Authors: Maurice G. Dantec
The first body is quickly turned over. Vernier searches pockets and holsters but does not find what he is looking for. The Desert Eagle recoils in his hand as the man’s head explodes. The night is black.
On to the second body. The man is only wounded; he stirs and seems to be asking for help. But the problem is that he can’t help Slade Vernier. He takes a 12.7-millimeter bullet right in the face. The night is black, and yet full of stars.
The third body seems more interesting. Vernier takes from it a large-caliber revolver, .357 Magnum–type, and the corresponding belt full of bullets, without difficulty. If infinity were quantitative, the sky would be constantly illuminated by all the suns in this infinite universe. But the night is black, and the stars are shining.
This time it is with the newly acquired revolver that he fires a bullet into the man’s head, dead or not. What he was looking for was a weapon with which to finish his work without wasting his own bullets. The entire Law of the Territory is encapsulated here. The Law of the Territory is the Law of the Night.
He moves on calmly to the next body. Yuri watches as he serenely lights an enormous Cuban cigar acquired who knows where, which he inhales with an expression of ecstasy before firing a bullet into the neck of the man, who seemed dead already. The Law of the Territory is the Law of the stars that shine in the Night.
He continues, limping; he continues with rigorous constancy, going on to the next one, a wounded man who tries weakly to extend an arm in a pathetic gesture of self-protection. A bullet to the head and the arm relaxes, falls to the side of the body; Vernier’s hand trembles only at the moment of ejection of the heavy .357 Magnum cartridge. The starlit night sky shows everything. At night it is the stars that serve as a sun, for those who know how to capture their light.
Every six steps, Vernier patiently takes six new bullets from the belt draped over his shoulder. Every three steps or so, he inhales and exhales a deep puff of his cigar.
Between the men, wounded or not, he does not fail to take what he wants from the animals, wounded or not. They are sometimes sprawled on the ground with their riders, sometimes a short distance away, sometimes still standing, wavering on their feet, trying to walk in one direction or another.
A man, a horse, a man, a camel, a man, a man.
The economy of the Law of Bronze in action, the Law of the Convoy-Library. The night is black and overflowing with luminous stars. Chrysler gathers weapons and ammunition; the deputy sheriff is finishing up with the dead, conserving his bullets. Thirty bodies are scattered over what can in truth be called a battlefield. Yuri cannot tear his gaze away from the two men’s methodical ballet, like an antique funerary right dedicated to the warrior gods who live in the mountains.
The night sky seems to be waiting for expiatory sacrificial victims, as if a gaping mouth will open at the zenith to swallow them up.
This is Slade Vernier’s version of the Law of the Territory. He won’t have any heads cut off. No time, no point, inefficient in this situation. But there will be no survivors among the bandits from Maine.
None. No men, no animals.
Not even any children. They will remember the Territory Convoy for a long time.
The Law of Bronze dominates the night of the asbestos mountains. The Law of Bronze protects them, them and their library. It has no pity for anything, or anyone.
It is an infinitely reassuring feeling, thinks Yuri.
A feeling that corresponds, he realizes, to the scope of the terror he is capable of inflicting on others.
Forty men. In forty-five minutes. By six of them. Five and a half, really.
Six to seven victims per person, on average. Around one every seven minutes. From another statistical angle, one enemy killed every seventy-five seconds. And that’s not counting the men taken out of combat that the vanguard took with them when they retreated toward Maine.
Vernier counted them all carefully as he fired a bullet into the head of each one. His zeal had even extended to asking the French sniper to take him up the butte, to the north, and then near the rocky ridge to the south, and finally six hundred meters straight west, in order to make absolutely sure that his work was finished.
There would be no survivors. None.
When he had returned from his patrol, he said: “We found the guy in the Nazi uniform. And the boys Lecerf mentioned.” And then: “And two or three others.”
Any additional commentary would be superfluous. No one can survive the passage of the Convoy; the remnants of the force that attacked them must be on the other side of Quebec by now, in New Brunswick, or in Maine. You don’t attack a Territory Convoy.
And
, Yuri adds to himself,
there can be no impunity when it comes to a Papal Convoy
.
The Convoy and the Forty Thieves
. They are creating a myth, a legend that
will sweep the entire Northeast.
Each of us is a soldier-monk; we are the
Guardians of the Sacred Library, and every bandit in the region better get that into
his thick skull, if he hasn’t already. As deeply into his skull as a .50-caliber bullet
fired by Slade Vernier
.
Around them, the strip excavations of Thetford Mines are vast arenas of chrysotile, giant craters whose walls descend in concentric spirals into the heart of the earth; it is like standing on a piece of the moon that has
been teleported to eastern Quebec. The huge mines are nothing now but archaeological remnants of a long-gone world, vanished even before the Metastructure. At that time, forgotten or nearly so, men worked the Earth in order to reach the Sky. Now they no longer work; they have abandoned the Sky and allowed what remains of the Earth to control their destinies.
According to Campbell’s estimations, they were attacked by around sixty men, seventy-two at most, the standard number in a
katyba
of neo-Islamist franc-tireurs. Apparently their armies are often composed of child soldiers. “The bandits had a numeric advantage over us,” says Chrysler, “but we knew how to stay compact, how to help each other, how to act in a coordinated way. We handed those bastards their own asses.”
Of course, there is more to be said on the topic. They put forty men out of combat, dead or wounded, seriously or not. And Vernier had taken it upon himself to balance out the equation; he had made everything clearer, more readable, more definable. He had counted to forty and turned all the numbers into a single and terrible zero.
The neo-Islamists from Maine don’t understand Territory mathematics at all; they know nothing of the Law of Bronze. They didn’t know how to see at night; they hadn’t had the support of starfire, or the allegiance of the ultraviolet sky.
The arithmetic of death provides you with a sort of map on which the darkest areas indicate the light to be found, light that will blind you remorselessly.
The Law of Bronze imposes itself with a vengeance; it seems to have an insatiable need for men of their type.
“I think you’ll be able to congratulate yourself fully when Brother Friedrich is definitively out of danger,” says Brother Francisco.
Campbell grimaces.
“We’ll be out of the Bois-Francs soon and in the Estrie. In twenty-four hours at the most, we’ll be in the Territory,” he points out.
Yuri is silent. The four of them are in the truck, transformed now into a makeshift ambulance. The so-called Francisco Alpini is at the wheel; Campbell is in the passenger seat, with Friedrich Ostermann lying in the cab’s large rear compartment and Yuri hunkered down beside him, keeping an eye on the patient.
Vernier is driving the Ford pickup at the head of the convoy; the
young French sniper bringing up the rear in the Silverado. Speeds up to sixty kilometers an hour are easy now. “The roads will get better as our altitude decreases,” Campbell remarks. “We should get there before night tomorrow, I’m sure of it.”
Yuri sighs deeply. There is one certainty, and only one: the man called Friedrich Ostermann has only a few hours left. The plasmapack and cardio-pump are doing what they can, as is the intrapulmonary microrespirator—as is Yuri himself—but the initial hemorrhages were too severe, the impact of powerful military bullets fired at close range much too heavy for his body. If he is to survive, they need to get the bullets out of him as soon as possible, and Yuri is not really equipped to perform such a procedure, unless he goes back to military surgical techniques from the time of the Thirty Years’ War.
They killed forty men. And they will lose one.
This man who will die in the foothills of the Notre Dame Mountains will never have seen America except to die here, saving a library that is not even his. His tomb will face the Saint Lawrence estuary amid desolate mountains where no one ever comes. He left the heart of the Old World, the Eternal City, to die in the northernmost reaches of the Appalachians.
He came. He conquered. He disappeared.
A man’s death can be the best opportunity for a group to fuse together forever, to become a single living entity, with all its contradictions.
In this sense, death can be a creator; all you have to do is look it right in the eyes.
Dawn is just breaking when they begin to dig. They all work together. Picks, shovels, sweat, silence.
Brother Friedrich Ostermann died at the border of L’Amiante and Asbestos counties, near the huge glacial Lake Aylmer, in the place called Moose Bay, a few miles from a city called Beaulac-Garthby—deserted, half destroyed, probably the victim of violent confrontations between various armed groups.
Yuri had told Campbell they needed to stop the convoy; then, in reply to his silent question, he had said to Francisco Alpini: “I think he wants to say something to you. And I think they will be his last words.”
Then, with the convoy halted in the middle of the road, they had changed places.
Yuri had watched the ritual of prayer and benediction with fascination.
He heard snippets of incomprehensible murmurs and brief whispered dialogues; he saw Brother Francisco gently close his comrade’s eyes and then make the strange gesture also common in the communities of HMV, the sign of the cross.
Friedrich Ostermann had died at the moment the day was being born in this America he would never see. He died in the very embers of the night, the embers of starfire. He died at the gates of dawn, entering gates more luminous still.
He died for men he didn’t even know; men that lived on another world, for a library he knew nothing of, for a Territory he would never see—but he had not died in vain. He died getting the Convoy through; he died for the life of the books; he died so that humanity would not be completely reduced to a catalog of numeric organs.
Yuri wonders for an instant where the strange feeling is coming from, both intellectual and emotional, that is assaulting him.
There is a paradox here, one that raises up the man they are burying.
Certainly, he is dead. And yet it is as if he has never been so alive.
Culture shock happens in all types of situations. Even the most improbable ones can bring it fully into view.
When the grave is dug, it becomes evident that they have nothing with them to make a decent coffin. The idea of using one of the steel boxes in the back of the truck is ventured by Slade Vernier, who quickly realizes that he would have done better to keep quiet.
“We have a large, fireproof tarp—white, a little silvery,” Yuri says. “Do you think it would work as a shroud?”
Brother Francisco asks to see it. The exposed surface of the tarp is indeed metallic gray, but the inside is pale, soft, opalescent.
“This will be perfect,” he says.
He goes to the back of the truck and returns with a simple Bible in his hands. He places it between Brother Friedrich’s stiffening fingers and then, from one of the large inside pockets of his long leather cloak, he takes a Celtic-style black steel cross, very plain, with no decoration, and places it at the body’s feet.
“It came from a monastery in Cornwall that was destroyed shortly after he took his first vows there. He carried it everywhere with him.”
Stating a simple truth, Campbell says: “He will have carried it with him to the very end.”
“Let’s wrap him in the shroud, and then we’ll lower him down with ropes.”
“In which direction?” asks Campbell, innocently.
Francisco Alpini knits his brow. “What do you mean, in which direction?”
Campbell shrugs. “I don’t know. You’re from Rome. You work for the Pope. I thought the body had to be pointing toward the Vatican.”
The man turns pale. Yuri hears the great tension in his voice as he explains: “We are Catholics, Mr. Campbell. Rome is not Mecca; no one expects us to turn toward the Holy See five times a day. Am I making myself clear?”
Campbell retreats into silence. Yuri attempts an answer. “I don’t know where I heard it, probably in HMV somewhere, but someone told me the first Christians prayed to the rising sun.”
“That’s quite right. You’re very well educated for a non-convert. But there are no rules on this subject in the Catholic Church. We pray to the setting sun just as often, I can assure you, Mr. McCoy. Christianity isn’t a sun-worshipping religion.”
Yuri, deep in thought, doesn’t reply.
Though it was totally off the subject, Campbell has brought up a real problem—an unforeseen one, a problem that requires thought.
A problem that necessitates telling the truth, creating the living organism that will know how to bring together all the elements required for an authentic synthesis.
The night. Fire. Stars. The Convoy. Then. The Library. Heavy Metal Valley. Dawn. Maps. Territories. “The” Territory. The Mission. The World. The Territory and its Law of Bronze. It is clearer than all the shadows seen through combat binoculars.
“I think we should bury him with his head facing west, Mr. Alpini. America is still the West. Here, the East is behind you, the Old World, the past, the Atlantic. What counts isn’t where he came from, but where he went, what he did, and why. He went toward the West like all pioneers; he followed the sun.”