Five Stars: Five Outstanding Tales from the early days of Stupefying Stories Read online

  “You hurt, sir? Where?”

  He pointed. Anseley lightly touched the place. Rupert cried out.

  “I’ll give you an injection,” he said, “so I can examine the wound.”

  As he was getting an injection of morphine ready, Plaud rushed up to them.

  “Report,” Rupert said, trying to maintain officer dignity despite the pain he felt.

  “All the buggers are dead, sir. Blake’s squad got them in a crossfire with machine-guns. The men are checking the field for survivors, but so far we haven’t found anyone alive.”

  Anseley gave Rupert a shot of morphine. He put Philips in charge of operations. The morphine coursed through Rupert’s body. The pain felt far away. Anseley pulled open his shirt to examine the wound.

  “Got two ribs,” he said, “and dislocated your collarbone. Those stones had some velocity. But I guess it was the same kind of thing David used to kill Goliath. You need to rest, sir.”

  “Can’t rest. There may be more of them. Can you wrap my ribs and collarbone?”

  Anseley wound strips of bandage around Rupert’s damaged bones. He sat in a chair and listened to the troops report. They had killed 235 of the enemy, whoever they were—no survivors. A few of the enemy troops were wounded but had not lived long. His own unit had had none killed, six slightly wounded—the most serious a broken wrist from a sling stone. Rupert told Philips to move the convoy to a more defensible position. They found a road and followed it until they came to a rocky hill, where they set up camp and posted perimeter guards. “Fall asleep,” he heard the sergeant of the guard say to the first watch, “and you might wake up with a spear stuck up your arse, like one of those poor bastards in the village.” While they were repairing equipment, treating the wounded, and eating, the other solders had wandered into the village to gape at the atrocities.

  Rupert meant to stay awake, but Anseley gave him another shot that put him out. He woke up at night. The pain in his shoulder had diminished somewhat. He ate and called in Philips, then got Cambridge.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said.

  “We went back in time. I’m sure of it. I’ve checked the stars—Giles checked them with me. We used a sextant he had. They’re way off from where they should be.”

  “Where in time are we?”

  “I’d say around 2500 years ago. And, of course, that was the age of Assyria.”

  “I remember a little about them from school and the Bible,” Rupert said. “Tell me what you can about them.”

  “The first war-machine in history. Like the Germans—total warfare was a thing they practiced as well. They would sweep down on a village, kill the men—they impaled the ones who did not die defending the place. They murdered anyone who might slow them down—pregnant women, babies, small children—and gathered up the people left—women, older children—to be marched away as slaves. The kind of demonic brutality you saw back in the village was deliberate. It was designed to strike fear in the populace, kind of like what the Germans did when they attacked Belgium and eastern France—only worse. They were unstoppable.”

  “You’re sure of this?”

  “This is not an occasion to mark time with rationalistic doubt, sir. An Assyrian army attacked us. If you doubt that, feel your left shoulder. A sling stone hit you. Their soldiers used arrows and had bronze spears and shields and armor just like you see in the bas reliefs they brought from Iraq and Persia and set up in the British museum.”

  “How, Cambridge?”

  “Sir, I don’t know. We need to take it on faith. It must have been the sandstorm. I can’t say how, but we’re here.”

  “Did you find anything in their camp that might shed some light on what they’re doing here? Do you read their language?”

  “Not their language, but I can read Hebrew. We found a tablet in what looked like their command wagon. The characters were a little different from what I’m used to, but when I started reading it, I recognized it because it’s also written down in the Book of Second Kings in the Bible. We’re up against the army of Sennacherib.”

  “Sennacherib,” Philips said, his eyes lit with recognition. “Byron: ‘The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold.’”

  “Exactly. He wrote his poem based on the account the Bible gives.”

  Cambridge took a thick stone tablet out of a pack he had with him. He held it up and read.

  People of Jerusalem—

  Do not let Hezekiah persuade you to give yourselves to die by famine and by thirst, saying, The Lord our god shall deliver us out of the hand of the King of Assyria. Hath not Hezekiah taken away his high places and his altars, and commanded Judah and Jerusalem saying, Ye shall worship before one altar, and burn on it? Know ye not what I and my fathers have done to all the peoples of other lands? Were the gods of those nations able to deliver their lands out of my hands? Do not let Hezekiah deceive you nor persuade you on this, neither yet believe him: for no god of any nation or kingdom was able to deliver his people out of my hand and out of the hand of my fathers: how much less shall your God deliver you out of my hand.

  “According to the scriptures, he sent letters like this one out to the major towns of Judah, to frighten the people into giving up.”

  “And?”

  “The Lord destroyed Sennacherib’s army,” Philips put in.

  “He retreated back home,” Cambridge elaborated, “and his two sons killed him in the temple of Nisroc, his god.”

  “How did the Lord destroy his army?”

  “The text says he sent ‘the angel of death’ against it. Of course, angel means ‘messenger.’ Most think it was a plague. Whatever it was, it caused the Assyrians to retreat in disarray.”

  They fell silent.

  “Nice to know,” Rupert said after a while. “I only wonder how we play into all this. Being here in bad enough, but the question is how we get back—if can get back at all.” He looked over at Philips. “I imagine the lay of the land hasn’t changed all that much. Do you have idea where we are?”

  “We’ve gone north for the past couple of days. We should be close to Jerusalem.”

  No one spoke, but all of them felt the same. Rupert finally broke the silence.

  “I suppose the most logical thing to do is to follow orders. We are to deliver a load of gas shells to Jerusalem. That would be the most likely course to follow.”

  “You don’t think we should return to where we were when the sandstorm hit us?”

  “I had thought of that. But there may be more Assyrians about. We destroyed one of their battle groups. They may be out looking for us in larger numbers. The two hundred troops we faced almost overran us. We’re getting low on food, water, petrol, and ammunition. I don’t even want to think of what would happen if they capture us.”

  “One thing,” Cambridge said. The tone of his voice suggested gravity in what he meant to say. The others in the tent turned their eyes to him.

  “From the tablet I read—comparing that to what the Bible says—Sennacherib and his entire army are getting ready to attack Jerusalem.”

  “They’re camped around it?”

  “Near it. The Book of Second Kings said he was attacking Lachish and staging his army for the final attack on Jerusalem when the plague hit. We might run into hundreds or thousands of them if we come too close to Jerusalem.”

  This brought quiet again. After a while, Rupert spoke.

  “Well, if we run into his camp, maybe we can be of assistance.”

  Rupert went to his tent. He slept poorly. Every time he rolled to one or another side, pain shot through his body. Anseley heard him cry out and gave him another shot of morphine.

  “I don’t want to get addicted to the damned stuff,” he muttered. He did sleep soundly, though, until dawn.

  ¤

  They continued north. Rupert noticed the verdant land. Unlike modern Palestine, it abounded in trees and forest. Lush meadows cloaked in wildflowers stretched in all directions. He also remembered hearing that when
the area fell under control of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks stripped it of timber. He saw the old kingdom of Judah—the kingdom of cedars, streams, the rose of Sharon, the fig tree and the vine.

  They sped on and began to climb. Their unit encountered no more Assyrian troops and saw no more massacred villages, though they passed by three deserted settlements. The people had doubtless fled, to either the countryside or the safety of a huge walled city like Jerusalem.

  Though the landmarks on their maps were not there, the land began to look familiar. Even though heavily forested, they recognized rock formations, rivers, the physical features that a year of being stationed here had made familiar. The countryside lay silent, deserted of people and animals. They brought their trucks to a thickly wooded hillside, pushed through the fern and trees, and came to the edge where they could see the city.

  They stared in silence. The city sat on hills, high walls surrounding it, the gold and stone of Solomon’s temple glistening in its center. They saw tents all around it, fires, movement. Half-constructed siege towers punctuated the massive tent city. As thousands of soldiers similar to the ones they had fought three days ago moved in rank, the sun glinted off their armor.

  “Never thought I’d see the Bible before my eyes,” Cambridge commented.

  “Looks like they’re about to attack,” Philips noted.

  “But we know what will happen,” Philips said. “Well, I know it from the Bryon poem more than from the Bible. God will kill them all. Isn’t that right?”

  “Depends on which book of the Bible you read. One account says the whole army died off. Another says the most valiant and mighty of their soldiers died. Herodotus, the Greek historian, says mice ate their bowstrings and they had to abandon the siege. Looks like they’re not ready to abandon it yet.”

  They looked down on the scene. After a long time, Rupert spoke.

  “Let’s go back to the camp. I need to go over some plans with you. I think I know why we were brought back to this time—and what we need to do to get back our own.”

  ¤

  As night fell, they set up the guns, donned gas masks, and began loading shells.

  “This has to be precise,” Rupert told them. “The wind is blowing in the right direction. You need to drop the Nine-Fives in the no-man’s land between the city wall and the Assyrian camp. We have enough rounds to get coverage. Begin to shoot as soon as you’re ready.”

  The soldiers aimed the guns high. They were far enough away and concealed by trees that both hid their post and muffled the sound of their artillery. Rupert watched as the shells hit the strip of land between the city walls and the line of tents.

  The high trajectory burrowed the shells deeply into the soft soil. They exploded, but the explosions, Rupert thought, were muffled—in the din of the camp the Assyrians would hardly hear them go off. After a while, he saw a green cloud, invisible to the untrained eye, rise from the holes the shells made and spread over the Assyrian camp. His soldiers kept up the barrage. It would take most of their shells to cover the enemy camp. How he would explain their loss was not certain, but he was certain that shelling the Assyrians was the right thing to do.

  After an hour, the barrage was finished. They had fifteen shells left.

  ¤

  By now darkness had fallen. Watch fires burned on the walls of the city. Smoke, illumined by moonlight, billowed from the courtyard of the Temple of the Lord. Undoubtedly, Rupert mused, they were sacrificing scores of animals to try to win the favor of the deity. He could not tell much about the Assyrian camp. He saw activity and fires burning. Hard to ascertain if the gas had had any effect—though, he thought, it had to have some effect.

  Philips came up to him.

  “I wonder if it happened.”

  “What?”

  He recited:

  … the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

  And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass’d,

  And the eyes of the sleepers wax’d deadly and chill,

  And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

  And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,

  The lances unlifted, the trumpets unblown.

  “I guess we’ll know in the morning.”

  His shoulder throbbed. He decided to endure it. He did not want another morphine injection. He headed past the perimeter guards, the artillery guns, and the pile of spent gas shell casings. Despite his pain, he slept well that night.

  ¤

  He woke to a cold, clear sky. He walked out to a barren, rocky ridge. The radio operators rushed over to inform him they had reestablished communications and that Allenby’s forces had taken Jerusalem. The Ottomans had retreated south. An amazed soldier raced up and reported that their stock of gas shells had, as if by an act of God, reappeared and once again filled the caissons. Of course, Rupert thought, they would not be needed now that the city was in British hands.

  Philips and Cambridge joined Rupert for breakfast.

  “Mission accomplished?” Philips asked.

  “I think so. Odd to become a part of history—of history you’ve already read.”

  They drank field coffee and contemplated. Below them, the new Jerusalem—minus the temple and the ancient walls—gleamed in the light of the winter sun.

  David W. Landrum teaches Literature at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. His stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His novellas, The Gallery, Strange Brew, and The Prophetess, as well as his full-length novel, The Sorceress of the Northern Seas, are available through Amazon.

  Teaching Women to Fly

  by Guy Stewart

  It was not the pungent sandfish sizzling in hot oil spiced with swamp onions and yellow reed pepper that made Celianne weep. Nor was it the annoying croak of slender, flying frogfolk constantly wheeling overhead, or the loathsome organic reek of the millions of hectares of alluvial marshlands.

  It was not the note her husband had left two weeks ago, before riding off on the harvester: “Hold off the loan-taker as long as you can. I’ll be home soon with the cash to pay him off.”

  “What loan-taker?” she muttered. It was not the ominous silence of the distant hot gold noonday sky that drove her sobbing.

  “Tomar shomashhata ki, Amma?” seven-year-old Uzzal said, tugging at her thin dress.

  Celianne patted him away, staring into the fry pan. “English, Uzzal! You know what your baba says about Bengali in the house.”

  His lower lip puffed out then he mimicked, “‘No Bengali! We speak English!’”

  She nodded, patted him on the head and said, “Exactly. And nothing is wrong. Now get back to your fishing.”

  It was, she suddenly knew, all of it at once.

  Uzzal ran off, vaulting over a weak spot in the floor that was marked by a green rug. Celianne dried her tears with a wrist and flicked a gaze through the pathetic living room, kitchen, and dining room. Gray plastic made from the harvest of organics was formed into everything to be purchased from the Baru Ekrasi-Kalligstadtzin company store. The shell of this houseboat itself was plastic. “Don’t jump in the house! Someday you’ll fall right through the floor into the marsh!” she called.

  She closed her eyes once more. Blocking out the tang of cooking, she imagined falling into vacuum sky, hands reaching to hold space. Hard white points stretched to hydrogen spikes cut by yellow calcium stripes. Pulse roaring in her ears, imagined hair shook around her face. Flushing in embarrassment, she knew herself a starship pilot horrified of flight trying to force herself to love it again.

  “Can I sell the rest in market and keep the money?”

  Celianne caught her breath, eyes snapping open. Uzzal was returning from the sink and holding up four crabfish, their claws sheared, legs plucked, scaled and gutted. “I done ‘em up, Amma,” he said. “Can I?”

  “We’ll ask Baba when he gets home. Until then, put them in the freezer, Bachchale.”

  “Amma! That’s a baby n
ame,” he said suddenly, pouting. “I’m big now. Call me Uzzal.”

  “You never said anything before,” she exclaimed.

  “You never axed before.”

  “’Never asked before’,” she corrected. Heading off a jag of bull-headedness she said, “How long have you been awake?”

  “I caught seven crabfish before moondown,” he said, proudly hoisting them up.

  She looked at the fish and her son, hair and skin coffee like hers but face like his baba: hawk nose, thin lips, and wide blue eyes. He wore red nylon shorts, dark feet calloused and pale at the edges. He flashed a white-toothed grin, but she had no joy to return it. “Nice job. Baba will be happy when he gets home.”

  “I seen the boats going out. Maybe the harvester’s coming in!” In the distance, a horn brayed: the signal that a starship would be stopping on Baru Ekrasi, a main island in the Ganges Nuton River delta, for a day or two.

  “When did you see the boats go out?”

  “Right at moondown, from the deck.”

  Celianne hurried out, stepping over the soft spot. The sun was a yellow patch in the cloudy sky, glaring rather than shining. Their houseboat was near the end of twin piers jabbing into marshy delta, grounded on the island Baru Ekrasi. Their neighborhood of houseboats was Little Big Cypress. A breeding flock of croaking frog flyers flew over, four females chasing a male. Marsh sharks lived near Human settlements, too. The marsh sharks, the humanoid frogfolk, and the flyers were all linked, but humans didn’t care much how, ever since the Frogfolk Massacre nearly exterminated them and calmed them all down, and as long as they didn’t interfere with the harvest of the organic sludge just under the surface.

  Peering past another row of houseboats, into the harbor slip and across to the twin pier, Big Chittagong, she saw only empty water and a few frogfolk poling punts, webbed fingers skimming the wriggling “plantimal” algae from the water. Usually full of houseboats, dinghies, canoes and ferries, the slip waited, ready to welcome the floating harvester.

  Celianne wiped her hands on a faded towel draping her shoulder and hurried back to the stove. She took two saucers, two spoons. Cutting a fourth of the sandfish for herself, she gave the rest to Uzzal. She scooped peppers over each. “Breakfast, Bachchale.”