The Caravan, Pt 3

“Do you know the story of the Hero Arendt?”
The Magister did not look up. The question was not worth answering. Everyone knew the story of The Hero. He had been taken as a child to become a scribe to the Emperor, a life spent in figures and in constant worship of The Hero that he may rise to become a God.
“He delivered us from the yolk of Earth, you know. They came from the Earth without faces, and ordered us to build more and more solar arrays and grow more and more food. But Arendt knew that without our food and without our solar power, they couldn’t come any more.”
“By the time they found him, hidden deep in the cathedral at Archimedes, it was already too late. He had taken the satellites and turned them, and bathed the surface of the earth in radiation and microwaves. They say that all at once, the lights went out. The seas began to boil and dark clouds blotted out the sun. They say the darkness overwhelmed them. All their crops died, and the air began to choke them. Billions of people died, unable to escape the choking air. The Hero cast them into a dark age from which they may never escape.”
At this the magister looked up. A slip of the tongue, a small heresy almost undetectable. Surely it was a mistake.
“Will never escape, madam.” He corrected.
She did not respond, lost in thought. It was improper to think on the topic, but at one time Arendt had been a boy. Records show he studied at the university at Copernicus, under corporate tutorship. There was rumor that he had been able to journey to the surface of the earth – they thought him clever and loyal, and he was to be given a small kingdom. And in gratitude, he built for them a way to capture the energy of the sun, and do with it as he willed. He willed it to burn the earth. Nobody knows why.
How different life would be, if he had simply taken their riches. His family would probably own half of the lunar face by now. They would all still be out in the fields, swinging scythes under the watchful eyes of soldiers from distant lands. And now she looked at her life.
The emperor had taken everything. She had a year, maybe, before the local vice lords would grow tired of her new taxes and would burn down buildings until the Emperor replaced her. Her family would be cast down, and she would be executed before the lot of them. It was a clever trap, from which there was no clever escape.
But perhaps the emperor assumed she did not know how to claw her way out – or perhaps it had been so long since someone tried that he had forgotten what it looked like. The pistol in her lap had always felt so heavy before, but sitting in her lap obscured by the folds of her dress it was simply an extension of her hand.

The Caravan pt 2

Continued from The Caravan, pt 1

The interior of the Marchioness’ private carriage is tasteful, lined with soft fabrics and curtained from the blowing dust. She sits perfectly still in the relative cool of her personal cave, dressed modestly in black from head to toe. She has been riding for days around the sea of Tranquility to pay respects to the Emperor in Copernicus and to discuss the fate of their noble house now that her husband has suddenly died. She will ride for days more, the sun growing higher and higher as they near the capital, central to the light side of the moon. As is the fashion of courtiers, she sits with a lapdog brought at great expense from the surface of the leaden earth. Unlike the product of the royal kennels he is a hunter, born and trained to hunt vermin in a much harsher environment than its present royal surroundings. His narrow eyes are focused on the imperial magister sitting across from them.
The magister requested to join the Marchioness’ caravan, and how could she refuse the hand of the emperor. Magister Mubarak was responsible for a long list of duties to the emperor, who has always known that the prohibition on spirits and narcotics have been loosely enforced in Taruntius. Unable to spare the troops required to rid the sea of Crisis of its privateers, he has wisely chosen to simply drown the crater in demands for tribute. While it is impossible to know the exact wages of sin, Mubarak knows what will be required to make this new Marchioness squeeze harder on the casinos and drug dens under her purview. Mubarak the magister is entirely consumed by these figures. He is professional, precise, and adept at his work. However, Mubarak the assassin takes unnecessary risks, inefficient, and worst of all unaware of these faults. For these reasons, the Marchioness is entirely aware of the hands which poisoned her husband’s rum. Her quiet rage permeates the carriage, which only seems to satisfy her companion. He knows she is completely unaware of the primary purpose of his trip. Her preoccupation with the untimely death of her husband has blinded her to the jealous eyes on her family coffers. Even now he casually checks his math, divvying up the Tamar holdings to ensure she is just at the cusp of leisure, quite unable to take her house renegade, unable to pay her way out of the situation.
Nino Tamar was a simple court girl once, 3rd daughter to a cousin of The Hero. She was a girl then, and had a girls interests in the rumors and intrigue at the palace. Oh, how she had pouted when he took her away, over the sea to his father’s wooden city. There she found another kind of intrigue – one of rum runners and opium dens. Gambling houses and love hotels. Privateers and assassins. Her father in law had been a spiteful sonofabitch, and her husband had been a heartless bastard. Now she wondered if she had learned enough from either of them to survive the trials to come.

The Caravan pt 1

The Caravan set out from Cassini at dawn, a long train of wagons draped in brightly colored sheets of canvas and flanked by guards and mercenary auxiliaries brought by the traders or poorer noblemen. Riding on camels and protected from the blazing sun only by helmets wrapped into a turban, they scanned the distant ridges for a chance to claim reward for spotting the first signs of attack. Behind them, The Marchioness’’ personal guard rode along on two-wheeled engines, flanked by pressured canisters of steam and holding saber and pistol akimbo. Under helmet and plates of armor, they looked forward calm and at the ready, which only served to send tremors of panic through their mercenary shield.

Grinding into the hard-packed earth, oxen and slaves brought from earth’s leaden landscape hurled their bulk against their yolks, pulling the carts and wagons under the watching buzzards. Given every comfort, Gladiators watch through the bars of their cage hoping for a chance to pound their freedom from a wave of marauders invariably peering between the scrub bushes. Fanatics of the Imperial cult walk behind them, their feet unprotected from the stones and eyes bare to the burning dust. Their parched throats sing discordant hymns for the apotheosis of the recently slain hero-king of their suzerainty in Copernicus. Above them, swinging choking incense and resplendent in purple and gold stands a lama. He will stand over his charge, completely unarmed and protected from harm only by the fanaticism of his followers.
Below him, the incense filters into the eyes of wretches behind iron masks, bound by iron chains to the iron scaffolds of the imperial cult’s altar. Men and women write naked, willing and unwilling alike, in penance to his will. Some few of them will walk home in a hair shirt, returning to Cassini with a clean soul. Many of them will never leave the temple at the trade city of Archimedes. They will be sacrificed to the hero-king or enslaved in her service to build wonders in her name.

They are watched by the piercing stares of heretic children, brought from the far northern craters as slaves to the empire in lieu of taxes. They sit in wide-eyed silence under the auspices of a dead-eyed crone who watches every blink and fidget to divine who will join the clergy, who will take up the rifle, who will fill the bureaucracy. She speaks of the Hero-Emperor and her great deeds, and the deeds they will do in her name. An endless supply of children raised to worship the sun or the moon will comprise the fingers of the 3 arms of empire. They nod, eager to please, leaving behind a dirt-floor hut ravaged daily by barbarians in the perpetual twilight of the far far north of Anaxagoras or Baillaud or Scoresby.

A child, large for his age and with a hunter’s sharp eye, hazards a glance away from his teacher to his future. A wall of Janissaries, warrior-slaves loyal to the empire and the corpse of its Hero King glides silently, armed with rifles and spears. Behind this impregnable wall 2 dozen adepts pull the noblewoman’s caravan. They are dressed in fine cloth and protected by a hard turban and the knowledge that if one should fall the rest will not stop pulling. The wheels behind him bear the seal of the hero, assuring that they will die knowing that even the weak know glory as a sacrifice to her return.

Above the menacing wheels the guard captain discusses philosophy with a wandering monk. The captain, under gilded plate and helm, behind tower shield and deadly blade, rubs his pale chin in deep thought while the monk, protected only by a hunting spear and the leather of his skin, lectures on the 8 types of murder which can be done in the heroes name. He can cite great epics from memory, and his Geas will be complete only when he has avenged the murder of a thousand priests. He will travel south to where it is rumored a rectory has been sacked and burned down near the fort of a barbarian king.

2040, Somewhere Along The Red Road, The Moon

Twitch sat hunched in the bushes, feeling the tendrils of a cramp rolling along his left calf. Down the hill, he could see the carriage dragging along the road towards the ambush that his boss had so carefully planned. They were down there, ready to send a great big rock hurdling down to stop them, while he had to sit all the way up here looking down Jessica's scope and hoping nobody spotted him. And still the oxen pulled the wagon, and still he sat like a stone.

Down near the road, Beano was breathing too hard. His eyes were wide. Jarvis, the so-called bandit king, was not happy with this development. Beano was nervous. Nervous, and armed. Beano was also new, he hadn't been around as long as Lenny or Scar, not back when they used to pull 10 dollar cons selling empty boxes of treasure and maps to tourists from the castle. No, he was here to shoot shit an' make money, lacking the finesse that Jarvis had come to expect from his boys. He tied on his favorite mask on, a black silk triangle with the mouth of a demon all curly teeth and brimstone, and he leaned down next to his horses ear.

"Baby, we gotta get a new crew."

As if this were the signal, Lenny's boys up the hill let the boulder go, about a decade too early. It crashed into the road and stopped like it should, but the god damned wagon was still yards and yards up the road. So much for the old boys. Well, it’s hard to find a clever man willing to get shot at for any amount of money. Jarvis bellowed, and out his boys came, 9 on horses and 1 in the hills, popping rounds in the air. Today was the payday, he hoped. Today was the day he betrayed his lads and his horse.

And there was the fella riding shotgun, the wood beside him exploding with a round just to his left. Ain't much worth to a marksman who misses all the damn time. The horses all around were kicking and neighing, and Beano was doing his best to waste bullets before he was nearly close enough to hit anything. The pinging of rocks echoed around the sun drenched desert basin as honest men fired out of the slits of the armored wagon, dropping Beano and his stupid hat. Lenny rode down into the road on a thunderous black horse, hammers akimbo, screaming like that would make him shoot straighter, like that would make the bullets swing around him. Jarvis shrugged, shooting his own long-barreled pistol into the kneecap of the shotgun toting gentleman who had been aiming to put a fistful of buckshot into anything moving.

And his boys rode around and around the wagon in a great wide circle, just like Jarvis had told them to, getting peppered with bullets and falling one by one, all the while pinging shots against the armored sides of the caravan and generally wasting perfectly good bullets. The marksman had done his job, the driver had collapsed into a leaking slump, the man riding shotgun was 200 meters back holding his knee and bawling like a child, and Jarvis waved to him. Twitch grabbed his bag of gold and started the long walk back to town.

And in the chaos and confusion, Jarvis kicked in the door, firing madly at the three men expecting their driver to be preventing just this sort of thing. The firing of his pistols, a distant popping outside, echoed in the hot metal chamber of the wagon, deafening him. While his boys rode around like wild idiots (there most only be four left), Jarvis holstered his hot iron. He placed his hand on the cool metal of his quarry. He touched its engines, and its handlebars. Gazed at himself, in his double-breasted white shirt coated with dust. Hanging off the speedometer was a pair of dark goggles, which he placed over his eyes, and the round helmet fit nicely. He smiled at himself. The demon mask seemed to accept the look of a motorcyclist without any dilemma.

He filled it with gas, and left the can upended, sloshing petrol around the room. He kicked open the rear door, threw the machine into gear, and flew out the back on his shiny new motorcycle, the wagon behind him engulfed in flames, his men immolating themselves trying to get at the promised gold that hadn't ever been there. On the road back to town, he spent his last bullet leaving Twitch penniless and oozing in the dusty sunset, while earthrise cast long leaden shadows on the prairie. For the first time in a long time, Jarvis the Bandit King laughed like a free man.