by Robert Adams
They found them quickly enough, and most died without waking on the sacks of straw which were barrack beds.
Squire Juan's final scream was drowned in a gurgle of his own blood, Sir Ali's backhand stroke nearly decapitating him. Don Pedro had his head and both arms buried in the doeskin pourpoint into which he was wriggling when the slim dagger blade went in under his left scapula and pierced his heart. Of all the garrison of the castillo, only the two busy cooks were spared and encouraged to continue their accustomed tasks, though tightly guarded by the hungry raiders the while.
When a single rider appeared at the southern gate, Sir Ali had the man speedily admitted. Within the courtyard, however, the horseman took but a single look at the strange men, the scattered corpses, and frantically reined about, to earn a brace of crossbow quarrels in the back, whereupon Sir Ali cursed; he had wanted the obvious messenger alive, and now he could only hope that they would send another to seek after the first.
From the walls of the castillo, it could be seen that all the town was aboil as the four galleons sailed in from the sea. Up around a gleaming-white building that was probably the palace of this grand duke, men and horses were assembling, weapons and armor flashed in the morning sun, while bugles blared and drums rolled and horses neighed over a continuous, though distance-dim and incomprehensible babble of human voices.
Down on the ships at the quays and wharves and anchorages, men scurried hither and yon, running up ensigns, it seemed, while others worked on deck guns—which could mean expectation of imminent combat or not. Sir Ali had no way of ascertaining this and could do nothing about it in any case, since no one of the archaic battery left mounted in the castillo pointed toward the harbor or the town, and the monster bombards were just too heavy to move to locations from which they would. Nor was Sir Ali at all sure that he would like to be the one to order men to try to serve and fire the ill-kept relics. All he was willing to do was to spike them all, then roll the balls and casks of powder out the embrasures to tumble down the cliff and so into the sea.
The second rider was more astute. He realized that something was wrong while still on the bridge, reined about, and was quarreled out of the saddle. The panicked horse galloped off toward the town, while the brace of galloglaiches dragged the still-twitching body into the castillo.
The third horseman did not arrive until the four galleons were already dropping anchor within the Gijon harbor basin. Arriving astride a frisky red-bay palfrey, wearing silver-washed parade armor and a sword with a gilded, bejeweled hilt and a matching dagger, he was exactly the stripe of Spanish nobleman that Sir Ali had earlier aped so successfully.
Drawing rein in the castillo courtyard—which had by then been circumspectly cleared of cadavers—and barely deigning to glance at a rank of galloglaiches now garbed in garrison clothing and equipment and bearing a miscellany of pole-arms and crossbows and arquebuses, the Spaniard glared at Sir Ali and demanded to see Don Pedro de Haro at once, adding that he came directly from the grand duke himself.
"Don Pedro is not to be seen by anyone," replied Sir Ali, adding, "He lies gravely ill in his quarters."
"Donkey turds!" snapped Don Sergio coldly. "Either dead drunk or hungover, you mean. And just who in seven hells are you?"
Sir Ali extended his leg in a courtly bow, a mocking smile on his dark face. "Don Ali ibn Hussain de Al-Munecar y de Castro de Castilla, at your service, Don . . . ?"
"Don Sergio Mario Felipe Umberto de la Torre de Fuentesauco y de Gata, Señor," the rider replied a little less stiffly, now that he knew himself to be addressing a fellow Castilian knight. "The fame of your casa is well-known, Señor, but why have I not seen you before? There are few enough of us genuine hidalgos de Castilla hereabouts, amongst this rabble of Catalonians and Basque sheep-fuckers."
Sir Ali thought it well to change the subject and did so: "What does his grace desire of me, Don Sergio?"
"Ah, yes, that matter. Don Ali, his grace dispatched me to tell you that it is past time for the salutes to be fired from the castillo in honor of our Roman visitors."
"Salutes from this castillo are now impossible, Don Sergio." Sir Ali grinned and added, "For the very good and sufficient reason that all those antique bombards have been thoroughly spiked and the powder and balls dumped down the cliff. Don Pedro is not really ill, nor yet drunk; he is dead, along with the rest of the garrison. The name I gave you was mostly an arrant lie told you with an abundance of joy in the telling. I actually am Essayed Ali ibn Hussain, a knight of Arabia, in service as herald to his grace, Sir Sebastian Foster, Duke of Norfolk, Markgraf von Velegrad, Earl of Rutland, Baron of Strathtyne, and Lord Commander of the Royal Horse of his majesty, Arthur III Tudor, King of England and Wales. You, Don Sergio, unless you are of the opinion that you can digest a half-dozen crossbow quarrels so early in the day, are my prisoner; give me your parole and you can keep your sword."
"But . . . but . . . but . . ." The red-faced, utterly flabbergasted Don Sergio could not seem to find words or get them out.
"We are come here," Sir Ali further enlightened him, "to burn your master's pitiful little armada where it floats and thus end his Crusade before it starts."
"But the Kingdom of England and Wales is at peace with the Kingdom of Catalonia and Leon!" Don Sergio finally found words.
"Just so," agreed Sir Ali mildly. "And this is a purely private action, mounted by my master against yours, nothing more."
Just then, from the harbor below, came the answer to Don Nasir's stated wish. All four galleons thundered forth four broadsides, sending red-hot shot from every gun that would bear into ships, docks, wharves, quays, warehouses, stacks of supplies, and dry-dock facilities. The crews reloaded fast and did it all again, continuing the horrific bombardment at point-blank range until all the waterfront was become one blazing and lifeless inferno along all three sides of the harbor basin of Gijon-port.
CHAPTER THE TENTH
Not bothering to summon a servant, the archbishop refilled Rupen's drinking vessel with his own hand, then said gently, "Mr. Ademian, if this recountal is become unpleasant to you, there is no reason to continue it, not today. I simply was trying to learn of your life and experiences so that I might judge how best we can fit you into this world and society. I began with you because you seem to be far more responsible and adaptable than those other men and women who were projected here with you."
"I'm sorry, Der Hal," answered Rupen, wiping at damp eyes with the hairy back of a hand that was become a little tremulous. "It was more than twenty years ago, but still it hurts. Maybe if I'd talked of it more over the years . . . ? But I didn't, couldn't, it was just too painful to me."
"My God, but I wish you'd let us know when you were coming into Richmond," said Boghos Panoshian, with evident feeling. "Mariya and I would sure have met your train, brought you out here, and told you what you had to know, what you would have learned sooner or later, but given you the facts a lot easier than you got them today. What an utterly rotten, traumatic thing to come home from a war to!"
"It's hard to believe, even with all I saw, all I've been told. Why, Boghos, why? Marge is . . . was . . . a bright, smart young woman, a former naval officer with a decent profession which, while it was not as lucrative as some others certainly offered a steady income and was highly respected by everyone. For her to have become in only two years a dope fiend, a whore, and a les . . . lesbian just seems completely unreal, some dark fantasy from the sick mind of a lunatic. How could it have happened? How could she have fallen so low so fast, Boghos?"
But Mariya answered him first. "Rupen, we—Boghos and I—hired an investigator about a year ago, shortly after Marge's first arrest for prostitution. . . ."
Listening to his sister, Rupen shuddered, the words—"arrest," "prostitution"—smashing into him like the bone-jarring blows of heavy cudgels. Marge, his Marge, sweet, pretty, blond Marge. His wife, the woman around whom he had woven all his lonely dreams for the nearly two years in Korea. How? Why? Had it be
en in some way his fault? What could he have done so far away?
"The lesbian thing apparently came first, when this Evelyn Mangold moved in to share your apartment with Marge. The Mangold creature had a record of abusing narcotics when she could get at them, and after she and Marge had become lovers—"
"But, dammit, Mariya," burst out Rupen in some heat, "Marge was never . . . that way! I was married to her, you know, lived with her for four damned years—you think I wouldn't have known a thing like that?"
"Probably not, Rupen," said Boghos dryly. "I discussed the whole matter, all that our investigator turned up, with one of my associates, Dr. Saul Fishbein, a neuropsychiatrist down at MCV Hospital. He says that not only can bisexuals be very cagey, cover their dual natures very cleverly and well, but that quite a few of them never realize that they are what they are until a situation arises which brings their aberrations to the surface. That might well have been the case with Marge, this Mangold woman being merely the catalyst."
"And all because they took me away into the goddamned army to fight a war that we weren't allowed to win, in the end," said Rupen bitterly. "Chalk up another one for the fucking politicians and the Commie-loving fellow travelers in the State Department!"
Mariya shifted in her chair and clasped her hands tightly, then said, "It may not have been just that way, Rupen. There . . . there were some . . . ahhh, rumors, years ago, during the war, on shipboard. The way I first wound up with Marge as a roommate was because her roommate moved out the day before I was logged in. Marge always said that it was a case of the other girl's disliking Armenians, and that particular nurse was very intolerant of any person who was not of pure-English descent, preferably born and bred in Boston, Massachusetts, which made her stories about Marge sound like just some more of her racism."
"Rupen, as you know, women hug and kiss each other normally, but Marge seemed always to be touching me, brushing against me, and once, when we had both come in very drunk from a dance in Norfolk, it . . . it went a bit farther than that. She was still in my bed when I woke up the next morning, too, though she always swore she had no memory of anything from shortly before we left that dance. But now, for over a year, now, I've wondered. . . ."
"The investigator's report states, Rupen, that after Marge and this Evelyn Mangold became lovers, Marge began to acquire drugs for her, then started using them herself, it appears. I even wrote her prescriptions before I started to become suspicious. It seems that when she finally had exhausted all legal means of laying her hands on drugs, she commenced to steal them from the hospital at which she then worked, and eventually she got caught at it. They declined to report it to the authorities or to prosecute, but they did fire her and quietly blackball her at every other facility in the area."
"She tried working private duty, nursing in patients' homes, for a while. It was during that period that she went through all of your savings buying drugs illegally. When that money was gone, she borrowed from your father, from me, from Mariya, from damned near everybody she knew and quite a few she didn't. She sold both your cars and everything else of any value, then she and this woman moved out of the apartment and into that place on Floyd Avenue. With her mind occupied entirely on ways to get more drugs, she was not able to do a very good job of nursing, of course; a number of patients let her go after thefts of small valuables and sums of money. Then she was apprehended trying to get a forged prescription filled and the State Board of Nursing lifted her license. It was shortly after that that she began to sell herself."
"And this, this Mangold woman," demanded Rupen, "she was whoring, too?"
"No." Boghos shook his head. "She apparently does no work of any kind. There's not even a record of her having a Social Security card. She's had two husbands that we know of. One was killed in the Pacific during the war. The other is in prison up north, serving a ninety-nine-year sentence for a murder he swore his wife actually committed, very grisly one, too, or so the investigator said."
"No, Rupen, her modus operandi seems to be to move in with a woman—there were at least three others before Marge—seduce her sexually, get her addicted to drug use, then live off her as long as she can keep her."
"Well, for the love of God, Boghos," burst out Rupen, "if you and Mariya knew all this a year ago, why didn't you do something about it? Why didn't you write and tell me about it, man? With a letter like that to show, I could probably have gotten the Red Cross on it, maybe gotten compassionate leave to come back here, even."
Mariya sighed, reached over, and laid her hand on Rupen's. "Don't you think we tried, my brother, my poor brother? But Marge had convinced herself that she was deeply, passionately in love with Evelyn Mangold, that she couldn't live without her. Boghos pulled every medical and political string he could get hold of to try to get her nursing license restored so that she might give up her new profession, but it developed that the board had discovered more and more heinous offenses than the forged prescription that she had perpetrated, and they wouldn't budge."
"Finally, all else failing, Boghos' attorney was instructed to offer the Mangold woman money on the condition that she leave the state permanently. She took the money, some thousands of dollars in cash, and even let herself be seen boarding a Greyhound bus . . . but she only stayed on it until she got out into Henrico County, then she took a local bus back into town."
"Boghos and I pondered writing to you, among other measures, but we at last agreed that Marge was just too far gone in drugs, perversion, and serious mental disorder for your presence here to do her or you any good. Anyway, there was continual talk of an impending cease-fire in the news and we both figured that you'd be back soon enough; nobody here had any idea that they'd drag that cease-fire business out for as long as they did."
"Boghos thought of getting Marge committed—to a private place, not Eastern State, Rupen—and he and his attorney did get her into Tucker's . . . for a little less than three weeks, then the Mangold woman went in there, told everyone that she was Marge's sister, and signed her out to go downtown shopping, and that was the last that anyone at Tucker's saw of either of them, of course."
Rupen cradled his face in his big, powerful hands, elbows on knees, his voice muffled, cracking slightly. "I'm sorry, Mariya, Brother Boghos, I should've known you both would do the best you could. Well, poor little Marge is at peace now, thank God. Now I have to see to it that that conniving harpy pays full measure for the life she corrupted, ruined, degraded, and finally took away."
The sack of Gijon-port, such of it as was not either blazing or heaps of smoldering ashes, was necessarily brief, for both Bass and Sir Paul Bigod were frantically anxious to be out of the deathtrap harbor, away from the rockbound coast and well out to sea before a guarda costa came sniffing along or some troops of better quality than the grand duke's "crusaders" marched over the surrounding hills, it being a certainty that numerous riders had gone out in every landward direction during the initial bombardment.
Had it been entirely up to him, Bass would have allowed no sack of any duration or description, but Sir Ali, Sir Liam, Sir Calum, and even Nugai pointed out that all of the soldiers, sailors, and noblemen expected one, eagerly anticipated an opportunity to get themselves a little loot and engage in a little casual rapine, and that to deny them, especially the half-savage galloglaiches, could easily breed trouble. Bass had had no option; he had acceded.
Sir Paul Bigod, like most people at most times in this world, had completely misunderstood the motives of the Duke of Norfolk, attributing it not to other-world squeamishness and hatred of bloodshed, but to a high degree of caution regarding the welfare of his ships. "Look you, your grace, four galleons, your carracks, and one flute are all that are in the harbor anyway, and these be ready to cut cables and beat out to sea with a minimum of work, should that prove needful. Any foeman that would make to block that channel would firstly have to deal with the galleon and the other, larger ships standing out just off it. Furthermore, all my sloops and smaller vessels—flyi
ng various ensigns, of course—are patrolling west and east from this place all a-watch for incipient trouble from the Spanishers, never you fear."
Bass did not fear; he would, indeed, have welcomed any diversion that would have brought the raiders back aboard the ships and then caused the ships to put out to sea. After a few quick, long-distance glimpses of what was going on in the steep streets, terraces, and plazas of the port town by broad daylight, he put away the binoculars and tried to find other things to occupy his hands and mind, but nothing seemed to work.
Locked in his flagship cabin, lest his squires or servants see what he was about and horrifiedly relieve this high nobleman of the inappropriate manual labor of burnishing a breastplate, he tried to think out the matter of the sack and his feelings on the subject.
"In my world, most of the killing and maiming in formal warfare had been placed on a long-distance, completely impersonal level. Since it was so damned seldom that flyers or artillerymen ever got a close look at the people they were killing and wounding, the making of war had become a job very much like any peacetime, civilian activity for them—hard work, sometimes, and not always done under ideal conditions, in ideal surroundings, but virtually bloodless."
"Even the men in infantry or armored units often did their work at long range, directing their fire—rifle, machine gun, rocket, mortar, recoilless rifle, and so on—toward places where they had been told there were groupings of enemies, not toward men they could actually see."
"But warfare here, in this world, is bloody and savage and very, very personal and done at such close range that a slain man's lifeblood often splashes onto the man who kills him. Now in the heat of battle, when it's your life or his and your life is clearly on the line, natural instincts take over, invariably, and you do what you have to do, anything that you have to do to make damned sure that he dies for his beliefs instead of you for yours. And you do what you do then instinctively, without regrets."