Now creatures do not raise their numbers forever: just up to the carrying capacity of their territories. Thereafter, either natural limiting mechanisms come into play—for example, difficulty in finding a mate in a polygamous species—or else famine, plague, and internecine fighting trim the swarms. Man is among the beasts that lack a birthrate regulator. Accordingly, from time to time he has suffered the fate of rabbit or lemming. But being intelligent, he can forestall it by various means: widespread celibacy, late marriage, sexual usages which do not impregnate, contraception, abortion, infanticide, gerontocide, emigration. Generally it is the civilized peoples who die from mnaway growth. Primitives control their breeding. That the Northfolk did would not have surprised Josserek.
However, in their case, all institutions worked to restrict numbers radically, to a small fraction of what their realm and technology could have supported. Polyandry, illegitimacy as grounds for what amounted to ostracism, and a universal feeling that no wife should bring more than about six children to adulthood: these kept the population at its low level. History said that in times of disaster, when deaths had much exceeded births, a tacit agreement relaxed the rules; but when the norm had been restored, the same unspoken, unenforced consent re-established the status quo.
The genetics of it intrigued Josserek. Superior women attracted the most suitors, or felt able to court the most themselves, and chose the best. But they bore no more young than did less desirable females who merely wed singly or doubly. Husbands of the latter thus passed on a larger proportion of their heredity, some of which was bound to enter later generations of the more prosperous families. Could this leveling effect help explain the fact that no aristocracy had ever arisen here, no government or state, no powerful organizations, no leadership except the most rudimentary kind, acknowledged only to the degree that each individual chose to follow it?
The advantages of being few were obvious. The Northfolk enjoyed a superabundance of game and other natural wealth. This gave them the leisure and economic surplus to create a culture which rivaled those of far harder-working civilized nations. Still more important to them seemed to be open space. They spoke with repugnance or outright horror of the crowded Southlands. Donya had remarked, “I couldn’t have stayed in Arvanneth as long as I did, if they there hadn’t smelled different enough that it wasn’t quite like being among humans.” (Diet? Race? The Rogaviki did possess hound-keen noses, though that could be due to trained awareness rather than extraordinary innate capability.)
The problem is, Josserek thought, long-range public benefit is apt to conflict with immediate private or bureaucratic advantage, and go by the board. That's why common lands get overgrazed, forests recklessly logged off, rivers polluted, useful wildlife exterminated, trade clogged, progress stifled by regulations and taxes— under any system known, tribal, feudal, monarchic, timocratic, democratic, theocratic, capitalist, traditionalist, collectivist, any. And the Rogaviki are anarchs. They make no pretensions to altruism, they haven't even a word for it. A particular Fellowship could gain strength, extra hands, riches by increasing its size. It could scoff at outside disapproval, for it’s self-sufficient already and there’s no authority to check it. Then soon every kith would have to do likewise, or risk becoming a victim. The process would be more complex than that, of course. Nevertheless—
What is the factor that keeps their way of living stable? It must have a stronger grip on each and every person of them than a wish for the well-being of their descendants possibly can ... especially since they don’t agree what that well-being is; some would like more outland trade, some less, some want a lot of firearms to make hunting easier, some fear getting dependent on the suppliers ... on and on ... and everybody is free to do whatever he or she pleases, short of provoking fatally many kithmates into breaking off relations.
Which hardly ever happens. The sole serious violence I’ve encountered or heard of among the Northfolk, relates to the Outrunners. And they are pathological cases, who for this reason or that hate the rest. Otherwise—no wars, no feuds, thefts rare, fights confined to barehanded blows—
They’re not saints, these people. They’re haughty, they’re greedy, they’ll lie and cheat shamelessly in making a deal, outside their Fellowship they show scant compassion, they’ve no creed, nothing but a sort of ethic, and it bluntly pragmatic. Furthermore, they’re wide open to foreign ideas. Yet they remain true to themselves, century after century. How?
It shouldn’t be humanly possible.
Thunder Kettle rose from a ground flat, treeless, billowy with tall green-golden grass, like the land into which Josserek and Donya had escaped from Sidfr’s riverboat (what years ago that seemed!) except for being drier. A nearby Station, while bigger than usual, still appeared lonesome, huddled between man-planted walls of cottonwoods against wind, rain, hail, snow, drought, brazen summer and iron winter. The rendezvous itself did not loom high, though from edge to edge the view raised awe.
He had met its kind before, scattered around Orenstane, and seen accounts of them in eastern Owang and western Andalin. Something sometime had scooped craters three or four miles wide out of the earth. Digging beneath the soil which had blown in afterward, men discovered fused layers, cracked by the frosts and roots of millennia but not too far gone for the bowls to hold their shapes. Deeper down were, occasionally, relics of ancient cities; or these might occur in mounds on a periphery. This had led scientists in Killimaralch to conjecture that, when the Ice marched from the poles, civilization destroyed itself in struggle for dwindling resources, by unleashing powers which none today had mastery of.
Opposed thinkers derided the theory. More frequently than not, excavation indicated that the catastrophes had happened in uninhabited areas. Who would have bombarded those? Besides, to postulate world-wrecking energies in human hands was baseless sensationalism. Indeed, evidence for substantial advances and retreats of the Ice was new, slight, controversial. It came chiefly from coastal lands, especially the Coral Range, which must formerly have been submerged. Where had the water gone but into glaciers? Well, argued the conservative schools, terrestrial forces might have elevated the continents, or dug pits in the ocean beds, perhaps millions rather than thousands of years in the past. They might also have made the craters. Or perhaps meteorites were responsible for the latter. Since Wicklis Balaloch first proved that shooting stars are stones from outer space, many had been identified, several very large. A rain of huge masses could well have brought down the global society, leaving a remnant of ignorant peasants and savages to start over.
Josserek had gotten fascinated by the issue, after Mulwen Roa lent him books and journals. It was exciting, it was good to live in an era when knowledge exploded outward. But as he rode across the rim of Thunder Kettle, the vision saddened him. Uncountable ages, uncountable deaths, doom that fell upon whole breeds of being, and nothing left save a few shards and bones.... Once he had seen the skull of a great reptile, embedded in a crumbling cliff, through whose hollowness the winds of eons must have blown, unheard, unfelt by an unaliveness which time had turned to stone. He saw Donya riding beside him, and thought about her skull.
Oh, I’ll try to rally them, try to talk sense into them. What else can I do but try, before I go home?
The sides and floor of the crater were speckled bright with encampments, well apart as always. The Hervar band pitched their own before they went gadding about. Despite the occasion, the atmosphere was genial. People moved briskly over green concavities, chatted, sang, drank, frolicked; kinfolk met and went off in pairs and trios, old friends did, youths and maidens, unwed women and unattached men, those who discovered they had things to dicker about. Josserek would have preferred solitude, but many who had heard of him sought him out and he must needs receive them politely. Then after dark, when he desired company, he was left alone. Nikkitay had found somebody else.
His sleep was haunted.
By morning, word had spread, and a meeting began not so much to get organized
as to crystallize. Donya and Josserek took a wagon down to the bottom and settled on its bench. She spoke little, and he sat mainly being aware of her profile, warmth, manyfold odors: smoke, flesh, sunny hair, wind-cleansed sweat, and an overtone he had no name for because none save Rogaviki women breathed it from their skins ... like sagebrush, like rosemary? By noon she decided the assemblage was ready to be addressed.
It was no large audience before a stage. About fifty from different households, mostly wives, sat or stood in earshot. The rest were strewn in small groups across the lower bowl. Strategically placed, persons with strong lungs and trained voices relayed speech. Nobody appointed or paid the stentors; they enjoyed the task and whatever sense of importance it brought them.
“We bear ill tidings,” Donya began.
She made no oration. In gatherings like this, Rogaviki spoke to the point. They kept emotional language for private use. There it sometimes approached poetry. (“Oh, terrible sweetness of stallions, come neighing, strike lightning from stones and, unmountable, mount, ” she had whispered to him in an hour when they were alone beneath the moon; and much else at other times, though never a simple “I love you.”) For fear of unpredictable reactions, her couriers had not bespoken the ruin which was planned for their country, but had just emphasized that this invasion was not like any in the past and that new responses to it must be developed. Today she told them in blunt phrases everything she knew.
They were less maddened than her own camp had been. Seemingly, the larger the meet, the more inhibited it became. Besides, the great majority present were from kiths west of the Jugular Valley. Their lands had not yet been entered by the enemy, nor would that happen for at least a year. The threat was thus remote enough for them to look upon it with a measure of calm.
They did shout, curse, brandish fists and blades, across the hollow miles. Donya let them have it out for an hour before she turned them over to Josserek.
“Dwellers in the North—” What can I put before them? He had had weeks to plan, ask advice, argue, refine, think; and he felt himself no further along. Words dragged out of him: “—-joint action, in a single grand scheme—” What scheme? That they meet Barommian cavalry head-on, a month or two of drill under masters as raw as themselves, against generations of soldierhood? The relaying criers sounded as far and thin-toned as marmots whistling. “—fight now, not in defense after the foe is across your borders, triumphant in the east, but catch him between two fronts—” How? Sidir brought well-nigh his whole strength up the river. If superior numbers make him retreat, he need only fall back on his strong points and let attackers ride into the mouths of his cannon. Not that I believe any longer the Rogaviki are capable of a charge en masse. “—coolness, forethought, instead of blind rage—” What forethought have I to offer, I who tried to understand them and failed? I’m no use here. Let me go home.
But can I just leave her to her death?
His speech crawled to an end. He got a courteous buzz of approval. Afterward several persons approached and asked what, specifically, he proposed. Donya replied for him that the main purpose of this Landmeet was to hammer that out. Let folk weigh what had been said, talk it over, ransack their wisdom. Then whoever got an idea could lay it before the whole, tomorrow or the next day or the next.
At the end, beneath a sky where thunderheads towered and a smell of storm blew on a rising cold wind, through brass-colored light, he and she stood alone in the wagon. He turned to her, grabbed her hands, and begged in his pain. “What can we do? Anything except die?”
“We?” she asked softly. Her locks tossed around high cheekbones and green eyes.
“I’m minded to stay,” he stammered, “if, if you’ll have me—”
“Josserek,” she said after a while, her grasp and gaze never leaving his, “I’ve not been kind to you, have I? Come away with me now to my tent.”
He stared. His heartbeat answered the drums beyond the horizon.
She smiled. “Do you think about my husbands? They like you too. And we aren’t always together, each night. Come.” She let go and sprang to earth. When he had followed, dazedly, she took his hand again and led him off.
In the morning he awoke to peace, and to knowledge of what he might do.
CHAPTER 18
The notes he kept as he fared told Sidlr it was on Starsday, the eighteenth of Ausha, that he entered Unknown Roong. But this had no meaning, was a mere scribble by a hand which the cold turned stiff and painful, in a book whose pages rattled beneath the wind off the Ice. Time was not here. If ever it had been, it was transformed, congealed into distance, into desolation.
A weary head worked slowly. His first thought was— after a scout cried aloud and pointed, after he lifted his binoculars—Is that all? For tiny did the fabled city look below the glacial mountains.
They filled three-quarters of his horizon, left, ahead, right in a monstrous arc; this piece of land across which his horse stumbled was a narrow bay in them. Up and up they climbed, tiers, slopes, scarps, cliffs, toward their hill height of a mile that walled in heaven as well as earth. Their foothills lay tumbled and dusty. Further aloft they shone under a cloudless wan sky, death-pure, shimmers of green and sapphire, here and there a rainbow glitter, above steely gray. Canyons that clove them were infinitely blue. Melt water ran down in a thousand streams which flowed together into roaring torrents. Several times he had heard an avalanche rumble off some peak and seen its plume go smoking toward sun or rain or constellations nameless to him, blanched as if a ghost volcano erupted in the underworld.
This close, he could feel the chill that poured off the Ice across his skin, through his garments, into his bones. But he had scarcely been a day out of Fuld, bound northeast across the Ulgani kithland, when he met its workings. Woodlands died away, grass withered, the prairie became the tundra. Between stiff brown tussocks grew only moss and lichens. Summer-sodden ground caught at hoofs, travel slowed to a plopping creep while strength drained daily from the poor horses,, and from men who never found a dry place to rest. Winds whistled, showers boomed, sleet hissed, hail drew blood where its skittering bullets struck; but that was better than clear daylight and the mosquitoes. Sidfr was afraid the mosquito fogs would swirl and whine through his nightmares till he died. Maybe lying in his grave, he would still hear them, still wear himself out wildly swatting, struggle with cloths and plant juices that did small good, feel the fever from their poison hum weakly through his brain. Else the waste bore little life. He glimpsed rare ptarmigan, hare, fox, caribou; waterfowl might settle on a pool; owls hooted after dark. How his company would have welcomed a native attack, anything human!
Today they were less plagued. Having found that downdrafts off the Ice kept most insects away, they followed its border. That lengthened their journey, and to swampiness added moraine boulders. However, they might well have taken still longer had they continued straight across, without reliable maps or directions or landmarks. The kiths did not forbid Arvannethans to visit Roong, but none had dared the trip in this generation. Sidfr’s firmest point of knowledge was that the city lay just under the glacier, at the end of a deep notch which somehow remained uncovered.
And now he was here. His goal was in sight. He turned attention from the dreariness stretching southward, focused his glasses more sharply, strained to make out the towers of a thousand legends. He saw an irregular dark sprawling which in places thrust forth peaks.
Colonel Develkai edged near. “That must be it, hai?” His voice was dull with exhaustion. “How shall we proceed, sir?”
Sidfr gave him a considering glance. The commander of the Barracuda regiment, which had lent a squadron— the Hammers of Besak—to this expedition, was a young man; or he had been. The tundra and the Ice had seemingly laid years upon him. His cheeks were stubbled and fallen in, scarred by welts, his eyes were embers, his shoulders bowed, as if his felt hat and leather jacket weighed too much. The horse he rode was in sorrier case, limping from stone bruises, head a-droop, ribs
in ridges beneath dried mud. Do I look that bad? Sidfr wondered.
“Directly forward,” he ordered. “We’ll take due precautions, of course. When we get nearer, we’ll know better what to watch out for. This night we camp in Roong.”
“Is the Captain General certain? I mean, enemy could lurk throughout a warren like that.”
“We won’t take foolish chances. We should be able to cast back assault wherever we’ve got room for maneuver and a clear field of fire. Frankly, I doubt if barbarians are present. With their trade routes cut off, why would they be? Roong isn’t kith territory, remember. They consider it common property, and therefore won’t defend it as fanatically as they do their hunting grounds.” Sidfr lifted his head, to let the breeze catch the red plume on the helmet he felt he must wear for an emblem of energy. “Colonel, dry shelter is there. Our men shall not sleep longer in the wet. Forward!”
Develkai signaled his bugler. Small, lost, defiant, a call to advance resounded off the steeps.
Soldiers trotted ahead. Banners fluttered, lanceheads gleamed. They were good lads. Besides the Hammers, who were entirely Barommian, they included a company of horsemen largely Rahfdian, mounted infantry and engineers, who would form the garrison. Dispersed among them were riflemen, for whom mules carried abundant ammunition.
They and their kind had beaten the Ulgani so terribly that on this trip they saw never a soul. (Skeletons latticed Elk Meadow.) Nor had emptiness daunted them. (The natives were driving game herds away from the river, beyond ready reach of Imperial foragers.) The tundra, its horrors unforeseen, had nonetheless failed before their will. Surely they could lay hand on a pile of ruins.
An hour passed. Shadows of the Ice grew long. And in Sidxr awareness waxed of the vastness that was Roong.
Anderson, Poul - Novel 18 Page 16