Marching Through Georgia Read Online Free PDF Page B

shrugged indifferently, to the clerk's surprise. The city-bred might be prickly in their insistence on the privileges of the master caste, but a von Shrakenberg was raised to ignore such trivia. Also… he remembered the rows of Janissary dead outside Palermo, where they had broken the enemy lines to relieve the encircled paratroops.

    The roadvan turned out to be a big, six-wheeled Kellerman steamer twenty years old, a round-edged metal box with running boards chest-high and wheels taller than he. It had been requisitioned from the Transportation Directorate, and still had eyebolts in the floor for the leg shackles of the work gangs. The Janissaries rose from their kitbags as Eric approached, flicking away cigarettes and giving him a respectful but unservile salute; the driver in her grimy coverall of unbleached cotton bowed low, hands before eyes.
    "Carry on," Eric said, returning the salute. The serf soldiers were big men, as tall as he, their snug uniforms of dove-grey and silver making his plain Citizen Force walking-out blacks seem almost drab. Both were in their late thirties and Master Sergeants, the highest rank subject-race personnel could ;ispire to. They were much alike—hard-faced and thick-muscled; unarmed, here within the Police Zone, but carrying steel-tipped swagger sticks in white-gloved hands. One was ebony black, the other green-eyed and tanned olive, and might have passed for a freeman save for the shaven skull and serf identity-number tattooed on his neck.
    The Draka climbed the short, fixed ladder and swung into the seat beside the driver. While the woman fired the van's boiler, he propped his Priority pass inside the slanted windscreen that ran to their knees; that ought to save them delay at the inevitable Security Directorate roadblocks. The vehicle pulled out of the loading bay with the smooth silence of steam power, into the crowded streets; he brought out a book of poetry, Rimbaud, and lost himself in the fire-bright imagery.
    When he looked up in midmorning they were south of the city. Crossing the Whiteridge and the scatter of mining and manufacturing settlements along it, past the huge, man-made heaps of spoilage from the gold mines. Some were still rawly yellow with the cyanide compounds used to extract the precious metal; others were in every stage of reclamation, down to forested mounds that might have been natural. This ground had yielded more gold in its century and a half than all the rest of the earth in all the years of humankind; four thousand meters beneath the road, men still clawed at rock hot enough to raise blisters on naked skin. Then they were past, into the farmlands of the high plateau.
    He rolled down the window, breathing deeply. The Draka took pains to keep industry from fouling the air or water too badly; masters had to breathe and drink, too, after all. Still, it was a relief to smell the goddess breath of spring overtaking the carrion stink of industrial-age war. The four-lane asphalt surface of the road stretched dead straight to meet the horizon that lay around them like a bowl; waist-high fields of young corn flicked by, each giving an instant's glimpse down long, leafy tunnels floored with brown, plowed earth. Air that smelled of dust and heat ana green poured in, and the sea of corn shimmered as the leaves rippled.
    They spent noon at a roadside waystation that was glad to see him; Eric was not surprised, remembering how sparse passenger traffic had been. Most of the vehicles had been drags —heavy haulers pulling articulated cargo trucks—or plantation vans heading to the rail stations with produce; once there had been a long convoy of wheeled personnel carriers taking Janissary infantry toward the training camps in the mountains to the east.
    He strolled, stretching his legs and idly watching the herds of cattle and eland grazing in the fields about; listened to the silence and the rustling of leaves in the eucalyptus trees that framed the low pleasant buildings