War Games. Brian Stableford
Base and its routines. You might be in on Scapaccio’s exciting archaeological discoveries—buried treasure from a million years ago. You might even get to see your loyal protectors shoot up a few of the locals. Then again, there’s the fabulous exotic city of Ziarat, straight out of some ancient mythology. Enjoy yourself.”
“You can be quite articulate when you try,” she said. “All you need is warming up a bit. And that’s a good philosophy you’re peddling. If only you could take it into your own heart. But you don’t like any of this, do you? You hate the desert, you hate Scapaccio, you despise Delizia and you don’t like having to associate with so many unpacified veich. Sometimes I suspect that you don’t even like having to associate with me.”
“Should I?”
“That depends,” she said. “I’d say you should...but I’m prejudiced.”
She turned, with the air of one who has emerged victorious from a battle of wits. She swung her hips deliberately as she walked away.
“Whore,” muttered Garston. He ran his hand up and down the barrel of his rifle, and almost began to hope that there would be an attack before it was time to move on. He was a patient man—as a soldier, he had been trained for patience—but even the most phlegmatic temperament builds up frustrations that need action to be released.
* * * *
Remy teased the focusing wheel of the binoculars with his forefinger, trying to work a sharp image out of the blur where the horizon should have been. He failed. The combination of the haze and the dust defeated him, and the only thing which testified to the continued presence of the er’kresha within his field of vision was a ruddy tower of cloud which sparkled like frosted mist: the extra dust stirred up into the hot air by the plodding hooves of the er’kreshan mounts.
“Shit!” murmured Remy.
“Well?” asked Doon, who was laid out prone alongside him.
Remy passed over the binoculars. “They’re headed straight out into the Syrene,” he said. “East-nor’east. That’s where Belle Yella is, all right. The worst possible place for him to be, from our point of view.”
Doon tried to focus the binoculars, but with no greater success than Remy.
“Why the hell are they heading into the desert?” asked Madoc, who was standing a few meters away, screened by the rock on which Remy and Doon were perched.
“According to Yerema,” said Remy dully, “there are two reasons. First, because the range of mountains in the heart of the Syrene is in some way sacred to them—nobody lives there, but the er’kresha have always regarded it as being in some way the centerpiece of their mythical empire. Secondly because it’s wild and desolate and completely private—an excellent place for working miracles.”
“I don’t see that it’s any better for miracles than anywhere else,” muttered Doon.
“According to the Calvar scholars, as told to Yerema,” said Remy, “the er’kresha have various stereotyped ideas about what constitutes a miracle. One of them is bringing rain to make the desert bloom.”
Doon lowered the binoculars and squinted out over the flat plain of gray sand and bronzed rock, patched here and there with black thorn bushes and spined grasses. “Now that would be a miracle,” he said.
“It rains there sometimes,” said Remy. “But in the mountains the dice are loaded in Belle Yella’s favor. Nobody lives there on a permanent basis, as I said, so nobody can testify to the regularity of its circumstances, but Yerema figures that it rains there every year just as it rains in the north and the south and the east. When the cloud blows in from the east at the end of summer the mountains drive it up and precipitate a downpour. That’s why the rivers flowing through the Syrene fill up with water again after the summer drought. The mountains are surrounded by hundreds of miles of desert in every direction, but they themselves have a somewhat more benevolent climate. What’s happening out there is that Belle Yella’s cultists are slowly gathering acolytes and witnesses, who are going to spend a lot of time praying bareheaded in the noonday until they’re hallucinating visions and revelations on a regular basis. Then Belle Yella will make rain and force the desert to bloom, and his followers will proclaim him the next best thing to God. Then the support will rally in no uncertain terms, and the war will be on. When people need miracles, they can find them easily enough. The Calvars reckon they know enough about er’kreshan history and oral tradition to write a script for this whole stupid crusade.”
“So what do we do?” asked Madoc.
Remy and Doon turned to look back at him, but made no move to scramble down from their coign of vantage.
“The sioconi say that the end of summer is already here. I don’t know how long it will be before Belle Yella’s miracle arrives on schedule, but we may have between twelve and twenty days. I don’t think we have any alternative but to go into the Syrene heartland after him. It isn’t going to be easy getting to him in that sort of territory, while he’s surrounded by several hundred crazy followers, but I reckon it’s a better bet than one of his assassins getting to the king in Ziarat. With luck, the er’kresha in the mountains will be preoccupied with spiritual affairs—and they certainly won’t be expecting visitors. But it’s not a job we can look forward to.”
“What about Yamba’s so-called army?” asked Doon. “They haven’t done a damn thing except police the streets of Ziarat since the king and the Calvars started using us for all important operations. Couldn’t we give this one back to him?”
“They couldn’t do it,” said Remy. “And it would show us in one hell of a had light. Yamba and his friends hate us enough as it is for what we’ve done. If we turn our back on the first major crisis—a crisis which our coming here has helped to precipitate—we lose virtually all of our influence in Ziarat. That would be fatal. This is our problem even more than Ziarat’s, and we have to solve it.”
“So what kind of force do you propose taking into the desert?” inquired Madoc. “Half a dozen commandos—or a small army?”
Remy adjusted the veil that masked the lower part of his face. Then he moistened his lips with his tongue.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “We’ll have to make plans back in Ziarat. I think Yerema will want to lead this one himself.”
Doon, meanwhile, had put the field glasses back to his eyes and was staring into the distance—not to the east, where the er’kresha had disappeared, but to the south.
“Riders,” he said, passing the binoculars back to Remy. “They’re ours.”
Remy had no difficulty in picking out the approaching men, riding Calvar beasts at a gallop. That didn’t augur well for their reasons. The animals brought by the Calvars from Omer, which Remy thought of for the sake of convenience as “horses” though they were not of Earthly stock, were bred for endurance and for the ability to work well in desert conditions, not for fast speed over short distances. They were longer in the leg and faster than the indigenous species that filled the same ecological and cultural niche, but they were usually ridden hard only in a fight or a pursuit.
One of the riders was a veir, the other a siocon—both were trusted men within Yerema’s private army.
Remy waved a signal to the approaching men, and the veir, Subala, waved back. The two slowed their mounts appreciably, and Remy jumped from the top of the rock into the saddle of his own horse, which shied uneasily at the shock of his abrupt arrival. Doon got down and mounted in a more conventional manner, and the three rode back the way they had come toward the rough desert trail. They met the riders at the bottom of the shallow slope, where the road—such as it was—led away across the coarse sandy soil toward Ziarat.
Iasus Fiemme, the siocon, handed Remy a folded piece of paper. Remy got down before opening it, and the alien also dismounted. “The news was transmitted from Pir by radio,” said Fiemme. “It’s several days old now. We picked it up in a small village three hours to the south.”