We had landed in a valley which was as close as Dark-scar dared proceed on the information at his disposal. An attempt to elicit an estimated distance from the Aetemans was met with a typical “not far.” This, at least, insinuated that the fortress was within walking distance. Darkscar was the only one of us who felt confident. None of the Falconians relished the prospect of walking up and down mountain slopes in the terrible weather.
In actual fact, the cold seemed no worse, and perhaps a little more bearable. I must have been getting used to it. The snow did not seem to have stuck to the mountains as much as it had in the lowlands, and it was not nearly so sticky underfoot; although where there was a white carpet of snow the ground would undoubtedly be treacherous. We had to rely on the females to keep us clear of crevasses.
The females were a good deal happier now that their feet were back on solid rock, their faces were pinched with cold and their eyes returned to a world of gray and white. They didn’t really like the rifles, which they found heavy and cumbersome, but they clung as tight as they’d been told to. None of us, not even the massive Comarre, volunteered to carry their rifles for them. They liked the weather, while we had inconveniences of our own.
We set off at a fast walk which soon slowed to a steady, decisive trek. The females were practically gliding, like ghosts, but the rest of us were often prone to stagger on bad ground. I fell twice, each time aggravating the cuts and bruises I sustained on Aquila. The pain was soon lost in the biting cold, however.
We left two men back at the ship, just in case we were lucky enough to be alive when our mad escapade was over. This reduced the strength of our assault party to eight, only six of whom were wholly dependable. For that matter, I don’t think either Darkscar or the Felides regarded me as wholly dependable. Maybe they were right.
I had to make our two guides slow down and give us more help. I tried to explain that we hardly ever saw snow and avoided it when we did, and that some of us weren’t very fond of trekking over mountains. Principally, the help was needed by Darkscar and myself. The Falconians had added strength by virtue of the fact that they were used to considerably higher gravity. Only the cold troubled them.
My appeal didn’t help relations between the Aetemans and ourselves, emphasizing as it did the fact that we were strangers, but it did get us a little more help. They stayed closer and were always ready to offer a hand on the sharper slopes. It felt oddly undignified being hauled around in the softer snow by Aetemans, but even the Felides didn’t laugh. They needed assistance themselves occasionally.
Sometimes I got the distinct impression that the tunnel dwellers were showing off. As time went on, our tempers got shorter and our efforts to be self-sufficient more ludicrous. They never faltered, but I don’t think they were so fond of it. After all, the temperature was bearable for a full third of the year where they lived, and this weather must have been unseasonably cold for summer.
“Doesn’t it ever get better?” moaned the man called Diall, after two or three horns.
“No,” I replied tersely. But Darkscar was weakening fast, and I was all too pleased to be able to call a halt. I asked one of the Aetemans whether it ever did get any better.
She looked critically at the sky and at the wan sun which was shrouded in cloud somewhere away near the horizon. It seemed to be lightening a little, but whether that was due to the fact that it was not yet noon, or the fact that the cloud was clearing slightly, I couldn’t tell. She, apparently, could.
“The snow will stop soon,” she announced, in an uncharacteristically long speech. I didn’t know how long soon might be on Aetema, but I needed very little persuasion to prolong the rest
“How soon?” I asked.
She made some rapid, practiced gesture with her fingers, which I presume was a local convention for indicating the passage of time. What it meant, I could only guess. I decided that there was little profit in pressing the point.
“Shelter?” I asked.
She shrugged and simply linked her fingers, pressing palms and forearms tightly together.
“We’d better wait for a while,” I said to Darkscar, the tone of my voice unwittingly usurping his command. He didn’t bother about it. In all probability, he was pleased to see me accepting some of the responsibility for seeing the madness through to its end.
At first, for a couple of minutes or so, I didn’t take any notice of the female’s suggestion for keeping warm. But the wetness and the harrowing cold soon drove away my distaste for close contact. So we huddled, closer and closer, every one of us trying to get some treasured part of his anatomy into the center of the group where the faint heat of our bodies was trapped and held.
I had an arm wrapped round one of the tunnel dwellers, and I could feel her shoving her small bones as deeply into my flesh as they would go. Obviously, she was feeling the cold. I remembered that the hives of the Aetemans were maintained at a high temperature and humidity.
I couldn’t help remembering as she pressed so tightly against me that she was “female.” But there was nothing sexual in the closeness, from either of our points of view. Physically, she was quite sexless. The whole idea made me feel strange, and I can’t quite describe my own attitude.
It struck me that I did not know her name, that it had not really occurred to me that she would even have a name. I asked her. She looked up into my face, and I looked back into her eyes. For the first time, she didn’t taking me in, absorbing my features, manner, expression. I suddenly cursed myself for earlier stupidity. How could I have expected her to stop regarding me as a stranger, instantly turn away. Her tiny black pupils remained absolutely fixed. She wasn’t merely memorizing me, she was just like any other stranger, when I didn’t even know her name?
“Pia,” she replied, and I read in her voice that from then on I didn’t need to be afraid of being shot in the back stranger or no stranger. Whether she’d promoted me to the hive or placed me in some special subrank of the stranger category I don’t know. Whichever it was, she was now with me rather than against me.
The other female was called Heli. I made sure that they knew our names, and at the same time made sure that 1 knew the names of the Falcorians. Pia had just taught me a new significance in the fact that we use individual names. I’d always five more or less in a world where there was me and everyone else, Mark Chaos and “strangers.” That one moment of self-criticism didn’t change me, of course, and the novelty of learning something soon wore off. But while it lasted, it was there. Besides Comarre, the Felides were the two men who had covered us before, Diall and Valens, and a man called Lestock. I’d always thought of all Falcorians as looking pretty much the same, but that was ridiculous when I actually looked.
Pia was right, and the snow did stop. Her gesture translated to a quarter of an hour, literally speaking, but how it did it, I was not disposed to consider. Huddling together had protected us better than I’d anticipated. Things didn’t look quite as bad as they might have when we started off again.
SKYWOLF
If one had to decide who was to blame for the Beast war, then it would be a matter of opinion whether the major part of it was to fall on Heljanita the toymaker or upon Daniel Skywolf of Sula and David Starbird of Home. For Starbird, there is at least the excuse that he was in love, although some might consider that to require excuse, rather than to be an excuse. For Skywolf, there are no excuses except stupidity and vanity, and these also may better be said to require excuses.
Skywolf was encouraged both by Eagleheart and by the crooked wheel, but it was neither of these which was responsible for his being a fool in the first place. And it was also Skywolf’s fault that he was very slow to realize that he had been a fool.
In fact, it was not until after the war that Skywolfs world began to fall apart. Not until Angeline was returned to him and legally married to him was he able to compare the salvage of his personal status quo with the cost the galaxy had paid to restore it. But gradually, the results of the chain of
events which he had initiated fell upon his conscience. For seven years he lived with it, bitter and alone. His gathering guilt persuaded him to isolate Sula from the rest of the galaxy, to quarantine himself from causing further misery and destruction. He refused to take any part in the supposed salvage of civilization via the Aurita-Falcorian Confederacy, and he refused to listen to Darkscar when the collector came to him with his appeal for help.
The reaction to being exposed as a fool leads him to more foolish actions, to which there is more reaction…
But Skywolf is a good man, if not a clever one. He is a Beast and a Beast Lord. In addition, he has a wife of considerable character and drive. And so, when the time comes to actually face Heljanita in the battle of the Saraca system, Skywolf takes to space with all the strength he can muster. He has no battleship, as do Rayshade and Deathdancer.
Sula is not a rich world, and even if Darkscar had been heard, it is doubtful whether such a colossus could have been paid for. Even the ships which he has are not too well prepared. They are almost all the same ships which made up his contingent of the Beast fleet during the last war.
Skywolfs presence in the Beast fleet is not, therefore, highly significant in terms of tactical advantage or firepower. The essential thing about Skywolf is that he will survive the battle and has yet to play a hand in the restructuring of the Kingdom of the Beasts. And Skywolf knows something which is known to none of the other Beast Lords. He knows it not because he is clever enough to see it where they cannot but because he feels it so much more deeply. He knows that war is not a matter of honor. He knows that it is not an extension of the duel or of a tactical game. He knows that the “days of glory” were an illusion. While Rayshade needs war for his own purposes, and the battle hungry Falcorians never question the morality of war, Skywolf is opposed to the actual process of war.
In all the reaction which follower the massacre in the House of Stars, the war itself never seemed to be called in question. All the hatred was directed at people: at Eagleheart, Stormwind, and Skywolf himself. Even Ray-shade and Deathdancer have preferred to forget what actually happened in the House of Stars. Only Mark Chaos and Daniel Skywolf remember the bloodlust, the fever of hatred and fear.
If the battle of Saraca serves to bring Skywolf and Sula back into the galaxy on an active level, Skywolf will be an important man, fool or no fool.
MORE INTERSTELLAR MELODRAMA
Daniel Skywolf did not want to be in the battle of Saraca at all. He had refused to offer Darkscar help for the last seven years, not because he was a coward, or because he doubted Heljanita’s strength, but because he wanted nothing to do with it.
Yet here he was in the very tip of Rayshade’s arrowhead, pressed forward into battle yet again, with a fleet nearly twice the size of the one which had fought for him in the Beast war at his back and an even larger one before him.
Once, he thought, as his eyes strayed oyer the control screen which had been hastily altered so that he could see the toy fleet, combat was an amusement. It was a sport. Something to be enjoyed, remembered and anticipated with pleasure. The feel of a sword in my hand was exhilaration. The feel of a victory was ecstasy. And now it is all sour. It is no longer a part of life but a way to die. The element of danger is exactly the same. I have fought before, knowing that I had more chance of dying than of living. I was always optimistic then, and this fleet of machines does not overawe me now. But I am scared, scared of myself, and of them, and of the whole galaxy.
There used to be fear. A delicious fear which tasted like raw alcohol, which filled my head and supplied my hand with power. Then it was a spur. Now it is a disease.
Silver dots flashed from screen to screen, and his control gunner blazed away fruitlessly.
“Cut away!” howled a sidescreen man, and Skywolf rocked the ship to avoid a shot he never felt, if it was even fired. There was plenty of activity from the gunners but no shouts signaling the death of a silver ship.
He heard the control gunner muttering “They won’t die. They don’t die.”
“Fire straighter!” he spat, and rocked the ship because he felt like it. His mind was cold, and he did not seem to be applying his reflexes with the same fervor. But he was just as fast as ever, except for the little that age had taken away. Ten years ago, he thought, we were all young men- But we have aged more than that. The Beast Lords are rulers now, not symbols.
Cain Rayshade’s voice chattered in his ear, coming over the high-omega link, sounding clipped and unnatural. Sky-wolf hardly heard him, but his hands obeyed the injunction. As the arrowhead turned, Skywolf tinned to lead it, with pale dots streaming behind him, filling the rear screen in a neat triangle.
Skywolf watched the toys regrouping and saw what the robots were doing even though his eyes covered only a fraction of the six thousand ships. Almost before Rayshade’s excited orders sent his fingers scuttling across the keys, he was willing the ship to turn, working out the curve that would take them into that misty black gap in the silver curtain.
He glanced round as the toys closed in on his sides, and the control gunner hunted unsuccessfully for targets, The gunners, most of them the same men who had fought beside him in the Beast war, were firing with practiced precision and deadly coldness. But they were no longer as good as the fierceness of the Beast war had made them.
“I hit him,” he heard one of them murmur; a small, birdlike man with eyes like dwarf stars. “They can’t be killed.”
They’re better than we are, thought Skywolf as he turned his eyes back to the control screen and made slight adjustments with his thumbs. Rayshade was ordering the fleet to tighten and turn, and the rear screen gunner informed him in a dead tone that he was drifting off line.
Were losing formation, he thought. Slipping sideways and losing the edges. Once we can no longer move as a unit, they’ll take us to pieces. That’s why they’re giving us all the ground we want. They’re just waiting like vultures. And they have all the time they want. It doesn’t matter how much we gain, we can’t keep it. They could use their ships to ram us, one by one. They don’t care. They only want to win, not to live.
“One dead!” screamed a sidescreen gunner, a big man with a peculiarly high-pitched voice. It was a hint of the old exultation, the old feel of battle. But there was nothing of the old atmosphere in the way the shout was received.
Even the silence is different, thought Skywolf. There’s fear in the air. Were breathing it in and out. It is a disease.
He watched the toys sweep out of the path of the arrowhead, regrouping into a wide tube and reducing its diameter slowly. They lost seconds as they did so but no ships. The toys were jealously preserving their numerical advantage. In the long run, it was that which would count.
What am I doing here? he asked himself. Why did I come?
Cain Rayshade ordered the fleet to curve again, and again quickly. Deathdancer’s voice joined in too, warning stragglers and drifters, trying to keep the fleet together. Deathdancer knows who’s out of line, mused Skywolf. Deathdancer knows who’s in the battle and where. Ray-shade only knows the number of pale lights on his screen, what configuration we have, and what to do. Rayshade’s in this for himself, not for the Beasts. It seemed significant when he thought it, but immediately after it ceased to matter at all.
With time on their side, the Beasts smashed their way out of the toys’ tube, sustaining hardly any damage at all. It was going to be a long, laborious battle. Every second, every death had to be earned and paid for. If there was glory to be won, it would not be for the warriors, but for their leaders. This was no battle for individualists.
Although he could not see most of the screens and it was impossible to see dots disappearing in quantity, Sky-wolf could feel the losses accumulating slowly. He believed that the toys were losing more ships than the Beasts, but it was not two for one or anything like it. Nobody was winning.
Something”s wrong, puzzled Skywolf. They should be faster. Their shooting should be better
. But they’re so slow. They aren’t cutting us to pieces the way they should be. What’s their handicap? Firepower?
Once, eight or ten years ago, Skywolf might have thought that it was simple superiority. He would have believed that no metal man could be as good as a real man. But he no longer thought in those terms. Now it was firepower and tactics which dominated his view. The game was one of skill, not of identity.
The magnetism of combat had died in Daniel Skywolf.
CHAOS’S STORY CONTINUED
We made better time once the snow had stopped falling. We could see, and this gave us a great deal of confidence. The air was clean and the wind had dwindled to a slight reminder of the intensity which the cold could muster if it wanted to.
While we still had not come in sight of the citadel-three hours later and two thousand feet higher—we stopped again, weary but a great deal more optimistic.
“What’s that smell?” asked Lestock.
We tasted the air critically. “Something burning. Or something was burning,” I stated.
Darkscar was scanning the snow-mottled slopes with a keen eye. He pointed ahead, slightly upward and through a crack made by two converging slopes. “Look!” We followed the direction of his finger, and saw snow-covered rocks. But the snow was different. It did not reflect the wan light in the same way. It was a dull, dirty gray. Higher up, there was a good deal of fog and low cloud. We all jumped immediately to the conclusion that Heljanita’s fortess was somewhere nearby, and was in some way responsible for these phenomena.
“The ships taking off,” guessed Darkscar. “They must have upset the local weather quite a bit. That’s ash on the far slopes.” There was a hint of triumph in his voice, although there was little enough to feel glad about yet.
All I said was “Good.”
We went on, or rather up. Once we had negotiated the crack, we were on the right mountain. It was only a matter of locating the fortress inside the cloud and fog. Luckily, the fog was only sporadic and clearing quickly. We had no difficulty with visibility, lack of which could have led to extreme danger on the treacherous face of the mountain.
Day of Truth Page 9
