Marching Through Georgia (29 page)

Now, that was real, the elder von Shrakenberg mused. The hands remembered, the
skin
did, as they did the silky feel of his firstborn's hair when he lifted him from the midwife's arms.

John had stood godfather, to a son Karl named for him.

But the cobra of ambition had bitten them both deeply, even then. That was back when there was still juice in it, the wine of power, every victory a new birth and every promotion a victory.

He had commanded a
merarchy
of warcars later in the Great War, Mesopotamia and Persia. Clumsy things by modern standards; riveted plates and spoked wheels and steam-powered, as only civilian vehicles and transport were today. Sleek and deadly efficient in their time…

Power exercised through others, men and machines as the extensions of his Will; the competition of excellence, showing his skill. Scouting for the Archonal Guard legion, vanguard of Tull's V Army as it snapped at the heels of the retreating enemy. They had caught the Ottoman column by surprise on a plain of blinding-white alkali, swinging around through
erg
and dry wadi-beds. For a quarter-hour while the rest of the unit came up they had watched the enemy pass beneath them, dark men in ragged earth-brown uniforms. Ambulance carts piled with the wounded; soldiers dropping to lie with cracked and bleeding lips; the endless weary shuffle of the broken regiments, and the stink of death.

The gatlings had fired until the turrets were ovens, the floors of the warcars covered in spent brass that glittered and shifted underfoot, the crews choking on cordite and scorched metal.

That was when he had burnt his hand, reaching down to the gunner who sat slack-faced, hands still gripping the triggers as the pneumatics hissed and drove the empty barrels through their whirring circle. He had not felt the pain, not then, his mind's eye seeing over and over again the ranks dropping in the storm of tracer, tumbled, layered in drifts that moaned and stirred; afterward silence, the sough of wind, bitter dust, and steam.

There had been nothing for John's truck-born infantry to do but collect ears and bayonet the wounded.

The stink, the stink… they had gotten very thoroughly drunk that night, with the main body there to relieve the vanguard.

Drunk and howling bad poetry and staggering off to vomit in the shadows. A step further, and another.

He had transferred to the Air Corps, valuable experience for one slated for Staff. The last great dirigible raid on Constantinople: Karl von Shrakenberg had been on the bridge of the
Loki
in the third wave, coming in at five thousand meters over the Golden Horn to release her biplane fighters while the bombardment ships passed below. The airship was three hundred meters long, a huge fragile thing of braced alloy sheeting; it had trembled in the volcanic up-drafts from the tracks of fire across the city spread out below them like a map, burning from horizon to horizon, the beginnings of the world's first
firestorm
. Traceries of flame over the hills, bending like the heads of desert flowers after spring rain. Streets and rivers of fire, casting ruddy blurs on the underside of soot-black cloud; heat that made the whole huge fabric of the airship creak and pop above him as it expanded. Diesel oil and burning and the acrid smell of men whose bodies sweated out the fear their minds suppressed.

He had been calm, he remembered; yet ready to weep, or to laugh. Almost lightheaded, exalted: a godlike feeling; he was a sky god, a war god. Searchlights like white sabers, cannon fire as bright magenta bursts against the darkening sky where no stars shone, muzzle flashes from the antiairship batteries of the Austrian battlewagons at anchor below. The great dome of the Hagia Sophia shining, then crumbling, Justinian's Church of Holy Wisdom falling into the fire. He had watched with a horror that flowed and mingled with delight at the beauty of that single image, the apotheosis of a thousand years. The ancient words had come of their own volition:

"Who rends the fortified cities

As the rushing passage of time Rends cheap cloth…"

Other voices—"
Prepare for drop
—
superheat off-
— stand by to valve gas!"

"Dorsal turret three, fighters two o'clock." A new shuddering hammer as the chin-turret pom-pom cut loose. "
Where're the
escorts
—
that's Wotan, she's hit
."

The ship ahead of them had staggered in the sky, a long smooth metal-clad teardrop speckled with the flickers of her defensive armament. Then the second salvo of five-inch shells had struck, punched through cloth-thin metal, into the gas cells.

Hull plating blew out along the lines of the seams; four huge jets of flame vomited from the main valves along the upper surface, and then enough air mixed with the escaping hydrogen to ignite; or it might have been the bombload, or both. For a moment there was no night, only a white light that seared through eyelids and up-flung hand. The
Loki
had been slammed upright on her tail, pitched forward; he could recall the captain screaming orders, the helmsmen cursing and praying as they wrestled with the man-high rudder wheels…

One moment a god, the next a cripple
, the general thought, shaking himself back to the present. Men told him he had been the only bridge officer to survive the shellburst that struck in the next instant; that he had stood and conned the crippled airship with one hand holding a pressure bandage to his mangled thigh.

He had never been able to recall it; the next conscious memory had been of the hospital in Crete, two heads bending over his leg.

A serf nurse, careful brown hands soaking and clipping to remove the field-dressing. And the doctor, Mary, looking up with that quick birdlike tilt of the head when his stirring told her he was awake. Fever-blur, and the hand on his forehead.

"
"You'll live, soldier
," she had said. She had smiled, and it wiped the exhaustion from her eyes. "
And walk, thats all I
promise
."

And that too was power
, Karl von Shrakenberg thought, looking around at his fellow-commanders.
Strange that I never
minded being helpless with her
.

He flexed his hands on the smooth wood. He must be getting old, if the past seemed more real than the present. Time to retire, perhaps; he was just sixty, old for active service in the Domination's forces, even at headquarters.

"Well." Karl was almost startled to hear the Chief of Staff speak in a normal voice, overriding the quiet buzz and click of equipment and sough of ventilators. He nodded at the map.

"Seems to be going as well as can be expected."

The German fronts were receding, marked by lines like the tide-wrack of an ocean in retreat from the shore.
And Eric
behind to stop an armed tide with his flesh
, Karl thought.
I wish
there were gods that I could pray for you, my son. But there is
only what we have in ourselves; no father in the sky to pick you
up and heal your hurts. I knew, Eric, I knew that someday you
would have nothing but yourself; we ask the impossible of
ourselves and must demand it of our children
. Harshness was necessary, sometimes, but…
Live, my son. Conquer and live
.

The Dominarch turned to his aide. "Appraisal."

That woman frowned meditatively. "Second Leipon can't hold until we break through. Their bridgehead is contiguous but shrinking from both ends…" A pause. "Basic reason things're goin' so well with First Legion over on the Ossetian Highway is the situation on the north. Century A of 2nd Cohort is savin' it; they're guardin' the back door."

Erikssen nodded. "Accurate, chiliarch. That's your boy, Karl, isn't it?" The elder von Shrakenberg nodded. "
Damned
good job."

Karl felt a sudden, unfamiliar sensation: a filling of the throat, a hot pressure behind the eyelids.
Tears
, he realized with wonder, even as training forced relaxation on the muscles of neck and throat, covered the swallow with a cough. And remembered Eric as a child, struggling with grim competence through tasks he detested, before he escaped back to those damned books and dreams…

"Thank you, sir," he muttered.
Tears. Why tears
?

The Chief of the General Staff looked down at the map again.

"
Damned
good," he murmured. "Better to get both passes, but we have to have one or the other, or this option is off. There's always an attack out of Bulgaria, or an amphibious landing in the Crimea, or even a straight push west around the top of the Caspian, but none of them are anything like as favorable…"

The
strategoi
nodded in unconscious agreement. It would not be enough to push the Germans back into Europe; to win the war within acceptable parameters of time and losses they had to bring the bulk of the Nazi armies to battle on the frontiers, close to the Draka bases and far from their sources of supply in Central Europe. The sensible thing for the Germans to do would be to withdraw west of the Pirpet marshes, but Hitler might not let them. The Draka
strategoi
had a lively professional respect for their opposite numbers, and a professional's contempt for the sort of gifted amateur who led the Nazis.

"And not just good, unconventional," the Dominarch said.

"Daring… where's that report?" He reached around, and one of the aides handed him the file. "Your boy didn't just freeze and wait for the sledgehammer, which too many do in a defensive position. Interesting use of indigenous assets, too—those Circassians and Russki partisans. That shows a creative mind."

A narrow-eyed smile. "That American has Centurion von Shrakenberg travellin' all around Robin Hood's barn for tricks…"

A hand waved. "Lights, please." The shutters sank with a low hum, and they blinked in the glare of noon.

"With respect, Dominarch…" Silence fell, as the beginnings of movement rippled out. An officer of the Security Directorate had spoken; the sleeve of his dark-green uniform bore the cobra badge of the Intervention Squads, the anti-guerilla specialists who worked most closely with the military. "Ah've read the report as well.
Unsound
use of indigenous assets, in our… mah opinion. Partisans, scum; savin' effort now at the price of more later. The internal enemy is always the one to be feared, eh?"

Karl leaned his weight on one elbow, looking almost imperceptibly down the beaked von Shrakenberg nose.
An
overseers sense of priorities
, he thought. Aloud:

"Most will die. This American seems anxious to remove the survivors; if that is inadvisable, we can liquidate them at leisure."

"Strategos von Shrakenberg, mah Directorate's function is to ensure the security of the State, which cannot be done simply by killing men. We have to kill
hope
, which is considerably moah difficult.
Particularly
when sentimental tolerance fo' rebel-dog Yankee—"

The Dominarch broke in sharply. "That is enough, gentlemen!" Institutional rivalry between the two organizations which bore arms for the State was an old story; there was a social element, as well. The old landholder families of scholar-gentry produced more than their share of the upper officer corps, mostly because their tradition inclined them to seek such careers. While Security favored the new bureaucratic elites that industrialization had produced…

"Von Shrakenberg, kindly remember that we are all here to further the destiny of the Race. We are not a numerous people, and
nobody
loves us; we are all Draka—all brothers, all sisters.

Including
our comrades from the Security Directorate; we all have our areas of specialization."

Karl nodded stiffly.

The Dominarch turned to the liaison officer from the secret police. "And Strategos Beauregard, will
you
kindly remember that conquest is a necessary precondition for pacification.

Consider that we began as a band of refugees with nothing but a rifle each and the holes in our shoes; less than two centuries, and we
own
a quarter of the human race and the habitable globe.

Because we never wavered in our aim; because we were flexible; because we were
patient
. As for the Yankee—" he paused for a grim smile "—as long as they serve our purposes, well let his reports through. Right now we need the Americans; let this Dreiser's adventure stories keep them enthralled. Their turn will come, or their children's will; then you can move to the source of the infection. Work and satisfaction enough for us all, then…

along with the rape and pillage!"

There was an obligatory chuckle at the Chief of Staffs witticism. Erikssen's eyes flicked to Karl's for a moment of silent understanding.
And if those reports make your son something
of a hero in the Domination as well, no harm there either, eh,
old friend
?

The Dominarch glanced at his watch. "And now, gentlemen, ladies: just to convince ourselves that we're not
really
as useful as udders on a bull, shall we proceed to the meeting on the Far Eastern situation? Ten minutes, please."

The corridor gave on to an arcaded passageway, five meters broad, a floor of glossy brown tile clacked beneath boots, under arches of pale granite. Along the inner wall were plinths bearing war trophies: spears, muskets, lances, Spandau machine-guns.

The other openings overlooked a terraced slope that fell away to a creek lined with silverleaf trees. Karl von Shrakenberg stood for a long moment and leaned his weight on his cane. Taking in a deep breath that was heady with flowers and wet cypress, releasing it, he could feel the tension of mind relaxing as he stretched himself to
see
. Satori, the condition of
just-being
. For a moment he accepted what his eyes gave him, without selection or attention, simply
seeing
without letting his consciousness speak to itself. The moment ended.

The eye that does not seek to see itself, the sword that does
not seek to cut itself
, he quoted to himself. And then:
What
jackdaws we are
. The Draka would destroy Japan some day, he supposed; they saw nothing odd in taking what was useful from the thoughts of her Zen warrior-mystics.
The Scandinavian side
of our ancestry coming out
, he thought. A
smorgasbord of
philosophies
. Although consistency was a debatable virtue; look what that ice-bitch Naldorssen had done by brooding on Nietzche, perched in that crazy aerie in the High Atlas.