Caliphate

in girls' clothing, minus the hijab.

Petra had known both boys. Their names were—had been— Martin Muller and Ernst Ackermann. She, like the other women and girls of the town, had cried when the masters took the boys and hanged them before the crowd last Sunday after church. The dry-eyed Catholic priest had stood by and blessed the masters' work. The boys would sway there, if history was a guide, until the following Sunday, just before church. (For while the masters had firm rules for the timing of the burial of their own dead, Nazrani bodies could be left unburied for educational reasons.)

Petra remembered the pleading as the executioner had forced the boys onto the stools under the gallows' crosspiece, the tears on the boys' faces as they were noosed and then the flailing legs, the eyes bugging and the tongues swelling out past blackening lips. That's why she couldn't look; she remembered it too well.

She didn't know why the boys had been executed. They'd always seemed very nice to her, especially nice in comparison to most of the other boys of the town, her Hans, only, excepted. After the hanging, all the girls had agreed that, among a pretty rowdy lot, those two had been much kinder and more decent to them than were any of the other boys of the town. Indeed, they'd been so sweet that they might almost have been girls themselves.

There was too much in the world that Petra really didn't understand. Shaking her head, she followed her brother to the small schoolhouse where she would spend half her day before hurrying home to help mother with the daily chores.

At the schoolhouse, Petra and Hans split up, he going in by the front door, she walking around back to the girls' entrance. Inside, she doffed her coat and her confining burka, hung them on her own peg, and walked into the classroom. A set of solid and pretty much soundproof walls separated the girls, all in one room, from the boy's seven classes. That was not so bad, really. Though the classroom was overcrowded, a little, education for girls wasn't mandatory and so there were only about a fifth as many girls in the school as boys.

Sister Margarete, the sole teacher for the girls of the town, was old enough to have learned to read as a girl herself. What would happen to the girls, once she died, the nun didn't know. The masters had granted the church a local exemption to the strictures against educating Christian females, but it was at best a partial and limited exemption. Margarete didn't know if it stretched enough to provide a replacement for herself once she'd gone to her final reward.

Tapping a wooden pointer on the podium, Sister Margarete directed the girls to sit, then began with a review of the previous day's lesson:

'We must pay the jizya . . . we must submit to the Sharia . . . Slavery is a part of jihad and jihad a part of Islam . . . we must cover ourselves in accordance with the Sharia . . . We must submit to our fathers and husbands or any other masters the Almighty may decree for us . . . No one not of the True Faith may ride a horse or an automobile, except at the order of one of the faithful . . . ' Petra knew what an automobile was but had only seen one occasionally in her life. She knew no one who had ever ridden one. . . . 'No Christian may live in a house better, larger or higher than any lived in by a Moslem . . . In a court of Sharia a Christian's testimony'— Petra wasn't too sure what 'testimony' meant—'counts for only half that of a Moslem, and a woman's for only half a man's. . . . No Christian or Jew'—Petra had no clue what a Jew was, either—'may possess a weapon . . . If the masters demand silver we must humbly offer gold . . . If a master wishes to fill our mouths with dirt we must open them to receive it . . . '

Along with the others, Petra recited. Like the other young girls, she didn't understand more than half of what she recited meant. Maybe it would come in time; she knew she was only six and that older people understood more than she did. Besides, her town was entirely Catholic, for the most part ruling itself. The Moslems all lived far away in the provincial capital of Kitznen or with the janissaries at the barracks of al Harv.

'Okay, children, school's over,' announced Sister Margerete as she stood near the door. 'You older girls, don't forget your burkas. Though you are not of the masters still you are subject to the same rules as the Moslem women.'

This only made sense. How, after all, was one of the masters to have any peace at home if the shameless Christian hussies had more privileges than their own wives and daughters? Even many of the younger girls, such as Petra, wore burkas for the same reasons Petra's mother had for forcing it on her daughter.

School got out early. School, for girls, always got out early. After all, most of what they needed to know in this year of someone else's Lord, 1527, they would learn better at their mothers' knees than in a school. Pulling on her gray covering, Petra filed out with the other girls. Since Hans would be several hours more, Petra walked home alone. She took back streets, dirty and muddy, rather than the cobblestoned main street. That way she didn't have to walk by the swaying and soon to be rotting bodies of Martin and Ernst.

As she walked, Petra chanced to look to her right, out into the open fields. A small herd of goats was out there, property of one of the masters in Kitznen, no doubt. The goats were eating the shoots from a field of barley.

Imperial Military Academy, West Point, New York, 26 March, 2106

'Knock it off on the Area!' the corporal bellowed. Immediately, some fifty-odd stamping cadets took themselves out of step and ceased their illicit, cadenced marching on the asphalt. Hours were punishment, to be walked alone and not marched as a group.

Fun while it lasted, for some constrained values of 'fun,' thought the gray-clad, overcoated, white-crossbelted, biochemistry major and Cadet First Classman John Hamilton. (Hamilton, despite being a first classman, was also Cadet Private, but that was a different story, an altogether sadder story, involving an illicit tryst in a little-used alcove down in the Sinks.)

Hamilton was a native of Maine. He'd had an ancestor, as a matter of fact, in the famous 20th Maine, during the Civil War—a Canadian who'd come south from New Brunswick to enlist and decided to stay on after the war. (Though one couldn't tell from his color or his eyes, he'd also had an ancestor from Toronto who'd enlisted in Company G of the equally famous 54th Massachusetts. That might have accounted for the wave in his hair.) For more than four centuries, in every generation that was called, Hamilton's generations had answered. He'd answered, too.

Coming to a halt a few yards from the stone wall of Bradley Barracks, Hamilton transferred his rifle—now, in an exercise in deliberate anachronism, a reproduction Model 1861 Springfield— from one shoulder to the other, turned about, and began walking in the other direction.

Already, Hamilton could hear the plaintive cries of 'Odinnn!' arising from the surrounding barracks to echo off the stone walls.

Much like the empire it supported and defended, the school had grown considerably from its rather humble beginnings. For example, while its first class, that of 1806, had graduated and commissioned fifteen cadets, the current class, that of 2106, was more than one hundred times greater. The Class of 2106 was expected to send forth some fifteen hundred and twenty-seven newly commissioned second lieutenants, or roughly one-fortieth of all new officers accessed by the Army in this year.

* * *

Or, thought the gray-clad Cadet John Hamilton, as he paced off his four hundred and seventy-seventh hour of punishment tours, One- thousand, five hundred and twenty-six if I get too many more demerits. I must be a shoo-in for the Martinez Award by now. If, that is, I don't get found— booted from the Academy—on demerits.

As West Point traditions went, the Martinez Award was, at about one hundred years since founding, relatively new. Like being the goat—the last ranking man or woman of the class—it was a distinction not avidly sought. Still, there had been a fair number of general officers who had, in their time, been recipients of the award, just as there had been through history a fair number of goats who rose to stars, George Edward Pickett (1849) and George Armstrong Custer (1861) being neither the least significant nor the most successful among them.

Hamilton, though, wasn't interested in stars. He wasn't really all that interested in the Army, certainly not as a career. If he ever had been, the Imperial Military Academy had knocked such ambition out of him. Instead, he saw it as a way to pay for school and to serve out his mandatory service obligation. Whether that service would see him on the coasts of the Empire's British allies, more or less comfortably, if chillily, watching the Moslem janissaries across the Channel, or hunting Luminosos or Bolivanos in the mountains or jungles of the South American Territories, or policing the Philippine Islands, or any of the dozens of other places across the globe where the Empire held or fought for sway, he couldn't predict.

Anything, Lord, anything but freezing my balls off hunting Canadians