Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition

by L. Neil Smith

  “Why, you learn canon law quickly, villain,” the weapon-holder whispered, almost sounding amused. “Now you may help us with the oxcart!”

  Abruptly one young guardsman stepped forward as if to block our progress, his fire-hardened wooden pike at the ready. With a casual swipe, the free hand of the priest lashed out. The guardsman took a stunned step backward with a ruined face, blood gushing onto the pavement. He collapsed, his pole falling to the flagstones with a clatter.

  The tension in the courtyard turned to fury in a wave that swept around its walls. More guardsmen took a step, lowered fire-blackened spearpoints. Swords, daggers, battle axes were loosened in their scabbards.

  “No!” cried the Bailiff, his shoulder rising several centimeters under the impetus of the upthrust steel in his armpit, “Stand ye all where ye be! Have that guardsman broken if he lives!” He pointed at the wounded and unconscious youth, but his face had turned to that of the priest. A murderous hatred now raged behind his small, bestial eyes.

  Together the two pulled at the harnessing of the animals, turning them toward the gate. With some difficulty they managed to line up the crude planked wheels of the cart to fit between the raised beam-edges of the narrow drawbridge. I very nearly fainted on the spot, only the idea of how Eleva would despise such a display of weakness sustaining me. They half-carried me to the cart, handing me up where I could lie gratefully in clean straw. Remotely I felt them lift the Lieutenant up beside me. Two robed figures took hold of the straps on the animals’ faces, pulled them through the gate onto the suddenly fragile-seeming bridge.

  It groaned under the strain.

  The other priest now trudged behind us, close enough to touch, had I been able, keeping a hidden eye on the Bailiff who had somehow been persuaded to perch his broad rear-end on the lowered tailgate of the vehicle. As if at an afterthought, the priest jumped up beside the man.

  “I yield to thee for now,” the Bailiff hissed between clenched teeth. It was easy, there were so many missing. Veins standing out on his scarred forehead, his voice began to rise as we passed beneath the rust-pitted portcullis. “But we shall all see anon who bows to what authority!”

  The outer walls of the castle were now lined at their tops with soldiers, each with a sheet-bronze cap, a leather vest closely sewn with iron rings, a sharpened wooden pike. Each young, disease-marked face peeked out over the high collar of a thick batting of cotton under-armor.

  “The Baron,” continued the Bailiff, “Shall hear of—!”

  There was the briefest of motions under the man’s arm, no noise at all. The Bailiff stiffened momentarily, lost interest in what he had been about to say, then slumped, propped against the hooded figure beside him as we rumbled off the end of the bridge onto a rutted dirt roadway.

  Gradually, miraculously, the Baron’s castle grew small in the distance.

  I struggled to an upright position on the pile of straw in the swaying cart, looking at the priest whose weapon had been tucked away again.

  “Just what is it that you are you planning to do with us?” I asked, almost surprised that I was beginning to care again—about anything.

  We turned a corner, finally losing sight of that hateful pile of stones behind a line of tall trees. The priest was a long time answering.

  “First you teach us,” the figure said at last in a loud crackling hiss. It gave the Bailiff a shove. His body tumbled off the side of the road into a ditch, vanished from sight. “Then you disappear, as well!”

  Escape to Captivity

  Scavians never seemed to have discovered that wheels should be round.

  The man-tall weathered pair on the cart might possibly have begun that way. They were constructed of heavy parallel timbers, bolted together carefully with iron strapping. But apparently it had never occurred to the wheelwright to apply some of that iron strapping to the rims, as tires, so the end-grain had worn less quickly than the rest of the circumference. Ah well, perhaps in another thousand years ...

  The straw-covered bed lifted, dropped, lifted, dropped, with every half-turn each of the wheels made, perfectly out of synch with one another.

  The Lieutenant did not notice. He lay even more deeply unconscious than before, although he seemed to breathe more regularly. His uniform was as tattered as mine. In addition to his wounded arm he was covered with sores from our long confinement. I wondered what they had done to him, what kinds of torture his unconscious body had endured. Whatever it had been, it did not show—which made me shudder with grisly speculation.

  Although nominally winter, only a few hundred kilometers from the planet’s northern pole, it was much warmer here, aboveground. My toes, my fingers had started aching as they thawed. I itched furiously all over, the vermin I unwillingly carried with me stirring from their torpor.

  Fellow escapees.

  How long it would take the Baron to catch on that his Bailiff was never coming back from this excursion, I could not guess. The hooded people seemed altogether too relaxed about it to suit me. My “Pistols, (Darrick), 8mm, Magazine, Revolving, (one each)” were Vespuccian history’s most sophisticated handweapons, fabricated directly from specimens discovered aboard the abandoned colony starship. But even they, I had found, could not hope to stand up to a sufficient number of mounted men, primevally equipped but unafraid to die. If the Baron sent his minions after us, I was half-prepared to wake up in my cell again.

  Or dead.

  Despite such grim considerations, well-shaken by the irregular rocking of the cart, I dropped off into an uneasy sleep at least a dozen times before we made our first stop. I would wake up, startled, remember where I was, assure myself the Lieutenant was okay, watch the hooded figures plodding silently behind us ... silently behind us ... Then awake again, repeating the whole heart-stopping process until it seemed that I had been doing this same idiotic thing for all of my life.

  Two of the moons were high now, painfully bright. Sca’s star, its sun, is an unbearable blue-white fusion torch, the temperature, the color, of metal being welded in front of your face. Animals, humans, plant-life, all seek refuge from the full deadly light of day, some in burrows or by bundling themselves in thick, reflective, toughened leaves.

  Scavian nighttime calls forth life again, illuminated much more brilliantly by the planet’s satellites alone than the high-noon summer surface of my own world ever is. Birds sing. Flowers bloom. Peasants stumble from their caves or their tightly-shuttered huts to till their masters’ fields. The rare desperate individual forced to travel abroad by daylight does so closely-robed—as these mysterious strangers who carried us with them—even so, at the risk of nasty burns, no matter how many layers of primitively-woven clothing he simmers and sweats in.

  A thought struck through the pain-filled fog swirling inside my head: mankind could not have originated here, either! Unless it was this sun they were escaping, just as we, in our own way, had tried escaping the ungenerous star of Vespucci. I could not picture human life evolving on this planet, the place was far too inimical to it. Then again, perhaps the star itself had changed, at some time in the past. Perhaps it burned hotter now than in the early days of Scavian life.

  The cart lurched to a stop.

  I very nearly slid off the slick yellow straw into the dirt-track of a road, but one of the trailing hooded people steadied me. The one up in front made clucking noises at the animals, wrestling them into a right-angle turn. We trundled into a narrow cavern between two great growths of shrubbery, several meters tall. As the pulling-creatures fed themselves from bags of grain tied to their faces, the hooded ones directed their attention first to the unconscious Lieutenant, then to me.

  The Lieutenant they stripped naked, efficiently, dispassionately. They turned him, carefully examining infected cuts, sores, abrasions he had acquired in our short, eventful stay on Sca. They were gentle with his deeply-injured arm, working together in a monastic silence that was perhaps appropriate, somehow generating an atmosphere of calculated haste, cutting away
the crude bandage with its sickening cargo.

  I had rolled over to watch them work on the Lieutenant, when a sudden lance of pain shot through my broken foot. I stared down at myself with agony-gauzed eyes as a robed figure busied itself at my trouser leg, with what was left of my stocking. The moment the mangled foot was exposed, I had to look away. It was as bad, I thought, as the Lieutenant’s arm. Without question I was going to lose it, counting myself lucky if that was all that I lost. In any event, I would never again—

  —abruptly, everything froze.

  As one, the three hooded people turned away from the cart. Two of them crossed the narrow roadbed, crouching down behind a big clump of slowly-opening nightbrush to conceal themselves from the direction we had just come—the direction of the castle, of the Baron, of the Baron’s murderous riders. The remaining figure hid itself on the near side.

  They waited.

  How they had detected our pursuers was a mystery. All I knew was that, eventually, there was a sound, a cascade of hollow noise quite unlike any other. It was terrifying, especially since I had heard it for the first time when our camp at the Asperance landing site was being overwhelmed. It was the sound of hard-shod animal-feet, pounding in their hundreds on the ground, audible through the very soil itself. Gradually there came, too, the metallic jangle of the mounted warriors the animals bore, their weapons, heir equipment, rough shouting, the peculiar hair-stirring high-pitched screaming of the riding-beasts themselves.

  As the mounted warriors thundered into sight, I had a plain view abreast from the tiny clearing. Casually, the hooded people stepped into the roadway with a smooth silent motion. The mounted column braked to a dusty, disorganized stop. Archers twisted their arms over their mailed backs for arrows. Axes were loosened in their belt thongs.

  Swords were drawn with a ringing whisper.

  This was followed by a brief unpleasant exchange of words, an even briefer silence. Then the officer heading the column happened to glance for moment to his right, straight at me. He began to shout a command.

  All at once, a broad fan of white-hot energy leaped from the burlap sleeve-ends of the robed people, showering the column, flaring into a wall of flame where it struck the mounted men. In a single horrifying instant the entire troop was engulfed, consumed where they stood, animals, men, without so much as a final scream of terror or pain.

  The heat of the thing baked itself onto my face.

  When the flames died out a scant few seconds later, exactly as if someone had turned off a gas valve, all that remained in the road were a few blackened, irregular smoky lumps which might once have been saddles.

  Even the bones had burned.

  As quickly as it had begun, it was over. The three robed figures calmly returned to the cart without looking back. They gave me water, flat-tasting, mildly bitter, drugged. I was not particularly surprised to awaken, swaying, bumping once again, with Sca’s four moons about to set.

  Daylight was about to arrive.

  -2-

  Daytime on Sca is just about twenty-five hours long, Vespuccian.

  What’s unusual is that so are the nighttimes.

  I had been unconscious for quite some while, apparently, wrapped up in a heavy robe like those worn by these strange people who had either captured or rescued us, but with the hood thrown back on my shoulders. My right foot was bound to the knee in clean local coarse-weave concealing something else, some other dressing, comfortable, yet firm.

  All right, then, what was missing? What bothered me?

  Lying on that pitching wagon, I discovered with a little shock that I had forgotten completely, somewhere in the past few nightmarish weeks, what it was like not to be in constant pain, waking, sleeping, or floating dazedly suspended between the two states as I had been most of the time. It was a peculiar sensation, like being thrown out of a high window. Pain had come to be the hidden foundation of my existence.

  The Lieutenant, too, wore a robe, but its long brown sleeve was slitted open to reveal the same rough burlap bandaging where the crude alien sword had nearly cut him through. He was snoring loudly. It was contagious.

  What felt like only moments later, I awoke again, the moons apparently still setting. This time, something felt very wrong, deeply disorienting. Perhaps it was a remnant of the drug. I twisted around, glancing reflexively at the Lieutenant, but his color, if one could judge in this slantways light, was steadily returning to normal. He breathed easily, if a bit loudly. The hooded people marched onward, two behind us, stolidly, mutely, any faces they might have possessed hidden away deep within the shadows of their clothing. A third guided the pulling-beasts who could scarcely have been more stoically unresponsive.

  Then I had it: the moons were actually rising! I had slept one entire hellish day-period through. To all appearances, our little traveling company had simply kept marching, when I had half expected we would take shelter somewhere, to wait for another night to travel. No wonder I was warm; it was residual daytime heat that I was feeling. This—

  —then another thought struck me: what had fooled me was that the moons were on my left. If they were rising, then they should be on my right.

  We were traveling south,

  Not northward to the city of the Bishop—or the burning-stake.

  -3-

  Another night passed.

  In one of my mother’s ancient folk songs, there is a passage about some place “where the dawn comes up like thunder”. On Sca, it comes up like a fission-bomb explosion. At the first excruciatingly brilliant bead on the cluttered horizon, the hooded ones halted the cart again. There had been a false down over there for some hours. It is never dark on Sca. Now the strangers stopped to drape heavy fabric over the animals, snugging string-drawn coverings down over the beasts’ placid eyes.

  The very air had an expectant smell to it. Insects were suddenly silent, birds nowhere to be seen, nothing rustled in the day-bleached grass.

  The Lieutenant’s sleep-disheveled robe was bound closely about his body now by gentle, competent hands, his limbs carefully covered, the hood slipped up around his ears. They closed the front with a draw-cord, fumbling deep inside the face for some time until they appeared satisfied. I got basically the same treatment, every square centimeter of my exposed flesh cloaked, everything accomplished in total eerie silence. Once the hood came over my head, one of the robed figures reached in, pulled a dark interior netting across my eyes, reducing my point of view to a small, increasingly brilliant circle. Soon it was like peering out of the mouth from deep within a darkened tunnel.

  Creaking into motion once again, we plodded onward under the near-lethal sun, meeting no one, seeing no one, not a single living thing except for trees, bushes, other foliage, their leaves clenched tightly into little knots to resist the deadly glory overhead. Time after time, half dazed, I would move to loosen the heavy stifling robe—my body was drenched in sweat that only made the itching worse—only to have my hands pulled gently away from the fastenings. Then I would remember what the sunlight on this planet could do to human flesh.

  On Sca, in addition to the gibbet, in addition to the pyre—as if the rulers here really needed another form of brutality—exposure to daylight was a third form of execution, reserved for miscreant nobility.

  Within an hour, everything around us appeared to be washed out, lit only in shades of glaring white, impenetrable black, like an old, over-exposed photograph. The Lieutenant mumbled, tossed, struggled fitfully with his smothering protection. They propped him up, gave him something to drink through a small plastic tube thrust into the face of his hood. Afterward, he rested quietly. Within my own sweltering discomfort, I began to yearn for a sip from the same potion, probably the drugged one they had given me the day before, but it was never offered.

  We continued southward.

  Slowly, I began to have an idea about what might really be going on here. Growing up, I had been warned never to jump to a conclusion prematurely in the absence of reliable data. This
is very good advice. However the human mind—mine, at least—was designed to jump reflexively, on the basis of partial information, whether its owner wants it to or not. Mine was doing that right now. Since nobody else would talk to me, I thought I would give it a chance, at least to explain.