Tale of

A Young Man Who Set Out in the World to Learn Fear

Even the craziest and baddest people alive have some things which they're afraid of... at least usually. It is known that what passes for bravery amongst soldiers is inevitably an ability to overcome fears and uncertainties and the terror of war. But every once in a rare while, you actually do find somebody who has no fears at all, or of any sort. A person like that is most easily thought of as being sort of like an albino; he has merely had the good or bad fortune, depending on your view of it, to be born without some common trait.

Once upon a time, very long ago and far away, amongst the captains of hundreds in Chengis Khan's army, was a young man named Mojodai, and Mojodai (Mo, to his buddies) was utterly and totally without fear of any sort.

Mo had no fear of the sorts of things which Mongols normally feared, such as lightning storms (anger amongst the Tengri), cleanliness (within limits), sobriety (Mo could go for weeks without drinking), peace (a Chinese girlfriend had taught Mo to read poetry when there were no wars to be had)...

And, being a Mongol, Mo had none of the kinds of petty fears which normally plague yuppies. Mo wasn't afraid of ring-around-the-collar (which would never show on a Mongol's clothing for reasons I won't go into). He had no fear of his underarm deodorant deserting him towards the end of a hard day at this office, or of five-o-clock shadow (Mongols' faces were ritually scarred to prevent beards growing). He didn't worry excessively about dandruff or morning breath causing girls to turn him down for dates, which would have been sort of hard for somebody being carried away on horseback in a burlap bag anyhow, when you think about it.

In sum total, Mo had no fears of any sort whatsoever, and you might think that this would be a happy set of circumstances for somebody in the line of work which Mo was in, but Chengis Khan had a funny attitude about that sort of thing. Chengis Khan figured that the very strongest and bravest of his warriers were not fit for high command, that the ordinary rank and file of his soldiers would destroy themselves trying to follow and emulate such a man; he figured that an orkhan or a large unit (tuman) commander must understand the weaknesses and needs of the average soldier.

But Chengis Khan liked Mo, and to help Mo along in his search for fear, used to assign him to all of the craziest and most frightening adventures which came up, all of the scenes of greatest barbarism and cruelty, several pyramid-of-skulls type happenings, the drag-the-tiger- out-of-the-cave event in the great hunt... you name it, but nothing had any effect. Mo always came out of it little the worse for wear with a happy-go-lucky smile across his face, as if a positive mental attitude actually could see him through anything.

Finally in desparation, Chengis Khan had Mo ride point on a manguadai unit, one of the heavily armed suicide squads which occasionally got hurled into the breach at the outset of some

Copyright 1992 Ted Holden

really big battle in which there was no time or room for the normal close support actions between Mongol horse archers and heavy cavalry. Out of a 2500 man squad, Mo was one of 17 survivors, and limped back into the debriefing that night with numerous cuts and bruises and a couple of arrow shafts still protruding from his left thigh, but otherwise unshaken and smiling the smile of one satisfied with a hard day's work, and the prospect of relaxing a bit the next day. Any normal person, even any normal Mongol, would have been shaking like the old drunk with the permanent DT's (the Foster Brooks character) on the old Dean Martin show.

"See anything that might have scared you out there?" Chengis Khan asked.

"A lot of guys got killed in that one..." replied Mo, "but nobody who wouldn't have died of old age, and it still beats the hell out of being a farmer!" Mo had been working with one of the arrow shafts in his leg as he spoke, and managed to pull it free as the thought of being a farmer crossed his lips.

"You're not worried those guys might start using poisoned arrows?" queeried Chengis Khan.

"That's what you see me eating all those snakes for!" replied Mo. "A man's got to think about things like that, kind of like planning for the future."

Chengis Khan walked off shaking his head in disbelief.

The following morning, having gotten the remaining arrow shaft out of his leg and having gotten a good night's sleep, the euphoria of surviving the manguadai charge wore off of Mo and an unwonted sullenness crept over him. "I'm doin' well enough for myself now..." thought Mo, "but unless I can figure out what all this bullshit about fear is supposed to be about, I'm never gonna make it past first louie."

That night, the horde camped in an area inhabited by a certain number of Nestorian christians and, claiming to be off for an hour or two hunting nocturnal creatures, Mo rode off to a little church they had passed an hour earlier, knelt at the crucafix, and prayed that someone or something might teach him what fear was. The archangel Michael chanced to be in the vacinity, and heard Mo's prayer.

The sky outside the little church was suffused with an eerie, pale green glow; there was a clatter as if of horses' hooves and of iron wheels on flint, and St. Michael appeared at the door the the little church in a blazing chariot, and said "Hop in, boy, My name is Mike. You an me're goin fer a ride..."

The chariot mounted switfly into the upper air. I'm takin' you on a trip into the future, boy...", said St. Michael, "Shape of things to come an all that. First thing you're gonna wanta see, prob'ly, is what happens to your own line of work, which is war... I noticed you guys had made sort of an industry of that."

The chariot came to rest at Mollwitz, Spring of 1741, in time for the battle of the same name, courtesy of Friedrich Der Grosse of Prussia and the Austrians. Mo couldn't help but notice the infantry blasting each other apart with muskets, in rows, from point blank range. "How the hell do they get volunteers for THAT?" he queried.

"Lots of drums, martial music, tight discipline, things like that..." St. Michael replied. "Freddy over there (pointing towards the king) once said if any of his men ever stopped to think about what they wre doing for ten seconds, they'd all be gone."

"That's depressing..." said Mo. "At least working for Chengis Khan was fun... sort of a challenge if you know what I mean, all the good cavalry charges and flanking maneuvers, all the archery and swordfighting and everything."

The chariot again mounted skyward. "If you thought that was something, you ain't seen nothin'." interjected St Michael. "Get a load of this!" The chariot had stopped at Okinawa, early summer of 1945, in time to watch U.S. marines attempting to storm a system of hill positions with interlocking fields of fire. The marines at first did not realize what they were dealing with, assuming they were taking isolated hills in each case. Aside from the ungodly rain of 16-inch shells and rocket fire from the American fleet, machine gun bullets, mortars, screaming meemies, and Japanese 150 mm shells were everywhere and shrapnell, bullets, bodies and body parts and blood were flying all over the place.

"Damn!" said Mo. "Now, I KNOW nobody could pay anybody else enough to take part in THAT shit... there ain't enough gold on earth!"

"You're right." replied St. Michael. "Only for idealogy or national survival would that one ever take place, and it reached a point after that one where the big powers were never willing to go at it that way anymore... only smaller types of afairs, police actions and what not... Funny thing is, right after that one, they figured out how to blow up whole cities with one bomb, and they never had the guts to fight big wars again. Hold tight, you're gonna get to see the most powerful nation of all time." Mo held on to the chariot's railing, and seconds later was descending over the South Bronx.

"You said one bomb, one city..." exclaimed Mo, "what the hell did they do, test it out on one of their own cities?"

"Heh, heh, heh, no, son; what you're seein here is logical consequences of things like rent control, welfare, HUD, and political machines over a 40 or fifty year period... other words, these are the results of this nation tryin to HELP people. You don't even want to see what it looks like when they set out to HURT somebody!"

The chariot, meanwhile, had come to ground, and Mo and St. Michael were at a red light with two other vehicles between themselves and the intersection in the South bronx, without New York tags. This hadn't gone unnoticed amongst the locals.

"Okay Mutha-FUCKUHS!!! Out the car, or whatevah' the fuck it be... you know, I ain't evah read nothin bout no chariot-jackins, not even in the bible; this might jus be a fuhst!"

Mo made a defensive gesture with his left hand, distracting the jackers' attention while his right hand went unnoticed for his sabre, but St. Michael stopped him with a hand on his wrist as the boosters made off down the road.

"Chariot's rigged to blow inside four blocks, boy, an besides, it'd just get in the way around here. I've got another one stashed for when we decide to leave... come on!" There was a deafening explosion about a minute later.

Mo was beginning to catch on to the conversations at the traffic signal: "Bad enough them kids be shootin theyselves up wif Uzis an assault rifles an all that; sound like now they got DIVE bombers. SHEE-IT! What this worl' commin to?" "Say, you two had best hurry up, that costume party up the block done already started obah an hour ago. An, Jesus Christ, YOU bettah take a BATH befo you goes, or maybe put yoself thru de car wash up de street, ah don't rightly know if a BATH would DO!

"No end of weird shit in this place, is there?" said Mo as the light turned and he and St. Michael crossed the intersection. "That woman was black from head to foot, you know, first thing Chingis Khan ever did after he took over was outlaw witchcraft."

Ain't witchcraft..." replied St. Michael, "just one of the locals."

"You said they didn't have any more big wars here..." interjected Mo, "what's all that I'm hearing up the street here?"

"Rapp music, boy! They got it in the cars now, huge bass systems, 500 watts and more, so's they have to have an extra battery in the car to run the stereo cause the regular battery can't run the ignition and the bass at the same time. You can see the cars like that pulsing as they sit at red lights... unbelievable, and not just in the cities but even out in the cornfields!"

"More like fucked up." retorted Mo. "I'd rather listen to wolves howling. We were total barbarians, and we had better music than that."

"And what was all that noise about BATHS" continued Mo. "Hell, I had a bath about three months ago... what's with these people?"

"These folks take baths once a week." Mo winced visibly on hearing this. "But that's no problem, boy..." said St. Michael. "Little lady cross the street there ought to be able to get you fixed right up."

The sign read "Madame La'Fontaine's House of the Bath", and if the typical customer didn't ordinarily go there for baths, the idea wasn't entirely out of the realm of possibility.

"YOU I've seen before." said the dark-haired girl, opening the door to the odd pair and speaking to St. Michael. "I never saw anything like your friend though... July's not gonna even wanta see him upstairs till we get him cleaned up, and it looks like we might need varsol or something."

"What in the WORLD you got all over yourself like that, mister?"

"You can call me Mo... Listen, I'm not that unusual or hard to figure out or anything, if you figure that war's the main business in my country, you could think of me as a sort of a businessman. There's usually some sort of a reason for doing things the way we do; you start getting into bow-n-arrow fights on horseback at 40 mph when it's 50 below, first thing you notice is there's an unholy chill factor n' it's hard to keep your hands limber enough to draw bowstrings. You GOTTA have grease on anything ain't covered, or you'll die in five minutes!"

The girls got Mo reasonably cleaned up, clothes washed and dried, and regreased with Crisco shortening, which they figured suited his tastes and didn't smell ridiculous.

"You know, this is New Jack city, mister, and that little bow ain't gonna do for street fightin here!" said Annie, and Tossed Mo a nine millimeter Barretta. "Here, even trade, my uncle

runs a museum, and might could use something like that! The pistol'll hold ya till ya can come up with something more serious." Mo and St. Michael paid their respects to Madame La'fontaine, and went on their way.

"You get into many bow-an-arrow fights this week?" the dark-haired girl asked the blond.

"Not THIS week, honey, been too busy with my acting lessons. Don't rightly know if I'd be able to use that thing even if I did... animal horn and wood glued together. I'm not sure if Arnold Schwarzeneggar could draw that thing."

Mo and Mike had several opportunities to use the little pistol on the way to the costume party at the Club 94, and then had to stand in line for three hours to get in. It was one of your colder waits in line, and Mike was obliged to borrow some of the Crisco shortening which Mo had lifted from the bath house. "It works more-or-less..." said Mo, "but if the guys ever saw me in corn oil they'd think I was a fag!"

"The guys who run this particular establishment wouldn't care." replied Mike.

After that, for the next several days, Mike took Mo on a tour of the various sections of New York and then on a tour of several other American cities: Flint, LA, Newark, Baltimore, D.C., and a handful of others, and a number of military bases, and finally back to a parking garage in the Bronx.

"Wild place." said Mo, "Real wild. Interesting place to visit, but the place depresses me somehow or other and I'm damned if I can put my finger on just why that is very easily. You see, the two things we always tried to achieve in Mongolia were wealth and barbarism... we used to have a saying in fact: <You can't be too rich or too barbarous!> , and that's what bothers me about this place. I mean, it's like this place was set up as some sort of a ultimate cosmic disproof of everything Mongols ever used to stand for."

"What do you mean?" queried St. Michael.

"What I mean is, that these people are the richist and most barbarous people I've ever seen or heard of, way the hell beyond where we ever got, and it hasn't brought them happiness. I don't see very many of these people smiling. You know, I really hate to say this, I always enjoyed being a barbarian, there was always a certain flair to it, something which made people take notice, but barbarism itself in this place is just a kind of a rat race. I'm not sure I wouldn't have to become a yuppie if I were to want to live here, God forbid."

"Run one thing by me again, what's this thing about taking baths once a week? I mean, I admire fanaticism as much as the next guy, but surely they don't expect someone like me to take a bath every week?"

"Most of the folks we've been seeing are barbarians." replied Mike. "Yuppies take baths once a DAY."

Mo's face turned several shades paler than was normal for Mongols, and his hair almost stood up. Aside from the notion of daily baths, he was looking at the chariot which Mike was pulling out of the storage area of the garage.

"That's a one-man chariot..." said Mo, in an uncertain sort of a tone (Mongol speech inflections were normally arrogant and cock-sure).

"So it is..." said Mike. I thought I remembered stashing a two-seater here last time I was by, guess I musta been mistaken. Tell ya what, whatever else you might think of this place, it IS the most powerful military nation that anybody ever put together, and you know Chengis Khan's gonna to want a full report and that's gonna take a while, and I have some business which'll bring me back this way in about three years... January 17, 1995 to be exact, an' I'll be sure to bring a two-man chariot. Be here!"

Mo's hands began to shake, and a cold sweat broke out over his brow.

"Come on now, man, you're kidding right? You're not gonna leave me in this place, man??? Come on now man, fun is fun but... I mean I could even deal with the traffic jams and the rapp music, an the crime, an the bank an S&L scandals, an the leveraged buyouts, an all the nerds running for office, I been shot an tortured lots before, man, but NOBODY could handle A BATH EVERY DAY, man, nobody could deal with that!!!"

"Oh, SHIT!!!!"

The eerie light faded away. The only thing which remained on the spot where the chariot had stood was a small cardboard box, with the word: "Lifebouy" on it.