Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  When they had descended once more into their native valley, footsore and exhausted from their headlong pace on the back track, a man ran swiftly from the nearest village to meet the column. Gasping, h: poured out his message: “Kasson has returned!”

  The god had come as before unheralded, in the night following Kiin’s departure . . . The chiefs of the People met Kiin and led him to the house where Kasson was lodged.

  Outside the door Kiin halted and waved the deputation back. “I wish to talk alone with—my friend.”

  As he stooped and entered the single room, Kasson stood up ceremoniously and looked down from his great height, squinting against the light of the doorway. “You are Kiin?” Once again, as so long ago, the god smiled and took Kiin’s hand. When the man’s eyes grew used to the darkness of the hut he saw that the stern face was unaltered, that the black beard fell crisply curling as of yore over the broad chest. And he felt with a poignant thrust what change there had been in himself since, as a boy, he had last clasped the hand of Kasson.

  Then he saw too Musenez, the withered hag, who crouched immobile in the shadow behind Kasson. And she met Kiin’s look and grinned in answer, screwing up her whole wicked old face.

  Vague fear chilled Kiin; but he disregarded the witch and spoke only to Kasson: “Will you stay with us this time?”

  The god nodded gravely. “That is my decision. I will remain here to help you, and live among you like one of the People.” He paused, then added, “I have arranged with Musenez to marry her granddaughter, Jezephaik.” Kiin’s thrill of anxiety became hot anger. He had never trusted Musenez far, and now he saw her scheming obscurely to undermine him. But he controlled himself. “It is good. My people will build you a fine house . . . one as large as the leader’s house.”

  “And I,” said Kasson, “will show the People how to build better house—and many other things. There is very much to be done, Kiin, and I can see that you have done little since I left you.”

  3

  IN THE YEARS that followed, the god kept his promise; he taught them a great deal which, left to themselves, the People would hardly have discovered. He taught them to make bows and arrows; to smelt copper; and to catch and tame the wild cattle which wandered now and then into the valley through the low passes of the southern range. He led them up into the pine woods to cut tall, straight trees for building houses, mid over the mountains to surprise the brown horde on its own soil, and deal it a defeat which gave the People long peace from raids.

  Through his lessons the ways of life were changed so greatly that many of the People felt themselves lost, adrift in the sea of change.

  Kiin spoke, once, of his attempt with the irrigation-ditches; the god listened closely, with the wry halfsmile that came so easily to him, then gave orders that the work be begun again, under his own supervision.

  It was that which precipitated the storm of revolt, which would have broken over Kiin’s head long before save for the return of his god. Leader of the mutiny was the once-trusted Dewn. It was put down bloodily; at the head of the warriors who remained loyal, Kasson overwhelmed the rebels, both by his generalship and by his terrifying presence. The work on the irrigation-system was finished; the rains filled the reservoirs; and the people had water beyond their wildest dreams.

  But Kiin grew old. His strength failed and his eyes grew dim; he looked less and less to the future, and lived more and more with his memories. And bitter as gall, hot as a red-hot coal, was in him the recollection of Kasson’s words on their second meeting: “You have done little.” Slowly Kiin groped his way to the realization of how easy—bow appallingly easy—it must be for an immortal, surveying the sweep of years without number, thus to sentence to ignominy the lifework of a man. “You have done little.”

  And there were other things that went to heap up resentment in his heart. The fright he held got from the revolt of Dewn had helped to change the erstwhile iconoclast, making him conservative despite himself; and, like so many of his subjects, Kiin felt bewildered, swept away and smothered by the innovations of Kasson. Cattle-breeding, carpentry, irrigation made life too complex for one man’s understanding. Kiin found himself yearning for the old days, when life was simple and sweet . . . and when he was young.

  More than that, Kiin, of course, hoped to see the eldest of his four sons, Salzen, take his place as leader of the People. Now Kasson also had begotten sons, three of them, from his wife Jezephaik; and the children of the god were noble youths, beloved by the People. There was no harm in that, of itself; but the sons of Kasson were the grandsons of Musenez. And Musenez still lived, an incredibly-aged, but still sharp and spiteful crone. It was she, Kiin felt sure, who sought, with a word well-placed in this and that ear, to turn the allegiance of the many from the family of Kiin to the sons of Kasson. There were still those who remembered that Kiin’s power had come, in the beginning, from no more than a touch of the god. What then was the due of these, who were Kasson’s flesh and blood?

  In justice, Kiin did not see it as a contest between him and his divine patron, but solely as between himself and Musenez. Indeed, Kasson had shown scant interest in his offspring since their birth. With his wry smile, or sometimes with a look of something like sadness, he had watched them glow to young manhood; and be had left most of their education—as was moreover the custom of the People—to their grandmother, the witch.

  THE OLD man fell sick as he brooded on it; and, feeling death near him, his tortured brain came at last to a decision. He cast about for men he could trust, and could think of none save his own four sons.

  For them he sent, and he made them promise to do all their father’s will. And they promised.

  And they did his bidding the same day. They went first to the rich house of the witch and struck her down in the doorway, and found inside the youngest son of Kasson, a mere boy, whom they killed likewise; and they fell upon the two other sons of Kasson in the open outside the village, and slew them both, though one of the sons of Kiin remained also dead in the desert.

  When the deed was known, it cleft the People more sharply than had been even in the time of Henzen or during the rebellion of Dewn. For many held to Kasson, crying vengeance on the murderers; but others, mostly of the older generation, flocked to Kiin and demanded that all the uncanny work of the god be rooted out.

  But each side fought the other with the bows that Kasson had taught them to make.

  The valley was divided between the two camps, too equally, so that for a time neither side could make head against the other. But Kiin, in the midst of his forces, knew with despair that he had lost; the power which had made weapons out of useless sticks would do that much again and more to destroy him. He could not match the wisdom of Kasson, the immortal.

  However, the end was otherwise. On the fifth day in the morning, as Kiin, leaning heavily on his spear-bearer’s arm, was consulting with his chiefs on top of a low hill, someone cried out, and they looked up to see Kasson approaching alone across the desert from the west. He had passed the sentries unseen.

  KIIN SHIVERED as he looked once more on the god. Then he waved his babbling henchmen aside and advanced tottering, but resolute, to meet his enemy.

  Kasson said brusquely, “This quarrel of ours it must be forgotten now.” And as Kiin only stared his question, “Last night the brown hordesmen crossed the mountains. They are attacking, now, the villages my people held. As you can see.” He gestured back the way he had come, and now everyone saw the spire of smoke that was rising steadily higher, straight into the still morning air.

  By noon the People were united once more against the common disaster. And before sundown battle was joined on the plain, a battle that raged far into the night with terrific slaughter.

  It was clear that the rulers of the horde had learned of the People’s division, and had come to destroy them once and for all. Never before had they passed the mountains unresisted with such a host On the open desert, before the village of Nuhl, the People made their stan
d against overwhelming numbers.

  Toward dawn the moon went down and fighting ceased—both armies scattered, disorganized in the blackness. The bows and bronze weapons of Kasson had wrought great havoc, but it could not be enough. The defending warriors, those who still lived, fell back and among the swarms of women and children, who had fled the villages, and huddled through the night in helpless fear behind the fighting line. Now these infected their men with the contagion of terror; and all that remained of the People was a panicky mass, crying and stumbling in the night. The darkness was the world’s end; beyond it lay only the cannibal horde.

  Somehow, Kasson found his way through the dark and the route to a mean hut in the village. Kiin was there, abandoned by all the chiefs; his sons had died in the battle. Everyone knew it was the evil Kiin had done that had brought destruction upon the People. But they had not harmed him; vengeance was Karson’s.

  But the god only greeted Kiin in words that held no anger, and lowered himself wearily to the earth floor beside the huddled old man. The doorway of the hut faced east; and already they could distinguish the boundary of earth and sky.

  The god said, “There is no time for escape; they will be over us as soon as it is light.”

  The whimpering of the doomed People came from far away and near, all around. Kiin’s voice cracked harshly as he spoke: “It is all my fault; slay me now, Kasson, but save the People.”

  “I cannot,” replied Kasson in a low level voice that buried all hope. “The battle is lost, and in the morning, it seems, we will all be dead . . . Yes, gods die too, Kiin, even as men. But that you still think of saving the People—that is something. It means I was not wholly mistaken in you; though, of course, I expected far too much.”

  THE WORDS of his god touched on what was still for Kiin, through all disasters, the burning question of his life. He cried out.

  “What did you expect? What should I have done?”

  “It does not matter, now; it is not your fault . . . I do not know whether I can make you understand what these things have meant to me, because we come of different worlds. To me, Kiin, you were an experiment. One of my experiments; my children were another—wherefore I cannot regret them too greatly—and the whole People was a third.” To the blank silence he explained, “An experiment is an attempt that failed.”

  “But what attempt—” began Kiin in a stifled voice.

  “You, or your People, cannot be blamed that this last battle has been lost.” And Kiin sensed that the battle of which Kasson spoke was not merely the struggle with the brown horde. “A greater battle was fought—and lost—long ago, and because of that you suffer. I will tell you its story, if you like.” Kasson glanced at the eastern sky.

  “Tell me,” said Kiin.

  “Ah, you still have curiosity—from that quality I once hoped for much.

  “But the story is this. In tire far past—‘before the People were, in the time when I was a boy—the earth was populated by a single race of the beings which you call gods. They were divided into nations, and those nations were so numerous that in one of them your People—yes, and the brown horde—would be lost like a single grain of sand in the desert.

  “They—we—were powerful magicians. We could fly; we could move mountains; we could make our voices heard all over the world. Most wonderful of all were the weapons we had. You would not understand such things as weapons, since they were nothing a man could wield, but more like great natural disasters—winds and fires and burning lights, that one people could send to destroy another. And the nations were often at war.

  “In my own youth, the last war of the gods began. Its armies and its dead were counted in thousands of thousands, for the warring peoples smote one another with unimaginable forces, even with the fire of suns. So they fought, and died not like gods, but like vermin.”

  Kasson’s voice had risen, with a greater intensity of feeling than Kiin had ever known him to show before. He paused; and when he spoke again it was flatly, wearily: “We are not gods. The people of the old time were men, and you are their descendant as surely as am I.”

  “But . . .” Kiin choked and swallowed with effort. “But you are not like me. You are . . . immortal.”

  THE OTHER chuckled drily. “I am coming to that. As the war dragged on, and the millions died, the advantage for a time was with that side whose numbers were greater. But on the other side there were many wise men called scientists; among whom were those who understood the fire of suns, and those who understood the secrets of the seed which is planted in the continuing war. There were men And they learned that when the seed is touched by sun-fire, there is a chance that the young will be unlike their parents—and also a chance that the offspring so changed will pass the changes on to their own children.

  “They learned to work such changes purposely, and did so to create various new breeds of men to fight as soldiers in the continuing war. There were men of great stature, and other hideously formed for combat—the giants of whom you know, and the hated monsters; and there were very small men, and ones who could climb like squirrels, and ones who could swim under water like frogs . . . But all these were little more than experiments, and a few of them survive today. Some few monsters were also born, no doubt, by accident; for as I have said, they used the sun-fire itself as a weapon, and in some places, the fire lingered in the earth for years.

  “But the great achievement of the scientists was the creation of a race of men that attained their growth, and bred children, in about a tenth of the time which men till then had required. Before then, you see, they had been able to speed up the production of every resource of war except manpower. Already a whole generation of fighters had died, but with the new race they could replace their armies in a few years and continue to replace them. It did not matter that the useful lives of the new men were short, for the average life of a combat soldier in that war was only a few months anyway.

  “It was not long, of course, until their enemies learned of and duplicated the new creation. All the peoples of that time were very wise in some ways.

  “There were disadvantages, all the same, in addition to the difficulties of feeding and clothing the swiftly growing race and providing arms for the soldiers. One of the great superiorities of men—or the ‘gods’—over the beasts had always been their long, long period of immaturity—which was twice the lifespan of your oldest men—and which, as you may imagine, served them for the accumulation of enormous wisdom, which they had time to use in their long adult lives. The new breed had hands, and a complex brain, and speech; but their growth and aging was like that of the animals. At an age when the infants of the older race had scarcely learned to talk, they were adults—soldiers and women fit to bear children.

  “They learned what they were taught, to fight, but they had no time to learn the complicated skills and knowledge of the long-lived people. And every year, as the war went on, the new men became more numerous, and the old race fewer and fewer—because of the great difference between their breeding-rates.

  “At last the war that had been begun with the fire of suns was finished with knives and sticks and stones, as the great armies fell apart, and fought one another in ever smaller bands, and starved, mid devoured each other. From that time it has been some thirty years—more than ten generations of your people.

  “During most of that time I have wandered over the face of the earth, seeing the short-lived people take root in their tribes, and make their ways of life with the ignorance and folly and cruelty of great children, and thrive or suffer, and forget. For eleven years now—since about the time of your grandfather’s birth—I have not seen or heard of any other survivor of my own kind; perhaps I am the last.

  “So I returned to the People three years ago and began the experiments of which I spoke. I wanted to know U your kind could be taught up to a higher civilization, though I knew that the god whom you call Shanon—and whom I knew, and who is dead now—had failed in this. But I am sure now that whate
ver I might have done in the remainder of my lifetime would not have endured long after my death. And my sons—I had hoped against hope that they might be like me, though it is certain that the new strain is dominant—that the children are shortlived. Nevertheless, if my sons had lived, some of their descendants would have been gods; the law which governs such things was known in the old time. But they are dead.”

  Kim’s face was buried in his hands;

  he wept bitterly, silently, with childish, senile tears.

  “I do not blame you, Kiin. You too were an experiment of mine. I saw in you a greater intelligence and curiosity and originality than the usual, and I hoped to build on that. But I did not reckon sufficiently with the shortness of your life—and I see now that I failed also to regard you as an adult, with an adult’s passions and virtues and failings . . . If you had been born of the old race, Kim, you would be a precocious child now; in fifteen or twenty years you would grow into a superior man. But as it is—you are seven years old, and your lifework is ended before it has had time to begin.”

  In the cold pale morning Kiin raised his bowed white head and peered into the face of the god. And he saw what he had not seen before: Kasson’s black hair and his great black beard were shot with threads of gray.

  4

  NOT FAR AWAY, in the dawn light, the horde began to move. Screams tore through the silence. The brown people came across the desert in long skirmish lines, chanting in unison their war cries.

  A handful of the People rallied on a rise of ground, where they fought off the swarming attackers until almost noon. Then the lines broke and the shrieking hordesmen rolled over them.

  Kiin fell, slain by an ax-blow, at the feet of his god. They surrounded Kasson and would have struck him down, save that the leader of the horde had heard of a god among the People; he wished this god taken alive. So they fell upon Kasson with bare hands and dragged him bound but living to Yerk, general of the horde.