The radio was still there! In the darkness they must not have noticed it in the flat pocket almost under his arm. It only had line-of-sight operation, but that might be enough to get a fix on the ship, or even call for help.
He pulled it out and looked gloomily at the crushed case and the fractured components that were leaking from a crack in the side. Some time during the busy events of the last day it had been struck by something heavy. He switched it on and got exactly the result he expected. Nothing.
The fact that the chronometer concealed behind his belt buckle was still keeping perfect time did little to cheer him. It was ten in the morning. Wonderful. The watch had been adjusted for the twenty-hour day when they had landed on Felicity, with noon set for the sun at the zenith at the spot where they had landed.
“That’s enough of that,” he said, making himself as comfortable as was possible on the hard ground and pulling the furs around him. “Let’s talk, Oraiel. Who is the boss here, the one who ordered my execution?”
“He is Temuchin the Warrior, The Fearless One, He of the Arm of Steel, The Destroyer . . .”
“Fine. He’s on top. I can tell that without the footnotes. What has he got against strangers—and buildings?
“The Song of the Freemen,” Oraiel said, digging his elbow into the ribs of his assistant. The youth grunted and rooted about in the tangled furs until he produced a lutelike instrument with a long neck and two strings. Plucking the strings for accompaniment he began to sing in a high-pitched voice.
“Free as the wind,
Free as the plain on which we wander,
Knowing no home,
Other than our tents. Our friends
The Moropes,
Who take us to battle,
Destroying the buildings,
Of those who would trap us.”
There was more like this and it went on for an unconscionably long time, until Jason found himself beginning to nod. He interrupted, broke off the song, and asked some pertinent questions.
A picture of the realities of life on the plains of Felicity began to emerge.
From the oceans on the east and west, and from the Great Cliff in the south, to the mountains in the north there stood not one permanent building or settlement of man. Free and wild, the tribes roved over the grass sea, warring on themselves and each other in endless feuds and conflicts.
There had been cities here, some of them were even mentioned by name in the Songs, but now only their memory remained—and an uncompromising hatred. There must have been a long and bitter war between the two different ways of life, if the memory, generations later, could still arouse such strong emotions. With the limited natural resources of these arid plains the agrarians and the nomads could not possibly have lived side by side in peace. The farmers would have built settlements around the scant water sources and fenced out the nomads and their flocks. In self-defense the nomads would have had to band together in an attempt to destroy the settlements. They had succeeded so well in this genocidal warfare that the only trace of their former enemies that remained was a hated memory.
Crude, unlettered, violent, the barbarian conquerors roamed the high steppe in tribes and clans, constantly on the move as their stunted cattle and goats consumed the scant grass that covered the plains. Writing was unknown, the jongleurs—the only men who could pass freely from tribe to tribe—were the historians, entertainers and bearers of news. No trees grew in this hostile climate so wooden utensils and artifacts were unknown. Iron ore and coal were apparently plentiful in the northern mountains, so iron and mild steel were the most common materials used. These, along with animal hides, horns and bones, were almost the only raw materials available.
An outstanding exception were the helms and breastplates. While some were made of iron, the best ones came from a tribe in the distant hills who worked a mine of asbestoslike rock. They shredded this to fibers and mixed it with the gum of a broad-leafed plant to produce what amounted to an epoxyfiberglass material. It was light as aluminum, strong as steel, and even more elastic than the best spring steel. This technique, undoubtedly inherited from the first, pre-breakdown settlers on the planet, was the only thing that physically distinguished the nomads from any other race of iron-age barbarians. Animal droppings were used for cooking fuel; animal fat for lamps. Life tended to be nasty, brutish and short.
Every clan or tribe had its traditional pasture ground over which it roamed, though the delimitations were vague and controversial, so that wars and feuds were a constant menace. The domed tents, camachs, were made of joined hides over iron poles. They were erected and struck in a few minutes, and when the tribe moved on they were carried, with the household goods, on wheeled frames called escungs, like a travois with wheels which were pulled by the moropes.
Unlike the cattle and goats, which were descendants of terrestrial animals, the moropes were natives of the high steppes of Felicity. These claw-toed herbivores had been domesticated and bred for centuries, while most of their wild herds had been exterminated. Their thick pelts protected them from the eternal cold, and they could go as long as twenty days without water. As beasts of burden—and chargers of war—they made existence possible in this barren land.
There was little more to tell. The tribes roved and fought, each speaking its own language or dialect and using the neutral inbetween tongue when they had to talk to outsiders. They formed alliances and treacherously broke them. Their occupation and love was war and they practiced it most efficiently.
Jason digested this information while he attempted, less successfully, to digest the unchewable lumps from the stew that he had forced himself to swallow. For drink there had been fermented morope milk, which had tasted almost as bad as it smelled. The only course he had missed was the one reserved for warriors, a mixture of milk and still-warm blood, and for this he was grateful.
Once Jason’s curiosity had been satisfied, Oraiel’s turn had come and he had asked questions, endlessly. Even while Jason ate he had had to mumble answers that the jongleur and his apprentice filed away in their capacious memories. They had not been disturbed, so he considered himself safe—for the time being. It was already late in the afternoon and he had to think of a way to escape and return to the ship. He waited until Oraiel ran out of breath then asked some pointed questions of his own.
“How many men are there in this camp?”
The jongleur had been sipping steadily at the achadh, the fermented milk, and was beginning to rock back and forth. He mumbled and spread his arms wide. “They are the sons of the vulture,” he intoned. “Their numbers blacken the plain and the fearful sight of them strikes terror . . .”
“I didn’t ask for a tribal history, just a nice round figure.”
“Only the gods know. There may be a hundred, there may be a million . . .”
“How much is twenty and twenty?” Jason interrupted.
“I do not bother my thoughts with such stupid figurations.”
“I didn’t think you could do higher mathematics—like counting to one hundred and other exotic computations.”
Jason went over and peered out of the opening between the laces. A blast of frigid air made his eyes water. High, icy clouds drifted across the pale blueness of the sky, while the shadows grew long.
“Drink,” Oraiel said, waving the leathern bottle of achadh. “You are my guest and you must drink.”
The silence was broken only by the rasp of sand as the old woman scrubbed out the cooking pot. The apprentice’s chin was on his chest and he appeared to be asleep.
“I never refuse a drink,” Jason said, and walked over and took the bottle.
As he raised it to his lips he saw the old woman glance up quickly, then bend low again over her work. There was a slight stirring behind him.
Jason hurled himself sideways, the drinking skin went flying and the club skinned his ear and crashed into his shoulder.
Still rolling, without looking, Jason kicked backwards and his foot caught the appr
entice in the pit of the stomach. He folded nicely and the spiked iron bar rolled free of his limp hands.
Oraiel, no longer drunk, pulled a long, two-handed sword from under the furs beside him and swung on Jason. Though the spikes had missed, the bar itself had numbed Jason’s right shoulder and his arm, which hung limply at his side. There was nothing wrong with his left arm, however, so he flung himself inside the arc of the sword before it could descend and locked his hand around the jongleur’s throat, thumb and index finger on the major blood vessels. The man kicked spasmodically, then slumped unconscious.
Always aware of his flanks, Jason had been trying to keep one eye on the old woman, who now produced a gleaming, saw-edged knife—the camach was an armory of concealed weapons—and hopped to the attack. Jason dropped the jongleur and chopped her wrist so the knife fell at his feet.
The entire action had taken about ten seconds. Oraiel and his apprentice were draped over each other in an unconscious huddle, while the crone sobbed by the fire, cradling her wrist.
“Thanks for the hospitality,” Jason said, trying to rub some life back into his numbed arm. When he could move his fingers again he tied and gagged the woman, then the others, arranging them in a neat row on the floor. Oraiel’s eyes were open, radiating bloodshot waves of hatred.
“As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” Jason said, picking over the furs. “That’s another one you can memorize. I suppose you can’t be blamed for trying to get your information, and the reward money as well. But you were being a little too greedy. I know that you’re sorry now and want me to have enough of these moth-eaten furs to disguise myself with, as well as that greasy fur hat which has seen better days, and perhaps a weapon or two.” Oraiel growled and frothed a little around his gag.
“Such language,” Jason said. He pulled the hat low over his eyes and picked up the spiked club that he had wrapped in a length of leather. “Neither you nor the old girl have enough teeth for the job, but your assistant has a fine set of choppers. He can chew through the leather gag, then chew the thongs on your wrists. By which time I shall be far from here. Be thankful I’m not one of your own kind, or you would be dead right now.” He picked up the skin of achadh and slung it from his shoulder. “I’ll take this for the road.”
There was no one in sight when he poked his head out of the camach, so he stopped long enough to lace the flap tightly behind him. He squinted up at the sky once, then turned away among the domed rows.
Head down, he shuffled away through the barbarian camp.
V
No one paid him the slightest attention.
Bundled as they were against the perpetual cold, most of the people looked as ragged and nondescript as he did, male or female, young and old. Only the warriors had any distinction of dress, and they could be easily avoided by scuttling off between the camachs whenever he saw one approaching. The rest of the citizenry avoided them as well, so no notice was taken of his actions.
There appeared to be no organized planning of the encampment that he could see. The camachs staggered in uneven rows, thrown up apparently wherever the owners had stopped. They thinned out after a while and Jason found himself skirting a herd of small, shaggy, and evil-looking cows. Armed guards, holding tethered moropes, were scattered about, so he made his way by as quickly as was prudent. He heard—and smelled—a flock of goats nearby, and avoided them as well. Then, suddenly, he was at the last camach, and the featureless plain was ahead, stretching out to the horizon. The sun was almost down and he squinted at it happily.
“Setting right behind me, or just a little to the right. I remember that much about the ride here. Now if I reverse the direction and march into the sunset I should come to the ship.”
Sure, he thought, if I can make as good time as the thugs did who brought me here. And if I am going in the right direction, and they made no turns. And if none of these bloodthirsty types finds me. If—
Enough ifs. He shook his head and braced his shoulders, then took a swig of the foul achadh. As he raised the skin to his mouth he looked about him and saw that he was unobserved. Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he strolled out into the emoty steppe.
He did not go far. As soon as he found a gully that would shelter him from view of the encampment he dropped down into it. It gave him some protection from the wind and he pulled his knees up to his chest to conserve heat, then waited there until it was completely dark. It wasn’t the most morale building way to spend the time, chilled and getting colder as the wind rustled the grass above his head, but there was no other way. He put a rock on the far wall of the gully, ready to mark the exact spot where the sun set, then huddled back against the opposite wall. He brooded about the radio, and even opened it to see if anything could be done, but it was unarguably beyond repair. After that he just sat and waited for the sun to reach the western horizon and for the stars to come out.
Jason wished that he had done some more stellar observation before the ship had landed, but it was a little late for that now. The constellations would be unfamiliar and he had no idea if there was a pole star or even a close circumpolar constellation that he could set his course by. One thing he did remember, from constant examining of the maps and charts as they prepared for the landing, was that they had set down almost exactly on the seventieth parallel, at seventy degrees of north latitude right on the head.
Now what did this mean? If there were a north polar star, it would be exactly seventy degrees above the northern horizon. Given a few nights, and a protractor, it would be easy enough to find. But his present situation did not allow much time for casual observation. Or the temperature either; he stamped his feet to see if they still had any sensation remaining in them.
The north polar axis would be seventy degrees above the northern horizon, which meant that the sun at noon would be exactly twenty degrees above the southern horizon. It had to be this way, every day of the year, since the axis of rotation of the planet was directly vertical to the plane of the ecliptic. No nonsense here about long days and short days—or even seasons for that matter. At any single spot on the planet’s surface the sun always rose from the same place on the horizon. Day after day, year after year, it cut the identical arc across the sky, then set at the same spot on the western horizon as it had the night before. Day and night, all over the planet, were always of equal length. The angle of incidence of the sun’s rays would always remain the same as well, which meant that the amount of radiation reaching any given area would remain constant the year round.
With days and nights of equal length, and the energy input always equal, the weather always remained the same and you were stuck with what you had. The tropics were always hot; the poles locked in a frigid and eternal embrace.
The sun was now a dim yellow disk that balanced on the sharp line of the horizon. At this high latitude, instead of dropping straight down out of sight, it slithered slantways along the horizon. When half the disk was obscured Jason marked the spot on the far rim, then went over and stood the pointed stone up at that spot. Then he returned to the spot where he had been sitting and squinted along his bearing marker.
“Very fine,” he said out loud. “Now I know where the sun sets—but how do I follow that direction after dark? Think, Jason think, because right now your life depends upon it.” He shivered, surely because of the cold.
“It would help if I knew just where on the horizon the sun set, how many degrees west of north. With no axial tilt the problem should be a simple one.” He scratched arcs and angles in the sand and mumbled to himself. “If the axis is vertical every day must be an equinox, which means that day and night are equal every day which means . . . ho-ho!” He tried to snap his fingers, but they were too cold to respond.
“That’s the answer! If the length of the night is to equal the length of the day, then there is only one place for the sun to set and rise, at every latitude from the equator north and south. The sun will have to cut a 180° arc through the sky, so it must rise due east and set due we
st. Eureka.”
Jason put his right arm straight out from his shoulder and shuffled around until his finger was pointing exactly at his marker.
“This is simplicity itself. I am pointing west and facing due south. Now I craftily pull up my left arm and I am pointing due east. All that remains now is to stand in this uncomfortable position until the stars come out.”
In the high, thin air the first stars were already appearing in the east, though twilight still lingered on the opposite horizon. Jason thought for a moment and decided that he could improve upon the accuracy of the finger-pointing technique. He put a stone on the eastern rim of the gully, just above the spot where he had been sitting. Then he climbed the opposite wall and sighted at it over the first marker stone. A bright blue star lay close to the horizon in the correct spot, and a clear Z shaped constellation was beginning to be visible around it.
“My guiding star, I shall follow you from afar,” Jason said, and snapped open his belt buckle to look down at the illuminated face of his watch. “Got you. With a twenty-hour day I can say ten hours of darkness and ten of light. So right now I walk directly away from my star. In five hours it will hit its zenith in the south, right on a line with my left shoulder as I walk. Then it swoops around and dives down to set directly in front of me about dawn. This is simplicity itself as long as I make adjustments for the new position every hour, or half hour, to allow for the changed position with the passage of time. Hah!”
Snorting this last he made sure that the Z was directly behind his back, shouldered his club, and tramped off in the correct direction. Everything seemed secure enough, but he wished, neither for the first nor the last time, that he had a gyrocompass.
The temperature dropped quickly as the night advanced, and in the clear, dry air the stars burned in distant, twinkling points. Overhead the constellations wheeled silently high, while the little Z hurried in its low arc until it stood at its zenith at midnight. Jason checked his watch, then dropped onto a crackling hummock of grass. He had been walking for over five hours with only a single break. In spite of his training at 2G on Pyrrus, the going was hard. He swigged from the drinking skin and wondered what the temperature was. In spite of its mildly alcoholic content the achadh was a half-frozen slush.
Deathworld: The Complete Saga Page 35