NationStates Jolt Archive

“What may be morally right, isn’t always practical or palatable.” ~Governor General Harding, final Midlonian Govenor of the Colony of Odaya.

The rifle was nothing special. An old, very plain and standard Mittelstand SLR as used by the Midlonian Armed Services for the better part of a century of rugged and reliable service, a darkening wood and small amount of dust settled along the barrel, having not been fired in anger for a very long time.

It hung in a glass display cabinet, surrounded by trinkets and small items such as a silvery pocket-watch, a manual from the 2MW era, including a pocket-bestiary of the Freethinkers mainland, as well as a page removed from the Odayan Apendix talking of the flying hippo.

The small crowd shuffled gently through the museum, an elderly gentleman with a heavy limp stopping to stare at this fairly inane cabinet with it’s basic display. His aged lips twitched and moved, before he licked his lips and squinted his failing green eyes through his glasses at the small item nearest to him at the bottom.

“That’s my old watch…” he suddenly said quietly. “My old watch….” he whispered again.

“What’s that Grandad?” A young girl said as she touched his arm and looked at him as the old man shakily pointed to the silver watch with a knight on it. “What’s that then?”

“My old pocket-watch. I thought I’d lost it. When I was ambushed, a local took it from me, I was lucky to have been left alive. It was in an area called the Bona… Bona…” his face twitched into a frown as he tried to remember what the area had been called and he chewed his lip frantically.

“Bona something? I don’t think they call it that anymore.” The old man sighed and scratched his head.


----- The Forgotten War----

The Oyadan emergency of 1954-58 is an annal of Midlonian Imperial History that is to many little more than a sideshow after the massive Second Moonstone War in which some 25 million lives would be lost to both sides. A conflict which consumed several nations for 8 gruelling years and resulted in the near decimation of the Freestian State, and the crippling of the Midlonian Economy due to the strain, length and distance of the war.

A conflict which is often skipped when compared to the better known, world-changing event that the 2MW was the Oyada Emergency. This little reported conflict was to claim a further 1 million Midlonian lives and to put to an end the Midlonian Empire which instead saw the rise of the Greater Kingdom in it’s stead, and the evolution of both Democracy at home and abroad with the curtailing of the Monarch‘s Power, making him largely subservient to the democratically elected body of the House of Commons.

The precursor to this event was the rich and bountiful mineral and agrarian deposits of the Federated Colonial holding known as Oyada were seen as a perfect way of getting much needed food and material back into the Homeland of Midlonia after the strain enforced on the Midlonian state after the massive outgoing of the 2MW. The plan as laid out by Governor General Harding was to see nearly 60% of all Oyadan crops grown that year to be exported to Midlonia, leaving just 40% of crops grown for the Oyadan people themselves.

However, the harvest season of 1954 was a poor one, and in order to meet demands of the Midlonian state the difficult step of increasing the quota to nearly 90% of foodstuffs grown saw a severe shortage of food across the colony. This resulted in the first of a series of civil disturbances which would eventually escalate into all-out war.

“To all those, at home and abroad, who say that we are the bringers of oppression, I ask only this: what worse oppression is there than the dominion of an uncaring people from a distant land? How can the “oppression” of equality and collective good be worse than the “liberty” we have now – the liberty to starve, to be rounded into hovels, to be denied our own homeland?” – Gen. Jizagu Ornua, “Address to the Oyadan People on Liberty”, 1954.

*****

The Museum of Military History (it had once been the Museum of the People’s Victory, back in the days when people had still believed in that sort of high-minded idealism) was, like many colonial-era buildings, large, heavily constructed, and by modern standards supremely overcrowded and ugly. Nonetheless, Oyadans seemed curiously fond of these relics of a past they were taught, expected and conditioned to despise; they had a certain magnificent grandeur which steel and glass could never match, and moreover the stone from which they were built, from which their ornate cornices and gargoyles and faded, pitted crests had been carved, was durable and cheap. Indeed, it was so durable that the Museum of Military History, formerly the Museum of the People’s Victory, formerly the Museum of Colonial History, formerly the Museum of Fine Arts and Lyceum, was still not far removed from the glory it had enjoyed when it was constructed, over a century before. The gargoyles were worn, somewhat; the crests were illegible, unless you were close; the cornices occasionally loosed a small flurry of chippings to the steps below when an errant pigeon happened to touch down on them a little too heavily. But for all that, its splendour refused to die. Only the steady accumulation of soot, staining the once-polished material grey and black, streaking down its sides in the heavy rain and snow that battered the city of Copperby, was now despoiling its ancient visage.

From where he was standing, Amon Turaya found the building as imposing as ever. Yet he couldn’t help a quiet chuckle; after three score years and a few more besides on earth, he was getting to be quite a devotee of irony. The irony of this, of all structures, housing a museum dedicated to the triumph of subject over ruler, could not fail to amuse him. Tipping his tattered brown homburg to the receptionist as he passed through the turnstile, he watched as a small cloud of dust danced off it in the bright sunlight streaming through the ornately-finished windows.

“Damned avian vandals,” he muttered to himself, not expecting there to be anyone else nearby for a while. He dusted the hat off and re-seated it on his balding pate, carefully pressing it down until it covered the very tops of his ears; or, to be more exact, until it covered the top of his left ear, for his right had, as he always put it, “had a scrap with a Middie bullet, and lost.” As he raised his head, carefully centring the brim of the hat, his weary eyes squinted into the distance and spotted a familiar sight: a large party of noisy children, coming his way, rapidly. He quickly retreated to the next room, a long hallway filled with relics somewhat smaller than the main attractions, for which the vociferous party was doubtless bound. But no, even here he could find no peace. A mother entered; her eyes, heavy and bagged, told of sleepless nights and long days aplenty, as did her greying hair. Turaya estimated her age at forty, perhaps thirty if life had really been tough to her. On each hand was a child, attached by a vice-like grip more akin to that of some variety of tick.

The small boy on her left hand stamped his feet and spoke up, shaking his head violently and setting the mop of tousled brown hair atop it dancing madly. “Mum, I’m booooored! can’t we go and see the picture instead? The new one’s out, Adam says it’s really cool!"

The mother simply looked down, unenthusiastically, at her offspring. “Let’s go and see the planes. Those’ll be good!”

“They have planes? Whoa, let’s go! C’mon, mum!” Turaya smiled slightly as the children departed, catching the eye of the other small boy of the pair as the group turned to depart. The boy glanced back, stared momentarily into the narrowed, classically Oriental eyes of the wizened, tanned figure behind him, and trotted ahead without even a backward glance, leaving Turaya quite alone in the long hallway. He had long since stopped feeling the fury he once knew, when the young behaved thus; older and wiser, now, he recognised that youthful minds such as theirs could not comprehend the full horror of warfare, nor the ramifications of the articles in the museum. To them it was all bangs and flashes, tanks and planes. Excitement, adventure, and glory. He smiled again, the slightest rise on the corners of his thin, dried lips the only indication of any amusement. “Only the dead have seen the end of war,” he murmured. “I suppose that gives them plenty of time to learn all about it.”

He began to amble, slowly, along the line of display cases. Each piece triggered something in his mind: here, a rack of rifles, a dozen weapons from a dozen lands, each of which had been used to fight the Midlonians. His face broadened reluctantly into a grin, a humourless grin of lupine satisfaction, at the sight of a weapon he recognised very well indeed; he had donated it himself, after all. His father’s weapon, handed from his father before him, and used for well over a century to hunt in the jungle and forest of Greater Island by the time he had first taken hold of it. Turaya’s eye travelled downwards, pleased that the old gun was being kept in such good condition; the steel of the barrel practically gleamed, which was quite an achievement considering its age, and the once-bleached, splintery cypress wood that ran beneath it had been lovingly repaired, carefully sanded and smoothed and varnished. Only the lack of the ramrod bothered Turaya; but when he had donated the ancient musket to the museum, way back in 1965, he had been unable to locate the thin steel stick anywhere in his little flat.

Other than that, the musket was as he remembered it, right down to the lock, into whose plate he had carved a bright, shining hammer and sickle, and the roughly-hewn notches in the butt to indicate the men he had killed. Beside it, the weapon’s socket bayonet shone, dusty but otherwise unmarked, in the bright light of the museum. By his memory, more than half of the twenty marks in the old wood of the butt had been gained, at least in part, by that bayonet, by the savagery of hand-to-hand combat. Turaya turned sharply away from the gleaming metal, which seemed suddenly to resonate like a finely-tuned bell in his mind. The stains, dull and black, on the grey steel were as real now as they had been all those years before. Tarnish and corrosion they might be, but he would always see them glimmering crimson.

He caught sight of another group, bending over a similar display cabinet, and turned in their direction. The man, stooped and elderly, was clearly older even than Turaya, and failing rapidly with it; his granddaughter – or that was what Turaya presumed, at any rate – glanced with concern to him as he pointed, falteringly, to the thin glass protecting the exhibit. As he strode slowly up to them, he noticed the man’s agitation; clearly, this was another veteran of the wars. Only a veteran could possibly react so. He quickened his pace, ignoring a slight twinge in his left knee, and doffed his hat as he came within polite speaking distance.

“Excuse me, sir; I couldn’t help noticing your reaction to this little display.” Turaya bowed slightly, returning smartly to the vertical and replacing his hat. “If you’ll pardon my curiosity, what is it that so interests you?”

Present Day, Copperby

The old man blinked and frowned at the gentleman before looking back at the case. His granddaughter turned and bowed respectfully and slightly oriental way, evidently a woman with some sense of cultural differences between the predominantly different outlook the Midlonians took on the world and the actualities of it.

“I do apologise, this is my Grandfather, he was a sergeant stationed here just after the Two-Emm-Double-you. He thinks some of his personal belongings are in this display.” she motioned to the case where the man was still frowning hard and skimming over the items in display, his hands now pressed against the glass as he stared longingly at them. She looked back at him for a moment before dropping her voice. “To be honest he’s starting to lose his mind, this being the 50th anniversary I thought he should come out here one last time. Visit the war graves, that sort of thing.”

The old man’s face contorted again as he stared. “Bona-cia!” He said suddenly. “The Bona-Cia we called it. God-awful area, filled with rice paddies and trees. Lots of trees.” he muttered.

-------------------------------

1954, Western Empire Trading Company Warehouse, Copperby

The WET as it was jokingly known as was the last of the great “Empire companies” There had once been four all denoting the points of a compass, but as the Midlonian Empire shrank slowly and inexorably from the 1920’s onwards, so too did the large consortiums which once made the glue holding together the trading of the Empire.

The WET was the last rather stubborn company left and they controlled all shipping in and out of Oyada as well as most of the food supplies, and it was here at the grand warehouses, once made in even greater times and reflected in their neo-imperial architecture.

But right now it was a scene of pandemonium. A baying mob with red banners with gold lettering held aloft were trying their best to stop the steam lorries from carrying the rice and grain away from the warehouse to the nearby dockland. A human chain had also formed to stop the nearby small steam locomotive and it’s own cargo of foodstuffs from leaving also, a baying booing crowd made up of every kind of person. Children, men, women, business owners, bankers, lawyers, even some members of local councils were part of the protest.

Trying to form a protective ring near to the warehouse were troops. Young fresh faces originally destined to fight the doomed war in the Freethinkers now found themselves not up against ghouls or vampires but people. Lots of them.

They weren’t properly equipped to deal with this matter either, they were issued with desert gear, lighter and more agile clothing along with the “body armour” that was fashioned out of sheets of metal and bowl helmets to combat the horrifying claws of ghouls, not the screaming children and hungry parents that actually presented themselves to them.

Most of the soldiers were using their CC-1’s, a type of sword issued to, again, combat things much larger than they in the Freestian Homeland as a way of shoving the crowd back with the flat of the blade. This was keeping them from storming the warehouse, but wasn’t getting the supplies out of there.

At the top of the warehouse, looking down was a nervous aging gentleman in a threadbare suit. He kept shaking his head and muttering, looking at a ledger before looking at the crowd below.

“Is there a problem?” a suit in the corner asked quietly.

“The crowds, there’s not enough to feed them because of the poorer harvest…”
“That’s not a problem.”

“It is!”

The cocking of a pistol behind the man in the threadbare suit caused him to stiffen. “Revolutionaries won’t be tolerated, Mr Needham.”

“I’m no communist!”

“Yet you’re working against the Empire, against the Western Empire Trading Company. Freestian Spy perhaps?” The suit persisted.

“Oh for goodness sake…” Needham said exacerbated. “Miss Fishbourne!”

A female voice replied somehow through the oak door. “Sir?”

“Order the train to leave, run over the crowds if they have to.” Needham said, his voice wavering slightly.

“Yes sir.” The voice said again.

“God have mercy on me.” Needham said before he pressed his hand against the glass window, the ledger dropping to the floor as several loud blasts on a whistle were followed by shrieks of a panicked and now angry crowd as the small locomotive began to forge it’s way out of the square and onto the tracks nearby, even if it meant over people.

Turaya stopped, the friendly and slightly perturbed smile frozen to his countenance, as the young woman explained her grandfather’s past. His mind, far from freezing up, began to drive itself in turmoiled, confused circles. Of course, Midlonians were still to be found in Oyada; trade with Midlonia was still important, and the tiny holding around Brackbridge – the one place the Oyadan Liberation War had failed to penetrate – was still Midlonian, and still a sore spot even after all the years of peace. Turaya had been there, had witnessed the tentative, halting steps towards accommodation and reconciliation between bitter rivals across the years. He could still remember the peace accords being signed, much as he could remember the moment when the entire mess started. And the build-up; oh great Sun in heaven, the build-up.

That he remembered best of all. Many hours of teaching students too young, arrogant and bred on visual entertainment to have the slightest inkling of war had drilled it into his head, so that to this day he could still quote, verbatim, the Advanced Level textbook. But here, finally, the wonder of modernity had overtaken him; the young woman pressed a small, somewhat worn plastic button (which looked suspiciously as though it had been removed from a 1970s fighter plane), and a crackly, somewhat disjointed voice began to emanate from a loudspeaker overhead. Opposite the cabinets, in the centre of the room, a projector screen suddenly came alive with images. Crowds, of men and women and children, surging against a huge stone block, like some absurdly-proportioned breeze-block plonked in the middle of the green Oyadan hills.

“Following the conclusion of the War of Freestian Liberation (generally known in Midlonian historiographies as the Second Moonstone War), rebellion was an option more frequently discussed among those Oyadans who had sought independence from the Midlonian Empire. The depletion of Midlonian manpower reserves, coupled to the catastrophic dent in Imperial morale following the defeat of the Freestian Liberation, were cited by many of the more hard-line Oyadan independence advocates (such as then-Major, later General Jizagu Ornua) as presenting an excellent opportunity for insurrection against Midlonian rule. Yet among the majority of the independence movement, enthusiasm for forceful solutions remained low; and among the general populace, either cowed by or indifferent to Midlonian rule, there was still less support to be had for the risky and inevitably destructive business of a coup. A popular saying on the subject ran: “why charge the lion when you can wait for him to die?”

The popular perception of a simmering cauldron of revolt bubbling at the centre of Oyadan consciousness at this time is, in short a fiction – until we arrive in the autumn of 1954. The unusually high rainfall during the spring and summer resulted in the worst failure of the Oyadan rice crop in contemporary living memory, and the widespread destruction of other, less vital crops such as flax and wheat. A hard year beckoned. This, in itself, was nothing new; and nobody, not even the most inculcated of independents, could seek to blame the Midlonian Empire for the weather. What they could blame them for was the decision to confiscate not less than ninety per cent of the Oyadan food harvest to feed the Midlonian homeland. The unfortunate Governor-General, Jeremy Harding, was to become a figure of many widespread and intensely vituperative addresses over the coming months, pilloried as “the butcher” and “the man who would be fed”, a title which carried a terrible bitterness when uttered by the dishevelled, starved crowds which were to gather with unerring reliability outside food warehouses and shops during the ensuing crisis.

All this was, in itself, enough to weaken the fear and apathy which could have sustained Imperial rule for some time to come. However, the spark which lit the fuse to rebellion would be struck, not in the capital, but in the mining city of Copperby. It was here that the infamous “Rice Wagon Massacre” took place, involving the deaths of some twenty-one civilians, most of them crushed to death by oncoming vehicles forcing their way past a protest ring. During his trial by a People’s Court for “crimes against humanity”, the then-overseer of the warehouse complex where the “massacre” took place, one Fidel Needham, was accused of having deliberately ordered the waiting train and lorries forward, even if this meant crushing the assembled crowds. His sworn testimony, delivered through an outburst of sobbing, that the Midlonian government had forced his hand by way of an agent, at gunpoint, was not enough to save his life…”

The voice drawled on, calmly reciting indubitable facts to the accompaniment of a flashing parade of black-and-white pictures, fuzzy and indistinct, as though viewed through an ever-so-slightly unfocussed lens, but Turaya needed neither the commentary, nor the images. His memory was failing, but far from gone, and he could still remember what had happened on that cold, frosty winter morning.

*****

The steam showed brilliant white in the cold air. Young Amon Turaya’s teeth chattered furiously as he watched it plume upwards from the little locomotive he had so often watched as a young boy, then drift lazily over the crowd as they shuffled, surged, begged and bayed towards the ugly stone of the warehouse.

He had only come to watch, taking his brother in tow. Anari Turaya was young, a mere twelve to his big brother Amon’s fifteen. By any standards, Amon would soon be a man; Anari would be a boy for some time yet. The Saturday routine was always the same for the two brothers; get up, wash, dress, fight a bit about something inconsequential, finally elect to go and do something. Today, as it had been since September, the “something” was to go and try to get a little extra food for the family. There wasn’t much chance of success, of course, but Anari was small for his age; he stood the best chance of managing to get some kindly stranger to part with an extra portion of meat, perhaps a little milk or a bit more rice. But Amon was cautious today, and intended to keep his brother well back. The crowd was larger than usual, and things seemed somehow different, though he could never, even into his old age, place precisely why with words. The smell of combat was in the air; the assembled multitude was becoming desperate, and where there is desperation there is rage. Even if he did not know it, some part of him did. So he kept a tight hold on his younger brother, and a close eye on the soldiers whose steel-clad bodies were now far more familiar than he had ever imagined possible.

The crowd was advancing again, banners flying, accompanied by the inevitable chants of accusation and fury, promises of retribution and threats of execution. Mingled with the hoarse, impassioned screams of the fighters, Amon picked out the wailing of the starving babies, the pleading of mothers and fathers alike whose concern was confined to getting just a little more food with which to feed themselves and their offspring. For them, anger over the high-handedness of Midlonia could wait until they had enough food to survive, assuming any of them did survive. Winter came particularly hard to Copperby, with the wind driving snow down onto the town from around the Watcher’s Peak, and fuel was already short, much of it going to feed the machines that kept local industries, such as they were, operational. Amon gazed, distractedly, at the bunker of the little tank engine in front of him. The fireman stared impassively into the crowd, ignoring or not seeing Amon’s wave. Maybe he could get a little coal, even if he couldn’t get any food today.

Unexpectedly, the fireman looked up, his head snapping round to look across the machine’s cab. When he looked back towards Amon, his expression was one the teenager had never seen before on a Midlonian: consternation, compounded by confusion. The man turned to look again, his hands gesturing wildly to the track in front of them, to the thronging mass of desperate flesh that blocked their path. Amon strained to hear what he was shouting to his driver, but could make out nothing above the jetting hiss of steam and the increasing bellows of the crowd. He turned to look down to his brother, to tell him to run as fast as he could, but his words were drowned out by the insistent, mournful shrieking of the engine’s whistle. A moment later followed the inevitable shriek of panic-stricken voices, as the engine bore down on their owners. Again Amon shouted to his brother, who now stood in the milling mob, frozen to the spot by fear and panic.

“Anari! Come on, we’ve got to go! Let’s get home! He seized his brother’s hand all the tighter and yanked him out of the path of the accelerating locomotive as it squealed over the tight bends in the road outside the warehouse and plunged down the hill, gaining speed all the time, and tried to guide the boy away from the warehouse, towards the alleys, to safety and space and light. But the pressing mass of bodies was whirling around him, a maelstrom of panicked humanity, unguided and uncontrolled. The maelstrom dragged Anari from his feeble grip with the ease of a tiger ripping the flesh from a deer, swallowing him deep in its embrace; and when Amon followed him, his path was blocked by yet more bodies, sweating, screaming, shouting – and falling.

Amon knelt down, momentarily forgetting the host surrounding him, and tried to help the man who had just collapsed before him. But the man’s eyes stared wildly at him, his face stretching and contorting with pain and shock as he took in his new surroundings, trying to say something to the boy who filled his failing vision. Amon did his best to listen, placing his hand on the man’s chest as he moved his head closer to his mouth, then closer still, straining to catch his words; to no avail. The man’s pointed, square-jawed head slumped to one side, his powerful neck muscles slack, eyes still wide and gawping. Amon tried slapping the man’s cheek. It was only when he gave up, after several seconds, that he noticed the cheek was red with blood, deep red, in a perfect imprint of his hand. He looked down, hesitatingly, and leapt from the dead man’s chest as yet more of his blood gushed from the great gash that had been torn into his ribcage by the heavy, clumsy blade of some vast sword. Beneath him, the man’s lungs wetly sucked their last convulsive breaths through the jagged holes cut into their sides by blades and punched into them by his sundered ribs, soft pink pillows bathed in bright crimson.

The fifteen-year-old Amon Turaya stood slowly, his clothes sticky with the blood of the murdered stranger, and ran. Behind him, more screams sounded across the valley, punctuated by the soft, wet snap and schlep of crushed bones and rent tissue.

*****

Turaya stared still at the grandfather, who continued to gaze, as if unaware of the other’s presence, into the glass case like a newly-lobotomised man. He blinked a few times, struggling with those of his memories that were still there and the bits his imagination was filling in for him for dominion of his waking thoughts. After a moment, he succeeded, and turned toward the young woman, slowly, a kindly expression planted firmly on his aged features.

“I see,” he said softly. “Yes, I see.” He looked at the floor, then straight into the woman’s eyes.

“Did he ever meet his enemy?”