Now to throw a scare in them, Ruori decided. “Fire arrows,” he said. Out on deck, hardwood pistons were shoved into little cylinders, igniting tinder at the bottom; thus oil-soaked shafts were kindled. As the enemy came in range, red comets began to streak from the Buffalo archers.
Had his scheme not worked, Ruori would have turned off. He didn’t want to sacrifice more men in hand-to-hand fighting; instead, he would have tried seriously to burn the hostile airship from afar, though his strategy needed it. But the morale effect of the previous disaster was very much present. As blazing arrows thunked into their gondola, a battle tactic so two-edged that no northern crew was even equipped for it, the Canyonites panicked and went over the side. Perhaps, as they parachuted down, a few noticed that no shafts had been aimed at their gas bag.
“Grab fast!” sang Ruori. “Douse any fires!”
Grapnels thumbed home. The blimps rocked to a relative halt. Men leaped to the adjacent gallery; bucketsful of water splashed.
“Stand by,” said Ruori. “Half our boys on the prize. Break out the lifelines and make them fast.”
He put down the tube. A door squeaked behind him. He turned, as Tresa reentered the bridge. She was still pale, but she had combed her hair, and her head was high.
“Another!” she said with a note near joy. “Only one of them left!”
“But it will be full of their men.” Ruori scowled. “I wish now I had not accepted your refusal to go aboard the Dolphin, I wasn’t thinking clearly. This is too hazardous.”
“Do you think I care for that?” she said. “I am a Carabán.”
“But I care,” he said.
The haughtiness dropped from her; she touched his hand, fleetingly, and color rose in her cheeks. “Forgive me. You have done so much for us. There is no way we can ever thank you.”
“Yes, there is,” said Ruori.
“Name it.”
“Do not stop your heart just because it has been wounded.”
She looked at him with a kind of sunrise in her eyes.
His boatswain appeared at the outer door. “All set, Captain. We’re holding steady at a thousand feet, a man standing by every valve these two crates have got.”
“Each has been assigned a particular escape line?”
“Aye.” The boatswain departed.
“You’ll need one too. Come.” Ruori took Tresa by the hand and led her onto the gallery. They saw sky around them, a breeze touched their faces and the deck underfoot moved like a live thing. He indicated many light cords from the Dolphin’s store, bowlined to the rail. “We aren’t going to risk parachuting with untrained men,” he said. “But you’ve no experience in skinning down one of these. I’ll make you a harness which will hold you safely. Ease yourself down hand over hand. When you reach the ground, cut loose.” His knife slashed some pieces of rope and he knotted them together with a seaman’s skill. When he fitted the harness on her, she grew tense under his fingers.
“But I am your friend,” he murmured.
She eased. She even smiled, shakenly. He gave her his knife and went back inboard.
And now the last pirate vessel stood up from the earth. It moved near; Ruori’s two craft made no attempt to flee. He saw sunlight flash on edged metal. He knew they had witnessed the end of their companion craft and would not be daunted by the same technique. Rather, they would close in, even while their ship burned about them. If nothing else, they could kindle him in turn and then parachute to safety. He did not send arrows.
When only a few fathoms separated him from the enemy, he cried: “Let go the valves!”
Gas whoofed from both bags. The linked blimps dropped.
“Fire!” shouted Ruori. Hiti aimed his catapult and sent a harpoon with anchor cable through the bottom of the attacker. “Burn and abandon!”
Men on deck touched off oil which other men splashed from jars. Flames sprang high.
With the weight of two nearly deflated vessels dragging it from below, the Canyon ship began to fall. At five hundred feet the tossed lifelines draped across flat rooftops and trailed in the streets. Ruori went over the side. He scorched his palms going down.
He was not much too quick. The harpooned blimp released compressed hydrogen and rose to a thousand feet with its burden, seeking sky room. Presumably no one had yet seen that the burden was on fire. In no case would they find it easy to shake or cut loose from one of Hiti’s irons.
Ruori stared upward. Fanned by the wind, the blaze was smokeless, a small fierce sun. He had not counted on his fire taking the enemy by total surprise. He had assumed they would parachute to earth, where the Meycans could attack. Almost, he wanted to warn them.
Then flame reached the remaining hydrogen in the collapsed gas bags. He heard a sort of giant gasp. The topmost vessel became a flying pyre. The wind bore it out over the city walls. A few antlike figures managed to spring free. The parachute of one was burning.
“Sant’sima Marí,” whispered a voice, and Tresa crept into Ruori’s arms and hid her face.
After dark, candles were lit throughout the palace. They could not blank the ugliness of stripped walls and smoke-blackened ceilings. The guardsmen who lined the throne room were tattered and weary. Nor did S’ Antón itself rejoice, yet. There were too many dead.
Ruori sat throned on the calde’s dais, Tresa at his right and Páwolo Dónoju on his left. Until a new set of officials could be chosen, these must take authority. The Don sat rigid, not allowing his bandaged head to droop; but now and then his lids grew too heavy to hold up. Tresa watched enormous-eyed from beneath the hood of a cloak wrapping her. Ruori sprawled at ease, a little more happy now that the fighting was over.
It had been a grim business, even after the heartened city troops had sallied and driven the surviving enemy before them. Too many Sky Men fought till they were killed. The hundreds of prisoners, mostly from the first Maurai success, would prove a dangerous booty; no one was sure what to do with them.
“But at least their host is done for,” said Dónoju.
Ruori shook his head. “No, S’ñor. I am sorry, but you have no end in sight. Up north are thousands of such aircraft, and a strong hungry people. They will come again.”
“We will meet them, Captain. The next time we shall be prepared. A larger garrison, barrage balloons, fire kites, cannons that shoot upward, perhaps a flying navy of our own … we can learn what to do.”
Tresa stirred. Her tone bore life again, though a life which hated. “In the end, we will carry the war to them. Not one will remain in all the Corado highlands.”
“No,” said Ruori. “That must not be.”
Her head jerked about; she stared at him from the shadow of her hood. Finally she said, “True, we are bidden to love our enemies, but you cannot mean the Sky People. They are not human!”
Ruori spoke to a page. “Send for the chief prisoner.”
“To hear our judgment on him?” asked Dónoju. “That should be done formally, in public.”
“Only to talk with us,” said Ruori.
“I do not understand you,” said Tresa. Her words faltered, unable to carry the intended scorn. “After everything you have done, suddenly there is no manhood in you.”
He wondered why it should hurt for her to say that. He would not have cared if she had been anyone else.
Loklann entered between two guards. His hands were tied behind him and dried blood was on his face, but he walked like a conqueror under the pikes. When he reached the dais, he stood, legs braced apart, and grinned at Tresa.
“Well,” he said, “so you find these others less satisfactory and want me back.”
She jumped to her feet and screamed: “Kill him!”
“No!” cried Ruori.
The guardsmen hesitated, machetes half drawn. Ruori stood up and caught the girl’s wrists. She struggled, spitting like a cat. “Don’t kill him, then,” she agreed at last, so thickly it was hard to understand. “Not now. Make it slow. Strangle him, burn him alive, toss h
im on your spears—”
Ruori held fast till she stood quietly.
When he let go, she sat down and wept.
Páwolo Dónoju said in a voice like steel: “I believe I understand. A fit punishment must certainly be devised.”
Loklann spat on the floor. “Of course,” he said. “When you have a man bound, you can play any number of dirty little games with him.”
“Be still,” said Ruori. “You are not helping your own cause. Or mine.”
He sat down, crossed his legs, laced fingers around a knee, and gazed before him, into the darkness at the hall’s end. “I know you have suffered from this man’s work,” he said carefully. “You can expect to suffer more from his kinfolk in the future. They are a young race, heedless as children, even as your ancestors and mine were once young. Do you think the Perio was established without hurt and harm? Or, if I remember your history rightly, that the Spañol people were welcomed here by the Inios? That the Ingliss did not come to N’Zealann with slaughter, and that the Maurai were not formerly cannibals? In an age of heroes, the hero must have an opponent.
“Your real weapon against the Sky People is not an army, sent to lose itself in unmapped mountains. … Your priests, merchants, artists, craftsmen, manners, fashions, learning—there is the means to bring them to you on their knees, if you will use it.”
Loklann started. “You devil,” he whispered. “Do you actually think to convert us to … a woman’s faith and a city’s cage?” He shook back his tawny mane and roared till the walls rung. “No!”
“It will take a century or two,” said Ruori.
Don Páwolo smiled in his young scanty beard. “A refined revenge, S’ñor Captain,” he admitted.
“Too refined!” Tresa lifted her face from her hands, gulped after air, held up claw-crooked fingers and brought them down as if into Loklann’s eyes. “Even if it could be done,” she snarled, “even if they did have souls, what do we want with them, or their children or grandchildren … they who murdered our babies today? Before almighty Dío—I am the last Carabán and I will have my following to speak for me in Meyco—there will never be anything for them but extermination. We can do it, I swear. Many Tekkans would help, for plunder. I shall yet live to see your home burning, you swine, and your sons hunted with dogs.”
She turned frantically toward Ruori. “How else can our land be safe? We are ringed in by enemies. We have no choice but to destroy them, or they will destroy us. And we are the last Merikan civilization.”
She sat back and shuddered. Ruori reached over to take her hand. It felt cold. For an instant, unconsciously, she returned the pressure, then jerked away.
He sighed in his weariness.
“I must disagree,” he said. “I am sorry. I realize how you feel.”
“You do not,” she said through clamped jaws. “You cannot.”
“But after all,” he said, forcing dryness, “I am not just a man with human desires. I represent my government. I must return to tell them what is here, and I can predict their response.
“They will help you stand off attack. That is not an aid you can refuse, is it? The men who will be responsible for Meyco are not going to decline our offer of alliance merely to preserve a precarious independence of action, whatever a few extremists may argue for. And our terms will be most reasonable. We will want little more from you than a policy working toward conciliation and close relations with the Sky People, as soon as they have tired of battering themselves against our united defense.”
“What?” said Loklann. Otherwise the chamber was very still. Eyes gleamed white from the shadows of helmets, toward Ruori.
“We will begin with you,” said the Maurai. “At the proper time, you and your fellows will be escorted home. Your ransom will be that your nation allow a diplomatic and trade mission to enter.”
“No,” said Tresa, as if speech hurt her throat. “Not him. Send back the others if you must, but not him—to boast of what he did today.”
Loklann grinned again, looking straight at her. “I will,” he said.
Anger flicked in Ruori, but he held his mouth shut.
“I do not understand,” hesitated Don Páwolo. “Why do you favor these animals?”
“Because they are more civilized than you,” said Ruori.
“What?” The noble sprang to his feet, snatching for his sword. Stiffly, he sat down again. His tone froze over. “Explain yourself, S’ñor.”
Ruori could not see Tresa’s face, in the private night of her hood, but he felt her drawing farther from him than a star. “They have developed aircraft,” he said, slumping back in his chair, worn out and with no sense of victory; O great creating Tanaroa, grant me sleep this night!
“But—”
“That was done from the ground up,” explained Ruori, “not as a mere copy of ancient techniques. Beginning as refugees, the Sky People created an agriculture which can send warriors by the thousands from what was desert, yet plainly does not require peon hordes. On interrogation I have learned that they have sunpower and hydroelectric power, a synthetic chemistry of sorts, a well-developed navigation with the mathematics which that implies, gunpowder, metallurgics, aerodynamics. … Yes, I daresay it’s a lopsided culture, a thin layer of learning above a largely illiterate mass. But even the mass must respect technology, or it would never have been supported to get as far as it has.
“In short,” he sighed, wondering if he could make her comprehend, “the Sky People are a scientific race—the only one besides ourselves which we Maurai have yet discovered. And that makes them too precious to lose.
“You have better manners here, more humane laws, higher art, broader vision, every traditional virtue. But you are not scientific. You use rote knowledge handed down from the ancients. Because there is no more fossil fuel, you depend on muscle power; inevitably, then, you have a peon class, and always will. Because the iron and copper mines are exhausted, you tear down old ruins. In your land I have seen no research on wind power, sun power, the energy reserves of the living cell—not to mention the theoretical possibility of hydrogen fusion without a uranium primer. You irrigate the desert at a thousand times the effort it would take to farm the sea, yet have never even tried to improve your fishing techniques. You have not exploited the aluminum which is still abundant in ordinary clays, not sought to make it into strong alloys; no, your farmers use tools of wood and volcanic glass.
“Oh, you are neither ignorant nor superstitious. What you lack is merely the means of gaining new knowledge. You are a fine people; the world is the sweeter for you; I love you as much as I loathe this devil before us. But ultimately, my friends, if left to yourselves, you will slide gracefully back to the Stone Age.”
A measure of strength returned. He raised his voice till it filled the hall. “The way of the Sky People is the rough way outward, to the stars. In that respect—and it overrides all others—they are more akin to us Maurai than you are. We cannot let our kin die.”
He sat then, in silence, under Loklann’s smirk and Dónoju’s stare. A guardsman shifted on his feet, with a faint squeak of leather harness.
Tresa said at last, very low in the shadows: “That is your final word, S’ñor?”
“Yes,” said Ruori. He turned to her. As she leaned forward, the hood fell back a little, so that candlelight touched her. And the sight of green eyes and parted lips gave him back his victory.
He smiled. “I do not expect you will understand at once. May I discuss it with you again, often? When you have seen the Islands, as I hope you will—”
“You foreigner!” she screamed.
Her hand cracked on his cheek. She rose and ran down the dais steps and out of the hall.
About the Author
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) grew up bilingual in a Danish American family. After discovering science fiction fandom and earning a physics degree at the University of Minnesota, he found writing science fiction more satisfactory. Admired for his “hard” science fiction, m
ysteries, historical novels, and “fantasy with rivets,” he also excelled in humor. He was the guest of honor at the 1959 World Science Fiction Convention and at many similar events, including the 1998 Contact Japan 3 and the 1999 Strannik Conference in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Besides winning the Hugo and Nebula Awards, he has received the Gandalf, Seiun, and Strannik, or “Wanderer,” Awards. A founder of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, he became a Grand Master, and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
In 1952 he met Karen Kruse; they married in Berkeley, California, where their daughter, Astrid, was born, and they later lived in Orinda, California. Astrid and her husband, science fiction author Greg Bear, now live with their family outside Seattle.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1983 by Trigonier Trust
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
978-1-5040-2434-1
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