"I thought you did not like Titian," I said to Helen as she dressed me. "Why do you want to make me look pretty for him?"
"I know more of the world than you do," she told me, and smoothed out the folds in the fabric. "He will not think of you. He won't see past the jewelry."
Each day I came to him, Titus would inquire about the lapis lazuli. I could only tell him my maid gave it to me.
"Your maid can give you lapis lazuli from the Black Mountain in Afghanistan?" he said, and his tiny eyes became twice their normal size.
I was unaware that Titian spoke privately to Helen about the jewelry or that she told him she got the baubles from Arab traders who had crossed the great desert to our south. I certainly did not know she told him the Arabs had heaps of the blue stone for sale at only twice the price of gold. The matter was of great interest to Titian. Without my knowing of his actions, he visited Helen as often as I visited him in his rented home. She also introduced him to a third party who connected him to a band of Arab traders encamped in the desert outside Van City. I would later learn through Helen that these men were going to arrange a business transaction with the avaricious young fuel factor.
The food at Titian's' grand banquet was inedible. The meat and poultry were prepared in the high Pan-Polarian style, which is to say they were aged unto putrefaction. To heighten the effect, the food was served to the guests in disgusting presentations, such as putting the smaller fish inside the mouths of larger fish and boiling an entire sheep without removing its skin or wool. The cooks put the sausages and other loose meats inside the abdomen of a cow, and when the servers cut open the animal's belly, the links fell onto the floor as real intestines would had the animal been gutted in front of us. A flock of live birds, feathers and all, were sewed inside a pig; they were supposed to fly about the dining hall when the pig's belly was cut, but the heat inside the cooked animal had killed them, so after they fell limply onto the floor they were each laid at the guests' tables as macabre party favors. The original plan had been to project holograms of cartoon swordfish dueling amid the piles of rotten food, but we were spared that because the projectors had the new metal plague in them and no longer worked.
Titian alone enjoyed the food. He ate and drank for four consecutive hours and three times went outside to vomit, as diners in Garden City are wont to do. The whole time I sat at his feet like a pet dog awaiting scraps from its master. From his vantage point above me Titian could look down the front of my gown and could fondle my breasts with his greasy hands whenever he desired. He leaned forward and whispered to me in what he considered a tender voice, "What a fine wife you will make for me." I closed my eyes and thought of my father's safety whenever he touched me. Father could see from his sofa what was happening to me, or he could have had he not chosen to look away. He said nothing to anyone nor touched any of the food during the long, stomach-turning feast.
Titian again commented upon the blue stones I was wearing. It was a second necklace Helen had borrowed from yet another officer's house. My maid had also arranged for a third set of lapis lazuli jewelry she was wearing herself as she sat behind us.
"Did you get both of these from the barbarian traders?" Titian asked her.
"They are nothing, sir," Helen told him. "You must see the really expensive ones they sell."
At the dinner's climax a giant silver tub containing red Mediterranean crabs, some of them boiled in their shells and some still alive, was rolled into the room. Titian's cooks tossed the crabs into the diners' laps, eliciting screams of agony when a steaming shell met bare flesh or a crab's talon bit into a diner's fingers. It was at this serene moment Titian proposed to me.
"Listen up, my dearest Justa Black," he announced in a strong voice the entire hall could hear. (Father grimaced when Titian used his name in connection with me.) "You are the loveliest lady in creation," he said, and teetered backward. "You have made me the happiest-"
He fell off the couch before he could finish. Being the game fellow he was, Titian laughed and climbed back up on his perch.
"Will you marry me?" he asked.
Fate (or, perhaps, simple dumb luck) intervened before I could answer. Titian became sick to his stomach again and had to be taken outside to vomit for a fourth time. Upon his return to the sofa he was disconcerted by the wine and the decaying food he had consumed and forgot what he had asked me only moments earlier. He soon thereafter passed into sleep. The rest of us set aside his appalling food and left while a half dozen of his larger male servants carried Titian to his bed.
When I visited his house on the day after the feast, the fuel factor was not there to welcome me. On the day after that I found his rented house remained empty. I asked Helen if Titian's servants had said anything to her about where their master might be, and my old nurse winked at me in reply.
"He has gone to buy Afghan lapis lazuli from the Arab traders," she laughed. "They say it is more precious than natural diamonds."
"Where are the traders staying?" I asked her. "Are they nearby?"
"They and the gentleman have left for the desert south of the Tigris River Valley, my darling," said Helen, clapping her hands with glee as she spoke. "That is where they told him the precious jewelry comes from."
"That is beyond the frontiers of the Empire. The Pan-Polarian Army has not set foot there for decades. Is it even safe there?"
"For us it is," cackled Helen. "Not so safe for the gentleman."
As Helen well knew, the Arab traders had no valuable jewelry for sale. My nurse had tricked Titian into venturing across the frontier in the com pany of one of the many bands of desperate men who forever hovered about the edges of the Empire and whose numbers had grown exponentially as the Empire weakened. Six weeks after he disappeared into the wastelands, another group of nomads brought a message to the base: Titian had been taken prisoner; the Arabs had seized the little money he had been carrying and wanted a ransom to guarantee his safe return to us; specifically, they wanted Titian's considerable weight in gold. Father had no money of his own and had to relate the kidnappers' message to Mr. Golden in Garden City. That wealthy man wrote us in the spring of the seventh year of the Concerned One's rule that he had decided Titian was not worth as much as the Arabs were demanding. By then the matter was moot anyway. Two months before Mr. Golden's letter arrived in Van City the kidnappers had grown tired of waiting for us to pay up; they left Titian's head, wrapped in a brown cotton sheet, in the sand outside our southern gate.
"Looks as though the wedding has been called off," said Helen the morning soldiers brought the last of the fuel factor to Father's house.
Father saw to the burial of Titian's remains, such as those we had of him. We gave the dead man the proper rituals of Father's religion and planted the head facing toward the East, whence Father believed the Lady of Flowers would one day come to resurrect the fallen. As small a recompense for Titian as the ceremony was, it was more than his special friend in Garden City had chosen to do for him in his time of need.
ll of July Father lay prostrate on his campaign bed. Unable to direct his troops in the field, he dispatched Brigadier Harriman across the Bosporus to block the passage of Selin's army into Asia. Healthy or bedridden, Father could not have selected a worse man for the mission. Brigadier Harriman was ordered to fight a series of delaying actions in the passes Selin would have to take to reach the channel crossing. Rather than do as he was told, the hothead swept through Thrace and Greece, smashing any military outposts that happened to be in his way and putting to death some of Selin's supporters he captured in the larger towns. Thus he succeeded in turning the entire region against our cause while he exposed Father's brigades to the advance of Selin's much larger force.
Father had to order Harriman to make a forced march back to Istanbul or Selin would have cut off Harriman's line of retreat on the European side of the Bosporus. Father then lifted himself from his sickbed and went to take command in person. He gathered his entire army in Istanbul, and in so doing
blocked Selin's advance outside the walls of that heavily fortified city. We were to some degree aided at that moment by a rebellion in North Africa, in which the Empire lost that entire region to the indigenous Muslim Arabs, and Selin had to rush to Tunis and evacuate the twenty thousand members of his extended clan to safety in Italy. This bought us several weeks of delay before we had to clash with Selin's army another time. With every ember of fury he could flag into life, Father berated-in front of the other senior officers-his protege Brigadier Harriman for failing to follow his directives.
"You were to sit in the mountains and wait for him to come to you!" Father shouted at the headstrong young man. "Now we have to stop Selin right at the coastline or we are lost!"
Never one to retreat to a more humble position when he could create a scene, Harriman put his hand on his sidearm and announced to the entire staff, "I will kill myself for displeasing my emperor!"
"You will do nothing of the sort," said Father. (In spite of our dangerous condition, Father pitied the young general more than he was angry at him.) "I will still have need of you," he told Harriman.
Father had to lie down after he had spoken to his officers. He called the disgraced brigadier into his residence to confer with him at his bedside while Medus rubbed Father's aching legs.
"I want you to take a third of the army back into Asia," Father told him. "March south to the Hellespont and block any forces Selin tries to land there. This will be your chance at redemption, my friend."
Harriman went to one knee and took Father's hand.
"You will not regret this, sir," said Harriman, shedding tears over my embarrassed father. "I will avenge my failures in Greece a thousand times over. I will drive Selin's men into the sea for your sake. I will-"
"Yes, very well said," said Father, who never could endure histrionics. "Mind this, my young friend: you are to meet the enemy at the coastline, take on Selin's men as they struggle through the surf. You will have the advantage there. He no longer has any aircraft or armored vehicles. He has more men, but they are not as well protected as we are. Should there be too many of them, and they drive you back, retreat farther south into the Cilician Gates. Do not, for any reason, attempt to fight Selin in a set-piece battle on open ground. Take up a defensive position at the Gates, and I will sweep down from the east and into their rear. Do you follow me? The radios don't work, but my Boer scouts will tell me where you are.,,
Brigadier Harriman swore on everything he held sacred he would obey Father's every dictate.
As soon as the young general ran off to do his duty Father told me he knew he had made the wrong decision.
"He will make a new disaster," he sighed from his bed. "His misadventures in Greece will weigh upon him. He will rush into a massacre to prove everyone was wrong about him. Poor brave fool."
"Why then did you send him, sir?" I asked.
"We have already lost," said Father, not letting a note of self-pity sound in his words. "We lost when the armies in the North American heartland declared for Selin. We could have never reached the capital or the naval bases before he did. Never could we have as many troops or as much money as he does. We now have to die well. Harriman deserves to die a brave man's death in battle. The living will forever after speak well of him. Selin is an old soldier, whatever else he is. He has kept something of a soldier's ways. Even he will admit afterward that young Harriman was courageous."
"Will we die well also, sir?" I asked.
"Not you, my beautiful Justa," he said, and sat upright long enough to touch my face. "I have plans to save you."
To delay the inevitable, Father had made other plans also. He wished to foray from Istanbul and by so doing to cut Selin's supply lines across Greece. Fate had it that the men he sent through the city gates to make the long strike into enemy territory chanced to see an owl perch atop one of their standards the moment they reached open ground on the European side; a swarm of bees attacked the bird and drove it out of sight. Among the men in the vanguard of Father's army was a Swedish mystic claiming to have the gift of augury; he announced to everyone about him the owl represented General Black and the bees were the countless forces of Selin that were going to attack him. The omen terrified the entire army. In those years of the Empire's decline most of the soldiers carried on their persons some such nonsense as a talisman or a hare's foot stuck under their body armor to ward off death in battle, and they were afraid of birds calling in the night and of dogs that had a bad eye and of every other harbinger of bad luck the superstitious can fear. To a man they retreated into the city and refused to move out again.
Father had to fortify the walls of Istanbul against a siege that was sure to follow. Thereafter he crossed the majority of his men once more into Asia. Many families in the city he was abandoning had declared for Father's cause and had already been condemned to death by Selin. Fear can be as effective as bravery in a hopeless situation, and in the later stages of the war the frightened city of Istanbul would hold out against Selin's mighty army until the issue of who would become emperor had been decided elsewhere.
Soon after reaching Asia we learned that Brigadier Harriman had lost his life and his men in one headlong attack against the enemy. He had waited while the bulk of Selin's army crossed the Hellespont, then had engaged the entire hostile force in a senseless battle near the lake we still call by the ancient name Cyzicus. A third of Father's men had perished with him.
Selin was now racing to get between us and our home base in Van City. Since we could not proceed south, Father placed his remaining troops in the narrow pass between Nicea and Eribulus and there awaited his fate. The few horsemen left in Father's command were Turks, as Selin was. Some of these soldiers were even members of Selin's sun-worshiping mystery cult. In the dead of night these same horsemen slipped away to join their countrymen in the other army. The infantry force Father was left with could now have reached the relative safety of the Cilician Gates only if they had grown wings to fly to that destination.
ix years earlier, Father had saved Selin's military career as well as his future rival's life. Abdul Selin was then military governor of the Great Plains, the vast province composed of fourteen former American states that had Kansas City as its capital. Like every other general or administrator serving under the Concerned One, Selin's survival depended upon keeping the erratic emperor's favor. When the emperor had a change of heart, men in Selin's position often came to a sudden and very bad end for no particular reason.
Cleander, the new chamberlain in Garden City and the unacknowledged leader of the City Guardsmen, was at this time helping himself to the treasury while the Concerned One spent the remainder of the Empire's fortune on his houses, his harem, his spectacles, and on his throng of hanger-ons who clung to the emperor's court as other lowlifes cling to famous athletes and celebrated actors. In this era of good stealings, army payrolls set aside for forces far removed from the capital often magically shrank before they arrived at the offices of the various military paymasters. In a repeat of what had happened in Britain two years earlier, some soldiers served for months with no pay at all. Selin's men in the Great Plains were among the most neglected. To air their grievances to their temperamental commander, these soldiers formed a committee and presented him a petition an educated man among them had rendered into good English. The little African of Turkish descent met with the committee one morning right after breakfast, and that same afternoon put them to death in the so-called old style, which is to say he stripped the men naked and had them clubbed to death with iron bars before the entire mustered army. He ordered the entire army in his province to draw lots and intended to kill every hundredth man among them in a similar fashion. His impudent troopers had the gall to revolt before he could execute his plan.
A common soldier named DeVries, a man possessing the mind and leadership abilities rarely found in men of any station, took control of Selin's rebellious troops and led them west from Kansas City into the lightly populated center of the Gre
at Plains, where many farmers and villagers were sympathetic to the rebels' cause. From hidden bases within that sea of grass and grains, DeVries waged a guerrilla war upon the unprotected towns and villas of the neighboring provinces. He freed thousands of local citizens from the rule of the tax farmers, and many of the rural folk joined the rebels' ranks and let them have the livestock and grain DeVries's men needed to feed themselves. In Garden City the Senate spoke of this rebel leader as a second Robert E. Lee; they and the emperor feared DeVries would cross into Mexico and lay hold of the capital, defended as it was by only a single division of Guardsmen. For months it seemed as if the center stone of the Empire were giving way. Everyone feared the rebellion would bring down with it the entire weakening imperial structure.
The Concerned One-or whoever was doing his thinking for him at the time-knew enough of his generals to know he did not dare send any of his more brilliant commanders into the Great Plains to put down the rebellion; the brighter stars in the military firmament might well use the occasion to join DeVries and mount a still greater revolt, one that was sure to overthrow the emperor. The one general the emperor could rely upon was Peter Black, for only he could be trusted both to do his duty and, for the sake of the emperor's late father, to remain loyal to the line of Anthonys. The Concerned One recalled Father from Turkey and put him in charge of three divisions of heavy infantry, ten thousand auxiliary troops, and a thousand pieces of mechanized artillery that still could be guided by satellites and two observation planes, although there were no longer any assault aircraft that would fly. The frightened emperor told Father to destroy the rebels by any means he could. We were marching north at the head of this considerable army when we met Selin as he fled toward the capital with two thousand soldiers-most of them relatives from his personal guard-who had remained true to him when the rest of his force bolted. I remarked the house of Selin was now wearing a new type of sun-shaped decal on their uniforms, a symbol that was an onyx disk with golden rays sprouting from it. I was told the cult had adopted this new style of sun fetish after a particularly large meteorite (or "sun rock" as the devotees of the sun religion called it) had fallen to Earth somewhere in the Siberian wilderness; the members of the cult said it was a sign from heaven. Selin took Father off the roadway and held a conference with him in the middle of a grain field. The little Turk from North Africa looked on his outside to be the same man we had seen in Progress; he still had a slight, muscular build and a bushy head that was too large for his body. We could not tell from how he appeared that the interior part of the man was in agony. He paced the rows of barley like a caged wolf and ran his hands through the forest of hair on his skull as he built up the nerve to reveal himself to his fellow general. He told Father he feared for his life; not because of what DeVries's soldiers might do, should they catch up with him, but because of how the emperor might react to his failure to suppress the revolt.
The Martian General's Daughter Page 13
