Looters Of Tharn rb-19

by Джеффри Лорд

  «You were wise.»

  Much of the mating and child-rearing had been communal at first, to save as much labor as possible for building, farming, herding, fighting, and everything else that had to be done. Over time, some women came to prefer to bear the children of one man rather than another. A man came to prefer seeing his children born to some women more than to others. As the struggle for survival became less desperate, families of one man and three or four women slowly emerged. One woman would care for the half-dozen children while the others worked.

  It was not polygamy, for the man was far from supreme. It was not really anything for which there was a handy name. But that was not important. The important thing was that it worked.

  There was also Zulekia, Beloved of Mazda, and her son. There was no doubt that the child was Mazda’s. Too many people knew of Mazda’s coi with his Beloved. From the moment when it was known that she was carrying Blade’s child, Zulekia was a woman set apart.

  She had the best of care and feeding when her time came.

  She alone of all the women was exempted from bearing any more children. She had fulfilled her destiny in bearing the child of Mazda. She was much in demand to honor other women’s birthings with her presence, but that was all.

  The son was called Rikard, and he was so strong and healthy that he might have survived and flourished even without all the care he had. But it was accepted from the first that when he reached manhood he would be King in Tharn, for who would dare to give orders to the son of Mazda?

  It was also obvious that he would have his choice of any and all the women of the people. There was no woman who would turn down a chance to bear a child descended from Mazda and his Beloved.

  Rikard’s oldest children were just past their second birthday when the Lesser War came upon Tharn.

  «More of the Pethcines survived than we thought,» said Krimon. «They fled deeper into the Gorge and bred sons who grew to be warriors filled with a desire for vengeance. They did not hope to conquer us this time. But they did hope to destroy us, and they did not care if they all died in doing so.»

  «They must have been terrible enemies.»

  «They were. And-though it shames me to remember it-many of us had doubts about those Pethcine men we had taken to be the fathers of the new people. Where would their loyalties lie? We could not help wondering.»

  But those who had once been Pethcines were now of the people. They could not turn against their children and the women who were the mothers of those children. They marched out against the attackers. From that moment there was truly one people in Tharn, and the attackers didn’t have a chance.

  «It was soon clear that we would win, and we did not care to do more than drive the enemy back into the Gorge. But then their raiders struck deep into Tharn, and among our dead was Zulekia, your Beloved.»

  Gentle Zulekia, dead in war with the Pethcines. The fate she had once escaped had finally caught up with her. «May she rest in peace,» said Blade, half to himself.

  «After that we did not willingly leave a Pethcine alive,» said Krimon. «We drove them from the plateau. We marched down into the Gorge and rooted them out of every cave and valley there, like a farmer rooting out weeds from his grainfields. What we could not kill we brought home. What we could not bring home we burned where it was, or threw it off high cliffs. If there are enough Pethcines left to make a good drinking party, it is not our fault. We have explored through the Gorge and out to a quarter of a year’s travel beyond it without finding any of them.»

  «I see,» said Blade. It was not a pretty story, but he couldn’t see any reason to mourn for the Pethcines. They had tried to destroy the best hope for human civilization in this dimension, and instead they had been destroyed. It was rough but undeniable justice.

  «The Lesser War made us truly one people, and Rikard the Son of Mazda became King at the time of the harvest that year. We moved forward swiftly from that time, with good crops, the children growing up and beginning to have children of their own and do much work, and so on. Among the children the men and women began to pair off and raise their families and work their fields. Until two years ago it seemed that the worst was over. But then-came-the Looters.» Krimon’s head wobbled on his skinny neck and sank down on his chest.

  «What about the Looters?» asked Blade sharply. Krimon was silent. Blade reached over and shook the neuter. His eyes flickered open briefly, then closed again. Then he toppled over on one side with a thud. A moment later Blade heard a rasping snore. Krimon was sound asleep!

  Well, it was hard to blame him. It had been a long and eventful day for the neuter, who was no longer young. Blade nodded, fought back an enormous yawn, and realized that the day’s events had taken a good deal out of him too. Perhaps sleep was the best thing for both of them. He wished he could set some kind of alarm, but he wasn’t sure how to do it. If the Looters came-The Looters could wait until tomorrow. Blade laid his head down on the floor and was asleep in less than a minute.

  Chapter 11

  Blade had left the screens on when he fell asleep, and the first golden blaze of the sun creeping over the horizon woke him. A drink of water cleared his head, and he awoke the sleeping Krimon. The neuter awoke very slowly, with many mutterings and yelps of pain as aching muscles complained.

  Blade was cheerfully unsympathetic. «Come on, my friend. We have another long day ahead of us. Breakfast first, and while we eat you will tell me of the Looters. Then we fly west until we come to the new homes of the people.»

  Krimon looked uneasy at the last idea. «That-it will spread fear among the farms and villages, Mazda. They will not know that it is Mazda in the machine. They will see only the Looter war machine and fear it. Is that the way you wish to come again to Tharn?»

  «I was planning to fly directly to my son’s home if the machine will carry us that far. How far is that?»

  «At least five days on a fast horse.»

  That worked out to at least two hundred and fifty miles. «Krimon, that is much too far to walk if we want to get there soon. But I will listen to what you say of the Looters, and say nothing. If when you are through I am satisfied that I should indeed not come to Tharn in the Looter machine, we will get out and start walking. But I am very stubborn, as you have no doubt heard.»

  «Indeed, it is always said of Mazda that he had a will harder than the hardest jewels. Very well, I will tell you what we know of the Looters.»

  Urcit had been the last city of Tharn, the one where everyone had retreated by the time Blade arrived. But it was not always the only one. Scattered across the vast plain stretching half a year’s ride toward the east were a score or more of other cities.

  But even with the power, the magveils that controlled the weather and let the mani grow could not be spread over more than a tiny fraction of the great plain. Urcit was the fairest of all the cities of Tharn, and the soil around it the most fertile. There was plenty of room and plenty of mani there for the dwindling remnants of a once-proud people. So they retreated to Urcit and the other cities drifted off into the realms of legend. Even Sutha, the wise First Neuter who had been Blade’s principal ally, had not considered them important enough to mention.

  But the legends survived. Now they drew explorers eastward across the plain, seeking out the substance of the legends. Two years ago the first explorers of the people reached the distant cities. But at almost the same time, so did the Looters.

  Who were the Looters, and where did they come from? They seemed to come from nowhere and to go back there when they had finished their deadly work. One woman said she had seen their war machines appear out of thin air, with a terrible sound and a blast of air that knocked her down. But she went mad afterwards. Did Mazda think she spoke the truth?

  Blade couldn’t say for certain. But he could wonder. Teleportation? Possibly. Or possibly-possibly even interdimensional travel. Had the Looters discovered it on their own?

  There was no evidence at all that the Looters were even liv
ing creatures. No one in Tharn had ever seen anything except the terrible machines.

  «Or at least nobody has seen a living Looter and lived to tell about it.»

  «Have any tried?»

  «Quite a few of our bravest young men and women have tried. None have succeeded, nor have any come back from the attempts.» Krimon’s face was grim at the memory.

  But the machines were there, and in terrible strength. There were the war machines, like the one Blade had captured. All of them had the fear-making sound, the mindnumbing light, and the deadly purple ray. There were also the tentacles, to tear captives limb from limb-or kill them in ways far slower and more agonizing.

  «That means there must be living creatures inside the war machines at least some of the time,» said Blade. «Only living creatures take pleasure from the pain they can inflict on other living creatures. Machines do not have that bad habit.»

  Krimon was able to describe for Blade the effects of the purple ray. Blade concluded that the ray somehow burst every blood vessel in a victim’s body. The victim dropped on the spot, dead almost before he hit the ground.

  Unfortunately Krimon’s account didn’t tell Blade anything about his own theory that the machines could distinguish living from nonliving matter. He decided against raising the question now. Why get the poor neuter’s hopes up before giving the theory the thorough testing it would need anyway?

  The Looter war machines were bad enough. But there were also the great boxlike machines that fired the rockets. The rockets were sometimes used as weapons, but not often. Mostly the big machines used a destructive red ray.

  «Could it possibly be that the Looters do not have very many of the rockets?» asked Blade.

  Krimon shrugged. «I do not know. I do not think anyone else does either.» It was obvious to Blade that the neuter had never considered the possibility of the Looters having any weaknesses at all. Morale in Tharn seemed to be down lower than a snake’s belly. He was going to have some work to do there.

  However, being a god was a real asset when it came to getting people to believe in you.

  There were the big box machines. They seemed to be in command. There were other kinds of boxlike machines that carried cutting rays, or large metal claws that scooped things up. Finally there were machines that were nothing more than enormous platforms, the size of a village square, with a small cabin in one corner. They carried away the machinery, the stone, the metalwork that the Looters stripped from the cities they attacked.

  The Looters had started far to the east of the city where Blade saw them at work. So far they had destroyed five Tharnian cities.

  «When the Looters have finished taking from a city everything they can use, they destroy it the way the release of the power destroyed Urcit. A terrible ball of flame rises up, and then a great cloud of smoke soars into the sky, spreading out at the top.»

  The mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion. It was hardly surprising that the Looters had the atomic bomb, considering everything else they had.

  «And they are moving toward the settled lands of Tharn, Mazda. They know of our existence. Sooner or later they will fly all the way to the settled lands. Their rays will strike, people will die horribly in the metal arms, and then the ball of flame will sweep away what is left. We cannot prevent their coming, and we cannot survive it either.»

  Definitely morale in Tharn was down. With good reason, Blade had to admit. To have the Looters come tramping along, murderous, destructive, and utterly mysterious, just when things had started to improve for the people-it would have been demoralizing to any people.

  Most of the knowledge that would have helped fight the Looters had been gone for centuries even before Blade arrived. After the destruction of Urcit, the surviving neuters were too busy learning what they needed to save the survivors to have time for anything else.

  It looked as if the job of organizing Tharn for battle against the Looters was going to be largely in the hands of Richard Blade.

  His hands and his son’s, he reminded himself. He was not only father to the people, but father to their King. He had found strange allies in stranger dimensions, but he had never dreamed that he would find one sprung from his own loins.

  He shook his head and set his thoughts in order. «Well, Krimon, I have listened as I promised. You have made many things clear. I now say that we must fly to the house of King Rikard, as fast as the machine can take us. We must stop the Looters soon. Who knows what machines and what knowledge they are taking from you in the cities they loot? And those who fear that they will someday soon march upon the people are correct. Beings like the Looters will kill and destroy for the sheer love of killing and destroying, unless they are stopped. For all their science they are like the Pethcines of the Lesser War.»

  «But this machine-«

  «This machine is now a terrible weapon for us against its masters. We shall take it to King Rikard, and I and the wisest of the people shall study it. We shall find how it may be destroyed. And then we shall march out against the Looters, and destroy the machines one by one until there are no more of them and Tharn is saved.»

  Krimon looked impressed. Blade realized he must have made the road ahead sound easy. He sighed.

  He very much wished it were as easy as he had made it sound.

  Chapter 12

  As soon as they finished breakfast, Blade lifted the machine into the air and headed west. Krimon turned pale as he saw the ground drop away beneath them. His prominent knuckles stood out as his hands clenched into fists. But he said nothing, and slowly relaxed as he saw that the war machine would neither fall down nor explode nor run away with them into the empty sky.

  Blade stayed low. He had no idea how much of the machine’s power supply he had used up. He didn’t want to plunge hundreds of feet to the ground if the lift-field suddenly died.

  The plain rolled past beneath them, mile after mile of grass and scrawny shrubs and gentle swells and depressions in the ground. Two hours after starting out Blade saw a herd of wild horses on the horizon. When he was certain that there were no Tharnians anywhere around, he sent the machine sweeping in toward the herd. It was an unpleasant job, but it had to be done. He had to test out the purple ray’s effects on a live target and see them with his own eyes. Yet he could not reasonably ask the people to sacrifice any of their animals.

  The horses began to scatter as the machine swept toward them. Blade activated the controls for the purple ray, but did not unlock and swing the turret. From the air and against a moving target it was easier to aim the whole machine. He sighted in on one young stallion running a little apart from the herd, and held him in the cross-hairs as Krimon watched, pale and wide-eyed.

  Two hundred feet. A hundred and fifty. A hundred. Get in close-beam weapons dissipate energy at long ranges. Fifty feet away, and right behind the poor beast. Blade swallowed, and pressed the firing button.

  The whole inside of the machine filled with a purple glare. Krimon let out a yell of fright, started so violently that he nearly fell to the floor, and clapped both hands over his eyes. Blade watched the purple ray leap out and envelop the horse. Then it was his turn to let out a yell.

  He had made a perfect shot. But the horse was still alive, still on its feet, still galloping like the wind. For all the harm Blade had done the horse, he might as well have hit it with a ping-pong ball!

  «Krimon!» he snapped. «Watch what happens when I shoot at the horse this time!»

  The neuter forced himself to watch the screen as Blade swung the machine in a wide circle around the horse and swooped to the attack a second time. Again purple light and purple death struck out. Again the horse galloped across the plain without even breaking stride.

  Krimon’s eyes widened until they seemed to fill his entire face.

  «What-that-it cannot be!» he stammered.

  «But it looks like it is,» said Blade shortly. «We’ll try a third time. If that damned horse keeps running after that «

  It did.<
br />
  Krimon shook his head. «Never has the purple ray failed to bring death wherever it strikes. Mazda, have you-done something-to alter this machine?»

  Blade shook his head. «I don’t yet know enough about this machine and its weapons to try.» Perhaps it wasn’t wise for a god to admit that he didn’t know everything. But the people would find out sooner or later that on some things Mazda was as much in the dark as they were.

  Blade went on. «I wanted to see with my own eyes how the purple ray killed. But it did not kill. This surprised me. I would like to know why.»

  «So, I think, would the people,» said Krimon. His voice still shook slightly, but there was a wry grin on his thin face that told Blade the neuter had recovered his nerve. Blade headed the machine west again. When he had it back to the desired course and speed he turned to Krimon.

  «I thought that the machine would not strike down living creatures who carried nothing that was not once also living because it had orders not to. But I begin to wonder if the purple ray cannot strike down such a living creature even when the machine has orders to fire. We must learn more about this.»

  «We certainly must,» said Krimon briskly. «This is a weakness of the Looters. Until now we in Tharn did not believe they had any weaknesses. We would have laughed at anyone who told us we might be wrong. But now Mazda has shown us that our enemy has a weakness. We can learn ways to take advantage of that weakness and fight the Looters. With Mazda to show us the way-«

  Blade shook his head. «Though I am Mazda, I cannot show you the whole way. You must discover much of it for yourselves. All that is learned the people must remember. If I die»-Krimon shuddered-«or must go away again before my work is done, the fight against the Looters must go on until victory.»

  «It shall be done as Mazda wishes,» said Krimon solemnly.

  Blade knew it would be. In this dimension people would willingly follow his orders. But however willing the people might be, could he give the right orders? Could he teach them everything they needed to know-particularly when he didn’t know half of it himself?