31 Armageddon
Only one man was fishing off the piers that morning. The other fishermen were either at the festival or sleeping it off. When he saw the warship Vesper on the horizon, he stared at it for a full minute before realizing he’d dropped his good pole into the water. When he noticed his hands were empty, he didn’t care.
“No one’s going to believe this...” Pirate ships sailed in children’s tales by the fire. They didn’t exist.
He took off up the boards into town, shouting, his brilliant, cerulean blue shirt fluttering from his suspenders. “There’s a ship on the sea! There’s a ship on the sea!”
A few merry-makers were curious enough, or drunk enough, to go have a look. Word spread and Meroe started to gather - for the first time ever - to watch a ship come in. And, it was coming in fast. They followed the cliff’s ridge as a gawking mob, watching as the minutes passed, as that heavy moment built until the ship would crash. Their hands went to their heads with gasps and exclamations.
The Vesper’s unbelievable bulk hit a full, raking stop, breaking its hull on the coast in an explosion of white geysers. Its sails rippled and bent as the crew spilled forward on the momentum over the rails and into the raging collision.
The natives rushed down to help, taking familiar paths, and the undead crew saw their coming as stars shooting out of the darkness. The pitching waves couldn’t bend the light of riin. Ink washed in. Then thin, black-eyed pirates crawled out of the spray, bones jutting from their wagging skin and hoops of clothing, smoking from their silently open mouths. Their breath made the wind burn.
Meroe ran.
They ran back to town, shouting, warning that evil ghosts had risen from the sea. The ignorant watched out of their windows in disbelief, but also in cold dread that they were about to witness what could not be. At those first wiry fiends that scuttled into view on skeleton’s hands and feet, many couldn’t help but scream.
It was already too late for some, those who’d unwittingly brought doom into their homes, in their bodies and on their clothes. Others chose to stand and fight. They fell. No matter courage, skill or implements, it was a rout in which the corpses overwhelmed the heroes.
Meroans climbed to the highest parts of their houses and shouted to each other from the rooftops and balconies like they would during a flood, trying to decide what to do. Bauran gathered below the voices. The town divided into two desperate efforts with those shouts:
“Wait for Gabriel!”
“No, we must make for Breahg!”
“Gabriel will come!”
Most made one of those choices.
They, who stayed, hid and listened to the others run away, a shouting and stamping descent into gravid silence. They’d locked themselves in to wait. Some looked out over the hours with hope torn into horror at their neighbors coming back to life in the streets. The sun set. All throughout the night windows shattered and people screamed as the dead broke in and broke out. Some changed their minds and ventured into the poison, always to return. Some gave themselves away by weeping. The sun crossed the sky again before a more lasting quiet fell over Meroe, a stretch of silence in which the staunchest holdouts in the safest corners met their inevitable ends from dehydration.
The flight to Breahg Bog faced two sleepless days by foot over the heath, chased by tireless ghouls. But, they had a favorable wind and there was a cruel certainty in their numbers and the distance if they kept moving; at over two thousand men, women and children, there simply weren’t enough of the fast ones to catch them all.
A mass of younger bauran set the flight’s pace to a hard walk, any slower than that were caught. The older bauran skittered in the gap, like spiders on the web, straight to the weakest and the loyal. They’d spend precious time with their captured lights, turning them over and picking at the shadows while the other lights swept away.
Those who died on the walk did so holding onto a strong desire: We must make it to Breahg. They made other final wishes, prayers and pleas, but that desire was particular to what they would become. It told where to go. When their eyes filled with ink and the smoke rolled in their lungs, that desire remained as an instinctual memory: Something important is in the bog.
***
To the north east, where the green heath dipped into misty peat before it elevated into the gray mountains, Clan Breahg had built a village of simple, circular huts out of mud bricks, bone and hide. In the past, they’d followed herds of giant elk across the countryside as a way of life, terrorizing the towns and settlements in their path and earning reputations as savage warrior-nomads and thieves. Over the course of generations, they domesticated the elk, started a settlement of their own and left the past behind.
The elk were seven monstrous feet tall at the shoulder and had palmate antlers that could serve as banquet platters, sometimes twelve feet across from furthest point to point. They were the center of Breahg culture. Called “great war-moose,” (though really a deer) they were meat, milk and mounts, shelter, weapons and living symbols of strength.
Lonny sat high over his, Wroughtvahk, on a tremendous bone and leather saddle that was almost a throne, hinged into the antlers with levers and thongs for driving. Lonny was a typical clansman, hardy, beard and hair long and untamed, clad from throat to toe in coarse elk-fur, brown and black. He looked like he’d burst out of his animal’s back. The pair rode in surging leaps over the spongy turf, up a low rise into the village and right to the hut of the chiefs.
Lonny climbed down a ladder of stirrups and then punched the door a few times. It was a hard-leather shield and, from the way it took his knocks, looked like it could stop a kick from Wroughtvahk. The chief of the men, Histain, opened it and came out naked. Bulging and hairy, fat and strong and gray, his posture challenged anyone to find a better man than him.
Lonny grinned and bit his tongue before he said what he’d come to say. “You’re not going to believe this, but I think Meroe is coming at us.”
Histain put his fists on his hips and laughed. “What? You’ve been in the huckleberry jug, haven’t you?” Huckleberry whiskey was the drink in Breahg. They drank a lot of it.
The other chief - the clan’s sexes governed themselves - was an ample vision of creamy skin on the dark furs inside, named Haukrith. Reclining with her own nude confidence, silver streaks in her tousled hair, she said, “Get out of here, Lonny.”
The insides of their huts were like the outsides of their elk, musty fur and antlers everywhere. Under an opening in the roof that kept and let the rain and the smoke out, a peat brick fire smoldered in a ring of stones. Next to it was a water-well. Their homes were symbolic of their values, the elk and the earth sheltering the halves of life together, fire and water next to one another like man and woman. The peat held meaning for them too. It was a piece of earth that burned even in the damp.
Lonny stopped himself from ogling the one chief to keep the other from punching him. “Uh… sorry to be a thorn, but you should come have a look. And, we should bring some friends.”
Histain turned back to Haukrith and shrugged. She rolled her eyes, waved him away and started dressing. They’d have time later. Their children were grown and in huts of their own. They’d nothing but time on the bog.
Lonny led the chief and eight other elk-borne warriors bounding out over the miles to where what appeared to be an army was trudging through the mist. It was difficult to tell at that distance, but there seemed to be two or three hundred of them, blue dye popping out like patches of sky in a muddy river. The riders passed glances at each other, considering the odds.
Lonny was disgruntled. “Told you we’d need more than ten…”
Histain soured at their concerns. Cowards... Then he decided to show them. “Breahg! The fire still burns! Look at me! Look at my heart!” He pulled a lever to flick spurs into his nineteen-hundred pound beast-machine, Hrothvel, and leapt toward the beleaguered Meroans. He’d cut a road through them. He’d show the others, those youngsters, that warrior
s still fought with their hair blazing in the wind. “Heya! Hrothvel!”
They were impressed. Histain heard them following. But, the first Meroan he was close enough to make out was only a woman holding a baby. He pulled back on the levers and slowed to a stop, looking down from Hrothvel’s antlers like a man in a tree.
The woman gave him a rabidly determined stare and kept walking, clutching her bundle in both arms to her chest, her veins standing out and her teeth bared and clenched. Histain was speechless at the sight of her. She was fleeing something at a fierce walk, having crossed her body’s thresholds to save her child. Neither said a word in the passing.
The other riders pulled in to watch the strange invasion firsthand. Almost all of them were women with children. There were no men, only a few boys and those had their little hands hitched in their mothers’ veiny grips. The Breahg called down to ask what was happening.
The Meroan women’s throats were so parched they couldn’t speak above whispers, and none of them would stop the march. If they’d been able, they might have wailed that their beloved men had sacrificed themselves to give their families more time. Thinking about it made them want to die. Only the urge to protect their young had kept them alive.
Some rasped, pointing backwards, but most had driven themselves beyond the ability to communicate. They could only go. The Breahg scratched their heads and then rode around to see what hounded the women. Fifty yards back, a ruddy skeleton scuttled out of the mist on all fours, its muscles cords that creaked like twisting leather. That time Histain was among the hesitant glances and it was Lonny who took action.
Lonny said, “It’s me! It’s me! Heya! Wroughtvahk!” and bounded toward the bauran. To the others’ surprise, it made no attempt to get out of the way - it changed its course to attack. A hush came over them. It charges the great war-moose… Wroughtvahk’s antlers lowered, pierced the skinny little devil like a bug on a fork and lifted it wriggling into the air.
Histain cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Brain him, Lonny!”
Lonny was on it, having already drawn out his bone-hammer, a club with a blade of stone lashed into one end. He reared up in the stirrups and brought it down in both hands on the bauran’s head - spack! A black gout spat out of its skull and its body went slack.
Wroughtvahk flicked it away like trash.
Smiling and spattered with ink, Lonny raised his weapon and shouted, “Breahg!” They all cheered his victory. And, when more of those devils appeared, the Breahg took up the fight. They weren’t idle, whiskey-drinking hut-men then. They were a war party. They leapt onto the skittering fiends, stamping them to pieces under the hooves, tossing them from the antlers and smashing them with bone-hammers, all while riding high above the meager smoke. It was easy, until the rotting army of the young approached, fifty to one.
The warriors nodded eagerly. Odds like those, how welcome they’d become, how good. The great war-moose would cut swaths through them, like grooves into the fallow to make bricks - like rolling thunder in the shadows - riders striking from the saddles. Battle!
The war party charged, slamming into the crowd of corpses, knocking them into the air, cutting them apart and trampling them. One elk plowed into the middle, spearing too many to lift. His rider drove him hard into a rut of flesh until they stopped, bauran spilling into their wake. The smoke curled up thick and churning from the young. One warrior and then another fell, gasping for breath into the grasping death.
The elk-borne didn’t mourn their fallen. They were fighting - killing - not protecting anything or anyone. They were killing because they loved it and they were purified by the violence. If they bled they’d let it flow and nod their heads and swing again. If they burned they’d let it burn them - burn them black - and swing again!
The mass of young divided, some limping after separate elk, some broken to a crawl and some destroyed. The bog was a smoking massacre. The war party bounded over it with lusty battle-cries. Heya! Grithsdel! The giant elk launched and landed with destruction. Heya! Nathanseffer!
Hrothvel and Wroughtvahk crossed the field back and forth into exhaustion. They took in too much dirty spore. Their mouths foamed, their great lungs rattled and mucus hung from their nostrils in ropes. They’d given everything and were dying.
Lonny and Histain knew it. They’d been fighting side by side. But, there were still bauran in the mist, a few in cerulean blue now. They decided to ride their elk clear, to avoid crashing at the enemy’s feet. As they plodded, out of breath in the saddle, their hair clumped with sweat and their faces burning from an infection they didn’t understand, Histain quoted an old something his father used to say:
“There we stood, ten against a thousand.”
“They rushed us…”
“And, we slew all ten.”
He finished it with a wicked grin. Lonny grinned back and they laughed and coughed. While their beasts drifted on, the riders climbed down and jumped off, bone-hammers in hand. Hrothvel and Wroughtvahk fell less than a hundred feet apart, with the tremor of giants returned to earth.
An hour’s walk away to the north, there were comfy huts, good, frisky women and whiskey. To the south there was only battle. Lonny offered a more common Breahg adage in response to what the chief had said. “If you’re gonna get dirty, get filthy.”
Histain bared his teeth. They charged back into the smoke together, shouting, “Breahg!” Three answering cries came from the elk-borne alive and one of those still rode high, raining blows.
***
Haukrith’s black and silver was pulled back into a bun with bone hairsticks, the ends beautifully carved into elk skulls. Her cold gaze narrowed in the firelight on a Meroan she had by the collar. She gave her a little shake. “Where are our men?”
The woman’s eyes rolled under their swollen lids like bloody eggs. Her mouth stayed open when she spoke. It was a breathy, feverish whisper. “They’re dead…”
Haukrith leaned in closer. “Who killed them?”
“Ghosts...”
Every Breahg in the hut groaned. No one believed that but that was all any of these Meroans had to say. Haukrith dropped her the six inches to the fur and stomped outside. The entire village had gathered around, learning of the emergency.
Haukrith shouted, “This one’s got the same story as the rest. Put all the google-eyes together and stay away from them. They’re sick or something. Start locking yourselves in. Whatever’s done for them’s on its way for us.” The women nodded and went about their business. She’d been barking orders at them since the Meroans arrived. The men, however, just stood there looking confused. Histain or Lonny usually told them what to do.
Haukrith shouted into a fury at them. “Your chief is out on the BOG! GO GET HIM!” They passed glances around at each other to see if any of them would follow a woman’s orders. There was a lot of open-handed shrugging and head scratching until they did. Then all forty-seven remaining warriors readied their saddles.
Haukrith pulled her son out of them and said, “If your father’s dead, kill the ones who did it, and after that - take it back to their blood.” She’d want an evil vengeance for Histain’s death. And, though only seventeen, her son quickly swore that he’d grant it.
***
John knelt in the church, meditating on the past. He reached a point of clarity, stood and went right to knocking on the library door. When Abraham opened it, John said, “I need two weeks to go home for a visit.” He hadn’t asked for leave in more than eighteen years.
Abraham didn’t give it a moment’s thought. “Go right ahead. Take three.”
John nodded and strode out, an embodiment of determination. From back in the library, without a mark on his face, Michael said, “May I have some personal time as well?”
Abraham frowned at him. “Wherever would you go?” Michael never really asked for leave either, but the church was practically surrounded by his family.
Michael knew what he was about to say would irritate Abraham.
It gave him pleasure he tried not to show. “This month is that festival for Gabriel in Meroe.”
Abraham grumbled. “Mmrnmhrn…” Then he held up two rude fingers. “You get two weeks.” Michael pulled his chin into his throat at the sight of the offensive gesture.
He walked into the stable while John was saddling the pinto. The older man offered an explanation without being asked. “It’s been so quiet lately. I keep thinking of my nephew. It feels time to heal the breach.”
Michael nodded on his way to saddle Ares. “Ah, very good. I’ll ride out with you until we part ways then.” There was unspoken warmth in their friendship. John had been almost a father to Michael over the years and Michael had been close to a son.
They shared some agreeable riding, campfires and conversation. Then they stood next to their horses at the crossroads where the dirt lane led off through the field to John’s farm. The southern sky darkened on the horizon from the coming of an oceanic storm. They’d be soaked before long.
John swung into the saddle with a sad smile. “Wouldn’t it be something if Horace just walked out and waved?” He didn’t expect it to happen.
Michael got up too. “I hope he does.”
John gave him a curious smirk. “What could possibly interest you at that festival? All you’ll do is brood.”
Michael smiled. “It was the company on the ride out I was interested in!” They laughed. “And, I don’t mind their music. They play those lutes. Hopefully it isn’t ruined by a bunch of drunken partygoers. I really do hate parties.”
John said, “Oh, I hate them too,” pleasantly mocking the other’s attitude.
Michael glanced south and saw someone staggering toward them on the road. “God’s mercy, here’s one of them now… barely on his feet. Just look at that blue shirt… garish. Meroans really have no humility whatsoever.” He shook his head and clucked his tongue. Then a lash of smoke crossed his face. He brought his hands up and started coughing.