Psittacosis.
Parrot fever. The very thing for a roost of jackdaws.
Pienaar flashed his broken, yellowed teeth. “God is my witness, and I am His servant. I have buried my father and my brothers. I will fight no more in this unhallowed cause. Look out there, all of you! Can you not see the fever come to take our young men? Can any of you doubt that we would not have suffered such terrible defeats if the Lord had hallowed our cause? For our sinful pride and ambition, will we cast aside everything our people have built? You prattle of guerrilla war. I know it. We are beaten before we have even begun. Let be. If it is our lot to be ruled by Imperials and by men like Beyers who have the bravery to speak out with words which none of us wish to hear, then let His will be done. For this delusion, let us spend no more Afrikaner blood. For now, we ourselves must make a harsh peace and reknit the sundered fabric of the Volk in this fair land.”
Malan, who was master-at-arms, recovered his courage. Hearkening to Strijdom’s ample gestures, he fired one shot into Pienaar and let the pistol drop from his hands with a shiver.
Pienaar fell to his knees. He tried to say something, but no words came out. Malan made a sudden chopping motion with his left hand. One of his gunmen stepped behind Pienaar. He shot him once in the back of the head.
“So will perish all traitors!” Strijdom stuttered exultantly, abruptly recovering his speech.
Meagher was outside watching. The mud in his mouth tasted rancid. It tasted of blood.
Why would the sons of the Irish go off to die in other people’s war? Pienaar had wanted to know. There was a fairy tale, of course.
The Children of Erin were the Children of Lir, transformed by jealousy and poverty not into mincing swans, but into wild geese, swift and proud, to fly for a thousand years from one field of strife to another. And when the Children of Lir came home from their wanderings, the Christian voice of the bell they heard. Their feathery plumage fell away and they regained human shape as men bony and wrinkled, feeble with hair of gray. Men ready to be peacefully buried by the saintly Kemoc, side by side, with an earthen mound over their heads.
Danny Meagher picked up his rifle and spat the earth from his mouth. He was not ready. At the sound of the first shot, Meagher said, “That’s what we were waiting for, boyo.” He tapped Pat Shaunessy and vaulted from concealment, gunning down the two guards at the door expertly with a burst of automatic fire. Shaunessy reached the door and kicked it from its hinges. Stepping inside, he cut down the two gunmen standing stupidly over Pienaar’s body and two of the delegates standing behind.
A third gunman beside the wall opened up wildly, and Shaun-essey slid to the floor, emptying the rest of his magazine high into the ceiling. Hard on Shaunessy’s heels, Meagher put five rounds in the gunman’s chest with a caress across the trigger. Turning to Scheepers, who was still wringing his hands, Meagher said simply, “I won’t be lecturing you, boyo. If you see my friend Hendrik, give my regards, though I don’t expect the two of you will be going the same direction. ” Meagher shot him gently, and before Strijdom could finish drawing the pistol from his sleeve, Meagher shot him dead as well.
Calmly reloading, he gunned down Malan and then picked out seven of the stunned delegates and shot each one of them through the head. Bleeding slightly from a graze, he bent to check for signs of life from Pat Shaunessy. After a second, he straightened.
“And a fine day to the rest of you, ’ ’ he said as he gaily vaulted out the window.
Sunday(14)
“I UNDERSTAND PIOTR RAZED VENTERSTAD THIS MORNING,”
Vereshchagin said.
Malinov nodded.
“Piotr always did have a fine hand for detail.”
Malinov let his face relax into a troubled frown. “Redzup is making calls.”
“Yes, he is preparing audits. Albert Beyers made us at least one convert, the assistant treasurer for the Order.”
“Conviction?”
“In a manner of speaking. De Roux was his brother-in-law. ’ ’
Malinov nodded again.
Vereshchagin could hear Redzup’s monotone through the paneling. “Your concern has been confiscated. You will not report to your office. You will report tomorrow to the Pretoria caserne to turn over your computer codes, and thereafter on a daily basis. You will continue to receive your pay so long as you undertake no activities inconsistent with your status as an Imperial employee.”
Redzup and Liu were having almost as much fun as they had running the banking system on NovySibir.
Malinov rose to leave unhurriedly. In between Redzup’s staccato phrases, Vereshchagin heard a timid knock at the door.
“Sanmartin. Beregov wants me to tell you he has a new nickname now,” Malinov said with his hands curled in the spider chair, the other spider chair.
“Which is?” Vereshchagin asked politely.
“Little Vee.”
“He will grow into it.”
“Might. Do you want me to stay?”
Vereshchagin shook his head. “If I arts going to be high admiral, I ought to have a desk, do you think?” he said smiling.
Malinov nodded a final time and levered the handle with a calm dignity. Haijalo almost fell over as he opened it.
“My timing appears to be precise, today,” Vereshchagin said as Haijalo entered the room with his head down like a bull. He pointed an accusing finger. Vereshchagin nodded gently, and Malinov closed the door on his way out.
“You told Solchava it was your idea. . .” Haijalo began with quiet venom as the door latched itself.
“The responsibility is mine,” Vereshchagin responded, the tiredness showing in his eyes for once. “She will return to the
hospital company tomorrow as soon as Eva decides who might be sent in her place.”
Harjalo stood there with his finger extended and his mouth open, but no words came out.
Vereshchagin picked up the kukri the senior surviving officer of the Gurkhas had presented and spun it in his fingers. “Come now, Matti. I know that your advantage over Raul is that you have been reading my mind for years, but wherever did you get the idea that I could not read yours? As I told Raul, very few of us have real choice of paths in this life. I have none left to me, and I am not sure that you do either. If you will kindly lock the door, I still have that half bottle of whatever it is sitting here somewhere. You look as if you could use a glass.”
Haijalo closed his mouth and looked down at his hand as if it had misfired. Vereshchagin reached into his rack and pulled out the flask in question and a pair of glasses. He filled one and handed it to Haijalo. “The Bond is beginning to disintegrate as an organization. I do not expect that its offshoots will be greatly longer lived,” he observed.
“It’s over, then,” Haijalo exclaimed.
Vereshchagin looked at him. “Come now, Matti, you know better than that.” He held up his own glass with one hand and stared through the clear fluid.
“Despite our pious hopes and intentions, in two days’ time, we will have half a dozen infected villages. In four, we will have at least a dozen. Albert Beyers has already let emergency contracts to put fences around Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Bloemfontein. It will not help, but the possibility cannot be overlooked. He will need a military force of his own. We have a few people we might lend him, an Afrikaner lad named Snyman in particular. After the disease has run its course, we may expect a resurgence of violence. More blood, perhaps a lot more blood, will be spilled out. Ultimately, we will discover whether we have correctly gauged the tide of history.” He smiled unexpectedly, striking ice into Haijalo’s soul with his sad, haggard eyes.
“In four days, you will become battalion commander. We will absorb what we can of the Gurkhas. We will give Coldewe his company, and Sversky as well.”
Haijalo pondered this, closing his eyes and then reopening them. “So tell my why, Anton. For once, I can’t read your mind,” he said slowly.
“The battalion? Consider, Matti. I will have four years
, perhaps five, to alter the face of this planet. Do you think that I will be retained in His Imperial Majesty’s service after what I will have done? I assure you, I will not.
"As for Natasha, she looked out at the worlds through colored lenses. I broke them on her face, Raul and I, and I watched her eyes bleed. She will forgive, she might perhaps forget, but something will have died and I am not Christ to raise the dead. We do what we must, Matti.”
“And shoot the ones we can’t reform,” Haijalo finished for him.
“She is resilient. She thinks quite highly of you, as I am sure you are aware.” He broke off. “Eighty-seven casualties,” he said to fill the awkward silence.
“Plus a few more on the other side.” Haijalo closed his mouth, then opened it to say, “Anton, what are we doing here? Now, I mean.”
Vereshchagin unfolded his hands and let his pipe swing freely, to give what was intended as a serious question appropriate consideration. “We are laying a new foundation for a society, Matti,” he said, “using what is salvageable from the old.” “Doesn’t happen often, does it? Ibesday is Christmas. Isn’t that strange? ’ ’ Haijalo said, making a mental note that there had to be another pipe somewhere on the godforsaken globe.
“Which reminds me,” said Vereshchagin, a polite lie. “Are you aware that among the battalion assets that Lieutenant-Colonel Higuchi salvaged from the spaceport were his pipers?” “Bagpipers? Gurkha bagpipers?”
“In kilts. They are actually quite good. I have heard them play Alamein Dead and Lord Lovat. ’ ’ And Flowers of the Forest. “Bagpipers?” Haijalo repeated incredulously.
“We have never had a band before,” Vereshchagin proffered with a childlike innocence. “We have the rest of today and tomorrow to teach them The Little Tin Soldier and The Whistling Pig.”
SANMARTIN STEPPED OVER TO THE WOULD-BE REFUGEES THAT
the Border Police and a few of Beyers’s men were screening for plague. He singled out one man wearing ill-fitted clothing, a hawklike man with two day’s stubble of beard on his face and a touch of gray in his hair.
“Aren’t you a bit old for this sort of thing, old man?”
“Too right you are, lad. Shocking thing, disgrace is what it is. They had no right to call me up at my age,” Meagher said jauntily.
“You look remarkably like the photo we have of Danny Meagher.”
“Ah, you flatter me, lad. By all accounts, he’s a much handsomer man.”
Sanmartin smiled, thinking of the story of Yoshitsune and Benkei.
“My name is Sanmartin, Raul Sanmartin.”
Meagher’s eyes lit up. “Captain Sanmartin, I’m pleased to have met you. A name for yourself you’ve made. From C Company, Johannesburg, I recall. Call me Dan, I ask you.”
“I’ll do that.” He looked at Meagher. “What do you think?” Meagher considered this carefully. “Well, Raul, I’ve seen cowboys, Boers, and Imperials now. You’re a right set of bastards. I’m not sure there’s a penny’s worth of difference between you, but I’m hardly one to speak,” Meagher said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic envelope. “A friend of mine asked me to deliver this, it’s addressed to his granddaughter, a woman named Bruwer. It occurs to me that you could give it to her as well as any and better than most.”
Sanmartin glanced at the name. He nodded. It would make a good reason to see her now that the Variag had told Mischa to stop monitoring her line. Beregov had sent a simple message. “Talk to her. We need to rechristen the still.”
He remembered the rest of the story of Yoshitsune. Yoshitsune’s military skill had made his brother shogun, but a shogun fears nothing more than an overmighty vassal. A hunted fugitive, Yoshitsune disguised himself as a servant to his retainer, Benkei. He was recognized by a captain of his brother’s guardsmen.
“You look like Yoshitsune,” the captain exclaimed.
Benkei immediately began beating his revered master about the head and shoulders, crying out, “How dare you look like Yoshitsune!”
The captain let them go, for whatever reason. “Good luck to you, old man,” he said, turning away. “Get yourself checked and injected.”
SEVERAL HOURS LATER AS THE BULLDOZERS PLOWED UNDER THE bundles gently laid in holes gouged from the earth, Coldewe delivered an epitaph, chanting crisply the opening lines from Heine’s poem,
Verloren Posten in dem Freiheitskriege,
Hieit ich seit dreissig Jahren treidich aus.
Ich kaempfte ohne Hoffnung, dass ich siege,
Ich wusste, nie komm ich gesund nach Haus.
He translated, “Forlorn post in freedom’s war/' Held true by me for thirty years/1 fight without hope, that I conquer/1 knew I would not come home sound.”
Behind him, Koryagin was singing,
‘ ‘We ’re having a war and we want you to come! ’ ’
So the pig began to whistle and to pound on a drum.
“We’ll give you a gun, we ’ll give you a hat!’’
And the pig began to whistle when they told him that!
The wailing of a dozen dead cats was brought to life. Gurkha handlers were torturing them. Koryagin’s grasp on the melody was none too sure, and the attempt that the pipers made to follow was both valiant and vain.
Coldewe watched the soil scatter itself over the ragged corpses. “Now and then indeed it might come to pass/ that such a wicked rascal likewise knew so well/ to shoot—I cannot deny—/ the wounds gape, and stream forth my blood,” he said, translating Heine’s last stanza to himself.
A little humor, a little horror, a lot of sweeping up, that was war, Rudi Scheel had once said.
Wars are sometimes over and they debited his pay,
They took away his hat and they took his gun away,
They told him they were thankful and they split him north to south
As they fried him with a whistle and an apple in his mouth!
Coldewe listened. “It’s not Heine, but it’ll do,” he said, watching the bulldozers scar the thin soil. He joined in the last verse.
The pig bought a planet and he earned it with his sweat,
He filled it full of corpses just to liquidate the debt.
He taught the people manners and it didn’t take him long
To teach them how to whistle and to sing The Whistle Song!
Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 01] Page 36