After another pause: “I’ve been through this sort of thing before. Sent out men according to the best possible plan, and then sat and waited, knowing that if I made any further attempt to help them I’d only throw askew the statistics of their survival. It’s even harder to deal with God, Who can wear any face.” He started trudging. “You’ll stay here and sweat it out, like the rest of us.”
Tolteca stared after him. Thought trickled into his consciousness. The chaos I will.
XI
Raven awoke more slowly than usual. He glanced at the clock. Death and plunder, had he been eleven hours asleep? Like a drugged man, too. He still felt tired. Perhaps that was because there had been evil dreams; he couldn’t remember exactly what but they had left a scum of sadness in him. He swung his legs around and sat on the edge of the bunk, rested head in hands and tried to think. All he seemed able to do, though, was recall his father’s castle, hawks nesting in the bell tower, himself about to ride forth on one of the horses they still used at home but pausing to look down the mountainside, fells and woods and the peasants’ niggard fields, then everything hazed into blue hugeness. The wind had tasted of glaciers.
He pushed the orderly buzzer. Kors’ big ugly nose came through the cabin door. “Tea,” said Raven.
He scalded his mouth on it, but enough sluggishness departed him that he could will relaxation. His brain creaked into gear. It wasn’t wise, after all, simply to wait close-mouthed till the Instar people came home. He’d been too abrupt with Tolteca; but the man annoyed him, and besides, his revelation had been too shattering. Now he felt able to discuss it. Not that he wanted to. What right had a storeful of greasy Namerican merchants to such a truth? But it was certain to be discovered sometime, by some later expedition. Maybe a decent secrecy could be maintained, if an aristocrat made the first explanation.
Tolteca isn’t a bad sort, he made himself admit. Half the trouble between us was simply due to his being somewhat in love with Elfavy. That’s not likely to last, once he’s been told. So he’ll be able to look at things objectively and, I hope, find an honorable course of action.
Elfavy. Her image blotted out the recollection of gaunt Lochlanna. There hadn’t much been said or done, overtly, between him and her. Both had been too shy of the consequences. But now—I don’t know. I just don’t know.
He got up and dressed in plain workaday clothes. Zio pattered after him as he left his cabin and went down a short passageway to Tolteca’s. He punched the doorchime, but got no answer. Well, try the saloon. . . . Captain Utiel sat there with a cigar and an old letter; he became aware of Raven by stages. “No, Commandant,” he replied to the question, “I haven’t seen Sir Engineer Tolteca for, oh, two or three hours. He was going out to observe high tide from the diketop, he said, and wouldn’t be back for some time. Is it urgent?”
The news was like a hammerblow. Raven held himself motionless before saying, “Possibly. Did he have anyone with him? Or any instruments that you noticed?”
“No. Just a lunch and his sidearm.”
Bitterness uncoiled in Raven. “Did you seriously believe he was making a technical survey?”
“Why—well, I didn’t really think about it. . . . Well, he may simply have gone to admire the view. High tide is impressive, you know.”
Raven glanced at his watch. “Won’t be high tide for hours.”
Utiel sat up straight. “What’s the matter?”
Decision crystallized. “Listen carefully,” said Raven. “I am going out too. Stand by to lift ship. Keep someone on the radio. If I don’t return, or haven’t sent instructions to the contrary, within—oh—thirty hours, go into orbit. In that event, and only in that event, one of my men will hand over to you a tape I’ve left in his care, with an explanation. Do you understand?”
Utiel rose. “I will not be treated in this fashion!” he protested.
“I didn’t ask you that, Captain,” said Raven. “I asked if you understood my orders.”
Utiel grew rigid. “Yes, Commandant,” he got out.
Raven went swiftly from the saloon. Once in the corridor, he ran. Kors, on guard outside his cabin, gaped at him. “Fetch Wildenvey,” said Raven, passed inside and shut the door. He clipped a tape to his personal recorder, dictated, released it, and sealed the container with wax and his family signet ring. Only then did he stop to snatch some bites from a food concentrate bar.
Wildenvey entered as he was slipping a midget transceiver into his pocket. Raven gave him the tape, with instructions, and added, “See if you can find Miguel Tolteca anywhere about. Roust the whole company to help. If you do, call me on the radio and I’ll head back.”
“Where you going, sir?” asked Kors.
“Into the hills. I am not to be followed.”
Kors curled his lip and spat between two long yellow teeth. The gob clanged on the disposer chute. “Very good, sir. Let’s go.”
“You stay here and take care of my effects.”
“Any obscene child of impropriety can do that, sir,” said Kors, looking hurt.
Raven felt his own mouth drawn faintly upward. “As you will, then. But if ever you speak a word about this. I’ll yank out your tongue with my bare fingers.”
“Aye, sir.” Kors opened a drawer and took out a couple of field belts, with supplies and extra ammunition in the pouches. Both men donned them.
Raven set Zio carefully on the bunk and stroked him under the chin. Zio purred. He tried to follow when they left. Raven pushed him back and closed the door in his face. Zio scolded him in absentia for several minutes.
Emerging from the spaceship, Raven saw that dusk was upon the land. The sky was deeply blue-black, early stars in the east, a last sunset cloud above the western mountains like a streak of clotting blood. He thought he could hear the sea bellow beyond the dike.
“We going far, Commandant?” asked Kors.
“Maybe as far as the Holy City.”
“I’ll break out a flitter, then.”
“No, a vehicle would make matters worse than they already are. This’ll be afoot. On the double.”
“Holy muckballs!” Kors clipped a flashbeam to his belt and began jogging.
During the first hour they went through open fields. Here and there stood a barn or a shed, black under blackening heaven. They heard livestock low, and the whir of machinery tending empty farms. If no one ever came back, wondered Raven, how long would the robots continue their routines? How long would the cattle stay tame, the infants alive?
The road ended, the ground rose in waves, only a trail pierced the way among boles and brush. The Lochlanna halted for a breather. “You’re chasing Tolteca, aren’t you, Commandant?” asked Kors. “Shall I kill the son of a bitch when we catch him, or do you want to?”
“If we catch him,” corrected Raven. “He has a long head start, even though we can travel a lot faster. No, don’t shoot unless he resists arrest.” He stopped a second, to underline what followed. “Don’t shoot any Gwydiona. Under any circumstances whatsoever.”
He fell silent, slumping against a tree in total muscular repose, trying to blank his mind. After ten minutes they resumed the march.
Trees and bushes walled either side of the trail, leaves made a low roof overhead. It was very dark; only the bobbing light of Kors’ flash picked stones and dust into relief. Beyond the soft thud of their feet, they could hear rustlings, creakings, distant chirps and hoots and croaks, the cold tinkle of a brook. Once an animal screamed. The air cooled as they climbed, but it always remained mild, and it overflowed with odors. Raven thought he could distinguish the smells of earth and green growth, the damp smell of water when a rivulet crossed the trail, certain individual flower scents; but the rest was unfamiliar. Smell is the most evocative of the senses, and forgotten things seemed to move below Raven’s awareness, but he couldn’t identify them. Overriding all else was the clear brilliant odor of baleflower. In the past few hours, every bush had come to full bloom.
Seen by daylight,
tomorrow, the land would look as if it burned.
Time faded. That was a trick you learned early, from the regimental bonzes who instructed noblemen’s sons. You needed it, to survive the waiting and the waiting of war without your sanity cracking open. You turned off your conscious mind. Part of it might revive during pauses in the march. Surely it was hard to stop at the halfway point for a drink of water, a bit of field ration, and a rest, and not think about Elfavy. But the body had its own demands. The thing could be done, since it must.
The moon rose over Mount Granis. Passing an open patch of ground and looking downslope, Raven saw the whole world turned to silver treetops. Then the forest gulped him again.
Some eight or nine hours after departure, Kors halted with an oath. His flashbeam picked out a thing that scuttled on spiderlike legs, a steel carapace and arms ending in sword blades.
“’S guts!” Raven heard a gun clank from a holster. The machine met the light with impersonal lens eyes, then slipped into the brush.
“Guard robot,” said Raven. “Against carnivores. It won’t attack humans. We’re close now, so douse that flash and shut up.”
He led the way, cat-cautious in darkness, thinking that Tolteca must indeed have beaten him here. Though probably not by very long. Maybe the situation could still be rescued. He topped the final steep climb and poised on the upper edge of the great amphitheater.
For a moment the moonlight blinded him. She hung gibbous over the Steeps, turning them bone color and drowning the stars. Then piece by piece Raven made out detail: mossy tiers curving downward to the floor, the ring of towers enclosing the square of the labyrinth, even the central fountain and its thin mercury-like jet. Even the gardens full of baleflower, though they looked black against all that slender white. He heard a mumble down in the forum, but couldn’t see what went on. With great care he padded forward into the open.
“Hee-ee,” said a man who sat on an upper terrace. “That’s hollow, Bale-friend.”
Raven stopped dead. Kors said something raw at his back. Slowly, Raven turned to face the man. It was Llyrdin, who had played chess in a diving bell and gone exploring for a spaceport in the mountains. Now he sat hugging his knees and grinning. There was blood on his mouth.
“It is, you know,” he said. “Hollow. Hollow is God. I hail hollow, hollow hallow hullo.”
Raven looked into the man’s eyes, but the moonlight was so reflected from them that they stared blank. “Where did the blood come from?” he asked most quietly.
“She was empty,” said Llyrdin. “Empty and so small. It wasn’t good for her to grow up and be hollow. Was it? That much more nothing?” He rubbed his chin, regarded the wet fingers, and said plaintively, “The machines took her away. That wasn’t fair. She was only a year and a half hollow.”
Raven started down into the chalice.
“She came up about to my waist,” said the voice behind him. “I think once, very long ago, before the hollow, I taught her to laugh. I even gave her a name once, and the name was Wormwood.” Raven heard him begin to weep.
Kors took out his pistol, unsnapped the holster from his belt and clamped it on as a rifle stock. “Easy there,” said Raven, not looking back but recognizing the noise. “You won’t need that.”
“The muck I won’t,” said Kors.
“We aren’t going to fire on any Gwydiona. And I doubt if Tolteca will give trouble . . . now.”
XII
They reached level sward and passed beneath a tower. Raven remembered it was the one he had climbed before. A child stood in the uppermost window, battering herself against the grille and uttering no sound.
Raven went through a colonnade. Just beyond, at the edge of the forum, some fifty Instar people were gathered, mostly men. Their clothes were torn, and even in the moonlight, across meters of distance, Raven could see unshaven chins.
Miguel Tolteca confronted them. “But Llyrdin killed that little girl!” the Namerican shouted. “He killed her with his hands and ran away wiping his mouth. And the robots took the body away. And you do nothing but stare!”
Beodag the forester trod forth. Awe blazed on his face. “Under She,” he called, his voice rising and falling, with something of the remote quality of a voice heard through fever. “And She is the cold reflector of Ynis, and Ynis Burning Bush, though we taste the river. If the river gives light, O look how my shadow dances!”
“As Gonban danced for his mother,” said the one next to him. “Which is joy, since man comes from darkness when he is born.”
“Night Faces are Day Faces are God!”
“Dance, God!”
“Howl for God, Vwi burns!”
An old man turned to a young girl, knelt before her and said, “Give me your blessing, Mother.” She touched his head with an infinite tenderness.
“But have you gone crazy?” wailed Tolteca.
It snarled in the crowd of them. Those who had begun to dance stopped. A man with tangled graying hair advanced on Tolteca, who made a whimpering sound and retreated. Raven recognized Dawyd.
“What do you mean?” asked Dawyd. His tone was metal.
“I mean . . . I want to say . . . I don’t understand—”
“No,” said Dawyd. “What do you mean? What is your significance? Why are you here?”
“T-t-to help—”
They began circling about, closing off Tolteca’s retreat. He fumbled after his sidearm, but blindly, as if knowing how few he could shoot before they dragged him down.
“You wear the worst of the Night Faces,” Dawyd groaned. “For it is no face at all. It is Chaos. Emptiness. Meaninglessness.”
“Hollow,” whispered the crowd. “Hollow, hollow, hollow.”
Raven squared his shoulders. “Stick close and keep your mouth shut,” he ordered Kors. He stepped from the colonnade shadows, into open moonlight, and approached the mob.
Someone on its fringe was first to see him: a big man, who turned with a bear’s growl and shambled to meet the newcomers. Raven halted and let the Gwydiona walk into him. A crook-fingered hand swiped at his eyes. He evaded it, gave a judo twist, and sent the man spinning across the forum.
“He dances!” cried Raven from full lungs. “Dance with him!” He snatched a woman and whirled her away. She spun top fashion, trying to keep her balance. “Dance on the bridge from Yin to Yang!”
They didn’t—quite. They stood quieter than it seemed possible men could stand. Tolteca’s mouth fell open. His face was a moonlit lake of sweat. “Raven,” he choked, “oa, ylem, Raven—”
“Shut up,” muttered the Lochlanna. He edged next to the Namerican. “Stick by me. No sudden movements, and not a word.”
Dawyd cringed. “I know you,” he said. “You are my soul. And eaten with forever darkness and ever and no, no, no.”
Raven raked his memory. He had heard so many myths, there must be one he could use . . . Yes, maybe. . . . His tones rolled out to fill the space within the labyrinth.
“Hearken to me. There was a time when the Sunsmith ran in the shape of a harbuck with silver horns. A hunter saw him and pursued him. They fled up a mountainside which was all begrown with crisflower, and wherever the harbuck’s hoofs touched earth the crisflower bloomed, but wherever the hunter ran it withered. And at last they came to the top of the mountain, whence a river of fire flowed down a sheer cliff. The chasm beyond was cold, and so misty that the hunter could not see if it had another side. But the harbuck sprang out over the abyss, and sparks showered where his hoofs struck—”
He held himself as still as they, but his eyes flickered back and forth, and he saw in the moonlight how they began to ease. The tiniest thawing stirred within him. He was not sure he had grasped the complex symbolism of the myth he retold in any degree. Certainly he understood its meaning only vaguely. But it was the right story. It could be interpreted to fit this situation, and thus turn his escape into a dance, which would lead men back into those rites that had evolved out of uncounted man-slayings.
&
nbsp; Still talking, he backed off, step by infinitesimal step, as if survival possessed its own calculus. Kors drifted beside him, screening Tolteca’s shivers from their eyes.
But they followed. And others began to come from the buildings, and from the towers after they had passed through the colonnade again. When Raven put his feet on the first upward tier, a thousand faces must have been turned to him. None said a word, but he could hear them breathing, a sound like the sea beyond Instar’s dike.
And now the myth was ended. He climbed another step, and another, always meeting their upturned eyes. It seemed to him that She had grown more full since he descended into this vale. But it couldn’t have taken that long. Could it?
Tolteca grasped his hand. The Namerican’s fingers were like ice. Kors’ voice would have been inaudible a meter away. “Can we keep on retreating, sir, or d’you think those geeks will rush us?”
“I wish I knew,” Raven answered. Even then, he was angered at the word Kors used.
Dawyd spread his arms. “Dance the Sunsmith home!” he shouted.
The knowledge of victory went through Raven like a knife. Nothing but discipline kept him erect in his relief. He saw the crowd swirl outward, forming a series of interlocked rings, and he hissed to Kors, “We’ve made it, if we’re careful. But we mustn’t do anything to break their mood. We have to continue backing up, slowly, waiting a while between every step, as they dance. If we disappear into the woods during the last measure, I think they’ll be satisfied.”
“What’s happening?” The words grated in Tolteca’s throat.
“Quiet, I told you!” Raven felt the man stagger against him. Well, he thought, it had been a vicious shock, especially for someone with no real training in death. Talk might keep Tolteca from collapse, and the dancers below—absorbed as children in the stately figure they were treading—wouldn’t be aware that the symbols above them whispered together.
Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga Page 53