War World III: Sauron Dominion

by Jerry Pournelle

  “The Breedmaster who left you out for stobor was an idiot,” Glorund said.

  Juchi’s only answer was to butt him under the chin. Even Glorund saw stars for a moment. Juchi’s blindness mattered little in the hand-to-hand struggle in which they were engaged. Both men fought more by ear and by feel than by eye--and Juchi, however he had learned them, knew all the tricks in the warrior’s bag.

  But however skilled, however swift, however strong he was, he was no cyborg. He hurt Glorund a couple of times. Even so much surprised the Battlemaster. Glorund, though, made him first groan and then scream. “There,” he snarled, snapping Juchi’s right arm against his own shin. “And there--” He rammed his knee into his enemy’s midsection. “And there--” A final savage twist broke Juchi’s neck. It was not the slow, lingering kill Glorund had looked for, but it would serve.

  Juchi’s will to live on was stubborn as any Soldier’s. His lips shaped one last word: “Badri,” he whispered with all the breath left in him. Then at last he died. Glorund started to scramble free of him.

  With a wordless scream, Aisha leaped on the Battlemaster’s back. Glorund had looked for that, looked for it with anticipation. He would, he thought, have her two or three times and then either kill her or take her back to the Citadel for breaking. He swept out an arm to roll her off him. It was a casual sweep, not one he would have made against an opponent he took seriously. But he still thought of Juchi s legend as legend and no more; he did not believe Aisha was truly Juchi’s daughter and sister both, did not believe she too could hold Soldier genes. When a cyborg did not believe something, he utterly banished it from his thoughts: for him, that possibility no longer existed.

  The way Aisha smashed down his arm warned him he had made a mistake. He twisted desperately now, in full earnest. He was fast as a leaping cliff lion. He was not fast enough to keep her from drawing her knife across his throat.

  Blood spouted, hideously crimson. Soldiers clotted far faster than ordinary mortals; cyborgs held their circulatory systems under conscious control. Glorund could will away bleeding in an arm, in a leg, in his belly. But in his neck--! Whether his brain lost oxygen from bleeding or from his own willfully imposed internal tourniquet, the result would be the same, and as bad.

  Pieces of the world went gray in front of him. The color even of his own gushing blood faded. He kicked out at Aisha. If he was to die, he wanted to take her down with him, lest her genes be passed on to those who hated Soldiers.

  He thought he felt his booted foot strike home, thought he heard her cry out in pain. But all his senses were fading now, not just his vision. When he fell to the ground, he hardly knew he lay against it.

  Was his bleeding slowing? He forced a hand to claw its way up his side to the wound that opened his neck. Yes, the fountain had dwindled to a trickle. If he stayed very still, he might yet live.

  Something dark appeared over him. He concentrated. It was Aisha. She still had that dagger. He tried to raise a hand to protect himself. Too slow. He knew he was too slow.

  The point, sharp and cold, pierced his left eye and drove deep. All he felt at the end was enormous embarrassment.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, Aisha got to her feet. She bit her lips against a shriek as the broken ends of ribs grated against each other. Even dying, Glorund had been faster and stronger and deadlier than anything she had imagined. Now she understood how and why the Saurons ruled so much of Haven. How they had ever been stopped, why they did not rule the human part of the galaxy, was something else again.

  She wanted desperately to pant, to suck in great gulps of air to fight her exhaustion. Her ribs would not permit it. She sipped instead, and trembled all over. “Father, I have given you justice,” she whispered.

  A noise, not far away-- Her head whipped around. Her fist clenched on the hilt of her dagger. The blade was still red with Glorund’s blood. Even as she made the gesture, she felt its futility. If that was a Sauron coming through the apple trees, she was dead. She knew it. Only wildest luck and surprise had let her slay the Battlemaster. She would not enjoy surprise here, not standing over Glorund’s butchered corpse. And as for luck, surely she had used it all in killing him. Her shoulders sagged in resignation as she waited for her end.

  But she still did have some luck left, as she found when the newcomer walked into the clearing. He was no Sauron, only a peasant dressed in sheepskin jacket and baggy trousers of undyed wool. He carried nothing more lethal than a mattock.

  His eyes widened as they went from her face to the dagger to the two bodies sprawled close by, back to her face, back to the bodies. They almost popped from his head when he noticed one of those bodies wore a greatcoat of Sauron field-gray. He shifted the mattock to his left hand so he could move the other over his heart in a violent crisscross gesture that Aisha had seen before in some of the valleys she’d visited. It belonged to a faith many farmers still followed.

  “You killed them both?” the peasant whispered in Russia. Now he gripped the mattock in both hands and fell back into a clumsy posture of defense.

  Aisha shook her head. The motion hurt. Every motion hurt. “No,” she answered wearily. “The Sauron killed my father. I killed the Sauron.”

  “You are a woman,” the peasant said, as if it were accusation rather than simple statement of fact. “How could you slay a Sauron Soldier?”

  “I am called Aisha. My father is Juchi.” She pointed to the corpse that was not Glorund’s. Juchi’s death had not hit her yet, save to make her numb--she noticed she’d still spoken of him in the present tense.

  The peasant knew the name. This time he dropped the mattock so he could crisscross himself. “The accursed one,” he whispered.

  “So people have named him,” Aisha agreed, more wearily still. “He taught me to fight--before misfortune cast him down, he was a great warrior. And I-- I share his blood.” The third repetition of the peasant’s ritual crisscrossing began to bore her. She said, “If you’re going to run screaming to your Sauron masters, go do it. I won’t flee. I’m sick to death of wandering.”

  “Don’t talk like a fool,” the peasant said, crisscrossing himself yet again. “We bury these bodies, we maybe have time to run away, Bog willing.” He picked up the mattock and set to work. Dirt flew.

  “Why do you need to run away?” Aisha asked.

  “This happens on the land I work for the Saurons, so they will blame me.” He paused to wipe sweat from his forehead. “Drag the bodies over here while I work.”

  Aisha obeyed. She did not relish the idea of her father’s sharing a grave with a Sauron but, as Juchi himself had said, perhaps that was only just. Glorund’s greatcoat came open as she hauled him by his boots to the edge of the growing hole.

  The peasant kept digging for another couple of minutes. Then he happened to look over at Glorund’s collar tabs and saw the death’s-heads embroidered there. As if drawn by a lodestone, his gaze swung back to Aisha. “You slew--a cyborg?”

  Now, at last, he did not bother crisscrossing himself. He did not bother digging any more, either. He whirled and threw his mattock as far as he could. It clattered off a treetrunk. Then he dashed away, back toward the road.

  “Where are you going?” Aisha called after him.

  “What does it matter?” he yelled over his shoulder. “Wherever I run, it will not be far enough. But I must try.”

  The thump of his heavy strides faded as he dodged between apple trees. Aisha felt a sudden, almost overwhelming surge of pity for him--she was grimly certain that lie was right, that he would be hunted down and killed. His crisscross Bog would not save him.

  And what of herself? Only minutes before, when she’d thought the peasant a Sauron, she’d been ready to give up and die. Now she found that was no longer so. She looked down at her father. Yielding tamely to the Saurons would spit in the face of everything for which he’d lived. She could not fight them all, not here in Shangri-La Valley. That she d killed Glorund the Battlemaster was a greater victory than she�
��d had any right to expect.

  Which left--getting away. The foolish peasant had fled at random, and probably would not go more than a few kilometers from this land he’d been working all his life. He could no more conceive of taking refuge on the steppe than of building a booster and escaping into space.

  But the plains and their clans were Aisha’s second home. Aye, the Saurons might seek her there, but seeking and finding were not the same. Before she consciously came to a decision, she was jogging toward the steppe. It was a slow jog, with knives in it, but she kept on.

  She skirted the town of Nurnen, staying off the main road in favor of the farmers’ tracks that snaked their way through the fields. Only at the inner mouth of the pass did she perforce return to the highway.

  She jogged on, ignoring her hurt, ignoring how tired she was. All her life she’d been able to do that at need. She seldom thought about why it was so. Now she did, acknowledging the Sauron blood that ran in her veins through Juchi. She felt she was putting it to its proper use, as he had before her--using it against those who had brought it, all unwanted, to Haven.

  Had the Saurons in the Citadel or in their sentry posts at the outer mouth of the cleft wanted her, they could have taken her. She knew that. They had assault rifles and Gatlings and no doubt deadlier weapons as well, leftovers from the starship that had carried them here. But now, without Juchi at her side, no one took any special notice of her. She seemed just another woman who had finished her business in Shangri-La Valley and was on her way back to her clan.

  She kept jogging for several kilometers after she left the pass. Only when the tall grass behind her had swallowed up the way back to the lowlands did she stop to wonder what to do, where to go next.

  For long minutes, her mind remained perilously blank. All her adult life she had led her father-brother about, served as his eyes and as a staff in his hand. She’d wanted nothing more. Now he was gone. She still knew no grief, only vast emptiness. Without Juchi, what point to her own life? What could she do? What could she be?

  “I am Aisha,” she said. The wind blew the words away. She said them again. The wind still blew. What did her name mean? Her voice firmer, she declared, “It will mean what I make it mean.”

  She still had no idea what that would be. She turned west, toward distant Tallinn Valley where she had been born, and began to find out.

  From The Book of Ruth bat Boaz, traditional.

  (Preserved in oral form from approximately 2630. Translated into Bandarit and printed, c. 2800, Strang, Eden Valley. Anthologized in Sayings of the Judges, 2910, Ilona’sstaad, Eden Valley.):

  I have lived a long life, very long for this world and this age; I have known bitterness and great joy, and now I am only weary. My father began as a godly man of peace, and he hung me from a cross of iron to die; my husband and lover was a man of war, but took me down from the cross and made our peoples free and one. Ilona, dearer than a sister to me, don’t weep! Even here, Piet and you and I will never die; because our children live, and what we taught them.

  Come closer, all of you. Let your grief he light; it’s only when a parent buries a child that grief is heavy; this is the way of nature. But remember me, remember all of us. Remember that you can see farther if you stand on our shoulders. . . . From my sister Ilona’s heritage, remember that we are nothing without the Law that binds us one to another. From mine, remember that the Law was made for us, not we for the Law; love is the final commandment. From Piet; be strong, for without strength and courage there can be no Law, nor love, nor peace. Together we are the People.

  Goodbye. . . .

  Traditionally recited at the truedark service Ruth’s Day, throughout the Pale.

  SEVEN AGAINST NÛRNEN - Susan Shwartz

  Bloody light from Cat’s Eye glared over the steppe. The wind lashed the high, coarse grasses into waves like the seas of lost Earth. Aisha had heard stories of them, but the only tides she could sense pulsed in her temples. The only salt she tasted came to her lips after she coughed, and she had been coughing too often as she ran, slowed to a trot, then to a walk, one hand pressed cautiously against her aching side.

  She ran her tongue over dry lips. The last thing she had drunk was the thin, sour beer they had served in that Soldier-loving tavern in Nurnen, that slut of a town. And she, even she, with her doubly Sauron blood, was cold now and sleepy enough to scare her. She and her father Juchi had come far during this day and now it was getting toward Haven’s long night. All her life, she had rested in the dark when she could. . ..

  And now her father would rest forever. Tears filmed her eyes briefly, then dried. He had died hard, but at the end, he had had her mother’s--and his--name on his lips. And she had avenged him. Aisha’s own lips snarled.

  Twenty years of wandering, of guiding a blind man who called himself accursed; and now what? The burden was off her back now, disloyal as it was to think of her father’s care as a burden--or was it? At the last, though Aisha had avenged him, she had failed. She could not even offer him a proper funeral. That the best a man like Juchi could have would be a ditch shared with a cyborg wasn’t just a reproach to her; it was a shame that cried all the way to Allah. It was almost as much a pain as the ache in her heart, or the burning of her broken ribs. The burning shifted for a second to a sharp stab, and she coughed. Not a good sign.

  She knew--and mourned--what became of her father. But what would become of her? Hours ago, when she had left a cyborg dead behind her in the fields of Nurnen, she had set herself on course for Tallinn Town and the range of the tribe her father had ruled. He had been cast out, accursed; and she had been proud to take his exile as her own.

  Aisha coughed again and spat, a dark glob. Control, she warned herself. Enough blood in her lungs and even she could drown.

  Would the tribe take her back? She feared not. Once, the tribe had been “we.” Now, it was “they”; and, touched by her father and mother’s curse, she was an outsider. She would be lucky if she were not killed on sight.

  She did not believe in curses from the gods. Twenty years of exile with Juchi had proved to her satisfaction that men’s curses were damnation enough. The long grass hissed against her heavy boots as the wind laid it at. Haven, she remembered, once had meant harbor. There was no haven, no harbor, for her anywhere, unless she made one for herself.

  Tallinn . . . she had counted it home long, long ago: a vanished haven of intricate red rugs and supple leather walls and care. She shut her eyes until red lights went off beneath her lids. So much red--blood from her father’s ruined eyes, the way blood gouted from his mouth as he died, then from the cyborg’s eye, the glare of Cat’s Eye, the pain, like a coal held to her lungs, of ribs grinding against each other. Even the sullen luster of what she had worn into exile: the great ruby that the Judge of the haBandari had sent her by her son’s hand.

  A thousand times in the past twenty years, she had thought of selling it. Juchi needed medicines; she needed a sharp knife; they both needed better boots and winterwear. Once, she had even approached a Bandari trade caravan and held out the ring. The ruby--for what she and her father must have. Even the greedy, sly Bandari recoiled from it, excusing themselves to whispering among themselves, with the occasional glance ficked back at her. (They had forgotten her hearing, augmented by her mother’s crime.)

  “Judge Chaya’s ring?”

  “Gevalt! Is she here?”

  “We can’t take that ring in trade. Chaya would skin us.”

  “Any chance we could bring them both in . . . the kapetein ...”

  “Quiet! Haven’t we got enough trouble without the tribes knowing we’ve got them? Give them what they need. It’s a mitzvah anyhow.”

  And so the trader had offered them leathers---finer than anything Aisha had seen since leaving Tallinn-- food, even a dagger with a blade shimmering with the intricacy of much-folded and hammered steel. She had wanted to hurl his charity in his big-beaked face. For her father’s sake, she had not. So she had accepted the
gifts. She had even managed to thank the man. And she had never told her father that she had traded pride for warmth. His shoulders had shuddered that night when he thought she slept; he had no tears, but she knew he mourned what he feared she’d traded. As she might have done, she realized. She just might.

  They had never spoken of it.

  Aisha shivered at the memory. Odd: she was no longer cold. Heat spread out from that burning coal at her side. Like the heat of a fire within a yurt after a long day’s ride, it was heat that sapped her strength and made her yearn only for sleep.

  Her father slept forever. Surely, no one would begrudge her just one little hour of rest in Cat’s Eye’s light. Even the coarse waving grass of the steppe looked inviting as new-washed fleece. Her knees were loosening, her pace slowing. . . .

  If she slept now, she would never rise. She met Cat’s Eye with a feral snarl and forced herself into a jog. The impact of her feet on the hard earth and the stabbing in her chest made her gasp. The cold air, rushing into her open mouth, nearly stopped her breath altogether with its impact.

  She coughed, and it felt as if she had swallowed clownfruit brandy that some fool had set on fire. She spat it out, and blood--more blood than she had will to stop--followed.

  Father, I avenged you! She took that comfort, at least, down with her into red-tinged darkness.

  “We’ve got guards out, so what do you want?” Barak snapped at the master of the trading caravan.

  “The kapetein hears we went this close to Nurnen, he’ll have both ears and a tail.”

  Anyone else in the caravan might have been hooted at for gutlessness, but it was the physician who spoke; and physicians--badmouthing them was like damaging a book or sounding off at old Oom Barak. (“Old, am I, yongk?” Barak could hear the bellow of the man for whom he was named. “I’m still Kommandant h’gana, and I’ll thank you to remember it. Until you settle down and take it over--let an old man rest his bones in whatever sun we get on this God-cursed rock.”)