The Face of Heaven: The Realms of Tartarus, Book One

by Brian Stableford

  Because Ermold’s people were the ones with the dire need the meetings at the canal usually resulted in the better side of the bargain going to Stalhelm. This only made Ermold hate such occasions all the more. When he desperately needed Shairn’s grain he had to pay not in fish or other standard trade goods, but in Heaven-metal and Heaven-sent books. Because Shairn had no independent source of such things, and because the Children of the Voice were lovers of books and efficient tools, such things were always in high demand. But the Children of the Voice were prepared to go without if need be, and could afford to. The pressure was always on Ermold, and he resented that. Often he would try to raid Stalhelm and steal supplies rather than buy them, but such fighting was always costly and bitter, and the invaders rarely managed to carry off anything like what they needed. It had become clear to Ermold that it was easier and better to trade with the Children of the Voice first and then raid—to steal what he could and to make him feel better anyway. Stalhelm knew of this thinking, and they made him pay all the more in consequence. It was accepted in Stalhelm that while Ermold ruled there would inevitably be the worst of bad blood between the peoples on either side of Cudal Canal.

  Ermold and his men had to cross the filthy water to attend the meeting, and they spent some time making sure that they could do so without getting their feet wet—and that they could get back in a hurry if need be.

  The chieftain of Walgo positioned three or four of his best men behind Shairn’s wall, supported by a rough and ready pontoon, and then he went forward into Shairn, accompanied only by Fortex and—of course—the girl named Huldi, who was still secured to him by the cord.

  He watched the Children of the Voice coming slowly down-hill towards him.

  “Filthy scavengers,” he muttered. “Filthy, disgusting little beasts.” Ermold was not a very big man by the standards of his people, though he was broad and immensely powerful. His height was closer to the average of the Children of the Voice, and the worst insult that could be hurled at him was well-known among his people. He had killed people for calling him “Shairan” and he would probably have gone berserk if he had heard anyone use the word “Rat.” The insults of his elders during his childhood probably had much to do with his deep-seated hatred of his neighbors.

  “That gray meat they bring will be full of cockroaches,” he said to Fortex. “It’s what they wouldn’t eat themselves. And they think it’s good enough for men. I’ll have a few skulls before this affair is quit. If I could only get near Old Man Yami....”

  “He’s not with them,” said Fortex, in a low voice. “It’s his son. Camlak. I wonder whether he’s killed the old one.”

  “That one!” snarled Ermold. “A coward if ever I saw one. If he’s Old Man in Stalhelm we won’t need to go hungry for a while. I could eat him alive.”

  “He’ll not be Old Man,” said Fortex glumly. “He’ll be here under orders. When Yami’s finished they’ll get a new leader. A strong one.”

  “They don’t have that much sense,” said Ermold. He was optimistic only by virtue of the strength of his hatred.

  The girl was picking at the cord with her teeth. His attention had wavered. He kicked her in the belly and checked the strength of the cord.

  Fortex wondered—privately—what the Shaira were going to think of Ermold having to keep his woman on a string, but he would never have dared to make such a thought known.

  There were six men from Stalhelm, and each of them carried a basket filled with dried asci from the gray-green saporshafts which they tended in some of their fields. In Ermold’s lands, they grew wild, but the supply was almost gone. Six baskets was little enough to distribute among the people of Walgo, but there would be more in time and time after if things went well today. A meeting of this kind could drag on and on before a serious squabble developed. Terms of exchange were always agreed at the first encounter, but they rarely held good forever, or even for long enough for Ermold to lay in anything of a store. Something always went sour.

  Ermold half-turned. “Bring the box,” he commanded.

  The suitcase was passed over the wall, and Fortex stepped back to collect it. It no longer contained all that it had when Burstone brought it into the world—some of the knives and implements would never find their way into Stalhelm, the books and the rest of the steel would have to be eked out and supplemented with such junk as Ermold thought he could pass off.

  Huldi began biting at the cord once again.

  Camlak came forward from his party and stood some six or ten feet away from Ermold. The warriors from Walgo stood up, stretching themselves to the full extent of their height to emphasize their superiority. Huldi stood up too. She was bigger than Ermold. He jerked the cord and made her fall back on to her haunches.

  “Where’s Yami?” demanded Ermold.

  “Sick,” said Camlak.

  “Sick of a steel blade,” suggested Ermold.

  “Just sick,” insisted Camlak, refusing to be intimidated by size or anything else. Porcel and the other warriors were watching him closely. This might well turn out to be something of a test.

  Ermold let out a sound that was midway between a laugh and a belch. He threw the suitcase at Camlak’s feet. “That’s worth twenty baskets,” he said. “You can take away the books one at a time and bring more gray meat. Later, we’ll bring you more. Just keep the meat coming.”

  Camlak opened the case and inspected the contents.

  “Six,” he said. “You want more than we brought, you bring more. I take it all now.”

  Ermold went into the old routine. It was new to Camlak but the younger man obviously knew what to expect. He had inherited little enough from his father, but he did have patience. And from his own point of view as well as the point of view of his people, he could not afford to take less than he might get. Ermold tried hard, but got nowhere. The trouble was that Ermold expected Camlak to take less than his father would have, and when the young man proved just as obstinate Ermold became very angry.

  The haggling grew intense, and then fierce. A genuine gap was open between each man’s final price—or what each man thought his final price ought rightly to be. Camlak had every intention of sticking by his—he was prepared to take the asci home if he had to—and Ermold’s temper boiled as this became more and more obvious.

  Meanwhile, Huldi had gone to work with a sharp stone, and had succeeded in scratching apart most of the threads in the cord which bound her. While she sawed she wondered exactly what she was going to do when the string finally parted. She knew that she could only take rebellion against Ermold’s anger and lust so far, and that in the present circumstances the simple fact of getting free was liable to be more than far enough. She had to run fast, and she had to have somewhere to run. She dared not go back toward Walgo while Ermold lived, and so it seemed that she had to cross Shairn—or persuade the Shaira to shelter her. That was not unknown—there were always odd Soulless Men and Hellkin hanging around the towns of Shairn, and in Central Shairn they would hardly be likely to hold it against her that she came from troublesome Walgo. Ermold’s trouble was limited in scope.

  While she sawed she looked speculatively at Camlak and his followers, and flicked occasional anxious glances back at Fortex. She could sense a fight building up and she knew which side she was on. She only hoped they would realize it fast enough.

  The rope parted just as Ermold was in the process of yielding to his temper. It was an unfortunate coincidence that at the very moment of parting he was jerking his right arm in a gesture of anger and petulance. The loose end of the rope flipped up into the air and distracted Ermold at the crucial second. His knife was already half-drawn, and the one time that momentary surprise is invariably fatal is when it catches a man with his weapon half-drawn.

  Camlak got to him first. The small man had a knife up his sleeve, and he didn’t even have to stand up. The blade was in Ermold’s abdomen just below the navel before he had time to think. It was a vicious wound, but the knife was far to
o small for it to be mortal. Ermold went down in a heap and lay still, waiting for the arrows to fly over his head. Camlak was already hauling out a deadlier weapon and the other warriors were coming forward.

  Ermold howled.

  Fortex howled too and launched himself on Camlak, brandishing a great stone axe. Ermold’s spare warriors popped up over the wall, bowstrings stretched. Fortex landed beside Huldi, but his attention was completely fixed on Camlak. That was a mistake. Huldi sprang up and brought her left arm round in a long arc. The sharp stone carved a gaping hole in the side of Fortex’s neck, and his carotid spouted blood.

  One of Walgo’s bowmen caught a spear in his right eye and was hurled backwards into the water. It was a blow directed by sheer fortune. The other Men Without Souls unleashed their arrows harmlessly, counted up the odds, and fled, bounding back across their pontoon and making for Walgo with all possible speed.

  Camlak was astonished. He stared at Huldi, holding his long dagger as if he had half a mind to run her through. His mind was made up by Ermold, who grabbed him by the ankles and upended him before leaping to his feet, hurling his own knife at the nearest of Camlak’s men, and taking flight. No doubt he would have loved to kill Huldi before he went, but there was no time. Nor was there any chance of getting back to his own side of the canal. He set off along the Shairn bank in the shadow of the wall. A couple of arrows followed him, missed, and then he disappeared with a crash into a tall clump of clawreeds.

  Porcel and the other warriors never paused to wonder if they should await orders from their Old Man’s son. They were after Ermold like a pack of hounds. They knew he was wounded and the thought of his being allowed to get away and recover from his wound was patently intolerable.

  Camlak was the only one who stayed. He got to his feet and stared warily at Huldi, who was still there, waiting.

  “You’re not going after him?” she said.

  Camlak shook his head. “I’ve got what I came for.”

  He picked up the suitcase, and carefully fastened the locks. He sheathed his dagger, and set out for Stalhelm—walking slowly. Huldi followed him. As they walked past the group of baskets filled with gray meat, Camlak kicked them over.

  A swarm of flies was not long gathering over the meat, and over the bodies.

  Chapter 17

  Julea sat at the dressing table, inspecting herself critically in the mirror.

  She looked too young to have sent her brother to his death. One of her brothers. The other had gone of his own accord.

  Downstairs, she could hear the argument beginning. She bit her lower lip, and continued adjusting her hair. The argument had begun so many times, by now, and had never yet reached any semblance of an ending. Tonight’s version, at least, was to be private, and one had to be thankful for that.

  Somehow, she could no longer see her father as the hero of the affair. She believed in him, after a fashion, but she could no longer commit herself in any way at all to the storm which was building up around him. There had been a storm before, shortly after she was born. She had grown up in the shadow of that storm, alongside Joth. Joth was dead now. She had sent him to follow Ryan, and he had. It must have been madness on her part. She must have known, underneath, that he would meet the same fate, whatever it was.

  She looked at herself in the mirror, and accused herself of murder.

  The charge wasn’t fair, but the guilt still massed in her mind. She had lost so much, in a world where loss was so rare, and so immaterial. No one else could possibly understand how she felt.

  While Carl Magner angled for one more convert, his daughter played out her private melodrama.

  They were saying that her father was mad, and she had begun to listen to them, if not to believe them. She felt some guilt about that as well.

  When she had finished attending to her hair she sat still for a few moments more, still fascinated by her own tragic image in the mirror. It was trying hard to be an alien face, to cast itself in the role of accuser or accused so that her feelings could be polarized at least in her illusions. She felt almost as though her identity were shattering slowly. All the things which had conspired to maintain it were dying or dead.

  Carl Magner was one of the dying. His sons were the dead.

  She had bad dreams herself now. But nothing like her father’s. Just disturbed dreams, in which images of Ryan and Joth and the world competed for her guilt and erased her part in the fabric of being.

  She simply could not understand what was happening. Worse, she had no idea why.

  She blanked the mirror and went downstairs.

  Chapter 18

  Abram Ravelvent was one of the cognoscenti. He was a scientist—a man of knowledge.

  Knowledge is not wisdom, and nowhere was that more obvious than in the character of Abram Ravelvent.

  He looked old—his hair was gray, his complexion dark. His skin had the visual texture of horn. Yet he had fifty more years in him yet, if he was careful and moderately fortunate.

  He was barely turned ninety. The look of antiquity was cultivated—it had been carefully brought out over the years, matured, remodeled, set hard and firm. The look of the all-knowing. The look, also, of the verbal chevalier, the argumentative artist.

  Ravelvent had no influence save for his personality, but nevertheless he would be one of the most valuable additions to the Magner bandwagon if he could be persuaded to climb aboard.

  He was at least willing to be persuaded, but he had come armed with arguments which he believed to be infallible. He intended to refute Magner’s case entirely, just to show that he could do it. Then, if the prospect seemed attractive, he might become Magner’s ally in the campaign to have the Underworld opened.

  His infallible argument, fairly simply stated, was that The Marriage of Heaven and Hell could not possibly be true.

  Chapter 19

  “Why not?” said Magner, brusquely. “Explain to me. Why not?”

  “It’s a naïve picture,” said Ravelvent. “It simply does not take into account the rigorousness and the essential alien-ness of any life-system which could survive in the conditions as they must be down there. Without light, the primary energy-source is likely to be heat. What you are proposing, therefore, in your portrait of life as lived by the people of the Underworld, is the evolution of an entirely thermosynthetic plant-kingdom to the level of complexity and efficiency required to sustain higher life-forms in a mere matter of eleven thousand years. It’s simply not possible.”

  “There’s an alternative energy source,” said Magner.

  “These ‘stars’ that you mention? Really, one can hardly put much credence....”

  “Waste,” said Magner. “The waste of the Overworld. Our civilization exports millions of tons of raw waste into the Underworld every year. Organic waste of all kinds—waste which is replete with reclaimable energy.”

  “We reclaim a lot of it,” Ravelvent pointed out.

  “Not so,” said Magner. “We reclaim metals, phosphates, nitrates and a few other minor things which are convenient and cheap to reclaim. But with atomic power, solar power, and tidal power in relative abundance we don’t need to exploit the waste as an energy source—and that’s the way in which the Underworld will exploit it. We take back a very tiny fraction indeed of what we export, as a glance at the figures available through the cybernet will assure you.”

  “But even if that is so,” Ravelvent protested, “the principle remains the same. You’re proposing an evolutionary proliferation which just isn’t possible. You’re hypothesizing the death of virtually everything of the old régime, and the growth of an entire replacement system. All right, even if that could happen, even if it has happened, one simply cannot imagine the kind of continuity you imagine to have taken place in human society.

  “Look closely at the kind of life which you suppose these people to be living. You imagine them to be loosely grouped into tribes, inhabiting small towns, buildings made of...what? Earth? Mud? Brick? Anyhow, they s
eem to have agriculture on some scale. They live peacefully for the most part, though they are a strong people. They hunt, but for the most part they use their weapons defensively against large carnivores whose description defies classification. They have other enemies, too, which you also seem to find some difficulty classifying. Humanoid creatures, larger than men, warlike, sometimes masked, sometimes naked, sometimes clothed, sometimes furred. What are all these strange beings supposed to be? There is no explanation in your book. But never mind that. What is the sum total of what we have here? An image of man as a kind of noble savage, heroically struggling to maintain a primitive social organization and even primitive social ideals of peace and prosperity against the terrible threats of a hostile environment.

  “But this hostile environment does little more than threaten. Most of its threats seem to be ghostly creatures with no sense to them at all. Giants and ape-men. What are they supposed to be? Mutants...?” He paused for a moment, but Magner did not seem anxious to enlighten him at this particular juncture. “Your account makes a strong psychological appeal. It may even make some kind of psychological sense. But scientifically, it is nonsense to suppose that life in the Underworld could be anything like this. If there are men alive down there, then they do live in an implacably hostile environment. The sheer dereliction of the environment must make searching for food a full-time operation. The notion of agriculture, townships, tribal organization...all these are quite out of the question. Man was and is a product of environment. The men of the Underworld were functionally designed to live in an environment which has very little, if anything, in common with the present environment of the Underworld. The idea of their maintaining the same kind of existence is patently ludicrous.