by John Jakes
“Horses?” Thade finally ground out.
Attar sighed. “Yes, sir. Our horses.”
Once again, Thade went silent, but this time Attar actually felt a chill, because that silence held the same quality as the blinding emptiness after lightning, before the thunder crashed in, or that one momentary exhalation of stillness before a tornado touches down…
He started to turn, but Thade was gone.
They had reached a large, tapestry-covered room dominated by a huge chandelier suspended from the ceiling like a snowstorm of crystal.
Thade leaped across this room, hit the far wall, and kept right on going, his mouth working wordlessly, his fingers and toes curved into claw-tipped grappling hooks. He swarmed up the tapestry like a spider climbing a web, reached the top, and then launched himself out into space.
Attar shuddered back as Thade’s flight ended with a jingling crash into the chandelier, where Thade hung by one hand, glass clashing and ringing all around him as he drew his sword.
He still had not yet made one sound, nor did he even when his arm flashed out, sending the razorlike blade of his weapon through the chandelier’s supports, severing them as neatly as an executioner might lop off a head.
A hundred candles shivered as the whole thing came smashing down, Thade right along with it, his sword glittering like a poisoned tooth, everything landing at once in the center of the room. Candles flew everywhere, popping and spitting, and then the whole thing went up in an eyebrow-scorching fireball.
Thade walked out of the blaze, hardly even singed, and seemingly unmindful of the paroxysm of unbridled rage he’d just unleashed.
He strode out, found his horse, and leaped nimbly onto its back, then waited calmly as a considerably unnerved Commander Attar approached him with the same gingerly care he might approach a hissing fireball.
The only evidence that Thade was even aware of what he’d just done was the two or three deep breaths he took as Attar walked up to him. When his commander was close enough, Thade leaned down and looked into Attar’s somewhat stunned gaze.
“Forgive me. I’m not angry at you. My father has been taken from me…”
Attar had already heard, but they hadn’t spoken of it yet between themselves, and now his heart went out to his general. He reached up and the two apes embraced, each finding solace in the strength of the other, and in the strength of their mutual embrace of the iron dictates of duty. They were soldiers, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be apes, either.
Attar said huskily, “He was a great leader. Your family are direct descendants of Semos.” His voice grew stronger, became a clarion call to all the things they held both highest and dearest: duty, ape-hood, honor, friendship, and Semos himself.
“Now it is time for you to lead!” Attar thundered.
The two men stared at each other. Behind them, the fire crackled merrily. Beyond them, a different kind of fire was building, a fire in the hearts of the soldiers gathering in the great square, their weapons clashing as loud as their fangs.
Thade nodded.
“Form the divisions,” he said.
Attar turned and hurried out into the square. His lieutenants were lined up there, awaiting word from the general.
“Form the divisions!” Attar barked, feeling the wild and furious exhilaration any true man of battle knows when the sword is finally drawn, and the blood is fresh for the tasting.
“Full battle ready. Sound the call to march!”
The trumpets blared back at him with a sound that set blood boiling and turned bones to ice. Higher and higher trilled the call, as Attar’s lieutenants hurried among their men, forming them into squads, companies, battalions, and finally divisions.
The city stirred as the slow, heavy tread of the ape army on the move sent rhythmic shudders through stone and bone. The apes moved as one, chimps in jingling mail, their skulls topped with burnished pointed helms, gorillas lumbering along, ponderously graceful, their lowering foreheads protected by brazen helmets the size of washtubs, their massive chests encased in gold-chased iron breastplates a human couldn’t lift, let alone wear.
Above the rumble of marching feet, and beneath the skirling shriek of the bugles, lived the sound of the drums, ruffles like a thousand heartbeats, flourishes that hammered the brain into a frenzy.
Inside the homes of the city, women, children, and old men crouched, silent and uneasy, listening to the tumult of war. The younger boys crowded the roofs and cheered them on, throwing flowers down like a cloud of colored snowflakes.
The army of the apes exited the city through the main gate, an endless river of fur and metal and strength, the heart’s blood of the city setting out to defend the city, setting out with the sound of trumpets and drums and distant cheers, setting out beneath a thousand flaming torches, setting out to maul and crush and destroy.
At the head of the juggernaut rode Thade, the twisting gold embossments on his breastplate gleaming like burning coals. Gleaming like his eyes.
He was well-pleased.
Death to humans!
* * *
From a distance, the campfire was a lonely flicker in the vast darkness of the high plains. The wind shuffled constantly back and forth across low ridges of rock and dust, and stirred the ashes around the edge of the fire, sending up spinning little devil-whirlwinds that held only for a moment or two before dissolving.
It was a bleak time in a bleak place, and the humans and apes huddled around the fire were mostly silent, either numb with exhaustion or speechless from contemplating the uncertainty of their futures.
Krull had been the most silent of all, sitting hunkered close to the fire, his eyes hooded as he stared at the flames. He held a thin switch in one hand and occasionally poked at the embers, but in general he displayed as much animation as a fur-covered rock.
Now he suddenly grunted, stood up, and marched off to the perimeter of the little camp, where he took up a watchful post, looking out into the night.
Davidson and Ari watched him go.
“He’ll stay like that all night,” she murmured.
Davidson nodded. He’d known the type before. One more instance of the often startling similarities between apes and men. It seemed soldiers were more alike than not, whether their skins were naked or covered with fur.
“No question,” he replied. “He’s army.”
Ari shifted slightly, trying to find a more comfortable position, one that didn’t irritate her numerous scrapes and bruises quite so much. Davidson sympathized. His own body felt like he’d spent several hours on spin-dry with a load of rocks.
“A general,” Ari went on. “Until he opposed Thade. After Thade ruined his career, my father took him in.”
Davidson grunted, leaned back, and stared up at the sky, wondering what had come between Thade and Krull. The strange stars gleamed silently; if there were constellations, he recognized none of them. He’d been a pilot, and even in a time when the planes almost thought for themselves, pilots still learned the stars. But the glittering canopy overhead was a mystery. As much as anything, that made him realize how far away from home he was.
These random thoughts left him feeling vaguely saddened, and he turned his gaze back to more mundane things. Their camp was crude and makeshift, just a fire and a few folks gathered around it. The humans, as usual, had pulled away from the apes, and sat or reclined in a tight little cluster away from where Limbo sprawled and Krull had been sitting. Daena, Gunnar, Birn, even Tival, whose human loyalties were slowly reasserting themselves over his habitual sense of duty toward Ari, looked on first glance as if they were all a solid knot of dislike and contempt for all ape-hood. But Davidson could see cracks in the wall of prejudice. Tival seemed obviously uncomfortable that he was neglecting his mistress, and Birn kept casting longing glances at Davidson, as if he’d much rather be sitting with him, even if it meant sitting next to Ari as well. And something was going on with Daena, too, though Davidson wasn’t at all sure what it meant. He tho
ught it might have more to do with something female than any issues of human solidarity.
Only Gunnar, whose face never lost its sullen glower, still seemed to be partaking of the pure drafts of human-ape hatred.
God, what a messed up place this is, Davidson thought. The biggest thing he had going for him was that it wasn’t his problem, that once he got to the other beacon that was still winking on his messenger, he’d get back to where he belonged, able to permanently forget about this topsy-turvy world and its weird troubles.
Ari saw what he was looking at, and perhaps read a little of his thoughts.
She tipped her head in the humans’ direction and said, “They think you’re going to save them. But tomorrow when you meet your friends, we’ll never see you again.”
Davidson noticed how she shifted from them to we…
But that, whatever the hell it was, wouldn’t be his problem much longer, either.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell them. I never promised them anything.”
Ari looked up at the sky. “No, you just dropped in from the stars.” She made it sound like it was something he should apologize for.
Davidson didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything. After a moment, Ari broke off a dainty piece of the food Krull and the others had gathered earlier, popped it delicately into her mouth, and slowly began to chew. A crumb spilled; she paused to wipe it neatly away.
Across the fire, Daena watched her from the corner of her eye. The humans were eating, too, but the difference was startling. Daena was surprised she’d never noticed before. Gunnar and Birn shoveled it in with both hands, cramming their mouths as they squatted on their haunches, almost growling in their eagerness to shove the food down their throats.
The same way I do, Daena thought suddenly. Still covertly watching Ari, she used the back of her hand to wipe smears of grease away from her lips. The ape female was so measured, so precise. She didn’t eat like a starving animal. Neither, she noticed, did Davidson.
Daena glanced thoughtfully down at the hunk she’d been gnawing on. Finally she used her other hand to break off a bite-sized piece. She popped it into her mouth and forced herself to chew slowly.
Not bad…
It made her feel almost… elegant.
Tival had been watching her. He smiled faintly. “It’s not the way she eats. It’s the way she thinks that pleases him.”
Daena’s face colored. She dropped her food, stood abruptly, then turned and loped off into the dark.
Gunnar glanced at Tival with a sour grin. Birn was watching, too, but he had no idea what was going on. Some sort of female stuff, he guessed. And while he found women interesting enough, what was really on his mind was Davidson, and dreams of glory. He’d never known anybody as brave, as resourceful, as commanding as the strange male who said he came from the stars. He saw himself striding beside Davidson, a mighty sword in his hand (or maybe even one of those amazing guns like the one Krull had smashed), slaying apes. Boy’s dreams, but they were the best he’d ever had.
Out on the plain, Daena kept on running until she’d outdistanced her own embarrassment. The soft gurgle of water drew her attention and she slowed.
She found the tiny spring leaking down a rock face a few yards away. She went to it, stared at the limpid little trickle, thinking hard. She looked around, saw that she was alone.
She took out a small piece of cloth, folded it, then touched it to the water until it was soaked through. Then she quickly took off all her clothes and began to run the wet cloth over her gleaming body.
* * *
Though the following two days and nights on the high plains were cool, almost frigid, the worst part of the day could be like the breath of a huge oven, and so Davidson had made some changes.
When the heat became unbearable during the day, they would find shade, stop, make a camp, take care of the horses and let them rest a bit, too, and then take up the march again in the middle of the night.
The night’s chill was still with them, painting the rocks with a gleaming coat of dew, when, two days later, dawn exploded above the mountains just as they clambered up to the crest of a low ridge.
As nearly as Davidson could determine, from crude estimates and the little knowledge he could glean from both the apes and the humans, his goal and this Calima place must be very close together, if not actually the same spot. And today, if his calculations were correct, was the day they would reach the place.
The old adrenaline rush of hope was fueling him now, quickening him as he rode along, so that every new ridge seemed like it might be the final one, and he would cross and see his goal at last.
When the heat of dawn light struck the powdery plains, it always stirred up a thin haze of dust and evaporating dew, and this obscured his view when he trotted up to the top of the ridge and looked out over another long vista of ancient, rolling stone.
He pulled up, stared, then shaded his eyes. Something out there, something that wasn’t just a rock formation…
Krull came up behind him, noted the direction in which Davidson was staring, and grunted.
“Calima,” he said.
Davidson leaped down from his mount, electricity pulsing in his veins. He faced the distant shadowy vision, squatted, and opened his box. It took him a few moments to get the messenger set up, and, as usual, when he finally got it going, he heard the customary gasps of awe from the techno-primitives gathered around him.
Once again, he watched intently as the sweep line began to flash back and forth across the little screen. The two flashing dots reappeared, and the beeping that marked each sweep was the loudest he’d heard yet. When he’d started his journey, they’d been far apart. Now they were so close together they had almost merged into a single blinking beacon, and the beeping was nearly a continuous piping tone.
He looked up.
Damn it, if not for the dust, I could probably see them…
He couldn’t control himself any longer. He’d been waiting for, fighting for, this moment almost since he’d arrived on this planet. Now it was upon him, and he would wait no longer.
He gathered the messenger unit under one arm and vaulted back onto his horse, dug in his heels, and set off toward Calima at a full gallop.
As he rode, with the wind whipping through his hair, he kept on checking the messenger’s screen. The two dots grew closer, closer still, the farther he rode.
The messenger was making a single high-pitched whine, as if it shared his excitement. Slowly, the veil of haze before him parted, and at last he saw the culmination of his journey.
Calima spread before him—
Silent. Cold. Empty.
He jerked his horse to a halt, dismounted, and waited for the others to catch up to him. The thunder of their approaching hooves echoed the thudding of his own heart.
He stared at the sere bones of Calima, trying to still the tsunami of despair that threatened to drown all his hopes. The messenger was still beeping, a seamless electronic shriek that echoed in his ears loud enough to wake the dead.
Which is what it will take, he thought. That isn’t a city. It’s a cemetery.
And where is the pod?
He held up the little instrument and stared at its screen. It said a pod was there. Or at least something from the Oberon broadcasting from an identification beacon. There could be no mistake. There was nothing on this benighted technological pesthole of a planet that could duplicate that signal. He was no box-and-wire jock, but he did know enough to understand that signals like these were digitally encrypted, to prevent any mistake about source identification. Even if these apes had been able to discover electricity and then build some sort of crude radio, they were hundreds of years away from the computer knowledge it would take to properly encode the signal.
No, if the messenger was picking up a signal at all, it had to be what it said it was: one of Oberon’s identification beacons. There was just no other alternative.
But there was a
lso no pod. He stared at the ruins of Calima. Maybe they’d landed beyond the city, someplace he couldn’t see them yet…
The others arrived, their puzzlement at why he’d reined up obvious. They stared about them, looking for a reason, but the only thing in all this vast wasteland was Calima.
Davidson was still holding up the messenger, staring at it as if he could will it into making the Oberon’s emissary visible. It was still beeping like a demented alarm clock. Davidson gave it a shake. Its stunted digital brain was telling him as loudly as it could that there was a damned pod around here someplace.
But where?
Gunnar, of all people, maybe because of his deeply inbred pessimism, was the first to correctly read the news written on Davidson’s face.
He stared at him, at first in disbelief, then in anger.
“They’re not here,” he said softly.
When Davidson didn’t reply, that was all the answer the rest of them needed. Every one of them had hopes or dreams of some kind tied up in the stories Davidson had told them. And now they could see the disappointment written clearly on his slack features, and it stunned them into silence.
Gunnar’s face grew redder and redder as the full implications sank in. Suddenly he exploded.
“They were never here!” he roared.
Daena pushed in, her expression a study in dismay. Her voice shook as she spoke.
“But… you said they’d come for you.” She sounded like a child promised a favorite toy for her birthday, only to be disappointed.
Ari, Krull, and Limbo, riding apart from the others, as usual, watched Davidson in silence. Suddenly Limbo raised his head and let go with a mockingly exaggerated sniff.
“I know this smell.” He sniffed again. “Right. It’s a catastrophe.”
Davidson, his eyes a study in agony, suddenly turned and ran full tilt into a stone passageway that led into Calima, Semos’s ruined city, and now, to him at least, the city of murdered hope.
* * *
Calima was strange. There was something bizarrely familiar about the even arrangement of its crumbled stone spires, all tilted in the same direction, but Davidson couldn’t quite figure out what it reminded him of.