panicked. She was ready to do anything, to get down on her knees. She saw the huge, soft-faced interrogator standing over her again. And the younger, handsome officer, telling her that they merely wanted her to befriend someone for them, saying it in an easy tone that threatened the end of the world.
The big man kicked a chair back from under the table. 'Have a seat,' he told Valya. 'What are you drinking?'
Valya half-tripped down into the chair. Her backside hit with force, and her backbone shook with a presentiment of age. It took her a moment to relax into the pain.
'Anything,' she said. 'It does not matter. Something strong.'
Suddenly the big man leaned in close to Valya, inspecting her. She cringed back into the bad light.
The big man whistled. 'Jeez. Your boyfriend give you that shiner, honey-pie?'
Valya could feel her face swelling with the blood of embarrassment. 'An accident,' she said. 'I have fallen down the stairs.'
The big man smiled slightly and sat back. 'Yeah, I guess fell down them stairs a couple times myself.'
He reached around behind Valya and jerked her chair next to his. He settled a big hand on her far shoulder, then railed it down her side before halting it on the swell of her bottom.
He nodded, figuring. 'You're a skinny little gal,' he aid, 'but I guess you'll do.' He leaned in close so that his friends could not hear. His lips brushed Valya's hair. He smelled like a puddle of stale beer.
'One hundred American dollars,' he said, 'and not a penny more.'
24
Noburu dreamed of a yellow horse by a salt lake. He approached the horse, but the animal paid him no attention. Browsing over tufts of stunted grass, the animal appeared weary beyond description, and its back was so badly bowed that a child's weight might have broken it. Noburu himself wore a fine English suit, but he had come away without his cuff links. He was searching for his cuff links on the sandy waste, and he feared that the horse might devour them by mistake. He called out to the animal. He knew its name. And the horse raised its head, swiveling dully in Noburu's direction. The yellow horse was blind. Disease had whitened its eyes. It soon turned its nose back to the dying grass.
Brown men came. Out of nowhere. Coming from all sides. They rushed slim-legged from the sea, wailing in a foreign language. Noburu assumed they had come to slaughter the horse. He ran toward the uninterested animal, determined to shield it in his arms. But the brown men were not immediately concerned with the horse. Noburu had been mistaken. They were coming for him.
Countless hands slithered over him, catching his limbs in small firm grips. They had made a cross of light from antique headlamps, and they intended to crucify him. He struggled, for he sensed that hanging from that cross of light would be the most painful of tortures. But the mob had him in its power. Their hands grew in strength, clamping him. He smelled the foreign spice of their breath. He tried to reason with them, explaining that he could not possibly be crucified without his cuff links. It was impossible to think that he might end like that, badly dressed in public.
Then the dragon came out of the sky. The world burned. He could see the profile of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, dark against the flames. He could not quite see the dragon. It was dark and shapeless. But he knew it was there. He could feel the wash of wind slapped earthward by its wings. The brown men were gone. In their place, the dead approached him, in moldering uniforms. Crippled by plague, with white skulls showing beneath old flesh, they limped hungrily toward him. And he knew them. He had known them for a long, long time. They were old acquaintances from his personal darkness. But they had never come so close before. The most terrible one of them all lunged forward, reaching for Noburu with fingers of light.
'They're coming back,' Akiro said.
Noburu set his nose to the wind. The scent of death. He had tried to nap, to rest a little. But it would have been far better to remain awake. His dreams were on a collision course with reality. Hungover with visions, he had staggered back to his vantage point atop the headquarters roof.
Yes. You could hear them now. Climbing back up the hill in the retreating light. The brown men. Singing.
'I cannot understand it,' Akiro said. 'I cannot understand it.' He was not speaking to Noburu now, but to himself, in the vacant tone of a man confronted with the collapse of all his certainties — and with the simultaneous prospect of death.
'Has the ammunition been cross-leveled?' Noburu asked. He touched the silly skullcap bandage on his head. It had loosened during his nap. His mind was still unsure of what was real. The dream warrior danced on a ragged carpet of facts. Noburu felt drugged after his healthless sleep, and the unearthly singing and chanting out in the streets seemed to weave the world of dreams into the pattern of common existence.
Yes. So much had been unforeseen. The mob climbed steadily up through the streets, preceded by its medieval wail. The ammunition might suffice to beat off the first rush, if they were lucky.
'Still no direct communications with the rear, or with Tokyo?' Noburu asked.
Akiro hung his head. 'The situation seemed to be improving. Then, an hour ago, the interference began again.'
'The same parameters as last night?'
'No. Different. The communications officer says that last night's attack was barrage jamming. He calls the present effort leech-and-spike.'
What could it mean? In the course of his military career, Noburu had never been so utterly cut off from information. He had come to take ease of communication for granted. Now, at too old an age, he had been transported back through the centuries, to fight his last battle in darkness.
Well, he thought, it did not make so great a difference now. Even had the communications leapt suddenly back to life, it would have been too late. The friendly forces were too far away. He had scoured the map, analyzing the undeveloped road network from the standpoint of both a relief column and an interdiction effort. And the advantage was all on the side of his enemies. In an hour, perhaps sooner, the foreign, foreign faces would come over the walls for the last time, blowing in the doors, clambering through the windows. It was finished.
He wanted to say something to cheer up Akiro, to buoy him to the last. But the words would not come. Even his language had failed him in the end.
'Come on,' Noburu said. 'We'll try a last broadcast. For form's sake.'
They went down through the arteries of the headquarters building, stepping between the lines of wounded men lying in the hallways. Here and there, a conscious soldier tried to rise at the passage of his commanding officer. But each attempt failed. Two officers and an enlisted helper shuffled boxes of documents into the room where the paper shredder was kept. You could smell the heat of the machine as you passed by, and Noburu caught a glimpse of disembodied hands dealing papers into the device's gullet. The days of careful document control and neatly logged numbers were over.
They negotiated a stretch of hallway cluttered with bureaucratic tools but no men, and Noburu halted Akiro by grasping his arm.
'Someone,' Noburu said, 'has been designated to… look after the wounded? Just in case?'
'Sir,' Akiro said sadly. 'The necessary ammunition has been set aside. Two NCOs have received the task.'
'Reliable men?' Noburu asked.
Akiro hesitated for a moment. In the space of little more than a day, his armor of selfassurance had been reduced to a coat of rags.
