The Sea Peoples(95)
The rear of the cart was a cage of iron bars. John saw the faces of children behind them, and started forward with his hand on the hilt of his sword as they stared at him through the bars.
“Wait, Prince!” Deor said. “Wait!”
The scop’s hand closed on his shield-arm and dragged him backward. That jerked him back from the bars just as the boneless fingers reached for him and the angelic lips parted to show rows of needle-teeth.
“Children!” the driver of the wagon chuckled, in a liquid burbling tone . . . and in an Old French that John alone of their party could speak. “Be good. Be gooooood!”
And laughing like water gurgling in a sewer he lashed the not-horse into a shambling trot.
“This way,” Deor said. And: “Appearances are dangerous here, as we go deeper. This is where all things collapse together, and that mixing is ill indeed.”
They walked on, like walking in a dream . . . except that John knew it wasn’t his dream, or the dream of anything human. Though he had a disturbing sense that it might have been once, in some inconceivably ancient cycle of the cosmos. A file of figures appeared, human this time, and linked by a rope around their waists; they were chanting and flogging each other with barbed whips as they walked, the blood running down into the rag loincloths twisted around their waists. Every dozen paces the whips would change hands. None of them looked up as the five adventurers passed, and John could see that their eyes were sewn shut; the first in the line probed his way forward with a stick. Beyond them in the field a plow went by, pulled by men, or things more or less like men, and guided by a horse . . . or something more or less like a horse.
Light showed ahead, brighter than the cindered sky yielded. The road made an abrupt left turn on the edge of a cliff, or a line of low steep hills. Thora whistled tunelessly as she looked down, and the rest of them came up.
Several hundred feet below was a vast panorama of land furrowed and fissured with what after a moment John recognized as field fortifications—the relatives of those he’d helped lay out for the siege of the Carcosan fort in Baru Denpasar. These snaked out as far as the eye could see, though, two opposing lines . . . or two opposing sets, for each was line after line of trench, connected with zigzagging communications trenches running vertically to the front. The whole was pockmarked with craters, some old and crumbling and flooded, others rawly new—and as he watched a spark light snapped and earth flew skyward, with a long rolling boom following close on its heels. Rusted barbed wire spread in coils and belts across the land between the trenches, and figures hung on it. For the closer ones you could see them twitch, and hear their thin hopeless mewling. Hints of movement beneath them showed where rats the size of cats scuttled and fed and dragged their full bellies through the muck.
Wisps of green mist floated over the landscape, and a hint of it set them all coughing more than the stink of death had. Faint in the distance whistles sounded, and suddenly the empty-looking trenches threw up hordes of men in steel helmets and drab-colored uniforms, scrambling up assault ladders and running forward. He thought they carried rifles with long knives affixed, though it was hard to be sure; there was a faint tacka-tacka-tacka sound and windrows of them fell. More snaps of fire and fountains of dirt, and men and pieces of men were tossed up in the black poplar-shapes of dirt.
Bugles sounded, thin and endless. When they ceased there was quiet again, save for the cries of the wounded. Two flags flapped not far apart, their staffs driven into the dirt by the hands of falling men. Both were featureless gray tatters.
“I don’t think we want to go that way,” John said thoughtfully, keeping the shiver out of his voice. “I think that’s a battle, and that it’s been going on a long long time.”
“Like the Einherjar, but without honor or joy or hope,” Thora said with a shiver.
“And to think I ran away from home because I was bored,” Pip muttered. “I’ll write a book about it—Pregnant In Hell would be a good title.”
Everyone chuckled, and they kept going. Now and then Deor would halt at a crossroads, chant and close his eyes and point one way or another. Once they had to cross a section of hard-paved road, twelve lanes wide and crowded with automobiles—looking very much like some sections of pre-Change highway he’d seen, except that they weren’t ruins and were all running. And totally motionless, bumper to bumper. The five companions all coughed and gagged at the acrid stench of the air they had to breathe. The jammed road extended out of sight in either direction, shimmering with heat, eternally motionless.
One glimpse through a bloodied windscreen where hands beat and beat and beat was enough, and he kept his head down and hurried with the others.
At last they came through the outskirts of a town, one that plucked at the strings of his memory. It was a quaint-looking place, with steep-pitched roofs and cobbled streets and overhanging balconies, and the odd elm and chestnut tree along its narrow ways. Folk in clothes a little like those of an Association town hurried past, wimpled housewives with baskets of loaves, besmocked artisans, a jongleur strumming on a lute . . .
“Stop!” a voice cried shrilly from a window several stories above them. “Stop! Stop! Stop!”
Each shout was accompanied by a thudding blow. At the fourth a naked woman with something dangling from her jaws ran out on the balcony, then leapt up and scaled the brick of the wall as agile as a monkey. She was laughing around whatever it was, and there were streaks of red down her chin and breasts.