by Jack Vance
“There will be a means. Time is long.”
“For your purposes, time needs to be long. Even on the Coralyne planets there are men. Enslaved, reshaped in body and mind, but men. What of them? It seems that you are wrong, that you are guided by faith indeed.”
The Demie fell silent. His face seemed to stiffen.
“Are these not facts?” asked Joaz. “How do you reconcile them with your faith?”
The Demie said mildly, “Facts can never be reconciled with faith. By our faith, these men, if they exist, will also pass. Time is long. Oh, the worlds of brightness: they await us!”
“It is clear,” said Joaz, “that you ally yourselves with the Basics and that you hope for our destruction. This can only change our attitudes toward you. I fear that Ervis Carcolo was right and I wrong.”
“We remain passive,” said the Demie. His face wavered, seemed to swim with mottled colors. “Without emotion, we will stand witness to the passing of the Utter men, neither helping nor hindering.”
Joaz spoke in fury, “Your faith, your Rationale—whatever you call it—misleads you. I make this threat: if you fail to help us, you will suffer as we suffer.”
“We are passive, we are indifferent.”
“What of your children? The Basics make no difference between us. They will herd you to their pens as readily as they do us. Why should we fight to protect you?”
The Demie’s face faded, became splotched with fog, transparent mist; his eyes glowed like rotten meat. “We need no protection,” he howled. “We are secure.”
“You will suffer our fate,” cried Joaz, “I promise you this!”
The Demie collapsed suddenly into a small dry husk, like a dead mosquito; with incredible speed, Joaz fled back through the caves, the tunnels, up through his workroom, his studio, into his bed chamber where now he jerked upright, eyes starting, throat distended, mouth dry.
The door opened; Rife’s head appeared. “Did you call, sir?”
Joaz raised himself on his elbows, looked around the room. “No. I did not call.”
Rife withdrew. Joaz settled back on the couch, lay staring at the ceiling. He had dreamed a most peculiar dream. Dream? A synthesis of his own imaginings? Or, in all verity, a confrontation and exchange between two minds? Impossible to decide, and perhaps irrelevant; the event carried its own conviction.
Joaz swung his legs over the side of the couch, blinked at the floor. Dream or colloquy, it was all the same. He rose to his feet, donned sandals and a robe of yellow fur, limped morosely up to the Council Room and stepped out on a sunny balcony.
The day was two-thirds over. Shadows hung dense along the western cliffs. Right and left stretched Banbeck Vale. Never had it seemed more prosperous or more fruitful, and never before unreal: as if he were a stranger to the planet. He looked north along the great bulwark of stone which rose sheer to Banbeck Verge. This too was unreal, a façade behind which lived the sacerdotes. He gauged the rock face, superimposing a mental projection of the great cavern. The cliff toward the north end of the vale must be scarcely more than a shell!
Joaz turned his attention to the exercise field, where Juggers were thudding briskly through defensive evolutions. How strange was the quality of life, which had produced Basic and Jugger, sacerdote and himself. He thought of Ervis Carcolo, and wrestled with sudden exasperation. Carcolo was a distraction most unwelcome at the present time. There would be no tolerance when Carcolo was finally brought to account. A light step behind him, the pressure of fur, the touch of gay hands, the scent of incense. Joaz’s tensions melted. If there were no such creatures as minstrel-maidens, it would be necessary to invent them.
Deep under Banbeck Scarp, in a cubicle lit by a twelve-vial candelabra, a naked white-haired man sat quietly. On a pedestal at the level of his eyes rested his tand, an intricate construction of gold rods and silver wire, woven and bent seemingly at random. The fortuitousness of the design, however, was only apparent. Each curve symbolized an aspect of Final Sentience; the shadow cast upon the wall represented the Rationale, ever-shifting, always the same. The object was sacred to the sacerdotes, and served as a source of revelation.
There was never an end to the study of the tand: new intuitions were continually derived from some heretofore overlooked relationship of angle and curve. The nomenclature was elaborate: each part, juncture, sweep and twist had its name; each aspect of the relationships between the various parts was likewise categorized. Such was the cult of the tand: abstruse, exacting, without compromise. At his puberty rites the young sacerdote might study the original tand for as long as he chose; each must construct a duplicate tand, relying upon memory alone. Then occurred the most significant event of his lifetime: the viewing of his tand by a synod of elders. In awesome stillness, for hours at a time they would ponder his creation, weigh the infinitesimal variations of proportion, radius, sweep and angle. So they would infer the initiate’s quality, judge his personal attributes, determine his understanding of Final Sentience, the Rationale and the Basis.
Occasionally the testimony of the tand revealed a character so tainted as to be reckoned intolerable; the vile tand would be cast into a furnace, the molten metal consigned to a latrine, the unlucky initiate expelled to the face of the planet, to live on his own terms.
The naked white-haired Demie, contemplating his own beautiful tand, sighed, moved restlessly. He had been visited by an influence so ardent, so passionate, so simultaneously cruel and tender, that his mind was oppressed. Unbidden, into his mind, came a dark seep of doubt. Can it be, he asked himself, that we have insensibly wandered from the true Rationale? Do we study our tands with blinded eyes?…How to know, oh how to know! All is relative ease and facility in orthodoxy, yet how can it be denied that good is in itself undeniable? Absolutes are the most uncertain of all formulations, while the uncertainties are the most real…
Twenty miles over the mountains, in the long pale light of the Aerlith afternoon, Ervis Carcolo planned his own plans. “By daring, by striking hard, by cutting deep can I defeat him! In resolve, in courage, in endurance, I am more than his equal. Not again will he trick me, to slaughter my dragons and kill my men! Oh, Joaz Banbeck, how I will pay you for your deceit!” He raised his arms in wrath. “Oh Joaz Banbeck, you whey-faced sheep!” Carcolo smote the air with his fist. “I will crush you like a clod of dry moss!” He frowned, rubbed his round red chin. “But how? Where? He has every advantage!”
Carcolo pondered his possible stratagems. “He will expect me to strike, so much is certain. Doubtless he will again wait in ambush. So I will patrol every inch, but this too he will expect and so be wary lest I thunder upon him from above. Will he hide behind Despoire, or along Northguard, to catch me as I cross the Skanse? If so, I must approach by another route—through Maudlin Pass and under Mount Gethron? Then, if he is tardy in his march, I will meet him on Banbeck Verge. And if he is early, I stalk him through the peaks and chasms…”
Chapter VIII
With the cold rain of dawn pelting down upon them, with the trail illuminated only by lightning-glare, Ervis Carcolo, his dragons and his men set forth. When the first sparkle of sunlight struck Mount Despoire, they had already traversed Maudlin Pass.
So far, so good, exulted Ervis Carcolo. He stood high in his stirrups to scan Starbreak Fell. No sign of the Banbeck forces. He waited, scanning the far edge of Northguard Ridge, black against the sky. A minute passed. Two minutes. The men beat their hands together, the dragons rumbled and muttered fretfully.
Impatience began to prickle along Carcolo’s ribs; he fidgeted and cursed. Could not the simplest of plans be carried through without mistake? But now the flicker of a heliograph from Barch Spike, and another to the southeast from the slopes of Mount Gethron. Carcolo waved forward his army; the way lay clear across Starbreak Fell. Down from Maudlin Pass surged the Happy Valley army: first the Long-horned Murderers, steel-spiked and crested with steel prongs; then the rolling red seethe of the Termagants, darting their heads as t
hey ran; and behind came the balance of the forces.
Starbreak Fell spread wide before them, a rolling slope strewn with flinty meteoric fragments which glinted like flowers on the gray-green moss. To all sides rose majestic peaks, snow blazing white in the clear morning light: Mount Gethron, Mount Despoire, Barch Spike and far to the south, Clew Taw.
The scouts converged from left and right. They brought identical reports: there was no sign of Joaz Banbeck or his troops. Carcolo began to toy with a new possibility. Perhaps Joaz Banbeck had not deigned to take the field. The idea enraged him and filled him with a great joy; if so, Joaz would pay dearly for his neglect.
Halfway across Starbreak Fell they came upon a pen occupied by two hundred of Joaz Banbeck’s spratling Fiends. Two old men and a boy tended the pen, and watched the Happy Valley horde advance with manifest terror.
But Carcolo rode past leaving the pen unmolested. If he won the day, it would become part of his spoils; if he lost, the spratling Fiends could do him no harm.
The old men and the boy stood on the roof of their turf hut, watching Carcolo and his troops pass: the men in black uniforms and black peaked caps with back-slanting ear-flaps; the dragons bounding, crawling, loping, plodding, according to their kind, scales glinting: the dull red and maroon of Termagants; the poisonous shine of the Blue Horrors; the black-green Fiends; the gray and brown Juggers and Murderers. Ervis Carcolo rode on the right flank, Bast Givven rode to the rear. And now Carcolo hastened the pace, haunted by the anxiety that Joaz Banbeck might bring his Fiends and Juggers up Banbeck Scarp before he arrived to thrust him back—assuming that Joaz Banbeck in all actuality had been caught napping.
But Carcolo reached Banbeck Verge without challenge. He shouted out in triumph, waved his cap high. “Joaz Banbeck the sluggard! Let him try now the ascent of Banbeck Scarp!” And Ervis Carcolo surveyed Banbeck Vale with the eye of a conqueror.
Bast Givven seemed to share none of Carcolo’s triumph, and kept an uneasy watch to north and south and to the rear.
Carcolo observed him peevishly from the corner of his eye and presently called out, “Ho, ho, then! What’s amiss?”
“Perhaps much, perhaps nothing,” said Bast Givven, searching the landscape.
Carcolo blew out his mustaches. Givven went on, in the cool voice which so completely irritated Carcolo. “Joaz Banbeck seems to be tricking us as before.”
“Why do you say this?”
“Judge for yourself. Would he allow us advantage without claiming a miser’s price?”
“Nonsense!” muttered Carcolo. “The sluggard is fat with his last victory.” But he rubbed his chin and peered uneasily down into Banbeck Vale. From here it seemed curiously quiet. There was a strange inactivity in the fields and barracks. A chill began to grip Carcolo’s heart—then he cried out. “Look at the brooder: there are the Banbeck dragons!”
Givven squinted down into the vale, glanced sidewise at Carcolo. “Three Termagants, in egg.” He straightened, abandoned all interest in the vale and scrutinized the peaks and ridges to the north and east. “Assume that Joaz Banbeck set out before dawn, came up to the Verge, by the Slickenslides, crossed Blue Fell in strength—”
“What of Blue Crevasse?”
“He avoids Blue Crevasse to the north, comes over Barchback, steals across the Skanse and around Barch Spike…”
Carcolo studied Northguard Ridge with new and startled awareness. A quiver of movement, the glint of scales?
“Retreat!” roared Carcolo. “Make for Barch Spike! They’re behind us!”
Startled, his army broke ranks, fled across Banbeck Verge, up into the harsh spurs of Barch Spike. Joaz, his strategy discovered, launched squads of Murderers to intercept the Happy Valley army, to engage and delay and, if possible, deny them the broken slopes of Barch Spike.
Carcolo calculated swiftly. His own Murderers he considered his finest troops, and held them in great pride. Purposely now he delayed, hoping to engage the Banbeck skirmishers, quickly destroy them and still gain the protection of the Barch declivities.
The Banbeck Murderers, however, refused to close, and scrambled for height up Barch Spike. Carcolo sent forward his Termagants and Blue Horrors; with a horrid snarling the two lines met. The Banbeck Termagants rushed up, to be met by Carcolo’s Striding Murderers and forced into humping pounding flight.
The main body of Carcolo’s troops, excited at the sight of retreating foes, could not be restrained. They veered off from Barch Spike, plunged down upon Starbreak Fell. The Striding Murderers overtook the Banbeck Termagants, climbed up their backs, toppled them over squealing and kicking, then knifed open the exposed pink bellies.
Banbeck’s Long-horned Murderers came circling, struck from the flank into Carcolo’s Striding Murderers, goring with steel-tipped horns, impaling on lances. Somehow they overlooked Carcolo’s Blue Horrors who sprang down upon them. With axes and maces they laid the Murderers low, performing the rather grisly entertainment of clambering on a subdued Murderer, seizing the horn, stripping back horn, skin and scales, from head to tail. So Joaz Banbeck lost thirty Termagants and perhaps two dozen Murderers. Nevertheless, the attack served its purpose, allowing him to bring his knights, Fiends and Juggers down from Northguard before Carcolo could gain the heights of Barch Spike.
Carcolo retreated in a slantwise line up the pocked slopes, and meanwhile sent six men across the fell to the pen where the spratling Fiends milled in fear at the battle. The men broke the gates, struck down the two old men, herded the young Fiends across the fell toward the Banbeck troops. The hysterical spratlings obeyed their instincts, clasped themselves to the neck of whatever dragon they first encountered; which thereupon became sorely hampered, for its own instincts prevented it from detaching the spratling by force.
This ruse, a brilliant improvisation, created enormous disorder among the Banbeck troops. Ervis Carcolo now charged with all his power directly into the Banbeck center. Two squads of Termagants fanned out to harass the men; his Murderers—the only category in which he outnumbered Joaz Banbeck—were sent to engage Fiends, while Carcolo’s own Fiends, pampered, strong, glistening with oily strength, snaked in toward the Banbeck Juggers. Under the great brown hulks they darted, lashing the fifty-pound steel ball at the tip of their tails against the inner side of the Jugger’s legs.
A roaring mêlée ensued. Battle lines were uncertain; both men and dragons were crushed, torn apart, hacked to bits. The air sang with bullets, whistled with steel, reverberated to trumpeting, whistles, shouts, screams and bellows.
The reckless abandon of Carcolo’s tactics achieved results out of proportion to his numbers. His Fiends burrowed ever deeper into the crazed and almost helpless Banbeck Juggers, while the Carcolo Murderers and Blue Horrors held back the Banbeck Fiends. Joaz Banbeck himself, assailed by Termagants, escaped with his life only by fleeing around behind the battle, where he picked up the support of a squad of Blue Horrors. In a fury he blew a withdrawal signal, and his army backed off down the slopes, leaving the ground littered with struggling and kicking bodies.
Carcolo, throwing aside all restraint, rose in his saddle, signaled to commit his own Juggers, which so far he had treasured like his own children.
Shrilling, hiccuping, they lumbered down into the seethe, tearing away great mouthfuls of flesh to right and left, ripping apart lesser dragons with their brachs, treading on Termagants, seizing Blue Horrors and Murderers, flinging them wailing and clawing through the air. Six Banbeck knights sought to stem the charge, firing their muskets point-blank into the demoniac faces; they went down and were seen no more.
Down on Starbreak Fell tumbled the battle. The nucleus of the fighting became less concentrated, the Happy Valley advantage dissipated. Carcolo hesitated, a long heady instant. He and his troops alike were afire; the intoxication of unexpected success tingled in their brains—but here on Starbreak Fell, could they counter the odds posed by the greater Banbeck forces? Caution dictated that Carcolo withdraw up Barch Spike, to make
the most of his limited victory. Already a strong platoon of Fiends had grouped and were maneuvering to charge his meager force of Juggers. Bast Givven approached, clearly expecting the word to retreat. But Carcolo still waited, reveling in the havoc being wrought by his paltry six Juggers.
Bast Givven’s saturnine face was stern. “Withdraw, withdraw! It’s annihilation when their flanks bear in on us!”
Carcolo seized his elbow. “Look! See where those Fiends gather, see where Joaz Banbeck rides! As soon as they charge, send six Striding Murderers from either side; close in on him, kill him!”
Givven opened his mouth to protest, looked where Carcolo pointed, rode to obey the orders.
Here came the Banbeck Fiends, moving with stealthy certainty toward the Happy Valley Juggers. Joaz, raising in his saddle, watched their progress. Suddenly from either side the Striding Murderers were on him. Four of his knights and six young cornets, screaming alarm, dashed back to protect him; there was clanging of steel on steel and steel on scale. The Murderers fought with sword and mace; the knights, their muskets useless, countered with cutlasses, one by one going under. Rearing on hind legs the Murderer corporal hacked down at Joaz, who desperately fended off the blow. The Murderer raised sword and mace together—and from fifty yards a musket pellet smashed into its ear. Crazy with pain, it dropped its weapons, fell forward upon Joaz, writhing and kicking. Banbeck Blue Horrors came to attack; the Murderers darted back and forth over the thrashing corporal, stabbing down at Joaz, kicking at him, finally fleeing the Blue Horrors.
Ervis Carcolo groaned in disappointment; by a half-second only had he fallen short of victory. Joaz Banbeck, bruised, mauled, perhaps wounded, had escaped with his life.
Over the crest of the hill came a rider: an unarmed youth whipping a staggering Spider. Bast Givven pointed him out to Carcolo. “A messenger from the Valley, in urgency.”