'Push on!' Oll yells at the others.
The noises make them falter the noises and the sight of the things along the ridge. Oll knows that look. Soon they will not be able to think. Where is Orfeus when he is needed? Some beeswax, even?
He plants the stock of his old rifle against his shoulder and fires at the trumpeters. He sees them whinny and flinch as his shots spark against their leathery, feathered flanks. He does not think he can kill them. He just wants to make some noise. Bale, Krank and Zybes turn and start shooting too, following Oll's lead. Soon, four las-weapons are cracking away up the ridge at the trumpeters. Zybes cannot hit anything, not even horrors that big, but Bale and Krank, who've never seen actual service, are fresh out of Founding Basic and have been gun-schooled. Their shots are clean, decent, neat.
It is not the hits that Oll wants, anyway, it is the noise. The squeal and crack of four infantry weapons up close could drown out, or at least disrupt, the effect of the trumpeting. Make a noise, like Orfeus did.
They keep shooting. After a few minutes, some of the trumpeters turn, belly-heavy, and waddle out of sight behind the ridge, stung too many times by the annoying las-shots to want to stay. The others follow.
Like cattle, Oll thinks. Like cattle, turning away as a herd, a collective. The hooting dies away behind the ridge.
He cannot shake the thought of them as cattle. Cattle suggest grazers, herbivores, and that suggests a darker possibility. It suggests something the trumpeting is supposed to keep at bay.
It suggests a predator.
[mark: ?]
Oll cuts a hole, and they step through. It is hot on the far side. Dry heat, like an oven, a bright sky that looks like it has been painted blue and then sandblasted. They are on a road, a dry and dusty track.
They walk for about ten minutes, long enough for Oll to realise he knows where they are.
He sees the first of the dead tanks, a burned out T-62, and knows they will see a lot more if they keep walking. In the space of one long, hot day right at the burned stump of M2, the regional despot lost a mechanised brigade and an armoured brigade. One hundred and fifty tanks and hard-shell vehicles.
'Why here?' he asks out loud.
'Who are you asking?' replies Zybes.
'What are you asking?' asks Katt.
Tank shells and metal wrecks line the road and the wadi beyond. The air smells of smoke and burned oil. Oll wants answers, but there is no one to ask. There is nothing but dry bones.
Zybes calls out. They go to him.
There is a trailer on its side in the ditch. There are plastic jerry cans of water, warm in the sun, food packs, bedrolls. Whatever was towing the trailer was hit so hard only lumps of it remain.
This is why.
They are dry already, and warmed, from the sun. They load up with the supplies they can carry, loading the water cans onto Graft.
This is why.
'Good luck we came here,' says Krank.
Oll is looking at something.
'Someone's luck,' he replies, not turning from what he has seen.
He is staring at the remains of another battle tank. The treads are gone and the wheel farings are bent. The hull's blackened and scarred, and the turret has been half ripped off like a can that has had its lid gouged away.
There is a mark on the side, just under the 18th Mechanised emblem. It could just be a curious little shrapnel scratch, because it is damned near indecipherable, but it was scored into the metal after the hull burned, showing bare steel through the caking of soot.
It is a word a name maybe, but not a human one.
M'kar.
What does that name signify?
And who thought to inscribe it there?
[mark: ?]
They stay for a few hours in the sun, moving along the dead road between the corpses of war machines. Oll checks his map and his compass, and discerns the next place.
'Not far this time,' he says.
'You were here, weren't you?' Katt asks him.
Oll wonders whether he should answer, and then he nods.
'Where is this?'
'They called it 73 Easting,' he says. 'The greatest armoured battle of its time, they reckoned.'
'Which time was that?' she asks.
He shrugs.
'Which side were you on?' she asks.
'Does it matter?' he replies.
'You must have been on the side of the winners,' she decides.
'Why?'
'Because you're alive and all of these machines are dead.'
'Okay,' he nods. Okay means something different now. He looks at her, squinting in the desert light.
'Just so you know; my being alive doesn't have much to do with the outcome of any battle. I've lived through things on all sides, one time or another. My life isn't predicated on victory. I'm just fond of it. And I'll chase after it when I can.'
'What is your life predicated on, then?' she asks.
'Just... being alive,' he says. 'I don't seem to be able to lose the habit, and it's hard to take from me.'
He looks back at her. Her eyes are dark-lined and big. They remind him of someone. Medea, of course. That crazy witch. So beautiful, and full of so very many difficult questions, just like this girl.
'It's hard to take from me, but not impossible,' he says.
'You're some kind of immortal,' she says.
'Some kind, I suppose. We refer to ourselves as Perpetuals.'
'We?' she asks.
'There are a small number of us. Always have been.'
'Should you be telling me this?' she asks.
Should I? Oll asks himself. I've never really spoken of it to anyone, not anyone who wasn't like me. But I'm standing in my own distant past, in a place that no longer exists, and I've got a long way to go before I can rest. A very long way. I'm telling the secrets of ancient Terra to a girl who won't understand them, and who will never be found or known, and certainly will never be believed.
Under this blue sky, in this desert wind, looking into eyes that should have belonged to a witch from Colchis, or at least been drawn on the prow of a Cyclades warship, what secrets am I really giving away?
'It's okay,' he tells her. 'I think I can trust you.'
'What kind are you?' she asks.
'What?'
'What kind of immortal?'
'Oh,' Oll says. He has never been required to answer that before. 'The ordinary kind,' he says.
[mark: ?]
When he cuts the hole this time, just before dusk, the desert wind gets up at 73 Easting, and the dry bones in the dead hulls start to rattle and fidget. The dead are sensing something, and it is not Oll and his companions.
Oll knows that the dead do not feel much. There are only sensitive to a few things. Things that do not have human names.
They leave through the hole to the sound of dry joints grating, and ribs fluttering, and teeth grinding.
The unease of the dead.
[mark: ?]
They sleep the next night in a wood, in the rain. They make a shelter using canvas rolls they brought from the trailer, and eat some ration packs. Artillery thumps and drums in the distance. There is a war going on over the hill.
Oll knows he is being played with. It is a pine wood, a familiar scent. He is not sure, but he is pretty convinced he knows this place too. Is this benevolent guidance, or someone leading him into a trap?
Most likely the same person, either way.
Damn you, John.
Oll gets up early, and leaves them sleeping. If he remembers it right, there is the end of an old communication trench not three hundred paces from the line of the wood. He can smell the river, which means that Verdun is to the west.
The trench is right where he remembered it, right where he and the other men dug it. It is abandoned, slightly overgrown. A shift in shelling caused a tactical displacement, and this part of the line got emptied out. Small blue weed-flowers nod. Grass sprouts between tumbled sandbags. Bulwark armour-plates are rusting. The trench floor decking is sodden and unmaintained. He can smell coffee grounds and nettles, and latrines. The bright brass of spent shell cases litters the ditch and the sandbag line.
Oll follows the jink in the zigzag trench under a low cover-top. He walks slowly, warily, carrying a rifle that will not be made for almost another thirty thousand years. There is the down-step into the officer's dugout. He remembers it all, as if it was yesterday.
In the dugout, there is a small desk made from a fruit box: a coffee pot, a stove, a dirty enamel mug. There is a dark stain on the back wall. Someone left in a hurry, someone who was hurt.
On the desk, there is a log book. He opens it.
It is a repurposed civilian diary, locally manufactured. The paper is cream, the numbers and the ruled lines all printed in the faintest blue. The diary was intended for a year '1916', a date so antique that he can barely make sense of it.
The first half is filled in with neat handwriting, ink pen, well-schooled. He wonders if it is one of his own hands, though he remembers the place so well that he would think he would know.
It is not his. There is only one word written in the diary, over and over again.
M'kar.
[mark: ?]
'I can't stay long,' he says.
Oll turns, bringing the rifle up. John is in the trench outside the dugout entrance, leaning against the back wall. He is wearing a bodyglove and dusty overalls.
'Damn you,' says Oll, letting his aim slacken, feeling stupid for being surprised.
'You got it, I see,' John says, nodding at the athame wrapped up and hooked in Oll's belt.
'It's really that important?'
'It really is,' says John.
'You should be doing this, not me,' says Oll.
'Oh, come on,' says John. 'You could hardly stay on Calth. It was a friendly warning, to help you get out of there. Besides, I've got my hands full. I've got a job of my own to do.'
'Yeah?'
'Don't ask and I won't tell.'
'I thought this errand you had me were running was the really important one?' asks Oll.
'It is. It honestly is. But my job is important too and frankly, you were in the right place. I'm on Cabal business, Oll. They sign my paychecks, you know that.'
'That's not a phrase I've heard in a long time,' says Oll. He almost smiles.
'The Cabal watches what I do. I can't be everywhere.'
'So I'm not on Cabal business?' asks Oll.
'No, you're not. I shouldn't even be talking to you.'
For the first time in a long time, Oll sees a look in his old friend's eyes. It is a look that says he is trying to do the right thing, even though the universe is out to make sure he does not. It is the first time that Oll Persson has pitied John Grammaticus in a long, long while.
'Look, Oll,' says John. 'I'm going to try to be there, when you arrive. I'm going to try my damnedest. But'