Terrible Swift Sword

by William R. Forstchen

  "We've got seventy-five trains a day stopping here!" the stationmaster protested. "It's chaos!"

  "Of course it's chaos!" John shouted. "It's madness, bloody madness!"

  He looked around at the men lining the platform.

  "Who's second-in-command here?"

  A bent-shouldered old man came forward.

  "Petrov Gregorovich, your excellency." The man took off his cap, his bald head bobbing up and down.

  "Well god damn it, Petrov, you're now Colonel Petrov. If you don't improve this by tomorrow you'll be fired too, until I find someone to get some order here."

  He turned to look back at the fired manager.

  "Your regiment? And where is it located?"

  "Fifteenth Kev. Last I heard, north of the Ford."

  "Find your rifle, and take the next train up and join it," John snapped and he stalked off, leaving the gape-mouthed man trembling.

  "He was doing the best he could," an aide argued.

  "Not good enough," John snarled in reply.

  He shouldered his way out of the station, climbing over the temporary tracks laid down to act as sidings.

  The high pierce of a whistle cut the air, and he looked back to watch as a long train came into the station, moving hard. People, squealing pigs, squawking chickens, and lumbering cows scattered before it. The train thundered through, the red-and-gold pennant of an express bound straight for Roum flying from its smokestack. Behind it were ten dormitory cars, swaying violently from their topheavy loads. The cars were crammed to overflowing with the lucky ones, destined straight through to the relative safety three hundred miles farther on.

  "Mina!"

  John turned with a groan as Emil Weiss stepped out of a shack and came up to his side.

  "Where the hell are my tents?"

  "Somewhere back in Suzdal."

  "I've got three thousand wounded from the last battle, a lot of them lying out under blankets in the open field. I'm losing thirty boys a day I could be saving."

  John held up his hand as if to beg off.

  "And beside that. We need tents for the people, lumber for barracks, and water, John. They're taking it straight out of the Volga—no filtration, nothing. I already got a couple of typhoid cases—soon it'll be a damned epidemic."

  "Later, doctor."

  Emil fell in by John's side as he walked down the track. On the far side of town the line turned northward, starting up the long grade along the flank of the White Hills. John went straight on, stepping over the track and wading down a sloppy, mud-caked embankment. He ignored Emil and shouted orders at his staff, pointing out another pile of abandoned food and roaring with anger at the sight of a dead horse, half-butchered, the remains of its carcass sinking into the mud. Emil wrinkled his nose at the smell, and simply followed John as he started up the long slope beyond the town.

  "I know you're doing the best you can," Emil said, his voice suddenly gentle, and John looked over at him in surprise.

  "How are you holding up?'

  "As usual," John replied, not wishing to even think about how he was feeling. His stomach felt as if it were in a knot. It had started the moment Andrew had mentioned evacuation and had stayed that way for the last ten days.

  "When was the last time you slept?"

  John laughed, shaking his head, and made no reply.

  Emil was silent, looking at him closely.

  John slowed going up the hill, and Emil turned with a solicitous look.

  "How old are you, son?"

  "Thirty-three."

  "I'm twice your age, and you're getting winded. Boy, you're run down and out."

  John held up his hand as if to ward Emil off.

  The rail line swept up the side of the hill before him, turning northward on its long four-mile climb to reach the pass through the White Hills. It ran nearly eight hundred feet above the valley floor, where it would turn through the cut and run back down, straight as an arrow, to the Kennebec crossing a hundred miles farther on.

  The hills were still heavily clad in towering pines, although in the last week they had been falling by the thousands, both slopes of the hills being cleared for the needs at hand—the west slope for the construction of fortifications, the east slope for where the temporary factories and shelters were going up. In another day the rail turnaround on the far side of the hills would be complete, eliminating the need of running the trains up through the hills, to offload and then slowly back down.

  Slowing, John stopped to watch the refugee train that had passed through Kev continue its laborious climb, engine puffing dark plumes of smoke, one of the first of the coal-burners to join the line. The burden it was carrying was almost too much—the engine was straining hard, showers of sparks were spraying up and flame shooting out from its belly. The acrid smoke rolled off to the south in a heavy layer.

  Around the bend out of Kev another train started to move up the slope, flatcars piled high with turning lathes and molds from the gun works. The engine pulling the equipment would be stripped down to provide the power to get the lathes running again. Nearly half the locomotives were destined to be cannibalized for the factories, once the first stage of evacuation had been completed. He cursed himself silently for not having converted the factories to steam power earlier, and for having allowed himself to stay married to the convenience of the nearly limitless power harnessed from the Vina Dam.

  He slowed, pulling out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his face. Without any worry about projecting the proper image, he sat down on a tree stump that was still oozing pitch. He looked a mess already, he realized, so getting the seat of his pants covered with pitch didn't matter anymore.

  Pulling out his field glasses, he looked back to the west. It was a beautiful, clear view, straight back through the heart of Rus. The showers of the night before had given way to the promise of a warm spring day, the sky a crystalline, fresh-washed blue. The orchards were shedding the last of their blossoms and the hills to the south of Kev were carpeted in pink. If he could only have blocked out the madness it would have been a scene of pastoral splendor, worthy of a painting by Church or Cole. The scent of green fields, of fresh grass, wildflowers, and pine, almost masked the undertone of sweat, unwashed bodies, and excrement.

  To the north, half a dozen miles away, the last solid stands of the great forest resting along the high hills dropped away into a scattering of trees, which followed the moisture of the creeks and gullies that cut through the gently rolling landscape. Behind him the high backs of the White Hills, which inarched in a straight line from the forest to the inland sea, were crowned with towering stands of virgin growth, many of the trees a hundred or more feet in height.

  He tried to visualize the rough survey maps that had been made at the same time the census teams went out. The realm of the Rus ran from the Neiper to here, nearly two hundred and fifty miles, with a few scattered settlements going out into the vast plains that stretched three hundred miles farther on to Hispania and Roum.

  If there was a final defendable point, it was here— Andrew had at least chosen well in that. Farther west, back toward Suzdal, the width of open land between the ocean and the great forest averaged more than sixty miles across, a few sections bulging out to nearly a hundred. This was the only other choke point, the thousand-foot crest of the White Hills forming a natural barrier, heavy with forest— twenty miles of front to defend.

  The valley floor below was a sea of chaos. Nearly a third of a million refugees had funneled through. Far out on the open plains beyond he could see wagon after wagon moving eastward, piled high with food and the few meager possessions the people of Rus could not bear to part with.

  Anyone capable of work was laboring on the long western slope of the hills, felling trees and digging, some with nothing more than sharpened sticks. He looked around at the women, the old men, the children of ten years of age; the long line already running for miles; the staff of engineers who had gained their knowledge on the Potomac front no
w laying out fields of fire, driving in marking stakes, directing the laboring thousands.

  "Just where in the name of God do they get their strength to go on like this?" John whispered in English.

  "They're Rus," Emil said, sitting down by John's side, pulling up a wilting blue flower and twirling it absently between his fingers.

  "We think we've pushed them to the edge, and still they keep on going. It's part of the peasant soul. Believe me, John, I know—remember, I'm from the old country. A Jew, to be certain. Back in the old world their cousins would have burned my beard off with joy. But the Slavic peasant, you pile suffering on top of suffering on his back and he'll carry it. Oh, God knows, they'll cut your throat if you cross them the wrong way. But they know that they either suffer doing this, or they all die in the end."

  "Think how much easier it all would have been," John said, "if we had listened to Tobias. Remember, back in that council meeting we held after the Tugar Namer of Time showed up."

  "Can't recall," Emil replied. "Never did care to listen to that pompous fool."

  "He said that we should leave, find a place down south and wait for the Hordes to disappear, then come back and take twenty years to build. You know, if we'd done that the Hordes would be gone by now."

  "And twenty percent of the Rus, the Roum, and the Cartha would be in the feasting pits."

  "My dear doctor, over half of the Rus have died in the last five years, and I bet not one Cartha in ten will be around to see next winter."

  "Don't forget that by staying we managed to put an end to the smallpox which would still be preceding the Tugars, so the number of lives saved in Roum and elsewheres more than makes up for it. Cold as it seems, John, it does balance out."

  "If we lose here, the Roum will get it by winter. That city is a trap—hills looking down on it from three sides. The Merki would shell it apart."

  "Go over and ask some of those folks digging down there if they'd want it different.

  "Go on—what the hell do you think they'd say to me?" John sniffed, leaning forward and plucking up a blade of grass, turning it over in his hand.

  "You're playing with what ifs, John," Emil said forcefully. "That's far too much for a peasant to worry about. All he knows is that he is free, and if need be he'll die fighting. Sure, we could have run. Would we have found a safe place? I doubt it. If we had, would we have found iron and coal sitting on top of each other? And what about being in the hands of Tobias—you saw how he turned out. I'm happy to stick it through as it was played out."

  "Even if we lose."

  Emil smiled softly.

  "Ever see a pogrom?"

  "A what?"

  "You Americans," Emil said, shaking his head. "I was born in what used to be Poland. My father was murdered by a gang of drunken Hungarian soldiers in 1813, when the French were retreating out of Russia. They spit on my father's body, called him a dirty Jew, and then raped my mother. Of course, she wasn't too dirty to receive that favor."

  He was silent for a moment, looking off, eyes unfocused.

  "She died from what happened," he whispered, "leaving me and an older brother, who died of the typhus that followed the army. I never forgot what it was like to live in that fear. Even after I grew up with my uncle, became a doctor in Budapest, and went from there to Vienna, I was still in the grip of that fear. Oh, I was a doctor, to be sure, but I still never knew when the Hungarian, or any goyim, might be at the door, laughing, knowing he could kill me without fear of reprisal. That's why I finally came to America. You Americans, born in your blessed New England, never knew that kind of fear."

  Emil sighed, looking off to the west.

  "That's why I loved your Maine, my Maine. That's why I hated what the Confederacy stood for, even though I saved the life of more than one rebel boy, caught in war beyond his making.

  "I was terrified when we first landed here and discovered they were Russians—Rus—and breathed a sigh of relief when I found they didn't know what a Jew was. I was just another Yankee to them." He laughed in a self-deprecating manner. "Surrounded by shiksas, and they think I'm one of them. Can't even tell the difference in accents."

  Mina looked over at him and smiled.

  "Better English than a lot of folks I've heard. O'Donald's brogue gets mighty thick at times."

  "Exactly what I'm talking about. O'Donald, ask him about watching his older sister starve to death during the potato famine. He knows what I'm talking about, the terrible fear. Well, these people were born and bred to it. Fear of boyars, fear of Tugars, fear of their own church. Give them a taste of living without that fear. That's why they're digging out here till they drop dead from exhaustion. That's why they'll fight them on the river, across those plains in front of us, into these hills, and if need be backwards across this entire goddamn world."

  He paused for a moment.

  "That's why their sons, their fathers, died with Hans, singing the 'Battle Hymn' as they went down." He paused for a moment, his voice choked.

  "So don't ever say we should have left these poor miserable bastards to the Tugars."

  John nodded, looking across the plains. He watched the shadows of the cumulus clouds as they floated lazily down to the sea, puffing high with the warmth of a spring day after a night of rain.

  "Hard to believe there'll be a war here in a month, it's so damned peaceful."

  "Maybe it'll be peaceful for your children," Emil said wearily, climbing back to his feet.

  "By the way, John, I've got hospital supplies stockpiled in Suzdal, Novrod, and Vyzima, and I want a priority train to get them out now."

  John chuckled softly.

  "Knew you'd put the pressure on me at some point."

  "It's my job," Emil said, extending his hand to pull John back to his feet.

  "All right, I'll write the order and send it down the line," John replied. "You'll get them day after tomorrow."

  He paused for a moment, looking off to the south to the point where the dark line of earth was turning up through what had once been a forest of pines. If they could get this position finished in time, it would be one hell of a killing ground.

  Twenty miles from the sea to the forest, the hills nearly twelve hundred feet high at points. The forest was right at their back—all they had to do was cut the logs and stack them up. The only drawback was the hard, rocky soil, unlike the loam of the Potomac front which was a paradise for digging entrenchments. In a month he could have a single line up; in three months, bastions, a fallback position, fortresses blocking each of the passes, and the slope forward a madness of entanglements. Time, it was always time.

  He looked over his shoulder. A hundred yards farther up the slope a crew was working hard. A low, double-walled blockhouse was going up, dirt piled up against its side. The men were doing good work, and when finished it'd be proof against damn near anything.

  "How long have we got?" Emil asked. "I've been out of touch up here."

  "They hit hard on the ford last evening, got a foothold across and we didn't push it back till morning. We took a thousand casualties—the 1st Orel and the 2nd Roum got badly chewed up. I forgot to tell you, there'll be a trainload of them coming in by evening."

  Emil nodded absently.

  "I think I better get some rest—it's going to be a long night."

  John didn't say anything. His deepest terror was to one day be brought in to Emil, this time to receive his professional consideration. He had gone through the war without a scratch, but he'd been in too many field hospitals—filled with the thunder of screams, rasping saws, and slashing scalpels—to feel anything but a primal dread. He looked over at Emil, wondering how such a gentle man—for after all, beneath the irascible exterior was an infinite well of gentleness—could wield a scalpel against the torn flesh of so many young soldiers. He felt a sick compulsion to ask how many arms, how many legs he had taken off, as he looked at the weathered hands, which seemed to be permanently red from the caustic washes he used to prevent infection.
r />   "Scared?" Emil asked softly.

  "Terrified," John whispered.

  "We all are, this time around. I thought for a while I might lose Andrew to it. I see it in you, Fletcher, Kal, and down deep, even that young Hawthorne."

  "But not in Pat. I think he really loves it."

  "Thick-headed, but we need that type. All the rest of us, though. We were scared the first time around, but I think we were too caught up in it all to worry. Last summer, that one hit us off-guard. I think it shook our confidence a bit, even though we won. It made us nervous, and then the disaster two weeks back, the way they sliced right through us, that one shook all of us to the core, it made us realize we really could lose this one."

  "I remember this bully in my town, Waterville," John said, his face flickering into a smile. "He taunted me for weeks and I was terrified of him. Finally I just exploded, and by god I beat the living daylights out of him. I felt grand, I did. The next morning, as I walked to school, I saw him, black-eyed. Behind him was his big brother, twice my size, who beat me to within an inch of my life.

  "Sort of the same this time with the Tugars and then the Merki. I guess that's why I'm so damn scared. What we're doing here is a last desperate bid, doctor. We're losing all of Rus, everything, to try and beat them. You know damn well if they break this line some of us might get to Roum, but we'll never come back. It'll all be gone forever."

  "And you think that'll happen, even after all of this?"

  John nodded sadly.

  "You know, I know that Andrew is playing out a game," John said, his voice lowering to a whisper. "Once they break through and find the country empty they'll storm forward, supplies or not. They'll have to. Six days after the breakthrough they'll be here, my good doctor, and there isn't a damn thing we can do to stop them."

  "Andrew keeps saying a month."

  John shook his head.

  "Propaganda, a last hope. I just pray to God that he knows that it's a dream. Believe me, doctor, those bastards will come on with death in their eyes. Give me a month and I might be able to make a go of it here. But I think, my friend, that in a month's time all of us will be bones in the feasting pits. Nothing will stop them once they're across."