by R. M. Meluch
“How in Creation did you get those?” Musa marveled.
“Those are the terms I offered to the Bel—take or leave. He appears to have taken.” Alihahd nodded to indicate the Na′id army dissolving its battlefront.
“How can you trust the Bel, though?” Musa asked.
“The Bel is the only person in this galaxy that I actually do trust,” Alihahd said. “If he gives his word to a thing, then it is so. You will all be conscripted, of course, as able Na′id citizens are. But you could fall to a worse army than the 27th. It is not an agreeable prospect, nor even tolerable perhaps. But the alternatives are unthinkable. There really are none.”
“What about you? What happens to you?” Musa asked.
“Me, they will eat.”
He turned curtly to Layla. “Be off quickly now before they become greedy. I did not surrender my allies. Watch for patrols. They will be combing the woods for deserters. And take Vaslav.”
“Vaslav is not here,” Layla said.
Alihahd frowned. “Where is he?”
“Gone. He must have run away.”
The frown deepened. Alihahd hoped the boy knew what decisions he could live with. Alihahd was not worried about Harrison Hall.
A rebel officer called to Alihahd from inside the flagship, “Captain, there’s a message for you from the new commander of the 27th Army. He’ll talk only to you.”
Alihahd started to rise. He spoke to Layla. “Go now. Surrender will be at first light.”
• • •
At sunrise, the rebels came out of their ships, weaponless. They deactivated their shield dome.
The 27th Army rushed in.
The sudden charge of soldiers terrified. Their ferocious speed made it seem they would strike down the unarmed rebels, under truce or no. But the Na′id only sought to take control before someone could balk, take out a concealed weapon and start shooting.
There was some brutality, but the old soldiers soon quashed it. Shad Iliya’s army still had a tradition of human decency.
A group of young military police grabbed Alihahd roughly and placed him under arrest. No veterans of the 27th Army had volunteered for that task. These MPs were from the Dayyanu. The new company with its new leadership was disgusted with the 27th Army for its total lack of initiative in this affair. It became rapidly apparent that this rabble band of rebel malcontents in Na′id dress was not an army at all. The Empire had been had. But there was no turning back on the Bel’s word. And that knowledge made the Na′id furious.
One traitorous man spoke, and a whole mighty army had turned into a litter of whimpering cubs. Neither did the one man look like much—spindly, limping, worn, on the downhill slope of middle age. The seventy-year-old Bel looked better than this man. And the Na′id scorn mounted. The great general Shad Iliya’s incredible record, seen in this new light, they attributed not to genius but to the machinations of a con artist.
They handled him with more force than they needed—he was not resisting—but not half so much force as they wanted.
Alihahd endured the abuse—which was mostly verbal, with some hard shoves and spits. He welcomed it. It was a thing due. He’d been running from it for years and now felt a perverse relief that it had caught up with him at long last.
And the battle he feared had not happened this time. He’d escaped that trap, the awful circle, with no blood shed but his own. He had revisited Jerusalem and said: This shall not be.
Someone slapped his face. He tried not to smile or cry. The MPs chained his hands behind him, then looped the chains around a charred tree, where he was to stand for hours while his rebels were searched, corralled, identified, and their criminal records deleted, to the increased grumbling of the loyal Na′id.
Periodically, young soldiers filed by to gawk at the Traitor with mutters and torment. The veterans of the 27th Army avoided him. Even his rebels, feeling sold, called him Traitor.
The sun beat down on the windless plateau. The dead tree offered no shade, and Alihahd languished in the stifling air. The afternoon wore on. He felt his skin burn, his joints ache, his muscles cramp with dehydration in the suffocating heat, and he gloried in the pain. Some kind of deviate you are.
His perception split onto two levels, one aware in bright detail of the burning in his limbs, the itch from his clothes sticking to his wet skin, the touch of a fly that kept returning to his twitching cheek. On the other level, his mind was detached, and he felt surprisingly well. He was aware that his sense of well-being was symptomatic of serious trouble. But since there was precious little he could do about it and no one around him who could possibly care, he ignored the hazard and enjoyed the alertness.
He recovered some sense of self—or found it. He wasn’t sure he’d ever had it to begin with.
After a long while, an MP strutted a slow circuit around the prisoner’s tree, his wide chest thrust forward, his fleshy buttocks thrust back. He stopped before Alihahd. Bulging eyes looked down a wide nose. Thick sensual lips formed a sneer. “What’s the matter, nazi? Too good for us with your pretty blue eyes and your yellow hair?”
Alihahd gave no answer. There had been no real question.
Another MP circled in from behind, the same curl on her lips. She plucked at Alihahd’s loose, rough-weave shirt. She inspected the unfamiliar fabric between her stubby fingers. “What kind of costume is that?” she said.
“Doesn’t match your eyes,” the man commented on the side.
Alihahd sighed and answered civilly, “It is the dress of people of Iry.”
The woman sniffed disdainfully. “There are no people of Iry.”
Alihahd wondered how he could have let that slip his mind. Aliens were not people.
I have changed. This place has truly done something to me.
The fleshy man made another remark about his pretty blue eyes.
Alihahd lost patience. He snapped his head around and shot at him, “I think you like my pretty blue eyes.”
Thick lips twisted into amazing shapes of outrage. The pulpy face beetled huge in Alihahd’s field of vision. The man’s breath smelled sickly sweet, and suddenly his knee smashed up into Alihahd’s groin with an explosion of pain and nausea. Alihahd folded over, unable to breathe—and he knew the man enjoyed that, too. Alihahd shouldn’t have invited it, he thought dimly as he sank down the tree to which he was bound, drawing air in a ragged gasp.
A party of officers marched to the site and dismissed the MPs.
The ranking officer, a lieutenant of the new company, merely stood over him for some moments, watching him retch and gasp at the foot of the blackened tree trunk. Then she pulled him to his feet by his hair and stepped back. She regarded the hand with which she’d grasped his hair curiously and remarked to one of her companions, “Hot.”
Alihahd panted, his weight pitched back against the chained post, trying not to pass out, then wondering why he bothered to try. The revilement started up again, slightly more literate than what the MPs served him. The neat and pretty little lieutenant with the blindingly shiny buttons had a big voice and an advanced education, the better with which to recite her creed at him. For her and the young officers, this was a chance to lambaste a general with impunity. One even drew a blade and set it against Alihahd’s throat. “You will suffer all the torments of hell for what you’ve done, Traitor.”
Alihahd recovered his breath. “Unless hell is peopled with fools such as you reciting their everlasting twaddle, I would gladly go this very moment, if any of you is willing to send me without an order from your betters.” He spat the last word—betters—at them, and his eyes flashed down toward the blade at his neck, daring them.
He could almost hear Harrison Hall chuckling at that speech.
The blade was sheathed.
“Be too merciful,” the officer mumbled.
“Then you may stop your threats
and posturing and you may shut up. I am not impressed or frightened. I am, however, annoyed.”
“You would do well to be fright—”
“Am I then to be killed with the jaw of an ass?” Alihahd roared to the sky. “The glory of the Na′id Empire is its unparalleled ability to vomit back cant.”
All six officers at once contested that charge hotly.
Deliverance came at last, painfully, in the form of a veteran officer who walked over to them, attracted by the noise. He observed, quietly appalled. He called off the hecklers, then stood looking at his former general in shame, shook his balding head, and walked away.
Alihahd was sorry. He could have taken the empty insults all day, but that one silent look of shame undid him. His head slumped on his chest. His eyes closed. He listened to the distant tide. It would be going out now. Tides were wonderfully predictable without moons, but not very powerful. He focused on the sound of far-off water. He let the sound rush through his head, until the crunch of a single set of footsteps came very near along with the oscillating beep of a medikit.
Alihahd lifted his head, finding it strange that someone should be interested in his state of health.
Not this man. The medic set the kit down brusquely and dutifully took a sounding of the captive, without one ounce of personal care. He was a coarse, common man wanting to do his job and be done.
“Where’ve you been?” the medic said gruffly, confounded by the reading. He took off his hat and mussed his already disheveled hair.
“That machine ought to tell you,” Alihahd said.
The medic clicked off the scanner dubiously. “A mountain?” Alihahd nodded, his throat too dry for many more words.
“Your heart is bigger.”
“Is that a fact?” Alihahd said faintly.
“Strictly literal, sir,” the medic said and rummaged through his kit for a diadermic injector, which he brought to Alihahd’s chest.
“Poison?” Alihahd asked.
“If it was up to me,” said the medic. He gave the injection, and Alihahd immediately felt a few degrees cooler and more comfortable. He was surprised.
“Who ordered this?”
“Supreme Commander General Issurish,” the medic said testily, putting his kit back together. “You’ve been summoned to his presence.” The man snapped his lips shut, reconsidered, and rephrased under strain, “Invited. I’m to ask you.”
“Well,” Alihahd said lightly, feeling buoyant on his borrowed time. “If it will get me out of the sun, lead on.” He shrugged in his chains.
The medic grumbled, let slip a curse, then said, “You won’t tell on me, will you, sir?”
Evidently the medic had orders to be polite. “No,” Alihahd said.
The medic grunted, took up his kit, and tramped away to send back a six-person escort-guard to collect and deliver the supreme commander’s guest.
• • •
The cabin inside the Na′id flagship Dayyanu was blessedly cool and air-controlled. It took Alihahd’s eyes a moment to adjust to the softer light.
The supreme commander, General Issurish, waved away the six enormous guards in the unhurried way of gentry, leaving him alone with the captive. The general didn’t worry that his prize prisoner might bolt or attack him. Alihahd’s hands were still bound. That precaution was more than sufficient. Issurish was a big man, if not nearly as tall as Alihahd. The general was a patrician, full of manners and breeding—one of Alihahd’s own kind.
“Shad Iliya,” said Issurish in greeting, swiveling his chair to face him. “And Alihahd also, I believe.”
Alihahd stood mute. His silence convicted him.
“You are two men I’ve always wanted to meet.” The general had a long-standing admiration and sense of professional rivalry with the great Shad Iliya, and an obsession with bringing the infamous Alihahd to justice. But since both had been reported dead, Issurish never dreamed he would actually meet them—and not in the same person.
At first the idea of the two being the same was incomprehensible. How could such an illustrious proponent of the Na′id ideology turn about-face and become such a trenchant foe? But it made more and more sense as he thought about it, and Issurish began to nod.
Zealots didn’t come from nothing. Issurish remembered the story of the Christian zealot St. Paul, who had been no apathetic unbeliever before his conversion, but rather a notorious, active, fanatical Christian-killer. To Issurish, there was nothing at all miraculous about a zealot’s becoming a zealot. Goals may change. People did not. Great hate could become great love, or love hate. The degree was constant. If Shad Iliya were to transgress, he would transgress hugely—nothing furtive and measly about it.
That Shad Iliya was Alihahd made all the sense in the world.
Issurish didn’t expect to understand Shad Iliya’s reasons for betrayal, and he wasn’t going to berate him. The prisoner was his honored enemy.
Issurish had never met a legend before. Strange, this one looked like a man—a battered, outspent one at that—dirty, ragged, tough-knit, and too lean, nothing at all soft but those liquid eyes. There was something very human in his worn, bedraggled features. And something else, the elusive quality of an immortal leader. It couldn’t be pinned down, but it was definite in its existence.
“I wish we could have met on the battlefield,” Issurish said. He wanted to do battle with a legend and see who won.
Alihahd did not. There was no more romance in war against his own kind. He’d already had his time to match wits and strengths with a great adversary in a battle to live through the ages. He had his undying fame, and all he could see behind him was a hillside littered with human dead.
It wasn’t to be explained. And this man wouldn’t understand, even had he been there.
“Your army is a disappointment,” Issurish said. “The 27th.”
The brilliance of the 27th Army under Shad Iliya had been that each member worked well in his or her singular capacity. Ra′im Mishari was a perfect second-in-command, and everyone else was perfect in place. But after Shad Iliya had gone, they’d all been promoted to positions in which they didn’t belong, and perfection had fallen apart.
“The victories must have been yours, not theirs,” Issurish said. “Such a loss.” He shook his head. “You present a sensitive problem, General. I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with you.” Then, as if suddenly realizing that he was remiss as a host, the patrician sat forward and solicitously swept his arm toward a chair. “Sit. Water? Are you hungry?”
Still standing and making no move toward the offered seat, Alihahd spoke for the first time, in a flat tone of injured pride and rebuke. “I have not been given leave to piss since I surrendered.”
Issurish was alarmed at his oversight as only aristocracy could be. There were still manners in the field.
Alihahd’s bonds were removed, and he was permitted to go unguarded to the commander’s facility. He had, after all, come to them of his own accord.
When he returned to Issurish, he sat in the chair, his weight to one side, elbow on one chair arm, his feet flat on the deck and spaced wide, relaxed, yet alert and commanding, even as a prisoner. His presence seemed to take over whatever sphere he came into.
“Do you want a change from those barbarous clothes?” Issurish asked.
“These are fine,” Alihahd said. He knew he must smell gamy by now, but he had become attached to this alien garb, and the supreme commander could just endure the stink. Alihahd wasn’t feeling as magnanimous as his host.
“Your funeral was very inspiring,” Issurish said, wending his way leisurely to the point of this meeting. “I was profoundly stirred.”
Alihahd said quietly, “I saw it.”
It had been broadcast over the Net to all parts of Na′id-controlled space, a ceremony of great pomp and solemnity. There had been a long procession with ho
rses and foot soldiers and drums. The Na′id standard had bowed to Shad Iliya’s family crest, and flags were lowered to half-mast throughout the Empire.
He remembered now that his daughter, Nikalmati, had been crying.
His beautiful widow, Libbya, had not. She stood, tragic and cold, with her lover standing a few paces in the background. It was a small scandal when she remarried before the official mourning period was done. Alihahd thought it a wise move on her part not to be called Shad Iliya’s widow for long.
There was erected a cenotaph, and a shrine in his honor—not as a god, but as a hero. And he had his day of the year when a rite was performed for him. Respect for great men and women did not end at death for the Na′id.
To discover that they had been revering a live traitor for the past thirteen years would be a major scandal.
It was too late to execute him quietly and pretend he’d never surfaced. Too many people already knew.
“It is in the terms of surrender that your life is forfeit,” Issurish said. “But I’m not sure if the Bel wants me to execute you here, or if I’m to bring you back for public trial. He signed it rather peremptorily. He didn’t elaborate on his orders. He was quite upset.”
He watched Alihahd’s face for reaction, saw little that he could read. “He left it up to my discretion—which means I’m to read his mind and do what he wants.” Issurish was talking confidentially to someone who also knew the Bel intimately. “You know how he is.”
Alihahd motioned affirmative with a close of his eyes. He knew.
“I would like to be able to tell you exactly what you are in for,” Issurish continued. “I have no desire to make this too bad for you. It will be suitably bad enough as it is. But I haven’t yet decided. I am not a mind reader.”
“The Bel sent you here to dispose of me for him,” Alihahd said. “Of course, he will hold it against you when you return to Mat Tanatti, but it is what he wants. He cannot tell you outright because he needs you to take responsibility for the action.”