Madman's Army

Chapter X

Rikos Laskos was ushered into the mam room of the suite by one of Milo’s personal guardsmen. When the door had closed firmly behind him, he said aloud, “Guten Tag, Milo Moray. I parted from you last in Nebraska … or was it Kansas? Ach, das ist schon lang her! Were my notebooks of any value to you and our people, then?”

Milo arose, then, to just stand for a long moment, wide-eyed. “Is it really you, then, Dr. Clarence Bookerman?” he asked in English of seven centuries before. “Where have you been all these hundreds of years?”

Laskos walked across to the sideboard and, after sniffing of the contents of several decanters, chose and poured for himself a small goblet of a powerful brandy. Warming the goblet between his two palms and sniffing appreciatively at the bouquet of the liquor thus freed, he answered, “Why, where our kind are for too much of the time: on the move, of course, putting as much distance as possible between the spot wherein we dwelt happily for a few, short years and the spot wherein we next will try to carve ourselves out a new, hopefully happy, niche for a few more years … until people begin to take too much notice of the bald fact that we do not age as do normal folk.”

“Where did you go when you left us there in central Kansas?” Milo demanded. “Most of the people who had been yours finally decided that you had felt death approaching and either had ridden off to die alone or to die near to the grave of your wife.”

“It surprises me that you remember so much and so clearly from so very long ago, my friend,” said Laskos-Bookerman, taking a seat, still cradling his brandy goblet. “My own recall is no longer so good; too many, many newer memories superimposed over the older ones must tend to cloud them, block them, make them of difficulty to drag up from the depths into which they have been pushed and immured.

“I cannot remember just where I went after I left you and those would-be nomads. I do remember that at some time during that period I dwelt for a long time alone in a well-preserved, well-stocked and still eminently livable complex I found carved into a mountain, out there in the Rockies. So long did I there remain that all of my beasts either died of old age or wandered off, and when to move on and find the humans for whose living companionship I hungered I did, it had to be on foot until at last I was able to acquire a scrubby little mount.

“Across the continent, slowly I wandered for years, seeing the natural increase of the survivors of near extirpation, Milo, and also observing the genesis of new societies, civilizations, cultures arising, phoenix-like, out of the dust and ashes of the old. Then, at last, I arrived upon the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. Through great good fortune, the rare kindness of fickle fate, I found a beautiful and incredibly well-preserved miniature version of a sleek ocean-racing boat. She was so beautifully designed and fitted that but a single man, if knowledgeable and active and strong, could easily sail her. In addition to her sails, she was equipped with an auxiliary diesel engine, one of sufficient power to give her decent headway in almost any circumstance.

“I now disrecall what her previous owner had called her, but I rechristened her Woge Stute after I had completely refurbished her for a long voyage. I cherished a desire to once more, after so very many long years, see again my Heimat, the land of my long-ago birth, and I had faith that this fine, friendly vessel would safely bear me to my longed-for destination.

“Of course, in those times, it took me actual years to hunt out or make all that was needful, but then the one thing for which our rare kind never lacks is time. Nicht wahr? Let it suffice to say that at last I felt everything to be in readiness and I put my treasure of a boat back into the water. But of course, contemplating a voyage of such length, the mere fact that she floated and seemed sound could not be enough, so I undertook several trial voyages of lesser and greater distances, each of them teaching and reteaching me things which I had forgotten over the years and centuries I had been almost landbound.

“Finally, on a late-April day, I left the coast of what had once been called the State of Maine behind me and pointed my darling’s prow northeast, toward the continent of Europe. At last I was bound for heiligen Deutschland, mein Heimatland.”

“My God, Clarence,” exclaimed Milo, “weren’t you at least daunted to consider such a risk? You can drown, you know. My original coruler of Kehnooryos Ehlahs, Demetrios, died in just that way some years back; was pushed off a bridge in the middle of a battle, in full armor, and with a death-wounded war-horse on top of him, to boot. We found his helm on the bed of the river and nearby a cracked skull that might or might not’ve been his, too. But no man has ever seen or heard of him, since.”

“Naturally, I was afraid, Milo,” replied the guest, “just as I was always afraid when the air raids took place during the Second World War, in Berlin. There is at least that much of true, normal humanity in my makeup. But just as beasts and birds and eels and salmon must return to their natal grounds or waters, regardless of obstacles or distances or swarming predators, I was consumed with an irresistible urge to once more see as many of the sights of my ancient youth as still remained in the hills and deep, silent valleys and dark forests that nurtured me of old. Cannot you understand that, my old friend, Milo?”

The High Lord of the Confederation of Eastern Peoples sighed. “Of course I do, Clarence. I know the feeling, believe me. Although I’ve never been able to remember any of my life prior to about 1937 A.D., still do I often desire to return to places where once I was happy for some years. For instance, although I have been only something like a century removed from the plains and prairies, I often must suppress an itching urge to just saddle a horse and ride west until I once more am where I lived for so very long. So, yes, I do understand, fully, just what drove you to take such hellish risks on the open sea, alone.”

“It was a terrible voyage, Milo,” said Bookerman-Laskos. “I had, I discovered, chosen a bad time of year for that northerly route, for it was spawning-time for icebergs. After not a few very near-disasters, I reset my course farther south, only to suffer through storm after storm, raising waves that often overtopped my masthead and cost me much of my precious diesel fuel to maintain headway and to keep the bilge pumps going that I not be swamped.

“Those storms it was drove me so far south that my first landfall was not Ireland or England as I had expected but, rather, France, in the Bay of Biscay I was standing in to some tiny, nameless Gascon port, when three craft about the size of whaleboats came rowing out toward me, fast as the crews could row.

“Some sixth or seventh sense gave me warning, and I fixed my set of big binoculars upon those boats while still they were fairly far distant. What I saw through the glasses was not at all reassuring to a sea-weary mariner. All of the men were armed to the teeth, though mostly with a vast assortment of edge-weapons. Nor were their physical appearances an improvement— all looking to be hairy, dirty and most brutish, though strong. So I threw over the rudder and retrimmed the sails, determined to put as many nautical miles as was possible between me and such an aggregation, and I was doing just that when, abruptly, the wind died to almost nothing and, with a hoarse, bellowing chorus of triumph, the rowers came onward, increasing their already-fast beat.

“That was when I repaired briefly belowdeck and returned with my Mannlicher rifle and its carefully hoarded store of cartridges, a Maschinenpistole for closer-range work, and two pistols, a saber and a hefty dirk for hand-to-hand, if it came to that.

“I was lucky enough to drop all three steersmen with five shots of the rifle. The next five dropped two replacement steersmen and two oarsmen, these last from out the lead boat, but the boat with still a steersman came on nonetheless, despite my deadly marksmanship, until it was less than twenty-five meters distant. At that, I laid aside the Mannlicher, took up the Automatisch and slew them all—rowers, steersman and passengers, alike. At the sound of the weapon, the sight of what I had done to the men in the lead boat, the other two swung about as one and rowed back toward their distant port at some speed.

“I kept watch lest they return until, just a little before sunset, I was blessed with a fresh breeze and was able to sail far upon it before heaving out the anchors and going below for badly needed sleep.

“While searching for other things, mostly things of a nautical nature in Maine, I had lucked across a store of smokeless powders, primers and even some boxes of unprimed brass cases and factory-cast bullets in the exact caliber of my Mannlicher—8 x 57mm. In late morning of the next day, once more becalmed off the southern coast of Brittany, I was engaged in reloading the rifle cartridges that I had had to fire at the Gascons when I once more heard the distinctive creak and thump of oarlocks approaching.

“I emerged, well armed you must believe, Milo, onto the deck to see with surprise that a double-masted schooner lay rocking in the swell some two hundred meters out from my vessel, and between us, a small boat was being rowed toward me—six oarsmen and a steersman, plus two other men. The glasses showed me that none of the men, neither in the boat nor on the deck of the schooner, looked so scruffy as had the lot off the coast of Gascony. Their clothing looked to be at least clean, and their dress was close enough alike that it might be a uniform of some type, I thought.

“Two of the men in the boat wore sidearms—heavy cutlasses and short daggers or dirks—but none of the others bore anything of a more threatening nature than belt knives of fifteen centimeters or so in the blades. Looking at the schooner, I could see at least a dozen of what looked amazingly like swivel-guns mounted along her rails, men standing beside them with coils of smoking slowmatch in their hands. Her flag was unclear, despite my binoculars, being mostly of a faded red and rusty black, insofar as I could determine.

“Some thirty meters off my port bow, the small boat heaved to and one of the men stood up in the stern and began to bespeak me through a leather trumpet! I was expecting the Breton dialect of French, and it took me a moment to realize that the language he was using was a very atrocious and thoroughly ungrammatical form of Russian. Recognizing his thick accent after a few seconds, I took up my own trumpet and asked him how long he was out from Hamburg. He was obviously startled to hear the good, Frisian dialect, but he became much friendlier, and, after exchanging a few more words, I agreed to allow him and one more to come aboard, but the boat to stand well out from my vessel when once those two had been put aboard, and they all complied with my orders.

“Milo, my friend, fortune assuredly was sailing with me on that day. The schooner, Erika, was an armed merchantman out of the Independent Aristocratic Republic of Hamburg. Hamburg was, I was soon to learn, one of the very few large German cities not seriously damaged in the brief exchange of missiles or the drive of Russian forces across Western Europe which followed.

“After breaking a few fangs on Switzerland, the forces of the Bear had bypassed it to sweep on into and through the vaunted but not at all effective French forces, then up through the Low Countries, whose tiny armies did not even try to resist. The German Federal Republic, however, though beset on every hand, still was not only holding its own but had, in certain sectors, begun to actually push the Russians and their satellite armies back, when the Great Dyings began to more than decimate both aggressors and defenders, impartially. The sole missile that came down in Hamburg was launched, surely from beneath the North Sea, very late in the game and in any case failed to explode, Gott sei dank.

“The great Russian-led invasion had ebbed as it had flowed, but if any of them returned to Russia, it must have been a miracle, so fast did they drop along the way to die. For some reason, a goodly number of Russians remained in the coastal departments of France, eventually taking Frenchwomen as spouses or concubines, and, therefore, France had become, by the time of my arrival in its coastal waters, a bilingual land, for all that it was as splintered and politically fragmented as any other European nation of that period, perhaps a little more than most, though, really, since the French have never had a stable, central government for any long period since they murdered their king and butchered their nobility at the close of the eighteenth century.

“By the time of my arrival, Milo, a few generations of breeding had brought the population of Western Europe back up to a fraction of its earlier size, but at least such progress had encouraged the people, had made them to think that perhaps mankind was not irrevocably doomed as a species. As the largest remaining port city in all of northwestern Europe, Hamburg was becoming something of a power, and its ships sailed out in every direction, just as its land merchants traveled the roads and byways of the continent with their heavily armed and pugnacious escorts.

“Of course, in times of such uncertainty, ships needs must sail well armed and, often, in convoy, shipping along larger crews than would have been necessary simply for working the vessel. Erika was such a ship, standing up from one of the Basque kingdoms with a mixed cargo and bound for home, Hamburg.

“My greatest good fortune was to be able to sail to Hamburg under Erika’s strong protection through the waters of the Dutch and English pirates, as well as up the Elbe, where had I not been in company with her I would likely have been blown out of the water by the line of powerful cannon-and catapult-armed forts or boarded in force by the river patrols and either killed or enslaved.

“After so many long years of either total solitude or companionship of only a few, pitiful survivors of all of mankind’s disasters, I found that new Hamburg to be most stimulating in all conceivable ways, Milo. It was, of course, as always, a booming, bustling center of commerce, but now much, much more than just that.

“Some twenty thousands of men and women and children were resident within the earth-and-wooden perimeter walls that were fast being replaced with dressed stone. Protected by well-armed guard ships, the fishers sailed out and came back up the Elbe, bearing heavy catches of stockfish to be smoked or salted or pickled; others of them brought in barrel on precious barrel of whale oil. Other ships brought in lumber for the flourishing shipbuilders, or sailed in laden with broken pieces of old statuary, bells and other bronze or brass scrap, copper, tin and zinc for the cannon foundry, sulphur and niter and charcoal for the powder mills. All of the rest of the world might be sinking into a slough of despair and barbarism, but Hamburg was keeping lit the lamp of true culture and civilization.

“The master of Erika, Kapitan Klaus Hauer, and his son and first mate—the fine young man who had rowed over to my vessel—Fritz Hauer, escorted me to the new seat of government and introduced me to him who just then was serving as Präsident of the Aristokratisch Sammlung of Hamburgerstadt, Herr Hubert Klapp-Panzertöt, whose surname was derived of his grandfather, who had been a great hero of the stand against the Eastern European hordes that had invaded Germany.

“When once Hubert learned just how much I in my mind held of the old, near-forgotten technologies of the world of almost, by then, three full generations before, he saw me declared an aristocrat and we two worked together for years until his death, at which time I moved on, traveling with merchants as far as Westphalia. I lived there for some years, a client of the Graf, to whose retainers I taught refinements of swordplay and oriental martial arts. After some years there, I moved on; of course, you know how and why it must be so, Milo.

“For longer or shorter times, I lived all over the German lands, in France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Rumania, the Baltic States, the Russian princedoms, all of Scandinavia, the Kingdom of Ukrainia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Albania, Macedonia and, finally the Peloponnese.

“By then, nearly two hundred years after the Great Dyings, the Greeks were once more getting a bit crowded on their poor and rocky holdings; despite their idiosyncratic perversions, no one ever has been able to fault Greeks at the act of breeding. Unable to feed themselves by way of farming or fishing, many of the men of Greece were become pirates of shipping and consummate raiders of other lands, and my own fleet was one of the largest, strongest and most feared, incorporating as it did techniques and relics of times past which gave it a distinctive edge over its opponents.

“However, as the fleets got larger and more numerous, not just Greek but Italian, Sicilian, Turkish, Syrian, Spanish, southern French and others too numerous to recount, we too often found ourselves fighting each other, bleeding and dying and losing ships to no real account or gain. The field was becoming overcrowded, you see, friend Milo. That was when the great idea occurred to me.

“Following actual years of careful plannings and negotiations, I was able to organize a relatively peaceful meeting of all the leaders of all the larger fleets of Mediterranean pirates and shore-raiders. So successful in many ways were our parleys that some began to take to heart my contention that were they to not all die by way of bloody violence and find as their only grave the belly of some sea-beast, then they had best find arable land somewhere, that they could hold and which would easily nurture them and their get.

“All knew that such was simply not available in most of the seacoast Mediterranean lands, and what little still was would be so hotly defended by present inhabitants as to demand a cost far greater than any possible gain, could it be taken at all. So I told them of the vast, almost-empty spaces of the sparsely inhabited North America that I recalled from before I had sailed back to Europe. I spoke of the fertility of the earth there, of the rich ruins to be stripped, of the thick forests, the abundance of clear water, the sad, huddled, all but helpless knots of survivors, the plentitudes of wild and feral beasts to be eaten and skinned or captured and retamed to the uses of man.

“Two decades of my sermons they heard, and following two deadly calamities that struck almost as one—a very powerful man ascended to the sultancy of the Turks and began to not only put down pirates with his numerous and intrepid fleet, but actually to mount bloody seaborne raids on the bases of the raiders, then a succession of terrible earthquakes and resultant tsunamis devastated the Peloponnese, Crete and many other islands—a large percentage of the sea-robbers of Greece, southern Italy, Syria, Sicily and even far-off Spain made indication that they would favorably consider setting sail across the ocean to a new land where the Turks could not so easily hunt them out.”

Milo just stared. “You? It is you who was responsible for the conquest of most of the East Coast by the ancestors of the Ehleenohee, Clarence?”

Bookerman-Laskos shrugged, self-deprecatingly. “It wasn’t all that easy, Milo. Ships that were fine for sailing or rowing on the tideless Mediterranean would never have made it across the Atlantic, and I knew this fact even if others did not know it or think of it. I had all of the bases moved from Crete and Cyprus, Sicily and Malta, Sardinia and Corsica and the Balearics to a single point, a huge, sprawling base, on the coast of Portugal, a bit south of the vast ruins of Lisbon. We were compelled to conquer the people of that land in a succession of wars. Only then could we go about utilizing their labor, their wood and their shipyards to build for us an oceangoing fleet.

“I like to think that we were good rulers and protectors of the people, Milo. We drove off countless raids by sea-rovers, defeated utterly two in-force raiding fleets of Moors and one of Basques. In answer to repeated provocations, we sailed up to Bilbao, scuttled or burnt all of their ships and even boats, went ashore and defeated their forces, then looted and fired the town that squatted among the ancient ruins. No, I had forgotten, we did not destroy all of their ships; those that looked usable to our purposes, we sailed or towed back to our base to add to our burgeoning flotilla, and, having learned from this episode, we began to do the same to other Atlantic-coast Spanish, French, English, Irish and other ports. We carefully scouted out objectives, struck with overpowering forces, fought hard, but then most often sailed away with only usable ships and easily come-by bits of loot, ships’ stores and perhaps a few new women.

“Even so, doing the best that we could, doing it as carefully but still as fast as we could, it took us the best part of eight years to make ready for the great adventure. Using ancient maps and charts, I laid out our course for North America, and, late in August of that year, we set sail out of our jam-packed harbor— nearly twelve thousand men aboard seventy-eight ships, leaving almost as many men to follow in a second wave whenever enough bottoms were built or taken from others to bear them. And even as we sailed out into the Atlantic, more of our kind were sailing in from the Mediterranean, fleeing the wrath of the savage Turks.

“The voyage, unlike my terrifying solitary one two centuries past, was relatively easy and almost serene. We did not begin to lose ships until we had sailed into the coastal waters and begun to run up against unmarked shoals and other dangers that were not, of course, shown on the two-hundred-year-old charts. But, recall, please, Milo, this all occurred more than two and a half centuries prior to that horrible spate of seismic disturbances, volcanism, tsunamis and land subsidences, so the coast was basically unchanged, with few swamps worthy of the name along them, so landings were effected with a fair degree of ease and we began to acquire a few mounts and send out some parties of scouts to see what lay before us and allow us to carefully choose initial objectives, for it was plain that the lands were not deserted as I had recalled them from so long in the past, but that certain numbers of folk were living on them, exploiting them in various ways.

“We had landed on the Atlantic coast of that area once known as the State of Georgia. There were many ruined places, yes, but there were also quite a few agricultural settlements, two of these large enough to be considered small cities, by then-current Mediterranean standards, and these were called Savannah and Brunswick. We knew that both must fall quickly were we to gain uncontested possession of the rich croplands between them; also, we needed harborage for our fleet, lest the autumnal and winter storms wreck it.

“I decided to first attack the larger, stronger of these little cities. I personally reconnoitered, lying hidden and still in many places for days, but finally emerging with a sound plan of action.

“With the weapons and equipment then available to us, Savannah sat impregnable atop its bluff, impregnable by river, that is. But still I sent elements of the fleet up the river, where they created a noisy disturbance just beyond the ranges of the defensive engines mounted atop the bluffs. All but a handful of the foolish, painfully naive Savannanans rushed to the walls atop the bluffs, and that was when I led my men against the landward walls. We swarmed up them on our assault-ladders, flung open the gates and let the rest of our men in to begin a bloody massacre of the inhabitants. Understand, Milo, I did try to control my men, but a single man cannot be everywhere at the one time, you see. Some few escaped the city, naturally, such things happen in warfare, so we well knew that the other city, to the south, Brunswick, would be warned and very watchful.

“The river harbor below Savannah was roomy enough for our fleethaven for the season of storms, so we moored the most of the ships therein and let Brunswick wait and watch and worry while we spent the autumn and winter and early spring in consolidating our gains and moving by both land and water against the smaller centers between us and the other city. I had managed to convince my bloodthirsty minions that live slaves were far to be preferred to decomposing bodies, so we oversaw our new-won lands planted in the spring, then the most of us marched off southward and westward to win more land and slaves and loot.

“With all of the countrysides surrounding it in our hands and all of its vessels sunk or driven off sea and river, besieged Brunswick fell to our arms a year almost to the day after Savannah had fallen. Therefore, with a firm foothold established on that coast, I took four ships and set sail back to the east to fetch back the second wave of Mediterraneans to conquer yet another part of the lands.

“On my return from Portugal, Milo, my starting fleet of some fifty-three ships was storm-scattered, and only forty-one still were With me when we laid over, briefly, on the coast of New England. We were bound for the lands just north of the originally invaded area, but another terrible storm drove us into the southern end of the Bay of Chesapeake, and so we made our base among the shattered ruins of that huge complex of ancient cities and commenced to fan out south, west and north.

“However, after two signal defeats of my Mediterraneans in the north and northwest, I ordered that all expansion head south and southwest, directions in which the indigeneous resistance seemed both weaker and less well organized, while I took thirty-two ships and set sail for Portugal and more men.

“I arrived back at the Portuguese base to find that thousands more folk, both pirate-raiders and more peaceful ones, had come to the base just in time to swell the ranks of the defenders in a war against invading Spaniards from the southeast and swarms of sea-raiders sailing up from Morocco and other points along the west coast of Africa.

“Leaving my fleet and that of the base to combat the Moors, I led out the army and, after a lengthy campaign of maneuver, caught, cornered and virtually exterminated the Spaniards, for all that their force was larger and stronger than my own. My victorious forces came back just in time to meet and drive back into the sea an invading army of Moors whose fleet had cunningly led mine off on a wild goose chase and thus left the base vulnerable and thinly defended. The one fortunate result of all this was, however, that we managed to capture a good two-thirds of the Moors’ ships, more or less undamaged, so some ten months after I had returned to Portugal for the second time, I sailed back toward North America with almost a hundred ships.

“The Chesapeake base lay empty of life, and through the tales of the survivors, by then holding lands along the coast of what is now called Karaleenos, I learned that a huge, well-armed army had marched down from central Virginia to join with another army of indigenes in southern Virginia and move against the base, crushing it and slaying all who were unable to crowd aboard the few ships I had left behind.

“The hearing of these tales bred a rage of vengeance in the men I just had brought over the sea. Therefore, deciding that such combative rage should not be wasted, I once more passed over the more southerly lands and led all of my fleet and forces up the rivers and into the heart of the Commonwealth and Kingdom of Virginia.

“Milo, that was a long, grueling war, the conquest of Virginia. Yes, we had cannon, but then so, too, did they. As you no doubt recall, small arms had become very rare by then, repeating firearms almost nonexistent, because of the lack of self-contained cartridges. Most guns as did exist by then were flintlock-muzzle-loaders. The King of Virginia had a corps of two hundred gunmen, perhaps eight hundred bowmen and crossbowmen, a thousand horsemen—about half of whom had at least one flintlock horsepistol—and several thousands more infantry armed with pikes, spears, swords, poleaxes and suchlike. A strong army, well and innovatively led, good morale in the beginning, hard fighters, most of them. But we defeated them, in the end. We took very few male slaves, though, for those men were of the sort who will fight to the very death rather than surrender while still a drop of blood remains within their veins; you have to admire such men … but, also, you have to kill them, all of them, are you to retain that which you have won from them.

“As in all of the other lands we conquered, the few units that did run fled to the mountains or took refuge in states not yet conquered by our arms, to the north or the western parts of the south. Again leaving men employed at cleaning out pockets of resistance and otherwise consolidating their conquest, I took some ships and bore back to Europe for yet another wave of my new-style immigrants.

“The base in Portugal was filled to overflowing; so crowded was it become in the three years I had been absent that folk were living perforce in tents and hovels outside the walls on every hand or aboard ships in the harbor.

“The Turkish sultan, stung to the point of malicious rage by Greek coastal-raiding, had first taken most of the islands, one at the time, then had launched an invasion of the mainland of Greece itself, and refugees—whole families of them—were pouring into any place or land that might give them permission to make landfall.

“Aware as I was that, even by that time, the states that had been known collectively as New England still owned only sparse populations and so would likely not be long or difficult in the conquering, I assembled the leaders of the Greek horde and, after extolling the beauty and richness of the lands, put forth my plans for helping them acquire a new home over the sea. Their straits in Portugal were no less than desperate, and so I had no difficulty in filling all of my then-available ships with displaced Greek families.”

“Hmmph!” grunted Milo. “So that’s why Kehnooryos Mahkehdonya has not only a different culture but even a different dialect, a Greek purer than the tongues of all the other Ehleenohee-settled lands.

“Since you were mostly responsible for settling the distant ancestors of these Ehleenohee here, Clarence, do you have any sense of … say, paternity, of being pater familias toward these, their very distant descendants?”

Bookerman-Laskos smiled lazily. “Why, of course I do, Milo. Just which of your schemes are you trying to lure me into, eh?”

“Refill your goblet and I’ll tell you, Clarence,” Milo replied.