[Interlude One] Welcome to New Blackstone
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[Interlude One] Welcome to New Blackstone
Summary: On the ruinous Shirerithian outpost of New Blackstone, a Nova English officer endures privations and the perverse nature of Imperial governance.
Narrative: The Sea-Reavers had erupted into the Great Western Sea from the shores of Batavia during the early part of the year 1655, wreaking terror across the Brettish Isles and the Eastern Keltian Seaboard. Crewed by Batavian fishermen and carrying armed parties of Imperial auxiliaries, they had originally been dispatched to exploit the unguarded fisheries of the isles in the wake of the catastrophic eruption. Not content however with plundering fishing grounds alone, this so-called 'maritime militia' had soon begun to carry away seamen and stranded Brettish refugees plucked from the shores as well. They made lightning raids along the ash scoured beaches, rounding up labourers from the fields where they toiled to salvage the last remnants of their crops and dragging whole families out of their shelters. Sometimes even the displaced persons camps themselves were targeted. They snatched people off the shores who belonged to the Willowii, the Hartii, and the Saxenii clans alike, most of whom would never be seen again.
To be sure the Sea-Reavers had arrived late to the party, finding that the Nova English and the Jingdaoese had enjoyed weeks of unimpeded freedom in which to conduct orderly evacuations. Yet, under the protective ambit of the Gravships which now prowled the narrow seas between Benacia and Keltia, these latecomers fell upon the survivors of the cataclysm with a gusto. To these Brettish victims were added the bedraggled survivors of USSO flagged ships, such as the MS Eternal Dawn and others beside it, who had fallen foul of the attentions of Shirerithian gravships and commerce raiders only to be 'rescued' by the armed trawlers of the Sea-Reavers.
The high-water mark of Shirerithian aggression was endured. The Jingdaoese attempted to establish a garrison on the island but could do little to help whilst the Western Armada doggedly pursued the capital ships of its Benacian battle-groups upon the high seas. The New Zimian War League moved forces into theatre to protect the Eastern Keltian Seaboard but made no proactive move to intervene. Those USSO forces put ashore onto the ruined hellscape of the Brettish Isles found themselves as much besieged and beleaguered as those remaining natives who had not yet been evacuated.
For those caught in Burgrave Zinkgraven's oceanic dragnet, a grim fate awaited. A consideration which brings us neatly to the isle of New Blackstone.
Barely thirty-six kilometres from the southern shore of the island of Caldera, the old name of New Blackstone is unknown, there being no-one left alive in the wake of the blast who can recollect. The sole survivor, a prisoner immured in his cell whilst pyroclastic clouds rolled over his island, was driven so far out of his wits that there was no reasoning with him and he was subsequently euthanised in-situ by the same landing party who had dug him out in the first instance.
The ruined and desolate island had been enclosed by stout battlements and two flak towers bristling with a worrying variety of weaponry. There were further gun emplacements mounted on the rocky shoreline, providing defence against any enemy ships attempting to enter the harbour. A ramshackle collection of corrugated iron huts and upended boat hulls, each with their own defensive ramparts in miniature, stretched down from the walls almost to the shoreline where the warehouses were congregated.
Such then was the first glimpse of the isle afforded to a certain Nova English Major who rejoiced in the name of Beowulf Blaec. As he, and a dozen like him, were hauled ashore it was apparent that for all the thought that had been given to defence, considerably less had been given to immediate questions of sanitation. The streets were for the most part gutters running between the rammed earth and rock lined walls that delineated the 'factories' of the rival independent traders who had flocked to the islands. Those streets, such as they were, were half engulfed by refuse. The major, as he was cudgelled in chains from the quayside towards the fortress, was disgusted to note that the walls themselves were used as public latrines by those reavers who sheltered from the boreal winds amongst them. In several instances, the mounds of dung and human excrement seemed to reach almost the same height as the man pissing upon them. Those few buildings which had survived the eruption were in a poor state of repair, with windowless walls that were broken down and roofs that had collapsed inwards.
The major, and his companions, as they were herded into the citadel, experienced his first taste of life as a 'loyal subject' of the Kaiser. A large iron ring was riveted to the ankle of each new arrival. The ring, along with a long chain that the prisoner was obliged to drag after himself, weighed in at twenty-five kilograms, roughly equivalent to the weight of a four year old child. After receiving his chains, the major and the other captives were marched back through the lower reaches of the island's main settlement for the ceremonial mockery and derision of the sea-reavers and the other settlers, who would curse, jostle and beat upon the verminous allies of the hated Jing.
The prisoners, half-drowned, beaten, humiliated and disorientated after their ordeals, were once again furiously cudgelled by their captors who forced them down into the underground cells recently hewed, by the toil of fellow slaves, into the black volcanic rock of the island, and covered over by ferroconcrete vaulting. These noxious oubliettes, into which they were now cast head first, were accessible only by hatches in the ceiling, the iron grates of which provided the only source of light and breathable available to those incarcerated within. In summer the rain, and in winter the snow, would pour in through this gap and flood the cells, forcing the prisoners to flounder and splash in the filthy waters tainted by their own bodily waste. The condemned were held, for weeks upon end, in water and their own sewage, awaiting the moment when ropes would be lowered to haul them out for judgement. Left bereft of bedding, the men, women and children trapped within could scarcely lie down for being knee deep in filth that left them with all manner of ulcers, sores and vile afflictions. Some of the more fortunate were able to scavenge or beg sufficient quantities of cloth from which to fashion hammocks, secured above the water by ropes held in place by rusty iron nails. All too often, these tattered cloths would fray sending those precariously suspended aloft tumbling into the stinking brown morass.
After a successful raid these cells would swiftly become overcrowded and extremely claustrophobic. On some days there would be so little room in the cells that the captives were forced to lie in a circle with no room to move about save to rise up on their haunches in order to ease themselves, shamefully in the full view of their cellmates.
The women and children of each new intake were the first to disappear. There remained a steady market for Inglizi kufar amongst the Babkhi communities of the mainland; the women and girls to serve as concubines and comfort women, the boys to be taken for instruction to become eunuchs or tea dancers. The men were more disposable and less readily sought. There remained still the glut of Storish 'community service workers' on the mainland whom attrition in the mines and factories of Benacia had not yet worn through. Their guards used to joke that the remaining Brettish were worth about as much as the rotten onions thrown into the cells as their daily nourishment.
By the Shirerithian calendar the major entered the cells on the 10th day of Gevraquun in the year 1655. It was one-hundred and fifty-six days later, on the 21st day of Araroqpinu that same year when he was finally hauled from the oubliette and brought, gaunt with hunger and still dressed in the stained and tattered rags of his uniform, complete now with the rusting anklet that had worn into his rancid flesh, before the island's governors.
As an unincorporated territory of the Imperial Republic, assigned to no extant state or dominion, New Blackstone was for the moment under the direct control of the Ministry of Military Affairs. Intended eventually to become the new home of the Royal Iron Company, it was for the moment a haunt for sea-reavers and a stop over point for gravships and cruisers engaged in commerce raiding on the high seas. A speck of land barely 13 kilometres across, the island had received scant attention from the Imperial Government, who had merely instructed that it be fortified and held, with no further thought being given to the matter. As such responsibility passed to the Ministry of Military Affairs, whose Ministers-in-Commission passed the matter onto the Lords of the Admiralty, themselves in commission, who appointed a Board of Lord Commissioners-in-Commission to supervise a New Blackstone Working Group who convened a New Blackstone Report Advisory Council, whose work devolved to a largely forgotten junior clerk in a forgotten corner of Tempus Keep, the appropriated, partially flooded and partially ruined 'main building' of the Ministry of Military Affairs. This clerk subsequently absconded with the New Blackstone Working Group's Report Advisory Council's Report petty cash register and a replacement has yet to be appointed - on account of his absence as of yet not being noticed.
In the absence of anyone centrally appointed a Lieutenant put ashore by the IRS Medusa served as 'praefectus castrorum', responsible for supervising the ad hoc garrison, constructing and maintaining fortifications, and carrying on the invidious task of maintaining broadly cordial relations between the bands of Sea-Reavers and representatives of the Royal Iron Company, both of which were covetous of the island and deeply antagonistic towards each other.
As Atos rose over the citadel's eastern ramparts, the louse-ridden and grime encrusted Major Blaec was led by his guard back through the principal gate towards the harbour, along those same dung filled ruinous streets where he was once again tormented by jeering, hostile reavers. More and more people flocked to the gate in order to mock the wretched Keltian barbarian, by now reputed amongst the mob to be a Jing collaborator and a friend to the pug-nosed sub-human Traders of Passio-Corum. Working themselves into a frenzy the crowd surged at the lone captive and tried to beat him with sticks and cudgels. Such was their fury that the auxiliaries assigned to the major as his guards could scarcely restrain the crowd from beating him to a bloody pulp. After a few minutes of terrifying violence, the major was whisked through the gate and frog-marched towards the Imperial command compound set in the base of the flaktower overlooking the main entrance to the citadel.
Heavy purple curtains screened the grim concrete slabs that formed the four walls of the prefect's committee room. Lieutenant Hasten Lupinus had been on the island since the 10th of Silunai that year and had come to loathe it. He loathed the scorched arctic landscape, loathed the stench of sweat, offal and dung in the streets, hated the stench of death and disease reeking from the prison pits. Still, he had full responsibility for the defences of the island and he had not stinted, on that account, when it came to making his own quarters comfortable. The committee room, his ready room, and his boudoir, were well appointed with divans, leather recliners, velvet cushions, and Alalehzamini rugs. He had even been able to install underfloor heating for his own private quarters. He half wondered whether Shirekeep was even bothering to check his invoices. Comfortably lodged, and with his main remit of defence fulfilled, Hasten was in no hurry to attend to the more mundane aspects of garrison life. Unfortunately, his security advisor, a decurion assigned from S.W.O.R.D., had been most insistent. The vaguely distasteful task could be no longer avoided.
The lieutenant shifted uneasily on his prefectural throne of office – which was more a glorified chair. He felt absurd but it, along with the four auxiliaries pressed into the approximation of lictor-sentinels, were necessary to invoke the dignity that came with the possession of imperium, no matter over how small and dismal a parcel of land it might actually be. Even in a military outpost the usual infestation of functionaries appeared, scurrying about ceaselessly, representatives of the Iron Company, the Imperial Constabulary, the Holodomatic School, the Imperial Cult of the Church of Cedrism, the Ministry of the Exterior, the Ministry of the Interior, the Office of Information, the Office of Bounties and Factorage, and fuck alone knows who else. Just about every entity in the labyrinthine horror that was the Imperial Government had managed to send a representative of some form or another to intrude upon his repose at the frozen edge of the world. Everyone that is apart from the Ministry of Military Affairs, which seemed singularly unhurried in dispatching his replacement.
With so many self-appointed and self-interested stakeholders intruding upon his imperium it was perhaps inevitable that what was supposed to be a simple interrogation had become festooned with the useless theatrical fripperies of Imperial rule. With so many unwelcome guests the Lieutenant had been obliged to go to great lengths to ensure that the correct stage props had been correctly selected and installed. Statues of the mewling imbecile child-kaiser, the mutilated cyborg regent, and the grasping skinflint Batavian steward, had all been set in their correct place at the east end of the room's stoa basilica. In front of these statues an altar had been placed onto whose low burning embers a Syndomate, some kind of junior Holodomatic priest, periodically sprinkled a particularly noisome incense. The Lieutenant was at least gratified to watch his unwelcome guests undergo the ritual humiliation of prostrating themselves on the floor before the statues as though they were the living representations of their Imperial Magnificences and Serenities themselves.
'Bring in the prisoner,' said Hasten.
The curtains parted, and a thin man, battered and bloodied, whose matted hair and beard was encrusted with dirt, entered, flanked by two auxiliaries who had evidently enjoyed their morning playing at the role of cudgellers. The man stank, and not even the artful and vigorous swinging of an incense censer by the young syndomate could disguise the rank smell of incarceration. Several of the more decorous Imperials held sweet smelling pomades to their noses in a futile attempt to ward of the malodorous reek assailing their nostrils.
'Name? Race? Slave or free?' Hasten rattled off the preliminary questions with a certain perfunctoriness.
The man, whose tattered uniform appeared to be Nova English rather than Brettish, not that Hasten really knew or cared at the distinction, blinked and gawped at the Imperial officer sporting a purple sash who sat before him on a folding cedar wood chair. Or rather he was gawping at robed official standing at a few paces to the Lieutenant's right, who was seemingly giving the Syndomate subtle, quiet, but firm corrections to his censer technique. It took Hasten a moment or two to realise – black robe with brocade sash about the waist and looped over the left shoulder – that this bearded gesticulating cretin was the Zonophore, the other Holodomatic priest who had seen fit to attach himself to his entourage. Gods rot all god-botherers, Hasten quietly thought to himself before turning his attention back to the prisoner.
'Do you have an answer?' he asked, impatiently.
The prisoner shrugged his shoulders.
'Gods. Does he not even speak Istvanistani?' Hasten murmured irritably. 'Corvus?' - this was addressed to Decurion Corvus, the lean and vengeful looking twenty-six year old attached to the outpost from S.W.O.R.D.'s Force Security Bureau.
The decurion stepped forward and eyeballed the prisoner before repeating the question in the bastardised trading tongue of the lesser races. The prisoner spoke haltingly after which the decurion slapped him twice across the face with a gloved right hand before turning to face the prefectural throne.
'The wretch claims that he is a Major Beowulf Blaec, of the Nova English Armed Forces, and that he is only obliged to give his name rank and serial number, which he has done.'
The prisoner spoke once more, before one of the auxiliaries struck him across the shoulders, sending him staggering to his knees.
'And he has the impertinence to claim that as a soldier and an officer, he has the right to be accorded humane treatment and the respect due to his rank,' the decurion flushed crimson with barely suppressed rage as he translated.
'You would have thought the pit might have cured him of such delusions,' the Lieutenant chuckled quietly to himself as some of the more sycophantic in the room emulated his mirth. The auxiliaries hauled the prisoner back up onto his feet.
'Tell him that he may become His Majesty's Loyal Subject, repent of his treasonable association with the Jing, and acquaint us with intelligence of our enemies, or that he may suffer the consequences of senseless defiance.'
The decurion duly translated, after which it was the prisoner's turn to chuckle. His laugh however was dry and mirthless. The decurion listened as the prisoner spoke and then sighed in exasperation before turning to translate once more.
'He asks if we are insane. He asks when did we become Babkhans, and when did we forget the customs and the laws of war which apply to all combatants equally.'
'I don't think he appreciates his present circumstances,' remarked Hasten, with the hint of a smirk. 'Tell him that he may declare himself His Majesty's Loyal Subject – a pinch of incense at the altar, prostration before the sacred likenesses – and that it is his last opportunity to enjoy our clemency.'
A further, irritable, discussion ensued before the decurion was able to reply on the prisoner's behalf.
'He refuses to cooperate and begs to inform us that we will pay for our crimes, as he presumes to label your lawful authority.' A flurry of bellowed, mercifully untranslatable, curses ensued, giving cause to doubt that the prisoner begged anything.
'Well, you can't say that we did not try' – the Lieutenant looked disdainfully towards the barbarian captive – 'Major Bee-o-wolf Black, you have sacrilegiously denied the grace and mercy of Our Lord the Radiant Sun, in so doing forgoing any hope of clemency. You have treacherously persisted in your senseless devotion to the merciless Jing and the inhuman Traders. So far you have fallen from the celestial light that if you are ever to achieve reconciliation with the Highest Divinity you must endure purification of the most arduous nature. As a senseless rebel and an enemy of humanity, we are obliged to condemn you. Your redemption shall be attained through suffering in your flesh and blood. Seven days hence you are sentenced to death. You will burn. But before that you shall be subjected to the tortures of a righteous inquisition. You will divulge your secrets, as flesh is bared to the flensing knife.'
It took a while to translate, but the curses, the furious struggling and the combined efforts of the two auxiliaries to beat the major into submission and drag him from the committee room suggested that the correct meaning of the sentence had been imparted.
This done, Hasten turned to consult with the useless flunkies and hangers-on who constituted his unsought consilium.
'What a curious fellow. Did he have no concept of the easy way out we were offering him?'
'These barbarians are prideful.' Opined a representative of the Count of the Sacred Bounty, a plump oleaginous creature whom Hasten loathed.
'I suppose it is what comes from having no higher conception of human society.' Agreed Hasten. 'But by the Gods, they really are filthy wretches. Disgusting pale things. Who are these Nova English anyway?'
The question was addressed to a scowling Decurion Corvus who took a moment to reattain the air of unaffected civility. 'A servile race, as all Keltians between the borders of Caputia and Normark are. The corruption is in their blood, an admixture of Brettish and Nordish tainted by the Ergonian strain.'
'But why are they troubling us now? The Jing and the Traders are enough to contend with, where do they keep finding these wretched lesser races to ally with?' The note of exasperation on the Lieutenant's voice was real enough.
'They do I believe harbour some grievance relating to the War of Jeremy's Nose.' a nondescript functionary who claimed to be with the Ministry of the Exterior helpfully chimed in. 'That could be why we see those little armed trawlers of theirs chugging back and forth. It's so charmingly provincial of them.'
'There are two kinds of truth', interjected the Holodomatic priest with the brocade sash, 'the “momentarily true” and the “eternally true”. What is momentarily true is that small nations have become fearful of our Imperial Republic's capacity for aggression, following a distorted narrative arising from misunderstandings occasioned by the Hammish Civil War you understand. What remains eternally true is that the so-called Heavenly Light of Jingdao is an omnicidal maniac who secretly chaffs at the indignity of being nice to foreigners whilst the creatures of Passio-Corum are scarcely human and cleave to the chthonic forces working for the downfall of humanity on this dying world. Come the final battle and humanity will stand united under the Kaiser alongside the emanations of the Highest Divinity, Holy Wisdom, against the legions of darkness and disorder, only then shall we be united with The Ultimate and escape the bounds of the disordered cosmos. Victory is assured.'
The Lieutenant merely gawped in abject and absolute incomprehension at every word the priest had said.
'Victory is assured.' He finally, dumbly, repeated. The phrase was taken up and repeated, then chanted, as though repetition and emphasis would make it more true. As they did so, the chanting took on a more strident timbre, the words morphed, the language shifted, the tone became more – Babki – and in the end those assembled in the committee room found that they were chanting one phrase to the echo, over and over:
'Sathrati Zindabad!'
Somewhere in frost-bound Hyperborea meanwhile, a mechanical-grade cleric tending to one of the dilapidated Palantir to be found on the island of Raikoth was heard to remark to himself that everything was proceeding as forseen.
All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
Re: [Interlude One] Welcome to New Blackstone
I've said it before, but I need to stop reading this stuff while eating
Superb tale.
Superb tale.
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Re: [Interlude One] Welcome to New Blackstone
Nice work! And a brief response in return..
Summary: Major Blaec resists his captors in the only way left to him.
The darkness slowly faded away as the Major began to regain consciousness. In the gloom he assessed his situation, he was sat in a wooden chair with his hands cuffed behind his back. A table stood before him illuminated by a flickering paraffin lamp carried an assortment of surgical implements and tools of a less delicate nature. He pulled at the cuffs in an attempt to gauge their strength but was rewarded by the overbearing urge to vomit as explosions of pain from his numerous injuries assaulted him.
He knew that his was a lost cause now, the earlier meeting with the arseling in command had confirmed that. All the major could look forward to now was several days of torture before finally being put to death.
Behind the stout wooden door of his cell, the Major could make out the sounds of his likely torturer reliving himself in a bucket. Time was of the essence, if he wanted to save himself pain and effort. ‘Fuck it’ he thought as he painfully shifted the chair a few inches closer to the table, thanks to the handcuffs the major had little choice but to mimic the tactics of an imprisoned mental patient that he'd once heard of. Major Blaec calmed his breathing and gave a brief prayer, then he begun to rock the chair forwards and backwards. Behind the door the sounds of piss splashing into a bucket stopped and heavy footsteps accompanied by an eerie whistle approached the cell.
The major committed himself to the momentum that he had built up and threw himself at the table. As he did so, he placed his tongue between his teeth and jutted his chin out. The oak table which had been scavenged from a nearby office connected with the major’s chin. Providing a solid enough surface to instantly decelerate the major’ fall and sever his tongue and break his neck. The major’s world quickly faded to black for good this time, whilst the noise of the crash quickened the pace of his jailor who rushed into the room.
Lying in a pool of his own blood and with his neck bent at an unnatural angle, Major Beowulf Blaec defeated his captors in the only way he could. The auxiliary who had been assigned to guard the major sighed heavily, ‘Bollocks’ he said to no one in particular as he wiped his hands on his blood stained apron.