by George R. R.
Kline came to his feet, the dust so thick that he sensed more than saw the men around him doing the same.
He and the others scurried up the ridge. Sometimes they slipped on loose stones, but that was the only thing that held them back. Kline sensed their determination as they reached the top and increased speed, charging past boulders toward the wall.
The dust still hovered, giving them shelter, but soon it thinned, and the moment they emerged from it, visible now, running toward the wall, the legionnaires opposing them opened fire. Kline felt a man beside him lurch back. A man ahead of him dropped.
But Kline kept charging, shooting toward movement on the parapets. At once, a portion of the wall blew apart from a cannon shell. A second explosion widened the opening.
Kline paused only long enough to yank the pin from a grenade and hurl the grenade as far as he could through the gap in the wall. Other legionnaires did the same, diving to the ground the same as Kline did, waiting for the multiple blasts to clear their way.
He scrambled over the rubble and entered a courtyard. Among stone buildings, narrow alleys led in various directions. A bullet struck near him, throwing up chunks of sandstone. He whirled toward a window and fired, not knowing if he hit anyone before he charged on. Then he reached one of the alleys and aimed along it. Joined by other legionnaires, he moved slowly now, prepared to fire at any target.
Shots seemed to ring out everywhere. Explosions rumbled as Kline pressed forward, smelling gunpowder and hearing screams. The buildings were no taller than three stories. Smoke drifted over them, some of it settling into the alley, but he didn’t allow it to distract him. The doors and windows ahead were all he cared about.
A man next to him screamed and fell. Kline fired toward the ground-floor window from which the shot had come, and this time, he saw blood fly. A legionnaire near him hurled a grenade through the same window, and the moment after it exploded, they crashed through a doorway, firing.
Two soldiers lay dead on the floor. Their white legionnaire’s caps were spattered with blood. Their uniforms had the long sleeves and full-length pants of the opposing side. Kline recognized both of them. Rinaldo and Stavros. He’d trained with them, marched with them, shared tents with them, and sung with them at breakfast in the mess hall at Sidi-bel-Abbès.
Stairs led upward. From above, Kline heard shots. Aiming, he and the other legionnaire checked a neighboring room, then approached the steps. As they climbed, a quick glance toward his companion showed Kline that he was again paired with Durado. The Spaniard’s normally tan complexion was now sallow.
Neither spoke as they stalked higher.
Above, the shots persisted, presumably directed toward the alley they’d left or else toward the alley on the opposite side of the building. Perhaps the numerous explosions in the area had prevented the shooter from realizing that this building had been hit by a grenade. Or perhaps the shooter wasn’t alone. Perhaps he continued firing while another soldier watched the stairs, hoping to draw Kline and Durado into a trap.
Sweat trickled down Kline’s face. Nearing the top, he armed another grenade and threw it into a room. Immediately, he and Durado ducked down the stairs, protecting themselves from the force of the blast. They straightened and charged the rest of the way up, shooting as they entered the room.
No one was there. A neighboring room was deserted, also. At the last moment, the shooter must have hurried the rest of the way up the stairs, taking refuge on the third and final floor.
Kline and Durado took turns replacing the magazines on their rifles. Again they crept up, and this time, it was Durado who threw the grenade. An instant after the explosion, they ran to the top, but amid the smoke of the explosion, they still didn’t find anyone.
In the far corner, a ladder led to an open hatch in the roof.
Durado’s voice was stark. “I’m not going up there.”
Kline understood. Their quarry was probably lying on the roof, aiming toward the hatch, ready to blow off the head of anyone who showed himself through the small opening. There was no way to know which way to throw a grenade to try to clear the roof.
“Maybe he ran across to another building,” Kline said.
“And maybe not. I won’t climb up there to find out.”
“Right. To hell with him,” Kline said. He peered through an open window and saw a sniper in a window across from him. The sniper wore a white legionnaire’s cap. His sleeves were long. As the man aimed down toward an alley, Kline shot him before he had the chance to pull the trigger.
Durado pointed. “Snipers all along the roofs!”
Kline worked the bolt on his rifle and fired through the window. Worked the bolt and fired. The movement became automatic. Hearing Durado do the same through an opposite window, he loaded a fresh magazine and continued shooting in a frenzy. His uniform was drenched with sweat. Struck by his bullets, white-capped men with long-sleeved shirts slumped on the roofs or else toppled into the alleys.
An explosion shoved Kline forward, almost propelling him through the window. He managed to twist sideways and slam against the window’s frame before he would have gone through. His back stung, and his shirt felt more soaked, but this time, he knew it was from blood.
Trying to recover from the shock wave, he spun toward the room and realized that the explosion had come from the far corner. The ladder was in pieces. The man on the roof had dropped a grenade through the hatch.
“Durado!”
There wasn’t any point in running to try to help him. Durado had been shooting through a window near the ladder. The grenade had exploded next to him, tearing him open. His blood was everywhere. His gaping intestines lay around him. Already, the flies settled on him.
Kline aimed toward the ceiling’s open hatch. Abruptly, numerous bullets sprayed through the window next to him. The snipers across from him had realized the direction from which his shots had come. If the wall hadn’t been made of thick sandstone, their bullets would have come through and killed him. Even so, the wall would eventually disintegrate from the unrelenting barrage. He couldn’t stay in the room much longer.
When another grenade dropped through the hatch, Kline dived toward the stairs. The impact made him wince as he rolled down, feeling the edges of the steps against his bleeding back. The explosion roared behind him. He groaned when he hit the bottom, but he kept rolling.
He deliberately made loud noises, striking his boots hard as he clattered down the final section of the stairs. At the bottom, he fired once, hoping to give the impression that he shot at someone before he left the building. Then he silently crept up to the middle floor and hid in the adjacent room.
The most difficult part about standing still and waiting was trying to control the sound of his breathing. His chest heaved. He was sure that the strident sound of air going through his nostrils would give him away. He worked desperately to breathe less fast, but that only increased the urgency in his lungs. His heart seemed about to explode.
A minute passed.
Two.
Blood trickled down Kline’s injured back. Outside, the explosions and shots continued.
I’m wasting my time, Kline thought. I ought to be outside, helping.
The moment he started to leave, he heard a shot from the floor above him, and smiled. The man on the roof had finally decided that the building was clear. He’d jumped down to continue shooting from the cover of a window.
Kline emerged from the room. Hearing another shot above him, he eased up the stairs. He paused, waiting for another shot and the sound of the rifle’s bolt being pulled back. Those noises concealed his own sounds as he came to the top of the stairs and fired, hitting the man in the back.
The legionnaire, who wore long pants, slumped forward, his head on the windowsill. Kline recognized the back of his brawny neck. His name was Arick. He was a German, who’d been part of Kline’s group of volunteers back in 1934. Outside, other Germans fought each other, some for the Vichy Legion, some for the Free
French Legion. But where a legionnaire had been born and raised made no difference.
The Legion Is Our Only Country, Kline thought.
God help us.
He turned to race down the stairs and reenter the battle. He reached the second floor. He hurried to the first at the same moment a man left the chaos outside, rushing into the demolished room. He wore the Legion’s white kepi. Long pants.
He gaped at Kline.
Kline gaped, as well.
The man was even thinner than when Kline had last seen him, his freckles almost hidden by the dust of battle.
“Rourke.”
The name barely escaped Kline’s mouth before he shot Rourke in the chest. The pressure of his finger on the trigger was automatic, the result of countless drills in which self-preservation preceded thought.
Rourke staggered back, hit a wall, and slid down, leaving a streak of blood. He squinted at Kline, as if trying to focus his dimming eyes.
He trembled and lay still.
“Rourke,” Kline said again.
He went to the open doorway, fired at an opposing legionnaire, and hurried into the tumult of the alley, hoping to die.
* * * *
The battle persisted into the next day. By sunset, the Vichy Legion had been routed. Damascus had fallen to the Allies.
Exhausted, his back crusted with scabs, Kline lay with other legionnaires in the rubble of a building. It was difficult to find a comfortable position among the debris. They licked the last drops of water from the brims of their canteens. They chewed the last of the stale biscuits in their rations.
As the sun set and the cold stars appeared, Kline peered up at the vastness. He was puzzled by the casualty figures that had been reported to his group of men. On his side, only 21 legionnaires had been killed and 47 wounded. But of the opposing legionnaires, 128 had been killed while 728 had been wounded.
The contrast was so great that Kline had difficulty making sense of it.
They had plenty of time to secure their defenses within the city, he thought. They had buildings to shield them from our bullets while we attacked across open ground. We were easy targets. They should have been able to stop us from reaching the walls.
An unnerving thought squirmed through his mind. Did they hold back? Did they shoot to miss? Did they hope to appear to fight when all they wanted was for the battle to end as soon as their pride would allow?
Kline recalled speaking with Durado about whether the men in the Vichy Legion knew they were on the wrong side, the aggressor’s side, the invader’s side.
The snipers whom Kline had seen in windows and on rooftops—had they been merely firing but not aiming? Had they been looking for an honorable way to lose the fight?
Kline remembered turning in surprise as Rourke had hurried through the doorway into the wreckage of the room. Kline had shot him reflexively. Searching his memory, Kline sought to focus on Rourke’s rifle. Had Rourke been raising it, about to shoot? Or had Rourke been about to lower it and greet his friend?
There was no way to tell. Everything had happened too quickly.
I did what I was trained to do, Kline thought. The next instant, Rourke might have shot me.
But then again, he might not have.
Would our friendship have meant more to him than his duty as a legionnaire? Kline wondered. Or would Rourke’s training have made him pull the trigger?
Peering up toward the sky, Kline noticed that there were even more stars. Their glint was colder—bitterly so—as a new, more unnerving thought took possession of him. He remembered the many times that he and Rourke had talked about salvation.
“What do Baptists believe?” Rourke had asked.
“God punishes us for our sins,” Kline had answered.
Kline now suspected that manipulating him into killing his friend was another way for God to punish him.
“What do Catholics believe about being saved?” Kline had asked.
The former altar boy had replied, “We tell God we’re sorry for our sins and do penance to prove we mean it.”
Penance.
Thinking of his dead wife and daughter, thinking of the dead bank guard, thinking of Rourke, he murmured, his voice breaking, “I’m sorry.”
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* * * *
Robert Silverberg
Soldiers in every age have learned that the military’s unofficial motto is “Hurry up and wait.” But suppose all you ever did was wait? And wait. And wait. . .
Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. As both writer and editor (he was editor of the original anthology series New Dimensions, perhaps the most acclaimed anthology series of its era), Silverberg was one of the most influential figures of the Post-New Wave era of the ‘70s, and continues to be at the forefront of the field to this very day, having won a total of five Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards, plus SFWA’s prestigious Grandmaster Award.
His novels include the acclaimedDying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, Son of Man, Nightwings, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, Shadrah in the Furnace, Thorns, Up the Line, The Man in the Maze, Tom 0’ Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, At Winter’s End, The Face of the Waters, Kingdoms of the Wall, Hot Sky at Midnight, The Alien Years, Lord Prestimion, The Mountains of Majipoor, two novel-length expansions of famous Isaac Asimov stories,Nightfall and The Ugly Little Boy, The Longest Way Home, and the mosaic novel Roma Eterna. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, Beyond the Safe Zone, and four massive retrospective collections, Secret Sharers (in two volumes), To the Dark Star (in two volumes), Something Wild Is Loose: The Collected Stories, Phases of the Moon, and a collection of early work, In the Beginning. His reprint anthologies are far too numerous to list here but include The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, and the distinguished Alpha series, among dozens of others. Coming up, as editor, isThe Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two B. He lives with his wife, writer Karen Haber, in Oakland, California.
* * * *
Defenders of the Frontier
Seeker has returned to the fort looking flushed and exhilarated. “I was right,” he announces. “There is one of them hiding quite close by. I was certain of it, and now I know where he is. I can definitely feel directionality this time.”
Stablemaster, skeptical as always, lifts one eyebrow. “You were wrong the last time. You’re always too eager these days to find them out there.”
Seeker merely shrugs. “There can be no doubt,” he says.
For three weeks now, Seeker has been searching for an enemy spy—or straggler, or renegade, or whatever he may be—that he believes is camped in the vicinity of the fort. He has gone up to this hilltop and that one, to this watchtower and that, making his solitary vigil, casting forth his mind’s net in that mysterious way of his that none of us can begin to fathom. And each time he has come back convinced that he feels enemy emanations, but he has never achieved a strong enough sense of directionality to warrant our sending out a search party. This time he has the look of conviction about him. Seeker is a small, flimsy sort of man, as his kind often tends to be, and much of the time in recent months he has worn the slump-shouldered look of dejection and disappointment. His trade is in finding enemies for us to kill. Enemies have been few and far between of late. But now he is plainly elated. There is an aura of triumph about him, of vindication.
Captain comes into the room. Instantly he sizes up the situation. “What have we here?” he says brusquely. “Have you sniffed out something at last, Seeker?”
“Come. I’ll show you.”
He leads us all out onto the flat roof adjacent to our barracks. To the right and left, the huge turreted masses of the eastern and western redoubts, now unoccupied, rise above us like vast pillars, and before us lies the great central cour
tyard, with the massive wall of tawny brick that guards us on the north beyond it. The fort is immense, an enormous sprawling edifice designed to hold ten thousand men. I remember very clearly the gigantic effort we expended in the building of it, twenty years before. Today just eleven occupants remain, and we rattle about it like tiny pebbles in a colossal jug.
Seeker gestures outward, into the gritty yellow wasteland that stretches before us like an endless ocean on the far side of the wall. That flat plain of twisted useless shrubs marks the one gap in the line of precipitous cliffs that forms the border here between Imperial territory and the enemy lands. It has been our task these twenty years past—we were born to it; it is an obligation of our caste—to guard that gap against the eventual incursion of the enemy army. For two full decades we have inhabited these lonely lands. We have fortified that gap, we have patrolled it, we have dedicated our lives to guarding it. In the old days, entire brigades of enemy troops would attempt to breach our line, appearing suddenly like clouds of angry insects out of the dusty plain, and with great loss of life on both sides we would drive them back. Now things are quieter on this frontier, very much quieter indeed, but we are still here, watching for and intercepting the occasional spies that periodically attempt to slip past our defenses.