Johanna looked down over one shoulder at her foot. No
pain
there
, she thought dazedly. Or at least none of the pain that a real wound would cause, just another ache. One heel of her boot had been torn off, left dangling by a shred of composition rubber. "Never bet on the horses again, woman, you've used it all up," she muttered to herself.
A shout brought her head up, and she clutched at the wheel against a wave of dizziness. A line of figures was trotting toward her from the copse of forest to the east, twenty of them. They were still five hundred meters away, but they looked too ragged to be Fritz, and German troops would have come up in a vehicle, anyway. Russians, then; the situation reports had mentioned partisan activity. They might be hostile, or not. The German yoke had lain heavy here, and she had two very dead Fritz for credentials. On the other hand… as the saying went, nobody loved the Draka. Russians least of all, after the bite the Domination had taken out of the lands east of the Caspian back in the Great War; and there had been a generation of border clashes since. A Russian young enough to be in the field now had probably been brought up on anti-Draka propaganda and atrocity stories, at least half of which were true.
A heavy, weary annoyance seized her for a moment. "Mother Freya," she said to herself, scrubbing a forearm over her lips again. "I really don't want to be here." Not so much the fear or discomfort, they were bearable, but she definitely did not want to be here in this cold and foreign place, covered in blood and sitting on a corpse. "I want to be
home
." Rahksan giving her a massage and a rubdown with Leopard Balm liniament and a cuddle, twelve hours' sleep, waking up clean and safe in her own bed with her cat on the pillow, with no dangers and nobody telling her what to do…" 'Nothing's free, and only the cheaper things can be bought with money'; you never said a truer word, Daddy."
She stood, feeling the raw breeze as her breathing slowed. One hand clenched on the other. Time enough to move when the shaking stopped.
The partisans came up in a wary half-circle as Johanna finished strapping on the gear from her kit, murmuring and pointing as they reconstructed the brief fight. None of them was pointing a weapon at her: she recognized "Drakansky" among the liquid slavic syllables, and wary sidelong glances. That was reasonable enough; she must look a sight, with drying blood matted in her hair and smeared about her mouth. From the way some of them leaned into the kubelwagon and then glanced back at her, fingering their necks, she imagined they were speculating that she had torn out the second SS trooper's throat with her teeth; it was obvious enough that neither of the Germans had been shot. There was awe in the glances, too, at the woman who had climbed out of a burning plane and killed two armed soldiers of the SS elite with her hands…
She ignored them with studied nonchalance as she slipped a magazine into the pistol grip of the machine pistol, clipped the bandolier to her belt and tossed back two pills from one of the bottles; aspirin, for the pounding ache between her eyes and the stiff neck and shoulders. Limping as little as her bruised foot and the missing heel would allow, she walked over to the corpse of the young Fritz on the ground. There were already flies, crawling into the gaping wound in his stomach and across dry eyeballs frozen in a look of eternal surprise. The heavy smell of excrement brought the bile to the back of her throat as she flipped his rifle up with a toe and tossed it to a startled Russian.
They never mention the smell of shit in the old stories
, she thought, fighting down the vomit.
Maybe they had tighter
assholes in the days of the sagas
. Johanna did not consider herself more squeamish than the average Draka, but there was nothing pleasing about looking at the ruin that had once been a person. Once, with an adolescent's fascination for horrors, she had gone to the public execution ground in Hyancitha, the market town nearest Oakenwald, to see a serf broken on the wheel and impaled for striking an overseer. Once had been enough.
Enough
. She had an audience, and upchucking with buck fever was
not
the way to impress them. Not that this was the first time she had killed, but aerial combat was a gentlman's form of killing. You didn't have to see the results of it, they fell out of the sky in a convenient and sanitary fashion and you went home… Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to reach out, grasp the ear, make a quick slash. Her blade was still sharp enough to cut gristle with two drawing strokes… The grenade in the German's boot went into hers, and she walked grimly over to the scout car and repeated the docking process; a little frightfulness was always good for a first impression, or at least so the textbooks said. Cleaning and sheathing the knife, she looked back once; for an outlander, that Fritz had not been bad at all. It was going to be an expensive war if there were more like him.
The partisans had come a little closer; their weapons held ready but not immediately threatening; there were about twenty of them, incredibly filthy, ragged, armed with a motley collection of Russian and Fritz weaponry, with a lean starved ferocity about them. None of them seemed to have blanched at the ear collection; from the look of it, affection for the Fritz in general and the SS in particular was running low in this part of Russia.
They stank, with a smell of unwashed filth and the sour odor of men who have not had a good meal in a very long time. She walked toward them, and suddenly it was all she could do not to laugh and skip.
Alive
, suddenly bubbled up within her. She felt a giddy rush of sensation, the blood cooling and drying on her chest, mild spring air, bright morning sunlight and the sweet vanilla-green scent of flowering oaks from the copse at the top of the hill ahead of her.
Feelings pushing at her control: tears, affection, incredibly a sudden rush of sexual arousal.
Freya, what a time to feel horny
, she giggled to herself, and then it faded out into a vast well-being. Fighting down the smile that threatened, she walked through the partisan line. Their leader seemed to be a thin man with no front teeth and a long scar where one eye should be; he had been waiting for her to stop and speak, and her steady pace threw him off his mental center, as if he had reached the bottom of a stairwell one tread too soon.
PD
, she thought. Psychological dominance, keep 'em off balance. It might not work, but on the other hand…
Every
moment of my life from now on is a bonus
. She waited until the partisans had walked after her toward the woods for a good ten meters, until she could sense their leader about to reach out and touch her sleeve. Then she turned, pulled the grenade from her boot, yanked the tab and tossed it up in the air, caught it as the Russians dived flat with a chorus of yells and threw it back toward the Fritz scout car.
Perfect. The throw felt right, a smooth heavy arc that her mind drew to the target. Suddenly, she could do no wrong: the stick grenade pinwheeled through the air and dropped neatly into the kubel-wagen's front seat. She stayed casually erect, hands on hips, tapping a foot to time the fuse. One… two…
three…
Whump!
Stamped-steel panels blew out of the German car, and the doors sprang open and stayed that way, sprung on their hinges. The body was flung out of the front seat to land a few yards away; flames began to pool and lick beneath it as the fuel tank ruptured. Johanna glanced from it to the shattered, burning framework of the
Lover's Bite
. Turn about's fair play, she thought, and looked to the figure at her feet. The partisan leader had been holding his tattered fur cap down around his ears with both hands. Unclenching hands and eyes, he looked up at her with the beginnings of anger. The fragments of casing could have been lethal, if the grenade had not fallen into something that absorbed them.
"Sprechen sie Deutsch?" she asked calmly, narrow blonde head tilted to one side, an eyebrow elegantly arched.
"Crazy devil woman!" he began in an understandable pidgin of that language, then continued more slowly. "Ja, ein weig."
Yes,
a little
. Strange things were happening, the partisan thought, since the Draka had attacked the
neimetsky
. Ivan escaping certain death over in the village on the highway, calling them all together… Caution was always wise, and at least there was an opportunity to shovel his intimidating whatever-she-was onto somebody
else's
plate. "My name Dmitri Mikhaelovitch Belov."
"Good," Johanna answered, with cool friendliness. "Then take me," she tapped a foot lightly against his shoulder for emphasis,
"to your leader."
* * *
It took them most of a day to reach the guerilla rendezvous.
Hard marching, through increasingly rugged hills, always south toward the snowpeaks of the Caucasus. Forest closed in until they were always under cover, diving for thickets when aircraft snarled by overhead; Johanna watched a dogfight far above with a sudden thick longing that was more than fear and aching feet and the strain of keeping up a show of tireless strength for her escort-captors. Tiny silver' shapes, wheeling in the sad blue light of early evening.
That
was where she belonged…
Or with Tom on the sheepskins in front of a crackling fire
, she added to herself as they waded through a stream whose iciness spoke of a source in melting glaciers. Thick woods now, huge moss-grown beeches and oaks, a carpet of leaves and spring wildflowers and occasional meadows where the scent grew dizzying. Simple enough to ignore the blisters in boots never designed for walking; her well-fed fitness made the march easy enough. Surprising that these scarecrows could set a pace that pushed her even a little, even still feeling the mild concussion from the crash. But then, anyone who had stayed alive and under arms in Russia for the last year or so was going to be a real survivor type.
A break in the bird-chorus warned them to go to earth just after cautiously crossing a rutted "road," and they laid up in the undergrowth while a column of German half-tracks and armored cars thundered by. There was little chance of discovery, with the speed the Germans were making; also, they seemed to be primarily worried about the sky above them, had probably chosen this trail precisely because it had branches meeting above it.
After that the partisans seemed to relax, an almost subliminal feeling. Their weapons still stayed at the ready, and nobody spoke; the fieldcraft was not up to Draka standards, but far from bad.
Probably the noisy-ones all died this last year
, she thought.
Dmitri tapped her on the shoulder, indicating a cleft in the hill up which they toiled.
"Fritz never come this far," he whispered. "This place."
A sharp hail brought them to a halt, and suspicious figures appeared out of the woods around them. The partisans who had found her engaged the others in a lengthy question-and-answer session; this group seemed marginally less ragged and better armed, and it included several women as tough-looking as any of the men. Johanna could puzzle through a simple Russian sentence, if it was written in Roman script; this rapid conversation left her with no more than the odd word—"Drakansky."
"Fritz", "Aeroplane." Pretending boredom, she split the cellophane cover on a package of cigarettes, tapped one out, lit it with her American Ronson.
That
brought attention—a circle of faces, bearded and desperate; she handed the package to Dmitri. He seemed to be expanding on the subject of the strange Draka, rather like a man who had brought home some dangerous exotic and called his friends around to see the basilisk, the more so as she sensed him a stranger here. Even the ear-cropping devil woman who tore out Fritz throats was not as interesting as tobacco, though; hands mobbed him, clawing. Dmitri shouted, and then used the butt of the rifle to restore order and hand the cigarettes out in halves and quarters.
"No smoke for long," he said, puffing happily as they walked toward the steep path up the cliff. "For Fritz only, eh? Always vodka while potatoes is, but no
rhakoria
. Dasvedanya!"
The hollow inside was crowded despite covering several thousand square meters, and Johanna guessed that this was a gathering of several bands, more than its usual population. Bluffs and dense forest surrounded it and the scattering of lean-tos, tents and brush shelters. Cooking fires were few and carefully smokeless, but otherwise the scene was a cross between the military and the domestic; there were even a few silent children, if no toddlers. Murmurs ran among them, and a steady stream began moving toward the party walking through the entrance.
Johanna's eyes moved in on a face whose slight smile remained fixed, noting the dug-in machine-guns farther upslope, slit trenches and the absence of stench that told of good latrine discipline, several mortars and stacked ammunition, a knocked-down heliograph set…
And one solid log-and-stone hut, the door opening to show a bearlike figure with dramatic crossed cartridge belts across a bulging stomach, belt full of daggers, baggy trousers and black astrakhan-wool cap… Dmitri snapped a salute, then continued his animated speech to the gathering crowd, full of hand gestures, swooping like planes, teeth worrying an imaginary neck.
Well, if it isn't Boris the Cossack, Terror of the Steppe
, Johanna thought, glancing aside at the hulking figure by the hut.
With a slight chill; there was no foolishness in the narrow black eyes. A figure in a patched but recognizable Soviet uniform followed the huge man: pale intelligent face and long thin hands.
Green tabs on the collar.
NKVD
, she thought. Oh, joy.
The big man rumbled a question; his face was round and puffy, but strong with thick red lips. Dmitri answered, then seemed to be arguing; there were murmurs from the crowd around them, until the big man turned on them and roared.
That quieted most; when the man with the green tabs spoke, it grew silent enough for Johanna to hear breathing, and the whistling sough of wind through the leaves.