I knelt, set my helmet on the hide-covered floor beside Yulen, and whispered, “How you doing, Sarge?”
Yulen’s eyelids fluttered, he stared past me, and his lips quivered. Then his eyes closed, and he let out a thin moan.
I tugged off my gauntlet, and laid my fingertips on his forehead. Hot. I said, “Let’s have a look.”
I shifted my weight, bent over Yulen’s middle, and grimaced. An entry wound as wide as a golf ball had torn Yulen’s belly open, three inches left of his navel.
Slug mag rifle rounds are bigger than a man’s thumb, and they hit hard. An unarmored body shot usually made a corpse, not a casualty, out of a normal-sized GI. Casuni were big and tough, and that was probably why even a Casuni as old as Yulen was still hanging on.
I felt for my aid pack, my hands trembling. There might be a chance.
I sniffed in the direction of the pot the woman had spooned liquid from. It was the peppery janga broth Casus’s man had brewed at his impromptu first-aid station, days ago, back at the escarpment. Then I sniffed Yulen’s wound, and the odor of janga overpowered even the rot of infection.
My shoulders sagged, and I stopped fumbling with my Aid Pack.
A primitive triage for intestinal perforation was to feed the patient an odoriferous liquid. If the intestine was perforated, the smell leaked out the wound.
Casus’s balm squad had been testing Yulen, and they had found the worst. A GI could save a buddy who took a clean shot through the shoulder or thigh, if the bleeding could be stopped.
But this Slug round had torn open Yulen’s intestine. His gut had been flooded with excrement for probably ten days now, and had incubated enough infection to kill ten elephants.
In the history of warfare, gut shots probably killed more GIs than any other single battlefield wound. Ord and I had tamperproofs stuffed with the latest and greatest battlefield meds. If we had known at the time. . . . But all the antibiotics in New Bethesda wouldn’t save Yulen now.
I remembered Yulen, threatening to cut out our lazy tongues one minute, then sneaking us bread the next, and I blinked back tears. I kissed the old man’s burning forehead, then stood, and wiped my eyes.
The woman with the clove knelt down again, resumed rubbing Yulen’s forehead, and said to me, “This will help your Sergeant’s fever.”
“My Sergeant?” I nodded. “Yeah, he is.”
Sergeant Yulen died just before noon.
Casuni funerals, like those of most cultures, are as much a product of environment as of theology. At spring thaw, the frozen tundra of Bren’s High Plains would vomit up corpses buried during her long, bitter winter, if the ground could be dug at all. And during that winter, BTUs are too valuable to waste.
Therefore, at sunset, Yulen ascended, presumably to heaven, in the form of a roil of oily black cremation smoke.
Kindling is as precious as warmth on the High Plains, which is why the mourners who had ridden from all across Casus’s domain brought a tribute of twigs and branches to build Yulen’s funeral pyre.
The mourners formed a circle around the roaring pyre, swaying to the slow beat of one hide drum. I stood among them, downwind, fighting back nausea at the smell of burning flesh.
Casus stood on the opposite side of the pyre. He motioned me to circle around and join him.
When I stood alongside him, he whispered behind his hand, “Stay here. The women like downwind because it’s warmer, and they don’t drink. But the mead tastes better upwind.”
The women left the circle, and returned with mead-filled horn flagons, which they distributed one to each man.
The drum stopped, and the only sound was the wind beating across the prairie, and the crack of burning branches.
Casus raised his cup. “Farewell, brave Yulen.”
All the men raised their cups, and I followed along. Then they spoke a single toast, with one voice, and drained their cups.
I figured, given observed Casuni propensities, that the funeral’s next phase would be for everybody to get hammered like Irish at a wake.
But on the High Plains the nights are too cold for long speeches or parties, mead is hard to come by, and the dehydration caused by alcohol is unwelcome in the cold. So everybody just stood around until the fire stopped putting out heat, and the wind picked up, then they scurried for their yurts.
Casus insisted I spend the night at his place, covered in robes, on a hide pile so thick it would shield a princess from a pea, so the two of us could visit about matters of mutual interest. I figured the topic would be smuggled guns. But across the chamber, he was snoring like an unsuppressed GATr before I could get a word out.
I lay on my side, stared into the fire, and shook my head.
Yulen’s funeral left me empty, guilty, and depressed.
Empty for the loss of a good man. Yulen had suffered, though an old soldier like him probably preferred to succumb to a bullet instead of a coronary.
Guilty because, while my emotion for Yulen was genuine, I was going to play this bond with Casus for all it was worth, like some used-Electrovan salesman.
Depressed because in the morning I was going to ask Casus to ally with the Marini and the Tassini in a war. And now I had to do it after Casus had told me, after the toast I had heard earlier in the evening, that it was the same toast that had ended every Casuni funeral for the last three hundred years.
The toast went, “May paradise spare you from allies.”
Forty-Six
The next morning, Casus and I walked out on the prairie, bent forward against the wind. Low clouds hung a dirty-gray ceiling above us, spitting pellets too hard to call snow that skittered across the frozen ground. I carried my M-40, four 40-round banana magazines, and a sack of groundfruit.
Groundfruit was the brown tuber that Bassin had lived on while he spied on the Stone trade, the one that made the hardtack cakes Yulen had shared with me. Groundfruit grew wild year round, everywhere beneath the High Plains, and Casuni women harvested it, ripened it, then pestled it into flour that made the leathery bread that served as the staple of the Casuni diet.
A groundfruit was the size of an adult human head, but more durable, so it also served as the gold standard for Casuni target practice.
I laid a row of groundfruit on a rock ledge, then we backed off two hundred yards. I tapped a magazine into the receiver, and plinked the gourds forty times without a miss, varying positions prone to kneeling to standing, without reloading. For my last five shots, I swung the optics aside, and, using just the iron sights, popped one fruit five times, so it yo-yo’d across the distant ledge like a rabbit.
I pointed to the selector switch’s full-auto position. “This makes it talk like a woman. Useful in close quarters.”
Casus stared downrange with his mouth open so wide that ice pellets ricocheted off his tongue, and asked, “May I try it?”
I reloaded while we walked up closer to the targets. I decrypted the grip safety and handed him the rifle. He plinked a few groundfruit, then thumbed the selector switch to full auto, sprayed a burst, and whooped, even though he didn’t hit much. “We must have these! What’s the price?”
“You understand that repeating rifles would have to come from the forges of the Marini.”
He winked, then held up his hand, and rubbed his thumb against his forefingers. “I know this sad song. The price will include a surcharge to cover certain—expenses—to avoid the Bitch.”
“I can not only save you the bribes to the Queen’s people, I can equip your army for no money at all. Not just with rifles. Stuff you’ve never even dreamed of. That thing that makes maps in the air? That’s just the beginning.”
Besides the crash debris that Howard insisted on dragging along with us like the world’s second-largest ball of twine, Ord and I carried radios, meds, platoon-level weapons, demolitions equipment, instruction chips for all of them, and for every military subject under our former sun.
Casus wrinkled his forehead as he tossed an M-40 round in h
is palm, then tapped the bullet’s Teflite jacket against his teeth. “Jason, my friend, now is the time for negotiation, not joking.”
“No joke. Just use the equipment against the black worms, and it’s yours.”
Casus paused with the cartridge between his lips like a cigarette.
I took a breath. “So long as you operate in concert with the Marini and the Tassini.”
Casus spit the cartridge, and it spun through the air and tinged off a rock. “You said no more jokes.”
I picked up the M-40 round, pocketed it, then sat on the rock, and patted the space beside me. “Hear me out.”
He frowned, but sat.
A half hour later, Casus stood, folded his arms across his wide breastplate, and shook his head. “Impossible. The Casuni will fight. But the Casuni will fight separately.”
“Then the Casuni will die separately. So will every other human in this world. The Queen understands that. That’s why she’s making a complete commitment—”
“The Bitch doesn’t know commitment!” Casus jerked his thumb over his shoulder, in the direction of the escarpment. “I lost two sons in that battle against the worms, already!”
I rocked back. An ash flake from the funeral fire tumbled past on the wind.
Two sons? Just the thought of losing Jude, who wasn’t even my blood son, paralyzed me.
I blinked, then stammered, “I didn’t know. Casus, I’m so sorry.”
I stood, and laid a hand on his quivering shoulder plate, as he wept.
He wiped his eyes, then blew his nose into his fingers and flicked the snot glob downwind. “Yes. My other sons are devastated, as well.”
My brow wrinkled. “How many sons do you have?”
Casus cocked his head, and paused. “Surviving, as of sundown yesterday, five hundred six.” He ticked a finger against two other fingers, then shook his head. “No. Five hundred eight.”
I stared at him. “All those mourners—”
“Who else did you think would attend the funeral of a miserable buzzard like Yulen but his students?”
Casus raised a finger. “In every encampment I conquer, I bed twenty women. I have each son they bear me trained as a soldier. Then, when I levy troops from that encampment, my own sons are among them.” He leaned toward me and winked. “Now, here’s the clever part. By Law, no Casuni can refuse to fight for someone who commits all his sons!”
“Oh.”
Casus picked up the M-40, worked its action, and blew into the chamber. “As one commander to another, I recommend the strategy. It’s slow, but the copulation part is excellent.”
“Casus, if the Queen has committed her only son to this alliance, that would be all her sons, true?”
“Bassin? They say he was too tough for the slavers to kill.” He lowered his voice. “Personally, I think that means he’s half Casuni. Though who would have lain with the Bitch is beyond me.”
“Anyway, if the Queen has committed Bassin—”
“Yulen was right. You are clever.” Casus wagged his finger at me, and narrowed his eyes. “But you aren’t asking me to fight for the Bitch. You’re asking me to fight for you. Therefore, Bassin is irrelevant, and I may refuse.” He straightened up, nodded, and crossed his arms.
I sighed.
Casus wasn’t opposed to a horrible and bloody war. Especially since he knew it was unavoidable, and in his nation’s best interest. He wasn’t opposed to taking orders from me, so long as he retained control of his own troops. He just needed to feel like destiny had forced him into doing what he had to do, anyway.
I’d dealt with a few advisees like Casus, guys who just wanted to act as their own barrack-room lawyers. Ord always said they had fools for clients.
If it were up to me, when this war heated up again, I would make Jude a PFC clerk, and assign him to count beans in the deepest subbasement of the Winter Palace, until the shooting stopped. But I knew it wouldn’t work out that way. I didn’t even think that Munchkin would pull strings so unfairly if she were in my shoes.
I asked Casus, “If a man only has one godson to commit, does that count?”
Forty-Seven
Casus reined up his big white duckbill with its forelegs on a natural pavement of red rock slabs crisscrossed with crevasses, swirled with rusty sand, and studded with scrub. The rocky plain stretched a mile further south, then the sand coalesced into a red dune sea that marched across the horizon.
I stopped Rosy alongside Casus, and the dozen outriders Casus had brought with us stopped, too. In two days, we had ridden three hundred miles south from Casus’s camp to reach this ragged border of the Tassin Desert, and the day had become almost warm. But as we stopped, the sun had dropped near the horizon. The High Plains’ thin air surrendered its warmth fast.
Casus turned in his saddle and faced me as I sat astride Rosy. “We camp here tonight. The ground ahead suits the Tassini mounts, but lames ours. Our fire and smoke will bring Tassini scouts. You’ll continue with them.”
Once Casus threw in with the Alliance, he threw in all the way. He insisted on guiding me to the border personally, but his presence any farther south would have chilled negotiations faster than a High Plains sunset, if it didn’t provoke gunplay.
Casus gazed out to the dunes. “You must win them over. The bastards are good riders and crack shots. Besides, I’m not about to weaken my Clan winning a war while the Tassini conserve their strength, then set upon us later.”
I stared at the sunset. There was no point in telling my new ally that without the Tassini, and probably even with them, there wasn’t going to be a later to conserve for.
Casus hefted a roll of sleeping gear off his saddle, and said, “Now, here is what you must know about the Tassini in order to win them over.”
I nodded. “A Brief.”
Back home, the State Department used to send us off to the Third World with downloads called Nation-in-Brief. A Brief provided up-to-the-minute data on Gross Domestic Product, manufacturing, health clubs, and approved restaurants within walking distance of Western-style hotels, and a graphic of the country’s flag with circles and arrows that explained the flag’s colors and icons. Useful when you were squatting in a tent with a Pashtun warlord who was picking his teeth with a rusty dagger.
Casus held up one finger. “First, you must understand that every Tassini is spit from a whore’s womb, either a thief or a cutthroat.”
I covered my hand with my mouth and coughed. “Any exceptions?”
“None. The cutthroats learn riding and marksmanship, then become raiders. The thieves learn to drink alcohol and smoke janga, then enter politics.”
I nodded. “We have the same system at home.”
Casus furrowed his brow. “Really?”
I knelt on the broken rock, and busied myself with gear so he couldn’t see my face. We unrolled nets woven from groundfruit fiber that wrapped thick wood poles.
Casus said, “You’ll negotiate with the Headman of the Encampment from which the scouts ride. He’ll smoke the janga, then decide. Once you persuade him, he, being a thief, will present your ideas to the Council of One Hundred as his own, and the deal will be done. Quite simple.”
I shook my head. “Simple? I don’t know much about this place.”
Casus disentangled his sleeping apparatus, two wood poles thick enough to support the weight of two male Casuni. These he wedged deep into crevasses in the rock. Between the poles he strung the two nets, like upper and lower bunk hammocks.
He rapped his knuckles on one of the poles. “Janga wood. Worms hate it. Otherwise, if you sleep on the sand—”
“Ah!” I nodded, and repeated what Bassin had taught me. “The screw worms crawl up your ass.”
He grinned. “You see? You know everything about this place already!”
That night, after Casus had told me what else he knew about the Tassini, I swung in the wind in the upper of Casus’s hammocks, and fell asleep with my visor open. I awoke with my nose so cold I thought it
would blacken and fall off. Maybe that ancient plague Bassin had described had really been just frostbite, and eight hundred years of Blood Feud had begun with a misunderstanding. That was how little I understood this place.
I snapped my visor shut, chinned up the heat, and stared at a brass-and-crystal hourglass placed on a rock. Casus’s cavalry turned it each hour to mark shift change for the pickets. Casus said hourglasses were Tassini inventions, as were calendars, gunpowder, and poetry. Maybe Casus’s worldview that every Tassini was either a cutthroat or a thief was just slightly biased.
I sighed so hard that I fogged my visor.
Casus thought I knew what I was doing, and I didn’t dare disillusion him. But the truth was I barely understood enough to keep worms off my ass, and Armageddon was rushing at me faster than sand through an hourglass.
I set my jaw.
I would force these disparate allies together by my own sheer will. I set myself an internal deadline of noon, tomorrow, to have them working together.
Blam.
One of our pickets called out, as his pistol shot echoed, “Halt! Or I shoot your purple ass off!”
Crack.
A Tassini long rifle rang.
Bwee.
The round struck rock out on our perimeter, then flashed an orange spark as it ricocheted away.
A distant voice called, “Eat my excrement, you fat ogre!”
I extended my noon deadline.
Rifle and pistol shots crackled like popcorn. I rolled out of my hammock and low-crawled into a crevasse.
Forty-Eight
The final damage tally for our party’s midnight handshake with the Tassini Scouts of the Twelfth Encampment was two janga wood poles shot in half; one clean, survivable hole through a Casuni shoulder, and a Tassini mount who broke her leg in the fracas and had to be put down.
The Tassini and the Casuni ceased fire to mourn her, then, just after sunrise, I headed south with the Scouts, into the dune sea.
Tassini rode what Howard would call ornithomimes—sand-colored, ostrich-like reptilians half as big as duckbills, but lots faster. Desert-adapted, they store water in fleshy headcrests that wobble as they run, and webs between their toes let them scamper over sand dunes that would have mired Rosy like a mammoth in a tar pit.
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