by David Drake
A drop in the sea compared with armies of yore, Center had commented.
You work with the army you have, Raj replied.
Abel could hardly believe it was possible to move a force this large so far and so quickly, but the proof was before his eyes. And they did it all with rifles and three-stone packs on their backs.
The air was hot and sticky. They’d left Lindron, worked their way through the badlands known as the Giants, and arrived in Ingres just four days ago. Now they were headed out the flat flax and wheat fields of Ingres, nearing its border with Treville District. This brought the road close to the River, and the humidity rose with each watch spent marching. The dust cloud glowed a luminous, sun-drenched yellow around the marching men. Fine brown alluvial dust stuck to sweating skin. It got into men’s eyes and scratched its way down their craws so that every swallow was dry and every breath ragged.
Even on a dont, the heat of late ripening time in the land was relentless.
The sun seemed not to move for whole watches at a time, although Abel knew it was progressing west little by little. Center was able to tell him the precise time of day if he wanted, but Abel usually refrained from inquiring. To ask Center the time was to risk hearing a history of galactic timekeeping.
Abel knew enough about how the universe truly worked to feel a stranger in his own world. No one in the Land, nor any of the barbarians in the Redlands, had a notion of the central fact of their own existence: that they were all on a planet that was rotating around its own axis, and traveling around its local star, which was what they called the sun, once per year.
The planet’s name was Duisberg. It had three moons which revolved around it, as the planet itself did around the sun. Some of the stars, the steady-burning ones, were other planets of the Duisberg system. Most were not.
Most of the stars in the night sky were distant suns.
There were other worlds, other men, out there.
Humanity had come from those stars over three thousand years ago. They had arrived in ships descending from the sky and had built a great civilization in the Valley of the River, which was the only easily habitable portion of Duisberg. It was a civilization that, compared to Abel’s own, had been magical and godlike. It was a place where every man woman and child had powers as great as those of Zentrum.
But men were not gods. And that shining civilization had collapsed. The fall had been total and galaxy-wide, the transportation gates slammed shut. Not even Center knew the full cause of the Collapse.
Center had been but a military computer on a planet called Bellevue. The only computational devices that survived the Collapse were those that had been hardened against infiltration by programming viruses or nanotechnological attack on the hardware. Usually this meant a military artificial intelligence.
After the Collapse, star travel ceased. Humanity, scattered across the galaxy, was thrown into a new Dark Age. Generations were born and died in the ruins, and on many worlds there was only a dim memory of a past now translated into myth.
In some places, such as Duisberg, all knowledge of the origins of humanity had vanished.
There was no memory of the time when people had not been inhabitants of the Land. Zentrum had seen to that. The Land was all, and all belonged to the Land. The Land was where civilized people had always dwelled. And then there were the surrounding Redlands, hellish places inhabited by terrible nomads. Devils. Barbarians. Worshippers of the dust with a god named after dust itself, Taub in their tongue.
And down the middle of the Land, feeding the irrigation ditches, flooding the rice paddies, and watering the sugar cane, wheat, flax, and barley fields, was—the River. It was the only river humans on this planet had ever known.
The River was life. It was death. The River was the blood of the Land, and everything depended on it.
And that was the way it had been for three thousand years.
Stasis.
Unending cycles of harvest and planting, threshing and grinding, eating, then planting once again. There was Zentrum’s Law to enforce the Stasis, and Edict upon Edict to guide behavior. These Laws and Edicts were what every child studied in Thursday school.
Certain actions must be always and forever interdict. There were lists to memorize. Only technology which Zentrum approved of was allowed to flourish. A ceramic dish that, Abel knew, had once graced a sophisticated electronic transmission facility and gathered messages from the stars might be used as a cook pot over a simple fire in the hearth of a villager, or as a slop bucket for daks intended for slaughter. Metal of every kind was forbidden but for the great exception: weaponry.
The list of allowed metal objects included the steel action and barrel of a musket or pistol, the lead of a minié slug, and the iron of a bayonet or knife.
All else was forbidden, on pain of punishment and even death.
With minor exceptions, all else was nishterlaub. Even to possess it was prohibited to any except for a priest. Most Landsmen believed in the depths of their beings that to merely touch nishterlaub was poisonous and deadly.
It was into this world that Abel Dashian had been born. And he might have remained as ignorant and unaware as the rest of the population had his curiosity not taken him one day into a warehouse within a priestly compound in his home district of Treville.
He’d been six years old when he first encountered Raj and Center, arrived two hundred years before as programs written into a capsule that fell from space. Since that day in the nishterlaub warehouse, the computer and the general named Raj had been constant voices, constant presences, in his mind.
Friends. Guides.
Whether he wanted them or not.
They had chosen him.
Their purpose in coming was to lift humanity from the doomed plans of Zentrum.
The three moons of Duisberg, two of them captured, near-miss asteroids, spoke of the danger. Abel now knew that the planet rotated in the opposite direction of the other five planets in the system. Something had reversed the planet’s spin. Something had raised the enormous lava plains that covered most of the surface.
That something was a system full of rocky debris.
This was the great flaw in Zentrum’s plan. A terrestrial computer, Zentrum thought in terrestrial terms. He must be sure that the dark age following the Collapse did not return. His purpose was to provide civil protection. Men may die in their thousands, but all was justified if dynamic equilibrium was maintained.
Nothing could ever, ever change. Any change would inevitably lead to another Collapse.
Yet those star travellers upon entering the system had immediately seen the flaw in Zentrum’s plan.
Disaster would return from the sky, like clockwork. The outer portion of the Duisberg system, its Oort cloud, was an asteroid-laden nightmare. Center had detected this on his approach, and barely made it through undamaged. Perturbations could send storms of asteroids inbound toward the sun. It had happened over and over again in increments of single digit thousands, sometimes only hundreds, of years. Much of the surface of Duisberg was a cratered ruin.
The asteroids would strike. All humanity would be wiped from the planet one day if they didn’t develop proper defenses—advanced defenses. It was only a matter of time and the roll of the universal dice.
The only hope was a return to science-based civilization.
The only hope for that came from the voices in Abel’s head.
Voices he still wasn’t sure were real. He’d spent years pondering the impossible dilemma of knowing for certain. Center and Raj seemed real. They could, if they wanted, control his body, even kill him.
That didn’t mean they weren’t his own mental creations.
What if it’s all me? What if they’re all me. What if I’m as benighted as any village beggar, babbling to some nonexistent phantom?
Who was to say that even his perceptions were his own? Maybe the voices let him see only what they wanted him to see. He could be quite insane and not know it.
> He’d learned much about the history of the Land. It was unarguable that Zentrum’s plans had provided stability for many periods of relative peace. The price humanity paid was eruptions of barbarity and slaughter from the Redland tribes.
At those times, the tribes swept in and the old aristocrats were replaced with new overlords. These changes were called the Blood Winds.
Yet even after the Blood Winds blew, the system remained intact. The Land had a way of taming even those who arrived in conquest.
Even in his moments of greatest doubt, there was one fact that kept Abel from wholly dismissing Center and Raj as voices.
His mother.
Her death when he was five.
Five.
The idiocy of her dying from a toothache. A cavity. Practically nothing. A tooth out, and then a week later, she was gone.
Center and Raj had told him—taught him—that there was a way for this sort of death to never happen again.
Whatever exasperation the familiar drone inside his mind might produce, however much he might wish to adopt the more sophisticated approach of the Academy, Center and Raj offered him one thing that the Academy never had: the chance to avenge his mother’s needless death. A chance to punish the being who had kept the means of her salvation out of the world as a matter of misguided principle.
2
Toward evening, the column crossed the boundary into the Treville District. Abel was now in familiar country and began to make out landmarks he knew well. They would not be passing through his hometown, Hestinga, where his father had his headquarters as district military commander. Hestinga was seven leagues to the east at the end of the great Canal, which fed into Lake Treville. This was the widest portion of the Valley.
They would pass Garangipore, however.
For Abel, Garangipore would always evoke the odor of hyacinth.
It was the perfume of the woman he loved, Mahaut DeArmanville Jacobson. So many meetings here in Garangipore, over the past few years, him down from Bruneberg, her up from Lindron.
She was a woman wedded to a job she loved, a job that gave her meaning. She’d found her calling.
He would never deny her that.
They were doomed.
* * *
The vanguard of the column reached Garangipore on the second day of the march through Treville. The town was a large grain repository, a transshipment center, with barges traveling down the River and heavily laden carts heading up the River Road to the northeast. It was also the place where the Canal left the River and headed for Lake Treville. Since the River Road ran along the eastern side of the River here, the Canal cut it off. The Corps would have to board ferries to cross.
Third Brigade had been chosen to handle transport of the entire Corps. Von Hoff, knowing the ability and experience of his engineering company, had volunteered.
Which meant that, as executive officer for Third Brigade, it was Abel’s job to work with his engineers to be sure this happened securely and on schedule. Fortunately, this was a task that pleased Abel. The chief of the Third Brigade Engineers was also Abel’s friend, the third part of the triumvirate at the Guardian Academy that had included Abel and Timon Athanaskew.
Landry Hoster was his name. Like Abel, he was a Guardian reserve officer, until recently stationed in the Regulars. For the past six years, that posting was serving as Abel’s righthand man and chief of combat engineering of the Bruneberg Black and Tans. In his maintenance shop a new type of bullet was being manufactured. It was a bullet based on the work of the heretic priest Golitsin. While Law had condemned Golitsin to burn at the stake because he invented breechloaders—nothing was said regarding the cartridges they used. These were bullets with the percussion cap, gunpowder, and slug held together by a stiff cylinder of papyrus.
In many ways, Landry was the complete opposite of Timon. About the only thing they had in common was a fanatical devotion to duty. Timon did it because he was a believer. Landry did it because, as he’d once told Abel, he was having so much fun.
“Tell me we have boats, Landry.”
“We have boats, Major,” the engineer answered, “and a lot of them. The engineering advance team got here five days ago. We hired or requisitioned damned near every vessel in the province.”
Landry was a heavyset man, almost a head shorter than Abel. He wasn’t fat exactly, but he had a pudginess that never quite melted away and seemed almost a part of his character. Landry was thirty, two years older than Abel, and had risen through the ranks in the Delta District Regulars before being accepted into the Academy. In the swamps and bogs of the Delta, an engineer had to know his stuff.
Landry was a shy man at heart pushed into leadership. Abel figured he’d probably been bullied a lot and scapegoated when he was younger. If so, Landry had gotten past that by the time he got to the Academy. There was a quiet competence about him, and he always seemed happy, or at least amused, even in the middle of the hardest tasks. Abel had learned not to underestimate Landry’s core military skills, either. He was a magician when it came to math, siege weapons, the layout of battlements and forts—anything having to do with numbers, angles, and the use of space.
Sometimes, when an idea struck him, he had a tendency to overdo it, however. Abel surveyed the huge gathering of River boats along the Canal’s southern bank.
“Looks like a bit of overkill to me.”
“Hey, we’ll end up glad we have them, sir,” Landry said, but cracked his usual smile. “I kind of had an idea about lashing them side-by-side and planking them over to make, well, sort of a bridge, but when I brought it up, our wonderful brigade chaplain nixed my idea. Said he’d hate to see me burn at the stake the way that priest did. You knew him, didn’t you?”
“I knew him.”
“Breachloading rifles,” said Landry, shaking his head in wonder. “Insanity. No wonder they set fire to the man.” Landry gazed across the water and mused. “Wonder how he handled the back-blow. I’d of liked to see how one of those things worked before they burned them all up.”
“I know you would,” said Abel. “Let’s get those boats loaded and moving, Captain.”
Landry straightened and saluted. “Yes, sir.”
Abel spent the day directing traffic. Landry’s men handled most of the launches, but Abel found he was needed in five places at once to solve small but potentially march-slowing logjams. Most of all, he made sure no boat was overcrowded. He told the loaders to remind the men at least three times what capsizing would mean.
This close to the River, the Canal was crawling with carnadons. An overturned boat full of men and donts would bring on a feeding frenzy of horrific proportions.
Besides, almost none of the men could swim.
His own captains knew Abel and Landry well, and gave Abel no trouble. However, some of the company captains from the First and Second Brigades were complete and cursed assholes about the whole thing. They didn’t like the way Abel was running the operation. They took exception to the warnings in his standard lecture—a speech that was designed to be sure the men knew what might happen if they dangled their hands in the water. They rolled their eyes and made fun of his hardcore attitude, as if they knew better.
Let them think what they want so long as they do what I say, Abel thought. What difference does it make if they know or don’t know that I’m saving their cursed lives?
Abel had been near two men when carnadons tore them limb from limb. Neither experience was one he wanted to relive.
But the truth was he was too busy to care what was said behind his back. In the end, with the help of Landry Hoster’s extremely efficient engineering company, he managed to cajole and bully the entire Corps over—men, donts, wagons, and all. The trailing pack train of the Quartermasters Corps was waiting to cross behind them. They would use Landry’s boats, but they had their own officers to oversee the specialized transfer.
Abel wished them luck.
It was after sundown, but before nightfall. The cloud of dust k
icked up by sixteen thousand men making camp for the evening glowed a dusky, golden hue. The murmur of a thousand rough conversations filled the air, along with a few shouts at donts and daks to get out of the way or get a move on. The Corps was spread up and down the northern banks of the Canal, since it was a readymade water source, and in spite of the fact it was carnadon infested.
He noticed that men were going in details to dip pails of water, and their companions were armed and vigilant.
Good.
Maybe he’d put the fear of Zentrum’s wrath in a few of them after all.
Abel unsaddled his dont and released her into a corral near the command area. Groelsh, the command master sergeant, who made the staff camp arrangements, had chosen a good spot on a rise that overlooked the troops in either direction along the Canal. Abel stowed his saddle beside the others on the makeshift corral railing. His pack and weapons he carried a short distance away. He put his rifle into the command staff rack, but kept the pistol in his waistband. He stowed his pack against the trunk of a small willow tree nearby. He slapped the pack to clear the sandy buildup on the canvas, but succeeded only in raising a cloud to further thicken the dust already hanging in the air. Ever-present insectoids buzzed around his head, but he ignored them.
He turned and looked down the rise at the Third Brigade encampment.
The flower-shaped sleeping circles of men were easy to see from this perspective. There were dozens of them—enough to fill the north side of the Canal as far as Abel could see from his position.
Then, something odd.
Farther along the Canal, there was a long line of men stripped down to bare chests. At the head of the line, a man stepped into a spray of water that came from an uplifted section of pipe supported on a wooden framework. He’d seen many such sod pipes before. They bent to a certain extent without breaking and were a staple of the irrigation system in the Valley.