Men of War Read online

“And what is it that your eyes see that mine do not?”

  Hans looked straight at him. Less than an hour ago he assumed it was lost. They had damaged the Horde, perhaps fatally, but it would still be lost for him and his comrades. Now there was a glimmer of light.

  Again the flutter of pain, but he ignored it. Even if I don’t survive this day, those whom I love will.

  He tried to pierce into the mind, the heart of Jurak. The Horde believed their shamans could read into the souls of others. Andrew claimed it was true as well, having resisted the leaders of the Tugar and Merki Hordes. He, in turn, had been in the presence of Tamuka and Ha’ark. There was something about Tamuka that had been coldly troubling, a sense that he could indeed see.

  As for Ha’ark, he was simply a warrior. A shrewd one at times but nevertheless easy to pierce. There was something about this one, though, that was different yet again.

  Hans reached into his haversack, Jurak’s gaze fluttering down. Hans slowly withdrew the small piece of tobacco and bit off a chew. There was a soft grumbling chuckle from Jurak.

  “Now I remember,” Jurak said. “You chewed that dried weed. Disgusting.”

  Hans could not help but laugh softly as well.

  He continued to stare at Jurak. As with most of the Horde there was no discomfort in silence, the feeling that one needed to fill the emptiness. As horse nomads they were a race long accustomed to silence, to days of endless riding alone.

  The air reverberated around them, distant explosions, the chatter of a Gatling. From the west the shriek of an approaching steam train, the neighing of horses, guttural cries of mounted warriors. Hans looked up. Less than half a mile away he could see a knot of them forming up, the fallen standard of the Horde held aloft again as a rally point. They most likely knew that their Qar Qarth was fallen; he wondered if they knew that he was still alive and a prisoner.

  A Hornet circled in on the forming ranks, opening fire, scattering them.

  Hans looked over his shoulder. Several hundred men were gathered behind him, watching in open awe and curiosity.

  “Jack, do you have some sort of signal to tell those flyers to cease fire? And Ketswana, I think they understand a white flag. Get some men out there, men who can speak Bantag. We’re not surrendering, but we are offering a cease-fire. Tell them we have their Qar Qarth.”

  He looked back at Jurak who sat, features unreadable. That has always been one of the damned problems with dealing with them, he thought. Can’t read their faces, their subtle gestures; it’s like dealing with a statue of stone.

  “I am telling my men to stop firing while we talk,” Hans said.

  Jurak nodded, then looked around. Groups of Chin were wandering about the battlefield. Whenever they spotted a wounded Bantag they closed in with shouts of rage, and of glee and fell to tormenting him before finishing it with a bayonet thrust or a crushing blow to the head.

  “And Ketswana!”

  His comrade came up to his side, looking down at him, eyes still filled with concern.

  “I’m doing fine now. But tell our people to stop that,” Hans said in the language of the Bantag. He nodded to where, less than fifty yards away, a mob of Chin had fallen on a Bantag warrior. “It’s despicable. This is a cease-fire, damn it, not an opportunity for a massacre. I want our people to halt where they are and hold. The wounded are to be left alone; if they can get out on their own, let them pass.”

  “Their blood’s up,” Ketswana replied in the same language, his voice filled with bitterness. “It’s time to remember and take vengeance. They wouldn’t offer us mercy if it was you who were now prisoner.”

  “And that’s what’s different between us,” Hans shouted, the effort of it leaving him dizzy and out of breath.

  Ketswana’s gaze locked on Jurak. He finally nodded, formally saluted Hans, and ran off, shouting orders.

  “Are we really so different?” Jurak asked.

  “I would like to think we are, at least when it comes to how we wage war.”

  “And tell me, Hans. After all this, after all the thousands of years of this, if your race gains the upper hand, can we expect any different?”

  “I can’t promise anything,” Hans replied. “For myself, yes. For those who’ve lived here all their lives, who know nothing different. I don’t know.”

  “So we shall continue to fight. Kill me if you wish. But I was always an outsider. Few will truly miss me. I was Qar Qarth because they were afraid of you and believed in Ha’ark, who claimed we were sent by the gods. They will select one of their own blood to continue the fight.”

  “What I assumed,” Hans replied wearily.

  There was a long blast of a steam whistle. Looking over his shoulder, he saw a train easing to a stop. Shocked, he saw that Seetu, one of Ketswana’s men was leading them. They had actually made it all the way from Xi’an. Dismounting from the locomotive, hundreds of Chin, all of them armed with Bantag rifles, jumped down from the string of flatcars and formed up.

  “They’re from Xi’an,” Hans announced proudly, “and there will be thousands more.”

  Jurak said nothing.

  If what Jurak said was true, Hans realized, it would simply go on. He might have saved the Chin, but who would be next after that? And so the war would continue.

  “You said your eyes did not see-my new umens,” Jurak said, interrupting Hans’s thoughts.

  Hans looked back at him absently rubbing his left shoulder.

  “I know enough of cat …” Jurak quickly stopped, “of humans to know you are ill.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “It is your heart, isn’t it?”

  Surprised, Hans nodded.

  “You are very ill, Hans Schuder.”

  “Not too sick to see this through to the end.”

  Jurak laughed softly.

  “Ha’ark once told me you were indomitable. I remember once telling him that if he sensed that in you, perhaps it was best to kill you before you created trouble.”

  “One of his many mistakes,” Hans said with a soft laugh.

  “Yes. I know.”

  “What do I see that your eyes do not?” Hans replied.

  “I know two umens were brought up by rail last night from Nippon. It must have taken near to every locomotive and piece of rolling stock within three hundred leagues to do that. Even if you had half a dozen umens in Nippon, it will still take you two days to turn those trains around, run them north, load them up, then another two days to bring them all back.

  “As you can see, I now control the rail line between here and Xi’an.”

  Jurak looked past Hans and nodded.

  “I will not speak an untruth. I don’t know how they got through. Perhaps they control the line. Perhaps you had few if any warriors between here and Xi’an to stop them.” Jurak was silent for a moment.

  “Obviously not enough to stop them.”

  “We captured supplies in Xi’an. Powder, artillery, guns.” He hesitated, remembering the barges of ammunition exploding. “Millions of cartridges, thousands of shells, even some of your steamships and land ironclads.

  “By the time you are reinforced, I can arm fifty thousand Chin.”

  “Then it will be a mutual slaughter.”

  “I could also pull back, tearing up track. Burn the factories that are left before leaving. Then you will have yet another front and hundreds of thousands of Chin armed and eager for blood by the time your umens reach Xi’an.” Jurak shook his head wearily.

  “Then we are doomed to fight. You and I will not be here to see it, but it will continue.”

  Hans sighed and lowered his head.

  “I know.”

  There was a long moment of silence. He looked back up at Jurak. Here was a warrior of the Horde. Eight feet or more in height, black-and-brown mane matted, dirty, the same as the black uniform. Visage that for a decade had filled him with horror. There was the memory of slavery, the terror, the brutality, the moon feasts and slaughter pits. And all so many
comrades of the 35th and 44th New York. Men of Rus, his friend Marcus, those whom he had suffered bondage with. All caused by this race.

  He fought down the urge to find a weapon, a knife, anything, to gut Jurak right there, to make it a signal for the slaughter to continue to the death. For he did indeed have the upper hand at the moment.

  He looked to his left and saw Ketswana standing over a wounded Bantag, ordering the Chin back. They were ready to fall on him with drawn knives.

  He thought of the rumors of yesterday, that in the frenzy of killing, Bantag had been mutilated beyond recognition; and some were even whispering that a few had even taken their flesh and consumed it.

  He looked closely at the wounded Bantag and realized that it was barely more than a cub, about the same height as the Zulu standing over him. He was on his side, gutshot. Looking up at Ketswana.

  The Chin fell back. Ketswana started to turn away, and the wounded Bantag said something. Ketswana hesitated, then unslung his canteen, pulled the cork, knelt, and offered the Bantag a drink.

  Jurak was watching as well.

  “In spite of what my race did, still one of yours will offer a drink to a dying child.”

  Hans said nothing for a moment. He was ready to shoot back with a sarcasm, an enraged comment about how many human children had died in agony, watching parents murdered before they themselves were slaughtered. He sensed, as well, that Jurak had an inner revulsion for what this world was. And the thought formed as he continued to watch Ketswana, holding the canteen to the cub’s lips.

  “Jurak.”

  He was looking straight into his opponent’s eyes.

  “Yes, Hans.”

  “Your tribal camping areas. Your old ones, your children, your women. Do you know where they are camped now?”

  Jurak seemed to stiffen slightly, the first true gesture Hans felt he could read accurately.

  “Yes.”

  “Many are south of here, toward the Shin-Tu Mountains.”

  There was a moment’s pause.

  “Yes, some are there. Others to the north and east.”

  “But many are there. A hundred thousand yurts, two hundred thousand perhaps.”

  “I cannot count them all.”

  Hans smiled. Jurak could try to bluff, but somehow he wasn’t.

  “My forces here are between them and you. Troops moving along this rail line are between them and you. For that matter, I have a score of airships that could be over them within the hour.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Hans made it a point of dropping eye contact for a moment. He slowly stood up. Jurak remained seated, but now it was he looking down on Jurak rather than the other way around.

  “I am ordering that all of them are to be put to death.”

  Jurak said nothing, gaze becoming icy.

  “The umens you see that I do not can come up if you want. But in two days’ time I will have a ring closed in around a hundred thousand yurts. The flyers will be over them ceaselessly from dawn to dusk. Arrows fired by women and old ones will fall back to the ground. Bullets and firebombs slashing down from the skies will slaughter by the tens of thousands.

  “And once armed Chin are amongst them, once I tell the Chin that this is their destiny, that the gods seek revenge, the slaughter will continue until even the ground can no longer drink all the blood, and the rivers will turn red.

  “You might bring up two umens, a dozen umens, but they will find themselves to be childless, fatherless, for their seed will be extinguished from this world forever.

  “This is the war your race started and I shall now finish.”

  As he spoke he was aware that Ketswana had come back and was standing by his side.

  “When do we begin?” Ketswana asked, his voice a guttural challenge.

  Jurak looked at the two of them and wearily shook his head.

  “Am I to believe you, a warrior I had come to respect, would do this thing?”

  “You did it to us first.”

  Jurak visibly flinched and lowered his head.

  He was again silent, and then ever so slowly he grabbed hold of the wheel of the caisson he had been sitting against and pulled himself up, flinching as he gingerly tried to put weight on his broken ankle.

  “It is over,” he finally whispered. “I would like to believe that you do not wish this murder to continue. I am asking you to spare them.”

  Hans said nothing, keeping his features hard.

  “Your terms?”

  This was a leap ahead for Hans which momentarily caught him off guard. Two hours earlier he was hoping Ketswana had saved one final round to prevent the agony of capture, now he was negotiating the end of a war. He wished Andrew was here; his friend would be far better at this than he.

  “Immediate cease-fire on all fronts. Immediate withdrawal from the territory of Roum, Nippon, and the Chin.”

  “To go where?”

  “East if you want, south. I’ve been told that there’s a thousand leagues east of here with barely a human on it. That is range enough for your people to live upon.”

  “You’d suffer us to live?”

  “It’s either that or kill all of you.” He held back for a second then let it spill out. “And if I did that, if we did that, in the end we would become you.”

  Jurak stood with lowered head and finally nodded.

  “I offer no apologies for what this world became.”

  “Then change it, damn it. Change it.”

  “And what is to prevent war from starting again?”

  “I don’t know,” Hans said, his voice weary. “I promise you this, though, if you go beyond that thousand leagues of open prairie, if word should ever come back of but one more person dying, of being slaughtered for food, or put into bondage, then I, or Andrew, or those who come after us will hunt your people without mercy.”

  “You will have the factories, the flyers, the machines. We will not,” Jurak replied. “I know what the result of that would be.”

  “Fine. I will keep the Chin back from your encampments. I will order the release of ten thousand yurts immediately to start moving east. Once I have word that the last of your troops are out of Roum territory, twenty thousand more. Once out of the realm of Nippon and the Chin, fifty thousand more, and a year from today the remainder. Any violation of what we agree upon here and all of them will die without mercy.”

  “Would you really do that?” Jurak asked.

  Hans stared straight at him.

  He knew there was no sense in bluffing, but he could not betray his own doubts either.

  “I don’t think either one of us wants to find out what we are capable of doing.”

  Jurak nodded.

  “Perhaps someday we can talk more, Hans Schuder. You might not believe this, but I sense your Andrew and I are more alike than each of us realizes, the same as Andrew has you, there is an elder for me.”

  Hans did not know what to say.

  In a way it had all been so simple, and yet all the years of agony and suffering to reach this moment, and all the millions of dead.

  Strange, he suddenly thought of Andrew, and knew that what had happened here Andrew would have agreed to.

  “I will signal that the attack is off at Capua.”

  Hans looked at him quizzically.

  “There were rumors that your government had collapsed, that Andrew was going into exile. We were to start the attack this evening, just before sundown.”

  Hans tried to quickly digest all that he had just learned. Andrew in exile? Suppose the government had already thrown in the towel. Then what? If this fighting was to end, he had better move quickly. He had already decided to let Jurak go, but he had to get him back to where he could telegraph out orders of a cease-fire before the government back home surrendered first. If they did that, some other Bantag leader might be tempted to press the attack anyhow.

  “Ketswana, bring up a couple of mounts.”

  The two stood in silence, waiting a
s Ketswana left them to find horses.

  “Twenty years from now I wonder,” Jurak said.

  “Wonder what?”

  Jurak fell silent again as Ketswana came up, leading two horses, one of them sightly wounded and limping.

  Hans motioned for Jurak to take the better horse. He hobbled over. Grimacing, he grabbed hold of the pommel, swung his injured leg up and over, then slipped his good foot into the stirrup.

  Hans, still feeling light-headed, though the pain had subsided somewhat, struggled to mount and was embarrassed when Ketswana and several others came to his side to help.

  “Hans, where the hell are you going?” Ketswana asked.

  Hans looked down at his old comrade.

  “lust for a little ride, that’s all.”

  “Wait for me.”

  “I can’t wait for you, my friend.”

  Hans suddenly reached down and took Ketswana’s hand.

  “Thank you. I don’t know how many times over I owe you my life.”

  “I owe you my freedom,” Ketswana replied, his voice suddenly choked.

  “No man owes another man his freedom,” Hans replied softly. “That was, and always will be, your right. Remember that.”

  He nudged his mount gently, not wanting to hurt it.

  “Wait here; I’ll be back soon enough.”

  . The two rode off, side by side, heading to where Bantag survivors of the bloody fight were rallying. Overhead a flyer circled as if keeping watch. Chin infantry, coming off of the trains, was fanning out to envelop the flank of the Bantag. Eastward, toward the still-burning city, the sound of battle continued to thunder, though it seemed to be dying away, falling into a final spasm of slaughter.

  The pain had abated; he wondered for a moment if that meant that he would survive the day after all, or was it the final ringing down of the curtain and that soon he would slip away.

  At the moment it really didn’t seem to matter. He felt a sudden lightness, a gentle floating, a sense of peace. Back home, back in Suzdal, for that now was home, Tamira would most likely be out with his young Andrew, the boy leading his mother on their daily walk through the meadows to the east and south of town. The thought of it made him smile. In the last year he had shared not more than half a dozen days with them, but each moment had been a blessed treasure, each night a reawakened dream.