Monsters and Magicians (20 page)

It had appeared to the senior officer that the beast had in some way blundered hard enough against a treetrunk column to knock it out of place and thus bring down the entire, immensely heavy sod roof on itself and all within. The rotted remains of the thick main beam still lay across the skeleton's crushed spine and ribcage, and the column itself lay upon the skull it had splintered just behind the tooth-studded jaws.

Looking at the overall enormity of the skeleton and the size and quantity of the recurved teeth, Kaoru could not repress a strong shudder. He could not imagine just what sort of a beast the monstrous bones had once supported, though the teeth looked vaguely reptilian, shaped a little like those of a python, he thought. Lizard? Possibly so, but most prob-

202

ably not, for not even the oversized monitor lizards of that island near Sumatra got anywhere near this big. He just hoped that he never would see the like of this in the flesh. It was to be a vain hope.

Within the succeeding months, almost all of his officers and men were killed—and sometimes eaten— by living relatives of that huge skeleton found in the old log house. Rifle fire could not stop or even slow the terrible things, and they could run faster than any man, though only for short stretches. Powerful as they were, their attack almost always resulted in the death of at least one man.

Brutal and deadly experience established that the only sure way to kill them was either a sustained and well-aimed burst of machinegun fire, a lucky hit by 50mm mortar shell, 37mm tank gun or grenade, or determined men pinning the thing down with bayonets long enough for another man to step in and sever the spine with stroke of sword or machete or axe. Since the things scavenged as well as predating, Sergeant Kiyomoto had devised and baited deadfalls of heavy logs; one monster had been killed in this way, but none since that one.

Initially, it had seemed to be the two mules that the monsters came seeking—the invaluable mules, without which the snaking of logs from out the forests would have been made far more difficult and strenuous of accomplishment than it already was. And so, until a safe, strong pen and stable could be constructed to house them, the draft beasts had been brought into one end of the big log house when not in use and guarded.

When, of a night, one of the monsters had tried to

break in through the single, thick-planked and heavily barred door, to be pinned down by bayonets and axed and sworded to death on the very doorstep, Kiyomoto had set the men to felling even more trees, stripping them, digging deep holes and setting them in a row all around the log house and enough land for a few other buildings to be erected later. The palisade logs had not been abutted one to the next, but rather left with enough space between them for a man but not a monster to pass through; in this way, only a single gate just wide enough for a mule was necessary-

Kaoru and all his dwindling company had discovered that the fearsome creatures were definitely reptiles, but such reptiles as no one could recall ever having seen or heard described. They also had made the discovery that the flesh of the huge things was not only edible but also tender and tasty if properly prepared and cooked, so the attacking monsters they had had to kill in defense did not go to waste. So fond did they all become of monster-flesh, in feet, that they not only eagerly anticipated another highly dangerous attack, but often tempted one or even set out to deliberately hunt down the creatures, if they suspected the presence of one in the general vicinity.

Not a few men having been lost in this pursuit, their bayoneted rifles having placed them in a proximity to their quarry that had proved deadly in the end, Sergeant Kiyomoto had come up with and— with, of course, die commander's approval—implemented the making of long spears: shafts of ash or oak, knife-edge points fashioned of mild-steel armor stripped from the fuelless tank and cold-hammered

into shape by him, then fastened firmly in place by way of brass rivets fashioned from 37mm shell cases. These proved themselves in use, and quickly. They were long enough to allow a man to maintain a safe distance from one of the creatures while at the same time pinning him securely that the men with swords or axes might do their deadly work on the dangerous beast.

Though unspeakably horrified by this callous desecration of their huge, complex weapon by a mere sergeant of infantry, the three remaining members of the tank crew liked to eat monster-meat too and usually kept their peace.

For all their appalling losses and how seldom they won so much as a nibble of flesh anymore, the big beasts still occasionally tried themselves against the deep-sunk palisades, often, oddly enough, by day. In such cases, when most of the men might be some distance away at some task or another, the guards on duty joined to spear-pin and axe the smaller ones and machinegun the largest. They none of them needed orders to aim for the toothy heads and expend only what was absolutely necessary to the job at hand of the steadily dwindling supply of 7.7mm ammunition.

The men, for some reason, took to calling their edible foes "dragons," though they little resembled any representation of a classic dragon, and Kaoru had himself taken up the practice, at least in his thoughts. Sergeant Kiyomoto, on the other hand, had named the monsters "Burma beef."

Toward the effort of maintaining proper morale, discipline, physical conditioning and esprit de corps

under conditions that were, at best, often very trying, Kaoru had established and seen kept up a correct, military schedule of training and assigned duties for all members of his much-reduced company, nor did even he stick at joining the ranks in the physical and weapons drills most often overseen and conducted by the more than competent Sergeant Kiyomoto.

That had been why, of a morning—early morning, prior to the first meal of the day—he had been in ranks like any common soldier, spear-armed, unshod and in minimal clothing, responding to the snarled commands of the professionally glowering Sergeant Kiyomoto.

When one of the on-duty perimeter guards had reported having seen the unmistakable tracks of a large dragon on the banks of the stream at the place wherein it entered the winding defile—fresh tracks, laid down since sunset of the preceding evening— Kaoru had detailed one of the spearmen in formation to run back to the log house, fetch his swords and an axe (which was the much preferred weapon of Sergeant Kiyomoto) then follow after the rest of them at his best speed. Then he, the company sergeant and the remainder of the drill formation had set off through the long, narrow, meandering, brush-grown defile, set to beard a big dragon.

By purest coincidence, at a point only some third of the way to where the defile would debouch into the open space wherein their smaller stream joined a large (which larger was, Kaoru was certain in his own mind, some nameless tributary of the Irrawaddy River), the leading runners of the hunt chanced to flush a trio of red deer does. Kaoru managed to spear

one of the big cervines in the side, just behind the shoulder, but the unbarbed spearhead pulled out as the wounded and terrified creature surged ahead. So the erstwhile dragon hunt suddenly, unexpectedly, became a deer chase, for—as Sergeant Kiyomoto would have put it in his earthy, rural way—meat was meat.

As was usual in running hunts, Corporal Tanuki took the lead, his short but powerful legs churning so fast as to frequently look like only blurs of motion. Also as usual under like circumstances, he was closely trailed by the other corporal—one of the erstwhile tank crew, Tanulas patent rival in many ways, who despised mere infantrymen as much as had his late officer, and whose presumptive behavior had often brought down upon him the heavy, horny hands of the grim sergeant of company, Kiyomoto—the tall, slim Numata.

When Corporal Tanuki's shouts were heard by the closely bunched average-speed runners, the officer and sergeant included, that not only was the doe down on the bank of the large stream but that a sizable dragon was feeding on her carcass, all the men grinned, took fresh grips on their spears, gasped as deep breaths as they could and did their best to increase the pace of their tired, trembling legs.

As he ran on, just a bit behind the hulking Sergeant Kiyomoto, Kaoru sincerely hoped that the man got up to them with his swords before one was needed; otherwise, someone would have to try to put a spearpoint into the eye of the pinned but thrashing, powerful and still deadly-dangerous monster . . . and not a few of the now-deceased officers, NCOs and men of his company had died while essaying just so risky a task in a hunting of dragons.

barely had graduated at all. And not only had his father—his pompous, arrogant, hypocritical and disgustingly well-heeled farther—flatly refused to take his youngest son into the family law firm with his elder brothers, an uncle and cousins, but he had declined even to try to use his many contacts to get David into any other prestigious practice.

In their last meeting, his father—looking, in his meticulously tailored silk-and-wool three-piece suit, his gold Rolex watch, his short-cropped, Grecian-Formulaed hair, his Miami Beach-tanned face and his contact lenses, the very epitome of all that his youngest son most hated about the land of his birth— had said, "David, you know well that you were offered the best education that I could afford, the equal of that offered your older brothers and your sister, Raquelle, no less than what your grandfather offered me and your uncle, way back when. From your freshman year in undergraduate school on, you had the use of a good car, tuition, room and board, charge cards and a checking account. All that you were expected to do was to study, apply your known intellect and develop into a fine, professional man like your brothers have done.

"So, with all these benefits, you did what was expected of you? Oh, no, David, not you, not our little Dave Klein, not him! You could have majored in anything you wished—law, medicine, accounting, dentistry, business administration, engineering, psychology even—but you chose to major in revolution, so that it's cost the family thousands of dollars over the last few years to get you into new schools when the old ones chucked you out, more thousands to

keep you out of jail so that your poor mother wouldn't lose her mind.

"So, now youVe graduated ... by the skin of your teeth. And you did finally manage to pass the state bar examination. But now, thanks to your extracurricular insanities of past years, you are strictly on your own. With your record of repeated misdemeanor arrests and convictions, no respectable firm is going to be willing to take you on until and if you can manage to prove yourself as something more than an anarchist bomb-thrower. Why, oh why, David? Why couldn't you have ignored the radicals and stuck to the books? You had such great promise, more promise than did either of your brothers at your age."

Bitterly, David had replied, "You're a windbag, you know that, Daddy? You always bragged about being a lifelong Democrat, a liberal, a humanist, and it was all just pure bullshit! Where were your so-called principles when this rotten sewer of a fascist country was supporting a totalitarian dictator in Saigon and all your fat-cat friends were growing even fatter and richer making napalm to barbeque yellow-skinned, slant-eyed children in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos? Where was your famous humanism when, if we did study hard and graduated, we knew wed go directly into the fucking Army or something and end up crippled or killed even? What did you ever do to try to stop that unjust war? What, Daddy ; what?"

His father had shaken his head, slowly. "David that war is over, done, finished, but you, God heir you, are still fighting it and I fear that, until you £ long last grow up, that's just what you'll keep doin^

I agree that the time and the place, the people we were supporting and the way in which the war was conducted, all were . . . ahh, ill chosen. But unjust? Not at all, David. That phrase, an unjust war/ is an infamous Marxist catch-phrase; to them, an unjust war is any conflict that does not, is not intended to advance the goals of Marxism.

"Drafted? David, you know and knew back then that you never would ever be drafted. You're Four-F, son, just like your cousin, Judah. Look, you keep fighting that war as long as you feel you must, but please let the rest of us alone to get on with our lives and our work in the real world. Okay?

"No, I couldn't look your mother in the face if I didn't try to do something to help you get a job of sorts."

He had taken a three-by-five card from under the tooled-leather edging of his blotter and shoved it across his polished teak desk with one manicured hand. "Get in touch with this man. He's your kind of people, David, he used to be a card-carrying CP member and he's as radical as he ever was, it's said, for all that he's now chin-deep in Democratic politics. He really likes perpetual undergraduates, like you, and as he hires P.D.s for that region, he just might be willing to take you on. I do this not for you or for him, but for your mother, understand that.

"If this man does take you on, you can have the Ford wagon as my parting gift. You won't suffer, no matter how small the remuneration, you know it and I know it, for your mother will keep sending you money whether I like it or not. I can only hope and heartily pray to the God of our People that experi-

212

encing real life, in the raw, out in the actual world and divorced from the womb of academe, you'll start to grow up. Goodbye, David."

The longer and the better David got to know his superior, the less he liked or even respected the man. He might have seemed a frothing radical to a man as reactionary as David's father, but in David's eyes he was nothing more than a sad, aging, Great Depression Era party-pink, still searching for an attractive woman who really practiced free love.

There was never any doubt in David's mind that the man owned real power in the incredibly corrupt Democratic political machine at state level; otherwise, Victor Owen Niedermeier Fridley would long since have been out on his ear from the civil service job he performed so poorly, and his stable of youngish misfits along with him.