The Ancient Enemy

by Christopher Rowley

  Men?

  Giffiam decided that, as constable, he had to do something.

  "Toshak, your fame has preceded you to Creton, but still you must realize that this news you bring us is hard to accept. But I will call the muster, and we will put this to the folk."

  Giffiam turned to the door where his assistant lurked.

  "Marsh, make a fire."

  "Yes, Constable," said young Marsh.

  Within a few minutes Marsh had assembled sticks and straw from the tavern's wood crib and got a blaze started.

  Across from the Swinging Door Tavern stood a bakery and a dry goods store. In front of the bakery was a platform erected for the town crier, who broadcast any dramatic news from its eminence of two feet.

  Dusk was falling as Giffiam mounted the town crier's stand and blew the ancient Constable's Trumpet. It had been years since the brass trumpet had been heard in the village, not since a posse had been called out to chase some bandits on the run from the coal towns. Four mots charged with highway robbery had eventually been caught and sentenced on that occasion, twenty years before.

  Giffiam was a little rusty with the instrument, and his first efforts sounded more like a chook in terrible pain than anything else. But eventually he got his lips around it and the trumpet responded with a long clear peal. Heads popped out of doors up and down the narrow streets. They saw the glow of a fire in the village center and soon a crowd had gathered.

  Giffiam got up and gave the warning, as he understood it.

  The crowd became agitated as they heard the news of the massacres, and cries of astonishment and alarm rose up.

  "What we gonna doo!" cried a chook sitting up on the low roof of the Swinging Door.

  "That's a good question," said Giffiam. "For an answer, I'm going to hand over to Toshak of Sulmo, the famous sword-fighter, who brought this news today. He has some ideas."

  Toshak got up and let them all take a look at him for a few moments. He gave off an aura of capable decisiveness. The sword and fighting knife in his belt were very obvious to them all.

  "I saw the ruins of Bilauk and Hurves. The attackers left nothing but the heads of the folk behind. This is truth. We must prepare to fight to save the village. I think that the men come very early in the morning. Probably before dawn. They surprise the villages and catch everyone in their beds.

  "So we must build barricades tonight. We must arm every mot who can fight, and prepare everyone else for flight in the morning. We will send the mors and children inland, to the coal towns."

  "And if you're wrong about this, we're going to beat you black-and-blue tomorrow and send you on your way," said a mean-spirited brilby named Uank.

  Voices shouted disagreement with Uank, who was not popular in Harfield.

  "Don't listen to that idiot," said Giffiam. "But how can you be sure the raiders will come here tomorrow?"

  "I cannot be absolutely certain. Perhaps they will not—but the consequences for you all if they do come and you are not prepared are too terrible to ignore."

  They were staring at him, trying to make up their minds. Some were convinced, a few were openly unconvinced.

  "Listen to me. They have attacked Bilauk and Hurve. You saw the smoke of Hurves, didn't you?"

  A few nodded. Indeed, they had wondered about that column of distant smoke.

  "All we found of the folk of those places was a pile of heads and old Haloiko there. He saw them. Big noses, beards, and hair. They are men!"

  The mots looked at each other in wonder and fear. What the hell was happening in the world? First two boats had gone missing, inexplicable in terms of the weather. And now these tales of villages burned, people slaughtered, and Man the Cruel coming back to do it. It was a terrifying thought, but still a few were not convinced.

  Then old Haloiko got up and told them what he'd seen.

  When he was done, Giffiam asked for a show of hands and found overwhelming support for building barricades and setting a defensive watch. All the mors and children would be ready to leave at a moment's notice. Chooks and donkeys would go, too.

  "Everyone should get their bow, and their best points. I'd suggest sword and knife as well. If you have spears or shields, bring them. We will need all the best weapons in the village."

  Mots scrambled in all directions.

  Hob joined a gang of big brilbies and set to building the barricades. For raw material they brought out timber from the sawmill and some heavy farm carts which they turned on their sides. Other folk brought down anything that might be useful, old barrels and broken doors, window frames and wheels. Soon the streets leading into the village were blocked at the edges with big piles of wood, wheels, and motley stuff.

  Meanwhile the mots who were good with the bow had gathered near the Swinging Door to hammer out a strategy. Toshak was the only one among them who had studied warfare. He emphasized the value of making their shooting count.

  "Don't waste your steel points on long shots. Don't shoot until they are close enough for you to choose a soft spot. The second thing is how we make use of the available cover."

  They made a tour of the three main barricades and noted likely places for bowmots to shelter while still keeping a good field of fire.

  An inventory of arrows and points was made and the handiest mots gathered in the smithy to fletch as many shafts as they could. Steel points were dug out of every keeping place.

  Toshak examined the weapons available. There were a few war spears, ancient things unused in hundreds of years. The shafts were mostly worthless and had to be replaced. There were some hunting javelins, small versions of the long spear thrown by the pyluk, and even an old pyluk spear itself, taken from a lone marauder decades before. That, too, had long since gone punky and was useless.

  There were more swords, many more. Usually the family blade, handed down for untold generations. They were made of good steel, with decorated handles and protective steel box for the hand, but most needed sharpening, and few mots had much knowledge of swordfighting.

  Beyond that were long knives, which were pretty universal among the mots of the world, axes, of which they had seventy good ones, and a few with fractured handles.

  The village turned out to work for its own defense. The smithy was running all night, the glow from his hearth visible in the darkness.

  The constable sent out small parties of scouts to the nearest headland. They carried pinecones soaked in pitch that they could light to give warning.

  Dawn came with nothing but the mournful croaking of a few chooks without sleep. The wind had died down, and the scene took on an absolute kind of peace and silence.

  The village stood down, and went about its business.

  Everyone was exhausted after a night of such tension, but the village life resumed its pace. Everyone had work to do. As they hurried about the polder and field, meeting in the lanes or back in the village they exchanged jokes and wry comments. "A wild sheep ride, that was!" was the general feeling.

  "Sometimes I think we can be convinced of any fool thing that comes down the pike," said old Huhumpa, and there was quite a lot of agreement with him.

  Toshak withdrew into himself. Thru and Nuza sat together in the taproom of the Swinging Door. They talked drowsily for a while and then slept there, heads back against the wall.

  About noon there was another blast on the trumpet from Giffiam, and everyone rushed from the fields to the village to hear.

  They found Giffiam, flanked by Toshak and Uls and Fel Diljer, who had hiked down to Hurves at first light and were just returned.

  "It is true," said Fel Diljer. "The village of Hurves is burned to the ground. There is only a pile of heads on the wharf, no other trace of the folk. They killed the entire village."

  "You're sure?" said someone in the crowd.

  "I scouted all around the village. There's no one there."

  The jokes were finished. Most folk did not return to the fields, but instead went to help improve the barricades.

/>   Toshak had studied them, and had had them moved and rebuilt. All three were now situated between stone walls of sizable homes on either side. The houses were also barricaded and made fast against assault. The walls would tend to compact an attacking force and bunch them up so they would be more vulnerable to stones and arrows.

  All that day a party of mors and children had worked at finding and bringing up good stones for slinging. They also had heavier rocks, hauled up by donkey cart and piled up ready to be used.

  As the afternoon wore on, new scouting parties were sent out to relieve the first ones, who had returned with no reports of anything out of the ordinary.

  But Hurves had indeed burned. A couple of the most recalcitrant mots who refused to believe even Fel Diljer had gone down there in person and returned to confirm that it was gone, village and villagers alike.

  After that everyone worked with even more determination. A group of mors started cooking up a mess of clams and bushpod cakes. Mussels were raked up and set to boil. All the chooks in the village were sent inland, since they moved too slowly over distance to wait until an emergency.

  At the end of the day of hard work the villagers ate and settled down for the night. A watch was put at every barricade and from the top of the dry goods store's roof, which had the best view out to sea in the village.

  At midnight the moon rose, close to full in a sky with clouds blowing up from the south.

  Soon afterward, there was a light flaring on the southern headland.

  "A light!"

  The village awoke.

  Everyone stared off into the south, and waited.

  Time passed, the wind picked up again so that small surf started beating on the beach.

  Eventually they heard someone hallooing from the southern road. One of the lookouts from the south. He'd come to report that it'd been a mistake. They'd thought they'd seen something out at sea, perhaps a sail, but it would have been too big. Then they thought their eyes had been playing tricks on them. It had been way out, at the edge of visibility. But whatever it was had gone and not been seen again. They thought now that it was an illusion.

  There was a collective sigh of relief. A fire was lit and water boiled to make guezme tea. Several mots retired to bed.

  "Wake me if anything happens," they said to one and all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Five longboats moved silently in toward the land. Rukkh stilled his nerves with a pinch of war snuff and looked back over the dark water. There was always tension just before an attack, no matter who the enemy. The moon had frosted the edges of things and given the waves a silvery glint. He closed the little wooden snuff-egg and tucked it back inside his leather breastplate. The breeze brought them the scent of the land. The oarlocks were muffled in cloth, and the oarsmen knew their job. No sound betrayed their progress. Each boat carried twenty men, handpicked from the Blitz Regiment, the toughest of the tough.

  Five other boats were heading in on the other side of the village. They would swing around on either side and then move in to trap the animals in a classic pincer attack.

  The village was laid out like all the monkey places, packed tightly around a central core. There were a hundred or more small houses, set close against one another, as if they'd grown together over centuries. Rukkh wondered if the monkeys were afraid to build away from each other.

  Small immaculately kept fields surrounded them, and offshore there were always wide arrays of circular ponds built of rock and shingle. It was amazing how much work they had put into it all, and yet left so much of the country quite empty. Beyond the villages and the small fields lay nothing but a tangled jungle of oak and pine, scouts reporting game animals by the hundreds on every hill.

  Admiral Heuze had decided that the monkeys in this village must have learned of the destruction of the place just eight miles south. But, nonetheless, the monkeys had not fled their own village. Telescope observation from the top of the mast had shown that smoke still rose from the village chimneys. Either the monkeys were very stupid, or they were damnably self-confident.

  Heuze had chosen the former. The stinking monkeys had no reason to be confident. They hadn't put up much of a fight anywhere yet, and eight ships had conducted successful raids along the coast.

  Heuze expected some sort of resistance, however, even if weak and disorganized, and his men were prepared. Each twenty in the boats had five bowmen among them, and the warriors wore full leather armor. It was inconvenient but necessary, since the monkeys did possess bows and swords, though so far they had never used them very effectively. The priests claimed that the monkeys did not make these things and therefore had little idea of how to wield them. According to the priests the monkeys were pure abomination, inferior beings created by the Fallen Ones and intended to usurp the world from Man. The Great God himself called for their total extirpation.

  The warriors had found little difficulty so far in carrying out the commands of the priests. So poor had been their resistance that no one had taken a monkey's head. The monkeys simply weren't worth the honor of having their heads shrunk for a warrior's personal shrine.

  The war snuff had taken effect and banished any nervousness. Rukkh was confident enough about the upcoming action that his thoughts returned to the girl, Simona of Ghuiter.

  She was the pretty one! Despite eating the same rations as everybody else, she retained her womanliness, her rounded hips and firm breasts, that spoke to him of good fertility. There was a fire in her eyes which spoke of passion in the bedroom.

  Perhaps, if he could distinguish himself in some way, the girl's family would be mollified. He knew that her parents were bound to resist him at first. They were of noble blood, she more than he, but both were from landed families. His own bloodlines were poor and rural, of little account in the social world of Shasht.

  But this was the new world, the New Land, and flexible conditions would exist for a while. If he proved himself worthy, he could rise into the nobility.

  Someday soon, he swore to himself, he would take the girl, and they would found a mighty clan together on the New Land. He felt a surge of pride. He and his fellows were unstoppable. They were the warriors of Shasht. No one could defeat them, not since the days of the first emperor, Kadawak. Now they were in the reign of the twenty-third emperor, Aeswiren III, and Shasht stood triumphant over the entire world.

  Except here on this distant shore, unknown to any except the priests. Where only the monkey folk stood to contest the law of the Great God, He Who Eats.

  The boat ground ashore on the mud. The tide was out and they had a wide expanse of mudflats to cross. Toward the village, the flats were covered in the maze of walls that contained the seaponds. The walls were mostly about five feet tall and usually two or three wide, made of stone and cemented together by mollusc-growth mats. Between them wound torturous little pathways that had confused even the scouts. They would have to be avoided by the warriors.

  The water was cold when he jumped out into the knee-deep foam. There was a breeze building off the sea now. He took his first step on the New Land.

  "There's a light up there, damn it!" Captain Cauta was pointing to the headland up above them.

  Piercing the gloom above and to the south was a single bright flare of yellow light. As they watched, it moved. Someone was waving it back and forth.

  "They are signaling to the village?"

  "What else?"

  "I didn't think they were capable of such complicated thinking."

  "We'd best hurry. Bowmen be prepared."

  They moved out of the surf and across the flats, jogging at a steady pace. Above the mudflats was a bank of shingle, small loose stones the size of hens' eggs. They scrambled up the bank in a roar of stones and emerged on top of a grassy open area along which ran a narrow road paved with rough flint cobbles.

  Rukkh was mildly surprised by the road, which though only five feet wide ran ahead unbroken, paved with stone. He hadn't thought the monkeys would be capable
of something like this. Then he thought that of course they must have inherited all these things from others. There must have been men here once, long ago.

  Up ahead lay the village, the dark outline of the roofs and chimneys was visible in the moon's light. Despite the lateness of the hour smoke still rose from a few chimneys.

  Hukkit was beside him, and behind them came Forjal.

  "For the glory of the Great God!" said Forjal with the mad excitement of a berserker in his eyes. "Let's kill the fucking monkeys! Kill them all."

  "For His glory!" echoed Hukkit.

  "Silence in the ranks," hissed Sergeant Burok.

  Rukkh said nothing, but his eyes glowed. He shifted and adjusted the strap that held his shield on his back, then took the spear in both hands.

  They moved down the dark road as quickly as they dared. It was rough and uneven in places, but not as much as Rukkh had expected. It was as good as any road in his home village.

  Ahead lay the monkey village, a cluster of deeper darknesses against the gloomy mass of the land beyond. Trees grew up close on both sides of the road, and there were stone walls, perhaps four feet high along the edge of the fields. The walls seemed extraordinarily precise in their layout.

  They slowed a little.

  The village ahead was quiet, but watchful. They could all sense it. The road ran into the village and became a narrow way between the walls of the houses. It did not look inviting. Unfortunately, there didn't seem any other way through the continuous wall of housing that stretched right down to the beach.

  They would have to enter on the main road. A little tentatively, they pushed forward with a wary eye on the rooflines ahead. The monkeys had killed a couple of men with arrows during a raid by the Batterer. Ahead through the murk they saw that the road was barricaded.

  Cauta halted them for a moment while he studied the situation and weighed the possibilities. He talked briefly with Sergeants Burok and Hugga.