The Super Barbarians

by John Brunner

  “You had that mark on your cheek from him?” Pwill demanded.

  I bowed and nodded, and said nothing.

  “Is his condition your doing?”

  I shook my head. “His own,” I said shortly. “Since he tried to whip me, he has visions like those of a madman, or a man in fever.”

  I heard a rustling whisper go through the crowd. Pwill cut it short with a glower.

  “He tried to whip you? On whose orders? When?”

  “A few days ago,” I said. “But with all respect to Himself I will not answer the other question. As you see, the matter has taken care of itself, and I do not bear grudges long.”

  Pwill hesitated. But he dared not offend me now that I was party to the jealously kept secret of his son’s unworthy addiction. He merely grunted and left it at that—a fertile ground for rumors to grow on.

  “Get rid of him,” he told his guards curtly, pointing to Dwerri. His glance fell on one of the two aides hanging back among the crowd. “You! Take his whip and assume his office!”

  “I—I am flattered by Himself’s honoring me,” the man whispered rather than said aloud, cringing. “But with all respect, I believe the whip is accursed!”

  I gave a grin, as wolfish as I could make it, and then looked innocent again when I was sure some of the crowd had noticed.

  Pwill turned to me again, his brows like thunderclouds. “Is this so?” he demanded.

  I spread my hands. “I do not know,” I said. “Certainly it has my blood on its tip.”

  “Then burn it! And you!” he added, indicating the new whipmaster. “Make yourself a whip suitable for the task and coma to me at sunset for its dedication.”

  That was the beginning of my reign over the House of Pwill. I could measure the growth of my power in a dozen ways. For instance, bit by bit my colleagues on the staff-though it hurt them cruelly to do so—stopped addressing me by equal-to-equal word forms, and began to use inferior-to superior ones. The junior wives and their relations and children, who had formerly ordered me about as readily as any other retainer belonging to anyone in the family, stopped sending for me. All except Shavarri, and I was becoming something of a confidant of hers.

  More than that: my duties grew fighter by the day. Someone else was found in preference to me to do what had formerly been my regular tasks.

  And Swallo, who had been the only servant of the house I might call a friend, became very distant indeed. It was Swallo, in fact, who told me when my grip was complete, because he came to me as he might have come to a half-brother of the heir, one evening after sunset when the gate was locked and he was released from duty, with a request I found surprising because I knew he was almost seventy, though well-preserved. Grinning, his mouth twisted up at the side as usual, he bowed and touched his scar and asked if I had any way to undo the harm my peoples weapons had inflicted on him, because he was thinking of getting married again and no woman would have him when he was so hideously scarred.

  I told him no. But for the sake of the way he had treated me when I was simply a serf of the kind the people of the Acre had accused me of being, I got him a potion similar to that I had obtained for Shavarri, and soon afterwards he had three wives as nice-looking as any Vorra could ask for: solid, thick-hipped, industrious and untalkative.

  That was two months later. I hadn’t just had to wait for this power to come to me, of course. I’d had some tricky jobs to look after. The affair of Pwill, Jr. and the coffee was the worst. On the one hand I had to satisfy Pwill Himself that his sons supply had been cut off. On the other, I had to keep the occasional handful of beans in his son’s possession. A handful lasted him a long time—five days or more—because the effect of the brew on Vorrish metabolism was so strong he drank usually only a few mouthfuls of a very watery solution.

  The answer came to me like a blinding flash, when I was on the point of delivering the first batch. Instead of giving it to Pwill, Jr., I gave it to his close friend Forrel, whom I believed not to be an addict. I was right. Forrel, I felt, was a man I could have been friendly with if he had not been a member of the conqueror race and somewhat haughty; at any rate he responded well to my pretended concern for his friend.

  “If I give this to him directly,” I argued, holding out the coffee, “he may overdose himself with it and run mad, or die. If you hold it in trust for him, you can ration it out in such a way that his father will come to believe he is gradually getting over the effects and becoming himself again. This will advantage us both.”

  “You’re a smooth-tongued double-dealer, Earthman!” was his answer, reluctantly admiring. He took the coffee nonetheless. “I must confess that for a while when Pwill Himself was so angry about his son’s behavior I could see no better future for myself as his companion than to be stripped of my rank and sent to labor in the fields. I do not like this matter at all! Still, Pwill Heir Apparent is so ill and anguished if he lacks coffee, and so elated and skillful when he has it, I cannot choose otherwise.”

  He must have been able to influence the heir much better than I could, because it went off magnificently. For a few days, while he was on short rations of coffee, Pwill, Jr. was crotchety and irritable. Bit by bit he brightened, as if recovering. Only I, Forrel and he himself knew otherwise—that he was actually being given his full need of coffee now. Perhaps his father deceived himself; I am sure his mother Llaq did, because of what was at stake.

  Under the stimulus of what was to him a drug he responded to an extent that almost alarmed me. He had never been a man of action. Now he acquired the ability to take decisions, to see things through, to absorb information, and his apparently unsuspecting father was delighted. Here, for the first time, seemed to be an heir worthy of him. I would have been alarmed if I hadn’t known that a word from me would reduce him to what he had been before, or worse.

  I had qualms at the beginning. Then I thought of the people in the Acre. I thought of Mrs. Kramer, who had died a week or so after I first went there. I thought of Marijane Lee and her brother Ken, and Judge Olafsson, and Kramer himself. I thought of the millions who had died during the war—which we had not asked for—and the further millions who had starved, or been shot as hostages, or simply died of diseases which, but for the wars aftermath, could have been cured. This was a dirty business altogether. It wasn’t an adequate reason to say we hadn’t asked for it—but it was a good excuse.

  So I hardened my heart, and went on scheming to disrupt the House of Pwill.

  CHAPTER XII

  IT WENT WELL. But it didn’t all go as smoothly as the episode of Dwerri, or the arrangement with Forrel about the supply of coffee to Pwill Heir Apparent. And no matter how pleased I felt with my small local successes one frightening problem continued to undermine my confidence.

  The same point which had so upset me in Olafsson’s office in the Acre kept coming back. Why had I been on Qallavarra, in my position of trust and influence, for seven mortal months without making use of my opportunities? Now indeed I had some results to show for my belated efforts, but all that time I had been living like a typical serf that the people of the Acre so despised: comfortable, well-fed, not overworked. And in the Acre my Earthly fellows were plotting, and struggling, and dying.

  When I concentrated on that question, my mind seemed to go out of my control. My memory clouded. I lost track of the difference between facts I really remembered and facts I might have pieced together subconsciously to account for the state of affairs as i found them.

  The Acre itself, for example. I’d known about it all along—I must have! Even back on Earth the tales circulated; on my first trip there to carry out Shavarri’s errand I’d been eager to find out if the rumors were true. I’d known the streets which bounded it, recalling their numbers instantly. Why hadn’t I gone beyond that?

  Many times I lay awake, staring into the darkness of my room, for hours on end before my tortured brain would relax into sleep, worrying over the same impossible paradox. It couldn’t be that I was purel
y a selfish, contented vegetable of a man. Pwill was too good a judge of human nature-Earthly or Vorrish—to select such a person as tutor to his heir.

  Yet if I were not, why I had been so passive for those seven months, when my every instinct should have been to get in touch with the people in the Acre and ask how best I could serve the cause of Earth from my unique position?

  Other unaccountable memories piled on that foundation. I remembered how Olafsson had commanded Ken, Gustav and Marijane to get out of his office when they brought me in for questioning, and not to mention the episode to anyone. I remembered the look of disgust on Marijane’s face when she found my house shield strapped to my arm. I remembered the passionate way I had tried to convince her that she was wrong about my being a mere serf—and wondered whether I’d been more interested in convincing her, or convincing myself.

  Once, while I was fighting to still my raging thoughts because I was exhausted and not only wanted, but needed, to sleep, an idea occurred to me which I was too weak to debate with myself, so that it simply rested in the front of my mind until I dropped off. The phrase is apt; that time, I felt I actually was dropping when I went to sleep, as though into a pit of darkness.

  The idea must have stayed in my dreams, for when I awoke the following morning I found that I’d come to accept it.

  I’d lost the need to justify my actions to myself. I’d given up the impossible struggle. But I had an even stronger need in its place: I had to justify myself to someone else who usually identified with Marijane.

  That puzzled me for a while. Then I reasoned that she was, after all, the first Earthly girl or woman I’d seen since I’d come to work on Qallavarra. Maybe, I told myself, that made her a kind of symbol for me. I didn’t find it very difficult to be without women, generally speaking, and I doubted if there was any deeper emotional implication. But I was going to have to prove by deeds, as well as explain by words, my good reasons for behaving as I had done, and since, in a sense it had been Marijane who first showed me how I’d been wasting my time, it would have to be Marijane I proved them to.

  It was lucky that the first person who suffered from my new-found authority was someone as generally hated as Dwerri. If it had been someone better liked by the rest of the retinue of the House of Pwill, I would not have had such an easy time as I did. Particularly, I realized, I was coming to be hated and suspected by three important groups of people on the estate.

  The most influential were the junior members of the family of Pwill—among them, the wives other than Shavarri.

  I hadn’t been wrong in my guess as to what use Shavarri intended to make of the love potion I brought her. She must have been dissatisfied for a long while with her status as an under-lady. Well, that was not surprising; all the junior wives were dissatisfied. Alone among them she had had the enterprise to do something about it. There was a limited amount of visiting permitted between the seraglios of the various great houses—encouraged, I think, by & hope that useful tidbits of information about the plans of rivals in the never-ending jockeying for power might leak out that way—and it must have been on one such visit that Cosra of the House of Shugurra suggested that she enlist Kramer’s help.

  Kramer had described Cosra as a stupid and greedy young woman, or words to that effect. I doubted, now that I was coming to know her better, whether Shavarri was either stupid or greedy. From hints picked up in talking to her I gathered that not the least of her reasons for deciding to take action was the destruction of her original fantasy notion about what her life as a junior wife might lead to.

  Pwill was a level-headed man. Also he had great ambitions for the future of his house. All too often, I’d heard, the fortunes of a house which had seemed unchallengeably in the ascendant had been wrecked by squabbling among rival successors to the headship after the death of a strong father. He wasn’t going to let this happen in his case if he could help it. He was no longer young, and he had five other sons who were nearly grown, in addition to Pwill Heir Apparent.

  It had not been unknown in the past, too, for the son of a junior wife to wrest power from the legal heir. Shavarri had cherished some such hope for her own child. Unfortunately for this secret ambition, shortly after she was married to him, Pwill decided that he had enough children and took brutal and direct steps to insure that his wives would give him no more. I only hoped, for the sake of the wives, that he’d enlisted the services of an Earthly surgeon instead of leaving the job to one of the Vorrish sawbones.

  Probably it was her silent mourning over the frustration of her dream which had led me to think that Shavarri was less intelligent than she turned out to be. Certainly, once she had the love potion, she lost no time in putting it to use. Within a couple of months it was she that Pwill called for, and she alone, on the occasions when he wanted company on his night couch. (The occasions were growing fewer, I heard from rumor. But then Pwill was no longer young.) The jealousy which this caused among the other wives was natural.

  I was quite certain that Shavarri would never allow anyone to admit that she had secured an Earthly love potion—that would have wrecked her plans—but I could tell from the way some of the jealousy rubbed off on me that behind the curtained doors of the seraglio, tongues were wagging and minds sharpened by years of petty scheming were adding two and two.

  In the end the jealousy reached all the way up to Llaq, who had probably thought her influence as senior wife and only partner in her husband’s state affairs proof against any attack. What showed her that it was not, I could only guess. But going by what I had learned of Shavarri, I imagined that in some small matter Pwill Himself had refused to agree with her, and had taken Shavarri’s advice instead. Shavarri would never have stinted the dose of the love potion, and even in its Vorrish modification credulin was a powerful drug to promote suggestibility.

  And I had brought a pound can of the stuff from Kramer.

  It took a long time for that to sink in. When I at last got the point, I almost kicked myself. According to the dosage instructions I had read five to ten small doses would produce a lasting result. To give her a pound of the precious stuff implied that Kramer, or whoever gave Kramer his orders, intended Shavarri to exploit to the full her opportunity. Soaked to the gills in credulin-A, Pwill would take the wildest advice from her and be unable to question it.

  Another group of people whom I now had to face hostility from was less important. Since my elevation to the confidence of both the head of the house and his heir in the matter of the coffee, nobody was eager to go on ordering me to perform my duties as steward of the household. Consequently I soon let them devolve on juniors, and since I had been industrious in organizing things my way this meant a considerable extra burden of work.

  I had not realized how thoroughly I’d altered the arrangemerits that had existed before my arrival—if you could call them arrangements. Even such a simple business as the supplying of meat and vegetables from the estate had been run on a slap-happy basis, creaking at all the joints except where it was greased with bribes. I’d contrived—by such small steps I could scarcely remember the details—to improve all that. Fresh from an Earth of scarcity and strict rationing, it had simply offended me to see such slackness.

  While I was actually on the job, it had made no odds to my subordinates to run things another way. They grumbled more about my Earthly origin than about my ideas, which were good ones as anybody could see. Now they were left to themselves to cope with the entire complex of the supply problem, they began to see how much they had let themselves depend on me. They hadn’t minded letting me do so much work, of course. That was what I was there for!

  But I could put up with their petty annoyance. Far worse, perhaps as dangerous as the jealousy of the various wives, was the enmity of a group of people I’d previously ignored altogether.

  I’d known, in a vague way, from such hints as the image which Swallo kept in his office by the gate and took out in time of trouble to stand on the table beside his fat ledger
, that there were various cults to which the lower-ranking members of he household subscribed. I’d heard the music and chanting at occasional festivals held in the townlets on the estate among different guilds of workers. The metalworkers had one strong cult; among the soldiers, another was popular, and each company maintained by subscription from their wages a sort of shaman. This kind of superstition did not seem to extend much into the higher ranks, particularly not into the family itself.

  Aside from that oath—swearing by the seven gods of Casca-Olla—which I’d heard him let slip, Pwill Himself appeared to subscribe to no deities at all. Nonetheless he was obliged on occasion to conduct quite elaborate ceremonies; I’d been present at several, although I’d never been able to find any hint of an invocation to supernatural forces in what was said or sung. The ritual was structured to induce a kind of generalized awe and reverence. If anyone was worshipped in any sense, it was Pwill Himself as head of the house.

  But after setting up in business as a mysterious medicine man myself—especially after the affair of Dwerri’s whip had convinced many people I knew what I was doing—I found that I had misjudged the determination with which the various shamans and cult leaders intended to hang on to their influence. Several times I found revolting charms in my room, under my pillow or nailed over the doorway in bags, and as time went by it became clear that the people responsible were willing to find something that worked more efficiently than mere charms.

  Once, when I snatched down a bag that looked like just another in the long series nailed over the door, something moved inside it. Barely in time I dropped, and stamped on, a deadly poisonous quasi-reptile, a thing with four legs and a chitinous shell and inch-long hollow fangs. The day following I went the rounds of the various townlets on the estate, and as often as I could manage it unobserved I fixed a little charm of my own to the door of a shaman’s home. It consisted of the name Dwerri written in Vorrish characters on a scrap of white leather.