Eric Flint - Mother of Demons

Some part of Indira wept, as she watched the tall figure of the boy she loved walk away from her. A breach had occurred, she knew. It would only widen in the years ahead; and might never be healed.

But she could not speak. Her love of Joseph had, in that moment, been overwhelmed by dread.

Of him. Barely eighteen, the boy was, with no experience or training to guide him. Yet, in one battle-not even a battle, a minor skirmish-he had grasped the secret which had eluded the vast majority of humanity's generals throughout the long and bloody history of the species.

The advent of mechanized warfare had made the secret obvious-but, even then, not in time to prevent the ghastly slaughter of the trenches in World War I. The Nazi blitzkrieg tactics had finally burned the lesson home, a generation later.

Of course, the secret had been known earlier. Much earlier, and by more than one general or people. But never, Indira knew, had the secret been taken closer to heart than by a people whose technology was barely Neolithic. A people who had created the greatest empire in the history of the human race.

As she watched Joseph Adekunle walk away, Indira did not see a tall boy whose ancestors had lived in the rain forest of West Africa. She saw the much shorter and lighter-skinned ghost of a different man, from a different continent.

The maneuvers of that man's armies had been measured in degrees of latitude and longitude, despite the fact that their only vehicles were horses and camels. His soldiers were reputed by his defeated foes to have been an innumerable "horde"; yet, in actual fact, he had been outnumbered in every battle he won. And he won almost all his battles. He had developed principles of discipline combined with lower-level initiative which, to his bewildered and hapless victims, had seemed like magic on the battlefield. He, and his fellow generals, had incorporated the systematic use of artillery into warfare, more than half a millenium before Napoleon. He had, centuries before the invention of electronic communication, discovered the centrality of what a word-besotted later culture would call CCCI- "communication, control, command and intelligence."

His armies, which continued his traditions after his death, shattered every realm which opposed them. China, the most powerful civilization of the epoch, had fallen to them. The cumbersome armies of Europe, moving like snails beneath iron shells, had been slaughtered like lambs. The vastnesses of the Russian forest and people defeated every invader which came against them, throughout history. Except once. Except when they were conquered by armies trained and led by the greatest general the human race ever produced.

Subedei Bat'atur. Born into the Reindeer people, an extremely primitive and obscure tribe related to another obscure and only slightly less primitive tribe, called the Mongols.

Subedei Bat'atur. Commander of the tumens, the 10,000 strong divisions of Genghis Khan's armies.

By his lights, and those of his people, Subedei Bat'atur had been neither cruel nor sadistic. The Mongols simply approached warfare as a practical task, to be carried out as efficiently as possible. The nomads-derided as superstitious savages by the civilized peoples who surrounded them-had, in fact, studied warfare with the clear and unblinkered eyes of a child. They experimented with the tactics and methods of their enemies, and adopted those which they found useful. For all the breathtaking scope of their vision-which was nothing less than the conquest of the entire known world-they were neither haughty nor arrogant. Quite unlike the vastly more cultured Chinese mandarins and the (much less vastly) cultured knights of Europe, who thought there was nothing to be learned from others.

The Mongols taught them otherwise. Or, at least, taught them to fear what they could not understand or learn.

In truth, Indira had always had a certain genuine admiration for the Mongols. The commonly accepted verdict of later history, she thought, was quite unfair. The Europeans who, at the time, had been able to do nothing more than pray for deliverance (which they received, simply because the Mongols, having already conquered half of Europe, decided the other half wasn't worth it) had taken their scholarly revenge centuries later. The Mongols had become synonomous with pure and simple brutality.

How many people knew, Indira wondered, that the Mongols instituted and enforced a policy of religious toleration which was unheard of in the Middle Ages? (She even smiled, then, in that moment of heartbreak, remembering the time that the Great Khan Mongke invited representatives from all the great religions to come to the imperial capital at Qarakorum. They had come-representatives from Islam, Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism-and had debated theology before the Great Khan and his court. Gritting their teeth, because the holy men were accustomed to other methods of settling accounts with heretics and nonbelievers. But the debate had not degenerated into violence. Not with the Mongol tumens prepared to enforce the law.)

How many people knew that the Mongols fostered the greatest explosion of trade and commerce that had ever taken place prior to that time between China and the western lands of Islam and Christendom? That they built, in China, twenty-seven observatories-and then invited the world's greatest astronomers to come from Persia to help the Chinese learn to use them? That the Mongols built hospitals and even a medical academy, institutions which would have mystified the Europeans of the time?

Almost no one, thought Indira, beyond a few professional historians. Whatever the glories of their later rule, the methods which the Mongols used to create that rule were all that remained in the common memory of the human race.

An admirable people, in many ways. But they had approached warfare with the clear eyes of a young and unfettered people. They had examined war, and grasped its secret.

Speed above all else. Mobility above all else.

Utter ruthlessness.

Their victims had numbered in the millions.

She watched Joseph walk away, paralyzed between the warm heart of a mother and the cold brain of an historian.

Julius soon noticed the quiet estrangement between Indira and Joseph, and was greatly distressed. In his clumsy way, he attempted to intervene. Indira, at first, denied that there was any such estrangement. Denied it hotly, in fact; and accused Julius of various unsavory psychological traits. She was lying, Julius knew-perhaps as much to herself as to him. He knew she was lying because the accusations had been grotesquely unfair (if not totally groundless). Indira's criticisms of Julius were normally rather mild-but excruciatingly accurate.

He then approached Joseph. At first, the boy also denied that any estrangement existed. But he did not throw up a cloud of anger. So Julius persevered, until he managed to crack, slightly, the shell of hurt which Joseph had erected.

"She is keeping secrets from me, Julius. Secrets I must learn."

Julius was dumbfounded. "Secrets? What secrets?"

Joseph groped for words. "Things she knows. She is wise, Julius. She is the wisest being that exists. Especially in those matters which are at the heart of things."

The boy gestured, in a way which encompassed both the village and the lands beyond.

"How people live, and grow. What roads they must take, and which they must avoid."

His face grew hard.

"And she also knows the secrets of war. And she will not tell me. My mother has abandoned me, when I need her most."

He refused to speak further. And Julius did not press him, for he understood the boy was right.

Yet, he also understood the fear possessing Indira. He did not feel that fear so deeply, himself. Perhaps it was because he was wiser; or, perhaps, more foolish. More likely, he thought, it was because he saw the world through the eyes of a biologist rather than an historian. A paleontologist, to boot-for whom all of life is a grand and glorious testament to the inevitability of extinction; and to the new life for which that extinction makes room.