The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (45 page)

“You mean you want to study… for a degree?”

He hadn’t really thought about sending Borislava or Evgenia to study at higher institutions of learning. There was no real point for them to study serious subjects more than to the degree where they could engage intelligently in small talk, since these days women would not have to acquaint themselves with state business. Moral instruction, fundamental learning, languages, and a host of other subjects were of universal utility, but obviously law, military science, statecraft, and so forth would be superfluous to them. Just as it had never crossed Petar’s mind to study medicine or even intermediate chemistry, there would be little point for them to study seriously. Although he liked to indulge Borislava, it would be rather unseemly to send her off to play student. Was she going to wear a student uniform? Tunic, pants, cap, and all?

“I just want to learn a little,” Nadia said, not quite sure what a degree was.

She knew what it was, but not exactly. Academic details were a bit fuzzy to her, and she didn’t want to admit that in case he would hold it against her.

“You have your duties at the hospital.”

For the country
. Every single royal subject across Bulgaria should know that the princes and princesses of the country were doing everything they could in the service of the war effort.

“Anyway, what is it you hope to learn? Education isn’t just listening to a speech once in a while. You have to work hard and focus your head.”

“I want to learn philosophy better,” she mumbled, not sure why Daddy was not delighted about her request.

He was the kind of man who should be very happy that she was interested in something, so he should be overjoyed. Maybe it was some kind of psychological trick he was playing?

“You have books for that, don’t you?”

He could see that she was disappointed by his answer. But he couldn’t just have her go off to university in the middle of a war.

“Why don’t we have someone tutor you? You liked your tutors in the past.”

She nodded slowly, not really hoping for a new tutor. It was embarrassing to be all alone with a tutor; that way he would know exactly what she couldn’t understand, and it would make her feel so stupid. That was why she hoped that she could be hiding in the back of a lecture hall and learn without anybody finding out about the things she couldn’t understand.

Chapter 6
8

Michael kept his head down, not looking over at Lothar a few feet from him. As soon as they had climbed out of the smoldering tank, they had rushed into a shallow crater while the tanks around them kept on the dueling with the Russians. Ivan’s whole damned army seemed to have come to meet the regiment, and they had at least knocked out three or four Russian tanks before they had to leave one of their comrades behind.

Lothar was lying still, and Michael didn’t bother to investigate why. His sleeve had been torn, and
most of his right arm had been left inside the tank after the sergeant had managed to pull him out. That left only Michael and the sergeant in mint condition, and they were focused on two great priorities; staying clear of the machinegun fire and watching out for any tanks that might come through the crater and fail to spot them. The thought of being crushed like a bug beneath the tracks of a German tank was even less appetizing than being hit by a bullet.

Isak glanced over at the driver, happy to not be alone
out here. His gunner, radioman, and loader had been good men, but there had been too many Russian tanks for them to handle. Even a god couldn’t have time to knock out every last tank, and the shell that had gotten them had fortunately been a rather bad hit, and other than two men and an arm, it hadn’t taken much material damage on the crew. Both Isak and the driver were fine, and now all they had to do was to wait for an opportunity to get back to Company and safety.

The Russians had attacked fiercely all over the sector, and the
whole regiment had been shoved in to plug the gap the Russians had punched in the line. Hopefully, the infantry had knocked out plenty of their armor before they were overwhelmed, and perhaps the Russian spear tip would be blunted before long and their breakout could be stopped.

He avoided raising his head to look at the Russian tanks in the open field ahead, but from the noise it was clear that the tanks around them we
re still fighting against the enemy, firing with main guns and machineguns against their Russian adversaries. It was hard to know who had the upper hand, since they had been so surprised by Ivan’s attack, and there was no way to tell just how many tanks were attacking.

Isak wondered what his mother would say if he wrote that he had been knocked out again. She had told him to say his prayers, but he wasn’t sure if that would matter
, and he felt a little self-conscious about it. His belt was imbued with the motto of the Prussian Army, just like the flag of the regiment. “
God with us
” on the belt buckle and “
With God for king and fatherland
” on the flag. Besides, she had herself written to him and told him that that supposedly wonderful Heinrich Kohen had been killed, so it wasn’t like putting your faith in God kept you safe from bullets and she clearly knew that. Yes, that virtuous little boy who’d been the great incarnation of piety ever since the day he started reading had apparently been shot to pieces by Ivan. Isak felt bad for smiling at the irony, but maybe he and God shared that black sense of humor. The Kohens were good people, but maybe Heini Kohen just proved that God didn’t give a fuck how pious you were. Even a guy with practically a rabbinical level of religious knowledge and the zeal of a prophet could still be shot to hell just as well as a proud atheist like Lothar Kaschinski.

The weather was pretty nice, but Michael didn’t bother basking in the warming spring sun. Indeed, other than constantly glancing over his shoulder at the imagined sounds of engines
of tanks coming towards them he was keeping his face down in the dirt while repeating Hail Marys in the hope that it would make a difference.

He had no idea how long they had been lying there before the sergeant reached over and tugged
violently on his sleeve, shaking him awake. Had he fallen asleep? In a crater? He hadn’t had much sleep, but sleeping around here had to be near the top of bizarre places to go for a nap.

“
Zimmermann, let’s go,” the sergeant said with a faint smile, not quite as cheerful as he usually looked.

The machinegun fire had stopped, and when he raised his head he saw that the tanks had moved several hundred feet up ahead, almost overtaking the burning wrecks that had
been firing on them and had knocked out their tank.

“You’re good?” the sergeant asked after they walked out of the crater and could see the tanks that had been destroyed by the Russians.

A couple of men from the company who had been hunkering by a tree came rushing towards them when they saw Sergeant Jew and Michael Zimmermann. Isak Gutmayer had been given the nickname Sergeant Jew from the now dead Lieutenant Bölcke, and it had stuck so that almost no one in the platoon knew him by any other name. The six comrades were all happy to see each other alive, although of course they all knew the men who had been killed.

The group of six walked back the same way they had co
me, eager to get back and report their misadventure. One of the men from the other tank had a bloodied hand and some of the men had sustained other slight injuries, but no one in the group was gravely hurt. There was no point in sharing the details. The sergeant and Michael had failed Lothar, but he didn’t have to tell them that he’d come out alive from the tank only to die out in the open from his injury. Bad luck. Damned bad luck.

“Damn Ivan won’t ever run out of people,” one of the men muttered, and the others listlessly agreed.

It was unbearable to think that the encircled Russians were attacking so hard all along the iron chain around their neck, but it was hardly unreasonable. Even Michael could understand the military logic, and the company commander had warned that the Russians would keep attacking them until they were out of ammunition or men, whichever came first. Considering the vastness of the Asiatic hordes, it seemed unlikely that they would run out of men.

Chapter 6
9

“Lieutenant Ibrahim is a hero,” Major Ueno added, as if the he thought that the remark would make the man’s former companion happy.

Meryem nodded, knowing for sure that Daryn was a great big hero forever and ever. She had had the opportunity to wash and had been given a warm fur overcoat, but she had yet to take a proper bath, and she had been hoping throughout that Daryn was fine and waiting for her. She had been sure that he would be there to meet her when the officer took her from her cell, and for all of yesterday she had been sure that there was a mistake, that Daryn might have escaped. It was only after she had met Major Ueno that he gave her the unwelcome news that she should relish, since that meant Daryn was a National Martyr who had given his life like a real patriot should.

He had only let her see the photo for a brief moment, and when she had tried to take it, he had pulled it back, not letting her touch it. Why couldn’t she have the last picture of him as a memento? However, she was much too shy to insist that she should be allowed to have it as a special memory of him, gruesome though it might be.

“It’s a shame,” Ueno Toshiyuki said, feeling a little uncomfortable to deal with Lieutenant Ibrahim’s widow.

He would have much rather have someone else speak to her, but he was still waiting for the junior colonel to come and go through the Russian papers where he had found the documents briefly explaining the sentences of both Lieutenant Ibrahim and his wife, as well as the picture taken right before and right after the lieutenant had been shot. The documents were short on details, but the grainy photo that had been taken as a record coupled nicely with the note that briefly reported the execution with the details of time and date of his death.

“I’m happy for him,” Meryem mumbled quietly.

It was a lie, but she should lie, shouldn’t she? Any woman should be proud to be a war widow. She had been sure that there was a mistake when she had first been told, and she wanted the major to show her the picture again so she could see his face, but she was too shy to insist on it.

Toshiyuki looked around the small room, trying to think of how to get rid of the girl so he could return to sorting out the papers in the filing cabinet. He had no time to deal with this woman. So far, the most interesting find had been the written and photographic evidence of Lieutenant Ibrahim’s execution, but in case there was something that would interest the Intelligence Department he would have to continue. Frankly, Lieutenant Ibrahim was not a significant matter for the Intelligence Department. They would be far more interested in verifying troop strength of the remaining Russian forces in the region, or other military intelligence.

“You’re from Tekika, aren’t you?” he asked, thinking that he might have a way to get rid of her easily.

Meryem nodded, discreetly biting down hard on her lip. She focused as best as she could on pushing every bad thought out of her head so that she could remain decent and collected. It was difficult to not want to take the photo of Daryn from the major, but she knew better than to make a spectacle of herself by arguing or crying.

“Captain Suzuki is going back there for a leave of absence. Perhaps you would wish to accompany him?”

Suzuki? Although she didn’t like the major’s unlikeable deputy, she only nodded, looking forward to going back home again. She didn’t ever want to go away. Although she had some luck on purging her mind of Daryn, she missed home too. She missed her mother and the tranquility of the house courtyard which had always been her private sanctuary as a girl.

The sky had turned dark with night when Meryem and Captain Suzuki boarded a crowded train packed with men wearing white papers stuck on their chests. Many of the officers had dirty white bandages that covered arms, legs, hands, and injuries in different places, and a couple of soldiers with armbands with the red writing “
Medical Orderly
” on them accompanied the officers and men that filled the car in the cloud of smoke from cigarettes.

Captain Suzuki wore a piece of paper on his chest too with the prominent characters at the top reading “
Medical leave permit
.” Under his peaked cap he had bandages covering part of his head and his left eye, and a bit of plaster covered the worst of the dry scrapes on his face. He looked very different from what he had looked like when she had last seen him, and at first she almost didn’t recognize him without the hairy face. It wasn’t just that he was wearing an officer’s uniform and had his head plastered; he had shaved his face and looked cleaner, despite the bandage and the note stuck on his uniform identifying him as infirm. Although facial hair was the telltale sign of manliness, she had grown up in an environment where small moustaches or no hair at all was the norm, and men not shaving looked filthy and unkempt to her eyes.

Meryem had a note pinned on her chest too, but it just labeled her with “
Wartime traveler permit
” and had been stamped and dated by a military clerk, and rather sloppily had he written her destination. The man who had filled it out for her had said that she had to keep it on her until she got home so people could see that she was supposed to be on the train. Maybe it was something like a ticket? She had never been much of a train traveler, so she didn’t know much about how trains worked.

The hard bench was so crowded that Captain Suzuki’s thigh was pushing against hers, and it was a little uncomfortable to be this close to someone. Other than her oldest little sister and Daryn, she had never been this intimate with someone as far as she could remember. However, there was not really any room between the window and Captain Suzuki, and she focused on looking at the empty track outside next to the train. She was doing her best to not think of Daryn in any way or form, and instead she was thinking about her mother and how delighted she would be to see her precious big daughter back home safe again.

When the train finally started moving, Meryem kept looking outside the window on the dark landscape on the other side of the dirty glass. It was hard to make anything out since the lights inside the train car were reflected in the glass and the dark outside became that much more difficult to get past, but she might not have cared even if it had been daylight. Somehow, she just couldn’t care about what the landscape was like.

It didn’t take long before she felt a distasteful feeling inside her throat. The soldiers and officers were smoking a great deal, and she wasn’t used to the taste of the air and the tobacco clouds that filled the compartment without a place to go, turning into a gray haze that hung in the air inside the car. After being outside so much in the last couple of years, she imagined that her lungs had tasted air cleaner and more pure than almost any air in the whole wide world. So much of this part of the world was just open space and only the ugly Russian cities interrupted the natural harmony of the land—her people’s ancient homeland. They were a natural peasant people, a rural people, rather than a city people, and cigarette smoke was a kind of city smog, so she might just be somehow less tolerant to it than the Chuuka men.

The train stopped and stalled several times over, and the uneven pace made it difficult to feel comfortable on the hard bench. The wooden seats were crammed tightly together, and there were so many men in the car that some of them were squatting on the floor in the aisle, and she was thankful that at least she had a seat to sit on. Tekika was more than 500 miles away from Verniy, and despite the slow passage of time the train advanced to its border very slowly, stopping for long waits that left it standing still for longer times than it was moving.

“Does your family know that you will be coming?”

It took Meryem several moments before she realized that Captain Suzuki had said something to her. She turned her head slightly in his direction before she quietly shook it no. She had no interest in speaking to the officer, yet she was becoming bored by the slow passage of the hours.

“I didn’t think so,” Tomoki mumbled.

There had not really been any time to notify anybody, and even if he would have bothered to write a letter, they would be in Tekika long before any mail would arrive. Private mail had to be far down the list of priorities, and the military mail service was hardly even a bad joke.

Meryem glanced over in the direction of the captain, avoiding his eyes. His neck twitched when he parted his lips to replace the smoldering cigarette between them, and he looked even more apathetic than she had ever seen him before. It looked like he was in pain, and Meryem wondered what might have happened to him. Her instinctive dislike for him melted away enough to formulate the obvious question.

“How did you acquire your noble wounds, sir?” she asked, her voice quiet and listless.

He scoffed with his lips together, and she had to wait several moments before he removed his cigarette and opened his mouth.

“Not so nobly, dear lady,” he mumbled. “A roof collapsed on top of me.”

It was nothing to be proud of, but at least Tomoki was alive. An NCO had been crushed to death, and another man had a broken skull from the incident. Tomoki’s injury was a rather pitiful affair, however. Perhaps akin to a medieval soldier being put out of action after getting a splinter from his spear shaft stuck in his hand or something banal and embarrassing like that. Nevertheless, the junior colonel had dismissed most of Ueno’s officers, and Tomoki would return home for a couple of weeks before he might get a letter transferring him to another command. He was after all an officer, and it would be a great waste to not put his education to proper use. Perhaps he could be assigned a company command in a cavalry regiment or something like that; the sort of command he had been trained for before he had been transferred to Intelligence on account of his “tribal” identity. He was still keen on being sent back to regular duty after the almost three years he had spent in the Intelligence Department. A real man should fight the enemy head on—or at least follow military codes of secrecy and stealth—not scour around the countryside like dishonorable shinobi who were rightly shot if caught.

Although Meryem had resented Suzuki for appearing to be a smug man, he wasn’t as smug now as he had seemed when she had met him before. She wasn’t a doctor, so she wasn’t sure what was wrong with him, but she wondered if he might have hurt his jaw, if that was why he hardly ever opened his mouth. When he spoke, his speech was a little unclear, and the syllables were just slightly jumbled and mispronounced. It was noticeable, but not much more than that. Had he not been clearly wounded it might just have seemed like a rather mundane speech impediment.

“Lieutenant Ibrahim was a good man,” Tomoki mumbled, not having forgotten that the young lady was a war widow of one of his juniors.

He would have to see a doctor when he returned home. The field surgeon had only superficially looked at him, but an uneasy, constant pain in his mouth left Tomoki wondering if something had cracked. He had lost consciousness when the rubble had buried him, and he could not stand the thought that his farcical injury might be worse than a gash in the head along with some smaller scrapes. The surgeon had sewed up the wound in his head, but he would be a lot more at ease when he could visit a doctor in the city and perhaps take an x-ray and have it examined by a more competent doctor than the field surgeon. Perhaps his family doctor would be enough to pass a judgment on the extent of his hurt.

“I am very proud to be his wife,” Meryem said mechanically, trying not to let Captain Suzuki tear her up with his words about Daryn.

She didn’t want to think about him, and she knew that he was in a happy place, happy to have gone there the way he had. But that didn’t make it happy for her. It wasn’t fair! Of all the people who could have been killed, why did it have to be someone as pure, kind, and good as him? There had to be millions of men who were inferior in every objective way whom the world would not miss. She didn’t care if she was being selfish, it wasn’t fair!

“He is a true samurai,” Tomoki said, not quite sure how a covert agent could really be properly praised.

Tomoki had learned about swords both as practical weapons but also as metaphorical symbols of a pure-hearted effort since he was a child. As a man, he could look back at his lessons in martial kendo as a time of learning and manly joy, and the pains of failure had dissipated from his internal record with the passage of time. He had never wielded a sword in combat, but the lessons and discipline of swordsmanship from his childhood were of self-evident benefit to him. All men should hope to be samurai, yet to be a real samurai, one had to die. That was the final achievement that determined a man’s life; dying like a samurai on a battlefield and never be brought back home. By that standard, Lieutenant Ibrahim had done very well. Forever lost on enemy soil. Like a real warrior man while Tomoki and all of these… non-warriors had nothing but possible future scars. Perhaps it was only an intellectual desire—Tomoki wasn’t sure that he really wanted to die. Besides, he didn’t even have a son yet, so it wouldn’t be right to his late father if he should die now. No, perhaps he wasn’t ready yet.