Beneath Strange Stars: A Collection of Tales

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  The signal had been sent aloft by Torimatsu, one of the brighter young warriors. “The girl and the traitor departed from here at dawn, Commander. Bound for Tehran.”

  “What is the source of your information?” Komurasaki demanded.

  Torimatsu pointed at an old man across the way He was slowly shoveling manure into a dogcart.

  “Yes, I did see the two people the whelp described,” the oldster replied when Komurasaki questioned him. He leaned upon his shovel, as grateful for respite from his toils as for the coins pressed into his palm. “In a rush, they was, heated for anything bound west. They joined the caravan of Khommeni, mixed steamers and dromedaries. Headed to the heart of Persia, it was.”

  After Komurasaki put several other questions to the old fellow, Kyozokura nodded and said, “The information seems genuine.”

  “We will ride them down, and put an honorable end to this quest!” Torimatsu announced.

  Komurasaki shot him a withering look. “You forget yourself!”

  “We’ll take up the trail tomorrow,” Kyozokura said. “A band of warriors coming upon a caravan encampment at night will be seen as bandits, and welcomed as such.”

  “Khomeini is never robbed,” the old manure shoveler added. “The old vulture is protected. Swords. Spears. Rifles. Guns holding the Greek Fire. Even some Rus rocket launchers” He shook his head. “Anyone coming at night is dead, done.”

  “We’re not afraid of fighting.” Torimatsu asserted.

  “Not when there is a battle worth fighting.” Kyozokura said.

  “Listen to wisdom, young man,” Komurasaki said.

  Torimatsu chose silence, wisely but reluctantly.

  The samurai lodged at a rundown inn near their steeds’ stable. For the trail-weary, the rest was a welcome one, a chance to eat and drink something other than camp rations and canteen water, to enjoy a bed not filled with stones. Most of all it was an opportunity to put from their minds the pursuit that had consumed their lives since leaving Edo. Only Torimatsu refused to surrender to the moment. He remained apart, sullenly drinking dark bitter ale.

  While the men rested Kyozokura and Komurasaki went abroad in Samarkand, seeking both intelligence about the way ahead and knowledge of a city they might never see again.

  They saw the Great Square of Timur at Samarkand’s heart, surrounded by magnificent palaces of Ulubek, Sher-Dor and the Madrassahas Khans; and the labythrine Shah-i Zinde necropolis in northwest Samarkand, they saw the tombs and cenotaphs of the legendary and the mythical. Most impressive was Gur Emir, the mausoleum of Timur Khan, whom some knew as Tamurlane, with its ribbed azure dome rising higher than the Shogun’s palace in Edo.

  “Faded glory,” Komurasaki remarked.

  “But glorious nonetheless,” Kyozokura pointed out. “If a man could die in such a way to warrant a monument like this, what a wonderful death it would be.”

  “Not a death in barbaric lands,” Komurasaki said.

  “You do not see honor?” Kyozokura asked.

  “Forgive me, commander.”

  “No, Komurasaki, speak,” Kyozokura urged. “I wish to know what is in your heart.”

  “There is no honor in chasing an old man and a girl no older than my youngest daughter.” Komurasaki said.

  “A traitor and a murderess wanted in Edo,” Kyozokura said. “Do not forget that. Their crimes are not mitigated by their ages. Nor can we simply ignore the orders of our master.” He paused, considering the weight of his words. “Even when the orders come from a shattered heart and a troubled mind.”

  Komurasaki held silence.

  “Perhaps you are right,” Kyozokura whispered. “But there is no other way but the path we have been set.”

  Komurasaki sighed and nodded wearily.

  They came to a cartographer’s shop and asked their questions.

  “You should avoid the northern tracks, sirs,” the map seller said, moving his slender fingers across the top quarter of the chart before them. “Death haunts those sere lands.”

  “You mean, because of the lingering radiation from the wars?” Kyozokura asked.

  “Yes, radiation from the war,” the bespectacled man replied. “And demons, of course.”

  Komurasaki snorted in derision.

  A small smile tugged at the corners of the map seller’s lips, causing his drooping white moustache to twitch. “Demons, sirs, and worse. I hear stories of Napoleonic war machines still wandering the glassy plains. Perhaps it is rather difficult to believe such machines could exist in the Twentieth Century, but both the Gauls and the Tribes of Rus made use of Roman and Hellenic artificers to create their weapons. Clever they were, and possessing technologies that now seem as magick.”

  Komurasaki frowned. “Twentieth century?”

  “By the Christian calendar, sir.”

  Still frowning, Komurasaki shook his head. “Warriors have as little use for gods, or the sons of gods, as gods have for warriors.”

  “Ah, good sir, you know the Son of God,” the map seller said. “Called Iosha the Christ.”

  “I know men of the west often reckon time from the year of his birth,” Kyozokura replied.

  “As decreed by the Emperor of Byzantium,” the map seller added.

  “By that reckoning it is the year 1963,” Kyozokura said.

  “It is Showa 38,” Komurasaki said.

  “In Nippon, perhaps,” the map seller agreed, “but the world is a big place, bigger than either of you could possibly imagine.”

  Khommeni the merchant, riding high in the pilot’s chair of the leading steam-wagon, turned his glasses southward and scowled at the roiling ribbon of sand at the horizon. If he kept the caravan headed due west at the top speed for a mixed-mode, the sandstorm would be upon them by late afternoon. True, they could batten down and weather it out, losing at least a full day to clean sand out the works. Veering north, however, would take them away from the desert’s edge, over rockier ground skirting a barrier range. It was slower going in the short run, but quicker overall.

  No one was pleased when Khommeni turned the caravan northward, but all protestations died quick deaths, terminated either by club-wielding mechanics or Khommeni’s crazed stare. With his piercing obsidian eyes, bulging forehead, sunken cheeks and fierce black beard, the caravan master looked a madman, but he was a successful merchant. It was well regarded that his caravans always arrived and passengers rarely died.

  “We’re being pursued,” Mitsuko murmured as she awoke. “They’re almost nigh!”

  “It was only a dream, child,” Ikeda Yoshaki said.

  Mitsuko gazed through the steam-track’s quartz windows. The day was sullen and an ochre sky overhung them. The landscape was populated by twisted stones. She could not see beyond them.

  “A storm of sand,” the old man said. “We escaped its brunt by turning north.”

  “Into the Plains of Death?”

  Yoshaki laughed. “Bards are not scientists. Anyway, I do not believe we will travel north far enough to see the storied plains of glass, just enough to skirt the worst of the storm.”

  Mitsuko looked back the way they had come. Her hands tried to strangle each other.

  “If Lord Zempachi’s men yet live, they still pursue us,” the old man admitted, “but there is nothing to show they are close. It was only a dream, Mitsuko.”

  “A dream is truth disguised.”

  “Some philosophers would have us believe that life itself is but a dream,” Yoshaki said. “All of us, they say, are dreamed by an unseen sleeper, who lives in a world like our own, but not exactly the same: if he awakens, our world vanishes as if it never were, but what our hypothetical dreamer does not realize is that he himself is dreamed by yet another sleeper. And so on.”

  Mitsuko did not shift her gaze. “Our world has endured more than a single night.”

  “When we dream,” Yoshaki observed, “a universe can be born, live and die between one breath and the next.”

  Mitsuko shrugged.


  “If anyone is close, which I doubt,” Yoshaki said testily, “I’m sure this storm is giving them a demon of time. Rest easy, child.”

  Mitsuko settled back into the seat, thankful for the restraining strap now that the journey had turned rough. The steam-driven vehicle’s tracks often slipped and skidded as they sought purchase upon the rocky surface. She would have been just as happy traveling in a howdah atop a dromedary, but her elderly companion, ever fascinated by machinery and technology, had insisted on booking passage in the belly of this iron beast. At least, she reflected, all the vehicle’s bouncing had the effect of shaking from her mind the disturbing images of her dreams.

  She wished she could banish them entirely. Ever since she was old enough to realize not everyone dreamt with the same lucidity as did she, that not everyone saw images that came to pass, she had hoped for nothing more than serene nights of dark and dreamless sleep, blessed oblivion.

  Was she, too, a monster?

  Certainly there was no defect of the flesh, for she was considered the most beautiful girl in her village, which had brought her to the attention of Lord Zempachi’s son, Morotsu. Some of the villagers, those who suspected the precognitive nature of her dreams, whispered that she must be touched by the radioactive fires that scoured the west, but no one cried monster! No one dared, for to do so without foundation was to invite incarceration or stoning.

  Perhaps she was touched by the Fire, for not all monstrous births were monstrous to behold. Morotsu had been quite a comely man, beautiful even, but soulless, a creature capable of only destruction. While it was true she had killed him, she had done so only to save her own life, when she plunged the blade of the katana into the void where his heart should have been the pale ichor that spilled across the floor was not blood. None of that mattered, of course—he was highborn, she was of peasant stock; he was a man, she barely a woman; he was somebody, she was nobody.

  She gazed through the ochre twilight, the roiling dusk.

  Their pursuers were almost upon them. She could hear their thundering steeds, their keening blood-cries through the wailing wind. She could almost see their shadowy forms through the veil of flying sand.

  “Mitsuko! Quickly!”

  Her eyes fluttered open. She saw Yoshaki before her working frantically to undo her restraining strap. Her head hurt, and when she put her hand to her temple it came back wet with blood.

  “We’ve hit something,” Yoshaki explained as he undid the strap and pulled her from the embrace of the wicker chair. “Or else something hit us.”

  The deck was tilted at a sharp angle, making it difficult to walk. She must have, she realized, drifted to sleep, then hit her head against the bulkhead when the vehicle pitched. The steam-track had ceased traveling. Something slammed into the hull, causing the entire vehicle to lurch violently, and the bulkhead near where they had sat crumpled inward. Sudden fire laced the air and smoke filled the compartment.

  Yoshaki reeled under the impact. Mitsuko caught him, supported him, guided him after the other passengers streaming out.

  They reached the exit, felt hands grabbing them, easing them to the ground. Mitsuko looked along the side of the steamer, saw that the track on this side had broken off the wheels. The damaged engine at the rear of the track was venting steam, screaming as if it were a wounded beast. As she watched, a dazzling sphere crackled out of the gloom swift as an arrow. It struck the side, flipping the vehicle.

  People ran in all directions.

  People wailed and screamed.

  More spheres of energy flew out of the dusk, some striking the vehicles of the caravan, while others streamed overhead.

  Mitsuko and Yoshaki found a measure of safety amongst a cluster of wind-carven rocks. When she had settled him into cover, she peered around the stones, eager to know who, or what, had attacked the caravan.

  The caravan guards fought back but they could see their attackers no better than could Mitsuko. Two armed vehicles with mounted recoilless cannons drew up from both ends of the caravan, their gunners searching for a target.

  Abruptly, a huge shadowy form loomed through the twilight, a vast machine bristling with ancient armaments, its titanic hull emblazoned with the imperial crest of the Tribes of Rus. Now that the defenders had a target, they opened fire with everything they had. Two more war machines hovered after the first one.

  A shimmering energy sphere screamed over the wreckage of the caravan from the other direction and another war machine hove into view, a battle-battered craft bearing the scarred insignia of Napoleonic Gaul. The energy projectile fired by the ancient war machine slammed into the lead Rus machine.

  Fierce volleys were traded between the opposing war craft; the caravan caught in the middle suffered as much from one as the other, even though it appeared they had become lost in the clash of enemies.

  “The caravan is finished!” Yoshaki shouted his mouth close to her ear to be heard above the din of weapons, screams and shrieking wind.

  “No!” Mitsuko cried. “Look!”

  The caravan, what was left of it, was again underway, moving away from the battling titans. Animals were quickly harnessed to vehicles that could not move under their own power; vehicles that were too badly damaged were abandoned where they lay, as were the wounded.

  “We must get to one of the transports!” Yoshaki said, grabbing Mitsuko’s arm and pulling.

  Almost immediately, the old man jumped into hiding, taking Mitsuko with him. One of the war machines now hovered almost directly over where they had stood. Its multiple banks of repulsor modules geysered sand up around them. The darkness was intermittently shattered by hurtling miniature suns, bursts of flame and artificial lightning.

  “What wonderful craftsmanship was lost in the war!” Yoshaki exclaimed, his neck craned back to better see the machine. “What magnificent technology!”

  Mitsuko bit back her words. Yoshaki’s fascination with forbidden technology had put him in disfavor with the Shogun in Edo, and going against the will of the Shogun made him a traitor. Even the Emperor of Nippon, a patron of the sciences and an avid oceanographer, had ultimately turned his back on Yoshaki. The old man, having learned nothing from his close brush with the executioner’s blade, still worshiped the muse of technology.

  Hit by energy spheres, the war machine reeled away from them.

  “We have to try to make it to the caravan,” Mitsuko said, but even as she uttered the words, she realized the futility of the hope.

  The ragged edge of the sandstorm swallowed the last vague lines of the last vehicle, a steam-tank with its cannon aimed rearward, a defiant, if futile, gesture. If they ran after the caravan, they would only become lost in the blinding sand, and she doubted aged Yoshaki could run any great distance without his heart bursting from the exertion.

  Two creatures suddenly burst from out the chaotic night, two dromedaries yoked in tandem, with high-peaked saddles and crates lashed to frames at their sides. Probably they had been hitched to a wagon and had broken free in the confusion.

  Mitsuko grabbed the length of wood linking the bits. She began talking to them and they immediately settled down. All dromedaries carry the reputation of being ill-tempered beasts, prone to stubbornness and well-aimed spitting. While the reputation was, for the most part, well earned, it was also true that they responded to kind words and gentle touches, not that professional dromedary handlers ever resorted to such niceties. Mitsuko, on the other hand, had neither the bulk to manhandle them nor the time to instill fear, so she took the gentle path, hoping to calm them long enough for her and Yoshaki mount them and ride away from the danger.

  In this, she was successful. She unyoked them, helped Yoshaki into the seat of one of the high, curved saddles, then climbed quickly onto the other.

  It did not take much urging to dispatch the frightened animals. Both Mitsuko and Yoshaki held on to keep from being thrown off. Unfortunately, the dromedaries did not take out after the caravan; instead, they rushed northward, into the hear
t of shadows toward the fabled plains of glass.

  The sounds of battle grew dim behind, swept away by the wind. The only tokens of the terrific battle were erratic crackles of light, flickering like distant lightning on a stormy summer eve.

  She wondered which side would win, or whether any side would. They had been warring for more than a century and a half, and likely they had fought over and over across the years. Perhaps they only battled to a stalemate after which they would glide away to safe-places and initiate their self-repair systems.

  The dromedaries ran as fast as they could away from the scene of battle. Since there was no turning the animals, no slowing their flight of terror, Mitsuko and Yoshaki clung to the saddle horns as if they were embracing life itself.

  Throughout the night they ran, guided by a sureness of instinct that allowed them to negotiate almost any terrain. By the dawn they slowed to a quick gallop. Now that the animals’ fright and panic had subsided, the two riders were finally able to halt them.

  The landscape surrounding them was sere to the extreme. Not a blade of grass showed, not one bird glided through the lightening sky, and no animal sound rose above the lonely sighs of the wind. It was like gazing upon the end of the world. Before them rose a line of high hills.

  “We should get a better idea of where we are, what we are up against, from the top,” Yoshaki said. He dug his heels into the side of the dromedary, as he would upon a horse, but the humped beast merely moaned in protest. “A damned stubborn monster.”

  Mitsuko noticed a crop held in a sheath near the saddle’s horn and withdrew it. She touched the short leather whip to the side of the animal’s neck and made a soft sound in the back of her throat. The dromedary moved forward at a quick, steady pace. Grimacing, Ikeda Yoshaki imitated Mitsuko’s actions until his animal decided to follow its previously yoked companion.

  At the summit, Mitsuko halted, sat staring ahead, her mouth slightly agape. A cold wind swept over her, flattened her long dark hair, but the shudder that coursed through her had nothing to do with the frigidity of the wind.