Fateful Lightning

by William R. Forstchen

  “That is why I told you.”

  Tamuka nodded, saying nothing. With the report of cattle again fleeing east had also come the belled rider of the Qar Qarth from out of the south. The cattle of Cartha had rebelled, taking their city back, several thousand dying with the withdrawal of the umen. With the two umens still posted to the south now facing a rebellion, it was not hard to imagine that such a sign of weakness might cause the Bantag to try to seize the place for themselves. It had been agreed that they could share in what the factories there produced, but only after the Rus and Roum had been destroyed. Now it was quite possible that the Bantag would move and the Merki horde would then be cut off, holding nothing but empty land.

  Nothing was now going right. The blood of his riders had at least been stirred to seek this vengeance against the Rus, but they were gone, vanished, and it had cast a pall over the encampments, which had believed that by tomorrow night there would again be a feast of cattle flesh and then the easy pickings of the rest of them after the army had been destroyed.

  Thirty-five days ago they were beaten, their army demoralized, their families fleeing. Now the country was empty. Reaching the main square of the city, he paused for a moment and then turned to go back out the main gate. On the open gates he again gazed at the strangely crafted picture.

  “We Shall Avenge” were the words written across it, or so he had been told. Dismounting, he looked over at Sarg.

  “The two of us are to remain alone,” Tamuka said, his voice soft, betraying no emotion.

  Sarg nodded, saying nothing, motioning for the silent ones to withdraw.

  Bowing low to the fires of purification which flickered at either side of the entryway into the yurt of the Qar Qarth, Tamuka went in.

  Vuka Qar Qarth stirred from his bed and looked up.

  “I said I was to be alone,” he whispered.

  Tamuka bowed low and approached him.

  “Sarg has told me about your fever dream and what you now wish.”

  Vuka looked up cautiously at his shield-bearer. “My fever is gone, the infection has drained,” he said, holding his right arm up weakly.

  “You are still ill.”

  Vuka nodded slowly. “I know why.”

  “And that is?” Tamuka replied.

  “You.”

  Tamuka did not move.

  “Sarg made the ceremonial cut, and then you bound it with a dressing from your battle kit. Sarg has treated it since. The cloth, the blade, or his poultices were unclean. The two of you wanted the infection to kill me."

  He smiled coldly at the shield-bearer.

  “Nonsense. Now what of this dream?” Tamuka asked.

  Vuka looked away, suddenly nervous, as if he had said too much. “My father spoke to me tonight.”

  Tamuka felt a chill ripple down his back, the hairs at the nape of his neck standing up. It could only mean that Jubadi did not rest well, that his spirit was troubled, or that in the spirit world he had learned something of such importance that he had risked the perilous journey back to the land of the living to give warning.

  “He said that the cattle war must end. That we must retake Cartha, elsewise the Bantag will seize it, learn the Yankee secrets, and turn them against us, with my people trapped here between two fires.”

  Tamuka said nothing, as if frozen.

  “I have heard the reports,” Vuka said, “though you have tried to keep them from me. The Yankees, the Rus, have fled to Roum. The crossing of the lands between the two realms is difficult even for the smaller horde of the Tugars. Without the loot of the Rus the march will be hard, and then still there is a battle to fight, while the Bantag will grow fat in the rich lands of the south. My father has spoken with the spirits and sees the truth that you, Shield-Bearer, do not.”

  “The Yankees will still be waiting, growing stronger. One hard campaign now will finish them forever. Your father knew that, and so do I. If we delay another year, they will still be here, stronger than before. We must strangle them in the cradle before they can walk. If we ride away and in the next circling your son comes to face them, he will face a giant.”

  There was almost a note of pleading in Tamuka’s voice, and he cursed himself for this show of weakness.

  Vuka snorted with disdain. “They will fight against themselves, or another plague will take them, or we will find some poison as it is said the Yor once used, a mere breath killing him who breathes it. I am now Qar Qarth, and I will not sacrifice my people the way Muzta did his. The Bantag laugh at our folly. We could barely match them before. And what would this campaign cost us? Already the Vushka Hush is a shadow, two more umens shattered, hundreds more dead in this last march. I hear that the cooking pots of our women, the old ones, will soon be empty in this cursed land.”

  He raised himself up.

  “No more. Tomorrow I call a meeting of the clans. Tomorrow we ride back to Cartha, where there will still be food, if we get there before the Bantag. I shall leave four umens behind to ravage this land from end to end, and when winter comes the Rus will starve. Do you honestly think that with this land destroyed, their cities flattened, their buildings shattered, they will survive? The Roum will cast them out, they will fight among themselves, they will die and rot.”

  He looked up coldly at Tamuka.

  “I am so sick of their flesh I wish them all to rot, and not one more of my warriors shall die by their cursed ways. Many now say that the cattle here are mad, possessed by demons. I will not see my horde destroyed fighting their madness. Some call for revenge for my father. Let the cattle starve in a ravaged land, that is vengeance, and it will cost not one more life of our horde.

  “Today I shall declare my decisions and begin a withdrawal out of this cursed land. Once across the boundary river, I shall order the white banner unfurled, and then I shall become Qar Qarth through full ceremony.”

  He smiled coldly.

  “And end for you the ambition I know you harbor in your soul.”

  He hesitated for a moment.

  “Tamuka, you are no longer my shield-bearer. I shall select another, one I can trust.”

  Tamuka stood as if frozen to the ground.

  “You lie,” Tamuka hissed. “It was not your father in a dream, for when your father came into the land of his ancestors, there also he met Mupa, the brother that you murdered, who told him the truth, who told him of the filth of your black soul. If your father returned to your dreams, it was to spit upon you.”

  Startled, Vuka could not even reply. His face was contorted with rage.

  “As he will spit upon you now!”

  Tamuka leaped forward, landing on top of Vuka, driving his knee into the Qar Qarth’s chest, snapping the wind out of him. Reaching up, Vuka tried to claw at his face, grimacing from the pain in his injured arm and the weight bearing down upon him. Tamuka wrapped his hands around Vuka’s throat, bearing down with his knees, pinning Vuka’s arms tight against the bed. If Vuka could have screamed from the pain he would have done so, but it was now impossible to breath.

  It was almost too simple, Tamuka found. He had strangled the life out of cattle that had fought harder. The illness had taken its toll. It should have killed Vuka as he had planned, but this would now do.

  He pressed his thumbs in tight around Vuka’s throat. Vuka’s eyes seemed as if they would burst from their sockets, looking straight up at him in rage, and then growing disbelief. He felt the strength slip from the Qar Qarth’s arms, the kicking legs stilling into spasmodic jerks. He bore down upon him. The eyes were still wide, mouth open, tongue protruding, cheeks running with saliva.

  Vuka’s eyes held upon him, and he felt a sudden urge to look away, but he could not. For a moment he felt as if he were being drawn into them, his soul being pulled into the abyss along with Vuka’s.

  The neck muscles suddenly went slack, relaxing beneath his grip, and he eased back ever so slightly, fearful that if he bore down hard he might snap the Qar Qarth’s neck. Yet he continued to hold on. He felt
the body beneath him relax as if it had turned already to emptiness and dust.

  “He’s dead.”

  With a startled cry, Tamuka looked up to see Sarg standing in the entryway to the yurt.

  Tamuka fell back, becoming tangled in the silken sheets. Frantically he pulled himself clear of the body and stood up.

  Sarg stepped past him, put his hand to Vuka’s chest, and then looked back up at Tamuka.

  “It appears that our Qar Qarth has died from a fit,” the shaman said quietly, moving to position the body neatly upon the sleeping pallet, closing the protruding eyes, and then pulling a sheet up to cover the face.

  Hands trembling, Tamuka went over to a small side table, grabbed hold of a goblet of fermented horse’s milk, and raised it up.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Sarg said.

  Tamuka stopped and looked at the goblet.

  “I only came to you when he declared that henceforth he would eat nothing that I had touched,” the old shaman said quietly.

  Tamuka threw the goblet to the ground. “So you only agreed to this because you feared he would replace you as he was about to replace me?”

  The shaman smiled. “I suspected the death of his brother, and he feared any who suspected that.”

  “The war, then—you didn’t care?”

  “Actually, I think he was right.”

  “And for your own power you would have murdered him?” Tamuka snarled. “Only the council of the white clan of all those who are shield-bearers can decide to remove a Qar Qarth.”

  “I don’t see a council meeting here,” Sarg sniffed, “so who is calling whom murderer? And don’t look so startled, my friend—it is not the first time a Qar Qarth died by having a fit.”

  “You disgust me,” Tamuka snapped. “I acted to save our people, to save this world from the cattle.”

  “Oh, but of course,” Sarg replied with mock sincerity.

  The shaman turned to look back at the covered body.

  “Since he had not gone through the full investiture of the Qar Qarth, we can dispense with the usual thirty days of ritual,” Sarg said, as if the issue were of no real concern to him. “The three days’ mourning for a Qarth will be sufficient. Then you can have your war again.”

  “And since there is no issue from him…” Tamuka said, his breath coming hard.

  “Until the white banner of peace is unfurled and this war is finished, there is no time for a gathering of council. That is the tradition of our ancestors. It is the same rule that prevented him from gaining full title as Qar Qarth until this war was ended. There is no time in war for such lengthy things. Therefore, you as shield-bearer will act as Qar Qarth.”

  With a near-mocking bow, Sarg lowered his head.

  “I bow before the Qar Qarth Tamuka.”

  Aware that the bronze shield was still slung to his back, Tamuka loosened its leather strap. He held it for a brief moment, looking at his reflection, distorted by the mark of the rifle bullet that had struck it during the burial of Jubadi.

  Hulagar. He felt a cold chill, as if the spirit of Hulagar somehow floated above him, having seen all, and worse, having seen into his heart of hearts as well.

  He flung the shield to the ground at Sarg’s feet.

  “And you will remain shaman of the Merki,” Tamuka said coldly. “Now go and announce the lamented death of Vuka. Announce as well that council of war shall be held at dawn. In three days we continue the campaign.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, as if to purge the memory of Vuka’s gaze and with it the ghost of Hulagar watching and seeing all.

  Without a backward glance at the corpse, he strode out of the tent and into the early light of dawn.

  Chapter 6

  It was hard to control the shaking of his hands. It wasn’t the test, that he was sure of, at least as sure as was possible. He looked over his shoulder, and the mere sight of her set his heart to turning over again.

  “Olivia, why don’t you go back to the dugout until this is over?” Chuck asked, still not sure if his Latin was coming out quite right.

  She smiled and shook her head.

  “You’re out here, all your staff is out here. I think I’ll stay.”

  The Roum personnel on his staff could not hide their grins of amusement at her calm defiance and the visible discomfort of their chief.

  “After all, last time I did save you from getting chopped up by that engine of yours.”

  His face red, he turned away, ashamed at the reminder that her quick thinking and a fast tackle had saved him from being decapitated when the first airship engine had decided to take off from its testing bench.

  “All right, then,” he mumbled.

  Looking back at the waiting team of workers, he grumbled out a quick curse and walked away, knowing that she was walking behind him, the scent of her perfume drifting with the early-evening breeze.

  He walked up to the side of his latest project and looked at it admiringly, as always excited by the first rolling out of one of his newest creations. Several dozen pipes were strapped together into an oaken frame, a dozen pipes to each layer, each pipe nearly six feet long and four inches in diameter.

  “Let’s set it at fifteen hundred yards,” Chuck announced, and a Rus worker, who only weeks before had been laboring in the musket factory, climbed up on the flatbed wagon. Working a simple crank with wooden gears, he jacked the front end of the mass of pipes skyward, stopping when a crude pointer indicated the correct range. The array was now pointing menacingly at a long spread of white canvas set up nearly a mile downrange at the far end of the clearing.

  “Signal ‘get ready,’ ” Chuck said quietly.

  A young Roum boy raised a red flag and waved it. Antlike figures at the far end of the field waved a flag in return and disappeared from view into a heavily fortified dugout.

  Chuck looked around nervously. Several months of hard work were tied into this moment, and five hundred workers back at the factory were ready to start mass production on this project if everything tested out correctly.

  “All right, gentlemen,” Chuck said, his voice barely a whisper, “I suggest we step back now.”

  The crew retreated into a narrow trench a dozen yards behind and to one side of the wagon. Chuck went up to the side of the wagon, took a thin coil of rope, and tied it to a musket trigger. The barrel of the weapon was gone. In its place, three thin copper tubes, each one containing a quick-fire fuse, ran from the nipple, each tube running behind the back end of the pipes. A quick fuse hooked into the rocket inside of each tube was in turn connected to the copper pipe fuse line.

  Chuck cocked the musket and gingerly placed a percussion cap on the nipple. Slowly walking backward, he payed out the rope, careful not to put any pressure on the trigger. He slipped into the trench and gently pulled the rope taut.

  He hesitated and looked over at Olivia, then handed the rope over.

  “Pull it hard,” he said.

  Not quite sure of what she was doing, Olivia took hold of the rope, shut her eyes, and yanked.

  The clear snap of the percussion cap cut the evening air. For a second Chuck thought that something had gone wrong. And then all hell broke loose.

  Fire belched from the back end of the three pipes closest to the trigger, the next three igniting half a second later, followed by the next three and the rest after them. There was no explosive report in the first seconds, only a boiling cloud of smoke and fire. A high, piercing shriek suddenly filled the air as if a pack of demons had set to howling. And then he saw them, arcing out through the smoke, the first rocket going downrange, spinning on its axis, flying straight, other rockets, blurring upward, chasing after the first, all of them shrieking. One of the rockets emerged from its launch tube at an angle, climbing straight upward, and another seemed to tumble from its tube, detonating with a thunderclap a dozen yards downrange. But the rest continued straight on, trailing fire and smoke, reaching apogee as the propellant burned out and then slowly arc
ing over back toward the ground.

  Ferguson and his companions leaped from the trench, choking on the smoke, cheering wildly. Running through the billowing cloud, Chuck pulled his field glasses from their case and, pushing his spectacles up on his forehead, focused on the target. The first rocket slammed into the ground two hundred yards short, the time fuse and percussion fuse both failing. The next one detonated in the air fifty yards farther on. Then the volley slammed down in a bracket a hundred yards to either side of the target, detonating in the air or exploding on the ground, thirty rounds, fifteen hundred musket balls spraying outward. The distant hillside disappeared in a pall of white smoke and geysering earth. Long seconds later, the distant reports echoed across the field, causing a renewed cheer and backslapping.

  Losing all inhibitions, Chuck turned to Olivia, picked her up, and squeezed her tightly, spinning her around, suddenly very aware of her round body pressed against his. He wanted to kiss her again, but, embarrassed, he lowered her to the ground, his cheeks reddening as she laughed and kissed him on the cheek.

  As the smoke cleared, the observation crew on the far hill emerged from their dugout and ran up to the target, one of them waving the red flag to point out where a rocket had actually gone through the target, the impact on the far side shredding it to ribbons.

  “Reload!” Chuck shouted, pulling out his watch to time the action.

  The Rus battery crew turned and ran back to the trench. Pulling out a heavy wooden box, they unloaded a dozen more rockets, each one fashioned from a pressed cylinder of tin four inches in diameter and nearly two feet in length.

  “Ten-second fuses,” Chuck shouted.

  The loaders and their assistants inserted the appropriate fuses into the noses of the rockets. The rockets were built in two parts, the powder propellant in the rear, separated by wadding from an explosive nose cone, which held a central bursting charge surrounded by fifty musket balls packed in sawdust and beeswax. Hie cardboard-and-wax fuses were preset to different times and color-coded, as were the artillery fuses, for quick identification in the heat of battle; they were inserted just before firing. The innovation in this area, which Chuck was inordinately proud of, was the backup of a heavy percussion-cap head, which would detonate the charge if it should strike the ground before the time fuse ignited.The handlers, each armed with a quill, checked the four vents at the aft end of the rocket. Each vent was set to blow some of the exhaust out at an angle to the long axis, thus giving the weapon its spin. Next they checked the small clipped vent for the shrieking whistle, an idea Chuck had seized upon primarily out of his love for whistling firecrackers as a boy, which he sensed might have something of an effect on morale.