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AK

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

The day the war ended. In the dawn of that day Paul lay for a while in a vague world between dreaming and waking. In his dream there'd been a hut made of grass and mud, a girl chanting at the door as she pounded mealie in the bowl cradled between her knees. He had known her ... he remembered ... he tried to hold on to his dream of her ... she was gone. And the dreamer who had belonged in that world ... he was gone too.

Automatically he moved his left hand an inch and closed it around the night-chilled metal of his AK. At once the dream world was forgotten and he knew exactly who he was, Paul, Warrior, of the Fifth Special Commando of the Nagala Liberation Army, now out on a mission to blow up and ambush the Grand Trunk Railway between Dangoum and Jom-jom. Who he was, what he was, all he was. Paul. Warrior. A boy with his own gun.

He didn't often need to tell himself this. Usually he knew it even in his sleep, and his dreams were dreams about the war, but once a month or so the dream about the hut came back, disturbing his certainties until the cold touch of the AK banished it. Then he would lie with his eyes shut, telling himself what he knew about his real world, making it come solid again.

It was a small world, the Fifth Commando, a unit specializing in dangerous raids into government territory. Twenty-three grown men and ten Warriors. Michael was leader and Fodo was second in command. The Warriors were boys whom the commando had picked up, one way or another, during the war, and were training to be soldiers. About half the men had been Warriors once. Michael said that they must be called Warriors, not boys, because what they were doing was no business for a child. He gave each new Warrior an uncle, one of the men to keep an eye on him, teach him the craft of war, protect him if necessary. In return the Warriors did small jobs for their uncles; made and brought them their meals, washed their clothes, built and fed their fires, and so on. Paul felt he was particularly lucky because Michael himself was his uncle.

That was Paul's world. When he had made it fully solid he opened his eyes to begin the day.

The men decided that the war was over. The first hint came while Paul was heating Michael's maize porridge for breakfast. Fodo and Papp were squatting by the radio with Michael, with their blankets wrapped around their shoulders against the chilly bush dawn. Paul knew that what was being said on the radio must be important because Michael had woken the other two up to hear it, though they had come back from reconnoitring the railway line long after midnight, and normally he'd have let them sleep on. Fodo was angry, not because of being woken, but at what he was hearing on the radio. He made sharp grunts of disagreement, like a jackal's bark. Michael ignored him, squatting with his head bowed and scratching with a twig at the yellow earth.

As soon as the voice on the radio stopped, Fodo began to argue. Papp looked puzzled. Michael listened to Fodo, totally still except for the hand where it prodded at the earth with its twig. Paul admired the stillness, which seemed to him full of strength, like a hunting leopard waiting for its moment to pounce, with only the tip of its tail twitching to and fro. Michael said something to Fodo which stopped his grumblings short. The porridge was hot so Paul scooped it onto the platter and passed the pot to Francis so that he could warm Papp's porridge. Michael looked up and smiled, when Paul handed him the platter.

"My thanks," he said. "Now go and tell the other Warriors to stop what they're doing and go out and relieve the sentries. I want the sentries back here. You needn't wait to put the fires out. Take water—we may be a long time. I want all ten of you out, in pairs. Tell Seme to choose the extra posts himself."

Paul trotted back for his AK, told Francis what Michael had said, and then went and found Seme. The camp was spread out as they were deep into government territory and the bush here was too thin to hide twenty-three men and ten Warriors sleeping in a huddle. All the Warriors were up, heating porridge for their uncles. This was the only hot meal anyone would have for a long while, as the attack on the railway would keep them on the move till dusk and it wouldn't be safe to light a fire after dark and who knew what might happen tomorrow? Soon the men who hadn't got Warriors to help them would take over the fires to heat their own porridge, but it was usually the Warriors' job to come back and see that the fires were out and the ashes covered.

Seme was leader of the Warriors because he was oldest, about thirteen. Michael said Paul was probably a year younger, but none of the Warriors knew their real ages because they'd all been found wandering in the bush. Some of them could remember the soldiers coming to their villages and burning and shooting, but Paul couldn't, except sometimes in his nightmares. He couldn't even remember his own name—he'd wiped all that out—so Michael had christened him Paul.

Seme frowned when Paul gave him the message and glanced to where his uncle, Judah, was kneeling by a fat-leaved badi bush. Most of Michael's commando were Christian, and Judah had been training to become a priest when the war had sucked him in. He still prayed a lot. Seme didn't want to interrupt him, but orders were orders. He picked up his AK, went over and touched Judah on the shoulder and whispered in his ear. Judah nodded and returned to his prayers. Between them Seme and Paul collected the rest of the Warriors and took them to relieve the sentries.

Michael had been right about the water. The chill and dewy dawn became brilliant day, fresh and tingling with life for a little while as the sun rose but then building to a weight of heat and light that pressed everything down, too dazzling to watch unblinking but despite that dull, weary, endless.

Paul lay hidden under the branches of a fallen but still living thunder tree, with the foresight of his AK reaching almost to the edge of the twigs. A faint path ran down to the plain which reached away northward, all the same with its yellow earth and flat-topped trees and tussocks of spiky grey grass, waiting for the rains. Two mole crickets called from their burrows, one a few yards away and the other farther along the slope. Paul could half remember, as part of his dream life before the war, an old woman telling him why mole crickets called like that—something to do with the bush spirit— but Michael had laughed when he'd asked and said that really they were males calling for females to come and mate with them, and the ones who called loudest got the most females. He'd explained how they shaped their burrows like a man cupping his hands around his mouth to shout, so that the calls would carry farther. Still, Paul would have liked to know about the bush spirit too.

Francis was a few yards away, lying in a half cave under the fallen trunk. The Warriors always watched in pairs. It was good training for the young ones—Francis was only eight—and it was useful if one of them could run back to the camp with a message while the other stayed on watch. Not long after Paul had been found by the commando he had been on sentry with an older Warrior called Didi. Two men had come up the track they were watching, looking like villagers, with leather loincloths and a blanket across one shoulder. Paul had been too small then to be allowed a gun but he'd known what to do. He'd scuttled back, got onto the path, and walked along it toward the men. The moment he'd rounded the corner that brought him in sight of them he'd stopped, as any child would have done, coming across strangers with the war crackling to and fro through the bush. Michael said that even a government soldier would hesitate a half second before shooting a child, so it was a way of finding out what strangers were up to without showing them that there was a commando near by.

The man in front had hesitated for that blink, then had twitched his blanket aside and brought down the gun it had been hiding. But the blink had given Paul time to flick himself sideways and down around the corner with the bullets whipping though the bush above him. They'd stopped, but the batter of gunfire had lasted a couple of seconds longer. Feet flapped away down the path. Paul had lain in the hot silence till he'd heard Didi's soft call, then had risen and peered around the corner. A man was lying by the path with his gun beneath him. The other man was gone.

Didi was dead now too. Some sort of tick fever, Judah had guessed, but the men who'd been taking him to the hospital had come back saying he'd died before they could get him there. The gun which Paul had pulled from under the man's body was an AK, airborne model with the folding butt. It had seen a lot of service, and had a deep gouge running slantwise across the receiver cover, but it still worked perfectly well. It lay in front of Paul now. It was his gun.

Toward the middle of the morning a new mole cricket called, close by, a double chirp which real mole crickets don't make. Francis had seen something. Paul narrowed his eyes and peered between the twigs, moving his head from side to side to bring fresh reaches of the plain into view. Heat made the distances waver, bounce, and fold. A herd of small buck was grazing half a mile away to the right, but they'd been there all morning. Paul had drawn his breath for a call of query when some lens of heated air stretched itself flat for a second or two and there the men were, five of them, moving in line from left to right, farther off than the buck. The heat hid them and brought them back, then hid them again. They had the movement of men carrying guns, a sort of confidence you get to recognize, but they were too distant for Paul to see the weapons or whether they were wearing uniforms. The one in front looked like a tracker. They might be a government patrol, but they were still several miles from the railway. Much more likely poachers. Paul made a cricket call, flattening the note at the end to make it say Okay, seen them. Michael hated poachers. When the commando caught any he took their guns away and told them to clear out, and if he caught them again he'd kill them.

Vanishing and reappearing, the men moved across the plain. The sentinel buck saw them and signalled to the rest of the herd. Every animal looked up at the same instant. The herd drifted closer.

Nothing else happened until a little after noon when Paul heard a quiet leopard-cough close behind him. He answered with a cricket call and Seme crept in under the branches beside him.

"We're to come back to camp."

"Did you see the poachers?"

"Yes. I told Peter."

"Who's coming to take over here?"

"They're only setting two sentries, Peter says. He says the war's over."

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know."

The camp had changed, its feel as well as its look. The men squatted in groups around the still smouldering fires, arguing aloud. Back at base there might be fierce arguments, about how to fight, and who was winning, and who to trust, and so on. But out on a mission you kept your voice low and you put out fires and you stayed wary and didn't argue, because you knew what you were doing and why you were there. And before an action everything became quieter still as the tension grew and grew ...

But all that was different now. The men were relaxed, some of them cheerful and others angry, as Fodo had been. But they were all uncertain. It wasn't just the camp that had changed, it was the world. The war was over.

Seme gathered the Warriors around the fire Paul had built that morning. The last grey embers had not yet lost the shape of the branches they had once been, so somebody must have been feeding it. Perhaps they'd wanted a second helping of porridge, or perhaps they'd kept the fire going, in spite of the heat, as a way of signalling the change. Tom and Francis fetched food and drink and they all settled in a ring, chewing the salty sun-dried beef sticks and sipping from the mug as it was passed around. Michael and Fodo joined them and when Michael took the mug he drained it and handed it back to Thomas for a refill. The Warriors stared.

"Only half a day back to the river," he said. "Camp there this evening. Have a party."

He smiled around the circle, forcing the boys to smile back. Some did so without a thought, but Bandu's lips were quivering. This was the first mission he'd been on with his own gun. He was only allowed to set it to single shots because he still wasn't strong enough to hold the aim steady in rapid fire—AKs always tried to squirt themselves away up to the left—but he had five rounds in his magazine and he'd probably been telling himself stories all morning about how he was going to fire each one of them during the attack on the railway, rescuing the rest of the commando from disaster as he did so. No singsong by the river could make up for that.

"He's telling you the war is over," said Fodo, anger still in his voice.

"Colonel Malani spoke on the radio this morning," said Michael. "He has come to terms with the NDR to form a government of national unity."

Even the Warriors felt the kick of shock. The Nagala Democratic Republicans were supporters of the government. They were the enemy.

"It's a sell-out," said Fodo.

"Never in life can you achieve every detail of what you desire," said Michael. "If the terms are those Malani described, we have eighty percent. How can we ever have a hundred percent? How can we hold the north without the NDR? We are forced to cooperate, in the end. But da Yabin and Vang and Chichaka are under arrest and warrants are out for the rest of the RKR leaders. Chichaka will be tried for the Ulumi massacre. Other war crimes will be investigated. Those not convicted will go into permanent exile. There will be UN-supervised elections within eight months. Any honestly conducted elections we are certain to win, so this time next year Malani will be President and perhaps Fodo will be minister of sport."

The boys laughed. Fodo didn't.

"The NDR are a bunch of crooks," he said. "Half of them are leftovers from Boyo's time. As soon as Malani took Olo they realized they were on the wrong side and switched."

"We know what they are," said Michael. "Malani's not a fool."

"I bet da Yabin thought the same," said Fodo. "I say anyone who tries to work with the NDR will either be cheated by them or become like them."

"Time will tell," said Michael. "But how can we know what it will tell without giving it the chance? What is the alternative? Two more years of war? Three? Four? How many lives? How many millions of dollars? Shall we blow up the railway today so that we can go and repair it tomorrow?"

"I've already told you—I accept Colonel Malani's orders. We have got this far by being better disciplined than anyone else, and that is our sole hope. Tell the Warriors what you wish."

"My thanks," said Michael.

He paused and looked around the circle, studying the Warriors one by one.

"You have been heroes," he said. "All of you, and so were those who are no longer among you—Japhet, and Didi, and the other Paul, and Bayi. I lay it on you to remember their names forever. It is for you that they died. But there is going to be no more of children dying in this war. I therefore lay it upon you to live. You are very special children, because you hold in your hands—no, you hold in your minds the future of this country. Suppose there had never been a war, what would have happened to you? You would have stayed in your villages, working in your fathers' fields, or herding his cattle, or learning to fish with his nets, and then you would have married and had your own children and taught them what your fathers had taught you. You would have been good men in your villages. Knowing you, I know that that is true. But now you are going to be much more than that. You are going to be good men in your country. I do not know the ways of Almighty God. I don't know why he allows such horrors and terrors as we have seen. But I do know that always, always, he works things so that out of every horror and terror comes something he can be glad of. Let him be glad of you.

"Look what he has done for you already. He has taken you away from your tribes and clans. Now you can think of something bigger than tribes and clans, because he has put you among men who talk and think and live and breathe that thing. That thing is our country, Nagala. Our country and all its varied people, and how one day, one day soon, they will live together in peace and happiness.

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Excerpted from AK by Peter Dickinson. Copyright © 2015 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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