The Kar-Chee Reign

by Avram Davidson

  Man, in short, adjusted.

  Where there were no Kar-chee, the people slowly increased in number, slowly developed new skills, new forms, new views. Where there were Kar-chee, the people either perished or retreated before them. The remnants of Earth’s wild life, where the Kar-chee did not yet venture or remain, and while man was still so few, increased as well. Once again the trees grew tall, the herbivores replenished their flocks and herds, the wild swine flourished in the marshes and masted on the nuts and acorns, the fish returned to the cleansed-again waters.

  It was fortunate, providential, that the last centuries of the movement of man away from Earth had coincided with the last centuries of a cold cycle. It may well have made no difference to the Kar-chee what the climate of the northerly part of the Northern Hemisphere was, tapping as they did the molten heart of the planet for energy. But the return of a warm cycle may have made all the difference to the bands of men living there. And when Britannia proper sank beneath the waves it once had ruled, and most of Ireland with it, when a new great island was created by joining the Outer Hebrides and the Isle of Man with much of Northern Ireland — then, great though the shock was, it was the milder climate which enabled the survivors to … survive. New rivers flowed into the sea through new beds; for a while they ran brackish as the rains washed the salt from the new-formed land. Eventually the whole new land was cleansed, and, richer than the older lands now joined with it by reason of its accumulations of eons of organic matter, it benefited by the milder climate and the longer growing season, and its people benefited even more. For the Kar-chee did not come. Perhaps they had intended the changes wrought in the south. No one ever knew. What they did know was that the Kar-chee did not come, and this was of the most infinite importance.

  Indeed, it might have been that what had occurred there had been done to balance what had occurred in California, when Rowan the first had fled, a sea-borne single Noah, an Aeneas fleeing fatherless across the sullen seas. None could say.

  So the centuries continued to pass; there, in the Kar-chee-created (yet Kar-chee-ignored) northern land, as in the fragment of former South America which Rowan found, man rediscovered old skills and learned and developed new ones. New societies began to form, were formed, and new forms of civilization arose. A distorted memory of what had happened remained with them in both places, as in others. But for the most part a life was lived which concerned itself more with the present than with the past. And then, in a village located on the high hill which was once the Hebridean island of Benbecula, men looked out and saw, with astonished anger, the Kar-chee coming at long last.

  • • •

  It was different this time than the first time. The human race had recovered from its fatigue, for one thing. For another, distance and the long, blind oblivion of time had hidden from Liam and Cerry and their fellows experience of how dangerous the Kar-chee really were.

  The great war-horns sounded, the alarm-drums were beaten, the farmers came running from the fields and the herds-men from their kine, the fishing-coracles put in from sea. And while Liam and the other fighting men mustered on the palisades which topped the earthen embankments around the townlet, Cerry and the other women boiled huge earthen pots of water by dropping red-hot stones in them. Thus they had prepared themselves against attack by either local factions or pirate-raiders from across the seas; and thus, straining and pulling and pushing, they set the lumbering catapults in place and loaded them with cold charges and set the stone shot to heating in the fires. On the part of the men, then, all proceeded according to plan.

  But the Kar-chee, seemingly, had other plans.

  A miner takes small heed of the swarming of an ant-hill.

  The men of Benbecula had no such things as surveying-instruments; they would not have recognized them even had the devices been of human manufacture. The local chief, peering through the single and ancient telescope the place afforded, saw only that enemies had engines and that these moved in direction to and fro, and when they paused a moment and seemed pointed and poised at his defenses, he waited not, but gave the signal to fire.

  Probably not a single shot struck the cluster of tall and slightly stooping black figures, but the thumping and crashing of their various impacts nearby drew the attention of the Kar-chee. The tiny triangular heads whipped up from their instruments and peered around; the stout anterior arms unfolded and waved about. The Kar-chee commenced to move on. Perhaps they did so merely because it was time to move. But the men of Benbecula did not consider this. They had fired on their enemies and their enemies were beginning to retreat. When the enemy retreats, advance. Thus, the old maxim. And, thus, shouting fierce cries of triumph and menace, waving war-clubs and making feints with their bone-tipped lances, arrows ready to be nocked on bowstrings, the levy en masse poured out of the fortified hamlet and down upon the aliens. The wind shifted and suddenly smelled no more of wood-smoke and heather and human sweat, but of something murky and pungent and strange. The shaggy ponies on which the lancers were mounted, toes gripping leather stirrups, neighed, fought, bolted for a less hateful air.

  The charge, to give credit, did not stop for more than a moment. Liam, frank, said later to Cerry, “We didn’t dare retreat, for then they should have attacked us — and they had the longer legs!” Now the Kar-chee did retreat, it seemed, or most of them did. Others stayed and whipped about them with the tripods of their instruments (clumsy weapons, the men considerea!), but, being to being and implement to implement, not even the superior height of the Kar-chee availed them victory. Their longer legs did not prevent their being clubbed to the ground, and if their chitinous exoskeletons protected them for a while against thrusting points, it was only a short matter to discover that this armor had unprotected under-folds. The lances entered, were pressed home, the clubs beat and threshed, soon the clickings and churfings of the aliens ceased; the alien limbs twitched but a moment more.

  So, dragging bodies and booties behind them, and singing impromptu songs of victory — including several verses directed at the unhappy cavalry — the triumphant defenders returned. The postures of defense were abandoned as quickly as they had been assumed, and Benbecula plunged into a frenzy of drunken feasting and rejoicing.

  But Liam did not entirely join in it.

  “What’s wrong?” Cerry asked him. She had never at all made the error of thinking that because his eyes were different colors and his appearance therefore odd that there was anything at all wrong with the rest of him.

  His face twisted, and he shook his head. All around him drunken shouts resounded. She put her ears to his lips. “Don’t like it,” he said. “Acting as though they’d driven off a raider-bunch from Orkland or Norland…. This is more, Cerry — much, much more….”

  He mumbled, shook his head, frowning, like a bothered child: another of the things which made some people think him a mere daftie. She knew better. She listened. She heard him, reconstructing from his mutterings, explain what was vexing him. That not everything the old-mothers nattered about the Kar-chee as they sat warming their dried-up feet by the fire, not all of it was or could be true: of course not, else the Kar-chee would have arrived riding upon their dragons as in the old tales, flying through the air and throwing bolts of fire. Would have picked up the land bodily and flown it away to the Northern Hell, whence the sight of the flames could be seen of nights now and then. Would have dipped it in the burning waters and burnt them off like beetles off a burning log.

  Well, then? she asked. If not true — and he reasoned well that it was not — why worry, then? A merrymaker came garbling up to him, waving what seemed to be a Kar-chee’s foot, and Liam pushed him away with such force that he never came back for explanation or fight, but hunted a horn of honey-strong to soothe his bewilderment. Why worry, then? Because, clearly, not all the oldmother’s tales had been false, either. For the existence of the Kar-chee, whom none of them had ever seen or smelled until today, was the very warp and woof and thrums of the old-mothers�
� tales….

  Now Cerry had the turn to frown and squint. Although sharing in the rejoicing, initially, and feeling no more misgivings than resentment at not having gotten to scald the attackers with boiling well-water, her long-felt and distinctive respect for Liam convinced her that if he thought something was wrong, then something was wrong. She tried to follow his line of thought, but it was too strange for her. So, instead, she tried to tell him what she felt for him and about him; but all that came out was the old, conventional question: “Shall I take my sheepskin and come and be a while in your cabin?”

  If he had given one of the old, conventional answers — say, if only, “Take and be” — why, that would have been good and she would have been happy; if, “You may take your featherbed and come and be in my cabin forever,” — why that would have been very, very good and she would have been very, very happy.

  But now instead he looked at her straightly, one odd eye as brown as loch-water and the other as blue-green as the open sea itself; and what he said now was stranger yet: “You may take your sheepskin and follow after me, if you will, but not to lie by me as a woman lies by a man. For I fear there will be many nights upon the cold ground and many upon the cold, cold sea before ever we may think of love or bairns or houses once again.”

  The words sounded as through from an old tale, sung and chanted to the background of pipe or harp or drum; yet she knew that she had never heard them before. And fast and hard upon this she knew, quite suddenly, in her heart, that the times were now come about which songs were sung and tales composed; and that Liam was and had always been destined to be one of those men, seers and doers and heroes, who figured in those tales. And, like a hand taking hold of her heart and tightening on it, she knew she would and must go with him and endure with him as long as his tale was run, come what might.

  Liam got up and left the sound and sight of the feasting and the fires and went out into the chill night. And Cerry followed after him and they took their sheepskins and their sticks and their little pots of fire and their sackets of food and they walked toward the north. Thus it was that when the dragons came to Benbecula Liam and Cerry were in North Uist and when the dragons came to North Uist he and she were part-way to Ulsland. The dragons were not then in quick haste to make an end of men, and indeed it did seem that they drew out their destruction to suit their pleasure and that of the Kar-chee, to avenge whom they had come. And by the time that the dragons began to stir toward the marches of Uls, Liam and Cerry were building in haste their great raft to carry them and those who believed in Liam and his warning over the seas to Gal.

  • • •

  Gal, however, they never found. Nor any other place which it seemed might do for refuge. They found bleak lands, all salt and sterile, all stone or sands, or crushed stones; they found lands all smoking and burning and slag; they found lands where naked men hid behind the rocks and then rushed howling out upon them. And once they found a land of grass and trees and they gave thanks before they prepared to go ashore … but then the watcher on the masthead cried out that he saw that there were Kar-chee and dragons already in that land; and they rushed to hoist the ragged sail again and gave greater thanks than before when wind and currents carried them safely past and out, even though it were to starve and parch, to sea.

  And so, finally, there was no more food and no more water and the sky and sun grew hot upon them and they looked with greedy and sickened eyes upon the body and the blood of the one who had made to steal the last of the food; and they wondered if they dared not use it as food. Cerry wept for sorrow that her hunger had been aroused once again and for joy that Liam was not dead. Liam muttered, but not to and not about Cerry; he muttered words as confused as his own mind; he muttered about maps.

  Maps! The very concept drew a blank look from all but a few of his countrymen. But Liam knew what a map was, knew what a book was; had seen both. Both were, presently, pragmatically, useless, referring to and depicting things which no longer existed. But the conceptions were infinitely important, and they stirred his mind with excitement and frustration. Inside his tattered trews was a rough, ungainly copy of a map which he had once made. It was, of course, useless as a guide, showing as it did lands which no longer existed and failing to show lands which now did. He wondered, fevered, sunstricken, famished and parched, if accurate maps of any sort existed anywhere at all. Not likely. He avoided the obvious admission: not possible. So, as Cerry had dreamed of flying fish and rain, so Liam lay dreaming of an accurate map, a true chart, showing lands and currents and winds….

  He saw the island as it came slowly into view and he did nothing. He watched the island change into a ship and he did nothing. He watched the one or two or three of the others on the raft who still had the semblance of strength, watched them creep and heard them croak and saw them gesture; he did nothing. The ship was not that at all, it was a whale; the whale calfed, the calf came toward the raft, men riding on it … in it…. He watched his craft become the captive of the whale and he suffered himself to be carried into the belly of the whale. He did nothing. But after an age of darkness he felt wet upon his tongue. And he swallowed.

  Still later, he thanked his graybeard succorer, whispering, “We would have died. We have no maps.”

  “I know,” said graybeard.

  “Fled … dragons … killing, tearing … Kar-chee …”

  “I know. I know.”

  “No land … no refuge … no rain….”

  Said graybeard, “I know.”

  After a long pause, he asked, “Who are you? And what is this place?”

  Said graybeard: “I am the Knower. This is the Ark.”

  III

  A STOCK ANIMAL had already been killed and was in process of being eaten when Lors, Duro, the young guest Tom-small, and the younger boys arrived back at the Rowan homesite. But there did not seem to be much pleasure taken in the eating by anyone. Lors wondered, shortly, why guards had not already been posted and the gates secured — or why everyone had not fled inland and upland — but before long this became clear enough, though it never became acceptable, to him.

  They found guest Jow, a very dark-brown man with a fleece of curly hair, off in a corner with old Ren Rowan: now Jow talked, intently, and Ren gnawed on a piece of meat; now Ren expostulated as Jow bit into his own victual. They shook their heads, they waved their hands, they took each other by the arms and elbows and shoulders. But they spoke so low that no one else could hear a word of what they were saying.

  But moods, of course, are as contagious as maladies. Jow may have bottled up whatever was on his mind en route to Rowen homesite, but he had not bottled it up any longer than it took to bring his mouth next to Ren’s ear. Ren, clearly, was not disposed to take the matter as something light or easy. The arrival of the young men and boys caught at once the attention of the two older men, and a curious mixture of relief and apprehension came over their seamed faces as they spoke almost at once.

  “Did you see anything?” — from Ren.

  “What did you see?” — from Jow.

  But before Ren’s sons or Jow’s son could answer, one of the little boys burst out with, “We saw the Devils — we saw two Devils!” and broke into tears and sobs of pent-up fright. A moment’s stunned silence. Women and girls ready to laugh and dispell the tension, thinking that the two elders were talking of some matter, perhaps, of a threatened and serious feud: a love affair discountenanced for weighty reasons, a disputed inheritance, a man-slaughter or serious injury done in anger, a land-quarrel — all sufficient to justify the mood of secretive agitation. It was a mood they would be glad enough to lighten; the women and girls ready to laugh looked up and over at the older men’s faces —

  And saw no amusement in them, not even justified annoyance at boyish babbling; but saw the muscles of Jow’s mouth and throat writhing as if he had been struck by an arrow, saw a look of sick dismay upon the face of Ren Rowan. And as though it was death’s approach made visible, the women and the g
irls began to wail and weep. A log of wood collapsed into its own embers in the fire and the sudden shower of sparks flaring outward and upward illuminated the scene of ignorant alarm and confusion and fright — children screaming, dogs jumping up and barking, babies awaking to add their contribution to the clamor —

  “Enough of this!” shouted Jow, his huge voice felling the turmoil like an axe a tree.

  And, “Women, be quiet,” Ren growled, standing up and showing the flat of his hand. Noise did not altogether cease but it went from a scream to a murmur. “Better,” he rumbled. “I’ll give you more Devil, otherwise, than you can use. You: little Tino, put some meat in your mouth. The rest of you, too. Now — my sons and Jow’s son — and you, Carlo” — he beckoned over his eldest, a married man whose skilled hands made up for his bad leg — “come over here.” Rapidly he made a decision. This was no mere inter-family matter. “And all the men and older boys, too. All of you. Over here.”

  Lamps were brought, shallow shells of oil or animal grease, and sticks were thrust hastily into the fire and then pulled out again to make torches. Flames flickered and flared, breaths were drawn noisily, and finally all were settled around the two elders.

  “Now,” said old Ren once more. “You, Tom-small; what did you see?” He didn’t ask him to mind his voice didn’t carry past the male circle, but pitched his own low enough to get his point across.

  Tom-small gave a feeble, bashful smile, but went on with what he had to say firmly enough. “We saw all the game had gone upland and we smelled a bad smell none of us knew and we saw two creatures that none of us knew. They were big. We came back, host Rowan.”