"Let's hope you're wrong," Emil whispered, but John could sense the fear in the doctor's voice.
They started back down the hill. A few soldiers, part of the engineering regiment, saluted as the two passed, but the peasants barely noticed their passage.
Emil motioned John over to his shack, past a long row of tents with their flaps open. John looked out of the corner of his eye at the cots within—casualties of the fight on the Potomac, the incessant skirmishing along the river, lying by the hundreds. He felt it was his duty to go in, to spend a couple of minutes and offer a cheerful word, but the fear, the exhaustion, caused him to look away, stabbing him with guilt.
He could hear their low moans, snatches of prayers, the wheezing gasps of a man shot in the chest, the insane cackle of someone driven over the edge by having seen too much. He felt as if his own knees were turning to jelly.
God, never let it happen. Make it quick, but not that—not looking up into Emil's eyes, shrieking on the table like a terrified animal.
His memory flashed for a moment to the hospital after Cold Harbor. The boy lying outside a tent, both legs gone at the thighs, screaming, just screaming.
"Are you all right, John?"
He looked over to see Emil staring at him.
"How do you stand it?" John whispered.
Emil tried to force a smile.
"I don't. I just try to remember the ones I put back together. The others . . ."
He waved his hand, as if warding off an evil demon, and continued on.
"I'd best be getting back to the depot," John said.
Emil motioned him over to his tent.
"Have a drink first."
"I've got to catch a ride to the other side of the hills. They'll be laying in the furnace for a temporary shot mill, and I need to be there."
"Take a couple of minutes."
John nodded wearily. Ducking low, he entered the tent and sat down on Emil's cot. Emil went over to a wooden chest and pulled out a bottle, then poured the contents into a beaker and passed it over.
John took the drink, downed it in a quick gulp, and sighed.
"Tastes good. What is it?"
"A good vodka, with a strong dash of laudanum. Was able to mix some up with the opium we found south of Roum."
"What the hell have you given me?" John said slowly.
"A good knockout drop. You'll be asleep in a couple of minutes, my good sir. Doctor's orders. It's either that or I'll be checking you into the hospital with a heart attack or nervous debilitation."
"Damn you, I don't have the time," John whispered.
"None of us do."
John cursed feebly as Emil lifted his feet up onto the cot. Within a couple of minutes he was snoring.
"My cot, too," Emil sighed.
It had been over a day since he'd slept, and he had a long night ahead of him. Amputations—cutting and yet more cutting—and he felt an inner shaking at the red price which war took out of his heart. It seemed like this was all he had ever done.
He looked over at his notebooks and the microscope next to them—the precious research he'd been doing on consumption, typhoid, infectious wounds, and that strange mold he was finding on the side of certain trees which seemed to kill infection on contact. It would all have to wait yet again.
He walked out of his tent and saw John's staff waiting patiently.
"Go on, get the hell out of here and find a quiet corner to sleep!" he shouted, waving his hands as if shooing away a flock of confused geese. "Come back tomorrow morning."
The men looked at each other, first in confusion and then almost gratefully, before going over to a stack of boxes covered with a tarpaulin and settling down.
"I'll get some hot food to the lot of you," Emil said, turned away and heading back to do another round in the hospital. There was a Roum boy with a terrible stomach wound. Ever since he had saved Pat he no longer turned stomach wounds away, sending them to an isolated tent to die. The problem was that an amputation took only five minutes, a stomach wound a half-hour or more. But he could not leave them to die. This time he had packed the wound with the mold, and he was curious to see if infection had set in yet. Perhaps, the lord willing, it just might work. If so, he'd have to get teams of people into the woods to gather more of the mold, and train all surgeons in stomach-wound treatment, something he had skipped over in the past.
Looking up, he saw a train slowly working its way down the hill, another of the huge aerosteamers riding above it.
He gave a sniff of disdain. Yet another way for men to figure out how to kill each other, he thought angrily, then disappeared into the tent.
"A beautiful day," Andrew said, sighing and leaning back against a tree.
There was a distant booming, like thunder on a summer evening, but he barely noticed it. A flash of light snapped over Suzdal, near the Yankee quarter. Long seconds later a dull, muffled thump rolled up against the hills. He tried not to think of Kathleen and Maddie. She'd most likely be in the Cathedral, working in the special surgery ward with several dozen trainees around her. It was a cold thought. His wife, nursing their child, and an hour later her hands wrapped around a saw, cutting a wounded boy's arm off as part of a training lesson. The giving of life in two such dif ferent ways—one through love, and yet the other an act of love as well, even as it mutilated. When done, she'd wash and then pick up Maddie yet again.
"A thousand and thirty-two yards to the outer gate," Andrew said, looking over at Yuri. "That's the closest the woods come."
Yuri nodded in reply.
"A bit far," he said, looking down the long tube of the telescope.
"Have you been practicing?" Andrew asked.
"Actually, I'm getting rather good at it," Yuri replied, the slightest hint of pride in his voice.
All Andrew's hopes were tied in to this one effort. It had to work.
"The hidden field you've been practicing at—any problems?"
Yuri shook his head and continued to look down the tube.
"Everything is according to ritual," Yuri finally said. "Suzdal is the same as the golden yurt of a rival Qar Qarth, the taking of it the symbolic overthrow of an enemy. The Tugars captured the great yurt of the Merki at Orki and it was a humiliation that still burns their hearts. It implies that a Qarth cannot protect the circle of fire of his own hearth.
"Though you are only cattle, the failure to defend your great yurt will mystify them."
"And Jubadi?"
Yuri chuckled, rolling up from where he had been lying on the forest floor and leaning back to sit against a tree.
"He somehow felt that taking Suzdal would be the focus—the same as when the Tugars fought you."
"Why not do this from inside of Suzdal?" Andrew asked.
Yuri shook his head.
"They are not that stupid. A full umen will sweep through your town before Jubadi even steps fool into it."
Andrew nodded.
"And when he discovers the city is empty?"
"Ah, there will be rage. It will be perceived as the ultimate action of cowards, abandoning one's own yurts, conceding the hearth circles without a fight. Incomprehensible to a Merki. I daresay that they will leap forward, like dogs on the scent of blood. No matter how good the destruction that you have wrought, he will still send ten or more umens straight eastward. In five days they will be before Kev."
"And we're not ready," Andrew said. "It'll be a month more, at the earliest, before everyone is safely out, and the lines are fortified. All our able-bodied men are in the army, at the front, or in the factories. It's what's left that's digging the line."
"That is where I come in," Yuri replied.
Andrew would have preferred that someone else would "present," as he now called it, the argument to Jubadi. Yet no one knew the rituals, the panoply, the markings of the Qar Qarth as Yuri did. It had to be he. At the suggestion that someone else be with him, Yuri flatly refused. There was no sense in ordering it; besides, Andrew could not bring himself
to ask for a volunteer. Yuri's argument that he was as good as anyone else was sound. All hopes were on him.
"I'm telling my people that it'll be weeks before the Merki come on again."
Yuri chuckled, shaking his head.
"Wishful thinking. Jubadi is no fool. He knows that to wait is to court disaster, and besides, you will have outmaneuvered him. That will not sit well. I dare say he dreamed that with the fall of Suzdal the war, for all practical purposes, would be over.
"No, he will come on. Again it will be the horns— two wings striking, one along the shore, the other along the forest, the head in the middle. He has learned to flank you through the forest, and he will do so again."
That is where we will be weakest yet again, Andrew thought, saying nothing.
A shadow passed over them, rolling down from the edge of the thick woods, across the open slopes to the Vina, and then on up over the fortifications along the north wall of Suzdal. Andrew realized that it was a beautiful day, what with the landscape being dotted with shadows and light. Perfect weather for the aerosteamers, which had been strangely absent since their defeat.
"Andrew Keane, you must learn to be a Merki if you are to win."
"I'm trying," Andrew replied, looking over at the man who was part of both worlds, torn between them.
"All the other arrangements?" Yuri asked.
"The seamstress reports that her work is finished."
Yuri smiled.
"Good, very good, that will help."
"Suppose you are still lying?" Andrew asked suddenly, looking over at Yuri. "Suppose that all you have said is merely a ploy within a ploy, a means for your safe return to the Merki, bearing with you all that you know about me?"
Andrew looked past Yuri to where several guards lounged not twenty feet away. They appeared to be uninterested, yet they observed Yuri's every move with intense scrutiny.
"If you suspect that, then why are you allowing me to do this plan?"
"Because you are the only one who possibly could."
Yuri smiled.
"You won't know until it happens," the Rus replied.
A startled cry aroused him from his slumber. Hulagar, torn from his own dark dreams, was up in an instant. Grabbing his scimitar he pulled the curtain back, even as the silent ones rushed into the small yurt. On the other side Jubadi was sitting up.
"A dream?" Hulagar asked.
Jubadi nodded, a bit sheepishly.
Hulagar looked to the guards, beckoning for them to withdraw.
Taking a candle he touched the wick against the glowing embers of the fire in the middle of the yurt. A dim glow of light filled the inside of the small yurt. Going up beside Jubadi he sat down, setting the candle in the top of a skull, and in an almost fatherly manner took up a cloak and placed it around Jubadi's shoulders.
"A drink," Jubadi whispered.
Reaching over to a small lacquered stand, Hulagar took a leather pouch full of fermented milk and passed it over. Jubadi leaned back and took a long swallow, then passed it back to Hulagar, who took a sip before tying the spout off.
"A strange place, this," Jubadi sighed. "This forest, the dank cold, the rain. I hate it."
"In our old realms, the heat of high spring would already be washing the steppe, and the grass would be up to mid-waist, turning golden. Here it is dripping trees and darkness—one can't even see the sky. It is the stink of the cattle weapons, death drifting through the woods unexpected, our warriors dying in the dark, without the sun to shine on their faces as they look to the everlasting sky."
"We will soon be out of it," Hulagar said soothingly.
Jubadi nodded wearily and with a sigh lay back, pulling the cloak around his naked shoulders and curling up under the heavy felt blanket.
"Remember when we were young? My father sent us out."
"To fetch the Qarth of the Fraqu for punishment," Hulagar chimed in, the two friends sharing the memory.
"And the great storm came up. You dug a hole into the snow, killing your own horse to close the hole over, cutting its body open to give us heat."
"That was your first horse," Jubadi said.
Hulagar looked off, a touch of sadness in his eyes.
"You gave me a thousand as a reward."
"But it did not replace him," Jubadi replied.
"Remember, my Qarth,..it was my life I saved too. Do not make too much of it."
"I've been making much of it for nearly two circlings."
Hulagar untied the spout and took another sip of fermented milk, offering it to Jubadi, who refused.
"What troubled you in your sleep, my Qarth?"
"I saw the banner of black," Jubadi said, looking into Hulagar's eyes.
"Dreams are but dreams," Hulagar replied, a bit too quickly.
Jubadi growled out a soft laugh.
"Imagine a shield-bearer telling me that!"
"If you want dreams interpreted, send for Shaga," Hulagar announced with a soft smile.
Jubadi shook his head.
"It would terrify the old faker to hear that his Qarth dreamed of the black banner. He never did have the sense to keep his mouth shut—it'd spread throughout the camp."
"You know what the dream means as well as I," Hulagar finally said.
"Now that I stir again in the world of things real, it holds not the same terror that it had but moments ago."
He was silent for a moment.
"Was it a portent?"
"Possible, my Qarth, but portents appear as a warning, not as a finality."
"Yet are not the chant-singers filled with tales of those who turned from the path, because of a portent, only to have it thus completed precisely because they did turn away from a danger not really there?"
"A puzzling question, my Qarth."
Jubadi reached out for the sack and Hulagar passed it over. He took a long drink and sighed.
"We should be a moon's ride east of Cartha by now, rising up into the low hills of the heavy red flowers. Instead . . ." He motioned toward the entry to the yurt, the dark forest invisible beyond.
"We did what you knew we must. I have never disputed that, Jubadi."
The Qar Qarth nodded, putting the sack down and lying back, hands open behind his head, shaggy arms spread out to either side, the taut muscles rippling.
"The cattle were almost too easy to break, after the fight of the summer, what they did to the Tugars."
"Tugars, they were fools."
"They were still good warriors. Something I would admit only to you."
"I am still uneasy about Muzta. He resists nothing. There seems to be no pride, no spark. He is far too silent for my blood."
"Bears watching," Jubadi replied. "He would be a fool to think that when this war is over, the cattle subdued, that we will turn south to face the Bantag and leave him at our back."
"I assumed that is what you were planning."
"The young ones, the women of choice, they will come with us. As for all the rest"—he paused for a moment—"I have not forgiven Orki."
He sighed again, closing his eyes.
"Are portents true?"
"It is truly troubling you," Hulagar said softly.
"If you had such a dream, would it not trouble you?"
Hulagar chuckled softly.
"Remember, my Qarth, when you die I die too at your grave. I wish to see you live a long time, a very long time."
"Motivated by personal concern, are we?"
Hulagar laughed, patting his old friend on the elbow.
"You have planned this war well, my Qarth. Tomorrow you will be across the river. In a week their great city, Suzdal, will be surrounded. In a month all of the cattle of Rus will either be dead or have submitted, their secrets revealed. Roum by midsummer, then the following spring turn southward, back into our old pastures, with ten times the cattle weapons of the Bantag, and they will learn their place. There is nothing to fear."
"But the unexpected. That, you said, was always my strength, to ex
pect the unexpected. That is how we have won so far, survived you and I through two circlings, a score of great battles, a hundred skirmishes, a dozen plots to kill me. I understand the minds of those like us; I do not understand cattle minds."
"Tamuka's pet will be sure to end that concern when the time comes. If not, he knows what will happen."
"He should have acted by now."
"He will act when he acts. Our cattle spy that got out during the winter says that he is still alive. Keane had turned to him for advice, in the same way you would speak to one of us who had ridden by Keane's side for a circling."
Hulagar snorted with disdain.
"I half wish I could see Keane alive rather than as we planned. He arouses my curiosity. I would make him a pet."
"Like the other prisoners, and the one like Hinsen." "Hinsen is a traitor. We use him, we reward him, but we never trust him. When he makes a mistake he will go to the moon feast the same as Cromwell."
Jubadi yawned lazily.
"The night must be half-past," he sighed, stretching and then curling back up.
"Tomorrow will be a long day, my Qarth. Rest now."
Jubadi nodded.
"Do you believe in dreams?" Jubadi whispered, his voice drifting away.
Hulagar pulled the blanket up around his Qar Qarth's shoulders and withdrew silently, saying nothing.
Wearily climbing down from his mount, Pat muttered a sharp curse while rubbing his backside.
"Too goddamn long out of the saddle," he snapped, looking around at his old comrades from the 44th who had moved up to serve as his staff.
"A bit of the cruel, Major darlin'." Harrigan, a former gun commander of the 44th who could pass for a double of Pat with his bright red muttonchops, dismounted alongside of him. Laughing, he pulled a bottle out of his pocket.
"Throw that thing away!" Pat growled. "I'm a goddamn lieutenant general, and you, you bloody ass, are a brigadier now."
Harrigan made a mock gesture of tossing the bottle into the woods, then slipped it back into his pocket.
A Rus brigade commander came out of the gloom and saluted as Pat started up the trail.
"What do you have?" Pat asked.
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