Pro

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “Come,” he said.

  They reentered the water and swam back out to the light and air of the outside world.

  “We’ll need torches,” the Homskarter king said as he rebuckled his body armor about him. “Stay close beside me, Outlander. There’s much to do.”

  The afternoon was already moving into its later stages. Rajn explained matters briefly to Witta and some of the other chieftains and put them on the alert to gather fighters and storm the city gates if they should see evidence of these being opened from within, or fire within the city. Then he gathered an expeditionary force of some twenty of his own Homskarters, weeding out those few who were not, like himself, good swimmers, and gathered a bundle of the large torches that had been part of their loot from the last conquest. These were a porous wood which had been steeped in vats of vegetable oil. They stank unbelievably, as Harb already knew from experience, but they would be able to stand a brief immersion and—once dried off again—still light.

  With this crew and Harb, who was beginning to worry and had cast about in his mind for some excuse to keep himself apart from what seemed to be the primary assault force, they returned to the inside of the grotto. But to Harb’s surprise, Rajn did not immediately light his torches and lead his warriors up the steps. To those among his own people who questioned him on that same point, he answered with succinct generalship.

  “We’ll wait for some to come down from the city,” he said. “Then slay them and go up. If we can kill quietly enough, those above will only think we are their own people returning.”

  So they waited—in the clammy darkness. It seemed an unbearable as well as an interminable wait, but eventually voices were heard down the stairwell, though these were distorted by echoes to unintelligibility, and finally a light was seen from above, growing stronger as whoever was carrying it descended.

  Rajn gestured them all off the ledge into the water.

  Footsteps and grumbling accompanied the growing illumination, and finally a native with the rounder face and tufted ears of the plains dwellers reached the ledge, blinking around with his eyes dazzled by his torch against the grotto’s dimness. With one hand he balanced a huge stack of what looked like empty wine-skins on his shoulder. He used the torch to light the nearer of the two torches on the stone wall above the ledge, put his own light out and dropped his skins. He shouted up into the darkness where sight of the grotto walls were swallowed up, overhead.

  There was a momentary wait and then, unexpectedly, the end of a rope fell from that same darkness to the ledge.

  Still grumbling to himself about something, the native attached the rope to one of his empty skins, dropped it in the water off the edge of the ledge and dragged it back and forth until it swelled with liquid. Then he shouted upward again and the line went taut. To a creaking sound from above the now full waterskin was hauled up into invisibility.

  Chilled in the water, watching, Harb could not believe his eyes. The waterskin, full, must have been nearly as heavy as the native himself. Nothing Harb had seen on this world implied rope manufacture and other technologies that could conveniently lift such a weight through a couple of hundred vertical feet of ascension.

  But he had no time for further consideration of that point, because Rajn himself had already silently emerged from the water behind the city native, with several of the other warriors behind him. They reached the waterskin handler in a silent rush. There was a brief explosion of action, and the city native dropped with only a half-strangled cry that was almost more of a grunt. Gratefully Harb climbed out of the chilling water with the others, once more onto the ledge.

  Leaving one warrior to tend the dropped rope with additional filled waterskins, so that those above would not be alerted to any difference from below, Rajn led the expedition up the stairs. They had not climbed more than fifty feet when they reached a small room cut into the rock, and Harb saw the explanation of how the waterskins were lifted. Here, at this much more practical distance for such primitives, was a windlass manned by two of the city natives. The line from it was taut and descended to the water below. Behind them was another rope, descending, obviously, from another such room fifty feet higher again, so that the waterskins could be lifted in stages.

  Once more, there was the sudden rush, the minimum of noise in killing, and the expedition climbed again. At the next windlass room, the scene was repeated, and so they continued upward, taking over the waterlift system as they went, until they emerged finally into a room containing a full dozen of the city natives.

  Not all of these were armed and ready. But silence was impossible. The stone-walled chamber they inhabited rang and thundered for a few minutes until all the city natives, and three of the invaders, lay still on the floor. Harb looked around. They had plainly reached the top of the conveyor system. A large supply of the waterskins, empty, were stacked in the back of the room, and to their left was a barred doo rto which Rajn was already headed.

  Harb went to join the Homskarter king. Rajn lifted the bar and opened the door slightly. He grunted under his breath in humorous self-congratulation.

  “Look for yourself, Outlander," he said to Harb. “We have them.”

  Harb looked. Plainly the place they were in was half-cave half-constructed room. It was in one of the stone buildings that seemed to nestle against the hill at a point where the rise of the hillside was somewhat steeper than normal. Below them were the roofs of a line of mud-brick buildings and beyond them, the city gates—closed, but guarded by what looked like no more than a half-dozen sentries. The attention of all these sentries was directed outward over the walls.

  “Go back the way we came, Outlander,” Rajn said. “Tell Witta we’ll open that gate for him as soon as it’s full dark. He should be close by, with warriors enough to hold it while the rest of the expedition follows.”

  Harb went, feeling a great relief at having been offered this easy way of dodging the area of actual fighting.

  At the foot of the hill, when Harb found him, Witta glared at Harb suspiciously all the time Harb was giving his message; but when Harb was done the Homskarter second-in-command swung about to the other chieftains and petty kings who had been gathered to listen.

  “You heard the words of King Rajn from this outlander!” said Witta. “Tell your men. As soon as twilight deepens all should begin to move up to the wall . . . quietly.”

  His eyes swung and focused on Harb.

  “And you, Outlander,” he said. “I want you by my side.”

  Harb’s only choice was to accept. So it developed that in the taking of the high city that followed he went with Witta to the very foot of the city wall before there was a sudden gout of flame and smoke inside it, a hundred yards or so away from the gates, and the roar of excited voices.

  “Now!” growled Witta. And, as if on cue, the gates creaked and opened. In the rush that started for them, as the forest natives at last forgot everything but the fighting, Harb was finally able to fall behind, to fade back through the other roaring invaders coming up behind Witta’s party and so reach the beach again with a whole skin.

  He was careful to stay there until the invaders started straggling back down, laden with booty. Above them on the hillside the high city burned merrily with a dozen separate fires. Before the first of the warriors could recognize him and remember finding him with the boats on their return, Harb had slipped away from the camp and he did not come in again until most of those who had gone up the hill in the twilight were back down it again.

  When he did return to camp, he detoured by the canots before circling to make his appearance seem as if he was just now coming back down the hillside.To his satisfaction the craft were finally loaded with plunder. Their cargo areas were full. The high city had been an even richer plum than Harb himself had expected.

  “Congratulations, King!” he said, when he at last found a—probably only seemingly—drunken Rajn by the royal Homskarter cooking fire. “Your canots lie deep in the water. No more room for l
oot, now!” Rajn coughed with uproarious laughter.

  “Always more room for loot, Outlander!” he said. “Always more room. We merely throw out the less good to make more room for the better!”

  For a moment Harb thought that the other was joking, that what he was saying was only another example of the rather cruel native humor that got its greatest pleasure out of confounding and frustrating its target. Then his hopes plummeted as he under-stood something he should have realized before.

  It was not for loot alone that the forest natives took the summer trail to the plains. It was for excitement—for entertainment. Why should they turn back now,when, there were still cities to take and plains people to kill?

  He had been an idiot. Of course, the expedition would not turn back until casualties had reached the point where the survivors began to worry seriously about their ability to fight their way safely home with what they had won. The summer was advancing and Harb with his aid to them had been making it possible for them to stay longer in the plains, not pushing them toward the day when they would turn back early with slaves and grain.

  But maybe he could still talk sense to Rajn.

  “A wise king keeps what he gets,” Harb said. “Would it not be wise to turn back now?”

  “Oh, wise indeed, Outlander!” said Rajn thickly. “Wise indeed.”

  Harb felt a sudden, leaping relief.

  “Then we go back?” he asked.

  “How can you think such a thing of me, Outlander?” hiccuped Rajn. “After you’ve pleaded with me so strongly otherwise? Of course we go on—to take those rich islands in a lake you’ve been so eager for us to loot!”

  When they reached the lake five days later, it was after a long paddle upstream against the current; and at the end of the trip were the falls by which the lake spilled out to form the river, so that the canots had all to be unloaded and portaged up around the falls, a labor that put most of the warriors in a bad temper.

  However, at the top of the falls, a little way around the lake they took over a cluster of lakeside fishing villages which, though they were too poor to have any loot worthy of the name and their frail lake-going craft excited nothing but contempt on the part of the forest natives, were still a ready supply of shelter, food and servants. Also, the weather was now delightful, and the expedition, having treated itself to a three-day drunk to celebrate the hard work of getting here, began to be in better humor.

  One of the first things Rajn did was bring in one of the fishing village natives for questioning about the islands and their inhabitants. There had been a certain amount of concern among the members of the expedition when they reached the lake and saw nothing but a watery horizon as far as their eyes could sweep. They had indeed heard the warning relayed from Harb that the islands would be out of sight from the shore that surrounded the lake, but they had preferred not to believe it. Nothing in their experience had made it possible to envision a body of water that big. It was much easier simply to assume that outlanders had weak eyes.

  It was with some relief, then, that a good many of the chieftains and petty kings heard the villager corroborate the fact that the islands and their people existed.

  “What are they like, then, you?” demanded one of the kings.

  The fishing villager rolled his gaze to the one who had spoken. He was plainly hoping against hope that he would not be killed as part of the questioning process; but there was also a sort of fatalism about him that seemed to lead him to give less careful and politic answers than a human might have in a like situation.

  “Like you,” he said.

  “Like us? How—like us?” growled Witta.

  “Thieves with swords. Takers. Just like you.”

  “Indeed,” said Rajn, coughing a laugh, “they sound like interesting opponents. How far from here are their islands?”

  The villager looked at him and blinked, without answering. Obviously he could find no way of expressing the answer Rajn had demanded. After a moment, he made a try at answering.

  “In half a day with one of our boats,” he said at last. “You can see them. In early evening you come to them. But your boats haven’t any sails.”

  He was referring to the simple lugsail with which each of the village fishing craft were equipped.

  “We can have sails if we wish,” Witta retorted. It was true, Harb remembered from his studies. When the wind was from the right direction, the forest canots would sometimes hoist a scrap of square sail in their bows to assist them on trips over the long, winding stretches where they occasionally travelled for kilometers without putting into shore.

  “Indeed,” said Rajn, again, “and I think we could well use them on so long a trip. We must rig some. If these cockle-shells they use here make the trip in one long day, we should certainly be able to do the same in no more than a little more time and probably in less. Let this one and some others—” he pointed to the villager, “be put to work doing that.”

  And the villager was hustled off to that purpose,quite cheerful still to be alive.

  However, as early as the following morning, difficulties appeared. The villagers, in their own way, were as conservative as any of the other natives. There was very little difference between the rigging of a square bowsail and the rigging of a lugsail. But it was too much of a difference for a people who believed that anything that was not a lugsail was not a sail at all. The forest natives took over the rigging of their sails, making a game of it, splashing and swimming around the shallow water of the shore to the amazement of the apparently non-swimming villagers, who were horrified to see them in the water.

  The expedition warriors gibed at the timidity of the villagers; and a high time was had by all the invaders until one of their number, swimming by himself,started to scream and thrash in the water—and a moment later disappeared, leaving only a bloody stain that rose to the surface and started to spread.

  Before the rest could get out of the water, either into dry land or into one of the moored canots, four others had been attacked and pulled under.

  “Killers!” shouted the villagers excitedly. “Killers!”

  “What killers?” roared Rajn in a towering rage. He picked up one of the villagers and raised him in both arms to throw him into the water. "What killers.”

  The villager screamed with terror.

  “Look! Look!” he cried.

  Rajn looked and dropped the other, absently. Luckily for him, the villager fell at the edge of the dock on which they were standing and was able to keep himself from going into the lake. Rajn strode out to the end of the dock and peered down into the meter-deep water at which the villager had been pointing.

  Harb followed after him and saw that the water held a fast-moving swarm of fish, all about the same length—about that of his forearm. They had stubby bodies and were big-bodied just behind the head, but the head itself and the jaws beyond it were like those of a barracuda. Harb looked at Rajn, expecting a further explosion of fury; but the Homskarter king now looked more interested than angry.

  “So that’s why these hairless-eared fisherfolk can’t swim,” he said. He turned to the villager he had almost dropped into the lake. “Come here!”

  The villager came, fearfully.

  “Where do they come from?” Rajn demanded, pointing at the fish. It was the question Harb himself had wanted to ask.

  “They live in the weeds of the shallow water near the shore. When they think there’s food near, they come out. They kill anything they can reach.”

  “So,” said Rajn. “Do they also live in weeds around the islands we’re going to?”

  “Anywhere there are weeds,” said the villager. “So. We’re wiser now, then,” said Rajn, looking thoughtfully back into the water where the fish still darted about, “than we were a few minutes ago. The rest of the sail-rigging will have to be done with the canots moored to the docks.”

  This new restriction slowed down work on the sails. Nonetheless, two days later, they were all ready to set
out. The weather had been hot for a week, and once they were well out from shore they got a breeze that their sails could use. Happily, the warriors stripped off their arm-paddles and relaxed to enjoy the ride.

  Pleasant, it undeniably was. Speedy, it was not. It became obvious to Harb early in the day that their speed was probably not much more than three-quarters of that possible to the lighter fisher craft with their lugsails, and without the plunder that weighed down the already heavy canots. When evening came there were still no islands in sight; although they could still see the shore they had left, as a faint line on the horizon far behind them.

  They tied the canots together for the night and took down the sails until daybreak. The leaders in the various canots kept a strict control over the evening drinking, so there was little in the way of incident.

  Still, Harb prudently changed places two times to put some distance between himself and altercations that broke out; and he ended up perched on the very bow of the canot, hidden from the others by the pile of furs and personal belongings that occupied the fore-part of the boat’s forecastle—Rajn’s territory.

  He had found himself a fairly comfortable niche, burrowed into the back of this pile, and was dozing off—when he felt a sudden shove and saw the water coming up toward him as he went overboard. He had a glimpse of a Homskarter face he thought might be Witta’s, staring down at him with a curious expression in which both terror and triumph seemed to be mixed—then the water closed over him and he came snorting to the surface, swimming furiously to make up for the fact he was trying to bear up under the weight of his sword and armor. These things, though designed to be as light as possible, were heavy enough to drown him if he could not get to safety quickly, and he was grateful for the hairy hands that caught him a moment later, and drew him back on board before he was exhausted.