The Forever Engine (21 page)

TWENTY-NINE

October 10, 1888, The Lim River valley, Serbia

I slipped the strap of the Mauser from my shoulder and eased it to the ground. Other rifles clattered down around me. The men in the brush and rocks above the road stood up, covering us with their own weapons. They wore uniforms that looked like most of the others we’d seen—threadbare dirty blue faded almost to a grubby gray. They wore faded red caps on the backs of their heads, round to the extent they had any shape at all, like stocking caps but made of felt. The caps weren’t at all like the stiff cylindrical fezzes the Shriners wore, but they were fezzes all the same.

“We’re going to be okay,” I told Gabrielle. “I think we just found the missing Turks.”

“I think they have found us.”

Well, yes. Now, what was the Turkish-American sergeant’s name? Durson.

“
Chavush
Durson,” I called out.
Chavush
was Turkish for sergeant.

The men with rifles reacted, exchanged glances.

“
Chavush
Durson?” I repeated.

One of them lowered his rifle and pointed toward the rocks at the head of the column. I walked that way, my hands open and well up over my head.

“Better come along, Captain,” I said to Gordon when I came even with him. “You’ve still got that dispatch for Sergeant Durson from Cevik Bey, right?”

We walked together toward the rocks and a cluster of soldiers.

“Sergeant Durson?” I asked in English when we got to within a half-dozen yards of them.

A very tall, very lean black man stepped forward. He wore three large dark green chevrons, points up and almost reaching his shoulder seam, on each sleeve of his blue jacket. I figured him to be about thirty, but it was hard to tell for sure, His face was lined, skin weathered, from a life spent outdoors. Long face with thoughtful eyes, close-cropped wiry hair, big strong hands resting calmly on his cartridge belt—those were my first impressions of Ibrahim Durson, the transplanted American.

“Who axe me?” Deep, steady voice.

“We have a dispatch from Cevik Bey for you.”

Gordon took the sealed dispatch from his map case and handed it over. Durson drew a pair of wire-framed reading glasses from his tunic and put them on, frowned as he read the writing on the outside and examined the wax seal closely, then broke the seal, unfolded the dispatch, and read. He read slowly, his face an unreadable mask.

When he was done he took off his reading glasses and looked us over, then the men behind us.

“
So,
Uh gwine maach wit duh buckruh. Dunno w’ymekso.”

He spoke more to himself than to us, and he shook his head. I wasn’t sure if it was from disgust or resignation. He turned to me.

“Binbashi,”
and Durson raised the dispatch slightly by way of explanation,
“
’
e tell’e say Uh haffuh do ’um, but
’
e sweet mout’ me, too.”
He said that with bitterness in his voice.
“Duh tabak got t’irty-fo’ soduh, strang, two gud cawpruls. Tabak long fuh grease dem mout’. Oonuh bring rashi’n?”
The question came out as an angry challenge, and his voice rose after that.
“Done soduh crackuhday to daak, spy billige in dayclean, steal biddle. Wore down. Hongry. Done ’nuf!”

“What?” Gordon asked, looking from Durson to me.

I hadn’t caught all of it, but enough to fake it for the moment.
Binbashi
and
tabak
were Turkish, the words for
major
and
platoon
. The rest . . .

“The sergeant has thirty-four men, but they’re tired and out of food.”

“Well, he can’t bloody have any of ours.”

“They’re your men now, Captain. They won’t be able to march very far or fight very hard on empty bellies.”

Durson didn’t react, but, from the way his eyes looked from Gordon to me when we spoke, I had the feeling he could pick up about as much of my words in English as I could of his.

“Did you live in the Carolinas, Sergeant?” I asked in Turkmen. “You can answer me in Turkish. I need the practice.”

“I was born in South Carolina.”

“My name is Jack Fargo. and this is Captain Gordon, the commander of the mission.”

He looked to each of us wordlessly, anger still in his eyes.

“I am from Illinois,” I added.

If that made an impression one way or the other, he hid it well. A wall stood between us, as thick and tall as any I’d ever run into. I’d traded insults with part-time Taliban hotshots in Kandahar’s market and felt closer to them than to this man. Part of it was being on opposite sides of the officer-NCO divide, which for me was weird, at least finding myself on the officer end of the relationship, but that wasn’t all of it. Part of it was race, but that wasn’t all of it, either.

“Let me ask you, why did you challenge us in Serbian?”

“We thought you were Serbs. We expected no one else up here.”

Well, that made sense. Good thing they were in the mood to take prisoners.

“We have some silver with us,” I said, “enough to buy food for your men. Is there a town nearby?”

“Kratovo, a mile farther up the road, but your silver will purchase only death there.”

“The cholera?”

“The
hajduci
.”

That was a word I was unfamiliar with in either language. I shook my head and spread my hands.

“They were fighters against us when this was Turkish land, ten years ago. Now they fight for themselves. The Serb soldiers control the valleys, the
hajduci
the high country.”

It wasn’t the first time in history freedom fighters turned into bandits once the war was over.

“Is there a safe place nearby where we can rest?”

“We have a camp up the mountain, less than a mile from here,
Effendi
.”

“Assemble your men,
Chavush
Durson. We will follow you.”

I translated the conversation and Gordon shouted for the Marines and Bavarians to pick up their arms and come forward. Durson shouted his own orders and moved off a few steps to get his men assembled.

“What the devil was that gibberish?” Gordon demanded in a low voice.

“He doesn’t speak English; he speaks Gullah. I don’t imagine Cevik Bey knew the difference. Gullah is a slave patois, West African grammar with a lot of English borrow words, borrowed from British slavers interestingly enough. Most slaves along the southeastern U.S. coast spoke it back—well, still speak it now, I guess.”

“You speak it?”

“I’ve read about it but I don’t speak it. I can figure out about half of what he says. Good thing I speak Turkish. Sort-of. His Turkish is very good, by the way.”

“Bloody hell.”

“You aren’t curious how a Gullah-speaking American ex-slave came to be a Turkish sergeant in a Bosnian rifle battalion?” I asked.

“Blasted Turks hire every drunk or ruined European who claims to have been a soldier, make half of them generals. Why not a nigger sergeant? All I want to know is how to get to Kokin Brod.”

Occasionally I found myself getting used to this time, forgetting how different it really was from my own, different in ways not visible to the eye. Then a single word, shocking as a cattle prod, could remind me.

“You need to share our food with these men. You understand that, right?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” he answered reluctantly. “Don’t imagine they’ll eat much. I doubt the Turks feed their men all that well. The officers probably steal half their food and sell it.”

I wasn’t so sure. Their uniforms were old and ragged, but the men looked healthy. They weren’t carrying a lot of fat but had pretty good muscle mass. They didn’t look to me as if anyone was stealing their rations.

I watched Durson assemble his platoon. The ten men from the boulder barricade had already formed a column of two, and the dozen or so from the embankment trotted forward and fell in behind them. Durson gave an order, his voice clear and loud without having to bark or shout. The leading two riflemen unslung their rifles and trotted forward up the road fifteen or twenty yards to where a faint trail snaked up the hillside. They scrambled up, and, when they were far enough ahead, Durson waved his arm and set off after them.

Gordon started at the head of our own column, and I let it pass until I could fall in beside Gabrielle. I filled her in on what was happening.

“He has the interesting face, this Turkish sergeant,” she observed.

“What do you find interesting about it?”

“It betrays nothing of the man.”

Our people were already tired from a day of marching on a mountain road. Climbing a trail so steep we sometimes had to use our hands to pull us forward really wore them down. It wore me down pretty good, too, but I made an effort not to let it show.

Gabrielle finally started wilting. She’d hung in so far and shown no signs of exhaustion. Now I saw lines in her face, squinting eyes, pursed lips, and a limp increasingly favoring her injured leg—all signs that she was running on willpower and not much more. I still never heard a complaint from her, though. I helped her along, particularly through the steep stretches.

“Can’t be much farther now,” I told her.

She gave me a tired smile but didn’t say anything.

Our column straggled badly, in part because of fatigue and in part because of the pace the Bosnians set. They must have had steel springs for leg muscles. The slope grew increasingly rocky as we climbed, with ever smaller patches of grass and scrub, but ahead I saw a belt of woods, the trees smaller, more stunted than the ones we had camped in the previous night. When the scouts got there, two more Bosnian riflemen emerged from the shadows and talked to them, turned to watch us as we finished the last hundred yards.

Of course. Durson had over thirty men in his platoon, but only twenty-some at the ambush: two squads with him in the field and the third pulling security at his base camp. The guy knew his business.

I turned and looked back. It looked as if we had bled stragglers, Marines and Bavarians in ones and twos down the hillside halfway to the sharp white line of the road.

We had six or eight miles ahead of us to Kokin Brod, all of it up and down like this, probably most of it on mountain trails instead of a proper road. Our own people weren’t going to get to Kokin Brod with enough energy left to put in a spirited assault. I wondered if Gordon understood how desperately we needed Durson’s Bosnian mountaineers.

The Bosnians had camped in a clearing in the woods with a mountain spring nearby—cover, fuel for the fire, and a good source of fresh water, with open approaches from above and below which were easy to watch. The tidy and well-organized campsite provided more evidence of Durson’s competence.

The sun disappeared behind the western mountains. While our men came in, Durson and his men washed in the stream and said
Maghrib
, the sunset prayer. The prayer continued for perhaps ten minutes, the thirty-odd men bowing and rising in unison, softly chanting.

“It is beautiful in its way,” Gabrielle said. “But they do not pray in Bosnian. You know the language?”

“Arabic,” I answered, and then when they began the second
Raka’at
I translated for her.

“God is Great. In the name of God, the most Beneficent, the most Merciful. Praise be to God. Lord of the Worlds, the most Beneficent, the most Merciful, Master of the Day of Judgment, to you we worship and to you we turn in need. Show us the straight path, the path of those you have favored; not the path of those who earn your anger or who go astray.”

“Strange that they pray in Arabic,” she said.

“Catholics still pray in Latin, don’t they?”

“That is strange as well.”

By the time the last of our men straggled in and got settled, the Bosnians finished their prayers and we started cooking. By pooling our rations we managed to put together a couple pots of pretty good-smelling food. The Bosnians had dug some turnips and still had onions with them. Those and a dozen tins of British bully beef made a decent stew.

The Germans contributed
Erbswurst
, which I’d never heard of before. The
wurst
part made it sound like sausage, and that’s what it looked like at first glance, but
Erb
is German for pea. When they unrolled the wax paper–wrapped “sausage” I saw six thick, hard, yellowish tablets, not very appetizing-looking. They dumped a couple sausages’ worth of tablets in a kettle of boiling water and in a few minutes had a steaming hot pea soup. I tried it: really good, thick and salty with a hint of bacon flavor.

“
Sehr gut,”
I told the Bavarian cook, “but the Bosnians can’t have any.”

His smile disappeared, and he looked as if I’d insulted his soup.

“Bacon,” I explained. “They cannot eat pork.”

Understanding came to his face, and then he looked at the Bosnians with pity. I agreed. A world without fatty pork goodness just wouldn’t have been quite as bright or warm a place. I looked across the fire at Durson and wondered how a man from South Carolina, land of bacon and ham and pulled pork, had managed to adjust.

Beef stew, pea soup, and hard biscuit. After a long day’s march to work up an appetite, they hit the spot. But there was something else, a rich, wonderful aroma I hadn’t smelled since coming to this world, hadn’t realized how much I missed until that moment.

“Coffee?”

The Bosnians smiled and nodded, one of them pouring me a cup of the dark, rich brew. After thanking them I rejoined Gabrielle. Usually I have a little half and half in my coffee, but this evening I took it black, luxuriating in its rich, unadulterated flavor—bitter but earthy with that distinctive roasted back-taste and, in this one, a hint of caramel and something that reminded me a little of potatoes.

I shared it with Gabrielle. She held the cup between her hands and breathed in its steam, then closed her eyes and drank. As we passed the cup back and forth I felt the muscles in my back and legs finally start to loosen up. It’s strange how a stimulant can relax you under the right circumstances.

I took her empty tin plate and looked at her, saw dark shadows under sleepy eyes.

“Lie down and get some rest. If I need a Bosnian translator, I’ll find Sergeant Durson.”