Down to the Sea Read online

  “We have our pride,” Garva interjected.

  “Silence!” Jurak shifted, gaze locked on his son for a brief instant, and yet Abraham wondered if he was indeed angry, if the son had not spoken what Jurak felt.

  Jurak pointed the gun straight at Vincent. “This weapon proves nothing to me other than your fears. Your fear of a Horde you cannot even find; a fear of us, a fear of yourselves.” He laughed darkly. “You are afraid of becoming like we once were, aren’t you? Your pity stayed your hand, and now you are afraid.”

  “Pity?” Vincent cried. “In the name of God, we were all sick of the killing. Remember, it was a human, a cattle who saved your life from that insane animal, the Qar Qarth of the Merki.”

  There was a flicker of doubt, of sadness, on Jurak’s face. “Yes, Hans,” he said quietly.

  “Then in his name, stay out of this. I’ll see what I can do about expanding your territory, perhaps even easing the restrictions on making machinery, as long as it can’t be used for weapons. I’ll do that in the name of Hans and on my honor as a soldier.”

  “You would do that, Hawthorne. I have heard of this religion you once believed in, this thing called Quaker. Tell me, do you still have nightmares over all whom you’ve killed?”

  Vincent stiffened and then stepped back. “I’ll forget that question,” he said, his voice filled with icy menace.

  Jurak nodded. “I offer apology.”

  Vincent, struggling for control, could only give a jerky nod of reply.

  “There is nothing else to be said here today,” Jurak announced. “We understand each other. I have begged, and you have threatened, and now we understand.”

  - “I have not threatened,” Vincent finally replied, his voice strained. “I have tried to explain things as they are.”

  “As have I.”

  “My adjutant will deliver a written statement to your camp tomorrow, detailing our understanding of what transpired today. Let us ponder what we’ve discussed and agree to meet again tomorrow or the day after.”

  “You have such a love of things in writing, you humans. My old world was like that, too. It is one of the few things about it I don’t really miss.”

  “If there is anything else you wish to communicate, I’ll remain camped here for a while.”

  Jurak looked at him warily.

  “By the treaty signed between us, I and an appropriate escort have the right to traverse your territory, though I would prefer if I did so as an invited guest who has received your permission.”

  “My permission?” Jurak laughed softly.

  “This is, after all, your land.”

  “By your sufferance.”

  “I wish you saw it differently.”

  “How can I?” There was an audible sigh. “You humans, how can you know what I think? You know nothing of the world I came from, where we were the sole masters. The things I knew there, about the history of our greatness, the half-formed knowledge I still carry of weapons that could sweep you away in a single day, but which I do not understand how to make. Tell me, on your old world, did you not have nations that subjugated and annihilated others solely because they could?”

  Vincent did not answer.

  “I see that here now. No matter what your intentions, your sense of honor, as you call it—the fact that you and I can in some way respect each other as two former enemies—will not change the inevitable. I know how such things must always end.”

  Vincent sadly shook his head. “The better angels of our nature,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “A saying by our president back home, the one this young officer”—he nodded toward Abraham—“was named after. He once said that. I wish we could be touched by that now, Jurak.”

  But then he pointed at the revolver still in the Qar Qarth’s hand.

  “If that, and what it implies, does not unravel everything.”

  Without waiting for a reply, he turned away and walked to his mount.

  Abraham remained where he was for a few seconds longer, looking at the two.

  Garva was rigid, gaze fixed on Hawthorne’s back, and he sensed that if the revolver had been in this one’s hand, Vincent might very well be dead. Garva, realizing he was being watched, looked over at Abraham.

  “There will be a day,” he hissed, and then turned away.

  Vincent looked next at Jurak, but could not read him. Wondering how to withdraw, he hesitated for an instant, then simply came to attention and saluted.

  Jurak, a flicker of a smile again on his face, nodded. “At least I will say this,” he said slowly, “your General Hawthorne has the spirit of a warrior, and I believe that in his heart, he knows us and sees the tragedy of all that was and all that shall be.”

  “And what, sir, will you do in reply?” Abraham asked.

  “Do? Survive, human, survive.” Jurak turned and walked away.

  Abraham came up to Vincent’s side and gently helped him to mount, then swung into his own saddle.

  “There’s going to be a war, isn’t there, sir?” he asked.

  Vincent, saying nothing, rode back to where the regiment was digging in for the night’s encampment.

  Abraham looked toward the bloodred setting sun that hung low on the horizon, the vast, empty steppes bathed in its bloody light. Strange, it was such a beautiful sight, even though it was filled with foreboding.

  A random thought came to him. He wondered where his friends Richard and Sean were. Perhaps, out on the vast open sea, such a sunset was indeed a sailor’s delight; a portent of at least one more day of peace.

  FIVE

  He awoke to hell.

  As consciousness returned, he could hear Sean O’Donald’s low rasping breath. Good, he was still alive.

  Or was it good? No. Death was the only way out now, better if Sean had died from the last beating.

  Eyes swollen nearly shut, Richard turned his head to look at his comrade, chains around their wrists, hanging suspended from the ceiling of the darkened cabin.

  As the ship rose and fell, they slowly swung back and forth, Sean groaning as he brushed against the cabin wall, then swung away.

  The only illumination came from a narrow slit of light through a slightly ajar wooden porthole cover.

  Richard Cromwell wished that the room were completely dark so that he could not see the table across from them. Knives, pincers, and whips were laid upon the table, the only furnishing in the narrow room other than the chains that bound them.

  How long had it been? He wasn’t sure. Definitely a day. Had there been a night? If so, he couldn’t remember now. His universe was focused on the pain; the racking thirst that was nearly as terrible; the realization that there was no way out, that they were the prisoners of the Kazan and death was the ultimate outcome.

  He tried to become detached, to remember how it once was. He had a vague memory—or was it just what his mother had told him?—of a time when they had been spared the full horror of the Merki occupation of Cartha. She, as the mistress of Tobias Cromwell, was allowed a place to live, decent food, deliverance from the feasts and from the mines.

  But then Cromwell had died, and the Merki had sent them into the mines. Even children of two and three had crawled into the narrow seams and retrieved loose rock.

  Thus he had lived and grown until the end of the war. He had learned toughness, to look with cold eyes upon unspeakable horror, to watch as others died the most horrible of deaths and to feel nothing.

  He wondered how it could be that he was not like so many others who had survived that time; the drifters, the beggars, the drinkers and murderers who had infested the city of Cartha after the war and the coming of the Yankees.

  It was his mother’s love that had shielded him from that fate. He could remember her soft touch, her stories of her family, rulers of Cartha before the Great War. Her love had formed a shield around him and somehow kept a kernel within his heart alive and warm.

  She had died on the final day the Merki fled
from the Yankee gunboats on the coast, the liberation within sight. The Merki had massacred nearly everyone. But even among that dreaded race there could be acts of pity. Their master, ordered to slay everyone, had granted her a clean death, a single blow. Then he had looked down, blade drawn, and hesitated.

  “Hide beneath your mother, little one,” he whispered, and left.

  So he had hidden, feeling the warmth that covered him growing cold.

  A Rus soldier had found him thus, taken him in and raised him. The old man had been kindly enough, a fisherman living alone, who had taught him to sail, to work, to read and write. The old man seldom spoke, for a wound to the throat from a Tugar arrow had made his speech all but unintelligible, but concealed within was a sharp mind and a gentle strength. They would take their small boat out upon the Inland Sea, and often for days not a word would be exchanged, but Richard had, at least with this lonely old man, learned the strength of silence and patience.

  He had died when Richard was eighteen, and only then did Richard learn that this quiet, lonely man had been a hero in the Great War, a war of which the old man had never spoken other than to say that his entire family had died in the great siege of Suzdal and that Perm had sent Richard to replace those he had lost.

  Several veterans came to the funeral, one of them the Yankee general Hawthorne. He was the one that suggested Richard attend the academy and offered to give a letter of recommendation, never realizing who Richard’s father had really been.

  Old Vasiliy had often suggested that Richard take his name, but something within had always stopped him, a defiance toward the world, an unwillingness to concede this one final point. It had caused nothing short of an explosion when he had appeared before the review board to take the exams and placed his true name on the form.

  The matter had gone all the way to Andrew Keane, who was not president at the time, but did sit on the Supreme Court. The four years at the academy had been, because of his defiance, less than pleasant. More than one instructor had denounced his father as a traitor and openly mocked his name. And yet his quiet defiance had, in the end, gained him a certain grudging respect.

  Vasiliy had taught him never to admit that anything was impossible. Once their net had become tangled in some wreckage, and the old man had told him to dive down and loosen it. The net was too precious to cut away or abandon. He had tried and could not reach it, and Vasiliy simply sat back, lit his pipe and told him they had days if need be, but he would untangle the net.

  It had taken a day, he had almost drowned doing it, but he had learned.

  And now it is time to die, he thought. I should have died nearly twenty years past. Every day since had been but an extra drawing of breath. At times he half believed in a God, Perm, and Kesus as old Vasiliy called them. At other times, in the face of all the cruelty he had witnessed, it was impossible to believe in any sense or order to the universe, for surely if there was a God he had to be mad to allow such a world as this.

  The ship rose on a wave and corkscrewed back down, slamming both of them against the bulkhead. Sean groaned, a shuddering sob racking his body.

  “Richard?”

  “I’m here.”

  Sean looked over at him, face contorted with agony. “I can’t take it again.”

  Richard said nothing. He had learned how to block out beatings. In the mines they were the primary way to force children of four and five to work, or simply to amuse a bored Merki master. He had once seen a child slowly beaten to death across an entire day in the same way human children would torment a fly.

  The beating of the previous day, however, had not been done for amusement, but for the simple purpose of breaking him down. He understood the method well enough, to push the agony to the limit of endurance, made even more maddening because no questions were asked, nothing demanded as of yet. Pain was simply inflicted, the lash snaking out against their naked bodies until both of them were bloody masses of peeling flesh.

  He knew the questioning would come next. They’d be offered yet more torture or a quick release from the pain if they talked.

  He looked over again at Sean and saw the terror in his eyes. He wondered if Sean, in turn, could sense the fear within his own soul as well.

  “Listen to me,” he gasped, pausing to lick his split and bloodied lips. He swallowed to clear his throat. “Lie to them. We’ll have to talk, but we can lie.” He whispered softly, suspecting that just behind the half closed shutter and porthole a guard was listening. That’s why he spoke in English, doubting that any of their captors knew the language.

  “Our ship, the Gettysburg, its an old ship. We have ships three, four times as big. Let’s say, twenty of them. We saw them pulling the wreckage of our flyer in, so tell them the truth about that, but say it’s our smallest aerosteamer. Tell them our army has half a million men under arms and can call up another half million. We have to agree on this now. They most likely will separate us soon.”

  Sean, eyes glazed, stared at Richard. “Why?” Sean whispered.

  Why? He was so incredulous, he couldn’t respond for a moment.

  “It’s our duty, that’s why,” he finally replied.

  “Duty? Duty got us into this. I joined because I had to. I was the son of damnable Senator O’Donald. Now look at us.”

  A shuddering sob escaped him, and he lowered his head.

  “Damn it, Sean, we have to agree on this. It will make it easier for both of us.”

  “Easier?”

  “I know how these creatures think. They respect strength. Show weakness, and they’ll drag out the agony for their own amusement.

  “When they start in again, try to hang on as long as possible. When you simply can’t take it anymore, act as if you’re breaking, then spill it out quickly.”

  He looked over at the table where the implements of torture were neatly lined up.

  “They get careless sometimes. If you have a chance, throw yourself on one of their blades.”

  He had seen that done often enough, and though it was easy to say, he wondered if he would have the courage to do so if the chance should arise.

  “Then what?”

  If we’re lucky, they just might cut our throats, Richard thought, but looking at Sean, he realized he’d better not say it.

  “The moon feast. That’s what they are planning for us, isn’t it?”

  Richard shook his head. “They only do that to fresh victims.”

  Sean groaned as another wave rolled the boat, swinging them back against the bulkhead.

  A burst of light flooded into the room, and, startled, he looked up. The door was open. Two of them were standing there, both in white robes, unlike their tormentors of earlier, who were stripped to the waist and wore black trousers.

  The two entered, the second one far taller than normal for one of the Horde, head inclined low even though the ceiling was over eight feet from the deck.

  Richard gazed at him warily. He was thin, almost cadaverous for a Bantag, eyes a strange pale blue, a rarity amongst that race. His gaze was penetrating, cutting directly into the soul.

  Richard knew that some were able to do this. The terrifying Tamuka, the fallen Qar Qarth of the Merki, had been one, although those with the power usually stood behind a Qarth or even the Qar Qarth as their adviser.

  This one, he sensed, had cultivated the ability to see within beyond anything the Hordes of the north knew or comprehended.

  As the blue-eyed one gazed at him, Richard fought to show indifference; the look of a slave who was beyond caring and beyond fear.

  There was the flicker of a smile, and then he turned to look at Sean.

  Richard watched the silent interplay. Sean gasped for breath, eyes drooping. Again the flicker of a smile.

  The blue-eyed one said something unintelligible, and his companion pulled a drinking flask out from under his robe, uncorked it, and held it so that Richard could drink.

  He gulped it down. The taste was strange, tinged with a slight bitterness,
like a strong herb. The flask was withdrawn and offered to Sean, who drank as well.

  The second one drew back and then left the cabin. At first Richard felt some of his strength returning, but then he sensed something else, a strange drifting. The pain was still there, but somehow he felt as if he were floating.

  The blue-eyed one smiled.

  “Yes, it was drugged.”

  Richard was startled. The words were in English.

  “I seek answers to a few questions. That is all, and then this will end.”

  Richard wanted to make a defiant reply, but decided that silence was still the best path.

  “Just end it,” Sean cried, his voice near to breaking.

  “It will end.” His attention turned to focus on Sean. “Tell me, are you the son of Senator O’Donald of the Republic.”

  Richard could not help but betray his shock. The blueeyed one smiled. “We know quite a bit about you.” As he spoke he snapped his fingers.

  A man came through the door, a human wearing a white robe, the same as the blue-eyed one. And yet something about him made Richard uneasy, even frightened. The man was tall, matching Richard’s height, but beneath the robe he could sense a physique that was perfection. The man moved catlike. There seemed to be a coiled and deadly power to him, his gaze cool, almost mocking.

  “Years ago I sent a dozen like Machu here north, to learn a few things. Your Yankee language was one of the things he returned with. My Shiv learn such things quickly.”

  “Shiv?” Sean asked.

  He smiled. “My name is Hazin, and you, Sean O’Donald, will learn soon enough who the Shiv truly are.”

  “I doubt that,” Richard snapped.

  The gaze turned, fixing on him. Yet again he felt the sense of uncovering, of staring within.

  At a subtle gesture, Machu stepped forward. The back-handed blow was delivered in almost a casual manner, but the force of it stunned Richard. For a moment he thought his jaw had been shattered, and he gagged on the blood, which nearly choked him.

  . The man turned on Sean, and the beating began. Within less than a minute O’Donald was sobbing, begging for it to stop. The whole time Hazin ignored Sean, all attention focused on Richard.