Burning Tower

by Larry Niven

  “She’s doing it,” Chalker said. His voice was unnaturally calm. “She’s got every bird out there following her. Chariots are all clear.”

  Sandry nodded. His men were safe for the moment. Now for Tower. “Sound recall.”

  “Sir.” Chalker signaled. More trumpet notes.

  “What do you see?” Sandry shouted up to Mouse Warrior on the wagontop.

  “Too much dust.”

  Dust and confusion. Maydreo trotted past Sandry’s chariot, wheeled, and stood ready, letting the horses rest. On the other side of the corral they’d formed out of wagons and ruined hogans, the other charioteers would be doing the same thing, waiting, resting.

  “Here she comes!” Mouse Warrior shouted.

  “Ready all!” Sandry called. It was hard to keep his voice clear. Tower! Be safe! There was no point in screaming—screamed orders were never understood—but he wanted to scream just the same.

  Hoofbeats. Now he could look up the line between the hogans. Dust, and out of the cloud of dust a white horse—not a horse but Spike, looking huge—with a tiny girl in brown on his back, her hair flying out behind her, her bare feet flashing in the afternoon light. And behind her, gaping beaks and bright feathers. Close. Too close!

  But not too close. She galloped past Sandry, to the end of the corral, to the barricade they had built higher than a man, and Spike leaped, an arc against the sky. The birds came on, the lead one made its jump—

  And jumped onto a spear point. Another bird tried to jump the fence, and the wagon train blacksmith smashed at its head with his big hammer. The bird fell back into the corral, and two more stumbled over it to crash into the fence.

  The birds were in a frenzy trying to reach Burning Tower. Sandry shouted, “Tower, throw…”

  Throw the cookpot at the birds! But they’d discussed that, and she remembered. She threw. The lid was still on, curse it! Then the pot bounced into the middle of the corral, and a bird snapped at it and the lid rolled free, and then the glowing stone inside.

  And the birds became a seething, shrieking storm of feathers, claws, and beaks. They were ripping each other apart, all trying to reach the glowing stone statue of a bird. Sandry screamed, “Now! Squirrel, now!”

  Fire blazed across the fence line, then everywhere in the corral. Wood chips, brush, logs from the ruined hogans, all burst into flame as Squirrel danced on top of the wagons. Green Stone’s slingers shouted in triumph and hurled their stones into the mass of green and orange feathers.

  Birds turned, frantic to get out of the corral, but across the end of the corral stood Fullerman and his shield wall, while Gundrin and the marines ran along the sides of the corral to thrust spears at any bird attempting to get out.

  The first wave of birds struck the spears and shields. One man was down, but Secklers rushed in to fill his place, the big Lordkin knife swinging murder.

  Squirrel danced faster. Flames rose, until there were no more green and orange feathers, only smoking black ruin, and the screams of the birds faded. Mouse Warrior chanted in triumph.

  And there was Tower, still mounted on Spike. He couldn’t go to her. The one-horn pranced and reared and wouldn’t let anyone near. But she was there, mounted, tears and laughter mixed. She waved to him.

  He ran as close to her as the one-horn would let him. It looked at him, and its rage seemed to turn to something like fear. “Marry me!” he shouted.

  Spike reared high, stood on two legs, and danced, fear and rage. “Down, Spike,” she shouted. She was just able to look at Sandry. “Of course!”

  And now everyone was rushing to them, Green Stone and the Younglords, everyone shouting in triumph. Green Stone came up to Sandry.

  “You heard?” Sandry demanded.

  “I have expected this for a year,” Green Stone said. “So has she. I expected it first with dread, but for weeks I have hoped. Welcome, brother found.”

  Spike was rearing again, but Burning Tower was able to dismount. She led the one-horn stallion to a wagon and tied his bridle to it, then ran to Sandry. They looked at each other, held hands, and stood at arm’s length for a moment—then she was in his arms. She looked up at her brother, saw his smile, and clung to Sandry.

  Chalker came up with two goblets of wine. He handed one to her, one to Sandry.

  Sandry’s eyes met hers. He lifted the goblet. Burning Tower was confused for a moment, but Sandry was sure of himself. He sipped from his goblet, then held it out to her. She drank. Then she sipped from her own and held it to his lips. He smiled broadly.

  Chalker was grinning like a Lordkin. “Congratulations, My Lord, My Lady. On a good day’s work, and a long life together.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Feast and Famine

  The wagon train rolled along a wall that was no more than rocky earth pushed into place. “Primitive,” Sandry said.

  “They used magic first, and craftsmanship too.” Squirrel waved at the gate. It was tall and ornate, made of vertical copper bars. It stood in a long ridge of granite, a civilized stretch of wall until it abruptly became little more than a ridge of earth and stone. “Maybe saved their talismans for something more urgent.”

  Tower tried to picture what could be more urgent than keeping terror birds out of a city.

  Men, women, and children were crowded up against the bars, looking out through the gate. They spoke in whispers; they sounded like a wind full of ghosts. Now someone was shouting orders. Now the crowd edged away from four tall men in armor polished to a glitter. As Sandry and Green Stone and their entourage reached the gate, the gate swung wide.

  Sandry had never seen a besieged city before. He waited for Green Stone to announce himself.

  The wagonmaster shouted in Condigeano. “Are you hungry?”

  A laugh, then a small, ragged chorus answered.

  “There’s fresh-killed bird meat up there!”

  A jumble of voices rose. Only a few must have understood Condigeano, but they were translating for the rest, and the wind carried smoke and roasted meat.

  What followed then resembled a stampede. Sandry held back his men, and Green Stone his wagons, as a horde of pale brown robes and a few armored, shouting soldiers streamed out and uphill.

  What remained were a great many soldiers and a handful of what must be merchants and dignitaries, judging by their dress and elaborately coiffed hair. One, then the rest bowed low. A tall man straightened first. His robe was wonderfully ornate. A garden splashed across the front, worked in colored thread: yellow corn, red peppers, a rainbow of flowers, tall trees in black and green. He announced, in oddly flavored Condigeano, “Gentlemen and ladies, you have broken the siege. We thank you. Crescent City is yours. And I am Mayor Buzzard at Play.”

  “You do us much honor. I am Green Stone of the Feathersnake wagons. This is Lord Sandry, who leads our fighters.” Green Stone wondered what would happen if he accepted the gift of the city; he decided against. “We come in trade.”

  “Good! Our water source comes from outside the gate but was never contaminated. You will camp along the West Bank, where the other caravans are. And when you can…” The Mayor hesitated, then: “We hope you’ll tell us how to deal with the nightmare birds.”

  “They make a formidable enemy, Mayor. Today we had some luck. We hope to hear the tale of what happened here. First we should get the caravan settled, and then—I trust there will still be stewed bird meat. We came hungry.”

  The streets were filthy with trash and sewage. Feathersnake’s wagons and Sandry’s men hesitated. In that moment, the mayor sighed, then shouted, “Wait here.”

  “For what?” Green Stone asked.

  “I’d hoped—never mind. Move off the avenue, I beg. Off to the side. Then wait. Gentlemen?” He spoke to the local merchants in alien speech.

  Green Stone set to moving the wagons off the filthy street. There was room among the conical houses. Meanwhile Mayor Buzzard at Play and a score of dignitaries—and two lines of soldiers—marched down the avenue t
o the main square.

  The Lordkin jogged to catch up. Spotted Lizard and Burning Tower hesitated, then joined them. The Lordkin grinned, welcoming; they bracketed the woman and child for safety.

  Flower gardens partly converted to fruit trees and truck gardens surrounded a palace and a stairway. The palace was big, a cone of vertically mounted logs that glittered like a rainbow…petrified logs, tree trunks turned to stone and garnet and chinked with mud, leaving vertical chinks for windows. It seemed to Burning Tower that the palace had once floated—that the stairs ended where the triangular front entrance would have been. The mayor climbed the broad stairs alone, leaving his little cluster of officials and merchants below.

  He stopped, puffing a bit, above a crippling drop. He looked about him.

  Now he reached inside his wonderful robe and pulled out a crude metal pot, opened it and set it at his feet. In the garden embroidered across his chest, the trees and the corn whipped in an unseen breeze.

  Turning his back on the gate, the Mayor began to dance above nothing, chanting in a language Tower didn’t know. She caught phrases from Squirrel’s secret languages, given in a twisted accent.

  Secklers asked, “What’s he doing?”

  The merchants had been keeping their distance from the Lordkin, but one answered: “Stand clear. This is well past due.”

  Burning Tower saw motion down at the far end of the main avenue.

  Garbage and sewage rose in a great stinking wave. It flowed toward the palace and stairs. Burning Tower coughed and then held her breath as it went past. Some of the mud spilled off into the gardens. Most of it kept moving, high and higher yet, up the street toward the gate and Feathersnake caravan. The Bison Tribe merchants and Sandry’s men fell back among the houses as a tidal wave of garbage spilled through the gate and on into the countryside.

  The dignitaries applauded. Burning Tower and the Lordkin joined in.

  The mayor strode down the stairs. His dignity held for a moment; then he looked at two Lordkin, a child, and a woman, and laughed. He said, “I wanted witnesses! You sent them away!”

  Secklers asked, “Mayor, why did you let it get so dirty here?”

  The mayor wasn’t angry, only curious. “You’re a Tep’s Town Lordkin? And you ask me that?”

  “I’m Secklers, Lord. I follow Chief Wanshig of the Placehold. He wouldn’t have let the streets around the Placehold reach this state.”

  Mayor Buzzard at Play spoke above the dignitaries’ angry grumbling. “Well, Secklers, it’s our usual practice to dump our trash outside our homes. Every few days we summon up scavengers to deal with it and then send them away again. Every thirty or forty days, I use the greater spell and send it all out to the farms. And that’s the way it was until the birds came. The nightmare birds come wherever there’s magic! Now what would you have done?”

  Secklers grinned into the mayor’s rage. “I’d ask someone smarter.”

  “We locked up all the talismans.”

  “Good.”

  “I was a caravan shaman for half my life before I became mayor. This city runs on the talisman trade. The birds cut me off from my living and the city from its life! Now I can make magic again, and the streets have got to be cleaned for your thank-the-gods caravan, but there’s nobody to see but you and these few friends. My citizens have all gone away.”

  Burning Tower had learned a little from her brother. She said, “Follow them.”

  Lurk saw no reason to hide his origins from the churning citizenry of Crescent City. He was Nothing Was Seen, a bandit’s child adopted by the Feathersnake wagons, come all this way to return the boy Spotted Lizard to his family. Green Stone had sent him to mingle and to see that the caravan’s gifts weren’t wasted. He was mildly appalled at what he saw.

  Gaunt men, women, elders, and children climbed in pursuit of the delicious smells, up the hills and into the makeshift corral where the birds had died. Before they could recover their breath, they were tearing big black sheets of feathers and skin off the birds that were worst burned. They ate what they found underneath, charred or cooked or just warm. A few raked burning timbers to make fires, to further cook the meat they found. Coyotes watched from a distance; buzzards circled; none would challenge the crowd.

  Later arrivals brought big pots riding on animals. Nobody made room for them, and there wasn’t any water.

  The scavengers wore knee-length robes of hide or wool; children ran naked. Lurk tried talking to some of them. The scavengers understood no language known to Lurk, though they were polite enough, and several men and women hugged or kissed him. Their robes were pale brown, sometimes ornamented with blue thread. A boy, better dressed, offered a thick cut of red terror bird meat, nearly cooked through. Lurk accepted with a smile and a bow.

  “Yes, I’m a shaman, and a good one. And yes, I’m hungry,” the boy’s father told Lurk in passable Condigeano. His robe was better than those the rest wore, a faded elegance. “I haven’t worked in a year. The shields hanged my apprentice because he hid a talisman from them. You don’t look like a shaman—”

  “I’m not.”

  “Warn your shaman. No magic unless you ask permission of the shields. Only…if the birds are gone, maybe that’s over? It’d be nice to have clean streets,” the man said hopefully.

  The ones who understood Condigeano had other things in common. Their robes were cleaner and more brightly painted, scarlet and blue decorated with bright weaving. They were the higher ranks, the ones who had brought cook pots.

  Things changed when the mayor and a score of dignitaries arrived. Glittering soldiers pushed scores of Crescent City folk aside, more or less gently, to make a place for pots. More were being carried up the hill. One big pot floated on the air, filled to the brim with water. The shaman who had been speaking to Lurk cheered.

  Soldiers retrieved an intact bird from under half-stripped corpses. It was barely singed, dead of a single spear thrust. Some of the mayor’s entourage gathered around it to examine their enemy, pulling its beak open, manipulating the wings, ultimately cutting it open to read the entrails.

  The mayor was as elegantly dressed as Green Stone at his best. He instructed his soldiers in a booming voice and broad gestures while they continued doing what they were doing. They fired up the pots using half-charred beams that were already burning courtesy of Clever Squirrel’s war. The soldiers emptied heavy pouches into the pots. They tore up carcasses and added them, more and more as more pots appeared.

  The mayor used an ornately carved sword to cut a couple of birds apart. Some went to the pots, some to eager hands.

  Then the mayor spoke and waved to families wearing coarse brown cloth. They nodded happily and left off eating. Men began collecting firewood while women and children, their first hunger satisfied, scattered into the fields. The fields were covered in crops grown wild, Lurk saw. Some vegetables could be salvaged. Corn, beans, tomatoes, and little bulbs Lurk didn’t recognize were cut up and dumped into the pots. Soldiers were bringing more water. The mayor departed with a diminished escort.

  “We were with Prairie Dog caravan,” an aging woman told Lurk. “The birds attacked us. Our wagon was still hitched up, a little slow, and we beat them off while the bison dragged us as far as the wall. We climbed over. The bison were killed and the other wagons are still”—she pointed with her nose, a sweep around her—“here.”

  Lurk asked her, “You’re not cut off from the sea, are you?”

  “Almost. It’s a cursed long trip to anywhere civilized, and the cost is enormous when there’s a real ship, and there hasn’t been one for moons. There are the little boats that run around in the Inland Sea. They don’t go anywhere, but if it got any worse, I’d have tried that, farmland down the coast, anything. Now there’s a real ship in port, the Angie Queen, she’s called, but I don’t have enough left to buy my way back to Condigeo.” Her face brightened. “Will you have a place for us when you go back? We can work.”

  Lurk shook his head. “I don’t kn
ow. You’ll have to talk to the wagonmaster.”

  It was beginning to smell like a feast.

  Now a procession began winding up from the city: Green Stone and his people mingling with…Lurk watched them come. They wore varied clothing, but rich cloth and fine colors. Most of these must be merchants who’d been trapped in Crescent City when the birds came. Some were local dignitaries, by their robes. They were in animated conversation with Green Stone and Clever Squirrel.

  Sandry’s men and Crescent City’s glittering soldiers paralleled them in formation. Now that two hundred slaughtered birds were becoming soup and stew, the rest of the politicos were coming to take charge.

  The caravan was settled. Green Stone was in a fine humor. He’d found caravans in place by the river, but they’d all been there for up to a year. They’d have nothing left to trade.

  He looked about for the most efficient-looking cook pot brigade and tried their stew. It wasn’t hot, yet it burned his mouth! And yet—he tried another bite—it was good. Very good. It just burned.

  “I was shaman of the Road Runner caravan for twenty-eight years,” Mayor Buzzard at Play told Burning Tower. “We cycled between Condigeo and Aztlan. When I got tired of the trail, Crescent City made me mayor.”

  “The chief at Road’s End did that too,” Burning Tower said. “Quit as shaman and made himself chief. Hahhh!”

  She was breathing hard. The mayor asked, “Are you all right?”

  “What did you put in the stew?”

  “Bell peppers, potatoes…chilis. Just don’t bite down on these.” He showed her.

  “Thank you, this news comes late…. And then the birds came?”

  “I had a year of good times before that. It’s magic that brings them, but why didn’t they come before? Crescent City has traded in talismans and magic since gods walked among us.”

  Green Stone said, “That’s what we came for.”

  “We do not permit strangers to trade in magical items,” Mayor Buzzard at Play said. He sounded dangerous. “But without you, there would be no trade, and few of our animals are in condition to make the long journey to Condigeo.”