A Town Called Dust: The Territory 1 (19 page)

“They are days away,” said the mayor.

“Not even that long,” said the general. “One more day and they will be walking up this very street.”

Squid watched as the general climbed down through the roof of the small hut. “We march on them tomorrow,” he said when he reached the bottom of the ladder. “They are too close to risk anything else.”

“How many, sir?” Major Tungsten asked.

The general simply looked at him.

“Then we have much to do. You,” Major Tungsten said to Squid, “fetch Darius.”

“Yes, Major,” Squid said before hesitating for a moment. “Could I ask something?”

“What is with the insolence of these new Apprentices? I thought they came highly recommended,” Major Tungsten said, looking at Lieutenant Walter. Lieutenant Walter didn’t answer.

“What is it, Apprentice?” General Connor said.

“It’s just,” Squid said, “will we be able to save Dust?”

The general looked at Squid. “Is this your home?”

“My uncle and aunt have a dirt farm, sir, just outside of town,” Squid said. “I was raised there.”

“We will ride to battle tomorrow,” the general said. “It is likely we will meet them close to town. I’m afraid the farms have already been lost.”

Squid felt Max squeeze his hand. He didn’t say anything more.

“Now,” Major Tungsten said to him, “go and fetch my Apprentice.”

Squid hurried out the door and back onto the main street of Dust. Darius sat on the dirty front porch of a wooden building from which swung a sign on two rusted chains: “Brickton’s Bicycles.” His head was down and he was scrawling absent-mindedly in the dirt between his feet with a splinter of wood.

“What do you want, Pumpkinhead?” he said without looking up.

“Major Tungsten wants you. We are going to march against the ghouls tomorrow.”

Darius raised his face. Like the faces of all the traveling army it was dirty, but the grime around his eyes had been smeared with damp rubbing and two long strips down his cheeks shined clean.

“I don’t care.”

“But he’s a major,” Squid said. “You have to come when he calls.”       

Darius stood and covered the ground between them before Squid even knew he had moved. He shoved his pointed finger roughly into Squid’s chest.

“Why don’t you just bugger off? You, and him, and the ghouls, can all just bugger off! The only reason I joined the stinkin’ Diggers was because of my family, and now what? They’re gone and I’ll never see them again.”

Squid stood motionless as Darius’s anger began to wane, the banging of his finger against Squid’s chest becoming ever weaker.

“Why should I fight when I have nothing left to fight for? Why? Answer me that, Squid.”

As Darius’s face crumpled and his shoulders sank Squid realized that this was the first time Darius had ever called him by his name.

“I grew up here, Darius,” Squid said. “My uncle’s farm will be gone too.” Squid could feel his eyes brimming with moisture now, but he didn’t understand why. He never wanted to go back to that farm, so he shouldn’t care if it was overrun or not. “We aren’t that different, you know.”

Darius said nothing, but he lifted his gaze to meet Squid’s.

“We both,” Squid said, stopping for a moment to gather himself, “we both need to fight against the ghouls so this doesn’t happen to anybody else.”

Darius nodded, a tiny, almost imperceptible movement of his head. Then quietly he said, “You’re right, Pumpkinhead.”

That night the army camped outside Dust. They erected the large tents that were carried on the back of the wagons, unrolling them, folding them out, hoisting them up onto the thick wooden poles and tying them down with ropes against the desert wind. The large white, red and yellow tents, looking like some sort of somber military circus, easily doubled the size of the town. If nothing else, Lieutenant Walter said this showing would give the townsfolk some faith that the Territory had not abandoned them. The army would base itself here. Tomorrow they would march to battle with only their First Apprentices at their sides while the Workmen and other Apprentices remained behind. The Diggers would travel light—or as light as one could when riding to war.

Squid had never been all that interested in people but tonight, as he wandered from fire to fire, he watched those around him. Some Diggers were sitting and talking quietly. Others joked and tried to laugh. Some just sat alone in quiet contemplation. Everyone dealt with the knowledge of what tomorrow would bring in a different way, but one thing was very clear. Everyone was scared.

The Diggers marched early. Despite being worn down by the waterless desert, Lieutenant Walter explained, the ghouls would not have stopped during the night, so there was no time to lose. Just under four thousand men, all on horseback, rode out from the camp in a long column. It was eerily quiet but for the rolling and rumbling of the engineers’ bio-trucks behind them.

Squid and Max had been made to share a horse; according to regulations each Digger was only allowed one First Apprentice and hence was entitled to only one extra mount. Lieutenant Walter had argued profusely at the ridiculousness of making his Apprentices ride one horse, but he quickly discovered that arguing with clerks about their policies was a little like arguing with the wind about its choice of direction.

Squid sat behind Max in the saddle as they rode Cadbury, a large brown warhorse who was just a little too much like The Horse for Squid’s liking. Although Squid and Max were the smallest members of the army, riding two to one horse was still quite uncomfortable. But even as the hard leather at the rear of the saddle rose and fell beneath him Squid didn’t mind all that much. He wasn’t good at horses and was happy to let Max steer the large beast.

As the army left the camp and rode down the main street of Dust, Squid saw the faces. The boards on the windows were coming down and doors were being unlocked. As the army passed, the people of Dust came out and began to clap. It was hesitant at first, as if they thought they might scare the army away, but then it grew louder and louder until it was a full-blown cheer. By the time they reached the far outskirts of town, the air was full of shouts and whistles. Squid sat up a little straighter and felt a little prouder. He kept one eye out for his uncle or aunt, but he saw neither of them.

It was less than an hour’s march before the ghouls came into sight. From this far away they looked like one great seething mass. Perhaps, Squid thought, that is exactly what they were: one huge creature crawling across the landscape. If they were really just mindless monsters, how did they know to move together?
They must have some way of communicating
.

The senior officers already knew the enemy they would be facing, but this was the first time the rest of the army had seen them. Until now they’d had nothing but their imaginations to rely on. As he craned his neck to see around Max, Squid’s eyes grew wide and he suddenly wished he could go back to his imagined idea of the horde. It was, in his mind, a lot smaller. In the distance the blurred colors of moving figures filled the horizon. Squid didn’t say anything. He fought to keep the realization pushed down inside him, but he knew this road and he knew this landscape. There must have been tens of thousands of ghouls in the distance and they were, Squid knew, well past Uncle and Aunt’s farm.

“Halt and prepare,” called General Connor. The command was echoed down the line by other voices.

Max reined in Cadbury and dismounted. Squid swung his leg over the saddle and let his weight carry him to the ground. His legs landed with a soft thud but it was soon clear that the hard leather of the saddle had sent them to sleep. They exploded with pins and needles and Squid hopped from one foot to the other, wriggling his toes and shaking his legs wildly. Lieutenant Walter, who had already dismounted, began laughing.

“When all this is done,” he said to Squid, “your task will be to teach me to dance like that.”

Max and Squid began unpacking the saddlebags, pulling out the pieces of Lieutenant Walter’s armor. It was far too hot under the high orange sun for Diggers to travel in their full battle armor. Instead, they suited up for battle at the last minute. Lieutenant Walter removed his clothes to the waist. Squid took his padded cloth shirt and dunked it in one of the barrels of water that had been carried in by wagon. He pushed it in and out of the water a few times. It was heavy; large streamers of water flowed loudly back into the barrel. Squid carried it over to Lieutenant Walter, holding it high, being careful not to let it drag in the coarse dirt. He lifted it as best he could and Lieutenant Walter slipped it on, shivering as the water dripped down his back, but Squid knew he would be thankful for the water vest soon enough, once the hot sun focused its anger on his armor.

Max and Squid helped Lieutenant Walter into his chain-mail shirt, its metal links chiming like bells as it slid over his shoulders. It was a sound that seemed all too graceful for clothing made for battle.

“This is where they’ll grab at me,” Lieutenant Walter said as Squid adjusted his leg greaves, solid metal for both the upper and lower legs. “Make sure they’re secure.”

“I will,” Squid replied, pulling hard on the straps.

“Boots now,” said Lieutenant Walter. At the Academy they had been through the motions of fitting armor more times than Squid could remember, but he didn’t say anything about that now. If it were he who was about to charge into thousands of shuffling ghouls he supposed he’d want to make sure his armor was fitted well too. Max helped as Lieutenant Walter stepped into his heavy metal boots. They overlapped the lower greaves, leaving no skin exposed. Over his chain mail they slipped a loose green shirt bearing the rising sun emblem of the Diggers. They strapped arm greaves to his forearms and helped him slip his hands inside shining gauntlets.

The last thing to add was his helmet. Squid took it out of its bag and held it up. It was fashioned in the likeness of an eagle and seemed to exude its own aura as the sunlight bounced off its shining surface. Squid ran his fingers over the delicately engraved feathers and down the beak that would sit between the wearer’s eyes. Lieutenant Walter looked down at him and extended his arm. Squid passed him the helmet and watched as the lieutenant slipped it on. Squid had spent a long time around Diggers now. He’d been conscripted by them, lived alongside them, trained under them and was now about to ride into battle with them, but as he looked up at Lieutenant Walter, fully dressed in his armor, he felt the same twinge of awe he’d experienced when he’d first seen them riding toward him in the stables in Dust.

As Max walked over to fetch the weapons, Lieutenant Walter reached out and grabbed Squid’s hand. “You and Max are to ride behind with the other Apprentices. You will stay put when the charge begins.” Squid felt him squeeze just a little bit harder. “Traditionally, if a Digger falls in battle their First Apprentice will pick up their weapon and continue the fight, defending the fallen body from the ghouls.”

“I know,” Squid said.

“I don’t want you to do this,” Lieutenant Walter said. “Max will want to. You need to stop him.”

“I’ll try.”

“No,” Lieutenant Walter said, “you need to do better than that. Max is not a common farm boy.”

“I know,” Squid said, although he didn’t really know what Lieutenant Walter meant. “But, sir …”

“Yes, Squid.”

“I am just a common farm boy.”

“No,” Lieutenant Walter said, and his stern faced cracked open with a smile beneath the threatening steel point of the eagle’s beak. “You are certainly not that.”

The Diggers of the Central Territory, all two thousand of them, their protective armor glinting in the hot sun, sat on their horses shoulder to shoulder. Behind them, in another line, their Apprentices sat upon their mounts, ready to follow them to the brink of battle, and maybe beyond. Behind them were the massive artillery guns of the engineers, loaded and ready to unleash their rain of fire.

As the general called out, the horses began moving forward. They reminded Squid very much of the wooden toy horses he had seen in the Dust marketplace when he was younger. He’d watched other children pulling them around the dusty market square on long pieces of string, their small wheels turning as fast as the children ran. He remembered wanting one of those horses very badly, but Uncle wouldn’t let him have one. He wondered now who was pulling the strings of these Diggers as they rode into battle.

Max only needed to give Cadbury the gentlest of taps with his heels for him to follow the line of horses in front. Squid could feel the horse’s excitement. He had begun stepping on the spot as soon as the warhorses in front of him began to move. He wanted to follow the herd, Squid thought, he wanted to prove himself among the bigger horses, a feeling Squid could empathize with. But right now, as Squid looked out toward the horde in the distance, his throat grew dry. He forced a painful swallow. He wondered again whether Uncle and Aunt had been on the farm, or whether they’d gone into Dust and were hiding with the rest of the town. What would Uncle think of this, if he could see Squid marching toward the ghouls? Squid had little doubt he’d be telling him the way he rode the horse was pathetic or that the job he did fixing Lieutenant Walter’s armor was barely passable. But at least Uncle was predictable, and not much in Squid’s life was predictable any more.

As the two lines of horses moved forward Squid strained to see past the Diggers to the ghouls moving steadily toward them. His first impression was that they were like people, more like people than he had thought they would be. True, they looked like people who had walked so long they were close to collapse, but they looked human all the same. It wasn’t until they drew nearer that Squid realized what was wrong about them. It wasn’t just that their skin was gray and wrinkled, or that their flesh sometimes hung in strips from their limbs, falling away and disintegrating into dust that floated away in the air. It was the way they moved, lurching in short, sharp streaks that were so quick they didn’t seem to move at all. It was unnerving, as though it shouldn’t have been possible. They shouldn’t have been possible. And there were thousands and thousands of them.

Squid could identify the moment when the horses caught the scent of the ghouls. They started to twist on the spot, stepping their hindquarters around and tossing their heads from side to side, shaking their manes. Even the veteran warhorses among them, those that had smelled ghoul before, started to snort loudly. Squid could hear the Diggers whispering reassurances to their mounts, trying to calm them. He thought it would be nice if someone would say a few of those reassuring things to him.

It wasn’t long before Squid could smell the ghouls too. They didn’t smell as he’d expected. The scent was pungent, but it was more like the ashes of a just-gone-out fire than of rotting flesh.

“It’s going to be all right, isn’t it?” he said to Max. “The Diggers will win, right?”

“They have to,” Max said.

The line of horses in front slowed to a stop and began to step on the spot in anticipation. Lieutenant Walter turned in his saddle to look at his Apprentices, then nodded and drew his sword.

Squid could make out the individuals in the approaching horde now. He could see which ones were short and tall, which ones were male and female and, perhaps worst of all, which ones were adults and which were children. He watched as one childlike monster tried to keep ahead of the sea of ghouls behind it, its small legs moving twice as fast as the others’. Suddenly one of its legs gave way—whether it broke or the creature just stumbled Squid couldn’t be sure—and it collapsed to the ground. The ghouls lurching along behind simply walked over it, literally treading on it, pushing its small face into the red dirt as it still tried to crawl forward. It was soon swallowed up by the advancing horde.

The horses snorted and stamped but their riders were still, statues in armor staring into the face of battle. General Wentworth Connor, in his startling green plate armor, rode out in front of the extended line.

“Artillery,” he called with a voice that boomed, “fire!”

From behind him Squid heard an almighty roar, then another and another, as the artillery fired. He felt the heat, and heard the
whoosh
, as the fire-bombs sailed above his head, arcing toward the horde. All but one of these first shots missed, falling short of the stumbling monsters. The one that was on target landed several rows back in the mass of bodies with a rising cloud of fiery ash. The artillery fired again. This time, the engineers had adjusted their sights and all the fire-bombs landed among the ghouls. One of them landed directly on the front row. Squid watched as the ghouls were blown apart in a display of burning dust that was, in a disturbing way, quite beautiful, like a hundred thousand fireflies darting out in all directions and then winking out of existence. He watched as the horde continued forward, and like a rapidly healing wound the hole the fire-bomb had carved out was filled in.

The barrage continued for what felt like a long time, though all the while the horde was drawing closer. The fire-bombs exploded among them, wiping out hundreds at a time, only to have the holes fill up with more of the shuddering monsters. Eventually the artillery guns fell silent and the crews began to call out.

“Empty.”

“Empty.”

“Empty.”

The general, who had sat steely quiet in his saddle during the whole barrage, turned to face the Diggers.

“Some men say that the ghoul is our greater. They say in whispers that we cling to a patch of red dirt against an inevitable fall at their teeth. It is true they do not eat, they do not sleep, they do not feel pain, and today their number is far greater than ours.”

Squid, where he sat atop Cadbury, was some way down the line, but the general’s voice was loud, louder and more powerful than any voice Squid had heard before. It was a voice that had been designed to inspire. General Connor began to walk his horse down the line, slowly at first, but he had increased to a trot by the time he reached Squid.

“But I say this to you, we are still here! We have been here for hundreds of years and today is not the day we give in! Today there is no retreat! Today we do what our Administrator has asked of us, and we crush the ghouls!”

The general urged his horse on, faster now, verging on a gallop. From the long scabbard that hung at his saddle he drew his sword.

“The ghouls are greater than us at only one thing.”

He raised his longsword high in the air. The blade caught the sun and reflected a brutal white glare.