Fateful Lightning

by William R. Forstchen

  He looked back at the palanquin that only now was cresting over the next hill, the curtains on it drawn shut.

  “He’s starting to feel better.”

  Tamuka looked over at Sarg, who had finally caught up, thanks to this latest delay.

  Tamuka said nothing.

  “The fever is dropping, and he even asked for some broth.” Sarg looked over at the dead cavalryman that one of the warriors had slung over the rump of his horse.

  The warrior, hearing Sarg, immediately bowed low from his saddle, motioning that the fresh food was a willing gift for the Qar Qarth. Dangling from a belt slung over the cattle’s shoulder was a gun. Tamuka edged his mount up to the warrior, leaned over, and tugged at the gun, nearly pulling the body off the rear of the horse. Grabbing hold of the body, he unsnapped the gun from its holding clip and let the body fall at Sarg’s feet.

  “For our Qar Qarth,” he said.

  He looked down at the gun, turning it over to examine it closely.

  “Everything is moving too slow,” Tamuka snapped, looking up at a knot of clan chieftains and commanders of five umens. He could see resentment in the eyes of some of them. Many of them were of the age of Jubadi, had ridden with him in battle for more than a circling. Now, with Vuka ill, and no heir of age to command in his place, he as shield-bearer was in control—and they did not like it.

  “The cattle have dark tricks,” growled Norgua, commander of the third umen of the black horse. “I’ve lost fourscore to their tricks, two of them commanders of a thousand.”

  “Are you advising caution before cattle?” Tamuka asked.

  “It is hard to see your kin, your young ones, die,” Norgua replied. “Especially when it is against sorcery, snakes, stinging insects, traps of cattle.”

  “They want us to be afraid,” Tamuka said, his voice even, but edged with the slightest contempt. “Listen to you—you voice fear of the filth of this world, soulless cattle.”

  Norgua lowered his head.

  “Is Norgua afraid of cattle?”

  Tamuka looked over at Pauka, one of the youngest umen commanders, hiding his own smile of approval.

  Norgua growled darkly, hand going to sword hilt.

  “They are cattle possessed,” Pauka snapped angrily, looking at the other umen and clan commanders for support. “Slaughter them all, gorge on their flesh, I say. The words of Tamuka are truth. Kill them now before they make even greater weapons to destroy us. Even the great Jubadi saw that, and that is why he rode north to defeat them.”

  “If we can trap them at this place they call Kev, destroy them there, the rest will fall without a fight. They are loath to leave their land, so they will try to stand there. We must rush to them before they change their mind and strike with all our strength.”

  “But our cannons,” Norgua replied angrily. “It will be six, maybe seven days before they arrive.”

  “The Vushka Hush turned the Yankee line without cannons and defeated them,” Pauka responded, looking with admiration at Gubta, the new commander of the Hush.

  “Six thousand of the Vushka Hush are dead or crippled, Shield-Bearer Tamuka,” Caug, commander of the spotted horse clan, interjected, “my own son of my first concubine one of them.”

  “And I want revenge for thy son,” Tamuka replied, his voice edged with anger.

  “You are but temporary of command,” Norgua said, looking defiantly at Tamuka. “You heard Sarg— in days the new Qar Qarth will be well again, and then we shall see what he says of this war.”

  “Are you afraid to fight cattle?” Tamuka replied.

  Norgua looked at him darkly.

  “There is no glory, no honor, in this chase. Besides, this is Tugar land. What of our own, what of the Bantag? While we chase through this forsaken place, the Bantag feast on our own cattle. There is even rumor that the Cartha have an iron ship and plan to take their city back. What then? I followed Jubadi because he was my Qar Qarth. I follow Vuka because he is now my Qar Qarth.”

  “And I am only a shield-bearer,” Tamuka said without irony.

  Norgua, without reply turned away and with a bark of command turned and started down the hill.

  “By tomorrow at sunset we’ll be before Kev.”

  Tamuka looked over his shoulder at Muzta; beside the Tugar, the bearer of the great scroll map was pointing out their position to a group of warriors who had gathered around.

  Tamuka sensed a near taunting in Muzta’s voice.

  “Find a ford, get across the river,” he snapped, looking over at his umen commanders. Turning his mount, he trotted back toward the burning village. Dismounting, he relieved himself, and then leaned against his horse, watching the thatch-roofed buildings disintegrate, the empty barns roaring as their log sides and split-shingle roofs were consumed by fire.

  Looking down at the cattle gun that he was still holding, he played with the mechanism for a moment until the breech dropped open. Pushing the trigger guard open and shut, he realized that this was like the gun found with the Yankee Schuder, a gun that could be loaded from the breech, faster, more deadly, ideal for men fighting from horseback.

  He felt a cold chill. Could the animals have made these in the last thirty days, perhaps outfitting their entire army with them? He doubted that, but the mere thought of it made him nervous. Again they had made something new, always making something new. Couldn’t his own fools see that? Norgua, wanting to quit the fight, to run away from something too strange to be understood, not seeing that if they did not kill all of them now, in five years, or ten, the Yankees would come unto the steppes of the south and hunt them down as sport.

  A throbbing hum sounded above the crackling roar of the fire, and he looked up to see the line of cloud fliers advancing overhead, their undersides painted with the dark eyes of the hunting hawk. Far above them, like a small line, lingered one of the Yankee cloud fliers, staying out of range. Absently he worked the breech mechanism of the Sharps, watching as the machines lumbered on eastward.

  “New type of gun.”

  Tamuka looked up at Muzta Qar Qarth, who edged his mount up beside him.

  Tamuka held the gun up, and Muzta took it and looked at it with open curiosity, holding the weapon up to look down the bore and then fumbling with the breech mechanism.

  “They don’t have to push the black powder and bullet down the barrel, they just slide it in from the back,” Muzta said, looking at the weapon admiringly. “Good crafting here.”

  Tamuka nodded glumly.

  “Always good crafting.”

  “Too bad you killed all your pets three days ago— maybe some of them could have made a few.”

  “We’re finished with pets. We’ll learn how ourselves.”

  Muzta laughed softly. “You speak as if you were the Qar Qarth.”

  “Norgua is a fool. I mean to see this campaign to the end.”

  “Of course you do, and it’ll cost you a hundred thousand dead.”

  “Then if that is the cost, that is the cost,” Tamuka snarled. “But then we’ll be done with them once and for all.”

  Muzta leaned over his mount, pulled up his water bag, took a long drink, and offered it over to Tamuka, who shook his head.

  “I don’t doubt that you’ll do it,” Muzta said. “In a way I can see your point, unlike the others. Norgua is a fool, still mourning Jubadi and not seeing the truth that the old Qar Qarth had only half grasped and you fully grasped.”

  A bit surprised, Tamuka nodded a thanks.

  “When they can make such as these,” Muzta said, handing the Sharps carbine back, “they are far too dangerous. For that matter, their mere thinking that they can kill those of the hordes was dangerous enough. We never thought that cattle could conceive of such things. I lost eighteen umens learning that fact.

  “I fear, though, that you are fighting the future. You might win, if you fight as you told Jubadi to, and now plan to do. Perhaps you will destroy them.” He hesitated. “But there’ll always be others.”

&
nbsp; “There were the Yor and the Sartag,” Tamuka replied. “Not even cattle. We have the legends as do you. And our ancestors fought and defeated them when they came through the tunnel of light.”

  “But they were only hundreds, and they did not have time to make new weapons. The same was true with the cattle in the wooden ships of fifteen circlings back who appeared near where the Yankees did. We found them within a year and killed nearly all of them.”

  Tamuka nodded, suddenly angry at the memory of their descendants, led by the cattle called Jamie. They had stolen the iron rail machine and disappeared back into the southern sea last year after the war of the iron ships. He had barely thought of them, wondering if they too were now making new machines.

  “I almost agree with you,” Muzta said. “I suspect that even many of the younger umen commanders feel the same. But asking warriors to die hunting cattle, without hope of honor, is hard.”

  “Their hatred will drive them forward,” Tamuka replied coldly.

  “It certainly is driving you forward,” Muzta said with a smile.

  “Don’t you hate them after what they did to you, to your horde?”

  “Of course I do,” Muzta replied. “It’s just that I have no intention of dying in the process.”

  “Tomorrow we’ll be at Kev. There they will be waiting, there we shall finish them, and then we shall ride on to Roum unopposed. We’ll leave this land a waste, killing every cattle, gorging until the grease runs from our mouths.”

  Muzta said nothing. With a smile he nodded, turned his horse, and trotted back to where his staff waited.

  Tamuka looked at him with barely concealed contempt.

  “And I’ll fight them to the last Tugar,” he whispered.

  His heart full, Andrew Lawrence Keane sat atop the hill, looking off to the west. It was late in the afternoon of a beautiful spring day, the type of day back home that would have sorely tempted him to let his classes out early so that he could go for a walk in the pine forest next to the campus. The air was warm, filled with the rich scent of early summer, slightly hazy, lazy, the type of day to lie beneath a tree and read a good book until sleep lulled you away, your dog curled up by your side. No dogs on this world. He missed their company.

  He ran his finger inside his open shirt collar, grimacing slightly from the dirty sweat-soaked feel. Almost absently he picked up a piece of hardtack smeared with a sour-smelling cheese and chewed on it, washing the dry cracker down with a swill of cold tea from his battered tin cup. Pat, Emil, Kal, and Gregory sat around him, field glasses or telescopes raised, silently watching the show.

  From north to south the Merki were advancing, arrayed in their checkerboard formation, ten blocks of a thousand to each umen, each block a hundred riders across and ten deep, five regiments to a mile of front, skirmishers in loose order ranging far ahead. The last of Showalter’s cavalry was pulling back in through the outer line of fortifications, occasionally reining in to trade a flurry of shots at long range, the carbines thumping in the heavy air.

  Kathleen sat by his side, a fact which bothered him. She should have gone east with Maddie days ago, but had somehow arranged that her hospital unit would be the last to pull out. She denounced his protest as favoritism, an argument which filled him with guilt, for in this situation he would have been more than willing to pull rank on her and send her packing east. At least the baby was safe, going back to Roum with Kal’s wife, Ludmilla, to stay with Tanya and her children in the city. Though he would admit it to no one, he had made Ludmilla promise that if they lost she was to take her grandchildren and Maddie and head into the Great Forest to hide. It wasn’t fair, his singling out his own child and the president’s grandchildren thusly, but dammit, after all these years of service he wanted some small part of his life to have an advantage if he failed and the war was lost. For the sake of the children, Ludmilla had readily agreed, showing him that the bonds of blood and mothering cared little for republican sentiment.

  “I can see how you can become addicted to this,” Kathleen whispered, nodding toward the vast array of the Merki horde, which moved across the open fields, deployed out across the broad valley below, four hundred thousand warriors on a front of forty miles. “As terrible as an army with banners,” she said, looking over at Emil, who nodded an agreement.

  “Only problem is, this army has a most unpleasant way of finishing a fight,” Emil replied.

  The crack of an artillery piece sounded behind them, causing Kathleen to start. Andrew looked back at the four-pounder mounted atop an armor car. The crew were swinging the yoke-mounted gun back down to reload. From the north the two Merki aerosteamers at which the piece had been firing continued to close in. He held his breath for a moment as tiny black dots detached from the bottom of the ships, growing larger with the second. They landed to the south of the rail line, a hundred yards away. Two of the bombs were duds, and the other four exploded harmlessly.

  The antisteamer gun fired again while the ships turned to race back to the west.

  There had been a clash of air fleets earlier in the day, Jack venturing all five of his ships against three Merki. One of each side had fallen in flames, a fact which caused Andrew to mark Petracci down for a sound chewing-out. Nine aerosteamers had been built in the last two months. Three had been lost in combat and one in a storm, and another had exploded on its first test flight. Such losses could not be tolerated if all their strength was to be marshaled for what was to come. The wreckage of the two ships burned to the south, the area quarantined by Emil’s orders; the doctor suspected there might be some form of arsenic poisoning from the Merki engine. Last year one of the engines had burst open after a crash; those who approached it had vomited blood, and their hair had fallen out before they died, the classic symptoms of ingesting the heavy metal. The few men in the area gave the burning wreckage a wide berth.

  The Merki airships had penetrated over the lines often enough by now to gather the assessment that the army had pulled out, all except for this last line of trains. If the Merki were hoping to end it here, they were mistaken.

  The withdrawal had gone without a hitch, three and a half corps moved back to the Penobscot in four days, only one brigade of Fourth Corps left now in front of Kev, the men already loaded. All that would be left behind were Showalter’s cavalry and a regiment of volunteers hiding up in the north woods, volunteers taken from all the ranks and formed into the first of five guerrilla regiments which would deploy into the forest all the way from Vazima to the Sangros. Another brigade, detached from Schneid’s corps, was now serving as a marine force under Bullfinch out at sea. As the Merki continued their advance they would soon discover a series of nasty surprises to their flanks and especially to the rear. It was another aspect of this new type of war which Andrew found distasteful, but which he knew would have to be pursued. There was no such thing as a noncombatant any longer. Factory workers were now perhaps even more important than the men at the front. The Merki had made this a total war; it had been nothing less from the start.

  He looked down at the latest issue of Gates’s Illustrated Weekly, the entire front page a woodcut of the one photograph that had successfully been taken by Petracci. Emblazed across the top in Cyrillic and the bottom in Latin was the new rally cry—“We Shall Avenge.”

  The image was horrifying, as he had hoped it would be, a reminder to all of their ultimate fate if they should fail. He knew what the guerrillas would do after the army passed. Orders had been given that Merki children were to be spared—he could not allow this war to sink to that final level of genocide—but everyone else was now a fair target. The Merki women and the old were to be killed, their yurts burned, horses slaughtered or captured. It was a violation of how the hordes had fought war against each other, a convention between them that he had scrupulously observed himself back on earth. He looked over at Kathleen, knowing what would happen if the Merki should take her. Let them now face the same, he thought darkly, sickened by what this had all become, but know
ing that there was no other way. If it forced but a single umen to stay to the rear, it might make the difference, and in total war there was no other consideration but final victory at whatever cost or action. It was a long way from the Christian civility of his last war, as were assassination, aerosteamers, and even the burning of the dead to keep their bodies from the hands of the Merki.

  Andrew sipped at the cold tea, watching the enemy lines, their outriders slowing to a stop before the walls of Kev. Kal, his features drawn and pale, stood up and turned to go back to the train. He hesitated and then leaned over and scooped up a handful of dirt, put it in his pocket, and then continued on.

  “He can’t bear to watch this final piece fall,” Kathleen sighed, looking back at the president, who with hunched shoulders climbed aboard the train.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Andrew said, coming back up to his feet.

  Wrapped in silence, Tamuka rode through the darkened streets of Kev in the hour before dawn, the silent ones looking nervously at the shuttered windows of the houses that crowded in upon them in the narrow alleyways.

  Empty, again empty. He had not truly believed the cloud fliers’ reports—surely they had to be mistaken; some semblance of a fight would have to be offered here.

  But there was nothing. Five days of riding only to find this, rather than the climactic battle.

  “They can’t run forever,” Tamuka snarled, looking over at Sarg in the twilight.

  “They’re doing a good job of it,” the shaman replied coldly. “And now the other concerns.”

  “You know what it will mean if we give them even more time.”

  “That is why I came and told you, Shield-Bearer,” Sarg said, his voice barely a whisper.

  “I did not believe in what Jubadi wished at first. But now I see. These cattle are demons, fleeing the very land given on to them out of our hands. Only a madness, a possession, could have moved them so. I now see what a delay of a year might mean.”

  “Or twenty years, as I suspect,” Tamuka replied.