The Domination

Chapter Six

LYON, PROVINCE OF BURGUNDIA

APRIL 1947

The car was not crowded, even with seven and an assortment of bags and parcels; the interior was open, folding metal seats in the rear and two bucket chairs at the front, a view through the front windows to the coffle of serfs huddled on the floor of the truck ahead. Marya crossed herself and waved to them as she climbed through the clutter to her seat, composing herself neatly out of long habit, feet and knees together, skirt folded about them and hands clasped in her lap. The car smelled of machine oil and leather, wickerwork and a stuffy heat that brought a prickle of sweat to her upper lip.

The driver was a thin-faced Frenchman in overalls, wearing a cap pulled down over his eyes and cuffs with a long chain looped through the steering wheel; the man beside him was uncuffed, with an automatic shotgun across his knees and a leather vest full of loops for the fat shells. A serf, European, a thin strong young man with a dark face and old-looking green eyes; a Jew, Marya thought, Polish or Lithuanian or from the Ukraine. She ventured a smile; he looked her up and down with cold disinterest and turned back to the front, his right hand stroking lightly across the receiver of his weapon.

The women sat in the rear, with the other serf: a big man, even sitting down with his kettle belly spilling into his lap; African-dark, wide-featured and wide-shouldered, the arms below his short-sleeved cotton shirt thick and corded with muscle. Grizzled tight-curled hair and muttonchop whiskers, shrewd black eyes with yellowed whites. A rifle was resting upright by his side. Not the T-6 assault rifles the Domination had used in the Eurasian War; this was a full-bore semiautomatic model, dark wood and blued steel and a look the nun recognized, of machinery that is old but lovingly cared for.

He smiled with strong square yellow teeth as they chuffed into motion, but he did not speak; there was a moment of backing and circling as the convoy lined up for the gate. The engine had the silence of automotive steam, but the heavy vehicle still quivered with the subliminal feeling of life, rocked slightly as a uniformed figure hopped up on the running board. A woman’s face leaned in the window, green military-style uniform and cloth-covered steel helmet; a Citizen officer of the Security Directorate’s internal-security troops—Order Police. Therese buried her face in her sister’s shoulder, and the other serfs covered their eyes and bowed. There was another rocking as she stepped down, a brief sound of boots on pavement.

Marya could hear a murmur of voices, then Tanya’s weary drawl: “No, Tetrarch, I don’t have clearance papers fo’ two armed serfs. I’m violatin’ the law and armin’ all my field hands. Didn’t we go through this all three hours ago? Or didn’t the duty officer log it?”

The nun raised her head and craned to see through one of the windows. The Security officer saluted and returned a file folder through the opened door of the other car. A lochos of green-uniformed troopers behind her, shaven-skulled and neck-tattooed; the Domination did not waste elite troops on that sort of duty. The Tetrarch shouted, and one swung up the barrier while two more threw their shoulders against the steel gate. It groaned open, and the light seemed to brighten as the cars accelerated smoothly and turned into the road outside.

Yasmin shivered and shook her shoulders. “Doan’ like that place,” she said. “An I sho’ doan’ like them chain-dogs. They look at you an’ they gotta impalin’ stake in they eyes.”

The middle-aged man beside her brought the rifle across his knees, slapped in a magazine and jacked the action. “Headhunters,” he said in agreement, turned and spat out the open window behind him. “Greencoats, tloshohene dogs; stay clear of ’em.” He looked up at the women across the body of the car, and grinned broadly. “Name’s Tom,” he said. “Late o’ th’ 15th Janissary, an’ father to this here uppity wench, fo’ mah sins. Listen to what-all she say, this time. Usually nohow good for anything but sassin’ and bed-wenchin’ with her betters.”

Marya nodded warily, with a shock of alarm, feeling Chantal stiffen beside her. Therese was paying no attention, eyes dreamy, humming under her breath. Better for her that way.

Janissary, Marya thought with distaste. Serf soldier. Volunteers—she could understand why many would choose such a way out of the dull drudge’s life of a Draka factory or plantation hand . . . though not the courage with which they fought. And they had a merited reputation for relentless brutality. She shivered inwardly. They would be confined with him for hours; they were bound and he was armed. Although . . . she glanced at Yasmin. Her father? And even a Janissary could hate the green-coated secret police troopers. Remember the publicans, she reminded herself. Roman tax collectors had not been well regarded in Judea in the Lord’s time on earth, either. Hate the sin, love the sinner.

She nodded in return, swiveling to watch the city go by. Much had changed in the six months of her imprisonment. Central Detention had been a fortress then, wire and firing trenches and dug-in armored vehicles; all that was gone, save for two concrete machine-gun bunkers beside each gate. The road outside the wall had been repaired, and the cleared fire zone beyond was being converted to a park by labor squads and construction machinery; piles of earth and sand, benches of brick and marble, fountains, pavements, a flatbed steamtruck loaded with young trees, springing up from burlap balls of root and earth. The city beyond was changing, too. There had been a fair amount of street fighting when Lyon fell two years ago; more damage after the surrender, when the Domination turned its troops loose for a three-day sack that killed more than the artillery and air bombardments.

Marya forced that out of memory: days spent crouching thigh-deep in a sewer, furnace-hot air roaring overhead as the buildings burned, and the fever the filthy water brought . . . No, consider what this meant. Less Resistance activity, obviously; that was bad, very bad that it should happen so quickly.

Now the ruined buildings and rubble were mostly gone, cleared gaps where they had been and new structures going up, buildings in the low-slung gaudily-decorated Draka style. There were more Citizens walking on the streets or driving little four-wheel runabouts, many in civilian dress; armed, but from what she had heard, Draka always were, even in their homelands. The native French were less numerous than she remembered, fewer of them in rags, more in gray issue overalls or the sort of warm, drab outfit she had been given in the serf dealer’s rooms. That might account for much; it had been years since rations were enough to still hunger, even to sustain health.

The man’s voice broke in on her thoughts. “Not a bad-lookin’ town, pity I’s too ol’ an’ useless to git in on this here war, git me some lootin’.”

“Oh, Poppa,” Yasmin said in resigned exasperation. “That ain’t nohow polite, these folks is from around hereabouts.”

She pulled up a wicker basket from under her seat and began to open it. “Who’s fo’ somethin’ to—” The ex-Janissary’s hand shot into the basket, came out with a sandwich made from a split loaf of French bread, pink ham and onions and peppers showed around the edges. “—eat,” Yasmin finished.

Marya had absorbed the byplay in silence. The food brought an involuntary spurt of saliva to her mouth, and she could feel her ex-cellmates stirring beside her. Yasmin carefully tucked a linen napkin into the high collar of her silk jacket and began unloading the basket; sandwiches and slices of thick crusty bread with real butter, tart cheese, olives and tomatoes, sugar-dusted biscuits and real fruit, a thermos of coffee and a bottle of the violet-scented wine of Bourgueil. The dark girl coaxed a peach into Therese’s hand, laughing at the little sound of pleasure she made as she bit; they were a country-orchard variety, small, tart and intensely flavored. Chantal put a hand on her sister’s shoulder and leaned back into the padded wall of the vehicle.

“You are a soldier, sir?” she asked slowly in her careful English. “Or do you also belong to the von Shrakenbergs?”

Marya could read the expression of polite interest; Chantal was Gathering Intelligence, in the recesses of her own mind. Carefully, carefully, she thought; but it was a sign of something more than rage born of despair, at least. You could come to know someone well, after four months together in a crowded cell. A wave of pity overtook her; at least her own faith was not so tied to the fortunes of war. God promised no victories over material enemies, His Kingdom was not of this fallen earth . . . but poor Chantal had given her heart to a prophet who promised a tangible paradise. The Marxist heresy was sinful and godless, but the Frenchwoman’s belief had been deep and sincere, rooted in love of the poor whom Christ also had held dear, her hatred a hatred of injustice as well of the rich.

Be cautious, my friend. It was ironic, here a Pole was being the calculating and rational one, cautioning a Frenchwoman against romantic gestures . . .

“Doan’ need to ‘sir’ me,” the man replied, his voice a slow deep rumble. “Yaz ’n no. I’s Janissary. Born on Oakenwald, that Mistis Tanya’s home, down in th’ Old Territories, way south. I go fo’ Janissary back in, Allah, that be 1911, ’12. Masta Everard, Tanya’s pa, he officer in mah legion, th’ 15th.”

He flipped the rifle up, holding it out by the barrel to show a small ivory inset near the buttplate: the head of a hyena, biting down on a human thighbone.

“We the Devil Dogs, th’ bone-makers,” he said proudly. “This here mah original piece; fight all through th’ Great War, beatin’ the ragheads; Syria, Persia, Bulgaria. Aftah that, we’se in The Stan.” He paused at his audience’s blank looks. “Afghanistan. Hoo, deedy; we make our bones heah, sho’ly did.” His smile slid away. “Left plenty bones, too. Damn few come out what went in, damn few.” More softly: “Damn few, sho’ly.”

“Well,” he continued brightly. “That where I loses th’ foot.” He shifted his right leg, knocked it against a strut with a hollow sound. “Step onna land mine, ’n lemme tell yaz—”

“Oh, Poppa, not more of you war stories,” Yasmin broke in, rolling her eyes and turning to the others. “They disgustin’.”

The man grinned slyly and glanced sidelong at his daughter: “Hell, jes’ losin’ a foot not so bad. I’s rememberin’ a sergeant, supply sergeant that was, ragheads caught him, and we found him with his—”

“Poppa!”

He laughed again, and reached out one huge hand to stroke the knuckles gently down her cheek. “Alright, sweetlin’, jes’ jokin’.”

“So,” he continued, taking a meditative bite of the sandwich, “coulda took retirement, laak a twenty-year man. Didn’ seem mucha life fo’ a young man, though. Done seen too many old Janissary, nothin’ to do but drink an’ knife each othah over cards ’n whores down at the caserne. You can go home, though. Janissary always belong to th’ State, cain’t never be sold, or whupped ’cept by our own officer, but if’n you volunteer, they rent you back. As guard, foreman, like that-there. Masta Everard, he settin’ up Evendim, that his place in Syria; he younger son, ’n Masta Karl gettin’ Oakenwald. I go with Masta Everard; he know me, y’see?

“I’s settle down nice; get me a wench, Fatima.” An affectionate sadness. “She got no sense, but she a good woman, I doan’ want no other while she ’live. She die birthin’ back befo’ this new war come; mah boys gone fo’ Janissary too—they in th’ 15th now too, out east fightin’ down the slope-eyes, someplace called Korea. Yasmin heah mah las’ chile, ’n she go with Mistis Tanya, so I comes too. You Frenchies got lotsa book learnin’ but you needs us t’learn the Draka. Some folks here is pretty sensible—got me a nice little widow wench ’n cottage—others altogethah useless ’n triflin’.”

He shifted his grip on the rifle, holding the heavy weapon by the stock and prodding the driver lightly in the back of the neck. “Like Jacques here, I’s got mah eye on you, boy. Doan’ forget it.” The rough voice went cold for a moment, and then he flicked the rifle upright beside him and relaxed once more. “Issac—th’ skinny boy with th’ bird gun—he a smart one. Doan’ talk much, though.”

“Like you, Poppa,” Yasmin said dryly as she repacked the basket, handing him a bottle of dark German beer. Her father snorted amusement, flicked the cap off with one horn-hard thumb and turned sideways to watch the passing scene, the rifle cradled in the crook of his arm.

“I,” the girl continued, fastidiously wiping her hands on her napkin and then using it to clean Therese’s chin, “am second indoor servant.”

It was said with a slight unconscious preening; the ex-Janissary’s glance was fond and proud. Even slaves must have their accomplishments, Marya thought. Then: be careful, this is real power, here and now.

“If’n you got any questions, come right to me.” She sighed and tossed back the loose black mane of hair. “Sometimes doan’ know rightly how to start, with you Frenchies. Doan’ sass back; doan’ sulk or disobey. There’s ways ’n ways of gettin’ around the Mastahs, but goin’ straight up agin’ they will ain’t accomplishin’ nothin’ but grief fo’ us all. Remembah all us serfs is family; talk as y’wants, do as y’wants if’n yous the only one to suffer, but doan’ do anythin’ what gets us all traced up to the whuppin’ post or worse. If’n you finds someone’s doin’ a crazy, like tryin’ to hide weapons or sneak off to the bushmen, come tell me an’ we’ll decide amongst ouahselfs what to do.”

Yasmin smiled and nodded toward the cuffs. “Soon’s we gets back to Chateau Retour”—she pronounced the French words carefully—“we’ll get those-there off. The Big House doan’ cuff or hobble on the plantation, ’cept as a punishment. Now,” she continued briskly, “the overseers, Masta Donaldson, Mistis Wentworth”—she shrugged—“they overseers, whats cain I say? Not too bad, ’n the Mastah ’n Mistis keep a close eye on ’em. Mistis Tanya, she downright easy going fo’ a Draka, long as you doan’ cross her. Masta Edward, her man, he pretty much the same‘cept when his head painin’ him.”

One brown finger tapped an eye. “He gets a head wound in th’ War; lose an eye, headaches real bad sometimes; gets pretty testy when one comin’ on, you sees it, stay outta his way. Other times, doan’ talk to y’much.” She giggled. “Not so bad in bed, either, if’n y’likes it, not rough, anyhow, ’cept sometimes he finish too quick, but you be findin’ out that fo’ youselfs.” An ironic eye at their flinch. “Call it work, call it play, doan’ make no nevah-mind to them, dearies. Honest, the things you new-caught get upsets about, it beyond me.”

Chantal cleared her throat, spoke in genuine wonderment: “Are . . . you content with your life, then?”

There was silence for a moment, a thrumming as the car swung onto the bridge over the Rhone. Light flickered by as they passed through the shadow of the girders, winked back from the surface of the river below; Yasmin wound down a window, and the stream of wet silt-smelling air poured in, ruffling the black curls around her face. She brushed them back with one hand, craning her neck to see a train of coal barges passing below.

“Pretty river,” she said quietly, turning back to them. “You thinks there’s somethin’ wrong with lookin’ at it?” She paused, pursed her lips in thought. “My life? It the only life I’s got, or is goin’ get; if’n I ain’t content with it, then I ain’t goin’ get much contentment, eh?”

A spread of the hands. “Ain’t sayin’ as everythin’s the way I’d put it, were I God, but that-there position’s filled, last time I looks. Plenty good things in my life; pretty things”—she touched the buttons of her jacket—“ ‘joyable things, like m’work, which I’s good at an’ getting better, my music”—she touched the case of her mandolin—“ ‘n my fam’ly an’ friends. Someday I’s have children of my own, maybe-so a steady man. If’n I doan’ take no pleasure from all that-there, who it hurt? Me, that who. Somebody else hurt you, that fate; hurt youself, that plain ignorant; troubles enough in anyone’s life, withouten you go courtin’ ’em. I ain’t hongry, ain’t sickenin’ to die, never been whopped; plenty folks worse off than me, I saves my pity fo’ them, doan’ waste it on myself.

“Look,” she continued gently, “I knows y’all not born an’ raised to this.” She touched her identity tattoo. “But this-here the only life you has to live, likewise same’s me. I’s not sayin’ nothin’ bad doan’ happen, but”—she gestured helplessly, as if trying to pluck words out of the air—“not everythin’ is bad, unless you makes it so. The Draka?” She shrugged. “They’s like the weather, they’s jus’ there. I’s known folks, rather cut off they foot than ’commodate to the mastahs; they-all end up churnin’ they guts with hatin’. Hate enough, it make go’ hateful; it jus’ ain’t worth the trouble, to my way a’ thinkin’.”

Earnestly: “You sees, the Draka can make you obey, but they can’t make you miserable. Well,” she amended, “not unless they sets out to, which the ones which owns us doan’, speakin’ general-like.” A tap on the head. “They orders, but we can say what goes on in here, eh? I’s do my work, takes the days one at a time, doan’ hurt nobody, helps those I can; when I’s got to do somethin’ I doan’ like, I does it an’ puts it outa my mind, soon’s I can.”

She smiled, trailing a hand out into the airstream. “Yous looks like sensible wenches, y’all will learn.”

For a moment Marya’s gaze touched Chantal’s, and they knew a rare moment of perfect agreement; an understanding so complete it was almost telepathy—Never.

* * *

“Beads of sweat glisten—

Ai!

In the undergroun’ lights—

Wo-hum

Where a million lifetimes go—

Wo-hum

All our lives gone,

Wo-hum

Lost down the mineshafts . . .

The car lurched and slowed, and Marya jolted out of a dreamy semisleep; the day had turned warm, and she and the Lefarge sisters had dozed, lulled by the comfort and food and even a single glass of wine, after so long without. And the music, strange quiet folksongs in Yasmin’s fine husky contralto, rhythmic minor-key laments. Odd how sad music can make you happy, she thought, stretching and rubbing at her eyes. She looked up, her ears ringing as the rush of air gave way to a pinging silence.

Wind blew through the opened windows, and the sound of earth-moving equipment, clanks and the sharp chuff of steam pistons, a turbine hum and the burbling growl of a heavy internal-combustion engine. The cars had halted before a roadblock, a swinging-pole barrier set across the two-lane road, a pair of armored cars flanked it, light four-wheeled models with twin machine guns in hexagonal turrets. There was a fence along their left, running down the eastern flank of the road, steel mesh on thick reinforced concrete posts three meters high; razor wire on top, and thin bare copper threads held away from it by insulated supports. Electrified, then.

And signs wired onto the mesh: prohibited area, entry forbidden on pain of death.

Marya glanced the other way, south and east to the direction they had come. That was where the activity was, broad weed-grown fields littered with wrecked and rusted war machines; German models, Panzergrenadier half-tracks and Leopard tanks with their long 88mm guns swiveled every direction in silent futility. Broken, peeled open like fruit by the explosions that had wrecked them, still blackened by the dark oily soot of burnt motor-fuel; armor crinkled around the narrow entry-holes of the penetrator-rods, lighter vehicles like soup-cans stamped on by cleated boots.

Workers were swarming over them, cutting torches laying bright trails of sparks; others were winching the carcasses onto flatbed trucks. A recovery vehicle was dragging the most difficult cases out, the ones whose weight had half-buried them in the light volcanic soil. The turretless tank bellowed, its broad tracks raking stones and dry-smelling dust into the air, the hook dangling from the jib of the crane on its deck shaking; black fumes quivered from the slotted exhaust louvres, and she could see the bare head of the driver twisting in the hatchway as he rocked the treads. Elsewhere gangs ripped out vegetation, leveled and pounded earth, spread crushed rock.

The nun lifted her eyes. They were in a high plain bordered by hills, shaggy fields and copses of trees bright-green with the late spring, the Auvergne mountains beyond blue and hazy in the distance. A glint of metal over them, approaching. It swelled into a circle, then a shape; long slender squared-off wings, a bulbous nose compartment that was all curved transparent panels save for the metal supports of the pilot’s seat and the console, a pusher-prop engine in a tubular cowl slung between the twin booms of the tail. It passed overhead; ghost-silent, wheeled and returned: observation plane, muffled engine. Slots and flaps opened on the wings as the undercarriage came down. The little aircraft slid down at an angle, as if hitched to an invisible rope, bounced lightly and rolled to a stop ten meters from contact on a finished section of the landing platform.

Marya dragged her attention back to the road outside, her owner was there, stretching and rubbing her back and talking to an officer as they strolled back from the lead car.

“ . . . better than ’copters for scouting,” the man was saying. Mottled camouflage uniform, black-edged rank badges, paratrooper wings. Citizen Force, of course, the elite military, and the airmobile arm were picked volunteers within the Citizen Force. Marya looked west, toward the area behind the fence. That would be the town of Le Puy, and there were rumors of what had been done there, during the war and since. Atomics. She shivered, and listened.

“Doan’ have anywhere near enough landing grounds,” he continued. “Everythin’ short, as usual; just got things under control out east and they move us back.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, towards the fence and the minefields behind it. “We’re refitting after China, overseein’ this here construction work fo’ our permanent base, and doin’ antipartisan work in the hills, and watchin’ that.”

Tanya nodded thoughtfully, looked at the wrecked war machines. “The Guard went down from Paris to Tours, but some of my friends were through here; the Fritz held hard.” She shrugged. “Well, not exactly the Fritz; by ’45 it was all odds and sods. Spaniards, these were, if’n I remember. Chewed up two Janissary units, and held the VI Cartago fo’ three days; tryin’ to keep us off until their atomics got goin’.” A shudder. “Wouldn’t that have been jus’ lovely.”

The airborne officer nodded, watching the observation plane. The transparent egg had folded open, and a fuel cart had pulled up beside the three-wheeled runabout that was unloading the cameras.

“Natural place fo’ it,” he added. “Hydro power, lots of water, remote, not too far from their uranium mines; that’s why Tech Section took it over: even damaged, the equipment was useful.” He grimaced. “Wotan’s spear, I’s glad they didn’t blow the reactor.”

“Sho’ly am myself,” Tanya said. “Praise be to Hitler’s ghost; even after the little bastard died—when was that?”

“December of ’42; I’s in hospital then.”

Tanya nodded. “Poland, myself . . . anyways, his memory kept the other Europeans from unitin’ against us until it was too late. Even as it was, we used too many of the atomics breakin’ through into Spain. I considered settlin’ in Rosillon, down near the Pyrenees, but on second thoughts, no. Not that I doubt Tech Sec’s infallible judgment ’bout it bein’ safe, but I wanted to stay as far upwind of that hell garbage as possible.”

The officer spread his hands. “It was a long war, we-all was tired, everybody wanted to get it over an’ go home.” He looked into the rear car; Marya averted her eyes, but the man’s gaze was on Tom’s rifle. “By Frey’s cock, a T-5! Couldn’t you get him a Holbars?” He slapped the T-6 assault rifle slung across his chest.

“I prefers whut I’s trained on, mastah,” Tom rumbled respectfully.

Tanya snuffled laughter. “Tom’s bein’ polite; s’far as he’s concerned, a T-6 is a ‘girl-gun.’ He’s damned good with that old big-bore monster, though. Hell, we conquered half of Asia with them; a weapon’s never obsolete if’n it’ll kill someone.” She extended a hand. “Glad to have your assurance the route’s safe,” she concluded.

He gripped hers. “Pretty well,” he answered. “There may be a few bushmen left, but we’ve been huntin’ hard.” A sigh. “Most of this mountain country was swept clear by Security—plan is to put it all back into forest—but I wish they’d get the cultivated portions settled an’ modernized; hard to keep these little peasant farms from slippin’ supplies an’ information to the holdouts.”

Tanya shrugged. “There’s only so many of us, Cohortarch, an’ we can’t all be Landholders.” She patted her stomach. “Take a generation or three to get it all covered.”

“Oh, sweet Mother of God, let it be food,” the guerrilla whispered, flexing his fingers on the grip of the machine gun. The muzzle trembled, shaking the screen of leaves and blurring the view of the winding road in the gorge below; the soft whisper of wheels and engines echoed, but the vehicles were still hidden by the hill shoulder to the left.

“Shut up,” his partner hissed savagely, but his mouth filled at the thought. He adjusted the ammunition belt with trembling hands. German ammunition, 7.92mm; there was little of it left, little of anything. He could smell the new-bread scent of starvation on both of them, under the rankness of unwashed bodies and the sap-green of crushed leaves.

“Shut up,” he said again, wiping his hand across his mouth, and wincing as it jarred one of his few remaining teeth. The belt was lying smooth, ready to feed; his rifle was by his hand, and the single precious stick grenade.

“Shut up,” he repeated. The enemy had stopped convoying all vehicles through the Massif Central a month ago, while the maquis were hiding in their winter caves; there were only a dozen men left in their unit, but that should be enough. One of the survivors from Denard’s group had told of the single truck they took two months ago. Cans of food, ammunition, medicines. “Of course they will have food.”

If nothing else, meat.

The gorge was drowsy with the afternoon heat as the convoy dropped through, down from the plateau into the winding valley the Loire had carved through basalt and limestone. The road was rough, only sketchily repaired; the underbrush had been cut and burned back twenty meters upslope and down, but the angles above the way were steep enough that greenery overhung them as often as not. Young and turbulent with spring, the river bawled and tumbled below them to the left. At two hundred meters Marya could still hear the deep-toned rumble as the water poured oil-smooth over curves and then leapt in manes of white froth from the sharp rocks. It sent drafts of coolness buffeting up from the river surface, the smell of wet rock and silt.

Ahead of her Issac’s head was bent over a portable chess set, carved wood, with peg holes for the pieces. He moved, slipped the knight he had taken into the inside of the box, snapped it closed and turned to hand it to Tom. He was stretched over the back of his seat when she heard the sound.

Crack. Familiar: rifle bullet. A starred hole in the window ahead. The Jew pitched forward as if slammed by an invisible giant’s hand, the thin face liquid with shock and only inches from hers, the chess set dropping from fingers that spasmed open in reflex. He bounced back, and she could see the dark welling crater of the exit wound in his shoulder. Then he slumped between the two seats, left hand pawing feebly at the wound. Blood welled between his fingers, bright primary red in the dusty sunlight. Marya felt herself darting forward, braced her hands under the Jew’s armpits, heaved to haul him back into the body of the car. The smell of blood was in her nose and mouth, raw salt and iodine, like the scent of the sea.

He stuck briefly as the shotgun caught in the seat, then slid free. The cab was full of noise and confusion as the driver wrestled with the wheel; the car slid out toward the ravine, turned, skidded sideways with its length perpendicular to the road. The nun’s hands were moving automatically, ripping at the wounded man’s clothes for pads to block the holes, shifting him to lie flat and applying pressure. She could feel the vehicle sway, pause sickeningly on three wheels, jounce back down on all six and give a brief spurt of forward motion; then they clanged into the boulders on the hillside verge of the road.

Marya lurched, spreading her knees and fighting to keep position beside her patient. One hand was beneath his shoulder, spread flat with the palm up; her other bore down on the exit wound. Boxes and wicker crates swayed about her, buffeted and bruised her. Her fingers grew slippery.

Plasma, she thought. Clamps, stitching, sulfa powder. More plasma, whole-blood typing, transfusion. Sterile gauze. The techniques she had been trained for, before the War as a nurse’s aide. In the long years since by experience, in true hospitals and tented field-medic camps, hundreds of hours of observation and reading and the sort of personal instruction harried doctors could give, enough to make her an M.D. of sorts herself. Now all she had was the knowledge and her hands and the memory of too many dying as she tried to help.

Not this one, she thought. The flow of blood was slowing; skin gray-tinged but not clammy or cold, unconscious or semiconscious, rapid shallow breathing beginning to slow . . . and the blood was tapering off, praise to the Mother of God and His Son and all the saints, not nearly enough lost to kill if shock didn’t take him off, but she didn’t dare move or the hemorrhaging would start again . . .

Sweat rolled into her eyes. Another rifle shot, and something pinged off metal. She looked left, toward the rear of the car; Chantal crouched, her fingers white on the lip of the window, her head craning to scan up the cliff face above them. Therese on the floor, crying again. Crouched over her protectively was Yasmin, cradling the French girl’s head. Tom also at a window, the rifle held easily in one hand below the metal body of the car, binoculars to his eyes. They moved in tiny, precise movements along the slope outside, rock and scrub oak. A ripple of automatic-weapons fire, machine gun; she recognized a German MG38, an experienced gunner tapping off short bursts. Then Draka assault rifles, and the savage hammer of the 15mm twin-barrel on the lead car, echoing around the curve of road that hid it.

A click. She turned her head, looked toward the driver’s seat. The driver, Jacques, had not spoken half a dozen words that whole day. Now he lay twisted across the seat, one arm through the wheel to give the other room; the chain stretched taut between his wrists, and she could see blood beneath the cuffs. His right hand reached the shotgun and held it between the bucket seats, pointing back into the cab. Marya’s vision was suddenly very clear, the blued steel muzzle of the gun wavering uncertainly, fear-sweat and desperate tension on Jacques’s face as it craned over his shoulder in the unnatural posture his bonds and position forced.

“Out of the way, Sister,” he hissed. “Let me get a shot at the Janissary, that is the maquis out there, the Resistance, move, please.”

The moment stretched as she felt the slowing ooze of blood past her fingers, as her mind sketched the narrow space behind her. If she flung herself forward and down she might be out of the cone of fire; the muzzle of the shotgun was only a hand’s breadth from her face. Then the wounded boy would die, of course. The shotgun would empty its six-round magazine as quickly as Jacques could squeeze the trigger, and recoil would slam the barrel back and forth in his awkward grip, would fill the rear of the cab with the heavy mankiller double-buckshot rounds. Therese huddled wide-eyed on the floor, Yasmin stroking her hair with her body between the French girl and unknown gunmen, Chantal.

And if Marya did not move, and Jacques fired, the first round would tear off her face.

The nun kept her eyes on the driver’s as she straightened and leaned forward, as far forward as she could without relaxing her hands on Issac. The cold metal of the gun muzzle millimeters from her throat, she could feel the skin crinkled into gooseflesh at the wind of its passing.

“Do what you must, my son,” she said. Her mouth was very dry, her tongue felt coarse, like soft sandpaper. She began to shape the prayers.

“Please—” Jacques screamed.

A blur passed her eyes and a clang of metal on metal; the buttplate of Tom’s rifle, lashing down on the barrel of the shotgun. Jacques screamed again, in pain this time as the trigger guard dislocated his finger. The shotgun fired once, into a wicker crate full of some dense-packed cloth that absorbed sound and shot both. Marya looked back; saw Tom raise the rifle again, held like a spear at the balance point above the magazine, and all his teeth were showing in a grin that had nothing to do with laughter. Chantal was reaching for him, until Yasmin snatched the chain between the Frenchwoman’s wrists and braced a foot against the seat.

“You stop that, now,” she snapped. The other woman reared back, struggling and shouting; Yasmin straightened her leg and pulled with all her strength, and Chantal went to the floor with a squawk and a flurry of limbs. “Damn you hide, wench, I’s savin’ your worthless life.” The serf buried both hands in the other woman’s hair, gripped tight and bounced her head on the floor with a hollow booming sound. And turned to her father:

“Doan’ kill him, Poppa!”

The rifle stayed poised, but something flickered out in the black eyes. A flat hardness, a total intensity of focus; his attention switched to the nun for an instant.

“Please,” she said.

He nodded at her, a brief jerk of the head. “Owes yaz one,” he said. “Now duck.” The rifle flashed past her ear, to where Jacques lay cradling his wounded hand and moaning, between the front seats. The butt cracked down on the back of his skull and he slumped.

“He woan’ die,” Tom said grimly. “May wish to, ’fore I’s through with him.” His eyes were back on the road outside; one hand stroked Yasmin’s hair. “Yous too soft-hearted for y’own good, girl. I’s promised you momma to look after you . . . ” For a moment his voice softened, speaking to a memory: “I is very sorry, Fatima . . . ”

The fire from the lead car had died down to an occasional burst, less loud than the screams and pleas and moaning of the coffle chained to the truck in the middle of the convoy. Tom scanned the slope again and laid the binoculars down carefully; he twisted to face the road behind the car and the cliff face above.

“They not shootin’ much, pro’bly short of ammo,” he said conversationally, half to himself. “Just tryin’ to pin the lead car, then . . . haaa, here they comes.” Marya could see the huge brown hands close more tightly on the smooth wood of the stock. “Everybody shuts up, hear?”

Yasmin crawled to the nun, rummaged under the driver’s seat for the aid box; Marya took the bandages and ointment thankfully, and for moments there was only the work of her hands. Applying the bandages, gauze pads, tape to immobilize the arm, it would do for now. Then the tip of a shadow fell across the window, and she looked up from the wounded man.

Two men stood in the road behind them, armed with Mauser carbines. Wild, bearded figures; their rags might once have been uniforms, but patches and caked mud made it impossible to tell with any certainty. They came toward the car at a trot, spaced across the road and moving in the instinctive half-crouch of men who expect to come under fire. Closer, and she could see the marks of hardship on them; scabs, weeping open sores clumsily bandaged, the slack-skinned gauntness that comes when the body has drawn down all its reserves of fat and begun to cannibalize the muscle beneath. They were strung about with a motley collection of string-tied bundles and sacks; as they came closer, she could see the lice moving in their beards, catch a gagging whiff of their stink.

The guerrilla nearest the river went to one knee and began a nervous scan up and down the road; the other hailed the car.

“Who’s there? Answer, or I fire!”

Tom’s voice replied, in slow ungrammatical French: “Just us serfs, here. Who yaz an’ what you want?”

“This is the Auvergne command of the National Resistance,” the man said; he repeated it as if it were a spell, a mantra against reality. “Food; we need food, medicine, weapons, clothing.”

His comrade called from the verge of the road. “And ask them if there’s any wine.”

The first guerrilla turned to the other with a rebuke ready when Tom spoke.

“ ’Fraid there’s nothin’ for yaz here,” the ex-Janissary said mildly.

“What—why—”

“Because yaz gonna die, bushman!” The guerrilla was an experienced soldier, but the bull bellow still checked him for the first fraction of a second.

Tom’s rifle cleared the lower sill of the window with smooth economy; he fired from the hip, with the forestock braced against the metal of the windowframe. Even with the muzzle outside the car, the blasts were deafening. Marya’s ears rang as she watched the guerrilla slip backward, and the hot brass of an ejected cartridge case bounced unnoticed off her forearm. Tom had fired three shots at less than ten meters range; all of them had struck the guerrilla in a patch over his breastbone no larger than the palm of a hand. They were standard load, 7.5mm jacketed hollowpoint rounds that mushroomed inside a wound; a plate-sized area of the maquisard’s back fountained out in an eruption of bone chips, spine and shards of flesh. The corpse went back, eyes bulging with hydrostatic shock, then fell limply.

The other maquis fighter was up, turning and shouting. His first round went over the car with a vindictive crack, and then he threw himself flat behind a boulder to work the bolt of his carbine.

Tom fired twice more, and the bullets bounced off the sheltering rock in front of the guerrilla with sparking whines.

“Shee-it,” he muttered. “Gettin’ old an’ slow.” One broad hand dove into the satchel at his feet, came out with a stick grenade. A quick yank pulled the tab; he brought it up across his chest, counted three and threw it out the window in a flat spinning arc toward the rock. The guerrilla was up and running toward the river edge of the road before it landed. Tom’s first two rounds kicked up dust and stone shards at the running man’s heels, the third sledgehammered him over the verge of the road an instant before the grenade’s blast struck. The guerrilla’s rifle pinwheeled free as he toppled over the retaining wall, metal twinkling in the afternoon sun, then clattering on the rocks below.

“Shee-it,” Tom said again. “Three rounds, slow.” He reached up, pulled a lever and swung the roof hatch open, kicked a box over to give himself a platform to stand on. Head and shoulders out of the hatch, he turned to the cliff face above them. “You wenches stay down now, hear?”

Marya drew a long breath and wrenched her attention from the blocky torso filling the center of the car. Chantal was lying with her head in her hands, muttering; Therese lay beside her, eyes wide and frightened. The air smelled of burnt propellant and the sour sweat of fear; the nun started with nervous tension as Yasmin touched her arm.

“I am goin’ back to take care of the chile,” she whispered, jerking her head toward Therese. Marya nodded. The younger woman’s brown skin had gone muddy-pale around mouth and eyes, but there was no quaver in her voice. Yasmin hesitated for a moment, then squeezed the nun’s shoulder reassuringly.

“Doan’ worry,” she said in an obvious attempt to comfort. “Poppa woan’ let the bushmen get us.”

When the attack came, Tanya von Shrakenberg had been paging through the Landholder’s Gazette, mildly annoyed that the workstock breeding programs were still behind schedule.

Dammit, they should let us use tractors, at least temporarily, she thought. There were sound reasons for the limits on mechanization, both social and economic, but a little more flexibility . . .

The first burst tore into the thin metal of the car’s hood, ripping and dimpling the sheet steel; the second pinged and hammered at the thicker side panels. Instantly her mind snapped back three years, plantation-holder’s reflexes yielding to the instincts of a Guards tank commander. The driver had frozen, eyes round as circles and whipping back and forth; he was reliable enough to go unchained, being very fond of his wife and children, but prone to panic. The car was losing power, a swift hiss of high-pressure steam and a mushy slowing-down feeling, but there was a fall of flat rock only twenty meters ahead, right side by the cliff.

“The rocks!” she shouted, wrenching the wheel back and clouting him over the head to break the grip of fear. “Pull us in by the rocks.” That in French, it would penetrate better. Her hands were stripping the machine pistol out of its clamps over the dashboard, an elbow to pop out the window beside her and look up the tumbled face of the cliff. Halfway between a cliff and a very steep hill, yes, muzzle flashes—

The twin-barrel cut loose above her head in a continuous blast of noise, double streams of tracer in economical two-second bursts. The familiar bitter chemical stink of burnt propellant, and the sound of the 15mm rounds on stone, like thousands of ball-peen hammers on a boulder. Sparks and splinters and dust from the target, a ledge up near the summit; a bush falling, cut through. That would keep their heads down: the heavy rounds could chew through brick walls and cut down trees . . . The car lurched as it left the road, skidded in the gravel shoulder and fishtailed to a halt in the shadow of the rocks; they were two meters high, enough to cut the body of the car out of the guerrilla machine gun’s sight-picture.

Tanya pushed at the driver’s head. “Down, stay down,” she said, pulling the radio receiver from the dashboard and punching the send button. It was a powerful set, predialed to the Settler Emergency Network.

“Code one, code one: 10-7 von Shrakenberg, main road two kilometers north of Vorey, bushmen. Do you read, ovah.”

“This is 1st Airborne, Le Puy. Say again, 10-7?” A young voice, bored; from what the officer at the roadblock had told her, it had been months since there was any activity this close to the air-cavalry base. Ambush on a main road was inconceivable; she recognized the tone of one resisting information because it violated mental habit.

The sloppiness was intolerable. “Damn you, puppy, I’m bein’ shot at! Three-vehicle convoy, under fire from automatic weapons in the gorge three klicks south of Chamalieres. Ovah.”

“Ah . . . code seven, scramblin’, maintain tone-transmission fo’ location; ETA—” a pause, “16:10.”

Tanya glanced at her watch: ten minutes, quick work. “Good work, 1st. I’m stalled on a C-shaped curve, northbound. My car first, a truck right on the bend, other car out of sight to the rear. Steep slope to the river on my left, an’ a 80-degree forested cliff to my right. From the volume of fire, I’d judge one MG and possible six-twelve riflemen.”

“ ‘Rodge-dodge, A.K.”

“A.K.,” she acknowledged grimly, leaning out the window and firing a short burst one-handed over the rock outside, aiming off-hand toward the muzzle flashes that winked out of the sunlit bush. No practical chance of a hit, that was four hundred meters, but it would help keep their heads down.

“An’ hurry it. I’ve got two overseers, two armed serfs, a child an’ me; an’ I’m not up to much just now.”

She pressed a button. “Switchin’ to tracer.” The signal would broadcast steadily now, for the triangulator stations to produce a guide beam that the reaction-squad aircraft could ride.

She levered herself up and squeezed back between the seats into the open body of the car. Damn this belly, she thought. Gudrun was at the rear doors, craning eagerly to see with her knife in one hand; she yanked the girl back by the hem of her tunic.

“Gudrun!” she snapped, swiveling her around to where the terrified nurse was huddling in a corner with one of the French housegirls. “Protect the serfs, and stay out of the line of fire. That’s an order, understand?”

Damnation, she thought. I would run into the last holdouts in central France with Gudrun along. She pushed the anxiety down below consciousness; there was no time for it.

“Ogden,” she continued, turning to the overseer at the twin-barrel. “Can you get them?”

As if in reply, a fresh burst from the hillside machine gun hammered at them. It dimpled the roof panels behind her, where the rear and riverward flank of the car extended beyond the cover of the rocks.

Wasp-buzz sounds, and the unpleasant pink-tinnng of ricochets: rifle fire. She felt obscenely exposed in this unarmored soup can, after all the years in a Hond battletank, acutely conscious of the quickened infant beneath her heart.

“Na,” the overseer said. “Have to be dead lucky, Tanya. Bushmen got a nice firin’ slit between two boulders, an’ heavy cover. Best I can do is keep they heads down.”

“Shit.” Tanya looked over at Sarah, the other overseer; she knelt by the rear-door windows with her assault rifle at the ready, scanning the bush along the road with the x4 optical sight. That was where they would come, and soon, the maquisards would know as well as the Draka that a reaction force would be headed this way. There was a crackle of rifle shots, the slow banging of bolt-action carbines, a quick blast of semiauto fire, and a grenade from around the curve to the south, where the truck and the other car were stalled on the narrow road. The guerrillas might have assumed the rear of the convoy was soft meat, but Tom was teaching them otherwise.

“Right,” she continued. “Ogden, Sarah, get ready to bail out an’ tickle ’em. I’ll cover you on the twin. When the airborne come in, get back down. Fast.”

“A.K.,” Ogden said, stepping down from the meter height of welded-steel platform beneath the gun and pulling his own Holbars from its clip beside his seat.

Tanya replaced him, blinking in the bright vertical sunlight as she came head-and-shoulders out of the roof hatch. Her hands went to the molded twin spade grips of the weapon, warm from the sun and Ogden’s skin. Infinitely familiar, steel and checked marula wood against her palms, thumbs falling home on the butterfly pressure trigger. The twin-barrel was swivel-mounted on a ring that surrounded the hatch; she braced her elbows, laid the cross-wires of the sight on the bullet-scarred patch halfway up the cliff, and waited. There was no way they could get out of there without being seen. A very good spot for covering the road, but just a little too low to rake the right-hand verge where the car had run in . . . Yes, right there, a V-shaped slit between the big round grayish rock and the triangular pink one—

“And a very good thing they don’t have a mortar,” she muttered to herself. The black flared muzzle of the enemy machine gun slipped through the notch, stick-tiny at four hundred meters.

“Now!” she shouted, and thrust down on the ridged steel of the trigger. The massive weapon shuddered in her hands, a vibration that pounded into her shoulders and hummed tight-clenched teeth together; it was strongly braced, but the yoke and pin that held it to the ring mount could not completely absorb the recoil. Blasting noise and twin streams of tracer arching away from the muzzles, solid light as they left, seeming to slow and float as sparks before the heavy 15mm rounds dropped home. Spent brass tinkled down across her stomach and into the car, hot enough to sting through the thin fabric of her shirt. Short bursts, push wait push. The air over the fluted steel barrels was already quivering with heat; she could feel it on her forearms and face.

Above her the rocks dissolved behind a cloud of dust and chips and sparks. She raked across the top of the two boulders that hid the machine gun, to discourage any idea of standing up and firing down from the hip, then began working the edges of the opening. It was just possible she might be able to bounce a few rounds in, and it did not take many of the thumb-sized slugs to put a machine-gun crew out of action.

Behind her the rear doors of the car slammed open. From the corner of her eye she could see Ogden’s squat form catapult out and dive into the roadside bush, a blur of black leather and metal. Sarah followed, a running leap from the back of the passenger compartment that took her three bodylengths out into the road, half the distance to the center truck. Then she backflipped, once, twice, dropped flat behind the truck and spider-crawled beneath it on palms and toes, a quick scuttling movement. A second’s pause, and then the rapid brrrt-brrrt of a Holbars set for three-round bursts.

That will keep their heads down, she thought, and depressed the muzzles for an instant to rake a burst across the cliff face below the machine-gun nest. Not too far below, Ogden would be hunting there . . .

There was a sudden choked scream and a body catapulted from the scrub-covered slope five meters up; it flew through the air with arms and legs windmilling in an arc that ended in a crunching impact on the pavement. Broken, the guerilla lay for a moment and then began to crawl. His comrades in the bush-covered rock of the cliffside were firing at the center truck, trying to silence the automatic rifle beneath it. Bullets pocked the thin metal of the cab and ripped through the canvas tilt; the screaming of the chained serfs within was louder than the gunfire, and their scrambling rocked the vehicle on its springs.

“Come on, come on,” Tanya whispered fiercely as she walked another burst back up the hillside and across the two bullet-scarred boulders. This was not good, a blindsided firefight against odds. “Come on, you knights of the air.”

Chantal retched as she awoke, and Marya’s hand pressed her back to the floor of the car. The nun briskly pulled up an eyelid and checked the pupil. “No concussion. You were unconscious for a little; keep quiet and keep down.” In a whisper: “And there is nothing we can do except die to no purpose.”

Marya kept her eyes resolutely below the level of the windows, down among the tumbled bundles and baskets. It could not have been long since the ambush, the hot metal of the flashtube boiler was still clicking and pinging. Danger stretched time, drew the seconds out, it seemed like hours. The sensation had become familiar in the war years, but the long changelessness of Central Detention had dulled the memory. Blood pounded in her ears, so loud that for long moments, the thup-thup-thup outside seemed no more than her own heartbeat. Then Chantal dropped her hand from her eyes and looked up questioningly.

“What is that?” she asked. It grew louder, a steady multiple whapping with a rising mechanical whine beneath.

Tom answered, looking down from the roof hatch above them.

“Those-there newfangled helicopters,” he said, with satisfaction in his voice. “Not too soon, neither.”

Chantal and the nun exchanged glances and crawled cautiously to the outside windows, raising their eyes to the lower edge and peering south. A line of dots was visible through the long gash of the gorge, swelling as they watched. Six of them in staggered line abreast, under the whirling circles of their rotors. Closer, close enough to see the rounded boxy fuselages and long tail booms, then the gaping twin mouths of the turbine intakes. The noise grew, shrilling and pounding; the fire from the hillside increased, no careful conserving of ammunition now, a panic-stricken crackle.

The helicopters rose slightly, to perhaps four hundred meters above the level of the gorge. Marya peered upward, blinking. Their speed was apparent now, as they snapped by with the bright flicker of tracer stabbing out from their flanks. The nun could see the door gunners standing to the grips of their weapons, the troopers crouching behind. The face of the slope above the road erupted in dust and the cluttering whine of ricochets; Tom ducked down as gravel and twigs and branches pattered onto the roof of the car. Then the flight passed beyond the cliff edge, the sound of the rotors changing as they came in to land.

“Look.” Chantal tugged at her sleeve.

Marya turned west; two more aircraft were approaching from the other side of the river, not more than fifty meters apart. A different type, approaching slowly in a straight line toward the rock face above the road. Helicopters like the others, but slender rather than boxlike, with stub wings and droop noses. Long flat-paned canopies above the nose and she could see the figures of two crewmen in each, one sitting behind and above the other. Both craft had multibarreled Gatling cannon in small domed chin-turrets beneath their prows, and she could make out the pitted cones of rocket pods under their wings.

“Sharkmouth markings,” she whispered, mostly to herself. Gaping red-and-white grins painted on the metal, with clutching hands and screaming faces drawn between the teeth. At Chantal’s quick glance she continued: “Draka fighters and ground-attack aircraft have them.”

The gunboats halted over the middle of the Loire. The nun had seen a few helicopters before—both sides had been using them by the end of the War—but it still seemed somehow unnatural for objects to hang in the sky like that. She swallowed through a dry throat; in the cockpit of a helicopter one of the bulbous helmets moved and the Gatling beneath followed it, tracking with a blind, mechanical malevolence. The noise was overwhelming as the war machines hung above the water, the pulsing wind of the rotors thumping against the side of the car and raising a skidding ground-mist of dust, leaving circles of endless ripples on the surface of the river. A howling like wolves in torment echoed back and forth between the stony walls.

Above, on the cliff, the maquisard machine gun spat at the Draka helicopters. A burst sparked off the armor-plate nose of the left-hand vehicle; its neighbor turned slightly, corrected back.

“Down!” Marya cried, dragging the French girl with her as the first dragon-hiss and flash of rocket fire caught her eye. The flare of ten-round pods being ripple-fired stitched a line of smoke between the warcraft and the stone; and where the line met granite, the side of the cliff exploded. She was deafened and dazzled for a moment; the steel beneath her shook, and a section of the cliff face slid free onto the road. Rocks hammered down, starring the high-impact glass of the car and denting its metal; there was a fresh chorus of shrieks from the truck ahead as jagged fragments tore through the bullet-weakened canvas. Marya looked up through the windshield as another piece the size of a piano toppled away, hit a crag and split with a tock sound exactly like that of a pebble dropped on flagstone multiplied a thousand times.

One fragment bounced high, hung twirling at the apex of its curve, and dropped straight down to crush the truck’s engine compartment with a crang of parting metal. Thick distillate fuel spilled down from the ruptured tank, then caught from some edge of hot steel and burned with a sullen orange flicker and trickles of oily black smoke. The other half of the stone was pear-shaped, wobbling through the air toward the car and missing it by a handspan before bounding down the gorge. Silence fell, or so it seemed as the rockslide ended. Shots, screams, the roaring thutter of the gunboats’ engines as they soared by overhead with slow insolent grace . . . Then true silence as they landed and the fighting ceased.

Draka airborne troopers were dropping down the face of the cliff from rock to rock in an easy bounding scramble; she could hear them calling to each other, yipping hunting cries and laughter that sounded harsh and tinny to her battered ears. She looked at them and blinked the grit out of her watering eyes, turning to Issac and checking the bandages, hoping there would be no prisoners.

“We got about eight of them,” the Tetrarch said to Tanya. South along the road there was another hiss as the extinguisher sprayed foam on the smoking hood of the truck; the oily stink of burnt distillate and overheated metal was in the air, the universal scents of machine-age war.

The Tetrarch was Eva von Shrakenberg, a cousin, daughter of Tanya’s father’s eldest brother. A mild surprise, but their family was old, prominent, and had always produced more than its share of officers. The Draka were not a numerous people, the Landholders even less so; one was always running into familiar faces. Eva’s sister Ava was the twin tetrarchy’s senior decurion.

“Interrogation?” Tanya asked.

“Oh, we’ll keep one or two. Up to the headhunters, really.” A lochos of Order Police had flown in with the airborne troops.

They were walking back past the wrecked truck: Ogden and Sarah had unreeved the coffle’s common chain from the eyebolts and pulled the serfs out to sit in the vehicle’s shade. The Polish nun was working on the wounded, with the Airborne medic standing by. Tanya’s nose wrinkled at the familiar smell; the flies were there already, the gods alone knew where they all came from; there were even a few ravens circling overhead or perched waiting in the trees. Chains clanked as the serfs saw her and stirred.

“How many did we lose?” she asked the senior overseer.

Ogden looked up. He was leaning against the tailgate and honing a nick out of a long fighting knife, the ceramic whetstone going screet-screet on the steel. There was a nostalgic smile on his face; Ogden had been with her husband during the War, a reconnaissance commando.

“Three kilt daid,” he rasped in his nasal north-Angolan accent, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the shrouded bodies in the truck. “Two like to die. Woulda been mo’, but that tow-haired wench got ’em patched quick. Saved Issac’s ass, too.”

“Marya?” The nun looked from her work; she had a tourniquet around the man’s thigh, and a plasma drip in one arm. “We goin’ lose any more?”

Marya nodded toward a still figure. “That man, yes. Shattered spine, multiple perforations of the intestine, spleen and liver. He is in a coma. Even a good surgeon and a hospital could do nothing; I have given him morphine and prayed for him.

“This one—” She looked down. “The bullet entered above the hip and ran the length of the thighbone. Multiple compound fracture.” He was unconscious, and better so: blood oozed from the sodden trouser leg, and the exit wound above the knee was cratered, vivid red flesh, white fat, pink shards of bone. “He needs immediate hospital care, and even so I fear the leg must go.”

Tanya looked over to the Draka medic; he nodded. Ogden walked over, wiping the long clip-pointed knife on his leather-covered thigh; his jacket hung from one shoulder, and he tested the edge on one of the sparse reddish chest hairs that curled through the cotton mesh of his undershirt.

“That’s our plumber,” he said. “Not much use, a one-legged plumber. Kill him?”

The nun looked up sharply, her eyes going wide. Tanya looked at her for a moment, and then to the woman who sat cradling the man’s head in her lap, stroking his forehead with a slow regular movement that set her wrist shackles chiming. Young, under the cropped hair and gray prison pallor. There was blood on her hands. She must have clamped the leg herself; the wounded serf would have bled out otherwise.

“Votre Marie?” the Draka asked.

The woman looked up. “Oui, maîtresse,” she said. “My Marcel. He is a good man, my Marcel.” She blinked, forced a trembling smile. “He will work well for you, maîtresse. Always a good worker, Marcel; he never drank his wages, or fought or . . . his skill is in his hands, fix anything, I will help him—”

Tanya signed her to silence. “No,” she said to the overseer. “A plantation isn’t a prison mine, Ogden; you can’t kill ’em offhand like that.”

He shrugged. “You’re the Landholder.” His knife slid into the boot sheath. “Best Ah see to the lead car, might be fixable, anyhows.”

She turned to her cousin. “Favor, coz?”

The officer nodded. “Pas de problème, as they-uns say hereabouts.” She turned and whistled for a stretcher, and Tanya nodded to her other overseer.

“Unshackle me two bearers, here, Miss Wentworth.” To the woman beside the wounded man: “They’re taking him back to Le Puy; there’ll be doctors for him there, and a place on Chateau Retour if he lives.” A frown as Marya clung doubtfully. “If I was going to kill him, I’d say so; don’t push your luck, wench.”

Gudrun had come up while her mother and the others spoke; walking briskly, but pale even by a redhead’s standards. Tanya put a hand on her shoulder and steered her a little away. “Your first time under fire and you did right well, daughter.” She could feel the girl straighten pridefully into an adult’s stance, hand on hip, and gave her a quick squeeze around the shoulders.

“Pity about losing the serfs just after we bought ’em, Ma,” she said, returning the pressure with an arm about her mother’s waist.

“In more ways than one, younglin’.” At the girl’s frown she continued. “Gudrun . . . these are cattle, but they’re ours. Ours to use, an’ ours to guard; we domesticated them, an’ when you tame somethin’ you make it helpless. Like sheep, or dairy cows. Lettin’ the wolves at ’em is a failure of responsibility. You understand?”

She nodded slowly. “I think so, Ma . . . Suppose it’ll make it harder to tame them proper, if they don’t think we can protect them.”

“Good,” Tanya said. Well, something of that lecture on the Tool that Thinks sunk in, at least. “We want these to be good cattle, submissive, hard-workin’ an obedient even when they’re not bein’ watched. They have to fear us, but that isn’t enough. You have to make them depend on us; that’s one reason we make the world outside the plantation bounds so rough fo’ serfs. Reminds them, ‘Masterless serf, lost soul.’ ”

Gudrun smiled. “I know that one, Ma. Carlyle.” A laugh. “Why don’ we keep some of those-there bushmen around, then?”

Tanya joined the child’s chuckle for a moment. “We did, sweetlin’, back in the old days, in Africa. A few runnin’ wild in the woods or mountains . . . made for good huntin’, too. That’s too risky here, for a lot of reasons.” She looked up at the cliff face, spoke more softly, as much to herself as her daughter. “We’ll import leopards, later. Bring back the wolves, give the field hands reason to be afraid of the dark . . . dangerous. That’s the blood price of mastery, child; we take the freedom for ourselves, the wealth, the power, the pleasure, the leisure . . . we get the danger and the responsibility, too, all of it.”

The guerrilla prisoners came up then, stumbling along with their elbows tied roughly behind their backs, prodded forward by bayonets whose points were dripping dark. Gudrun wrinkled her nose at their stink; green-coated Security troopers slung their rifles and two gripped each maquisard.

“Phew, Ma. An’ they’re so ugly.”

“I’ve smelled ’most as bad, sweetlin’; sometimes there’s no time to wash, in the field.” A quick appraisal. “These look like they’ve been dyin’ by inches fo’ a while, too.”

A working party came out of the roadside scrub with poles over their shoulders and their bush-knives in hand. Tanya turned and clapped her hands for Yasmin, and the serf scuttled up with her head bowed, glancing nervously over her shoulder at the soldiers.

“Yasmin, take Gudrun and, hmm, what’s-her-name, the halfwit wench—Therese—an’ walk a ways up past my car. Ahh, on second thoughts, take Tom with you too. Don’t get out of Mister Donaldson’s sight, but don’t come back ’lessn you’re called. Understand?”

“Aw, Ma, why can’t I stay an’ watch?” Gudrun said with a trace of petulance. Tanya gripped her chin firmly and tilted the head up to meet her eyes.

“Because you’re too young. This is necessary; it’s also an ugly thing. It’s not for entertainment—that’s a sickness an’ I won’t tolerate it. Were it possible I’d kill them clean; so would you, I hope. Understood?”

“I reckon, Ma.” A glower at the prisoners. “But they tried to hurt you, Ma!”

“So they did; an’ you, sweetlin’, which is worse. But it’s ’neath us to hate them for it; we kill ’cause it’s needful, not for hate; that hurts you inside. Remember that . . . and scoot!”

Tanya walked over to the coffle. “Look at me, serfs,” she said, jerking her chin back at the airborne troopers and their prisoners. “That bushman offal tried to attack the Draka; they ended by attacking you. It’s always that way, we’ve seen it a thousand times. Now watch how we protect our own, and punish rebellion.”

The working party were hammering in the stakes by the side of the road, swinging their entrenching tools and wedging the bases with chips of rock. She could feel a shiver and murmur run through the seven maquisards, and turned to watch their faces. Fear, but not real belief, not yet; that was familiar, it was not easy to really believe that there would be no rescue, no reprieve. And these were brave men, to have remained starving in the mountains for . . . years, probably. A glance; the squad monitor was walking down the row of waist-high poles, kicking to check their set. He nodded, and the troopers began trimming the points, fresh-cut white wood oozing sap. Their task finished, the airborne soldiers scattered; some standing to watch the serf police at their work, others beginning the climb back to their vehicles.

One of the guerrillas shouted some sort of political slogan. The Security NCO finished wiping his bush knife, slid it over his shoulder into the sheath as he walked back to the man, grinning. A flicking back-fist blow smashed teeth and jaw with a sound like twigs crackling; the impact ran through the watching serfs with a ripple and a sound of breath like wind amid dead grass.

“This one wants to sing,” the monitor said. “Him first. Mboya. Scaragoglu.”

The two troopers lifted the man easily, each with a hand on shoulder and thigh, carried him out to the first length of sharpened wood. He began to fight then, kicking and twisting wildly; the serf policemen ignored his flailing and lifted him higher as they turned to face him in toward the road. Liquid feces stained his ragged trousers, and urine spread dark on their front. The sudden hard stink carried across the five meters of road, mixing incongruously with the smells of vegetation and river.

“Shit,” said the younger of the Order Police.

“Every time,” the other grunted, with a frown of effort. Shuffling their feet, they arranged the Frenchman carefully, spreading his legs over the point. “Raaht, let’s put a cork in him. Not too far.”

They pushed down. The scream came then, long and hoarse and bubbling. The monitor waited until it died down, replaced by a desperate grunt as the guerrilla’s feet scrabbled on tiptoe, moving in a splay-legged dance. He strained, trying to drag himself off the six inches of rough timber shoved up through his anus into his gut. Inevitable futility; the rock-tense muscles of his calves could only carry his weight for a few moments. He sank down on his heels, and the scream rose again to a wailing trill as the point went deeper inside. Then a series of tearing grunts; the sound of the wind was louder, and the noisy vomiting of one of the coffle.

Strolling, the monitor paced down the line of prisoners, tapping the knuckles of his right hand against his left. A block-built man with broad Slavic features, he was wearing warsaps, and the steel inserts of the fingerless gloves made a tink-tink sound. Then a thumb shot out to prod another guerrilla in the chest.

“You. C’mon, sweetheart, you’ve gotta date with the Turk.”

The troopers dragged him past Tanya; she could see that this one had gone limp, hear him sobbing with a bawling rasp. This one believed now, yes, knew that the dirty unspeakable impossible thing was happening to him.

Ugly indeed. That’s the point, she thought, watching the wide, staring eyes of the coffle. Nobody died well on the stake, or bravely. It had the horror of squalor, death robbed of all dignity, all possibility of honor.

There are so many of them, she thought. So few of us. A kick inside her womb; she put a hand to her belly and looked back at the row of stakes with a chilly satisfaction. “So, so, little one,” she whispered. There had been times in the War when she felt a detached sympathy for the men she killed. Not here, never here. This was home.

Another kick. “I’ll keep you safe, doan’ worry, child of my blood.” Tanya looked at the coffle once more, a sudden fierce anger curling the lips from her teeth, bristling the tiny hairs along her spine. Remember, ran through her. Remember, all of you, make this worth it. Remember this forever, tell your children and your children’s children. It was the ultimate argument. When you think submission is impossible, remember this. This is what raising your hand to one of the Race means.

The executions continued at a measured pace, until only two of the captured maquis were left. The monitor stood before them, tapping a finger on his chin; their eyes were wild, and they trembled in the strong hands that gripped them.

“Well, well. One for Abdul the Turk’s lovin’, one for the interrogators back in Le Puy.” He stretched the moment. “Yaz the one.”

His finger stretched out, slowly, to touch the man on the nose. The Frenchman’s head reared back, spittle running down his chin, until the touch. His companion was shaking with hysterical relief, giggling and weeping.

Then the first man slumped, boneless, as the serf policeman’s fingertip touched his face. Laughing, the monitor pushed back an eyelid.

“Allah, fainted,” he said, shaking his head. “Well, no point in takin’ a sleepin’ man to the Turk.” He turned to the other. “You luck’s out, sweetheart.”

Tanya ignored the last impalement, watching the two women she had bought in Lyon instead. Chantal was standing with her hands pressed over her face, the fingers white as they pressed into her forehead. Marya . . . Marya was glaring at the execution, face pale and rigid, eyes alight with . . . No, not hatred, the Draka judged. Anger. A huge and blazing fury, held under tight control, and the more furious for all that.

Her cousin touched her shoulder. “Your transport’s on its way,” she said, then followed Tanya’s gaze, blinked. “Got somethin’ interestin’, there.”

“Yes,” Tanya said. “But is it an interestin’ plow, or a landmine?” She sighed. “Ah, well, the work to its day.”