Mother of Demons Read online

  Battle language.

  Chapter 13

  The military training which Joseph and his lieutenants had reinstituted—indeed, taken far beyond the level achieved by Hector Quintero—was soon put to use.

  A scouting patrol reported the appearance, on the lower southern slope of the Chiton, of a small party of gukuy slavers. The identity of this party as slavers was confirmed by the Pilgrims of the Way (as the gukuy from the big valley called themselves), when they heard the scouts' report. The gukuy on the slope were bearing large manacle-like devices, identical to ones discovered on the bodies of the earlier group of invaders. The Pilgrims informed Joseph that these devices were employed exclusively by slavers seeking owoc. The devices had no military use whatsoever.

  Two platoons—Ludmilla's and Takashi's—set forth immediately to destroy the slaver party, with Joseph in overall command. Joseph chose those two platoons because Takashi's platoon had been experimenting with the use of shields, in addition to the light "sortabamboo" armor with which all the platoons were equipped. Joseph wanted to learn from practical experience whether the experiment would bear fruit. If so, he would arm all three platoons with shields. If not, Takashi's platoon would resume training with spears only.

  The slaver party had moved. It took the human warriors almost another day to find them. The slavers had apparently chosen to approach the mountain-top through one of the smaller canyons. (Joseph took note of the problem; thereafter scouting patrols were instructed to continue shadowing the enemy, sending back only one individual to report.)

  During the middle of that night, the humans surrounded the slaver camp on both sides of the canyon. Joseph thought that the slavers would not expect an attack directly down the slopes of the canyon, given the gukuy difficulty with steep terrain. (In this regard, he proved to be correct; and took note.) He also thought that by attacking in the middle of the night the humans would completely surprise the slavers. (In this regard, he proved to be wrong; and took note.)

  The attack did not surprise the slavers. At least, not in the sense that Joseph had intended. As soon as the first human warrior began moving down the slope, the inhumanly perceptive eyes of the gukuy camp guard spotted her. The guard instantly raised the alarm. By the time the first human reached the base of the canyon (within seconds), all of the gukuy slavers were roused and armed.

  Joseph was deeply impressed by the quick reactions of the gukuy; and took note. Later, in the course of discussions with the Pilgrims of the Way, he learned that the slavers' reactions had been unusually quick. The Pilgrims thought that these slavers had been exceptionally edgy—no doubt because they were fearful of Kiktu. He filed the information away; but ordered the platoons to increase their wind sprints and emphasized training in rapid movement over rough terrain.

  Although Joseph failed to achieve the surprise he had intended, the net effect was hardly any different. The gukuy simply stared in shock and amazement at the bizarre shapes flickering down the mountain sides toward them, at a speed they could barely comprehend. Six of the ten slavers were butchered before any of them so much as moved. The remaining four did not survive more than fifteen seconds. Only one of them put up any kind of effective resistance at all. She managed to inflict a minor wound on a boy's upper arm before his spear went into her brain.

  The boy was one of Ludmilla's warriors. A girl in Takashi's platoon was much more seriously injured. The injury resulted not so much from any skill on the part of her opponent, but from the fact that the large shield she was carrying had caused her to fall off balance when she reached the floor of the canyon. She was unable to move back quickly enough when the last surviving slaver almost accidentally flailed her leg. The slaver died immediately thereafter from three spear thrusts. But the girl's leg was horribly mangled. So horribly, in fact, that she limped for the rest of her life and was unable to remain in the platoon.

  (A fact which upset her deeply, until Joseph appointed her to replace Takashi as the head of the fortification project. The girl threw herself into the effort, as a result of which the mountain's fortifications took shape far more quickly than would have happened otherwise. Over the years, Adrian Harabi would become famed as the shrewdest designer of fortifications—and siege tactics—of any being in the known portion of Ishtar. But she would always take her deepest satisfaction from the first fortified wall she constructed, across the big canyon of the Chiton. The wall would ever after be called "Adrian's Wall," to Indira's amusement.)

  Despite the casualties, Joseph considered the ambush a great success. An entire party of slavers had been exterminated. But more importantly, he and his warriors had learned much.

  The shields were immediately discarded. Nine out of the ten slavers had been slain by members of Ludmilla's platoon—principally because they had arrived at the canyon floor several seconds before any of the shield-laden members of the other platoon. It was obvious that the protection provided by the shields was a poor exchange for lessened mobility.

  Over the next two days, Joseph assessed the results of the battle with his platoon lieutenants and Jens Knudsen. In the end, they adopted what would become the central principle of the little human army's military doctrine. Speed and mobility are the heart of victory. All else is subordinate.

  It was a simple idea, to them; even obvious. When they told Indira of their conclusion, she said nothing. She could have encouraged them, for she knew they were right. She could have reinforced their conclusion with a thousand illustrations from human history, had she so chosen. Indeed, Joseph waited patiently for long minutes before he walked away, the stiffness in his face the only indication of the deep hurt at her silence. Soon thereafter, his lieutenants followed him, their expressions equally stiff. Only Jens Knudsen remained behind; but he was silent, and would not look at her.

  Some part of Indira wept, as she watched the tall figure of the boy she loved walk away from her. A breach had occurred, she knew. It would only widen in the years ahead; and might never be healed.

  But she could not speak. Her love of Joseph had, in that moment, been overwhelmed by dread.

  Of him. Barely eighteen, the boy was, with no experience or training to guide him. Yet, in one battle—not even a battle, a minor skirmish—he had grasped the secret which had eluded the vast majority of humanity's generals throughout the long and bloody history of the species.

  The advent of mechanized warfare had made the secret obvious—but, even then, not in time to prevent the ghastly slaughter of the trenches in World War I. The Nazi blitzkrieg tactics had finally burned the lesson home, a generation later.

  Of course, the secret had been known earlier. Much earlier, and by more than one general or people. But never, Indira knew, had the secret been taken closer to heart than by a people whose technology was barely Neolithic. A people who had created the greatest empire in the history of the human race.

  As she watched Joseph Adekunle walk away, Indira did not see a tall boy whose ancestors had lived in the rain forest of West Africa. She saw the much shorter and lighter-skinned ghost of a different man, from a different continent.

  The maneuvers of that man's armies had been measured in degrees of latitude and longitude, despite the fact that their only vehicles were horses and camels. His soldiers were reputed by his defeated foes to have been an innumerable "horde"; yet, in actual fact, he had been outnumbered in every battle he won. And he won almost all his battles. He had developed principles of discipline combined with lower-level initiative which, to his bewildered and hapless victims, had seemed like magic on the battlefield. He, and his fellow generals, had incorporated the systematic use of artillery into warfare, more than half a millenium before Napoleon. He had, centuries before the invention of electronic communication, discovered the centrality of what a word-besotted later culture would call CCCI— "communication, control, command and intelligence."

  His armies, which continued his traditions after his death, shattered every realm which opposed them. China, the most pow
erful civilization of the epoch, had fallen to them. The cumbersome armies of Europe, moving like snails beneath iron shells, had been slaughtered like lambs. The vastnesses of the Russian forest and people defeated every invader which came against them, throughout history. Except once. Except when they were conquered by armies trained and led by the greatest general the human race ever produced.

  Subedei Bat'atur. Born into the Reindeer people, an extremely primitive and obscure tribe related to another obscure and only slightly less primitive tribe, called the Mongols.

  Subedei Bat'atur. Commander of the tumens, the 10,000 strong divisions of Genghis Khan's armies.

  By his lights, and those of his people, Subedei Bat'atur had been neither cruel nor sadistic. The Mongols simply approached warfare as a practical task, to be carried out as efficiently as possible. The nomads—derided as superstitious savages by the civilized peoples who surrounded them—had, in fact, studied warfare with the clear and unblinkered eyes of a child. They experimented with the tactics and methods of their enemies, and adopted those which they found useful. For all the breathtaking scope of their vision—which was nothing less than the conquest of the entire known world—they were neither haughty nor arrogant. Quite unlike the vastly more cultured Chinese mandarins and the (much less vastly) cultured knights of Europe, who thought there was nothing to be learned from others.

  The Mongols taught them otherwise. Or, at least, taught them to fear what they could not understand or learn.

  In truth, Indira had always had a certain genuine admiration for the Mongols. The commonly accepted verdict of later history, she thought, was quite unfair. The Europeans who, at the time, had been able to do nothing more than pray for deliverance (which they received, simply because the Mongols, having already conquered half of Europe, decided the other half wasn't worth it) had taken their scholarly revenge centuries later. The Mongols had become synonomous with pure and simple brutality.

  How many people knew, Indira wondered, that the Mongols instituted and enforced a policy of religious toleration which was unheard of in the Middle Ages? (She even smiled, then, in that moment of heartbreak, remembering the time that the Great Khan Mongke invited representatives from all the great religions to come to the imperial capital at Qarakorum. They had come—representatives from Islam, Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism—and had debated theology before the Great Khan and his court. Gritting their teeth, because the holy men were accustomed to other methods of settling accounts with heretics and nonbelievers. But the debate had not degenerated into violence. Not with the Mongol tumens prepared to enforce the law.)

  How many people knew that the Mongols fostered the greatest explosion of trade and commerce that had ever taken place prior to that time between China and the western lands of Islam and Christendom? That they built, in China, twenty-seven observatories—and then invited the world's greatest astronomers to come from Persia to help the Chinese learn to use them? That the Mongols built hospitals and even a medical academy, institutions which would have mystified the Europeans of the time?

  Almost no one, thought Indira, beyond a few professional historians. Whatever the glories of their later rule, the methods which the Mongols used to create that rule were all that remained in the common memory of the human race.

  An admirable people, in many ways. But they had approached warfare with the clear eyes of a young and unfettered people. They had examined war, and grasped its secret.

  Speed above all else. Mobility above all else.

  Utter ruthlessness.

  Their victims had numbered in the millions.

  She watched Joseph walk away, paralyzed between the warm heart of a mother and the cold brain of an historian.

  Julius soon noticed the quiet estrangement between Indira and Joseph, and was greatly distressed. In his clumsy way, he attempted to intervene. Indira, at first, denied that there was any such estrangement. Denied it hotly, in fact; and accused Julius of various unsavory psychological traits. She was lying, Julius knew—perhaps as much to herself as to him. He knew she was lying because the accusations had been grotesquely unfair (if not totally groundless). Indira's criticisms of Julius were normally rather mild—but excruciatingly accurate.

  He then approached Joseph. At first, the boy also denied that any estrangement existed. But he did not throw up a cloud of anger. So Julius persevered, until he managed to crack, slightly, the shell of hurt which Joseph had erected.

  "She is keeping secrets from me, Julius. Secrets I must learn."

  Julius was dumbfounded. "Secrets? What secrets?"

  Joseph groped for words. "Things she knows. She is wise, Julius. She is the wisest being that exists. Especially in those matters which are at the heart of things."

  The boy gestured, in a way which encompassed both the village and the lands beyond.

  "How people live, and grow. What roads they must take, and which they must avoid."

  His face grew hard.

  "And she also knows the secrets of war. And she will not tell me. My mother has abandoned me, when I need her most."

  He refused to speak further. And Julius did not press him, for he understood the boy was right.

  Yet, he also understood the fear possessing Indira. He did not feel that fear so deeply, himself. Perhaps it was because he was wiser; or, perhaps, more foolish. More likely, he thought, it was because he saw the world through the eyes of a biologist rather than an historian. A paleontologist, to boot—for whom all of life is a grand and glorious testament to the inevitability of extinction; and to the new life for which that extinction makes room.

  As a human with a good heart, he regretted the suffering of the past. But he thought it had been a necessary evil, an inescapable part of the progress of humanity. Indira, ironically, had a considerably cooler personality than Julius. And she knew, even better than he, that the anguish of human history had been the inevitable accompaniment of human advancement. But she also knew—far, far better than Julius—just how truly horrible and protracted that anguish had been.

  Historical suffering, to Julius—as to most people of the early 22nd century—was a pale shadow, an abstraction. He had heard of things, even read about them. He knew who the Mongols were. And Tamerlane.

  But Indira had walked the barren vastnesses of Central Asia, where a great civilization had flourished while Europe was a land of fur-clad savages. Before the Mongols came, and Tamerlane. Julius had heard of those things, and read about them upon occasion. Indira had studied the chronicles, and looked at the ruins.

  And the bones.

  To the warm-hearted Julius, bones were the stuff of his trade. To the cool and distant Indira, each bone had cried out with agony; and horror.

  Common bones. Not buried in great sepulchres. The bones of illiterate peasants, lying where they had been kicked aside by conquerors. The bones of the ocean of humanity, the uncountable multitudes of unknown people whose little lives had been the real stuff of history. Without whose endless toil, suffering and perseverance, nothing else would have been possible.

  It could be said that the end result of human history had been worth the cost. It was said often, in fact, in the 22nd century. By professional historians as well as laymen.

  Indira did not disagree with that assessment. As an historian—certainly as a woman—she had not the slightest romantic illusions about the realities of human life during the long childhood of the species. That period, tens of thousands of years in duration, when a relative handful of hunters and gatherers had been simply a part of the biological landscape of the planet. Tiny cultures, which had been characterized by a degree of social egalitarianism which would not be recaptured until the last century of human history.

  Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years of relative peace and social tranquillity. And, she knew as well, lives of utter ignorance; ending at an age when modern humans were barely out of school.

  No, modern civilization was worth the price it had cost. Indira
had no doubt of it. Many times, back on Earth, she had closed the book she was reading; and heaved a sigh of relief that she was fortunate enough not to have been born in the past. Any part of that past—prehistorical or civilized. She had been blessed with the rare good fortune not to have been a hunter-gatherer; or a slave; or a peasant toiling in the fields of her lord; or the victim of a bombing raid.

  Indira knew she had been blessed beyond belief. She had been born in the 22nd century. At the only time in the history of the human race when life was truly all it could be. A time when the daughter of Bengali peasants and Bolivian tin miners could aspire to anything.

  And had. She had aspired to the stars, and reached them.

  Until, caught in disaster, a courageous captain had chosen to include an historian among the handful of adults who would survive the catastrophe. Plunged, before she was knew what was happening, back into the Bronze Age.

  Years ago, Indira had stopped wondering why Captain Knudsen had included her among the survivors. She knew. He had known that, if they survived, his children would need a guide through the terrors of history.

  She tried to explain her dilemma to that Captain's son. For, of all the young leaders of the colony, Jens Knudsen was now the least distant. She tried to explain that history held no "secrets"; that there was no guide through its terrors; that anything she would try would inevitably fail of its purpose—not immediately, but over time, twisted into unforeseen pathways. Stumblingly, she tried to explain that the personal freedom, equality and social justice which 22nd century humanity took for granted was the end product of millenia of struggle and suffering. She tried to explain that, in the end, the precondition for that progress was the vast wealth of modern society, which was itself another end product of the long, tortuous, bitter road of history.