He turned hastily back to the pages, skimming forward through those he had already read, which continued to detail the need for hatred of the humans; then settled down to a regular reading of what was left. He finished the book with four minutes to go of his self-allotted time. A number of blank pages had been bound into the end of it, and this had made it possible for him to finish his task quicker even than he had expected.
He rose, turned out his light and left. After putting the copy back on its shelf, he headed toward the dormitory, his head full of the Book and its meanings. They were not easy to extract, those meanings, for what he had just finished reading was almost as full of wild stories as Gallard’s translation of the Thousand and One Nights.
Whatever else al-Kebir had been, he had been a stupendous egotist and capable of the most outrageous exaggerations and lies. The difficulty was that he was also clearly almost as intelligent and capable as he claimed to be. Certainly, some of the things he reported himself as doing or experiencing could not be true; but some, at least, of them must have been fact, or else the present-day Inner World surrounding Bart could not exist, let alone remain dedicated to this man’s furious idea of a revenge against the whole human race.
Al-Kebir’s mother had soon died under the rigors of the life forced on them by the ignorant brute that was their master, who was apparently part owner of a small herd of goats and part anything else at all that might gain him money or goods. Shortly thereafter, al-Kebir was taken from this man by another of superior standing in the area; and so began a succession of changes through the hands of a number of owners, each of them better off, or more powerful, than the previous; until at last he who was to become al-Kebir—but was at this time known by the name of Bebe, with which his first owner had christened him—ended up in the hands of the ruler of the island of Sicily.
Of this ruler, Bebe at first had hopes.
“. . . though,” he wrote in his book at this point, “even for a human, in body he was ugly and useless-appearing. He was short, as these gangling humans go. He was also fat, even for the young man he was when I first made his acquaintance, and already beginning to lose his hair. His eyes were green and apparently frightening to other humans—I, myself merely found them to reinforce his general ill-favored appearance.
“But even before I met him in person I had heard of his wisdom and seeking mind; and I had some expectation consequently of at last finding a human who would realize the naturally superior endowments of our great race and in particular my own remarkable superiority even in that context.
“Alas, he turned out to be only partly what I had hoped. It was true he had a good mind—for a human. It was also true that he had a truly scientific curiosity and the boldness to attempt to satisfy it. Even before I met him, I had heard of experiments he had conducted to discover more about how the body, mind, and that thing humans call ‘soul,’ function.
“During the time I was his slave and his servant, for example, he conducted an experiment in which he fed two prisoners a large, identical meal and sent one to sleep, the other upon an arduous hunt. Afterwards, he had both men killed and cut open to find out which had done the best job of digesting the meal each had eaten. It was, of course, as I had already deduced, the one who had slept.
“But he also had the intelligent idea of sealing a man in a large keg which was already placed upon a set of scales so that it could be weighed with the man in it. The man, of course, soon suffocated. Having died, it was to be presumed that he had now lost his living soul, which would have taken flight from his body; and this master of mine was eager to obtain proof of the weight of that soul, about which so many of these humans talk.
“But, again, as I might have told him, there was no change in the weight indicated on the scales at all, which went a good ways toward proving that such a thing as a ‘soul’ had no existence in reality. I■ could go on, listing many such experiments that he made, but there is no point in wasting paper further. There was only one of his experiments that was of importance to you and me, O my brothers—and of that, more later.
“It is important, however, that you all understand what sort of human he was. He was gifted with intelligence, high intelligence as his race knew it; but aside from this he was like a naive child, merely tinkering with the world around him in whatever direction his current fancy took him. I had hoped that, since he had such a mind, I might at last have found a human who would listen to me and understand the great gift that had been given him by having such as me dropped in his lap, as it were.
“But this was not to be—and the fault was in his basic character. That he was lecherous and gluttonous to a remarkable degree was beside the point. He was not self indulgent in matters requiring work and application; but he was blinded by his own conceit. He was of royal extraction, but he had grown up poor and disregarded, running loose on the waterfront of Palermo, Sicily’s main port. This situation continued until a series of inheritances brought him, first, the Kingship of Sicily, then ultimately the authority of Emperor over the Holy Roman Empire, that at this time consisted of Germany and much of Europe.
“As Emperor, he challenged the Pope of the Christian Church, in Rome, and showed his indifference to the Pope’s excommunicating him by going on a Crusade and concluding a treaty with the Saracen leader, Sultan al-Kamil; under which there was proclaimed a ten-year truce, ceding Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Nazareth to the Christians, along with a corridor from Jerusalem to the sea, while giving the Moslems full rights to keep their homes and mosques in Jerusalem.
“This was the more remarkable in that he had done all this without a single battle. The Pope was furious at such a bloodless achievement of what past Crusades had fought and died for. But there was little he could do about it; and after a time he had no real choice but to revoke the excommunication.
“All this I relate was to this man’s credit, as proof of a mind with which I might have done much. But it added up to nothing and less than nothing because of the man’s character. He was completely self-centered, believing no one in the universe could be so wise and discerning as himself; and, when he encountered my own superior intellect, he simply refused to acknowledge it and treated me like nothing more than a clever beast, who was perhaps of some use with accounts and planning, but was essentially little more than a funny human animal to be entertained by, laughed at, and lent out to other sovereigns from whom he wished something in return. It is hard to believe that a greater egotist ever existed.”
That description, Bart thought to himself now as he hurried to the dormitory, might as well have pictured Bebe himself as well as the Emperor. The man Bebe had been writing about was Frederick II, the grandson of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, otherwise known as Barbarrosa—“Redbeard”—and had made six expeditions into Italy in his lifetime, in an attempt to dominate the Italian peninsula.
Frederick Roger—Frederick II—himself, Bart had discovered from other books in the Library—was indeed a remarkable, if not a particularly lovable, person. He dug deeply into mathematics and science, entertaining himself with people like Michael Scot, the scientist-adventurer-philosopher-astrologer and dabbler in magic. Frederick was fascinated by questions such as the ones behind the experiments Bebe had recounted; and with others such as whether children raised without ever hearing human speech would speak naturally the tongue that was spoken by Adam and Eve in Eden.
He also concerned himself with questions as to why a stick pushed into the water appeared to have its section below the water bent at an angle with the part above. He wrote a book on falconry, and ornithology in general. He founded the University of Naples; and himself spoke a number of languages, including Arabic. Like his grandfather Barbarrosa, he spent his lifetime fighting the papal establishment with the hope of uniting Italy and creating an actual, unitary, functioning, Holy Roman Empire stretching from Sicily to the Baltic.
In the meantime, he provided the base on which Bebe built his own heights of wealth and power and unit
ed those like him in what was to end in this Inner World.
“. . . Of all of Frederick’s experiments, the most detestable” Bart read, “was a farm or nursery which Frederick set up in order to breed human curiosities. As he considered me to be one of these I was forced to leave his court from time to time to attempt to breed with distorted specimens of the humanity on this farm of his, in the hope of producing even more grotesque individuals. Such was his influence and power that he had gathered together individuals of that classification from all over Europe and North Africa, as another man might collect women or jewels.
”You cannot imagine how repugnant it was for me to interact sexually with the sort of hideous females that were assembled there and continually added to. But, at the same time, unknown to Frederick, a great end was served by sending me there. For it was there I met those of our people who had also managed to survive. They consisted of only six Ladies and twenty-three Lords; but they were now where I could keep an eye on them, provide means to make their life easier—secretly and whenever possible—and continue to maintain my knowledge of their whereabouts when they were given or lent by Frederick to other rulers and like individuals. . . .”
There was clearly, and no one ever denied it, thought Bart now as he hurried toward the dormitory, a very practical side to Frederick. He kept the most interesting of the “Naturals,” as those like Bebe were called—Bart almost paused, but then resumed his movement toward his dormitory; he had just realized that at no time in his book did Bebe—al-Kebir—say just what exactly it was about himself that put him in the category of the kind of freaks that Frederick was interested in.
True, the man was obviously very short; but that did not seem to be the whole story. There must, Bart thought, have been some other—and severe—abnormality about him; something unsightly enough to excite the admiration and envy of the world, including visitors of note. Whatever it might have been, Frederick had made good use of it, and in effect created a market for such human oddities—which he then offered to satisfy with the products of his freak farm, giving away or selling the less promising children of the sexual unions he had forced there and those adult members who had failed to prove interesting, either because of natural disabilities or because they had not proved of value as breeders.
To those of sufficient importance to be supplied with something better than a baby human grotesque, Frederick balked at selling or giving, but was occasionally willing to lend for a short term some of those on display at his court. In this way, Bebe found himself several times lent out to other masters, with most of whom he did well by adapting himself to their personal tastes. There was one, however, he was unable to satisfy and hated above all others; so .that a good twenty pages’of his book was filled with anecdotes and diatribes against that individual. This was a Sir Hubert de Gar, a German knight and lay-member (as all the knights were of that order) in the Knights Templar.
According to Bebe’s account, he had been lent to such an insignificant individual because Frederick had some tortuous designs that involved intrigue with the Mongols, who were just then beginning to invade Europe; and he needed a spy on the activities of the martial religious orders—and particularly the Knights Templar —who were the only organization fit and ready to be the spearhead of Christianity’s defense against them.
Intelligent and educated for his time, Frederick had been, Bart thought; but like the Europeans of his day in general, he had obviously vastly underestimated the superiority of the Mongol armies over anything Europe would be able to put in their way. If it had not been for the death of Genghis Khan himself, which caused the recall of all the generals of his blood to choose a successor to lead them, Europe—and Sicily along with it—would almost undoubtedly have fallen to the Mongols.
The day came, however, when lending out Bebe for brief periods was no longer equal to the situation that had arisen. Finally, and perhaps even with some slight sense of relief, since Bebe, if useful, could probably be wearing on the nerves, Frederick made an outright gift of him to the Sultan in Fez, whose kingdom lay to the west, inland along the North African coast of the Mediterranean.
It was the sort of move Bebe was looking for. The year in the Christian calendar was twelve hundred and forty-six and Frederick was beginning to show his age. Bebe had already prospered as a slave of Frederick’s. Under Moslem law he had rights, even as a slave, to accumulate property land gain power. He did so; and, when the time was appropriate, adopted the Moslem religion, with the Dey’s drunken consent, one night when the ruler was celebrating. As a Moslem he could no longer be held as a slave by a fellow Moslem. Therefore he was now able to free himself and improve his position even more.
He grew wealthy; and, as slowly and quietly as possible, he began to buy, steal, or otherwise free the other members of those he called his own race; and establish them in positions where they could in turn gain wealth and power.
He also drew a blueprint for their future actions, and the actions of the generations that should follow them. The last third of the book was given almost entirely to this.
He told them that they must build toward the construction of an Inner Kingdom, secret and hidden from the rest of the world. To do this, they must learn everything new that humans were discovering and strive to get ahead of them in studies of their own. They must strive to raise children—full-blooded if possible, but half-breeds from their unions with humans, if nothing else was possible. In any case, whatever children were produced in each generation must be trained almost from the cradle and severely tested, at age eleven and again at age seventeen; and those who did not, on being tested, show evidence of unusual mental abilities should be destroyed.
Those who survived must mate with each other and with humans of the highest possible intelligence. Lords and Ladies of the true race should in turn mate with the half-breed progeny of other Lordly individuals, those who showed promise. So that in every way a community should be produced of unusually brilliant individuals who would work toward knowledge beyond that of the humans. From that knowledge they would then derive a means to destroy the humans and their world, in payment for the cruel treatment the true race had received from them—
Bart’s mind left the subject of the Book of al-Kebir with a jolt, as he finally stepped through the door of the dormitory, on reaching it. The clock on the wall within read still twenty-eight minutes before the hour at which the Court formation had been set. But the dormitory was deserted. On one bed, only—his own—lay a scarlet tunic and a pair of scarlet sandals.
chapter
seventeen
DRESSED IN SCARLET and out of breath, Bart plunged through the wide open, huge double doors of the Court Room and checked to a panting halt just a few steps short of Chandt, who was standing with his back to the entrance, talking to the dormitory Leaders, Paolo among them. Catching Bart’s eye behind Chandt’s back, as the Master of the Steeds slowly turned around at the sound of Bart’s sandals on the polished floor behind, Paolo made a grimace of warning.
Beyond Chandt and the Leaders, the Steeds of all the dormitories were lined up in formation. The clock on the soaring ivory-colored wall to Bart’s right read two minutes to the appointed formation time of fourteen hundred hours. Bart gulped for breath. He had literally run most of the way after finding the main gym of the Steeds empty. A grinning janitorial slave there had told him how the rest had marched out of the gym fifteen minutes before to go to the Court Room—and had given Bart directions on how to find it.
Now he gulped air so as to speak before Chandt could.
“I was held up on an errand for my Lord—,” he began.
“I gave him permission. To come as soon as he could,” said the growling voice of Paolo. Paolo had come forward out of the group of other Leaders and now stepped level with Chandt, who turned his gaze on Bart’s immediate superior.
The two pairs of eyes, the Master’s and the Leader’s, locked on each other. Both sets of eyes were dark, but Chandt’s were mountai
n pebbles in shadow, while Paolo’s held in their black depths a sullen fire. Chandt said nothing and the two men continued to look at and into each other.
“Very well,” said Chandt finally, without removing his gaze from Paolo’s, “put him in ranks.”
Paolo was forced to look away at Bart, and the moment was ended.
“Into your place, damn you!” he said.
Bart went hastily to the lineup of men from his own dormitory, while Chandt and Paolo once more rejoined the other dormitory Leaders and Chandt began speaking quietly to them all again, as if there had never been those seconds of confrontation between himself and Paolo.
Bart had expected under-the-breath gibes from the Steeds around him as he pushed himself into his usual place in the formation. But this time those he joined looked stiffly ahead, ignoring him and each other, not moving—on the best behavior he had seen among them since he had first waked up as one of them.
Left with a minute in which to catch his breath, Bart for the first time took a look at his Court Room to which they had all been summoned.
It was a high-ceilinged, expansive chamber, with false windows having cathedral tops. These were carved into the ivory-colored material of the upreaching walls on all four sides of the room; and what would have been their openings on an outside surface world were filled with paintings of the kind of gardens found in tropical or semi-tropical latitudes. Curtains of sky blue, reaching to the ceiling, were tied back in graceful folds at each side of each of these windows.
This much about the room was pleasant enough. But the ceiling overhead was carved into gargoyles and death’s-heads; and at the far end of the room was a dais raised off the floor and covered, top and sides, with glaringly scarlet cloth of the same color as the tunics the Steeds were now wearing. On this sat three high-backed chairs of dark wood, like thrones. They were carved all over and their armrests ended in lion’s heads. Half a dozen feet in front of them stood something that was a sort of mixture of pulpit and lectern with a platform on which a speaker’s notes might rest, at a convenient reading height for one of the Lordly class.
The Earth Lords Page 24