Spartan is 16
A novel by Jacob Malewitz
Columbia, 400
Civilization Empires, 200
Wordpress, 200
Archangels of the Sword, 3 trill
Red Shirt, 5 short stories
Ch. 3
Red hit the ground, rolled over, eyeing a weapon from the latest Combat Spartan who decided to take the high bounty--the very high bounty--on his head. So he rolled into a punch, then went for the small blade lieing on a table next to the bed, which happened to hold a naked women, her breasts a prize for Red, and she started laughing when he cut the throat of the Combat Spartan. “Nother’ day on the road, that’s what my father told,” and he finished the Combat Spartan by taking the blade and diving into his chest, a gruesome business when he pulled the heart out. He jumped back into bed, trapped by the perfume of this prostitute, a black Nubian girl, of a slave caste, whose best quality was her skin, her worst, her skinny hips, discolored nails, missing front tooth--traits that reminded Red, also from a slave caste, a Afrikana caste, that his time on the top could end all too quickly.
“Take it off, shuzza, that’s what he said, take it off, shizza.”
“What the hell does Shizza mean?”
He put the knife to her throat, still eyeing her breasts, and she stopped asking questions, knowing this man didn’t like pop quizzes after screwing.
“Culture, my ladey’, culture. Once you’re on top, everyone wants to sleep with you.”
“Then you must not--” she stopped, and he let out a guttural laugh.
“Quite right, quite.”
He went to the floor, scrounging for his old combat boots, finding them next to an pile of needles each with opium chemicals laced with other fine drugs from the deep north of old world. He pulled them on, walking around the room with nothing on but his combat boots, making her giggle. That pissed him off. He killed her and left the room--a black shirt hiding a small belly, as well as a blade; an opium pipe in his hand, a drug of choice; orange pants he took off a male hooker whom he became involved with, because of the pants; and the old combat boots he took off a dead Combat Spartan a decade ago. He looked quite old, and to some peoples that made him evil, for either he be wise, or he be wicked.
The pipe calmed him, its aroma catching glances from around the street of Wake Omega, a city a good distance from Wake Alpha, on the dark side of the planet. He looked up, always expecting to see either light or Hades, but only saw the darkness barely lit by a small moon, the tiny stars saying come and see, come and see, the hot stars saying the world was small in the whole scheme of things.
“Old man running, can’t stop running,” and he jingled his own trademark terrible songs as he walked down the straight of darkness, pulling on hookers shirts and eyeing all the weapons available for sale on the streets. The machines were gone--and in another way they weren’t. Their weapons said hello to the end of humanity, and humanity was sick here, almost not even human. Machine like creatures with human brains walked around, straight out of the neo theater, the dark theater which told you all the history of Wake World, before and after the fall. The science stories, the small magazines which told stories too crazy not to be true. The old term was Wake Dark, Wake Light … that the cities meant nothing … the darkness and the light did.
Back to the streets, hitting up every dealer he could, the old and forgotten hell bringer pushed on to his destination, remembering, for a brief moment, his life in a nutshell was screwing and smoking, where once it had been all screwing, sometimes all killing. He was, in a sense, the darkest of the tech lords, the so called society enders who became powers here on Wake World. Wake Dark, Wake Light.
He kept walking, but in circles.
“What does my bro--” said a dealer before Red grabbed the man by the balls and pushed them back into his lungs, where they belonged.
“Another mile down the road, all that they told,” and his symmetry was odd in that he couldn’t stop walking this single route, couldn’t escape his own chaos for the life of him. Then it came, the small vision of a gate in his mind, where blood flowed, because sometimes his mind told him the oddest of things. Once, he thought he was an angel, then a mad angel, then a warrior messiah. In a sense, he was the messiah for the Spartan people, the ones who wanted to die.
His cadence continued, and whenever someone tried to stop him, he pulled out an old poem, one terrible line followed by another, then proceeded to put pain on them like he’d been taught.
“Dude, you gotta stop this shit,” said the dealer behind him, “or I stop it for you,” and the smell of the old pulse pistol said so many things to the dark Red, the man of the hour who fell more at home with a pistol to his brains than most.
“Righti-o, my man. What you need, I got,” and he pulled the opium pipe out of his mouth.
“I know who you are, my man,” said the wannabe killer, “And I intend to end this game, Red.”
“Who’s Red?”
“The dude who ended it all, the joe who used too much angel dust, the dead dude, you, the end. There were stories--” And just as the dealer continued to tell his epic tale of writers saying one man would end the new eden in a fiery grace, the gun shot, too late to readjust, and Red came into the dealer full swing.
“You talk too much, you know too much.”
He pulled the pistol out of the dead hand, eyeing a group of hookers down the street, one, whose bionic leg looked quite odd rising up into her skirt, looked away … a mistake.
#
Red played this evil game for years. There was the line between Wake Light and Wake Dark. The cities were just dead instruments of justice, meant to keep things in line in case the Free Machines came back in full force. Or the angels. Or those who remembered the days when Spartans still ruled the world, the old world, the place of dreams now for so many youth.
The world was big, but not that big. The lines between, it was said, were full of machines. Or they were underground … or in space … or home, where the rest of humanity laughed at the small band of Spartans, laughed at the first human colonizers of space for destroying themselves. If they only knew what Wake World knew, if they had the gods that Wake had, perhaps they wouldn’t think—
Red played this evil game for years, eyeing the prize as he went from drug deal to drug deal. His problem was emotional: he hated the face in the mirror … liked killing others to see that last glimmer in their eye … and still had the idea he was a renegade outside of society, looking in and laughing.
He took the hooker down the street, pretending to be her escort perhaps, or maybe her Duva, the pimp who said what went down, collected the bills, and screwed with every one of his girls.
“Tell me, girl, it the world who made me or was it them who made me.”
“Please, hon, just let me get going.” Her skin, a white, her smell, a fragrance of flowers, turned out not to be an asset anymore. She didn’t mind the hands, it seemed, until they went to her throat. “Tell me girl, would you like to be dead or an agent of chaos.”
“Agent.”
“Right-o. You got it going for you. Could get you some money, or something, could help you out.”
“You’re evil. You want me to—“
“Don’t jump ahead of me. What I want I will get, and what I want is a moment of your time. See, we were slaves once. Sure, you look like an aristocrat, but that’s because your ancestors were good looking, not because they were royalty. Same with me. Nubian genes in me, and it’s said I might have some Pharaoh blood, see, but what I really want is to take what’s mine.”
“I am an agent of chaos.”
“Good. Add some chaos to the situation,” he said, pulling off his cap, the orange cap he stole from a different male prostitute. And it seemed for a moment she could see the change in his eyes, much like Janus, the two faced god, and he turned into someone else.
“Yes, my name is Red, darling, and I am very old, older than the first light, some say, and that means I’m a god.”
Ch. 4
The M-16 felt cold to touch, arcing upward out of the back of his cloth garment, a white overcoat concealing him from eyes and from the rain. His fingers, touching the gun, hoped for a moment of calm, shaking as they were.
M wasn’t sure: did he kill the machine? Why did it try to kill him? And how the hell did it get a job as a bartender in Wake Alpha?
He looked up at the rays of light, letting the sun cool him and heat him up in its odd celestial way. He wondered about the darkness not so far away, the other side of the planet, and he wanted to remember---for that one moment—what had really happened on Wake Dark, what had set the evil in motion. A piece of him, he felt, was over there, and he simply could not figure out why; the only thought was of father: a man of history, a drinker, a forgotten soul who wanted to be forgotten after mom died. He felt the pain gash at him, reeling him in like a net, telling him not to think anymore and just do.
But that was what his father had done: stopped thinking. It’s all that made sense anymore. He had to think; it was the choice; it made him different.
Pulling on the gun, he lost himself in the wave of walking straight out of the city. “Trapped,” he whispered to no one, making sense of nothing with it. He knew no other place, knew few other ways to live, than living and fighting here.
“Best to make the best of it,” he recalled his father telling him.
So instead of leaving the city and running away, he turned in, pushed past the suburbs, walked into a gang area, still harnessing his weapon; walked past a military outpost covered in the yellow of the elite warriors of Wake, the Spartans with direct bloodlines to the old world; walked deeper into the city, his eyes catching other’s eyes, his steps a tide pushing him onward. He went to the old world, here, the first settlement Persepolis, built much like the one of Athens, or at least the pictures of Athens. He walked right into the eye of a storm, not realizing it. He walked into the Wake Spartan dining area, looking for nothing, finding too much, he later realized, finding far too much.
“Wake Spartans,” said the recruiter, “aren’t about making choices, or thinking, or reacting, they act, they make the opponent react, they don’t think. And you want to know why, brother? You want to know why Wake Spartans kill more of the Red Monsters than anyone else? Because we have souls.”
“Souls?”
“A piece of us—“
“Why would we have souls?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. What are you, a Christian?”
“Where have you been?”
“In school,” M looked down.
“Right, they teach you how to use this,” this warrior said, pointing to his head, “but I will teach you how to use this,” he said, pointing at his hand, “and then this.” The fingers rested on M’s heart.
# ##
M took the gun and set it on the table; the metal of the M-16 calmed him for some reason, reminding him of his calm father sitting at the table all those moments ago and telling stories, saying the right things, not speaking of the madness and how it was in his day, for in those moments it was his day.
“It’s my only weapon,” he said smiling through the lie.
“So I see.” His name was Artimus, a descendant of a great Greek philosopher who turned into a warrior poet when his family was murdered by Persian mercenaries; the best kinds of men were made out of extreme pain, as were the worst. “But do you truly know how to use it? Can you spot a man six hundred yards away with the sight, can you see a Free Machine stopping because of one single bullet?”
“In my experience, you shoot for the head, human or machine, and it works out.”
“Cute, good,” and the aging Combat Spartan pulled out a cigar, two actually, and handed one to M. “It’s a nasty habit but it’s doubtful you’ll die from it.”
“What is it? Drugs?”
“In a sense, but it doesn’t have the effects of opium or angel dust.”
“Oriental?”
“A bit west of the old Sparta, a bit west,” lighting it, holding it in his mouth as he inspected the M-16. “This is a good weapon,” and he tried to break it in half. What the hell! M screamed. “A good weapon,” Artimus answered, “is the kind that keeps working when it’s broken.”
“A blade?”
“That breaks isn’t worthy of a Combat Spartan. Tell me, where did you get this weapon?”
“Long story.”
“I have all the time in the world, M.”
“My father gave it to me, said it was special.”
“Ah, a Talisman, but there is more.”
“My mother altered it, the scope, because it was meant for the old world with old gravity. They say weight is less there, that you can’t move quite as fast. So she altered the sights to make it work better, even made bullets out of …” he slowed, a guttural laugh building in his system, “Silver so my father could kill any wolf that came into my bed when I was a baby. They spent years putting it together. In one of my father’s drunken memories, he said he did break it.”
“And?”
“And she fixed it. He says it’s never been the same. He said it’s never been the same. That the gun lost hope in him.”
“Ah, so you do know of spirits,” said Artimus, looking down the scope.
“I suppose so. But what does it matter? A Free Machine has no spirit. I only want to know how to kill them: where they are, how to end them, where the rest are, how to blow them all up.”
“Violence.”
“Violence.”
Artimus set the gun down, pulled up his boot, and laid an old Roman model blade, called a Gladius, on the table. Yet M saw differences in the design. Originally, from his history, he knew the Gladius blades come from the Iberian Peninsula in the, from Spaniard lands. This blade was different: a red handle, a star on the tip that looked quite like a diamond, and a heavier edge than a normal Gladius which made it seem much like an axe hacking downward. He held it in his hands, eyeing the tip, touching the tip and drawing blood. “Real?”
“Real.”
“Yours?”
“Yours.”
“He found hell yesterday,” Artimus continued with his own stories of who he was, what he be, where the stars set for him and his dreams.
M wanted to ask a question, like exactly what the meaning was, yesterday, but he let Artimus continue.
“Old ways stopped working. He broke our phalanx, our supreme weapon against the darkness of the night, against death herself, and all my brothers died, and both my sons died, and all that came out of the darkness was me, a blade in one hand, a handful of pain in the other. I just couldn’t stop: killing. It changes you, seeing death, and I saw her.”
“Madness!” M wanted to say, wanted to scream out. Death? There was no death: the old visceral idea that hell didn’t serve it, humanity served the goddess of the underworld. It was all wrapped up in philosophy and religion. Madness! he wanted to yell, but he bit his tongue and continued listening.
“There is more—and I see it in your eyes—to this world than the small battles we face every day. The archons have fallen from the graces of the light. A war of attrition, see, between humanity, and it will take one soul to bring us back together against the Free Machines.”
There was a moment of silence, M holding his breath the entire time, until he let some air out, finding the right words, the only word. “Who?”
“Not you.”
“Why not?”
“A girl. A hero born out of the night of Wake.”
##
Both taking puffs on their cigars—which M found made his mouth taste like gruel—they left the small Combat Spartan operation center. M had many questions. Who … what … where … and why were simply the basics. Who ruled Wake Dark? Red? That stung him: the evil darkness ruled by a man who sold out his own people to machines, ending the Wake golden age, killing so very many. He wanted Red dead. More, he wanted Red’s death to be painful. He would take him apart piece by piece until there was nothing left save some DNA evidence; he would burn the that; he would end his first life.
“I’ve never killed.”
“And you’ve never—“
“A human.”
“Right. If you want to be a Combat Spartan, you’ll need more than weapons to kill.”
He looked up at space. “Why can’t we go up instead of around?”
“What do you mean?” Artimus’s eyes lit up. “You want to hit the Free Machines in space?”
“Right.”
“No aircraft left not on full time defense duty.”
“Could we borrow one?”
“Could ‘borrow’ one if you got past a few battalions and hacked into the net.”
“The net?”
“Don’t ask me, I live outside of technology. Scares the damn out of me.”
“I have a secret,” M said, pulling out his own blade, “And it’s one I’ve never told anyone. I’ve known you one day,” he slowed. He made eye contact with Artimus, the engineer of the Combat Spartans, the last of a generation; the rest died by the bottle or smoked themselves senseless; the rest died in battle, to be remembered or forgotten. “I have my own blade, a magical blade, a powerful—“
“Spare me the poetry; don’t show it to me.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not in the way things go. I must tell you a secret then, and you wouldn’t want to hear that. No one should hear my secrets.”
The blade in his hand, the free blade in his palm, he eyed the outskirts of Wake Alpha. It was the capital, and there was a sort of peace occurring here, a time of relief. Death was here too, death and the end, not so far from each other, not so far from Wake. They said—
And he stopped, realizing Artimus had stepped away, to a small marker on the ground.
“There was a time,” said the Combat Spartan, “When this line was the one line we had to hold. I wanted to forget it, but memories that shouldn’t be forgotten rarely are.”
“A line?”
“Sometimes you have to make a stand for something; ours was for survival.”
“Tell me everything.”
“I’ve told you much,” replied Artimus.
“And I want more.”
The story went slowly at first, the gate bringing Spartans and even a few Athenians and Egyptians across the galaxy. There had been stories of gates crossing the gaps in space before; early Greek science evolved quickly, explaining that traveling through this space the Earth rescided in, was quite impossible. But someone, from some other time, perhaps a dozen millennia before the first Dorians “civilized” Greece, knew this first. And they built a gate, with a key. And this key took a mass of Spartans and a few dozen Athenian and Egyptian carpenters and scientists and philosophers across the gap. To men with faith, it was a last chance to escape the solar system, Noah’s voyage in action. Stories of gates were as common as stories of Babel and God, yet this gate existed, this gate worked, and this gate brought Dorians to Wake.
“So it went,” said Artimus, “And they don’t tell you that in school.”
“Some of it.”
“Sure,” Artimus replied, “there was a ‘magical” gate that took us here, a place rich in goods. But we changed here on Wake, very early: we became power mongers and tech lords and opium and rum addicts; we destroyed more than we created in the first millennia.”
“Millenia! They said we’ve been here four—“
“Not four generations, not even close. It’s the believers, who are close on many things, but want us to believe we’re still connected to the lands of Earth, that the gods still exist, that God is still here with us. We can’t believe this is us, we are here, and there is nothing but darkness and light. It’s too tragic, even for a poet.”
“I don’t believe you,” said M.
“You don’t have to, my soldier, because I might be wrong. There are stories of men being here before even us, the original builders of the gate and some Chaos God, who were sick with technology when man had yet to build a city. But it’s what I believe; it’s in the Book of Lights.”
M stopped, pulling a small, tattered and leather bound copy of Book of Lights out. “The machine gave me this.”
“Yes?”
“And then tried to kill me.”
Artimus stopped. They weren’t going anywhere in particular, in a philosophical sense, but on the physical level they had left Wake Alpha a dozen miles ago, going through small hamlets and crossing bridges over dark and sick looking rivers. They called them the blood rivers; no one drank from them; no one went there unless they intended to die.
“He gave you the Book of Lights and then tried to kill you. Ha! You see the symbolism, correct?”
“No.”
“You will.”
They stopped at a bridge, where a Combat Spartan in ancient ceremonial gear, with even his spear and short sword, stood. He walked toward them, his head down and his walking slow; old, was M’s original thought, for he walked angled, like a drunk, but held his spear steady and kept his eyes downward, looking at the stones on the ground.
“Keepers of the Light,” said the Spartan.
“Bringers of the Machines,” said Artimus.
“Are the end and the beginning.”
The Combat Spartan went to the ground, laying his head on the sand. “I grow old, Artimus.”
“I have—“ but M was stopped.
“He’s just a Spartan Poet, my friend, just a Spartan who fought at the Gate so long ago.” “You fought at the gate?”
“Fraid so.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
“How old are you? That was two centuries ago.”
“I am very old.” And he was. This veteran missed one eye, had a slight stutter to his voice, one lip pushing against the other when words came out; his motion was chaotic, for he danced with death; his body itself was huge, but slim in the gut, his arms muscled even for an old man. “Have you not known the ways of the Art?”
“Nope,” said M, sick of everything and too confused to care.
“it’s the path to immortality..”
“No one lives forever.”
“True, but some of us live longer. The keepers of the light, they live on, young man, and I am one of them.”
“I am a Combat Spartan.”
“Good,” the veteran said, uncaring.
“I killed a Free Machine.”
“And what? You want respect and power.”
M wanted to kill him, to let his rage out. He wanted to tell him how he’d lived alone for 8 years, living on the streets sometimes, taken in by friends and strangers, bums and the lowest of society. Because society didn’t help the fallen, because ..
The Spartans had forgotten him; he didn’t want their respect; he wanted answers.
“I want more than that.”
“Ah, ambition is a sin to certain of us. Not me. Certainly not me.” The Spartan pulled off his helmet, a long wave of graying hair falling down around his shoulders, then set his blade on the ground, giving M his good eye for a moment when he did so.
“I have better blades.”
“You don’t. This one speaks. Took it off a Free Machine at the gate.”
“This was made by a Free Machine,” replied M.
“What!”
Artimus let out a laugh. “The old sage is surprised.”
“Let me see this blade,” said the veteran.
“For what?”
“You want something?”
“Yes.”
“As always. I will tell you a story.”
“I want access to this gate. No stories.”
The gate stood, casting a shadow over the expanse. It held the old Dorians, it was said, or it held the keepers of hell, others said. If you saw this gate on an ordinary day—and which are those?—you might get a quick glimpse and keep walking. The doorway was made of wood, a gentle blacksmith had placed gems on the handles; an old door, this gate, and it didn’t seem to mind them staring at it. For some reason, M wanted to speak with it, like it had much to say.
“You’re saying this old beaten doorway took man to the stars?”
“Quit reading your textbooks and open your eyes.”
“To what?”
“The wood, feel the wood, an old tree, from a time of angels on this earth. An old soul, not from a man or a women, not from a dog or a cat; this beast is alive with the very beginning of the universe, created by a race before even the angels, long before the Dorians.”
“It’s a wooden doorway.”
“Is he always this questioning?” The old man asked.
