Drakas! Read online

  Well, a man's appearance was a poor indicator of his worth; Custer had seen at close quarters the magnificent fighting qualities of ragged, shoeless Confederate troops, let alone the near-naked warriors of the Plains. But he knew these men, had dealt with most of them personally at one time or another—usually for disciplinary offenses or dereliction of duty—and he was under no illusions. Hardcases, they would have been called on the American frontier; excellent shots and skilled horsemen, to be sure, tough as rhinoceros hide and physically brave to the point of recklessness, but constitutionally incapable of accepting discipline, of playing by any rules but their own.

  None of the eight ordinary troopers was native Drakian; all had come here from elsewhere, some dreaming of gold and diamonds, some at odds with the governments of their homelands—like the army, the KMP included a considerable number of unreconstructable American rebels—and, though the subject was not safe to talk about, more than a few running from criminal warrants. Custer had seen their kind drinking and raising hell in the cowtowns of the west—or staring out from WANTED posters, or dangling from the ends of ropes.

  Of course there were exceptions. Up at the head of the troop, Decurion Shaw sat upright and impeccably uniformed astride his beloved bay mare. Custer had often wondered what Shaw was doing in the KMP; Drakia born, well educated from his speech, and absolutely steady and reliable, he was wholly out of place here. A broken love affair, perhaps, or family trouble; Custer had never inquired. The KMP had one iron rule, never written down but never broken: Don't ask.

  Out in front of the column rode another exception: old Luther Boss, onetime elephant hunter (and, some said though not to his face, diamond smuggler.) A civilian on contract to the KMP, Boss didn't bother even going through the motions of looking military; he wore loose flapping shorts, exposing big bony knees, and a bright-patterned dashiki shirt such as the blacks wore up along the coast. A huge dirt-brown hat shaded his weathered face. Flanking him, dressed in castoff rags of KMP uniform, his two black trackers Ubi and Jonas sat easily on their tough little Cape ponies.

  A dozen men, good God, what a pathetic command for a man who had once led regiments . . . but in this case there was no choice; the few small waterholes of the Kalahari would never support a larger mounted force, not at this time of year. As it was they would be pushing their luck.

  * * *

  The patrol got even smaller next day. As they left the isolated ranch where the cattleman had been killed, Trooper Lange's horse pulled up lame. Custer thought he didn't look terribly disappointed at having to drop out. The others called out various derisive remarks as Lange led his horse slowly back toward the ranch.

  "What the hell," one of the troopers remarked as they rode on. "Already lost a man and we ain't even got started. Bad sign."

  Custer turned in his saddle. "No," he said with forced joviality, "it's a good sign. Thirteen men, everybody knows that's an unlucky number. Now we're only twelve."

  The trooper gave Custer a long stare. "Shit," he said finally. A wiry little man named Pace, he was from Texas and seemed to think that proved something. "How do you add that up? I don't see but ten of us."

  Then he glanced forward and made a face. "Oh, you counted them two niggers? Hell, ain't that just like a bluebelly?"

  The man riding behind him, a burly North Carolinian named Garvin, laughed out loud. "Jesus Christ, Centuri'n, a nigger ain't a man. Ain't you learned that yet?"

  His voice was loud enough to carry to the head of the troop, as Pace's had been, but if Ubi and Jonas understood they gave no sign. Luther Boss, however, looked around and gave both men a glare that would have stripped the hide off a hippo.

  "Bluebellies," Pace said, ignoring the old man, and shook his head. "I'll never understand 'em."

  * * *

  The Kalahari is unusual, as deserts go; nothing like the naked wastes of the Sahara or the nearby Namib, and in fact quite a lively place, considering the almost complete lack of surface water for most of the year. The flat sandy plain wears a patchy covering of tall tough grasses, laced with hidden thorny growths; clumps of thornbush and wind-bent acacias dot the landscape, while along the crests of the occasional rocky hills groves of mongongo trees offer shade and edible fruit. Giraffe and various kinds of antelope manage to live there, and jackals and brown hyenas; even, in the slightly wetter north, lions and elephants.

  In the rainy season, from around the end of October through the following March, an uninformed observer might not recognize the Kalahari as a desert at all. Herds of animals come to the pans and waterholes, while the grasses and trees turn cheerfully green.

  By April the rains have ended; the pans begin to shrink and go dry. Hunting is good, though, because the animals cluster more densely around the remaining sources of water; and the temperature drops, over the next few months, until by June the days are pleasantly cool and the nights downright cold.

  Now it was the end of August, and getting hot again, the grasses turned yellow and the pans long since gone dust-dry. The animals had mostly migrated north, toward the Okavango country; there was always a rise in cattle-rustling incidents, this time of year, when the scarcity of game drove the Bushmen to take desperate risks.

  Which, Custer reflected as the troop moved westward, was why this patrol had to deliver results; time was running out. A few more weeks and the central Kalahari would be almost impassible for any humans but Bushmen—and even they would be holed up around the few permanent waterholes, traveling as little as possible in the terrible heat—and would stay that way until the late-October rains. Even now, it was hard to imagine how anyone or anything could live in this parched desolation.

  Yet life there was. Trooper Caston found that out on the third day, when he went to relieve his bowels next to a clump of thornbush and surprised a black mamba.

  * * *

  "I don't like it," Custer said as they rode away from the crude grave. "We never left our dead behind on the Plains."

  "We have no choice," Luther Boss pointed out. "Carry a dead man along, in this heat? Impossible."

  "It'll be all right," Decurion Shaw added. "When we get back the Commandant will send out a party to recover the remains."

  That was nonsense and they all knew it. All the rocks they had piled on top of the grave had represented nothing more than extra exercise for the men—and for the brown Kalahari hyenas, who would have the body exhumed before it was dark.

  "It was so fast," Custer said wonderingly.

  Luther Boss grinned, big yellow crooked teeth surrounded by bristling white whiskers. "A mamba's a bad customer," he said. "Just another reason to be careful in this country. You don't get but one mistake."

  * * *

  Two days later they found the Bushman camp.

  There was no question of moving into position and making a textbook attack; no one, certainly not white men with horses, could hope to sneak up on Bushmen in their own country. The only possible tactic was to move in fast and strike before the quarry could escape.

  Even so, the Bushmen were already scattering as the riders charged, little yellow-brown forms vanishing into the tall yellow-brown grass. The slower ones, the elders and the women who paused to snatch up children, were less lucky.

  It was over in a very short time. The troopers swept in, yipping like wild dogs, firing their pistols—the Drakia T-2 rifle was an excellent infantry weapon, but much too long and clumsy for horseback use—or simply riding the Bushmen down. Custer saw a pregnant woman trip and fall in front of Decurion Shaw's horse; her mouth opened as the hooves struck her, but her shriek was lost in the racket. Another woman, running fast despite the baby slung on her back, almost made the cover of the grass, but Pace reined his horse to a stop and held his revolver in both hands and took careful aim and knocked her over with a single shot.

  Custer's own sidearm remained unfired, almost forgotten in his hand. He watched the butchery from the shade of a lone acacia tree, paralyzed by unexpected memories, pictures flashing
in his mind like a magic-lantern show: the Cheyenne camp on the Washita, the troopers firing and the Indians running out of the teepees and being shot down in the snow while the band played "Garryowen."And the old man, white hair hanging to his shoulders, who had materialized suddenly through the falling snow, eyes full on Custer's face, pointing a long bony finger, calling out something in Cheyenne just before a .45 slug cut him down. . . .

  At the time it had been no more than a neat bit of professional work, tactical surprise against a usually clever enemy; but the satisfaction had given way, with time, to—not guilt, no, a soldier could never feel guilt at carrying out his orders, more a weary disgust.

  The recollection sickened him, now, as did the pathetic spectacle before him. He shook his head angrily and looked around as Luther Boss came riding up. The scout's big double-barreled rifle rested across his saddle-bow, but Custer knew he hadn't fired it; there would have been no missing the blast of that old cannon.

  "Ubi and Jonas went after a couple of the ones who ran," Luther Boss reported.

  Custer made no reply. The scout scratched his beard and added, "They say these aren't your culprits. The ones who killed the rancher, the ones we've been following, were Kung. These are Gwi. Southern tribe, don't know why they'd be this far north."

  Custer shrugged. "It doesn't matter," he said tiredly. "You know that."

  Luther Boss nodded heavily. There was no need to spell it out. A white man had been killed, an example had to be made; there had never been any question of selective action. Anyway, Drakian policy—never officially stated, but universally understood—was that the Bushmen were basically a species of pest, to be eradicated as soon as possible. (Though a few old-school aristocrats, who sometimes enjoyed the sport of hunting them with dogs, had been agitating for the establishment of preserves for Bushmen and other challenging game.)

  "We'll bivouac here for the night," Custer went on, "and then tomorrow we'll get on the trail of the others again. How far is it to the next waterhole?"

  "Long way," Luther Boss said. "Hell of a ride, in fact—"

  Later, no one could figure out where the old man had come from. The grass was too short and thin, all around the acacia tree, to cover even a Bushman's approach. He was just there, all of a sudden, standing no more than a dozen feet away: an old Bushman, the oldest Custer had ever seen. He couldn't have stood much over five feet and his nearly naked body was nothing but bones and dried-apricot skin. He was pointing a finger at Custer, calling out a string of tongue-clicking syllables, his voice high and hoarse.

  Custer jerked back in his saddle, eyes wide; he almost screamed, but his throat had closed shut.

  There was a loud flat bang and a quick twisting shock against his right palm. The old man stood still for a moment and then toppled backward, limp before he hit the ground, like some assemblage of dry sticks. Custer looked down in amazement at the smoking revolver that he had not aimed, had not even been conscious of firing, had in fact forgotten he still held.

  Decurion Shaw rode up, holding his service pistol muzzle upward. "Sorry, sir," he said to Custer. "Can't think how we let him get past us like that." He looked down at the tiny body and then back at Custer, smiling. "Good shot, Centurion."

  Custer made a vague gesture with his left hand. For the moment, he had no words. He had a strange mad thought that if he tried to talk, he would find himself speaking some savage tongue.

  * * *

  They settled in around the waterhole, the troopers tethering and unsaddling the horses, then wandering briefly about the Bushman camp, examining the bodies and commenting on their marksmanship, picking up souvenirs from among the Bushmen's abandoned possessions. One man was fingering a little bow, like something a child would make to play Indians, and a couple of arrows, being very careful with the latter; the slightest scratch from the poisoned tip could be mortal. Another man found a collection of ostrich-egg shells, the Bushmen's water container of choice, in one of the tiny grass huts; the other troopers gathered around, drinking and laughing and filling their canteens.

  Ubi and Jonas came out of the bush, grinning, and spoke to Luther Boss.

  "They caught a couple of women," the old hunter told Custer. "Had themselves a little entertainment, too, I'd wager."

  The trackers looked at each other and then at Custer, still grinning. They were an odd-looking pair; Ubi was tall and long-limbed and very black—Herero, he claimed, with a dash of Zulu and a touch of Hottentot—but Jonas was almost as small as the bodies on the ground, and close to the same color. His mother had been full-blood River Bushman, taken in childhood from her home in the Okavango marshes by Ba-tswana slave raiders and sold to a brothel in Virconium; he had, he admitted cheerfully, no idea who or what his father had been.

  Both men had been with Luther Boss for a very long time. Technically they were his bondservants, as much his property as his horse or his rifle. In reality the relationship was obviously more complex, with an easy familiarity that annoyed some white men.

  "They say maybe eight people got away," the scout continued. "Maybe nine. They think all men."

  Whom, of course, they hadn't pursued too closely in the high grass; why risk a poisoned arrow when there was safer and, as a bonus, rapeable prey to be had?

  Custer said, "Decurion, have the men haul these bodies clear of the area. Take them a good long way out, or the hyenas will be spooking the horses all night."

  The waterhole turned out to be a pretty desperate affair, even for the Kalahari in August. The sandy soil was thin here, and next to the Bushmen's camp the rock was fully exposed in a low rough outcrop, which some ancient force had cracked right down the middle. The water was deep at the bottom of the cleft, out of sight and very nearly out of reach.

  But Jonas took off all his clothes and wriggled down into the fissure, clutching a gourd dipper taken from a Bushman shelter, while Ubi stood ready to lower the canteens down after him. Custer watched, amazed; it didn't seem possible a human being could fit himself into such a tight space, let alone move about down there.

  "Hewers of wood and drawers of water," Decurion Shaw said to Custer, "eh, Centurion?"

  * * *

  The next day's ride was a very long and hard one, just as Luther Boss had predicted. But at the end there was a good waterhole, more accessible than the last, and as the men made camp Ubi and Jonas found fresh Bushman sign.

  "They say we'll catch them tomorrow, sure," Boss reported, and Custer let out a grateful sigh. With any luck this business would be over soon; and then back to the post and a sensible settled adjutant's life, never again to trouble Cohortarch Heimbach with requests for patrol duty. . . .

  But in the middle of the night he woke to the shouts of men and the screams of horses and a loud dry crackling roar that he recognized even before his eyes opened and saw the licking red-orange glow against the night. "Fire," a man yelled, and another, "Brush fire, God damn—" and then Shaw's bellow: "The horses! See to the horses!"

  Too late, though, for that; as Custer fought free of the blanket and got to his feet he could see the horses silhouetted against the wavering wall of flame, rearing and pawing the air and lunging against the picket ropes, shrieking in pain and fear. Black shapes of men moved among them, trying to grab them and lead them away, but the beasts were too far gone in the blind brainless panic of their kind, and the fire was already on top of them. First one horse and then another broke free and charged away into the dark; then here they all came in a rumbling rush, while men sprinted to get out of the way.

  A horse went by dragging a man, his arm apparently tangled in the broken tether rope; in the flickering light Custer recognized Decurion Shaw, his mouth open in a high agonized yell that died away as the horse dragged him off into the night.

  The fire was coming right through camp now, flames leaping up high as a man's head, the dry tall grasses blazing up with almost explosive speed. "To the rock," Custer shouted, but it was an unnecessary command; the men were already scrambling hast
ily atop the rock outcrop, coughing and cursing and slapping out smoldering patches on their clothes.

  Custer hurried after them, grabbing up his gunbelt and his hat and boots. Clambering sockfooted up the steep side of the outcrop, he slipped and almost lost his balance. But then Luther Boss's voice said, "Here," and a big hand pulled him upward, and a moment later he was standing on top of the rock, staring disbelievingly out over the blazing desert. All around the rock the thornbush clumps were starting to catch fire, with a crackling sound like an old man's dry hating laughter.

  * * *

  Later, when the worst of the fire had passed, Custer did a quick headcount. Three men were missing: Trooper Mizell, who had been on sentry duty, and another man named Butler, and of course Decurion Shaw.

  Butler they found first, next morning, though it was not easy to identify him. His clothing had been mostly burned away and his face and body were blackened. His left leg stuck out at an unnatural angle. "Broken leg," Luther Boss said after a quick examination. "Probably got run over by a horse, couldn't get clear in time. Like as not the smoke got him before the fire did."

  Mizell had fallen on a relatively bare patch of earth; the fire had hardly touched him, except to smudge his face a little, and to singe the feathers off the tiny arrow that protruded from the small of his back.

  "God-damned murdering little sand monkeys," Pace said. "It was them set the fire, too, wudn't it?"

  "Almost certainly," Luther Boss agreed.

  As the sun climbed into the sky they fanned out across the flat, searching for the horses. It was a hopeless job; even Ubi and Jonas couldn't find trails across that charred and still-smoking ground. They did find Decurion Shaw, half a mile or so from the waterhole, his right arm almost severed at the wrist. He had, quite literally, no face left; the flock of vultures that rose flapping and squawking from the body, as the other men approached, had finished what the dragging had begun.