Empire of the East

by Fred Saberhagen

  “I’m ready to hike,” Rolf told him. “I’ve rested most of the day. Just paddled in the dugout.”

  Thomas, staring at him thoughtfully, cracked a faint smile. “You call that resting, hey?” He looked across the fire at Mewick.

  Mewick said, “I think the young one has got all the madness out of his system.”

  Thomas looked back at Rolf. “Is that true? If I take you, we may run into a fight but we’re not looking for one.”

  “I understand that.” The madness for revenge was not gone, far from it. But it had grown into something cold and patient. Calculating.

  Thomas stared at Rolf a moment longer; then he smiled. “Very good. Then let’s get started.”

  IV

  The Cave

  The earliest light of dawn found Rolf and Thomas lying side by side, facing south across the pass, in the mouth of a narrow crevice between towering rocks. The pass before them was not distinguished by any name; though it was the only clean break in the Broken Mountains for many kilometers both north and south. They were both worn with swamp-paddling and cross-country hiking through the night just past—with their furtive wading crossing of the river Dolles, and their last climb, racing against the coming of dawn, to their present position.

  The spot they had reached was a commanding one. By moving a meter forward, out of the mouth of the tiny canyon, they might have seen to their right the Dolles winding like a lazy snake along the foot of the mountains from north to south. Beyond the river stretched Rolf’s home country of farmlands and lowlands and swamps. And in the distance, plainly visible, was the blue vagueness of the western sea.

  Straight ahead of the tiny canyon’s mouth, the barren land fell downward for some two hundred meters in a gradually decreasing slope to where the east-west highway threaded the bottom of the pass. And south beyond the highway the land rose again in an equivalent slope, to a foothill of the southern mountain chain; and upon that foothill stood the gray and newly strengthened walls of the Castle.

  To the left of the Castle, Rolf could see part of the desert country that rolled down from the all-but-rainless inland slopes of the Broken Mountains, and stretched on for perhaps two hundred kilometers to the high and forbidding Black Mountains. The desert looked hot already, though the sun was scarcely risen.

  “The leatherwings are up betimes,” said Thomas quietly, nodding straight ahead. The early sun was bright on the net-protected houses and perches clustered on the upper parts of the high Castle, showing a gray-green movement of reptile bodies under the nets. Ekuman’s flag of black and bronze had evidently flown all night from a pole on the flat roof of the keep. And there were other decorations dangling high on wall and parapet; the tiny whitish stick-figures that Rolf knew had once been people, good people, who had displeased the land’s new masters and had been lifted up there to be living toys and food for the leatherwings.

  The only living men to be seen now on the high places were dots of black and bronze, the movements of their arms and legs barely distinguishable at this distance. They were about the morning routine of furling the protective nets from around the reptiles’ roosts. Now the gray-green dots came into plainer view, swelling and contracting. The reptiles would be stretching their wings. Cawing and whining drifted faintly across the pass. In another moment the first of them were airborne, making room for more and more to appear on the perches. Soon the air above the Castle grew cloudy with their circling swarm.

  “And now we had better make sure to lie low,” said Thomas, casting a look around at their hiding place. To their rear, the narrow crevice in which they lay twisted back into the foot of the mountain, its sandy floor losing itself among huge tumbled boulders and splintered outcroppings of rock. A shoulder of the mountain had slumped and fallen here an age ago. Somewhere back in that jumble, this little crevice grown wider had high on one of its walls the hidden cave-entrance. Strijeef and Feathertip had taken shelter there for the day. Getting Rolf or Thomas somehow into the cave would have to wait for another night.

  Directly above Thomas and Rolf, the rock-bulges of the canyon walls shut out the sky entirely. The reptile swarm centered above the Castle had now spread until its thinned edges reached this far and farther, but still there came no cawing of alarm from overhead, no gathering of faces at the Castle wall. Rolf found it moment by moment easier to believe that he and Thomas would not be seen today if they kept still.

  Keeping still was not going to be hard. The folk in the swamp had given Rolf sandals, but still his feet were sore from the long, fast hike. And he was tired in every muscle.

  Lying stretched out in the sand, nerves still sleeplessly taut, he let his gaze wander eastward again. In the far distance the Black Mountains looked grayly insubstantial with the morning sunlight almost at their backs. Much nearer, but still well out over the badlands, clouds were forming a high knot that promised rain. Rolf knew that under those clouds the Oasis of the Two Stones must lie, though a low elevation of the land between kept him from seeing that round fertile patch. Years ago Rolf’s father had brought him here to the pass, to show him the Castle—then an innocent and wondrous ruin—and had also pointed out to him where the Oasis lay amid the desert, and had told him of the wonder of its rainfall.

  Rolf suddenly realized that something strange was happening to the clouds. Instead of remaining gathered above the one always-favored spot they were moving now, coming roughly toward the pass.

  This seemed to him so odd that he called it to Thomas’s attention. Thomas slid a few centimeters forward and peeked cautiously out of the canyon mouth to look for himself.

  “Something must have gone awry with their magic out there,” he said shortly.

  “I wonder what their magic is.”

  Thomas shook his head. The distant knot of vapor had already darkened into a thunderstorm, and was chasing its shadow toward them across the desert, lighting itself from within by a sudden flicker of lightning.

  “I suppose the invaders are holding the Oasis too,” Rolf said. He thought he could hear the thunder, tiny and distant.

  Thomas nodded. “Quite a strong garrison, I understand.” He pulled himself back. “We’d better take turns on watch, and each get some sleep while we can.”

  Rolf said he could not sleep yet, so Thomas agreed to let him take the first watch. Then Thomas opened his pack and took out a marvelous thing. It was an Old World device, he explained, that was supposed to have come from beyond the western sea. It had been cherished for generations in the family of a man who now had joined a band of Free Folk.

  The device consisted of a pair of metal cylinders, each about the length of a man’s hand. The cylinders were clasped side by side with metal joints that fitted and worked with incredible smooth precision, as Rolf saw when Thomas let him take the device carefully into his hands. He had never before had the chance to handle anything of the Old World so freely, and he had never before seen such workmanship in metal.

  Each end of each cylinder was glass, and looking through them made everything suddenly a dozen times closer. At first Rolf was less impressed by the function of the thing than by the form. But gradually Thomas made him understand that there was no magic involved here; Thomas said that Old World devices never depended upon it. Instead the illusion of closeness came somehow from what Thomas called pure technology; the thing was a tool, like a saw or a spade, but instead of working wood or soil it worked on light. It needed only whatever power eyes could give it, looking through its double tubes.

  No magic needed, to move a man’s point of vision out from his body and bring it back again. It was an eerie thought. Technology was a word that Rolf had heard perhaps a dozen times in his life before today, and then always in some joking context; but now the truth of what it meant began to gradually impress itself upon him.

  “How do you know there’s no magic in them?”

  Thomas shrugged slightly. “No one can feel any. Wizards have tried.”

  Rolf handled the eyeglasses with an
eagerly growing fascination as he drew the Castle near him and pushed it away again. He searched for the thunderstorm, but it had dissipated already. He looked at Thomas’s face, a mountain-blur of nearness.

  “Don’t look at the sun through those, your eyes will burn out.”

  “I won’t.” Rolf already felt an affinity for technology deeper than any he had ever felt for the things of magic; he had known enough not to look at a sun made a dozen times more dazzling.

  Something in the satisfaction of the glasses eased the tension that had so far kept him from feeling sleepy; he yawned and felt his eyelids drooping. Thomas announced that he himself had better take the first watch after all.

  Rolf rolled against the rock wall of the canyon, put down his head and at once dropped off to sleep, to awaken with a violent start when his arm was touched. He had little sense of time having passed, but he did feel rested, and the sun was near the zenith.

  Having the Old World glasses to use, Rolf found the time of the afternoon watch passing quickly. At the main gate of the Castle, there was a more or less continual coming and going, of both soldiers and civilians. A few wagonloads of provisions came jolting over the bridge that spanned the Dolles in the midst of what was now a half-deserted village at the foot of the Castle’s hill. Barrels and bales and sacks were carried up on slave-back to the Castle from the barges moored at the village landing-place. Only slaves labored now in what Rolf remembered as a free and thriving town. Dots of bronze and black stood guard with whips that became visible only through the glasses.

  Rolf did not watch that for long. Each time a party of soldiers came down from the Castle, or passed below him in either direction through the pass, he watched them tensely, ready to rouse Thomas in an instant should any turn upslope toward these rocks.

  Thomas had rolled under a bulge of rock as far as a man could get, and there he slept. Now and then he would utter a faint groan and make abortive motions with his powerful arms. Somehow it seemed wrong and discouraging to Rolf that a man healthy and strong, a successful leader, should have to put up with bad dreams.

  Rolf swept the landscape once more with his glasses. Here was something new, coming toward the Castle from the southwest, the general direction of the swamps. In a little while Rolf made out that it was a group of slaves or prisoners being marched along a road. First he had seen only the dust raised by their slow progress; now through the glasses he could see that they were men and women both, chained or roped together, perhaps fifteen of them. Now he could see the arm of a bronze-helmed guard rise and snap and fall back again. A long time later the faint pop of the whip came drifting across the intervening valley of the pass.

  He did not want to watch this and yet could not keep from watching. The prisoners’ faces became visible. More bewildered conscripts for the endless building…

  Rolf nearly dropped the glasses. He raised them again quickly, and with shaking fingers turned the knurled knob that Thomas had taught him to use for greatest clarity. Still the image wavered before him, until he remembered to rest his elbows once more in the sand.

  A little behind the other prisoners, and bound more lightly if at all, was a young girl who looked like Sarah. She was riding, mounted on a huge beast behind a soldier. She looked like Sarah all the more as they came slowly closer. If it was not some terrible trick of these demon-begotten glasses…Rolf kept trying to tell himself that it was only that.

  At last he woke Thomas. Thomas was instantly alert, but still just too late to see the girl as the Castle’s maw swallowed the last of the prisoners and their guard. The teeth of its portcullis snapped shut behind them.

  Thomas put down the glasses he had just raised. “Are you sure it was Sarah?”

  “Yes.” Rolf stared at a double handful of sand and pebbles, into which he was digging his fingers until they hurt.

  “Well.” It seemed to Rolf that Thomas was taking the news with unnatural calm. “Did you recognize anyone else?”

  “No. I don’t think any were people from our camp.”

  “So. There might have been some word about Nils come into the swamp, and Sarah went out to try to make sure of it—whatever it was. And she just got picked up. Those things happen. Anyway, there’s nothing we can do about it, except to go on with what we’re doing now.” When Rolf nodded, he put a hand on Rolf’s shoulder for a moment, then turned away again against the rock. “I should sleep a little longer. Be sure and rouse me before the sun goes down.”

  But Thomas could scarcely have fallen asleep before Rolf was shaking him again. More people were approaching the Castle, and had popped suddenly into Rolf’s view, their earlier progress having been hidden from him by the rock he sheltered against. Not in chains did these folk come, but in great splendor, on a gaily-painted river barge descending the Dolles, escorted on each shore by a hundred mounted men.

  This time Thomas looked long before handing the glasses back to Rolf. “It’s the Satrap Chup, coming down from his own robber’s roost in the north. Ekuman’s son-in-law to be.”

  The barge tied up at the central landing-place. In the center of those who disembarked was a powerful-looking man in black trousers and cuirass trimmed with red, mounted on a magnificent riding-beast. And beside him on a white animal came riding a young girl with blonde hair of marvelous length; so fair was her skin, so beautiful her face, that Rolf wondered again, aloud, if the glasses might not add a shading of magic to the things they showed.

  “No, no,” Thomas reassured him, dryly. “You’ll not have seen her before, because her habit is to stay in the Castle or very near it. But that’s Charmian, Ekuman’s daughter. She evidently went halfway to meet her bridegroom, and now comes finishing his journey with him. It might be an interesting wedding; I’ve heard there’s another in the Castle who dotes on her.”

  “How could you hear that?”

  “The Castle servants are human if the masters are not. They’re too frightened to talk much, but sometimes a single word can travel marvelously.”

  Rolf had heard of Charmian’s existence, but had not really thought about her until now. “I thought that Ekuman had no wife.”

  “He had once, or perhaps she was only a favored concubine. Then he went East, to perfect himself in…the ways that he has chosen.”

  Rolf did not understand. “He went East?”

  “From where he came to begin with I do not know, but he has been to the Black Mountains, to pledge himself to Som the Dead.”

  That name was new to Rolf. Later he would seek to learn more, but now he took a turn at thoughtful silence. It was beyond his understanding that a fiend like Ekuman should have a lovely daughter, to be given away like some kindly farmer’s, with a feast.

  Thomas’s thoughts were evidently running along the same lines. “I wonder sometimes why such as these bother to marry. Hardly to pledge their love. I think not even to pledge each other any kind of honest help in life.”

  “Why, then?” Rolf wanted to think of anything but what might be happening to Sarah.

  Thomas shrugged. “It’s hard to remember sometimes that Ekuman and those about him are still human, that the crimes they commit are human crimes. I’ve heard Loford say that if the Satraps live for many years, growing stronger in their evil, it sometimes happens that they are summoned East at last, to stay.”

  “Why?”

  “To become something more or less than human, I think that was the way Loford put it.” Thomas yawned. “Loford wasn’t sure, and I’m talking in total ignorance. You want another nap?”

  “No. I don’t feel tired.”

  So Thomas did sleep again, but he roused himself well before sunset, and then Rolf was willing enough to take another nap himself. He only dozed, and got up without being wakened as the shadows began to deepen.

  Like the humans of the Castle, the reptiles had been coming and going in small numbers all through the day, but now they came from all directions, in haste to reach their roosts before night. Now was the time when Feathertip, i
f she had been following her original plan, would have come soaring forth. Tonight she could have caught more than one straggler made careless by the Castle’s nearness. But with a far greater enterprise hanging in the balance, the birds would not hunt reptiles tonight. The leatherwings came home unmolested, to slowly blacken the rooftops of the Castle with their clusters.

  And in the earliest of the true night the two birds came silently down the canyon, following the dim twisting channel of it with scarcely a wing-movement. Their huge shapes were over Rolf before he had more than imagined that he saw them.

  Rolf and Thomas were each carrying ropes, long and strong but thin, wound about them under their shirts. Thomas unwound a long rope now from his ribs, and tied one end of it into a loop, of a size Feathertip directed.

  The two birds then flew back up the canyon. Behind them a trailing end of rope tickled over the sand and over shadowed, broken rocks where human feet must move with caution.

  Rolf and Thomas followed. The looped rope had already been hung for climbing when they caught up with the birds, who sat waiting on the canyon floor.

  “Well,” said Thomas. He set down his pack, then tugged hard on the rope, to make sure that the loop was holding solidly on the invisible peak, about eleven times his height. Then he hesitated. At last he said, “If I’m killed or left unconscious beyond rousing—I’ve seen men that way after a fall—then you must just go on as best you can.”

  “I know.”

  After that Thomas delayed no more but climbed, swiftly and surely; Rolf envied the strength of arm that could swing a big man up like that. For a few moments Thomas’s climbing figure was outlined vaguely against the stars. Then he passed out of sight above a convexity of rock. Soon after that, the hanging rope’s gyrations ceased.

  From where he stood Rolf could see only that loose descending rope, and nothing of what was going on above. He could see where Thomas would come down, if he fell. At that place a hard flat surface would have been bad enough, but the actuality was worse, a jumble of sharp upjutting stony corners.