Terrible Swift Sword (40 page)

If there was a final defendable point, it was here— Andrew had at least chosen well in that. Farther west, back toward Suzdal, the width of open land between the ocean and the great forest averaged more than sixty miles across, a few sections bulging out to nearly a hundred. This was the only other choke point, the thousand-foot crest of the White Hills forming a natural barrier, heavy with forest— twenty miles of front to defend.

The valley floor below was a sea of chaos. Nearly a third of a million refugees had funneled through. Far out on the open plains beyond he could see wagon after wagon moving eastward, piled high with food and the few meager possessions the people of Rus could not bear to part with.

Anyone capable of work was laboring on the long western slope of the hills, felling trees and digging, some with nothing more than sharpened sticks. He looked around at the women, the old men, the children of ten years of age; the long line already running for miles; the staff of engineers who had gained their knowledge on the Potomac front now laying out fields of fire, driving in marking stakes, directing the laboring thousands.

"Just where in the name of God do they get their strength to go on like this?" John whispered in English.

"They're Rus," Emil said, sitting down by John
's
side, pulling up a wilting blue flower and twirling it absently between his fingers.

"We think we've pushed them to the edge, and still they keep on going. It's part of the peasant soul. Believe me, John, I know—remember, I'm from the old country. A Jew, to be certain. Back in the old world their cousins would have burned my beard off with joy. But the Slavic peasant, you pile suffering on top of suffering on his back and he'll carry it. Oh, God knows, they'll cut your throat if you cross them the wrong way. But they know that they either suffer doing this, or they all die in the end."

"Think how much easier it all would have been," John said, "if we had listened to Tobias. Remember, back in that council meeting we held after the Tugar Namer of Time showed up."

"Can't recall," Emil replied. "Never did care to listen to that pompous fool."

"He said that we should leave, find a place down south and wait for the Hordes to disappear, then come back and take twenty years to build. You know, if we'd done that the Hordes would be gone by now."

"And twenty percent of the Rus, the Roum, and the Cartha would be in the feasting pits."

"My dear doctor, over half of the Rus have died in the last five years, and I bet not one Cartha in ten will be around to see next winter."

"Don't forget that by staying we managed to put an end to the smallpox which would still be preceding the Tugars, so the number of lives saved in Roum and elsewheres more than makes up for it. Cold as it seems, John, it does balance out."

"If we lose here, the Roum will get it by winter. That city is a trap—hills looking down on it from three sides. The Merki would shell it apart."

"Go over and ask some of those folks digging down there if they'd want it different.

"Go on—what the hell do you think they'd say to me?" John sniffed, leaning forward and plucking up a blade of grass, turning it over in his hand.

"You're playing with what ifs, John," Emil said forcefully. "That's far too much for a peasant to worry about. All he knows is that he is free, and if need be he'll die fighting. Sure, we could have run. Would we have found a safe place? I doubt it. If we had, would we have found iron and coal sitting on top of each other? And what about being in the hands of Tobias—you saw how he turned out. I'm happy to stick it through as it was played out."

"Even if we lose."

Emil smiled softly.

"Ever see a pogrom?"

"A what?"

"You Americans," Emil said, shaking his head. "I was born in what used to be Poland. My father was murdered by a gang of drunken Hungarian soldiers in 1813, when the French were retreating out of Russia. They spit on my father's body, called him a dirty Jew, and then raped my mother. Of course, she wasn't too dirty to receive that favor."

He was silent for a moment, looking off, eyes unfocused.

"She died from what happened," he whispered, "leaving me and an older brother, who died of the typhus that followed the army. I never forgot what it was like to live in that fear. Even after I grew up with my uncle, became a doctor in Budapest, and went from there to Vienna, I was still in the grip of that fear. Oh, I was a doctor, to be sure, but I still never knew when the Hungarian, or any
goyim,
might be at the door, laughing, knowing he could kill me without fear of reprisal. That's why I finally came to America. You Americans, born in your blessed New England, never knew that kind of fear."

Emil sighed, looking off to the west.

"That's why I loved your Maine, my Maine. That's why I hated what the Confederacy stood for, even though I saved the life of more than one rebel boy, caught in war beyond his making.

"I was terrified when we first landed here and discovered they were Russians—Rus—and breathed a sigh of relief when I found they didn't know what a Jew was. I was just another Yankee to them." He laughed in a self-deprecating manner. "Surrounded by
shiksas,
and they think I'm one of them. Can't even tell the difference in accents."

Mina looked over at him and smiled.

"Better English than a lot of folks I've heard. O'Donald's brogue gets mighty thick at times."

"Exactly what I'm talking about. O'Donald, ask him about watching his older sister starve to death during the potato famine. He knows what I'm talking about, the terrible fear. Well, these people were born and bred to it. Fear of boyars, fear of Tugars, fear of their own church. Give them a taste of living without that fear. That's why they're digging out here till they drop dead from exhaustion. That's why they'll fight them on the river, across those plains in front of us, into these hills, and if need be backwards across this entire goddamn world."

He paused for a moment.

"That's why their sons, their fathers, died with Hans, singing the 'Battle Hymn' as they went down." He paused for a moment, his voice choked.

"So don't ever say we should have left these poor miserable bastards to the Tugars."

John nodded, looking across the plains. He watched the shadows of the cumulus clouds as they floated lazily down to the sea, puffing high with the warmth of a spring day after a night of rain.

"Hard to believe there'll be a war here in a month, it's so damned peaceful."

"Maybe it'll be peaceful for your children," Emil said wearily, climbing back to his feet.

"By the way, John, I've got hospital supplies stockpiled in Suzdal, Novrod, and Vyzima, and I want a priority train to get them out
now."

John chuckled softly.

"Knew you'd put the pressure on me at some point."

"It's my job," Emil said, extending his hand to pull John back to his feet.

"All right, I'll write the order and send it down the line," John replied. "You'll get them day after tomorrow."

He paused for a moment, looking off to the south to the point where the dark line of earth was turning up through what had once been a forest of pines. If they could get this position finished in time, it would be one hell of a killing ground.

Twenty miles from the sea to the forest, the hills nearly twelve hundred feet high at points. The forest was right at their back—all they had to do was cut the logs and stack them up. The only drawback was the hard, rocky soil, unlike the loam of the Potomac front which was a paradise for digging entrenchments. In a month he could have a single line up; in three months, bastions, a fallback position, fortresses blocking each of the passes, and the slope forward a madness of entanglements. Time, it was always time.

He looked over his shoulder. A hundred yards farther up the slope a crew was working hard. A low, double-walled blockhouse was going up, dirt piled up against its side. The men were doing good work, and when finished it'd be proof against damn near anything.

"How long have we got?" Emil asked. "I've been out of touch up here."

"They hit hard on the ford last evening, got a foothold across and we didn't push it back till morning. We took a thousand casualties—the 1st Orel and the 2nd Roum got badly chewed up. I forgot to tell you, there'll be a trainload of them coming in by evening."

Emil nodded absently.

"I think I better get some rest—it's going to be a long night."

John didn't say anything. His deepest terror was to one day be brought in to Emil, this time to receive his professional consideration. He had gone through the war without a scratch, but he'd been in too many field hospitals—filled with the thunder of screams, rasping saws, and slashing scalpels—to feel anything but a primal dread. He looked over at Emil, wondering how such a gentle man—for after all, beneath the irascible exterior was an infinite well of gentleness—could wield a scalpel against the torn flesh of so many young soldiers. He felt a sick compulsion to ask how many arms, how many legs he had taken off, as he looked at the weathered hands, which seemed to be permanently red from the caustic washes he used to prevent infection.

"Scared?" Emil asked softly.

"Terrified," John whispered.

"We all are, this time around. I thought for a while I might lose Andrew to it. I see it in you, Fletcher, Kal, and down deep, even that young Hawthorne."

"But not in Pat. I think he really loves it."

"Thick-headed, but we need that type. All the rest of us, though. We were scared the first time around, but I think we were too caught up in it all to worry. Last summer, that one hit us off-guard. I think it shook our confidence a bit, even though we won. It made us nervous, and then the disaster two weeks back, the way they sliced right through us, that one shook all of us to the core, it made us realize we really could lose this one."

"I remember this bully in my town, Waterville," John said, his face flickering into a smile. "He taunted me for weeks and I was terrified of him. Finally I just exploded, and by god I beat the living daylights out of him. I felt grand, I did. The next morning, as I walked to school, I saw him, black-eyed. Behind him was his big brother, twice my size, who beat me to within an inch of my life.

"Sort of the same this time with the Tugars and then the Merki. I guess that's why I'm so damn scared. What we're doing here is a last desperate bid, doctor. We're losing all of Rus, everything, to try and beat them. You know damn well if they break this line some of us might get to Roum, but we'll never come back. It'll all be gone forever."

"And you think that'll happen, even after all of this?"

John nodded sadly.

"You know, I know that Andrew is playing out a game," John said, his voice lowering to a whisper. "Once they break through and find the country empty they'll storm forward, supplies or not. They'll have to. Six days after the breakthrough they'll be here, my good doctor, and there isn't a damn thing we can do to stop them."

"Andrew keeps saying a month."

John shook his head.

"Propaganda, a last hope. I just pray to God that
he
knows that it's a dream. Believe me, doctor, those bastards will come on with death in their eyes. Give me a month and I might be able to make a go of it here. But I think, my friend, that in a month's time all of us will be bones in the feasting pits. Nothing will stop them once they're across."

"Let's hope you're wrong," Emil whispered, but John could sense the fear in the doctor's voice.

They started back down the hill. A few soldiers, part of the engineering regiment, saluted as the two passed, but the peasants barely noticed their passage.

Emil motioned John over to his shack, past a long row of tents with their flaps open. John looked out of the corner of his eye at the cots within—casualties of the fight on the Potomac, the incessant skirmishing along the river, lying by the hundreds. He felt it was his duty to go in, to spend a couple of minutes and offer a cheerful word, but the fear, the exhaustion, caused him to look away, stabbing him with guilt.

He could hear their low moans, snatches of prayers, the wheezing gasps of a man shot in the chest, the insane cackle of someone driven over the edge by having seen too much. He felt as if his own knees were turning to jelly.

God, never let it happen. Make it quick, but not that—not looking up into Emil's eyes, shrieking on the table like a terrified animal.

His memory flashed for a moment to the hospital after Cold Harbor. The boy lying outside a tent, both legs gone at the thighs, screaming, just screaming.

"Are you all right, John?"

He looked over to see Emil staring at him.

"How do you stand it?" John whispered.

Emil tried to force a smile.

"I don't. I just try to remember the ones I put back together. The others . . ."

He waved his hand, as if warding off an evil demon, and continued on.

"I'd best be getting back to the depot," John said.

Emil motioned him over to his tent.

"Have a drink first."

"I've got to catch a ride to the other side of the hills. They'll be laying in the furnace for a temporary shot mill, and I need to be there."

"Take a couple of minutes."

John nodded wearily. Ducking low, he entered the tent and sat down on Emil's cot. Emil went over to a wooden chest and pulled out a bottle, then poured the contents into a beaker and passed it over.

John took the drink, downed it in a quick gulp, and sighed.

"Tastes good. What is it?"

"A good vodka, with a strong dash of laudanum. Was able to mix some up with the opium we found south of Roum."

"What the hell have you given me?" John said slowly.

"A good knockout drop. You'll be asleep in a couple of minutes, my good sir. Doctor's orders. It's either that or I'll be checking you into the hospital with a heart attack or nervous debilitation."

"Damn you, I don't have the time," John whispered.

"None of us do."

John cursed feebly as Emil lifted his feet up onto the cot. Within a couple of minutes he was snoring.

"My cot, too," Emil sighed. 

It had been over a day since he'd slept, and he had a long night ahead of him. Amputations—cutting and yet more cutting—and he felt an inner shaking at the red price which war took out of his heart. It seemed like this was all he had ever done.

He looked over at his notebooks and the microscope next to them—the precious research he'd been doing on consumption, typhoid, infectious wounds, and that strange mold he was finding on the side of certain trees which seemed to kill infection on contact. It would all have to wait yet again.

He walked out of his tent and saw John's staff waiting patiently.

"Go on, get the hell out of here and find a quiet corner to sleep!" he shouted, waving his hands as if shooing away a flock of confused geese. "Come back tomorrow morning."

The men looked at each other, first in confusion and then almost gratefully, before going over to a stack of boxes covered with a tarpaulin and settling down.

"I'll get some hot food to the lot of you," Emil said, turned away and heading back to do another round in the hospital. There was a Roum boy with a terrible stomach wound. Ever since he had saved Pat he no longer turned stomach wounds away, sending them to an isolated tent to die. The problem was that an amputation took only five minutes, a stomach wound a half-hour or more. But he could not leave them to die. This time he had packed the wound with the mold, and he was curious to see if infection had set in yet. Perhaps, the lord willing, it just might work. If so, he'd have to get teams of people into the woods to gather more of the mold, and train all surgeons in stomach-wound treatment, something he had skipped over in the past.

Looking up, he saw a train slowly working its way down the hill, another of the huge aerosteamers riding above it.

He gave a sniff of disdain. Yet another way for men to figure out how to kill each other, he thought angrily, then disappeared into the tent.

"A beautiful day," Andrew said, sighing and leaning back against a tree.

There was a distant booming, like thunder on a summer evening, but he barely noticed it. A flash of light snapped over Suzdal, near the Yankee quarter. Long seconds later a dull, muffled thump rolled up against the hills. He tried not to think of Kathleen and Maddie. She'd most likely be in the Cathedral, working in the special surgery ward with several dozen trainees around her. It was a cold thought. His wife, nursing their child, and an hour later her hands wrapped around a saw, cutting a wounded boy's arm off as part of a training lesson. The giving of life in two such dif ferent ways—one through love, and yet the other an act of love as well, even as it mutilated. When done, she'd wash and then pick up Maddie yet again.

"A thousand and thirty-two yards to the outer gate," Andrew said, looking over at Yuri. "That's the closest the woods come."

Yuri nodded in reply.

"A bit far," he said, looking down the long tube of the telescope.

"Have you been practicing?" Andrew asked.

"Actually, I'm getting rather good at it," Yuri replied, the slightest hint of pride in his voice.

All Andrew's hopes were tied in to this one effort. It had to work.

"The hidden field you've been practicing at—
any
problems?"

Yuri shook his head and continued to look down the tube.

"Everything is according to ritual," Yuri finally said. "Suzdal is the same as the golden yurt of a rival Qar Qarth, the taking of it the symbolic overthrow of an enemy. The Tugars captured the great yurt of the Merki at Orki and it was a humiliation that still burns their hearts. It implies that a Qarth cannot protect the circle of fire of his own hearth.

"Though you are only cattle, the failure to defend your great yurt will mystify them."

"And Jubadi?"

Yuri chuckled, rolling up from where he had been lying on the forest floor and leaning back to sit against a tree.

"He somehow felt that taking Suzdal would be the focus—the same as when the Tugars fought you."

"Why not do this from inside of Suzdal?" Andrew asked.

Yuri shook his head.

"They are not that stupid. A full umen will sweep through your town before Jubadi even steps fool into it."

Andrew nodded.

"And when he discovers the city is empty?"

"Ah, there will be rage. It will be perceived as the ultimate action of cowards, abandoning one's own yurts, conceding the hearth circles without a fight. Incomprehensible to a Merki. I daresay that they will leap forward, like dogs on the scent of blood. No matter how good the destruction that you have wrought, he will still send ten or more umens straight eastward. In five days they will be before Kev."

"And we're not ready," Andrew said. "It'll be a month more, at the earliest, before everyone is safely out, and the lines are fortified. All our able-bodied men are in the army, at the front, or in the factories. It's what's left that's digging the line."

"That is where I come in," Yuri replied.

Andrew would have preferred that someone else would "present," as he now called it, the argument to Jubadi. Yet no one knew the rituals, the panoply, the markings of the Qar Qarth as Yuri did. It had to be he. At the suggestion that someone else be with him, Yuri flatly refused. There was no sense in ordering it; besides, Andrew could not bring himself to ask for a volunteer. Yuri's argument that he was as good as anyone else was sound. All hopes were on him.

"I'm telling my people that it'll be weeks before the Merki come on again."

Yuri chuckled, shaking his head.

"Wishful thinking. Jubadi is no fool. He knows that to wait is to court disaster, and besides, you will have outmaneuvered him. That will not sit well. I dare say he dreamed that with the fall of Suzdal the war, for all practical purposes, would be over.

"No, he will come on. Again it will be the horns— two wings striking, one along the shore, the other along the forest, the head in the middle. He has learned to flank you through the forest, and he will do so again."

That is where we will be weakest yet again, Andrew thought, saying nothing.

A shadow passed over them, rolling down from the edge of the thick woods, across the open slopes to the Vina, and then on up over the fortifications along the north wall of Suzdal. Andrew realized that it was a beautiful day, what with the landscape being dotted with shadows and light. Perfect weather for the aerosteamers, which had been strangely absent since their defeat.

"Andrew Keane, you must learn to be a Merki if you are to win."

"I'm trying," Andrew replied, looking over at the man who was part of both worlds, torn between them.

"All the other arrangements?" Yuri asked.

"The seamstress reports that her work is finished."

Yuri smiled.

"Good, very good, that will help."

"Suppose you are still lying?" Andrew asked suddenly, looking over at Yuri. "Suppose that all you have said is merely a ploy within a ploy, a means for your safe return to the Merki, bearing with you all that you know about me?"

Andrew looked past Yuri to where several guards lounged not twenty feet away. They appeared to be uninterested, yet they observed Yuri's every move with intense scrutiny.

"If you suspect that, then why are you allowing me to do this plan?"

"Because you are the only one who possibly could."

Yuri smiled.

"You won't know until it happens," the Rus replied.

A startled cry aroused him from his slumber. Hulagar, torn from his own dark dreams, was up in an instant. Grabbing his scimitar he pulled the curtain back, even as the silent ones rushed into the small yurt. On the other side Jubadi was sitting up.

"A dream?" Hulagar asked.

Jubadi nodded, a bit sheepishly.

Hulagar looked to the guards, beckoning for them to withdraw.

Taking a candle he touched the wick against the glowing embers of the fire in the middle of the yurt. A dim glow of light filled the inside of the small yurt. Going up beside Jubadi he sat down, setting the candle in the top of a skull, and in an almost fatherly manner took up a cloak and placed it around Jubadi's shoulders.

"A drink," Jubadi whispered.

Reaching over to a small lacquered stand, Hulagar took a leather pouch full of fermented milk and passed it over. Jubadi leaned back and took a long swallow, then passed it back to Hulagar, who took a sip before tying the spout off.

"A strange place, this," Jubadi sighed. "This forest, the dank cold, the rain. I hate it."

"In our old realms, the heat of high spring would already be washing the steppe, and the grass would be up to mid-waist, turning golden. Here it is dripping trees and darkness—one can't even see the sky. It is the stink of the cattle weapons, death drifting through the woods unexpected, our warriors dying in the dark, without the sun to shine on their faces as they look to the everlasting sky."

"We will soon be out of it," Hulagar said soothingly.

Jubadi nodded wearily and with a sigh lay back, pulling the cloak around his naked shoulders and curling up under the heavy felt blanket.

"Remember when we were young? My father sent us out."

"To fetch the Qarth of the Fraqu for punishment," Hulagar chimed in, the two friends sharing the memory.

"And the great storm came up. You dug a hole into the snow, killing your own horse to close the hole over, cutting its body open to give us heat."

"That was your first horse," Jubadi said.

Hulagar looked off, a touch of sadness in his eyes.

"You gave me a thousand as a reward."

"But it did not replace him," Jubadi replied.

"Remember, my Qarth,..it was my life I saved too. Do not make too much of it."

"I've been making much of it for nearly two circlings."

Hulagar untied the spout and took another sip of fermented milk, offering it to Jubadi, who refused.

"What troubled you in your sleep, my Qarth?"

"I saw the banner of black," Jubadi said, looking into Hulagar's eyes.

"Dreams are but dreams," Hulagar replied, a bit too quickly.

Jubadi growled out a soft laugh.

"Imagine a shield-bearer telling me that!"

"If you want dreams interpreted, send for Shaga," Hulagar announced with a soft smile.

Jubadi shook his head.

"It would terrify the old faker to hear that his Qarth dreamed of the black banner. He never did have the sense to keep his mouth shut—it'd spread throughout the camp."

"You know what the dream means as well as I," Hulagar finally said.

"Now that I stir again in the world of things real, it holds not the same terror that it had but moments ago."

He was silent for a moment.

"Was it a portent?"

"Possible, my Qarth, but portents appear as a warning, not as a finality."

"Yet are not the chant-singers filled with tales of those who turned from the path, because of a portent, only to have it thus completed precisely because they did turn away from a danger not really there?"

"A puzzling question, my Qarth."

Jubadi reached out for the sack and Hulagar passed it over. He took a long drink and sighed.

"We should be a moon's ride east of Cartha by now, rising up into the low hills of the heavy red flowers. Instead . . ." He motioned toward the entry to the yurt, the dark forest invisible beyond.

"We did what you knew we must. I have never disputed that, Jubadi."

The Qar Qarth nodded, putting the sack down and lying back, hands open behind his head, shaggy arms spread out to either side, the taut muscles rippling.

"The cattle were almost too easy to break, after the fight of the summer, what they did to the Tugars."

"Tugars, they were fools."

"They were still good warriors. Something I would admit only to you."

"I am still uneasy about Muzta. He resists nothing. There seems to be no pride, no spark. He is far too silent for my blood."

"Bears watching," Jubadi replied. "He would be a fool to think that when this war is over, the cattle subdued, that we will turn south to face the Bantag and leave him at our back."

"I assumed that is what you were planning."

"The young ones, the women of choice, they will come with us. As for all the rest"—he paused for a moment—"I have not forgiven Orki."

He sighed again, closing his eyes.

"Are portents true?"

"It is truly troubling you," Hulagar said softly.

"If you had such a dream, would it not trouble you?"

Hulagar chuckled softly.

"Remember, my Qarth, when you die I die too at your grave. I wish to see you live a long time, a very long time."