The Caryatids, page 26
With every human soul covered head to foot in windy torrents of black Gobi dust, with the air thick with miasma from merciless urban fires, no previous social distinction would have made much difference on the ground. A water war wasn’t a mere civil war but a hell on Earth, where you either seized water or you died.
Breathing through cloth, bricking up the windows, heaving their possessions from their homes and stores to form impromptu barricades, struggling to climb through burnt-out high-rises to dominate the free-fire zones … in a matter of weeks, with hand tools and their own backs, they had churned their urban fabric into this vast, scumbled-up, fatal labyrinth: a graveyard of sandbags, cruel palisades, sharpened stakes of iron reinforcing rod, high-piled, bullet-riddled washing machines, the twisted hulks of bomb-seared cars.
Eventually, the survivors had been led on an organized long march, the weakest of them dropping like flies, to some new locale where the state guaranteed them some water. The people of their city had never come back to their death trap. If they ever returned, they would never again live in this doomed, unsustainable way. They would be living in Jiuquan-style bubbles where every drop of the water was micromanaged by state machines.
The rains had been good this year. The ruined town was rankly overgrown with tall, weedy, sulfur-yellow flowers.
It took them four hours to march outside the line of sight of the Great Wall, with its mystically swaying and Taoistically impartial wands. This effort achieved, they stripped themselves and buried every traceable relic of China in a cairn of anonymous rocks.
Sonja then made a special point of plucking the state’s radio ID tags from the flesh of their arms. That was a simple matter when you knew what you were doing, and, when done correctly, it was only slightly bloody.
They then climbed, barefoot, wincing, cautious, and entirely naked, over the crest of a long hill to the predetermined spot where George had hidden his bounty.
An unmanned cargo helicopter sat there. It was a kind entirely new to Sonja, though she considered herself a connoisseur of helicopters. Crazily lightweight and transparent, all veins and segments, it looked like a sleeping dragonfly.
It bore Indian markings, and if it had really fluttered in from whatever was left of India, it must have traveled a fantastic distance.
The cargo helicopter was lying precisely where its global positioning system had placed it, inside a rugged little declivity, with poor lines of sight but a decent amount of sunshine for its exhausted batteries.
Sonja had a hard-won philosophy when it came to long marches through harsh territory. Sonja believed in traveling light. Her cargo consisted mostly of fabrics.
Everything else within the helicopter, she had ordered as a wedding gift for the Badaulet. The Badaulet had no such minimalist philosophy about his own goods. On the contrary: He had a gorgeously barbarian “more is more” aesthetic.
The Badaulet’s gifts were a sniper rifle, a plastic pistol, binoculars, a gleaming titanium multitool, self-heating meals for those of an Islamic persuasion, a canteen, chemical lightsticks, paracord, a radio, a razor-keen ceramic dagger, a global positioning system, ammunition, and a veritable host of horrible little marble-sized land mines.
The Badaulet was painfully shy about his nudity, so he quickly tunneled into his desert camouflage. He swiftly disappeared. His new uniform was spotted with colored chromatophores, like the hide of a squid. It had a similar bush hat, with a face net.
Sonja’s signature garment was her blindingly white robe. It was a simple baggy mess of dust-repellent fabric. Any fabric that was “dust-repellent” was also somewhat skin-repellent, so it was a stiff and unforgiving thing.
Sonja lashed the fabric to her wrists and waist and ankles with her signature magic charms, which George had included in the shipment. Long, crisscrossed black cords, with hexagrams, yin-yangs, lucky ideograms, crucifixes, Stars of David, tiny Muslim moon-and-crescents.
Ernesto had once told her that only a madwoman would dress in such fashion. She had made herself a big white target for snipers.
But Sonja, who unlike Ernesto was still alive, had sensed in some occult fashion, she had known, that the war surrounding them was not about their supposed enemies: the real war was about the dust. It was about the black dust, gray dust, red dust, yellow dust, that catastrophic omnipresent filth that penetrated every aspect of human existence. Peace would come—it would only come—when brought by cleanliness. Cleanliness brought by something—an angel, a saint, a prophet, a machine, a system, an entity, anyone, anything capable—that was in the dust but never of the dust.
Time and again Sonja had walked into the hellholes where they stored the sick and dying—the dead factories, the empty schoolyards—where, at the first sight of her, a medic without any dust, the moaning, sobbing crowds fell silent…
In the midst of the filthiest inferno, there were people and things and actions and thoughts that were not of that inferno. They were beyond the grip of hell.
The people could never leave hell with bullets. They needed a figure shining and white and clean who would hold out her two compassionate hands and pour fresh cleaning water on their split and aching faces. Despair was killing them faster than any physical threat.
It was they, not she, who had begun hanging magic charms on her—the knickknacks they’d been clutching in their desperate hope of redemption. She looked different, she was different, and they were hanging meaning on her.
They needed to hope in order to live, and for a dying public, a public image brought hope. A radiance that might come to them, bearing a handheld lamp: radiance to the bedside of the sufferer at the midnight of the human soul. There to wash the filth from their suffering feet.
Hope would cure when all other methods failed, when other treatments weren’t even noticed. True anguish, the killing kind of despair, could only be relieved by ritual … If the sky turned black and the air was brown, an armed general could reason and bluster and bribe and threaten—not a soul would stir, even to save their own lives. An emotionally damaged teenage girl could drift by, in spotless white, dangling superstitions and jabbering lines of poetry, and they would rise as one and they would follow.
At this point in her life, Sonja found it hard to believe that she had done those things. But she had done them. Repeatedly. Spontaneously, tirelessly, in inspired trances, drawing strength from the light she saw in others. Extreme times pulled strange qualities from people. There were times when it helped a great deal to know that one was not entirely human.
Some men called her crazy—her second husband, and her third, in particular—but they were merely putting their own madness into better order by piling accusations on her. Because if Red Sonja was the crazy one, why were they all dead?
The Angel of Harbin had the gift of giving. Those who took it in the proper spirit, lived. The others … men, mostly …
From time immemorial, when a soldier left a battlefield, his body racked, his nerves shattered, for “rest and relaxation” … “Rest and relaxation” were the last things on any man’s mind: any soldier fresh from battle immediately sought out a woman. If she merely opened her legs for him—if she said and she did nothing else whatsoever, if she asked him no questions, if she didn’t even speak his language—all the better for him …
The Badaulet still had no horse. Sonja knew this as a failing on her part. There should have been a horse in George’s shipment. But George, who was no poet, did not care to ship live animals in a helicopter, so Sonja could supply only a rough equivalent: a clumsy and graceless off-road pack robot.
She examined the robot with sorrow. When the crumbling Great Wall had been a vivid, living Chinese enterprise—for in its dynastic heyday, the Great Wall of China was no passive barrier, it had also been a highway, an imperial mail route, and the world’s fastest visual telegraph—any Chinese bride would have endowed her warlord with a horse.
A world-famous “blood-sweating horse.” Sonja had seen gorgeous T’ang dynasty pottery of those horses, and Chinese bronzes as well, with stallions as the emblems of Chinese state power at its most confident, serene, and globally minded. Superior Chinese war ponies, earth-pounding, indomitable, fit to run straight to Persia with wind-streaming manes and dainty hooves like swallows, surely the most beautiful horses that civilization had ever offered to barbarism.
Instead, she had this lousy robot. Hauled from its plastic mounts on the copter wall, the ungainly device mulishly escaped control and scampered straight up the harsh slopes of a nearby hillside. Sonja hated the robot instantly. She knew that it was bound to be a grievance.
The pack robot was as ugly as a dented bucket. It featured four eerily independent legs. Each leg swiveled from a corner of its cheap and brutally durable chassis.
Since it was not a beautiful male animal like a Chinese T’ang dynasty stallion, the robot did not trot with any dark animal grace. Instead, it moved by detailed computer analysis—as if it were playing high-speed chess with the surface of the Earth.
This meant that, on a cracked, eroded, thirty-degree slope of bitterly eroded Gobi Desert rock, a slope that would break the hairy legs of the toughest Mongol ponies and require rope and pitons from any human being, the robot scuttled along like a cockroach. Ever untiring, unknowing of anything like pain, the robot flicked out its horrid, metallically springy, devilishly hoofed legs, and it flung itself hither and yon, leaping from the minutest little purchases—tiny pebbles, invisible niches in boulders. It shot up and down treacherous hillsides like a thunderbolt.
The Badaulet was the picture of satisfaction. “I love you very much.”
“You don’t mind my very ugly, very stupid robot?”
“No,” the Badaulet insisted, “I truly love you now. No man I know has such a clever wife as you. I had expected us to die quickly riding the Silk Road, for the planes drop many land mines there, and the mines have eyes and ears and they are clever. But with this mount, we will cross the desert on a magic carpet. We will surround ourselves with our own land mines to kill anyone who dares to bothers us. Each night I will sleep beneath the stars in your warm and tender arms!”
The scampering pack robot knew no difference between day or night; it could “see” by starlight as well as it “saw” anything at all. Its greatest single drawback, among many, was that it blindly trusted the latest data downloaded into it about the conditions on the ground. This meant that, despite its nasty genius at knuckle-walking the uneven landscape, it had a distressing tendency to pitch into unseen arroyos and ramble off unmapped cliffs.
Worse yet, unlike horses or camels, the robot had no natural rhythm in its gait. So that, when they crouched within the thing’s bucketlike cargo hold, its hurrying tread felt like one endless, sickening set of panic stumbles.
To endure the numbing hours of travel, Sonja wrapped herself in a riding cloak. The heavy cloak grew steadily heavier with the passing hours, for it was an air distillery. Its fibers were sewn through with crystalline salts, which chemically sucked humidity from the desert breezes.
When the Badaulet scolded her for guzzling at his canteen, she stripped off her dark cloak, gave it one expert caressing twist, and clean water gushed down both her wrists in torrents.
A curdled look of astonishment and disbelief and even rage crossed her husband’s face. The Badaulet had always suffered badly for his water. Water had been the cause of bitter discipline to him. The loss of water meant certain death … Yet here in this simple stupid rug, this plain womanly thing from off her back—she had only to twist it, and all his suffering was elided, erased, made senseless and irrelevant.
“My cloak is yours,” she told him quickly.
He grumpily threw her magic cloak across his own back, but he hated her for that.
“You must wear this,” he said at length, “for it grows heavy.”
“No, dear husband, it’s for you. It is sturdy, it will last for years.”
“You wear this,” he commanded. “In those foolish white robes you could easily be shot.”
She obeyed him and put on the cloak, for she knew she had given offense. They were entering hills, unkindly hills like ragged black boulder piles, but the hills caught falling water and where there was water there was grass.
Sonja stopped, gathered some grass, stuffed it into a fabric rumen bag.
Sonja did not worry much about human bandits lurking in the Gobi—bandits were unlikely to survive in any place this barren. Death in the desert came mostly from autonomous machines.
The killer machines of the great Asian dust bowl came in three great families: autonomous rifles, autonomous land mines, and autonomous aircraft. They were all deadly: a few cents’ worth of silicon empowered them to rain death from above, or to punch an unerring hole through a human torso, or to wait for silent years in a puddle of machine surveillance and then tear off a human leg.
The aircraft and the sniper devices were harder to manufacture and maintain, for they were frequently blinded or clogged with clouds of dust. So the land mines were the worst and most numerous of the three. The land mines had all kinds of arcane names and behaviors.
Most land mines were scattered where human victims might logically go: roads, trails, highways, bridges, and water holes, any place of any former economic value. The great comfort of a robot pack mule was that it didn’t bother to follow trails. Also, land mines were unlikely to recognize its uneven, highly unnatural tread as a proper trigger to explode.
Knowing this, the Badaulet was eager to exploit their tactical advantage and to catch up with their enemies. Lucky was convinced that their would-be assassins had released the killer plane at the limit of its striking range, and then beaten a swift retreat back into the deeper desert. The Badaulet thought in this way, because this was the tactic he himself would have chosen.
His pack robot was tireless. He was also proud of the fact that it could run in pitch darkness. He would have blindly trusted it to carry him off the edge of the Earth.
Being a new bride, Sonja gently persuaded him to stop awhile, despite his ambitions. They located a nameless hollow, a shallow foxhole in the wind-etched, dun-colored desert. Utterly barren, their honeymoon hole had all the anonymity of a crater scooped from the surface of Mars.
As the Badaulet scoured the horizon for nonexistent enemies, Sonja climbed stiffly from the robot’s bucketlike chassis, folded the robot flat, kicked dirt over it to disguise it, and opened her blister tent.
This tent had a single mast in the center, a lightweight wand that clicked together like jointed bamboo and socketed into a ring. The power within the wand brought the fabric to life. In moments, the tent was as moist and pale inside as the skin of a newly peeled banana.
They would sleep together here.
Against all odds, in the few moments in which she had gathered up grass, a large, evil desert tick had latched on to Sonja. It had inched straight up her dusty legs to her constricting waistband, sunk its fangs into the tender skin near her navel, and died. The first taste of her toxic blood had killed that tick as dead as a brown Gobi pebble. How gratifying that was.
Sonja checked the sloshing rumen bag, where fermentation proceeded. She tapped foamy water from the bag, damply inflated a paper-dry foam sponge, and set to work on the Badaulet. Lucky had many babylike patches of hairless new flesh, healed by a rapid exfection. His nerve cells would be slowest to regrow there: he would have some numb spots. It would help him if his bride dutifully made his spots less numb.
Warm air drafted cozily up the domed walls, but her husband seemed unpleased. “This is improper.”
“We are married! Anything must be all right if it pleases you.”
He slapped at the woolly skin of the tent. “I can’t see the stars!”
“Yes … but aircraft can’t see us.” Sonja liked the stars well enough. She liked stars best when they were poised inside a planetarium, mapped, and color-coded.
The real stars of the modern Earth, speckling the fantastic dome of central Asia, these were less emotionally manageable. The high desert, untouched by the glare of cities, was as black as fossil pitch, and the stars wheeled above it in fierce, demented desert hordes. Those stars twinkled in the Earth’s dirtied atmosphere—and their tints were all wrong, owing to the fouling, stratospheric haze of all the Himalayan bombs.
The Milky Way had a bloody tinge in its sky-splitting milk … how could anyone like to see that, knowing what that meant?
Was she getting older, to fear the stars? Sonja had often seen that older people were afraid of the sky. Older people could never say precisely what disturbed them about the modern sky’s current nature and character, but they knew that it was wrong. The sky of climate crisis was alien to their being—it scratched at the soul of humanity in the same unconscious, itchy way that an oncoming earthquake would unnerve cats, and panic goats, obscurely motivate serpents to rise from their slumbers …
Redoubling her wifely caresses, she managed to distract the Badaulet, and to soothe herself a little. On the air-inflated mat he turned eager, then energetic, then tender. She felt raw when he was done, but she was also open and emotionally centered and sexually awake.
Sleep claimed him as she thoughtfully licked the scabs on his arms—those seven puckered little wounds, where she had plucked seven different state IDs from his flesh. Infection wanted a foothold in those salty little wounds, but the microbes died under her tongue.
She slithered under his slumbering body like a prayer mat of flesh.
Heavenly voices woke Sonja. The voices broke like a revelation into her interior nightmare landscape of thirst, dust, bombs, pain, black suns, cities burning …
Her eyes shocked open. For long, tumbling moments she had no idea who she was or where she was—for she was no one, and she was everywhere.
A torrent of sound was falling through the walls of the tent, sound tumbling out of the sky. Deep, Wagnerian wails from a host of Valkyries … Those were starry voices, tremendous, operatic, obliterating, thunderous, haunting the core of her head.
