Men of War

by William R. Forstchen

  Jurak looked over and saw that Zartak was smiling slyly.

  “At dawn to see the vast multitude arise, facing to the east, chanting our greetings to the morning sky. The yurts, a hundred thousand of them, and that of the great Qar Qarth drawn by a hundred oxen with room for a hundred within. Our encampments blanketed the steppe for as far as the eye could see.

  “And then we would ride, the wind in our hair, the thunder of a million hooves causing the earth to shake. Hunters sweeping far forward, bringing in game, the great wool-clad giants with tusks that could feed a thousand for a day.”

  He smiled, taking another drink.

  “I remember my first hunting eagle. I named him Bakgar after the God of the Westerly Wind. His cry would reach to the heavens. We’d range far ahead, he and I. Have you ever truly been alone on the steppes, my son?”

  Jurak shook his head, inwardly pleased that the wine had loosened the old one’s tongue, causing him to drop the deference, the titles, to call him son. He realized that Zartak was not even aware of the slip.

  “To be truly alone, the bowl of the blue heavens overhead, the great green sea beneath you, spring grass as high as your stirrups. When the god Bakgar sighed, the green sea shifted, rocking, the wind taking form as it touched the land. And the air. the smell, you know you were breathing the sweet breath of heaven.

  “And I’d raise my wrist, setting my own Bakgar loose, and with a great cry he’d circle upward, bright golden feathers rippling. Alone, so truly alone, and it was worth everything to be alive and to know that, to know the joy of a fleet horse, an eagle on your wrist, and the wind in your hair.”

  He lowered his head for a moment, lost in his dreams.

  “And you never knew the joy only the young can feel when they ride to war for the first time. Our umens would fill that green sea, ten thousand riding as one, turning as one, pennants snapping overhead, the great nargas sounding the charge.

  “My first charge, ah there was a moment. It was the year before I completed my first circling, not far from here in the land of the Nippon. We and the Merki. When we loosed our shafts ten thousand arrows blotted out the sun, the dark shadow of them racing like a storm cloud.”

  He shook his head and sighed.

  “Madness really. But we fought for different things then. The world was big enough for all of us to ride, to hunt, to have pasture. It was simply to match steel against steel and prove that we were still worthy of the blood of our ancestors and unafraid. It was not to the final death, to the slaughter of the young, the old, the bearers of young. No, just steel against steel. Not like this.” And he vaguely waved back toward the west and the front lines.

  “If you bested a champion, you took his faka, his glory, but would suffer him to live, even to feast him before sending him back to his yurt. That was as war should be.”

  He took another drink of wine.

  “But always there were the humans.”

  “You don’t call them cattle anymore,” Jurak said.

  Zartak laughed sadly.

  “You know I once had a pet. It was when I was a child, a female. In those days, among those of the blood of the royal lines it was common to give to a youth a human pet to serve as companion, a teacher of their languages, a slave to do the menial tasks.”

  He was silent for a moment.

  “Go on.”

  “Some, as they came to their first passions of youth, would become besotted by such a cattle female.”

  Jurak could not hide his disgust at the mere thought of it. It was a subject not spoken of, a dark infamy only whispered of, and punished brutally.

  “No, not in that sense did I care for her,” Zartak added, not even aware of his friend’s reaction.

  “Not in that sense?” Jurak asked cautiously.

  “Her name was Helena. She was of the tribe called the Greek Byzantens, a thousand or more leagues to the west. But I did love her.”

  Zartak shifted uncomfortably.

  “I think she genuinely cared for me, almost like a mother to a child. She was a gentle creature. I remember when I was not more than five years or so I was stricken with a fever that all but killed me. She sat by me day and night for nearly the passing of an entire moon.”

  “What of your mother?”

  “I never knew her. She died giving me life. My father never took another to his bed and died mourning her. Thus there was only Helena to tend to me.

  “She would tell me stories of her people, of human kings and princes of their old world, of a poet called Homer. She knew much of his great ballad by heart.”

  And for a moment Zartak drifted, speaking in an unknown tongue of House Atreides and black-hulled ships. The ancient song died away, and he took another drink.

  “You know the ritual of the naming day, the day a warrior is accepted into his unit of ten and finally takes the name he will carry for the rest of his life?”

  Jurak nodded, having seen it often enough since coming to this world.

  “One is expected to make a sacrifice, usually a horse”— he paused for a moment—“but also a cattle. My cousins had taunted me that I was too attached to my cattle pet. My father was dead by then, so it was my eldest uncle who on that morning decreed that Helena was to be the sacrifice.”

  He stopped again, finishing the rest of the wine sack. With a low grunt he threw it out of the yurt, reached back under the table without bothering to ask, drew out another sack and opened it.

  “Strange how this brew loosens the tongue to such foolishness.”

  “Go on,” Jurak said softly. “Tell me.”

  “So 1 went to my yurt. She had laid out my warrior’s garb, my first shirt of chain mail, the scimitar and bow of my father. I knew she was proud of me, even though I was of the Horde and she was merely a cattle. And she was wearing a plain white robe, as white as a morning cloud, the robe of a cattle sacrifice. She already knew.

  “I could not speak. She'smiled and said that today she would join her parents. We had slaughtered them years before, and yet she loved me. She went unafraid. I was the one who was afraid, as we walked to the circle where my family awaited.

  “We entered the circle. She hesitated at the sight of the stake she was supposed to be tied to. My uncle, a cruel one he was, had wood piled about it. He wanted the old forms to be observed, so she was to be burned alive and then devoured.”

  Zartak hesitated and looked away.

  “She turned and looked at me and whispered in her language. ‘If you loved me as I loved you, do it now. Please don’t let me burn.’”

  He stopped again.

  Jurak waited in silence.

  “‘He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside still waters.’”

  “What?”

  “The last words she said,” Zartak whispered. “It was a prayer of her people. She taught me to say it. She said her god taught it to her people, and my gods would hear it, too. When I was a cub we would say it together every night.

  “She began that prayer. I stepped behind her so she could not see the blade.”

  He paused again.

  “No. That’s a lie. Because I could not bear to look into her eyes. I killed her with a single blow before she finished the prayer. I did that so it would catch her unaware and those were her last words.

  “And so the feast of my naming day began. My cousins fell upon her body. I had lost face for my weakness, killing her thus, and I was taunted for years after that. I didn’t care. I knew what was in my heart even if they did not.”

  Zartak’s voice broke, and Jurak was unable to contain his surprise. Such a display of emotion before one not of your own blood was all but unknown.

  After several minutes Zartak regained his composure.

  “The drunken ramblings of a decrepit warrior,” Zartak announced self-consciously.

  “No, not at all.”

  “I knew then they had souls. That they were as good as us. Yes, I joined in the moon feasts and felt the passion of
the slaughter when after a long and hungry ride we fell upon a great city of theirs and one out of ten were culled out to feed us. I remember three circlings back when one of the cities on the far side of this world rebelled. It was somewhat the same as here; some humans had come through a portal in a ship. They had weapons of powder, men with black beards, blue uniforms, and a great ship flying a flag of red and blue and white. They did not have the skill of these Yankees, though, in the making of machines. But they did field a great army of humans armed with pikes and bows, following those flags and golden eagles as standards. We slaughtered all of them, millions, the feasting lasted for weeks before we rode on, and I did love it.

  “Yet always I was haunted by her.”

  “Your love of her?” Jurak asked, uncomfortable associating the word love with a human.

  “No. That was inside here.” He pointed to his stomach, the liver, where all feelings rested.

  “No. It was the knowledge of what they truly are. When the first humans came here our ancestors slaughtered them out of hand.”

  He hesitated for a moment. “And that was good.”

  “Why?”'

  “Our ancestors had reverted to barbarism, becoming little better than the cattle they slaughtered. And then came the horse and we—bred it to our size and the tribes started the Great Ride about the world. If only it had stayed thus, I would say that was good, too. But somewhere back then our ancestors decided not to slaughter all the humans, but to spread them out about the world instead. To place one of each of their tribes as a chief or king. Then, when we circled the world and returned in twenty years, there would be more of them.

  “We thought ourselves so wise, for we reasoned, let the humans do the labor. Let them raise food for us, let them fashion saddles, lay down vineyards, make the boats, rafts, and bridges so that we might cross the great rivers in our path. Let the humans do all things and in addition offer up their flesh as food.

  “We thought that would control their numbers, to harvest them as one harvests the great tusked beasts or the vast herds of the hump-backed bisons. So in that first circling of long ago there might be a village of a hundred humans by a river. Twenty years later two hundred and then by my time a city of a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand.

  “They are fertile, and we are not. Perhaps our blood is old, and theirs is young. I don’t know. But our numbers never seemed to increase; theirs did. Some in their wisdom urged that we harvest half, and at times we did, but then we would ride on and upon our return a generation later there’d be yet more.

  “They spilled out of the Portals of Light. Oh, never many, perhaps in an entire ride we’d discover one new tribe. Sometimes they were but a few dozen, more often a ship or two. I suspect that upon their world the old portals are lost beneath several different seas. We’d scatter them about or settle them in one place, tell them to labor, and move on. Of late, though, in the last ten or so circlings we should have realized that something was happening on their world that was not happening here.”

  “What?”

  “Their cunning, their skill with machines. That ship I told you of. I spoke once with the elder warrior of the Tugars who told me of a similar ship, filled with men wearing jackets of polished steel. The Tugars slaughtered them, of course, but we should have realized the threat and acted before it was too late. The Tugar elder also told me that near here there was a similar ship whose crew actually escaped and sailed south toward the ocean that circles the southern half of this world.

  “We should have realized then that we had to somehow change the balance between us.”

  “And do what?”

  “Either come to terms with them or slaughter them all.”

  “Terms? How?”

  “I know. I think it is impossible now. My cousins, all my people, not one in a thousand do I think contemplated who these humans truly were. They were cattle, they were food, they were slaves. None heard the beauty of their languages, their poetry, their songs.” Again his words lapsed into the ancient human tongue, speaking of the numbering of ships and the names of captains dead across three thousand years and the infinity of the universe.

  “It was far more, though. We have become”—he hesitated for a moment and then spat out the word—“parasites upon the flesh and minds of the humans.”

  Jurak stirred uncomfortably, started to voice an objection but Zartak waved his hand, motioning him to silence.

  “Think of it. Every weapon we carry, the clothing we wear, the food we eat, all of the new tools of war, none of it has been shaped by our hands. We do nothing but exist; it is they who have fashioned the world.

  “It has gone to the very soul.” Zartak sighed. “The division between us now. Imagine if the world was reversed, imagine if it was the humans who rode and who feasted upon our blood, who cracked our bones open to draw out the very marrow while we were still alive.”

  Jurak shivered at the thought. Impossible. The primal dread of being consumed, eaten alive, the fear that was even more dreadful than the fear of death filled him with darkness.

  “No, it could never be. Could it?” Jurak laughed coldly. “That gulf can never be crossed now,” Zartak continued. “Too much blood has been drawn for them ever to forgive us. For that matter our own people cannot imagine it any other way as well. Oh, I have whispered at times and been rebuffed when I suggested such thoughts when I was young. My cousins taunted me, accused me of an obscene love for my dead pet, so I learned to be silent. I learned to hide such thoughts and thus did I rise through command of ten, to a hundred, to a thousand, to ten thousand, to eldest of the clan of the white horse. Now as an ancient one though I find I am as free as a youth to speak again.”

  “And that is why I value you,” Jurak replied. He hesitated, looking at the Great Wheel, visible outside the open flaps of the yurt, wondering which out of all the millions of stars was his home world. He felt a cold shiver, a loneliness, and infinite sadness.

  “So you see no chance then of a change?” he finally whispered.

  “Go outside this yurt and shout for the west wind to go away.”

  Zartak sighed, then chuckled softly, the laughter sad, lonely.

  “No, we are both trapped in this war. The Yankees freed these humans and with that freedom the inner dread, the paralyzing fear of being eaten alive was replaced with a blind all-consuming rage. You saw with your own eyes what they can now do, even with their bare hands if they have the chance.”

  Jurak nodded, remembering the carnage of Roum, and along the Ebro, where the slaves had rebelled and escaped, literally tearing warriors limb from limb in their frenzy.

  “And now what?”

  Zartak looked up at him and smiled.

  “I’ll be gone before it is decided. Perhaps the last of you will come early to join me above, where again there will be the Endless Ride. I fear, son, that either you must kill all of them or they will kill all of us. It is that simple.”

  “Even though you loved one of them?”

  Zartak flinched.

  “A weakness of youth,” he fumbled.

  “No. Perhaps an insight?”

  Zartak sadly shook his head.

  “Don’t let it weaken you. This is not a time for weakness. Do you honestly think that after all we have done to them there could ever be peace, a place in this world for us and a place for them?”

  Jurak found that he was again wrestling with that thought. If this campaign was lost, as he feared more than once it would be, then what?

  “You’re wondering what will happen if we lose this war,” Zartak said. “This attack at Xi’an caught you completely off guard.”

  “Yes.”

  “It surprised me, too. I did not understand these flying machines. I did not ever think they could be used to transport hundreds of warriors across hundreds of leagues to fall upon our center of supply. Tell me, were such things done on your world?”

  Jurak sensed the slightest tone of rebuke in Zartak’s question.

/>   “Yes! But the airships there could carry a hundred in their bellies. And there would be hundreds of such ships in the sky at once, warriors leaping from them, floating to the ground under the umbrellas made of silk.”

  “Such a sight it must have been.”

  Jurak nodded.

  “The ships here, so primitive in comparison, I never considered that they would risk all of them. There cannot be more than three hundred of them in this attack.”

  “Joined by how many tens of thousands of Chin?”

  Jurak was silent. Damnation.

  “If you do not suppress this rebellion within the next day, two days at most, all is lost. You will have to flee east or south, south across the seas, for they will come after you.”

  “From all that I’ve heard of Keane, I wonder if he would if we did leave.”

  Zartak grunted.

  “I wonder about him as well. I do have the sense you know. And of Keane I sense much. But consider the rest of the world. Let word come to all the other humans of this world that we have been beaten, and they will rise up, remembering their dead across all these thousands of years. There is no compromise with that I fear.”

  Jurak slowly nodded in agreement.

  “I know. Perhaps we are alike in that, for I know if it was as you said, if it was they who rode and we who bowed, I would die to kill but one.”

  “See what we’ve created here?” Zartak laughed sadly. “I know.”

  “And now?”

  “They found the weak link. They’ve used their air machines to fly several hundred soldiers to Xi’an. The city is in chaos, rebellion, the last telegram before the line was cut said hundreds are being slaughtered, including females and cubs.”

  Zartak nodded.

  “A brilliant move,” Jurak whispered. “Damn all. I tried to consider every potential, every move and countermove. I knew if we went to the defensive and waited, we could build our forces up, train our troops, and even outproduce the Yankees. I knew if we held most of the territory of the Roum we could perhaps even drive a political wedge between the two states of their Republic, maybe even get them to mistrust and turn on each other.”