The Stone Dogs by S.M. Stirling Read Free Book Online Page A

before the Great War. Which, difficult as it may be to imagine, infants, I can remember." Muffled laughter, and the screens showed Africa alone in black, with outliers in Crete and Cyprus and Ceylon. "Ten-year intervals back to the beginning." The dark tide receded, from the western bulge of the continent and from the interior. 1800, and Egypt went pale. Two decades more, and there was nothing but a tiny black spot around Cape Town in the extreme south.

    Yolande stirred uneasily at the sight. The sequence was familiar, but showing it in reverse was not. Usually the maps started with the tiny speck, and then it flowed irresistably forward. Doing it this way seemed vaguely… improper, somehow.
    She glanced at the servant, who was sitting on her heels by the side of the desk, hands folded neatly in her lap and eyes cast down. A wench in her twenties, blond and with a Germanic-looking pallor, very pretty—what Pa would call a hundred-auric item—with the serf-number standing out orange beneath her ear.
    I wonder what she thinks of the course , the Draka girl thought suddenly. The wench must have heard it dozens of times . Some people said serfs didn't think at all, except about things like food and sex and their work, but that wasn't true. Serf children played quite freely with the offspring of the Great House when they were young, and Yolande had learned all their gossip; the stories, whose mother yelled and hit, and whose father drank too much smuggled grappa . Deng thought a lot, he was really smart even if he wasn't very talkative. Rakhsan, Mother's Afghan maidservant, she could tell you things about times way back before the War. It was the older fieldhands who kept so quiet, never speaking unless you asked them something, the ones old enough to remember the War and the times right after it, the purges and the camps.
    "… Sure yo're quite familiar with it," the teacher was saying.
    "What I'm goin' to teach is the realities beneath it. Question: how did we get from that ,"—she moved her head toward the screen—"to this ." A hand indicated the school.
    Myfwany raised her palm. "We won, Miz Harris," she said, and there was another muffled giggle.
    Harris smiled herself, and reached into the folds of her gown for a gunmetal cigarette case. "Pardon the bad example," she said sardonically at their round-eyed stares. Draka of their generation did not often smoke, at least not tobacco.
    "I was raised befo' we knew it was bad for yo'. Yes, Myiwany, we won. But war isn't the explanation, it's the result. We're a warrior people, and our weakness is that we tend to think too much of battles and not enough of the things which lead up to victory. There are problems that don't yield to the butchershop logic of the sword. Yo' can say a man dies because his heart stops, but it doesn't explain . We need to know the why ."
    She turned slightly, leaning back against the desk and cupping her right elbow in the left hand. "School is trainin', and not just to fight."
    "Yo', girl." She pointed at Mandy. "How many Draka are there?"
    The tall girl started. "Hum, ah, sixty million? Roughly." Under her breath: "I hope. Moo."
    "Fifty-eight million, nine hundred and twenty thousand-odd.
    How many serfs?"
    "Lots, ah, a billion and a half?"
    "Correct. So we're about three percent of the total; that's not countin' the billion or so wild ones in the Alliance countries. It's not enough to be strong an' fierce, good fighters. Necessary, but not enough; to use the old cliche', we aren't a numerous people and nobody loves us. We have serfs enough in the Janissary legions for brute force, to carry rifles and die. Yo' are Citizens, and need to be able to think ."
    A meditative puff. "History is process; like dancin', or an avalanche. Sometimes it's… too ponderous to move, just grinds on regardless. Sometimes it balances delicately, and a minor push can turn it. Other times, yo' can turn even a pretty heavy movement with a small force by findin' the right