Marching Through Georgia. By S M Stirling. A Puke (TM) Audiobook

Scanned by Highroller.
Proofed by the best Elf proofer's Aunt.
Made prettier by use of EBook Design Group Stylesheet.
Formatted for Machine Text by PukeOnaPlate, 2023

Marching Through Georgia.
By S M Stirling.
CHAPTER ONE.
"Finally in seventeen eighty-three, by the Peace of Paris. Great Britain made peace with the American revolutionists and their European allies.
However, the revival of British naval strength in the last years of the war made Spain and France ready to offer a face-saving compromise, particularly when they could do so at the expense of the weakest partner in their coalition, the Netherlands. Franco-Spanish gains in the West Indies were to be balanced by allowing Britain to annex the Dutch Cape colony, which had been occupied in seventeen seventy nine to prevent its use by the French, almost as an afterthought, in an operation nearly cancelled.
Poor and remote, the Cape was renamed after Francis Drake and used as a dumping ground for Britain's other inheritance from the American wan the Loyalists, tens of thousands of whom had fought for the Crown and now faced exile as penniless refugees. As early as seventeen eighty-one shiploads were arriving; after the Peace, whole regiments set sail with their families and slaves as the southern ports of Savannah and Charleston were evacuated. They were joined by large numbers of Hessian and other German mercenaries formerly in British service. Within a decade over 250,000 immigrants had arrived, swamping and assimilating the thin scattering of Dutch-Afilkaander settlers.
200 Years: A Social History of the Domination, by Alan E Sorensson, P-H-D.
Archona Press, 1983.
NORTH CAUCASUS FRONT, 20,000 feet. APRIL 14, 1942: Oh four hundred hours.
The shattering roar of six giant radial engines filled the hold of the Hippo-class transport aircraft, as tightly as the troopers of Century A, First Airborne Legion. They leaned stolidly against the bucking, vibrating walls of the riveted metal box, packed in their cocoons of parasail and body harness, strapped about with personal equipment and weapons like so many deadly slate-grey Christmas trees.
The thin, cold air was full of a smell of oil and iron, brass and sweat and the black greasepaint that striped the soldiers' faces; the smell of tools, of a trade, of war. High at the front of the hold, above the ramp that led to the crew compartment, a dim red light began to flash.
Centurion Eric von Shrakenberg clicked off the pocket flashlight, folded the map back into his case and sighed. 0400, he thought. Ten minutes to drop. Eighty soldiers here in the transport; as many again in the one behind, and each pulled a Helot-class glider loaded with heavy equipment and twenty more troopers.
He was a tall young man, a hundred and eighty centimeters even without the heavy-soled paratrooper's boots, hard smooth athlete's muscle rolling on the long bones. Yellow hair and mustache were cropped close in the Draka military style; new lines scored down his face on either side of the beak nose, making him look older than his twenty-four years. He sighed again, recognizing the futility of worry and the impossibility of calm.
Some of the old sweats seemed to have it, the ones who'd carried the banners of the Domination of the Draka from Suez to Constantinople and east to Samarkand and the borderlands of China in the last war. And then spent the next twenty years hammering Turks and Kurds and Arabs into serfs as meek as the folk of the old African provinces. Senior Decu-rion McWhirter there, for instance, with the Constantinople Medal and the Afghan ribbon pinned to his combat fatigues, bald head shining in the dim lights.
He looked at the watch again. Oh four oh five. Time was creeping by. Only two hours since liftoff, if you could believe it.
I'll fret, he thought. Staying calm would drive me crazy. Christ, I could use a smoke. It would take the edge off; skydiving was the greatest thing since sex was invented, but combat was something you never really got used to. You were nervous the first time; then you met the reality, and it was worse than you'd feared. And every time after that, the waiting was harder.
Eric had come to believe he would not survive this war many months ago; his mind believed it, at least. The body never believed in death, and always feared it. It was odd; he hated the war and its purposes, but during the fighting, that conflict could be put aside. Garrison duty was the worst.
In search of peace, he returned to The Dream. It had come to him often, these last few years. Sometimes he would be walking through orchards, on a cool and misty spring morning; cherry blossoms arched above his head, heavy with scent, over grass starred with droplets of fog. There was a dog with him, a setter. Or it might be a study with a fire of applewood, lined with books with stamped leather spines, windows closed against slow rain. He had always loved books; loved even the smell and texture of them, their weight. There was a woman, too: walking beside him or sitting with her red hair spilling over his knees. A dream built of memories, things that might have been, things that could never be.
Abruptly he shook himself free of it. War was full of times with nothing to do but dream, but this was not one of them.
Most of the others were waiting quietly, with less tension than he remembered from the first combat drop last summer, blank-faced, lost in their own thoughts. Occasional pairs of lovers gripped hands. The old Spartans were right about that, he thought. It does make for better fighters, although they'd probably not have approved of a heterosexual application.
A few felt his gaze, nodded or smiled back. They had been together a long time, he and they; he had been private, NCO and officer-candidate in this unit. If this had been a legion of the Regular Line, they would all have been from the same area, too; it was High Command policy to keep familiar personnel together, on the theory that while you might enlist for your country, you died for your friends. And to keep your pride in their eyes.
The biggest drop of the war. Two full legions, First and Second Airborne, jumping at night into mountain country. Twice the size of the surprise assault in Sicily last summer, when the Domination had come into the war.
Half again the size of the lightning strike that had given Fritz the Maikop oil fields intact last October, right after Moscow fell. Twenty-four thousand of the Domination's best, leaping into the night,"fangs out and hair on fire."
He grimaced. He'd been a tetrarch in Sicily, with only thirty-three troopers to command. A soldier's battle, they'd called it.
Which meant bloody chaos, and relying on the troops and the regimental officers to pull it out of the can. Still, it had succeeded, and the parachute chiliarchoi had been built up to legion size, a tripling of numbers. Lots of promotions, if you made it at all. And a merciful transfer out once Italy was conquered and the "pacification" began; there would be nothing but butcher's work there now, best left to the Security Directorate and the Janissaries.
Sofie Nixon, his comtech, lit two cigarettes and handed him one at arm's length, as close as she could lean, padded out with the double burden of parasail and backpack radio.
"No wrinkles, Cap," she shouted cheerfully, in the clipped tones of Capetown and the Western Province. Listening to her made him feel nineteen again, sometimes. And sometimes older than the hills, slang changed so fast. That was a new one for "no problems.
"All this new equipment: to listen to the briefing papers, hell, it'll be like the old days. We can be heroes on the cheap, like our great-granddads were, shootin' down black spear-chuckers," she continued.
With no change of expression: "And I'm the Empress of Siam; would I lie?"
He smiled back at the cheerful, cynical face. There was little formality of rank in the Draka armies, less in the field, least of all among the volunteer elite of the airborne corps. Conformists did not enlist for a radical experiment; jumping out of airplanes into battle was still new enough to repel the conservatives.
Satisfied, Sofie dragged the harsh, comforting bite of the tobacco into her lungs. The Centurion was a good sort, but he tended to, worry too much. That was part of being an officer, of course, and one of the reasons she was satisfied to stay at monitor, stick-commander. But he overdid it; you could wreck yourself up that way. And he was very much of the Old Domination, a scion of the planter aristocracy and their iron creed of duty; she was city-bred, her grandfather a Scottish mercenary immigrant, her father a dock-loading foreman.
Me, I'm going to relax while I can, she thought. There was a lot of waiting in the Army, that was about the worst thing, apart from the crowding and the monotonous food, and good Christ but being under fire was scary. Not nice-scary like being on a board when the surf was hot, or a practice jump; plain bad. You really felt good afterward, though, when your body realized it was alive.
She pushed the thought out of her head. The sitreps had said this was going to be much worse than Sicily, and that had been deep-shit enough.
Still, there had been good parts. The Italians really had some pretty things, and the paratroops got the first pick. That jewelry from the bishop's palace in Palermo was absolutely divine! And the tapestry, she sighed and smiled, in reminiscence. There had been leave, too, empty space on transport airships heading south, if you knew the right people. It was good to be able to peacock a little, do some parrying, with a new campaign ribbon and the glamour of victory, and some pretties to show off.
Her smile grew smug. She had been very popular, with all the sexes and their permutations; a change from ugly-duckling adolescence. Men are nice, definitely, she thought. Pity I had to wait 'til I reported to boot camp to start in on 'em.
That was the other thing about the Army; it was better than school.
Draka schooling was sex-segregated, on the theory that youth should not be distracted from learning and their premilitary training. Either that or sheer conservatism. Eight months of the year spent isolated in the countryside: from five to eighteen it had been her life, and the last few years had been growing harder to take. She was glad to be out of it, the endless round of gymnastics and classes and petty feuds and crushes; the Army was tougher, paratroop school more so, but what you did off duty was your own business. It was good to be an adult, free.
Even the winter in Mosul had been all right. The town was a hole, of course, provincial, and all new since the Draka conquest in 1916.
Nothing like the mellow beauty of Capetown, with its theaters and concerts and famous nightspots. Mosul, well, what could you expect of a place whose main claim to fame was petrochemical plants? They'd been up in the mountains most of the time, training hard. She flexed her shoulders and neck complacently. She'd thought herself fit before, but four months of climbing under full load and wrestling equipment over boulders had taken the last traces of puppy fat off and left her with what her people considered the ideal feminine figure, sleek, compactly curved, strong, and quick.
Sofie glanced sidelong at her commander; she thought he'd been noticing, since she qualified for comtech. Couldn't tell, though; he was one for keeping to himself. Just visited the officer's Rest Center every week or so. But a man like that wouldn't be satisfied with serf girls; he'd want someone he could talk to.
Or maybe it's my face? She thought worriedly, absently stripping the clip out of the pistol-grip well of her machinepistol and inserting it again. It was still obstinately round and snub-nosed; freckles were all very well, enough men had described it as cute, but it obstinately refused to mature into the cold, aquiline regularity that was most admired. She sighed, lit another cigarette, started running the latest costume drama over again in her head.
Tragic Destiny: Signy Anders and Derek Wallis as doomed Loyalist lovers fighting the American rebels, with Carey Plesance playing the satanic traitor George Washington.
God, it must have been uncomfortable wearing those petticoats, she thought. No wonder they couldn't do anything but look pretty and faint; how could you fight while wearing a bloody tent? Good thing Africa cured them of those notions.
0410, Eric thought. Time. The voice of the pilot spoke in his earphones, tinny and remote.
"Coming up on the drop zone, Centurion," she said. "Wind direction and strength as per briefing. Scattered cloud, bright moonlight." A pause. "Good luck."
He nodded, touching his tongue to his lip. The microphone was smooth and heavy in his hand. Beside him the American war correspondent, Bill Dreiser, looked up from his pad and then continued jotting in shorthand.
Dreiser finished the paragraph and forced his mind to consider it critically, scanning word by word with the pinhead light on the other end of the pen. Useful, when you had to consult a map or instrument without a conspicuous light; the Domination issued them to all its officers, and he had been quick to pick one up. The device was typical of that whole bewildering civilization; he turned it in his hands, feeling the smooth careful machining of its duralumin parts, admiring the compact powerful batteries, the six different colors of ink, the moving segments that made it a slide rule as well.
Typical indeed, he thought wryly. Turned out on specialized machine tools, by illiterate factory-serfs who thought the world was flat and that the Combine that owned their contracts ruled the universe.
He licked dry lips, recognizing the thought for what it was: a distraction from fear. He had been through jump training, of course, an abbreviated version tailored to the limitations of a sedentary American in early middle age. And he had seen enough accidents to the youngsters about him to give him well-justified nightmares; if those magnificent young animals could suffer their quota of broken bones and wrenched backs, so could he. And they would be jumping into the arms of Hitler's Wehrmacht; his years reporting from Berlin had not endeared him to the National Socialists.
He glanced across the echoing gloom of the cargo hold to where Eric sat, smoking a last cigarette. His face was impassive, showing no more emotion than it had at briefings around the sand table in Mosul. A strange young man. The eagle-faced blond good looks were almost a caricature of what a landed aristocrat of the Domination of the Draka was expected to be, so was his manner, most of the time. Easy enough to suppose there was nothing there but the bleakly efficient, intellectual killing machine of legend, the amoral and ruthless superman driven by the Will to Power whom Nietzsche had proclaimed.
He had mentioned that to Eric, once. A useful myth, had been the Draka's reply. That had led them to a discussion of the German thinker's role in developing the Domination's beliefs; and of how Nietzsche's philosophy had been modified by the welcoming environment he found among the Draka, so different from the incomprehension and contempt of his countrymen.
The Domination was founded by losers, Eric had said, letting an underlying bitterness show through. Ex-masters like the Loyalists and all those displaced European aristocrats and Confederate southerners, prophets without followers like Carlyle and Gobineau and Nietzsche. The outcasts of Western civilization, not the "huddled masses" you Yankees got.
My ancestors were the ones who wouldn't give up their grudges. Now they're coming back for their revenge.
Dreiser shrugged and brought his mind back to the present, tugging at the straps of his harness one more time. Times like this you could understand the isolationists; he had been born in Illinois and raised in Iowa himself, and knew the breed. A lot of them were decent enough, not fascist sympathizers like the German-American Bund, or dupes like Lindberg. Just decent people, and it was so tempting to think the oceans could guard American wholesomeness and decency from the iron insanities and corruptions of Europe.
Not that he had ever subscribed to that habit of thought; it led too easily to white sheets and hatred, destroying a tradition to protect it. Or to the Babbirtry that had driven him to Paris in the 1920's; the America he returned to in the Depression years was more alive than Hoover's had been, finally acknowledging its problems. Trying to do something about the submerged third of the population, taking up the cause of the Negro abandoned during Reconstruction, reforming the Hispanic backwaters south of the Rio Grande, where annexation in 1848 had produced states free only in name.
Dreiser ground his teeth, remembering the pictures from Pearl Harbor, oily smoke pouring to the sky from Battleship Row, the aircraft carrier Enterprise exploding in a huge globe of orange fire as the Japanese divebombers caught her in the harbor mouth. The United States had paid a heavy price for the illusion of isolation, and now it was fighting on its own soil, full-fledged states like Hawaii and the Philippines under enemy occupation. His prewar warnings of the Nazi menace had not been heeded, now his reports might serve to keep the public aware that Japan was not the only enemy, or the most dangerous of the Axis.
"JUMPMASTERS TO YOUR STATIONS!" Eric's amplified voice overrode even the engines; there was a glisten of eyes, a hundredfold rattle as hands reflexively sought the ripcords. "PREPARE TO OPEN HATCH DOORS."
"And step into the shit," came the traditional chorus in reply.
Far to the south in Castle Tarleton, overlooking the Draka capital of Archona, a man stood leaning on the railing of a gallery, staring moodily at the projacmap that filled the huge room below. He was an Arch-Strategos, a general of the Supreme General Staff. The floor of the room was glass, twenty meters by thirty; the relief map was eerily three dimensional and underlit to put contrast against contour marks and unit counters. The mountains of Armenia extended in an infinity of scored rock, littered with the symbols of legions, equipment, airstrips, and roads; the red dots of aircraft crawled north toward Mt. Elbruz and the passes of the Caucasus.
Stale tobacco scented the air, and the click-humm of the equipment echoed oddly in the unpeopled spaces.
"Risky," he said, nodding toward the map. "Twenty legions of armor, thirty mechanized. Another sixty of Janissary motorized infantry. Six thousand tanks, twenty thousand infantry carriers, a thousand SP guns. Two million troops, and it all depends on two legions of paratroopers.
North of the mountains, in an open-field battle of maneuver, we can take the Fritz.
The Ivans are still holding hard east of the Volga, the Germans took on too much; they haven't got a strategic reserve to speak of. But butting our heads into the Caucasus, fighting our way over the mountains, inch by inch." He shook his head. "We can't afford a war of attrition; there aren't enough Draka; it would ruin us. And there may not be any limit to the number of serfs we can conscript for the Janissaries, but there are limits to the number we can arm safely."
"War is risk," the officer beside him replied. The cat-pupiled eye of Intelligence was on her collar; she had the same air of well-kept middle age as he, and a scholar's bearing. "Breaking the Ankara Line was a risk, too, but it gave us Anatolia, back in seventeen.
The general laughed, rubbing at his leg. The fragments from the Austrian antiairship burst had severed tendons and cut nerves; the pain was a constant backdrop to his life, and worse on these cold nights. Pain does not hurt, he reminded himself. Only another sensation.
The Will is Master.
"Then I was an optimistic young centurion, out at the sharp end, sure I could pull it out of the kaak even if the high command fucked it up," he said. "Now the new generation's out there, and probably expecting to have to scoop up my mistakes."
"I was driving a field ambulance in sixteen, all you male lords of creation thought us fit for, then."
He laughed. "We weren't quite so stretched for reliable personnel, then."
The woman snorted and poked a finger into his ribs.
"Hai, that was a joke, Cohortarch," he complained with a smile.
"So was that, you shameless reactionary bastard," she retorted. "If you're going to insult me, do it when we're on-duty and I can't object."
He nodded, and grew grim. "Well, we're committed to this attack; the Domination wasn't built by playing safe. There'll never be another chance like this. Thank the White Christ that Hitler attacked the Soviets after he finished off the French. If they'd stayed in Europe, we'd never have been able to touch them."
She nodded, hesitated, spoke: "Your boy's in the first wave, isn't he, Karl?"
The man nodded, turning away from the railing and leaning his weight against the ebony cane at his side. "Eric's got a Century in the First Airborne," he said quietly, looking out over the city. "And my daughter's flying an Eagle out of Kars." The outer wall was window from floor to ceiling; Castle Tarleton stood on a height that gave a fine view of the Domination's capital. The fort had been built in seventeen ninty-one, when the Crown Colony of Drakia was new. The hilltop had been for practical reasons, once:
Cavalry had been based here, rounding up labor for the sugar plantations of Natal, where the ancestors of the Draka were settling into their African home.
Those had been American loyalists, mostly southerners; driven from their homes by vengeful neighbors after the triumph of the Revolution.
The British had seized the Cape from its Dutch masters during that war, and found it cheap enough to pay their supporters with the stolen goods of colonial empire. "Strange," Karl von Shrakenberg continued, softly enough to make her lean toward the craggy face. "I can command a legion handily enough, by Gobineau's ghost, I wish they'd give me a field command! Run my estate; I even get along well with my daughters. But my son.
Where do the children go? I remember taking him from the midwife, I remember setting him on my shoulders and naming the stars for him, putting him on his first pony. And now? We hardly speak, except to argue.
About absurdities: politics, books. When did we become strangers? When he left, there was nothing. I wanted to tell him, everything: to come back alive, that I loved him. Did he know it?"
His companion laid a hand on his shoulder. "Why didn't you say it?" She asked softly. "If you can tell me?"
He sighed wearily. "Never was very good with words, not that sort.
And there are things you can say to a friend that you can't to your blood, perhaps, if Mary were still alive." He straightened, his eyes focusing on the world beyond the glass. "Well. This view was always a favorite of mine.
It's seen a lot."
Together they looked down across the basin, .conscious of the winds hooting off the high plateau at their backs, cold and dry with winter.
The first small fort of native fieldstone had grown over the years, grown with the colony of Drakia, named for Francis Drake and heir to that ruthless freebooter's spirit. It was a frontier post guarding the ranches and diamond mines, at first. Railways had snaked by to the great gold fields of the Whiteridge; local coal and iron had proved more valuable still, and this was a convenient post for a garrison to watch the teeming compounds of serf factory hands that grew beside the steel mills and machine-works. Then the Crown Colony became the autonomous Dominion of Draka and needed a capital, a centrum for a realm that stretched from Senegal to Aden, from the Cape to Algeria.
Lights starred the slopes beneath them, fading the true stars above, mansions with roofs of red tile, set in acres of garden. A monorail looped past, a train swinging through silently toward the airship haven and airport to the west, windows yellow against the darkness. A tracery of streets, sprawling over ridge and valley to the edge of sight, interrupted by the darker squares of parkland. Archona was the greatest city of the Domination, eight million souls. Through the center slashed the broad Way of the Annies, lined with flowering jacaranda trees, framed between six-story office blocks, their marble and tile washed snow-pale in moonlight. The Assembly building, with its great two hundred meter dome of iridescent stained glass; the Palace where Archon Gunnarson had brought law into conformity with fact and proclaimed the Domination a sovereign state, back in 1919.
Karl's mouth quirked; he had been here in the Castle on that memorable day. The staff officers had raised a loyal glass of Paarl brandy, then gone back to their planning for the pacification of the New Territories and the next war. None of them had expected the Versailles peace to last more than a generation, whatever the American president might say of a "war to end war." Unconsciously, his lip curled in contempt; only a Yankee could believe something that obviously fatuous.
"You grew up here, didn't you, Sannie?" he said, shaking of! The mood of gloom.
"Ja,' she replied. "Born over there," she pointed past the block of government buildings, to where the scattered colonnades of the University clustered. "In the house where Thomas Carlyle lived.
Nietzsche visited my father there, seemed to think it was some sort of shrine. That was a little while after he moved to the Domination.
Anthony Trollope stopped by as well, they tell me. While he was researching that book, Prussia in the Antipodes, back in the 1870's. He was the one the English didn't pay any attention to, and then wished they had."
They both smiled; it was an old joke in the Domination, that the British had been warned so openly of the Frankenstein's monster they had created by unleashing the Draka south of Capricorn. Their gaze lifted, to the glow that lit the northern horizon, the furnaces and factories of the Ferrous Metals Combine, stamping and grinding out the engines of war. The serfs of the industrial combines were being kept to their tasks; for the rest, there was little traffic. Mobilization among the citizens had left little of Archona's vaunted nightlife, and curfew kept the subject races off the central streets.
"Well," he said, offering her an arm with a courtesy old-fashioned even in their generation of Draka. "Shall we see if, somewhere in this bureaucrat's paradise of a city, two ancient and off-duty warriors can find a drink?"
He would face the waiting as he would any other trial; as befitted a von Shrakenberg of Oakenwald. Even if I'm the last, he thought, as his halting boot echoed through the empty halls of the fortress.
Thump! Eric's parachute unfolded, a rectangle of blackness against the paling stars of dawn. He blinked; starlight and moonlight were almost painfully bright after the crowded gloom of the transport, silence caressed his mind.
Straps caught at crotch and waist and armpits, then cradled him in their padding. Above him the night was full of thunder, as hundreds of the huge transports spilled their cargos of troops and equipment into the thin air, south and east still more formations bulked black against the stars, transports and glider-tugs. Chutes blossomed, sorted themselves into formations, turned to their destinations. A paratrooper lost velocity fast, the transports drew ahead and above quite quickly.
Above a flight of Falcon Three fighters banked, their line stretching into an arc, moonlight glinting on the bubble canopies. Sharks of the sky.
This is the best time, Eric thought, as the flight of transports vanished, climbing and turning for height and home, southward to their bases.
Silence, except for the fading machines and the hiss of the wind through the silk. Silence over a great scattered cloudscape, castles and billows of silver under a huge cool moon; air like crisp white wine in the lungs, aloneness. A feeling beyond the self, peace, joy, freedom, in a life bound on the iron cross of duty, in the service of repression and death. There had been a few other times like this; making love with Tyansha, or single-handing a ketch through monsoon storms. But always here, alone in the sky.
His hands were working on the lines, turning and banking; these new sail-chutes flew; like gliders. None of the old business of dropping all over the farmyard, where the wind and fate pleased. You could jump high and sail to your drop zone quietly, with no thunder of engines to announce you.
And you could land soft; that was important. Paratroopers had to carry most of their equipment, as much again as their own body weight. With a load like that you could break your back just stepping into a ditch, if you weren't careful.
The rest of the Century were forming up behind, wheeling like a flight of birds of prey; he saw with relief that the gliders, with their cargo of heavy weapons and specialists, were following. The Legion was dropping on the whole pass that took the Ossetian Military Highway through the mountains from north to south, but the bulk of it was landing at the southern end. The Second Cohort was the northernmost unit, and Century A was the point formation of Second Cohort. They would take the shock of whatever reaction force the Fritz could muster to relieve their cut-off comrades south of the mountains. Two hundred of them, to blunt the enemy spearheads, they were going to need that special equipment, and the thirty-odd specialists in the tetrarchy of combat engineers. Very badly.
Now. The cloud cover was patchy, light and shadow. Southward, the main peaks of the Caucasus shone snow white. Below was a black-purple immensity of scree, talus-slope, dark forests of beech and holm oak, sloping down to a valley and a thread of road winding up into the mountains. On a map it was nothing, a narrow sliver of highland between the Black and Caspian Seas.
Over it all loomed the great mass of Mount Elbruz; beyond it was the south slope, ex-Soviet Georgia; beyond that the Draka armored legions massing in the valleys of Armenia. The symbolism of it struck him, all Europe was in shadow, in a sense. From the Elbe to the Urals, there was a killing underway great enough to leave even the cold hearts at Castle Tarleton shaken. Eric had been a student of history, among other things, his mouth quirked at the supreme irony that the Draka should come as deliverers.
Still, true enough, he thought, as his body automatically leaned and twisted to turn the parasail. The rule of the Domination was cruel and arbitrary, merciless in breaking resistance. But his people made war for land and booty, killed to enforce submission. What the Intelligence reports said was happening below was madness come to earth: slaughter for its own sake, an end rather than a means.
The Fritz must be convinced they've won it all, he thought, as his eyes automatically scanned for the landing zone. There.
He stooped, a giddy exhilarating slide across the sky, a breathless joy.
For a moment he was a bird, a hunting bird, an eagle. Stooping on the world, feeling the air rushing past his wings. Be practical, Eric, he reminded himself severely. Once they grounded they would have only their feet, and the south slope of the mountains was German-held.
But lightly, by the spearhead divisions of General Von Paulus' Sixth Army, itself the vanguard of Army Group South. They had fought their way across the Ukraine, through the great encirclement battles at Kiev and Kharkov, even with most of their armor up north for the attack on Moscow.
The frantic Russian counterattacks had failed; the Panzers came south, ground down by a thousand miles of route-march over frozen wasteland and the costly destruction of Zhukov's Siberians. The offensive continued, on through the winter and the mud of spring; east to the Volga at Stalingrad, wheeling south and east to Astrakhan, south into the Kalmyk steppe, taking Maikop and Krasnodar, on to the Kuban.
Now. Now they were a very long way from home, thousands of miles of mud trail, torn-up railway, scorched earth. Good troops, but exhausted, fought out, short of supplies. If the paradrop could hold the passes behind them, they could be crushed out of existence by waves of Janissary infantry, then the Draka armor would pour into the Russian plains, close to their bases, fresh, with superior weapons and limitless supplies, against enemies who had battered each other into broken-backed impotence.
The ground was coming up fast; he could smell it, a wet green scent of trees and spring meadow-grass and rock. This area had been swarming with Draka reconnaissance planes for months; the contours were springing out at him, familiar from hundreds of hours poring over photomaps. He banked to get a straight run at the oblong meadow. Carefully now, don't get caught in that fucking tree line. Branches went by three meters below. He hauled back on the lines, turning up the forward edge of the parasail; it climbed, spilled air, slowed. With the loss of momentum it turned from a wing to a simple parachute once more, and good timing landed him softly on his feet, boots vanishing in knee-high grass starred with white flowers.
Landing was a plunge from morning into darkness and shadow, as the sun dropped below the mountains to the southeast. And always, there was a sense of sadness, of loss; lightness turning to earthbound reality. Not an eagle any more, went through him. More like a hyena, a mordant part of his mind prompted. Come to squabble over the carcass of Russia with the rival pack.
Swiftly, he hit the quick-release catches and the synthsilk billowed out, white against the dark grass. He turned, clicking on the shielded red flashlight, waving it in slow arcs above his head. The first troopers of his Century were only seconds behind him, grey rectangles against the stars.
They landed past him, a chorus of soft grunts and thuds, a curse and a clatter as somebody rolled. A quick check, mapcase, handradio, binoculars, Holbars T-6 assault rifle, three 75-round drums of 5 millimeter for it, medikit, iron rations, fighting dagger in his boot, bush knife across his back. That was an affectation, the machete-sword was more a tradition than anything else, but.
Dropping their chutes and jogging back by stick and section, rallying to the shouts of their decurions and tetrarchs, platoon-commanders, the troopers hurried to form in the shadows of the trees. The mottled grey of their uniforms was nearly invisible in the dim light, and their faces were white ovals beneath the rims of their wide-flared steel helmets. Sofie jogged over to her position with the headquarters communication lochos, the antennae waving over her shoulder; she had the headset on already, tufts of bright tow hair ruffling out between the straps. As usual, she had clipped her helmet to her harness on touchdown; also as usual, she had just lit a cigarette. The match went scrit against the magazine well of her machinepistol; she flicked it away and held out the handset.
For Dreiser, leaving the airplane had been a whirling, chaotic rush.
For a moment he tumbled, then remembered instructions. Arms and legs straight.
That brought the sickening spiral to a stop; he was flying forward, down toward silver clouds and the dark holes between them.
"Flying, hell, I'm falling," he said into the rush of cold wind. His teeth chattered as he gripped the release toggle and gave the single firm jerk the Draka instructors had taught. For a heart-stopping moment there was nothing, and then the pilot chute unfolded, dragging out the main sail. It bloomed above him, the reduction in speed seeming to drag him backward out of his fall. Air gusted past him, more slowly now that the parachute was holding. He glanced up to the rectangle above him, a box of dozens of long cloth tubes fastened together side by side, held taut by the rush of air.
"The parasail functions as both a parachute and a wing," he quoted to himself." To acquire forward speed, lean forward. Steer by hauling on left or right cords, or by shifting the center of gravity."
God, it's working. Blinking his eyes behind the goggles that held his glasses to his face, he peered about for the recognition-light. The aircraft had vanished, nothing more than a thrumm of engine noise somewhere in the distance. There it was, a weak red blinking: he shifted his weight forward, increasing the angle of glide. Cautiously; you could nose down in these things, and he doubted he could right it again before he hit.
The meadow rose up to strike; he flung himself back, too soon, lost directional control, and barely avoided landing boot-first in another chute at a hundred feet up. Ground slammed into his soles and he collapsed, dragging.
"Watch where yo' puttin' y'feet. Yankee pigfuckah," an incongruously young and feminine voice snarled as he skidded through tall grass and sharp-edged gravel on his behind, scrabbling at the release straps until the billowing mass of fabric peeled away to join the others flapping on the ground. He stood, turned, flung himself down again as the dark bulk of a glider went by a foot above his head, followed by a second.
"Jesus!" he swore, as they landed behind him and collided with a brief crunch of splintering plywood and balsa. Boots hurdled him, voices called in throttled shouts.
As he came to his feet, the meadow seemed to be in utter chaos, groups of Draka paratroopers dashing about, parasails still banking in, color-coded lights flashing. But visibly, the mass of men, women, and machinery was sorting itself into units, moving according to prearranged plans. Behind him the detachable nose of a glider broke free under enthusiastic hands and the ramp to the cargo-hold dropped; a pilot staggered down to sit cradling his head in his hands, while a file of troopers ran up to begin unloading crates.
Dreiser walked toward the spot where the Draka commanders would be gathering, feeling strength return to his rubbery legs and a strange exhilaration building.
Did it, by God! he thought. So much for being an old man at thirtyeight.
Now, about the article, let's see: The landing showed once again the value of careful preparation and training. Modern warfare, with its complex coordination of different arms, is something new on this earth. Our devotion to the "minuteman" tradition of the amateur citizen-soldier is a critical handicap.
Eric took the handset, silent for a moment as the gliders came in with a shush of parted air, guiding themselves down into the field marked with discarded parasails. Moonlight and predawn glow cast their wings in patterns of shade and light as flaps and slots opened to shed lift. Around him there was a holding of breath as the landing skids cut turf with a screeching of steel on gravel. The sailplanes slewed to a halt, the wing of one catching the other's tail with a crunch of plywood. A sigh gusted up as the detachable nose-sections fell away and figures began unloading.
Sofie gently tapped his hand. "Set's workin' fine, Centurion," she said.
"Got the Cohort Sparks already, green-beepers from all the handradios in the Century. want a smoke?"
"Trying to give it up," he grunted, lifting the phone to his ear and clicking the pressure-button in his call sign. "You should too." He glanced at his watch: 0420 almost exactly. Forty-five minutes to dawn.
"Hey, Centurion, do I complain about your baby girls?" she replied, grinning. The rest of the head-quarters tetrarchy were falling in around him:
Senior Decurion McWhirter, two five-trooper rifle "sticks" who would double as runners, two rocket-gun teams and a heavy machine gun.
They both fell silent as the hissing of static gave way to voices, coded sequences and barked instructions. Unconsciously, Eric nodded several times before speaking.
"Yes? Yes, sir. No sir; just coming in, but it looks good."
Reception was excellent; he could hear a blast of small-arms fire in the background, the rapid snarl of Draka assault-rifles, the slower thump and chatter of German carbines and MG 34's.
"Ah, good." Then he and the comtech winced in unison. "The armor landed where? Sorry, sir, I know you didn't design this terrain. Right, proceed according to plan, hold them hard as long as I can. Any chance of extra antitank. Yes, Conortarch, I appreciate everybody wants more firepower, but we are the farthest north. Yes, sir, we can do it. Over and out, status report when Phase A is complete. Thank you, sir, and good luck to you, too."
"Because we're both going to need it," he added under his breath as he released the send button. The Legion had had a Cohort of light tanks, Cheetahs with 75 millimeter guns in oscillating turrets. Those had apparently come down neatly in a gully.
The gliders were emptying, stacks of crates and heavy weapons being lifted onto their wheeled carts. Paratroopers jumped with light weapons, their Holbars assault rifles, machine guns, machinepistols for techs and weapons teams, the 85 millimeter recoilless-rocket guns that served as tetrarchy antitank. The gliders held much of the Century's fighting power, trenchmortars, the 100 millimeter automortars, 120 millimeter recoilless guns, heavy machine guns, flame-throwers, demolition charges, ammunition. Not to mention most of their food and medical supplies. It would likely be all they had until the regular supply drops started. And already the trunks of the birches were showing pale in the light of dawn.
A sudden sense of the. Unlikeliness of it all struck Eric.
He had been born in the heartlands of the Domination, fourteen thousand kilometers away in southern Africa. And here he stood, on soil that had seen. How many armies? Indoeuropeans moving south to become Hittites, Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Armenians, Arabs, Turks, Czarist Russians, Bolsheviks. And now a Century of Draka, commanded by a descendant of Hessian mercenaries, come to kill Germans who might be remote cousins, and who had marched two thousand kilometers east to meet him.
What am I doing here? Where did it start? He thought. Such a long way to journey, to die among angry strangers. A journey that had lasted all his life. The start? Oakenwald Plantation, of course. In the year of his birth, and last year, six months ago. But that was the past, and the battle was here and now, an ending awaiting him. An end to pain, weariness; an end to the conflict within, and to loneliness.
You could forget a great deal in combat.
Eric von Shrakenberg took a deep breath and stepped forward, into the war.

CHAPTER TWO.
Napoleonic wars cut off imports, and industries had to be established if only because the mines were far inland; the need for a strong military-industrial complex maintained the pressure. Lack of navigable waterways led to an early development of steam transport and southern Africa proved to be rich in copper, iron, and coal, as well as precious metals. Gold prompted rapid expansion northward; plantation agriculture remained dominant, but increasingly, its markets were local.
Steam-engine pioneer Richard Trevithick was only the first of many British engineers to find Drakia welcoming. With no local entrepreneurial class, the landed aristocracy stepped in to invest, followed by the State and the free-employee guilds: the social pattern of the countryside repeated itself in the growing industrial cities of the early nineteenth century.
Outright enslavement of the natives was forbidden by the British, but the proto-Draka quickly developed a system of indentured labor and debtpeonage distinguishable only in name.
200 Years: A Social History of the Domination by Alan E Sorensson, P-H-D. Archona Press. 1983.
ARCHONA TO OAKENWALD PLANTATION OCTOBER, 1941.
The airdrop on Sicily had earned Eric von Shrakenburg a number of things: a long scar on one thigh, certain memories, and a field-promotion to Centurion's rank. When the First Airborne Chiliarchy was pulled back into reserve after the fall of Milan, the promotion was confirmed; a rare honor for a man barely twenty-four. With it came fourteen-day leave passes to run from October First, 1941, and unlike most of his comrades, he had not disappeared into the pleasure quarter of Alexandria. The new movement orders had already been cut: Draka Forces Base Mosul, Province of Mesopotamia. Paratroopers were cutting-edge assault troops; obviously, the High Command did not expect the de facto truce with Hitler to last. And that would be a more serious matter than overrunning an Italy taken by surprise and abandoned by its Axis allies. It was well for a man to visit the earth that bore him before he died. He would spend his leave in Oakenwald, the von Shrakenberg plantation, now that the quarrel with his father had been patched up. After a fashion.
Travel space was scarce, as mobilization built toward its climax, but even in the Draka army it helped to be the son of an Arch-Strategos, a staff general. A place was found on a transport-dirigible heading south with a priority cargo of machine-parts; two days nonstop to the high plateau of southern Africa. He spent the last half-hour in the control gallery, for the view; they were coming in to Archona from the north, and it was a side of the capital free citizens seldom saw, unless business took them there. For a citizen, Archona was the marble-and-tile public buildings and low-rise office blocks, parks and broad avenues, the University campus, and pleasant, leafy suburbs with the gardens for which the city was famed.
Beyond the basin that held the freemen's city lay the world of the industrial combines, hectare upon hectare, eating ever deeper into the bush country of the middleveld. A spiderweb of roads, rail-sidings, monorails, landing platforms for freight airships. The sky was falling into night, but there was no sleep below, only an unrestfulness full of the light of arclamps and the bellowing flares of the blast furnaces, factory-windows carpeted the low hills, shifts working round the clock.
Only the serfcompounds were dark, the flesh-and-blood robots of the State exhausted on their pallets, a brief escape from a lockstep existence spent in that wilderness of metal and concrete.
Eric watched it with a fascination tinged with horror as the crew guided the great bulk of the lighter-than-air ship in, until light-spots danced before his eyes. And remembered.
In the center of Archona, where the Avenue of Triumph met the Way of the Armies, there was a square with a victory monument. A hundred summers had turned the bronze green and faded the marble plinth; about it were gardens of unearthly loveliness, where children played between the flower-banks. The statue showed a group of Draka soldiers on horseback, their weapons were the Ferguson rifle-muskets and double-barreled dragoon pistols of the eighteenth century. Their leader stood dismounted, reins in one hand, bush-knife in the other. A black warrior knelt before him, and the Draka's boot rested on the man's neck.
Below, in letters of gold, were words: To the Victors.
That was their monument; northern Archona was a monument to the vanquished, and so were the other industrial cities that stretched north a thousand kilometers to Katanga; so were mines and plantations and ranches from the Cape to Shensi.
Eric slept the night in transit quarters; he got the bed, but there were two other officers on the floor, for lack of space. He would not have minded that, or even their insistence on making love, if the sexual athletics had not been so noisy. In the morning the transport clerk was apologetic; also harried. Private autocars were up on blocks for the duration, mostly; in the end, all she could offer was a van taking two Janissaries south to pick up recruits from the plantations.
Eric shrugged indifferently, to the clerk's surprise. The city-bred might be prickly in their insistence on the privileges of the master caste, but a von Shrakenberg was raised to ignore such trivia.
Also. He remembered the rows of Janissary dead outside Palermo, where they had broken the enemy lines to relieve the encircled paratroops.
The roadvan turned out to be a big, six-wheeled Kellerman steamer twenty years old, a round-edged metal box with running boards chest-high and wheels taller than he. It had been requisitioned from the Transportation Directorate, and still had eyebolts in the floor for the leg shackles of the work gangs. The Janissaries rose from their kitbags as Eric approached, flicking away cigarettes and giving him a respectful but unservile salute; the driver in her grimy coverall of unbleached cotton bowed low, hands before eyes.
"Carry on," Eric said, returning the salute. The serf soldiers were big men, as tall as he, their snug uniforms of dove-grey and silver making his plain Citizen Force walking-out blacks seem almost drab.
Both were in their late thirties and Master Sergeants, the highest rank subject-race personnel could aspire to. They were much alike, hard-faced and thickmuscled, unarmed, here within the Police Zone, but carrying steel-tipped swagger sticks in white-gloved hands.
One was ebony black, the other green-eyed and tanned olive, and might have passed for a freeman save for the shaven skull and serf identity-number tattooed on his neck.
The Draka climbed the short, fixed ladder and swung into the seat beside the driver. While the woman fired the van's boiler, he propped his Priority pass inside the slanted windscreen that ran to their knees; that ought to save them delay at the inevitable Security Directorate roadblocks. The vehicle pulled out of the loading bay with the smooth silence of steam power, into the crowded streets; he brought out a book of poetry, Rimbaud, and lost himself in the fire-bright imagery.
When he looked up in midmorning they were south of the city.
Crossing the Whiteridge and the scatter of mining and manufacturing settlements along it, past the huge, man-made heaps of spoilage from the gold mines.
Some were still rawly yellow with the cyanide compounds used to extract the precious metal; others were in every stage of reclamation, down to forested mounds that might have been natural. This ground had yielded more gold in its century and a half than all the rest of the earth in all the years of humankind; four thousand meters beneath the road, men still clawed at rock hot enough to raise blisters on naked skin. Then they were past, into the farmlands of the high plateau.
He rolled down the window, breathing deeply. The Draka took pains to keep industry from fouling the air or water too badly; masters had to breathe and drink, too, after all. Still, it was a relief to smell the goddess breath of spring overtaking the carrion stink of industrial-age war. The fourlane asphalt surface of the road stretched dead straight to meet the horizon that lay around them like a bowl; waist-high fields of young corn flicked by, each giving an instant's glimpse down long, leafy tunnels floored with brown, plowed earth. Air that smelled of dust and heat ana green poured in, and the sea of corn shimmered as the leaves rippled.
They spent noon at a roadside waystation that was glad to see him, Eric was not surprised, remembering how sparse passenger traffic had been.
Most of the vehicles had been drags, heavy haulers pulling articulated cargo trucks, or plantation vans heading to the rail stations with produce, once there had been a long convoy of wheeled personnel carriers taking Janissary infantry toward the training camps in the mountains to the east.
He strolled, stretching his legs and idly watching the herds of cattle and eland grazing in the fields about, listened to the silence and the rustling of leaves in the eucalyptus trees that framed the low pleasant buildings of colored brick with their round stained-glass windows; sat in the empty courtyard and ate a satisfying luncheon of fried grits, sausage, and eggs, not forgetting to have food and beer sent out to the van.
The manager had time on her hands, and was inclined to be maternal.
It was not until he had sat and listened politely to her rambling description of a son and daughter who were with the Fifth Armored in Tashkent that he suspected that he was procrastinating; his own mother had died only a few years after his birth, and he did not generally tolerate attempts at coddling.
Not until he found himself seriously considering her offer of an hour upstairs with the pretty but bedraggled serving-wench was he sure of it. He excused himself, looked in the back window of the van, saw that one of the Janissary NCO's had the driver bent over a bench and was preparing to mount. Eric rapped on the glass with impatient disgust, and the soldier released her to scurry, whimpering, back to the driver's seat, zipping her overall with shaking fingers.
It would be no easier to meet his father again if he delayed arrival until nightfall. Restlessly, he reopened the book; anticipation warred with. Yes, fear: he had been afraid at that last interview with his father. Karl von Shrakenberg was not a man to be taken lightly.
The quiet sobbing of the driver as she wrestled with the wheel cut across his thoughts. Irritated, he found a handkerchief and handed it across to her, then pulled the peaked cap down over his eyes and turned a shoulder as he settled back and pretended to sleep. Useless gesture, he thought with self-contempt. A serf without a protector was a victim, and there were five hundred million more like this one.
The system ground on, they were the meat, and the fact that he was tied on top of the machine did not mean he could remake it. And there were worse places than this, much worse: in a mine, or the newly taken Italian territories he had helped to conquer, to the drumroll beat of the Security Directorate's execution squads, liquidation rosters, destructive-labor camps.
Shut up, he thought. Shut up, wench, I've troubles of my own! It was still light when they turned in under the tall stone arch of the gates, the six wheels of the Kellerman crunching on the smooth, crushed rock, beneath the sign that read: "Oakenwald Plantation, establish seventeen eighty-eight K von Shrakenberg, Landholder." But the sun was sinking behind them. Ahead, the jagged crags of the Maluti Mountains were outlined in the Prussian blue of shadow and sandstone gold. This valley was higher than the plateau plains west of the Caledon River; rocky, flat-topped hills reared out of the rolling fields.
The narrow plantation road was lined with oaks, huge branches meeting twenty meters over their heads; the lower slopes of the hills were planted to the king-trees as well.
Beyond were the hedged fields, divided by rows of Lombardy poplar:
wheat and barley still green with a hint of gold as they began to head out, contour-ploughed cornfields, pastures dotted with white-fleeced sheep, spring lambs, horses, yellow-coated cattle. The fieldworkers were heading in, hoes and tools slanted over their shoulders, mules hanging their heads as they wearily trudged back toward the stables. A few paused to look up in curiosity as the vehicle passed; Eric could hear the low, rhythmic song of a work team as they walked homeward, a sad sweet memory from childhood.
Despite himself he smiled, glancing about. It had been, by the White Christ and almighty Thor, two years now since his last visit. "You can't go home again," he said softly to himself. "The problem is, you can't ever really leave it, either." Memory turned in on itself, and the past colored the present; he could remember his first pony, and his father's hands lifting him into the saddle, how his fingers smelled of tobacco and leather and strong soap. And the first time he had been invited into his father's study to talk with the adults after a dinner party. Ruefully, he smiled as he remembered holding the brandy snifter in an authoritative pose anyone but himself must have recognized as copied from Pa's. And yet it was all tinged with sorrow and anger, impossible to forget, hurtful to remember, a turning and itching in his mind.
He looked downslope; beyond that screen of pines was a stock dam where the children of the house had gone swimming sometimes, gods alone knew why, except that they were supposed to use the pool up by the manor.
There, one memorable day, he had knocked Frikkie Thyssen flat for sneering at his poetry. The memory brought a grin; it had been the sort of epic you'd expect a twelve-year-old in love with Chapman's Homer to do, but that little bastard Thyssen wouldn't have known if it had been a work of genius. And over there in the cherry orchard he had lost his virginity under a harvest moon one week after his thirteenth birthday, to a giggling field wench twice his age and weight.
And then there had been Tyansha, the Circassian girl. Pa had given her to him on his fourteenth birthday. The dealer had called her something more pronounceable, but that was the name she had taught him, along with her mother tongue. She had been. Perhaps four years older than he; nobody had been keeping records in eastern Turkey during those years of blood and chaos. There were vague memories of a father, she had said, and a veiled woman who held her close, then lay in a ditch by a burning house and did not move. Then the bayonets of the Janissaries herding her and a mob of terrified children into trucks. Thirst, darkness, hunger; then the training creche. Learning reading and writing, the soft blurred Draka dialect of English; household duties, dancing, the arts of pleasing. Friends, who vanished one by one into the world beyond the walls. And him.
Her eyes had been what he had noticed first, huge, a deep pale blue, like a wild thing seen in the forest. Dark-red hair falling to her waist, past a smooth, pale, high-cheeked face. She had worn a silver-link collar that emphasized the slender neck and the serf-number tattooed on it, and a wrapped white sheath-dress to show off her long legs and high, small breasts. Hands linked before her, she had stood between his smiling father and the impassive dealer, who slapped her riding-crop against one boot, anxious to be gone.
"Well boy, does she please?" Pa had asked. Eric remembered a wordless stutter until his voice broke humiliatingly in a squeak; his elder brother John had roared laughter and slapped him on the back, urging him forward as he led her from the room by the hand. Hers had been small and cool; his own hands and feet felt enormous, clumsy; he was hideously aware of a pimple beside his nose.
She had been afraid, not showing it much, but he could tell. He had not touched her; not then, or in the month that followed. Not even at the first shyly beautiful smile.
Gods, but I was callow, Eric thought in sadly affectionate embarrassment. They had talked; rather, he had, while she replied in tense, polite monosyllables, until she began to shed the fear. He had showed her things, his battle prints, his butterfly collection, that had disgusted her, and the secret place in the pine grove, where he came to dream the vast vague glories of youth. A month, before she crept in beside him one night.
A friend, one of the overseer's sons, had asked casually to borrow her; he had beaten the older boy bloody. Not wildly, in the manner of puppy fights, but with the pankration disciplines, in a cold ferocity that ended only when he was pulled off.
There had been little constraint between them, in private. She even came to use his first name without the "master," eventually. He had allowed her his books, and she had devoured them with a hunger that astonished him; so did her questions, sometimes disconcertingly sharp.
Making love with a lover was. Different. Better; she had been more knowledgeable than he, if less experienced, and they had learned together. Once in a haystack, he remembered; prickly, it had made him sneeze. Afterward they had lain holding hands, and he had shown her the southern sky's constellations.
She died in childbirth three years later, bearing his daughter. The child had lived, but that was small consolation. That had been the last time he wept in public; the first time since his mother had died when he was ten.
And it had also been the last time his father had beaten him; for weakness.
Casual fornication aside, it was well enough for a boy to have a serf-girl of his own. Even for him to care for her, since it helped keep him from the temptations that all-male boarding schools were prone to. But the public tears allowable for blood-kin were unseemly for a concubine.
Eric had caught the thong of the riding crop in one hand and jerked it free. "Hit me again, and I'll kill you," he had said, in a tone flat as gunmetal.
Had seen his father's face change as the scales of parental blindness fell away, and the elder von Shrakenberg realized that he was facing a very dangerous man, not a boy. And that it is not well to taunt an unbearable grief.
He shook his head and looked out again at the familiar fields; it was a sadness in itself, that time healed. Grief faded into nostalgia, and it was a sickness to try and hold it. That mood stayed with him as they swung into the steep drive and through the gardens below Oakenwald's Great House.
The manor had been built into the slope of a hill, for defense, in the early days, and it still gave a memorable view.
The rocky slope had been terraced for lawns, flowerbanks, ornamental trees, and fountains; forest grew over the steepening slope behind, and then a great table of rock reared two hundred meters into the darkening sky.
The manor itself was ashlar blocks of honey-colored local sandstone, a central three-story block fronted with white marble columns and topped with a low-pitched roof of rose tile; there were lower wings to each side, arched colonnades supporting second-story balconies. There was a crowd waiting beneath the pillars, and a parked grey-painted staff car with a strategos red-and-black checkerboard pennant fixed to one bumper; the tall figure of his father stood amidst the household, leaning on his cane. Eric took a deep breath and opened the door of the van, pitching his baggage to the ground and jumping down to the surface of the drive.
Air washed over him cool and clean, smelling of roses and falling water, dusty crushed rock and hot metal from the van; bread was baking somewhere, and there was woodsmoke from the chimneys. The globe lights came on over the main doors, and he saw who awaited: his father, of course; his younger sister Johanna in undress uniform; the overseers, and some of the house servants behind.
He waved, then turned back to the van for a moment, pulling a halfempty bottle out of his kit and leaning in for a parting salute to the Janissaries.
They looked up, and their faces lit with surprised gratitude as he tossed the long-necked glass bulb; it was Oakenwald Kijafla, cherry brandy in the same sense that Dom Perignon was sparkling wine, and beyond the pockets of most freemen.
"Tanks be to yaz, Centurion, sar," the black said, his teeth shining white.
"Sergeants Miller and Assad at yar s'rvice, sar."
"For Palermo," he said, and turned his head to the driver. She raised a face streaked with the tracks of dried tears from where it had rested on the wheel, glancing back apprehensively at the soldiers.
"Back, and take the turning to the left, half a kilometer to the Quarters. Ask for the headman, he'll put you all up."
A young houseboy had run forward to take Eric's baggage; he craned his head to see into the long cabin of the van after making his bow, his face an O of surprise at the bright Janissary uniforms. And he kept glancing back as he bore the valise and bag away. Eric paused to take a few parcels out of it, reflecting that they probably had another vo