The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (13 page)

“I’m fine,” Meryem insisted.

Ever since they had begun their never-ending trek back and forth across the wide steppe she had been afraid that she would not be strong or committed enough to cope with the rough conditions—afraid that she was a weak girl. She did not want to disappoint Daryn or slow him down. Because she was a woman, she had to push herself to keep up. A man lesser than Daryn might not be blamable for being weak like she could, and she didn’t want him to think that he couldn’t rely on her.

She wiped her chin to get rid of the saliva. Even though she had been retching, nothing but drool had come out
, which was a relief in one sense but worrying in another since she didn’t understand what the retching came from. Since shortly after they had set out for Verniy a couple days back she had been feeling sick, and she figured that was just a passing cold. But what if it wasn’t? The nausea came and went, and it was not like an ordinary illness where you felt progressively worse over a couple of days before becoming progressively better again. Usually the obnoxious sick feeling was over by the time they got up in the saddle and continued, but today was worse than yesterday. It had been almost five days—they had lost two full days because of a storm that had kept them from traveling—since they left to get to the big city.

“Are you sure?” Dary
n asked right before he lit a cigarette.

Meryem
had looked pale and tired for some time, and he was worried about her. The initial worry of bringing her along had been dispelled when she had proven capable to take care of herself and her needs. After all, they had been living like this for the past almost two years, and in that time she had proved herself quite resilient. For someone that had been brought up as relatively sheltered as her, she seemed to have prepared for this long time spent living so simply.

Daryn had to conserve the
Russian money Major Ueno had given him and save as much as possible for future expenses. The government was a bit stingy, but with all that had happened since the war began it was understandable that they would not fund a life of oriental luxury in Russia when presumably the whole nation was preparing for the largest military showdown that Japan had ever taken part in. The money had to last, and they had to keep living as frugally as possible.

“Yes, I’m fine,”
Meryem lied as she took a drink of water from her canteen.

The sudden retch made it feel like it would all come up again, but it stayed down with only the nasty taste of acid
coming up in the back of her throat.

“Are you scared?” he asked.

Daryn had been worried that the scheme to get into the big city was what had made her appear so sickly all of a sudden. As far as he could tell, there was a correlation between her sickness and the hatching of the plot to get into Verniy.

“I’m fine,” she muttered, annoye
d that he used that ugly word.

Meryem
might just be a weak girl, but she wasn’t scared. At least she hoped she wasn’t. And even if she was he shouldn’t talk about that. If she would die, then she would die and if she would live, then she would live. It was all in God’s hands, and there was no use fretting.

“We should get going.”

Daryn pushed himself up from the ground and started to pack up the bedding. It was already hours past dawn, and Verniy was still probably about two days away. After riding around these parts for so long, he had become as intimately familiar with the place as you could hope to be as an outsider. Verniy was by far the largest Kazakh city, and he had visited it before the war. The large factories, churches, the city theater, and the spectacular palace of the governor reflected the power of Russia, but there was a large Kazakh population that followed its own way of living on the fringes around the Russian city center. The mix of wood, clay, and traditional yurts was a stark contrast to the otherwise ordinary Russian city. Except for the rustic slums containing much of the sizeable Kazakh majority it was not very different from cities like Tsaritsyn or Tula in Europe, and Daryn was conflicted about which of the two worlds was the superior one. Perhaps he had spent too much time in Russia to see their deficiencies properly.

The city
had been a military outpost and small town up until the Russian settlers came to build it up around the turn of the century, and the people from the steppe had escaped their unsustainable lives to look for work and wages there and had added to the transformation of the place into a proper city. In that regard it was not very different from most other cities, except that like the rest of Turkestan, Kazakhia suffered under a series of edicts that proscribed all sorts of things related to “savagery.” Even Jews and Germans were treated better than the native people in the eyes of the law, and during his short stay in the city prior to the war he had been ashamed to see how the white devils wielded their power so far from their homeland. After all, they had conquered this land not that long ago, and they had imposed their will on the local peoples so effectively and some tribes had escaped to the mountainous, Tajik regions of Japan which had created a whole world of trouble with some rather bloody fighting between Kyrgyz tribes and Tajiks.

The border to the south
between Shinkyou and Russia was a matter of historical accident. The men who had hammered out the demarcation decades ago had been diplomats from Edo, Petersburg, and London who had hardly been aware that anyone even lived in the largely unmapped and undiscovered homelands of the mountain dwelling people living on the fringes between British India, Persia, Russia, and western Japan. Between Punjab Province and western Shinkyou, the Emirate of Afghanistan—the land of the Pashtuns—had been established as an independent kingdom while most of the rest of the world east of Persia was either under British domination or had been joined to Japan with Punjab Province and western Shinkyou being the most recent additions to the Japanese provinces except for the Alaskan Settlement Treaty of 1888 that had resolved the dispute over the border between Alaska and British Canada in a straight line along the 120th meridian.

Shinkyou extended south of
the Russian border city of Bishkek and down south of the Fergana Valley to a growing city named Dushanbe that had been the capital of the short-lived Persian Governorate that had been subsumed into Shinkyou years ago. It was one of the few cities the Russian warplanes had been bombing throughout the fall during the bitter mountain war when they had briefly taken to bomb Japan. Most Russian bombers were serving in the West, so the air war in Asia was mostly a matter of reconnaissance. Both sides had undertaken bomb raids, but nothing like what was going on in Europe according to the news they had heard through the Russian press. The war in Asia was fought primarily in the western Tenshan Mountains where Japanese mountaineers were slowly pushing out their Russian enemies from the border area between Russia and Japan south of Samarkand and through long cavalry operations against small Russian settlements in desolate Yakutia.

Packing up the skins and the leftover breakfast went quickly and they were on the move again.
Meryem sat quiet in her saddle which was unusual when they were out on the steppe. Most of the time when they were out riding in the middle of the open expanses she would sing to pass the time. Whatever one might say about her, Daryn could at least brag about his wife’s singing voice. She had a knack for picking up songs along the way and sing them. The songs she knew from home were the kind she couldn’t ride around and sing in Russia. As unlikely as it might be that anyone would hear her, it would be rather compromising if someone would hear when she sang Japanese folk songs she had learned in school. Thus she had to pay attention to the songs sung in her home tongue rather than her school tongue and memorize them. While they were very different from the songs she knew from Tekika, she did her best to get a hang of anything she happened to hear when they stopped by in small nomadic villages and settlements.

The rhythm and style was very different from the songs she had learned in school, some of the songs being long stories of ancient heroes and the stories of the people’s long unwritten histories
, or just songs about mundane things. Her long internal registry of songs that she had picked up made her wonder why she had never gotten to learn them before and only over the past year or so had acquired songs in Kazakh. Mom had never been a singer, and the songs that Meryem had picked up in her childhood were almost exclusively in Japanese from school. At some times she wasn’t even sure which of the two was her natural language since she had them both inside her head at all times. When she found herself thinking in Japanese she felt that she was really an integral part of the nation of Great Chuuka, and when she thought in Kazakh she wasn’t so sure.

If her father would have been here he would have
said that those things were too complicated for her to understand, but she still wanted to understand the relationship between herself, the little tribal peoples, and Great Chuuka despite her limitations. It was unfair that her brothers and father were supposed to “understand” complex and important things while she just wasn’t. After six years of formal schooling she supposedly knew everything she needed to as an educated adult, yet she had still never understood why the world was the way it was, or where in the world hierarchies she should be. She didn’t want to be an antisocial tribalist, but what Daryn was telling the Russian Kazakhs sounded an awful lot like evil tribalism—although perhaps the king in Russia was not a legal ruler with an absolute mandate like the Emperor.

Daryn seemed to know so much more, and he wasn’t that many years older than her. She was already eighteen
this year, and it didn’t seem likely that she would be wiser next year or the year after that when she would pass the legal majority. She wasn’t sure what she was, but the more she heard Daryn speak about a “Kazakh Nation” she became more and more confused. She was undoubtedly part of it—whatever
it
was—and if it was the way Daryn described it, then she thought that her idea of the world would have to be revised. She had always been different from most people in Tekika. Her father had a good salary from the government and like any normal household they had a shrine where they could make sacrifices to the Present Emperor and the Imperial Ancestors, and in the large living room there was a prominent framed picture of the Reigning Majesty on the wall too. But at the same time, Mother did not speak Japanese well at all, and she mostly spoke her birth language. The “Mom language” that Meryem had grown up with was completely foreign to the language people spoke in school. In school the children were only supposed to speak Japanese, and no one in her neighborhood was exactly like her since their parents did not speak odd languages. For some years she had thought that her family had its own special language that no one else spoke, and only when she was a very young teenager did she understand that it was a language with a slightly larger circle of speakers than that.

Daryn almost felt like he should
pray, if for no other reason than to please Meryem. As far as he knew, prayer was just a waste of time and effort, unless perhaps it was to the ancestors. Daryn had heard a lot of his superiors and sempai at the academy make the rather apparent claim that there was no God, and he didn’t look back fondly on the hazing that had included his forced public apostasy by older students who had assumed that he was a dirty Mohammedan. If there was a God, surely he would not take too kindly to Daryn announcing that he wanted to rape the Great Prophet just in order to please the sadistic senior students. Yet as he saw Meryem so pale, listless, and nauseous he very much liked to think that there was something out there that would care to lighten her up a bit. Sending a petition to His Imperial Majesty would be a laughable thing to do, and it was impossible to even get it to Kyoto from where they were now. As much as he knew the Emperor existed, He was not that kind of god. He was perhaps an avatar of some kind, but He did not have the magical power to remove a cough, sneeze, or illness. That was the work of nature, whatever that even meant. Daryn couldn’t imagine ever joining the millions of people who would write humble petitions to the Emperor and ask for supernatural intervention into relatives’ health or social affairs. Somehow he doubted the Emperor would make Meryem feel better even if Daryn would send the nicest, most humble petition to the Palace.

H
er silence made Daryn feel like something was missing, and when he looked over at her she didn’t even bother to look back. She was just staring in front of her. Her sickness made the quiet journey one of emptiness compared to the musical kind he had come to expect. He waited for her to strike up a tune, but none came. When they would reach the city she could have time to rest up, but he felt like he was pushing her.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Meryem mumbled, just nodding faintly.

Am I dying?

She had no idea why she felt like throwing up, why all food tasted like solid sick, or why she felt so listless and tired. She just wanted to go to bed, but her discipline kept her from even mentioning the devilish nausea that would strike at her from a clear blue sky. It acted like a Russian, unconcerned by honor and it would sneak up on her when she least wanted it. She had thrown up, but for the most part it would just be dry, horrible retching leaving strands of saliva on her chin. And it made Daryn think she was scared. Scared! She had told him before; if God wanted her dead, then she would die. It had nothing to do with what she wanted. She didn’t fear anything. Well, maybe loneliness, but that was hardly a big problem for her now. She was together with Daryn and she even had a revolver under her jacket in case she would ever feel threatened.
God willing
she would send any nasty devil to hell with it.