Cossacks anyhow.
But first—
The guns boomed louder. Given the news she bore, the Soviet artillery would take aim at Kratoy Gully. It would blast the Germans out of there before they could dig in. That would be that, while the war went on.
Work, you guns. Bring down the wrath of Dazhbog and Perun, of St. Yuri the dragonslayer and St. Alexander Nev-sky. Here we stand. The thing that bestrides all Europe shall come no farther than us. If we fight in the name of a monster, that makes no difference. And we don’t really. Once this Stalingrad was Tsaritsyn. It can become something else someday in the future. But good for now to think that we hold fast in the City of Steel.
We will endure, and prevail, and abide the day of our freedom.
XVIII. Judgment Day
1
At first it was as if half a century had never been. Snow-peaks gleamed against unutterable blue; in this clarity they seemed almost near enough to touch, though any of them might be fifty miles remote. A road that was little more than a track rose, fell, writhed through a darkness of deodars and gnarly wild fruit trees where langurs scampered. Then the forest opened onto pasture strewn with boulders, intensely green after the rains. Sheep and cattle grazed among stone threshing-floors. Tiny terraces carved from the valley walls bore maize, amaranth, buckwheat, barley, potatoes. A westering sun breathed a ghost of purple across the heights that looked into it, while across from them shadows lengthened, intricate over the wrinkles of the land. The air smelled of grass and glaciers.
As his mule brought him nearer the village, Wanderer began to see how much it had in fact changed. It had grown. Most of the new houses were not earth-roofed stone but timber, two or three stories high, with carved and painted galleries; it was curious to find something so tike Swiss chalets here on the knees of the Himalayas. Wires ran from a former dwelling which must house a generator, and the fuel tanks outside it also supplied a battered truck. A satellite receiver dish quite likely served more than a single communal television set. The folk were still Bhutias, essentially Tibetan stock, and men still generally wore the traditional long woolen coat, women the sleeved cloak; but he spied occasional sneakers or blue jeans, and he wondered how many people held by the mingled Buddhism, Hinduism, and animism that had been the faith of their fathers.
Herders and workers in the fields swarmed to meet him, soon joined by those who had been at home. Excitement capered and shouted. Any visit from outside was an event, and this newcomer was extraordinary. His two attendants were simply Gurkhas, familiar enough, guides to manage the animals and serve his needs, but he himself rode altogether strange, clad like a white man but broad of face and bronze of skin, his nose jutting yet his hair and eyes and cheekbones akin to theirs.
One woman, shriveled and toothless with age, made an abrupt sign against evil and scuttled from the crowd into a house. One man, equally old, drew a sharp breath before he bowed very low. They remembered his earlier call on them, Wanderer knew—when they were children and he just the same as today.
His senior Gurkha spoke with another woman, large and strong, who must be something like the mayor. She in turn addressed the villagers. A sort of calm descended. They eddied around the party, silent or talking in undertones, while it made its way through the lanes to a house at the northern edge of the settlement.
This seemed much as it had been. It remained the biggest, of stone and wood, an alien grace to its lines. Glass shone in the windows. Graveled paths twisted about the shrubs, dwarf trees, bamboo, and stones of a small, exquisite garden at the rear. The servants who emerged were of a new generation, but the man and woman who trod onto the verandah and waited were not.
Wanderer dismounted. Slowly, under awed stares and a hush, he walked to the steps and up. He bowed before the two, and they returned the gesture with equal gravity.
“Welcome,” said the man, and “Oh, boundlessly welcome!” the woman. He was Chinese, powerfully built, rather flat of countenance and without guile in it. She was Japanese, well-formed in a petite fashion, cat-alert beneath the schooled serenity. Both wore robes, simple though of the best material.
They had used Nepati, of which Wanderer had but a few words. “Thank you,” he replied in Mandarin Chinese. “I have returned as I promised.” He smiled. “This time I took the trouble to learn a language you understand.”
“Fifty years,” the woman breathed, using that tongue. “We could not be sure, we could only wait and wonder,”
“At last, at last,” the man said as shakily. He raised his voice in the tribal dialect. “I told them we will hold a feast of rejoicing tomorrow,” he explained. “Our servants will see to your men. Please come inside where we can be alone and honor you rightfully, sir—uh—”
“John Wanderer,” the American supplied.
“Why, that is what you called yourself before,” the woman said.
Wanderer shrugged. “What difference, after so long and in a foreign country? I like the name, take it again and again, and otherwise usually a version of it. Who are you being?”
“What does that matter any more?” It came as a bass cry from the man’s throat. “We are what we are, together for always.”
The room where they conferred was gracious, the furniture Chinese, a variety of objects on shelves. The pair had adventured widely before they raised up this home. That was in 1810, as nearly as Wanderer could figure from the calendar they employed. Subsequently they had absented themselves from time to time for years on end, gone to oversee the businesses that kept them prosperous, brought souvenirs back. Those included books; Tu Shan found his diversion mainly in handicrafts, but Asagao was quite a reader.
In the presence of their fellow immortal, they chose to recall those ancient names. It was as if they snatched for a handhold, now when once more their world was falling to pieces.
Nevertheless joy overrode uneasiness. “We hoped so, hoped you really were what you seemed to be,” Asagao said. “How we hoped. More than an end to loneliness. Others like us, why, that gives meaning to these lives of ours. Does it not?”
“I can’t say,” Wanderer replied. “Besides you, my friend and I know of only one who is certainly alive, and he refuses to associate himself with us. We may be mere freaks.” From the end table next his chair he lifted a cup and took a sip of the pungent local chong, followed by a mouthful of tea. They comforted.
“Surely we are on earth for a reason, however mysterious,” Asagao insisted. “At least, Tu Shan and I have tried to serve some purpose beyond surviving.”
“How did you find us, fifty years ago?” the man asked in his pragmatic way.
No real conversation had been possible then, when everything passed through an interpreter who had better not realize what meaning lay behind the words he rendered. Wanderer could just hint. Presently he thought these two had caught his intent and were doing likewise. They made it clear that they had no wish to depart, nor did they invite him to prolong his stay. Yet they were abundantly courteous, and when he risked his guide’s astonishment and suggested that he return in fifty years, their answer throbbed with eagerness. Today they all knew, past any doubt, what they were.
“I was always restless, never fond of cities, for I began as a wild plainsman,” Wanderer related. “After the first World War I set off around the world. My friend Hanno—he uses different identities, but between us he is Hanno—he had grown rich in America and gave me ample money, hoping I might come on the track of somebody like us. Nepal was not easy to reach or enter in those days, but I guessed that on that account it could harbor such persons. In Katmandu I caught rumors of a couple in the uplands who lived a kind of baronial existence among tribespeople whose benefactors and teachers they were. In spite of treating themselves well, they were considered holy. The story went that when they grew old they left on pilgrimage, and their son and his wife reappeared hi their place. Imagine how such a tale drew me.”
Asagao laughed. “Things were never so simple, of course,” she said. “Our people aren’t fools. They keep up the fiction about us because that is plainly what we want, but they know quite well that the same two come back to
