West Of The Sun, Edgar Pangborn [world of reading txt] 📗

person to the Vestoians. In this third battle he was at the head of his army, massive and tall; with a cold, unhappy precision, he was using a long hardwood stick with a razor-edge semicircular blade. And this time his legion had driven in out of the west, directly against the palace and the temples and sacred places of the Queen of the World.

Lantis was aging then, and sick, and bewildered; she probably never understood that it was merely a question of her own methods being used against her. Even when her city was in flames around her and her people were scattering into forest and swamp and lake, she could neither yield nor destroy herself; thus it was her misfortune to be taken alive.

A week later Ann and the children were brought by litter from Spearman City; Spearman recognized the political advantage, almost necessity, of their presence at the triumph. Lantis was ceremonially dragged through the still-smoldering and stinking streets and forced to drink an infusion of the green-flower weed that destroyed the self: this was pygmy custom, which Spearman watched in regretful disgust, anxious that his small sons should preserve the impassive dignity proper to gods. "They're far from human, you know—they don't feel things as we do...." The boys were puzzled and curious.

So far as Ann knew, however, Lantis was not eaten at the festival. "He told me she was mercifully put away after the excitement died down, and another meat slave was sacrificed, made up to look like Lantis—not deception, but ritual substitution; Ed felt he'd achieved quite a step in progress there. It showed, he said, they were beginning to accept ritual for reality under the influence of——Oh, the devil with it.... He moved his capital to Vestoia. The palace was restored—modernized. I lived there—two and a half years. That's where I bore him another son. I'll never know how I came to allow it—a kind of madness, hate close to love—something.... He didn't want me any more, you know. He had some ideas about—ascetic discipline—purity—I don't know what exactly—and he didn't try to explain it to me. I'd hated him with all my mind for years—before the Vestoian wars—but I'm not a good hater. I even still imagined I could[180] influence him a little—until the baby was born and he was in black despair because it wasn't a daughter. I had to escape. I could feel my mind, my self, rotting away—dissolving, as the Vestoian empire was dissolving, for that matter. He couldn't hold them. It began to fall apart right away. They were terrified of him and of his Spearman City bodyguards—weasels.... They simply drifted away into the woods and didn't come back. I doubt if they've organized anywhere else. Lantis must have had a rare sort of skill—the city was all hers: she built it out of Stone Age villagers, and it died with her. Ed tried everything to keep them—bribes, threats, endless spying and public executions by his guard. Bread and circuses, meaningless offices for favorites with fancy clothes and no duties. It didn't work. At the time I escaped, the population was down to—he'd never tell me, but my guess is under ten thousand for the whole city. There was an epidemic—rather like flu. I used that as a reason to take the baby back to Spearman City, knowing Ed would need to stay and go on trying to hold things together. I thought he would let me take the twins—John—David——"

"Rest awhile," said Arek. "We're going to bring them home too." Ann could not speak. "How would you like to bathe again in our lake? I'll hold you up. Water's warm with the sun—best part of the day——"

"I'd like it. It's so pretty. What do you call it?"

"Sears Lake."

"Sears.... What am I made of? I haven't thought or asked——"

"It was a Vestoian arrow," Wright said. "At the end he enjoyed remembering Earth."

[181]

2

"The city is a desolation." Miniaan slipped out of shadow into the clearing, where the others waited for her without a fire; she was shaken, short of breath. No longer young, she had hurried on the ten-mile return journey from Vestoia through high-noon heat of jungle. "I could not even find the house where I was born. Oh, Pakriaa—Paul—of every ten houses, seven are empty. The streets are dirt and rubbish. No one knew me. Well, that's not strange. Those I met supposed I was a stranger, probably from the east. But the ones who were suspicious did not challenge me—they slipped into their sorry houses and stared at me through the cracks." She sat down in weariness, wiping sweat from her scarred head and shoulder. "Word of what I said will travel quickly. But not one followed me here. I made sure of that."

Arek asked, "Have you had anything to eat?"

"No, I—only walked through the streets.... Doc, some had English words—a few, badly spoken. No one could pronounce d at the beginning of a word, and they had absurd turns of speech I don't understand. One woman said to me, 'One fella goddamn skirt belong you what name?' I thought she was asking about this skirt I made in the old fashion, but then we spoke in the old tongue: I found she only wanted to know who I was and where I came from. It seems that now, under Spearman-abron-Ismar, they indicate—what word do I want?—social—social levels——"

"Castes?"

"Castes, that is it, Paul—they indicate castes by the color of a skirt. In the old days there were only two castes—soldiers and voluntary laborers, not considering the family of Lantis or the slaves at the bottom. Now there[182] are—oh, ten, twenty, I don't know. Those who work at the dye pots must never do anything else, and they can look down on the workers in hides; this woman was a maker of arrowheads and despised both.... I told her (and some others) that I was a stranger from a distant village, and I said I had heard by rumor of other gods and giants, who would come one day soon to talk with Spearman-abron-Ismar—yes, they call him that, Spearman-male-issue-of-Ismar. It frightened her: she made excuses and ran away. I told it to another, an old woman, who broke out cursing and weeping. She said, Oh, no more of them! No more——' And sat down in the street and scattered dust on her head."

"Did you see—him?"

"No, Paul. I saw the palace—changed, with new tall doors. There were soldiers at the entrance, so I did not dare go near. They wore a headdress—it was the old bark fabric, I think, but a shape I never saw. I saw the great stockade—always the biggest thing on the shore of North Lake—still in repair; there was the same sluice, to wash away the blood of the meat slaves. There is still a ferry near it, where the crossing is narrow at the lake's inlet; I could see across—streets and tree-sheltered houses. And outside the city I saw a mound, very foul. Once the city was clean. There was a boy playing near it—ran when he saw me, but I caught him and asked him about that mound. I could hardly understand his gabble. It seems that nowadays in Vestoia children have reason to be afraid of grown women. When we could talk he told me the mound was the grave of the False Empress, the Wicked One—everyone who passes is required to defile it. A law."

Pakriaa laced her wrinkled hands at her throat, smiling at Christopher Wright, quoting a few of his own words: "'The laws are living things: let men guard them against crippling and disease.'"

Nisana asked, "What is next to do?"

"We sleep on it," Wright said. "Long journey. We're tired. We'll go there in the morning. With our weapons of course, but...."

Mijok said softly, "First-light is a good time."

"I think there won't be any fighting," Miniaan said,[183] and she relaxed and leaned happily against Muson's plump knee and ate the meal Arek had ready for her in fastidious birdlike bites. "If they're troubled by the rumors I scattered they'll slip away and hide, not fight. They're weary, bewildered, disillusioned people—at least that is the temper of the city as I felt it."

Nisana murmured, "With Spearman's bodyguard it could be different."

"Why," said Wright, "he'd never turn them against us. Not if he's the man I used to know, or anything like that man. He came a long way with us once." But Paul had to wonder: Was he ever with us?

There were six giants in the party: Mijok, Arek, Muson, Elis, Sears-Danik, Dunin. Elis was the year's Governor at Adelphi, but Dorothy had held that position the year before and would assume its simple duties in his absence. Nisana's eldest twin daughters had wanted to come, but Nisana had not allowed it, requiring them to stay in school under Brodaa's temperate discipline; the only pygmies here were herself, Pakriaa, and Miniaan. The group had come 120 miles overland, after Argo IV set them on a beach north of the coastal range: this had seemed better than taking the sloop south, where harbor would be uncertain and the winds and currents unknown. The first twenty miles ashore had been a retracing of Abara's long-ago journey with the olifants, through swampy and treacherous jungle. After rounding the range they could follow the eastern edge of the grassland that spread on its lee side, traveling in the open only at night, to avoid omasha. For all of one day they were bedeviled by a swarm of biting flies, and since there were brown wings circling they could not escape into full sunlight, where the flies would not follow. Eventually Pakriaa found an evil-smelling plant and remembered its use from old times. The juice of the root was a protection; the smell was almost as distressing as the bites but less dangerous. Miniaan of Vestoia had never heard of the plant's use: perhaps that explained why Vestoia had never exploited the otherwise pleasant region due west of Lake Argo.

There was fitful sleep in the daylight following Miniaan's return, and then an evening meal. Arek and Muson and the two young giants seemed untroubled by tomorrow,[184] full of speculative curiosity. Mijok was uneasy, though he would not put it in words; Elis, too, would be remembering. Wright said again, "He came a long way with us.... Jensen chose him—remember that: chose him from among seven hundred other physically fine youths who had the same training, the same kind of courage, who wanted the—privilege, as he did."

"I can always wonder what Jensen himself would have made of Lucifer."

Wright said, almost with reproach, "Jensen was a great engineer, Paul, but he was also a student of history. Compared with what his leadership would have been, mine has been weak, vacillating, academic—it was bound to be. I take credit for some achievements. I've said give protoplasm a chance. We have done that. We've established the climate of liberty under law (for our very small group) and proved that a human mind can by-pass twenty thousand years of blundering, with no other help than a flexible language and the few basic rules of civilized action—as the so-called savages of Earth always proved it whenever they had a chance to secure a genuine education and fair treatment. But—in our material development there must have been a thousand lost opportunities—things Jensen (and probably Ed Spearman) would have seen at once."

Paul laughed. "Ed could have designed a better sloop."

Wright dismissed that with a chuckle. "Ach—she floats, boy. She sails.... When I get angry or impatient or discouraged—when I stick too tight to a plan of my own and fail to hear the opposing argument—then I remember that Jensen had a charity, a patience, a kindliness, almost as great as Sears had—"

"Tocwright," said Pakriaa, half amused, "why do you search yourself? Must you always be sitting in judgment on your own mind?"

"Why, yes, dear, I must." His fingers played in his white beard. "Cod-and-baked-beans origin ... Remember my fussy little History of the Americas, the first book Dorothy and Nisana copied out for me when we found how to make good paper from the marsh grass...? But self-searching is a vice-and-virtue not limited to the Charin tribe, Pakriaa—ask yourself. And ask Elis." The black giant[185] smiled. "So—I'll go on with it just a little. Paul, is it weakness in me to ask that when we find Ed Spearman, you do most of the talking? I want to be—merely friendly if I can, not say much. At least until we know what sort of man he's become. Nine years ago, I don't think he ever had much resentment against you. You hear both sides—usually the surest way to make an extremist hate you bitterly, but somehow people don't. You're a—kindly listener; I only try to be, pushing down a big part