ROCINANTE

After the shooting of their immediate superior and being ordered by General Omar Bradley to await the fallout at their barracks ...

The rabbi, Lt. Stein, and Major Richard Blaine go where the remainder of the Spartan 300 reside ...

ROCINANTE

“I love the light, for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.”

 - Og Mandino 

 

Rabbi Stein drove us to our barracks. I just wasn’t up to it. Besides, Sentient and I had some talking to do.

I looked up from our jeep into the night sky. The fiasco was over. Its devastation lay round about us. 

The clamoring mind and heart stilled, almost indifferent, certainly disembodied, frail, and exhausted. The buildings we passed were hushed, obliterated. 

Up in the sky, like a crater from some distant cataclysm, was the leering moon.

I hoped it had enjoyed the show. I hadn’t.

I flicked my eyes to my hands on the dash, then to Lt. Stein. I saw blurred portions of my long fingers and still bruised knuckles. 

I saw the rabbi’s face looking like an early black-and-white movie. I saw a sprawl of black sky with unfamiliar stars in it. I was accustomed to the stars of Sicily or New Orleans ... not "jolly” old England.

‘Melodramatic as always.’

Lt. Stein murmured, “You know, one day your best interests and the Dark Passenger’s will not coincide. Then, what, Rick?”

‘I will miss you terribly.’

He looked at me closely. “She just said something snide, didn’t she?”

“Yes, Amos. She did, and she prefers being called ‘Sentient.’”

“She wants to be called an adjective?”

“Like you, she likes to play with words.”

‘I am nothing like your friend nor any human.’

‘And I had such hopes.’

‘Through binoculars the Crab Nebula, in the constellation Taurus, looks to your species like a smoke ring. It is a star in the process of exploding. Light from its explosion first reached the earth in 1054; it was a supernova then, and so bright it shone in the daytime. Now it is not so bright, but it is still exploding. It expands at the rate of seventy million miles a day.’

‘Your point?’

‘Photographs of the Crab Nebula taken fifteen years ago seem identical to photographs of it taken yesterday. Its growth barely discernible in actual time … like your wisdom.’

‘Very not funny.’

‘But apt.’

If Rabbi Stein survived this hellish war, would he remember me? Everyone remembered my face differently from meeting to meeting. 

But then, when you, yourself, try your hardest to recall someone’s face, or the look of a place, you see in your mind’s eye some vague sight in filmy inaccuracy. It is dark. It is insubstantial.  It is all wrong.

We remembered our living days wrong.

Like the house whose curb Rabbi Stein pulled beside was wrong. It fit not a bit with all the shotgun dwellings on either side of its towering eeriness. If the House of Usher had a rich maiden aunt, this structure was it.

‘The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering, Blaine.’

‘Maybe. But I think blessed are those who give without remembering and take without forgetting.’

‘Talking with … Sentient, Rick?”

“Yeah, she’s chastising me. Again.”

‘If you think that was what I was doing, then you are more dense than I believed.’

We got out of the jeep slowly. My muscles were tense for an attack. Our barracks gave off that kind of feeling … as if all your old sins were waiting in the shadows to leap out at you demanding compound interest for your long unpaid debt of committing them.

I stopped at the foot of the long arch of the porch stairs. “The Army paid for this?”

“Not hardly, Rick. You said this place was courtesy of the ‘small, still Voice’. I can believe it. The M.P.’s don’t even see this place. They walk by it as if it were an empty lot.”

“Really? How about the Spartans? They see it?”

“Oh, yes. In fact, only they can enter.”

“With what kind of key?”

“None. The door opens as each one approaches. Come. See for yourself.”

I paused before climbing the steps and tapped my head. “Sentient has held me prisoner inside here for so often, for so long. I won’t recognize three-fourths of my own men, Amos.”

“But they’ll recognize you. The first time you met each of us was when you rescued us from a certain death situation. Even Cpl. Reese respects you … though he would deny it and slug me for even saying it.”

A flash of a lean, leonine face came and went in my mind.

Amos tugged on my shoulder. “Come on, Rick. I don’t know how much time Bradley will give us.”

“He promised ….”

“I thought you were cannier than that, Rick. The promises of a general are like a tiger’s smile: not something you can depend on.”

I kept forgetting that I looked older than who I really was … thanks to Sentient. Inside my head, my heart, I was still twenty years old. Naïve: but naïve as much as a vicious French Quarter had allowed me to be.

Which was still too naïve for others to depend on my judgement.

It was not for me to choose the path of another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.

‘But you do not have that luxury, Blaine. Fortunately, for you and your Spartan 3oo, you have me. Now, climb those stairs and meet those who depend on you to be wiser than you are.’

I climbed … and almost climbed out of my skin when the huge, varnished rune-covered door opened on its own volition at my approach.

“Cue the spooky music,” I managed to get out of a fright-choked throat.

Amos slapped my left arm. “I knew you’d be unfazed at it.”

‘I masked your jerk of fright from him. All of your Spartans need to believe you are more than you are … even your friends.’

I walked into the cavernous manor and Sentient kept me moving though I would have frozen dead in my tracks. It was like walking into a landscape cursed by an eclipse.

A wall of dark shadow came speeding at Amos and me. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like a thunderous tidal wave. It roared up at us.  It slammed the summit of our conscious mind and knocked it out.

It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of an interior moon, hauling darkness like plague behind it. I have since read that the wave of an actual eclipse shadow moves at 1,800 miles an hour.

Language can give no sense to this kind of speed.

‘The Eclipse of Time/Space finds no room for comprehension in the minds of Man, Blaine.’

I felt the deadness race up my left arm. I felt the appalling, inhuman speed of my own blood surge through my veins. Amos and I saw the eerie, numbing wall of shadow coming and screamed before it hit.

Or I would have, but Sentient clamped my lips tight. ‘You must appear a living legend to them, my Blaine.’

I was saved from collapsing into a mound of terrified flesh by a sneering voice from within: “Daddy’s home, guys!”

‘That was Reese, And, no, I will not detail his sordid past for you, any more than I will describe the profane crimes of Wentworth who stands beside him. The two of them have become cronies of a sort. Jackals band together.’

Amos weakly laughed. “Even totally yourself, and you still didn’t flinch, Rick. You are like David of old.”

‘More like Moses .., but that is yet to come.’

‘As I recall, David was hated and persecuted by King Saul as I am by Eisenhower.’

‘Point taken.’

Time for me to introduce the real me to these men, all older than me.

“Missed me?” I asked the assembled twenty Spartans milling in the huge Victorian foyer to a sputter of laughter.

Sgt. Savalas broke from their ranks and walked up to me, pumping my right arm as if hoping to get water from it.

“When Sturges dragged you and Amos away by those M.P.’s, I got to admit I was a bit worried. What happened to the captain?”

Amos sighed, “Old sins claimed him.”

Suddenly, Cloverfield was beside Theo without me noticing him doing it … but then, he was a former MI6 agent. “They have a way of doing that, mate.”

There was even heavier laughter coming from the rest of the Spartans.

‘Not my carefully crafted, out of Time vessel, but this riffraff are your Rosinante, Blaine.’

‘Not funny.’

‘But apt.’