By now the sun had set. Guanamarioch looked down into the stream at the stars reflected therein. Which of them, he asked himself, how many of them have seen our passage since that long ago, terrible time?
“Who was it, Ziramoth? Who was that long ago philosopher who plunged our clan into chaos?”
Now it was the Kenstain who grew silent, staring into the flowing stream at the stars that twinkled there.
His voice, when he answered was full of infinite sadness. “His name was Ziramoth.”
Chapter 20
This is defeat; avoid it.
They’d held for a while, there at the bridge before the town of Bijagual. Half of Digna’s artillery, firing directly into the cleared kill zone, had stacked the aliens up like cordwood, carpeting field and stream with their bodies and then adding layers of bodies to that carpet. It had become quite a plush pile before the Posleen had learned better and gone searching for the flanks.
Digna had assumed they would go searching for the flanks as she’d assumed they would eventually find them. She had hoped it would have taken a bit longer, long enough to finish burying her dead, at least. That grace the aliens had not given. Before the bodies could be decently interred the frantic calls had come from both flanks. She’d ordered the mortars to give priority of fires to one flank, the SD-44s to another. The guns and mortars had fired off every round that could not be carried out on the long anticipated and planned-for retreat. That artillery fire had helped, but not enough.
She spared barely a glance for the long line of noncombatants trudging the road to Gualaca. Instead, she stood there, at the edge of the long meter-deep trench she’d had dug against this eventuality. Her eyes swept along the length of the trench, fixing in her mind the last few images of some of her most beloved children and grandchildren.
Digna had buried children before, several of them. But they had been only babies, dying — as children in the Third World often do — before she had had a chance to get to know them and love them as individuals. This was in every way worse.
The column of refugees-to-be was mostly silent until Digna ordered the gasoline poured into the trench. At that, with the overpowering smell of the fuel blown across the road by the breeze, the deaths became real. As if the first leaping flames were a signal, a long inarticulate cry of pain and woe arose.
She had not had the heart to order someone else to apply the flame. Instead, a grandson had handed her a lit torch. Almost — almost — she had broken down and wept as she turned her eyes away and tossed the torch into the trench.
Her grandson, the same one as had supplied the torch, touched Digna’s shoulder in sympathy. She shrugged it off, bitterly and impatiently.
Voice halfway to breaking, she snarled, “Never mind that. There’ll be a time for tears later. Get these people moving.”
Her clan and its retainers had retreated with the smell of fuel overlaying that of overdone pork.
Digna had looked upon that pyre exactly once, dry-eyed. It was still not the time for weeping.
Dry-eyed, too, she had prodded, cajoled, and beaten her family toward the northeast. There, all through the night, the lights of the town of Gualaca had served as a beacon. There Digna hoped to find safety, at least for a time. Perhaps there would even be medical care for her wounded kin.
It was not to be. Crossing over the bridge spanning the Rio Chiriqui southwest of the town, Digna had expected to find a defense prepared. What she’d found instead was a town bereft of leadership; the alcalde gone with his family, the militia officers gone with theirs. What was left was not much more than an armed mob without direction.
Direction Digna knew how to provide. She’d taken charge, ordered half a dozen men shot, and formed the rest into a semblance of a defense. With another twenty-four mortars and a dozen SD-44s, plus a fairly generous amount of ammunition, she’d held the bridge and the fords over the Rio Chiriqui for two days. This was long enough, if just barely, to send the noncombatants on foot thirty kilometers up the road northward in the direction of Chiriqui Grande on the Caribbean coast. The vehicles, and there had not been many of them, were commandeered to carry the wounded and the food. The point of that band was just cresting the mountains as the pursuing Posleen again found the fords to turn Digna’s flanks. She began another fighting retreat.
The little towns on the way were scooped up, the very young and very old being sent northward, along with most of the women, while the younger men and some of the women were pressed into the fighting arm.
Digna had to order a few more men, and two girls, shot along the way. She’d sent them to their deaths dry-eyed still. I can weep later.
There had been a moment, there where the fighting had been thickest, that Digna had thought with despair that she would not be able to hold, that the aliens would break through to feast on her charges. Then suddenly, as if by a miracle, the aliens’ flying sleds had all turned and disappeared southward. She had no idea why, but relished the thought that somewhere they were being badly enough hurt to cause such a change in priorities.
With the disappearance of the flying sleds, the Posleen normals had pulled back. With the terrible pressure from the aliens relieved, Digna was able to pull out her expanded forces mostly intact.
As he was probably her best field man, and perhaps because he was also one of her oldest friends, Tomas Herrera took the point.
“Demons of Fire, curse the Aldanat’ who condemned us to this,” whispered the low flying God King, Slintogan, as his tenar skipped over the mounded piles of his people’s slain. Scattered among the heaped, yellow, centauroid corpses were more than a few crashed tenar, clear indicators that more than mere normals had fallen trying to force a way across this river.
Internal gasses from decomposition had swelled the bodies, Slintogan noted with disgust. In many cases, the internal pressure had been strong enough to burst abdomens and spill out organs. And then the sun had gone to work; the stench was appalling.
For a moment the God King thought a curse in the general direction of the now escaped threshkreen, not for killing so many of his people, but for allowing so much valuable thresh to be wasted. As it was, with the bodies grown so overripe in the sun, even the normals could not be forced to eat of them.
It was enough to make the hardest heart weep.
But then, this is not the way of the local thresh. I wonder how it would be to grow up and grow old on a planet so abundant, in comparison to its population, that its inhabitants can afford to sneer at nourishing food.
My people, too, might have had such a chance, if those stinking, ignorant players at godhood, the Aldenata, had not meddled. “It’s for your own good… We know and you know not… War is the greatest of scourges… Trust and have faith in us.”
The God King laughed softly and bitterly. More likely this planet will change its direction of rotation than that a group of do-gooders with the power to meddle will refrain from it. Damn them.