Battle Hymn

by William R. Forstchen

  More screams came from the camp, each one tearing into his soul. He could somehow sense that Tamira must now be awake, huddled in the yurt, terrified. The thought of looking into her eyes as she died in agony was more than he could bear.

  "Food. I want adequate food for the workers," he said gruffly.

  The thin crease of a smile lit Ha'ark's features.

  "One day in seven to rest. You'll get more work that way in the long run. Proper shelter, barracks for my people to live in. And exemption from the Moon Feast and, for that matter, from the pits at all times. If they work for you they live, if they have children the mothers are exempt from work while pregnant and the children are too until old enough."

  "Agreed."

  Hans sagged forward, feeling sick. They had finally broken him.

  "And one final thing," his tormentor said. "We will talk, from time to time, human. There is something about you I like."

  "The feeling is not mutual."

  "But still we will talk. You choose well, human. It is better than having to kill you."

  "So others will die in our place tonight."

  "They are not your concern. Fifty thousand will die this night of feasting. It could have been you, your companions; now it is someone else. You will see tomorrow, as will the woman who waits for you." He paused for a moment. "And an old friend as well."

  And others will die in my place, Hans thought bitterly.

  "There is no room for pity in this world," Ha'ark snapped. "You have chosen to live, to choose otherwise is the act of a fool. Go and hold your woman tonight and know she will not scream in agony."

  Ha'ark reined his horse around, and then almost as an afterthought he extended his hand, offering the plug of tobacco again. Hans took it.

  "You know the way back. Now go. We will talk more another time. Tomorrow you will go to the place where the new factory is to be built. You and your people will build it and make it run. Do that and you will live. Fail me and…" He nodded down the hill, where the feasting had already begun.

  With a soft laugh Ha'ark rode off into the gathering darkness, and half a dozen guards, who throughout the conversation had remained at a discreet distance, fell in around him.

  Hans was tempted to throw the plug of tobacco to the ground but instead put it in his pocket. With his head low, he turned his mount, choking back tears of humiliation and rage.

  “Hans?"

  Startled, he looked up. "My God! Gregory?"

  A lean and battered figure, dressed in the baggy white tunic and trousers of the Rus infantry, stepped from the side of his yurt and approached him nervously.

  "Sir, is it really you?"

  Hans slid off his horse and with hand extended raced up to the boy who had once been his chief of staff for Third Corps but was even better known as a budding Shakespearean actor, a Rus soldier who had become enamored of a copy of the plays brought from another world.

  Gregory came to attention and started to salute, but Hans grabbed his hand, clutching it tight.

  "Son, how the hell?"

  Gregory shook his head. "I was taken about six months ago. We were running patrols out, pushing south and east, probing to find out whatever happened to the Merki and also trying to find out where these bastards were."

  He hung his head, as if ashamed. "My unit, we fell right into a trap. It got wiped out, sir. I wish I'd been killed." His voice started to falter. "I woke up after the fight and they had me. I had a hundred men with me, sir. All of them…"

  "Nothing to be ashamed of, son," Hans replied. "The same with me."

  "They took me to this Ha'ark, or Redeemer, or whatever it is he thinks he is. He treated me well enough, sir, just wanted to learn the language. He told me this morning I might see you, but I didn't believe it until they brought me here a couple of minutes ago."

  "This might not sound right," Hans replied eagerly, "but I'm almost glad to see you."

  Gregory tried to smile.

  "There's a couple other men here from Rus. Alexi Davidovich, he used to be an engineer, was in my unit—they got him as well. I also saw Hinsen. I never knew him before he deserted, but I kind of figured out it was him. He's in good with them, has his own yurt, a horse, even women. It'd be worth dying just to get him."

  Hans shook his head. "Let it go. He'll get his reward. The main thing is to stay alive for now."

  "What will they do to us?"

  "In the end, they'll kill us," Hans said quietly, and he looked at his yurt, thinking of her inside. "But for now, we survive. We survive and find a way to escape. We have to get back to tell Andrew, even if it takes years to do it."

  Chapter One

  Ninth Year of the Republic

  “Hans!” Colonel Andrew Lawrence Keane sat bolt upright in his bed, his sheets soaked with sweat.

  "Andrew, you all right?"

  For a moment he couldn't speak. The image had been so clear.

  "Andrew?"

  "All right, Pat."

  Andrew swung out from his bunk and stood up, shifting his feet to maintain balance as the train thundered around a sharp curve.

  "It was Hans, wasn't it?"

  Pat O'Donald, commander of the First Army of the Republic, sat up and tossed his blankets aside. Andrew nodded.

  "Thought so. The old bugger came to me in my dreams as well." Sighing, Pat slipped out of the bunk. "Could use a spot of the cruel right now. Stills the nerves of an old soldier."

  "I was thinking the same."

  Andrew walked down the swaying corridor and stepped into the back parlor of his command car. Fortunately the room was empty. The staff was sleeping soundly in the next car forward. Andrew sat down on a hard-back bench while Pat threw a shovelful of coal into the stove and stoked it. Andrew started to shiver and Pat, seeing his discomfort, went back up to the bunks and returned with Andrew's sky-blue cape, which he draped over his shoulders.

  Andrew nodded his thanks, wishing he had put his jacket on, but he hadn't wanted to deal with it. It had taken him a long time to get used to the fact that with only one arm, putting on a jacket could be something of a bother. At home Kathleen always helped him to dress, an almost comforting ritual, but he hated to impose on Pat, or anyone else, especially in the middle of the night. Pat next handed Andrew his glasses, which he worked open with his one hand and put on. Not being able to see, even when sitting in a darkened room, bothered him.

  Pat settled down beside him and pulled a flask of vodka from his hip pocket, uncorked it, and ceremoniously passed it to Andrew.

  "For Hans, God bless him."

  "For Hans," Andrew whispered, and raising the flask, he took a long pull, grimacing as the fiery liquid burned his throat. He handed the flask back to Pat, who seemed to be praying. The old artilleryman quickly made the sign of the cross, raised the flask, and took a long pull himself.

  "If Doctor Weiss gets up and sees you doing that on an empty stomach," Andrew said, "we'll both be in for it."

  "I'm already up."

  Emil Weiss, chief surgeon of the armies, stepped into the parlor, wearing a dressing gown and a nightcap. Yawning, he went over to the stove and opened the lid of the coffee pot to sniff its contents. Emil poured a steaming cup and sat down by Andrew. After sampling the brew, he wordlessly upended Pat's flask into his cup, then took another long sip.

  "Almost like the old days," Emil grumbled. "Hard to believe it's been more than four years since our last campaign."

  "We were dreaming of Hans," Andrew announced quietly.

  "And?"

  Andrew sighed and looked out the window at the steppe rolling by, shimmering silver beneath the glow of the twin moons. After the disaster to the Third Corps in the Battle of the Potomac, he had always assumed that Hans had died fighting. But since then there had been disquieting rumors. A Cartha merchant reporting seeing him, and several escaped slaves of the Merki and one from the Bantag came bearing reports of a "Yankee." It was well known that the traitor Hinsen had gone into the service of the Bantag,
and Andrew always preferred to believe that such reports were about him. But the last escapee to come through the lines had insisted that the "Yankee's" name was "Ghanz." Given the guttural pronunciations of the Horde language, he could easily see that as a corruption of his mentor's name.

  "He's dead, Andrew. I assumed that on the day he was lost," Emil said coldly. "It was the best way to think of him."

  "I never could. He has drifted in my dreams for four years now. But tonight it was stronger. I saw him in what looked like hell, flames all around him." Andrew lowered his head, his voice thick. "He was in hell and alive."

  The low, mournful whistle of the train interrupted his thoughts. He turned to look out the window as they thundered across a bridge and past a station. Village lights whisked by.

  "Where are we?" Emil asked.

  Andrew strained to see the station sign, but it shot past in the shadows. "I think we're out of Roum. Could be Asgard."

  Pat grinned and stood up to look out the window. "Now there's folks who know how to brew beer."

  "Barbarians," Emil sniffed.

  “Good fighters," Andrew replied. "Damn, this is a strange world. Descendants of ancient Germany next to Romans, and medieval Japan eight hundred miles ahead. How many damn gates were there back home?"

  "Well, the Vikings must have come through the same one we did, down near Bermuda," Emil said. "There's the one in the Mediterranean—that explains the Romans and Carthaginians, Egyptians and Greeks. The one that got the Rus, that's beyond me. It could have been a weird one that opened up only once. I've even been thinking that maybe there's only one, somewhere out in space above our world. As the world rotates on its axis, the gate above is pointed at different places."

  Pat looked at him wide-eyed. "In space, you say. Why, what would keep it up?"

  "It's orbiting."

  "Don't be foolish. There's nothing out there except the stars. How could anyone get something up there? You're daft."

  Andrew was barely listening as Emil and Pat launched into an argument about the Tunnels while finishing off the rest of the vodka.

  Damn, how I miss the old days, Hans, Andrew thought sadly. You'd be sitting in the corner, matching Pat drink for drink, usually saying nothing, just watching, smiling occasionally, but always thinking.

  The old days… Funny, the old days were years of unrelenting fear, staring disaster in the face and knowing that you didn't stand a chance of survival. Of the more than five hundred men who had come through the Tunnels into this world, members of the old Thirty-fifth Maine, Forty-fourth New York Artillery, and the crew of the Ogunquit, fewer than two hundred were still alive. And as for the Rus who had started the human rebellion on this planet, more than half were dead.

  "Strange," Andrew whispered.

  "What?" Emil asked, breaking away from his argument with Pat, which was being expressed with an increasingly choice selection of obscenities.

  "Oh, just that we look back now on the wars and somehow miss them."

  Emil nodded sagely. "I guess we're getting older. Hell, even Pat here is starting to lose his blessed red hair for gray."

  Pat stroked his heavy beard, which was now peppered with long streaks of white, and laughed. "Ah, but the lasses still love it."

  "When are you ever going to settle down and get respectable?" Emil asked.

  "Never! And have three squawking young ones like Andrew here? No wonder he wanted to go on this inspection tour."

  Andrew smiled. Every minute away from Kathleen and the three little ones was a torture to him. No, it wasn't to escape that he had come… it was to find something again.

  "Do you miss the old times, Pat?"

  Pat upended his flask after snatching it away from Emil and gave the doctor a mock angry look. He retreated to his sleeping berth and returned a. minute later with a full bottle of vodka. Uncorking it, he took a long pull and then passed it over to Emil.

  "Ah, now those were the days. Shielding the northern flank with Fourth Corps as we retreated. And that first day of Hispania, now there was a fight to be proud of."

  "But do you miss it?"

  "Guess it's the Irish in me, to be certain. I miss it, Lord, how I miss it. I miss old Hans forever chewing, and me beauties, my Napoleon twelve-pounders. Firing them in battery, ramming double canister down the throats of them heathens, now there was a moment to remember."

  Andrew looked over at his old friend and smiled.

  "And you, Andrew?" Emil asked quietly, his voice slurring after another drink from Pat's bottle.

  "I don't know anymore," Andrew replied. "During all of it, all I wanted was an end to the fighting. Lord knows—and I can say it now, no matter what I said or did at the time—I feared that in the end we'd lose. More than anything, I fought to try and give my friends—and my Kathleen—a little more time to live, to let my daughter and now my two boys have a chance.

  "But for myself…" He hesitated. "I felt like a sacrifice, someone to be used up for others. I never found in it the same joy you did, Pat."

  "As you look back upon it now, though?" Emil pressed.

  "It was easier then. There was only one focus, one goal, to make it to the next day, the next campaign. Beyond that, there was no time to think about."

  "It was the preciousness of it all that I miss," Pat interjected.

  Startled, Andrew stared at him.

  "You know. Us being together." He fumbled for words for a moment. "It was good. We trusted each other, knew each other. Now the years are passin', new faces taking over, like Hawthorne. But I miss old Hans, I do. It's never been quite the same."

  He shook his head.

  "The old days were precious, they were."

  All that has transpired since, Andrew thought. In the year after the end of the war, all were united by the common goal of simply getting through the winter and rebuilding. But then, somehow, it seemed to get sidetracked. The alliance with Roum, forged in blood, would endure as long as Proconsul Marcus lived. That, at least, was secure. The Cartha were a different story. In the winter after the war they endured devastating raids from the scattered bands of Merki, who finally drifted off to the west. Fighting a regular campaign was one thing, but the army was not designed for protracted counterinsurgent warfare. A division of troops was all that could be spared to help the Cartha, and by the following spring Hamilcar severed any hope of an alliance. The Cartha, at least for now, were lost.

  The dream of building a transcontinental railroad—that seemed to be dissolving as well. The line had been run nearly a thousand miles east, through the region of the Asgard, and then it came to a halt, stopped by negotiations with the next neighbors, the Nippon, and more frustratingly, the vote in Congress to cut back funding.

  Now there was the constant skirmishing to the south, on the open steppe frontier between the two seas. Patrols were constantly going out from the defensive line, currently under construction where the Great Sea jutted westward, coming within a hundred fifty miles of the Inland Sea. Probing patrols of cavalry would have occasional run-ins with Bantag patrols. Never anything major—a few casualties traded on both sides—but the numbers slowly added up. Nearly five hundred dead this year alone. It reminded him so much of the Indian wars on the frontier before the Civil War. The land had once been Merki, but now the Bantag laid claim to it.

  He had hoped that the Bantag would continue migrating and move on, but they were staying put, and he surmised that the reason was the Republic. They were preparing, and at some point the blow would come.

  Young Admiral Bullfinch's long-coveted Second Fleet was finally coming into existence. At present it comprised only one ironclad and a newly commissioned side-wheeler gunboat, the Petersburg. There were half a dozen wooden three-masted sloops, which were keeping watch mainly over an estuary on the eastern shore of the sea, four hundred miles southeast of the defensive line. There was a small city at the mouth of the river, apparently occupied by Bantag, and indications of a larger town up the river, but the approach was g
uarded by more than a dozen galleys.

  He had wanted to rim a patrol up the river, if need be risk an encounter with the galleys, but the president had firmly overruled that idea. The problem was to keep the constant state of watch, to convince Congress, and now even the president, that this was not the time to let one's guard down and, more than ever, to keep pushing the railroad forward.

  In the years since he had come here, the railroad had caused his first real falling-out with the president, the wily old peasant Kal. No amount of lobbying on Andrew's part regarding the military necessity of projecting a potential line of conflict as far forward as possible could sway Kal and his party from wanting to cut back on military spending and, with it, the railroad. It was now shaping up as the key issue in the fall congressional elections.

  Just thinking about it gave Andrew reason to want another drink, and he reached over and took the bottle from Emil.

  "Damn Congress," Andrew muttered.

  Emil sat back and laughed.

  "What's so damn funny?"

  "Ah, the Republic. You're the one who created it here, and now that you can't get your own way, you damn them. You know, you could have made yourself dictator for life and they would have loved you for it."

  Andrew looked at Emil as if he had just muttered the foulest obscenity.

  "Why, he was dictator," Pat chimed in, "a regular Julius by God Caesar back during the first war. And a damn good one he was. Too bad he threw it away."

  Andrew looked from one to the other and finally saw the grins of amusement.

  "You're a born Republican and Abolitionist," Emil said. "Guess that's why I came to America from the old country—'cause of folks like you. If you had tried to keep it, I think I would have poisoned you."

  Andrew laughed and shook his head.

  "It's a soldier's prerogative to mumble against the government in private," he replied. "The best system humanity's ever created, but still, a pox on it at times. Always so damn shortsighted. We really didn't win a war, just a battle. There's still two other tribes out there, and the Merki, what's left of them, lurking on the western border. It could start again at any time."