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  "Your uncle's lasers could cut us to pieces before we got out."

  He held her hands and looked gently down into her face. At this moment he did not feel the fierce, aggressive, happy glow which an able young man feels in the presence of a beautiful and tender young woman. He felt something much stranger, softer, quieter—an emotion very sweet to the mind and restful to the nerves. It was the simple, clear compassion of one person for another. He took a chance for her sake, because the "dark knowledge" was wonderful but very dangerous in the wrong hands.

  He took both her beautiful little hands in his, so that she looked up at him and realized that he was not going to kiss her. Something about his stance made her realize that she was being offered a more precious gift than a sky-lit romantic kiss in a garden. Besides, it was just touching helmets.

  He said to her, with passion and kindness in his voice: "You remember that dog-woman, the one who works with the dishes in the hospital?"

  "Of cours . She was good and bright and happy, and helped us all."

  "Go work with her, now and then. Ask her nothing. Tell her nothing. Jus work with her at her machines. Tell her I said so. Happiness is catching. You might catch it. I think I did myself, a little."

  "I think I nderstand you," said Genevieve softly. "Casher, good-bye an good, good luck to you. My uncle expects us." Together ey went back into the palace.

  Another me Hereditary ruddy, wellCasher O'N that ruthless price of we

  "You're a may win ba

  "I don't w

  "I have ad! is good adviq the political refuse powetl your wicked yourself and remember ye now. But it i5 am good at r not tricking y

  Casher O' trying to thin when the dic

  "Thank ye your name, (

  "Saved yo

  "The alfall

  "Oh, that deserve mud

  "I didn't tl

  nory was the farewell to Philip Vincent, the ictator of Pontoppidan. The calm, clean-shaven, leshed face looked at him with benign regard. i11 felt more respect for this man when he realized ess is often the price of peace, and vigilance the th.

  ;lever young man. A very clever young man. You k the power of your Uncle Kuraf."

  int that power!" cried Casher O'Neill.

  lice for you," said the Hereditary Dictator, "and it e or I would not be here to give it. I have learned ins well: otherwise I would not be alive. Do not Just take it and use it wisely. Do not hide from uncle's name. Obliterate it. Take the name rule so well that, in a few decades, no one will ur uncle. Just you. You are young. You can't win in your fate to grow and to triumph. I know it. I iese things. I have given you your weapon. I am ou. It is packed safely and you may leave with it." [Neill was breathing softly, believing it all, and k of words to thank the stout, powerful older man Lator added, with a little laugh in his voice:

  u, too, for saving me money. You've lived up to asher."

  money?"

  a. The horse wanted alfalfa."

  ea!" said Casher O'Neill. "It was obvious. I don't credit for that."

  ink of it," said the Hereditary Dictator, "and my staff didn't either. We're not stupid. That shows you are bright. You realized that Perinii must have had a food converter to keep the horse alive in the Hippy Dipsy. All we did was set it to alfalfa and we saved ourselves the cost of a shipload of horse food twice a year. We're glad to save that credit. We're well off here, but we don't like to waste things. You may bow to me now, and leave."

  Casher O'Neill had done so, with one last glance at the lovely Genevieve, standing fragile and beautiful beside her uncle's chair.

  His last memory was very recent.

  He had paid two hundred thousand credits for it, right on this liner. He had found the Stop-Captain, bored now that the ship was in flight and the Go-Captain had taken over.

  "Can you get me a telepathic fix on a horse?"

  "What's a horse?" said the Go-Captian. "Where is it? Do you want to pay for it?"

  "A horse," said Casher O'Neill patiently, "is an unmodified earth animal. Not underpeople. A big one, but quite intelligent. This one is in orbit right around Pontoppidan. And I will pay the usual price."

  "A million Earth credits," said the Stop-Captain.

  "Ridiculous!" cried Casher O'Neill.

  They settled on two hundred thousand credits for a good fix and ten thousand for the use of the ship's equipment even if there were failure. It was not a failure. The technician was a snake-man: he was deft, cool, and superb at his job. In only a few minutes he passed the headset to Casher O'Neill, saying politely, "This is it, I think."

  It was. He had reached right into the horse's mind.

  The endless sands of Mizzer swam before Casher O'Neill. The long lines of the Twelve Niles converged in the distance. He galloped steadily and powerfully. There were other horses nearby, other riders, other things, but he himself was conscious only of the beat of the hooves against the strong moist sand, the firmness of the appreciative rider upon his back. Dimly, as in a hallucination, Casher O'Neill could also see the little orbital ship in which the old horse cantered in mid-air, with an amused cadet sitting on his back. Up there, with no weight, the old worn-out he would be good for many, many years. Then he saw the hors 's paradise again. The flash of hooves threatened to overtake him, but he outran them all. There was the expectation f a stable at the end, a rubdown, good succulent green food, nd the glimpse of a filly in the morning.

  The hors of Pontoppidan felt extremely wise. He had trusted peopl —people, the source of all kindness, all cruelty, all power am ng the stars. And the people had been good. The horse felt v

  much horse again. Casher felt the old body course along the river's edge like a dream of power, like a completion service, like an ultimate fulfillment of companionship.

  The Thunder of

  the Captains

  by

  Garry Kilworth

  Garry Kilworth is a British writer who began to publish in the mid-1970s upon retiring after eighteen years of service as a cryptographer in the Royal Air Force. Raised partly in Aden, he has traveled and worked in the Far East, and after living for a number of years in Hong Kong, is now residing in England again. He sold his first SF story in 1975, and has subsequently become a frequent contributor to Omni, Interzone, Asimov's Science Fiction, and many other magazines and anthologies; his short fiction has been assembled in The Songbirds of Pain, and in the upcoming collection In the Country of Tattooed Men. His many novels include Witchwater Country, a mainstream novel, and, among many others, the science fiction novels In Solitary, The Night of Kadar, Split Second, Gemini God, A Theatre of Timesmiths, Cloudrock, and Abandonati. His most recent work is a trilogy of popular fantasy novels, The Foxes of First Dark, Midnight's Sun: A Story of Wolves, and Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares.

  Here he gives us a harrowing look at the seduction and corruption of the innocent, at the misuses of power, and at the dread consequences that inexorably follow that misuse . . .

  Those who have never experienced the rigid discipline of a military school cannot imagine how assiduously such establishments work to destroy one's identity. There is not a single minute of the seventeen-hour day that is not filled with gruelling physical training, base manual labor or academic study. One might work through the remaining hours of the night in order to be immaculate for a morning parade and an inspection, then, desperate for sleep, stand by with a tense frame while someone in authority destroys the kit layout because a toothbrush is still damp, or is facing the wrong way, and orders a re-inspection within the hour. Even during sleep one's head sti 1 rings with the bawling voices and bugle calls that pass for communication. There are nightmares that are formed from a state of extreme order as well as chaos.

  There are more terrors than are found in the established hierarchy. Just as terrible as the hostile oppressions of the authorities are the attentions of the senior boys whose brutality belongs to street gangs. They choose a victim with care and, physically and mentally, annihilate their charac
ter with a systematic cruelty found only in a mind disciplined beyond thinking or feeling. I have seen boys beaten, then hung by their legs from third story windows by drum cords. I have seen boys stripped and rubbed raw with wet wire pads. When the lights go out in the dormitories, the manufactured adolescent—a creature possessed and fashioned by inflexible ritual, by set rules and regulations—exercises an ungovernable free will and prowls through sleeping forms, looking for the youth who is solitary, friendless and weak. It is a calculated destruction that has all the hallmarks of insanity. There are those who try to fight both formal and informal authority openly, and are broken, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, into items useless to any society except that of a service life. There are those who bend with the system, like malleable strips of copper, hoping that though they allow themselves to be distorted during their years at the school, they can reshape, reform themselves later. There are those who feign mental illness or deliberately cause themselves to be physically disabled, in order to escape. There are those whom the life suits and who have no desire to retain any individuality. Then there are those like Jake and I, who fight in secret, fight insidiously in the dark, with mysticism, black magic, and souls the color of pitchblende.

  There were two activities which kept us sane, Jake and I, during those hellish years at the school: horses and witchcraft. Possibly a strange combination, but while we were out horse-riding we had the freedom of the open air, the exhilaration of animal-powered speed and a proximity with the natural, chaotic elements of weather and nature to contrast to the order and discipline. At night, behind the closed doors of the drying-room, we lit tinlids of rags soaked in brass cleaner and chanted incantations to unhallowed gods: to Satan, to Nahemah the princess of succubi, to Seddim, to Astaroth, to Bael, to Praslus, to Furfur the demon winged stag, to Glasyalobalus, to Kobal, to Ukoback the stoker of Hell's fires—but most of all, to Cimeries, the demon who rides a black horse. We studied the works of Alister Crowley, Mathers, W. B. Yeats and others of the Order of Golden Dawn.

  After our initial explorations into the art of the occult, Jake and I finally formed our own bastard religion, linking our two favorite activities. We began to pray to the spirits of dead horses. Bucephalus, Alexander's charger, and King Richard's mount, Barbary. Other famous steeds. Almost from the dawn of its creation, the destiny of humanity has been closely interwoven with the horse. Together we have forged civilizations out of wildernesses, have pushed back frontiers, have ploughed the land and made it fertile, have conquered wastelands and formed unions stronger than marriages.

  In the dim light and foul gases of our homemade brands, we would try to conjure up visions of these beasts in the unsanctified air of the drying-room, murmuring invented chants into its dark corners. Perhaps it was a trick of the mind, brought about by the atmosphere we created, but on certain occasions my heartbeat quickened to see horse-like shapes in the wispy fumes of burning rags. We found the passage in Job, Chapter 39, which says, "Hast thou given the horse strength? Hast though clothed his neck with thunder? He mocketh at fear. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage. He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the Captains, and the shouting."

  How we loved those words, would recite them backwards in an attempt to produce this wonderful creature, Jake more enthusiastically than I, for he was the leader and I his lieutenant. No one could touch our souls, we were sure of that, for we had blackened them beyond any stains the school could overprint. We heard the thunder of the Captains, but not from afar. We heard them as their vicious faces pressed to ours. We smelt their breath as their mouths contorted with threats and obscenities. We, with stiff bodies, wooden expressions, heard

  their booming break close to our ears and had held down our heartbeats for fear of betraying fear. We were afraid of being afraid. We ran ten miles in mud and rain; scrubbed toilet pans with nail brushes; scraped, cleaned, polished, washed, ironed, oiled; we slaughtered cardboard enemies; we marched and drilled to distorted commands; we prayed in rigid rows, the words mechanical; we sat with poker spines in disinfected classrooms; we ate our meals in unison; we knew sudden light or instant darkness to the minute—all to the thunder of the Captains.

  Of course, we did as we were told, avoided the bullies as best we could and outwardly appeared pliable to the system's manipulations. But beneath our disciplined shells, deep beneath the fear, were dark smiles that mocked the authorities as surely as Job's horse mocked at fear. We said our "Yes, sirs" and "No, sirs" with the correctness of groomed students, and once on our own prayed to Pegasus, the flying horse that rose from the drops of blood of the decapitated Gorgon. We prayed for deliverance from those who would destroy we. We prayed for the destruction of our enemies. We prayed for power over the lives of the oppressors, the persecutors, the hated authorities.

  Somehow I made it through two years at military school and then escaped on the death of my father. My mother required my support at home and money was short. I had to go to work to help with the household expenses. Father had left many debts, God bless him. Jake stayed on, of course, and the last I saw of him at the school was his wan face beneath the cropped tar-black hair, watching me through the barred gates as I walked away. He looked thin and wasted, his prominent front teeth giving him the curious paradoxical appearance of combined predacity and piteousness. For Jake, there was no escape. His father was wealthy and determined to have a soldier for a son. I was sorry for him but that sorrow extended only as far as common human kindness. We had never been friends in the true sense of the word. We had combined our forces to fight a common enemy: had shared experiences as soldiers do in the trenches, only seeing a single facet of a many faceted character. I did not know Jake, the way one knows a friend, because life at the school produced narrow viewpoints on personalities. It is like looking at a folded map. One sees small sections of rivers and roads, but their sources and destinations are hidden somewhere behind the sharp creases and edges of the folds. Jake, the whole Jake, was a folded chart and it was only years later that I was to be allowed another study of the regions and contours of the man.

  Over the subsequent years my memories of school and its horrors were obliterated from my mind piece by piece. People speak of memories as fading, like sepia photographs under a desert sun, but memories do not fade—they are either there, or they are not. In order to retain memories one has to recharge them from time to time by re-running them through conscious thought. In this way we remember the good old days and not the bad ones, because we muse on pleasant hours and reject uncomfortable ones. Of course, had I wanted to, I could have recalled them—but the desire was not there. Even Jake, with his pinched, eager expression and quick gestures was sliced from my mind, like celluloid film in a cutting room. So too were my tentative ventures into the world of the occult. Consequently, when he came back into my life again, it was a while before I recognized him.

  By the time I was thirty I had worked at a number of jobs and finally settled into a niche that I hoped would remain available to me for the rest of my life. I became a gamekeeper to John Sutton, a gentleman farmer in the district of Rochford in Essex. The date I took up employment with him was August the 17th, 1952, five months before the great flood, when high winds and a spring tide encouraged the sea to new, temporary conquests of the east coast of Britain. My period of military school had revealed an aptitude for marksmanship—not something I was especially proud of because of its limited worth in civilian life; but it seemed to impress my employer. The morals of breeding birds to shoot them did not impinge upon my principles either. Most people ate meat and it seemed to me that the only difference between putting a bolt into the brain of a calf, or shot into a bird, was that the latter had some chance of escape, especially from the myopic, cack-handed gentry that sported shotguns on John Sutton's estate every year. In the main they were flaccid, gin-soaked bankers and politicians who had never grown out of playing with guns.

  I was needed, among ot
her things, to keep out poachers. East Essex is a settling place for gypsies and John Sutton was convinced that the bulk of local gypsy mealtables was gathered from his land. It was not true, of course. Gypsies are shrewd business people, and if you are looking for a bargain, you stay clear of them, but they have no more thieves amongst them than house dwellers. A pheasant in the bush by the road is considered wild fruit to gypsies and country folk alike, but concentrated poaching is usually carried out by organized gangs from the towns. It was the gypsies that drew Jake back into my life again. They are, traditionally, horse traders and it was on a Thursday in October, market day in Rochford Square, that I felt a lean hand on my shoulder.

  "It is you!"

  I had turned to face a gaunt man of my own age and attempted to place him in front of one of the bars of the Plough and Sail, my local pub.

  "Jake! Jake Dorstern," he cried.

  Still nothing registered and I felt a little stupid.

  "Are you sure .. ." I began, but he interrupted me, saying, "God, fancy seeing you after all these years. How many? Fifteen . . . it must be fifteen. You lucky bastard—you escaped early, didn't you? I had two more years of that ... well, no sense in raking the ashes, now they're thankfully dead. How are you anyway?"

  Then I had him of course. Jake. I shook his hand and asked the inevitable question.

  "I'm buying a horse for my girlfriend. We're in London now that the old man's gone. Yes, died a year ago. Left me quite a bit, which is lucky. I'm not good for much. Went into the army, of course. Had to. Wouldn't have inherited otherwise and it's the only thing I've ever been any good at, inheriting money. Not easy, you know. You have to graft like hell at it. People seem to think an inheritance drops in one's lap. Instead one has to slog one's guts out doing all sorts of unpleasant things, like soldiering, in order to keep the source sweet. Captain Dorstern." He smiled grimly. "I nearly became one of them—one of those who tormented us at school . . . and beyond."