It was at the ungodly hour of eleven in the morning when I heard those most wretched words ever spoken by man or beast: “Rise and shine, sir.”
“Turn off the sun, blast you,” I responded with good humour, but alas, I was greeted with naught but the pinning-open of the tent-flap – and so, having been shone upon, I was accordingly forced to make myself rise.
But there was no rule that said I had to be blasted happy about it.
“Is there any mail?” I demanded of my batman as I snugged on my boots. They still squeaked, even after ten weeks – the d—ned things were never going to be broken in at this rate.
“No, sir.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Dash it all Batholomew, it’s been a full week! Half the campaign could be over by now, and then where shall we win fortune and glory, eh what?”
“At breakfast, perhaps, sir.”
Life was suddenly close to being worth living again. “Ah yes! Tell me, Batty old boy, what’s on the menu today?”
“Tea and rations. The supplies have been delayed along with the mail, sir.”
“MREs?” I asked, though I already felt that sinking sensation in my stomach that I had learned came when I had spoken a question whose answer I full well knew and dreaded.
“Indeed, sir.”
“You know I despise the things.”
“It’s unfortunate, sir.”
I rubbed a hand over my face. “Is the tea fresh at least?”
“I regret to inform you that it is bugged, sir.”
At this moment my composed was broken and I permitted myself to run my right hand over my face and exhale sharply, and it was a mark of his distinguished and exemplary servitude that my batman did not so much as raise an ear or quiver a wingtip at this,.
“Well,” I managed at last. “Batty old boy, nobody ever said war was going to be easy”
***
Though I would never dare breathe a word of it aloud in polite company (for fear my mother would catch wind of it and pass away or disown me on the spot), I had to confess I had rather come to enjoy teabugs. The way the little shells crunched between my teeth reminded me of eating icicles fresh from the stable roof when I was a small lad.
MREs, now… those were a different kettle of fish. I’d never gotten used to the noise, really.
“Are you deuced certain they don’t have anything else?”
“Utterly, sir,” said Batholomew. Of course he was. Of course there wasn’t.
Well, nothing for it. I took a deep breath, pulled the ripcord on the sheep, and raised my voice a little over the bleating. “You know, I’m beginning to feel that, well, maybe not the war itself you understand, but perhaps the little bit of it here – just a TAD, Batholomew, just a TAD – has maybe, perchance, not been badly planned or unplanned, but could be described as, well, being given a little less time and effort in the planning department than it could be oh d—n it all, how long do these things take to heat up!?”
“Two minutes, sir,” said Batholomew as he replaced my empty mug with a full one. I valiantly summoned every ounce of breeding from my veins and resisted the urge to slurp over the continued protests from my plate; aunt Germania would have been well, not PROUD, but given a stern nod. “It says so on the packaging.”
“Packaging is for pricing, and pricing is for the common man, Batholomew,” I reminded him fondly. He really was excellent at what he did, but he was still just a batman. “You know, I think I’ll take a moment to stretch my legs while it cooks. Take a look around outside.”
“Astute thinking, sir, to so familiarize yourself with the terrain. If I may be so bold, would sir mind the chance to educate me on it? I find it often helps to settle sir’s thoughts, to speak them aloud.”
“Of course, of course, of course!” I shot to my feet and darted out of the tent so quickly I nearly tripped over my own boots and had to catch myself by the dangling beeswax-waterproofed taurpalaphant flap. I kicked the wretched footwear savagely until it subsided with a shudder; I should have known better than to purchase boots from a man who hadn’t worked for my grandfather. “Right. Right! Now err, now. Now. Behold!”
There was a lot to behold. Unfortunately I had beheld rather a lot of it when we first arrived here and hadn’t bothered to refresh myself since, having had much better things to do with my time, and so perhaps I found myself a trifle light on details to elaborate on and found myself hoping – quite nonsensically – that Batholomew would mistake my loss of words as solemn profundity. Which was rot because for one thing Batholomew had served my family since he was weaned and knew me too well to fall for that, and for another thing he was merely a batman and as such seeking to impress him would be too bally close to trying to impress my boots, or my blankets.
Still, it wouldn’t do to appear indecisive or show ignorance, so I made the best of a bad situation, straightened up, tilted my mug at the valley beneath us in an appropriately insouciant manner, and said “bloody big bones, aren’t they?”
“Very perspicacious of you, sir,” said Batholomew solemnly. The wind ruffled the fur on his face in a manner that I had always found deeply hilarious as a child.
“One wonders where the rest of the old chap went off to, eh what?”
“Bargorbibriminus.”
I raised both eyebrows, then hastily corrected it to one and hoped he hadn’t noticed. “Oho?”
“The old capitol of Gorbus. After the goliath was felled with a meteor by the observatory stationed there at the peak of Mount Ibrimi, most of its carapace and long bones were disassembled over the subsequent centuries for royal construction and maintenance. The ribcage, lodged as it was in the creature’s torso, was not accessible until it had become too embedded in the ground to be worth the trouble, and so it was left unattended until the empire waned and the capitol was abandoned for Barmuhegus in the west, towards the coast.”
I raised the other eyebrow again. “Egad! A scholar you are, Batty! Quite so, quite so. And nobody’s ever come back for the sad blighter since, have they? Makes one think, makes one think.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the ghastly blood covering the valley floor I suppose is what, rust from iron in the rocks?” I pondered, scratching at my chin in a deliberate and thoughtful way.
“Perhaps a bit, sir. The rest is the goliath’s. Too dense to evaporate and too toxic to be handled or consumed. It’s a bit like treacle in texture.”
“Suppose we couldn’t feed it to you lot for lunch to get rid of it, hahahahahahahaha,” I said wittily.
“Very droll sir,” said Batty with that tight little smile I knew he only used when he couldn’t admit how humorous I was without losing face. “But alas, we must content ourselves on dried apples for now. Though speaking of meals, I do believe by the sound of it that yours is done cooking.”
“Don’t call what that thing’s done ‘cooking,’ Batty,” I groaned as I turned away from the vast gory crater below the camp and back to the cool shade and noxious smell of my tent. “I swear to you on every member of my family, after this war is through I will never touch mutton again, ready-to-eat or not.”
***
After I’d breakfasted (by which I meant poked through breakfast with a fork until it looked sufficiently consumed, then consigned the rest to my boots in hopes they’d learn to be less noisy and clumsy – mother always did say I was too soft on my beasts, but then again mother herself always had a soft spot for our estate’s curtains, which had belonged to her own mother, so really life’s complicated in that sort of way don’t you know), I turned my attention to matters of import: grand strategy.
“Where the devil ARE those dastardly little creatures?” I demanded as I stared despondently at my desk, or the morass of paperwork and documents that surely hid my desk. Batholomew did his best, but ofttimes in my peregrinations I was short of time to perform the sort of larger-scope examination of the resources at my fingertips, and so my work ran fallow under his care. “Where are those blasted scouting reports….”
“Over here, sir. By your elbow, next to the pay slips.”
“Pay, pay, pay – bah for pay, and bah for the man who thinks of nothing beyond it! Does glory and truth and righteousness mean nothing to the common man, Batty?”
“Certainly not to the common conscript, sir, though this is not to say they do not have concerns beyond coin for services rendered. I understand they are most upset over the lack of mail from home.”
“Yes, yes, we all miss hearth and home but for god’s sake that’s precisely why we’re out here! These little b—–ds (pardon my Frankness) think they can steal the bread-box of the empire right out from its table, and I for one am here to tell them jolly well how wrong they are. If you don’t believe in that, what is there to believe in?”
“The mind boggles, sir. The scouting reports, sir?”
I took them and looked at them and groaned at them. “Oh balderdash! Look at this – this muck! ‘Nothing to report, nothing to report, nothing to report!’” Then why are we here if there’s nothing to report?”
“Sir’s orders are to fortify the pass atop the ‘blood pit’ and wait for-”
“Yes yes yes, ‘wait for further instructions.’ Well, we’ve waited and there’s no further instructions! And there should be, because I for one think it’s nonsense to tie up this many men and beasts out here waiting for an attack by unholy little upstarts that never arrives?”
“Sir?”
“Come off it Batty, you know I’m no bible-thumper but it’s pretty black and white: ‘man shall have dominion over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and the beasts of the land.’ Truths to build empire by Batty, truths to build empire by – and these rotters violate it every bloody moment they spend alive.” I shook my head in disgust. “Bloody dinosaur riders. I need to clear my head again. Wait half a moment.”
“Sir, if I may-”
I stepped free of gloom and ink and into the air again. It was nearing now and the sun was vicious and barbed and so it took me a good ten seconds of squinting to see anything, from the lovely sapphire-blue sky to the jagged old ribcage of the valley to the single column of cavalry quietly creeping its way up the gully of the last legs of the pass towards the camp.
Well, at least the mail was finally here. Although there were an awful lot of them. And those certainly weren’t OUR flags. And they weren’t Frankness Foreign Soldieres. And they were holding something that glittered in the sun – here I fished out my trusty binoculars, a gift from my youngest sister (god rest her soul!) – which, on inspection, looked to me like guns. ‘Marshlock’ lever-actions. Made in Veersch, sold anywhere else to anyone who shouldn’t have them, most particularly around here. To the dinosaur riders.
The advent of the repeating rifle had been a real godsend for the little blighters, it was true.
One looked up and made eye contact with me through my binoculars and waved. I dropped them onto the rocks and ran into the tent, purest authority coursing through my veins.
“BATTY! The ENEMY is HERE! To ARMS, damn you, to ARMS! Where oh where is my pangolpany?! ARMOUR ME, you WRETCHED BEAST!” I didn’t wait for him to respond, but began to ransack my quarters – oh mere minutes ago I had known where everything was, now it was a tangle as foreign to me as the depths of the sea by Shoresline. “ARM me TOO! Ah H—L, ah H—L, ah ****!” I picked up my fork and then put it down and picked it up again. “Where is my PANGOLPANY?”
“Sir!” said Batty.
I looked up to find him keen and at the ready and holding out my lovely armoured coat to step into, scales fluttering in the breeze from epaulettes to knee-length tail. I hurried into it in a rush, shrugging so frantically that I almost shaved my neck clean with the collar, and hurried to peer out of the tent again. The enemy had not yet breached the crater’s rim; with speed and courage they would be bottled up in the narrow pass. “Damn you, Batty,” I cried, “we may yet win this! Now hand me my bees.”
“Sir!” said Batty, and I felt the long, cold wax-rubbed bore of my beestick in my right hand, which wasn’t shaking at all.
“Alarm!” I shouted to him. “Get the horn, rouse the trumpeters, get the alarm! I’ll hold them off! I’ll do it! For glory! GO!”
Then I braced myself, rushed forwards to the rim, slowed a bit down strategically, dropped and crawled the last bit to avoid being picked off, gently stuck the tip of my beestick out into the air to see if anyone was looking, then peered over the edge.
Still there beneath me, moving quicker now but still quiet. The fools thought they were as of yet undetected! I closed my eyes for a split second to pray, popped them open, drew a beed on the lead rider, and pulled the trigger.
A low, gluey ‘thump’ emerged from the barrel, but nothing else. I pulled it again. And again. Glump, glump. A fourth time I tried, ignoring all trigger discipline and squeezing the little lever like a disobedient boot, and this time the beestick emitted a belch and went silent entire.
“Drat,” I said. It was what my father said when I spilled tea on his desk, and it was the only thing that filled my head now. That had been the worst thrashing of my life. “Drat.”
My hands still weren’t shaking. The beestick fell out of them anyways, which didn’t seem fair. It was also getting difficult to talk and my mouth tasted like I’d been eating coins.
“I’ll take that now,” said a stranger’s voice from somewhere behind me. I’d have investigated this, but found myself rather stiff-necked. Then hairy, winged hands took the beestick from me – dripping royal jelly from the barrel; what tom-fool had let THAT happen? – and I saw Batholomew and he spoke to me and it was quiet puzzling because he didn’t sound like Batty at all. “Wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself. If you held down the trigger long enough something might actually come out.”
I squeaked something interrogatory. He patted my arm gently and began to tug at the pangolpany’s sleeves. “Best to take this off. There isn’t MUCH contact oil on the inner collar, but you drank an awful lot of awfully special tea today – without so much as a bite of mutton to adulterate it, picky thing – and it’d be a shame to lose you to a runaway allergic reaction by now. I put a lot of effort into you, Horace, and I don’t intend to throw it all away by mistake.”
I was shucked clean of armour within the minute, which was also the amount of time needed for the first of the dinosaur riders to reach us atop the pass. Her horse eyed me with wary impatience as she patted its neck with one scaly, feathered limb, balancing her ‘Marshlock’ atop her shoulders with the other. “Well. Glad to make your acquaintance in person, Colonel,” said the wretched up-jumped vermin. “It IS the Colonel, isn’t it? If you aren’t, tell him thanks for playing mailman; I think I’ve received more gossip-by-post in the last month than the dowager empress has since she attended her first ball. And who’s this you brought with you?”
“I am indeed the Colonel,” said Batholomew. “And this is ALSO a colonel of sorts: meet Horace Winsmoore-Handover, soon to be Duke Horace Winsmoore-Handover (if his father keeps drinking the way he was when I saw him last). The third.”
“A lot of smoke for a little spark,” the insolent leering vermin said, peering at me like aunt Tabitha might examine an undusted mantelpiece. “Did you get them all like this?”
“The officers are locked down tight, the conscripts are locked more mundanely in their barracks with the runs,” said Batholomew. “They’ll be well enough to surrender and not much else, and frankly after the time they’ve had I think they’ll be glad of it. You can probably get half of them to sign on within the month, within the week if you promise they’ll get to shoot their old commanders. Not these ones, though.”
“What’re they good for then – boot fodder?” asked the terrifying inhuman vermin. She reached out with the barrel of her weapon and poked my cheek and her teeth were inescapable due to my frozen eyelids.
“No, no. Nothing so particular. Hostages.”
“Ah. So we feed them while they sit around doing nothing.”
“I can personally assure you,” said Batholomew with the largest smile I had ever seen on his face, “that they have been very well trained for exactly this situation.”
“Well, at least they’re trained for SOMETHING,” she said. And they laughed, laughed, laughed, and all I could think of as I stood there, eclipsing the anger and the fear and even the shame was that my nose was beginning to itch.
Yes, nobody ever said war was going to be easy. But it could at least have the d—ned decency to be straightforward.