Timemaster
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May 20th, Siege of Mombasa
-----------------------------------------
Thomas Jefferson Murungaru stood on the beach watching a catamaran bucking on the rolling waves of the Indian ocean. Four men manned it, two in each of the canoes that made up the homespun vessel, one of them hanging on a machine gun and its equipment trying to protect it from the spray. In the distance, hazy on the horizon, an unidentified yacht approached. Airbrush out the ominous weapon and the scene would have fit perfectly on a post-card, Wish you were here in playful font against a vacation paradise. Even when the gunner began to fire on the yacht, the sound was drowned by the roaring waves, and the flashes of light were barely visible from where Murungaru stood. A man could string up a hammock and take a nap here. It was a calm war, much to Murungaru's irritation.
Murungaru was Secretary of the Communist Party in Swahililand. This put him just below Chairman James Lutalo in terms of importance. He wasn't a marshal man, but his place in the hierarchy suggested him to this duty, and he commanded the patchwork forces here with an impatient zeal.
Mombasa is one of those rare blessed places, like Constantinople or Manhattan, in a spot that seems hand-made for a great city. It is a tropical paradise where the sand is white, the ocean a clear cerulean, and the palm trees offer seductive shade from a balmy equatorial heat. This describes the Kenyan coast for hundreds of miles, but geography offers more to make this place stand out. Mombasa is an island sitting between two tidal creeks and cut off from the mainland by a small connective channel. Its deep harbors ties it to trade, and the water doubles as a moat. The natives knew this, and they settled Mombasa long before the Arabs or Portuguese knew of the place. Its newest owners were the English settlers who came to British East Africa in search of land where they could build the quaint life of English gentry. That dream was ended, and its end was brought about by the descendants of those early black-skinned settlers who first lived on the island, now a mixed bag of tribal nations sewn together by the foreign ideas of Karl Marx.
On the beach, Communist warriors prepared another catamaran, lashing two canoes together in a hurried attempt to aid their comrades. Two of the men were black-skinned Africans of native Kenyan blood, but the other two were foreigners. Communist revolution is a magnet for outsiders, a fact that made many native Africans nervous who'd learned to distrust outsiders after years of Arab and European abuse. But Murungaru liked the foreigners. Of the two working on the boat, he got the most use out of Franz Agricola, a Spartacist engineer fled from the reactionary government of Germany to work in a place friendly to his ideals. But his favorite foreigner was the second one, his Red-Chinese paramour, Li Huan. She was a young head-in-the-sky idealist, drunk on Houism, fled from the safer work she had been sent to Africa for and joined to an active communist revolution in the same way an American child might be drawn to join the circus. She wore a pair of Chinese coveralls with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and the star and gear of Houism patched on the shoulder. Murungaru wouldn't say that he loved her, but he did enjoy her company, and her presence in his bed helped to calm him down through the tedious siege.
"We're going in" Agricola shouted up to him in heavily accented English.
"Get this one before it comes in range of Fort Jesus" Murungaru shouted back, "I don't want to fish you out when they shoot a hole in your boat. Again."
Li Huan beamed up at him, her youth shining through the grime and masculine lifestyle of siege warfare. "If we find more Madeira, I'll make sure you get first pick this time" she said.
Murungaru returned the smile and watched as they pushed off into the sea, headed for piracy, or something like it.
No ships. No artillery. No airplanes. Chairman Lutalo hoarded what little the Swahili Republic had in terms of heavy hardware and used it in Uganda to protect his 'Revolution-Town' Project, and his own personal ass, from being swept up by the counter-revolutionaries crawling in the Ugandan jungles. This left Murungaru with little to work with.
This would have been fine if it were only the British colonists in the city. The Kenyan whites had been few and far between. On their own, they might have surrendered and worked out a deal ages ago. It was volunteers and under-the-table support from the white governments on the southern half of the continent that kept this doomed counter-revolution afloat. Most of the fighters left in Mombasa were German-speaking Tanganyikans. They fought hard though, helped by privately chartered blockade runners passing through the weak net of re-purposed trawlers and catamarans the Communists called a blockade. Murungaru couldn't quite close the gap. He felt like a man with no thumbs trying to strangle his enemy.
The enemy trawler caught on fire as both catamarans pulled up along side it. From the beach, the flames looked like a bright sparkle. Murungaru smiled. He didn't care about retrieving their supplies - he had a knack for scavenging for his army. For a few months he had been purchasing supplies out of Mombasa itself from a corrupt Tanganyikan officer, until that man was caught and lynched from a motel balcony visible across the water. What Murungaru cared about was that he denied those supplies to his enemy. His siege, at least for one more day, was actually a siege.
The Catamarans stayed with their prey. Murungaru's smile wavered as he realized what was happening. The idiot pirates were plundering the burning boat! He couldn't replace Agricola for what the contents of that damned trawler was worth, and he didn't want to lose the comfort of Li Huan's presence. If there was ammo in that boat... if it exploded...
There had been spotty gunfire going on behind him this entire time, as one expects in active combat zones, but as he watched the burning boat the background noise reached an active crescendo, and Murungaru's attention was turned from the blockaders to the world behind him. It sounded like a raid. He couldn't help Agricola and Li Huan from the beach. He indulged in one last anxious glance toward the sea, then he drew his pistol and sprinted toward the action.
The commander of Mombasa's white defenders was a man called Commander Tom Trevor. The Communists knew very little else about the man, a state of things that embarrassed Murungaru. They didn't even know what country he was from, whether it was South Africa or Rhodesia, and this inconsistency of knowledge laid the foundation for the boogey-man legend Trevor had made for himself. The meat of this legend, however, was his raids. In his boldest moments he sent parties of men over, more to count coup than to win battles, with the aim of dragging off as many captives as they could. These captives would be lynched from the same motel the corrupt Tanganyikan officer had met his fate. So many bodies had dangled from that balcony that the place was now considered to be haunted. Trevor made this part of the torture too, and he housed those captives waiting to die in the rooms emptying onto that balcony so that their spent their last nights in terror of the supernatural.
There had been a raid. Launched in the middle of the day, it had been repulsed. Murungaru saw instantly that it was a diversion, meant to help the supply boat. White warriors fled back across Tudor Creek on rowboats as gunfire poured across the channel. It didn't look like they had taken any prisoners. Commander Trevor was not there. Sometimes, he stood on the lynching balcony and shouted bizarre pro-capitalist slogans over a megaphone, like "Death is a preferable alternative to communism" and "Communism is the very definition of failure." Not today.
"Comrade Kiprop" Murungaru shouted at an officer he recognized. "What has happened?"
"Comrade Secretary" Kiprop stood at attention, a tall man shaved completely bald and wearing a red sash around his fatigues. "We have not counted the bodies, but I didn't see any black faces on their boats."
Murungaru still held his pistol out as he came to a stop near the shallow trenches overlooking the river bank. Gunfire crossed from both sides. A boat full of white men tipped over, spilling them into the channel, making them into bobbing targets. "They pivoted. We're going in on the causeway. Radio them." Murungaru said. They were walking quickly along the trench line now. Kiprop motioned for a man with a handheld radio and told him what to say. He didn't finish before Murungaru barked "Get me a ride."
It was a motorcycle with a sidecar that picked him up, driven by a Maasai fighter with his red warrior's robe over his fatigues. As they took off, his thoughts returned briefly to his pirates and their burning boat. The bike sped down the rutted dirt supply road and onto a pontoon bridge crossing Tudor Creek. The rhythmic jostling of the bike on the bridge helped him to put those thoughts out of his mind.
The battle for the causeway was already starting when Murungaru arrived. The bridges to Mombasa had all been burned by the defenders, but a man-made earthen causeway crossed the connective channel to the northwest, and it hadn't been destroyed. Makeshift defenses were thrown together on both sides, turning the causeway into a miniature example of Great War style warfare complete with a mangled no-mans-land in between. That small strip of land was active now as Communist units moved through piled sandbags and scrap metal baricades and fired desperately at the faceless enemy defenses on the other side.
"Bring up a bomb." Murungaru said vaguely, but these men had worked with him before, and they knew what he meant. Not far from here sat an ammo dump, where stacks of fresh shells waited for artillery that wouldn't come. What else could he do but invent new uses? Even useless uses were better than no uses at all.
The communist forces were a medley, fed by different tribes and traditions into one national whole. "Swahililand" was a western construct, its borders designed ages ago by European colonizers who had little knowledge of the land they were designing. The only thing that united these people were a shared experience in an English speaking colony, and that was a very weak thread to sew a country together. Most of the men here knew nothing about Communism. They were drawn in through tribal alliances made to oppose foreign rule.
The battle moved in waves. A surge of brave men moved forward until they were checked by the other side. A lull set in, filled by bursts of gunfire. When one side noticed a new angle to the battle that might give them an advantage, the pitch rose again. Unlike the birds-eye view books afford to armchair generals, Murungaru was stuck with a poor view, posed in a trench on a rise behind the battle. What he mostly saw was smoke, and he lead more by ear than by sight, with full knowledge that he wouldn't completely understand what was happening until it already happened.
A bomb came up, moved by motorcycle in a manor so clumsy that it made Murungaru nervous. Never mind that, it was here now, and he moved with it toward the front, sending soldiers into the crowd to seed for volunteers. A small number of interested parties gathered behind the barricade with him.
"I will take the bomb" said Grenade-Man. Murungaru forgot the man's real name, since all of his comrades called him by his favorite weapon. A tall man with the limbs of a swimmer, Grenade-Man impressed his comrades with how far and consistently he could lob a good grenade. They were so impressed that they lent him their grenades when they got them. Grenade-Man wore them all on belts across his chest, looking like a suicidal christmas tree. "No" Murungaru said, "You are too valuable for this. It is a suicide mission."
"I will do this" another man said soberly.
Murungaru didn't recognize him. "You will do." he said, "You know what to do?" Murungaru showed how the mechanism rigged by Agricola worked. The soldier nodded.
"Okay." Murungaru jumped into action as the doomed soldier put the bomb harness around his shoulders, "Take your places. Give this city your temper, all at once!" He pulled out his pistol and looked beyond the ragged defenses toward the enemy ramparts. "Now!" He fired his pistol, and it sounded to him as if it had fired one thousand shots.
Grenade Man rushed ahead with the bomber, and they both took shelter in a cratered defense at the beginning of no man's land. Grenade Man started to throw, and the sound of bullets scraping against steel and cement was replaced by deep-throated explosions. The bomber dashed forward, the bomb dangling in front of him as if he had to carry his massive steel balls by a chain around his neck. Murungaru emptied his pistol. The bomber slipped into the enemy barricades. A large explosion went off, sending up dust and gore. The Communists ululated as if they had just won the battle.
"Take the city!" he yelled. His ululating hoard rushed forward, bristling with bayonets and machetes. The enemy weren't firing back. Murungaru's heart pounded in his ears. Was this it? His men disappeared into the enemy barricades. The sound of gunfire resumed, and it sounded hard and hateful in his ears.
"Send more!" he yelled, looking back at those men left behind to man the Communist lines. Those in front rushed forward. Murungaru had one hand on his pistol and another on the edge of a piece of corrugated metal. Both hands gripped hard, but he did not notice the pain, his eyes dead set ahead on the target. The gunfire and screaming was still active, still beyond his sight.
People reappeared. His eyes struggled to focus in the smoke. His heart sank when he saw white faces. In spurts, like liquid from a mud-clogged spout, he saw his own men running back across the corridor, the red flag put to flight.
"No!" he screamed, "Go back! Go with more men!" Nobody listened. The attack died there, and Murungaru grieved for it as if it were a dead child. The officers, afraid he would attract snipers, dragged him away screaming curses at his own tired men. The deadlock was alive and well.
--
The sun set on a battlefield unchanged from what it had been in the morning. Murungaru and Agricola sat on beach chairs, sipping pirated beers and looking out at the sea. Li Huan lay in the sand next to them where she had fallen asleep. She smelled strongly like smoke.
"I could settle down here." Agricola said, laying his head back.
"You already have." Murungaru replied.
"You almost finished it today. I hear the causeway was a close thing. If you had cracked it..."
"It wasn't." Murungaru said, "Ifs and maybes don't mean a thing. It wasn't any closer than the day before."
Agricola shrugged. "Tomorrow then. There is always tomorrow."
"It'll be the same. We did tomorrow today. We did tomorrow yesterday. We did tomorrow for hundreds of yesterdays. I don't see the pattern breaking. Unless you invent something to get us out of this."
"I built bridges back home" Agricola shrugged. "I could build you a bridge here, but they'd shoot at us."
"Didn't Alexander the Great build a bridge into a city he was laying siege too? Put your engineering skills to that test."
"Tyre didn't have Mausers" Agricola said. He laughed. Murungaru didn't.
The sound of the waves crashing onto the shore gave off a strange vibe, one that their battle adjusted minds suggested was silence. Gun shots were rare now that the sun was setting. Agricola laid his head back, looking as he was going to fall asleep too. Murungaru didn't. His mind was driving, searching everything he knew, hoping to find an answer, but nothing was there.
"You know..." Agricola stirred, "When I was at Stuttgart, there were these guys... they had a medieval engineering club. Just for fun. They built old type weapons and put on shows. Real old, catapults, that sort of thing. They'd throw together some quick building to use as a target, we'd bring them wine, and we'd all sit around getting drunk and watching them do their thing."
"And what did that accomplish?" Murungaru asked.
"Thomas." Agricola smiled, "I think I have an idea."
May 20th, Siege of Mombasa
-----------------------------------------
Thomas Jefferson Murungaru stood on the beach watching a catamaran bucking on the rolling waves of the Indian ocean. Four men manned it, two in each of the canoes that made up the homespun vessel, one of them hanging on a machine gun and its equipment trying to protect it from the spray. In the distance, hazy on the horizon, an unidentified yacht approached. Airbrush out the ominous weapon and the scene would have fit perfectly on a post-card, Wish you were here in playful font against a vacation paradise. Even when the gunner began to fire on the yacht, the sound was drowned by the roaring waves, and the flashes of light were barely visible from where Murungaru stood. A man could string up a hammock and take a nap here. It was a calm war, much to Murungaru's irritation.
Murungaru was Secretary of the Communist Party in Swahililand. This put him just below Chairman James Lutalo in terms of importance. He wasn't a marshal man, but his place in the hierarchy suggested him to this duty, and he commanded the patchwork forces here with an impatient zeal.
Mombasa is one of those rare blessed places, like Constantinople or Manhattan, in a spot that seems hand-made for a great city. It is a tropical paradise where the sand is white, the ocean a clear cerulean, and the palm trees offer seductive shade from a balmy equatorial heat. This describes the Kenyan coast for hundreds of miles, but geography offers more to make this place stand out. Mombasa is an island sitting between two tidal creeks and cut off from the mainland by a small connective channel. Its deep harbors ties it to trade, and the water doubles as a moat. The natives knew this, and they settled Mombasa long before the Arabs or Portuguese knew of the place. Its newest owners were the English settlers who came to British East Africa in search of land where they could build the quaint life of English gentry. That dream was ended, and its end was brought about by the descendants of those early black-skinned settlers who first lived on the island, now a mixed bag of tribal nations sewn together by the foreign ideas of Karl Marx.
On the beach, Communist warriors prepared another catamaran, lashing two canoes together in a hurried attempt to aid their comrades. Two of the men were black-skinned Africans of native Kenyan blood, but the other two were foreigners. Communist revolution is a magnet for outsiders, a fact that made many native Africans nervous who'd learned to distrust outsiders after years of Arab and European abuse. But Murungaru liked the foreigners. Of the two working on the boat, he got the most use out of Franz Agricola, a Spartacist engineer fled from the reactionary government of Germany to work in a place friendly to his ideals. But his favorite foreigner was the second one, his Red-Chinese paramour, Li Huan. She was a young head-in-the-sky idealist, drunk on Houism, fled from the safer work she had been sent to Africa for and joined to an active communist revolution in the same way an American child might be drawn to join the circus. She wore a pair of Chinese coveralls with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and the star and gear of Houism patched on the shoulder. Murungaru wouldn't say that he loved her, but he did enjoy her company, and her presence in his bed helped to calm him down through the tedious siege.
"We're going in" Agricola shouted up to him in heavily accented English.
"Get this one before it comes in range of Fort Jesus" Murungaru shouted back, "I don't want to fish you out when they shoot a hole in your boat. Again."
Li Huan beamed up at him, her youth shining through the grime and masculine lifestyle of siege warfare. "If we find more Madeira, I'll make sure you get first pick this time" she said.
Murungaru returned the smile and watched as they pushed off into the sea, headed for piracy, or something like it.
No ships. No artillery. No airplanes. Chairman Lutalo hoarded what little the Swahili Republic had in terms of heavy hardware and used it in Uganda to protect his 'Revolution-Town' Project, and his own personal ass, from being swept up by the counter-revolutionaries crawling in the Ugandan jungles. This left Murungaru with little to work with.
This would have been fine if it were only the British colonists in the city. The Kenyan whites had been few and far between. On their own, they might have surrendered and worked out a deal ages ago. It was volunteers and under-the-table support from the white governments on the southern half of the continent that kept this doomed counter-revolution afloat. Most of the fighters left in Mombasa were German-speaking Tanganyikans. They fought hard though, helped by privately chartered blockade runners passing through the weak net of re-purposed trawlers and catamarans the Communists called a blockade. Murungaru couldn't quite close the gap. He felt like a man with no thumbs trying to strangle his enemy.
The enemy trawler caught on fire as both catamarans pulled up along side it. From the beach, the flames looked like a bright sparkle. Murungaru smiled. He didn't care about retrieving their supplies - he had a knack for scavenging for his army. For a few months he had been purchasing supplies out of Mombasa itself from a corrupt Tanganyikan officer, until that man was caught and lynched from a motel balcony visible across the water. What Murungaru cared about was that he denied those supplies to his enemy. His siege, at least for one more day, was actually a siege.
The Catamarans stayed with their prey. Murungaru's smile wavered as he realized what was happening. The idiot pirates were plundering the burning boat! He couldn't replace Agricola for what the contents of that damned trawler was worth, and he didn't want to lose the comfort of Li Huan's presence. If there was ammo in that boat... if it exploded...
There had been spotty gunfire going on behind him this entire time, as one expects in active combat zones, but as he watched the burning boat the background noise reached an active crescendo, and Murungaru's attention was turned from the blockaders to the world behind him. It sounded like a raid. He couldn't help Agricola and Li Huan from the beach. He indulged in one last anxious glance toward the sea, then he drew his pistol and sprinted toward the action.
The commander of Mombasa's white defenders was a man called Commander Tom Trevor. The Communists knew very little else about the man, a state of things that embarrassed Murungaru. They didn't even know what country he was from, whether it was South Africa or Rhodesia, and this inconsistency of knowledge laid the foundation for the boogey-man legend Trevor had made for himself. The meat of this legend, however, was his raids. In his boldest moments he sent parties of men over, more to count coup than to win battles, with the aim of dragging off as many captives as they could. These captives would be lynched from the same motel the corrupt Tanganyikan officer had met his fate. So many bodies had dangled from that balcony that the place was now considered to be haunted. Trevor made this part of the torture too, and he housed those captives waiting to die in the rooms emptying onto that balcony so that their spent their last nights in terror of the supernatural.
There had been a raid. Launched in the middle of the day, it had been repulsed. Murungaru saw instantly that it was a diversion, meant to help the supply boat. White warriors fled back across Tudor Creek on rowboats as gunfire poured across the channel. It didn't look like they had taken any prisoners. Commander Trevor was not there. Sometimes, he stood on the lynching balcony and shouted bizarre pro-capitalist slogans over a megaphone, like "Death is a preferable alternative to communism" and "Communism is the very definition of failure." Not today.
"Comrade Kiprop" Murungaru shouted at an officer he recognized. "What has happened?"
"Comrade Secretary" Kiprop stood at attention, a tall man shaved completely bald and wearing a red sash around his fatigues. "We have not counted the bodies, but I didn't see any black faces on their boats."
Murungaru still held his pistol out as he came to a stop near the shallow trenches overlooking the river bank. Gunfire crossed from both sides. A boat full of white men tipped over, spilling them into the channel, making them into bobbing targets. "They pivoted. We're going in on the causeway. Radio them." Murungaru said. They were walking quickly along the trench line now. Kiprop motioned for a man with a handheld radio and told him what to say. He didn't finish before Murungaru barked "Get me a ride."
It was a motorcycle with a sidecar that picked him up, driven by a Maasai fighter with his red warrior's robe over his fatigues. As they took off, his thoughts returned briefly to his pirates and their burning boat. The bike sped down the rutted dirt supply road and onto a pontoon bridge crossing Tudor Creek. The rhythmic jostling of the bike on the bridge helped him to put those thoughts out of his mind.
The battle for the causeway was already starting when Murungaru arrived. The bridges to Mombasa had all been burned by the defenders, but a man-made earthen causeway crossed the connective channel to the northwest, and it hadn't been destroyed. Makeshift defenses were thrown together on both sides, turning the causeway into a miniature example of Great War style warfare complete with a mangled no-mans-land in between. That small strip of land was active now as Communist units moved through piled sandbags and scrap metal baricades and fired desperately at the faceless enemy defenses on the other side.
"Bring up a bomb." Murungaru said vaguely, but these men had worked with him before, and they knew what he meant. Not far from here sat an ammo dump, where stacks of fresh shells waited for artillery that wouldn't come. What else could he do but invent new uses? Even useless uses were better than no uses at all.
The communist forces were a medley, fed by different tribes and traditions into one national whole. "Swahililand" was a western construct, its borders designed ages ago by European colonizers who had little knowledge of the land they were designing. The only thing that united these people were a shared experience in an English speaking colony, and that was a very weak thread to sew a country together. Most of the men here knew nothing about Communism. They were drawn in through tribal alliances made to oppose foreign rule.
The battle moved in waves. A surge of brave men moved forward until they were checked by the other side. A lull set in, filled by bursts of gunfire. When one side noticed a new angle to the battle that might give them an advantage, the pitch rose again. Unlike the birds-eye view books afford to armchair generals, Murungaru was stuck with a poor view, posed in a trench on a rise behind the battle. What he mostly saw was smoke, and he lead more by ear than by sight, with full knowledge that he wouldn't completely understand what was happening until it already happened.
A bomb came up, moved by motorcycle in a manor so clumsy that it made Murungaru nervous. Never mind that, it was here now, and he moved with it toward the front, sending soldiers into the crowd to seed for volunteers. A small number of interested parties gathered behind the barricade with him.
"I will take the bomb" said Grenade-Man. Murungaru forgot the man's real name, since all of his comrades called him by his favorite weapon. A tall man with the limbs of a swimmer, Grenade-Man impressed his comrades with how far and consistently he could lob a good grenade. They were so impressed that they lent him their grenades when they got them. Grenade-Man wore them all on belts across his chest, looking like a suicidal christmas tree. "No" Murungaru said, "You are too valuable for this. It is a suicide mission."
"I will do this" another man said soberly.
Murungaru didn't recognize him. "You will do." he said, "You know what to do?" Murungaru showed how the mechanism rigged by Agricola worked. The soldier nodded.
"Okay." Murungaru jumped into action as the doomed soldier put the bomb harness around his shoulders, "Take your places. Give this city your temper, all at once!" He pulled out his pistol and looked beyond the ragged defenses toward the enemy ramparts. "Now!" He fired his pistol, and it sounded to him as if it had fired one thousand shots.
Grenade Man rushed ahead with the bomber, and they both took shelter in a cratered defense at the beginning of no man's land. Grenade Man started to throw, and the sound of bullets scraping against steel and cement was replaced by deep-throated explosions. The bomber dashed forward, the bomb dangling in front of him as if he had to carry his massive steel balls by a chain around his neck. Murungaru emptied his pistol. The bomber slipped into the enemy barricades. A large explosion went off, sending up dust and gore. The Communists ululated as if they had just won the battle.
"Take the city!" he yelled. His ululating hoard rushed forward, bristling with bayonets and machetes. The enemy weren't firing back. Murungaru's heart pounded in his ears. Was this it? His men disappeared into the enemy barricades. The sound of gunfire resumed, and it sounded hard and hateful in his ears.
"Send more!" he yelled, looking back at those men left behind to man the Communist lines. Those in front rushed forward. Murungaru had one hand on his pistol and another on the edge of a piece of corrugated metal. Both hands gripped hard, but he did not notice the pain, his eyes dead set ahead on the target. The gunfire and screaming was still active, still beyond his sight.
People reappeared. His eyes struggled to focus in the smoke. His heart sank when he saw white faces. In spurts, like liquid from a mud-clogged spout, he saw his own men running back across the corridor, the red flag put to flight.
"No!" he screamed, "Go back! Go with more men!" Nobody listened. The attack died there, and Murungaru grieved for it as if it were a dead child. The officers, afraid he would attract snipers, dragged him away screaming curses at his own tired men. The deadlock was alive and well.
--
The sun set on a battlefield unchanged from what it had been in the morning. Murungaru and Agricola sat on beach chairs, sipping pirated beers and looking out at the sea. Li Huan lay in the sand next to them where she had fallen asleep. She smelled strongly like smoke.
"I could settle down here." Agricola said, laying his head back.
"You already have." Murungaru replied.
"You almost finished it today. I hear the causeway was a close thing. If you had cracked it..."
"It wasn't." Murungaru said, "Ifs and maybes don't mean a thing. It wasn't any closer than the day before."
Agricola shrugged. "Tomorrow then. There is always tomorrow."
"It'll be the same. We did tomorrow today. We did tomorrow yesterday. We did tomorrow for hundreds of yesterdays. I don't see the pattern breaking. Unless you invent something to get us out of this."
"I built bridges back home" Agricola shrugged. "I could build you a bridge here, but they'd shoot at us."
"Didn't Alexander the Great build a bridge into a city he was laying siege too? Put your engineering skills to that test."
"Tyre didn't have Mausers" Agricola said. He laughed. Murungaru didn't.
The sound of the waves crashing onto the shore gave off a strange vibe, one that their battle adjusted minds suggested was silence. Gun shots were rare now that the sun was setting. Agricola laid his head back, looking as he was going to fall asleep too. Murungaru didn't. His mind was driving, searching everything he knew, hoping to find an answer, but nothing was there.
"You know..." Agricola stirred, "When I was at Stuttgart, there were these guys... they had a medieval engineering club. Just for fun. They built old type weapons and put on shows. Real old, catapults, that sort of thing. They'd throw together some quick building to use as a target, we'd bring them wine, and we'd all sit around getting drunk and watching them do their thing."
"And what did that accomplish?" Murungaru asked.
"Thomas." Agricola smiled, "I think I have an idea."