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Drakas!

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Custer Under the Baobab

Hewn in Pieces For the Lord

WRITTEN BY THE WIND A Story of the Draka

THE TRADESMEN

The Big Lie

The Greatest Danger

Home is Where the Heart Is

The Last Word

A Walk in the Park

Hunting the Snark

UPON THEIR BACKS, TO BITE 'EM

The Peaceable Kingdom

DRAKAS!

EDITED BY S.M. STIRLING

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-671-31946-9

Cover art by Stephen Hickman

First printing, November 2000

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press: Consulting & Editorial Services

Printed in the United States of America

INTRODUCTION

To coin a phrase, the 20thcentury has been the best of times, and the worst of times; the century when

smallpox was abolished and the century when a new word, "genocide," entered the lexicon of politics. It

started with the serene confidence of the Edwardian Enlightenment at the end of a century free of great

international wars, when reason and progress seemed to be rolling forward on a broad invincible front.

Then it took a wrong turning in the slaughters of Passchendale and Verdun, descended into the abyss of

Stalingrad, Nanking, Buchenwald and the Gulag. Even the motor of progress, science, turned out to have

some very nasty exhaust. For fifty years we hovered on the brink of annihilation, forced to threaten the

survival of civilization, if not humanity, to hold totalitarianism in check.

And then, all at once, things got better . . .

Anyone who studies history eventually runs across a little jingle that goes:

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;

For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;

For want of a horse, the message was lost;

For want of the message, the battle was lost;

For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost—

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail!

What's more, you come to appreciate the essential truth of it. There are broad, impersonal forces at

work in history; if Christopher Columbus had died as a child—most children did, in his age—someone

else would have discovered the Atlantic crossing soon enough. Basque fishermen may well have crossed

to Newfoundland before him; an English expedition set out to America a few years after; the Portugese

blundered into Brazil on their way to India (it makes sense, in sailing-ship terms) a few years after that.

The knowledge was there, and the ships, and the civilization that produced them, a strong hungry people

ready to burst out upon the world. And so we live in the world the West Europeans made, built on

foundations laid by the empires of sailing ships and muskets.

But oh, how the details would be different if it had not been Columbus, but another man a few years

later! And how those changes might have rippled on, growing through the years.

So a thought came to me; suppose everything had turned out as badly as possible, these last few

centuries. Great changes make possible great good and great evil. The outpouring of the Europeans

produced plenty of both.

The great free colonies of North America were perhaps the best, for it was here that the great

18th-century upsurge of popular government began, and here the power that broke the totalitarians was

founded. My friend Harry Turtledove has imagined a world in which America broke apart in its Civil

War, and no strong United States was ready to come to the aid of the beleaguered Allies against the

Central European aggressors.

Imagine a change even more fundamental. Perhaps the worst product of the great wave of European

expansion, before this century of ours, was the South Atlantic system of slaves and plantations.

Eventually it faded away—or was blown away by the cannon of Grant and Sherman, although we still

feel the aftereffects.

What, though, if a fragment of that system had fallen on fertile ground, and grown? Say that the potential

of South Africa, so neglected by its Dutch overlords, had fallen prey to it . . . a base for that deadly seed

to grow, unchecked by free neighbors, until it was too strong to stop. An Anti-America, representing all

the distilled negatives of Western civilization.

From that thought was born the alternate history of the Domination of the Draka. I've chronicled the rise

and transformation of that dystopia in four novels.

But a world can be a playground big enough for more than one imagination to run in. Here are stories

others have set in that anti-history, a funhouse mirror held up to our own.

Custer Under

the Baobab

William Sanders

William Sanders is a Cherokee; maybe that has something to do with the sardonic irony in the eye he

trains on history. Maybe not; how could anyone doubt all is for the best in the train of events that

produced we our glorious selves?

Will has produced science fiction and fantasy stories—many of them alternate history—highly regarded

by the critics and by his peers. His novels Journey to Fusang , The Wild Blue and the Gray , and latest

The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan have shown a wild inventiveness worthy of

Jonathan Swift, plus an encyclopedic knowledge of history, and a combination of high literary skill and

crazed, gonzo abandon that could only have been born on this continent.

Herein we have a George Armstrong Custer who escapes the arrows of the Sioux, only to find that even

in another history and on another continent, some things never change . . .

The baobab tree is one of the world's most remarkable vegetable productions. Its soft, swollen-looking

trunk may be as much as twenty or thirty feet in diameter; its grotesquely spindly limbs may reach up to

two hundred feet toward the African sky.

Anywhere it grows, the baobab is an impressive sight. On the great dead-flat plain of the Kalahari

Desert, where the land stretches empty to the horizon and even a cluster of stunted acacia trees is a

major visual event, a lone baobab can dominate the entire landscape.

This particular baobab is of no more than average size, but it is still the biggest thing in view in any

direction. Beneath its spreading branches, just now, are four men. Three are dead.

The fourth man sits on the ground, his back against the sagging folds of the baobab's thin bark. A lean,

long-limbed, long-faced white man, dressed in dusty brown near-rags barely recognizable as having once

been a smart military uniform; thinning yellow hair straggles from beneath the broad-brimmed hat that

shades his face. His right hand lies on his lap, next to a heavy revolver.

Centurion George Armstrong Custer, of the Kalahari Mounted Police (former Brevet Major General,

United States Cavalry), licks his dry cracked lips. "Libbie," he says, barely aloud, his words no more

than a whisper lost in the whine of the wind through the baobab's branches, "Libbie, is this what it all

comes to?"

* * *

"I don't know, Custer," the Commandant said, ten days ago. (Wasn't it? Custer realizes he is not sure.)

"A man of your rank and experience, leading a minor patrol like this? Pretty silly, isn't it?"

"Possibly, sir." Custer stood at attention before the Commandant's desk, face expressionless, classic

West Point from crown to boot soles. Not that these Drakians demanded much in the way of military

formality—and the Mounted Police weren't even a military organization, even if they did like to put on

airs and give themselves fancy titles of rank—but it was, Custer had found, a subtle but effective way to

bully Cohortarch Heimbach.

"I need you here," Heimbach continued. "Things to be done, paperwork piled up. Don't stand like that,

Centurion," he added peevishly. "This isn't your American army."

"No, sir," Custer said tonelessly, not shifting a hair, keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead above the

Commandant's balding head, exchanging stares with the portrait of Queen Victoria that hung on the

mud-brick wall. Cohortarch Heimbach was one of the handful of conservatives who still insisted on the

fiction of Drakia's membership in the British Empire.

"Things to be done right here," Heimbach repeated. "Instead you want to ride off chasing Bushmen.

Tetrarch Leblanc could use the experience, and he's eager to go."

Custer didn't reply. After a moment Heimbach blew out his breath in a long loud sigh. "Oh, all right—"

He fumbled in his desk drawer and got out a short-stemmed pipe and a pouch of tobacco. "Actually," he

said, thumbing tobacco into the bowl, "this is a bit more than a normal patrol. Seems our little friends, out

there, have gone very much too far this time."

Custer waited silently as he lit up. "Two days ago," Heimbach went on after a moment, blowing clouds

of foul-smelling blue smoke, "a bunch of Bushmen raided a cattle ranch in the Ghanzi area. Usual sort of

thing—cut a cow out from the herd, killed it and butchered it on the spot, you know."

Custer knew. The Bushmen were constantly bringing trouble on themselves with their addiction to

cattle-rustling. Of course, living as they did on the edge of bare subsistence, they must find the scrawny

Kaffir cattle irresistible targets.

"This time," the Commandant said grimly, "things got out of hand. The rancher happened to show up as

they were cutting up the kill. He shot one of them. The others scattered into the bush—but when the

damned fool dismounted, one of them put a poisoned arrow into his back."

"Good God," Custer said involuntarily. "They killed a white man?" That was unheard-of; Bushmen were

a nuisance but seldom actively dangerous.

Heimbach was nodding. "And so they have to be taught a lesson. Orders from the top, on this morning's

wire."

He pointed the pipe stem at Custer, like a pistol. "Which is why I'm not altogether unhappy to let you

take this one, Centurion. Some important people want this done right."

Cohortarch Heimbach got up from his desk and went over and stood looking out the glassless front

window. Out on the parade ground, an eight-man lochus stood in a single uneven rank, while a big

red-faced NCO inspected their rifles. He didn't look happy. Of course sergeants—decurions, Custer

corrected himself, damn these people with their classical pretensions—rarely did. Beyond, past the high

barbed-wire fence that ringed the little post, the Kalahari shimmered in the midday sun.

"So I'm giving you your wish," the Commandant said, not looking around. "Take the Second Lochus

from Leblanc's tetrarchy—that's Decurion Shaw's lot, he's a good man—and of course Boss and his

trackers. Ride up to the ranch, pick up the trail, and go after the culprits. You know what to do when

you find them."

"Yes, sir." Custer went wooden-faced again. He did know.

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