‘To the bridge,’ he answered, to prevent the bayonet being thrust into his lung.
A rifle was given to him, and a belt of ammunition draped over his shoulder. ‘Take off your shoes,’ said the soldier.
Another light went up, this time red. A score of soldiers came from each street, walked towards the bridge in single file along the left line of house-fronts. All were in bare feet, so as to make no sound. The uneven surface of the pavement was painful to the skin through Edgar’s thin socks. The soldiers had a thicker wadding of cloth round their feet and could therefore concentrate on not being seen, instead of on avoiding the discomfort of stones and potholes.
He did not know what to do with his rifle, and wanted to throw it away. Why had such an important attack been kept secret from Mella? Because she would have exposed herself to danger by joining it, he reasoned. She would have led her band on like a fearsome queen, her presidential future jeopardized by any stray bullet or piece of shrapnel.
He mistook the ache in his head for a feeling of excitement, which he didn’t like, preferring to acquire it in the more useful project of threading his way back towards Shelp. Getting involved in this pointless fight was a terrible misunderstanding. When a yellow signal-light showed over the bridge he became frightened and wanted to shout for Mella. He opened his mouth as if to do so, but before any sound came, a bayonet caught him in the back and prodded him on. A whistle shrieked from behind, blown by someone still at the safety of the intersection, and Edgar cursed it for an entirely unnecessary noise.
The street was filled with two blinding lights, one red and one blue, and those caught in it began running towards the bridge, as if to get back into the darkness even if it killed them. Faces fixed in the pallor of the beams ran forward, and Edgar, whose marrow had collapsed, clung to a drainpipe, knowing that something cataclysmic was about to happen.
Machine guns began a dreadful stutter from three hundred metres, and the forty men melted into the stones, though only half as many were hurt. Edgar let go of the drainpipe, and ran back towards the intersection, when he spun like a top as if a ball of ice had smashed into him below the shoulder. He cried out, not from pain, which wasn’t yet apparent, but from the indignity of having to put up with the unexpected. When someone tried to lift him from the road he cried out that reinforcements were needed at the bridge.
The officer, assuming him to be a messenger who had come back with this information at the risk of his life, passed it on to someone of higher rank in case anything could be done about the obvious failure of their surprise attack, on which so many hopes had been placed. Before his eyes closed, and he fainted, Edgar saw several dozen more unfortunate soldiers make their way out into the Nihilists’ field of fire. His mind bit hard on the fact that if he hadn’t run back, and faked this message to cover his cowardice, they might not be going off to get killed. But even the bitterness of this reflection didn’t stop him thinking what a pity it was that he should be dying in some nightmare battle, when only a few days ago he had been nothing more (or less) than a happy-go-lucky tourist.
Chapter 28
Nihilism had worked so well, Benjamin reflected, after setting up his headquarters at Agbat railway station, that it was almost impossible not to believe in God. During the last twenty-five years, industrial production had gone up five per cent. Not much, perhaps, but certainly it had not declined. And if the people weren’t happier than they had been before, at least they were livelier. Nihilism had given them a new zest for life, a positive interest in it. What more could they ask for?
It may not be the finest of governments, but it was the next best thing to having no government at all, he decided, signing an order to have another half-dozen prisoners set free when, according to the new principles of honesty and re-education, they should have been sent for trial, after which they would have been committed to a special establishment for rehabilitating. Nihilists which had yet to be set up.
Before him were several thick volumes on Nihilist industrial progress during the first quarter-century of its power. Apparently they had been the stationmaster’s favourite reading. The columns of figures presented a dazzling picture of a nation set on such a course of economic betterment that it seemed destined to dominate the world. Every commodity for a firm industrial base was to be found in Nihilon, it was stated, from coal to bauxite, tungsten to pigiron, copper to oil, though no one had ever claimed such a thing for the country before it went Nihilistic. However, the National Statistics Board of Mystical Nihilism (to give these voluminous reports their full title) acquired such deposits for Nihilon simply by stating that they existed. And so, in the imagination at least, as well as in print, they did.
A poet must have drawn this picture, and primed these books before the figure-men got to work on them. And if such fabricated calculations kept the people happy, what need was there of the real thing? The question to ask was: Would the real thing make them more happy? And one could only answer that it was doubtful. With these figures even dry bread would taste as if it had butter on it. Benjamin sighed, at the fact that the moral regeneration of mankind was simpler to accomplish than he imagined. Perhaps, after all, the Nihilists had hit upon the secret of it, and now with his insurrectionist brigade he was out to upset the delicate fabric of nihilism that had been painfully built up over the last twenty-five years by these idealistic perverts.
He could not deny that the people had grown accustomed to it. It was their one and only way of life. It worked for them, and it was working for their children, and so what right had he, with his ideals, to come along and wreck it so completely? The only reason that people were running with such alacrity to join his standard was because they saw it perhaps as another playful manifestation of nihilistic mismanagement, and would not realize their mistake until it was too late.
He tried to shake off such wayward thoughts. By a brilliant series of manoeuvres he had captured Agbat less painfully than the town of Amrel. His knights-in-shining-overalls were making merry in the main square, while he unrolled his map, and put a volume of the stationmaster’s statistics at each of the four corners to hold it down. The final phase of his advance was about to begin, and he was so much assailed by the rights and wrongs of it that he almost hoped he would be killed in the battles ahead, especially when he thought back on his carefree time as a mere tourist in this chaotic haphazard paradise, and knew with melancholic certainty that such enjoyment would never return.
He sighed, and went back to his planning, deciding to leave a hundred soldiers and two heavy machine guns to hold Agbat, which would defend his communications with Amrel and the frontier, so that when he resumed his push towards Tungsten he would know that his retreat to Cronacia was halfway open should anything go wrong. He never advanced without being sure that he could retreat, an axiom that no amount of heady and easy success could turn him from. There was no advance without a retreat, and no retreat without an advance, and no ground was ever covered twice, because even if you actually went over it again, you were in another frame of mind, and circumstances were different anyway. No one day resembled the one that had preceded it, nor the one that was on its way from tomorrow, and he didn’t need any nihilistic philosophy to remind him of such a natural law, though in a sense it made him more comfortable to be constantly aware of the fact.
Even the insurrection was run, it seemed, on nihilistic principles, which was why he enjoyed it so much, and he realized that when the dragon of nihilism was split down the middle and bleeding to death, he might not like it here any more. In some strange way, and at this late hour, honesty and nihilism might after all be related, an observation which for the moment lightened his mood.
Even that waiting space-rocket, set to charge for the heavens in a few days’ time, out of which the finest male specimen and the juiciest female of the line would emerge for the long-planned well-advertised extravaganza of sex-in-space, was nothing more than a dramatic manifestation of Nihilon’s health and honesty. Yet it was a s
how he felt obliged to destroy, for if it succeeded, nihilism would reign forever glorious. Who then would argue over its merits? – though in becoming an eternal fact of life it would certainly lose all possible attraction for him.
There was a knock at the door, and one of his soldiers shuffled over the dusty boards to announce that they had found a strange woman.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ Benjamin demanded.
‘It’s a woman, commander. We were patrolling towards the railway bridge, and saw that she was being ravished by two Nihilists. We heard her screaming for help, so we killed them.’
She had fallen, and when they carried her in, Benjamin saw that she was a young woman, her dress torn, and her blood-stained face smeared with ash and dust. He was too absorbed in his favourite work of planning his attacks to like being disturbed, and if he had been a Nihilist officer advancing against the forces of law and decency, order and honesty, he would have told them to finish raping her themselves instead of bothering him.
Hair straggled over her breasts and shoulders, and when he at last looked at her closely, she opened her eyes, and saw a brutalized generalissimo with a shaved head, wearing bush-shirt and trousers, a belt around his waist from which hung a revolver. Her lips trembled, as if about to open for a scream. ‘All right, then,’ she said weakly, not believing that her good luck in being saved by the two madmen could last, ‘get it over with. I might as well die in this awful country.’
He drew back at the shock of hearing her speak. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, putting a chair by her so that she could sit down, then sending the two soldiers away. When she pushed her hair back over her scratch-covered face, he felt himself on the point of choking. He took a bottle from his desk, and poured her a glass of Nihilitz. ‘Drink this, Jaquiline. It’s a terrible potion, but you’ll feel better,’ his stomach twisting with black rage against this country and its nihilism.
He knelt, to keep the glass steady at her mouth. She said nothing, but gulped the Nihilitz. He took the glass away, and held her hands, saw that she wasn’t wounded badly, but supposed that her experiences had been full of the usual Nihilon nightmare. ‘I want to go home,’ she cried, ‘I want to get out.’
‘You’re quite safe. There are more than two thousand honest soldiers to guard you. What fools we were to let a woman come alone into this foul place. But the Nihilists will pay for this. I’ll burn them out. I’ll destroy them. I’ll lay the country waste between here and Tungsten. I’ll plough this land with so much dynamite there won’t even be a breath of nihilism left in it.’
Her eyes closed from utter exhaustion, and relief at such unexpected deliverance. He helped her into the next room, where she lay on his camp-bed, and with a heavy blanket drawn over, she sank into a deep sleep.
When she sat beside him next morning in his Thundercloud Estate car, her face showed little of her ordeal. Her blue eyes were the colour of steel as she looked ahead at the rocky and winding trail that led into the mountains. She wore an olive-green shirt, a pair of men’s slacks, and sandals on her feet. A belt around her waist had a holster hanging from it, with a loaded pistol inside.
Advancing patrols were already far ahead, marking the track where it became uncertain, fanning out for snipers, crowning the neighbouring heights for any sign of resistance or ambush. Benjamin’s burning zeal to rid Nihilon of its detestable régime had decided Jaquiline to work for the same end.
Such bravery and suffering in a beautiful young woman filled him with a fatherly love for her, and he agreed that she could come with the column. And Jaquiline felt a liking for this new Benjamin she had found so unexpectedly in the wastes of Nihilon. As an acquaintance of the last two years she had looked on him as no more than a brash hedonist, but it was now obvious that he was a man of deeply fundamental ideals whom she had been wrong to misjudge. Where else could his good qualities have been brought out except in a place like Nihilon? She turned and smiled tenderly at him as he set the car in motion.
The landscape of grey rock, ash, and pumice glistened under the scorching sun. Their car climbed over backs and shoulders of land, sometimes ascending several hundred metres in sharp curves of the track. The region appeared to be sparsely inhabited, but now and again steep narrow cuttings in the mountainside, cleverly hidden by the complex configuration of the land, showed clusters of small houses at the bottom, presumably built around springs or streams, for small green trees grew down there, and on either side of the indentation, terraces had been built some way up the banks, long strips of verdure vividly glowing. Occasional belts of terracing were fallow, or had just been harvested, and the soil was so dark it looked like pure soot.
More bushes appeared, and a few trees as they ascended, as well as a house here and there by the roadside. Even the squalor-ridden children playing out of doors, who laughed and waved at them, seemed fortunate and picturesque to Jaquiline when she thought that their day of deliverance from vile nihilism was close at hand. At a thousand metres the air grew cooler, for they were approaching the plateau on which the Groves of Aspron were situated. Then the track suddenly turned into a wide, paved highway, a miracle of unexpected road-building in this remote area of Nihilon.
‘It’ll go on for a few miles, then end in a swamp, or at the edge of a cliff,’ Benjamin said. ‘I’ve met this sort of thing before. Nobody can tell how these isolated stretches of perfect road get here, or why they were built, but they seem to be a characteristic feature of this country.’
He drove slowly, at forty kilometres an hour, when from around a slight bend ahead a small red sports car came weaving towards him. It brought to mind his first encounter with such a maniac several days ago; when he had been civilized and inexperienced enough to get driven off the road and almost killed.
The car was at a distance still, and there would be time to act. He pulled into the side and stopped his Thundercloud. ‘Get out,’ he said to Jaquiline. They crouched behind the car, her heart thumping as she witnessed the mad career of the Zap, ready to throw herself clear should it decide to crash against the superior weight of their estate car.
Benjamin picked up a sub-machine-gun and took aim, standing by the right headlamp. A few moments would pass before the car drew level and he could open fire, meanwhile keeping the gun halfway to his shoulder.
The Zap slowed, and straightened course. A face at the windscreen looked at him, all teeth, fair hair, and homicidal sweat. The driver levelled a gun through the open window. Benjamin dropped, spattered by the glass of his own headlamp.
The Zap passed, but with the coolness and accuracy that can come with extreme rage, Benjamin stood up and fired the whole magazine at the petrol tank of the retreating car. Without looking, he rummaged for another clip, but saw smoke pouring out of the Zap as it zigzagged on its way. The dead silence of the earth was shaken by a grunt of wind, as the car went up in a column of smoke and flame. ‘That’s the second time those Zaps have tried to kill me,’ he smiled, courteously opening the door of the Thundercloud so that Jaquiline could get in.
She smoothed her hair. ‘A woman on the train told me that when men are discharged with good results from the Groves of Aspron they are awarded a crimson Zap car as a prize. It’s supposed to normalize their emotions by the time they get home.’
‘That’s one patient who won’t go back for more treatment,’ he said, with a nihilistic laugh. ‘I’ve been persecuted by those Zap cars ever since coming to this lawless land, and it’s one instrument of terror we’ll ban as soon as the new government gets together.’
At the highest point of the Aspron Way, which was now back to its usual rugged unpaved state, stood a wooden shack, on which was hung a large notice saying COFFEE. He stopped the car, and they went inside, having neither eaten nor drunk since setting out.
It was a cool dark room, with a rough counter at one end, and two or three rickety chairs and tables between it and the sackcloth door. On the counter sat a Nihilonian cat, with neither ears nor tail, and behind it s
tood a tall corpulent man wearing a waistcoat over his apron. His thinning hair was parted down the middle, and he emerged from the daze of his own stillness to ask what they wanted.
On being told, he lit a small spririt stove on the counter: ‘Are you part of the liberation army? If you are, you won’t be the first army that’s passed this way. May I invite you to sit down?’
They preferred to stand, for a change. ‘What army?’ Benjamin asked, refusing the bottle of Nihilitz.
‘We’ll wait for the coffee to boil,’ the café-keeper said. ‘It’ll take a few minutes. But I’m glad to see travellers, even if it is an army. I’m dying of boredom. My wife died of it last year. Absolute agony. I held her hand all through it. Never thought I had it in me. Had to send for soil from Agbat to bury her in, because the peasants near here wouldn’t sell me any. They even stole my load of it coming up from Agbat, so I had to leave her in the living rock after all.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Jaquiline said, wiping her forehead with a handkerchief. ‘How long have you lived here?’
He pondered on the number of years: ‘Twenty-six. My whole life, in fact. I wanted a peaceful life, and here it is. Come outside, and I’ll have great pleasure in showing you what I got for my trouble.’ They followed him through the sackcloth, into searing metallic sunshine. ‘Grey mountains for as far as the eye can see – in every direction. Beautiful, inspiring, empty. The most gorgeous sight in the world. I must have yearned for it the moment I was conceived. When I was a boy, and then as a young man, I knew that one day I would achieve all this, though for many years there was absolutely no clue that I would ever get it. In fact for two decades I forgot about this deep yearning in my blood, and it was only when my ambition was half complete that I realized it was coming about, and remembered that I’d always wanted it. I was recovering from a state of catastrophic despair, and was on the point of dying of it, when I bought this shack for selling coffee to passing travellers. Then, slowly, I acquired all this land, to increase my peace of mind.’