Battlefield Earth (76 page)

     The little boy lay on the blood-stained ground, his head back and in the direction of the lower slope.

Jonnie had been certain he was dead. Nobody could take that many submachine gun slugs in the middle of his body- and a small body- and live.

He felt awful. He knelt beside the torn boy. He was going to pick the body up and he put his hand under the head and lifted it slightly.

There was a light flutter of breath!

Bittie’s eyes trembled open. They were glazed in shock but they saw Jonnie, knew him.

Bittie was moving his lips. A very faint whisper of a voice. Jonnie bent closer to hear.

“I…I wasn’t a very good squire…was I…Sir Jonnie.”

Then tears began to roll sideways from the boy’s eyes.

Jonnie reacted, incredulous! The child thought he had failed.

Jonnie tried to get it out, tried to speak. He couldn’t make his voice work. He was trying to tell Bittie, no, no, no, Bittie. You were a great squire.

You have just saved my life! But he couldn’t speak.

The shock was wearing off in the boy; the numbness that had held back the pain vanished.

Bittie’s hand, which had risen to clutch Jonnie’s wrist, suddenly clenched bruisingly in a spasm of agony. The body did a wrenching twist. Bittie’s head fell to the side.

He was dead. No heartbeat. No breath. No pulse.

Jonnie sat there for a long time, crying. He hadn’t been able to speak, to tell Bittie how wrong he was. He was not a bad squire. Not Bittie. Never!

After a while, Jonnie picked the boy up in his arms and went down the hill. He laid the body very gently on the seat of the ground car.

He went back and picked up the dead body of the Russian and carried it to the car and put it in.

Windsplitter had seen him from a distance and came up, and the other horses, over their fright now, approached.

Jonnie put the dead boy on his lap and drove very slowly toward the Academy. The horses, seeing him go at that pace, followed. The little cortege crossed the plain.

It took them a long time to make the trip. Jonnie stopped at last beside the trench where the sixty-seven cadets had fought the last battle so very long ago. He just sat there holding Bittie’s body.

A cadet sentry had seen them approach. In a little while cadets started to come out of the buildings. Word spread further and more came.

The schoolmaster, from an upper window, saw the crowd gathering around the ground car and went out. Dunneldeen and Angus and Ker came up to the fringe of the crowd.

Jonnie got out, holding the dead boy. He wanted to talk to them and he couldn’t speak.

Several truckloads of Russians suddenly roared up to a halt and they spilled out, joining the crowd.

Several cadets raced back to the armory and came out with assault rifles and shoulder bags of magazines and began to pass them around to men who were looking in the direction of the compound.

An angry mutter was rising higher and higher among them.

Several cadets raced back to their rooms to get personal side arms and came back, buckling on belts and loading magazines.

The thunder in the mountains reverberated now and then across the plain and an angry, cold wind whipped around the mob.

A truckload of Russians who had swung over by the compound arrived back and stopped in a geyser of dust. The Russians were shouting and pointing toward the compound, trying to say what was over there now. No one could understand them.

A small ground car raced up from the direction of Denver, spraying clods of dirt as it screeched to a stop. The pilot officer in charge of drones jumped out, a stream of drone printout pictures crackling in the wind as he forced his way into the crowd, trying to tell them it had all come through on a drone overfly, trying to show people what had happened. He had ripped the printouts and the discs out of the machines and come at once.

A Coordinator was finally able to make himself heard. He had gotten now what the single Russian truck had seen at the compound. “The Brigantes are all dead over there! A whole commando!”

“Is that Psychlo Terl still alive over there?” somebody shouted.

There was an angry roar from the crowd. Several surged forward to see whether Terl was visible in the pictures.

“He’s still alive,” shouted the Russians’ Coordinator who had gotten the information from the truck.

The crowd surged and some started to climb into the Russian trucks. The Russians had been drawn up in a line by a Russian officer and they were checking their rifles on command.

Colonel Ivan, who had come to stand near Jonnie, was gazing, stricken with guilt, at the face of the dead boy. “The Psychlo dies!”

Jonnie had finally gotten a grip on himself. Still holding the boy he climbed to the top of the ground car. He looked down at them and they quieted to hear him.

“No,” said Jonnie. “No, you must not do anything now. In the star systems of the universe around us there is a far greater danger than Brigantes. We are fighting a dangerous battle. A bigger battle. We have made a mistake and it has resulted in the death of this innocent boy. I killed his murderer. We cannot undo the mistake. But we must go on.

“In that trench there, sixty-seven cadets died, fighting the last battle of the Psychlo invasion over a thousand years ago. When I first saw that trench, it gave me my first hope. It was not that they lost, it was that they fought at all against hopeless odds. They did not die in vain. We are here. We are fighting again. You and your fellow pilots control the skies of

Earth.

“I will make a request of one or another of you in times to come. Will you honor those requests?”

There was a massed stare. Did he think they would not? Then there was a concerted roar of assent. It took minutes for it to quiet.

Jonnie said, “I am leaving you now. I am taking this boy to Scotland. To be buried by his own people.”

Jonnie got down off the car.

The pilot whose ore carrier had been readied for the Russians was pointing it out to the Russian Coordinator.

They loaded Jonnie’s horses. They found Stormalong’s kit in the ground car and put it aboard.

The Russians took over the body of Dmitri Tomlov to take it home.

Jonnie climbed to the cockpit of the big ore carrier, still holding Bittie.

Before he closed the door, he looked down at the crowd and said, slowly and clearly, “It is not the time for revenge.” And then he added a bitter, grim “Yet!”

The crowd nodded. They understood. Later it would be an entirely different matter.

The huge plane rose and turned in the gray, storm-discolored sky. It dwindled and was gone.

     A much more serious crisis awaited him in Scotland, one that threatened to wreck all his plans.

Pilots on the ground talked the ore plane down through the dark swirling mists of autumn. The Scots had begun to rebuild Castle Rock in Edinburgh, cleaning up and trying to restore the ancient buildings that two thousand years before had been the seat of

Scottish nationalism and that was now being called its original Gaelic word: Dunedin, “the hill fort of edin.” Jonnie landed in a park below the Rock, just in front of the ruins of the ancient National Gallery of Scotland.

Swarms of people had been there to meet him and gillies had been hard pressed to clear space in the throng for the plane to land.

Unfortunately, the drone pictures of the compound fight had come in on the Cornwall minesite recorders, and they had been rushed by mine passenger plane to Scotland long before Jonnie’s arrival. The Scots were making good use of the vast amounts of transport taken from the Psychlos, and flatbeds were being used as buses now that trainee machine operators were back home.

Bittie’s mother and family were there and Jonnie gave over the corpse to

them to dress and prepare for a funeral. Pipers were wailing a lament, drums beating its slow and doleful cadence. Women in the crowd were openly crying and men were beating their fists together as they dwelt on what they conceived to be the necessity of war.

It was nearly dark. An honor guard of kilted Highlanders approached and its officer courteously told Jonnie he was there to escort him through the crowds to a meeting of the Chiefs. They had not yet restored the parliament house on the Rock; the Chiefs, brought hastily in from the hills, were meeting in the nearby open park before the ruined Royal Scottish Academy.

To the mournful cry of pipes, Jonnie walked toward the space. It was lit with a towering bonfire in its center. The flame’s glow was flickering over the buckles and swords of Clanchiefs and their retainers. It was an assembly with only one, single-minded purpose:

WAR!

Belatedly, Robert the Fox, just in from Africa, rushed to Jonnie’s side. They were already on the outskirts of the assembly, the honor guard opening the way, heading for some raised stone slabs that served as a rostrum. Clanchief Fearghus was coming forward in courtesy to escort him to this rostrum.

“Do you want war?” said Robert the Fox into Jonnie’s ear. “I think not! It would ruin all your plans.”

“No, no,” said Jonnie. “That is the last thing we want. Without it we have a chance.”

“Then why,” said Sir Robert, “didn’t you change your clothes before this meeting? You might have known it would take place!”

Jonnie had not thought about his clothes. He glanced down. The buckskin shoulder was dark red from the bleeding of the superficial wound at the side of his neck, long since staunched by coagulation. The entire front of his shirt and his trousers down to the knee were saturated with Bittie’s blood.

At that very moment the Chief of the Campbells was speaking to the assembled Chiefs. “…and I say this is a blood feud that can only be settled in

There was a savage roar of agreement. “War!” “War!” Lochaber axes were flashing in the light of the leaping flames. The slither of swords coming from their sheaths was a deadly, martial declaration.

Jonnie stepped up on the stone rostrum. He held up his hand for quiet. They gave him a silence electric with tension and punctuated by the crackling flame of the bonfire.

“We want no war,” said Jonnie. It was the wrong thing to say. A clamor of disagreement rolled at him.

“By the very blood on his clothes,” shouted the Chief of the Argylls, “this cries out for war!”

“The murderer of the boy is dead!” said Jonnie.

“What of Allison?” cried the Chief of the Camerons. “His vile murder has not been avenged! The chief of the Brigantes, he that brought it about, still lives! These are matters of blood feud!”

Jonnie realized they were out of control. They were demanding pilots and transport. Their target was the obliteration of the entire force of Brigantes. And now! He knew this had all been decided before his arrival on the slow ore carrier. He could see all their labors going for nothing. If that area in America were wiped out, that would end their plans!

He looked for the face of Robert the Fox and found only this sea of enraged Chiefs and retainers. He did not dare tell them so openly and in public of his plans. Lars had shown there could be traitors.

He tried to tell them the planet was under a much greater threat, that they did not really know what had happened to Psychlo, that there were other races out in the stars, but not one single word he said was heard in the tumult.

Finally the big and lordly Chief of Clanfearghus leaped up beside him and bellowed at the throng: “Let the MacTyler speak!”

They quieted under that, tense, determined.

Jonnie was tired. He had not slept for days. He summoned up reserves of energy and spoke in a strong confident voice: “I can promise you

SUCCESSFUL war! If you will let me guide you, if you will each one contribute men and time to a daring enterprise, if you will but plan with me and work in preparation for the next few months, we will have war, we will have revenge, and we will have a chance of everlasting victory!”

They heard that. After a moment, while it sank in, they burst into a savage din of agreement. The lochaber axes were raised higher; claymores flashed back the light of flames. The pipes suddenly burst into the stirring tunes of war. They hailed Jonnie until they were hoarse. As he stepped down and was led away by Robert the Fox, big hands clapped him on the back as he passed, others sought to grip his. Men leaped before him, claymores held before their faces in devoted salutes. Somebody started a chant of “MacTyler! MacTyler! MacTyler!” The pipes screamed and drums added to the din.

“Count on you, laddie,” said Robert the Fox fondly as he led Jonnie off to temporary quarters in an old house, a bath, clean clothes, and rest. “But I’m only hoping we can deliver!”

They buried Bittie MacLeod the next day in a crypt in the old Cathedral Saint Giles. The funeral procession was over a mile long.

To the Chief of Clanfearghus Jonnie had said, “He died a squire. We must bury him as a knight.”

Placing a robe on the corpse, Fearghus, as titular King of Scotland-and now the entire British Isles-knighted Bittie with the tender touch of a sword.

A rock carver had worked straight through to complete a sarcophagus-a stone casket- and it was ready.

The parson read the funeral oration, and to the doleful mourn of pipes, Bittie was laid away.

On the plaque, beneath the new armorial bearings they had given Bittie, was carved:

Sir Bittie

A True Knight

They knew Bittie would have liked that.

Pattie, her face frozen in shock since she had first heard the news of his death, at the funeral’s end was given the small packet they had found in his pocket. It was the locket. She numbly read the engraving on it: “To Pattie, my future wife.”

The dam of her tears broke and she collapsed across the sarcophagus, weeping uncontrollably.

But Bittie was not really gone. He had become a legend. Future generations, if they survived, would hold in song and story the memory of Sir Bittie who they said had saved the life of Jonnie.

- Part XXI -