The Heretic

by David Drake

  Despite it all, she’d been flabbergasted when Edgar had asked her to marry him.

  She still wasn’t sure exactly what he’d been thinking, for they’d gone for one another’s throats on the wedding night itself when she’d refused him what he believed was his manly due.

  Oh, not the sex. She’d given that willingly enough, and liked it, too, for that, too, proved to be a kind of battle.

  No, the other. When he told her she would have to give up her bow and arrows. When he told her he would now see her light-skinned and not tanned from the sun, and what was more, she would show herself to others, reveal her new class and status by the clothes she wore, which would have to change.

  It would all have to change, for he intended to show them all, all the others, that he was the one who could tame her, tame the wild DeArmanville girl.

  Did she not know she’d become quite a legend?

  And by winning her, he had won a bet, a rather large wager, with a friend that no one, ever, would tame that woman.

  So it was all a sort of rich boy joke, according to him. But now that he had her, the joke was over, for both of them, and life must begin. Respectable life. Doing things the way they had always been done.

  Had he not known her before? Had he thought her entire way of being in the world would disappear from the sheer act of marriage under the Law and Zentrum?

  They’d fought. Endlessly. And of course he could not bloody her lip, twist an arm, or bruise her body, without the aid of a servant or two to restrain her, which proved far too embarrassing to him to do more than once or twice.

  She was a much better fighter than he, and—if she’d had a mind—could repeatedly have beaten him to a bloody pulp.

  The sex had remained good, got even better, until, after two years, the good sex was all there was other than the hatred.

  No child resulted. Of course he blamed her.

  Now that was gone. At least, she thought it must be gone along with her torn flesh. She had no doubt that in appearance, her vagina would seem little more than the extension of the mass of scar that was forming upon her inner thigh and belly. Unless, of course, she could convince him he was hurting her, opening the wound once more, by fucking her.

  Edgar was the sort who would go for that.

  But she knew herself that it would become just too . . . wearying to keep up. She’d laugh one day instead of cry, and he’d be on to the fact that she was enjoying herself once more, and that would ruin everything for him.

  Yet he would not divorce her. Jacobsons didn’t divorce. It was almost unheard of in Treville, in any case.

  So the solution would be—living apart. But how could she manage that?

  Because she still would want and need. She could feel it now. She was still a woman, despite her ravaged womb. And if Edgar wouldn’t have her and she could take no other lover . . .

  Why didn’t he kill me? Why did he aim low? Did he know he was letting me live? Allowing me to crawl the earth, with me knowing I did so only because of his passing whim?

  It was going to be a long and painful life, any way she looked at it.

  Then the day came when she could stand. He was there at the moment she did so, Abel. He was the one who helped her to her feet, who braced her from behind as she slowly learned to use her legs again.

  There would always be the limp, yes. Always the reminder to the world of what she knew she was inside now. Torn. Broken. Barren. But she learned to walk again.

  * * *

  I calculate that this representation is an accurate interpolation to nine-six point seven-three-five hundreds of a percentage point, said Center.

  Observe what? Abel thought. What did you want me to learn, to see? Her state of mind? Why did you show me this, Center?

  I think he’s pointing out the fact that you are falling in love with her, lad, Raj said.

  And how this may become a problem, Center added.

  Shut up, both of you. Let’s see to the breechloaders.

  * * *

  “So you understand, muzzle loading is the issue,” Abel said to the priest.

  Raf Golitsin sat back in the chair in his small office. They were in the rear of the armory, which itself was one of the four primary structures in the temple compound of Hestinga. It was where the muskets came from.

  Abel had passed through what had seemed an erupting hot spring of heat and activity on his way back to the office. He’d been blindfolded by Golitsin, as was required of all nonclerical entrants to the area, but Golitsin had used muslin gauze, which was the understood blindfold of choice for officials who were in small danger of misusing priestly secrets. Abel had seen all.

  The firing mechanisms of the muskets in for repair were dismantled to a degree Abel had not imagined possible. Flaws were annealed in glowing forges. Other parts were filed, planed, oiled. Barrel bands were pulled from rifle stock, and barrels themselves were dismantled, reamed. Rifling was done with an enormous handcranked screw, itself made of a metal of a hardness Abel had never seen before. Golitsin called it a drillpress and die.

  The stocks were lovingly reconditioned. Some were willow-wood, but most were made from the hardwood maple of the Delta.

  A local cambium-producing flora, not related to Earth’s maples genetically, but similar in dendrological characteristics, Center said.

  And in the rear was the rebuild shop, where all came back together to produce the reconditioned rifle. Here the most skilled priest-smiths worked, checking each component and, in a final step, test firing and calibrating sights using complicated instruments that, anywhere else, would have been considered utterly nishterlaub, and probably poisonous to the touch, as well.

  They closed the door to Golitsin’s office—a wooden interior door, rather than beads, was a necessity here to keep out the noise of the shop—and Abel, still excited from what he’d just witnessed—From the possibilities, most of all, he thought—proceeded to lay out his plans for a new kind of gun that would help them stem another Blaskoye invasion.

  “It comes down to this: reloading is slow and you die,” Abel continued. “You have to put in the powder, put in the ball, ram them down the barrel. Put your primer cap over the nipple so that its fire will ignite the gunpowder within the barrel. And only then can you aim and fire. And hope you’ve done it all right. And then start all over again as fast your love of life demands of you, because they are coming right for you, the ones who want to kill you, while you are doing this.”

  “So you need to make the steps quicker,” said Golitsin. “Or combine them.”

  “Yes,” Abel said. “And here is my idea.”

  Or the idea that was delivered to me from the stars, Abel thought. The stars that are suns, and the planets that circle them filled with other men who have discovered and lost this knowledge a hundred, a thousand times. I can barely conceive of this after a lifetime’s instruction, so I won’t tell you that, my friend Golitsin. You’ll think I’m crazy, as I may well be.

  “First of all, the cartridge. It needs to combine the percussion cap. And we have to get rid of this biting off and pouring. I’ll show you my idea—”

  Abel took out the scroll. On it was the cartridge design he had copied from memory, from the picture that Center had placed in his mind.

  “I see, I see,” Golitsin said. “A cylinder. One end the cap, the other the minié ball.”

  “Yes,” Abel said. “The paper cartridge should be the diameter of the rifle bore. It should fit snugly, but not so tightly it can’t slide into place. They must be extremely uniform.”

  “We can wrap them around a dowel,” Golitsin said, scratching his head. “We can hold them together with glue, I suppose. I’ll have to work up a prototype for you to take a look at.”

  He grunted in consternation. “But this will be pointless without a way to load it. You can’t ram it down the barrel from the muzzle.”

  Abel smiled. Golitsin was getting it. He was understanding the problem, and so approaching the solutio
n. Raf Golitsin was a very intelligent man, but if he could get it, many others might, as well.

  “We are going to load it from the rear of the barrel,” Abel said. He broke out the second scroll with his drawings on it. “It will require a new mechanism.”

  “A new . . . mechanism?”

  “Yes,” said Abel.

  “Use of nishterlaub remains is sanctioned only for piecemeal work. Combinations are forbidden,” Golitsin said from rote memory. “A mechanism is a combination of simple machines. You know this, of course. It’s a basic Thursday school lesson.”

  “What I know,” Abel said. “What I know: we are faced with an enemy concentrated in overwhelming numbers. No one is going to send help. Cascade is corrupt. Ingres barely has a force of Regulars, and no Militia to speak of. Lindron feels secure and will do nothing until it is too late.”

  “This is heresy, Abel,” said Golitsin. “You are asking me to commit heresy.”

  “This is survival.”

  He waited. He could see the eagerness on Golitsin’s face, the desire to know how. The need to try something new. He could also see that this longing was at war with a thousand Thursday school lectures.

  Golitsin blinked twice as if to clear his eyes, shook his head. The inner war was over. All that remained was to discover the outcome.

  “All right, show me,” said Golitsin. “I’d rather burn for the knowing of it than live as a fool.”

  Abel put a hand on the priest’s shoulder. “Let’s hope it won’t come to that.”

  “We can always hope,” the priest said with a forlorn sigh. “Show me.”

  After a moment, Abel rolled out the scroll.

  “The breech lock,” he said, “is a very simple concept. It’s the execution that may be the problem. But seeing what you have in place here in your shop, I think you may be able to handle it.”

  * * *

  “The point of using the women is not to prove anything,” said Abel, “but to increase our firepower.”

  Joab shook his head. Abel had reported to him in his office to detail the assignment of Scout tasks, but had decided that now was the time to bring up this innovation with his father.

  It was not an innovation that Center had insisted upon, although he had not rejected the idea. He’d merely said it would “alter certain equations that might lead to interesting variables to consider.”

  It was something Abel felt he had to push for, after he’d seen the women fight at Lilleheim. They were throwing away a resource in a war where the forces of the Land were being purposely undermined and thinned.

  I agree with your reasoning, Raj had said with a laugh. But maybe your motivations are not so pure as you purport them to be.

  “No,” Joab said. “Absolutely not. Look at what happened at Lilleheim. That woman brought out her little coterie of—I don’t know what to call them. Women who aren’t content with one cock to lead a man around with, but who have got to have their own, to yank themselves here and there with, I suppose. And she got thirteen wives and daughters of some very prominent men killed in the bargain.”

  “They fought like carnadons,” Abel said. “We need their numbers. Plus, they have almost all been around military men in some way or another. They are our sisters and our wives. They’ve absorbed many skills, and they know how we do things.”

  “It could have been worse,” Joab mused. “Rape. Torture. The Blaskoye using the women against us the way they used the children.”

  “We are at war, Father,” Abel replied. “If they beat us, they’re going to do those things anyway. And right before our eyes.”

  “Try telling that to Tarl Magiorre, whose daughter lay dead on that thrice-damned nameless knoll,” Joab said.

  “Yes,” Abel said with a bitter laugh. “And try telling it to Edgar Jacobson.”

  Joab considered his son. Abel was not sure how much he knew, or how much he’d guessed, about Abel’s own interest in Dame Jacobson. But one thing he’d learned about his father over his years of serving under him was that there wasn’t much that went on in his district that he didn’t at least have some inkling about, especially when it came to the military families.

  “Jacobson should have controlled her,” Joab said. “The women’s auxiliary exists for washing, mending, doing a soldier’s chores when he is better occupied with fighting. And, well, at least creating the hope of a good fuck afterward. The Scouts have always had their retinue of women following them about, as you know.”

  “Oh, yes.” Abel shook his head. “Some would follow them into the Redlands if they could.”

  “I have no doubt,” Joab replied. “They perform a function, a useful function. But not as warriors. Not as fighters.”

  “Not ideally,” Abel said. “But we live in far from ideal times.”

  “I simply won’t allow it,” Joab said. “And I especially won’t allow her to continue with it, which is what I know you are really after.”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “You know what I’m talking about, Lieutenant, and don’t say you do not,” his father said testily. Then he shook his head, sighed. “She’s a married woman, Abel. From a good family, married into a good family. This cannot end well.”

  “I know who she is,” Abel said. “I respect it. As much as she does.”

  “Besides, from what I hear—well, she’s rather damaged goods. I mean that in a very literal sense. That wound . . .” Joab looked down, shook his head sadly.

  “You’re being unkind, Father.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Joab replied. He again met Abel’s eyes and seemed genuinely chagrined. “But when one’s only son looks to be on the verge of throwing his manhood away on something—all right, someone—like that, it brings out the beast in a father. He’ll take the low road, if that’s what’s required.”

  Abel considered. There was always the question of how much he could tell his father. Raj and Center were adamant. He must reveal nothing. If he did, they would not merely go away; they would kill him if they could. Raj, he was not so sure about. He had no doubt Center would do just that. His affection for Center was genuine, but it was rather like affection for a pet carnadon. You must never allow yourself to believe your feelings were returned.

  “It may not matter, all this concern over status and position,” Abel said. “The Blaskoye have grown very strong. They seem determined to spread into the Land, to take it from us. They are gathering for that purpose. Every sign points to it: the incursions, the sack of Lilleheim, the increased raids. The way that they turn the corruption of Cascade to their advantage.” How to say it? “Father, do you not think what we both agree is a coming war might change, well, everything. The Land. The Law?”

  Careful, lad, Raj murmured. See that where you’re going with this is not over a cliff.

  “And will the nature of men and women change? Will what is right and good under Zentrum?” Joab laughed. “I think not. Some things flow and change. Some things are written in stone.” He put a hand on Abel’s shoulder. “You sound like a man who is trying to convince himself that something he wishes with all his heart were true actually was true. I understand that.”

  A pensive look, a shadow, passed across Joab’s face.

  He’s thinking about Mother, Abel thought.

  “But we are men who deal in reality, not wishes and fantasy,” he said. He pointed toward the outspread papyrus map scroll on the big table in his office. “The Blaskoye will try again soon, but it will be far worse than Lilleheim.”

  “I agree.”

  “We have drawn their ire by our own competence, I’m afraid. Cascade has paid them off. Ingres is protected to the west by Treville itself. Lindron District is too well defended and anyway too long and wide to take with a west-to-east invasion. Twenty leagues of flat land with walls and flooded rice paddies favors organized foot, not savages on dontback.”

  “Yes, they’ll move on Lindron last, when they’re certain of it.”

  “Which leaves the n
orthern districts and us.”

  “Agreed,” Abel said. “But I would add one thing. You said they are drawn by ire at our competence. I would say that they are very angry at one commander in particular: you. They want your head. It is the way the Redlanders think. From them, a single charismatic leader rises and fights his way, or tricks his way, into leading a band, a tribe. Sometimes he even grabs for himself a godlike status.”

  “Utter heresy.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Abel. “You know this, but they don’t know. They understand us as badly as we understand them. For them, there is no Law of Zentrum. No Thursday school lessons. Whatever poor excuse for being something other than meat and dust that they have—well, that must be the way the world is for everyone, they believe. Their gods are the gods. Those gods’ rules are the only way men can rightly behave. So they figure we have exactly the same motives, that we are exactly the same men as they. They figure that if they shoot the dont in the head, the rest of the beast will collapse.”

  “And you’re saying I’m the head.”

  “To them, you are the godhead on Treville District,” Abel replied. “I believe they are particularly targeting you, Father.”

  Joab sat back, took a long sip of wine. “Great,” he said, shaking his head. “Do they not realize that any competent officer can do as I do, that one will do so if he is called to take my place?”

  “I’m not so sure you’re right about that,” Abel said. “But they surely do not understand how we organize and build in redundancy. Or even what organization means in a farming society such as ours. They are herders. But they’re learning. You saw it. They were much better commanded at Lilleheim than we’ve ever seen them before.”

  “Agreed.”

  “They may be organized enough to move in two directions at once.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “A feint,” said Abel. “To draw you out. You in particular. To draw the Regulars into a dry plain, say, where they can use their donts and overrun the Regulars, destroy the Militia. They don’t want to attack us in the town, not really, because they lose all advantage, and we gain several, not the least of which is fighting on our own turf. They have no villages, much less towns, of course.”