Seeker of the Four Winds: A Galatia Novel (31 page)

Josie listened to them
negotiate as she sat wedged on a bench seat between Lars and
Lindsey. Rolf sat on the opposite side of the ship next to Dante.
Lars furtively held her hand until she withdrew it to leaf
through
Riddle of Steel
again.

A riddle indeed.

Passages of text were underlined where they
hadn’t been before. It had been firmly instilled in Josie to never
write in a book, so she marveled at who could have been so bold.
The same person who wrote the note inside of the cover had probably
marked up the pages as well. Could it be some kind of secret
code?

Glancing up, she caught Rolf staring
intently at Lindsey again. When Lindsey caught his gaze, he quickly
looked away.

“So,” Josie whispered into Lindsey’s ear,
“what’s the deal—are you two an item?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Lindsey tossed her
hair. “He’s not my type. Shy and backward.”

“If you feel that way, why did you make out
with him?”

“It was just that one time—and well, that
other time. Oh, and that time in the slayer’s barn...well, never
mind.”

“Don’t you feel bad for letting him think a
relationship with you is possible?”

“I’ve told him I’m my own woman. It’s not my
fault if he refuses to listen. When he started talking about having
kids, that was the last straw. I don’t want to get married and I
certainly don’t want to be tied down with children. Not today, not
tomorrow, not ever.”

“Why not?”

“My parents are devout Catholics. Even
though they hate each other, they stay together out of love for
Jesus. I’m sure Jesus appreciates all their anger, all their
breaking things, and swearing at each other—done in His Name.
Amen.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was like that
for you.”

“Well, it is. When we get back to Galatia,
I’m going to find my own place.”

“Need a roomie?” she teased.

“That would be crazy! We only just started
tolerating each other. Put us in a room together for that long and
we’d be back to hating each other.”

“Calm down,” Josie snorted with laughter. “I
was only kidding.”

..............................

In the evening, the Zlod vessel moored along
the riverbank of a grubby forest covered with gooey red fungus.
Harmless, Loyl said, but sticky. The vessel pulled over to the
shoreline for the evening, where the squad decided to get out,
stretch their legs, and set up camp for the night. The Zlods also
got out to stretch their legs, to find some food, but returned to
sleep on the boat. The captain couldn’t understand why their
passengers preferred the damp ground to his dry decks. The squad
didn’t have the heart to tell them they stank worse than
Bulwarks.

Josie set up her blankets next to Lars. He
was already lying down and opened an arm in invitation for her to
crawl inside of his hug. She saw the sharp lines of disapproval on
the faces of the rest of the team, but nobody reprimanded them. Not
even Loyl. Maybe he understood that after what they’d been through,
she pined for a drink of human kindness, a bucket of forgiveness,
and thirsted for affirmation that she was still worthy to be part
of the human race.

Sensing that Lars needed
the same, she kissed the tip of his nose, and then snuggled into
his side. But that voice inside of her head refused to be
quieted.
If it wasn’t for your selfish
choices, Big Clo and Willow would be enjoying their freedom,
instead, they’re smoldering in the grave. You really are a
bitch.
Her hands went to her ears in hopes
that sleep would quiet her accusing conscience.
And a murderer.

At long last they came to Blue Junction. The
captain went into town for supplies, and to negotiate the terms for
a shipment down stream, but Prince Loyl refused to enter the town
that had turned them away in their time of need.

The Zlod captain returned with bad news.

“I received confirmation—the allied armies
have surrounded Galatia and closed her port. I can let you off ten
miles south of your borders. But all the money in the world
wouldn’t convince me to get any closer to that blood bath. You seem
like nice people though, so why don’t you stay in Blue Junction
until it’s over?”

“My family lives in Galatia,” Dante
said.

“Well, may the god of war have mercy on your
souls.”

(Josephine Rose Albright)

Many miles north of Blue Junction the Zlod
captain ordered his rowers to stop. Their oars went straight up in
the air and the anchor zipped down into the water. Due to a clog of
Western Alliance ships running the breadth of the river, they could
get no closer to Galatia. Prince Loyl was pleased, though, saying
they had landed about where he had expected. Thanking the captain,
he paid the agreed-upon fare, and they all parted ways.

After half a day traveling by foot, Josie
longed for the ease of sitting on a boat while the rowers did all
the work. The terrain was hilly, the vegetation dense, making
walking slow and tedious. Also, she was hopelessly lost, but at
least Loyl seemed sure of the path. A week passed before the land
began to seem familiar again.

As the skirted the river, Loyl led them up a
steep muddy embankment, which Josie climbed by pulling herself by
tree roots that hung like vines from the steep embankment. Lindsey
was ahead of her and kept sending cascades of dirt down into her
face.

“Quit that!” Josie complained, watching in
envy as Loyl shimmied across a branch hand-over-hand without any
trouble to plop down on the grassy bluff above.

“Hey, Lindsey, remember when we were in the
Girl Scouts,” Josie said when she got to the top, a prairie of
swaying green grass and acres of blue spruce, “and we thought that
spending the night in Biodome Three was roughing it?”

Lindsey busted out laughing
at the memory, ending with a nostalgic sigh. “And we made S’mores
over the space heater, the one with the fake digital flames, and
told ghost stories.” The two girls intoned
Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary,
and burst into giggles. The men in the group cut dubious
glances at each other but said nothing, asked no
questions.

They walked through the afternoon, taking
only a couple of breaks, until deep into the night. Prince Loyl
surveyed the amount of trampled foliage they had found. “More than
one army has already marched through here.” Squinting at the
horizon, he added, “But they haven’t come back through. This is a
good sign that the battle hasn’t taken place yet.”

“Or it’s taking place right now,” Dante
said.

“No,” the prince said, twitching his velvety
white ears. “We are already within the borders of Galatia. Maybe
ten or fifteen miles away from your main settlement. That’s close
enough for the Regalan ear to pick up the sounds of a battle the
size of which I expect.”

“It’s like we’re in a cowboy movie, heading
to Dodge for a duel, and the map is our six-shooter,” Josie said.
Her stomach had turned into knots a long time ago and remained
clenched. “Everybody pray we get there before High Noon.”

“The battle will begin at daybreak,” Loyl
corrected, “not when the sun is at its peak.”

“I know,” Josie said, not bothering to
explain cowboy tradition. “I know.”

..............................

The Red Squad rarely traveled after sundown,
but tonight they walked beneath a waning moon filtered by a forest
full of thin trees with white trunks and an airy canopy of yellow
leaves. Josie held her hands out like feelers, barely able to see
them in front of her face. The sound of animals scurrying through
the underbrush added to her growing anxiety. Wasn’t this where the
hunters had been attacked by those acidic flower petals? What if
they were walking into a patch of them right now? Trying to calm
down, she reminded herself of the Regalan ability to see in low
light. Loyl had become the squad’s Seeing Eye dog, warning everyone
of dangers and obstacles in the terrain as they went along.

Rolf complained that he had a stone in his
boot, so the group paused while he emptied it and Josie used the
opportunity to take a long sip from her canteen. One good thing
about Future Earth was that the water tasted awesome here, clean
and fresh. Bunker water had an odd moldy taste. Her mother used to
say it tasted like water from a slimy sump pump hole.

“Isn’t this snuffy territory?” Lindsey
asked, turning around in a circle, pointing her gun at random
noises. Josie’s hand went to her sword as she remembered how
bloated and purple the mayor had been after being attacked by a
poisonous snuffleupagus.

“It’s the soldiers that have me concerned,”
Loyl said, eyes studying the spaces between the trees. “I can
already make out their voices.”

“How close are we to the army?” Dante
asked.

“Less than an hour.”

A Few Weeks Earlier

(Michael Penn)

Three weeks before the Summer Solstice, the
hired laborers began to leave Galatia. Good riddance, Barrett said.
They shouldn’t have been here in the first place. I hope the gates
hit them on the way out. The mood around town was mildly anxious,
but when foreign troops entered the Northlands, that anxiety rose
to panic levels. About two hundred Galatians, including families
with young children, fled in the middle of the night.

Unfortunately, on the way across the
southeastern border, the escapees ran into an army of Bulwarks who
either didn’t know what the proclamation said or simply didn’t
care. Red was now trying to arrange a meeting with the Bulwark
chief to negotiate our captured people’s freedom. In his official
capacity as sheriff, Barrett tried to talk him out of meeting with
Chief Krom, saying he was needlessly putting himself in danger.

Nonetheless, as mayor, Red said he had to
try.

As it was, the Bulwark army had set up camp
less than a mile away from my new farm. My wife Jessica and our
youngest children were staying at our eldest son’s house in Zena
City, but I stayed at the farm with my two strapping sons, Damian
and Ryan. They were both big lads like myself and had been
champions in the Fight Club. They had taken to the mandatory combat
training quite naturally and were hungry to test out their skills.
I hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but it was reassuring to know
that they could hold their own.

The night after Jessica left, the three of us
sat on the front porch to watch the army’s campfires spread out
among the meadows. We hit the trail for several days, scouting up
ahead, and reported back the bad news to the council: we were
already outnumbered, and the army had only just begun to assemble.
And more enemy troops were on the way.

Red told us a story about a Six-Day War that
took place in the 1960s. The armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria,
Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Sudan had poised themselves on the
vulnerable borders of a tiny nation called Israel. Surrounded by
enemies on every side, and hopelessly outnumbered, the Jewish
state’s destruction seemed a certainty. Yet, they pulled off a
miraculous victory because God was on their on their side. The
lesson was supposed to reassure us, because God was on our side as
well, but it only made me wonder if our leader had his head on
straight.

Meanwhile, Gizmo and a team of engineers had
designed a machine to make bullets. It involved a lot of manual
labor, but workers were manning the machine day and night to build
up the arsenal. A skilled gunner could take out more humanoids than
a dozen of King Doyl’s finest archers, evening the odds in our
direction.

Another defense we had up our sleeves was
Barrett’s charismatic ability to mold the earth to his own liking.
This ability had manifested itself in my little brother early on,
and by the time he was twelve, like Mickey Mouse in the
Sorcerer’s Apprentice
, he commanded the soil with a wave of
his hand. The ground became a tidal wave, which he froze into the
shapes of his imagination. A really flashy charisma, I must say. As
the city went up, a lot of people were living in shelters of dry
earth that Barrett had built for them using his charisma. The
problem was they tended to crumble within a few months, so they
only offered temporary respite from the elements.

Down in the bunker, it wasn’t long before the
agricultural area was filled with life-sized structures Barrett had
made from the soil of the fields. When he was about twenty, he made
a full-scale Santa’s Castle, including a throne where I would sit
in my red suit and black boots, while a line of children waited to
tell me their heart’s fondest desire. After Christmas, the castle
fell down of its own accord and was blended back into the field,
but every year Barrett would build a new one. Christmas had come
and gone this year without much ado, without any castle, but there
was always next year. Hopefully, Barrett’s ability hadn’t gotten
rusty.

After a day of rain, a large crowd gathered
to watch him raise a wall around Zena City. Though the architecture
wasn’t nearly as detailed as Santa’s Castle, it was his biggest
project ever. The expenditure of energy sent him to bed for days.
Four stories high in places, there was only one way through the
wall, which Barrett would fill in just before the battle. He even
managed to carve out small windows for gun turrets. It was a feat
worthy of the history books. I asked Bryce to snap some pictures to
include in my journals.

Veronica complained that it was the ugliest
thing she’d ever seen. It destroyed the view of the grassy plains,
the mountains and the river. Regardless, Barrett’s wall made people
feel more secure and they threw a party in his honor.