The Sky People

by S. M. Stirling

  "Mais, here's the big city," Marc said. "Remind you of home, city girl?"

  "Shee-it, no," Cynthia said honestly, then grinned. "Not even the 'hood' I came from was like this."

  Set into the walls beside the entranceway in three-quarter relief were polychrome statues of bearded, armored men raising bronze swords aloft and trampling enemies below their feet. Each wore what looked like a Plains Indian war bonnet on a helmet, and around them were the symbols of the Kartahownian gods—a sun-disk, a tooth, a spade, a lightning-bolt, a dozen others—each with a stylized open hand beside it.

  "Showing the kings are 'under the hand' of the gods, you see," Blair said, in a voice with more than a touch of the lecture-hall in it.

  I knew that, Marc thought, as they exchanged salutes with the guards on either side of the gates. But I knew better than to say it.

  "Well, I'm off to the temple," Blair said. "Enjoy yourselves, children."

  Marc nodded. The Englishman had an audience with the High Priest of Koru, about the only possible excuse for not seeing the kings first.

  "Enjoy the archives," Marc said.

  Venus, Gagarin Continent—Far West

  Teesa blinked. The sights of many fought within her mind, blurring the green fronds before her eyes-of-the-flesh; the feel of air on skin, the scents in the noses of as many bodies overpowering her sense of self, of the smooth, narrow shaft of the blowgun beneath her hand, the rank green smell of ferns crushed beneath her knee, the presence of her warriors hiding about her.

  Mother, you died too soon! You did not teach me all that I must know! she thought, groaning within as she resisted the temptation to tear the band from her brow.

  Here near the Mystery, the featherweight of the Cave Master seemed greater than mountains. To the eyes-of-the-flesh it was a simple circlet of light-colored metal with a green gem above the wearer's brow, no more mysterious than a silver gewgaw such as the sea traders brought in her mother's time. But not even the hottest fire or the heaviest rock could mark or mar it; and somehow it always fit perfectly, whoever wore it.

  That was the least of its wonders, if you were of the sacred blood.

  With a focused effort she pushed the experience of bodies not hers out of her mind. Instead she drove her will outward in a simple command nothing to fear. Birds and fliers near the Cloud People band grew quiet, went about their daily rounds; a ground squirrel walked by within arm's reach, giving her a casual sniff and glance.

  Closer and closer came the footfalls of the beastmen. She could hear their voices grunting and hooting, unlike any tongue of men—but still more than those of wordless beasts. Sense them, sense them, the scent of each slow alien mind—

  Her hand went out beside her, fingers splayed and then clenched three times, then two held out: three-hands-and-two of them. A little more than twice her band's numbers. Then a gesture with her thumb across her own throat: We take them.

  Through the broad leaves of the ferns she could see the packed earth of the trail, below them on the slope. Across it was an old statue of the hunter god as a hawk-headed man with a spear, skillfully carved but neglected and moss-grown. Her eyes prickled for a second; without their children to tend them, how could the shrines of the gods and the graves of the Ancestor Spirits be strong enough to ward the Cloud Mountain folk?

  Beyond the trail were only glimpses of pine-trees and oaks and beeches, down to the valley where the Cloud Mountain People had once dwelt in pride and happiness. The river was hidden from her, nor had she ever seen it, but she knew every bend of it, where each family and clan had fishing rights, and the caves in the cliffs beyond, and the place where the huts and gardens had stood, the holy lake, and the very Mystery itself. All swarmed by the beastmen and their shes now, all defiled by their filth. Her people remembered, though, they remembered very well, and repeated the tales for each new generation over and over again.

  The raiders lay completely still. Teesa blinked her eyes closed, seeing each mind in her mind, like glowing lights. When the lights were in the right place—

  "Arag!" she screamed, leaping upright: Kill!

  Her blowgun came to her lips. A blob-nosed beastman face filled her gaze, not twenty paces away. Thin lips skinned back from menhir teeth as the thing screamed, threw aside the great haunch of meat he carried, and reached for the club and shield slung across his shoulders. She filled her lungs as her lips clamped on the carved ivory mouthpiece, then surged the air out from the bottom of her chest, clenching her gut to give it added force.

  Phhhtt.

  The bone needle had an amber bead on its rear to stabilize it in flight. The curve it made between her blowgun and the beastman was a single blurred streak, and then the creature tried to scream with eight inches of sharpened tharg-shin through his throat—not for long, because the grooves at its tip were coated in the crystallized venom of the black spider. Teesa's hand whipped down to the little pouch at her waist-belt made from the hide of a whole marmoset, with the head-cover folded back. The six warriors with her had shot at the same instant, and four of the beastmen were down dead; another had a needle through his arm and would die in less than a minute. Already his eyes glazed and foam dripped from his lips.

  The Cloud Mountain warriors snatched up spears or obsidian-headed axes and charged screaming the war cries of their clans, and the remaining beastmen surged to meet them. Teesa ran behind them, ready.

  Phhhtt.

  This time the needle sank to its bead beneath the beastman's ribs. The hairy torso convulsed, and the Cloud Mountain warrior's axe slammed into the side of his head an instant later. Beyond him a beastman had cast aside his weapons and grappled with one of her people, taking him in a bone-crushing bear's grip and snapping at his throat. Teesa dodged in and laid a hand on the bristly, sweat-slick hide and pushed with her mind.

  "Ai!" she screamed, staggering backward.

  The air filled with the stink of fear-loosened bowel as the beastman collapsed backward, head nearly touching heels as every muscle in his body convulsed, breaking bone and ripping loose from it as well. Teesa shuddered and staggered herself, forcing the death-fear out, a black tide that had nearly consumed her as well as the enemy fighter; the Cloud Mountain warrior dropped to his knees and panted like a tharg run to earth by hunters, caught by the backwash.

  Using the Cave Master to kill was dangerous. Her hand fumbled a little as she shoved another dart into the blowgun.

  Then a noise struck her, a long braaapppp! It was nothing she'd ever heard before, something like a grove of shamboo breaking in a bad storm, something like two rocks striking together again and again… and not like them at all. A hot, acrid stink came with it, alien, making her nose wrinkle.

  It was the last of the beastmen—by the feathers in his topknot and the necklace around his corded throat, their chief. Jondlar of the Axebeak clan was in front of him, the point of his spear almost touching the beastman's breast, but somehow his own back had erupted into a mass of blood and bone.

  No! she thought, as time seemed to stop. Not my man! No!

  Jondlar was falling, falling backward; as he did she saw a row of holes across his torso, much smaller than the ones in his back and just turning from black to red. The beastman held a… something. It was the length of a club with a forward part a little like a blowgun, and a sheen as of metal—but no metal she had ever seen before. From below it a flat boxlike curved shape jutted out, and he fumbled at it—

  That is a weapon! she knew suddenly.

  Action followed thought; there was no time for grief. The curved shape came free of the weapon and the beastman snatched for another like he held in a vest across his body, but her blowgun was already at her lips.

  For my beloved! she cried within, and shot.

  The beastman chief threw up his arms as the dart slammed home into his eye. That close to the brain, the poison killed in the space of a double blink, and he fell limp as a wet rope.

  Teesa looked around. Her warriors were wide-eyed, shaking
, on the brink of flight. Ordinary death they did not fear overmuch, but magic was another matter. There was frank terror in their eyes as she held the strange weapon of the beastman chief in her arms.

  When there is time I will learn its secret, she told herself. That which slew her man would avenge him. Aloud she said, "Be brave! You are the Cloud Mountain People, clans of the Axebeak, the Raveners, the Winged. Be brave!"

  She could see the words take effect and feel them through her mind as she relaxed the screens that kept the death-anguish away from her.

  "Gather up all their gear that is strange—that is a new-thing. And some food; we will not be able to stop to hunt and forage while we run."

  The men obeyed, though they held the new-things gingerly. Taldi showed her a knife as long as a man's forearm, of some shining metal. He touched it, and then pulled a callused thumb back in surprise as it sliced deep enough to bring a thin line of blood.

  "This is cursed!" he said.

  "No, fool," she said, overcoming her own impulse to flinch. "This is sharp. And tough; see—"

  She rapped the flat of the blade hard on a rock, and it rang with an odd vibrating call like nothing she had ever heard before

  "—it does not shatter, as obsidian would. Bring all such here."

  She waited impatiently; while she waited, it was harder to fight back the tears. Then she passed her hand over first the Cave Master's jewel and next the plunder.

  "See, I take away ill-luck by the power of the Mystery. Now we must go. The beastmen will be here soon. I can hide us on the track, but not if they see us from a distance first."

  Venus, Gagarin Continent—Kartahown

  "You are of the imiAmerican," the High Priest of Koru said.

  He sat motionless on his throne before the great gilt solar disk of his god. Spicy and bitter smoke from burning incense-resin coiled up to either side of him from censers held by motionless underpriests.

  "Why should we trust your word, you deceivers, blasphemers, violators of all good custom and decency?" he went on in excellent English.

  Christopher Blair—or Christophe, as he thought of himself most of the time—felt a fine bead of sweat break out on his forehead. He forced himself to take a long calming breath and lean back in the shamboo chair. That was a sign in itself that Tau'tan wasn't as hostile as he acted. Chairs were a luxury here, reserved for the elite, and that Blair had been given one was a good sign—although not as good a one as refreshments would have been. That would make him a guest, and as such absolutely sacred in theory… though Kartahownians were human, and hence didn't always put their theories into practice.

  "In every people, there are factions and divisions," he replied. "Are all the men of Kartahown as one in all things?"

  Tau'tan smiled thinly and tossed his head, the local gesture for no. "Truth," he said. "There is some truth in what you speak."

  "Thin" was the word that came to mind when you saw the ecclesiastic. He was tall, an inch over six feet, and gaunt to an almost skeletal degree. Green eyes burned in the face of an ancient eagle; the resemblance was increased by the roach of hair down the center of his shaven scalp, short at front but longer at the rear and slicked up with wax into a crest that curled forward. The sun god's gold glittered from rings and bracelets and a broad rayed pectoral; his robe left one shoulder bare as was common custom, but it was ankle-length and covered with shaggy tufts of wool dyed yellow to show his office and allegiance. Besides being chief hierarch of the Great God, he was a cousin of the Left-Hand House, one of the city's royal families, and a major noble in his own right.

  For a long moment the green eyes bored into Blair's. Then Tau'tan waved a hand. One of the shaven-headed acolytes standing behind his chair turned and padded away, his feet silent on the white-streaked black stone of the floor. When he returned it was with a servant who bore a tray with bread, honey, fruit wine, water, and cakes made from something like dates and something very similar to walnuts. Blair sipped and nibbled; it was difficult with a throat clenched tight, but necessary. The cakes were palatable, and the fermented fruit juice awful beyond description.

  When he had eaten and drunk enough to satisfy ceremony, he went on: "Nor are we who have… come to this land…"

  He didn't say world. That was one of the sore points with the priests of the sun god; the notion of other planets sharing the light of the sun struck them as obscenely blasphemous.

  "… all of one people, really. We are of… different cities. Not all are willing allies of the Americans, an arrogant and thoughtless people."

  "Ah. Restive subject-allies," the Kartahownian said; his city had conquered most of the Mother River's valley in the past two centuries and had plenty of experience with the attendant problems. "I understand this. What then do you offer? Can you remove your polluting presence from the Land Beneath the Hand of the Gods?"

  Blair sighed and shook his head. "As well ask your mariners to cease sailing to the northern isles," he said. "If one city of the Land ceased, would the others?"

  Tau'tan's lips narrowed. The Kartahownians had been sailing to the archipelago off the northern coast of Gagarin for a long time, and "islander" meant much the same to them as "wog" had to a Victorian Briton. Then the priest controlled his temper.

  "We have heard of this other settlement of Sky People, far south of here in the upper basins of the Mother River," he said. "Cosmograd, is it not called? And we have heard there is no friendship between it and Jamestown. Are you of that folk?"

  Blair shook his head. "No. There are many, ah, cities and kingdoms among the… Sky People. Mine is neither of the imiAmerican and their allies nor of those who rule Cosmograd. We are a people of more ancient culture and wish only friendship with the people of Kartahown."

  Tau'tan grinned like a shark. "And to outdo your rivals for trade and wealth and glory and mastery," he said. "Yes. Perhaps we should discuss this further."

  He snapped his fingers again, and a cup carved from a single carnosaur tooth was placed in his hand, full of the revoltingly thick, sweet fruit wine.

  His other hand waved. "You may speak freely. None of my attendants understands your tongue."

  And with nothing recorded… what do les Americaines call it…plausible deniability?

  I hope that's not symbolic, Marc thought, as the Left-Hand King of Kartahown brandished a new steel sword, smiling at the American guests. Tahyo pressed himself back against Marc's leg, silent but tense.

  Unlike the first steel sword—the one the king had worn for years—this wasn't a gift brought from Earth. It had been made by his own Terran-trained smiths from ore smelted right here on Venus.

  Maybe we should have insisted that the first load from the smelters be made into plowshares or frying pans. Oo ye yi, I hope he doesn't decide to chop someone up to test it!

  "Wonderful!" the monarch said. "And my blacksmiths"—he used the English word, horribly garbled—"tell me that soon there will be many more!"

  Marc could have sworn that Cynthia raised one slim dark brow ever so slightly at the exchange; she certainly coughed slightly, but that might just be from the strong bitter smell of incense.

  The King of the Left Hand was a man in his early forties, middle-aged by local standards, his hair and curled beard shot through with gray though he had most of his own teeth; the spare tire around his middle was a carefully acquired mark of status. The King of the Right Hand was sitting more quietly, clean-shaven as befitted an unmarried youth. He smiled at the Earthlings as well; most of his closest advisers were priestesses of Owl Eyes, the goddess of agriculture and wisdom, and the friendliest of the religious hierarchy to the Sky People. Both kings wore pleated cloth-of-gold robes to their feet, and towering headdresses of green and scarlet feathers in crowns of gold set with uncut gems.

  The thrones they sat in were of wood, a dark near-ebony thickly set with polished, sectioned scutes from the belly-armor of a type of 'saur. They were cut thin enough to be translucent, spreading in a high arch behind the sea
ts; they looked a little like the spread fan of a peacock, and something like stained glass or the wing of a butterfly, glowing with the light that shone through the windows behind them. A few shipments sent back to Earth by solar-sail cargo pod had been auctioned after study, for publicity and to support the space program; the price they fetched had actually paid for the shipping costs, or nearly. Here on Venus the material was much less expensive, merely worth several times its weight in gold.

  At that, this was the informal throne room, probably being used now to make the Terrans' refusal to make the customary prostration less offensive to traditionalists. It was merely twenty yards by ten, with a high, arched ceiling. The yard-thick walls were rammed earth around a matrix of shamboo, sort of a primitive equivalent of ferroconcrete, pierced with tall, narrow windows and smoothly plastered and painted with colorful murals in a blocky, half-stylized fashion. They showed the kings and their ancestors at war, the hunt, or sacrifice; the gods of Kartahown hovered over them, smelling the smoke of the offerings, shedding blessing and help. The floor was some highly polished dark stone, slick underfoot. Warriors with gilded armor and painted shields stood around the edge of the room; within milled a crowd of nobles and functionaries and priests in a blaze of bright cloth, feathers, and silver and gold.

  Only the Queen Mothers and First Wives sat, besides the kings, and on stools rather than chairs, but those were important posts, making the holders powerful in their own right. Clerks, some of them women, stood by the more senior officials and commanders, their reed pens ready to write on palm-wide strips of shamboo; lean, muscular runners in loincloths and complex leather hats stood poised, ready to dash off with messages. The lands ruled from here covered an area the size of California, with a population several million strong.

  It would all have been more impressive without the smell, which the incense cut only a little, and minus the flies. The kings and Queen Mothers and a few other bigwigs had servants behind them with billowy fans of feathers on long poles; most of the rest made do with whisks. Marc felt himself beginning to twitch like a horse in a summer pasture, sure that something was going to crawl up his nose soon. Occasionally Tahyo's jaws went clop on a passing bug.