The Chivo Doctrine (AMW)

[Beddgelert]

Drafodon, formerly Virovitica, Republic of Tsagija

"That's right, class! And what do we do with Christians?"

"Burn them!" replied the newly-arrived Geletian primary school children in chorus.

"Very good! And what is Christianity - is it something you're born with, or something you choose?"

"You choose!"

"Yes! So Christians..."

"...are... are... made out of wood?"

"No, Berwyn, remember they start out the same as us, so they're not made from wood."

"Oh! Oh! They want to be burned!"

"That's right, Cerys! Christians choose to be burned! Somebody has to go in the wickerman, or it wouldn't be much of a ceremony, would it?"

"Burn them! Burn them!"

Today there would be a school outing to Celea -once Lapolis- to witness the unveiling of a victorious statue of Front Commander Camma, the woman who had over-seen Operation Convalescence, Beddgelert's decisive counter-punch against the Grand Duchy of Tsalland. Her likeness in thirty metres of concrete, iron, and bronze appearing in the capital of the defeated state may seem designed to provoke the vanquished, but as the victors saw it, well, woe to them.

While the Celtic children were safely out of Drafodon, the army moved in, and the school trip would return only through a checkpoint in a wall of prefabricated concrete slabs dividing the county along ethno-cultural lines, with Slavs on one side and recent Celtic settlers the other.

Akink quietly announced the building of five hundred new Celtic homes between the Durcodi border and the Sava, and sent in the militia to field local objections.

Republic of Regnia, Beddgelert

Quite unlike some state properties in the Federal Democratic Republic -including the eclectic and colourful government epicentre of Portmeirion and the former palace in Trevenya that remained Europe's largest building- General Head-Quaters North was not outwardly much to look at. In fact to the casual observer it rather closely resembled many a druidic lodge as may be found throughout the forests and mountains of Geletia, cut into a natural rock formation and situated apart from urban civilisation. But where the typical hermitage would have ended, perhaps with a shrine built from bones of the fallen, this structure went on, plunging under ground to trace its sinuous corridors throughout an entire hillside.

Deep within his claustral lair, Front Commander Cailtain stood in contemplation of a vast and open expanse. His gaze lingered on one spot, then another, as he regarded in detail a portrait of that hospitable sea in whose western shallows his command dabbled and whose limitless grains, mighty rivers, and tempting tank country he had come to covet.

Hermitage or headquarters? Cailtain's own reputed religious fanaticism further blurs the line on the Northern Front.

Set so near to the great Danu port city of Pessinos, the apparent seclusion of Cailtain's head-quarters was remarkable. But it did not preclude his close following of last year's dangerous events on the river's Ysguborion distributary, even though he had not been allowed a hand in their direction, at least not beyond the mundanities of administration. The men were his, the machinations were not. Cailtain's name would be associated in some smaller way with any triumphs -or disasters- that may result from their designs, but original thinking on relevant matters was the preserve of such great men as Chivo and Adiatorix.

And so Cailtain did not think so much as he dreamed. His fantasies were those of a warrior without a war; a general, honoured as one indispensable third of a military triarchy yet denied a cause so romantic as the south's Return to Galatia or an enemy so reviled as the west's lately vanquished Archduke. What was his purpose if not to plan the liberation of Ancyra from the Christian Empire or to punish the outrageous misdeeds of the mad Antonis? To defend the Republic against the laughable supposition that Llewellyn's heirs could muster all of two or three divisions, defeat Kezo, and invade Beddgelert? Or was it that the withered rose of the Shield may still have thorns, and that Beddgelert need maintain an army for no other purpose than to tend the high king's pride? Yes, yes, we are like exiguous Muslims and fear your legions! See, we have an army that waits on your attention!

Bah. It was no little matter for a commander of men, a Geletian warrior, to have no blood-fed laurels and no battles to fight. But to have no cause? No ambition at all? To stand on guard simply for the sake of standing on guard? Oh, when Kezo finally dies perhaps Regni soldiers will be first to cross the Pyretos in some ceremonial link-up between Federal and People's Republics, a showy event that historians may call the Geletian Cysylltiad. But even that seems politicians' work, a waiting game with a peaceful conclusion. There is fighting even now in Tsagija, there are terrorists to be sought in Macedon, and if still we have this army to spare then there is sacred ground in need of rescue from Byzantine occupation, to say nothing of the Pope's increasing animation.

But we do claim Wyclyfe's territory as our own. Tradition may have precluded our making the assertion that, in the southwest, the Shield ends upon the left bank of the Chwyrniad, or Durinos, or Mans, or whatever else it may be called, but only because to maintain such would have been to admit that Drawschwyrniad, or Transdurinos, is Shieldian as seagull shit... what of it now? Let them have the MapGelerts' little vale, Beddgelert would lose nothing!

Cailtain thought that he knew better than to speak his mind on this matter. Ambitions that could run contrary to Portmeirion's grand plans were best never discussed.

Never discussed, but perhaps acted upon without warning and when the time was high?

Ffynnonnewydd, People's Republic of Transpureto

Kezo's capital was by some measures the fifth largest city in the Geletian world, the municipal area of which it was the centre being home to more than one and a quarter million people. Sprawling Ffynnonnewydd hung with the grand architectural shadows of the late Llewellyn's short-lived attempt to plaster over the considerable cracks of his defeat in 1982, and of the brief Communist spring of '89 when Kezo's revolution found favour with a lately-victorious Hotan and enjoyed the fleeting sympathy of the Federal Democratic Republic. Here, with red flags flying and the nation's only long-range air defence missile regiment on guard, it was just possible that an elderly Kezo, one-time Colonel in the royalist military and now de facto commander of the Geletian People's Army of the Transpureto, had lost touch with the realities beyond.

Beyond, his country held only twice Ffynnonnewydd's population again across its entirety, two and a half million peasants and small-town labourers every bit as isolated from the world beyond as was Kezo in his capital. Fifteen thousand soldiers and sixty thousand conscripts drilled for war, be that in prospect against the tiny Principality, the giant Federal Democratic Republic, or the even greater Shieldian Empire, but did so with empty rifles and wooden models, instructed by political commissioners who guarded fuel and ammunition against theft, sabotage, or waste, and waited for one external enemy or other to compel the release of such resources to the troops.

The military parades that Kezo saw through failing eyes now passed between the famous Regni Gates with only tokens of mechanisation amidst ranks of dismounted muscle, and the crackle of gunfire was less likely to be heard on military shooting ranges than on national television, even then only in the gradually reducing evening window during which aired any broadcasts at all, power-supply permitting.

He made the PRT a castle, inspiring imitators to his west with three quarters of a million pillboxes, ten to every soldier. Myriad firing positions! Kezo, the dying Gaul, impossible to corner!

But starving, and low on ammunition, too. And then - one tormentor casts down crumbs, another turns his back. Akink was ushering across the Pyretos a rare convoy of essentials scarce in the Transpureto, including more than the usual quantity of gasoline, which Kezo had (repeatedly) requested in order to boost independent agricultural production through greater mechanisation. And the Shield was withdrawing the Seventh Shock Corps, presumably to tackle an unexpectedly resilient Chingiz.

[Beddgelert]

The term Thrace wasn't used officially by any Geletian authority to describe its territory or that of a neighbour, and the historic region remained disputed by three governments that currently administered it in part (and more that did not). In any language, the region was troubled.

During the Geletian Principality an infant Sopworth had been dragged about the hills of Thrace by his storied parents as they lived in the field with a partisan band, ignoring national borders in hit-and-run raids against Llewellyn's hated Constabulary and its inquisitorial Roman advisors. Macedon had been largely subordinate but ultimately autonomous of Princely authority, too, and though glad of the reforms enacted by first Celert and then his son and successor, was lax in dealing with the partisan threat, prefering to see the Cornitouti ravage the northern and eastern sides of the frontier. Fearful that the crackdown requested by Trevenya might redirect Igovian attention against Salonika and never imagining that the rebels might actually succeed in toppling the comparative might of the Principality, the Greeks had by their inaction penned their own writ of execution.

And now, with the Principality consigned to history, Sopworth would come to make good on that document.

The world at large wondered how far Nate's war with the Pope would spread, but in the Saimonas the martial question was one of race. Celts, Greeks, and Slavs, when would their claims be settled?

Komotini

Comotini to approximately half of its population, the Celtic speakers, Cornitouti in the main. This was the administrative centre of the Republic of Macedon's Thracian division, a city of thirty thousand Greeks and as many Geletians at the heart of Cornitouti Chieftain Sopworth ApGraeme's long-standing irredentist claim to no little Macedonian soil.

Komotini had escaped recent inter-communal violence relatively unscathed. Perhaps it was because the relatively equal population balance in the city had lead to greater mingling and a lessening of resentment, or perhaps it was because neither side felt sufficiently strong to challenge the other? Or perhaps it was because the Greeks were terrified of the Celts, and the Celts were busy making ready for something more than raising placards and throwing punches.

Not so very far away in the global scheme important men gathered in Rome. The prospect of peace in Europe troubled Celtic hearts, and the medicine was war. Here the Cartreflu mustered in response to the carnyces, which sounded quorum amongst the clan elders meeting in secret and seclusion amongst a little grove upon a low hill in the outskirts and voting for action. Republican authorities in Thessaloniki and Akink were as oblivious as the Greek residents of Komotini, only the alarmingly heavy state of armament in which the city's Celts took to the streets suggesting that perhaps Dinasbrenos knew more.

One, two, three hundred Geletian men came out of their streets and converged on the Greek quarter, angrily calling out off-duty Greek policemen and on-leave soldiers from their homes as they advanced on the telephone exchange, the radio station, the police barracks, and the city hall with ancestral blades, Great War rifles, sporting bows, and home made explosives amongst more than a few machineguns of the military reserve.

A wicker man, five metres tall and assembled from pieces apparently hidden in private homes, lumbered through the streets in the mob's midsts, and a rusted old minibus was driven through the front doors of an orthodox church, which had been flung open by a number of Celts broken off from the main crowds. Minutes later the building exploded from inside, and the carnyces continued to shriek.

[Beddgelert]

Arawn, Republic of Sygenia, Beddgelert

"The Celtic nation remembers when there were no Slavs in Europe."

"When there were no independent Greek states.

"And when there was no Christianity."

"We knew happiness."

"To insipid Christmen it may seem that Geletia has been one of the principle forces acting on the continent."

"That we have done well for ourselves.

"And that we have been a great power."

Chivo turned to face each of the hooded figures surrounding him as they spoke their short pieces, faces masked and voices almost musical, their accents obscure and surreal as the stone-clad setting. One speaker followed seamlessly from another and the Chairman of the Council of State maintained a respectful silence.

"The fattest hog in the sty may be said to have done well for himself."

"But he lives within walls of another's construction.

"Amidst filth."

"And in the company of pigs."

"He is destined for slaughter."

"But not we."

There was a considerable pause before Chivo spoke up.

"Nine tribes have watched through aeons the Gauls driven from east and west, humbled and trained in north and south. But our renewed fight with the Slavs has yielded historic triumphs and restored a Celtic order known only for one brief moment in fifteen centuries. I have come to ask- must not this herald the dawn of Annhangnefedd Annwn?"

Chivo seeks the council of the druwides.

"Hir yw'r dydd."

"A hir yw'r nos."

"A hir yw aros Arawn."

Long is the day and long is the night, and long is the wait for the lord of the otherworld.

"But soon comes the first day of summer."

"And let then the rejoicing be double."

Chivo was dismissed from the sacred place with reason to smile, though of course he did not. There was bloody work to be done.

Danusirmion/Vukovar-Syrmia, Tsagija

Amongst the pioneering Geletian settlers of Tsagijan soils may naturally be found some of the most determined true-believers in the pan-Celtic cause. It was also natural, perhaps, that a great many of these die-hards should be women. Operation Convalescence had been directed by Front Commander Camma, Geletia's 'warrior princess', as she was known to more than a few admirers abroad, and of course in Geletian society the success of a self-confident woman, even in a military context, barely merited special notice in any case.

Now it was the turn of recent settler and greengrocer Escenga Nantoigna to settle the fate of another nation. She, like the rather more famous Chivo, had received the blessing of at least one druid, though while the priestly elders had found a way to frame the Chairman's ideas as their own, thus rubber-stamping them, Escenga's militant ideas were entirely fed to her by Danusirmion's senior holy man, whom she had known since before the war and the construction of the settlements. She'd also left notes amounting to a biography of her short life with her favourite local bard and heard reassuring divinations from one of the community's vates before starting what should be her last journey.

Near her now empty home (which would soon be filled, for the waiting lists outstripped even the frenetic pace of construction in the legally-dubious settlements) Geletia's national river, the Danu, was met by one of its many tributaries, and here as darkness fell (and thus, for the Geletians, a new day began) a solitary figure slipped down the bank to the water's edge, sword in hand. Rudianos, look favourably on her mission and treat well the souls of the innocent. Escenga's Clan Commander heaved the polished blade's several kilos of hand-crafted steel towards the river's middle and watched in silence as the valued ornament struck the sacred water and disappeared, much as the destiny-bound young woman, who was at that moment climbing aboard the train to Moridunon.

Tolosa, Republic of Regnia, Beddgelert

Through the main street of this 'great little' city a flatbed lorry rolled, coming to a halt in the northern outskirts, from where could be seen a distant Wyclyfe. Strapped to it was about one third of a giant likeness of Front Commander Cailtain. Hm mused those who passed by and recognised both the statue's subject and its similarity to that raised in Tsagija to honour Front Commander Camma for her leading role in the defeat of Tsalland. What has he ever conquered?

Port of Thessaloniki, Republic of Macedon

Beddgelert had spent most of the post-revolutionary era bracing for a multi-fronted war of national destruction against over-land neighbours Tsalland, Byzantium, and the Shield, expecting that the Papacy should be behind such a Christian conspiracy and that the support of France also would count against the Celts, to say nothing of internal Princely enemies whose menace was imagined to be far greater than its reality proved. The revolutionaries could, they thought, bank on support from nowhere beyond their own tribal federation.

Such was the environment in which Akink had been able to sell austerity to the masses- in any case excess was Princely, and when offered to the people was usually a bribe obscuring deeper abuses. What other nation on earth had been so utterly surrounded and outnumbered by those who believe that the core values held by its people meant that they deserved an eternity of torture? Beddgelert had to save and stockpile for hard times to come, and if it was unpleasant, well, it wasn't the Social Democrats' fault that Europe was full of thieving Christian imperialists would could fall upon the Geletians at any moment... unless you believe that we should be doing something about them? Thus national service had remained in effect with few complaints, and government spending had been kept below revenues despite muffled calls for welfare benefits akin to those known across the Niebelung frontier as currency reserves were fattened for a wartime feast.

'tis the season.

Chief amongst Macedon's ports and one of the most important transshipment points for the Saimonas at large, Thessaloniki was busy even by its own imposing standards. More than twenty thousand tonnes of product was delivered daily to the oil and gas terminal, and every week several large vessels arrived laden with iron, alumina, and uranium. Having wiped-out a long-standing budget surplus by its emergency appropriations for the on-going counter-insurgency effort in Tsagija, the federal government now joined the ranks of those states expecting to report a deficit as hundreds of millions of guilders were spent by agencies such as Adiatorix's Supreme Defence Council and the League of Federal Industry Champions in an apparent scramble to increase the nation's already renowned stockpiles of fuels and other industrially essential materials.

Moridunon, Republic of Durcodia, Beddgelert

Durcodia's fifth largest city, Moridunon had declined considerably to reach that position. Today's population was fully forty-thousand lower than the peak of more than two hundred and ten thousand, reached just twenty-five years earlier during the early days of the republic. Many young people had moved to Regnia to find work replacing disgraced collaborators and fleeing Christians, which that new republic haemorrhaged during the 'eighties. Today all that remained to employ locals was tourism centred around the city's hillfort and other features of extremely ancient Celtic occupation, pre-dating the glorious Geletian descent into the Saimonas and the defeat of the Roman Empire there, and the enormous metalworks, which in the first decade after the revolution had employed most of the population in the course of producing a million tonnes of steel and other metals each year but more recently had been working under capacity. Now it seemed that the fortunes of the plant, and so the city, may be on the upswing once more. Some mighty big work orders were coming in, and lo, the necessary raw materials had already been delivered! Most unusual, most welcome.

[Beddgelert]

Palace of the Saved, Durinopolis, Tywysogaeth Drawschwyrniad

The most ardent admirers of Versailles called it, “too much”. Familiars of Chingizid palaces called it, “insane”. Llewellyn had called it simply, “Salvador”. The only monarchical line ever known to Geletia had plundered the wealth of an empire a hundred times the population of the surviving state just to build a new residence that would proclaim its holders' continuation.

Somewhere within, Llewellyn's widow, the Princess Morgana, quarrelled with their son, young Prince Maelgwyn, who had recently come of age and was set to assume power following years of regency headed by Morgana and the Prime Minister Sir Dallas of Saharna. The Prince, it seemed, disagreed with his mother's insistence on maintaining the independence -and as such isolation- of the tiny principality, and had let it be known that he intended to petition the Shieldian High King James III for the incorporation of Transdurinos as a petty kingdom within the Grand Empire.

“I'd have to change the name, of course, since we aren't 'beyond' the river so far as the Empire's concerned, but the obvious truth of it is that if we continue to pretend that the world's smallest nation can go on while our neighbours aim at our destruction, that's just what we'll suffer.”

Though her son had come of age, Morgana wasn't herself too old to argue her own case, and not so old as to have lost much of her intimidating forcefulness. She lectured her son, recalled events long passed, both victories and defeats, and invoked the spectre of the Prince's late and terrible father. But Maelgwyn remained cool, almost arrogantly disinterested. His time was nigh, soon the throne would be his seat and everyone on his side, not that of his mother.

“Perhaps I can even convince them to take on some of our debt.” The Prince said, likely digging at Saharna's financial administration.

The exchange went on, Morgana increasingly exasperated by her son's disengagement behaviour as he doodled and scribbled ideas pertaining to his notion of Geletian membership in what others had called the 'broken-down sham' of the Grand Empire, until interrupted in a style that stunned both of them.

Modlen burst into the room, fire in her eyes. Maelgwyn's twin sister, Princess Modlen was Llewellyn and Morgana's first-born, but passed over in the line of succession when her brother followed hours later. She'd maintained a low public profile, regarded as almost angelic, an innocent assumed by media and public -without much cause- to be on her way through a life of chastity and purity.

The Princess was now making quite apparent to her family a deep-seated opposition to this thoroughly un-Celtic view of womanhood, meek and virginal. She was dressed in traditional Geletian garments, hatched patterns on her apparently hand-woven dress, cape fixed with a gold broach adorned with traditional patterns, and she was shouting louder than her mother. Modlen, it seemed, had finally decided to reveal her self, her true feelings, and her rejection of the twins' conservative Christian upbringing, cloistered as it had been in a palace set amidst poverty and layer upon layer of smothering state security.

Cardew came stumbling in after her, the Captain of the Guard obviously winded after the chase and perhaps after being struck, something he clearly had not expected from little Modlen. He was bewildered, and looked from Modlen to Morgana, flapping his hands uselessly. He was much better at executing red fifth-columnists of the Kezoist persuasion than dealing with an irate teenage girl who happened to be second in line to the throne he was sworn to protect.

The Princess meanwhile called her brother a traitor and a coward, “oblivious”, and accused her mother of indifference, of serving a dead man, and of dividing a nation to satisfy the pride of a man who, “never loved you, nor me, not any woman!”.

This was no ordinary youthful tantrum. Maelgwyn's new ideas had worried the establishment, but his sister's adornment in polytheist jewellery and venomous expulsion of the word, “Chwyldro!” amounted to something else. Suddenly being inferiors of the Shieldian High King did not seem so terrible to Cardew and Morgana as the young Princess raced away like a stormcloud gathering a charge about her. In the palace gardens, a blazing three-metre wickerman suggested proudly that Modlen had co-conspirators -or manipulators- within the palace itself, for she certainly hadn't raised that alone, not without notice.

[Beddgelert]

Pysgotapwll, Tywysogaeth Drawschwyrniad

The ancient river Durinos -known locally as Afon Chwyrniad- had never hosted such a scene... or, on the other hand, perhaps it was one of the world's principle blood gutters, having washed away the leavings of countless Shieldo-Geletian conflicts and half the Grand Host. Now, while the first rays of dawn broke, silhouetting royalist figures on the left bank, bursts of tracer fire were reflected in the waters as they arched back and forth between the Principality and the People's Republic. The relentless rattle of machineguns was accompanied by a constant drone from the pipes played by the advancing People's Army, and punctuated by the odd burst of a mortar-bomb.

“...we have the bridgehead contained, barely” a frail-looking but implausibly tall man of improbably advanced years was loudly reporting through the din, telephone clutched in sinuous claws, “but I see no sign of Cardew, and can't speak to my flanks. Where are the Guardsmen? And what of His Highness on the Shield?”

“Nothing doing, Sah! Maelgwyn's done a bunk... Her Celtic Majesty's disinherited him- can she do that? A coup like James', you might say... What's that? Ah, here? Oh, a bit sticky, as it happens.”

“'A bunk'!? And Cardew? Where is Cardew?”

Speaking in a mutually-intelligible Shieldian, Sir Dallas of Saharna, Prime Minister to Princess Morgana and commander of her armed forces, continued to beg information of Walmingtonian hired soldier -adventurer, he may prefer- 'Captain' Ronald Ackendorf, who was himself commanding a struggling operation to find and suppress infiltration tunnels from which already dozens of Communist special-forces troops had emerged near the capital, Durinopolis. The choice of language made sense: most of the Principality's soldiers were ethnic Shieldians, their distant relatives being in Weshield, Wyclyfe, and in some cases Javia, while their officers were in the main Geletians of the Regni tribe. Ackendorf represented just twenty-five thousand residents of the Principality whose roots were neither in the Shield nor in Geletia, though he was probably alone amongst them in being here by choice, and his mother-tonuge was loosely related to that of the Shield, making it relatively easy for him to learn.

Ackendorf was tasked with defending the approaches to the capital, Durinopolis, which lay in the south, and it fell to the elderly Sir Dallas to protect the second city, Pysgotapwll, some seventy miles to Ackendorf's north. Cardew, as Captain-of-the-Guard, commanded Transdurinos's elite mechanised infantry unit, which was supposed to act as a floating reserve behind the border units, moving to plug gaps or exploit breakthroughs on the front line. As for Prince Maelgwyn, he had been ordered to the Shield in search of reinforcements to help resist the Kezoist attack: much hope was placed in his relationship with the Shield's nobility, which had lately been made apparent in his alarming plan to petition the High King for the Principality's incorporation as a petty kingdom within the Grand Empire once he assumed the throne. But, it seemed, the young Prince had simply fled when the first Communist infiltrators opened fire on the Constabulary in Durinopolis, and he was rumoured to be heading for France, declaring the Principality, “...not worth it, and the Shield hardly better.” Morgana remained in the capital, protected by the Constabulary and straight-leg elements of the Royal Guard.

Fadwyr, Tywysogaeth Drawschwyrniad

Lying about equidistant between the two largest settlements in the Principality, 'the city of boatmen' was by most indicators its third city, home to more than twenty thousand people, and it was here that Cardew had brought the Guard after being told that Communist forces were attempting to cross and capture the vital hydro-electrical dam on the Afon Chwyrniad nearby. On arrival, though, he found that to be only a fraction of the truth.

Princess Modlen, who had initiated an enormous 'manhunt' just days earlier when, dressed head to toe in 'pagan' Gaulish fashion, she stormed out of the palace in the mother of all teenage tantrums, was revealed as the source of Cardew's information, and was waiting for the Captain when his Guardsmen arrived. There was no sign, however, of the expected border police unit. The Princess appeared as Cardew sent a vanguard section across the dam to the Communist side, rushing from cover with a loud shriek, at the head of an armed band and charging straight for the Captain. She left the Guardsmen confused and disarmed by the presence of their princess, who was still popularly portrayed as a paragon of demure femininity, and Cardew himself was quickly captured with barely a shot fired.

On the right bank, the party sent across the dam found itself isolated, and was confronted by a large force of People's Army troops that had apparently been lying in wait, forewarned of the operation. A brief fire-fight during which the Guardsmen made a failed attempt to withdraw across the dam culminated in their surrender once it became clear that Cardew had surrendered and Modlen was somehow behind the whole confusing affair. Within half an hour a full battalion of People's Army soldiers would be established on the left bank at Fadwyr, cleaving the Principality in two.

[Beddgelert]

Sometimes, it seemed to the Celts, that nothing anybody ever said or thought about them bore the dimmest relation to reality. So far as the Chrinthanis were concerned, Beddgelert had invaded the Shield despite being unlike them in not having done so; so far as the Alexandrians were concerned, Chivo was a clown for having given a press conference in which he essentially criticised the enemies of their Catholic brethren; so far as the Byzantines were concerned, cocking an eyebrow and talking around a question from a minor statesperson amounted to screaming in a corner.

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound...

Tsagija

Inter-communal violence was the status quo in Macedon and Tsagija, and a police bias towards the Celtic communities was well enough documented. Migration of Celts from Beddgelert to the occupied territories told heavily on the Federal Democratic Republic's census reports, and Greco-Slavic refugees flooded every sympathetic country around the world. The Geletians were spreading across the Saimonas, while the Greeks and Slavs were being pushed out entirely. Combat between security forces and terrorists/resistance-fighters was not infrequent, nor between communities. Down in Thrace the Cartreflu had virtually rid Taidgoeden -Alexandroupoli- of Greeks after weeks of rioting and mob attacks against which the security forces had acted in token gestures at best, and the same was happening in the Tsagian cities of Virovitica and Vukovar, where Geletian settlers had begun to use the names Drafodon and Danusirmion in place of the Slavic terms.

This month things were different. Operation Barbastél swept through Tsagija like a bat through a cloud of mosquitoes, hoovering up the 'bloodsucking' Christians, the Slavic barbarians whom the Geletians perceived to be squatting on their land.

More than two years had passed since Operation Convalescence, now remembered in Beddgelert as The Short War, and Geletia was tired of waiting for the return of its birthright.

Palasmaes (formerly Brodac)

A major centre of population in the former Tsalland, nestled in a valley in the Dinaric Alps, Brodac had been twinned with Salt Lake City, Chrinthania, before the Celts returned. Now it was a centre for the next phase in the Chivo Doctrine, begun as the Grand Empire of the Shield collapsed and Areopagitican lashed out murderously, both drawing the attention of the Chrinthanis, Nibelung, Byzantines, and more besides.

The Beddgelen army had let it be known that they intended to arrest the entire clergy in the city, and had moved to surround it in great force against the possibility of their escape. Across Beddgelert and Tsagija a propaganda campaign had been under way, directed against the Church in the former Tsalland. It was said that the priesthood was guilty of institutional abuse of children in its care, raping young boys en masse and 'curing the homosexuality' of those who attempted to speak out by castrating them. Thousands had been beaten, molested, and mutilated, denied care, and their property and the money of their parents often stolen. Worse yet, due to the entwining of church and state in the Grand Duchy, the police and government had been sympathetic, and refused to help abused children.

The Tsag church was declared a terrorist organisation. It had, after all, also called for the killing of Geletian civilians, and urged troops into battle, and was now said to be harbouring rebels. Now, Operation Barbastél would bring the guilty to justice, for they had walked free too long in spite of their incomparable evil.

As hoped, many Tsag -and some Greeks, too- came out to protect the churches and clergy when the militia came to arrest them. The Geletian response was simple. Those actively defending the terrorists were themselves declared enemy combatants, and the army was called in. On Thursday afternoon, the first laser-guided 152mm shell crashed through the roof of the city's cathedral, where in were gathered numerous members of the clergy and their supporters -some of them armed-, and within minutes the other churches and religious establishments, several government buildings, and those police stations not staffed by Celtic personnel also came under precision artillery fire. When some tried to flee, the presence of snipers became painfully apparent: the army did not intend to waste artillery shells missing Christians.

Locals also found phone lines cut and air waves jammed, while Beddgelen media reported in an off-hand manner the facts of another gun fight between security forces and terrorists in Tsagija. No big deal.

[Beddgelert]

Báilearasán Barracks, North-Western Scordiscia

Barrack House 2, like others sheltering the men and women of the 401st Guards Division, was of circular configuration, making it more homely in the sentiments of those recruits who'd grown up in the countryside or the highlands of the Western Confederacy, while suggesting equality and togetherness and, so the theory went, providing better visibility and all around line of fire against the now remote possibility of a Tsag attack on the base, which lay barely eleven kilometres from the decaying Bozovic Line.

In the middle of the concrete floor a hearth smouldered, a memory of the hog roast that had been still hanging in the air with the last pungent wisps of smoke. The men -most of those billeted in BH2 were men- lolled in their bunks or against the one never ending wall, picking their teeth or swilling their bosa, some talking idly on topics of little importance.

Fusilier Cairbre, still picking over a rib, dipping it periodically in a jar of peppery relish sent from home, was still thinking on the recent departure of two men from their platoon alone, not to mention half a dozen others in the company made up by BH2's affiliation with the barracks on either side.

”It's all the...” he trailed off, and took another bite, though having already consumed the good meat his intention was chiefly to cover for an inability to find the right term, ”I mean, the lads who've gone... well, there was always something a bit 'off' about Buss... right?” Getting a non-committal response from his comrades, Cairbre pressed on. ”Y'know... he never laughed until everyone else did... straight face no matter the joke, and again as soon as you looked at him. Creeped me out.”

”Maybe you're just not as funny as you think you are, Cair.” Offered a voice from the top bunk.

”And Feoras, well...” Cairbre didn't have to say more about Feoras. Sat on the next bed, hands cupped around his flask of fermented millet and wheat, was Fusilier Keenan, the platoon's newest recruit and physically its most diminutive by some margin. He should have gone into armour with the girls, the others teased, and not tried to be an infantryman. But Feoras always went too far. All the newbies came in for some stick, and if they pushed their luck they got a thump. But Feoras...

Keenan seemed to shrink a little at the memories, fresh as they were. ”Well, who's complaining?” He bravely asked, then shrunk further as Cairbre's gaze turned his way. ”I mean, maybe they wanted to put the weird ones somewhere...” the younger man waved his hand as if to indicate great distance and unimportance. ”...out of the way.”

”You didn't say anything?”

”No! No, I asked, a couple of weeks in, for a transfer, but they wouldn't give it to me because I wouldn't say why!”

Cairbre turned the rib over in his hands and looked it over one last time, then flicked it out of the doorway without sitting up. There was a pause, but he seemed satisfied with Keenan's assertion of innocence.

”Well, if there was no complaint, why move them? And if there was, why not disciplinary action? They've not been kicked out, gaoled, demoted, just transferred to Vindos knows where. And six of them at once.”

“More than that, boyo.” Said another trooper, gruffly, as he strode back into the building, rubbing his 'warrior mullet' with a towel and dripping water from the rest of his nakedness as he padded over to his bunk. ”There's four gone from number twelve, and that prick Macoran from six, thank fuck. Who the fuck shoots a perfectly good working dog? I hope the fucker's in Drafodon, dancing with nail bombs.

”Oh, and you're up, Cair.”

Cairbre let the furrows out of his brow and hauled himself off his bunk, then headed to the medic hut for his check-up.

”There's a load of psychological shit this time.” the gruff voice called after him. ”Some fucking Nib-nonsense about how many friends you had in school and how you feel about spanking.”

“Er, all right!..” He yelled back, adding under his breath, "...you irritable sod."

[The Crooked Beat]

Central Tsagija, Near Brodac

Immediately following Tsalland's unexpectedly rapid and utter collapse in the face of Beddgelen arms several years previously, foreign readings of the new Balkan situation tended to strike an optimistic tone, and understandably so. What could that unpleasant dictatorship's demise be, after all, apart from a positive development? It had not entirely been lost on the wider world, however, that Geletia's interests there were not always strictly benign and above-board. Indeed, matters had recently taken a decidedly nasty turn.

On strength of nature alone, it was another beautiful summer's day in Central Tsagija, dry but not unbearably so, with a bright, joyful sun hanging high overhead, spreading its life-giving rays over many a planted field and pasture. A perfect afternoon, but for a scene of considerable human squalor unfolding amid such splendid surroundings.

A trio of casually-dressed individuals, two men and a woman, all of dark, Mediterranean complexion, had succeeded in climbing into a stately pine, leaving another young man, peering anxiously upward, at its base. Brodac, or Palasmaes, as indicated by newly-emplaced signage, may have been inaccessible by automobile behind a web of checkpoints and roadblocks, through which a civilian, especially a foreign civilian, could most definitely not pass, but the Geletian military's hold on walking routes was somewhat more tenuous. With a bit of luck, and traveling light, an interested party might just make it to within sight of the encircled city. Rumor had it that local partisans knew a way through to Brodac itself, but inherent in such a journey were risks of potentially lethal character, not to mention what a person might be confronted with once within city limits.

Through a pair of old Tsag Army binoculars, Afet Inan, Balkan correspondent for Avarga's leading daily the Citizen-Radical, watched with admirable composure as a church steeple, evidently struck by at least one 152mm shell, fell into a billowing cloud of grey-brown dust, leaving an odd-looking gap where it once stood. Scattered cheering could just be made out against the regular boom of outgoing artillery, or the staccato notes of automatic fire in the city below, but the steeple's own demise was, at such a distance, scarcely audible.

"I hope Father Stepovich was in there. That's one bastard who deserves what's coming to 'em, ha ha!"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Roman, this is no time for your damned fashionable cynicism! There are people dying down there!"

Roman and Demetrios, related by marriage, and Demetrios' young cousin Kostas formed Inan's local support team of driver, translator, and guide, a strange family unit if ever there was one but united by an abiding sense of mutual affection, and, having been uprooted by post-war upheavals, turned into an unlikely set of nomadic go-betweens for foreign journalists, aid workers, diplomats, and whoever else from Europe's richer regions might happen to be passing through. Kostas, just recently turned 18, escaped military service during the Short War, but both his older relatives were called up, a source of many bitter memories. Roman, for instance, remembers being committed to a catastrophic frontal attack, little more than a desperate bayonet charge, on a Beddgelen position, from which he was lucky to escape with his life, while Demetrios, a senior sergeant in a supply outfit, still bore an ugly scar from when a Greek comrade, insensibly drunk on plum brandy, slashed him with a bayonet while trying to steal a motorcycle after all discipline had gone by the board. Still, it was difficult to say that their situation was much improved, and that small spark of a comment sets them in argument, carried on in hoarse whispers for fear of roving patrols.

At a reproachful glance from Inan, unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth, they left off.

"Hand me one of those orange slices, would you?" she asked, while jotting down a brief note. "I think we've seen enough, if you fellows are satisfied. Let's see if we can't glean anything from the locals."

Inan had been in Tsalland, or Tsagija as it was now known, for five weeks, and it did not take a genius intellect to discern that things were definitely far from ship-shape. Fired-on by Geletian homesteaders, frisked and threatened by black-jacketed militiamen, stopped and questioned by every soldier with a spare moment, she was fairly sure that Akink did not want its activities to become common knowledge. From dozens of interviews, with Slavic families forced out of their villages to make way for Celtic settlement, young men beaten-up by suspiciously well-organized parties of their erstwhile Greek compatriots, rapes, disappearances, murders, she could certainly see why that might be the case. As a long-serving foreign correspondent, a veteran of assignments in Dra-pol, Nilosahara, Depkazia, and other perennial trouble-spots, Inan could not be described as easily-unnerved, but events so far had been, in her mind, sufficiently disturbing. Maybe not a corpse-strewn battlefield in Southeast Asia, or Registan Square after a round of beheadings, but wrong, no doubt about it, and a story that ought to be told.

World opinion had for some time suspected as much, but after her long and dispiriting stay, Inan was about ready to begin writing.

[Beddgelert]

Portmeirion, Akink

“...more than two-hundred and sixty thousand from Regnia and Siluria, sixty-eight thousand from Armorica, twelve-hundred from Cornitoutia-”

“-But ninety percent of them have gone to Macedon.”

“The Cornitouti? Yes, Chairman. And a minority of the Silures are Durcodi moving home... we're having trouble with Durcodia's own figures, it seems many people are using the Republic as a stepping-stone, trying to get land there and only moving on to Dubeanach when they fail.”

“That's to be expected, I'm sure, any reasonable person would prefer to farm the steppe in peace than have to defend his valley from terrorists. In all?”

“In the last ten months... approximately two hundred and seventy thousand... to within a margin-of-error of about five thousand.”

Chivo briefly clasped his hands and his step began to quicken. The Resettlement Commission was on course to meet its target- one million Geletians gone west in three years. But was the Commission for the Preparation of Virgin Soils holding up its end? The Chairman dismissed the prior Commissioner with the customary salute as he approached the doorway to the latter's central office.

Palasmaes, Tsagija

Brodac was the second largest city in Tsalland; Palasmaes remained the second largest in Tsagija, officially...

The grand old city had not well stood a season's bombardment from the essentially unchallenged Western Front of Y Fyddin Du, the Black Army as Chivo's Federal Democratic Republic styled the largest arm of Geletian military, recalling the infamous regiments with which the Celts terrorised their neighbours during the fifteenth century. Given the artillery arrayed against it on the surrounding hills, that was hardly surprising. The Western Front commanded more than four thousand mortars, six hundred multiple-rocket-launchers, fourteen-hundred towed guns, and almost five-hundred self-propelled guns, along with over twenty-eight hundred tanks, and even half a dozen ballistic missile launchers, though these had yet to be deployed against Palasmaes.

After a grim summer, the autumn equinox saw the fall of more leaves than shells. But the seasonal shift brought no real respite. If the bombardment had relaxed, it was only to herald the arrival of Rudianos' Irregulars, men (and women) such as Feoras Ó Clúmháin, who, presently, was familiarising himself -and some terrified locals- with the purported capacity for his newly-issued bayonet to function as a scissor-like wire-cutting tool. This was much to the detriment of one Father Stepovich, whose purportedly long ill-used manhood was at the centre of the lesson.

Inside the shattered church at which this and other such scenes were playing out, Trooper Brandubh Macoran sat on the back of a pew, resting his elbows on the Md. 86 rifle laid across his thighs while he measured tobacco into the anatomical snuff box of his left hand and watched a member of the congregation tend to the badly wounded church organist. The old woman had herself been struck in the arm by a round from the squad's automatic weapon, but never the less worked to bandage the only other survivor and stem the flow of blood from his side.

After some minutes, she had done all that was possible, and Macoran watched as the dazed organist, head in her lap, thanked the old woman by name. The Geletian snorted his tobacco, stretched, stepped down into the aisle, and fired a three-round burst into first the organist, and then his carer.

Ó Clúmháin called from outside. “Are you quite finished in there, Bran? This one's offering bread and wine!”

This soil was about as prepared as it was going to get, Macoran observed, and so he set a final charge in one corner of the hall and headed out.

[Beddgelert]

Pejačević Castle, Drafodon (formerly Virovitica), Tsagija

Two centuries of Arch Ducal pandering by the former occupants had been kind to a neoclassical residence that sat perilously close to one of the world's least stable frontiers. Less than two days of fighting between Arch Ducal and Geletian soldiers had been cruel in much the same degree, and now the late baroque façade was festooned with shrapnel and bullet-holes.

It was all-change indoors, too. No longer Slavic nobility walked the halls but black-jacketed Celts, all white trim, and those distinctive peep-hole salutes thrown in passing.

Security was tighter than ever before, Gwylwyr snipers posted at various windows, baring doorways, and pacing the grounds. Billeted in the town itself was an entire battalion of Scordisci motor-rifle troops, and Geletian settlers in the area had recently accepted official recognition of their Cartreflu unit, which was newly in receipt of a formidable cache of surplus armaments.

In the main hall, the Chairman of the Council of State contemplated a recent edition of Udgorn Rhyddid, the pro-SDP newspaper of preference, in the company of his daughter Aileana, General Secretary of the ruling party's Central Committee, who was pacing the room and tapping busily away at an example of the latest intranet-enabled device available on the Geletian market.

Noting her father's mounting irritation as he read through an article in the geopolitics section, Aileana suggested that he turn his attention to the stack of official documents at the centre of the table by which he sat. ”Pay no attention to that Scaramella, dad, he's a Roman Consul... testiculating is his futile calling.”

Chivo let out half a laugh and looked up from his paper. ”He's what? Testiculating?”

“Waving his hands about and talking bollocks! It's what those people do.
“Look, we've people of substance to deal with, closer to home.”

Fighting down a smile and shaking his head, the Chairman set aside the newspaper and began to sift through the other documents on hand. Time to go over Gwylwyr reports on the opposition's up-and-comers.

Ypentrefmawr, Republic of Siluria, Beddgelert

Tucked into the northwest corner of Siluria, all but adjoining the Durcodi and Javian borders, the awkwardly-named Big Village was one of those industrial cities of Beddgelert that had bled residents at a fantastic rate since the legally dubious settlement campaign began in Tsagija. Today home to fewer than ninety-five thousand people, the population had peaked at more than one hundred and thirty thousand. The large Durcodi minority had departed most readily and now made up barely more than a third of the population in a region it had once dominated. The Silures all but had their city back. That meant upheaval.

Samain wasn't helping. Celebratory bonfires around the city filled the air with smoke and wine flowed more freely than ever as the scent of roasting hog flesh rushed through the streets. Livestock were being brought down from the hills as harvest season closed and Geletia welcomed the dark half of the year. Tonight was an ysbrydnos, or spirit-night, when the gates of the Otherworld broke open. Disguised youths bearing lanterns made from turnips went door to door, exchanging song, dance, theatre, and poetry for coins and foodstuffs, and both communities, Silures and Durcodi, mingled.

The city's transition, though, was not merely from light to dark in the calendar sense, nor from Durcodi to Silurian majority. It was also just one year since the electoral shock of an unprecedented victory for the League of Communists, whose candidate, the beautiful young firebrand Heulwen, had unseated from the Republic's presidency the immovable object that was the ancient and storied Mbddraig Clan, descendants of The Dragon, infamous medieval butcher of a Byzantine army and impaler of entire Shieldian communities.

But much of her support had come from the locally marginalised Durcodi, who were accustomed to greater influence federally and dissatisfied with their lot in Siluria, and who had conspired through the inventive use of new social media to switch their support en masse to the Communists in an act of protest against the corrupt and uncompromisingly racist Caradoc Mbddraig. He, viewed as something of a crackpot even within the Social Democratic Party, had dominated politics in Siluria for decades thanks in part to corporate block voting practices against which Heulwen was now campaigning with what seemed imminent success. Business leaders in the republic feared that the end of their political privilege would only shortly precede the loss of their economic choke-hold, and Heulwen faced a gathering storm of establishment reaction.

As darkness fell on Samain and festivities began in earnest, so did the work of the men of violence. Within hours of dusk, news was breaking across Siluria, Beddgelert, and then Europe: Ypentrefmawr was burning, and the conflagration was deliberately set. In Durcodi neighbourhoods, gangs of people in festive dress were taking torches from the bonfires and putting them to houses and small businesses, and in the heart of the city the offices of the League of Communists and the town council buildings were besieged by mobs of people, mostly Silures, some in fancy dress and others in white-trimmed black jackets, wielding ancestral blades, improvised bludgeons, and petrol-bombs.

[Beddgelert]

Danusirmion/Vukovar

”...no, no, you don't need to pack, leave that, look, the Lieutenant over there will take your signature and everything will be sent on. See? The lorries are here to take it all, your address will go on the crates and you'll see everything again in Zenica. You can sign for it all again at your new address. Move along, come on, now.”

It was about time, really. Vukovar, located within shell shot of the frontier, had been blasted apart during the Short War, hit with hundreds of heavy artillery rounds, scores of rockets, and tonnes of bombs. So far the only reconstruction had come in the form of Geletian settlement building of uncertain legal standing. Now a helpful brigade of Scordisci soldiery was kindly inviting the embattled Tsag population to relocate at, well, somebody else's expense. For now that wasn't quite clear, but it was made quite apparent that new housing in and around Zenica, some hundred and fifty kilometres to the southwest (perhaps two hundred by road), would be allocated on a first-come first-served basis, so best to get on the buses that were being laid on here and now.

A handful of course refused in spite of their miserable circumstances in the bombed out, settler-dominated border town, and the considerable incentives offered. But as the last bus pulled out of the district, one company of motor rifle troops from Dúnabhainn who did not join the departing convoy now moved in to forcibly dislodge the isolated hold-outs, in more than one case simply choosing to send in the bulldozers or to light fires rather than risk life and limb storming a barricaded property.

Those Tsag already on the road remained oblivious, many quietly seething, others sobbing at being forced to leave their homes, a few excitedly chattering about how it was going to be easier in the south. ”It'll be better when we're all with our own kind. The Greeks on the coast, the Celts in the east, and we in the middle. That's as it should be. We can rebuild without having to worry about more settlers moving in. The government said so.” On the other hand, one old chap did observe that his sister lived in Zenica, and she hadn't said anything about new housing being built, at least not enough to accommodate this many people. "Oh, no, I'm sure they did a report about it on the news in autumn, didn't they? New houses in the old Greek district." he was told by another passenger.

Approaching two hours into their journey, passengers aboard some of the buses from Danusirmion began to comment on the drivers' choices of route. Yes, they were still headed more or less in the right direction, but this wasn't the best way to get to Zenica. Stupid Celts and She's probably drunk were popular sentiments. ”Pwllhalen? What the hell is that? Wait, isn't this Tuzla?”

The buses began to pull up on the side of a minor road a short distance outside what had been one of Tsalland's major cities, and passengers were invited to alight and, 'stretch their legs'. Gradually more vehicles arrived, and as dusk set in, people began to ask as to the meaning of the delay. They were more than half way there, after all.

”Apparently they've not finished clearing the workmen's things out of some of the new apartments, so we're going to wait until morning before we start moving people in.” a Captain Forsàidh eventually explained. ”The Tsagijan army has kindly provided cots, blankets, and bottled water, which my men are setting-up in one of the old salt mines here at Tuzla. We've run a cable down for lighting, and you can use the rest-rooms on the coaches. I'm afraid we didn't plan for supper on the road, but I'll see to it that we have something in for breakfast at eight sharp. Please make a list of any serious food allergies that you or your dependants suffer, and we'll collect the information in thirty minutes so I can make arrangements.”

Presently, a little wrong-footed and generally irritated by the journey and the long delay but glad to finally have some information and the bones of a plan, some six hundred people began to file into the disused salt mine by two galleries, following strings of old lights that hardly seemed up to the task of illuminating such long and poorly surfaced tunnels.

Seventy kilometres away in Zenica, demolition work and clearances similar to those seen near the border got under-way as night fell on the city, which exhibited no substantial signs of new apartment building save that under-taken in one quarter by newly-arrived Celts. Tsag and Geletian state media both reported in passing the start of 'slum clearances' and long over-due demolition of 'war damaged structures' in Danusirmion and in other towns and cities such as Drafodon/Virovitica. It was also said that organised crime, which had reportedly run rife in some of the damaged and disrupted communities, would be stamped out, and that some 'gangsters' were fighting authorities and trying to prevent residents from leaving some 'dilapidated' districts where they allegedly operated.