Warren Murphy: An Old Fashioned War

Nor did he fail to understand the gun, which his great-great-grandfather had been the first to capture from the whites.

Huak had the first flintlock taken from a Russian nobleman, whose head was strapped in a bag with a dozen scorpion beetles. He had the Enfield taken from the British troops who tried to help one of the Russian armies during its rebellion. He had the shortnosed submachine guns taken from Russian troops who got lost on their way to the border with Korea.

But his favorite weapon was the short razor-sharp sword that could take the ears off a man before he could hear the words of challenge, lie facedown, and submit.

This sword did the chunky five-foot-two-inch Huak, warrior, brandish before him, lathering his horse to reach the two whites before there was nothing left to attack.

Because Huak had taken the time to command everyone to attack the whites, because he had called out the ancient battle cry, "Let blood honor your swords," because he had been in his own mind too much of a gentleman, there would now be nothing left.

They would already be disemboweled. The ears would be gone. Someone would undoubtedly have plucked the eyes with a dagger, and as for the sexual organs of the two, those would be the first to go. There might not even be a bone left.

That was what Huak would get for being a gentleman, and as he raced his little pony, also a descendant of the horses of the horde, the only army in the world never to lose a battle, Huak the Greater thought: No more Mr. Nice Guy.

But when he was less than a spear's throw away from where the remnants should be, he saw the white man whole, the woman whole, and at least eighteen of his brothers lying peacefully in repose, numbers nineteen and twenty rapidly following suit, and with the great horse skills undiminished since the horde left the Gobi desert to devour everything and everyone in its path, Huak pulled his steed up short, almost breaking its neck.

"Skirah," he screamed, and that meant "spirit." Huak was not afraid of death. He believed that a man killed honorably in battle would live to fight again. Only those who fled from battle died like tow animals. But the spirit that came from the winds, that could snuff his soul and put him in the sleep from which his spirit would never awake-that would torment him for eternity, leave him without a horse forever, without a sword forever, and steal his name so Huak would not even know who he was but be like some grain of sand, nothing, undifferent from any other, unbeing.

A few were not in time to hear his warning about the evil wind spirit, and went to sleep at the spirit's hands. He had brought his pale woman with him, probably also to feast on the souls of those to be made like dust, like sand, like nothing.

Of those gone before the other horses were able to rein in, the number was twenty-two, not dead so much as lost forever.

A young warrior, hearing Huak's command, but thinking there were so many of them that the white man could not possibly dodge a hundred arrows, pulled back his bow in the quick short draw of the bowstring made famous at the gates of Baghdad and at the fringes of Europe.

Huak's knife cut that short with a snap jab into the jugular. The boy fell instantly like an old wineskin spilling its red contents on the tundra.

The boy's father, riding adjacent to the son, saw what Huak had done, and said:

"Thank you, brother Huak." And no more was said. The father understood that if the son had died at the spirit's hands, his soul would be gone forever. Now they could take the body back with them and bury it knowing it was still part of them, possibly returning even in the next birth, a boy of course.

Male spirits never came back as women. Thus was the belief of the horde unchanged in its centuries of unbroken triumph.

A thousand horses came to snorting, stamping rest around the two whites. Clouds of warm air from their nostrils puffed out into the cold Siberian air. "Oh Skirah spirit, what have you come for, what can we give you to appease you, to honor you so that you will leave our souls in peace and seek others?"

"Get your horses back, they smell. The whole horde smells like a shit farm," said the white man in the older tongue used at the time of Genghis Khan himself.

"How many languages do you speak?" whispered Anna. She had seen Remo kill before, and all of it looked so smooth, it could have been someone stacking crates at an hourly wage.

"I dunno," answered Remo in English. "You read the scrolls, you pick up dozens of languages. Sinanju needed them for work."

"I presume, darling, that's Mongolian," said Anna.

"No. The horde spoke a dialect peculiar to Genghis Khan's tribe."

"How many words do you know?"

"If you know to tell them to move their smelly horses back, you've got fifty percent of everything you ever need to tell a Mongol," said Remo, and in the language Chiun had taught him during a training session outside Dayton, Ohio, while Remo was still learning basic breath, he said:

"Horses, move backward. Back. And you there. Clean up the droppings. Don't litter the tundra. Bunch of dirty dogs. Back."

A warrior dismounted, and quickly gathered a loose plop of goo in a skin.

"You didn't have to use your hands. We may be eating supper with you. On second thought, if you've only got yak meat, we'll do without. I'm looking for someone."

"Whom, Skirah, do you seek?"

"He calls himself Mr. Arieson and I think he should be around here."

"Arieson?"

"Thick neck. Beard. Blazing eyes. Hard to put a spear through. Probably impossible."

"Oh, you mean our friend Kakak."

"White?" asked Remo.

"What else is the color of ugly dead flesh?" asked Huak.

"Do you want to stay on that horse or would you like to blend in with the tundra?" said Remo.

"I did not mean to dishonor your color, Skirah. Come with us and take your glorious bride spirit with you. Our encampment is not far away."

"Ride ahead and clear the horses out. I don't want to be downwind from you guys."

"As you say, Skirah," said Huak to Remo.

"Who is Skirah?" asked Anna.

"One of their spirits. Maybe the way they pronounce Sinanju."

"I think I understand. Religion, spirits, and gods are the way people explain to themselves what they don't understand. So when Genghis Khan died at the hands of Sinanju, they explained it away as a bad spirit. And it had to be a great bad spirit because Genghis Khan was great. It's all logical. Everything in the world is logical, except we don't always understand the logic right away. Don't you think?"

"We're walking behind eight hundred horses, and you're thinking about rational explanations for myths?" asked Remo.

"What should I be thinking about?"

"Where you're stepping," said Remo.

Anna felt a sudden warm moistness up around the calf of her boot. She realized Remo could be brilliant at times.

But there was something far more sinister on the tundra. As they approached the encampment, great gaping cracks appeared around them, parallel paths chewing up the frost-white earth, churning up frozen blackness underneath. Something had passed here very recently, and it used treads. Tanks.

But the Mongols of the horde did not use tanks, at least not to Anna's knowledge. With modern equipment like that, these horsemen-invincible in the frozen wastes of Siberia-could theoretically overrun Europe, something they could not do with Genghis Khan.

Then again, the family that had stopped him was back again. He might stop them before they broke out.

Unless, thought Anna, the treads were not made by Mongol-driven tanks at all. Maybe it is something worse.

And as soon as they saw the encampment, Anna knew the worst had happened. Walking freely among the Mongols were Russian soldiers and officers. Thousands of them. She saw them with their arms around the shoulders of the Mongols, and vice versa.