The Domination, page 5
Too big, she mused. Impossible to think about in any meaningful sense; you could only see it in personal terms. And seeing it that way, Armageddon itself couldn’t kill you deader than a skirmish. It was the personal that was real, anyhow. You lived and died in person-time, not history-time.
“Funny,” she said. “Back when we were children, we couldn’t wait to grow up . . . Do you remember when Uncle Everard gave Rahksan to me? I was around six, so you must have been going on ten.”
Eric nodded, reminiscing. “Yes: you’d play at giving orders until she got tired of it; then she’d plump down and cross her arms and say, ‘This is a stupid game and I’m not going to play anymore,’ and we’d all roll around laughing.”
“Hmmm, well, it was a change to give anybody orders. At that age, nurse and all the house serfs tell you what to do, and wallop your bottom if you don’t . . . Did you know she’d have nightmares?”
Surprised, he shook his head. “Always seemed a happy little wench.”
“At night, she’d wake up sometimes on the pallet down at the foot of the bed, thinking she couldn’t breathe. Damn what the vet said, I think she got some lung damage when they gassed her village. I’d let her crawl in with me and hold her until she went to sleep; then later, when we were both older, well...” She paused and frowned. “You know, I never did go in for the schoolgirl stuff, the real thing, roses and fruit left at the window, bad poetry under the door, meetings in the pergola at midnight . . . Always seemed silly, as if this was seventy years ago and you could get in real trouble. So did what happened in the summer months off, everyone rushing out and falling on the nearest boy like ravening leopardesses on a goat.”
He laughed. She had always been able to draw him out of himself, even if that humor was a little barbed at times.
“Rahksan . . . that’s just fun and exuberance, and release from need, with more affection than you can get in barracks. I really like her, you know, and she me.” She paused to sip the cool tart wine. “And I miss Tom.”
“I always thought you two were in love,” Eric said lightly. “From the way you quarrelled: you’d ride ten miles just to have a fight with him.”
Johanna smiled ruefully. “True enough. And I do love him . . . ” She paused, set down the empty glass and linked her fingers about one knee. “Not the way you felt about that Circassian wench,” she continued softly. “Don’t think I didn’t notice. I’ll never love anyone with that . . . crazy single-mindedness, never, and I thank the nonexistent gods for it.”
He glanced away. “There has to be one sensible person in this family,” he said. He thought of his other sisters, twins three years younger than Johanna. “Besides the Terrible Two, of course.”
“Yes; they were threatening me bodily harm if I won the war before they could get into it . . . Eric, you know the problem with you and Pa? You think and feel exactly alike.”
“We haven’t agreed on a goddamned thing in ten years!”
“I didn’t say the contents of your thoughts were alike, but the way you think is no-shit identical, big brother. You feel things . . . too much: duty, love, hate, whatever. Everything’s a matter of principle; everything counts too much. You both want too much—things that aren’t possible to us mortals.”
“Possibly; but even if that’s true, it’s no solution to our problems.”
“Shit, you always did want solutions, didn’t you? Most of the things that bother you two aren’t problems, and they don’t have solutions: they’re the conditions of life and you have to live with them.” She sighed at the tightening of his lips. “It’s like talking to a rock, with either of you. Mind you, Pa’s more often right on some things, to my way of thinking. Politics, certainly.”
“You don’t think I should have gotten Tyansha’s child out of the Domination?”
“Oh, that—that was your business. And she was yours, after all. You could have done it more . . . discreetly. The law is intended to discourage escape, not a man sending his own property out. I can even see why you did it, not that I would have myself; with her looks, that one was going to have trouble once she was into her teens. Tyansha was very lucky to end up belonging to you. No, I meant the other stuff, real politics.”
“Hmmm,” he said. “I can’t remember you ever taking much interest in party matters.”
“Well,” she said, sitting up and stretching. “I’m a voter now. I mean, how long has it been since the Draka League party lost an election, even locally? Sixty years, seventy? Regular as clockwork, seventy percent of the vote. The Liberals—‘free enterprise’—doesn’t it occur to them that three-quarters of the electorate are employees of the State and the Combines? They could all be underbid by serf labor if the restrictions were lifted, then there’d be revolution and we’d all be dead. That the Liberals get as much as three percent is a monument to human stupidity. Then there’s the Rationalists. I suppose you support them because they want a pacific foreign policy and an end to expansion. Same thing, only slower; we’re just not compatible with the existence of another social system. And we’re unique . . . ”
“The government line, and very convenient; but this war might kill us both,” he said grimly. “The way our precious social system already killed our brother. I wouldn’t be much loss to anyone, even myself, but you would, and I miss John.”
They turned their eyes to the portrait beside Johanna’s bed. It showed their elder brother in uniform, field kit; a Century of Janissaries had stood grouped around him. It was policy that those earmarked for advancement hold commands in both the serf army and the Citizen Force. John was smiling; that was how most remembered him. Alone of the von Shrakenberg children of this generation, he had taken after their mother’s kindred: a stocky, broad-faced man with seal-brown hair and eyes and big capable hands.
He had died in the Ituri, the great jungle north of the Congo bend. That was part of the Police Zone, the area of civil government, but there was little settlement—a few rubber plantations near navigable water, timber concessions, and gold mines in the Ituri that were supplied by airship. The rest was half a million square kilometers of National Park, where nothing human lived but a few bands of pygmies left to their Old Stone Age existence, looking up in wonder as the silvery shapes of Draka dirigibles glided past.
The mines were conveniently isolated. They were run by the Security Directorate, and used as a sink for serf convicts, the incorrigibles, the sweepings of the labor camps. The Draka technicians and overseers were those too incompetent to hold a post elsewhere, or who had mortally offended the powers that were. There had been an uprising below ground, brief and desperate and hopeless. The usual procedure would have been to turn off the drainage, or dump the tunnels full of poison gas. But the rebels had taken Draka hostages and John’s unit had been doing jungle-combat training nearby. There was no time to summon Security’s Intervention Squads, specialists in such work. Their brother had volunteered to lead his troops below; they had volunteered to follow, to a man.
Eric had never wanted to imagine what it had been like, he had always disliked confined spaces. The fighting had been at close quarters, machine pistols and grenades, knives and boots and picks and lengths of tubing stuffed full of blasting explosive. The power lines had been cut early on; at the last they had been struggling in water waist high, in absolute blackness . . . Incredibly, they had rescued most of the prisoners; John had been covering the withdrawal when an improvised bomb went off at his feet. His Janissaries had carried him out on their backs at risk of their lives, but it had been far too late.
They had been able to keep his last words, spoken in delirium. “I tried, Daddy, honest. I tried real hard.”
“I’m not surprised they brought him out,” Eric said into the silence. “He was an easy man to love.”
“Unlike you and Pa,” Johanna said drily. “Rahksan was head-over-heels for him; Pa . . . took it hard, you’ll remember. I thought he was going to cry at the funeral. That shook me; I can’t imagine Pa crying.”
“I can,” Eric said, surprising her. “You were too young, but I remember when Mother died. Not at the funeral, but afterwards, I went looking for him, found him in the study. He’d forgotten to lock the door. He was sitting there at the desk with his head in his hands.” The sobs had been harsh, racking, the weeping of a man unaccustomed to it.
They looked at each other uncomfortably and shifted. “Time to go,” Johanna said at last. “Pa wanted us down in the Quarters when the recruits get selected.”
They had taken horses, this being too nearly a formal occasion to walk. The path led down the slope of the hill between cut-stone walls, through the oak wood their ancestors had planted and patches of native scrub where the soil was too thin over rock to grow the big trees. The gravel crunched beneath hooves, and light came down in bright flickering shafts as the leaf canopy stirred, lancing into the cool wet-smelling green air of spring. Ferns carpeted the rocky ground, with flowers of blue and yellow and white. The trunks about them were thick and twisted, massive moss-grown shapes sinking their roots deep into the fractured rock of the hill.
Like the von Shrakenbergs, Eric thought idly, as they clattered over a small stone bridge, well-kept but ancient; the little stream beneath had been channeled to power a gristmill, in the early days.
They passed through a belt of hybrid poplar trees, coppiced for fuel, and into the working quarters of the plantation on the flat ground. The old mill bulked square, now the smithy and machine shop, about it were the laundry, bake house, carpenter’s workshop, garage—all the intricate fabric of maintenance an estate needed. The great barns were off to one side, with the creamery and cheese house and cooling sheds where cherries and peaches from the orchards were stored. Woolsheds and round granaries of red brick bulked beyond; holding paddocks, stables for the working stock . . . then a row of trees before the Quarters proper.
Four hundred serfs worked the fields of Oakenwald; their homes were grouped about a village green. Square, four-roomed cottages of field-stone with tile roofs stood along a grid of brick-paved lanes, each with its patch of garden to supplement the ration of meat and flour and roots. Pruned fruit trees were planted along the streets; privies stood behind the cottages, with chicken coops and rabbit hutches. Today was Saturday, a half-holiday save during harvest; only essential tasks with the stock would be seen to. Families sat on their porches, smoking their pipes, sewing, mending pieces of household gear; they rose to bow as Eric and Johanna cantered through on their big crop-maned hunters, children and dogs scattering before the hooves.
The central green was four hundred meters on a side, fringed with tall poplars. The south flank held the slightly larger homes of the headman and the elite of the Quarters gang—foremen, stockmen, skilled workers. The others were public buildings—a storehouse for cloth and rations, the communal bathhouse, an infirmary, a chapel where the serf minister preached a Christian faith the masters had largely abandoned. Beside it was the most recent addition—a school where he taught basic letters to a few of the most promising children; there were more tasks that needed such skills, these last few generations.
The green itself was mostly shaggy lawn with a pair of goal posts where the younger field hands sometimes played soccer in their scant leisure time; the water fountain was no longer needed now that the cottages had their own taps, but it still played merrily. Dances were held here of an evening; there was a barbecue pit, where whole oxen and pigs might be roasted at harvest and planting and Christmas festivals, or when a wedding or a birth in the Great House brought celebration.
And on one side was a covered dais of stone with a bell beside it; also stocks, and the seldom-used whipping post. Here the work assignments were given out, and the master sat to make judgments. The son and daughter of the House drew rein beside it, leaning on their saddle pommels to watch and nodding to their father, seated in his wooden chair.
The two Janissaries were there, with a crowd of the younger serfs standing about them. They were stripped to shorts and barefoot, practicing stick-fighting with their swagger canes, moving and feinting and slashing with no sound but the stamp of feet and grunting of breath. But for color they were much alike, heavy muscle rolling over thick bone, moving cat-graceful; scarred and quick and deadly. A smack of wood on flesh marked the end, they drew themselves up, saluted each other with their canes, and repeated the gesture to the Draka before trotting off to wash and change back into their uniforms.
Eric dismounted and tossed his reins to a serf. “Formidable,” he murmured to his sister as they mounted the dais and assumed their seats. “Wouldn’t care to take on either of them, hand to hand.”
She smiled agreement; the elder von Shrakenberg nodded to the crowd of young field hands before them. “Not without its effect there,” he said, and raised his voice. “Headman, summon the people.” That elderly worthy bowed and swung the clapper of the bell. Almost at once, the serfs began to assemble, by ones and twos and family groups, to stand in an irregular fan about the place of judgment. Eric spent the time musing. This was, he supposed, the best side of the Domination. Certainly, he had seen worse in Italy; much worse, among the peasants of Sicily and Calabria—sickness, hunger, and rags. All the von Shrakenberg serfs looked well-fed, tended, clothed; there had been callous men and women among his ancestors, even cruel ones, but few fools who expected work from starvelings. A drab existence, though: labor, a few simple pleasures, the consolations of their religion, old age spent rocking on the porch. So that the von Shrakenbergs might have power and wealth and leisure; so that the Domination might have armies for its fear-driven aggression.
There would always be enough willing recruits for the Janissaries. In theory, they were conscripts, but there were a million plantations such as this, not counting the inhabitants of the Combines’ labor compounds. And that was well for the Domination, for it was the Janissary legions that made the Draka a Great Power, able to wage offensive war. The Citizen Force was a delicate precision instrument, a rapier; it destroyed armies not by destroying their equipment and personnel, but by shock and psychological dislocation. Its aim was not to kill men, but to break their hearts and make them run. Draka were trained to war from childhood, and none but cripples escaped the Forces. But by the same token, their casualties were expenditure from capital, not income; too many expensive victories could ruin their nation.
And the Janissaries . . . they were the Domination’s battle-ax, their function to gore and crush and utterly destroy. Half a million had died breaking the Ankara line in Anatolia in 1917, and as many more in the grinding campaigns of pacification in the Asian territories after the war. Where there were no elegant solutions, where there could be no escaping the brutal arithmetic of attrition, the Janissaries would be used—street fighting, positional defense, frontal assault.
Eric was startled to hear his father speak. “Economical,” he murmured, and continued at his son’s glance.
“Conquest makes serfs, serfs make soldiers, soldiers make conquest . . . empire feeds on itself.”
Eric made a noncommittal sound and looked out over his family’s human chattel; he could name most of them, and the younger adults had been the playmates of his childhood, before age imposed an increasing distance. They stood quietly, hats in hand, their voices quiet shusshps running under the sound of the wind. Most were descendants of the tribes who had dwelt here before the Draka came, some of imports since then—Tamil, Arab, Berber, Egyptian. None spoke the old language; that had been extinct for a century or more, leaving only loan words and place names. And few were of unmixed blood; seven generations of von Shrakenberg males and their overseers taking their pleasure in the Quarters had left light-brown the predominant skin color. Not a few yellow heads and gray eyes were scattered through the crowd, and he reflected ruefully that most of his blood-kin were probably standing before him.
It occurred to him suddenly that these people had only to rush in a body to destroy their owners. Only three of us, he mused. Sidearms, but no automatic weapons. We couldn’t kill more than half a dozen.
It would not happen, could not, because they could not think it . . . There had been serf revolts in the early days. His great-great-great-grandfather had commanded the levies that impaled four thousand rebels along the road from Virconium to Shahnapur, down in the sugar country of the coast; there was a mural of it in the Great House. Oakenwald serfs had worked the fields in chains, in his day. Past, long past . . .
The two NCOs returned, spruce and glittering in the noonday sun, each bearing a brace of file folders; these they stacked neatly on a camp table set up before the dais. They turned to salute the dais, and his father rose to speak. A ripple of bows greeted him, like wind on corn.
“Folk of Oakenwald,” he said, leaning on his cane. “The Domination is at war. The Archon, who commands me as I command you, has called for a new levy of soldiers. Six among your young men will be accorded the high honor of becoming arms bearers in the service of the State and for the welfare of our common home. Pray for their souls.”
There was another long-drawn murmur. The news was no surprise; a regular grapevine ran from manor to manor, spread by the servants of guests, serfs sent to town on errands, even by telephone in these times. The young men shuffled their feet and glanced at each other with uneasy grins as the black Janissary rose to his feet and called out a roster of names. More than two score came raggedly forward.
“Yaz awl tinkin’ how lucky yaz bein’,” he began, the thick dialect and harsh tone a shock after the master’s words. “T’ be Janissary—faahn uniforms, t’ best a’ food an’ likker, usin’ t’ whip ‘stead a’ feelin’ it, an’ plunder’n girls in captured towns. Live laahk a fightin’ cock, walk praawd.”
His glance passed across them with scorn. There was more to it, of course: to give a salute rather than the serf’s low bow before the masters; excitement; travel beyond the narrow horizons of village or compound. Education, for those who could use it; training in difficult skills; respect. And the mystery of arms, the mark of the masters; for any but the Janissaries, it would be death to hold a weapon. A Janissary held nearly as many privileges over the serf population as a master, with fewer restraints. The chance to discharge a lifetime’s repressed anger . . .
