Rank Hath Its Privileges; but how great should those privileges be? What price aristocracy?
I first read this story in high school. It disturbed me a lot, for it presents the clash of two valid ideas. I have remembered this story for thirty years; certainly reason enough to include it here.
The Aristocrat
Chan Davis
Chapter One
It was an hour or so after sunset on a heavy September night. I was sitting alone in the high-ceilinged main room of the temple, reading by the light of a five-foot candelabrum. The corners of the room were dark as always; the white tree trunks outside the window seemed to catch more of the light than the piles of books which lined the walls.
The silence was broken by a loud but patient knocking at the door.
"Who would enter?" I called.
"Jim Jenkins. See the Elder Stevan."
I laid down my book. "Enter, Jim Jenkins." He came in and stood just a few yards inside the door, blinking at the candlelight. Jenkins was in his late forties, graying, but still one of the best farmers in the Village. Like all the Folk he had a round and almost chinless face, and just now its gray-shot eyebrows were drawn together in uncertainty. He stood just at the limit of the candles' light and shifted from one foot to another.
"What would you ask the Elder Stevan?"
"Elder Stevan," he said, "Paul Pomroy wants to marry my daughter."
"Your daughter—"
"Grace Jenkins."
I searched my memory. I had not seen the girl since she last came to the Temple, several years before. "Bring me the Record, Jim Jenkins."
With clumsy respect, he crossed the room, got the high, thin book and, holding it in both hands, brought it to me. "She's young," I said, after a moment.
Jim Jenkins looked troubled. "Paul Pomroy wants to marry my daughter," he repeated.
I considered. He sounded pretty insistent, and it behooved me as a priest of Truth to recognize a fact, preferably in advance. Besides, there was definitely a percentage in my doing Jenkins a favor at this point. I spoke, sternly. "You have room for Pomroy and Grace in your house?"
"Yes."
"Jim Jenkins, they may marry, but because Grace is young they live and work with you for one year."
"Yes, Elder Stevan." He turned, thinking the interview was over.
But it wasn't. There was my very necessary percentage to collect—very necessary indeed, at this particular time. And I couldn't have asked for a better one to collect it from than him. "Jim Jenkins! You know Old Red has gone to the west with Buddy Hoey and others to forage. How long have they been gone?"
"Ten days, more."
"Thirteen days. You know they went against the word of the Elder?"
He half-whispered, "Yes."
"Do you expect the Elder will punish them when they come back?"
He frowned a little, apparently suspecting a trick. "Yes, Elder Stevan."
"The others in the Village—do they expect it also?"
"Some do."
"Do they wish it?"
"The Word of the Elder—" He bowed as my parents had taught him.
"The Word of the Elder will be given when Old Red comes back. But those who do not wish to see Old Red punished, Jim Jenkins?"
He stood a moment, absently scratching one hairy forearm against his hip, then answered, "The other day two of the Folk said something against the Elder, for Old Red. Tony Shelton heard. I told Tony Shelton and Paul Pomroy and Tim Marvic to beat them up. They beat them up."
"Why didn't the Elder hear of this?"
"The two didn't tell the Elder. They knew Tony Shelton heard them. They said something against the Elder."
"But why didn't you tell the Elder? You did wrong, Jim Jenkins. You should not beat up men like those two. You should tell the Elder."
"Yes. I hear other Folk say something the same, I tell the Elder Stevan."
I let him go without asking him the names of the two dissidents. I was more than satisfied. It couldn't have worked out better if I'd planned it. Jenkins was one of the Folk whom I could trust, and now that I could count on him and his friends to form the beginnings of a spy system I felt easier about the situation.
A spy system in the Village was something new, but so was Old Red's action in leaving on a foraging party without my sanction. That was new, and unpleasant. I was alone, the only Elder, and now that the routine of obedience to the Word had been broken I was none too sure of what to expect.
I entered the information of Grace Jenkins' wedding in the Record, then stood up and slowly walked to the window. The chalky white trunks of the long-dead oak grove stood motionless between me and the night. As a child, here in the Temple, I had once thought of them as guards protecting the Elders' home; now I found myself wishing, whimsically, that each of them had at least a bow and arrows in its hand.
The foraging party returned several nights later. The first thing I noticed when the leaders of the party were brought to me was not Old Red, or Buddy Hoey, or anything connected with them. The first thing I noticed was the girl.
She was a prisoner who had been taken on the expedition. She was dressed in a cloak of animal skins of some sort, quite different from the rough woven clothes of the Villagers. But that was not the only difference. There was her firm-jawed oval face, with its arched brows—it took me a moment to place the nature of the difference.
She was human. She was the first human I'd seen since my father's death years before. Human—not Folk!
I addressed Old Red. "Tell of the people you found."
"To west and north, near the river. Had no houses, not much clothes, only deerskins, other skins. Had beards. Meat, but no leather, had no cows to keep. Many dogs."
"About how many people were there in the tribe?"
"Twenty, thirty, more." He frowned and shrugged. "We caught them."
"You surprised them—at night?"
"Yes. But dogs barked, they got away. They thought we were more than them, they ran away. We killed some. None of us killed. We took meat and—her." He indicated the tall, black-haired girl beside him. "Tried to take dogs. Good dogs."
Then I asked the question that was uppermost in my mind. "Were all the people like the Folk?"
"Didn't see faces of all of them."
"But of those you saw—?"
Again he nodded at the prisoner. "She was the only one like the Elders." (Like the Elders, I thought. Well, he was the first to say it.) "The others like us."
"Was she a prisoner from some other tribe?"
The girl herself answered. "I child of Chief. Name Barbi."
She was part of this Folk tribe, then. That was something to puzzle over later. But something else was brought home to me by her words. They were spoken in English, of course, but they were spoken so exactly with the intonation of the Village that I realized suddenly where the Chief and his tribe must have come from. During the time when my parents were Elders, shortly after the Folk had been taught the use of the bow and arrow, a number of Folk had left on hunting trips and never returned. They must now be the "Chief" and his men. Let's see—if this Barbi had been born soon after they left the Village, that would make her eighteen now; about right.
I put it up to Old Red. "These people may be those who left the Village in the Elder David's time. Did you see any faces of men you knew?"
Obviously the idea was new to him, for he was taken off guard and made one of his rare slips. "Yes, Elder Stevan," he said. "I thought it were the same. We punished them for going from the Elder—"
I laughed harshly. The laugh was well done. He stopped.
I questioned him further. It seemed he and Hoey really knew very little more about the tribe. For the rest, they had found few houses along the way, but there was one large cache of canned goods; they had not made many attempts at hunting; there had been considerable woodland in the territory they covered, but mostly prairie; enough water.
My questions were over. I stared at Old Red and Buddy Hoey.
Hoey dropped his eyes, preferring the sight of his unshod toes to my face. The two Folk guards and Barbi watched curiously. Except for the sputtering of one of the thick bayberry candles beside me, the room was still.
I had to name the transgressors' penalty. It couldn't be as stiff as I'd planned, because the party had been too successful; at the same time I couldn't go too easy in punishing a disobedience of the Word of the Elder. I improvised, and hoped the four Folks wouldn't notice my scanning their faces. "Until harvest next year, those of the foraging party will clean the barn." That, they would not like. "And each of them gets forty lashes; in public, next rest day. Fifty for Old Red, and Buddy Hoey." That was enough. "You did very wrong, and the forfeit is small. Another time it will be much more.
"Later this summer another party will go out, to bring back the food you discovered. It will be led by Jim Jenkins." Buddy Hoey didn't like that, either; the idea of Jenkins, the farmer, in charge of such an expedition rubbed him the wrong way. Let it rub.
One of the guards, Tim Marvic, moved as if preparing to leave, but the other told him by a nudge that I had more to say. And I had. Something as important as all the rest.
"Barbi is not any more Old Red's prisoner." As I spoke I glanced at her; she returned the look with unwavering calm. I hoped the trembling I felt didn't sound in my voice. "Nor is she any longer the prisoner of the Village. This night she is freed. She lives at the temple, and her name is the Elder Barbi."
The two young guards turned toward each other, startled; even the imperturbable Old Red bit his lip behind his carroty beard. The girl looked alertly at them and at me, taking the situation in.
"The Word of the Elder," said Tim Marvic hoarsely.
I motioned to the guards to leave with the two raiders, and they shuffled out through the blackness of the door, leaving me with the unknown stranger who was the Elder Barbi.
"You know you are different, don't you, Barbi?"
"Different, yes. Was child of Chief, now Elder Barbi—Elder Barbi." She smiled.
"You know that's not what I meant."
"Yes."
She was sitting on the floor, restlessly I thought, in the direct sunlight from the paneless window. I watched her lazily from the Elders' chair, between its rude candelabra. Barbi's black hair shone blue-white in the sun. She shifted, sitting upright and clasping her knees in her arms, and the hair fell liquidly around her shoulders.
"How are you different? Tell me."
"Look different. Father told me I look different, told me I look—"
"Like the Elders?"
"Don't know. Heard the word—" She stopped to frame the sentence. "I know I heard the word 'Elder' before I came here. I think my father told me that."
I mused, wondering what the results would be of my precipitate action in taking the girl into the Temple. There was one big result already—I had Barbi. That was, so far, a decidedly pleasant result.
But what I had was a half-savage Barbi, illiterate and ignorant as any of the Folks, in spite of her alertness and her obvious human intelligence. Not an Elder. She accepted completely her position and title as my wife, but she was not yet an Elder. I smiled, then wondered why.
"Barbi, did you ever ask your father why you looked different?"
"Yes."
"What did he say?"
"Didn't know. You know," she stated, turning toward me.
"Yes, partly. Shall I tell you?"
"Yes."
"Well, long ago, more than a hundred years ago, there were many more people here than there are now. They had large houses and many other things; this house and all the other large houses in the Village were built in that time. And all the people were like you and me."
"None like the Folk?"
"Not as far as I know. The books"—I waved toward the hundreds of volumes piled on the floor along the room's walls—"have many pictures of men, and none are Folk."
She jumped up, crossed in front of me, and leafed through a few of the books on top of the piles, as she had done several times before in the two days she had been at the Temple. "Yes," she said. "Father didn't say that."
"He doesn't know it. From what you've told me, your parents came from the Village and no one in the Village knows what I'm telling you."
"Why not!"
"Only the Elders know."
She said nothing.
I took a deep breath. "You have seen the City?"
"The City?"
"Let's go and take a look at it."
I lifted myself to my feet and led the way out the back door of the Temple and up the small knoll to the east. It was hot, I realized. The sun's constant yellow speared down on the bare hill, the sun's blue hung in a haze around us. From the threshing floor far behind us, in the Village, came the sound of a new Folk singing.
I spoke as we walked. "These people long ago had many things we don't have. For instance, they had ways of killing other people much stronger than our bows and arrows. They could kill more with one blow than there are in the whole Village."
"How?"
I smiled. "Don't worry: I can't do it. But when people fought then, more would die in a single night than you can count." We had reached the top of the hill, and I was out of breath. "I'm getting old," I said, offhand.
She looked at me, aslant. "How old are you?"
"Thirty-five. Same as Buddy Hoey."
She seemed incredulous. Well, that was one of the things I'd have to explain, too.
I pointed ahead of us, where the hill sloped down to a broad level valley. "There's the City." I tried to speak matter-of-factly; it did no good to be bitter after a hundred years. "See that ring of peculiar brown and gray things, like rocks? They used to be houses, some much larger than the Temple. See that space in the middle, on the river, where the very green grass is? There were houses there, too, and people."
Her face showed awe, or perhaps just bafflement. Still she did not move, but stood beside me, independently.
"People died there, Barbi. And horses, and dogs, and rats, and birds . . . everything died. More people in a single night than you can count. Other places there were other cities, and everyone there died, too.
"And after that there was the radiation—you can learn from the books what that is. Those people who were still alive were poisoned, they grew weak and sick, they died in one way or another."
"Not all of them."
"I hope . . . I don't know. There may not be anyone alive anywhere except right here. Here, a strange thing happened. One of the people near the City, or perhaps more than one, were changed when the City was destroyed, so their children were Folk, and their children's children." And what a fantastic accident that had been! But there was no point in trying to get Barbi to appreciate the extent of the coincidence, or the luck it must have taken for the first Folk to survive. "The Folk were different. The radiation hurt them hardly at all. They weren't sick and weak, like all of my grandfather's people."
"But—"
"I know, you don't understand. You can learn from the books. Here's what happened. The Folk lived near the City for many years; my grandfather's people lived out behind this hill, where the Village is now. My grandfather and the rest had the sickness and were dying off; on the other hand the Folk didn't have the knowledge that the people, before, had had. Living so close to the City, the parents of the first Folk and the other survivors from before the War must not have lived long enough to teach the Folk much. I suppose all of them must have been gone within ten years; and the last of their children—those that weren't Folk—must have died within the next twenty years after that. Leaving the Folk, who knew how to open the cans of food they found in the ruins but didn't know much more. They could speak hardly at all, I understand."
"Yes, and later the Folk came here and the Elders taught them and had them work on farms. You told me about that already, a little. And the Village, and the Elder David and the Elder Carmela, and you— But Stevan, what you said before isn't right. I'm not like you sai
d. The other childs . . . the other children in the tribe never—"
She must have seen the way I was looking at her, for she broke off. In a strained voice, I said: "Let's see you run down to the Temple and back."
For just a fraction of a second she hesitated, a questioning look in her black eyes. Then she was off, and by the time I'd turned my head to follow her she was going all out. And I mean all out! "Scamper" isn't the word; "fly" isn't the word either. She simply and matter-of-factly covered ground. It was just that she covered an awful lot of it. A little way down the slope she stooped, hardly breaking stride, and snatched off the leather moccasins I had given her; barefoot she went faster if anything.
Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War Page 20