Catch a falling star, p.9
Catch a Falling Star, page 9
“So this is why one city, at least, did not send to thank us for our work!” said Hoo in a voice of tremendous anger, and while Chalyth and Creohan stood dazed by horror, he gave way to his frustrated! feelings and ran in among the bones, smashing them with lack after kick.
All at once his temper subsided, and he returned soberly to where they waited, carrying something round and white on which the flying lights played fantastically. Since the city was decayed, there was no order or grouping of colour in the sky, just the mad whirling of a crazy rainbow.
“That-” said Chalyth, and swallowed. “That’s a skull.”
“It is indeed,” Hoo agreed, and Creohan stared at it.
“I didn’t know you sent out meat when it was as young and small as that,” he began. Hoo cut him short.
“We don’t!” He set the grinning bone on his shoulder, so that for an instant they thought the? saw Death looking at them, and then Creohan realised.
“It’s a man’s,” he said sickly. “So they are dead, the people of this city…”
The vista of desolation .spread around him filled his mind with horrible imaginings. Perhaps their journey might after all be futile; perhaps they would have found the same whichever trail they followed from the valley of the meat, and his own city might be the last inhabited in all the world.
Chalyth gave a little cry and hid her face on his shoulder.
Then a noise came to them. Another. Another. Sounds of movement, purposeful, distinct from the aimless shambling of the meat. Hoo seized the skull by the stump of its neckbone and brandished it for a club, looking around warily. Black shadows gathered among the heaped skeletons, and suddenly a man appeared, so boldly that even without the continuing noises which now came from every side they would have guessed he could not be alone.
He was small in stature, barely reaching Chalyth’s elbow. His glossy brown body was protected with tough leather cuirass and leggings, and on his head was a round white half-helmet made from one of the meat-creatures’ skulls. A broad axe rested lightly in his hands, and the reflected lights gleamed on its keen-honed blade.
He studied them for a while without saying anything. Seeming satisfied with the result of his inspection, he made a beckoning gesture, and a dozen others accoutred as he was sprang into view. Trying to keep nervousness from his voice, Creohan said, “Who are you? What do you want?”
“For da time been, you ull do,” the little man replied. A mirthless grin accompanied the words. He spoke with an accent unlike any Creohan had ever heard—and with the contagion of dead languages introduced by the Historickers, his home city was full of strange accents. But the man had spoken fluently; this was presumably his native tongue.
“Com wid us,” he added, and Hoo gave him a glare, as though prepared to take on him and all his companions singlehanded.
“We would do better not to resist,” Creohan counselled. “Maybe these are the survivors of whatever overwhelmed the rest of this city’s people, and we may learn—”
“We uh w’at overw’elmed dis people!” declared the little man proudly. “Is well you doan resis’! Move, move!”
Tiredly, the travellers complied.
Behind them the insane laughter of the meat grew faint. The reek of rotting carcases was blown away from this direction and they could breathe more freely. But it was with a heavy heart that Creohan looked at the wild-growing houses among which they passed and read into the riot of vegetation the splendour which must once have reigned here. The city must have been twice the size of his own, as he had already guessed from the much larger herd of meat sent forth to it. Yet now it was a desolation.
Hoo kept his thoughts to himself, but it was plain from the wide-eyed sadness on Chalyth’s face that she too was puzzling over the doom of this fine city.
They came into clearer roads, along which their captors escorted them at a near-run that strained their weary muscles. Attempts to slow the pace resulted in blows from the handles of the brown men’s axes, and insults and jeers so do with the travellers’ greater tallness. Creohan began to see a pattern in their captors’ behaviour.
They reached a causeway, irregular now and patched with lichens, but which must once have been a handsome highway along the bank of the river. The river, indeed, was still there; logically, it would be the one the herd of meat had followed on the last stage of their journey. At the brink the party halted, and on glancing down Creohan saw a whole fleet of boats tied up to a cable stretched from bank to bank, bows to the sluggish stream. Men-all little, all brown of skin, all clad in leather armour-guarded them.
“Down,” said the leader, and indicated a flight of steps slippery with moss that led to the muddy riverside. When they hesitated, his face twitched into a snarl, and with a broadside blow of his axe he struck Chalyth on the buttocks, so that she cried out, fell forwards, lost her footing, tumbled headlong to the stagnant mud.
Creohan looked at Hoo, and found that they had come to the same decision in the same instant. They had no stomach to be delayed on their quest by cocky little brown warriors. Forgetting their sores and their stiffness, they rounded on their nearest captors, Hoo taking the leader and Creohan another man, seized them by their arms and pitched them bodily to the water. Two splashes sounded as one. The guards on the boats jumped, up with shouts of alarm.
How light and fragile these little men were, thought Creohan. But their axes were not. One whistled past his head as he dodged aside. The weight of the blade took the weapon to the ground before its wielder could recover. Creohan seized his chance and sent a second victim after his first. And another and another, while Hoo did the same.
“Did these runts claim to have overwhelmed this city?” Hoo said scornfully. “They’re too weak to drag their own shadows after them! I’d like to see one of them try to wrestle with a rogue meat-creature, as I’ve had to do.”
The causeway was clear but for themselves. Plashing from the water informed them that the little men were swimming to the safety of their boats. Creohan possessed himself of an axe dropped by one of them in his involuntary and quite literal flight from the scene, and started down the steps to see to Chalyth.
He exclaimed anxiously when he reached her. She had sunk to her knees in the marshy wetness of the bank, and her futile struggles were only sinking her ever deeper. A rusty metal ring was set in the wall of the causeway near at hand, and he grasped it while stretching out his other arm towards her. It was no use—the distance was too great.
“Let me!” said Hoo, and Creohan gave place; the other’s span was longer than his. Chalyth tried vainly to come closer. The sucking mud was up over her thighs, and her face was pale with fright.
“So!” said Hoo, linking his fingers in hers. He tugged and hauled, and some slight progress was made, but not fast enough. There was activity out on the river, cries and the clang of metal, and they dare not delay until the brown warriors recovered from their first surprise. Creohan hunted for a foothold from which he could help Hoo, but wherever he trod he also began to sink in.
Without warning Hoo lost his grip on Chalyth’s fingers, they being slippery with mud, and his feet splayed out from under him. Now were there two to be helped? No, luckily; he was recovering, taking care not to lose his footing again as he scrambled up. Creohan took his place at the ring, reached out to Chalyth—and saw, as he raised his eyes, that one of the boats had put over to the bank. Two brown men were hauling it along by the cross-river rope; two more sat on its thwarts with axes raised; and one sat in the stern, who voiced an incomprehensible command.
Fatalistically, Creohan wondered what it was like to die.
XIV
A moment later he was stupefied to find that the words his mind had rejected were only disguised by speed of utterance and the brown man’s unfamiliar accent. He understood them the second time very well, and they were addressed to him and had nothing at all to do with his being killed.
“Doan stan’ dere like silly meat-beast, you! Catch rope an’ t’read it t’rough dat ring!”
Rope? What rope? While Creohan was still gawping, Hoo reacted, accepting a cord which one of the men in the boat tossed to him, passing it through the ring, dropping a loop of it over Chalyth’s shoulders. His and Creohan’s combined strength brought her sliding across the mud to the foot of the steps, almost crying with relief.
But that was not the only trick with ropes the brown men knew. While they stood panting from the exertion, a second cord whizzed through the air, dropped over them, was pulled tight at precisely the correct moment, and they found themselves encircled at waist-height.
“Com ‘ere!” said the man in the stern of the boat, and the line was given an ungentle tug. On the slippery mudbank they could obviously be dragged if they didn’t go voluntarily, and there was no reason why dragging should stop when they reached the actual water.
“All right,” Creohan said, and they made their awkward way into the boat.
There was some grumble of complaint from the crew as they dripped mud over the bottom-boards, which was quickly silenced by the man in the stern. Creohan studied the latter with curiosity. Unlike his subordinates he wore a robe that hid his body from shoulders to feet. On his head was a woven cap dotted with glistering sequins, and laid out either side of him was a small arsenal which made Creohan rather glad they had agreed to come aboard unresisting, for it included not only a battleaxe such as the man ashore had carried, but two smaller thro wing-axes, swords, knives and a quiver of wicked javelins. The four members of his crew were similarly outfitted, though less lavishly; alongside every thwart in the boat there was a rack of weaponry.
“You uv cos’ me t’irteen men,” the man in the stern said before Creohan could speak, and Hoo spoke up defiantly.
“We only threw them in the river. They’ll be no worse off than wet and sorry for themselves.”
“Dey are not good to me no more,” the man in the stern said. “Dey uv been beaten by a q’arter of deir number. See!” He gestured, and they turned to see a wet head bob up alongside the next boat out from shore. A guard on the boat raised and slammed down his axe, and the head went floating down the current. The body, spurting blood that looked black in the light from overhead, sank where it was.
Chalyth clutched Creohan’s arm, biting back her horror at this casual expenditure of life. Apparently satisfied that he had made the desired impression on his captives, the man in the stern snapped another order, and the men at the bow hauled on the cross-river cable again, dragging the boat free of the mudbank where they had beached it and returning it to the middle of the stream.
“You uh not f’om dis city,” the man went on, making it a plain statement.
“Ah—how did you know?” Creohan countered, struggling to overcome the revulsion which had affected him no less strongly than Chalyth.
“Och! Dis city’s dead.” The man spat over the side. “Like all da rest, dis city’s been dead for long long time.”
Chalyth gave a little gasp, and Hoo took a step forward which made the boat roll heavily. “All the rest are dead?” he echoed. “All of them?”
“Sure, all.” Paradoxically, the man in the stern seemed sad at it. He made a large half-circle with his left arm in the direction of the nearer shore. “All over dere we roamed an’ wandered, and we foun’ always like dis. Again, again, again. Soon now my people com back from da city, and dey tell me w’at I a’ready know—dat dere is no one but da animals dat are like biggest men. An’ you, only you not belong ‘ere. Were you from, eh?”
“We are not from any city,” Creohan lied, and to his surprise the man did not even question his assertion.
“Dat I know. If you came from a city, I ud uv conquered it. But dere are only dead cities now. Dis is da end for us, dat I do fear.”
He was interrupted in his melancholy refrain by the arrival—hand over hand along the cable from the bank—of just such a cocky little man as had led the party they had been captured by. He hesitated with one foot on the bow on seeing the tall strangers, but a gesture from the man in the stern brought him nimbly down into the boat. There, he fell on his knees and reported, “Lord, we uv been t’rough da city. Dere is no one alive.”
“Go!” said the man he had addressed as “lord”, and he obeyed, to be followed by another and another and another—just as many, Creohan noticed, as there were boats beside this one moored on the river. And at the same time those boats, including their own, began to fill with little brown men who laid down their axes as they occupied the thwarts and took up broad paddles instead.
The travellers stood together at the lord’s right, waiting for the string of reports to reach an end. Chalyth, in a whisper, complained to Creohan of the foulness of the mud on her body and asked ii: he thought it safe for her to go overside and rinse it off, but he warned that it might be taken for an attempted escape, and they had seen with what small compunction this lordling treated those who offended him. One, though, who seemed to be the boatswain was displeased at the smears of mud he found on his return, and ordered a folding leather bucket to be dipped so they could cleanse off the worst of it.
At last one party alone had not filled its boat, and that, Creohan realised, must have been crewed by the men they so ignominiously defeated. The lord rose to his feet and shouted for it to be stove in and sunk, and with the movement a half-formed guess of Creohan’s was confirmed.
The lord stood head and shoulders above any of his inferiors—but his long robe concealed tall wooden platforms strapped to his feet, which clumped betrayingly as he moved.
These little brown warriors, then, must be jealous of taller races, and it would be that jealousy which had driven them to lay waste cities such as this. Creohan saw no reason to doubt the truth of the boast which the cocky leader of the party they had first met had made: “We uh w’at overw’elmed dis people 1”
And now there were no more populous cities for them to attack, they must be making a continual vain round of the scenes of past victories, in the hope of finding people once again—tall people whom they could humble and bring low.
“Sit!” instructed the lord, and they did so awkwardly: Chalyth and Creohan pressing close together on a thwart, for warmth against the chill of their soaking clothes, and Hoo on the bottom boards, dark face brooding over the brown man who had so completely taken control of their destiny.
“W’at were you doing in da city?” the lord asked, and Creohan risked another outrageous claim, hoping that his analysis of the brown warriors’ psychology was correct.
“You look for cities to conquer. We who are done with cities seek to conquer a star.”
The statement made so bluntly filled the lord with sudden awe. His hand crept to the haft of one of the axes beside him, as though he felt he might need to protect himself from—from whatever he feared about people bigger than himself. Delighted, Creohan went on.
“You have searched up and down this coast—the one from which this river runs inland—and you have found only deserted cities. Is that not so? Why then do you go on searching?”
Pleased to find something the travellers did not know, the lord shrugged. “It is among our people dat before a lord can become a king he must prove self and sack a city of da biggest people. For ten, twelve generations we uv no king. My fader like me was only a lord. For dere are no more cities to attack.”
Creohan gave a thoughtful nod. It seemed that still more of his guesses were being confirmed. In particular, he had established why the brown warriors had never appeared at his own city. On their way here they had crossed a ridge of hills; the valley of the meat was somewhere near its highest point. Presumably those hills spined an isthmus, and his home faced a different ocean. That was as well—he hated to think what easy pickings the warriors could find there.
“You must come from an island far out in the sea,” he ventured, and the lord admitted as much.
The talk continued. Before the boat reached the river’s mouth he had confirmed all he wanted to know. Far to the north and south the coastline stretched unbroken. A short way inland lay the line of hills, which these people had never crossed—they were tied too closely to their boats to risk an overland voyage, so they limited their range to the highest navigable stretch of the rivers. In fact, he suspected that water-transport so dominated their thinking they imagined no one could live away from the reach of a boat, or at least not in cities sizeable enough to make this lord into a king.
His tongue loosened, the lord began to boast of the legendary exploits of his ancestors, as though he feared to seem petty beside the travellers who went towards a star. Creohan was only a little surprised to find that his tales resembled stories he had heard from Historickers at home. The race of which these few boatloads of marauders were the last remnant must once have made a tremendous mark upon the world
“And where do you head now?” Creohan demanded at last, when the sky was greying towards dawn and the sound of surf on a beach had announced they were about to change from fresh water to salt.
“We go on,” said the lord hopelessly. “Somew’ere-maybe even now—dere may remain a populated city.”
Creohan rose to his feet, steadying himself against the rocking of the boat with a hind on Chalyth’s shoulder. “We can guide you to a land where you have never been,” he said solemnly. “We can show you the right course for a coast you have not explored!”
The lord, disliking to look up to Creohan, yet afraid to stand in his turn for fear he might lose his balance on his awkward stilt-soled shoes, shifted uneasily. “Den were we shall go?” he demanded.
Creohan pointed skyward, to what had given him his sudden inspiration: a covey of lights fleeing homeward before the dawn from the deserted city they had left.
“Do you know all the places the lights go to?” he asked, and the lord shook his head.
