And the temples of his gods.”
Lafranches and Kattihaws poured through the collapsing gate to a reception of boiling bran which, flung from a ladle, possesses a diabolic ability to stick until skin and flesh are cooked enough to fall from bone. The Kattihaws had mostly swords and hangers, and slightly more cuir bouilli armor than the Lafranche band whose recent hard times were reflected in their relative lack of armor and the wolf spears they carried in lieu of proper arms.
At twelve Jerome was still a foot short of his full growth and the spear he had appropriated from Oncle Antoine was, relatively speaking, more like a short pike in his immature grasp. But his short stature spared him from the worst of those gobs of flung bran and Jerome managed to slip between fighting, screaming, cursing men to drive a spear into the broadfaced woman who was ladling out woe with such abandon. He got a foot on her supine body and removed the spear from between huge pillowy breasts just in time to drive it into the demon-faced Sodbuster who rushed him with a pitchfork. Jerome had to drive the foot-long spearhead three times into the man’s chest, almost losing it when vertebral musculature spasmed and held the spear fast. Finally the wild-bearded man was down. Eyes glazing, he still clawed at the boy who had killed him.
Without conscious intention Jerome knelt over the man’s bloody breast and sucked a mouthful of warm gushing blood. Suddenly renewed, he wrenched the spear loose and charged into the stockade intent on his next victim.
But there were no more victims. Men and boys, all dozen of them, were dead. While Kattihaws rounded up women and girls, the Lafranche band patrolled the corpses, driving a spear into any that still moved: Infants and any girls under ten were killed on the spot, as well as all the older women. Which left only two worth consideration as slaves or concubines.
“Which’n you want ” Les Kattihaw asked.
The Lafranches were already topheavy with women. And twelve-year-old Jerome wanted nothing more than to get one night’s sleep without some heir-hungry woman crawling under his blankets and rubbing herself against him until the inevitable happened … again!
“Tell you what,” he offered, “you keep ‘em both.”
Les Kattihaw stared in disbelief. “What do you want?” he demanded.
“Your folk have better arms than we do. And more muskylopes.”
“I can’t spare any muskylopes.”
“Can you spare us the holding?”
“This little pissant fort? They ain’t so much as one good sword in the whole place. All you’ll git’s a few kitchen knives, maybe a scythe or two and some pitchforks.”
Jerome nodded.
“Is that really all you want—you’re willing to let us take the women and whatever we done picked up already?”
Jerome nodded again.
“Well, I’ll be danged! Boy, any time y’all Lafranches need some help you can count on Les Kattihaw.” The heavily-mustached man frowned in perplexity. “One thing I can’t figger,” he said. “I saw you rush the gate. Was you bitin’ that bugger after you kilt him?”
Afterward Jerome never knew why he said it. But once said, he knew the idea must have been germinating within his brain for the last couple of years. Above all, saying it, he knew it was true. “Brave man. Can’t let strong blood go to waste.”
Kattihaw gave him a doubtful grin and changed the subject. The Kattihaws were awed at the easy way they had gotten the best of the bargain with these unsophisticated Lafranche. So the band had too many women … had they never heard how much in trade goods a young woman could fetch down south? Yet the Kattihaws’ amusement was tempered by the sly grins of the Lafranche band. It was just as if they had somehow tricked the Kattihaws into the bad end of a bargain.
As the fires died down Cat’s Eye began graying the eastern skyline. By the time the sun was up the Kattihaws were on their way back to their main camp. The Lafranche band surveyed the scorched farmstead, licking lips at the sight of all those fat Sodbusters. They turned to with skinning knives. Then the women started cooking.
From Bar Lev, A Traveler’s Tales of Twenty Worlds (Dayan, 2618)
They don’t call it the Outback on Tanith, because for some reason the ubiquitous footloose Aussies missed the ship to Tanith. They do call the wild land beyond the settled areas a great many other things, few of them suitable for print.
And it is wild, make no mistake about that. Almost eerily wild, for a planet that has had not only settlers but cities for five centuries, and escaped the worst of the Formation Wars thanks to being under the Falkenberg Protectorate for most of them.
Part of the problem is that bad flying weather, uncomfortable temperatures, and rugged terrain slow down communications over a large part of Tanith. It’s too much trouble to get to a good part of the land area, so few people try.
Those hardy souls who do try and survive don’t make much of an impact on the land. There aren’t very many of them, and what they do cut and clear, the land is constantly trying to take back. They also don’t talk with the government, even the local government, more than they have to—and the government usually doesn’t find it worthwhile making them talk.
So I came to Tanith wondering why it’s so often the setting for novels of exotic adventure, lost races, and what have you. I left, no longer wondering.
I’d stopped wondering the day I went three klicks into the wilderness from somebody’s farm (I won’t embarrass my host by giving his name) and it took all of the next day for me to find my way back. I was dry and bug-bitten and thorn-pricked and thanking all the gods of the galaxy that the Weems’ Beast isn’t as common as it used to be.
The locals say this is because all the ones who survived to breed after the Formation Wars were too smart to hang around human settlements. I said I thought that would make a fine horror novel—the Weems’ Beasts secretly developing intelligence.
My host handed me a stiff drink and said that you don’t make jokes about some things, even if you’ve been in the jungle for two days.
1994
Tinhorn from Tarshish
Uncle Hiram was a small man with a beard like a date cluster, and dark even by Phoenician standards. Right now his turban was pushed askew and his head needed shaving. I glanced over the railing into the outer office. A few years ago there’d been a hundred scribes out there checking invoices and bills of lading. I used to watch them, marveling at the speed with which they flipped styli from end to end, balancing their accounts with neat little lines of dots and wedges.
Uncle Hiram erased wet clay with the palm of his hand and began pricking another line.
“Hello, Hanno,” he said. “Squat.”
“Sorry, Uncle, I’ve only got a minute. Assurbanipal just got in a load from Egypt and I want to get there before the king’s buyer gets all the fat ones.”
“That can wait,” my uncle said.
“I may not get another chance for six months!”
“You’ll be back before then.” I had a pretty good idea of what was coming next, and I didn’t think much of it. “I’m not going anywhere,” I said, but Uncle Hiram wasn’t having any. “Squat.”
“But I just got back!”
“Hanno, squat!”
I squatted.
“We’re in trouble.”
I groaned. “When aren’t we?” Out on the flat spot where tablets were pressed out, our remaining ten bookkeepers were rolling bones. I glanced past them at the empty warehouses. “Well,” I sighed, “you can’t keep a monopoly forever.”
“Who wants a monopoly?” Uncle Hiram wailed. “I’d be happy with just a little stock.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I wish I knew. You’ll have to get up to the northern depot and get the goods moving again before we’re in receivership.”
“Is it that bad?”
“Tyre’s under siege. I saw Assurbanipal this morning and got the news while you were still sleeping off last night’s orgy. The Egyptians are having troubles, and things are in an uproar all over the east.”
“So what else is new?”
“What do you suppose’ll happen if those Centaurs ever bypass us?”
I felt a chill where the tail of my turban hung between my shoulders. If they ever push across Europe, it’s goodbye, Tarshish.
The Centaurs came out of Asia with a new animal like a pony only faster. And big. It was so big a man could ride on its back. When one was coming at you Sheol-for-breakfast and shooting twenty arrows a minute from a horned bow, it was hard to tell where the man left off and the animal began.
“But our northern depot is hundreds of days from Centaur country,” I protested. “Besides, a horned bow won’t stay glued in that miserable climate.”
“I didn’t say they were there,” Uncle Hiram snapped. “But the Board of Trade is unhappy, and if you don’t get up to the Myrtos Station soon and straighten things out, I just might lose my charter.”
“Just because we’re a little late with this quarter’s return?”
“And last quarter’s, but that’s not why the king’s after my head.” Uncle Hiram sighed and looked older. “We bungled an affair of state.”
We? I waited.
“It was back at the Tauris depot. The Scythians are having an attack of nationalism.”
“So what? Has there ever been a trading post didn’t get tarshish, go home! painted on it once in a while?”
“We had that part of it patched up pretty well,” my uncle continued. “You know that native custom of one man and one woman living together all their lives?”
“Don’t they get sick of each other?”
“They don’t live long enough. A girl’s lucky to live through her first baby. And the men are so busy killing each other they’ve never found out if you can trust anyone over thirty. Anyway,” Uncle Hiram shrugged, “a—oh shrivel it!— what’s the word? marriage —that’s it, had been arranged. You know the routine: a half-breed prince and everybody’s happy.”
I was beginning to feel uncomfortable.
“A local family came up with a girl. The factor at our Tauris stockade shipped her off to Tarshish. It was up to the king here to find a pigeon who’d —marry her, that’s the word for it.”
“But I’m just a babe in arms—”
“Oh, settle down. You don’t have to marry her.”
I waited, wondering what next.
“No girl,” Uncle Hiram said. “No girl, no ship, no marriage. It was my ship, so it’s my fault—as if I had any control over the storms or Underwater People or pirates or a hundred other things that could happen between the Pontos Axeinos and Iberia.”
“I don’t see what I can do about it.”
“Nobody expects you to. Just get up there and see what in
Sheol’s going on up at the Myrtos Station. Get the goods moving so we can pay our taxes, and maybe the king’ll get off my back.”
“How do I get there?”
Uncle Hiram looked at me keenly. “The Ishtar, of course.” That changed things. After lugging a sample case until I was round-shouldered, I was finally getting a ship. And it was about time. If the gods lent me life, I’d be seventeen before the next Sun Sacrifice. Any other man in a shipowning family would have been trading on his own a year ago. I rushed out of the warehouse.
Down by the river I found Abner superintending a gang of carpenters. Several of Ishtar’s planks were being replaced, along with all her sewing. “Hanno!” he shouted, “I hear you’re stuck with her.”
I nodded, trying not to grin like a jackass eating thorns.
Abner’s evil face split into a smile. He was taller than Uncle Hiram but had the same date-cluster beard. He was even uglier than I remembered from days aboard my father’s ship. “How’re we fixed for crew?” I asked.
“Not too good.”
The banks of the Tartessus River were littered with beached ships, but I didn’t see any men apart from the gang
Abner had working. I wandered back upriver towards the mudbrick taverns where beached sailors hung out. After a couple of hours I began to wonder if I shouldn’t have done a little more checking up after I’d arrived home. The Ishtar was a good ship, and my Uncle Hiram was always known to feed well. Why weren’t these hungry sons of nobody scrambling for a chance to pull an oar? I fished as much as I dared, for a skipper is supposed to know all without having ever to ask any questions. No luck. As soon as I mentioned a voyage to the northern depot they started backing away as if I had the Egyptian Sickness.
That night my uncle dragged me to a Board of Trade meeting. The old palace was the biggest building in Tarshish and dated from times when even civilized people still worked flint. It was a monstrous, drafty old place, made of stone blocks so big I often wondered how they ever got them in place without proper machinery. The king was not particularly happy living there, but it was handy for meetings like this and the thick stone walls did have a certain advantage. When times get bad, people always think it’s the king’s fault.
But politics wasn’t worrying me at the moment. “Uncle,” I finally said, “you used to send two ships a month up there during the season. The warehouse ought to be full by now. How many have you sent?”
Uncle Hiram’s answer was a trifle too quick.
“Men don’t care to sign on,” I pressed. “I have a feeling that you’re being less than frank with me.”
My uncle gave me a hurt look. “Why lie? My own sons are all dead or captive. Someday you’ll have to run it if there’s any business left to run.”
Knowing one of my cousins was already ransomed and on his way home, I was unimpressed. “Yes, Uncle,” I said, “we’re just one big happy family, but we won’t be if you don’t get off it and tell me what kind of a deal you’re sending me into cold.”
Suddenly he sagged. “I’ve watched the flight of birds,” he said. “I’ve tossed bones. I’ve sacrificed to the beer and sun gods. I’ve practiced seatology and tyromancy; I’ve sliced chicken livers. Nothing’s given me a hint of what happened to my eight ships.”
Eight! “Do you suppose it’s the Underwater People?’
Uncle Hiram gave me an odd look. “You actually believe that crap we made up to scare the Greeks?” A voice hailed us from an open-fronted tavern. It was Abner. The bartender brought reeds, and we squatted to suck beer, “What’s the cargo?” Abner asked.
“The usual,” Uncle Hiram said. “Bronze knives, axes, blue glass beads.”
I studied the design in the beer crock. There were figures of animals like the gorillas down on the Gold Coast. Local gods, I decided. I wondered where the crock came from.
I spent the better part of another week scrounging around to fill out my crew. It wasn’t easy. I bought most of them from their owners, but I did find two freedmen ready to sell themselves for a pot of beer and the prospect of steady eating.
Uncle Hiram stood by worriedly and tallied goods while we loaded. Then I went to spend my last night in Tarshish. It wasn’t a very satisfactory night because the king’s buyer had latched onto all the fat ones. Paleface girls smiled and beckoned from their mudbrick cribs, but that white skin chills me. Reminds me of snow, I guess.
We shoved off at dawn, Abner beating a slow five on the sounding board Oars flashed raggedly as the new men tried to pick up the beat. After a few strokes they more or less got with it, and I relaxed. The Ishtar was almost seven years old now, but she still made a fine picture as we slipped down the Tartessus on the morning tide, her oars flashing in the sun and sixty men putting their backs into it. Her long bowsprit trembled and thrummed as the lashings from the extending keel swished down the muddy old river. Inexperienced oarsmen did their best, but the sun was nearly down before we reached the first entrepot. While Abner got the fire started and the men settled in, I swept out the shrine and made the best deal I could with the gods.
Next morning we passed by the still smoking beacon, and as a clumsy trireme with a load of copper from Cyprus labored upriver, Abner raised the beat to twelve. Oarsmen cursed and broke wind, then the bow broke clea
r of the water and the thrumming stopped. The Ishtar lifted over a long Ocean comber, and the muddy river water began turning green. I leaned on the steering oar, and she slowly turned west.
Fresh-sawn timbers groaned, and little spurts of water came through the seams. Abner put the scrawniest rowers to bailing, and we continued under way with several oars shipped. Leaning against the steering sweep, I started calling up the gods. At the proper times I threw bread overboard and poured out the half crock of beer I had ready. Then I remembered the eight unreported ships. I heaved more bread and dumped the rest of the beer. Gods are unpredictable, but it pays to stay on their good side.
Abner swung mallets and roared each time a rower broke rhythm. A breeze from dead ahead shortened the chop, and our inexpert oarsmen caught crabs more often. I struggled to keep a heading, and Abner glanced at me in mute despair. After seven hours the men wilted until I could barely hold steerageway. They revived when I came about to shoot a landing.
We spread the goods out to dry while woodcutters scavenged the barren, low-lying coast. I got out pots of barley. By the time the woodcutters were back, I had talked things over with the gods and was ready to brew. In spite of the headwinds and hayseed oarsmen we’d made twelve miles.
Under weeks of blazing sun and dead calms we skirted the Iberian coast, around the rocky headland and up past the Tagus. By the time we reached Cape Katzeh-Eretz, Abner had consigned two worn out oarsmen to the Underwater People. I did not care to ruin any man’s chance for Life Eternal, but this lack of burial seems to help the living learn how to row.
That night Abner and I talked over a new problem. The Underwater People are nearly as treacherous as the gods. Sometimes I wonder if they even understand the chants, or if our spells can bind them at all. Still, you’ve got to try. If a stranger isn’t interested in trade, there isn’t much you can do except kill him. But there’re probably more of them than there are of us. “Do you think they’ll let us across?” I wondered.
Abner shrugged. “You remember what happened to your father’s ship,” he said. “Still, it’s three times farther if we follow the coast. Maybe the bastards’ll be satisfied with those two we threw overboard and let the rest of us cross.”
Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 33