The Heretic (20 page)

Malnutrition is evident,
Center replied.
And his people are starving.

The fact that he tried to bargain with you at all is a sign of how tough the old bird is,
Raj added.

“If I may be so bold,” said the chief, interrupting Abel’s flow of thoughts. “Since I am now determined to stay to assuage your discomfiture, how long until the noonday meal? I would very much like to start seeing to the maintenance of your honor sooner rather than later.”

“First, the name,” Abel said.

“The name?”

“The Blaskoye,” Abel said. “He with the silver knife. The one who stole your children and raped your women. Then we’ll have a bite to eat. And I promise that bite won’t be you.”

This brought forth the first genuine smile he’d seen from Gaspar.

“Like you, we call him Silver Knife,” said the chief. “But he has a given name. They call him Rostov. Dmitri Rostov.”

* * *

Two rises of the three-day moon, Levot, passed—nine days—as they rode through the Voidlands and into the Highsticks. Gaspar of the Remlaps was a plumper man.

He ought to be,
thought Abel.
He’s been chewing on something constantly, walking, standing, sitting, except when he’s asleep, and sometimes I swear he manages to chew on something even then.

The Highsticks was the name of the elevated plains on the extreme east of the Redlands. Beyond the Highsticks, all vegetation gradually gave out. Volcanism increased, and the soil became toxic for most forms of life. Beyond that lay the Tables, an unbroken coating of basalt that stretched, according to Center, for thousands of leagues, and was a half-league thick in all places.

There is no way for the Redlanders to cross that area,
said Center.
The water table has been made completely inaccessible by a magma eruption that occurred three million years ago. There has been no rain there in over one hundred Duisberg years. There are therefore no tanajas or natural cisterns. And the basalt gives way on the east not to another desert and riverine system, but to the Eastern Sea. Thus there is not the slightest possibility for Redland eastward migration. The only population spigot for the Redlanders is the Valley. It has ever been thus, and this is exactly what Zentrum counts on in his Stasis regulation equations.

And the pot is set to boil right about now,
Raj said.
Over the brim, and down the Valley.

The Highsticks were not the Sulfur Plains or the Tables, however. They were a tough country, but quite habitable for a desert people.

Abel and his company had travelled two hundred leagues. They had completed a half circle of the Redlands, southwest to northeast, always keeping contact with tribes, interior and outlying.

Taking Raj’s advice, Abel arranged the regiment in a left echelon of squads. They were attempting to encircle the enemy’s presumably teardrop-shaped disposition stretching from the west, and the edge of the Valley, to a terminus in the east at Awul-alwaha. The Scouts approached from the southwest. The goal was to keep contact with concentrated forces as well as to survey the tribes who were not participating in what was looking to be a great gathering of the desert nomads. The purpose of this gathering was all too evident: war on the Valley.

The lead squad sought contact, mostly visual, but not unwilling to give and take fire when they met an armed Blaskoye group. It was for these times that the echelon arrangement came into play, for—as Raj had predicted—the Redlanders, however many there were in an area, would invariably rush all their forces toward the first sound of trouble. This not only pulled them out of areas that squads to the left of the lead squad could then reconnoiter, it also left them entirely open to an unexpected flank attack in wave after wave as the deployed squads caught up with the lead and joined the fighting from an easterly direction. Sometimes the Scout reinforcements arrived directly in the Blaskoye’s rear and set the Redlander donts scurrying in all directions, scattering the terrified Redlanders like a puff of wind on an open hand full of grain.

Occasionally, the point squad passed too far to the east of the enemy and another squad would make contact. In these instances, signal mirror contact and flag wigwag became paramount. Long experience had made moving yet maintaining sightline contact second nature, and a forward unit would circle back in a variety of spirals, depending on terrain, if signaling were lost for longer than a few minutes.

The engagements took their toll, but produced what were, to Abel, surprisingly few casualties on either side. He had had visions of having to lead a line of wounded, gangrenous men across the barren landscape, and being constantly hampered by his train of wounded. So far, he’d only lost five men from his original ninety, and one of those was a fall from a cliff while dismounted and taking a piss. The body of that one, a Scout named Largo, they’d had to leave where it lay, or risk more casualties retrieving it. The others they’d managed to bury. Their places of rest were duly marked on the map Weldletter was constructing. Their graves were then trampled to obliteration.

These men know cover when they see it, as do the Blaskoye,
Raj told him.
And since neither of you have conquest in mind, but simply driving the other off, there’s no instinct to go for the throat and destroy the other completely. The time will come when that will change.

Similarly, they killed few Blaskoye, and what wounded they found were usually well enough for interrogation and eventual release. There was no way to keep prisoners, and Abel had no desire to execute those hapless enough to get shot and caught. Besides, releasing a wounded man in a desert was not doing him any favor, however good he might be at living off the land.

Nomad encampments were a bit more tricky, and Abel avoided direct contact with these groups whenever possible, with the regiment dividing itself and quickly flowing around them. It helped that, unlike traveling bands, the families in the camps had a tendency to stay in place long enough to allow him and his men to clear out of the area. But the position of the camp was duly noted on the map and in logging scrolls. Each camp was, as Gaspar said more than once, probably in a traditional spot that would remain constant. Even though Redlanders were always on the move, they tended to congregate in favorite feeding and watering grounds for their measly (by Valley standards) dak herds.

The going was hard, but not so hard as it would have been without a destination in mind—and Abel had a destination in mind he had not shared with his father. He’d also not mentioned it to Raj and Center, but by now it was fairly obvious what his plan was.

Spiral in toward Awul-alwaha, the First Oasis.

* * *

Josiah Weldletter was not a man who was at home in the desert. First of all, he was as overplump as Gaspar had been underfed. And, in a sort of negative reflection of Gaspar, he had steadily reduced in size even while the Redlander was growing larger. Strangely enough, the two men got along well after getting over the fact that both thought the other a barbarian. For Gaspar, the map was in his head, and had always been. The very idea of a detailed map on a scroll of papyrus had never occurred to him, but the moment that he did understand the idea was a moment of revelation. He couldn’t get enough of Weldletter’s map.

The two would ride ahead, with a guard of three or four Scouts, find a knoll or rise, and together they would fill in the blank places on the developing map. Gaspar showed an uncanny ability to predict what would lie over the next rise, the depth of a declivity, and, after he understood the idea of scale, the altitude of the hill in the distance as expressed in elbs, paces, or fieldmarches. He was particularly excited when Weldletter showed him how contour lines worked. It was as if a flitter that had known it had a song within itself suddenly found the voice that had been missing all these years and burst forth with its native call.

For his part, Weldletter had never met someone who truly had a better imagination for the folds of land than he, and for him it was the first time he’d had a conversation with someone he believed to be his equal in this regard. The two became so inseparable that Abel felt the necessity of pulling Weldletter aside and reminding him that, given the chance, Gaspar might gladly cut his throat if it gained his tribe some sort of advantage in the Redlands.

“He would be sorry,” Abel said. “And I believe he might even shed real tears, if he has had enough to drink in the past day or so, but he will go ahead and slit your throat. And then, if he hasn’t eaten in a while—”

“All right, all right, Lieutenant,” Weldletter had answered, cutting Abel off. “You have a great deal of your father in you, particularly the ability to put the facts before a person in a visceral manner. I will watch myself.”

“Oh, let’s do better than that,” Abel said. “Let’s show him everything. Maps he never dreamed of, even.”

“What do you mean?”

And Abel told him.

* * *

So it was Weldletter and Gaspar and their retinue of porters, aides, and guarding outriders who first found the nishterlaub execution site.

By the time that Abel rode up, this group had descended into the small valley where the executions had taken place and had disturbed some of the remains. But when he crested the hill above, Abel got a good view of the tableau.

There were dozens of men staked out with their backs down and their faces and bellies up to the sun, naked, their arms and legs tied to hold them in that position. They were bent over what looked like metal arches. The metal itself was brown and rusted, but it was strong enough to hold them up exposed to the sun.

They have been tied to the roofs of ground cars,
said Center.
These groundcars were, at one time, electrostatically powered vehicles that your ancestors used pre-Collapse to journey into the planetary wastelands. There were many dwellings in what you now know as the Redlands. People use the area as a recreational getaway and journeyed from the Valley on holidays. As you see now, the ground cars have become little more than clumps of rust preserved these three thousand years only by a process of something like petrification, with the sand filling their declivities to the point that they are almost sedimentary rock now instead of metal.

How long ago was the execution?
Abel thought.

Much more recent,
answered Center.
Within the previous three-moon, plus or minus an eight-day.

And your count?

Fifty-seven adult males. Similar garb and physique indicates that they are likely all members of the same tribe.

And they were staked out alive? To die in the sun stretched across nishterlaub in this grotesque sacrifice?

It is difficult to tell due to the state of decay of the bodies, but I would assume so. We will have to get closer for me to verify.

Of course that’s what happened,
Raj put in.
And you can be sure that they wounded them in some manner so that an enterprising sort would not have the wherewithal to get himself free and to free the others. Probably broke their legs. That’s what I’d do.

Would you? Have you?

No,
Raj said.
But I’ve seen and had to countenance worse. And now you understand what they are prepared to do to you and your kin if you do not submit, so perhaps it is a good lesson after all.

Abel rode down among the bodies. He descended a stone-strewn path that looked to be more of a game-animal route than anything humans would use, but his dont retained its sure footing. And as he went down the side of the hill, an odd sound began to assail his ears. It was as if the valley were filled with the dry sizzle of the sort of insectoid plague he’d only seen in the Valley during rice ripening days. Surely the Redlands couldn’t sustain so many bugs?

The arms and legs of the executed had not been tied to the nishterlaub groundcars with rope of any sort, but with the hacked off branches of a local pricklebush. It was a sort that grew straight up with many thorn-covered shoots about the thickness of two fingers, and sometimes ten elbs long. The thorns had not been stripped from the shoots and had been used to secure the knots in the flesh of the victims.

Most of the eyesockets were empty, having been eaten out by desert scavengers. This in itself was a clue to Center, who said:
One would expect at least some closed eyes, but you’ll notice that there are not any. It seems that they all died with their eyes open.

You mean with their eyelids sliced off
, Raj roughly cut in.
So they were to go blind first, before the dehydration got to them.

Abel leaned over, gazed at the gaping mouth and eyeless sockets of one of the victims.

Yes, the eyelids were sliced off,
said Center.
But on one side only, the right. I believe I can project a likely reanimated image of the process, if it becomes necessary to—

No,
thought Abel.
Please don’t.

It was then that he realized what the strange scraping and crackling insectoid murmur actually was: the flapping of the dried-out skin of the victims as the desert wind blew through the declivity.

Yes, imagine trying to keep one eye closed while the other shrivels like a raisin in the sun,
Raj said.
Seems as if they couldn’t manage it, poor bastards, and died with both eyes open.

And then they rode up to Gaspar, who approached on foot and looked up at Abel mounted on the dont. “These are Schlusels,” he said. “I think they killed them all and either took the women and children, or slaughtered them, too, but without the honor of a lingering death.”

“And who were these an example
for
, do you imagine?”

“Around here are good lands. There are larger tribes in the Highsticks. Or there
were
. We are all Redlanders now,” Gaspar said with a dry laugh. “This is what Rostov intended to do to the Remlaps, too, had I not convinced him that pursuing us into the Voidlands, that place you came across us, would take too much of his precious time and kill off too many of his precious donts.”