But He Who Eats needed blood on His altars. That way He felt His people's love. He felt it in the death of their enemies and those they anointed for sacrifice. He was the Wise God, the One who ate His enemies. He Who Eats demanded hundreds of hearts be tossed onto His altars. All unbelievers were to be annihilated. That was the first commandment given by Kadawak, the first emperor of all Shasht. And despite the Reformation undertaken by great Norgeeben, unbelievers were still given only one choice, convert or die.
But what, wondered Simona, if the believers became the unbelievers?
"He bound them and he baked them and he sat right down and ate them..."
Let He Who Eats strike her down dead if He existed. That was her challenge, and so far she was still alive.
Which thought did not exactly cheer her. She stared out, not really seeing the waters stretching to the horizon.
The fleet had moved offshore after the news of the loss of the settlement at New Hope Harbor. While the plague raged, the admiral had taken the ships out into deep water, well away from a lee shore. With their numbers severely reduced, plenty of running room was essential. They sailed up and down just as they had for months before, while the New Land was being spied out and the coastline mapped.
Despite the enormous improvement in her circumstances, Simona's heart was a desolate place. There was no message from Rukkh, and she had no way of sending him one. Filek was obdurate and would not listen to his daughter's plea that he have Rukkh brought to the Anvil. Filek would not even find out for her if Rukkh still lived. And while her status had improved aboard ship she was still a "red-mark girl," and no man of her own age and class would want her. But Filek's improved position meant that some older man might take her. Now he expected her to marry for his sake. He'd as much as told her so.
"You have to understand that whether we like it or not we have to found a colony. We have a duty to those who come after us. We must put duty above our personal feelings."
Duty? What he meant was establishing a dynasty. He had a position to protect. His daughter would marry well, even if it meant marrying some old fellow in his dotage. It was an appalling thought. Simona wanted a man her own age, not some filthy ancient with withered flesh and fumbling fingers. She wanted Rukkh, a man she could love. Filek would not listen.
So she would be the young wife of some aged admiral or other. She thought she'd rather die.
Oh, Great Nebbeggebben, you will have to do without me.
The cold blue water beckoned just thirty feet below.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
When Melidofulo and Toshak entered the room used to interrogate the men, they found that the prisoners were chained to their chairs. They had to be, for given their freedom they invariably sought to attack their guards and interrogators. They had shown unrestrained viciousness from the very beginning. Some had had to be tied down while their wounds healed to stop them pulling out their stitches to make the blood flow. One even managed to smash his own skull against the wall. He just suddenly stood up, snarled a few words to the other men, and hurled himself into the wall, facefirst with enormous force. He never came to, although he lived for three days in a coma.
The room had once been the royal racquet court, for a game that had long since gone out of favor. Since those days it had been kept in good repair and used occasionally for a party or royal frolic, with silks upon the wall. Now it was down to bare walls, with the light of a dozen lamps. Now it was a room for examining Man.
As the prisoners recovered from their wounds, so they were brought there and weighed and measured and poked and prodded while they hissed angrily and shook in their bonds.
Once they'd been measured, the men were put on comfortable chairs and Melidofulo and his team of mot questioners tried to get them to communicate. They had tried everything. The men would not respond other than through curses and spitting.
Melidofulo had finally resorted to the arcane arts of the Assenzi, soft-spoken spells and hypnotic tricks, but these men were even resistant to that. Those that did fall under the spell spouted some gibberish, but did not respond effectively. After a while they would fall asleep, or just curl up into a fetal ball. None would ever accept that he was speaking to them, attempting to communicate with words to them. Using language, just as they did. Their disdain was clear. You are animals, no more worthy of speech than dogs.
In desperation they tried to communicate by writing on the blackboard, demonstrating the alphabet of the Land, and putting simple words up. They brought in objects that were surely common to all cultures, like shovels and a pail, and wrote their names. But none of this brought any response whatsoever.
Now, weeks after the battle at the Man-Place, they were still without any way of speaking to the men. And it was true that this group of men were an exceptionally uncommunicative lot. They rarely spoke among themselves, and that only sullenly and in few words.
More messenger birds flew north from Dronned to Highnoth. A few days later other birds brought answers from the north.
And so Melidofulo brought Toshak to the room again. Toshak was good at solving problems.
"All they have ever shown me is dumb passivity or furious rage."
Toshak nodded. He had been less than hopeful about this part of the exercise.
"They think of themselves as already dead. It doesn't seem that they accept the concept of surrender."
"They might respond to pain, to extremes of agony," said Melidofulo.
"We considered torturing them. But, well—" Toshak spread his hands.
"Mmmm," said Melidofulo. "You doubted that we could come up with tortures capable of breaking these men. There is a cultishness to their appearance, the patterns of shaving of their heads, the scars on their bodies that tells me they will attempt to sing their death song, even while we slowly burn their feet off."
"It is hard at times to understand how such a culture can succeed so well."
"Because it rewards aggression, craft, and cunning. These men are accustomed to cruelty and pain. They will laugh at us while we try to hurt them."
"They fought like demons, even though they were dying of that fever."
"And we know that it does not kill all of them. I am afraid that you are right, Toshak. They will never give up. There will be war."
Toshak's pulse jumped; Melidofulo had seen the light at last. He understood now that it was a fight to the death and not easily ended.
Melidofulo chewed his lip thoughtfully. War was such a waste of everything that Melidofulo believed in. He had thought it was something they would never see again, as extinct as Man or the dinosaurs of faraway Urth.
"By our count we deduce that the disease may have killed about a third of the men in the Man-Place."
"Well, we know a little more about our enemy, but there are still huge gaps in our understanding. We know there are forty large ships. There are at least twelve smaller vessels, which act as scouts for the main fleet. These small ships are very fast and have beautiful lines. All our fishing boat captains have commented on that.
"Their largest ships may hold as many as a thousand men, certainly they're big enough. There might have originally been thirty thousand in the whole fleet. Now, after the plague, perhaps only twenty thousand. Some of my staff think they might still be able to put an army of nine or ten thousand into the field, supposing that they have one soldier for every other person aboard the fleet. Right now we could not face anything larger than a force of perhaps three thousand."
Melidofulo had tented his slender fingers toward the tip of his long nose. Toshak didn't disagree. He had barely five thousand troops, of which half were still in the very earliest part of their training. They certainly could not match the enemy one on one.
"Let me say one thing here. If we are correct about the social status of the warriors, then we might expect that their armed force will not be that large. For every warrior there will be several noncombatants. We can see that these men are exceptional, they are all tall,
powerfully built, all marked with scars and brands. Lesser men probably sail the ships and take care of menial duties."
Toshak nodded.
"So a standing army of perhaps only five thousand would be your conclusion?"
"Something in that region. The men we captured are all hyperrobust specimens, and cannot be the norm."
"How do we know that?"
"Assenzi memory is long. We remember Man."
"Well, five thousand men like these would be too much for our own forces to handle right now. We are still working on very basic drills."
"How long will it take before our army is ready?"
Toshak shook his head slowly.
"We will fight long before we're ready. The men will always be better trained than we. When we fight them, as I am convinced we must, we will lose many mots."
"And the Land will be saddened by their loss forever," said Melidofulo.
"One thing I cannot decide, is what kind of society these men have come from. I wonder if they are outlaws. Perhaps they have suffered some terrible wrong, and that has made them so savage."
"Oh, it is a great empire, Toshak. It can be nothing else. The size of their ships betrays that. They have the resources of a large society behind them."
"Then we have to learn their language and learn everything we can about them. They will come again and again, and we have to know how to defeat them."
"Do we have any idea where they might strike next?" asked the Assenzi.
"No common view has developed. I think they will come to Dronned next. They burned Tamf to terrify us, but then they used the ruins to build those sheds. They want to use our own cities as raw material for theirs."
"Then they might strike at Sulmo; that is the largest city in the Land."
"They might, but Sulmo is far south of here, and we know they didn't raid farther south than Bilauk. They moved steadily north after that, and after Tamf, Dronned is the next large city to the north."
"How will we face them?"
"We will have to meet them, shield to shield. If they do attack Dronned, we will give them a hot welcome."
Suddenly the door burst open and the King, himself, came hurrying in wearing nothing but a tunic, trousers, and yellow slippers.
"There you are, the two of you, both the fellows I wanted to talk to the most."
Melidofulo and Toshak looked at the King expectantly.
"Here," the King proffered a message. "There is marvelous news for you."
Toshak took the message, scanned it, and handed it to Melidofulo.
"A female?" said Toshak.
Melidofulo's eyes jumped wide open.
"Where?"
"Down in Creton."
"That is wo-man, the wife of Man."
"Woman," Toshak mouthed the unfamiliar word. "Excellent."
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Thru Gillo hastened south to Creton that same day with three companions. They were all veterans of the assault on the Man-Place: Onu Hamf, Beremel Padjaster, and Dunni of Tamf.
Onu was a hefty young fellow and the others slimmer, but all were capable of a fast walk all day. Dunni was said to have extraordinary skill with the bow. Their mission was to bring the female, the wo-man, back to Dronned.
Creton was a federation of villages and small city-states, owing allegiance to no king. Still, Thru was sure the folk of Creton would honor the wishes of the King of Dronned in this time of emergency.
They made good time. The weather was fine, and they passed through the ruins of Tamf on the second day out. They planned to spend the night with the Watch on Tamf, who were camped a mile or two farther down the road.
Tamf was a strange sight. Very little remained except for stonework here and there. Most of the walled city had been burned or pulled down. Piles of rubble and partly burned wood had been pushed together at the street corners. Here and there were houses that had been miraculously spared heavy damage and stood like sentinels to the devastation of the rest.
The walls remained, of course, including the ancient watchtowers and the gatehouse, but they were blackened by soot.
The South Road, where he had lived the winter before, had had the misfortune to be on the side of Tamf nearest the Man-Place. Everything had been plundered for lumber for the huge Man barns. The laundry building where he had lived so happily had been torn down. Only the foundations remained.
The view up the road to the bridge was stark. There was just the city wall, the gate tower, and the bridge. All the graceful roofs and towers of old Tamf were gone.
Thru recalled the happy time he'd spent there, working during every scrap of daylight producing his best work. Those wonderful evenings with Nuza. Eating by the fire, making love on the big bed he built in the corner of the space.
Thinking of her brought on the pain of loss and separation and left him with a weird ache in his heart.
The walls of Tamf were all that was left of that time.
He looked down the road. Grey clouds were coming in. It would be best if they stopped the night here with the Watch on Tamf.
The camp was now a solidly built fort set on a bluff overlooking the Tam River. Most of the materials, former beams and rafters from Tamf, had come from the now-reclaimed Man-Place.
They were met with a warm welcome. Thru and the others were well-known to all the young mots in the current Watch force. The capture of the Man-Place had set off an explosion of activity in the Land. The terror had given way to the rage in the hearts of the folk of the Land.
There was sad news too. King Rolf of Tamf had finally succumbed to his wounds. In the woods of Sonf, he had breathed his last. The succession would pass to his son Sudu, who had already been anointed. The folk of Tamf, meanwhile, had evacuated the coastal regions. The mots there had gone to the muster in Dronned.
Thru and his companions made a quiet supper of bushpod and mealpuppies washed down with some thin beer. They slept in bunks like the rest of the Watch.
The next day they set out for Creton.
Wagons laden with building materials pulled from the Man-Place were rumbling slowly eastward into the interior as they went past. Tamf was going to be rebuilt, eventually. But for now, nothing was to be wasted in a place where the enemy might return. The coastal cities had emptied of valuables and furniture. Inland, in the towns along the edge of the Drakensberg, the price of storage for furniture had jumped fourfold overnight. And still the wagons were heading east.
Thru, on the other hand, was going west and south, out into Creton once more. Most of the folk had fled these parts, and at night the wolves howled after detecting the presence of Thru and his fellows.
Through the vale beneath Mount Nippi's grey peak they went, under the eaves of the gracious beeches along the Fwaan River. They found small villages abandoned, the polder still being tended by small groups of mots who camped in the woods. These mots were hungry for news of the world outside. The emergency had brought traffic on the roads through Creton to a complete halt, and most of the local folk had fled up into the Coal Mountains.
Thru and his party did their best to answer questions. The men had made no further landings. Meanwhile, there was a lot of training in progress. The army was quickly taking shape. Units had been formed up, officers appointed or merely confirmed in some already-existing units, and it was now fumbling its way through the process of learning to fight as an army. Indeed Thru had had to leave his own regiment just as they were beginning drills in line combat.
Everyone they spoke to had finally come to the realization that life as they had known it was over. War had come, and unless it were won, there would be no future for any of them.
The following day they came out into the coast country. In the afternoon they saw the sea and they had reached Meulumb, a town a little up the coast from Crozett by evening. There were two messages waiting there for Thru. One, dated three days before, was from Mies Aglit, the royal agent in Crozett. It urged Thru and his "force" to hurry to Crozett where the "woman" wa
s being held prisoner. The second was dated the day before and urged Thru even more strongly to hurry his progress. Crozett had many angry refugees from the devastated villages, mots who had seen their families slain by men. There was a danger that the woman might be killed by a mob.
With the moon lost in cloudy skies there was very little light, so they rested, rose before dawn, ate a hurried breakfast and got on the road within minutes of the sun's breaking the eastern horizon. By late afternoon they were entering Crozett.
They couldn't fail to spot the changes. Crozett had a wall and guards now. Thru also noticed that the moat had been deepened and filled to the top. Crozett was not about to join Bilauk in the list of places taken by surprise.
The guard carefully perused Thru's documents, checked the Royal Seal, and sent them on at once to the Guild Hall.
Inside they found the town constable, Iras Bafuti, who was struggling with a thousand requests from refugees for help in looking after their houses or their polder while they were absent.
Bafuti rose from the table with a sigh of gratitude. His clerks continued to open messages and pile them up on the appropriate stack.
"Welcome to our city." Bafuti clasped each of them by the hand. "I take it you come on official business."
"Yes," said Thru, fumbling in his pack. "Here are letters Royal from King Belit describing us and our mission."
Bafuti wasted no time in opening and scanning the scroll.
"Ah hah! Yes, that would be a very good idea." He looked up at Thru.
"You will be taking the prisoner back with you. You will need guards, I think. There are many very angry mots in the town. They want to kill her."
"What is her physical condition?"
"She seems well. We have fed her buttered oatmeal, and she takes some seaweed and podwater. She is kept in a guarded room, but she is no longer kept in bonds. She hasn't shown the slightest trace of violence toward us."
"That is good news," said Thru, who had been hoping that the female version of Man would be more tractable than the males.
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