Armada of Antares dp-11

by Alan Burt Akers

  An ob-Deldar stuck his head in the door and bellowed.

  That, after all, is what ob-Deldars exist to do.

  “All out! Wenda!”[6]In the lamplight the ob-Deldar’s face exhibited an incipient case of apoplexy. The swods scrambled for the door. They took only their thraxters for weapons, leaving their stuxes and shields. They knew what they were being called out for.

  The ob-Deldar saw me.

  “You! Nit that crawls on a fluttrell’s back! Out!”

  I went across to him and looked at him.

  “I am not a soldier, dom. Hurry about your business. The Hikdar appeared to me to be a man of hasty temper.”

  “By Kuerden the Merciless! You are right, he is a very devil.”

  The wooden walls shook — no, the floor shook!

  The Deldar took a fresh grip on his thraxter and pushed his helmet straight. “Look out for yourself,” he said. “You messengers don’t know half of it.” He ran out, already bellowing fearsomely for the men to get topside.

  When I reached the door the men were already gone. I stepped out and gasped. The wind reached for me with burning fingers. Flat and level, the wind coursed across the ground, swirling dead leaves and twigs, scraps, rubbish, dust. I bent my head into it and tried to see what was going on. The four major moons were up, but drifting clouds broke the light and threw intermittent shadows on the earth. The wind blew with the furnace breath of the desert. I peered through slitted eyes and saw the trees bending. I also saw, but did not realize then the full significance of what I saw, the unripe fruit being torn from the trees and hurled through the air, squashing and dripping, wasted. A fresh party of soldiers ran up and the Hikdar, having lost all appetite for chicken, was bellowing them on. He saw me and was about to push past. I said, “I will help.”

  “You will be welcome. We go to mend the windbreaks. The fruit is being destroyed.”

  I could understand that. Heads down, our capes billowing, we struggled against the wind across that fruit-strewn ground. And I thought — I thought! — the ground moved beneath me with the violence of the wind.

  After a time the fences showed before us. Tall constructs of wood and lath, they were tightly woven to give shelter to the fruit trees. Now there were grinning gaps torn in their orderly ranks. Even as we came up a whole section a full hundred paces long ripped away and flailed concertina-like for a moment, then broke and splintered. The air was filled with the whirring, deadly slivers of wood.

  “On! On!” yelled the Hikdar, as though he led a regimental charge against swordsmen. A number of low huts against the fence contained repair materials. We were going to have to rebuild the damned fence if the gale persisted much longer. Soon I was employed lugging out lengths of lumber and running with them to the men propping the fences, reinforcing the props that had snapped, reweaving fresh withes between the uprights and diagonals to form fresh panels. It was damned hot work with that biting, burning wind scouring the air in the lungs and frying the eyes in the head. And, over all, the moons of Kregen shone down through the gale-torn gaps in the clouds. It did not rain.

  Other men were there helping, and I realized that reinforcements had been brought up from somewhere, for these new arrivals were slaves. They were lashed into the work, while the soldiers labored through their own discipline.

  A voller sliced down from above, riding on an even keel and without discomfort in the shriek of the gale. It was very clearly of that class of flier that moves independently of the wind, the forces in its silver boxes surrounding the voller with its own sphere of influence. A man in a blue cape gestured and the anger in his gesture was plain. The Hikdar yelled more fiercely over the wind and the slave overseers plied their whips.

  Staggering up carrying a timber balk against the wind I cannoned into a Brokelsh who, with the crudity of that race, grabbed me for mutual support. He seized the other end of the balk and together we ran it across to the soldiers where they struggled to hold up a section of fence against the wind. In the lee of the half-raised fence the cessation of violence, streaming wind, and blattering noise cut and snuffed, I paused for a quick breather. The Brokelsh spat.

  “These onkers’ll never get a section as big as this up. Look at ’em. . onkers!”

  “It’s a tough one,” I said. A few paces further along the fence lay flat on the ground, rippling with the wind flow. Men clustered like flies on a honeyed rope as they sought to shove the fence up with their poles. A pole slipped from the upright against which it thrust. It ripped through the withes, tearing them like tissue as wind pressure smashed the fence down. Men jumped out of the way and the wind hit us again.

  Ropes lay neatly coiled here and there. I had once been a sailor on the seas of Earth and had long experience in handling enormous weights and dealing with wind pressures, with the only power at my disposal the muscles of men.

  The blustering yell of the wind made normal speech impossible. If I started to do what I intended, others would follow. . that is always the way. Once a man takes the lead there are always those who will follow. It just needs the right man in the right place at the right time. How all the gods of Kregen must have guffawed! How the Star Lords and the Savanti, if they were watching, must have snickered!

  They say pride comes before a fall.

  I, Dray Prescot, Krozair of Zy, jumped up and ran head-down into the wind. I snatched up the end of a coil of rope and sprinted for the flat section of fence. Once over that I could loop the rope around an upright and then, with the men I knew would follow my example, we could haul back and so raise the fence in proper shipshape fashion.

  I saw the Deldar waving his arms at me, his face a most wonderful color, much like an overripe shonage, and his mouth opening and opening as he bellowed all silently in the wind rush. I waved my arm back, reassuringly. The rope felt thick and bristly in my hands. It felt wonderfully reassuring, also, bringing back many salty moments of the past. Running forward, bent over, I scarcely heeded where I was going. Just to get around the end of the fence and loop the rope up onto an upright, that was my task. I’d show these onkers of Hamal how a sailorman handled the wind!

  As I say, pride goes before a fall.

  I lurched against the wind past the end of the fence and for a moment I put my hand against the wood. I looked down.

  To this day, as I sit here talking into this microphone, I can recall the utter shock of disbelief that thrilled through me.

  The wind shrieked past my ears, the wood felt thick and sleazy in one hand, and the rope thick and bristly in the other — and I looked down. I stood on the very lip of a precipice. The edge of ground broke sheer away. At that instant the clouds parted. The four great moons of Kregen shone forth. And I saw.

  I saw.

  Far far below I saw the ground. I saw the ground moving past below. The sharp edge of the precipice did not join that ground; I stood on ground that soared above the earth like a flier. I yelled. The very shock of it, the incredible fact of it, hit me shrewdly. Land that flew through the air!

  Volgendrin!

  And then I slipped and pitched forward, spinning out into thin air.

  Chapter 16

  The Volgendrin of the Bridge

  I fell.

  The wind smashed at me. The world spun upside down and right side up, with the moons hurtling between my feet and the volgendrin Catherine-wheeling above me and then the hard earth far far below flicking into view over my head.

  The rope burned through my hand.

  My other hand came across as though I drew my rapier to face a treacherous attack from a Bravo fighter, and gripped. My two hands pained with a tearing agony that lanced up my arms and into my brain, but I held on. I held on and dangled. Now the distant earth was below me and above me the volgendrin showed its sheer side and the black rock crust. Above that the moons cast down their mingled pinkish light and I was rising and lifting in the air as willing hands hauled me back from death.

  “By Havil!” said the Brokelsh as they hauled me o
ver the lip. “And how were the Ice Floes of Sicce?”

  “Cold.”

  They landed me as a fisher lands a fish and I rolled over on the ground, getting my breath back. The wind had sensibly decreased in violence. The longsword poked out awkwardly as I sat up sideways and so rose to my feet.

  “That is a strange cross on your shoulder, dom,” said the Brokelsh. The Deldar moved up, shouting, and we could hear what he was saying, the usual farrago of obscenities and orders to get back to work.

  “Aye,” I said. “And here is the obbie.”

  The ob-Deldar lashed his men on and, in that remarkable way these men have, requested me most politely, although at the top of his voice, if I would mind lending a hand. So we pitched in to re-erect the fences.

  The whole time, as we labored and the wind dropped, sighed a few fitful gusts, then died altogether, I marveled at just where I was. So the word volgendrin held a precise meaning! I had not suspected the full truth, but, looking back, and with a little hindsight, I realized I had been blind. In all probability you who listen to these tapes will long ago have fathomed out just what a volgendrin is. No one went to their beds that night until the last fence had been firmly staked, lashed, and propped. It was now clear why the wind had risen so rapidly and then so rapidly died away: the volgendrin had passed from the lee of one mountain into the open maw of a pass before reaching the shelter of the next peak. Those barren, burning wastes of arid mountainsides with the wind tunneling through had poured that burning gale on us. Now the volgendrin in its eternal circling movement would swing around and away from the mountains before its course once more brought it back into the funnel of the wind. Just how high up we soared through the air was not too easy to determine; I thought we held the thousand-foot mark. With the earliest light of the next day I was up, ostensibly to fly back, in actuality to find out as much as I could about this marvel, this flying island, this volgendrin. And the first thing I saw with the suns was another flying island an ulm away, floating through the air like a cloud.

  Beyond that floated others. I had no idea how many there were or how far they extended. The land below, barren and poor, would not reveal by stunted growths the path of the islands’ shadows. One thing was very clear: the agency which held these masses in the air must be closely allied to the forces within the vaol and paol boxes. The wind had no effect on them in the sense that they floated independently of it, although it could wash across them, as we had seen last night. I spent some time just walking around the flying island, following the perimeter fence and climbing up to the watchtowers studding the rim. I saw why this volgendrin had been given its name.

  From its northern side the next volgendrin was joined by a seething mass of writhing vegetation, from bottom to bottom. That undulating floor of creeping vines stretched between the two volgendrins, and I judged it to be at least a hundred feet thick, against the apparent three hundred foot thickness of the islands themselves. Across the gap stretched the bridge.

  A thin, spidery construction, it looked frail and flimsy. It was still there, though, after the wind of the previous night.

  To give a revoltingly crude image, imagine two thick slices of bread resting on a plate of spaghetti, with a hair stretching between them — there you have the volgendrins, the undulating mat of vines, and the bridge spanning that horrific gap.

  Men were continually crossing the Bridge carrying burdens, or marching from slave quarters to work in the orchards. Near at hand a gang worked a chain pump fetching water up from the cavernous reservoirs deep below. The orchards thrived. The land below burned barren and desiccated under the Suns of Scorpio and under the eternal orbiting of the volgendrins around a continually shifting locus. The volgendrins remain in their orbits, like planets circling a sun, although for them the locus is an invisibility. The wind cannot move them. They remain there, close to the Mountains of the West of Hamal. There are other volgendrins on Kregen, which I was to visit in the fullness of time, but I do not believe any of them shocked me with such a sense of wonder as that one time when I discovered the Volgendrin of the Bridge.

  Why had the chain of events instigated by the Star Lords brought me here?

  When I went along to see about food, I felt it politic to go to the swods’ mess. That Hikdar might have thought about the way I had treated him. As it happened, the Matoc in charge of the group I had sung with was not at all surprised to see me. He smiled a snaggle-toothed smile as I helped myself to roast ponsho and momolams — not as fine as those served in Delphond, but tasty all the same — with a right-angled section of squish pie which I took with what memories and hopes you may imagine. I truly felt that I had not wasted my time here so far, for a recce is always valuable. But time was running out. Soon I must return to Pandahem and the army. If the Star Lords had given me this one chance and I was too blind and too stupid to see in which direction I must go, then I must once again trust myself to Oxkalin the Blind Spirit.

  So I said: “Tell me, Matoc, has production been good recently? The war makes heavy demands on us all.”

  He wiped his plate clean with a chunk of bread, the heavy somewhat doughy bread much favored in Hamal, and stuffed the dripping mass into his mouth. With the flavorsome chunk pushed into his cheek, bulging and shining, he said, “I thought you merkers knew all the secrets in the world.”

  I made myself laugh. “Oh, aye, Matoc. That is what is said.”

  He gave a few perfunctory chews and swallowed with a fine acrobatic display from his Adam’s apple. Already he was pulling out a wad of cham wrapped in its leaves from his pouch. “Well, now, this wind won’t do production any good. The pashams were rolling every which way, like Ochs’ heads after a cavalry charge.”

  That image made him laugh in his turn.

  I said, “Yes. I saw plenty of fruit rolling around in the wind.” I had to contain myself. Who the blazes was interested in their fresh fruit production? I wanted to know about the mineral that went into the silver boxes of the vollers. I opened my mouth and started to say, “That’s all very well, but the army of Hamal requires bigger production. How many binhoys can you fill in-” And then I paused. Could it be?

  He had the cham in his mouth now and was working it up into a succulent wad that would last him through better than two burs.

  So it was somewhat indistinctly that he said: “What they do with ’em I do not know, by Krun! They taste like the sweepings of a totrix stable. And you never see ’em sold in the markets.”

  This emboldened me to say, “I’ve never seen any pashams in the markets of Ruathytu.”

  “I come from Dovad. I’d sooner be there than here.”

  “I know Dovad,” I said. “A charming town and the waterfall is most impressive.”

  “Ah!” he said, chewing. “Many’s the time I’ve taken a pretty little shishi on a trip to the falls. Well, no one then believed you could ever go as far as the Mountains of the West.” He spat, the cham working up nicely. “And they’re right, by Havil’s Greenness! I’ve no wish to serve on a vo’drin, and that’s a fact.”

  There was no difficulty at all in picking up a pasham. The slaves were being flogged into clearing up and I simply walked past the collecting bins. The bins were running with a green juice that had called forth all manner of obscenities, for the fruit was not ripe and was useless. The juice ran down, smelling of old sweaty socks. I picked up a reasonably undamaged pasham, making a face, and wrapped it in leaves. This I stowed away in the lower pockets of the green dolman I wore slung over my left shoulder under the cloak.

  The fruit looked to be as large as a grapefruit and would probably swell into melon size — honey melon, that is — when ripe. If it was not edible and yet was so assiduously cultivated and provided with soldiers to act as guards, then it must be connected to voller production. It could simply be that the pasham was pressed for oil, for lubrication, for example. But I hankered after my unfounded belief in the Star Lords. They had used me as their puppet and I had resisted them. Of
late they had left me alone. I knew that at any minute I could find myself caught up in the mistiness of that radiant blue scorpion and go head over heels back four hundred light-years to Earth. But, despite the aloofness of the Everoinye, I persisted in my notion that they had sent me here for a purpose connected with the vollers. That being so, pashams had to be the answer.

  From my previous experiences with the management of voller production in Hamal I surmised that the people here would simply grow and pack the pashams. After that the binhoys, those huge flat barge-like fliers, would take the fruits to be processed at another plant. Then they would go on somewhere else and then — the thought occurred to me with no excitement but only a dull feeling of my own ineffectiveness

  — they could be dried and ground into a powder, a powder I had previously thought of as a mineral. There were four minerals we had not found in Vallia, for all San Evold Scavander’s researches and the field trips of Ornol. The iron-masters of Vallia did not know. Coal was known and used; the coal-masters did not know. Nor did the masters of the various chemical works, all in a relatively primitive state, to be sure, know. The dyers threw up their hands and shrugged. So perhaps one of the mystery minerals was no mineral at all, but a dried and powdered fruit.

  In the past, Vallia had bought everything she required except her navy from the traders of the world of Kregen under Antares.

  Now the Hamalians were clamping down, and it was high time I returned to my army in Pandahem. There was one other question, and then I would be off.

  The binhoys were late, as the Matoc had foretold. I wandered down to the lowest open sections of cliff face, fenced in, and looked down at the writhing mat of vines and tendrils below, stretching out to join the other volgendrin which was, really, a part of the whole, the whole Volgendrin of the Bridge. Away to my left another volgendrin drifted along, partly shielded by the island across the Bridge. I walked along the rail walkway above the mat of vines, walking quietly, coming up to the Hikdar who stood there, overseeing his overseers as they flogged on a line of slaves hard at work. I did not know what they were doing. The Bridge extended out from the cliff face above our heads, casting two pencil-thin lines from the twin suns. Something glittered on the distant flying island and I looked across, between the two halves of the Volgendrin of the Bridge.