The Steel Tsar (20 page)

“Free Cossacks.” he cried, “Your blood has been spilled in the holy cause of Liberty and Socialism. The Central Government has sent her might against us. All the powers of her science are being brought to bear upon the Cossacks. They would destroy us forever. They would make Cossack history mere folk tales and the great noble deeds of the Hosts turned into comic stories. Such dishonour is impossible to contemplate, impossible to tolerate. But now we have our own pure science, untainted by their alien blood! We can create our own miracles! Behold!”

His pointing finger focused thousands of pairs of eyes upon the dominating figure of the metal man which rose to the school’s roof and which could be seen from all sides.

“Here is a Tsar made truly of steel. He is an impregnable battle-leader worthy of the Free Cossacks. He will lead you against anything the enemy can muster. He is the symbol of all I stand for. He will bring inevitable victory.”

A great cheer went up from the Cossacks. Sabres whistled from their scabbards and burned like brands in the morning air. These men were always impressed by such flashy symbolism. Djugashvili had got their measure well and Wilson had been able to translate his ideas into reality.

“Now, comrade—” Djugashvili turned to his tame mechanic “—now you must give life to our new leader. You must set him in motion. You must demonstrate his magical power!”

Self-controlled at last, Wilson reached up to the figure’s waist and depressed a small lever. He stepped hastily backward, almost tripping, as slowly the steel creature began to come to life.

Wilson seemed to detect an unfamiliar movement in the mechanical man and frowned. I recalled that the albino Count von Bek had taken an interest in Wilson’s invention. Had that mysterious visitor made any adjustments of his own to Wilson’s marvel...?

Again the mechanic relaxed. Smoothly his giant seemed to respond to a grandiose gesture of the warlord’s and with awkward, spastic movements, reached to its belt and drew its huge sabre, a match to its scale. With a screech the sabre cleared the scabbard and again the Cossacks cheered.

They were mightily impressed. Djugashvili had gauged their needs well. They were all cheering as the mechanical man raised the sword over his head. Again they waved their own sabres in response. They made their horses rear and buck. The noise of their approval was deafening.

Slowly the monster turned its head, as if listening. It inclined its gaze to stare down at Wilson. It lifted its head again. It seemed to be peering from one figure to the other, from the dais to the assembled Hosts.

Evidently these movements had been part of a programme already designed by Wilson and approved by Djugashvili. I had never seen the warlord more puffed up or pleased with himself. Already, in his mind, he ruled the world.

Mrs. Persson began to applaud. Her cue was taken up by the rest of us, to Djugashvili’s further immense approval. Ponderously he, too, began to clap his hands together.

Mrs. Persson put her lips close to my ear. “He loves public adulation as much as his Cossacks love ikons. They would rather admire statues than real people. It has been their undoing for centuries.”

Dempsey had begun to laugh, almost uncontrollably, and only grew silent when Mrs. Persson signed to him to stop. I, for my part, found the whole scene nightmarish. Dempsey cast a bloodshot, crazy eye about him and then, chillingly, winked at me.

As if in imitation of the cheering Cossacks, the mechanical Tsar now waved its sabre over its head. Wilson had recovered his confidence entirely. He had the air of a ringmaster in charge of an especially fierce beast. He bowed and strutted, a great, broad grin on his face and, for that moment, I saw something in him that I could like. The man was happy. He was doing what he had always dreamed of doing. He was proud of his accomplishment. All his whining and pontificating, his groveling and bullying, his greedy ambition, had been expressions of a profound disappointment, a loss so terrible to him, I guessed, that he could never recall exactly what it was that had been taken away. And now, in these dreadful circumstances, at the behest of a pathological mass-murderer, in a remote part of the Russian Empire, Peewee Wilson had come into his own. This was his moment. He might have been a matador swaggering before the Spanish crowd, a matinee idol standing before his admirers, a general returning from a victorious campaign. The applause, as far as he was concerned, was all for him. He reached to set another lever.

The steel giant began to lumber forward again, heading towards the dais.

It stopped in mid-stride. Then one of its knees bent a little so that it seemed he stumbled and might fall. Djugashvili looked a little apprehensive as the thing loomed over us, but he continued to clap, even when a grinding screech issued from the knee joint as the giant swayed.

I think Wilson had meant the mechanical creature to fall upon one knee in a gesture of supplication to Djugashvili but the motion had been halted and the Steel Tsar thrown off balance. The knee jerked two or three more times. There was the squeak and the clash of metal again. The monster began to turn, but its leg still dragged. It swayed again and this time we flinched, certain it must fall on us. Djugashvili flung up his arm and I could have sworn I heard him whimper. Only as the thing swayed away in the opposite direction did he recover himself and it was obvious to us all that he was vastly angry at being forced to show his fear.

He leaned over the dais, letting out a stream of disgusting language in Russian and then a further torrent in which I took to be his native Georgian. There followed more expletives in English and French, all of them directed at the unfortunate Wilson, who saw his whole moment of triumph fading away to be replaced by the threat of unusually painful death.

“Set the thing to rights, Wilson, old man, for God’s sake.” Cornelius Dempsey was the only one of us who seemed amused.

Djugashvili’s voice was venomous. “Make him behave, Wilson. Or must I first teach
you
to behave?”

Wilson was in no doubt about the nature of the threat. He ran towards his creation, reaching up towards its waist, grabbing for other levers.

“Please,” he was whimpering. “Please.” He seemed to be begging the mechanical man to obey and pleading for his life at the same time.

The whole scene sickened me. I pressed forward to beg the warlord to stop this farce. I could not bear to see even as unlikable a creature as Wilson humiliated in this way. But Mrs. Persson made me pause. I knew there was no way I could influence Djugashvili. It was like being forced to watch in silence while a man beat a dog.

Blindly, Wilson tugged at levers and all at once the giant straightened up. He fell back, grinning with relief, casting a wild glance towards his master. His chest rose and fell, his unhealthy skin shone with his terror. He was close to collapse and yet gibbering in his gratitude for his escape.

But now he fell silent, looking up at his creature as it appeared to peer down at him.

The Cossacks had stopped cheering. The whole vast Host was hushed and those of us on the dais moved forward, also silent.

It was as if the air were filled only with the sound of Wilson’s erratic, terrified breathing. His placatory grin towards the dais had no hope in it. Djugashvili’s mouth seemed to move in a grimace of hellish amusement and then he flung back his metal head and began to laugh.

None joined him.

Marek muttered something about the levers and made to descend the steps, but Djugashvili stopped him with the flat of his heavy, peasant hand. “This is entertaining. Let us see what happens.”

“The levers are wrongly placed. I can see it from here. They are in different coloured metals...”

“No matter, no matter. Wait.” Again Djugashvili chuckled. “Watch.”

The great steel warrior was moving again. The sword arm rose higher, inch by creaking inch.

Wilson took a step backward. Then he took another. Suddenly a sound like the roar of Babel issued from the metal mouth. It was as if every member of the human race gave voice at once.

Wilson covered his ears, screaming. “No!” He shook his head. “That’s wrong. It’s wrong. I didn’t!”

The voice swelled again from the metal throat. It was unbearable.

“Can’t you stop the thing, Marek?” I asked the scientist, but he shook his head, gestured towards his master and shrugged.

Wilson stumbled away. Now the giant moved in two long strides to stand over him as, in his uncontrollable fear, he fell to the dust of the quadrangle.

“This wasn’t how it was supposed to be!” Wilson’s scream was, to my ear, almost the scream of a betrayed child. I still remember it. I have never heard a sound like it.

Then, with swift inevitability, the sword began to descend. Wilson’s scream was suddenly stilled.

The sabre had sliced him from crown to breastbone. His blood rained upon the canvas of the dais, upon Djugashvili and Marek, who craned forward now.

Wilson’s body collapsed like butcher’s meat into the dust.

Dempsey began to cough. It was a dry, hard noise, echoing in the silence.

Not a Cossack voice was raised. There was still an air of expectancy as they waited to see what either of the Steel Tsars would do next. I heard the wind sighing over the steppe.

Then, with a speed which shocked me, the creature fell with a grinding of cogs and wheels down upon its creator’s corpse until all we saw of poor Peewee Wilson were his carefully polished boots.

Professor Marek was saying to his master: “It was too soon, comrade. He didn’t give himself enough time. He was too hasty. The levers were in the wrong places. It is very important where they...”

Djugashvili clapped the scientist on the back and again his brutal laughter filled the air.

“Well, well. This is poetry, professor. What poetry! The stuff of epics, eh. Very well arranged. Excellent.” He was praising Marek, I think, for Wilson’s murder. In this way he made the man his ally in evil. Marek could neither deny nor agree. He left the dais and began to cross the square, heading towards the fallen giant and the crushed figure which lay beneath it. He approached uncertainly, as if he feared the thing would come alive again and turn its fury upon him.

Djugashvili was addressing his Cossacks again, his arm raised in a triumphant salute. “The traitor Wilson has paid the price of his treachery! It is fine justice that he is the first to die beneath the vengeful sword of the Steel Tsar! Comrades, the foreigner was a spy for the Central Government. He planned, in his cunning, to sabotage our War Effort. But we anticipated his plans and punished him, for the Steel Tsar obeys only its true master, your
hetman
! We are revenged, brothers! Freedom! Freedom!”

“Poor Wilson,” said Una Persson. “What a dreadful lesson.”

“And a final one,” said Dempsey. His body was still convulsing. He moved away.

Djugashvili turned to us. “We are all rid of a bore, eh?” He chuckled, calling to the scientist, who had reached the fallen giant. “Revive him, Professor Marek. Get him back to the laboratories. He must lead our troops tomorrow.”

Marek fiddled expertly with the thing, unscrewing levers and putting them in different parts of the mechanical creature’s machinery. Who had tampered with the levers? Not Marek himself, I thought. Had Wilson, in his panic, simply made mistakes? Or had von Bek sabotaged the monster after he had visited us? I would never know.

There is a line in that great Skimling epic of the Second Ether—“We have searched every inch of charted Space and Time and found only ghosts and shadows.” As I looked about me then I, too, saw only ghosts and shadows. Were we all simply reflections of some forgotten original, versions in an infinite series of men and women? How many million Bastables at that moment knew a scene almost identical to this? Was there any such thing as real individuality?

I was sure there was. I looked to where Mrs. Persson was comforting Dempsey. I was sure that Una Persson was unique. Able to move between the space-time planes of the multiverse, she had no counterparts and few equals. I wondered, with a kind of twisted hope, if the act of joining the League of Temporal Adventurers meant that all those ghosts and shadows of oneself were reincorporated or abolished. Was that the benefit Mrs. Persson had hinted at? And yet to know such a benefit was also to know a peculiar kind of loneliness.

Cossacks had now come up to help Professor Marek get the mechanical man on its feet. Its whole body was smeared with its creator’s flesh and blood and the head was slightly dented, giving it a mad, crooked grin, but once it was on its feet it marched with easy precision between the Cossacks. Clearly, the thing had been tampered with—and Wilson’s death was intentional.

The sense of being a courtier in some Byzantine power struggle was very strong. I have always hated such stuff at the best of times. I had the choice, once, of standing as the Liberal for Croydon, but I could not bear the thought of wasting my time extracting promises from people who had no clear intention of keeping them. But at least the corridors of Whitehall did not as a rule smell of freshly spilled blood!

Djugashvili was thoroughly satisfied with the day. His own brief expression of terror forgotten, he strutted up to Dempsey and put his arm around the airshipman. “Well, my friend, you have joined us. The bombs are aboard, eh?”

Dempsey straightened up, pulling away from the warlord’s embrace. “They’re aboard,” he said. His voice had a colder, more controlled note.

Djugashvili was still in good spirits. His manner was jocular. “Then get to your ship, sir. Get up into the air, Captain Dempsey. Speed like the wind to your target. Your mission is a glorious one. You will redeem us. I wish to witness no further disloyalty to our great, common cause!”

Dempsey was shaking his head with open amusement at Djugashvili’s hypocritical rhetoric.

“Ah!” The Steel Tsar lifted his head and seemed to taste the air and find it sweet. “What glory it holds for me, what fruits and rewards, what honour, this future I see!”

Mrs. Persson tapped him lightly upon the shoulder, causing him to turn, angered by the interruption. He followed her pointing finger, staring up into the sky.