Black Chamber

by S. M. Stirling

  “Luz!” Ciara said, scandalized.

  “I can’t help it, querida,” Luz wheezed. “You know, Horst is a prime fighting man, a hardened killer who’s gazed unmoved on terrible things. And the Herr Privatdozent is the author of one of history’s most monstrous crimes. Yet what is it put them both to flight and protected our whirring little device beneath the bed from their attention and questions we couldn’t answer?”

  She stepped over, snatched up one of the packages of Johnson & Johnson’s finest products, and fell into a fencer’s pose with it pointed toward the door, then advanced thrusting and cutting like a sabreur on the mat of a salle d’armes, or someone playing one on stage.

  “Aha!” she said. “Flee, flee, mighty Teutonic warriors, pale with terror before the bloody, awful power of the bloody, dripping—”

  “Luzzzzz!” Ciara wailed, and then dissolved into helpless giggles mixed with wincing embarrassment.

  “¡Ay!” Luz said, and sighed. “Mind you, it would have worked just as well at home. Amazing what men can be squeamish about, isn’t it?”

  She flourished the violin’s bow. “Let’s do something just for fun!”

  Ciara put her head to one side. “Vivaldi? Vivaldi is fun in musical form.”

  “The Concerto in G Major? It’s been done for piano and violin. As a matter of fact, I think I saw a copy . . .”

  She rummaged in the sheet music and put it down on the piano’s music rack.

  “Ah, I know that arrangement!” Ciara said, and they began.

  FOURTEEN

  Königlich Preußische und Großherzoglich Hessische Staatseisenbahn

  (Royal Prussian and Grand Ducal Hessian State Railways)

  Lehrte, Province of Hanover

  Kingdom of Prussia, German Reich

  SEPTEMBER 16TH, 1916(B)

  There are special trains, Elisa, and then again . . .” Horst began.

  “And then again there are special trains,” Luz finished with a sigh. “I doubt the two . . . eminent personages . . . we met with are being shoved onto sidings like this.”

  Though it’s an opportunity to gather intelligence, too, she thought.

  She kept her hands in the sleeves of her orange coat; it was not only stylish but warm, something the carriage most manifestly had not been since the coal ran out—the new orderly had said he was going out to get more, though he was taking a long time about it and the train might leave at any moment. It suddenly occurred to her that she ought to have a loop for her navaja sewn into the left sleeve of this coat if she was going to be in cold-weather country. It wouldn’t alter the drape much, and a knife you couldn’t reach quickly wasn’t much use except to excite suspicions if it was discovered.

  I am a true professional, she thought whimsically. It is starting to override my fashion sense.

  And the fabric was bright, which her surroundings weren’t either. Now that they were into the gray chill autumn of the North European plain it even smelled differently, more of the damp scent of waste steam and lubricants and a certain staleness. Coal smoke was the main contribution from the rail yards outside, though the drifting misty rain was laying some of that.

  Nobody thought it odd she was wearing the coat; Europeans were used to buttoning up inside, being far from the land of central heating and even farther from California. Horst had his greatcoat on too, and Ciara her cloak, and Daubigny an overcoat with a raccoon-fur collar. The company was a bit different this time too; von Bülow was somewhere else—nobody had told her and she’d known better than to ask, but she suspected Berlin where he’d be cooking up some other devilment in his laboratory, or helping some less politically adept version of himself cook up other devilments. And she knew Horst was extremely annoyed by the fact that he had to share one of the two small sleeping compartments at the rear with the knight of the KKK, though to his credit he hadn’t had the unimaginable brass to suggest putting Ciara in with a man.

  Horst really is a gentleman, in his way . . . but this isn’t a century for knights. Not real ones, unlike that puto from the KKK. I suspect he’s going to fit in perfectly.

  Their not-all-that-special train was sitting idle but with steam up on a siding in the industrial sector of Lehrte, a town that existed because about seventy years ago the then-king of the then-Kingdom of Hanover hadn’t wanted any such ugly newfangled things as railway stations in his beautiful capital city.

  That had made this former farming village a few miles away the center of the Royal Hanoverian Railways, and that reactionary attitude had played its part into turning the Kingdom of Hanover into the Prussian province of Hanover and the Royal Hanoverian Railways into part of the Royal Prussian and Grand Ducal Hessian State Railways about fifty years ago. Not that Prussian kings and nobles couldn’t be ferociously reactionary in their way, but they rarely turned down something that would make their army more effective, from needle guns and steam locomotives to the monster killing engines of the twentieth century.

  Lehrte had grown up as a typical grubby Victorian railroad-junction industrial town, as witness the sugar factory to one side of them and the cement plant to the other and acres of crowded workers’ dwellings. And added to the scents of industry was the odor of a big cattle mart—Baedeker’s Guide said it was the largest in the northern half of Germany—that didn’t smell as bad as the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, but not for want of trying and possibly only because the weather was cold. The fact that it was drizzling and dark in late afternoon helped keep down the stench, but it didn’t do anything at all for the view.

  Living here would undoubtedly drive you to drink, socialism, suicide, or all three in succession, Luz thought. Places like this make me love California in general and Santa Barbara in particular more and more. It makes you understand European painters like Munch, too, and why they’re always doing things titled The Scream or Ashes or Melancholy or Despair.

  Luz had seen a Munch exhibition while she was at loose ends in New York in 1912, before the election, before the Black Chamber. She’d come away convinced that despite his difference from her preferred Academic painters like Leighton—that was one area in which she’d agreed with the Party’s official aesthetics even before the Party—he was an extraordinary genius. And that it was even more extraordinary that he’d only gone mad and had to be locked up once, and even more that they’d let him out again. It was the sort of art that made you think:

  What genius! How compelling! I think I’ll slit my wrists now!

  Of course, that had been much closer to the murder of her parents, and she’d been more or less insane then herself.

  It was to the north that interesting things were happening, and she craned her head for a better view through the rain-streaked window beside her armchair. A main east-west line—quadruple tracked—from Berlin to the Rhine ran there. Trains were thundering by westward on three of the lines at a steady twenty miles an hour, a pace that spared strain on engines running on reduced maintenance and poor-quality coal but ate the miles well enough on this crowded continent. Germany was only about six hundred miles across, smaller than Texas, though you’d have to add in the distance from the dissolving Eastern Front to the Western in France. At this pace they could get men from one to the other in about five days, or allowing for a realistic degree of friction perhaps a bit more than a week.

  Europe, where a hundred miles is a long way; America, where a hundred years is a long time, she thought.

  Each troop train was fifty-four cars long, enough to hold a battalion and its equipment; she counted only a few that deviated from the norm. At precise intervals one would leave the main tracks for a siding, refuel and take on more water for the boiler, and rejoin the stream. Luz wasn’t surprised at the mechanical perfection that kept the flow going at exactly the maximum the tracks and rolling stock could carry; the Germans and more specifically the Prussians had invented this sort of thing. In 1914 the head of th
e Great General Staff’s railway section had been General Wilhelm Gröner, a man who spent his off-duty weekends with his wife enjoying their joint hobby: drawing up railway schedules.

  Most of these were troop trains, men jam-packed into ordinary passenger cars or even slatted boxcars that probably had the proverbial forty men or eight horses stenciled on the side and where the amenities were straw and a bucket. One had something else as well: Ein Lebewohl dem schönen Polen und seinen anhänglichen Läusen chalked on the side, the letters still legible despite having smeared and run. Luz laughed aloud.

  “What’s funny, Elisa?” Ciara asked without looking up from her chessboard.

  “What those soldiers had put on the side of their train. It means . . . A fond farewell to lovely Poland and her . . . anhänglichen . . . that would be companionable or cuddly . . . lice in English, wouldn’t it, Horst?”

  He looked up from his book, a copy of Ardistan und Dschinnistan with a luridly Oriental cover featuring curved daggers and robes, and spoke in an amused tone:

  “Yes, but it’s more sarcastic auf Deutsch. Anhänglichen . . . more like sticks close to you or affectionately inseparable. And their hopes will be disappointed; the lice in France are just as bad. Up at the front, at least—there aren’t as many in the rear areas among the Etappenschwein and the civilians, I grant.”

  About a third of the trains were carrying horses or their fodder, which took up more space per head. Lances and sabers might be obsolete, but armies still needed the big beasts as much as they did bullets or bread or artillery, not least because they hauled the bullets and bread and artillery from the railheads to the actual fighting line, or as close as they could get before men’s arms and backs took over. Even the U.S. Army still used a lot of horse and mule power, and everyone else far more so. Others were mostly flatbeds holding chained-down artillery under tarpaulins, everything from the ubiquitous little 77mm field guns to monsters weighing scores of tons that had to be disassembled even to be shipped by rail.

  An interesting variant was hundreds of captured Russian guns.

  “Those aren’t German artillery, Horst?” she asked; Elisa Carmody probably would know enough to realize that, if not the details.

  “They’re Russian, war booty. The light ones are Putilov 76mms . . . those are 107mms, a copy of a French design, a really fine piece . . . those are medium howitzers—from a Krupp model they bought before the war. All perfectly good guns, the Russians just weren’t very good at using them. We captured thousands last year and this, and lots of their ammunition too; the Ivans were too demoralized or just too pig-stupid to destroy much before they surrendered, and I heard that we’re going to be getting more shells as part of the peace terms. One thing this war’s proven is that you can’t have too many guns, so we’re using some of it to fill out the artillery brigades of the newer Ersatz divisions and giving most to the Austrians and Turks and Bulgarians. Almighty Lord God knows they need every piece they can get, even if it shoots by shoving nails and black powder down the muzzle.”

  More trains passed, and more. And hospital trains and freight trains, and more, and more, and more . . .

  It’s an impressive display of efficiently handled power, Luz thought. Fighting Germany isn’t going to be a pushover even if we manage to stop the Breath of Loki. We’re not making war on Mexicans anymore.

  “Every ten minutes on the dot,” Ciara said.

  She looked up again and glanced at the old-fashioned pocket watch she’d left open on the table beside the board as Daubigny frowned over his next move. She was winning handily for the third time in a row, to the Southron’s badly concealed dismay. Luz had won exactly one game of chess with her so far, and that by dint of telling stories that made her laugh to distract her.

  Ciara went on thoughtfully: “I’d read of that, in newspaper articles in 1914. That trains crossed the Rhine bridges every ten minutes for hour after hour, day after day, but sure I hadn’t quite believed it; the scheduling problems would be monstrous. Yet this is the same. Though I also read that the trains were like holiday excursions, with the men singing and waving to the crowds.”

  She’d spoken in English, and Horst put his book down and replied in the same language, speaking softly and with his eyes fixed on distant memories, not really seeing her:

  “No, this is not like 1914, Miss Whelan. Two years can be a very long time. And yes, we sang then, as we marched in our stiff new boots from the depots to the stations to board our trains for the front, past the cheering crowds. The sun was hot on our backs and the fields were golden with the harvest and the linden trees rustled overhead. We sang, yes . . .”

  His voice was deep and well-controlled, and he could make the music seem rich even a cappella and done very quietly:

  “Es braust ein Ruf wie Donnerhall,

  wie Schwertgeklirr und Wogenprall:

  Zum Rhein, zum Rhein, zum deutschen Rhein,

  wer will des Stromes Hüter sein?”

  Luz translated it mentally:

  The cry resounds like thunder’s peal,

  Like crashing waves and clang of steel:

  The Rhine, the Rhine, our German Rhine,

  Who will defend our stream divine?

  He was silent for a moment and went on: “The girls threw flowers and kissed their men good-bye, laughing . . . or hiding their tears behind smiles, for luck. We promised them we’d be home before the snow fell, and we chalked Ausflug nach Paris and Auf Wiedersehen auf dem Boulevard on the sides of the cars . . . A weekend trip to Paris—See you later on the boulevards. There were crowds at every stop westward giving us food baskets and fruit and wine . . . and more flowers and kisses, too. All our lives our fathers and uncles had drunk their beer on Sedantag, and boasted of their victories and their march to Paris, making us feel as if we were eternal children, a lesser breed. We felt like men that day, by Almighty Lord God, and it was good to be young and off to high adventures of our own. We’d be heroes with a tale to tell to our own sons one day!”

  He fell silent again, rubbing absently at his side with one big long-fingered hand; Luz had seen the shrapnel scars there, rough against the smooth white skin and hard muscle. Very softly he finished:

  “And then we crossed the Rhine . . . yes, a battalion’s worth of us rattling over the bridges every ten minutes, Fräulein Whelan . . . and left the trains behind. Forced marches, twenty kilometers forward each day, week after week. Marching toward the sound of the guns. Two million pairs of Marschstiefel with their hobnails in the white dust of the roads.”

  His voice was almost dreamy now: “White roads, the white dust smoking in clouds, and the endless heat and the foundered horses in the ditches and the men staggering like drunkards with lack of sleep . . . and soon nobody was singing and there were no laughing girls or kisses or flowers or wine. The snow fell, but we didn’t return . . . or reach Paris, either. Not yet.”

  Luz reached across and laid her hand on his; the gesture was genuine enough. He might be an enemy, but he was a man to respect, clever and brave and in his way honest, one who had suffered willingly for his loyalties and could laugh in the face of hardship and danger. He smiled and squeezed her hand for a moment, then released it. Ciara looked aside and swallowed at the byplay. Then Horst clapped a palm to the table to break the mood and went on cheerfully:

  “Well, these are no boys off on a holiday; they’re tried and tested fighting men, good tough front-swine. These are the victorious divisions from the Eastern Front, less the garrisons left behind—those will be mostly the older reservists and Landsturm, enough to kick the Russians’ backsides and get the juice out of the Rumanians with a few prods of the bayonet. These men will beat the Tommies . . . the English . . . for you, Fräulein Whelan. And you and I and Elisa and Mr. Daubigny here, we will make sure the Yankees don’t come to their aid!”

  Ciara nodded solemnly; she wasn’t up to being deceptive while she sm
iled, and wisely didn’t try. Instead she looked down at the chessboard again.

  “I queen this pawn,” she said. “That gives me a queen and a rook and a bishop . . .”

  “And me a checkmate in about ten moves,” Daubigny said, toppling his king over.

  “Twelve, I think . . . Another game, Mr. Daubigny?”

  “I think I’ll write a letter to my sister, if you don’t mind, Miss Whelan,” he said. “I’ll probably arrive before it does.”

  “Where does your sister live, Mr. Daubigny?” Luz asked casually, then imperceptibly slowed the cadence of her speech. “Charleston . . . or . . . Savannah?”

  The KKK man started a little; and significantly after she’d mentioned Charleston, during the naming of Savannah.

  He’s headed for Savannah, then, she thought. They probably were smart enough not to send him to destroy his hometown.

  “No, Macon in Georgia, she’s there with her husband and children,” he said.

  “You’re not married yourself?” she said.

  That was something a woman could ask if she saw no ring on a man’s hand, and in fact by convention was almost supposed to once they were introduced and on friendly terms, whereas it would possibly be a rude and definitely an odd question for a man unless the acquaintance was much longer and closer.

  “Not yet,” he replied. An artificial smile. “Our Southron belles are commonly so beautiful that it’s difficult to choose.”

  Thirty-five was about as old as a healthy upper-class male of more-or-less her own generation could be unmarried without being looked at as a confirmed bachelor. In her father’s youth that would just have meant he was a confirmed bachelor, the type who spent most of his time in male company at his club or in the army or the faculty of a university, what they’d called then a man’s man or woman-hater like Lord Kitchener. These days it came with a suspicion that the confirmed bachelor preferred his own sex for pleasure—that he was a sodomite or what people in advanced circles called by the new terms of invert or homosexual. Luz studied him closely behind a bland smile and decided she just couldn’t tell.