Chapter Eighteen – War

Morwen put down the pan of bacon, wiped her hands on a cloth and went to the door. Before she got there the knocking came again, impatient, heavy. Her hand was reaching for the latch when she hesitated. She thought a moment, Tanner was in his workshop, next door, he'd have heard the knocking. He'd come.

"Dogs! Quiet with yer!"

The raucous barking stopped. She opened the door.

A man stood there. He had taken a step back and was now a pace away in the yard. He wore a long dark frock coat, fully buttoned up. At his throat was a crisp white collar and a dark bowtie. He wore a round felt hat and most peculiar of all dark glasses, the round lenses so black Morwen couldn't see his eyes at all. He looked like a blind man. He also wore black leather gloves and was gently pushing the fist of his right hand into the palm of his left. Tapping the knuckles to the palm ever so slightly.

He looked like a banker. Or an undertaker.

He had wisps of gingery hair and a thin ginger moustache, but it was his face Morwen noticed most. It was hard, and characterless, no emotion on it at all. She didn't think he had ever smiled in his whole life. Even as a baby she didn't think this man had known laughter.

He spoke. His voice was soft and well educated. And that just made her more uneasy.

"Would this be the Tanner farm?"

--I--
---o-o-oOo-o-o---
I I

When she awoke she was alone. She lay for a minute staring at a wall of hay and then sat up, reached for her clothes and dressed quickly. She looked around. One or two other travelers were in the yard preparing their horses and a large cart went grinding past over the cobbles towards the road, a big water barrel on the back. Pulling her hat on and tucking her bushy mass of hair under it, she jumped down and went to the horse trough. She pumped up a little fresh water and splashed her face, wrists and reaching into her shirt, scrubbed quickly under her arms. She would let her clothes and body heat dry her. Looking around for what she needed and not seeing it, she went out of the yard and behind the buildings into a field, and finding a bush for concealment did what her body had to, wiping afterwards with some large leaves.

Returning towards the wagon, he was there. She stood a little way away and looked at him. He lit a fire and put a pan on, adding tea leaves and herbs. She enjoyed watching him, his economical movements and his easy relaxed frame. He set the tea to brew and put two steaming bowls on the back of the wagon. Glancing round and not seeing her behind the hedge, he went to the horse trough to do what she had done. He pulled his shirt off and bent to pump water and she stood and watched him, looked at the tanned colour of the skin of his back, and how broad it was and his arms, his shoulders, where he scrubbed them she saw the muscles there. No, not just cute, more than cute. He was growing up, growing into a man.

She looked for a minute, just enjoying the simple sight of him, then, not wanting him to see her looking, Sheeta went to the wagon and investigated the steaming bowls. Porridge, he must have bought breakfast. Getting a spoon from the knapsack she began to eat.

"Morning."
"Hello."
"Sleep well?"

She watched him button up his shirt and wipe his neck with a rag. He watched her watching him. With his face turning pink, he picked up the second bowl, began spooning in food.

"I did, thank you. And thank you for last night. I was a little silly, I'm sorry."
"You're not silly. I'll never say taeg to you. But I'm glad you told me those things, it helps me understand why you're like this. I still want to learn more Gondoan though. And, um…"
"Hm?"
"Thank you for last night too. It was nice."

She smiled.

"I'm not usually like that. Only when I'm upset."
"I suppose I should say that I hope you don't get upset again soon. But I don't mind, really."
"What are you saying? Are you saying what I think you are?"

He merely grinned at her, his face turning even redder. He scraped the last of his porridge direct from bowl to mouth with his spoon. He said nothing, but his look was his answer.

"Tea?" she poured from pan to mug, took the first sip,
"Yes please."
"You paid for breakfast?"
"Only with a little work. I swept the yard this morning. Push a broom for an hour, and you get breakfast, easy."
"Any sign of Hamar?"
"Inside, eating."

--I--
---o-o-oOo-o-o---
I I

They were soon on the road. The day was cooler, with high cloud and there was a hint of rain. They made good time and Sheeta sat in the back of the wagon and did some needlework with some socks Morwen had given her, trimming to size with Pazu's knife, and redoing the stitching, darning the holes.

Pazu sat on the driver's board alongside Hamar and they chatted about work. Pazu managed to bend his story around to having only recently begun farming, before that he had been a miner he said, up in Greycastle, but had moved out of there when the situation started. He was able to lie easily and effortlessly about mining in Greycastle. He didn't like doing it but it was necessary to hide who they were. For her sake.

There was a honk of a motor car horn, several loud impatient honks. Hamar looked over his shoulder and guided Morris off onto the grass. Pazu stood up and climbed onto the hay. Sheeta had no need to stand; at the back she had a ringside seat. A long column of army trucks was behind them and as the wagon rolled to a stop they drove by. Pazu began to count them but gave up when he got to thirty. They were painted dull grey with solid tyres and had grey canvas awnings over supporting metal frames at the back. Each was filled with soldiers, maybe twenty to a truck. The men looked pale and tired, no one at the farm gates they passed cheered them by. After the trucks came a series of huge cannons hauled by big fat tractors. These tractors had high armoured cabs behind which sat a vertical steam boiler. They rode not on wheels but on continuous metal treads that ran on rollers, laying an endless carpet as they went. Pazu had never seen anything like it. On the open backs of the tractors were bench seats and the gun crew of six or eight men sat there. The big cannons rumbled past, the tractor treads tearing the dirt road surface to pieces. Pazu counted twelve guns. Behind them came something even stranger; more big tractors laying endless metal carpets but these towed long low flat bed trailers. On each trailer was something squat and wide and hidden under a tarpaulin. Pazu glimpsed tracked wheels like the tractors on some of them and cannons poking out the front on others. Artillery pieces on their own mechanized chassis. Finally after about twenty of these had gone by, a miscellany of supply trucks and service vehicles brought up the rear of the column.

The military convoy receded into the distance, their passing clouded by a thick screen of dust.

Hamar concluded the obvious.

"Hey, guess it's war then."
"Wow," Pazu was genuinely impressed.
"Peter!"

He looked at where Sheeta was pointing. With her sharp eyesight something high up had caught her attention. He looked, squinting into the light. An airship was up there, very high and coming south. It was visible only briefly when it came out into breaks in the clouds. Then he noticed two airships, bigger, lower and slower that had been flying above the truck column. They bore Marinaer markings and seemed to be an aerial escort to the convoy. They both began to climb and Pazu could distinctly hear the heavy pulsing of their motors working hard. They clawed at the air, gaining height slowly. The very small high airship continued south then came round on a bearing towards the east clearly shadowing and following the road convoy, watching it. As the two Marinaer ships closed up with the more distant one, it swung away northwards and easily sped away. The convoy escort stayed high, covering the lorries and cannons from high up. One of them stayed below the clouds, it's companion climbed up through them and was lost to sight.

"Hey, we're still no further north than Kingsbury. If Restormel is sending aerial scouts this far south we're going to be in trouble."
"War hasn't even been declared yet has it?" Pazu asked

Hamar and Pazu both looked at the sky, the sun's position above the overcast told them it was still two or three hours before noon.

Hamar let the mass of military transport get well ahead of them, the foul miasma of raised dust took ten minutes to clear, no point in driving in that.

--I--
---o-o-oOo-o-o---
I I

They were passing through a village that afternoon and noticed quite a few people at their doorways and garden gates, just standing about, some talking, others merely waiting, as if for news. Three little boys ran beside the wagon pointing sticks at them.

"Bang! Bang! Bang! You're dead! Bang! You're the enemy and you're dead!" their eager voices shrilled.
"War now, I think," Pazu mused.

Hamar stared at the boys.

"Hey, let's hope it's a quick one and those poor little blighters don't get the chance to play it for real."

--I--
---o-o-oOo-o-o---
I I

It was later when Sheeta heard it. At the back of the wagon, a little distant from the clopping horse hooves and the intermittent chatter of the two men, and shielded from the fallout of their casual conversation by the mound of hay, she heard it. At first her mind was focused on her sewing, and it came to her from the edge of her senses, in the same way the birdsong occasionally intruded or the smell of cut grass in the silage fields beyond the hedges from time to time came to her. They passed over a stream where the water chuckled and squealing children jumped to the mill pool below. The laughter of their innocent voices, carefree in the dying days of summer, mingled with the splashes of their white bodies in the clear water. She had stopped working to lean over the wagon rail and watch them and to wave back at their cheeky insolent greetings. As these happy sounds faded and she sat back against the yellow wall at her back, she heard it. It reminded her of summer thunder, distant and harmless, a storm for someone else to endure. But summer thunder would roll over the hills and vales and be gone, mysterious and forgotten. This thunder however went on, it rumbled faintly and persisted, now growing, now lessening as the breeze picked it up or lay it aside. Swelling and falling like waves in a storm, she considered it and what it might mean. It never quite went away, but hung there low down on the edge of hearing. She puzzled over it for a time.

"Peter."
"Yes."
"Can you ear that?"
"What?"
"That rumbling. Like thunder."

She had put on her best boy voice.

"No."
"Stop the wagon."

Hamar pulled on Morris' traces.

"Ho there boy, hold up."

The crunching of the heavy iron tyres in the grit of the road was stilled. High overhead, in the impossible height of its own song, a lark wheeled and cried. It swooped and went on its screaming, laughing way. Screaming and laughing at the world of men below. And the sound that replaced it was a sound Sheeta hated, it was a sound she had heard before, too recently and as well as being heard in the ear she could feel it through the soil, through the rock of the land, the grit of the road and the iron and wood of the wagon. Even through the flesh and bone of her own body she could feel it.

The sound of men dying.

"Hey, what is it?"
"Explosions," Sheeta supplied, "Big guns. A long way away."

Pazu stood up, he climbed onto the mound of hay and looked to the north, his eyes shaded by an eager hand although he could see nothing but fields and farms and sky. He glanced at Sheeta. She wasn't looking. She didn't want to see. She sat, huddled on the floor of the wagon, looking back at the mill pond they had just passed. She wanted time to stop and for them to turn around. If Hamar would turn the wagon round and go back, and pass the playing children, perhaps time would reverse with them and the further south they went, so time would wind backwards. Guns wouldn't shoot, men wouldn't die, politicians wouldn't argue and even crazy men wouldn't steal crystals and she and Pazu could go back in time to the Ravine and she would awake in his hut and hear his trumpet playing. And just be with him.

But Sheeta knew this was a hopeless hope, a mere game she played in her heart. Like the children in the mill pond, soon such games would be over and war would show them its murderous face. No playing now children, this was serious stuff. There was no stopping it. Once men decided to fight, they enjoyed it. They relished it, she knew this from stories she had heard from the elder men in her village. She knew it too from the look on a crazy man's face as he'd spoken words that had opened the floor of Laputa and murdered hundreds with a gleeful deranged smile. Men were not crazy to love this, they just had to be exposed to it enough, and it became normal.

I just want to be left alone. to live in peace, have children, see my children have children, and die. no one can ask for more, or deserve less.

She had no idea when she would live in peace. Maybe she never would. Perhaps she and Pazu were destined to never rest, to always be running from crazy men, men with a lust for power or a lust for killing. She let her gaze fall from the children on the bridge.

"Go home now children. Time for tea. Playtime is over."

She hung her head and a wave of depression took away summer's sun and replaced it with a darkness that was colder than even winter.

"Hamar. I'm going to ride back here with Simon. He's younger than me and I think he's scared."

bless you Pazu. come to me.

"Hey, alright Peter, you take care of her."

Hamar flicked his reins and called on Morris to walk on. Pazu had climbed the hay pile and was almost down the other side when he realized what the blonde man had said. Maybe he'd noticed his brother was a girl yesterday when he'd driven the wagon, or perhaps last night. Perhaps he'd come out in the night to use the latrine and seen the brothers cuddled up much too closely in the wagon and realized then. It didn't matter, Pazu would speak to him when they parted.

--I--
---o-o-oOo-o-o---
I I

For a while he sat in front of her and she put her face against his chest. She didn't press against him as she had last night, and he didn't touch her, she just needed him close, she just needed to feel him care. After a time she lifted her head, smiled at him and carried on sewing.

"Alright?"
"Yes, I'm fine now. Let's just get to Gondoa and get this over with. I can do it. With you, Pazu, I can do it."
"Sheeta, with you, I want to. Oh, and Hamar knows you're a girl."
"What did he say?"
"Nothing much, but I'll talk to him when we leave. I'll ask him to not tell anyone about us."
"Good idea. I hate the feeling of us leaving a trail behind us. I suppose the boy disguise only works from a distance."
"Yes, try to keep your girly lips hidden. And those big blue eyes don't help. Are you alright now? Do you want to talk or shall I go back?"
"I'd like it if you stayed."
"That's alright. How are the socks?"
"Why wouldn't you talk to me the other night?"
"Oh, that. I was a bit confused. About my feelings."
"Do you want to talk about them?"
"Yes. I did then as well, I just couldn't find the way to say things."
"Can I ask you something?"
"Of course."
"Why did you ask Morwen if we could have separate rooms?"
"You ask good questions. The answer is the same as why I couldn't speak that night in the lane."

She said nothing, merely glanced at him and carried on sewing. There were a couple of minutes silence.

"It doesn't matter if you don't want to tell me, I was more concerned that you didn't like me."
"I do like you, Sheeta. A lot. I assumed that was obvious. Right back to Tepis Fortress, I hope."
"You were amazing. I don't think I ever thanked you."
"Thank Dola, it was her piloting. She's the amazing one."
"It was you who grabbed me."
"It was you who jumped. You gave me no choice, yau taeg Lucita."
"You said you'd never say that."
"Never again, but that was a stupid thing to do, if I'd missed you, you'd have died."

She looked at him carefully.

"If you'd missed me I would have wanted to die."
"Now that really is a silly thing to say. And I wanted to sleep in another room because I was having funny feelings."

Blurting it out was easiest, he'd decided.

"Oh. What kind of feelings?"
"Uh, this is really hard to say. Let me say this. When I came up to leave those flowers by your bed, I looked at you sleeping. And, hm, well you looked very. Uh, I'm trying to think of the right word."

She thought she knew what he was trying to say.

"Let me make it easier for you."
"Thank you."
"This morning, when you'd made the fire, you went to wash at the pump."
"I did."
"I was watching you. I'd just come back from a walk in the field behind the stables. I saw you take off your shirt. And, well, I watched you. Because you looked nice."
"I did? I mean, you did?"
"Is that how you felt when you left the flowers?"

He realized that in simple terms, very simple terms, it was.

"Yes, I think. Yes."
"Good."
"Good? It's good?"
"It is good. It means you feel the same way about me as I feel about you."
"I do? I mean you do?"

She chuckled.

"Yau taeg Paetsu, yau taeg-dhu…"
"Why am I an idiot?"
"Your face, it's so… idiotic!"
"Uh, so when I had my shirt off, you were looking at me?"
"Yes. I don't think that's a crime."
"Sheeta. A week ago. When you were bathing. Hm… in the stream…"
"No! You didn't!"
"I couldn't help it. I only looked once. Quickly. I had to."
"You… you… had to? Pazu!"
"You looked at me!"
"You're a boy. Boys don't have things to hide!"
"We're as bad as each other!"
"No. You're far worse! No wonder you didn't want to see me in the bedroom, if you'd already sneaked a look at the stream!"
"No, it's not like that!"
"You are so rude!"
"Me rude? You looked at me, you're just as bad!"

She picked up the only thing to hand, a bundle of socks, and hurled them at him. He covered his face with his hands and then dived at her and she collapsed giggling into the hay.

"Stop it! You monster!"
"You're the one who's worse, talk about double standards!"
"Get off me you great lump!"
"Won't! It's your fault."

He reached under her, slid his hands under the red shirt and tickled her sides.

"Agh! No! No, no! Ow, tickles! Noooo!"

She arched her back and convulsed into laughter. He tickled harder and she squealed.

Hamar drove on, listening to what was clearly not two boys. And also equally clearly not even brother and sister. In fact, he wasn't even sure he should be listening at all.

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12 March 2007

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