Come Armageddon Page 9

“You speak well,” he said, his voice hoarse. “We must all be avenged for our losses. We must drive the barbarian back into oblivion with a lesson he shall not forget, nor his children’s children. I am doing all that you say. But if you know such men of experience, send them to me!”

  “At once, Majesty,” she replied. Her voice was dry like the breaking of old wood, but it carried to every corner of the huge chamber. “Then every man, woman and child of the Shinabari people will be safe again, once the might of the army stirs and you stretch forth your sword to strike the enemies of your people.”

  There was a whisper of approval from the courtiers, and those still awaiting audience. But Ardesir saw that most of them were looking not at the Isarch slumped in his high seat with its gold panels, but at the old woman who stood on the tessellated floor in front of and below him, bent, haggard with age, and less than half his weight, but with a passion of will that all but drowned him.

  She withdrew, to send messages back south across the desert. The Isarch refused any further petitions and retired to his rooms.

  Every day the news grew worse. Fear mounted. Tiyo-Mah’s name was repeated more often. Word came of her courage, her will to fight, her belief in victory.

  Within ten days she was given rooms in the palace and Ardesir saw her almost every day, carrying messages, relaying orders, giving advice which the Isarch never refused, while everyone waited for the generals from the south whom she had promised.

  A sense of purpose settled over the city. Panic subsided. Taxes were doubled and no one complained. Then they were tripled, and the few dissenting voices were quickly silenced.

  Men with money invested it in great foundries to make swords and armour. Tanneries sold leather to cobblers who made boots for the army. Fabric was woven and stitched for military tunics and tabards. Carpenters and wheelwrights built chariots. Grain, dried dates, honey, salt and water flasks were sold to army quartermasters.

  Extra money was paid to those who worked longer hours. Profits soared. The Isarch was praised, but there were few who did not know it was Tiyo-Mah’s advice he took, her voice which goaded him, her will he finally dared not displease.

  Then the first of Tiyo-Mah’s new generals arrived at the army camps to the west of the city. Word spread like fire of his brilliance, his ruthlessness. Overnight the discipline of the army changed.

  Every week more men were drafted and the army swelled to vast proportions. Battalions were sent south into the desert and news returned of terrible fighting on the caravan trails, in the oases and around the outlying towns. Notices of the dead were posted in the city every third or fourth day. A sense of the reality of war came at last with the knowledge of soldiers who would not return, fathers, brothers, and sons lost for ever.

  But Thoth-Moara prospered. Every able-bodied man found all the work he could do. The only poverty was among those who were old or sick in mind or body, those crippled by the hurts of life, simple of mind or wounded of spirit.

  For a little while they were ignored, then gradually they were seen as a drain on a society fighting for survival. As summer faded and winter approached the mood became more than an intolerance for perceived idleness. Thoughts were expressed that the precious substance of the nation should not be used to sustain those who purchased nothing. It became illegal to give to beggars, regardless of whatever misfortune had driven them to such recourse. Idleness was a sin, and to foster it, or aid and abet it became a crime. Those who indulged in it were punished with confiscation of their goods, with hard labour, and if persisted in, eventually with execution as traitors to the common good.

  All this required monitoring, controlling, and even acts of force when necessary. A secret police was the most efficient answer, and when Tiyo-Mah put it to the Isarch, he understood and grasped it.

  The army became vast, and for the first time in centuries it was a machine of war. New captains were appointed from the desert, men of a very different mettle from those Shinabari who had postured at its head in time of peace. The ability to stand straight, behave with panache, and look good in a dress uniform were of no value. Men who were cunning and tireless, and ruthless not only with the enemy but with their own subordinates as well, were needed now.

  The name of Tiyo-Mah’s general was on every tongue, with respect, hope of victory at last.

  But when finally he came from the camp into Thoth-Moara the name was whispered with awe and a shudder. When Ardesir saw him, walking with a slightly rolling gait in one of the palace corridors, he knew why.

  Mabeluz heard Ardesir stop behind him and he turned. Only part of his face was visible because he wore a black silk mask over most of it, but his skin was purplish-black and covered with lumps and pustules. The muscles of his neck seemed to be constantly moving, but involuntarily, without reason. His small eyes were without whites, like an animal’s, and filled with such malignity that Ardesir felt the strength go from him and he stood motionless, staring back.

  “Who are you?” Mabeluz demanded. His voice was hoarse as if his throat hurt to use it, and it had no timbre.

  “Ardesir, sir,” Ardesir replied. “Clerk of works to ... to the palace.” He nearly said to the Isarch, then realised that this man of all of them knew that the Isarch was Tiyo-Mah’s puppet.

  “Why are you following me?” Mabeluz glared at him. “Do you want to be a soldier, eh? You don’t look fit for it, tiptoeing around the corridors like a servant!” It was an insult, almost an accusation. His neck twisted and his shoulders hunched. He seemed to have some nervous tic in his scalp, the bristles of his hair moved, and it was hard to drag one’s eyes from their hideous fascination.

  Now Ardesir understood with horror who this creature was. Tathea had described the six who had followed Tiyo-Mah through the portal. This thing was one of them.

  What should he say? He was in the presence of hell walking the earth. His throat was dry and his mind in chaos. But Mabeluz demanded an answer, he was not a nightmare but intensely real. Ardesir could not only see him and hear his breathing, he could smell a strange sourness in the still air of the palace corridor in spite of the cool stones of the floor and the water rippling over the fountain edge a dozen yards away.

  He swallowed again and felt his throat constrict. Please God, give him an answer. “I want to serve my country in any way I can,” he replied, careful to avoid using the Isarch’s name. “Whether it is here, or anywhere else.”

  Mabeluz grunted. It displeased him, because almost everything did, but he could find no fault with it. “You should do well in the police!” he said viciously. “You have the face for it.” And he turned on his heel and resumed his odd, slightly rolling gait to the end of the corridor and turned the corner out of sight.

  Ardesir was left shivering and covered with sweat. Suddenly the evil had assumed a new reality. Tiyo-Mah, for all her skill and her evil, was human. This creature might have been once, but he was not now.

  That evening, in the quiet of their own courtyard, Ardesir sought Min-Obal. He moved beyond the fountain where the sound of the water would mask any speech from being overheard in the house, or the street beyond. He had become accustomed to the knowledge that there were listeners everywhere, and potential betrayal.

  There was no time to lead up to his purpose gently.

  “I saw the new supreme general of the armies today,” he said as soon as Min-Obal had sat on the edge of the pool. Now was the time for the truth.

  Min-Obal’s face darkened. “So did I. He looks scarcely human. I didn’t think even the vilest of the barbarians from beyond the last oasis looked like that!” He spoke with a wry smile, but it did not hide his understanding of something beyond ordinary evil, or his fear of it. “God knows what lies behind the mask, if it is worse than what we can see!”

  “Only because God knows everything,” Ardesir replied, matching his tone. “But I think the devil is more likely to be acquainted with it.”

  Min-Obal became suddenly very still, his eyes intense, as if h
e recognised a moment of new truth. There was no sound in the courtyard but the soft slithering of water down the walls of the upper pool into the lower. The perfume of lilies filled the air, and of bitter herbs blowing in from the desert on the sunset wind.

  “The devil?” Min-Obal said with a lift in his voice, even though it was no more than a whisper.

  “Asmodeus,” Ardesir answered. “The Great Enemy, who would wage the final war of the world, and destroy the souls of every living thing, and then take it for his own.” He watched Min-Obal’s face for incredulity, but he did not see it.

  “You believe there is such a being?” Min-Obal asked, but his eyes betrayed that he accepted it already. Something within him understood.

  “This is the final war,” Ardesir said urgently, “in the last victory of good or evil.” He watched Min-Obal’s face. “It was prophesied in the Book which Ta-Thea brought over five hundred years ago.”

  Min-Obal’s eyes widened.

  “She still lives, in the Island at the Edge of the World,” Ardesir went on.

  Min-Obal watched him gravely, belief deepening every moment. “Asmodeus?” he repeated.

  “There has to be opposition in all things,” Ardesir said. “Without the extremes of choice, there is no freedom, and without the freedom to be anything at all, what are we? Pygmies of the soul. There are no limits to good or evil. Heaven’s door was always open, if we would climb to it—but now the beginning of the end, and hell’s door is open too. Mabeluz is one of the creatures who has come through it.”

  “And Tiyo-Mah?” Min-Obal whispered.

  “A human soul in the last corruption,” Ardesir answered. He wondered if Min-Obal was ready for the truth of that, and of Tathea. Perhaps not yet. “Such a one has unique powers, because all humans are children of God, and that which could have been good and chose evil is always blacker than that which never possessed that possibility. The depth of the fall is the measure of the sin.”

  Min-Obal looked at the water gently stirring around the lily leaves and the tiny flies hovering on gilded wings above it. “What can we do against them? There must be something! Where is the power of good?”

  “Within us.”

  “Can we win?” Min-Obal looked up, fear and hope struggling in his eyes.

  “Yes! But only if we give everything we have, and more than we believe we do ...”

  “Then we must strike at Tiyo-Mah.” Min-Obal’s face was pale as he said it, and he did not try to mask his horror.

  Ardesir closed his eyes for a second. “I know. But first we must find her weakness—if she has one—and we must believe that she does. Watch her, for need, fear, pain, hunger, any vulnerability at all. I will too. But be careful! Don’t ask questions, trust no one else, especially the Isarch.”

  Min-Obal gave a short, bitter laugh. “I haven’t trusted the Isarch in years! And watch for his son, Bol-Ferrat, as well. The boy has neither mercy nor loyalty. He would be a natural leader of the secret police if he were older. Give him five years, and he’ll have the job.”

  Ardesir turned down his mouth in acknowledgement of an ugly truth.

  Days passed into weeks. More news came of losses to the army, around the southernmost oases. Fearful atrocities were committed against civilians: women were raped and disembowelled, men castrated. Hundreds of men were dead and thousands wounded. Gains were small, savage and greeted with jubilation.

  However, neither Ardesir nor Min-Obal saw the slightest weakness in Tiyo-Mah. She grew from power to power. After four months in Thoth-Moara she no longer even pretended to defer to the Isarch. The palace staff had realised within weeks the extraordinary force of will that drove her, and that the Isarch was a weak creature compared with her. Now even the crowds in the streets knew that she was their hope of salvation from an enemy who grew more dreadful with each passing day. Terror gripped them and soared beyond any form of reason. Even the lists of missing and dead posted at regular intervals did not dampen their ardour and willingness to sacrifice anything and everything to the cause of war.

  Tiyo-Mah herself took time from her duties to speak with the new widows and orphans of the men lost. Ardesir was present one bright winter day when at last the air was cool even in the city near the palace, and he saw her walk out under the palms towards the bent and grieving women, some holding small, bewildered children by the hands.

  As Tiyo-Mah emerged into the sunlight again Ardesir saw her face clearly. It was the first time he had stood so close to her in two or three weeks. He was startled how haggard she looked. Her hair was even thinner and it seemed to drag across her skull, pulling the skin tight, but even so, it could not smooth out the hollows around her eyes, nor conceal the shadowed, almost bruised-seeming skin. She looked bloodless, as if she had not eaten or slept in days. Her mouth was soft and sunken over her teeth. Her hands, clawlike, grasped her ebony stick, and she seemed to need its support as she walked unsteadily over towards the first widow awaiting her. If Ardesir had not known who she was, he would have admired her courage in attempting to come out here to offer sympathy to those so recently bereaved. He could even have imagined her to be showing a profound pity. It was plain in the faces of others watching her that that was what they felt. A swell of emotion greeted her, a reverence.

  Tiyo-Mah reached the first woman and stopped, looking up into her face. She murmured a few words, inaudible to Ardesir at this distance, and stretched her skeletal hand to touch the woman’s face, still wet with tears.

  She moved on to the next, and the next, speaking to each one, touching them, and then touching her own face as if she could absorb their grief and share its burden.

  It was not until she had spoken to them all and was returning to the palace that she passed Ardesir within half a dozen paces. He saw her face with a shock as if lightning had struck him, tingling sharp and burning his mind. She was no longer gaunt and drained, her flesh did not look dark nor paper-thin. The strength was back in her, the blood, the passion of will. She was too clever to have altered the way her back was bent or how she leaned on her stick, but the power vibrated in her, her eyes were bright and hard, and her mouth was firm with all the old cruelty again. She had been rejuvenated.

  He tried to keep the elation, the wild hope out of his voice when he told Min-Obal. It must be confirmed. It was only an idea.

  “Watch next time she comforts the bereaved,” he said quietly when they were alone. “Look at her before, and after. See exactly what she does, and tell me.”

  Min-Obal started to ask why, then stopped himself. He must have seen the urgency in Ardesir. His own face quickened with hope, and he said no more.

  It was three weeks before they were certain. Then they met in the courtyard by the pool again, after dark when the night wind was chill off the winter desert and the stars blazed so low in the sky they seemed almost within reach of an upstretched arm.

  “I’m certain,” Min-Obal whispered. “I’ve seen the same thing every time. She comes out almost on the point of exhaustion. She speaks to them, touches them, and then returns with her strength renewed.”

  “Does she always touch them?” Ardesir pressed.

  “Yes.”

  “Always their faces?”

  “Yes, and then her own.”

  Ardesir leaned forward. “Whether they weep or not?”

  “No—they always weep, but she doesn’t touch them all.” Min-Obal hesitated but Ardesir could not read his face in the dark. “She only touched those who wept for grief. I’ve seen her with those who wept for self-pity, or rage at loss. She spoke to them but did not touch. It is grief, only grief which feeds her.”

  Ardesir hesitated, but the certainty grew inside him.

  “What is there to wait for?” Min-Obal asked. “It is worse every day. The whole city is changing, there is fear everywhere, people suspect one another. There are fewer and fewer who would not betray someone else to save themselves. Nobody knows who the secret police are. The old and the sick are starving and no one dare
s help them. Once we used to nurture the simple or the troubled and count it a mark of honour. Now we deliberately destroy them. Our fear of the barbarian is consuming our humanity and we ourselves are becoming a kind of barbarian of the soul.”

  “You are right,” Ardesir conceded. “There is nothing to wait for.” He felt the fear flutter inside him. “We know her vulnerability. We must use it. We must deprive her of the tears of grief.”

  “How? Have you thought yet?”

  Ardesir had barely the vestige of an idea, and he was not yet ready to own even that. “No ...”

  “I have,” Min-Obal said quickly. “They are new widows every time—by definition they have to be. They are strangers to her.”

  Ardesir swallowed hard. “How does that help?” He almost knew what Min-Obal would say, and for all his hate of Tiyo-Mah and his knowledge of what she was, he dreaded the moment of commitment. He needed a little longer to prepare himself.

  “If we give her women who can weep on command, actresses whose tears are real, but sprung from skill, not grief, they will not feed her,” Min-Obal answered.

  Ardesir was flooded with relief, and shame for it. “It won’t work! She is strengthened almost immediately. She’ll know they are not widows.”

  “Then we must arrange a time when she cannot ask for more,” Min-Obal replied. “It must be immediately before a big audience with armourers, the Isarch, anything for which there would be no sensible excuse. After all, she cannot tell anyone she needs the tears for her own survival!”

  “No ... but it can hardly stop her seeking more people, nor from destroying the actresses in her rage,” Ardesir pointed out.

  “If it is all done in front of a huge audience—courtiers, ambassadors from Camassia and Pera, even the bankers from Tirilis—then she cannot risk being seen to show any vulnerability at all.”

  “But how long can we keep her from more grief? How long must she be starved before it kills her?” Even as he framed the question, Ardesir knew Min-Obal would have the answer, just as he had it himself.