kroth:  the slant

10: hungry horizon

I opened my left eye.
    My gaze met sky: it had become duskier.  Without yet raising my head to look, I sensed that the sun had just disappeared behind the Slope.
    My eye followed the line of my out-flung left arm which lolled southward.  Beyond my hand, grassland, interspersed with small patches of forest, extended down the slope of the world, till it met the deepening blue of the sagorizon.
    Maybe half a mile off, moving figures were visible in the gloaming: Gonomong, on their mounts.  I stared, awake but hardly knowing it.  Those figures –
    In retreat?
    Yes - into the distance: a shrinking, dim multitude of decapods, carrying or in some cases dragging their fallen masters.
    Stickiness smeared my right cheek, which rested on my shoulder; some noise issued from my throat.  Other groans and whimpers, coming from behind me, penetrated my woozy consciousness.  Screams broke out, and were just as suddenly cut short.  I tiredly closed my eye, but continued to listen.  
    Next thing I knew, my wrist was held, then released. “This one's all right, I reckon,” said a voice.
    I opened my eye again. A youngish man squatted beside me. The twilight had dimmed somewhat; real night had not yet fallen. I must have passed out again but not for more than a few minutes.
    “You're all right, mate, aren't you?” the man said, sounding fairly sure about it. I also saw the boots and trousers of a companion standing to his right, one knee bent in the typical slope stance. A satchel rested on the ground between them.
    “Yaaagh,” I said, or words to that effect.
    “You were born lucky, I guess.  Flung out this far, yet no bones broken; I'd call it a krunking miracle.” The squatting man shook his head in wry admiration of my good fortune, stood up and reached for the satchel.  Just then I heard some more screams, from a different direction than the first lot. The man said to his companion, “That one next.”
    “Urrgh?” I called.
    He looked back, and advised:  “Just get up when you can; there's no hurry. We've got more urgent cases than headache to deal with!” He and his companion, who was carrying a folded stretcher, walked past my head.
    “Wait – ” I was able to croak. “We won?”
    It was the other man who spoke this time. “Of course we won, ye daft bat! D'ye think the doctor and I'd be picking up the pieces otherwise? I tell ye, if we'd lost this scrap, we'd ken nothing about it.”
    “Sorry,” I mumbled.
    “Don't be sorry; be proud. You laddies have done yer job well. Sent the Rip-Mig reeling for a generation, in my opinion. Things can only get better from now on.”
    Propped up on one elbow I twisted to look where they went and I saw maybe a dozen or more other medical teams picking their way among strewn bodies. I sat up, while waves of dull pain sloshed in my head, and got my right eye open, there being nothing wrong with it except for some blood stuck around the lid. I felt terrible and lucky and guilty and joyful at being alive. I tried to shut my ears to the agonies of the wounded. I had to look, though, because my nervous system was still half keyed up to battle, a situation in which you have to see what's coming.
    The base of the embankment was about six or seven yards from where I lay.  Most of the bodies lay along it, like snowdrifts against a wall, though a sizeable minority, like myself, had been flung further a-field by the force of the rout. Hundreds of bodies, all in the blue uniform of the regular army or the brown jackets of the militia. We had won at fearful cost. But why could I not see any dead or injured Gonomong?
    Well, it would have taken more than this rout down the embankment's south side to kill those mounted men; their steeds would have retained their footing. The dead Gonomong were the ones who had been trapped instead on the Vallum's north side, hidden from where I was. The triumphant, the exuberant Gonomong, who'd streamed through the gap they had punched in our line, and fanned out in their drive to surround us completely – they were the ones who must now be lying mangled and pulped in the avalanche that crushed them. We had won because as it turned out they had after all been stupid enough – forgetful enough, in their elation – to put themselves in the path of the Marraspang.
    As for the rest, the survivors…. I remembered the retreating forms I had seen southward. Turned once more in that direction, I peered in fascination through the deepening twilight and saw, very obscurely, that the defeated survivors were still visible, though now too far away to be distinguished as individuals.  Evidently, no attempt was being made by our side to pursue or harry them. Having given them a beating we were allowing them to recede into the dim depths of Slantland.
    Perhaps we lacked the strength to prevent their escape, but I guessed, also, that it might suit our policy. Tales told by the surviving Gonomong would serve our purpose. The terrible surprise that had turned the tide of the battle, as it gained in the telling, would inspire such dread of Topland's ingenuity that it might earn us a generation of peace.
    From this, another overwhelming truth burst upon me, namely that the previous overwhelming truth that had burst upon me was actually a load of rubbish. Topland's strategy, far from being fatally flawed, had been vindicated; our general actually did know what he was doing.

                                                   *

A lone, abandoned, riderless decapod - one curious minor exception to the enemy's retreat – was crouched about twenty yards from me.
Its four back limbs and its six front limbs lay flat on the ground; between them, the central length of body arched like the curve of a capital Omega. Its head-shield lay tilted back which allowed me to glimpse a blunt face somewhat like that of a tortoise.  At that moment, as if suddenly aware of my gaze, it moved its head slightly round.  I hastily looked elsewhere, purely as a reflex, to avoid eye contact.  Why? I didn't know why. I felt no aversion for the creature.  Nor could I see any reason to fear it.
    Meanwhile, lights came on as technicians strung up lamps on aluminium poles, the closest of them not many yards from where I lay. Soldiers, medicos and nurses were moving around, setting up a field hospital with equipment lowered on ropes from the Vallum. Everything was placed on platforms which in turn were set up using standardized wedges or “chocks”, bevelled to compensate for a 30-degree Slope. I admired the practised rapidity with which the chocks were placed to serve as foundations for planks on which, in turn, plastic bricks were laid, building up to the larger platforms for beds and tables.
    Amid all this activity, no one tried to approach the decapod, or, alternatively, to shoo it away. People ignored it. They wanted nothing to do with it. If someone unthinkingly approached within a few yards of it and then became suddenly aware of the thing's proximity, he or she would shrink away.
    I thought, that creature is staring at me. Just on the edge of the illuminated zone, it sat waiting. Was this a melodramatic way of describing it? For a human, a “wait” implies purpose; I must remember that this thing was only an animal. Yet the fact remained, that while far off in the gathering night its defeated brethren were retreating southwards, this one lingered…. Of course, I repeated, it was only a beast. Should I let myself get jumpy at being stared at by a decapod? No, and yet –  A nebulous suspicion came into my head, that in some way or other the battle was not yet over for me.
    Part of my problem, no doubt, was a stupid sort of guilt at having got through it all intact when so many of my comrades had been killed or maimed.  A kind of embarrassment at being a favourite of Providence. I found it did not help to say, “accidents will happen, including accidents of survival”; I could not accept pot luck so easily.  I became receptive to the fuzzy idea, that I was alive because I had a debt still to pay.
    I eventually scrambled upright. A nurse saw my swaying step, hurried towards me, grabbed to steady me and said, “Come on, I'll clean you up.”
She escorted me towards a zone marked out by folding chairs and a wash-stand, an area for those like myself, the dazed but not too serious cases, the lucky ones. I allowed myself to be led, and while the nurse removed the caked blood from my face, I encouraged myself to relax, to quieten the core of horror which still quaked deep inside me.  How absurd to be jumpier after the battle than while it raged….
    “Wemyss,” said a weak voice.
    I did an eyes-right and saw a man with a bandage round his head, resting in one of the chairs. He said, “Glad you survived.”
    I recognized Murena. “Captain – great to see you, sir.” And it was great, even though I had never particularly cottoned to him. For he was doing something which deserved an affectionate hurrah: he was continuing in existence, he was alive.
    “Seen any of the others?” he asked. “Our company, I mean.”
    “No sir, none yet.”
    “Don't reckon we will. Not many.”
    “But, sir, we did it: we won the victory.” A pause.
    “Yes,” he murmured. “We had to win. It was that or kerunk.”
    “No chance they might, er, mount a counter-attack?” I inquired. I was glad he hadn't said anything cynical, but I wanted at the same time to rouse the old Murena disdain.
    He replied in a rambling style which wasn't much like him.
    “Gonomong counter-attack now? If there were any chance of that, our look-outs on Neydio would tell us. Infrared scopes they have up there; turn night into day.”
    “I hope so, sir.”
    “You 'hope so'. Breathe again, Wemyss - the war's over.” The curt Murena, the one I knew, was back again. He added, with a dry husk of a laugh, “We put such a scare into the Mongees….”
    “For another generation,” I nodded.
    “That'll do me.  One whole generation of peace? I'll be satisfied with that.”
    I on the other hand, no matter how much I wanted to sit back and enjoy the miracle of life after the prospect of death, could not yet relax. Conscience was a needle between my shoulder blades. Get up, it said, and see to one last job, after which you will be allowed to enjoy your luck.
    But I've already done my bit! I fought all through the horror and came out the other side!
    Yes, with the aid of that extra allowance of luck, for which the bill has now arrived.
    You don't mean –
    Yes. Turn around.
    You may theorize, you may think you understand, that the transition from battle to quietness, from dire peril and the expectation of death to sudden safety, is likely to be as unhinging as the opposite change, enough to make a fellow begin to hear voices. You may decide that what was wrong with me was my inability to unwind, to cope with my own relief. Or you may more superstitiously say that I was experiencing the far-off sucking pull of the insatiable sagging horizon.  Howsomever, the reasons for my action are debatable.  
    The nurse had finished with me; no one, except possibly Murena, was watching me. I swivelled in my chair. The voices around me grew faint, while pesky Conscience grew louder, and I found myself staring once more at the placid decapod.  
    It sat isolated, shunned by all, as it munched grass in the half-light on the edge of the hospital area. See? You cannot refuse the opportunity.
    Opportunity?
    To ensure that today's horror will not happen again.
    I could, I must, rise out of my chair. All right, Conscience, I know, I know, I will confront the creature….
    Though drained of most of my energy, I felt basically sound and whole.  Ready for a final gasp or two of effort, I was nerved by a spirit of resolve that seemed to blow into me from the night breeze. It was a surge of trust: a conviction that honesty in the long run really does pay: a decision to face the truth, the real reason why I was alive and unhurt.
    It was not at the very foot of the Vallum, not on the heap of the fallen, that I had recovered consciousness after the battle. It was at some distance from there that I opened my eyes. If chance really did fling me so many yards away from the rest, then no bodies can have broken my fall, so I ought to have been seriously injured, probably killed.  
    So it didn't happen that way. I did fall with the majority. But then that thing picked me out, dragged me from the heap, dragged me several yards until, to avoid discovery, it withdrew to wait.
    Now I was walking towards it. One ruby eye fixed on me, it was tearing up some grass when it saw me approach. Its jaws ceased to work. Then its head and front paws and the whole front third of its body subsided, lay extra flat and still, and waited for its new rider.
    Confidence came to me from I knew not where. I was convinced I was about to do the right thing; the basis of this conviction was an unidentifiable cotton-wool blur of assurance, floating without logical support. Sharper reasons did exist, but they weren't what made me dare. My motives remained fuzzy until – as my strides brought me closer – details came into focus and I became overwhelmed by the creature's fitness for its role of steed. In place of arrangements such as saddle or stirrup, the shape of its body was adapted in detail for conveying humans: its hide was stepped and flapped where the rider's feet must go; its ruff provided protection for one's legs; the holes in the head-shield were positioned for one's eyes to see through….
    If war is to be avoided in the future, or at least made less costly, we Toplanders need to beat the enemy at their own game – learn to be properly mobile in Southern latitudes – meet the Southern powers on equal terms, instead of cowering behind walls or relying upon avalanches.
    I, the dreamer of Earth, free from Krothan phobias, free from Topland terrors, free from any Northern antipathy for the worms of the South – I shall be the first “shonk” to master the steed of the Gonomong.
    All this was true, but it wasn't enough to explain how I dared, or how I succeeded.  What really did make me do it? The pull of destiny? Not a nice idea, really – being pulled by a force. You don't know where it's been.   Especially a force that pulls down-Slope from the lands of terror.
    “Hey! Look what that feller's doing!” cried a startled voice.
    “Quiet!” hissed Captain Murena. “You – fetch the Colonel. You – find me a camera.”
    The decapod had reared, revealing the mauve stripes down its front, whereupon I remembered that I had seen this particular beast during the battle. Now its front paws waved close to my face. Then it lowered itself again and fawned on me, rubbing the edge of its head-shield against my side, gently nudging me round to where it wanted me to step up. In another moment I was astride it.
    “Great krunking gadrop,” called another voice. “Will you look at that?”
    “Quiet!” repeated Murena. “Nobody interfere.”
    I wanted the creature to rise to its feet, and no sooner had I formulated the thought, than it rose; I wanted it to take a step forward, and immediately it did so. The fuzzy blur in my brain, the cotton-wool presence, was, it seemed, one end of a psychic conducting rod, the other end of which extended into the decapod's brain. Krunking gadrop, indeed. And yet swear-words seemed inappropriate. It was all happening as smoothly as a lullaby.
With effortless skill, borrowed free of charge I knew not how, I took the decapod through its first paces under my command. You have seen an inchworm move: the front end goes up, quests for a moment or two, goes forward and down, and then the rear end likewise goes up and forward and down. Imagine you're sitting near the front end of a giant version, just behind a kind of prow that is formed by a head and two front limbs raised on a neck that extends beyond the central arch. You might think that the up-down, up-down motion would make you, the rider, sick. But actually it does not feel that way. A fuzzy blur in your head, a rapport and command link, provides constant and instantaneous feedback, so that you experience the thing's movements as properly yours, as quite natural and expected. You don't in the least mind the up, down, up, down. I'll put it more strongly: you hardly even think of it. When, in an everyday situation, a man wants (for example) to raise his arm, his inner command and the act he performs are, so far as he can tell, simultaneous. To my amazement, my control of the decapod was just like that. No sooner did I think to wish it to move than it moved in obedience to my thought. It might as well have been a part of me.
    “He makes it look easy,” commented Murena.
    “Too easy,” came the clipped response of Colonel Reece. He arrived with a look of glum disbelief on his thin face. “Meanwhile, captain, I note that everyone else round here has seen fit to stop work to watch this curvetting.”
    “Perhaps they need…. need to witness….”
    “And what, may I ask, are we witnessing?”
    “History, sir,” said Murena.
    Indeed the crowd continued to swell and it was not long before my little area of grassy Slope was surrounded by men who evidently were not quite exhausted by the hours they'd spent fighting for their lives, men who still had the energy to come and gawp at something new. They must, I thought, be as crazy as I am. But then after all why should I be the only one who had sensed unfinished business at the end of the near-death experience which we had all undergone today? Why shouldn't I be given moral support? That, no doubt, was why I sensed no actual hostility, despite the distaste I could see in the drawn faces around me: they saw the point of my efforts, they understood, or at least they intuited, that I was trying to see to it that the war was properly finished off, that the whole nasty episode could be filed “closed”.
    Of course there was bound to be a lot of argument. I could hear the murmurs, and the lamplight revealed to me the faces on which fascination, even admiration, contended with disgust and loathing. Colonel Reece's expression of wincing amazement was no different from the crowd's average.  While he conferred with Murena, I went on with the demonstration, I turned in various manoeuvres, meeting the stares on every side with a stare of my own in which I packed as much confident reassurance as I could. Finally the Colonel called out to me:
    “Wemyss! How can you control that thing?”
    I could tell by his tone, his question really required I prove to him that it was not controlling me.
    I shouted back: “It responds to thought control, sir.”
    “Tell it to turn three times clockwise.”
    I did so and it happened.
    Reece nodded, “I'd rather believe your explanation, than believe that it heard me and knows English. Now listen carefully, Wemyss. This business could be big, but we've got to make sure we finish it properly. Suppose you want to get down, what will - No! No! Don't actually do it; just tell me. I see, I see.” For I had ordered the decapod to let me off and it had begun to descend into its crouch.
    Reece seemed satisfied. “Don't get off yet,” he emphasized. He spoke to someone by radio. Then he said: “We can make a start. Clear a way, you people….” and he began to snap out orders for an escort of spears to form around us. “Now then, Wemyss, start moving. I've found some secure quarters for you and your mount.” Further orders – by radio, these – must, I guessed, concern what was to happen at the other end of the rapidly organized procession.
    “Am I under arrest, sir?” I hazarded.
    “You're not a prisoner, but your mount is. As for you, you're a hero. So shut up and co-operate.”
    Not wishing to receive another blast of what I took to be irony, I obediently refrained from asking any more questions. I had done what I could. My task was over; for me the day was done, really done, at last, and I hardly cared whether they took away my liberty or not, so long as they put me in a room with shower and clean bedding. The exhaustion which I had so far kept at bay now took possession of me so that I could hardly move a muscle, and only the fact that I rode by means of mental command enabled me to continue. Follow orders, I told myself, and don't try to think ahead.
    We approached a space at the foot of the Vallum that was now cleared of corpses. Boards had been placed over the bloodied ground, wide enough for us to tramp over.
    Up the Vallum's south slope, we progressed; going home now, I thought, groggily. The escort carried torches, whose beams swung this way and that. In addition, little blue-white glares, from ground-lamps shining up into our faces, began to line the path we took, as the Army's technicians went to further trouble to light the way: not so much a torch-light procession, as a cats'-eyes procession, I thought in sleepy wonder. The effect flowed up to the top of the embankment, to the battlements. My decapod then stepped, my escort clambered, over onto the Vallum summit, where I averted my eyes from the havoc revealed by the torch-beams. Switch off, I wanted to shout: I don't wish to see. Yet the veil of night in any case couldn't cover the horror, couldn't abolish – rather, worsened – the smells and the stumbling. Despite all this, peace crept into me; the tired-out sense of a part played, disgrace avoided, approval earned…. all rewarded with permission to surrender to weariness.
    We crossed over, to the north edge of the embankment; here the line of lights continued over the planks of a bridge which must have been thrown together with impressive speed, to reach horizontally from the Vallum to a point on the Slope beyond. Why had such a bridge been built? No need to ask: this was where the great mess lay, the gruesome mash where the boulders had come down. Some of my escort played their torch-beams over horrid fragmentary sights which my eyes skidded to avoid. I thanked the new bridge for saving us from having to clamber over the great rocks and wade through the crushed remains amongst them.
    Faraliew, I reflected, must take responsibility for this. He it was who composed this scene; he must have given the actual order, whereupon the rocks rolled and rebounded to their rest amid the splashed and pounded meat. He – none other – had spoken and it was done.
    What a way to earn a mention in the history books.
    I did not try to be fair, to weigh points for and against his military decision; my mind simply gave way to revulsion. My hatred of what had happened flowed up to the general in command, and, past him, flowed higher still. The sheer ghastliness of it all shocked my entire belief system into a new shape.
    An “Act of God” – that was how an insurance company would refer to a naturally occurring avalanche. But if Nature's acts are God's, and if Man is a part of Nature, it follows that all manifestations of human wickedness, including wars and battles, are also Acts of God. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…. and in so doing He unleashed an avalanche of cause and effect which had evidently escaped from His control.  “God,” thought I, “You have acted irresponsibly.” In my present black mood I told Him that He ought not to create any universe which was liable to lead to something like this; it just wasn't worth it.
    I had meant well, I had wanted to do my bit, to fulfil my sense of obligation to the society of Topland, the wonderful yob-free civilization to  which I was proud to belong…. but I hadn't joined up in order to play a part in a massacre.
    Admittedly – so I conceded – He has earned high marks for having created all that is splendid and loveable. But what's the point doing that and then smashing it up? Or rather, letting it be smashed up (for I was now convinced that He had lost control).
    So my view shifted. I thought to see God's career on Earth in a new light.  My religious background (my mother had brought me up as a Congregationalist) turned out to be insufficiently strong to stand up to the test of battle, or rather, of the aftermath of battle, and so a host of new perspectives came crowding in on me all at once. Christ's ministry, instead of a triumphant turning point to put mankind on the path of salvation, now seemed a desperate rescue attempt, or even less, a mere morale-boosting exercise like dropping Allied propaganda leaflets into Nazi-occupied Europe to reassure the oppressed that they had not been forgotten. Well, maybe a bit more. (I struggled to be fair.) All right, it was a new voice in history, a new kind of voice. Nevertheless, the status of the One who uttered that voice was reduced in my eyes to that of a mere hero, a basically good guy who was out of his depth, a beloved leader but (this was most unfortunate) definitely not a sure-fire winner. The odds against Him were too great; by which I really meant, that my former belief in God's omnipotence was a position I must retreat from if I was to continue to believe in His goodness – and without that belief there isn't any point in bothering with religion at all.
    And because I could no longer believe in an all-powerful benevolent God, the field was left open, unfortunately, to belief in another sort of power. Not that I believed that a Satan existed; not yet. But conditions seemed right for fragments of a potential Satan to develop. Light-headed thoughts, dark imaginings assailed me with ideas of emergent evil. “Bits of Satan must assemble,” I slurred, “unless we do something…. do something….”  
    Well, it had been a tiring day.

                                                   *

TO BE CONTINUED