Not For Glory (7 page)

The Assyrians had elephant cavalry—large, destructive beasts, easily two men tall—that could crash through our lines, crushing whatever was in their way, scattering the rest. The sides of the animal were always armored, and it had a trunk—a long, snakelike protuberance growing out of its face—to protect itself from a frontal attack.

There was only one way to stop an elephant, and Eleazar, son of Mattityahu, brother to Yehuda the Hammer, found it: he stood still and let one of the beasts come over him, knocking him flat to his back.

And then he thrust his spear upwards, into its soft underbelly. The elephant collapsed on the spot.

Eleazar was the spot.

"I don't see the connection."

"Fuck you, General. Like hell you don't." Tzvi Hanavi picked up his microphone. "Zachariah," he said, "go home. Your grandchildren need to see you." The thin, silver-haired man shrugged, nodded, and left.

The Sergeant looked through the glass and dismissed five others, leaving behind five men, ranging in age from perhaps as young as fifty to Yehuda Nakamura, who I knew was sixty. Don't let his Nipponese name mislead you; old Yehuda has a little Nipponese blood as I do, but the Nakamuras kept their patronym when they joined clan Aroni.

"Eleazar ben Mattityahu is calling you," Tzvi Hanavi said, to what I suddenly realized was all that was left of his old company. Blunt fingers came up to his honorable retirement pin, and tore it away from his uniform shirt. It dropped to the floor. "You'd better plan on reporting in uniform tomorrow at oh-eight-hundred—and you can lose those fucking we-don't-need-you-anymore pins."

"We can
what
?" one asked.

"You heard him, he said we can lose the fucking we-don't-need-you-anymore pins."

The Sergeant hugged me. When he pressed his cheek against mine, it was wet. "Tetsuki," he said, "thank you. I thought I was going to die in this fucking rock."

As he released me, five old men gathered around us, all of them half out of the Freiheimer uniforms, none of them wearing anything from the waist up but their undershirts. Not very prepossessing, to look at. They were all slack-bellied, skins whitened from too many years in Metzada.

"Tzvi?" Thin, bald Menachem Yabotinsky asked. "Are you serious?"

"Yeah," the Sergeant said. "You in, or do I need to find another corporal?"

Yabotinsky barely smiled. "In."

"Besides, he wouldn't shit us about something like this," white-haired Yehoshua Bernstein said. "Is it still okay to be scared?" He looked older than he was, and was clearly the frailest of all of them, but if he was good enough for the Sergeant, I hoped he'd be good enough.

"Fuck, yes," Ephriam Imran said. "For me, this is almost enough to put lead back in my pencil."

"C'mon, Eph." Yehuda Nakamura snickered. "Take a hell of a lot from your medikit to put lead back in—"

"Shut up and line up," Tzvi said, and he and Yabotinsky glared them into order.

"It's purely a voluntary assignment," I said. "Nobody's under any compulsion to volunteer."

It wasn't as though what I said was heard and decidedly ignored; it was as though I was broadcasting on a frequency that they weren't equipped to receive.

The Sergeant performed a sharp right face and drew himself up to attention as he faced me.

"General," he said, as he turned back to me, "Sergeant Tzvi Hanavi, with elements of Company C, First Battalion, the Old Eighteenth Regiment, reporting for duty,
sir
."

Then he threw me a salute, and held it.

We're not much on saluting in Metzada; it took me aback.

" 'A salute,' " he said, when I didn't react, " 'is not a bow. A bow is a gesture from a subordinate to a superior. A salute is a greeting between practitioners of the profession of arms, one that is initiated by the junior, and returned by the senior.' You have six practitioners of the profession of arms in front of you,
sir.
You have six soldiers."

"That I do." I returned the salute. "Carry on, Sergeant."

CHAPTER FIVE

Family Affair

Metzada, Bar-El Warrens

Refectory Gimel

12/20/43, 1900 local time

Home to me has never meant whatever bed or compartment I've been assigned to. Those have kept changing; besides, a soldier ought to learn not to be particular about where he sleeps.

Home has always meant Refectory Gimel, the huge, open room where laughter occasionally peeks through the curtain of murmured conversation.

Refectory Gimel isn't just where I eat when I'm home; it's also where my family is. Both times I was married, it was in Refectory Gimel, with four thousand of my family shouting their wishes for our happiness.

It was where my father Yisrael used to preside at our family table, over our portion of the Passover service, in true Bar-El clan fashion. When the religious celebrate Sabbath or Passover, they cover even their butter knives while they pray, as though to shield God's gaze from what knives symbolize. We do things differently in clan Bar-El, reading from the Haggadah as we celebrate the exodus from Egypt, bared knives and loaded assault rifles piled on the table, giving meaning to the final words: "And so shall we remain free men!"

Refectory Gimel is also where the clan board is, covering half the western wall. I couldn't read it from where I sat, but I had glanced at it before supper: the status of the new Eighteenth had just been updated, and Benyamin was still well.

Supper that night was about as usual, except for the extra merriment at Ari's table, next to mine. At mine there was a bit of added tension, caused in part by an extra absence.

Although . . . I didn't like the proportions on the plates. You can tell a lot about how Metzada is doing by the size of the portions on the supper trays. There had been a lot more rice cake than chicken cutlet tonight.

Benyamin's chair would have been empty, but it had been taken by Devorah Amrani, his (in my opinion) overly-quiet, fifteen-year-old fiancée, who was visiting for the evening. Probably to spend time with my daughter Z'porah, who was the same age, as much as to mingle with the rest of the family.

Rachel wiped at little Devorah's—a different Devorah; our year-old daughter—mouth with a damp washcloth, then tried to force more strained beets in.

Rachel wasn't having a whole lot of luck; as much seemed to ooze out as went in; I suspect young children actually absorb nutrients through their cheeks. Rachel didn't share my suspicion; she blew a stray strand of hair from her forehead and tried again, turning to help two-year-old Shlomo manhandle his carrots.

Yes,
Shlomo, there is another Shlomo among the Hanavis.
I may not have liked my brother, but I did love him.

"How they manage to feed them in creche, I'll never understand," Rachel said.

"Be grateful," I said, "that you only have them for one meal a day." I would have offered to help, but I probably wasn't any better at it than she was.

There were tables where I was not popular. A few tables away, where the Sergeant presided over his three wives, all his children long since grown and moved away, two out of the three women were taking turns glaring at me.

Sorry, Aunties, I wanted to say. But I need him.

Metzada needed him. I might have even put forward some nonsense about him being a volunteer, but that had never been a consideration. The lesson of Eleazar ben Mattityahu is not always what it appears to be; consider his brother, Yehuda. . . .

But, still, the room was festive. Many Bar-El men were home, some of them, like my brother Ari, who was holding court at the table next to mine, actually starting to relax.

We had a small, eight-person table at that point; there were seven of us at full complement. Yet another Devorah, my stepdaughter, had just married a month before, and was a quarter-klick across the refectory, at table with her in-laws.

"Za-za," I said, using Z'porah's baby nickname, "help your mother with Shlomo."

Za-za sniffed, as though to say,
she isn't my mother and you aren't my father,
both of which would have been true, in a sense, but both likely to get her in trouble. One of the first things you learn when you take your second wife is that children will try to play one off against the other, and that that must not be tolerated.

Devorah Amrani's downcast eyes kept shifting to other tables, probably sorting out eligible bachelors.

I held back a frown at that. She and Benyamin were not yet married, and he wasn't yet back from his first time offworld. Alsace, too. I wished he'd lucked into something a bit easier. I hadn't seen a report from Alsace for a week, but things were not going well. A complicated situation, really: their extra mobility was allowing the Dutch Confederate forces to carve right through French line defenses. Yonni Davis' new Eighteenth was enough to stop a French advance anywhere they were, but a regiment can only be in one place at one time, unless you go for a dispersal, which is unsuitable for point defense.

I shrugged. Tactics and strategy are not my forte, but they were Yonni's. Hopefully, he'd figure something out, and if he didn't, then I certainly couldn't.

Suki's chair, at the other end of our table, was empty; she was still in surgery, and had sent word that she wasn't to be expected home until about 0300—if everything went okay.

"What else did she say?" I asked.

"That she checked on Dov," Rachel said. "And that he's out of surgery and resting fine, but had demanded a phone."

Dov was stretched out on his bed in the infirmary, just one of a long line of patients that almost vanished into the distance. We are not a rich world; private rooms are for the contagious.

There is a solid quiet in the hospital, an almost verbal lack of noise that's more punctuated than interrupted by the slap of the attendants' shoes on the hard floors, the whir of a pump, or the hacking cough and whispered voices of the sick.

Dov looked like hell. There was a tube running up his nose, a bag of something or other dripping into his veins, and his eyes seemed to have trouble focusing, but as he lay in his drab, gray patient's gown he still looked anything but innocuous. Behind his ashen complexion, he was still Dov.

"Visiting, sir?" he asked, his voice raw around the edges. He swallowed twice.

"Just seeing how you're doing," I said as I pulled up a chair. Suki might not have known, not really; an appendectomy is far too minor an operation for her to do herself, even if she was going to be physician of record.

"There apparently were some complications, sir," he said. "I was told I will not be fit to travel for at least ten days."

He was taking that too well. "So what did you tell the doctor?"

"I called the deputy, sir," he said. "I told her that I was going to Thellonee with the rest of you."

"And she said?"

"After a short discussion, sir, she agreed that I was, and she talked to the doctor, and I begin NoGain therapy in the morning."

I shuddered. NoGain magnifies your pain, and Dov had been cut into. You can't dull exposed nerve endings with valda oil, either; the two drugs interact, and the only thing I know about it is that the result is not potentiation.

"It's necessary, sir," he said. "If I am to travel with you. Regardless of the expense." His own pain wasn't a matter for discussion, or for consideration. It wasn't important to Shimon.

"What exactly did you tell her?"

He returned my gaze levelly. "Shimon once told me that there might come a time when I would decide that I ought to try to join him, sir. He gave me specific instructions in case either Rivka Effron or you were the ones blocking me from doing that, and general instructions in case it was someone else. He told me what to say."

"And that was?"

"Nothing subtle, sir. I wasn't ordered to be subtle. Just that I would be allowed to join Shimon, or I would be killed by Rivka Effron's guards before or after I killed her. Before she could say anything, I pointed out that since I truly meant that, and since her guards could easily take me in my present condition, it made me militarily useless, and completely expendable for this assignment."

"Shimon told you to say that?"

"If injured or sick, yes. Word for word, sir." He nodded slowly. "I always do what he says. I always have."

What happened next may have been the drugs and the exhaustion. Even with a constitution like Dov's, being operated on takes something out of you, opens up channels of weakness that you might have not thought were there.

"I was a weak little boy, when the soldiers came," Dov said, as though to himself. "He changed that."

I don't know enough about it, but Shimon's Children's Crusade began when Shimon Bar-El, then a private, alone and cut off from his company, ran across a group of soldiers torching an orphanage, raping the girl children, killing the boys. I don't exactly know what happened next, but the upshot was that Shimon and his new underage troops carved their way through Neuheim territory back to our lines, leaving death and destruction in their wake, arriving dirty, battered, tired, and bloody, with only six of the original two hundred children alive.

The ten-year-old boy he called Dov was one of the six.

I once saw a flat picture taken that afternoon, of that spindly ten-year-old boy, still hefting one of those oversized autoguns the Neuheimers like to burden their infantrymen with. The boy was wearing little except rags and a necklace of what looked, at first glance, like dozens of figs. They were souvenirs, of a sort.

"What did he do, Dov?" I asked.

"Something he said." He smiled weakly and then shrugged. "You wouldn't understand; you weren't there." Dov Ginsberg closed his eyes. "I have to sleep now."

CHAPTER SIX

Farewells

Metzada, Central Warrens

Intelligence Wing, Section 0

12/26/43, 0741 local time

The story is told of a famous sword maker who was approached by a would-be student. "How long, sensei," the student asked, "will I have to study in order to learn the art of swordmaking?"

"Ten years," the teacher said.

"But I will study night and day!" the student exclaimed.

"In that case, twenty years."

"Then let me devote every attention to it, concentrating all my energies on learning the art, pushing every fiber of my being to the maximum to learn the art of swordmaking."

"In that case, it will take you thirty years," the teacher said, returning to his anvil.

I used to practice Zen because I thought it would give me insight. And then I stopped getting insight and started to learn the Arts.

No, that's too complicated. It's much simpler, really: the sages used to insist that a rabbi must have another way of earning money; the Akiva himself, we are taught, was a common laborer. Why? Because Torah is not a shovel; Torah is too important to be a way to make a living.

The Arts aren't a shovel, either, although sometimes we have to use them like a headsman's axe. When we do, it should feel like sacrilege, like hitting someone over the head with the Torah scroll.

It doesn't, not for me.

So much the worse for me.

The room doesn't exist. Warrens and wings are named; sections begin with One, compartments with Aleph. There have been maps smuggled off Metzada, by the occasional offworlder we allow in Metzada. All of them show named warrens and wings, section numbers starting with One, compartments with Aleph.

Follow the syllogism: since Section is Section 0, Section doesn't exist.

Neither do I. You don't exist, either. Everything is, is not, will be, will ever not be. All is illusion.

An arc of ten men, each clad in a worn gi, ranging in ages from seventeen to almost seventy, knelt on simple mats of surface grass. Not all of Section, of course. Not even all on-planet. Just those who were there that night.

Ten is a special number for us. There were ten lost tribes, ten commandments, ten is minyan.

Halfway across the circle from me Zev knelt, his dark face impassive, not with strict control of emotions, I think, but with mind like water, mind like the moon, the mind that sees everything, but lets all wash over it. Zev was farther along than I was.

Even with the whir of the air conditioners, the room was stifling, the air so humid that the rough rock walls glistened in the warm light of the overhead glows. It is impossible to practice without raising a sweat, and all of us had been working out for a solid two hours, fists flying in seiken and uraken, open hands thrusting and slashing in shuto, feet moving in geri and keage.

There is something special, something beautiful in what happens in the dojo; I've always felt that to have to bring any of it outside is only to soil it with blood. The beauty is in the thing itself.

At the focus of the arc sat Pinhas Levine.

Ten minutes' rest would have been enough to loosen tired muscles; a full night's would not have been enough for me to completely recover from the exercise.

We sat zazen for more than an hour before he spoke.

I do not practice the Arts because they make me a better person; they don't. I don't practice the Arts because it somehow makes my vision clearer; I've always seen everything and nothing. I don't practice the Arts to make myself wise; I'm already a fool and a sage, who knows all and understands nothing.

The universe is a cruel joke, but cruelty is kindness.

Ignorance is truth.

Trust me on this one: in truth, we are all ignorant.

War is peace; George Orwell should have studied the Arts. He would have been just the same as he was before he started, if he studied it long enough and well enough—but not
hard
enough. He would have had to study without trying.

"Metzada is a cold rock," Pinhas said, beginning without preamble or warning, his voice barely above a whisper, although I had no trouble hearing his every syllable. "Still, it preserves. The religious preserve the Law; stories told in the refectories after supper keep the families strong; the army keeps Am Yisroel, the people of Israel, from dying.

"We preserve something else here, something that's valuable, too." His lips quirked into a smile. "In its own way."

He said it with the quiet practiced patience a man can use when he says something he believes fully, if not unquestioningly, when he takes that belief out only to display it to others who value it.

I've heard that tone elsewhere, seen that expression in few other places. If you happen to be up at the pulpit for an aliyah, you may be lucky enough to see it in his face for a moment when a devout rebbe, the meaning of what he does fully upon him, takes out the Torah and holds it over his head as he turns his back to the Ark. He turns his back to the Ark not out of disrespect, but so that the rest of his congregation can see the words, share the writing.

What Pinhas was doing was like that. We'd all heard before what he had to say, although he always phrased it differently, but there's something special, something almost loving, in the repetition.

"What we do here isn't just to teach ourselves to kill better. We're preserving ways that were almost lost, that would have been lost, if the madmen of the Bushido Brotherhood hadn't kept them alive, and brought them to Metzada to be preserved and protected until they can be returned to Nippon. Right now, I don't know if the Nipponese want the Arts back, and I'm not going to ask. It's not time for that, not yet.

"In the meantime, the Arts can serve us." He shrugged. "If not, we'd probably have to let them die off." He looked at me, but he was talking to the others. "Two of us are now leaving Metzada—yet again."

He rose, walked to a cabinet at the front of the room, and opened it. It was unlocked.

From it, he took a rolled cloth and returned to the circle of men, seating himself across from me. He unrolled the black cloth and spread out the instruments inside. "Tetsuo, if you want to, you may take any of this with you, with the understanding that it can be used as necessary, but not exposed to the sight of the gaijin."

It's one thing to be good at hand-to-hand; that's permissible, even expected, from a soldier. But the rest of the Art is hidden; it's always been that way.

"You can take these with you, but on your own responsibility," Pinhas said. "The decision is yours."

Old Yehuda Agron looked over at me, his eyes missing nothing. "Tetsuo, you are . . . ?"

I shrugged. "I am worried, Adoni, worried."

His eyes twinkled; his fingers, seemingly of their own will, twisted themselves in his long beard. "Ah. You feel that these are not quite the right weapons? Maybe you would rather have a better mind than a few shuriken?"

I forced a smile.

"I don't blame you," he said. "You're wiser than I was at your age. When I was in my thirties, I thought that there was no problem in the universe that couldn't be solved by slitting the right throat."

Levine almost glared at him, but the old man wouldn't have cared, so he didn't. My boss is always studied in everything he does. It's one of the reasons I respect him.

"You think your uncle knows you better than you know him?" the old one asked.

"Perhaps." I rubbed my hands across my face. "Sometimes, I feel like it's going to be a duel of wits between Shimon and me, and I'm the unarmed opponent."

"We can't give you wit, boy. And if you don't know where to point them, weapons are pointless. A good joke, eh?"

"Not particularly," I said.

"I'm a retired headsman, Tetsuo, not a comedian." He rose and lightly folded the cloth over the instruments, then handed the bundle to Pinhas. "Put them away, Pinhas," he said, then turned back to me. "The battle isn't over your uncle, but with him. Don't let yourself be distracted, not by anything. Do what you have to do. Whatever that is," he said. "Whatever that is."

Pinhas looked from face to face. Even among ourselves, we compartment, segment some knowledge, and slap walls labeled "Need to Know" between our minds, between ourselves.

"Need to know," I said.

As though it were a great joke, old Yehuda laughed, and other faces broke into smiles.

"Ah, ah," he said, tears streaming down his cheeks, losing themselves in his ragged beard, "you keep such secrets, Tetsuo Hanavi, such secrets. And you, Pinhas, you're such an asshole. You tell Tetsuo to kill his uncle and you expect it not to show here? You expect me not to see it?"

Levine let himself smile. "One can always hope."

Old Yehuda turned to me. "Are you paying attention, Tetsuki?"

"You haven't asked me that for years."

"True." He nodded. "I'm asking you now: are you paying attention, Tetsuki?"

"Always, Adoni, always."

Outside, in the real world, it would have mattered that something I had said, or something that Pinhas had said or done, had told the others what my orders were.

But here, it didn't matter.

It was suddenly all a joke. It didn't matter. Nothing matters, and everything matters.

I threw back my head and laughed.

The times in the dojo are good ones, I think.

I slept with only Suki that night; Rachel had creche duty.

In the morning, I rose and dressed.

The family creche is one corridor over and two levels down from our apartment. It took me only a few minutes to walk over, bag slung over my shoulder.

Rachel's eyes were puffy with white-night sleepiness as she sat at the desk outside the four-year-olds' creche. She rose and clung to me.

"I'll miss you," she said.

"As will I, you," I said, perhaps too formally, holding her tightly. I think we've been together too long; we were married when I was just sixteen; she was fourteen. Eighteen years is a long time. Too long to really be strangers, too little time for us to ever get to really know each other. I know every inch of Rachel's body, but I really don't know her. And she really doesn't know me.

I think she's better for that; just as well she doesn't know me.

"You've already seen Shlomo?"

"Not yet."

"Well, I don't want you in there. We've had a rough night; she's—"

"I won't disturb anything."

"No."

You can't pull rank on your wife.

I kissed her goodbye, long and hard. As she pulled away from me, she looked at me curiously. "This
is
just routine, isn't it?"

I nodded, lying. Rachel has never quite worked out what I do, and I didn't want to worry her. "Just part of a negotiating team, that's all. Maybe a side trip or two, but nothing heavy."

"Well, good." She
tsked.
"You be careful, then. I don't like the way you keep being around when there's shooting."

I stopped at the two-year-olds' creche and bullied sleepy-eyed cousin Sarai into letting me in.

"I won't disturb them, I promise," I said, as I set down my bag and slipped off my shoes.

She didn't say anything; she just glared at me.

I opened the door.

The Arts have some minor applications; I shut the door behind me, and became Silence.

That's the real secret. It isn't the technique, although that's where you have to start: weight always balanced easily on the balls of the feet, each foot lifted and set down, under control, not merely allowing yourself to stagger through life, the way most people do.

No, it's not just technique. It's the becoming. All the Art is, is becoming. Silence is one of the easier things to become; it doesn't trouble you later.

I drifted through the room until I was at Shlomo's crib.

He slept easily, his little knees pulled up underneath him, one chubby arm outflung, the other tucked in closely. I put my hand lightly to the back of his head, and wondered, for the thousandth time, why it is that God makes my children of such special stuff, why the hair on the back of my children's heads is always softer, finer than that He uses for the rest of his Creation.

I love you, little one,
I mouthed.

There was a time in my people's history, when a son might inherit a civilian profession from his father. In one line of my family, there was an unbroken string of six generations of male doctors—real physicians, not just medicians; in another, a hundred years of rabbis.

All I have to leave to you is my profession. You can become a butcher like your father.

They were all waiting for me at the 'port. Dov, Zev, the Sergeant, and his oldsters, now in khakis that had no trace of honorable retirement pins, were over on one side of the room, Alon and his half-dozen assorted staff negotiation officers on the other.

At my arrival, Alon nodded and opened a cabinet at the far wall, bringing out a tray of shot glasses and a mottled stone bottle, complete with ceramic cork.

He squealed the cork out of the bottle and poured each of us a glass. "Gentlemen," he said, "I am the senior here. And who is the junior?"

"I am," Dov said, his voice normal once more: flat, almost too high-pitched, emotionless. He raised his glass. "Brothers and cousins, I give you the Mercenary's Toast."

"The Mercenary's Toast," we all echoed, as custom required.

"Everybody comes back," he said. No special intonation; he just said the words. It's a toast, not a prayer.

"Everybody comes back."

We drank the harsh whiskey. As the fiery liquid burned the back of my throat, I lowered the glass and set it down, empty, on the table.

And I remembered what the Sergeant used to murmur, back in the old days.

I didn't have to trust my memory, though; he turned to his six comrades and whispered, just like in the old days, "Remember, chaverim—it's a toast, not a promise."