by S M Stirling
"Strip them, and take the jewels." He took a blanket from one of the carriages and spread it. "Pile the gauds here. All of them, trooper M'lewis." Raj waited until the women were huddled together, staring at him in wide-eyed fright. "Go," he said softly, when they were still. "And if you're ever within the perimeter of my camp again, I hereby announce you're not under my protection."
They were professionals, too, in their way; they looked around at the troopers' wolf-grins, turned in a body and began trudging down the dirt lane, heading south toward the town at the ford.
Raj noticed that the old woman who had run to bring him was back, panting and wheezing up past the barn. She stopped at the sight of the farmer lying with his pitchfork in hand, then squatted beside him, rocking herself and moaning. One hand reached out to touch the corpse's face, then drew back. The moaning continued, low and eerie; the next-oldest of the farmstead's women was standing on the porch. She had clothed herself, but looked uncertainly around at the armed men.
"Goodwife," Raj continued: there were a number of things to be done, before this cursed night was over.
"Yes, Messer?" she said, her voice surprisingly strong as she went to her knees. Well, you had to be strong, to survive the sort of life these people led. "Thank you, Messer, but " there was a tremor to her voice as she looked about " they ate everything we needed for the season, Messer, and, "
"You see this?" He toed the pile of ornaments and dresses. "It's yours." Her mouth dropped open; there was enough there to buy a farm the size of the one her family sharecropped, and stock it besides. "I'd advise you to hide it under the hearth and sell it carefully and in small amounts." Because a peasant who came into money was like one of the legendary cooked pigs who ran about with knife and fork in its back, squealing "eat me." "Don't let your men out of the shed for an hour or so." No point in having enraged civilians complicating matters.
"Master Sergeant," he continued.
"Ser?"
"M'lewis is a watch-stander?"
"Ser. Readin', writin' and numbers, summat."
"Have him transferred to Battalion staff as a courier." The scrawny trooper whooped as he rebuttoned his uniform tunic; there was a suspicious hang to one sleeve, but Raj decided to ignore it for the moment. "M'lewis, there should be woodworking tools on a steading like this; bring anything in the way of mallets and hammers, and stakes, wooden treenails, anything like that. Run." As he sped off: "Now bring the prisoners down this way. You, too, Messers," he added to the soldiers of the 2nd Gendarmerie "You should watch the results of your valiant work."
The outer wall of the barn was only five meters from the laneway; it was a little more than head-high, built of large adobe bricks mortared with mud, and no whitewash had ever been wasted on it. Quite sturdy enough, Raj decided.
"Line them up against it." Rough hands pushed the men to stand against the hardened mud; some of them were weeping, and a few fell to their knees to beg. Raj looked up into the crystal purity of the night.
"Ahh, firin' squad, ser?" da Cruz asked.
"By no means, Master Sergeant: by no means." There was a wait; Raj remembered to turn and clap Foley on the shoulder. "Quick work, Ensign," he said.
The boy had been looking nausea-pale; he straightened. "Thank you, sir," he said, looking down at the shotgun and fumbling it open. It took several seconds for him to unload it. "It's a good weapon, Gerrin, Senior Lieutenant Staenbridge got it for me."
"Use it well," Raj said; the youth snicked it closed and went to stand beside Staenbridge, accepting an arm around his shoulders with a grateful sigh. M'lewis came panting up with his arms full.
"Messer Captain, gots a bit," he said. Quite a bit; three large wooden hammers, the sort used to drive vine-props, and several dozen stakes of turned hardwood the length of a man's forearm.
"Excellent, M'lewis," Raj said, bringing his eyes down to the line of men against the wall eleven of them. Fifteen to fifty, East Residence born, you could see the mark of the streets on them. Eyes bewildered, eyes defiant, cringing.
"Master Sergeant," he continued, listening to his own voice as he might have a strange sauroid calling in the forest. "This laneway leads to the ford over the Torunavir, doesn't it? Passable for the Battalion?"
"Yes, ser. Bit more direct than the highway. Take a little longer, mebbe."
"Excellent," Raj said again. "Have the men draw straws for a crucifixion detail, if you please. And a detachment to see nobody touches the bodies until tomorrow morning."
Raj heard the Gruder brothers hiss in surprise behind him. The servants stared uncomprehending until the soldiers spread-eagled the first of them against the wall and brought up the stakes. They began screaming, then.
Raj walked into his tent; the table had been cleared and the flap lowered. Suzette sat in a folding chair under the single lamp, a snifter of brandy in one hand and a cigarette in the other, with a book open in her lap. Unspeaking, he walked to the sideboy and poured himself a stiff shot of Hillchapel plum brandy, tossing the clear liquid to the back of his throat. He followed it with another, motions as controlled as a machine, then threw the glass out of the tent, listening as it crashed and tinkled in the darkness outside.
"Raj?" Suzette said, closing the book and laying it aside. Some detached portion of his mind noticed the gold-leaf title on the spine: Gentry, Nobility and Estates of the Southern Counties.
He walked to her side, moving like one of the compressed-air automatons in the Hall of Audience, sank to his knees and laid his head on her lap.
"Suzette, " he croaked.
"Shhh," she said, stroking his hair.
"What I had to "
"Shhh, my brave one. It'll be all right. Shhh, sleep now."
Ten of the servants were still alive, spiked to the wall like butterflies in a specimen box, when the banner of the 5th Descott went by, twelve hours later.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Crash.
The volley rang out in crisp unison, and the boulder designated as target went pockmarked as seventy or eighty rifle bullets from First Company struck as one. Raj lowered his binoculars with a grim smile, scanning across the rolling plain. Second Company were hauling in out of a gallop five hundred meters ahead of their comrades and sliding to the ground, running for cover.
Crash. Their volley had the same mechanical perfection, and the clump of daggerbrush that was their aiming point disintegrated in a cloud of dust and fragments. The First was already remounted and pounding forward in line abreast, leapfrogging to a new firing line. Raj nodded to the signaller beside him; the man was using a portable heliograph, an affair of mirrors and lenses on a collapsible tripod. He began to click the slatted cover in coded patterns, setting pulses of reflected sunlight to the lip of a gully nearly a thousand meters away. The Captain raised his glasses once more; the erosion slash looked like a thousand others on the rolling plain, deserted, rimmed in saltbush.
Then it flashed and smoked, as Third Company popped their heads above the rim and opened up. Couldn't see them myself, and I knew they were there, Raj thought. Fourth and Fifth surged over the rim a moment later, mounted and sabers out. Without pausing to dress ranks or needing to they joined into a blunt wedge and charged, screeching exultantly. Shells burst ahead of them as the two 75's below Raj's hilltop command post bucked and roared. Grey smoke drifted in clumps across the scrubby plain smelling of brimstone, but the sounds of firing seemed to disappear into that endless waste.
"Not bad at all, Master Sergeant," Raj said.
"Mebbe, ser. Mought wish the new men'd been with ussn longer, gots doubt about how steady they is."
"Well, there's only one way to find out, isn't there?" he replied. "Sound Regroup and Reform, trumpeter." He stood in the stirrups and stretched; Horace took that as a sign to lie down, and Raj pulled firmly on the reins.
"Up, you son-of-a-bitch," he said affably. The dog sighed and looked over its shoulder at him, mournful eyes and drooping floppy ears, tongue the size of a washtowel out and jig
gling as he panted.
Horace was a premier product of the Hillchapel stud, but his sleek black coat put him at a disadvantage under the merciless southern sun. The peaks of the Oxheads were to their left and north, now; the last week since they crossed the passes had been a steady eastward trudge through the foothills, where great wedge-shaped spurs ran out into the steppe. Easier to put the road further out, from an engineering standpoint, but there was very little point in having a road without water and fodder for the men and beasts that travelled it.
"Water and fodder," Raj remarked aloud as the Battalion formed up behind the colors.
"Messer Captain?" the guide sent out from the County Legate in Komar said, smiling.
He smiles a lot, Raj thought, looking at the rather dashing face, white teeth gleaming in the dark-tanned face against black point-trimmed mustache and beard. The guide wore an odd little cap with a fore-and-aft peak, wound 'round with a snowy white cloth whose end dangled down his neck and could be drawn across the face in a sandstorm. Muzzaf Kerpatik was a sleekly prosperous person, in his long light-brown jellaba and curl-toed boots, a Star medallion around his neck in silver and diamond chips, two amulets dangling from his belt, mother-of-pearl inlays on the scabbard of his dagger and the butt of his pepperpot revolver.
"Not much water or fodder around here," Raj amplified. The 5th was drawn up in column of march; the command party took its place at the head. He held up a hand and chopped it forward.
"Battalion "
"Company "
"Platoon "
"Dressing by the left walk-march trot." With a jingle of harness and a mass panting of dogs, the Battalion broke into motion, a single great blue-and-dun snake a thousand meters long coiling across the plain like some steel-tipped centipede of war.
Muzzaf nodded, stroking his beard; he was a travelled man, a man of affairs, who had been east to Sandoral, west to Kendrun, and to the capital several times. He looked about, seeing with a northerner's eyes. The southern slopes of the mountains were themselves dry, unlike the dense broadleaf forest of the other slope; open scrub, grass, a few glades of cedar or bottletree higher up. Down here was pasture, verdant enough in the winter rains, but drying out now, the carpets of wildflowers long gone. Already the sheep were being herded up the valleys and into the high meadows, vast bleating herds surrounded by mounted guardians. Several were in view from here; the land was not really flat, it rolled like the frozen waves of the sea, and from a ridgeline like this you could see a score of kilometers.
"Yet there is good trade in wool done here, Messer," he said; his Colony-bred whippet kept pace with the great black wardog easily enough.
Raj looked at the man the legate had sent, frowning slightly as his body adjusted with a lifetime's practice to the up-and-down sway of a dog's travelling pace. This Muzzaf Kerpatik was neither soldier nor bureaucrat, landowner or peasant, nor a shopkeeper or an artisan or laborer "You're a merchant, Citizen Kerpatik?" he said politely.
"Ah, not exactly, Messer Captain," the man said, gesturing widely as all these southerners seemed to do. "That is, I have trading interests, yes. And in manufacturies; then again, shares in mines and the alum pits, and in a property of rents in the city."
Raj made a rapid mental adjustment: "rent" was familiar, at least. "My apologies, Messer," he said.
"Simply 'Citizen' will do. My father was a man of middling rank, and my mother a concubine from the Colony; hence my inheritance was small, and I had my own way to make in the world." Another of those flashing smiles. "I am as we would say here in Komar County, a, "
The word that followed was unfamiliar to Raj: something like "person-of-doing." "That's a dialect term?"
"No, no, common in many cities these days, though I think first in Kendrun. One who risks moneysavings in affairs of profit."
Extraordinary, Raj thought. Getting rich without inheriting or stealing it. Odd, and rather unsettling; and if he had so much wealth in cash and goods, why didn't he buy land, the only wealth that was really real?
The Komarite hesitated. "Your pardon, Messer Captain you think, then, that your force will be sufficient to defend Komar County against the Spirit-Deniers?"
Raj looked at him in puzzlement. "Defense is the local garrison's concern," he said. "We're here for offensive action."
Muzzaf paused again, moistening his lips as if considering speech, then shrugged. "As you say, Messer." Oddly intent: "Yet if there is any way I may aid you, however humble Komar is my home, and it has been good to me. A man should pay his debts."
Raj nodded abstractedly. Behind him he could hear the Master Sergeant talking, agreeing, by the sound of it. Then a Company noncom bellowed:
"Sound off, 5th Descotters!"
The Captain grinned; they all knew that one, and it was a good sign after a hard day's work in this heat. Five hundred strong young male voices roared it out:
Oh, we Descoteers have hairy ears,
We goes without our britches
And pops our cocks with jagged rocks,
We're hardy sons of bitches!
Raj laughed aloud, drawing a deep breath of the hot dry air. I like this country, he thought. They were angling east of south, now, and the dust column of the 2nd and the transport was visible in the far distance; they rounded a mountain spur, and the valley on the other side was inhabited. The villages were high up along the sides, wherever there was a spring. Like home, he thought, but different. Patches of cultivation around the houses, growing olives and figs to supplement the grain, mostly, rather than the apples and plums and cherries of his homeland. The architecture had a functional similarity, walls and defensive towers, but these lacked the grimly foursquare build of the County's black-basalt farmhouses and keeps. Descott County's prime exports were plum brandy, fighting men, dog trainers and skilled masons; here they seemed to be content with fieldstone cemented by mud, like giant dactosauroid nests.
We fuck the whores right through their drawers
We do not care for trifles,
We hangs our balls upon the walls
And shoots at 'em with rifles.
I like the people, too, he decided, as they passed a shallow depression in the plain; it had collected enough water to grow a catch-crop of barley, five hectares or so. Women were throwing the stooked grain onto two-wheel oxcarts. They wore vests over their striped robes, sewn with coins and brass bangles and bits of shell, and wide hats to shelter their faces from the sun. He had noticed no woman covered her face in the border country, although many men veiled for comfort; it was for the same reason the borderers made a point of eating pork and drinking wine, and spitting at the name of Mohammed, he supposed. The wars in this strip of land had been long and bitter.
Much joy we reap by diddlin' sheep
In divers nooks and ditches
Nor give we a damn if they be rams
We're hardy sons of bitches!
Not much chance of giving offense, Raj thought. The Descott dialect of the common Sponglish tongue was archaic to outside ears, and the local country folk talked a sing-song version larded with Arabic loanwords. The column slowed as the women ran to the edge of the field, holding up leather bottles of water or pieces of dried fruit, giving an ululating cheer to the passing soldiers. Raj swung his hand out, and the order passed down:
"March walk!"
The women trotted along beside the dogs, holding up their gifts and refusing offers of payment; the soldiers passed the jugs among themselves, blasphemously happy when they found the water had been cut one-quarter with the strong local wine. A trooper swept a girl up before him one-armed, trying to steal a kiss; she returned it with enthusiasm, then reared back and punched him neatly in the face, hard enough to bloody his nose. He shouted with pain and clapped his hands to it as the girl dropped nimbly down and ran to rejoin her friends; his comrades howled laughter, nearly falling from their saddles.
So did the male kinsfolk of the women who were riding guard for the harvesters. They were men much like tho
se who had been trickling in to volunteer by ones and twos for the past hundred kilometers, drawn by a hatred older than the hills and the smell of loot. Glad they're taking it in good humor, Raj decided, saluting as the riders waved. Slight, lean men, whipcord next to the bull muscle of his Descotters; about the same shade of skin, where they were not burned black, which made them rather darker than most in the Civil Government, and they dressed for rough use, in sand-colored doghair robes and headcloths. Some carried buckets of light javelins, a few lances; more had short horn-backed bows or long-barreled flintlock rifles, and nobody seemed to feel dressed without half a dozen knives up to a foot long.
Raj looked upslope to the rock-built villages, and imagined fighting his way into the foothills. Long guns and hairy hawk-faces behind every rock, screaming rushes out of the side gulleys, ambush, rockslide, guerrillas and these people were fanatics, they didn't just hate the Muslim enemy. Apart from Muzzaf he had heard scarcely a person south of the Oxheads who didn't invoke the Star Spirit every second sentence, and every hamlet had a church, usually large, no matter how squalid a flyblown slum the town was.
Raj's hand chopped forward once more, and the 5th rocked into the steady wolf-lope again. The riders who had been guarding the women spurred alongside for a moment, shouting and waving their weapons in the air:
"Aur! Aur! Despert Staahl!" Awake the Iron, the local warcry.
"Star Spirit of Man with you, brothers! Kill many! Kill!"
"I'm surprised the Colony finds it pays to raid," he said, as they peeled off back to their charges.
"Hmmm, you might be surprised what a Bedouin will do for a sheep, Messer," Muzzaf said. "Also, there are mines of precious metals and silver in the mountains and," he added with a smile that seemed less assumed than most of his expressions, "you have not yet seen the Vale of Komar."
