I could forget the wars here. The smell of death, of putrid flesh and fusing circuitry, had been reduced to the merest shred of memory. If at night I sometimes dreamed of hulks greater than the Camelot Town Hall thundering over ravaged terrain, the charge of the ~Dinochrome Brigades, it was my own secret.
After three years of sanity, tending the trees and milking the cow, I married a native Camelot girl. Isabelle brought her chickens and her geese to the yard, started a kitchen garden with dill and rosemary and thyme, and filled the house with the sounds of singing. Isabelle had a voice like the angels, and she sang as she worked and she worked all the time. And when I dreamed of the war, of the flaming Hellbore frying an Enemy outpost, a single Bolo left powerless and dead on the field, my best friend found mindless in an ~Enemy holding pen, Isabelle would hold me and tell me it was all over now and give me warm milk and a slice of fresh pie. And I could believe that it was all over, that I had found perfection. I had, in fact, found Paradise. And I kept wondering when the dream would be shattered.
Ten years of peace and prosperity and laughter lulled me. Ten years when the worst thing that happened was the night the weather planner went out and we had to put out ancient smudgepots among the trees. When the worst thing that happened was the fear that little Margaret’s fever would never break and Isabelle and Ricky and I kept running to the stream for snow melt to cool her. When the worst thing was Gwain Thacher leaving Emily and their four children and running off with Elisa Chase.
And so, when the first attack came, I was not prepared.
They were not the Enemy I had fought in mankind’s wars. Those were things I could hate without reservation and identify without thought. This enemy was our own, a force of thirty humans in a rustbucket of a ship that landed out in the Abbey’s cornfield.
Ships didn’t land in Camelot valley. They were~ directed to Dover Port, where they were properly vetted and the trade delegations sat full time to regulate prices. The warehouses with the surplus wool and fine lace, the elegant pottery and ironwork and glass, crowded the edge of the Port. Strangers never came so far as town, and we didn’t want them.
At first we thought this must be a ship in distress. Why else would they land in a cornfield, killing off an acre of crops? And out where it was inconvenient and there was nothing to do and no trade items waiting for their cargo bays.
The monks were the first to arrive, and then a few of us farmers. A large number of young people who should have been tending sheep and milking cows and making cheese gathered quickly, glad of any excuse from their chores. We waited for a long time, and ~finally the bell called the monks to their chapel, ~before the hatch opened and the visitors came down.
I should have known. By that time I should have realized that the rustbucket was up to no good, that any ship that wouldn’t open up to the clean air and the monks’ good ale was trouble waiting. But, as I said, after ten years my instincts were dulled and my memories reduced to bad dreams, and I had wanted it that way.
So when the hull seals opened and the first of them appeared and jumped to the ground in surplus assault suits, armed with a motley collection of power rifles, needlers and laser sticks, I was as shocked as any Camelot native who had never seen these weapons ~before. There were at least twenty of them, blast shields in battle-ready over their faces and weapons pointing at the small crowd.
They looked nothing like the military I had left. The assault suits were patched with a blinding array of colors, the weapons looked worn and dirty. No commander in my time would have held rank for long with this crew to show for it. And the one who came out last was the sloppiest, his assault suit covered with long ribbons that blew loose ends to the breeze.
One of the girls nearby giggled. “He looks like a Maypole,” she whispered to a friend. The giggles spread rapidly through the group.
“We want your wool, and also your cider and a case of the Abbey’s brandy,” the maypole said, rasping. I couldn’t tell if the voice was real or on distort through the helmet’s speakers. “And whatever jewelry you have. You have some nice silver work here, I’ve heard. I want it here, piled up right on this spot, by sundown.”
“Man’s crazy,” one of the farmers muttered. “Twenty against all of us? Hell.”
The maypole must have heard that. He signalled to one of the anonymous attackers holding a power rifle. The single weapon blasted through the group and Gavin Fletcher and Gwynneth Jones lay smoking dead on the young green corn.
“Now, I didn’t want to do that,” the maypole ~announced. He sounded somewhat pleased. “But now that we know we can’t trust you, we’re going to have to collect for ourselves. For protection, you understand. You pay the tax and we protect you.” He laughed unpleasantly.
I wanted to kill them there where they stood. A tax? This was outright robbery. This was something I had left behind, escaped when the final documents were sealed making me a citizen of Camelot. This was something I could not accept.
I wanted to kill them. But I turned and ran back to my house, to Isabelle singing while she kneaded the bread, to Ricky carefully tending the vegetables and reciting his times tables. To Margaret, who toddled ~after her mother and pulled the loaf pans down off the table.
When I was twenty-two and received my commission in Command, I would have done anything rather than run. When I was twenty-two I didn’t have a family to protect, a family that immediately overrode any of the old catchwords like courage and honor and pride.
I got to the house and hustled Isabelle and the children into the root cellar. It was strong and well-built, and the door overhead was heavy. Then I gathered up what we had, the few pieces of jewelry and a pitcher that had been my grandmother’s and the silver worked frame of the picture of Isabelle in her wedding dress.
I took them all and piled them at the door. And when the anonymous trooper showed up with a laser stick and his blast shield down, I handed it over without words. All I could think of was to get him out of the house before he heard Margaret cry. Before Ricky decided to run upstairs and help out. I had never known so much fury, and so much fear.
The thief took my small pile without so much as a glance, threw it all into a sack already half full with the goods of other households down the road, and left. I watched him go, raging at his back. Pirates. Thieves. I had never hated our alien Enemy half so much as I hated these humans who threatened my community, my family.
I waited until the rag-tag colors on the assault suit disappeared before I opened the cellar door.
“What was that?” Isabelle asked, shaken.
I told her about the ship and Gavin and Gwynneth.
She shook her head slowly. “Geoffery, I know you left the war behind you. But you know things, you and your refugee friends, that we don’t. We’ve never had to fight on Camelot before. I think, maybe, it is time to remember.”
She stroked my cheek with her work-rough hands, her large dark eyes soft and full of sorrow. Not fear, but sadness that I would have to bring back what I had fought so hard to forget.
That evening everyone stayed in at their own hearths, watching for the strangers to leave. The next day I didn’t want to go out far from the house, from the children. If one of those blast-shielded troopers came back, I wanted to be there to make sure he died or left, but that Ricky and Margaret were safe. And so I was sitting in the doorway sharpening my pruning axe when Frederick came by.
“‘Lo, Jazz,” he said. I winced. I had left that name ten years ago. Jasper was not a real Camelot name, and all immigrants were encouraged to take on names that were “appropriate.” I had become Geoffery. And Fidel Castanega had become Frederick Case.
But Fidel and I, when I was still Jazz-for-Jasper, had served together in the 1st Battalion of the Dinochrome Brigade, in Command Status. Talking to the great hulks of the Mark XXX Bolos who had been, in their own strange way, friends as well as comrades. Fidel and I went way back, but we never talked about those days now.