"You have to give me your legions, Peter," were the first words out of his mouth when he had Father out of earshot from us. "I will give you anything you want in return. Look, you and I are both outsiders. I'm a Turk from Tunis, my father was a construction worker, and you have no money. Those fancy boys in Garden City eat our kinds by the handful. If we don't help each other, who will? One old warrior helps another, and so on, don't you see?"
"The emperor was specific," said Father. "I alone am to proceed north with this strike force. My servant is carrying the papers the emperor signed in his own hand."
"Orders, orders," said Selin as pleasantly as he could. "We make up our own orders out here, away from the pretty boys. Who cares about the emperor's hand? How about letting one hand wash the other, as the old saying goes?"
"My hands are tied, sir," said Father, for once almost creating a witticism. "I have no other options."
"Did Cleander send you after me?" demanded Selin, and bounded away from Father. (Father said Selin might have been said to have become hysterical at this point. The little Turk forever went about in such a constant fury it was hard to tell his one mood from the other.) "He sent you to kill me, didn't he?! Don't mention the Concerned One to me! He doesn't do anything anymore besides amuse himself with his whores!"
"The emperor alone sends me," said Father. "I am to tell you to use the men you have left to defend the Rio Grande to prevent the deserters from going farther south."
Selin calmed momentarily and took Father deeper into the field. He paced about and fingered his beard as he fought to regain control over his emotions. When he spoke again to Father, his words sounded as soft as a beggar's.
"They will blame me for this disaster," he told Father. "You must see how it is: I have to redeem myself. These are my divisions, and you know how those people in Garden City jump to judgment just because of little facts like that."
"Were I to give you these men, the emperor would kill me," said Father. "I sympathize with you in your position, sir, but I have a family as you do. However, I do have a friend in the capital who might help-"
"You think Golden the speculator could save me?" sneered Selin, once more letting his true, pugnacious personality come forth. "Did you really think I don't already know of him? I know everything!" he said, drawing close to Father's chest. "The Concerned One isn't the only one with agents! I watch everyone, including you! I'm not an idiot the pretty boys can order about like a trained dog! I am not you! You know what the pretty boys in the capital call you? The Black Zero, because that's a number that never comes up on the roulette tables in the new casinos. Do you know why they call you that? Because you are an imbecile! A man of your position would be frightening, General Black, were you not so very, very stupid! Don't tell me about your friend Mr. Golden! I could pick both of you off the Earth like ticks off the emperor's athlete friends!"
"I think we have spoken as much as we should, sir," said Father, and walked away from him.
Completely given over to rage, Selin threw a dirt clod at him and nicked Father on the flank.
"Go on to glory, you moron!" Selin shouted. "Abdul Selin and the Selin Clan don't need your help! We won't beg to you! Selin has lived through worse than this! You wait and see if he doesn't make it through this crisis, you sand ape!"
We in Father's household expected that noisy conference might be the last time we would see the Turk from Tunis above ground. To our misfortune (and the Empire's), he was not exaggerating his ability to weather the worst situations. An adage from India tells us gluttony is a virtue in a time of famine. Selin had a gluttony for power that would serve him well in an era when there was little power to be had outside the emperor's throne room. The ferocious little general would feed his great virtue until he devoured every morsel of power in the Empire, including that invested in the throne, in the purple stripe, and in everyone wearing the purple stripe, and still he would be hungry for more. We should have known when we parted company with him in the barley field the question was never whether Selin would survive; the question was who or what could possibly survive Selin and his ravenous kinsmen.
DeVries's deserters quickly learned of Father's advance. Our Boer scout planes told us the rebels had broken camp on the South Platte River and were on the march toward the central Rockies. Should they reach the mountains before we did, they could either cross over to the Great Basin and seal the passes behind them with a few thousand men, or the entire mutinous army might find refuge in the highlands of the northern mountain basins, from where we would need dozens of divisions and years of effort to dislodge them. Father abruptly turned west on the remnants of the empty Highway 70 and made a dash to head off the rebels before they could leave the Great Plains. Since we no longer had any usable transport trucks and only two observation planes, Father made his men go triple time, running them for twenty steps then marching them for twenty more before he made them run again. They marched for seventeen hours a day, resting for ten minutes of every hour. At night Father did not let his troops make camp: he bade them sleep on the bare ground, as we in his household did, and he made them eat their meals cold and right from their knapsacks. Father loved the excitement of riding up and down the moving lines in our last four-wheel-drive vehicle and shouting to his men, "Step lively, boys! Look at me: I'm an old man, and I can still outmarch any of you!" The years rolled away from him during the excruciating journey. He would dismount from his vehicle ten times a day to get beside the soldiers and show them how a real trooper marched heel to toe, heel to toe. As he stomped along next to them, he told his troops the story of the Egyptian crocodile, and the beast in his story became larger and more fierce each time he got off his vehicle to tell the tale. In nine days of flatout exertion we beat DeVries to the mountain pass beyond Denver and were drawn into battle array when the rebel force appeared in the east.
The deserters' army was less than half the size of Father's, and it lacked any heavy artillery units to soften us up or any cavalry to protect its flanks. Had they turned tail and run back into the plains, Father's Mex ican horsemen could have easily gotten behind the enemy infantry and slowed their flight until our troopers overtook them. Since the rebels had been trained to be soldiers of the Empire, they spread themselves out and dug parallel lines of trenches, which was the only defensive formation they knew and is a devastating tactic against irregular opponents fighting in haphazard order but is much less effective against other soldiers trained in the Pan-Polarian way, for we positioned ourselves in exactly the same formations and had the added advantage of picking at them with our heavy artillery. DeVries's one chance was to smash the center of Father's lines with one quick charge. To counter this possibility, Father had decided to enfold the mutineers; he would give ground slowly at the middle of his line as his men retreated from their first two trenches while his cavalry and his lightly armed auxiliary troops swept around the enemy on the left and right, and in that way trap the whole of them in a circle of steel. The deserters could pierce our soldiers' body armor with their conventional gunpowder rifles only if they drew within twenty feet of our positions, which of course exposed them to the murderous fuselage of our mortars and cannon. Some of the deserters saw what was happening as they advanced, and they retreated from the snare Father had set for them before it closed completely. The men in the front lines of the rebel army stopped a thousand meters away, just out of killing range of our rifles, before they made their final charge. Their advance revealed the complete disadvantage the smaller force bore, because at close quarters everyone could see that Father's infantry reached far beyond the ends of the deserters' lines. Pan-Polarian officers train their men to hold their fire until they can hear the other side's footsteps, but in this situation the deserters were reluctant to venture farther, as it was obvious they could not win. Father's troopers called out in their vulgar soldiers' patois for their opponents to surrender and avoid further bloodshed in this pointless battle.
"Come over to us!" they called.
"Our General Black is a soft old man! He hasn't executed a deserter in years!"
"Does he pay you?!" the mutineers called back.
"He gets our payroll direct from the emperor's hand!" our men replied.
For several minutes the men stood apart and shot over one another's heads while they discussed the surrender. Once terms were agreed to, the battle ended more quickly than it had began: the rebels laid down their arms and submitted to their former rivals. Less than a thousand men had been lost on both sides added together, and nearly all of the fallen were from the ranks of the deserters.
Father's one demand of the rebels was they give the leaders of the insurrection to him. DeVries and the other principals had slipped through the gap in the closing circle moments before the battle was joined, leaving behind a mere seven leaders of the uprising, all of whom were dispatched to a swift death by a flying tribunal that needed only a couple hours to hold its trials and to carry out the verdicts. Father then blended the rest of the mutineers back into the army. After the deserters had taken the oath of allegiance a second time and each had been given a few coins of the money the Concerned One had sent with us, Father marched them back to their old bases on the Great Plains. When they filed out of Father's column three weeks later in the green heart of the Missouri Valley, the former rebels cheered the old man they had been trying to kill at the foot of the Rockies a fortnight and a half earlier.
General Abdul Selin did not cheer Father when we met him on the road near San Antonio as he was going north to resume control of his men. That angry, ungrateful man did not so much as dismount from his horse when he confronted Father. He explained that since we were all on foot or mounted on horses he did not wish to make our exit from his province longer than it already would be. Selin might have contained his natural inclinations had Father simply saluted him at the spot where chance had put them together. Father regrettably attempted to give the little Turk an account of the swift victory he had won.
"I have sometimes wondered," said Selin, interrupting Father's account, "if you were conspiring against me with the pretty boys in Garden City, with that bloodless reptile Cleander, maybe with the self-styled the Concerned One himself. I have come to think no one would want you in on their plots. I called you a moron, Peter, when last we met. Never have I spoken truer words. I cannot imagine why anyone, not even that diseased simpleton we call our emperor, would trust you with any authority."
"I am one who does his duty, sir," said Father.
"You may think I am destroyed," said Selin, and grinned. (Seemingly hundreds of white teeth showed through his beard.) "You may go to the capital and tell them how you saved my skin. They will give you a triumphal parade. In their conferences, the pretty boys in the Senate and in the palace will talk of punishing Abdul Selin for his incompetence. `He lost control of his men,' they will say, `and look: old General Black got them back for him.' I have foreseen these possibilities, old man. Be warned, Black Zero; I am prepared for whatever may happen."
He hit his horse with his lash and spun the animal about in a circle, a nervous gesture that accomplished nothing and was typical of the man, and typical of one still unfamiliar with riding a horse.
"Selin will live through this crisis," said Selin after his horse had come about and he faced Father again. "He will live a long, long time. He will live for the day he can thank you properly for saving his army and making him look a fool. You may trust in that."
Tiny bits of saliva gathered on his beard about his mouth as he spoke. He was smiling as he threatened Father and was simultaneously trembling with rage.
Father was too weary to argue and too old to fight with Selin any longer. He saluted to the furious little man and walked back to his carriage without another word passing between them. At Garden City the emperor and his court welcomed Father as a hero, exactly as Selin had predicted they would. The Concerned One gave Father a triumphal parade in the emperor's golden chariot (which had replaced the golden hovercraft after the latter ceased to function) and named Father not only governor of Turkey but general of all the armies on the Eastern frontier, though by then that meant only the forces in Turkey and what remained in western Siberia. The emperor had sculptors make a black onyx bust of Father that showed Father turning his eyes to heaven, and it was placed inside a recess of the palace's central hallway. Other artists constructed a second portrait of Father, this one a mosaic depicting the general in his long white robe as he performed a processional ritual for Sophia, the Lady of the Flowers. This second portrait was placed on a wall near one of the palace's interior gardens in which the emperor and his friends exercised. The Concerned One, however, was not so generous as to give Father any money.
The honors the emperor rained upon General Black made my father scores of new enemies in the capital, the most dangerous of them being Cleander, the imperial chamberlain. This sly, scheming man jealously guarded access to the interior compartments of the palace where the emperor lived and diverted himself. The chamberlain was most upset that the Concerned One not only had spoken to Father in the throne room but had as well put up Father's likeness in places the young emperor and his entourage were certain to pass every day. The former chicken farmer disliked anyone of any importance communicating with the emperor in person, for then the Concerned One could give orders that might contradict other edicts Cleander had given in the emperor's stead. Besides the scores of athletes the emperor trained among in his garden courtyards and the harem that entertained him in his bedrooms, the two people Cleander regularly allowed into the emperor's presence were the chief mistress, Marcie Angelica, and a strange lumbering giant, a former professional wrestler named Norman Alzedo. Cleander could daily change the cast of prostitutes and aging fighters who visited the imperial living quarters, except for Marcie and the giant, both of whom the Concerned One demanded always be near him. The emperor claimed Norman Alzedo was teaching him how to fight hand to hand. As for Marcie, it was widely rumored that only she could devise methods of satisfying the Concerned One's unusual desires. She was, however, far more than his concubine. "The Amazon," as she was called outside the palace, was creating a power base second only to Cleander's, and when the emperor did get the chance to speak to important men, the words he spoke were often more hers than his. She was another reason why the chamberlain did not want Father speaking to the emperor, for such conversations gave her an opportunity to project her will into the world lying beyond the palace's marble walls.
Cleander visited Father one evening at the general's house in the Field of Heroes two days after Father had been given his parade. To protect him on the dangerous city streets, the second-most-powerful man in the northern world brought along two inconspicuous bodyguards he left in a weedy lot outside Father's residence. Wearing a simple gray suit as a government aide might adorn himself with to demonstrate his humility and carrying no rings on his hands to proclaim his rank, Cleander slipped into the garden at the rear of the house where Father was sitting alone, looking up at the stars. He nearly frightened Father out of his chair when he announced his presence in the darkness. He had to introduce himself to the general, for Father had never before seen Cleander up close.
"I think, sir," the chamberlain said, getting right to the purpose of his visit, "you should be returning to the East."
He would not sit when Father offered him a place on one of the garden's wicker chairs. Cleander remained standing in the garden shadows, half hidden behind a column.
"I haven't been given any orders to leave," said Father.
"You have them now," said Cleander. "A ship is ready in Tampico. A sailing ship, but swift, and blessed with an experienced crew. You can be on board tomorrow."
"Why should I be, sir?" asked Father, leaning his ear toward his guest to catch the man's soft, nearly whispered words.
"Because we do not need heroes in Garden City," said Cleander. "The senators say you are a sergeant with a general's rank. I think they mean that as a compliment. Every sergeant I h
ave known did not argue when given an order. You shouldn't either. Good night, sir, and have a safe and swift journey."
While Father could be slow at times, he had enough good sense to have himself, me, and his two principal servants on a ship leaving Tampico the next day. There was something cold, almost unliving in the slight chamberlain that terrified the veteran of a hundred pitched battles into acting without asking further questions.
We were not yet back in Turkey when Abdul Selin made good on his vow to redeem himself in the emperor's estimation. The chief rebel DeVries, still alive and still hungry for vengeance, had journeyed from the Great Plains with a small group of his confederates across the Rio Grande and into Mexico. Dressed in wide straw hats and carrying bouquets of flowers, they infiltrated the capital posing as religious pilgrims attending the Festival of the Great Goddess, and intended to assassinate the emperor when he made an appearance at the footraces held in the Field of Diversions. Unbeknownst to them, Selin had a paid informer within DeVries's group, and the little Turk already knew every part of the conspiracy. On the very day when the former soldiers were massing in the stands and were preparing to rush onto the field and hack the Concerned One to death at the moment he made his formal salute to the runners, Selin and fifty of his relatives charged into the arena and revealed everything to the City Guardsmen. In an hour the emperor's soldiers had swept the grandstands, killing everything in their path, including DeVries, his comrades, and a hundred thousand innocent spectators who happened to be in an unlucky place at an evil time. Everyone left alive in Garden City proclaimed Selin a hero. Later that same year Selin's army helped repulse a foray some starving French Canadians made south of the Great Lakes. The emperor gave him a triumphal parade in Garden City equal to that he had given Father, and he granted Selin the honorific title `The Canadian,' one of the names he had already granted to himself. All talk of punishing Selin for the rebellion in the Great Plains quickly died within the imperial court. The ferocious man from Tunis had survived to make certain others did not do the same for very long.
The Martian General's Daughter Page 14
