THE WINGED BARBARIANS AND THE WINGLESS
WONDERS
Only three humans survived
the wreck of that spaceship on the little known planet of Diomedes. One was
the beautiful ruler of a distant colonial world; another was the fat, slovenly
owner of a great Solar trading company; the third was a handsome, blue-eyed
engineer.
The survivors had food for
only six weeks, for the native food was one hundred percent poisonous to
people. So in that limited amount of time they had to gain the trust of the
winged barbarians who held them prisoners, end the
terrible war that these Diomedians were engaged in, and persuade the wing-men
to carry the three across the thousands of miles of unmapped territory to the
single Earth spaceport.
Their desperate efforts to beat that fatal deadline makes WAR OF THE
WING-MEN one of Poul Anderson's most exciting novels.
CAST
OF CHARACTERS
Eric Wace
He
handled machines much better than he did people.
Sandra Tamarin
She ruled her heart with her head.
Nicholas van Rijn
Blustering,
joking and politicking were his idea of hard work.
Rodnis sa Axollon
Her great love saved her people.
Delp hyr Orikan
This winged general was almost human.
T'heonax
hyr Urnan
His fear destroyed him.
WAR OF THE WING-MEN
by
POUL
ANDERSON
ACE
BOOKS, INC. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.
war
of the wing-men
Copyright
©, 1958, by Ace Books, Inc.
All
Rights Reserved
Magazine version copyright, 1958, by Street
& Smith Publications, Inc.
To
John W. Campbell, Jr. with thanks
Grand Admiral, Syranax hyr Uman, hereditary Commander in
Chief of the Fleet of DrakTio, Fisher of the Western Seas, Leader in Sacrifice,
and Oracle of the Lodestar, spread his wings and brought them together again in
an astonished thunderclap. For a moment, it snowed papers from his desk.
"Nol" he said.
"Impossible! There's some mistake."
"As my Admiral wills it." Chief Executive Officer Delp hyr Orikan
bowed sarcastically. "The scouts saw nothing."
Anger
crossed the face of Captain Theonax hyr Uman, son of the Grand Admiral, the
heir apparent. His upper lip rose until the canine tushes showed, a white flash
against the dark muzzle.
"We
have no time to waste on your insolence, Executive Delp," he said coldly.
"I would advise my father to dispense with an officer who has no more
respect."
Under the embroidered cross-belts of office,
Delp's big frame tensed. Captain TTieonax glided one step toward him. Tails
curled back and wings spread in instinctive readiness for battle until the room
was full of their bodies and their hate. With a calculation which made it seem
accidental, Theonax dropped a hand to the obsidian rake at his waist. Delp's
yellow eyes blazed and his fingers clamped on his own tomahawk.
Admiral
Syranax's tail struck the floor. It was like a firebomb going off. The two
young nobles jerked, remembered where they were, and slowly, muscle by muscle
laying itself back to rest under the sleek brown fur, they relaxed.
"Enough!"
snapped Syranax. "Delp, your tongue will flap you into trouble yet.
TTieonax, I've grown bored with your spite. You'll have your chance to deal
with personal enemies when I am fish food. Meanwhile, spare me my few able
officers!"
It
was a firmer speech than anyone had heard from him for a long time. His son and
his subordinate recalled that this grizzled, dim-eyed, rheumatic creature had
once been the conqueror of the Maion Navy (a thousand wings of enemy leaders
had rattled grisly from the mastheads) and was still their chief in the war
against the Flock. They assumed the all-fours crouch of respect and waited for
him to continue.
"Don't take me so literally, Delp,"
said the Admiral in a milder tone. He reached to the rack above his desk and
got down a long-stemmed pipe and began stuffing it with flakes of dried sea
driss from the pouch at his waist. Meanwhile, his stiff old body fitted itself
more comfortably into the wood-and-leather seat. "I was quite surprised,
of course, but I assume that our scouts still know how to use a telescope. Describe
to me again exactly what happened."
"A
patrol was on routine reconnaissance about thirty obdisai north-northwest of
here," said Delp with care. "That would be in the general area of the
island called ... I can't pronounce that heathenish local
name, sir; it means Banners Flew."
"Yes,
yes,* nodded Syranax. "I have looked at a map now
and then, you know."
Theonax
grinned. Delp was no courtier. That was Delp's trouble. His grandfather had
been a mere Sailmaker, his father never advanced beyond the Captaincy of a
single raft. That was after the family had been ennobled for heroic service at
the Battle of XaritTia, of course. But they had still been very minor peers, a
tarry-handed lot barely one cut above their own crewfolk.
Syranax, the Fleet's embodied response to these grim days of hunger and
uprooting, had chosen officers on a basis of demonstrated ability, and nothing
else.
Thus it was that simple Delp hyr Orikan had been catapulted, in a few years, to
the second highest post in DrakTio. His rise, though, had not taken the rough
edges off his education, or taught him how to deal with real nobles.
If
Delp was popular with the common sailors, he was all the more disliked by many
aristocrats. To them he was still a parvenu, a
boor, with the nerve to wed a sa Axollonl Once the old
Admiral's protecting wings were folded in death. . . .
T'heonax
savored in advance what would happen to Delp hyr Orikan. It would be easy
enough to find some nominal charge.
The Executive gulped. "Sony, sir,"
he mumbled. "I didn't mean . . . we're still so new to this whole sea. The
scouts saw this drifting object. It was like nothing ever heard of before. A pair of 'em flew back to report and ask for advice. I
went to look for myself. Sir, it's true!"
"A floating object
six times as long as our longest canoe, like ice, and yet not like ice."
The Admiral shook his gray-furred head. Slowly, he put dry tinder in the bottom
of his firemaker. But it was with needless violence that he drove the piston
down into the little hardwood cylinder. Removing the rod again, he tilted fire
out into the bowl of his pipe and drew deeply.
"The
most highly polished rock1 crystal might look a bit like that stuff,
sir," offered Delp. "But not so bright. Not with such a shimmer."
"And there are animals scurrying about
on it?"
"Three of them, sir. About our size, or a little bigger, but wingless and
tailless. Yet not just animals either ...
I think. They seem to wear clothes
and—I don't think the shining thing was ever intended as a boat, though. It
rides abominably, and appears to be settling."
"If it's not a boat and not a log washed
off some beach," said T'heonax, "then where, pray tell, is it from? The Deeps?"
"Hardly, Captain," said Delp
irritably. "If that were so, the creatures on it would be fish or sea
mammals or . . .
well,
adapted for swimming, anyway. They're not. They look like typical flightless
land forms, except for having only four limbs."
"So they fell from the sky, I
presume?" sneered Theonax.
"I
wouldn't be at all surprised," said Delp in a very low voice. "There
isn't any other direction left."
Theonax
sat up on his haunches, mouth falling open. But his father only nodded.
"Very
good," murmured Syranax. "I'm pleased to see a little imagination
around here."
"But where did they
fly from?" exploded Theonax.
"Perhaps
our enemies of Lannach would have some account of it," said the Admiral.
"They cover a great deal more of the world every year than we do in many
generations; they meet a hundred other barbarian flocks down in the tropics and
exchange news."
"And females," said Theonax. He
spoke in that mixture of primly disapproving voice with which the entire Fleet
regarded the habits of the migrators.
"Never mind that,"
snapped Delp.
Theonax
bristled. "You deck-swabber's whelp, do you dare—"
"Shut upl" roared
Syranax.
After
a pause, he went on, "111 have inquiries made among our prisoners.
Meanwhile, we had better send a fast canoe to pick up these beings before that
object they're on founders."
"They may be
dangerous," warned Theonax.
"Exactly,"
said his father. "If so, they're better in our hands than if, say, the
LannachTionai should find them and make an alliance. Delp, take the Nemms, with a reliable crew, and crowd sail on her. And bring along that fellow
we captured from Lannach, what's his name, the professional linguist—?"
"Tolk?" The Executive stumbled over the unfamiliar
pronunciation.
"Yes. Maybe he can talk to them. Send
scouts back to report to me, but stand well off the main Fleet until you're
sure that the creatures are harmless to us. Also till I've
allayed whatever superstitious fears about sea demons there are in the lower
classes. Be polite if you can, get rough if you must. We can always
apologize later ... or toss the
bodies overboard. Now, jumpl"
Delp jumped.
II
Desolation walled him in.
Even from this low, on the rolling, pitching
hull of the murdered skycruiser, Eric Wace could see an immensity of horizon.
He thought that the sheer size of that ring, where frost-pale heaven met the
gray which was cloud and storm-scud and great marching waves, was enough to
terrify a man. The likelihood of death had been faced before, on Earth, by many
of his ancestors; but Earth's horizon was not so remote.
Never
mind that he was a hundred-odd light-years from his
own sun. Such distances were too big to be understood; they became mere
numbers, and did not frighten one who reckoned the pseudo-speed of a
secondary-driye spaceship in parsecs per week.
Even the 10,000 kilometers of open ocean to this world's lone
human settlement, the trading post, was only another number. Later, if he
lived, Wace would spend an agonized time wondering how to get a message across
that emptiness, but at present he was too occupied with keeping alive.
But
the breadth of the planet was something he could see. It had not struck him before, in his
eighteen-month stay;
but
then he had been insulated, psychologically as well as physically, by an
unconquerable machine technology. Now he stood alone on a sinking vessel, and
it was twice as far to look across chill waves to the world's rim as it had
been on Earth.
The
skycruiser rolled under a savage impact. Wace lost his footing and slipped
across curved metal plates. Frantic, he clawed for the light cable which lashed
cases of food to the navigation turret. If he went over the side, his boots and
clothes would pull him under like a stone. He caught it in time and strained to
a halt. The disappointed wave slapped his face, a wet salt hand.
Shaking
with cold, Wace finished tucking the last box into place and crawled back
toward the entry hatch. It was a miserable little emergency door, but the
glazed promenade deck on which his passengers had strolled while the cruiser's
gravbeams bore her through the sky, was awash, its ornate bronze portal
submerged.
Water had filled the smashed engine
compartment when they ditched. Since then it had been seeping around twisted
bulkheads and strained hull plates until the whole thing was about ready for a
last long dive to the sea bottom.
Wind
passed gaunt fingers through his drenched hair and tried to hold open the hatch
when he wanted to close it after him. He had a struggle against the gale. Gale?
Hell, no! It had only the velocity of a stiffish breeze, but with six times the
atmospheric pressure of Earth behind it, that breeze struck like a Terrestrial
storm. Damn PLC 2987165 II! Damn the PL itself, and damn Nicholas van Rijn, and
most particularly damn Eric Wace for being fool enough to work for the Company!
Briefly,
while he fought the hatch, Wace looked out over the foaming as if to find rescue.
He glimpsed only a reddish sun and great cloud-banks, dirty with storm, in the
north, and a few specks which were probably natives.
Satan fry those natives on a slow griddle,
that they did not come to help I Or at least go decendy away while the humans drowned,
instead of hanging up there in the sky to gloatl
"Is all in
order?"
Wace closed the hatch, dogged it fast, and
came down the ladder. At its foot, he had to brace himself against the heavy
rolling. He could still hear waves beat on the hull and the wind-yowl.
"Yes, my lady,"
he said. "As much as it'll ever be."
"Which
isn't much, not?" Lady Sandra Tamarin played her flashlight over him.
Behind it, she was only another shadow in the darkness of the dead vessel.
"But you look like a saturated rat, my friend. Come, we have at least
fresh clothes for you."
Wace
nodded and shrugged out of his wet jacket and kicked off the squelching boots.
He would have frozen up there without them—it couldn't be over five degrees
C—but they seemed to have blotted up half the ocean. His teeth rattled in his
head as he followed her down the corridor.
He
was a tall young man of North American stock, ruddy-haired, blue-eyed, with
bluntly squared-off features above a well-muscled body. He had begun as a
warehouse apprentice at the age of twelve, back on Earth, and now he was the
Solar Spice & Liquors Company's factor for the entire planet known as
Diomedes. It wasn't exactly a meteoric rise—van Rijn's policy was to promote
according to results, which meant that a quick mind, a quick gun, and an eye
firmly held to the main chance were favored. But it had been a good, solid
career, with a future of posts on less isolated and unpleasant worlds,
ultimately an executive position back home and—and what was the use, if alien
waters were to eat him in a few hours more?
At the end of the hall, where the navigation
turret poked up, there was again the angry copper sunlight, low in the wan
smoky-clouded sky, south of west as day declined. Lady Sandra snapped off her
torch and pointed to a coverall laid out on the desk. Beside it were the outer
garments, quilted, hooded, and gloved, he would need before venturing out again
into the pre-equinoctial springtime. "Put on everything," she said.
"Once the boat starts going down, we will have to leave in a most horrible
hurry."
"Where's' Freeman van
RijnP" asked Wace.
"Making some last-minute work on the
raft.
That one is a handy man with the tools, not? But then, he was once a common
spacehand."
Wace shrugged and waited
for her to leave.
"Change, I told
you," she said.
"But-"
"Oh." A thin smile crossed her
face. "I thought not there was a nudity taboo on Earth."
"Well
. . . not exactly, I guess, my lady. But after all, you're a noble born, and
I'm only a trader—"
"From
republican planets like Earth come the worst snobs of
all," she said. "Here we are all human beings. Quickly, now, change.
I shall turn my back if you so desire.''
Wace scrambled into the outfit as fast as
possible. Her mirth was an unexpected comfort to him. He considered what luck
always appeared to befall that pot-bellied old goat, van Rijn.
It wasn't right]
The colonists of Hermes had been, mostly, a
big fair stock, and their descendants had bred true—especially the
aristocrats—after Hermes set up as an autonomous grand duchy during the
Breakup. Lady Sandra Tamarin was nearly as tall as he,
and shapeless winter clothing did not entirely hide the lithe, full femaleness
of her. She had a face too strong to be pretty: wide forehead, wide mouth, snub
nose, high cheekbones, but the large smoky-lashed green eyes, under heavy dark
brows, were the most beautiful Wace had ever seen. Her hair was long, straight,
ash-blonde, pulled into a knot at the moment but he had seen it floating free
under a coronet by candlelight.
"Are you quite
through, Freeman Wace?"
"Oh
. . . I'm sorry, my lady. I got to thinking. Just a momentl" He pulled on
the padded tunic, but left it unzipped. There was still some human warmth
lingering in the hull. "Yes. I beg your pardon."
"It
is nothing." She turned about. In the little space available, their bodies
brushed together. Her gaze went out to the sky. "Those natives, are they
up there yet?"
"I
imagine so, my lady. Too high for me to be sure, but they can go up several
kilometers with no trouble at all."
"I
have wondered, Trader, but got no chance to ask. I thought not there could be a
flying animal the size of a man, and yet these Diomedeans have a six-meter span
of bat wings. How?"
"At a time like this you ask?"
She
smiled. "We only wait now for Freeman van Rijn. What else shall we do but
talk of curious things?"
"We
. . . help him . . . finish that raft soon or we'll all go underl"
"He
told me he has just batteries enough for one cutting torch, so anyone else is only
in the way. Please continue talking. The high-bom of Hermes have
their customs and taboos, also for the correct way to die. What else is man, if
not a set of customs and taboos?" Her husky voice was light, she smiled a
little, but he wondered how much of it was an act.
To
hell with that bite-the-bullet-old-chap farce! he
wanted to say. We're down in the ocean of a planet whose life is poison to us.
There is an island a few score kilometers hence, but we only know its direction
vaguely. We may or may not complete a raft in time, patched together out of old
fuel drums; and we may or may not get our human-type rations loaded on it in
time; and it may or may not weather the storm brewing there in the north: Those
were natives who swooped low above us a few hours ago, but since then they have
ignored us ... or watched us . . .
anything except offer help.
Someone hates you or old van Rijn, he wanted
to say. Not me, I'm not important enough to hate. But van Rijn is the Solar
Spice & Liquors Company, which is a great power in the Polesotechnic
League, which is the great
power in the known galaxy. And you are the Lady Sandra Tamarin, heiress to the
throne of an entire planet—if you live— who has turned down many offers of
marriage from its decaying, inbred aristocracy, publicly preferring to look
elsewhere for a father for your children so that the next Grand Duke of Hermes
may be a man and not a giggling clothes horse. And many courtiers must dread
your accession.
Oh, yes, he wanted to say, there are plenty
of people who would gain if either Nicholas van Rijn or Sandra Tamarin failed
to come back. It was a calculated gallantry for him to offer you a lift in his
private ship, from Antares where you met, back to Earth, with stopovers at
interesting points a-long the way. At the very least,
he can look for trade concessions in the Duchy. At best ... no, hardly a formal alliance; there's
too much hell in him. Even you (most strong and fair and innocent) would never
let him plant his fat bottom on the High Seat of your fathers. But a romp in
the hay, a bellowed adieu, and a folk wedged open for his exploitation. . . .
Nol You're too good for
itl
But I wander from the subject, my dear, he
wanted to say; and the subject is, that someone .in
the spaceship's crew was bribed. The scheme was well-hatched; the someone watched his chance. It came when you landed on
Diomedes to see what a really new raw planet is like, a planet where even the
main continental outlines have scarcely been mapped during the mere five years
that a spoonful of men have been here. The chance came when I was told to ferry
you and my evil old boss to those sheer mountains, halfway around this world,
which have been noted as spectacular scenery. A bomb in the main generator ... a slain crew, engineers and stewards
gone in the blast, my copilot's skull broken when we ditched in the sea, the
radio shattered. And the last wreckage is going to sink long before they begin
to worry at Thursday Landing and come in search of us. And assuming we survive, is there the slightest possible chance that a few
skyboats, cruising a nearly unmapped world twice the size of Earth, will happen
to see three human fly-specks on it?
Therefore, he wanted to say, since all our
schemings and posturings have brought us merely to this, it would be well to
forget them in what small time remains, and kiss me instead.
But his throat clogged up
on him, and he said none of
it.
"So?" A note of impatience entered
her voice. "You are very silent, Freeman Wace."
"I'm sorry, my lady," he mumbled.
"I'm afraid I'm no good at making conversation under . . . uh, these
circumstances."
"I regret I have not qualifications to
offer to you the consolations of religion," she said with a hurtful
scorn.
A long gray-bearded comber went over the deck
outside and climbed the turret. They felt steel and plastic tremble under the
blow. For a moment, as water sheeted, they stood in a blind, roaring dark.
Then, as it cleared, and Wace saw how much
further down the wreck had burrowed, and wondered if .they would even be able
to get van Rijn's raft out through the submerged cargo hatch, there was a
whiteness that snatched at his eye.
First he didn't believe it,
and then he wouldn't believe because he dared not, and then he could no longer
deny it
"Lady
Sandra." He spoke with immense care; he must not scream his news at her like any low-born Terrestrial.
"Yes?"
She did not look away from her smoldering contemplation of the northern
horizon, empty of all but clouds and lightning.
"There, my lady. Roughly southeast, I'd
guess . . . sails, beating upwind."
"What?" It was a shriek from her. Somehow, that made Wace
laugh aloud.
"A boat of some
land," he pointed. "Coming this way."
"I
didn't know the natives were sailors," she said, very softly.
"They aren't, my lady . . . around
Thursday Landing," he replied. "But this is
a big planet, one roughly four times the surface area of Earth, and we only
know a small part of one continent."
"Then you know not
what they are like, these sailors?"
"My lady, I have no
idea."
HI
Nicholas
van Rijn came puffing up the companion way at their
shout. "Death and damnation!" he roared. "A boat, do you say?
Better for you it is a shark, if you are mistaken. By
damn!" He stumped into the turret and glared out through
salt-encrusted plastic. The light was dimming as the sun went lower, and the
approaching storm-clouds swept across its ruddy face. "So! Where is it,
this pestilential boat?"
"There, sir,"
said Wace. "That schooner—"
"Schooner! Schnork! Powder and balls, you cement head, that is a yawl rig . . .
no, wait,l by damn, there is a furled square sail on
the mainmast too, and, yes, an outrigger. Ja, the way she handles, she must have a regular rudder. Good saints help
usl A bloody-be-damned-to-blazes dugoutl"
"What
else do you expect on a planet without mortals?" said Wace. His nerves
were worn too thin for him to remember the deference due a merchant prince.
"Hm . . . coracles, maybe so, or rafts or catamarans. Quick, dry clothesl Too
cold it is for brass monkeys!"
Wace
grew aware that van Rijn was standing in a puddle, and
that bitter sea water streamed from his waist and legs. The storeroom where he
had been at work must have been awash for—good Lord on high, for hours!
"I
know where they are, Nicholas." Sandra loped off down the corridor. It
slanted more ominously every minute, as the sea pushed in through a ruined
stern.
Wace helped his chief off with the sopping
coverall. Naked, van Rijn suggested a gorilla, two meters tall, hairy and
huge-bellied, with shoulders like a brick warehouse, loudly bawling his
indignation at the cold and the damp and the slowness of assistants. But rings
flashed on the thick fingers and bracelets on the wrists, and a little St.
Dismas medal swung from his neck. Unlike Wace, who found a crew-cut and a clean
shave more practical, van Rijn let his oily black locks hang curled and
perfumed in the latest mode, flaunted a goatee on his triple chin and
intimidating waxed mustaches beneath the great hook nose.
He
rummaged in the navigator's cabinet, wheezing, till he found a bottle of rum.
"Ahhhl I knew I had the devil-begotten thing stowed somewhere." He
put it to his frog-mouth and tossed off several shots at a gulp. "Good!
Fine! Now maybe we can begin to be like self-respectful humans once more."
He turned about, majestic and globular as a
planet, when Sandra came back. The only clothes she could find to fit him were
his own, a peacock outfit of lace-trimmed shirt, embroidered waistcoat,
shimmersilk culottes and stockings, gilt shoes, plumed hat, and holstered
blaster. "Thank you," he said curtly. "Now, Wace, while I dress,
in the lounge you will find a box of Perfectos and
one small bottle applejack. Please to fetch them, then we go outside and meet our hosts."
"Holy St. Peterl"
cried Wace. "The lounge is under waterl"
"Ah?" Van Rijn
sighed, woebegone. "Then
you need only get the applejack. Quick, nowl" He snapped his fingers.
Wace
said hastily, "No time, sir. I still have to round up the last of our
ammunition. Those natives could be hostile."
"If they have heard of us, possible
so," agreed van Rijn. He began donning his natural-silk underwear.
"BrrrrI Five thousand candles I would give to be back in my office in
Amsterdam!"
"To what saint do you
make the offer?" asked Lady Sandra.
"St.
Nicholas, natural . . . my namesake, patron of wanderers and—"
"St. Nicholas had best
get it in writing," she said.
Van Rijn purpled, but one does not talk back
to the heiress apparent of a nation with important trade concessions to offer.
He took it out by screaming abuse after the departing Wace.
It
was some time before they were outside. Van Rijn got stuck in the emergency
hatch and required pushing, while his anguished basso obscenities drowned the
nearing thunder. Diomedes's period of rotation was only twelve and a half
hours, and this latitude, thirty degrees north, was still on the winter side of
equinox; so the sun was toppling seaward with dreadful speed. They clung to the
lashings and let the wind claw them and the waves burst over them. There was
nothing else they could do.
"It
is no place for a poor old fat man," snuffled van Rijn. The gale ripped
the words from him and flung them tattered over the rising seas. His
shoulder-length curls flapped like forlorn pennons. "Better I should have
stayed at home in
Holland
where it is warm, not lost my last few pitiful years
out here."
Wace
strained his eyes into the gloom. The dugout had come near. Even a landlubber
like himself could appreciate the skill of its crew, and van Rijn was loud in
his praises. "I nominate him for the Sunda Yacht Club, by damn, yes, and
enter him in the next regatta and make bets I" It was a big craft, more than thirty meters
long, with an elaborate stempost, but dwarfed by the reckless spread of its
blue-dyed sails. Outrigger or no, Wace expected it to capsize any moment. Of
course, a flying species had less to worry about if that should happen than—
"The Diomedeans." Sandra's tone was quiet in his ear, under
shrill wind and booming waters. "You have dealt with them for a year and a
half, not? What can we await from them?"
Wace
shrugged. "What could we expect from any random tribe of humans, still
back in the Stone Age? They might be poets, or cannibals, or both. All I know
is the Tyrlanian Flock, who are migratory hunters. They always stick by the
letter of their law; not quite so scrupulous about its spirit, of course, but
on the whole a decent tribe."
"You speak their
language?"
"As well as my human palate and
Techno-Terrestrial culture permit me to, my lady. I
don't pretend to understand all their concepts, but we get along." The
broken hull lurched. He heard some* abused wall rend, and the inward pouring of
still more sea, and felt the sluggishness grow beneath his feet Sandra
stumbled against him. He saw that the spray was freezing in her brows.
"That does not mean 111 understand the
local language," he finished. "Were farther from
Tyrlan than Europe from China."
The canoe was almost on them now. None too
soon: the wreck was due to dive any minute. It came about, the sails rattled down, a sea anchor was thrown and
brawny arms dug paddles into the water. Swiftly, then, a Diomedean flapped over
with a rope. Two others hovered close, obviously as guards. The first one
landed and stared at the humans.
Tyrlan
being farther north, its inhabitants had not yet returned from the tropics;
and this was the first Diomedean Sandra had encountered. She was too wet, cold,
and weary to enjoy the unhuman grace of his movements, but she looked very
close. She might have to dwell with this race a long time, if they did not
murder her.
He
was the size of a smallish man, plus a thick meter-long tail ending in a fleshy
rudder and the tremendous chiropteral wings folded along his back. His arms
were set below the wings, near the middle of a sleek otterlike body, and looked
startlingly human, down to the muscular five-fingered hands. The legs were less
familiar, bending backward from four-taloned feet which might almost have
belonged to some bird of prey. The head, at the end of a neck that would have
been twice too long on a human, was round, with a high forehead, yellow eyes
with nictitating membranes under heavy brow ridges, a blunt-muzzled,
black-nosed face with short cat-whiskers, a big mouth and the bear-like teeth
of a flesh-eater turned omnivore. There were no external ears, but a crest of
muscle on the head helped control flight. Short, soft brown fur covered him; he
was plainly a male mammal.
He
wore two belts looped around his "shoulders," a third about his
waist, and a pair of bulging leather pouches. An obsidian knife, a slender
flint-headed ax, and a set of bolas were hung in plain view. Through the
thickening dusk, it was hard to make out what his wheeling comrades bore for
weapons—something long and thin, but surely not a rifle, not on this planet
without copper or iron.
Wace leaned forward and forced his tongue
around the grunting syllables of Tyrlanian, "We . . . are . . . friends.
Do . . . you . . . understand me?"
A
string of totally foreign words snapped at him. He shrugged, ruefully and
spread his hands. The Diomedean moved across the hull, bipedal, body slanted
forward to balance wings and tail, and found the stud to which the humans'
lashings were anchored. Quickly, he knotted his own rope to the same place.
"A
square knot," said van Rijn, almost quietly. "It makes me
homesick."
At
the other end of the line, they began to haul the canoe closer. The Diomedean
turned to Wace and pointed at his vessel. Wace nodded, realized that the
gesture was probably meaningless here, and took a precarious step in that
direction. The Diomedean caught another rope flung to him. He pointed at it,
and at the humans, and made gestures.
"I
understand," said van Rijn. "Nearer than this they dare not come. Too
easy their boat gets smashed against us. We get this cord tied around our
bodies, and they haul us across. Good St. Christopher, what a thing to do to a
poor creaky-boned old man!"
"There's our food, though,"
said Wace.
The skycruiser jerked and settled deeper. The
Diomedean jittered nervously.
"No,
no!" shouted van Rijn. He seemed under the impression that if he only
bellowed loudly enough, he could penetrate the linguistic barrier. His arms wmdmilled. "Never! Do you not understand, you oatmeal brains? Better to guggle
down in your pest-begotten ocean that try eating your food. We die! Bellyache! Suicide!" He pointed at his mouth, slapped his abdomen,
and waved at the rations.
Wace reflected grimly that evolution was too
damned flexible. Here you had a planet with oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen,
carbon, sulfur, a protein biochemistry forming genes, chromosomes, cells,
tissues—protoplasm by any reasonable definition—and the human who tried to eat
a fruit or steak from Diomedes would be dead ten minutes later of about fifty
lethal allergic reactions. There just weren't the right proteins. In fact, only immunization shots prevented men from getting
chronic hayfever, asthma, and hives merely from the air they breathed or the
water they drank.
He had spent many cold hours today piling the
cruiser's food supplies out here for transference to the raft. This luxury
atmospheric vessel had been carried in van Rijn's spaceship, ready-stocked for
extended picnic orgies when the mood struck him. There was enough rye bread,
sweet butter, Edam cheese, lox, smoked turkey, dill pickles, fruit preserves,
chocolate, plum pudding, beer, wine, and God knew what else, to keep three
people going for a few months.
The
Diomedean spread his wings, flapping them to maintain his footing. In the wan,
stormy light, the thumbs-tumed-claws on their leading edge seemed to whicker
past van Rijn's beaky face like a mowing machine operated by some modernistic
Death. The merchant waited stolidly, now and then aiming a finger at the
stacked cases. Finally the Diomedean got the idea, or simply gave in. There was
scant time left. He whistled across to the canoe. A swarm of his fellows came
over, undid the lashings and began transporting boxes.
Wace helped Sandra fasten the rope about her.
"I'm afraid it will be a wet haul, my lady," he tried to smile.
She
sneezed. "So this is the brave pioneering between the stars! I will have a
word or two for my court poets when I get home—if I do."
When
she was across, and the rope had been flown back, van Rijn waved Wace ahead. He
himself was arguing with the Diomedean chief. How it was done without a word of
real language between them, Wace did not know, but they had reached the stage
of screaming indignation at each other.
Just
as Wace set his teeth and went overboard, van Rijn mutinously sat down.
And
when the younger man made his drowned-rat arrival on board the canoe, the
merchant had evidently won his point. A Diomedean could air-lift about fifty
kilos for short distances. Three of them improvised a rope sling and carried
van Rijn over, above the water.
He
had not yet reached the canoe when the skycruiser sank.
IV
The
dugout held some hundred
natives, all armed, some wearing helmets and breastplates of hard laminated
leather. A catapult, just visible through the dark, was mounted at the bows;
the stem held a cabin, made from sapling trunks chinked with sea weed, that towered up almost like the rear end of a medieval
caravel. On its roof, two helmsmen strained at the long tiller.
"Plain
to see, we have found a navy ship," grunted van Rijn. "Not so good,
that. With a trader, I can talk; with some pest-and-pox officer with gold
braids on his brain, I can only shout." He raised small, close-set gray
eyes to a night heaven where lightning ramped. "I am a poor old
sinner," he shouted, "but this I have not deserved! Do you hear
me?"
After a while, the humans were prodded, between
lithe devil-bodies, toward the cabin. The dugout had begun to run before the
gale, on two reef points and a jib. The roll and pitch, the clamor of waves and
wind and thunder, had receded into the back of Wace's consciousness. He wanted
only to find someplace that was dry, take off his clothes and crawl into bed and sleep for a hundred years.
The cabin was small. Three humans and two
Diomedeans left barely room to sit down. But it was warm, and
a stone lamp hung from the ceiling threw a dim light full of grotesquely
moving shadows.
The
native who had first met them was present. His volcanic glass dagger lay
unsheathed in one hand, and he held a wary lion-crouch; but half his attention
seemed aimed at the other one, who was leaner and older, with flecks of gray in
the fur, and who was tied to a corner
post by a rawhide leash.
Sandra's
eyes narrowed. The blaster which van Rijn had lent her slid quietly to her lap
as she sat down. The Dio-medean with the knife flicked his gaze across it, and
van Rijn swore. "Tfou little all-thumbs brain, do you let him see what is
a weapon?"
The
first autochthone said something to the leashed one. The latter made a reply
with a growl in it, then turned to the humans. When he
spoke, it did not sound like the same language.
"Sol
An interpreter!" said van Rijn. "You speakee Angly,
ha? Haw, haw, hawl" He slapped his thigh.
"No,
wait. It's worth trying." Wace dropped into Tyrlan-ian, "Do you
understand me? This is the only speech we could possibly have in common."
The captive raised his head-crest and sat up
on hands and haunches. What he answered was almost familiar. "Speak slowly, if you will," said Wace, and felt
sleepiness drain out of him.
Meaning
came through, thickly, "You do not use a version of the Carooi that I have
heard before."
"Camoi—?" Wait, yes, one of the Tyrlanians had
mentioned a confederation of tribes far to the south, bearing some such name.
"I am using the tongue of the folk of Tyrlan."
"I
know not that race. They do not winter in our grounds. Nor do any Carnoi as a
regular thing, but now and then when all are in the tropics one of them happens
by, so—" It faded into unintelligibnity.
The Diomedean with the knife said something,
impatiently, and got a curt answer. The interpreter said to Wace, "I am
Tolk, a moohra of the Lannachska."
"A what of the
what?" said Wace.
It is not easy even for two humans to
converse, when it must be in different patois of a language foreign to both.
The dense accents imposed by human vocal cords and Diomedean ears—they heard
farther into the subsonic, but did not go quite so high in pitch; and the curve
of maximum response was different—made it a slow and painful process indeed.
Wace took an hour to get a few sentences' worth of information.
Tolk
was a linguistic specialist of the Great Flock of Lannach. It was his function
to leam every language that came to his tribe's attention, which were many. His
title might, perhaps, be rendered Herald, for his duties included a good deal
of ceremonial announcements, and he presided over a corps of messengers. The
Flock was at war with the Draklionai, and Tolk had been captured in a recent
skirmish. The other Diomedean present was named Delp, and was a high-ranking
officer of the Draklionai.
Wace postponed saying much about himself,
less from a wish to be secretive than from a realization of how appalling a
task it would be. He did ask Tolk to warn Delp that the food from the cruiser,
while essential to E art tilings, would kill a Diomedean.
"And why should I tell him that?"
asked Tolk, with a grin that was quite humanly unpleasant.
"If you don't," said Wace, "it
may go hard with you when he learns that you did not."
"True."
Tolk spoke to Delp. The officer made a quick response.
"He says you will not be harmed unless
you yourselves make it necessary," explained Tolk. "He says you are
to learn his language so he can talk with you himself."
"What was it
now?" interrupted van Rijn.
Wace told him. Van Rijn exploded. "What?
What does he say? Stay here till—Death and wet liverl By
holy damn, I tell that filthy toad!" He half rose to his feet. Delp's
wings rattled together. His teeth showed. The door was flung open and a pair of
guards looked in. One of them carried a tomahawk,
another had a wooden rake set with chips of flint.
Van
Rijn clapped a hand to his gun. Delp's voice crackled out. Tolk translated,
"He says to be calm."
After more parley, and with considerable
effort and guesswork on Wace's part, "He wishes you no harm, but he must
think of his own people. You are something new. Perhaps you can help him, or
perhaps you are so harmful that he dare not let you go. He must have time to
find out. You will remove all your garments and implements, and leave them in
his charge. You will be provided other clothing, since it appears you have no
fur."
When
Wace had interpreted for van Rijn, the merchant said, surprisingly at ease,
"I think we have no choice just now. We can bum down many of them. Maybe
we can take the whole boat. But we cannot sail it all the way home by
ourselves. If nothing else, we would starve en route. Were I younger, yes, by
good St. George, I would fight on general principles. Single-handed I would
take him apart and play a xylophone on his ribs, and try to bluster
his whole nation into helping me. But now I am too old and fat and tired. It is
hard to be old, my boy—"
He
wrinkled his sloping forehead and nodded in a wise fashion. "But by damn,
where there are enemies to bid against each other, that is where an honest
trader has a chance to make a little bit profit!"
"First," said Wace, "you must understand
that the world is shaped like a ball."
"Our
philosophers have known it for a long time," said Delp complacently.
"Even barbarians like the Lannachlionai have an idea of the truth. After
all, they cover thousands of obdisai every year, migrating. We re not so
mobile, but we had to work out an astronomy before we could navigate very
far."
Wace
doubted that the DrakTionai could locate themselves
with great precision. It was astonishing what their neolithic technology had
achieved, not only in stone but in glass and ceramics; they even molded a few
synthetic resins. They had telescopes, a sort of astrolabe, and navigational
tables based on sun, stars, and the two small moons. However, compass and
chronometer require iron, which simply did not exist in any noticeable quantity
on Diomedes.
Automatically,
he noted a rich potential market. The primitive Tyrlanians were avid for simple
tools and weapons of metal, paying exorbitantly in the furs, gems, and
pharma-ceutically useful juices which made this planet worth the attention of
the Polesotechnic League. The DrakTionai could use more sophisticated
amenities, from clocks and slide rules to Diesel engines, and were able to meet
proportionately higher prices.
He
recollected where he was: the raft Gerunis, headquarters
of the Chief Executive Officer of the Fleet; and that the amiable creature who
sat on the upper deck and talked with him was actually his jailer.
How
long had it been since the crash—fifteen Diomedean days? That would be more
than a week, Terrestrial reckoning. Several percent of the Earthside food was
already eaten.
He had lashed himself into learning the DrakTio
tongue from his fellow-prisoner Tolk. It was fortunate that the League had, of
necessity, long ago developed the principles by which instruction could be
given in minimal time. When properly focused, a trained mind need only be told
something once. Tolk himself used an almost identical system; he might never
have seen metal, but the Herald was seman-tically sophisticated.
"Well, then," said Wace, still
haltingly and with gaps in his vocabulary, but adequately for his purposes,
"do you know that this world-ball goes around the sun?"
"Quite
a few of the philosophers believe that," said Delp. "I'm a practical
one myself, and never cared much one way or another."
"The motion of your world is unusual. In
fact, in many ways this is a freak place. Your sun is cooler and redder than
ours, so your home is colder. This sun has a mass . . . what do you say? . . . oh?
call it a weight . . . not much less than that of our
own; and it is about the same distance. Therefore, Diomedes, as we call your
world, has a year only somewhat longer than our Earth's. Seven hundred
eighty-two Diomedean days, isn't it? Diomedes has more than twice the diameter
of Earth, but lacks the heavy materials found in most worlds. Therefore its gravity. Accordingly, I only weigh about one-tenth more here than I would at
home."
"I don't
understand," said Delp.
"Oh, never mind,"
said Wace gloomily.
"What's
so unusual about the motion of DctTianis?" Delp said. It was his name for
this planet, and did not mean "earth" but—in a language where nouns
were compared— could be translated "Oceanest," and was feminine.
Wace
needed time to reply; the technicalities outran his vocabulary.
It was merely that the axial tilt of Diomedes
was almost ninety degrees, so that the poles were virtually in the ecliptic
plane. But that fact, coupled with the cool ultraviolet-poor sun, had set the
pattern of life.
At
either pole, nearly half the year was spent in total night. The endless
daylight of the other half did not really compensate; there were polar species,
but they were unimpressive hibemators. Even at forty-five degrees latitude, a
fourth of the year was darkness, in a winter grimmer than Earth had ever seen.
That was as far north or south as any intelligent Diomedeans could five; the annual
migration used up too much of their time and energy, and they fell into a
stagnant struggle for existence on the paleolithic level.
Here,
at thirty degrees north, the Absolute Winter lasted one-sixth of the year—a
shade over two Terrestrial months— and it was only a few weeks' flight to the
equatorial breeding grounds and back .during that time. Therefore the
Lan-nachska were a fairly cultivated people. The
Drak'honai were originally from even farther south.
But
you could only do so much without metals. Of course, Diomedes had abundant
magnesium, beryllium, and aluminum, but what use was that unless you first
developed electrolytic technology, which required copper or silver?
Delp
cocked his head. "You mean it's always equinox on your Eart'P"
"Well, not quite. But
by your standards, very nearly!"
"So that's why you haven't got wings.
The Lodestar didn't Rive you any, because you don't need them."
"Uh . . . perhaps. They'd have been no use to us, anyway. Earth's air is too thin for a creature the size of you or me to fly under its own power."
"What do you mean, thin? Air is ... is air."
"So
dense is this air that if it held proportionate amounts of oxygen, or even of
nitrogen, it would poison me. Luckily, I he
Diomedean atmosphere is a full 79 percent neon. Oxygen
and nitrogen are lesser constituents: their partial pressures do not amount to very much more than on
Earth. Likewise carbon dioxide and water vapor."
Wace went on, "Let's talk about
ourselves. Do you understand that the stars are other suns, like yours, but immensely
farther away; and that Earth is a world of such a star?"
"Yes. I've heard the
philosophers wonder. Ill believe you."
"Do you realize what our powers are, to
cross the space between the stars? Do you know how we can reward you for your
help in getting us home, and how our friends can punish you if you keep us
here?"
For
just a moment, Delp spread his wings, the fur bristled along his back and his
eyes became flat, yellow chips. He belonged to a proud folk.
Then
he slumped. Across all gulfs of race, the human could sense how troubled he
was:
"You
told me yourself, EartTio, that you crossed The Ocean
from the west, and in thousands of obdisai you didn't see so much as an island.
It bears our own explorings out. We couldn't possibly fly that far, carrying
you or just a message to your friends, without some place to stop and rest
between times."
Wace
nodded, slowly and carefully. "I see. And you couldn't take us back in a
fast canoe before our food runs out."
"I'm
afraid not. Even with favoring winds all the way, a boat is so much slower than
wings. It'd take us half a year or more to sail the distance you speak
of."
"But there must be some way—"
"Perhaps. But we're fighting a hard war, remember. We
can't spare much effort or many workers for your sake. "I don't think the
Admiralty even intends to try."
To the
south was Lannach, an
island the size of Britain. From it Holmenach, an archipelago, curved northward
for some hundreds of kilometers, into regions still wintry. Thus the islands
acted as boundary and shield defining the Sea of Achan, protecting it from the
great cold currents of The Ocean.
Here the DrakTionai lay.
Nicholas
van Rijn stood on the main deck of the Gerunis, glaring
eastward to the Fleet's main body. The roughly woven, roughly fitted coat and
trousers which a Sailmaker had thrown together for him irritated a skin long
used to more expensive fabrics. He was tired of sugar-cured ham and branched peaches, though when such fare gave out, he would
begin starving to death. The thought of being a captured chattel whose wishes
nobody need consult was pure anguish. The reflection on how much money the
Company must be losing for lack of his personal supervision was almost as bad.
"Bah!" he rumbled. "If they
would make it a goal of their policy to get us home, it could be done."
Sandra gave him a weary look. "And what
shall the Lannachs be doing while the DrakTionai bend all their cllorts to
return us?" she answered. "It is still a close thing, 111 is war of theirs. Drak'ho could lose it
yet."
"Satan's hoof-and-mouth disease!" He waved a hairy fist In
the air. "While they squabble about their stupid little territories, Solar
Spice & Liquors is losing a million credits a day!"
"The war happens to be a life-and-death
matter for both sides," she said.
"Also for us." He fumbled after a pipe and remembered that
his meerschaums were on the sea bottom, and groaned. "When I find who it
was stuck that bomb in my cruiser—" It did not occur to him to offer
excuses for getting her into this. But then, perhaps it was she who had indirectly
caused the trouble. "Well," he finished on a calmer note, "it is
true we must settle matters here, I think. End the war for them so they can do
important business like getting me home."
Sandra
frowned across the bright sun-blink of waters. "Do you
mean help the DrakTionai? I do not care for that so much. They are the
aggressors. But then, they saw the wives and little ones hungry—" She
sighed. "It is hard to unravel. Let such be so, then."
"Oh, no!" Van Rijn combed his goatee. "We help the other side. The Lannachska."
"What!"
She stood back from the rail and dropped her jaw at him. "But—but—!"
"You
see," explained van Rijn, "I know a little somethings about politics.
It is needful for an honest businessman seeking to make him a
lfttle hard-earned profit, else some louse-bound politician comes and taxes it
from him for some idiot school or old age pension. The politics here is not so
different from what we do out in the galaxy. It is a culture of powerful
aristocrats, this Fleet, but the balance of power lies with the throne—the
Admiralty. Now the Admiral is old, and his son, the crown prince, has more to
say than is rightful. I waggle my ears at gossip;
they forget how much better we hear than they in this pea-soup-with-sausages
atmosphere. I know. He is a hard-cooked one, that Theonax.
"So we help the DrakTionai win over the
Flock. So what? They are already winning. The Flock is only making guerrilla
war now in the wild parts of Lannach. They are still powerful, but the Fleet
has the upper hand, and need only maintain status quo
to win. Anyhow, what can
we, who the good God did not offer wings, do at guerrillas? We show TTieonax
how to use a blaster? Well, how do we show him how to find somebodies to use it
on?"
"Mm
. . . yes." She nodded, stiffly. "You mean that we have nothing to
offer the Drak'honai except trade and treaty later on, if they get us
home."
"Just so. And what hurry is there for them to meet the League? They are natural
wary of unknowns like us from Earth. They like better to consolidate themselves
in their new conquest before taking on powerful strangers. I hear the scutded
butt, I tell you; I know the trend of thought about us. Maybe Theonax lets us
starve, or cuts our throats. Maybe he throws our stuff overboard and says later
he never heard of us. Or maybe, when a League boat finds him at last, he says ja, we pulled some humans from the sea, and we was good to them, but we
could not get them home in time."
"But
could they—actually? I mean, Freeman van Rijn, how would you get us home, with any kind of Diomedean help?"
"Bah!
Details! I am not an engineer. Engineers I hire. My job is not to do what is impossible, it is to make others do it for me. Only how can
I organize things when I am only a more-than-half prisoner of a long who is not
interested in meeting my peoples? Hah?"
"Whereas
the Lannach tribe is hard pressed and will let you, how you say, write your own
ticket. Yes." Sandra laughed, with a touch of genuine humor. "Very good, my friend! Only one question now, how do we
get to the Lannachs?"
She
waved a hand at their surroundings. It was not an encouraging view.
The
Gerunis was a typical raft: a big structure, of light
tough balsa-like logs lashed together with enough open space and flexibility to
yield before the sea. A wall of uprights, pegged to the transverse logs,
defined a capacious hold and supported a main deck of painfully trimmed planks.
Poop
and forecasde rose at either end, their flat roofs bearing artillery and, in
the former case, the outsize tiller. Between them were seaweed-thatched cabins
for storage, workshops, and living quarters. The overall dimensions were about
sixty meters by fifteen, tapering toward a false bow which provided a catapult
platform and some streamlining. A foremast and mainmast each carried three big
square sails. A lateen-rigged mizzen stood just forward of the poop. Given a
favoring wind—remembering the force of most winds on this planet—the seemingly
awkward craft could make several knots, and even in a dead calm it could be
rowed.
It held about a hundred Diomedeans plus wives
and children. Of those, ten couples were aristocrats, with private apartments
in the poop; twenty were ranking sailors, with special skills, entitled to one
room per family in the main-deck cabins; the rest were common deckhands,
barracked into the forecastle.
Not
far away floated the rest of this squadron. There were rafts of various types,
some primarily dwelling units like the Gerunis, some
triple-decked for cargo, some bearing the long sheds in which fish and seaweed
were processed. Often, several at a time were linked together to form a little
temporary island. Moored to them, or patrolling between, were the outrigger
canoes. Wings beat in the sky, where aerial detachments kept watch for an
enemy: full-time professional warriors, the core of DrakTio's military
strength.
Beyond this outlying squadron, the other
divisions of the Fleet darkened the water as far as a man's eyes would reach.
Most of them were fishing. It was brutally hard work, where long nets were
trolled by muscle power. Nearly all a DrakTio's life seemed to go to
back-bending labor. But out of these fluid fields they were dragging a harvest
which leaped and flashed.
"Like fiends they must drive
themselves," observed van
Rijn. He
slapped the stout rail. "This is tough wood, even when green, and they
chew it smooth with stone and glass tools! Some of these fellows I would like
to hire, if the union busybodies can be kept away from them."
Sandra
stamped her foot. She had not complained at danger of death, cold and
discomfort and the drudgery of Tolk's language lessons filtered through Wace.
But there are limits. "Either you talk sense, Freeman, or I go somewhere
else! I asked you how we get away from here."
"We
get rescued by the Lannachska, of course," said van Rijn. "Or,
rather, they come steal us. Yes, so-fashion will be better. Then, if they fail,
friend Delp cannot say it is our fault we are so desired by all parties."
Her tall form grew rigid. "What do you
mean? How are they to know we are even here?"
"Maybe Tolk will tell
them."
"But Tolk is even more
a prisoner than we, not?"
"So.
However . . ." Van Rijn rubbed his hands. "We have a little plan
made. He is a good head, him. Almost as good as me."
Sandra
glared. "And will you deign to tell me how you plotted with Tolk, under
enemy surveillance, when you cannot even speak DrakTio?"
"Oh, I speak DrakTio pretty good," said van Rijn blandly. "Did you not just
hear me admit how I eavesdrop on all the palaver aboard? You think just because
I make so much trouble, and still sit hours every day taking special
instruction from Tolk, it is because I am a dumb old bell who cannot leam so
easy? Horse maneuvers! Half the time we mumble together, he is teaching me his
own Lannach lingo. Nobody on this raft knows it, so when they hear us say funny
noises they think maybe Tolk tries words of Earth language out, ha? They think
he despairs of teaching me through Wace and tries himself to pound some DrakTio
in me. Ho, ho, they are bamboozles, by damn! Why, yesterday I told
Tolk a dirty joke in Lannachamael. He looked very disgusted. There is proof
that poor old van Rijn is not fat between the ears. We say nothing of the rest
of his anatomy."
Sandra
stood quiet for a bit, trying to understand what it meant to learn two nonhuman
languages simultaneously, one of them forbidden.
"I do not see why Tolk looks
disgusted," mused van Rijn. "It was a good joke. Listen: there was a
salesman who traveled on one of the colonial planets, and—"
"I can guess why," interrupted
Sandra hastily. "I mean . . . why Tolk did not think it was a funny tale.
Er . . . Freeman Wace was explaining it to me the other day. Here on Diomedes
they have not the trait of, urn, constant sexuality. They breed once each year
only, in the tropics. No families in our sense. They would not think our—"
she blushed—"our all-year-round interest in these questions was very
normal or very polite."
Van
Rijn nodded. "All this I know. But Tolk has seen somewhat of the Fleet,
and in the Fleet they do have marriage and get born at any time of year, just
like humans."
"I got that impression," she
answered slowly, "and it puzzles me. Freeman Wace said the breeding cycle
was in their, their heredity. Instinct, or glands, or what it now is called.
How could the Fleet live differently from what their glands dictate?"
"Well,
they do." Van Rijn shrugged massive shoulders. "Maybe we let some
scientist worry about it for a thesis later on, hah?"
Suddenly she gripped his arm and he winced.
Her eyes were a green blaze. "But you have not said . . . what is to
happen? How is Tolk to get word about us to Lannach? What do we do?"
"I
have no idea," he told her cheerily. "I play with the ear.
He cocked a beady eye at
the pale, reddish overcast. Several kilometers away, enormously timbered,
bearing what was almost a wooden castle, floated the
flagship of all DrakTio. A swirl of bat wings was lifting from it and streaming
toward the Gerunis.
Faintly down the sky was
borne the screech of a blown sea-shell.
"But
I think maybe we find out quick," finished van Rijn, "because his
rheumatic majesty comes here now to decide about us."
VII
The
Admiral's household troops, a hundred full-time warriors,
landed with beautiful exactness and snapped their weapons to position. Polished
stone and oiled leather caught the dull fight like sea-blink; the wind of their
wings roared across the deck. A purple banner trimmed with scarlet shook loose,
and the Gerunis
crew, respectfully crowded
into the rigging and on the forecastie roof, let out a hoarse ritual cheer.
Delp
hyr Orikan advanced from the poop and crouched before his lord. His wife, the
beautiful Rodonis sa Axollon, und his two young
children came behind him, bellies to the deck and wings over eyes. All wore the
scarlet sashes and jeweled armbands which were formal dress.
The
three humans stood beside Delp. Van Rijn had vetoed any suggestion that they
crouch too. "It is not right for a member of the Polesotechnic League, he should get down on knees and elbows. Anyway I am
not built for it."
Tolk
of Lannach sat haughty next to van Rijn. His wings were tucked into a net and
the leash on his neck was held by a husky sailor. His eyes were as bleak and
steady on the Admiral as a snake's.
And the armed young males who formed a rough
honor guard for Delp, their captain, had something of the same chill in their
manner—not toward Syranax, but toward his son, the heir apparent on whom the
Admiral leaned. Their spears, rakes, tomahawks and wood-bayoneted blowguns were
held in a gesture of total respect; nevertheless, the weapons were held.
Wace thought that van Rijn's outsize nose
must have an abnormal keenness for discord. Only now did he himself sense the
tension on which his boss had obviously been counting.
Syranax
cleared his throat, blinked, and pointed his muzzle at the humans. "Which
one of you is captain?" he asked. It was still a deep
voice, but it no longer came from the bottom of the lungs, and there was a
mucous rattle in it.
Wace
stepped forward. His answer was the one van Rijn had, hastily and without
bothering to explain, commanded that he give, "The other male is our
leader, sir. But he does not speak your language very well as yet. I myself
still have trouble with it, so we must use this Lannach'ho prisoner to
interpret."
T'heonax scowled. "How should he know
what you want to say to us?"
"He
has been teaching us your language," said Wace. "As you know, sir,
foreign tongues are his main task in life. Because of this natural ability, as
well as his special experience with us, he will often be able to guess what we
may be trying to say when we search for a word."
"That
sounds reasonable." Syranax's gray head wove about. "Yes."
"I wonder!" T'heonax gave Delp an
ugly look. It was returned in spades.
"So!
By damn, now I talk." Van Rijn rolled forward. "My good friend . . .
um . . . er . . . pokker,
what is the word? My
Admiral, we, ahem, we talk-urn like good brothers—good brothers, is that how I
say-um, Tolk?"
Wace winced. Despite what Sandra had
whispered to him, as they were being hustled here to receive the
visitors, he found it hard to believe that so ludicrous an accent and grammar
were faked. And why?
Syranax stirred impatiently. "It may be
best if we talked through your companion," he suggested.
"Bilge
and barnacles!" shouted
van Rijn. "Him? No, no, me
talk-um talky-talk self. Straight, like, urn, er,
what-is-your-tide. We talk-um like brothers, ha?"
Syranax sighed. But it did not occur to him
to overrule the human. An alien aristocrat was still an aristocrat, in the eyes
of this caste-ridden society, and as such might surely claim the right to speak
for himself.
"I
would have visited you before," said the Admiral, "but you could not
have conversed with me, and there was so much else to do. As they grow
more" desperate, the Lannach'-honai become more dangerous in their raids
and ambushes. Not a day goes by that we do not have at least a minor
battle."
"Hm?" Van Rijn counted off the
declension-comparison on his fingers. "Xammagapai ... let me see, xammagan,
xam-magai . . . oh, yes. A small fight! I make-um see no
fights, old Admiral—I mean, honored Admiral."
Theonax brisded. "Watch your tongue, EartTioI" he
clipped. He had been over frequendy to stare at the prisoners, and their
sequestered possessions were in his keeping. Litde awe remained, but then, Wace
decided, Theonax was not capable of admitting that a
being could possibly exist in any way superior to TTieonax.
Syranax lay down on the deck in an easy
lion-pose. Theonax remained standing, taut in Delp's presence. "I have, of
course, been getting reports about you," the Admiral went on. "They
are, ah, remarkable. Yes, remarkable. It's alleged you came from the
stars."
"Stars, yes!" van Rijn's head
bobbed with imbecilic eagerness. "We from stars.
Far far away."
"It
is true also that your people have established an outpost on the other shore
of The Ocean?"
Van
Rijn went into a huddle with Tolk. The Lannacha put the question into childish
words. After several explanations, van Rijn beamed. "Yes, yes, we from
across Ocean. Far far away."
"Will your friends not
come in search of you?"
"They
look-um, yes, they look-um plenty hard. By Joe! Look-um all over. You treat-um
us good or our friends find out—" Van Rijn broke off, looking dismayed,
and conferred again with Tolk.
"I believe the EartTio wishes to
apologize for tactlessness," explained the Herald dryly.
"It
may be a truthful kind of tactlessness," observed Syran-ax. "If his
friends can, indeed, locate him while he is still alive, much will depend on
what kind of treatment he received from us. Eh? The problem is, can they find him that soon? What say, EartTio?" He
pushed the last question out like a spear.
Van Rijn retreated, lifting his hands as if
to ward off a blow. "Help!" he whined. "You help-um us, take us
home, old Admiral . . . honored Admiral . . . we go home and pay-um many many
fish."
TTieonax murmured in his father's ear,
"The truth comes out—not that I haven't suspected as much already. His
friends have no measurable chance of finding him before he starves. If they
did, he wouldn't be begging us for help. He'd be demanding whatever struck his
fancy."
"/ would have done that in all
events," said the Admiral. "Our friend isn't very experienced in
these matters, eh? Well, it's good to know how easily truth can be squeezed out
of him."
"So," said TTieonax contemptuously,
not bothering to whisper, "the only problem is, to get some value out of
the beasts before they die."
Sandra's breath sucked sharply in. Wace
grasped her arm, opened his mouth, and caught van Rijn's hurried murmur,
"Shut upl Not a word, you bucket head!" Whereupon
the merchant resumed his timid smile and attitude of straining puzzlement.
"It isn't right!" exploded Delp. "By
the Lodestar, sir, these are guests—not enemies; we can't just use them!"
"What else would you
do?" shrugged Theonax.
His father blinked and mumbled, as if
weighing the arguments for both sides. Something like a spark jumped between
Delp and T'heonax. It ran along the ranked lines of (ierunis crewfolk and household troopers as an
imperceptible tautening, the barest ripple of muscle and forward slant of
weapons.
Van Rijn seemed to get the drift all at once. He recoiled operatically, covered his eyes, then went
to his knees be-for Delp. "No, no!" he screamed. "You take-um us
home! You lielp-um us if we help-urn you!"
"What's this?"
It
was a wild-animal snarl from T'heonax. He surged forward. "You've been
bargaining with them, have you?"
"What do you mean?" The Executive's
teeth clashed together, centimeters from T'heonax's nose. His wing-spurs
lilted like knives.
"What sort of help
were these creatures going to give you?"
"What
do you think?" Delp flung the gage into the winds,
and crouched waiting.
T'heonax did not quite pick it up. "Some might guess you had ideas of getting rid of certain
rivals within the Fleet," In: purred.
In the silence which fell across the raft,
Wace could hear how the dragon shapes up in the rigging breathed more swiftly.
He could hear the creak of timbers and cables, the slap of waves and the low,
damp mumble of wind. Almost, he heard obsidian daggers being loosened in their
sheaths.
If
an unpopular prince finds an excuse to arrest a subordinate whom the commoners
trust, there are likely going to be men who will
fight. It was not otherwise here on Diomedes.
Syranax broke the explosive quiet.
"There's some land of misunderstanding," he said loudly. "Nobody
is going to charge anyone with anything on the basis of this wingless
creature's gabble. What's the fuss about? What could he possibly do for any of
us, anyway?"
"That
remains to be seen," answered Theonax. "But a race which can fly
across The Ocean in less than an equinoctial day must know some handy
arts."
He
whirled on a quivering van Rijn. With the relish of the inquisitor whose
suspect has broken, he said curtly, "Maybe we can get you home somehow if
you help us. We are not sure how to get you home. Maybe your stuff can help us
get you home. You show us how to use your stuff."
"Oh,
yes!" said van Rijn. He clasped his hands and waggled his head. "Oh,
yes, good sir, I do you want-um."
Theonax
clipped an order. A DrakTio slithered across the deck with a large box.
"I've been in charge of these tilings," explained the heir. "Haven't tried to fool with it, except for a few knives of
that shimmery substance." Momentarily, his eyes glowed with honest
enthusiasm. "You've never seen such
knives, father! they don't hack or grind, they slice!
They'll carve seasoned wood!"
He
opened the box. The ranking officers forgot dignity and crowded around. Theonax
waved them back. "Give this blubberpot room to demonstrate," he
snapped. "Bowmen, blowgunners, cover him from all sides. Be ready to shoot
if necessary."
"You
mean to fight your way clear?" hissed Wace. "You can't!" He
tried to step between Sandra and the menace of weapons which suddenly ringed
them in. "They 11 fill
us with arrows before—"
"I
know, I know,"
growled van Rijn sotto voce. "When will you young pridesters learn,
just because he is an old and lonely, the boss does not yet have teredos in the
brain? You keep back, boy, and when trouble breaks loose, hit the deck and dig
a hole."
"What? But-"
Van
Rijn turned a broad back on him and said in broken DrakTio, with servile
eagerness, "Here a . . . how you call it? . . . thing.
It make fire. It bum-um holes, by Joel"
"A portable flame thrower—that
small?"
For a moment, an edge of terror sharpened T'heonax's voice.
"I told you," said Delp, "we
can gain more by dealing honorably with them. By the Lodestar, I mink we could
get them home, too, if we really tried!"
"You
might wait till I'm dead, Delp, before taking the Admiralty," said
Syranax. If he meant it as a joke, it fell like a bomb. The nearer sailors, who
heard it, gasped. The household warriers touched their bows and blowguns.
Rodonis sa Axollon spread her wings over her children
and snarled. Deckhand females, jammed into the forecastle, let out a whimper of
half-comprehending fear.
Delp
himself steadied matters. "Quiet!" he bawled. "Belay there!
Calm down! By all the devils in the Rainy Stars, have these creatures driven us
crazy?"
"See," chattered van Rijn,
"take blaster
. . . we call-urn blaster . . . pull-urn here. . . ."
The ion beam stabbed out and crashed into the
mainmast. Van Rijn yanked it away at once, but it had already made a gouge centimeters deep in that tough wood. Its blue-white (lame licked across the deck, whiffed a
coiled cable into smoke, and took a section out of the rail, before he released
the trigger.
The DrakTionai roared!
It was minutes before they had settled back
into the shrouds or onto the decks; curiosity seekers from nearby craft still
speckled the sky. However, they were technologically sophisticated in their
way. They were excited rather than frightened.
"Let me see
that!" Theonax snatched at the gun.
"Wait.
Wait, good sir, wait." Van Rijn snapped open the chamber, in a set of
movements screened by his thick hands, and popped out the charge. "Make-um
safe first. There."
Theonax
turned it over and over. "What a weapon!" he breathed. "What a weapon!"
Standing
there in a frosty sweat, waiting for van Rijn to spoon up whatever variety of
hell he was cooking, Wace still managed to reflect that the DrakTionai were
overestimating. Natural enough, of course. But a gun
of this sort would only have a serious effect on ground-fighting tactics—and
the old sharper was coolly disarming all the blasters anyway; no uninstructed
Diomedean was going to get any value from them."
"I make safe," van Rijn burbled.
"One, two, three, four, five I make safe. . . . Four?
Five? Six?" He began turning over the piled-up
clothes, blankets, heaters, campstove, and other equipment. "Where
other three blasters?"
"What other
three?" Theonax stared at him.
"We
have six." Van Rijn counted carefully on his fingers. "Ja, six. I give-um all to
good sir Delp here."
"Whatr
Delp leaped at the human, cursing.
"That's a lie! There were only three, and you've got them there!"
"Help!" Van Rijn scuttled behind Theonax. Delp's body clipped the Admiral's
son. Both DrakTionai went over in a whirl of wings and tails.
"He's plotting mutinyr screamed Theonax.
Wace
threw Sandra to the deck and himself above her. The air grew dense with
missiles.
Van
Rijn turned ponderously to grab the sailor in charge of Tolk. But that DrakTio
had already sprung away to Delp's defense. Van Rijn had only to peel off the
imprisoning net.
"No," he said in fluent
Lannachamael, "go bring an army to fetch us out of here. Quick, before
someone notices!"
The
Herald nodded, threshed his wings, and was gone into the sky.
Van Rijn stooped over Wace and Sandra.
"This way," he panted under the racket. A chance tail-buffet, as a
sailor fought two troopers, brought a howl from him. "Thunder
and lightning! Pest and poison ivy!" He wrestied Sandra to her feet and husded her toward the
comparative shelter of the forecasde.
When
they stood inside its door, among terrified females and cubs, looking out at
the fight, he said, "It is a pity that Help will go under. He has no
chance. He is a decent sort; we could maybe have done business."
"All
saints in Heaven!" choked Wace. "You touched off a civil war just to
get your messenger away?"
"You know perhaps a
better method?" asked van Rijn.
VIII
Wieen Commander Krakna fell in battle against the
invaders, the Flock's General Council picked one Trolwen to succeed him. They
were the elders, and their choice comparatively youthful, but the Lannachska
thought, it only natural to be led by young males. A Commander needed the physical
stamina of two to see them through a hard and dangerous migration every year;
he seldom lived to grow feeble. Any rash impulses of his age were curbed by the
General Council itself, the clan leaders who had grown too old lo fly at the
head of their squadron-septs and not yet so old and weak as to be left behind
on some winter journey.
Trolwen's
mother belonged to the Trekkan group, a distinguished blood-line with rich
properties on Lannach; she herself had added to that wealth by shrewd trading.
She guessed that his father was Tomak of the Wendru; not that she cared
especially, but Trolwen looked noticeably like that fierce warrior. However, it
was his own record as a clan-elected officer, in storm
and battle and negotiation and everyday routine, which caused the Council to
pick him as leader of all the clans. In the ten days since, he had been the
chief of a losing cause; but possibly his folk were pressed back into the
uplands more slowly than would have happened without him.
Now
he led a major part of the Flock's fighting strength out against the Fleet
itself.
Vernal
equinox was barely past, but already the days lengthened with giant strides.
Each morning the sun rose farther north, and a milder air melted the snows
until Lannach's dales were a watery brawling. It took only 130 days from
equinox to Last Sunrise; thereafter, during the endless fight of High Summer,
there would be nothing but rain or mist to cover an attack.
And if the Drakska were not whipped by
autumn, reflected Trolwen grimly, there would be no point in trying further;
the Flock would be done.
His wings thrust steadily at the sky, the
easy strength-hoarding beat of a wanderer bom. Under him, there was a broken
white mystery of cloud, with the sea far beneath it peering through in a
glimmer like polished glass; overhead lay a clear violet-blue roof, the night
and the stars. Both moons were up: hasty Flichtan, driving from horizon to horizon
in a day and a half; Nua, so much slower that her phases moved more rapidly
than herself. He drew the cold, flowing darkness into his lungs, felt the
thrust in muscles and the ripple in fur, but without the sensuous enjoyment of
an ordinary flight.
He was thinking too hard
about killing.
A
Commander should not show indecision, but he was young and gray Tolk the Herald
would understand. "How shall we know that these beings are on the same
raft as when you left?" he asked. He spoke in the measured, breath-conserving
rhythm of a route flight. The wind muttered beneath his words.
"We cannot be sure, of course,
Flockchief," replied Tolk. "But the fat one considered that
possibility, too. He said he would manage, somehow, to be out on deck in plain
view every day just at sunrise. After which he groaned and complained about
horrible hours to get out of bed. He is a strange one."
"Perhaps,
though," worried Trolwen, "the Draka authorities will have locked him
away, suspecting his help in your escape."
"What
he did was probably not noticed in all the turmoil," said Tolk.
"They doubtless think I used
the chance to work myself loose in some way. If there was any unpleasantness,
well, the fat one has now had several days in which to talk the Drakska out of
it."
"And perhaps he cannot help us after
all." Trolwen shivered. The Council had spoken strongly against this
raid: loo risky, too many certain casualties. The turbulent clans had roared
their own disapproval. He had had difficulty persuading them all.
And if it turned out he was throwing away
lives on something as grotesque as this, for no good purpose. . . . Trolwen
was as patriotic as any young male whose folk have been cruelly attacked, but
he was not unconcerned about his own future. It had happened in the past that
Commanders who failed badly were read forever out of the Flock, like any common
thief or murderer.
lie flew onward.
A chill, thin light had been stealing into
the sky for a time.
Now
the higher clouds began to flush red, and a gleam went over the half-hidden
sea. It was crucial to reach the Fleet at just about this moment, enough light
to see what to do and not enough to give the enemy ample warning.
A
Whisder, with the slim frame and outsize wings of adolescence, emerged from a
fog-bank. The shrill notes of his lips carried far and keenly. Tolk, who as
Chief Herald headed the education of these messenger-scouts, cocked his head
and nodded. "We guessed it very well," he said calmly. "The
rafts are only five buaska ahead."
"So
I hear." Tension shook Trolwen's voice. "Now, has that infernal
Eart'o, or whatever he calls himself, indicated . . . V
He broke off. More of the youths were beating
upwind into view, faster than an adult could fly. Their whistles wove into an exuberant battle music. Trolwen read the code like his
own speech, clamped jaws together, and waved a hand at his standard bearer.
Then he dove.
As
he burst through the clouds, he saw the enormous Fleet spread, still far below
him but covering the waters, from those islands called The Pups to the rich
eastern driss banks. Decks and decks and decks cradled on a purplish-gray calm,
masts raked upward like teeth, the dawn-light smote the Admiral's floating
castle and burned off his banner. There was an explosion skyward from rafts
and canoes as the DrakTionai heard the yells of their own sentries and went to
arms.
Trolwen folded his wings and stooped. Behind
him, in a wedge of clan-squadrons, roared three thousand Lannacha males. Even
as he fell, he glared in search—where was that double-cursed Eart'o monster—there! The distance-devouring vision of a flying animal picked out three ugly
shapes on a raft's quarterdeck, waving and jumping about.
Trolwen spread his wings to brake.
"Here!" he cried. The standard bearer glided to a stop, hovered, and
unfurled the red flag of Command. The squadrons changed from wedge to battle
formation, peeled off, and dove for the raft. As each went by, a husky young
warrior chosen for guard duty left it, until Trolwen floated in a loose sphere
of defenders.
The
Drakska were forming their own ranks with terrifying speed and discipline.
"All smoke-snuffing gods!" groaned Trolwen. "If
we could just have used a single squadron—a raid—not a full-scale battle."
"A
single squadron could hardly have brought the Eart'ska back alive,
Flockchief," said Tolk. "Not from the very core of the enemy. We have
to make it seem . . . not worth their while ...
to keep up the engagement, when we retreat."
"They
know ghosdy well what we've come for," said Trolwen. "Look how they
swarm to that raftl"
The
Flock troop had now punched through a shaken line of Draka patrols and reached
water surface. One detachment attacked the target vessel, landed in a ring
around the humans, and then struck out to seize the entire craft. The rest
stayed airborne to repel the enemy's counter-assault.
It
was simple, clumsy ground fighting on deck. Both sides were similarly equipped:
weapon technology seems to diffuse faster than any other kind. Wooden swords
set with chips of flint, fire-hardened spears, clubs, daggers, tomahawks,
struck small wicker shields and leather harness. Tails smacked out, talons
ripped, wings buffeted and cut with horny spurs, teeth closed in throats, fists
battered on flesh. Hard-pressed, a male would fly upward; there was little
attempt to keep ranks, it was a free-for-all.
Trolwen had no special interest in that phase of the battle; having landed
superior numbers, he knew he could take the raft if only his aerial squadrons
could keep the remaining Drakska off.
He
thought—conventionally, in the wake of a thousand bards—how much like a dance a battle in the air was: intricate, beautiful, and terrible. To
coordinate the efforts of a
thousand or more warriors awing reached the highest levels of art.
The backbone of such a force was the archers.
Each gripped a bow as long as himself in his foot talons,
drew the cord with both hands and let fly, plucked a fresh arrow from the belly
quiver with his teeth and had it ready to set before the string snapped taut.
Such a corps, trained almost from birth, could lay down a curtain which none
might cross alive. But after the whistling death was spent, as it soon was,
they must stream back to the bearers for more arrows. That was the most
vulnerable aspect of their work; and the rest of the army existed to guard it.
Some
cast bolas, some the heavy sharp-edged boomerang, some the weighted net in
which a wing-tangled foe could plunge to his death. Blowguns were a recent
innovation, observed among foreign tribes in the tropical meeting places. Here
the Drakska were ahead: their guns had a bolt-operated repeater mechanism and
fire-hardened, wooden bayonets. Also, the separate military units in the Fleet
were more tightly organized.
On the other hand, they still relied on an
awkward set of horn calls to integrate their entire army. Infinitely more
flexible, the Whisder corps darted from leader to leader, weaving the Flock
into one great wild organism.
Up and down the battle ramped, while the sun
rose and the clouds broke apart and the sea grew red-stained. Trolwen clipped his orders: Hunlu to reinforce the upper right
flank, Torcha to feint at the Admiral's raft while Srygen charged on the
opposite wing. Once, with a hammering glee, he was in combat himself, as
a Draka squad made it to his hovering place. He tomahawked one of them
personally and watched the wing-broken shape flutter into the waters below.
Thus
did battles traditionally end. When the missiles had
all been cast, if neither side had broken, it would be ax and club and rake and
spear, warrior against warrior. Sometimes the chaos grew so great that both
armies disintegrated.
But
the Fleet was here, thought Trolwen bleakly, with all its arsenals: more
missiles than his flyers, who were outnumbered
anyway, could ever have carried. If this fight wasn't broken off soon. ...
The raft with the Eart'ska had now been
seized. Draka canoes were approaching to win it back. One of them opened up
with fire weapons: the dreaded, irresistible burning oil of the Fleet, pumped
from a ceramic nozzle; catapults throwing vases of the stuff which exploded in
gouts of flame on impact. Those were the weapons which had annihilated the
boats owned by the Flock, and taken its coastal towns. Trolwen cursed with a
reflex anguish when he saw it.
But
the Eart'ska were off the raft, six strong porters
carrying each one in a specially woven net. By changing bearers often, those
burdens could be taken to the Flock's mountain stronghold. The food boxes,
hastily dragged up from the hold, were less difficult. A Whistler warbled
success.
"Let's
go!" Orders rattled from Trolwen, his messengers swooped to the
appropriate squadrons. "Hunlu and Srygen, close ranks about the bearers;
Dwarn, fly above with half his command; the other half
guard the left wing. Rearguards—"
The morning was perceptibly further along
before he had disengaged. His nightmare had been that the larger Fleet forces
would pursue. A running battle all the way home could have snapped the spine of
his army. But as soon as he was plainly in retreat, the enemy broke contact and
retired to decks.
"As you predicted, Tolk," panted
Trolwen.
"Well,
Flockchief," said the Herald with his usual calm, "they themselves
wouldn't be anxious for such a melee. It would overextend them, leave their
rafts virtually defenseless. For all they know, your whole idea was to lure
them into such a move. So they have merely decided that the Eart'ska aren't worth the trouble and risk: an opinion which the
Eart'ska
themselves must have been busily cultivating in them."
"Let's
hope it's not a correct belief. But however the gods decree, Tolk, you foresaw
this outcome. Maybe you should be Commander."
"Oh, no. Not I. It was the fat Eart'a who predicted this in detail."
Trolwen laughed. "Perhaps, then, he
should command." "Perhaps," said Tolk, very thoughtfully,
"he will."
ix
The
nohthehn coast
of Lannach sloped in broad valleys to the Sea of Achan. There, in game-filled
forests and on grassy downs, had arisen those thorps in which the Flock's clans
customarily dwelt. Where Sagna Bay made its deep cut into the land, many such
hamlets had grown together into larger units. Thus the towns came to be, Ulwen
and flinty Man-nenach and Yo of the Carpenters.
But their doors were broken down and their
roofs burned open; DrakTio canoes lay on Sagna's beaches, Drak'ho war-bands
laired in empty Ulwen and patrolled the Anch Forest and rounded up the hombeast
herds emerging from winter sleep on Duna Brae.
Its
boats sunk, its houses taken, and its hunting and fishing grounds cut off, the
Flock retired into the uplands. On the quaking lava slopes of Mount Oborch or
in the cold canyons of the Misty Mountains, there were a few small settlements
where the poorer clans had lived. The females, the very old and the very young,
could be crowded into these; tents could be pitched and caves occupied. By
scouring this gaunt country from Hark Heath to the Ness, and by going often
hungry, the whole Flock could stay alive for a while longer.
But the heart of Lannach was the north coast,
which the
DrakTionai
now forbade. Without it, the Flock was nothing, a starveling tribe of savages
until autumn, when Birthtime would leave them altogether helpless.
"All is not
well," said Trolwen understating the situation.
He strode up a narrow trail, toward the
village. What was its name now?—Salmenbrok—which perched on the jagged crest
above. Beyond that, dark volcanic rock, still streaked with snowfields, climbed
dizzily upward to a crater hidden in its own vapors. The ground shivered
underfoot, just a bit, and van Rijn heard a rumble in the guts of the planet.
This
was no place for a man his age and girth. He should be at home, in his own
deeply indented armchair, with a good cigar and a pretty girl, a tall drink and
the canals of Amsterdam serene around him. For a moment, the remembrance of
Earth was so sharp that he sniffled in self-pity. It was bitter to leave his
bones in this nightmare land, when he had thought to puD Earth's soft green
turf about his weary body. . . . Hard and cruel. Yes,
and every day the Company must be getting deeper into the red without him there
to oversee! That hauled him back to practicalities.
"Let me get this all clear in my
head," he requested. He found himself rather more at home in Lannachamael
than he had been—even without faking—in the DrakTio speech. Here, by chance,
the grammar and the guttural noises were not too far from his mother tongue.
Already he approached fluency.
"You came back from your migration and
found the enemy was here waiting for you?" he continued.
Trolwen
jerked his head in a harsh and painful gesture. "Yes. Hitherto we had only
known vaguely of their existence; their home regions are well to the southeast
of ours. We knew they had been forced to leave because suddenly the trech —the
fish which are the mainstay of their diet—suddenly the trech had altered their
own habits, shifting from Draka waters to Achan. But we tad no idea the Fleet
was bound for our country."
Van Rijn's long hair swished, lank and greasy-black, the careful curls
all gone out of it, as he nodded. "It is like home history. In the Middle
Ages on Earth, when the herring changed their ways for some begobbled herring
reason, it would change the history of maritime countries. Kings would fall, by
damn, and wars would be fought over the new fishing grounds."
"It
has never been of great importance to us," said Trolwen. "A few clans
in the Sagna region have . . . had small dugouts, and got much of their food
with hook and line. None of this beast-labor the Drakska go through, dragging
those nets, even if they do pull in more fish I But for our folk generally, it
was a minor thing. To be sure, we were pleased, several years ago, when the
trech appeared in great numbers in the Sea of Achan. It is large and tasty, its
oil and bones have many uses. But it was not such an occasion for rejoicing as
if . . . oh, as if the wild hombeasts had doubled their herds overnight."
His
fingers closed convulsively on the handle of his tomahawk. He was, after all,
quite young. "Now I see the gods sent the trech to us in anger and
mockery; for the Fleet followed the trech."
Van Rijn paused on the trail, wheezing till
he drowned out the distant lava rumbles. "Whoofl Hold it there, youl Not so like a God-forgotten horse race, if you please. . . .
Ah. If the fish are not so great for you, why not let the Fleet have the Achan
waters?"
It was, he knew, not a true question—only a
stimulus. Trolwen delivered himself of several explosive obscenities before
answering. "They attacked us the moment we came home this spring. They had
already occupied our coastlandsl And even had they not
done so, would you let a powerful horde of . . . strangers . . . whose very
habits are alien and evil
. .
. would you let them dwell at your windowsill? How
long could such an arrangement last?"
Van
Rijn nodded again. Just suppose a nation with tyrant government and filthy
personal lives were to ask for the Moon, on the grounds that they needed it and
it was not of large value to Earth.
Personally,
he could afford to be tolerant. In many ways, the Drak'honai were
closer to the human norm than the Lannachska. Their master-serf culture was a
natural consequence of economics: given only neolithic tools, a raft big
enough to support several families represented an enormous capital investment.
It was simply not possible for disgruntied individuals to strike out on their own; they were at the mercy of the State. In such
cases, power always concentrated in the hands of aristocratic warriors and
intellectual priesthoods; among the Drak'honai, those two classes had merged
into one.
The
Lannachska, on the other hand—more typically Dio-medean—were primarily hunters.
They had very few highly specialized craftsmen; the individual could survive
using tools made by himself. The low calorie, area
factor of a hunt-ting economy made them spread out thin over a large region,
each small group nearly independent of the rest. They exerted themselves in
spasms, during the chase for instance, but they did not have to toil day after
day until they nearly dropped, as the common netman or oarsman or deckhand must
in the Fleet; hence, there was no economic justification on Lannach for a class
of bosses and overseers.
Thus,
their natural political unit was the little matrilineal clan. Such semi-formal
blood groups, almost free of government, were rather loosely organized into
the Great Flock. And the Flock's raison d'etre—apart
from minor inter-sept business at home—was simply to increase the safety of all
when every Diomedean on Lannach flew south for the winter.
Or came home to war!
"It is interesting," murmured van
Rijn, half in Anglic. "Among our peoples, like on most planets, only the
agriculture folk got civilized. Here they make no farms at all: the big
half-wild hombeast herds is closest thing, nie? You hunt, berry-pick, reap wild grain, fish a little; yet, some of you
know writing and make books. I see, too, you have machines and houses, and
weave cloth. Could be, the every-year stimulus of meeting foreigners in the
tropics gives you ideas?"
"What?" asked
Trolwen vaguely.
"Nothings. I just wondered why, since life here is easy enough so that you have
time for making a civilization, you do not grow enough food. You eat up all
your game and chop down all your woods. That is what we called a successful
civilization back on Earth—when you have enough to eat."
"Our numbers do not increase fast,"
said Trolwen. "About three hundred years ago a daughter Flock was formed
but it moved elsewhere. We lose so many on the migrations, you see: storm,
exhaustion, sickness, barbarian attack, wild animals, sometimes cold or famine.
. . ." He hunched his wings, the Diomedean equivalent of a shrug.
"Ah-hal Natural selection. Which is all well and
good, if nature is obliging to pick you for survival. Otherwise gives
awful noises about tragedy." Van Rijn stroked his goatee. The chins
beneath it were getting bristly, as his last application of antibeard enzyme
wore off. "So. It does give one notion of what made your race get brains. Hibernate or migrate!
And if you migrate, then be smart enough to meet all lands trouble, by
damn!"
He resumed his noisy walk up the trail.
"But we got our troubles of now to think about, especially since they are
too the troubles belonging with Nicholas van Rijn—which is not to be long
stood. Hmpfl Well, now, tell me more. I gather the
Fleet scrubbed its decks with you and kicked you up here where the only flat
country is the map. You want home to the lowlands again. You also want to get
rid of the Fleet."
"We
gave them a good fight," said Trolwen stiffly. "We still can—and will, by my grandmother's ghost! There were reasons
why we were defeated so badly. We came tired and
hungry back from ten days of flight. One is always weak at the end of the
springtime journey home. Our strongholds had already been occupied. The Drakska
flamethrowers set afire such other defenses as we contrived, and made it impossible
for us to fight them on the water, where their real strength lies."
His teeth snapped together in a carnivore
reflex. "And we have to overcome them soon! If we don't, we are finished.
And they know it!"
"I
am not clear over this yet," admitted van Rijn. "The hurry is that
all your young are born the same time, nie?"
"Yes."
Trolwen topped the rise and waited beneath the walls of Salmenbrok for his
puffing guest.
Like
all Lannachska settlements, it was fortified against enemies, animal or
intelligent. There was no stockade-that would be pointless here where all the
higher life-forms had wings. An average building was roughly in the shape of an
ancient Terrestrial blockhouse. The ground floor was door-less and had mere
slits for windows; the entrance was through an upper story or a trap in the
thatched roof. A hamlet was fortified not by outer walls but by being woven
together with covered bridges and underground passages.
Up
here, above timberline, the houses were of undressed stone mortared in place,
rather than the logs more common among the valley clans. But this thorp was
solidly made, furnished with a degree of comfort that indicated how bountiful
the lowlands must be.
Van
Rijn took time to admire such features as wooden locks constructed like Chinese
puzzles, a wooden lathe set with a cutting edge of painstakingly fractured
diamond, and a wooden saw whose teeth were of renewable volcanic glass. A
communal windmill ground nuts and wild grain, as well as powering numerous
smaller machines. It included a pump which filled a great stone basin in the
overhanging cliff with water, and the water could be let down again to keep the
mill turning when there was no wind. He even saw a tiny, sail-propelled
railroad with wooden-wheeled basketwork carts running on iron-hard wooden rails. It carried flint
and obsidian from the local quarries, timber from the forests, dried fish from
the coast, furs and herbs from the lowlands, handicrafts from all the island. Van Rijn was delighted.
"Sol" he said. "Commerce!
You are fundamentally capitalists. Ha, by damn, I think soon we do some
business!"
Trolwen
shrugged. "There is nearly always a strong wind up here. Why should we not
let it take our burdens? Actually, all the apparatus you see took many
lifetimes to complete; we're not like those Drakska, wearing themselves
out with labor."
Salmenbrok's temporary population crowded
about the human, with mumbling and twittering and wing-flapping, the cubs
twisting around his legs and their mothers shrieking at them to come back.
"Ten thousand purple devils!" he choked. "They think maybe I am
a politician to kiss their brats, ha?"
"Come
this way," said Trolwen. "Toward the Males' Temple.
Females and young may not follow; they have their own." He led the way
along another path, making an elaborate salute to a small idol in a niche on
the trail. From its crudity, the thing had been carved centuries ago. The Flock
seemed to have only a rather incoherent polytheism for religion,
and not to take that very seriously these days; but it was as strict about
ritual and tradition as some classic British regiment, which, in many ways, it
resembled.
Van
Rijn trudged after, casting a glance behind. The females here looked little
different from those in the Fleet: a bit smaller and slimmer than the males,
their wings larger but without a fully developed spur. In fact, racially the
two folk seemed identical.
And
yet, if all that the Company's agents had learned about Diomedes was not pure
gibberish, the DrakTionai represented a biological monstrousness. An
impossibiUtyl
Trolwen
followed the man's curious gaze, and sighed. "You can notice it already on
their dugs," he muttered. "Nearly half our nubile females are
expecting their next cub."
"Hra. Ja, there is your problem. Let me see if I understand it right. Your young
are all born at the fall equinox."
"Yes.
Within a few days of each other; the exceptions are negligible."
"But it is not so long thereafter you
must leave for the south. Surely a new baby cannot fly?"
"Oh, no. It clings to the mother all the way; it is bom with arms able to grasp
hard. There is no cub from the preceding year; a nursing female does not get
pregnant. Her two-year-old is strong enough to fly the distance, given rest
periods in which it rides on someone's back. That's the age group where we
suffer the most loss. Three-year-olds and above need only be guided and
guarded: their wings are quite adequate."
"But this makes much
trouble for the mother, not so?"
"She
is assisted by the half-grown clan members, or the old who are past
childbearing but not yet too old to survive the journey. And the males, of
course, do all the hunting, scouting, fighting, and so forth."
"So.
You come to the south. I hear told it makes easy to live there, nuts and fruits
and fish to scoop from the water. Why do you come back?"
"This is our home," said Trolwen
simply.
After
a moment, "And, of course, the tropic islands could never support all the
myriads which gather there each midwinter—twice a year, actually. By the time
the migrants are ready to leave, they have eaten that country bare."
"I see. Well, keep on. In the south, at
solstice time, is when you rut."
"Yes. The desire comes
on us; but you know what I mean."
"Of
course," said van Rijn blandly. He had no intention of explaining that the
human reproductive pattern was like the Fleet's. If Trolwen wanted to imagine
van Rijn bellowing and pawing the earth once a year, Trolwen was free to do so.
"And
there are festivals, and trading with the other tribes." The Lannacha
sighed. "Enough. Soon after solstice, we return, arriving here sometime
before equinox, when the large animals on which we chiefly depend have awakened
from their winter sleep and put on a little flesh. There you have the pattern
of our lives, EartTio."
"It
sounds like fun, if I was not too old and fat." Van Rijn blew his nose
lugubriously. "Do not get old, Trolwen. It is so lonesome. You are lucky,
dying on migration when you grow feeble, you do not live wheezy and helpless
with nothing but your dear memories, like me."
"I'm
not likely to get old as matters stand now," said Trolwen.
"I can see how the fall, then, is time
for nothing much but obstetrics. And if you have not food and shelter and such
helps all ready, most of the young die."
"They are replaceable," said
Trolwen, with a degree of casualness that showed he was, after all, not just a
man winged and tailed. His tone sharpened. "But the females who bear them
are more vital to our strength. A recent mother must be properly rested and
fed, you understand, or she will never reach the south. And consider what a part of our total numbers are going to become mothers.
It's a question of the Flock's survival as a nation! And those filthy Drakska,
breeding all the year round like . . . like fish. No!"
"No
indeed," said van Rijn. "Best we think of somethings very fast, or I
grow very hungry, too."
"I spent lives to rescue you," said
Trolwen, "because we all hoped you would think of something
yourself."
"Well,"
said van Rijn, "the problem is to get word to my own people at Thursday
Landing. Then they come here quick, by damn, and I will tell them to clean up
on the Fleet."
Trolwen
smiled. Even allowing for the unhuman shape of his mouth, it was a smile
without warmth or humor. "No, no," he said. "Not that easily. I
dare not, cannot spare the folk or the time and effort in some crazy attempt to
cross The Ocean—not while DrakTio has us by the throat. Also, forgive me, how
do I know that you will be interested in helping us once you are able to go
home again?"
He
looked away from his companion, toward the porticoed cave that was the Males'
Temple. Steam rolled from its mouth, there was the hiss of a geyser within.
"I myself might have decided
otherwise," he added abruptly, in a very low voice. "But I have only
limited powers. The Council is suspicious of three wingless monsters. It thinks
... we know so little about you . . .
our only sure hold on you is your own desperation. The
Council will allow no help to be brought for you until the war is over."
Van Rijn lifted his shoulders and spread his
hands. "Confidential, Trolwen, boy, in their place I would do the
same."
X
Now
darkness waned. Soon there would be light nights, when the sun hovered just under
the sea and the sky was like white blossoms. Already both moons could be seen
in full phase after sunset. As Rodonis stepped from her cabin, swift Sk'huanax
climbed the horizon and swung up among the many stars toward slow and patient
Lykaris. Between them, She-Who-Waits and He-Who-Pursues cast a shuddering
double bridge over broad waters.
Rodonis
was born to the old nobility, and had been taught to smile at Moons worship.
Good enough for the common sailors, who would otherwise go back to their primitive
bloody sacrifices to AeakTia-in-the-Deeps, but really, an educated person knew
there was only the Lodestar. Nevertheless, Rodonis went down on the deck,
hooded herself with her wings, and whispered her trouble to bright mother
Lykaris.
"A
song do I pledge you, a song all for yourself, to be made by the Fleet's finest
bards and sung in your honor when next you hold wedding with He-Who-Pursues
you. You will not wed Him again for more than a year, the astrologues tell me;
there will be time enough to fashion a song for you which shall live while the
Fleet remains afloat, O Lykaris, if but you will spare me my Delp."
She
did not address Skliuanax the Warrior, any more than a male DrakTio would have
dreamed of petitioning the Mother. But she said to Lykaris, in her mind, that
there could be no harm in calling to His attention the fact that Delp was a
brave person who had never omitted the proper offerings.
The
moons brightened. A bank of cloud in the west bulked like frosty mountains. Far off stood the ragged loom of an island. She could hear
pack ice cough in the north. It was a big, strange seascape; this was not the
dear green Southwater whence starvation had driven the Fleet, and she wondered
if Achan's gods would ever let the DrakTionai call it home.
The lap-lap of waves, creaking timbers,
cables that sang as the dew tauntened them, wind-mumble in shrouds, a slatting
sail, the remote plaintiveness of a flute and the nearer homely noises from
this raft's own forecastle, snores and cub-whimpers and some couple's satisfied
grunt—all these were a strong steady comfort in this cold emptiness named Achan
Sea. She thought of her own young, two small furry shapes in a richly
tapestried bed, and it gave her the remaining strength needed. She spread her
wings and mounted the air.
From above, the Fleet at night was all clumps
of shadow, with the rare twinkle of firepots where some crew worked late. Most
were long abed, worn out from a day of dragging nets, manning sweeps and
capstans, cleaning and salting and pickling the catch, furling and unfurling
the heavy sails of the rafts, harvesting driss and fruitweed, felling trees and
shaping timber with stone tools. A common crew member, male or female, had
little in life except hard brutal labor. Their recreations were almost as
coarse and violent: the dances, the athletic contests, the endless love-making,
the bawdy songs roared out from full lungs over u barrel of seagrain beer.
For a moment, as such thoughts crossed her mind, Rodonis felt pride in her crewfolk. To the average
noble, a commoner was a domestic animal, ill-mannered, unlettered, not quite
decent, to be kept in line by whip and hook for his own good. But flying over
the great sleeping beast of a Fleet, Rodonis sensed its sheer vigor, coiled
like a snake beneath her. These were the lords of the sea, and DrakTio's
haughty banners were raised on the backs of DrakTio's lusty deckhands.
Perhaps it was simply that her
own husband's ancestors had risen from the forecastle not many
generations back. She had seen him help his crew often enough, working side by
side with them in storm or fish run. She had learned it was no disgrace to
swing a quemstone or set up a massive loom for herself.
If labor was pleasing to the Lodestar, as the
holy books said, then why should DrakTio nobles consider it distasteful, There
was something bloodless about the old families, some-tiiing not quite healthy.
They died out, to be replaced from below, century after century. It was
well-known that deckhands had the most offspring, skilled handicrafters and
full-time warriors rather less, hereditary officers fewest of all. Why, Admiral
Syranax had, in a long life, begotten only one son and two daughters. She,
Rodonis, had two cubs already, after a mere four years of marriage.
Did
this not suggest that the high Lodestar favored the honest person working with
honest hands?
But
no, those Lannach'honai all had young every other year, like machinery, even
though many of the tykes died on migration. And the Lannach'honai did not work;
not really; they hunted, herded, fished with their effeminate hooks. They were
vigorous enough but they never stuck to a job through hours and days like a
Drak'ho sailor. And, of course, their habits were just disgusting. Animall Indiscriminate lust,
and that was all. For the rest of your life, the father of your cub was only
another male to you—not that you know who he was anyway! you
hussy! And at home there was no modesty between the sexes; there wasn't even
much distinction in everyday habits, because there was no more desire. Ugh!
Still, those filthy Lannach'honai had flourished,
so maybe the Lodestar did not care. No, it was too cold a thought, here in the
night wind under ashen SkTiuanax. Surely the Lodestar had appointed the Fleet
an instrument to destroy those Lannach beasts and take the country they had
been defiling.
Rodonis's wings beat a little faster. The
flagship was close now, its turrets like mountain peaks in the dark. There were
many lamps burning down on deck or in shuttered rooms. There were warriors
cruising endlessly above and around. The Admiral's flag was still at the
masthead, so he had not yet died; but the death watch thickened hour by hour.
Like carrion birds
ivaiting, thought
Rodonis with a shudder.
One of the sentries
whistled her to a hover and flapped close. Moonlight glistened on his polished
spearhead. "Holdl Who are you?"
She had come prepared for such a halt, but
briefly, the tongue clove to her mouth. For she was only a
female, and a monster laired beneath her.
A
gust of wind rattled the dried things hung from a yard-arm: the wings of some
offending sailor who now sat leashed to an oar or a millstone, if he still
lived. Rodonis thought of Delp's back bearing red stumps, and her anger broke
loose in a scream,
"Do you speak in that
tone to a sa Axollon?"
The
warrior did not know her personally among the thousands of Fleet citizens, but
he knew an officer-class scarf. It was surely plain to see that a life's toil
had never been allowed to twist this slim-flanked body.
"Down
on the deck, scum!" yelled Rodonis. "Cover your eyes when you address
me!"
"I—my lady," he
stammered, "I did not—"
She
dove direcdy at him. He had no choice but to get out
of the way. Her voice cracked whip-fashion, trailing her, "Assuming, of
course, that your boatswain has first obtained my permission for you to speak
to me."
"But. . . but . . . but. . . ." Other fighting males had
come now, to wheel as helplessly in the air. Such laws did exist, but no one
had enforced them to the letter for centuries.
An
officer on the main deck met the situation when Rodonis landed. "My
lady," he said with due deference, "it is not seemly for an
unescorted female to be abroad at all, far less to visit this raft of
sorrow."
"It
is necessary," she told him. "I have a word for Captain TTieonax
which will not wait."
"The
Captain is at his honored father's bunkside, my lady. I dare not—"
"Let it be your teeth he has pulled, then when, he learns that Rodonis sa Axollon could have forestalled another mutiny!"
She
flounced across the deck and leaned on the rail, as if brooding
her anger above the sea. The officer gasped. It was like a tail-blow to the
stomach. "My lady! At once . . . wait, wait here,
only the littlest of moments. Guard! Guard, there! Watch over my lady. See that
she lacks not." He scutded off.
Rodonis waited. Now the
real test was coming.
There
had been no problem so far. The Fleet was too shaken; no officer, worried ill,
would have refused her demand when she spoke of a second uprising.
The
first had been bad enough. Such a horror—an actual revolt against the
Lodestar's own Oracle—had been unknown for more than a hundred years . . . and
with a war to fight at the same time! The general impulse had been to deny that
anything serious had happened at all. A regrettable misunderstanding.
Delp's folk misled, fighting their gallant, hopeless fight out of loyalty to
their Captain. After all, you couldn't expect ordinary sailors to understand
the more modern principle, that the Fleet and its Admiral transcended any
individual raft.
Harshly, her tears at the time only a dry
memory, Rodonis rehearsed her interview with Syranax, days ago.
"I
am sorry, my lady," he had said. "Believe me, I am sorry. Your
husband was provoked, and he had more justice on his side than T'heonax. In
fact, I know it was just a fight which happened, not planned, only a chance
spark touching off old grudges, and my own son mostly to blame."
"Then let your son suffer for it!"
she had cried.
The gaunt old skull wove back and forth,
implacably. "No. He may not be the finest person in the world, but he is
my son. And the heir. I haven't long to live, and
wartime is no time to risk a struggle over the succession. For the Fleet's
sake, T'heonax must succeed me without argument from anyone; and for this, he
must have an officially unstained record."
"But why can't you let Delp go,
too?"
"By
the Lodestar, if I couldl But it's not possible. I can give everyone else
amnesty, yes, and I will. But there must be one to bear the blame, one on whom
to vent the pain of our hurts. Delp has to be accused of engineering a mutiny,
and be punished, so that everybody else can say, 'Well,
we fought each other, but it was all his fault, so now we can trust each other
again.'"
The Admiral sighed, a tired breath out of
shrunken lungs. "I wish to the Lodestar I didn't have to do this. I wish .
. . I'm fond of you too, my lady. I wish we could be friends again."
"We can," she
whispered, "if you will set Delp free."
The
conqueror of Maion looked bleakly at her and said, "No. And now I have
heard enough."
She had left his presence.
The days passed, and there was the farcical
nightmare of Delp's trial, and the nightmare of the sentence passed on him, and
the nightmare of waiting for its execution. The Lan-nach'ho raid had been like
a moment's waking from fever-dreams, for it was sharp and real, and your
shipmate was no longer your furtive-eyed enemy but a warrior who met the
barbarian in the clouds and whipped him home from your cubs!
Three nights afterward, Admiral Syranax lay
dying. Had he not fallen sick, Delp would now be a mutilated slave, but in this
renewed tension and uncertainty, so controversial a sentence was naturally
stayed.
Once
T'heonax had the Admiralty, thought Rodonis in a cold comer of her brain, there
would be no more delay. Unless. . . .
"Will my lady come this way?"
They were obsequious, the officers who guided
her across the deck and into the great gloomy pile of logs. Household
servants, pattering up and down windowless corridors by lamplight, stared at
her in a kind of terror. Somehow, the most secret things were always known to
the forecasde, immediately, as if smelled.
It
was dark in here, stuffy, and silent. So silent. The
sea is never still. Only now did Rodonis realize that she had
not before, in all her life, been shut away from the sound of waves and timber
and cordage. Her wings tensed; she wanted to fly up with a scream.
She walked instead.
They
opened a door for her. She went through, and it closed behind her with
sound-deadening massiveness. She saw a small, richly furred and carpeted room
where many lamps burned. The air was so thick it made her dizzy. Theonax lay on
a couch watching her, playing with one of the EartTio knives. There was no one
else.
"Sit down," he said.
She squatted on her tail, eyes smoldering
into his as if they were equals.
"What did you wish to
say?" he asked tonelessly.
"The Admiral your father lives?"
she countered.
"Not
for long, I fear," he said. "AeakTia will eat him before noon."
His eyes went toward the arras, haunted. "How long the night isl"
Rodonis waited.
"Well?"
he said. His head swung back, snakishly. There was a rawness
in his tone. "You mentioned something about . . . another mutiny?"
Rodonis
sat straight up on her haunches. Her chest grew stiff. "Yes," she
replied in a winter voice. "My husband's crew have
not forgotten him."
"Perhaps
not," snapped T'heonax. "But they've had sufficient loyalty to the
Admiralty drubbed into them by now."
"Loyalty to Admiral
Syranax, yes," she told him. "But that was never lacking. You know as
wall as I , what happened was no mutiny . . . only a
riot by males who were against you. Syranax they have always admired, if not loved.
"The real mutiny will be against his murderer." TTieonax leaped.
"What do you mean?" he shouted.
"Who's a murderer?"
"You
are." Rodonis pushed it out between her teeth. "You have poisoned
your father."
She
waited then, through a time which stretched close to breaking. She could not
tell if the notoriously violent male she faced would kill her for uttering
those words.
Almost, he did. He drew back from her when
his knife touched her throat. His jaws clashed shut again,
he leaped onto his couch and stood there on all fours with back lurched, tail
rigid and wings rising.
"Go
on," he hissed. "Say your lies. I know well enough how you hate my
whole family because of that worthless husband of yours. All the Fleet knows.
Do you expect them to believe your naked word?"
"I
never hated your father," said Rodonis, not quite steadily; death had
brushed very close. "He condemned Delp, yes. I thought he did wrongly, but
he did it for the Fleet, and I ... I
am of officer kindred myself. You recall, on the day after the raid I asked him
to dine with me us a token to all that the DrakTionai must close ranks."
"So
you did," sneered Theonax. "A
pretty gesture. I remember how hotly spiced all the guests said the
food was. And the little keepsake you gave him, that shining disc from the
Eart'ho possessions. Touching! As if it were yours to
give. Everything of theirs belongs to the Admiralty."
"Well, the fat Eart'ho had given it to
me himself," said Rodonis. She was deliberately leading the conversation
into irrelevant channels, seeking to calm them both. "He had recovered it
from his baggage, he said. He called it a coin, an article of trade among his people. He thought I might like it to
remember him by. That was just after the . . . the riot . . . and just before he and
his companions were removed from the Gemnis to
that other raft."
"It
was a miser's gift," said Theonax. "The disc was quite worn out of
shape. Bah!" His muscles, bunched again. "Come. Accuse me further, if
you dare."
"I
have not been altogether a fool," said Rodonis. "I have left letters,
to be opened by certain friends if I do
not return. But consider the facts, Theonax. You are an ambitious male, and
one of whom most persons are willing to think the worst. Your father's death
will make you Admiral, the virtual owner of the Fleet. How long you must have
chafed, waiting for this! Your father is dying, stricken by a malady unlike any
known to our chirurgeons: not even like any known poison, so wildly does it destroy
him. Now it is known to many that the raiders did not manage to carry off every
bit of the Eart'ho food: three small packets were left behind. The EartTionai
frequendy and publicly warned us against eating any of their rations. And you have had charge of all the Eart'ho things!"
Theonax gasped.
"It's
a lie!" he chattered. "I don't know ...
I haven't ... I
never. . . . Will anyone believe I, anyone, could do such a thing as . .
. poison ... his own father?"
"Of you they will believe it," said Rodonis.
"I swear by the
Lodestar!"
"The Lodestar will not give luck to a
Fleet commanded by a parricide. There will be mutiny on that account alone,
Theonax."
He glared at her, wild and panting.
"What do you want?" he croaked.
Rodonis
looked at him with the coldest gaze he had ever met. "I will burn those letters," she said, "and will keep silence
forever. I will even join my denials to yours, should the same thoughts occur
to someone else. But Delp must have immediate, total amnesty."
T'heonax brisded and
snarled at her.
"I
could fight you," he growled. "I could have you arrested for
treasonable talk, and kill anyone who dared—"
"Perhaps,"
said Rodonis. "But is it worth it? You might split the Fleet open and
leave us all a prey to the Lan-nachlionai. All I ask is my husband back."
"For that, you would
threaten to ruin the Fleet?"
"Yes," she said.
And
after a moment, "You do not understand. You males make the nations and
wars and songs and science, all the little things. You imagine you are the
strong, practical sex. But a female goes again and yet again under death's
shadow to bring forth another life. We are the hard ones. We have to be."
T'heonax huddled back,
shivering.
"Yes," he whispered at last,
"yes, damn you, curse you, shrivel you, yes, you can have him. I'll give
you an order now, this instant. Get his rotten feet off my raft before dawn,
d'you hear? But I did not poison my father." His wings beat thunderous,
until he lifted up under the ceiling and threshed there, trapped and screaming.
"I didn'tl"
Rodonis waited.
Presently
she took the written order, and left him, and went to the brig, where they cut
the ropes that bound Delp hyr Orikan. He lay in her arms and sobbed. "I
will keep my wings, I will keep my wings. . . ."
Rodonis sa Axollon stroked his crest,
murmured to him, crooned to him, told him all would be well now, that they were
going home again, and wept a little because she loved him.
Inwardly she held a chill memory, how old van
Rijn had given her the coin but warned her against . . . what had he said? . .
. heavy metal poisoning. "To you, iron, copper,
tin is unknown stuffs. I am not a chemist; chemists I hire when chemicking is
needful; but I think better I eat a shovelful arsenic than one of your cubs
try teething on this piece money, by damn!"
And
she remembered sitting up in the dark, with a stone in her hand, grinding and
grinding the coin, until there was seasoning for the unbendable AdmiraTs
dinner.
Afterward
she recollected that the Eart'ho was not supposed to have such mastery of her
language. It occurred to her now, like a shudder, that
he could very well have left that deadly food behind on purpose, in hopes it
might cause trouble. But how closely had he foreseen the event?
XI
Guntra
of the Fnklann sept came in through the door. Eric Wace
looked up wearily. Behind him, hugely shadowed between rush lights, the mill
was a mumble of toiling forms. "Yes?" he sighed.
Guntra
held out a broad shield, two meters long, a light sturdy construction of wicker
on a wooden frame. For many ten-days she had supervised hundreds of females and
cubs as they gathered and split and dried the reeds, formed the wood, wove the
fabric, assembled the unit. She had not been so tired since homecoming.
Nevertheless, a small victory dwelt in her voice as she said, "This is
the four thousandth, Councillor." It was not his tide, but the Lan-nacha
mind could hardly imagine anyone without definite rank inside the Flock
organization. Considering the authority granted the wingless creatures, it fell
most naturally to call them Councillors.
"Good."
He hefted the object in hands grown calloused. "A strong
piece of work. Four thousand are more than enough; your task is done,
Guntra."
"Thank
you." She looked curiously about the transformed mill. Hard
to remember that not so long ago it had existed chiefly to grind food.
Angrek of the Trekkans came up with a block
of wood in his grasp. "Councillor," he began, "I—" He
stopped. His gaze had fallen on Guntra, who was still in her middle years and
had always been considered handsome.
Her
eyes met his. A common smokiness lit them. His wings spread and he took a stiff
step toward her.
With
a gasp, almost a sob, Guntra turned and fled. Angrek stared after her, then
threw his block to the floor and cursed.
"What the devil?"
said Wace.
Angrek beat a fist into his palm.
"Ghosts," he muttered. "It must be ghosts . . . unrestful
spirits of all the evildoers who ever lived . . . possessing the Drakska, and
now come to plague us!"
Another
pair of bodies darkened the door, which stood open to the short pale night of
early summer. Nicholas van Rijn and Tolk, the Herald, entered.
"How
goes it, boy?" boomed van Rijn. He was gnawing a nitre-packed onion; the
gauntness which had settled on Wace, even on Sandra, had not touched him. But
then, thought Wace bitterly, the old blubberbucket didn't work. All he did was
stroll around and talk to the local bosses and complain that things weren't
proceeding fast enough.
"Slowly, sir." The younger man bit back words he would
rather have said. You
bloated leech, do you expect to be carried home by my labor and my brains, and
fob me off with another factor's post on another hell-planet?
"It
will have to be speeded, then," said van Rijn. "We cannot wait so
long, you and me."
Tolk
glanced keenly at Angrek. The handicrafter was still trembling and whispering
charms. "What's wrong?" he asked.
"The ... an
influence."
Angrek covered his eyes. "Herald," he stammered, "Guntra of the
Enklann was here just now, and for a moment we . . . we desired each
other."
Tolk
looked grave, but spoke without reproof. "It has happened to many. Keep it under control."
"But
what is it, Herald? a
sickness? A judgment? What have I done?"
"These
unnatural impulses aren't unknown," said Tolk. "They crop up in most
of us every once in a while. But of course, one doesn't talk about it; one
suppresses it, and does his or her best to forget it ever happened." He
scowled. "Lately there has been more of such hankering than usual. I don't
know why. Go back to your work and avoid females."
Angrek drew a shaky breath, picked up his
piece of wood, and nudged Wace. "I wanted your advice; the shape here doesn't seem to me the best
for its purpose."
Tolk
looked around. He had just come back from a prolonged journey, cruising over
his entire homeland to bear word to scattered clans. "There has been much
work done here," he said.
"Ja,"
nodded van Rijn complacently.
"He is a talented engineer, him my young friend. But then, the factor on a
new planet had pest-bedamned better be a good engineer."
"I
am not so well acquainted with the details of his schemes."
"My
schemes," corrected van Rijn, somewhat huffily. "I tell him to make
us weapons. All he does then is make them."
"All?"
asked Tolk dryly. He inspected a skeletal framework. "What's this?"
"A repeating dart-thrower—a machine gun,
I call it. See, this walking beam turns this spurred fly wheel. Darts are fed
to the wheel on a belt . . . s-s-so . . . and tossed off fast: two or three in
an eye-wink, at least. The wheel is swivel-mounted to point in all directions.
It is an old idea, really. I think Miller or de Camp or someone first built it
long ago. But it is one hard damn thing to face in battle."
"Excellent," approved Tolk.
"And that over there?"
"We
call it a ballista. It is like the Drak'ho catapults, only more so. This throws
large stones to break down a wall or sink a boat. And here—ja!" Van Rijn picked up the shield Guntra had
brought. "This is not so good advertising copy, maybe, but I think it
means a bit more for us than the other machineries. A warrior on the ground
wears one on his back."
"Mmmm
. . . yes, I see where a harness would fit. It would stop missiles from above,
eh? But our warrior could not fly while he wore it."
"Just
sol" roared van Rijn. "Just bloody-be-so!
That is the troubles with you folk on Diomedes. Great balls of cheesel How you expect to fight a real war with nothing but all air
forces, ha? Up here in Salmenbrok, I spend all days hammering into stupid
officer heads, it is infantry takes and holds a
position, by damn! And then officers have to beat it into the ranks, and
practice them. Gout of Judas, it is not time enough! In these few ten-days, I
have to try make what needs years!"
Tolk nodded, almost casually. Even Trolwen
had needed lime and argument before he grasped the idea of a combat force whose
main body was deliberately restricted to ground operations. It was too alien a
concept. But the Herald said only, "Yes. I see your reasoning. It is the
strong points which decide who holds Lannach, the fortified towns that dominate
a countryside from which all the food comes. And to take the towns back, we
will need to dig our way in."
"You
think smartly," approved van Rijn. "In Earth history, it took some
peoples a long time to learn there is no victory in air power alone."
"There are still the Drakska fire
weapons," said Tolk. "What do you plan to do about them? My whole
mission, these past ten-days, has been largely to persuade the outlying septs
to join us. I gave them your word that the fire could be faced, that we'd even
have flame throwers and bombs of our own. I'd better have been telling the
truth."
He
looked about. The mill, converted to a crude factory, was too full of winged
laborers for him to see far. Nearby, a primitive
lathe, somewhat improved by Wace, was turning out spearshafts and tomahawk
handles. Another engine, a whirling grindstone, was new to him: it shaped ax
heads and similar parts, not as good as the handmade
type but formed in wholesale lots. A drop hammer knocked off flint and obsidian
flakes for cutting edges; a circular saw cut wooden members; a rope-twisting machine spun faster than the eye could follow. All of it
was belt-powered from the great millwheels. All of it ludicrously haywired and
cranky, but it spat forth the stuff of war faster than Lannach could use,
filling whole bins with surplus armament.
"It is
remarkable," said Tolk. "It frightens me a little."
"I
make a new way of life here," said van Rijn expansively. "It is not
this machine or that one which has already changed your history beyond changing
back. It is the basic idea I have introduced: mass production."
"But the fire-"
"Wace
has also begun to make us fire weapons. Sulfur they have gathered from Mount
Oborch, and there are oil pools from which we are getting nice arsonish liquids.
Distillation, that is another art the Drak'ho have had and you have not. Now we
will have some Molotov cockatils for our own selves."
The
human scowled. "But there is one thing true, my friend. We have not time
to train your warriors like they should be to use this
materials. Soon I starve; soon your females get heavy and food must be
stored." He heaved a pathetic sigh. "Though I will
be long dead before you folks have real sufferings."
"Not
so," said Tolk grimly. "We have almost half a year left before Birthtime,
true. But already we are weakened by hunger, cold, and despair. Already we have
failed to perform many ceremonies—"
"Damn your ceremonies!" snapped van
Rijn. "I say it is Ulwen town we should take first, where it sits so nice
overlooking Duna Brae that all the hombeasts five at. If we have Ulwen, you
have eats enough, also a strong point easy to defend. But no, Trolwen and the
Council say we must strike straight for Mannenach, leaving Ulwen enemy-held in
our rear, and then go down clear to Sagna Bay where their rafts can get at us. For why? So you can hold some blue-be-fungused rite
there!"
"You
cannot understand," said Tolk gently. "We are too different. Even I,
whose life's work it has been to deal with alien peoples, cannot grasp your
attitude. But our life is the cycle of the year. It is not that we take the old
gods so seriously any more—but their rituals, the rightness and decency of it
all, the belonging.
. . ." He
looked upward, into the shadow-hidden roof where the wind hooted and rushed about
the busy millwheels. "No, I don't believe that ancestral ghosts fly out
there of nights. But I do believe that when I welcome High Summer back at the
great rite in Mannenach. as all my forebears have done
for as long as there has been a Flock . . . then I am keeping the Flock itself
alive."
"Bah!"
Van Rijn extended a dirt-encrusted hand to scratch the matted beard which was
engulfing his face. He couldn't shave or wash: even given anti-allergen shots,
human skin wouldn't tolerate Diomedean soap. "I tell you why you have all
this ritual. First, you are a slave to the seasons, more even than any farmer
on Earth back in our old days. Second, since you must fly so much and leave
your homes empty all the dark time up here, ritual is your most precious possession.
It is the only thing you have not weighing too much to be carried with you
everywhere."
"That's as may be," said Tolk.
"The fact remains. If there is any
chance of greeting the Full Day from Mannenach Standing Stones, we shall take
it. The extra lives which are lost because this may not be the soundest strategy, will be offered in gladness."
"If it does not cost us the whole befouled war." Van Rijn snorted. "Devils
and dandruff! My own chaplain at home, that pickle face, is not so fussy
about what is proper. Why, that poor young fellow there was near making suicide
now, just because he got a litde bit excited over a wench out of wenching
season, nie?"
"It
isn't done," said Tolk stiffly. He walked from the shop. After a moment,
van Rijn followed.
Wace
settled the point of discussion with Angrek, checked operations elsewhere,
swore at a well-meaning young porter who was storing volatile petroleum
fractions beside the hearth, and left. His feet were heavy at the end of his
legs. It was too much for one man to do, organizing, designing, supervising,
trouble-shooting. Van Rijn seemed to think it was routine to lift neolithic
hunters into the machine age in a few weeks. He ought to try it himself! It
might sweat some of the lard off the old hog.
The nights were so short now, only a paleness between two red clouds on a jagged horizon, that
Wace no longer paid any heed to the time. He worked until he was ready to drop,
slept a while, and went back to work.
Sometimes he wondered if he had ever felt
rested and clean, and well fed, and comforted in his aloneness.
Morning smoldered on northerly ridges, where a
line of volcanoes smeared wrathful black across the sun. Both moons were
sinking, each a cold coppery disc twice the apparent size of Earth's Luna.
Mount Oborch shivered along giant flanks and spat a few boulders at the pallid
sky. The wind came galing, stiff as an iron bar
pressed against Wace's suddenly chilled back. Salmenbrok village huddled
flinty barren under its loud quick thrust.
He had reached the ladder made for him, so he
could reach the tiny loft-room he used, when Sandra came from behind the
adjoining tower. She paused, one hand stealing to her face. He could not hear
what she said in the blustery air.
He went over to her. Gravel scrunched under
the awkward leather boots a Lannacha tailor had made him. "I beg your
pardon, my lady?"
"Oh ...
it was nothing. Freeman Wace." Her green gaze came up to meet his,
steadily and proudly, but he saw a redness steal along
her cheeks. "I only said . . . good morning."
"Likewise." He rubbed sandy-lidded eyes. "I haven't
seen you for some time, my lady. How are you?"
"Restless,"
she said. "Unhappy. Will you talk to me for a Little,
perhaps?"
They
left the hamlet behind and followed a dim trail upward, through low harsh
bushes breaking into purple bloom. High above them wheeled a few sentries, but
those were only impersonal specks against heaven. Wace felt his heartbeat grow
hasty.
"What have you been
doing?" he asked.
"Nothing of value. What can I do?" She stared down at her hands. "I try, but I
have not the skills, not like you the engineer or Freeman van Rijn."
"Him?" Wace shrugged. No doubt the old goat had found plenty of chance to brag
himself up, as he lounged, superfluous, around Salmenbrok. "It—" He
stopped, groping after words. "It's enough just to have my lady
present."
"Why, Freeman!" She laughed, with
genuine half-amused pleasure and no coyness at all. "I never thought you
so gallant in the words."
"Never
had much chance to be, my lady," he murmured, too tired and
strength-emptied to keep up his guard.
"Not?" She gave
him a sideways look. The wind laid its fingers in her tightly braided hair and
unfurled small banners of it. She was not yet starved, but the bones in her
face were standing out more sharply; there was a smudge on one cheek and her
garments were clumsy baggings hurled together by a tailor who had never seen a
human frame before. But somehow, stripped thus of queenliness, she seemed to
him more beautiful than before. Perhaps because of being
closer? Because her poverty said with frankness that she'was only human flesh like himself?
"No," he got out
between stiff lips.
"I do not
understand," she said.
"Your pardon, my lady. I was thinking out loud. Bad habit. But one
does on these outpost worlds. You see the same few men so often that they stop
being company; you avoid them. And, of course, we're always undermanned, so you
have to go out by yourself on various jobs, maybe for weeks at a time. Why am I
saying all this? I don't know. Dear God, how tired I ami"
They paused on a ridge. At their feet there
was a cliff tumbling through hundreds of meters down to a foam-white river.
Across the canyon were mountains and mountains, their snows tinged bloody by
the sun. The wind came streaking up the dales and struck the humans in the
face.
"I see. Yes, it clears for me." Sandra
regarded him with grave eyes. "You have had to work hard all your life.
There has not been time for the pleasures, the learned manners and culture.
Not?"
"No time at all, my lady," he said.
"I was bom in the slums, one kilometer from the old Triton Docks. Nobody
but the very poor would live that close to a spaceport, the traffic and stinks
and earthquake noise; however, you got used to it till it was a part of you,
built into your bones. Half my playmates are now dead or in jail, I imagine;
the other half are scrabbling for the occasional half-skilled, hard-and-dirty
job no one else wants. Don't pity me, though. I was lucky. I got apprenticed to
a fur wholesaler when I was twelve. After two years, I'd made enough contacts
to get a hard-and-dirty job myself—only this was on a spaceship, fur-trapping
expedition to Rhiannon. I taught myself a little something in odd moments, and
bluffed about the rest I was supposed to know, and got a slightiy better job.
And so on and so on, till they put me in charge of this outpost— a very minor
enterprise which may in time become moderately profitable but will never be
important. But it's a stepping stone. So here I am, on a mountain top with all
Diomedes below me, and what's next?"
He
shook his head, violently, wondering why his reserve had broken down. Being so
exhausted was like a drunkenness. But there was more
to it than that . . . no, he was not fishing
for sympathy . . . down underneath, did he want to find out if she would understand?
If she could?
"You
will get back," she said quiedy. "Your kind of man always
survives."
"Maybe!"
"It
is heroic, what you have done already." She looked away from him, toward
the driving clouds around Oborch's peak. "I am not certain anything can stop
you. Except yourself."
"I?"
He was beginning to be embarrassed now, and wanted to talk of other things. He
plucked at his bristiy red beard.
"Yes.
Who else can? You have come so far, so fast. But why not stop? Soon, perhaps
here on this mountain, must you not ask yourself how much further it is worth going?"
"I don't know. As far as possible, I
guess."
"Why? Is it necessary to become great?
Is it not enough to be free? With your talent and experience, you can make good-enough monies on many settled planets where men are
more at home than here. Like Hermes, exemplia. In
this striving to be rich and powerful, is it not merely that you want to feed
and shelter the little boy who once cried himself hungry to sleep back in
Triton Docks? But that little boy you can never comfort, my friend. He died
long ago."
"Well ...
I don't know ... I suppose one day
111 have a family. I'd want to give my wife more than just a hving; I'd want to
leave my children and grandchildren enough resources to go on—to stand off the whole
world if they had to."
"Yes. So. I
think maybe—" he saw, before she turned her head from him, how the blood
flew up into her face. "Maybe the old fighting Dukes of Hermes were like
so. It would be well if we had a breed of men like them again." Suddenly
she began walking very fast down the path. "Enough. Best we return,
not?"
He followed her, little
aware of the ground he trod.
XII
When
the Lannachska were
ready to fight, they were called to Salmenbrok by Tolk's Whistlers until the
sky darkened with their wings. Then Trolwen made his way through a seethe of
warriors to van Rijn.
"Surely
the gods are weary of us," he said bitterly. "Near always, at this
time of year, there are strong south winds." He gestured at a breathless
heaven. "Do you know a spell for raising dead breezes?"
The merchant looked up, somewhat annoyed. He
was seated at a table outside the wattle-and-clay hut they had built for him
beyond the village—for he refused to climb ladders, or sleep in a damp cave—dicing
with Corps Captain Srygen for the beryl-like gemstones which were a local
medium of exchange. The number of species in the galaxy which have
independently invented some form of African golf is beyond estimation.
"Well," he snapped, "and why
must you have your tail fanned?. . . Ah, sevenl No,
pox and pills, I remember, here seven is not a so good number. Well, we try
again." The three cubes clicked in his hand and across the table. "Hm, hm, seven again." He scooped up the stakes. "Double or nothings?"
"The
ghost-eaters take it!" Srygen got up. "You've been winning too
motherless often for my taste."
Van
Rijn surged to his own feet like a broaching whale.
"By damn, you take that back or—"
"I said nothing
challengeable," Srygen told him coldly.
"You implied it. I am
insulted, myselfl"
"Hold on there," growled Trolwen. "What do you think this is, a beer feast? Eart'a, all the fighting forces of Lannach
are now gathered on these hills. We cannot feed them
here very long. And yet, with the new weapons loaded on the railway cars, we
cannot stir until there is a south wind. What to do?"
Van Rijn glared at Srygen. "I said I was
insulted. I do not think so good when I am
insulted."
"I
am sure the captain will apologize for any unintended offense," said
Trolwen, with a red-shot look at them both.
"Indeed," said
Srygen. He spoke it like pulling teeth.
"So." Van Rijn stroked his beard. "Then to prove you make no doubt about
my honesties, we throw once more, nie? Double or nothings."
Srygen
snatched the dice and hurled them. "Ah, a six you have," said van
Rijn. "It is not so easy to beat. I am afraid I have already lost. It is
not so simple to be a poor lired hungry old man, far away from his home and
from the Siamese cats who are all he has to love him for himself, not
just his monies. Tum-te-tum-te-tum. . . . Eightl A two, ii
three, a three! Well, well,
well!"
"Transport," said Trolwen, hanging
on to his temper by a hair. "The new weapons are too heavy for our
porters. They have to go by rail. Without a wind, how do we get them down to
Sagna Bay?"
"Simple,"
said van Rijn, counting his take. "Till you get a good wind, tie ropes to
the cars and all these so-husky young fellows pull."
Srygen
blew up. "A free clan male, to drag a car like a . . .
like a Draka?" He mastered himself and choked: "It isn't done."
"Sometimes,"
said van Rijn, "these things must be done." He scooped up the jewels,
dropped them into a purse, and went over to a well. "Surely you have some
disciplines in this Flock."
"Oh . . . yes ... I suppose so—" Trolwen's unhappy gaze went downslope to
the brawling, shouting winged tide which had engulfed the village. "But
sustained labor like that has always . . . long before the Drakska came . . .
always been considered . . . perverted, in a way. It is not exacdy forbidden,
but one does not do it without the most compelling necessity. To labor in public—Nol"
Van
Rijn hauled on the windlass. "Why not? The
Drak-Tionai, them, make all kinds tiresome preachments about the dignity of
labor. For them it is needful; in their way of life, one must work hard. But for you? Why must one not work hard in Lannach?"
"It isn't right," said Srygen
stifEy. "It makes us like some land of animal."
Van Rijn pulled the bucket to the well coping
and took a bottle of Earthside beer from it. "Ahhh, good and cold . . .
hm, possibles too cold, damn all places without
thermo-statted coolers!" He opened the botde on the stone curb and tasted.
"It will do. Now, I have made travels, and I find that everywhere the
manners and morals of peoples have some good reason at bottom. Maybe the race
has forgotten why was a rule made in the first place, but if the rule does not
make some sense, it will not last many centuries.
Follows then that you do not like prolonged hard work, except, to be
sure, migration, because it is not good for you for some reason. And yet it does not hurt the DrakTionai too
much. Paradox!"
"Unlawfulness
take your wonderings," snarled Trolwen. "It
was your idea that we make all this new-fangled apparatus, instead of fighting
as our males have always fought. Now, how do we get it down to the lowlands
without demoralizing the army?"
"Oh,
that!" Van Rijn shrugged. "You have sports—contests?" "Of course."
"Well, you explain these cars must be
brought with us and, while it is not necessary we leave at once—"
"But it is! Well starve if we
don't!"
"My good young friend," said van
Rijn patiently, "I see plain you have much to learn about politics. You
Lan-nachska do not understand lying, I suppose because you do not get married.
You tell the warriors, I say, that we can wait for a south wind all right but
you know they are eager, to come to grips with the foe and therefore they will
be invited to play a small game. Each clan will pull so and so many cars down,
and we time how fast it goes and make a prize for the best pullers."
"Well, 111 be accursed," said Srygen.
Trolwen
nodded eagerly. "It's just the sort of thing that gets into clan
traditions."
"You see," explained van Rijn,
"it is what we call semantics on Earth. I am old and short with breath, so
I can look unprejudiced at all these footballs and baseballs and potato races,
and I know that a game is hard work you are not required to do."
He belched,
opened another bottle, and took a half-eaten salami
from his purse. The supplies weren't going to last very much longer.
When
the expedition was
halfway down the Misty Mountains, their wind rose behind them. A hundred warriors harnessed to each railway
car relaxed and waited for the timers whose hourglasses would determine the
winning team.
"But they are not all so dim in the
brain, surely," said Sandra.
"Oh,
no," answered Wace. "But those who were smart enough to see through
Old Nick's scheme were also smart enough to see it was necessary, and keep
quiet."
He
huddled in a mordant blast that drove down alpine slopes to the distant cloudy
green of hills and valleys, and watched the engineers at work. A train
consisted of about thirty light litUe cars roped together, with a
"locomotive" at the head and another in the middle. These were
somewhat more sturdily built, to support two high masts with square sails.
Given wood of almost metallic hardness, plus an oil-drip over the wheels in
lieu of ball bearings, plus the hurricane thrust of Diomedean winds, the
system became practical. You didn't get up much speed, and you must often wait
for a following wind, but this was not a culture bound to hourly schedules.
"It's not too late for you to go back,
my lady," said Wace. "I can arrange an escort."
"No."
She laid a hand on the bow which had been made for her—no toy, a 25-kilo
killing tool such as she had often hunted with in her home forests. Her head
lifted, the silver-pale hair caught chill ruddy sunlight and threw back a glow
to this dark immensity of cliffs and glaciers. "Here we all stand or we
all die. It would not be right for a ruler bom to stay home."
Van Rijn hawked. "Trouble with
aristocrats," he muttered.
"Bred for looks and courage, not brains. Now I would
go back, if not needed here, to show I have confidence in my own plans."
"Do you?" asked
Wace skeptically.
"Let
be with foolishness," snorted van Rijn. "Of course
not." He trudged back to the staff car which had been prepared for
him: at least it had walls, a roof, and a bunk. The wind shrieked down ringing
stony canyons, he leaned against it with all his weight. Overhead swooped and soared the squadrons of Lannach.
Wace
and Sandra each had a private car, but she asked him to ride down with her.
"Forgive me if I make dramatics, Eric, but we may be killed and it is
lonely to die without a human hand to hold." She laughed, a little
breathlessly. "Or at least we can talk."
"I'm afraid—" He cleared a
tightened throat. "I'm afraid, my lady, I can't converse as readily as . .
. Freeman van Rijn."
"Oh," she grinned, "that was
what I meant. I said we can
talk, not him only."
Nevertheless,
when the trains got into motion, she grew as quiet as he.
Lacking
their watches (had that bastard TTieonax figured out what those were for?),
they could scarcely even guess how long the trip took. High Summer
had almost come to Lannach. Once in twelve and a half hours, the sun scraped
the horizon north of west, but there was no more real night. Wace watched the
kilometers click away beneath him. He ate, slept, spoke desultorily with Sandra
or with young Angrek who served as her aide, and the
great land flattened into rolling valleys and forests of, low, fringe-leaved
trees, and the sea came near.
Now and again a hotbox or a contrary wind
delayed the caravan. There was restlessness in the ranks: they were used to
streaking in a day from the mountains to the coast, not to wheeling above this
inchworm of a railway. DrakTionai scouts spied them from afar, inevitably, and
a detachment of rafts lumbered into Sagna Bay with powerful reinforcements.
Raids probed the flanks of the attackers. And still the trains crawled.
In
point of fact, there were eight Diomedean revolutions between the departure
from Salmenbrok and the Battle of Mannenach.
The harbor town lay on the Sagna shore, well
in from the open sea and sheltered by surrounding wooded hills. It was a gaunt,
grim-looking complex of stone towers, tightly knitted together with the usual
tunnels and enclosed bridges, talking in the harsh tones of half a dozen big
windmills. It overlooked a small pier which the DrakTionai had been enlarging.
Beyond, dark on the choppy brown waters, rocked two score enemy craft.
As
his train halted, Wace Jumped from Sandra's car. There was nothing to shoot at
yet: Mannenach revealed only a few peaked roofs thrusting above the grassy
ridge before him. Even against the wind, he could hear the thunder of wings as
the DrakTionai lifted from the town, twisting upward in a single black mass
like some tornado made flesh. But heaven was thick with Lannachska above him,
and the enemy made no immediate attack.
His
heart thumped, runaway, and his mouth was too dry for him to speak. Almost
hazily, he saw Sandra beside him. A Diomedean bodyguard under Angrek closed
around in a thombush of spears.
The
girl smiled. "This is a kind of relief," she said. "No more
sitting and worrying, only to do what we can, not?"
"Not
indeed!" puffed van Rijn, stumping toward them. Like the other humans, he
had arranged for an ill-fitting cuirass and helmet of laminated hard leather
above the baggy malodorous native clothes. But he wore two sets of armor, one
on top of the other, carried a shield on his left arm, had appointed two young
warriors to hold another shield over him like a canopy, and bore a tomahawk and
a beltful of stone daggers. "Not if I can get out of it, by damn I You go ahead and fight. I will be right behind
you—as far behind as the good saints let."
Wace
found his tongue and said maliciously, "I've often thought there might be
fewer wars among civilized races, if they reverted to this primitive custom
that the generals be present at the battles."
"Bah!
Ridiculous! Just as many wars, only using generals who
have guts more than brains. I think cowards make the best strategists, stands
to reason, by damn. Now I stay in my car." Van Rijn stalked off,
muttering.
Trolwen's
newly-formed field artillery corps were going frantic, unloading their clumsy
weapons from the trains and assembling them while squads and patrols skirmished
overhead. Wace cursed—here was something he could do!—and hurried to the
nearest confusion. "Hoy, there! Back away! What are you trying to do?
Here, you, you, you, get up in the car and unlash the main frame." After a
while, he almost lost consciousness of the fighting that developed around him.
The
Mannenach garrison and its sea-borne reinforcements had begun with cautious
probing, a few squadrons at a time swooping to flurry briefly with some of the
Lannachska flying troops, then pulling away again toward the town. DrakTio
forces here were outnumbered by a fair margin; Trolwen had reasoned correctly
that no Admiral would dare leave the main Fleet without a strong defense while
Lannach was still formidable. In addition, the sailors were puzzled, a little
afraid, at the unprecedented attacking formations.
Fully half the Lannachska were ranked on the
ground, covered by roof-like shields which would not even permit them to fly!
Never in history had such a thing been known!
During an hour, the two
hordes came more closely to grips. Much superior in the air, the DrakTionai
punched time after time through Trolwen's flyers. But integrated by the
Whistler corps, the aerial troops closed again, fluidly. And there was little
profit in attacking the Lannachska infantry; those awkward shields trapped
edged missiles, sent stones rebounding, an assault from above was almost ignored.
Arrows
were falling thickly when Wace had his last fieldpiece assembled. He nodded at a Whistíer, who whirled up immediately to bear the word
to Trolwen. From the Commander's position, where he rode a thermal updraft,
came a burst of messengers. Banners broke out on the ground, war-whoops tore
through the wind, it was the word to advance!
Ringed
by Angrek's guards, Wace remained all too well aware that he was at the
forefront of an army. Sandra went beside him, her hps úntense. On either hand stretched spear-jagged fines
of walking dragons. It seemed like a long time before they had mounted the
ridge.
One
by one, DrakTionai officers realized . . . and yelled their bafflement.
These stolid ground troops, unassailable from
above, unopposed below, were simply pouring over the hill to Man-nenach's
walls, trundling their siege tools. When they arrived there, they got to work.
It became a gale of wings and weapons. The
DrakTionai plunged, hacked and stabbed at Trolwen's infantry, and were in their
turn attacked from above, as his flyers, whom they had briefly dispersed,
resumed formation. Meanwhile, crunch, crunch, crunch, rams ate at Mannenach; detachments on foot went around the town and
down toward the harbor.
"Over there! Hit 'em again!" Wace
heard all at once that he was yelling.
Something
broke through the chaos overhead. An arrow-filled body crashed to earth. A five
one followed it, a
DrakTio warrior with the air pistol-cracking under his wings. He came low and fast. One of Angrek's lads
thrust a sword at him, missed, and had his brains spattered by the sailor's
tomahawk.
Without time to know what had happened, Wace
saw the creature before him. He struck, wildly, with his own stone ax. A
wing-buffet knocked him to the ground. He bounced up, spitting blood, as the
DrakTio came about and dove again. His hands were emptyl Suddenly the DrakTio
screamed and clawed at an arrow in his throat, fluttered down and died.
Sandra
nocked a fresh shaft. "I told you I would have some small use today,"
she said.
"I—" Wace reeled
where he stood, looking at her.
"Go
on," she said. "Help them break through. I will guard."
Her
face was even paler than before, but there was a green in her eyes which
burned.
He
spun about and went back to directing his sappers. It was plain now that
battering rams had been a mistake; they wouldn't get through mortared walls
till Matthewsmas. He took everyone off the engines and put them to helping
those who dug. With enough wooden shovels—or bare hands —they'd be sure to
strike a tunnel soon.
From somewhere near, there lifted a clatter
great enough to drown out the struggle around him. Wace jumped up on a ram's
framework and looked over the heads of his engineers.
A body of DrakTionai had resorted to the
ground themselves. They were not drilled in such tactics; but then, the
Lannachska had had only the sketchiest training. By sheer sustained fury the
DrakTionai were pushing their opponents back. From Trolwen's airy viewpoint,
thought Wace, there must be an ugly dent in the line.
Where the devil were the
machine guns?
Yes, here came one,
bouncing along on a little cart. Two
Lannachska
began pumping the flywheel, a third aimed and operated
the feed. Darts hosed across the Drak'honai. They broke up, took to the sky
again. Wace hugged Sandra and danced her across the field.
Then
hell boiled over on the roofs above him. His immediate corps had finally
gotten to an underground passage and made it a way of entry. Driving the enemy
before.them, up to the top floors and out, they seized this one tower in a
rush.
"Angrekl"
panted Wace. "Get me up there!" Someone lowered a rope. He swarmed up
it, with Sandra close behind. Standing on the ridgepole, he looked past stony
parapets and turning millwheels, down to the bay. Trolwen's forces had taken
the pier without much trouble, but they were getting no further; a steady hail
of fire-streams, oil bombs, and catapult missiles from the anchored rafts
staved them off. Their own similar armament was outranged.
Sandra squinted against the wind, shifted
north to lash her eyes to weeping, and pointed. "Eric, do you recognize
that flag on the largest of the vessels there?"
"Mmm ...
let me see . . . yes, I do. Isn't that our old chum Delp's personal
banner?"
"So,
it is. I am not sorry he has escaped punishment for the riot we made. But I
would rather have someone else to fight, it would be safer."
"Maybe,"
said Wace. "But there's work to do. We have our toe-hold in the city. Now
we'll have to beat down doors and push out the enemy room by room. You're
staying here!"
"I
am not!"
Wace jerked his thumb at Angrek. "Detail
a squad to take the lady back to the trains," he snapped. "Nol"
yelled Sandra.
"You're too late," grinned Wace.
"I arranged for this before we ever left Salmenbrok."
She swore at him, then suddenly, sofdy, she
leaned over and murmured beneath the wind and the war-shrieks: "Come back
hale, my friend."
He led his troopers into
the tower.
Afterward he had no clear memory of the
fight. It was a hard and bloody operation, ax and knife, tooth and fist, wing
and tail, in narrow tunnels and cave-like rooms. He took blows, and gave them;
once, for several minutes, he lay unconscious, and once he led a triumphant
breakthrough into a wide assembly hall. He was not fanged, winged, or caudate
himself, but he was heavier than any Diomedean, his blows seldom had to be
repeated.
The Lannachska took Mannenach because they
had training enough to make them good ground fighters, or at least the concept of battle with immobilized wings. It was as
revolting to Diomedean instincts as the idea of fighting with teeth alone,
hands bound, would be to a human. Unprepared for it, the DrakTionai bolted and
ran rat-like down the tunnels in search of open sky.
Hours afterward, staggering with exhaustion,
Wace climbed to a flat roof at the other end of town. Tolk sat there waiting
for him.
"I think ... we have ... it all
now," gasped the human.
"And yet not enough," said Tolk
haggardly. "Look at the bay."
Wace grabbed the parapet to
steady himself.
There
was no more pier, no more sheds at the waterfront; everything stood in one
black smoke. But the rafts and canoes of DrakTio had edged into the shallows,
forming a bridge to shore; and over this the sailors were dragging dismounted
catapults and flamethrowers.
"They
have too good a commander," said Tolk. "He has gotten the idea too
fast, that our new methods have their own weaknesses."
"What is ... . Delp . . .
going to do?" whispered Wace.
"Stay
and see," suggested the Herald. "There is no way for us to
help."
The
Drak'honai were still superior in the air. Looking up
toward a sky low and gloomy, rain clouds driving across angry gunmetal waters,
Wace saw them moving to envelop the Lannacha air cover.
"You
see," said Tolk, "it is true that their flyers cannot do much against
our walkers, but the enemy chief has realized that the converse is also
true."
Trolwen
was too good a tactician himself to be cut up in such a fashion. Fighting every
centimeter, his flyers retreated.
Down
on the ground, covered by arcing bombardment from the rafts, the sailors were
setting up their mobile artillery. They had more of it than the Lannachska,
and were better shots. A few infantry charges broke up in bloody ruin.
"Our
machine guns they do not possess, of course," said Tolk. "But then,
we do not have enough to make the difference."
Wace
whirled on Angrek, who had joined him. "Don't stand here!" he cried.
"Let's get down and rally our folk. We must seize those damned—I It can be
done, I tell youl"
"Theoretically, yes." Tolk nodded
his lean head. "I can see where a person on the ground, taking advantage
of every bit of cover, might squirm his way up to those catapults "and
flamethrowers, and tomahawk the operators. But in practice, well, we do not
have such skill."
"Then what would you
do?" groaned Wace.
"Let us first consider what will
assuredly happen," said Tolk. "We have lost our trains; if not
captured, they will be fired presendy. Thus our supplies are gone. Our forces
have been split, the flyers driven off, we groundlings left here. Trolwen
cannot fight his way back to us, being outnumbered.
We
at Mannenach do outnumber our immediate opponents by quite a bit. But we cannot
face their artillery.
"Therefore,
to continue the fight, we must throw away all our big shields and other
new-fangled items and revert to conventional air tactics. But this infantry is
not well-equipped for normal combat: we have few archers, for instance. Delp
need only shelter on the rafts, behind his fire weapons, and for all our
greater numbers, we'll be unable to touch him. Meanwhile he will have us pinned
here, cut off from food and matériel.
All the excess war goods
your mill produced is valueless lying up in Salmenbrok. And there will
certainly be strong reinforcements from the Fleet."
"To
hell with that!" shouted Wace. "We have the town, don't we? We can
hold it against them till they rot!"
"What
can we eat while they are rotting?" said Tolk. "You are a good
craftsman, Eart'a, but no student of war. The cold fact is,
that Delp managed to split our forces, and therefore he has already won. I
propose to cut our losses by retreating now, while we still can."
And then suddenly his manner broke, and he
stooped and covered his eyes with his wings. Wace saw that the Herald had grown
old.
XIV
There was dancing on the decks, and jubilant chants Tang across Sagna Bay to the enfolding hills. Up and down and around, in and
out, the feet and the wings interwove till timbers trembled. High in the
rigging, a piper skirled their melody; down below, a great overseer's drum
which, set the pace of the oars, now echoed their stamping rhythm. In a ring of
wing-folded bodies, sweat-gleaming fur and eyes a-glisten, a sailor whirled his
female while a hundred deep voices roared the song:
"—AsaiUng,
a-sailing, a-saUing to the Sea of
Beer, fair lady, spread your sun-bright wings and sail with met" Delp walked out on the poop and looked down
at his folk.
"Therell
be many a new soul in the Fleet, sixty ten-days hence," he laughed.
Rodonis held his hand, tighdy. "I
wish—" she began. "Yes?"
"Sometimes
... oh, it's nothing. . . ." The
dancing pair fluttered upward, and another couple sprang out to beat the deck
in their place. Planks groaned under one more huge ale
barrel, rolled forth to celebrate victory. "Sometimes I wish we could be
like them."
"And live in the
forecastle?" said Delp dryly.
"Well, no, of course
not. . . ."
"There's
a price on the apartment, and the servants, and the bright clothes and
leisure," said Delp. His eyes grew pale. "I'm about to pay some more
of it."
His tail stroked briefly over her back, then he beat wings and lifted into the air. A dozen armed
males followed him. So did the eyes of Rodonis.
Under
Mannenach's battered walls the DrakTio rafts lay crowded, the disorder of war
not yet cleaned up in the haste to enjoy a hard-bought victory. Only the
full-time warriors remained alert, though no one else would need much warning
if there should be an attack. It was the boast of the forecastle that a Fleet
sailor, drunk and with a female on his knee, could outfight any three
foreigners sober.
Delp, flapping across calm waters under a
high cloudless day-sky, found himself weighing the morale value of such a
pride against the sharp practical fact that a Lan-nachlio fought like ten
devils. The Drak'honai had won this time.
A cluster of swift canoes floated aloof, the
Admiral's standard drooping from one garlanded masthead. T'heonax had come at
Delp's urgent request, instead of making him go out to the main Fleet, which
might mean that T'heonax was prepared to bury the old hatred. (Rodonis would
tell her husband nothing of what had passed between them, and he did not urge
her; but it was perfecdy obvious she had forced the pardon from the heir in
some way.) Far more likely, though, the new Admiral had come to keep an eye on
this untrusted captain, who had so upset things by turning the holding
operation on which he had been contemptuously ordered, into a major victory. It
was not unknown for a Field Commander with such prestige to hoist the rebel
flag and try for the Admiralty.
Delp, who had no respect for T'heonax but
positive reverence for the office, bitterly resented that imputation.
He
landed on the outrigger as prescribed and waited until the Horn of Welcome was
blown on board. It took longer than necessary. Swallowing anger, Delp flapped
to the canoe and prostrated himself.
"Rise,"
said T'heonax in an indifferent tone. "Congratulations on your success.
Now, you wished to confer with me?" He patted down a yawn. "Please
do."
Delp looked around at the faces of officers,
warriors, and crewfolk. "In private, with the Admiral's most trusted advisors, if it please him," he said.
"Oh?
Do you consider what you have to say is that important?" T'heonax nudged
a young aristocrat beside him and winked.
Delp
spread his wings, remembered where he was, and nodded. His neck was so stiff it
hurt. "Yes, sir, I do," he got out.
"Very well." T'heonax walked leisurely toward his cabin. It was large enough for
four, but only the two of them entered, with the young court favorite, who lay
down and
closed
his eyes in boredom. "Does not the Admiral wish advice?" asked Delp.
T'heonax
smiled. "So you don't intend to give me advice yourself, Captain?"
Delp
counted mentally to twenty, unclenched his teeth, and said:
"As the Admiral wishes. I've been thinking about our basic strategy,
and the battle here has rather alarmed me."
"I didn't know you
were frightened."
"Admiral, I . . . never mind! Look here, sir, the enemy came within two
fishhooks of beating us. They had the town. We've captured weapons from them
equal or superior to our own, including a few gadgets
I've never seen or heard of, and in incredible quantities, considering how
little time they had to manufacture the stuff. Then too, they had these
abominable new tactics, ground fighting—not as an incidental, like when we
board an enemy raft, but as the main part of their effort!
"The only reason they lost was
insufficient coordination between ground and air, and insufficient flexibility.
They should have been ready to toss away their shields and take to the air in
fully equipped squadrons at an instant's notice.
"And
I don't think they'll neglect to remedy that fault, if we give them the
chance."
T'heonax
buffed his nails on a sleek-furred arm and regarded them critically. "I
don't like defeatists," he said.
"Admiral, I'm just trying not to
underestimate them. It's pretty clear they got all these new ideas from the
Eart nonai. What else do the Eart nonai know?"
"Mm. Yes." T'heonax raised his
head. A moment's uneasiness flickered in his gaze. "True. What do you propose?"
"They're
off balance now," said Delp with rising eagerness. "I'm sure the
disappointment has demoralized them. And of course, they've lost all that heavy
equipment. If we hit them hard, we can end the war. What we must do is inflict
a decisive defeat on their entire army. Then they'll have to give up, yield
this country to us, or die like insects when their birthing time comes."
"Yes."
T'heonax smiled in a pleased way. "Like insects. Like dirty, filthy
insects. We won't let them emigrate, Captain."
"They deserve their chance,"
protested Delp. "That's a question of high policy, Captain, for me to decide."
"I'm
. . . sorry, sir." After a moment, "But will the Admiral, then,
assign the bulk of our fighting forces to—to some reliable officer, with orders
to hunt out the Lannach-Tionai?"
"You don't know just where they
are?"
"They
could be almost anywhere in the uplands, sir. That is, we have prisoners who
can be made to guide us and give some information. Intelligence says their headquarters
is a place called, um, Psalmenbrox. But of course they can melt into the
land." Delp shuddered. To him, whose world had been lonely islands and
flat sea horizon, there was horror in the tilted mountains. "It has
infinite cover to hide them. This will be no easy campaign."
"How
do you propose to wage it at all?" asked Tneonax querulously. He did not
like to be reminded, on top of a victory celebration and a good dinner, that
there was still much death ahead of him.
"By forcing them to meet us in an all-out encounter, sir. I want to take our main fighting strength,
and some native guides compelled to help us, and go from town to town up there,
systematically razing whatever we find, burning the woods and slaughtering the
game. Give them no chance for the large battues on which they must depend to
feed their females and cubs. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, they will
have to gather every male and meet us. That's when 111 break them."
"I
see." Theonax nodded. Then, with a grin, "And if they break
you?"
"They won't."
"It is written: 'The
Lodestar shines for no single nation.'"
"The
Admiral knows there's always some risk in war. But I'm convinced there's less
danger in my plan than in hanging about down here, waiting for the Eart'honai
to perfect some new devilment."
Theonax's
forefinger stabbed at Delp. "Ah-hahl Have you forgotten, their food will
soon be all gone? We can count them out."
"I wonder—"
"Be quietl"
shrilled Theonax.
After a little time, he went on, "Don't
forget, this enormous expeditionary force of yours would leave the Fleet ill defended.
And without the Fleet, the rafts, we ourselves are finished."
"Oh, don't be afraid of attack,
sir—" began Delp in an eager voice.
"Afraid!" Theonax puffed himself
out. "Captain, it is treason to hint that the Admiral is a ... is not fully competent."
"I didn't mean-"
"I. shall not press the matter,"
said Theonax smoothly. "However, you may either make full abasement,
craving my pardon, or leave my presence."
Delp stood up. His lips peeled back from the
fangs, all the race memory of animal forebears who had been hunters bade him tear
out the other's throat. Theonax crouched, ready to scream for help.
Very
slowly, Delp mastered himself. He half turned to go. He paused, fists jammed
into balls and the membrane of his wings swollen with blood.
"Well?" smiled
Tneonax.
Like
an ill-designed machine, Delp went down on his belly. "I abase
myself," he mumbled. "I eat your offal. I declare that my fathers
were the slaves of your fathers. Like a netted fish, I gasp for pardon."
Tneonax
enjoyed himself. The fact that Delp had been so cleverly trapped between his
pride and his wish to serve the Fleet, made it all the
sweeter.
"Very
good, Captain," said the Admiral when the ceremony was done. "Be
thankful I didn't make you do this publicly. Now let me hear your argument. I
believe you were saying something about the protection of our rafts."
"Yes
. . . yes, sir. I was saying . . . the rafts need not fear the enemy."
"Indeed?
True, they lie well out at sea, but not too far to reach in a few hours. What's
to prevent the Flock army from assembling, unknown to you, in the mountains,
then attacking the rafts before you can come to our help?"
"I
would only hope they do so, sir." Delp recovered a little enthusiasm.
"But I'm afraid their leadership isn't that stupid. Since
when ... I mean ... at no time in naval history, sir, has a
flying force, unsupported from the water, been able to overcome a fleet.
At best, and at heavy cost, it can capture one or two rafts . . . temporarily,
as in the raid when they stole the Eart'honai. Then the other vessels move in
and drive it off. You see, sir, flyers can't use the engines of war: catapults
and flamethrowers, and so on, which alone can reduce a naval organization.
Whereas the raft crews can stand under shelters and fire upward, picking the
flyers off at leisure."
"Of course." Tneonax nodded. "All this is so obvious
as to be a gross waste of my time. But your idea is, I take it, that a small
cadre of guards would suffice to hold off a Lannach'ho attack of any
size."
"And, if we're lucky,
keep the enemy busy out at sea till I could arrive with our main forces. But as
I said, sir, they must have brains enough not to try it."
"You
assume a great deal, Captain," murmured Theonax. "You assume, not
merely that I will let you go into the mountains at all, but that I will put
you in command."
Delp
bent his head and dropped his wings. "Apology,
sir."
"I
think . . . yes, I think it would be best if you just stayed here at Mannenach
with your immediate flotilla."
"As the Admiral wishes. Will he consider my plan, though?"
"AeakTia
eat youl" snarled Theonax. "I've no love for you, Delp, as well you
know; but your scheme is good, and you're the best one to carry it through. I
shall appoint you in charge."
Delp stood as if struck
with a maul.
"Get
out," said Theonax. "We will have an official conference
later."
"I thank my lord
Admiral—"
"Go, I saidl"
When Delp had gone, Theonax turned to his
favorite. "Don't look so worried," he said. "I know what you're
thinking. The fellow will win his campaign, and become still more popular, and
somewhere along the line he will get ideas about seizing the Admiralty."
"I only wondered how my lord planned to
prevent that," said the courtier.
"Simple enough." TTaeonax grinned. "I know his type. As long as the war goes on,
there's no danger of rebellion from him. So, let him break the Lannachlionai as
he wishes. Hell pursue their remnants, to make sure of
finishing the job. And in that pursuit ... a stray arrow from somewhere . . . most
regrettable. These things are easy to arrange. Yes."
This
atmosphere carried
the dust particles which are the nuclei of water condensation to a higher,
hence colder altitude. Thus Diomedes had more clouds and precipitation of all
kinds than Earth. On a clear night you saw fewer stars; on a foggy night you
did not see at all.
Mist
rolled up through stony dales until the young High Summer became a dripping
chill twilight. The hordes lairing about Salmenbrok mumbled in their hunger and
hopelessness; the sun itself had withdrawn from them.
No
campfires glowed, the wood of this region having all been burned. And the
hinterland had been scoured clean of game, unripe wild grains, the very worms
and insects, eaten by these many warriors. Now, in an eerie dank dark, only the
wind and the rushing glacial waters lived. And Mount Oborch hulked, sullenly
prophesying deep in the earth.
Trolwen
and Tolk went from the despair of their chieftains, over narrow trails where
fog smoked and the high thin houses stood unreal, to the mill where the
Eart'ska worked.
Here
alone, it seemed, there was existence. Fires still burned, stored water came
down flumes to turn the wind-abandoned wheels, movement went under flickering
tapers as lathes chattered and hammers thumped. Somehow, in some impossible
fashion, Nicholas van Rijn had roared down the embittered protests of Angrek's
gang, and their factory was at work.
Working
for what? thought
Trolwen, in a mind as gray as the mist.
Van
Rijn himself met them at the door. He folded massive arms on hairy breast and
said, "How do you, my friends? Here it goes well,
we have soon a many artillery pieces ready."
"And what use will they be?" said
Trolwen. "Oh, yes, we have enough to make Salmenbrok well-nigh
impregnable. Which means, we could hole up here and let the
enemy ring us in till we starve.
"Speak
not to me of starving." Van Rijn fished in his pouch, extracted a dry bit
of cheese, and regarded it mournfully. "To think, this was not so long
ago a rich delicious Swiss. Now, not to rats would I offer it." He stuffed
it into his mouth and chewed noisily. "My problem of belly stoking is
worse than yours. Imprimis,
the high boiling point of
water here makes this a world of very bad cooks, with no idea about controlled
temperatures. Seamdus,
did your porters haul me
through the air, all that long lumpy way from Mannenach, to let me hunger into
death?"
"I could wish we'd
left you down there!" flared Trolwen.
"No,"
said Tolk. "He and his friends have striven, Flock-chief."
"Forgive
me," said Trolwen contritely. "It was only ... I got the news . .
. the Drakska have just destroyed Eisel-drae."
"An
empty town, nie?"
"A holy town. And they set afire the woods around it." Trolwen arched his back.
"This can't go on! Soon, even if we should somehow win, the land will be
too desolated to support us."
"I
think still you can spare a few forests," said van Rijn. "This is not
an overpopulated country."
"See
here," said Trolwen in a harsh tone, "I've borne with you so far. I
admit you're essentially right: that to fare out with all our power, for a
decisive battle with the massed enemy, is to risk final destruction. But to sit
here, doing nothing but make little guerrilla raids on their outposts while
they grind away our nation—that is to make certain our doom."
"We needed time," said van Rijn. "Time to modify the extra field pieces, making up for what we
lost at Mannenach."
"Why?
They're not portable, without trains. And that motherless Delp has torn up the
rails I"
"Oh,
yes, they are portable. My young friend Wace has done a little redesigning. He
has knocked down, with females and cubs to help, everyone carrying a single
small piece or two. We can tote a heavy battery of weapons, by damn!"
"I
know. You've explained all this before. And I repeat: What will we use them
against? If we set them up at some particular spot, the Lannachska need only
avoid that spot. And we can't stay very long in any one place, because our
numbers eat it barren." Trolwen drew a breath. "I did not come here
to argue, Eart'o. I came from the General Council of Lannach to tell you that
Salmenbrok's food is exhausted; and so is the army's patience. We must go out and fight!"
"We
shalll" shouted van Rijn. "Come, I will go talk
at these puff-head Councillors."
He
stuck his head in the door. "Wace, boy, best you start to pack what we
have. Soon we transport it."
"I heard you,"
said the younger man.
"Good. You make the work here, I make the politicking, so it goes along fine, nie?" Van Rijn rubbed shaggy fists, beamed, and
shuffled off with Trolwen and Tolk.
Wace
stared after him, into the blind fog-wall. "Yes," he said.
"That's how it has been. We work, and he talks. Very
equitable!"
"What
do you mean?" Sandra raised her head from the table at which she sat
marking gun parts with a small paintbrush. A score of females were working
beside her.
'What
I said. I wonder why I don't say it to his face. I'm not afraid of that fat
parasite, and I don't want his mucking paycheck any more." Wace waved at
the mill and its sooty confusion. "Do this, do that, he says, and then
strolls off again. When I think how he's eating food which would keep you alive—"
"You
do not understand?" She stared at him for a moment. "No, I think
maybe you have been too busy, all the time here, to stop and think. And before
then, you were a small-job man without the art of government, not?"
"What
do you mean?" he echoed her. He regarded her with eyes washed-out and
bleared by fatigue.
"Maybe later. Now we must hurry. Soon we will leave this
town, and everything must be set to go."
This time she had found a place for her hands
in the ten or fifteen Earth-days since Mannenach. Van Rijn had demanded that
everything—including the excess war matériel,
which there had luckily not
been room enough to take down to battle—be made portable by air. That involved
a certain amount of modification so that the large wooden members could be cut
up into smaller units for reassembly where needed. Wace had managed that. But
it would all be one chaos at journey's end unless there was a system for identifying
each item. Sandra had devised the markings and was painting them on.
Neither she nor Wace had stopped for much
sleep. They had not even paused to wonder greatly what use there would be for
their labor.
"Old Nick did say something about
attacking the Fleet itself," muttered Wace. "Has he gone uncon? Are
we supposed to land on the water and assemble our catapults?"
"Perhaps,"
said Sandra. Her tone was serene. "I do not worry so much any more. Soon
it will be all decided because we have food for just four Earth-weeks or
less."
"We
can last at least two months without eating at all," he said.
"But
we will be weak." She dropped her gaze. "Eric—"
"Yes?" He left his mill-powered, obsidian-toothed circular
saw, and came over to stand above her. The dull rush fight
caught
drops of fog in her hair, they gleamed like tiny jewels.
"Soon ...
it will make no matter what I do . . . there will be hard work, needing
strength and skill I have not . . . maybe fighting, where I am only one more
bow, not a very strong bow even." Her fingernails whitened where she
gripped her brush. "So when it comes to that, I will eat no more. You and
Nicholas take my share."
"Don't
be a fool," he said hoarsely.
She
sat up straight, turned around and glared at him. Her pale cheeks reddened.
"Do you not be the fool, Eric Wace," she snapped. "If I can give
you and him just one extra week where you are strong—where your hunger does
not'keep you from even thinking clearly—then it will be myself I save, too,
perhaps. And if not, I have only lost one or two worthless weeks. Now get back
to your machine!"
He
watched her for some small while, and his heart fluttered. Then he nodded and
returned to his own work.
And down the trails to an open place of harsh
grass, where the Council sat on a cliff's edge, van Rijn picked his steadily
swearing way.
The
elders of Lannach lay like sphinxes against a skyline gone formless gray, and
waited for him. Trolwen went to the head of the double line, Tolk remained by
the human.
"In
the name of the All-Wise, we are met," said the Commander ritually.
"Let sun and moons iUumine our minds. Let the ghosts of our grandmothers
lend us their guidance. May I not shame those who flew before me, nor those who
come after." He relaxed a trifle. "Well, my
officers, it's decided we can't stay here. I've brought the Eart'a to advise
us. Will you explain the alternatives to him?"
A
gaunt, angry-eyed old Lannacha hunched his wings and spat, "First,
Flockchief, why is he here at all?"
"By the Commander's
invitation," said Tolk smoothly.
"I mean . . . Herald,
let's not twist words. You know what
I
mean. The Mannenach expedition was undertaken at his urging. It cost us the
worst defeat in our history. Since then, he has insisted our main body stay
here, idle, while the enemy ravages an undefended land. I don't see why we
should take his advice."
Trolwen's eyes were troubled. "Are there
further challenges?" he asked, in a very low voice.
An indignant mumble went down the lines.
"Yes . . . yes
. . . yes . . . let him answer, if he can."
Van Rijn turned turkey red
and began to swell like a fog.
"The
Eart'a has been challenged in Council," said Trolwen. "Does he wish
to reply?"
He sat back then, waiting
like the others.
Van Rijn exploded.
"Pest and damnation! Four million worms coccooning in hell! How long am I to be saddled with
stupid ungratefuls? How many politicians and brass hats have You
Up There plagued this universe with?" He waved his fists in the air and
screamed. "Satan and sulfur! It is not to be
stood! If you are all so hot to make suicides for yourselves, why does poor old
van Rijn have to hold on to your coattails all the time? Jump, you damned
Protestants! Perbacco,
you stop insulting me or I
stuff you down your own throats!" He advanced like a moving mountain,
roaring at them. The nearest Councillors flinched away.
"Eart'a . . . sir . . . officer . . . please!" whipered Trolwen.
When
he had them sufficientiy browbeaten, van Rijn said coldly, "All rights. I
tell you, by damn. I give you good advices and you stupid them up and blame me.
But I am only a poor patient old man, not like when I was young and strong and
full of beans; no, I suffer it with Christian meekness and keep on giving you
good advices.
"I
warned you and I warned you, do not hit Mannenach first. I told you the rafts
could come right up to its walls, and the rafts are the strength of the Fleet.
I got down on these two poor old knees, begging and pleading with you first to
take the key upland towns, but no, you would not listen to me. And still we had
Mannenach, but the victory was stupided away. Oh, if I had wings like an angel,
so I could have led you in person! I would be cock-a-doodle-dooing on the
Admiral's masthead this moment, by holy Nicolai miter! That is why you take my advices, by damn! No, now you take my orders! No more
backward talking from you, or I wash my hands with you and make my own way
home. From now on, if you want to keep living, when van Rijn says frog, you
jump. Understanding?"
He
paused. He could hear his own asthmatic wheezes and the far unhappy mumble of
the camp; finally the cold wet clinking of water down alien rocks; then nothing
more in all the world.
Finally
Trolwen said in a weak voice, "If. . . if the
challenge is considered answered . . . we shall resume our business."
No one spoke.
"Will
the Eart'a take the word?" asked Tolk at last. He alone appeared
self-possessed, in the critical glow of one who appreciates fine acting.
"Ja. I will say, I know
we cannot remain here any more. You ask why I kept the army on leash and let
Captain Delp have his way." Van Rijn ticked it off on his fingers. "Imprimis, to attack him
directly is what he wants; he can most likely beat us, since his force is
bigger and not so hungry or discouraged. Secundus, he will not advance to Salmenbrok while we
are all here, since we could bushwhack him; therefore, by staying put, the army
has gained me a chance to make ready our artillery pieces. Tertius, it is my hope that by all this delay while I
had the mill going, we have won the means of victory."
"What?" It barked from the throat
of a Councillor who forgot formalities.
"Ah."
Van Rijn laid a finger to his imposing nose and winked. "We shall see.
Maybe now you think even if I am a pitiful old weak tired man who should be in
bed with hot toddies and a good cigar, still a Polesotechnic merchant is not
just to sneeze at. So? Well, then. I propose we all
leave this land and head north."
A
hubbub broke loose. He waited patiently for it to subside.
"Order!" shouted Trolwen. "Order!" He slapped the hard earth with his tail. "Quiet, there, officers! Eart'a, there has been some
talk of abandoning Lannach altogether—more and more of it, indeed, as our folk
lose heart. We could still reach Swampy Kilnu in time to ... to save most of our females and cubs at
Birthtime. But it would mean giving up our towns, our fields and forests,
everything we have, everything our forebears labored for hundreds of years to
create, to sink back into savagery in a dark, feverhaunted jungle, to become
nothing. I myself will die in battle before making such a choice."
He drew a breath and hurled out, "But
Kilnu is, at least, to the south. North of Achan, there is still ice!"
"Just so," said
van Rijn.
"Would you have us starve and freeze on
the Dawrnach glaciers? We can't land any further south than Dawrnach; the
Fleet's scouts would be certain to spot us anywhere in Holmenach. Unless you want to fight the last fight in the archipelago—?"
"No,"
said van Rijn. "We should sneak up to this Dawrnach place. We can pack a
lunch and take maybe a ten-day's worth of food and fuel with us, as well as the
armament— nier
"Well
. . . yes . . . but even so, are you suggesting we should attack the Fleet
itself, the rafts, from the north? It would be an unexpected direction. But it
would be just as hopeless."
"Surprise
we will need for my plan," said van Rijn. "Ja. We cannot tell the army. One of them might be captured in some skirmish
and made to tell the Draklionai. Best maybe I not even tell you."
"Enoughl" said
Trolwen. "Let me hear your scheme."
Much
later . . .
"It won't work. Oh, it might well be
technically feasible. But it's a political impossibility."
"Politicsl"
groaned van Rijn. "What is it this time?"
"The
warriors, and the females too, even the cubs—since it
would be our whale
nation which goes to
Dawrnach—they must be told why we
do so. Yet the whole scheme, as you admit, will be ruined if one person falls
into enemy hands and tells what he knows under torture."
"But
he need not know," said van Rijn. "All he need be told is, we spend a
little while gathering food and wood to travel with. Then we are to pack up and
go some other place, he has not been told where or why."
"We
are not Drakska," said Trolwen angrily. "We are a free folk. I have
no right to make so important a decision without submitting it to a vote."
"Hm . . . maybe you could talk to
them?" Van Rijn tugged his mustaches. "Orate at them. Persuade them
to waive their right to know and help decide. Talk them into following you with
no questions."
"No,"
said Tolk. "I'm a specialist in the arts of persuasion, Eart'a, and I've
measured the limits of those arts. We deal less with a Flock now than a mob,
one that is cold, hungry, without hope, without faith in its leaders, ready to
give up everything—or rush forth to blind battie. They haven't the morale to
follow anyone into an unknown venture."
"Morale can be pumped
in," said van Rijn. "I will try."
"Your
"1
am not so bad at oratings, myself, when there is need. Let me address them."
"They
. . . they . . Tolk stared at him. Then he laughed, a jarringly sarcastic note. "Let it be done,
Flock-chief. Let's hear what words this Eart'a can find, so much better than
our own."
And
an hour later, he sat on a bluff, with his people a mass of shadow below him,
and he heard van Rijn's bass come through the fog like thunder:
"... I say only, think what you have here, and what they would take away
from you:
"This
royal throne of kings, this scept/d
isle, This earth of majesty, this
seat of Mars, This other Eden,
demi-paradise, This fortress built by
Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed. . . ."
1 don't
comprehend all those words," whispered Tolk. "Be stilll"
answered Trolwen. "Let me
hear." There were tears in his eyes; he shivered.
".
. . This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Lan-nachl"
The army beat its wings and
screamed.
Van
Rijn continued through adaptations of Pericles' funeral speech, "Scots
Wha' Hae," and the Gettysburg Address.
By the time he had finished discussing St.
Crispin's Day, he could have been elected Commander if he chose.
XVI
The
island called Dawmach lay
well beyond the archipelago's end, several hundred kilometers north of
Lannach. However swiftly the Flock flew, with pauses for rest on some
bird-shrieking skerry, it was a matter of Earth-days to get there, and a
physical nightmare for humans trussed in carrying nets. Afterward Wace's
recollections of the trip were dim.
When
he stood on the beach at their goal, his legs barely supporting him, it was
small comfort.
High Summer had come
here also, and though, this was not too far north, still, the air remained
wintry; and Tolk said no one had ever tried to live here. The Holmenach islands
deflected a cold current out of The Ocean, up into the Iceberg Sea, and those
bitter waters flowed around Dawmach.
Now
the Flock, wings and wings and wings dropping down from the sky until they hid
its roiling grayness, had reached journey's conclusion. Black sands, washed by
heavy, dark tides climbed steeply up through permanent glaciers to the inflamed
throat of a volcano. Thin, straight trees were sprinkled over the lower slopes
between quaking tussocks. There were a few sea birds, to dip above the broken
offshore ice-floes; otherwise, the hidden sun threw its clotted-blood light on
a sterile country.
Sandra
shuddered. Wace was shocked to see how thin she had already grown. And now that
they were here, in the last phase of their striving, she intended to eat no
more.
She
wrapped her stinking, coarse jacket more tighdy about her. The wind caught
snarled pale elflocks of her hair and fluttered them forlorn against black
igneous cliffs. A-round her crouched, walked, wriggled, and flapped ten thousand
angry, winged dragons. Whisties and gutturals of un-human speech, the
cannon-crack of leathery wings, overrode the empty wmd-whimper. As she rubbed
her eyes, pathetically like, a child, Wace saw that her hands were bleeding
where they had clung to the net, and that she shook with weariness.
He
felt his heart twisted, and moved toward her. Nicholas van Rijn got there
first, fat and greasy, with a slap for her rump and a roar for comfort,
"So, by jolly damn, now we are here and soon I get you home again to a hot
bath. Holy St. Dismas, right now I smell you three kilometers upwind!"
Lady
Sandra Tamarin, heiress to the Grand Duchy of Hermes, gave him a ghostiy smile.
"If I could rest for a little. . . ." she whispered.
"Ja,
ja, we see." Van Rijn stuck two fingers in his mouth and let out an
eardrum-breaking blast. It caught Trolwen's attention. "You
there! Find her here a cave or something and tuck her in."
"I?" Trolwen
bridled. "I have the Flock to see to!"
"You
heard me, pot head." Van Rijn stumped off and buttonholed Wace. "Now, then. You are ready to begin work? Round up your
crew, however many you need to start."
"I—" Wace backed away. "Look
here, it's been I don't know how many hours since our last stop, and—"
Van
Rijn spat. "And how many weeks makes it since I had a smoke or even so much a little glass Genever, ha? You have no
considerations for other people." He pointed his beak heavenward and
screamed, "Do I have to do everything? Why have You
Up There filled up the galaxy with no-good loafers? It is not to be
stood!"
Wace
saw Trolwen leading Sandra off to find a place where she could sleep,
forgetting cold and pain and loneliness for a few short hours. He struck a
fist into his palm and said, "All right! But what will you be doing?"
"I
must organize things, by damn. First I see Trolwen a-bout a gang to cut trees
and make masts and yards and oars. Meanwhiles all this canvas we have brought
along has got to somehow be made in sails; and there are the riggings; and also
we must fix up for eating and shelter. Bah! These is
all details. It is not right I should be bothered. Details, I hire ones like
you for."
"Is life anything but details?"
snapped Wace.
Van Rijn's small gray eyes studied him for a
moment.
"So,"
rumbled the merchant, "it gives back talks from you too, ha? You think
maybe just because I am old and weak and do not stand so much the hardships
like when I was young . . . maybe I only leech off your work, nie? Now is too small time for beating sense into your head. Maybe you leam for yourself." He snapped his fingers.
"Jumpl"
Wace
went off, damning himself for not giving the old pig a fist in the stomach. He
would, too, come the dayl Not now. . . .
Unfortunately, van Rijn had somehow oozed into a position where it was him the
Lannachska looked up to . . . instead of Wace, who did the actual work. Was
that just a paranoid thought? No.
Take
this matter of the ships, for instance. Van Rijn had pointed out that an island
like Dawrnach, loaded with pack ice and calving glaciers, afforded plenty of
building material. Stone chisels would shape a vessel as big as any raft in the
Fleet in a few hours' work. The most primitive land of blowtorch, an oil lamp
with a bellows, would smooth it off. A crude mast and rudder could be planted
in holes cut for the purpose: water, refreezing, would be a
strong cement. The Flock, males, females, old and young, made one
enormous labor force for the project.
If an engineer figured out all the practical
procedure: How deep a hole to step your mast in? Is ballast needed? Just how do
you make a nice clean cut in an irregular ice-block hundreds of meters long?
How about smoothing the bottom to reduce drag? The material was rather friable; it could be strengthened considerably by dashing
bucketsful of mixed sawdust and sea water over the finished hull, letting this
freeze as a kind of armor. But what proportions?
There was no time to really test these
things. Somehow, by God and by guess, with every element against him, Eric Wace was expected to produce.
And
van Rijn? What did van Rijn contribute? The basic idea, airily tossed off,
apparentiy on the assumption that
Wace
was Aladdin's genie. Oh, it was quite a flash of imaginative insight, no one
could deny that. But imagination is cheap. Anyone can say: "What we need
is a new weapon, and we can make it from such-and-such unprecedented materials."
It remains an idle fantasy until somebody shows up who can figure out how to do it.
So,
having enslaved his engineer, van Rijn strolled around, jollying some of the
Flock and bullying some of the others, and when he had them all working their
idiotic heads off, he rolled up in a blanket and went to sleepl
xvii
Wace
stood on the deck of the Rijstaffel and watched his enemy come over the world's
rim.
Slowly,
he reached into the pouch at his side. His hand closed on a chunk of stale
bread and a slab of sausage. It was the last Terrestrial food remaining. For
several Earth-days, now, he had gone on a still thinner ration than before, so
that he could enter this batde with something in his stomach.
He found that he didn't want it after all.
Surprisingly
little cold breathed up from underfoot. The warm air over the Sea of Achan
wafted the ice-chill away. He was less astonished that there had been no
appreciable melting in the week he estimated they had been creeping southward,
for he knew the thermal properties of water.
Behind
him, primitive square sails, lashed to yardarms of green wood on overstrained
one-piece masts, bellied in the north wind. These ice ships were tubby, but
considerably less so than a Drakno raft; and with some unbelievable talent for
tyranny, van Rijn had gotten reluctant Lannachska to work under frigid sea
water, cutting the bottoms into a vaguely streamlined shape. Now, given the
power of a Diomedean breeze, Lannach's war fleet waddled through Achan waves at
a good five knots.
Though
the hardest moment, Wace reflected, had not been while they worked their hearts
out to finish the craft; it had come afterward, when they were almost ready to
leave and the winds turned contrary. For a period measured in Earth-days,
thousands of Lannachska huddled soul-sick under freezing rains, ranging after
fish and bird rookeries to feed cubs that cried with hunger. Councillors and
clan leaders had argued that this was a war on the Fates: there could be no
choice but to give up and seek out Swampy Kilnu. Somehow, blustering, whining,
pleading, promising—in a few cases, bribing, with what he had won at dice—van
Rijn had held them on Dawrnach.
Well, it was over withl
The merchant came out of the little stone
cabin, walked over the gravel-strew deck, past crouching war-engines and heaped
missiles, till he reached the bows where Wace stood.
"Best you eat,"
he said. "Soon gives no chance."
"I'm not hungry,"
said Wace.
"So, no?" Van Rijn grabbed the sandwich out of his fingers. "Then, by damn,
I ami" He began cramming it between his teeth.
Once
again he wore a double set of armor, but he had chosen one weapon only for this
occasion, an outsize stone ax with a meter-long handle. Wace carried a smaller
tomahawk and a shield. Around the humans, bristled
armed Lannachska.
"They're
making ready to receive us, all right," said Wace. His eyes sought out the
gaunt enemy war-canoes, beating upwind.
"You
expected a carpet with acres and acres, like they say in America? I bet you
they spotted us from the air hours ago. Now they send messengers hurry-like
back to their army in Larmach." Van Rijn held up the last fragment of
meat, kissed it reverently, and ate it.
Wace's
eyes traveled backward. This was the flagship, chosen as such when it turned
out to be the fastest, and it had the forward position in a long wedge. Several
score grayish-white, ragged-sailed, helter-skelter little vessels wallowed
after. They were outnumbered and outgunned by the Drak'ho rafts, of course;
they just had to hope the odds weren't too great.
The much lower freeboard didn't matter to a winged race, but it would be
important that their crews were not very skilled sailors.
But at least the Lannachska were fighters.
Winged tigers by now, thought Wace. The southward voyage had rested them, and
trawling had provided the means to feed them; and the will to battle had
kindled again. Also, though they had a smaller navy, they probably had more
warriors, even counting Delp's absent army.
And
they could afford to be reckless. Their females and young were still on Dawmach
(with Sandra, grown so white and quiet). They had no treasures along to worry
about. For cargo they bore just their weapons and their hate.
From
the clouds of airborne, Tolk, the Herald, came down. He braked on extended
wings, slithered to a landing, and curved back his neck swan-fashion to regard
the humans.
"Does it all go well
down here?" he asked.
"As
well as may be," said van Rijn. "Are we still bearing on the
pest-rotten Fleet?"
"Yes.
It's not many buaska away now. Barely over your sea-level horizon, in fact; you'll raise it soon. They're using sail and oars alike,
trying to get out of our path, but they'll not achieve it if we keep this wind
and those canoes don't delay us."
"No sign of the army
in Lannach?"
"None yet. I daresay what's-his-name—the new Admiral that we heard about from
those prisoners—has messengers scouring the mountains. But that's a big land up
there. It will take time to locate him." Tolk snorted professional scorn.
"Now I would have had constant liaison, a steady two-way flow of Whistlers."
"Still,"
said van Rijn, "we must expect them soon, and then gives hell's safety
valve popping off."
"Are you certain we
can—"
"I
am certain of nothings. Now get back to Trolwen and oversee."
Tolk nodded and hit the air
again.
Dark,
purplish water curled in white feathers beneath a high heaven where clouds ran
like playful mountains, tinted rosy by the sun. Not many kilometers off, a
small island rose steeply, viewed through a telescope, Wace could count the
patches of yellow blossom nodding under low, bluish conifers. A pair of young
Whistlers dipped and soared over his head, dancing like the gay clan banners
being unfurled in the sky. It was hard to understand that the slim, carved
boats racing so near bore fire and sharpened stones.
"Well,"
said van Rijn, "here begins our fun, Good St. Dis-mas, stand by me
now."
"St.
George would be a little more appropriate, wouldn't he?" asked Wace.
"You
may think so. Me, I am too old and fat and cowardly to call on Michael or
George or Olaf or any like those soldierly fellows. I feel more at home, me,
with saints not so bloody energetic, ones like Dismas,
or my own good namesake who is so kind to travelers."
"And is also the patron of
highwaymen," remarked Wace. He wished his tongue wouldn't get so thick and
dry on him. He felt remote, somehow . . . not really afraid . . . but his knees
were rubbery and the Paternoster felt teiTifyingly unfamiliar.
"Ha!" boomed van Rijn. "Good
shootings, boy!"
The forward ballista on the
Rijstaffel, with a whine and a thump, had smacked a
half-ton stone into the nearest canoe. The boat cracked like a twig; its crew
whirled up, a squad from Trolwen's aerial command pounced; there was a moment's
murderous confusion and then the Drak'honai had stopped existing.
Van
Rijn grabbed the astonished ballista captain by the hands and danced him over
the deck, bawling out,
"Dm bist mein Sonnenschein, mein
einzig Sonnenschein, du machst mir freulich. . . ."
Another
canoe swung about, close-hauled. Wace saw its flame-thrower crew bent over
their engine and hurled himself flat under the low wall surrounding the ice
deck.
The burning stream hit that wall, splashed
back, and spread itself on the sea. It could not kindle frozen water, nor melt
enough of it to notice. Sheltered amidships, a hundred Lan-nacha archers sent
an arrow-sleet up, to arc under heaven and come down on the canoe.
Wace
peered over the wall. The flame-thrower pumpman seemed dead,
the hoseman was preoccupied with a transfixed wing. No steersmen either, the
canoe's boom slatted about in a meaningless arc while its crew huddled.
"Dead ahead!" he roared. "Ram them!"
The Lannacha ship trampled
the dugout underfoot.
DrakTio
canoes circled like wolves around a buffalo herd, using their speed and
manuverability. Several darted between ice vessels, to assail from the rear;
others went past the ends of the wedge formation. It was not quite a onesided battle: arrows, cataput bolts, flung stones, all
hurt Lannachska.
But winged creatures with a few buckets could
douse burning canvas. During all that phase of the engagement, only one
Lannacha craft was wholly dismasted, and its crew simply abandoned it,
parceling themselves out among other vessels. Nothing else could catch fire
except live flesh, which has always been the cheapest article in war.
Several canoes, converging on a single ship,
tried to board. They were nonetheless outnumbered, and paid heavily for the
attempt. Meanwhile Trolwen, with absolute air mastery, swooped and shot and
hammered.
DrakTio's
canoes scarcely hindered the attack. The dugouts were rammed, broken, set
afire, brushed aside by their unsinkable enemy.
By
virtue of being first, of having more or less punched through the line, the Rijstaffel met little opposition. What there was, was beaten off by catapult, ballista, fire pot, and
arrows. Behind, sea itself burned and smoked; ahead lay
the great rafts.
When
those sails and banners came into view Wace's dragon crewmen began to sing the
victory song of the Flock.
"A
little premature, aren't they?" he cried above the racket.
"Ah,"
said van Rijn quietly, "let them make fun for now. So many will soon be
down, blind among the fishes, niep"
"I suppose—" Hastily, as if afraid
of what he had done merely to save his own life, Wace said, "I like that
melody, don't you? It's rather like some old American folk songs. John Hatty, say."
"Folk songs is
all right if you should want to play you are Folk in great big capitals,"
snorted van Rijn. "I stick with Mozart, by damn."
He
stared down in to the water, and a curious wistfulness tinged his voice.
"I always hoped maybe I would understand Bach some day, before I die, old
Johann Sebastian who talked with God in mathematics. I have not the brains,
though, in this dumb old head. So maybe I ask only one more chance to listen at
Eine Kleine
Nachtmusik."
There
was an uproar in the Fleet. Slowly and ponderously,
churning the sea with spider-leg cars, the rafts were giving up their attempt
at evasion. They were pulling into war formation.
Van
Rijn waved angrily at a Whistler. "Quick! You get upstairs fast, like
goosed lightning, and tell that crookhead Trolwen not to bother air-covering us
against the canoes. Have him attack the rafts. Keep them busy, by hell! Don't
let messengers flappity-flap between enemy captains so
they can organize!"
As
the young Lannacha streaked away, the merchant tugged his goatee—almost lost by
now in a dirt-stiffened beard— and snarled, "Great hairy honeypots! How
long do I have to do all the thinkings? Good St. Nicholas, you bring me an
officer staff with brains between the ears, instead of clabbered oatmeal, and
I build you a cathedral on Mars! You hear me?"
"Trolwen's
fighting up there," protested Wace. "You can't expect him to think of
everything."
"Maybe
not," conceded van Rijn grudgingly. "Maybe I am the only one in all the galaxy who makes no
mistakes."
Horribly
near, the massed rafts became a storm when Trolwen took his advice. Bat-winged
devils sought each other's fives through one red chaos. Wace thought his own
ships' advance must be nearly unnoticed in that whirling, shrieking
destruction.
"They're not getting integrated!" he said, beating his fist on the wall.
"Before God, they're not!"
A
Whisder landed, coughing blood; there was a monstrous bruise on his side.
"Over there . . . Tolk, the Herald, says . . . empty spot . . . drive
wedge in Fleet—" The thin body arced and then slid inertly to the deck.
Wace stooped, taking the unhuman youth in his arms. He heard blood gurgle in
lungs pierced by the broken ends of ribs.
Presently he died.
Van
Rijn cursed his awkward vessel into a course change-not more than a few
degrees; it wasn't capable of more. But as the nearer rafts began to loom above
the ice deck, it could be seen that there was a wide gap in their line.
Trolwen's assault had so far prevented its being closed. Red-stained water,
littered with dropped spears and bows, pointed like a hand toward the Admiral's
floating castle.
"In therel" bawled van Rijn.
"Clobber them! Eat them for breakfastl"
A catapult bolt came whirring over the wall,
ripped through his sleeve, and showered ice chips where it struck. Then three
streams of liquid fire converged on the Rijstaffel.
Flame
fingers groped their way across the deck. One Lannacha lay
screaming and charring where they had touched him. Fire found the sails. It was
no use to pour water this time: oil-drenched, mast and rigging and canvas
became one great torch.
Van
Rijn left the helmsman he had been swearing at and bounded across the deck,
slipped where some of it had melted, skated on his broad bottom till he fetched
up against a wall, and crawled back to his feet calling down damnation on the
cosmos. Up to the starboard shrouds he limped, and his stone ax began gnawing
the cordage. "Here!" he yelled. "Fast!
Help me, you jelly-bones! Quick, have you got fur on the brains! Quick before
we drift past!"
Wace, directing the ballista crew, which was
stoning a nearby raft, understood only vaguely. Others
were more ready than he. They swarmed to van Rijn and hewed. He himself sought
the racked oil bombs and broke one at the foot of the burning mast.
Its socket melted, held up only by the
shrouds, the enormous torch fell to port when the starboard lines were slashed.
It struck the raft there; flames ran from it, beating back frantic DrakTio
crewmen who would push it loose. Rigging caught. Timbers began to char. As the Rijstaffel drifted away, that enemy vessel turned into a
single bellowing pyre.
Now
the ice ship was nearly uncontrollable, driven by momentum and chance currents
deeper into the confused Fleet. But through the gap which van Rijn had so
ar-dentiy widened, the rest of the Lannacha craft
pushed. War-flames raged between floating monsters, but wood will bum and ice
will not.
Through
a growing smoke-haze, among darts and arrows that rattled down from above, on a
deck strewn with dead and hurt, but still filled by the revengeful hail, Wace
trod to the nearest bomb crew. They were preparing to ignite another raft as
soon as the ship's drift brought them into range.
"No," he said.
"What?"
The captain turned a sooty face to him, crest adroop with weariness. "But
sir, they'll be pumping fire at
1 |
»
"We
can stand that," said Wace. "We're pretty well sheltered by our
walls. I don't want to bum that raft. I want to capture itl"
Van
Rijn passed by, hefting his ax. He could not have heard what was said, but he
rumbled: "Ja.
I was just about to order
this. We can use us a transportation that maneuvers."
The word went over the ship. Its slippery
deck darkened with armed shapes that waited. Closer and closer, the wrought ice
floe bore down on the higher and more massive raft. Fire, stones, and quarrels
reached out for the Lan-nachska. They endured it, grimly. Wace sent a Whisder
up to Trolwen to ask for help; a flying detachment silenced the DrakTio
artillery with arrows.
Trolwen still had overwhelming numerical
superiority. He could choke the sky with his warriors, pinning the Draklionai
to their decks to await sea-borne assault. So far, thought Wace, Diomedes'
miserly gods had been smiling on him. It couldn't last much longer.
He
followed the first Lannacha wave, which had flown to clear a bridgehead on the
raft. He sprang from the ice floe when it bumped to a halt, grasped a massive
timber, and scrambled up the side. When he reached the top and un-limbered his
tomahawk and shield, he found himself in a line
of warriors. Smoke from the burnings elsewhere stung his eyes; only indistincdy
did he see the defending Drak-nonai, pulled into ranks ahead of him and up on
the higher decks.
Had the yelling and tumbling about overhead
suddenly redoubled?
A
stumpy finger tapped him. He turned around to meet van Rijn's porcine gaze.
"Whoof
and whool What for a climb that wasl Better I should
have stayed, nie?
Well, boy, we are on our
own now. Tolk just sent me word, the whole Drakno Expeditionary Force is in
sight and lolloping hereward fast."
XVIH
He
hefted his weapon. The lean
winged bodies about him hissed, bristled, and glided ahead.
These
were mostly troopers from the Mannenach attempt; every ice ship bore a fair
number who had been taught the elements of ground fighting. And on the whole
trip south to find the Fleet, van Rijn and the Lannacha captains had exhorted
them, "Do not join our aerial forces. Stay on the decks when we board a
raft. This whole plan hinges on how many rafts we can seize or destroy. Trolwen
and his air squadrons will merely be up there to support you."
Ideas took root reluctandy in any Diomedean
brain. Wace was not at all certain it wouldn't die within the next hour,
leaving him and van Rijn marooned on hostile timbers while their comrades
soared up to a poindess sky battle. But he had no choice, save to trust them
now.
He broke into a run. The screech that his
followers let out tore at his eardrums.
Wings
threshed before him. Instinctively, the untrained DrakaTio lines were breaking
up. Through geological eras, the only sane thing for a Diomedean to do had been
to get above an attacker. Wace stormed on where they had stood.
Enemy
sailors stooped on these curious, unflying adversaries. A Lannacha forgot
himself, napped up, and was struck by three meteor bodies. He was hurled like a
broken puppet into the sea. The Drak'honai rushed downward.
And
they met spears which snapped up like a picket fence. Lannach's one-time ground
troopers had rescued their basket-work shields from the last retreat and were
now again transformed into artificial turtles. The rest fended off the aerial
assault. And the archers made ready.
Wace heard the sinister whisde rise behind
him, and saw fifty Drak'honai fall.
Then a dragon roared in his face, striking
with a knife-toothed rake. Wace caught the blow on his shield. It shuddered in
his left arm, numbing the muscles. He lashed out a heavy-shod foot, caught the
hard belly and heard the wind leave the DrakTio. His tomahawk rose and fell
with a dull chopping sound. The Diomedean fluttered away, pawing at a broken
wing.
Wace
hurried on. The Drak'honai were now milling around overhead out of bowshot. The
object was to capture the raft's artillery.
Someone up there must have seen what was
intended. His hawk-shriek and hawk-stoop were ended by a Lannacha arrow; but
then an organized line peeled off from the Drak'honai mass, plummeted to the
forecastle deck, and took stance before the main battery of flame-throwers and
bal-listae.
"Sol"
rumbled van Rijn. "They make happy fun games after all. We see about
thisl"
He
broke into an elephantine trot, whirling the great mallet over his head. A
slingstone bounced off his leather-decked abdomen, an arrow ripped along one
cheek, blowgun darts pincushioned his double cuirass. He got a boost, from two
winged guards, up the sheer ladderless bulkhead of the fore-casde. Then he was
in among the defenders.
"Je maintiendrail" he bawled, and stove in the head of the
nearest Drak'ho. "God
send the rightl" he
shouted, stamping on the shaft of a rake that clawed after him. "From, from, Kristmenn, Krossmonn,
Kongsmennl" he
bellowed, drumming on the ribs of three warriors who ramped close. "Heineken's Bierl" he trumpeted, turning to wrestie with a
winged shape that fastened onto his back, and wringing its neck.
Wace
and the Lannachska joined him. There was an interval with hammer and thrust,
and the huge bone-breaking buffets of wing and tail. The Drak'honai broke. Van
Rijn sprang to the flame-thrower and pumped. "Aim the hose!" he
panted. "Flush them out, you bat-infested heads!" A gleeful Lannacha
seized the ceramic nozzle, pressed the hardwood ignition piston, and squirted
burning oil upward.
Down on the lower decks, ballistae began to
thump, catapults sang and other flame-throwers licked. A party from the ice
ship reassembled one of their wooden machine guns and poured darts at the last
Drak'ho counter-assault.
A female shape ran from the forecasde.
"It's our husbands they kill!" she shrieked. "Destroy
them!"
Van
Rijn leaped off the upper deck, a three-meter fall. Planks thundered and
groaned when he hit them. Puffing, waving his arms, he got ahead of the frantic
creature. "Get back!" he yelled in her own language. "Back
inside! Shoo! Scat! Want to leave your cubs unprotected? I eat young
Drak'honai! With horseradish!"
She
wailed and scutded back to shelter. Wace let out a gasp. His skin was sodden with sweat. It had
not been too serious a danger. Perhaps, in theory, a female mob could have been massacred under the eyes of its
young, but who could bring himself to that? Not Eric Wace, certainly. Better
give up and take one's spear thrust like a gentleman.
He realized, then, that the
raft was his.
Smoke
still thickened the air too much for him to see very well what was going on
elsewhere. Now and then, through a breach in it, appeared some vision: a raft
set unquen-chably afire, abandoned; an ice vessel, cracked, dismasted,
arrow-swept, still bleakly slugging it out; another Lannacha ship laying to
against a raft, another boarding party; the banner of a Lannacha clan blowing
in sudden triumph on a foreign masthead. Wace had no idea how the sea fight as
a whole was going, how many ice craft had been raked clean, deserted by
discouraged crews, seized by Drakno counter-attack, left drifting uselessly
remote from the enemy.
It had been perfectly clear, he thought—van
Rijn had said it blundy enough to Trolwen and the Council—that the smaller,
less well-equipped, virtually untrained Lannacha navy would have no chance
whatsoever of decisively whipping the Fleet. The crucial phase of this battle
was not going to involve stones or flames.
He
looked up. Beyond the spars and lines, where the haze did not reach, heaven lay
unbelievably cool. The formations of war, weaving in and about, were so far
above him that they looked like darting swallows.
Only after minutes did his
inexpert eye grasp the picture.
With
most of his force down among the rafts, Trolwen was ridiculously outnumbered in
the air as soon as Delp arrived. On the other hand, Delp's folk had been flying
for hours to get here; they were no match individually for well-rested
Lannachska. Realizing this, each commander used his peculiar advantage: Delp
ordered unbreakable mass charges; Trolwen used small squadrons which swooped
in, snapped wolfishly, and darted back again. The Lannachska retreated all the
time, except when Delp tried to send a large body of warriors down to relieve
the rafts. Then the entire, superbly integrated air force at Trolwen's disposal
would smash into that body. It would disperse when Delp brought in
reinforcements, but it had accomplished its purpose: to break up the formation
and checkrein the seaward movement.
So
it went, for some timeless time in the wind under the High Summer sun. Wace
lost himself, contemplating the terrible beauty of death winged and
disciplined. Van Rijn's voice pulled him grudgingly back to luckless unflying
human-ness.
"Wake
upl Are you making dreams, maybe, like you stand there with your teeth hanging
out and flapping in the breeze? Lightnings and Luciferl If we want to keep this
raft, we have to make some use with it, by damnl You
boss the battery here and I go tell the helmsman what to do. Sol" He
huffed off like an ancient steam locomotive in weight and noise and sootiness.
They
had beaten off every attempt at recapture until the expelled crew went
wrathfully up to join Delp's legions. Now, awkwardly handling the big sails, or
ordered pro-testjngly below to the sweeps, van Rijn's gang got their new vessel
into motion. It grunted its way across a roiled, smoky waste of water until a
Drak no craft loomed before it. Then, with the broadsides cut loose, the arrows
went like sleet, and crew locked with crew in troubled air midway between the
thuttering rafts.
Wace stood his ground on the foredeck,
directing the fire of its banked engines. Stones, quarrels,
bombs, oil-streams, hurled across a few meters to shower splinters and
char-wood as they struck. Once, he organized a bucket brigade to put out
the fire set by an enemy hit. Later, he saw one of his new catapults and its
crew smashed by a two-ton rock, and forced the survivors to lever that stone
into the sea and rejoin the fight. He saw how sails grew tattered, yards sagged
drunkenly, bodies heaped themselves on both vessels
after each clumsy round. And he wondered, in a dim part of his brain, why life
had no more sense, anywhere in the known universe, than to be forever tearing
itself.
Van Rijn did not have the quality of crew to
win by sheer bombardment like a neolithic Nelson. Nor did he especially want to
try boarding still another craft; it was all his little tyro force could do to
man and fight this one. But he pressed stubbornly in, holding the helmsmen to
their collision course, going belowdecks liimself to keep exhausted Lannachska
at their heavy oars. And his raft wallowed its way through a fire-storm, a
stone-storm, a storm of living bodies, until it was almost on the enemy vessel.
Then
horns hooted among the Draklionai, their sweeps churned water and they broke
from their place in the Fleet's formation to disengage.
Van
Rijn let them go, vanishing into the hazed masts and cordage that reached for
kilometers around him. He stumped to the nearest hatch, went down through the
poop-deck cabins and so out on the main deck. He rubbed his hands and chortled.
"Aha! We gave him a little scare, eh, what say? Hell not come near any of
our boats soon again, him!"
"I
don't understand, Councillor," said Angrek, with immense respect.
"We had a smaller crew, with far less skill. He ought to have stayed put,
or even moved in on us. He could have wiped us out if we didn't abandon ship
altogether."
"Ah!"
said van Rijn. He wagged a sausagelike finger. "But you see, my young and
innocent one, he is carrying females and cubs as well as many valuable tools and other goods. His
whole life is on his raft. He dare not risk its destruction; we could so easily
set it hopelessly afire, even if we can't make capture. Hal It will be a frosty
morning in hell when they out-think Nicholas van Rijn, by damnl"
"Females—"
Angrek's eyes shifted to the forecasde. A lustful light rose in them.
"After
all," he murmured, "it's not as if the were our females—"
A
score or more Lannachska were already drifting in that same direction,
elaborately casual, but their wings were held stiff and their tails twitched.
It was noteworthy that more of the recent oarsmen were in that group than any other
class.
Wace
came running to the forecasde's edge. He leaned over it, cupped his hands and
shouted, "Freeman van Rijn! Look upstairs!"
"So." The merchant raised pouched little eyes, blinked, sneezed, and blew his
craggy nose. One by one, the Lannachska resting on scarred bloody decks lifted
their own gaze skyward. And a stillness fell on them.
Up there, the struggle was
ending.
Delp
had finally assembled his forces into a single irresistible mass and taken
them down as a unit to sea level. There they joined the embattled raft
crews—one raft at a time. A Lannachska boarding party, so suddenly and grossly
outnumbered, had no choice but to flee, abandon even its own ice ship, and go up
to Trolwen.
The DrakTionai made only one attempt to
recapture a raft which was fully in Lannacha possession. It cost them
grue-somely. The classic dictum still held; that purely airborne forces were
relatively impotent against a well-defended unit of the Fleet.
Having settled in this decisive manner
exactly who held every single raft, Delp reorganized and led a sizeable portion
of his troops aloft again to engage Trolwen's augmented air squadrons. If he
could clear them away, then, given the craft remaining to Drakto, plus total
sky domination, Delp could regain the lost vessels.
But
Trolwen did not clear away so easily. And, while naval fights such as van Rijn had
been waging went on below, a vicious combat traveled through the clouds. Both
were indecisive.
Such
was the overall view of events, as Tolk related it to the humans an hour or so
later. All that could be seen from the water was that the sky armies were
separating. They hovered and wheeled, dizzyingly high overhead, two tangled
masses of black dots against ruddy-tinged cloud banks. Doubtless threats,
curses, and boasts were tossed across the wind between them, but there were no
more arrows.
"What is it?"
gasped Angrek. "What's happening up there?"
"A
truce, of course," said van Rijn. He picked his teeth with a fingernail,
and patted his abdomen complacentiy. "They was making nowheres, so finally
Tolk got someone through to Delp and said let's talk this over, and Delp
a-greed."
"But
... we can't . . . you can't bargain
with a Drakal He's not a . . . he's alien!"
A
growl of goose-pimpled loathing assent went along the weary groups of
Lannachska.
"You can't reason with a filthy wild animal like
that," said Angrek. "All you can do is kill
it. Or it will kill you!"
Van Rijn cocked a brow at Wace, who stood on
the deck above him, and said in Anglic, "I thought maybe we could tell
them now that this truce is the only objective of all our fighting so far, but
maybe not just yet, nie?"
"I wonder if well ever dare admit
it," said the younger man.
"We will have to admit it, this very
day, and hope we do not get stuffed alive with red peppers for what we say.
After alls, we did make Trolwen and the Council agree. But then, they are very hard-boiled-eggheads,
them." Van Rijn shrugged. "Comes now the talking.
So far we have had it soft. This is the times that fry men's souls. Hal Have
you got the nerve to see it through?"
XIX
Approximately
one tenth of the rafts
lumbered out of the general confusion and assembled a few kilometers away. They
were joined by such ice ships as were still in service. The decks of all were
jammed with tensely waiting warriors. These were the vessels held by Lannach.
Another
tenth or so still burned, or had been torn and beaten by stonefire until they
were breaking up under Achan's mild waves. These were the derelicts, abandoned
by both nations. Among them were many dugouts, splintered, broken, kindled, or
crewed only by dead DrakTionai.
The remainder drew into a mass around the
Admiral's casde. This was no group of fully manned, fully equipped rafts and
canoes. No crew had escaped losses, and a good many vessels were battered
nearly into uselessness. If the Fleet could get half their normal fighting
strength back into action, they would be lucky.
Nevertheless,
this would be almost three times as many units as the Lannachska now held in toto. The numbers of males on either side were
roughly equal; but, with more cargo space, the Draknonai had more ammunition.
Each of their vessels was also individually superior, better constructed than
an ice ship, better manned than a captured raft.
In short, DrakTio still held the balance of
power. As he helped van Rijn down into a captured canoe, Tolk said wryly,
"I'd have kept my armor on if I were you,
Eart'a.
Youll only have to be laced back into it when the truce ends."
"Ah."
The merchant stretched monstrously, puffed out his stomach, and plumped himself
down on a seat. "Let us suppose, though, the armistice does not break. Then I will have been wearing that bloody-be-smeared corset all
for nothings. Which is worse than just a dart in my navel, St. Dismas witness
mel"
"I
notice," added Wace, "neither you nor Trolwen are
cuirassed."
The
Commander smoothed his mahogany fur with a nervous hand. "That's for the
dignity of the Flock," he muttered. "Those muckwalkers aren't going
to think I'm afraid of them."
The canoe shoved off, its crew bent to the
oars. It skipped swiftly over wrinkled dark waters. Above it dipped and soared the rest of the agreed-on Lannacha guard, putting on
their best demonstration of parade flying for the edification of the enemy.
There were about a hundred all told. It was comfortlessly little to take into
the angered Fleet.
"I
don't expect to reach any agreement," said Trolwen. "No one can—with
a mind as foreign as theirs."
"The
Fleet peoples are just like you," said van Rijn. "What you need is
more brotherhood, by damn. You should bash in their heads without this race
prejudice."
"Just
like us?" Trolwen bristied. His eyes grew flat glass-yellow. "See
here, Eart'o-"
"Never
mind," said van Rijn. "So they do not have a rutting season. So you
think this is a big thing. All right. I got some thinkings to make of my own. Shut up."
The
wind ruffled waves and strummed idly on rigging. The sun struck long
copper-tinged rays through scudding cloud-banks to walk on the sea with fiery
footprints. The air was cool, damp, smelling a little of salty life. It would
not be an easy time to die, thought Wace. Hardest of all,
though, to forsake Sandra, where she lay dwindling under the ice cliffs of
Dawmach. Pray
for my soul, beloved, while you wait
to follow me. Pray for my soul.
"Leaving
personal feelings aside," said Tolk, "there's much in the Commander's
remarks. That is, a folk with lives as alien to ours as the Drakska will have
minds equally alien. I don't pretend to follow the thoughts of you Eart'ska. I
consider you my friends, but let's admit it, we have
very littie in common. I only trust you because your
immediate motive—survival—has been made so clear to me. When I don't quite
follow your reasoning, I can safely assume that it is at least
well-intentioned.
"But
the Drakska, now—how can they be
trusted? Let's say that a peace agreement is made. How can we know they'll keep
it? They may have no concept of honor at all, just as they lack all concept of
sexual decency. Or, even if they do intend to abide by their oaths, are we sure
the words of the treaty will mean the same thing to them as to us? In my
capacity of Herald, I've seen many semantic misunderstandings between tribes
with different languages. So what of tribes with different instincts?
"Or
I wonder . . . can we even trust ourselves to
keep such a pledge? We do not hate anyone merely for having fought us. But we do hate dishonor, perversion, uncleanli-ness. How
can we live with ourselves, if we make peace with creatures whom
the gods must loathe?"
He sighed and looked
moodily ahead to the nearing rafts.
Wace
shrugged. "Has it occurred to you, they are thinking very much the same
things about you?" he retorted.
"Of course they are," said Tolk.
"That's yet another hailstorm in the path of negotiations."
Personally,
thought Wace, I'll be satisfied with a temporary
settlement. Just let them patch up
their differences long enough for a message to reach Thursday Landing. Then
they can rip each other's throats out for all I care.
He glanced around him, at the slim-winged
forms, and thought of work and war, torment and triumph; yes, and now and then
of some laughter or a fragment of song. He thought of high-hearted Trolwen,
philosophic Tolk, earnest young Angrek; he thought of brave, kindly Delp and
his wife Rodonis, who was so much more a lady than many a human female he had
known. And the small furry cubs which tumbled in the dust or
climbed into his lap. No, he
told himself, I'm
wrong. It means a great deal to me, after all, that this war should be
permanently ended.
The canoe slipped in between towering raft
walls. Drak no faces looked stonily down on it. Now and then someone spat into
its wake. They were all very quiet.
The unwieldy pile of the flagship loomed
ahead. There were banners strung from the mastheads, and a guard in bright
regalia formed a ring enclosing the main deck. Just before the wooden casde,
sprawled on furs and cushions, Admiral TTieonax and his advisory council
waited. To one side stood Captain Delp with a few personal
guards, in war-harness still sweaty and unkempt.
Total
silence lay over them as the canoe came to a halt and made fast to a bollard.
Trolwen, Tolk, and most of the Lannacha troopers flew straight up to the deck.
It was minutes later, after much pushing, panting, and swearing, that the
humans topped that mountainous hull.
Van
Rijn glowered about him. "What for hospitality!" he snorted in the
Drakno language. "Not so much as one litde rope let down to me, who is
pushing my poor old tired bones to an early grave all for your sakes. Before
Heaven, it is hard! It is hard! Sometimes I think I give up and retire. Then
where will the galaxy be? Then you will all be sorry, when it is too
late."
Theonax
gave him a sardonic stare. "You were not the best-behaved guest the Fleet
has had, Eartno," he answered. "I've a great deal to repay you. Yes.
I have not forgotten."
Van Rijn wheezed across the planks to Delp,
extending his hand. "So our intelligences was
right, and it was you doing all the works," he blared. "I might have
been sure. Nobody else in this Fleet has so much near a gram of brains. I,
Nicholas van Rijn, compliment you with regards."
Theonax
stiffened, and his councillors, rigid in braid and sash, looked duly shocked at
this ignoring of the Admiral. Delp hung back for an instant. Then he took van
Rijn's hand and squeezed it, quite in the Terrestrial manner.
"Lodestar help
me, it is good to see your villainous fat face again," he said. "Do
you know how nearly you cost me my . . . everything? Were it not for my
lady—"
"Business and friendship we do not
mix," said van Rijn airily. "Ah, yes, good Vrouw Rodonis. How is she and all the little ones? Do they still remember old
Uncle Nicholas and the bedtime stories he was telling them, like about
the—"
"If you please," said Theonax in an
elaborate voice, "we will, with your permission, carry on. Who shall
interpret? Yes, I remember you now, Herald." An ugly
look. "Your attention, then. Tell your
leader that this parley was arranged by my field commander, Delp hyr Orikan,
without even sending a messenger down here to consult me. I would have opposed
it had I known. It was neither prudent nor necessary. I shall have to have
these decks scrubbed where barbarians have trod. However, since the Fleet is
bound by its honor—you do have a word for honor in your Ianguge, don't you?—I
will hear what your leader has to say."
Tolk
nodded curtly and put it into Lannachamael. Trolwen sat up, eyes kindling. His
guards growled, their hands tightened on their
weapons. Delp shuffled his feet unhappily, and some of
TTieonax's captains looked away in an embarrassed fashion.
"Tell him," said
Trolwen after a moment, with bitter precision, "that we will let the
Fleet depart from Achan at once. Of course, we shall want hostages."
Tolk
translated. Tneonax peeled hps back from teeth and laughed. "They sit here
with their wretched handful of rafts and say this to us?" His courtiers tittered an echo.
But
his councillors, who captained his flotillas, remained grave. It was Delp who
stepped forward and said, "The Admiral knows I have taken my share in this
war. With these hands, wings, this tail, I have killed enemy males; with these
teeth, I have drawn enemy blood. Nevertheless I say now, we'd better at least
listen to them."
"What?"
Tneonax made round eyes. "I hope you
are joking."
Van Rijn rolled forth. "I got no time
for fumblydiddles," he boomed. "You hear me, and I put it in
millicredit words so some two-year-old cub can explain it to you. We have got
you Fleetsters by the most sensitive place, and if you are not very good we
start squeezing, by damn. Look out there!" His arm waved broadly at the
sea. "We have rafts. Not so many, perhaps, but enough. You make terms with
us, or we keep on fighting. Soon it is you who do not have enough rafts. So!
Put that in your pipe and stick it!"
Wace
nodded. Good. Good, indeed. Why had that Drakno vessel run from his own
lubber-manned prize? It was willing enough to exchange long-range shots, or to
grapple sailor against sailor in the air. It was not willing to risk being
boarded, wrecked, or set ablaze by Lannach's desperate devils.
Because it was a home, a fortress, and a
livelihood—the only way to make a living that this culture knew. If you
destroyed enough rafts, there would not be enough fish-catching or fishstoring
capacity, not even enough roosting places, to keep the folk alive. It was as
simple as that.
"We'll sink you!" screamed Theonax.
He stood up, beating his wings, crest aquiver, tail
held like an iron bar. "Well drown every last whelp of you!"
"Possible
so," said van Rijn. "This is supposed to scare us? If we give up now,
we are done for anyhow. So we take you along to hell with us, to shine our
shoes and fetch us cool drinks, roe?"
Delp
said, with trouble in his gaze, "We did not come to Achan for love of
destruction, but because hunger drove us. It was you who denied us the right to
take fish which you yourselves never caught. Oh, yes, we did take some of your
land too, but the water we must have. We can not give that up."
Van Rijn shrugged. "There are other
seas. Maybe we let you haul a few more nets of fish before you go."
A captain of the Fleet said slowly, "My
lord Delp has voiced the crux of the matter. It hints at a solution. After all,
the Sea of Achan has little or no value to you Lannach-Tionai. We did, of
course, wish to garrison your coasts, and occupy certain islands which are
sources of timber and flint and the like. And naturally, we wanted a port of
our own in Sagna Bay for emergencies and repairs. These are questions of
defense and self-sufficiency, not of immediate survival like the water. So
perhaps. . . .'*
"No!" cried Theonax.
It
was almost a scream. It shocked them into silence. The Admiral crouched,
panting for a moment, then snarled at Tolk, "Tell your leader ... I, the final authority ... I refuse.
I say we can crush your joke of a navy with small loss to ourselves. We have no
reason to yield anything to you. We may allow you to keep the uplands of
Lannach. That is the greatest concession you can hope for."
"Impossible!"
spat the Herald. Then he rattled the translation off for Trolwen, who arched
his back and bit the air.
"The
mountains will not support us," explained Tolk more calmly. "We have
already eaten them bare, and that's no secret. We must have the lowlands. And
we are certainly not going to let you hold any land, whatsoever, to base an
attack on us in a later year."
"If
you think you can wipe us off the sea now, without a loss that will cripple you
also, you may try," added Wace.
"I say we canl"
stormed Tneonax. "And willl"
"My
lord—" Delp hesitated. His eyes closed for a second. Then he said quite dispassionately,
"My lord Admiral, a finish fight now would likely be the end of our
nation. Such few rafts as survived would be the prey of the first barbarian
islanders that chanced along."
"And
a retreat into The Ocean would certainly doom
us," said Tneonax. His forefinger stabbed. "Unless
you can conjure the trech and the fruitweed out of Achan and into the broad
waters."
"That is true, of
course, my lord," said Delp.
He
turned and sought Trolwen's eyes. They regarded each other steadily, with
respect.
"Herald,"
said Delp, "tell your chief this. We are not going to leave the Sea of
Achan. We cannot. If you insist that we do so, well fight you and hope you can
be destroyed without too much loss to ourselves. We have no choice in that matter.
"But
I think maybe we can give up any thought of occupying either Lannach or
Holmenach. You can keep all the solid land. We can barter our fish, salt, sea
harvest, handicrafts, for your meat, stone, wood, cloth, and oil. It would in
time become profitable for both of us."
"And
incidental," said van Rijn, "you might think of this bit too. If
DrakTio has no land, and Lannach has no ships, it will be sort of a little hard
for one to make war on another, nie? After
a few years, trading and getting rich off each other, you get so mutual
dependent war is just impossible. So if you agree like now, soon your troubles are over, and then comes Nicholas van Rijn with
Earth goods for all. Like Father Christmas my prices are so reasonable.
What?"
"Be still!" shrieked TTieonax.
He grabbed the chief of his guards by a wing
and pointed at Delp. "Arrest that traitor!"
"My
lord—" Delp backed away. The guard hesitated. Delp's warriors closed in
about their captain, menacingly. From the Hstening lower decks there came a groan.
"The
Lodestar hear me," stammered Delp, "I only suggested ... I know the Admiral has the final
say—"
"And
my say is, 'No,'" declared TTieonax, tacitly dropping the matter of
arrest. "As Admiral and Oracle, I forbid it. There is no possible
agreement between the Fleet and these . . . these vile . . . filthy, dirty,
animal. . . ." He dribbled at the lips. His hands curved into claws,
poised above his head.
A
rusde and murmur went through the ranked DrakTionai. The captains lay like
winged leopards, still cloaked with dignity, but there was terror in their
eyes. The Lannachska, ignorant of words but sensitive to tones, crowded
together and gripped their weapons more tighdy.
Tolk
translated fast, in a low voice. When he had finished, Trolwen sighed.
"I
hate to admit it," he said, "but if you turn that marswa's words around, they are true. Do you really,
seriously think two races as different as ours could five side by side? It
would be too tempting to break the pledges. They could ravage our land while we
were gone on migration, take all our towns again ... or we could come north once more with barbarian allies, bought with the promise of DrakTio plunder. We'd be
back at each other's throats, one way or another, in five years. Best to have it out now. Let the gods decide who's right and
who's too depraved to live."
Almost
wearily, he bunched his muscles, to go down fighting if TTieonax ended the
armistice this moment.
Van
Rijn lifted his hands and his voice. It went like a bass drum, the length and
breadth and depth of the castie raft. And nocked arrows were slowly put back
into their quivers.
"Hold
still! Wait just a bloody minute, by damn. I am not through talking yet."
He
nodded curtly at Delp. "You have some sense, you. Maybe we can find a few
others with brains not so much like a spoonful of moldy tea sold by my
competitors. I am going to say something now. I will use Drak'ho language.
Tolk, you make a running translation. This no one on the planet has heard
before. I tell you Drakno and Lannacha are not alien! They are the same identical stupid race!"
Wace
sucked in his breath. "What?" he whispered in Anglic. "But the
breeding cycles—"
"Kill me that fat
worm!" shouted Tneonax.
Van
Rijn waved an impatient hand at him. "Be quiet, you. I make the talkings.
So! Sit down, both you nations, and listen to Nicholas van Rijn!"
XX
The
evolution of
intelligent life on Diomedes is still largely conjectural; there has been no
time to hunt fossils. But on the basis of existing biology and general
principles, it is possible to reason out the course of millennial events.
Once upon a time, in the planet's tropics,
there was a small continent or large island, thickly forested. The equatorial
regions never know the long days and nights of high latitudes: at equinox the
sun is up for six hours, to cross the sky and set for another six; at solstice
there is a twilight, the sun just above or below the horizon. By Diomedean
standards these are ideal conditions which will support abundant life. Among
the species at this past epoch there was a small, bright-eyed arboreal
carnivore. Like Earth's flying squirrel, it had developed a membrane on which
to glide from branch to branch.
But a low-density planet has a queasy
structure. Continents rise and sink with indecent speed, a mere few hundreds
of thousands of years. Ocean and air currents are correspondingly deflected;
and, because of the great axial tilt and the larger fluid masses involved,
Diomedean currents bear considerably more heat or cold than do Earth's. Thus,
even at the equator, there were radical climatic shifts.
A period of drought shriveled the ancient
forests into scattered woods separated by great dry pampas. The flying
pseudo-squirrel developed true wings to go from copse to copse. But being an
adaptable beast, it began also to prey on the new grass-eating animals which
herded over the plains. To cope with the big ungulates, it grew in size. But
then, needing more food to fuel the larger body, it was forced into a variety
of environments, seashore, mountains, swamps; yet by
virtue of mobility remained interbred rather than splitting into new species. A
single individual might thus face many types of country in one lifetime, which
put a premium on intelligence.
At this stage, for some unknown reason, the
species (or a part of it—the part destined to become important) was forced out
of the homeland. Possibly diastrophism broke the original continent into small
islands which would not support so large an animal population; or the
drying-out may have progressed still further. Whatever the
cause, families and flocks drifted slowly northward and southward through
hundreds of generations.
There
they found new territories and excellent hunting, but a winter which they could
not survive. When the long darkness came, they must perforce return to the
tropics to wait for spring. It was not the inborn, automatic reaction of
Terrestrial migratory birds. This animal was already too clever to be an
instinct machine; its habits were learned. The
brutal natural selection of the annual flights stimulated this intelligence
still further.
Now
the price of intelligence is a very long childhood in proportion to the total
lifespan. Since there is no action-pattern built into the thinker's genes, each
generation must learn eveiything afresh, which takes time. Therefore, no
species can become intelligent unless it or its environment first produces some
mechanism for keeping the parents together so that they may protect the young
during the extended period of helpless infancy and ignorant childhood. Mother
love is not enough; Mother will have enough to do tending the suicidally
inquisitive cubs without having to do all the food-hunting and guarding as
well. Father must help out. But what will keep Father around, once his sexual
urge has been satisfied?
Instinct
can do it. Some birds, for example, employ both parents to rear the young. But
elaborate instinctive compulsions are incompatible with intelligence. Father
has to have a good selfish reason to stay, if Father has brains enough to be selfish.
In
the case of man, the mechanism is simple: permanent sexuality. The human is
never satisfied at any time of year. From this fact we derive the family, and
hence the possibility of prolonged immaturity, and hence our cerebral cortex.
In the case of the Diomedean, there was
migration. Each flock had a long and dangerous way to travel every year. It was
best to go in company, under some form of organization. At journey's end, in
the tropics, there was the abandonment of the mating season; but soon there was
the unavoidable trip back home, for the equatorial islands would not support
many visitors for very long.
Out of this primitive annual grouping (since
it was not blindly instinctive, but the fruit of experience in a gifted animal)
there grew loose permanent associations. Defensive bands became cooperative bands.
Already the exigencies of travel had caused male and female to specialize their
body types, one for fighting, one for burden-bearing.
It was therefore advantageous that the sexes maintain their partnership the
whole year around.
The
animal of permanent family (on Diomedes, as a rule, a rather large family, an
entire matrilineal clan) with the long gestation, the long cubhood, the
constant change and challenge of environment, the competition for mates each
midwinter with alien bands having alien ways—this animal had every evolutionary
reason to start thinking. Out of such a matrix grew language, tools, fire,
organized nations, and those vague unattainable yearnings we call
"culture."
Now
while the Diomedean had no irrevocable pattern of inborn behavior, he did tend
everywhere to follow certain modes of life. They were the easiest. Analogously,
humankind is not required by instinct to formalize and regulate its matings as
marriage, but human societies have almost invariably done so. It is more
comfortable for all concerned. And so the Diomedean migrated south to breed.
But he did not have tol
When
breeding cycles exist, they are controlled by some simple foolproof mechanism.
Thus, for many birds on Earth it is the increasing length of the day in sprmgtime
which causes mating: the optical stimulus triggers hormonal processes which
reactivate the dormant gonads. On Diomedes, this wouldn't work; the fight cycle
varies too much with latitude. But once the proto-intelligent Diomedean had
gotten into migratory habits (and therefore must breed only at a certain time
of the year, if the young were to survive) evolution took the obvious course of
making that migration itself the governor.
Ordinarily
a hunter, with occasional meals of nuts or fruit or wild grain, the Diomedean
exercised in spurts. Migration called for prolonged effort; it must have taken
hundreds or thousands of generations to develop the flying muscles alone, time
enough to develop other adaptations as well. So this effort stimulated certain
glands, which operated through a complex hormonal system to waken the gonads.
(An exception was the lactating female, whose mamillaries secreted an
inhibiting agent.) During the great flight, the sex hormone concentration built
up; there was no time .or. energy to spare for its
dissipation. Once in the tropics, rested and fed, the Diomedean made up for
lost opportunities. He made up so thoroughly that the return trip had no
significant effect on his exhausted glands.
Now
and then in the homeland, fleetingly, after some unusual exertion, one might
feel stirrings toward the opposite sex. One suppressed that, as rigorously as
the human suppresses impulses to incest, and for an even more practical
reason: a cub bom out of season meant death during migration for itself and
its mother. Not that the average Diomedean realized this overtly; he just
accepted the taboo, founded religions and ethical systems and neuroses on it.
However, doubtiessly the vague, lingering year-round attractiveness of the
other sex had been an unconscious reason for the initial development of septs
and flocks.
When
the migratory Diomedean encountered a tribe which did not observe his most
basic moral law, he knew physical horror.
DrakTio's Fleet was one of several which have
now been discovered by traders. They may all have originated as groups living
near the equator and thus not burdened by the need to travel; but this is still
guesswork. The clear fact is that they began to live more off the sea than the
land. Through many centuries they elaborated the physical apparatus of ships
and tackle until it had become their entire livelihood.
It gave more security than hunting. It gave a
home which could be dwelt in continuously. It gave the possibility of
constructing and using elaborate devices, accumulating large libraries, sitting
and thinking or debating a problem; in short, the freedom to encumber oneself
with a true civilization, which no migrator had except to the most limited degree.
On the bad side, it meant grindingly hard labor and aristocratic domination.
This work kept the deckhand sexually
stimulated; but warm shelters and stored sea food had made his birthtime
independent of the season. Thus the sailor nations grew into a very human-like
pattern of marriage and child-raising: there was even a concept of romantic
love.
The
migrators who thought liim depraved, the sailor considered swinish. Indeed,
neither culture could imagine how the other might even be of the same species.
And how shall one trust the
absolute alien?
XXI
"It
is these ideological
pfuities that make the real nasty wars," said van Rijn. "But now I have taken off the ideology and we can
sensible and friendly settle down to swmdling each other, nie?"
He
had not, of course, explained his hypothesis in such detail. Lannach's
philosophers had some vague idea of evolution, but were weak on astronomy;
Drakno science was almost the reverse. Van Rijn had contented himself with simple, repetitious words, sketching what must
be the only reasonable explanation of the known reproductive differences.
He
rubbed his hands and chortled into a tautening silence. "Sol I have not made it all sweetness. Even I cannot do that overnights. For long times to
come yet, you each think the others go about this in disgusting style. You make
filthy jokes about each other. (I know some good ones you can adapt.) But you
know, at least, that you are of the same race. Any of you could have been a
solid member of the other nation, niep Maybe, come
changing times, you start switching around your ways to live. Why not
experiment a little, ha? No, no, I see you can not like that idea yet, I say no
more."
He folded his arms and waited, bulky, shaggy,
ragged, and caked with the grime of weeks. On creaking planks, under a red sun
and a low sea wind, the scores of winged warriors and captains shuddered in the
face of the unimagined.
Delp said at last, so slow and heavy it did not really break that
drumhead silence, "Yes. This makes sense. I believe it."
After
another minute, bowing his head toward stone-rigid Theonax, "My lord, this
does change the situation. I think. It will not be
as much as we hoped for, but better than I feared. I think we can make terms:
they to have all the land and we to have the Sea of Achan. Now that I know they
are not . . . devils . . . animals, well, the normal guarantees, oaths and
exchange of hostages, and so on, should make the treaty firm enough."
Tolk had been whispering in Trolwen's ear.
Lannach's Commander nodded. "That is much my own thought," he said.
"Can we persuade the Council and the
clans, Flockchief?" muttered Tolk.
"Herald, if we bring back an honorable
peace, the Council will vote our ghosts godhood after we die."
Tolk's
gaze shifted back to Theonax, lying without movement among his courtiers. And
the grizzled fur lifted along the Herald's back.
"Let us first return to the Council
alive, Flockchief," he said.
Theonax
rose. His wings beat the air, cracking noises like an ax going through bone.
His muzzle wrinkled into a lion mask, long teeth gleamed wetly forth, and he
roared, "No I I've heard enough. This farce is at an end!"
Trolwen and the Lannacha escort did not need
an interpreter. They clapped hands to weapons and fell into a defensive
circle. Their jaws clashed shut automatically, biting the wind.
"My lordl" Delp
sprang fully erect.
"Be
stilll" screeched Tneonax. "You've said far too much." His head
swung from side to side. "Captains of the Fleet, you have heard how Delp
hyr Orikan advocates making peace with creatures lower than the beasts.
Remember itl"
"But
my lord—" An older officer stood up, hands aloft in protest. "My lord
Admiral, we've just had it shown to us, they aren't beasts . . . it's only a different—"
"Assuming the Eartno spoke the truth,
which is by no means sure, what of it?" T'heonax fleered at van Rijn.
"It only makes the matter worse. Beasts can't help themselves. These
Lannach'honai are dirty by choice. And you would let them five? You would . . .
would trade with them . . . enter their towns ... let your young be seduced into their—
Nol"
The
captains looked at each other. It was like an audible groan. Only Delp seemed
to have the courage to speak again.
"I
humbly beg the Admiral to recall we've no real choice. If we fight them to a
finish, it may be our own finish, too."
"Ridiculous!"
snorted Tneonax. "Either you are afraid or they've bribed you."
Tolk
had been translating sotto
voce for Trolwen. Now,
sickly, Wace heard the Commander's grim reply to his Herald, "If he takes
that attitude, a treaty is out of the question. Even if he made it, he'd
sacrifice his hostages to us—not to speak of ours to him—just to renew the war
whenever he felt ready. Let's get back before I myself violate the truce!"
And there, thought Wace, is the end of
the world. I will die under flung stones, and Sandra will die in Glacier Land.
Well . . . we tried.
He
braced himself. The Admiral might not let this embassy depart.
Delp
was looking around from face to face. "Captains of the Fleet," he
cried, "I ask your opinion. I implore you, persuade my lord Admiral
that—"
"The
next treasonable word uttered by anyone will cost him his wings," shouted
T'heonax. "Or do you question my authority?"
It
was a bold move, thought Wace in a distant part of his thuttering brain, to
stake all he had on that one challenge. But of course, Tneonax was going to
get away with it; no one in this caste-ridden society would deny his absolute
power, not even bold Delp. Reluctant they might be, but the captains would
obey.
The silence grew
shattering.
Nicholas van Rijn broke it with a long, juicy
Bronx cheer. The whole assembly started. Tneonax leaped backward. For a moment
he was like a bat-winged tomcat. "What was that?" he blazed.
"Are you deaf?" answered van Rijn
mildly. "I said—" He repeated, with tremolo. "What do you
mean?"
"It is an Earth term," said van
Rijn. "As near as I can render it, let me see . . . well, it means you are
a—" The rest was the most imaginative obscenity Wace had heard in his
life.
The captains gasped. Some drew their weapons.
The Drak-no guards on the upper decks gripped bows and spears. "Kill
him!" screamed Tneonax.
"No!" Van Rijn's bass exploded on
their ears. The sheer volume of it paralyzed them. "I am an embassy, by
damn! You hurt an embassy and the Lodestar will sink you in hell's boiling
seasl"
It
checked them. T'heonax did not repeat his order; the guards jerked back toward
stillness; the officers remained poised, outraged past words.
"I
have somethings to say you," van Rijn continued, only twice as loud as a
large foghorn. "I speak to all the Fleet, and ask you ask yourselves, why
this little pip squeaker does so stupid. He makes you carry on a war where both
sides lose; he makes you risk your lives, your wives and cubs, maybe the
Fleet's own surviving. Why? Because he is afraid. He
knows, a few years cheek-by-jowl next to the Lannach-Tionai, and even more so
trading with my company at my fantastic low prices, then
things begin to change. You get more into thinking by your own selves. You
taste freedom. Bit by bit, his power slides from him. And he is too much a
coward to live on his own selfs. Nie, he
has got to have guards and slaves and all of you to make bossing over, so he
proves to himself he is not just a little jellypot but a real true Leader.
Rather he will have the Fleet ruined, even die himself, than lose this
prop-up!"
T'heonax
said, shaking, "Get off my raft before I forget there is an
armistice."
"Oh,
I go, I go," said van Rijn. He advanced toward the Admiral. His tread
reverberated in the deck. "I go back and make war again if you insist. But
only one small question I ask first." He stopped before the royal presence
and prodded the royal nose with a hairy forefinger. "Why you make so much
fuss about Lannacha home fifes? Could be maybe down underneath you hanker to
try it yourself?"
He turned his back, then,
and bowed.
Wace
did not see just what happened. There were guards and captains between. He
heard a screech, a bellow from van Rijn, and then there was a hurricane of
wings before him.
He threw himself into the press of bodies. A
tail crashed against his ribs. He hardly felt it. His fist jolted, merely to
get a warrior out of the way and see.
Nicholas van Rijn stood with both hands in
the air as a score of spears menaced him. "The Admiral bit me!" he
wailed. "I am here like an embassy, and the pig bites me! What kind of
relations between countries is that, when heads of state bite foreign
ambassadors, ha? Does an Earth president bite diplomats? This is
uncivilized!"
Theonax backed off, spitting, scrubbing the blood from his jaws. "Get out!" he
screamed in a strangled voice. "Go at once!"
Van
Rijn nodded. "Come, friends," he said. "We find us places with
better manners."
"Freeman . . . Freeman, where did
he—" Wace crowded close.
"Never mind
where," said van Rijn huffily.
Trolwen
and Tolk joined them. The Lannacha escort fell into step behind. They walked at
a measured pace across the deck, away from the confusion of DrakTionai under
the castle wall.
"You
might have known it," said Wace. He felt exhausted, drained of everything
except a weak anger at his chief's unbelievable folly. "This race is
carnivorous. Haven't you seen them snap when they get angry? It's ... a reflex. . . . You might have
known!"
"Well," said van Rijn in a most
virtuous tone, holding both hands to his injury, "he did not have to bite. I am not responsible for his lack of control or any
consequences of it."
"But the ruckus . . .
we could all have been killed!"
Van Rijn didn't bother to
argue about that.
Delp
met them at the rail. His crest drooped. "I am sorry it must end
thus," he said. "We could have been friends."
"Perhaps it does not end just so
soon," said van Rijn.
"What
do you mean?" Tired eyes regarded him without hope.
"Maybe
you see pretty quick. Delp—" Van Rijn laid a
paternal hand on the DrakTio's shoulder. "You are a good young chap. I
could use a one like you, as a part-time agent for some tradings in these parts.
On fat commissions, natural. But for now, remember you
are the one they all like and respect. If anything happens to the Admiral,
there will be panic and uncertainty, but they will turn to you for advice. If
you act fast at such a moment, you can be Admiral yourself! Then maybe we do
business, ha?"
He
left Delp gaping and swung himself with apish speed
down into the canoe. "Now, boys," he said, "row like hell."
They
were almost back to their own fleet when Wace saw clotted wings whirl up from
the royal raft. He gulped. "Has the attack—has it begun already?" He
cursed himself that his voice should be an idiotic squeak.
"Well, I am glad we are not close to
them." Van Rijn, standing up as he had done the whole trip, nodded
com-placendy. "But I think not this is the war. I think they are just
disturbed. Soon Delp will take charge and calms them down."
"But-Delp?"
Van Rijn shrugged. "If Diomedean proteins is deadly to us," he said,
"ours should not be so good for them, ha? And our late friend Theonax took
a big mouthful of me. It all goes to show, these foul tempers only lead to
trouble. Best you follow my example. When I am attacked, I turn the other
cheek. Ha, is good joke, no?"
XXII
Thursday
Landing had little in the way of hospital facilities:
an autodiagnostician, a few surgical and therapeutical robots, the standard
drugs, and the post xenobiologist to double as medical officer. But a six
weeks' fast did not have serious consequences, if you were strong to begin with
and had been waited on hand, foot, wing, and tail by two anxious nations on a
planet none of whose diseases could affect you. Treatment progressed rapidly
with the help of bioaccelerine, from intravenous glucose to thick rare steaks.
By the sixth Dio-medean day, Wace had put on a noticeable amount of flesh and
was weakly but fumingly aprowl in his room.
"Smoke,
sir?" asked young Benegal. He had been out on trading circuit when the
rescue party arrived; only now was he getting the full account. He offered
cigarets with a most respectful air.
Wace
halted, the bathrobe swirling about his knees. He reached, hesitated, then
grinned and said: "In all that time without tobacco, I seem to've lost the
addiction. Question is, should I go to the trouble and
expense of building it up again?"
"Well, no, sir-"
"Hey! Gimme that!" Wace sat down on
his bed and took a cautious puff. "I certainly am going to pick up all my vices where I left off, and doubtless add some
new ones."
"You,
uh, you were going to tell me, sir. . . how the
station here was informed—"
"Oh, yes. That. It was childishly
simple. I figured it out in ten minutes, once we got a breathing spell. Send a
fair-sized Diomedean party with a written message, plus of course one of Tolk's
professional interpreters to help them inquire their way on this side of The
Ocean. Devise a big life raft, just a framework of fight poles which could be
dovetailed together. Each Diomedean carried a single piece; they assembled it
in the air and rested on it whenever necessary . . . also fished from it; a
number of Fleet experts went along to take charge of that angle. There was
enough rain for them to catch in small buckets to drink. I knew there would be
since the Draknonai stay at sea for indefinite periods, and also this is such
a rainy planet anyhow.
"Incidentally,
for reasons which are now obvious to you, the party had to include some
Lannacha females. Which means that the messengers of both
nationalities have had to give up some hoary prejudices. In the long
run, that's going to change their history more than whatever impression we
Terrestrials might have made by such stunts as flying them home across The
Ocean in a single day. From now on, willy-nilly, the beings who
went on that trip will be a subversive element in both cultures; they'll be
the seedbed of Diomedean internationalism. But that's for the League to gloat
about, not me."
Wace shrugged. "Having seen them
off," he finished, "we could only crawl into bed and wait. After the
first few days, it wasn't so bad. Appetite disappears."
He
stubbed out the cigaret with a grimace. It was making him dizzy.
"When
do I get to see the others?" he demanded. "I'm strong enough now to
feel bored. I want company, dammit."
"As a matter of fact, sir," said
Benegal, "I believe Freeman van Rijn said something about—" A thunderous
"Skulls and
smallpox!" bounced
in the corridor outside—"about visiting you today."
"Run
along then," said Wace sardonically. "You're too young to hear this. We blood brothers who have defied death together, sworn comrades,
and so on and so forth, and are about to have a reunion."
He got to his feet as the boy slipped out the
back door. Van Rijn rolled in the front entrance.
His
Jovian girth was shrunken flat; he had only one chin, and he leaned on a
gold-headed cane. But his hair was curled into oily black ringlets, his
mustaches and goatee waxed to needle points; his lace-trimmed shirt and
cloth-of-gold vest were already smeared with snuff; his legs were hairy tree
trunks beneath a batik sarong; he wore a diamond mine on each hand and a silver
chain about his neck which could have anchored a battleship. He waved a ripe
Trich-inopoly cigar above a four-decker sandwich and roared:
"So
you are walking again. Good fellow! The only way you get well is not sip
dishwater soup and take it easily, like that
upgebungled horse doctor has the nerve to tell me to do." He purpled with
indignation. "Does one thought get through that sand in his synapses, what
it is costing me every hour I wait here? What a killing I can make if I get
home among those underhand competition jackals before the news reaches them
Nicholas van Rijn is alive after all? I have just been out beating the station
engineer over his thick flat mushroom he uses for a head, telling him if my
spaceship is not ready to leave tomorrow noon I will hitch him to it and say
giddap. So you will come back to Earth with us your own selfs, nie?"
Wace
had no immediate reply. Sandra had followed the merchant in.
She was driving a wheelchair, and looked so
white and thin that his heart nearly shattered. Her hair was a pale frosty
cloud on the pillow. It seemed as if it would be cold to touch. But her eyes
lived, immense, the infinite warm green of Earth's gentlest seas; and she
smiled at him.
"My lady—" he
whispered.
"Oh,
she comes, too," said van Rijn, selecting an apple from the fruit basket
at Wace's bedside. "We all continue our interrupted trip, maybe with not
so much fun and games aboard." He drooped one little
sleet-gray eye at her, lasciviously. "Those we save for later on
Earth when we are back to normal, ha?"
"If my lady has the strength to
travel—" stumbled Wace. He sat down,
his knees would bear him no longer.
"Oh,
yes," she murmured. "It is only a matter of following the diet as
written for me and getting much rest."
"Worst thing you can do, by damn,"
grumbled van Rijn, finishing the apple and picking up an orange.
"It
isn't suitable," protested Wace. "We lost so many servants when the
skycruiser ditched. She'd only have—"
"A single maid to attend me?" Sandra's laugh was ghostly, but it held
genuine amusement. "After all of our experiences I am to forget what we
did and endured, and be so correct and formal with you, Eric? That would be
most silly, when we have climbed the ridge over Salmenbrok together, not?"
Wace's pulse clamored. Van Rijn, strewing
orange peel on the floor, said, "Out of hard lucks, the good Lord can pull
much money if He chooses. I cannot know every man in the Company, so promising
youngsters like you do go sometimes to waste on little outposts like here. Now
I will take you home to Earth and find a proper paying job for you."
If she could remember one chilled morning beneath Mount Oborch, thought Wace,
he, for the sake of his manhood, could remember less pleasant things, and name
them in plain words. It was time.
He
was still too weak to rise—he shook a little—but he caught van Rijn's gaze and
said in a voice hard with anger:
"That's
the easiest way to get back your self-esteem, of course. Buy itl Bribe me with
a sinecure to forget how Sandra sat with a paintbrush in a coalsack of a room
till she fainted from exhaustion, and how she gave us her last food . . . how I
myself worked my brain and my heart out, to pull us all back from that
jailhouse country and win a war to boot. No, don't interrupt. I know you had
some part in it. You fought during that naval engagement because you had no choice, no place to hide. You found a nice nasty way to
dispose of an inconvenient obstacle to the peace negotiations. You have a
talent for that sort of thing. And you made some suggestions. I admit all that.
"But
what did it amount to? It amounted to your saying to me: 'Do thisl Build that!' And I had to do it, with nonhuman helpers and stone age tools. I had to design it, event Any fool could once have said, Take me to the Moon'. It took
brains to figure out how!
"Your
role, your leadership', amounted to strolling around, gambling and chattering,
playing cheap politics, eating like a hippopotamus, while Sandra lay starving
on Dawmach, and claiming all the credit! And now I'm supposed to go to Earth,
sit down in a gilded pigpen of an office, spend the rest of my life
mumb-twiddling, and keep quiet when you brag. Isn't that right?
"I've
had enough! I can't stop you leeching off society, but I can pluck you off me.
You can take your sinecure and sti—"
Wace saw Sandra's eyes on him, grave, oddly
compassionate, and jerked to a halt. "I quit," he ended.
Van Rijn had swallowed the orange and
returned to his sandwich during Wace's speech. Now he burped, licked his
fingers, took a fresh puff of his cigar, and rumbled quite mildly:
"If you think I give away sinecures, you
are being too optimist. I am offering you a job with importance for no reason
except I think you can do it better than some knucklebone heads on Earth. I
will pay you what the job is worth. And by damn, you will work your promontory
off."
Wace gulped after air.
"Go
ahead and insult me, public if you wish," said van Rijn. "Just not on company time. Now I go find me who it was
put the bomb in that cruiser and take care of him. Also maybe the cook will fix
me a little Italian hero sandwich. Death and dynamite, they want to starve me
to bones here, them!"
He waved a shaggy paw and departed like an
amiable earthquake.
Sandra wheeled over and laid on a hand on Wace's. It was a cool touch, light as a
leaf falling in a northern October, but it burned him. As if from far off, he
heard her:
"I awaited this to come, Eric. It is
best you understand now. I, who was bom to govern . . . my whole life has been a long governing, not? I know what I speak of.
There are the fake leaders, the balloons, with talent only to get in people's
way. Yes. But he is not one of them. Without him, you and I would sleep dead
beneath Achan."
"But-"
"You complain he made you do the hard
things that used your talent, not his? Of course he did. It is not the leader's
job to do everything himself. It is his job to order, persuade, wheedle, bully,
bribe—just that! to make people do what must be done,
whether or not they think it is possible— that's a leader's work.
"You say, he spent time loafing around
talking, making jokes and a false front to impress the natives? Of course!
Somebody had to. We were monsters, strangers, beggars
as well. Could you or I have started as a deformed beggar and ended as all but
long?
"You say he bribed—with goods from
crooked dice—and blustered, lied, cheated, politicked, killed both open and
sly? Yes. I do not say it was right. I do not say he did not enjoy himself,
either. But can you name another way to have gotten our fives back? Or even to
make peace for those poor, warring devils?"
"Well—well.
. . ." The man looked away, out the window to the stark landscape. It
would be good to dwell inside Earth's narrower horizon.
"Well,
maybe," he said at last, grudging each word. "I ... I suppose I was too hasty. Still, we
played our parts too, you know. Without us, he—"
"I think, without us, he would have
found some other way to come home," she interrupted. "But
we without him, no."
He jerked his head back. Her face was burning
a deeper red than the ember sunlight outside could tinge it.
He
thought, with sudden weariness: After all, she is a woman, and women live more for the next generation than
men aan. Most especially she dóes, for the life
of a planet may rest on her child,
and she is an aristocrat in the old pure meaning of the word. He who
fathers the next Duke of Hermes may
be aging, fat, and uncouth, callous and conscienceless, unable to see her as
anything but a boisterous episode. It
doesn't matter if the woman sees him
as a man.
Well-a-day, I have much to
thank them both for.
"I—"
Sandra looked confused,
almost trapped. Her look held an inarticulate pleading. "I think I had
best go and let you rest." After a moment of his silence, "He is not
yet so strong as he claims. I may be needed."
"No," said Wace with an enormous
tenderness. "The need is all yours. Good-bye, my lady."