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He had plenty of time to give it thought, under the orders and the implied threat of short whip, knotted rope, or crop in the hands of some ill-tempered NCO.
He'd seen, all too often, one race or species used to supervise another. It focused the subject people's animosity in the right direction-at least in the tyrant's terms-at a powerful tormentor. Every shortage, every injury, every illness could be blamed on the people charged with policing. The group on top had to be fiercely loyal to the existing order, or they'd fall-and a bloody, hard fall it would be.
Seemed crazy of the Gray Baron not to use this system on his human forced labor. But instead, a few men and women with clipboards and kepis kept quiet watch, little brutality required.
Probably the Gray Baron wanted to make sure his fighting Grogs didn't get any ideas about pushing men around. In Valentine's experience, all Gray Ones considered themselves superior to puny humans, most of whom weren't even as strong as a prepubescent youth.
Valentine wondered if the Gray Baron wasn't sitting on a throne of sweaty dynamite. If only he were more sensitive to the unspoken currents among Grogs-he might be able to find an ambitious revolutionary among the Deathring Tribe.
Over the next two days, Valentine paid more attention to the young people he saw in camp. Teenage and preteen humans and Gray Ones worked together, dressed alike in either green or blue overalls, putting up utility poles, working in the kitchens and laundry. They looked healthy, intelligent, and strong-they reminded him of the Kurian Zone propaganda posters where everyone had firm jaws and full heads of hair.
The cooperation between the younger humans and Gray Ones was the closest thing to symbiosis Valentine had seen. The juvenile Gray Ones did much of the heavy work, with the human youths directing and checking and correcting. But when not engaged in work, the roles were reversed and the Gray Ones ate first while humans served and poured, with humans cleaning their ears and nails and teeth, making sure the bedding was clean and the chamber pots empty. Perhaps to the teens, the Grogs were glorified, highly trainable pets that needed care, and to the young Gray warriors, the human allies were their slaves once the enforced egalitarianism of action was over.
The Baron's stronghold didn't feel like a Kurian Zone. The elements were there, a survivor at the top with absolute power, his close advisors and guards just below, then the common herd scratching for any kind of advantage or notice to climb up the next rung of the ladder.
Valentine had his chance to step up a rung with the Warmoon Festival.
It was his first time inside the old megachurch that served as the Baron's headquarters. He was, to his surprise, the Baron's new champion human bare-handed fighter, and despite his lowly status as forced labor, he'd won a front-row seat at the festivities. Even more oddly, Sergeant Stock was to lead his small party, which consisted of a teenage girl who had finished studies at the top of her class in the stronghold's school and a Youth Vanguard military track student commander who'd travelled all the way from a little town near Buffalo on Lake Erie to join the Baron's forces.
Again, a less Kurian Zone establishment could hardly be imagined. It reminded him of some of the older, forgotten corners of Southern Command, where staff inspectors were rare and the men built a little military world they liked. There were captured weapons and pieces of uniform hung on the timbered walls, hunting-lodge style.
Trying to get out of the press of flesh moving for the big central arena, he stepped off the corridor and into a sort of museum-cum-trophy hall. Some of it was a little gruesome. There was a collection of human scalps in one case, an early souvenir of the Deathring Tribe. Valentine saw some photos of piles of corpses, bodies lying in the streets in front of apartment buildings, one plummeting to earth after being tossed out by corpse-disposal teams, what looked like a wild band of ravies victims, shot down Goya-like and frozen in time and space, white eyed and screaming, in a photographer's flash.
The only time you ever saw photos of corpses were in Church museums featuring the sins of the Old World, such as the Nike and Coca-Cola corporations' slaughter of laborers in the sugar plantation killing fields of Cambodia or the murder of the Tutsi nation in central Africa by a New York diamond consortium.
Valentine guessed that the genesis of the Baron's organization was a body locator and gravedigger's unit, judging from some of the pictures and souvenirs in the first cabinet.
The "Warmoon" to the Gray Ones was the first crescent moon after the vernal equinox-the fang that signaled the start of the season when their obscure cosmology looked favorably on fighting.
Snake Arms found him looking at some early Gray One weaponry and armor, much of it cut from car parts and old utility tools.
"Future father of my child!" she called. She was dressed, if you could call it that, in a costume made out of silk patching, snakeskin, feathers, and lines of beads, both atavistic and glamorous somehow. She had multiple, thick layers of makeup on, giving her face an otherworldly whiteness.
"Baby come?" Valentine asked.
"Just kidding. Women don't know so fast, you know."
"We go again now?"
"What are you, punchy? You don't want to be seen arriving late under the Baron's nose."
He kept glancing down at her costume.
"Like it? The enlisted ranks do. It's what keeps me in my trailer with some of the other wives. If they hauled me to the officers' whorehouse, I think there'd be a riot."
"Top come off, you'll see riots plenty," Valentine said.
"I have to get backstage. See you later."
Valentine caught up to his group and they entered the big auditorium.
Perhaps next to the Memphis Pyramid's stadium, it was the largest indoor structure Valentine had ever entered. Unlike the Pyramid, smoke hung heavy in the air and it smelled like a pig show.
The main auditorium of the old church reminded Valentine of a gigantic pup tent. Thick wooden beams, six of them, rose to the ceiling, where skylights admitted the evening light at the pinnacle. There was a balcony-one part glassed in, presumably for the families with small children when it served as a church.
Valentine was surprised to see the cross still there. It was a simple one, made of the same thick, wrought-iron bolted beams of the ceiling, and it hung down at an angle over the congregation, making Valentine think of a set of last rites he'd seen performed by Father Max over a dying woman in his youth. He'd held the cross before her face at just that angle. Whether that had been the original architecture or a recent change Valentine couldn't tell.
There was too much activity to look at.
