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  At last Custer ordered a halt to the search. The horses were long gone and nothing could be gained by all this wandering about in the sun; they would need all their strength for the walk back.

  Most of their equipment had been lost or ruined in the fire; they had the scorched and filthy clothes they wore, and their sidearms, and not much else. They picked through the smoldering site of their camp, finding little. Only four rifles remained in working condition, and not much ammunition for those.

  And only nine men left, Custer thought numbly, counting of course their fine leader; a third of the command lost . . . . Even if I had attacked at Little Bighorn, the Indians could not possibly have inflicted such losses.

  * * *

  Next day they started back.

  It had taken all day to make the journey between waterholes on horseback. It was very soon obvious that it would take longer than that to do it on foot. The going was slow and hard, once they were clear of the burned area; tough bushes and vines hid beneath the tall grass, snagging clothes and tearing skin, and here and there broad patches of soft sand dragged at their feet, while a steady hot wind stung their faces and dried their throats and drove dust particles into eyes and nostrils. Their boots had been designed for riding, not walking; everyone had blisters by the middle of the first day. And the water was not really enough, not in that heat; they should have been carrying two or three canteens apiece but there were not that many left intact, most having burst in the fire when their contents boiled.

  Ubi and Jonas led the way, backtracking the patrol's trail from the previous day. Their heads were down and they muttered to each other. Luther Boss gave Custer a sardonic grin. "They say this patrol is under a curse."

  "Tell them to be quiet," Custer said irritably. Thinking: the patrol, or its commander?

  * * *

  They camped that night in a grove of acacias, nibbling sparingly at what food they had managed to salvage. In the morning Ubi and Jonas were gone.

  "Deserted," Luther Boss said blankly. "I can't believe they did that. We've been together through worse than this."

  Pace laughed, an ugly hoarse cackle. "What's the matter, old man, did your faithful darkies take off?" He shook his head. "Thought they were your God-damned little brothers, didn't you?"

  One of the other troopers, a thin redheaded boy named Hankins, said, "My pa had all these niggers on the old home place, back in Virginia. Never whupped 'em, fed 'em good, he really thought they loved their ol' massa. Broke his heart when they all left with the first Yankee column to come through."

  The old hunter seemed not to hear. He stared out over the desert with sad red-rimmed eyes, muttering to himself, too low for the words to be understood; till at last Custer took his arm and said gently, "Come on, Luther. You'll have to lead us now."

  * * *

  The second day's march was even harder than the first. The sun seemed hotter, the bush denser, the open stretches rockier; that was how it felt, at any rate, and certainly there was no doubt that the water situation was much worse—for Ubi and Jonas, they discovered while breaking camp, had thoughtfully helped themselves to four of the canteens.

  Late in the afternoon they reached the Bushman campsite and threw themselves on the ground around the waterhole, only to find that—as Custer had feared—there was no relief here. The cleft in the rock was too narrow, the water too far down; none of them could get within reach. Only Pace and Hankins, the smallest men in the group, even tried; and Pace gave up immediately, after getting dangerously stuck.

  Hankins, however, refused to quit. "I can do it," he cried, wriggling an inch or two downward in the fissure, lacerating his skin against the rough rock but paying no mind. He squirmed himself into a new position, his right arm disappearing into the depths of the crack. "Just a little fu'ther—"

  His eyes went suddenly huge; his mouth opened. "Oh, shit," he said softly, and then he screamed, and kept on screaming as they hauled him free. His right hand had already begun to swell.

  The scorpions of the Kalahari are not as instantly lethal as the mamba. It took Hankins the rest of the afternoon to die. They piled rocks atop the body, having neither tools nor energy to dig a grave.

  "Cursed," Luther Boss said, sitting down next to Custer in the evening, resting his back against an acacia's spindly trunk. He picked up something white from the ground: a fragment of ostrich-egg shell. The troopers had smashed all those they found, the day of the massacre, after draining their contents; you never left anything that might help the survivors go on surviving.

  "Africa is cursed," Boss went on in a strange voice. "The whole world is under a curse. A curse called the white man."

  "I don't agree." Custer didn't feel like talking, but the old man was obviously distraught. "The black Africans used to kill Bushmen, and each other, even when they had the country to themselves. You know that."

  "True." Boss nodded slowly. "Yes, that's true. I was wrong. The name of the curse is mankind."

  * * *

  Just before sunrise Luther Boss shot himself. The noise was tremendous, waking everyone at once. They gathered around, Custer holding a torch from the fire, and stared. The big double rifle hadn't left much of Boss's head.

  "Crazy old turd," Garvin said, "what'd he do that for?"

  In the gray light of false dawn the four survivors piled a few token rocks atop the body and moved out. The trail was fairly easy to follow at first, but then they lost it in a big patch of soft sand and it was a long hot time before they found it again. By now the sun was high and the water almost gone.

  Trooper Evans was a dark, husky, taciturn Welshman with a record of disciplinary infractions, mostly involving drunkenness; he had soldiered well on this patrol, though, doing his share and never complaining. About midday, as they crossed an open sandy space, he suddenly stopped, turned half around, said, "Christ," and fell unconscious to the ground, his face very pale.

  "Heat stroke," Pace said, feeling Evans's wrists and forehead. "Seen it on cattle drives."

  "What do we do?" Garvin asked.

  "Not a damn thing we can do," Pace said, straightening up. "Pour water on him, only we got no water. Get him in the shade, only there ain't no shade anywhere close. He's a goner."

  They loosened Evans's clothing, fanned his face a little with his hat; it made no difference. In less than an hour he was dead.

  "We'll have to bury him here," Custer said. "Find rocks—"

  "Naw," Pace said flatly. "I ain't toting no more rocks. It's too hot and we got too far to go."

  Garvin nodded, folding his arms. Custer said, "I'm giving you men a direct order," and knew immediately he'd made a mistake.

  Pace snorted. "You don't pull no more rank on us, bluebelly." His hand dropped to the butt of his revolver. "You want to try us?"

  Garvin unslung his rifle from his back. "Yeah," he agreed. "Come ahead. Show us what a big hero you are."

  Pace peeled back sun-split lips in a grin. "Like you showed them Injuns, huh? Shit," he said. "You ain't gonna do nothing. Just like that bluebelly captain back home, wanted to take me in and hang me for shooting one of his uppity black nigger soldiers. He didn't have the guts and neither do you. Come on, Roy."

  Contemptuously, ostentatiously, Pace turned his back and began walking away, followed after a moment by Garvin. Neither man looked back; and after a moment, stumbling and staggering, Custer followed them.

  * * *

  They came to the baobab just as the sun was going down. "Good a place as any," Pace said. "Let's get a fire going."

  "What for?" Garvin asked. "It ain't cold and we sure-God got nothing to cook."

  "Yeah, but it'll keep the hyenas away." Pace picked up a fallen branch and broke it over his knee. He had to make three tries; they were all very weak by now. " 'Course they're gonna get us anyway, but I don't want 'em eating on me till I'm dead."

  Custer sat on the ground, leaning against the baobab, hearing the voices but paying no attention. It didn't matter now, after
all. There was no longer any hope of making it to the next waterhole. Pace was right: they would be lucky if they were dead before the vultures and the hyenas got to them.

  They got the fire going just as it got dark. That was when the Bushman appeared.

  He came out of the bush, into the circle of firelight, walking steadily and straight toward them: a skinny little man, naked except for a skimpy hide loincloth. His flat childlike face was without expression; his eyes stared straight ahead.

  Garvin said, "Son of a bitch," and reached for his rifle.

  "Wait," Custer said urgently. "Look what he's got."

  In both hands, held out in front of him like an offering, the Bushman held a large white ostrich-egg shell.

  "Water," Garvin said, and licked his lips. "Lord God."

  Pace got up from the ground and walked forward to meet the Bushman. He took the eggshell very gently from the small hands and hefted it in both of his. "Damn," he said softly. "It's full."

  He raised the big eggshell and put his lips to the opening at the top. His whole body seemed to quiver as he took a long, throat-bobbing drink.

  "Oh, Jesus, that's good," he said, lowering the eggshell, holding it out to Garvin. "Roy?"

  Garvin's hands were shaking. "Careful," Pace warned as the big man raised the eggshell to drink. "You drop that, we're dead."

  The Bushman was still standing there, a couple of paces from the fire. He held out one hand, palm upward. Custer said, "He wants to trade. For God's sake give him something."

  Pace's face fairly lit up. "Oh, sure—"

  Custer had never seen a man draw a gun so fast; Pace's hand barely appeared to move, yet suddenly the long-barreled revolver was in his hand. Custer cried, "No," but the sound of the shot drowned out his voice.

  "There, sand monkey," Pace said as the Bushman fell to the ground. "Don't say I never gave you nothing."

  "You fool," Custer said tiredly. "You evil murderous little swine. He could have gotten us out of this. He could have gotten us home."

  "Shit." Pace holstered his pistol. "We're gonna be okay now. That's enough water to make the next hole. Hell," he said, grinning, "you ask us nice, we might even let you have some—"

  He stopped. A puzzled look came over his face. "Huh," he said, and rubbed his chin in an odd motion. "Hey, Roy, I feel kinda—"

  He took a couple of aimless little steps. "Uh," he grunted, and fell face forward into the fire.

  "What," Garvin said, and dropped the eggshell. As it shattered on the rocky ground he made a strangled sound in the back of his throat and collapsed amid the white fragments.

  Custer watched, unmoving and without any great interest, as the two men kicked and flopped and writhed and then lay still. On the far side of the fire he could see the dead Bushman's eyes, still open, staring at him. The small round face seemed to be smiling.

  * * *

  Now, as the sun breaks clear of the eastern horizon, Custer looks at the bodies and then up at the circling vultures. He wonders how much longer they will wait. Not much longer, he guesses, and puts his hand over the gun in his lap, which is still warm from firing at the hyenas all night. He is almost out of ammunition. Perhaps he should take Pace's gunbelt, or Garvin's rifle.

  He gets to his feet, very slowly, his movements those of a very old man, or perhaps a sleepwalker. He stands for a moment gazing about him, at the empty grass-covered plain and the enormous sky.

  "Oh, Libbie," he whispers, hearing now the tiny sound behind him, turning, feeling an almost gentle thumping sensation halfway down his right thigh; looking down, now, entirely without surprise, at the ridiculous little arrow sticking barely an inch into his leg. "Libbie—"

  Hewn in Pieces For the Lord

  John J. Miller

  John Miller resides in the arid lands of the southwest, an environment not totally different from the Sudanese deserts of this story. He has written for graphic novels, and some highly inventive stories for the great Wild Cards alternate history series.

  Herein he tells a tale of the great Christian hero Charles "Chinese" Gordon, an unwitting accomplice of the Draka in a much darker Africa . . .

  "It's not the heat, so much," William Hicks said as he took a sip of chilled wine from a delicately-stemmed crystal goblet, "it's the humidity. Bally muggy for a desert."

  Hicks had retired as a colonel in the British Army six months earlier, but finding the prospect of living on half-pay unpalatable, had joined the Draka, who were desperate for experienced command officers. Within the last decade and a half the Domination had added vast African territories, but their control over some of these new lands was nominal at best. Hicks, who had never even stepped on African soil before joining the Draka, had immediately been given the rank of strategos, handed a legion of Janissaries, and ordered to pacify the territory once known as the Sudan.

  Merarch Kevin Harrison, his chief of staff, mopped his brow and dropped the sodden handkerchief on the camp table. Harrison was an ex-soldier of the Confederacy who'd been a Draka for a decade. He'd spent most of those years in the Sudan and in fact had been a tetrach in the expeditionary force that had brought this hellish country into the Domination. His job now was to provide the newly appointed strategos with the benefit of his local experience.

  The officers were sitting in the shade cast by the canvas awning of the command tent, taking afternoon tea as their legion settled into the day's encampment. They were somewhere in the northern Sudanese desert, chasing an army of rebellious natives who had so far proved remarkably elusive.

  "Humid, yes sir." Harrison preferred tea to wine, and beer to tea, but when in field camp you do as the strategos does, even if the strategos knew less about deserts than a bloody penguin.

  Hicks held his empty goblet up for the Janissary orderly, standing somewhat at attention near the wine bucket, to re-fill. He waved his other hand vaguely at the desert.

  "I know the Nile's in full flood, just over there-away's, keeping Fuzzy Wuzzy off our backs, but when the sun goes down the damn mosquitoes are almost as bloodthirsty as the Mahdi's chaps. Haw. Haw."

  "Yes, sir." Harrison didn't care for the sweet wine, but the ice, caravaned regularly into camp in straw-wrapped blocks, slipped soothingly down his throat.

  "Though I expect the rain will cool things off."

  "Rain?" Harrison looked at Hicks as if his superior had suddenly been stupefied by heat stroke. "I don't think it'll rain, sir. It never rains this time of year in the Sudan."

  "Well, why's it thundering, then?"

  "Thundering?"

  Harrison frowned, concentrating. He'd been in artillery while in the Confederate Army and he'd paid for that with diminished hearing. After a moment of concentration, he more felt it rather than heard it himself, a low rumble spilling across the empty desert like the droning of countless angry wasps. He jumped to his feet, knocking over the camp chair and spilling chilled wine all over tiffin as a tetrach raced across the bivouac to the command tent, sweating and disheveled, his face red from heat and fear.

  "Fuzzy Wuzzys, sir, thousands of them!"

  He pointed desperately at the ridge over his shoulder. Cresting it, shimmering in the heat waves rising off the sand were thousands of the black, green, and red battle flags borne by the hairy, half-naked Sudanese tribesmen they called Fuzzy Wuzzys. With the flag bearers came battle drummers, beating a wild rattatatat on their tin drums that sounded like thunder rolling across the desert. With them came spearmen and swordsmen and archers and even some riflemen, rapidly descending by the thousands upon the surprised camp.

  "Bloody hell," Hicks said.

  i.

  Charles George Gordon was tired.

  All his life he'd possessed an indefatigable reserve of energy that he could draw on to get him through any situation, but somewhere, somehow, he'd lost it. It had happened recently, right about the time he'd turned fifty and resigned his commission in the British Army. This evening, he thought, was proving particularly difficult.

  G
ordon had always disliked social gatherings and public functions, and he'd always been ill at ease in the presence of women. He was therefore doubly uncomfortable at a dinner party with the cream of Alexandrian society where he was surrounded by curious—and bold—Draka women eager to meet him.

  Alexander von Shrakenberg was the host. The setting was the dining hall of his Alexandrian manor, the largest, grandest dining hall that Gordon had ever seen. Considering that he'd endured many such affairs in many great homes in many big cities while he'd been in the British army, that was saying a lot.

  But, back then, Gordon could afford to be eccentric. He could pick and choose which invitations to accept and which to decline, and actually he'd declined most of them. His relative isolation from society had hurt his career, of course, but he didn't care for the vain-glories of fame.

  Much, a sly voice whispered silently in his mind.

  Gordon patted his lips with his linen napkin.

  Down, Agag, he said silently to his private inner demon. I would think you'd be very happy with this evening. The pomp, the glamour, the vanity of it will give you much ammunition for our debate . . . later . . .

  Agag slipped away, content, perhaps, to merely observe for awhile, and Gordon was glad to be rid of him, if only for awhile. Agag never completely vanished. He lived in some deep, dark crevice of Gordon's soul, popping out at the most inopportune times, braying like a fame-starved jackass when Gordon most desired to be humble, silent, and Christian. By naming him, by actually engaging him in argument, Gordon refused to accept the fact that Agag was really a part of him. He was a piece hewn apart from Gordon's whole, because the attitude he represented was unChristian.

  Gordon relinquished his fish plate to one of the legion of servants who were ferrying food from the manor's vast kitchen in seemingly endless rounds. Gordon liked to eat as much as the next man, but apparently not as much as his host, Alexander von Shrakenberg. Von Shrakenberg was young, not much over thirty, but unlike most of the Draka Gordon had met, was already fleshy. If he kept up this pace of eating and drinking he'd be uncontestedly fat within a very few years. He was also quite jolly for a Draka, full of smiles and had what seemed to be a genuinely hearty laugh. His vast holding on the outskirts of the Egyptian city of Alexandria consisted of cotton fields and associated mills. The manor at the estate's heart was huge and decorated in expensive, luxurious, but, Gordon conceded, quite good taste. Besides his cotton plantation, Von Shrakenberg was also connected with the Alexandria Institute, the foremost scientific conglomerate on the continent. Gordon had to get the Institute's approval if he hoped for his plan come to fruition and The Plan, as he thought of it, was now all he had to live for.