War World III: Sauron Dominion

by Jerry Pournelle

  “I shan’t, Aisha, unless I trip,” Juchi said. He heard the futile pride in his voice. He carried Sauron blood. His senses, those he still had, were swift and keen.

  Automatically, he cocked his head for a better look at the terrain over which he’d pass. Futile again; his ruined eyes gave back only blackness, as they had since the day he took his own sight with his dead wife’s brooch. “Where are we now?” he asked.

  “Halfway through the cleft,” Aisha answered. “The Citadel sits above us on the rocks, armed and armored like a tamerlane.”

  Juchi sighed, long and slow. “I never dreamed I would see it.” He laughed harshly, at himself. Like the head-cocking gesture, the word remained, half a lifetime after his eyes were gone. He sighed again. “I’ve wandered farther than ever I dreamed I would back in the days when I rode with Dede Korkut’s clan. And what did it gain me in the end?”

  “Great glory,” his daughter answered stoutly. “Who but you ever drove the Saurons from one of their lairs, made a whole valley free of them?”

  “A greater curse,” Juchi said. “Who but I lay afterwards with the woman who proved my mother as well as Sauron chieftain’s lady; who but I bred children-- bred you, dearest daughter--who were also my sibs? How can I atone for such sin, make myself free of it? Blinding did no good; my mind sees still. For all the long years since, I have sought relief. If I do not find it here, I fear it may never come. Allah will spit on my soul and the spirits blow it round Haven forevermore.”

  Aisha said, “You have borne it, where a lesser man would have fled into death.”

  Juchi’s laugh held nothing of humor. “That is your fault more than mine. Had you not come after me out to the steppe, come as I forbade you to do, death would have found me soon enough. Many time, oh, how many times, I’ve wished it had.”

  “No.” Aisha had been a stubborn child; that had changed not at all since she grew to womanhood. She went on, “Allah and the spirits must have had reason for twisting your life as they did. Before its end, they will grant that you know that reason.”

  “Then they’d best hurry,” Juchi said. “I cannot see my beard, but I know it is the color of snow. I need not see to know how my bones ache, how my heart pounds, how my lungs burn with every step I take. Soon I will die whether you let me or no, daughter of mine.”

  “That is why we have come at last to Shangri-La Valley. Here sit the Saurons in their power, the Saurons but for whom your curse would never had arisen. By the god, by the spirits, I will see that you have justice from them before the end. If they do not give it to you, I will take it from them myself.” Aisha spit on the trail to show her contempt for the overlords of Haven.

  “What do they know of justice?” Juchi said. “They know only force. And why not? It has served them well over the years. And their blood is ours as well, to me through the father I slew; to you, poor child, through me.

  “I am no child,” Aisha said wearily; how many times had they argued this round and round? “And I do not willingly claim their blood, while you, father, you struck a great blow against it.”

  “You may not claim the blood, but the blood will claim you,’ Juchi said. Aisha did not answer, not in words. The pressure of her hand on his arm changed; she was moving forward again. Juchi followed. From the breeze that blew into his face, he tried to scent out what lay ahead in the valley.

  With every step he took, the air seemed to grow thicker. That, he knew, was his imagination, but the Shangri-La Valley was far and away the greatest lowland Haven boasted. Women came from hundreds of kilometers around to bear their babies here; the steppe tribes paid the Saurons a steep price for the privilege, in goods and in women.

  The breeze brought the fresh, green scents of growing crops. By Haven’s standards, the climate of the Shangri-La Valley was tropical; a man from the Terra now long lost in legend would have judged it no worse than austere. It was mild enough to let wheat survive. In the Tallinn Valley that Juchi had once ruled, oats and rye were the staple crops. Of course, the Tallinn Valley could have been dropped anywhere here without being noticed as it fell.

  The breeze also carried the odors characteristic of man, and man in large numbers: smoke and sweat (the amount of labor required to wrest a living from even the most salubrious parts of Haven was plenty to raise sweat even in the moon’s icy climate) and ordure. Falkenberg and Catell City and Hell’s A-Comin’ had been cities once, before the Saurons smote them from the sky. Towns still stood not far from where the bombs had landed.

  Another, newer town lay close to the inner mouth of the valley. Nurnen had grown up to serve the Citadel, the Saurons’ greatest center on Haven. After more than three hundred T-years as masters of the moon, the Saurons were not averse to such luxuries as it could provide them. Further, the more work the humans they contemptuously called cattle did for them, the less they had to do for themselves and the more they could remain fighting machines. That suited them. Thus Nurnen throve.

  “Take me into Nurnen,” Juchi said suddenly.

  Aisha stopped. “Why do you want to go there? Of all the towns on Haven, Nurnen loves the Saurons best.”

  “Just so,” Juchi said. “Through all the long years since they came, simply hating them has not availed. They are too strong, and their strength repels hatred as armor will turn a sword stroke. Those who love them may know where they are truly weak.”

  The noise Aisha made, deep down in her throat, did not betoken agreement. But she led Juchi into Nurnen all the same. She had guided him for more than twenty T-years now. When he gave her a destination, she got him there. Whatever she thought of the life she led, she never complained.

  “I’ve given you a long, empty time, my daughter,” Juchi said.

  “You did not give it to me; I chose it for myself,” Aisha answered. “And how could I have found a better one? Who would have taken me into house or yurt, bearing the burden of ill-luck I carry?”

  “Through me, all through me. You could have left me behind, left your name and birth behind, gone off and lived among folk who knew nothing of your misfortune.”

  “You tried that, father, growing up as you did among the steppe tribes after you were rescued from Angband Base’s exposure grounds. Yet your name and birth returned to work your fate. Why do you think it would have been different for me?”

  To that, Juchi had no good answer. Allah and the spirits accomplished a man’s fate as they would, not so as to delight him. The best he could hope to do was bear up under it with courage.

  Soon after the narrow canyon opened out into Shangri-La Valley, Aisha stopped to pick a couple of clownfruit from a tree. She gave one to Juchi. As he bit into it, the mixture of sweet and tart brought to mind a perfect mental picture of the red-and-white fruit. Even after so long without eyes, he knew what things looked like.

  Before long, they entered Nurnen. The clamor of busy streets surrounded Juchi: men and women afoot and on horseback, wagons with squealing wheels, the rhythmic footfalls of litter-bearers. “Turn here,” Aisha said. “This is a tavern.”

  The blast of heat from the door, the noise inside, and the smell of beer and tennis-fruit brandy had already told Juchi as much. The noise faded a little while the drinkers sized up Aisha and him when they stepped inside. A moment later, it picked up again: they were judged harmless, at least at first glance.

  Juchi almost smiled at that. He’d worked more harm than any tavern tough could aspire to.

  “Here is a stool,’ Aisha said Juchi felt for it with his hand, sat down. Someone approached the table-- a barmaid, by the rustle of skirts. “What’ll it be, sir, lady?” she asked, her voice losing some of its professional good cheer as she got a look at Juchi’s face.

  “Kavass,” Juchi said. He d learned to like fermented mare’s milk among the nomads who raised him.

  “Beer for me.” Aisha had grown up in Tallinn Valley, and had the taste of a farmer. “And a roast chicken for the two of us to share.”

  “I’ll bring your dr
inks right away. The chicken will take just a little while--were cooking three of them now, and they should be done soon.” The barmaid hesitated, then said, “Maybe you’d better show me your money first, since by the look of you, you’re new in town.”

  Aisha fumbled in the pouch she wore at her belt. A moment later, silver rang sweetly on the tabletop. “Will that do?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes, ma’am.” The barmaid retreated in a hurry. She came back very quickly, set a mug of beer in front of Aisha and a skin of kavass before Juchi. He tasted it, made a sour face. Town taverns had a habit of serving a thin, weak brew, and this one was no exception.

  Someone new came up to the table: a man, and no lightweight, either, not from his stride. “The tavemer,” Aisha whispered to Juchi. She raised her voice to speak to the man: “How may we help you, good sir?’

  “I’d talk to your companion, if I could,” the fellow said. Hearing Aisha use Russki, he answered in the same language, though his voice had a shrill Americ accent: the Saurons spoke Americ among themselves, and Juchi had heard it more than any other tongue on the streets of Numen. Americ made him nervous.

  It was the language Badri had known best, Badri his mother, Badri his wife--

  He pulled his mind back to the blackness of here and now, away from the image of Badri’s face that burned always behind his eyes. “I will speak with you, good sir. Ask what you would.”

  That openness made the taverner hem and haw, and Juchi had never heard of a bashful taverner. He knew what was coming: “Forgive me if I offend, gray-beard, but there are tales that stick to an old blind man who travels with a woman younger than he is.”

  “I am the man of whom those tales tell,” Juchi answered calmly, as he had many times before. The tavern went deathly still. Juchi’s shoulders moved up and down in a silent sigh. That had happened many times, too.

  The taverner gulped, loud enough for Juchi to have heard even without his genetically augmented ears. Legends, by their very nature, dealt with the long ago and far away. To have one sitting at a table had to disconcert the taverner. He needed close to half a minute to gather himself after that gulp. At last he said, “I don t want your trade here. I ask you politely to leave in quiet and peace.”

  “Our silver is as good as anyone else’s,” Aisha said hotly. She took slights harder than Juchi, who felt he deserved them. The legs of her stool bumped on the rough planks of the floor as she started to get up so she could argue with the taverner face to face.

  Juchi set a hand on her arm to stop her. “Wait, daughter.” He turned his ruined face toward the taverner. The man gulped again. Juchi kept his voice mild: “Tell me, sir, if you would, why you want me--want us--to leave.”

  “Because--Because--” The taverner stopped, took a deep breath, tried once more: “Because you are who you are, curse it, and because you did what you did. And because Nurnen is a town that depends on the Soldiers and their goodwill. They’d not think kindly of me if I let you stay.”

  “Those are fair reasons,” Juchi said. “We will go.” Aisha started to protest further. He shook his head at her. “Come, lead me away. I would not stay where I am not welcome. Is it any wonder, then, that I have wandered all through these many years?”

  “Everywhere you travel, folk treat you unjustly,” Aisha said.

  “No, only with horror, and horror I have earned. Now let us go.”

  As Aisha led Juchi toward the door, a man at a table he passed said, “And good riddance to you, too, mother-fucker.” He laughed at his own wit.

  Juchi reached out, effortlessly lifted the man with one hand. The fellow squawked and kicked at him. Juchi felt the muscle shift, heard the whisper of cloth against moving flesh. His body twisted to one side before the booted foot arrived.

  “Mother-fucker!” the man yelled again. His hand slapped against the hilt of his knife. At effectively the same instant, Juchi’s hand closed on his wrist. Juchi squeezed and twisted. Bones crunched. The man screamed. Juchi threw him away. He smashed against something hard. Juchi stood in a warrior’s crouch, waiting to hear if he got up. He did not.

  “Horror I have earned. I grant this,” Juchi said. “The contempt of such a dog I have not earned. Come, Aisha; lead me away from this place where I am not welcome.”

  He reached out his hand for hers. She took it, guided him toward the doorway. Behind him, someone said softly, “More Soldier blood in him than in most Soldiers, by the saints. Check on Strong Sven, somebody--see if he’ll ever get up again.”

  “Let him lie there,” someone else answered. “He picked on a blind man; he deserves what he got. Maybe he’ll keep his stupid mouth shut next time.”

  Slightly warmed at that, Juchi followed Aisha down the street. He listened, tried to learn. Nurnen was indeed a town on good terms with the Saurons. The best indicator of that was how seldom he heard the term. Like the taverner and the other man in his establishment, most people called them Soldiers, their own name for themselves. Juchi did not care one way or the other. Just as he was what he was, they were what they were, and names did not matter.

  “Most names,” he amended out loud. Aisha made a questioning noise. “Never mind,” he told her. He could still feel the quick, precise motions his muscles had made as he chastised the foul-mouthed fool. The memory would stay with him. That was his trouble, he thought. He was blind, but the memories stayed with him.

  Soldiers lined up for a meal at the Citadel refectory. It was first come, first served, regardless of rank. If a simple Section Leader took his place in line before a Chief Assault Group Leader, he was served before him, too. The Soldiers did not make distinctions among themselves where distinctions were unnecessary.

  Glorund was no simple Section Leader. Nor was he merely a Chief Assault Group Leader. Nevertheless, the Battlemaster took his tray and waited for his turn with everyone else. Once a young officer, an Assault Group Leader with, everyone said, a promising future ahead, had stood aside for him. The fellow was a blank-collar-tab Soldier within half a cycle, and bound for duty on the most barren part of the steppe Glorund could find. After that, no one curried favor with him in the refectory line.

  The refectory workers who slapped food onto the tray were from Nurnen. Soldiers did not need to cook; therefore, they did not cook. The food was unexciting--stewed heartfruit, a meatloaf made from ground mutton and muskylope, a chunk of rye bread, a mug of beer. It was nourishing, though. And Glorund, like lower-ranking Soldiers, was no gourmet. No geneticist had ever found a good enough reason to bother amplifying the sense of taste.

  Glorund’s ears, however, were not only genetically modified but also had the bioengineered implants that accompanied the cyborg deaths-heads on his collar tabs. He heard, and listened to, every conversation in the refectory. Differential signal processing let him pay attention to each of them in turn at not quite the same time. That was useful; even people who knew intellectually what he could do sometimes made interesting slips if the refectory was crowded.

  “The blind man’s come into the valley,” he heard a Soldier who’d been on sentry-go say. His modifications did not literally let his ears prick up, but he willed into being the mental analog of that primitive physical process. If he heard the word blind again, he would key on it, correlate it with this first mention. To Glorund, to all the high-ranking Soldiers of the Citadel, there was only one blind man, the one responsible for the loss of Angband Base and Tallinn Valley. Not for the first time, he thought the Citadel should have mounted a punitive expedition, no matter that Angband Base lay far, far to the west. Cattle should never be allowed to get the notion that they could beat Soldiers. So often in combat, what men believed counted for as much as what was true.

  But more cautious heads had prevailed back then: Soldiers who had argued that an attack on Tallinn Valley would draw in the Bandari of Eden Valley. And in the end Juchi had destroyed himself more thoroughly than any mere outsiders could have destroyed him. The lesson Soldiers found most difficult to learn was that
abrupt, straightforward aggression was not always the best solution to a problem.

  “--blind man smashed him against a table, broke three of his ribs.”

  Glorund hadn’t been consciously following that conversational track; the gossip of other ranks seldom held much of value. Now he replayed it, and learned of the bar fight in Nurnen. Haven was a tough, unforgiving place; few handicapped folk could survive here. Fewer still could hope to win a fight against a sighted foe. Even for Juchi, that did not seem likely, not so many years after his fall. For anyone else, though, it seemed impossible.

  Glorund kept eating. His metabolism was augmented, too, to power his implants. He needed twice the calories of an ordinary Soldier, or three times those of an unmodified man. No matter what he decided to do, he had to fuel up first, as if he were a river pirate’s steamboat taking on wood before it sailed.

  When he was done, he rose from his bench, stacked his tray, and left the refectory. He did not even pause to draw weapons: what need for them, against the old blind man he sought? He did stop a moment at the Citadel’s outer gate, to record a message that he was going into Nurnen for a while. He needed no one’s authorization to proceed; Soldiers, and especially cyborgs, were supposed to use their initiative. “Each man his own army” had always been their motto.

  Nurnen was a dozen kilometers from the Citadel, down the pass and out its throat: a couple of hours’ walk for an unmodified man, half an hour’s run for the finest unmodified athlete. Glorund got there in less than twenty minutes, and was not breathing hard when he arrived. He paused to button his greatcoat just outside of town, to hide his collar tabs. That a cyborg was in Nurnen would have raced through the lace as quickly as word of Juchi’s presence had got back to the Citadel. Sooner or later it would get around anyhow, but better later than sooner.

  He needed to ask fewer questions than an ordinary man would have. He simply strolled through the streets as if window shopping and let his enhanced ears do his work for him. He kept keying on blind. By the time he’d heard it three times, he knew in which tavern Juchi had had his fight. He paused on the way to buy a couple of barbecued lamb ribs. When he was done with them, he tossed the gnawed bones into the street. There they lay; he hadn’t left enough meat on them to interest scavengers.