The Stone Dogs (6 page)

"… Sure yo're quite familiar with it," the teacher was saying.

"What I'm goin' to teach is the realities beneath it. Question: how did we get from
that
,"—she moved her head toward the screen—"to
this
." A hand indicated the school.

Myfwany raised her palm. "We won, Miz Harris," she said, and there was another muffled giggle.

Harris smiled herself, and reached into the folds of her gown for a gunmetal cigarette case. "Pardon the bad example," she said sardonically at their round-eyed stares. Draka of their generation did not often smoke, at least not tobacco.

"I was raised befo' we knew it was bad for yo'. Yes, Myiwany, we won. But war isn't the explanation, it's the result. We're a warrior people, and our weakness is that we tend to think too much of battles and not enough of the things which lead up to victory. There are problems that don't yield to the butchershop logic of the sword. Yo' can say a man dies because his heart stops, but it doesn't
explain
. We need to know the
why
."

She turned slightly, leaning back against the desk and cupping her right elbow in the left hand. "School is trainin', and not just to fight."

"Yo', girl." She pointed at Mandy. "How many Draka are there?"

The tall girl started. "Hum, ah, sixty million? Roughly." Under her breath: "I hope. Moo."

"Fifty-eight million, nine hundred and twenty thousand-odd.

How many serfs?"

"Lots, ah, a billion and a half?"

"Correct. So we're about three percent of the total; that's not countin' the billion or so wild ones in the Alliance countries. It's not enough to be strong an' fierce, good fighters. Necessary, but not enough; to use the old cliche', we aren't a numerous people and nobody loves us. We have serfs enough in the Janissary legions for brute force, to carry rifles and die. Yo' are Citizens, and need to be able to
think
."

A meditative puff. "History is process; like dancin', or an avalanche. Sometimes it's… too ponderous to move, just grinds on regardless. Sometimes it balances delicately, and a minor push can turn it. Other times, yo' can turn even a pretty heavy movement with a small force by findin' the right lever to magnify yo' strength."

"That's how we dominate. Leverage… and this class is goin' to teach yo' how the process works. Look to either side of the screen, now."

Murals flanked the two-meter square of the display panel, a landscape of hills rocky and steep and covered with the olive-green scrub bush of southern Africa. A labor-gang was building a road through it, black men in leg-hobbles swinging picks and sledgehammers; others pushed wheelbarrows full of crushed rock, chipped granite blocks for the curbs, pulled stone rollers beside yoked oxen. Draka worked with surveyor's transepts and spirit levels to mark the course, swung their whips over the bent backs of the serfs, sat mounted and armed to guard.

"Question," the teacher said. "Date this mural and place it."

Yolande blinked at it, dredging at her memory. No powered machinery, just ox-wagons and horses.
Probably
before the 1820s. Her eyes switched to the right, a close-up of a horseman.

Canvas-sided boots, baggy leather pants, a coarse cotton shirt, and a jerkin of zebra-hide; long yellow hair in a twisted braid down his back to the waist. A saber at the belt, and a saw-hilted flintlock pistol in his right hand, double-barreled and clumsy-looking. Two more in holsters at his saddle-bow, and a fourth tucked into the high top of a boot. The long-barreled musket slung across his back was the same as the heirloom antique Mother had brought north from her family's plantation in the far south, a Ferguson breech-loader.

Her hand went up. "1790s?" she said, when the teacher glanced her way. "Uhhh, somewhere north of the Whiteridge?

Limpopo valley, I think." Myfwany glanced her way, and Yolande caught the thumb-and-forefinger gesture of approval with a flush of pleasure.

"Excellent," Harris said. She looked down and tapped again at the controls set in the stone, and a map of Africa appeared on the screens. It jumped as the focus shifted, narrowing down to the southeastern corner of the continent, and a red dot appeared. "1798, in the Northmark." That was the province north of the Limpopo. "Not far from where I was born, just south of the Cherangani mountains. A wild place and time."

Yolande looked at the man in the picture again. There was a trick she knew, of getting inside someone's head. You had to think
really hard
, and imagine you were wearing their skin, feeling what they felt. Sometimes it worked; sometimes you could even put it down in words, and that was the most magical feeling there was. She fixed her eyes on the face in the picture, made herself forget that it was pigments on a flat surface.

There was pale stubble on his cheeks, and she could see the sheen of sweat on it; the hand that held the pistol was tight-clenched, with half-moons of black under cracked nails. He would stink, of sweat and leather and gun-oil and sulfury black powder, and his hands would have the sweet-sour pungent smell of brass from the hilt of his sword. It was a good picture…
no,
not a picture, that's how he looked
.

Eyes slitted, they would be flickering ceaselessly back and forth. At the laborers, there were hundreds of them, big muscular men with heavy hammers and picks in their hands.

Captured warriors, not meek born-serfs. At the dense bush all around; rough stumps and edges where it had been cut back from both sides of the road, but it rose dense enough to block sight within javelin-cast. She felt the unseen hating black eyes on her back, and pink-palmed hands gripping the hafts of iron-bladed spears. Trapped in close thornbush country, eight shots and then hand-to-hand with cold steel…

"Ah, I see yo' understand," Harris said softly as she blinked the present back into her eyes and met the teacher's.

Yolande's mouth was dry, and she drank from the glass of lemonade beside her screen. "No radios or tanks, no helicopter gunboats or automatic weapons. Tell me, how did you place it?"

Yolande willed the sour taste of fear to leave her mouth. The feelings lingered just below the surface of her mind, an adrenaline-hopping intensity of focus, of anger and ferocity.

"Ahh… it couldn't be earlier. The way they're wearing their hair, and the zebra-skin. But that's an early-model Ferguson, my Mother's got one just like it, see how the trigger-guard has only a little knob to turn it and open the breech? Later on they made them with a bigger handle sticking down from the buttstock."

"To increase the rate of fire," Harris said. "We were the first to adopt the breech-loader, because it shot further an' faster.

Gatling came to the Domination, because we'd use his invention… because we were always outnumbered, and had to be able to kill them faster than they could charge. Right, now someone else. Which is the richest continent? Yo', Veronica."

"Uh, Africa?"

Harris grinned. "Sorry, trick question. Wealth is a subjective quantity. Fo' example, the Congo river generates as much hydropower as the whole of North America… if yo' can get at it, through jungles crawling with diseases."

Her hand reached to the screen controls again. "This is a disease map of Africa, before we cleaned it up. Sleeping sickness.

Ngana. Malaria. Yellow fever. Dengue fever, river blindness, bilharzia. Now well overlay it on the political sequence-map I showed befo'. Muriel, what do you see? Patterns, remember.

Process."

A frown and a long pause from the student whose parents followed the proscribed faith. "The south's healthiest, the areas south of Capricorn. Then the high country all the way north and east to the Ethiopian provinces, then the far north."

"Right. Now the sequence again."

"They… they overlap. Not always, but the conquest starts in the south, then leaps 'way north to Egypt, then it goes across North Africa and in both directions down the rift highlands. For a long time, anyway."

"Good, Muriel. Most of this part,"—Harris' finger indicated the western coast of Africa—"is a deathtrap for Caucasians without modem medicine. It ate them alive. Now, when was the first European settlement at the Cape?"

Yolande raised her hand again. "1654, Miz Harris. The Dutch."

"Right, the Dutch East India Company. Feeble little colony, and after a hundred and fifty years there were only ten thousand of them. Why?"

"They weren't interested in it?"

"Right again, they never sent mo' than a few hundred colonists; it was so healthy that they multiplied fast. Some of us are descended from them, though they got swamped pretty quick. Next significant date."

"1779," Myfwany said. "The British annexed the Cape."

"Conquered. The formal annexation was in 1783 after the Peace of Paris. But our ancestors were already arrivin'."

The screen flashed a montage: American Loyalists being driven from their homes by revolutionary mobs, Loyalist regiments and their families boarding sailing ships as the British evacuated Charleston and Savannah and New York, Hessian mercenaries sitting idle in camp as the war for which they had been hired wound down.

"Question: with about twenty thousand fightin' men—it was all men in those days—our forebearers conquered a half-million square miles of southern Africa in about a decade. We've seen it was possible partly because the environment didn't loll them; but two generations later, it took a hundred thousand men
two
decades to conquer North Africa for us… with better weapons an'

organization, too. There were two million strong an' warlike blacks in the southern provinces. Why were they relatively easy to break to the Yoke? Yes, Berenice."

"Mmmm, blacks are stupid an' backward?"

Harris laughed. "A comfortin' lie that was obsolete when I was yo' age girl." She called up the world map again. "Whats the most relevent fact about that area, all things considered? Think about it Berenice."

"It's… far away from everywhere?"

"Correct
. As far as yo' can get , failin' Austrailia. Societies grow and develop by compitition, same as species, only the process is Lamarckian not Darwinian.The inhabitants of this area are barely neolithic, cept' for havin' iron spears and hoes.

No political unit larger than a few villages, no written language, no horses, no wagons, an' a magical-ritual world view. Four thousand kilometers of mountain, jungle, and fever-bush protection; than three millennia of progress arrived overnight by ship, with the result that they became our cattle."

She glanced at her wrist. "Class over. Fo' the next, I want a short essay, outlinin' why plantations became the standard rural unit." A hard look. "I do
not
want a rehash of chapter 7," she added, tapping the brown jacketed text before her.
The
Domination: A Historical Survey
. "Yo'
own
thoughts. Give yo' a hint: look at where the most of the Loyalists came from. Then look at the figures in the appendix on soil fertility an' erosion in the far-southern provinces, and the demographics chapter. See yo' Thursday, girls. Service to the State."

"Glory to the Race," they answered. The desks hummed and began to spit printouts of the maps the

teacher had summoned into the receiver trays.

Wheeee
! Yolande thought, slowing to a handstand on the parallel bars. Her body was straight as a plumbline, toes pointed to the ceiling and arms a rigid Y on the hardwood poles. Then she let her weight fall back, a long swoop that accelerated like a sling's circuit into speed that pulled the blood out of her head, flung her
up
and her hands came off the bars and she twisted in midair, body whirling like a top.
Slap
and her hands were back on the bar, almost in the same position but facing the opposite direction.

Five
, she thought. That was enough; her arms were starting to tire. There was no sense in risking an injury. Instead she spread her legs in the air and lowered her feet, placing them neatly just behind her hands. The damp skin touched oak; she took a deep breath and sprang, backflipping in the air and landing on the balls of her feet, knees bending slightly to take the shock as she touched down on the hard rubbery synthetic of the
palaestra's
floor.

There was applause. Startled, Yolande looked up as she reached for a towel. Several of the other girls had stopped and were clapping, halting for a moment the stick-fighting or free weights or exercise machines that their individual programs prescribed. She blushed and bent her head to dry herself off; she was slick-wet with sweat from face to feet, a familiar enough sensation and rather agreeable. The embarrassment was not, and she was glad that the exertion-glow would hide it. She finished and drew on the rough cotton trousers and singlet, pulling the drawstring of the pants tight with fingers that trembled slightly. Half irritation, half a pleasure that was almost painful…

I am good at the bars
, she thought.
I just wish… it's nice to
be good, but I wish it didn't make you
stand out.
Why can't I
ever just fit in
…

"Not bad," Margrave said. The instructor was dressed in
pankration
practice-armor, shiny black leather and synthetic, and a padded helmet with protective bars across the face. "Ever thought of trying for the Games?"

"Yes, Miz Margrave," Yolande said. The Domination had little in the way of professional sports, but amateur athletics had high prestige. She had daydreamed it, standing on the rebuilt plinth at Olympia with the golden olive-wreath resting on her hair…

but that would mean giving up all her spare time, and… "There are too many other things to do."

Margrave nodded, and jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the rack of pankration equipment on the far wall. "Such as that.

Suit up, I'd bettah check yo' style."

Yolande swallowed dryly and trotted to obey; that was one of the rules, you ran everywhere. This palaestra was a severly plain box two stories high and open on one end to face a turf running-track and a long vista of fields and woods; the interior was finished in white tile, with mirrors and stretching-rails around most of the perimeter, climbing-ropes and rings dangling from the ceiling. "Thanks," she muttered to Myfwany, as the other girl helped her on with the armor.