“Now!” Eric threw himself forward. The headquarters lochos followed. Ahead the mortar barrage “walked” into the town proper, then back to its original position. But now the shells carried smoke, thick and white, veiling all sight; bullets stabbed out of it blindly. The 120s crashed again and again, two working along the edge of the village, another elevating slightly to shell the larger buildings in the square.
With cold detachment, Tetrarch Marie Kaine watched the shellfire crumble the buildings, flicked a hand to silence the firing line as the rifle Tetrarchies reached the barrier of smoke. It thinned rapidly; she could hear the crackling bang of snake charges blasting pathways through the German wire. The small-arms fire died away for a brief moment as the first enemy fire positions were blasted out of existence, overrun, silenced. The medics and their stretcher bearers were running forward to attend to the Draka wounded.
“Combat pioneers forward!” she said crisply. The teams launched themselves downhill, as enthusiastically as the rifle infantry had done; being weighed down with twenty kilos of napalm tank for a flamethrower, or an equal weight of demolition explosive, was as good an incentive for finding cover as she knew.
“All right,” she continued crisply. “Machine-gun sections cease fire. Resume on targets of opportunity or fire requests.”
The smoke had blown quickly; a dozen houses were rubble, and fires had started already from beams shattered over charcoal braziers. The fighting was moving into the town; she could see figures in Draka uniforms swarming over rooftops, the stitching lines of tracer. They were as tiny as dolls, the town spread out below like a map . . .
But then, I always did like dolls, she thought. And maps. Her father was something of a traditionalist; he had been quite pleased about the dolls, until she started making her own . . . and organizing the others into work parties.
The maps, too: she had loved those. Drawing her own lines on them, making her own continents for the elaborate imagined worlds of her daydreams. Then she discovered that you could do that in the real world: school trips to the great projects, the tunnel from the Orange River to the Fish, the huge dams along the Zambezi. Horses and engineering magazines, she thought wryly. The twin pillars of my teenage years.
It had been the newsreels, finally. There wasn’t much left to be done south of the Zambezi, or anywhere in Africa—just execution of projects long planned, touching up, factory extensions. But the New Territories, the lands conquered in 1914-1919 . . . ah! She could still shiver at the memory of watching the final breakthrough on the Dead Sea-Mediterranean Canal, the frothing silver water forcing its way through the great turbines, the hum, the power. The school texts said the Will to Power was the master force. True enough . . . but anyone could have power over serfs, all you needed was to be born a Citizen. The power to make cultivated land out of a desert, to channel a river, build a city where nothing but a wretched collection of hovels stood—that was power! Father had had a future mapped out for her, or so he thought: the Army, of course; an Arts B.A.; then she could marry, and satisfy herself with laying out gardens around the manor. Or if she must, follow some genteel, feminine profession, like architecture . . .
But no, I was going to build, she thought. And here I am, destined to spend the best years of my life laying out tank traps, clearing minefields and blowing things up. Oh, well, the war won’t last forever. Russia, Europe . . . we’ll have that, and there’s room for projects with real scale, there.
A trained eye told her that it was time. “Forward,” she called. “Wallis, stop fiddling with that radio and bring the spare set. New firing line at the first row of houses.” Or rubble, her mind added. That was the worst of war—you were adding to entropy rather than fighting it. Just clearing the way for something better, she mused, dodging forward. Hovels, not a decent drain in the place.
Chapter Seven
“ . . . saw little of my father. Home was the servants’ quarters of Oakenwald, where I was happy, much of the time. Tantie Sannie fed me and loved me, there were the other children of the House and Quarters to play with, the gardens and the mountainside to explore. Memory is fragmentary before six: it slips away, the consciousness which bore it too alien for the adult mind to re-experience. Images remain only—the great kitchens and Tantie baking biscuits, watching from behind a rosebush as guests arrived for a dance, fascinating and beautiful and mysterious, with their jewels and gowns and uniforms.
“A chid can know, without the knowledge having meaning. We had numbers on our necks; that was natural. The Masters did not. There were things said among ourselves, never to the Masters. I remember watching Tantie Sannie talk to one of the overseers, and suddenly realizing she’s afraid . . . The Young Master was my father, and came to give me presents once a year. I thought that he must dislike me, because his face went hard and fixed when he looked at me, and I wondered what I had done to anger him. A terrible thought—my Mother had died bearing me. Had I killed her? Now I know it was just her looks showing in me, but the memory of that grief is with me always. And then he came one night to take me away from all I had known and loved, telling me that it was for the best. Movement, cars and boats, strangers; America, voices I could hardly understand . . . ”
Daughter to Darkness: A Life, by Anna von Shrakenberg
Houghton & Stewart, New York, 1964
VILLAGE ONE, OSSETIAN MILITARY HIGHWAY
APRIL 14, 1942: 0530 HOURS
Eric cleared the low stone fence with a raking stride. Noise was all around them as they ran: stutter of weapons, explosion blast, screams; the harsh stink of cordite filled his nose, and he felt his mouth open and join in the shout. The rifle stuttered in his hands, three-round bursts from the hip. Behind him he heard Sofie shrieking, a high exultant sound; even the stolid McWhirter was yelling. They plunged among the apple trees, gnarled little things barely twice man height, some shattered to stumps; the Fritz wire was ahead, laneways blasted through it with snake charges. Fire stabbed at them; he flicked a stick grenade out of his belt, yanked the pin, tossed it.
Automatically, they dove for the dirt. Sofie ooffed as the weight of the radio drove her ribs into the ground, then opened up with her light machine pistol. A round went crack-whhhit off a stone in front of his face, knocking splinters into his cheek. Eric swore, then called over his shoulder.
“Neal! Rocket gun!”
The trooper grunted and crawled to one side. The tube of the weapon cradled against her cheek, the rear venturi carefully pointed away from her comrades; her hands tightened on the twin pistol grips, a finger stroked the trigger. Thump and the light recoilless charge kicked the round out of the short smooth-bore barrel. It blurred forward as the fins unfolded, there was a bright streak as the sustainer rocket motor boosted the round up to terminal velocity: crash as it struck and exploded. Her partner reached to work the bolt and open the breech, slid in a fresh shell and slapped her on the helmet.
“Fire in the hole!” he called.
Forward again, through the thinning white mist of the smoke barrage, over the rubble of the blasted house. That put them on a level with the housetops, where the village sloped down to the road. He reached for the handset.