Walk in Hell gw-2

by Harry Turtledove

  That sparked another couple of sentences from Bjornsen: “Fish is one thing. I just hope they haven’t got any cooked goose.”

  Loop Point boasted a lighthouse. Enos hoped nobody was staring down from it with a pair of field glasses. If somebody was staring down from it with a pair of field glasses, he hoped his boat and the two chugging along behind it looked enough like little local fishing boats to draw no notice.

  The land was low and muddy and not particularly green, in spite of Ireland’s fabled reputation. Here and there, George spotted stone houses with turf roofs. They looked little and cramped and uncomfortable, a small step up from a sodbuster shack out on the prairie. He wouldn’t have wanted to live in any of them.

  A petty officer named Carl Sturtevant had a map. “There’s the Cashen River inlet,” he said, pointing to a stream that, as far as George was concerned, wasn’t big enough to deserve to be a river. “A couple-three miles to Ballybunion.”

  Ballybunion Castle had, at some time in the distant past, had part of one wall blown out of it, making it worthless as a fortification. Enos saw it only in the distance. Closer, some men were waving cloth caps to signal to the boats. “There they are,” he said happily.

  “Yeah, those should be our boys,” Sturtevant agreed. “If those ain’t our boys, we’re in a hell of a lot of trouble.”

  “Shit, if the limeys were wise to us, they wouldn’t waste time with no ambush,” said Bjornsen, a born optimist. “They’d haul a field piece out behind a haystack, wait till we got close, and blow us so high we’d never come down.” He glanced at those anonymous crates. “One hit would do the job up brown, I calculate.”

  The men in baggy tweeds came trotting toward the boats. Out from behind a haystack came not a British field gun but several carts. “We’ve got more toys here than they can haul away in those,” George said as his boat beached.

  “That’s their worry,” Sturtevant said. He and the other sailors, Enos among them, started unloading the crates.

  “God bless you,” one of the Irishmen said. His comrades were lugging the Americans’ presents to the carts. He had a present himself: a jar with a cork in it. “Have a nip o’ this, lads.”

  Quickly, the jar went from sailor to sailor. The whiskey tasted different from what George was used to drinking, but it was pretty good. He took a long pull. When he swallowed, he felt as if he’d poured lava down his gullet. The Irishmen didn’t water it to make it stretch further, as bartenders were in the habit of doing.

  Wise in the ways of the sea, the Irishmen helped the sailors shove the boats back into the water, some calling thanks in brogues so thick, Enos could barely make them out. Free of the crates, the boats bobbed like corks. He headed out to sea once more, out toward the Ericsson.

  “How about that?” Sturtevant said. “We just bit the King of England right in the ass.”

  “Now all we have to do is see whether we got away with it,” George said. He wished the boat would go faster.

  “Will you look at that crazy son of a bitch!” Vic Crosetti burst out.

  Sam Carsten looked. The Sandwich Islander in question was indeed crazy, as far as he could tell. The fellow was skimming over the waves toward shore standing upright on a plank maybe nine or ten feet long and a foot and a half or two feet wide.

  “Why the devil doesn’t he fall off and break his fool neck?” Sam said. “You wouldn’t even think a monkey could do that, let alone a man.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Crosetti said. “But I ain’t gonna let him hear me call him a monkey. He’d break me in half.” That was undoubtedly true. The surf-rider, who came up onto the beach with the plank on his head, was a couple of inches above six feet and muscled like a young god, which was all the more evident because he wore only a dripping cotton loincloth dyed in bright colors.

  “Hey, pal,” Carsten said, and tossed him a dime. “That’s a hell of a ride you had there.” Crosetti coughed up a dime, too.

  “Thank you both very much, gentlemen,” the fellow said. Like a fair number of his people, he talked like an educated Englishman, which made it hard to treat him like a nigger. His skin was only a couple of shades darker than Crosetti’s, anyhow.

  “Where did you learn to do that, anyway?” Sam asked. The moment the words were out of his mouth, he realized he’d been stupid. Too late to do anything about it then, of course. That was the way the world worked.

  The native laughed at him. It wasn’t a snotty laugh, it was a friendly laugh: maybe because the surf-rider was a friendly guy, maybe because he knew better than to get himself in trouble squabbling with the U.S. Navy. Both, Sam judged. The fellow said, “Having grown up here in Honolulu with the sea as my neighbor, so to speak, it was a sport I acquired as a boy. I confess I can see how surprising it might appear to those born in other climes.”

  “Other climes, yeah,” Carsten said, while Vic Crosetti did his best, which wasn’t any too good, to keep from snickering. As always, every inch of Sam’s flesh the sun touched was cooked red and juicy.

  “How come you talk so damn fancy?” Crosetti asked.

  “This is how English was taught to me,” the Sandwich Islander said with another shrug. “Since you Americans came here, I have learned the language may be spoken with a number of different accents.”

  “Haven’t heard anybody here who’s got quite as much mush in his mouth as you do,” Crosetti said. Was he looking for a fight in spite of denying it before? He hadn’t had that much to drink yet; he and Sam had only just come on leave from the Dakota.

  The surf-rider sighed. “You must understand, gentlemen, that under the previous administration my father was assistant minister for sugar production, thus enabling me to acquire rather better schooling than most of my contemporaries.”

  Sam needed a moment to realize that under the previous administration meant when the British ran the show. He needed another moment to realize something else. “Your father was assistant what-do-you-call-it, and you took our dimes? Christ on His cross, I bet you can buy and sell both of us and hardly even notice you’ve done it.”

  “It may be so, but, for one thing, we Hawaiians-we prefer that to Sandwich Islanders, if it matters to you-have discovered expediency to be the wiser course in dealing with the occupying authorities. Had I refused your money, you might have thought I was insulting you, with results unpleasant for me.” The fellow’s smile revealed large, gleaming white teeth. “And besides, you both chose to reward me for my skill out of what I know to be your small pay. Especially in wartime, acts of kindness and generosity should not be discouraged, lest they disappear altogether off the face of the earth.”

  “Whew!” Carsten couldn’t remember the last time anybody had done that much explaining. “You ought to be a chaplain, uh-”

  “John Liholiho, at your service.” The surf-rider’s bow could have been executed no more smartly had he been wearing top hat, cutaway, and patent-leather shoes rather than gaudy loincloth and bare feet. “And with whom have I had the pleasure of conversing?”

  Carsten and Crosetti gave their names. Crosetti plucked at Sam’s sleeve, whispering, “Listen, do you want to spend the time chewing the fat with this big galoot, or do you want to get drunk and get laid?”

  “We got a forty-eight, Vic-don’t have to be back on board ship till day after tomorrow,” Sam answered, also in a low voice. “God knows it’s easy to find a saloon and a piece of ass in this town, but when are you going to run across another real live aristocrat?”

  “Ahh, you want to be a schoolteacher when you grow up,” Crosetti snarled in deeply unhappy tones. But he didn’t leave. He hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his tropical white bell-bottoms and waited to see whether Sam could make standing on the beach banging his gums with a native more interesting than a drunken debauch.

  John Liholiho peered over toward the jutting prominence of Diamond Head while the two sailors talked with each other. The presumably British school he’d attended had trained him in more things than
an upper-crust accent; he showed very plainly that he was not listening to a conversation not intended for him. Carsten wished most of the sailors he knew had a matching reserve instead of being snoops.

  He didn’t really know how he was going to make this more fun than getting lit up and having his ashes hauled, either. After a little thought, he asked, “So how do you like it, living under the Stars and Stripes?”

  The Sandwich Islander-no matter how he thought of himself, that was how Carsten thought of him-frowned. “You do realize, of course, that this is a question on which circumspection might be the wisest course for me?” Seeing Sam hadn’t the slightest idea what circumspection was, he translated his English into English: “I might be wiser to keep quiet or lie.”

  “What am I going to do, shoot you?” Sam said, laughing. Crosetti plucked at his sleeve again. He shook off his pal.

  Liholiho gave him a serious look. “Two friends of my father’s of whom I know for certain have suffered this fate. It does give one pause. On the other side of the coin, the protectorate the British exercised over these islands was also imperfectly humane. Mr. Carsten, would you prefer to be thought of as a bloody wog or a nigger?”

  Since Sam had been thinking of John Liholiho as a nigger not ten minutes before, he had to work as hard at keeping his face straight as when he was raising on a pair of fives in a poker game. “Anybody called me either one of those things, I’d punch him in the teeth.”

  “Yeah.” Now Vic Crosetti’s attention was engaged. “I get called a fuckin’ dago or a wop, that’s bad enough.”

  “People seldom call me these things to my face, though I have heard nigger in a mouth or two since you Americans came.” The surf-rider seemed to have a British sense of precision, too. He went on, “What one is called, however, sometimes matters less than how one is seen. If the powers that be reckon one a wog or a nigger, one is not apt to be taken seriously regardless of the potential value of one’s contributions.”

  “That’s too complicated for me,” Carsten said, thinking he should have headed out and got drunk after all.

  But Crosetti got it. “He’s saying it’s like he’s an ordinary sailor, and he’s trying to convince an admiral he knows what he’s talking about.”

  John Liholiho beamed at him. “Mr. Crosetti, I am in your debt. You Americans and our former British overlords do tend to look at race as if it were rank, don’t you? — yourselves being admirals, by the very nature of things. I shall have to use the analogy elsewhere.”

  A Sandwich Islander as near naked as made no difference…with whom would he use an analogy (whatever an analogy was; Sam gathered it meant something like comparison, but it was another word he didn’t think he’d ever heard before)? Then Carsten remembered that, even though John looked like a savage, he was a local bigwig’s son. That he had to think twice before the fellow’s station came to mind went a long way toward making his point for him.

  Dipping his head again, the brown-skinned man said, “And now, if you will excuse me-” He turned and, carrying his surfriding board, trotted out into the Pacific. Once in the water, he climbed up onto the board, lay on his belly atop it, and used his arms to paddle farther from shore.

  Sam turned to Vic Crosetti. “All right, now we can have all the fun we want to. That didn’t take real long, and it was sort of interesting.”

  “Yeah, sort of.” Crosetti stared out at John Liholiho’s receding shape. “I bet he’s a limey spy. He sure talks like a limey spy, don’t he?”

  “He talks like a limey, anyway,” Carsten answered. “But so what? Even if he is a spy, how’s he going to get word off the island? And if you’re going to start seeing spies under every bed-”

  “If I look under a bed,” Crosetti said with great assurance, “it’s to make sure I can hide there if her husband comes home before he’s supposed to.” Both men laughed, and headed into town to see what kind of damage they could do to the fleshpots there.

  Reggie Bartlett trudged wearily into Wilson Town, Sequoyah. Seeing houses around him felt strange after so long on the prairie with no human-made artifacts close by but the occasional oil well…and the trenches, and the shells, and the other appurtenances of war.

  Lieutenant Jerome Nicoll called, “We got to hold this town, boys. Ain’t a whole hell of a lot of Sequoyah left to us, and we have to hang on to what there is, not let the damnyankees run us out of the whole state. Remember, the Germans don’t hold all of Belgium even now.”

  “I ain’t seen any Germans in Sequoyah,” Nap Dibble said. Sweat cut ravines through the dust caking his face. “You see any o’ them damn Huns, Reggie? Yankees is bad enough, but them folks-”

  “Haven’t seen any Germans, Nap,” Bartlett answered. He’d long since figured out Nap, while a good fellow, wasn’t what anybody would call sharp. When Dibble lined up in front of the paymaster, he signed his name with an X. No wonder he’d be on the lookout for Germans smack in the middle of Sequoyah.

  “We have to save this town,” Lieutenant Nicoll repeated. A shell crashed down a few hundred yards off to the left, arguing that the Confederate soldiers didn’t have to do any such thing.

  Bartlett would have been more impressed with the speech if the lieutenant hadn’t said the same thing about Duncan, which had fallen several weeks before. He’d heard the same kind of speech on the Roanoke front, too. There it had sometimes presaged a retreat like this one, and sometimes a counterattack that left dead men piled high in exchange for retaking a couple of hundred yards of chewed-up, worthless ground.

  Nicoll tried something new. Pointing south, he spoke in dramatic tones: “There are the people who depend on us to protect them.”

  As far as Reggie could see, the people of Wilson Town weren’t depending on the Confederate Army for any such thing. A lot of houses already looked to have been abandoned. More folks-Indians, whites, a handful of Negro servants and laborers-were throwing whatever they could into buggies and wagons and hightailing it south toward the Texas line.

  Sergeant Pete Hairston spat in the dust of the road. “If the damnyankees want a pack of damn redskins, they’re welcome to ’em, far as I can tell. Weren’t for the oil round these parts, hell, I’d give Sequoyah to the USA and say, ‘You’re welcome to it.’”

  “Will you look at that?” Bartlett pointed to a side-curtained grocery wagon and to the tall, gray-bearded man in a black suit and homburg who was, instead of loading things into it, selling things from it. “Crazy Jew peddler, doesn’t he know he’s liable to get blown to hell any minute?” He raised his voice to a shout: “Hey, you! Hymie!”

  That got the peddler’s attention. He wasn’t just big; he looked strong and tough, too, in spite of those snowy whiskers. “Vot you vant?” he asked, his voice wary-no matter how tough he was, he had the brains not to argue with anybody toting a Tredegar.

  “You’d better get out of here before you get killed,” Bartlett told him.

  “Oh. Dot vot you talk about.” The peddler shrugged. “Soon I go.”

  Hairston made money-counting motions. “Business is good, huh?” He laughed. “Damn fool Jew. Money ain’t worth your neck.”

  The Jew muttered something under his breath. Reggie didn’t think it was a compliment. He didn’t think it was English, either, which was likely to be just as well: if he didn’t understand it, he didn’t have to notice it. That made something else occur to him: “Hey, Hymie, you sell a lot to the Indians around here?”

  “A lot, yes,” the peddler answered. “Is most of folk.”

  “How do you talk to ’em?” Bartlett asked. The Jew stared at him, not following the question. He tried again: “What language do you use when you sell to them?”

  “Oh.” The Jew’s face lit with intelligence. “They speak Henglish, same like me.” Reggie burst out laughing; from what little he’d seen of them, most of the local Chickasaws and Kiowas spoke English better than the peddler.

  “Go on, get the hell out of here,” Hairston said, and the peddler, not withou
t a sigh or two of regret for business lost, scrambled up into the wagon and rattled south out of Wilson Town, almost the last one to leave it.

  Methodically, the troops of Lieutenant Nicoll’s company began to dig in. Nap Dibble said, “Wish them niggers what was in this town would’ve stayed a bit. They could have done this here entrenching for us.”

  “Back on the Roanoke front, we had us lots of nigger labor battalions,” Reggie said as he made the dirt fly. “Haven’t seen so much of that here out west.”

  “Ain’t that much of it,” Sergeant Hairston said. “Like I been tellin’ you since you got here, Bartlett, ain’t that much of anything.”

  “Except Yankees,” Reggie said.

  “Yeah, except them,” Hairston agreed. “But they ain’t got any more’n-well, ain’t got a whole lot more’n-what we do, ’cept maybe soldiers.”

  “Except,” Reggie said again. He dug and dug, steady as a steam shovel. The ground was the perfect consistency: not so hard that he had to labor to force his entrenching tool into it, not so soft or muddy that the edges of the trench he was digging started falling down into what he’d already dug. He flipped the dirt up in front of his excavations to form a parapet. “Wish we had some more barbed wire.” He scooped out another couple of shovelfuls. “Wish we had any barbed wire.”

  “Wish for sugarplums for Christmas while you’re at it,” Sergeant Hairston said. “Oh, we may get some wire-we had a good bit in front o’ Duncan, once we’d stayed there a while. But this here ain’t the Roanoke front-that kind of good stuff don’t grow on trees here. I just told you that a couple seconds ago, dammit. Ain’t you listenin’ to me?”

  “Yeah, Sarge. I always listen,” Bartlett answered, so mildly that Hairston went back to digging for another stroke or two before giving him a dirty look. Reggie grinned back, a grin that had occasionally softened even the Yankee prison guards in West Virginia. He looked around, not to see if the Yankees were coming or the Chickasaws getting the hell out but to spot his company commander. “Now that the fighting’s picked up again, what’s the lieutenant going to do for his hooch?”