Down in The Bottomlands (and Other Places)

by Harry Turtledove

  Park, his heart laboring and sand in his eyes, wrenched his own knife-arm free. But when he stabbed at Darling, the parasite parried with a curious twisting motion of his left arm, and gathered Park’s arm into a bone-crushing grip. Park in agony heaved himself to his knees, pulling Darling up too. They faced each other on their knees, the belt still around them. Darling wrenched his knife-arm loose again, whipped it around as for a backhand stab, then back for an overhand. Park, trying to follow the darting blade, felt as if something had exploded in his own left arm. Darling’s point was driven into it and into the bone. Before it had a chance to bleed, Darling tried to pull it out. It didn’t yield on the first pull. Park leaned forward suddenly. Darling unwound his left arm from Park’s right to catch himself as he swayed backwards. Park stabbed at him. Darling blocked the stab with his forearm, making Park feel as if his wrist was broken. He played his last improvised trick: tossed up the knife, caught it the other way to, and brought it around in a quick up-and-out thrust. To his surprise, Darling failed to block it at all — the blade slid up under the parasite’s ribs to the hilt. Park, warm blood running over his hand, twisted and sliced his way across Darling’s abdomen…

  Trigvy Darling lay on his back, mouth open and sand in his sightless eyeballs. The spectators looked in awe at the ten-inch wound. Park, feeling a bit shaken, stood while they bandaged his arm. The knicks gravely took down the vital information about the dead man, filling the last line of the blank with: “Killed in fair fight with Allister Park, 125 Isleif St., N.B.”

  Then people were shaking his hand, slapping his bare back, and babbling congratulations at him. “Had it coming to him…” “… never liked him anyway, only we had to take him on account of Brahtz…” “You’ll make a better chairman…”

  Park stole a hand to his upper lip. His mustache was a little loose on one side, but a quick press fixed that. He gradually became aware that the duel, so far from spoiling the party, had made a howling success of it.

  Leading a double life is a strenuous business at best. It is particularly difficult when both one’s identities are fairly prominent people. Nevertheless, Allister Park managed it, with single-minded determination to let nothing stop his getting the person of Joseph Noggle in such a position that he could make him give his, Park’s, wheel of if another half-spin. It might not be too late, even if the Antonini case was washed up, to rehabilitate himself.

  His next step was to cultivate Ivor MacSvensson, burg committee chairman for the Diamond Party of the Burg of New Belfast. This was easy enough, as the chairman of the hide committee was ex-officio a member of the burg committee.

  They were dining in one of the small but expensive restaurants for which MacSvensson had a weakness. The burg chairman said: “We’ll have to get Anlaaf off, that’s all there is to it. Those dim knicks should have known better than to pull him in it in the first place.”

  Park looked at the ceiling. “Even if it was Penda’s daughter?”

  “Even if it was Penda’s daughter.”

  “After all, spoiling the morals of a ten-year-old-”

  “I know, I know,” said MacSvensson impatiently. “I know he’s a dirty bustard. But what can I do? He’s got the twenty-sixth hide in his fist, so I’ve got to play cards with him. Especially with the thingly choosing coming up in three months. It’ll be close, even with Bishop Scoglund lying low the way he has been. I had a little plan for shushing the dear bishop; it didn’t work, but it seems to have scared him into keeping quiet about the ricks of the Skrellings. And the Thing meeting next month… If that damned equal-ricks changelet goes through, it’ll split the party wide open.”

  “If it doesn’t?” asked Park.

  “That’ll be all right.”

  “How about the Dakotians and the rest?”

  MacSvensson shrugged. “No trouble for fifty years. They talk a lot, but I never saw a Skrelling that would stand up and fick yet. And what if they did try a war? New Belfast is a long way from the border; and the choosing would be called off. Maybe by the time it was over people would get some sense.”

  Park had his own ideas. His researches had told him something about the unprepared state of the country. New Belfast had hundreds of miles between it and the independent Skrellings; in case of a sea attack, they could count on the friendly Northumbrian fleet, one of the world’s largest, to come over and help out. Hence the New Belfast machine had consistently plugged for more money for harbor improvements and merchant-marine subsidies and less for military purposes… However, if the Northumbrian fleet were immobilized by the threat of the navy of the Amirate of Cordova, and the Skrellings overran the hinterland of Vinland…

  MacSvensson was speaking: “… you know, that youngest daughter of mine, she wants to marry a school teacher? Craziest idea… And that boy of mine has the house full of his musical friends; at least that’s what he calls’em. They’ll play their flugelhorns and yell and stamp all night.”

  “Why not come up to my place?” asked Park with the studied nonchalance of an experienced dry-fly fisherman making a cast.

  “Sure, of course. Glad to. I’ve got three appointments, thinging, but hell with ’em.”

  There was no doubt about it; Ivor MacSvensson was good company even if he did have a deplorable scale of moral values. Park, having made the necessary soundings, finally suggested getting some company. The chairman’s blue eyes lit up a bit; there was some lechery in the old war horse yet. Park telephoned his little waitress friend. Yes, she had a friend who was just dying to meet some big political pipes…

  Many residents of New Belfast were wont to say of Ivor MacSvensson: “He may be a serpent (crook), but at least he leads a spotless home life.” MacSvensson was at pains to encourage this legend, however insubstantial its basis. These people would have been pained to see the boss an hour later, smeared with lipstick, bouncing Park’s friend’s friend on his knee. The friend’s friend was undressed to a degree that would have shocked Vinlanders anywhere but on a beach.

  “Stuffy, isn’t it?” said Park, and got up to open a window. The unsuspecting MacSvensson was having too good a time to notice Park thrust his arm out the window and wag it briefly.

  Five minutes later the doorbell rang. By the time MacSvensson had snapped out of his happy daze, Park had admitted a small, wrinkled man who pointed at the friend’s friend and cried: “Fleda!”

  “Oswald!” shrieked the girl.

  “Sir!” shouted Dunedin at the boss, “what have you been doing with my wife? What have you been doing with my wife?”

  “Oh,” sobbed Fleda, “I didn’t mean to be unfaithful! Truly I didn’t! If I’d only thock of you before it was too late…”

  “Huh?” mumbled MacSvensson. “Too late? Unfaithful? Your wife?”

  “Yes, you snake, you scoundrel, you bustard, my wife! You’ll suffer for this, Boss MacSvensson! Just wait till I-”

  “Here, here, my man!” said Park, taking Dunedin by the arm and pulling him into the vestibule. For ten minutes the boss listened in sweaty apprehension to Park’s and Dunedin’s voices, rising and falling, the former soothing, the latter strained with rage. Finally the door slammed.

  Park came back, and said: “I got him to promise not to put in any slurs or tell any newspapers for a while, until we talk things over again. I know who he is, and I think I can squelch him through the company he works for. I’m not sure that’ll work, though. He’s mad as a wet hen; won’t believe that this was just an innocent get-together.”

  The imperturbable boss looked badly shaken. “You’ve got to stop him, Al! The story would raise merry hell. If you can do it, you can have just about anything I can give you.”

  “How about the secretaryship of the burg committee?” asked Park promptly.

  “Surely, of course. I can find something else for Ethelbald to do. Only keep that man shut up!”

  “All right, old boy. Right now you’d better get home as soon as you can.”

  When MacSvensson had been gone
a few minutes, Eric Dunedin’s ugly face appeared in the doorway. “All clear, Hal — I mean Thane Park?”

  “Come on in, old boy. That was a neat piece of work. You did well too, Fleda. Both you girls did. And now-” Park started to drive a corkscrew into another cork, “we can have a real party!”

  “Damn it, Dunedin,” said Park, “when I say put your breakfast down on the table and eat it, I mean it!”

  “But Hallow, it simply isn’t done for a thane’s thane to eat with his master-”

  “To hell with what’s done and what isn’t. I’ve got more for you to do than stand around and treat me as if I were God Almighty. We’ve got work, brother. Now get busy on that mail.”

  Dunedin sighed and gave up. When Park chose to, he could by now put on what Dunedin admitted was a nearly perfect imitation of Bishop Scoglund. But unless there were somebody present to be impressed thereby, he chose instead to be his profane and domineering self.

  Dunedin frowned over one letter, and said: “Thane Callahan wants to know why you haven’t been doing anything to push the glick-ricks changelet.”

  Park mentally translated the last to “equal-rights amendment.” “Why should I? It isn’t my baby. Oh, well, tell him I’ve been too busy, but I’ll get around to it soon. That’s always the stock excuse.”

  Dunedin whistled suddenly. “The kin of the late Trigvy Darling have filed a wergild claim of a hundred and fifty thousand crowns against you.”

  “What? What? Let’s see that!.. What’s that all about? Have they got the right to sue me, when I killed him in self-defense?”

  “Oh, but of course, Hallow. There’s nay criminal penalty for killing a man in fair fight. But his heirs can claim two years’ earnings from you. Didn’t you know that when you took up his challenge?”

  “Good lord, no! What can I do about it?”

  “Oh, deary me, glory be to Patrick. You can try to prove the claim too big, as this one may be. I don’t know, though; Darling got a big stipend from Brahtz as a parasite.”

  “I can always withdraw Allister Park from circulation and be just the bishop. Then let ’em try to collect!”

  * * *

  It would be wearisome to follow Allister Park’s political activities in detail for the three weeks after his use of the badger game on MacSvensson. But lest his extraordinary rise to power seem improbable, consider that it was not until the 1920s in Park’s original world that a certain Josef Vissarianovitch Dzugashvili, better known as Joseph Stalin, discovered what could really be done with the executive secretaryship of a political committee. So it is not too surprising that, whereas Park knew what could be done with this office, the politicians of Vinland did not. They learned. Among other things, the secretary makes up the agenda of meetings. He puts motions in “proper” form, since a motion is seldom intelligible in the form in which it is presented from the floor. He prompts the chairman — the nominal head of the organization — on parliamentary procedure. He is the interim executive officer; wherefore all appointments go through his hands, and he has custody of all records. He is ex-officio member of all committees. Since a committee seldom has any clear idea of what it wants to do or how it wants to do it, an aggressive secretary can usually run as many committees as he has time for. Whereas the chairman can’t speak at meetings, the secretary can not only speak but speak last. He gets the gavel when an appeal is made from the chair…

  At least, that is how it is done in this world. In Vinland the rules were not quite the same, but the similarity was close enough for Park’s purpose — which was still to get back to good old New York and that judgeship, if there was still any chance of getting it.

  It was after the burg committee meeting on the first of June that Park faced Ivor MacSvensson in the latter’s office. Park intended to start needling the boss about the body of Joseph Noggle. But MacSvensson got there first, demanding: “What’s all this about your making up to the committeemen?”

  “What’s that?” asked Park blandly. “I’ve been seeing them on routine duties only.”

  “Yeah? Not according to what I’ve been told. And I’ve found out that that girl you had up for me wasn’t wedded at all. Trying to put one down on the boss, eh? Well, you can go back to hide-walking. You’ll call a special committee meeting for Friday night. Get those seeings out today without fail. That’s all.”

  “Suits me,” grinned Park. The chairman can demand special meetings, but the secretary’s the man who sends out the notices.

  When Friday evening arrived, two thirds of the seats in the committee room in Karlsefni Hall remained empty. MacSvensson, blue eyes glacial, fretted. Park, sending out thunderheads of smoke from the bishop’s largest pipe, lolled in a chair, glancing surreptitiously at his watch. If MacSvensson were down at the far end of the hall when the hand touched sixty, Park would simply arise and say: “In the absence of the chairman, and of any other officers authorized to act as such, I, Allister Park, acting as chairman, hereby call this meeting to order…”

  But MacSvensson, looking at him, divined his intention. He snatched out his own watch, and dashed to the chair. He made it by one and a half seconds.

  Park was not disturbed. He took his place, hearing the boss’s growl: “Did you send out all those seeings when I told you to, Park? There’s just barely a quorum here.”

  “Absolutely. I can’t help it if they go astray in the mail.” Park neglected to add that, with the proper cooperation from a postal clerk, it is sometimes possible to make sure that certain of the notices, though duly postmarked as of the time they are received, are accidentally misplaced in the post office and completely overlooked until the day after the meeting.

  “The meeting will kindly come to order,” snapped MacSvensson. He did not like the look of the quorum at all; not one of his tried and true friends was in sight, except Sleepy Ethelbald.

  He continued: “This is a special meeting called to hold in mind the good and welfare of the committee. As such there will be no reading of the minutes. The meeting will now consider items for the agenda.”

  MacSvensson caught the eye of Sleepy Ethelbald, who had been primed for just this occasion. Before Ethelbald could rouse himself, another committeeman popped up with: “I move that we take up the fitness of Chairman MacSvensson to last in his present office.” “Twothed.” “I move the agenda be closed.” “Twothed.”

  MacSvensson sat up for a few seconds with his mouth open. He had had revolts before — plenty of them — but never one with the devastating speed and coordination of this. He finally mumbled: “All in favor-”

  “Aye!” roared most of the quorum.

  MacSvensson ran fingers through his hair, then squared his shoulders. He wasn’t licked yet, by any means. There were more tricks… “The meeting will now consider the first item on the agenda.”

  “I move the impeachment of Chairman MacSvensson!” “Twothed!”

  For the second time the chairman sat with his mouth open. Park said gently: “You take up the motion and give me the gavel.”

  “But-” wailed MacSvensson.

  “No buts. A motion to impeach the chairman self-movingly shifts the gavel to the secretary. Come on, old boy.” An hour later Ivor MacSvensson stalked out, beaten. Park could have had the chairmanship himself, but he astutely preferred to keep the secretaryship and put the ancient of days, Magnus Dutt, in that exposed position.

  * * *

  Mayor Offa Greenfield knew his own mind, such as it was. He banged his fist on his desk, making all his chins quiver. “Nay!” he shouted. “I don’t know what you’re up to, Allister Park, but by the right ear of Hallow Gall, it’s something! The freedom of a free people-”

  “Now, now, we’re not talking about the freedom of a free people. I’m sure we agree on that matter. It’s just a question of the person of Joseph Noggle-”

  “I won’t be dictated to! I won’t take orders from anybody!”

  “Except Ivor MacSvensson?”

  “Except Iv — nay! I sai
d anybody! Go practice your snaky trick on somebody else, Allister Park; you’ll get nothing from me! I won’t interfere with Borup’s running of his Institute. Unless, of course,” (Greenfield lowered his voice to normal) “you can get MacSvensson to back you up.”

  Greenfield, it seemed, had the one virtue of loyalty. He intended to stick by the fallen boss to the bitter end, even though nearly all the rest of MacSvensson’s staunch supporters had deserted him when the effectiveness of Park’s coup had become patent.

  But Greenfield was not elected, as were the members of the burg thing. He was appointed by a committee of the Althing, the national legislative body. So Park, for all his local power, could not displace Greenfield at the coming elections by putting up a rival candidate. He could only do it by acquiring sufficient power in the Althing. He set himself to study how to do this.

  New Belfast elected six members to the Althing. As the city was firmly Diamond, nomination implied election. Therefore the six thingmen, however much they bragged about their independence in public, were careful to obey the whims of the boss of New Belfast.

  The repeated efforts of Yon Brahtz to impose his control on the New Belfast Diamonds, by planting stooges like the late Trigvy Darling in their hide committees, had aroused some resentment. Park decided that he could trust his most active supporters, and the six thingmen, to back him in a gigantic double-cross: to desert the Diamond Party altogether and join the Rubies. The goats would be, not merely Brahtz and his squirearchy, but the local Ruby politicians of New Belfast. However, as these had never accomplished anything but draw some patronage from the Althing in the periods when the Rubies were in power there, Park thought he would not find much resistance to their sacrifice on the part of the Ruby leaders. And so it proved.