The Man Who Counts nvr-1

by Poul Anderson

  “We needed time,” said Van Rijn. “Time to modify the extra field pieces, making up for what we lost at Mannenach.”

  “Why? They’re not portable, without trains. And to make matters worse that motherless Delp has torn up the rails!”

  “Oh, yes, they are portable. My young friend Wace has done a little redesigning. Knocked down, with females and cubs to help, everyone carrying a single small piece or two — we can tote a heavy battery of weapons, by damn!”

  “I know. You’ve explained all this before. And I repeat: what will we use them against? If we set them up at some particular spot, the Lannachska need only avoid that spot. And we can’t stay very long in any one place, because our numbers eat it baren.” Trolwen drew a breath. “I did not come here to argue, Eart’a. I came from the General Council of Lannach, to tell you that Salmenbrok’s food is exhausted — and so is the army’s patience. We must go out and fight!”

  “We shall,” said Van Rijn imperturbably. “Come, I will go talk at these puff-head councilors.”

  He stuck his head in the door: “Wace, boy, best you start to pack what we have. Soon we transport it.”

  “I heard you,” said the younger man.

  “Good. You make the work here, I make the politicking, so it goes along fine, nie?” Van Rijn rubbed shaggy fists, beamed, and shuffled off with Trolwen and Tolk.

  Wace stared after him, into the blind fog-wall. “Yes,” he said. “That’s how it has been. We work, and he talks. Very equitable!”

  “What do you mean?” Sandra raised her head from the table at which she sat marking gun parts with a small paintbrush. A score of females were working beside her.

  “What I said. I wonder why I don’t say it to his face. I’m not afraid of that fat parasite, and I don’t want his mucking paycheck any more.” Wace waved at the mill and its sooty confusion. “Do this, do that, he says, and then strolls off again. When I think how he’s eating food which would keep you alive—”

  “You do not understand?” She stared at him for a moment. “No, I think maybe you have been too busy, all the time here, to stop and think. And before then, you were a small-job man without the art of government, not?”

  “What do you mean?” he echoed her. He regarded her with eyes washed-out and bleared by fatigue.

  “Maybe later. Now we must hurry. Soon we will leave this town, and everything must be set to go.”

  This time she had found a place for her hands, in the ten or fifteen Earth-days since Mannenach. Van Rijn had demanded that everything — the excess war materiel, which there had luckily not been room enough to take down to battle — be made portable by air. That involved a certain amount of modification, so that the large wooden members could be cut up into smaller units, for reassembly where needed. Wace had managed that. But it would all be one chaos at journey’s end, unless there was a system for identifying each item. Sandra had devised the markings and was painting them on.

  Neither she nor Wace had stopped for much sleep. They had not even paused to wonder greatly what use there would be for their labor.

  “Old Nick did say something about attacking the Fleet itself,” muttered Wace. “Has he gone uncon? Are we supposed to land on the water and assemble our catapults?”

  “Perhaps,” said Sandra. Her tone was serene. “I do not worry so much any more. Soon it will be all decided because we have food for just four Earth-weeks or less.”

  “We can last at least two months without eating at all,” he said.

  “But we will be weak.” She dropped her gaze. “Eric—”

  “Yes?” He left his mill-powered obsidian-toothed circular saw, and came over to stand above her. The dull rush light caught drops of fog in her hair, they gleamed like tiny jewels.

  “Soon… it will make no matter what I do… there will be hard work, needing strength and skill I have not… maybe fighting, where I am only one more bow, not a very strong bow even.” Her fingernails whitened where she gripped her brush. “So when it comes to that, I will eat no more. You and Nicholas take my share.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” he said hoarsely.

  She sat up straight, turned around and glared at him. Her pale cheeks reddened. “Do you not be the fool, Eric Wace,” she snapped. “If I can give you and him just one extra week where you are strong — where your hunger does not keep you from even thinking clearly — then it will be myself I save too, perhaps. And if not, I have only lost one or two worthless weeks. Now get back to your machine!”

  He watched her, for some small while, and his heart thuttered. Then he nodded and returned to his own work.

  And down the trails to an open place of harsh grass, where the Council sat on a cliff s edge, Van Rijn picked his steadily swearing way.

  The elders of Lannach lay like sphinxes against a skyline gone formless gray, and waited for him. Trol-wen went to the head of the double line, Tolk remained by the human.

  “In the name of the All-Wise, we are met,” said the commander ritually. “Let sun and moons illumine our minds. Let the ghosts of our grandmothers lend us their guidance. May I not shame those who flew before me, nor those who come after.” He relaxed a trifly. “Well, my officers, it’s decided we can’t stay here. I’ve brought the Eart’a to advise us. Will you explain the alternatives to him?”

  A gaunt, angry-eyed old Lannacha hunched his wings and spat: “First, Flockchief, why is he here at all?”

  “By the commander’s invitation,” said Tolk smoothly.

  “I mean… Herald, let’s not twist words. You know what I mean. The Mannenach expedition was undertaken at his urging. It cost us the worst defeat in our history. Since then, he has insisted our main body stay here, idle, while the enemy ravages an undefended land. I don’t see why we should take his advice.”

  Trolwen’s eyes were troubled. “Are there further challenges?” he asked, in a very low voice.

  An indignant mumble went down the lines. “Yes yes… yes… let him answer, if he can.”

  Van Rijn turned turkey red and began to swell like a frog.

  “The Eart’a has been challenged in Council,” said Trolwen. “Does he wish to reply?”

  He sat back then, waiting like the others.

  Van Rijn exploded.

  “Pest and damnation! Four million worms cocoon-ing in hell! How long am I to be saddled with stupid ungratefuls? How many politicians and brass hats have You Up There plagued this universe with?” He waved his fists in the air and screamed. “Satan and sulfur! It is not to be stood! If you are all so hot to make suicides for yourselves, why does poor old Van Rijn have to hold on to your coat tails all the time? Perbacco, you stop insulting me or I stuff you down your own throats!” He advanced like a moving mountain, roaring at them. The nearest councilors flinched away.

  “Eart’a… sir… officer… please!” whispered Trolwen.

  When he had them sufficiently browbeaten, Van Rijn said coldly: “All rights. I tell you, by damn. I give you good advices and you stupid them up and blame me — but I am a poor patient old man, not like when I was young and strong no, I suffer it with Christian meekness and keep on giving you good advices.

  “I warned you and I warned you, do not hit Mannenach first, I warned you. I told you the rafts could come right up to its walls, and the rafts are the strength of the Fleet. I got down on these two poor old knees, begging and pleading with you first to take the key upland towns, but no, you would not listen to me. And still we had Mannenach, but the victory was stupided away… oh, if I had wings like an angel, so I could have led you in person! I would be cock-a-doodle-dooing on the admiral’s masthead this moment, by holy Nicolai miter! That is why you take my advices, by damn — no, you take my orders! No more backward talking from you, or I wash my hands with you and make my own way home. From now on, if you want to keep living, when Van Rijn says frog, you jump. Understanding?”

  He paused. He could hear his own asthmatic wheezes… and the far unhappy mumble of the camp, and the cold wet clinkin
g of water down alien rocks nothing more in all the world.

  Finally Trolwen said in a weak voice: “If… if the challenge is considered answered… we shall resume our business.”

  No one spoke.

  “Will the Eart’a take the word?” asked Tolk at last. He alone appeared self-possessed, in the critical glow of one who appreciates fine acting.

  “Ja. I will say, I know we cannot remain here any more. You ask why I kept the army on leash and let Captain Delp have his way.” Van Rijn ticked it off on his fingers. “Imprimis, to attack him directly is what he wants: he can most likely beat us, since his force is bigger and not so hungry or discouraged. Secundus, he will not advance to Salmenbrok while we are all here, since we could bushwhack him; therefore, by staying put the army has gained me a chance to make ready our artillery pieces. Tertius, it is my hope that by all this delay while I had the mill going, we have won the means of victory.”

  “What?” It barked from the throat of a councilor who forgot formalities.

  “Ah.” Van Rijn laid a finger to his imposing nose and winked. “We shall see. Maybe now you think even if I am a pitiful old weak tired man who should be in bed with hot toddies and a good cigar, still a Polesotechnic merchant is not just to sneeze at. So? Well, then. I propose we all leave this land and head north.”

  A hubbub broke loose. He waited patiently for it to subside.

  “Order!” shouted Trolwen. “Order!” He slapped the hard earth with his tail. “Quiet, there, officers! Eart’a, there has been some talk of abandoning Lannach altogether — more and more of it, indeed, as our folk lose heart. We could still reach Swampy Kilnu in time to… to save most of our females and cubs at Birthtime. But it would be to give up our towns, our fields and forests — everything we have, everything our forebears labored for hundreds of years to create — to sink back into savagery, in a dark fever-haunted jungle, to become nothing — I myself will die in battle before making such a choice.”

  He drew a breath and hurled out: “But Kilnu is, at least, to the south. North of Achan, there is still ice!”

  “Just so,” said Van Rijn.

  “Would you have us starve and freeze on the Dawrnach glaciers? We can’t land any further south than Dawrnach; the Fleet’s scouts would be certain to spot us anywhere in Holmenach. Unless you want to fight the last fight in the archipelago — ?”

  “No,” said Van Rijn. “We should sneak up to this Dawrnach place. We can pack a lunch — take maybe a ten-days’ worth of food and fuel with us, as well as the armament — nie?”

  “Well… yes… but even so — Are you suggesting we should attack the Fleet itself, the rafts, from the north? It would be an unexpected direction. But it would be just as hopeless.”

  “Surprise we will need for my plan,” said Van Rijn. “Ja. We cannot tell the army. One of them might be captured in some skirmish and made to tell the Drak’honai. Best maybe I not even tell you.”

  “Enough!” said Trolwen. “Let me hear your scheme.”

  Much later: “It won’t work. Oh, it might well be technically feasible. But it’s a political impossibility.”

  “Politics!” groaned Van Rijn. “What is it this time?.”

  “The warriors… yes, and the females too, even the cubs, since it would be our whole nation which goes to Dawrnach. They must be told why we do so. Yet the whole scheme, as you admit, will be ruined if one person falls into enemy hands and tells what he knows under torture.”

  “But he need not know,” said Van Rijn. “All he need be told is, we spend a little while gathering food and wood to travel with. Then we are to pack up and go some other place, he has not been told where or why.”

  “We are not Drakska,” said Trolwen angrily. “We are a free folk. I have no right to make so important a decision without submitting it to a vote.”

  “Hm-m-m maybe you could talk to them?” Van Rijn tugged his mustaches. “Orate at them. Persuade them to waive their right to know and help decide. Talk them into following you with no questions.”

  “No,” said Tolk. “I’m a specialist in the arts of persuasion, Eart’a, and I’ve measured the limits of those arts. We deal less with a Flock now than a mob — cold, hungry, without hope, without faith in its leaders, ready to give up everything — or rush forth to blind battle — they haven’t the morale to follow anyone into an unknown venture.”

  “Morale can be pumped in,” said Van Rijn. “I will try.”

  “You!”

  “I am not so bad at oratings, myself, when there is need. Let me address them.”

  “They… they—” Tolk stared at him. Then he laughed, a jarringly sarcastic note. “Let it be done, Flockchief. Let’s hear what words this Eart’a can find, so much better than our own.”

  And an hour later, he sat on a bluff, with his people a mass of shadow below him, and he heard Van Rijn bass come through the fog like thunder:

  “…I say only, think what you have here, and what they would take away from you:

  “This royal throne of kings, this sceptr’d isle,

  This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

  This other Eden, demi-paradise,

  This fortress built by Nature for herself

  Against infection and the hand of war,

  This happy breed…”

  “I don’t comprehend all those words,” whispered Tolk.

  “Be still!” answered Trolwen. “Let me hear.” There were tears in his eyes; he shivered.

  “…This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Lannach…”

  The army beat its wings and screamed.

  Van Rijn continued through adaptations of Pericles’ funeral speech, “Scots Wha’ Hae,” and the Gettysburg Address. By the time he had finished discussing St. Crispin’s Day, he could have been elected commander if he chose.

  XVI

  The island called Dawrnach lay well beyond the archipelago’s end, several hundred kilometers north of Lannach. However swiftly the Flock flew, with pauses for rest on some bird-shrieking skerry, it was a matter of Earth-days to get there, and a physical nightmare for humans trussed in carrying nets. Afterward Wace’s recollections of the trip were dim.

  When he stood on the beach at their goal, his legs barely supporting him, it was small comfort.

  High Summer had come here also, and this was not too far north; still, the air remained wintry and Tolk said no one had ever tried to live here. The Holmenach islands deflected a cold current out of The Ocean, up into the Iceberg Sea, and those bitter waters flowed around Dawrnach.

  Now the Flock, wings and wings and wings dropping down from the sky until they hid its roiling grayness, had reached journey’s conclusion: black sands, washed by heavy dark tides and climbing sheer up through permanent glaciers to the inflamed throat of a volcano. Thin straight trees were sprinkled over the lower slopes, between quaking tussocks, there were a few sea birds, to dip above the broken offshore ice-floes; otherwise the hidden sun threw its clotted-blood light on a sterile country.

  Sandra shuddered. Wace was shocked to see how thin she had already grown. And now that they were here, in the last phase of their striving — belike of their lives — she intended to eat no more.

  She wrapped her stinking coarse jacket more tightly about her. The wind caught snarled pale elflocks of her hair and fluttered them forlorn against black igneous cliffs. Around her crouched, walked, wriggled, and flapped ten thousand angry dragons: whistles and gutturals of unhuman speech, the cannon-crack of leathery wings, overrode the empty wind-whimper. As she rubbed her eyes, pathetically like a child, Wace saw that her once beautiful hands were bleeding where they had clung to the net, and that she shook with weariness.

  He felt his heart twisted, and moved toward her. Nicholas van Rijn got there first, fat and greasy, with a roar for comfort: “So, by jolly damn, now we are here and soon I get you home again to a hot bath. Holy St. Dismas, right now I smell you three kilometers upwind!”

  Lady Sandra Tamarin, heiress to t
he Grand Duchy of Hermes, gave him a ghostly smile. “If I could rest for a little—” she whispered.

  “Ja, ja, we see.” Van Rijn stuck two fingers in his mouth and let out an eardrum-breaking blast. It caught Trolwen’s attention. “You there! Find her here a cave or something and tuck her in.”

  “I?” Trolwen bridled . “I have the Flock to see to! ”

  “You heard me, pot head.” Van Rijn stumped off and buttonholed Wace. “Now, then. You are ready to begin work? Round up your crew, however many you need to start.”

  “I—” Wace backed away. “Look here, it’s been I don’t know how many hours since our last stop, and—”

  Van Rijn spat. “And how many weeks makes it since I had a smoke or even so much a little glass Genever, ha? You have no considerations for other people.” He pointed his beak heavenward and screamed: “Do I have to do everything? Why have You Up There filled up the galaxy with no-good loafers? It is not to be stood!”

  “Well… well—” Wace saw Trolwen leading Sandra off, to find a place where she could sleep, forgetting cold and pain and loneliness for a few niggard hours . He struck a fist into his palm and said: “All right! But what will you be doing?”

  “I must organize things, by damn. First I see Trolwen about a gang to cut trees and make masts and yards and oars. Meanwhiles all this canvas we have brought along has got to somehow be made in sails; and there are the riggings; and also we must fix up for eating and shelter — Bah! These is all details. It is not right I should be bothered. Details, I hire ones like you for.”

  “Is life anything but details?” snapped Wace.

  Van Rijn’s small gray eyes studied him for a moment. “So,” rumbled the merchant, “it gives back talks from you too, ha? You think maybe just because I am old and weak, and do not stand so much the hardships like when I was young… maybe I only leech off your work, nie? Now is too small time for beating sense into your head. Maybe you learn for yourself.” He snapped his fingers. “Jump!”