Jerry Pournelle War World II Death's Head Rebellion

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that, he thought with grim enjoyment, he would finish him at leisure.
But the nomad's knee was not there. Dagor was almost too slow to skip aside
from his rush, and still took a buffet that made his ear ring. He shook his
head to clear it, stared in amazement at the plainsboy.
"You're quick," he said with grudging respect. "Very quick."
"So are you," said the nomad, who sounded as disconcerted as Dagor.
They circled, each of them more wary now. Another flurry of arms and legs, a
brief thrashing on the ground, and they broke free from each other once more.
Dagor felt a dagger when he breathed - one of his foe's flailing feet must
have racked a rib. Blood ran from the steppe-rover's nose; a couple of fingers
on his right hand stuck out at an unnatural angle, broken or dislocated.
Dagor willed his pain to unimportance. He had to be getting old, he thought,
to let a puppy - and a puppy from the cattle, at that - lay a finger on him,
let alone hurt him. Old? He had to be getting senile!
All right, the fellow was fast and strong for an unaltered man, but that was
all he was, all he could be. It did not suffice.
No more play now, Dagor thought, and waded back into the fight.
Even when he lay on the ground with the nomad's arm like a steel bar at the
back of his neck, he could not believe what had happened to him. "I will spare
you if you yield," his opponent panted.
Instead, as any Soldier would, Dagor tried once more to twist free. That steel
bar came down. He felt
- he heard - his vertebrae crack apart, then felt nothing at all. "Badri," he
whispered, and died.
"More kavass, my son?" Before Juchi could answer, Kisirja handed him the
leather flask. He drank, belched with nomad politeness, drank again. The
fermented mares' milk mounted to his head, helped blur the hurts he had taken
in the fight with the outlaw.
He belched again, touched the pistol on his belt. After endless
searching, he'd found it and the ammunition the outlaw had carried for
it. Better than either had been the awe on Salur's face when he brought his
prizes back to the flock.
"Who was the bandit?" Kisirja asked, for about the tenth time. "Who could he
have been?"
Juchi shrugged, as he had each time she'd asked. "By his gear, he could have
been anymore. He was very fast and strong, stronger than anybody I've wrestled
in the clan."
"Could he have been - a Sauron?" Kisirja knew a sudden spasm of fear,
remembering what she had drilled herself never to think of: how Juchi had come
to her, come to the clan.
He stared at her. "How could I hope to best a Sauron, my mother? No, I think
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he must have been a bandit of some sort, perhaps exiled from the Bandari. They
have Frystaat blood, many of them, which makes them fast and tough. But as I
say, I can't be sure. I'll never be sure, just glad that I'm here."
"As am I, my son." A haBandari outlaw, Kisirja mused.
That was possible, maybe even probable. For the first time in years, she
wondered what had become of the exposed Sauron babe the Bandari woman had
taken when she found Juchi.
And, for the first time in even more years, she found herself feeling odd to
hear Juchi call her "mother."
No one in the clan had ever told him he was not theirs by birth. The nomads
stole babes from Bases'
exposure grounds now and again, aye, but they feared the Saurons too much to
let those babes learn their heritage. The genes were valuable. Everything that
went with them . . . Kisirja shivered.
Juchi hugged her, tight enough to make her bones creak. "Don't worry, my
mother. There was but the one of him, and he is not coming back to rob honest
men any more."
"Good." Kisirja smiled and did all the things she needed to do to reassure
him. Even his embrace, though, somehow only made her own worries worse. That
effortless, casual strength - She felt like a filebeak that had hatched a land
gator's egg.
The land gator named Juchi was, for the moment, quite nicely tame. "I have to
go now, my mother.
The clan chief himself invited me to his yurt, to see the pistol and hear my
story." He puffed out his chest and did his best to strut in the cramped
confines of the yurt, then kissed Kisirja and hurried off to guest with Dede
Korkut.
Kisirja should have been proud. She was proud, and all her forebodings, she
told herself, were merely
the fright of any mother at her son's brush with danger. After a while, she
made herself believe it.
"He is not coming back," the Breedmaster said.
"How can you be sure?" Badri wanted to scream it at him. Ice rode her words
instead. Ice was better for dealing with the likes of Grima. "He's only been
gone twenty cycles."
"Only?" Grima twisted words; his tongue writhed like a worm, Badri thought.
The Breedmaster went on. "Twenty cycles is more than a quarter of a T-year. He
should have returned in half that time, or less.
No, we have to conclude the cursed cattle got lucky this time."
"I don't believe it," Badri said flatly. She spoke simple truth: Dagor was too
fine a soldier, and too much a Soldier, for her to imagine any mere human
vanquishing him.
"I fear I do." The Breedmaster did not sound as though he feared it; he
sounded glad. "And not only do I believe it, so does Brigade Leader Azog. He
has ordered me to put your name on the reassignment list. You are not as young
as you once were, but you have at least a Haven year's worth of fertility left
to give to the Race, maybe close to two. You may yet bear many children, many
Soldiers." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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