Riders of the Pale Horse (23 page)

“Don't borrow worries,” Robards replied easily. “Keep your weapons ready and hope for peace, that's my motto.”

“At least we are avoiding the accursed Chechen,” Mikhail agreed when Wade translated, and pointed westward. “All the hills you see in the direction of the setting sun they claim as theirs. The other tribes disagree, of course—we Ossetians most of all. The battles between us have continued for over seven hundred years. War with the Chechen is inevitable.”

“Correction,” Rogue replied to the translation. “War is inevitable, here or anyplace else.”

“What does the warrior say?” Mikhail demanded.

When Wade had translated, the old man grunted. “He speaks a truth. War is man's curse and his destiny and his beginning and his end. I am an old man and have seen much and know there is no other answer.”

“I am young,” Wade replied quietly, “and yet I believe you are wrong. With respect, I must say that I feel you are wrong.”

The old man turned glittering eyes his way. “Yes? You say the answer lies with the priests?”

Wade shook his head. “With Jesus.”

“What are you two talking about?” Robards asked.

The old man kept his eyes fixed upon Wade. “Tell the warrior that this is a land where time is not measured as elsewhere. Here the Khevsur tribesmen still have shrines to their tree gods. Here the Eti fought in chain mail and great swords until Stalin swept through here in the thirties and showed them that modern war has no concern for battle honor, only blood.”

Robards accepted this news in silence. “What got this started?”

“It wasn't—”

“Tell him these mountains contain the great fortress of Shatili,” the old man continued, his sharp gaze now shooting from one to the other. “The only fortress in the world never taken in battle, although the Chechen, their mortal enemies, whom they call the Kistebi, tried for more than eight hundred years to overrun its defenses. Tell him that here the word of honor dominates all else. Disgrace and offenses to the family name are held as matters of revenge for three and four and five hundred years. Here men still show their strength as warriors by abducting brides from enemy villages in the bright of day.”

Instead of being troubled by the news, Robards leaned back against the stone wall, crossed his legs, and released a satisfied sigh. “Been looking for a place like this all my life and never thought I'd find it.”

“So tell me,” Mikhail demanded of Wade. “Where does this peace of yours fit into my world?”

Wade met the old man's level gaze and quietly replied, “Within the heart of every believer.”

They traveled through a countryside that spoke vivid tales of bygone days.

Tucked here and there amidst the green landscape and softly layered hills lay deserted villages, ruined by passing wrath and conquering armies. Piles of rubble buried what once had been cobblestone thoroughfares, the cinders and sorrow gentled by forty years of weeds and wind and rain, testimony to Stalin's determination to wipe out all allegiance to anything save the great Soviet Empire.

And yet elsewhere remained hamlets of a dozen or so houses, untouched by the red tide of Soviet power. They were peaceful places, rich in produce and beautiful to behold. Vineyards glistened in the early sunlight, their orderly rows pointing toward ancient villages. Chapels nestled beneath trees so old that their girth could not be spanned by six grown men. Churches and monasteries crowned distant hilltops, majestic in their timelessness. The houses had been built before Western Europe had formed itself into nations, and had served as homes to more than twenty generations, often of the same family. Living history dwelled among the citizens of such places, reminders of what had been, beacons to what was yet to come.

Women sat in doorways and hand-spun the hair of goats into thread, most of which would be used within the community. The local wool, Mikhail told them at their next stop, made clothes with the softness of silk, yet was waxy enough to keep skin dry through the hardest of storms. Wade waved as they passed and wished them well from the fullness of an adventurous life.

Yuri and Mikhail rode in Rogue's lead truck, while Ilya and
Alexis, the man who had been ill, traveled with Wade. Ilya remained the loner, content to stay in the back of the truck and doze. Alexis, on the other hand, reveled in his regained good health. He was thin by nature, and his illness had left him little more than skin and bones. He bore the air of an ascetic, his light blue eyes glorying in all they saw, his cheeks sunken and arms almost skeletal, his blond hair and three-day beard in unnoticed disarray.

As they drove, Alexis turned from gazing out the side window to demand, “You are a religious man?”

“He is a fool for God,” Ilya called from the back, speaking for the first time that day. “He seeks to grow peace in soil where only war can take root.”

“My mother was religious,” Alexis said, taking no heed of Ilya's bitterness. “I thought of her often when the illness had me. I never understood her, and yet I found comfort in her strength.”

“Most of the time,” Wade admitted, “I do not understand much.”

“And yet you believe?”

“In Christ's salvation I have no doubt,” Wade replied firmly. “It is my rock.”

Alexis nodded slowly. “It would be nice to have such a rock.”

Ilya groaned and said, “Another fool in the making!”

There was a silence until Alexis announced quietly, “I lived in Polygon.”

“I don't think I've ever heard of it,” Wade replied.

“It is Russian for nightmare.” The sunlight streaming in the truck window turned his stubbled features into a deeply shadowed visage. “And if it is not, it should be.”

“Where—”

“Moscow 400, that was our only address. We were more than two thousand kilometers from the capital, but letters went first there, even if sent from a neighboring village. Every letter was screened by the KGB. A telephone call to the outside
world meant applying for a pass and waiting a day, a week, sometimes months. Travel outside was tightly restricted. Everything was restricted.”

“Why did you stay?” Wade asked.

“Because I was ordered to.” Blue eyes glinted with bitter humor. “Of course, that is something one raised in a land of freedom like you would not understand.”

“Perhaps not,” Wade agreed.

“Life was not so bad. We were well paid, by Soviet standards. We had good housing, by Soviet standards. We had access to goods that were not available to the average citizen. My work was granted high priority, which meant that almost anything I felt was required, I received. There were twenty thousand of us, all either specialists or soldiers or spies. We used to joke that Polygon was a comfortable model of the great Soviet state—a prison within a prison.”

“What did you do there—I mean, what was your work?”

Alexis replied simply, “Object 100.”

“What?”

“A miniature nuclear reactor. A propulsion system for an atomic-powered rocket.” He stretched his legs out as far as the cabin area would permit. “Your American scientists had such a project, but it was dropped in 1979 as too costly. There were also environmental questions, although we have since proven them to be unfounded. We were on our way to Mars. We were just ten years away, and then...”

“And then everything changed,” Wade said.

“Before I left, we had teams of American scientists visiting, looking, taking pictures, asking questions.” His tone turned bitter. “We were required to stand and be polite because suddenly there was no more money. Our research was at a standstill. Our stores were empty. Our homes had no heat. The Americans walked around as if they were shopping at a local bazaar. Then they left, and we heard nothing further. We wondered if perhaps they had decided to take all our years of research, return to their warm comfortable
homes in America, and do their work in bright new American factories. We asked, and we wrote, and we begged, and still we heard nothing.”

“What shame you must have felt,” Wade offered softly. “What humiliation.”

“So now you ask why I go to build bombs for strangers, yes?” Alexis smiled sadly. “Tell me, have you ever watched your life's work lie in ruins? Have you ever had to beg for assistance, only to be ignored? Have you ever seen your children go hungry?”

Slowly Wade shook his head. “No.”

“Then what right have you to judge me?”

“None,” Wade said quietly. “I have no right.”

“No?” Alexis turned back toward the front windshield. “Then why do you bother me with the questions in your eyes?”

“A hope only,” Wade said. “That you would stop and think of other families, families who also only wish to live in peace.”

Alexis was silent so long that Wade thought the conversation had ended. But as the truck bounced and rumbled its way around another bend, Alexis said to the window, “Can you also tell me why I hear such questions asked by my heart to my head? Can you tell me why there are no answers?”

They approached yet another nameless hamlet as the sun softened and cooled and touched the highland peaks. Robards pulled from the road and pointed. Nearby fields had been torn apart by dual troughs, which ran in irregular patterns around the nearest houses. “Tanks.”

Mikhail walked ahead on foot and returned in the last light of day. “I have found us safe refuge,” he announced.

“The trucks?” Rogue demanded when Wade had translated.

“There is a stable,” Mikhail replied, swinging into the truck. “Come. My belly is becoming too neighborly with my spine.”

The village houses were constructed of rocks slathered with concrete and laid roughly in place. The roofs were all jagged slate. Other than the single main road in and out of town, the tracks were mud layered by stones upon which donkeys and people could find safe footing. At the high point of the village rose an ancient watchtower. A church huddled up against it, as much in abject submission to the region's brutal ways as for protection against invaders.

The house where Mikhail led them was of concrete and brick. One side of the house was in shambles. A deep trench split an old oak standing between the house and stables. The trench continued on through the living-room wall and ended on the opposite wall, a violent fiery comet whose reddish tail splashed up and around the ceiling.

“Three weeks ago we were hit by a rocket attack,” the woman of the house told them dully. Her five young children clustered about her with expressions of weary sadness. “The rocket did not explode. Otherwise we would all be dead. My aged father and mother came and dug it out while we waited in the woods. They said their lives were closer to an end, and so they took the risk of it blowing up in their faces.”

Robards inspected the plastic tarp that covered the gaping hole and asked, “Where is her husband?”

“Away,” she replied through Wade. “Fighting these past four months.”

Wade did not need to ask for details to explain further, “When Georgia declared independence from the Soviet Union, South Ossetia declared independence from Georgia.”

“That was asking for trouble,” Rogue commented.

“I do not know where he is,” the woman went on in her toneless drone, “or even if he is alive. I have no way of finding out. When the Georgians last came through here, they demanded that I hand over my husband. When I said that he was not here, they did this and ordered me to leave my own homeland.”

“Ossetia was divided by Stalin,” Wade continued to Rogue
after translating. “The lower half was joined to Georgia to split up the patriotic Ossetians and to make the Georgian border look straighter. They don't have the same language as the Georgians, not even the same alphabet. North Ossetia has been made a semi-independent enclave inside Russia. South Ossetia wants to join up with its other half.”

Wade gestured at the ruptured wall. “The result is war. All of South Ossetia has been split into villages either full of Georgians or Ossetians.”