The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (16 page)

“Oh, well, I suppose I will leave you in peace, soldier,” Lehmann said, at long last leaving Heinz to quietly keep an eye on the quiet, desolate landscape while the smug little man continued his stroll down the trench.

How long would it take until he would be relieved and be allowed to leave the periscope? Heinz had so many other things he would rather do, like even just working on maintenance. If anything good might come out of this war, it was Heinz’s honed skill at woodwork which was essential to replace and repair broken boards that kept the trench stable. Unlike the massive fortifications just a few hundred yards away, the trenches at this post were much more rudimentary and were based primarily around wood, and when the Frenchies shelled them, plenty of boards had to be replaced to make sure that the trench didn’t risk caving in completely. There were stories about trenches collapsing and burying a bunch of poor bastards alive, and nobody wanted that. It was bad enough spending a night in a dugout praying to whatever God might be up there that a big shell not land squarely on top of it. At least most of the French artillery fire was too distant and inaccurate to do much else than scare the bejesus out of any sane man, but one dugout not too far away had caved in from a shell some months back, reminding him of just how unlucky some guys could be. Being scared shitless was probably a lot better than being buried alive or blown to pieces.

Meryem
enjoyed the atmosphere and was very excited about the “unfortunate” timing. She had never really celebrated Nowruz in any way since she had always learned that the year in fact started in the middle of winter and not at the start of spring. Granted, it was perhaps more logical to kick off the year when things were about to start grow rather than at the time when the world looked pretty dead. The proper Nowruz was still some weeks away, but the elders had been very happy to see Daryn again, and they had invoked the upcoming feast as a natural reason for brotherly celebration. Meryem and Daryn had met these same people before when Daryn had tried to convince them to do something—anything really—to defy their foreign ruler in Petersburg. They had declined to rebel, but they had done so in a very friendly way, insisting that they would pray for Daryn, Meryem, and the success of their brothers fighting the Russians. And now, they had insisted that they be allowed to hold a small feast for them because of the impending “New Year.”

As much as she wanted to scold them for being cowards, she could see that tanks, warplanes, and machineguns would make anyone think twice about attacking them with old rifles and knives
, and she tried to ignore the men’s cowardice. Even if all the tribesmen of the Great Horde would take up arms, they would probably not do any better than how the Middle Horde had fared when several tribes had taken arms against the Russians and liberated Akmolinsk. When the Cossack armies had descended on the city Meryem had heard it said that they killed every last Kazakh they could find within twenty miles of the big city of Akmolinsk and as punishment for the revolt most of Russian Turkestan had to pay a special fine of horses, cattle, gold, silver, silk or anything else that was valuable to the
white ghosts
.

The stories from people seeking shelter in Japan had been printed in papers not only in Shinkyou, but also in the rest of the country
, and newsreels had condemned the savage
white ghosts
for their cruel barbarism. Meryem had been a very small girl when not only her father, but her teacher as well had warned the children of the white devils and their quest for world domination and how that sort of grisly slaughter proved the need for Celestial Imperialism. All people with brains had to be fearful of the whites when they heard about their horrible mistreatment of people, but it was particularly frightening because of the people around her right now.

Daryn was treated very well, and Meryem was proud to see the clan elders speak to him and offer him the best food. These people were poor, yet they slaughtered a sheep for Daryn, and Meryem had the pleasure and dread of facing the girls and women while Daryn was talking to the men. She had never been an orator, and she felt like she could not do Great Japan justice to these people and just tried to converse as best she could. There was no doubt in Meryem’s mind that they would live good lives when the Imperial Army would liberate them from their Russian shackles, yet rather than to galvanize these compatriots and her future countrywomen, she spoke as little as possible.

The women and girls wore a lot of fur to help keep warm, although some of them wore the colorful Kazakh kimonos that were very different from the kind of kimonos Meryem had worn. As a child, she had only ever seen distinct Kazakh clothes in old photographs, particularly of her foremothers on her father’s side. She knew that her father’s father had often worn a Kazakh fur cap in the winter, but she couldn’t remember ever seeing her father wear anything that she could not picture being worn by His Majesty’s Chuuka counselors and the esteemed lords of central Japan. There was nothing Kazakh about uniforms, Western suits, or tunic suits, and the closest relative she had seen dressed in distinctly Kazakh clothes was a couple of old photographs of her mother as a child, one together with her siblings, and one shortly before she had been married to Meryem’s father.

One of the girls in the group was being very friendly, and Meryem found it both a little exasperating, but also, in some way, heartwarming that someone was interested in her the way Inkar was. The girl was unmarried and looked to be around fourteen. It was obvious from the cheaply adorned caps and dresses that the girls were not rich. Meryem had learned that you could tell a great deal about a girl from what she was wearing on her head, and the caps most of the girls were probably warm and comfy, but they were not as elegant as the ones she had seen on others, their decorations mostly just glass beads rather than gemstones or gold.

“Your pants look funny,” the girl said as she pinched the unusual pants Meryem was wearing.

She hadn’t changed out of her traveling clothes, and her Russian winter pants did look rather odd compared to the pants the girls and women were wearing. There was nothing Russian about them at all. As far as Meryem could tell, they were completely untouched by the white colonialists, apart from their victimization when it came to animals. Although it was hard for someone brought up so far from animals, she had realized that the people here were absolutely dependent on livestock, and for them it was almost like having members of the group taken away when the Russians stole horses from them. While most of her countrymen in Japan were peasants who relied on growing grains and other kinds of crops in a single place all year round, the people out here moved around with the seasons, setting up their yurts in different places.

There were stories too of Cossacks taking girls from the steppe, and raids between tribes had been a source of conflict between different groups during the lawless periods. Meryem did not understand the differences between the tribes between the Caspian Sea and the Altay Mountains, but it was obvious that as much as she had thought they were all the same, they weren’t. The Uzbeks were supposed to be complete aliens as far as she could understand, although she didn’t know them from firsthand experience. The tribal relations were awfully confusing, but she obeyed Daryn and did not talk about difficult things with anybody. A lot of their fellow people resented not just the Uzbeks, but also most of the Muslims in central Shinkyou. She wasn’t sure why, but just like the Chuuka, the Greater Aralia Region had seen a lot of violent discord. Maybe it was just like how the Chuuka had suffered from war and all kinds of nasty things before the Liberation War, and once all of Aralia from the Caspian Sea to Shinkyou had been liberated, everybody would be happy and friends together. She hoped so. She was sure of it. It was probably the bloody Russians who made Asians fight and hate each other.

The girls and women sitting around her in the yurt were simple people, and Meryem couldn’t even begin to try to show them how to write. None of the girls could read and write properly, and Meryem was very disappointed that she hadn’t brought a book or some good writing sample that could illustrate the beauty of the Japanese script. The men who were literate wrote in the unintelligible Arabic wavy things rather than Japanese—the Asian script.
Chuugo
was the oldest kind of writing, and it had been designed by the ancients thousands of years before the whites even started to talk, let alone read and write. She had no idea what Arabic was good for, but it looked an awful lot like the tedious German or Russian writing—just a bunch of waves and circles that didn’t seem to mean anything. Meryem was by no means a master of calligraphy, but she did as well as she could. Her father could write very beautifully, and she knew that writing was the key to measure people’s character and intellect. That was why she wasn’t so good at writing; she wasn’t very quick and intelligent. That’s what you could tell from looking at how she wrote; too impulsively and she didn’t properly finish all the strokes, instead writing quicker than she should. She hoped these nice girls and women would get to learn how to read and write as soon as the Europeans were all kicked out and the great scholarly traditions could come here like it had spread in other places where the Empire’s laws and customs ruled.

Several of the girls and women were friendly and curious about Meryem and her native land, but she was too ignorant to teach. One of the women had borrowed one of the slates the men used to teach the boys to write, and Meryem was pleased to show them the name of their rightful—future—homeland. The string of five characters were simple enough, containing three ideas. Great; the sun’s home; and empire. Great, because it was the greatest country ever conceived; the home of the sun, which meant that it was the bright hope and good of the world, and it was a country governed by sublime imperial authority, so it was an empire.

“How do you write Inkar?” the nice teenaged girl asked after Meryem had drawn some characters for them on the worn slate.

“I can show you,” Meryem said, waving for the girl to lean in over the slate.

She put the chalk in Inkar’s hand, and she did like she had been shown how to write back when she had been a young, illiterate child. Guiding Inkar’s hand over the slate, she spelled out the characters;
I-n-ka-ru
. Inkar. The four phonetic characters didn’t look as neat as if they had been Chinese characters, but names were like that.
Me-rya-mu
didn’t look all that elegant either, at least not when Meryem wrote it. The only part of her name that looked nice was Daryn’s family name, Ibrahim with the neat Chinese characters that fitted so well together. She felt a little bad when she wrote it because she did such a bad job at it and had not really had any time to practice.

“What does that mean?” Inkar asked, curious about the first of the phonetic characters.

Might her name mean something different in this language?
Inkar
was straightforward, but if each symbol meant something, then it had to mean something different because there were so many symbols, four of them just for her.

“It’s a sound,” Meryem said, no really sure what
i
would mean other than just the sound of
i
.

“But what does it mean?” Inkar curiously insisted.

She had heard when Meryem spelled them out when they wrote them on the slate, but what did the two lines mean? Maybe they were two people sitting and talking to each other? It was hard to tell, since the symbols she had explained were far from obvious.

Maybe it was a little confusing. Meryem couldn’t quite see the characters as meaningless, but if you had never seen them, it might be hard to understand how those two lines became the sound
i
. There wasn’t some obvious law that made
i
sound like
i
, but she remembered a funny game she had learned from her little sister.

“Let’s try again,” she said, again taking Inkar’s hand to write, but this time, rather than writing four phonetic characters, she wrote just a single Chinese character. “There, that can mean something you really, really want,” she said.
“
Inkar.”

“It does?” the girl asked, examining the writing closely.

The women who weren’t interested in Japanese script were nevertheless kind to Meryem, and she felt absolutely delighted to interact with people like her. It reminded her of the importance of what Daryn was doing, and for a moment she felt a small part of it rub off on her. She knew that she had an obligation to not be taken by self-importance, but if she just let her imagination run off for a while, she could see these friendly compatriots as not just the descendants of the same horsemen who had lived freely on the steppe between the East and the West, but as contemporary countrywomen.

They were obviously different from her—Meryem had only learned about social cues, things like the significance of the women who wore white headscarves rather than caps, and other cultural practices she had never known about before. She was wearing a scarf now, but she had not been raised that way. Apart from praying to God and sharing her special language with her mother, Meryem had very little in common with these girls and women in practice. Yet despite all that, she had an obligation to be concerned about these people, not only because their distant kinship to her. If
the Russians would be allowed to have their way with these people, they would just drain them and move on to their next victim. Because that was what Europeans were like; they would just eat up everything in their path. There was only one solution which Meryem had known since she was a child because it was a phrase that was easy to remember. “
Strong army, strong country
.” The government knew that, and now the country had to fight for not only the freedom of Asia but for the survival of people as far away as Karafuto Island, or even the Philippine Islands, or Hawaii Province. Because in the end, the Europeans would want that land too. It wasn’t for nothing that Nanshuu and Alaska were under threat from the English colonialists, and the English and the Russians were all the same devils, just with different flags. Daryn had said that Japan would probably have to liberate Nanshuu, South Malaya, Sarawak, India, and all the other Asian lands the English had occupied, but she didn’t want to think about that. It was depressing when you looked a map and saw how big the world was and how much of it was ruled by enemy countries. It was bad enough that Japan had to fight one war. She didn’t want the country to have to fight all the enemies, but they would probably have to, because evil wouldn’t tolerate good—and good and honorable men had a duty to fight evil just as they had a duty to obey their Emperor.