Tales from Kalgachia - 44

Although trains between the cities of Bergburg and Lepidopterum were drawn on a twisting mountain course by lumbering biodiesel locomotives built more for gradients than speed, a train departing the former city at a fresh enough hour of the morning might have technically expected to reach the latter city in the early evening. As it was however, the twilight hours also marked the day's peak Tee-al activity and required a halt of a few hours in the defended surroundings of Gravelbottom until the night was well enough established to proceed onward. As the stopover occurred near the border between Kalgachia proper and its protectorate of Lepidopterum, it also allowed for the inevitable browsing of passengers' paperwork by Prefect border guards and their Lepidopteran counterparts from the Bureau of Coordination.

Travelling in the leather and teak comfort of train's executive class car on one such evening was Kohen Shimon ben Ira Deissfurst, the most senior Pesakhnik cleric from the Kalgachi Defence Force School of Chaplaincy. To say Deissfurst was irritable by nature would have understated the quiet dread experienced by all who faced his presence on a regular basis; as he knew well but cared little, his colleagues in Jollity and Bergburg were breathing more easily at the news of his assignment "in the southwest". From a distance his full black beard and enormous shtreimel hat resembled some kind of Laqi chieftain - an impression only dispelled by his small rounded spectacles, pressed against eyes which bulged foward beneath their lids and almost seemed to touch the thick little lenses. This latter detail did more than any other to reinforce the air of terrifying erudition about the man, an air which was not without accuracy; in Kalgachia's military chaplaincy his knowledge of the ways of the Old Temple was second to none. This had not always been so, but in recent years Deissfurst had luxuriated in the satisfaction that except for a few mavens in the Shrubagogues of Bergburg, everyone who knew their way around the megillot better than he did had died of old age.

The train's extended stay around Gravelbottom, a sprawling freight depot masquerading as a town, had been inconvenient enough. The gaggle of green-uniformed officials asking for Deissfurst's papers was even more irritating, although his KDF travel warrant - stamped by a National Command Rhizome and authorised for "movement throughout the Broodmother II/III Area of Operations" - instantly silenced all who checked it and indeed seemed to propel them away from Deissfurst as fast as decorum permitted. Soon he had been left to the company of the train car's only other passengers, a pair of suited and gold-watched young men from the DLEP who propped up their feet on the walnut table between their seats and discussed the market for Lepidopteran olives in an acceptably low murmur. Soon the gentle rocking of overhead chandeliers announced the train's movement, and the harsh white floodlights of the Gravelbottom rail yard gave way to the darkness of night.

From his leather attaché case, Deissfurst got out the sheaf of briefing papers which he had been perusing since the train left Bergburg. Quite aside from the day's other annoyances, the very reason for his assignment was a source of seething disdain. It had begun with an air-drop of leaflets upwind of KDF kossar artillary units operating in the Upland Confederation by scout aircraft of the Unified Governorates - that the KDF had deployed such assets so far forward in that particular conflict was something of which Deissfurst had been left disgracefully uninformed until recently, but that was another matter. It transpired that the leaflets contained a screed from one Adin ben Shmuel, the leader of a Kossar band in league with the Gubernatorials around the ruined city of Litkov to the far west. Ben Shmuel had utilised a slew of Talmudic citations to argue that the Pesakhniks - those adherents to the Yehudi faith who professed a compatibility with Ketherism - were in contempt of Jehovah's commandments by recognising the divine character of the Ketherist Salvators and that they had strayed from His mercy ever since they began "consorting with the creatures of Sheol" in the Minarborian era. Standard accusations with standard rebuttals, as Deissfurst - having authored many of the latter - well knew. The true shame upon his tribe had been that the embedded Kohanim scattered among the KDF's kossars had failed to propagate these rebuttals with sufficient conviction that the kossars stopped debating the matter among themselves; although none had yet heeded ben Shmuel's exhortation to redeem themselves before the all-seeing demiurge by deserting to the Gubernatorials and their archonic creed, the KDF General Staff were in no mood to let the situation brew into something more dangerous and had duly ordered Deissfurst to the front line to "offer the necessary reassurance and instruction". Already however, he had relegated this to his second priority behind ritually berating the frontline Kohanim who, despite being trained by Deissfurst himself, had utterly failed to implement their craft in field conditions without his-

"Would sir require any refreshment?"

Deissfurst looked up. A dark-haired young woman in a pristine white waistcoat was standing over him with a silver tray full of drinks and hors d'oeuvres.

Deissfurst's bespectacled eyes glared at her in reluctant patience, as if dealing with a halfwit child. "Did I need anything the last five times you asked?"

"Forgive me sir," said the stewardess. "We're some hours from Lepidopterum and we don't like to leave our passengers without sustenance."

"And now the girl talks back to me... the chutzpah! What is your name?"

"Sir?"

"Your name, you insolent bitch. The name your mother calls you by."

"St... Steatoda..." the woman began to stutter. "Mycelia Steatoda..."

Deissfurst snatched up a pen and began to write in effortlessly calligraphic Hebrew along the margin of one of his papers. "There will be a complaint letter going to Kalgachi Railways head office with that name on it," he muttered without looking up. "I already ate in the buffet car and if I require anything further, including your infantile small talk, I will ask for it. Now go away."

"Y-yes sir. My apologies." The woman swallowed hard, turning smartly on her heel and walking away before the first tears began to glisten in her eyes.

"A Kalgachi never apologises!" Deissfurst shouted after her, ignoring the bemused stares of the two DLEP men and returning to his papers. Taking a fresh sheet and a pen, he began to write:

+ + + + + +

"It is a matter of scriptural record that Almighty G-d, in His unknowable wisdom, takes His greatest interest in observances which appear peripheral to mortal men, especially among we of His Chosen People. In his cold, seemingly Nazarene reading of the Scrolls of the Law, the neophyte ben Shmuel fails to appreciate the manifest reality of our relationship with the Throne in Heaven in that a man of the Chosen Blood can consort with competing paramaterial forces such as the Garden of the Shrub and His Salvators, indeed go further and curse the very name and works of G-d Himself, yet know the fullity of the divine mercy; but what wrath has come down upon they who have dispensed with all regard for the Almighty in Heaven, and left off our manifold and timeless rituals of memory unto Him! Thus is it determined for all time that G-d is not interested in the obedience of we Chosen Peoples, only our attention - this being the essence of the 'archonic fixation' as the Troglodytes would have it. Any greater genuflection is the sole burden of Ruth and those of the nations who came after her, they for whom I shall not speak - but know that our own salvation is guaranteed by the blood of Jacob and assured by the trials of those whom he begot, and whom they begot, and whom they begot, through all of the scripture of Our Tribe until there was no sin in our blood left to cleanse and the smiting hand of G-d was rested. Against that sufficing feature, then, know that our deeds in this world today weigh as nought in the judgement of the Throne of Heaven, except that we acknowledge He who sits upon it. That we break our bread with the Children of the Shrub, they of the Righteous Garden who have given us refuge and filled our treasuries and opened their society to our intellectual gift, in the eye of Almighty G-d is no worse than the privilege of the ox to tread grain without a muzzle.

What then of the Chosen Blood, and of its preservation through the miscegenate imperative put upon us by the government in Oktavyan? To this, the disreputable ben Shmuel asserts a mutual exclusivity that does not exist. There is nothing in the Oktavyan Code which compels as a condition of Kalgachi ethnicity the propagation of goyish blood through both parents and the mechanism therefore remains to sustain for ourselves the birthright of Jacob and of Levi, as did our maroon ancestors and theirs, and theirs, and theirs..."

+ + + + + +

He woke slowly, to a hand gently rocking his shoulder. "Weh...wha?"

"We're here, brother Kohen," said a man's voice.

Deissfurst lifted his head off the table and began fumbling around. "What's going on!? Where are my glasses? Wha.." Feeling his glasses pressed into his hand, he hurriedly pulled them on. The two DLEP men were standing over his seat.

"We're in Lepidopterum, sir." One of the men indicated the window with his thumb. Through it could be seen the soft yellow-green lighting of a railway platform and a throng of passengers who had just disembarked from the train's working and managerial class segments.

"The stewardess was going to wake you up," said the other man, "but she was too scared."

"Is that so?" said Deissfurst, sitting bolt upright. "I don't know where they get these idiots. I've already writing a complaint letter about her... I'll have to add this latest indiscretion to it. I pay two hundred Millirand for an executive class ticket and what do I get? Distraction when I want silence and silence when I need waking up!"

"Don't you KDF guys get it on expenses?" said the first man. "We do."

"Well I do too, but that's not the point." Deissfurst began gathering his papers together and gave the men no further attention, much less his gratitude. By the time he had shuffled off the train, all but a few scattered passengers had cleared the platform. A KDF officer and an enlisted minion in grey kossar uniforms were waiting for him on the platform, their rogatywka caps set at an identically jaunty angle. Both offered a crisp salute on the approach of Deissfurst, who wordlessly gestured for the enlisted man to take his suitcases.

"Welcome to Lepidopterum, brother Kohen," said the officer, who offered his hand only to draw it awkwardly back when Deissfurst refrained from shaking it. "How was your journey?"

"Terrible," said Deissfurst. "Eeegh, is it always so warm around here? It's the middle of the night, for Shrub's sake."

"Normal for the time of year," said the officer. "It's the humidity mainly. Transpiration from the Litovine Forest."

"I'll transpirate you if you don't get me out of here," said Deissfurst.

"This way, brother Kohen," said the officer, turning smartly about and letting Deissfurst walk ahead through the station gates. A KDF staff car was waiting in the darkness just beyond, the driver of which got out and helped the luggage bearer stow the suitcases. Having seen Deissfurst and the officer into the rear seats, the enlisted men climbed into the front and started the car along the winding roads of Lepidopterum, more of a tree-lined maze spotted with burrow entrances than its status as a 'city' suggested. Aside from clouds of passing fireflies and the occasional lantern hung in the trees, most of the light came from the car's headlamps.

Deissfurst jolted as two grey-skinned humanoid figures, their eyes the size of billard balls and reflecting like those of a cat, were briefly illuminated in the car's beam as they walked alongside the road. "What in the name of...!"

"Deep Singers," said the officer. "Nocturnal, hence the eyes. Spend enough time around them and the amygdala response wears off eventually. Took me about three weeks, but sometimes you'll bump into one of the really deep-dwelling ones with the insect features and all, and it'll-"

"I don't want to know any more!" snapped Deissfurst. "It's hard enough to know we're sending good kossars out to die for the sake of those things."

"Well, their contributions to medicine and-"

"I am well aware of their contributions, young man! But it doesn't make them any easier to look at. Where are we going, anyway? Will there be Deep Singers there?"

"A few Nezenis, maybe. Are you okay with them?"

"What kind of a stupid question is that? I work with Nezenis all the time. But you haven't told me where we're going."

"KDF Theatre Headquarters. You'll rest overnight there and take a 'Birb out to Fort St. Govert in the morning."

"This headquarters, it's air conditioned?"

"Yes, brother Kohen. And deep underground. I gather it's-"

"What are the beds like? Comfortable?"

"In the officers' quarters, yes. The-"

"Room service?"

"Well, we can assign you a valet. As it's only one night I'm sure you can manage-"

"Television?"

"There's one in the mess chamber. But I must advise you, brother Kohen, you'll be spending most of your time in derelict forts and dugouts after tomorrow. The facilities out there are... pretty basic."

"What do you take me for, some kind of spoiled brat? I can tolerate roughing it, you know."

"Oh I've no doubt, brother Kohen," said the officer, his teeth clamping down on his tongue a little.

A checkpoint manned by armed KDF line infantry loomed suddenly out of the darkness. While the other kossars were fumbling for their papers, Deissfurst cranked down the window and waved his travel warrant impatiently in the face of an approaching sentry. It seemed to have the same magic effect as on the train, for within two seconds the barrier had been lifted and the car was waved through with salutes all round. Within a second of that, it was bumping along an unlit and particularly shrubby road with no sign of further military presence.

"Almost there," said the officer.

Deissfurst fished a golden pocket watch out of his robe and read it with some difficulty in the poor light. It was past midnight. "Bozhe moy," he muttered with a yawn.

"I gather..." begin the officer hesitantly, "...you're here to fix some trouble with the Kohanim on the front line?"

"Trouble?" said Deissfurst. "With my boys? Not a bit of it. They're the most learned men in all the KDF. I trained the better part of them myself. Nothing wrong with them."

The car swerved off the road, bumped along rough ground for a few seconds and pulled up to a burrow entrance which could not be seen until the car drew to a halt immediately next to it. There were no exterior buildings, guards or other signs of activity except for a gentle orange glow as some type of door within the burrow was opened.

"So if you're not here to fix anything, brother Kohen," asked the officer as the car's rear doors were opened, "why ARE you here?"

Deissfurst climbed unsteadily out of the car, pulled his giant shtreimel onto his head, looked around at the darkened shrubscape and shrugged.

"Eh," he said, "everybody's got to be somewhere."