head…

I made a wry face for their benefit. “Let’s face it. Women as a whole were always second-class citizens in the prevailing culture of the fortresses, as were ordinary troops, for the most part, so at some point some trooper — possibly many such troopers over the years — got the bright idea of staging a mutiny, and it worked. He and his cohorts didn’t have the advantage of a fortress after turning tail and running, but the local plants weren’t nearly as hostile as they were out on the plains, so they made do without, but were ideally suited up to pretend to have been unwillingly separated from their own homes, and begged assistance from those who might pity them, and thus got first pick of everything for their murders, rapes, and treason.”

“So the treason spread….” Our hothead made the connection inside her brain. You could see it filtering through layers of self-justification and denial.

“So it spread indeed,” I said. “Civilizations are usually brought down by their own armies, if you look at the long haul. They hold most of the power, unless they willingly cede it to the overall population through tradition and pride, but when things start falling apart, they’re usually the only ones left with the training and discipline to start over from scratch.”

 

 

Pearl, that was the tough broad’s name, the one with the rock and ready sneer, kept her word. Once she realized that I was serious, that I wasn’t just a ‘Reiver’ in a skirt, she threw herself into organizing our further adventures with a right good will. “Ma’am? We’ve got the women who are going with us ready to go,” she said, saluting rather smartly, for a raw recruit. Many of the women had decided to stay, once they figured out that they had a very good chance of being able to defend the valley on their own.

“Excellent! Pearl. You’ve done very well.” I’d asked two of our bandersnatches if they’d like to stay behind — well, as coherently as one could manage with non-verbal communication — and had explained their care and feeding, which was pretty simple as long as they had access to water and organic matter of any sort as fertilizer.

It wasn’t much of a problem, because there were already three young bandersnatches running around who were about the size of Gumball when I’d first met him. Evidently, the addition of a large number of corpses to the local soil was very good for encouraging the growth of burrowers, so the women left behind already had the beginnings of their own heavy cavalry if they ran into any trouble, and I’d had Becky explain how any roving bands of Reivers would approach them, thinking that they were still in trade, and I’d left behind almost all the ammunition and weapons, except for a bit to lug along for our new recruits. The Reivers had been mad for guns and weapons though, so there was a huge stockpile in two hidden bunkers to pick and choose from, and they’d already picked out one big woman who could manage enough of a reasonably ‘masculine’ voice to lure them in. Good luck to her. Even as a man, I’d been a tenor, and was now definitely singing the soprano rôles.

Thinking of Gumball, though, made me miss him, since he’d disappeared just around the time that Beryl’s body had gone missing. ‘Gumball!’ I gave him a mental shout, but wasn’t really hopeful, since he hadn’t been answering for almost a week by now.

‘Gumball!’ I ‘shouted’ again, ‘We’re about to leave! Come on, Sweetie!’

No joy. But then, after a long interval, I felt a faint stirring somewhere. ‘Gumball!’ I called again. ‘Are you coming with us?’

Then, there was a rumbling, a deep growl of movement from deep underground, and the earth began to roil in the clearing. Several of the women, already mounted, had to spur their horses to stay clear of the trembling earth, and many were frightened, including me. Whatever it was, there was more of it than merely Gumball, as huge as he was. I backed up my own mount. “Gumball? Is that you?” I shouted aloud, as an instantaneous gulf opened in the clearing and a huge burrower, bigger than I’d ever seen, rose from the depths, rising into the air until it towered above our heads. “Gumball?” I queried the apparition. It turned toward my voice and I knew instantly that it was Gumball, but grown beyond anything I’d thought possible. He must have been eighty or ninety feet tall, the size of an average office building back in the city downtown.

He smiled. Then he opened the dark and toothy maw that was his mouth, an opening large enough to house our entire troop of horses and women, if not exactly comfortably, and somehow a shape rolled out across the bed of nails that were his many rows of teeth, rolled out and gently rolled, once, twice, shrouded in many leaves. It had a vaguely human form, about six feet in length, and I moved immediately to dismount and investigate. I wasn’t at all frightened, although many of the women around me were, never having seen exactly how big bandersnatches could become, although I remembered them well from my first encounter with them, when just one of them had eaten almost our entire foraging party in one gulp.

I touched the leaves, which were a loose blanket covering what must be a human figure, although they were so entwined and braided that it took me a good long time to untangle them enough to get a good look at what they concealed. It was Beryl, and she was warm, evidently sleeping though, because she didn’t stir. “Beryl? Is it really you?” I asked, or perhaps it was a prayer.

“Who’s Beryl?” the figure asked, her eyes fluttering until they opened. Then she looked at me and smiled and said, “I was dreaming of you.”

 

 

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

Copyright © 2012-2013 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Eleven Marching Through Georgia

 

 

In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.

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

 

I could almost smell the Atlantic, somewhere ahead of us, although it may have been my imagination. We’d already seen and heard seagulls carving noisy arcs in the skies above us, and the whole character of the land and vegetation had changed. The soft-slopes of the ancient mountains lay behind us, and even the rolling hills we’d ridden through as we descended to the endless flat lowland before us were now fond memories. For the first time since entering the uplands we’d seen fortresses, mostly abandoned and ruined now after suffering from the Reiver’s treacherous assaults, with what remained of a surrounding ringwall of besieging plants, hostile hedges already softening at the borders, since there were no people left behind to prune them, and the plants themselves were quickly readapting to the lack of human predators by reverting to type, the dandelions already shrunken sightly as they slowly merged back into the grasslands which were their natural habitat, the burdocks going to less lethal seed.

“Oddly enough,” Beryl said as we rode along, “the giant carnivorous plants have turned out to have been as dependent on human enemies as we had always been on plants. There’s a certain delicious irony there.”

“There is,” I replied judiciously, “if one ignores the death and suffering our mutual warfare entailed.”

“Well, we humans have always found death and suffering well enough on our own, don’t you think? Throughout our history, we’ve rarely managed to let all that much time pass before we find an ‘enemy’ or two to shake our fists at.”

We rode along in silence for a few moments after Beryl finished speaking. “True enough,” I finally admitted. “The Reivers seem to have sprang up like human ‘parasites’ in areas more-or-less unsuitable for agriculture and too sparsely settled to support either fortresses or their predatory plants. I reckon the pine and hardwood forests mature too slowly to change too much in less than geologic time. The dandelions and burdocks had their greatest success where the forests and native plants had been felled or uprooted to make way for monoculture farmlands.”

Beryl winked at me then and said, “Well then, we’re working in the right direction with our merry band of angels, don’t you think?”

I laughed, for more than half of us were pregnant by then. “Of course it is! After living in the grim fortresses — where it was forbidden to embark on pregnancy without permission from the ‘Chatelain’ — and then suffering under the slavers, the resurgent human spirit quite naturally reasserts itself in increased desire and fecundity.”

“By which you mean to say…?” she prompted me.

I found it difficult to repress my inclination to laugh, but managed to keep a straight face as I answered with some attempt at dignity, “After a bad scare — once they’re feeling safe — most women do have a tendency toward increased libido.”

She rolled her eyes. “ ‘Increased libido,’ Harry’s Holy Hell! Sometimes, after an engagement, I get so horny I could fuck for seven straight days without stopping.”

“Okay… that too…,” I confessed, trying to remain at least a little demure, despite having experienced the violence of Beryl’s passions, which I had to admit made me hot from time to time. “Evidently, your experiences in the Underworld had you hobnobbing with a little of the ‘rough trade’ one expects to find down there.”

“Oh, Honey!” she confided, “It’s not for nothing that Hades is depicted in ancient art as driving a tethrippon, the four-horse chariot of the Gods. Just imagine those four powerful black stallions surging ahead as one, plunging and bucking, throwing back their heads in triumph, teeth gnashing, fierce, wild, and completely irresistible! He… or She… — it doesn’t much matter — can be… a little overwhelming, from the first onrush of darkness to the final climax that presages oblivion…. Hades’ other name, of course, is Dionysus, epiphany personified, the burning bush that is not consumed,” here she arched one knowing brow, “the towering pillar of undying fire, the sudden lightning that strikes one to the core, the God (or Goddess) of divine ecstasy.”

I blushed. Then I squirmed a little on my saddle. I may seem dense at times, but I do know my way around a metaphor.

Beryl grinned at me. “Time to take a little break?” she said.

It was.

 

 

Did I tell you that we’d gotten the radio network up through most of the coastal plains by then? At least though Virginia and North Carolina. It was my doing, mostly, because I’d found the original field repair manuals for the issue Horticulturist radios in my library, back in the City, and had carried what looked like the handiest of them along. The radios themselves had been hard to find back home, but they were still fairly plentiful on the Atlantic Coast, especially in the Hampton Roads area, because there was a huge military depot there that was still under Horticulturist control. It must have been several miles wide at least, sprawled over an enormous area set well back from the coast, a ‘military reservation,’ they called it. Heck, they had ‘tanks’ there, huge behemoths made of steel and layered ceramic and Kevlar armor with weird ribbons of flat-linked chain that they evidently used instead of wheels. Unfortunately, they were fresh out of fuel to make them run, until I’d suggested that they start cultivating the giant sunflowers for the sake of their reapers full of volatile hydrocarbons. I wasn’t sure exactly what mixture of napalm juice and oil would make them work, but there ought to be some way to test, since they weren’t likely to run out of ‘tanks’ for a hundred years, given the rows and rows of huge warehouses they had them stored in, but they waiting for a miracle, I reckon, like any hoarder.

Anyway, in the field guide for the helmet-mounted radios, it described a ‘field expedient’ for hilly terrain which consisted of a dipole antenna which could be mounted on a stick and then hoisted up into the air by any means possible. The manual showed antennas mounted on trees, or even pulled up into the air on ‘kites,’ easily-constructed ærodynamic tethered parafoils which lifted themselves into the air in almost any sort of breeze, so lifts of a hundred feet or more were easy to arrange, albeit somewhat at the mercy of the weather. The signal tended to fade in and out as the ‘kite’ rearranged itself in relation to the wind, but with patience — and a little luck — a fairly reliable communication schedule could be maintained with fortresses as much as fifty miles away or more, depending on the terrain. On average, though, with an antenna two hundred feet in the air, a radio could reach out fifty miles to a soldier on the ground in flat terrain. If both antennas could be elevated, that distance would double, of course, but the vagaries of two wind-borne antennas made communications at least twice as frustrating, but we very quickly realized that antennas carried up to the tops of mountains, or even hills, could make a huge difference in the overall quality of our radio network. I’d gathered from my reading that at one time there had been specialized radios known as ‘repeaters’ whose sole purpose had been to relay communications over hills or long distances, but of course those had fallen into disrepair — or had even been junked for parts — when the fortresses drew in upon themselves and stopped paying any attention to what was going on in the outside world.

The long and the short of it was that we had plenty of warning before we met up with a column of our soldiers riding down from the Virginia Horticultural base we’d established near Hampton Roads. We decided to meet somewhere in the vicinity of Savannah, since it was large enough to be difficult to miss, and we thought at the time that there was still an active fortress there, although we’d had no word from them for quite some time, according to the local authorities up north, more than thirty years. We kept the exact location rather vague, however, because we hadn’t changed the frequencies of the radios, in part because we didn’t have the manufacturing capability to recreate and tune new circuitry, but also because we wanted to be able to talk to any survivors of real Horticultural outposts we might encounter. This left us open to covert eavesdropping, of course, but it wan’t a huge handicap, first because few among the Reivers had the knowledge or the training to maintain the radios in working order, much less any ability to repair them, but also because we had a psychic side-channel which seemed fairly safe from any but the transformed, and the transformed, of course, were women, when push came to shove. Thus far we’d run across only the one exception to the general rule amongst the slavers, that women were mere ‘property’ in their eyes, to be taken, used, and then discarded at will, which meant that transformation — rather difficult to notice in a woman born — meant an almost-instant rebellion and slaughter of their quondam ‘masters’ wherever and whenever the new pandemic took hold, which was happening more and more as the number of us wandering through the eastern half of North America grew larger and we began to take up all the available space and military power.

Whatever might be said for the efficacy of our spore-laden missiles, mosquitos, especially in the lowlands, were a very efficient means of transmitting the infection, especially in the slave quarters, where the women were crowded in together to make it simpler to control them. In women, the process of transformation ran to completion in at most half the time it did in men, often much more rapidly, so by the time any changes amongst the Reivers themselves took place by means of which they might have been able to put up some sort of defense, most were already mostly dead or dying at the hands of their erstwhile victims, saving us all a bit of trouble.

“What do you think?” I asked Beryl. “Should we take Savannah from the northern coast? Or should we come in over the inland swamps?”

“I think from inland,” she said. “As I recall your maps, there were several broad estuaries protecting the city from the north, and they’re bound to be larger and more impassable by now, so the speed of our assault would be diminished, and it might even be necessary to backtrack and go around if we encountered unexpected difficulties. Sherman made his famous march from the highlands more-or-less straight to the sea, and I doubt that the general idea is unsound, even after half a millennium or more. He was a master strategist, and knew how to exploit every feature of the terrain in a time when armies were lumbering things, and battles were either won and lost by the number of wagons in the supply train.”

“How do you know about Sherman?” I asked her. “Wasn’t he a bit before our time?” As far as I knew, Beryl hadn’t spent all that much time in the library, and I knew that her family had been strictly enlisted-class, unlikely to have the access to any military library that I’d had as my father’s child, at least before I’d been forced to move to the barracks. If I’d been a better soldier, I suppose I would have had a ‘fast-track’ to officer training, but of course that hadn’t worked out all that well for me.

“I met him,” she said. “He’s quite the raconteur.”

“You met him‽” I exclaimed. She hadn’t been at all forthcoming about her adventures underground, other than a mysterious hint or two, but the idea that she’d been chatting up famous people I actually knew about had never occurred to me.

“Well, yes,” she said. “It would be a little awkward being the Queen of the Damned without holding audience from time to time, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t understand” I said. “How exactly did you get to be the Queen?”

“Hades chose me, of course,” she said wide-eyed, little Miss Butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth. “How does one usually manage such things?”

“But how does ‘Hades’ choose people?”

“Through capture, of course, although some few people choose themselves, poor fools.”

“Wait a minute! You’re talking about different things, aren’t you? Isn’t being dead the same for everyone?”

She blinked owlishly at me. “Of course not, how could it be? The honored dead have vastly superior status, and every possibility of rebirth, whilst those who die performing acts of ignominy or cowardice are condemned to an afterlife of eternal shame and degradation. In the ordinary course of things, one has no second chances after having badly handled the first.”

“None at all?”

“Of course not! Why should there be? In my own case, I died heroically,” she said with a slight moue, “if somewhat beyond my intention, but with a brave smile, a joke, and a kind word upon my lips, so many people remembered me with fondness and pride, especially you, so of course that kept my memory alive and green, and the added fact that Gumball and his many pals loved me, in their way, and had access to the entire sensorium of the wide green world, propelled me to a position of authority and power in the Underworld.” Here she paused and added brightly, a little sly, “It’s good to be the Queen.”

“So Gumball had a hand in it? if you’ll pardon the clumsy words, since he has no hands at all.”

“Oh, yes!” she said. “In fact, he was the agent of my almost immediate deliverance, although I don’t know exactly how he did it, but I suppose that he’d eaten enough people by then that he knew exactly how they’re put together, especially since he had my former body as a model.” She paused then, thinking. “I wonder if he ate me, not that I’d mind, of course, since everything turned out well, and I wasn’t really using my old body for anything in particular at the time.”

“You have a new body?” I asked, foolishly, since I’d seen both how little and how much she’d changed. She was still recognizably Beryl, but her beauty had been enhanced in subtle ways, coming closer to ’perfection,’ if you will, or maybe beauty wasn’t even the proper word… she was more herself, perfected, the ideal embodiment of the true Beryl, the form she’d had before the world was born.

“Yes,” she said, as if surprised that I might think otherwise. “Despite your best efforts, I bled out, and the cells of the brain start dying immediately, I think. It’s not too many minutes before all that’s left of a living brain is useless mush.” She grinned. “Dead bodies have a very short shelf life. One can’t keep them around for long before one notices.”

She was right there. We’d seen enough casualties by now, in various states of disrepair, that there was no doubt at all when intelligence left a dead stare behind. “Yeah,” I said. “It ws a stupid question.”

Then she laughed again — in fact, now that I thought of it, she was laughing a lot more these days — “Didn’t anyone ever tell you, ‘There are no stupid questions, only thoughtless answers’?”

I let out a heavy sigh, as annoyed as any teenager, and complained, “You’re neither my mother nor my ‘spiritual advisor,’ and there are loads of stupid questions in life, and plenty of people anxious to provide stupid answers. Just look around us!”

She made a show of looking, then said, “I see a world in which humans are living well within the ‘carrying capacity ’ of the land, which one supposes is a good thing.”

“True,” I admitted grudgingly, “but it certainly wasn’t intentional, and could hardly be said to represent an ‘answer’ of any sort. All it really proves is that every œcology is self-correcting to some degree, and that no sin goes unpunished in the long run, although I do admit leaning a bit more toward the retributive side these days than toward reconciliation.”

“That’s as it should be,” she said. “Soldiers generally represent the punitive power of the State, and neither its general comity nor hospitality.”

“But are we the State? Aside from my ‘spin,’ we haven’t seen any central authority at all.”

“True, but the Horticulturist Oath includes the words, ‘I… do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.’ You’ll notice that it makes no mention whatsoever of any particular representative of that solemn covenant, so it’s fairly clear that we have an obligation to the existential State, and not to any particular incarnation of it. The Reivers were in flagrant violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, not to mention the Nineteenth and the universal laws against murder, extortion, and rape. In the absence of any extant State authority, we must presume that Federal authority takes precedence.”

“Spoken like a lawyer,” I replied with a smirk.

“It ought to,” she said, “I’ve got all the lawyers.”

I had to laugh, since she had all of everyone, eventually.

 

 

The reconnaissance on Savannah didn’t go all that well, although it wasn’t nearly as bad as it might have been, at least in retrospect.

“What in Harry’s Hell is that!” I said to Beryl. We were on the very edge of a clearing surrounding the supposed site of the closest Fortress we knew of, but it was an immense mound of greenery with no rock or concrete visible at all, as un-Horticultist an artifact as one might possibly imagine, so we were instantly suspicious. There were what appeared to be people coming and going as we watched, slipping into the mound or out of it as if it were made of fog, but it clearly wasn’t fog, and they clearly weren’t any sort of people we’d ever seen before, because they had shiny green skin and no hair at all, not even eyebrows, which I don’t think was any sort of East Coast fashion statement. “Got any ideas?” I asked her. She had that look of intense concentration she gets when she’s communing with her spirits, or shades, whatever you want to call them.

Finally she said, “I think it’s kudzu, or so the only botanist I could find offhand believes. He’s fascinated by it, though, and would appreciate the opportunity to observe in person.”

I stared at her, dumbfounded. “You can do that‽”

She winked at me flirtatiously and said, “I can do almost anything. ‘Si cʾest possible, cʾest fait; impossible? cela se fera.’ If it’s possible, consider it done; the impossible takes a bit longer. Exactly how long would you like?”

I pouted. “In that case, I’m afraid we’ll have to retire from our observation post; I’d hate to be interrupted, after all.”

“Well, in that case, presto!” she said, and we were gone.

 

 

As it turned out, it took just as long to grow a botanist as it had Beryl, so it was some few days before we returned to the strange green mound, but we hadn’t been idle, or not exactly.

 

 

“Did you notice,” Beryl asked me as we lay concealed in ambush, accompanied by our new botanist, who was still looking around herself in wonder and amazement, “that these green ‘people’ seem singularly incurious?”

I had noticed, actually, and had done a spread on them, but the results had been inconclusive, centering — ominously enough — around the nine of swords, meaning deception, grief, death, and disappointment, amongst other things, but also featuring the eight of swords, bondage, also ominous, but with no coherent trend that I could see. “They did seem odd,” I answered. “We’ve only had a glimpse or two, but they were and are very strange indeed, I thought. They were all jostling around, striding from place to place — busy with whatever it was that they were doing, I suppose — but not one of them ever bothered to talk to anyone, not that I noticed, nor even looked at each other, as people usually do. They just went about whatever they were doing as if they were all of them parts of some sort of strange green machine.”

“I’ve noticed much the same thing,” she said, “albeit in less emotionally evocative detail, but I couldn’t touch their minds at all, which was and is much more than merely odd, since I should have been able to read almost anyone and anything living from that distance, especially when I could see them right in front of me.”

“I couldn’t either, but then I wasn’t actually trying all that hard. They gave me the creeps, which may have been a subconscious reaction to the selfsame vacancy of aspect I mentioned, but might just as well have been because they were green! for Harry’s sake. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to make friends, but I know for a fact that no one of my acquaintance is green!” Then I thought for a moment and added, “Except for Gumball, of course, and his many friends, but they seem so fluffy and cheerful that it’s difficult to think of them as merely plants. What I meant to say was that green people are somewhat disquieting, especially green people who act like robots.”

I was a little ticked off at Beryl, though, because it seemed sometimes that she felt somehow superior to those amongst us who didn’t happen to be Goddesses of Hell, or wherever the hell she was lurking during her absence from my life. Her belated revelation that she’d evidently been fucking this ‘Hades’ guy didn’t really sit well either, now that I’d had time to actually think about it, although — in perfect fairness — I could hardly complain, since my own imaginary ‘husband’ had been coming between us for a good long time before her untimely death and unexpected resurrection. My putative ‘marriage’ to a high-ranking officer had seemed like a good idea at the time, but in retrospect it hadn’t made any difference at all. In fact, when considered carefully in the light of our universal changes, the more perceptive amongst us must surely have realized that a ‘husband’ probably wasn’t in the cards for any of us, since any theoretical husband would quickly become yet another wife, given any intimate contact at all.

Luckily for me, most people never really think things through, and so my recent lapse from a necessary ‘fidelity’ to a non-existent man — not to mention my very obvious pregnancy — could just as easily be explained as succumbing to human weakness under stress as irrefutable ‘evidence’ of the underhanded chicanery and double-dealing that it actually represented that might bring my little house of cards come tumbling down. In terms of my pregnancy, I didn’t stand out at all from the crowd of women around me, the majority of whom were pregnant, though not all.

Maybe I should just kill my rotten bastard of an inconvenient husband with my trusty typewriter. I even had a small supply of the proper forms available. Then again, in fiction — and probably in real life — it’s almost always obsessive attention to detail that makes eventual discovery more likely, so maybe best leave well enough alone. Plenty of people have died over the years — especially on campaign — and no one thinks a thing about it if they didn’t manage to leave records behind them. In fact, the lack of correspondence from the lazy sod, now that more reliable communications were spreading our scope and outreach toward New York, might be the best evidence of all, since that would be the one bit of documentation I wouldn’t have to fake.

My own foraging party had vanished without a trace, if one doesn’t count me, and of course one can’t, so the likelihood of a somewhat larger party going missing wasn’t all that odd. My own survival had everything to do with my accidental ‘discovery’ of the magic ‘cheese,’ which had been the transformative source of everything that had happened to every one of us, like ambrósias, like néktar, the divine exhalations of Gaia Herself, Great Mother of us all, which carry us inexorably toward æternal life and undying bliss. I’d been blessed with a purely secular transubstantiation, the mundane equivalent of Beryl’s later transmogrification into Goddess incarnate. ‘Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiæ,’ as one might say. We’re smack dab in the middle of a great Revival. Who knew?

“Look! I didn’t ask for any of this, so cut me a little slack, why don’t you?” Beryl was obviously irritated.

One of the big advantages of having a girlfriend who could quite literally read minds, was that one could have a knock-down, drag-out argument without ever saying a word in anger, at least theoretically. I merely rolled my eyes in her general direction and said, somewhat petulantly, I admit, “Oh, yeah? At least my boyfriend was only a figment of my fevered imagination!” Okay, so stunning repartee wasn’t one of my strong points.

She smirked at me and said, “Is there any part of ‘capture’ that you fail to understand? You may recall that I wasn’t given all that much choice in the matter, and the dead are notoriously ‘unevolved.’ Gods especially tend to lag behind the times, because omnipotence tends to discourage any sort of thoughtful approach to problem-solving, much less relationships of mutual respect and loving concern. In fact, Hades was an asshole, but I was stuck with the reality of a social milieu with a prehistoric attitude toward interpersonal relationships in which ‘brides’ were imperfectly distinguished from rape victims.”

That shut me up right properly. We’d both seen plenty of examples in the women we’d rescued from bondage, at least some of whom had become… fond of their particular ‘protectors,’ or at least grateful for their small kindnesses, and had managed to save them from the general slaughter. And I couldn’t claim all that much superiority as the child of Horticulturists either. Just as ancient slaves in this country had been forced to take the surnames of their masters, so my mother had taken my father’s name through long ‘custom,’ and in the end he’d exercised his ‘right’ as pater familias to end her very life when she was found wanting, even though through no particular fault of her own. I wasn’t ignorant; I’d actually read the Bible, which still contained the proper religious ritual whereby a woman raped and abducted from amongst one’s enemies could be transformed into a ‘proper’ wife; which still enjoined slaves to obey their masters; and which urged wives to submit themselves to their husbands, a cosmic hierarchy with some sort of God as the ultimate despot whose authority descended down through servants and slaves of varying degrees, to wives, to lesser women of even lower status, even to children, whom one was advised to beat regularly to train them in the habits of masochistic submission and obedience. “It was like that, then?” I asked, ambiguously.

“Yes… and no,” she answered with equal obscurity. “Time ran oddly there — as it does sometimes in dreams — so I’m not quite sure whether I ‘belonged’ to Hades for an hour, or for a thousand years. It wasn’t all bad by any means, but neither was it uniformly good, because at no point was I truly free, at least until the end, when I escaped and came back to you.” She glanced at me with a peculiar awkward grace.

Something in her look affected me with an odd feeling of lassitude, a sensation of warmth and lightness in the pit of my stomach, or perhaps somewhat lower down, and I found it strangely difficult to catch my breath. From somewhere antique words came to me and I sang, sotto voce, as quietly as the beating wings of a moth in the moonlight,

“Oh, hard is the fortune of all womankind.
We’re always controlled, we’re always confined.
Confined by our parents until we are wives,
Then slaves to our husbands for the rest of our lives.”

“Yeah, well,” she said. “One is still held fast in bondage, whether one’s restraints are forged from cold iron or plaited from silk as soft as a zephyr’s breath.”

Never having actually been married, despite the deceptive status I’d affected, and certainly never ‘married’ through rapture to a God, I had nothing to say.

She grinned at me. “It rankles, doesn’t it? Having someone know anything you can’t fathom?”

“Everything’s a metaphor.” I smiled at her. “Even knowing isn’t much help when push comes to shove. I’ve noticed that every time I stub my toe it hurts as badly as it did the first time, and it’s still an unpleasant surprise.”

“Which means?” she asked.

“Which means,” I said, “I’m curious, but not curious enough to invite a similar experience. There are some things which I’d prefer to remain ignorant of, all in all, and of course your experiences have nothing to do with us at all. It was another life, just as my own life before meeting you, our lives together before you died, my lonely life after your murder, and then my new life when you miraculously returned from death, were each one unique and separate from each other, connected only by the fragile threads of memory. So we pass from day to day, each day becoming a new memory for the next, until at last we run out of days entirely, which I fondly hope will be a good long time from now, and hope too that each future day we have will be spent together, in one way or another. More than that, I have no right to say, because we’re both of us soldiers, and both our lives are pledged to something greater than whatever it is we’re privileged to share.”

“You old softie, you,” Beryl cooed into my ear. “You do love me after all, my strange adventures notwithstanding.”

“Of course I do, you randy harridan. Next time you chance to die, let’s see if you can take me with you and we’ll just see how well Hades stands up to the two of us together! I reckon we can make the so-called Monarch of Hell squeal like a little girl, if we put our minds to it.”

She laughed out loud, almost instantly clapping her hand over her mouth to muffle the sound before she drew the attention of the green automatons. At last she managed to say, calmly enough, “Next time we try spying, do let’s try to stop ourselves from making jokes, however tempting.”

“Bosh,” I said quietly. “What’s mortal danger worth but the occasion for a little levity from time to time. Once we start taking danger too seriously, we’re almost bound to fail.” I reached over Beryl’s shoulder to draw the attention of our botanical expert, newly dubbed ‘Lynette.’ “Hey, Sweetie, what can you tell us about our green pals here?” I said quietly.

“The runners and vines along the ground here, even those surmounting the large structure, are definitely some form of Pueraria lobata, kudzu, in layman’s terms,” Lynette said, “and I’d guess that these creatures have some sort of commensal or symbiotic relationship to them, but I’ll need a specimen to say for sure, if we can take one quietly.”

“They do tend to stick together,” Beryl observed.

“Almost like ants,” I said. “Let’s do try not to stir them up too much.”

“Good plan!” Beryl said and promptly fired an HE missile toward their leafy castle, which instantly erupted into furious action as the thermite explosion and fire expanded into a general conflagration and the denizens began running, not away, but toward the flames, toward and even into the burning castle. Most of their activity seemed directed toward putting out the flames, as green people flung themselves upon the burning foliage and vines, beating at them with their hands until they themselves caught fire. Others dove into the heart of the fire and started handing out what looked like eggs.

Our botanist could hardly contain herself with glee as she observed their behavior, completely selfless, their entire activity focused on what must be their home, their collective futurity. I, at least, was horrified. “Why did you do that?” I said tightly.

Beryl looked as cool as a cucumber as she said, “First, whoever they are, they’ve either killed or assimilated all the inhabitants of one of our outposts, which is an act of war any way you look at it, but most important is that they’re not human, and they’re very dangerous.”

“How do you know that they killed everyone? Maybe the fortress was already empty and they just moved in?”

“What happened to the refugees? We know from our detached Virginia troop that they’ve encountered untouched and fully human fortresses just over the State line, but there are no rumors of Reivers in the area to account for an empty fortress so far from their usual camps in the uplands and mountains. In fact, we haven’t actually seen any Reivers since we reached the coastal plains.”

“But how do you know that they’re not human? We’ve been changed, and maybe this is just another type of change.”

“No, it isn’t. Just look at them; they have no sense of self-preservation, and it’s not simple courage. They simply don’t care that they’re being burnt up, because their essential ‘self,’ is either missing or so diffuse that these… creatures we see running around the fire are no more significant than our fingernails, which we trim without a thought.” She looked around suddenly. “In fact, here comes one of those things right now. Look sharp!” One of the green people came crashing through the underbrush behind up, eyes focused on the fire when Beryl took out her machete and sliced off its head as neatly as could be. Horribly, the thing didn’t even appear to notice its sudden lack of a head, and kept on running until Beryl brought it down by slicing off its legs with the same dispassionate efficiency. Unfortunately, even that wasn’t enough, because the thing kept dragging itself along with its arms, so they too joined the dismembered parts upon the ground as Beryl picked up the head, sliced in in two with another slash of her machete, and handed it to Lynette. “Quick, tell us as much as you can, because eventually whatever motivates these things will notice us, in which case we’ll have to run like Harry’s Green Hell.”

Lynette took charge of our specimen with commendable alacrity and started dissecting it at speed. “First,” she said, “The creatures are vampiric.” she used a small scalpel to lift one of its teeth, longer than the rest, which was hinged something like a rattlesnake’s fangs, but with some specialized apparatus backing up a siphon fully a quarter inch in interior diameter which descended right down its neck with no hint of tongue or gullet.

“I see no hint of fine vision capability in these eyes,” she added. “I’m guessing that they distinguish light from dark and that’s all, possibly gradations of light, but there seems to no differentiation between the few large light sensors that take up all the interior space of the pseudo-eye. There’s no focusing mechanism, for example, so any distinctions must be made either through touch or some coördinating transmission of information between individual motile cells like this one. It’s really quite fascinating, what looks like a completely new life form, completely unrelated to any existing animal.”

“Speaking of coördination,” Beryl warned us, “Something in that stinking pile has noticed us.” The fire seemed to have been smothered — at least in part — by the bodies of the creatures, and many of those left seemed to have shifted their focus onto us. As she said it, the mass of green creatures began to advance toward us in freakish silence.

I noticed rustling in the woods to either side of us and shouted, “Grab what you can and run like Harry’s Green Hell! They’re all around us!”

Beryl had the presence of mind to fire another two HE missiles straight at the leafy castle, which promptly caught fire again, causing at least half of the advancing green minions to turn around and march back toward the castle, or at least it seemed that they had, but we weren’t paying all that much attention, because the green beasties from the forest were reaching out to grab us by then, the lipless gashes that were their mouths gaped wide, their fangs extended, and one of them had caught hold of my left leg! It was enormously strong, so strong I couldn’t break free, but I was dragging the thing behind me as it squirmed about trying to sink its fangs into my lower leg or ankle. Almost at the last minute, I finally managed to pull my machete from my belt and lopped off the thing’s arm, which finally let me surge ahead of my pursuers. At that point, I took the time to turn and fire off one of my own missiles toward the nest of these evil things. Belatedly, I realized that Beryl had been right, and gasped out, almost breathless, “Well, Beryl, I apologize sincerely for doubting your initial assessment. Whatever these sleekit beasties are, they’re an existential threat to humanity.” Then I turned to Lynette, who was struggling to carry the other half of the thing’s head in one hand whilst wielding her machete to good effect on our pursuers. “Run along with me so we can guard the head between us as we fend off our pursuers long enough to be on our merry way.”

Beryl, of course, had been improvising as she ran and had managed to cobble together a sort of bangalore torpedo which she dropped behind us as we ran, and then detonated by pulling sharply on a wire she’d fixed to the detonator. I could feel the flash of heat before the force of the explosion sent us tumbling, but she’d managed to time it well enough that we weren’t hurt, and almost all of our flock of green monsters were flopping around like fish thrown on the ground by a stream, their connection with whatever had been controlling them somehow disrupted. Their confusion lasted long enough for us to reach our horses, at which time we rode away as fast as we could spur our mounts. “That was simply loads of fun, Beryl, but let’s try hard to be better prepared for our next encounter.”

“Oh, we are, Sweetheart. I’ve snagged us another head, so we have one and a half heads to muck around with. I’ve got mine in a rucksack, and would advise you to do the same, since I don’t know how their communication scheme works exactly, and would hate to give them any clues that we can avoid.”

That sounded like a good idea, so I dumped everything out of my own rucksack as we rode and stuffed the remaining half head into the now-empty sack after grabbing it from Lynette. “Got it!” I called out to Beryl, “but if you’ll look off to your right you’ll see a small gang of them ahead of us.” I punctuated my warning with an HE missile which wiped out most of the hostiles, but worried that the thing’s long-range communications seemed better than I’d thought possible. We were already halfway back to our camp and the things were still intent on catching us, so they were able to relay the alarm at least two miles away from our initial encounter with their hive, or nest, or whatever it was. They reminded me of insects, somehow, more than plants, so either word seemed appropriate.

“I can see that we’re going to need a different set of weapons to deal with these things,” Beryl yelled back to me. “Some sort of pole weapon, I think, like a halberd, or a glaive-guisarmes, would be useful for pruning off their heads and arms, since they don’t seem to have all that much fine coördination, at least when they’re out of sight from their main mound of vegetation.”

I added, “If we’re right about them having to ‘sum up’ the viewpoints of many of the creatures to get any sort of vision beyond vague distinctions between light and dark, it might also be useful to modify some of our missiles to produce lots more smoke, to screen the sites of active battle from easy purview.” The conversation was quickly becoming tiresome, being conducted at the top of our lungs whilst riding at a hard gallop. In fact, if it weren’t for the creatures closing on our right, I’d be prepared to skip the commentary in favor of more riding.

I drew my machete, none-the-less, but wished that I’d had a heavy cavalry saber instead, or perhaps a Moorish scimitar. “If we get out of this,” I yelled, “remind me to reïnvent horse armor and proper cavalry edged weapons! Our machetes are way too dinky to reliably protect our mounts, much less ourselves!”

Beryl spurred her own gelding — by now in short supply, as ‘mares’ were replacing them with great regularity, now that the infection had spread to our herd — to greater speed, catching up to the two of us on mares quite easily, despite our best efforts, and forged ahead slightly, now armed with an issue flame thrower, with a single tank of our precious napalm mixture, which was in short supply due to the lack of the giant sunflowers in this region of the South. “Here’s hoping!” she called out with a grin as she passed us. “I’d hate to be forced to reconcile with my quondam husband! I’m afraid we didn’t part on the very best of terms!” This last was tossed over her shoulder as she forged ahead, already using the flamethrower judiciously to sprinkle fire through the packed mass of green monsters, where it quickly spread among the plants, who didn’t seem to care, moving toward us with eerie of purpose, their pale green fingers outstretched to snatch at us, even as they burned and their limbs withered into brittle charcoal, which flaked away to dust.

Beryl’s flamethrower sputtered out as the tank emptied, and she tossed it away as so much excess baggage, instead taking up a ten-foot length of steel chain she’d liberated from the last group of Reivers we’d encountered and using it as a flail, whipping it around her head so fast it actually whistled as it spun a shiny wheel of death and dismemberment that sliced through the crowding beasties like a hot knife through butter, but they kept on coming in a creepy silent wave of pure hostility, their hands outstretched before them, their mouths gaped open and their fangs extended. Even when Beryl altered the length of chain slightly and started snapping off their fangs with dexterous adjustments of her spinning wheel of steel, they behaved as if nothing had happened, until she managed to snap off a few heads, but even then the bodies just collapsed and their own companions would impale the headless corpses with their fangs and rapidly extract whatever liquid was in them until only a dry husk remained. It was more then merely creepy, it was a nightmare sprung to life in the plain light of day; these… things were evil. They needed to die, because they were inimical to all of life.

I was enveloped in cold fury when I saw my impetuous lover battling a horde of monstrous vampires; and I placed one hand upon my belly as a talisman, my womb even now filled with a life for which I was responsible, and rode forward toward our common foe. “Beryl! Take cover!” I screamed and raised my own rocket launcher, releasing a single HE missile, my last, toward the rear of the swarm of green things, where it burst and scattered burning thermite through their surging amorphous mass. I felt a fierce pride when I saw the bulk of them alight; I was almost always dead on the mark when I aimed to hit anything, even difficult shots like this one had been, with a very small margin of error, and much at stake.

I wasted little time before taking apart the now-useless launcher with my bare hands, since the business end of it was a long steel forging riveted to a metal tube. By popping off the tube, I was left with a somewhat dull, but still serviceable, sword. I rode forward and took my proper place beside Beryl, who was even now springing up from where she lay under the heap of headless bodies she’d dragged over herself as cover for the burst of pyrotechnic chemical fire I’d precipitated. “Taking a little rest, Sweetheart?” I asked mildly.

“Sapphire, dear, I was trying to take a nap, just to refresh myself from our tiring journey, when someone set off a hell of an explosion right over my head. My ears are still ringing, for Harry’s sake!”

“Well, Dearest, if you hadn’t brought all your little play-date pals out to carouse you wouldn’t be nearly so tired and wouldn’t have needed that nap quite so badly. You really must learn a little moderation in your choice of friends.”

“I admit,” she said, twirling her steel whip with deadly skill, “that I failed to envision quite this level of boisterous enthusiasm.”

“They have been very naughty,” I said, wielding my improvised blade to fairly good effect, although I did wish for a better edge. “I really don’t feel that we should consort with these fellows on a regular basis, Beryl, at least until we can organize a proper playgroup.” Using my vorpal sword to nip off heads was the best strategy, I’d decided. The damned things took the loss of mere limbs in stride, as it were, but the loss of a head was slightly beyond their powers of durability, and it slowed down their companions to boot, when they stopped to feed upon their fallen comrades, a net gain of no small proportion, but it took a mighty blow to sever the neck completely and at once, so it was a bit tiring, since there seemed to be no shortage of replacement heads that needed trimming for every one that toppled to the ground. “There’s nothing for it, I think, but to bring them back to camp. Taking proper care of them is going to require more hands than I can spare right now.” I was still lopping heads to fairly good effect, but the wear and tear on my improvised sword was taking a heavy toll on its efficiency. Never exactly sharp, it was becoming less so by the moment.

“Agreed,” Beryl said reluctantly, although her metal whip was holding up quite well, “but we really ought to send word ahead. Do you suppose Lynette could manage that on her own?”

“I don’t think I’ll need to, actually,” Lynette said from right behind us. “They seem to have found us of their own initiative.”

I risked a glance over my shoulder without pausing in my general infliction of mayhem. “Oh, poo!” I said, just a bit discouraged. Our troop had indeed arrived, but right behind them were rank upon rank of marching green monsters, what looked like thousands of them.

 

 

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

Copyright © 2012-2013 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved

 

 

Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Twelve Pincer Movement

 

 

On the ground of intersecting highways, join hands with your allies.

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

 

Beryl noticed the advent of our troops, followed closely by another cohort of our enemies, with what were obviously mixed emotions. “I may have acted rashly, Sapphire, in my haste to obtain more information.”

“Bosh, piffle!” I replied. “The alternative would have been to walk up and knock upon the gate, which would, in hindsight, have been a fatal mistake. Let’s… just call your so-called ‘haste’ something more like ‘prescient inspiration’ and have done with pointless kibitzing after… the fact.” My speech was less fluent and more halting than my wont, primarily for lack of breath as I swept my makeshift sword through as many necks as possible. Every once in a while they didn’t line up as well as I’d have liked, so I’d run my blade partway through a skull or shoulder and have to pull it free with a sudden jerk. It was hard work, and more to come it seemed.

“How’re our girls holding up?” Beryl asked without looking, which I could easily understand, because her weapon, whilst more powerful than my disassembled rocket launcher, also took quite a bit of concentration and interactive feedback to control. At the first sign that her metal lash might be wrapping around too much green monster to cut cleanly, she had to flick it into another path to either clear it or obtain a better purchase that might prove more quickly lethal.

I took some little time to look toward our ranks, cutting with my imperfect blade more by instinct than any particular plan. “They’re doing well, so far, as they have enough hands to handle the advance of the green goblins using machetes, and a few have sabres, evidently from the Reiver’s stores somewhere, although I don’t recall actually seeing them before.” I turned again to my more urgent task just in time, for three of the nasty things had begun to crawl upon their bellies, beneath the reach of my makeshift sword from horseback. “Watch out for creeping goblins!” I cried. “It seems a new tactic, at least amongst my lot.” I dismounted at once, of course, and was immediately regretful, despite the grim necessity, because the creeping bloodsuckers immediately attacked my lovely mare from the other side and began to suck her blood with their vicious fangs. I vaulted over her body as she collapsed, first to her knees and then rapidly to her side as the blood left her brain. I killed her killers with cold efficiency, then leapt up to stand upon her sprawled body to give myself better access to their necks whilst still remaining low enough to dismember any creepers on the ground.

Beryl adjusted instantly, of course, shortening up her chain enough to have a shorter length to twirl with her other hand, making two intersecting arcs of flashing steel to hit them both high and low. “They’re not very bright on their own,” she said, “so there must be one or more central vantage points they’re being directed from.”

That sounded like something I could handle, so I immediately focused on my mental deck of cards. Beryl might be able to hear human thoughts from anywhere within a mile or two, but I was much better at abstractions. One card forced itself to my attention. Major Arcanum V, the Heirophant! Upright! “Southeast!” I said, “Somewhere to the Southeast!” The card was also fit to represent the monsters, at least in its negative sense, because it represented rigid authority and conformity, and one could hardly be more subservient than to have no sense of self at all.

“I see it!” Beryl shouted from her better vantage point on horseback. “That tall longleaf pine, almost completely smothered in kudzu vines! Lynette! Do you see it?”

Lynette was busy on her own, but was armed only with her machete, so wasn’t taking as large a rôle as we were, not to mention that she’d been partially shielded from the main onslaught by Beryl and I. I heard her speak behind me.

“I see it! But what can I do?”

Beryl shouted out immediately, “Ride hell for leather toward our main body of troops and tell them to fire half a dozen HE missiles at it and set the damned thing burning as quick as ever you can! Tell them to keep firing, and if they see any more giant piles of kudzu, burn those too!”

“But! You’ll both…”

“Get going, Lynette!” she shouted with that inimitable Queenly arrogance she had sometimes. “We’re depending on you to do your duty and follow orders! That tree — with its burden of vines — is the real danger right now and we’re fresh out of HE missiles.”

“Yes, Ma’am!” she said smartly. I’ll just bet that she saluted Beryl as well, but didn’t turn around to look. Beryl had that effect on people, so I sort of took it for granted, and I was rather busy at the time in any case. I heard her galloping off toward our advancing troops as the green goblins closed in toward us with renewed urgency, so evidently the tall pine kudzu had noticed our change of tactics.

I won’t go into details about our stand against the goblins, because it was horrible, sticky, tiring work, until an explosion, then several more, heralded our main body’s successful operation against the piney nest of the nasty things. Almost instantly, the goblins became less organized and much easier to kill. When they’d first attacked us, so close to their main nest — or whatever that massive central structure was — even chopping off their heads hadn’t slowed them down too much at all, but too much distance seemed to impair their overriding control of their pet goblins, and certainly their being set afire had done wonders for our success against our robotic attackers. After a short time, I heard another salvo of HE missiles against some other target — evidently Lynette had taken to heart Beryl’s order to seek out any prominent nests of the things — and their coördination dropped off to almost nothing, and they began wandering around almost at random, except that they were still bloodthirsty, but were just as likely to attack and kill each other as they were to turn toward us. It might have been amusing, were it not for my memories of my lovely pregnant mare, felled by these muderous green goblins with her foal yet unborn.

“I quite like ‘green goblins,’ I think,” Beryl said quietly, obviously having read my mind as we were mopping up the last of them. “It nicely encapsulates their most prominent characteristics, as well as their malice.”

“Well, I briefly flirted with ‘Kudzu Klan,’ but I imagine the reference would have been lost on most.” This was a quip, of course, I’d thought of no such thing — until just now — but I thought Beryl might get the joke.

She smiled. “Just as well, I think. We’d have to call these concentrated vine bodies ‘Grand Dragons’ or the equivalent, which would quite turn their vulnerability to fire on its head.”

I laughed, because she’d seen the joke, and because I was so very glad that we were both alive. “I do think ‘Goblin castle’ has a certain air about it, though.”

“Or perhaps ‘goblin tower’ might do, and minimize confusion between our castles and theirs.”

“That’s an interesting idea, Beryl!” I said. “It sounds almost like something out of a fairy tale; just the right amount of menace without being too daunting.”

“Exactly!” she answered me. “The propaganda war is at least half the battle, of course, so let’s get our stories straight before we rejoin the troops.”

“No problem!” I said. “They never listen to me when you’re around anyways, especially now, I think, when you’ve raised ‘Off with their heads!’ to an art form, so I daresay your legend will grow in the telling. By the time we get back, they’ll probably have reïnvented curtsies and constructed a portable throne.”

She laughed at that. “Courtly manners I can live without; I’ve had my fill of them, but a proper sit-down toilet would be awfully nice, now that I think about it.”

I sighed. That was one thing I missed badly from my first few weeks in The City, when I’d discovered working fire hoses in my huge building, fed from rain-collecting cisterns on the roof, by means of which I was able to use buckets of water to flush the toilets in the ladies room. They even had closets filled with toilet paper and paper towels, which had seemed an almost inconceivable luxury at the time. I made a mental note to arrange a similar convenience, if we ever settled down for any length of time. It couldn’t be all that hard to arrange a cistern to collect water, and gravity could do the rest, although I supposed that we’d have to arrange some sort of leach field to handle the waste, since we couldn’t depend on streams and rivers in the long run. It was all well and good when we were riding through essential wilderness, but eventually our population centers would outstrip the ability of natural streams to handle the waste. The Roman Empire, after all, was enormously popular not least because their first major building projects in any conquered land were convenient public water fountains, heated baths, and sanitary public toilets. “I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

“Really? You can do that?”

Beryl might be long on derring-do, but I was the ingenious one. I nodded… and she smiled.

 

 

“Lynnette!” I yelled when we’d finally dragged our weary selves back to our sisters. We’d had some casualties, I quickly saw, but no more than a handful, by my rough guesstimate. “I’m so glad you managed to save our bacon!”

She colored as she answered, “Well, you two did most of the heavy lifting….”

“Nonsense1” Beryl said as we approached. “If it hadn’t been for your insights into the creatures, based upon your intimate scientific knowledge of plants, we’d still be out there fighting, if not sucked dry of every bodily fluid.”

“That puzzled me,” she said, “until I reasoned that at some point the pseudo-epiphytic climbing vines must have developed parasitic capabilities, which were then passed on to their motile offspring.”

“Epiphytic?” I asked succinctly, completely mystified, but tackling the problem from left to right.

“Normally,” she said, “the various forms of kudzu are true vines, so any damage they do is down to simple crowding out of other species, eliminating access to sunlight, and so on, coupled with what is — for plants, at least — a fantastically rapid growth rate. Like every true plant, they originally required a connection to the soil for nutrients and moisture. In the recent memories of those few modern botanists I was able to contact in the Underworld, they’d developed a partially epiphytic habit, in that they sometimes depended upon trees and other plants for access to sunlight in regions of heavy shade, but without giving up their ability to flower and reproduce independently of any of their neighbors. I reason that — at some point, either through evolution or some other form of gene transfer — they developed the equivalent of a haustorium, the modified root or hyphal tip of a plant or fungus that allows it to pierce into the circulatory systems of other plants, either in the xylem, the phloem, or both, and steal nutrients made by other plants.”

“Xylem? Phloem?” I do wish she’d speak English sometimes, though she didn’t ever seem bothered by having to explain herself.

“The xylem is the plant structure primarily responsible for transporting water from the roots — or whatever plant structure has access to moisture — to the rest of its body. The phloem is similarly responsible for transplanting sugars and other nutrients from wherever they’re being made to where the plant needs them to be for growth and reproduction. You might think of them as somewhat analogous to veins and arteries in animals and human beings, except that a plant’s fluids are transported by hydrostatic pressure from transpiration and osmosis.”

“So, exactly what has this to do with the creatures — we’re calling them ‘goblins,’ for lack of a better word — we were fighting?”

Lynette looked at me in surprise. “I was just telling you! The so-called ‘fangs’ I found in the creature’s head were modified haustoria! I presume that the demands of an ambulatory existence required a more energy-laden food supply than mere photosynthesis could provide, so the plants took to preying upon animals as well as other plants.”

I rolled my eyes. “Couldn’t you have just said that they were vampires?”

“We already knew that, for Heaven’s sake!” she said indignantly. “Why bother to yank a respected scientist out of a reasonably comfortable afterlife if you weren’t looking for definitive answers in the first place‽ It wasn’t as if I were just lounging about in the Elysian Fields and twiddling my thumbs, after all! I was able to engage in intense conversations with Galen, Pythagoras, Theophrastus, Pliny, Aristotle, Cesalpino, and countless other scientists and sages, all on a daily basis, without once having to worry about some damned green parasite gnawing on my leg!” She looked a little irritated.

“I… I’m sorry, Lynette,” I said. “I thought that you volunteered. I suppose I imagined that you were bored or something.”

She scowled at me. “Well, I wasn’t. I did volunteer, but I did so out of a general sense of civic duty, not because I was yearning for a fun-filled idle holiday in the middle of a war zone! From the Queen’s description, these things sounded like a very dangerous threat to human life, and I do feel an obligation to take sides in any such primal conflict.”

“Oh,” I said, nonplused.

“Indeed,” she said, in low dudgeon.

 

 

“So,” Beryl asked Lynette, “are we any closer to figuring out how these things can be decisively defeated?”

“Of course,” Lynette answered archly. “Simply manipulate a very large asteroid and send it crashing down on Earth. The resulting confusion will cause many life forms to go extinct, amongst which our Kudzu Goblins will hopefully be numbered.”

Beryl scowled in irritation. “Any way short of global catastrophe?”

“Of course not!” she answered. “Hasn’t the experience of the Horticultural Forces over the past several hundred years taught you anything about living things? The main purpose of every living creature is to survive long enough to reproduce another generation. In some sense, it’s their only purpose, and while it’s possible through overzealous predation and/or relentless destruction of a local habitat to drive one or more individual species to extinction, their place in the resultant œcology of any given area will eventually be taken up by some other species, most often less desirable from a human viewpoint, and thus less subject to predation. Kill enough mice, you get rats. Kill enough itty-bitty dandelions ‘infesting’ urban lawns, you get the monstrous hybrids which laid siege to your walled ‘fortresses’ and killed people by the score. I strongly suspect that these ‘goblins’ arose because every other top predator in this entire region had been eliminated by human beings, leaving an œcological vacuum into which the kudzu eventually found a way to expand.”

“But how can we possibly live with these murderous fiends lurking in every field and forest?”

“The same way we used to live with dandelions, of course. Did you know that at one time dandelions were not only a cheerful ornament on urban lawns, but most people considered them a valuable crop, something to be treasured for more than the fun of blowing the ripe florets into the air and watching them waft away to create new dandelions elsewhere. Every part of those ancient dandelions was edible; the leaves and buds made a lovely salad, the flowers could be brewed into a delightful wine, the roots ground and roasted made a tolerable hot beverage. Various portions of the plant even had medicinal uses, primarily as a fairly gentle diuretic, but were also said to help with hepatic disorders. It was only when obsessive-compulsive idiots decided that they wanted lawns that looked like putting greens — lawns that children weren’t allowed to play on because they were saturated with toxic chemicals, lawns as flat and boring as a billiard table — that things really started to change.”

“There’s a hell of a lot of difference between dandelions on a lawn and those goblin vampires!” Beryl said furiously.

“Not really,” Lynette said calmly. “Your current incarnation is the result of many converging lines of separate evolution, but evolution is still going on, albeit usually a bit too slow to notice on a human scale. Is it too much to imagine that other beings might also coëvolve into something other than they were before?” She gestured to the plain around us, or as far as the horizon, or beyond. “This is the wide world we live in, but even this is just a speck within the vast immensity of time and space. Tomorrow, next week, a hundred years from now, great ships of space might land carrying beings far more clever and powerful than we mere humans could ever hope to be; does that prevent us from living out our own lives and preferring that we and our descendants survive, even if we have to slay these putative godlike beings to do so? Even the tiniest mouse will bite if captured in a hand. Are we less courageous than that wee mousie?”

For once, especially since her transubstantiation, Beryl was speechless. I sympathized. It must be difficult, to be a Queen, and then discover an upstart minion who wasn’t cowed, a scientist whose agenda encompassed only truth, whose essential courage enabled her to boldly confront the truth wherever it lay hidden. Oddly, although I’d always been very fond of Beryl, almost from the start, had initiated sex with her, had imagined that I was in love with her, was even now carrying her child, for the first time — as I observed Lynette’s dispassionate defiance from the sidelines, as it were — my chest quite suddenly ached with love and it felt like my heart had expanded to fill all the space there was beneath my breastbone, as if I couldn’t breathe, the oxygen driven from my lungs by swelling passion, all-encompassing, and all the world around me changed in the twinkling of an eye. I saw what Lynette saw — or thought I did — that we were all connected to the same world, that these horrible goblin things were our neighbors, and that we had to somehow come to an accommodation. “What do we need to do, Lynette?” I asked her, my eminently practical question breaking a silent tension so ominous and fragile that I could almost hear it shatter, then fall tinkling in ragged shards to the Earth beneath our feet. They both blinked and stared at me as if I were a miraculously-talking horse, then both spoke simultaneously, to each other.

“Aren’t you listening, Lynette? We’ve got to destroy these vicious creatures root and branch!” she screamed. “We can have ten thousand HE missiles sent down from the Virginia stockpiles within a week or two, so we can start wiping these vile abominations off the face of the Earth as quickly as possible!” She paused for breath, a small miracle in itself, and then continued. “Can’t you see that these monsters are killing people‽ We simply have to save them! They’ve obviously murdered all the people who lived down here in the Georgian lowlands, and we can only presume that they’ve done — or are in the process of doing — the same thing south of here! They have to be exterminated!”

“Don’t you get it? You couldn’t expect to wipe them out in the first place! even if you burned millions of hectares, which you can’t. The root crowns are buried deep underground, and we wouldn’t have the power to dig up all of them if we had an army of ten million enhanced women with ten million bulldozers, which we don’t!” She gathered her thoughts, and then said, more calmly, “In fact, since you’re riding Nineteenth Century horses as transportation on your military expedition to conquer the world, I strongly suspect that you don’t even have the fuel to power those ten million bulldozers if you had the damned machines to begin with!”

“Shut up! Both of you!” I shouted at them. “You’re both wrong,” I continued quietly, “and both right, both at the same time.”

Somehow, that stopped them, and they both stood there staring at me again; the talking horse had repeated her miracle, had spoken for the second time, and was suddenly something that had to be reckoned with. “Beryl, I love you, probably more than I know words enough to express, and certainly more than I’ve ever managed to tell you, but you can’t run around like the damned Red Queen shouting ‘Off with their heads!’ and expect instant results. Lynette is right. We can’t possibly defeat them all. We don’t know how many thousands of square miles of forest and kudzu empire there is between here and whatever end there is of them, but our ancestors never managed to eradicate the kudzu, so I doubt that we will either, certainly not in our lifetimes, and certainly not with their new adaptations to encroachments by other lifeforms.”

Then I turned to Lynette and said, “Don’t forget that you’re wrong too. We’re not going to be patsies for anyone, and if we’re mice, we’re mice that roar like lions from time to time. For a million years or more, human beings have been shaping the world around them, and these creatures are just another piece of that same world. What we’re going to do is to domesticate these goblins until their own mothers — if they have mothers — won’t recognize them. We tamed the fierce and dangerous giant aurochs to such an extent that ‘cow’ is now a word that means ‘to subdue,’ and we use castrated oxen to pull carts around. Mark my words, those goblins will be our servants before this encounter is over, however long it takes.”

Both of them stared at me dumbfounded, evidently unable to find words either to agree with me or call me seven kinds of idiot for my arrogant delusions of human grandeur. ‘Tough luck!’ I thought. ‘I started all this — I’ll finish it. This particular mouse knows how to bite!’ “Lynette, start figuring out what they need and how we can control it so completely that they become dependent on our good will. Beryl, you can tell me what these things might be good for, so we can convince people to let them alone until we figure out how to snap a leash on them. Whatever it is that we wind up doing, we can’t let it escalate to the point that it did before the Dandelion War began and blunder our way into the same long series of mistakes all over again.”

“Yes, Ma’am!” Lynette replied smartly, evidently well content to leave the driving to someone with any semblance of command and any idea that seemed somewhat less than stupid. “Although they appear to have developed other resources, in that they can prey upon animals for nutrients and moisture, I can’t imagine that there would be sufficient animal life in any region dominated by these things to sustain the sort of intelligence they seem to display, as witnessed by their obvious profusion of leafy growth. Like any plant, therefore, they need access to water, light, nutrients, and a friable soil which allows for root growth, and especially soil depth enough to contain their root crown, at least six feet, I’d guess, considering the size of the visible portions above the soil, although younger plants undoubtedly require less depth, but then I haven’t had the opportunity to excavate one of the mutated specimens to determine actual dimensions.”

“You mentioned the ‘root crown before. Is this necessary for growth?’”

“Not absolutely, no, but certainly for regrowth after any destruction of the vines above ground. The root crown contains a large store of nutrients that fuel rapid regrowth after consumption of the portions of the plant that perform photosynthesis above the ground. Any seeds left behind can do the same, but regeneration from seed is much slower, and requires more favorable conditions. I believe we can extrapolate from their historic behavior that they compete with others of their own kind as well, since there were far too many of their mobile ‘goblins’ available to imagine that they all sit idly by until a large animal or human army comes wandering by. Like ants, which I think might furnish at least a tentative model, these goblins would be the means by which ‘foraging parties’ could venture forth to snatch up the resources of other plants. In fact, we saw what seemed to be analogous behavior when we saw the first colony removing what appeared to be ‘eggs’ from that tower of them that our Queen set alight with chemical fire. The creatures were evidently attempting to rescue their own genetic heritage, so it follows that the ‘goblins’ themselves are probably sterile, or they could have done the same thing by simply running away, as humans or other mammals might have done.”

I thought about that for a moment, and it appeared that Beryl was thinking too, then asked, “Consumption, you say? Is the plant edible?”

“Yes, of course,” Lynette said with assurance. “The vines were originally imported to the Americas to serve as rapidly-growing forage for herbivores of various sorts, although humans had also consumed the more tender portions for many years, and have used almost every part of for various herbal remedies for many centuries, perhaps thousands of years. The root crowns especially contain large amounts of starch which can fairly easily be extracted to form a human staple, although there are better-quality sources found in other plants, so very few human populations appear to have depended upon kudzu, except in times of famine.”

I grinned in gleeful surmise and said, “Beryl, are Gumball and the boys anywhere within shouting distance?” They tended to be slower than our mounted troops, so often lagged behind, and Beryl had become much more sensitive to their presence than even I was, after her astonishing rebirth within the belly of the beast himself. Come to think of it, since Gumball was in some sense Beryl’s surrogate-mother, or something, perhaps we should start calling them ‘girls.’ ‘Nah!’ I thought. ‘Why mess up our heads with tiresome analogies?’ I gave a little mental shrug. ‘ “Boys” is close enough. I overthink sometimes.’

Beryl, of course, intuited my purpose. “Gumball is, but the rest of the boys are about three miles behind our line of march.”

“Gumball!” I thought and shouted at the same time. At first there was nothing, and then finally a roiling disturbance in the soil approaching us like an invisible snake with an endless tail. Then Gumball himself erupted from the head of the dirt snake like a happy ball of green fur. “Gumball!” I cried aloud, although I knew that he depended more on thought than sound. Quickly, I filled him in on what had happened, and he took a ‘look’ around, using whatever he used for analogous eyes, then promptly dove underground again and headed off toward the largest massing of kudzu still unburnt. this time, he dove deep, so he left no trail behind, but soon enough sprang up again, almost at our feet this time — if a creature that towered so far above us could possibly be so described — with must be a ‘root crown’ in his mouth, which he spat out in front of us with obvious pride.

Lynnette, of course, was ecstatic, and almost immediately had the thing in pieces, roughly dissected with her trusty machete, which did yeoman service as a scalpel for an object that large. “Ha!” she said aloud. “See this?” she said, showing us a peculiar formation that looked nothing like any root I’d ever seen. “I believe this to be roughly equivalent to the cerebral cortex in the Animal Kingdom — begging your pardon, my Queen — and possibly enervated with some sort of sensory structure that communicates to the outside world, although I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it in the literature. In theory, though, there seems sufficient evidence to surmise that this is what runs the show.” Then she turned to Gumball with a calculating look, flexing the muscles of her right hand on the hilt of her machete.

“Don’t you dare, Lynette!” I yelled at her. “Gumball is our friend!”

With what might have been a guilty start, if she’d looked anything like regretful, she let the blade fall to her side and said, almost grudgingly, “Sorry….” She was obviously just itching to figure out what made Gumball tick, though, and I made a mental note to have Beryl lay down the law.

Beryl, of course, figured it out on her own, or maybe she was reading my thoughts; she’d done that often enough. “Lynette! Gumball and all his companions are off-limits to dissection by anyone, especially you. They’ve been our allies from the beginning, and they’re intelligent living beings who’ve kindly helped us ever since Sapphire here first encountered and befriended them. If you have any questions, ask her, or me, if she’s not available for any reason.”

“Yes, my Queen,” she said instantly, which made me wonder exactly what sort of government they had in the Underworld, although I guessed from Beryl’s story of capture and rape by the head honcho that it wasn’t anything like egalitarian. I made a mental note to give him, or her — Beryl seemed flexible in her references to him — a good thrashing, if ever I encountered the sorry bastard.

Beryl laughed without smiling, although I didn’t know quite what for, and the whole interaction seemed odd, since Lynette had seemed to have had no trouble standing up to her when science was more directly involved. I made another mental note not to dwell upon imponderables until the opportunity arose to do something about it, and just then Beryl snorted in a most unladylike fashion. That irritated me. “Stay the Hell out of my head!” I told her, in no uncertain terms. “You may think that you know what I can do, but if I ever see that nasty little twerp, the so-called Hades, I’ll have his or her balls off before you can say, ‘Rat snap!’ Just you wait and see if I don’t!” At that point, I could have chewed red-hot nails and spit out bullets, and I wasn’t all that picky about where I spat them.

Beryl… Beryl! seemed taken slightly aback, and Lynette was horrified, although I didn’t know exactly which lèse majesté the more discomfited her. “You too, Lynette. I don’t take crap from anyone!”

“Yes, Ma’am,” she said, eyes wide, obviously weighing the political situation a bit more carefully than she had in the past.

My glare toward Beryl could easily have melted osmium, and was just as hard and sharp. “Any further comments from the peanut gallery, Queen Beryl?”

“Not that I can think of, just off-hand,” she said, not in the least abashed, but just a trifle wary.

‘As well she should be,’ I thought. ‘I was just getting started.’

 

 

As it turned out, the Bandersnatches were just what we needed to begin controlling the kudzu and shaping them toward our needs. The human world had been at least partially depopulated, so there were ample niches available where a ready supply of cheap labor, which the remaining root crown entities were eventually happy to supply in exchange for fertilizer and water. The bandersnatches were happy too, because the uncoöperative root crowns contained just the right combination of concentrated starches and protein to allow them to flower and seed, so it wasn’t long until we had almost more bandersnatches rolling around than either we or they knew what to do with. Mind you, a baby bandersnatch is awfully cute, and might even make a nice pet, except for the fact that they seem to grow without stopping, given an adequate food supply.

Beryl had her army too, in an almost endless series of very small platoons: a dozen humans, a ship, and a gross or two of dormant root crowns carefully packed in balls of soil and wrapped carefully for the voyage. Add a dozen baby bandersnatches grown in pots and we had a heavy infantry troop with armored support. A little water was enough to keep them happy on the trip, and then add a few bags of fertilizer and lots of water at the end of the voyage to grow an army of fearless warriors in a week or two, like Athena’s dragon’s teeth scattered on the ground.

Which left me with a little time on my hands, and idle hands are the Devil's plaything, as they say, so naturally I took out one of my Tarot decks, the Devil's primer, according to some. For some reason — possibly intuitive — I chose the Golden Tarot, perhaps because it was created by a woman and carried  — in my mind, at least — a greater weight of femininity, without the feminine excess of some of the more extreme extravagations in the past half-millennium or so, but also because the images had been chosen from real paintings by real artists, so was literally the work of many hands and thus its emotional and intellectual scope seemed broader, if one can resist the pun, and the quality of the artwork allowed for interpretations that went beyond the merely superficial. The first card I drew was The Fool, First amongst Les Atouts, Les Arcanes Majeures, which didn't surprise me in the least, since I hadn't actually shuffled the deck. When I looked at it carefully, though, I saw myself, a woman boldly standing at the brink of a precipice after emerging from the shaded depths of a deep forest, playing a large bodhrán, so there was no question of stealth, and she was stylishly dressed in the late Medieval style, with a relatively simple white gown and contrasting girdle, but it was hemmed with gold. She wore a simple cap — something like a pilos, the historic symbol of freedom — in gold and red, the soul and life entwined. I also saw my dear Gumball in her whippet, the aforesaid Fool's prescient companion. It certainly seemed appropriate, even aside from its traditional significance, since I was widely-known for coloring outside the lines, and here I was stepping out into space, marching to the beat of a truly different drummer.

My next card was equally purposeful, but drawn almost by chance, Trump Thirteen, Death, but this particular Death was itself transformed, here shown as the guardian of the boundary between the light and darkness, Death itself reduced to a hovering winged skeleton embracing the entirety of the waking world, at one with the ministering angels who pay homage to the central figure, a dying woman, who blesses all around her with her flowery wand of power, a reversal both of focus and of integral dynamic.

‘That's good enough for me!’ I thought. “Gumball!”

He must have been lurking nearby, because he erupted from the earth as quickly as a genie out of a magic lamp, without the showy mystical theatrics. “Gumball,” I said, “We're going on a little trip. Now open wide.”

 

 

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

Copyright © 2012-2013 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved

 

 

Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Thirteen Preëmptive Strike

 

 

All is fair in love and war.

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

 

Stepping into Gumball’s open mouth was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done, a leap of faith into an unknown future, but of course my whole career since leaving The Castle — my childhood home — in disgrace had been comprised of similar high-stakes wagers, and this was something that had to be undertaken by someone, and who better than me? In the first place I’d been swallowed up by Gumball before, so I knew roughly what to expect, but — most importantly — I didn’t really think that anyone else had the sang froid to pull it off.

I took a good look around at the piney woods around me. It was a beautiful sunny day, with a quiet sough of wind from off the distant sea that took the edge off the heat, but didn’t blow my hair around. ‘Perfect!’ I thought, as Gumball swallowed me and a stygian darkness pressed in on me, not welcomed, but at least familiar.

It actually wasn’t quite as bad as it had been when first he’d engulfed me, because Gumball had been in a bit of a hurry at the time, so I didn’t suffer the indignity of being tumbled around with half a ton of dirt, but it wasn’t pleasant either. I’d told him to dive down as deeply as he could — for purely symbolic reasons — so hypoxia soon had me gasping for breath, but of course there was no air to be had, clasped tight in Gumball’s keeping, well away from the regions of oxygen and sunlight. I began to feel a little queer, so I held the image of Death in mind as my soul left my body behind, fully prepared to offer my peculiar blessings to all and sundry.…

…It was just as Beryl had described it, the sudden rush, the ravishment, being caught up by a violent man of incredible power, a fell God hooded in darkness and cloaked by endless Night. Hades, in very fact, arrogant and cruel in the still heart of his shadowy dominion, just as Beryl had described, but I wasn’t nearly as overawed, having been forewarned as to his nature. He pressed against me, obviously intent upon claiming me as his very own, the filthy bugger.

“You’re mine!” he shouted in triumph, his voice a basso profondo so deep that it made my teeth ache, and his lecherous tone made his lascivious intentions fairly clear, so my suspicions about his predacious nature seemed more than justified.

“Fat chance, you musclebound asshole!” I shouted, slapping him on the forehead with Trump Five, The Chariot, from the Golden Tarot, an armored woman with a white staff and wearing a royal crown, a Warrior Queen — Boadicea? It was she who led the last great uprising of the Celts against their Roman conquerors. The name means ‘Victory!’ but hers was only a moral victory in that she wasn’t quite defeated, but then she hadn’t had nearly my own advantages of preternatural strength and speed — perfectly balanced upon a stone pedestal drawn freely through a rushing torrent by a pair of swans. True leadership and power is earned, not taken by force, and all physical movement is paradoxical, an illusion reïnforced by our quaint belief that the Earth itself is at the center of the Universe when, in very fact, any ‘center’ is exactly as real — or unreal — as any other. The only reality that truly exists is that which lies within, and the only actor with the power to change that reality is yourself, so I was in complete control of the situation and I promptly did something which startled him; I pulled him toward me with force majeure, then kissed him, putting plenty of spit in it, swabbing his mouth with my tongue. Feh! It was very clear to me that this particular God wasn’t at all fastidious in his oral hygiene, but I hadn’t kissed him because I was growing fond of the nasty bastard; I kissed him as an invasive assault on his personal integrity, because I knew what my physical kisses did to those I kissed, having seen the inevitable progression of the infection I’d discovered and promulgated many times before, although of course this kiss was metaphorical. As above, so below, as Hermes Trismegistus once observed, and one could hardly find a below as deeply-rooted as this one. He wasn’t the slightest bit aware of the fact that he’d already been defeated, and kissing women didn’t seem to be any part of the ancient Greek social context, since he seemed to be taken slightly aback. It seemed unlikely — all in all — that he thought anything more about it at all than as the silly sentimentality of a mere female, if he could even be described as having thought at all, the musclebound twit. ‘The more fool, then, was he, since I had a thousand potent symbols in my arsenal, and he’d just led with his cock, rarely a shrewd wager in any world, much less in the psychic realm, because it hadn’t impressed me at all.’ He’d thought to rape me, but in fact I was raping him, stripping him of every vestige of masculine power, intent upon leaving him as naked as a newborn babe, and just as vulnerable.

He faltered slightly in his pathetic attempt to overcome my now negligent resistance, and I mocked him, “What’s the matter, Limp-Dick? Can’t get it up? What is it with all you Greek Gods anyway? Whilst it’s clear that you do seem to be male — sort of — what with the black beard and all, you’ve all got puny little ‘packages’ like six-year-old boys. Or maybe that’s because those tiny boy-pricks are so enticing, is that it? Does your mouth just water, thinking about those cute little boy buns?”

He gave an incoherent roar of rage, redoubling his efforts, but failed to move me one whit.

I smacked him then with Trump Three, The Empress, an archetype of Gaia — or Ceres to use the Roman name — crowned with wheat and surrounded by symbols of fertility, without which primal fecundity life would vanish from the Earth, and in which context males were merely a belated afterthought, now both made redundant by my fortuitous discovery and exemplified in my own pregnant body. I held up another card to mock him. “You’ll notice” I taunted him again, “that Trump Four, The Emperor to match his true sovereign, is a fat old man sitting alone in a stone prison, his only access to the outside world a tiny window through which he couldn’t possibly squeeze his own fat belly, and even that small temptation to engage the world is guarded by a bird that looks suspiciously like a vulture, a carrion-feeder that preys on corpses… Oh! Wait! I’m so sorry! That’s you! isn’t it? And the regal lion at your feet just happens to look like the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz, yet another fairytale about overblown male humbugs and frauds! All the real power in Oz was held by women, of course, whether for good or ill, and I’ve just ‘Ozified’ this ossified ‘man cave’ with a bevy of fecund beauties.” This was not an idle boast, of course, since through Hades I’d infected the essential core of his former realm. ‘As above, so below.’

I felt him hesitate and instantly played Trump Eight, my own personal Significator, Strength, in this incarnation of the universal Tarot a seated woman whose servant — a mounted knight on a charger — is behind her, deferential and subject to both her temporal and spiritual power — as shown by the lion in her lap and the infinity symbol above her head — yet is herself untouched by any sort of male domination, metaphorically depicted by the shield on the lion’s back, which is also centered on her womb and private parts by symbolic proxy. “You’re soon to be my handmaiden, little Hadesette,” I said forcefully, willing his final transubstantiation through the psychic correspondence of my transformative kiss. ‘As above, so below!’ I thought. “The golden dawn is upon you, Άιδα Θεᾱ, and you stand revealed as what you are now, a young girl with at least the possibility of atoning for your many crimes through service to your rightful Queen!” I showed my last Trump, Twenty-One, The World, a woman grown to power, sheltering all humanity under her scarlet cloak, in her hand the arrow of truth which pierces through hypocrisy and false seemings. Of a sudden, our shadowy Queendom was invaded by a sourceless light which permeated all of that secret space and left no darkness behind wherein nothing evil might lie hidden. It wasn’t at all as gloomy as it had been, but I thought a little vegetation might go a long way to making the place seem more inviting, so with a wave of my feathered sceptre — very nearly the same sort of broadhead arrow which had made short work of the flower of French Chivalry at Agincourt — I made it so, transforming the stony castle keep into an annex of the Elysian Fields. “If you’re a very good girl in future, I might let you serve me in other ways, but for now you’ll bear a miraculous child from your newly-virgin body, an heir to carry forth your lineage of light and love when I release you to rebirth.” Hey, it might seem cruel — and was certainly a sneaky trick to play — but what better way to convey his… her new rôle as he transcended the now-outmoded sexist Greek scheme of things? I expected that it might take some time for my New World Order to trickle down to every field and byway, although I made a mental note to tackle Ares and Zeus sometime soon. From the sorry example that the former Hades had set — supposedly the fiercest warrior amongst the Olympians during the Titanomachy — the other two brothers ought to be pushovers, although of course those two might pull the trigger on themselves, as both were notorious philanderers, and the new and improved Hades — as one of my progeny — was far more than passing beautiful, and exquisitely infectious. If mere Helen’s face had launched a thousand ships, almost any of my girls could easily commence the Ragnarök, much less Hades, with whom I’d taken special care. She was my personal pìece de résistance, a woman for whom the Gods themselves would quarrel.

I looked around me, well pleased with all my workings. “Gumball!” I said quietly, “take me home!”

When he arrived, he looked a lot like Cerberus, having evidently picked up a few bad habits during our joint descent into the Underworld. “Gumball!” I chided him, “Don’t be like that! You’ll scare the children!”

I swear he pouted, and I have to admit that it was easier to read his mood as a sort-of dog than it had ever been as his own sweet self, so I reassured him. “Oh, Sweetie, you can be a hell-hound whenever you like, as long as it’s in battle and the babies are all safely tucked away, but wouldn’t you really rather be a dragon?” I held the mental image of a dragon in my mind, an Imperial five-toed dragon, of course, with golden armored scales and lovely wings, so he tried it on for size, instantly rising toward the stone skies above us before swooping back down in a rush of divine wind and fire. He was obviously very pleased with himself.

“Now, isn’t that lots better than being a silly dog?” I asked, and he roared his agreement. If I’d been corporeal at the time, I might actually have been singed, although it was rather spectacular, so I blinked.

“Then let’s go back up into the light. We’ll have lots of time to play down here, since I obviously have new responsibilities now, but my first duty is to my baby, and I don’t want to injure her through lack of oxygen.” That was a little bit of a copout, of course, since we’d spent zero biological time since I’d left my body behind in existential stasis. I could have spent a hundred spiritual years tidying up the place without a single heartbeat ticking by within my living body. Come to think of it, if ichor now flowed through my symbolic arteries and veins, did immortality cross the placental barrier? I couldn’t think why it wouldn’t, since Castor and Pollux had managed to inherit based upon the status of their different fathers, despite being ‘twins,’ born at the same time to one mother who’d been impregnated by two males, one mortal and one divine, within moments of one another, but Leda, their mother, was mortal. Then again, Selene’s daughters by Endymion were all immortal, as far as I could remember, despite the father’s ambiguous status, and if immortality were only inherited based upon paternity, I’d have none of it, and wouldn’t allow any such blatant sexism within my dominions, at very least. Beryl and I would have to be especially thoughtful, when choosing our baby’s name, since she’d have to live with it for a very long time.

 

 

Beryl was waiting for me when I reëmerged into the open air, of course, obviously having noticed that I’d been busy turning her subterranean empire upside down. “Where the Hell have you been?” she said, although ‘said’ might be a trifle understated. ‘Screamed’ might actually have been the better word.

I took some time to look around, filling my eyes with the world, the sky, with her dear — but furious — visage. “Funny you should mention that,” I said archly, the ghost of a smile playing across my luscious lips, now somewhat improved upon through my recent ascension to divinity. “I’ve been busy harrowing Hell, of course, as I’m sure you know, so I assume the question was merely rhetorical.” I did mention that sang froid was my particular speciality, didn’t I? “And your precise point was?”

“What on Earth were you doing endangering the baby like that?” she screamed again, evidently having not quite given up on the notion of overawing me.

I was in no mood to be intimidated. “In the first place,” I said calmly, filled with infinite compassion and benevolence, “there was no particular danger, and you may have noticed that this baby of ours has two mothers, despite the fact that I seem to have taken on the job of actually carrying it, yet I haven’t seen you holding back from any putative ‘dangers’ thus far. We’re both of us soldiers, for Harry’s sake. What’s sauce for the goose, is sauce for the other goose, as far as I’m concerned, so don’t be silly.” I may have been a tiny bit irritated after all, now that I actually thought about it. Blame my hormones.

“But what did you do?” she shouted, one step down from screaming, which was an improvement, at least.

“Just what I said I’d do,” I answered, feeling quite pleased with myself, despite her annoying cavil. “I snipped his little balls, and little was the operative word, if you know what I mean, which I was surprised to notice, since I’d been given quite the opposite impression by someone I know. None-the-less, if anyone is going to be ‘messing’ with you, it’s going to be me, or we can go our separate ways. I was getting a little tired of hearing you boast about how über-masculine that overbearing macho twit was, in any case. It was, I think, in extremely poor taste, especially considering as how I’m now your Consort and Co-Queen. Lèse majesté works both ways, you know.”

“What do you mean,” she said, her eyebrows narrowed.

“According to the Olympian rules,” I explained, “whomever knocks the head honcho off his throne generally replaces him, a sort of ‘winner-takes-all’ strategy that eliminates all that messy business of campaigning and free elections. I may not have been ‘chosen,’ as you so delicately put it — although I do admit that he tried to force the issue — but I decided to choose myself, which is just as good, as it turns out, and allowed me to ignore his halitosis and many other distasteful personal traits completely. Hades himself won the rulership of the Underworld in a game of pick-up-sticks after he and his fellow Olympian Gods had bumped off their Titanic predecessors, so he can hardly complain, not that ‘hard’ is at all likely to come to mind when she is mentioned in future,” I mused with pointed irony, then smiled benignly, my hands resting on my distended belly like a pregnant Gioconda.

Beryl stood gaping, her lips trembling with words unspoken, until she finally said, “I see that I underestimated you.”

“You have,” I agreed, agreeably. “I sincerely hope that it doesn’t become a habit.”

“Aren’t you worried about the other Gods?” she asked suspiciously.

“Not a bit,” I said, sanguine. “If they have any sense, they’ll stay out of my way. If not, Olympus can always use another couple of Goddesses, and the rest of the world’s religions will eventually either toe our mark or go down into oblivion. When I supplanted Hades, I drank down his immortality, just as he and his fellow Olympians had cannibalized the powers of the Gods who came before them, in an ancient cycle of vampiric regicide that’s probably been going on for half a million years or more. You can’t stop progress, and the Underworld is already looking lots better than it was before I took over. Quite frankly, Hades had let the place go to hell and gone. I’ve already had many heartfelt professions of gratitude from the unfortunate denizens of Tartarus since I put in the pool tables and an exercise yard. They may have been wicked, but that’s no particular reason to be inhumane. People change, and perhaps they’ll be more likely to change for the good in a nicer environment. My only real worry is the next set of Gods who come along, since the current versions are wimps, as far as I can see.”

“What do you mean?” she asked me again, although I’d never known her to be slow on the uptake. I reckoned that her sojourn underground had been harder on her that she’d let on. I deeply sympathized.

“There’s been a huge turnover problem in the God business historically, with old versions being supplanted by ‘new and improved’ revisions every few thousand years. The old Gods had only human support to prop them up, though, and never all that many of them, since there were dozens of competitors who had to share out the merely human ‘True Believers’ between them. In my case — and yours, of course, now I’ve changed the paradigm — we have the plants believing in us these days as saviours as well as avenging angels, and the relative difference between our populations is so great that the total number of human beings still alive on Earth are little more than a rounding error. Gumball quite enjoys being my dragon in his off hours, so I’m sure he’ll tell all his friends, who will, of course, tell theirs, and pretty soon we’ll all have green dragons flying around in our subconsciouses.”

“But what exactly do you mean by that extraordinary claim?” she asked again, which I thought was less than gracious, since I’d believed her story from the outset, or at least I did when it gradually transformed from dream into recollection in her mind, or maybe it was the other way around, until I’d changed from dream to memory.

“Watch this!” I said, then addressed the world at large. “Gumball, would you mind fetching me a few of our loyal goblins, please?”

About three seconds later, Gumball positively flew from the untouched soil before us and spat out three green goblins, none the worse for wear, who promptly kowtowed, and stayed there prostrate on the ground.

“Q…E…D?” I asked.

“Point taken,” she said, still puzzled, but getting there.

 

 

Beryl was still ticked off at me, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t because I’d managed to transmogrify her quondam boy-toy into the broadly-defined opposite. She was quite a bit more conservative than I had ever been, and so resisted change of almost any sort, and here I’d gone and turned the afterlife she’d just discovered straight upside down. ‘It’s those pesky “eternal verities” that are getting in her way,’ I thought. ‘Gods and Goddesses had probably rarely entered her thoughts before I’d come along — Horticulturist society was far too pragmatic, since we’d lived with mortal danger almost every day, which tends to reduce the scope of one’s concentration most wonderfully. There used to be a saying, that there were no atheists in foxholes, but the corollary was, of course, that there were no churches in them either, and very few philosophers — but we’d been so very busy overturning so very many cultural icons that my messing with the spiritual realm just might have seemed like some sort of tipping point.’ “Look, Cuisle mo Chroí, I’m sorry,” I said.

She sniffed — the slightly more subtle equivalent of a raucous raspberry — and answered succinctly, “Go to Hell!”

“No, thanks, Sweetie. I’ve been there, and done that, as they say, but surely you realize that I wouldn’t have done it at all if you hadn’t been taunting me about your wonderful experiences down there. It pissed me off, since it attacked me in a manner for which I had no possible response, and it assumed an aura of heterosexist privilege which was both demeaning and offensive.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, you do almost the exact same thing from time to time!” she shouted at me, causing heads to turn amongst the nearest troops.

“I don’t see how I could,” I said more quietly, taken aback by her unexpected vehemence.

“Not one of us were asked if we wanted to join your little army, were we?!” she started to say forcefully, then lowered her voice mid-sentence, suddenly more aware of our nearby listeners.

I thought about that, considering both the inaccuracy of her heated characterization and her obvious passion, before I answered. “As I recall, Beryl, you and your then-misguided and belligerent companions were trying to destroy my little farmstead at the time, and would have killed me if I’d given you the slightest opportunity. In point of fact, at least two of your number did try to kill me, and were dissuaded only because they couldn’t prevail against me in hand-to-hand combat. I thought I showed remarkable forbearance and compassion, taking all in all, when I could just as easily have killed your entire entourage, in which case we probably wouldn’t be having this tiresome conversation. Please do let me know if you would have preferred death, but I far prefer you alive.” I rolled my eyes, just a bit disheartened, but I couldn’t help it. People do get worked up about the damnedest stuff from time to time.

“Don’t be silly, Sapphire,” she said, glaring at me with lips drawn tight. “You’ll notice that I did come back to you, which very few have ever done before. But it wasn’t as if I were living a miserable existence down there, starving and tortured, then escaped from Hell through sheer desperation. In fact, as far as the Underworld goes, I had the cushiest billet available, as the ruling Queen, subservient only to Hades Himself. I made a conscious decision to return to light and life because I literally dreamed of you. I couldn’t stay away, once I’d remembered.”

That shut me up, which is sometimes pretty difficult to accomplish, I admit. “I realize that now, Dear Heart, but I didn’t at the time. In fact, I murdered each and every one of the remaining Reivers when I reached the bottom of the mountain path with neither hesitation nor remorse, using the thin excuse that one of their number had violated a negotiated truce, which was quite unlike me. Of course, I’d killed your attacker straightaway, but that was in hot blood. The rest of them I murdered in pure ferocity and hatred, because just one of them had dared to raise a hand against you.”

She smiled then, and looked at me fondly, then said, “I know, Sweetheart. I had to consign most of them to Tartarus, one of my first official acts, almost immediately after I arrived, although a very few, much less than a handful, wound up in the meadows of Asphodel, and only one of those had the barest chance of eventually working his way up to the Elysian Fields, if he manages to apply himself and learns his life lessons very well.” She was quiet for a while before she said, “Once I’d finally remembered, at least in my dreams, I understood your passion and was both proud and flattered. That’s part of what inspired me to return, in fact, and the fellow who shot me wasn’t very daring at all, as it turned out. He’d fired at our backs while lying in wait, like the miserable coward that he was, and was still so nervous that he managed to miss his main target, which was you, and felled me almost by chance.”

That surprised me. I hadn’t thought to check upon him whilst I was in the Underworld, and frankly hadn’t really given a damn what had happened to him, as long as he was dead. “At the time, it didn’t feel all that noble. It felt more like revenge,” I answered bleakly.

Beryl clucked her tongue and said, “Not at all, I think, when you really think about it. Please remember that you have a wonderful gift for inspired improvisation. Nobility is as nobility does, and there’s ample precedent for institutional revenge as enlightened public policy — even if you weren’t thinking quite as calmly and insightfully about the issue as usual — and it amounted to a valuable object lesson for both the rescued women — who were very pleased to observe justice at work after experiencing terror and cruelty with little hope of rescue — and any future Reivers who chance to hear the tale. If groups of lawbreakers are free to take traitorous individual potshots at those who’ve magnanimously spared their lives, the whole concept of surrender and parole breaks down, and the victors have no choice but to kill every one of their opponents without quarter in future, which is bad for everyone, because it inspires a vicious desperation that can easily spill over to include the murder of innocent noncombatants as ‘bargaining chips’ meant to persuade their pursuers to let them off scot free.” She reached out to take my hand. “No, once a truce is broken, there’s no going back and saying, ‘Well, I had my fingers crossed.’ The order to surrender was quite properly accepted by their chief and relayed quite clearly to the rest of them, since we both heard him shouting as we walked blithely down the path, made careless by our relatively easy victory, and by means of which deceptive tactic the cowardly ambuscade was carried out which killed me. In the end, each and every member of the falsely-surrendered troop can be quite properly be called upon to pay for their collective crime with their lives. Any other course of action breeds chaos and confusion amongst the troops, and so interferes with the good order and discipline of the military services in general.”

I was puzzled. “How so?”

“Because every soldier is bound to obey the lawful orders of their superiors, and a formal surrender is exactly such an order. If any soldier is free to disregard that order on a whim, it implies that the entire contract though which the soldier subsumes his will and actions to the larger State is broken. In turn, that means that their collective immunity from individual prosecution for otherwise lawful killings, as ordered by their superior officers, is null and void. In fact, any and every officer or soldier of their group would themselves have had the duty to kill the traitor immediately, but they made no move to do so, for whatever reason, nor did they mention the fact that there was a sniper lying in concealment while the terms of the surrender were made and accepted, nor even made any disavowal of his action after the fact — thus each and severally forfeiting their privileges and guarantees of safety as prisoners of war in their totality — just as we would have been reciprocally obliged to defend them with our own lives if they’d come under attack by other Reivers for surrendering in the first place.”

I wondered at first, exactly how she could describe the situation so clearly, but then remembered that she’d probably encountered the very people…? spirits…? whom I’d dispatched to her dominions. “But wouldn’t the doctrine of command responsibility limit any retaliation to those actually in command at the time?”

Beryl rolled her eyes. “Oh, please, since when did the Horticultural Services rely all that much on rules and regulations?”

She had me there. In practice, despite our military pretensions back in the enclaves, we weren't all that different than the Reivers, except that we didn't actually keep slaves. What we did have were supposedly ‘free’ women so starved for food and creature comforts that the lowliest troops had ready access to sexual favors for the cost of a decent meal.

“In the first place,” she said, “the Reivers really had no legitimate command structure to begin with, because they were criminals, not soldiers, and would have been shot on sight for the simple reason that they were armed men outside the walls of an enclave without the protection of an issue protective suit. In the second place, they'd murdered and enslaved citizens of the enclaves, so were our deadly enemies despite being nominally ‘human.’ And in the third place, if there was any general principle that guided our forces it was ‘Kill it right away if looks at all odd.’ ”

“Whoa! That’s harsh!” I said. That was also the longest stretch of words I’d ever heard from her, so maybe chatting with dead poets and philosophers had ‘rubbed off’ on her somehow.

“Not really. Of all our former Reivers, only Rebecca is truly an asset. The rest are kept in line by rigorously-enforced military discipline, but the moral weakness that led them to a life of crime is still there, lurking just beneath the surface. I catch a whiff of it from time to time, especially since taking up the rôle of Queen and Justicar in the Afterlife.”

I nodded my agreement, albeit a bit reluctantly. That was one of the reasons I’d given them all odd names, to remind me when I wasn’t deliberately snooping into their thoughts. “I keep my eye on them as well,” I said, “but their transformation puts them at a disadvantage if they tried to return to their former occupation, despite their increased strength and quickness, not to mention the fact that either of us could find them in a heartbeat if they bolted, and I did let slip the fact that we’d set the burrowers on them if they did, during our original demand for their surrender.”

“True,” she admitted. I’m sure that most of them would be too frightened even to run away, but I suppose the best of us are tempted toward sin from time to time. I remember stealing a can of corned beef hash once, when I was just a boy. It had evidently dropped unnoticed from a supply cart and had rolled into a dark corner. I was very hungry at the time, as so many of our children were, and there was no one looking, so I wrapped it in a rag and walked casually into the public latrine, sat in a stall, and then ate the contents right down to the shine on the can. I was very lucky to get away with it, but I did, and managed to toss the empty can over the parapet a short time later. They did that a lot with trash in our enclave, so it didn’t stand out from the rest of the junk lying scattered at the bottom of the wall.”

I nodded. “And I was goofing off on watch when my father caught me at it. Sinners all are we. That’s how we all got picked for foraging duty, I’m sure.” I grinned, feeling quite chipper after discovering Beryl’s ‘shady’ past. “Face it, Sweetie, it was destiny for both of us.”

She quirked one eyebrow at me and said, smiling, “Of course it was, Sweetie. I arranged it.”

 

 

When next I opened my eyes I was flat on my back and Beryl was looking down at me as she knelt beside me. She smiled sweetly. “Feeling better now, are we?”

“What happened?” I said stupidly. I say ‘stupid’ because I knew what happened. My poor brain had been inundated with billions of life histories, and most of their conclusions. What I didn’t fully realize was exactly why it had happened.

This time she grinned. “What? You thought being Queen of the Underworld was all a bed of roses? It’s hard work, mostly, although it does have its moments. In fact, now that you’ve taken over the rôle of our former regent, I expect we’ll only have to work half as hard. Hades was never much of a one for fiddling with mere details. He was more of a ‘big picture’ kind of guy.”

“In other words,” I said sourly, “he didn’t do squat, but wandered around pointing out flaws in other people’s work?.”

She laughed out loud, and could hardly stop giggling long enough to answer, “Pretty much.”

I smiled. “I thought so. From our very brief acquaintance, I recognized the type.” I stopped, considering. “But what am I supposed to do with all this stuff floating around in my head? It’s like I’ve been plugged directly into the akashic record; I think of someone and suddenly their whole life pops into my head.”

“Akashic?” she asked.

“It was in one of the books in that ‘occult’ shop I showed you, but it’s by no means required reading. Supposedly, it’s some sort of transcendental ‘library’ that contains every speck of knowledge, the pre-scientific equivalent of the Holographic Universe hypothesis implied by certain theories of quantum gravity and string theory.”

Beryl looked puzzled for a bit before she said, “Well, isn’t that also suggested by the reality of the Moirai, the Fates, who apportion the destiny of every creature? One doesn’t have to rifle through the dusty interiors of occult shops — or even scientific laboratories — to find similar beliefs and theories, since the notion is inherently suggested by human observations of the natural processes of the starry firmament.”

“Moirai?” I said, remembering a memory I’d never had before. “Moirai!”

“Indeed. The ancient Greeks were co-inheritors of the entire store of Indo-European knowledge inherited from all our ancestors, going right back to Africa. There’s nothing new under the sun, when push comes to shove, and one tradition is as good as any other, as far as I can tell, and I ought to know, having been in the Goddess business for simply weeks longer than you have.”

I rolled my eyes. Beryl could be a drama queen at times. Still… “I remember now,” I said, reminiscing. “You were Ereshkigal once, and Hel.” I was still sorting out my memories.

“And many more, Freyja, Morena, Kali, Maman Brigitte, Nirá¹›ti, Izanami-no-Mikoto, Nephthys, Sins Sagaana…, the list goes on and on.”

“And I was Isis, ’Elat, Ereshkigal, Anu, and a thousand sister wives and husbands…,” I responded.

“Many more than that,” she said, looking at me fondly, “but who’s counting?”

“Well, poetic license…,” I answered. “It grows tiresome to ramble on and on; we’d be here all day and night for the next year or two.”

“Depending on how rapidly you talked….” She stopped talking for a while, then said, “About the guy who shot me, you may or may not be pleased to know that I devised a special punishment, just for him — without the slightest hint of rancor, I hasten to add — as part of my new duties; despite your general dispensation which ameliorated the plight of the relatively innocuous denizens of Tartarus, he’s still chained spreadeagled between two giant boulders whilst jackals feast on his private parts, although they continually grow back, which of course keeps the jackals very happy. They’d done nothing wrong, and they have a good life otherwise; a guaranteed food supply, a safe place to rest when they’re feeling tired, and of course they’re a mated pair.”

I thought about that for a while, running over the facts of the case in my mind, along with the motivations and character of the shooter which were now at my fingertips, as it were, before I answered, “Well, each ka chooses its own reward, I think. It does no good in terms of learning one’s life lessons if it doesn’t hurt, for some people.” Then I thought some more and added, “The jackals must have been rather nice, though, for jackals….”

She nodded, pleased that I’d noticed. “They were, and were quite delighted with their eternal reward in the Afterlife, although they do sometimes miss the companionship of their fellows, but there’s not enough of him to feed a pack, and well they know it, plus, their utter safety from lions and other predators — not to mention diseases and old age — makes a very acceptable tradeoff for them both.”

I nodded, understanding. “You done good, Sweetheart, and thank you for both your concern and your desire for revenge. It’s just enough to appease and flatter me without going too far over the top.”

“Since I now command the Erinyes, insofar as they aren’t nominally autonomous, revenge directed toward those who spill innocent blood is a small portion of my bailiwick, the active and prospective counterpart to retributive justice at leisure. So the private bits weren’t too much?”

“Not at all! They weren’t using them for anything at all nice, so having them serve as an object lesson for onlookers is admirable utility, as far as I’m concerned. I personally wouldn’t have been nearly as understanding and compassionate.”

She grinned. “Well, that’s nice to know, then. Coming up with inventive penances is really a big part of the fun.”

I could see that, really I could. Contemplating the billions of souls I would inevitably encounter without the respite of a few excursions into creativity would be a truly deadly bore.

 

 

It was about a week into my Godesshood that I first asked — Okay, I’d been reluctant to admit that I hadn’t fully realized what I was getting myself into — “Do you have the same litany of supplications and daily trivia constantly pouring through your head that I do?”

Beryl answered very promptly, so I supposed that she wasn’t quite as distracted by it, “Of course! I told you the Goddess business was hard work.”

“Do I have to do something with all of them?”

She laughed. “Not at all. In fact, most people don’t really expect an answer to their prayers. It’d be a poor sort of world if we were constantly treated like babies — get a poopy diaper, whine about it, then instant diaper change and lots of attention. How boring could it be? — Most people just like to ‘touch base’ from time to time, and use this decidedly one-sided ‘conversation’ to keep themselves ‘grounded’ in whatever it is that they perceive as the ultimate foundation of reality.”

“Oh, great!” I complained. “It’s a lot like listening to a million whiny teenagers all at once.”

She laughed. “Now dear, you mustn’t be cruel. They can’t help their lack of eternal perspective. Taking the long view is a lot easier when you have the luxury of a distant place to stand.”

“Sort of like Archimedes….” I mused.

“Archimedes?” She asked.

“Greek guy; he’s downstairs now, in fact, in the Elysian Fields having a jolly gabfest with Benjamin Franklin and Nikola Tesla. Doesn’t want to be reborn, as he’s having the time of his life just as he is, and isn’t particularly interested in learning about computers and crap, since there aren’t any to play with in the present world, nor is this particular time an exciting time for research.”

“Computers?” she asked, bewildered by the word.

“Fancy gadgets for performing various kinds of calculations very quickly. Went out of fashion  — in this country at least — more than a hundred and fifty years ago. The population and economy couldn’t support them.”

“Well, that will have turn around eventually,” she said firmly. “We’ll have to get up off our asses sometime within the next half million years or so, or be caught with our collective pants down when the next supernova goes off and wipes out most life on Earth.”

The vehemence of her instant response amazed me. I hadn’t imagined that the subject would be of any interest to her. It certainly wasn’t to me, nor did I see what earthly use a ‘computer’ might be. “Supernova?”

“Big stellar explosion, very exciting stuff, especially when it happens in the local neighborhood.”

“Stars explode?” I felt like a rube. I hadn’t run across anything like that in my library. Of course, the library was a big place, and I hadn’t explored everywhere.

“All the time. Ask what’s-his-face — Ali ibn Ridwan! — Tycho Brahe, and Sir Fred Hoyle about them. They keep up with all that stuff and are all agog to see the effects of one up close. Of course, being spirits, they have no personal ‘skin in the game,’ so to speak. I understand that it will be a Type Ia thingie set off in what they call a binary star system in which one member is a white dwarf. If the stars are close enough, the white dwarf sucks off a little of the other star’s atmosphere all the time, eventually becoming massive enough that it collapses into something called ‘degenerate matter,’ which releases enormous amounts of energy and blows the bigger star apart, usually, or strips off big chunks of its stellar atmosphere. You’d have to ask them about the details, or almost any of the science guys. Most of them are hanging around waiting around for better budgets in the real world; have been for centuries….”

“Harry’s Brass Balls, Beryl! Why isn’t anyone doing anything about it?”

“Nothing to be done, Sweetie. It’s an inevitable physical process caused by gravity, and gravity don’t sleep, as they say in the song. We operate in the spiritual realm — mostly — so it doesn’t really affect us, although of course I’ve made plans for a huge influx of souls when the time comes, but it will be a long time before any of them can be reborn, which is a pity, but everyone experiences disappointment from time to time in the course of a very long life.”

“I don’t understand how you can be so infernally calm about this.”

“It’s the Long View, Sweetie,” she said, producing an enigmatic smile that she simply must have practiced, “You’ll have to take the Long View or you’ll go crazy down here. Eventually, life will reëmerge, evolution will happen, and Gaia will rebuild a stable ecosystem. If we manage to restart an interest in scientific research that was notably absent during the years that led up to the Dandelion Wars, we can cut the time and danger considerably, of course, but most people have a great deal of trouble looking beyond the ends of their noses. As far as I know — and I ought to know, if anyone does — our gang down in the Underworld are the only people still interested in theoretical science at all. That’s why so few of them are interested in being reborn these days. There’s at least a hundred years of hard slogging ahead to get anywhere near the level of expertise we had in almost every field of knowledge.”

Well, Harry’s Hell! It’s just one damned thing after another, isn’t it? “I’ll put it on my ‘To Do’ list,” I said. “Start up a University or two. Do you suppose that any of your pet ‘thinkers’ would be willing to volunteer?”

Beryl answered promptly. “I’ll ask around, but I can be very persuasive, given the incentive. There’s one guy who had a relatively ‘low-tech’ notion of building what he called a ‘Dyson Sphere,’ named after himself, of course. Really clever people tend to have egos to match, so you’ll probably like him.”

“…or hate him,” I said. “So what’s a Dyson Sphere?”

“It’s essentially a gigantic shell that surrounds a star, allowing the people who live near the star to capture essentially all its output of energy and use it for whatever they want. Of course, if they’re capturing all that energy before it escapes into the void, it stands to reason that it might possibly be used to capture energy flowing the other way, thereby protecting the Earth from supernovas almost by accident.”

Okay, I was boggled. First Greek Gods and Goddeses, now red rubber balls around the Sun! “So what’s the catch?”

“Well, there’s a couple of things that seem a little dicey, according to some of them — They have astonishing arguments about it, actually — First, it turns out that the neutrino flux from such a supernova is quite likely to approach lethality, and shielding against neutrinos is essentially impossible. The second problem is that the structure would have to be amazingly lightweight, and of course we don’t exactly know how to build such stuff.”

“Neutrinos?”

“Teeny-tiny particles with essentially no electrical charge that slip through ordinary matter like nobody’s business. Back when they were still building ‘neutrino detectors,’ they usually poked them deep underground, or at the bottom of the sea, to keep ordinary radiation from interfering with the results.”

“But how are they a danger, then?”

“If you have enough of them. they add up, and it turns out that supernovas are very nice tools for generating neutrinos by the very large bucketful, although they also pump out X-rays and other types of radiation. They tell me that one of the last major extinction events on Earth was very likely caused by a supernova hundreds of lightyears away.”

“Really?”

“Well, you couldn’t prove it by me, but the ‘boys’ tell me that they could demonstrate it by ‘isotope’ variations in dust collected at the bottom of the ocean.”

“Isotopes?”

“Look, Sapphire,” she said, exasperated, “this is all outside my personal knowledge and interest. If you want to know more, go talk to the science boys yourself. I just thought that you might like to know what we’ll be looking at in the next few millennia so you could plan for it.”

“How in Harry’s Hell am I supposed to plan for a star exploding?!” I shouted, forgetting my potential audience in my excitement.

“The same way that you planned for taking over military operations for the Western Hemisphere and the world, of course,” she said quietly, “one careful step at a time, punctuated by occasional flashes of brilliant improvisation and luck. Do you actually see any real obstacles in your path? Or are you just being modest for the sake of form?”

One of the major problems of being in a relationship is that — if one happens to be… slightly improvisational… at times — one’s partner inevitably has a very long memory. “Uhmmm… Maybe both,” I said. “I’ve always been happier talking than actually doing things. If I didn’t have you to keep me honest, and give me the occasional kick in the pants, I’d probably never get anything done.”

“Well, you’d better get busy, then. You’ve only got a few hundred thousand years to rebuild the educational infrastructure for a modern technological civilization, solve the problem of interplanetary travel and construction, and rescue humanity from its own short-sightedness in time to save the entire solar system from catastrophe.”

“Can’t I just figure out a way to eliminate the star?”

“Not at all. We’re all of us the beneficiaries of supernovas past, without which we wouldn’t be here. Who knows how many future peoples and civilizations might hang by the slender thread of that same stellar catastrophe that might discomfit or annoy us?”

It was a pretty — if annoying — paradox. This ‘Long View’ that Sapphire had gone on about was difficult to swallow when seen from the dispassionate viewpoint she’d just described, although of course I tended to be a bit more excitable than she was, usually. I reckon she’d had more experience with this Goddess thing than I had, despite my recent pretensions and somewhat bellicose confrontation with Hades earlier. Still, I couldn’t manage to regret besting him, so I suppose my ego was still intact, all in all. I just wasn’t feeling quite as proud of myself as I’d been before.

 

 

Of course, I’ve always been an optimist, so it didn’t take me long to figure it out, so I rode off to see Lynette, our resident expert on botany and the scientific method. Although she’d been forbidden to do any more dissections on bandersnatches, she’d grown up in Sweden, and had done most of her work there, so the New World was an exciting challenge for her.

It took me a while to find her, since she was off in the woods collecting specimens with a bodyguard of half a dozen troops to protect her. She tended to become engrossed with new discoveries, so she wasn’t the best of sentries. Still, she was definitely our best actual scientist. “Lynette! How good to see you!”

She looked at me with deep suspicion. I was, after all, the one who’d imposed a few minor limits on the scope of her scientific curiosity. “What do you want?” she asked.

“Lynette, I’m very sorry if we’d stepped off on the wrong foot, as it were, but I have a project in hand that I thought might interest you, and I wanted to present it to you as soon as possible.”

Now, she was even more leery. “What is it?”

“I want to set up a university, and I know your own experience is substantial.”

She seemed dumbfounded. “A university? In the midst of a wilderness? Where do you plan to put it?”

“Wherever you like, of course. If you’re to be the head of it, it must be entirely up to you. My own home is quite a bit inland from here, but has an extensive library, but there are probably other libraries and museums to be found. There was a very substantial library some leagues north of here, but it was unfortunately drowned in the rising seas quite some time ago. I don’t actually know if any of the contents were saved, but where one library survived, there must surely be many others.”

“You say there is an extant library in the place you came from?”

“There is, with what must be tens of thousands of volumes.”

“Tens of thousands?” She seemed amazed.

“Easily,” I said. “There may well be more. I didn’t count them, but there are five floors above the ground level in a very large building, and each floor is densely packed with books. From references in their catalog, I noticed that there’s supposedly a university library in the general area as well, but I never set off to find the actual buildings, so I can’t actually vouch for the current state of their holdings.”

“But where would we find teachers? students? From what I gather about this oddly rough-hewn society of yours, you’re just coming out of what was essentially centuries of barbarism.”

“True, but your own example suggests that there might be many scientists in our dominions in the netherworld who would welcome a chance to explore new frontiers of knowledge, and perhaps even those now less knowledgeable who would welcome a chance to learn from them. Under the new regime, we can offer these souls the possibility of rebirth with all their memories intact, unlike the former dispensation which mandated a draught of the river Lethe before passing through the veil between death and life. We can also offer them new bodies such as your own, stronger, more fit, better coördinated, and probably more intelligent as well. I noticed a great improvement in my own intellectual capacity and memory when I transformed, and believe it to be a general side-effect. How does it seem to you?”

She blinked, caught be surprise. “Now that you mention it, I do seem more capable of many things, as well as possessing an innate skill and dexterity in combat that I’d never imagined possible.”

“Now imagine your formidable intellect facing new challenges, quite possibly the exploration of the worlds of our own solar system, and eventually beyond. We did it once, so there must be records somewhere, and if not, no matter; we know that these things are possible, and what humans did once, we can do again.” I could see from her expression that I had her.

“What would I have to do?”

I smiled. “I’ll bump you up in rank to general officer… let’s say Brigadier General, to maintain a distinction to Beryl’s position in the military hierarchy, and to make it much less likely that you’ll ever encounter anyone higher in the military pecking order. As far as I know, the highest rank in the enclaves is Major, or possibly Lieutenant Colonel in some of the major bases… then cut you a set of orders to take charge of libraries and any other educational or scientific institutions you encounter. It might be good to start back home, since I know that the infrastructure of the city was essentially intact, but you’ll be essentially on your own regarding what you do and where you go. Your mission is only to rebuild a scientific civilization, so it would be presumptuous of me to offer anything but general direction and advice.”

“And what would that advice be?”

“Sometime in the future, we don’t know when, the Earth we live on will be rendered uninhabitable for some finite period of time. You’ll have to ask a few cosmologists and astronomers, once we get some volunteers. We’ll be recruiting engineers and architects as well as scientists of all sorts, because I  — at least — have no idea what will be necessary to survive a cosmic catastrophe. We’ll simply have to improvise.”

Lynette furrowed her brow, obviously thinking. “I’m not really familiar with this theory, but have a vague recollection of hearing someone mention global catastrophe as happening in Earth’s past, and as a possibility in the future. It seemed outlandish, though, so I didn’t pay much attention. Assuming its reality, diversity is probably one strategy we should explore. If we journeyed to the distant stars, for example, and established colonies, we’d be much less vulnerable as a species to the destruction of any particular habitat. That’s a long-term goal, of course, not something we can figure on doing immediately, and physics is quite outside my own area of expertise.”

To me, this sounded far more practical than constructing spherical shells around the Sun, and mirrored the time-proven biological mechanisms for long-term survival: adapt, multiply, and explore the limits of one’s habitat. “That might be a very good start,” I said, “but we might also start thinking about whether our current adaptations include radiation resistance, and if not, how to compensate. If damaging radiation is inevitable, perhaps some sort of resistance — or increase in resistance — might be possible.”

“That seems reasonable,” she admitted. “It seems highly unlikely that we could actually transport a significant proportion of even the human population off Earth, much less enough of our complex œcological communities to ensure a stable off-world future for all of our children’s children’s children.”

“Œcology?” I’d never heard the word used in quite that context before. “ Are there more than the one? Can an entire œcology be transported somewhere else?”

“Yes, at least in theory. Strictly speaking, œcology is the scientific study of the entirety of plant and animal communities within a given area, so by default an œcology is limited to a finite area. As such, it would include predators of all sorts, both herbivores and carnivores, as well of the plants they feed upon, and the millions of lichens, fungi, microörganisms, and insects required to create the soil they thrive in out of bare rock and sand. Loosely, it can also include plant and/or animal communities managed primarily by human intervention, although these tend to be much less robust.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Because human-managed monocultures always require a huge amount of effort to prevent reversion to the local norm, whatever that may be. The most efficient food production tends to be performed in those environments exploited by hunter/gatherer societies, because they’re inherently more stable under a wide range of stressors. The traditional ‘market garden’ is a variation of that, with a great variety of foodstuffs grown in any given area, which minimises predation by specialist insects and prolongs the harvest season over as much time as possible with readily-available resources in the local climate.”

“Okay,” I said, “that’s about as much as I want to know about that! I like the idea of having a life sciences guy in charge, because the problem is basically how do we stay alive and healthy in a dangerous environment, not how do we create new gadgets. If we simply must have a gadget, let it be the simplest and least intrusive gadget possible, and make sure that we’re still human beings after we use it.”

“Agreed. Should I coördinate with Queen Persephone about the selection of scientists, or should I go through you?”

“It doesn’t matter. She already had a few candidates picked out that I know of, and may have many more, so she might be able to offer helpful suggestions, and so lessen the time required to get things underway.”

“Alright, then, when do I leave?”

“I reckon it will take a few weeks to select your initial science crew and have Beryl or me reïncarnate them, but our only limitation there is really the number of bandersnatches available as incubators. Please don’t feel constrained,, though; we almost certainly have hundreds of thousands of years before anything happens locally, and probably even longer, so it’s a longterm project that simply can’t be allowed to remain on hold until we bother to address it. I fully expect it to take at least that long — considering the daunting magnitude of the job — so it’s well past time to get the effort underway. At the same time, I don’t want an overabundance of haste to preclude the identification of anyone who really ought to be part of the effort, so my best judgement is to ‘proceed with all deliberate speed.’ ”

“I’m at your service, my dread queen,” he said and bowed.

I’m really going to have to discourage that. Obsequiousness is rarely a good quality to find in a scientist.

 

 

It was actually several months before we got going again. The problem was that — thus far, despite my optimistic assumptions — Gumball was the only bandersnatch who actually had the trick of reïncarnation down pat. The others were extremely enthusiastic, but evidently lacked the discipline… or ki… or something to follow through. I wasn’t too disheartened. Even Genghis Khan didn’t manage to conquer the entire world during his lifetime, although of course he was only a man.

I asked Beryl what she thought about the problem, but she had no more clue than I did.

“You do understand,” she said, “that the usual method of rebirth involves the creation of a baby, but a baby’s mental capacity isn’t quite up to containing an adult soul. That’s one of the reasons for Lethe; it’s the means by which the soul can be trimmed to fit, as it were, without using up more mental resources than a baby has available, as well as allowing the soul to develop along different lines, hopefully improving itself in the process, thus leading to a better outcome. What Gumball did for me was a miracle of sorts, but even then my memories were hazy, especially at first. I do think that I’m fully recovered now, but how does one identify memories that might be absent?”

That stumped me. I didn’t know, and didn’t suppose that I could know. Everyone forgets things from time to time, whether it be the birthdays of dear friends or the location where one misplaced the watchamacallit one had just been fiddling with. Even if we compared our separate memories, there would surely be things that she remembered and I didn’t, and vice versa. What exactly would either possibility actually prove? “I think I have to agree with another adventurer in strange lands, ‘We must cultivate our gardens.’ Let’s both leave philosophy to the philosophers.”

She had the graciousness to laugh, entirely without rancour, then said, “So says the most ‘philosophical’ conqueror since Marcus Aurelius.”

“Oh, please,” I said. “I’m hardly a philosopher.”

“What are you, then? Who else finds themselves in a city with infinite food and leisure and decides to spend most of her time studying in libraries and bookstores? Philosopher, ‘philá³sophos, philo-sophá­a,’ a lover of wisdom, that’s just you all over.”

“But…but you know all that stuff too, don’t you?”

“Not by inclination; it sort of came with the job….” She stopped herself, then added, “…Well, a large part of it came from you as well, since you do share your enthusiasms.” Then she stopped talking again, her brow furrowed a bit, before adding, “Your tarot cards were especially handy, actually, because they gave me a reference point aside from what was thrust upon me, and so helped me to avoid being totally subsumed in that sexist hierarchical milieu that pervaded Hell.”

 

 

It took us almost three weeks to march down the coast of the Atlantic down through North Carolina on our way to Charleston, where there was supposed to be another major Horticulturlist base, although not quite on the scale of Hampton Roads in the Tidewater region of the Virginia Coast, what with reäffirming — or reëstablishing — our agreements with those Kudzu crowns that we encountered — surprisingly few, although I finally figured out, with a little help from Lynette, that the low-lying lands near the coast were often too salty for them to thrive —and offering general humanitarian aid to the remaining enclaves of human beings, most of whom had been at least besieged by the kudzu, those that hadn’t been overrun entirely and consumed.

It was beautiful, though, in those parts which hadn’t been overrun by the kudzu, thicket after thicket of ancient live oak trees dripping with Spanish moss, separated by low yellow-green grassy promontories outlining the twisting channels of brackish water leading toward the distant sea horizon, reminding me of Sydney Lanier’s poem about the sea-marshes of Glynn:

     Glooms of the live-oaks, beautiful-braided and woven
     With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven
     Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs,--
          Emerald twilights,--
          Virginal shy lights,
     Wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows,
     When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades
     Of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods,
     Of the heavenly woods and glades,
     That run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within
     The wide sea-marshes of Glynn;

Okay, so the marshes of Glynn were actually up in Georgia, quite a bit north of where we were, but the poem matched my mood, since it was all about love, and the setting was pretty much what the poem described so many centuries before, and I was feeling a strange mixture of bemused nostalgia and irritation, neither of which had any clear referent at the moment.

Of course, I was heavily gravid, and exactly as uncomfortable as pregnant women have been since humanity began walking around on two legs. I’d have thought that being transformed and enhanced by the fungal infection would have made childbearing much easier, what with vastly-increased strength and general durability, but my baby shared my transformation, and had managed to start shifting around right at fourteen weeks, progressed to rolling, then kickboxing lessons and synchronized swimming by the beginning of the third trimester. I think baby was doing jumping jacks at the moment, although it was difficult to say, since I didn’t have X-ray vision, more’s the pity. I would have liked to see the tiny person who’d been having so much fun inside my belly, not to mention the interesting dance she was doing on my bladder right that very minute. I sighed and said to Beryl, “Would you mind stopping for a bit? I’ve got to pee again.”

She rolled her eyes at me and smirked. “Again?”

“Look!” I said “Blame bipedalism. Blame a fastidious desire to avoid peeing on my saddle and have warm urine trickling down my leg, but human bodies are an awkward compromise between our fishy roots and the exigencies of running through the open savannah in ancient Africa. If we were still fish, of course, the problem of when and were to pee would be moot, but then one has the mental challenge of living and breathing in an enormous lake of sewage. If I were a fish, I’m sure that I’d be grateful — in some sense — for my lack of comprehension.” As I looked at her, she looked a little miffed, so I looked more closely. “You’re jealous, aren’t you?” I noticed her flush at that. ‘Gotcha!’ I thought. “I’m sorry, Sweetheart. Here I am flaunting my pregnancy and you’re stuck with being the ‘responsible warrior’ and ‘protector’ in our little family.”

Her face held a flicker of her usual good humor as she said, “Worse luck, I’m stuck with the job until we succeed in your ambitious plan for global domination. I’m just a tiny bit better at it than you are, and every little bit helps when one wants to rule the world.”

I contemplated that for a long heartbeat or two before I replied. “It does, doesn’t it?”

“Seems to,” she answered, as unpretentious as any monk.

“In my defense, I can only plead that I have a niggling uncertainty gnawing at my theoretical serenity as an expectant mother. Where I should be concentrating on creating a cozy ‘nest’ for our baby, I’m very worried about the possibility of some vagary of accelerated evolution creating something so powerful that we can’t overcome it. Paranoia is the other dominant leitmotif of pregnancy, or so I was given to understand through my research in the Library.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

I could tell by the way she pursed her lips and looked off slightly to the side that she was well aware of the fact. “Liar. Of course you did, just as I’m sure you’ve noticed my other more-or-less instinctual drive.”

“Which is,” she said smirking again.

“Pair bonding, of course. After I pee, do you think we might have time for a little nookie? What with the heat and the incessant motion of this damned horse between my legs, I’m getting a little crazy here.”

She laughed, but not unkindly. “Well, considering that we’re all cavalry these days, I believe that we could poll the troops and find almost unanimous agreement amongst the ranks.”

“Ahh, but it’s not the ranks I’m interested in.” I sidled my mount alongside hers, our legs brushing lightly against each other. “It’s the good opinion of my closest friend and confidant that I crave, a need that burns more brightly every day.”

“You forgot to mention ‘lover.’ ”

I grinned. “Well, that’s rather the point right now, isn’t it? Put your money where your mouth is, Sweetie, or put your mouth where your honey is… so to speak.”

“Oooh! I do love it when you talk dirty!”

 

 

Well, that’s about as deeply as I want to explore that particular interlude, except that I thought it marked a new stage in our relationship, which has had its ups and downs, if you’ll pardon the tiny bons mots. At least we seemed to be on the same page now, which I suppose is another little jest, since I’m typing this record of our journeys even as you read it, or should that be ‘was typing?’ and ‘you’ll read?’ Writing like this is something like entering a time machine, since I have no idea when and where my words are going to wind up after having been scattered to the winds. Anyway, we all of us handle trauma in unique ways, I think, and I tend to make light of things, at least in retrospect, whilst Beryl takes every moment much more to heart. I’d grieved, but only deep inside me when my mother died, because it was forbidden to show any emotion when ‘weaklings’ were ‘culled’ from our ranks, and then again when Beryl was snatched away from me by a coward’s assault with a deadly weapon, but my instantaneous reaction was rage, deadly fury, and I externalized it through killing all the men in any way responsible, even if peripherally. I think… I hope… that my spiritual duel with her arrogant rapist made things easier for her, since he, or rather she, was in the same boat now, and no longer in any position to gloat in any sort of lascivious pride. ‘How have the mighty fallen!’ as they say.

 

 

It wasn’t until two weeks later that Beryl finally realized that she was late, and not in a good way. We’d been very careful to take no chances whatsoever of winding up with both of us hors de combat, so it was almost immediately apparent that the late and unlamented Hades had fired a Parthian shot at his erstwhile ‘bride’ with truly lasting repercussions.

Beryl wasn’t so much devastated as amazed and angry, since it had been more than four months since her resurrection, and as far as any of us knew her body had remained in the waking world, either digested or transmogrified by Gumball as he recreated her mortal body. “Well,” she said resignedly at last, after a lengthy and impassioned rant that made her mount more than a little skittish as we rode alongside the ruined road that led into Savannah, according to our antique maps, “Zeus impregnated Danaë in a shower of gold, so who knows how the Greek Gods arranged such things. All that’s really certain is that the former Hades is just as vulnerable to pregnancy now, and there are a lot of players out there with an axe to grind where he’s concerned, so I don’t doubt that she’ll be keeping busy changing diapers for the next millennium or so.”

I was enormously pleased to hear her say that, since it confirmed — at least in part — that my transformation of Hades had subsumed his numinous presence in her mind and memory with a new and less imposing instantiation of lesser divinity and existential threat. We both knew that he was the anomalous ‘male’ progenitor of her child, since I’d done several readings and Beryl had consulted arcane sources I wasn’t nearly as familiar with as I was with my homely bits of pasteboard. “I hope so,” I said. “I took a great deal of care with her outward appearance and inner qualities as well. According to the criteria in my Beauty Book, she’s the quintessence of feminine perfection and allure, well-calculated to entice male-identified Gods and Demigods from every Western Pantheon to woo her, so there ought to be a throng of love-struck suitors queueing at her doorstep by now.”

“I thought that you were the one who did’t like revenge,” Beryl said.

“It’s not revenge at all, nor is her new situation onerous in any way. She delights in her own perfection, and unlike Narcissus, she longs for admirers in whose eyes she sees the true reflection of her seductive charm. Unlike that heedless boy, our new Demigoddess is well able to fulfil both her own passion and that of her many lovers in a manner deeply satisfying to both.”

“So her ‘punishment’ is eternal ecstasy?”

“More or less,” I said judiciously. “She’s fecundity personified as well, so she’ll also have the blessing of her many beautiful children, and their children after her. Assuming some other Goddess doesn’t come along and fiddle with my creations, she have an exponential explosion of tangible blessings without end. What more could anyone ask?”

“What more could anyone possibly desire?” she said facetiously, rolling her eyes with just a hint of sarcasm and more than a trace of resentment.

I smirked at her. “Well, she may have a bit of trouble finding a lover as powerfully fulfilling as her old avatar was purported to be, but that’s the only potential cloud that I can see on her otherwise limitless horizon.”

She blushed. “I may have exaggerated a bit,” she admitted. “You know me, the eternal optimist; I do try to look on the bright side of most situations, however disconcerting they might appear to be at first.”

“Not to mention that you like to tease me,” I said smiling, careful to avoid any hint of censure.

“Well, there’s that. As a Goddess, I definitely have a few minor flaws.”

“Impulsive and capricious come rather to mind, but I could hardly fault you for that….”

“True, despite excursions into meticulous calculation, you do tend to improvise at times.” she said, and she was smiling as well, a good sign, as far as I was concerned.

“Well, yes, I admit it, and I’m getting worse as the pregnancy hormones invade my brain. The worst of it is that I’m craving tastes that I’ve never actually experienced, so I don’t have the slightest clue what it is I actually want. The culinary style of the fortresses wasn’t exactly haut cuisine, at least amongst the ranks and lower officers, so all I really know is that I’m missing something. I’ve even tried gnawing on kudzu vines, although the experiment creeped me out.”

“Oh, great! Then that’s another thing I’ve got to look forward to, and me without ever having had the little ‘talk’ with my mother.”

“Tut, tut! Don’t exaggerate. If your mother has passed from the waking world, she’s certainly available in our dominions below.”

“Well, the same goes for you then, doesn’t it? Tell you what, you ask her, and then give me the benefit of your wisdom. I can’t believe you didn’t find a book on the subject in your famous library and memorize it!”

That hit a nerve. In very fact, I hadn’t, and hadn’t even thought about it. “I did see several books meant for expectant mothers,” I confessed, “but they all assumed that the woman would be married to a supportive man, would be under a Doctor’s care, also presumptively male, and at the time I wasn’t particularly enamored of the whole notion of men in general, had much less viewed them as potential bed partners or intimate attendants, and was further determined to act in such a way that I’d never require any one of these two assumptive co-participants, firmly focused upon perpetual virginity.” I looked at her with a sly smile playing over my lips. “So much for good intentions, eh?.”

Beryl laughed harshly, a short explosion of hateful resentment. “I’m living proof that ‘intentions’ don’t mean a thing. The matter can be taken out of one’s own control.” She seemed slightly bitter.

I was boundlessly forgiving and compassionate. I’d experienced his ugly attentions to a much lesser degree, but well remembered the disgust he’d engendered in me, even if he hadn’t quite managed the other sort of breeding…. At least I hoped he hadn’t; after seeing how Beryl had been affected, long after the psychic coupling which had been the presumptive cause, and couldn’t completely discount the possibility of belated twins, like Leda in her bestial encounter with Zeus, another serial rapist, and had borne quadruplets, half of them mortal by her husband, the rest divine by God the Father, Deus Pater. I said nothing about this, but would worry about it later. “Or one’s self-control can be willingly let slip away,” I said quietly, “as it did when I fell in love with you. As it turns out, absolute autonomy is an illusion, and all our lives are intertwined, if that’s any consolation. I’m sure that you remember me giving this speech — or something like it — to the many pregnant women we’ve rescued from the Reivers, and I’m still not exactly sure how genetic inheritance arranges itself amongst the immortal Gods and Goddesses, but your baby is by now undoubtedly transformed in such a way that everything specifically belonging to the ‘male’ Hades has been stripped away, leaving only Rhea and Rhea’s mother Gaia as her true ancestors, the grandmothers of our second child together. Hades himself was only an ancillary, the entity who delivered a divine heritage far older and more powerful than he was. My own memory of our realm tells me that the Queen of Hell has always been the center of the ancient Mysteries, with Hades introduced almost as an afterthought, essentially to explain why a Queen was able to rule in Hell, despite Her cult being deeply embedded in an otherwise tediously patriarchal society, women as a whole being profoundly associated with the notional cycle of birth and death from sources far more ancient than mere Gods. The oldest representation of a Deity ever found in the archeological record — indeed, the oldest sculptural figure of any sort — depicts a woman, the so-called Venus of Hohle Fels, created something like thirty-five or forty thousand years ago by the Aurignacian peoples of Europe and southwest Asia, although of course Goddesses in general are far older than that.”

She laughed at that, not happily. “I remember, although I hadn’t managed to twist it around as prettily as you just did, and it does seem ironic — now that I think about it — that since you transmitted the spiritual equivalent of the fungal infection which transformed him, it’s probably true that we’d have to add you somewhere to the list of our unexpected baby’s spiritual progenitors.” She stopped talking for a while, then added, “That actually cheers me up a bit.”

I sidled my mare closer to her gelding and reached out my hand. “Unexpected doesn’t mean unloved, dear heart, as I’m sure you know. It’s enough for me to know that it’s your baby, and that she’ll have you as her mother.”

She took my hand and quietly said, “True. On that distant day when I left the Citadel to forage in company with a small band of misfits, who would have guessed that I was destined to meet my lover, the future mother of our children?”

‘Damn! For an unsentimental woman, Beryl lapsed from time to time into what often approximated maudlin sentimentality!’ “Is it too soon to call a temporary halt to the forward progress of our band of soldiers?” I asked her very prettily.

She laughed, as bold and chipper as a lark perched at the margins of a marshy meadow proclaiming his mastery of the skies to all and sundry. “I suppose not. We have many pregnant troops these days, so I imagine their needs are similar to your own. Now that I appear to be ‘knocked up’ as well, it probably behooves me to comport myself in sympathy with the general trend.” She raised her voice. “Captain! Please choose an appropriate stopping place for a meal and rest break!”

“Yes, Ma’am!” Captain Topaz Booker said smartly from behind us. “Platoon! Make for that clearing to the right for a short bivouac and meal break!” she called out loudly, motioning toward a likely spot about a hundred yards ahead of our loose column. That’s all she had to say to set much in motion. We were all of us so accustomed to our perpetual campaign that we had the details of camp life well in hand, so outriders immediately set about the task of finding wood for cooking fires and water for both the camp kitchen and the horses. Although there was a slough within easy sight to our left, it was likely brackish, so we might have to range a little further inland for sweet water. It was a tradeoff; inland, the water was usually fresh but the woods and underbrush were thicker, almost impassable at times without tiresome and slow trail-breaking with machete and axe. Here at the sea margins the way was often clear, although we did have to forge the occasional stream or river on our way south.

In the interest of overall speed, we’d skirted the coast as closely as possible, despite the occasional need for a detour to avoid river crossings too deep or broad to safely forge. We’d often encountered the remains of bridges, some of them looking surprisingly sturdy, but experience had taught us not to trust them. Often, what seemed like a sturdy highway from above was supported only by a rusting cobweb of steel below, so after a few near-fatalities, and one horse which had to be put down with a broken fetlock when she’d plunged through a hidden weakness that opened into void, we avoided them religiously. We didn’t even use them when they ran over dry land, since travel on them was uncomfortable for our horses for any lengthy period and tended to split their hooves. They were unshod, since decent iron was difficult to come by, most of the easily-accessible salvage having been taken by one group or another. I made myself a mental note, now that I thought about it, to add exploration for iron deposits and the redevelopment of iron and steel foundries to my list of things to do… every metal, actually, now that I thought about it, and rare earths as well, since I knew that the latter were essential to the creation of the sorts of electronics we’d need to recreate our real civilization. As our population grew, we couldn’t depend upon salvage, but would have to start making things for ourselves, growing our own food, reïnventing tractors and farm equipment, milling facilities, manufactories of all sorts, and a thousand details that I was sure would come to me in time. My mind might have boggled — at one time — but having descended to Hell and returned had been a bit of an education, so I was developing that ‘Long View’ that Beryl nattered on about.

The clearing Topaz had found for us was broad and fertile, with plenty of what the horses thought of as succulent hay, just moist enough to be comfortable in their mouths, but not so green and sugary that there was any chance of them foundering with painful hoof laminitis. From a human perspective it was beautiful as well, with a vista that extended across the grass and through the trees to the broad expanse of brackish slough beyond, fringed with cattails and rushes, with a few pockets of cordgrass. The sea was near enough — though invisible over a sandy rise on the other side off the slough — that I could hear the surf and smell the salt in the air, an undercurrent to the leafy odors of the bay trees, live oaks, and palmettos that formed the bulk of the nearby forest. There was even a small stream running along one edge of the open meadow, and when tasted by one of our many troopers — Carnelia, I think her name was — it proved to be fresh, which would save us quite a bit of trouble hauling buckets.

“Well, this is awfully cushy, Sweetheart,” I said to Beryl, then went on to declaim:

     “Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
     A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse — and Thou
     Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
     And Wilderness is Paradise enow.”

Beryl rolled her eyes. “Funny, we seem to lack all three of the accessories, so you’d better be saying that all you need is me, since I can’t supply any of the other ingredients you claim are needed in paradise.”

“Of course I do, Dear Heart. What I meant to say was:

     Here with cool Water beneath the green Trees,
     A Bit of dry Hardtack — a little Salt,
     And Thou beside me in the Wilderness —
     And Wilderness is all I’ll ever need.”

Beryl sighed. “You do know that you’re almost impossibly glib, don’t you?”

“Au contraire, mon amour. I’m nothing if not sincere. What I am, at least on my better days, is eloquent, but never superficial. Originally, the word meant smooth or slippery, and referred to physical agility as well as verbal skills, so might as easily refer to a juggler or gymnast as to an orator. Any skill or ability can be perverted toward evil ends, though, without reference to the particular ability, just as a ‘strongman’ might refer either to someone who can easily rescue a hapless traveler from the bottom of a crevasse, or to someone who can beat and rob an innocent victim, or even kill them, with equal facility. Intention is almost everything, although of course execution does play a substantial rôle.”

Beryl looked away, toward the hidden sea just over the nearest dunes. “Speaking of execution, do you detect something very dangerous approaching?”

Quickly, I chose a mental card, the nine of Swords. “Get up and out!” I screamed to our resting troops, “Scram! We have incoming nasties from the east and we need much better cover! Into the trees! Get up! Get up and out!”

To their credit, they wasted no time, but abandoned most of the gear, grabbed their weapons, and stampeded the horses inland with shouts and flapping cloths and flogging ropes as they ran. I grabbed the nearest rocket launcher and aimed it seaward even as I backed toward relative safety. On general principle, I let fly an HE missile toward my perception of the threat and quickly grabbed another whilst Beryl did the same, as we both snatched up several satchels filled with missiles and chased after the troops. Then I heard the roar of what sounded like surf, but it rolled on and on. “Grab the biggest trees that you can find!” I screamed again. “We’re going to get wet! Keep the horses moving if you can, but save yourselves!”

“Any idea what’s behind us?” Beryl asked, calm despite our flight from whatever lay behind us.

“I suspect some creature of Poseidon, or whatever he’s calling himself these days, so a Kraken, a Cetus, or some other form of sea monster, broadly-defined.” I turned to look, saw water spilling over the farthest dunes, and screamed, “Up! Up! Up into the biggest trees you can find!” I looked over toward Beryl, not fifteen feet away, “Beryl! Jump! I shouted as I did the same, choosing the nearest large oak, reasoning that oak roots are typically broad and fairly deep, so would resist the coming onslaught of ocean, at least, though what was behind it was still in question.”

Beryl made a similar choice, and we both started climbing, putting as much height between our bodies and the oncoming wave as possible without getting so high as to depend upon frail branches. She was already higher than I was — she’d always been more athletic — and she called out, “Look sharp, girls! and hang tight! Here it comes!”

On came the dirty turgid flood, but that was the least of it, because behind it came the monster, a hulking behemoth of a beast at least as large as one of what they’d called ‘aircraft carriers’ still mothballed up in Hampton Roads. It looked like some sort of a weird cross between a giant squid and an even bigger walrus, with a touch of dragon thrown in for fun. “That, I suppose, is the Κητος Αιθιοπιος, the Cetus Æthiopius, especially imported from across the broad ocean just for us.”

Beryl looked at the dreadful thing and said, “We’re going to need some bigger missiles.”

 

 

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

Copyright © 2012-2013 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved

 

 

Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Fourteen Military Intelligence

 

 

It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles.

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

 

When the salty torrent struck my tree it was instantly torn away and tumbled in the flood, spinning me under and above the rushing tide in what seemed like less than heartbeats, staccato opportunities to snatch a breath interspersed with long sojourns underwater. Surprisingly enough, at least to me — perhaps not to past generations of mothers-to-be before me — my thoughts were not of my own safety, but that of my child, and I was filled with a vicious rage that some petty Godling was trying to harm my baby. I was not a happy camper, despite the fact that this particular camp had been my idea to begin with. ‘The best-laid plans of mice and men…’ I wanted to kill him slowly, whoever he was, and the thought of murder brought me a pellucid instant of clarity; although I didn’t have the protection of Gumball, I was in almost the same situation because I could hardly breathe from one swirling plunge into salty water so darkly filled with sand and muck that I couldn’t see to brief seconds of light and air that I could barely discern, because my eyes were streaming tears from the debris beneath my eyelids. I fled my body in an instant, first to the Underworld to gather in omniscience and power, and then flashing back to the world above, where I confronted the rider — to Earthly eyes invisible — who sat astride the monster and goaded it on with pricks of his golden trident. Poseidon then, almost certainly, or possibly Neptune; there was little difference between them other than their native language. I hadn’t thought of either when I’d made my little hit list. The more fool then, me, since he was one of the Holy Trinity who ruled the major divisions of Creation. ‘So, Earth-Shaker, you defy me?’

‘More than that, I will exterminate you and your pathetic stable of trollops!’ he shouted on the psychic plane. ‘Abomination! Whore! You defiled my noble brother first with your sorcerous magic and then with your unnatural rape of his person, engendering yet another of your foul brood on him as if he were a mere woman!’

‘But Πλούτων,’ I explained, ‘the formerly-grim Ploutōn, was in the process of attempting to rape me — an effort at which he failed in limp chagrin, by the way, undoubtedly because I didn’t sufficiently resemble a ten-year-old boy — and is still alive, despite his pathetic attempt to violate my person, and now possesses a much more suitable form in which to thrive. More than that, she is extremely pleased by her new incarnation as Macaria, more blessed with many gifts, I think, than any mere Olympian, the only woman-born Goddess without a father, a virgin birth somewhat similar to that of sea-born Aphrodite — ruler of hearts, spontaneously created from the natural elements as an essential miracle — whose ætherial beauty she now exceeds three times over and whose divine power quite o’ertops the mere Olympians, whose heads were ever in the clouds — with the exception of yourself, of course, since you plunged your own thick skull into a bucket. You and Zeus treated her like dirt when she was still a male, and then cheated her during that so-called game of lots in which you divvied up the spoils of your collective murderous assault upon your parents and ancestors, though she was your elder brother and should, by rights, have held pride of place amongst the Olympians — as she would have done were it not for Hera’s scheming with the Cyclopes —, so why in all the Worlds would she owe you either fealty or concern? Her destiny lies far above you, for she will be exalted to the same extent that you will be abased and withered into darkness and obscurity. You, unlike the thrice-divine Macaria, whose heart is now filled with mercy and love, had planned to viciously murder innocents, and have been caught redhanded, so I’m sorry to inform you that your coming fate will be a cautionary tale for the ages.’

‘You can try, vile witch! You’ll never succeed! It was I who vanquished both Oceanus and Tethys with my prowess and courage! A thousand Gods could not defeat me within my own realm, even when I bring it with me onto the land!’

Those Greeks! From my enhanced perspective as the newest/oldest Queen of the Underworld, I was as familiar with a thousand Greek battles as I was with the palm of my own hand. Ritual posturing and ‘manly’ braggadocio were an integral prelude to their battles. His next trick would probably be to turn around and show me his bare ass by way of taunting me, although in a culture where pederasty was almost ubiquitous amongst the upper classes, perhaps it was meant as a bit of a tease as well. ‘Puerile prattle, you jabbering jackass! I brought your fatheaded brother low with a bit of pasteboard and a kiss, do you really think that you can stand against me with mere weapons?’

‘Foul Enchantress! My brother was betrayed by you and your evil magic! Your unmanly sorcery merely took him by surprise! I’ll kill you now in vengeance, hang your putrid corpse raped, splayed and gutted upon a tree to humiliate your followers, and then slaughter the lot of them like swine!’ He sneered at me then, supremely confident in his Godly power.

Rape again. What was it with these nasty pricks? Well, I’m not usually one to bandy words about unnecessarily, so I took up the bident I’d inherited from Hades, donned the tricorn Ἄϊδος κυνέην, the Haidos kuneÄ“n — that star-steel helm which conceals the wearer even from immortal eyes — and struck him through the liver. ‘Have at you, then!’ I said calmly and jerked my weapon from his immortal flesh with all my strength, which was considerable. The edged barbs on the two spearpoints made this action rather messy, so I added, for his benefit, ‘Ouch! that’s just got to hurt.’

It must have done, because he was enraged! ‘More treachery!’ he shouted, his voice so low in timbre that it was almost subsonic, like the throbbing low notes of an earthquake. He rallied, though, and laid about him with his trident, twirling the shaft like a deadly baton and stabbing out with both head and butt at random, trying to connect with my invisible deathless flesh as I danced around him, cutting, slashing, lunging as opportunity presented itself. Great Harry! He was strong! He was very fast as well, but thus far I was faster and, perhaps, just a tiny bit stronger. I hadn’t counted upon the size of his demesne, which contained most of the biomass upon this Earth, so we partly shared the strength inherent in its plants, whilst he had the advantage of its fauna.

He fleered at me, ‘Not laughing now, I see! You may have the trick of my brother’s invisibility, but you’re only a woman, in the end, and no match for a real man’s power!’

I knew better than to respond, both to avoid giving away my position before he inferred it from the wounds appearing on his person and because I imagined that it might unnerve him. More than that, the sexist pig annoyed me! I began to do what I do best, to think things through. He was mounted on a Cetus, but something about that niggled at the back of my brain, even as I pursued my close and furious assault. His position astride the thing’s neck was a significant advantage for him, since he was partially shielded by the hulking body of the monstrous beast, as well as being aided by the restless movements of the Cetus itself, although its own vision was as useless as that of Poseidon. The problem was that the random additional changes in his instantaneous position made my own efforts considerably less effective than they could be, and I was getting just a little tired.

I reckon that my continued silence annoyed him, or perhaps it was the bloody wounds that I was still managing to inflict on his Godly body that ticked him off. He was oozing ichor — the pearly stuff the Gods use for blood — at quite a rate when he shouted, ‘Coward! Show yourself and face me like a man!’

I repressed a snort. Like an total moron, more like it, a total… Tiamat! I suddenly remembered a brief mention of the divine Creatrix of the universe in monstrous form, the shining embodiment of the salt waters. But if She were the Goddess incarnate, then She was Me! I instantly jumped from my current form to hers and was instantly filled with raw power and some little confusion as I finally realized exactly Who I was. I turned my massive head around and bit off the spindly legs of the twit riding me, snip, snap! Then I bit off his head, which rather cut short his irritating curses. Even immortals can be discommoded by decapitation, so he was well on his way to my subterranean domain at the moment, and good riddance to him!

In the blessed silence, I quickly snatched up the trident which had fallen from his lifeless hands, then made a mental note to arrange some suitable fate for him in the Netherworld, probably not nearly as comfy as the gig I’d found for Hades, since he was something of a shirttail relation, although I hadn’t realized it at the time. ‘Everything comes out in the wash,’ I thought, quite pleased by how well everything was working out thus far.

Thinking of which, I still had myself and Beryl to succor, and our troops, and anyone else caught up in the local tsunami that had swept in Poseidon, the nasty twerp. Beryl was still in her tree, having chosen one with a sturdier root system, obviously, but I couldn’t see me, so I figured I was still underwater. ‘Beryl!’ I thought. ‘Can you see me?’

Ever quick on the uptake, she replied instantly, ‘Last I saw, your tree had capsized and seems stable, so I reckon you’re somewhere in the vicinity of that one!’ She pointed into the near distance.

I saw the one she meant and lunged for it, saying, ‘Hang tight! I’m going to make some waves!’ Luckily, my neck was rather flexible and elongated, something like a turtle’s, so I stretched out and snapped up my tree, then shook it out over Beryl’s, releasing my body to fall into her arms. Instantly, I leapt back into my body, drawing a shuddering breath as I managed to focus, trying to see through the mud and sand and salty water still caked in my eyes. “Well, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” I said. “Now let’s go find our girls.”

They’d been considerably ahead of us, and their trees were bigger, so they were already climbing down by the time we’d managed to wade through the saltwater and debris to walk out on the oozing dark muck that used to be our grassy meadow.

“Captain Topaz!” Beryl called out, “Report!”

She turned to us and said with admirable aplomb, “No casualties, Ma’am, other than five horses, two of them carrying foals. We haven’t tallied any loss of supplies, but believe that these losses will be minimal, once we search out the scattered packs, other than food and water, most of which can be easily replaced if spoilt.”

“Any loss or irreparable damage to our ordnance or ammunition?” she asked, punctilious when it counted.

“Not that we know of, although we haven’t completed our detailed inventory.”

“Very good, Captain. Carry on.” Then she turned to me and asked, “So, where do we go from here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” she said, “What in Harry’s Green Hell are we supposed to do with Her?” She gestured toward the Cetus, who had us both fixed in her stern regard. It was somewhat disconcerting.

“I’m not sure. She’s Tiamat, the Queen of Heaven, ancestress of us all, or something very like her, Creatrix of the starry Universe, preceded only by Chaos, also female, by all accounts. Poseidon awaits our pleasure in the Underworld, but I’d as soon you had the judgement of him, since I doubt that I could be at all dispassionate. He pissed me off.”

“Already done,” she said. “I sent him off to Tartarus to commune with the few remaining bad Titans for a few millennia, which I’m sure will do him a world of good.”

Tiamat herself intervened, ‘I take it you’re referring to Poseidon?’

“We are,” I said.

‘How was it, exactly, that you were able to coerce me into performing your personal will? I felt like a bystander, watching myself from the outside, as it seemed, which I conclude was my consciousness in your body.’

“I apologize, but it was an act of desperation. Poseidon was using you to overcome my superior fighting skills, which I thought was quite unfair. Because we are all three of us related, in that you’re the spiritual ancestress of the two of us, indeed every Goddess of the Mediterranean tradition, as well as the ultimate Creatrix of everything living, I was able to use our psychic link to temporarily share your soul with mine and swap our respective viewpoints.”

She spoke aloud for the first time, in a voice like rolling thunder, “So does this mean that I’m no longer bound to Poseidon’s will?”

“Exactly so,” I said. “The entire Pantheon is being rewritten even as we speak, since the so-called ‘rulers’ of the Earth, the Oceans, and the Underworld have been diminished by two thirds. Zeus in his many analogues is the only one left, and his future tenure in the pantheon is dependent entirely upon his continued good behavior, for which trait he’s never been famous.”

She smiled a fearsome smile, quite filled with teeth and menace, the sight of which which was even more disconcerting than her voice. “Oh, Goodie!” she said, as pleased as punch. One might actually get used to her reverberating voice after a bit, if one heard it from very very far away. Up close, it tended to test one’s footing, and left one’s ears ringing when she got excited.

“Believe me,” I said, “I was extremely relieved to escape his sexual assault as well.”

“Yes, well, what’s the point of having Divine powers if one doesn’t have the fun of raping the odd woman from time to time,” she thundered dryly, “They all do it, from Abzá» to Yahweh to Zeus; some young girl gets knocked up and all the men applaud. Sexual assault without adverse consequence seems to be an almost universal male fantasy, possibly a vestigial memory from the days when they were all brainless fishes, not that they’ve actually improved themselves all that much since.”

One gathered that her low opinion of men in general wasn’t the sort of thing she wanted to keep secret, since everyone with a dozen miles or so could easily hear her. She was definitely not the sort of Goddess one might ordinarily choose with whom to share an intimate tête-à-tête. I suppose that when one has created the Universe and all within it one develops a certain cavalier attitude toward the finer points of social nuance. “So,” I said, “were you around at the very beginning?”

“It depends on how you look at it,” she said resoundingly. “As you seem to discovered, we’re all of us related, since our powers result  — at least in part — from the adulation of worshippers, and worshippers tend toward faddishness, as a general rule, so Gods and Goddesses mutate over time, even changing from one sex into another. For quite a while, for example, I was male — once Goddesses fell out of favor — albeit in a vague sort of way, which of course didn’t prevent me from impregnating a young Jewish maiden by means of force majeure, leaving her no more choice in the matter than had Danaá«. It was expected of Gods, quite naturally, since they’d have difficulty coming up with offspring otherwise, the God business never having been conducive to long-term stability, neither in aspect nor relationships, and of course it had been prophesied, which is about as dirty a deal as you can imagine, if you happen to be the unlucky target of one.”

“I imagine it must be, ” I said.

“Well, you should know,” she thundered, “since it’s happened to the two of you, albeit in separate instances and through separate causes.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Of course!” she rumbled like an earthquake. “In a world with millions of people in it, someone is just as likely to have said ‘It’s going to rain fishes tomorrow’ as not, even if they meant it as hyperbole, so if fishes literally rain from the sky, it’s been ‘prophesied,’ and that doesn’t even take into account after-the-fact ‘predictions,’ the sort of thing where someone claims that they ‘knew it all along’ when the most unlikely events transpire. There are few things people enjoy saying more than ‘I told you so.’ ”

I had to admit the likelihood of that, since I myself had made vague plans to ‘take care of’ Zeus and the rest of the male Olympians after defeating Hades. All I’d have to do was mention that tidy fact and Poseidon’s downfall would have been ‘prophesied,’ even though my ‘plan’ had had no specificity at all at the time. “So when I told Beryl that she could become pregnant when she was first transformed, that counted as a ‘prophecy?’ ”

“Of course!” she laughed, which knocked down a few of the nearest trees and left my ears ringing slightly, “and it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving pair of lovers. I’m very pleased to see at least two of my many daughters finally set about putting things right, as well as contributing to the next generation of Goddesses, but I’m especially looking forward to seeing that blustering twit Zeus brought down a peg or two. I’ve never liked him, not one little bit, in any of his many incarnations.” She grimaced in a peculiar manner which might well have been a smile, had it been a little less bloodthirsty and had a few less fangs showing, each and every one of them very long and very sharp.

“Well, it ought to be a bit easier now,” I said, “since I now hold both Poseidon’s trident and Hades’ bident and helm, although Zeus still has his thunderbolts.”

“They are formidable,” she roared helpfully, “but I can ask my cyclopic offspring to give you some of those as well, if you think it will help. They were and are the ones who created the thunderbolts for Zeus when Hera asked them very nicely, so I can both provide an ample supply of them and cut off his own provisions from their makers, although I don’t know exactly how many he might have in store.”

“I thought that was Hephæstus; and isn’t he an Olympian?”

“By courtesy, not by birth. He was adopted into the official roster due to his excellent services in arming the Gods, so of course he had to change his form slightly, but was never-the-less usually depicted as either lame or partially-sighted, supposedly because one of his eyes was burnt by the fires of the forge he worked at, or his limbs were broken in a fall from Olympus, or some other crippling mishap, a curious defect to persist in a supposed immortal with an ideal Aspect.”

“Politics!” Beryl cursed, disgusted.

“Can’t be helped,” Tiamat rumbled philosophically. “In the ever-shifting continuum of Divinity, relative positions and status are continually changing. Look how suddenly my own position has been exalted by one or two of my related Avatars…,” she beamed with obvious pride, “from beast of burden to Creatrix of the Universe once more. It’s not necessarily the strongest who survive, nor even the most intelligent; it’s those most instantly prepared to cope with and take advantage of any local change in circumstance.”

“I quite agree, since we’ve seen this in our own experience,” I said. “We both of us started out as doomed sacrifices to a supposed ‘common good,’ but now we not only lead a powerful army against disjoint forces of oppression and injustice locally, but command the countless legions of the Dead in a struggle for the soul of the world and the future of humanity. We’re well upon our way toward changing the destiny of every living thing on Earth for the better, or so we hope.”

“One for all and all for one!” Tiamat thundered with startling force, blasting us all with a breath like very brief hurricane. “It just struck me that we three together are a new Holy Trinity, supplanting that of airy Olympus and its analogs, grounded in the real world, determined to heal the world and preserve it for future generations.”

“Uhmmm,” I added, “Did we forget to mention that we plan to move the planet out of the local neighborhood sometime in the eventual future?”

“Really?” she boomed, surprised.

“Why ever not?” I asked rhetorically. “Archimedes thought that he could do it, and he was only a man.”

“Supernovas are the real danger,” Beryl added. “Just ask our pal Ali ibn Ridwan and his brainy cronies. They’re convinced that there’s one ticking towards eventual ignition somewhere in the local neighborhood, and that it will destroy most life on Earth when it happens.”

“Oh!” Tiamat exploded like a lightning flash behind nearby clouds, but somewhat more imposing and much less cryptic. “Supernovas! I remember using quite a few of those things when I made this little corner of the Universe. It takes quite a while to get the recipe just right, you know, and there’s a lot of stirring involved.” She gnashed her teeth, sounding something like an avalanche. “It’s worse than a dratted Risotto con Fagioli Bolognese, what with a jillion finicky dashes of this or that required for perfection.”

I looked over to Beryl, trying not to laugh at the sheer incongruity of talking with the Creātrix of the Universe using kitchen metaphors, although it made about as much sense as anything else in my crazy life, so I smiled instead. “Well, it looks like the right guide’s shown up for our little pilgrimage, if we ever manage to get our stuff together.”

“I have every confidence in you, my very dear Sapphire,” Beryl said. “After all you’ve managed thus far with little more than native intelligence, devastating beauty, and impeccable taste in clothing and accessories, I don’t suppose that recreating the best parts of a global scientific civilization from scratch will be much trouble at all.”

“Thank you, Dear,” I answered carefully. With Beryl, I rarely knew exactly whether she was being sincere, ironic, or merely droll. It kept me on my toes, let me tell you.

“You’re very welcome, Sweetheart,” she replied, which failed to make the context clear at all.

 

 

Tiamat was still with us, albeit currently frolicking about a mile offshore. The open sea was her natural environment, she’d said, at least when she wasn’t brooding over the face of the deep, an explanation that wasn’t truly satisfying. I had the impression that she was using these alternatives either as a metaphor or an allegory, since my short acquaintance with her mind had left me at a loss for words to reconcile the vague impressions her memories had left behind with any conceivable configuration of our current reality. One good thing was that she’d told us that there weren’t any supernovas scheduled for at least a million years, so that took a huge burden off my immediate planning schedule, since we’d managed to go from savagery to the Moon in far less time than that, and hadn’t then had the advantage of knowing that high technology — beyond pointed sticks and flakes of rock — was even remotely possible when we began our journey toward civilization. I sincerely hoped that we’d get it right this time around, but divine inspirations had failed before — we had the living proof before us — and ordinary people — not to mention Divinities — tended to twist things around to suit their current convenience or mood. What with all the things we were handling even now, neither Beryl nor I had time to pay all that much attention to the details of everything that was going on at once. Whilst there was some satisfaction in seeing to the final disposition of miscreants and villains, we really couldn’t keep track of every instance of depravity, instead relying on whatever passed for the Akashic Record, although one of Beryl’s scientific philosophers down in the Elysian Fields had called it ‘The Holographic Universe,’ whatever in Harry’s Green Hell that meant.

“The girls are starting to talk, you know.” Beryl interrupted my musings.

“What do you mean?” I asked cleverly.

“Well, Tiamat is making them a little nervous, and then there’s the whole bringing me back from the dead thing; they think you’re some kind of witch.”

“But I had nothing to do with bringing you back from the dead,” I protested. “That was Gumball’s idea.”

“And whose creature is Gumball, exactly? Some of them think that he’s your familiar.”

“That’s just silly!” I said.

“Oh, absolutely!” she said, “and I certainly agree with you, but ignorance and stupidity are as impenetrable as… well, ignorance and stupidity. In general, people believe what they want to believe, and you may possibly recall casting a ‘spell’ on them that changed them into sort-of-women, as close as one could come and still account for the perpetuation of the human species.”

“Harry’s Flaming Brass Balls!” I cursed, “what is it with these women?! Don’t they have anything better to do than sit around making up stupid stories?”

“Well, no,” Beryl said, as if this were obvious. “In the first place, that’s what people do. We’ve been doing it for the best part of a million years or so, and the stories always get away from themselves, since every storyteller wants to ‘improve’ upon whatever’s been said before. Eventually, the stories snowball and you’ve got people like us, the inheritors of a million years of human hopes and dreams, the defining limits of human imagination.”

I glared at her for lack of anything better to do. “Well, I don’t have to like it, do I?”

“Perhaps not, but it’s our duty as officers to be aware of it and to control it as much as possible, consistent with the good order and discipline of the Horticultural service.”

“But how in Harry’s Green Hell are we supposed to control it?! I certainly didn’t tell them that I was some sort of evil sorceress, and it doesn’t strike me as immediately obvious that simply saying that I’m not is going to make the slightest bit of difference!”

“Oh, please!” she said. “Don’t be dense. It’s perfectly obvious that you are a witch, for all practical purposes, so the only real question is whether you’re a good witch, or a bad witch.”

“Yeah, me and Dorothy!” I groused.

“Dorothy?” Beryl seemed puzzled.

“A character in a very old children’s book who wound up in the middle of a very strange situation. In her story, though, no one died.” I thought for a bit. “Well, except for the two wicked witches, and they did have slaves, though. Maybe there’s some parallel?”

“Oh, please!” she said again. “Be serious! What’s wrong with telling them the truth? It’s certainly a lot simpler than spinning yet another tall tale!”

“Who’d believe it?!” I shouted.

“Almost anyone with any sense,” she retorted immediately. “Look around yourself! You’ve got enormous monsters from the vasty deep at your beck and call, you’ve apparently resurrected a fallen comrade, gone to Hell and overthrown the former tyrant, then were yourself visibly resurrected, rising from the earth like Aphrodite borne upon the waves, calmed the waters of a giant flood, preserved all your followers alive when any sensible mundane story would have ended in many personal tragedies. True, we lost a few horses, but not that many, certainly not enough to impair our effectiveness as heavy cavalry in our continuing campaign through the American Southeast, and more than that, you’ve made peace with the plants — evidently all of them — a gambit no mere human had managed to pull off for the last three centuries or so. This is the age of miracles and wonders, for Harry’s sake! If not you, then who?”

“Uhm…, unh…,” I struggled for the proper words.

“Exactly!” she said smugly.

 

 

“Ladies! Be at ease, and may I have your attention, please?” I shouted, all the local troops were gathered in the open meadow before me, another gem selected by the incomparable Captain Topaz. It was a bright, sunshiny day and the live-oaks and sedges around us cast cool morning shadows on the grass. Tiamat, lounging in the water offshore, loomed ominously, outlined against the sun and casting her own shadow over a portion of the meadow. Several of our girls were keeping a wary eye upon her. Couldn’t be helped. Our troopers, though well-disciplined and spirited campaigners against humans — and even our former enemies the Kudzu crowns — were slightly out of their depth when confronted by the sort of creatures usually seen only in nightmares.

“I’m sure many of you have noticed our newest companion” — there was an expected nervous laugh — “and I know that rumors are rife, but I assure you that her continued presence here is the result of personal curiosity, not malice.”

“Ma’am?” Captain Topaz spoke up on behalf of the troops, by arrangement, I might add, “I’m sure that many of us had noticed that she showed up at the exact moment that we were attacked, How can we be sure that she wasn’t the aggressor?”

“I believe that she can answer that better than I can, Captain, so I’ll let her speak for herself.”I turned to face the Eldest of the local Gods, cheating slightly toward my audience. “Tiamat?”

“Captain Topaz,” she roared, “when I arrived I was driven as a slave, but had nothing to do with the earthquake which caused the greatest damage; that was caused by my rider, the late Poseidon. Some of you may have noticed me snapping off his head when his power over me was broken by your leader Sapphire. I have to admit that I was angry with him, since he’d kept me in captivity for the best part of three thousand years.”

Topaz riposted smoothly, also scripted, “And who was this Poseidon fellow?”

“An ancient and immortal entity of immense power who ruled over the sea until quite recently.” Tiamat had a way of making her rhetorical points memorable, since when she spoke, people couldn’t help but be impressed, if only from the volume of her voice. “Many knew him as a God; others only knew him as the rumour of an ancient myth, but he was once a mortal man who happened to have a run of very good luck. Eventually, as these things inevitably transpire, he ran into someone who was having a slightly better streak of good fortune, and he fell. Whilst he was still alive, he possessed a dangerous weapon which could generate earthquakes, and it was this weapon which caused the flood I floated in upon.”

“What sort of weapon could possibly cause an earthquake?”

‘Good girl, Captain Topaz!’ Taking my cue, I spoke up then, “Like every truly advanced technology, it looks impossible, but here it is.” I held up Poseidon’s Trident, then tapped the business end very lightly on the ground before me, which caused a minor temblor. “As you’ll notice, this artifact is a weapon of immense power and now belongs to me, but I’m not going to fiddle around with it until I put a little space between it and anyone I care about. I have the impression that someone might be hurt if I was less than very careful.”

“How came it into your possession?” Topaz asked.

“I took it from his hand as we fought, so it’s mine by right of combat, as are all the other relics of his former power.”

“How is it that we were unable to see this battle?” Topaz continued. “It seemed almost as if he were fighting with himself.”

“At the time,” I said, “I was wearing a forfeit of arms taken from yet another ancient enemy, the man I finally vanquished after bringing back Brigadier General Beryl Farquhar from his realms, the so-called ‘Helm of Darkness,’ which obscures the visible presence of the wearer through some scientific mechanism which I don’t fully understand.” I produced it with something of a flourish and displayed it. “You’ll notice that it doesn’t look like much, but in use it’s very potent.” I ostentatiously placed it on my head, watching for their reactions as I vanished from their sight, then took it off and reappeared. I grinned. “As you can see, or rather couldn’t see, it’s a really nice trick. Poseidon was hard pressed to find me, despite raw superiority in strength and combat knowledge honed by thousands of years of experience. It was touch and go until his power over Tiamat slipped far enough that she was able to help me.” I shaded the literal truth a bit there, but life is complicated enough without introducing profitless metaphysics.

“But where did this so-called ‘Helm of Darkness’ come from?” another trooper asked.

That was outside the script, but scripts can only carry one so far. Eventually, we must all needs improvise. “I’m not exactly sure. I took it from the King of the Underworld, a fellow called Hades — or sometimes Pluto — the same guy who kidnapped Beryl when she was mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet.” I finessed the issue of her actual death on a hunch. “I finally defeated him by means of that same fungal infection which has transformed us all, so he became a female version of himself, and was thereby very much discommoded. She’s doing well though, and is happy with her new outlook on life. Not every battle necessarily ends in slaughter, and changing hearts and minds is a better longterm strategy than simply creating desolation and calling it peace.” I essayed a cheery smile. Who says that the Gods have to be grim and pretentious?

“Now wait just a minute!” one of the women said, frowning. “I was there and saw her dead body. I was the one who laid her with the other casualties. She’d bled out; I could tell from her ghastly pallor. She was as cold and stiff as any other corpse.”

That wasn’t in the script, so I tried to recover. “And yet here she stands before you,” I said reasonably. “Does she look like a corpse to you? Is it common for dead people to be pregnant?”

That caused a stir. “Is Major General Farquhar really pregnant?” asked another, not the trooper who’d objected to begin with.

Beryl spoke up, “I am, unfortunately by my captor but, like many of you, I’ll make the best of it. Babies can’t choose their parents, and mothers the world over have had as little control over their pregnancies, as we all of us know. As women, we do the best we can with what we have, and certainly the babies are innocent, however unsuitable the father may have been. As Lieutenant General McKenzie said not so very long ago, most actual genetic contribution by any male has been largely suppressed by the fungal enhancements that have given us all our strength and agility. I’m not particularly worried about any adverse long-term effect due to any lingering physical inheritance from my rapist, since most of what’s left is down only to his mother and his grandmothers.”

Well, my soi-disant ‘script’ was veering off into chaos now. So much for scheming. “Look,” I said, “the point of all this is that people like Tiamat are a part of the natural world, just like the kudzu crowns and the rider who caused the earthquake and tsunami. Just because we haven’t personally encountered something before doesn’t mean that it’s unnatural. In fact, there’s almost always a perfectly logical explanation, even if it takes us a while to work out exactly what that is.”

Captain Topaz gave me a sceptical look, not at all intimidated by my rank. “You’re telling us that this giant monster before us is a perfectly ordinary denizen of the western Atlantic ocean? That she’s the sort of thing we might see sunning herself on the beach in Hampton Roads? You’ll pardon me, I’m sure, if I don’t believe you. In fact, if I might be so bold…,” she raised her voice, “…Miss Tiamat, are there any others of your kind in the ocean?”

Tiamat laughed, a sudden rumble of near-subsonic rolling thunder, “Of course not! There’s only one of me in all the universe, and there’s been only me for nearly fourteen billion years, from long before the earth itself was formed, in very fact!”

I rolled my eyes. Tiamat didn’t seem at all inclined to conform to my expectations, but I didn’t know what to say or do to regain control of the situation.

Topaz intervened, suddenly even more suspicious of our eldritch guest. “Wait a minute! What do you mean, fourteen billion years? The Earth isn’t that old, not by a long shot!”

“Of course it isn’t,” Tiamat crooned as one might comfort a small child, if that child happened to be about the size of Mount Rogers. My ears were ringing.

“Well! I’m glad that’s settled!” Topaz said smugly.

“The Earth,” Tiamat informed us, “is only about four and a half billion years old, since entire generations of stars had to be born and die in order to create the stuff the Earth is made of. You can’t have organic life without carbon, and a surprising amount of heavy metals as well.”

The Eldest Goddess certainly had the knack of making people feel comfortable, or at least mystified, which can sometimes be nearly as good, and certainly everyone within this whole section of the State would have reason to feel enlightened right about now, having finally been presented with a coherent expantion of the origin of the Universe by someone who’d actually witnessed the Primal Scene. The unflappable Captain Topaz was certainly feeling right at home, just to judge by the way her jaw was dropping as her eyes glazed over. “But… but… Harry…”

“Harry who?” Tiamat bellowed with her usual level of subtlety.

“Harry, our great Liberator!”

Her brows knit together slightly, I think, although it was difficult to read facial expressions on… whatever sort of beast Tiamat currently manifested. “I think,” she mused,“that you must be referring to Ἡρακλῆς, HÄ“raklÄ“s, Hera’s Glory. He was quite the hero, admittedly, but only a man. You have far more powerful champions by your side right now.”

“More powerful than the Holy Harry?” Captain Topaz sounded doubtful.

“Of course. You see before you the current manifestations of Δημήτηρ, DÄ“mÄ“tÄ“r, sometimes called Erinys, the Raging One, because of her deadly ferocity, and her daughter Περσεφόνη, Persephone, Kore, the Maiden, the ruler of both the seasons of the year and life and death itself, although of course their names are many and manifold. You know them as Sapphire and Beryl.”

‘Oh, crap! That’s torn it!’ “Uhm, Tiamat,”I said, “we weren’t exactly going to mention that just yet.”

“Nonsense! It’s a family reunion! Even now you carry Despoina, your long-lost daughter by Poseidon, so it’s entirely fitting that you’ve just now killed him. He was always a bit of an asshole, to use the modern idiom, and as a father he was an utter dickwad.”

“Tiamat!” I shouted involuntarily. She was telling everyone within sight — and some who weren’t — things about us that even I didn’t know. “I’m not sure that this is the proper forum for airing dirty laundry!”

“Feh! I’m too old to keep secrets,” she thundered. “In any event, bottling things up inside never does anyone any good in the long run. Trust me, dears, having everything laid right out on the table is better for everyone in the long run! Don’t they teach you kids anything in school these days?”

“Not much, actually,” I admitted. “Our society’s been pretty focused on basic necessities for quite some time, and a lot of things have fallen into disrepair, including the public educational system.”

“Have you no gymnasia? No philosophers? No sophists to educate your youth?” Tiamat was astonished and dismayed.

“Not exactly,” I admitted. “I do have tentative plans to remedy this lack, but the exigencies of a military campaign have delayed the execution of my preliminary schemes.” I paused for a long moment, reflecting. “Lynette!” I yelled. “Is Lynette anywhere handy?”

Topaz answered, “She’s off on a collecting expedition right now, but we expect her back in a day or two.”

“That won’t do,” I said. “Tiamat, could you try and find her?”

She obliged immediately. “Lynette!” she shouted, probably almost loud enough to be heard in Europe, I know my ears were really ringing this time. “Lynette! Your Queen would like to see you!”

‘Oh, swell! Now everybody in the damned State knows, or close to it.’ “Thank you, Mother,” I said with what I thought must be admirable restraint. I made a mental note to check up on my real mother sometime soonish, since I now had an entirely different perspective on her death than I had before. Whatever her imagined ‘sins’ within the constricted Horticulturist worldview, I remembered her as a loving mother and wife, so I couldn’t imagine her being stuck in Tartarus or anywhere bad; the Horticulturist writ didn’t run nearly that far. I hoped for the Elysian Fields, or somewhere equally nice, but wherever she was, I vowed to make her situation better. I deliberately avoided accessing her Akashic record, since I want our first meeting to be spontaneous and at least somewhat egalitarian.

“Uhm, Tiamat, please don’t take offence, but would you mind doing the mental telepathy thing again? It makes me nervous having everyone within this part of the state hear your end of our conversation without hearing anything from me. It’s kind of disconcerting, more or less the opposite of talking to one’s self.”

‘That’s only because you haven’t mastered the art of talking to everyone at once. You’ll get the knack of it soon enough, you’ll see,’ she communicated with an overtone of blithe serenity.

‘I can do that?’

‘Of course,’ she said benignly, ‘You’re one of my many avatars — and one of the most talented. I can’t recall ever meeting one of me with the trick of swapping viewpoints — and you don’t suppose I wasted my valuable time shouting revelations from the tops of mountaintops, do you?’

I thought about that before I answered. ‘I have to admit that it was a spur-of-the-moment inspiration. I realised as I was fighting Poseidon that you were familiar to me, but thought of you as an ancestor at the time, with something more of a psychic link than identity. It’s difficult to explain, since I find my present personal knowledge being expanded by that of you and Demeter and of a thousand other Goddesses. It’s extremely disconcerting, something like an ongoing trance.’

‘I believe your lover Beryl — by the way, your new relationship and sex is an awfully nice innovation. I can relish simplifying my own complicated love life in future — called it “the long view.” ’

‘Or satori. I suspect the two concepts are roughly equivalent.’

‘You might want to pay attention to your memories of Quan Yin, then,’ she informed me. ‘She has the most intimate experience as Goddess, Saint, and Sage.’

I did just that — surprised that it seemed so easy to do so, once she’d put the notion into my head — and belatedly discovered that I’d chosen one of my Attributes, the Imperial five-toed dragon I rode to calm the seas for mariners in trouble — or for any who were sore beset, especially women — for Gumball, whom I now recognised as a spirit friend and companion from long ages past, having been a bear when I was Artemis the Huntress, a scorpion when I was Isis in my dual rôles as protector of the honored dead and as the mistress of magic, an owl when I was Hekate, keeper of the gateways between the worlds, and on and on into the very distant past, my Spirit Friend and Guide. ‘So I see,’ I replied, and I did.

 

 

The very next sunrise was accompanied by the growing smell of thunder in the air, although the sky was perfectly clear, an azure bowl of slightly hazy cerulean that extended out toward infinity, so pristine that one could imagine invisible angels on the wing so far above the Earth that their wings beat in the subtly-charged vacuum of near-Earth space, wrapped in the sheltering cocoon of the Terran magnetic field, yet still bathed in the fiery radiance of the Sun’s untempered flux of brilliant light. In fact, I could hear their shrill and longing cries to one another, and feel their unending loneliness.

Then, I felt a stirring in the air. ‘Heads up, ladies,’ I told them privately. ‘We have visitors.’

‘Zeus and his hangers-on,’ Tiamat observed. ‘I recognize their boisterous roiling of the æther.’

‘Oh, goody!’ I said. ‘Have you noticed how crowded it’s been getting up here since I started mucking about with religious figures?’

Beryl snorted aloud. ‘The wisdom of the old aphorism, “Let sleeping dogs lie,” does come rather to mind, not that I’ve ever actually seen a dog except in metaphor.’

‘Hey!’ I said indignantly. ‘they started it, both times!’

‘Only on a technicality,’ Beryl observed. ‘From Hades’ viewpoint, he had a perfect right to exercise his dominion over anyone who entered his realm, and Poseidon was enraged by your treatment of his brother.’

I glared at her. ‘We’ve had this conversation before. Hades made it my business when he… interfered with you. You can’t claim that Poseidon had the right to murder our entire party for my single act of lá¨se-majesté! Hades and Poseidon both usurped the Gods and Goddesses who came before them, and the whole sorry crew of them had evidently overthrown our friend Tiamat here, under several of her many names.’

‘Well, to be perfectly fair,’ the object of my contention chimed in cheerfully, ‘they’re all of them aspects of me, including yourselves, since I’m the divine spark in all of you. You might profitably regard this entire episode as a metaphor for social change. Almost every narrative of the Beginning of the world starts out with me, even now, under one or another of my Names, since I’m synonymous with the Deep, the starry universe itself, within which metaphorical waters all life — and thus every God and Goddess — eventually emerged.’

Harry’s brass balls, but I hated it when she pontificated. ‘The trouble is, dear Tiamat, Mother of us all, is that most of the Gods and Goddesses appear to have forgotten that untidy fact. They certainly don’t act like any sort of children one might encounter in daily life, or at least any of those one might be proud to acknowledge.’

‘Possibly, but consider your own history; your own mother was murdered by your father, was she not? Why then pretend that families aren’t complicated things, even in this earthly realm? The first families arose from nothing, with no examples to guide them, and children tend to be undisciplined without a larger culture to constrain their childish tantrums. As you yourself noted quite some time ago, we seem to have a dearth of sociopaths lately, now that you’ve eliminated almost all the local slavers.’

Well, that startled me, until I realized, ‘Are you omniscient then?’

‘Of course I am, within my purview, which covers quite a scope, since it encompasses all Creation. I’m sure you’ve noticed that a very slightly circumscribed version of the same deep knowledge attends your own duties as the High Queen of Hell. You do realize, of course, that they’ll be calling the place “Beryl” soon enough, following the example of your predecessor in the rôle.’ She seemed to find this amusing, because she laughed out loud, the sound echoing from distant hills. I frowned. In the course of my sometimes uneven career, I’ve noticed that here are few things more amusing to some people than seeing other people in embarrassing situations.

‘I’m sorry if I seemed ignorant; I’m an amateur at all this stuff.’

‘Not at all!’ she said. ‘You’re doing very well! It takes a while to regain your sense of perspective after undergoing a radical shift in your worldview, especially after surmounting what might appear to be impossible obstacles — such as, for example, rampaging Gods getting up in your face and disrespecting you.’

I was taken aback. Hadn’t she herself recently experienced just such a change of fortune when she and I together had killed Poseidon? ‘But aren’t you a free agent now? Didn’t you just tell me that you hadn’t liked being ordered around by the blustering fool?’

‘Of course I did. I enjoy being at the top of my game as much as the next woman, but these things come and go.’

‘What do you mean?’ Beryl asked.

‘I mean that this is not the first Universe I’ve created, nor will it be the last. Universes are as fragile and ephemeral as soap bubbles, mere fluctuations in the infinite expanse of all that is. Change is the only constant reality.’ She grinned, a somewhat horrifying sight if taken out of context. ‘Indras all of us.’

That last remark was truly mystifying. ‘Indras?’ I said.

‘An obscure reference to an entirely different worldview. It was an inside joke, so never mind it. As it turns out, all such worldviews are only approximate, so the details hardly ever matter.’ Without another word, she turned and swam off toward the deep waters much further offshore, then sank beneath the distant grey-blue swells.

“Harry’s Holy Hell!” I exclaimed. “She sure doesn’t waste a lot of time on being polite, does she?”

“Well, even I’ve noticed that old people tend to grow impatient with the young,” Beryl mused. “Not that we had all that much experience with aged people within the Enclaves, at least among the enlisted population and their dependents. There were too many ways to incur disciplinary punishments for relatively minor infractions that led to fatal consequences.”

“True. The only old people I ever encountered back home were either officers or officer’s wives, who tended to be impatient with their ‘inferiors’ in the best of circumstances. I’d never really thought of it as a way to cull the surplus population, because foraging tended to weed out the young men in any case, and starvation and disease usually took unmarried women when they grew too old to barter sex for food from the ranks at any rate.” I thought about that for a moment before adding, “How did we ever get so messed up in the first place, do you suppose?”

“Who knows?” Beryl shrugged. “In almost every human society, there are many who seek unfair advantage; the Reivers are — or were — just the most egregious local example, but the higher ranks of the Horticulturalists that we both sprang from weren’t immune from conspicuous excess and self-serving greed. You might as well ask, ‘What makes some people selfish and cruel whilst others are not?’ There’s a shade in our dominions, one Benito Juá¡rez, who famously said, ‘Entre los individuos, como entre las Naciones, el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz.’ Of course, Emanuel Kant had much the same idea, building upon the notion of honesty and hospitality to envision a new world order, but even that’s built upon the very ancient Greek concept of ξενία, xená­a, the divine obligation to treat every visitor well.”

“ ‘And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.’ The Golden Rule, as they say.” I thought about it for a moment or two. “Looking back, it’s the foundation of every coherent human relationship and society. Pity more people haven’t realized that over the ages. We’d have had a lot less murders and general cruelty.”

“True,” she said, “but now that the Gods are walking around on Earth again, the ancient consequences prevail. Perhaps we’ll soon see a return to ancient courtesies.”

I laughed. “We’d better see a change, since we seem to be the arbiters of final consequences these days. Do you suppose we really ought to make public examples of a few jerks from time to time? That seems to have been the ancient practice, not that the old systems were without flaws, since the Gods were somehow exempt from the general obligations of host and guest, and thus tended to spread chaos and misery wherever they roamed.”

“Don’t you think that that’s rather a function of the metaphor?” Beryl asked. “If the Gods hold ultimate power over everything, doesn’t it beg the question of whether they merely dropped the ball in any particular misfortune, or was the mishap both purposeful and malicious?”

“I think we get the Gods that we deserve,” I said. “Hateful people generate savage Gods, whilst compassionate people call forth kindly Spirits from the vasty deep. It’s all a matter of predisposition on the part of any particular God’s adherents, I believe. Even our dear Tiamat, primordial Creatrix of our starry Universe and Eternal Mother of us all, was ultimately bound by the prejudices of her congregation, most of whom were caught up in a sexist patriarchal mindset that left her trapped in the rá´le of servant to a male. You’ll note that she was almost instantly freed when her then ‘Master’ was foolish enough to use her to attack a large group of women with quite the opposite opinion.”

“Speaking of which,” Beryl observed, glancing toward the near horizon, “our uninvited guests appear to be on the threshold of a capital mistake.”

“Well, let’s be sure to offer them a very warm welcome then.” We both stood quietly to wait for the roiling in the firmament just now building to resolve itself into what the perpetrators fondly imagined was an intimidating tableau vivant of lightning and thunder heralding, one supposes, the advent of Zeus and three of his sons, Ares, Hephaestus, and Appollo, his brothers Hades and Poseidon having previously ‘taken care of’ in one way or another.

We didn’t have long to wait. Right on schedule, the Heavens parted in a brilliant display, revealing a celestial host all arrayed in gold and silver armour, brandishing edged and hafted weapons of impeccable polish and sharpness, in at least two cases augmented by thunderbolts humming angrily with an excess of pent-up power. The whole crew of them, Olympians and a motley rabble of hangers-on, were black-bearded thugs with bulging muscles, the scruffy sort one might see posing around the barracks in homoerotic display, although of course acting out more intimate behaviors wasn’t tolerated in the Horticultural Forces, strictly speaking. ‘Thunderbolts?’ I thought dismissively, ‘I’ll give them thunderbolts in spades!’ Quickly, I sorted through the nearer rocks hurtling through our solar system and gave just one a little twist through space and time to appear above their heads, still travelling at orbital speeds, in this particular case around twenty-seven thousand miles an hour after a long fall in from the Oort Cloud toward the Sun. My little hunk of iron — and it was little, less than ten pounds or two — first made itself known as a sudden flash of brilliant light, then a streak of light descending from the zenith something like a slow bolt of lightning, but with considerably more power behind it. The sound of its passage caught up with it only after it impacted with a thunderous roar and a sudden rush of heat and light. Even Tiamat might have been surprised, but I was very pleased, especially by how well I’d calculated the exact balance between weight and speed to make an effective weapon that wouldn’t completely disintegrate during its impact with the upper atmosphere yet still packed just enough power to forestall any possible attack. The hostile Gods were far less pleased. Even immortal flesh doesn’t recuperate quickly after being vaporized.

“Harry’s Brass Balls!” Beryl exclaimed. “What was that?!”

“A little innovation of my own,” I said modestly. “I felt a little guilty about the notion of ‘borrowing’ thunderbolts from Tiamat’s Titans, since Zeus and his cronies were armed with the same weapon, so snatched a small bit of the perpetual rain of incoming meteoroids and trimmed up its orbit a little.” I grinned. “I feel a little like David when he faced down Goliath with a single stone, because it seems to have left our Gang of Four just a tiny bit discombobulated.” In fact, the Gang was history, together with many of their followers, already knocking at the gates of Hell in spirit form.

“I can see that,” Beryl said. “In fact, I’ve already sent most of them down to Tartarus to stew for a while, contemplating their many sins over the long millennia since their birth.” She paused, then added, “Hephaestus I felt sorry for, though, and have already granted him rebirth with a draught of Lethe. I’m sure she’ll turn out better this time, free of physical deformities and surrounded by those who will love her as she ought to have been before. That so-called Olympian ‘family’ of theirs was about as dysfunctional as a bag of rocks. I do note that we have a least a few survivors, though, so we’d best see about tending to their wounds.”

“Seems fair about Hephaestus, at least,” I agreed with her. “They treated her like dirt, and of course we can’t leave those on the outskirts of the local disaster to suffer in pain and terror.”

“Captain Topaz!”I called out. “Could you arrange a rescue party for our erstwhile foes? I don’t think that there will be any further trouble from them, since their leaders have been vanquished.” This was said as much for their benefit as ours, and indeed many took the hint and threw down their arms in tacit surrender, the only notable exceptions being those who were already hors de combat.

“Yes, Ma’am!” she said promptly, a testament to her own cool head in the face of unprecedented violence. Still, one supposes that the sight of Tiamat was quite enough to dispel any notion that today was going to be a day like any other.

“What was it exactly that you did?” Beryl asked me.

“I rounded up a nickel-iron meteoroid and brought it down to Earth to be a sign and a wonder for any who might think to attack us again.”

“ ‘Brought’ sounds much less spectacular than what you managed,” she observed drily.

“Well, you know how I do like a bit of showmanship.” I smiled at her, thinking of her own proclivities toward flamboyance.

“I do, but whatever made you think of it?”

“I’ve been cogitating on our supernova problem and wondering if I could collect enough angular momentum to simply spirit the Earth itself to somewhere far away, although there are still logistical problems to face, like how to keep warm without a Sun.”

“Couldn’t we take the Sun with us?”

I grimaced. “It’s a problem, since shifting around that much mass in our immediate stellar neighborhood is as likely to precipitate one sort of supernova or another as not. Tiamat might be able to handle it, but juggling a million balls in the air at once has never been my strongest suit. I’m much better at putting together a snazzy outfit, or telling someone what their best and most flattering colors might be.”

“Have you asked her?”

“No, but my memories of being her don’t include much in the way of either subtlety or delicate coá¶rdination. On the battlefield, she can’t be equalled, but she’s not the best dancing partner. I hesitate to bother her with silly questions in any case. We’ve already talked about the problem, and she seems perfectly content to let the world go hang and move on to the next project.”

“Whilst you have a sentimental attachment to our place of birth.”

“Exactly. Tiamat is necessarily a Goddess of Chaos, which tends to discourage fixed attachments. Whilst the Underworld may or may not have any temporal or physical extension into mundane reality, we’re essentially dependent on the world of light and air for our population, not to mention destinations for those of our many guests who move on to rebirth, so we’re heavily invested in the long-term survival of our entire œcology, to adopt Lynette’s terminology. Without a living Earth, the Underworld will eventually become a static fossil, inhabited only by shades and ghostly memories, Earth’s attic.” I changed the subject. “Hermes!” I called out. “Your presence is required!”

There was a flicker of motion from somewhere outside ordinary reality and a very fit young man appeared before us, cloaked in a white chlamys with a broad-brimmed πέτασος, the low-crowned sombrero favored by shepherds and wayfarers. He carried his herald’s staff, a simple wooden rod about seven feet in length, twined with carven serpents and crowned with wings, the symbol of his holy office. “I am here, my Dread Queen.” He bowed low.

“I see you’ve heard the news, which somehow doesn’t surprise me,” I said to him.

“Indeed, my Queen. I had the honor of escorting the former Gods to your chthonic domains, so I was naturally curious.” He bowed again, somehow including Beryl in his courtesy as well, ever the diplomat.

I rolled my eyes. Hermes was a charmer, but a rogue and a trickster from way back. Give him a few minutes and he could talk the knickers off a nun. Give him a few minutes more and he could charm the robes off a priest. “That will be quite enough of that,” I said. “I have a commission for you which may tax even your considerable skills. It’s come to my attention that the likelihood of Earth being adversely impacted by lethal radiation from distant stellar explosions makes our long-term tenancy — ‘long-term,’ in this case, being tens of millions of years or more — fairly unlikely.”

“And this is bad?” he asked. “Everything living dies eventually, which is a lucky break for those who remain, or no one would have room to turn around, much less get anything done.”

“And yet,” I said, “for purely maudlin reasons, it would be nice if some remnant remained of this world in times to come, since it’s shaped all of us, including you. There’s a difference between mere death and the utter dissolution of everything we know.”

He stared at me, as if I were talking gibberish, which I suppose I was from his viewpoint. None-the-less, I held power over him as his liege lord, however reluctant he might be to admit it. “Exactly how,” he said, “do you propose avoiding the common fate of everything living in this particular instance?”

“I thought about moving the entire solar system outside the plane of our galaxy.”

“Wouldn’t that be a little drastic? I’m sure the sky would look a little odd with half the starry vault gone missing.”

“It might, but it seems possible within the time period I have in mind, and partially emptying the sky of stars is exactly my purpose, since it’s stars that threaten us in the very long view. One or another of the poles of our Sun seem appropriate to my purpose, since increased solar emissions there would avoid impacting the Earth itself, but the current position of the Sun suggests that heading south would be the quickest journey into relatively uninhabited regions, which argues for the northern pole. It would simply be a matter of selectively enhancing and accelerating preëisting coronal mass ejections at the Sun’s north pole, much as Zeus and other thunderbolt wielders have historically concentrated the power of the electrical potential between the clouds and the earth below, but on a much grander scale. While slow, there’s no particular hurry, since it’s extremely unlikely that a local supernova will exterminate life on Earth any time within the next few million years.”

He looked puzzled. “It sounds as if you have this all worked out; so why would you need me?”

“Because moving the Sun with all its planets intact is a delicate operation, and there is no one that I know who would be better at juggling a thousand minutia at once than you.” My beauty book had had a few tips on how generally to please men, as well as a massive compendium of tricks and studied artifice in the business of looking beautiful. ‘Wheedling’ was the word they’d used to describe this particular technique, with the emphasis being on acting something like a child whilst looking like a sexually-powerful woman who wanted to flatter a man. Not that I had any actual intention of following through on my teasing provocation. It was a delicate balance between seduction and ice princess. Hey, you work with what you’ve got. You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, and I wanted a little enthusiasm from the people I needed to work on my behalf.

He looked very pleased with himself. “You have my word that I will do my best, dread Queen.” He bowed low in mute homage.

See, it works…. I was appropriately blandished, though not, perhaps, quite so much as he might have preferred. “I have every faith in you, my noble Herald and King of Arms. I’ll let you know when our Sophists have come up with a more inclusive plan of operations.”

Again bowing low, he took his silent leave.

I wasn’t at all displeased to see his back. Diplomacy was not my strongest suit, and there was a constant current of underlying lust and greed beneath his pretty words that creeped me out a bit. ‘Welcome to the monkey house,’ I thought to myself. “There’s an old saying,” I mused aloud, “ ‘Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.’ ”

“Always good advice,” Beryl replied. “You don’t want to give that sort of man enough room to sneak around behind your back. He probably carries an extra dagger, or more likely two.”

 

 

 

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

Copyright © 2012-2014 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved

 

 

Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Fifteen The Element of Surprise

 

 

Though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.

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

 

 

With Hermes out from underfoot for the moment, I started taking stock, trying to sort my new responsibilities and powers into some semblance of order. I appeared to be Mistress of both land and sea now, as well as the Underworld, courtesy of my conquest of both Zeus and Poseidon, but the deaths of Ares, Hephaestus, and Apollo had also put me in charge of War, of Fire and all the metal arts, of healing, music, light, poetic inspiration, and of the Sun, albeit only for the last two thousand years or so, since the Sun had previously been the responsibility of Helios — current whereabouts unknown, if still extant — but the boundaries between the two of us had been subsumed into the overall notion of Light. The Gods, I’d found, were nothing if not adaptable to changing milieus.

My new powers as Goddess of the Sun were fascinating, though, although difficult to grasp, since almost everything important took place in a seething maelström of charged particles moving at the speed of light, slowed only by the meandering paths they took after collisions with their fellows, carried along by tremendous currents of degenerate hot gas, compressed almost to fluidity by the tremendous weight of the solar atmosphere overhead. “I’m beginning to think,” I said to Beryl, “that I can do this, with Hermes’ help.”

“Or possibly without. Wasn’t Zeus supposed to be all-powerful?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said, “if that was actually true or only flattery. He didn’t seem all that powerful when he showed up with his little gang. What sort of omnipotence is it that requires a backup plan?”

“Well,” she said archly, “You did eat his brother, when all is said and done, and your little trick with rocks falling from the sky was probably unexpected. You do have the gift of thinking outside the box, you know. For a guy who grew up in an age of bronze swords, crystalline celestial spheres, and epicycles, an untimely introduction to modern celestial mechanics by someone with a legacy of studying the accessible records of military strategic thinking over the last three or four thousand years would probably be indistinguishable from magic, and your intensive historical research in a modern library on scientific concepts would only add mystery to the miracle. Even some of our relatively modern scientists, like the former Linnæus, now Lynette, have trouble keeping up with you at times. Your own grasp of tactical manœuvering, based on the Horticulturist curriculum of military knowledge that all happened after his time, might well have taken the poor sod by surprise, and he was already wary of you, since Poseidon was a tough customer on his own, supposedly his near-equal.”

I thought about that before responding. “They do seem overly-dependent on brute force, these ancient Gods.” I thought a bit more. “I suppose they tend to be limited by the imaginations of their worshippers.”

“Sounds good to me,” she said. “When thunder and lightning are the only spectacular things around, that may be just about all one can manage to lug around in one’s armamentarium.”

“True, and I do tend to cheat — by their standards — through changing the rules of the contest to suit the moment.”

“Well,” she said, “winning is always the best strategy, no matter how one arranges it, and one rarely wins by doing only what’s expected of one.”

I nodded. “True. A long time ago, a guy named Carl von Clausewitz said, ‘All war presupposes human weakness and seeks to exploit it.’ Failing to expect the unexpected is probably the most notorious human weakness of all. From confidence tricksters like the Reivers, who depended upon what turned out to have been the naïve Horticulturist belief that ‘we were all in this together’ to gull their innocent victims, to the great military leaders of the past, trickery and deceit have been a staple of almost every conflict, with the victory usually going to those who managed their deceptions best.”

Beryl laughed. “Backstabbing has a bad reputation, doesn’t it? But daggers have never gone out of style. Our friend Hermes seems likely to have an almost endless supply.”

I grinned. “But not, I suspect, as many as I do. When it comes to having tricks up my sleeve, I try to plan ahead, and simply killing people is dead boring, when push comes to shove.”

She laughed again. “Especially since we now have to deal with them once separated from their mortal coil. It’s not nearly as tidy as it was when it was someone else’s bailiwick to clean up the mess left behind.”

“True, although we’ve only really been at it since the Egyptians were building pyramids, more or less. Before that, we were another crew with a different set of notions about the nature of the afterlife invented mainly by a priestly class more anxious to ensure their own livelihoods than anything else. I didn’t much care for it, until the whole rigmarole finally got more-or-less democratized when the Greeks took over.”

“Well, that’s true of priests in general, isn’t it? — the original con artists, as far as I can tell — but doesn’t that just make them wily Generals, to hear von Clausewitz tell it?”

I sighed. “I suppose it does; they’ve started enough wars over the ages. The trouble always was that they rarely left their wars for their Gods to arrange amongst themselves.”

“The poor dears!” Beryl exclaimed sarcastically. “It’s so irritating when Divinities don’t do their own chores, or even clean up their own messes. You’d think they were men, almost.”

I shrugged and cast my eyes briefly toward the heavens. Beryl had the knack of sarcasm down pat. “Well, this last lot was, but their ranks are thinning. To their credit, though, they acted as individuals rather than through proxies. I don’t suppose that there’ll be many left when all is said and done, but at least this latest lot had the courage of their own convictions.”

“They died well,” she conceded, “by their own standards.”

“True, and their deaths were merciful, for the most part, in that they were almost instantly flashed into vapor. Most of those who were merely injured survived with minor flash-burns and miscellaneous contusions from flying rocks and dirt, so received a healing bit of our special cheese to help them recover quickly. They were hangers-on, for the most part, what one might call ‘cannon-fodder,’ with no particular support in the form either of relatives who might be tempted to vengeance or fond admirers. Either way, the living and the dead, they’re no longer any sort of threat, since they can no longer call upon the help of their more powerful fellows, and are under my dominion in any case, through my overthrow of the three major Gods, who handily ruled the Land, the Sea, and the Underworld, Apollo, the lesser God who ruled the Sun, and a handful of minor divinities. The only domain still in any sort of doubt is the interstellar Void, and I might have some small claim on that through Tiamat, whose dominion was a confusing melange of primordial ocean and the fertile reaches of interstellar space, since the ancients had no clear referents to a Universe beyond the Earth itself, which was erroneously viewed as more-or-less all-encompassing, and somehow possessed the starry firmament, the planets, and the Sun itself as accretions held in ‘shells’ around its bulk.”

“Well, Tiamat herself claimed as much when she described her creation of the Universe, if you’ll recall. I even went to the trouble of an oracular pronouncement, just to clarify things in your mind, so please don’t tell me that you’ve forgotten it already!”

“Mea culpa,” I said sourly. “I’ve had a lot on my mind for the last few hours.”

“Oh, don’t be a pill,” she said primly. “If either of us had any reason to be put out of sorts, it would be me. You spent a few brief moments snuffing the old crew out of existence, leaving me to clean up the mess you left behind without so much as a by-your-leave.”

I blinked. “Was it really a lot of trouble?”

“It was,” she sniffed. “You never saw such a crowd of snooty crybabies demanding the perquisites of their supposed rank, the sorry lot of them pushing and shoving to be first in line, then complaining and demanding to see my superior when they didn’t get the cushy billet and special treatment they’d expected.”

“I hope you told them that you’re in charge of final dispositions,” I said. “That’s always been your prerogative and office, even before I showed up and took over the nominal head office.”

“To be fair, you’ve done a few on your own,” she observed.

“Well, yes,” I admitted, “but I was always conscious of your primacy and dispositive power in that regard, and did my best to meet your expectations.” I grinned at her. “I may be a tyrant, but I’m both benevolent and cute.”

“That last can be taken two ways, you know.”

“Of course, my very dear,” I purred with ill-concealed prurience, “wordplay is amongst my many fortés.”

She smiled back at me. “Why, Sapphire, you sly vixen, you, I do believe you may have something else in mind.”

“Don’t I always? Although I do think it may have at least something to do with adrenaline.”

“So they say,” she said, smiling. “You do look a little flushed.”

“A natural response to many stimuli, I’m told”

“I don’t know if there can actually be too many stimuli. It seems to me that seeking sensations of various sorts is what makes the world go round, as they say, from paramecia to people.”

I sniffed for effect. “Angular momentum makes the world go round, as you well know.”

She rolled her eyes. “Now you’re just being rotund.”

“Surely you mean ‘profound,’ ” I objected.

“Nope, fathead is as fathead does. You knew what I meant, so please don’t try to deny it. You never have been able to resist a wisecrack, even at completely inappropriate times, and flattering yourself over a trivial bon mot is certainly inappropriate, even at the best of times.”

Beryl was sometimes a stickler for what she considered to be ‘appropriate’ behavior and could at times, quite frankly, be a perfect pill. In fact, ever since she’d taken on the task of weighing the hearts of the dead, she’d become a lot more judgemental, taking all in all. Of course, there was another and entirely different way of looking at it, since the former ‘Dolt,’ then aptly short for Dolomite, had been vastly improved by her less-than-subtle transformation — as had I, I fondly hoped — first feminine, then apotheotic on many levels, and Harry knows what else was coming down the road. Perhaps, in fact, now that I really thought about it, it was I who was being unfair. “You’re right, of course, my darling heart of hearts. There are few things more tedious than calling attention to one’s own witticisms, since they’ve either already been noted or studiously ignored, depending on criteria which include the native wits of both sides to any conversation. Any failure, of course, is my own, since I obviously misjudged either my own cleverness or yours.”

“You do tend,” she said dryly, “to err in favor of your own, a common failing of genius. Kindly remember that Salvador Dalí is remembered mostly as a disgusting human being these days, George Orwell’s scathing assessment of his character having prevailed.”

Well, that set me back a bit, since I shared her view entirely. “Darling,” I said humbly, “please feel free to ‘smack me upside the haid,’ as they say down here, if I ever come even close to arrogant flamboyance or eccentricity.”

“Well,” she said with a smirk, “I do hope you aren’t expecting me to apply this new dispensation of yours liberally, since I’d hate to scramble your brains through repetitive trauma.”

“Repetitive trauma, my sweet ass,” I said indignantly. “I am not now and never have been quite that bad.”

“Says who?” she said. “As far as I can see, I’m the only thing standing between you and a truly magnificent pratfall, somewhere down the line, although I have to confess that enlisting the aid of Hermes was a stroke of genius.”

“How very perspicacious,” that selfsame worthy said quietly from the deep gloom beneath a nearby stand of live oaks. “I’ve rounded up a large group of Sophists you might be interested in, in-so-far as I’m aware of your complete purpose.” He beckoned to a largish group of new women – and a few old women reborn in the new dispensation – lurking behind him.

I was startled, although Beryl seemed less so. “That was quick,” I said. Then I looked at them more carefully and saw that many of their number were more comely incarnations of the very sages I’d thought about when first imagining a restoration of public education in general, but especially the great universities. “Last I looked, many of these people were still shades in Hades, though. However did you manage it?”

In answer, he held up his herald’s staff, a more rustic version of the traditional Caduceus, the Greek κηρύκειον, twin snakes entwined around a wooden bâton. “Amongst my many offices for the Gods and Goddesses, I’m the psychogogue who leads souls to and from the former realms of Hades — so we have a relationship of sorts, my dread Queen, that goes back for many millennia, at least in spirit. Amongst the many powers of my traveller’s stave are the twinned gifts of life and death; hence, the symbolism of the serpents.”

“That’s right,” Beryl exclaimed, “I remember you as Χθόνιος! Or Ningishzida!” She frowned. “You do seem to disguise yourself anew for every rôle you play.”

“My Queen,” he smiled modestly, “the most important aspect of diplomacy lies in presenting a charming face to every party. As a diplomat…,” he shifted through a bewildering series of entirely different appearances, from grizzled ancient to young maiden to rustic peasant to courtly lady to centaur, and then back to what seemed to be his current natural state, a handsome and muscular man, “…I adapt myself to every circumstance.” He shifted one last time, into the semblance of a beautiful young woman who might easily have been lost amongst our troop of soldiers. “If you’d prefer, I’m entirely amenable to serving you in any form that you prefer. As you might guess from my association with Mercury, I’m protean by nature, both eloquent and fluent in every sense.”

“Now that I actually think about it,” I said, remembering, “as Rhea, or Aphrodite, I do believe that we’re related.”

“Indeed,” she acknowledged. “Hermaphrodite is another of my many names, since all forms of communication lie within my purview.” Here, she wriggled her hips seductively, which I supposed might relate to her function as the God/Goddess of commerce, so it made some sense that the ‘oldest profession’ ought to fall well within her larger demesne.

“Well, Cousin,” I said. “Welcome to our happy little family, then. How is it that you can grant rebirth with such facility? We’ve had a great deal of trouble here-to-fore.”

“Like many things, My dread Queen, which may seem difficult at first, but really aren’t when looked at carefully, it’s often simply a matter of perspective. Life and death are intertwined, just as symbolised by the supporters on my staff, and one man’s meal is someone else’s body, going all the way back into the depths of time. Your own problem with supernovas is just another aspect of the same essential equivalence, as it’s only through the death of stars and planets that new stars and planets can be reborn as new cradles of burgeoning life.”

“I see,” said Beryl. “Just as every creature goes back into the Earth at some time after death, so every new creature is — in some sense — reborn from those same elements. Preparing a soul for rebirth, then, is just a matter of gathering together the right chemicals in their proper proportions.”

“Exactly, my dread Queens. Although some essential portion of their new bodies is supplied by protozoa and bacteria, which come preassembled, and so saves a great deal of time and effort.” She bowed to both of us as if this were a particularly impressive conjuring trick, which I suppose it was, since I hadn’t thought of it.

“Do you have any insights on the practicality of moving the Sun using coronal mass ejections from one pole or another?” I inquired.

“Indeed I do,” she said. “As the acknowledged Goddess of art, law, magic, science, the moon, wisdom, writing, fire, light, travellers, and sundry other responsibilities, I have considerable influence upon the Sun, despite the fact that my supposed ‘son,’ Apollo/Osiris, held the official post, or supposedly inherited it through my father Ra, but you know how sexist the ancients tended to be, feeling quite free to disguise the origins of their Gods as recycled reïncarnations of former Goddesses in order to flatter themselves that men ruled the Heavens as well as the mundane world. You’ve already met our Mother Tiamat, so you have at least some realisation of ultimate reality.”

Well, I could see exactly how skilled she would be at mediating any sort of conflict, and allaying even niggling suspicions. To judge from her brilliant performance just now, she could easily have reconciled foxes and chickens, perhaps even turned them into best friends for life, or at least would have made them wish that they were. “Yes, I’ve noticed,” I said dryly. “Reality can almost always be relied upon.”

“It can indeed,” she said with a sly sort of smile. “How may I be of further service, my dread Queen?”

“If you wouldn’t mind, I think you’d make a lovely Præceptrix for my new university system. You’ve already managed to collect quite a few Sophists and Lecturers who might wish to join one or another of the faculties, and I presume that more can be had where those came from, assuming that they’re willing to accept rebirth in our present world. I’ve already promised Lynette the leadership of at least the primary university in North America, but I have a global system in mind, so there’ll be plenty of opportunities for both local and regional bailiwicks and honours, with some sort of overarching supervision of the local institutions.” I still didn’t fully trust her; who in their right mind would? But they always say that more rats are caught with honey than with vinegar…, or was that flies? I never did understand what people were supposed to do with flies, whilst rats were almost a staple in the fortresses, at least for the enlisted families and underlings, but I’d heard it both ways. Perhaps they used flies for something before the Dandelion Wars; I do remember reading once in the library back home about a dish they called ‘shoofly pie,’ but I’d never bothered looking for a recipe, since my diet – even since escaping into the wild – was pretty much limited to stuff I found in cans and other rations laid up in the times before the war, at least until we began living more-or-less off the land since we’d begun our reconquest of America.

She seemed to consider my proposition for a moment before answering, “I’m sure, honored Queen, that you might find a more… reliable executive. Whilst I do have flashes of exquisite brilliance – or so I flatter myself – but I’ve never been known neither for my constancy nor – if truth be told – for my ability to refrain from a bit of innocent… fun… from time to time.”

“I trust that you’ll be better able to separate your hierarchical responsibilities from your personal pleasure in future, my loyal herald and messenger. To encourage this new habit of constancy, especially in interpersonal relationships, dear Hermes, I therefore strongly suggest that you retain your current form, dear Maia, Maia of the lovely black eyes, Goddess of the Earth before Gaia, your own mother by Zeus Pater, and a thousand other names and rôles – or Māyā, to use the Vedic equivalent – the pleasant face the workings of the Universe present to outside observers. You’ll find it a great help in recruitment these days – especially since male humans are becoming rare – and the possibility of… lasting consequences may help to keep your fertile mind on business.”

Her eyes narrowed with ill-concealed suspicion and hostility. “Am I to be constrained, dread Queen? I hadn’t counted upon any form of slavery when I freely offered my allegiance and fealty.”

“Not at all, beloved Messenger and Herald, but you may have noticed that the world around us is dominated by women now; you’d hate, I’m sure, to be mistaken for a Reiver, if only for the inconvenience and tedium of endless cycles of reïncarnation. As partial compensation and further honor, I grant to you the wings and appurtenances of Nike, anciently common, and the traditional chariot of the most-honored Gods and Goddesses, the golden Quadriga with four powerful black stallions to speed your journeys in my service.”

Her suspicion was quickly concealed, papered over with the practiced ease of the diplomat or politician. “Are you returning the demesne of the Sun to me, then?”

“I am. Haven’t these negotiations centered around that very dominion? Haven’t you noticed that the late and unlamented Ἀπόλλων, Apollo of Delphi, the prophet, physician, and patron of music, is no longer with us? I’m well aware that you have historical claims to many of these appellations and dominions, and am fully prepared to grant all these courtesies – so long either in abeyance or decline – to you alone, provided only that I have both your support and loyalty…, coupled with your solemn oath upon these selfsame undertakings.”

She blinked, curious, perhaps, that I neither coveted these things for myself nor mistrusted her beyond reason. “I so swear, dread Queen, and am astonished by your generosity and trust.”

“Thank you, dear messenger and perhaps our eventual friend. This our interaction is neither trick nor ploy, you’ll come to understand. Unlike most of those divinities you’ve hitherto been acquainted with, Beryl and I are adults, slow to anger, and not unreasonably inclined toward jealousy, mischief, nor spite.”

“In fact,” Beryl chimed in, “I believe a smallish group of Olympians approaches us now, and I’m rather more inclined to offer them tea and cookies than kill them.”

“As am I,” I added, “since it’s such a waste to vaporize them. I’m fairly sure that they’d have much to offer in the way of individual viewpoints and expertise, if only they’d have a mind to do so, and the cycle of rebirth is notoriously unreliable in terms of timeliness…, at least.”

“Well,” Beryl said defensively, “I like to think of it as a sort of… ripening. Some people just take a bit longer to properly… mature. It’s something like what we might call… childhood development, in which every individual, no matter what their actual social background, is given ample time to play and interact with others in Elysium or the Fields of Asphodel – and perhaps experience a few ‘do-overs’ involving draughts from Lethe or Mnemosyne – and the occasional ‘time-out’ in Tartarus or other unfortunate environment to encourage better attention to morality and compassion the next time around.”

“Well, that’s one way of looking at it,” Maia/Hermes mused. “I’m rather more accustomed to a less… hopeful… view of the afterlife.”

“Times change,” Beryl said lightly. “We tend to be somewhat less judgemental these days, although a good dose of bitter medicine may offer the potential penitents an incentive to reflect upon and mend their wicked ways. Certainly, I myself have taken the responsibility of consigning particular shades to torment – and am usually well-pleased by the salutary result – but some are more recalcitrant than others, and take more time to ripen and mature.” She paused and looked out toward the horizon, where another group of deities had appeared, all armed cap-à-pie, just as before, but with an admixture of more feminine representatives of the Olympian hierarchy. I was touched that they’d taken the trouble and time to scare up a few thunderbolts of their own, since they do cheer up the place, and leave a delightful fresh scent of electricity in the air. Somehow, it reminds me of seduction, although carnal love is sweeter and more earthy.

‘Tiamat!’ I called out in thought, ‘would you mind showing yourself to your sometimes haughty descendants?’ then released a fusillade of thunderbolts well away from their general line of approach, just as a cautionary display of strength to encourage circumspection and an inclination either to parley more readily or to expend less effort in intimidation. Mind you, a little intimidation can be an excellent beginning to any negotiation, or at least I’d found this to be the case in recent experience.

Tiamat lifted herself above the waves about a mile offshore and thundered, “Welcome, children! As you can see, our relative positions have altered slightly.” She smiled, itself an horrific exercise in studied intimidation.

I added, ‘Well come, indeed, sisters and friends! As you may observe, there’ve been some changes made, but not entirely to your own disadvantage, however discomfiting they may appear to be at first.’

‘We’d hate,’ Beryl gently expanded on my proposition, ‘to think that needless rancour might exist between us when we could be allies and boon companions.’

Slightly chastened, they came toward us without further outward showings of hostility, passing under Tiamat’s baleful gaze with some hint of diffidence, their understanding of her overall position in the scheme of things having been slightly altered from what it it so obviously had been heretofore, and their understanding of the two of us, and of the army behind us, sadly out-of-date. One – most probably Hera, by her aspect and accoutrements – said, “Was it you who killed my husband and brothers?”

“It was,” I said boldly, but with just a hint of compassionate sorrow for her loss, whatever that might be, “but can only plead necessity, since they were rapidly proceeding toward us in a hostile, even warlike, manner that threatened myself and my companions, so left me little responsible choice other than to… handle the danger they posed with some measure of finality. Rest assured that they’re perfectly safe in our Underworld, biding their time in relative comfort until rebirth.”

“And when might this proposed revanance occur?” the one whom I presumed to be Hera challenged me.

“When we judge them ready,” I said, “my sister bride and I.”

She fell instantly into indignant wroth. “But what possible right have either of you… upstarts to judge us, your predecessors and betters?”

“Power,” I said simply. “I’ve already vanquished the most powerful of the old Gods, this most recent gang of petty thugs, entirely on my own, and without even breaking a nail. Would you like to try your own luck with me?” I asked her. A bland smile brushed across my perfect lips as I arched one perfect brow and held up one hand in an elegant gesture to display my exquisite French Tips. My other hand, of course, held a weapon of puissance. Whilst I was all for the notion of filling up and spilling over like an endless waterfall of Sisterhood is Powerful, I’d read Bullfinch in my library, and each and every one of those ancient Gods and Goddesses had gone through more than a few sociopathic moments in which they’d acted like malevolent two-year-olds with ready access to deadly swords and axes sized perfectly to fit their dainty hands.

Hera looked at me as if assessing her chances, then shrugged and said, “Given the fact that you eliminated my husband and his cronies so handily, I believe it might be unwise of us to quarrel with our latest sisters.” She smiled graciously, although there was an almost palpable undertone of condescension in her voice that I didn’t quite like. Still, one supposes that it must rankle to have one’s place in the grand scheme of things upset so drastically, from co-ruler of Olympus and the world of human beings to an almost also-ran in one brilliant instant of incandescent fury flashing down from outer space, especially when outer space itself had been nearly inconceivable at the time. There’s nothing the ‘Old Guard’ likes less than to have their presumptions and assumptions toppled.

“My thoughts almost exactly,” I said insincerely, but with what I hoped at least believable touching warmth. “Please feel free to come visit our subterranean realms at any time if you wish to engage in any fond farewells with your former companions. Do call ahead to make arrangements, though, so that we can prepare a suitable reception.” I looked behind me and said, “Maia!”

Maia/Hermes appeared instantly at my side. “At your instant service, my dread Queen, please do impart to me your slightest desire.” She bowed low, with only the faintest hint of mockery.

I liked that in her. “I appreciate your prompt attention, dear friend. Allow me to call your attention to the previous female denizens of Olympus. Whenever it suits you, from time to time, I’d appreciate it if you might drop in on them to see if they have any pressing need to communicate or visit with their loved ones down below, if that might ease their understandable grief or curiosity. I’d consider this a kindness, both to me and to your former companions on Olympus.”

“Of course, mighty Sovereign. Your merest wish is my command.” She bowed low.

I smiled and bent down to raise her and then drew her to my ample bosom, made a bit more lavish by my pregnancy. “You flatter me, of course, but then that’s your nature, always so generous and loving, instilling amity and concord in those around you through your shining example and benign influence.” I smiled again, a benevolence aimed mostly toward our… guests… from cloud-topped Olympus.

“As you say, my ever-generous and loving Queen, productive colloquy is always facilitated by mutual understanding and cordial harmony, and all such intercourse falls within my purview.”

I smirked and said, “Indeed, it seems that all forms of… intimate communication fall within your scope of authority.” Okay, so it was a somewhat childish joke, so sue me. It wasn’t all that long ago that I was a teenaged boy, for whom the word ‘puerile’ was invented.

Maia/Hermes arched a brow in my general direction, not exactly displeased by my little jest. “Well, yes, dear Queen, but that usually goes without saying.” She rolled her eyes briefly toward the heavens.

“My dear Maia,” I said, “for you, there’s almost nothing that goes without saying.”

 

 

After suitable displays of hospitality, during which I was amazed to discover that our guests, when presented with our special ‘cheese’ as a part of our refreshments, immediately identified it as a type of ambrosia, and were curious to discover how we’d come by it. “It’s commonplace in the area,” I said, “but I’d actually thought it was a local product.”

“It does have a somewhat different flavor than that which is more familiar to us,” Hera said, “but I can feel it cleansing all defilement from my flesh and reïnfusing my body with immortality already, so it seems particularly potent. Do you also possess νέκταρ, which I suppose you’d be more familiar with as néktar?”

“Not that I know of, but then I haven’t looked. This form seems to have been sufficient thus far.”

“The two are equivalent,” she admitted, “just different preparations of the selfsame exhalation of power from the Earth itself. Since you seem to hold dominion thereof through your overthrow of my brother, the former regent, I imagine you could conjure it up in either form. I usually have it delivered by doves, but was never actually involved in its creation. How is my brother, by the way?”

“Doing very well, last I looked, and blissfully happy in her new life.”

“She’s reborn already? I would have thought you might have consigned him to Tartarus, as is the usual rule amongst us.”

“We’re not nearly so inhospitable,” I said. “Hades is doing very well indeed, and very happy, as I said. She goes by ‘Macaria’ these days, and I’m quite sure you’d like her, once you got to know her.”

Hera blinked, so I gathered that their relationship had not been entirely cordial in the past. “I confess that I’m astonished,” she said. “Is it your plan to be similarly merciful to all of us?”

“Merciful? I wasn’t aware that you’d done anything particularly deserving of censure in recent years. Why would I punish you, or any of your friends here present?”

She looked to be perplexed. “To consolidate your power? I don’t know; that’s always been the way it was in the past.”

“What’s past is only prologue;” I cribbed. “What’s to come, lies in my discharge, and I have no desire to repeat the mistakes of my predecessors. To be fair, aside from Hephaestus, already reborn without physical deformity and doing very well, most of the gang which attacked us were, in fact, consigned to Tartarus, but are very unlikely to stay there, just long enough to get their attention before accepting a draught of Lethe and sent off to rebirth. In the very long view, we live here on Earth in the shadow of an existential threat to our very existence, the random and chaotic nature of the violent Universe, and it’s my intention to either avoid or ameliorate that threat through careful planning and decisive action. I can’t perform this task effectively if I go around making enemies of even minor players, much less women of power and ancient heritage.”

“You’ll probably like this part,” Beryl added. “When she vanquished Apollo, Sapphire here took control of the Sun, and has already worked out the beginnings of a plan to steer our Solar system out of harm’s way, as much as possible.”

“Solar system?” Hera said, obviously out of her depth.

I explained. “What you might think of as the Earth with its fifty-five concentric crystalline spheres. We now perceive the Heavens as slightly more complex, and somewhat more susceptible to effective manipulation, since we no longer believe that our environs are either unchanging or impossible to change. I can give you a tangible reference if you like, but I might have trouble locating the text in Greek, if it matters. If you’d care to visit the Underworld, I can introduce you to some of the more brilliant of our Sophists who might be able to explain with more facility, or you could simply wait, as we’re attempting even now to gather together a new symposium of ancient and more recent scholars in the modern world with whom you might take counsel. It’s my intention to offer education gratis to anyone who has the inclination, although I’m sure we’ll have a few obstacles to overcome along the way.”

“Including women?” She seemed incredulous.

“Especially women. We tend, I think, to have a greater stake in the future – if only to ensure the welfare of our children – where many men seem take the cavalier attitude of the murderous Punch, a folkloric figure from a more recent antiquity, who lewdly tells his lover, after having thrown her baby to her death upon the rocky ground, ‘Don’t worry, Judy dear, there’s plenty more babies where that one came from.’ ”

“Surely,” Hera said, “there are legitimate reasons to fear one’s own offspring, though. Think of King Laius, who tried to kill his own child to thwart the prophesy which foretold his death by that child’s hand.”

“Perhaps, but would Oedipus have killed his father if he’d been raised within the bosom of his own loving family? Surely Laius himself set in motion the sequence of events that led to his own death, which some might think was just punishment for his own sin of attempted infanticide.”

“Perhaps,” she conceded, “but both Laius and Oedipus were repugnant characters. One remembers that they fell into their fatal quarrel through arguing over who should stand aside to let the other pass on a narrow stretch of road. To me, it seems no matter which of them died, or even both, since they were a matched pair of belligerent fools.”

I smiled. “There,” I said, “you’ve outlined an important tenet of my own philosophy. The world, I think, would be a better place without quite so many arrogant twits cluttering up the place. From time to time, I’ve had the opportunity to rectify the problem, and haven’t shirked my duty.”

Hera looked at me appraisingly. “I take it that you find it easy to distinguish yourself from the typical fool, then?”

“I do,” I conceded. “For one thing, we’re here having an amicable conversation without trying to kill one another. For another, those we have killed have been, for the most part, cruel abusers of women and children, with no particular redeeming qualities that we could discover. I try to remain phlegmatic, even in battle, and although I’ve undoubtedly made a few mistakes, I’ve tried to keep them to a minimum.”

She thought about my words for quite some time before replying. “I admit that my initial armed response was thoughtless – for this oversight I do apologize – and upon careful review I can see that Hades acted rashly in the first place, yet you managed to overlook his violent capture and rape of your lover to the extent that he has wonderful prospects ahead of him in his new life post-conquest, perhaps even an exemplary path of upward progress that might eventually make him worthy of divinity once more. I must confess, however, that his harsh rejection of Persephone, the Kore, upon whom the salvation and spiritual achievements of so many depend, has put him in my bad books.”

“I’m well aware of this,” Beryl interjected, “but assure you that I have personally maintained the spiritual continuity of the ancient traditions in my own right. Not one soul has been impeded on its progress toward their rightful reward in the afterlife, however they may have conceived it at the time of their initiation into the Mysteries. Persephone herself is free to come and go as she pleases, either to return to the world of light or to tarry for the benefit of those souls she has taken into her personal care. I’m not at all jealous of her, and hope that we may be – or become – good friends.”

“Are you yourself an Initiate, then?” she asked, curious rather than concerned.

“I embody the Sacred Mysteries in my own person,” Beryl replied, “and fully inspire and reward those who follow the ancient traditions as an essential aspect of my own divinity. In a word or two, I will be what I will be, ʾehyeh ʾašer ʾehyeh.”

Hera said simply, “Lady.”

I responded, but not directly, having had enough of metaphysics, for which I had little patience, despite the advantages it offered, “We have no designs upon your persons, not any of you, and wish to assure you that your homes and persons are sacrosanct, as well as your authority and prerogatives, insofar as they do not touch upon our own. In fact, we seek your aid in achieving several of our own purposes, among which are to pacify the plants and make this world more hospitable to humanity again – as it was at the dawn of human civilization – and to set humanity moving forward once more in the arts and sciences, both in rebuilding whatever has been lost, and in forging ahead on many fronts, artistic, cultural, and scientific. In the interim, however, let us all sit and chat, introducing ourselves to each other, although I believe I recognize at least wise Athena, fierce Artemis, and noble Hestia.”

“You might like to acquaint yourself with Demeter, then, mother to Persephone, the Kore, whose essential personality and powers are strangely commingled with your lover Beryl.” She led forth a woman crowned in gold, the filigree points of her elaborate regalia decorated with golden ears of wheat and the band encircled with a narrow river of winged snakes entwined in endless pursuit of themselves, the symbols of her dominion over the Earth itself and the entirety of the vegetable world, especially grain, but also domestic animals and snakes, the latter, one supposes, due to her central rôle in the Elusinian and other Mysteries, both as mother of the Kore, thereby the implicit mother of all humanity, and as the source of that Kundalini power which propelled the soul through endless cycles of rebirth, with wisdom as an ultimate goal. In one hand, she held a wooden staff with a carved lotus flower as another symbol of perpetual life, an attribute she shared with Isis – Isat, as she was known to the ancient Egyptians – Lakshmi, Sarasvati, Guanyin, and a thousand Bodhisattvas.

Beryl reached out to clasp her close, saying, “Welcome, Mother, to our familial embrace. We’re honored by your presence, and truly need your help.”

“My help? Whatever for?”

“Reconciliation,” I said, “for one, entirely appropriate to your authority as guardian and inspiration of the true family, the sacred hearth and center of the home, but also a metaphor for the order of the Universe-at-large. I aim to tame the chaotic nature of the Cosmos, ameliorating the cruelty of random cosmic violence by subordinating it to the needs of sentience and life itself.”

“Tame Chaos? How could that be possible?” she asked.

“Through humane intervention, wherever possible, just as humanity has done for half a million years or more. Foodstuffs are sometimes in short supply, yet human beings have been inspired to set up both farms and granaries to tide them over during the lean times. The home itself is a similar intervention, so that human beings are far less subject to the vagaries of weather and predators, being more-or-less safe within walls and beneath a roof. So too the sacred hearth itself, the spiritual center of a human home, is also a means whereby the food we eat can be cooked, preventing many diseases and increasing the nutritional value of our foodstuffs.”

“So, this scheme of yours to move the Sun accomplishes some similar purpose in protecting the hearth and home?” She seemed especially intrigued by this prospect, as one might suspect.

I nodded. “Yes. Just as the hearth is carefully designed to honor, shelter, and control the essence of hospitable fire, which has destructive as well as beneficial potential, my scheme is meant to provide a similar protection for the Earth itself, taking us out of the chaotic galactic plane – where sometimes dangerous conditions prevail – and putting us into a position of greater safely out in the galactic ‘halo’ which surrounds our galaxy, where nearby supernovas are comparatively rare.”

“Would it be possible to move these ‘supernovas’ instead?” Hera mused, cleverly applying her own considerable intellect to a potential solution.

“I thought about that, but these events are both extremely rare – individual instances scattered amongst literally millions, perhaps billions, of potential candidates – and critical to the formation of new suns and planets, as Tiamat has kindly explained to me, so robbing the galaxy of their presence would almost surely prevent other civilizations from developing in future, just as human civilizations depend upon volcanoes to bring up riches from within the Earth, fertilizing the land and providing ready access to metals and minerals which would otherwise be in very short supply.”

“Well, naturally,” Hera said. “That’s how Hades derived his original power. Even the ancients observed that volcanic soils are extremely fertile, and that sulphur and other valuable minerals were often thrown up on the surface of the Earth by volcanic eruptions.“

“According to Tiamat,” I answered, “and corroborated by the human scientific observations made by some of our guests in the underworld, almost all the complex elements – at least everything much heavier than oxygen – were produced in supernovas, and certainly distributed widely by one or another sort of stellar explosion, with the smaller novas and other forms of mass ejection comprising from five to ten percent of total mass spilled out into the interstellar medium, and supernovas making up the bulk of it. Certainly, without supernovas, the Earth we know would not exist, and even here volcanoes play a very important rôle in human civilization in that they form natural retorts suitable for distilling and concentrating many important minerals, including bauxite – from which aluminium is derived – diamonds, gold, nickel, lead, zinc, and copper, to name a few of the most common, and those most notably valuable to humanity. It’s certainly volcanic activity that brings these valuable minerals to the surface as well, where they can be very useful indeed.”

“And most all this treasure is created in these so-called ‘supernovas?’ ”

“It is,” I acknowledged. “As it turns out, all tangible materials are made of atoms, just as your ancient Greek philosophers imagined, but these ‘atoms,’ once supposed to be indivisible, are actually comprised of smaller particles which can be broken apart and reforged into new materials if the fires are hot enough and enough force is applied.”

“Just as copper can be commingled with tin to form bronze?”

“Exactly so, at least in principle. The energy required, however, is immense, and requires a very special type of ‘forge’ most common in the central portion of very massive stars, and the heaviest atoms can only be produced in the stupendous explosions that result from the violent compression of these extremely large stars.”

“And it’s these explosions that present a danger to life on our Earth?”

“Yes, not from the explosion itself, but from the high-energy particles emitted from such explosions, much like very fine sand may be whipped up by strong winds into a deadly blast that can strip leaves and bark from trees and skin from unprotected people.”

“I understand, I think,” Hera said uncertainly.

“It’s a difficult concept,” I said, “and I confess that I myself have had to take the words of our most accomplished Sophists in this field pretty much on faith, although they claim to have done this in laboratory experiments not more than three hundred years ago, before the collapse of the world scientific establishment during the wars and other struggles brought on by global warming and the uncontrolled environmental mutagens that resulted in new and deadly species of plants that captured our entire attention.”

“I wasn’t aware of this,” Hera said. “We’ve been dozing, I think, since humanity gave up on us.”

“I understand,” I said, “and seek to rectify this state of affairs through an increased level of benign divine involvement, so will depend upon all of you to do your part without such quarrelling or malicious mischief as has transpired in the past. I’m sure the altered fates of many of the most powerful male denizens of Olympus will serve as both good example and cautionary tale for any nascent sociopaths.” I wasn’t terribly concerned about potential revolts, since I suspected that at least some portion of our success of late, almost from the very start, is that the world hasn’t seen a decent general officer take the field in several centuries, so potential opposition has grown complacent and disorganized, both jointly and severally. Although the plants were evolving to become more deadly, there was never any overall strategy involved, just a series of more-or-less random responses to particular selection pressures, but I couldn’t account for the appearance of what appeared to be a species of ‘ambrosia’ – ἀμβροσία – on this continent, so far removed from the exhalations of Etna or Santorini, and where Sybils weren’t exactly thick on the ground.

 

 

A few days later, we were making our collective way along an arm of the sea south of what used to be Charleston, well on our way to Savannah, then on to Florida, which was rumored to be controlled by some sort of Reiver King, and thus fair game. Hera was still with us, intrigued by our brave New World, and of course by the notion of taming Chaos, every woman’s dream, but the rest of the Olympians had gone back home, to do whatever it is that semi-retired Goddesses do in their ample spare time. “So, dear sister,” I informed Hera, who had taken to equestrianism with great enthusiasm, “did you know that this was once the very center of the North American slave trade?”

“I did not,” she answered, “but what does it matter? Wherever people congregate, there inevitably arise those who seek to rule and these rulers capitalize on their labour, persons, or other assets. The strong dominate the weak through whatever means come readily to hand, whether economic, political, or through brute force. Slavery is just one drab color on an entire spectrum of human exploitation, and probably not the worst.” She appeared to be as utterly unconcerned as her words implied.

“What do you mean? The Reivers we’re chasing use women as prostitutes, murder those who have no value to them, and wantonly destroy all those human artefacts that seem to have no immediate value.”

“So have conquerors throughout the ages; it’s nothing new. Conquerors tend overwhelmingly to be men, and most men have very simple tastes, rapine being only one of the most direct.”

“And well amongst least admirable,” I said acerbically. “I choose when, where, and with whom I have a sexual connection to, and insist that all my friends have similar latitude in their preferences.” Then, I added, either parenthetically or prophetically, I’m never quite sure which mode I’m in these days, “I’m extremely friendly, all in all, so one can never tell with what disagreeable fellow I might take umbrage. Thus far, it’s been pretty much universal, as you can see.”

“Well then, you’ll quite enjoy the company of these women who now approach, since they share your general condemnation of men who betray their obligations to the Gods… and Goddesses, now further exalted with your connivance.” She rolled her eyes toward Heaven.

I looked up and saw a host of what looked to be angels, winged women flying towards us in a ragged ‘Vee’ formation at least three thousand feet above us, so their figures were tiny, their faces almost indistinguishable from this distance. Still, Hera didn’t seem at all discomfited, so I took my cue from her and signalled the troops, “Hai! Captain Topaz! We’re expecting visitors, so please make camp and prepare refreshments for around…” I glanced up again, estimating… “thirty… ish… guests!” Then I found a likely spot quite near a largish shade tree to dismount and wait for the imminent arrival of our visitors.

Our Topaz was an absolute wonder, and had our camp organized and homely whilst they were still dropping down towards us with a series of shrill, ululating, cries that would undoubtedly have woken the dead, had they been sleeping, which of course they didn’t. Their leader – if that were she, since she spoke with some authority once they’d landed in a sudden rush of wings, the winds of their passage accompanying them in buffets that lifted clothes and hair, and a presence that made one almost humble, if one were so inclined, which of course I wasn’t at all – faced me and said, in a voice as soft and lovely as jasmine incense on a summer night, “My name is Peisinoë. You killed Poseidon?”

Leaving aside metaphysical quibbles as pointless, and taking my cue from her no-nonsense brusqueness, I said, “Yes, I did.”

She knelt and bowed her head, despite my instant but inarticulate protestations, and said, “We are in your debt.” The others all made the same obeisance, as if they were the chorus in some eldritch passion play.

“Please,” I said, “let’s not stand on ceremony, or… rather… let’s all stand up. I killed him not to do you any particular favor, so any good that came from my actions was merely collateral to my own purpose, which was mostly to stay alive and to protect my friends from his unprovoked assault.”

“None-the-less,” she said, “and whatever your intention, you’ve been of great benefit to all of us, whom the Sea Tyrant had held in vile bondage through the mistaken assumption that we were denizens of the oceans. The debt stands.” Prophetically, or perhaps they simply preferred to coördinate their every action, they all stood up in synchrony, even as she spoke these words.

“So you’re not ocean-dwellers?” I asked, assuming an affirmative answer, reasonably enough, since they’d flown in from the heavens above us. In fact, I couldn’t see any reason for them to fall within Poseidon’s dominions at all.

“Not entirely; we’re equally at home in every realm, the Empyrean, the wide fields of Āsgarthr and Earth, the remote mountain fastness of Shangri-La, the deep blue ocean depths inhabited by the mer-folk, and even the Underworld. In fact, we cross every boundary with impunity, because we predate almost every later deity and creature, being essentially coeval with Tiamat, the Creatrix of all there is.”

“I see,” I said, although I didn’t, or not really. I quickly drew a mental card, The Fool, which I couldn’t relate to at all. I was pretty sure it wasn’t me, but who else could it refer to? Most all of our new friends seemed impossibly ancient, and seemed rather ensconced in rather specific rôles and attitudes, hardly innocents, at least.

“I see you don’t,” their leader said. “We are the Σειρῆνες, the Seirēnes, the Sirens, in your vulgar tongue, the Daughters of the Earth.”

“I do see,” I said, “though not clearly. I had a vague report from Persephone of your attempt to succour her in Hell, but confess that her account of your visit was somewhat incoherent, since she was traumatized by her long subjection in captivity.”

“How is she then?”

“Somewhat forgetful. She begged a sip of Lethe and went back home to Demeter, her mother, but returns to the Underworld from time to time, since she has a rôle and duty there that she shares with Beryl here.” I pointed Beryl out with a slight movement of my eyes and chin.

The angelic leader nodded. “We tried to help her, but she’d eaten whilst in Hades’ captivity, which gave him certain rights of hospitality, despite the fact that his largesse was imposed upon her through violent rapture.”

“Luckily for us, then, that our own obligations were somewhat less constrained by traditional habits of thought and archaic morality.”

She furrowed her brow. “By ‘us,’ do you include Persephone herself?”

“We do. We are co-equals in the new Underworld, and she’s free to come and go as she pleases, no longer held captive to any sort of schedule, much less the former Hades, whose personal destiny has yet to be determined, since she too chooses her own path these days.”

“She?”

“I gave her a sip of our local Nektar, so she’s reïnfused with our own peculiar immortality, but I see that we share this exceptional freedom from duality.”

She cocked her head at me. “You do?”

“We do, all of us. I am pregnant by Beryl here, my wife and lover, although she herself is pregnant by the former Hades, now known as Macaria, ‘she who is blessed,’ who is pregnant as well, though I blush to admit by whom. We grappled rather closely during our psychic duel, and there was at least some unintended contact of our private parts whilst he attempted to rape me, as was his usual habit at the time. I suppose that one might say that he was ‘hoist on his own petard,’ although it seems somewhat vulgar thus to say.”

She laughed, and after a rapid-fire explanation in some foreign tongue to her fellows, they laughed as well. “I suppose it would be pointless to ask then, if your shared child is a boy or a girl.”

“It would, and Macaria is as pleased as Punch – once she’d realized the full ramifications of her new condition – because bearing the first child of the new ruler of the Underworld gives her a certain inherited status to replace her old mastery, and has thus served to soften the official demotion, and she has beaucoup bragging rights amongst her fellows as the mother of my first-born and heir. Of course, the situation is vastly complicated by the fact that I was pregnant myself – by Beryl, as I said – at the time that I impregnated Macaria, so the situation is fraught with seeming paradox in terms of everyday assumptions about paternity. The whole sordid episode might well furnish a dozen bards with new tales to delight rapt audiences for a thousand years to come.” I rolled my eyes toward the distant sky, not at all unaware of the irony involved. That’s the whole trouble with being clever; it’s very difficult to be nearly as self-righteous as the average ignorant clod.

“Our own customs will be of little help, then,” she said smiling, “if such things matter to you, since we hold all things in common, and so avoid any problems with either inheritance or primogeniture.”

That puzzled me, since it was contrary to the way things worked amongst the Horticulturists, but I soon figured it out. “It actually seems the most sensible plan,” I said, “for a society of immortals. Any other arrangement would eventually lead to at least local monopolies on both power and wealth, and encourage pointless bickering. I gather that the Olympians don’t adhere to similar customs.”

She nodded graciously, perhaps marginally impressed. “You’re right, of course, and it’s certainly true that they spent a great portion of their endless lives quarrelling amongst themselves.”

“So I’d gathered. Most of the Olympians we’ve met – with the exception of our dear sister Hera and her companions – have been violently bellicose and quick to anger. I suppose squabbling might help to pass the time that might otherwise be taken up with either twiddling their thumbs or following the latest fashion trends, but I’d much rather do something that makes some positive difference in the world besides leaving behind a mess to clean up. ”

She grinned quite girlishly. “Well, I suspect that these paragons of civilized bonhomie may have been motivated to reconsider their first response and adopt a far less confrontational stance after contemplating the fates of their former companions. There are very few things that concentrate one’s attention on potential outcomes nearly as well as the imminent possibility of death.”

“So, what is it, exactly, that you ladies do in your spare time?”

“Oh,” she drawled, with a studied air of negligent insouciance, “…right wrongs, punish malefactors, persuade the guilty to confess, and – without putting too fine on point on it – humbling those who offend against the norms of human life, which is a rather pretentious way of saying, ‘We’ve got a little list, they never will be missed.’ It’s a rather flexible standard which has evolved over the years, but I have to confess that slaughtering villains is still very much on the table. We see, however, that you’ve already adopted a very similar position on your own, so I’d say that you were born to be a Siren, if you ever get tired of your current gig.”

I smiled. “Well, I’ve got quite a lot on my plate right now, so it may be a while, but I’m flattered, although I do think that it’s somewhat better to anticipate problems than to kibitz after the fact. That’s what I’m in the process of arranging right now, actually, trying to prevent a future catastrophe so far in the future that it seems like hubris even for me, and I have a long history of grandiose dreams.”

“No problem there,” Peisinoë said. “Our own mission is equally quixotic, I think, in that despite thousands of years spent providing very well-publicized and terrifying examples of what eventually happens when one is cruel, or unjust, or dishonest, or whatever deviltry one cares to contemplate, there are always a great number of people eager to inflict exactly that same evil to someone else.”

“People have an amazing ability to consider themselves natural exceptions to the general rule, so that’s not surprising at all.”

She scowled. “That may well be true, but it’s still down to sheer stupidity, not that human stupidity actually surprises me after all this time. The reptilian dinosaurs were quite amenable to thoughtful compromise – when they ruled the Earth – in comparison to that paragon of animals, Homo sapiens.”

This struck me as a rather harsh indictment, but then I thought me of the Hundred Years War and changed my mind. “Well, we haven’t been getting along all that well lately, I have to agree.”

“On the other hand, we heartily approve of your latest course of action against the worst of the lot, although a little more Shrecklichkeit might better the lesson for those who might be moved to repent their folly.”

“Possibly, but scorn and hatred are endlessly attractive to the human spirit, and driving folly into hiding means little if it festers underground. Granted, we have a ‘penitentiary’ system in the Underworld that can’t be bettered, since we can weigh our prisoner’s hearts quite literally, and miscarriages of justice are essentially impossible, or at least they are under the current revolutionary régime. I do accept the fact that the previous management had been much less concerned with justice and, in fact, had acted in a lawless manner on more than one occasion, having been complicit in – or guilty of – acts of revenge, false imprisonment, and various criminal assaults, of which the most egregious – to my mind, at least – was the rape and impregnation of my own lover. I was extremely ticked off about that.”

“And yet, you acted mercifully toward him, blessing him with both beauty and joy in full measure, depriving him only of his manhood, which I’m sure must have irritated him.”

“Not as much,” I said, “as being tortured through eternity might have, the sort of cruel excess that he and his pals had inflicted on both sinners and political enemies during his tour of duty at the helm.”

“Well,” she said, “in his partial defence, State terrorism has been the cohesive force behind almost every civilization for thousands of years. As the drover said about the mule, ‘First, you have to get their attention.’ ”

I laughed. I knew the story, although I’d never actually seen a ‘mule.’ “I suppose you’re right; you’ve obviously had a lot more experience as the rough equivalent of a police force than we have here, but we like to pretend – at least – to limit our punitive interactions with the rubes to something approximating the due process and letter of the law, aside from armed conflict between warring states, and even then there are laws and customs which must needs be obeyed, lest one wind up on the losing side and brought to justice for them.” Then I thought for a bit before adding, “Of course, omniscience does help quite a bit when it comes time to judge between guilt and innocence.”

“True,” she said judiciously. “We ourselves have inflicted considerable pain over the millennia, but it’s also true that at least some of the many reports of our fell cruelty were grossly exaggerated, partly for the covert purpose of encouraging compliance with social norms before the fact, rather than after, when harm has already been done, and you yourself have made ‘bad examples’ from among the more egregious of your local sinners. You mustn’t be quite so quick at judging others before examining all the facts in every case.”

She’d scored a good point there. We had, in fact, made limited use of Tartarus and other pœnal strictures, and in part spurred on by wrath. “I do repent me,” I said. “I was overhasty in my speech, even if one disregards the context. When dealing with immortals, and aren’t we all? the notion of proportionality goes all awry, since we juggle with infinities.”

          Solstice

“Five thousand solemn rounds we’ve trod since first this feast was made.
The Dragon rose above us then but ever since has strayed
Through airs still filled with secret song and hidden from our sight.

The yellow gold within the earth was formed from Dragon’s blood
And crystal tears He shed for us are buried in the mud
Of oceans lost since we awoke still dreaming of the deep
And velvet coils of fiery love which wreathed us in our sleep.

The tune was ancient, even then, before we heard the sound
Of starlight falling from the sky and music underground
Which called our feet to join the dance and never be dismayed.

Our Lady kindled every star and shaped this tender Earth
To cradle children of Her womb through ages of rebirth.
The Moon above us lights our way, the Sun above us burns;
Her gifts to keep us safe from harm until the Dragon turns.

From our stations in the chorus we praise the growing light
Which shows our path before us into the sea of night

       Where love awaits,
       Where joy awakes,
       Where magic may be found.

Uncertain, lonely mariners who journey with the stars,
We steer our flimsy vessels forth into the restless dark.
No earthly wind surrounds our craft, no sails we have nor spars;
We long to find safe harbor where we hope to disembark.”

 

 

 

 

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

Copyright © 2012-2013 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved

 

 

Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Sixteen The Flying Wedge

 

 

Move as swiftly as the Wind and be as closely-formed as the Wood. Attack like the Fire and be still like the Mountain.

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

 

 

Florida wasn’t at all like we’d expected. In the first place, Jacksonville was under water, a huge shallow bay surrounded by the pristine white-sand beaches which had taken its place, with a fringe of low grass and shrubbery along the shore which carpeted the ocean side of the rolling dunes which receded into the hazy distance. Of Reivers, were there none, nor were there any creatures visible other then random seabirds and the occasional scuttling crab. “Our enemies appear to have decamped,” I said to Beryl and Hera, who were mounted by my side.

“Not necessarily,” Hera noted. “There are mermaids just out there.” She indicated a long jumbled line of roiling waves that framed the beach with surf.

“Mermaids?” I asked, incredulous.

“Of course,” she said. “Look there!” she pointed, and by Harry’s bouncing brass balls, a tousled feminine head appeared in the surf as a shallow wave rolled past her, not more than three hundred feet from where we loitered. She was scowling in our general direction with unconcealed hostility.

“You wouldn’t happen to know why she seems quite so ticked off?” I asked her.

“I imagine that she’s somewhat disappointed to find no men among our party,” said Hera.

“Why men, in particular?” I asked again.

She rolled her eyes. “Because mermaids have no particular power over women, of course, so she must be furious.”

“What kind of power?” I asked, then thought to add, “I come from the deep interior of this continent, on the western edge of Pennsylvania, and have only recently encountered any sort of ocean, much less the sorts of creatures who make the oceans their home.”

She looked at me skeptically before she answered, “Their song, of course. Surely you’ve heard of the siren’s song.”

Okay, now I was confused. We were travelling in the company of Sirens, and not one of them would have looked particularly comfortable lurking beneath the waves. “But she looks nothing like a Siren,” I said indignantly.

“Siren with a small ‘ess,’ she said, exasperated, a generic term for female creatures of great power, an homage to the real Sirens, I suppose, as one might refer to a ‘whale’ in several senses, only one of which refers to very large mammals who live in the seas.”

Okay, so I’d heard, at least, of whales. “There’s something else I’ve never seen. Pennsylvania – our place of birth, has no seacoast at all, and the largest bodies of water that I had been personally aware of during the first sixteen years of my life – until I ran across one smallish lake with a green monster in it – were readily contained in a hand-held bucket. Suffice to say that ‘whales’ were not a daily topic of conversation. We have an ancient saying amongst us that ‘ignorance is bliss,’ so I’m a little surprised that we weren’t laughing every day back home, because we were pretty much as ignorant as the days are long in the muggy heat of summer.”

“Pennsylvania,” Hera said, apropos of nothing that I could imagine. “Latin, I see, and so a suitable origin for both of you. You’ll have to arrange a shrine, of course, and I’d suggest a Sybil, since chthonic Goddesses always have a Sybil. In fact, I’d recommend that you select a Sybil each, so they can share in the administration of your growing responsibilities.”

“Why on earth would either of us need a Sybil at all?” I asked her, although I grasped the meaning well enough. In the standard deck, the Sybil is represented by the High Priestess, who rules between the darkness and the light and often stands in for Persephone, who I suppose can represent either of us, although Beryl certainly had the stronger claim, since she was Hades’ more recent conquest. Oddly enough, she represents the balance between male and female as well, the reconciliation of every seeming ‘opposite.’

Hera rolled her eyes. “Surely you don’t contemplate spending every conscious moment adjudicating petty disputes and judgements, do you? If so, you have a lot to learn about command, since planning and delegation are the primary skills of every leader.”

She was right, of course, it was a bit wearing, although with two of us sharing the responsibility of weighing new souls as they arrived in our subterranean realms, the load was somewhat lightened. Since the demise – or recycling – of Zeus Pater, not to mention Apollo and Poseidon, we were also fielding all too many requests from all around the world – exceeding by far the numbers of actual deaths – regarding our personal intervention in everything from children who’d wandered off into the woods to decisions concerning whether it might be advantageous to murder one’s rival for the hand of one potential mate or another, or to lead an expedition against the encroaching plants in areas outside our immediate control. Harry’s Bloody Hell! We were even fielding the odd prayerful appeal to bloody Harry! It wouldn’t surprise me at all to run into him – one of these days – since belief tended to impute reality to Gods and Goddesses, and there were still a very large number of people – all around the modern world – who’d grown up with an extremely passionate belief in Harry, even if that deep-seated belief had been distorted into something that Harry himself probably wouldn’t recognize. I made a mental note to ask him what he thought of this whole business of ‘Harryism,’ the underpinnings of Horticulturist society and power, if ever I came across him. Quite frankly, the Akashic Record wasn’t nearly as well indexed as my Library back ‘home,’ and was a bloody pain-​in-​the-​ass to access unless you had a soul – so to speak – in hand. “I hadn’t planned quite that far ahead,” I admitted. “I’ve been just a bit preoccupied with putting out the fires that were actually burning us of late.”

“Well,” she said, “then that’s your problem! I personally would recommend enlisting the assistance of your dear Maia – the former Hermes, since she can accomplish much of your purpose almost instantaneously. It’s not for nothing that she wears the Talaria, πτερόεντα πέδαλα, the winged sandals of the Divine Messenger, whose powers transcend both time and distance, if only you trouble yourself to demand them.”

I blinked in self-surprise. Hadn’t I studied the Mysteries in depth, at least of late? But then I realized… “I’ve been far too reliant on personal puissance of late.”

She smiled. “I know the feeling well. That whole debacle before the Walls of Troy was a case in point. I should have handled the whole affair with considerably more despatch, since the relationship between affianced individuals lay entirely within my sphere of authority, however much Aphrodite may have wished to meddle. Quite frankly, though, I was angry and out of sorts at the time, and a little play of hot-blooded human passions was a welcome diversion. One of the problems inherent in taking the ‘Long View,’ as your wife Beryl puts it, is that, in the truly long run of things, nothing really matters at all. The end of everything is death, eventually, so every problem – even the minutest – even the greatest – sorts itself out eventually.”

“I suppose you’re right, but I can’t help worrying about the interim, at least in small detail. I don’t accept the so-called ‘fact’ that rapine and pillage means next-​to-​nothing in some grander scheme of things, since it’s individuals who actually suffer the cruelties and deprivations that others inflict on them, however grandiose their oppressors’ flimsy excuses may appear to be.”

Hera smiled. “Hail, holy Goddess, Mother of all mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. Only unto thee do we, the children of Eve, cry out; only unto thee do we send up our sighs, our mourning, and all our tears in this our land of exile. Turn, then, your merciful eyes toward us, most gracious Queen, and lead us home at last.”

“Well, yes,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“That’s the spirit!” Peisinoë said, whilst Hera embraced us both. “Now let’s get this savage little mermaid and her many bloodthirsty sisters sorted out!”

 

 

 

The mermaids turned out to be amazing singers, with a haunting lyric beauty in their voices that beggared description, for how can one delineate perfection within any finite string of mere words? Their voices paradoxically reminded me of quiet starlit nights when that brilliant river of stars, the Milky Way, arched overhead and dazzled us with wonder, reminding us of our homely sanctuary within this tiny inglenook nestled near the fiery Sun, all of this embedded in the vasty universe beyond our sight.

Their leader, one Molpe, told us, “We’ve seen no mariners of late – not for three centuries or more – and the horsemen who most recently used to visit our shores have taken to inland routes, possibly alarmed over the frequent disappearance of their fellows.” Here, she smiled, as if remembering a private joke, but her pointy teeth belied that humor, or at least put a rather grim face on it.

Peisinoë and her sisters embraced them, having artlessly plunged into the sea by way of warm welcome, and Peisinoë said, “Take heart, cousins, our puissant new sister is opening up the sea lanes again, so I imagine that at least some few sailors will venture out once more, although I should warn you that her long-term plan is to gift them with her local form of ambrosia with a view toward eliminating mere males from the Earth entirely.”

Molpe pouted. “But they were delicious, so filled with sin and lust that even one might sate a hundred of us.”

“Don’t worry,” I assured them, “Considering the sheer size of the Earth, I don’t think that sailors will vanish utterly for a hundred years or more, possibly thousands, and I plan to be much more circumspect about offering the bounty of immortality to all and sundry, now that I know its full effects.”

“Oh, good!” Molpe said. “The raiders were quite tasty, almost as delicious as true sailors, but they were much more difficult to catch, and seem to have finally learned to avoid waterways of any sort, since we’re equally at home in lakes and rivers, or any body of water deep enough to ford and too wide to leap across. We’ve had the satisfaction of drastically diminishing their range, though, and have started many on their journey toward rebirth, since most of this peculiar peninsula is underwater now, or very near it. We’ve actually been considering moving northward, but our scouts haven’t reported much activity up there at all for quite some time, and there’s a peculiar vine in the southern continent which appears to have wiped out all or most of the humanity down there.”

“That would probably be the kudzu,” I said. “We’ve made a truce between us in the regions to the north, by the terms of which we supply certain essential nutrients and a few other tangible benefits in exchange for the labor of their drones.”

“How very convenient,” Molpe said. “I trust that the lives of humans aren’t involved.”

“Of course not!” I said, scandalized. “The vines had already overrun many of our… settlements, killing or driving off the inhabitants thereof, until I made a very credible threat to their very existence by pointing out that I controlled a very powerful and intelligent predator that might have been expressly designed for the purpose of attacking the kudzu ‘crowns’ directly, whereupon they capitulated en masse.”

“Predator?” she asked?

‘Gumball!’ I thought to him, ‘Be a dear and come show the nice mermaid your teeth. Pretty please?’

There was a sudden roiling of the sand and Gumball burst from the sandy soil with an aggressive rustle of leaves, then opened wide his toothy maw, which must have been thirty feet wide by now. Gumball was still growing; I suspected that he had designs on increasing his size as a dragon in the Underworld; but plants in general tended to go on forever growing, witness the many truly enormous oaks we’d encountered on our journey, and I had some hope that the giant Sequoias were still extant on the northwestern coasts of North America, the more northern latitudes of which still had marine climates chilly enough to generate the fog and damp which supported them. I made a mental note to check on this, whenever I had the time.

“Impressive!” Molpe said, and her aquatic sisters obviously agreed, as did the Sirens proper. “We have nothing like sentient plants in the Old World, aside from the occasional Dryad or human woman transformed into arboreal form to protect her from sexual assault.”

“Well,” I said with some heat, “it would have seemed to me far more sensible and appropriate if the rapist had been so transformed, thereby not only eliminating the immediate threat, but giving an entirely new meaning to the jocular description of a ‘woody.’ ”

This last, of course, was greeted with puzzled looks, unfamiliar as they were with English idioms, much less slang, and still disinclined to step too far beyond the boundaries of an ingrained sexism going back at least six thousand years or so, since the matriarchies were overthrown.

They all of them had an obvious fondness for predators, though, which I took as a helpful portent. I suppose we all of us, Goddeses, Sirens, humans, and other sentients included, feel a curious sort of kinship with carnivores, since the great majority of our ‘pets’ and other intimate animal companions through the ages had been predators, for the main part, with the possible exception of horses, but then very few of us have ever invited horses to hop up on the bed. Dogs and cats had the predator’s unique combination of relatively compact size, well-controlled sanitary habits, and heightened intelligence, which combined to make them a useful and emotionally-satisfying domestic companion. I pondered that for the moment.

‘If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.’

I made another mental note to seek out some sort of dogs and cats – somewhere along our journeys – and cultivate their friendship once again. I suspect that they were as good for us as we were for them, taking all in all, and one of the many problems associated with the Horticulturist enclaves was the utter lack of pets with whom we might encourage habits of empathy and caring amongst our children. Harry’s Name! As far as I knew, we didn’t even allow dolls as playthings! I know I’d never seen one.

“Sapphire?”

That was Beryl, I think, and I turned toward her with a start. “Yes?”

“What’s happening? You seemed awfully preoccupied.”

“Sorry, I was just thinking about the future, if we ever cease from wandering. I’ve been getting broody lately, as my belly expands and the imminence of motherhood is slowly working itself into my brain.”

She gave me a wry smirk. “Tell me about it. It’s been a long time since last we saw anything at all approximating a nursery. Sylvan bivouacs that change every night just don’t quite cut it for me these days, and I’m not half as far along as you are.”

“I suppose we have a palace in the Underworld, but I don’t think anything really grows down there, much less babies.”

“I’m sure of it,” she said. “There’s plenty of amorous dalliance going on in the Elysian Fields, and not one pregnancy that I know of, and I would know.”

It’s true, she would. I might be the nominal ‘Ruler’ of the Underworld by virtue of having overthrown the former King in a bloodless coup, but Beryl was the real mover and shaker down there. I just did the odd chore or two when she let me, really, the chthonic equivalent of taking out the trash and mopping the floors. “Well put,” I agreed. “Our little band of merry adventurers is coming right along as well. Almost half are visibly enceinte by now, and the other half are working on it, as best I can judge by the number of canoodling couples I glimpse beneath the trees these days.”

Beryl smiled. “Well, military service is difficult and dangerous enough – even when one has a little fiddle in with the Goddess of Death – that we can hardly begrudge them a few comforts in their sack time.”

I grinned back at her. “True, especially as I set a very bad example for them straight off.”

“Never say it! Your own example was an excellent encouragement for the troops, not to mention one of our best recruiting incentives, since the upper ranks in the fortresses imposed strict limitations on family size for the troops, with drastic punishments meted out for any infractions against ‘the good order and discipline of the service.’ In fact, I think our pregnant warriors are far more fierce than most all of the rest, since they’ve got more ‘skin in the game,’ so to speak, and an irrevocable investment in the future.”

“Of course,” I said, “it doesn’t hurt that no one dies forever in this particular outfit. In fact, our healing abilities are such that I don’t think any of us have even come close to dying, with the notable exception of you.”

“Lucky me,” she said, rolling her eyes in exasperation.

“Well, you know what I meant,” I told her. “What else could possibly have motivated me to beard the old lion in his den, as it were, to take hold of the fabric of reality and rend it into rags and tatters before reweaving it to suit my deepest need?”

She smiled at me then. “Well, you’ve always been a bit of a ball-buster, but I have to confess that you managed to perfect your game when you took on my assumptive ‘husband’ and vanquished him so handily. ”

“Hole in one?”

“You might say that,” she said, and laughed.

I was never much for smooth-talking the ladies, but I was both glib and clever, as well as being very much in love, which is a fairly good foundation, I think. “Well, I had everything in the world that meant anything to me riding on the game, so I gave it my very best effort.”

They say in my books that there are perfect moments, instants in time when everything becomes clear, a brief glimpse into an underlying reality that might well define the rest of your life. This was one of them, at least for me. “While you were gone, I dreamed of you, but I wasn’t asleep. People told me that you were gone, lost amongst the nameless dead, somehow cast aside, but I never believed them, because I could feel your living presence inside me, as tangible as the heat of the sun on my face, but you were in my heart.” I reached out and took her in my arms as I looked deep into her open eyes. “I searched for you across the open meadow, my heart called for you, and suddenly you appeared, seemingly unharmed, but I could feel that you were still held partially in thrall by the cruel tyrant who’d abducted you to begin with, and I knew where to find him, so I called my dear Gumball to deliver me to his presence, to confront the craven villain with the clear light of truth, to bring him to justice come what may, and Gumball didn’t let me down.”

“So,” she said, seemingly unmoved, “just like that, you decided to wrestle with God?”

“Why not?” I said without chagrin. “My strength is the strength of ten, you know, because my heart is pure. Though I’m neither splenitive nor rash, yet I have in me something very dangerous; let him beware who does you any harm. There was a grim shadow on you, a stain inside your heart, so I had to do my very best to either cure you, or to offer at least my fitting vengeance for your hurt – perhaps to make a place for healing to begin – perhaps simply to ensure that the perpetrator of this cruel assault upon your personal integrity could never boast of his distasteful deeds without instantly putting the lie to it in his own person.”

“…and his concomitant pregnancy?” she said, amused.

“Completely unintentional, yet a direct consequence of both of our actions, since he was trying to rape me at the time, and so had certain parts of his anatomy in an unfortunate juxtaposition to mine own when the sudden metamorphosis came full upon him. I’m fairly sure it took him by surprise, and it surprised me as well, but there’s ample precedent. Sometimes ‘just fooling around’ has lasting consequences which quite often come as a shock to both parties involved in the heated contest. Luckily enough, I was pregnant at the time, and so relatively immune from being knocked up twice, for which I thank my lucky stars, but evidently still fertile otherwise, which is probably a good thing to keep in mind for all of us. Remind me to tell our sisters, or at least pass the information on through Captain Topaz, and from thence to official despatches.”

Beryl responded instantly, “I’d have to say that’s almost pure luck, as well, since we have to consider the experience of poor Leda, who was bedded by her royal husband, Tyndareus of Sparta, then raped by Zeus that very same night, and wound up bearing two sets of twins by different fathers, Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, as well as Castor and Pollux. Oddly enough, the four of them were supposedly contained in two swanish eggs – I can only imagine how that must have hurt – and the paternal ancestry of all but Helen is still very much in doubt, although they managed to stuff the ill-fated Castor and Pollux up in the sky to keep them well out of the way, as was often the case with bastards, back in the day.”

“Ouch…,” I said. “The mind boggles even at a single egg big enough to contain two twin babies, I’m afraid, much less two such eggs in a row. I have trouble enough imagining a single infant’s head and shoulders, even when wriggling around to make room. Mind you, though, some accounts have Helen’s mother as the Goddess Nemesis, but that’s probably just poetic license, since it’s difficult to imagine how Helen would have escaped immortality, had both her parents been divine. The confusion about paternity seems perfectly understandable, though, since I imagine that the King of Sparta had every incentive to keep a lid on the rumours, or at least to try. So very few men are sanguine about the notion of their wives being bedded and impregnated by other men, even if one of them is purported to be a ‘God,’ since there’s always the possibility that this was meant by a perfectly ordinary wayward wife to be a cruel and derisive taunt directed at an ageing, wimpy, or otherwise lackluster husband.”

“One notes with prejudice,” Beryl said primly, “that one doesn’t hear of Goddesses shacking up with merely human men all that often, so your critique seems pertinent, at very least, and the masculine allure of my former bedmate was severely compromised by the disappearance of his rather impressive ‘tackle’.”

“So I suppose,” I said, subtly disheartened by her prosaic nonchalance. There was at least one major difference between our otherwise similar transformations. Where I had embraced it, perhaps through some inherent inclination, Beryl retained far more of her original trooper’s personality and inclinations, with only such adjustment to her transformed body as she deemed necessary. The contrast between us was obvious, now that I thought about it; I was focused on romance – for the most part – and enjoyed our sexual relationship as an important aspect of our overall intimacy, but not the sine qua non by any means, Beryl tended to focus upon sex alone, and was much less concerned than I was about emotional context, as evidenced by what had seemed at the time to be her callous taunts toward me about that bastard Hades’ sexual prowess after her abduction and installation as his Queen, evidently supplanting Persephone in his… affections, and her continuing expressions of something approaching nostalgia for the time she’d spent as his captive paramour. That got me thinking about our overall rôles in the current Pantheon, despite our nominal positions. I was nominally the ‘successor’ to Hades, Zeus, Ares, Poseidon, and many others usually numbered amongst the most ‘virile’ of the Gods, yet I seemed to have left behind the entirety of their propensity for random concupiscence involving attractive strangers. I also seemed to be leaving Beryl behind, to my sorrow, but facing eternity tends to make one impatient with anything much less than perfection.

 

 

In the event, the ‘mermaids’ were very fond of me for some reason, although I wasn’t really sure if it were down to the fact that I stood in loco parentis to them as Poseidon’s new eidolon, (εἴδωλον) or kleos (κλέος) – I couldn’t quite decide which was which – or simply because they saw me as a powerful and bloodthirsty heroine whom they admired, since I’d personally slain what must be very many hundreds of men by now, and more than a double handful of Gods. “So, Molpe,” I said. “Do you think it would be useful to lead an expedition south from here? As far as I can see, almost the entirety of historic Florida is underwater now, and those few islands still above the mean high water mark are swept by hurricane surges with great regularity.”

“It’s not quite as desolate as that,” she said. “Over to the west, there’s a fairly substantial peninsula left, about a third of the ancient state, but all the shoreline is drowned, as well as almost everything south of the Orlando Archipelago. There are a very few Raider outposts there, but the climate is perfect for the hostile vines, so they run the risk of being eaten whenever they travel by land, and of course they couldn’t possibly make any lengthy journeys afloat, since that would leave them subject to the same general sort of predation.”

That posed a puzzle for me. I didn’t like the idea of leaving them alone, but neither was I minded to extend my influence to encompass the local kudzu crowns, since they seemed perfectly capable of handling a large part of the Reiver problem in this area on their own, and there didn’t appear to be any civilian fortresses left in the southern archipelago, so persuading them not to eat the Reivers would be counterproductive, at least in the short term. “So, where exactly do these ‘raiders’ catch their victims?”

“As far as we know,” Molpe told me, “they most often travel up into the hills to the mainland north-west, then return driving female slaves before them, usually with a wagon or two of loot, mostly foodstuffs. Their usual paths cross several deep rivers, so we exact our rightful toll, and have toppled the foundations of many bridges to help to ensure their inability to find any sort of completely safe passage over our extensive domains.”

“Toll?” I queried.

“We have the ancient right to enforce a toll upon all maritime commerce, which includes any commercial or sovereign activities taking place within sight or sound of the sea.”

“And what, exactly, is covered by this ‘toll?’ ”

“Lives and goods, of course, but in practice only males are forfeit, and only then if they can be held in thrall, and we’re only truly interested in precious gems and jewelry in the way of goods, so our tax upon commerce is minimal, and we more than make up for that by rescuing ships and lives in peril upon the sea.”

I thought about that before I answered, “By ‘held in thrall,’ I presume that you mean ‘captivated by your voices,’ or is there more than that?”

“There is, actually, in that our mere appearance is just as irresistible as our voices, but only for susceptible individuals, mostly males.”

That confused me. Why in Harry’s Green Hell would anyone’s mere appearance be irresistible? “I’m sorry, but I don’t quite follow the chain of cause and effect.”

“It’s really quite simple. Just like our elder sisters, the Sirens, we punish derelictions of duty, but our scope is somewhat more limited. In the general run of commerce, sailors have a duty to the captain of the vessel, the shipowner, and to the merchants who either charter the vessel itself, or make payment for the delivery of goods on a common carrier. They may also have a range of other duties, to their wives and families, if any, to their sovereign, especially when aboard a man-o’-war, and fail in this obligation to their mortal peril. We ourselves specialize in moral peccadilloes, for the most part, sins against the family and righteous behavior. In this area, of course, our writ encompasses the traditional prerogatives of La Llorona, so any body of water larger than a puddle lies within the scope of our authority.”

“La Llorona?” I said, in complete ignorance.

“The Weeping Woman, the latest incarnation of Cihuacoatl or Coatlicue, ‘The Mother of the Gods,’ an Aztec Goddess with very many incarnations across Middle and South America. She’s somewhat akin to your patroness, Tiamat, but also has some considerable correspondence to you, in that she’s the special protector and saviour of pregnant women, and all matters concerned with the home and family, as well as the mother of us all, the Earth itself, from whom we spring forth and to whose loving embrace we descend at death.”

I thought about that for quite some time, even going so far as to access the Akashic records of some number of my subjects in the Underworld. “You’re right, of course, and are hereby acknowledged and confirmed in your ancient rights by this, my word, and by my hand as significator of my special protection.”

“Thank you, my Queen!” Molpe bowed low and took my hand in hers.

“I gather that philanderers and other abusers of the sanctity of the family are your special charge, and equally the special concern of La Llorona, so this constitutes a special class of oathbreakers.”

“It does.”

“As such, then, I grant you special discretion to handle this particular evil, including both the high justice and the low, depending upon your own evaluation of the situation as a whole.”

“Thank you, my Queen.” She smiled, showing her alarming teeth very prettily. “We are your eager servants.”

I smiled back. I found Molpe’s innocent savagery oddly refreshing, for some reason, not least because she and her companions seemed somehow completely free of angst, perfect soldiers, taking all in all. “I believe we can depend upon you, then, to manage those few Reiver populations still extant. We’d appreciate your coöperation in restoring any captive women you encounter to their families, if at all possible, or to some other supportive environment. To help you in this task, I plan to billet a small company of regular soldiers here, or any other location that seems advisable to you and your sisters. If the kudzu vines become a problem at any time, just let someone know and we’ll enforce our truce with them locally. Until they do, I can’t see them really bothering any of you, since they can’t tolerate salt water at all, and aren’t all that fond of any sort of water.”

“And how,” she asked, “is this rapprochement to be effected?”

“As I pointed out before, we have allies in the plant kingdom far more powerful than they are, and they’re limited in number only by what the local ecosystem can support.” I whistled up Gumball again, who’d been keeping a very low profile of late, having discovered that he quite liked romping around in the Elysian Fields, since he was able to take on any number of his favorite forms at will, although Cerberus and the Imperial Chinese Dragon were his usual choices. He quite liked having three heads to snap at things, and flying was his passion, so he sometimes seemed hard-pressed to choose between them. Gumball almost instantly erupted from the soil again with an admirable show of raw power far more impressive than his earlier entrance, soaring from the earth in a rush of leaves and dirt like a green avalanche in reverse, leaping perhaps sixty feet into the air before crashing to the ground with a toothy smile every bit as feral as that of our bloodthirsty mermaids. This time, he was immediately followed by two of his companions, although they didn’t leap quite so spectacularly. I could tell they were impressed.

Aglaope asked, eyes rounded in astonishment, “What sort of strange creatures are these, that they come at your command?”

“We call them ‘Bandersnatches’ after an ancient story, but human association with these creatures goes back at least a thousand years on this continent, where we commonly kept them as pets, although they started out as a food crop. There're actually related to the mints, but have an edible seed which can be ground into a type of flour and baked into bread This one is my personal companion, Gumball, but we have a few dozen travelling with us and plan to leave a few behind. You’ll find them a great help, I think, in managing the remaining slavers, since they can arrange fatal ambuscades from any location underlain by any sort of dirt. You might think of them as a terrestrial analogue to your mermaids – the equivalent either of a human who simply never learned to speak or read, or perhaps of a very clever dog, I hesitate to assign any sort of equivalency to creatures so profoundly alien to merely human conceptions of intelligence, which tend to be very much constrained by language – who can swim through fertile soil as easily as your sisters do the sea.”

“Can they speak at all?”

“Not directly, but their mental processes are accessible to any with the gift.”

‘Like this?’ Molpe communicated silently.

“Exactly so!” I cried. “You’ll have no trouble at all, provided you pet them from time to time. They’re quite friendly and loving, once you get to know them, and have developed quite a taste for our local form of ambrosia. We’ll leave you a supply, if you like, to keep them happy.”

Molpe’s eyes went wide with wonder. “You’ve dicovered a new source of ἀμβροσία so far from the winged doves of Olympus? How marvelous!”

“We have. Our local recipe includes only milk or cream, with the slightest admixture of the fermented elixir, either neat or as a dried powder. Let it sit for a day or two and it’s fully efficacious. Making it on your own beats waiting on birds six ways from Sunday.”

“Six ways from Sunday?” Molpe said, puzzled once again. “What in the world does that mean?”

“It’s what they call an ‘idiom,’ basically descended from an old way of describing an individual with eyes either askance – something like a hen or cock – or crossed, whom they colloquially described as looking two ways for Sunday, or any other thing. Eventually the notion of a physical quirk took on a life of its own, as idioms do, and came to mean something more like ‘exhaustively,’ or ‘in every conceivable way,’ with the number of different ‘ways’ to look increasing to some larger number for emphasis, or the underlying metaphor misapprehended completely, with random excursions into some sort of pseudo-meaning that seems somehow plausible to the speaker.”

Molpe smirked. “Well, that’s happened enough over the years, even in Greek, the logically-perfect language.”

“Probably,” I agreed, suppressing any inclination toward scepticism. “Every language is continuously pruned and re-sculpted by myriads of artists in sound and meaning, some of whom are poets, and some… somewhat less skilled. Not all of whom have similar attitudes toward their medium, nor even similar familiarity with the basic framework of their common language, yet all of them crib from one another, so the end result is something of a hash.”

“Barbarians are everywhere,” she sniffed. “Discourse is at the heart of civilized life, and eloquence is its currency.”

I tended to agree, but it seemed somehow unfair, because without ready access to the entire world of words and ideas, one starts out in the world of words and discourse heavily-burdened with a crippling handicap. In the real world of the Greeks, aside from the Gods and Goddesses, education was reserved for the upper classes, and there were masses of slaves and other sorts of servants who were not at all free to participate in the social and other benefits enjoyed by the ruling classes. “One advantage of immortality,” I said, “is that it gives one time to become skilled at almost everything one sets one’s hands and heart to do. True mastery of anything, from playing a musical instrument to putting words together to make a story, requires ten thousand hours or more of practice, roughly five years of working at it forty hours a week, but more is always better.”

“Of course it does. That’s what the gymnasia are for.”

“Well, it’s also what my Underworld is for. Regardless of their former status in the world of light, essentially all souls are free citizens in the world below – unless they are prisoners sentenced to a specific term of penance and reconciliation – and are therefore entitled to study and learn anything they choose to take up, whether natural philosophy, the performing arts, rhetoric, literature, the fine arts, or even the unsavory practice of literary criticism.”

“But doesn’t Lethe dissolve their memories before they’re accepted for rebirth?” She frowned.

I shrugged. “Lethe is still available for those who prefer it, but it’s optional under our new joint rule. It seemed to Beryl – who seems to have inherited Persephone’s position and authority, since Persephone herself was weary of the responsibilities entailed by her former position as Hades’ bride, not to mention Hades himself – that it was somewhat schizophrenic to forcibly destroy the memories of the reborn on one end of a lifetime and then encourage them to participate in a Mystery religion to partially replace these hard-won memories on the other. All it really did was provide unwarranted employment for a gang of parasitic sacerdotes and simultaneously discourage the habit of independent thinking.”

Hera blinked, evidently alarmed. “But the religious hierarchy is the foundation of civilised life!”

“Not in America,” I said. “We have both religious and political freedom here, or will have, once the rule of law is fully restored.”

“But what can possibly replace it?”

“Beryl reminded me, not so very long ago, that there was a revolutionary leader born several centuries ago in a province of North America called Mexico, Benito Juárez by name – he’s a very droll fellow, I met him once in the Elysian Fields on Beryl’s recommendation – and he said, ‘Entre los individuos, como entre las naciones, el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz.’ Being translated from the original, it means roughly, ‘Between individuals, just as between nations, respect for the rights of others is the foundation of peace.’ I can’t argue with his words, even now. As for worship, I’m all in favor of human consciousness of a higher power and/or an overarching concept of morality and human decency, but the best way to encourage that is to give good value for their investment, not send strong-arm bullies around to punish people for some ill-defined ‘impiety,’ especially when the instigators of this enforced devotion quite often make two-year-olds look like revered elder statesmen ripe with patient wisdom and bottomless depths of compassion and loving-kindness.”

“I take it then,” Hera said, bemused, “that orthodoxy is for you neither turpitude nor virtue.”

“Not at all,” I replied, “or not as such. It’s my own opinion that religion is as religion does – and I fully appreciate the irony inherent in this, considering the fact that I seem to be the All-Mother now, as well as the All-Father – so I don’t really care what people either think or believe, especially whether they ‘believe’ in me, as long as they behave like decent human beings.”

“But what about monotheism?” Beryl asked, always willing to argue both sides against the middle.

“Why not? Although it’s either a more-​or-​less silly conceit, or a mere metaphor for the essential uncertainty of the merely human viewpoint, necessarily limited in scope to a single brief lifetime, it’s as good as any other opinion. Between us two, though, we have at least two immortal Goddesses, as well as our former lives as human beings, not to mention our memories of our many former selves, so as long as we don’t engage in a solipsistic kicking contest in which we each claim that the other is a product of our own fevered imagination, we have no real alternative but to admit some sort of divine pantheon, at very least, and since we have a veritable gang of Goddesses ready to hand, most all of whom are rather seamlessly somewhat diffusely interrelated in most peculiar ways, and many of them appear to be other incarnations of our very own ‘selves,’ something more… flexible than mere panentheism seems very much in order. Perhaps some notion of the ‘Cosmic All’ might better fit the bill, although I freely admit that this might easily slide into a sort of existential nihilism, which always sounds silly, once you say it out loud, since it’s perfectly obvious that non-suicidal entities persist in finding meaning to their lives, however frivolous that purpose may appear at first to others.”

Beryl, of course, looked at me with eyes aslant, a skeptical expression on her face, as almost always. “Whatever,” she said. “I personally have little faith in ‘purposes,’ since actions speak much louder to me than mere words and theories.”

“There’s something to be said for that, of course,” I said, temporizing. “On the other hand, truly strategic thinking requires a bit more than merely superficial observation.”

“I’m glad to hear you say so,” said a very strange voice from behind me, layered with a hundred sibilant whispers in uneven cadence that somehow called to mind a mystic chorus of ghosts.

I whirled around, as did Beryl, whilst Hera and Molpe just smiled. There before us… well, formerly behind us… was a very tall and very beautiful woman whose long blonde hair was twined with writhing green and yellow-spotted vipers. I recognized her instantly, of course, Medusa, Μέδουσα, the ancient ruler and protector of human civilization, first amongst the firstborn of the Titans, the first children of Tiamat, born of Κητώ, Keto, from whom the whales I’d heard about had taken their name. “Funny how things work out,” I said, “but welcome, dear sister. I’ve heard of your beauty, of course.”

“Really?” she asked. “So few remember me clearly, these days.”

“I have the advantage, of course,” I said courteously, “of having been Poseidon, in one of many past lives, and could hardly forget the blessed mother of my children, much less your many noble virtues.”

“You were Poseidon?” she exclaimed. “Mind you, there’s a certain arrogance about your bearing that reminds me of him, but he was nothing if not a very manly fellow.”

“I’m sure that we were, but we live under a different dispensation these days, and we all of us share the essential androgyny of the Sirens, or will share in the future.” I grinned for all of us. “The change is in the very air we breathe, and so is both inexorable and inevitable.”

Medusa rolled her eyes. “Well, I can’t say that I’m exactly looking forward to this new world order, but in the course of a long life, one must be prepared to abandon one’s baggage from time to time, and it certainly beats abandoning my body entirely, as I was forced to do for quite some time. Now that was somewhat irritating, but when Athena took over my rôle in the eternal Pantheon, she didn’t have the chops to carry it off on her own, at least in the popular imagination, so had to carry my head around as her badge of office.” Then she laughed. “I imagine it must have irritated her as well, since it would have been a constant reminder of her lesser status in the hearts of her worshipers, who still looked to me for justice and civil order.”

At that, Athena herself, still present in our number, coughed and cleared her throat. “Uhm… if you don’t mind, dear ‘sister,’ I’m actually right here!”

“So?” Medusa arched her brow. “Since when has that mattered to anyone?”

Just what I needed, a cat-fight. “Ladies,” I said ecumenically, “we’re all of us sisters here, and since Tiamat herself is one of our number, albeit somewhere out at sea just this minute, one supposes that we all of us, whatever our current dignities or offices, might properly be described as afterthoughts and copy-cats. The fact is that we all derive much of our power from merely human imaginations and aspirations, as their many attempts to encompass and explain the Universe developed a narrative power that transcended mere mortality and reached out to grasp the heavenly stars. We are both the instigators and the inheritors of that legacy, and should have a decent respect for their opinions and needs. That’s part of the bargain, after all.”

“What ‘bargain?’ ” Hera asked suspiciously.

“That deities derive the entirety of their just powers from the adherence and consent of their worshipers. That’s precisely how Athena supplanted Medusa, in that Medusa’s worshippers were conquered by the Ionians, and it was the Ionians who gave us modern life, for the most part, although they did it largely at the expense of women. That’s why Athena, the most ‘masculine’ Goddess possible – having been created through a particularly bloody sort of ‘parthenogenesis’ which involved Zeus murdering the real mother and then falsely claiming that he ‘gave birth’ to Athena on his own – was forced to adopt her predecessor in the affections of the people as her mask and alter ego. Women are the heart of every religion, and no religion can thrive without their support. Athena – essentially Zeus transmogrified as a Goddess – almost entirely supplanted Zeus in the public mind, just as Metis, Athena’s real mother, had preceded Zeus and his gang of thugs, especially amongst the original inhabitants of Ionia, but only through her literal ‘masquerade’ as Medusa, by means of which she appropriated Medusa’s primordial rôle as ‘Guardian,’ but also as the Mother of all Invention, Wisdom, Courage, Inspiration, Civilization, Law, Justice, Just Warfare, Mathematics, Strength, Strategy, the Fine Arts, all manner of Crafts, and other human skills. In fact, aside from the rather undistinguished career of Zeus as serial rapist, patricide, and bully, he had few qualities that might have endeared him to his supposed ‘subjects.’ It’s no wonder that no one was terribly fond of him.”

“You’re speaking of my husband, upstart!” Hera wasn’t pleased at all by my contemptuous characterization of her departed spouse.

“True, but please bear in mind that his shade now lies within my power, and all his sins are fully-revealed to me, so kindly don’t bother making him out to be better than he was posthumously. If it’s any consolation, he’s well on his way to rebirth, although you aren’t likely to recognise him in feminine form. She’s bound to turn out nicely, if you must know, since my partner and I do very good work, but she’s already drunk deep of Lethe, and won’t remember you at all.”

“Zeus is like you two now? Half woman?” Hera seemed concerned.

“A little more than half, dear Hera, since we’re both of us pregnant, Beryl by your former brother Hades now, and I myself by Beryl. The new avatar of Zeus, of course, cannot be impregnated until she has a living body, but will be equally capable of fathering a child, so will have, I think, the best of both worlds, as will all of us going forward.”

“Am I infected too?” she said.

“Almost certainly, although I could access your Akashic Record if you’re tormented by curiosity.”

“You can access my life?” she asked, alarmed.

“Of course, as can Beryl, if she troubles herself to look. Every one of us, all creatures living, including the so-called ‘immortal’ Gods and Goddesses, eventually knocks upon our subterranean door and is eventually reborn, despite any illusions they might harbour about their putative ‘imperishable’ flesh.”

“But the immortal Gods…!”

I rolled my eyes up toward the azure sky above us. “How, dear Hera, do you suppose most of the original Titans wound up in Tartarus? They were ‘immortals’ too, if you’ll recall, and were overthrown by treachery and deceit, for the most part.” Zeus and his warlike companions, putative ‘immortals’ all, were completely vulnerable to me, at very least, and all are fully within my power even as we dally here, so one can’t count neither upon Nektar nor Ambrosia to keep one completely safe from any harm. There are no certainties in life, even in the lives of the ‘Immortal Gods and Goddesses,’ so it behooves us all to tread humbly upon the Earth – our collective home and Mother – and to take good heed of our sins, for we any of us might at any time be suddenly called upon to atone for them in full.”

“Is that a threat?” Hera said pugnaciously.

“Not at all,” I answered. “Rather, it’s merely a fact of existence in this time and place, since I am the eternal Goddess of the Dead. Although I have no dark designs on any of our present company, sooner or later, all souls come home to me and can rest secure beneath my outspread wings in confident expectation of my sheltering love and care. Unlike the previous Sovereign of the Underworld, I hold no grudges and am committed to the spiritual advancement and eventual rebirth of all the inhabitants of my chthonic realms.”

“Does this largesse include my brother Hades?” Hera asked.

“It does, as I’ve already explained. Indeed, she’s just as pleased as punch to be carrying the first-born child of the Sovereign of the three worlds, the broad earth, the deep sea, and the still more vasty realms below, since it offers bragging rights, at very least.”

“But what about Beryl’s child?” she asked reasonably, perhaps understandably confused by the notion of having two firstborns.

“I have to admit that it’s rather been a puzzle for me as well, but of course Beryl’s child was conceived whilst we were both mortal, and the rules for this sort of thing appear to be almost as complex as the rules of inheritance amongst European royalty, not to mention the fact that that we’ve never been formally married. Pregnancies resulting from rape amongst the Gods, though, appear to follow rather odd rules, no matter who was actually in the process of raping whom. Mind you, I doubt that the ‘rules’ ever contemplated changing sex during the very act, despite the cautionary example of Tiresias, but then she married and had children by her legitimate husband, and was your priestess to boot, dear Hera, although she’s reported to have dallied in the ‘oldest profession’ as well, which was evidently not an uncommon trade for priestesses in ancient times, as it not only made religious observance more attractive for men, but served to bolster the Temple treasuries to boot.”

Hera laughed. “Well, that’s certainly been true in some traditions, but neither has it ever been universal. So, tell me, has sexual congress been better for you as a woman?”

If she thought that she was going to trick me with that old chestnut, she had another think coming. My mama didn’t raise no fools. “Alas, I can’t quite say, since I was a virgin, back when I was a man, so have nothing at all to compare with my more recent experiences.” This was true enough, but I knew the history of Tiresias, so was forewarned. To be perfectly fair, I suspected that the old boy had got it right, since it makes perfect sense in an evolutionary context, considering the mortal hazards females face in pregnancy, maternity, and motherhood, not to mention the fact that heterosexual intercourse usually involved putting up with the antics of men from time to time, but I felt no particular obligation to choose sides in an ancient quarrel.

“Pity,” was all she said, but I could see that my glib answer irritated her.

‘Tough luck,’ I thought. “Yes, isn’t it?” I said, “but then you weren’t all that happy with the opinion of Tiresias, who certainly had far more experience to call upon.”

She said not a word, but I could see she wasn’t well-pleased by my glib observation. I’ve never been all that disciplined about keeping my mouth shut.

Beryl, on the other hand, loves a good fight, and squared off on my behalf straightaway. “If you’re trying to rustle up a ruckus, old woman, you’ve come to the right place, so just let me know how it’s going to go down and I’ll gladly oblige you!”

“Uhm, Hera,” I intervened, “just as a word to the wise, I’ve seen her tear limbs and heads off grown men with her bare hands, so I wouldn’t advise any sort of confrontation, whether physical or magical. She tends to become… enthusiastic.”

Beryl merely smiled, but it was the sort of smile one wouldn’t want to encounter in daily life, the sort of hungry smile that one might see on wolves and tigers.

Hera apparently thought better of her latest comment and said, “It was merely a matter of curiosity, since I’ve heard differing opinions, but I’m terribly sorry if I offended anyone, but rather thought that Sapphire here might be able to satisfy my purely intellectual curiosity.”

“I’m sure she could, if she thought about it – she’s a great one for thinking – but even I would hesitate to quarrel with her, since she’s a lot more vicious than even I am, once she gets her dander up. You saw what happened to a whole passle of the immortal Gods when she became irritated by them, however merciful she’s been postmortem.”

“Well,” I interjected, seeing dudgeon rising between them, “Let’s all focus on more pleasant topics. It’s a lovely day, and we’re in good company. If anyone really wants to kill somebody, just for practice, we could probably find a nest of Reivers somewhere off to the northwest, if we troubled ourselves to look.” Of course, since I’d brought it up, I had to satisfy my own curiosity, despite the possibility of spoiling a bit of the Siren’s fun. I quickly riffled through my mental Tarot, although it was gradually becoming redundant as my psychic awareness of the world-​at-​large improved. “In fact, there’s a largish clan of them not fifteen miles way to the northwest, if you’re interested in a little dust-up, although of course the local mermaids and Tiamat would be left twiddling their thumbs until we were finished.”

“Don’t mind me!” she roared, shaking leaves from the oaks and needles from the pines for quite some distance around us – I could hear the soft sough and susurrations of falling detritus for miles around – one of the more significant irritations of essential omniscience, which seemed to be creeping up on me as time went on. “I’m organizing the local cetaceans as an honour guard to make a court-​in-​exile, since this seems to be the center of human society for the nonce. The Mediterranean was always far too small, I thought, for a proper ocean, and the Pacific tends to be boring with so little land around, except at the edges, and there’s nothing much happening in the way of civilization on either shore in these modern times.” She snorted in a very unladylike manner. She’d never paid all that much attention to the social graces, at least in my estimation, doubtless through having come into existence before any sentient beings were available to form any sort of society with which one might conceivably interact.

I smiled. “I’m sure you’ll do a bang-up job of it, since you’ve done such a fine job with the Universe as a whole. Please let me know if I can help in any way.”

‘And please let me know how your own little expedition turns out, why don’t you?’

‘Expedition?’ I eloquently displayed my ignorance.

‘You are going to clear up this little problem with the remaining Reivers, aren’t you?’

‘I hadn’t thought of it,’ I said. ‘I’d planned to leave it to the mermaids as something to pass their time, since there’s not much commerce on the sea to occupy them, much less oath-breakers and villains.’

‘But I could use them in my Restoration project. They’ve always been very fond of life at court, since it gives them an excuse to wear their very best jewelry and exotic finery.’

I hadn’t thought of that, not having had the advantage of observing the mermaids at length in their natural habitats. Thinking quickly, I answered, ‘You’re right, of course, and one could easily make a case that human villains are my responsibility. I was just thinking about getting my European project going, since I have no idea what’s really going on over there.’

‘Why in the world don’t you simply go take a look? Do you think the late Zeus and his companions booked passage on a dirigible when they came calling?’

‘Dirigible?’

‘A sort of lighter-​than-​air balloon used to transport goods and people half a millennium or so in the past. I thought it was rather clever, but it was soon superseded by faster and noisier alternatives, so of course they vanished from the stage, although they did manage to capture the imaginations of the storytellers of that age, and for a few hundreds of years thereafter.’

‘Dirigible,’ the notion fascinated me. We’d obviously need some sort of gas lighter than nitrogen – hydrogen and/or helium came to mind most easily – but it would allow a relatively low-technology society like ours to bypass the oceans in greater safety, and quite possibly with much less investment of time and scarce resources. ‘Unfortunately, we won’t have enough time to reïnvent these handy ærial gadgets before our putative raid,’ I said.

‘Why on earth would you even bother? You have the Sirens right here, with the lesser sirens as your backup troops, and can easily lead them on your own, with Beryl if she longs for a little more action after your long trek.’

‘You seem to forget that the Sirens have wings, like angels, whilst Beryl and I ride on perfectly ordinary horses,’ I told her. ‘I’m fairly sure we’d slow them down.’

She smirked at me, although it was a little difficult to tell, ‘Are you not my own daughter, somewhat removed? I gave birth to Metis, who bore Athena, all of whom are shapeshifters. Since your paramour seems to have supplanted Persephone, the potent Praxidike, one would assume that she inherited her powers as well.’

“Shapeshifting?” I spoke out loud, startled by what seemed like magic mentioned as casually as barley porridge.

“Of course!” she thundered. “Even Zeus that was – as greedy, thick-headed, and clumsy a dolt as one could possibly imagine – was able to disguise himself in many forms, although most of them, quite frankly, lacked even a shred of creativity.” Then she paused for a moment, visibly pondering, before saying, in a bellow only slightly subdued, “The swan thing was rather clever, I have to admit, however perverse and horrifying it must have been for poor Leda.”

Classical mythology had never been my strong suit – or should that be… ‘thealogy?’ In any case, it didn’t surprise me that there was a lot that I still didn’t know about the situation I found myself inhabiting. ‘I suppose that I should have guessed, since Gumball took to shapeshifting with an enthusiasm that astonished me, almost as soon as he’d descended to the Underworld.’

‘Your animal companion isn’t prejudiced in favor of any sort of eternal verities, so retains a childlike joy and freedom,’ she suggested. ‘Transformation is the sine qua non of the Eleusinian and other Mysteries, since facilis descensus Averno;
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; Easy is the descent to Avernus, for the doorway to the underworld lies open both night and day. But to retrace your steps and return to the sunlight and warm breezes of the world above – that’s a mighty labour.’

‘So Beryl’s return from the Underworld was a similar transformation?’

‘As was your own, of course, and the ready access to the hidden ways enjoyed by your envoy Maia, anciently known as Hermes, but her earliest incarnations were always feminine, since the Gates of Hell and the opening of the womb were seen as the twin way-stations of a single journey.’

‘So Hercules,” I intimated, showing off what little I really knew, “Hera’s man,” was made to don women’s garments by Omphale, the Queen of the Lydians, so that he himself could reënact the true Hero’s Journey, the entire cycle of dying and rebirth, which necessarily involves reïncarnation in bodies of varying sexes.’

‘Exactly! Omphale, herself an incarnation of the primal Goddess of all preliterate humanity, was enacting the rôle of the Psychopomp now taken up by Maia, the spiritual guide who conducts the soul through the frightening cycle of dying and rebirth. Omphale’s very name means the Navel of the World – that is, a personification of the very deepest question, “Who in the world are we?” – and she and Hercules were said to be involved in a very strange relationship, in that she forced him to wear her garments whilst she wore his, and she ordered him around as a husband does his wife, demanding his wifely obeisance and modesty as he performed the daily duties normally required of the woman of the house, including worship paid to the household Gods, like Hestia and Hermes. Now in fact, that in and of itself isn’t really truly odd, since the Holy Mysteries of peoples all around the world quite often feature either male officiants wearing some sort of women’s garments, or women wearing men’s garments, perhaps as a symbol of rebirth, since human beings rarely have any choice about the stations in life they will inhabit on the other side of the veil, so must always be prepared for what’s to come. It’s a pity they didn’t keep at it, though, since I think the world would have been a better place if more people had taken the long view over the years.’

‘Beryl’s been saying that for ages,’ I said.

‘Well, she would have done, wouldn’t she then? As an avatar of the Kore, she would have been terribly concerned about the long-term fecundity of the Earth, given the short-sighted antics of a mostly uninformed humanity.’

‘I myself have often thought that the Mysteries should have been made available to everyone at no cost, since they gradually became commercial “cash cows” that catered to the wealthy, rather than being offered to all and sundry as their birthright.’

‘Well, it’s often been the case that people who are disinclined to actually work for a living quickly gravitate toward the priestly classes. In my day, we discouraged those who had a purely venal “calling” by requiring castration for male postulants, and perpetual virginity for the women.’ She laughed out loud, a sudden thunderstorm of mirth. ‘The vows of perpetual poverty didn’t hurt neither. That’s one thing the Buddhists got right, requiring their priests, or monks, as they called them, to go out begging for their food from the people they serve, each and every day. It tends to keep them relatively honest.’

‘What do you mean, “your day?” It’s not as if you’re dead.’

‘Oh, please! Until I met you, I’d been a virtual slave for almost seven thousand years, it’s not as if I’d been fulfilling any meaningful life plans. As far as that Poseidon jerk-off was concerned, I was merely a useful beast of burden that he used to intimidate his enemies with very little effort on his part. You, on the other hand, blithely changed the entire paradigm, in one fell swoop transmogrifying the sorry sod from Lord and Master into Lunch. My only quibble, and it’s very minor, is that I do wish that you’d persuaded him to discard his armor first, since it felt rather prickly going down.’

‘I know. I did most of the swallowing, if you’ll recall. It was just bad luck that your neck is so very long, compared to the one I’m used to, and so my timing was a little off.’

‘Well, least said is soonest mended, as they say. In any case, you should be off to fight for justice and right innumerable wrongs, since you seem to be the final arbiter of life and death these days.’ “Ladies, your mistress has need of you!” she roared in a voice like thunder, in a staggering declaration of august presence that a thousand lions working as a consortium might only dream of.

Within a few seconds the great mass of Sirens stooped from the sky like great eagles – at least a hundred or more of them – alighting with a curiously graceful unfurling of their wings that raised dust and bits of grass and fallen leaves over half an acre of meadow, including, curiously enough, thousands of wild dandelion florets that danced off into the sky. I made careful note of the incongruous beauty of the scene and day, a slight dusting of clouds drifting across an azure Southern sky, and the trees, the green grass, the slight stirrings of the insects, the song of birds, not at all undaunted by the sudden arrival of the winged women.

Peisinoe spoke first, “We’re at your service, Great Queen.” She bowed slightly and raised her hand in greeting.

“And I, Raidne!” another said, also saluting me with a casual nod and wave.

“Parthenope!” “Leucoisa!” “Aglaope!” “Thelxiepeia!” “Ligeia!” “Teles!” “Thelxiope!” … A hundred names and more rang out in a collective shout of instant readiness for action from the throats of a hundred women, all of them smiling.

“Ladies!” I shouted, “Tiamat, our honored Creatrix and Great Mother has reminded me that we share a common heritage, and have a common obligation to punish evil souls.” I cast my mind about, accessing the Akashic Record in real time. “To the northwest, the main camp of the largest group of remaining raiders and slavers remaining in the Southeast corner of this continent remains untouched. I propose to touch them with the spirit of genuine remorse and repentance as they are escorted personally to the Gates of Hades by the Ladies of this august company.”

Then I gathered my wits about me and reached for a dimly remembered form, rising up with wings that spanned six fathoms. “Up!” I cried, and took to the air in a fury of beating wings! The feeling of stronger muscles across my back was suddenly familiar, as was the matching strength across my chest, a whole vocabulary of movement and interior anatomy as familiar as the memory of trees had been when I first stepped foot into the broad world beyond the citadels.

With a great shout, they rose up behind me, a terrible mass of winged women, the true Sirens of legend, all armed and dangerous. As if we shared one mind, we veered slightly toward a nearby hill and caught the updraft within which we rose, spiraling toward the clouds.

As I flew, I manifested a sword of worth, Excalibur, in very fact, from another incarnation as the Lady of the Lake, Viviane, whose true stories and many names are all twisted up in a thousand lies and legends. Now that I had full access to all my memories, I finally saw exactly why I’d been both loved and feared through half a million years of human history. ‘Noblesse oblige!’ I thought. ‘Unfortunately for some, my duties haven’t always included neither kindness nor mercy.’

Even at the speed of angels, not quite as swift as thought, it took the best part of a quarter of an hour to reach the largish area they’d staked out as their own. Fat lot of good it did them, other than making them easy to find, since the horse trails up from the old peninsula and between their camps were easily visible from our height, their intricate switchbacks and ambuscades laid bare.

As for the Reiver camp in question, it turned out there were three of them. I chose the first at random, indicating its general direction in flight, which I knew would be clue enough for my small flock of avenging angels. The psychic stench of sin is unmistakeable, once you’ve smelt it, and it tends to infect the entire neighborhood, once it sinks in deep.

Hovering for a moment above them – for the sake of a quiet conference, since holding ourselves stationary in mid-air entailed rather more effort than soaring – I said, “I’m rather inclined to believe, from past experience with these general sorts of slavers, that anyone free to walk around unchained is part of the conspiracy, whilst their victims will most probably be confined. They do have firearms, however, which can pierce both flesh and bone, so be careful to kill them suddenly, and all at once, if possible.”

“Not to worry,” said Thelxiepeia, which name I understood to mean something like either ‘solace’ or ‘soothing voice,’ an interesting sort of name for a professional assassin, “the worst that can happen is that we visit you down below and rise refreshed in an instant, not to mention that immortal flesh and bone is notoriously difficult to damage.” She smiled benignly, which somehow didn’t seem all that comforting… in context.

From five thousand feet, through scattered wisps of cloud as we circled above it, moving from damp chill as we passed through thick tendrils of foggy stratocumulus cloud into warm sunlight, the camp seemed roughly similar to those we’d seen in the Appalachias, a low stockade with a more-​or-​less central keep where they kept their loot, and where the leader seemed to live, a slave pen with a fortified sub-stockade off to one side of the camp, a few outbuildings where the troops slept, and a communal kitchen where the slaves served out food that they weren’t allowed to eat. The women would be raped wherever convenient, but were usually returned to the pen when their ‘services’ were no longer desired. My vision seemed sharper somehow, so I guessed that it had something to do with my brand new shape-shifted body, although I was still heavily pregnant, so I hadn’t changed all that much. “Ladies!” I called out softly, pointing to the structures far below us, “Their leaders will usually be found in or near that largish building near the center of the camp, although they do wander around from time to time, and the slave pen is that open stockade off to the side, where they keep captives penned when they’re not being put to immediate use. The rest of the building are usually all the run-​of-​the-​mill gang-related, cookhouse, barracks, and storage, although they will have slaves in them occasionally. They’ll usually have a few pickets out to guard against ambush, so look for locations which overlook trails or other likely approaches to the central camp; they’re very unlikely to guard against anyone dropping in from above, I think.”

“Good!” Peisinoe said, “then let’s have at them, I’ll seek out the sentries first, just for luck, and let Sapphire here have all the fun of dispatching their leader.”

I grinned, already looking forward to it, and plummeted to the ground by simply turning myself upside down, as if I were diving into a lake, then folding my wings close to my flanks and legs as I dropped headfirst toward the camp a mile below us. As I began my plunge, I winked at Peisinoe and blew her a kiss by way of an informal farewell. She, and then the rest of the Siren cohort, followed close behind, the only sounds the rush and susurration of the very air as we plummeted through it, tickling and massaging our feathers as we slipped toward our separate targets. For some reason I noticed that there was no particular sound of wind in my ears, as I would have expected heretofore, so supposed it must be some sort of adaptation inherent in the structure of this body.

All too soon, the keep was just beneath me, possibly four hundred feet below, and through good luck – or fate – a burly man with a long sniper rifle was standing outside, talking to a woman whose ankle was chained to a heavy iron weight. From their instantaneous postures, he was making demands – I actually heard the words, ‘On your knees…’ as I dropped toward them at terminal velocity and she cowered. With a quick flick of my puissant sword, his head was off and rolling on the ground even as I flipped over and spread my wings, feeling the instantaneous pressure in the flight muscles of my chest, and the corresponding tension in my back as I brought myself up short with a graceful movement of my outspread wings, managing to regain my footing with some small degree of elegance. “Are you alright?” I said to the woman, who was cowering with her hands over her ears for some reason.

When she didn’t reply, I asked her again, this time touching her hair and stroking it, “Are you alright? You’re quite safe you know, as my companions have dispatched the last slaver.” Quickly, I looked around to ensure that my words were true, with a view toward remedying any departure from my reassuring description of the current situation with a few more instantaneous translations to the Underworld, if necessary. There were no lingering opportunities at all, the Sirens having followed my example by similar fatal curtailments throughout the camp and were even now seeking out their victims to offer comfort, freedom, and food.

Leaning down, I reached out to inspect the chain around her leg and said, “Please allow me to free you from these cruel fetters.”

The poor woman was still fearful, as might be expected, since winged women with swords were probably not regular visitors to this part of the world, and she had just seen a man decapitated, however much she may have feared and hated him, and however richly he’d deserved his fate.

Gently I reached out and touched her leg, my hand already filled with a large dollop of our ‘cheese,’ spreading it over the visible chafing and scars before grasping the two halves of the wicked thing with both hands and snapped it open as gently as possible, I spread more ‘salve’ over the newly-revealed festering wounds immediately, then inspected her more closely, healing whatever I could find from the outside before giving her a morsel of the solid stuff to eat, which she fell to with gusto, quite evidently starved for nourishment of all sorts.

‘Beryl?’ Considering how she’d seemed to be in a bit of a snit the last time I sent a pack of penitents down to Hell, I thought I’d offer my sympathy, at least. ‘We’ve freed the first camp, but it turns out that there were two satellite camps to the north of the main grouping, so you should receive a few more Reivers posthaste.’

‘No problem,’ she responded. ‘I have the disposition of them well in hand, and have sent most of them to cool their heels in Tartarus for a while, since they seem to have had little time to contemplate their many sins before being dispatched.’

‘Well, I didn’t have much to say, and didn’t want to give them any time to either threaten or harm their hostages in an attempt to bargain their way out of our swift and definitive justice.’

“Well, it was probably a good idea. So you’re going to do the same to the outlying camps?”

“I am, although I’ll leave a few Sirens behind to organize some sort of rescue for the captives. Do you think that you could dispatch a few of our troops to see to setting up some sort of longterm arrangement for them? If the local Reivers followed their usual practice, there’ll be none left behind in wherever they found them with whom they might reunite in any attempt to rebuild their former lives.”

‘Perhaps I can make arrangements for their loved ones down here,’ she said.

‘How would that work?’ I asked.

‘Well, if I could do it for Orpheus and Eurydice, I might as well be even-handed for similar victims of senseless violence. It seems a shame, when you stop to think about it, to make people wait for a second chance to be together, and the situations are very similar, since Eurydice was being pursued by a rapist when she died.’

‘That one didn’t turn out all that nicely for either one of them, as I recall.’

‘Yeah, well, that was under the previous management; we’re more on top of things these days. Other than deliberate cruelty, what was the point of granting poor Orpheus’ heartfelt wish for the return of his beloved, and then snatch her away again because he broke a silly rule that was designed to trick him in the first place?’

‘Especially since Aristaeus got off scot free, even though he’d harried the poor girl to her death,’ I complained sourly.

‘Well, that was then, and this is now. I don’t have the same inclination to whitewash “boyish hijinks” as did the ancient Greeks, who were all male, to hear them tell it.’

‘You know, there are some who say that Eurydice was only a euphemism, and that Orpheus actually tried to woo you away from Hades with his enchanting poetic talents, and that it was Hades himself who threw a crafty snare before the two of you when you tried to escape your unwilling captivity.’

I felt her smile. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, and so on…. Be that as it may, and I admit nothing, you’re not so terribly lacking in lyrical talent yourself, these days, although I’ve never seen you pick up an instrument. Does that make you Orpheus?’

‘If so, I had somewhat better luck in planning the second jailbreak,’ I told her, smiling. ‘As for lyres, I’m not all that bad with my tongue alone.’

‘Naughty girl!’ she said, and then turned to other things. Not that I blamed her, of course. Even with the global population cut down to roughly a tenth of its former count, and birth rates down as well, there were still roughly fifty thousand deaths a day that demanded almost instant attention, and I wasn’t helping. I made a mental note to catch up with my housekeeping as soon as I could spare a moment or two.

Idly, I wondered too if there were sentient beings on other worlds, somewhere in the universe, and exactly who it was who dealt with them if so. I knew it wasn’t either of us.

 

 

The second outpost was warned of our coming, or else their guards were at least more aware of the importance of a proper watch, since they started firing on us as we plummeted to Earth again, first one sentry, followed shortly by another few as his hysterical shouts aroused the camp, although it took them quite some time, by our standards, since we began accelerating with powerful sweeps of our wings as soon as the sentry looked up at us, and even then it took a few seconds for the ugly sod to gather his wits, whilst we covered the full mile back to Earth in less than seven seconds. In all, three sentries managed to get off shots, all badly aimed, since they weren’t used to aiming at an accelerating target, and before they learned that lesson they were dead, two decapitated, and one cleft through from head to crotch, which left a very awkward corpse. The rest didn’t happen to have a rifle near to hand, so were slaughtered as they scrambled to find one, and one was in the midst of raping one of the slaves, so he lost his head as well. His victim was a little hysterical for a while, but was quickly comforted by Leucoisa, who seemed to have quite a knack for it, since the former slave was laughing and calling out to her friends not two minutes later. I think the wings helped. Despite almost two centuries of Horticulturist indoctrination, most of us still had at least a vague notion of what angels were supposed to look like, and the Sirens certainly looked like what the stories described. Hell, I knew what I looked like, heavy bastard sword in hand, with twelve-foot wings splayed high; if I wasn’t an angel, I really ought to be one, although I did lack any sort of halo.

After a suitable interval, I approached the woman I’d rescued, since Leucoisa had moved on to other women by then. “Would you allow me to remove those shackles,” I said to her. “They don’t look at all comfortable, and I hate to see a woman chained.”

“They’re riveted,” she said.

“That’s not a problem,” I answered, bending down to take them in my two hands and rend them as easily as if they were paper, taking care to avoid injuring her as much as possible, although her ankles had been rubbed raw by the iron. Almost instantly, I had a handful of cheesy salve in hand and began soothing her ankle and leg with the healing mixture before moving on to her back, which was crisscrossed with scars and open sores from whipping. I was almost sorry then that I’d acted so quickly to dispatch her tormenter, since I really wanted to kill him twice, at least, this time with more care to ensure his very protracted agony. “Do you happen to know,” I said, “anything about the other outpost of these cowards? We’ve taken good care of the main center of them to the south already, so they’ll be the last we know of in the area.”

“I’ve heard that it’s much the same as this one, except that it sits atop the entrance to a cave, which is where they keep the women.”

“Do you know how big this cave is?”

“No, I’ve never seen it, but I know that it exists, even though they never put me there.”

“Could you tell me your name?” I asked her.

“It’s Cymophane, although they called me ‘Slut’ most of the time. That’s what they called most of us, actually.”

Her affect was dissociated and flat, as was all too common in many women freshly rescued from the Reivers. “No one will ever call you that again, Cymophane. Have you ever seen the precious mineral your name refers to? It’s quite beautiful, but also very tough, usually a sort of tawny orangish color with inclusions of another gem they call rutile, which simply means ‘reddish.’ It’s sometimes called ‘Catseye,’ because it reminded people of the eyes of cats, a small predator that commonly preyed on mice and other small animals, before the Plant Wars started.”

“Predator?” she asked, probably unfamiliar with the word, since we didn’t have many around these days.

“That’s an animal which captures other living beings and kills them, just as we just killed the men who treated you so badly.”

“So you’re one of these ‘predators?’ ” she asked.

“I have to confess that I am, but one of the very best sort, or at least I so flatter myself.”

“I want to be like you!” she said.

“You will be, if you like, and no man will ever have the strength to overpower you again, or force you to do anything against your will, whatever you decide to do in your personal life.”

“Good,” she said, “but I’d prefer to kill as many men as I can.”

I smiled. “Actually, they’re becoming rather scarce, at least locally, but there are places where they still abound. Do you have family anywhere?”

“Not that I know of. I was born in the pens, and never knew my mother, and the women who helped to raise me are all dead now.”

“Do you know what happened to your mother?”

“No. She was probably either killed or traded to some other group of Raiders. No one usually bothers to keep track, in the pens, because it happens a lot.”

‘Beryl!’ I called to her. ‘Please give this last batch a little extra time in Tartarus. I’ve just been talking to one of their victims, and they were a particularly nasty bunch.’

‘So I’ve discovered,’ Beryl answered. ‘Rest assured, my justice was both swift and certain. Even now, their entrails are being plucked by vultures, and will be for the next few centuries, at least.’

‘Thanks, Sweetheart. I should have known that I could depend on you.’

‘Nice to hear you admit it, Sapphire, Queen of the Damned.’

‘No more than you, Dear Heart, though you’re also Queen of the Blessed.’

‘I am, aren’t I? On the other hand, you’re terribly good at taking out the trash, and I am awfully fond of you.’

‘We all have our proper rôles,’ I opined.

She didn’t respond, so I posited an expressive roll of her eyes as I refocused my thoughts.

I returned my attention to Cymophane. “You may be pleased to know, then, that their shades are going to spend the next few hundred years having their livers and bowels snatched out by vultures.”

“That sounds nice, but what are ‘vultures’?” she asked me.

“A type of bird, a winged predator, but not like me. They usually prey on creatures who can no longer move around for any reason.”

“Shouldn’t you be going, then? They do have radios, and will be expecting to talk with someone soon enough.”

I actually hadn’t thought of that, to my chagrin. “You’re right, of course, but I wanted to make sure that you were on the mend before I left. There’s no danger of them escaping my justice, which is very swift and certain, as is that of my companions here.”

“Will I grow wings?” she asked, and seemed hopeful.

“I think it might be arranged,” I answered her with a benign smile. “I seem to be in charge of these sorts of things lately.”

“Good!” she exclaimed. “Now get going and rescue the other women!”

“I’m off, then,” I said, and left, gathering a half dozen Sirens as I walked to the edge of the camp, seeking a little room to spread our wings. There was a nice low cliff there, above a local stream that seemed to head off roughly south, towards the distant ocean, and the approach to the edge was grass, not bushes. The entire area looked as if it had been heavily grazed, but there were no horses present, so I assumed that there was a raiding party out somewhere.

‘Peisinoe,’ I found her. ‘The second camp of these slavers appears to be partially vacated, so I’m guessing that they’re out raiding somewhere. I’m off to rescue the women of the third camp, supposedly the last, but could you spare a few Sirens to go look for the missing Reivers if we don’t find them?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘We’re just sitting around doing little besides gossip and grousing right now, so it would be nice to see a little action.’

‘I’ll leave them to you, then, and concentrate on the women of the other camp.’

‘That sounds good to me. Do have fun, and I’ll try not to kill everyone, in case you want to interrogate a couple of them.’

‘It actually doesn’t matter all that much, since I can always access the Akashic Record.’

‘Akashic Record? What’s that?’

‘It’s a little complicated to explain, but it’s sort of like an Oracle, but far more accurate than most, and it really only operates in relation to the present moment, or the past. It’s not really a good predictor of the future, although it can give one excellent clues, just as timely military intelligence can allow one to make reasonable guesses as to the enemy’s future disposition.’

‘Couldn’t you use it to find your missing slavers?’ she said.

‘Yes, but it can take quite some time to sort through the data when you’re not looking for specific individuals, and I’m afraid that the people left in charge of the third outpost may get wind of the fact that the other two have gone silent. In the past, Reivers have reacted to the danger of discovery by simply killing all possible witnesses, so time is really of the essence.’

‘I see, and I agree. Please forgive my ignorance.’

‘Not a problem, I think. I don’t feel any immediate disturbance in the near vicinity, so believe that we still have a bit of time to spare. I’m off, in any case,’ I said.

‘Good hunting!’ she said.

I took off running.

“Cymophane!” I called out, “Would you like to take a little trip to help rescue the remaining captive women?”

She looked suddenly frightened, but then she steeled herself and said, “Yes!”

“Brave girl!” I said, sweeping her up into my protective embrace. “Hang on tight and don’t let go, whatever happens.” I squatted down slightly and then leapt into the air, unfurling my wings to their full span at the same time, then pulled myself aloft with a mighty stroke of my wings, then began to row through the air as I gained altitude, Cymophane held safely in my arms.

‘Sirens! I need two of you, I think, but please no more than two. We need a strong enough force left behind to guard the camp against the remaining outlaws.’

“At once!” Teles said, and then Ligeia said the same, both leaping into instant motion as they sprang into the sky, climbing quickly upward into the clear blue empyrean… well, not literally. In any case, a faint track trodden down by horses led off into the piney woods below us, the likely direction of the third camp. “What do you think?” I called to them as we flew along.

“I smell villainy ahead,” was Ligeia’s reply, which was good enough for me. Thirty miles we flew, the horsepath fading in and out of clarity, depending on the thickness of the foliage, but the stench growing stronger as we neared our destination. Even I could smell it now.

At last we saw it, a typical Reiver fortress, but smaller than usual. There was an outcrop of rock on one side, not quite a cliff, but neither a hill, a solitary bastion thrust up through the woods without any context otherwise, as if some giant had dropped it from his arms, if giants there were who could carry a lump of limestone a hundred feet or so tall and two hundred long, something like a loaf of bread, but harder. There were two sentries we could spy out, one in a makeshift hidey-hole carved into the face of the rock above the camp, but with no clear access to it, unless they had a rope ladder stowed away for access. The other was concealed behind the stockde itself, in a little wooden shack that was little more than a shed roof covering an acute angle formed by two sections of the wall itself. Both looked a little awkward to access, as both strongholds were far too constricted to accommodate our wings. “What do you think?” I said to Teles. “Did anyone think to bring along a bow and a few dozen arrows?” I had a rifle with me, of course, in addition to my puissant glaive, but it was difficult to begin a stealthy assault with a fusillade of bullets.

“It won’t be a problem,” Ligeia said. “I have knives.” She adroitly displayed a half-dozen throwing knives in a very deadly-looking fan, then tucked them away again in some hidden recess of her garments, a white chiton pinned at the shoulders with decorative bronze clasps, with a white himation overall, a surprising elegant outfit for a warrior, but I didn’t doubt her deadly prowess, having seen the Sirens at their work.

“The hole in the rock won’t be much of a problem,” I said. “I can simply land on top of the cliff, drop down over the edge, and catch the edge of the hole as I fall past. Even I should be able to disable the sentry with a well-thrown rock at that distance, and I’m highly motivated.”

Ligeia smiled and answered, “I can take the man in the box on the wall easily enough, since I can simply lift off the roof and grab him.”

“I take it then you’re strong,” I said.

“A bit. Flying tends to develop upper-body strength, and our archetype is inherently robust. It goes with the job description. One of the favorite punishments of old was being rended limb from limb, which makes a terrible mess, especially when tearing off the legs.”

“I imagine.” I answered. “We’ll have to be quick once we start; they have a tendency to hide behind ‘human shields.’ ”

“Cowards!” Ligeia spat toward the ground, although there was a long way down to reach it.

I said, “Let’s be off, then,” and started my stoop towards the top of the rock. They followed.

I landed silently, one great advantage of having wings, and proceeded immediately to carry out my plan. I crawled toward the edge, finding it extremely awkward – one disadvantage of wings – until I reached the edge. Glancing over, I checked the position of the sentry’s spy-hole, then dropped, a five-pound rock in one hand and the other ready to catch the edge. I took him by surprise, although I had to beat my wings just once to catch my hold, since the edge of the spy-hole was more rounded than it looked. My rock crushed his skull quite nicely, though, so I dropped the rest of the way to the ground. Once I’d landed, I looked up the wall of the stockade and saw the roof of the guard station was off, so figured that Ligeia had been successful in her own mission. I couldn’t see any others of the slavers, though, so looked toward the opening of what must be a cave of some sort, although it had a carved lintel and decorative rails on either side of a stone door, all inset into the face of the cliff by some three feet or so, which must make a nice shelter from the rain, but which had prevented our seeing it from above. ‘Harry’s Brass Balls’ I cursed silently. I hadn’t seen any sort of slave pen either, so it must be inside the cave, and the job was no longer looking quite so straightforward, as well as very strange, to judge by the usual Reiver camp. Of course, that explained why the two assaults on the sentries had gone completely unnoticed, as far as I could tell, so it was a mixed blessing, or curse, depending on which way one looked at it. I glanced out toward the yard, where there was a wooden structure that I’d incorrectly assumed was the ‘Big House’ where the leader slept and kept his treasury, but was now looking more like barracks, at least in hindsight. At the same time, it looked pretty damned impregnable, a mini-keep within the main keep, plus that damnable stone door. ‘What in Harry’s Horrendous Green Hell were these guys playing at?’ I thought to myself, but then I had was I modestly imagined was a brilliant idea.

‘Gumball!’ I called out to him with a little extra mental ‘oomph.’ ‘Would you mind going down to the Underworld and coming back in your dragon form? I’m quite sure that you can do that, and if not, I’ll help.’

Then I turned to my fellow assassins, ‘Ligeia! Teles! I’m going to cause a ruckus, I think, so please be aware of any opportunity for mayhem.’

Teles laughed, then said, ‘I like the way you think.’

Then I felt Gumball rising up from Hell to meet me and told him, ‘Gumball, in the enclosure here there’s an ugly log building. I’d like you to take it apart very carefully, in case there are any women inside, but you can eat any men you find.’

Gumball took the simplest path and simply rose up beneath the blocky log building, slowly rending it into individual logs. In the process, I saw three Reivers disappear down his capacious maw and then he looked toward me. I swear that he was grinning. His dragon face was far more expressive than that of his native form. ‘Excellent! my noble Gumball! You’re the best! but now, if you don’t mind, could you please come over here and knock down this damned door?’

With a sudden roar and an eruption of white-hot dragon fire, he attacked the door. Evidently, dragon fire is fairly hot, so the instantaneous application of Gumball's violent blast of flame on the cold stone caused the door to shatter into jagged shards which fell from the doorframe into a heap of rubble. I saw two Reivers staring toward Gumball in horror and took advantage of their discomfiture by throwing my sword through the throat of one and a handy piece of rubble through the skull of another, then I jumped inside to gather up my sword. Over in one corner was a wooden wall with at least seven women staring at the spectacle before them through cracks between the rough-hewn planks, on the other were three more Reivers, even now reaching for their rifles, which had been propped against the stone wall behind them. Big mistake. One should aways keep one’s weapon close to hand. I remedied my own fault by wrenching my sword from deep in the body of the first Reiver and jumped toward the others, already swinging. Through sheer good luck – and more than a little skill, or so I flattered myself – I managed to separate three heads from three bodies with one fell arc of lashing steel, then looked around the rest of the room.

At the far end, in partial darkness – since the place was lit by exactly three smoky candles – sat the damnedest critter I’d ever seen, what looked like a portmanteau of human, snake, and bird, garishly outfitted in yellow, green, and red cloth armor. It looked like a bad choice to go against a dragon, but then I personally couldn’t thank of any choices that weren’t bad in a situation like that.

He seemed to have the same idea, since he made no move toward his own weapons, which appeared to consist of a wooden club studded with flint blades and a wooden spear headed with a very nicely-knapped obsidian spearhead. “Whoo arre yooou?” he hissed at me, a severe speech impediment obvious in his voice, probably resulting from a mouth full of very sharp and pointy teeth and a tongue that was decidedly forked. If a snake could talk – and this one obviously could – he’d sound just like that.

“The global Goddess of the Underworld, and other things too numerous to bother mentioning.” I didn’t want to get into a pissing contest with him, whomever he might be, and my first title really encompassed nearly everything, since everything that lived in any sense came eventually under my dominion, and I was very patient. ‘Mother Earth is waiting for you; there’s a debt you’ve got to pay.’ “And who might you be?” I enquired.

“Quetzalcoatl! Sky God, Vision-Bringer, and Creator of the Universe,” he boasted loudly. He didn’t quite beat his manly chest, but he might as well have.

“Yeah, well,” I said, not in the most friendly manner, I have to admit, “I’ve got quite a few other tricks up my sleeve as well, but I don’t like to hyperbolize. To be perfectly plain, I’m not at all fond of these creeps you seem to be hanging out with, but have nothing in particular against you that I know of, so I’m inviting you to leave the field of conflict and retire in perfect safety.”

“Woman! How dare you!?” He was obviously incensed. “I am the God of War”

“Yeah? You and whose army?” I just happened to be the Goddess of War myself, from a lineage far more ancient, I suspect, and the little creep was starting to annoy me, that was for sure, so I partly blame myself for what happened next.

The snaky guy opened his mouth wider than seemed humanly possible – which was a dead giveaway that he wasn’t really human, I suppose – and stretched out his head to engulf me, or I guess that’s what he’d been planning to do – when two things happened. First, I brought up my sword and plunged it down his open gullet in half a trice, which didn’t do him much good at all, and then Gumball stretched out his scaly neck and ate the guy from his shoulders down, which left his head still hanging on my sword, from which it fell and then went rolling on the ground, managing to find its way into a corner from which it didn’t move. He didn’t say much after that, although his eyes did blink once or twice before they glazed over. “Great job, Gumball!” I praised him effusively, since I was loath to criticise any action taken in the heat of battle, which this clearly was, nor did I forget the fact that Gumball had intervened to save my life, a habit I tended to approve of, and would be extremely reluctant to censure him in any case, even if a more measured approach might have left the reptilian idiot alive. As a treat, I picked up the now redundant head and tossed it to him, and he caught it very nicely. I couldn’t help wondering at the symmetry of it all, since Gumball as a dragon might be considered a type of serpent with wings, whilst this Quetzalcoatl guy had appeared to be a type of serpent with only feathers. Funny how all things seemed to be connected. If I didn’t know better, it might have seemed almost like a story.

‘Beryl, sweetie,’I called instantly to my putative wife, ‘ Gumball and I have sent you a little special gift, along with the Reiver riffraff. He seems to be some sort of snake god in the local pantheon, but he’s not very bright.’

‘They never are, and you don’t have to tell me,’ she said sourly. ‘He’s already whining about his plight, since he expected an entirely different sort of afterlife, is irritated that a mere women struck him dead, by what he loudly declares were unfair means, since he didn’t have time enough to get fully prepared for your treacherous ambush, and doesn’t much care for our mostly self-service franchise down here either, since he believes that he’s entitled to a large retinue of servants, and especially a bevy of sexy women at his beck and call.’

‘Hang on, I’ll be right there,’ I said and changed my viewpoint in a flash of illumination.

I took in the scene in an instant, our little God-boy all puffed up with indignation, Beryl on her throne in high dudgeon, her brows furrowed and her manner tense. ‘Hey, you!’ I said. ‘Snakeboy!’

He turned and glared at me, obviously recognizing the source of all his troubles in me. Tough luck; he’d asked for it. I conjured my virtual deck of cards again and slapped Trump Twenty-One upside his head, The World, a Woman grown in power to rule the cosmos, and the Significator of my own Dominion, which changed everything. All that was other shrank in him until it was subsumed in the face he’d had before he was born, the fœtal tadpole that we’d all started out as, destined to evolve into feminine form with a good jolt of testosterone. He was lucky at that, since I could as easily have jolted him right back into a starfish, the ancient originator of our own roughly five-fold symmetry, and left him with no brains at all.

I sat back to watch him radiate for a few instants before I stopped him, his new Müllerian ducts already fixed, and let him grow until he started breathing on his… make that her own, then put the finishing touches on, stopping her accelerated growth at the equivalent of about eighteen years of age in the waking world. “Wake up!” I said. “Arise reborn!” and she did.

Unfortunately, her personality hadn’t changed all that much, and she immediately tried to attack me again, albeit somewhat less forcefully, so I killed her again. I really didn’t have all that much time to spare for reclamation projects, and we have a whole system set up in the Underworld to rehabilitate lapsed sinners, so I sent her to the back of the line. She’d been working with the slavers, in any case, whatever it was she was doing, so was probably just as much of a jerk as she’d looked like as a God. I can’t see being part snake as any sort of character recommendation, in general, and of course snakes aren’t terribly clever in the first place, so her intellectual capacity may have been limited. A few thousand years spent talking with ordinary people, perhaps even a few scientists and philosophers, might well improve her prospects.

“After all… tomorrow is another day,” I mused aloud.

 

 

 

 

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

Copyright © 2012-2014 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved