The Caryatids

Time and again Sonja had walked into the hellholes where they stored the sick and dying-the dead factories, the empty schoolyards-where, at the first sight of her, a medic without any dust, the moaning, sobbing crowds fell silent…

In the midst of the filthiest inferno, there were people and things and actions and thoughts that were not of that inferno. They were beyond the grip of hell.

The people could never leave hell with bullets. They needed a figure shining and white and clean who would hold out her two compassionate hands and pour fresh cleaning water on their split and aching faces. Despair was killing them faster than any physical threat.

It was they, not she, who had begun hanging magic charms on her-the knickknacks they'd been clutching in their desperate hope of redemption. She looked different, she was different, and they were hanging meaning on her.

They needed to hope in order to live, and for a dying public, a public image brought hope. A radiance that might come to them, bearing a handheld lamp: radiance to the bedside of the sufferer at the midnight of the human soul. There to wash the filth from their suffering feet.

Hope would cure when all other methods failed, when other treatments weren't even noticed. True anguish, the killing kind of despair, could only be relieved by ritual…If the sky turned black and the air was brown, an armed general could reason and bluster and bribe and threaten-not a soul would stir, even to save their own lives. An emotionally damaged teenage girl could drift by, in spotless white, dangling superstitions and jabbering lines of poetry, and they would rise as one and they would follow.

At this point in her life, Sonja found it hard to believe that she had done those things. But she had done them. Repeatedly. Spontaneously, tirelessly, in inspired trances, drawing strength from the light she saw in others. Extreme times pulled strange qualities from people. There were times when it helped a great deal to know that one was not entirely human.

Some men called her crazy-her second husband, and her third, in particular-but they were merely putting their own madness into better order by piling accusations on her. Because if Red Sonja was the crazy one, why were they all dead?

The Angel of Harbin had the gift of giving. Those who took it in the proper spirit, lived. The others…men, mostly…

From time immemorial, when a soldier left a battlefield, his body racked, his nerves shattered, for "rest and relaxation"…"Rest and relaxation" were the last things on any man's mind: any soldier fresh from battle immediately sought out a woman. If she merely opened her legs for him-if she said and she did nothing else whatsoever, if she asked him no questions, if she didn't even speak his language-all the better for him…

The Badaulet still had no horse. Sonja knew this as a failing on her part. There should have been a horse in George's shipment. But George, who was no poet, did not care to ship live animals in a helicopter, so Sonja could supply only a rough equivalent: a clumsy and graceless off-road pack robot.

She examined the robot with sorrow. When the crumbling Great Wall had been a vivid, living Chinese enterprise-for in its dynastic heyday, the Great Wall of China was no passive barrier, it had also been a highway, an imperial mail route, and the world's fastest visual telegraph-any Chinese bride would have endowed her warlord with a horse.

A world-famous "blood-sweating horse." Sonja had seen gorgeous T'ang dynasty pottery of those horses, and Chinese bronzes as well, with stallions as the emblems of Chinese state power at its most confident, serene, and globally minded. Superior Chinese war ponies, earth-pounding, indomitable, fit to run straight to Persia with wind-streaming manes and dainty hooves like swallows, surely the most beautiful horses that civilization had ever offered to barbarism.

Instead, she had this lousy robot. Hauled from its plastic mounts on the copter wall, the ungainly device mulishly escaped control and scampered straight up the harsh slopes of a nearby hillside. Sonja hated the robot instantly. She knew that it was bound to be a grievance.

The pack robot was as ugly as a dented bucket. It featured four eerily independent legs. Each leg swiveled from a corner of its cheap and brutally durable chassis.

Since it was not a beautiful male animal like a Chinese T'ang dynasty stallion, the robot did not trot with any dark animal grace. Instead, it moved by detailed computer analysis-as if it were playing high-speed chess with the surface of the Earth.

This meant that, on a cracked, eroded, thirty-degree slope of bitterly eroded Gobi Desert rock, a slope that would break the hairy legs of the toughest Mongol ponies and require rope and pitons from any human being, the robot scuttled along like a cockroach. Ever untiring, unknowing of anything like pain, the robot flicked out its horrid, metallically springy, devilishly hoofed legs, and it flung itself hither and yon, leaping from the minutest little purchases-tiny pebbles, invisible niches in boulders. It shot up and down treacherous hillsides like a thunderbolt.

The Badaulet was the picture of satisfaction. "I love you very much."

"You don't mind my very ugly, very stupid robot?"

"No," the Badaulet insisted, "I truly love you now. No man I know has such a clever wife as you. I had expected us to die quickly riding the Silk Road, for the planes drop many land mines there, and the mines have eyes and ears and they are clever. But with this mount, we will cross the desert on a magic carpet. We will surround ourselves with our own land mines to kill anyone who dares to bothers us. Each night I will sleep beneath the stars in your warm and tender arms!"

The scampering pack robot knew no difference between day or night; it could «see» by starlight as well as it «saw» anything at all. Its greatest single drawback, among many, was that it blindly trusted the latest data downloaded into it about the conditions on the ground. This meant that, despite its nasty genius at knuckle-walking the uneven landscape, it had a distressing tendency to pitch into unseen arroyos and ramble off unmapped cliffs.

Worse yet, unlike horses or camels, the robot had no natural rhythm in its gait. So that, when they crouched within the thing's bucketlike cargo hold, its hurrying tread felt like one endless, sickening set of panic stumbles.

To endure the numbing hours of travel, Sonja wrapped herself in a riding cloak. The heavy cloak grew steadily heavier with the passing hours, for it was an air distillery. Its fibers were sewn through with crystalline salts, which chemically sucked humidity from the desert breezes.

When the Badaulet scolded her for guzzling at his canteen, she stripped off her dark cloak, gave it one expert caressing twist, and clean water gushed down both her wrists in torrents.

A curdled look of astonishment and disbelief and even rage crossed her husband's face. The Badaulet had always suffered badly for his water. Water had been the cause of bitter discipline to him. The loss of water meant certain death…Yet here in this simple stupid rug, this plain womanly thing from off her back-she had only to twist it, and all his suffering was elided, erased, made senseless and irrelevant.

"My cloak is yours," she told him quickly.

He grumpily threw her magic cloak across his own back, but he hated her for that.

"You must wear this," he said at length, "for it grows heavy."

"No, dear husband, it's for you. It is sturdy, it will last for years."

"You wear this," he commanded. "In those foolish white robes you could easily be shot."

She obeyed him and put on the cloak, for she knew she had given offense. They were entering hills, unkindly hills like ragged black boulder piles, but the hills caught falling water and where there was water there was grass.