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Fragments
Pete's Father (a.k.a. The Sergeant)
Date: March or April of 1998, Time: Late some evening. Place: Camp Meander, Pete's quarters. Personae: Pete, Dolly.
(Takes place in Dolly: The True Story, Book Two: The Book of Acts.)
Recruits in training aren't supposed to be in regular quarters, not even a private's cubby, shared with three other troopers. But everyone recognized that Dolly was special. They would be forced to admit that, even had they not borne her great affection. Which everyone did.
So it is not all that strange that, whenever she showed up at the door to the room Pete shared with Sam, Little-Low, and Beana, that the other three inevitably found somewhere else to be within seconds of the little doll's arrival. Nor is it strange, given who Dolly is or was, that she understood from their actions and expressions that it was a ceding of precedence--respectful gesture--at motivated their behavior, not some racial resentment and hatred of her.
What is strange is that the tifela should have accorded the freedom of the billilaal so soon after her arrival at Meander. Humans of other times and other places had encompassed great deeds in the service of the People and not been admitted, and here was a newborn, a fetch, and a burden, who was as privileged as the most beloved firstborn. It was remarkable.
"Pete," Dolly said one evening in March or April of her first year, when they were sitting side-by-side on Pete's bunk. "Tell me about your father."
Pete was wearing her blue-and-yellow tunic, the one she customarily wore in her free time around the barracks, a blue bandanna tied over her titian curls, loose white slacks on her legs, and shower thongs on her feet. Dolly was in china red shorts and a white tee-shirt, overwhelmed with joy at the warming weather that allowed her to bare her limbs to the air outdoors in comfort for the first time in her life. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail, clasped with one of her prized possessions, a hair ring of a Celtic knot design from the tie-in merchandise of her favorite television show--the one about the immortal swordsman. She was bubbling with questions and curiosity and news about her day, while Pete was quiet and contemplative and she folded some laundry before stowing it in her locker.
When Pete had been silent for a longer time than felt comfortable, Dolly's innate courtesy overcame her insatiable curiosity and she thought to ask:
"Is it OK? Are you allowed to tell me about him?"
In the weeks since her arrival in camp, the doll had grown accustomed to treading lightly around areas that were taboo to the Trolls. Living among them had not rendered them any less mysterious for her. Nor was her sense of isolation mitigated by the twin facts that of those Trolls to whom she was in closest proximity on a daily basis, fewer than one in eight could speak more than twenty words of English, and that the little Trollish she herself knew was limited to those words and expressions needed in the field or to wheedle an extra cheese Danish or a cup of coffee from the cooks in Meander's kitchens.
The deep, rich, and beautiful world of Trollish culture that she sensed lay beyond her ken was--for the moment at least--out of her reach, and it was made plain that the Trolls intended it should remain so. Despite their love of her, she was still a frell, and as such was forbidden to see the inward face of their People. They held that they did her great honor by permitting her to inhabit this gray half-world between the inner and outer where the frekun-ang [sheltering wind] and the billilaal [thistledown] intermingled in a protective shell around the taboo core of the Trollish People.
"Billilaal," Dolly asked. "What does it mean?"
"Thistle down," Pete replied.
"What?"
"Yes. Surely. In the mountains, we use all manner of seed pods for insulation. Kapok, mostly. But thistle down has an image of lightness as well as insulation ... it floats on the air in early spring. The part of the society—and the army-- that insulates between the outer layer--the frekun-ang and the inner core--the Ma'ong, or Pa'a-um--is called so after the light thistle down that keeps the body warm. But not without the strong protective outer layer of the frekun-ang.
Those who knew her best felt that she could have been accorded greater trust with no harm coming to the Pasu as the gentle People called themselves--spiritual ones. But they were young and without much authority in the Councils of the Pasu, and their opinions were held of lesser account, (albeit not ignored completely).
The older ones among them, who had managed to acquire two or three stripes and the commensurate additional years of seniority, advised patience--in the rare moments when the topic was up for discussion. Change was on the wind, they said, and many of the ways of the People would be altered, including the frell status of beloved outsiders such as Dolly.
After all, they would point out, the word "frell" did not so much refer to one's status vis-à-vis membership in the Troll species as it did to one's metaphysical and social position outside--as it were--the Pale.
A frell, they would conclude, would always be a non-Troll, but a non-Troll need not necessarily always be a frell. It was a point of distinction that was extremely subtle, given that no non-Troll had ever been admitted to the Pa'a-um.
That not only applied to living memory, but to all of written Trollish history as well. The first recorded contact between Trolls and the Enterprise had been in the Thirteenth Century, by the Christian reckoning. A companion of Malfeo and Nicolo Polo--the uncle and father of the more famous Marco Polo--one Benvolio Orienté, (East), struck out on his own up the great Amu Darya--the greatest river of Central Asia--into the Hindu Kush and there met with a xenophobic tribe of warlike giants whom he called Trolls. At that meeting, the custom of constructing an elaborate physical and social barrier between outsiders—frells--and Trolls--t'pa-ang (literally "the wind of the blessed soul") --first came into existence. Before that time, frells had simply been killed or avoided. Or so it was then recorded.
(This of course ignores the millennia of contact between Trolls and members of the East families stretching back into the distance of the Stone Age but remembered only in verbal family legends. But those were both more cryptic and less subject to the commercial pressures Benvolio Orienté attempted to bring to bear.)
"Yes," Pete said. "It's alright. I just ... I have to think how to say things I ... I had put aside. When we take up the sword, you see, we leave all that behind--family, friends, the society of our people in the Pa'a-um. The Guard becomes our Pa'a-um, and we're supposed to forget about what went before."
"What does that mean, Pa'a-um?"
Pete blinked. "World of Purity," she said, sounding surprised that it needed to be explained. "It also means 'home,' 'village,' 'safety,' ... no ... 'sanctuary.'"
"Oh," Dolly said. "I wondered. I hear it so much."
The Troll nodded. "It is our word for the Center ... where the life of our People resides. There is a physical place we call Pa'a-um, where the frell may never come. But it is also a spiritual place, the Pa'a-um is the place where your Pa'a resides."
"Home is where the heart is," Dolly murmured.
Pete chuckled. "Yes. Clichéd and vastly oversimplified, but true nonetheless."
"So," Dolly said with greater energy. "Your father?"
Pete sighed. "Yeah. OK. Begin at the beginning. Um ... I was born in 1978 in the Pamir mountains of eastern Tajikistan, which was then a part of the old Soviet Union."
To Dolly, this was about as dark and mysterious as a faraway place could get. "Wow!" she said.
"I do not remember it. All of this I know from being told by my relatives." Her voice took on a more formal tone than her everyday speech, as though she had rehearsed the story.
"My parents were members of a nomadic tribe which subsisted in the remotest parts of the Pamirs by herding goats and sheep as they had done from time immemorial. They kept to themselves and were incredibly shy of outsiders, as all of the People always have been. Their whole lives were encompassed by the limits of a couple of mountains and the valleys in between and around them, little more than that. They knew there was a wider world beyond the mountains, but they cared little for it, for the most part.
"But my parents were aging, and the life was hard. I was the youngest of fifteen children born to them. My mother took sick in birthing me and, although she recovered, she was never strong after that. They had to rely on my older brothers and sisters to care for me. And for my mother. Her care was an incredible drain on the resources of the tribe and was the cause of a great deal of resentment and friction.
"Then one day, a traveling tifel passed through the mountains... ."
"A Tifel Pasu?"
"No!" Pete said sharply. "Where did you hear that word?"
Dolly froze and the color drained from her cheeks. "I... I'm sorry!" she stammered. The unalloyed fear in her expression took Pete aback. Her vast affection for the little redhead flooded her being with remorse, and slowly the Troll calmed herself.
"Forgive me, Dolly," she said. "I did not mean that to... to frighten you. It just startled me to hear the word come from... you."
"From a frell, you mean," Dolly said bitterly.
"Um... yeah," Pete admitted. She winced and couldn't meet Dolly's eyes right away. "Sorry?"
"Hey, what the fuck!" Dolly said, suddenly magnanimous, mollified by Pete's contrition. "I suppose if my People had been treated the way yours were and are, I'd be paranoid of strangers, too. No big."
Pete breathed a little easier after that, and in a moment, she was able to go on.
"Anyway ... No. It was just an ordinary tifel... you might call her a good witch, a healer woman. Her tribe had been scoured out of the area around Communism Peak, about a hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies to the northwest of my parents' home. Coming from that distance, she might as well have been from the moon, so small was my tribe's world, so narrow their view of it. Most of her tribe had been killed, the rest scattered. For all she knew, she was the lone survivor.
"At that time, the Red Army was preparing to invade Afghanistan, although the civilian population of Tajikistan didn't know it until afterward. The soldiers were searching for spies who might betray their preparations, and it was assumed that, among the Moslem tribes and villages in the region there were many potential spies, agitators, and fifth columnists.
"Of course, we Trolls never have anything to do with human political matters, but the Soviets didn't know that... didn't even know that there was a subspecies of humans living in the area.
"Nor would they have given credence to reports of the existence of non-humans in the area had they heard of us. The legends of the wild men of the mountains--the Almas, they call them--were scorned by the Bolsheviks as children's tales. To them, we looked just the same as the Tajiks, with the occasional throwback to Greek and even Norse invaders from centuries past.
"It never occurred to them to connect tales of the Almas to the madmen and social outcasts of a non-human race. All over the world, human scientists make the same mistake. They hear tell of a Sasquatch or a Yeti and they assume that the individuals reported must represent some kind of a norm. They never think that the ones they see in that state could be homeless, miserable creatures scavenging their livings on the margins of society. They never connect the sightings with groups or individuals actually living among them. So they look for us in all the wrong places. For which we are eternally grateful.
"But the maps showed the part of the region where the Pasu lived to be uninhabited, and therefore they had no business being there. The Soviets started up near Lenin Peak and worked their way South and East, clearing out every subsistence farmer and goat herder they found. They didn't care where they went or how they lived once they got there, they just... wanted them gone.
"The tifel told my father that he should take his family and head South. She told him about Jirhum Ra, how in a cove in the mountains there was a city of the People, a mighty civilization, that was protected by great magics from the outside, how the People lived there in peace and plenty.
"He spat and said that was an old wives' tale, told to comfort frightened children and to provide a dose of nostalgia for old men, that there was no such place as Jirhum Ra, that he would die before he would leave the land where his father and his grandfathers had lived and tended their flocks going back to the beginning of time."
Pete sighed.
"Years before, his two younger sisters had gone off in search of Jirhum Ra, never to be heard from again. It was forbidden to speak of them."
She fell silent for a long time. Then, as if she had forgotten where she was and what she was doing for a time, she shook herself and went on.
"When you study history and folk lore, you'll come across the same story time and time again. Ordinary, innocent people crushed under the wheels of progress. In one way or another, they always lose. They might have survived, or even thrived, if only they had the sense to get out of the way. But their pride and the righteousness of their cause makes them stubborn. I wasn't even two summers old when the Red Army came and scoured our tribe out of the valley and chased us down the road to Afghanistan.
"Now, Jirhum Ra, as you know, is in the Karakoram Range, some four hundred miles to the East and North of Kabul. So, if my parents wanted to go there from eastern Tajikistan, they should have traveled South and East, as the tifel had gone, crossing the Baroghil Pass North-to-South and entering Kashmir at Misgar or through the Khunjerab Pass between Sinkiang and Kashmir. There are settlements of the Pasu in all the mountains thereabouts--in the Kunlun Shan between China and Tibet, the Ladakh Range and the Karakoram Range, south to the Himalayas and east to the endless and impenetrable ranges that give rise to the headwaters of all the great rivers of Southeast Asia: the Bramaputra, the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Chao Phrya, the Mekong, the Hong, the Si-kiang, the Yangtze...
"If they had only turned eastward at the start, they would have been fleeing into the bosom of their people. But Soviets didn't know or care where a group of people they didn't know or cared existed wanted to go. They drove everyone to the West out of the mountains and into Afghanistan across the upper gorges of the Amu Darya. As a result, in the fall of 1979, my parents found themselves, along with the rest of their tribe, a part of a flood of refugees forced out of a place most of them would never have left voluntarily, caught up in events they never would have paid any mind, and on the roads of Tajikistan, being herded toward the border with Afghanistan.
"Life on the road is never pleasant, but under those conditions--extreme cold, no food or water, incredible filth--the camps were hotbeds of disease... And, of course, there were predators, both the four-legged and the two-legged kind.
"An adult Troll doesn't have anything to be afraid of in a confrontation with a human, but there were children with the tribe, of course, and they were easy pickings for the scum that would try to sell them into slavery in Dushanbe or Tashkent. None of ours were taken, I'm told. Our adults kept a close watch over the little ones and brought them through. But there were many human mothers in the camps wailing for their lost children, taken by the slavers... the jackals who preyed on the misfortunate ones."
Pete sighed again.
"I was lucky, I suppose, to be too young to remember this more than dimly," she said softly.
"We crossed the Amu Darya into Badakhshan on the festival of Bulu Lao. They say it was a hard crossing, that just there, the river lies in deep gorges and there are no safe road crossings for a hundred miles or more downstream and none upstream at all until the end of the gorges where the river turns east toward its source. And, as if they were done with us once we crossed the border, the Soviets left us alone after that. We wintered in a valley near Bar Panj. It was harsh, they say, but we survived, even my mother, until the next spring, in 1980.
Far away to the West, the communists invaded Afghanistan that winter on the eve of the Christians' feast for the birth of their Messiah. But it was of little account to the People, who never cared for the political affairs of humans in the best of times and who were, just then, more concerned with their own survival than anything."
"When the spring melts began, our tribe set out on the road again. Over the winter, they had held many councils and had argued themselves hoarse. They had hammered out a consensus. The tribe would trek south, then East, following the course of the Amu Darya into the Vakhan, that little arm of Afghanistan that interposes itself between Tajikistan and Kashmir and reaches out to touch China as with a fingertip. At the eastern mouth of the Baroghil Pass, they would find their way South into the Karakoram Range and, eventually, to Jirhum Ra.
"In peacetime, it might have been possible. But the communists' invasion of Afghanistan had made all of the other governments in the region nervous. The Chinese have always been suspicious of the Russian Bear, as have the Indians. Pakistan, of course, was playing host to American CIA operatives who were fueling the mujahedin resistance movement.
That narrow corridor between the Pamirs and the Karakoram Range, in the valley where the headwaters of the Amu Darya fall from the continental divide and begin their long trek to the Aral Sea, was probably the most watched region on earth that year. The armies of five nations and the spies of a dozen more were concerned with everything that went on in that valley. That summer, a family of field mice could not have traveled up the river unnoticed, let alone a tribe of thirty Troll families... Some six hundred of us all told there were."
Pete stopped. She caught up her right knee in her hands and pulled it toward her chest, rocking back and forth on the edge of the bed, her jaw clenched tight. When she spoke again, it was with the soggy sound of tears sniffled away and an ache in the throat.
"Out of the six hundred and more of the People who entered Vakhan Corridor in April of '80, two survived to reach Jirhum Ra in August that year.
"Two: My father. And me."
She wiped tears out of her eyes with a forefinger and looked up at the ceiling.
Dolly just sat there, stunned, tears sheeting down her cheeks. She thought there was nothing more. Could be nothing more. But then Pete went on, in a very small voice.
"They tell me I couldn't remember. That at barely two, uprooted, on the road, surrounded by fear, disease, starvation, and death, I could not possibly remember... but I swear, I do. I remember my father as he was in those moments. He would have been forty-four that summer, the same age as your Mr. Drummond. He was big as a mountain, I remember. Tall and blond with eyes of impossible blue! And his voice! I remember he sang the songs of our people as he walked. I didn't know them, then, just the sound of his voice... rich and golden like the sun. It was the sound of safety. It was my Pa'a-um, that voice.
"The spring in the mountain valleys--the pass at Baroghil is over 13,000 feet, so I'd guess the floor of the valley is five to seven thousand feet--the air was light and sweet, and the sun was bright, but no burden. The scent of water on the wind was a ... I think the word is benison ...? You don't know?" She shook her head. "I don't suppose it matters. But I could live in that place the rest of my life and consider myself blessed.
"Except.
"Except that we left over six hundred bodies in that valley. Some were buried properly. Very few of those. Some in shallow graves, some tumbled into ravines, some... near the end, father said they could only leave the dead by the roadside and run for their own lives. Somewhere about the middle of the valley, my mother's heart gave out. They scooped a shallow grave out for her and buried her with wildflowers, the way my people always have. By then, she'd already buried half of her own children.
"The soldiers. The warlords and bandits. The native peoples of the valley, who were suspicious of all of the strangers on the road. They hunted us on foot and from vehicles on the ground, and when we took to the hills, they hunted us from helicopters... the great Russian Hind helicopters, the terror machine of that whole war. Even a small band of a peace-loving Pasu, frantic to get away from the war zone, even we were targets for the Hinds. They would hover over the road or loom up across low hills and cliffs, and rain death down on us like evil gods of hellfire. Death in the bullets of machine guns or cannons. Death in napalm and white phosphorus. Death in nerve gasses: CX and malathion. They would swoop down on fleeing women and children and they never, never showed any mercy. We had no weapons to fight back. The mujahedin had Stingers, but those were hundreds of miles away. We could only run and hide. And die.
"And toward the end, my father put me in a sling on his chest and carried me, dragging two other children--both no more than five summers old--by the hands, traveling at night, eating new leaves and bark from the trees, and the meager roots that had survived the winter, drinking melt water, traveling at night by moonlight and starlight. It took him all spring and into summer to get to Jirhum Ra. When he got there, they said he was a stick figure of a man, and I was a little bundle of bones, barely alive. In fact, they thought I was dead at first. Along the way, he'd buried the last two children, not even sure they were his own, he was so muddled by hunger and fatigue. He buried them almost within sight of Nanda Devi that stands over Jirhum Ra. If they could have lasted another week or so, they might have survived. But in the end, it was only he and I who made it.
"He found a relative--one of those sisters who had fled the mountains for a life in the city years before--and he fostered me with her. As soon as he saw me settled in, he took the sword. He enlisted with Regiment Boeotia and was gone. I never saw him again until the night of your birth.
"But I heard about him. Those of us who take the sword leave life in the Ma'ong behind, but the Center does not forget us. Word of his deeds came back to us in Jirhum Ra from time-to-time. We heard of his rise in the ranks to become the highest enlisted soldier in the Regiment, to become the foremost Command Sergeant in the entire Guards.
"I was proud to know he was my father. When it came time for me to take my wanderjahr, I chose to come to America, for I had heard it was a whole continent like Jirhum Ra. Here, I ran into a boy whose family had lived near us in Jirhum Ra, who had enlisted in Regiment Arcadia and come to America that way. He persuaded me to enlist in the Guards. I did so in honor of my father. That boy was Bob-O. I never went back. I sent my hair back, as is the custom, and from then to now, I have never thought of my home or the home of my family that is no more."
Dolly remembered his eyes. They had been impossibly blue. She had looked into them as she struggled with him in the falling sleet at the foot of the Thaum tower. And she recalled the timbre of his voice--hearing in her head the sound of his taunts and threats--and she could tell that, twenty years before, it could have sounded in joy like sunshine to a worshipful daughter whose world is encompassed by the love of her parent. In her brief life, Dolly had learned much of things she would never know herself, and the love between a child and a parent was something she knew she would always regret not knowing. And she remembered again the feel of Pete's gun in her hand, the resistance of the trigger, the buck and report of the obscene thing of cold metal in her grip, the strike of the bullets into his body, how he had fallen to the wet ground and how quickly the sleet had coated him with its rime of frost.
She collapsed against Pete, clinging to the Troll, and wailed something that might have been "What have I done?" muffled by the fabric of her tunic.
The two of them wept, Pete with regrets for a time long gone and forever lost, and Dolly for the promise of a man she might have known and loved as a father, and now never would, and the grief she had caused her friend.
And for the fact that it probably could not have been any other way. They held each other for a very long time, and took what comfort they could from it.