The Ironclad Prophecy (14 page)

On their first encounter with an urmen enclave the natives, thinking the tank was Skarra, this world’s god of the underworld, prostrated themselves before it and treated the crew as holy men. The crew went along with it in a bemused manner, because it suited their purpose. They rather liked the idea. Too much, it seemed. After months of subsisting on half rations and whatever vile local stew the mongey wallahs came up with, it was a relief to be feted for a change.

Reinforced by the euphoria and confidence imparted by the constant inhalation of the fumes, they were soon exaggerating and expanding the act until it was like a carnival sideshow. Norman, the ex-music hall actor, painted their rain capes with magic symbols and did a few conjuring tricks. At first it was just a jolly, but as the weeks went on their attitudes were tempered by the fumes, and as their side effects took hold, they began to half-believe the act themselves.

Alfie felt a sharp rap on his turtle shell. Jack was staring at him. He looked around to find Frank, Cecil and Norman staring across the engine at him.

Norman stepped up to him and put his mouth close to his ear in order to yell over the sound of the engine.

“I’ll say this once. We’ve got a chance to be something here, to be someone. Don’t you dare muck this up for us.” He poked Alfie in the shoulder to emphasise his point.

Alfie was a little taken aback. He glanced at each of his crewmates in turn. They looked at him with expectation. They wanted his compliance. Alfie, disappointed in his mates but more so in himself, gave a reluctant nod.

Norman held his gaze a little longer, pointed to his own eyes and then at Alfie, “I’m watching you,” before turning back to his gun.

O
UTSIDE,
M
ATHERS TURNED
around and, with an expansive gesture, held his staff aloft, like Moses before the burning bush, and bowed low before the tank. The ironclad wavered gently in his vision, an effect of the fuel fumes, although it seemed to him that the tank was breathing, its sides expanding and contracting, a fact he now accepted as quite natural.

He wheeled smartly to face the front, his rain cape whipping around him as he turned. He had them in the palm of his hand. He raised his staff like a Regimental Sergeant Major on a parade ground and nodded at the urman. “Lead on. Skarra, god of the underworld, will follow.”

The urman backed slowly away on his knees before getting to his feet and walking back into the jungle with his companions, casting fearful glances behind them. The warriors before him slipped into the undergrowth and vanished from sight, only to re-emerge tens of yards further on.

B
EHIND HIS MASK,
Mathers took a deep breath and began to march imperiously behind them, ushering the way for his god. Behind him, the armoured juggernaut kept up a stately pace as they entered the jungle.

The undergrowth closed in about them, the shrubbery and saplings groaned and snapped, giving way under the rolling plates of the
Ivanhoe
. Mathers was aware of shapes in the undergrowth surrounding them. Quick, fleeting, almost insubstantial. More urmen. He pretended not to notice, keeping his steady pace.

The noise of the oncoming tank quelled the chatters and whoops of unseen beasts and the high boughs shook as creatures, startled by the unworldly noise beneath, took flight through the canopy.

The tank took no heed. An air of death, of lifelessness, surrounded it, striking trees and ploughing over stricken trunks as if gorging itself on the life that fell before it. That life should flee it or be crushed beneath it seemed only right and something the urmen expected from a god of the underworld. No wonder they melted into the undergrowth, reappearing only to offer a brief benediction and a direction, unwilling to approach for fear of their very lives being sucked from them.

All the time as he walked, Mathers could hear the tank muttering to him in its mechanical growl, whispering encouragements and dark truths, pattering out half-perceived homilies, making promises, soothing with words of power. It filled his head with such concepts that it began to pound, luring him with talk of other spaces, other realms. Ideas so profound that he couldn’t hold them in his mind and they slipped from his consciousness, leaving only a vague sense of loss and shame as though he had somehow disappointed it.

So rapt was he by this communication that he scarcely noticed the slavering creature with matted fur and great long limbs, all angles and joints, as it swung screeching down towards him, teeth bared. He felt nothing. No fear, no anger, just a complete disinterest. Then his god, Skarra, the god of the underworld, spoke, its words a brief staccato chant of death. The gangly beast, its momentum stilled in mid-air by the abrupt invocation, dropped to the jungle floor, dead.

His primitive escorts froze as the machine gun burst ripped through the air, but seeing the beast die they bowed and bobbed towards the
Ivanhoe
before moving off, emboldened by the protection now offered by the crawling god.

Mathers looked down at the body, its long limbs twisted and snapped beneath it. He cricked his neck, cleared his throat, gathered himself and walked on for what seemed like hours, but he had no way of telling. Time seemed to expand and contract. The only constants he had were the jungle and the iron murmurs of Skarra.

An excited muttering rippled between their urmen escorts. Mathers saw the reason for it. A totem. The mouldering body of an urman lashed to a carved post by liana vines, his chest split open, its soft tissues eaten long ago, leaving only a mummified husk. Echoing the hollow-eyed stare of the PH helmet on the top of his staff, its eye sockets were empty but for shadows and its jaw hung slackly as if in an eternal scream. Was it a sacrifice, a warning, a boundary marker or all three? It didn’t funk the urmen. If anything, they seemed relieved to pass it. It no doubt marked the edge of their territory.

Transfixed by it, Mathers watched as darkness seemed to seep from the skull’s sockets with a malicious intent, threatening to drown him in the rising shadows. Yet he could not take his eyes from it.

A voice reached out to him and he used it to pull his attention away from the deepening shadows about him.

“A sacrifice.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“A sacrifice,” said his urman guide. “He was
jundurru
. Now he’s a warning to other bad spirits that come to tempt or trick the Gilderra Clan. They will face the same fate. Jarak’s magic is strong. You will see.”

Mathers swallowed dryly, his tongue rasping against the roof of his mouth. He caught the tortured thing out of the corner of his eyes as he walked past it. If there was a chance to turn back, this was it. But now he felt no fear, no guilt. After all, he thought, why should he? Was he not under the aegis of the god of the underworld? Urged on by its whisperings in his mind, he took the first defiant step beyond the grisly totem. That broke the spell, and from thereon his fate was sealed.

The
Ivanhoe
rumbled past it, oblivious to its petty magics. The ground shuddered under its passing and the totem trembled in the wake of its iron tread.

A
S THE TREES
thinned, Mathers saw the urmen escort waiting expectantly on their edge. Beyond, a great wall of living bark rose up before them. Great thick sheets of it spanned the spaces between rising tree trunks, forming a stockade. They were not cut and hewn by crude tools, but grafted by some esoteric form of arboriculture from the very trees themselves, shaping and training the living wood so that planes of thick rough bark, some twenty or thirty feet high, grew from one tree to the next to form a natural living barricade, supported and strengthened by pleached boughs. Roots thrust out from the base of the living bark wall like natural buttresses. In spite of himself, and anything he expected to find on this world, Mathers was impressed. This was obviously a much older enclave than they had visited before. Established, less nomadic than those of their previous encounters. The gnarled and cracked bark fortification told of decades of growth, if not a century or more. This looked promising.

The jungle had been cleared from around the stockade and overhanging boughs cut back, right up to the canopy, which spanned out high above to become a natural vault.

Their urman escort called out with a yodelling cry towards the bark-walled enclave. A single great crack echoed around the clearing, followed by a succession of dry creaks. Two large gates of bark opened, revealing the compound within. Stood in the open gateway was a small party of urmen, who moved aside out of deference and fear as Mathers entered the clearing, the tank waiting in the jungle shadows behind him.

Cerulean trees, their trunks ten or twenty feet in diameter, rose high above into the vaulted canopy overhead, many stripped of their bark to a height of some fifty or sixty feet. Mathers soon saw why. The dwellings clustered below within the stockade were themselves made of great curved sheets of bark. Crepuscular fingers of light sliced down through the canopy, illuminating the clearing with an almost ethereal glow. There, he found nearly a hundred urmen women and children, watching him in silence.

He threw out his arms and, almost as one, the urmen dropped to their knees.

“I offer you a blessing in the name of Skarra!”

Behind him, the tank came to a halt, cresting a mammoth tree root where it squatted like some monstrous toad. There was a muttered response from the gathered enclave, who looked afraid and uncertain.

Mathers strode forwards towards the small central group, where a man wore a headdress made from an Yrredetti facial plate. He was dressed in a mottled fur cloak over a chest plate assembled from the carapace of some dead creature, scraped clean and now inscribed with symbols.

Next to him stood a smaller, wiry man, patterns of ritual scarification obvious on his face even under the ceremonial daubings of white clay smeared across his skin. Mostly naked, he wore only a loin cloth and bands of chitinous exoskeleton, harvested from some arthropod’s limbs, decorating his wrists, upper arms and ankles. The man regarded him with a sullen stare. This must be Jarak.

A group of tense and jumpy warriors stood behind them.

“I am Dranethwe of the Gilderra,” said the headdress wearer. When he spoke it was with the same inflections but a more heavily accented English than any other urman Mathers had heard before. It
was
recognisable, however, if a little hard to follow at first. “My clan is honoured by your presence,” the urmen went on. “We are grateful that the gods have heard us and that our offerings did not go unheeded.”

“Skarra hears all,” replied Mathers. Really, it was no more difficult communicating with them than with any other foreign subject of the British Empire. Learning a few words of their lingo always helped, but above all, keep it short and keep it simple. That way there would be no misunderstandings. Failing that, they always had the
Ivanhoe.
He turned back towards the tank. With great pomp, he anointed each track horn with the tip of his staff, while hissing out a command to Clegg.

“It’s showtime.”

A
LFIE WATCHED AS
the others grinned and struggled to put on their rain capes, helmets and splash masks in the confines of the tank, with all the eagerness of actors in the wings. Alfie wanted to speak out, to take one last chance to persuade them, but now wasn’t the time. That time had long since passed, he realised. They were committed to a course of action, and he felt very uneasy about it.

Handing out the ‘turtle shell’ bruise helmets, Norman thrust Alfie’s into the mechanic’s chest and held it there. He leaned in close, his mouth close to Alfie’s ear.

“Don’t funk it. If you mess this up for us, I’ll have you.”

Alfie felt his face smart as if he’d been struck. As if he would. As if he’d put his crewmates in jeopardy. How could he even question that? He said nothing, but met his gaze with a sullen silence. Then, with Norman still watching, he put on his splash mask and helmet. Norman nodded, apparently satisfied, before popping something into his mouth and putting on his own splash mask.

Wally cut the engine and the tank’s growling died in its throat as if pleased by the enclave’s submission to its will. He lit the hurricane lamps and hung them before the driver’s visors then opened the front visor hatches. The light from the lanterns flooded out as Skarra’s piercing gaze lit the clearing. As quietly as possible, the crew bundled out of the hatches in the rear of the sponsons, hidden by the bulk of the
Ivanhoe
. At the rear of the tank Cecil and Reggie lit torches with a Lucifer. They fell into Indian file.

Glumly Alfie fell in with the others behind Mathers as they began intoning their version of a mock liturgical chant, but he couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for it. Like Mathers’, their rain capes were daubed with symbols, only less ornate. Wally and Frank were in front carrying rifles, bayonets fixed, in the
present
position, like crucifixes. Behind them came Cecil and Reggie, bearing the flaming torches. Alfie and Norman brought up the rear of the procession. Alfie knew it was so that Norman could keep an eye on him, and he resented the fact. Jack stayed in the tank, ready with a loaded gun, should the urmen require the ultimate demonstration. Alfie felt nauseous. The Padre would be spitting feathers if he could see them now.