Reap the Whirlwind

by C. J. Cherryh

  "I'd—prefer to think I'm your friend," Teo said softly. "And yes, I do appreciate you. There's an awful lot about your people I admire, Jegrai. Not the least of which is your sense of honor. There's not a lot of that around."

  The young Khene smiled a little. "That is a good thing to hear. Will you be my advocate, then, to your Master?"

  "Yes," Teo heard himself saying. "Yes, my friend, I will."

  * * *

  Felaras had had the suspicion from the moment that Kasha brought word Teo was coming up the mountain that she was going to need something stronger to sustain her than chava.

  One look at Teo's face convinced her.

  "Teo, sit down before you fall down," she ordered, pushing him into the chair beside her desk. She turned to her Second. "Kasha," she said, rubbing the back of her neck and feeling the muscles already starting to go tense, "I know it isn't even noon yet, but—"

  "Wine," Kasha replied. "I'll get it for you, I think you're going to need it. And I'll get Zorsha. I think you're going to need him, too."

  The wine and Zorsha arrived at the same moment, and with every word Teo recited, Felaras felt more and more in need of both. Even the good news, the wedding of one of the Vale folk and the young Vredai warrior and Jegrai's wholehearted support of it, did little to leaven the feeling that she'd just had a mountain dropped on her shoulders.

  "—I told him—no, I promised him—I'd be his advocate, Master Felaras," Teo said nervously. "I—I don't know, everything he told me seemed so reasonable last night, and I've never caught him in any kind of untruth. I want to believe him. But—supporting him militarily in a coup of his own, something that's not in our plan? I—I just don't know, I'm absolutely out of my depth."

  Felaras sighed, and had a long sip of her wine. "Teo, you're the student of history. Are there any parallels?"

  "Maybe," he replied, voice and face strained. "If you can believe Ancas folktales, oral tradition from peoples who hadn't a notion of literacy for the first couple hundred years of their ascendancy. The folktales say the leader of the Ancas was like Jegrai; charismatic, and with a long view. That was the one who supposedly overran the Sabirn empire. But he didn't have the incredible hunger for learning that Jegrai has, nor the respect for those who have it."

  "Kasha?"

  "Mai says she'd follow him into hell," Kasha replied positively. "Hladyr bless, I've been down there and fought with his people, and I can tell you I'd do the same! All he needs is an edge, just the tiniest edge, and he'll have his enemies. We could give him that edge. And you know what he'll give us." She straightened and looked directly into Felaras's eyes. "I'll tell you what my father would tell you; the Swords like Jegrai. The Watchers would back him without a single second thought."

  "Zorsha?"

  "No such unity in Tower, Felaras," Zorsha said with regret. "But even though I may not be a student of history, I can tell you with Jegrai you're sitting on a dragon. You can ride it, and it will likely take you places you've never dreamed. But if you try to get off, it may crush you without even knowing it did so."

  Out of the corner of her eye Felaras saw Teo bristle.

  "Jegrai wouldn't—"

  "Jegrai damned well would," Zorsha replied calmly. "His first, last, and holiest priority is his people. If he had to cut you down to save them, Teo, he'd do it. He'd give you the best funeral you ever saw, after, but he'd still do it."

  "But—"

  "You heard it out of his own mouth, Teo," Kasha agreed. "He was perfectly willing to sacrifice himself for them, and at what age? Seventeen, eighteen? At twenty his people have been in flight for years and he's suffered with every one of them; he'll buy them peace and safety with whatever coin it takes. His blood, yours, or mine."

  "But the fact is, he won't roll over us unless we stand in his way—which, I trust, we're too wise to do," Zorsha continued, as Teo subsided into the chair, red-faced and abashed. "And what he's offering—Felaras, it's tempting. If I were in the Master's seat, I'd take it. We're not just one man anymore; we're not Duran. We're an ongoing organization, and we'll live beyond the span of any one man. We have the potential, not only to advise and aid a potentially very strong leader, but all those who succeed him. Have you thought what that could mean to the Order in particular—and the world in general? We could help to foster hundreds, maybe a thousand years of peace and learning, if we can stay uncorrupted by power. And I think that because of our organization we can."

  Felaras nodded, slowly—and in her own mind eliminated Teo from the "competition" for the Master's seat altogether. Though Teo had had all night to consider what Jegrai had told him, his only thoughts had been personal, and confused. Zorsha had cut straight to the heart of the matter, and seen the long-view possibilities, positive and negative.

  And being Felaras, she could not be less than honest with the three so close to her.

  "Teo—what would you say if I told you I don't think you've got it in you to sit in my place?" she asked quietly.

  Kasha and Zorsha went very quiet, and froze in their chairs.

  Teo's face was suffused with only relief. "I'd thank the gods, Master. Honestly." Then he started a little, and his eyes widened. "Do you mean that? You're pulling me out?"

  She nodded slowly.

  He closed his eyes and sagged against the back of the chair. "Oh, gods. Master Felaras, you will never know how happy you've made me. Every time I thought about having to make decisions—oh, gods, I just got so knotted up inside I wanted to puke." He opened his eyes again, and there was no shadow of falsehood in them. "Zorsha, you can have it all, with my blessing! Gods, I can just be me again. . . ."

  Zorsha looked stunned.

  "It had to come some time, and soon," Felaras told him. "There can only be one successor in the end. You're it, lad. I'm not sure whether to give you congratulations or condolences."

  Zorsha shook himself a little, and managed to smile weakly at her. "From all I've seen, both. Well. Thank you . . . I think."

  Felaras laughed. "Lad, just now you sounded so like me you could have been my echo! All right—Teo's brought us Jegrai's offer. You've all given your opinions and they match mine. We're in for a leg; we might just as well go in for the whole lamb."

  Zorsha nodded. "What's first?"

  "Those Talchai that Jegrai thinks are on his heels. Kasha, I want you to consult with your father about what it would take to truly crush an army of three or four thousand at the Teeth. That includes more fire-throwers than we currently have—both mortars and hand-cannon. Zorsha, I want figures on how long it would take to make those fire-throwers and the ammunition for them. Teo, get back down there and tell Jegrai he's got a bargain."

  She looked about at her aides, her successor, and felt a kind of perverse thrill of excitement.

  "All right, don't just stand there, people," she said, feeling an upwelling of energy. "Lets move!"

  CHAPTER TEN

  The workroom was swept clean, and there was only one source of flame: a tiny candle sheltered by a glass chimney. Zorsha took no chances when working with explosives; no Seeker would, nor would any of those of the Watchers whose duties included handling such things.

  "This is what makes the lightnings?" Yuchai asked, regarding the little pile of black powder in the palm of his outstretched hand with doubt and puzzlement.

  "Only that," Zorsha agreed. "Doesn't look like much, does it?"

  "Not really." Yuchai poured it carefully back into the little leather sack Zorsha held open, and dusted his hands off on a bit of cloth. "It looks like dirt. Or ashes."

  Zorsha grinned, a little tightly. "Trust me, it isn't dirt, and it's every bit as dangerous as real lightning. Listen, Yuchai, Felaras gave me open-ended permission to show you whatever you wanted to know in the meeting I had with her last night—and that 'everything' includes the fire-throwers. You told me a while ago that Jegrai wanted you to learn about them. Well, now Felaras figures he should know. But we're dealing with perilous stuff here—there've been S
eekers and Watchers both blown to little bits just because some tiny thing went wrong. Still want to go on? It isn't just the explosives that are dangerous—even knowing about how they work could put your life in danger, outside these walls. There've been members of the Order tortured to death over this stuff."

  He hefted the little bag of black powder. Yuchai bit his lip, but shook his head stubbornly. "I want to know. Even if Jegrai hadn't asked me to learn about it, I'd have wanted to know. You told me it wasn't magic. That meant it was something anybody could learn. If anybody could, I wanted to."

  "I'm going to start by showing you a few things. First, I'm going to light a little bit of this stuff in the open." Zorsha poured a tiny pile of the explosive powder on a metal plate, set the plate on the workbench, and carefully uncovered the candle. With equal care he touched the candle to the pile. Yuchai watched in fascination as it sparked, and then went up in a poof of smoke, consumed in a bare instant of time.

  "Now, this little paper tube has about the same amount of the powder packed into it." Zorsha took one of the tiny firecrackers used at festivals out of a metal-lined drawer in his workbench. "There's also a little bit of the powder wound into the paper fuse—that's the twist of paper sticking out of the end. Now watch."

  He put the cracker on the plate, lit the fuse, and stood back. The fuse was a short one; he'd barely gotten out of the way when the cracker exploded. Yuchai jumped nearly a foot into the air.

  "Now . . . logic, Yuchai. What was the difference between the firecracker and the pile of gunpowder?"

  The boy's brows knitted for a moment.

  "Think hard."

  Yuchai shook his head, defeated.

  "In the firecracker the force of burning was confined. It had nowhere to go, so it broke its container."

  Yuchai's eyes lit. "like putting a lid on a boiling pot?"

  Zorsha chuckled with delight. "Damn good!" Impulsively he hugged Yuchai's thin shoulders, and the boy's whole face lit up. "Now watch this."

  He took another firecracker and this time put a small metal measuring cup over it, leaving only the fuse sticking out. He lit the fuse.

  This time Yuchai was prepared for the noise and didn't jump, but his mouth formed a soundless "oh" when the metal measure was thrown into the air and off the table.

  "Now, what was the difference there?"

  "The—force was more confined?"

  "Partially. It was also confined so that it could only go in one direction. Obviously, the force was too small to move the table, so it could only move the cup."

  "You use the—confined force—to throw things?" Yuchai hazarded. "like a catapult, only farther and faster?"

  "In part; look here." He rummaged through his document-drawer and pulled out a drawing of one of the hand-cannon. "Now, this is a drawing of a fire-thrower—a small one. You pack the explosive powder down in here, see? Then you add paper, you stuff it in so that it blocks all the cracks, so that the force can't escape around the edges of whatever you're going to use as shot. Then you put in the shot, then more paper. The shot is usually a round metal ball, very heavy."

  Yuchai crowded up under his arm, studying the drawing with an intensity that allowed no distractions.

  "Look here—here's the hole that the fuse goes in; you light that, and when the powder explodes, the ball is propelled out."

  "But Jegrai said that the ground before him exploded—like lightning had struck there. No matter how hard a metal ball hit, it wouldn't do that."

  "That's the fire-throwers we have on the walls—another kind." He pulled out a second drawing. "We call this one a mortar; it doesn't send things as far, because we don't use as heavy a charge, and we let a little more of the force escape by not using wadding. What it does fire is something like a very large firecracker, but one made of cast iron; which, as I showed you, is brittle enough to shatter if struck hard enough. When you light the fuse on the mortar, you also light the fuse on the canister, which is timed so that it goes off when it hits the ground. Mortars are a lot more dangerous to the handlers than the cannon, because the act of firing them can set off the charge in the shell."

  "The fire gets through the shell?"

  "No. It isn't just fire that can set off the gunpowder."

  Zorsha put a firecracker unobtrusively on the bench, and pulled out a hammer.

  "Impact can do it too."

  He brought the hammer down squarely on the firecracker—and Yuchai jumped back, wide-eyed, at the crack of the explosion.

  "You see? Hard enough impact sets it off."

  The boy stared at the blackened place on the bench for a moment, while Zorsha rubbed his tingling fingers. It was an effective demonstration of how dangerous gunpowder could be—but a little hard on the hand.

  "Zorsha, I am probably a fool—and I am not very learned," Yuchai said, shyly, but with those intense eyes focused on Zorsha's face. "But—I have a question. Two questions?"

  "Go ahead."

  "In battle, even our arrows often bounce off armor. The Suno laugh at arrow-fall when they are in full armoring; not even our bows can pierce metal. But—could—could a man not make an arrowhead, hollow, with the powder inside? And when it struck the armor or the shield, would it not explode?"

  "Hladyr bless," Zorsha breathed. "I never thought of that. Even if it did very little damage it would certainly frighten whoever it hit white! And if it hit a rider—"

  "The horse would bolt," Yuchai said simply. "No horse would abide that without being trained to it. A few archers could scatter an entire force of heavy cavalry, could they not?"

  "They could—gods above and below, they certainly could. And your other question?"

  "You told me of the Sabirn-fire, the fire that water only spreads? And you told me that you could not use it very often because it was so dangerous?"

  "So dangerous we've seldom even used it with catapults. All it would take would be for the jars to break open a little, and the fire would be all over the catapult and crew."

  "But cast iron is tougher than pottery, and still breaks. Why do you not put it in the hollow canisters of the mortars? You could throw it far beyond the lines of your allies. You could destroy the siege engines you told me of before they were even put into play. You would not even need to hit anything exactly, only near it, because the fire would splash and spread. You could take whole groups of fighters that way. Am I not right?"

  "Yuchai—" Zorsha looked aghast at the boy. "Yuchai, that is a terrible thought."

  The boy hugged his arms to his chest, as if to ward off a sudden chill, and his face took on a strange, masklike appearance. "If you made these shells, you could hurl such things at the Talchai when they came—you could burn them, burn them up. They couldn't stand against you, no matter how many warriors they had."

  Zorsha took the boy's thin shoulders in his hands and shook him. "Yuchai, you can't mean that—you've never seen the fire; I have—it's a terrible thing, a weapon of absolute desperation."

  "The Talchai are terrible!" the boy cried, his voice spiraling up and cracking. "The Talchai are—are—"

  The boy's voice abruptly went flat and dead; his eyes stared at the stone wall of Zorsha's workroom, but plainly did not see it. His young face held more pain than Zorsha had ever imagined in his life.

  The young Hand stared at what he had thought was just an extraordinarily bright boy. The "boy's" face was transformed, aged, and so bleak Zorsha would not have known him. He looked a hundred years old, and sick to death. And when he began to whisper in a harsh, strained voice, Zorsha thought, aghast, No puppy is going to heal this.

  "If I saw them drowning, I would call for rain! If I saw them burning, I would throw oil upon them! I hate them, I hate them, and I want to see them die, terribly, horribly, I'd set demons on them if I could!"

  He started to laugh, in that same suppressed way he'd spoken—but it was hopeless, hysterical laughter. It tore at the heart, and the boy began to tremble all over, then to shake.

 
Zorsha couldn't bear it. He seized the boy and held him close, face against his chest. For one moment there was nothing but silence.

  Then the boy made a choking sound, and seized him with all the desperation of a drowning child.

  Zorsha hugged him tighter, and Yuchai clung to him and began to speak again; slowly at first, brokenly—but then the words began pouring from him in a kind of deadly monotone, a flood of appalling words.

  Words that blanched Zorsha and made him tremble; words telling of atrocities committed on the Vredai that exceeded Zorsha's wildest nightmares.

  This was not imagined, or something the boy had embroidered with his own fantasy; no one could have imagined a massacre like the one Yuchai was describing, a hellish kind of festival of blood and death. Zorsha could hardly begin to take it in. Every incident the boy recited was worse than the one before—and Zorsha began to realize with soul-chilling horror that the boy had witnessed all this rapine and slaughter in a single afternoon.

  For Yuchai was reciting the tale of the raid by the Talchai on the Vredai camp—a raid that had been staged when most of the weapon-bearers were out of camp on hunts or guarding the herds. There had only been the sick, women with young children, the elderly, and the children themselves. Of which Yuchai had been one. One small boy who escaped the fate of his playmates only because he had been hidden in a thicket of bushes as part of a game.

  Gods, what was he? Ten? Eleven? Old enough to remember everything clearly—oh, gods, what can I do? What can I say?

  It was the voice that was the worst—that dull, monotonous recitation of horrors. That, and the way the boy clutched at him, seeking a shelter from his own memories.

  "Yuchai . . ." Zorsha couldn't think what to do to comfort him. Could there be comfort? "Yuchai—Yuchai, stop it! Listen to me!" Zorsha's own face was wet with tears as he shook the boy's shoulders and got him to look up at him. "Listen, Yuchai, listen to me—it won't happen again! Not ever! I pledge you on my life, I won't let it happen!"