The Ancient Enemy

by Christopher Rowley

  He pointed and swam for the farther bank of the river. She followed him, and they emerged, wet, shivering in the shallows. They scrambled up the bank and into an orchard.

  She was holding her arm when Thru stopped her with a gentle touch on the shoulder. He examined the wound carefully. She felt a ferocious sense of concentration from him. She heard something rip a few moments later and he tied a length of cloth very tightly around her arm above the elbow. A tourniquet! Then I am bleeding, she thought, glad to have it at least confirmed.

  They continued walking through fruit trees and then down a narrow lane past low walls. There was a scent of jasmine blossoms on the air. It would have seemed a magical night to her, after so long in captivity aboard the Growler, except that there were creatures like men who wanted to kill her.

  Much later they waited, shivering a little, in a hollow at the base of a tall cliff while dawn broke over the hills. They slowly warmed in the light as it strengthened. Off to the east wolves were calling to the sun. She shivered at the sound of their calls, which she had heard before only when her family had visited Uncle Direkk, who lived in the mountains of central Shasht, where wolves and were-cat still roamed. She'd been twelve that summer, and first aware of how crushing the embrace of purdah would become. Her first menses were only months away, and as soon as they came she would be a woman and therefore restricted to the world behind the screen and the veil. Those days with her father and Uncle Direkk had been wonderful, but tainted by her fear of what was to come.

  When the light was strong enough Thru inspected her wound again and then disappeared into the trees below the cliff for a few minutes. He returned with some leaves which he wove into an impromptu bandage that he tied together with strips of bark peeled off a tall tree with brown-and-yellow bark. Simona was simply astonished by the dexterity and skill displayed in his work.

  "Thru?" she said when he had finished. She felt very daring for a moment.

  He turned to her, the big eyebrows rising in a way that suggested a monkey's face again. And yet he was more like a man, by far. Perhaps that was the effect of those scars, running down his face. In his eyes there was an open door to another world.

  "Simona," she said, pointing to her own chest.

  He nodded. "Simoan-a," he said with exaggerated care.

  She pointed to her arm. "Arm," she said.

  He broke out into a huge smile.

  "Arrrm," he said in response. She giggled, enthralled suddenly with this wonderful thing, the opportunity to converse with another kind of intelligent being.

  Later, when the sun was above the trees, they left the cliff and went on across a landscape that struck her as being utterly wild. They were between two hills, each of which showed bare rock surfaces in several places. Trees struggled to survive on every exposed surface, their roots coiled into cracks along the rock. A stream splashed down through a field of stones and boulders.

  They continued through a tangled world of fallen trees, patches of dense undergrowth and stands of great trees, taller and more robust than any she recalled from Shasht.

  As they went they continued to trade words.

  Water was la'am. There was a little catch in the middle of many mot words. She had already learned that Thru was a mot, that she was like a mor, but mors didn't have "ga-an"—hair or perhaps long hair. She was still not sure. She had named herself "woman" and she thought Thru understood that clearly enough. He said, "Mor, woman," several times.

  And so the lessons went.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  After sleeping out under the stars for more than a week, Thru and Simona reached the outskirts of Dronned without further evidence of pursuit. They had not seen Onu or the others after the fight in the woods. Thru had left one of the attackers for dead and others had been wounded or killed in the fight on the shore, but he knew not how many or how badly. All in all it was a bad situation; to have more mots killed in this business was only likely to inflame the hotheads in every community.

  So, since he was determined to keep Simona safe at all costs, he struck away from the roads and took hunting paths. They skirted Tamf, avoided the big camp, and took a broader trail that passed through woodland for miles. They saw very little traffic and when they did they usually hid in the woods until it passed. For food he went into villages along the way and bought what available supplies he could get with promissory notes on the Crown of Dronned. This meager supply he supplemented with a rabbit or squirrel if they came across any. In the wildwoods game was plentiful, so most evenings they had something for their fire and their bellies. Still, they grew lean on this diet.

  Simona understood that Thru was keeping their path away from civilization. Apparently he feared more violence from mots who wanted to kill her in revenge for the raids on their own folk. Beyond that she had no clear idea where he was taking them; they lacked the words yet to express such things. Still, she found it easy enough simply to trust him.

  He was her savior in a foreign land, and he was also her demanding language instructor. He never rested, it seemed, and was always pushing for more words, more usages, new verbs, adjectives, and ways to say things. He was starting to get the hang of the declensions of the common verbs in Shashti, which surprised her a little, since all of them were irregular verbs with very different systems.

  They had begun to speak to each other though in a weird gabble of both languages together. It was ugly, but it just about worked, and it even helped them learn new words since they came at things from both directions, like "tree" which she learned was "avasar" while the "forest" was "avasari." Generally the language of the monkey-folk seemed very regular, quite easy to learn. Still there were many things beyond immediate comprehension, such as the proper word order in a sentence. And yet, despite everything, each day they added dozens of new words and their use of the verbs and adjectives grew steadily more accurate.

  Along the way she had tried to tell him something about the world she came from.

  "Shasht is the city, the great city. It is built of stone. Many thousands of people live there, perhaps a million. No one has counted in a long time. It is politically difficult to count."

  It took them an hour or so before they were both confident they understood what "politics" meant. The harsh repression and use of informers that governed Shasht was also difficult for him to comprehend. Why would the great king need to hear every word his people spoke? What good would it do him to know that they hated and feared him? He must know that already. The system seemed nonsensical.

  But Simona explained that a great many lives were lost every year because of informers ferreting out traitors. "Traitors" was another word that was difficult to explain satisfactorily.

  From these exchanges Thru gained the impression of a huge society, much, much bigger than Dronned or even Sulmo, both wider and deeper than his own, with layers of oppression holding it all together.

  Never had his mission seemed more important. He had to get Simona safely to Dronned. Thankfully they were finally in sight of the turrets of the Guild Hall. But he wanted to make sure of her reception. He led her off the path and left her hidden in a thicket at the bottom of the great dunes that skirted the beach.

  "Wait here, Simona. I go to see our King, make sure all is safe. Understand?"

  Impulsively she reached out and hugged him. "Understand," she said.

  He left her then and hurried away through the undergrowth. After a few minutes he reappeared down on the road, a small figure hurrying north. Simona watched him disappear up the straight road. There was other traffic, a few donkey carts, other figures bent over under objects carried on their backs. The walls of the city were close enough that she could see the towers and steeples inside, signs of a good-sized regional capital back in Shasht. This, then, was the sort of place that the warriors had captured and burned to the ground on the orders of the priests.

  The priests had always claimed that the New Empire was different, that since Norgeeben the Great's reformation
, the bloody ways of the Old Empire were no more. But here, with this dismal slaughter of an intelligent other race, the priests of He Who Eats had shown that they were in no way advanced over their terrible forebears.

  It was strange, she realized, but all thought of wanting to end her own life had gone. She guessed that it had vanished the moment she hit the water off the stern of the Anvil.

  That water was so cold! The shock had just changed everything. Suddenly she had wanted nothing more than to live!

  She had swum after the ship, but it had continued sailing away from her, and no one responded to her cries for help. And then, alone in the sea, she had swum until she could swim no more and she simply floated, tossing up and down on the waves while lying on her back and using her hands and legs as little as possible. She understood that death was closing in.

  And then the miracle, a small boat under a triangular sail. Rough hands had hauled her out and wrapped her in that warm blanket, stinking of fish.

  She'd stared at them, and they had stared back at her, both sides appalled by the differences they saw in each other. But they did not kill her or throw her back in the water, and later she slumped into the sleep of utter exhaustion. When she woke up they fed her a bowl of hot porridge and sour butter. She'd slept again, and finally she had awoken at dockside and entered a new and completely strange world.

  In a brief time she had seen so much, the buildings, the streets of a town that were obviously ancient and well made, that she was left overwhelmed. Then they had brought her to a dark room, and all she was left with were the memories, those images! Those buildings, with their fantastic detail. Each housefront was faced with stone set in exquisite patterns. The amount of work involved was simply enormous.

  Since all she'd had on when she jumped ship was a shift, they brought her clean, dry clothing. They opened seams and reworked them on the spot, and she watched them with absolute fascination. She liked their neat, quick ways of moving, their big-eyed expressions. Once, at Uncle Direkk's ranch in the mountains, she had seen monkeys taking ripe grain from a field. Their hands and fingers went through the grain with the same speed and meticulousness.

  Most of the time she dozed on the little pallet they had provided. They freed her hands after a while and brought her food twice a day. Usually it was more porridge, with butter and salt. Sometimes they brought steamed vegetables and seaweed. They were not hostile, nor did they try to talk with her. For elimination they provided a bucket with a tight lid. She was forced to reflect that they were in every way the civilized equals of her own world.

  While she was there she had become aware of a slow-building tension outside. Then had come the first angry crowd. She'd heard them, shouting and banging on the door. It sounded like there were a lot of them, and it didn't take much imagination for her to guess what they wanted. More guards came and went outside her door while she crouched in that room, terrified.

  When she thought of what the warriors had done to these folk she wanted to weep. And the memory of the hot, roasted meats brought down to the women's deck made her want to vomit.

  She would never believe in the Great God again. He Who Eats was a disgusting atavism, and she renounced Him completely.

  The priests were all liars.

  Then came that long night when the mob came back and raged outside the building for hours. She had expected them to break in and kill her, but they did not. After hours of shouting and banging on the door, the mob finally quieted and left.

  And then the next day Thru Gillo came to her cell, and everything had changed.

  She sensed a strength in him which only intensified while they fled through the wilderness. He was a quiet one. The guards outside her door had talked all the time, great chatterers she thought. Thru was not like that, but he was persistent in working on learning new words. She felt an enormous thirst in him for communication, and she wished to respond.

  Thru returned after a couple of hours, breaking into her ruminations. He brought a donkey cart, which he pulled off the road down below her position in the scrub. She climbed down from her hiding place.

  "Come, the King wants to see you."

  She climbed into the back of the cart, lay down, and he covered her with a blanket. Back at the city gates the guards paid him no mind.

  Through the city they went. She heard the sounds of many citizens at work, the clop of donkeys and the rattle of cart wheels, some hammering and a loud roar from some unknown source. Then these sounds died away and were replaced by echoes as if they were in a large walled enclosure.

  The cart came to a halt. The blanket was pulled back, and Thru helped her out and guided her through a door and up some stairs. There was a narrow passageway and a door to a large room, plastered and painted white. The red-tiled floor was covered with large woven mats. Furniture of a consistent, neat design stood here and there. Figures stood up, pushing back their chairs.

  There was another mot, who looked older and fiercer than Thru Gillo. His eyes were extraordinarily piercing.

  "D'thaam," she said, using the term for "greetings" that Thru had taught her. The fierce-looking mot smiled at that, and his eyebrows bobbed up and down.

  Then she saw the other two figures, and her eyes bulged and her blood ran cold. They were not mots, and they were certainly not men.

  The bodies were lean and frail-looking, the heads seemed overlarge and in the heads the eyes seemed even more out of scale. Those eyes! The way they peered at one...

  They were the demons, just as they were described by the priests of Orbazt Subuus. Narrow faces, large protruding eyes, the V-shape to their foreheads, the narrow ears. It was exactly as they were painted on the Hell Wall in the temple of He Who Eats. They were of the cloven hoof, the taint of other, the workings of evil.

  She stood there shivering, struck dumb. Could it be true? All of the tales of the priests? No, it was not possible!

  "D'thaam," they said in quiet, whispery voices.

  She turned to Thru Gillo with beseeching eyes.

  "Will they kill me?" she said.

  "No, no, no!" He put his hands up. "No kill you. Talk to you."

  She whirled back to the demons.

  "Talk to you," they repeated.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Filek Biswas sat at the lower end of the admiral's table and listened patiently to the wrangling between generals and admirals. It was late in the day, the sixth bell had rung a while back and Filek was very tired. Organizing an army's medical arm in the wake of a plague was quite an onerous task.

  The meeting had been running for more than an hour, and little had been accomplished. Filek knew that Admiral Heuze was playing his own game, allowing the lesser commanders to exhaust themselves against each other before he moved in to lay down the law.

  Heuze had been flattered by fate, Filek believed. With the Imperial Scion, poor Nebbeggebben, reduced to an invalid by the plague, Heuze had a free hand. Only the yellow tops could challenge him, and their position was much weakened. The pestilence had also carried off Admirals Neg and Jamaillo, who had outranked Heuze.

  Heuze could not have asked for more, but he got it anyway, when his old wife died as well. And since he had deliberately not brought his sons on the expedition, so they wouldn't be killed by the watchful and suspicious Scion, he posed no threat to Nebbeggebben's New World dynasty.

  Heuze understood his situation very clearly, one reason he had raised Filek to surgeon general for the fleet. Heuze needed smart men around him, and he had met few that were smarter than Filek Biswas.

  For his part, Filek had never imagined that he might rise in the world like this. He had resisted the urge to think himself exalted in some way, but it was hard to resist, when you were surrounded by a group of such utter dolts. The generals, from Uisbank to Raltt, were uniformly stupid. They had risen in the world by surviving while their cleverer counterparts had been weeded out by the Hand of Aeswiren, which constantly monitored the upper classes of the empire.

 
The admirals were slightly better, but Heuze himself was unusually learned. He came from a good family and had received an adequate education.

  Filek could sense that Heuze knew that he had an opportunity of historic scale. With no real rivals he would eliminate the monkeys and set the colony in place. He would be there beside the crippled heir of Aeswiren and would rule through Nebbeggebben's authority. It was perfect, and with no heirs of his own in the colony he did not threaten the dynasty, so the Hand would leave him be.

  Heuze spoke up, breaking into the old quarrel about numbers.

  "We will land three thousand men on the first day. We will replace them with a second three thousand on the third day. We will hold two thousand in reserve."

  "Exactly," said Sub-Admiral Geppugo, hurriedly switching his position.

  "We will land three thousand and their supplies," Heuze said next. General Uisbank, who had been frowning, settled back a little. It was Geppugo's turn to frown.

  "Two days' worth?"

  "Of course. If the wind changes, we might have to pull away from a lee shore, so we must land enough food for at least two days."

  "What did the leadsman find?" said Geppugo, clutching for one last hope.

  "They have charted the northern approach and found it hopelessly riddled with shoals. Only the south is usable for vessels with our draft."

  "If we're restricted to the south side of the estuary, that will keep the number of ships we can deploy to a minimum. We can land the men, but not with all their supplies."

  "We will send in the supplies in longboats, from all across the fleet. Every ship will contribute."

  "That breaks with the rotation that was in use before."

  "The situation has changed. We have a third more supplies than we thought we'd have. All ships can afford to contribute."

  Quartermaster General Scupp frowned, but said nothing. Under Heuze his position was uneasy anyway. And what Heuze said was actually true, though Scupp had wanted to wield a little patronage from his position. Ah, well, he'd done well enough from the voyage. No need to stir the pot too much.