Chapter 7

"Blow it."

Mina touched the torch to the fuse and watched in silence as the powder train snapped to light, racing down the side of the bank and then on to the trestle. Seconds later the first charge snapped off and timber, rails, a month of work rose upwards, charges further on the bridge flashing off with thunderclap detonations.

The Neiper bridge collapsed. Several hundred yards upstream a second flurry of charges went off, and moments later the first crest of the flood came around the bend of the river, the mill dam torn away, the water washing through the ford.

Mina tossed the torch aside and walked over to the train where Andrew stood.

"Had to do it myself," John said quietly.

Andrew nodded without comment and followed John up into the train car.

He spared a quick glance to the chair in the corner, brass spittoon resting beside it. Clearing his throat, he went to the head of the table and sat down.

"How bad are the losses?" Kal asked.

"Eight hundred casualties in first corps, three hundred in the second," Andrew said, looking down at the roster reports. He paused for a moment. "First division, 3rd corps, and half of the 2nd and 3rd divisions gone."

Kal leaned back in his chair, looking at the ceiling.

"Ten thousand boys."

Andrew nodded.

"Nearly all the corps equipment except what they carried out—sixty field pieces, half a million rounds of ammunition, tentage, two hundred thousand rations."

"And Hans," Pat stated softly. "And twenty-five more of the men from the 35th and 44th."

John shook his head.

"I know that," he whispered. "It's not my job to report the flesh and blood, only the rest."

Kal extended his hand in a consoling gesture.

"Now what?"

The room was silent.

"Now what?" Kal snapped, his voice sharp, jarring Andrew from his thoughts.

He looked over again at the empty chair, as if someone were still sitting there, quietly judging, ready to reproach him if he lost his nerve, especially now.

"We continue to fight," Andrew said coldly.

"Forgive me if I seem unduly pessimistic, Andrew," John said, "but we've lost nearly twenty percent of our best trained troops in the last three days. The plan was that we wouldn't be fighting on the Neiper till midsummer, and that at that point we'd have two, maybe three corps more, ready and equipped. The rail line up the river would be completed, and the entire river from the Inland Sea to a hundred miles upstream fortified."

"Well, the plan is finished," Andrew said quietly.

"And our alternative?"

"Fight to the death," Pat snapped angrily. "Hans piled them up in mounds around his square. By God, I'll take a dozen with me when they come."

"You're talking defeat," Father Casmar interjected.

"When you're staring forty umens armed with artillery in the face," John replied, "it's hard to think otherwise."

"We beat the Tugars, we beat the Merki fleet last year," Casmar reminded him reproachfully.

"Father, we won both by the skin of our teeth," John replied.

"And the grace of Kesus and Perm," Kal interjected.

"Well, the grace is gone," John said coldly. "In two days they'll be building batteries across from Suzdal and be on the other side of the river, not a half-mile from where we sit. Within the week they'll have patrols a hundred miles farther up the river. Within ten days they'll have tens of thousands of Cartha slaves working like moles at a dozen different places. We saw that on the Potomac."

"May their souls find peace," Casmar whispered.

"Work them till we kill them, and in the killing we fill their pots," John snapped.

"We knew three years ago when we faced the Tugars that we couldn't defend the upper Neiper, that sooner or later they'd get across and any troops above the cut would be annihilated.

"Once they cross the river, I'd say in under two weeks, their numbers will bear us down. They'll invest Suzdal, and they'll remember what we did to the Tugars. They'll blow the dam, the city gets washed out, and then they charge in for the kill."

"Start dropping the water in the reservoir right now," Casmar replied.

"I ordered it this morning," John replied. "It'll still take weeks. Even if we drain it down, there's no way we'll hold the city. Remember, this time they have artillery. They'll smash a way in, even if it takes all summer."

Andrew, who was staring dully at the empty chair, listened without comment. "Always play your advantages, do the unexpected. If you lose your nerve, everyone will lose their nerve," the now silent voice whispered.

Losing my nerve. He felt an inner tremble. That was the core of it. He had gone to the bank once too often. Long years of going to the bank, knowing that a mistake might kill the men of his company, the regiment, the army, the nation.

Well, Hans, I just killed you and ten thousand others—a hell of a mistake. You saw it coming, and I didn't. You could have told me to go to hell, could have refused to obey, and god damn you I would have listened.

But no, you never would have done that. You didn't, even when you saw it coming.

"You'll make an officer some day, if you don't get kilt over first"—his favorite line.

Well, Hans, I've been "kilt over" inside, but did I ever make it to being an officer after all?

The bank's empty, and I finally made a mistake that cost you your life.

"My fault, all my fault"; a reb prisoner had told him that's what Lee said after Pickett went down. Ten thousand rebs lost in a half-hour, the turning point of the war.

Was this the turning point, Hans, the end of all of us, because I left you out on the limb, because I did not send up that one extra division?

"Are you saying the war's already lost?" Casmar asked, staring at John. "That tomorrow I go into my cathedral and tell my flock to prepare, to dig their graves, to cut the throats of their own children to spare them the horrors of the pit?"

John spread his hands and looked to Andrew.

"I'll smother Maddie and then hang myself!" she had shouted.

"Andrew?'

He looked back to the table. Kal was watching him.

"Let it rest," Kal whispered.

"What?"

"Let it rest. You can't go back, you can't change it."

"He put up a hell of a fight, he did," Pat said, looking to the chair and then back at Andrew.

Their gaze held for a moment, and Andrew felt as if the look in Pat's eyes were piercing right into his heart.

Do something! You're the one who thinks! I'm just the loudmouthed brawler!

Andrew got up from his chair and walked out of the car to stand alone on the rear platform.

Along the bank of the river troops stood in silence, watching the bridge burn.

He leaned back against the side of the car, pulling his kepi low over his eyes.

The door creaked open behind him, and Kal came out. He wanted to tell his old friend to leave, but he didn't have the heart to do so.

"Still shaken by it, aren't you?"

Andrew forced a weak smile.

"I lost. I killed ten thousand good men and lost my oldest friend. I most likely lost the war in the process. You heard John in there."

"You've lost something else," Kal said.

"Go on and tell me," Andrew replied coldly.

"Your nerve, of course."

"Thank you for enlightening me."

"I'm President of this country because of you," Kal said sharply, coming to stand in front of Andrew.

"If it hadn't been for you and your people I most likely would have survived the Tugars—they would be long gone by now. Ivor and Ragnar would still be squabbling for power, and I would still be a dirty peasant making up bad verse in order to stay alive."

"I didn't want all of this," Andrew replied.

"I did. I still do. And by Kesus, Andrew Lawrence Keane, I need you."

"Do you?"

"What's the alternative? Fire you? I can, you know, after all, I am the President."

Andrew looked down at Kal, who stood before him, a miniature Lincoln. A foot too short, but a Lincoln nevertheless, in black frock coat, chin whiskers, stovepipe hat, even the broad streak of earthy humor and touch to the common folk.

"Old Abe fired more than one."

"He kept your Grant."

"Grant. The Butcher,' we called him—he carpeted the fields with our bodies. I lost half my regiment in twenty minutes at Cold Harbor because of him."

"And yet you still followed him, because you were soldiers."

"We lost the best under him," Andrew said softly.

"That's war. Sometimes generals make mistakes and good men die for it."

"I lost too many good men. We couldn't afford a thousand dead, let alone ten thousand."

"So who the hell would I replace you with?" Kal asked ruefully. "Pat. A hell of an officer, as long as someone tells him where to go first. John? A desk commander, the best organizational mind we've got, even better than you in that area, but he doesn't have the spark. Maybe Vincent someday—needs a lot more seasoning, and there's a terrible fire in that boy's soul that needs to be doused first."

"He needs seasoning, but maybe someday," Andrew said quietly. "I'd already thought of that, even though he wants out the same way I now do."

"It's you or nothing. Just why the hell do you think Hans picked you to start with?"

Andrew looked at Kal, unable to answer.

"He's expecting you to win even now. You have to Andrew, because I'd sure as hell hate to face him if you didn't."

"Thanks for the guilt," Andrew said quietly.

"If it works, I'll use it."

"You son of a bitch. I was the one who made the mistake," Andrew snarled.

Kal chuckled, shaking his head.

"Most combative thing I've heard from you all day. It'll make great history some day, how my general called me a son of a bitch. A heroic painting perhaps, a wood carving on the side of a train car entitled 'Colonel Keane calls the President a son of a bitch.' "

A smile creased Andrew's features.

"Hans picked you. I need you because, by Kesus, you can think, and you can lead. Look at those men back in there. Pat talking about the pile of Merki dead around his corpse, John weeping doom, Casmar whispering that the end of the world has come. You alone can change that."

"I've never lost before," Andrew whispered, looking past Kal to some distant point. "No matter what, I've always won. I always got the boys out, even at Cold Harbor."

He shook his head sadly.

"I got to the point where it was impossible to think otherwise, yet there was a cold nagging inside me, whispering that this time I was reaching too far. I was asking more than we could possibly do. And it caught up with me. I hesitated at the key moment. I got rattled and didn't act when I should have."

"That's history now, Andrew. I'm not worried about history, I'm worried about next week."

Kal pointed to the ford.

"In a week, ten days, four hundred thousand Merki will be crossing through here, and farther up they'll be like a herd of locust consuming everything in their path: the grass, the crops, ourselves, our children.

"You alone can stop it. You're not the first general to lose a battle, a campaign, even a war. But by heavens, I dare say you'd be the first one to win a war while inside you we're already defeated," Kal whispered. He fell silent, and climbing down from the train he walked toward the riverbank, nodding as the soldiers saw him, waving for them to stand at ease, to come over and chat.

That damned peasant can outthink us all at times, Hans, Andrew whispered to himself.

All right, we certainly won't stop them on the Neiper, he thought, forcing his thoughts to clear, we knew that all along. Our only hope was to hold them back for so long that they'd start to starve, forced to eat their own horses, their families growing thin until they finally gave up and turned away.

Starve.

An amateur studies tactics, a professional logistics.

In the end we'll lose the Neiper line. We'll all die in Suzdal. At least Vincent will live a while longer in Roum.

We need time, precious time. There was the other idea, the one that had been forming since his talk with Yuri. It still bothered him in a way, so much so that he had spoken to no one about it. He needed time.

He felt as if the old eyes were looking up at him, waiting for the flash of understanding, like the first time at Antietam when the rebs had come crashing in from three sides.

"Son, you'd better lead these boys out of here," he had said.

"God damn it."

Kal turned to look back at the car. Andrew was already turning away, pushing the door open and going back inside.

"I better be going along, boys," Kal said, patting a drummer on the head and shaking hands with an old gray-bearded captain whom he remembered for a guard in Ivor's retinue.

"What's going to happen to us?" a young private asked, his face speckled with the first faint wisps of a beard.

"Why, we'll win of course," Kal said with a smile. "That's a promise. If I'm wrong, you can elect somebody else President in the next election."

The men chuckled ruefully as he turned away.

Gaining the car, he stepped back inside. He interrupted what was already turning into an argument between Andrew and John.

Andrew looked up at Kal.

"You damn well better be right," Andrew said.

"About what?"

"About not firing me."

Kal smiled, saying nothing.

"I'm sending you up to Roum right now," Andrew said. "We'll arrange an express train to take you through. I think Marcus needs to hear this one personally and agree before I announce it. If he does I want you back here at once, with him along if possible. You can do it round trip in two days if we clear the line and hook you in to our fastest engine."

"Just what am I being the messenger boy for?" Kal asked, the tone of his voice expressing an agreement before he had even heard what it was.

Andrew told him, even as John snapped about the impossibility of success.

Kal looked at John.

"Defeat is just as impossible an alternative. Let's get this train going. I have a message to deliver."

"You mean to say you funneled your entire Horde up this miserable track?"

Muzta nodded, looking to either side of the wide trail that was now bisected by the rail line that disappeared into the woods beyond.

"The first umen could move up it at fifty miles a day," Muzta said. "But after that things slowed, the track gets turned into mud. It took nearly seven days to move all my umens up to the ford of the Neiper."

The mud.

Jubadi leaned over and looked down. His mount was buried nearly up to mid-hock, the ground churned to a thick soup by the first umen.

"And the horde behind us?" Hulagar asked.

Muzta smiled, shaking his head.

"We were but a third your size, and still it took nearly a moon passage to move through the hundred miles of forest, cross the river, and get back onto the steppe beyond Suzdal. It's as bad as a mountain pass, worse in some ways."

"I did not think it would be this difficult," Jubadi whispered.

"We did not expect the rain," Vuka sniffed, looking up at the canopied branches, which were still dripping with moisture. "It is the mud that slows us. Let it dry, and we shall move faster."

Muzta moved his mount up to the grading of the rail line, his horse slipping on the slope till it gained the limestone ballast beneath the tracks.

"And they got away," Jubadi thought to himself. He had hoped to end it on this side of the river, and then cross unopposed. Their damned iron rail machines had saved them. Eight thousand bodies were taken, enough to feed the army with all its meat for four days at best. The salters were already preparing that which could not be consumed at once.

The trees overhead swayed with the wind, sending down a cold shower of mist. No airships would fly today. Another problem. They were to bomb the rail tracks, to slow the retreat.

Never plan with the weather. A bank of fog, rain at the wrong time, a sudden blizzard, these had ensured more than one victory, or defeat.

He could not even communicate with the southern wing, riding along the edge of the forest thirty miles to the south, sweeping forward to the sea and then pivoting north. Against the retreating cattle, there was not much worry in that. They were on foot or wed to their iron rails. Against the Bantag—and he looked over at Muzta—or against the old Tugars, to split an army like that was to beckon disaster.

That is how they beat us at Orki, forcing us to divide between three passes and then defeating each column in turn.

The trail ahead was obscured with dank smoke roiling across the trail, blinding him for a moment as he rode through it.

The narrow clearing was filled with wreckage. Several log huts still burned, a water tank was on its side, smashed in. An iron rail car, one of its wheels broken, was up on its side. Fresh-turned earth behind the burning cabins was piled high. Half a dozen warriors were digging the graves up, dragging the still fresh bodies out.

He grimaced. Distasteful, but a waste of good food otherwise.

Muzta reined in his mount to watch the disinterring. He edged down off the rail embankment to join him, motioning for his entourage to continue.

The cavalcade continued on, gold standards of the Horde in the fore, the silent ones reining off the trail to wait. Drummers, signalers, nargas-sounders, shamans, servants, message riders, all continued on, slipping through the mud, cursing.

Captured flags of the cattle army passed, white-and-blue standards marked with stars, strange-shaped words emblazoned in gold—7th novrod, 15th kev, 44th suzdal, battle honors listed beneath: the ford, siege of suzdal, relief of roum, battle of saint stanislav. A blue guidon, riddled with shot and marked with sergeant major stripes went past, but all of the words and markings were undistinguishable to him—the panoply of animals, and as such not worthy of note.

Muzta looked back at Jubadi, then returned to gaze at the corpses being pulled out of the earth.

"It got so that my warriors would creep into the killing ground before the city, to hack off strips of flesh from dead and rotting horses," Muzta said, his voice flat and distant.

"Why such memories now? We'll be in their city before the next moon feast."

"Old terrain, old memories coming back. I rode this trail once with my sons, my horde arrayed behind me. I remember our laughing, the feeling one has when the nargas sound not for battle but rather for a hunt. Little risk to be had, a pleasant day's sport, and then meat on the table."

"You saw the way we slaughtered them this morning," Jubadi said.

"It was almost too easy. They made a mistake."

"They are only cattle!" Vuka shouted, edging his mount down the slippery side of the railroad embankment, coming to join his father.

"First time I've seen them caught like that," Muzta acknowledged.

"Because this time they face Merki," Vuka retorted.

Muzta looked back at the Zan Qarth. There was a motion of rebuke from Jubadi, but nothing more.

"Of course," Muzta said with a smile.

A slash of rain burst from above, the heavy drops washing the mud from the frozen features of the cattle lying by the edge of their graves.

Jubadi looked at the cold bodies staring up with sightless eyes, muddy water pooling in their sockets.

"It'll be eight, maybe ten days to get the Cartha cattle up, to start them working at the crossings," Jubadi said, as if speaking to himself.

"Use the prisoners we took this morning for starters," Vuka interjected with a cold laugh.

"They're useless," Hulagar said. "There's less than a hundred, all of them wounded and unable to fight. That's how we took them."

"Then why keep them alive?" Vuka snapped.

"They might prove to be useful yet," Jubadi replied, dismissing the subject.

He looked up the trail, the last regiment of the Navgah umen lost to sight in the gathering mist of evening.

"Pass the word up to the Navgah to press up to the Ford by dawn, start scouting the river for crossings, try and force a way across. Maybe they are demoralized and will rout.

"I doubt it," Muzta stated.

"They face Merki this time," Vuka whispered, just loud enough for Muzta to hear.

The Tugar Qar Qarth turned to look back at the heir.

"But of course," Muzta said softly.

"Grandpapa!"

Andrew Hawthorne escaped from the grasp of his mother and raced across the room, nearly knocking Kal over in a wild embrace.

Smiling, Kal kissed the forehead of his grandson, and then was almost swept away by the embrace of Tanya and the tottering hugs of the year-old twins.

"How are you, daughter?" he sighed, breaking free for a brief second to make the sign of blessing before the icon and to accept the sliver of bread, dipped in salt, that she offered in greeting.

Smiling, Tanya patted her stomach.

"Another one started," she whispered.

"That boy certainly has been active," Kal said with a sly grin, and she blushed.

"Daughter, this home is a mess."

Tanya broke free from Kal and raced into her mother's arms, Ludmillia surrounded in turn by the children, all three crying to be picked up.

"Three children," Tanya said apologetically. "Would it be anything less than a mess?"

"A fourth on the way," Kal announced proudly.

Tears clouding her eyes, Ludmillia went up to her daughter and kissed her lovingly on the cheeks.

"Then get a helper."

"I'll have no servants," Tanya replied defensively. "Neither will Vincent."

"A good republican attitude," Kal said, going over to sit by the open window facing out on the forum.

"The devil take politics," Ludmillia announced. "She's the daughter of a president, the wife of a general and ambassador."

"Exactly why I won't have any servants," Tanya stated sharply, her tone indicating that the subject was closed.

"Always was your daughter," Kal said with a soft chuckle.

Kal leaned back in the chair with a sigh, taking off his stovepipe hat and putting it on the table.

"Daughter, something cool to drink perhaps?"

"I'll attend to it," Ludmillia said. "Come along, angels." She swept the children with her into the kitchen.

"What brings you here?" Tanya asked, and as she drew closer he took her around the waist, setting her on his knee.

"I'm a big girl now, Papa," she whispered shyly.

"You'll always be my little one," Kal said, kissing her lightly on the cheek and affectionately tucking a wisp of her hair back up under her fading blue kerchief.

"You look exhausted, Papa."

He nodded, still brushing her hair back.

"Something's wrong, otherwise you wouldn't be here like this."

"Something's wrong," Kal said softly.

"What is it?"

"We lost. We lost badly, nearly an entire corps." He paused. "And Hans."

"Oh, God!" She looked away.

"Basil Alexandrovich, Ilya Progoniv, Boris Ivanov-ich, Sergei Sergeievich, Yuri Andreievich, Mikhail Ernestovich—all of them dead."

"Yuri?"

He nodded, and she fought a losing battle to hold back the tears for the one she most likely would have married if all had been different.

"Zemyatin Rasknovich lost an arm, Gregory Basio-vich has not woken up since he was struck in the head."

"And Andrew Keane, Pat?"

"Andrew is shaken, badly shaken, my dear. You see, we'll most likely lose Suzdal before the next moon. Oh, we'll fight them tooth and nail for it, but

the mouse cannot stand in his nest when the wolf starts to dig too deep."

"Is that why you are here, Papa?"

"I'll tell you later. I have little time. I came here in secret. I expect to be with Marcus shortly—he needed to hear this news personally, and not by a message clicked out on a wire."

"Everyone knows something has happened. No messages of the battle have arrived since yesterday morning."

"My orders," Kal said. "It might only start panic."

"It's half there already."

"But at least, my little plum, you and the babies are safe for now."

She wanted to protest, to express some guilt, thinking of Kathleen, of all her friends, but it was different now. There was no room for such heroics when there were three children to protect, and a fourth already quaking inside her.

Smiling, he fumbled in his breast pocket and pulled out a small package wrapped in a stained cloth. She opened it to reveal a tiny chunk of honeycomb.

"Papa, I'm not eight anymore."

"Let's just play the game for now," he sighed. Smiling, she took a bite and leaned her head against his shoulder.

"Our Vincent?"

"The same," she whispered.

Kal nodded slowly.

"He's distant. The innocence . . ." she sighed, and looked away.

"We all lose our innocence. Even my little girl's lost hers."

"Papa, you know what I mean. There was a gentleness, a certain wonder at what Kesus and Perm had created. It was impossible for him to hate."

"And now he hates," Kal asked.

She nodded sadly.

"This war, before it's done, it'll teach a lot more of us to hate," Kal said coldly. "Maybe we need that hate to win. Kesus tells us to love our enemies, Father Casmar says that even the Merki, the Tugar are His creations."

"And do you believe that?"

"Hard to believe it if they take my grandchildren and throw them alive into the feasting pits."

"Don't say that!" Tanya whispered, making the sign of blessing.

"It's just that the hate has eaten his soul. Old Dimitri tells me that no one can talk to him as they once did. He's cold, aloof, obsessed with killing Merki, and merciless to any who cannot match him in that hatred."

"And to yourself?"

She forced a smile.

"He's tired. I think underneath it all there's still the young man I loved, afraid of what he might become. But somehow he's turned away, building wall, a distance between us. Where before he'd take Little Andrew, play and wrestle, walk hand in hand, now he comes home, when he does come home, and sits alone in the shadows."

"And the dreams, Papa, the terrible dreams. Nearly every night he wakes up covered in sweat, sometimes screaming, often crying. I try to hold him then, but he won't let me."

"So much has happened to him," Kal said soothingly. "Much more will happen before it's finished."

He paused for a moment.

"I need men like him. I could use a hundred more."

"You're talking about your son," Tanya whispered.

He patted her on the knee.

" 'When This Cruel War Is Over,' I think that's the title of the song some are singing now."

"How about 'All Quiet on the Potomac'?"

The two looked up to see Vincent coming into the room, cape dripping with the rain that had rolled in at dawn.

"Very popular song back in the old world."

"It's nothing to joke about," Tanya said softly, leaving her father's knee to take his cape and hat.

"We lost the Potomac front yesterday morning," Kal said quietly.

Vincent hesitated. There was a shimmer of emotion, and then a silent withdrawal.

"How bad?"

Kal told him as he walked over to the window.

"That's why you're here."

"Partially."

"Care to tell me the rest?" Vincent retreated into the kitchen, to return a moment later with an earthen jar. Sitting down at the table he poured out a mug of wine, offering it to Kal, who refused.

"A bit early in the morning for that, isn't it, son?"

"I just heard that we might very well have lost the war yesterday, and you're lecturing me about a drink," Vincent chuckled, draining off part of the mug and setting it back down.

"How soon before your two corps will be ready lor action?"

Vincent shook his head.

"At least a month, and even then barely ready. I sure as hell wouldn't trust them in a standup brawl. We'll have weapons—mostly old smoothbores, no artillery. If they get hit hard, I think they'll fall apart, more danger than help to us, and get all their hides slaughtered in the process. I need more time."

There was a knock at the door and Tanya went over to open it.

"Your excellency."

Marcus came in, as soaked as Vincent, and Tanya took his cape.

"Formalities state that I should wait downstairs in my audience chamber for a foreign dignitary to visit," Marcus said coolly.

Kal came to his feet and extended his hand. A slight smile crossed Marcus's features.

"But after all, the ambassador from Rus does live under the same roof as I, so we could say you are paying me the first visit as well."

"I was told you were out drilling with the troops, and would return shortly," Kal said apologetically. "I wanted to see my daughter and grandchildren while I had the time."

Marcus nodded his greetings to Tanya and to Ludmillia, the children rushing back out to greet "Uncle Marcus," who hugged each in turn.

"I take it, if you came this far, the news must indeed be bad," Marcus said, putting the children back down.

Kal nodded to Tanya, who took the three youngsters and left the room, not without a defiant look at Kal, who shook his head.

"Yesterday we lost ten thousand men, the Potomac front, and Hans Schuder."

Marcus said nothing, but took up the other empty mug, poured a cup, and drained it in silence.

"They'll be in front of Suzdal within a fortnight," Kal said coldly.

"And then?"

"They'll be in Roum by the end of the summer," Vincent replied.

Marcus nodded.

"You're coming back with me to Suzdal—the train leaves in an hour. Vincent, I want you as well."

"Well, thank you for the orders," Marcus said, putting his cup down a little too loudly. "Perhaps I should stay here and start building my own defenses. Remember, Rus was to be the shield for us."

"I hope it still can be, but we're going to have to ask for everything from you if we're to have any chance of survival."

Marcus nodded.

"I promised that to you. We're linked to this."

Kal leaned back in his chair.

"You might not like what you'll hear." He started to explain the plan.

Andrew settled back into his chair and nodded for Yuri to pour himself another drink.

"So he beat you," Yuri said in a detached manner.

"Soundly," Andrew said, a bit shocked by Yuri's bluntness.

"I figured he would," Yuri replied, looking at the vodka for a moment before downing the mug. He roughed slightly and set the cup back on the table, He looked at the grandfather clock ticking in the corner, as if lost in thought.

"Why did you assume that?" Andrew finally ventured.

"He still understood you, better than you him."

"God damn it, that's why I need you."

"I know."

Andrew came to his feet.

"Just who the hell are you?" Andrew shouted. "Why the hell did you come back?"

Andrew slammed his fist on the table.

He heard Maddie stir upstairs, a thin cry echoing at being thus disturbed. He listened as Kathleen walked across the room, and the crying died away.

There was a pained look in Yuri's eyes as he looked up to the ceiling, listening.

"A pleasant sound," he whispered. "The cry of an infant at night, quieting down in its mother's embrace."

He quickly reached over and poured another drink, closing his eyes as he drained the cup again

Andrew watched him. Something had surfaced for a moment, he could sense that, a flicker of emotion behind the outer mask that was devoid of all feeling, as if the warmth of life had momentarily pulsed back into the cold body of a corpse.

"I would dare say that part of his plan was to catc h not only the army but you as well," Yuri finally said, looking straight back into Andrew's eyes.

"Why?"

"Standard Merki approach to war. Cut the head off even as you dig out the heart. In action against the Bantag, they assign a regiment of a thousand the sole task of searching for the Qar Qarth to bring him down."

"That seems logical enough," Andrew replied. It was anathema to his own military thinking. He realized it was an illogical bit of European tradition regarding warfare, for after all, kings and dukes realized that to use such a policy would mean they would be hunted as well. Gentlemen have better things to do than shoot at each other, Wellington had once said. Yet somehow it had always struck him as a bit illogical.

"Remember, war is tradition to the Merki, every action prescribed by their laws, from which direction to piss, to who will scoop first at the beginning of the moon feast."

"I assume you fought the Vushka on your right."

"How did you know?"

Yuri smiled.

"The Vushka are accorded the right of first entry into a war. They are the oldest of the clans of the Merki, and guard that distinction with jealousy."

"They were chewed up—we estimate we got two-thirds of them. Foolish to waste your elite for an opening move."

"Not foolish to them. The only drawback is that when their spirits were swept up by Bugghaal, there was nothing to boast of."

"Who?" Andrew interrupted.

"Bugghaal, goddess of the dead, the spirit who rides the night, sweeping up the souls of the slain Into her quiver, bearing them to the everlasting sky. The problem was that when she rode past, none would be able to boast of their kills to gain her attention first."

"Because we are cattle."

Yuri nodded.

"The shamans puzzled hard over that one," Yuri said with a chuckle. "They declared that since it is obvious that all of you have been driven into some madness, the death was honorable, since they were lighting against evil spirits who had possessed the cattle."

"So they think we are evil spirits," Andrew said softly.

Yuri chuckled, his head bobbing up and down.

"Weak cattle-spirits though. The world is full of spirits, good and evil. The Merki find protection in that realm through the intercession of their ancestors, who ride the everlasting sky above them."

"If our spirits are so weak, how then did we defeat the Tugars?"

"Tugars. They were viewed as being foolish, too prideful. Though all were appalled, inside they rejoiced, for they saw it as a vengeance for the battle of Orki when the Tugars shattered the Merki Horde."

"The Tugars are reported to have two umens with the Merki," Andrew said.

"Your intelligence is good."

"We have several hundred refugees a day coming out of Cartha. We get daily reports from Hamilcar.

"I'd be careful."

"Why?"

"Another standard Merki trick. To somehow infiltrate the enemy. There is a story how, several circlings back, a pet was traded to a Bantag Qarth. The pet poisoned his master."

"Why?"

"He was promised that if he succeeded lis family would be spared the moon feast."

Andrew nodded, looking at Yuri sharply.

Yuri laughed, looking down and rubbing the ring on his finger.

"Now, I might have told you that information as a demonstration of my loyalty, though in fact I truly have been sent to spare someone still in their camp after all. A game within a game."

"I've already heard the story. Hamilcar repeated it to me the night you were brought in."

"With advice to cut out my tongue, jam it back into my mouth, then crucify me on the walls of the city—the traditional punishment for an eater of flesh here in Rus."

Andrew said nothing.

"As we were saying, the Tugars ride with the Merki. I made a bracelet for Muzta Qar Qarth. I stood in his yurt when it was presented."

"Muzta."

"You know him?"

"We met once."

"Perhaps we will meet again, one called Keane," Muzta had said. He had spared Kathleen and Vincent, a strange chivalrous act. Out of character for all Andrew thought the Horde to be.

"I'm surprised they let him live after his defeat," Andrew said.

"There's almost a tone of affection in your voice," Villi replied.

"Let us say that, in spite of everything, he did me favor once."

Andrew listened for a moment. She was asleep, most likely with Maddie back in her cradle. She was title, at least for the moment.

"I heard about that. A sign of weakness, some said. Curious that his own people have not slain him. He must still somehow hold power over them."

"It is hard to kill a Qar Qarth, even among the more barbaric Tugars."

Andrew detected the slightest note of superiority in Yuri's voice—again, the identification with his old masters.

"Does a Qar Qarth ride at the lead in battle?" Andrew asked.

"Rarely. He is the planner, the center of thought, the master hand pulling the strings of battle.

"You noticed the flags."

Andrew nodded.

"We assumed they were for signaling."

"Incredible. Blue flags for marking the line of march. Red for battle information. A message can fly miles in a matter of minutes, and is not tied to your wires that clatter. All goes back to him.

"The Vushka are at the point of the first attack. The Qar Qarth usually remains at the center, so that neither horn is beyond his quick reach. The Zan Qarth is expected to range forward to gain blood and training."

"Vuka?"

Yuri nodded.

"I heard he was the reason for the riot in Roum."

"Hotheaded. Prone to be rash, yet down deep perhaps a coward. The opposite of his father, who is cautious, thinks out his plans, calculates his moves, and has the courage worthy of his office. It is something Jubadi learned when his father was killed at Orki, a lesson he has never forgotten. That is why, whatever tricks you have, he has already thought out the response. He expects to be surprised, and thus the surprise is lessened. His campaign against you last summer was designed for a victory, but it was also to probe you, so that even if he lost he would better know your thinking."

Andrew leaned back in his chair, his right hand resting absently on the stump of his left arm.

"He knows that you will fight to the last, that is assumed. It is hoped, though, that if you are soundly defeated here in Rus, the Roum will accept the offer of surrender and a return to the old order. That, when your situation is hopeless, you will surrender as well, under blood oath that you will not be slain."

"He doesn't know us very well, then."

"You see defeat as almost inevitable. You might change your mind before this is finished."

If we are wiped out, Andrew thought, Marcus would be a fool not to accept the offer. At least there would be a small hope, rather than the inevitability of annihilation.

"And Vuka would rush in headlong."

"Not himself, but he would send others in, and without the guile of Jubadi. Down deep I think he fears you. You are outside his understanding, again beyond the confines of tradition. He is far too unpredictable—sly, but lacking some of the calcula tion of Jubadi and his shield-bearer Tamuka, whom I served."

Andrew stood up and walked over to the window. Not more than a week and a half ago they had danced out on the green. Tonight it was empty.

Completely empty, as if already all of them were ghosts.

Jubadi. He was the enemy. He had thought too much of them as the faceless Horde. He had to focus more. He was the enemy to be defeated.

He thought for a moment of the package that still rested in the cabinet in the corner of the room. This was the time, but he had to be sure before he asked.

He looked back at Yuri.

"You saw Jubadi often."

"Every day, my lord, since I was of the yurt of Tamuka. Where the bronze shield of Tamuka was, usually there was Vuka and Jubadi."

Andrew nodded again, feeling a cold sense of calculation.

"Why did you come back to us?"

"My own reason," Yuri whispered.

He paused again, his eyes distant, and then he looked back up to the ceiling.

"How old is the baby?"

"Why?" Andrew asked, his voice soft and very cold.

"Just curious. Interesting, that you've had me over here several times and never have I met your child."

Andrew felt an inward chill. He found repulsive the thought of the hands of a cannibal, one who had eaten at the table of the Merki, holding his child.

Yuri smiled and shook his head.

"I understand."

Andrew, feeling embarrassed, looked away. Irrational. The man had been forced into it. He'd had to survive, everyone had wanted to survive, even when in the pit of Hell.

Prejudice. I thought I was above it, he thought. Yet he felt his skin crawl at the thought of Yuri holding Maddie, his hands stained with the flesh of how many children?

He looked back at Yuri.

"I'm sorry."

"Down deep, I know you're not."

Yuri held up his hand.

"It's all right, don't apologize. The winter before I was taken I saw the Tugars winter in Suzdal."

He looked far off, again with that serene, detached look.

"I was almost taken by them for the pits, the feast. I took my gold, the things I had fashioned, out of hiding. I groveled, presenting them. One of their women laughed, and with the flick of a finger pointed me away from the pit. I was set to work fashioning a necklace for her, for her old pet had died. She was going to take me as her new pet, but she died during the winter and I hid then till spring.

"I saw those who traveled with the Tugars, tens of thousands of pets, I saw them grovel as I did. I saw them eat the leavings of the pots as well, struggling for a morsel while their masters laughed. I loathed them.

"They loathed themselves," he whispered. "None would gaze into my eye, they were the damned. When alone with them, I spat in their faces if one dared to look at me. I reviled them, called them traitors, asked them why they did not draw a dagger in the night and at least slay one, for there were no families or villages which could then be taken in vengeance. They crawled away, whispering that I did not understand.

"Now I understand, even as you do not."

Andrew sat in silence, not looking at him but watching the pendulum of the clock ticking off the seconds of time.

"I hate them for it," he sighed. "I hate myself. I even hate you, for never knowing what you could finally be reduced to the way I now know."

His features did not change as he spoke. Still, there was the slightest of smiles, as if he understood some vast secret that Andrew could never fathom.

'I want my vengeance," Yuri whispered. "In that, our paths have crossed."

Andrew reached the point of decision, feeling a slight qualm of guilt, for after all this was different Bom what he had believed war should be. But this was survival. Yuri had finally reached the point he had been quietly maneuvering him to since they had first met.

"I shall help you have it," Andrew replied. Standing, he went over to a cabinet in the corner of the loom, opened it, and pointed within.

"You'll do it with this."

"It's dangerous to go further," Hulagar said, pushing his mount in front of Jubadi's, and the Qar Qarth nodded in agreement. A grin of satisfaction lit his features as he looked through the scattering of trees to the flowing river beyond. In the middle an ironclad rode at anchor, its guns pointing toward the woods. A spattering of skirmish fire puffed along either bank, punctuated by the deeper blast of artillery.

"Well, we've finally come back, my friend," Jubadi announced.

Hulagar, his features breaking into a smile, motioned for a guard who had been waiting for them to come forward. The warrior bowed low, offering up a leather-wrapped case. Jubadi tore the covering off, and grinned as his hand gripped the hilt of the sword.

"I marked where you threw it in the river," Hulagar said. "This warrior was with the advance guard of the Darg Umen that deployed before Suzdal. He dove in the river under fire, until he retrieved th blade."

Jubadi looked down at the warrior, nodded his thanks, and then climbed down from his mount.

"A gift should be matched in kind," Jubadi said, pointing to his horse.

The warrior backed up, hands extended.

"My Qar Qarth, I cannot."

"Take it, and ride well," Jubadi said with a smile.

Grinning, the warrior leaped into the saddle.

"Now go back and kill cattle."

With a shout of joy the warrior reared the hors< up then galloped off through the woods.

"A generous mood, my Qar Qarth."

"Reward loyalty and bravery," Jubadi said. He motioned for Hulagar to follow, as he walked down closer to the river's edge.

A minie ball flickered through the branches above his head, the shot hissing with a cold cry.

Hulagar stepped in front of Jubadi and motioned for him to stand behind one of the trees.

"And yet I never reward you," Jubadi said, doing as Hulagar had requested.

"I am your shield-bearer. It is not for me to be rewarded with trinkets or horses."

"Well said," Jubadi said softly. "Loyalty of the shield-bearer is his lifeblood, as guided by his tu."

"Something is troubling you," Hulagar said.

"Tamuka."

Hulagar said nothing, knowing that this had been coming.

"In battle he left the side of my son to seek blood, and I see the hatred that simmers between the two. This is not as it should be between shield-bearer and Qarth."

"No, my Qarth," Hulagar replied, unable to say anything else.

"Why is this?"

"What do you think, my lord?" Jubadi laughed softly.

"Turn the question back to me, since you believe I might know the answer already." Hulagar nodded.

"Because he despises Vuka, believing that Vuka murdered his brother."

"Your words, not mine," Hulagar said cautiously. "Somewhere along this accursed river," Jubadi said quietly, and despite Hulagar's protest he stepped out from behind the tree to look at the Neiper flowing past, the ironclad not a hundred yards away.

"Do you believe that Vuka did this thing?"

"It is not my place to say," Hulagar replied cautiously. "Hulagar, yes or no."

"Yes, my Qar Qarth."

Jubadi held Hulagar's gaze, the shield-bearer not turning away. "I see," Jubadi sighed.

"If I should fall in this campaign, would he be fit to lead my people to victory?"

"His ka is strong," Hulagar replied.

"Too strong."

Hulagar nodded.

"He went into the charge against my orders and then he held back at the last moment, at least that is what I heard."

"That is what I heard as well, my lord."

Another shot whistled past, but he ignored it.

Turning, he slammed his fist against the tree.

"Why was it not Mantu who lived?" he gasped.

"Bugglaah called his name," Hulagar said. "Fate is fate."

"Now Vuka is the only son of the bloodline left to

me," Jubadi said, looking straight into Hulagar's eyes. "When I die, he will be the Qar Qarth."

"Speak not of your death, Jubadi," Hulagar cautioned, "for the ancestors might heed it as a wish."

"Tamuka must swear to protect him, to guide him."

"He shall."

"There is no one who can replace Vuka."

Hulagar was silent.

"No one!" Jubadi roared, grabbing hold of Hulagar.

"I have served you, my Qarth, for more than a circling, but I am not the shield-bearer of the Zan."

"And if Tamuka should decide differently?"

"My lord, only the father may order the death of the son, only the council of my clan may order the death of a Qar Qarth. It is not Tamuka's to decide."

"I know that," Jubadi whispered.

Hulagar looked down at Jubadi's hands, and almost apologetically the Qar Qarth let go and stepped back. Another shot hummed in, slapping into the tree above Hulagar's head.

"To lose a shield-bearer to this type of shooting is one thing," Hulagar said, forcing a laugh, "but quite ignoble for the Qar Qarth."

Jubadi stepped back behind the tree, and Hulagar breathed easier.

"I know that Tamuka does not agree with how I fight this war," Jubadi said, leaning back against the trunk and taking the flask of fermented horse milk offered by his shield-bearer.

"He speaks from his tu, and that is how it guides him."

"I still do not understand it. We fight the cattle to preserve our way of life, the way of our ancestors, and yet he wishes to destroy that in the end. Granted, the Rus will most likely be destroyed, per-

Imps the Roum will live on as pets—they have been loo infected with this thing—but to slaughter all cat-lie around the world? And the hatred that burns in his heart, it is not something I understand, especially from a shield-bearer. There is a cold calculation there, not born of hot blood but rather out of the icy, rational mind of your order. Yet if we kill all cattle, then in the end we starve."

"It is a problem I see no answer to," Hulagar replied.

"Yet it must be answered," Jubadi replied. He looked down at the sword in his hand, the blade burnished, the leather of the grip rewrapped and fresh, and then he looked back across the river.

The forest started to lighten, and looking overhead Jubadi saw the gray clouds thinning, a patch of blue appearing for a moment.

He smiled.

"Storm's lifting."

Hulagar nodded, turning his face upward as a thin shaft of sunlight filtered through the trees. The smells here were so different. Unlike the endless sea of grass, here it was dank, rich with damp earth, trees that never shed their thin needles. He could not decide if he liked the smell or not.

"Ground should start drying out tomorrow; we'll be able to move up."

"I want us across the river within seven days," Jubadi announced, looking out on the flood-swollen river. "I don't trust these Yankees to stay beaten for long."

"Is everyone here?" Andrew asked, looking around the nave of the cathedral.

Kal nodded wearily, motioning for the guards to close the doors. Outside, the square was in turmoil. Casualty lists had at last been posted, and the screams of lamentation echoed through the building even as the oaken doors slammed shut. Three Suz-dalian regiments had been entirely wiped out—fifteen hundred men gone in an instant. Similar lists were going up throughout Rus, and panic was in the air.

"A hard day out there," Casmar said. Rising, he offered his blessing to the assembly of officers and senators, all going to their knees except the non-Catholic New Englanders and Marcus.

Andrew nodded his thanks and stepped before the group, looking around the church.

A strange place to be holding a council of war, but the Senate Hall had been hit by an airship only the hour before. If the timing had been slightly different they might have succeeded in annihilating the high command in one stroke. The high stain-glassed windows, depicting the lives of the Saints, of Kesus, shone with a soft translucent light, the church smelling of thousands of candles and incense burned down through the centuries. It had stood as the focal point of the Rus since they had come through the tunnel of light nearly eight hundred years before. Its time was finished.

"You all know that we are in serious trouble," Andrew began.

The men were silent.

"I fully expect that even if we fight it out on the Neiper we will lose that position as well—it is far less defendable than the Potomac. After that, I expect they will invest this city. They will have artillery unlike the Tugars. Even if we hold against that, it is only the middle of spring. The first harvest will not be in for months, and when it does come in it will be in their hands and not ours. We might hold out here for weeks, maybe even for months. But in the end ..." and his voice trailed off.

"And what about Novrod, Kev, Vyzama, all the other cities of the Rus?" a senator shouted from the back of the room. "Are you saying that Suzdal will be defended, and we will be left outside to fend for ourselves?"

Andrew held up his hand, nodding in agreement.

"I will not do that. To start with, all the Rus could not possibly hide in the city. Second, I will not ask regiments of Kev to abandon their city and defend this capital. We built fortifications around those cities in case a raiding group should break through. But if we try to defend all the cities, they will simply reduce them one by one."

The men looked at Andrew with open curiosity.

"Then what are you saying?" the senator replied.

"I propose to evacuate all of Rus, and move it east before the Merki arrive. All noncombatants will be shipped to Roum—half a million people. Marcus Licinius Graca has come back here to voice his agreement to this, to offer shelter, food for our people. All involved with the army, or who can work in any way, will be moved to our eastern borders of the White Hills, where we will make our next stand outside Kev. Anything we can use will go with us, that which they can use we will destroy. All factories will be torn apart. The tools, the engines, even the raw material will go with us, and will be rebuilt, if need be, in the open fields and kept working. Anything we can eat—cows, pigs, grain—all will go, and that which we cannot take will be destroyed. The wells we'll poison, we'll sow the ground with traps. We'll leave them nothing. With our navy the river, the sea, will still be ours, and we'll harry their every movement. The army will fight it out on the Neiper and buy the time for the rest to escape, to rebuild and to fight again. I am asking for two weeks from all of you, to give our people that time to escape.

And when we are gone what we leave behind will be a wasteland, in which those bastards will starve!"

Pandemonium broke out in the cathedral, and Andrew stood silently. He looked over at John Mina, with Ferguson and Bob Fletcher by his side. John stared straight ahead, not saying anything.

Andrew held up his hand and the room fell silent.

"It is the only alternative. We cannot hold the Neiper. I realize now that my dream of holding the Potomac was a vain hope as well."

He paused, waiting for the condemnation, the bitter recriminations to echo forth. He had already resolved within himself that if they came he would tender his resignation.

The room was silent. He looked into the eyes of all his generals, the ones whom he and Hans had elevated, to the senators he had created in writing a constitution, and at last to Kal, who had quietly risen from his chair to stand beside him.

"Lead us, Andrew Lawrence Keane," Kal said, his voice cold and clear, "Lead us and we shall follow."

The church was silent, and Andrew looked over at Father Casmar.

"Lead us, and I will follow."

He turned his gaze back to the others. Marcus stepped forward and grasped his hand. The men looked at him, grim-faced, filled with coldness, as if they had heard a call to battle. They came to their feet—first one, and then in seconds the entire assembly—and a cheer of defiance rang out. Andrew turned away, blinded by tears.

Chapter 8

"All of your ideas were easily stated," John Mina said, "but I do hate to be the one who starts to throw the cold water."

Andrew struggled to keep from falling asleep. The grandfather clock in the parlor ticked in slow rhythmic time. He picked up the hot tea that Kathleen had placed on the side table by his chair and took a sip. The parlor was almost too warm, for the fire in the stove which had been lit to drive out the cool chill of evening had made the room feel stuffy.

He unbuttoned the collar of his shirt, glad to be out of the heavy woolen uniform and vest. Outside, in the town square of their little New England village in the heart of Suzdal, all was quiet. The mass meeting had gone smoothly enough, the men and their families going back home in silence. Ten of the men lost with Hans had families, and their homes were now dark. He tried not to think about the simple log cabin on the other side of the square, where he had spent many an evening in quiet talk. A guard was at the door, the inside dark and cold. He'd have to go over there to decide what should be done with the personal effects. He pushed the thought out of his mind. There was too much to worry about to allow grief to creep back in.

He had told them that all of it was lost, that they were to abandon their homes, which they had built with such a loving recreation of an older life, and go east into an unknown fate.

He looked around the room at his old friends, the companions who had been with him in this adventure from the beginning: Pat, John, Emil, Vincent, Chuck Ferguson, Kal, the staff officers, and the two new leaders, Marcus and Hamilcar; and of course Kathleen, who sat down beside him.

"Throw all the cold water you want," Andrew replied. "That's part of your job, John, to tell me what we can and cannot do. But this time I'm telling you it has to be done."

"I know that, Andrew."

"Then tell me how we'll do it."

"We have sixty-six locomotives, and of all rolling stock just about eight hundred cars. That's what we'll have to base all of this on.

"In all of Rus the census counted just over three-quarters of a million people. That's increased somewhat since last year." He looked over at Hamilcar. "By about thirty thousand."

"About two hundred thousand of those people live within a hundred miles of Kev, with fifty thousand of those within twenty miles of the city. Except for the infirm and the old, I'm proposing that nearly all of them walk out."

"What about their provisions?" Emil asked.

"I'll get to that, doctor," John said wearily.

"It means we'll have to move at least five hundred and fifty thousand people by rail. I'm proposing that we do it in two steps. We go first to Kev—that'll put us two hundred and fifty miles east of here. From there, we'll stage all noncombatants the rest of the distance to Roum." "Two hundred and fifty miles can be covered by the Horde in five days," Hamilcar said coldly.

"On what?" Andrew asked. "They expect to live off the land when they get here; if we turn it into a desert as we leave, it'll make that somewhat more difficult."

"You can't burn green grass," Hamilcar replied.

Andrew nodded in agreement.

"They'll have a million horses with their army. John, what does it take to keep one horse going?"

"I remember hearing that for one of our regular-size horses, not the monsters we have here, that it comes out to about twenty-five acres a year. I'd say at least thirty, maybe thirty-five acres of prime pasture land."

"They'll not be quartering for a year," Emil said quietly. "They just need to cut through us. Seventy pounds of hay a day for horses that size will do it."

"A million horses, four hundred thousand warriors, four hundred guns, all funneling in through Suzdal," Andrew said forcefully. "And remember, this is not just an army marching, it's an entire people, a Volkswanderung."

"A what?" Pat asked.

"A people movement," Emil said. "You know, like the Huns. Women, children, old people, wagons, everything."

"Another million horses with them as well, at the very least," Andrew added.

"They'll eat horse flesh. The Tugars refused that, but I think these people know better now."

"Two thousand horses a day, if there isn't any other foodstuff available. It'll start to hurt fairly quick, if we can slow them down. They can't abandon their yurts, so they'll have to keep those beasts of burden alive. It'll come out of their remounts."

"Even with the sweet grass of spring," Pat said, a glimmer of optimism in his eyes, "ten horses will eat through an acre of this farmland in a day. It'll drop off like mad, maybe down to an acre a horse in a couple of months."

"A hundred thousand acres a day, just for the army mounts, a million acres a day by midsummer," Andrew said, a thin smile lighting his drawn features.

"You still haven't answered my earlier objection," Hamilcar said, barely giving his translator time to work. "They can still rush a dozen umens across the entire length of Rus in five or six days, then smash into the disorganized mass around Kev."

He lowered his voice.

"It'll be a slaughter."

Everyone looked at Andrew.

"They'll be slowed down. You can be sure of that."

Andrew's tone was emphatic.

"How?"

"It'll be done," he replied, his manner indicating that the topic was closed.

"They'll continue to feed off my people," Hamilcar said angrily.

Andrew looked over at the Cartha leader, unable to say anything, still ashamed of the slaughter on the Potomac.

"I'm still in the fight, though," Hamilcar said quietly.

"If we hold the river with our ironclads, even after we retreat it'll force them to go further upstream to cross, and the river road will be untenable. They'll have to cut another road entirely through the woods for fifty or more miles to move their wagons up."

"And our food?" Emil asked.

Andrew looked back to John hopefully.

"With the trains I have, we can move eighty thousand people a day to Kev, each with ten pounds of belongings.

"I estimate that we have approximately a ninety-day supply of food in all of Rus at this moment. Roughly one hundred thousand tons of food—that's counting everything on hoof or in the barns. Considering the bulk, it comes out to at least six hundred trainloads."

John shuffled his notes for a moment.

"Well need at least thirty days to move everything by rail, just for the people and food up to Kev. But there is one hell of a lot more. We have all the tools and machinery from the iron mills, foundries, shot works, the locomotive yard, and sawmills. And I recommend all farm tools as well, if we wish to survive—and if, on the off chance, we win.

"I figure forty days of trains running nonstop can do it, and that's assuming that every locomotive keeps on running. We cut a lot of wood this winter, but I'm not sure it'll be enough. And we've only converted six of the engines to coal-burning."

The room was silent.

"And after that, Andrew, don't forget the army. We'll need to keep the river posted throughout, and when the line finally breaks all rolling stock will be needed to get the army out. That is, if we want an army and its equipment, which we've worked three years to build. Just to get the field artillery out will take every flatcar for two days. Another day for guns emplaced in the cities."

"What about the navy?" Bullfinch asked.

"Every ironclad will be on the river or patrolling the sea," Andrew said.

"The galleys?"

"If we land them further up the coast, we could evacuate all my people and some of the Rus living nearby," Hamilcar said.

Andrew nodded his thanks.

"Then we start tomorrow," Andrew said. "Those that can start to walk out will do so. Children, mothers with infants, anyone over sixty, the infirm, all the wounded—they go out by rail starting tomorrow morning."

"Jesus, Andrew, we have no contingency plans for this type of thing. It'll take days to figure it out."

"We don't have days!" Andrew snapped. "You just said it."

"It'll get tangled as hell. These people won't have a place to live in Kev."

"Then stage off several trains, take the dormitory cars the rail workers used, and start running them all the way up to Roum right off. If we did that, we could get at least a hundred thousand up to Roum in thirty days."

John nodded in agreement.

"First step is to load on all food after the first wave of evacuees. Though I hate to do this, Mr. President, I'm going to declare military law as of this moment."

Kal smiled.

"I assumed it."

"We have to. All food will have to be pooled. Webster, you and Gates start printing up voucher forms tonight. I'm nationalizing all food. Everyone will receive a receipt, and after this is over we'll try and sort out compensation. When a farm is cleared out, the farmer and his family start walking east. If there's room on a train, we take them out."

"There goes capitalism," Webster sighed, bringing rueful smiles to the group.

"We tear down the factories. If we lose the tools and the machines, we lose the war. Once the factories are torn down they receive top priority—all the workers and families still here go out on the trains with them. We don't want those people getting separated from their equipment, since they'll be the only ones who know how to put it back together.

"Finally, we pick up everything else that we can move. Wagons and their teams, even the rails from the tracks, and then the army, when it can no longer hold."

"It'll have to be done in three weeks," Andrew said softly, looking back at John. "I can't even promise you ten days, but we'll try to hold longer."

John said nothing.

"And if they break through before we are done?" Casmar asked.

"The priorities stand," Andrew whispered. "As we organize, noncombatants go first, then food as it's moved in, and the factories once they're torn down, and finally the army and what's left. If they break through before that, the army goes out first along with the factories, and the rest will have to move to Kev by foot."

Casmar nodded and said nothing.

"Fire the cities," Emil said quietly.

"Moscow?" Andrew said hesitantly.

He looked around the room.

"No," he whispered. "Cities are useless to these people. Maybe something of what we have will still be standing when it's over at last."

He looked around his home, realizing for the first time what he had ordered and how it applied to himself. The clock ticking in the corner, the desk carved by a Rus peasant and left on his doorstep one morning, the simple plates in the kitchen, even the jewelry box, the one he had given to Kathleen so long ago, when they had first walked the streets of Suzdal together. All of this, left behind. He struggled with the thought for a moment and looked over at Kathleen, their hands touching.

"Emil, I want you to go out tomorrow to Kev with all the wounded. Start setting up a hospital there, and organize sanitation. Fletcher, you go with him—you're responsible for organizing food storage and distribution. We'll need to get warehouses up to store everything."

For once, there was no argument from the doctor.

Andrew looked over at Kathleen.

"Maddie and I leave when you do," she whispered. He said nothing, and squeezed her hand.

"There is a final point," Andrew said. "This is to be done in secret. The Merki are not to know until they cross the river and get in here."

"A hell of an order, Andrew," Kal said. "What with them damned aerosteamers buzzing about."

"That is a point," John said. "We had some defenses along the military railroad down to the Potomac, but past the Novrod turnoff the road is empty for miles. Once they get wind they can swoop in, bomb a section, maybe even land and tear up a rail or two. One derailment could cripple the line for a day or more."

Andrew looked over at Chuck.

"You flew a machine last week?"

"Well, sir, Jack was the pilot."

"I knew all along you'd go up, in spite of my orders," Andrew said, a note of reproach in his voice. "Is it ready to fight?"

"We're still getting some minor problems ironed out."

"I want it in the air over Suzdal in three days. And move the other ships up as fast as you can."

"The hangers above Vyzima are barely up, sir. Also, sir, it'll depend on the wind. We need a northeasterly, better yet an easterly to get up here."

"Get them up, and get those ships in the air, son. We won't have time to build up a fleet to surprise them, as we'd originally planned, but if they figure out what we're up to they'll swarm across the Neiper regardless of casualties.

"This Jubadi learned from Muzta's mistakes. He's being methodical, sparing his men. But he won't spare them if he thinks we're escaping. I need air protection."

Chuck smiled cautiously.

"I have a full card to do whatever I think necessary?"

"Of course. Your orders will be cut and ready for you when you leave."

Chuck smiled and sat back.

"Whatever you say, sir."

John looked over suspiciously at Chuck, sensing that Andrew might have given a far more sweeping order than he'd suspected, but he was too tired to care and said nothing.

John turned his gaze back toward Andrew. He realized that the entire operation was a fool's dream. Though Andrew had brushed it off, once the Merki broke through there would be nothing to slow them from a sharp run east with part of their forces. Positions along the White Hills would barely be ready to receive their attack.

He was feeding all of them a fantasy. This was the end of it all. He wanted to say something, but a sharp look from Andrew told him that now was not the time to say anything. He lowered his gaze, numbed by what was being asked of them yet again.

Tamuka grabbed hold of the branch, feeling it bow slightly with his weight. He pulled himself up and leaned back to sit against the trunk of the tree. It swayed slightly, the breeze coming out of the north, cool and fragrant. He looked back to the west. The wide trail through the forest, as far as the eye could carry, was packed with horses, warriors, and batteries of artillery, all of it moving forward like one slow, undulating serpent.

A terrible place this, he thought. His memory flashed back to the charge: the lone line of the Nav-hag sweeping forward, behind them column after column of umens, sweeping across the open steppe. And now this. Four days, and still less than a third of the northern wing up to the river. Below him the forest was packed with horses pawing through the leaves, the riverbank lined for fifty miles or more with the gathering host.

A shot fluttered through the night air trailing sparks, then burst above the trail. A scream of pain, then a warrior and his mount going down in a bloody heap, their torn bodies ghostly in the red moonlight.

Another gun fired, and he looked eastward. A ripple of fire raced down the line. Shells winging overhead, bursting along the trail, in the treetops. He felt foolishly naked. A hiss of shrapnel screamed past, cracking through the branches. More warriors went down, the column in confusion. The cattle guns fell silent.

Masterful, Tamuka thought grudgingly.

The fortifications across the river were imposing: two lines on the rising slope, the front of each a near impenetrable maze of sharpened stakes and brush. The shore line was covered with the bodies of three regiments that had attempted to storm across, only to be annihilated by the crossfire of the iron ships and the batteries lining the shore.

He closed his eyes, blocking out the cries of pain from below. His breath came strongly, pulsing in and out, rapidly and yet more rapidly. The tree swayed and the wind whispered a gentle voice through the branches, sighing, drawing each breath out, pushing each breath in. It seemed to say that he, the wind, and the sky were as one.

Tamuka's spirit soared.

He felt himself falling away, and though his tu knew it not, his hands clung yet more tightly to the branch, the husk preserving itself for the return.

There was a pulse of light flowing up out of the west, stretching back hundreds of miles. The life-Mood of his people, the Horde, relentlessly moving ever forward, the scent of the horses, of the peoples, the smell of the yurt, of the fires, of the open grasslands, the endless steppe floating about his tu, focusing his energy.

The spirits of the ancestors hovered, a vast river as well, forever flowing through the heavens above them, guiding them onward in their endless ride. His sightless eyes turned to the heavens, and could I see. Again that longing, a memory locked into his very soul, the memory arching out across the very heavens. The ancestors of the ancestors calling. We were once this, we who traveled the stars, who fashioned the tunnels of light to leap between worlds. Even unto the world of the cattle that we once trod in our youth, building the gateways upon its green surfaces, building the gates upon lands now buried by the seas, gateways upon their open steppes, in their vast mountains, in realms beneath turquoise oceans.

And it is gone, all of it gone—destroyed by our pride, our self-hatreds torn down ten thousand generations ago, until now all that is left of us rests here upon Valennia, the remnants of what we were in our greatness.

He felt his heart bursting with anguish—the understanding of all that had been lost, the memories seeping through his very bones, passed by the blood of his fathers into his own heart. A universe once in

our hands, and now we are but this, struggling with those whom we did not even deem to notice, when once we were masters of the stars. And now the ancestors whispered to him, they who were but in their dawning while we were at midday have risen. They have risen to come out, to come out to hunt us down thus, and to kill us.

The ancestors thus spoke to Tamuka, shield-bearer, spirit-walker of the tu, to the path of knowledge, and his soul wept bitter tears, the tu crying out in rage, so that even the husk, the ka, trembled as it clung to the tree, tears clouding its closed sightless eyes. For we are now in the evening of our days, and they shall leap into their bright morning.

O fathers! he cried with a soundless voice, cast back the suns in their turning, guide me back to the brightness of our noonday!

That, o Tamuka, was what we once were, the ancestors whispered in reply. Gaze upon our greatness and weep, for the circling is but a pale reflection of our greatest rides, when the universe was like the steppe and we gloried in our power. And now those whom we disdained have risen. Almost as if in taunting, sad, pained faces floated before his spirit, pointing to the heavens.

His spirit turned eastward, away from the realm of the ancestor who floated yet beside him, unable to bear the ineffable pain of his knowledge, focusing on the here, the now, and not all that had been lost in the distant past. For it was the past, one he had already gazed upon in tears, a glory he kept unto himself. To speak of it was to no purpose. He looked away from the dream-memories of ancestors not even born upon Valennia, guiding his spirit back up, up through the memories of the coming. Again he rode across the world, the endless generations trapped, living upon the memories of their past, and then came the cattle, and with them the gift of the ancestors, the horse, the liberator that had given them all the world to ride upon. Two hundred circlings, and what glory there was, the spirit of the ka, the warrior, the horse-rider, feeling the wind in one's face, the lamentations of their enemies, enemies though brothers, the glory of the charges, the celebrations of triumph, the lamentations of defeat, yet knowing there would be triumph yet again. For alter all, was it not all an illusion, the glory of this living? The circlings spun past through his wandering soul, images of a hundred ancestors whispering to him, laughing in their joy, crying in their anguish, rising to the endless ride of the everlasting sky when their brief moment had passed.

And then, at last, the image of his own sire drifted past, coming into his own. All of the generations of the Merki, the chosen ones. And in his heart was the warning, that the twilight of the ancestors, of all that they were, might very well be upon them, the realization shaking into his soul. The responsibility of halting it thrust into his heart, calling to his ka to seize what must be taken.

He looked eastward and the world ahead was dark, as if a curtain had been drawn across his sight. The powerful spirits of the cattle, blocking what he could see.

What is happening beyond the river, the boundary between us? He strove to go forward to see.

There was nothing but darkness, and yet even in the darkness there was a swirling, a strength, pulsing away, moving away, following the trails of iron. He felt a vague foreboding. If the strength was moving lo the east, what could this mean?

He looked back to the heavens, the Great Wheel which blazed through his soul, filling him with longing. But there was nothing to be heard there, no ancestor to help him pull back the veil.

They are far from finished, his tu whispered. Far from finished. They come to this world each time more powerful, coming out of our own past to haunt us, for if it was not for the Tunnels they would never be here.

He felt the clouding of spirits, the memory of all the Hordes, Merki, Bantag, Tugar, Kuvak, Org, all the peoples. We are old, he realized, old unto a million generations, of which our time here is but the briefest of flickers, a dying race upon a last lonely world.

And they are young, these cattle, rising up new, streaming with life, sweeping through the devices we have left behind, coming even unto this world as our slaves to turn and kill us in their defiance.

The ancestors were silent.

He felt a cold rage at their resignation, their blood which was one and now trembled.

Fate is not fate, he hissed, startled as his silent words echoed through the firmament. He bent his thoughts back to the east, to where they waited, the defiant few, the first trembling of the storm, a race coming out of the cradle to challenge.

They were drawing their strength eastward, but to what goal?

It would not form—only the foreboding of understanding whispered to him.

Then let the dying race suck the strength out of the new, and cast aside their dried husk.

We have grown fat and old in our ignorance ol what we have lost, he realized. Then let us take that strength, that knowledge back unto our selves and seize all that we once were.

He looked back to the heavens, and suddenly the steppe, the endless ride, were as nothing, the tottering

of an old one whose mind had fled while the ka staggered blindly.

There was a snap of light, a whistling shriek. He felt a warmth, a sting.

The tu returned inward, the vision fading.

He felt a throbbing pain in his arm. Opening his eyes, he saw the trickle of blood coursing down his sleeve, his leather armor torn open at the shoulder, the flesh of upper arm laid open in a shallow cut. The jagged fragment of shell that had struck him was sticking out of the tree trunk.

There was another flash overhead, and yet more screams from the trail below.

With a grim understanding at last, Tamuka ( limbed down from the tree and stalked away into the shadows of night.

He had laid out his plan, the tu whispering to him. He had groomed his chosen one for years, tormenting and then rewarding. If the cattle acted either way, the plan in the end would be the same, and Tamuka smiled.

"Line is cleared up to Kennebec station!" the telegrapher shouted, standing outside his office and looking up with awe.

Jack Petracci nodded, tapping the exhaust vent. The Flying Cloud, lowered ever so imperceptibly.

Ground crews, standing on the empty flatcars, waved the all-clear, securing the last line in place.

Anxiously, Jack looked at the locomotive engine a hundred feet below.

"Feyodor, cable release secured?"

Feyodor leaned out of his chair, hanging nearly upside-down.

"Looks in place, Captain."

Jack reached down with his right hand and grabbed hold of the ring bolt. According to Chuck, one yank

would release all the cables holding the aerosteamer to the train below.

"All ready!" Jack shouted, trying to conceal his outright terror at this mad plan. Chuck had outlined it months before, and it had seemed all so simple on paper. But like everything else about this insane project it was a first, the testing would be in the doing, and if something went wrong it'd be his life that was forfeit.

Towing the ship by rail all the way back to Vyzima had seemed easy enough when sitting around a table. Get a train, hook some cables, and away we go.

Now it was real. A hundred feet below, the engine was hissing, occasional sparks wafting up from the smokestack, a light breeze coming out of the north and pushing the ship south of the track. Feyodor revved the engine up slightly and Jack pushed the rudder over to keep the ship stationary.

The hundred men of the ground crew were standing on the flatcars, looking up anxiously. All of the equipment for the Flying Cloud—barrels of fuel, hopper cars loaded with zinc, a lead, line-sealed tank full of sulfuric acid for making hydrogen—all of it had been loaded up and moved down to the main line of the MFL & S railroad.

Jack looked off to the north. The entire city of Hispania seemed to have turned out for this one. The secret of what was going on in the woods above the city had been revealed at last.

"Waiting for you, sir!" the locomotive engineer shouted through a speaking trumpet.

Jack looked over his shoulder at Feyodor.

"All set, Captain."

Jack gulped hard and, pulling a green signal flag out from under the seat, waved it.

The engineer disappeared back into his cab. A puff of smoke shot up, and Jack winced.

The train started to inch forward.

The cables went taut, the aerosteamer straining against the pull and dropping down slightly.

He looked back over his shoulder again at the long shadow cast behind him by the setting sun. The shadow moved over the water tower behind the station.

The puffing from below came at shorter intervals.

The brass gauge, fashioned by his recommendation to measure the flow of wind, started to move, the pointer on the dial shifting past five miles an hour.

As the engine picked up speed, the balloon continued to shift down closer to the ground.

"Give us some throttle!" Jack shouted.

Feyodor responded and the propeller, which was clicking over slowly, shifted into a stuttering blur.

The balloon rose back up.

Jack continued to wave the green flag. The engine below accelerated.

"Fifteen miles to the hour."

Telegraph poles, by pure luck laid out on the north side of the track, started to drift past. The engine continued to move forward, the sound of the clicking rails echoing up.

The ship shuddered, a gust of breeze shifting it out to the south. Jack pushed the rudder over, lining back up, the aerosteamer now pulling back astern. He pulled out a yellow flag and waved it.

The engine speed leveled out at just over twenty miles to the hour.

It was going to be one hell of a long trip, and Jack tried to settle back in his chair and let the tangled

knot of queasiness in his stomach loosen up.

* * *

Chuck stood to the side, watching as the first of his aerosteamer fleet gradually disappeared westward, back to the front from which he had returned.

"Think it will work?" Vincent asked, standing beside him with arms crossed over his narrow chest.

"Got to. We built them out here where they'd be safe. If the Merki ships found out what we were doing before we got into the air, we'd be sunk before we even got up. Tricky maneuver, this—too much strain and it could tear the ship apart, or maybe even derail the train. Try it alone and we'll burn through engine time like mad, might not even make it.

"Those damn Merki aerosteamers can stay up forever with those engines they got, wherever the hell they got them from. Love to get a hold of one and tear it apart."

"You know the orders," Vincent said quietly. "Some sort of poison in them. They're to be buried."

"Damn it, I know."

"The first battle between aerosteamers ... I'd love to see it," Vincent whispered.

"Did you like flying?"

Vincent smiled.

"The last ride I took was interesting."

Again that smile, and Chuck said nothing.

The whistle of the train on the siding sounded.

"Time to get going," Vincent said, looking back at the train. It was packed with the first load of refugees moved out of Suzdal the morning since the conference. Every car was crammed to overflowing. Kal had loaned his personal car to Chuck, Marcus, and Vincent for the return, and they had shared it with fifty mothers and over a hundred screaming infants

Chuck wrinkled his nose in disdain—if that's what being a father was all about, they could keep it. The smell of swaddling clothes, spit-up milk, and a hundred unwashed babies had driven him out to the platform on more than one occasion. Marcus had surprised him by acting almost like a politician. He'd held more than one wailing child. A strange sight: A true patrician—gray haired, chiseled features, still holding to the traditional breastplate and red cape— rocking a screaming child in his arms.

"Hell of a fight coming up," Vincent said quietly, looking back to the west.

"You sound like you're looking forward to it, Vincent."

The general looked over at Chuck and smiled.

"I am."

He turned and walked away.

"A strange fish."

Chuck looked over at Theodor, who had watched with open envy as his twin brother flew off to war.

"Too much war either kills you or makes you crazy."

"Or both."

"Perhaps," Chuck said quietly.

A high-pitched tooting cut through the yard.

"Our train," Chuck said. He started toward the toylike engine waiting to take him up to the aero-steamer hangers and his factory.

"Do whatever you want," Andrew had said, and he smiled. John would be far too busy now to miss some powder, some high-grade steel, a couple of boring machines. Mark it off to the aerosteamer program.

"Why are you laughing?" Theodor asked.

"You'll find out. Now let's get back home and get Yankee Clipper launched."

"Jesus Christ, what a mess," Pat groaned.

Andrew could only nod his head in agreement. The rail yard was bad enough. The city was emptying out already, so that after only four days the streets seemed empty. No longer did the sound of laughing children, the bustle of the market, the singing in the churches, the hum of life echo through the streets. Six thousand more had left before dawn, all semblance of order nearly disintegrating as hysterical families were pulled apart—men staying behind till the last, women and children leaning out of car windows or sitting forlornly on flatcars that were heaped with their meager possessions. Their only connection to the future was a numbered card held by the males telling them which train their family had departed on. The trains had pulled out in silence, so that the watchers on the other side of the river would not hear.

A battery had opened up the evening before, dropping shells across the river. The guns were light compared to the fifty- and seventy-five-pound shot that the ironclads and the south bastion had hurled back at the position. But it was evidence enough that the Merki were there, watching, undoubtedly able to see the sparks as the trains crossed the trestle over the flooding Vina, which was swollen with the runoff from the reservoir.

The vast foundry was a nightmare of confusion. Hundreds of workers, who but days before had been laboring on twelve-hour shifts to turn out artillery pieces, muskets, and rifles, were tearing their machines down, packing the precious equipment into rough-made crates, pushing and shoving the crates out the doors and onto the rail sidings. A train waited by the brick building, with gangs of men struggling to heave the larger pieces of equipment up on to flatcars, where they were covered with tarps and roped down.

"Every day we lose like this is another three hundred rifles and muskets, another two field pieces not turned out," Pat said ruefully, turning sideways to let a team of men manhandle a press forge through the door.

Andrew looked around and forced a smile of encouragement as he stepped into the cavernous building.

This place had been the core, the heart pulse of all their efforts. Only days before it had been a place of smoke and showering sparks. Sweating gangs of men had pulled the raw iron out from the blast furnace next door, moved it in here, cooked it down into steel and cast. They'd poured it into molds, turned the barrels on lathes, and bored the tubes out, all to build the coiled spring sinews of a modern war machine bent on the salvation of a people.

It was here that any dream of survival had rested. How it had grown! He remembered the first foundry in comparison, but half the size of this, the building swept away with the flood from the blown dam. The fires were still going, a ruse for the watchers beyond the river, smokestacks still coiling out black plumes.

Next door at the rail foundry the chaos was the same. After the naval war it had reached a peak of nearly a hundred and fifty tons of rail a day, forty lengths of track an hour, twenty-four hours a day. The shiny iron had been loaded straight from the molds and forges onto waiting flatcars, which were rolled straight into the building. For months the trains had rolled eastward, one every eight hours, moving eastward to repair the Roum track torn up to make the ironclads. With the coming of late fall the trains had started to move north, up the river road line, across the Neiper and then west onto the military railroad for the Potomac. Ten thousand men had labored to build that line, which was completed only days before the Merki attack. And all of that effort had been for naught.

Beyond the rail foundry, where crews were tearing down the presses and molds, was the latest addition to their factories, the turning out of sheets of one-inch-thick armor for the ironclad fleet. The plates were moved down to the naval yard on the Neiper, now under bombardment, or by rail all the way up to Roum, where the second yard on the Tiber was turning out two more ships of the latest six-gun design.

On the west side of the naval armor forges was the shot factory, where one-inch ball was molded and packed into tin cans as canister, and next to that the molding rooms for four-, twelve-, fifty-, and seventy-five-pound solid shot. Another brick building alongside was built more like a bunker. There the exploding case shot for the Napoleons, and the percussion shells for the three-inch rounds were packed with powder, fused, and crated up in ammunition chests.

Down the slope were the rail yards, where the locomotive factory was located. Within it some of the most valuable and best-trained men in all of the Republic raced to finish the two engines on the assembly line, while others packed up the tools and forges and stripped down the other three engines, only partially built, to be shipped east for completion later.

The rolling stockyard had already been stripped. The molds for wheels and frames for the rolling stock had been shipped out that morning, to be moved back to Hispania. Hispania had become the second major rail yard before the war had even started, and now would be the center of the rail industry.

Andrew passed through the last of the factories, this one dedicated to producing a wide variety of miscellaneous items: reapers and plows, tire irons lor the guns, bolts, nails, bayonets, wood stoves, and even the bells for the churches.

Everywhere it was the same, the chaotic, insane look of a vast moving operation, arrived at that terrible point where one looks around one's home, cursing the fact that one has acquired too many possessions, believing that it will be impossible to have everything ready when the moving day actually arrives.

"God, do you think we'll ever get it done?" Pat whispered.

Andrew looked over at his friend. Something had weathered in the burly Irishman. It had started when he had gone through the long, slow recovery from the gut-shot wound. It must have tempered out when he had stood on the hill, watching Hans and the brigades go down to defeat. The boisterous swagger was gone and the feigned act of being a slightly dumb, belligerent drunkard had fallen aside. It was as if Pat sensed that Andrew now needed a rock-stable companion rather than a humorous foil and gadfly.

"We have to get it done, Pat. We can evacuate out all our people, all the food, but if we lose this"—he gestured back toward the factories—"we might as well crawl into the woods or become like the wanderers, forever fleeing in front of the Hordes. It's taken us damn near four long years to build all of this, and I refuse to see it be lost. The buildings we can replace, but these men and their tools can't be replaced."

His voice rose with passion as he spoke, and in anger he turned away to look to the west.

"I'll be goddamned if they'll get it from us."

Pat smiled as Andrew walked away. There was something of the old fire coming back in the man. He looked like hell to be sure—burned-out, face pale, eyes hollow—but at least the eternal spark, the spark of a professional killer, was flaring.

An engine puffed into life from alongside the gun foundry, the flagman racing down the track and waving for the switchman to clear the way.

The engine's wheels spun for several seconds, and then with a lurch the train started forward. Its long line of fourteen flatcars was piled high with crates, half a drop-forge resting so heavy that the car beneath it had been reinforced with six-by-six beams. The cars were packed with men who rode with their equipment, their families packed into three boxcars tagged to the end of the train.

At the sight of Andrew standing alone, the men came to their feet, defiant fists raised in the air, hoarse shouts echoing. Andrew raised his hand and saluted as the train rolled through the switch, picking up steam for the run up along the bank of the Vina, where it would be switched through to the trestle and then eastward to Hispania.

Pat raised a meaty hand, held a clenched fist aloft as the cars rumbled past.

"Get that damn thing working!" he shouted. "I need the bloody guns!"

The men, who were part of his corps, recognizing their commander, gave him a cheer. Then the boxcars rumbled past, silent and frightened families looking out, and the train was gone.

"Five thousand of our best men tied up here—an entire division," Pat said.

"We need them more in the factories," Andrew replied. "Let's just hope we don't have to put guns in their hands as well, before this is done."

From the town the cathedral bell started to ring, the soft, melodious peals sending a shiver through Andrew.

"Aerosteamers . . ." He looked around at the laboring crews, which had stopped to look to the southwest.

A messenger came running up and breathlessly handed Andrew a telegram.

"From our watch station above the mine. Four aerosteamers coming up along the coast of the Inland Sea," Andrew said quietly.

"Well, we might be seeing our first air battle," Pat replied, and there was a glimmer in his eye.

"At four-to-one, it should be interesting," Andrew said coldly.

"Get her up!" Jack shouted, racing out of the telegraph shed. The crews were already scrambling, alerted by the clanging bell.

Feyodor came running out of the hanger shed, waving the ground crew to their tasks.

Cables were grabbed hold of and the vast doors to the shed were rolled back. The ground chief looked to the watch tower and the banner fluttering atop it.

"Wind northerly. Haul it out slowly, now."

"Where are they?" Feyodor shouted, coming up to Jack's side.

"Coming up the coast of the sea." He paused. "Four of them."

"Kesus damn it!" Feyodor snapped.

"Boiler on?"

Feyodor nodded. "Full load of fuel on board."

"At least we'll have the wind at our backs going down."

Assistants came running up to help Jack and his assistant engineer into heavy coveralls and wool caps. The nose of the aerosteamer cleared the hanger door, bearing against the wind. More than two hundred men, most of them the original Roum crew, struggled to keep her centered.

Jack paced back and forth anxiously, trying not to think too much about what was coming. Flying it was bad enough, but the rest... He pushed the thought away.

The wicker cabin, engine section, and propeller appeared, and Jack and Feyodor raced over to the craft, which was now riding with wheels floating above the ground.

They climbed up into the cab, the aerosteamer coming back down to the ground, wheels beneath the cab hitting the ground.

The tail cleared the hanger and the balloon weath-ervaned around into the wind, crews struggling to keep her steady.

"Boiler on full power?" Jack spoke into the speaking tube, an addition put in only yesterday at his suggestion, the tube hooked up to Feyodor's ears. Only three feet separated them, but in the long and exhausting ride being towed by the train he had found it difficult at times for them to hear each other.

"Boiler on full power."

We must look like two elephants in a passionate embrace, he thought, with these tubes running back and forth between us.

He sat shaking with excitement and fear, waiting for the hot-air bag to provide the necessary lift. The crew chief stood beside him, looking down at the wheels on the ground.

The chief raised his hand. Jack nodded, and the man reached under the cab to pull the release lever that dropped the dolly wheels off. The aerosteamer started up.

"Slow forward!"

"Slow forward it is."

The propeller started to flick over, the warship rising straight up. Ground crews cast off lines, and

a priest stood in the middle of the clearing waving

branch laden with holy water as a blessing.

Jack made the sign of the Catholic cross in response and the priest nodded, even though it was backwards to the Rus rite.

The aerosteamer field started to drop down from beneath him. The four hangers formed a rough square, and fake chimneys on the side spewed smoke to make the buildings look like factories. It had fooled several inquisitive runs by the Merki ships, which had merely passed over and continued on. But after today he knew they'd be coming back, surmising that this balloon had to come from somewhere beyond Suzdal.

The valley floor was now a hundred feet down, the trees lining the hills wavering slightly in the breeze.

"Bring her up to quarter speed."

The engine surged louder and he gave a bit of up-rudder to the machine. The nose tilted up, the cheers of the crew echoing from below.

With a light touch he turned the aerosteamer to the left, the nose swinging around, the valley dropping away.

"Three-quarters speed!"

The propeller humming, the Flying Cloud now climbed upward at nearly two hundred feet a minute. The valley cleared, the steamer's shadow raced across the open fields, growing ever smaller. The town of Vyzima passed by to the east, the streets packed with refugees pointing and shouting.

Jack could only hope that the huge flag of Rus painted on the underbelly, with the name Flying Cloud in Cyrllic and English painted on the bow, would prevent the soldiers from opening fire.

Feyodor leaned far out of the cab, waving, and the realization sunk in on those looking up gape-

mouthed that the aerosteamer was on their side, the crowds screaming with delight, leaping up and down excitedly, children racing through the streets of the town, waving. The church bells started to peal, the air trembling with their harmonic rolls.

"Almost makes you feel like a hero," Jack said.

"Well damn it, we are!" Feyodor cried excitedly.

All of Rus is going to know the secret now, Jack realized, their efforts of the last nine months revealed at last. Damn it, if he survived this day he might very well be a bloody hero, and the fear dropped away for a moment as he imagined his triumphant return. He imagined Svetlana, the young Rus girl he had noticed at the Vyzima station, whose father was the telegrapher, coming out to greet him with shining eyes. Leaping into his arms, her heavy rounded breasts pressing into him.

It just might be worth this, he thought.

The ship continued to climb, the fair rolling fields of Rus undulating below him. Small farmsteads, villages, tiny chapels to Perm, streams lined with trees, all rolled by beneath him. He felt like an eagle.

The main rail line back to Suzdal rolled into view—the track cutting through the side of a hill, a train laboring eastward, puffing down the grade, the boxcars crammed with people, hundreds more riding on the roofs, pointing up fearfully at first and then waving with delight.

Hills rose to the west, clad with the heavy forest that marched on in scattered clumps across the rich black land. Far away to the northwest he saw a tracing of smoke on the horizon which climbed lazily into the sky. Barely visible beyond, a high ridgeline, green-blue.

Battle, somewhere along the Neiper.

There was a flicker of light on the horizon, reflecting off water. The reservoir above Suzdal. He kept a close eye on the ground, picking out distinguishing landmarks, quickly marking them down on a sheet of paper pegged to a board resting on his knees. It was a crystal-clear day, the horizon limitless, but as he might have to negotiate this in far different weather it was best to build the charts up now. He continued to sketch in details. A high-spired church, a small village with an old boyar manor house, its roof a gaudy red, the peak surmounted with carved bears marching in procession. Another village, burned huts replaced with Tugar yurts salvaged from the war. Wagons burdened down with supplies were moving across the countryside, heading to the nearest section of track where trains would come through, picking up the precious supplies. In an outlying village, near the great forest, several barns were on fire, bulk fodder being put to the torch. A procession of antlike creatures was moving out of the town, heading south to the rail line, a drove of pigs, cattle, barking dogs, and several horse-drawn wagons following behind the group.

If any of the Merki airships should come over the countryside now, they would have to be blind not to surmise what was being done. He sketched in the position of the village, noting the burning barns. Feyodor was behind him doing the same, and they would compare charts later.

"Novrod!" Jack shouted, his voice too loud in the voice tube. He pointed to the city, nestled in on a gentle southward slope, going down to the banks of the Vina. A long train of passenger cars was rolling out of the station. Behind it another train—a long line of flatcars piled high with machinery, several boxcars on the end—was slowly climbing the slope into town.

"Not far now!" Feyodor replied. Leaning out of his chair, he bathed the engine drive shafts with a

long-necked oil can. He eyed the float gauge of the first tin drum of fuel and quickly calculated out their remaining supply.

Jack uncased his field glasses and trained them southwestward. Within seconds, he saw the four dark ships on the horizon.

"I see them!"

Feyodor leaned around, taking his own glasses and training them on the spot where Jack had pointed.

The Rus engineer nodded, saying nothing.

"Taking her up higher." He pulled the up-rudder back slightly, letting the nose rise, and then centered it while the ship continued to climb.

He had spent countless hours debating tactics with Feyodor, both of them often screaming at each other, reminding their companion that if the other was wrong, they would both go down in flames cursing each other.

They had at least agreed on one thing, that whoever came in higher and faster, and with the wind at their backs, would have the advantage.

The rest was all a mystery. He suspected they could climb faster than the Merki, but wasn't sure. The Merki ships were certainly bigger, and he feared their engines were far more powerful. Colonel Keane had given strict orders not to destroy one over a city, fearing whatever mysterious poison was inside the engine if it should break open, but Jack knew if battle was joined that would be the least of his worries. But the Merki ships were simple balloons kept rigid by the gas inside, while the Flying Cloud had a wicker-worked structure woven out of a bamboo-like plant that was hollow, light, and extremely tough.

Coming almost to the northwest corner of the reservoir, he turned more westerly. Suzdal was now clearly in view, the gold roof of the cathedral catching the noonday sun and reflecting the light with a golden red. The high log buildings of the old town looked fairy tale-ish, their multicolored roofs a riot of color, while the section rebuilt after the war was dominated by the Yankee Quarter, the twin spires of the Methodist and Congregationalist Churches shining white.

It all had a toylike appearance, which fascinated him as the ship climbed ever higher. The reservoir was now below, stretching for several miles through the low, tree-lined hills. Farther to the south he could see the low ridges above abandoned Fort Lincoln, where the ore and coal mines were. Atop the highest of the hills the slender line of a watchtower jutted up, the position from which the enemy aerosteamers had first been sighted.

Near the earthen wall of the dam, the valley below revealed the vast factory complex, the tracks bordering each building aswarm with workers, disassembled machines piled high, engines backing in to the siding, pushing a long line of empty boxcars. A sea of tiny oval faces was turned upward, and Jack felt a surge of pleasure. He and Feyodor were alone on the stage, like the knights of old going forth to single combat, a David facing four Goliaths. Even at this great height he could hear the faint echo of their cheering.

"Well, now everyone knows!" Feyodor shouted.

"Let's hope we get back to bask in the glory."

The enemy ships were already above the mouth of the Neiper, slowly moving up the river in single file, each ship a mile behind the one in front.

Jack had yet to learn how to gauge relative height and distance, for all the sensations in their realm, both physical and visual, were far too new. But it was obvious they must be having some sort of effect on the Merki ships. The lead vessel was at a near stop, the three behind coming up and spreading out to the east.

Continuing to climb, they rose above the factory and headed straight over Suzdal, the church bell ringing below, those still in the city looking up, shouting and pointing. It was a lovely sight; the old city a warren of narrow lanes leading to the great square, the cathedral, and the partially bombed ruins of the Presidential and Senate building.

"Prelate Casmar!" Feyodor cried, leaning over to point straight down at the cathedral tower, where a lone, black-robed figure stood, waving excitedly. Feyodor again made the sign of blessing, and Jack wondered if prayers could float up to be captured and held.

On the far bank of the river the low hills rose up, their crest marked by felled trees and the raw slashes of gun emplacements. The forest rolled on for miles, the open steppe beyond visible on the horizon, the southward run of the Potomac military railroad an arrow-straight line through the woods, crammed now with a long column of Merki horse warriors. He was tempted to push on, to do a little reconnaissance of his own, but the orders were clear there as well: Do not risk the ship over enemy territory. If the engine should cut out now, the wind would bring them far across the river before Jack could bring her down. He didn't relish the thought of landing inside Merki lines.

The enemy aerosteamers were gathering just above Fort Lincoln, as if waiting to see what he would do. He pushed the rudder over to the left, the Flying Cloud turning to run southward with the wind at its back.

"We're definitely above them!" Jack shouted.

The south side of Suzdal passed below, the river just to his right with two ironclads anchored in midstream. The bed of the MFL & S traced southward the few scant miles to Fort Lincoln, which now stood covered in high grass, the old cabins of their first home on this world sitting abandoned and derelict.

The four enemy aerosteamers were drawing up abreast, their noses pointed high, struggling to climb.

"Get ready, Feyodor!"

The Rus engineer tore open a wicker basket lined with straw and gingerly lifted out a thin-walled jar, a linen wick sticking out of the wax-sealed top.

Nervously, Feyodor looked over Jack's shoulder as the range closed.

"A good thousand feet above the bastards!" Feyodor shouted.

Jack nodded and pushed the rudder forward. The nose of the Flying Cloud dropped and its speed increased, as the ship went into a slow dive, engine howling.

"I'm lighting it!" Feyodor shouted. With a gloved hand he pulled open the door to the engine boiler and stuck the linen wick inside. Pulling it out, he held the pot nervously, watching the wick flicker, terrified that a burning ember might snap lose and get whisked astern to lodge against the underbelly of the aerosteamer.

He looked back over his shoulder.

"Dropping now!"

He released the jar, flame snapping around it. With a groan, he watched as the jar fell far forward of the center airship and continued to plummet to the ground, the wick going out. The enemy ship soared by beneath them, nose still high, the eyes of the eagle that were painted forward barely visible. Jack steered straight on.

"Give us full power, Feyodor!"

He pushed the rudder hard over, the Flying Cloud turning eastward, drifting astern of the enemy ships, which were still climbing.

The enemy airships continued to climb slowly, like black whales of the sky. Reaching a full easterly heading, the wind continued to push the Flying Cloud aft of the enemy ships. Jack continued the turn and leveled the ship, coming out a good half mile astern of the enemy vessels, which were still pushing northward and slowly rising.

He singled out the ship farthest to the east and headed straight for it.

Directly below the old forge, the first iron foundry of Valennia passed beneath, the crew of workers out on the track jumping up and down, shouting, urging them on.

The climbing race continued, with the enemy ships slowly pulling ahead, though Jack found he climbed at a slightly higher rate with the exhaust vent fully closed off.

Running parallel to the MFL & S rail line, the five ships moved up toward Suzdal.

"Can't you get any more speed?"

"At full throttle already!" Feyodor cried.

Jack pushed the ship into a shallow dive, wind buffeting his face, the ship rippling up and down in the northerly breeze, a thermal rising from an open field causing an upward surge. They started to gain, and he nosed over even further.

Hands white-knuckled on the controls, he guided the Flying Cloud in, coming up astern of the most easterly ship, which was still rising as he dived down. He pushed hard rudder over to the right to avoid smashing into the tail, and then hard left.

"Now, Feyodor!"

The aerosteamer mechanic lifted up a revolver as the cabins of the two ships came alongside with not ten yards separating them, the air bags above brushing alongside each other.

The two Merki looked over at him wide-eyed. Feyodor leveled the revolver and squeezed, cocked, and squeezed again and yet again.

One of the Merki flinched and the other shook its fist, its cries of rage heard above the roaring of the caloric engine. The enemy ship continued to rise as they shot past. The revolver empty, Feyodor lifted a musket, the barrel sawed off. Leaning far out of the cab, Feyodor fired it off with an explosive roar, the recoil of the double load of buckshot slamming him back with such force that he dropped the weapon, which tumbled end-over-end to the ground below. One of the Merki slumped back, clutching its shoulder.

"Got him!" Feyodor screamed.

Shouting with joy, Jack pointed the nose of the Flying Cloud up, as the enemy ship started to turn to the west and continued on through, putting its stern to the wind.

Jack swung the Flying Cloud into a shallow turn to the left, then pulled the nose up again, angling in toward the other three vessels. The nearest one suddenly turned head-on, nose pointing up at a forty-five-degree angle, the two Merki engineers hanging in their side-by-side chairs.

Jack was tempted to run head-on, plowing the nose of the Flying Cloud straight into the cabin dangling below the balloon, but the thought of what might happen caused him to push the rudder forward, dropping Flying Cloud back down, pushing it hard over to the north again. The two vessels crossed, the Merki above. He felt a thump.

"Bloody Kesus!" Feyodor screamed.

Jack looked aft to see a Merki bomb tumbling end-over-end toward the ground, sparks trailing from its fuse. The bomb turned into a black point, an explosion detonating in a field just south of the city.

"Dropped it on us, and it didn't explode," Feyodor gasped.

Jack's legs started to tremble, feeling as if they had turned to jelly. The other two ships were turning as well, coming straight at him.

"Hang on, Feyodor!" He pulled the up-rudder full back.

The ship started to surge upward, and he prayed that the Merki ship that had bombed them had cleared, since the vast bag overhead blocked all view in that direction.

The nose climbed past forty-five degrees up to sixty, and he leveled the rudder and pressed back in his chair, Feyodor behind him cursing wildly as he dangled from his safety belt.

Like two lines of a triangle climbing toward the apex, the Merki and Rus ships rose heavenward. Jack pushed the rudder over to the right, pivoting the vessel toward the northwest. The next Merki ship passed to the right, climbing in the opposite direction, the engineers on board shaking their fists in rage. Jack pulled out a revolver and, Feyodor following suit, they blazed away. The two Merki ducked down as the ships passed, and when the shooting had stopped they rose back up, shouting insults.

The last ship was before him, and he could see they were climbing at a slightly faster rate than the enemy.

"Get another one ready!"

Feyodor reached over to his side, this time cutting free from alongside his chair the wicker basket filled with the fragile jars. Balancing the basket on his lap, he pulled a jar out. He stuck the wick into the boiler for a moment, then pulled it out and placed it back in with the other containers.

He held the basket over the side as it started to flame.

"Hurry up!" Feyodor roared.

Jack turned the ship back toward the southwest, and the nose of the enemy ship passed by not a hundred feet below.

Feyodor dropped the flaming basket. It slammed into the top of the enemy balloon, even as the Merki pilot started to turn to the west in a vain attempt to run parallel with the Flying Cloud. The basket slid off the side of the balloon, a burst of liquid flame trailing behind it.

The enemy ship continued to turn, the flame licking the silk covering. It seemed to wink out with a wisp of smoke.

Feyodor leaned out of his chair, watching. The silk top of the ship suddenly appeared to melt open, a barely visible tongue of blue flame rippling along the top of the ship where a river of benzine from the broken jug had soaked the silk.

"It's catching!" Feyodor roared.

Jack looked over his shoulder.

The melted circle of silk rolled back, and a jet of blue flame roared up.

"She's going up!" Jack screamed.

A shudder passed through the Merki ship, the bag buckling in. It started to nose over, wisps of flaming silk shooting skyward on a river of heat, soaring straight up into the underside of the Flying Cloud which surged upward, bucking wildly.

Terrified, Jack pushed the rudder hard to the right and turned to the northwest, going straight over the Neiper. The enemy ship started to fold in, pointing a trailing arc of fire down across the river, which caught and reflected the fiery glow of the death plunge. In a river of flame, the ship tumbled from the sky in a fireball. A smoke-wreathed body

leaped free, and even though it was a Merki Jack felt sick at the sight of it tumbling, trailing smoke, its arms flung wide. The body slammed into the west bank of the river, followed seconds later by the rest of the ship, which crashed into the woods and ignited the forest in a smoking inferno.

"Kesus and Perm protect us from that," Feyodor whispered.

Awed by what he had done, Jack let the ship continue straight on for some seconds, silently contemplating the flaming wreck half a mile below.

"The others are getting the hell out," Feyodor said. Looking back over his shoulder, Jack saw that the ship with the wounded engineer was already a couple of miles astern, the other two swinging in behind it. They themselves were now more than a mile over the west bank, looking down on the line of Merki guns dug in on the crest of the hill. Far out to the south, more than thirty miles away, he could see dark, serpentine lines, columns of the Horde.

"We'll hold station over the city," Jack announced, suddenly anxious at being over enemy territory, where a sudden engine failure might bring on a decidedly unpleasant conclusion.

He turned the ship eastward, passing north of the still flaming wreck.

"Scratch one," he said coldly.

"They've only got about twenty more," Feyodor replied.

Jack nodded, saying nothing. This first one had been a surprise—next time, they'd come up ready for battle. It wouldn't be so easy the second time around.

Crossing back over the river he turned Flying Cloud into the wind, Feyodor throttling the engine down till they had matched the breeze from the north and hovered above the great square. The cathedral bell was pealing, and the square below was tilled with upturned faces, their cheers rising up. Looking back over his shoulder, Feyodor watched as the enemy ships continued southward, growing smaller and smaller.

"They've had it for today," Feyodor announced.

"Well, let's bask in some glory!" Jack cried. Reaching up he pulled the black vent cord, letting the ship settle, then closed it off till they were only a couple of hundred feet above the square.

Leaning out of the cab, the two waved and bowed like triumphant knights returning from the joust. With a kick of the rudder Jack turned the ship northeasterly, and moments later they were slowing, to hover above the factories as thousands cheered.

"Time for supper!" Jack finally shouted. "Let's head for home!"

Feyodor gave him full throttle, and pointing her nose heavenward the Flying Cloud climbed upward to race back to its hanger.

"Well, now we've got to figure out how to fight them next time," Feyodor announced gravely.

"Jesus, one thing at a time," Jack replied, his mind still filled with the sight of that burning body, tumbling end-over-end to its brutal death.

Raging, Jubadi watched as the cattle airship swung to the northeast and climbed into the afternoon sky.

"How, by the hide of Bugglaah, how?"

"It is always the same," Hulagar said. "They build something, we take it and build. And then they create something new to best us. We gained the advantage with the cloud-flyers. Now they have figured out the same."

"We should have anticipated it!" Jubadi snapped.

"We did. It's just that we did not find where they were building them."

"But the engine! We found ours in the barrows of the ancients. Where did they find such a thing?"

"They made their own," Muzta said.

Jubadi looked over at the Tugar angrily.

"I need to know where they are, what they are doing beyond this damned river."

"Don't blame me," Muzta said with a smile.

"Perhaps we should," Vuka interjected. "If you had taken care of your own cattle at the start we would not be troubled by this now."

"I'm eager to see you try them, o Zan Qarth. Perhaps you would care to lead the charge across the river, as my own youngest son once did."

He paused for a moment.

"He died, of course."

"Doubt my courage, Tugar?" Vuka snarled. He stepped up closer to Muzta, the Tugar guards around him stepping forward, hands leaping to hilts.

"The Yankees are laughing twice as loud," Tamuka said coldly. "Laughing at their triumph. And if they can see us argue thus, they are laughing about this as well."

Muzta grinned sardonically at Vuka.

"Of course I would never doubt your courage," he whispered. "All know how well you fought on the river before us."

Vuka bristled, yet there was a sudden nervous look in his eyes.

"Zan Qarth," Jubadi snapped. "The enemy is across the river."

With a bitter curse, Vuka let his hand drop from his blade and stalked away.

"We must find where their cloud-flyers hide, where they are made, and smash them," Hulagar said. "Let weapons to kill other cloud-flyers be made." "By whom?" Tamuka said quietly.

"By the cattle who made the machines in the first place," Jubadi replied.

"Oh yes, but of course," Tamuka replied.

The cracking of a whip disturbed the group, and Jubadi turned to look back down the slope. Along the rail bed a long column of Cartha cattle were coming into view, staggering forward.

"Tomorrow they will be at the first ford. We can start building another mole. Within five days I want the river covered for a hundred miles. We must keep the pressure on. If we stay pent up in these woods beyond then, disaster will start to loom."

Tamuka said nothing but looked closely at Muzta, who was gazing at the flaming wreck, a thin smile lighting his features.

Chapter 9

"What a mess, what a godawful mess!"

John Mina slapped his gauntlets against the side of his leg, as he waded through the sea of refugees climbing down from the train.

As far as the eye could see, the hills rising to the south and east of Kev were carpeted with a ragtag tent city. The air was filled with incessant hammering, shouting, the sounds of squalling babies and shouting women, a mad cacophony of noise. A team of horses pulling a wagon laden down with fresh-cut lumber went past, splattering him with mud. He looked down at his stained, bedraggled uniform and cursed. It was one thing he had always hated about the army, one could never get clean. Back in the old Army of the Potomac days he had been filled with self-loathing and embarrassment the day he discovered that he was lousy. It did not matter that everyone else, from Andrew on down, was vermin-ridden. The abominal creatures were on him, and that's all that mattered.

Nervously, he scratched at himself. Was the itching from being in the same clothes for five days and nights without a change, or had he caught them again?

He pushed his way through the crowd, ignoring 362

the delegation from the town council, which always attempted to grab any official it could find to scream out its complaints.

He paused for a moment to look at a pile of ground wheat in canvas bags that lay by the side of the road, half-buried in mud and soaked through from the rain.

"What dim-witted, son of a goddamned devil's spawn is responsible for that?" John raged, pointing at the ruined food.

The unloading master stood mute.

"Enough wheat there to feed a thousand people for a day, and it's ruined!" John shouted.

"We've got seventy-five trains a day stopping here!" the stationmaster protested. "It's chaos!"

"Of course it's chaos!" John shouted. "It's madness, bloody madness!"

He looked around at the men lining the platform.

"Who's second-in-command here?"

A bent-shouldered old man came forward.

"Petrov Gregorovich, your excellency." The man took off his cap, his bald head bobbing up and down.

"Well god damn it, Petrov, you're now Colonel Petrov. If you don't improve this by tomorrow you'll be fired too, until I find someone to get some order here."

He turned to look back at the fired manager.

"Your regiment? And where is it located?"

"Fifteenth Kev. Last I heard, north of the Ford."

"Find your rifle, and take the next train up and join it," John snapped and he stalked off, leaving the gape-mouthed man trembling.

"He was doing the best he could," an aide argued.

"Not good enough," John snarled in reply.

He shouldered his way out of the station, climbing over the temporary tracks laid down to act as sidings.

The high pierce of a whistle cut the air, and he looked back to watch as a long train came into the station, moving hard. People, squealing pigs, squawking chickens, and lumbering cows scattered before it. The train thundered through, the red-and-gold pennant of an express bound straight for Roum flying from its smokestack. Behind it were ten dormitory cars, swaying violently from their topheavy loads. The cars were crammed to overflowing with the lucky ones, destined straight through to the relative safety three hundred miles farther on.

"Mina!"

John turned with a groan as Emil Weiss stepped out of a shack and came up to his side.

"Where the hell are my tents?"

"Somewhere back in Suzdal."

"I've got three thousand wounded from the last battle, a lot of them lying out under blankets in the open field. I'm losing thirty boys a day I could be saving."

John held up his hand as if to beg off.

"And beside that. We need tents for the people, lumber for barracks, and water, John. They're taking it straight out of the Volga—no filtration, nothing. I already got a couple of typhoid cases—soon it'll be a damned epidemic."

"Later, doctor."

Emil fell in by John's side as he walked down the track. On the far side of town the line turned northward, starting up the long grade along the flank of the White Hills. John went straight on, stepping over the track and wading down a sloppy, mud-caked embankment. He ignored Emil and shouted orders at his staff, pointing out another pile of abandoned food and roaring with anger at the sight of a dead horse, half-butchered, the remains of its carcass sinking into the mud. Emil wrinkled his nose at the smell, and simply followed John as he started up the long slope beyond the town.

"I know you're doing the best you can," Emil said, his voice suddenly gentle, and John looked over at him in surprise.

"How are you holding up?'

"As usual," John replied, not wishing to even think about how he was feeling. His stomach felt as if it were in a knot. It had started the moment Andrew had mentioned evacuation and had stayed that way for the last ten days.

"When was the last time you slept?"

John laughed, shaking his head, and made no reply.

Emil was silent, looking at him closely.

John slowed going up the hill, and Emil turned with a solicitous look.

"How old are you, son?"

"Thirty-three."

"I'm twice your age, and you're getting winded. Boy, you're run down and out."

John held up his hand as if to ward Emil off.

The rail line swept up the side of the hill before him, turning northward on its long four-mile climb to reach the pass through the White Hills. It ran nearly eight hundred feet above the valley floor, where it would turn through the cut and run back down, straight as an arrow, to the Kennebec crossing a hundred miles farther on.

The hills were still heavily clad in towering pines, although in the last week they had been falling by the thousands, both slopes of the hills being cleared for the needs at hand—the west slope for the construction of fortifications, the east slope for where the temporary factories and shelters were going up. In another day the rail turnaround on the far side of the hills would be complete, eliminating the need of running the trains up through the hills, to offload and then slowly back down.

Slowing, John stopped to watch the refugee train that had passed through Kev continue its laborious climb, engine puffing dark plumes of smoke, one of the first of the coal-burners to join the line. The burden it was carrying was almost too much—the engine was straining hard, showers of sparks were spraying up and flame shooting out from its belly. The acrid smoke rolled off to the south in a heavy layer.

Around the bend out of Kev another train started to move up the slope, flatcars piled high with turning lathes and molds from the gun works. The engine pulling the equipment would be stripped down to provide the power to get the lathes running again. Nearly half the locomotives were destined to be cannibalized for the factories, once the first stage of evacuation had been completed. He cursed himself silently for not having converted the factories to steam power earlier, and for having allowed himself to stay married to the convenience of the nearly limitless power harnessed from the Vina Dam.

He slowed, pulling out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his face. Without any worry about projecting the proper image, he sat down on a tree stump that was still oozing pitch. He looked a mess already, he realized, so getting the seat of his pants covered with pitch didn't matter anymore.

Pulling out his field glasses, he looked back to the west. It was a beautiful, clear view, straight back through the heart of Rus. The showers of the night before had given way to the promise of a warm spring day, the sky a crystalline, fresh-washed blue. The orchards were shedding the last of their blossoms and the hills to the south of Kev were carpeted in pink. If he could only have blocked out the madness it would have been a scene of pastoral splendor, worthy of a painting by Church or Cole. The scent of green fields, of fresh grass, wildflowers, and pine, almost masked the undertone of sweat, unwashed bodies, and excrement.

To the north, half a dozen miles away, the last solid stands of the great forest resting along the high hills dropped away into a scattering of trees, which followed the moisture of the creeks and gullies that cut through the gently rolling landscape. Behind him the high backs of the White Hills, which inarched in a straight line from the forest to the inland sea, were crowned with towering stands of virgin growth, many of the trees a hundred or more feet in height.

He tried to visualize the rough survey maps that had been made at the same time the census teams went out. The realm of the Rus ran from the Neiper to here, nearly two hundred and fifty miles, with a few scattered settlements going out into the vast plains that stretched three hundred miles farther on to Hispania and Roum.

If there was a final defendable point, it was here— Andrew had at least chosen well in that. Farther west, back toward Suzdal, the width of open land between the ocean and the great forest averaged more than sixty miles across, a few sections bulging out to nearly a hundred. This was the only other choke point, the thousand-foot crest of the White Hills forming a natural barrier, heavy with forest— twenty miles of front to defend.

The valley floor below was a sea of chaos. Nearly a third of a million refugees had funneled through. Far out on the open plains beyond he could see wagon after wagon moving eastward, piled high with food and the few meager possessions the people of Rus could not bear to part with.

Anyone capable of work was laboring on the long western slope of the hills, felling trees and digging, some with nothing more than sharpened sticks. He looked around at the women, the old men, the children of ten years of age; the long line already running for miles; the staff of engineers who had gained their knowledge on the Potomac front now laying out fields of fire, driving in marking stakes, directing the laboring thousands.

"Just where in the name of God do they get their strength to go on like this?" John whispered in English.

"They're Rus," Emil said, sitting down by John's side, pulling up a wilting blue flower and twirling it absently between his fingers.

"We think we've pushed them to the edge, and still they keep on going. It's part of the peasant soul. Believe me, John, I know—remember, I'm from the old country. A Jew, to be certain. Back in the old world their cousins would have burned my beard off with joy. But the Slavic peasant, you pile suffering on top of suffering on his back and he'll carry it. Oh, God knows, they'll cut your throat if you cross them the wrong way. But they know that they either suffer doing this, or they all die in the end."

"Think how much easier it all would have been," John said, "if we had listened to Tobias. Remember, back in that council meeting we held after the Tugar Namer of Time showed up."

"Can't recall," Emil replied. "Never did care to listen to that pompous fool."

"He said that we should leave, find a place down south and wait for the Hordes to disappear, then come back and take twenty years to build. You know, if we'd done that the Hordes would be gone by now."

"And twenty percent of the Rus, the Roum, and the Cartha would be in the feasting pits."

"My dear doctor, over half of the Rus have died in the last five years, and I bet not one Cartha in ten will be around to see next winter."

"Don't forget that by staying we managed to put an end to the smallpox which would still be preceding the Tugars, so the number of lives saved in Roum and elsewheres more than makes up for it. Cold as it seems, John, it does balance out."

"If we lose here, the Roum will get it by winter. That city is a trap—hills looking down on it from three sides. The Merki would shell it apart."

"Go over and ask some of those folks digging down there if they'd want it different.

"Go on—what the hell do you think they'd say to me?" John sniffed, leaning forward and plucking up a blade of grass, turning it over in his hand.

"You're playing with what ifs, John," Emil said forcefully. "That's far too much for a peasant to worry about. All he knows is that he is free, and if need be he'll die fighting. Sure, we could have run. Would we have found a safe place? I doubt it. If we had, would we have found iron and coal sitting on top of each other? And what about being in the hands of Tobias—you saw how he turned out. I'm happy to stick it through as it was played out."

"Even if we lose."

Emil smiled softly.

"Ever see a pogrom?"

"A what?"

"You Americans," Emil said, shaking his head. "I was born in what used to be Poland. My father was murdered by a gang of drunken Hungarian soldiers in 1813, when the French were retreating out of Russia. They spit on my father's body, called him a dirty Jew, and then raped my mother. Of course, she wasn't too dirty to receive that favor."

He was silent for a moment, looking off, eyes unfocused.

"She died from what happened," he whispered, "leaving me and an older brother, who died of the typhus that followed the army. I never forgot what it was like to live in that fear. Even after I grew up with my uncle, became a doctor in Budapest, and went from there to Vienna, I was still in the grip of that fear. Oh, I was a doctor, to be sure, but I still never knew when the Hungarian, or any goyim, might be at the door, laughing, knowing he could kill me without fear of reprisal. That's why I finally came to America. You Americans, born in your blessed New England, never knew that kind of fear."

Emil sighed, looking off to the west.

"That's why I loved your Maine, my Maine. That's why I hated what the Confederacy stood for, even though I saved the life of more than one rebel boy, caught in war beyond his making.

"I was terrified when we first landed here and discovered they were Russians—Rus—and breathed a sigh of relief when I found they didn't know what a Jew was. I was just another Yankee to them." He laughed in a self-deprecating manner. "Surrounded by shiksas, and they think I'm one of them. Can't even tell the difference in accents."

Mina looked over at him and smiled.

"Better English than a lot of folks I've heard. O'Donald's brogue gets mighty thick at times."

"Exactly what I'm talking about. O'Donald, ask him about watching his older sister starve to death during the potato famine. He knows what I'm talking about, the terrible fear. Well, these people were born and bred to it. Fear of boyars, fear of Tugars, fear of their own church. Give them a taste of living without that fear. That's why they're digging out here till they drop dead from exhaustion. That's why they'll fight them on the river, across those plains in front of us, into these hills, and if need be backwards across this entire goddamn world."

He paused for a moment.

"That's why their sons, their fathers, died with Hans, singing the 'Battle Hymn' as they went down." He paused for a moment, his voice choked.

"So don't ever say we should have left these poor miserable bastards to the Tugars."

John nodded, looking across the plains. He watched the shadows of the cumulus clouds as they floated lazily down to the sea, puffing high with the warmth of a spring day after a night of rain.

"Hard to believe there'll be a war here in a month, it's so damned peaceful."

"Maybe it'll be peaceful for your children," Emil said wearily, climbing back to his feet.

"By the way, John, I've got hospital supplies stockpiled in Suzdal, Novrod, and Vyzima, and I want a priority train to get them out now."

John chuckled softly.

"Knew you'd put the pressure on me at some point."

"It's my job," Emil said, extending his hand to pull John back to his feet.

"All right, I'll write the order and send it down the line," John replied. "You'll get them day after tomorrow."

He paused for a moment, looking off to the south to the point where the dark line of earth was turning up through what had once been a forest of pines. If they could get this position finished in time, it would be one hell of a killing ground.

Twenty miles from the sea to the forest, the hills nearly twelve hundred feet high at points. The forest was right at their back—all they had to do was cut the logs and stack them up. The only drawback was the hard, rocky soil, unlike the loam of the Potomac front which was a paradise for digging entrenchments. In a month he could have a single line up; in three months, bastions, a fallback position, fortresses blocking each of the passes, and the slope forward a madness of entanglements. Time, it was always time.

He looked over his shoulder. A hundred yards farther up the slope a crew was working hard. A low, double-walled blockhouse was going up, dirt piled up against its side. The men were doing good work, and when finished it'd be proof against damn near anything.

"How long have we got?" Emil asked. "I've been out of touch up here."

"They hit hard on the ford last evening, got a foothold across and we didn't push it back till morning. We took a thousand casualties—the 1st Orel and the 2nd Roum got badly chewed up. I forgot to tell you, there'll be a trainload of them coming in by evening."

Emil nodded absently.

"I think I better get some rest—it's going to be a long night."

John didn't say anything. His deepest terror was to one day be brought in to Emil, this time to receive his professional consideration. He had gone through the war without a scratch, but he'd been in too many field hospitals—filled with the thunder of screams, rasping saws, and slashing scalpels—to feel anything but a primal dread. He looked over at Emil, wondering how such a gentle man—for after all, beneath the irascible exterior was an infinite well of gentleness—could wield a scalpel against the torn flesh of so many young soldiers. He felt a sick compulsion to ask how many arms, how many legs he had taken off, as he looked at the weathered hands, which seemed to be permanently red from the caustic washes he used to prevent infection.

"Scared?" Emil asked softly.

"Terrified," John whispered.

"We all are, this time around. I thought for a while I might lose Andrew to it. I see it in you, Fletcher, Kal, and down deep, even that young Hawthorne."

"But not in Pat. I think he really loves it."

"Thick-headed, but we need that type. All the rest of us, though. We were scared the first time around, but I think we were too caught up in it all to worry. Last summer, that one hit us off-guard. I think it shook our confidence a bit, even though we won. It made us nervous, and then the disaster two weeks back, the way they sliced right through us, that one shook all of us to the core, it made us realize we really could lose this one."

"I remember this bully in my town, Waterville," John said, his face flickering into a smile. "He taunted me for weeks and I was terrified of him. Finally I just exploded, and by god I beat the living daylights out of him. I felt grand, I did. The next morning, as I walked to school, I saw him, black-eyed. Behind him was his big brother, twice my size, who beat me to within an inch of my life.

"Sort of the same this time with the Tugars and then the Merki. I guess that's why I'm so damn scared. What we're doing here is a last desperate bid, doctor. We're losing all of Rus, everything, to try and beat them. You know damn well if they break this line some of us might get to Roum, but we'll never come back. It'll all be gone forever."

"And you think that'll happen, even after all of this?"

John nodded sadly.

"You know, I know that Andrew is playing out a game," John said, his voice lowering to a whisper. "Once they break through and find the country empty they'll storm forward, supplies or not. They'll have to. Six days after the breakthrough they'll be here, my good doctor, and there isn't a damn thing we can do to stop them."

"Andrew keeps saying a month."

John shook his head.

"Propaganda, a last hope. I just pray to God that he knows that it's a dream. Believe me, doctor, those bastards will come on with death in their eyes. Give me a month and I might be able to make a go of it here. But I think, my friend, that in a month's time all of us will be bones in the feasting pits. Nothing will stop them once they're across."

"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 expect 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.

"They're getting set to hit."

"Well, let's go see."

The Rus brigadier pointed up the trail and Pat followed. Both of the moons were just past full, their light illuminating the forest with twin ribbons of shadows and light. Pat had been up on the ford when both had been at full, and the shrieks of the Cartha prisoners on the other side had curdled his blood, like the wailing of banshees. Just at dawn the Merki had stood one of them up, and he had seen the flames.

He suppressed a retch at the memory, which had sent the Rus troops into a frenzy. Whoever had done it was certainly a fool, Pat realized, for if ever there was a way to harden men to fight to the death, it was the sight of that.

"Get down low," the Rus general hissed. "They're getting damn good at it. Some of them have got our captured rifles."

Enough to arm nearly two divisions' worth, Pat thought coldly. As if to add weight to the argument, Harrigan stood up for a quick look around only to dive into the pine needles when the tree alongside his head was torn open by a minie ball.

They slid into a trench lining the river bank, then moved down its length for a score of paces to the spot where a narrow sniper's slit had been carved between two logs.

Pat cautiously peered through the hole.

The river was less than a hundred yards across, and the moonlight gave a ghostly glow to the corpses, human and Merki, lining the other shore.

The sound of axes ringing on the far shore rang across the river. The mole was only thirty yards into the stream, fronted with a heavy log breastwork, and it had been torn and riddled by twelve-pound solid shot fired at near point-blank range.

Farther upstream he saw incessant flashes of light rippling up and down the shore, both sides keeping up a murderous fire.

"It's been building all night," the general said. "There must be thousands of those poor Cartha devils in the woods, getting ready to push the log rafts in to block off the stream."

Pat nodded.

"All you men up?"

"Haven't slept since early morning of yesterday."

"Get them ready."

"What kind of support do I have?"

Pat smiled.

"They're planning this for all along the line, fifty miles. I'm getting the same reports. They've got six moles like this one, and there's half a dozen other fords. The bastards are even floating across the deep sections on logs. It's all getting set to hit."

"I'm just worried about me," the brigadier said.

"It's gonna be a long day, Ilya, I'm sorry."

"A regiment by mid-morning, that's all I'm asking. Hell, general, they'll be over the river by then."

"You better not let it happen here," Pat said quietly. "You've got a good path running behind you for horses. They'll slice right through us if you fail."

"Well, thanks for the support," the brigadier hissed.

"A pleasure, general, a pleasure," Pat replied, slapping the man on the shoulder.

He paused for a moment.

"Ilya."

The Rus general looked back angrily.

"We need you to hold out as long as possible, do you understand? I'm trusting you to give it everything you've got before you allow your men to fall back."

"Thanks, I understand now." His voice was cold, as if already coming from the grave.

Pat crawled back out of the trench and started for the rear, ignoring the flurry of shots that snapped

through the trees above him. Standing up at last, he walked back to his mount.

"Poor son of a bitch doesn't stand a chance," Harrigan said in English.

"Somebody had to take the worst spot, and it's him," Pat replied, looking back sadly as he mounted. "It's the same place where the Tugars first flanked us. They were bound to remember it."

"Will you commit the reserves to him?"

"They're dug in five miles back across a gully. It's all we've got."

"Then you won't."

"Never reinforce what you know will be a defeat," Pat whispered. "We're weak all along the line, and we've got to save most of this army for Kev. We're buying time here, Harrigan. Buying time. Five miles a day through the woods at most—that's what Andrew's asking for, that's what he'll get. We need at least three corps to make any type of stand at Kev, and we need another two weeks to get everyone out. It means a lot of men are going to die in the process."

Trying to still the guilt in his heart, Pat turned his mount and galloped off.

Andrew stepped out of his headquarters into the incessant roar of battle. Overhead a shot fluttered past, detonating at the opposite side of the clearing.

A half-mile away, at the ford, the thunder was reaching a sharp crescendo. The incessant shouts of the Merki boomed above the roar of the artillery and the sharp tearing report of volleys.

Yet this was merely a demonstration.

Andrew looked down at the telegraph message from Pat.

" 'Yerganin Ford breached on half-mile front.

Recommend evacuation of enure 2nd Corps southward.' "

The Merki were across the river, on the fifteenth day of what he had hoped would be thirty.

He slumped against the side of the rail car. In less than five days, Suzdal and the heart of Rus would be overrun.

"The Navgah and Vushka have forced the river!"

Jubadi looked over at the joyful messenger and merely nodded in reply.

He stretched wearily, wishing he could take off his battle armor, but he still had to put on the show. His Qarths and umen commanders grunted their approval of the news.

"It's more than fifty miles through the woods, from the ford down to the open lands near their city of Vazima," Muzta said quietly. "It's gullies, sharp ravines, marshes. The last time they didn't have the men to cover that approach and ceded it to us. It'll be a hard fight, Jubadi."

"We are still driving them back," Vuka replied.

"And we are running low on food," Muzta said. "Horses cannot dig for roots in the forest for long. They cannot eat cattle flesh. Our mounts are thinning."

Jubadi held his hand up for silence.

"We will be in their land. Then we shall eat off of it."

"If they are still there," Tamuka replied.

Jubadi looked over at the shield-bearer.

"Not your vision again?"

"It was the tu, the sight; that is what I speak of, my Qar Qarth."

Vuka gave a sniff of disdain and turned his horse around, trotting off.

"We will know of this when the cloud-flyers go up again," Hulagar interjected. "They are ready, and but wait for a favorable wind."

"Get them up, once the wind changes," Jubadi snapped. "I need to know."

He looked up at the dark skies heavy with rain, and cursed.

His mount slipping through the mud, Pat reined in hard, the horse nearly collapsing.

"You've got to hold here till night!" Pat shouted, pointing with his saber to the crest of the ravine.

The men in the road nodded, moving up to the low ridge and deploying across the trail. From up over the next ridge a mud-spattered mob appeared, men staggering, running hard, many without weapons.

From beyond came a rising, taunting shout.

Pat edged his horse up to the top of the ridge.

In the gully below, men were wading through the marshy ground to either side of the trail. Spilling over the opposite ridge, barely visible in the rain and mist, came a scattering of Merki, some on horse, most on foot, waving scimitars, some carrying Springfield rifles, others with bows.

Pat had thought to keep the next line five miles back from the river, but guilt had finally won, and he had rushed a regiment forward to provide cover for Ilya's broken units.

The forest to either side echoed with shouts, the woods for miles along the river now a breach.

"Bad as the Wilderness."

He looked down to see an officer standing by his horse, gasping for breath. He wore the colonel's eagle of the Rus army, and was dressed in the faded blue of a Union uniform, his corporal stripes still visible.

"Damn near," Pat said dryly. "What happened up there?"

"My regiment was to the right of the ford. We burned off most of our ammunition just shooting the poor Cartha bastards pushing the log rafts and booms in. They jammed the river by the mole, and in minutes they started across. Thousands of them. The whole line broke, sir."

"It had to happen sooner or later," Pat replied, his voice edged with bitterness.

"We got flanked, I ordered the boys back. Got cut off a couple of times, but we pushed out. I told the men to keep going straight south, angle in towards the road, and get the hell out of here."

Pat nodded.

A volley roared down the line, slamming into the Merki on the opposite ridge and slowing their charge. The men down in the gully were running hard, coming up the slope and dragging their wounded along. The survivors came through the line and kept on going.

Pat saw the Rus general and rode up to his side.

"Tried, but they just keep coming," the man gasped.

"You did your best."

"Lost half a brigade back there. It better be worth it," the man said bitterly.

"Let's hope so," Pat replied, reaching over to offer the man a drink.

The officer took the flask, drained it down in a long gulp, and passed it back up.

"Keep your men moving south," Pat said. "Rally them at sundown, then march 'em south and out of here. Once clear of the woods head to Vyzima—a train will pick you up."

"To go where, yet another debacle?" the general snapped, and without waiting for a reply he started down the trail.

The Merki, stalled for a moment by the fresh regiment, started down the slope at a run, chanting their clan names. They hit the marshy ground and sank knee-deep, but kept sloughing forward. The woods filled with acrid smoke, bullets that missed then mark sending up geysers of mud. The enemy pushed on, climbing over their dead and relentlessly pushing in.

Straight down the trail a heavy column started in at a run, hitting the corduroy road through the low ground. The head of the column collapsed from the volleys and the rear spilled over the sides of the road and leaped past the bodies of their comrades, swarming up the slope. Bows wet from the rain snapped lazy bolts up the hill, still carrying enough power to drive into flesh. Men staggered out of the line, holding still quivering shafts.

"Wounded that can walk, take your guns with you!" Pat shouted. Far too many weapons were being lost in the leapfrog retreat through the woods.

Pat watched the action closely. The fresh regiment was giving a good account of itself, and the torn remnants of the broken units were now safely to the rear.

He rode up to the regimental commander.

"They'll be flanking you before long. Send a couple of your reserve companies back to the next ridge, then get your boys the hell out before you get overrun!"

The commander nodded without comment.

Pat turned to ride away. He had to keep reminding himself that he was not a field commander anymore. He was responsible for the entire right wing of the army, a full two corps, holding over fifty miles of woods bordering the river. If he let this corps go down, there'd be precious little to hold Kev.

He started back. A wounded Rus soldier was hobbling down the road, trailing blood from a gunshot wound to the leg. Pat reached down from his mount.

"Get up here, damn it!" he snapped, grabbing hold of the man and pulling him up across the horse's rump. The soldier grimaced even as he tried to force a smile of thanks.

Pat urged the horse into a gallop. With mud splattering, he cantered off into the mist.

The train rolled silently into the station, the hiss of steam mingling with the light drizzle that marked the ending of the storm that had lingered for two long days and nights.

Wearily, Andrew climbed down from the car. The reception committee looked ghostlike in the fog, silhouetted by a couple of lanterns, the umbrellas above them shiny from the rain.

There was an eerie silence to it all. He had so many memories of other days at this station: the day the first train bearing citizens of Roum came in; the morning he had left here to lead the relief to their allies, or the coming back less than three weeks ago after the defeat on the Potomac. Now there was another defeat in the air. Three days ago the enemy had broken the Neiper. With the coming of morning advanced scouts most likely would be filtering out of the forest, sweeping down toward Vyzima by nightfall. The moment Merki units hit the rail line, the retreat out for everything west of Vyzima would be cut.

"I've been reading the reports," Kal said quietly, coming out of the group to shake Andrew's hand.

"They put up a hell of a fight, but I still don't think it gave us enough time," Andrew replied softly.

"Is it time to leave?" Kal asked.

Andrew nodded sadly.

"Anyone still in the city has to be out by tomorrow," Andrew said. "We're keeping a brigade at the ford till tomorrow night. Once evening comes in, all trains will be run back up the line to pick up the troops pulling back to Vyzima and those at the ford,

"A couple of regiments will stay in the city till the end. They'll retreat south to the beach on the inland sea, and be pulled out by Hamilcar and a couple of the ironclads. After that, the only ones to see Suzdal will be Bullfinch's flotilla, which will stay on the river for the duration.

"How did we do, John?" Andrew asked quietly, falling in with the group as they started back up the hill toward the Great Square. A shell from the far shore arched overhead, bursting in midair, followed seconds later by a volley of shots that thunder-clapped across the square and on northward into the Yankee Quarter.

Andrew tried not to worry about it.

"Only half the food out we had hoped for," John said wearily. "We must of burned tens of thousands of tons out in the barns and fields that we could have gotten out. We've got a pretty good sweep of everything west of Vyzima, but east of that, especially from Nizhil to Kev, maybe fifty thousand tons of it are still sitting there. If the Merki drive straight on east, it's all going to have to be torched."

"The people?"

"Like something out of the Bible. An exodus of them marching east, the roads choked with them. Trains overflowing. Nearly everyone west of Vyzima is out, but if they come on hard, Andrew, I'm afraid a couple of hundred thousand still might get caught.

There's a hell of a lot of people still a hundred or more miles west of Kev, and a huge cluster around Vyzima. Word didn't get to some of the out regions for days. Some of those poor bastards out in the far reaches don't believe what's happening and are refusing to leave, or got started too late. We've got a good fifty thousand along the coast. Hamilcar is running galleys to pick them up, moving them to the Kennebec, where they can walk up to the rail line and catch a train east. Some of the folks are even heading into the woods."

"Maybe they'll get lucky and survive," Kal replied.

"I tell you, it's like them stories you read about the Russians and Napoleon. Some of the peasants even plowed their crops back under before leaving. Trees are getting dropped across roads. I broke up a couple of companies of engineers and sent them to damn near every town. Showed people how to make traps, deadfalls. I saw one smart bastard catch a couple of poisonous snakes and put them in a barrel that looks like it might have food. If it doesn't kill some Merki bastard, it'll sure scare the shit out of him."

John chuckled softly, the rest of the group shaking their heads.

"We took about five hundred defective shells that hadn't been cast right and packed them with powder anyhow, set percussion fuses in them. We'll bury them in the roads as we pull back. That ought to shake them up as well."

"Good work. When they come on to Kev, anything to slow them will buy us time and hurt them further."

"Once they break through, they could sweep up to the White Hills in five, six days," John said. "If only we had a division or two of cavalry, it'd slow them down. We're tied to that single rail line. They'll outflank us anywhere we try to slow them."

Andrew said nothing, and after a long moment of silence John realized that his commander would not offer any information.

"Now the bad news. We're going down on engines, Ten were stripped down to give power to the factories. The first rifles were turned out today in Hispania, and we've got shot getting molded again as well. But twelve of the locomotives are just plain finished—they're back up at Hispania for overhauling, We had to tow three of them in, the others barely could make it under their own steam. We've done a year's worth of hauling in a month, Andrew—the tracks are ready to come apart."

"Well, I don't think it'll be much of a worry after tomorrow."

"I've got crews waiting for a good sixty miles west of Kev. Once the last troop trains go through we're going to start tearing up the rail behind us. At a hundred tons to the mile that'll be six thousand tons of iron. It'll keep the forges going for weapons— we'll even use them in fortifications."

"Good thinking," Andrew said, forcing a smile. "But don't pass the order on that till I give the word."

"But the food, Andrew, that's the problem. At best we've got forty days' worth for the people. Army rations are fairly secure for the next sixty days, though I had to order a lot of them sent back up to Hispania, where we have more warehouses going up. Emil's worried about disease. We're getting a lot of typhoid—it's spreading from that outbreak we had last winter up in Yaroslav. There's even been a couple of cases of smallpox. A lot of consumption, too, what with all this rain."

"A mixed blessing," Casmar said.

"Father, if you could come up with a clear-weather prayer I'd sure appreciate it."

"For tomorrow morning's mass, my son."

Andrew nodded his thanks.

They had reached the great square. It was ghostly, the city dark and eerie as only an empty city can be. Andrew felt as if spirits were taking over.

"What about the factories?"

"Cleaned out, as of yesterday."

"And all the government material?"

"Everything's gone," Bill Webster said. "Presses for money, a full boxcar load of paper for notices, forms, the usual garbage of running a bureaucracy, including all records. The same for the treasury and public corporations."

Andrew shook his head at that. It was hard to conceive that several cars had to be given over to such things, but if they were ever to rebuild they would be needed later.

"What have we forgotten?" Andrew asked quietly.

The circle of men was silent for a moment.

"A way to save our city as well," Yaro, one of the senators, said sadly.

"I wish we could," Andrew whispered, looking around at the square and the cathedral. The wondrous clock designed by Hawthorne ticked away the minutes above them, its chimes silent else they might be taken as a warning of an aerosteamer attack.

Would they come back to nothing but a flame-scorched wreck? Would they ever come back, or were they now condemned refugees, like the tens of thousands of wanderers who forever fled before the Hordes?

"Final pullout starts tomorrow, gentlemen. We all better get some sleep."

Andrew looked overhead. The clouds were breaking, the wind coming up from the southwest, the Wheel standing out clear in the midnight sky.

"Good flying day for them tomorrow," John said. "They'll be up, and most likely figure it out at last."

Andrew nodded and turned away, to walk alone back to his home.