The Arsenal of Miracles

by Gardner Fox

  “They call this duel the dravi-kor,” Peganna said. “It has been a part of our culture for endless generations. The winner need not kill the other. A blow on the head to knock him out would be sufficient. I think this is what young Avrak intends, since Parkan is his uncle.”

  Bran watched the play of the swords, finding his blood pounding faster in his veins. There was something elemental in this struggle for mastery of the clan. It had its roots deep in the ancient cultures of man wherever he existed, wherever he had risen out of savagery into civilization. Just so might men have fought on Earth with stone axes, with stabbing swords, with claymores, though there had been no formal rite to it as there was among the Lyanir, and the custom had long since faded into oblivion with the duel.

  He glanced sideways at Peganna, “And the rayanal? Is she also subject to the dravi-kor?”

  She smiled faintly. “Yes, except that we call it the raya-kor. The queen does not fight herself, naturally. Her champion fights for her.”

  “Who is your champion?”

  She smiled wryly. “My brother, Gron Dim. He has a great reputation with the sword and shield, has Gron Dhu. He made my reign safe except when he began to know ambition.”

  Below them, the old man was tiring. His shield moved slower and slower. Avrak forced the fighting, swift in his movements and untiring. He put his blade against his uncle and wove a web of steel around him until Parkan stood panting with weariness.

  Then Avrak leaped. His blade rose and fell. The flat of it took Parkan alongside the head and the old man fell like a tree going down in a gale.

  Bending, Avrak tore loose the gold band on his uncle’s arm and put it on his own. The sunlight caught it, made it shimmer as Avrak tossed his shield and sword aside and bent above the fallen man. They could hear him calling for water and bandages and healing herbs.

  Peganna sighed and stirred. “It’s like a symbol or—an omen. Am I to lose my queenship as Parkan lost his chieftainship, of a swordstroke? Or—have I already lost it?”

  Bran made no answer.

  They walked down the rocky slope and among the people who drew back at first and then rushed forward with glad cries, surrounding Peganna in pleasure and delight. As she had been greeted at Andelkrann, before Gron Dhu had captured her, so now she was greeted, patted and kissed by the women, admired and bowed to by the men.

  Leaving his uncle to the hands of his womenfolk, Avrak came forward to meet his rayanal. He would have gone down on a knee except that Peganna caught his hands and held them.

  “I may no longer be your queen, Avrak,” she smiled, and went on to speak of how Gron Dhu had treated her in Andelkrann.

  The new chief shook his reddish hair. “No man rules the Lyanir while you live, Peganna.” He looked pleased as a shout went up at his words. His new role sat his shoulders like an ill-made cloak, Bran thought, but in time it would smooth to a good fit.

  Parkan was coming forward, head wrapped in a white cloth, leaning his weight on the shoulder of a grandson. He stood beside Avrak and listened while Peganna explained why she had gone to Makkador and what had befallen her after she had met with Bran Magannon.

  It was night when she was done talking, seated on a little stool beside Avrak, staring down into the fires where the evening meal was cooking. Bran sat crosslegged to one side of her. Old Parkan was just beyond Avrak, sipping occasionally from a cup that held wine with crushed herbs in it. The old man had accepted the new chief cheerfully enough; privately, Bran thought he was rather pleased at the outcome. He had been chief for close to half a century; let another hold the office and know its cares! Yet he was determined to add his voice to the advice that would pepper Avrak for a time, until he had enough confidence in his judgment to make his own decisions.

  Peganna said, “The blue egg is the key, we hope. All we have to find is the lock it fits.”

  Avrak growled, “And Gron Dhu? Will he come seeking you here?”

  “If he does, what will you do?” Bran wondered.

  “If he threatens my queen, I’ll fight,” Avrak said simply.

  “Against the whole nation?”

  Parkan leaned forward, watching Avrak. What he saw in his hard face seemed to satisfy him, for he buried his mouth in his winecup.

  “To the last man, the last woman, if need be. The clan of the Axe swore allegiance to Peganna. While she lives the oath is binding.”

  “Let me release you, Avrak,” Peganna said sweetly.

  The young chief shook his head. “Only death can do that, highness. Yours or mine.” He grinned suddenly. “And we’re both too young to think of the grave.”

  Bran leaned forward, saying, “Number me among your warriors.”

  Avrak studied him, nodded, and put out his arm for the hand-fasting. Peganna laughed and clapped. Then she straightened on the stool and reached for the ladle in one of the cooking pots to stir it. A woman leaned forward, horrified that her queen should do her task, but Peganna waved her away.

  “It has been too long since I worked for the dravi. Let me at least do this,” she smiled. The firelight caught her features, burnishing them to a pale gold. A lock of her silver hair had fallen loose, to dangle about her shoulder.

  Bran thought her the most beautiful woman in the stars. As if she sensed his admiration she turned and wrinkled her nose at him. When Avrak left to speak to some returning hunters. Bran slipped into his place.

  After a moment, Peganna leaned against him.

  For three weeks, Bran shared the life of the clan.

  He went out with a party of hunters for rock deer. He helped a smith forge new swordblades, working the bellows and then taking his turn at the hammer that flattened the steel which was to be a blade. He sweated and his muscles grew weary with the work he did, but he delighted in his tiredness.

  He even sought out old Parkan for advice.

  “Teach me what I would know,” he said, and when he explained his need, Parkan took him for a tramp on the high ridges.

  When Peganna questioned him as to what he did with the old man, Bran would only grin and shake his head, telling her that there were facets of Lyanirn life he wanted to know more closely. If she pouted and stamped her foot—being more queenly than she guessed and used to having her own way—he would kiss her to breathlessness and say only that it was for her own good. With this, she had to be content.

  From time to time he wondered why Gron Dhu had not come here to claim his life and that of the rayanal. When he spoke of this, Peganna told him that Gron Dhu was not yet strong enough to risk an open attack on her. She was popular with the people. The soldiers served Gron Dhu but when it came to an open rupture between the clans, her brother must be more powerful than he was at present.

  “Until then, we are free to do as we want, as long as we stay close to the clan tents.”

  Then it was the turn of Bran to question her about what she did while he went walking with old Parkan. She dimpled and laughed and would tell him only that what she did was for her own good, too. If he had his secrets, so had she.

  Bran knew by the men who came and went on air-sleds that Peganna interested herself in more than the daily life of the clan. Many of the visitors wore the clan devices of the fox, the bear, the deer. They were dwellers of the lowlands and the nomads of the desert, shepherds and hunters. She sat long hours with them, always asking questions, always interested in their lives and in the happenings of those lives.

  She got the answer she wanted, one night, from a youth whose skin bore the heavy tan of long sunlight. He was from the southlands where the herds grazed and sunlight was a warm blanket over lush grass the greater part of the year. The southlanders wore baggy pantaloons tucked into short leather boots, with broad belts at their middles from which hung ropes and curving swords. In their country, the shepherds went naked to the waist but in this colder clime, each man wore a fur jerkin loosely tied with leather thongs.

  They had come riding up a narrow trail between the rocky slopes, five men in al
l, with the young spokesman at point. He was a sub-chief, Bran gathered as he came up to stand a little behind the seated Peganna, with long blonde hair tied in a tail that dangled down his back.

  “—a mound with a shining thing inside it,” the youth was saying. “My hound went sniffing and barking all around it. I had heard the orders of my queen that we were to investigate anything that might tell us more of the Crenn Lir people and so I dug, using my saber.”

  The youth looked a bit uncomfortable at that, as if it might be considered a shameful thing for a soldier-shepherd to do, but was reassured at the warm smile and understanding nod Peganna gave him. The faces of the four men at his back, sitting crosslegged as they might about one of their own campfires, did not move a muscle.

  “I dug, as I say, and I found a great metal wall. I called my people, many of them, and they dug, also. We found nothing, not even a door that would let us enter if we knew the manner of its opening, but we did discover—this.”

  From a leather bag on the ground at his feet, the sub-chief lifted out a crystal cube. As he held it up and the fireflames touched it so that everyone could see there was something bedded deep inside it.

  He came across the little clearing and knelt to the queen, holding out the cube on a palm. Peganna took it, frowning, and stared inside it. From behind her shoulder, Bran could see the tiny figure of a man.

  “A picture cube,” said Peganna and would have laid the cube aside but that Bran put his hand on her shoulder so that she turned to look up at him.

  “It may be more than that, highness,” he said softly.

  Curious, she turned it over and over in her fingers. “I see no more than a picture, Bran Magannon.”

  Bran was filled with an odd excitement. Long ago, on one of the worlds of Akkan, he had found such a thing, half-buried in silt near an old ruin. There had been a picture of a tree inside it which, when Bran was half asleep that night, had whispered in his mind.

  He had been sleeping. The cube of the tree lay near his sleeping bag. Restless, he had turned in his sleep so that his face was touching the cube. It seemed, in that half-waking state, that words had formed in his mind from the cube. Later he had tried to cause the same effect but could not, as though the cube were worn out from much use and was simply too tired to do what it should.

  He stood now with the cube Peganna handed him, smiling faintly down at it. The picture here was clear, as though formed yesterday. The picture of the tree had been a nebulous thing, faintly glimpsed as through water. The words in this cube might be fresh, strong.

  His hand lifted. The cold crystal touched his forehead.

  Bran cried out.

  You who find this, if ever you do, know that these are the last words of Antro Zorr, chief marchical of the Crenn Lir colony of Lar. Disaster has come to my people. Nearly all are dead now. I am one of the last to be left alive, hurrying my fellow Larns to finish this mausoleum in which we bury our past.

  Peganna was standing before him, eyes shining, breathing fitfully. She asked, “What was it? What happened? What did you see?”

  He touched the cube to her forehead, hearing her gasp, watching her lips open wide. There was a faraway stare in her eyes as she listened to that dead voice whisper telepathically to her brain.

  “A mausoleum,” she breathed. “In which the Crenn Lir left mementoes of their civilization. Bran, it has to be.”

  She whirled on the sub-chief, handing the cube to him. The youth touched it to his own head, then passed it to his fellows. It went around the campfire slowly, so that all might hear its voice.

  Bran said, “It is a new cube. The one I found on the Akkan planet was old, used up. That one was probably a poem carried about by the man who lost it or threw it away when it outlived its usefulness.”

  Peganna made an impatient gesture. “We will go to the mausoleum, at once. Tomorrow, at dawn.”

  “The cube was one of many, I’d guess,” Bran went on. “Left at the mausoleum to be found by anyone who came upon it. When it was built, the mausoleum might have been a splendid structure, impossible to miss.”

  She hit his arm with her fist in her eagerness. “Do you hear a single word I’m saying, Bran Magannon? What difference does the cube make? The mausoleum is the important thing.”

  His smile was humoring. “What good is the mausoleum to us when it’s Gron Dhu who has the blue egg?”

  She put a hand to her mouth, tears brimming up into her eyes. Her throat worked a moment, then she whispered. “Bran, are we always to know defeat? Can’t we win even a little victory?”

  “Why, we’re alive—and the blue egg exists. All we have to do is figure a way to get it.”

  But she slumped in despair, so that Bran had to lead her to the little stool she used as a throne. As she sat, she sighed and lifted her face in the fireflames. He could see tears clearly on her cheeks.

  “Suddenly, I’m so tired,” she whispered.

  His grin was hard. “Be tired, acushla. This is man’s work from now on. You sit and wait.” He went past her among the shepherds, talking swiftly, telling them that Peganna would be ready to travel on the morrow.

  “We go by air-sled but we need directions. The queen would see the mausoleum with her own eyes. She fights for her people, does your queen—for what lies inside the mausoleum may mean the freedom of you all. A better world to live. No radiation sickness for which you need these pills.”

  His hand brought out a handful of the white pills so they could see them. The sub-chief growled in his throat. He hated the pills, as did all his people, but they were a way to stay alive. Bran guessed they looked on the pills as a prisoner might on the manacles that held his ankles.

  As he spoke, he felt the first stirrings of homesickness inside himself. Earth lay far across the stars, forbidden to him by his own will and desire until he could come back a conqueror, a man to take his old rank of Fleet Admiral. Until now, this had only been a dream in his mind, something which had no chance at reality.

  Now, however—

  His fingers closed over the cube. It felt oddly warm, as though a part of the man inside it were still alive. An odd thought. And yet, perhaps not so odd. The cube might be himself, a dead thing without a world to call his own, a wanderer across the faces of the stars. Yet still alive, still warm with the unfulfilled hope that someday he could go home to Earth.

  Vindicated in the eyes of the Empire.

  As Commander Bran Magannon, Admiral of the Fleet.

  The breath hissed between his teeth. Had the cube been less than solid it might have broken in his grip. To stand on green Earth, to sniff its scented winds and the salt air of its oceans! To walk barefoot along a seashore, to hurtle on skis along a snowy slope, to walk a city street and see the products of the stars in the store windows!

  The meanest man on Earth could do all these, yet they were denied to him who had saved Earth from defeat at the hands of these people who were his hosts. Bran growled in his throat. Enough of self pity! What he must do now was find a way to make Earth take him back. Aye, and his bride who was to be, Peganna of the Silver Hair.

  “The directions,” he asked the youth. “How may I find the mausoleum?” As he spoke he felt Peganna touch his hand, stand beside him. Yes, she was as much a part of this quest as he was himself.

  The hell with protocol! He put his arm about her shoulders and hugged her. If any of her people objected to his familiarity with Peganna, let them try and stop him. She laughed softly as if she had read his mind, and leaned her head against his shoulder.

  Together, they learned the way to the mausoleum.

  Dawn lay behind the jets of their air-sleds as they coursed above a series of rocky highlands. Far and far away, they could make out distant hills which once had been high mountains, blue and hazy with distance, like the goals which Bran the Wanderer and Peganna of the Silver Hair had set for themselves.

  Like darting swallows they fled across the sky.

  First Bran and then Peganna woul
d take the lead in this race through space toward the tomb of a dead people. Slowly the stone ridges fell behind them and now they slipped across a rolling timber line of firs and spruces, that became a vast land of grass and dwarf pines which appeared to stretch interminably to the south. The sun was hot above them and when he could, Bran slipped out of the fur jerkin he had worn in the hills.

  Something white lay on the grass in the distance, sprawling like some flattened monster out of legend. Bran grinned when he saw it was no more than a great flock of sheep grazing as wolfdogs ran around their edges, barking at the stragglers. Now he could see the cotton tents of the shepherd clan, each striped and painted, with the history of its family.

  Peganna brought her sled to the ground in a cloud of dust. Bran was not quite so accomplished with the strange carrier. He bounced three times before the wheels caught and held.

  Peganna was speaking to an old man as he came up to them. The old man was nodding his head and pointing. Bran shaded his eyes.

  Yes, he could see it, now. Sunlight was glinting on a piece of metal jutting up from a distant mound. The mausoleum of the Crenn Lir.

  SEVEN

  A PART of one metal wall had been exposed. It loomed up like an ancient rampart, silent and mysterious, its story perhaps never to be learned. Behind it was the mound that hid it, which the years and the centuries had built of loess and detritus. Tufts of grass and a few hazelnut bushes carried here by the storm winds, grew in sparse fashion across its back, dots of green against a somber brown soil.

  Peganna stared at it, eyes alive as if it were a thing of beauty. Bran was more realistic. He went down into the depression carved out by the sword of the young sub-chief and kicked about among pebbles and bits of hardened dirt. It would be no mean feat to expose this bulky tomb to the rays of Miranor’s sun. Many men would be needed for such a dig, and Bran wondered if the proud Lyanir would agree to bend their backs at the word of their young queen.