Under the Yoke

by S. M. Stirling

  "Drunk?" the bossboy asked. Short and dark and thin, with a long willow-switch in his hand. He prodded at Jean with it, as the Frenchman bent over and leaned his hands on his knees, rasping for air. "You drunk? You got drink with you? Our party's not until Wednesday. Nobody here but Masters and the wenches to pleasure them, that bastard Arab fieldboss posted me here where I can listen and do nothing."

  "Vashon," Jean wheezed.

  "What? What you say, boy? You belong who? Who your master?"

  "Vashon, Master Vashon, Strategos Vashon, I have news, now, hurry."

  "The greencoat?" Even in darkness Jean could see the fear on the serf foreman's face, the little start of recoil; he stood up, heartened. Even the Master's name was a thing of power. "Third door, he have wenches in there." The switch trembled as it pointed. "You lie, he kill you. Not Erast's business."

  Jean walked forward, stumbling, pushed through the heavy flap, into the dimlit shadows. He could see the Master's face, at first he thought it was floating, all amid a froth of feathers and giant wings and the limp head of a great golden swan that lay and stared at him with eyes of tourmaline. Then his brain made sense of the pattern of line and movement before him; Vashon was on a woman, kneeling with her legs over his shoulders, embracing another who leaned back from her position astride the first's head. The Frenchman's mouth dropped open; the women were darkly beautiful, lithe as cats, the Master a study in power, his skin rippling, bunching, the whole human pyramid shaking with the power of his thrusts. There was another clicking behind his eyes and Jean fell to his knees, a vague wash of awe and terror and worship submerging consciousness.

  "Who the Eblis—" Vashon's roar cut off, and Jean's eyes jerked open. Only seconds could have passed, for the Master was just rising. His green eyes were like jewels in the gloom, narrowed as he recognized the double agent, came to stand before him like a squat minotaur statue gleaming with sweat and fluids.

  "Jean," he said. The voice was soothing, deep, all that Jean remembered from— whitenoisenothoughtnothought

  "Master," he said, a choking in his voice. "Master."

  "I am very pleased with you, Jean," the voice said, and the serf felt an uprushing of joy. "Now, tell me. Tell me everything."

  A moment to marshal his thoughts. They seemed so clear, once again, as if the noise in his head and the shaking were all gone. He is strong, He bears the burdens of my sins, Jean thought, and began, rapid and precise:

  "At the cave to the north, Master. Three of us. Here, the American who calls himself Kenston, the nun, the Boche; there is a box of the poison dust, and…"

  Afterward nothing could bother him, not the shouting or the noises or the shots, the darkness or the cramping of his muscles as he knelt, nor the whimpers of uncomprehending terror from the dancers, who clung together and stared at him with white rims around their eyes. His strong Lord was pleased with him, and all was well.

  Tanya heard the distance-muffled shots a dozen meters before the stairwell entrance. She took the stairs in a rush and flipped the gun into her left hand, leading with it as she went up the steep spiral treads in a silent crouching bound. The open door of the armory drew her in like a magnet, coming up in a knee-roll and quartering the empty room. Nothing, racked weapons and drained beer-bottles beside a cooler and an open window… she darted over, noticing the fresh blood trail without focusing on it. All her attention was out on the slate roof, on the figures at the far end of it, over a hundred meters, impossible distance with the snub-nosed toy she carried. A careful brace of the elbows against the windowsill, and all but one of them were gone, squeeze—Crack-crack-crack, and did he stagger or was that a wish and the distance and the starlight? No time, she thought, spinning back to the stairwell. No time for pursuit, she couldn't go haring off on her own. No telling how many there were, either. The stairs above the armory were wet, slow congealing trickles that were an old story to her. The astonishing amount of blood a human body carries and the swiftness with which it can escape through massive wound trauma as the heart itself shoots the pulse of life out to scatter and cool.

  Jules Lebrun sat before the ruined equipment, watching it spark and refusing to turn. Even when he heard the pistol snap below, the light tick… tick… sound of bootsoles pulling free of what coated the floor stones outside. Instead his lips moved; surprising himself with the first genuine prayers since he had been an earnest middle-class chorister in Paris, all those years ago. Prayers for another.

  "Ah, Tom," he heard Tanya's voice say behind him. The feet moved, to the dead girl's side. "Yasmin, sweetlin'. I should…"

  They stopped behind him, and he waited for the bullet; wondering whether he would hear the click of the action first, and at how the pains in his chest seemed farther away, almost unimportant.

  Even then the small hairs along his spine seemed to crawl and struggle to stand erect when he heard her voice. "Well, well, what have we heah?"

  "A man who would rather die than be a slave," he said quietly, proud of the fact that his voice did not quaver.

  "No." The word was calm and even, but suddenly a hand spun him around and wrenched him upright with a force that jerked his limbs loose as a puppet's. The pistol was under his chin as Tanya held him off the ground, his eyes level with her own. She spoke, and now the killing was naked in the guttural snarl:

  "No. That choice yo' made three years ago, Lebrun, it's too late. So what we have heah is a fuckin' rabid mad dog, that turned on its owners, an' now will be put down like one."

  There was a faint sound from the Janissary, a mixture of grunt and sigh. Lebrun felt himself thrown backward over the desk and against the dials and hanging severed wires of the radio, felt them gouge into his back. The pistol remained unwavering on his face as she knelt beside the man who was incredibly not quite dead.

  "Yas… min?" Tom said in a breathy whisper. His head had fallen turned away from her; Tanya looked up at the corpse, rested her free hand on his forehead, leaned close and spoke with clear conviction as the man's eyes wandered unseeing.

  "She goin' be fine, Tom. Hurt, but not bad."

  Another sigh, and a catch in the faint breathing. The next words were fainter still, almost a suggestion: "Reportin's ordered… suh."

  Tanya closed the lids with thumb and forefinger, rose, and gripped Lebrun by the back of the neck, until he could hear the tooth-grating sound of protesting vertebrae through the bones of his skull.

  "No," she said. "Not quite like a dog; even at the risk of a few seconds, wouldn't be fittin'. We were discussin' what we have?" Suddenly she pulled him over to Yasmin's body in a slithering rush that sent him banging and twisting against unseen hard objects as they passed. The man found his face pushed down to within inches of the dead girl's.

  "What we had here," she said, "was Yasmin. A pretty, happy little wench, who loved music an' babies an' wanted most of all never to hurt anyone, anyone at all. What we have now is fuckin' dogmeat."

  Another rush, over to the Janissary's body. Again the thrust nose to nose with the dead flesh. "What we have here, is a brave man an' a good soldier who died loyal to his salt. Who should have died thirty years from now, in his sleep, surrounded by grandchildren."

  She spun him around, tapping the pistol-barrel against the bridge of his nose. "An' what we have here—here— here is the last thing yo'll ever see, yo' piece of vomit."

  "Please," Solange said.

  Tanya's head jerked around so quickly that her hair lashed across Lebrun's eyes before he could blink them closed, starring them with tears. His daughter was standing in the doorway, staring at the bodies with the backs of her hands pressed to her mouth.

  "Oh, Poppa, what have you done?" she mumbled. Then her hands dropped, and she walked to the Draka. "Please," she said again, knelt. Pressed her cheek to her owner's foot. "It is your right, it is your right, we are yours… but he is my father, I beg, please."

  "No," Lebrun said, and looked up into the Draka's eyes. She must know, know I am dying, he thought. S
he smiled.

  "I give yo' life, on her plea," she said. "Solange… Solange! He'll be out fo' a couple of hours, tie him up and then go back to my room and wait." Her hand held his head while the pistol came down with precisely calculated force.

  Ah, the peace and quiet of the country, Andrew von Shrakenberg thought. The leaves of the vineyard rustled as he strolled down the rows, enjoying the cool contrast of the air and soil still carrying fragments of the day's heat. Am I being ironic, or not? It was certainly more peaceful than the pavilion, now mostly occupied by the noises of vigorous fornication. Fresher, too, dew-damp leaves and turned earth.

  Which is not displeasing in itself, but not conducive to thought either, he mused. Perhaps it was time to take his sister's advice and settle down. He looked up at the stars, smiling and remembering the night when he had first seen them with depth, not as lights in a dome but as tiny fires suspended in infinite space, feeling an echo of that elating, terrifying rush of vertigo. Wondering if somewhere out among the frosted scattering of light something was looking skyward at him.

  And to them, all our loves and hates, wars and passions are so insignificant that they can't be seen, not even as a shadow on the sun.

  "Jean? Is that you?" a voice said. French, accented… a woman's voice.

  Peace held his mind in its embrace a moment longer. "No," he said, chuckling. "But if it's a man yo' lookin' fo', wench, I'm willin' to volunteer."

  Starlight glittered on the blade of the knife as it drove toward his belly.

  Smack. The edge of his left palm hit her wrist, and he felt the familiar jolt as the small bones of the joint crushed under an impact that would have broken pine boards. It was the measure of his bewilderment that his follow-through was completely automatic, a strike upward with the heel of his right hand that sent the woman flipping back with her nasal bone driven into her brain and neck snapped. The knife flew off, tinkling, but his fingers touched the piano wire garrote coiled within her belt before the body stopped twitching.

  He stood, and the first of the vehicles blew with a huge muffled thump that struck his face like a soft warm hand. Light blossomed beyond the line of trees that screened the vehicle park, and explosions followed like a string of giant fuzz-edged firecrackers.

  "I think," he said quietly to himself, "that a serious mistake has been made." Turning, he drove for the laneway at a steady loping run.

  There was a bristle of guns under the arched entranceway to the central court of Chateau Retour. They lowered as the figure approaching halted and grunted out her name.

  "Tanya," she said, shifting the body to a more comfortable fireman's carry over her shoulders, then dropping it in the midst of the crowd. "This one's necknumber was dye, not tattooin'."

  The face sprawled upright as the body rolled, a small black hole between its brows. Tanya stretched, looked around, estimating numbers and weapons. Sixteen Draka, pistols, three submachine guns, two battle-shotguns, two assault-rifles. More in the armory, of course… Five armed serfs who would do to stand guard. The scouts had all reported back, and there was no sign of bushman activity beyond the one small band. Which is enough, she thought sourly.

  "Oerbach," Vachon was saying, "by Loki and the soul of the White Christ, Oerbach.' He looked up at her. "Congratulations." Back down at the body, and a murmur. "Because yo' may have just saved me from the Aral Sea."

  "Dumb luck," she replied. "Hundred meters with a Tolgren, pure fluke." To her husband. "Situation?"

  'Transport gone," he said calmly. "Power out. Communication out. Runners to the neighbors." Draka runners, nearly as fast as horses, but still a half hour there, more time to organize, transit time back… three quarters of an hour to an hour. "Children, sick an' bearin' mothers down on the yacht, Uncle Karl presidin'." A weight lifted from the back of her neck, a thing she had not been conscious of until that moment.

  "Information from the Strategos here," Edward went on. "Three bushmen from Lyon, one a double who reported in to warn us. Two mo'—"

  Andrew interrupted: "One, if the second was a woman with a knife," he said bluntly. "She's fertilizin' yo' vineyard, sister."

  "One mo' up at the winery, with the Yankee callin' hisself Kenston, an' the wenches Chantal an' Marya. Yankee plane comin' in, soon."

  "And many, many kilograms of plutonium oxide," Andrew said.

  "Bad?" Tanya said, as a fist clenched under her gut. She had seen the fallout-victim wards, the ones caught in the plume from the Ruhr strikes toward the end of the war. An image welled up in her mind, Cudrun, Tim, the newborns, their ulcerated skins sloughing away—

  "The radiation isn't that severe," Vashon began.

  "It doesn't have to be," Andrew cut in decisively. "Garbage is so toxic chemically yo' don't have time to die of the radiation sickness an' cancer that would kill yo' in days to weeks. It's worse than nerve gas, submicroscopic particles deadly almost immediately, the amount they've got could kill everythin' within light-artillery range of here, or worse. Dependin' on how it's scattered." He jerked his head toward the kilometer: distant glow of the vehicle park. "We know they've got explosive, and imagine how an updraft like that would scatter a finely divided powder?"

  "Shitfire." Hushed awe in the word.

  A thick silence fell. "We've got to attack," someone said.

  "Sholy do! And quick. Befo' they can lose that stuff."

  Tanya held up her hand, and silence fell. This was her land, and Draka were soldiers, they understood the need for teamwork down in their bones. She looked around, at steel and fugitive gleams from eyes and teeth.

  "We can't just roll over them," she said slowly. "We may have to talk them out."

  "No!" That was Vashon. "The Race doesn't back down from a threat! We take that plutonium back, and—"

  Tanya nodded, and there was a multiple click and rattle. Vashon froze as the cold muzzles of weapons touched lightly on his skin. She walked close, held her face inches from his.

  "Strategos… let us say, I'm not very impressed with the quality of yo' security work. Seein' as the position we're in."

  Someone behind him spoke. "The hell we don't back down from threats, how do yo' think we got this far, by bein' bull-stupid like so yo?'

  Another: "It's our land and children, Vashon. I think the von Shrakenbergs are senior here… Hell, we are the Race."

  Tanya continued, never taking her eyes from the man's. "Nobody here will do anythin' prejudicial to the interests of the Race or the State," she said. "Andrew, run it down fo' me."

  "Bad if"—he kicked Oerbach's body—"had gotten away to the Yankees; he is, was, a genuine thinker, an experimenter an' theoretician in one. Unfortunate if they were to get his research to date, but no disaster, we've got it too. Mildly unfortunate to let them have the plutonium, it's rare an' expensive, but still just materiel."

  Tanya nodded. "Against which we have to balance risk to the lives of two-score members of the Race. We're not a numerous people, Strategos; never start imaginin' yo' can spend our lives the way yo' might do serfs. That's not the way we've operated, ever." A pause. "I think it might be bettah if somebody else took care of this mastah's gun; the gleam in his eyes is a touch too fanatical fo' my taste." Hands reached out. Green eyes met gray, nodded. There would be feud, but not now.

  Tanya looked around. "Yo', Sofie. Down to the dock an' tell Karl to cast off with the kids, downstream as fast as he can an' not run aground. The rest of yo'… follow me."

  They turned and ran toward the north, to the caves, toward the waiting poison.

  "No, no, no!" Kustaa said, pounding his fist into the turf.

  "He is with God," Marya said quietly. They were resting in the shadow of one of the disabled Draka aircraft, with the winking rectangle of the landing strip stretching away.

  "That isn't going to do any good to the fucking Taos Weapons Research Lab!" Kustaa shouted, then mumbled apology as pain lanced through his wounds.

  Marya examined them again, frowning; there had been bandages, io
dine, sulfa powder in the aircraft first-aid kit, she had cleaned and bound as best she could, but he needed stitching and plasma, and complete bed-rest. Instead he had insisted on a stimulant, and he was right, but it made it so difficult for him to lie still. "Rest, Frederick. We have done what human hands can do, the rest is with God."

  Her eyes went doubtfully to the steel box. It had been transformed into a lumpy gray mass by the ten kilos of plastique they had wrapped around it. The batteries and improvised switch rested atop it, wires spindling down to the detonator. Such a simple thing, she thought with a shiver. Their insurance. A deadman swich, so just a name. Grip, so. Press down sharply and now you must keep pressing or the contact will be made, contact, current through the detonator, detonator explodes, rapid-propagating shock wave provokes sympathetic reaction in the plastique.

  And all this dies, she thought, looking around at the night countryside with another shudder.Like wrath of God upon the cities of the plain, only this wrath is man's. It all dies, the beasts and the humans, innocent and guilty, fathers and mothers and babes in arms for leagues around.

  She signed herself, knelt by the box and began to pray; first seeking the intercession of the Saints, that they might stand between the her and the terrible necessities that God seemed to demand of her. Then asking mercy of Mary, the Mother that was the pattern of all mothers, human flesh united in nine months' inconceivable communion with the Word. Then at last to the heart of Mystery. The words ordained, and then her own.

  Lord God, she begged, let there be mercy in this hour. As you would have spared Sodom for ten upright men, spare those poor souls dwelling here, whose lives are humble and full of suffering yet still precious to them, as You intended. For indeed Your world is good, where we have not marred it. And if only through blood may there be remission of sin, let the sword fall upon me alone. Wordless for long minutes. Then: Lord, I am unworthy, full of pride and sin and conceit of my own righteousness, yet ever willing to be Your instrument. Give unto me not that which I ask, but what is best for me, though it be the thing I fear most. Not my will, but Thine be done.