A lot of people bridle when “the art of war” is mentioned— they feel that mass killing doesn’t deserve to be described as anything so fine as art. But perhaps they underestimate the wide variety of uses to which art can be put. Imagine a future after widespread plagues have reduced the United States to a jumble of city-states, autonomous enclaves controlled by very different groups of people; if one of those cities were run by artists, and they should find themselves invaded by an army, what might they do?
Pat Murphy’s first novel, published in 1982, was The Shadow Hunter. She lives in San Francisco.
Jax watched through binoculars as the army from Sacramento crossed the Bay Bridge to invade San Francisco. She could see the figure of a woman sitting on the freeway sign just past the bridge’s second tower. The Jaxdoll was waiting for the army to come to her.
“About two hundred of them, wouldn’t you say?” asked Danny-boy. “No problem.”
Jax took her eyes from her binoculars to frown at him. They were at the top of the Union 76 Tower, where they had the best view of the bridge. Danny-boy sat at the edge of the platform, legs dangling over the long drop to the street below. His khaki-colored cap was pushed back on his head, and his curly red hair was braided to keep it out of his way. He was Jax’s lover and head of the War Council of the Artists Collective. His binoculars were trained on the army, and he did not see Jax frown.
Jax glanced at The Machine, the other artist in her fighting unit, and The Machine just shrugged. He was busy with his equipment—monitoring the radio, listening to reports from other groups scattered around the city, and preparing to communicate with the army through the Jaxdoll.
The Jaxdoll was what The Machine called an automatic sculpture. It was an automaton, built to look like Jax and mimic some of her gestures. When The Machine had given it to Jax for her birthday the year before, it had been wired to snap its fingers in a characteristic Jaxian gesture and say in Jax’s voice, “If you’re going to do it, do it now.” Now, rigged with a radio transmitter and receiver, the Jaxdoll sat on a road sign above the freeway. The sign had once given directions to the Civic Center in downtown San Francisco. More recently, it had welcomed out of towners to the Summer Solstice Festival. Currently it held a banner that read “SACRAMENTO, GO HOME!”
Jax looked at the army again. Sunlight sparkled on burnished gun barrels. The army had ten battered jeeps loaded with troops and supplies, forty or so men on horseback, and a slow-moving transport truck. The soldiers were all dressed in green. The horses were nervous, and Jax watched the riders fight to keep them under control.
“What do you think?” Danny-boy asked her.
“I think this is going to be harder than you think,” she said.
This was not a new conversation. This was a very old conversation. For months she had been trying to convince Danny-boy that a war could not be a work of art.
Danny-boy was a pacifist who specialized in organizing large art projects. When rumors of Sacramento’s invasion plans had first reached the city, he had just finished two projects—wrapping the old Alcoa Building in aluminum foil, and repainting the Golden Gate Bridge in a lovely shade of sky blue. Danny-boy took on the war as a moral challenge worthy of an artist and called the first meeting of the War Council. At that meeting, the artists elected Danny-boy to head the War Council, put Jax in charge of weapons procurement and combat training, and put The Machine, a specialist in electronic gadgetry, in charge of electronic surveillance and espionage. With that, preparations for war began.
Three months later, the Government of Sacramento had sent the artists a message demanding that the City of San Francisco become a part of Unified California under the leadership of Sacramento, pay taxes, and generally stop making trouble—or face the consequences. By that time the artists had gathered or created weapons, stockpiled food enough for a two-month siege, and organized a military organization where none had existed before. The artists painted the messenger as blue as the Golden Gate Bridge and sent him home.
“I still say we should have blown up the bridge when they were halfway across. If they want to get you, then get them first,” Jax said. She had said the same thing at the first meeting of the War Council, and she had been outvoted. Most people did not trust Jax. They considered her art and her temperament to be dark and violent, and the city was not a dark and violent place. Danny-boy had argued against her, and the War Council sided with Danny-boy. People liked Danny-boy. They trusted him.
“They’re people,” Danny-boy said. “Stupid people, but they shouldn’t have to die just for being stupid. There aren’t enough people around as it is. Maybe back before the Plagues you could justify killing people, but now ...”
“I can justify it,” she said. “They wouldn’t mind killing us, so I don’t mind killing them.” She took her eyes away from the binoculars to scowl at him again. “You’ve been trying to convert me to someone with higher moral values for so long that sometimes you think you’ve succeeded. You haven’t. I have only one rule to live by: I like to live. No higher moral values.”
She returned to her study of the army. The foremost jeep carried no supplies. The driver was a young man, much the same as the men on horseback. The man beside him was another matter. His face looked like it had been chiseled from granite. His hair matched the gray of the gun barrels. The gold braid on his hat and the gold eagles on the shoulders of his green jacket glittered. His hat was cocked back, and he stared ahead with fearsome intensity.
A red, white, and blue flag flew from the jeep; it looked like a flag of the old United States, before the Plagues had decimated the population and divided the country. “Ugly flag,” Jax commented.
When the army was within shouting distance of the Jaxdoll, one of the riders saw her and waved to the men in the jeep. The procession stopped, and the rider rode back to confer with the granite-faced man. Then the rider went forward alone. He reined his horse in under the Jaxdoll. The Machine fiddled with his controls and made the doll lean forward a little, as if it were watching the rider. The Machine handed Jax a microphone.
“Hi, soldier,” she said confidently. “I’d like to talk to whoever’s in charge of this invasion.” The rider stared up at the doll, and Jax watched his face through the binoculars. He was young—maybe eighteen or nineteen.
“Who are you?” he called.
“My name’s Jax,” she said. “I’m here to speak for the Artists Collective. We run this city, remember? We’ve been running it since the Fourth Plague. And we don’t like visitors unless they’re invited. Who are you?”
“Come down from there, and I’ll take you to the general.” His voice was sharp. He sounded as young as he looked. An army of youngsters, recruited from the Central Valley, she thought.
“Tell the general to come here,” Jax snapped back. She watched the rider frown and study the supports for the sign, looking for an easy way to climb up. “You’d look pretty silly trying to get me down. Just tell the general that I’m alone and harmless.”
He wheeled his horse around and trotted back to the jeep for a lengthy conference with the general, the man with the stone face. The general frowned throughout the discussion. Then the rider backed off, and the jeep drove forward.
“Get down from there, woman,” the general growled without hesitation.
Jax grinned. The Jaxdoll did not change expression. “I can talk to you just as well from up here,” she said. “I’m here to give you a message from the Artists Collective: Go home. You aren’t welcome here. We aren’t open for a festival right now, and we aren’t welcoming visitors.”
The granitic lines of the general’s face shifted; he smiled. “What do you plan to do if we don’t go home?”
The Jaxdoll leaned farther forward. “We’ll declare war. And then we’ll kill you one by one.” The Jaxdoll shrugged. “We don’t want to kill you, but we will.”
“Get down from there,” the general snapped. The Jaxdoll did not move.
“You’ve been warned,” Jax said, and she turned the microphone off and looked at Danny-boy. “Well,” she said. “Looks like we’ve got a war to fight.” Danny-boy was watching the army through his binoculars and grinning.
She looked through the binoculars and saw two soldiers manhandling the Jaxdoll down from the sign. They loaded her into the back of the general’s jeep and the procession moved on,
“There goes The Angel,” Danny-boy said. She looked up in time to see the silver hang glider soar overhead. The Angel, the only member of the War Council’s air force, did not wave. His gaze was focused on the army. He swooped over the soldiers gracefully, but not too low. He dropped three smoke bombs. As the bombs fell they left trails of smoke—red, yellow, and blue. The army scattered and the horses spooked. For a time the men were hidden by the clouds of smoke. The Angel soared away from the sound of rifle fire.
“Good shot,” Jax said. She watched through the binoculars as the smoke cleared and the army regrouped. The soldiers moved on, following the freeway and watching the skies. They took the Civic Center off ramp, and Jax lost sight of them behind the skyscrapers of downtown.
The city was an unnerving place for a first-time visitor. San Francisco was as strange as the combined efforts of several hundred artists, working together for fifty or so years, could make it. Colt Tower was painted like a giant phallus, and the downtown area was a riot of abstract neon, powered by a wind generator atop one of the taller buildings. The Transamerica Pyramid was caught in a spiderweb of colorful climbing ropes (that was one of Danny-boy’s first projects), and a giant spider was frozen in mid step halfway up one face of the building (that was one of The Machine’s first projects). Near the Pyramid a group of artists who called themselves the Royal Order of Masons was constructing a sphinx. On the other side of town a group called the Secret Order of the Druids was building a replica of Stonehenge for the next Summer Solstice Festival.
At the Civic Center off ramp, where the army would exit the freeway, a neosurrealist group headed by an artist named Lily had set up a herd of plastic horses, scavenged from saddlery shops in the city and the suburbs. With great care Lily had mounted a human skeleton on each horse, wired in a riding posture. She had rigged the skeletons so that they moved in the slightest breeze, shaking their heads and moving their jaws with great animation. It was a very ominous, very effective display.
Just beyond the horses was a group of kinetic sculptures. A tyrannosaurus watched the street with tiny piggy eyes and opened and closed formidable jaws. A pterodactyl perched on a streetlight, flexing its wings and making a strange rasping cry whenever the wind blew. Zatch, the artist who had sculpted these, had plans to reconstruct the entire history of the world in kinetic sculpture, starting with the age of reptiles.
Jax, Danny-boy, and The Machine listened to reports from the other artists. “The horses are spooking,” said a voice from the radio. “They don’t seem to like Lily’s display. Hell, one guy just shot three of the horses.”
“Everyone’s a critic,” said another voice, which Jax recognized as Lily’s.
“They’re heading for the Civic Center,” continued the first speaker. “Someone just shot a hole in the pterodactyl, but he’s still flapping his wings.”
“They’re in the plaza now,” said a new voice. “Some of the guys on horses are scouting around. They’re checking out some of the houses.”
Jax could hear the sound of distant gunfire. “These guys shoot at everything that moves,” said the voice on the radio. “Crazy.”
“The flag on City Hall is coming down. They’re putting up the ugliest flag I’ve ever seen. We’ll have to do something about that.” Jax recognized the voice—it was Catseye, a fiery young painter. He sounded ready to climb the roof of City Hall and remove the flag that moment.
“They’re parking the jeeps in front of that ugly concrete building on Golden Gate Avenue,” someone was saying. “They don’t have much taste in architecture. That’s the ugliest building around.”
“That’s an easy building to defend,” Jax commented to Danny-boy. “Smart move.”
Danny-boy marked the army’s position on the map he had fastened to a clipboard, then tucked his pencil behind his ear. He looked calm and confident. “Years from now,” he said, “they’ll remember this war. They’ll tell about how a band of artists held off an army without firing a shot. We’re making a legend, Jax. A project even bigger and better than repainting the Golden Gate.” He grinned at her.
Jax leaned back on her elbows and wondered why he was not wearing the handgun she had issued him. “Hey, Danny-boy,” she said. “Now that we’re at war, do you suppose you could wear your gun? On the off chance that you might have to fire a shot?” His belt, holster, and gun lay with his water and other supplies on the far side of the roof. She brought him the gun.
He looked a little sheepish, but he did not lose his grin. “This is a war of symbols,” he said, “not guns.”
“Wear the gun,” she said softly. “Please.” He put it on, his grin a little crooked but still in place. “In case you’ve forgotten,” she said, “you can’t shoot anyone with a symbol. And there’s a war on.”
It was night. Fog crept through the wide streets and narrow alleys of the city. The tatters of foil that still clung to the Alcoa Building rustled in the gentle breeze from San Francisco Bay. Somewhere far away a fog horn bellowed.
The sentry on the corner of Turk and Market streets yawned and stretched.
Jax watched from the shadows behind him. He was looking out into the night, facing the outside world from which danger would come. Jax had come up through the sewers. She was alone. The Machine was in the van that served as their mobile headquarters, and Danny-boy had joined Catseye for the first evening of fighting. Jax preferred to work alone.
The sentry lit a cigarette. The flame cast a brief light on his face. He was young; he looked tired. Jax sympathized, just then, with Danny-boy and his insistence on minimal violence. She was glad she did not have to kill this youngster. He could have been one of her brothers, drafted to fight in a war. He did not deserve to die for that.
Jax slipped the dart into the blowgun and aimed at his neck, just above the collar of his shirt. She preferred the blowgun to the tranquilizer rifle; it was quieter and just as effective. She fired and ducked farther back in the shadows when he grabbed his neck. He was fumbling for his rifle, starting to lift it as the tranquilizer took effect, and he fell. He was down.
She stepped from the shadows and laid him carefully on his back. She crossed his arms neatly on his chest and snapped open the pouch of indelible skin paints that she carried on her belt. With her left hand she brushed the hair away from his forehead. She worked quickly and carefully, using the red paint and the black. Simplicity, she felt, was best at this point. In bold lettering across his forehead, she wrote dead in red. On his right cheek with black paint, she signed by jax. Between his folded hands she placed the death certificate, written by Danny-boy and lettered by Animal, a skilled calligrapher. The paper said:
Certificate of Death
Please consider yourself removed from combat.
Look at it this way—we could have killed you.
If you don’t quit fighting, we will.
Signed,
Danny-boy
War Chief
Artists Collective
Jax plucked the dart from the sentry’s neck, picked up his rifle, and faded back into the shadows.
“Aces,” Jax said to The Machine. “I got one.”
He nodded. She had found the van at the planned rendezvous point. The Machine was wearing headphones and monitoring communications among the artists. Mama B, a stout older lady who painted murals on buildings, was also wearing headphones. She had been training with The Machine for the past four months.
“I’ve been listening to the men guarding the Jaxdoll,” Mama B said softly to Jax. “She makes them real nervous.”
“Good,” Jax said. “They’ll be even more nervous tomorrow.” She was impatient, eager to leave the safety of the van for the darkness and excitement of the streets. “Where’s Danny-boy?” she asked The Machine.
“Catseye and Danny-boy are still out. So far, they’ve taken two sentries out by the Pyramid. Lily’s squad got the ones guarding the horses. She let the horses loose, and she’s bringing one home with her. A white one, she said.”
“Good,” Jax said. “Real good.” She sat on the floor of the van for a moment, then slipped out the door again, too restless to stay inside. She could hear the sound of distant gunfire, and she wondered what the soldiers were firing at. All day they had been firing at shadows, at their own reflections in windows, at moving sculptures, at nothing.
Jax heard the sound of running feet and faded into the shadows. Danny-boy ran from the shadows, two steps ahead of Catseye. Catseye was laughing as he ran, and the tiny drops of fog sparkled on his curly black hair. Jax stepped from the shadows, and Catseye ran to her. “They never knew what hit ‘em,” he said, still grinning, always grinning. “We got four.”
All in all, on the first night of the war, the artists got fifteen soldiers—each one labeled dead, autographed, and left with a certificate of death. Among the artists, there were no casualties.
* * * *
In the morning Jax talked to the general through the Jaxdoll. The Machine parked the van up by Twin Peaks, and Jax sat in the open doorway, looking out over the city. Puffs of red and black smoke rose near Market and Castro streets; she guessed that an ambush was underway. The morning sun glittered on the silver wings of The Angel’s glider as it soared over the streets of downtown.
“Hey, soldier,” Jax said into the microphone. “Get the general over here. I need to talk to him.” She waited, watching the smoke drift over the city.
Over the headphones, she heard a door open. “That you. General?”
“You have something to say to me?” The general was not happy.
“I just thought I’d suggest that you leave town,” she said. “This is your second warning.”
“Another warning? Why would we leave now? Because you have painted the foreheads of a few of my men?” The general laughed—an abrupt, forced sound.
“We’ve killed fifteen of your men,” Jax said. “You have only two hundred men. At this rate, in less than half a month you’ll all be dead.”
“You have killed no one. You’ve painted on the foreheads of a few men. My men are laughing today about these paintings. They are—”
“They are dead men,” Jax said, and she made her voice cold. “Dead men, General. And war is nothing to laugh at.” She could hear the rustling of clothing; someone in the room was moving restlessly. The guard perhaps.
“You fight a very stupid war,” the general said.
“We’ve never fought a war before,” Jax admitted. “We’re improvising.” Danny-boy grinned at her from across the van.
“My men have real bullets, woman,” the general said. “When we kill a man, he’s really dead.”
“Are you suggesting we should do the same?” She raised her voice. “What do you think of that, soldier? Do you think that tonight we should really kill people?”
The soldier did not speak. “You have nothing more to say to me?” the general asked. She heard him stand.
“I guess not,” she said. “The war goes on.” She heard the general close the door behind him. “Hey, soldier,” she said to the guard. “What do you think of all this?”
There was no answer.
After a moment she turned off the microphone and pulled off the headphones. “I wish the soldier had said something.” she said to Danny-boy. “I wonder if he’s one of the ones we got last night.” Danny-boy shrugged. They pulled the door of the van closed and drove off to set up temporary headquarters somewhere else.
* * * *
The war went on. The Angel showered the city with leaflets. On one side of each leaflet was a prose poem by Ralston, head of propaganda; on the other side, it said surrender before it s too late.
The Video Squad triggered a remote projector that displayed a pornographic movie on a white wall on one side of the Civic Center plaza. The movie was periodically interrupted by commercial announcements in which Danny-boy explained why the men should surrender.
Jax worked alone for the most part, finding soldiers who were alone or in pairs. At dusk on the third day of the war, she was prowling around the edge of downtown when she spotted a man sitting by himself at one side of a large plaza. She caught him from behind with a tranquilizer dart and went to label him dead. Beside one of his outstretched hands was a notepad and a pencil. He had been drawing the buildings of the city; his style was crisp and clean with sharp lines and hard edges.
She dragged him into the shadows, took his weapons, painted his forehead, and waited for him to wake up. “Hello,” she said when his eyes blinked open. “I’m Jax.”
His eyes opened wide. His hand went quickly for his gun, then came away from his empty holster slowly. His eyes focused first on the gun in her hand, then on her face.
“What . . . what do you want? Are you ...” He stopped, struggling with the words, then reached up to his forehead.
“Yeah, you’re dead,” she said calmly.
He struggled to sit up, swaying just a little. She reached out to help him, but dropped her hand when his eyes widened and he tried to edge away. “What do you want?” he tried again.
She glanced down at the sketch pad. “You do much of this?”
The soldier chewed on his lip and looked down at his hands. He shook his head quickly, an unconvincing denial. His expression was panicky, and he did not meet her eyes.
“Good composition,” she said. “Nice feeling to it. I like it.” The soldier looked startled. “When the general gives up, come and join us.”
“The general will never give up,” he said.
“Well, then, when you give up on following the general.”
“The general kills deserters.”
She frowned at him. “If you desert, how can he kill you? He’d have to catch you.” The soldier was watching her as if she were crazy. “He’s just a man.”
The soldier did not answer. She heard distant gunfire and the dull explosions of smoke bombs, and she stood up, taking his rifle with her. “Think about it,” she said, and she ran away into the twilight shadows.
* * * *
On the fifth day of the war, temporary headquarters were in the old Pacific Telephone building. Headquarters were wherever Danny-boy was, and they were always temporary. Before the fighting began the artists had set up living quarters in several different locations. All important facilities were scattered: the chemical warfare lab run by a skin painter named Tiger was on the other side of town; the repair shop for electronics was elsewhere; food was stored in a number of places.
Midway through the fifth day Gambit, a musician of the natural noise school, started his automatic bells. Gambit had spent months experimenting to find buildings with the best resonant quality and scavenging to find gongs and bells with the best tone. His favorite was a gong that he had scavenged from a Buddhist temple and hung in a brick warehouse with a high arched roof. The sledgehammer that struck the gong was powered by the controlled fall of an old safe filled with sandbags, linked to the hammer by a complex set of pulleys. The hammer struck the gong every five minutes, and when the gong rang the entire city block reverberated with a sustained middle C. Gambit had scattered twenty or so bells throughout the city, set to ring according to a precise mathematical formula. Jax thought that the clash of notes sounded like nothing so much as distant explosions.
Jax came in from the street with her head aching from the constant clamor of the bells. In the basement room that served as headquarters the bells were muffled, but she could still hear them. She wondered what they sounded like in the general’s rooms.
Danny-boy was studying a map that he had pinned to a wall. One hand was against the wall, propping him up. He smiled when he saw Jax, but his smile had a jittery look about it.
“They’re getting worried,” he said. “The soldiers are traveling in groups of two or three now.”
“I know,” said Jax.
“The general is mad and he’s yelled at three men this morning so far. The guys that aren’t dead yet don’t trust the guys that are dead. They won’t go on patrol with the dead ones.”
“How do you know that?” She looked over his shoulder at the map and could make no sense of the marks he had made on it.
“Phone system,” he said. “Wherever the lines are still up, The Machine can listen in on anything within earshot of a phone. There are still a few phones around.” He turned from the map and put one arm around her shoulders. “Did you know that you’re a ghost? You can make yourself invisible—that’s how you manage to get so many men. And I’m some kind of god-hero too.”
“We’re starting to get to them.”
Danny-boy nodded. “They seem to think we’re immortal or invulnerable, since they still haven’t shot or caught any of us.”
“Yeah? Well, don’t let them fool you into thinking the same thing. We’ve been real lucky so far.”
“I thought that was skill,” he said. He grinned, and for a moment he did not look as tired.
“Mostly luck. Those guys are good shots—I’ve seen them practicing. But the city spooks them, and they don’t know where to aim.” She shrugged. “All it will take is one stray shot, and someone on our side will be a casualty. Don’t fool yourself.”
“I know better,” he said. “I know you aren’t a ghost.”
“Did you get any sleep last night?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “Not much. I went out with Catseye and Zatch. I wanted to keep an eye on Catseye.”
“Get any sleep today?”
“A nap. It’s hard to sleep with those bells going.”
“Do you know how long it will take those damn things to run down?”
“Maybe a week,” he said.
“Come on,” she said, and she took his hand and led him away from the map down one flight of stairs to a room still deeper beneath the city. On the floor was a straw-tick mattress and a few blankets. She could still hear the bells, but they were a distant annoyance now. Danny-boy lay down beside her and put his arms around her. He was frowning.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing new,” he said.
“You worried now?”
He shrugged. “Just tired,” he said. “That’s all.”
She kissed him and snuggled closer. “We’ll be legendary,” she said. “Now go to sleep.”
She held him until he fell asleep in her arms.
* * * *
The war went on.
Tiger, working alone in the war chemicals division, made three batches of a new kind of smoke bomb, one that released an hallucinogenic gas.
The Angel dropped a new set of leaflets: on one side was a picture of a group of pretty women; on the other side it said join us.
Ralston began propaganda broadcasts through the system of loudspeakers left from the Summer Solstice Festival. Mama A, a blues singer with a rich contralto voice, was the main DJ. “Soldiers,” she said in sweetly chiding tones. “Why do you keep fighting? There’s no need for that, no need at all. Put down your rifles and come join us. We’d be glad to have you. Don’t you understand that you’re free men?” By the end of the second day of broadcasting, the soldiers had found all the speakers and destroyed them at the general’s orders.
Jax, working with Zatch and Catseye, laid a trap near Mission Dolores Park. They made a convincingly gruesome open grave by dressing department store mannequins in army green, splashing them with red-brown paint, and tumbling them into a shallow trench. “Toss a little dirt on top,” Catseye suggested. Zatch heaved a few shovelfuls of dirt over the dead mannequins, and Jax turned one dummy’s head so that its eyes did not stare glassily skyward. The trench, which was left over from a fountain-building project abandoned in favor of the war, extended for about ten feet past the buried mannequins.
Jax stood over the grave. Her tranquilizer rifle was slung over one shoulder, the rifle taken from the soldier she had caught sketching over the other. “Looks convincing,” she said.
Catseye waited in the tower of a nearby church. Jax and Zatch waited on the low rooftop of an old store, lying almost prone behind the high facade that faced the street. Jax lay her head on her arms and tried to relax. About ten of Gambit’s bells were still ringing, but she had grown accustomed to their sound.
“You look tired,” Zatch said. He folded his arms and rested them on the low facade. He was a burly man with strong hands and an unshakable confidence in himself.
She shrugged. “Everyone’s tired,” she said.
He nodded and kept an eye on the street. “Danny-boy’s been looking bad.”
“Yeah,” she said, turning her head to stare at him. “And I’m sure the general is tired and the guys we’re going to ambush are tired and you’re tired.” She shrugged. “Danny-boy’s okay.”
“There,” Zatch said, pointing at Catseye’s tower. Catseye was waving—a patrol was coming. He waved three times, indicating three men. Jax moved forward and came to a crouch just behind the high facade of the store. Zatch followed. Jax let the three soldiers pass the store, then fired a burst of bullets just behind them. They whirled and stopped in the center of the street. They could not see her.
“Drop your guns,” Zatch said. His voice echoed and made his exact location impossible to pinpoint. The soldiers conferred, a small huddle of frightened young men. Jax could not hear what they were saying.
“Drop them,” she said. “This is Jax and I’m getting impatient.”
A thin youth with red hair was the first to place his rifle in the street, put his hands up, and back away. The other two followed. All three were marked dead.
Jax stood and covered the soldiers while Catseye climbed down from his tower, and he covered them while she and Zatch dropped to the street. “That way,” she said, jerking her head down the street toward the park.
The redhead led the way, stumbling once or twice over potholes, walking awkwardly with his hands high. “Are we prisoners?” he asked over his shoulder.
“We don’t take prisoners,” Catseye said. He narrowed his black eyes and showed his teeth wolfishly. Jax frowned; she had warned him against overacting.
The redhead saw the grave at that moment. He stopped in the middle of the alley, his hands drooping from their position above his head. He turned, his mouth a little open, working as if to say words that did not come. “But,” he said. “You don’t ...” He could not manage to say anything more. He looked at Jax, who was standing just behind Catseye. She held the rifle casually in the crook of her arm. The kid’s gaze darted past her to Zatch, who stood just behind her holding a tranquilizer rifle. No escape.
“Stand over there,” she said, jerking her head toward the open section of the trench.
“But you can’t . . .” he was saying.
Catseye shoved him and he moved. The other two, both younger than the redhead, let themselves be pushed. They stood beside the open trench, looking to him for guidance, looking to Jax for sympathy. “Hands up,” she said. “Now.” Zatch fired with the tranquilizer gun.
The soldiers fell with maddening slowness into the pit. Jax stood over them as Zatch retrieved the darts. “They thought they’d had it,” Jax said.
Zatch nodded and folded the soldiers’ arms gently across their chests. He climbed out of the pit, and the three artists headed back for the city center.
* * * *
A squad of poets staged a raid on the men guarding the jeeps. The Angel had dropped several of the new bombs in that area, and the men did not put up much of a fight. The poets labeled them with extremely short verses: dead by Fred; death by Seth; kill by Bill. The poets sustained one injury—a scat singer was hit in the arm by a ricocheting bullet and had to be patched by the medic.
The artists captured their first deserter that same day. The poets found a young man without a rifle wandering out by the ocean’s edge at Land’s End. They brought him back, and the artists established a halfway house for deserters at some distance from temporary headquarters. At that point temporary headquarters were in a warehouse building on the waterfront.
“Hey, General, your men are giving up on you,” Jax said to the general via the Jaxdoll. “Don’t you think you should leave our city soon? When are you going to give up?”
“I don’t give up,” said the general.
“Will you give up when your men leave you?”
“A few may leave. The others will not. They fear me too much.” Jax could hear the general lean back in his chair. He sounded as if he were smiling. “One of my lieutenants thought he could leave me. That was in Los Angeles. I tracked him down and shot him in front of the others. My men don’t leave me.”
When Jax shut off the microphone, she found Danny-boy and persuaded him to take a break and have a cup of chicory tea with her. She wanted to talk to him about the general’s unwillingness to give up, about a possible change in tactics. The artists continued to specialize in harassment and improvisational ambush. This strategy continued to be successful, but the fighters were beginning to show signs of strain.
A small kerosene stove had been set up in one of the ground floor offices. Jax and Danny-boy were waiting for the water to boil when Lily dragged in with two men. One man was limping; the others were smudged with soot. Lily, a slender wiry redhead, was frowning, and Jax could see the track of tears through the soot on her face.
“Hey, Lily,” Jax called to her. Lily stopped in the doorway, “Is it that bad?” Jax asked.
Lily nodded. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse, tired. “We were over by the Golden Gate Bridge,” she said, “just checking up on the guards there. The Angel was on patrol above us, and I was right near the approach to the bridge, down in the place that the brush has grown up.” She spoke as if she had been going over this story in her mind, waiting to tell it to someone. “I saw these soldiers coming along the approach. Three of them. All painted dead. Young men, all of them. They didn’t have any weapons.” Her voice was getting softer and softer. “The bridge guards ... the guards stopped them. It looked like the guards were telling them to go back. The three dead ones tried to push past the guards and there was a bit of a fight. One broke from it. He started running for the bridge.” She pushed her hair back with a dirty hand, frowning and shaking her head. “The Angel dropped a smoke bomb—I think he was trying to spoil the guards’ aim. I couldn’t see clearly. But I think they shot that soldier. The other two escaped under cover of the smoke, I think. But that kid—I think they shot him.” She was shaking her head wearily. “The rest of my squad was back farther; they didn’t see anything—just caught some of the smoke. But I think that they shot that kid, one of their own.”
“Maybe they figured that he wasn’t one of theirs if he was wearing our mark,” Jax said slowly. “And the general doesn’t like deserters.”
“You look like you could use some rest,” Danny-boy said gently.
Lily nodded and went on past the doorway. Jax watched her go and wondered if one of the deserters was a thin redhead whose uniform was marked with dirt from an open grave. “We’re going to have to kill the general,” she said.
He nodded. “I think you’re right.”
“No,” she said. “Not just label him dead. We have to kill him.”
Danny-boy shook his head. “He just needs to know that we can get him.”
“He won’t scare,” she said softly. “That won’t work. Not with the general.”
“Why are you so sure about that?”
“I understand him better than you do, Danny-boy,” she said impatiently. “Believe me, he won’t scare.”
“Why don’t we try it and see?” He leaned back in his chair and watched her face. “Can’t we do that?”
“You haven’t been out there much lately, have you?” Jax’s hands were clenched on the table in front of her. “The general stays in the most heavily guarded area. And they use real bullets, remember?”
“I’ve been out there,” he said softly. “I remember.”
“Sometimes I think maybe you’ve forgotten,” she said. “Or maybe you’ve started believing the stories that the soldiers are telling, maybe you believe I’m a ghost and you’re a god.”
He reached across the table and took one of her fists in his hands. “I don’t believe that.”
“You’re having too good a time with this,” she said. “You think it’s a game. It isn’t.”
“I don’t think it’s a game.”
“Then what the hell do you think? Why shouldn’t we kill the general?”
He was looking down at his hands, frowning. “You’ve got to realize that violence and death aren’t the only forces that can change the social order.”
She shook her head, watching his face, started to speak, then just shook her head again. She wearily rested her head on her hands. “I don’t have to realize that. I don’t have to realize anything.”
“We’ve started it this way,” he said. “We have to keep going or it’s all for nothing.” He spoke as if he were trying to convince himself. “If we kill him, that doesn’t end it. They’ll just send another general next year. We need to make him run.” He shrugged. “I’ll go in after him.”
“You wouldn’t make it past the first sentry.”
“I might surprise you.”
“Yeah, You might make it all the way to the second sentry.” She shook her head again. “I’ll go. I’ll help change the goddamn world. But I want you to know that I’m not doing it because I think it’ll work. I’m doing it because you think it will work. Okay? And if he doesn’t give up then, we’ll have to change our tactics.”
She turned away before he had time to argue.
* * * *
The deserter was the soldier Jax had caught sketching. His name, Jax learned, was Jason.
“So,” she said to him, “you’ve joined us. You still sketching?”
He nodded warily.
“Can I see what you’ve been doing lately?”
He handed her his notepad, and she flipped through the pages. On one page she found a sketch of her own face. She was grinning, and she wore a rifle slung over one shoulder. He had scrawled a title beneath the sketch— Ghost Lady.
“I’m not a ghost,” Jax said.
He shrugged. “Maybe not,” he admitted.
“Believe me. I’m not. In fact, I’m looking for a way to get into the general’s quarters when he’s asleep. And it can’t involve walking through walls or becoming invisible.”
He studied her face, chewing his lip. “You going to kill him?”
“I’ll kill him the same way I killed you.”
He shook his head, and his expression was grim. “You should really kill him. You can do it.”
She studied his face and shrugged again. “Can you draw me a map of the sentry posts around his quarters?” she asked him.
He nodded and started drawing. His map was detailed and complete. He knew the time that the guards changed, and he advised her that the best time to attack was about three in the morning when the guards were tired. She listened carefully, took his map, and rolled it neatly.
“So you’re not a ghost,” he said then.
“Not yet,” she said. “If this information is wrong, I may become one.” And she ran away to kill the general.
* * * *
Catseye and Zatch had volunteered to create a distraction at one edge of the area occupied by the army, using smoke grenades and fireworks. At two in the morning they waited with Jax, resting for a moment on the flat roof of a store about a half mile from downtown. Three of Gambit’s bells were still ringing—a sweet high note, a deep bass note, and the middle C from the Buddhist gong.
“It’ll be fine,” Catseye said. Zatch looked tired, but Catseye was still cheerful. He was grinning, looking out toward City Hall. Only one of the neon lights of downtown still glowed—a red stripe that ran down the side of one building and corkscrewed up another. “You’ll do great,” he said to Jax.
She did all right. She went in through the alleys, then up the backside of the building.
The night was dark. No moon. The air was heavy with the smell of smoke. Jax caught the sentry on the roof from behind, labeled him dead, slung a rope down the side of the building, and climbed down to the general’s window. She could hear shouting and muffled explosions in the distance, see the billowing smoke rising, but the street below her was quiet.
She let herself in quietly through the open window. The general was sleeping soundly, but she clapped a rag soaked in a concoction of Tiger’s making over his mouth and nose. He struggled for a moment, then relaxed.
He looked older now than he had looked on the bridge. His gray hair was rumpled; his skin was slack and wrinkled. He frowned, even in his sleep.
With the red paint that had become her trademark, she labeled him dead and signed by jax on his cheek. Once, she heard the sentry at the door cough. In the distance she could hear gunfire. But that was all. She left through the window, climbed down the back of the house, and ran away through the alleys. The smell of smoke was strong.
Catseye and Zatch were late reaching the rendezvous point. Jax sat in the shadows in the corner of a rooftop, listening to the distant gunfire and wondering where they were. She heard them before she saw them. Zatch’s voice was a soft, encouraging monologue. “Not much farther. Come on. Just a little bit farther. It’ll be all right.”
She met them halfway up the stairs and helped Zatch lower Catseye to sit on a step. Catseye’s eyes were half-closed. By the dim light of her flashlight Jax could see how pale he was. The right leg of his jeans was soaked with blood. His thigh was wrapped in a crude bandage, made from Zatch’s shirt. “He caught a bullet,” Zatch said softly. “He caught it in the thigh. He’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Jax?” Catseye’s voice was a whisper. She leaned over him and put a hand on his shoulder. She could feel him trembling. “Jax, I want to paint ... I want to paint the battle we just fought. The colors—the colors were great.” He stopped for breath- “Fireworks against the darkness. I want to paint that.”
“We’ll get you home,” she said. “It’ll be all right.” She straightened up, her hand still on his shoulder. “Headquarters is only about a mile from here. I’ll get help. You stay here with him.” Zatch nodded. She hesitated for a moment, then took her jacket off and draped it over Catseye’s shoulders. “We’ll get you back,” she said to him.
She ran away and she came back with Doc. She rode the white horse that Lily had captured on the first night of the war, galloping through the dark streets with Doc riding behind her and clinging to her waist. The streets were quiet; even the distant shouting had subsided. Dawn had touched the eastern sky with an angry red glow.
The stairwell was dark. “Zatch?” she said softly. She could hear him breathing in the darkness.
“I’m here,” he said.
“Doc’s here. How’s Catseye?” She was climbing the stairs, hurrying toward him.
“Too late.” Zatch was sitting on the stairs, his broad shoulders hunched forward, his head bowed. He looked up at her, and she could see the smudges of soot and blood on his face. “He died not long after you left. Nothing I could do. He just died.”
Doc stood over Catseye’s body. He lifted Jax’s jacket from him and put it around Jax’s shoulders. Only then did she realize that she was cold.
Jax took Catseye home on the back of the white horse. She walked with Doc and Zatch, leading the horse. At headquarters (temporarily located in an old apartment building), she left Doc to take care of the body and told Zatch to get some rest.
She found Danny-boy and The Machine in what had once been the recreation room. “The general wants to talk with you,” Danny-boy said as she walked in the door. “He’s been waiting for a while. We were starting to worry.”
Jax took the microphone and pulled on the headphones. “Hello, General,” she said. Her voice sounded very tired.
Through the headphones she heard a rustle of clothing as the general shifted position, the clink of a bottle against a glass, and the gurgle of liquor being poured. “I’d offer you a glass,” he said. “But I think the gesture would be wasted.”
Jax visualized the old man sitting in an easy chair in his room. She thought he might be wearing his jacket. He would be leaning forward a little, a glass cupped between his hands. Her lettering was on his forehead and cheek.
“When are you going to give up and pull out, General?” she asked him wearily. “Three quarters of your men are dead; the others are worried. You’re a dead man yourself.”
“I don’t give up,” he said. “I never have.” His voice was slow and considering. “I don’t know how.” He paused, and she imagined he was taking a sip of whiskey. When he spoke, his voice was soft. “You realize that when I catch you, I’ll have to kill you.”
“Why?”
“To prove that you’re just a woman, nothing more. My men think you are a ghost. Or a goddess. You’re not a woman to them. You’re a mystery to them, and they are beginning to fear you more than they fear me. So I’ll have to kill you. I think you understand.” She heard his chair creak as he leaned forward. “I think you know the need for blood and the need for fear. You understand that I must kill you.”
“You won’t catch me,” she said.
“Ah,” said the general. “You sound so sure. Perhaps you believe your own legend. Maybe you think that you are more than mortal.” Jax said nothing. “My men once thought I was more than mortal.” His voice was softer, a little blurred. Jax wondered how many drinks he had had. “They know now that I’m not. Now that they have seen this mark on my forehead. But even when they thought I was more than I am, I never made the mistake of believing the stories. I always remembered that I could be killed. You must always remember that.” His voice was almost warm, the voice of an uncle giving advice to a nephew. “Remember that I can kill you.”
“You won’t catch me, General,” she said. When she reached up to turn off the microphone, her hand was shaking. She stood slowly and walked over to where Danny-boy stood.
“We can’t scare him,” she said. “We have to kill him.” Her hands would not stop shaking. Even when Danny-boy took her hands in his, she kept trembling. “I could have killed him last night. Then Catseye would have died for a reason.”
His grip on her hands tightened, and she realized that he did not know about Catseye. “Catseye died in the raid last night,” she said. “And the general’s still alive.” She did not know she was crying until Danny-boy reached up to brush a tear from her cheek. “If I had killed the general, then Catseye would be dead for a reason. As it is, he’s just dead.”
“He died for something,” Danny-boy said. “He—”
She shook her head and freed her hand from his grasp. “No,” she said. She stepped back from him. He watched her, his hands open at his sides.
“Jax,” he said.
She shook her head, unwilling to listen. Danny-boy laid a hand on her arm as she started to walk away. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“I’m going to kill the general,” she said, and she kept walking. She went to the door and was surprised to find Danny-boy still at her side. He put a hand on her shoulder, and she shrugged it off. He took her hand. She stepped back, jerked her hand out and up to break his grip. Her hands were in fists. “Don’t get in the way, Danny,” she said.”You grieve for Catseye your way. I’ll do it mine. Don’t get in the way.” She turned from him and ran into the darkness.
It was morning, but the streets seemed very dark. The city smelled of smoke, and she could hear gunfire, always gunfire. The darkness around her seemed like the darkness of a dream, where some things are very clear and others are vague and ill formed, as if only half-imagined. She was very tired, and the shadows seemed to move in the empty streets. She ran through the alleys and climbed from rooftop to rooftop. She stopped when she saw a sentry in the street below, climbed down, and caught him from behind with a blow from her billy club. His face was very pale, a pale oval in the half-imagined darkness, and for a moment he looked like Catseye. He had the same dark curly hair, the same pointed chin. She hesitated, distracted, confused.
The man’s replacement caught her from behind. His shouts brought a patrol, and the patrol took her prisoner. She was tired; she did not fight. She looked at them—five young men, three labeled dead—and shook her head slowly. They stood around her, keeping a respectful distance, holding their rifles ready. The man who searched her did it quickly, then stepped away. They were afraid, she knew. She was tired, but they feared her.
When she rubbed her forehead, her hand came away streaked with blood. Her other hand ached. When she opened it, she found that she had gashed the palm. She had a vague memory of falling and catching herself with that hand, but she could not remember when or where. She rubbed at the cut, trying to rub some of the blood away, and she was surprised to feel pain. They marched her through the streets.
The soldiers took her directly to the general. She waited in the living room of the house, under guard, while a soldier went to fetch him. He came to the room quickly. His gray hair was rumpled, as if he had been asleep. His shirt was wrinkled, and one cuff was marked with a coffee stain. He looked tired. “So, you’re Jax,” he said. He stood with his hands locked behind his back. The word dead was still on his forehead. She stood in the center of the room, soldiers on both sides, and did not say anything.
He studied her for a moment. She stared back, her face carefully neutral. “Can you speak, Jax?” he said.
“I can.”
“Make that, “’Yes sir.’ “
She studied him for a moment and considered her options. It was a moment of decision. “Why?” she asked.
He studied her for a long moment. Still smiling, he reached out and slapped her across the face. She did not dodge far enough to avoid the blow.
“You don’t need to ask that. You’re not stupid. You’re not armed, and my soldiers are all around you. Say, ‘Yes sir.’ “
She considered him carefully. “Yes sir,” she said.
“Good,” he said. “Very good.” He glanced at the soldier beside her. “She’s unarmed?”
“Yes sir!”
“Very good. You and your patrol will be commended for this, soldier,” the general said.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Guard the door,” he said.
The soldiers left, and the general still sat in the chair, his hands on the arms of the easy chair, studying Jax. His eyes were shrewd. She met his gaze and continued to consider her options. They were few and unacceptable. She could attempt to overpower him and die trying to escape. She could stay here and die.
“Sit down, Jax,” said the general, waving a hand at a chair. “Would you like a drink?” He poured her a drink from the bottle on the coffee table without waiting for her reply.
She took it from him and sat down. “Thanks,” she said cautiously.
“You’re welcome, Jax.” He smiled, amused. “You’re very welcome indeed. I had been wondering when my luck would return. It seems it has.” He swirled the drink in his glass. “Now, the question is: what should I do with you?”
“I thought,” she said slowly, “that we talked about this once before.”
He nodded slowly, obviously enjoying himself. “That’s true; we did. But that was a different situation, wasn’t it? You would never have said ‘Yes sir’ then.”
“True.” She sipped the drink. It was whiskey; not good whiskey. She winced a little when it touched a cut on her lip.
“Make that ‘Yes sir,’ “ he said.
“The soldiers aren’t here,” she said. “Why put on a show?”
He studied her and his grin broadened. “Perhaps for my private amusement?”
“General, if you’re going to kill me, then I’d rather not amuse you first.” His grin had penetrated her weariness. “If you’re not going to kill me, then we have something to talk about.” She knew that he could order the soldiers back to beat her, and in that moment she did not care.
He laughed and slammed his left hand against the arm of the chair. “By God, I like you. So angry, so arrogant. But I may kill you anyway.” Still smiling, he studied her. “However, if you pledge your allegiance to me, I might not.”
She kept her face still, hiding her surprise. How strange, she thought, how very strange. An option she had not considered.
“I need to know some things,” he said. “For example, where are your headquarters?” He sipped his drink. “That would do for a start.”
“Headquarters? That changes from day to day.” She sipped her drink and tried to think of a way to turn this option into a way to survive.
“Yes, and where were they last?” He watched her face. She did not speak. “I am waiting, Jax.”
She shrugged. “They’ll be changed by now. Yesterday, they were in the Garden of Eden, a club on Broadway. By now ...” She shrugged again. “You see, General—that’s the beauty of this way of fighting a war. We’re guerilla fighters on our own land. Temporary headquarters can be just about anywhere. We carry our weapons with us.” She watched him over the drink. “So even if I told you all I know, you’d learn nothing of value.”
“I could torture you until you’d willingly answer all my questions.” He leaned back in the chair, studying her. “I won’t do that. I think you’re right—the information you gave me would be useless by the time we pried it loose. I could hold you for ransom. I wonder what you would be worth to them.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Or I could persuade you to work for me. I would prefer to keep you as you are—a ghost on a white horse.” He grinned. “But I want that ghost working for me.”
She took another sip of the drink. “If I said yes, what would you want me to do?”
“If you say yes, I will assemble the troops and you will surrender to me publicly and vow allegiance to me. If you say no, we will have a public execution,” he said. “A hanging on the steps of City Hall.”
She liked living. She sipped the drink, and even the bad whiskey tasted good. The room was filled with a silence that made her back feel cold and unprotected. Far away, muffled by the walls, she could hear one of Gambit’s bells ringing, but the sound did not touch the silence in the room. What difference would it make if she pledged her loyalty to the general? None. It would mean nothing. The words would just be words, words like “Yes sir.” She liked living. She swirled the bad whiskey in her glass. Danny-boy would say the words were symbols. They were fighting a war of symbols. Danny-boy was crazy. He was wrong. She liked living.
“Hanging, I think, is one of the most dramatic ways to execute a prisoner,” the general said. “It’s really ideal. There’s the anticipation while the stage is set—the men build the scaffold in a central place and everyone watches it take form. There is the execution itself—the moment of silence when the prisoner is led forth, the touching ceremony when the blindfold is offered, when the noose is adjusted around the prisoner’s neck. Then the sudden crack when the trapdoor drops open and the moment of heart-stopping pathos when the prisoner dances in the air, struggling against death, but losing. And then, the memory lingers. The shadow of the scaffold stretches across the plaza, a constant reminder of death. I’ll leave the scaffold in place until the war is over.” He nodded, satisfied with his plans. “Most dramatic,” he said. “Most effective.” He smiled and sipped his drink. “You could learn a little about dramatic staging, you know. That business about painting my forehead ...” He touched the mark, acknowledging it for the first time. “That would have been much more effective if you had arranged for a witness, even one witness. I plan to arrange for a full audience for you.”
“I should have killed you that night,” Jax said with sudden passion. “I could have.”
“You would have done more good for your cause by wounding me in public than killing me in private. If you had killed me, you would stage your show for an audience of one—the soldier who found my body. You have to plan these things better. For you I plan a grand spectacle.” He shrugged easily, leaned forward, and filled her glass again. “In some ways, you have disappointed me. You don’t take this art business far enough,” he said. He sipped the whiskey and nodded slowly. “You take the easy way. You don’t risk enough.”
She was alert now, awake and glaring at him over her drink. “What the hell do you know about it?”
“I know that you draw foolish lines. You are willing to die for art, but you aren’t willing to kill for it.” He leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “A good death can be a work of art. So can a good execution. You should learn by my example.”
She finished her drink. “I don’t believe I’ll have a chance,” she said coldly.
He nodded and smiled pleasantly. “True enough,” he said. “You’ll die tomorrow.”
* * * *
That night she dreamed of dark rooftops and dark streets. She rode on a white horse, and the general rode beside her. Somehow, in the dream, she did not know if she was fighting with the general or against him. As they rode, the general kept lecturing her about the nature of art and death until she wanted to scream. She dreamed of darkness and the smell of smoke. She dreamed that Danny-boy was with her, there in the room. “I guess I’m going to die,” she said to him. He handed her a red rose and smiled. “Do you know how to tell if a work is art?” he asked her calmly. In the early days of their relationship, they had talked endlessly about the nature of art. “True art changes the artist. The artist puts something into the work and he changes. That’s how you tell.” He handed her a red rose, and he vanished in the smoke.
She woke to a rhythmic pounding, like the hoofbeats of running horses. In the thin light of dawn, hammers pounded as soldiers built the scaffold where she would die.
She went with the soldiers willingly when they came to take her. She saw no point to struggling. Not now. The plaza was quiet. She walked through the center of the open space to the City Hall, through the ranks of soldiers. They stood quietly at attention. She saw some she thought she recognized—the sentry she had marked on that first evening, the soldier who reminded her of Catseye. So many; so young. She was glad she had not killed them.
The sun shone dimly through the haze of smoke and morning fog. She could feel the morning breeze on her face. The bright banners flew over the plaza, snapping in the wind. They were smudged with smoke, a little tattered. Even so, they were a fine, brave sight. The city was a beautiful place, she thought, such a beautiful place.
The general waited for her at the scaffold. “You can still change your mind,” he said softly. “I can use you.”
She turned to look at him. Strangely, she did not hate him. He seemed smaller now than he had on the bridge. She had seen the coffee stain on his cuff, seen his face when it was relaxed in sleep, listened to him slur his words when he was drinking. She did not hate him.
She shook her head quickly once. She did not speak. She climbed the crudely made steps to stand on the wooden platform and looked out over the soldiers.
The general bound her hands behind her. He offered her a blindfold, but she refused. She wanted to watch the banners fly over the gathered soldiers. As she watched, a man in the front ranks crossed himself.
The general put a rope around her neck and adjusted the knot. He stood beside her, his hand raised, ready to signal the man who would pull the rope to release the trap door and kill her.
She saw a movement on the top of the old Library Building on the far side of the plaza. She heard the sound of a single rifle shot. She saw a blossom of blood on the general’s forehead; he swayed a moment, then fell. The stiffness went out of him as he fell; he crumbled, folded. His body struck the steps and rolled down. Rolled more like a sack of old clothes than like a man.
Jax looked up in time to see the assassin. Danny-boy stood above the crowd on the edge of the old Library’s facade. His red hair was bright in the morning sun. The light glinted on the barrel of the rifle. She could not see his expression, not at that distance. For an instant the world seemed frozen. The colored banners stood still; the smell of smoke hovered in the air.
One soldier fired quickly, and Danny-boy started to fall. He fell against a stone carving on the Library’s facade, clung for a moment, then fell. She watched from so far away, unable to move. The soldiers moved—some to the general’s body, some to surround her, some raising their rifles to fire at Danny-boy now that he had fallen.
“Gentlemen.” The Machine’s calm voice boomed from a speaker, hidden somewhere. “The plaza where you stand was planted with explosives before your arrival. The charges are wired to explode at my signal.” It was a lie, Jax knew. But it was a well-told lie, and the soldiers believed that the artists were capable of anything. The plaza was suddenly silent again. “We will sacrifice Jax if that should be necessary. We will welcome those of you who wish to join us peacefully, and escort the others over the bridge. No one will be hurt. Please put down your weapons. Now.” The last word was delivered with uncharacteristic force.
The soldier who shot Danny-boy was the first to put down his gun. The plaza was quiet. Danny-boy lay where he had fallen. His head lolled back, and the hole in his chest was a deep rich red.
The general lay tumbled at the bottom of the steps. The hole in his forehead was the same rich red as the hole in Danny-boy.
Jax stood on the scaffold. The soldiers laid their weapons at her feet, then backed away, as if frightened. She stood, swaying a little, her hands still bound behind her. The numbness was gone, and her head was starting to ache. “Well,” she said to the soldiers. “Who won?” She looked at Danny-boy and looked at the general. “They’re both dead, so who won?” She stopped for a moment, looking across the plaza. “A good death,” she said to no one in particular, “is a work of art.” She started to laugh, but the sound caught in her throat.
The banners fluttered and snapped in the morning breeze. The clip-clop of hooves on pavement echoed across the plaza. The Machine rode the white horse through the open space. He stopped in front of her, and she studied him for a minute, wondering if he was part of the long dream from which she was emerging.
The Machine swung his leg over the horse’s back and slid to the ground. When he untied her, she smiled at him with unaccustomed sweetness. “It’s over,” she said. And then her knees gave way beneath her, and she sat on the edge of the scaffold. She took his hand and held it warm in hers, and they sat on the wooden platform and watched the banners fly in the wind.
She looked over at the general. Through the blood on his forehead and cheeks she could still read the words by jax. She looked out at the flying banners and the white horse. The horse’s harness rattled when it moved its head, searching for a few blades of grass on the trampled earth. Most of the grass had been pounded into the ground by soldiers’ feet. Little was left.
Other artists had come. They were moving through the crowd of soldiers, dividing them into groups—men who would stay, men who would leave.
Jax shivered and The Machine took off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. “We spent last night talking about it,” The Machine said. “Zatch volunteered, but Danny-boy insisted that he would be the one.”
Jax watched the soldiers milling about the open space. The smoke hung in the blue sky, and the tattered banners fluttered bravely. The white horse cropped the trampled grass. She would paint this someday. Someday she would paint Catseye huddled in the darkness at the top of a long stairway. She would paint a portrait of the general sitting in an easy chair, with an empty whiskey bottle at his elbow and the word dead written on his forehead. She would paint Danny-boy and the general on the steps of City Hall, leaning against each other, stained with blood that was the same rich shade of red.
Later she would paint. Now she would look at the city with new eyes and wait for the smoke to clear and the blood to wash away in the winter rains.