ONE


ARGO


Argo Weaver stood in the doorway of the bedroom and pointed the pistol at his stepfather. The two-shot horse pistol, with its long twin barrels and two hammers, was heavy, but his hand was steady and his aim did not falter. Argo Weaver's stepfather snored softly. To say that his mother slept next to the man was an exaggeration. She slept in the same bed, as she had done since Argo's father had been confirmed killed, but she was turned away from the man, as far from him as was physically possible to be and still remain under the same covers. When Argo fired, she would wake screaming. She would be terrified. She might even be spattered by her loveless husband's blood. The effect on his mother, as Argo could picture all too clearly, would be devastating. He had imagined the scene he was now acting out a hundred times since the man called Herman Kretch had come to their house. He would cock both of the pistol's hammers. He would slowly squeeze the first of the triggers, and, in the flash and report, payback would be exacted for all the cruelties large and small that Kretch had inflicted on Argo, his mother, and his sisters. Over and above the personal, to murder Kretch while he slept would also serve as a just punishment for the crime of being a collaborator.
With his left hand, Argo eased back the first of the hammers. The double click-click was loud in the night, and the tone of his stepfather's breathing changed for a moment. He shifted position slightly, but did not wake. Argo waited for a few moments, just to make sure, and then slowly cocked the second hammer. The pistol had been made by George and James Bolton of Jamestown. That information was engraved on the left-hand barrel, and it was dated according to the old Mother Goddess calendar, the use of which had been forbidden since the Mosul occupation and the coming of the men from the Ministry of Virtue. According to his stepfather, it was a type of small-bore, double-barreled pistol known as a "cuckold's special." Although, as far as Argo knew, Kretch had never used the gun since he came to their house, he liked ostentatiously to clean it, sipping 'shine and acting the big man. As he ran a strip of oiled rag down one of the barrels and tightened the dual spring mechanisms with a small screwdriver, he had explained to Argo why the weapon had been given such a name. "You shoot her, and then you shoot him, and then, if you feel like it, you reload and shoot yourself." But Herman Kretch was not the kind to shoot himself. He held his miserable life in far too high regard.
With the pistol cocked, Argo again took aim, but his finger did not immediately go to a trigger. This was the point beyond which his imagination was increasingly less clear. After the shot, he knew he would run, but what of his mother and two sisters? Herman Kretch was their sole support. The large, raw-boned man with the pot belly, red face, and muttonchop side-whiskers might be a bully, a braggart, and an occasional drunkard, but, for the three women Argo would have to leave behind, life would become close to impossible without him. The Mosul, the Ministry men, and the collaborators who ran things in the occupied territories showed no kindness to the widows and orphans of their defeated enemies and had scant tolerance for those who did. Herman Kretch might be a swine as far as Argo was concerned, but he was not a liar. He had made it very clear when he had proposed marriage to Argo's mother that it was not to be a union of love or even affection. He wanted a strong woman to cook and clean for him, to fetch and carry, and to warm his bed. That she was good-looking only made it an added plus, and that she came to him with three children presented no real problem. Argo, Mathilde, and Gwennie were of an age to be useful, and it made them a source of unpaid labor in these dark times when the conquered worked from morning to night and, even so, barely survived. They were three pairs of extra hands to be exploited in the fields, to help with the livestock, and clean up in the workshop where Herman Kretch repaired boots, shoes, and other leather goods for the Army of Occupation. Argo's stepfather not only kissed the boots of the Mosul, but he mended and shined them, too, along with their saddles and harnesses. He was equally pragmatic and open about his collaboration. "Hassan IX and his Mosul will take it all in the end. Carolina has gone, and the Virginia Freestate, too. Albany can't hold for long on its own. We may not like it, but Hassan is the future, and we better buckle down and get used to it."
Without even Kretch to protect them, his mother and sisters could all too easily become three more refugees in the woods and wild places, wandering aimlessly without papers until they starved or worse. Although the worst of the atrocities that had occurred in the direct wake of defeat had been mitigated, the woods were still full of deserters, fugitives, the displaced, and the migrant crazy, as well as the regular Mosul patrols (who fired first and rarely bothered to ask questions), the Indians, who moved like ghosts, and the ghosts themselves. Under Mosul rule, women on their own were vulnerable from every side. Without even the meager rights accorded to the males among subject peoples in the Empire of Hassan IX, carpetbaggers and scallywags could seize their homes and property. The young and comely might simply disappear to serve as an officer's concubine or in the bordellos, cribs, and joyhouses of Savannah and Newport. The old would find themselves driven out to die in the rain. Rape was still a popular pastime among the Mogul grunts, the Mamaluke troopers, and Teuton uhlans, although they were now restrained by their captains from the pillage and razing of all but the occasional village or small town. Worst of all, any woman could be fingered as a witch on the most flimsy pretext and hanged if they were lucky, or put to torture and then burned alive if they were not.
The entire chain of events that had led to Argo Weaver standing over his stepfather with a loaded gun and a murderous if wavering resolve had started when, earlier that day, the Ministry men and priests of the Zhaithan had burned Gaila Ford for heresy. The execution by fire of Gaila Ford was by no means the first witch-burning in the village of Thakenham. Even with a population of less than three hundred, the place had still apparently harbored a major complement of women who were deemed by the Zhaithan Ministry of Virtue to constitute a threat and abomination to the Twin Deities, Ignir and Aksura. The burning of Gaila Ford, however, had been invested with a certain significance. The villagers had talked of nothing else for the two weeks since she had been taken, denounced with full ritual by the Masked Informer, and arrested by the Ministry men backed by a squad of Mosul soldiers from the garrison at Bridgehampton. The collaborators expressed a general opinion that it was a miracle she had survived for so long. Those, like Argo, who had as little to do with the Mosul as they could, held their silence and contained their anger. Argo had known Gaila Ford well. How could he not? Her husband, Henry, and Argo's father, Jackvance Weaver, had gone to the war together. They had enlisted in the same company of the 9th Virginia Freestate Volunteers and had by all accounts died together in the final doomed attempt to hold the Mosul horde at Richmond. Ford had been what was called a handsome woman. She was too mature to be taken as brothel fodder to Savannah, but even Argo, at just fourteen, was well aware that she turned the heads of many men and set them to wondering what she did in her cottage of an evening, all alone, widowed and childless but still obviously in her prime. That alone might have been enough to get her denounced, but worse still, she made it clear to all, in deed if not in word, that she still considered herself a freewoman of the Americas and not a second-class subject of the Mosul Empire.
A number of men had proposed marriage to her just as Herman Kretch had made his overtures to Argo's mother. Without children to consider, she had dismissed these offers out of hand. Apparently she wanted nothing to do with the cowards, gimps, and snivelers who, for their own reasons, had avoided the call to serve. Argo suspected that she might have wed either Jed Pett or Struther Broad, the only two men to return to the village alive, but seemingly neither of the shattered survivors had asked her to take them. Gaila Ford had been well liked by most. She rarely complained, seemed capable of remaining cheerful in impossible situations, and had proved a tower of strength during the winter sickness a year and some earlier. Any one of these qualities would have brought her to the attention of the Ministry of Virtue, and the entire list was more than enough to bring her finally to the flame. Argo loathed to agree with the collaborators, but it really was a miracle she had remained alive and free, at least in her own mind, for as long as she had.
The wood of her pyre had been piled at the north end of the village square, in front of where the church of the Mother Goddess had once stood, and where the Mosul now had their fire tower. The priests of Zhaithan were great believers in lessons taught by example, and the entire village would be assembled in the square, by force if necessary, to witness the prolonged and agonizing death. The only exceptions would be the children and teenagers under fifteen. This was not because the priests or the Ministry men sought to preserve any childhood innocence. They had simply learned by experience in their two centuries of conquest that children were too unpredictable and could be a potential for disruption of the solemnity of the ritual putting-to-death. The younger teenagers were excluded for similar if slightly different reasons. The priests also knew that the boys and girls already passing through the confused rage of puberty were one of the deepest repositories of resentment against the occupation, and if any futile protest was to occur, it would be the young who triggered it. Too full of life fully to grasp the true and absolute reality of death, they were less easily deterred by the muskets and bayonets of the soldiers.
Not that the young of the village could really be prevented from watching the burning of Gaila Ford. It was just that they would not be standing with the adults. Instead, they would be peering through gaps in the shuttered upper-floor windows of the houses around the square. They would be squatting precariously on the thatch or tile of the higher roofs or wedged between trunk and bough of the taller trees. Argo was among the latter. He had hidden himself, along with Will Steed and Jason Halfacre, in the big oak at the other end of the village street from where the flame would be lit. The three of them were in place well before the villagers began to gather and the collaborators checked the parish rolls and the lists of residents to see that none were deliberately staying away. The checking was hardly needed, however, since the morbid attraction of the brutal spectacle was more than enough to overcome any principled and dangerous boycott of the execution. Even those whom Gaila Ford had nursed through the two great bouts of winter sickness would stare transfixed as she died.
Argo's stepfather had specifically forbidden him to go anywhere near the square or the burning. "The rules are the rules, boy, and, while I personally think it might be an education to you to see the Ford woman get what's coming to her, the rules come first." Accordingly, Argo had been dispatched with a shovel and a rake to clear the dead leaves that were clogging the ditch at the north end of the top field. In a charade of obedience, Argo had headed for the top field with the designated implements, but only remained by the neglected ditch long enough to hide the tools in the long grass before heading for the village to where he had arranged to meet Will and Jason. He took the long way round so he would not accidentally meet his father along the shorter route. He considered going to watch the burning as an act of open rebellion, but he was still doing all he could not to be caught. Under normal circumstances, Herman Kretch would not have given a damn whether Argo watched the execution or not, but ever since Gaila Ford had been denounced, his behavior had been tense and strange. He had seemed more angry and impatient than usual, and Argo had wondered about this. Herman Kretch was not one to be unduly upset by anything like a witch-burning that did not affect him directly, and Argo could only suppose it was nothing more than coincidence. Then, just two days earlier, he had overheard two women gossiping as they waited on the interminable line for their weekly flour ration. A story was apparently circulating that his stepfather had been the Masked Informer who had denounced Gaila Ford, and he had done it because she had rebuffed his advances when he had gone to Ford's cottage one 'shine-drunk night, looking for an alternative bed partner to Argo's mother. Argo hated his stepfather but still found this hard to believe. And how could these women know? The identity of the Masked Informer, with hidden face and in the shapeless robe that dragged along the ground and disguised physical build and even gender, was supposed to be known only to the priests. Argo tried to listen longer, but the women had seen him and lowered their voices.
The tree that the three boys had selected was a tall and venerable oak on which village lovers had, in happier times, made it a practice to carve their linked initials. It was at the opposite end of the square from where the execution would take place, and it afforded them a better view than that of many of the adults on the ground. Argo, Will, and Jason had arranged to be in position early, well before the majority of the villagers had arrived, so they would not be spotted clambering into the high branches. They had lain and stared through the late summer foliage as the square rapidly filled with drab and ragged people who seemed to carry their air of defeat around with them like a collective shroud. As the crowd entered the square, the men went to the right and the women to the left. He saw his mother and stepfather dividing and going their separate ways. The onlookers were strictly divided by sex, and even couples had to separate until the burning was over. This segregation was enforced at all Zhaithan gatherings and assemblies. Argo had never understood why this had to happen, and no one older had ever been able to give him a reason, but many things ordered by the Mosul conquerors had no discernable reason except maybe to degrade and humiliate those under their rule. The women in the square far outnumbered the men, but that was the way of it in the wake of the terrible slaughter that had come with the Mosul invaders. The Mosul also tended to take their time where subject peoples were concerned, and, by Argo's estimate, the crowd had been kept standing in silence for at least a half hour before Gaila Ford was finally brought out from the two-storey building on the northwest corner of the square that, in the old days, had been the constable's station and the village lock-up but was now draped with the black flags and the red flame insignia of Hassan IX and served the local office of the Ministry of Virtue.
Many who had been held by the Ministry men for a full two weeks had to be carried to their deaths, but Gaila Ford emerged walking, wearing the paper shift and headdress of the condemned heretic. She had undoubtedly been repeatedly tortured during her imprisonment, but, although plainly weak and unsteady, she seemed determined to go out standing tall. A red-robed priest kept pace on either side of her, and two lines of soldiers flanked her as she was led to where the wood was stacked around the base of the iron A-frame and the metal ramp that led up to it.
* * *
Abomination!
Abomination!
Abomination!
Abomination!
Abomination!
Abomination!
* * *
For a moment she faltered. One of the priests gripped her arm to steady her, but she shook free. With what had to be the very last of her strength, Gaila Ford was plainly demonstrating to them all, including her anonymous betrayer, that she had not been broken, even by the Ministry torturers. Argo could feel tears welling up in his eyes, but he quickly wiped them away before either Jason or Will noticed. She mounted the ramp that led to the hideous scaffold of blackened metal, and then stood in front of the instrument of her destruction, motionless, with her back to the chanting crowd. The two priests followed Gaila Ford up the ramp. One quickly turned her around while the other beckoned to a pair of already-designated Mosul soldiers to come and secure the chains at her wrists, waist, and ankles that would hold her in place for the consuming fire. Her arms were stretched above her head and her legs pulled apart so her body conformed to the up-pointing triangle of the scaffold. Gaila Ford neither resisted nor made any further protest. She had gone to her end with all the dignity that she could summon, and now she seemed resigned. Once her chains were locked, a third soldier moved forward with a red-painted can of kerosene. He thoroughly doused the wood at Gaila's feet and then splashed the last of the flammable liquid down the front of her body. As it soaked into the heretic's shift, the paper became close to transparent. She was plainly naked beneath the ritual garment, and the crowd fell silent at the sight until the Ministry man signaled curtly for the second phase of the death chant as the priests and soldiers moved back from the pyre and left Gaila Ford alone with her fate.
* * *
Burn the witch!
Burn the witch!
* * *
The chant was hesitant at first, but, under the grim gaze of the priests and soldiers, it grew in baleful intensity, as though the villagers were being forced to beg for their own oppression.
* * *
Burn the witch!
Burn the witch!
Burn the witch!
Burn the witch!
Burn the witch!
* * *
The first fire was taken directly from the Zhaithan sacred flame. While a prayer was offered up to Ignir and Aksura, a bundle of oil-soaked rags on the end of a Mosul pike was thrust into the hemispherical bowl mounted on the tall, tapering pylon. When the rags were thoroughly ignited, the pike was carried to the pyre and applied to the wood. Rumor had it that, now and again, a merciful executioner would rapidly strangle the victim before they burned. Either that was a lie, or no mercy had been shown in Gaila's case. The kerosene caught with an explosive sigh and a first eager fireball, and then, as it took a fuller hold, Argo had his last glimpse of Gaila contorting against the chains that held her, before her helpless figure was hidden by the conflagration. The flames burned orange, and the black smoke rose to stain the already-grey sky. A capricious wind suddenly swirled a loose smoke vortex down and directly into the square, filling the village with the stench of kerosene and burned flesh. The assembled villagers coughed, and some actually gagged, but the Ministry men refused to dismiss them. At that moment, Argo Weaver knew he could no longer stay in this place. He knew he had to run, he had to go north, he had to try and make it across the now-stalled-and-static battle lines where Car-lyle of Albany was still managing to hold back the Mosul advance. Argo was as aware as any fourteen-year-old could be aware that the odds were probably against him making it. More likely he would be picked up by a patrol or lose himself in the wilderness, but at fourteen he didn't play the odds, and even if he did, what did he really have to lose? With a teenager's optimism he pictured himself finding one of the secret ways through the Mosul lines which, according to rumor and hearsay, would bring him to the free territory of the Kingdom of Albany. He saw himself, brave and dashing in the uniform of the Albany Royal Guard, in the vanguard of the long-awaited advance that would put Hassan IX to total rout and push him and his unholy legions back into the Northern Ocean, or perhaps, somewhere in the woods or wilderness, he would make contact with the partisans, the guerrillas of the resistance, the ones whom the Mosul called bandits. On a sudden impulse, he began swinging down out of the branches of the old oak. He did not care if he was seen; he just wanted to be away from the smoke and the stench, the cringing villagers. Will called after him in surprise. "Hey, Argo, where you going?"
Argo looked up and realized that he was never going to see Will Steed again. "I'm going north, Will. I'm going north."
Will wanted to know what he meant, but Argo was already on the ground and slipping away between two buildings. Once clear of the village, he hurried, heading for home, but when the house and barn were in sight, he remembered that his stepfather would not be back from the village, and Argo did not want to be there when Herman Kretch returned from the burning. If he had not been drinking already, he would undoubtedly start. Argo changed direction and began walking more slowly in the direction of what the boys called Hunchback Hill. The high ground provided him with a view of both the village and his home, and as he squatted down on the short grass, settling himself to wait, an unbidden but very clear and absolute feeling came over him. He was looking at the two places, really the only two places that he had ever known, aside from the journeys in the old days to market at Bridgehampton, and he was looking at them for the last time in this prelude to his departure.
The Ministry men must have finally dismissed the villagers, because Argo saw a small swarm of dark figures moving away from the cluster of houses and other buildings that constituted the center of Thakenham. With the strange insight that seemed to have overtaken him, Argo realized that he truly hated the people among whom he had been born and raised. He hated their submission and their willingness to surrender, and the way they could watch, so ragged, drab, and unmoving, a horror like the burning of Gaila Ford without doing or saying anything except coughing and grimacing when the smoke billowed too thick or the stench of death became too gaggingly unbearable. With the natural intolerance of youth, he could feel nothing but contempt for the way that the villagers would endure anything, even slavery in all but the name, in order to survive, and how they lacked the courage to stand up to their oppressors and die with some degree of dignity and while shreds of honor still remained.
The Mosul had come soon after Argo's eleventh birthday. The invasion force had landed near Savannah on July 5th '96 by the old and now-forbidden Mother Goddess calendar, and, on that hot summer day, the world had changed forever. The Mosul had immediately established multiple beachheads and then fanned out to cut through the courageous but disorganized forces of the Southland Alliance in a matter of days. Within a month, Atlanta had fallen, and, with Florida cut off and the infamous treaty concluded with George Jebb and his gang of traitors in St. Petersburg, Hassan
IX had turned his attention and his armed might to the north, in the direction of the rich lands between the Appalachians and the ocean. The Southland Alliance, although doomed, had bought time for the Republic of the Carolinas and the Virginia Freestate to marshal their troops and to mount a more concerted defense. For seven bloody months, battle after battle had raged, and at the height of the terrible Winter Campaign of '97 it had actually seemed as though the Mosul would be pushed back, but an armada of troopships, under steam and sail, continued to bring what appeared to be limitless divisions of battle-hardened men and inexhaustible supplies of munitions. The ships of the Flame Banner shuttled back and forth across the Northern Ocean from Cadiz and Lisbon and other ports in conquered Hispania, protected from the privateers of the Norse Union, the small but effective Royal Albany Navy, and the pirates up from the Caribbean by formidable escorts of ironclads. It appeared that all of Southern Europe, if not North Africa and Asia Minor, was being stripped of men and machines to feed Hassan IX's megalomaniac conquest of the Americas.
The outcome was probably inevitable. Volunteer farmers, miners, and merchants, a few mountain men, hunters, and traders, and their mostly amateur and inexperienced officers, were no match for Hassan's highly disciplined and religiously motivated blitzkrieg. The men of Virginia might be brave and strong, they might be crack shots, and, one on one, as they had so often and proudly boasted in the early days of the conflict, worth any ten Mosul, but they had gone to war with a fatally imprecise idea of what manner of foe they faced. Two hundred years of carnage might have come and gone since the Mosul, originally tribal nomads from an area to the east of the Black Sea, had advanced into Europe with fire and sword and formed their unassailable alliance with the Teutons of Germany and the Mamaluke warlords in North Africa to subjugate the land of the Franks, the city states of Italia, and all of the Hispanic Peninsula. Somehow the people of the Americas had felt immune to the danger. They had become too safe in their supposed isolation and too confident of the broad protection of the ocean. Many of the American settlers' parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents might have crossed the seas as a direct result of the Mosul terror, but even that had not equipped them to face down the most murderous and implacable war machine the world had ever had the misfortune to see, or to defeat the Mosul's iron discipline, fanatic religious motivation, and honed battle tactics. Through the spring of '98, the tide of conflict had turned against the defenders, until, fighting little more than desperate rearguard actions, and constantly regrouping as their numbers were decimated, they had fallen back on Richmond for the last battle of a war that seemed to have taken on the towering melancholy of a grand and tragic opera. On May 10th, all hope for Virginia and the Carolinas had gone with the wind as the last stand had collapsed to relentless shot and shell followed by butchery and fire.
In Thakenham, the war had seemed to happen in a number of phases. At first, life had seemed strangely routine and eerily close to normal. The majority of the men might have gone off to the September start of the war, boasting that they would be home well before Solsticetide, but the cows still had to be milked, the eggs collected, the hogs slopped, the bread baked, and the beer brewed. Dogs still barked, babies still cried, roofs leaked when it rained, and eleven-year-old boys roamed the woods and fields playing soldier and wishing they were men already, so they could go off gloriously campaigning like their fathers. In the beginning all had been optimism. The headlines of the broadsheets and the wireless broadcasts had always trumpeted imminent victory and continued to promote the happy certainty that the Mosul would be driven into the sea by the end of the year, but some of the volunteers' letters home were less sure. They had hinted that the fighting was far more grim and a lot less decisive than the official reports wanted it to be. By October, the first casualty lists had been posted on the public notice board in the village square, but, since none of those listed were Thakenham men, no one paid them too much mind. As the days grew shorter, and the lists of the dead and missing grew longer, however, the atmosphere changed. The official reports now stressed the heroic rather than the victorious, and those, like Argo's mother, who were capable of reading between the lines of the propaganda, knew that which was already bad was rapidly turning worse.
Even blind optimism had to cease when the casualty lists were no longer posted, the broadsheets were no longer distributed beyond the confines of Richmond and Lynchburg, and the wireless played music more than the repetitively grim war news. Although the fighting never passed through their village, the residents of Thakenham had heard the sound of the guns in the distance, at first from the south, but then moving up and past them, and finally booming from the north. Exhausted soldiers, in small groups, squads, and companies, had trudged up the Bridgehampton Road on their way to whatever place had been selected for their next attempt to contain the invaders. Argo had stood beside his mother with a hand on her shoulder as the ragged lines of retreating men had tramped through the village. He had looked for his father among the walking wounded, but his father had never come. At the start of the retreat, the columns were still organized by regiment. Argo could tell that by their uniforms and collar tabs, but, as the enemy front rolled deeper and deeper into Virginia, and company after company, and battalion after battalion, were wiped out by the iron Teuton land-crawlers, the savage Mamaluke cavalry, the jogging columns of implacable Mosul foot soldiers, and the Dark Things that no one dared name, the squads became cobbled together from all the survivors who could be rounded up and sent back to the lines. Now old men and boys only a couple of years older than Argo were being sent to face the foreign invaders.
One late afternoon, a group of about forty men had passed through town, and Argo had recognized that some were wearing the patches of the 9th Virginia. He ran up and grabbed one of them by the torn sleeve of his tunic. "Hey Mister, do you know Jackvance Weaver?"
The soldier had looked at him with a blank, ghost-haunted stare. "I don't know no one no more, kid."
"He was in the 9th Virginia."
The soldier quickened his pace, wanting to get away from Argo and his questions. "I told you, kid. I don't know no one."
"He's my father."
The man halted and looked down at Argo. He sighed and shook his head. "Kid, we've got good men scattered all the way from here to hell, and most of them are either dead or on their way to Richmond, which is the next best thing. My best advice to you is to stop hoping. It's maybe the dead who should be grateful."
Around the time of this encounter, the people of Virginia had started looking for a miracle. To the north was the Kingdom of Albany, with supposedly large and quite formidable forces massed on the banks of the Potomac River. In the snug and smokey inns, in parish meeting rooms, and around the home fires the same question was asked over and over. "Why doesn't Albany come?" It was asked the loudest by the cowards and slackers, the ones like Herman Kretch, who had remained safe at home while others like Jackvance Weaver did the fighting and the dying. "Why doesn't Albany come?" What Herman Kretch did not know, or anyone else in Thakenham, and only a very few in all of the lands that were under threat or had already fallen, was that Albany was not going to come. General James Dean, known simply as the Old Man, who, after a long and distinguished career exploring and mapping the interior, had taken command of the Army of Richmond, had met in secret with King Carlyle II and his staff and had come to a logical if desperate decision. Even with a fresh army from Albany added to Dean's battle-weary troops, Richmond could not stand. "Why doesn't Albany come?" Because at best they might turn a futile final battle into a few more weeks of equally futile final siege. In the long run, such a move could only increase the numbers of the dead. Richmond could not be rescued, and Carlyle would save his strength for an attempt to stop Hassan at the Potomac.
The night that Richmond fell, church bells all through Virginia had rung for an hour, in an eerie peal, and then stopped. It was like a signal. No more. All motion ceased for about five days, as though the world was holding its breath. In that last terrible month, the last time they were allowed to call it May, even spring itself seemed to pause and wait while a steady and unrelenting late-winter rain had fallen. And then the first Mamaluke column had ridden into the village. Thakenham had been lucky. The previous night they had sacked and burned Coster's Mill, indulging to the full in all the rape and murder for which they had become notorious. Swarthy and stone-faced, the hard horsemen with their spiked helmets and eagle-beak noses were seemingly sated and too hungover to engage in yet another orgy, and they had simply posted the orders of occupation and moved on. A few days later the priests had come, along with their retinue of Mosul soldiers and the men from the Zhaithan Ministry of Virtue, to begin setting up the frightening network of spies and informers that maintained the political and philosophical Mosul armlock on their subject peoples.
Suddenly more columns of men were on the move, details of chained prisoners, guarded by detachments of armed and whip-wielding troops, going in both directions, some headed north to perform slave labor under the direction of Teuton engineers digging trenches and bunkers on the Mosul side of the Potomac, while others were driven south to Savannah to work on the construction of the citadel that would be Hassan IX's capital in the new world. And it was from one of these starved and wretched prisoners that the first word had come that both Jackvance Weaver and Hank Ford had been blown to pieces by Mosul cannon as they had taken part in the final stand before the gates of Richmond. Then and only then had his mother cried, and only in private, away from the spying eyes of the other villagers.
As Argo sat on Hunchback Hill, reflecting on all that had gone before, a half-formed vision came to him, unbidden, for no reason he could fathom. The face of a girl appeared to his inner sight, a girl with red hair and the kind of skin that freckled when it was too long in the sun. Argo did not know the girl, but she was not exactly a stranger. She had the familiarity of a dream dreamed more than once, or some glimpse of encounters and adventures to come. Argo set no store by stuff like prescience and prophecy, but he simply recognized, with the most certain and matter-of-fact intuition, that he would see the red-haired girl again, either in dream or reality. Kretch and his mother had now been home for some time, and smoke was rising from the chimney of the house, but Argo continued to sit, clasping his knees and thinking. He decided it would be better to wait until well after dark before he went back inside. If his stepfather was drinking 'shine, the possibility existed that he would have drunk himself unconscious if Argo delayed his return. Thus Argo continued to sit until the moon rose, and only then did he slowly descend the hill. Unfortunately, he had failed to delay long enough. The moment his weight caused the porch to creak, his stepfather was snarling in the doorway. "Defy me, would you, you little bastard? Get in here."
The razor strop lay in full view on the kitchen table, right beside the lamp. The message was plain. Somehow Herman Kretch had found out that Argo had been to the execution instead of cleaning out the ditch by the top field, and now a beating was inevitable. The razor strop was his stepfather's favorite instrument of discipline, and when he swung it at Argo's bared buttocks it hurt like hell and left welts like the mark of a brand. Argo inhaled deeply and took comfort in the fact that it would be the last thrashing that Kretch ever inflicted on him. Without a word, he turned on his heel and started back for the door, but his stepfather immediately wanted to know what he was doing. "Where are you going"
Argo looked back, slack-faced and sullen, failing to understand. Surely it was obvious? "To the root cellar, sir."
Usually his stepfather conducted this kind of punishment down in the root cellar in comparative privacy, but it appeared that tonight he had a greater humiliation in mind. Maybe unpleasantly inflamed by the execution and the 'shine he had put away in the aftermath, he had added cruelty on his mind. "Right here, boy. You'll take your medicine right here."
Argo could hardly believe what he was hearing. The beating was going to be carried out right there in the family kitchen, in front of the big stone hearth and in full view of his mother and sisters? "No!"
"What did you say, boy?"
Argo saw the looks of horror on the faces of the women and shook his head. "Not here."
"Right here."
Argo's mother got to her feet. "I'm taking the girls outside."
Kretch glared at her. "The hell you are. You sit right back down there, or it'll go worse for the boy."
His mother summoned a nervous defiance. "You can make me sit here, but the girls don't need to watch this."
"They'll learn what to expect when they're bigger and maybe decide they can defy me."
Argo's mother gestured to Mathilde and Gwennie. "Outside, girls."
"You want me to have his papers revoked? You want them to see their precious brother marched off in chains to a labor camp?" Kretch's threat was no idle one. Argo only remained in the comparative safety of Thakenham because Kretch had used his collaborator's clout with the Ministry of Virtue to ensure that Argo was not sent off to forced labor in Savannah or set to digging trenches beside the Potomac. Argo's mother sat back down again with a face like stone and gathered the girls to her. Content with his victory, Kretch turned his attention to Argo. "Shuck those britches, boy, and grab your ankles."
Argo did as he was told, trying to think of nothing, trying to forget that his mother and sisters were right there to witness his exposed humiliation. He stared straight into the fire as Kretch slapped the strop into his palm as though testing it, even though, after all the other times he had used it, no testing was needed. Argo was determined to give the man as little satisfaction as possible, even if it prolonged the punishment, but he could not help but gasp as the first blow seared his taut skin. As blow followed blow, to Argo's blurred and tear-distorted vision, the flames of the log fire leapt with each searing cut of the leather and each wide-burning strip. The flames danced before him just as they had danced around the chained form of Gaila Ford before they had consumed her. After what seemed like an eternity, his stepfather finally tossed the strop onto the table. "Pull up your pants, boy. That's your medicine for tonight. Remember it the next time you get an urge to ignore what I tell you."
The fabric was rough on his throbbing flesh, but Argo again tried to hide the hurt. His mother was on her feet, bustling the girls out of the room. As Argo buckled his belt, Kretch jerked a dismissive thumb. "Now thank me and get out of here."
Argo stared at the floor, unable to look his stepfather in the face, but he stubbornly shook his head. "No."
Kretch actually laughed and poured himself a drink. "Well, you've got some stones and no mistake. You want the same all over again?"
"No, sir."
"So thank me and get to your bed."
"I knew Gaila Ford."
"We all knew Gaila Ford, boy. We knew her, and now she's scattered ashes, and good riddance as far as I'm concerned. She wasn't the first, and she won't be the last. Now thank me for your beating or get those breeks down for a double dose. It's your choice."
Argo wished he had the strength to endure a second thrashing just to show the bastard he couldn't be intimidated. But he knew a second time around, Kretch would whip him bloody. With the taste of gall in his mouth, he spoke to the wood of the floor in a monotone. "Thank you, sir. Thank you for my beating."
As he fled from the room, Kretch crowed after him. "You can't win, boy. You know that, don't you? You can't win."
Argo lay for the longest time in his narrow bed, blanket thrown back despite an early autumn chill, his flesh throbbing but a cold resolve hardening to the point that it couldn't be denied. This was the night that he would not only run from Thakenham, but kill Herman Kretch in his bed while he slept. He only slipped from his bed when the house was silent, and Argo was certain the rest of the family slumbered. He took the big canvas satchel that he had used for his schoolbooks before the Mosul had come and closed the school, and moved silently through the house, gathering what he thought he needed to survive in the wild: spare shirts and socks, beef jerky and hard crackers, a slab of cheese, the old water bottle that had belonged to his father, a lighter and spare flints. Finally he had taken the pistol and all of Kretch's ammunition from the hiding place in back of the linen press. Leaving his boots and bundle by the door, and moving silently in his stockinged feet, he had slowly climbed the stairs and gone to the bedroom where Kretch and his mother slept.
From the doorway he pointed the pistol. He cocked both hammers, but before pulling either trigger he had paused. In theory it had all seemed so easy. A hundred times, Argo had pictured himself standing over his stepfather with the twin barrels pointed true and unwavering as he slowly squeezed the trigger. Except he simply could not pull even the first of the twin triggers. So many factors crowded in: the womenfolk alone, the hue and cry that would follow him as a murderer rather than just a boy runaway, the very fact that perhaps he was not ready to take the life of another human being. He knew he was not, in the end, going to shoot Herman Ketch. He might feel like a traitor to his own anger, but he knew he could run but not yet kill. He lowered the pistol and carefully released one hammer and then the second. He hurried down the stairs, stepped into his boots, shrugged into his jacket, hooked the satchel over his shoulder. His last move was to stick the pistol in his belt. He might not be able to kill Kretch, but he would steal his gun, the gun that meant so much to the drunken bastard. Argo Weaver opened the door and stepped out into the night. A dog barked in the distance.

CORDELIA

Lady Cordelia Blakeney had paid a seamstress a full forty shillings for the alterations to her new uniform. If judged according to the most stringent interpretation of the dress regulations of the Royal Women's Auxiliary, it fitted a little too snugly to the most crucial parts of her body, but RWA officers like Cordelia, assigned to permanent posts in the capital, either at the War Office or the Headquarters of the General Staff, were permitted some considerable laxity in matters like dress regulations and overnight passes. The Kingdom of Albany might be at war, but that did not mean the social waltz and romantic entanglements in and around Albany Castle and the court of Carlyle II had been completely discontinued. Indeed, they had actually taken on an increased sense of immediate urgency. In wartime, the sense of living for and in the moment was a kind of heightened reality that came with the knowledge that, without reason or warning, death might snatch the moment away and leave nothing but grief on one side of the affair and oblivion on the other. The young men came and went with dizzying if delicious rapidity, moving on a five-stage circuit between the royal castle at Albany, to the field headquarters at Frederick, the great port of Manhattan, the equally crucial base at Baltimore, and the front itself. Only a week earlier she had been consoling her cousin Daphne, who was devastated to the point of hysteria after her current lover, a captain in the Intelligence Corps, had been lost on a mission across the Potomac. This week, Daphne was sufficiently recovered to be pursuing a major in one of the newly formed tank regiments.
Cordelia checked herself in the full-length mirror in the ladies room on the second floor of the War Office building. The delegation from the Norse Union had arrived, and First Lieutenant the Lady Cordelia Blakeney wanted to look her best. Although field green was not the most flattering of colors, it was the best that could be done in wartime, and it did not do a total disservice to her red hair and pale skin. Unfortunately, her stint as driver for Colonel Blackwood had put her a little too much in the late-summer sun, and, even now that her duties put her back inside the castle and the War Office, a dusting of freckles still covered her nose. She knew some men found freckles cute, but she would have preferred her complexion to be a flawless porcelain. That, however, was not possible. The rules of the RWA might be fairly lax, but the use of excess makeup was frowned upon among junior officers, no matter how highborn. All in all, though, Cordelia was fairly pleased with herself. Her buttons and insignia gleamed, her epaulets hung just right, her tunic nipped in her waist to perfection, and the tighter-than-regulation pencil skirt left only a minimum to the imagination of any Norse naval commander or Air Corps major. She twisted around for a glimpse of the backs of her legs. Silk stockings were scarce, and she wanted to be assured that the seams of the ones she had were straight. She hoped that at least one of the Norse officers had enough unscrupulous practicality to bring a supply with him, along with the good Scotch whiskey they usually handed out as gifts. The Norse were rapidly emerging as the possible saviors of Albany, perhaps of all the Americas, in much more than just Scotch and silk stockings. Although in Europe they maintained an uneasy peace with the Mosul Empire, with the English Channel as the dividing line between their conflicting spheres of influence, the Norse were moving closer and closer to an open alliance with Albany to halt Hassan IX's invasion of the New World.
The Norse were far fewer in number than the Mosul, and controlled a great deal less territory, but they had technology and heavy industry, and that gave them an increasing edge. The Mosul, strangled by the constraining coils of their disgusting religion, failed to progress. The Zhaithan priests were hard-pressed to tell a scientist from a heretic, and that completely stifled all research and innovation. The foundries of Damascus and the Ruhr turned out cannon and musket twenty-four hours a day, but they produced only crude quantity, and nothing to compare with the sophistication of the repeating rifles being developed in Birmingham and Stockholm or the keels of the submarines being laid in the shipyards along the Clyde. The courtship between Albany and the Norse was a slow one, but progress was definitely being made. Already the prefabricated parts of Norse gasoline-powered tanks were being delivered to the port of Manhattan by cargo ship and assembled in a huge, roaring factory complex in the city of Brooklyn. Norse Air Corps instructors were training the crews of Albany's first small squadron of airships, and cadres of officers from Albany were attending advanced command schools in London and Stockholm, learning to apply the use of these new weapons on the battlefield and in naval tactics on the high seas. The wedding of Albany and the NU was inevitable. Their people came from the same stock, and shared culture and customs. Many spoke an approximation of the same language, and the two nations could only move closer together in the face of the common threat. On a personal level, Cordelia only hoped the process would be considerably faster.
She emerged from the ladies' room into a busy second-floor corridor and
ran straight into Coral Metcalfe. Cordelia and Coral had been friends since they had been little girls. The two had gone to different schools and been separated, except at holiday times, through their teen years, but now their war work caused them once again to move in the same circles. Metcalfe was a chronic gossip and something of a ladylike slut, although Cordelia, with her record of conquests, was hardly one to judge. On this particular morning, Coral seemed especially excited. "Have you seen them yet?"
Cordelia did not have to ask whom. She was well aware that Coral was talking about the newly arrived Norse delegation. Coral was very taken with everything Norse, particularly young English-speaking officers. "No, not yet. Have you?"
Coral Metcalfe nodded enthusiastically. "I managed to tag along with the reception committee, and, oh, my dear, there are a couple of real dolls among their number."
"Really?"
"Really."
Cordelia smiled. "I'll be there later when they meet with the king and Jack Kennedy."
"Lucky you, you'll get to speak to them."
Cordelia nodded. "Or die trying."
Coral looked at her watch. "Got to go, darling. I'm in trouble already."
With that, Coral Metcalfe hurried away. The girl always seemed to be late for something. She had been late all her life. She also reminded Cordelia that she, too, was supposed to be somewhere and had better not linger. The morning promised to be deary. It would be spent filling manpower reports and approving supply requisitions, but by noon she would be on her way to the castle for the start of the vital conference between the Norse Union delegates led by Vice President Ingmar Ericksen and the king and his ministers. Cordelia had wangled things so she was one of the squad of RWA girls who'd be there to fetch things, organize the distribution of papers and the spreading of maps, but, above all, to look decorative and put the Norse officers in the most pleasant of moods. The king wanted a consignment of the highly secret Norse rocket bombs, while the girls of the RWA, with the possible exception of that little prig and professional virgin Pamela Stanley, simply wanted the Norse.
Leaving nothing to chance, Cordelia signed out of her office at eleven forty-five and took the public tram the five blocks to the castle. The war had brought a considerable social leveling to the Kingdom of Albany. In the old days she would rather have walked than take the trolley, but now she grabbed one of the brass rails and swung herself onto the rattling, clanging, slow-moving conveyance as though she'd been doing it all her life. With their backs to the wall, the people of Albany faced a grim reality, and no room remained for the putting on of airs. As the trolley car rattled up Mason Street, the sky was overcast and promised rain. Cordelia had neglected to bring a raincoat, but she did not let that dampen her spirits. Even if the skies opened, some officer would undoubtedly be gallant enough to drape his trench coat over her shoulders to protect her from the weather. Nothing was more attractive than a damsel distressed by a downpour. As she rode the trolley and anticipated the afternoon and evening to come, Cordelia stared at the passing streets and reflected on how one could never mistake Albany for anything but a city at war. The high percentage of uniforms on the sidewalks, the army trucks and the drab green military steamers that jammed the streets, the recruiting posters and patriotic billboards that had replaced most commercial advertising, all told of a people in a high order of military readiness. But Albany was also a city with a certain optimism. In the dark days after the Battle of Richmond and the fall of Virginia and the Carolinas, a desperation had been in the air, a sense that it was only a matter of time before the Mosul rolled on over Albany. But then the enemy had been halted at the Potomac, and everyone had breathed again. Two years of stalemate had not been easy. Albany threw everything it had into the war effort, galvanized by the knowledge that the Mosul attack could come at any time, but with the domestic military buildup and the tacit support of the NU, a feeling had spread that, when the Mosul came, as, without doubt, they sooner or later would, Albany would be in a position to repulse their assault, and the essential spine of their invasion could be broken. If that happened, it would only be a matter of effort and resolution to push the invaders back the way they had come, down through Virginia and the Carolinas and ultimately into the sea.
Cordelia dropped off the trolley in front of the Calder Street gate of the castle and showed her pass and identity card to one of the military policemen standing guard. Before the invasion, before the war, she, her family, and the other highborn of Albany, had thought of Calder Street, with its iron portcullis guarding the dark and narrow tunnel through the high stone wall, as the tradesmen's and servants' entrance, its use somewhat beneath their aristocratic dignity. But that was definitely no longer the case. During the panic over the possibility of Mosul suicide attacks that had swept the capital in the first months after the landings in Savannah, it had been decided that the Grand Gate, flanked by its statues and carved lions, was too open and vulnerable, and it had been closed and sealed for the duration. All who had business in the castle, even visiting dignitaries and the king himself, had, from then on, come and gone through Calder Street.
Like so many of the dire imaginings in those early days, the anticipated suicide attacks had never materialized, but the custom of using the tunnel had remained, as had the squads of MPs, the hastily erected sandbagged gun emplacements, and the twin multibarreled Bergman guns that were capable of sweeping the entire length of Calder Street with a deadly and sustained hail of one-inch cannister shot. Rumor also insisted that land mines had been laid beneath the flagstones that could seal this single public access in a chain of massive explosions, and each and every time Cordelia passed though the dark space, she could not help wondering if she really was walking over a ton or more of explosives, nor recalling that the fact that she, just like everyone else, was now using the same route to enter and leave a Castle that was foremost among the last solid symbols of freedom and equality in the Americas.
Before the war, Cordelia had been little more than a child, a spoiled aristocrat brat with a title and a self-centered petulance who believed she had a right to anything and everything she might demand. Before the danger had brought its sobering dose of hard reality, she had lived on whim, caprice, and an overbearing belief in the complete and unquestionable superiority of her class. The horrors of those early days, especially the fall of Atlanta and the example of the hideous fate that had befallen that unfortunate city's ruling class, had been a lesson in survival that had mercifully been quickly learned by lady and servant alike. The Mosul atrocities had made it painfully clear to Lady Cordelia Blakeney, her friends, relatives, and all of those like her, that their airs, graces, and hereditary lineage would not save them from the shot and shell, nor from the rape, pillage, and fire that would inevitably follow. As the tales of the hanged, the burned, and the gruesomely impaled were carried north to Albany, the whole of the nation's social structure saw, with a terrible clarity, that to continue as they were would be to court as sure and certain a doom as had destroyed all the lands to the south.
With a weird irony, the arrival of the Mosul hordes had saved the Kingdom of Albany from itself. Without the external threat of foreign invasion to unite them, the country had been tottering closer and closer to the edge of revolution with the reeling determination of a self-destructive drunkard, and Carlyle I, the father of their present king, was perhaps the self-destructive drunkard in question. In the early part of his reign, he had been sufficiently dashing that his self-indulgent extravagance and narrow autocratic perspectives had been dismissed as nothing more than youthful swagger, but as he grew to full maturity, it had become clear that neither his attitudes nor his behavior were going to change. Even the aristocracy knew in their hearts that the elder Carlyle was a stupid man, only concerned with the maintenance of his own power and position, although to voice such knowledge was to court charges of treason and sedition. Queen Diana, with her good works, worthy causes, and apparent consideration and compassion for the poor and needy, had, for a long time, been able to mitigate the spreading dislike of her husband, but, after her death, after the well-liked Diana had been one of the hundreds of victims of the influenza epidemic of '84, nothing remained to prevent the inevitable headon clash between Carlyle I and his subjects. The elder Carlyle had been a strange combination of stubbornness and fear. On one hand, he believed that his place on the throne was a divine gift from the Goddess, and that none had the right to question his actions or to challenge or question his decisions, but, on the other, he lived in constant terror that his own people would force him into exile or worse, in the same way the people of Virginia had overthrown their monarchy more than half a century earlier. He was never able to see that, at best, he held power by an unwritten compromise and unspoken transaction that a king could only lead, and the people would only follow, if all were assured that the direction taken was ultimately for the good of the country as a whole.
When in '88 he had attempted to dissolve the Common Parliament after his call for and their rejection of a massive increase in the general taxation, it had seemed that the only way out would be open revolution. In that crisis, moderation had managed to prevail, but only by a near miracle, and the country had staggered on for another four years with Parliament and the king at loggerheads. In the winter of '93, the poor had marched in the streets, and only the cool resolve of then-Colonel Virgil Dunbar had prevented bloodshed on Regent Square. The traditional but rapidly waning loyalty of the army had kept Carlyle I in power, but even then it had looked like little more than a matter of time before Albany became a republic or a military dictatorship. Through '94 and '95, the situation had continued to deteriorate, and Cordelia could clearly remember how she had overheard her father admit to her mother, late one night when Cordelia should have been asleep, how he had made discreet enquiries as to what kind of reception the Blakeney family might expect in either London or Oslo should they decided to abandon Albany and relocate in the Norse Union. Then Dunbar and a number of other popular army officers had been arrested. Whether they had in fact been planning a move against the king, or whether it had been the product of the elder Carlyle's fevered imagination, was still a subject of debate. Either way, everyone was aware that the moment of truth had come, and for days the capital had seemed to wait, strangely quiet, hanging in the balance, as though to see where and when the first crack would expand into an irreparable fissure and the first move of open revolt would be made. Would the die of change and upheaval be cast by the revolutionary workers on the streets, the rank and file of the army, or some conspiracy of the Commons and the officer corps? But then Hassan IX's troops had hit the beaches, and everything had changed.
Everyone in Albany knew the outcome of what had come to be known as the Midnight Meeting, although few who had not actually been present were sure of the exact details, beyond that the historic encounter between the king, the leaders of the Commons, and the army had taken place very late at night, and the end result had been that Carlyle I had abdicated in favor of his son, Carlyle II, who was perceived by the vast majority of the nation to have inherited the popularity, wit, and intelligence of his mother and only the bold good looks of his father. Virgil Dunbar was promoted to full general and placed in command of the projected Army of the Potomac that would attempt the halt the Mosul northern advance at that already formidable natural barrier. A war cabinet headed by Prime Minister Jack Kennedy was formed that not only included members of the already elected Common Parliament, but also the radicals, seditionaries, and revolutionaries who had previously been considered enemies of the state. By the end of the extraordinary and singularly uncompromising meeting, Albany had entered a new, dangerous, but thoroughly modern world and was as ready as it would ever be to steel itself for the conflict to come. In the fearful but also headily energetic days that followed, the older Carlyle had departed for exile in a country house outside Stockholm, and men and women from the entire spectrum of political beliefs had rallied to the colors, and even the previously privileged and titled young, like Cordelia and her friends, had abandoned much of their former frivolity and put on the admittedly fashionable new uniforms. A king was still in the castle, but now all, him included, entered by the dark, arched tunnel from Calder Street that had once been the servants' access, and all were well aware that this new Carlyle would only remain in the castle as long as the Mosul were held at bay.
Cordelia emerged from the dark into the light of the Quadrangle, the wide central courtyard that was the architectural heart around which the rest of the walls, blocks, and towers of Albany Castle were constructed. The leaves of the two great and spreading oak trees in the center of the Quadrangle were rapidly turning on brown and gold on the sides of the trees most exposed to the prevailing chill winds from the north. Winter was already beginning to make itself felt in Albany, and everyone to whom Cordelia spoke seemed certain that the winter would also bring the first Mosul assault on the Potomac line. High and low, throughout the city, everyone was certain the two-year stalemate would come to an end before the first snow, and the defenses of Albany, so far to the south, would be put to the test. The Great Oaks in the Quadrangle were a definite symbol of Albany and its freedom. Their roots extended deep into the foundations, into the earth that surrounded the masonry of cellars and dungeons and the secret tunnels that were supposed to honeycomb the subterranean depths of Albany Castle, and their passive presence in all the historic events of the kingdom, both good and bad, was a given factor in the nation's folklore. Out in the countryside, other trees were showing even greater signs of the coming of winter. Leaves were already turning rust red, and all too soon a strong wind would strip branches to the lacy skeletons of autumn.
Cordelia's destination was the West Tower. The meeting with the delegates from the Norse Union was to be held in the impressive circular reception room on the second floor. Before the war, the Round Room had been the scene of balls, banquets, and, earlier still, prior to the death of Queen Diana, lavish masques. The unique domed ceiling with its radiating beams that had once rung to the sound of music and laughter now only felt the terrible tension of statesmanship and the grim debate of war councils. Cordelia's orders were to report to Colonel Grace Patton, a stocky career soldier who had been in the peacetime RWA and was rumored to be a discreet but determined lesbian under her ramrod-stiff professional exterior. Patton was the price that the young RWA officers had to pay for being close to the center of events, proximity to the king, his ministers, and, last but far from least, the stunning array of young officers who passed through the castle as part of their duties. As Cordelia started up the steps that led to the arched entrance of the West Tower, Lacy Davenport, another lieutenant with approximately the same duties, and definitely the same desires, as Cordelia, hurried to catch up with her. "Are we late?"
Cordelia half turned but did not stop. "Not quite."
"With Patton, not quite doesn't make it."
Cordelia raised both eyebrows in acknowledgment of the fact. "I'm well aware of that. She arrives early and expects you to be there before her."
"Have you seen any of these young men from the NU?"
"Not yet, but I ran into Coral Metcalfe at the War Office. She was with the welcoming committee, and she said"—Cordelia thought for a moment—"there were a couple of ‘real dolls.'"
"‘Real dolls'? She said that?"
"Don't be a snob, Davenport. There's a war on, and we're all equal now. Coral has very good taste, even though she might express it in a somewhat shopgirl vernacular."
At the top of the steps the two women had to pass through a second security check. Normally, these internal checkpoints were fairly perfunctory for anyone already in uniform, but this one was of an intensity that made it clear the Guards of the Household Regiment were taking no chances that a bomber or assassin might slip into a meeting at which not only the king, the prime minister, and most of the War Cabinet would be present, but also the party from the NU and that nation's vice president. Should a Mosul suicide squad manage to kill only half of those present, the Albany military machine would be headless and effectively crippled. Cordelia raised her arms and allowed herself to be patted down by a Household Guard corporal who at least had the good grace not to openly show how much he was enjoying this part of his homefront duty assignment. In the old days, the Household Regiment had been dressed up like toy soldiers or the cast of a bad operetta in red coats and white buckskin breeches and festooned with more gold braid than a Solstice tree. On ceremonial occasions they had added mirror-polished breastplates and plumed helmets and clanked around rattling their sabers in a way that had looked quite formidable to the little Cordelia and her schoolfriends, but now seemed patently absurd. The outbreak of real hostilities had swept away all the pomp and foolishness. Now the Household Regiment wore the same olive drab and matte black insignia as every other Albany squaddie, and the sabers had been replaced by coveted Norse repeating rifles acquired under the lease-lend deal between Albany and the NU that everyone hoped would be extended and expanded at the upcoming meeting, and perhaps even broadened into a full alliance, with the Norse openly joining with Albany and formally declaring war on the empire of Hassan IX.
The corporal took a final look at Cordelia's and Lacy's passes and checked one more time that their faces matched the sepia photographs on their identity cards before he waved them through. Now Cordelia really was late. She hadn't factored in the time consumed by the increased security, and, as she and Lacy hurriedly climbed the regal and sweeping staircase that spiraled up the outside wall of the West Tower to the Round Room, she hoped to the Goddess that Patton was not her usual extrapunctual and ultrapunctilious self. As they entered one of the antechambers that led to the Round Room, she saw to her dismay that not only had Patton arrived, but she had a dozen other young RWA officers already formed up for inspection, standing in a dressed line at full attention. The colonel turned and looked bleakly at Cordelia and Lacy. "I'm delighted that you ladies could join us. You are too generous with your time."
"I'm sorry, ma'am. Getting past the security took longer than we anticipated."
Colonel Patton gestured to the inspection line. "These officers seem to have managed the calculation."
Both Cordelia and Lacy nodded, looking suitably chastened. "Yes, Colonel."
"It is incumbent on all officers to expect the unexpected and plan accordingly."
"Yes, ma'am."
"I suggest you reflect on that during the week you spend confined to your quarters."
Cordelia cursed silently. Damn Patton. There went all hope of close and private fraternization with the Norse officers. "Yes, ma'am. Thank you, ma'am." And damn you to hell.
"Now get in line, and don't waste any more of my time."
Cordelia and Lacy quickly joined the others. Patton turned and walked down the line, looking hard at each junior officer in turn, apparently assuring herself that each met her exacting standards of dress and decorum and was suitably turned out to be present at such a vital and august assembly. Finally she halted and nodded as though marginally satisfied. "I suppose you'll do. Stand at ease."
The lieutenants relaxed from attention, but not by much. Patton flicked an invisible piece of lint from her immaculate uniform and addressed them as a group. "Now that Blakeney and Davenport have graced the party, I have a reminder for you all. I'm well aware that you have basically been assigned here as decorative adjuncts at what will still be, despite the gender enlightenment of the times, a predominately male gathering, but I'm warning you now. Don't get carried away. You also have a job to do, and I expect you to do it with speed and efficiency. If one of the delegates wants something, you get it for them, and you get it for them quickly. If you are needed to take notes or provide any other assistance, you do it. There will be points when the meeting breaks for refreshments, and you may make conversation during those breaks, but you don't speak unless spoken to." The Colonel paused to let all this sink in. "And let me warn you in no uncertain terms that any girl trying to become the center of attention will find herself winding bandages in the mud beside the Potomac so fast she won't believe it. War is neither a dinner party nor a society ball, and I don't want to see it being treated as such." She paused again, looking sternly from face to face. "Do you ladies have any questions? Is there any part of what I've said that anyone doesn't understand?"
When Patton delivered a speech of this kind, it was her habit to finish by asking for questions, but that did not mean she actually wanted any, and the rank of girls knew better than to ask unless they truly foresaw a problem. Seemingly no one did, because no one spoke. Again the colonel nodded. "Very well. Dismissed. Proceed into the Round Room and try not to make bloody fools of yourselves."
As the women turned to leave the anteroom, Patton's hard blue eyes fixed on Cordelia. "Blakeney."
Cordelia halted and stiffened to attention. More trouble? "Yes, Colonel?"
"If that uniform of yours was a little less formfitting, you might be able to move a little faster."
"Yes, Colonel."
"I would suggest you have your dressmaker let out a little."
Cordelia did her best to keep her expression formally blank, but her jaw stiffened at the contempt that Patton put into the word "dressmaker." "Yes, Colonel."
"You're coming perilously close to the limits of what is acceptable, Blakeney."
"Yes, Colonel."
"And I think you might go a little lighter on the lipstick."
"Yes, Colonel."
Furious at being confined to quarters when the NU boys were in town, and convinced that Patton had it in for her and the other aristocrats who had received their commissions through family contacts at court while the Colonel had come up the hard way and faced all the tribulations and frustrations of a lowborn woman attempting to succeed as a career soldier under the former peacetime regime, Cordelia entered the Round Room fuming. But she was quickly distracted by the changes that had been made in the huge interior space since the last time she had been there. The centerpiece was a wide, circular table. Although gleaming and immaculately finished, it was obviously of recent construction and perhaps purpose-built for the conference. A clear symbolism of the equality of all those attending the
conference must have been part of the design, and it reminded Cordelia of the childhood tales of the mythic court of Utha the Dragon King and his knights, where no one hero was elevated above another. She didn't think this nod to ancient fable was any accident. Utha the Dragon King was a piece of folklore common to both Albany and the Norse. According to legend, it had been Utha who had forged the thousand-year alliance between the Scandinavian Vikings and the English of the islands that had, in turn, led to the very first seafaring settlements in the Americas. The room was already fairly crowded, even though the primary participants had yet to make their entrances. Beneath the flags and banners that streamed from the rafters, decorated with the heraldic symbols of both nations, the Crowned Bear of Albany and the North Star of the NU hanging side by side, a large and well-armed contingent of the Household Regiment was positioned round the walls, while parliamentary private secretaries, civil servants, and aides from the War Office and the General Staff shuffled papers and held low-voiced conversations. Castle servants were laying out a bar and buffet that would come into play when the conference decided to adjourn for refreshments, and the smell of percolating coffee—quite a rarity now that the enemy occupied the lands to the south—and the sight of food and drink reminded Cordelia that in her hurry to reach the War Office and then the castle, she had neglected to eat yet that day.
The level of conversation suddenly dropped away as the principals began to file into the room. They made their entrances in what some, Cordelia included, might have described as a reverse pecking order. The politicians came first: seated members of the Common Parliament and representatives of the labor unions and trade guilds, including Vincent Corleone, the leader of the United Workers Party, whose dark Sicilian eyes and melancholy good looks had always caused a stir in Cordelia's otherwise aristocratic heart. They were followed by the religious leaders of the kingdom, Archbishop Belfast, Rabbi Stern, the Shaman Grey Wolf, and the Lady Gretchen, High Priestess of the Mother Goddess. In tune with the tenor of both the meeting and the times, the religious leaders wore no ceremonial robes. The men were in dark frock coats, and the Lady Gretchen wore a floor-length burgundy robe with a pushed-back cowl that allowed her thick grey hair to fall free, almost to her waist. The Reverend Bearclaw Manson was not a religious leader, but he walked in just behind them. "Reverend" was little more than a nickname, but the small man with his buckskins and unkempt hair tied back in a ponytail exercised a similar mystic sway over many in the kingdom. Often vanishing, sometimes for a year or more at a time, he was credited with knowing more about the uncharted interior of the continent than any other individual in Albany, and also with being in closer touch with the world of the invisible than perhaps any living man, except for possibly the mysterious Yancey Slide, who some said was actually not human at all, and who would undoubtedly have been invited to attend the meeting had he and his Ranger band of scouts and marauders not been somewhere south of the Potomac wreaking covert havoc behind enemy lines.
Cordelia found it somewhat fitting that the strange little Manson was followed by the representatives of Albany's remaining free American allies, Earl Long III from Grand Louisiana, Chanchootok of the Ohio, and Naxat of the Montreal Nations. Grand Louisiana was not yet formally at war with Hassan IX, but with the Mosul already in Atlanta, and with a large proportion of the population of the Earldom being the second and third generation descendants of Frank and Hispanian refugees from the Mosul horror, or those from the former city states of Roma, Venezia, Tuscany, Naples, and Milan, plus all the others that now made up what was known as the Province of Italia, the lands down on the Gulf and along the Mississippi knew their time of trial would not be long in coming. The Ohio and Montreal Nations covered Albany's right flank in the north. In times past, both aboriginal confederacies had fought wars with Albany, but in the face of the Mosul invasion, urgent and enduring treaties had been made. The Ohio and the Montreal recognized Hassan IX as a far greater foe and a more fundamental danger to their lands. They had held back the settlers from across the Ocean from penetrating too deeply into the interior since the Vikings had first settled, and now they would do everything in their power to stay the advance of the Mosul.
Long, Chanchootok, and Naxat walked in together, side by side, and acted as heralds for the people that everyone there had really come to see. The Norse delegation was some twenty strong. Apart from Vice President Ingmar Ericksen, whose craggy face Cordelia recognized from pictures in the Albany newspapers, she didn't know any of their names, but except for the Vice President, who was somber in a formal morning coat, they all sported somewhat dashing military uniforms, long, belted coats with decorations and shoulder boards, that were a mixture of the field grey of the Norse Army, the dark blue of its formidable Navy, and the lighter blue of the small but growing Air Corps. Cordelia observed that Coral Metcalfe was quite correct. Some of the younger officers were "real dolls," and her appraisal was already being reciprocated if Cordelia was any judge of men. A blond Air Corps captain was looking directly at her with the hungry expression of one who has traveled a long way without the company of women. It was not, however, the moment for even the most mild and silent flirtation. All other eyes were now on the arched entrance of the Round Room as the final three men walked in. To the left was Prime Minister Jack Kennedy, to the right Field Marshal Virgil Dunbar, and, in the center, the king.
The three most powerful men in the room constituted an odd contrast one from the other, both visually, right there and then, and also in terms of their respective but completely different backgrounds. The venerable Kennedy, with his broad shoulders and carefully shaped mane of white hair, had fought tooth and nail with the king's father to preserve Albany as a parliamentary democracy. Although he now walked with a silver-topped cane, a truculent cigar jutted from the corner of his mouth and he radiated dogged and unrelenting energy. Dunbar, who had been imprisoned by the old king for much the same reasons that Kennedy had fought him, had a similar energy, but was cooler and more introverted. He walked with a limp after a Mosul sniper had nicked him in the leg during an overly exposed surveillance of the enemy lines. The king himself walked straight and with a reserved formality. He had the whole weight of the war thrust on his shoulders at the age of just twenty-seven, but, in his simple, unadorned, but immaculate uniform, his high, polished riding boots, and with his light brown hair neatly combed to one side, he carried the burden with a quiet dignity and determination never to reveal what the responsibility might be costing him, except for a certain strained pallor he could do nothing to disguise. Carlyle II led by example and seemed outwardly confident that, if he held himself intact, his people would follow him to either victory or an honorable defeat.
By the time the three had reached the round table, the others designated to sit there had found their respective places and stood beside their high-backed leather chairs. The king seated himself without any theatrical display and indicated with an unassuming gesture that the others should do the same. "Mr. Vice President, my lords, ladies and gentlemen, shall we all be seated and see what can be done to extinguish once and for all this flame of evil that has burned its way to our borders?"

RAPHAEL

"Fire!"
Thirty hammers of thirty unloaded muskets clicked in unison.
"Reload!"
Powder—wadding—ball—wadding—use the ramrod—replace.
"Take aim!"
The hard butts of thirty muskets were raised in unison to the shoulders of thirty conscript trainees.
"Fire!"
This time only twenty-nine hammers came down together. One was a fraction of a second late, and every one of the thirty trainees knew it was Pascal, one of the three Franks in the company, who had fallen behind. As the squad stood rigid and motionless, muskets still in the firing position, Gunnery Instructor Y'assir advanced on Pascal, stood in front of him, and looked the boy up and down. "You fired late, maggot."
Pascal responded with the training school bellow that he knew was expected of him; no point in compounding the crime of firing late with the equal offense of a faltering reply. "Yes, Gunnery Instructor! I fired late, Gunnery Instructor!"
"And what do you do when you fire late, maggot?"
The response was again a familiar bellowed ritual. "I become a traitor to the Deities and the Emperor, Gunnery Instructor!"
"And what is the only fitting fate for a traitor, maggot?"
"Death, Gunnery Instructor! Death is the only fitting fate for a traitor, Gunnery Instructor!"
"I can't hear you, maggot!"
"Death, Gunnery Instructor! Death is the only fitting fate for a traitor, Gunnery Instructor!"
The one thing that the company of conscript trainees knew was that Pascal would not die. Although executions were hardly a rare occurrence on the training camp that lay outside the ruins of Madrid, the boy would not be killed for a moment's hesitation in one of the most routine and fundamental of drills. If that was the punishment for every such infraction, Hassan IX would have no army left to fight.
"Company, lower arms!"
In a snap, three-part motion, the trainees brought their muskets down to their sides and stood at attention, stiff as their own ramrods. Y'assir walked slowly along the line of young men, some of them little more than boys, then turned and walked back again until he was once more standing in front of the unfortunate Pascal. Without warning, his good right arm shot out and a clublike clenched fist struck the conscript just above and exactly between his eyes. Pascal went down like a felled tree. One moment he had been standing, and the next he was laid out on the parade ground at right angles to the line formed by his companions, blinking, looking stunned, but making no sound.
"On your feet, maggot!"
Pascal blinked once more, shook his head, scrambled to his feet, and rejoined the line. A newcomer might have expected that the drill would have continued, but the conscripts knew that, with Gunnery Instructor Y'assir, nothing should be taken for granted. Y'assir was the hardest of hard men, full Mamaluke, cold and unbending, once upon a time one of the MuKadar, the Immortals, the pampered elite. He had only been brought back across the ocean and assigned to the post of gunnery instructor after a saber cut from a Virginia cavalryman, received at the Battle of Richmond, had severed the tendons in his left arm, rendering it useless. No longer able to fight or even ride, the Mamaluke compensated for what he saw as his fall from grace, his loss of glory, and his failure to die in the service of Emperor by an unrelenting and specific brutality. Although he was too much of a professional to ever voice his bitterness, it was plainly expressed each time he disciplined a recruit. He punched Pascal a second time, in exactly the same spot on his forehead, but Pascal must have had just enough warning to brace himself for the second blow. He merely staggered back and then quickly rejoined the line, but blood now flowed from a cut above his nose. Without comment from Y'assir, the drill continued.
"Reload!"
Powder—wadding—ball—wadding—use the ramrod—replace.
"Take aim!"
The muskets leveled as one.
"Fire!"
This time thirty hammers again clicked in unison.
"Reload!"
Powder—wadding—ball—wadding—use the ramrod—replace.
"Take aim!"
Y'assir could keep this up until the shoulders of the trainees were black and blue.
"Fire!"
The trick was to make the moves without thinking. If you thought about it, you fumbled. Raphael Vega let his hands go through the drill while he thought about the drawings in the hidden notebook concealed beneath his mattress in the barracks. Although forbidden by both military regulations and the dictates of the Zhaithan, Raphael Vega drew because, in the training camp, the officers and the instructors like Y'assir did everything they could to break the will and destroy the minds of the conscript trainees. Once upon a time, Raphael Vega had been an attractive fourteen-year-old with olive skin, fine features, and straight black hair that, no matter how much he combed it back, fell into his dark brown eyes like a raven curtain. The young girls had started treating him to hot, dramatic glances, and many had predicted that he would be a handsome man. All that had changed, though, when the Mosul had taken him for a conscript. No more girls, no more hot looks, and, with his head shaved, his eyes seemed to harden and his features take on a uniform coarseness. Whether he would ever be a man, handsome or otherwise, was also extremely debatable. The Mosul did not want men; they wanted automatons who would advance when ordered into the fire of whatever enemy confronted them, without hesitation, fear, or question. Raphael Vega would let himself be turned into a Mosul soldier. With Hispania long conquered and decimated, he could do nothing about that, but he was not going to allow himself to be transformed into a thing without a brain. The drawings were where he hid his individuality and concealed his freedom of mind. His art was his medium of rebellion, a means of maintaining his identity under the harsh discipline meted out by Y'assir and his other superiors, and the constant Zhaithan religious indoctrination. When he had first come to the camp, he had drawn more openly and even circulated scrawls of naked women and mythic beasts among his barrack mates. Then he had been caught, and ten savage strokes of the formal cane that left him striped and bloody had cured him of that, and also taught him that the Zhaithan Ministry of Virtue even had its spies and snitches, known as zed-hunters, in among the raw recruits. After the caning, he drew strictly in secret, and trusted no one.
"Reload!"
Powder—wadding—ball—wadding—use the ramrod—replace.
"Take aim!"
The muskets leveled as one.
"Fire!"
Pascal was again slightly slower than the rest, but this time Y'assir chose to ignore it. Blood had run down into the Frankish trainee's eyes from the cut on his forehead. Maybe the gunnery instructor wanted the company to become accustomed to the sight of blood on their companions.
"Reload!"
Powder—wadding—ball—wadding—use the ramrod—replace.
"Take aim!"
Raphael aimed at an imaginary target.
"Fire!"
The drill was a pantomime, conducted without ammunition, for one simple reason, and everybody knew it. The training camp was presently suffering from a shortage of powder. Even the fact that they were using the old-fashioned muzzle-loading muskets was the result of yet another supply problem. Hassan IX might rule an empire that stretched from the Indus to Hispania and the Northern Ocean, but it was an empire that was far from efficient in anything but the practice of terror and oppression. The movement of supplies was a constant and labyrinthine foul-up. The Mosul were conquerors but hardly organizers, and such organizational skills that might be found among the defeated and subject peoples were either ignored or severely hampered by the hidebound distrust of the Zhaithan priests, who viewed science, technology, and even the simple art of logistics as hell-spawned abominations and only tolerated them on the most grudging and material sufferance. Like the old saying went in the subject nations that had boasted railroad systems before the coming of the Mosul, the trains now never ran on time, if they ran at all. The grand alliance with the Teutons should, in theory, have put some of this to rights. The Teutons were skilled engineers, and, within the Mosul domain, they were the masters of heavy industry, but it was common knowledge that the Teutons' fatal weakness was that they were far too fond of power and authority. They could be seduced by strength. That was why they had voluntarily allied themselves with the Mosul in the first place and made their rape of Europe possible. It was also why they had allowed the Zhaithan to infiltrate their society, bringing as it did the chaos of distrust and holy repression under the guise of order and religious uniformity.
Despite the Zhaithan spies and zed-hunters, the conscript trainees in Raphael's company had heard a wide-enough selection of horror stories about Mosul foul-ups. Not even the Ministry of Virtue could keep soldiers from complaining and spreading rumors. They had heard the whispers in the night and grouching on the forced marches about how entire regiments had starved on the Asian Front while perfectly good food had rotted less than a hundred kilometers away, awaiting transportation that never came because it had been ordered to the wrong place. Y'assir himself had made it clear that maps were not to be trusted unless they were of Teuton or even enemy origin. The worst stories, however, were those of the human-wave assaults, employed extensively in the invasion of the Americas, in which the front ranks were not issued with weapons at all because the inevitability of their deaths was so absolute. The trainees all prayed that they would be furnished with modern Krupp breechloaders before they shipped out for the Americas. A modern weapon was a fairly definite guarantee that they would not immediately be placed in the front lines of a "forlorn hope" suicide squad the moment they arrived at the front. Y'assir had come as close to promising them as he came to promising anything except punishment and death that they were supposed to be so armed, and thus they had some chance of surviving at least their first encounter with the enemy. On the other hand, he made it clear that, in the Provincial Levies, what was supposed to be, and what was, were two very different things. "It could well be that the guns intended for you boys will be left standing on some loading dock between here and the Ruhr for the next three months. Or, even if they do arrive, you'll find you've been issued with the wrong ammunition."
When Y'assir finally dismissed them, the trainees stumbled to their barracks, too tired to do anything but fall into their bunks. The sun had set and the interior of the barrack room was quite dark. Some lit the stubs of candles that were the only light permitted to them after sunset, while others just flopped on their mattresses with exhausted sighs and groans. Some sat hunched on their bunks and blindly turned the pages of their pocket-sized copies of the Yasma, the holy book of Zhaithan, that were issued to all recruits when they came to the training camp, and, as Raphael knew well, was the only book they could own on penalty of dire punishment. Indeed, the Yasma would have been the only book permitted in all of the empire if the priests completely had their way, but that was something beyond even the cruel and fanatic capabilities of the worshipers of Ignir and Aksura. Raphael hated the Yasma, with its rules and its ancient tales of hideousness and carnage, the deities and the demons, the interminable lists of rules and regulations and the equally endless genealogies. He would have simply lost the book had it not been one of the items regularly checked during the gunnery instructor's routine inspections, and woe to any trainee who could not produce his copy of the Yasma. He even had to regularly fan through the pages to make it look as though he was actually reading the accursed texts.
The short interval between dismissal and lights-out was the only time that the trainees showed any kind of personality. Through the rest of their waking hours they moved as one, and with their shorn heads and rough cotton uniforms, they looked as alike as it was possible to make them. In their preparations for bed, they showed small idiosyncrasies. Renaldo obsessively inspected his hair and toenails. Pablo stared at his lit candle stub as though looking for some kind of answer or inner reason, or maybe trying to hypnotize himself away to someplace out of the training camp. The four trainees from the Lowlands gambled compulsively. The quartet stuck to each other like glue, and in every available moment they pitched copper coins or rolled dice, and had an elaborate system of memorized credit and debit, so nothing was ever put on paper. Pascal was usually talkative, but on this night he simply lay facedown on his bunk after bearing the brunt of Y'assir's practiced ire for the whole of the long, hot day. Raphael would have liked to have vanished into the latrine and drawn for a while. A portrait of an imaginary girl with caramel skin, huge eyes, and dark hair had lodged in his mind, and he wanted to get it down on paper, in this case the blank back of a supply requisition form he had filched while no one was looking. He had no idea where the pictures in his head came from, and he never knew when they might vanish. The girl's face was somehow, in some mysterious way, important, but, since he had been caught and caned, he had become extremely circumspect with his drawing. He had no desire to feel the burning cuts of the formal cane ever again if he could in any way help it.
"Lights out!" All too soon, Underofficer Beg, Y'assir's immediate deputy, had screamed from the barrack room door, and the trainees snuffed out their candles. After that the only light came from a small iron brazier on the top of a tall tripod: not a heating device, but a reminder of the presence of the gods. Even in the darkness the Zhaithan refused to release their grip. Raphael had no recall of falling asleep. The next thing he knew was a violent hammering that he thought at first was inside his head but then realized was being created by a squad of underofficers led by Beg who were rousing the trainees with their batons, tipping them out of their bunks, upending the rough straw mattresses, and screaming.
"Out! Out! Out! Quit your snoring and start roaring!"
Outside, the dawn had yet to break. One of the Lowlanders had the temerity to ask what was going on, and, amazingly, he received an answer. "You're all shipping out, maggot. Out of here, across the ocean, and off to the front to be blown to pieces. And are we glad to be rid of you little bastards."
Raphael wanted to protest. How could the training be over? He did not feel trained. He did not feel like a soldier, but in the Mosul legions, no one protested.

JESAMINE

Jesamine woke to the sound of the call to prayer and the subsequent bustle of the waking camp that was just outside the blackened ruins of the Virginia town that had been called Alexandria. She had only slept fitfully that night. The flesh of her bottom still smarted from the colonel's late night ministrations. Drunk on schnapps and lager after early-evening hours spent in the Teuton officers' mess, Colonel Helmut Phaall of the 4th Engineers, the
man who owned her body, if not her soul, had taken a mind to thrash her soundly with the same quirt he used on his charger Wotan, inflicting some fifteen slow and lingering stripes with the plaited leather before forcing her to her knees to finish him in the manner that had, for some time, been his preferred method of consummation. The colonel had gone to some lengths to explain that the beating in no way constituted a punishment. She had neither transgressed nor displeased him, and the pain he was so liberally meting out was purely for his own amusement, and, in keeping with her abject and lowly station, she should willingly suffer the chastisement with good grace and in the eternal hope of finding favor in not only his eyes but in those of the All-seeing Twin Deities. Colonel Phaall had, at the same time, however, made it quite clear that she was free to moan, gasp, whimper, or sob, just as long as she didn't "wake up the whole damned camp." He had absolutely no objection to hearing her suffer. Indeed, it was the perfect complement to the visual spectacle of her bare body twisting and her muscles clenching and contracting with each cut of the whip.
Her normal practice was to slip from her cot in the officers' slave pavilion and remain as invisible as possible until Phaall had departed for his duties of the day, but on this particular morning that was not possible. On a final alcoholic whim, Phaall had ordered his manservant Reinhardt to escort her to her cot and chain her as regulations dictated. Normally the rules concerning the chaining of concubines were not scrupulously observed. It created too many problems and too much work for the orderlies and the menservants who had to see to their enforcement. None of the slave girls in this Teuton camp were captured Virginians, or even Americans. They had all made the long ocean voyage with their officers from Cadiz or Lisbon, so if they attempted to escape, where exactly were they going to go? A few concubines had tried to run, just as a percentage of soldiers, especially the Provincial Levies, tried to desert, but most were caught and brought back to either be hanged or burned, while the others either perished in the swamps to the north, among the snakes and mosquitos, or wandered until they starved in the forests to the south or were eaten by wolves, foraging pigs, or wild dogs. Why Phaall had suddenly decided that Jesamine was a flight risk was a mystery, but she could only take his final order to Reinhardt at face value.
"Better hook her up tonight. Don't want her fleeing the coop in a snit because I decided to freshen her up a little. I've put in too much fucking time training the bitch. I don't need all the bother of breaking in a new one."
Thus she greeted the morning wearing a padlocked leather collar attached to a meter and a half of light steel chain that was, in turn, fastened to the iron frame of her folding cot. Reinhardt had the responsibility of keeping collar and chain polished and gleaming, and it was also the manservant's duty to free her at the start of the day. Unfortunately, releasing Jesamine was only one of the demands on his time as the new day got underway. Phaall needed his breakfast; he would have to be shaved and might also require a bath. Papers and maps had to be located, and although Reinhardt would have polished the colonel's boots and filled his flask with schnapps the night before, a Teuton colonel of Engineers could find a dozen or more tasks for his manservant before he went about his duties. Jesamine might wait, hungry and confined to her cot, until close to lunchtime before Reinhardt came to unlock her restraining collar unless Phaall wanted to fuck her during or after his breakfast, and that was rarely on his menu of morning desires. In the minimal way that reasonable kindness might be defined in any camp of the Mosul, the manservant Reinhardt treated Jesamine with reasonable kindness. He did not slap her around, subject her to intimate indignities behind Phaall's back, or otherwise abuse her the way some of the servants did. He rarely carried tales about her to the colonel, and, now and then, he would slip her small treats like unfinished bottles of schnapps, chocolate, candied fruit, and pastries from the officers' mess. In the hard world of the Mosul, however, kindness was always a matter of transaction. A manservant did not merit his own concubine and had to be content with the small selection of ugly native whores who were sent to the front to be used by the rank and file. In return for the titbits and the blind eye he turned to her indiscretions, she would allow him to touch her body and sometimes pleasure him with hand or mouth. She would never, however, permit Reinhardt full penetration, since discovery of such a violation would certainly slow-hang the both of them.
The officers' concubines were housed in a large, pavilion-style tent of camouflaged canvas where some two dozen women slept in cots identical to Jesamine's. Beside each cot was a steel locker in which each woman kept her cosmetics, folded clothes, small personal vanities, and the inevitable copy of the Yasma. When not in use, each concubine's chain and collar hung from a hook at the side of the locker. A tiny measure of privacy was afforded each cot by the tent of mosquito netting that protected it from the troublesome insects that seemed to thrive in the constantly flooded wetlands beside the wide river the Americans called the Potomac. As on any other morning, the slave pavilion was a chaos of sleepy women preparing for another day in their particular kind of servitude. It smelled of bodies and bad perfume, stale cooking, fear, and the pervading damp of the bottomlands beside the river that, according the current rumors, the army would soon cross in what promised to be a bloody and final assault on the kingdom of Albany. Women's voices surrounded Jesamine, some sleepy and complaining, others bickering and petulant.
One of the problems that beset the officers' concubines was that they had far too little with which occupy their time or their minds while the men who owned their lives were away about their duties. It had once been suggested, probably by a priest or an agent of the Ministry of Virtue, that, here in the Americas, the concubines on the campaign should be put to work just like any other collection of servants or slaves. To the religious mindset, this made perfect sense. Idle hands did the devil's work, and food needed to be prepared and laundry to be done. Clothes required mending, and a hundred things had to be fetched and carried on any given day in the camp. They might be the playthings of the military elite, but they were also slaves, and slaves were supposed to work. This idea, however, was unanimously vetoed by the officers. They didn't want their women with rough red hands and dirt under their fingernails. It spoiled the illusion. And thus the concubines at the front succumbed to the chronic and narcissistic boredom that had beset seraglios, harems, and whorehouses all down the centuries. They retreated into an almost mindless pettiness of gossip, intrigue, jealousy, backbiting, and fantasy. One of the favorite illusions was for women to imagine that they would make their officers fall in love with them and thus gain their freedom. Maybe for one in a hundred the dream came true, but for the great majority it was a chimeric escape into a refuge of impossible hope. Jesamine had seen this romantic absurdity happen for real a few times on the other side of the ocean, in the permanent garrisons where the men also had little to do and time on their hands. Here at the front, though, in the New World, she doubted that it was possible when the officers had an entire campaign of conquest to keep them occupied and amused. Jesamine's desire for a way out was as strong as any woman's in the tent, but she refused to attach any kind of hope to the hard and professionally cruel men who controlled their lives. Jesamine prided herself on being a complete realist.
Kahlfa, the concubine of a cavalry major called Urman, approached Jesamine's cot. She nursed a cup of hard Mosul coffee, probably sweetened with honey if she had any. Kahlfa and Jesamine were both from the mountains to the southeast of the Mamaluke homelands, and both had the caramel complexion, large dark eyes, straight noses, and black hair for which the mountain women were famous. They had been blessed with similar smooth and muscular bodies, and it was the combination of those faces and bodies that had saved them the hard labor and ceaseless toil of the common working slaves. The women of the mountains were accustomed to the idea of slavery, if, indeed, anyone could become accustomed to slavery. The Mamalukes had been raiding their lands and carrying off their people apparently since the beginning of history. Jesamine and Kahlfa weren't alike enough to be taken for sisters, but perhaps cousins, and they had one other thing in common. The mountain women were also famous for their voices, and they both sang. It was a talent both Kahlfa and Jesamine put to good use in the officers' mess, and, as performers rather than objects, it gave them moments when they were more public property than merely the toys of Urman and Phaall, respectively. Kahlfa had confided in Jesamine how she hoped that her singing might lead to a betterment of her situation, but while humoring her, Jesamine had inwardly dismissed the idea as one more wistful but ultimately forlorn hope. All that Jesamine expected from her singing was that maybe, if Phaall abused her too badly, some other officer, more appreciative of her worth, might buy her from the colonel or win her by making her an object of a wager. In this, though, she was little better than a thoroughbred horse that was being overridden and beaten by its owner in a way that caused another to step in and stop the wanton waste of good flesh.
Kahlfa pulled back the mosquito netting, thinking that Jesamine had overslept. "You'd better wake up, girl, or you'll be in trouble." Then she saw that Jesamine was chained. "He had you hooked up? What did he do that for? What did you do?"
Jesamine threw back her blanket and rolled over to display her welts. "He freshened me with the quirt, didn't he?"
"You'd displeased him?"
Jesamine shook her head. "He made it clear it was just for his amusement."
"And did you like it, too?"
"No, of course not."
"There are some who do, girl."
"I know that."
"By all accounts, Ravenna can't get enough of her colonel's cane."
Jesamine nodded. "So I've heard."
They both glanced at a tall, dark, full-bodied woman cooking eggs for herself on one of the three communal hotplates while talking to the pale blond twins, Mai and Leah, who performed a different kind of act for the officers in the mess. "I heard she provokes him to get him to beat her."
"I heard that, too."
"It might be guilt."
Jesamine eased herself up, letting the chain fall between her breasts. "Guilt?"
Kahlfa sat down on the end of the cot and lowered her voice. "She's suspected of being our Virtue girl."
"She's a zed-hunter?"
"Our very own."
"What makes you say that?"
"You remember when they arrested Yvonne, a month or so back?"
Jesamine looked surprised that Kahlfa even asked. "Of course I do."
"I was standing next to that Ravenna. Everyone else looked terrified, but she seemed like she was expecting it."
"It took me completely by surprise."
"And there was something else, too."
"What else?"
"She looked pleased, smug almost, as if she'd just won some kind of victory or scored points."
"Maybe she was just pleased it wasn't her. I mean, she's been in the cage more than once."
In a corner of the pavilion, near the row of hot plates and the common washing facilities, was a low steel cage, three feet deep by three feet high and a little over four feet long. It was used as an alternative punishment to the routine beatings, both formal and informal, and also as a lockdown for new arrivals who were deemed to need time to acclimate to their status and surroundings.
Kahlfa shrugged. "Believe what you like. I'm going to be watching her."
Jesamine trusted Kahlfa as much as she trusted anyone in the camp, but she was far from sure that Ravenna was their current snitch. Identifying who might be a spy for the Ministry of Virtue was another of the more popular pastimes in the concubines' pavilion, second only to the constant discussions of the means and machinations by which the woman who believed they could win their freedom by impossible romance might achieve their desired objective. "Look at her now. Even when she's doing something, she also seems to be watching. See the way she's looking at the twins?"
Jesamine turned over and again lay on her stomach, regarding the blond twins. Mai and Leah were unique among the concubines in that they were the only ones who did not belong to any particular officer. They had been brought to the camp by the celebrated—although some said insane—Mamaluke cavalry colonel Hussa Kastar, the leader of a troop of MuKadar, one of the Immortals, who was reputed to have had no less than a half-dozen horses shot out from under him in the advance through the Carolinas and Virginia. Unfortunately, he had apparently begun to assume that he really was immortal in more than just title, and that his invincibility was absolute. The errors of these assumptions had been proved just three months earlier, when, on an ill-considered and foolhardy intelligence gathering raid into enemy territory, Kastar had been shot dead by an Albany lookout. According to normal custom and protocol, that would have been the end for the twins, but some of the other officers had intervened to save them from the quick deaths that would have followed after the demise of their owner. This was no act of compassion, though, merely Kastar's brother officers realizing that Mai and Leah were simply too rare an item to be wastefully strangled or to have their identical white throats cut. A consortium of officers had worked out a deal whereby Mai and Leah had become the collective property of all the members of the mess, acting as a syndicate. If any officer wanted them for his private use, he had to make a sizable donation to mess funds. The twins had seemingly taken the dubious step up from slavery to a form of controlled prostitution. Only the Teutons could have worked out such an unprecedented arrangement, and how it was reconciled with the complexities of Zhaithan law, even in the more relaxed form of the combat zone, that allowed a certain leeway in personal behavior, was a mystery to the other women in the pavilion.
Jesamine had seen the twins act a dozen or more times, either on evenings when she and Kahlfa were required to sing, or on what were euphemistically called "lady's nights," when the officers brought their concubines with them and the girls found themselves passed around like schnapps, beer, and the cigars that had become so popular since the conquest of the tobacco-growing lands of the Americas. Their performances were gymnastic, innovative, highly pornographic, and, of course, incestuous, and the officers' mess could not get enough of them. Men en masse were both fascinated and aroused beyond reason by two women having ornate and flamboyant lesbian sex one with the other, and the sight of twins so publically engaged was treated as even more of an erotic charge. Jesamine knew this from firsthand experience. She had seen and felt the effect that the twins had on Phaall, and suffered his engorged excitement in the aftermath. The twins' popularity, and the perquisites and small measure of freedom it allowed them, had set them apart from the rest of the concubines. Jesamine personally considered them a little stupid and felt the airs that they put on were probably not a good idea in the long run. Right at that moment, the two were dressed in matching, pale blue, hooded jellabas that would have been fairly modest garments had the outer seams not been slit from hem almost to armpit and the neckline not plunged nearly to their navels, revealing a considerable area of white and intimate, naked flesh. Jesamine was of the opinion that to walk around like that, first thing in the Mosul morning, was courting an eventual disaster. To be too noticeable was to risk coming to the attention of the Ministry of Virtue, or, at the other extreme, to court the bitter envy of the other women. Indeed, a few whispered threats had been made against Mai and Leah, but no woman was going to follow through while they were such a hit with the officers. Others, on the other hand, actively sought their friendship in the hope of making use of their supposed influence with the officers in the camp, just as Ravenna seemed to be doing right then. The woman who Kahlfa suspected of being a Zhaithan spy was actually cooking up another batch of eggs for the twins, who seemed to accept the gesture as no more than they deserved.
As Jesamine stared thoughtfully at the twins, Kahlfa traced the curved stripe of one of Jesamine's welts with a cool finger. "I could probably find some salve for that."
"It's okay. I'll live. I just wish Reinhardt would get here soon and unlock this damned collar."
"I'd kiss your bruises better if there weren't so many to see."
Jesamine laughed. She had no shame that Kahlfa and she had now and again taken comfort from each other's touch. Before she could do more than laugh, though, a cry went up. "Male in the tent!"
It was a routine warning, but, always fearful of trouble and a sudden visit from the Ministry of Virtue, the women all stopped whatever they were doing and warily looked to the entrance. When it turned out to only be the manservant Reinhardt, they made noises of relief and went back to what they had previously been doing. Presumably he had arrived to free Jesamine from her collar and chain, and that was no cause for alarm or comment, but Jesamine noticed that he was carrying a small napkin-wrapped bundle. Treats? Jesamine could use a treat right there and then, although obviously Reinhardt would expect her favors in return.
She smiled jokingly as he approached. "About time. I thought you were going to leave me like this all day."
A certain familiarity existed between Jesamine and Reinhardt that went beyond private and public manners of address between servant and slave of the same master. Jesamine could hardly see how it might be otherwise. She had taken him in her hand and mouth too often, and listened to his moans of forbidden pleasure, for him to pretend they were strangers. Like everything else in the camp, however, the familiarity was a calculated transaction. He could hardly betray her, since she would immediately betray him, and they would slowly and painfully hang together. Most times Reinhardt would have laughed at her bantering complaint, but instead he scowled. "I am in no mood for jokes. Our colonel has one full and foul hangover. I fully expected him to take the quirt to me as well."
"Is he about his business?"
Reinhardt nodded. "Thank the Deities he'll be away until late. Something to do with barges." He looked down at the welts on Jesamine's buttocks as he unlocked the collar. "He really laid it on you good, didn't he, girl?"
"Good isn't the word I'd choose."
Kahlfa rose from the bed. "I think I'll make myself scarce."
Jesamine quicky grasped her by the hand. "No, stay." She looked up at Reinhardt. "Do you have something there for me?"
"I thought you might need a little something after the whipping you took."
Jesamine reached up and quickly patted his cheek, but only after checking that Ravenna or any of the other women were not looking. "You're so sweet and thoughtful."
She quickly unwrapped the bundle, revealing that it contained two pockets of pita bread, with lamb kebab chunks and salad, a clay oven—cooked half chicken, a honey cake, and two thin, dark cheroots. At the sight of the food, Jesamine flashed the servant a dazzling smile, and Kahlfa made no more moves to leave. "Thank you, Reinhardt. You are my benefactor and my only true friend. I will share these with Kahlfa."
Reinhardt lowered his voice. "Then I'll expect the two of you to meet me later."
Jesamine held her smile fixed. It was a chore, but she had been with him for much less. "You know we will."
Reinhadt looked quickly around. "So, the usual place?"
"Down in the willows where no one can see us."
"At sunset."
"We'll be there."
He nodded, then turned and hurried out of the tent. Kahlfa was already tearing off a piece of chicken. "So, we have to do him later?"
Jesamine picked up one of the petas. "Isn't it worth it not to have to eat slave slop?"
Kahlfa chewed and nodded, speaking with her mouth full. "I guess so."
"You can kiss him and tickle his asshole while I suck him off. Isn't it worth it? You know how fast he is."
"One day we'll be caught."
"One day we'll be caught doing something."
"I'd rather it was later than sooner, though."
"Then leave that damned chicken alone."
Kahlfa continued to chew. "Don't worry. I'll be there, kissing and tickling."
They ate quickly and in silence. When they were finished, Jesamine stretched. "I've been having these dreams."
"Again?"
"Almost every night."
Kahlfa, who had been sniffing one of the cheroots, looked around, apparently more worried by Jesamine's dreams being overheard than by the coming illegal assignation with Reinhardt. "About the young men again?"
"The same ones."
Kahlfa gestured to the entrance to the tent. "Let's go and smoke these outside. I don't want to talk dreams in here."

Copyright © 2004 by Mick Farren