by neetha Napew
The second pair followed a moment later. Then Skorzeny yelled "Go! Go! Go!" again and Ja'ger and Max burst out of the woods and
started off toward the promised panje wagon. It waited several kilometers north and west, outside the Lizards' tightest security zone. Ja'ger wanted to sprint the whole way. Slogging through mud carrying a heavy chest, that wasn't practical.
"I'm fucking sick of rain," Max said, though he knew as well as Ja'ger that the snow which would follow was even harder to endure.
Ja'ger said, "Right now I don't mind rain at all. The Lizards will have a harder time chasing us through it than they would on dry ground. The low clouds will make us harder to spot through the air, too. If you want to get right down to it, I wouldn't mind fog, either."
"I would," Max said. "We'd get lost."
"I have a compass."
"Very efficient," Max said dryly. Ja'ger took it
for a compliment until he remembered it was the word the Jew had used to describe the assembly-line murder at— what was the name of the place?— at Babi Yar, that was it.
Anger surged in the panzer major. The trouble was, he had trouble deciding whether to turn it on his own people for dishonoring the uniforms they wore or the Jew for telling him about it and making him notice it. He glanced over at Max. As usual, Max was watching him. He had no trouble finding a focus for his fury.
Jager twisted his head, looked behind him. The driving rain had already obscured the woods. He could see one of the decoy pairs, but only one. He wouldn't have wanted to track anyone in weather like this, and wished just as much trouble on the Lizards. They wouldn't pursue in panzers, anyhow; from what he'd seen, their armor had at least as much trouble coping with Russian mud as the Wehrmacht did.
He must have been thinking aloud. Max grinned an unsympathetic grin and said, "You poor bogged-down bastards."
"Fuck you, too, Max." In the wrong tone of voice, that would have started the fight Skorzeny had not-quite-joked about. As it was, the Jewish partisan's expression changed shape as if he, like Ja'ger, had to change some of his thinking.
Then both men's faces congealed to fear. The Lizards had more helicopters in the air, and this time no flak cannon would stop them. Rifle shots rang out from back in the woods, but using a rifle against one of these machines was as magnificently futile as the Polish lancers' charges against German panzers back when the war— the human war— was new.
But these rifle bullets did have some effect. The whistling roar of the copter rotors grew no
louder. The deadly machines hovered over the trees. Their guns snarled. When they paused, more rifle fire announced that they hadn't finished off all the raiders. The yammering resumed.
The sound from the helicopters changed. Ja'ger looked back, but could see nothing through the curtains of rain. He tried to be optimistic anyhow: "Maybe they're settling down so they can comb through the woods— if they are, they'll be looking in the wrong place."
Max was less sanguine: "Don't count on them to be so fucking stupid."
"They aren't what you'd call good soldiers, not in the tactical sense," Ja'ger answered seriously. "They're brave enough, and of course they have all that wonderful equipment, but ask them to do anything they haven't planned out in advance and they start
floundering around." They're even worse than Russians that way, he thought, but he kept quiet about that.
The strafing from the helicopters hadn't slaughtered all the raiders. Rifles barked again; a Soviet submachine gun added its note to the din. Then, harsher and flatter, Lizard automatic small arms answered.
"They have landed troops!" Ja'ger exclaimed. "The longer they waste time back there, the better the chance the mission has of succeeding."
"And the likelier they'll kill off my friends," Max said. "Yours too, I suppose. Does a fucking Nazi have friends? After a tough day shooting Jews in the back of the neck, do you go out and drink some beer with your Kameraden?"
"I'm a soldier, not a butcher," Ja'ger said. He
wondered whether Georg Schultz had got one of the dummy chests. If so, he was tramping through the mud, too. If not... He also wondered about Otto Skorzeny. The SS captain seemed to have a gift for creating impossible situations and then escaping from them. He'd need all that gift now. But thinking of the SS made Jager think of Babi Yar. That would have been their doing; Wehrmacht men couldn't have stomached it. He added, "You Russians have butchers, too."
"So?" Max said. "Does that make you right?" J a'ger found no good answer. The Jewish partisan went on, "I wish they'd sent me to the gulag in Siberia years before you fucking Germans ever got to Kiev. Then I wouldn't have had to see what I saw."
Further argument cut off abruptly when Jager fell headlong into the muck. Max helped him haul himself to his feet. They pushed on. Jager felt as if he were a hundred years old. A
kilometer through this clinging goo was worse than a day's march on hard, dry ground. He wistfully wondered whether the Soviet Union contained so much as a square centimeter of hard, dry ground at the moment.
He also wondered for what the soft, wet ground over which he was fleeing had been used. In Germany, land had a clearly defined purpose: meadow, crops, forest, park, town. This stretch met no such criteria. It was just land— raw terrain. Of that the Soviet Union had unending inefficient abundance.
Ja'ger abruptly cut off his disparaging thoughts about Soviet inefficiency. His head went up like a hunted animal's. The tiny, atrophied muscles in his ears tried to make them prick like a cat's. Lizard helicopters were in the air again. "We have to move faster," he said to Max.
The partisan pointed to his own trousers,
which were covered in mud up to the knees. He dismissed Ja'ger's suggestion with three sardonic words: "Good fucking luck."
Rationally, Ja'ger knew Max was right. Still, as the whirring drone from the sky grew louder, he wanted to drop the heavy chest and run. He looked over his shoulder. The driving rain veiled the helicopter from sight. He could only hope it helped hide him from the Lizards.
Off to the south, from the middle of this big open field, shots cracked; Ja'ger recognized the deep bark of a Gewehr-98K, the standard German infantry rifle (no way to tell now, of course, whether it was borne by a standard German infantryman or a very definitely nonstandard Russian partisan). The helicopter that had been closest to him droned off to meet the fleabite challenge.
"I think some of the decoys just drew them away from us," Ja'ger said.
"It might be a Jew saving your neck, Nazi. How does that make you feel?" Max said. After a moment, though, he added in wondering tones, "Or it might be a fucking Nazi saving mine. How does that make me feel? You know the word verkakte, Nazi? This is a verkakte mess, and no mistake."
A village— maybe even a small town— loomed out of the rain ahead. In instant unspoken agreement, both men swerved wide around it. "What's the name of that place?" Ja'ger asked.
"Chernobyl, I think," Max said. "The Lizards drove the people out after their ship blew up, but they might keep a little garrison there."
"Let's hope they don't," Ja'ger said. The Jewish partisan nodded.
If the village held a garrison, it didn't come
forth to search for the raiders... or maybe it did, and simply missed Ja'ger and Max in the downpour. Once past the clump of ugly wooden buildings and even uglier concrete ones, Ja'ger glanced down at his compass to get back onto the proper course.
Max watched him put it back in his pocket "How are we going to find the fucking panje wagon?"
"We keep on this heading until—"
"— we walk past them in the rain," the Jew put in.
"If you have a better idea, I'd love to hear it," Ja'ger said icily.
"I don't. I was hoping you did."
They pushed on, skirting another small patch of woods and then returning to the course the
compass dictated. Ja'ger had a piece of black bread and some sausage in his pack. Getting them out one-handed was awkward, but
he managed. He broke the bread, bit the sausage in half; and passed Max his share. The Jew hesitated but ate. After a while, he pulled a little tin flask from his hip pocket. He yanked out the cork, gave the flask to Ja'ger for the first swig. Vodka ran down his throat like fire.
"Thanks," he said. "That's good." He put his thumb over the opening so the rain couldn't get in, passed the flask back to Max.
Off to one side, somebody spoke up in Russian. Ja'ger started, then dropped the chest that had become like an unwelcome part of him and grabbed for the rifle slung on his back. Then a German voice added, "Ja, we could use something good about now."
"You found them," Max said to Ja'ger as the
panje wagon came up through the muck. "That's fucking amazing." Instead of hatred, he looked at Jager with something like respect. Jager, who was at least as surprised as the Jewish partisan, did his best not to show it.
The horse that pulled the panje wagon had seen better days. The light wooden wagon itself rode on large wheels; it was low, wide, and flat-bottomed, so it could float almost boatlike across the surface of even the deepest mud. It looked as if its design hadn't changed for centuries, which was probably true; no vehicle was better adapted to coping with Russia's twice-yearly rasputitsa.
The driver and the fellow beside him both wore Red Army greatcoats, but instead of a shelm, a Russian cloth helmet rather like a balaglava, the man who wasn't holding the reins had on the long-brimmed cap of a
German tropical-weight uniform. The weather was anything but tropical, but the cap kept the rain out of his eyes.
He said, "You have the cabbages?"
"Yes, by God, we do," Ja'ger said. Max nodded. Together, they lifted the lead-lined chest into the wagon. Ja'ger had grown so used to the burden that his shoulder ached when he was relieved of it. Max handed the flask of vodka to the driver, then clambered up over the side of the wagon. Ja'ger followed him. Between them, they almost filled the wagon bed.
The fellow with the shelm spoke in Russian. Max turned it into Yiddish for Ja'ger. "He says we won't bother with roads. We'll head straight across country. The Lizards aren't likely to find us that way."
"And if they do?" Ja'ger asked.
"A//chevo,"the Russian answered when Max put the question to him: "It can't be helped." Since that was manifestly true, Ja'ger just nodded. The driver twitched the reins, clucked to the horse. The panje wagon began to roll.
"It's true," Yi Min declared. "I floated through the air light as a dandelion seed in the little scaly devils' airplane, and it flew so high that I looked down on the whole world." The apothecary conveniently forgot to mention— in fact, he'd just about made himself forget altogether— how sick he'd been while he floated light as a dandelion seed.
"And what did the world look like when you looked down on it?" one of his listeners asked.
"The foreign devils are right, believe it or not— the world is round, like a ball," Yi Min answered. "I have seen it with my own eyes,
so I know it is so."
"Ann," some of the men said who sat crosslegged in front of him, either impressed at his eyewitness account or astonished that Europeans could be right about anything. Others shook their heads, disbelieving every word he said. Foolish turtles, he thought. He'd had a lot of lies taken for granted in his time; now that he was telling nothing but the truth, half the people in the scaly devils' prisoner compound made him out to be a liar.
In any case, his audience hadn't gathered to hear him talk about the shape of the world. A man in a blue cotton tunic said, "Tell us more about the women the little scaly devils gave to you." Everyone, believers and skeptics alike, spoke up in favor of that; even if Yi Min were to lie about it, he'd still be amusing.
The best part was, he didn't need to lie. "I had a woman whose skin was black as charcoal
all over, save only the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. And I had another who was pale as milk, even her nipples only pink, with eyes of fine jade and hair and bush the color of a fox's fur."
"Ahh," the men said again, imagining it One of them asked, "Did their strangeness make them better on the mat?"
"Neither of those two was particularly skilled," Yi Min said, and his audience sighed with disappointment. He quickly added, "Still, their being so different to look at was piquant, like pickle after sweet. If you ask me, the gods first made the black folk, but left them in the oven too long. Then they tried again, but took the white folk— the foreign devils most of us had seen— out too soon. Finally they made us Chinese, and cooked us to perfection."
The men who listened to him laughed; some of them clapped their hands. Then the fellow
in the blue tunic said, "From what oven did the gods take the little scaly devils?"
Nervous silence fell. Yi Min said, "To know that for certain, you would have to ask the little devils themselves. If you want to know what I think, my guess is that a whole different set of gods made them. Why, do you know they have a mating season like, cattle or songbirds, and are impotent all the rest of the year?"
"Poor devils," several men chorused, the first sympathy Yi Min had heard for the Lizards.
"It's true," he insisted. "That's why they took me up into their airplane that never lands in the first place: to see for themselves that real human beings could mate at any season of the year."
His smile was very nearly a leer. "I proved it to their satisfaction— and to mine."
He smiled again, this time happily, at the grins and laughter his words won. Being back among people with whom he could speak, back among people who appreciated his undoubted cleverness, was the greatest joy in returning to the ground after so long aloft.
Then a bald old fellow who sold eggs said, "Didn't the little devils also kidnap that pretty girl who was living in your tent? Why didn't she come back with you?"
"They wanted to keep her up there," Yi Min answered, shrugging. "Why, I don't know; they would not tell me. What does it matter? She's only a woman."
He was just as glad Liu Han remained with the scaly devils, she'd been a pleasant convenience to him, certainly, but no more than that. And she'd seen him sick and vulnerable while he floated without weight, a weakness he was doing his best to pretend
had never happened. Now, with the prestige of his journey and the connections he retained with the little scaly devils, women both prettier and more willing than Liu Han were happy to share his mat. He sometimes wondered what the little devils were doing to her, but his curiosity remained abstract.
Bowing as he sat, he said, "I do hope I've held your interest, my friends, and that you'll reward me for helping you pass an idle hour."
The gifts the audience gave were about what he'd expected: a little cash, a pair of old sandals that wouldn't fit him but which he could trade for something he wanted, some radishes, a smoked duck breast wrapped in paper and tied with string, a couple of tiny pots filled with ground spices. He lifted their lids, sniffed, smiled appreciatively. Yes, he'd been paid well for entertaining.
He gathered up his loot and walked back
toward the hut in which he was living. Nothing was left of the tent he'd shared with Liu Han. He could not honestly say he missed it, either; with winter nearly at hand, he was glad to have wooden walls around him. Of course, the people in the camp had also stolen everything he'd accumulated before the scaly devils took him up into the sky, but so what? He was already well on his way to getting more and better. Getting more and better of everything, as far as he could see, was what the world was all about.
From the changes in the camp while he'd been flying, he had to conclude just about everyone agreed with him. Instead of several square //of flapping canvas, it now boasted houses of wood and stone and sheet metal, some of them quite substantial. None of the construction materials had been here when the scaly devils' prisoners were herded into the wire-enclosed compound, but they were here now. One way or another, people
managed. Sharp wire wasn't enough to keep them from managing.
As he came up to his own shelter, Yi Min readied the key that he carried on a bit of string around his neck. Key and lock both had cost only a couple of pig's feet; the smith who made them out of scrap metal was too skinny to have bargained hard. Yi Min knew they weren't very good, but what did that matter? The lock on his door publicly proclaimed him a man of property, which was what he had in mind. It wasn't supposed to keep thieves away. His close connections with the little devils took care of that.
On about the fourth try, the key clicked, the lock opened, and Yi Min went inside. He started a fire in the little charcoal brazier by his sleeping mat. The feeble warmth the brazier gave made him long for his old home, where he slept on top of the low clay hearth and stayed snug even in the worst weather.
He shrugged. The gods dealt the tiles in the game of life; a man's job was to arrange them into the best hand he could.