Clerk Fifty-Four of the Revolution sat in a basement. Actually, he now stood, staring at an easel, one of the only ones in the Capital, and in his possession for years. His skull vibrated as another shell slammed into the revolutionaries’ impromptu headquarters. A chunk of rock tumbled out of place and crashed onto the floor, breaking into countless pieces. Clerk Fifty-Four ignored it.
He held a soft number-two pencil as he thought of what to put on the canvas. He had sketched the rectangle, of course. There would need to be a central star, too. Stars were important, and they were something everyone saw every single night. They implied unity.
Clerk Fifty-Four had the locally rare experience of being an actual artist. Not a good one. A mediocre one who was never quite able to sell his paintings to the people he wanted them sold to, for the amount he wanted. But he was one, nonetheless.
He had been tasked by Lincoln, who was surrounded by tactical maps and a copy of Hemingway and an always-whining radio of tactical reports, and who had somehow found the peace of mind to assign Clerk Fifty-Four the task of designing the new flag of Buduneli.
“Make it good. Make it Budan,” Lincoln had instructed, with one hand permanently attached to his temple, soothing it the way one calms a screaming child.
Clerk Fifty-Four had felt honored, but also as if he had taken a three-hundred-pound box off a shelf without first realizing how much it weighed. He now had to lower it off his back, as safely as possible, without it breaking. This was easier said than done.
Clerk Fifty-Four, with time, managed to get most of it done, but a few touches remained.
The colors. What to color them.
The steppes were blue and green and dull and vivid. He had painted them many times to no one in particular. But they weren’t the same anywhere. As Lincoln had instructed, between roars of splitting earth, the eventual Buduneli nation would stretch over vast terrain, vast peoples, vast biomes, vast everything. So using the landscape was a cop-out, thought Clerk Fifty-Four.
So what did they have in common?
The star was a nice touch, Clerk Fifty-Four thought, crediting himself. It was many-ended, with thirty-six points, almost too many, but enough for now. One for each tribe of the to-be nation.
He stared at the easel as he heard the chatter of two clashing machine guns in a heated argument with each other, pausing for breath at times and interrupted by detonations on either side. Clerk Fifty-Four felt pressed for time, so he went down the natural chain of thought.
Stars. Stars were out at night. The night. The night was black. Mostly.
So: a black background.
What color for the star? Stars were white. But that seemed cheap. Gold. Gold was expensive. He could work with that.
He used the cheap, very cheap, oil paint and filled the flag in. After a few uncontrollable shakes of the hand requiring correction, as a result of both artillery and mind, he had the flag.
But it lacked something.
Clerk Fifty-Four felt as though he had a good base, but needed a final detail to top it off. It was currently blank, at least to him. A rehash. We, as in WE, needed something extra.
He studied the easel. He walked backward toward a bookshelf, the only one in the room, chipped and cracked, with a small emblem in a hidden nook reading: “DISCOUNT-AR-US ALABASTER IMPORTS.”
The books it housed were expected given the environment. Classics. Well, “Classics.” He had never really read them until a year ago, but they were Classics because they were Classics because they were said to be such. So they were.
He opened a book at random, flipped at random, landed at random, and opened his eyes to read the following:
“E PLURIBUS UNUM.”
Yeah. That sounded right.
He tried to remember what it meant. In the foreign art school he had attended for a few months before being kicked out for “disciplinary reasons,” they had learned some Latin. Plur-something sounded like a plural. E maybe was a starting…thing. Unum sounded like unitary, which sounded like one.
Something many, one.
Clerk Fifty-Four chewed on this for some time, but the lights flickered again and reality returned. He decided this would do.
Top or bottom?
He decided to paint it on the bottom of the flag, in a fake cursive he had forced himself to learn in week two of failed art school.
And it was done.
A far closer explosion brought him to his knees. But he was smiling all the same. He had done it. Well, enough of it. It was good enough for government work, mused Clerk Fifty-Four, as he picked up the easel and quickly brought it for Lincoln to verify and approve.
✦ ✦ ✦
Lincoln wasn’t expecting the clerk to return from his work so soon. The clerk caught him in the middle of a phone call and waited for it to end as the explosions grew nearer and nearer.
“Yes, yes, I realize that they’ve advanced, but the perimeter is already thin as it is. I doubt we ca… All right. All right, give me a moment to check, sir.”
Lincoln put a hand over the receiver and looked at the clerk.
“Is it finished?” Lincoln asked.
The clerk blinked and showed the art to Lincoln. He studied it for a moment, still holding the phone, then returned to it.
“Yes, he finished it. It looks good, yes… now?! Are you sure? …Yes… yes, I understand. It will be done, sir.”
Lincoln looked up like he had been ordered to do an autopsy.
“Khormuzta is pleased that you finished the flag. He orders it to be fluttering above our temporary congress by the end of today.”
The clerk looked taken aback.
Lincoln nodded solemnly. “Yes, yes, I know. But it must be done. There’s a group of laborers in the building across. Have some of them sew it.”
The clerk nodded and left, cradling the flag of the nation in his arms.
✦ ✦ ✦
The clerk sprinted across the open field between the two buildings, watching chunks of dirt fly upward as shells cratered the ground nearby. He kept his head down and ran, careful not to trip and ruin such an artwork. One leg after the other, each kicking with a spirit and pride the clerk hadn’t realized he had until now.
A particularly close explosion rocked his head. His eyes spun, but his legs kept kicking. He made it across to the other building, which upon closer inspection was more warehouse than anything else.
He entered.
Chunks of the roof were smashed open from the barrages, letting in daylight that hung in dusty beams. A group of laborers rested on the floor behind a storage shelf, observing the clerk. The clerk mustered what will he had left and approached them.
“Does anyone here know how to sew?” the clerk asked.
A few of the men nodded warily, waiting to see where this was going.
He showed them the painting. One of the men held it gingerly, studying it.
“This is to be the flag of our new nation,” the clerk explained. “Create it on cloth. It will be hung by the end of today.”
One of the men looked at him. “…How, exactly?”
The clerk considered this. He himself had no clue, but they had to figure it out somehow.
They started, between the thunder of war, by assembling all the cloth they could. They had a surplus of black, thankfully, and bits of golden cloth were cut from curtains, uniform linings, whatever they could find. And off they went to work, sewing and patching together an ugly but functional thing.
At one point, a line of bullets ripped through the thin sheet-metal wall of the warehouse, rampaging through and eventually meeting a box of scrap, shredding it apart with a frightening noise. The men jumped at this, tearing a small hole in the flag that had to be quickly sutured.
A few hours went by in arduous labor as the clerk supervised, crafting his vision one comment at a time. First the black base. Then the golden star, meticulously woven in thirty-six points to meet its message. The motto along the bottom was the hardest to sew, as none of the men could write cursive. The clerk tried his best at it, though it resembled a scribble more than any coherent message.
But that didn’t really change much, the clerk remarked when looking at the final product.
It was folded into a triangular shape. The clerk gently held the flag in his hands.
“Thank you, men. Your actions here will not be forgotten,” the clerk said, though the names of these men were indeed forgotten, alongside the clerk’s.
The men responded with a crisp nod and went back to playing poker, gambling bits of warehouse scrap to each other as chips.
✦ ✦ ✦
The clerk shielded the flag to his chest and bolted back across the empty field. Adrenaline pounded in his forehead, veins bulging with every heartbeat. He could hear the crack of bullets trying to sweep him, catching up as he made it across.
He tripped.
The flag smashed into the mud, soaking through. The clerk, reeling with shock and adrenaline, picked it up, picked himself up, and kept sprinting.
An explosion erupted a dozen meters behind him, where he had been a few seconds ago. The clerk tried not to think about it and reached the building.
He smashed the door open with more force than he expected, causing Lincoln to jump.
The clerk gave Lincoln the flag. Lincoln noted that it was dripping wet and brown with grime and mud. He shrugged, content with the result anyway.
“This will do.”
Both men hurried up to the top floor, staying away from the windows as they climbed. The rooftop entrance creaked open, with the clerk going first.
Both men whisked to the flagpole, which currently held the old flag of the Kurultay. The Kurultay’s flag whipped in the wind, riddled with holes. It was lowered for the final time to no fanfare as Lincoln watched.
As the clerk attached the new flag to the clips, Lincoln watched the terrain six stories down. He wasn’t actually called Lincoln. A notable hard-line sect of the Sons of Khagan styled the idea of rebirth so literally they renamed themselves, rejecting the names given to them by their tribes. Koganat became Aurelius. Yagak became Cincinnatus. “Koz” began to refer to himself as Lincoln. They named themselves the Emperor’s Men.
Koz, no, Lincoln, looked down at the cratered streets below.
The clerk called for him, unsure what the procedure was now.
Lincoln turned back and looked at the flag. It was hooked up and prepared to be raised. Lincoln wasn’t sure himself what the protocol was here. There was no protocol.
So Lincoln did what he did best and improvised one into existence.
He nodded at the clerk to begin raising the new flag of Buduneli. For his part, he instinctively gave a crisp salute, humming a song he had known since childhood, something martial of sorts, something with resonance.
The flag rose and, with a click, caught at the top, now fluttering violently.
The clerk handed Lincoln the old flag, decaying and torn. Lincoln nodded, then simply tossed it off the building. It glided down the six stories and crumpled into a wet bush.
Both men stood shoulder to shoulder and watched the new flag: the flag of Buduneli, fluttering violently.
A distant gunshot rang out, and the flag suddenly found itself with a new hole in the upper-left corner.
Both men scrambled back to the rooftop entrance to safety.