by Glen Cook
“Why not a fisherman?”
“Can’t find one interested.”
“And why a Gathering?”
“The War again. High Command’s discovered that the Australians are putting together a fleet to come against Europe, summer after next. This time we’ll end it for good. We’ll destroy all their ships, then go on and smash their ports and harbors so they can’t ever try again.”
Kurt frowned. He had been quite young and disinterested at the time of his father’s departure, yet it seemed he had heard all this before, then. Yet, to go, to see places about which he could only dream here, to have a major ship beneath and about him... His eyes sought the distant warship, at the Hoch-und-Deutschmeister pier, where she had been waiting all his life.
“Do you really believe that, Heinrich?” Kurt jerked around. Karen had come in quietly, unasked. “Or are you as cynical a liar as Beck? I hope, for your sake, that you’ve been honestly taken in.”
“Karen!” Kurt was shocked. This was no way to speak to a close and long-time friend.
“Karen,” said Haber, gently, “I do hope you’ll not talk that way in public. Even a lazy old man like Karl Wiedermann would have to do something — especially with a ranking Political Officer here. Beck would probably gun you down with that ugly pistol he always carries.”
“I don’t care!” Kurt’s wonder grew. This was the first time he had seen her angry — and he still had no slightest notion why. Surely, not because of his reaction to breakfast.
“I want you to leave,” she said. “We don’t want your phony patriotism.”
“Karen!”
“Oh, shut up, Kurt. You don’t know what’s going on. You’ll let yourself get talked into something you’ll regret.”
He was angered by her implying he was incapable of rational decision. So, to prove something, he made an irrational one. “I’ll go.” He meant to say he would think about going, but it did not come out so, and, afterward, Karen forever turned deaf ears to his explanations.
“Kurt!” she wailed, “why? Haven’t our families been hurt enough?”
Then the argument began, their first. As each angry word took birth and flew, Kurt grew more determined he would not let Karen think for him. He was by nature a drifter, a follower, easily manipulated, yet, when accused of it, became stubborn in proving to himself he was not — sometimes in support of the stupidest things.... He committed himself to Jager so clumsily there was no way he could withdraw without tremendous loss of face. He won a sad victory over Karen, and slept that night alone.
“Ranke!” It seemed sleep had just come, but here was the messenger of the watch, shaking his rack, stirring him forth from the muzzy depths of memory. “Time to relieve the watch.”
“Goddammit,” he muttered, “I just got off.”
“It’s three-thirty,” the messenger said defensively. “I’m coming, I’m coming.” Then he chuckled. The engineers were standing watch and watch, six hours on and six off. He consoled himself by thinking of those with a worse lot. “Go on. Get out of here,” he told the messenger. “I’m up.”
“Just making sure.” The man hurried off to his next victim.
The Norwegian coast was a vague black line when Kurt reached the bridge. He relieved Milch, made the log entries necessary for a new watch, then stepped outside to stare at the shadowed land. Hans joined him shortly.
“Think we could see the mountains from here?” he asked.
“No. Maybe when we get upriver.”
“When’re we going in?”
“When there’s enough light.” Kurt looked eastward, astern. The false dawn had begun painting the foaming wake. Then he saw Beck on the maindeck, amidships, near an open porthole. “Look. Beck. Hope he doesn’t hang the cooks. They’re bad, but they’re all we’ve got.”
Hans considered Beck at the galley, chuckled. “Pray it’s Kellerman if he does.” Kellerman was the officers’ cook, unpopular, considered a lickspittle.
They moved forward where Beck could not see them. Musingly, Hans said, “It’d be a pity if something happened to him, wouldn’t it? Suppose a tree fell on him? Anything could happen while we’re cutting firewood.”
Kurt frowned. There was something wrong about Hans, something different. He was altogether too friendly, and the way he was talking, too, was unlike the Hans Kurt thought he knew....
“Captain’s on the bridge!”
Kurt’s train of thought died as he hurried into the pilothouse, to the chart table, where he waited until von
Lappus had a question.
“Ranke, what do you know about this river?”
“Not a damned thing,” Kurt replied, surprising himself. Now why had he said that? As an afterthought, “Sir.” Then, “But we should have a flood tide.” The Captain grunted and walked away. He spoke with Gregor for a moment, assumed the conn, and turned the ship toward the river. lager reached Kristiansand an hour after sunrise. The old town seemed a thriving village of perhaps a thousand souls, many of whom came out to watch the warship pass. The men of the Sea Detail, which had been set when Kristiansand was sighted, waved and shouted. Petty officers passed among the seamen, growling, toning them down. There would be no fraternizing with the Kristiansander girls anyway. Their fathers and husbands and brothers were already hustling them home. An ancient custom, Kurt thought.
Jager crept up the Otra until, near noon, she dropped anchor off a good stand of timber. Kristiansand, forty kilometers downstream, was an attraction no more. Kurt was wolfing a delayed breakfast, wondering about the Norwegian way of life, when Hans approached his table with his own morning meal. “You’ve got boat three,” he said. “What?”
“You’re in charge of boat three, to get wood. You’ll need a dozen Operations men for your working party. There’ll be one from Engineering, two from Deck.”
“What about Gunnery?”
“Somebody’s worried about the natives. Why, I don’t know.”
“I don’t feel like chopping wood.”
“Who does? Want to trade boats?”
“Why?”
“Beck’s going over in mine.”
“No thanks. Why?”
“To watch for deserters, I guess. It’s a golden opportunity, you have to admit. We’re awful close to Telemark.”
“Two days’ walk,” Kurt replied, revealing his recent thoughts.
Hans’s eyes narrowed. “You taking off?”
“I thought about meeting Karen there. But I won’t.”
“Get your tools from the boatswain’s locker. Deckinger’ll have them ready.”
“All right.” Kurt hurriedly finished his coffee and soggy roll. After returning his tray to the scullery, he went to Combat, where he collected a working party.
“Muster the working parties!” was soon piped. Kurt smiled, briefly wondered why Hans so enjoyed the public-address microphone — perhaps he achieved a surrogate feeling of power, of godhead. He reached boat three as Gregor arrived.
“Everyone here?” the lieutenant asked.
Kurt ticked off names in his mind. “Where’s Weber?”
“Here.” The sonarman hurried up. “All present, sir,” said Kurt, saluting sloppily. Jager’s crew, often to Beck’s dismay, demonstrated little interest in ceremony.
“Very well. Weber, Hippke, get the tools. The rest of you stand clear here.” Men from the deck force lowered the boat, rigged a Jacob’s ladder. “All right, get aboard,” Lindemann directed when the tools arrived. “Ranke, you’re coxswain.”
“We may need shovels, sir,” Kurt observed later, when they finally managed to get the boat to shore. The bank was a clifflet six feet tall.
“Mr. Czyzewski’s ahead of you.” Behind them, the engineers were loading their own boat. Shovels were among their tools. Kurt shrugged, made the boat’s painter fast to a sapling, scrambled up the bank.
A hundred meters of gently rising green meadow lay between river and wood, richly strewn with petaled jewels. The grass was deep and comf
ortable. Several men were lying in it, talking. Kurt breathed deeply of the meadow’s lush perfume.
“A nice place,” Gregor observed. Indeed. Here there was no sign of man or his foibles.
“Yes, pretty,” Kurt replied. “Except for that.” He pointed at Jager. The ship, beautiful as a panther is beautiful when moored at Kiel, was a canker here in the wilderness.
“Uhm,” Lindemann grunted. “All right, stand by!” He went to meet Czyzewski, just coming ashore. They spoke for a moment, then Lindemann returned. “Kurt, start with a few of the bigger trees. He wants a raft to float the wood over.”
Kurt nodded, passed the word. Soon sounds of axes, of spades at the bank, and, later, of sledges hitting wedges, splitting logs, racketed along the riverside. Jager added the sounds of chipping hammers and an occasional shout as someone hailed a friend ashore. The work was hard, but the sailors enjoyed themselves. Chatter, snatches of song, high spirits filled the meadow.
But there was always an island of silence, always in motion, following Beck. The Political Officer prowled constantly, watching, listening. No one remained cheerful in his presence — Kurt wondered if the power-feeling this must give Beck, and the sense of alienation which would attend the silence, might not reinforce the man’s cold aloofness and make him even more of what he was. Something was bothering Beck, he saw as he surreptitiously studied the man, though he felt it was not connected with alienation — in his own alienation from friends he thought should be closer, Kurt felt he could touch Beck’s being at congruent points (and here he also achieved insight into Hans’s growing friendliness, for he, Kurt, was the only person aboard with whom Hans had a standing relationship, albeit based in lengthy enmity). The Political Officer had come ashore accompanied by two armed men, whose weapons the crew were certain were for use against deserters. The guns, Kurt decided, were bad tactics on Beck’s part. They undermined an already decaying morale. If flights to Telemark were what Beck feared, his mere presence ashore should have been ample deterrent.
Otto was one of Beck’s riflemen. Kurt collared him while the Political Officer was at the nether end of the work area. “What’s Beck up to, Ott? Why the guns?”
Kapp checked Beck’s location, then said, “I think he’s hoping somebody’ll run. He wants to kill somebody. He doesn’t say it right out, but you can feel it there, like a maggot in his soul. It’s like he has to get somebody quick, before the thing in him turns and destroys him. Kurt, I’ve never met anyone like that. He’s like... like a devil inside... an eater of souls. But he’s human, too. It keeps trying to get out, tries to make contact, like this morning when we were getting ready to come over. Out of the blue he asked me about Frieda, and, before I knew it, he was telling me all about his wife at Gibraltar. A slut and a dragon, to hear him tell it. Cruel... oh-oh. Better move on. Pass the word to be careful.”
Beck was looking their way, wearing a calculating expression. Otto departed, leaving Kurt with a hundred questions about Beck. Had his wife beaten him into his present distorted shape? Did he hate all humanity because of her, especially women? Certainly he had had nothing to do with them in Kiel, where liberties were a byword. Might he be a man who thought he was complete unto himself? Kurt pounced on the notion, remembering a similar person met aboard a Danish boat, a man much like Beck outwardly. And, as Otto had suggested about Beck, that fisherman had proved an emotional time bomb.
A small incident — the tearing of a net, as Kurt remembered — had triggered him one day; he had gone berserk, and had distributed injuries liberally before being subdued.
He was jerked from his speculations by Jager’s screaming general alarm. Men ran for the boats. Kurt looked around confusedly. A hundred meters downstream, just watching, were a dozen shaggy men clad in the skins of equally shaggy animals. Norwegians of the semi-nomadic variety Kurt had often seen at the Danish trading posts, men who farmed the high valleys of the mountains and hunted, and, someday, might fall into the savage raiding habits of their ancestors a millennium gone. These men were armed, as their sort invariably were, but their bows were unstrung, slung over their shoulders. Why the panic? he wondered.
The alarm ceased. Bells rang in the ensuing stillness as Jager’s after gunmounts swung around toward the hunters — who settled on their hams in the grass, laconically observing the panic.
Mr. Czyzewski began shouting in mixed Polish and German, driving sailors back to work. Sheepishly, they returned to their tools. Beck and his riflemen hurried past Kurt, took up defensive positions between hunters and sailors. Kurt found this pleasing. Beck would be out of the way, unable to snoop.
Uneventful days passed. Jager lost her trim, wolfish look. Stem to stern, rail to rail, from her lowest void to her highest deck, she was stacked with fuel to drive her the long three thousand kilometers to Gibraltar. She rode very low in the water and her center of gravity had risen — dangerously so if she was forced to face a storm — and still Mr. Czyzewski was uncertain the fuel was sufficient. He claimed the wood would bum too fast, loudly mourned the lack of coal.
Jager had burned coal thus far — coal brought to Kiel from Sweden, in driblets over the years, as ballast in the sailing ships of Swedish traders — but the little store left was to be saved for combat, when the ship would need its greater efficiency.
Sailors were loading a last mountainous raft while Kurt wondered where it was to be stored. A shout came from downriver. He turned. The Norwegians were striking camp — why had they spent so many days just sitting and watching? — and all but one vanished into the wood. The remaining man unhurriedly approached, smiling. Beck and his riflemen rose, waited. The meeting took place fifteen meters from Kurt. All activity ceased along the riverbank.
“What’s happening?”
Kurt jerked nervously, then laughed. “Got me, Hans. Maybe he’s bringing the bill for the wood.”
“Hey!” Hans stared at the approaching man. “Isn’t that... what’s his name? Franck? Yes, Karl Franck.”
Kurt squinted against the sunlight. “You’re right. He disappeared about the time I went to sea, after those speeches....”
“My father still complains about him, usually when he wants to make a moral point.” Hans grinned. “Prime example of moral decay. Dad says that, with my attitude, I’m sure to end up like him.”
“Wait!” Kurt said. “Lookslike trouble.”
Franck had stopped a few paces from Beck, surveyed his uniform with exaggerated loathing, said something softly. Kurt saw color creep up Beck’s neck, heard him mutter. His two riflemen retreated.
“What’s happening, Ott?” Kurt asked.
“Don’t know. Franck said something about the High Command, then Beck told us to get the hell out.” Kapp fell silent, turned all his attention to Beck and Franck. An argument had begun. Beck appeared to be growing angry, which surprised Kurt. He had never seen Beck get emotional. He thought of his time-bomb notion. Someone laughed. Beck jerked as if stung, turned, narrowed eyes searching, promising reprisal, seeing nothing but sober faces. Growing angrier, he turned back to Franck, growled something.
Now Franck laughed. He made a megaphone of his hands, shouted, “Hey, men, thought you might like to know that High Command and the War are —”
He was unable to finish. Beck broke. He jerked his pistol out and fired. Jager’s crew, ashore and at her rails, watched in dumb surprise as Franck jerked to the repeated impact of bullets. Beck emptied his weapon, continued insanely pulling the trigger.
Berserk, just like that sailor, Kurt thought. He forced his rising breakfast back with difficulty. Hans muttered, “Oh, Christ!” and lost his.
Otto, after a silent moment during which the shots seemed to echo on, gasped, “He’s finally done it. He’s killed somebody.” Beck stood staring down at the corpse, shaking, yet with a beatific glow about him — a look of almost orgasmic satisfaction.
Then arrows streaked from the forest. Beck screamed as one hit his leg, was silenced as a second transfixed his throat. He to
ok two more in leg and shoulder as he fell.
“Let’s get out of here!” a sailor shouted. Everyone unfroze. Men caromed into one another as they raced for the boats. Kurt, stunned, walked after them, unable to hurry. Otto, retaining some presence of mind, snapped off random rifle shots as he retreated at Kurt’s side.
Jager bellowed like an indignant dragon defending chicks. Three-inch shells racketed over low, with a sound like nothing Kurt had ever heard. 40mms added their smaller voices to the uproar. The little shells hummed like bumblebees in passing. There were rapid explosions in the woods. Kurt saw a large tree suffer a direct hit. Five feet of ancient trunk disintegrated. The rest fell slowly, with the stateliness of a wounded giant.
But there were no more arrows. The Norwegians (or, perhaps. Littoral refugees) seemed satisfied with Beck’s death. This bothered Kurt as he waded through shallow water and clambered into his boat. Why Beck alone? And why had the Norwegians opened fire so quickly — as if waiting? What had Franck been trying to say? Why had Beck felt the need to silence him? So many questions.
He sat in the bow of the boat and stared toward the dead men. They were the first he had seen fall to violence. He was sickened. Franck lay in a grotesque position, some bones bullet-broken. Beck lay on his back, staring at cottony cumulus with cold, unseeing eyes. Kurt was certain Franck had intentionally baited Beck into his attack, but without expecting such sudden reaction — and his miscalculation had been fatal. Why he thought this Kurt was not certain, though. Perhaps because the arrows had come so swiftly, imply the shooting was planned. But to what purpose? He shook his head and stared around.
In the next boat he saw Gregor, pale and stricken. From behind him came the sound of warning bells as Jager brought more guns to bear. Cordite smells, sour, bitter, assailed his nostrils. He saw, on looking back, men at Jager’s rails with rifles and machine-pistols. He looked back to the wood. A curl of smoke rose from a small fire started by an exploding shell. Shattered trees leaned drunkenly in one another’s arms. Raw brown wounds, shell holes, scarred the meadow. It was all so savage, so quickly come and gone. The feast of blood, he thought, the curse of Cain. He was grateful when Jager’s stem interrupted his view of the destruction.