Dzikohses and his guerrillas left; the fliers and Ilmika Thorrsstein were escorted from the house by the soldiers. Again, they marched by night and slept as well as they could during the day. Apparently, the enemy had overrun this area but did not have a tight control as yet. The party avoided all Perkunishan patrols but could not get away from the swarms of huge mosquitoes. All were forced to apply a thick coating of the stinking grease every day.
Two days after they had separated from the guerrillas, O’Brien began to suffer from chills, fever, and sweating. Two Hawks thought the sergeant had malaria. The medico with the troops confirmed his diagnosis.
“For God’s sake, don’t they have any quinine?” O’Brien said. “You’d think that in a country where they have malaria, they’d...”
“There isn’t any,” Two Hawks said. “It was unknown on our Earth until after South America was discovered. So...”
“What’d they do before Columbus? They must’ve had something!”
“I don’t know. Whatever they had, it wasn’t very effective.”
He did not tell O’Brien that malaria had been a great killer in the Mediterranean region of their Earth. In fact, it still took a large annual toll. He was worried, not only for O’Brien but for himself.
The malaria parasite could kill a man if he got no medical aid, especially since the parasite of this world might be even more deadly than those of his.
The soldiers made a rude stretcher from two branches and a blanket. The sergeant was placed on it; Two Hawks took one end of the stretcher and a soldier the other. The troops relieved each other at fifteen-minute intervals, but Two Hawks had to stay at his task until his hands could lock themselves around the branches no more, his legs were like stone, and his back felt as if it would unhinge at the next step.
The medico gave O’Brien water and two large pills, one red, one green, every hour. Whatever the ingredients, they had little effect. O’Brien continued to chill, burn, and sweat in turn for four hours. Then the attacks ceased, as could be expected. Although he was weak, he was forced to rise and walk, with Two Hawks supporting him. The officer made it plain that he wanted no lagging. Two Hawks urged O’Brien to keep going. The officer would have no compunctions about killing a possible spy who was holding them up. His main concern evidently was in getting the Blodland woman through the enemy and to the capital city.
After four days of travel, during which O’Brien became sicker and weaker, they came to their first village. They walked during the daytime hours the last 12 hours. The enemy must not have advanced very near to this point. Here Two Hawks saw the first railroad and locomotive. The locomotive looked like an engine circa 1890, except that the huge smokestack was shaped like a demon’s face. The cars of the train were painted scarlet and covered with good luck signs, including the swastika.
The village was the terminus for the line. Thirty houses and stores were parallel with both sides of the tracks. Two Hawks gazed curiously at the houses and the people who ran out to greet them. The buildings reminded him of the false-fronted structures seen in Western movies. However, each had a wooden and brightly painted carving of a tutelary spirit in front of it and also one like a ship’s figurehead near the top of the false front. The men wore heavy boots and shirts of cloth or cowhide or deerskin. The shirts hung outside their belts. The women wore bead-fringed, low-cut blouses of cloth and ankle-length skirts. Small stone carvings or sea shells were sewn in various patterns on the skirts. Both sexes had long hair falling to the shoulders; the German-helmet haircuts of the guerrillas and the soldiers, Two Hawks thought, must be military requirements.
There were a few old men and women, all of whose faces and hands were tattooed in blue and red. He supposed that this skin decoration had been a universal custom among the Hotinohsonih. Something, possibly the influence of the white West European nations, had caused the tattooing to die out.
The officer politely asked the Thorrsstein woman to step aboard a passenger car. He was not so polite to the two Americans. He shouted at them to go three cars back. Two Hawks pretended not to understand, since he did not want his captors to know he was gaining fluency in their tongue. Some soldiers shoved the two toward the car. Two Hawks, assisting the chattering shaking sergeant, went up the steps and into the mobile prison.
The car was bare of furniture and crowded with wounded soldiers. Two Hawks found a place for O’Brien to stretch out on the wooden floor. Then he looked for water for O’Brien, but discovered that it was available only in the next car. A man with an arm in a bloody sling and a bloody bandage around his head accompanied Two Hawks. The wounded man held a long knife in his good hand and promised to cut Two Hawks’ throat if he so much as looked like he meant to escape. He did not leave the side of the prisoners during the rest of the long trip to ‘Estokwa.
This took five days and nights. Many times, the train was shifted to a sidetrack to allow trains loaded with soldiers to pass westwards. During one day, nobody in the hospital car had water.
O’Brien almost died that day. But the train finally stopped near a creek, and the bottles and canteens were refilled.
The car was jammed, hot, noisy, and malodorous. A man with a badly gangrened leg lay next to the sergeant. His stench was so nauseating that Two Hawks could not eat. The third day, the soldier died and was buried four hours later in the woods near the tracks while the locomotive puffed impatiently on a spur.
Surprisingly, O’Brien improved. By the time they got to ‘Estokwa, the fever, chill, and sweating were gone. He was pale, weak, and gaunt, but he had beaten his sickness. Two Hawks did not know whether the recovery was due to the Irishman’s basic toughness, the pills which the medico had continued to dose him with, or a combination of the two. It was also possible that he had been afflicted with something besides malaria. It did not matter; he had health again, even if only a precarious one.
6
The night the train arrived in ‘Estokwa, a rainstorm was lashing the city. Two Hawks could see nothing through the windows except lightning flashes, nor was he allowed to get a better look after being escorted off the car. His eyes were bound, his hands tied behind him, and he was taken through the rain to a wagon. He knew it was enclosed because he could hear the water fall on the roof, and his back was up against a wall. He sat on a bench on one side of the cabin and O’Brien, also blindfolded, sat on the other.
“Where do you think they’re taking us, lieutenant?”
O’Brien sounded weak and nervous. Two Hawks replied that he did not know. Privately, he supposed that they were being taken to an interrogation station. He hoped fervently that civilization had softened the old Iroquois methods of dealing with prisoners. Not that being “civilized” necessarily meant that subtle or brutal torture was out of consideration. Look at the “civilized” Germans of his own world. Look at the Russians. Look at the Chinese. Look at the American whites in their dealings with the red man. Look at anybody, preliterate or civilized.
After an estimated fifteen minutes of travel, the wagon stopped. O’Brien and Two Hawks were roughly helped down. Ropes were put around their necks, and they were led up a long flight of steps, down a long hall, down another, then down a curving staircase. Two Hawks said nothing; O’Brien cursed. Abruptly, they were halted. A door swung open on squeaky iron hinges; they were pushed through a doorway. Again halted, they stood in silence for a while. Their blindfolds were removed, and they were blinking at the bright illumination of an electric lamp.