Terrible Swift Sword (5 page)

Feigning indifference to Tayang's words, Muzta reached over to the tray by his side and took up a morsel of boiled cattle flesh and chewed slowly.

All was now clear to him: There would be a difficult path for the Tugars to weave between the three forces of Bantag, Merki, and cattle.

Tamuka was right at least in his prophecy of the war. Rivers of blood would flow come spring, as each maneuvered according to his own plan. Yet with the weapons being forged even now by the cattle slaves in Cartha, and with the new machines that could fly,

Jubadi would most likely win. The cattle were simply too few to stand against such strength.

Yet the trick was to survive. And as he ignored the haggling between the other two, a thin smile finally crossed his features.

"Bring him back in," Andrew said, without looking back at the door.

He opened up the stove and pushed another lo into the fire. The first real chill of autumn was settling in, and outside a cold rain was slashing against the windowpane. The grandfather clock in the corner ticked softly, and he found a sense of threat in the sound: each second a click, measuring off th precious time. It was funny, he thought, how a clock sounds as it ticks away. The sound is barely notic until one is alone. It is a reminder of mortality, of time passing, slipping through one's fingers, its voice loud, remorseless, unstoppable.

He looked back out the window. It was dark nearly two in the morning, Kathleen and the baby asleep upstairs, the house silent except for the creaking of the wood as a gust of wind swept outside, and the ticking of the clock.

He looked back at the clock.

How long do we have? he wondered. They will not come with winter—they don't have the weapons, there isn't enough food to support a horde three rimes the size of the Tugars, and there was their war with the Bantag that delayed them. No, it will be in the spring when the grass is up, that they will come.

He drew the imaginary lines in his mind, not eve needing to look at the map. The Potomac River hundred miles to the southwest—he smiled at the name. They were fixing such names to all the places of their new world, as if to make it feel like the lost home of fading memory.

Always fight an enemy outside your own territory if possible, but beyond that the Neiper could never be held for long. The Merki could move upstream through the woods, following the river as it turned cast. They'd be on our flank, cutting in east of Vazima. Rough terrain there, too rough for a rail line. Flank us, and fall into Rus from behind, and then the finish. No. Last time all we had to hold was Suzdal, now we have all the Rus, the alliance, the rail line to Roum. We can't hole up again—Suzdal can't hold everyone, they would starve us out if we even attempted to try.

No, it had to be the Potomac, even though Hans was against it. Hold them out there, out on the edge of the steppe. Build a line like Bobbie Lee did at Petersburg: trenches, earthen bastions, traps, and entanglements. Make it so strong that they'll bleed white against it. And then hold out till they finally get sick of it and leave.

Yet why am I unsure? he wondered.

There was a soft knock on the door to the parlor.

"Come."

He heard him walk in, but waited a moment before turning. He could hear the soft breathing of the man, and there was a momentary chill, as if a fetid air lingered about him, the smell of the pits.

"You know everyone, including my own people, would be happy to see you driven out—or even better, receive the punishment of the outcast."

"I offer no apologies." The voice was cool. Suzdalian in accent to be sure, with the broad rolling vowels, but tinged with the guttural pronunciation of someone used to the language of the Hordes.

Andrew turned and looked at the man.

"To eat the flesh of another human . . ." Andrew whispered.

"It was that or die," Yuri replied. "Any who are pets are forced to do it—it is their way of forever separating us from our own kind. I wanted to live."

Andrew tried to imagine how he would react if caught thus. There was the Donner Party, the men of the
Essex
who had gone so far as to draw lots
as
to who would be clubbed and eaten, the son of the captain being one of the flesh offerings. For this is my body . . . Blasphemy! He pushed the thought away.

The haunted lives the survivors must have led, the breaking of the most forbidden of taboos: Eat not the flesh of your own kind.

"It is easy to say, to think, in the comfort of this room, that you would not," Yuri said, the slightest of smiles crossing his pale features. "And then you see it, the moon feast, the victims led in struggling, the shrieks of agony, the convulsions of the dying, and the taunts of the Merki, the golden spoons flashing in the torch light. The eyes of the tortured victims going dark. Then they look at you, and they thrust the platter beneath your eyes.

" 'Eat,' they taunt," and he whispered the words in Merki, " 'eat, or you shall be next.' "

He looked into Andrew's eyes.

"I wanted to live. . .." He paused. "I couldn't stand the terror in the eyes of the moon offerings, I could not imagine my own skull being thus ripped open while I was still alive. I could not face the horror of the ending, my own skull open, the shaman pouring the golden flask . . ."

His voice faded away, the slightest of tremors passing through him.

"And so I ate. . . ."

Andrew said nothing. There was a perverse sort of fascination in listening to this. The cool horror of gazing into something obscene and yet not turning away, being compelled by the fascination of the for« hidden, the grotesque. While his wife and child slept above him he listened, as if Lazarus had come back from the gates of Hell to speak.

The second time it was not as hard, for after all, when one is already damned, one cannot be damned even further for one's iniquities. And finally, I didn't even notice what was upon the plate, it was a part of my existence in hell. I was one of them. After a time, I no longer cared."

"So why did you leave?" Andrew asked.

"One never forgets the whispering of the waters of home, the smell of one's hearth, the voices of
One
's people, the laughter of children when one was a child. Yankee, you must know that—I have heard tell of your Maine."

The word stabbed through him.
Maine. Home.
The streets of Brunswick, the tight Yankee drawl of his friends and neighbors, the lazy mornings teaching a class in springtime, when the world was alive with the scent of apple blossoms, the calling of the loons on a summer iake in the woods near Waterville (that was magic on moonlit nights), the waters of Merrymeeting Bay filled with the geese of autumn, the surf crashing on a rocky shore. It flooded back into his heart.

He nodded, lowering his head for a moment, his heart heavy, throat tight.

"Even if you drive me out, even if I am condemned and killed, still I will have seen Suzdal one more time, that is enough."

"If that was the only concern," Andrew replied, "I would not even be speaking to you now."

"I realize that," Yuri said, his voice soft and controlled. "You can't decide the rest of me, the truth or lies of what is locked in up here," and he pointed lo his head.

Andrew nodded.

Yuri looked around the room with frank curiosity, an inquisitiveness that Andrew found interesting. He looked over at the clock, and then questioningly back at Andrew.

"A machine for the measuring of time."

"So much has changed," Yuri said. "Twenty-one years ago I left here, to go to Cartha and trade in foolish trinkets of gold. When I departed Ivor was not yet boyar, my wife was still young and not yet dead, my city .. ."

He shook his head and looked about the room.

"Not yet changed by all you had done."

"My entire life, because I thought of a mere profit to be gained by going south, was shipwrecked on the eastern coast, and there taken by the Merki as they rode out from Cartha. Now, twenty-one years later, I am back."

He sighed, as if realizing the folly of dreams.

"You know that we have no one who has ridden with the Merki for a full circling," Andrew said, carefully watching Yuri's reactions, "no one who has seen them as you have."

"They usually kill their pets at three moments," Yuri replied, his voice distant. "All but the most cherished are destroyed when the sacred mountains of Barkth Nom are first sighted. Next, if there is the death of a Qar Qarth."

"And all but the most trusted when one's home land is again near," Andrew interjected.

Yuri nodded.

"Only the most trusted."

"Were you trusted?"

"I served Tamuka, shield-bearer to Zan Qarth Vuka, heir to Qar Qarth Jubadi va Ulga of the Merki Hordes," Yuri announced, and there was a note of pride in his voice. "I fashioned for him the gorget of gold that even now he wears, and the bindings of the sacred writings of names. I taught Tamuka, Shield-Bearer of the White Clan, the language of the Rus.

"Yes, I was trusted. I was shown with pride as speaker of a dozen tongues, master of the fashioning of precious gold; I was allowed to wear the gold collar of the pet of the shield-bearer," and he absently touched his neck, ringed by a faint line of calluses.

"There are some who say that you were sent here to mislead us, to spy, to learn what would be needed it this land was to be taken."

"I came with word of the meeting of the three Qar Qarths."

"We would have found out soon enough without your help."

Yuri laughed softly.

"Then kill me," he whispered. "I have seen my home again, though all turn their faces from me. My wife dead, my sons grown to manhood only to die in your wars."

He paused for a moment, looking straight at Andrew. He looked down at a gold ring on his finger and absently ran his thumb over it, then looked hack up at Andrew with cold eyes.

How many parents look at me thus? Andrew suddenly wondered. Yuri's eyes cut into him, and he felt an uneasiness. This one had a power to him, a coolness and self-assurance that he could not quite grasp. How could one who had lived on the edge of the pits, had seen the horrors and lived thus as a slave, be so inwardly calm?

"I offer all I know, Andrew Lawrence Keane of Yankee Maine. If I betrayed my people the day I look their flesh, it is easy to betray those who made me thus."

The two were silent, the clock ticking, its voice again loud, filling the void.

Yuri looked over at it.

"The voice of time," he said with a chuckle. "A curious machine. You know, you don't have much time left, and when they come it will be like a storm out of hell."

Andrew nodded, still uncommitted.

"Believe me, Jubadi has spent countless hours learning of you. He has the traitor Hinsen, and those few Yankee sailors of the great ship who are still prisoners and have traded their honor for their lives. Jubadi spends much time creeping into your mind, you have no means of learning his."

Andrew looked up at the mention of Hinsen's name. It carried now as much dark meaning as the name Benedict Arnold, a name to be spit out with disgust. He was the only one who could have told them how to make hydrogen for their machines, and much more.

"Did you see Hinsen?"

Yuri nodded.

"Many times. Groveling before Jubadi, promising much, telling him all of your means of fighting, the formations used, the way you think, the way you lead."

"And the others?"

"Most of the Yankee sailors, the Suzdalian sailors, are dead, some refused to help, others tried to run. But there are still a handful who remain. There are the other sailors, the ones who spoke your language and were from the southern sea. They took one of your steam land machines back to Cartha, but when word came of your victory they slipped away."

He chuckled softly.

"They stole one of the iron ships that Cromwell was making but was not ready for the war. Several of the Suzdalian and a couple of the Yankee sailors went with them. They went south, and have not been heard from. Jubadi was furious."

He paused for a moment.

"He killed five thousand who lived along the waterfront as vengeance."

Too bad they didn't run north, Andrew thought. The engines in Cromwell's boats, though crudely made, were of a solid design. Again he cursed the man for holding back his knowledge when it was needed the most.

"Cromwell? What ever happened?"

"Moon feast. It was said he died well."

Andrew said nothing. Though a traitor, he could pity anyone doomed to such a fate. Even though driven against his will, Yuri was a traitor as well. He had to be totally loyal, elsewise they would have slain him years ago. Twenty years with them must have left their mark.

"We've had too many traitors," Andrew said softly, looking straight into Yuri's eyes.

"Use me, and I will tell you what they fear. I will tell you of Jubadi, of Vuka, of Shaga, and of Tamuka."

The names, rattled off, sounded dark and full of menace, and he suddenly realized just how little he really knew of his enemy. They were a faceless mass, a dark seething entity of dread, like the shadowy demons of the apocalypse. Yet he knew nothing of them—who they truly were, how they thought, and what they dreamed. This was the first voice out of that darkness that might tell him.

He knew as well that not one of the Rus he had spoken to this evening had said a word of trust for this man. A few remembered him from before his disappearance, a merchant despised even then. A man now with the scent of burned flesh on his lips.

A man who had betrayed his own kind to save his life, a life thus rendered worthless and without hope of redemption. The more humane demands were simply to drive him out, but all the Rus, even Kal, wanted the punishment for a runaway pet: cut his tongue out, jam it down his throat, and tie him to the city wall as he choked to death. It was the old punishment set down by the Tugars and Merki for a runaway, yet it also spoke to a dread of one who had lived so long with the hordes that he might now have become like them and turned traitor to his own race.

Again there was the silence, the clock ticking out the seconds, the minutes, and hours until the horde would return. Outside, the cold autumn rain sounded softer, different, and he looked out the window to see the first heavy flakes drifting down, freezing against the glass.