Horses of the North

“Friend Milo,

“You read this only because I at last have decided that the time has come for me to leave. Please do not come after me or send men to track me, for I am well armed and I will shoot any of you that I discover upon my trail.”

The very next sentence sent cold chills coursing up Milo’s back, covered his skin with gooseflesh and set his nape to bristling.

“Them I will assuredly kill, though I have reason to believe that, like me, a mere bullet would not kill you as it would kill other, more normal, humans.

“I do not know your true age, although I suspect you to be far older than you now aver. My own age, too, is very much more than the one I claim, but if I am wrong about you, you could not believe it were I to herein note it down. Suffice it to say that I have appeared just as I now appear for an exceedingly long time. Nor are you the first friend I have had to suddenly desert due to my noticeable aberration of not aging as do all other human beings.

“Part of what I have told you of myself at various times over our years of friendship has been of truth. I was, indeed, born in Niedersachsenland, to a wealthy, landed family of most noble blood and antecedents; my father was a margrave, a renowned military officer, a very brave man and a widely recognized hero, may whatever God exists bless his gallant spirit.

“Along with all of my brothers and half brothers, I was sent up to University and given the chance at a decent education, then presented a commission in one of the most illustrious of the Schwadronen of Hussaren, the Kaiser’s then-favorite one, in fact. It was during my baptism of fire that I discovered—twice over—that something extremely odd about me there was.

“We received orders to deliver an attack against the flank of the French army opposing us. That charge was delivered with great firmness, driven home, but just as I reached the French at the head of my Jungen, a French officer fired his pistol and the ball struck me in the breast. I distinctly felt the hideous pain as that large piece of lead, after passing through my dolmen and blouse and shirt, tore into my flesh, shattered rib bone, lacerated my heart, then exited my back, smashing another rib in the process. Forcing myself to ignore, alike, the agony and the giddiness and the firm knowledge that I was a dead man, I almost decapitated that Frenchman with my sharp saber, then bored into the formation, resolved to take the lives of as many of them as possible before I tumbled, dead, out of my saddle.

“I felt myself to be truly acting out the words of the ‘Alte Reiterlied.’ (‘Gestern noch auf stolzen Rossen, Heute durch die Brust geschossen, Morgen in das kuhle Grab.’ And then, ‘Und so will ich tapfer streiten, Und sollt’ ich den Tod erleiden, Stirbt ein braver Reitersmann. ’) (an old cavalry song: Yesterday, still on prancing horses, Today, shot in the chest, Tomorrow in the cool grave. And so will I fight bravely, And should death claim me, Then dies a brave cavalryman.) I set myself to fight until the last drop of my blood had been drained away and the great dark had enfolded my being, as befitted a man of my race and house.

“But, friend Milo, when the recall was winded and I hacked my way back out of the French ranks, my good horse wounded many times over and stumbling under me, my saber blade dulled and nicked and cloudy, my clothing all torn and gashed and soaked through with my own blood and that of many another, the top of my fur busby shorn raggedly away and the heel of my right boot shot off, I still lived, nor was there much deep pain in my chest, as there most surely should have been.

“Then, when almost I was out of the French lines, a wild-eyed, frothing gunner appeared suddenly and jammed the slender finial spike of his linstock into my body, skewering my right kidney and bringing from me a scream of pain. I split the man’s head with my saber, the linstock’s own weight dragging its point from out of me, then rode on, groaning and grinding my teeth in my agony. My good horse made it back with me still astride him to almost the point from which the charge had been launched, then he suddenly fell dead and a passing troop sergeant dragged me up across the withers of his mount and bore me back to the rallying area.

“The indelible mark of Fahnrich Karl-Heinrich von --- was made on that long ago day, friend Milo. Every officer and other rank of the survivors of that charge treated me with a respect bordering upon awe; my Oberst not only presented me with one of his own string of chargers to replace my dead one, but offered a very generous price for a full captaincy in his unit, and immediately my father was apprised of my exploits, he sent the monies to buy me that position, plus funds to pay for uniforms and equipment commensurate with that rank.

“But I here get beyond my story. When, in the privacy of the tent I had shared with another Fahnrich who had not come back from the charge, I stripped off my blood-stiff dolmen, blouse and shirt, I could find no trace of the wounds that I knew I had sustained. Just below and a bit to the right of my left nipple was a dent that looked like a very old scar, and there was another just below my left scapula. At the place in which the gunner had speared me, there was no mark at all, for all that the blood had dried on my skin and soaked my clothing, which last was holed in just the right places and ways to match my memories of those two deathwounds. Yet I was a living hero, not the dead one that I should rightly have been twice over that day.

“Justly fearing a charge of witchcraft at the very least, I said nothing to anyone in that army about my wounds or their miraculous healings, nor did I mention to anyone aught of the many other severe injuries that I suffered briefly in the course of that and many another war. Eventually, when certain noblemen and comrades began to openly question my imperceptibly slow aging process, I found it expedient to fake my death and move on to another country and army, something that I have been forced to do over and over again across the long years, as I do now, friend Milo.

“But, then, if what I most strongly suspect of you is of a Tightness, you, too, are more than familiar with this pattern of self-protection from superstitious or envious human beings. At times, one believes so long a life to be a curse—a curse of seemingly eternal loneliness and wandering amongst strangers—rather than the blessing that normally aging humans would imagine it to be. But there is a very positive side to it, in that it teaches one so very much about humanity in general and the proper psychology to be used in manipulating people both in groups and as individuals. You are different. You are very much like me, and my very first suspicion of you was simply caused by the fact that you did not seem to think, to reason like, a common, normal, short-lived human. I have, I firmly believe, met only two others of our rare kind over my years and travels.

“The first was a French comte (although I believe that he did not begin a Frenchman, but more likely as an Italian or a Spaniard), a charlatan, swindler, confidence man, poseur … and these constituted his better qualities. But Monsieur le Comte briefly took me under his wing, recognizing me for what I was, and taught me telepathy and the arts of mindreading and of hypnotism. He imparted to me the few vulnerabilities of men such as ourselves. For we can be killed, friend Milo; anything that prevents the air from reaching our lungs for long enough will render us lifeless as any mere human—immersion under water, strangulation, smothering or a prolonged crushing of the chest and lungs. So avoid these things, friend Milo, and be most wary of fire, as well, for are you consumed faster than the body can regenerate, you will be just as dead as any poor old woman who was burned for a witch.

“Prior to his very precipitate departure from Paris and the French court, Monsieur le Comte first sent bravos to kill me, next notified certain sworn and deadly enemies as to my current whereabouts and finally, all else having failed, endeavored to have me taken by the Holy Office for examination on a charge of witchcraft, sorcery and heresy. This last meant that I, perforce, had to depart the court and city and country in some haste myself; but it was as well that I did so then, for within a very short time the rabble of peasants and artisans had arisen and were soaking France in the blood of the better classes, finally even murdering their hereditary king.

“Late in the nineteenth century, I became a physician and surgeon, and I was practicing this profession in Munich in the years after the First World War when I happened to meet the second of our kind, who then was leading a small political party made up mostly of former soldiers. I was able to teach him much concerning himself and how best to use his powerful mind to sway masses of people.

“He had wonderful dreams and plans for his party and his nation and his race. Had destiny allowed for him more time to prepare properly the ground, to lay firmly the foundations of his new and much better order, to draw about him a corps of capable, effective men rather than the flawed fanatics with whom he found himself burdened, then who knows how very grand and great an edifice he might have built for Germany and the world.

“But, alas, circumstances over which he had no control forced his hand, compelled him to launch prematurely portions of his grand design which should have incubated for much longer. And, slipping into a degree of overconfidence bred from his early successes as much as by the lavish praise of the sycophants then surrounding him, he plunged onward, disregarding my advice and even the warnings of his own reasoning abilities.

“As if overextending a finite military were not enough, he allowed certain frothing, fanatic lunatics to destroy certain irreplaceable resources that might, properly utilized, have even so late given him victory. With a wild abandon, henchmen of these fanatics turned potential laborers into corpses, made of would-be allies sworn enemies, even went so far as to cause battles to be lost and German soldiers to die needlessly in order to misuse the rail transport to their own lunatic ends, hauling Jews off to the slaughter, rather than munitions and supplies to the fighting fronts.

“Heinrich Himmler had always hated me and deeply envied my behind-the-scenes influence on my protégé, and after the try to blow up the Fuhrer failed so disastrously, Himmler accused me of being implicated and ordered my arrest. I fled Berlin and, after assuming the identity of a fellow surgeon who had died only the day before in an air raid on Magdeburg, I used his Soldbuch and orders to get me to the Western Front, then arranged to be captured by the American army, which presented no great difficulty in my unit’s sector, so fluid was the front then become.

“The medical officer of the Wehrmacht I was become—one Hauptmann Klaus Rudolf von Klippe—was well treated by his initial captors, only cursorily questioned by a tired, overworked intelligence officer who spoke very poor German, worse French and most ungrammatical English. After many weeks of waiting and of traveling, Hauptmann von Klippe arrived at Camp Trinidad, Colorado, U. S. A., and he there remained until quite late in the year of 1946, practicing his profession (for which he was paid by the U. S. Department of Defense), living quite comfortably and eating better than most any German then still in Germany.

“Repatriated to Germany in 1947, Hauptmann von Klippe disappeared, ceased to exist, which was not at all a difficult thing or an unusual occurrence in the Germany of those bleak days of defeat and national dismemberment.

“I then lived in Switzerland for a short while after I had claimed and taken possession of certain funds from a numbered account established years before in anticipation of just such a contingency. Then, by way of contacts in the Vatican, I made my way to South America, supposedly one Hauptsturmführer Alois Schmidt, but traveling under the passport of Karl Herbert Bucher provided by the Vatican.

“Friend Milo, I know that many people thought that the Fuhrer actually survived the debacle of the defeat of die Dritten Deutschen Reich, that he faked his death and escaped to Spain or to South America as did so many others, but I do not, cannot, so believe and I possess the very best of bases for my lack of belief.

“You see, I became connected with the ODESSA network, and I traveled all over South and Central America, as well as to Spain, Portugal, the Near East and parts of Africa, on their behalf, and if he had been in hiding I would surely have found him, for no matter how he might have had his physical attributes changed, he could not have changed his mental makeup, and that I would have instantly recognized.

“Oh, yes, we are most difficult to kill. Mere cyanide or a bullet in the brain would not have accomplished the purpose. But, because we know ourselves, a suicide would have been very easy and could have been accomplished most painlessly, as well. Even so long ago, there were drugs available which might have been used by trained personnel in such a way as to have frozen the action of the lungs for sufficient time to cause the organism to run out of oxygen and so die. Then a trusted associate could have fired a bullet into the head and the body could have been borne up to ground level, soaked with petrol and burned.

“This would, of course, have required complete cooperation on the Fuhrer’s part, but I think that his despondency at the foiling of all his plans and hopes and aspirations nurtured for so very long might have rendered him suicidal, knowing his mind as well as I did. Other causative factors might have been the announced intentions of his friend Josef Goebbels to take not only his own life but those of Frau Goebbels and all of his children, the deaths or desertions of so many men he had liked and trusted over the years and last, but far from least, the unhealthy influence of the Braun woman, who was at best a borderline manic-depressive personality and harbored suicidal tendencies almost constantly. She never was good for him, but he would hear no scintilla of her true nature from anyone, no matter how close or sincere.

“In 1975, I entered Germany on a tourist visa as an Uruguayan citizen, traveled on in slow, leisurely stages to Switzerland and drew upon my last untouched account. With these funds, I returned again to Germany and, through certain persons, was able to purchase a new identity as a citizen of the Federal Republic and a physician.

“Then, in 1980, I took advantage of the shortage of medical practitioners in the United States of America, emigrated and married an American-born woman of Germanic descent. Nurturing pleasant memories of my so-enjoyed and most comfortable captivity in Colorado, I moved there and set up a practice in an affluent suburb of Denver. It so happened that my wife and I were looking over investment property in Wyoming when the missiles were launched and Denver died.

“As I am certain that you recall, friend Milo, ‘chaotic’ is a very mild term for the two weeks that followed the War, and in the interests of simple safety for my wife if for no other reason, I decided to remain in our hotel suite in Casper rather than try to make it back to who knew what in my home area.

“Then those horrible, deadly plagues began, killing ninety-five or ninety-six out of every hundred who contracted them, and I, like every other person with even a soupcon of medical training or experience, was desperately needed in the overflowing hospitals and makeshift wards in commandeered buildings. My dear wife, Brigitte, had been a registered nurse when I met and wedded her, and she insisted on joining me in my labors despite the risk.

“The emergency brought us all together as equals—doctors, surgeons, nurses, osteopaths, chiropractors, dentists, medical technicians of all sorts, paramedicals, midwives, veterinarians, pharmacists, morticians, orderlies, even sitters and military veterans with antique medical-corps training. But those terribly contagious plagues quickly weeded out almost all of the volunteer staff despite the most stringent precautions, and the man or the woman working beside you in the morning might well be just another dying patient before the fall of that night. Poor Brigitte lasted through three weeks of work in that hellish charnel house, then she came down with a combination of the two worst, most incurably deadly varieties, and, seeing the inevitable, I stole enough of the proper drug to give her a quick, painless death, for she had been to me a very good and loving wife.

“Being what I am, of course, I neither sickened physically nor died. Although I grieved over the loss of my sweet Brigitte and missed her terribly for a while, I did recover in time and then saw for me and my talents a new and a pressing need. No leaders were left alive among the few pitiful survivors still rattling about in the almost empty city of Casper. Food stocks were perilously low, and no one seemed to know just what to do, how to go about the business of remaining alive. So I took over, took command, and won them all over to me with my abilities to so do.

“I organized the survivors, disciplined them, had certain of them do a thorough inventory of our remaining resources and supplies, then set up rationing of food and fuel for the remainder of that mild winter. With the spring thaw, those with any knowledge or experience of farming were set to preparing selected land for the harrowing, plowing and planting, while others were sent out into the surrounding countryside to bring back cattle, horses, sheep, swine, goats, domestic fowl, seeds, farming machinery and equipment and all of the thousand-and-one other necessities.

“Knowing that spoilers would make an appearance, soon or late, I collected firearms and ammunition, trained my people in the proper use of them and waited for the inevitable worst. When it came, each time it came, we drove them back with heavy losses and mounted counterattacks which extirpated their entire strengths, or as good as did so, then appropriated their arms and munitions and explosives to our own use to utilize against the next pack to descend upon us.

“After some years and for a number of reasons, I persuaded my folk to move south to Cheyenne, where we found a few more of the survivors already in residence, but sorely beset by spoilers and overjoyed to be reinforced by trained and well-armed fighters. I was chosen mayor—which should be read to mean ‘paramount leader’—and had served as such for a bit over four years when you rode in that day with your scouting expedition.

“Friend Milo, alte Kamerad, I had wanted so very much to tell you many of these things over the years we have been co-leaders of the folk. Had you proved less hostile in regard to my rational beliefs about breeding our folk along reasonable lines, I might have told you much of this that night by the camp-fire. Better yet, I might have awakened your clear, but now latent, telepathic powers and then have opened my memories to you, that you might more quickly have realized the truths, the validities of my beliefs, based as they are upon centuries of experience and of deep thought with which I occupied my mind through countless lonely nights of exile enforced by my differences from humans. “Now, with me departed, you will just have to awaken your mind yourself. I have left under this rather long letter copies of two books which will be of assistance in this endeavor. Also you will find in this locker formulae for the fullering and the hardening agents for felt, all derived of natural substances, all of these native to the prairie hereabouts; this must be my last gift to the folk once mine and now yours. I know that you will lead them well, probably as well as might I have led them, and possibly better.

“I must soon depart, old friend. This typewriter has surely all but drained the storage batteries and I can hear the morning shift of felters cursing even now at the necessity of mounting the bicycles and recharging them so early in the day, none of them knowing that I and my laboratory will no longer have need of that electricity.

“So, my work—such of it as you would allow—is done and I now make my exeunt, as it were. I am taking my Schnellig, of course, two spare mounts and two of the Bactrian camels to bear my yurt, gear, food and essentials, grain for the horses, et cetera; I believe that the folk and you owe me at least this much, friend Milo.

“I feel most certain that we two will meet again, one day, be it in a few hundred of years or in a millennium, but meet we will. As you will then, perforce, be an older, sadder, but much wiser man, perhaps we can then converse as true equals.

Your true friend,

Clarence Bookerman, M. D.

“Post scriptum: Guard well my sheafs of notes from my series of experiments, for contained within them are many other formulae upon which I stumbled. Included are formulae for the easy tanning of leather and furred pelts, the best materials for softening animal sinew (for use in fabricating bows, for instance), several really effective bonding agents all derived of natural, if not common, ingredients, a number of salves of antiseptic and/or anesthetic properties, some truly fast dyes, a procedure for rendering common cowhide leather almost as tough and impervious as metal, some analgesics, laxatives and a first-rate expectorant. Consider these to be bonus gifts to you and our folk.

Clarence”