The man looked uncomfortable in his suit. He talked for a while without any noise coming from the speaker, then said, 'Sir Zakalwe, is very important you come. You must. Is very important.'
He shook his head. 'I must,' he repeated seemingly to himself. He turned to the captain. 'Captain, sir; could I have my earring back, please?'
'No,' the captain said, with a beatific grin. 'Now, get off my ship.'
The craft was cramped and very low tech and the air was warm and smelled of electrics. They gave him an old suit to put on and he was shown to a couch, and belted in. It was a bad sign when they made you put a suit on inside a ship. The troopers who'd taken him from the clipper sat behind him. The three-man crew - also suited up - seemed suspiciously busy, and he had the disquieting impression that the manual controls in front of them were not just for emergencies.
The craft re-entered the atmosphere spectacularly; buffeted, creaking, surrounded by gas glowing bright (seen through, he realised with a gut-wrenching shock, windows; crystal or glass, not screens), and with a gradually increasing howl. The air got even warmer. Flashing lights, hurried chatter between the crew, and some hurried movements and more excited talk, did not make him feel any happier. The glow disappeared and the sky turned from violet to blue; the buffeting returned.
They swept into the night, and plunged into cloud. The flashing lights all over the control panels looked even more worrying in darkness.
It was a rolling landing on some sort of runway, in a thunderstorm. The four troopers who'd boarded the Osom Emananish cheered weakly from behind him as the landing gear - wheels, he supposed - touched down. The craft trundled on for a worryingly long time, slewing twice.
When they finally rolled to a stop, the three crewmen all sat back slumped in their seats, arms dangling over the edges, silent and staring out into the rain-filled night.
He undid the belts, took off the helmet. The troopers opened the interior airlock.
When they opened the outer door, it was to reveal rain and lights and trucks and tanks and some low buildings in the background, and a couple of hundred people, some in military uniforms, some in long robes, rain-slicked, some trying to hold umbrellas over others; all seemed to have the circular marks on their foreheads. A group of a dozen or so, all old, robed, white haired, faces spattered with rain, walked to the bottom of the steps that led from the craft to the ground.
'Please, sir,' one of the troopers held out a hand to indicate they should descend. The white-haired men in the robes gathered in an arrowhead formation at the foot of the steps.
He stepped out, stood on the little platform before the stairs. The rain battered into one side of his head.
A great shout went up, and the dozen old men at the foot of the steps each bowed their head and went down on one knee, into the puddles on the dark and wind-whipped runway. A blast of blue light ripped the blackness beyond the low buildings, its flickering brilliance momentarily illuminating hills and mountains in the distance. The assembled people started to chant. It took him a few moments to work out what it was, then realised they were yelling, 'Za-kal-we! Za-kal-we!'
'Oh oh,' he said to himself. Thunder bellowed in the hills.
'Yeah... could you just run that past me again?'
'Messiah...'
'I really wish you wouldn't use that word.'
'Oh! Oh, well, Sir Zakalwe; what do you wish?'
'Ah... how about,' he gestured with his hands. 'Mister?'
'Sir Zakalwe, sir; you are pre-ordained! You have been beseen!' The high priest, sitting across the railway carriage, clenched his hands.
'"Be-seen"?'
'Indeed! You are our salvation; our divine recompense! You have been sent!'
'Sent,' he repeated, still trying to come to terms with what had happened to him.
They'd switched the floodlights off shortly after he'd set foot on the ground. The priests enveloped him, took him, many arms round his shoulders, from the concrete apron to an armoured truck; the lights went out on the runway and they were left with the slit-light from the truck and tank-lights; cones made fans by blinkers clipped over the lights. He was bustled away down a track to a railway station where they transferred to a shuttered carriage that clattered into the night.
There were no windows.
'Why yes! Our faith has a tradition of finding outside influences, because they are always greater.' The high priest - Napoerea, he'd said his name was - made a bowing motion. 'And what can be greater than the man who was ComMil?'
ComMil; he had to dredge his memory for that one. ComMil; that was what he had been, according to the Cluster's media; director of military operations when he and Tsoldrin Beychae had been involved in the whole crazy dance the last time. Beychae had been ComPol, in charge of politics (ah, these fine divisions!).
'ComMil...' He nodded, not really much the wiser. 'And you think I can help you?'
'Sir Zakalwe!' the high priest said, shifting down from his seat to kneel on the floor again. 'You are what we believe in!'
He sat back in the upholstered cushions. 'May I ask why?'
'Sir; your deeds are legend! Forever since the last unpleasantness! Our Guider, before he died, prophesied that our salvation would come from "beyond the skies", and your name was one of those mentioned; so coming to us in our hour of need, you must be our salvation!'
'I see,' he said, seeing nothing. 'Well, we'll see what we can do.'
'Messiah!'
The train drew up in a station somewhere; they were escorted from it to an elevator, then to a suite of rooms that he was told looked out over the city beneath but it was all in black-out. The internal screens were closed. The rooms themselves were quite opulent. He inspected them.
'Yes. Very nice. Thank you.'
'And here are your boys,' the high priest said, sweeping aside a curtain in the bedroom to reveal a languorously displayed half-dozen or so young men lying on a very large bed.
'Well... I, uh... Thank you,' he said, nodding to the high priest. He smiled at the boys, who all smiled back.
He lay awake in the ceremonial bed in the palace, hands behind his neck. After a while, in the darkness, there was a distinct 'pop', and in a disappearing blue sphere of light there was a tiny machine about the size of a human thumb.
'Zakalwe?'
'Hi, Sma.'
'Listen...'
'No. You listen; I would really like to know what the fuck is going on here.'
'Zakalwe,' Sma said, through the scout missile. 'It's complicated, but...'
'But I'm in here with a gang of homosexual priests who think I'm going to solve all their military problems.'
'Cheradenine,' Sma said, in her winning voice. 'These people have successfully incorporated a belief in your martial prowess into their religion; how can you deny them?'
'Believe me; it would be easy.'
'Like it or not, Cheradenine, you've become a legend to these people. They think you can do things.'
'So what am I supposed to do?'
'Guide them. Be their General.'
'That's what they expect me to be, I think. But what should I really do?'
'Just that,' Sma's voice said. 'Lead them. Meanwhile Beychae's in the Station; Murssay Station. That counts as neutral territory for now, and he's making the right noises. Don't you see, Zakalwe?' Sma's voice sounded tense, exultant. 'We've got them! Beychae's doing just what we wanted, and all you have to do is...'
'What?'
'... Just be yourself; operate for these guys!'
He shook his head. 'Sma; spell it out for me. What am I supposed to do?'
He heard Sma sigh. 'Win their war, Zakalwe. We're putting our weight behind the forces you're working with. Maybe if they can win this, and Beychae gets behind the winning side here, we can - perhaps - swing the Cluster.' He heard her take another deep breath. 'Zakalwe; we need this. To a degree, our hands are tied, but we need you to make the whole thing settle out. Win their war for them, and we might just be able to get
it all together. Seriously.'
'Fine, seriously,' he said to the scout missile. 'But I've already had a quick look at their maps, and these guys are in deep shit. If they're going to win this war they're going to need a real miracle.'
'Just try, Cheradenine. Please.'
'Do I get any help?'
'Um... how do you mean?'
'Intelligence, Sma; if you could keep an eye on what the enemy's -'
'Ah, no, Cheradenine, I'm sorry we can't.'
'What?' he said loudly, sitting up in the bed.
'I'm sorry, Zakalwe; really I am, but we've had to agree to that. This is a really delicate deal here, and we're having to keep strictly out of it. This missile shouldn't even be here; and it'll have to leave soon.'
'So I'm on my own?'
'I'm sorry,' Sma said.
'You're sorry!' he said, collapsing back dramatically on the bed.
No soldiering, he recalled Sma saying, some time ago now. 'No fucking soldiering,' he muttered to himself as he gathered his hair at the nape of his neck and pulled the little hide band over it. It was dawn; he patted the pony-tail and looked out through thick, distorting glass to the mist-shrouded city, just starting to wake to the dawn-rouged mountain peaks and the blue-glowing skies above. He looked with distaste at the over-ornamented long robes the priests expected him to wear, then reluctantly put them on.
The Hegemonarchy and its opponents, the Glaseen Empire, had been fighting, on and off, for control of their modestly-sized sub-continent for six hundred years before the rest of the Cluster came calling in its strange floating sky-ships, a century ago. They'd been backward even then, compared to the other societies on Murssay, which were decades ahead in technology, and - arguably - several centuries ahead morally and politically. Before they'd been contacted, the natives had the crossbow and the muzzle-loading cannon. Now, a century later, they had tanks. Lots of tanks. Tanks and artillery and trucks and a few very inefficient aircraft. Each side also had one prestige system, partially bought from but mostly just donated by some of the Cluster's more advanced societies. The Hegemonarchy had its single sixth- or seventh-hand spacecraft; the Empire had a clutch of missiles which were generally reckoned to be inoperable, and probably were politically unusable anyway because they were supposed to be nuclear-tipped. Public opinion in the Cluster could tolerate the technologically enhanced continuation of a pointless war so long as men, women and children died in relatively small, regular batches, but the thought of a million or so being incinerated at once, nuked in a city, was not to be tolerated.
The Empire was winning a conventional war, then, being waged across two impoverished countries which left to themselves would probably just be harnessing steam power. Instead refugee peasants filled the roads, carts loaded with whole households swayed between hedgerows, while the tanks ploughed the crop fields and the droning planes dropping bombs took care of slum-clearance.
The Hegemonarchy was retreating across the plains and into the mountains as its beleaguered forces fell back before the Empire's motorised cavalry.
He went straight to the map room after dressing; a few dozy general staff officers jumped to attention and rubbed sleep from their eyes. The maps didn't look any better in the morning than they had the previous evening, but he stood looking at them for a long time, sizing up the positions of their forces and the Empire's, asking the officers questions and trying to gauge how accurate their intelligence was and what level their own troops' morale was at.
The officers seemed to know more about the disposition of their enemy's forces than they did about the feelings of their own men.
He nodded to himself, scanned all the maps, then left for breakfast with Napoerea and the rest of the priests. He dragged them all back down into the map room afterwards - they would normally have returned to their own apartments for contemplation - and asked even more questions.
'And I want a uniform like these guys,' he said, pointing at one of the junior regular army officers in the map room.
'But, Sir Zakalwe,' Napoerea said, looking worried. 'Those would demean you!'
'And these will slow me down,' he said, indicating the long, heavy robes he was wearing. 'I want to take a look at the front myself.'
'But, sir, this is the holy citadel; all our intelligence comes here, all our people's prayers are directed here.'
'Napoerea,' he said, putting his hand on the other man's shoulder. 'I know; but I need to see things for myself. I only just got here, remember?' He looked round the unhappy faces of the other high priests. 'I'm sure your ways work when circumstances are as they have been in the past,' he told them, straight-faced. 'But I'm new, and so I have to use new ways to discover what you probably already know.' He turned back to Napoerea. 'I want my own plane; a modified reconnaissance aircraft should do. Two fighters as an escort.'
The priests had thought it the height of daring unorthodoxy to venture out to the space port, thirty kilometres away, by train and truck; they thought he was mad to want to start flying all over the sub-continent.
It was what he did for the next few days, however. There was a lull of sorts in the fighting just at that point - as the Hegemonarchy's forces fled and the Empire's consolidated - which made his task a little easier. He wore a plain uniform, without even the half-dozen or so medal ribbons that even the most junior officer seemed to warrant just for existing. He spoke to the mostly dull, demoralised and thoroughly hidebound field generals and colonels, to their staff, and to the foot soldiers and tank crews, as well as to the cooks and the supply teams and the orderlies and doctors. Most of the time he needed an interpreter; only the top brass spoke the Cluster's common tongue, but even so he suspected the troops felt closer to somebody who spoke a different language but asked them questions than they did to somebody who shared their language and only ever used it to give orders.
He toured every major air field in the course of that first week, sounding out the Air Force staff for their feelings and opinions. About the only person he tended to ignore on such occasions was the always watchful priest every squadron, regiment and fort had as its titular head. The first few of these priests he'd encountered had had nothing useful to say, and none of those he saw subsequently ever seemed to have anything interesting to add beyond the ritualised initial greetings. He had decided within the first couple of days that the main problem the priests had was themselves.
'Shenastri Province!' Napoerea exclaimed. 'But there are a dozen important religious sites there! More! And you propose to surrender without a fight?'
'You'll get the temples back once we've won the war, and probably lots of new treasure to put inside them. They're going to fall whether we try to hold there or not, and they'll probably be damaged if not destroyed in the fighting. This way, they'll survive intact. And it stretches their supply lines like crazy. Look; the rains start in, what? A month? By the time we're ready to counter-attack, they'll have even worse supply problems; the wet lands behind them mean they can't bring stuff that way, and they can't retreat there once we do attack. Nappy; old son; this is beautiful, believe me. If I was a commander on the other side and I saw this area being offered, I wouldn't go within a million klicks of it, but the Imperial Army boys are going to have to because the Court won't let them do anything else. But they'll know it's a trap. Terrible for the morale.'
'I don't know, I don't know...' Napoerea shook his head, both his hands at his mouth, massaging his lower lip while he looked worriedly at the map.
(No, you don't know, he thought to himself, watching the man's nervous body-language. You lot haven't known anything very useful for generations, chum.) 'It must be done,' he said. 'The withdrawal should start today.' He turned to another map. 'Aircraft; stop the bombing and strafing of the roads. Give the pilots two days' rest, then raid the oil refineries, here.' He pointed. 'A mass raid; use everything with the range that'll fly.'
'But if we stop attacking the roads...'
'They'll fill with even more refugees,' he told
the man. 'That'll slow the Imperial Army down more than our planes. I do want some of these bridges taken out.' He tapped a couple of river crossings. He looked mystified at Napoerea. 'You guys sign some sort of agreement not to bomb bridges or something?'
'It has always been felt that destroying bridges would hinder a counter-attack, as well as being... wasteful,' the priest said, unhappily.
'Well, these three have to go, anyway.' He tapped the surface of the map. 'That and the refinery raid should put some sand in their fuel-lines,' he said, clapping his hands together and rubbing them.
'But we believe the Imperial Army has great reserves of fuel,' Napoerea said, looking very unhappy.
'Even if they have,' he told the high-priest, 'Commanders will move more cautiously knowing supplies have been interrupted; they're careful guys. But I bet they never did have the supplies you thought; they probably think you have bigger supplies than you do, and with the advance they've had to fund recently... believe me; they may panic a little if the refinery raid comes off the way I hope it will.'
Napoerea looked downcast, rubbed his chin while he gazed forlornly at the maps. 'It all sounds very...' he began.'... very... adventurous.'
The high-priest invested the word with a degree of loathing and contempt that might have been amusing in other circumstances.
Under great protest, the high priests were persuaded they must give up their precious province and its many important religious sites to the enemy; they agreed to the mass raid on the refinery.
He visited the retreating soldiers and the main airfields that would take part in the refinery raid. Then he took a couple of days travelling the mountains by truck, inspecting the defences. There was a valley with a dam at its head that might also provide an effective trap if the Imperial Army made it that far (he remembered the concrete island, the snivelling girl and the chair). While he was driven along the rough roads between the hill forts, he saw a hundred or more aircraft drone overhead, heading out across the still peaceful looking plains, their wings loaded with bombs.
The refinery raid was expensive; almost a quarter of the planes never came back. But the Imperial Army's advance halted a day later. He had hoped they would keep on coming for a bit - their supplies hadn't been supplied straight from the refinery, so they could have kept going for a week or so - but they'd done the sensible thing, and stopped for the moment.
Use of Weapons Page 33
