Terrible Swift Sword (6 page)

He looked back at Yuri.

"Sit down, Yuri Yaroslavich. We need to talk."

Chapter 1

"My dearest love, your precious daughter and I are thinking of you longingly."

He smiled at the memory of her letter. When he was still a professor at Bowdoin he would have scratched "longingly" out from any student's paper. But from Kathleen it was endearing.

Six weeks now, or was it seven? He could hardly recall the days since he had last sat before the fire, holding Maddie in his arms, Kathleen by his side, the fire crackling before them.

Longingly.

A gust of icy wind swept across the open steppe, driving needlelike slivers of frozen rain before it. Mumbling a curse, Colonel Andrew Lawrence Keane pulled his battered kepi down low over his eyes. Damn hats, they never were worth anything. Whatever fool back in the War Department had authorized them for the Union Army had never stood out in a driving rain, or marched beneath a blazing Virginia sun. He had never been a stickler over regulation uniforms, and most of the men from the 35th Maine had tossed the ridiculous cap aside at the first opportunity, adopting the broad-brimmed, high-crowned Hardee, which did a splendid job of keeping rain, snow, and sun off of one's face. But as the commander of the regiment he had always complied with army regulations, even here. Old habits certainly die hard, he thought, with a sad shake of his
head. Now he was Secretary of War and Vice-President of the Republic of Rus, and yet still he wore the old battered uniform of a colonel in the Union Army of the Potomac.

Did that proud army still march? he wondered, feeling a tug of nostalgia. It would be what year now back there . . . ? Funny, he didn't even think of it as home anymore. Home was here, the city of Suzdal, the Republic, and the world of Valennia.

Almost four years now, so it'd be late 1868. No, most likely all the boys had gone home by now, the war over. The long swaying columns of blue, the circling fields of campfires, the serpentine river of men flowing over the countryside had disappeared by now, the hundred thousand parts drifting back to their homes, to loved ones, except for the dead. Except for the survivors of the 35th Maine, exiled here, wherever here was.

He remembered a march a couple of days before Gettysburg, when a thunderstorm had rolled over the columns. The sky turned a dark black-green, illuminated by forked tongues of fire. He had paused atop a low ridge and looked back, the column snaking across the valley. With each electric blue flash it seemed as if twenty thousand muskets had picked up the light, reflecting back Thor's bolts of war, blinding the eyes with their brilliance. The rain had come, drowning the world in darkness, and yet they had marched on, shimmering in the flashes of light, an electric body of blue swaying toward their final destiny.

He could remember the sound of their voices, the songs drifting down the marching columns, the laughter floating with the evening air, the triumphant shout as they rushed to victory, the paeans rising to the heavens, the rattle of drums in the distance, the haunting call of the bugle hovering over all when night finally came. Where were they now? Where are
we?

He looked up as he so often did, always thinking that they were somewhere out there, beyond the Great Wheel, obscured now by the driving storm. Was the old country safe? he wondered. Lincoln would be finishing up his term, and the memory of his old hero brought a sad smile. His second term would be ending soon, hopefully over a United States that was whole.

"The old country," that was how he thought of it now, the same way Hans spoke of Prussia, Pat of Ireland, Emil of Hungary. Yet this was different. He had transplanted something of America here—"the United States of Rus," they called it now. They were molding it into a memory of home. At least in the woods beyond Suzdal it did in a way feel like home, like Maine, especially in the winter when the vast forests were still and draped in a crystalline white mantle. He could let it all drop aside, at least in those rare moments when he would ride north into the woods to be alone. It was so much like the land he'd grown up on—the boulder-strewn woods, the towering pines, the sharpness of the icy wind.

God, how I miss Maine, he thought sadly. There was a time when he'd been nothing more than a professor of history at Bowdoin, in the quiet, tranquil backwaters of life, giving his lectures, reading in the library, walking the rocky beaches, and yet always dreaming of something beyond. That, he knew, was the lure of being a historian, the dreaming of what had been and the imagining that somehow, someday, one could play such a part. And when the bit part in the vast drama of the war had been offered he'd rushed to it, never realizing all that he'd be leaving behind. Winning his dream, he had lost a dream.

Of course, I never could have imagined
this,
he thought with a sad smile: the last trip aboard the
Oqunquit
, the awakening in this nightmare world. Funny, now he found himself dreaming that somehow it could all come back, that he might awake as if from a dream. But then, he reflected, I would lose everything—Kathleen, the baby, Emil, Pat, Hans, Kal, and the strange pulse of power that this world has given me—as if I alone were shaping the destiny of an entire people. But at least there, before I left, I knew what peace was.

Peace.
He mulled over the word, letting it drift through his mind. Over two years of war against the rebs, and nearly twice that here. It was leaving its mark: Though he was just barely forty, his hair was flecked with gray, his face lined and creased. He thought of himself as he was, the day before Antie-tam, and he seemed now to have been a child then, before the "seeing of the elephant," as the veterans called a recruit's first battle. Could he ever have been so young?

Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, he silently clicked off the names, Wilderness, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, the Peasant Rebellion, the First Tugar War, the Roum campaign, the naval battles before Suzdal, the incessant skirmishing of the winter campaign in the Shenandoah Hills, and now the next one, whatever its name would be—and in his gut he knew it was coming.

He turned his back to the rain and looked southward toward the vast open steppe, but there was hardly anything to be seen in the storm-swirled mists of early dawn. But he knew what it looked like, the vast open spaces that he found vaguely disturbing.

Was it because of the land, the endless, low, rolling hills that seemed to go on forever, so alien to one from New England? Or was it because of the threat that he knew waited out there, coiling up in its power, waiting for the weather to break and for the first grass of spring before it struck?

He knew they were coming, that was as undeniable as the rising of the bloodred sun. The intelligence that the bitter and near mad Hamilcar had returned with, from his raids down to Cartha, in a desperate bid to save at least some of his people, bore that out. The refugees coming back with him had told of the incessant preparations, the foundries turning out cannon and yet more cannon. Vast sheds were going up just on the other side of the Shenandoah Hills to house the flying machines. The Horde had wintered through at Cartha, nearly three quarter of a million of their people going into the pits as the Horde marshaled its strength, the umens maneuvering through the winter, practicing with their new weapons, freed from fighting against the Bantag, who even now were reported to be moving farther east.

The refugees also told of the feasting, of the hundreds of thousands who had been led to the slaughter pits. The age-old saying that "but two in ten would die for the tables of their masters" had long since lost any meaning, as if the Merki planned to devour all humans in their path.

They were coming, he realized, and this time it would be a fight to the death for one or the other, it would be a war of annihilation.

"You know, if Emil saw you out here like this, he'd die of apoplexy."

Andrew turned back into the driving rain and saw Hans Schuder standing behind him, a look of reproach in his eyes.

Andrew said nothing and turned away.

"How's the fever?" Hans asked, coming up to stand beside him.

"All right."

The mention of it made him realize just how sick he still felt. Despite Doctor Weiss's drive for sanitation, which had nearly eradicated the disease in Suzdal, typhoid was still a fact of life in army camps. He fought to suppress a shiver.

"Son, why don't you get back into your quarters where you belong? The train will be pulling in shortly, and you should be resting."

Andrew smiled sadly and looked over at his old mentor. Hans Schuder's dark eyes looked up at him through a face riven with deep-set lines, wreathed in a beard that had gone over to a bushy gray. Hans shifted uneasily, favoring the right leg a bit, the reminder of a rebel sniper before Cold Harbor. They both bore the souvenir of their profession, and for a brief moment he felt as if he could almost flex the fingers of his left hand. "The ghost limb," the old soldiers called it. Even though the arm was gone just above the elbow, there were times when it felt as if it was still there. He would absently reach out to touch the empty sleeve, half expecting that the long-lost limb, buried at Gettysburg, had somehow returned from the dust of another world.

He felt the compulsion but pushed it aside, little realizing that all those around him knew that when he was lost in thought his right hand would drift over to hold the rounded stump.

He looked back to Hans and smiled weakly.

Though Hans was commander of the Suzdalian army, like him the sergeant major still wore the insignia of his old rank on the threadbare blue jacket, hidden now under a cracked and aging poncho. Hans had been with him since the beginning, shepherding him along, teaching him the business of command and killing, and then stepping back to see the ma
n
he had created forge a new nation and offer a hope of liberation from the suzerainty of the hordes.

I just needed some air, Hans," he finally said, breaking the silence. "I'll get back inside in a couple of minutes."

Hans sniffed the wind, like an old dog trying to pick up a scent.

Hacking around to southwest, it'll be rain soon, most likely warm up a lot by the end of the day."

"The last snow of the season, I expect," Andrew replied absently.

The storm had come on hard the afternoon before, catching everyone by surprise, burying the first pale green hints of spring and blanketing the world with a thick swirl of heavy wet snow. He wished it had gone on forever, covering everything in a blanket so deep that neither man nor horse could move. Every extra day gave them just that much more time to prepare. But it was already what he would have considered to be mid-April back in Maine
.
This storm would most likely be the last of it. Within the month the steppe would be knee-deep in grass. It was most likely green already on the other side of the Shenandoah Hills fifty miles to the south, which was the forward picket line, beyond which was the realm of the Merki.

The ice on the Potomac had broken two weeks ago. He could hear the river rushing by, thick and heavy with the muddy runoff of spring. A hundred yards down the slope the water was lapping at the edge of the forward rifle pits, rushing over the rocky bottom of the ford. He could imagine the position— heavens knows, he had spent enough months looking at it. This was the first ford, forty miles up from the sea, the river running broad and deep from he down to the sea.

Yet all that line had to be held as well, thou thinly manned at the moment. The river was full shoals, which made the maneuvering of ironcla impossible except at the mouth. Leave it empty and they could get across—there were reports they had built hundreds of lightweight boats which could used for pontoon bridges. Forty miles of trench and bastions had to be constructed along that sector straight down to the sea.

To his right, for another sixty-five miles up in the forest, there were a dozen more fords, each faced with heavy fortifications, in places three lines deep. By midsummer, though, the situation wou change, unless it poured every day, something th he had prayed for nearly every night. When the river dropped, becoming a muddy stream duri the dry summer, the entire line nearly down to t sea could be crossed. But by then there would three more corps ready for action, while at the same time the Horde would be forced to disperse across a wide area to feed their mounts when the summer grasses thinned out.

We'll still have the rails and they won't, thought, as if seeking an inner reassurance; the rails are our only hope in this. He could draw the line his mind, going out of Suzdal, up to the Neiper Ford, down the west shore of the river and leavil the woods after thirty miles at Wilderness Stati< and coming straight down to here. The line th forked, running parallel to the river down to
t
sea, and in the opposite direction running northw along the river up to Bastion 110 set nearly ten mi back into the woods. At Bastion 100 another rail line ran straight back east along the edge of the woods for ten miles, and then turned up the broad trail, the path used by the Tugars all the way to the
Neiper
Ford. It was a vast circle of rail, over three hundred miles of it, hastily laid down during the fall and winter. A strategic gamble that had consumed over fifteen thousand tons of light ten-pound-to-the-foot rails.

And straight ahead were the Shenandoah Hills.

O Shenandoah, I long to see you.

Longingly.

The snow was most likely even heavier back home, back in Suzdal. He could imagine her by the fire, nursing Maddie—Madison—Madison Bridget O'Reilly Keane, a long name for fifteen pounds of squalling humanity, and the thought of it filled him with a cold aching pain. All he wanted was to lie down by the stove in the parlor, to take an entire day of nothingness, other than his daughter, Kathleen, and quiet solitude.

He started to shiver.

"Son, let's get back inside; the train will be coming in shortly."

Andrew looked over at Hans. He had gone for some time without calling him "son." It was funny, but it felt almost strange now. Hans was still the mentor
,
the father figure from the beginning. With linns by his side he had carried the crushing responsibility of running first a regiment, and then an entire war effort. He felt far distant from the young professor of history who had gone, wide-eyed like a boy, to see a war. It was now nearly impossible to define himself as someone's son.