The Heirs of Babylon

by Glen Cook

  “How should we hit them?” Hans asked.

  “What if they’re not all here?” Kurt realized he had no question as to the rightness of attack. Strange, Here, violence seemed somehow appropriate. Perhaps because it was a dying place.

  “We’ve got to do something...”

  Indeed. The High Command sailors were discussing execution. Kurt shrugged. “Just shoot, I guess.” The group, standing separate for their planned bloody purpose, left shipmates out of the line of fire.

  “All right. Make sure you’re on full automatic,” said Hans. “You go from right to left. I’ll go the other way.”

  Shivering as if a sudden coldness had come into the breeze, Kurt glanced right for reassurance — great towering black doubts assailed his mind with burning power. Hans was shooting left-handed, favoring his wounded right arm....

  “Hans, take your jumper off.”

  “Why?”

  “Please?”

  “Kurt, there’s no time for games.” Nevertheless, he rose carefully and did as he was asked.

  Kurt stared at his unmarked left arm. All these hours he had thought Hans’s wound intentional, to destroy the Political Office ID mark.... The wrong arm. At sea, suddenly smitten by the fact that Hans was not Marquis — uncertain even if he had committed the murders confessed — Kurt tried to banish his confusion in the press of business at hand. Down deep, the wish to believe innocence, the need for Hans, and motives he could never understand, mixed, swirled like pinwheel colors, and from them came, unrecognized then, forgiveness.

  They fired, emptying magazines in long, dread bursts. High Command sailors jerked, danced, fell like marionettes with tangled and broken strings. They reloaded, paused, saw they had done their murderous task well. The enemy was fallen, some groaning — stunned shipmates came to belated life, seized dropped weapons.

  Too late.

  Fire came from the far side of the clearing, doing unto as had been done. Littoral sailors fell among their captors. Kurt and Hans shot back, lacing the jungle with death. One man in black appeared briefly, staggering. But three live weapons remained.

  They exchanged fire for several minutes, to no effect. Bullets tore the vegetation above Kurt, showered him with twigs and leaves. His rifle jammed. Cursing softly, he fought it. No matter what he tried, he could not eject the bent cartridge. He pushed the weapon aside, drew his pistol.

  As he did, a submachinegun came to violent life near the enemy position — friendly fire, apparently, for two High Command rifles were quickly silenced. Sounds of a man fleeing followed. Soon, from the far side of the clearing, von Lappus stepped into the open, smoking weapon in the crook of his arm.

  Kurt and Hans crossed that graveyard field to meet him. Small it seemed — just large enough to contain the dead and dying. Of the latter there were few, mostly High Command sailors. With a dreamlike feeling of slow motion, of floating, Kurt stepped over blank, familiar faces, shipmates who were strangers now, gone to distant lands. “

  The day had never been more than gray. Now a drizzle began falling. They stood there, the three, just looking down at the dead and soon-to-die, silent. Surprisingly, von Lappus made the sign of the cross.

  “And this’s where it ends?” said Hans. It was barely perceptible as a question, purely rhetorical.

  The jungle was very still. Only the raindrops made any sound, pitter-pattering on earth and leaves.-Kurt watched drops trickle down the cheeks of a seaman named Karl Adolf Eichhom, like Nature’s given tears for the folly of man. Somewhere a jungle bird called tentatively, perhaps seeking a mate lost in the flight from the fighting.

  “Well,” said Hans, “one long journey done. Must we try another?” The gloom behind his words was as gray as the morning. “Why not end it here?”

  Kurt understood. Why prolong their misery by a futile effort to reach home? “No,” gesturing with his pistol. “Nothing else matters, but I do have to try to get back to Karen.” He turned to fetch his pack.

  “Kurt!” von Lappus bellowed, falling into a sudden crouch, lifting his weapon....

  Something hit Kurt from behind. He staggered forward, fell, rolled as von Lappus’s weapon fired. He aimed, pulled his trigger three times, wildly. Hans had time for a single shrieked “No!” before a bullet smashed his skull.

  “You idiot!” von Lappus thundered through tears, “you goddam rock-headed beetle-brained idiot!” He hurled his weapon to the earth. “Not Wiedermann.” He fell to his knees beside Hans....

  Kurt finished rolling — and there, at the edge of the clearing, trying vainly to push entrails back inside a ruined abdominal wall, was Heinrich Haber, shirtless. Slowly, he toppled forward — and Kurt spied the scar on his left arm.... Here was the source whence Hans’s killing orders had come.

  Killing. He’d killed Hans. He’d killed Hans. It ran through his mind in an endless chain, and suddenly he knew what Hans had been living since Otto’s death. Torment. Mad wanderings through the Dantesque hells of his mind. He wanted death himself. “Hans!” he moaned. “I’m sorry. I thought it was you....” But Hans was not listening. How do you explain to the dead? How do you tell them, how do you make them understand? He threw himself on Hans as though the corpse were a lover. “No, no, no...”

  Von Lappus turned away, to see if any of the wounded could be saved, though he knew the search was futile.

  Kurt wept a bit, then looked north through rain and tears. Small hope that way, but Karen, and at least a chance for a future.