“Well?” she said, working the injured leg, and then lying back on her elbows, looking at him expectantly. “If you think I’m crawling over there and getting on top with this knee, you’re crazy, Sauron.”
“Fahise!” The shriek echoed from the buildings. Whore.
Erika bat Miriam turned in the saddle to look behind her, craning to see past the other haBandari to the crowded Ashkabad street.
No harlots that I can see, she thought in puzzlement. There were a few in Strang, the main settlement of the Pale, although none in her hometown of Ilonasstaad. It would be hard to tell, here. Ashkabad was well outside the Pale, its population mostly Tadjik-muslim. Townswomen wore the head-to-toe black tent of the chador, and the female nomads in for the trade fair used the shorter face-covering yashmak.
“Fahise Yahud!” the man screeched again, pointing: Jew whore! He was an elderly Ashkabadian in a long black robe and a turban as snowy-white as his beard, blue eyes wide with anger.
He means me, Erika thought. How odd.
Karl bar Yigal cursed softly beside her, and something in the words and tone made her mouth go papery with fear; she had been married less than a T-year, but that was long enough to know that her husband did not swear often or without cause. The street was emptying, she saw a woman sweep up her child and dodge through a plank door that banged shut behind her. But there was a knot of men around the white-bearded mullah, dressed like him but younger; others were drifting closer as he launched into a sermon in Tadjik, town laborers in rags and nomads in leather and sheepskins. Some were bending to pick up rocks or lumps of horse dung, and there were more on the flat roofs of the mud-brick houses to either side. No firearms that she could see, but of course everyone carried a knife, and many of the nomads wore their shamshir-sabers always. . . .
Riot, Erika thought. Pogrom. She reached down and unlatched the cover of the bowcase in front of her left knee, acutely conscious of the compound bow within, of the saber slung across her back, and of the double-barreled flintlock pistol on her hip that had been a wedding gift from her half-sister Shulamit. She had been trained to fight, all haBandari were, but . . .
There was a rattle and click behind her, from the others of their party. She glanced over a shoulder. Only a few were wearing their armor, but some were reaching for the bucket-shaped helmets at their saddlebows. Sannie bat Brigid gave her a wolfish grin as she lifted her lance out of the scabbard and let the butt rest on the toe of her boot. Several others had readied their bows; one plucked at the string, a flat snapping throb that cut through crowd-murmur. Tom Jerrison growled and heeled his horse forward to Karl’s left side. Bodyguard and companion, he served Karl as he had Karl’s father, who had taken him in when the elders of his church congregation back in the Eden Valley cast him out. Erika had never liked him, a slouching troll-shaggy unspeaking presence at Karl’s side, but now there was something comforting in his gaunt gray massiveness and the sledgehammer that seemed feather-light in one scarred fist.
Karl cursed again, and pulled off his shapeless bag-hat. The bright yellow coil of his hair fell down loose to his waist; even then, she felt a thrill at his beauty.
“Honored Imam,’’ he said, in a tone that cut across the mullah’s tirade: he used the Turkic lingua franca of the steppes. “What complaint have you against us, who come as peaceful traders?”
“You bring Allah’s wrath upon us, riding with your shameless harlots through the streets of a decent town!” The mullah shifted back into Turkic, finding insult unsatisfying when the recipient did not understand the language. His finger jabbed out at Erika; she blinked bewilderment back at him. “You Jew dogs carry Shaitan’s ill-luck as a cur does fleas!”
I’m wearing a shirt, she thought resentfully; that was manners, among strangers, even on a hot day. Shirt and trousers and boots and hat; what did he expect, a tent? Anger replaced puzzlement as the meaning of yahudi kopekleri sank in, and she let her hand drop to the pistol; she was not Ivrit herself, but an insult to any of the Three Faiths was an insult to all the People.
Sannie bat Brigid walked her mount level with Karl’s and dropped the point of her weapon; a Bandari lance was twice the wielder’s height, and that put the leaf-shaped steel head within a meter of the Muslim priest’s throat.
“Give me the word, aluf” she said in guttural Bandarit. “I’ll put it right through that lice-ridden beard and out the back of his empty head.”
“Shut up!” Karl snarled, and struck up the shaft hard enough to nearly tear it from her hand. The blood of Frystaat ran strong in him, and that showed in strength and speed as well as blond hair, green eyes, and mahogany-dark skin. Forcing his smile back, he continued talking to the townsman.
“Does it not say in the first of the Medina surahs, ‘Indeed, there shall be no coercion in matters of religion’? You have your customs of dress and behavior, and we have ours.” His smile grew slightly wider; he did not need to move the rifle that lay across his saddlebow.
A ripple of hesitation went through the crowd; one invariable custom that the folk of the Pale followed was tenfold revenge for unprovoked attack. The mullah had blinked in startlement as the lancehead flashed up from before his face, and again as the haBandari leader quoted the Koran; now he looked around,
Plainly calculating. His students would stand by him, but they were not fighting men; neither were the town roughs. The Turki nomads in for the fair were at least nominal Muslims and always game for a fight . . . but there were a dozen haBandari, well-armed, some of them armored, mounted on the tall warhorses of the Pale. Another voice shouted from the milling pack around him:
“You take the grain from our mouths, the cloth from our children’s backs!”
Karl shrugged, eyes searching for the face behind the mullah. “We pay well for what we buy. If you think your merchants sell too much, talk to them. Or your khan.”
There was another stir through the brown-and-gray mass of the crowd. Ashkabad lay on the southern slope of a range of hills that ran out from the Iron Limper mountains, in the neck of steppe where they swung west away from the east-tending Afritsberg. Quanats and springs made a string of villages possible, and this was a natural meeting-place for trade, the products of the Pale and the southern valleys and ranges for the goods of the great Northern Steppes. That also made it a natural target for raiders and conquerors; Quilland Base levied tribute for the Saurons, and two generations before the Yek Mongol clans had swept down from the northwest to conquer and hold. The crowd glanced upslope, toward the stone-walled citadel that dominated the mud-brick buildings of the town. The khan was Buddhist, and had excellent relations with the Pale . . . and his men-at-arms would welcome a chance to teach the townsfolk a lesson.
There was a clatter as stones were dropped. Erika sensed Karl’s leashed patience as the crowd dispersed; his eyes staved locked on the mullah’s until the little clump in black robes was again an island in the busy traffic of the street. The haBandari spurred past them at a fast walk; Sannie let her mount’s shoulder brush one of the students and sent him reeling, answering his raised fist with a mocking grin and upright finger.
“Rein back, bat Brigid,” Karl said tightly.
“They’re only ragheads, aluf,” she said protestingly.
“This is their territory. Keep that in mind!” To Erika: “This is worse than usual; I’m glad to be back, father’s not well and he needs me to see to things.” A wave to indicate the locals. “They’ve got some reason for complaint, actually.”
She raised her canteen and drank, passed it to her husband. “Why?” she said, gazing about in fascination once more. They were moving upslope, into a district where whitewash covered the mud-brick outer walls of the houses. Here went a litter, bearing a stout merchant in curly-toed slippers and sequined vest; there a coffle of slaves, yoked neck-and-neck; a bush-bearded Christian priest stood outside an onion-domed church like none she had ever seen, fingering the silver cross on his breast; a yellow-robed lama passed him with a wave, a
nd more and more. . . . The air was thick with dust from the overgrazed plains around the town, rank with the smells of spices and dung fires and human excrement.
“It’s been dry, these past few years,” Karl said. “I should have remembered.”
Tom Jerrison surprised her with a grunted comment: “Dry in the Pale, too. The hottnots don’t know how to care for the land.”
Karl shrugged. “Still, they’re short. Yes, we pay for what we buy: with luxury goods, weapons, craftwork. The grain and wool and meat the khan and his merchants sell us comes out of rent and taxes. The Saurons take their tribute good weather or bad, the khan takes his, the farmers and herders get what’s left. Why should he care, as long as enough live? He’s a Mongol and so are his troops, they aren’t going to starve.”
“That’s your friend Toktai?” Erika asked. “I thought you said he was a good sort, for a gayam?”
“His father’s khan, he’s the noyon, prince and heir,” Karl said, neck-reining his horse around a blind beggar. “Toktai’s a nice fellow to hunt gazelle with, good fighter--we went after those Quechua bandits together, did I tell you?--and he’d give his shirt to a friend; we’re anada, blood brothers. Otherwise, anyone outside his own clans are sum, sheep to be fleeced.” Karl chuckled. “At that, he’s a miracle of humanity compared to his mother, khatun Hoelun. You’ll be meeting her, and--”
“Sssst!” Assault Leader Gorthaur hissed.
Shulamit dropped flat behind the boulder. Waiting, she strained her ears. It was minutes before she heard the hoofbeats and bleating, the laughter and men’s voices echoing up the slope, bouncing from the crags of the narrow rock-cleft they had followed down to the edge of the plains.
Impressive, she thought, fighting to keep that from her face. Then: kaak, they re between us and the water. Her mouth was dry and more than dry, despite the smooth pebble she had been sucking on. The well down below was the only one in three days’ foot travel, four in the state her leg was in. She and the Sauron had carried as many canteens as they could, and they had not been enough; the last of it had been drunken three days ago. Steppe air was dry as well as thin; it sucked the water out through your skin and mouth and lungs. And it was near Truenight, sun almost down and Cat’s Eye a sliver near the horizon; little light, and that orange-brown from the banded planet. Conflicting shadows moved across the reddish, tumbled stone.
Cold tonight, she thought, assessing herself. She had lived hard most of her life, always the wild one. Ill content in the valley, happiest out on the Western Steppes with her family’s herds, or even better outside the Pale altogether. But there were limits. Desiccation did more than swell your tongue and make the eyes burn, drive a spike of pain between the eyes. Enough of it could kill.
The Sauron--Gorthaur, she thought: all things considered it would be silly not to think of him as an individual--looked nearly as fresh as he had in the fight four T-days ago. He doesn’t even pee when the water’s short, she mused resentfully. The long-dead Breedmasters who designed the Soldiers had known their business.
Slowly, she raised her head to a crack in the boulder. The well was four hundred meters downslope, where a last line of boulders marked the edge of the Afritsberg foothills and the beginning of the rolling steppe; four hundred clicks to Ashkabad, over in the outliers of the Iron Limper range. The well was a circle of mortared stone, with a low dun-green egg-bush tree beside it. A wooden lid as well, priceless, but even the worst outlaw would think three times before damaging a water source. The haBandari pulled a small spyglass from her belt and focused it. Images sprang close, tiny circular close-ups: the worn bone of a saber-hilt, a man’s broken nose, the deep pink crater of a horse’s nostril.
Raiding party, she decided. A dozen men, all on horses though they had muskylopes along; a couple of pack-camels, too, the two-humped breed common on the high Northern Steppes, and half a hundred sheep. Some of the warriors were wounded, crude bandages on limbs or torsos; tallish bandy-legged men, their heads shaven except for scalplocks, but with long mustaches, a few beards. Some were blonds, and they seemed to favor brightly colored baggy pantaloons, brimless caps with tassels, Astrakhan-wool vests; they were armed to the teeth, the leader positively dripping with weapons. Saber, knives thrust through his sash, two long-barreled pistols and a musket with an odd curled butt as well . . . that was the only firearm; the others had the usual horn-backed plainsman’s bows. They pitched camp quickly, hobbling their beasts, laying out blanket-rolls and kindling a small fire of dried dung.
Snulamit ducked her head behind the boulder, then started slightly to find Gorthaur beside her. He had crawled over, one handed, on fingertips and toes. She knew better than to offer the spyglass; a Sauron’s eyes were binoculars in themselves. His long slab-and-angle face was impassive as always; the only time she had seen any discernible expression on it was during orgasm, and not always then. The odd-looking gray eyes seemed to glitter slightly, as the hawk-style central focus shifted.
“Cossaki,” he whispered. Shulamit made an inquiring sound.
‘Related to the Russki,” he continued. “Steppe dwellers, though.” That was unusual; most of that breed were valley farmers or townsmen, like the Americ. “East of Quillard, a month’s journey.”
The haBandari raised her eyebrows; that was a third of the way to the Citadel. There was always a flow of raid and counter-raid on the plains, and it had been growing worse most of her life, quarrels over grazing and water, but things must be getting very bad.
“We will wait for them to leave, then lie up by the well for a T-day or two,” Gorthaur decided.
Shulamit gave him a hard glare, then shrugged: It was the best thing to do. Then a scream brought her head around, a long, shrill sound.
She raised her head again, and the scene below sprang into jiggling focus in the optic of her spyglass. The raiders had brought out more of their loot, two women who had been tied over the back of a dromedary. She could see the beweaponed leader laughing with head thrown back as they struggled with his men. More screams as they were stripped and thrown on their backs, men holding them by arms and legs. More laughter from the leader as he knelt and began to unfasten his pantaloons. Almost of itself, her hands brought up the Sauron rifle.
“No.” Shulamit raised her head, looked over at Gorthaur. “No need to take the risk,” he said. “We can stand another cold camp, and they will leave in the morning.”
Shulamit sighed and shrugged, leaning her cheek back on the stock of the rifle. It was a well-made weapon, sighted out to a thousand meters; blade for-sight, adjustable notch backsight, much like the rifles her own people made. Of course, she thought, this is a magazine weapon. Ten rounds. Flatter trajectory, too. She brought them together, resting the aimpoint between the Cossaki’s shoulderblades, then moved it down his spine.
“Gorthaur,” she husked, raspy from a dry throat. Bastard didn’t even look to see if I agreed with him. He had turned his back on her, scanning out toward the western plains with his Sauron vision. She heard a faint interrogatory sound. “Blow it out your ear, Gorthaur,” she continued, and squeezed the trigger.
“Thank the p’rknz,” Erika said, as the Pale compound came into sight.
“Good to see the rag again, nu?” Karl replied, waving. The flag of the People was flying above the gate; a six-pointed white star on a field of dark blue, flanked by flaming swords, overlain by a leaping antelope. The wall behind was whitewashed adobe brick, lance-high and thick; the gate was laminated steeltree wood, strapped with black iron, wide enough for four horsemen to ride through abreast and left half-open.
“Yes. But . . .” she hesitated. “I’m a little anxious, too, darling. All those friends and relations I’ve never met, and, and, well--they know Shulamit, not me.”
Karl cocked an eyebrow at her. “Afraid they’ll resent you for beating her out?” he said dryly. “I’m not the prize ram at a Piet’s Day archery contest, you know.” Erika felt herself flush. “Don’t worry, they’ll all love you.” A gri
n. “Shulamit was too like me, anyway, and everyone knew it; we’d have quarreled all the time.”
Erika smiled shyly and gave his hand a squeeze; it was still a miracle to her. It had seemed only natural that the dashing young merchant-prince would love the eldest of the daughters of Miriam. The darling, adventurous, adored Shulamit, leader in every scrape and trouble, who had left the quiet of Ilona’sstaad for stockdrives and hunts, gone prospecting for shimmerstones in the thin air of the Afritsburg, gone roving outside the Pale itself. Their quarrels had been a bewilderment; that he should turn to her, the mousy, bookish second sister, glory beyond words. And Shulamit never said a hard word to me, nothing maztov when I told her, she thought. But she had gotten drunk at the wedding, and ridden quietly off on the second day of the feast. I . . . hope she’s here. It’s been a whole year now; we should be close again.
The guards at the entrance to the compound had caught sight of the haBandari party; one of them blew a sharp note on an oxhorn.
“Shalom!” Karl shouted it out to the gate guard as they cut through the crowd waiting for entrance.
The guard officer grinned delightedly and returned the greeting; a haBandari in horsehair-crested helmet, with a rifle slung over his shoulder. His men were from the Pale but not of the People; Edenites, descendants of the Church of New Harmony farmers who had held the Eden Valley before the coming of the haBandari, three centuries ago. Big dour-looking men in breastplates and bar-visored helms, leaning on their long pikes or the helves of two-handed axes; some had crossbows slung over their backs, others war-hammers. Mostly of Americ descent, taller and fairer than their haBandari fellow-citizens.
War World III: Sauron Dominion Page 27