Of Beginnings and Endings Page 11

  The erstwhile victim of Gabe's rage looked emotionlessly down at the unconscious junkie-mugger, started to step over him to get into the automobile, then noticed the spiteful damages inflicted to the body finish by Gabe and the other two earlier. His face indicated no slightest change of expression, but rather than getting into the automobile, he took off his suit coat, folded it carefully, and laid it across the back of the driver's seat. He softly closed the door, thus extinguishing the courtesy lights, then took a grip of Gabe's shirt collar and dragged him toward the dark bulk of the old bandstand, taking care to pick up the screwdriver from where it lay among the weeds.

  Gabe Lauderback lived for about five minutes after he was brought back to full consciousness, but to him that few minutes seemed at least a century long and could not have ended soon enough.

  Neither the police, who found the roach-crawling, fly-buzzing, rat-chewed mess that had once been a heroin addict named Gabriel Lauderback some days later, nor the city pathologist to whom the fast-decomposing, maggoty organic rubbish was finally delivered for examination had ever before seen the like. The body had, to all intents and purposes, been virtually disassembled, and seemingly by main strength by the perpetrator; no traces of any cutting had been found anywhere on the parts.

  At the outset, it had appeared that there should be comparatively little difficulty in apprehending the clearly deranged killer, for the flaking woodwork and the warped floorboards inside the trash-filled bandstand bore numerous bloody handprints, fingerprints, and even prints of shoe soles. But in point of unpleasant fact, the case never was solved and eventually was filed under the catchall of "a drug-related killing" by the baffled police. None of the hand or finger imprints showed the slightest trace of any identifying lines or whorls or palm markings, the shoe soles told them to be of a commonly sold if moderately expensive oxford, size nine, and the extraneous material those soles had left in the dried blood had all seemed to be from plants and soils found in the immediate vicinity of the bandstand.

  If he had been asked, which he was not, the city pathologist could have told them that it was utterly impossible for one lone man or woman—no matter how strong—to have done barehanded all the things that had been wrought upon the flesh and bone of the late Gabriel Lauderback. But as said pathologist worked in a department that was chronically understaffed and continuously overworked, both he and his superiors were more than content to let well enough alone, agree to the police conclusion, and close the files on the grisly case of the dismantled junky.

  On the morning following the dismemberment of Gabe Lauderback, the stocky, powerful man who had terminally rent the addict sat at a desk in a Victorian-mansion-become-expensive-office-building near the center of the city. The polished brass plate affixed beside the paneled walnut doors read: "Samuel Vanga, Investigations by Appointment Only, Security Advisor." Beyond those doors, in the comfortably appointed outer office, an attractive receptionist sat, filing her nails by the silent telephone; neither she nor the older but no less attractive secretary (just now typing personal letters in her own office) would or could have believed their soft-spoken, kind, considerate employer capable of coldly, methodically taking a man's body completely apart with his bare hands. And if you had told either woman that the creature they knew and revered as Mr. Vanga was, though an excellent copy, not a man at all, they would most likely have looked frantically for the men in white coats who must surely have been diligently searching for so patently certifiable a loose lunatic as you. And they would have been completely wrong in almost everything they knew or thought they knew about Sam Vanga.

  * * * *

  By order of their Great Khan, a sizable horde of yellow-brown, slant-eyed Kalmyks and their kindred allies were, in fits and starts, withdrawing from the ravaged provinces of northeastern France; behind them, they left a howling wilderness within which squatted a few of the stronger, better-defended castles and walled towns which never had fallen to them but otherwise, the only accurate word for the lands was desolation.

  In those so recently populous and productive lands, the now most frequently seen living creatures were sleek wolves, vultures, and carrion crows, though from out the wilder reaches, boars, bears, and even a few lynxes had come out to feed upon the carnage lying unburied upon the land in the wake of battles, fights, and massacres. Those croplands not burnt provided ready sustenance to hordes of smaller vermin, and these beasts, in their natural turn, fed vast numbers of raptors, reptiles, and the smaller felines. Unmolested by hunters, deer browsed in grain fields, while the bodies of the men who might have pursued them went to sate the hunger of the beasts who might have hunted them.

  The unfortunate provinces all had been thoroughly looted, raped, ravished, and ravaged by the eastern horsemen, and those few survivors as remained alive on the lands were become as chary as game, crouching and trembling in the deeper reaches of forests, in hill caves, or among the blackened ruins of homes, farms, towns, villages, and the weaker castles.

  The Kalmyks had proved pitiless. After the last armed resistance to them had been overcome, they had moved across the face of the land like a cloud of locusts, killing man, woman, child, babe, and beast impartially, as the mood struck them. The killings would have been bad enough, but they had not been all or even the worst of the savage barbarities inflicted upon the inhabitants. Wave after wave of the swarthy, fur-clad, stinking riders on their shaggy, big-headed ponies had crisscrossed the lands, each horde trailed by a heterogeneous collection of carts, waggons, wains, pack beasts, and coffles of chained, brutalized, and terrified slaves, folk of all stations and both sexes, for the primitive Kalmyks did not recognize the practice of ransoming war captives.

  Those merely subjected to multiple rape, otherwise abused or beaten, and then taken for slaves were actually the luckier ones, for the hordes of raiders were capable of and gleefully practiced much more and far worse against their helpless prey. Multiple rape followed by disembowelment or impalement was far more common than was enslavement for women and little girls, while in the cases of men and boys, an amusing session of savage tortures and deliberate maimings which invariably included castration was most often followed by slowly roasting them alive, although if the horde happened to be in a hurry, they might cut leg and arm tendons, pull out tongues, gouge or burn out eyes, and just leave the bloody, blind, croaking, flopping sufferer to bleed to death.

  Anything the Kalmyks could not bear away with them was if living killed, if inanimate burned or pulled down or broken or befouled. It was not a new practice; such had always been the way of the nomadic Kalmyks and their ilk. They did not either sow or reap; their sole use for lands was a place whereon to erect their yurts and graze their flocks and herds before packing up and moving on to fresh pasturage; it was the only way of life they and their forefathers ever had known. They loved their untrammeled existence and they had no understanding of or even bare tolerance for any settled peoples or their works.

  On the way back to their own steppes and plains, the hordes rode through lands no less rich and populous than had been those lands they just had left, but there could be no mere thought of rampaging through these as they had through the others, for all that there were precious few fighting men in evidence, for these were the lands of the mighty Khan of the West, the Holy Roman Emperor, by whose leave they had been afforded the most recent fun, loot, and slaves, and by order of their own Great Khan, these lands were sacrosanct and any rider who misbehaved against them or their peoples would long for death weeks before it finally was vouchsafed him and all his family.

  The Great Khan himself was seen at least once by each group of Kalmyks as they rode back east through Empire lands. With him rode a big, towering white warrior, his blood brother, the uncle of the present Khan of the West, Reichsherzog Wolfgang. Now and again, as the Great Khan's party rode up the slow-moving columns, this white Kalmyk would spy a slave, talk with him briefly, then seek out his owner and buy him of the Kalmyk. The nomads thought it odd that
the Great Khan's blood brother never bought females but only males, and potentially dangerous warrior males at that, but then who could ever know or understand the souls of white Christians? The brown Christians of the south and the white animists of the north were far easier to fathom.

  As he forked a decent rounsey beside his benefactor's well-bred ambler, Sieur Charles de Brienne, despite his verminous rags and the ceaseless pain of suppurating whip weals on his back and shoulders, could but silently offer up prayers of thanks that he was miraculously delivered up from out his odious bondage to the savage heathen. No matter that with the current devastation of his family's lands he would no doubt be very, very long in accumulating even a modest ransom and so would probably end for a good while as a virtual military slave to one of the hated and hateful noblemen of the Empire, still he would at least be swinging steel as he had been bred and reared to do, and moreover would be doing so in the service of an honest Christian.

  Also, there was this: So far as he knew, he now was the last extant scion of his family, so that would mean that younger son or no, all familial estates and privileges would be his when once he won back to claim them. He had witnessed the deaths of his father and his eldest brother, Jules, and he had it upon the reasonable testimony of surviving servants that his other two brothers also had been slain during the hellishness of the intaking of their ancient fortified home and the city which had grown up out of its onetime bailey.

  Even after the town itself had fallen to the howling horde, the old Marquis, Charles's sire, and his family and retainers had made to hold the venerable castle on the hill. They had held it, fought it, fought it well and hard for weeks, not only bloodily repelling the barbarians' every assault, but with their bombards, cannon, engines, calivers, and crossbows making it deadly dangerous for the savage victors to mass anywhere within range of the walls of that castle.

  But it had been a defense doomed before it had started for lack of adequate supplies and foodstuffs. The old Marquis had known that messengers had alerted the king of this sudden invasion and had but hoped that he could hold out until a relieving royal army could be marshaled and marched the distance. But the long weeks had rolled on, the stocks of gunpowder had dwindled alarmingly, and still no royal banners were visible from even the highest tower of the castle. When there had been no more rabbits in the hutches, not one dove or pigeon left in the cotes, no milk cows, not a single cat or hound and precious few rats left to be caught and cooked, the old Marquis had sternly ordered the inhabitants of the mews—even his treasured gyrfalcon—to the stewpots, that the garrison might remain strong enough to fight on a little longer. Then it had become the turn of the horses, one or two at the time, taking the rounseys, amblers, and palfreys first, rather than the high horses and trained destriers. The fewer numbers of horses to be fed released quantities of grain, pease, and bran, of course, and these helped to lessen the need for more immediate horse butchering.

  But even so, it could not last forever, all knew that, and still no royal army came to break the siege and save them from the Kalmyks. Then, of a day, as if they did not have enemies and to spare, the stubborn, valiant little garrison was struck with an outbreak of the bloody flux, and within a week, several of the oldest and youngest—these including both of Charles's twin daughters—were dead of its ravages, while more than a few of the survivors were seriously ill or weakened. Of course, that was the time when the pagans in the town below, reinforced by the arrival of another group from the east, had set about assaulting the castle in earnest, raking the wall tops with arrows, quarrels, and musketry fire, dragging bombards from off the city walls to batter at the castle stonework and main gate. Behind, in the streets of the town, the defenders could see a timber tower under rapid construction and knew all too well what that portended.

  Rapt in his own thoughts, his bitter memories, Charles did not at first realize that the big man beside him was bespeaking him, but when he did, he replied, "Uh, yes, my lord Archduke, please to forgive your servant, his mind was far away."

  The broad, loaded shoulders under the rich fabric of the Reichsherzog's brigandine rose and fell, and he nodded shortly, his deep voice speaking in his fluent—if Burgundian—French, kind and sympathetic. "Think nothing of it, my good Sieur de Brienne. I was but merely saying that when we reach the lodge wherein I am making my headquarters in this principality, you will be provided all your immediate needs—servants to bathe you, the services of my barber, who also happens to be a fair to middling leech, cupper, and drawer of teeth, clothing and accouterments commensurate with your true rank and station, and, do you give me your parole, weapons."

  "You will meet at meat today certain other gentlemen of France whom I have bought, as I did you, from their Kalmyk captors. Like them, you will be decently mounted, and when I move on in company with the Great Khan, you and they will accompany my retinue. When the last of the Kalmyk raiders are back out of France and these more populous lands of the Empire, then I shall repair to my own principal residence and all of you with me. Until that time, you all are my noble guests, and if you want for aught, you need but to ask of the servants or of me, your own servant, Herr Wolfgang."

  "My lord Archduke," said Charles slowly, haltingly, "as regards my ransom . . . my lands . . . well, my family's lands are now completely despoiled—crops burned, orchards felled, vineyards chopped down, kine and peasants all butchered or driven away or enslaved, towns razed, fortified places slighted, everything looted away. So it may well be years, even a decade, before I could raise and deliver to you a decent ransom . . . But you have my sacred oath that—"

  The large, powerful warrior on the ambler made a clucking sound with tongue and palate. "The time will come to discuss such things, my good Sieur de Brienne, but that time is not now. As I just said, for now and for some time to come, you brave gentlemen of France are my guests, a part of my retinue. I now ask only that you enjoy my hospitality and repay it with your company and conversation."

  At journey's end, Charles found the so-called lodge to be nothing less than a sprawling, comfortable country mansion, its main building four stories high and its three wings, three and two, plus a full quantity of outbuildings, gardens, and a pleasant park, all within the compass of its walls. Atop a small but steep hill within the park crouched an aged round tower of dark-gray stone; this ancient motte now was almost entirely overgrown with ivy and its outer stockade was become only a barely visible ring of rotted wood, but a well-used track leading up to it showed that the motte still was being put to some kind of use.

  Observing his newest guest's scrutiny of the elderly fortification, the Reichsherzog beckoned him to his side and remarked, "For many years, despite the general lack of internal war, it has been the order of the emperors that places such as that remain in repair and defensible in emergencies, and that one is, despite all its outward appearance. Within it, for the length of my stay hereabouts, I am billeting many of my Kalmyk mercenaries, survivors of the squadron I took with me to England, years ago, to help my dear cousin, King Arthur III, retain his rightful throne and lands against all the might that the late and unlamented Pope Abdul could hurl against him and his loyal subjects."

  Charles nodded. "Two of my cousins took the Cross in that Crusade, my lord Archduke; one drowned while fording a river in northern England somewhere, the other died of camp fever, it is said. May the good God ever keep their souls." He signed himself, piously.

  The Reichsherzog emulated his guest, saying solemnly, "May it be so."

  At first, Charles automatically recoiled, almost cringing, when the four Kalmyks entered the chamber used for immersion bathing in the Reichsherzog's almost palatial lodge, but the short, yellow-brown men were deferential, though all conversation between him and them had needs be in German, since none of them spoke even so much as a single word of French. But although they all bore the unmistakable and honorable scars of proven and veteran warriors, they were equally adept at the role of gentleman's servitor, and their min
istrations were as gentle and considerate as the Frenchman could have wished.

  His bathing completed, a fifth Kalmyk entered the chamber, this one bearing with him the basin, razors, shears, and other paraphernalia of the barber, plus a chest of cour bouilli slung over his shoulder.

  In better German than that spoken by the other four, he said, "Mein Herr von Brienne, this speaking is Rukh, barber to His Grace, the Reichsherzog. To trim your hair and beard this one will, and also to rid them and your body of parasites, but first, please to allow that this one see to and treat your injuries. The black rot more warriors kills than sharp steel, my lord."

  Gaping his leathern casket widely, the little man squatted on his heels beside it, had Charles stretched facedown upon a swath of coarse cloth before him, and used another, softer cloth to dab away the pus, serum, and diluted blood which the necessary handling in the bath pool had caused to exude from the knight's whip-wealed back and shoulders.

  Charles gritted his teeth and breathed a prayer, expecting more and worse to come . . . but he was wrong. The Kalmyk took from out the casket a broad, round container filled to the very brim with what looked to be a viscous, greasy brown mud. He dipped out a goodly handful of the stuff and dumped it between Charles' shoulder-blades, then began to spread it over all sites of injury, and in the wake of the gentle fingers, all pain ceased, to be replaced with a coolness. Such pain as the Kalmyk's work caused after that was easily borne.