1 'The Seventh is the Fool, the Innocent.' - The Book of the World, ch.2, v.47. Command was situated in a school on the outskirts of the town and Bligh had to repeat his story several times before coming to wait in a deserted corridor. Eventually a door opened and Merc Domenech gestured for him to enter his small office. "We've met before," said Domenech. "On the plain. When I was in command of the 12th. You brought supplies." Now Bligh recalled his earlier feeling that his fate was somehow linked to that of Domenech. "I'm surprised you remember," he said defensively. "I was sick for three days afterwards." He felt uncomfortable under Domenech's scrutiny. He looked about the room and saw UPP posters on the walls. One, presumably for the illiterate, showed the Queen's Citadel burning, with drifts of black smoke taking the shape of the icons of the six Lords Elemental. Another urged the workers to unite in a holy cleansing of their nation. "We could find a place for you here at Command," said Domenech, surprising Bligh. "You would have to join the UPP, of course, but that could be arranged." Bligh felt suddenly angry. "I'm LA," he said. "I came for support by nightfall." Domenech shrugged. "That's all being arranged. The Landworkers' Alliance are no longer in favour," he continued. "They are seen as inefficient - this fragmentation of Cooperatives and Syndicates runs counter to the revolutionary current. The UPP is growing and before too long the LA will be integrated. Our seers have mapped it all out, you see. The only way to victory is through unification of forces - it is the only solution." "And where does all this come into it?" Bligh swept his hand to indicate the posters and the stacks of news-sheets. Domenech tipped his head to one side and fixed Bligh with a predator's stare. "Religion is a means of unification," he said. "It soothes the necessary pain, it inspires the necessary sacrifices, it convinces those who doubt." Bligh looked away, still reluctant to argue with an officer. "Belief is for the individual," said Domenech. "And who is to say that there is no truth in such an interpretation of the class struggle? Perhaps I am merely a tool of the Lords ... perhaps they speak through me." Bligh suppressed a shudder. Domenech was smiling as if at a joke, but his expression bore the look of a well-practised mask. With a heavy sense of sadness, Bligh wondered exactly what this revolution was becoming and whether he even had a place in it any more. "Now," said Domenech. "To the matter of reinforcements ... "

As runner, he guided the advance Section of thirty UPP militia men along the road to Pigeon Ravine. Despite hurrying, it was still dark by the time they arrived. They bunched up at the bottleneck as Bligh explained the position to the officer in charge. When they arrived tonight the defences would be almost back to full strength and by morning the rest of the 182nd Company of the UPP would come to relieve what remained of the 34th LAs. They were as quiet as possible, but the passage of thirty men at night can never be completely silent. As they followed the road down past the crag and along the fringe of no-man's land, Bligh heard an indistinct 'phut' from nearby and seconds later a crimson flare lit up the valley. The Army must have posted listeners near to the road, knowing reinforcements would have to come this way. A distant thud was followed by the metal crash of a mortar bomb going off nearby. The reinforcements scattered as another landed in their midst and a clatter of rifles rose up. Bligh hit the ground and instantly his gun was at his shoulder and he let off two shots at where he thought the listeners might be concealed. Then, as the flare began to fade, he leapt to his feet and ran. The rough ground of the valley bottom was treacherous in the dark, but it would be safer than the road at the moment. In this respect he was fortunate, as the UPP soldiers would have to stick to the track, not knowing the territory. Another flare went up and the firing, which had abated slightly, came again with renewed vigour. Bligh ducked but continued to run. It was no good firing back: the Army were dug in and Bligh was exposed. All he could do was flee. It seemed to take forever, but it could only have been a minute or so before he was back on the road, slowing to a jog as it rose out of the valley. A group of soldiers was waiting a short distance up the road, hiding behind a cluster of boulders, not aware that they were safely out of range. "It's okay up here," said Bligh, struggling for breath. "How many are missing?" They waited for as long as they dared but when there were still seven men missing they assumed the worst. Gloomily, they continued on their way. They knew by the sound of gunfire when they were near to the LA sector. The Army must have signalled up the Line that reinforcements had passed through the bottleneck and their colleagues were attacking before they could get established. They spread out in the rough ground near the trench and directed their fire into no-man's land. Once, a bullet whistled off the rocks Bligh was using for cover and he feared someone had located him by his muzzle flash, but the shot was not repeated. Eventually, the fighting abated and with a weary sense of victory, Bligh led his reinforcements down into the trench and handed Domenech's orders over to Captain Elliam.

As the rest of the 182nd Company of the UPP arrived in the early hours the survivors of the 34th LAs were told that their Company was to be broken up. After the fighting, Bligh's Guard of ten had been reduced to himself, Bernie Rayner, Wink Hawley, Sandy Brigg and Oori Campion. Along with three survivors of another Guard they were to be drafted in to reinforce the 16th LAs on the plain. "What do they do?" asked Wink. "Are they at the Front?" "I don't know," said Rayner. "Don't even have a precise location for them ... " A fine, dry snow hung in the air as they marched out and Bligh found breathing painful because of the cold. "I will not be missing this," said Sandy Brigg, waving a hand at the darkness. Bligh was not so certain. As the road fell away from the Ephedreal Hills, he began to feel exposed and vulnerable. He searched the dawn greyness to either side but could see no farther than a few yards. The snow had turned to a thick misty rain, and the road was topped with several inches of slippery mud. Before long his damp clothes began to chafe on his skin. At a junction, Rayner halted his seven men and they watched as the rest of the Company took the fork towards Comeras. Bligh thought of Madeleine and her little room and wished he was going with them. He had no more stomach for this war. The road they followed instead was a muddy track, wheel-ruts incised deeply into its soft surface, obscured pot-holes a frequent cause of cursing. Eventually, Rayner called them to a halt and suggested that they take shelter in a ruined barn that loomed darkly at the roadside. They waited until full daylight, with water dripping all around and the smell of damp faeces in their noses. The rain had stopped now and they emerged to the wet-earth smell of early Spring. Bligh looked around and saw fields with self-seeded corn sprouting inches high from the mud, a clump of cherry trees breaking into flower, tiny violets growing from the walls of the barn. Some kind of magpie was chattering from the cherry trees, sounding like a child's imitation of a machine gun. They marched in their ragged manner for three hours, stopping to question suppliers and a Land Party runner of the whereabouts of the 16th LAs. Eventually they were lucky. "The 16th?" said a tall Traian, at the head of a party of suppliers returning from the Line. "That's us." The 16th were covering the supplies runs for much of the Comeran Plain. Their base was an old farmhouse, complete with roof, window shutters, doors, floorboards. It seemed to Bligh to be slightly corrupt to have such comfortable accommodation so close to the Front. Their commander, Captain Ivoro, knew nothing of his reinforcements. "The orders were hurried," explained Rayner. "Our Company suffered heavy losses at Pigeon Ravine and we've been redeployed." "Pigeon Ravine, eh? I heard about that. You'd better settle yourselves then. You'll spread the load, I suppose." He grinned, suddenly. "I've even got a job for you tonight: you can take our lunatic back to Comeras and dump him on the healers at Command." Later, Bligh went to mix with his new Company. He soon found that many were from the region around Dona-Jez and that he knew some of their families. When he mentioned that Madeleine Palmes was in Comeras, Salas Benjennery, a middle-aged man with silvery hair and long-lashed brown eyes, said he had taught at the school with her, before the revolution. "I am glad she has found someone other than Hammad Fulke," he said. "Fulke was healer to the patricians, he visited the Citadel often. He was on the other side." Bligh wished he could just forget about Madeleine's former lover. "No, Friend," said another, Alyk Ammar. "He gave it all up when we took Dona-Jez. Even a - " He was interrupted by a sudden torrent of abuse from another room. "You have seen our good Lord?" he said to Bligh. Bligh shook his head and so the two led him out into the corridor and down to the door of another room. It opened as they approached and a soldier backed out, yelling at someone within. "I told him he's being moved out tonight," the soldier said, turning to Benjennery. "He didn't like it." "What's wrong with him?" asked Bligh. Benjennery grunted. "The mental fracture of our times," he said. "He hears voices in his head. He claims that the Lord of Stone, or sometimes the Lords of Soul or Water, are pushing Their way into his head. 'Out of the mayhem the Lords will arise, riding the bodies of innocents, leading mankind to a new Creation.'" Bligh recognised the quote from the Elementalist Book of the World. "He was always simple," Benjennery continued, "but he could at least fire a rifle and serve the cause. He has been this way since last week. Even when he's not violent he's a burden." Bligh pushed open the door and went inside the room. He had expected a man his own size, with protruding jaw and bulging eyes - the traditional jibbering fool. Instead, a small man sat on a window ledge, peering out through the gap between the wooden shutters. His hair was straight and unevenly cut, his back slightly hunched. He looked incapable of aggression. "Hello," said Bligh tentatively. The man turned and Bligh realised that he was a mere boy, perhaps fifteen years old. His face was marred by eruptions of acne and one eye was partly closed and swollen. "I'm new here." "I'm not," said the boy, staring without embarrassment at Bligh. "What's your name?" "Gaspar Sech." "What were you looking at?" Bligh wandered deeper into the bare room, keeping a safe distance from the boy. Sech's eyes followed him relentlessly. "I was listening," said Sech. "I'm hungry but they don't feed me any more." Bligh handed him a piece of cheese from his pocket. Sech held it up to the light and examined it closely before putting it in his own pocket. Bligh felt a terrible weight, seeing how the war could damage one so young. He sensed Salas Benjennery coming to stand beside him. "You were listening to the Lords, weren't you, Sech?" he said. "Which one was it today? Fire? Air? Flux?" He sounded nervous, as if something was not right. Gaspar Sech just looked at him. Eventually the boy said to Bligh, "What does he mean? I'm hungry, can I have some food?" Benjennery turned to Bligh and said, "He's refused food for two days now. He hasn't said anything that makes any sense for even longer. What did you do?" "I'll get him something," said Bligh. He found the Company supplies in an airy cellar and took some bread and a flask of water back to Sech. The boy ate greedily and then drank the flask dry. At dusk, Captain Ivoro found Bligh and Bernie Rayner sitting outside on the wood pile. "I was going to send you back with the fool," he said. "He seems well enough to me," said Bligh. "That's what I mean," said Ivoro. "You'll win a reputation as a healer if you're not careful. You're taking supplies to the Front instead." Over the next week, Bligh got to know his new Company a little better. Apart from the newcomers, they were all native Traians. Most came from the north but a few were from Anasty and the coast. Gaspar Sech was soon back on the supply runs doing his share of the work. It did not take long for Bligh's compassion to fade under the onslaught of Sech's favouritism. The boy would bring him pieces of food and glittering fragments of quartz, he would march by his side and recite muddled proverbs and litanies. "The fire that I breathe, the ground that I drink upon, the thoughts that warm me ... " "You healed me," he said one day, "and in return I am to follow you to the ends of all the worlds and I am to serve you and bring you favour and fortune." When they were put on two days' leave and Sech was left behind with the Company, Bligh felt a tremendous sensation of relief.

When Madeleine saw Bligh with Salas Benjennery, she rushed out under the bar and hugged them both. Bligh wondered bitterly whether she would have kept her distance if they had not already been to the public baths. "We're serving together in the 16th," said Benjennery later, as they perched on an old stone trough by the town's Assembly House, enjoying the unseasonal warmth of the evening. "How do you cope here, Madeleine? This place is dangerous for a young woman living alone ... anything could happen. You must be careful." Madeleine glanced at Bligh and said, "I've been here for some time now. I can defend myself." Bligh sensed that there was something wrong, but when he had asked earlier, she would only say, "Later, love. It doesn't matter." Now, she said to Benjennery, "You're quiet. You were always the romantic one. Back at the school you would tell us tales of magic and wonder. Has all that gone now?" Benjennery shook his head sadly. "I'm no story-teller," he explained to Bligh. "I am a historian. I would collect anecdotes from the old people of Dona-Jez. In some instances the stories had been passed down for generations: they would tell of healers who could cure a deadly illness with the touch of a hand, of seers who plotted the course of dynasties. Even my parents' generation possessed a greater sense of the wonderful than we do today. There's no room for magic in a modern life, there's no room for the soul." Bligh thought of the UPP posters and their adoption and corruption of traditional religious symbols. Across the street a queue had formed at a church. He nodded towards it and said, "The people don't seem to agree." "Salas is right," said Madeleine, and Bligh felt chastised. "Magic is being pushed aside. People no longer believe in miracles, they want motor wagons and radios and cinema pictures." "It is a modern, secular world," said Benjennery. "And is it not an improvement?" They looked around at the broken buildings, the shabby soldiers, the people dressed in rags. "This is not how a world without God has to be," said Bligh. "This is only one alternative." But he knew he was outnumbered. Later, after they had parted company with Salas Benjennery, Bligh pressed Madeleine about what had been bothering her. "I was questioned by the police three days ago," she said. "Not the police we used to have, these were the People's Police of the UPP. They are armed bullies who roam the streets in search of 'agents' and 'anti-revolutionary forces'. They thought my papers might be false. They wanted to know why I was here and not in Dona-Jez, working for the revolution. When I told them about you and that you were in the Landworkers' Alliance, I thought they were going to ... I ... " They had stopped outside the house that held Madeleine's room. She was crying now, and Bligh held her tight until she had stopped. "What did they do?" he asked softly. "Nothing," said Madeleine. "Only questions. I'm lucky they didn't keep me - " she laughed bitterly " - I'm lucky they didn't find me attractive enough to keep." Bligh felt sick. He kissed Madeleine's hair and let her cry herself out. He felt helpless. "Go back to Dona-Jez," he said, after a time. "Get away from all this." He swallowed. "Get away from me. Before everything goes horribly wrong and it's too late to put things right." He was crying too, now. "Get away from me, Madeleine. Just ... get away." He released her and pushed her towards the door of the house. "Go," he hissed. And then he turned and ran away into the night.

2 'As Mother is to the Child, so Stone is to the Soil, and from the Soil Springs All Sustenance and New Life.' - from The Lords Give ... aphorisms. Within days of his return from leave, Bligh's Company was on the move. When told they were to be relocated, Sandy Brigg asked, "Where to?" Captain Ivoro looked grim. "The Front," he said, and would add no more. When their preparations were complete, they shouldered their back-bags, slung their rifles and set out. They marched all day, through the interminable rains of the Traian Spring. Arriving in mid-afternoon at the reserve position, they found the trench to be little more than a filthy ditch, half full of yellow water and floating filth. They waited in the open here until dusk, having been informed by the soldiers they were relieving that the forward trenches were no better, the single difference being that here you could sit in the open whereas at the Front you had to keep under cover at all times. "I might take my chances on that," said Wink Hawley, interrupting a long pull from a bottle of fortified wine. "I have a distinct dislike of trench-water - it puts out the fire in the belly." There followed nearly a month of the conditions Bligh knew were far closer to the norm for this miserable war than had been his time in Pigeon Ravine. On a good day, the water in the trench bottom came to the tops of your boots; more typically it reached your knees or beyond, despite a double depth of duckboards laid somewhere in the depths of the mud. It rained at some time on every last day and the surrounding plain was a sea of mud, broken by occasional islands of tree stumps and broken buildings. In these conditions, at night, a simple tour from one end of the trench to the other - a journey that in dry, well-lit conditions would take five minutes - could last for longer than two hours. In such an environment even the most basic hygiene became impossible. Diarrhoea and vomiting affected everyone, as did the fiery aches and pains of trench fever, or 'pyrrhexia of unknown origin' as Captain Ivoro insisted on calling it. Worst of all, in Bligh's ranking of his afflictions, was the selective organic decay - starting with the webbing between the toes and then spreading - of foot rot, a condition impossible to avoid in these water-logged conditions. He dreamt his dream again and again. The one where he was a mountain, immovable, where he became a boulder plunging through the air. Now it would go a stage further and he would be running naked across the slopes of his mountain, there would be people watching him, urging him on. He would feel the weight of their hopes, a burden that bore down on him but simultaneously pushed him on. He felt the power of his position, the temptation, the specialness of being Chosen ... and then he pulled away and broke loose, the crowds dropped back and he thought he could become free. All around him the war continued. The sounds of fighting never abated; even the infrequent spells of calm were interrupted by the occasional bored firing of a rifle or a trench mortar or an Army machine gun. Added to this was an experience Bligh had been sheltered from up in Pigeon Ravine: the awful, deafening noise of an artillery barrage. At some point on most nights the screeches and the booms would start, mostly in the distance but frequently at or near to the sector held by the 16th LAs. The heavy 'tumblers' could cause devastation, but more often than not the deep drone and tumbling flight was followed by silence rather than explosion. The smaller shells were less likely to fail. Fired at high velocity the cartridge explosion, the whizz of their flight and the shell-burst were almost simultaneous. The only consolation was that if you could hear one of these shells that meant it had missed. Bligh never worked out how this could be known, but all the experienced soldiers insisted on its truth. The most terror-inspiring shells were the shrapnel bombs which hummed over regularly at dusk and dawn and exploded in the air with their blast directed downwards at the trenches full of soldiers on Twilights watch. On one grim night, the 16th lost six men to a direct hit and then eight more were wounded by a shrapnel bomb as they cleared up the debris. Bligh barely noticed. If it was not a barrage that pulled Bligh out of his gloomy cocoon, it would be Rayner or Cabo Dona-Santen rounding up volunteers for watch or patrol. No-man's land on the plain was an awful place - the mud and water was treacherously honeycombed with shell-holes, but worse, a soldier could never tell if the soft ground his foot was squelching in was the mud or the festering belly of some uncollected corpse. Bligh learnt not to think too closely about the places his feet fell. He knew that if the patrol made it out to almost half way across no-man's land they would reach the levelled ruins of a row of landworkers' cottages. The ground here was higher than by the trenches and the layer of rubble lifted the grateful soldiers' feet clear of the mud. All sense of precaution, all thoughts of their orders, would leave the patrol as this island of dryness came into sight. Shrapnel did not matter, and neither did the bodies or the possibility of encountering an Army patrol. During these snatched moments Bligh could feel the freedom of his dream again, and for a time his old self would be reasserted. It was on one unusually fine and sunny morning that word spread of relief in two days' time. Bligh and Wink Hawley were sharing an old ammunition box they had dragged out to use as a seat, a short distance behind their reserve trench. Before them, their boots lay steaming in the sun and now Bligh was tentatively approaching the task of peeling the waterlogged bindings from his feet. He did not like to think what his skin would look like after all this time. "You've heard," said Wink, "about relief?" Bligh had heard nothing. "Night after tonight," Wink continued. "Back to Comeras and a dry bed. You going to see that Mada ... Ma ... Madeleine, are you?" Wink had been drinking his favourite liquor again. Alcohol was a staple part of the supplies deliveries, here on the Front. It kept you going. Bligh stared into the distance and thought he might not answer. "She won't be there," he said, eventually. "Or at least I hope she won't be there. It's too dangerous. I told her to go." "Did she say she would?" "I don't know," said Bligh. "I didn't wait for an answer." Just as Bligh was about to return to the contemplation of his feet, Gaspar Sech came jogging up from the direction of the forward trenches. He was grinning madly and clutching something to his chest. He stopped before Bligh and Wink and said, "I've brought presents." His voice sounded like that of a little boy. "Brought them for you, please." Bligh and Wink exchanged looks and then Bligh put out a hand and said, "Thank you, Friend. But I've told you before that you owe me nothing - I'm no more special than Wink, here." Sech snatched his handful of gifts away from Bligh's open hand. "No!" he yelled aggressively, drawing alarmed looks from all around. The soldiers looked bored again when they saw that it was only Sech. They were all accustomed to his sporadic, violent outbursts. "You," he continued, pushing them towards Wink. "I brought you presents." Bligh was surprised. He had given up trying to persuade Sech to stop bringing him tributes of glittery stones and pieces of food. Now, though, it appeared that the message had penetrated. "You've found a new friend," he said to Wink, who looked unenthusiastic in response. "Bligh doesn't like it when people know him too well," said Sech, talking about Bligh as if he was not there. "But I know about that now and so it doesn't hurt like it did before. I brought you presents." He thrust his two closed hands at Wink, who had little choice but to accept the gifts. Sech dropped his booty and then turned and trotted away. "Oh no," said Wink, shaking his head. "He's been collecting souvenirs again." He showed his cupped hands to Bligh and they were full of engraved tinder boxes, rings, broken teeth capped with gold. It seemed that the dry ground of the ruined cottages was not the only reason men volunteered to go out into no-man's land. Wink Hawley stared at his collection of gruesome trophies, and then he retched and his vomit was coloured a fiery liquor-stained orange.

Apart from a furious thunder burst in the early afternoon, the rest of the day remained sunny and dry. Large lakes of mud acquired a pale crust which, by dusk, had developed a tracery of cracks. Dark, steaming footprints cut broken lines across the dried mud, where soldiers had passed in the afternoon. When Bligh woke from the rare luxury of a three hour sleep, sunlight was beginning to lose its grip on the world and the shadows were taking over. He sensed immediately that there was a new atmosphere, here in the vicinity of the reserve trench. The familiar, short-tempered weariness had been transformed into an air of excitement, of anticipation. Relief would come tomorrow evening, he remembered. He soon learnt that there was more to it than tomorrow's relief. "Tonight we celebrate," said Cabo Dona-Santen. "I have had men out all afternoon, up and down the Line, trading with our neighbours. Now we have some drink, some decent food. There is fuel for a fire." Bligh had noticed a pyre being built, in the shelter of a broken wall. "Tonight we celebrate," he repeated dumbly. It seemed a strange idea, more foreign than anything else he had come across in his time in Trace. He looked around at the mud, the decay, the sheer desolation of it all, and wondered whatever could there be to celebrate? "Can we do it? Can we do it?" sang Gaspar Sech, bounding up to join Dona-Santen and Bligh. Bligh found his youthful energy intensely irritating. "Do what?" he asked. "The Prayer of the Body," said Sech, giving him a sly glance before returning his attention to Dona-Santen. "Oh, we'll most certainly be doing it," said Dona-Santen. "But - " "I can do it!" Dona-Santen turned back to Bligh. "We have no priest to mediate the Prayer," he said. "And no sensitive to take his place. Some people wouldn't see the importance, but it does matter. The boy says he went to a Church charity school before the war and that he can mediate for us. What do you think?" Bligh shrugged. "I'm a lapsed Jahvean," he said. "I'm hardly the man ... " So Dona-Santen took the decision himself. He put his hands on Sech's shoulders, turned him around and gave him a gentle push in the back. "Go and ask Captain Ivoro," he said. As he was in reserve, Bligh did not have to stand Twilight duty. Instead, he stood in the open and looked out towards the Line. If he tried hard enough, he could distinguish the boundary between sky and ground. Somewhere over that gentle rise were their own trenches and, a little farther, the trenches of the Army. The field guns were quiet for now, and even the rifles only cracked occasionally. Bligh wondered if it might be some kind of national holiday, still perversely respected in this episode from hell. He went down to the trench to look for Wink Hawley, and when the two returned the fire had been lit and a number of soldiers were gathered around. "These things give me the creeps," said Wink, "even though I was born an Elementalist and expect to die one." "You believe in it all?" Bligh had never considered Wink to be a particularly religious man. "There's more to the religion than mere belief," said Wink. "Especially here in Trace. You go to church, you learn the scriptures in school ... it becomes a part of you whether you believe or not. It's an element of my experience, it dictated a large part of what I could and could not do for the first seventeen years of my life. No, I suppose I don't believe in it - not as a fundamental truth - but it's made me what I am." Just then he turned to look at Bligh and the fire lit the twisted, scarred side of his face a fiery salmon pink. Bligh looked away. He did not want to think about what Wink had just said. He did not want to apply it to himself. From around the fire, the soldiers cheered as a cork was drawn noisily from a bottle. There were more men here than could be accounted for by the thirty or so in Bligh's reserve Section. Particularly when many had chosen to stay away, either through religious difference or for their own private reasons. Some of the men had slipped away from the forward trenches, presumably those who were not actually meant to be on guard or patrol duty. But there were also many faces new to Bligh. Word must have spread to neighbouring Companies, through the afternoon's trading for food and drink. "It does, however, have its compensations," said Wink, as they went up and filled their flasks from a huge clay wine jug and then helped themselves to some of the bread and dried meat cakes that had been spread out across a tarpaulin on the mud. After a few minutes of idle talk, the eastern sky flickered and the ground shook with the distant rumble of artillery explosions. "Let's hope they stay clear of us tonight," said Alyk Ammar, a bearded young man with a peasant scarf tied around his head and the fingers of one hand looped around the necks of three bottles of beer. During one of the lulls in the distant fighting, the gathering's attention suddenly focused on those around the fire. Gaspar Sech was there, flanked on one side by Cabo Dona-Santen and on the other by Madeleine's former colleague, the silver-haired Salas Benjennery. The boy's face was already awash with sweat and his eyes were glassy and rolled up to show the whites. He was swaying back and forth and humming. "They believed him then," said Bligh softly. Nothing seemed to happen for a long time, and Bligh grew bored. At the same time, however, he was unable to look away from the fire, the boy, the rolled back whites of his eyes. Bligh stretched his back and rolled his head and shoulders in an effort to loosen the tension that had seized his unmoving form. He felt angry when Sech mimicked this action. He had not realised the boy was watching him. He took a drink from his flask and followed the satisfying course it took, across the back of his throat and down, down, to sizzle in the pit of his stomach. He felt the heat expanding within his body and he reached out and touched the cool stone of the wall for reassurance. For a moment it was as if his hand had merged with the wall and he could not wrench it away. With a grunt he managed to free it and then he stared at his palms, confused. He shook his head, drank some more wine. The boy was moaning now. The two by his side took up the noise. Dona-Santen looked awkward about it, but Salas Benjennery looked thrilled. Bligh remembered their conversation in Comeras about the death of magic in a modern, secular world. It seemed that Benjennery would do what he could to slow down that process. Bligh shifted uncomfortably and Wink nodded at him and then said, "Seems pretty intense tonight." Bligh rubbed his eyes with the back of his wrist. The smoke was making them hurt. Sech suddenly yelped and threw himself down on his hands and knees before the fire. He was still for a moment, and then he started to squirm in the mud, crying out over and over, something like, "Bubububub!" After a minute or so, the crowd joined in with the call and the rhythm became a steady, pounding pulse that seemed to resonate with the very flesh. Bligh felt the ground beginning to shift beneath his feet and then Gaspar Sech tipped his head up and his eyes rolled back down from under their lids as he looked directly at him. "No!" cried Bligh, dragging the word out into an awful bellow. "No!" The ground was snatched from under him and suddenly he was naked, running across the smooth flank of a mountain. Cold night air was cutting across him, making his body hair stand on end, making his genitals shrivel, and his rotten feet slapped painfully on the bare rock, cleansed with each slippery footstep. From all around, people stared at him, their eyes bulging in their faces, their heads looming over him, voices chattering. With each cat-like bound, he felt stronger, his muscles gliding smoothly over one another. He felt the power, felt the crowd's frenzied need. He felt capable of almost anything and so he ran and ran until he left it all behind and he felt as if he was floating, drifting in a sea of darkness. He felt warm and comfortable. He wanted to stay like this forever. He was unaware of what was happening for a time that could have been forever, for all that he cared. But then he realised that - somewhere in this sea of darkness - he did care, and he began to struggle, to fight whatever it was that was making him feel this way. The dream had never gone this far before and he thought that he must have become lost in its depths, but then he saw the faces, the mountain, and he started to run again. He looked up and the soldiers were all around him, pushing and barging to get a better view. Their eyes bulged making them look like the people in his dream and he pushed his way to his feet and out past them, away from the fire and the pressure of their stares. All around, the sky was a flickering horror of artillery fire but he had to run, had to escape. After another age he found himself sloshing about in the mud and mouldering bodies of no-man's land. He slowed himself so that the sound of his struggling feet would not draw the attention of sniper fire or enemy patrols and he realised that his feet were still bare and he could feel the very essence of the mud and gore with each slow step - the varying degrees of softness and firmness, the lumps that may have been stones or shell fragments or pieces of bone. When he reached the ruined cottages, he scrambled up over their rubble gratefully. Suddenly he was aware of the night air biting into his skin and he cowered down amongst the debris and wondered what he could do now. As he waited, his senses gradually recovered, but his shivering body grew steadily colder. He wrapped his long arms about himself and closed his eyes and when he opened them he thought he was in the dream again. A gruesome distorted face was peering at him, inches from his own, one twisted side a fiery contortion of flickering flames and scars. "Wink," he gasped, and then he realised that there were rowdy soldiers all around and he was slumped against a broken wall. Wink Hawley had a tight grip on Bligh's arm, and when he spoke his voice was tight with tension. "You felt it too," he said. "Hmm?" Bligh's mind was still unclear. Was this still the dream? "You blacked out for a moment," said Wink. "But you felt it, didn't you? You heard the calling of the Lords ... They've chosen us, can't you feel it?" There were tears in his one eye and now his grip was hurting Bligh's arm with its intensity. "I felt nothing," said Bligh. "Nothing." Voices were raised now, and they both looked across to the fire. Gaspar Sech was being pushed roughly aside by some of the soldiers and he was being subjected to a torrent of abuse. "You're no good," Cabo Dona-Santen told him drunkenly. "You can't do it. You lied to me!" The boy did not seem to care. He let them push him from the fire and as the soldiers turned away he looked up at Bligh and Wink Hawley and smiled.

When they marched into Comeras the following night Bligh felt terrible. All day he had been suffering shooting pains in his arms and legs and Salas Benjennery told him with a hint of glee that it was most probably rheumatic fever and he would need the attentions of a healer if he was to avoid hospitalisation. Then he had laughed and said, "Of course, Friend, to be healed one requires an element of faith and ... " Then he had clapped Bligh on the shoulder and finished, "Captain Ivoro keeps some aspirin. A poor substitute for faith but I suppose it's your only choice." The pain-killer had helped and now he just felt stiff. The Company split up when they reached the main street of Comeras and Bligh found himself alone. Everyone was accustomed to not including him in their plans when they were on leave, so now he wondered what he should do. Madeleine would have gone by now, he thought. He could not remember why, but he felt certain that she must have had good reason. Had they rowed? He thought not. He peered around in the darkness. It was near to midnight now, but there were still people passing along the pavements or wandering down the middle of the street. Soldiers, mainly, and weary-looking women who were probably prostitutes. Across the road, he noticed one of these women staring at him. He had never been with a prostitute before. He had always assumed that the taint of commerce would steal his passion and make it a waste of time. Now, though, he stared hard at the woman. She was old, maybe forty, but she had held her figure and she stood proudly. He felt himself coming alive for the first time in days. He straightened and took a step, and then he noticed that it was not only the woman looking at him, but a couple standing nearby. Suddenly scared, he glanced back over his shoulder and just down the pavement a group of soldiers were watching, too. Instead of moving towards the woman, as he had planned, he stood, rooted to the spot. He felt the blood pumping through his body, thumping in his groin and his chest and his head. He felt dizzy and he had to move in order to avoid falling. Suddenly he was walking, out in the middle of the street. Now others turned to stare and he felt their eyes pushing at him, trying to knock him to the floor. He started to run and the eyes followed. Down a side street, across a square, he ran, and the throbbing in his body transformed itself into the heaving of his lungs as he pushed his exhausted limbs ever harder. When he stopped, he realised that he had come to the little crooked house where Madeleine had rented a room. "Gone," he muttered, unaware that he was speaking aloud. He pushed his way through the door and climbed the stairs. He did not consider the possibility that someone else may have taken the room and he would be barging in on them, he just wanted to see it again. One last time. He barged into the door, harder than he had intended, and it swung open with a loud crash. She was still there. She woke with a stifled scream and sat up, clutching the blanket across her chest. "Bligh," she gasped. "I didn't ... " She climbed out of the bed, wearing only Bligh's old shirt. "Love," she said, still startled. "I'll put on some water for your bath. You must be desperate." He reached, dumbly, for her as she passed within reach, but she danced away from his clumsy hands and went out onto the landing for her water. He looked around the room and struggled to straighten his mind. He saw her bag lying on the floor and realised that she had removed her things from the shelf and the top of the chest of drawers. "You're leaving?" he said, as she returned. "Yes." She poured a jug of water into the iron tub and turned to go for some more. "You wanted me to, remember?" He did not know what she was talking about. "And anyway," she continued. "I lost my job." She had not been looking directly at him, but now for a moment she glanced up and he realised she was upset. "It's because you're in the LA," she said. "Mr Caur said he couldn't take the chance. Not with the police as they are. The UPP have been saying the LA is an anti-revolutionary force because it is resisting integration. Oh, Bligh ... I didn't know what to do." Bligh moved towards Madeleine. She let him stroke her arm, and then she started to remove his clothes. He watched her expression and realised how she was repelled by him when he was like this: the smell, the filth, the lice. He pulled away and removed the rest of his clothes by himself. "I'm going tomorrow," she said. "By train. Or at least, I was planning to leave tomorrow. But I can stay, if you want." He took her roughly and pulled her towards him. "Why?" he hissed angrily. His head was pounding and when he saw the distress on her face he felt a perverse satisfaction. "Be ... because you ... " She tried to pull away, to escape his embrace, but as she turned he managed to push her and she tumbled onto the bed. "Bligh!" she cried, as he lay down beside her and forced his mouth onto her neck. "Bligh ... " Her lips tasted sweet but she kept her teeth clamped tightly together, resisting his tongue. She tried to squirm across the bed, but he had a hold of her arm and now his leg was spread across her hips. Ignoring her soft cries, Bligh rolled over on top and clumsily tried to enter her. He could not manage it. Despite the angry pounding in his body, he was not stiff enough to penetrate. He pressed against her, nevertheless, in some gruesome pretence at passion. Pulling back for a moment, he looked down at her tear-streaked face. Her eyes stared up into his and he saw that she was frightened, and his anger grew again. The next time he opened his own tearful eyes, he saw that her fear had been replaced by a look of pity. Then she reached down and guided him into the right position and, only partly erect, he was inside her at last.

Afterwards, they lay in the darkness. Bligh felt sick and tired and confused. His anger had retreated but he could still feel it smouldering within. Madeleine lay awake all the time with one hand placed on his heaving chest, staring at him. He wished she would stop. He wished she had stopped him earlier - she was strong enough, he knew. Just at that moment he hated her, with all the intensity his enfeebled condition would allow. But more, he felt that same deep loathing towards himself. He feared what he had become, what he felt this terrible, dark longing in his chest could make him become. And all the time, Madeleine watched him in the shadows. In the morning, she attempted conversation but soon gave up. She was trying so hard, but it was only having a negative effect on Bligh. Soon, he was out on the street without a word of goodbye. He did not know what had happened last night, he felt that he had been a passenger in his own body for weeks and he did not know where reality ended and his own distorted imagination took over. All he knew was that he never expected to see Madeleine again.

3 'Caspe holds our history, Anasty our vitality ... but what of poor Comeras, eh? Why, the Festival, my friend, the Festival of the Day of the Lords ... ' - The Book of Confirmation, p.273. Bernie Rayner was the only person at the Landworkers' Alliance barracks in Comeras. Most of the soldiers, with their back pay in their pockets, took hotel rooms or spent the hours of darkness in the town's brothels. Such things were cheap in war-time. Rayner saved his money and sent it back to his family in Wederia. "It's not much," he had once told Bligh, "but when times are hard ... " Bligh had said something noncommittal about how he must care for his wife. "She died twelve years ago," Rayner said without expression. "Caught syphilis from a Traian diplomat." He patted his gun and continued, "Each time I fire this thing I think of the two of them. I'm probably wasting my time: my guess is the bugger fled five minutes after the first bullets were fired. But I hope, nonetheless. The money's for my two boys, and for my brother and his wife who see to them up in Tandrice. I write the boys letters telling them how wonderful she was - there's no reason to disillusion them. No, my lovely - " he took up his rifle and placed it against his shoulder " - this is where I let it all escape." He squeezed the trigger and a dead click indicated that the chamber was empty. Now, Rayner was seated in the barracks doorway, writing another letter. He glanced up as Bligh approached and shifted his feet so that he could pass. Instead, Bligh threw himself down to sit, his back jammed against the wall. It was a cool day, the sun a diffuse white patch on high clouds. He did not want to go inside, alone, but at the same time he did not want company. He felt edgy and confused; his thoughts seemed to be cascading through his head with little coherence. He believed he might be close to breaking down. "You argued with it, hmm?" said Rayner, as if he was merely passing comment on the weather, Bligh glowered at him, but felt numbed when the only faint response in Rayner's expression was a twitch of one corner of his mouth. "It's the smell, lovey," Rayner continued, as if unaware of Bligh's hostility. "When one's spent any time in an army one develops a ... a nose for scent. The shit-decay of the trenches, the sweat-fart-feet of a barrack-room, the booze and carbolic soap of leave. I know you've rowed, Bligh: every time you come back from leave you stink like a whore's bedroom - she uses soap and bath herbs from Anasty, hmm? I thought so. And today you come back, in a foul mood, smelling of the Front and trench foot. I deduce, Friend, that you did not even reach the stage of washing and screwing before she started, hmm?" "There are posters," Bligh said, seizing the thought. This morning there had been new posters on the walls of Comeras, plastered over those of the UPP and the various out of date news-sheets. Pictures of stone cats and water fountains and scenes of festivities. "What do they mean?" In his confused state, he half thought they held a hidden message for him, a code that maybe Rayner would be able to explain. "Ah, the Comeras Festival," said Rayner, tucking his letter into an envelope with a fold of fifty shilling notes. "An annual event, held to celebrate the Lords' Day. It happens all over Trace at this time, but Comeras has a certain reputation." "What does it mean?" "As much as you want it to mean," said Rayner. "The same as for everything in life. Believe as much of it as you like, lovey. Me? I prefer to read my books and avoid it all. They have animals in the street, for sport. They roast whole pigs and goats - it reminds me of things I'd rather forget." Bligh remembered that Rayner refused, irrationally, to eat meat. "It celebrates each of the Lords Elemental," continued Rayner, seeing that Bligh still did not understand. "There are scent galleries and narcotic smokes for the Lord of Air, seers and whores for the Lord of Soul. There are pontoons and great fountains over the river for the Lord of Water, troughs of fire and caged lammergeiers for the Lord of Fire. There are games of chance for the Lord of Flux, and the stone cat run for the Lord of Stone. And then, there's always the wild card, the Fool, to add spice to the mix. "But you're wasting your time with thoughts of the Lords' Day," Rayner concluded. "We're moving out tonight and who knows where we'll be posted next? There's not a single chance that we will be in Comeras for the Festival. Not a single chance."

Rayner was wrong. On the night before the Festival, the 16th LAs marched back into Comeras. They had spent the intervening twelve days holding a sector of the Line a few miles out on the Comeran Plain. In that time, Bligh felt himself coming alive again. It was as if he had been buried to the neck in trench mud and at last he had managed to grab a handhold and pull himself clear. This sector was only forty yards from the enemy Line. The trench was deep and narrow in order to minimise the chance of a well thrown hand grenade finding its target. The mud and water at the bottom was deep and smelt like an open sewer, but the squalor of the trench was preferable to exposing yourself to sniper fire out in the open. Life in this sector passed in a state of constant alertness. The Company successfully held off two night-time assaults and failed in one of their own. They lost eight men in the failed assault, none of them from Bligh's Section, which had remained in the reserve trench throughout. Standing Twilights, he had watched as some of the bodies were dragged back to lie festering in the trench until they could be disposed of the following night. The ceaseless struggle for vigilance - the constant fear for his life - pulled Bligh through. The talk, as they marched away from the Front was of the latest UPP news-sheet. There were two main items of news, if The Voice could be trusted. The first provoked both anger and dismay. The UPP were saying that some of the Cooperatives, including the Landworkers' Alliance, showed signs of becoming a counter-revolutionary factor. They were resisting moves to unify the forces of progress and there was the suggestion that within the Syndicates and the Cooperatives there were shady figures who favoured a settlement with the Government and a return to the days when Cooperative and Syndicate bosses had 'lived hand in pocket' with the patrician land-owners. It was blatant propaganda, an indication of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring for influence in the coalition of revolutionary factions, and it was clearly done without thought to the effect on the men at the Front. The second item of news went some way towards softening the blow of the first. Talks had been held with the ambassador of Feorea, Trace's biggest neighbour to the north. Nothing concrete had emerged, the report stated, but the simple fact of the report itself was enough to stir excited rumours of desperately needed arms supplies and international pressure being put on Queen Minna and her Government to concede the defeat which, of course, was inevitable. These new weapons from Feorea - which, as rumour consolidated rumour, rapidly acquired the status of accepted fact - would be enough for the revolutionary militias to launch a major assault on the Government all along the Line. "Who needs Minna to concede?" the reasoning went. "We already hold over half of the country and, with these new arms, it is only a matter of time now ... " As he marched, Bligh wondered what he would do if he saw Madeleine. The day and a half of his previous leave in Comeras was remote from him now. He could remember some sort of row, something unpleasant that passed between them, but he did not think too hard about the detail. More clearly, he could recall the feeling as he had left her room the next morning: the feeling that he would never see her again. He realised that their relationship had probably come to an end, and that he did not really understand why, or even if he wanted it to be like that. Before the Company split up, Captain Ivoro reminded his men of the delicacy of their situation and that they should not go out of their way to reveal that they fought with the Landworkers' Alliance. One or two of the soldiers even went as far as to remove their Alliance neck scarves. With Wink Hawley, Oori Campion and Salas Benjennery, Bligh went first to the public baths, where they lingered in the steam rooms and the communal tubs, telling stories and arguing politics. Later, they went to a bar and filled themselves with liqueurs and wine and the local yeasty sweetbreads. There was a new atmosphere to the town already. Stalls and marquees were being set up, their support-posts locked into sockets in the cobbles that Bligh had never noticed before. Boards were being put up, too, across any street level windows that did not have shutters already, and a number of side streets and alleyways were being blocked off with heavy tarpaulin screens. "You're going to be around for all this?" said Wink, at one point. Bligh did not know what to make of it. When the fairs had passed through Stenhoer in his boyhood they were a strange and mystical world, forbidden to the boys of the school. Since leaving Wederia, Bligh's experience had broadened but he still felt that boyish attraction to the forbidden. He shrugged and said something noncommittal. "But what about the cats?" said Wink. "Surely you'd stop at that ... " Bligh wondered what he meant. He sensed that his friend was more disturbed about this Festival than he would admit. "It's your religion," he pointed out. "That's what scares me," Wink said softly, and turned away to answer a question from Salas Benjennery. As darkness fell, however, Wink remained with his three colleagues. Bligh had never seen Comeras so crowded. The air was full of cries, laughter, the clashing, pounding beat of music. The people were dressed in their gayest outfits, their gaunt, half-starved features standing out in stark contrast, making them look like ghosts or gruesome chimeras. Groups of soldiers roamed, singing drunkenly, slouching over their women. Pontoons were moored in the river, platforms placed precariously across them so that the crowds could walk from bank to bank. Powerful pumps had been anchored farther downstream, flinging water into the air in a series of graceful curves and spouts, all lit by brightly coloured floating torches and beacons which seemed to be magically kept alight despite the water that regularly swamped them. Bligh marvelled at the extravagance of it all, when everyday life in the town was so harsh. He wondered at the sacrifices made for this one night of celebration. "This is the tribute to the Lord of Water," said Salas Benjennery, as the group paused at a trinket stall in the middle of the river. "The town is divided into the six Astral Houses of the Lords. It is an acknowledgement, a call to the heavens to say that we are ready for Them to walk among us once again. Ready to be saved from the eternal cycle of life and death." Just then, a soldier who had been scouring the stall turned and Bligh saw that it was Bernie Rayner. He nodded and raised his eyebrows as Rayner joined them. "You can't get away from it," explained Rayner. "So I decided to come and get something for my boys. Something to show them how even the spiritual and the sacred can be so readily trivialised." "This is not trivialisation," said Benjennery. "This is the people themselves rising up to celebrate. These trinkets, this coming together ... it is a far higher expression of the human need for the divine than any be-robed priest's judgement or gloomy rote-learning of The Book of the World. This is magic happening. You cannot get more spiritual than this!" Rayner raised his hands to fend off the stall holder, who had sensed a potential sale. "No," he said. "This is not tacky enough, my dear. I'll find worse elsewhere tonight, I feel sure." They drank more liqueurs at a marquee set up in a street dedicated to the Lord of Soul, and teased each other for not going in to one of the many shielded areas to consult a seer or an astrologer or a whore. A little while later, they found an entire marquee devoted to the Lord of Air. Inside, what was called a gallery of scent had been constructed: a series of areas with particular perfumes somehow confined to their own spaces and not mingling and mixing as Bligh felt sure would be their natural tendency. They passed through snow flowers and that indefinable smell of a mountain stream, heady barrages of orchid and musk, and finally the more subtle, almost undetectable flavours of the narcotic clouds which clung to the senses and made you see angels and magnificent birds, numbing blurs and angry colour splashes. Next, they spent some time and many shillings in the street dedicated to the Lord of Flux, losing their back pay on card games and gambling machines, while Rayner looked on and assured them that the odds were stacked heavily against them and Benjennery insisted that it was the mystical workings of chance and flux, @alone, that influenced the outcome. The atmosphere was quite intoxicating, so much so that Bligh barely noticed the change in Wink Hawley when they reached an open area devoted to the Lord of Fire. A single, central pyre was built up to almost the height of the nearby buildings and around it there were troughs of coloured fire, statues that spouted great gouts of flame at unnerving, irregular intervals. At one of these, a man stood, dodging out of the way as flames leapt towards him, taunting the statues with rude gestures and comical remarks. His partner was working the crowd for shillings and pennies of appreciation. "How could they?" muttered Wink, as they paused at the far side of the arena of fire. "They net them at the nest," said Salas Benjennery, misunderstanding. Before them there was a raised beam and along it, their feet bound to the wood, were twelve huge lammergeiers. Old Man of the Mountain, young Erin Panniker had called them. Bligh remembered another name for them - Bird with Fire for a Face - and he saw how appropriate that was: from a strong, dark body there emerged a creamy head with a blaze of orange - more vivid than any of the fiery displays of the Festival - at the throat, and tiny, black, pin-pricked eyes with irises of the same fierce orange. "The things can't move," said Wink. "Come on," said Bligh, putting a hand on his friend's back. "There are worse things than this." They left the field of fire and stopped briefly at a stall selling meat cakes and pies. "We've seen all but Lord of Stone," said Bligh. "Where's he then? We've got to do them all." He was feeling more than a little drunk by now. Spending most of his time on leave with Madeleine, he had not grown accustomed to the drinking sprees the other soldiers pursued. "Oh, there is time for that," said Salas Benjennery, grinning. Something in the way he spoke made Bligh cautious. He glanced at Rayner, who said, "The climax of the night: the stone cat run. I'm not waiting for that, myself. I'm not a one for needless barbarism." Just then, a shout rose above the general excited clamour of the night and Bligh sensed that something was wrong. Looking around, he quickly saw that Wink Hawley was missing. Remembering Wink's distress at the Fire displays, he automatically turned to look back down the street to where the shouting had arisen. "Come on," he snapped at his friends. "It's Wink!" They started to run, Bligh wishing he had not abandoned his sturdy old rifle at the warehouse barracks. They rounded the last corner and saw that the open area was in chaos. People were running about, more than could be accounted for simply by the high spirits of the night. As Bligh watched, several great black shapes banked and swooped, scattering people in their path, rising up over the huge pyre and the troughs and spouts of flame. The birds were clearly confused: they were not creatures of the night and so they lingered by the light of the fires, muddled and, perhaps, amused by all these running, shouting people who they could scatter with one graceful stoop. "What's the excitement?" said Wink Hawley, appearing from the shadows. "The birds are free," said Rayner, giving Wink one of his knowing looks. "Well," he added, "I'll give you this, my friend: you've really stirred things up tonight." Even as he spoke, the last of the birds disappeared into the shadows of a boarded-up side street. As they wandered off again, no one wanting to talk directly about what they all assumed Wink had done, Bligh noticed that the crowds were growing thinner and a number of the stalls and marquees were being dismantled. If it had not been for the magnificent effort of creating such a festival in the depths of wartime, Bligh would have wondered what all the excitement had been about. The festivities had been little more than were put on at any number of coastal towns in Feorea or Marland over the course of a Summer. They entered the main street again, and here Bligh could see where much of the crowd had gathered. A mass of faces was pressed to the upper windows of the houses and shops along here, bodies hanging out over balconies and clinging part-way up the stone frontages of shops. Ahead, there was a crowd, mostly of young men, thronging the street, shouting and cheering and stamping their feet in some shambolic, drunken order. "Ah," said Salas Benjennery. "Now, we see, it is time for the Lord of Stone ... " It was impossible to get through the crowd. The jostling and shouting, the heat of the massed bodies, all made Bligh feel dizzy and disorientated. He did not want to be here, he realised. He spotted Bernie Rayner forging a path through the mass and, desperate, he followed, knowing that Rayner would not stay for this either, if he could help it. He kept sight of Rayner for a time, then lost contact in the chaos. Moments later, he spotted his friend's back and lunged, panicking towards him. Gaining ground rapidly, he threw himself forward and grabbed Rayner's shoulder, but the man turned and it was someone he had never met before, yelling abuse at him even as his whole face was lit up with a fervent excitement. Bligh looked around in growing confusion, sensing that he had moved close to the heart of the crowd. Bodies pressed against him from all sides, arms and shoulders and heads striking him and knocking him off balance, making it impossible to stand still and get his bearings. A short time later, Bligh found himself jammed up against a wall. He found a handhold and heaved himself up, using the surrounding bodies as stepping stones to raise himself above the mass. He managed to hook a hand over the railing of a crowded balcony and now he could look down at the seething mosaic of people. A short distance along the street, there was a platform with a set of heavy cages in place and some men clustered around. Inside the cages were four stone cats; through the shouting and laughter Bligh thought he could hear the hissing and snarling as one of the beasts threw itself furiously at the end of its cage, shaking the entire platform. Bligh felt sick and trapped now. He did not want to be here. Then he saw why the cat was so agitated: the roof of its cage was being steadily lowered, trapping it against the floor until finally it could not move. The crowd gave a mighty roar as some men on the platform reached in through the criss-cross bars of the cage. Bligh looked at the people on the balcony and a large woman whose face was jammed close to his own turned to him and smiled a drunken smile. "What are they doing?" he yelled over the noise of the crowd. She smiled more broadly, and now her eyes reflected the flickering of a nearby torch. "They're tying his balls so he's not so fast," she said, and turned away again. Bligh looked back to the platform and the cage roof was being raised again. The cat had become quieter, and Bligh could see a leather harness bound across its rear quarters and extending down each of its hind legs. Two of the others already had their testicles bound up in this manner, and the fourth was now being pinned down in its cage. Someone pushed Bligh and he lost his grip on the balcony. He landed spreadeagled on the crowd and hands reached up and pushed him, bouncing him along on a sea of humanity, until eventually a hand grabbed him and hauled him to the ground. "Bligh," said a voice he remembered. "I knew you'd be here." He felt a surge of euphoria on recognising Sadiq Phelim. It seemed that all emotions were amplified to extraordinary levels in the incandescent atmosphere of this crowd. "Sadiq!" he yelled. "What's happening?" "Everything." His voice was quiet, but Bligh heard it easily. He realised that Sadiq was with friends. "This is Alderas Aldivine," said Sadiq, louder now, nodding to a tall thin man who was being lifted off his feet by the press of the crowd. "And Pozas Cantera." A rotund man, sheened with sweat and looking edgy. The crowd was shifting now, and they had a little more room to move, or at least to hold their ground. "And I understand you've come across Merc," he said, nodding towards Merc Domenech, who stood there with a quiet smile on his face, studying Bligh closely. "Join with us," said Domenech. "It is about to happen." "What?" said Bligh. "No ... no." He felt confused, but suddenly he knew he did not want to stay with this peculiar group of men. Yet still he felt drawn to them, he felt a tingling in his head, a strange desire. He felt that the electricity of the crowd was being channelled through this group, setting his mind alight, sending all sorts of odd, intrusive thoughts tumbling through his brain. "Come on. We're special - can't you feel it?" demanded Domenech. "No!" Bligh cried, and turned and started to struggle, bouncing off bodies and pushing angry people aside, fleeing from the beating in his head and the crazed look on Merc Domenech's face. Just as he thought he might break free, a horn blew from behind and drums started to beat from the balconies and the upper storey windows, a pulse that matched his own pounding heartbeat, driving it to thump louder, faster. He stopped running as he felt dizziness threatening to swamp him, and then, as he looked back down the street, he realised that the crowd had thinned and the stone cat cages were open. It took him several seconds to spot the cats in the shadows of the street, and when he found their dusky forms he saw that they had covered almost half the distance towards him. They were running with a staggering lope, but despite their handicaps their pace and agility was frightening. Already, an old man had been swiped with a heavy paw and was being dragged up onto a balcony beyond the reach of one of the cats. Bligh's senses cleared in a sudden rush. He turned and ran. He was one of the last men here. He ducked into the mouth of a side street and instantly he was floundering against a huge tarpaulin which had been drawn across the opening and bound into place through steel hoops in the walls. Now, he realised why the boards and shuttering had gone up during the day. The cats were being restricted to certain areas of the town. And so, he realised, was he. He ran, until each heavy breath tore at his chest and his heart thudded heavily, finding its panicked echo in his gut and his head. As he ran, he was stripped of all thoughts except survival. He became nothing, a machine of bone and aching muscle, a single, isolated unit of fear. Each side street and alleyway was blocked until, finally, he found a passage that was clear and he darted along it, running with a group of young Comerans, leaving them behind as they lingered to drink from their clay bottles of wine. Every so often he looked behind, but there was no sign of the four cats, only people, running in every direction, playing a game of chance which would have served the Lord of Flux proudly. And above him, all the time, there were people shouting and cheering from their balconies and windows, driving him on despite the doubts in his mind. He had lost track of time when he came across Domenech again. He stayed in the shadows and watched as Domenech strode around in energetic circles, brandishing a long sword in the air, demanding that he be obeyed. His group of followers had grown, now, although he had lost Sadiq and the man called Alderas Aldivine. Domenech grabbed someone from his crowd and Bligh saw that it was poor old Wink Hawley, looking bemused and slightly embarrassed. Somewhere in the shadows, the fool Gaspar Sech was prancing about, singing one of his mad little songs until Domenech turned and cuffed him across the back of his head and he ran whimpering into the crowd. "It's time!" cried Domenech, to Hawley and to his followers. "They're getting tired now: it's time we hunt the beasts that hunt us!" The crowd roared in answer and an echo rose from the onlookers high above. Wink Hawley shrugged Domenech's hands off his shoulders and turned with a muttered curse, starting to run away from the crowd. Bligh wished he knew what was happening. He wished he could understand the strange excitement that was threatening to overtake him. He felt that he could be so easily submerged. He shrank back into the shadows as Domenech led the crowd past him, along the street. Part of him wanted to follow. He felt that he could control these puppets just as Domenech did, he felt the potential of power if only he would use it. He held himself back, resisted the temptation. Minutes after Domenech had left, Bligh saw a stone cat dragging itself along in the shadows of the street. Immediately, there were yells from a balcony above, and bottles and stones were hurled down at the distraught animal. The beast was no longer the fierce, skittish creature that had leapt from its cage in the main street of Comeras. Now, it limped along, dragging its hind feet and giving little anguished whimpers as its harness dragged at its balls and its rear legs. Bligh did not know what to do, but as he dithered there was a cry from a nearby side street and a crowd of young men raced out at the cat, brandishing swords and clubs and broken bottles. Instantly the cat yelped and leapt, twisting into the air, turning as it landed, and raced away down the street, still able in its pain to flee this bloodthirsty mob. Bligh turned away, unable to watch. He headed in the direction he had seen Wink Hawley take, hoping desperately that his friend could help him. Some time later, he heard a shout from above, different from all the other shouts. It was Wink, leaning over a balcony and beckoning, Bernie Rayner by his side. Bligh peered up at the group on the balcony and for a moment he thought he saw Madeleine in the shadows, but then he spotted Slowly Skett and young Erin Panniker and he knew that his mind was fooling him. He looked at Wink again, who may not have been Wink, and wanted desperately to grab his hand and be hauled out of the madness of the street, the madness of the stone cat run. He turned and started to trot away, aware of a dull ache in the pit of his belly, a fire in his groin. After a few seconds, his trot turned into a headlong run and his whole body was alight with pain, but he knew he must run, as every cell of his being was infused with the most desperate animal fear. He heard the roar from the onlookers in the buildings, the baying for blood. He heard the roar of a crowd behind him and he knew he must somehow run even harder, even faster. He emerged in the open space where the tall pyre still burnt for the Lord of Fire and the statues still gouted irregular jets of flame. He turned, in the centre of this open area and waved his hands, taunting the crowd. He felt them respond, even before he heard their cheers and cries. He shouted Traian obscenities at them, his use of the language having broadened with his time in the trenches. They yelled back at him and he felt again that he could lead them, control them. He felt it with a certainty that he had never felt about anything before. He could make them do whatever he wanted: they would worship him before he was through, if that was his choice. He turned and ran again. His feelings frightened him. He felt sure that at some point on this mad night he had finally crossed the boundary into the land of pure insanity. Off another wide street, Bligh found an angled shutter, an access point to the cellar of a drinking house. He pulled at the hasp with no sense of hope and one door swung upwards. Surprised, he straightened and peered about himself. He was shielded from the view of the overhanging balconies above. The street was wide here, and he felt sure that no one on the other side would see what he was doing. He stepped into the darkness, found a foothold and entered the cellar, dragging the door over behind him. He waited in the darkness for some time, not quite sure what he was doing but savouring the coolness and the calm that was returning to his body. Perhaps he was not insane after all: perhaps this mania overtook everyone who became a part of the stone cat run. Already, his head seemed clearer and his thoughts felt as if they were his own. All that remained was a nagging feeling that he was being watched. After a short time he moved back to the cellar's entrance and found that he could see through a gap between the two wooden shutters. There were people in the street again, roaming aimlessly. The night seemed to be dying now, the excitement dissipating. Then, after a time, he recognised the form of Merc Domenech, still leading his band of followers. They numbered more than forty by now, but their spirits seemed lower, despite Domenech's commands and encouragement. As they drew closer, passing in the street, Bligh saw the sword that Domenech was still carrying aloft. As it glinted in the torchlight, Bligh felt sure, for a moment, that its blade was red with blood. And then they were gone, away down the street, and there were just the small knots of men, trudging about dispiritedly. Bligh pulled away from his viewpoint and sat on the top step, peering into the shadows, and then he saw the dusky shadow, hunched up by the far wall between two wine barrels and a heap of old rags. Before, he had simply taken it for another pile of rags, but now he could see its sandy, lightly specked coat, the black folds of its mouth, the dark tuft at the end of its tail which it flicked, restlessly, back and forth. "How long have you been here?" he said softly, but the beast did not reply. He moved, carefully, down the steps and settled against one wall, where he could keep a watchful eye over the stone cat and wonder what to do. He fell asleep almost instantly, for when he opened his eyes there was sunlight slanting in through the crack between the shutters and the cat had gone. Now, he wondered if he had imagined it all, but later in the day he discovered that only three of the released stone cats had been cornered and gored the previous night. The fourth had disappeared. "Surprising that more didn't get away," Salas Benjennery told him. "So much of the town has been damaged by the war, it's impossible to block off escape routes now." Bligh wandered back through the streets of Comeras, feeling shabby and worn. The effects of the previous day's drinking had not taken long to manifest themselves and his head pounded with each pace and his mouth felt dry and rough, like the dusty cobbles of the street. All around, it was as if it was just another day in Comeras. All that remained of the Festival were the posters and an increase in litter and smashed bottles which did not look at all out of place in this war-battered town. Back at the barracks, most of the Company was gathered. Bernie Rayner greeted him with his usual knowing look and brief shake of the head. He was the only one who did not look as if he had been awake and drunk for all of the previous night. "Good morning, my lovey," he said, with irritating good humour. "I think you might need some sleep this morning. We've got new orders. We're moving out this afternoon. We're taking a train, going south of Caspe." That name - Caspe - sent a visible shudder through all those within hearing. The fields around Caspe had been the scene of the bloodiest fighting of the entire war. It could mean only one thing: that the forces of the revolution were going for another big push, in the hope of bursting through the strong Army lines of the region and storming the heartlands of Trace. Success would win the war, but it was a success that had exceeded their grasp at every attempt so far.

4 'If there is, or ever was, a God of Battles, We worshipped Him well on this dying day.' - from the diary of an un-named soldier. "Orders," said Bernie Rayner tiredly. "It's orders, lovey." They were waiting at the railway station in Comeras for the train which would carry them south. The 16th Company of the Landworkers' Alliance was no more, a result of the orders to which Rayner referred. Bligh was only one of many to complain about the dismemberment of the Company. His own Section had been switched to reinforce the 6th Company of the Unification Party of the People. Bligh felt somehow responsible for this twist of renaming when he learnt that the 6th UPPs were under the command of Captain Merc Domenech. He felt that the man had some kind of vendetta against him. He felt angry that he should end the war - for he felt certain that this new campaign would end his war, in one way or another - fighting under the badge of a party he had specifically chosen not to join back in Anasty. He walked away from Rayner, disgusted. The only answer was 'Orders' and no one would argue too vociferously because they all knew that this was the big one, the Grand Advance which could end the war for good. It seemed that Domenech would get his 'unification of the forces of revolution' without even a whimper. He settled himself on the stone floor and accepted some a sugar stick from Wink Hawley. "Don't worry," said Wink, after a few minutes. "The fighting won't reach Dona-Jez - Madeleine will be safely at home by now." Bligh had told him they had argued and he thought Madeleine had returned to the north. "I just wish I could have seen her one last time," he said now, believing it to be true. "Just to know she's well and ... and to know what she feels." He had never been good at talking of his emotions, conceding psychological advantage to his confessor. "I don't know why I couldn't just take your hand and climb up onto that balcony last night," he added, aware that he was changing the subject, even now. "What do you mean?" "Last night. During the stone cat run. I was in the street and you were on a balcony with ... " He remembered seeing Madeleine and Slowly Skett and Erin Panniker and that made him stop. Wink was looking at him strangely. "I wasn't there," he said. "I left just as it started, and found a room in a deserted guest house. I had the most fearsome dreams: back on the train, with flames all around. A lammergeier was trapped inside, screaming, its legs bound to a hand-rail with leather thongs I was trying to cut with a knife that was too blunt ... It's coming back now. You were there, Bligh, riding the back of a huge stone cat - more of a lion than a cat - and I did reach down to you because I wanted you to share the heat. You couldn't come." He shrugged and scratched at the dead side of his face. "I don't know what any of it means," he finished, softly. "I think this war has left me just the slightest bit mad." "It has done that to every all of us," said Sandy Brigg brightly, settling on his haunches by the two of them. "This is the push," he continued. "I have been hearing on the radio of a friend that the capital of Anasty has fallen. UPP troops moved in last night and now we are have the Parliament buildings and all of the oldest town. The end is beginning for the days of monarchs and their allegiances, no?" Suddenly, Bligh really believed that the war was nearly over. Anasty's Old Town had held firm since the beginning. Now, if Brigg's report was true, the way was open for the revolutionary militias to sweep down the coast, while the defences of the central plains were punctured by the Grand Advance south of Caspe. The southern and western half of Trace the Government had clung onto for so long would be simultaneously out-flanked and split in two. "Then this could really be the end," he said to Wink and Sandy Brigg. Minutes later a locomotive, pulling carriage after carriage, rolled into the station. Bligh had never seen such a long train. It came to a halt with the lead engine beyond the head of the platform, and as Bligh's new Company trudged off the other end and down through the undergrowth at the railway's edge, eventually he spotted another engine at the rear. They heaved themselves into an old passenger carriage, with windows that were cracked or boarded over and seats that had been stripped and burnt. As the soldiers settled themselves, Sadiq Phelim worked his way through the carriage, exchanging jokes and comments with the soldiers. After the massacre of Pigeon Ravine, Sadiq had moved into the UPP and now he was commanding his own Section. "This is the Final Battle," Bligh heard him say at one point. "We must do what we can." Bligh knew that he did not simply mean the final battle of the civil war: he was referring to the mayhem predicted by The Book of the World, the time of upheavals when the Lords Elemental will stride the Earth again to lead mankind to salvation. It had become standard UPP propaganda, but now it took on a menacing air as it was used to goad the troops, to whip them into the state of mind in which they would sacrifice anything for the revolution. "Ah, Bligh, Wink," said Sadiq, coming to stand by them in the passageway at the rear of the carriage. "I had hoped to find you here." Then, with a sudden jerk and a screech of wheels on rusting, distorted track, the train started to edge forwards, away from Comeras, heading for the battlefields of the south. "Are you prepared for the Final Battle, Friends?" said Sadiq, hanging on to a hand-rail suspended from the carriage's ceiling. "The sooner this war is finished the better, as far as I'm concerned," said Bligh. "I've had enough. The day when I get on that train to Feorea or Marland will be the best day of my life." "You think you will leave?" said Sadiq, raising his eyebrows slightly. "This is only the beginning of the revolution - there is so much to do." "What does Domenech want with us?" said Wink Hawley. Bligh looked at his friend, surprised. Sadiq raised his eyebrows again and Wink continued. "I met him before. After I walked out of the train." He touched his scarred face, reflexively. "He was nobody then, but he acted as if he was Queen Minna herself. I got a commendation from General Malatre and he was lapping up the great man's shadow. Afterwards he confronted me and said commendations for special merit had no place in the revolution and that any man would have done the same in my position. I looked at him and I knew he would never have ... have gone back into those flames to drag his Friends clear. I remember thinking that it was people like him who would go far, people like me who carry the burden. Ever since then he has kept reappearing like a curse." Sadiq was quiet for a moment. "Merc Domenech will go further, yet," he said. "I can tell you that. He is careful about who he selects, who he trusts. We are lucky." "We?" said Bligh, uneasily. "He is aware of you and Wink. He has a theory." Sadiq thought for a moment, then continued. "Merc believes that the war in Trace has acted as a magnet. It has drawn certain individuals from across the world - individuals with particular abilities or affinities. He thinks it is a fundamental dynamic of the true revolution that these sensitives should come together for the good of the people. Merc has employed seers and astrologers to map out the trajectories of these individuals and identify them to him." Sadiq shrugged. "It took no seer, I think, to realise that any sensitives coming from afar would end up in the only Cooperative to recruit Internationals on any scale: the Landworkers' Alliance. The Traians would be more difficult to find: what if they were fighting on the other side? But Alderas Aldivine was found, healing the men of his own and neighbouring Companies. And Pozas Cantera came to Merc one day, saying that he felt there was a magical bonding between them and that he should be sent to hospital if Merc did not feel the same." "What is Domenech's theory?" asked Wink. Bligh stared out of the broken window at the rushing fields. "We all have weaknesses," said Sadiq. "Areas of the mind which have suffered emotional damage. Wounds heal over leaving scar tissue tougher than that which it replaces - a bone never breaks twice in the same place, as they say. Merc thinks we have each suffered these emotional wounds and the rebuilding process, in the tissues of our mind, has reinforced certain aspects of our being, certain sensitivities." "We?" said Bligh again. He had no special powers, no emotional scars covering dead areas of his mind. Sadiq's intensity was disturbing him. He wanted to be outside, to be back in Dona-Jez with the war just a distant source of radio news. "I warn you, Friends," said Sadiq. "Merc believes that we sensitives should harness our powers to the good of the revolution. Anyone who is not with him in this, would be considered to be against him." "And what do you believe, Sadiq Phelim? Hmm?" Wink Hawley was leaning forward now and Bligh sensed a new connection between his two companions. Apologetically, Sadiq replied, "I think we might be God." Strangely, the soldiers around them seemed to find nothing unusual in this fantastic conversation. It appeared, to Bligh, that they must sit next to the reincarnated Lords Elemental every other week in Trace. He shuddered. He did not believe he had heard correctly until Sadiq continued. "I came to Trace because one of my teachers told me that all of the portents were in place for the Lords Elemental to walk again upon the face of the Earth. I did not, at the time, believe that I could serve as host. I came because I wanted to be close at hand if my teacher's prophesy should prove accurate. "I have dreams," he said, as if trying to justify himself. "Visions. Things happen around me, Bligh - you know that - it's never long before people say I am a source of good luck, or bad luck, but always that I am a source of change. If I am not being prepared to carry the Lord of Flux, then I must certainly be His most favoured servant." When Sadiq had gone, Bligh wanted to talk to Wink. He wanted them to share a joke about Sadiq having finally flipped, but he knew they would not. "I cannot deny that I have had vivid dreams and that I've often doubted my own mental stability," said Wink, eventually, shaking his head. "I even say crazy things on occasions. But this is fantastical ... ludicrous." A little later, he said, "Look around, Bligh. The myth has its grip. You can see how such fantasies establish themselves in the minds of the desperate. It has a place, even in my mind: I cannot believe it, but we all have room for doubt, for superstition. The framework of my mind was nurtured by the teachings of the Church - I can never be free of the shadows they cast." Bligh did not answer. Instead, he looked at his fellow soldiers. Many slept, but others were mouthing their prayers, or whispering the litanies of acknowledgement to the Six Lords. Others drank from flasks and clay bottles, or huddled together to read futures from the faces of playing cards. He wondered what it would be like, to play host to a god. Would you be aware of it, he wondered? Or would you simply black out, your personality wiped out of existence as the Holy Spirit invaded your mental space? Sadiq was still Sadiq, despite his ramblings. Did he believe that he shared his head with a god already, or was he merely prepared to make way when the time was right? Were the dreams and visions he talked of merely a means of preparation, so that he would be ready? And why Bligh? He did not feel special. He did not want to feel special. He was not ready for any of this. He was unable to think about it for long. He found the entire concept simply too far outside his normal view of the world: he could never bring himself to believe in Lords Elemental and possessing spirits. Years before, he had lost the ability to believe in the single God of the Brotherhood, and now Sadiq expected him not only to believe in six, but to play host to one of them ... He tried to sleep for a time, but the irregular stopping and starting of the train and the awkwardness of his position, wedged against a wall at the end of the carriage, prevented him. Occasionally, he would hear sounds of the struggle, a lone gunshot or the distant rumble of artillery. Later, he stood at the door of the carriage, staring out into the night. The moon was nearly full and Bligh could see some distance from the track, to the dark skeletons of trees and the sullen shapes of abandoned houses. Now, more buildings began to rise up from the shadows, some of them lit by candles and lanterns from within. The train's progress was interminably slow, but still the length of the journey began to illustrate for Bligh the very scale of the war, the vast spaces that were being fought over, and now he began to understand how so many could have died in less than four years. Edging along at a little more than walking pace through a ghostly, wrecked cityscape, the train eventually passed a rough stone platform where soldiers stood guard and a brazier burnt, despite the mildness of the night. A sign loomed up from the shadows and in the low light Bligh could read the city's name: Caspe. A sick thrill of excitement travelled through his body. At the same time, he felt a sense of ominous tension. It was a little more than a year since the last big push near Caspe, when more than half a million men had perished, all to move the Line a few hundred yards deeper into Government territory. He looked around, at his sleeping, praying, card-playing colleagues, and he felt a desperate sense of weight across his shoulders. Down the carriage, he saw Bernie Rayner with his face pressed against a window. Rayner had fought here before. Bligh wondered what was passing through his mind.

They disembarked at a small town called Huesja. In this place there was not a single building with more than three walls standing, save for the little huts of corrugated tin and sandbags put up by the militias to serve as stores and a simple command post. Domenech was already there when the Company arrived, but he was far too busy mixing with the Generals to bother Bligh or Wink. The Company camped down in the rubble until orders eventually came for them to march out. It was still light as they approached the battleground. From a slight rise, Bligh could look out over the fields. The ground appeared level from this distance and there was not a single tree or building in view. It looked like some deserted quagmire from one of the Spiritualist paintings of the last century. A swamp which would draw the innocent down into the depths of hell and eternal damnation. But this was no deserted wasteland, Bligh knew. There was not a sign of life, yet hidden in the trenches, the foxholes and the dug-outs, there was a cancerous mass of humanity, just waiting for the order to move. They stopped a short way down the slope, to let a Company of cavalry pass. Their horses were protected by chain-link armour with steel plates over the head and eyes. Over it all, they wore fine linen mandilions with tassels and ribbons, all in the red and gold colours of the Unification Party of the People. It was a scene from another age, Bligh thought. These animals and their riders would not last a minute when shrapnel and bullets filled the air. He looked away. When darkness fell, they marched two abreast, stumbling over the mud and debris and always keeping in sight of the man ahead. It had been a dry day but, almost inevitably, the Spring rains started as they reached the battlefield proper and progress became painfully slow. Eventually, they came to a halt and word was passed back from Domenech that they were to take shelter until dawn. Bligh settled, as best he could, in a crowded trench, which had been made by linking shell-hole to shell-hole. During the remaining hours of darkness, Bernie Rayner worked his way round the Section, spreading words of encouragement and reassurance, ensuring that everyone knew that ten minutes into the dawn barrage they were to leave shelter and advance as a second thrust behind the troops of the forward trenches. "How could we not be knowing that?" snapped Sandy Brigg, when Rayner reminded him of their orders. "It is not the thing you forget, Friend. Not the thing you forget." Back in Huesja, each man had been issued with 150 rounds of good ammunition and a strap of five hand grenades to sling across the shoulder. Bligh had refused a new rifle; he felt that he knew the foibles of his own, he knew when it was too hot and when it would jam and he was able to load it by feel and memory. Now was not the time for change. He wiped that old rifle obsessively, terrified that in the rain and the mud he might lose his grip on it and find himself alone and unarmed in the middle of the fighting. Brigg did the same with a light machine gun he had acquired: unlike the heavy trench guns Bligh had seen before, this gun was compact enough to fire from the shoulder, although only for a man of Brigg's strength and experience. In the distance, the sky became edged with pink and the clouds overhead took on a lighter shade of grey. There was no sign of the rain abating and already the trench was half filled with stinking brown water. They waited and waited. "It must be soon!" cursed Oori Campion, usually the last man to let his frustration show. But the most propitious timing had been set by UPP seers and so daylight was almost full before, finally, the shelling began. As if they had been waiting all along for the militia guns to open negotiations, the Army artillery answered immediately and Bligh hugged the trench wall as shells began to slam into the ground all around and burst in the air overhead. Within seconds Sandy Brigg had caught some shrapnel which opened up his scalp so that his skull showed through. He wanted to carry on, but he couldn't see a thing through the blood and Cabo Dona-Santen managed to persuade him to lie low in the trench until he could be evacuated. Oori Campion crawled over to take Brigg's machine gun and tried, helplessly to follow his colleague's confused instructions. Eventually, Campion dumped it in the mud in favour of his rifle, all the time assuring Brigg that he understood how to use his new weapon. Bligh checked his watch, sure that the barrage had lasted more than ten minutes. "Okay," said Rayner and Dona-Santen together. "Time to move," Rayner finished. Bligh struggled up through the mud of the trench and crouched in the open. His senses were being bombarded from every possible perspective: the light of artillery flashes, the numbing noise of the barrage, the smell of burnt powder and faeces and mud. He looked down and there was a hand protruding from the ground, its skin green and puckered. "Come on! Come on! Come on!" urged Dona-Santen, scurrying about the Section, slapping men on the back and waving his hands. Bligh began to move, dragging his feet through mud that tried to suck him down with each step. He covered the thirty yards to the forward trench, but he did not know how long it took. In the distance, he could see the first wave of men advancing. He had no idea if they were meant to be that far ahead or not. Just before the trench, he came across the first of today's corpses: a body torn almost in two; another with its stomach and chest blown away, the young man's face staring at the sky in apparent confusion. In Pigeon Ravine death was clean, the result of a single, stray bullet. Here it was a fierce, distorting end. Duckboards had been placed as bridges over the trench and Bligh staggered across, convinced that he would lose his balance and plunge headlong into the yellow water on either side. He made it, and paused for breath behind the bloated hulk of a dead mule. Just then he heard a sudden whistle and a shell thudded into the ground only feet away. He waited for the explosion, but none came. He moved on, leaping from shell-hole to shell-hole, using the muddy craters for cover from the flying shrapnel. After a short time, he came across Bernie Rayner huddled in a fresh crater, his face whiter than a sheet of his writing paper. Rayner looked up and recognition passed slowly across his features. "Have you been hit?" said Bligh, urgently. Rayner opened his mouth, then swallowed, and started again. "I've got the shakes, lovey," he said, and managed a brief smile. "I'll be all right." Bligh scrambled out of the shell-hole and hurried forward. He never saw Rayner again. His progress grew more and more slow. Hauling his boots through the sucking mud, scrambling over the fallen, the moaning wounded and the dead. He stopped about fifty yards short of the enemy trenches, trying to ignore the bodies all around. He wondered why the barrage was still going on. If they advanced any further they would be blown away by their own shells. Ahead there was the burnt-out skeleton of a motor wagon, rising from the mud. He cowered in its lee with two other soldiers and another tangled corpse for company. They waited for several minutes, debating what they should do, and then Bligh saw a section of the enemy trench being stormed by the militia and he leapt from cover and made a ten yard dash for the security of a deep crater. Peering up from the lip of his shelter, Bligh spotted Merc Domenech a short distance away. He was standing upright in the open, his eyes bulging, and he was waving a sword in the air. All around him there was a hail of bullets and shrapnel, with shells droning and crashing overhead, but he simply stood there, disregarding all precaution. He was shouting, and somehow his words carried through the din. "Come on!" he yelled. "Advance! Advance!" Domenech took a couple of paces and then reached down into the mud. He dragged a man up by the scruff of his jacket and hit him with the side of his sword. "Advance!" he screamed. Bligh was incensed. He clambered out of his shell-hole and stood defiantly upright like Merc Domenech. All around, bullets whistled and shrapnel sang. He took a step and then another. Somewhere nearby, a portable radio crackled music incongruously from its resting place in the mud. Domenech glanced across triumphantly and Bligh felt like a hooked fish. He felt something click inside his head and suddenly he felt invincible, as if nothing would dare strike him down. Domenech turned and charged through the mud, directly at the Army defences. Bligh waved his gun in the air and gave a mighty bellow and then began to follow. The next thing he knew was opening his eyes and seeing the world through a hazy red blur. He felt a terrible, dull ache in his left leg and when he reached down he felt the damp heat of his own torn flesh. He had fallen into the shelter of another shell-hole and he realised that his face was half-submerged in the slowly rising water. With an awkward wriggle, he dragged his head clear. He wondered how many men would die out here, not from the battle but by drowning as the shell-holes filled up around them. He did not know how long he had been unconscious, only that the deafening boom of the fighting had moved on into the distance and that rising above it were the anguished wails, the sobbing, the dull moans, of the wounded and the dying. And somewhere, amidst it all, the radio played faintly on.

5 'Disbelief requires a faith at least as great as simple belief.' - The Book of the World, ch.39, v.24. The ensuing days were, for Bligh, a disjointed series of episodes. Some of these were dreams, he felt sure. He did not believe, for instance, that his mother had come all this way to see him, after fourteen years in which she had not shown the slightest interest. But she was there, by his bed, nonetheless. Her eyes were sad and creased, the make-up giving way like a room where new wallpaper has been hung over the old, damaged hangings of years gone by. "My son," she kept saying. Her mouth barely moved when she spoke: she never did more than was necessary. "They've shot my son." Then he would try to speak and she would turn to a doctor or one of the Brothers and say, "No, I'm sorry, Benjahmine. This is wrong. This isn't my son, after all." The Brother would apologise profusely, his mother would stand, lean over, kiss Bligh's brow and then walk away. The stretcher bearer, he thought, was probably the real thing. He did not know how long he had spent, lying in his shell-hole in the rain and the mud with the radio hissing in the distance. But when he heard the slosh-slosh-slosh of footsteps passing just beyond the lip of his near horizon, he called out, "Hoy! Please! I'm wounded!" A head appeared, then shoulders and the upper half of a body. It was a man with a desperately infectious grin and one arm in a dirty grey sling. "Listen," he said softly. "You're not alone." Bligh's calls had stirred up fresh cries and shouts from nearby. A lot of the anguished noises had quietened down, in the hours - days? - since the battle. Men grew tired, their throats gave out, they died. Now, the sound of human voices had reminded the survivors of the possibility that they might, after all, live. "It won't be long, now," said his discoverer, over the cries. Bligh found himself grinning manically in return as the man turned and sloshed away. Minutes later, he heard voices, and then there were men in the mud by his side, examining his injuries then hauling him up into the open and onto a canvas stretcher. He looked up, at one point, and the bearer he could see was the same man who had found him. Now, his arm was free of its sling and he was humming a religious tune as he marched and slipped over the mud. He left the battlefield propped up in the back of a motor wagon, along with four other casualties of the fighting. He looked around and each of the men was plastered in mud, their eyes and teeth flashing white. All had been struck down by shrapnel or a bullet. Either those who had been more seriously hit had already died as they waited to be rescued, or the medics were only recovering those with a chance of surviving the journey out. Bligh closed his eyes and wished he had the energy, or the ability, to cry. It never occurred to him to ask the outcome of the battle, or of the war itself. Presumably at least the battle had been won, or he would be in a loyalist ambulance and the prospects of skilled medical treatment would be far better. A hospital camp had been established in the ruins of Huesja. There were broken walls all around, canvas for a roof, rats and cockroaches for company. There were no doctors or healers, just a few soldiers who had taught themselves to tie bandages and prise the more obvious shrapnel from wounds. The patients were dumped with blankets onto the bare ground and jugs of foul wine were brought to those capable of drinking. There was never a time when the air was not torn by the cries and moans of Bligh's fellows. A few hours after his arrival, Bligh's wound was examined by one of the soldiers in charge of the medical post. The man was short, with spiky, mud-brown hair and crooked buck teeth. Bligh swore it was the same man who had found him and who had carried him out to the ambulance. Everyone seemed so alike out here. "Three inches higher and I'd be calling you Miss," said the soldier cheerfully, as he poked a dirty bayonet at Bligh's wound. Bligh refused to yell out, despite the bolts of pain which the inexpert examination was causing. "You should have bled to death by now, too," continued the man, as if he was merely commenting on the weather. "You know what we're going to prescribe now?" "Doc's Answer," grated Bligh, and the man nodded delightedly. That was what they called morphine: the doctor's answer to almost every ailment. "You're after my job," he squealed. "Hey, Roddy! This one's after my bloody job!" He had a laugh like the yelp of a green woodpecker. "Yek! Yek! Yek!" he said. "You're after my job ... " That night, it could just have been the morphine. At one point Bligh woke, feeling as if there was a blanket weighing down on his face. It was dark, and for a moment, he thought it was true. Then he turned his head and realised that he could actually see quite well in the murk. He turned back the other way and there he saw a huge grey rat with its haunches spread over the face of his neighbour. Its snout was buried in the bloody cavity where the man's shoulder had been. He watched, fascinated, not really aware that anything should be wrong in this. Eventually, the rat straightened its tail and a trickle of urine ran down across the man's cheek and into his ear. "Doc's Answer," said Bligh, and the rat turned to look at him, grinning like the stretcher bearer who looked like everyone else around here, or so it seemed. The next time he woke, it was daylight and either he was in a different place or his neighbour had been replaced by a black man from the Saraja. The train journey happened, he was sure of that. One time he had been asleep, and he woke to find himself riding on a horse-drawn cart through the flattened skeleton of Huesja. The next time he was conscious he was on a train. There could not be a surer sign that the war was dying out than that the train did not keep stopping in the middle of the countryside for no apparent reason. Bligh was propped roughly across a bench with his head against a window. They were not all injured men on this train. Sitting opposite him, for much of the time, were three slightly drunk UPP militia men. "What happened?" Bligh asked them, at one point. Outside, he remembered, was an orchard covered in pastel blossom, and a church with its bell-tower smashed to a heap of rubble. They broke their conversation and one of them leaned towards Bligh and spoke in clear, spaced words. "You are on a train, Friend. It is taking you to a place to get better." Then, to his friends, the man said, "He didn't understand a word. He's foreign." "And delirious," said another. "Or drugged," said the third. Bligh realised he had spoken in Wederian. Or maybe Marish or Feorean or ancient biblical Edrew ... he was not entirely sure. "Sorry," he said in Traian. "I know about the train. What of the war?" "Ah," said the first man. "You speak our language." He was still speaking as if to an infant, or an imbecile, but at least he was speaking. "The war is history, it is in the past." Suddenly there was an edge to his voice. "Now we are a unified nation, again." Bligh noticed that, although the men wore the arm badges of the UPP, beneath their jackets each still wore a Land Party neck scarf. "Please," he said. "I'm LA. I don't know what ... " "We've won the coast to Haen," said another of the three, sounding weary and hopeless. "We've taken the Great Plain to Figuaras and Mountsenys. And now, instead of the final push to Harrahket, where we could capture Minna and her Generals, we hesitate and march instead upon ourselves. The UPP took the Citadel of Anasty as a seat for the new Government, but now a whole Division has turned back from the plains and is heading there as we speak." "They're not alone," said someone else. "They're drawing support from the people as they march. Now they are women and the old, as well as war heroes and the wounded." Bligh wondered how long it had been since he had fallen on the fields of Huesja. On reflection, he realised that it need only have been a few days for all this to happen. "When history moves," he remembered one of the Brothers saying, "it moves like a panther, or an earthquake. And in between we live as statues." Just then, a group of UPP soldiers wearing POLICE badges on their arms threaded their way along the carriage and the three men changed the subject to the possible resumption of the football season, broken four years ago by the revolution. "How many did we lose?" asked Bligh, when they could speak again. "It's far too soon to know. And will the UPP release figures when they do know?" He snorted. "Only those that suit their purpose. The Land Party says we lost fifty thousand on the coast and another seventy thousand on the Great Plain." Bligh felt sick - these figures must apply to the LP alone, he realised. "But we were put into the hardest fights," continued the soldier, leaning forward. "Along with the Syndicates and the Cooperatives. The UPP gave all the orders and saved their own ... " He hesitated now, as one of his friends looked across at him and shook his head. "All I am saying is what I have heard ... I don't know. In the last two weeks Trace has lost maybe a million of its best, along with the same from the Army. And what have we gained?" Now, his friend put a hand on the man's chest and forced him back into his seat. "We are tired," he said to Bligh. "Please: do not question us." Bligh suddenly felt as if they suspected him of spying. He tried to protest, but they merely looked the other way. The train stopped in the early evening in the town of Passerat. The air was still and warm and, as he was lifted roughly down onto the platform, Bligh realised that it was not raining. It felt wrong to be dry and relatively clean. He was still unable to walk and, for a desperate time as he waited on that platform with the other war cripples, he wondered if he would ever be able to do so again. His left leg felt completely lifeless - no feeling when he prodded it, no muscle that he could persuade to respond to his commands. His right leg would move, but the lack of sensation made him dizzy whenever he tried. His whole lower body was an enormous dull ache, but the feeling had no focus; the Doc's Answer was clearly at work on him still. Passerat had been held by the Government until a few months ago. The two old men who brought a long motor ambulance for the injured complained bitterly about the shortages that had been imposed since the revolutionaries had come. Bligh was powerless to do anything when one of them spotted his watch and without a word undid its catch and slipped it into his own trouser pocket. "That's mine," said Bligh weakly. "Oh yes?" said the man. His eyes refused to look in the same direction and suddenly Bligh realised that one of them was made of glass, like a large white marble with a blue iris but no black dot for the pupil. Bligh stared into his one good eye and the man looked away and spat into the gutter. "You've got to pay your dues," he said, and slammed the doors. The ambulance shrieked into life and jolted them over the hilly, cobbled roads of Passerat to the hospital. Then the doors were opening again and hands grabbed Bligh roughly and heaved him down and into a wheeled chair and he realised that somewhere he had lost another few minutes, another period of his life that resisted the probings of his memory. He could have been in that hospital for no more than four days, but he had no way of tracking the time with any certainty. At first, he was put on a mattress in a dark corridor. All he saw were skirting boards, a worn carpet, boots flying by within inches of his face. At some point a nurse came to inspect his dressing, and a little later there was an old man who squinted at him and tutted a lot, before finally addressing him. "You are a believer, of course?" he said. Bligh stared up at him. He could see himself reflected side by side in the man's tiny spectacles. "No," he grunted. "Oh, surely you are." He was a healer, Bligh realised. He would mend Bligh's leg by the power of their shared faith, if Bligh would let him. "You must believe in something, my son. Every individual needs belief." "I believe in nothing," said Bligh, turning to stare at the wall. "Ah, but you fear a great deal - am I right?" He paused, but Bligh chose not to respond. "Your leg will recover. I can sense that it is healing rapidly already." The healer did not sound put off by Bligh's manner. "Will you tell one of the helpers a bit about yourself, so we can contact your family, I wonder?" "There's nobody." It hurt Bligh to say that, but he could think of no one who might care enough that he was here, in this pathetic state. "If you would just open yourself to me, my son. Tell me what you are feeling. What the pain is doing to you. Give me your trust, my son, if there can be no faith." All the time, he was manipulating Bligh's legs, raising them and twisting them, laying his hands over the dressing which had become matted with new blood since it was last changed. "If you won't cooperate, then it's going to take a whole lot longer." His tone had barely changed, but now Bligh could see him looking along the corridor, thinking already of his next patient. "I'll give you some more of this," said the healer, finally. "Surely even you must believe in the power of the needle ... " Some time later, there were birds calling from nearby and he could sense the coolness of foliage all around. He opened his eyes and there was blue sky overhead, criss-crossed with wooden slats and white smears, which he realised were bird droppings on a sloping glass roof. Vines twined over the framework of this roof, outside and in, and all about there were potted lemon trees strung with cages of exotic, piping birds. He pushed himself up onto his elbows and paused as the dizzy swirl of his head settled itself. He was clear of the floor now, raised on a bed which was in some kind of conservatory. Around him were other beds, packed so close they were almost touching. His neighbour, on this side, was a man with no legs and a surgical collar which held his head in position, pointing straight upwards. "Can you see the cats?" asked Bligh, for he remembered clearly now that there were cats up there. Big cats, with dusky coats and black folds around the mouth. Cats that could kill you with the single swipe of a paw. "They eat birds," squeaked his legless neighbour. "The cats. That's why they're in cages. The birds." "No," said Bligh. "They're in the hills. But you can still see them, if you try." He pushed himself up to a sitting position and now he realised that both legs had responded to his commands. There was little pain now, but he thought that might be something to do with the light, swirling feeling that ran around his body. "Do you know the Fireman?" he added as an afterthought. "He has legs, you'll understand. But only half a face." "I was a fireman," came the reply, eventually. "I kept the boiler fires in the Duke of Maritz stoked. I was never a cat, though. Not even a cat you can't see." Bligh shook his head. He turned to the man standing at the foot of his bed with one of the nuns who acted as nursing helpers. "Mad," he mouthed at them, and then nodded towards his neighbour. The man, who turned out to be a doctor - a medical one this time, not a faith healer - turned to the helper and said, "He's still in shock. Is he sleeping at all? What medication is he on?" Bligh felt a panicky sensation rising through his body. "No," he said. "I'm fine. It's the ... the medication. It's messing my head. Can't think. Can't understand. Keep dreaming. Ask the Fireman, go on." "It's shock," repeated the doctor to his helper. "The painkillers wouldn't do that to him. He might need restraint." "No!" cried Bligh, but he no longer understood what it was that he was denying.

The ability to walk returned with surprising speed. With the beds so close together, he soon learnt that he could support himself with bed-ends on either side and drag his lame leg along as he went. One time, he found the old healer sitting with his knees tucked up to his chin in the hospital garden. "You're walking well now," he greeted Bligh cheerily. "I'm not on morphine any more," Bligh said. "I couldn't think straight when I was on that stuff." "You never were," said the healer, pulling himself to his feet and studying Bligh's progress critically. "You only ever had aspirin here, my son." "But ... " Bligh was confused again. "The dreams. I was seeing things even awake." "Hallucinations, my son. You were traumatised by what you saw, and by the indignities suffered by your poor body. The spiritual wound is often greater than the physical. That is why my colleagues and I have established the profession of healing. Tell me, are you still seeing these stone cats and fire people? Does your mother visit you in your dreams?" Bligh felt naked before this seeing old man. "I see nothing," he said, trying to close up again. He felt more like himself, in defence. The healer smiled. "You'll be leaving, I presume?" Bligh nodded, although he had not given the matter a thought until now. "You have a lot ahead of you, I think. No! Don't look so horrified: I am a healer, not a seer or an astrologer. I cannot tell you your future, or at least, no more than any other with average talents could. You are a troubled young man, anybody can see that much. Please - " he stepped forward and kissed Bligh on the cheek in the Feorean manner " - let us part on good terms. I am a happy man to have learnt that you have a faith of sorts - no one could recover so quickly without a source of spiritual sustenance. Let us leave it at that." Bligh watched the old man turn and head back into the hospital. He felt numb. He did not know what he should be thinking. He left later the same day. He wandered, without a plan, down the hilly street that led from the hospital. He had never looked up to the horizon before, but now he did and he could see the cool blue of the Cyanic Sea a few miles away in the distance. For a moment, he imagined that he could taste the salt on the breeze, but it was his mind playing tricks again, calling up memories of his first visits to the coast after he had left the Jahvean school. It had been a novelty then, such a vast expanse of greyish blue. He had stripped off his clothes and waded out, marvelling at the steady slope of the sand beneath his feet, discovering for the first time the awesome power of the waves. Somehow, the slope must continue downwards like this, he had realised, and he could almost understand the scale implied by depths of half a mile, a mile, or more, of the great ocean trenches. He had reached little more than waist deep when the sea's power finally grew too great and he was knocked sideways and had to struggle to master his body's buoyancy and paddle back to the shore. Passerat was different to the small towns of the north of Trace, or the inland ruins like Comeras. The houses were low and moulded to the contours of the land. From one side a house might be three storeys high, from farther up the hill it would be only one. Each had its own garden, with vines and avocados and small citrus groves. Passerat was a sprawling settlement and Bligh had to stop frequently to rest his weakened body. He wondered where the town hid its refugees and its poor, and he realised that it would be a long time before the revolution could ever, really, be won in places such as this. He thought he might find somewhere to stay for the night, and maybe the next day he would be in a better position to think about his future. He sat on a wall by a deep railway cutting and searched through his pockets. His money had gone, along with his Landworkers' Alliance papers, his passport, the crumpled photograph he always carried of his mother as a gay young thing with feathers in her hair and breasts in danger of spilling out of the flimsy construction of her evening dress. He had often wondered why she should choose such a picture to give to her son to remember her by. It must have said something about how she saw herself, or how she wanted to see herself, but what it was he did not know. He had nothing. He did not feel that he could move any farther. Suddenly he felt completely blank, as if he had been stripped of everything that had been him. His mind would not stay still and he could no longer recall that photograph, or the details of his papers. He felt as if his past had been wiped away by the simple actions of whoever had robbed him as he lay ill in hospital. He looked around but took nothing in. He was an empty vessel, a blank template waiting to be co