Presently the visitors and their host emerged together from Old Guns’ house, and went down the winding path to the palisaded enclosure around the largest building in the camp — the Mister Mallardy’s. In another moment the thin feather of smoke from the main smoke hole thickened. And, as if waiting only for this signal, a white flake drifted down from the leaden skies; then another, then the air was filled with them.
Whether to see the unfamiliar sight, or whether to punish himself for his own ineptitude, or to defy the fates which were bent on defying him and all his aims, he did not know; but Lomar stayed on and stayed on and on. He had some dim notion of waiting until dark, but the recollection that day on Pia 2 was six hours longer than on Old Earth, his distant, terribly distant homeworld, worked its way up to the surface of his unhappy mind. And so, finally, cold and stiff and wet and almost past misery, he painfully made his way back the way he had come.
• • •
It was late when his host returned. He added his own damp clothing to his guest’s, drying before the stove, and changed. Then, not looking over to where Lomar sat brooding in a corner chair, he said, “You think that redwing is the main problem?”
“What?”
“You think that getting more redwing is the main problem — don’t you?”
Lomar frowned, blinked, yawned. Stretching, he asked, “It is for me, I guess. Why?” — suddenly becoming aware of the challenging and troubled tone of Old Guns’ voice — “Isn’t it?”
The elder man shook his head. Seating himself before the fire, he said, as if thinking aloud, “Suppose they could be convinced? I say, suppose. … What could they do? Mount an expedition and come on down here? No. No good. No good at all. No good if it could succeed, no good if it failed. Choice of evils. What then? Stay up there and wait? Keep the force fields up? For how — ”
“Guns, what are you talking about?”
A stick of wood caught fire with little gouts and gusts of flame, blue bursts at first, then an audible burning, red and orange and yellow. Old Guns’ craggy face was lit by the flickering light.
“For how long? Sooner or later they’d have to rest the generators. No…. No…. Whichever way I look at it: No.” He stood up, abruptly. “Well — ‘Come day, go day, God send Sunday,’ and every day we’ve all got to eat. Sathy? Norna?”
And he wouldn’t repeat what he’d been saying, or enlarge upon or explain any of it.
“Rorks,” he said, after supper, taking up a pikehead and a whetstone. “They don’t know anything about rorks up North. Down here we do. Know them as well as we know the lot at Flinders Crag. But — They can talk, boy. Listen, now. They can talk! I don’t mean the Flinders, I mean the rorks. Oh, laugh, if you like. I didn’t believe it either, when I first heard it. But it’s true.”
In a low voice, Ran said, “You’ve been down here too long.”
Anger flashed in Norna’s eyes at that. “And I says ye hasn’t been here long enough! They can talk! They’s been heard to! And what’s more, they has a city — ”
“Oh, come on!” he burst out, half-annoyed, half-amused. “I know better than that! I’ve seen them myself, and I’ve seen old 3Ds of them, too. A city, indeed!”
Norna’s father nodded, slowly. “To be sure, it’s hard to credit. They have been heard to talk. No one’s seen their city in the daytime, but its lights have been seen at night from a place called Tiggy’s Hill, far into Rorkland. Folks don’t usually venture there, but now and then they do, in gathering; and they camp out on the Hill and build guard fires all around and keep a watch and ward, you may be sure, main carefully. And at such times they have seen the windows and streets of a great city…. This place is called the Plain of Lights. And if it isn’t rorks that live there — and I’m not sure, for one — then, tell me who does? People? So great a place would require a great area of fields to feed, and would have a great population. We’ve seen no signs of such. No — don’t underestimate the rork, Ranny. Don’t underestimate them at all.”
That night, sleeping on his hard and narrow cot after waiting a long time in what he admitted was the probably foolish hope that Norna might come to him, Lomar dreamed. In his dream a huge and dun-grey rork stood a ways before and below him, its mask a bright yellow lineation; and it spoke to him in its hoarse, roaring and clicking voice. And what it said was:
“Come down … Come down … I kill! I kill!”
“These two are exempt,” Old Guns said, hefting a matchlock in his hands, and indicating for Lomar to take the other from the table.
Lomar did, looking at it with curiosity. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I made them myself, and they aren’t counted on the old man’s roster. I mean that they are exempt from war. They are hunting weapons only, and I took my oath in blood upon them that they would never be aimed at any man no matter what. I did this before all the clans at the last powwow, some years back, and so everybody knows about it. That means that I can go anywhere with them at any time and no one will think I came to fight and I can pass safely. But it also means that if anyone wants to have at me, ever if a ‘lock is pointed at me and primed and a lighted match at his touch hole, I am the same as unarmed. I can’t use either of these even to defend myself. They’re exempt, you see.”
The match was made of a punk of wood and fungus, and burnt ill. Old Guns said that he might be able to make better, but preferred to keep to tradition. Besides, he had no desire to add to the arts of war as practiced too eagerly in the Wild land. One could usually tell where an armed enemy stood in the nighttime because his need often compelled him to whirl his match and fan it rapidly to keep it alive, and the sparks thrown off gave away his position. “To say nothing of the smell,” he added, wryly.
“I make my own powder, too,” he continued, “partly at least to keep from being blown up. But I tell them, when they ask me to make it for them, that it’s only strong enough for hunt shot and couldn’t kill a man. I use none of those big slugs that go for bullets here.”
Powder “horn” (actually, a wooden flask) and shot bag were of traditional design, made by a clan craftsman who was of some small fame in such matters. On the bag was painted a rip, and the words — crude but quite legible — I Bites; and the horn was engraved with the figure of a rork and the legend, Ware.
Two long prongs folded from the heavy body of the matchlock to give it support when the ‘lockman knelt to aim and fire; in order to do so from a standing position he would have needed three hands.
With the archaic instrument on his shoulder and powder and shot in place, Lomar felt like someone from an ancient drama, the First Men on Mars, perhaps; or the Revenge of Cleopatra. “I’d wear a loincloth to match,” he said, smiling, “if it weren’t so cold.” Old Guns did not smile, however, and made him repeat the rules for safety which he’d been told earlier. Finally, he allowed that it was safe for them to start out.
“What game are we after, by the way,” Lomar asked. They were heading downhill and away from the sea, the camp above them sinking out of sight behind its dark walls. The snow had mostly melted, and once again the black color predominated. Black — the damp leaves underfoot, black — the boles of the naked trees, black — the moss growing thickly on them and on the black rocks.
“What we find is what we’re after. Leapers, tree climbers, ant pigs, any of them are fit to eat, little though they may appeal to your Station-trained palate, boy. Daybats, maybe. Rips — I’d never eat a rip, though, believe me, there are those around who have, and glad to get them…. Rork?” He named the name hovering between them. “Not now; in Cold Time. They don’t exactly hibernate, but almost. Slow, sluggish, weak, you know. I’ve known some of the young bucks to go out in Cold Time and drag back a young rork. Only a very, very young one, though the way they beat their chests about it, you’d think it was a great feat.
“The Tame Tocks, as you probably know, prize the claws for charms. And both they and the Wild men have this notion that the toes, if cooked, are good
for ambition, as the Tame ones call it — the Wild ones are franker, they call it rut. If you’ve ever seen the things close up, it’s not too hard to imagine why. Personally, I don’t care one way or the other, but sometimes the creatures aren’t quite dead when they drag them in; they butcher them alive, torture them. … I don’t like to see that….”
The ground was beginning to grow more level, the trees were larger. The nuts they had dropped lay all around and underfoot, inedible for men, and the arboreal creatures who lived on them had to descend to the ground to get them.
“They’re a tough bunch of bumboes, your clan-kinsmen,” Lomar said.
Old Guns nodded, shrugged. “Circumstances have made them so. You don’t really know what their lives are like, you don’t get a picture of it from my house. I live like a king. The old Mister himself doesn’t eat better or sleep as warm and dry as we do. So you can imagine how the others live. And Mallardy is one of the richer clans, too! Every bite of food has to be wrestled out of this thin, rocky soil, and out of the sea … and the sea isn’t exactly teeming, either. I’d say that a good half of them have never in their lives known what it is not to be hungry, have never once had a full belly. Think how it was in the early days, before they’d adapted, gotten acclimated — when redweed had become just a weed again and had no market value because there was no market. An empty sky over their heads and just the dirt beneath their feet. Waiting, waiting, waiting, for help that never came. Virtue must have died. It was dog eat dog, and root, hog, or die.
“So they fought like dogs and they rooted like hogs. And you see their children.”
Lomar nodded. The air suddenly seemed colder. He shivered. “And so they hate us,” he said, voice low.
“You have no idea how they hate you. You, I say. Not, us. Oh, Flinders hates me. But Flinders hates everyone. There is the ultimate Wild man for you, the Mister Flinders. But the others have accepted me. I’ve even been sounded out about joining them when they raid North.”
Lomar glanced at his match, couldn’t tell if it was still alive or not, shook it vigorously till it glowed up and threw sparks. He tried to form a map in his mind of the territories of the clans from the bits of information gotten at the haphazard and only vaguely remembered. Hannit and Haggar and Crame. Dominis, Nimmai, Boylston, Owelly. … He ran out of names, could form no picture.
“North? Whose camp lies north of here?” he asked.
Old Guns slowly blew out his breath, watched it misting in the morning air. “Yours does,” he said, at last. “The Station.”
• • •
The game bag on the way back contained a tree climber and two leapers. They had given the offals to a scrannel, ragged hag who had appeared from nowhere; Lomar, insomuch as he thought of it at all, thought that she might well intend to eat them all raw.
For perhaps the hundredth time he asked, “But you can’t be serious?”
His host shrugged. “Have it your own way, then,” he muttered.
“No — I mean, they can’t be serious! … can they? It’s madness — ”
Old Guns sighed and waggled his head. “Of course it is. Isn’t all war madness? And the Wild men are all at least a little mad and some of them, Floras Flinders, for example, are more than a little mad. No so long ago he and Haggar raided into Nimmai’s Camp. They were repulsed. He had at least some sort of a claim against Nimmai, but then he raided Owelly, and he had no claim at all against Owelly. What was his reason? He was hungry. Owelly had food and Flinders didn’t. Thou shalt want ere I shall want. Isn’t that a sort of insanity?”
The grievances of the Wild Tocks against the Guild were deep and bitter and old. The Guild had committed no new, specific act to antagonize them lately — but lately they had found a focus for their discontent in Flinders. The Guild was rich, they were poor. How had the Guild become rich? By taking redwing cheap and selling it dear. Therefore the riches of the Guild rightfully belonged to the Tocks. The Guild Station had food, it had clothing. Why should others go naked, cold, unshod? It had weapons, too.
It had guns.
“But … but … listen. They think of those weapons as booty to plunder for. Don’t they realize that they are capable of being used against them, as well as by them?”
Ran Lomar, Old Guns said, was arguing rationally. By this time he should have learned that men are not always moved to act rationally. Had Lomar, with all his rational argumente, been able to persuade any of the Guildsmen? No, not one. And if sophisticated, educated, far-traveled and civilized folk could not be swayed by logic and sense, then what was to be expected from those who had lived for generations on the thin edge of barbarism? going nowhere, learning nothing, minds dulled by parochialism, hunger, bitterness, and a form of pride so perverted that it scarcely deserved the name.
A solitary daybat broke the solitude of the sky. Quickly, automatically, Old Guns glanced at it, fingers moving for his matchlock. Then his glance dropped away, and his fingers. The swooping, fluttering, erratic flight made it a bad target. The mournful cry of the creature fell upon their ears, distant and thin. Then it vanished.
“You’ve heard or read about a telescope, boy? An archaic form of farseer? If you looked through the right end — it was only fitted for one eye — then, of course, small things seemed large. But if you looked through the opposite end, the wrong end, then even large things seemed small. Now — you and the Wild men are looking through opposite ends. You see the situation as a handful of Tocks against the teeming Galaxy. And they see it as thousands of Tocks against a handful of Guildsmen. Ah … Don’t they realize the numbers and the power of the world Outside? No. They don’t. How could they? None of them have ever been Outside. They’ve seen no more than the Station. Once every five years comes one single ship. You can talk to them till your teeth ache, as I’ve done, as I’ve done; it’s no use. Academically they may acknowledge that a few, a very few, other worlds may be inhabited besides this one and Old Earth.
“But they can’t conceive that they are inhabited any more thickly than this world is. The Q Ship is not a war ship, they know that much. They think its schedule is a sort of act of nature: It couldn’t return in less than five years any more than the sun can rise or set in less than its allotted time. So they figure: suppose they attack the Station. Conquer they must. The Q comes. Perhaps they conquer the Q. Even if they don’t, it would be years before it returns. By that time they are impregnable. Besides, do they not control all the redwing in the Universe? Guild will have to make terms…. That’s how it looks to them. That’s how it looks.”
They plodded along in silence. A thousand thoughts fleeted through Lomar’s mind. Should he leave now and warn the Station? No — impossible — the boat wouldn’t be back for weeks. A surprise attack might possibly succeed. Suddenly, sickeningly, he realized that it might very possibly succeed! And even if he should get up North in time, would he be believed? He knew that he would not, he could not, never in a million years convince any of them that such a danger existed. What, then? Make his own escape? Persuade Lindel and perhaps a few Tame Tocks — build a raft (his own past fantasies now return ing, more vigorous than before) — try and make a landfall on another continent or island?
Supposing, and it was not too healthy a supposition — this to succeed — what then? Live like the first generation of the forefathers of the Tocks, with the prospect of their children falling into a similar degeneration?
His thoughts went around and round, and the wind grew cold against his shoulders.
“When — ” His voice came out low and thick, and he struggled to clear his throat. “When do they plan this attack?”
“Oh,” said Old Guns, almost indifferently, “they have no plans. Not yet. It’s still just talk, just firestone talk. But it’s a talk that begins to grow louder. Maybe the main thing keeping it down — ” He stopped, frowned; shook his head. “ — so far, is that it is known to be Flinders’ idea. No one likes Flinders. No one trusts …” Again he stopped, his voice fading o
ff, again he frowned.
He stopped. “Speak of the devil,” he muttered. “I could swear I heard Flinders’ voice — be quiet,” he said abruptly. Lomar, who had said nothing, continued to say nothing. They stood in their steps, listening. At first Lomar could hear nothing but the occasional slight pit-pit-pit of the again-falling snowflakes against the tree behind him. Then the wind changed. Then he heard voices. He could not tell how many, but above them on the changeable wind, now sharp, now gone, now fading, falling, rising — one voice: loud, loud, loud.
“It is Flinders. What’s he — Ranny! Remember, now! These ‘locks are exempt! Don’t load, don’t prime, certainly don’t fire, and if you want us all to live, don’t even point!”
Before Ran could reply he saw the band of men coming through the woods ahead of them. And, at the same moment, they were seen. Several of Flinders’ men dropped at once to the one-knee position, flipping out the supports for their ‘locks and blowing on their matches.
“Covered!” cried Flinders, his bristly face splitting into an unpleasant grin. “Ye’s be covered, says!”
“We know it,” Old Guns answered, coming on. “You know me, Mister. I use no tricks.”
The clan chief lifted his upper lip. “Says, ‘I use no tricks.’ Use any, an’ we puts bullets in ye. If ye doesn’t fear bullets — ” his whole mouth expressed his glee and his triumph, “ — then we has what’ll makes ye fear!” His men guffawed. “Strip! Come up. Come up.”
Flinders’ heir-son, an ungrizzled version of his unlovely sire, came forward. And with him, hands bound and feet hobbled, defiantly tossing back her long black hair, was Norna.
Old Guns groaned, whispered her name. “Sathy? Is she — is your mother — ? Child — ?”
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