Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  The subordinate indicated his agreement and withdrew. Leros pondered briefly: Might the agent who had left the message be a disloyal priest? He did not think it probable. But he could not be completely sure.

  The Tournament, meanwhile, had to get started. There had been no sign from up the hill that High Priest Andreas or any of his Inner Circle were coming down to watch.

  A pack train came into view on the lower reaches of the long road that wound its way down the forested slopes from the summit; but when it drew near Leros saw that no men of rank were walking near the animals, it was only a regular supply caravan returning unburdened from the top.

  On with it, then. Turning to a waiting herald, he gave the signal for the battle-horn to be blown, to call the contestants all together for the last time in the world of living men. When they were assembled he drew from a pocket of his fine white robe a scroll of new vellum, on which a priest-scribe had set down the names in elegant calligraphy. They appeared in the alphabetical order hallowed by time and military usage:

  Arthur of Chesspa

  Ben Tarras of the Battle-Axe

  Big Left Hand

  Bram the Beardless of Consiglor

  Brunn of Bourzoe

  Byram of the Long Bridges

  Chapmut of Rillijax

  Charles the Upright

  Chun He Ping the Strong

  Col Renba

  David the Wolf of Monga’s Village

  Efim Samdeviatoff

  Farley of Eikosk

  Farmer Minamoto

  Geno Hammerhand

  Geoff Symbolor of Symbolorville

  Gib the Blacksmith

  Giles the Treacherous of Endross Swamp

  Gladwin Vanucci

  Gunter Kamurata

  Hal Coppersmith

  Here Stambler of Birchtown

  Homer Garamond of Running Water

  Ian Offally the Woodcutter

  John Spokemaker of the Triple Fork

  Jud Isaksson of Ardstoy Hill

  Kanret Jon of Jonsplace

  Korl the Legbreaker

  LeNos of the Highlands

  Losson Grish

  M’Gamba Mim

  Muni Podarces

  Mesthles of the Windy Vale

  Mool of Rexbahn

  Nikos Darcy of the Long Plain

  Oktans Buk of Pachuka

  Omir Kelsumba

  One-Eyed Manuel

  Otis Kitamura

  Pal Setoff of Whiteroads

  Pern-Paul Hosimba

  Pernsol Muledriver of Weff’s Plain

  Phil Cenchrias

  Polydorus the Foul

  Proclus Nan Ling

  Rafael Sandoval

  Rahim Sosias

  Rico Kitticatchorn of Tiger’s Lair

  Rudolph Thadbury

  Ruen Redaldo

  Sensai Hagenderf

  Shang Ti the Awesome

  Siniuju of the Evergreen Slope

  Tay Corbish Jeandry

  Thomas the Grabber

  Thurlow Vultee of the High Crag

  Travers Sandakan of Thieves’ Road

  Urumchi

  Vann the Nomad

  Venerable Ming the Butcher

  Vladerlin Bain of Sanfa Town

  Wat Franko of the Deep Wood

  Wull Narvaez

  Zell of Windchastee

  WHEN he had done with reading, Leros glanced up at the still-high sun. “There will be time today for much fighting. Let it begin.

  He handed the scroll to a subordinate priest, who read in a loud voice: “Arthur of Chesspa—Ben Tarras of the Battle-Axe.”

  Having both stepped into the ring, and made their holy signs imploring Thorun’s favor, the two went at it. Ben Tarras had taken only a dozen more breaths when his battle-axe spun out of his hand to bury itself with a soft sound in the calmly receiving earth, while Arthur’s swordblade at the same time sank true and deep in Ben Tarras’s flesh. The bare, flattened soil of the fighting ring drank Ben Tarras’s blood as if it had been long athirst. A pair of slaves in shabby gray tunics dragged his body from the ring, toward a place nearby where other slaves were readying a pyre. The dry wood was stacked twice taller than a man already, and was not yet enough. Thirty-two men today would join the gods and begin their eternal feast with Thorun.

  “Big Left Hand—Bram the Beardless of Consiglor.”

  This fight went on a little longer; and then both hands of Big Left Hand (they appeared equally big) were stilled as Bram’s sword tore his middle open. Again the slaves came to bear a corpse away, but Big Left Hand stirred and kicked feebly as they took him up. His eyes opened and were living, though the terrible wound in his front was plainly mortal. One slave, who limped about his work, pulled from his belt a short but massive leaden maul and broke the head of the dying man with a short methodical swing. Leros for the second time said ritual words to speed a loser’s soul to Thorun, nodded to the acolyte who held the scroll.

  “Brunn of Bourzoe—Byram of the Long Bridges.”

  It went on through the afternoon, with little pauses between fights. Some of the fights were long, and one of the winners had lost so much blood that he could hardly stand himself before he managed to still the breath in the loser’s throat. As soon as each fight was over the slaves came quickly to stanch the wounds, if any, of the winner, and lead him to food and drink and rest. It was likely to go hard in the second round of fighting with those who had been weakened in the first.

  The sun was reddening near the horizon before the last match had been fought. Before retiring, Leros gave orders that the camp should be moved early in the morning. Originally he had planned to wait until midday before beginning the slow intended progress up the mountain, but the smoke of the funeral pyre seemed to lie heavy here in the low air, and amphibious vermin from the river were being drawn to the camp by the blood of heroes in which the earth was soaked.

  III

  ORION was well in-system now, rapidly matching orbital velocities with Hunters’ planet, and in fact not far from entering atmosphere. From his command chair in the small control room at the center of the ship, Schoenberg supervised his autopilot with a computer-presented hologram of the planet drifting before him, the planet as it appeared in gestalt via the multitude of sensing instruments built into the starship’s outer hull.

  A few days earlier Suomi had obtained a printout on Hunters’ planet from the ship’s gazeteer, a standard databank carried for navigation, trade, and emergency survival. The Hunterian year was about fifteen times as long as the Earth-standard year; Hunters’ planet was therefore much farther from its primary than Earth was from Sol, but Hunters’ Star was a blue-white subgiant, so that the total insolation received by both planets was very nearly equal. The radius, mass, and gravity of Hunters’ planet were Earthlike, as was the composition of the atmosphere. Hunters’ would surely have been colonized from pole to pole had it not been for its extreme axial tilt—more than eighty degrees to the plane of its revolution around Hunters’ sun, almost as far as was Uranus in its orbit around Sol.

  Spring was now a standard year old in the Hunterian northern hemisphere, which region was therefore emerging from a night that had been virtually total for another Earthly year or so. Near the north pole the night had now lasted for more than five standard years and would endure for a total of seven. Up there the ice-grip of the dark cold was deep indeed, but it would soon be loosened. Seven standard years of continuous sunheat were coming.

  According to statements in the gazeteer, which were probably still valid though more than a standard century old, men had never managed to settle permanently much farther than fifteen degrees of latitude in either direction from the Hunterian equator. Dome colonies would have been called for and there had never been sufficient population pressure to make it worthwhile. Indeed, the population had not occupied even the whole equatorial zone of the main continent when the berserkers came. When the killing machines from out of space attacked, the growing technological civil
ization of Hunters’ colonists had been wrecked; the intervention of Karlsen’s battle fleet was the only reason that any of the colonists—or the biosphere itself, for that matter—had survived at all. The native life, though none of its. forms were intelligent, did manage to endure at all latitudes, surviving the long winters by hibernation of one kind or another, and in many cases getting through the scorching, dessicated summers by an estivation cycle.

  Away from the tropics, spring presented the only opportunity for feeding, growth, and reproduction. Because the southern hemisphere was so largely water, the northern spring was the one that counted insofar as land animals were concerned. In the northern springtime beasts of all description emerged from caves and nests and frozen burrows with the melting of the ice. Among them came predators, more terrible, burning with more urgent hunger and ferocity, than any creatures that had ever lived on the old wild lands of Earth. On Hunters’ planet now, as every fifteen standard years, the hunting season by which the planet had acquired its name was in full swing.

  “THE poaching season, I suppose we should call it,” said Carlos Suomi to Athena Poulson. The two of them were standing in the shooting gallery Schoenberg had set up a few weeks earlier in the large cabin directly beneath Orion’s lounge. Suomi and Athena were looking over a large gun rack filled with energy rifles; Schoenberg had enjoined everyone aboard to select a weapon and become adept with it before shooting in earnest was required. Schoenberg and De La Torre spent a good deal of time down here, Celeste and Barbara hardly any.

  Suomi and Athena were intermediate, he generally showing up whenever she went to practice. They were in mid-session now. Some ten meters from the rifle rack—half the diameter of the spherical ship—a computer-designed hologram showed a handful of Hunterian predators stop-actioned in what looked like a good drawing of their natural habitat. Around and beyond the sketch-like animals in the middle distance what appeared to be several square kilometers of glacier spread to an illusive horizon.

  “All right,” Athena said in her low voice. “Technically speaking, this trip is outside interstellar law. But it’s evident that neither the authorities on Earth or the Interstellar Authority care very much. Oscar is too smart to get into any real trouble over such a thing. Relax and enjoy the trip, Carl, now that you’re here. Why ever did you come along if you don’t like the idea?”

  “You know why I came.” Suomi pulled a rifle halfway out of the rack and then slid it back. The end of its muzzle was slightly bulbous, dull gray, pitted all over with tiny and precisely machined cavities. What it projected was sheer physical force, abstracted almost to the point of turning into mathematics.

  Suomi had already tried out all the rifles in the rack and they all seemed pretty much the same to him, despite their considerable differences in length and shape and weight. They were all loaded now with special target cartridges, projecting only a trickle of power when triggered, enough to operate the target range. Its setup was not different in principle from the target ranges in arcades on Earth or other urbanized planets; only there it was generally toy berserkers that one shot at, black metal goblins of various angular shapes that waved their limbs or flashed their imitation laser beams in menace. “I’ve always enjoyed these target games,” he said. “Why shouldn’t these be real enough, instead of going after living animals?”

  “Because these are not real,” said Athena firmly. “And shooting at them isn’t real either.” She chose a rifle and turned her back on Suomi to aim it down the range. Somewhere a scanner interpreted her posture as that of the ready hunter, and the scene before her came alive again with deliberate motion. A multmouthed creature bristling with heavy fur stalked toward them at a range of seventy meters. Athena fired, a small click was emitted by the rifle, which remained perfectly steady, and the beast flopped over in a graceful, almost stylized way, now wearing a spot of red light riveted near the middle of what should have been its spine. The indication was for a clean kill.

  “Athena, I came along because you were coming, and I wanted to spend time with you, to get some things settled between us. That’s why I had you get me invited. Also it was a chance to take a trip on a private space yacht, something I’ll probably never be able to do again. If I must hunt, to keep your lord and master upstairs happy, why then I’ll do it. Or at least go through the motions of hunting.”

  “Carlos, you’re always talking down Oscar to me, and it won’t work. I think this is the one I’ll carry.” She turned the rifle this way and that, looking at it critically.

  “I wonder what the people living on Hunters’ think about expeditions like ours.”

  “They’re not being harmed, as far as I can see. I don’t suppose they’ll give a damn, even if they know we’re there, which they probably won’t. We won’t be hunting in an inhabited area, but in the north.”

  She sounded as if she knew what she was talking about, though she had probably only read the same ship’s printout that Suomi had been studying. None of them except Schoenberg had been here before, and, when you thought about it, Schoenberg was really uncommunicative about his previous trip. With a few words he gave assurance that they were all in for some marvelous sport, warned succinctly about certain dangers to be wary of—and that was about it. He might have been on Hunters’ a number of times before. He might be three hundred years old or more; it was getting hard to tell these days, when an age of five hundred years was not unheard of. As long as the central nervous system held out other systems of the body could generally be maintained or replaced as needed.

  Schoenberg’s voice now sounded on the intercom. “We’re coming into atmosphere soon, people. Artificial gravity will be going off in another twenty minutes. Better secure your areas and settle in the lounge or in your staterooms.”

  “We hear you in the target range,” Suomi answered. “We’re on our way.” He and Athena began to secure the rifles in the rack, and to make sure that nothing in the area was likely to fly around loose if the coming maneuvers in free gravity should become violent for any reason.

  SEATED a few minutes later in the lounge, Suomi watched the progress of their descent on the wall-sized screens. The planet, that had been hardly more than a star when last he observed its image, was now on top of them, or so it seemed. It grew further, eased around to a position below them as Schoenberg changed ship’s attitude, spread a cloud net to catch Orion, became a world with a horizon to hold them in. The blue-white sun grew yellowish as they began to see it from inside the planet’s atmosphere.

  The land below was high, rough country. Like most planets, Hunters’ had an uninhabited look when seen from the upper air. Here the appearance persisted even when they had dropped to only a few kilometers’ altitude.

  Schoenberg, alone in the control room, now took over control completely from the computers, guiding the ship manually, looking rapidly from one television screen to another. In the lounge they could watch him on the passenger’s screen. Obviously traffic in the Hunterian atmosphere was practically non-existent and a mid-air collision nothing to be feared.

  Now Schoenberg was following a river, actually skirting sometimes between the walls of its deep-cut canyon. Mountains rose and dipped beneath Orion as he veered away from the watercourse, steadily decreasing speed. At last a chalet-like structure, flanked by log outbuildings, the whole complex surrounded by a palisade, came into view at the head of a pass. There was a scarcity of level ground, but Schoenberg had no real trouble in lowering the ship onto the barren soil about fifty meters outside the stockade. From the spherical metal hull, thick landing struts moved out to take the ship’s weight and hold her upright. There was a scarcely perceptible settling motion when the pilot cut the drive. The ship used the same silent forces for maneuvering in atmosphere as in space—though caution was necessary when using them near a planetsized mass—and it could be landed on any surface that would bear its weight.

  Obviously their descent had been observed, for the drive was hardly off before people in drab
clothes began to appear from a gate in the stockade. The arrival of a spaceship seemed to be an exciting event, but no more than that. The impromptu welcoming committee of six or eight showed no hesitancy in drawing near.

  Once the ship was firmly down Schoenberg got out of his chair and headed for the main hatch, which, without formality, he at once opened wide to the planet’s air, and pressed the button to extrude a landing ramp. He and the others aboard had taken the routine immunological treatments before departure, and the ship had been gone over by his own medics to avoid carrying dangerous microorganisms to a planet with only a primitive medical technology.

  The natives waited a few meters from the ship, the women wearing long gowns and heavy aprons, the men for the most part dressed in coveralls. A couple of them had primitive cutting or digging tools in hand.

  ONE smiling young man, better dressed than the others, his boots just as heavy but fancier, and with a short sword in a decorated leather scabbard at his belt, stepped forward.

  “Welcome, then.” He spoke the common language with what seemed to Earth ears a heavy, but understandable, accent. “Now you are Mister Schoenberg, I recall.”

  “I am.” Smiling and open in his manner, Schoenberg went down the ramp to shake hands. “And you are—Kestand, isn’t it? Mikenas’s younger brother?”

  “Now that is right. I was just a small one last hunting season when you were here. Surprised you know me.”

  “Not at all. How’s Mikenas?”

  “He’s fine. Out now tending stock.”

  The conversation went on about the state of affairs on the ranch or fiefdom or whatever it was that the absent Mikenas owned or ruled. Suomi and the other passengers—all the girls were now dressed quite modestly—had come down from the lounge, but at a gesture from Schoenberg remained just inside the ship, enjoying the fresh alien air. Meanwhile the farm workers remained standing in a group outside. These all appeared cheerful and more or less healthy, but might have been deaf and dumb. It was probably a decade and a half since any of them had had any news from the great interstellar civilization that networked the sky about them. They smiled at the visitors, but only Kestand spoke, and even he showed no inclination to ask how things were going, out among the stars.