William Forstchen - Down to the Sea

“There will be a day,” he hissed, and then turned away.

Vincent looked next at Jurak, but could not read him. Wondering how to withdraw, he hesitated for an instant, then simply came to attention and saluted.

Jurak, a flicker of a smile again on his face, nodded. “At least I will say this,” he said slowly, “your General Hawthorne has the spirit of a warrior, and I believe that in his heart, he knows us and sees the tragedy of all that was and all that shall be.”

“And what, sir, will you do in reply?” Abraham asked.

“Do? Survive, human, survive.” Jurak turned and walked away.

Abraham came up to Vincent’s side and gently helped him to mount, then swung into his own saddle.

“There’s going to be a war, isn’t there, sir?” he asked.

Vincent, saying nothing, rode back to where the regiment was digging in for the night’s encampment.

Abraham looked toward the bloodred setting sun that hung low on the horizon, the vast, empty steppes bathed in its bloody light. Strange, it was such a beautiful sight, even though it was filled with foreboding.

A random thought came to him. He wondered where his friends Richard and Sean were. Perhaps, out on the vast open sea, such a sunset was indeed a sailor’s delight; a portent of at least one more day of peace.

He awoke to hell.

As consciousness returned, he could hear Sean O’Donald’s low rasping breath. Good, he was still alive.

Or was it good? No. Death was the only way out now, better if Sean had died from the last beating.

Eyes swollen nearly shut, Richard turned his head to look at his comrade, chains around their wrists, hanging suspended from the ceiling of the darkened cabin.

As the ship rose and fell, they slowly swung back and forth, Sean groaning as he brushed against the cabin wall, then swung away.

The only illumination came from a narrow slit of light through a slightly ajar wooden porthole cover.

Richard Cromwell wished that the room were completely dark so that he could not see the table across from them. Knives, pincers, and whips were laid upon the table, the only furnishing in the narrow room other than the chains that bound them.

How long had it been? He wasn’t sure. Definitely a day. Had there been a night? If so, he couldn’t remember now. His universe was focused on the pain; the racking thirst that was nearly as terrible; the realization that there was no way out, that they were the prisoners of the Kazan and death was the ultimate outcome.

He tried to become detached, to remember how it once was. He had a vague memory-or was it just what his mother had told him? — of a time when they had been spared the full horror of the Merki occupation of Cartha. She, as the mistress of Tobias Cromwell, was allowed a place to live, decent food, deliverance from the feasts and from the mines.

But then Cromwell had died, and the Merki had sent them into the mines. Even children of two and three had crawled into the narrow seams and retrieved loose rock.

Thus he had lived and grown until the end of the war. He had learned toughness, to look with cold eyes upon unspeakable horror, to watch as others died the most horrible of deaths and to feel nothing.

He wondered how it could be that he was not like so many others who had survived that time; the drifters, the beggars, the drinkers and murderers who had infested the city of Cartha after the war and the coming of the Yankees.

It was his mother’s love that had shielded him from that fate. He could remember her soft touch, her stories of her family, rulers of Cartha before the Great War. Her love had formed a shield around him and somehow kept a kernel within his heart alive and warm.

She had died on the final day the Merki fled from the Yankee gunboats on the coast, the liberation within sight. The Merki had massacred nearly everyone. But even among that dreaded race there could be acts of pity. Their master, ordered to slay everyone, had granted her a clean death, a single blow. Then he had looked down, blade drawn, and hesitated.

“Hide beneath your mother, little one,” he whispered, and left.

So he had hidden, feeling the warmth that covered him growing cold.

A Rus soldier had found him thus, taken him in and raised him. The old man had been kindly enough, a fisherman living alone, who had taught him to sail, to work, to read and write. The old man seldom spoke, for a wound to the throat from a Tugar arrow had made his speech all but unintelligible, but concealed within was a sharp mind and a gentle strength. They would take their small boat out upon the Inland Sea, and often for days not a word would be exchanged, but Richard had, at least with this lonely old man, learned the strength of silence and patience.

He had died when Richard was eighteen, and only then did Richard learn that this quiet, lonely man had been a hero in the Great War, a war of which the old man had never spoken other than to say that his entire family had died in the great siege of Suzdal and that Perm had sent Richard to replace those he had lost.

Several veterans came to the funeral, one of them the Yankee general Hawthorne. He was the one that suggested Richard attend the academy and offered to give a letter of recommendation, never realizing who Richard’s father had really been.

Old Vasiliy had often suggested that Richard take his name, but something within had always stopped him, a defiance toward the world, an unwillingness to concede this one final point. It had caused nothing short of an explosion when he had appeared before the review board to take the exams and placed his true name on the form.

The matter had gone all the way to Andrew Keane, who was not president at the time, but did sit on the Supreme Court. The four years at the academy had been, because of his defiance, less than pleasant. More than one instructor had denounced his father as a traitor and openly mocked his name. And yet his quiet defiance had, in the end, gained him a certain grudging respect.

Vasiliy had taught him never to admit that anything was impossible. Once their net had become tangled in some wreckage, and the old man had told him to dive down and loosen it. The net was too precious to cut away or abandon. He had tried and could not reach it, and Vasiliy simply sat back, lit his pipe and told him they had days if need be, but he would untangle the net.

It had taken a day, he had almost drowned doing it, but he had learned.

And now it is time to die, he thought. I should have died nearly twenty years past. Every day since had been but an extra drawing of breath. At times he half believed in a God, Perm, and Kesus as old Vasiliy called them. At other times, in the face of all the cruelty he had witnessed, it was impossible to believe in any sense or order to the universe, for surely if there was a God he had to be mad to allow such a world as this.

The ship rose on a wave and corkscrewed back down, slamming both of them against the bulkhead. Sean groaned, a shuddering sob racking his body.

“Richard?”

“I’m here.”

Sean looked over at him, face contorted with agony. “I can’t take it again.”

Richard said nothing. He had learned how to block out beatings. In the mines they were the primary way to force children of four and five to work, or simply to amuse a bored Merki master. He had once seen a child slowly beaten to death across an entire day in the same way human children would torment a fly.

The beating of the previous day, however, had not been done for amusement, but for the simple purpose of breaking him down. He understood the method well enough, to push the agony to the limit of endurance, made even more maddening because no questions were asked, nothing demanded as of yet. Pain was simply inflicted, the lash snaking out against their naked bodies until both of them were bloody masses of peeling flesh.