The 53rd Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK; Geoff St. Reynard

by Geoff St. Reynard

  “You may not have noticed it, miner, but I have on just one slipper, and it doesn’t have a heel.” She scowled up at him. “And when I say one slipper, I mean that’s all.”

  “You look fine,” he grinned. “No silk and satin looks as attractive as your own pelt, my lady.”

  They traveled for upwards of half an hour, sometimes down forest lanes that allowed free passage, other times through thickets that ripped their flesh and slowed them to a swearing, sweating crawl. Always there was a screen above them of natural growth, shielding them from the buttoned sky.

  At last before them there opened a huge amphitheater of the forest, a hollow with gently sloping sides, covered by a gigantic roof of twined willow wands and twigs. Jerran said, gesturing upward, “That’s the biggest piece of camouflage we ever did! The top of it is planted with grass and scrub, rooted in square sods of earth cut from the woods’ floor in many places. From above it looks like a round hill rising out of the trees. Took us a year to perfect it.”

  “Jerran, who is ‘us’ and—”

  “Why, lad, the rebels.”

  Revel stared at the little man. Could Jerran, the straw-colored stringy fellow he’d worked beside all these years, the quiet one who’d preached serenity and dragged him out of a hundred brawls, could he be a rebel? Fantastic....

  The rebels were the anonymous elite of the ruck. They were the malcontents of their society, men whose intellects could not swallow the dreary bromides of the priests, who felt savage indignation against the cruel gentry and the bright, all-mighty globes. It was said that they formed an organization in Dolfya and other cities, these rebels, and that to them could be laid the sabotaging of the coal and diamond mines, the gentry slain in accidents that looked too pat, and the constant aura of uneasy discontent that pervaded the shebeens and all such illegal gathering places of the ruck.

  The rebels were highly romantic figures, but Revel had always considered them mythical, for who could think of resisting the condition of Things As They Are? Songs were sung about them over the turf fires, in the squat little huts of the people, and by vagabonds who roamed the countryside by night. The rebels went by fanciful names, as rebels of the people always do; and the one most sung of, most whispered about, in Dolfya at least, was the Mink, who seemed to be a kind of promised savior who would come (soon, always soon) with punishments for the gentry and liberation for the ruck.

  * * * *

  So Revel stared at Jerran, mouth agape, and repeated stupidly, “The rebels?”

  “Aye, lad! Didn’t you ever guess?”

  “Orbs, no!”

  “Why’d you think I kept stopping your fights in the shebeen?”

  “Because you were a pacifist.”

  The small man shook with laughter. “One, there’s nothing I love so much as a good brawl. Two, a brawl might bring the orbs or the gentry to our hidden drink-house, and that’d be bad. Three, a man who’s a rebel must appear not to be one, even to men he believes he can trust. Four, I’ve had my eye on you ever since I came from Hakes Town, and didn’t want you murdered in a drunken scrimmage. So five, though I hated to do it, I had to preserve you from raging and quarreling until all that brute force and honest fury could be turned to real account for us.”

  “I can’t take it in,” Revel said helplessly. “It’s as though the heroes of the Ancient Kingdom that we sing about, Rob-’em-Good and Jonenry and Lynka, had met me here. I never believed in rebels, truly, Jerran.”

  “Why should you? We haven’t done anything big yet. We’ve been searching and waiting for a leader.”

  Revel snapped his fingers. “The Mink!”

  “Yes, the Mink.” Jerran looked at him oddly, head cocked like a small yellow bird. “He hasn’t come yet, but he will.”

  Revel looked around him. The amphitheater was dim, lit only by the sunlight that managed to creep in from the forest around it; for no illumination fell from the sodded roof. It must be capable of holding hundreds of men. “How many are you?” he asked.

  “Some four thousand and three hundred.” There was pride in the man’s voice. “After today, Revel, we shall be uncountable thousands. Now the gods have been torn down.”

  “Not torn down.”

  “Torn down,” repeated Jerran firmly, “from their false ‘untouchable’ eminence. You’ve shown the world that the globes can be slain as easily as hares.”

  “They can still rise into the buttoned sky, and rule from there.”

  “We’ll find ways,” grunted Jerran impatiently. “False gods that can die can be lured down by trickery—or we can find a way to go up to the buttons.”

  “That’s insane,” said Revel, and would have amplified it, but at that moment the girl spoke.

  “When you are quite ready, Squire Revel, I wonder if you’d kindly set me down?”

  He had forgotten her, slung over his shoulder like a slain doe. Hastily he slipped her off and set her on her feet. She was like a forest nymph, one of those legendary wild women who haunted the trees near towns and lured men to their death; tall and whitely lovely, her stark naked body shone against the greensward with a perfection that made Revel’s throat constrict.

  Then she doubled up a fist and hit him in the eye.

  “You lout!” said the gorgeous creature. “Can’t you at least get me something to wear?”

  “I can have clothes for you in two minutes, Lady Nirea,” said Jerran. “Man’s clothes, I’m afraid. No woman has ever seen the meeting place before you.”

  “Man’s clothes—rucker’s clothes,” she said caustically. “If I’d known what—”

  Then her words were muffled by a terrible sound, a noise as of the earth exploding beneath them. Nothing moved, yet they had the sensation of being shaken intolerably by a giant blast of wind. The roar dwindled away, reluctant to cease, and Revel said, “What is it?”

  “Come on,” said Jerran urgently, “we’ll go to the dome and see.”

  “The dome?”

  “The roof of the sanctuary,” barked Jerran impatiently. “It holds the weight of a score of men without quivering. We build slowly, but well.” He sprinted away.

  “The girl!” yelled Revel.

  Jerran called over his shoulder, “If she’s fool enough to risk woods lions and the bears, let her go!”

  Revel stared at Nirea. Then he chuckled. “No gentrywoman could find her way home from this maze-center. You’ll wait.” He followed his friend.

  They shinned up a tree on the edge of the clearing, and jumped to the rim of the dome, which never even swayed beneath their impact. Revel saw it stretch up before him like a grassy hill, and marveled at the rebels’ artistry. Shortly they were standing on the crest, and he was clutching at Jerran’s arm.

  “Orbs above! Look there!”

  On the horizon lay a tremendous cloud of gray-black smoke, like the reeking smudge of a forest fire; above it rose another and more ominous cloud, this tinged with red and of mushroom shape.

  Revel was speechless, but Jerran ripped out a curse that would have curled the hair of a squire’s neck.

  “The Globate Credo,” he said. “You’ve proved it wrong in one respect, but there’s terrible proof of its truth in another.” He spat. “If I figure right, that cloud’s hanging over the eastern quarter of Dolfya Town, where none but the ruck lives; and every soul that lived there is dead as last week’s dinner.”

  “The Credo?” said Revel haltingly.

  “Sure. Vengeance of the gods comes swift and without warning, below the twin clouds, with a sound of volcanoes. Nobody ever knew what that meant ... till now.”

  CHAPTER VI

  The pretty daughter of the squire,

  She mourned and would not eat;

  The Mink he tried to tempt her

  With barley bread and meat.

  “O no, O no, you rebel cur,

  I’ll never eat nor drink,

  Till father’s hall I see again!

  Till death has trapped the Mink!”

&n
bsp; —Ruck’s Ballad of the Mink

  * * * *

  There were seven hundred silent men in the amphitheater of the forest, and more came in each minute, slipping from the trees without a sound, taking seats on the sloping grass. Miner’s lanterns, the marvelous contraptions that hung in the shafts beside the veins of coal or pockets of diamonds, glowing with a dull penetrating radiance, had been filched from the mines one by one over years, and now illumined the strange hall like blue glowworms spaced around a pit.

  Revel sat, uneasy, on the sward in the center, at the bottom of the bowl; beside him were Jerran and Dawvys, the small rebel’s cousin who served in the house of Ewyo the squire. There also was the Lady Nirea, dressed in a miner’s plain short-sleeved shirt and unornamented pants, but looking as delectable to Revel as she had in the silver gown. She had not spoken to him since the great bang and the twin clouds, but his mind was so full that he didn’t care.

  He had killed gods. This had brought his whole world down in ruins, shaken his belief in all he had ever been taught by the priests.

  He had killed gentrymen, squires whom no breath of trouble from the ruck had ever disturbed. This had made the myths of rebellion very real to him, very possible; and then Jerran had admitted to being a rebel himself.

  The east quarter of Dolfya had been wiped out, as Jerran had guessed; men from the town, coming in after dusk, had confirmed it. The place for a square mile was level, featureless, without sign that thousands of people, women and shopkeepers, brewers and doctors, shebeen hosts and small craftsmen and thieves and vegetable-growers, had lived there just this morning. They were all gone into the smoke of the double cloud.

  His own mother was dead, then, and perhaps Rack, if the big red man had gone home.

  He had taken a squire’s daughter and made love to her, love that was returned if only for a brief time; and afterwards he had shot down zanphs with his new-found guns and plummeted a priest to destruction.

  So now where was he? Among rebels, certainly, but mentally, where did he stand? Did he espouse the cause of the rebels? He nodded to himself. Of course. Their cause was the ruck’s, and Revel was a man of the ruck. He had given the rebels a terrific boost with his god-killing, too. As word went round of it, he could see faces turn toward him, marveling, awe-struck, respectful.

  And what was he to do? Become a vagabond, probably, living by night, skulking in the forest edges, passing from town to town hoping he could find a place where the gods had not heard of him, so he might settle down and eventually become a miner again. Mining was all he knew.

  He felt for his pick, tucked into his trousers at the back. For all the new handguns, with their ammunition that made hash of a head or a belly, he still preferred his pick. It was the weapon of a man.

  He took out a gun from his belt and stared at it. Then he asked Nirea, “What is this called, the curved metal you pull to shoot?”

  She glanced over haughtily. “The trigger. Any dolt knows that.”

  “I wish you’d be nicer. I don’t mean to harm you.”

  “You touched me, and more. I’m dreaming of your torture. Leave me alone.”

  Jerran stood up. The rebels, who had been buzzing and talking in low tones, quieted until Revel could hear the rabbits hopping in the underbrush beyond the amphitheater.

  Jerran began to speak. He told them the whole story of the day, of the gods’ death and all. Murmurs and exclamations arose, and he hushed them with a gesture.

  “Many of us,” he said, “though rebels, have owed allegiance to the gods. Our quarrel has been only with the gentry, whose useless existence and awful power over us are a constant irritation. They who hunt us as ‘foxes’—who kill us if we touch them—we have seen are only men like ourselves, women like our women.” He pointed to Nirea. “There’s a gentrywoman; is she different in body from our wives? Not by so much as a mole!”

  “I didn’t see any moles,” whispered Revel to the girl. She turned red in the face and clamped her teeth together.

  “Is her mind different, superior? It’s eviller, cruder, more ferocious, maybe, but no whit better than our own! Why then should her kind have power over us?”

  * * * *

  The amphitheater roared to the angry yells of rebels. Jerran waved his hand again. “That’s been our quarrel with the established way of things in the world. We’ve hoped for weapons to fight the gentry, and prayed for guidance from the gods. Now we know that the gods are mortal too! They can die! Then they aren’t gods, not if gods are the supreme beings we’ve all been taught! They flee from a miner’s pick? Then, by Orbs, they’re craven cowards, not fit to be worshipped!”

  A hush, then another roar.

  “I said we’d waited. The biggest need was a leader, a man of brains and guts and power. We’ve sung of him for centuries, made up stories of him, songs about him.” Jerran paused dramatically. He flung out a finger at the mob. “Who will he be?”

  The answer almost broke Revel’s eardrums.

  The Mink! The Mink! The Mink! The Mink!

  “He’s here! He’s come, from the bowels of the ruck, from the mines, from the people, as he was to come! Already he’s done some of the acts the saga-makers put into the Ballad of the Mink!”

  Revel frowned. Jerran hadn’t told him that the Mink had come at last. The small yellow-faced man went on.

  “He’s the greatest trapper of mink in Dolfya—his family sleeps under blankets of the little beasts’ hides. His own hair is the shade of a mink’s pelt, as was foretold. He’s as swift and deadly and cunning as the oldest mink alive. He’s slain gods and priests, and taken toll of the gentry. I’ve worked beside him for years, and know his mind and heart have always been ours, though he lived in ignorance of us.”

  The light, a lurid incredible light, began to dawn on Revel.

  Jerran’s voice rose to a shriek as the rebels muttered stupefaction. “I tell you I know this is the man we’ve waited for, us and our fathers and their father’s fathers before them! Rebels of Dolfya, I show you—Revel, the Mink!”

  The shouts that had come before were murmurs to the chorus of stentorian bellows which assaulted Revel’s ears now. The woman turned and said something to him, her fine face disdainful, but the words were lost in the tumult. A dozen men surged down and lifted him to their shoulders and paraded him round, while hands reached up to touch him and wave greeting to him.

  It was the beginning of a celebration he had never seen the like of, a festival occasion that included a great dinner of boar and deer meat and stolen gentry’s wine, over which much vague planning was done; and it ended only when the last rebel had left to sneak homeward, and he and the girl were left alone with Jerran.

  “Sleep now, lad,” Jerran said, grinning. “You’re exhausted. It isn’t every day a man finds himself a savior.”

  “But the Mink—I, the Mink?” He still had not entirely accepted it.

  “I think so ... and if I care to call you the Mink, no one can contradict me.”

  “All the while I was doing those things this morning,” muttered Revel, “I had the feeling I’d done them before. I must have been remembering the old ballad, for by Orbs, the acts do fit!”

  “That minor blasphemy begins to annoy me,” said Jerran seriously. “It’s like saying ‘by the man I killed yesterday.’ We’ve got to revise our swearing habits.”

  “Why not substitute Revel or Mink for Orb?” asked the girl harshly. “Our Revel who dwells in the buttoned sky,” she added, with a malevolent sneer.

  “Ah, go to sleep, both of you,” said Jerran. “Tomorrow we start to plan—really plan—to overthrow the gentry.”

  “And the priests,” said Revel fiercely, “and the gods!” He almost believed that somehow they could climb into the air and destroy the gods in their red and blue buttons. He lay down, one hand vised on the woman’s wrist, and though he felt he should never sleep that night, being far too excited, in three minutes he was snoring mightily.

  * * * *

&
nbsp; He woke some time later with the prickling feeling of danger on his skin. He opened his eyes and saw red, literally a red mist that obscured the world. Then his head began to open and shut, open and shut, and he knew he had been hit a hell of a blow on the forehead, and there was blood in his eyes.

  Groping for his pick, that had lain next his left hand, he missed it; then he recalled the girl, reached out for her, found she was gone too. He drew the back of his arm over his eyes and cleared the gore a trifle. “Jerran?” he said quietly. No answer.

  Blinking, he saw the vast meeting place empty, lit by the blue lanterns. He rolled his head and there, its point buried deep in the sward an inch from his right ear, was his pick. He sat up. Jerran lay a dozen feet off, looking very dead indeed, with his thin hair matted with blackening blood.

  Instinctively he tore the pick out of the ground. It was buried so deep that only a very strong hand could have sent it in; not the girl, he thought, somehow relieved that she hadn’t done it. No, a miner’s blow alone might have done it, for the earth was packed solid as oak’s wood by untold multitudes of rebels’ feet.

  Wait a minute, he said to himself: this is all wrong. That blow should have opened my skull like a walnut. It missed me by a fraction—either the aim was poor, or else damned good. I could have struck such a blow, sure to miss where I wished to, but not even many miners could duplicate it.

  Had the enemy missed, then walloped him with another weapon and left him for dead? Gingerly he felt the wound on his head. It was healing already, a tap that might have laid him out for a few hours, but would never have slain him.

  He glared at the pick in his hand. Then he brought it up and in the combined light of the blue lanterns and the dawn filtering in from the woods, he squinted at the handle.

  Where his own pick bore the crude carving of a mink (he had taken the beast as his symbol a long time ago, another sign of his identity), this one had a jumble of grooves meant to represent a woods lion.

  This wasn’t Revel’s pick—it was his brother Rack’s!

  Caught in an appalling dream that was the hardest reality he’d ever faced, he pored over the pickax, scanned the motionless form of his friend Jerran, then goggled foolishly at nothing in particular as he thought of his situation, stranded in a place he could not escape from alone, with many half-formed plots in his head but no way to carry them out. Between him and Dolfya, and the other rebels, lay miles of tangled forest no man, be he ever so skillful at woodscraft, could penetrate without the knowledge of a route; thousands of the ruck were depending on him to lead them, and he couldn’t even lead himself home.