I echoed him, but silently. My Marackians, sensing, but not knowing, really, that an awful tragedy had taken place, fell to muttering and to crossing themselves with the triple circle of Ormon, Wimbely and Harris. Sweat sprang in cold beads to dampen my forehead.
Rawl and Murie were the only ones, I think, to turn to me, to watch me as if for a clue to this phenomenon with its quite obvious indication of ghastly death.
Murie whispered in a small voice, “Have they been killed, Collin? All of them?”
“Yes,” I said. “All of them.”
But there was no way for them to knew the meaning of what had happened. A great ship, a galactic starship with a crew of a hundred had died out there; had been brought to instant destruction. And the bloody-damned sphere was still there, as were its five alien consorts. We saw them all just as we entered heavy atmosphere. After that they too were gone.
Being in mag-turbulence, as stated, their scanners would play hell in tracking me; nor could we now scan them. Just as well. I had no desire to see any part of them, ever again. For I now knew what would happen if I did. What Was that opening line: “A starship is invincible in war and indestructible to all known phenomena?”
At the least we would now have to write a new intro to the code book….
Physically numb, I took us down to within five thousand feet of zero. We were in “null” plus “five,” which involved a distortion factor, producing something akin to invisibility. Good enough. I hit the coast of the northern continent just short of Kelb’s capital of Corchoon and zoomed on above a thick cloud layer for the last few hundred miles to Marack’s capital of Glagmaron.
We came to earth precisely where I’d landed the first time, and from whence we’d left but one short hour before with our package of the twelve “ambassadors.” Actually, I’d returned to the same spot for disparate reasons: one, because we’d left our dottle mounts there; two, because the chances were that whatever it was that had destroyed the Deneb would also, and soon, be coming to Glagmaron, Corchoon, Klimpinge, Rheen, Saks, and Janblink, and all the cities to the southern continent. For whatever one might conclude of the Deneb’s destruction, the heart of the matter was that the lovely world of Camelot-Fregis now stood alone and helpless and was thus subject to whatever the sphere and its accompanying warships had in mind.
To fight the Dark One had been one thing. To battle this new intrusion with an alien science sufficiently strong to destroy the greatest of galactic creations, the Deneb, was another: a thing that no one had ever foreseen or prepared for. We’d always thought that whatever the problem, whatever the obstacle, in the end a starship would always be there to protect us. For a starship could destroy an entire system, with its sun, or suns. But now a starship had itself been destroyed. And now, too, in the place of that starship, in this limited quadrant of the galaxy, there would be just me and the humanoids of Camelot-Fregis—and Hooli!
And Hooli?
Well that, too, was a toss-up. For this time even he had seen fit to run; had even psyched out his poor little host in the process. That fact was at least as ominous as the death of the Deneb, if not more so.
I brought us down in the midst of a veritable cloudburst; one of Fregis’s summer downpours that could last for as many as ten hours and bring a solid twenty inches of rain to forest and field. Timewise, we’d left this spot but one hour before. On any other occasion, excepting that of the last event, I’d be amused.
I’d introduced a quasi dark-ages people to a starship; to their own planet as seen at fifty thousand miles; to that same starship traveling through an advanced “hole-punch warp” for a distance of some two billion miles; to their original home planet, Alpha, which their forebears had destroyed long ago; to an alien life form which had first been blasted out of the void, and had then blasted us out; and to the great escape of the millennium—ourselves, fleeing the starship before it was pulverized. Now here we were again on home turf where it was raining gogs and flimpls—and all, in the space of a single hour….
I deliberately held our dozen to the cramped confines of the scoutship for the time it took to rebrief them. I spelled out bluntly what I expected would happen now. One or more of the five alien ships would land at Glagmaron Castle today, tomorrow, or the day after. I did not know who or what would be aboard. There would be little point in attempting to oppose their weaponry. To try it, I told them, would be suicidal; not just for us but for the populace too. I, their Col-1m, their hero, told them this and so they were bound to listen. … A last provision was that if the alien had not landed by nightfall, well then we’d at least have time to discuss our position further with the king’s council; the more reason then to be on our way now!
A severe reactive depression had seized upon me as I talked, so that at the end I’d no desire even to ask what they had learned from my discourse. In a sense, I was too fearful of the answers.
Outside again, we whistled up our dottles. They came trooping and whoooing out of the trees, greeting us as if we’d been gone a month instead of an hour. Their three pairs of painted paws plopped up and down in the mud like webbed duck feet. Fat fannies waved happily. Bushy tails wagged. Big blue-purple eyes rolled, and each of them seemed frantically ready to give each of us a big wet kiss if we showed the slightest inclination for such an exchange. At a ton and a half, it was difficult to be puppylike. But they managed. It just might be, I mused wryly, that when all else was lost our dottles would be the one thing left to cling to.
Fel-Holdt oversaw their saddling. Our gear, including serviceable cloaks against the rain, was quite dry, as it had been put beneath saddle tarps against the weather.
Kriloy would not accompany us. I had other plans for him. Inside the scoutship, I told him bluntly, “You’re here for one purpose. A scoutship’s communicator is worthless beyond a single system. But you’ve got to break through anyhow into the galactic matrix. And mind you, I don’t give a bloody damn how you do it, or how long it takes. Do you understand me?”
He groaned. “There’s no way, Kyrie. There’s just no power for a thing like that.”
“Then find it. Suck it up from the mag-lines; use the juice from the Loog drives. But do it! The Center’s got to know about the sphere and the Deneb—and that damned ‘gateway1; and about us. Moreover, your doing it will be the only chance well ever have. Think about that.”
He still floundered, his fear as apparent as his anger at me for having dared to do what I had done: countered the authority of a Space Admiral and brought him, Kriloy Rog, an Adjuster Third Class, to Fregis against his wishes; no matter that he was alive! I’d always liked Kriloy, though I knew that he’d never make Second Class let alone First. The computers, in respect to Kriloy, had made a very serious mistake.
“If we use the drive fuel,” he said, “we’re dead and you know it. We’ll never get off, Kyrie.”
“You wanna take my place?”
He didn’t answer.
“Maybe you don’t understand,” I told Mm. Tm going to have to face whatever comes out of those goddamned ships when they land; me and those other poor sons of bitches out there. Do you want to take my place? IH be only too happy to stay here and try for the matrix.”
He whispered, “Kyrie. I’m not psyched. I’d be no good.”
“Then do what I ask. The node’s still at the base of my skull, so you can keep contact. And I can buzz you through the belt. If I’m alive you’ll hear from me. Okay?”
‘I’ll try, Kyrie.” He sounded suddenly contrite, even ashamed of his weakness. “What about me leaving the ship?”
“Don’t”
“Why not?”
“Because we need you alive. There are things in that forest. When I leave, 111 phase you out You keep it that way….”
We shook hands then and I went outside to stand before the scoutship and orally key the grid numbers: three-seven, two-nine, four-one. It quickly began to shimmer and to fade. Then it was no longer there.
My Marackians had sat
their mounts stoically, watching. I swung myself up into the saddle of my mount, Fat Henery, amused as always at their Oat-faced approach to “visual” magick; in this case the scoutship’s disappearance. Then Fel-Holdt, tall and grim in the saddle, halooed, and we were off—to a long roll of accompanying thunder in the west.
Marack’s commander and the four ambassadors from the various northern kingdoms rode to the fore; a concession from me. Somehow, my awareness that I, the greatest of warriors and warlocks, their hero-Collin, would soon, in their eyes, be reduced to second fiddle if not third bassoon by what would ensue from those damned ships, had really reached me. Ego trip. Loss of innocence. Call it what you will. I wasn’t ready for it.
That I was plain damned afraid was also a part of it Hooli’d put his finger on it as far back as the battle of Dunguring, when I’d been forced to fight the great Ool-Bades. “So what’s holding you back, buddy?” he’d asked inside my head. “You got a little old crappola in your blood ‘cause you’ll be evenly matched for a change? Hey, isn’t that what you’re here for?”
And that other time when I’d been forced to fight and kill the skaiding, a beast something like old Tyrannosaurus Rex, before the dread city of Hish. Young Hargis, a student warrior of mine, had died to hide my cowardice. Murie had bravely attacked the damned tiling to give me courage and also to shield me and my fear from the cheering ranks of the finest warriors of an Camelot-Fregis. Prodigious feats? Sure. I’d accomplished them all a hundred times over. I’d destroyed Gol-Bades too, and gone on to kill the skaiding. But there was still that all too civilized part of me that I couldn’t control, that small albatross of spine-tingling fear that would forever despoil the image I flaunted before the world.
Murie’d sensed it too; though there was no way she could guess its reason. Usually she talked a mile a minute. Not now. Instead, from time to time and despite the driving rain, she’d simply ride close and allow a rounded thigh to brush my own while she watched me through slitted eyes.
“My Lord,” she finally burst out when she could no longer contain herself, “You are my love and I am yours. Indeed, we’re but a week from wedlock, at long last—for you do possess some skill in dodging the marriage bed. Still, ‘tis precisely now that you withdraw from me, who should be privy to your thoughts. What’s with it, love? I’ve a right to know.”
And she did. But I could only say solemnly, “‘Tis that this time there’ll be no way I can match their weapons.”
She brightened, laughed, gave me an elbow to the ribs. She said, “You joke, Collin. And you harm yourself in the doing. Twas you, .sir, who fought the hundred of Keflwher; who killed the skaiding, destroyed the armies of Om, and who with nought but twenty-two swords brought down that hellish center of all evil, the black temple of the Dark One. … I cannot believe you.”
I smiled sadly. “The fact that you cannot but accentuates the problem.”
“I fail me, Collin, to see your point.”
“Tis that no Marackian will believe me either; though they’ll still depend upon me while I, in turn, can give them nothing but a useless sword.”
“Hey, now, sirrah! Tis one that’s always been victorious.”
I reached across to catch her hand, bring it to my lips and kiss the fingers. Giving it back, I said, “Murie, hear me…. Those who come now can destroy this entire world with the snap of a finger. And I doubt not that they’ll do just that If we only had time. But there is none.”
My voice trailed weakly off and despite her nearness, I settled again to my depression.
No way. She wouldn’t have it. She was my love; would be my love. The fighting Alphian in her forced her to take charge in a different way; the way she knew best: to distract me, to channel my thoughts elsewhere in the age-old therapy that has no equal. She first reached out to pinch my ear, hard, to get my attention. She then leaned across—to press her rain-sweet lips to my cheek and throat She clung tight this way as we rode; so that Henery, my court mount, looked back to see us and actually chortle. Henery had long forgiven me, I knew, for the ear Gol-Bades had taken at Dunguring; though, in the battle’s aftermath, he’d turn away whenever I came near him, to moan and twitch his stump.
Murie whispered softly, but with the tiniest touch of steel to her voice, “Let’s cross the Cyr when we come to it, Collin.”
I shuddered. She held me tighter. The clich6, though I’m sure she thought she’d invented it, was like a man’s teeth on a shield front. “We are of Marack,” she persisted with the proper hauteur, “as you are too, though Fm minded, if my ears told me true, to think that you also had some command of that great ship we rode in, which is gone now. Still, you are handsomely furred like me, whilst they were naked of such—so pale and ugly. So you must truly be of Marack, my love. Therefore, be this enemy ever so powerful, you’ll find a way. We’ll find a way!”
She kissed me hard again, clung to me like a succubus. I loved every minute of it. … And thus, I thought, had the love-smitten, but wholly amateur in war, Cleopatra, counselled her Anthony on the eve of the disaster at Actium.
Instinctively, I knew that she’d thought of Camelot’s magick as the answer. To her it was a boundless sorcery which could make all things right; which is the way they would all think. Conditioning guaranteed it—that we would find a way where none existed!
For what they didn’t know or otherwise refused to believe was that the magick of Camelot-Fregis had serious limitations. If one was good at it, he could rain, hail, sleet or snow on someone else’s crops, chickens or festive outing. One could even do better than that: put a boil, perhaps, upon the nose of an adversary to keep him from a dance or rendezvous with his lady-love; upon which the spell-caster could move in on the lady… . But there was nothing at all with which to confront an alien battlecraft from another universe.
The lovable but absolutely murderous in battle, Rawl Fergis, for example, had learned just three spells of magick in his two full years at the collegium. The first had made him a veritable devil with the lute, though for the life of me, I couldn’t see how he’d achieved this prowess with magick. He could also turn gog-milk into sviss, a most excellent Marackian-Fregisian brandy—a handy stunt! And finally, he’d been given a solid spell for love to be used three times only. He’d hastily used all. three of them on the lovely Caroween Hoggle-Fitz, unaware that that sweetest of lusty redheads had used the three she had on bun.
The true sorcerers and witches were something else, of course. As were the “king’s sorcerers” and the “teachers.” These were indeed adept, and could do some damned interesting and even powerful things. But that, I repeat, was the extent of it.
I shook my head against her pageboy bob and sighed. We were, I thought, as Terran Druids against a coming night of laser bursts, death-dealing weaponry and even obliteration. I’d no reason whatsoever to be optimistic.
Our fat dottles, loping happily against the fast-setting sun, paced themselves at then-usual twenty miles per hour, a rhythm, so I’d been told by certain chirurgeons, to correspond to their heartbeat. The distance to Glagmaron Castle being just twenty-two miles, we arrived upon the military field before the drawbridge in just a few minutes more than an hour. The town of Glagmaron, lying below the field, the bridge and great crenellated ramparts, was also in the shadow of the hill. Lanterns already bobbed in its streets.
The rain had not let up. And though twilight, too, was fast descending, we’d still been spotted from the battlements. Trumpets cried shrilly in greeting. A hundred kettledrums began to cadence our arrival.
I halted our troop at the drawbridge. There was no moat, Just a great ravine to split the hilltop with its field from the castle. Once more I cautioned silence about all that had happened: “As if your lives depended on it,” I warned them flatly. “For that is precisely the case here.”
The courtyard was storm-lashed; the great slate slabs all dappled with a hail of bouncing drops. We parted hurriedly, handing our mounts to as many ostlers. Rawl and I headed for
the entry to the west turret. Murie and Caroween ran for the entrance to the great hall and the corridors to their own apartments. I had one last glimpse ,of Murie, with that. damned macrocephalic rodentius riding on her shoulders. A sopping-wet tarn drooped around his head so that only his lack luster eyes were showing. I swore. I couldn’t help it She really did treat that little bastard as if he were the long-lost Terran Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Fel-Holdt and Per-Looris, the king’s sorcerer, headed directly for the royal chambers to report our unexpected and swift return, as was their duty.
I cursed again and felt the better for it.
Rawl and I were once more sharing an apartment. It being high summer, the place was always crowded, for fetes, tourneys, dinners and the like, with swarms of heggles (knights), kolbs (lords), and their ladies, plus magistrates and tax councillors, all coming to stay a day or so arid to take up space at Glagmaron. The reason beyond .the usual? Well there was peace in all of Marack and in all of Fregis. And, too, the previous year had been a bountiful harvest everywhere so that wassail was forever on the order of the day.
The Magick of Camelot Page 3