AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Never' Never! Our sacred trust... Never!
"Never!" to the Kurian Kings, we 11 take up arms again...
Outside, Valentine heard the men join in the song. It spread across the hill, even to the pickets on the crestline. Though most of them couldn't carry a tune with the help of a wheelbarrow, they did slap their rifle butts, or shovel blades, in time to the "Never!" It was a rhythmic, savage sound. He hoped the Quislings across the river were listening.
* * * *
Valentine found Hank Smalls learning his duties as a "runner." The boy's job was to pass oral messages between the guns and the main magazine, headquarters, or the forward posts in the event of a hard-line breakdown with the field phones. He and a handful of other young teenagers were being escorted around the hilltop and taught the different stations still being put together by Beck and his construction crews.
"Can I borrow Hank a moment?" Valentine asked the corporal walking the teens around.
"Of course," the corporal answered. She had the nearsighted look of a studious schoolgirl entering her senior year, despite the "camp hair" cropped close to her scalp. Valentine stopped the children as they lined up, as though for inspection.
"Excuse me, Corporal." He drew Hank aside. "How are you getting on, Hank?" Valentine asked the boy. Hank wore a man's fatigue shirt, belted about the waist so it was more of a peasant smock. Mud plastered Hank's sandal-like TMCC training shoes, but the old tire treads were easy to run in and then clean afterwards.
"Busy. Lots to remember about fuses, sir."
"Are you getting enough to eat?"
Hank looked insulted. "Of course. Two hot and one cold a day."
Valentine had a hard time getting the next out: "Worried about your parents?"
"No." But the boy's eyes left his this time. Valentine went down to one knee so he was at the boy's level, but Hank's face had gone vacant. The boy was off in a mental basement, a basement Valentine suspected was similar to his own.
"Keep busy,"Valentine said, summing long experience into words. The boy looked like he needed more.
"Hank, I'm going to tell you something a Roman Catholic priest told me when I lost my parents. He said it was up to him to turn me into a man since my father wasn't around to do it. He'd never had kids, being a priest, so he had to use the wisdom of others. He used to read a lot of Latin. Roman history, you know?" For some reason Valentine thought of Xray-Tango and his groma.
"They had gladiators," Hank said.
"Right. A Roman statesman named Cicero used to say that 'no Roman in any circumstance could regard himself as vanquished." You know what vanquished means?"
"Uhhh," Hank said.
"What Cicero meant was that even if you were beat, you should never admit that you were. Especially not to the people who'd beaten you."
"Like Southern Command keeping together even after all this," Hank said. The boy's eyes had a sparkle of interest, so Valentine went on.
"Cicero said a man had to have three virtues. Virtus, which meant courage in battle. Not minding pain and so on. You also have to have gravitas, which means being sober, aware of your responsibilities, and controlling your emotions. Even if someone has you madder than a stomped rattlesnake, you don't let them know they've got you by the nose, or they'll just give you another twist. Understand?"
"Virte-virtus and gravitas," Hank said. "I see. But you said there was another."
"This is the most important one for you now. Simplicitas. That means keeping your mind on your duties, doing what most needs to be done at the moment. In fact, I'd better let you get back to yours. I don't want to keep the corporal and the rest waiting."
"Yes, sir," Hank said, saluting. The vacant look was gone. Valentine wanted to hug the boy, but settled for a salute. Gravitas required it.
* * * *
All through the following day the sound of distant trucks and trains could be heard.
That night, though the men were exhausted from laboring on what was now known as the "Beck Line," they danced and cheered at the news that Arkadelphia was liberated, and the Quislings were falling back in disarray. Southern Command would soon be knocking on the hilly gates of Hot Springs, barely fifty miles from New Columbia.
They'd had their own successes. The mortar crews had prevented repair gangs from working on the rail lines during the day, and the occasional illumination shell followed by 4.2-inch mortar airbursts slowed the work to a crawl at night.
But strongpoints with machine guns were now all around the base of the hill, and the mortars on Pulaski Heights had begun to fire again, scattering their shells among the buildings of Solon's Residence. Two men laying wire for field phones were killed when a shell landed between them.
Big Rock Mountain added a life when one of the women gave birth. The eight-and-a-half-pound boy was named Perry after one of the dead signals men.
