by Robert Adams
"Is anyone receiving my transmission?" asked Milo yet again, hoping that he was, after so long, speaking a twentieth-century brand of English. Move the dial another tiny incremental distance. "Is anyone receiving my transmission?"
When he was just about to pack it in for that day, had decided to try later, a distant voice replied, "... is the ... dy Center Base Communications. Who is calling, please?"
"Where's Sternheimer?" demanded Milo coldly.
"I say again," said the voice, "who is calling? I cannot summon Dr. Sternheimer without telling him who is calling."
"All right, boyo, tell him it's Milo Moray. Tell him I've fallen heir to another of his infernal transceivers, and with any luck, I'll shortly have the vampire that goes with it, too."
Placing the flat of his palm over the face of the condenser microphone, he said in current Merikan,
"Tomos, be a good lad and fetch our wine in here. This may take a while, and talking is often dry work."
But by the time he had the goblet in his hand, the same voice came back on, saying, "Mr. Moray? Mr. Moray, are you still on the air?"
"I'm here," growled Milo. "Where's Sternheimer?"
"Dr. Sternheimer is at ... another location, just now, but he will be back within the week. Dr. von Sandlandt, his deputy, is on hand here, however; would you speak with her?"
Milo shrugged. "Why not? Put the lady on."
Dr. Ingebord von Sandlandt proved, once Milo had shrewdly brought her to a sufficient pitch of anger, a virtual gold mine of information. Hundreds of years of dealing with men and woman had imparted to him the skills necessary to play her like a game fish and extract nugget after precious nugget before he was done. After refusing her offer of "hospitality" as flatly and profanely as he had refused Sternheimer's similar offer years before, he had promised imminent destruction of the transceiver and power unit, then had abruptly broken off the connection, turned off the radio and disconnected the power cable for fear that the Center might be still in possession of arcane equipment capable of tracking back along the beam and locating his position, about which he had been both nebulous and misleading.
"Tomos," he said to his companion, "please send a rider into the city to summon Grahvos and Mahvros . . . oh, and Sitheeros, too. And send for Portos, as well. I have learned some things from that woman down in the so-called Witch Kingdom that I think you all should hear."
"Gentlemen," said Milo to the assembled thoheeksee he had had summoned, "that which the folk of this land and others call the Witch Kingdom is no such thing. It is, rather, an unnatural survival of a group of men and women from the world of more than seven centuries ago. Men and women who, just prior to the death of that elder world, had learned how to transfer their minds from their own, aging bodies to younger, vibrant, healthy bodies and thus prolong their minds' lives through what is, in essence, human sacrifice. In a very real sense, they are an aggregation of vampires.
"Armed with devices and knowledge of that older, much more sophisticated civilization, they have for long centuries preyed upon the descendants of true survivors of the long-ago holocausts and plagues that so nearly wiped the races of mankind from off the face of this earth, but there is nothing of the occult or of true magic in their bags of tricks, only mechanical devices and knowledge of how to make use of those devices and use some of them to help in making more of them.
"It is their aspiration to own and strictly rule all of the continent of which their swamps and this land are parts, and they are aware that in order to fulfill this aspiration, they must somehow, in some manner, keep the land divided into tiny, weak, warring states. What you have done in your homeland and what I am doing frustrates their sinister plans. Therefore, something over two years ago, one of these creatures forced her ancient, evil mind into the body of a very attractive young Ehleen and, using the name of Ilios, formed an attachment with your Grand Strahteegos Thoheeks Pahvlos, who then, as you know, was one of the most powerful men in all of your Consolidated Thoheekseeahnee, both in a civil and a military sense.
"Being fully aware that, was she to destroy the adhesion of the thoheekseeahnee and thus the state, she first must wreck the strong army, she set to work with her centuries of wiles upon an aged man in the beginning of his dotage. And you all know far better than could I just what horrors she used him to accomplish. It was a truly devilish scheme, and had he not died when he did, she might well have gained a complete success. Also, she might just have managed to latch on to some other relatively powerful man and tried to continue her dangerous mischief, had she not chanced to be so injured as to feel that she must abruptly leave Mehseepolis and hurriedly seek out things like herself, lest the body she inhabited die and she with it."
That had not been exactly how Dr. Inge von Sandlandt had said it to Milo, of course. "That damned motherfucker of a Greek bastard, that one called Portos, he's a monster, an animal—big as a frigging house, strong as an ox and hairy as a goddam ape! Mr. Moray, that boy was fourteen when I took over, and though the body was nearly seventeen when all this happened, I doubt that it weighed more than fifty-five kilos. There was absolutely no reason for that pig to beat that little body so badly that he knocked loose teeth, cracked the left ramus, broke three ribs and penetrated a lung, and lashed it so ferociously with a fucking sword-belt that it could hardly walk.
"Had it not been for my radio, that body would have been dead with me still trapped within it long before I could have reached our most northerly permanent outpost. Even as it was, with one of the copters waiting for me at a rendezvous point at the limit of its round-trip range, it was a very near thing. Bare seconds after I had transferred into a new body, that of that boy was dead of peritonitis resulting from a ruptured rectum.
"Mr. Moray, I was . . . am ... a medical doctor, but in my more than seven centuries of life and training and practice, I never before had seen a natural endowment like that bastard has. Penises that size should, in the natural course of things, be hung on horses' bellies, not the crotches of humans."
"Portos buggered your then-body, eh?" said Milo, laughter clear in his voice.
"Gefühlloser idiot!" the woman had raged at him. "You think it amusing, do you, du Zotig?"
"Well," Milo had chuckled then, "within that body, you had been playing the part of a pooeesos, a Schwuler, for two years, by that time, had you not?" He had chuckled again and, with laughter clear in his voice, had added, "You knew that Portos was an Ehleen, you vampire bitch, yet you chose to turn your back on him. Now you know precisely why it is bad policy to turn your back on an Ehleen.
"You did at least remember to relax and enjoy it, I hope?"
And then, her scream of pure rage had nearly deafened him.
Chapter X
Rikos Laskos was ushered into the mam room of the suite by one of Milo's personal guardsmen. When the door had closed firmly behind him, he said aloud, "Guten Tag, Milo Moray. I parted from you last in Nebraska ... or was it Kansas? Ach, das ist schon lang her! Were my notebooks of any value to you and our people, then?"
Milo arose, then, to just stand for a long moment, wide-eyed. "Is it really you, then, Dr. Clarence Bookerman?" he asked in English of seven centuries before. "Where have you been all these hundreds of years?"
Laskos walked across to the sideboard and, after sniffing of the contents of several decanters, chose and poured for himself a small goblet of a powerful brandy. Warming the goblet between his two palms and sniffing appreciatively at the bouquet of the liquor thus freed, he answered, "Why, where our kind are for too much of the time: on the move, of course, putting as much distance as possible between the spot wherein we dwelt happily for a few, short years and the spot wherein we next will try to carve ourselves out a new, hopefully happy, niche for a few more years . . . until people begin to take too much notice of the bald fact that we do not age as do normal folk."
"Where did you go when you left us there in central Kansas?" Milo demanded. "Most of the people who had been y
ours finally decided that you had felt death approaching and either had ridden off to die alone or to die near to the grave of your wife."
"It surprises me that you remember so much and so clearly from so very long ago, my friend," said Laskos-Bookerman, taking a seat, still cradling his brandy goblet. "My own recall is no longer so good; too many, many newer memories superimposed over the older ones must tend to cloud them, block them, make them of difficulty to drag up from the depths into which they have been pushed and immured.
"I cannot remember just where I went after I left you and those would-be nomads. I do remember that at some time during that period I dwelt for a long time alone in a well-preserved, well-stocked and still eminently livable complex I found carved into a mountain, out there in the Rockies. So long did I there remain that all of my beasts either died of old age or wandered off, and when to move on and find the humans for whose living companionship I hungered I did, it had to be on foot until at last I was able to acquire a scrubby little mount.
"Across the continent, slowly I wandered for years, seeing the natural increase of the survivors of near extirpation, Milo, and also observing the genesis of new societies, civilizations, cultures arising, phoenix-like, out of the dust and ashes of the old. Then, at last, I arrived upon the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. Through great good fortune, the rare kindness of fickle fate, I found a beautiful and incredibly well-preserved miniature version of a sleek ocean-racing boat. She was so beautifully designed and fitted that but a single man, if knowledgeable and active and strong, could easily sail her. In addition to her sails, she was equipped with an auxiliary diesel engine, one of sufficient power to give her decent headway in almost any circumstance.
"I now disrecall what her previous owner had called her, but I rechristened her Woge Stute after I had completely refurbished her for a long voyage. I cherished a desire to once more, after so very many long years, see again my Heimat, the land of my long-ago birth, and I had faith that this fine, friendly vessel would safely bear me to my longed-for destination.
"Of course, in those times, it took me actual years to hunt out or make all that was needful, but then the one thing for which our rare kind never lacks is time. Nicht wahr? Let it suffice to say that at last I felt everything to be in readiness and I put my treasure of a boat back into the water. But of course, contemplating a voyage of such length, the mere fact that she floated and seemed sound could not be enough, so I undertook several trial voyages of lesser and greater distances, each of them teaching and reteaching me things which I had forgotten over the years and centuries I had been almost landbound.
"Finally, on a late-April day, I left the coast of what had once been called the State of Maine behind me and pointed my darling's prow northeast, toward the continent of Europe. At last I was bound for heiligen Deutschland, mein Heimatland."
"My God, Clarence," exclaimed Milo, "weren't you at least daunted to consider such a risk? You can drown, you know. My original coruler of Kehnooryos Ehlahs, Demetrios, died in just that way some years back; was pushed off a bridge in the middle of a battle, in full armor, and with a death-wounded war-horse on top of him, to boot. We found his helm on the bed of the river and nearby a cracked skull that might or might not've been his, too. But no man has ever seen or heard of him, since."
"Naturally, I was afraid, Milo," replied the guest, "just as I was always afraid when the air raids took place during the Second World War, in Berlin. There is at least that much of true, normal humanity in my makeup. But just as beasts and birds and eels and salmon must return to their natal grounds or waters, regardless of obstacles or distances or swarming predators, I was consumed with an irresistible urge to once more see as many of the sights of my ancient youth as still remained in the hills and deep, silent valleys and dark forests that nurtured me of old. Cannot you understand that, my old friend, Milo?"
The High Lord of the Confederation of Eastern Peoples sighed. "Of course I do, Clarence. I know the feeling, believe me. Although I've never been able to remember any of my life prior to about 1937 A.D., still do I often desire to return to places where once I was happy for some years. For instance, although I have been only something like a century removed from the plains and prairies, I often must suppress an itching urge to just saddle a horse and ride west until I once more am where I lived for so very long. So, yes, I do understand, fully, just what drove you to take such hellish risks on the open sea, alone."
"It was a terrible voyage, Milo," said Bookerman-Laskos. "I had, I discovered, chosen a bad time of year for that northerly route, for it was spawning-time for icebergs. After not a few very near-disasters, I reset my course farther south, only to suffer through storm after storm, raising waves that often overtopped my masthead and cost me much of my precious diesel fuel to maintain headway and to keep the bilge pumps going that I not be swamped.
"Those storms it was drove me so far south that my first landfall was not Ireland or England as I had expected but, rather, France, in the Bay of Biscay I was standing in to some tiny, nameless Gascon port, when three craft about the size of whaleboats came rowing out toward me, fast as the crews could row.
"Some sixth or seventh sense gave me warning, and I fixed my set of big binoculars upon those boats while still they were fairly far distant. What I saw through the glasses was not at all reassuring to a sea-weary mariner. All of the men were armed to the teeth, though mostly with a vast assortment of edge-weapons. Nor were their physical appearances an improvement— all looking to be hairy, dirty and most brutish, though strong. So I threw over the rudder and retrimmed the sails, determined to put as many nautical miles as was possible between me and such an aggregation, and I was doing just that when, abruptly, the wind died to almost nothing and, with a hoarse, bellowing chorus of triumph, the rowers came onward, increasing their already-fast beat.
"That was when I repaired briefly belowdeck and returned with my Mannlicher rifle and its carefully hoarded store of cartridges, a Maschinenpistole for closer-range work, and two pistols, a saber and a hefty dirk for hand-to-hand, if it came to that.
"I was lucky enough to drop all three steersmen with five shots of the rifle. The next five dropped two replacement steersmen and two oarsmen, these last from out the lead boat, but the boat with still a steersman came on nonetheless, despite my deadly marksmanship, until it was less than twenty-five meters distant. At that, I laid aside the Mannlicher, took up the Automatisch and slew them all—rowers, steersman and passengers, alike. At the sound of the weapon, the sight of what I had done to the men in the lead boat, the other two swung about as one and rowed back toward their distant port at some speed.
"I kept watch lest they return until, just a little before sunset, I was blessed with a fresh breeze and was able to sail far upon it before heaving out the anchors and going below for badly needed sleep.
"While searching for other things, mostly things of a nautical nature in Maine, I had lucked across a store of smokeless powders, primers and even some boxes of unprimed brass cases and factory-cast bullets in the exact caliber of my Mannlicher—8 x 57mm. In late morning of the next day, once more becalmed off the southern coast of Brittany, I was engaged in reloading the rifle cartridges that I had had to fire at the Gascons when I once more heard the distinctive creak and thump of oarlocks approaching.
"I emerged, well armed you must believe, Milo, onto the deck to see with surprise that a double-masted schooner lay rocking in the swell some two hundred meters out from my vessel, and between us, a small boat was being rowed toward me—six oarsmen and a steersman, plus two other men. The glasses showed me that none of the men, neither in the boat nor on the deck of the schooner, looked so scruffy as had the lot off the coast of Gascony. Their clothing looked to be at least clean, and their dress was close enough alike that it might be a uniform of some type, I thought.
"Two of the men in the boat wore sidearms—heavy cutlasses and short daggers or dirks—but none of the others bore anything of a more
threatening nature than belt knives of fifteen centimeters or so in the blades. Looking at the schooner, I could see at least a dozen of what looked amazingly like swivel-guns mounted along her rails, men standing beside them with coils of smoking slowmatch in their hands. Her flag was unclear, despite my binoculars, being mostly of a faded red and rusty black, insofar as I could determine.
"Some thirty meters off my port bow, the small boat heaved to and one of the men stood up in the stern and began to bespeak me through a leather trumpet! I was expecting the Breton dialect of French, and it took me a moment to realize that the language he was using was a very atrocious and thoroughly ungrammatical form of Russian. Recognizing his thick accent after a few seconds, I took up my own trumpet and asked him how long he was out from Hamburg. He was obviously startled to hear the good, Frisian dialect, but he became much friendlier, and, after exchanging a few more words, I agreed to allow him and one more to come aboard, but the boat to stand well out from my vessel when once those two had been put aboard, and they all complied with my orders.
"Milo, my friend, fortune assuredly was sailing with me on that day. The schooner, Erika, was an armed merchantman out of the Independent Aristocratic Republic of Hamburg. Hamburg was, I was soon to learn, one of the very few large German cities not seriously damaged in the brief exchange of missiles or the drive of Russian forces across Western Europe which followed.
"After breaking a few fangs on Switzerland, the forces of the Bear had bypassed it to sweep on into and through the vaunted but not at all effective French forces, then up through the Low Countries, whose tiny armies did not even try to resist. The German Federal Republic, however, though beset on every hand, still was not only holding its own but had, in certain sectors, begun to actually push the Russians and their satellite armies back, when the Great Dyings began to more than decimate both aggressors and defenders, impartially. The sole missile that came down in Hamburg was launched, surely from beneath the North Sea, very late in the game and in any case failed to explode, Gott sei dank.