“That one of ours?” asked Carter, once horse and rider had vanished again into the swallowing dark.
“Oh, good,” said Fenn. “You saw it, too.”
Carter thought of a question he’d never asked Fenn before. Same as a question Fenn had never asked him.
“Fenn, what did you do before you joined the company?”
Fenn smiled and stared off in the general direction of the horizon. “Nothing at all. You?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. Funny how that works, huh? None of us did anything before, I guess.”
“I guess.”
For a minute, neither man spoke. Neither man looked at the other.
Carter remembered reading somewhere once how the captains of Spanish galleons, after sailing their load of conquistadors halfway around the earth to the New World, would burn their ships in the bay, giving their men a very showy lesson in commitment and dedication to a cause. With their ships in flames, a point was succinctly made: No one was ever going home again. There was no retreat. No surrender. Win or die.
And Carter seemed to recall that it’d worked. The conquistadors—with their guns and steel and armor and horses and big, ridiculous hats—had decimated entire populations, had killed millions of indigenous peoples, murdering them with gunpowder, with swords, with plagues and starvation and, eventually, had installed themselves as rulers of a hot, sticky, smelly, and dangerous place, as alien to them as this place was to him even now.
Of course, it’d taken a century. And even at the end of it, there’d been plenty of indigenous peoples left to hate the Spaniards for what they’d done. It was a messy process, and there was a lot of dying to be done before the inevitable victory. Carter imagined that a lot of those dead conquistadors went to their graves thinking that the New World wasn’t all that nice a place anyway, that maybe everyone would’ve been a whole lot happier had they all just stayed home, eaten some olives, screwed their wives, and left the New World to the people who were already there.
And he was willing to bet that all of them, to a man, thought that burning the ships had been a really shitty idea.
“What’s on your mind, Kev?” Fenn asked.
Carter shook his head. “Ancient history,” he said. “So what do we do next? I feel like we should do something.”
“Cards? There’s been a rotating game going on in Stork and Hardman’s tent for the last day or so.”
Carter shrugged. It sounded as good to him as anything else. He figured he’d have plenty of time to sleep when he was dead, and told Fenn as much.
“Very cheerful, Captain. Be sure to tell the boys that one. I’m sure they’ll appreciate it.”
Together, they stumbled off into the quiet dark. Cat waited until they were gone and carefully slunk back inside to walk in slow circles around the stove and sniff at the drunk lawyer on the floor.
CARTER WON THIRTY DOLLARS PLAYING POKER. Vic was there. They were coldly cordial to each other, but neither of them could bluff, each knowing the other a bit too well. He took the two screamers about an hour before his next flight was due to lift, giving them time to work themselves in, swallowing them with a mouthful of cold coffee. In his condition, they hit almost immediately, and he was seized with a sudden urge to clean the tent. His, Stork’s, didn’t matter. His hands couldn’t seem to stay still.
Dawn patrol was uneventful. He flew a two/three with Tommy Hill and Ernie O’Day. Exhausted, hungover, hyped up, and feeling poorly, he went up in the bomber, taking a little DH.2 called Scrambler out of the house and up near maximum altitude. He just hung there, glad, for a change, for the cold and the quiet and the thoughtless boredom while the boys talked about girls on the flight channel and tried to get themselves shot at. Scrambler had been refitted with a 250-horse replica Rolls-Royce Eagle and bomb grapples under its lower wing, triggered hydraulically from a finger switch on the stick. He kept all ten of his far away, not trusting his own hands not to just drop the weight wherever to make some pretty flowers.
The cold made him ache. He’d forgotten his helmet in the tent, and the grease on his face made his skin smell like a hospital. He ducked low, curling within the body of the plane, and looked up past the top wing and into the gray-blue sky. It almost never snowed on Iaxo—it was one of the small mercies of the place. Clouds grew, darkened, fattened, but what fell, if anything, was freezing rain or a mist that seemed almost to sizzle and made the eyes sting like tear gas if one stayed out too long in it. Real snow was a rarity. On some nights, though, he longed for it simply because it felt as though it ought to snow.
The plane flew like a brick. They were down around Southbend, still under strict orders to stay clear of the walls and outlying mud huts and tents that huddled close around the periphery. At fourteen thousand feet it looked like a scene out of antiquity—the fortified town almost like a castle, white-walled and standing at the river’s edge. Peeking over the cockpit’s side rail, Carter imagined peasants going about their daily business in the shadow of its squat, roofed towers and massive gate, and he wondered what this place must’ve been like before they’d all arrived—a Heisenberg riddle, just enough to keep his mind churning through the dull, looping repetitions of air patrol.