Conflagration Read Online Free PDF Page A

attention and armed might to the north, and the rich lands between the Appalachians and the Ocean.
    Riordan grunted. “I know the people in Virginia had it hard.”
    Two hundred years of carnage had come and gone since the Mosul, the descendants of merciless tribal nomads from an area to the east of the Black Sea, had advanced into Europe with fire and sword, and formed their unassailable alliance with the Teutons of Germany and the Mamaluke warlords in North Africa, to subjugate the Land of the Franks, the city states of Italia, and all of the Hispanic Peninsula. The immigrant peoples of the Americas should maybe have taken warning from the Mosul conquests in the old world, but the Northern Ocean was comfortingly wide, and they had believed that it would protect them in their hard-won isolation, and make them immune to the danger. They had grown too confident, however, in their geographic safety, even though many of the American settlers’ parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents might have crossed the seas as a direct result of the Mosul threat. When the enemy had landed, they had been no better equipped than the Franks, the Italians, or the Hispanians to resist the murderous onslaught of the most implacable war machine the world had ever had the misfortune to see, and they had been driven down to defeat by the Mosul’s iron discipline, fanatic religious motivation, and honed battle tactics.
    Argo stared out across the Virginia landscape. “I knew one of the women who went to the fire. I knew her really well. She was a friend of my mother, and she’d helped nurse me when I was sick. I hid in a tall tree with some other boys and watched her burn.”
    Riordan said nothing, and Argo knew he was losing control in front of the older man, but he was momentarily unable to check himself. “And the drunken bastard who denounced her could well have been my stepfather. His name was Herman Kretch, and he turned her in because she refused to fuck him.”
    “I hope you took care of him.”
    Argo thought of the night when he’d stood over the sleeping man with a loaded pistol, but had been unable to pull the trigger. He bitterly shook his head. “I was too young. I just ran away.” He sighed. “I think someone else did it, though.”
    “Just as long as the bastard got his. That’s what counts.”
    Argo indicated the horizon to the west. “Our village was called Thakenham. It’s over there somewhere, but I haven’t heard a damn thing of my mother and sisters since I ran off.”
    Riordan looked where Argo was pointing. “That’s the way of it, boy, with families divided by war. Not knowing can be a terrible thing, but you’re far from being the only one.”
    Argo remembered how for seven bloody months of his eleventh year, battle after battle had raged, and at the height of the terrible Winter Campaign of ’97 it had actually seemed as though the Mosul would be pushed back. The boys of the village had felt a mounting excitement as more and more optimistic rumors had circulated up from the front. But then an armada of troopships, under steam and sail, brought what appeared to be limitless divisions of men and horses and inexhaustible supplies of munitions, and the tide of conflict had turned against the defenders. Fighting a series of desperate rearguard actions, they had fallen back on Richmond, for the last battle. On May 10 th , Richmond had fallen, and all hope for Virginia and the Carolinas along with it.
    Argo shook his head. “It’s getting harder and harder to remember my sisters’ faces. I’m not sure I’d recognize them anymore, and I know they wouldn’t recognize me.”
    Riordan let out a short sigh, part sympathetic and part impatient. “Maybe, after the coming fight’s done, you’ll be able to get yourself some leave and ride over to this Thakenham. Find out for yourself what’s happened to them?”
    Riordan’s mention of the battle that could now be only a day or so away jerked Argo out of his