When he had wiped the grease and sauce from his lips and beard, then swallowed a good half-leetrahof the fine country ale, Bralos remarked to his n.o.ble dining companion, "My lord, that was indeed a beau-tiful piece of work you did out there today, and I will for long remember it and tell of it. But, please, my lord, you must think of me if not yourself and not so risk your life. Has my lord any idea just how much trouble it would cause me if I had to deliver back his ashes to Council at Mehseepolis?"

Sitheeros chuckled. "Not half the trouble you're going to be in with me, here and now, if you don't cut out that disgustingly formal military manner of speak-ing and address me as I have advised you to address me, Bralos.

"As regards the bull, well, chances are that had it been any one of a hundred or so other bulls, I'd've just sat back with the rest of the party and tried to hold him where he was until someone had got back with that crossbow, or at least some dogs. But, h.e.l.l, man, you know how hunting is. I justknew that I could do it with that particular beast, for all that it's been a good twenty years or more since last I did anything similar on a hunt. I justknew that I could cripple him without serious injury to either me or my horse.

"Don't you worry about me taking insane risks, Bralos, for I mean to make old bones. My days of active warring are over and done. I intend to die at the age of one hundred years or more, in a soft bed of overexertions with a young and willing doxie, not with a gutful of sharp steel or on the horns of some wild bull, thank you."

On the next day's march, Sitheeros remarked, "You know, Bralos, this ride has been a tonic for me in more than one way, but I also think that it has given me an idea for killing several birds with but a single stone. No army can be allowed to just sit in camp, drilling ceaselessly and doing make-work ch.o.r.es, with-out suffering for it; any man who has commanded knows that. But neither is the army or Council or our people to be properly served by marching that army hither and yon to no real purpose or with the an-nounced purpose of picking fights along the borders, as old Pahvlos did and tried to do.

"Yes, light and medium cavalry can be put to good use chasing stray bands of outlaw bandit raiders, but what of infantry, eh? Due to their survival necessity to move fast, bandits are always mounted, and even our light foot would play merry h.e.l.l trying to catch them were any featherbrained senior officer to order them to it. So, must it be the fate of all our foot to sit and vegetate between drilling and endlessly repolishing un-used weapons? No, there is better work for them and for the good folk of our ConsolidatedThoheekseeahnee, I think.

"As of the time that we two left Mehseepolis, all save one of thethoheekseeahnee hadthoheeksee and all of the border marches had anopokomees, but as we have seen on this march, right many of these interior lands are totally lacking minor n.o.bility-komee-seeandvahrohnoee -and the common people are work-ing the land without the help or the supervision of any resident lord, given what little aid oradvice as they do receive by agents of thethoheeks when they ride through each year to collect taxes or to gather men for sea-sonal work on river levees and other civic projects of a local nature.

"Moreover, many of these lands are quite likely to stay devoid of petty lords until such a time as there is more hard money about for purchase of the t.i.tles and holdings of extinct houses, for no one can expect a thoheeks who is himself often living on gruel and wild herbs and spring water between harvests to just give valuable a.s.sets away to the first promising landless n.o.bleman-born who chances down the road; our world just does not work that way nor will it ever.

"Therefore, we have the current problem: willing, striving folk who could produce far more from lands that even now are showing traces of their old fruitful-ness did they but have steady, intelligent guidance and set goals toward which to labor, did they but have access to extra hands during those, seasons when they most are needful, did they but have men armed and trained to arms to keep large, baneful wild beasts in check, until these lands each have again their own resident lord with his family and retainers to do all these needful things for them. And this is where our idle soldiery comes into the scenario, Bralos.

This is the plan that I mean to put to the High Lord of the Confederation on our ride back with him."

"And what, my lor ... ahh, Sitheeros," said Bralos uneasily, "if this great ruler has other plans for our and now his army?"

Thoheeks Sitheeros just smiled. "My boy, we will just have to see how best to cross that stream when we are up on its banks."

"From all that I have been told and the little that I have seen," said the High Lord, "you have done a stupendous job in so short an amount of time,Tho-heeksee."

Despite the best efforts of Grahvos, Mahvros, Bahos, Vikos and several others, they had been able to as-semble only twenty-two of the thirty-three in Mehsee-polis by the time Sitheeros and the escort came riding in from the east with the notable visitor and the new squadron of Horseclansmen.

"We sincerely thank our High Lord Milos of Morai," saidThoheeks Grahvos with grave solemnity. "We regret that many of those who have strived so hard for and contributed so much to the rebirth of what was, and not too long since, a smitten, blighted land of chaos and disorder could not be on hand to welcome our overlord and to hear his generous words of praise; but few of the lands are even as yet on a firm, paying basis-be theythoheekseeahnee, komeeseeahnee, vah-rohnohseeahnee or opokomeeseeahnee -and some of our peers simply could not absent themselves from their lands and still be a.s.sured that all their folk will be able to eat through the winter coming."

Which was, thought Grahvos to himself, as good a way as any other of which he could think of putting the powerful man on notice that affairs within these ConsolidatedThoheekseeahnee were just not as yet to a point at which any meaningful amounts of repara-tions could be paid to the sometime Kingdom of Karaleenos or to anyone else.

He had, of course, heard that Milo was telepathic, as too were a good many Horseclansmen, but even so he was shocked when the tall man nodded his head of black hair stippled with grey and said, "Thoheeks Grahvos, gentlemen, I fully realize that that which you all have so valiantly set out to do will a.s.suredly take time, much more time than has thus far pa.s.sed. My reasons for making this initial visit to your land has nothing to do with the collection of any monies. I am come to offer help rather than hindrance, you see. "That which I have learned from the regular reports ofThoheeks Tomos Gonsalos, added to the informa-tion freely imparted me by your ownThoheeks Sitheeros andVahrohnos Bralos of Yohyultonpolis, has con-firmed my earlier thoughts of just where I and the might of our Confederation of Eastern Peoples can best be of aid to you, our newest member-state.

"Your northern marches are, I am a.s.sured by all, secure and at peace. Your southern marches are as secure as ever they will be with the Witch Kingdom ab.u.t.ting them-and I'll be speaking more of them at a later date.

"Your eastern marches, too, are about as safe and as peaceful as anyone who knows the fen-men could expect them to be. These fen-men are treacherous killers, all seemingly at a never-ending war with all the world and all peoples. They make precious few trea-ties and they keep or abide by the terms of even fewer. If human vermin truly exist, they are of the race of the fen-men. The one good thing that I can say about them is that, at least in Kehnooryohs Ehlahs and northern Karaleenos, they appear to be a grad-ually dying race. It is to be hoped-and I sincerely do so hope!-that these sc.u.m dwelling on the periphery of your lands will register similar declines in numbers, for only thus can you, will you, ever be free of their unsavory ilk.

"In the west, however, you have a very real problem confronting fledgling naval forces. Considering the degree of destruction that the available seaborne effectives of the late High King Zastros suffered at the hands of Lord Alexandras and his fleet, some years back, it is indubitably to your credit that you have managed to raise any naval force at all within so short a s.p.a.ce of time, and that they have proven ineffective in dealing successfully with the existing menace of these marauders is perhaps to be expected.

"Nonetheless, herein is a place and time that the Confederation can prove its worth to you and your people. Even as I speak to you all here, elements of Lord Alexandras' fleet are a.s.sembling in and around one of the rivermouth ports of southern Karaleenos, awaiting only the word from one of my gallopers to set sail for Neos Kolpos. If he and his pack of recently reformed pirates cannot catch and put paid to these sea-raiders afflicting your westernthoheekseeahnee, then be certain that no mortal man can do so, gentlemen.

"During this first part of my stay in your land, I would prefer to bide in your army camp, for I must quickly learn of that army's best and worst features, that I may choose wisely those who will set out with me for the west, those who will make up the landward jaw of the nutcracker with which we will strive to crush and crumble those who now so sorely plague this land of the ConsolidatedThoheekseeahnee.

"Considering the pressing need, I think that the civil side of affairs here must await the outcome of the military-the naval, to speak with more exact.i.tude. But never you fear, any of you gentlemen; before I depart again for the north, I will appoint a surrogate, asatrapos whose t.i.tle will bepriehkips or, in the Merikan tongue, prince. This man will have four sub-ordinates immediately under him and their t.i.tle will beahrkeethoheeks. My surrogate may or may not be one of you gathered here today, but all four of the ahrkeethoheeksee will, I solemnly a.s.sure you, be one of your own."

Milo's first private meeting with Tomos Gonsalos was conducted in the s.p.a.cious, comfortably furnished and tastefully appointed parlor of those quarters that had been Pahvlos the Warlike's. Immediately Tomos had spoken his latest and highly candid report to the High Lord, he arose and said, "Lord Milo, please come with me to the other side of this suite's foyer. We found while inventorying the contents of this suite that one of the storerooms had a false rear wall, and behind it was found something I think willinterest your High Lordship."

When the section of wall shelving had swung aside and a lamp had been positioned properly, Milo hissed between his teeth at sight of what lay revealed within the secret recess. But he kept a blank face nonetheless and asked Tomos calmly, "What made you suppose that these artifacts would be of interest to me, in particular?"

"Because, Lord Milo," was the reply, "they so re-semble those somewhat larger and more ornate ones that were in the compartment of High King Zastros' great mobile yurt, using which, you spoke to the king of the Witchmen."

Milo smiled. "Yes, I had clean forgotten, you were there that day up on the Lumbuh, weren't you, Tomos? All right, who lived in this suite besides the now-dead GrandStrahteegos ?Never mind, just see that every one of them on whom you can lay hands is put under lock and key until I can get around to examining and questioning them. For now, let's see if this devilish device is working."

When he had connected the male plugs of a thick insulated cable to the matching female receptacles on the two metal boxes, he raised the lid of the smaller of them, then searched vainly for something, before no-ticing that on this particular model, something was built into one front corner. Slowly, various things in the metal chest started to glow and a humming sound- first very low-pitched, but gradually getting louder- emanated from it.

After he had fingered a switch to a different posi-tion from that in which he had found it, he located a large silvery k.n.o.b and began to turn it slowly and carefully, at the same time saying what sounded to Tomos vaguely like Merikan words, but in an incom-prehensible dialect of that tongue that he only had heard once before-up on the Lumbuh River in south-ern Karaleenos, years ago, when this same lord had used that larger but similar device to talk with the Witch King, who had spoken that same obscure dia-lect, too.

"Is anyone receiving my transmission?" asked Milo yet again, hoping that he was, after so long, speaking a twentieth-century brand of English. Move the dial another tiny incremental distance. "Is anyone receiv-ing my transmission?"

When he was just about to pack it in for that day, had decided to try later, a distant voice replied, "... is the ... dy Center Base Communications. Who is calling, please?"

"Where's Sternheimer?" demanded Milo coldly.

"I say again," said the voice, "who is calling? I cannot summon Dr. Sternheimer without telling him who is calling."

"All right, boyo, tell him it's Milo Moray. Tell him I've fallen heir to another of his infernal transceivers, and with any luck, I'll shortly have the vampire that goes with it, too."

Placing the flat of his palm over the face of the condenser microphone, he said in current Merikan, "Tomos, be a good lad and fetch our wine in here. This may take a while, and talking is often dry work."

But by the time he had the goblet in his hand, the same voice came back on, saying, "Mr. Moray? Mr.

Moray, are you still on the air?" "I'm here," growled Milo. "Where's Sternheimer?"

"Dr. Sternheimer is at ... another location, just now, but he will be back within the week. Dr. von Sandlandt, his deputy, is on hand here, however; would you speak with her?"

Milo shrugged. "Why not? Put the lady on."

Dr. Ingebord von Sandlandt proved, once Milo had shrewdly brought her to a sufficient pitch of anger, a virtual gold mine of information. Hundreds of years of dealing with men and woman had imparted to him the skills necessary to play her like a game fish and extract nugget after precious nugget before he was done. Af-ter refusing her offer of "hospitality" as flatly and profanely as he had refused Sternheimer's similar offer years before, he had promised imminent destruction of the transceiver and power unit, then had abruptly broken off the connection, turned off the radio and disconnected the power cable for fear that the Center might be still in possession of arcane equipment capa-ble of tracking back along the beam and locating his position, about which he had been both nebulous and misleading.

"Tomos," he said to his companion, "please send a rider into the city to summon Grahvos and Mahvros .

. . oh, and Sitheeros, too. And send for Portos, as well. I have learned some things from that woman down in the so-called Witch Kingdom that I think you all should hear."

"Gentlemen," said Milo to the a.s.sembledthoheeksee he had had summoned, "that which the folk of this land and others call the Witch Kingdom is no such thing. It is, rather, an unnatural survival of a group of men and women from the world of more than seven centuries ago. Men and women who, just prior to the death of that elder world, had learned how to transfer their minds from their own, aging bodies to younger, vibrant, healthy bodies and thus prolong their minds' lives through what is, in essence, human sacrifice. In a very real sense, they are an aggregation of vampires.

"Armed with devices and knowledge of that older, much more sophisticated civilization, they have for long centuries preyed upon the descendants of true survivors of the long-ago holocausts and plagues that so nearly wiped the races of mankind from off the face of this earth, but there is nothing of the occult or of true magic in their bags of tricks, only mechanical devices and knowledge of how to make use of those devices and use some of them to help in making more of them.

"It is their aspiration to own and strictly rule all of the continent of which their swamps and this land are parts, and they are aware that in order to fulfill this aspiration, they must somehow, in some manner, keep the land divided into tiny, weak, warring states. What you have done in your homeland and what I am doing frustrates their sinister plans. Therefore, something over two years ago, one of these creatures forced her ancient, evil mind into the body of a very attractive young Ehleen and, using the name of Ilios, formed an attachment with your GrandStrahteegos Thoheeks Pahvlos, who then, as you know, was one of the most powerful men in all of your ConsolidatedThoheek-seeahnee, both in a civil and a military sense.

"Being fully aware that, was she to destroy the adhesion of thethoheekseeahnee and thus the state, she first must wreck the strong army, she set to work with her centuries of wiles upon an aged man in the beginning of his dotage. And you all know far better than could I just what horrors she used him to accom-plish. It was a truly devilish scheme, and had he not died when he did, she might well have gained a com-plete success. Also, she might just have managed to latch on to some other relatively powerful man and tried to continue her dangerous mischief, had she not chanced to be so injured as to feel that she must abruptly leave Mehseepolis and hurriedly seek out things like herself, lest the body she inhabited die and she with it." That had not been exactly how Dr. Inge von Sandlandt had said it to Milo, of course. "That d.a.m.ned motherf.u.c.ker of a Greek b.a.s.t.a.r.d, that one called Por-tos, he's a monster, an animal-big as a frigging house, strong as an ox and hairy as a G.o.ddam ape! Mr. Moray, that boy was fourteen when I took over, and though the body was nearly seventeen when all this happened, I doubt that it weighed more than fifty-five kilos. There was absolutely no reason for that pig to beat that little body so badly that he knocked loose teeth, cracked the left ramus, broke three ribs and penetrated a lung, and lashed it so ferociously with a f.u.c.king sword-belt that it could hardly walk.

"Had it not been for my radio, that body would have been dead with me still trapped within it long before I could have reached our most northerly per-manent outpost. Even as it was, with one of the cop-ters waiting for me at a rendezvous point at the limit of its round-trip range, it was a very near thing.

Bare seconds after I had transferred into a new body, that of that boy was dead of peritonitis resulting from a ruptured r.e.c.t.u.m.

"Mr. Moray, I was . . . am ... a medical doctor, but in my more than seven centuries of life and train-ing and practice, I never before had seen a natural endowment like that b.a.s.t.a.r.d has. p.e.n.i.ses that size should, in the natural course of things, be hung on horses' bellies, not the crotches of humans."

"Portos b.u.g.g.e.red your then-body, eh?" said Milo, laughter clear in his voice.

"Gefuhlloser idiot!" the woman had raged at him. "You think it amusing, do you,du Zotig ?"

"Well," Milo had chuckled then, "within that body, you had been playing the part of apooeesos, a Schwuler, for two years, by that time, had you not?" He had chuckled again and, with laughter clear in his voice, had added, "You knew that Portos was an Ehleen, you vampire b.i.t.c.h, yet you chose to turn your back on him. Now you know precisely why it is bad policy to turn your back on an Ehleen.

"You did at least remember to relax and enjoy it, I hope?"

And then, her scream of pure rage had nearly deaf-ened him.

Chapter X.

Rikos Laskos was ushered into the mam room of the suite by one of Milo's personal guardsmen. When the door had closed firmly behind him, he said aloud,"Guten Tag, Milo Moray. I parted from you last in Nebraska ... or was it Kansas?Ach, das ist schon lang her !Were my notebooks of any value to you and our people, then?"

Milo arose, then, to just stand for a long moment, wide-eyed. "Is it really you, then, Dr. Clarence Bookerman?" he asked in English of seven centuries before. "Where have you been all these hundreds of years?"

Laskos walked across to the sideboard and, after sniffing of the contents of several decanters, chose and poured for himself a small goblet of a powerful brandy. Warming the goblet between his two palms and sniff-ing appreciatively at the bouquet of the liquor thus freed, he answered, "Why, where our kind are for too much of the time: on the move, of course, putting as much distance as possible between the spot wherein we dwelt happily for a few, short years and the spot wherein we next will try to carve ourselves out a new, hopefully happy, niche for a few more years . . . until people begin to take too much notice of the bald fact that we do not age as do normal folk." "Where did you go when you left us there in central Kansas?" Milo demanded. "Most of the people who had been yours finally decided that you had felt death approaching and either had ridden off to die alone or to die near to the grave of your wife."

"It surprises me that you remember so much and so clearly from so very long ago, my friend," said Laskos-Bookerman, taking a seat, still cradling his brandy goblet. "My own recall is no longer so good; too many, many newer memories superimposed over the older ones must tend to cloud them, block them, make them of difficulty to drag up from the depths into which they have been pushed and immured.

"I cannot remember just where I went after I left you and those would-be nomads. I do remember that at some time during that period I dwelt for a long time alone in a well-preserved, well-stocked and still emi-nently livable complex I found carved into a moun-tain, out there in the Rockies. So long did I there remain that all of my beasts either died of old age or wandered off, and when to move on and find the humans for whose living companionship I hungered I did, it had to be on foot until at last I was able to acquire a scrubby little mount.

"Across the continent, slowly I wandered for years, seeing the natural increase of the survivors of near extirpation, Milo, and also observing the genesis of new societies, civilizations, cultures arising, phoenix-like, out of the dust and ashes of the old. Then, at last, I arrived upon the sh.o.r.e of the Atlantic Ocean. Through great good fortune, the rare kindness of fickle fate, I found a beautiful and incredibly well-preserved miniature version of a sleek ocean-racing boat. She was so beautifully designed and fitted that but a single man, if knowledgeable and active and strong, could easily sail her. In addition to her sails, she was equipped with an auxiliary diesel engine, one of sufficient power to give her decent headway in almost any circ.u.mstance.

"I now disrecall what her previous owner had called her, but I rechristened herWoge Stute after I had completely refurbished her for a long voyage. I cher-ished a desire to once more, after so very many long years, see again myHeimat, the land of my long-ago birth, and I had faith that this fine, friendly vessel would safely bear me to my longed-for destination.

"Of course, in those times, it took me actual years to hunt out or make all that was needful, but then the one thing for which our rare kind never lacks is time.Nicht wahr ? Let it suffice to say that at last I felt everything to be in readiness and I put my treasure of a boat back into the water. But of course, contemplat-ing a voyage of such length, the mere fact that she floated and seemed sound could not be enough, so I undertook several trial voyages of lesser and greater distances, each of them teaching and reteaching me things which I had forgotten over the years and centu-ries I had been almost landbound.

"Finally, on a late-April day, I left the coast of what had once been called the State of Maine behind me and pointed my darling's prow northeast, toward the continent of Europe. At last I was bound for heiligen Deutschland, mein Heimatland ."

"My G.o.d, Clarence," exclaimed Milo, "weren't you at least daunted to consider such a risk? You can drown, you know. My original coruler of Kehnooryos Ehlahs, Demetrios, died in just that way some years back; was pushed off a bridge in the middle of a battle, in full armor, and with a death-wounded war-horse on top of him, to boot. We found his helm on the bed of the river and nearby a cracked skull that might or might not've been his, too. But no man has ever seen or heard of him, since."

"Naturally, I was afraid, Milo," replied the guest, "just as I was always afraid when the air raids took place during the Second World War, in Berlin. There is at least that much of true, normal humanity in my makeup. But just as beasts and birds and eels and salmon must return to their natal grounds or waters,regardless of obstacles or distances or swarming preda-tors, I was consumed with an irresistible urge to once more see as many of the sights of my ancient youth as still remained in the hills and deep, silent valleys and dark forests that nurtured me of old. Cannot you understand that, my old friend, Milo?"

The High Lord of the Confederation of Eastern Peoples sighed. "Of course I do, Clarence. I know the feeling, believe me. Although I've never been able to remember any of my life prior to about 1937 A.D., still do I often desire to return to places where once I was happy for some years. For instance, although I have been only something like a century removed from the plains and prairies, I often must suppress an itching urge to just saddle a horse and ride west until I once more am where I lived for so very long. So, yes, I do understand, fully, just what drove you to take such h.e.l.lish risks on the open sea, alone."

"It was a terrible voyage, Milo," said Bookerman-Laskos. "I had, I discovered, chosen a bad time of year for that northerly route, for it was sp.a.w.ning-time for icebergs. After not a few very near-disasters, I reset my course farther south, only to suffer through storm after storm, raising waves that often overtopped my masthead and cost me much of my precious diesel fuel to maintain headway and to keep the bilge pumps going that I not be swamped.

"Those storms it was drove me so far south that my first landfall was not Ireland or England as I had expected but, rather, France, in the Bay of Biscay I was standing in to some tiny, nameless Gascon port, when three craft about the size of whaleboats came rowing out toward me, fast as the crews could row.

"Some sixth or seventh sense gave me warning, and I fixed my set of big binoculars upon those boats while still they were fairly far distant. What I saw through the gla.s.ses was not at all rea.s.suring to a sea-weary mariner. All of the men were armed to the teeth, though mostly with a vast a.s.sortment of edge-weapons. Nor were their physical appearances an improvement- all looking to be hairy, dirty and most brutish, though strong. So I threw over the rudder and retrimmed the sails, determined to put as many nautical miles as was possible between me and such an aggregation, and I was doing just that when, abruptly, the wind died to almost nothing and, with a hoa.r.s.e, bellowing chorus of triumph, the rowers came onward, increasing their already-fast beat.

"That was when I repaired briefly belowdeck and returned with my Mannlicher rifle and its carefully h.o.a.rded store of cartridges, aMaschinenpistole for closer-range work, and two pistols, a saber and a hefty dirk for hand-to-hand, if it came to that.

"I was lucky enough to drop all three steersmen with five shots of the rifle. The next five dropped two replacement steersmen and two oarsmen, these last from out the lead boat, but the boat with still a steersman came on nonetheless, despite my deadly marksmanship, until it was less than twenty-five me-ters distant. At that, I laid aside the Mannlicher, took up theAutomatisch and slew them all-rowers, steers-man and pa.s.sengers, alike. At the sound of the weapon, the sight of what I had done to the men in the lead boat, the other two swung about as one and rowed back toward their distant port at some speed.

"I kept watch lest they return until, just a little before sunset, I was blessed with a fresh breeze and was able to sail far upon it before heaving out the anchors and going below for badly needed sleep.

"While searching for other things, mostly things of a nautical nature in Maine, I had lucked across a store of smokeless powders, primers and even some boxes of unprimed bra.s.s cases and factory-cast bullets in the exact caliber of my Mannlicher-8 x 57mm. In late morn-ing of the next day, once more becalmed off the south-ern coast of Brittany, I was engaged in reloading the rifle cartridges that I had had to fire at the Gascons when I once more heard the distinctive creak and thump of oarlocks approaching. "I emerged, well armed you must believe, Milo, onto the deck to see with surprise that a double-masted schooner lay rocking in the swell some two hundred meters out from my vessel, and between us, a small boat was being rowed toward me-six oarsmen and a steersman, plus two other men. The gla.s.ses showed me that none of the men, neither in the boat nor on the deck of the schooner, looked so scruffy as had the lot off the coast of Gascony. Their clothing looked to be at least clean, and their dress was close enough alike that it might be a uniform of some type, I thought.

"Two of the men in the boat wore sidearms-heavy cutla.s.ses and short daggers or dirks-but none of the others bore anything of a more threatening nature than belt knives of fifteen centimeters or so in the blades. Looking at the schooner, I could see at least a dozen of what looked amazingly like swivel-guns mounted along her rails, men standing beside them with coils of smoking slowmatch in their hands. Her flag was unclear, despite my binoculars, being mostly of a faded red and rusty black, insofar as I could determine.

"Some thirty meters off my port bow, the small boat heaved to and one of the men stood up in the stern and began to bespeak me through a leather trumpet! I was expecting the Breton dialect of French, and it took me a moment to realize that the language he was using was a very atrocious and thoroughly ungrammatical form ofRussian. Recognizing his thick accent after a few seconds, I took up my own trumpet and asked him how long he was out from Hamburg. He was obviously startled to hear the good, Frisian dialect, but he be-came much friendlier, and, after exchanging a few more words, I agreed to allow him and one more to come aboard, but the boat to stand well out from my vessel when once those two had been put aboard, and they all complied with my orders.

"Milo, my friend, fortune a.s.suredly was sailing with me on that day. The schooner,Erika, was an armed merchantman out of the Independent Aristocratic Re-public of Hamburg. Hamburg was, I was soon to learn, one of the very few large German cities not seriously damaged in the brief exchange of missiles or the drive of Russian forces across Western Europe which followed.

"After breaking a few fangs on Switzerland, the forces of the Bear had bypa.s.sed it to sweep on into and through the vaunted but not at all effective French forces, then up through the Low Countries, whose tiny armies did not even try to resist. The German Federal Republic, however, though beset on every hand, still was not only holding its own but had, in certain sec-tors, begun to actually push the Russians and their satellite armies back, when the Great Dyings began to more than decimate both aggressors and defenders, impartially. The sole missile that came down in Ham-burg was launched, surely from beneath the North Sea, very late in the game and in any case failed to explode,Gott sei dank.

"The great Russian-led invasion had ebbed as it had flowed, but if any of them returned to Russia, it must have been a miracle, so fast did they drop along the way to die. For some reason, a goodly number of Russians remained in the coastal departments of France, eventually taking Frenchwomen as spouses or concu-bines, and, therefore, France had become, by the time of my arrival in its coastal waters, a bilingual land, for all that it was as splintered and politically fragmented as any other European nation of that period, perhaps a little more than most, though, really, since the French have never had a stable, central government for any long period since they murdered their king and butch-ered their n.o.bility at the close of the eighteenth century.

"By the time of my arrival, Milo, a few generations of breeding had brought the population of Western Europe back up to a fraction of its earlier size, but at least such progress had encouraged the people, had made them to think that perhaps mankind was not irrevocably doomed as a species. As the largest re-maining port city in all of northwestern Europe, Ham-burg was becoming something of a power, and its ships sailed out in every direction, just as its land merchants traveled the roads and byways of the conti-nent with their heavily armed and pugnacious escorts. "Of course, in times of such uncertainty, ships needs must sail well armed and, often, in convoy, shipping along larger crews than would have been necessary simply for working the vessel.Erika was such a ship, standing up from one of the Basque kingdoms with a mixed cargo and bound for home, Hamburg.

"My greatest good fortune was to be able to sail to Hamburg underErika 'sstrong protection through the waters of the Dutch and English pirates, as well as up the Elbe, where had I not been in company with her I would likely have been blown out of the water by the line of powerful cannon-and catapult-armed forts or boarded in force by the river patrols and either killed or enslaved.

"After so many long years of either total solitude or companionship of only a few, pitiful survivors of all of mankind's disasters, I found that new Hamburg to be most stimulating in all conceivable ways, Milo. It was, of course, as always, a booming, bustling center of commerce, but now much, much more than just that.

"Some twentythousands of men and women and children were resident within the earth-and-wooden perimeter walls that were fast being replaced with dressed stone. Protected by well-armed guard ships, the fishers sailed out and came back up the Elbe, bearing heavy catches of stockfish to be smoked or salted or pickled; others of them brought in barrel on precious barrel of whale oil. Other ships brought in lumber for the flourishing shipbuilders, or sailed in laden with broken pieces of old statuary, bells and other bronze or bra.s.s sc.r.a.p, copper, tin and zinc for the cannon foundry, sulphur and niter and charcoal for the powder mills. All of the rest of the world might be sinking into a slough of despair and barbarism, but Hamburg was keeping lit the lamp of true culture and civilization.

"The master ofErika, Kapitan Klaus Hauer, and his son and first mate-the fine young man who had rowed over to my vessel-Fritz Hauer, escorted me to the new seat of government and introduced me to him who just then was serving asPrasident of theAristo-kratisch Sammlung ofHamburgerstadt, Herr Hubert Klapp-Panzertot, whose surname was derived of his grandfather, who had been a great hero of the stand against the Eastern European hordes that had invaded Germany.

"When once Hubert learned just how much I in my mind held of the old, near-forgotten technologies of the world of almost, by then, three full generations before, he saw me declared an aristocrat and we two worked together for years until his death, at which time I moved on, traveling with merchants as far as Westphalia. I lived there for some years, a client of the Graf, to whose retainers I taught refinements of swordplay and oriental martial arts. After some years there, I moved on; of course, you know how and why it must be so, Milo.

"For longer or shorter times, I lived all over the German lands, in France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Rumania, the Baltic States, the Russian princedoms, all of Scandinavia, the King-dom of Ukrainia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Albania, Macedonia and, finally the Peloponnese.

"By then, nearly two hundred years after the Great Dyings, the Greeks were once more getting a bit crowded on their poor and rocky holdings; despite their idio-syncratic perversions, no one ever has been able to fault Greeks at the act of breeding. Unable to feed themselves by way of farming or fishing, many of the men of Greece were become pirates of shipping and consummate raiders of other lands, and my own fleet was one of the largest, strongest and most feared, incorporating as it did techniques and relics of times past which gave it a distinctive edge over its opponents.

"However, as the fleets got larger and more numer-ous, not just Greek but Italian, Sicilian, Turkish, Syr-ian, Spanish, southern French and others too numerous to recount, we too often found ourselves fighting each other, bleeding and dying and losing ships to no real account or gain. The field wasbecoming over-crowded, you see, friend Milo. That was when the great idea occurred to me.

"Following actual years of careful plannings and negotiations, I was able to organize a relatively peace-ful meeting of all the leaders of all the larger fleets of Mediterranean pirates and sh.o.r.e-raiders. So successful in many ways were our parleys that some began to take to heart my contention that were they to not all die by way of b.l.o.o.d.y violence and find as their only grave the belly of some sea-beast, then they had best find arable land somewhere, that they could hold and which would easily nurture them and their get.

"All knew that such was simply not available in most of the seacoast Mediterranean lands, and what little still was would be so hotly defended by present inhabitants as to demand a cost far greater than any possible gain, could it be taken at all. So I told them of the vast, almost-empty s.p.a.ces of the spa.r.s.ely inhab-ited North America that I recalled from before I had sailed back to Europe. I spoke of the fertility of the earth there, of the rich ruins to be stripped, of the thick forests, the abundance of clear water, the sad, huddled, all but helpless knots of survivors, the plent.i.tudes of wild and feral beasts to be eaten and skinned or captured and retamed to the uses of man.

"Two decades of my sermons they heard, and fol-lowing two deadly calamities that struck almost as one-a very powerful man ascended to the sultancy of the Turks and began to not only put down pirates with his numerous and intrepid fleet, but actually to mount b.l.o.o.d.y seaborne raids on the bases of the raiders, then a succession of terrible earthquakes and resultant tsu-namis devastated the Peloponnese, Crete and many other islands-a large percentage of the sea-robbers of Greece, southern Italy, Syria, Sicily and even far-off Spain made indication that they would favorably con-sider setting sail across the ocean to a new land where the Turks could not so easily hunt them out."

Milo just stared."You ?It is you who was responsible for the conquest of most of the East Coast by the ancestors of the Ehleenohee, Clarence?"

Bookerman-Laskos shrugged, self-deprecatingly. "It wasn't all that easy, Milo. Ships that were fine for sailing or rowing on the tideless Mediterranean would never have made it across the Atlantic, and I knew this fact even if others did not know it or think of it. I had all of the bases moved from Crete and Cyprus, Sicily and Malta, Sardinia and Corsica and the Balearics to a single point, a huge, sprawling base, on the coast of Portugal, a bit south of the vast ruins of Lisbon. We were compelled to conquer the people of that land in a succession of wars. Only then could we go about utiliz-ing their labor, their wood and their shipyards to build for us an oceangoing fleet.

"I like to think that we were good rulers and protec-tors of the people, Milo. We drove off countless raids by sea-rovers, defeated utterly two in-force raiding fleets of Moors and one of Basques. In answer to repeated provocations, we sailed up to Bilbao, scut-tled or burnt all of their ships and even boats, went ash.o.r.e and defeated their forces, then looted and fired the town that squatted among the ancient ruins. No, I had forgotten, we did not destroy all of their ships; those that looked usable to our purposes, we sailed or towed back to our base to add to our burgeoning flotilla, and, having learned from this episode, we began to do the same to other Atlantic-coast Spanish, French, English, Irish and other ports.

We carefully scouted out objectives, struck with overpowering forces, fought hard, but then most often sailed away with only usable ships and easily come-by bits of loot, ships' stores and perhaps a few new women.