S. M. Stirling - Draka 05 - Drakas!

Drakas!

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Custer Under the Baobab

Hewn in Pieces For the Lord

WRITTEN BY THE WIND A Story of the Draka

THE TRADESMEN

The Big Lie

The Greatest Danger

Home is Where the Heart Is

The Last Word

A Walk in the Park

Hunting the Snark

UPON THEIR BACKS, TO BITE 'EM

The Peaceable Kingdom

DRAKAS!

EDITED BY S.M. STIRLING

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-671-31946-9

Cover art by Stephen Hickman

First printing, November 2000

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press: Consulting & Editorial Services

Printed in the United States of America

INTRODUCTION

To coin a phrase, the 20thcentury has been the best of times, and the worst of times; the century when

smallpox was abolished and the century when a new word, "genocide," entered the lexicon of politics. It

started with the serene confidence of the Edwardian Enlightenment at the end of a century free of great

international wars, when reason and progress seemed to be rolling forward on a broad invincible front.

Then it took a wrong turning in the slaughters of Passchendale and Verdun, descended into the abyss of

Stalingrad, Nanking, Buchenwald and the Gulag. Even the motor of progress, science, turned out to have

some very nasty exhaust. For fifty years we hovered on the brink of annihilation, forced to threaten the

survival of civilization, if not humanity, to hold totalitarianism in check.

And then, all at once, things got better . . .

Anyone who studies history eventually runs across a little jingle that goes:

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;

For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;

For want of a horse, the message was lost;

For want of the message, the battle was lost;

For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost—

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail!

What's more, you come to appreciate the essential truth of it. There are broad, impersonal forces at

work in history; if Christopher Columbus had died as a child—most children did, in his age—someone

else would have discovered the Atlantic crossing soon enough. Basque fishermen may well have crossed

to Newfoundland before him; an English expedition set out to America a few years after; the Portugese

blundered into Brazil on their way to India (it makes sense, in sailing-ship terms) a few years after that.

The knowledge was there, and the ships, and the civilization that produced them, a strong hungry people

ready to burst out upon the world. And so we live in the world the West Europeans made, built on

foundations laid by the empires of sailing ships and muskets.

But oh, how the details would be different if it had not been Columbus, but another man a few years

later! And how those changes might have rippled on, growing through the years.

So a thought came to me; suppose everything had turned out asbadly as possible, these last few

centuries. Great changes make possible great good and great evil. The outpouring of the Europeans

produced plenty of both.

The great free colonies of North America were perhaps the best, for it was here that the great

18th-century upsurge of popular government began, and here the power that broke the totalitarians was

founded. My friend Harry Turtledove has imagined a world in which America broke apart in its Civil

War, and no strongUnited States was ready to come to the aid of the beleaguered Allies against the

Central European aggressors.

Imagine a change even more fundamental. Perhaps the worst product of the great wave of European

expansion, before this century of ours, was the South Atlantic system of slaves and plantations.

Eventually it faded away—or was blown away by the cannon of Grant and Sherman, although we still

feel the aftereffects.

What, though, if a fragment of that system had fallen on fertile ground, and grown? Say that the potential

of South Africa, so neglected by its Dutch overlords, had fallen prey to it . . . a base for that deadly seed

to grow, unchecked by free neighbors, until it was too strong to stop. An Anti-America, representing all

the distilled negatives of Western civilization.

From that thought was born the alternate history of the Domination of the Draka. I've chronicled the rise

and transformation of that dystopia in four novels.

But a world can be a playground big enough for more than one imagination to run in. Here are stories

others have set in that anti-history, a funhouse mirror held up to our own.

Custer Under

the Baobab

William Sanders

William Sanders is a Cherokee; maybe that has something to do with the sardonic irony in the eye he

trains on history. Maybe not; how could anyone doubt all is for the best in the train of events that

produced we our glorious selves?

Will has produced science fiction and fantasy stories—many of them alternate history—highly regarded

by the critics and by his peers. His novelsJourney to Fusang ,The Wild Blue and the Gray , and latest

The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan have shown a wild inventiveness worthy of

Jonathan Swift, plus an encyclopedic knowledge of history, and a combination of high literary skill and

crazed, gonzo abandon that could only have been born on this continent.

Herein we have a George Armstrong Custer who escapes the arrows of the Sioux, only to find that even

in another history and on another continent, some things never change . . .

The baobab tree is one of the world's most remarkable vegetable productions. Its soft, swollen-looking

trunk may be as much as twenty or thirty feet in diameter; its grotesquely spindly limbs may reach up to

two hundred feet toward the African sky.

Anywhere it grows, the baobab is an impressive sight. On the great dead-flat plain of the Kalahari

Desert, where the land stretches empty to the horizon and even a cluster of stunted acacia trees is a

major visual event, a lone baobab can dominate the entire landscape.

This particular baobab is of no more than average size, but it is still the biggest thing in view in any

direction. Beneath its spreading branches, just now, are four men. Three are dead.

The fourth man sits on the ground, his back against the sagging folds of the baobab's thin bark. A lean,

long-limbed, long-faced white man, dressed in dusty brown near-rags barely recognizable as having once

been a smart military uniform; thinning yellow hair straggles from beneath the broad-brimmed hat that

shades his face. His right hand lies on his lap, next to a heavy revolver.

Centurion George Armstrong Custer, of the Kalahari Mounted Police (former Brevet Major General,

United States Cavalry), licks his dry cracked lips. "Libbie," he says, barely aloud, his words no more

than a whisper lost in the whine of the wind through the baobab's branches, "Libbie, is this what it all

comes to?"

* * *

"I don't know, Custer," the Commandant said, ten days ago. (Wasn't it? Custer realizes he is not sure.)

"A man of your rank and experience, leading a minor patrol like this? Pretty silly, isn't it?"

"Possibly, sir." Custer stood at attention before the Commandant's desk, face expressionless, classic

West Point from crown to boot soles. Not that these Drakians demanded much in the way of military

formality—and the Mounted Police weren't even a military organization, even if they did like to put on

airs and give themselves fancy titles of rank—but it was, Custer had found, a subtle but effective way to

bully Cohortarch Heimbach.

"I need you here," Heimbach continued. "Things to be done, paperwork piled up. Don't stand like that,

Centurion," he added peevishly. "This isn't your American army."

"No, sir," Custer said tonelessly, not shifting a hair, keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead above the

Commandant's balding head, exchanging stares with the portrait of Queen Victoria that hung on the

mud-brick wall. Cohortarch Heimbach was one of the handful of conservatives who still insisted on the

fiction of Drakia's membership in the British Empire.

"Things to be done right here," Heimbach repeated. "Instead you want to ride off chasing Bushmen.

Tetrarch Leblanc could use the experience, and he's eager to go."

Custer didn't reply. After a moment Heimbach blew out his breath in a long loud sigh. "Oh, all right—"

He fumbled in his desk drawer and got out a short-stemmed pipe and a pouch of tobacco. "Actually," he

said, thumbing tobacco into the bowl, "thisis a bit more than a normal patrol. Seems our little friends, out

there, have gone very much too far this time."

Custer waited silently as he lit up. "Two days ago," Heimbach went on after a moment, blowing clouds

of foul-smelling blue smoke, "a bunch of Bushmen raided a cattle ranch in the Ghanzi area. Usual sort of

thing—cut a cow out from the herd, killed it and butchered it on the spot, you know."

Custer knew. The Bushmen were constantly bringing trouble on themselves with their addiction to

cattle-rustling. Of course, living as they did on the edge of bare subsistence, they must find the scrawny

Kaffir cattle irresistible targets.

"This time," the Commandant said grimly, "things got out of hand. The rancher happened to show up as

they were cutting up the kill. He shot one of them. The others scattered into the bush—but when the

damned fool dismounted, one of them put a poisoned arrow into his back."

"Good God," Custer said involuntarily. "They killed a white man?" That was unheard-of; Bushmen were

a nuisance but seldom actively dangerous.

Heimbach was nodding. "And so they have to be taught a lesson. Orders from the top, on this morning's

wire."

He pointed the pipe stem at Custer, like a pistol. "Which is why I'm not altogether unhappy to let you

take this one, Centurion. Some important people want this done right."

Cohortarch Heimbach got up from his desk and went over and stood looking out the glassless front

window. Out on the parade ground, an eight-man lochus stood in a single uneven rank, while a big

red-faced NCO inspected their rifles. He didn't look happy. Of course sergeants—decurions, Custer

corrected himself, damn these people with their classical pretensions—rarely did. Beyond, past the high

barbed-wire fence that ringed the little post, the Kalahari shimmered in the midday sun.

"So I'm giving you your wish," the Commandant said, not looking around. "Take the Second Lochus

from Leblanc's tetrarchy—that's Decurion Shaw's lot, he's a good man—and of course Boss and his

trackers. Ride up to the ranch, pick up the trail, and go after the culprits. You know what to do when

you find them."

"Yes, sir." Custer went wooden-faced again. He did know.

"And, of course," Heimbach added, "the same for any other renegade Bushmen you find."

"Yes, sir." Since no Bushman had any legal status whatever—outside of a few bondservants, mostly

raised from captured infants and kept as household novelties by aristocratic Drakia families—they were

all in effect "renegades" and subject to out-of-hand disposal on sight. Custer, however, did not point this

out.

"After all," Heimbach said, "you do, I believe, have some experience of pursuing and punishing savages."

Custer managed not to wince. "Yes, sir," he said once more, face blank, looking at Queen Victoria, who

looked back at him without joy.

* * *

His face is blank now, under its coating of dust; his long bony features register nothing of the voices

within:

"Colonel Custer, was it not your mission to pursue and punish the savages?"

"I learned that their forces were overwhelmingly superior to mine. I saw no reason, sir, to lead my men

to certain defeat."

"And on what basis did you make this evaluation?"

"My Crow scouts reconnoitered the Sioux encampment and reported it contained thousands of

warriors."

"So on the word of a few . . . aborigines, you not only abandoned the offensive but ordered a general

withdrawal from the area? Colonel, are you aware that expert witnesses have testified that no Indian

band has ever been seen in the numbers you allege, in all the history of the frontier?"

"There were enough of them to defeat General Crook six days earlier, on the Rosebud."

"May I remind you, Colonel, that General Crook is not on trial here—"

And at last the dry sour voice of little Phil Sheridan: "It is the finding of this court that on June 24, 1876,

Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was guilty of dereliction of duty and of cowardice in the

face of the enemy, in that he did fail to attack the hostiles as ordered . . . . "

He hears the voices now without bitterness or chagrin; all the old emotions are gone, leaving only a

profound and bottomless fatigue. Too tired for fighting old battles, too tired, he thinks dully, ever to fight

again—

"Fight them, Autie." Tom Custer, arguing, urging. "They're railroading you. They've been out to get you

ever since you exposed the way they're starving the reservation Indians. Now Sheridan's making you the

scapegoat for his botched campaign."

Libbie: "Yes, Autie you've got to fight back, it isn't right, they can't do this—"

But of course they could, that was never in doubt, no army ever let a lieutenant colonel fight his own

generals, not even a lieutenant colonel who had once been a general himself.

Well, Libbie was gone now, of a fever the doctors said, but then the medical profession did not

recognize a broken heart as a cause of death. And Tom, good faithful Tom, resigning his own

commission in protest against his brother's disgrace, only to be gunned down on a Kansas street by a

vicious thug named Wyatt Earp, whom he had accurately but unwisely accused of cheating at cards.

* * *

His eyes move, now, his gaze dropping to the revolver in his lap: the same big English .45 he carried on

that last campaign against the Sioux, a good reliable weapon, faster to fire and load than the

standard-issue Army Colt. True, in the end there was no occasion to use it. . . .

Not, at least, on anyone else; there were, to be sure, plenty of times afterward when he found himself

considering the ultimate alternative. He wonders why he never did it. Maybe, he thinks, I am a coward

after all.

But he might have taken that route, in the end, but for the letter: "Dear Genl Custer, pardon my

fammilierty but I fot the Rebs under you & now I read about your trobles & I say it is a H—l of a thing

after all you done for our Countrie. You shoud come to Drakia, a White man has a real show hear. They

got more gold than Callifornea & dimons to—"

He never found the man who wrote the letter; his inquiries, around the gold-field settlements of eastern

Archona, drew only shrugs. At first he sought the man to thank him. Later he thought more in terms of

killing the well-meaning fool.

The Dominion of Drakia did indeed possess a wealth of gold and diamonds; but, as new arrivals quickly

learned, Drakia was no California. All the major fields were firmly in the hands of big combines, the

mines big elaborate affairs, worked by armies of slaves.

(Bondservants, the Drakia insisted on calling them, claiming that slavery was extinct and even illegal now.

But that was sheer sophistry; the poor devils were slaves, whatever the official terminology, as much as

any character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's.)

There was little room here for the romantic figure of the lone prospector. A few remained in the remoter

areas—such as that awful Namib Desert, over on the southwest coast, that made the Kalahari look like

the Garden of Eden—but their day was rapidly coming to an end.

And anyway, despite all that silliness in the Black Hills, the truth was that George Custer knew virtually

nothing about gold or mining; soldiering was the only trade he had ever studied.

Very well, then, he would soldier here. But that idea too came up short against Drakian reality. The

Dominion's legions did indeed contain many former Americans, but almost all were ex-Confederates. A

man who had fought on the antislavery side, in what was still regarded here as an Abolitionist war, was

regarded with grave suspicion by the Drakian command; and a onetime Yankee officer who had been

convicted of cowardice, in a campaign against native savages, simply need not apply.

In the end it was Jeb Stuart, of all people (now Strategos Stuart of the Third Legion; the Drakians had

easily recognized at least one genius), who stepped in to help. Still the perfect Southern knight, extending

a magnanimous hand to a fallen former adversary:

"I am mortified, sir." It came out "Ah am mo'tifahd, suh," it would take more than a decade or so of

Drakian residence to obliterate that Virginia drawl. "Even to make such an offer, to a man of your

ability—I hope you will not take offense, General Custer, at my temerity."

"Temerity was always your long suit, General Stuart."

"Why, I appreciate that, sir, coming from a man whose audacity I once had all too good cause to know."

Smiling, stroking the ends of the long mustache; most of the American immigrants, Custer included, got

rid of their whiskers and long hair in the African heat, but count on Stuart to put style above mere

comfort. "But as I was saying, the Mounted Police—"

"They're offering me a job as a policeman?"

"Technically, yes. But then the soldier often has to serve as a policeman. After all, our former duties

against the Indians could be considered in the nature of police work, could they not?" Stuart smiled again.

"And the Mounted Police are practically a military organization in most respects. True, the men are

sometimes a trifle rough, but . . . . "

* * *

A trifle rough, yes. That was good. That was another voice he had occasion to remember in the time that

followed. As for example on the present operation, during the ride north to pick up the trail of the

Bushmen who had killed the Drakian rancher.

Riding along beside the little column, looking over his command, he considered that he had never seen a

scruffier lot. All wore at least the major components of the KMP's brown cotton uniform—it was

comfortable, after all, and free—but each man had felt free to make his own modifications: shirt sleeves

and trouser legs hacked off to taste, shapeless slouch hats substituted for the regulation cap, leather

cartridge belts festooned with unauthorized private weaponry. Some wore cowboy-style boots in place

of the knee-high issue jackboots; none, whatever their choice of footgear, seemed to have heard of

polish.

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-patterneddashiki 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

S. M. Stirling - Draka 05 - Drakas!

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