The Long War

A woman with the West in her eyes, / And a man with his back to the East . ‘Yeah. Probably.’
    ‘As for me, I’m off to get bladdered while I’ve got the chance. See you in the morning.’

38
    T HE B ENJAMIN F RANKLIN was summoned to the town of New Purity, a hundred thousand worlds East of Valhalla, where there had been an ambiguous report of yet more trouble with trolls.
    Joe Mackenzie stood by Maggie on the observation deck, looking down on the community. From the air it had a look of competence: town hall, neat fields, and, of course, what looked like a large church. ‘New Purity, huh?’ he said. ‘What’s the name of this sect again?’
    Maggie checked her briefing. ‘The Uncut Brethren.’
    ‘Well, you’d expect a church. But there’s no stockade.’
    ‘No. And look over there.’ She pointed at what looked like a charnel pit.
    Even as the twain descended, Maggie’s instincts started pressing alarm buttons. The Uncut Brethren . Maggie had been home-schooled by avowed atheists – actually not that avowed, they had argued that an outright fundamentalist atheist was just as bad as the worst fire-and-brimstone spittle-dribbling Bible-puncher, and as an adolescent Maggie had been fascinated by both extremes. So, as a connoisseur of believers and unbelievers, she thought she recognized the Uncut Brethren’s type on sight, as they gathered before the Franklin party: uniformly dressed, both male and female, in drab woollen smocks, with long queues of hair down their backs.
    Still, they seemed hospitable enough – right up until Jake the troll and his family stepped down the ramp from the hovering twain, after the human crew.
    One young man promptly approached Maggie. ‘We don’t allow these creatures on our premises, our homes, our farms. They are unclean.’
    Maggie looked into his face, irritated. But she saw tension there. Even grief. Something bad had happened here. ‘Unclean how? Also, Jake is not a creature.’
    The man’s face worked. ‘Very well, let him tell me that.’
    Maggie sighed. ‘Actually that’s possible, just. What’s your name, sir?’
    ‘My name is immaterial. I speak for all, it is our way.’
    Maggie felt a gentle but persistent pressure on her arm. It was Jake. She beckoned to Nathan Boss, who carried the troll-call. ‘This alive person / close to dead / gone away / person was and is not / song of sadness.’
    Hearing these scratchy words coming out of the instrument, the Brethren stared at the troll.
    Maggie faced the young spokesman. ‘What happened here? Just show me.’
    For answer, he led her away from the neat buildings to that pit they’d spotted from the air.
    It was indeed a hole in the ground, full of corpses. A dozen bodies in total, she guessed, maybe more. There were no human remains here that she could see, but many humanoids: trolls, and another species Maggie recognized from her pre-mission briefings. Elves – one of the more vicious varieties, if she remembered the detail.
    Maggie turned again to the young man, and said with a note of command, ‘I think you need to tell me your name, son.’
    He blushed and said, ‘Brother Geoffrey. Auditor of the Uncut Brethren. We are a contemplative order; we believe the prepared soul can overcome all hostile circumstances . . .’ His voice faltered.
    The story she extracted from Brother Geoffrey, in between his sobs and mea culpas , had been repeated all over the Long Earth. Every stepwise Earth was a new world, a world for free, a blank slate on which you could write a wonderful life, if you dreamed a strong enough dream and watched your back. Here, the Brethren had built a decent open township, along, according to Geoffrey, Athenian lines. Their philosophy seemed to be a melange of the teaching of figures that Maggie, in her vague theological understanding, generally identified as the good guys, Jesus, the Buddha and Confucius among them. But they had not listened to basic warnings that must have been given them by more experienced hands, even before they left the Datum.
    And the peril that had befallen them, out of many possible out here, had been elves.
    Mac approached her. ‘We’ve done a little forensic analysis on that pit. Captain, it was the elves did the attacking. Defensive wounds only on the trolls. The elves evidently stepped in, targeting the humans . . .’
    In her briefings Maggie had seen records of such bewildering attacks, launched out of nowhere by stepping hunter-killers. ‘A