Empire of the East

by Fred Saberhagen

  And somewhere outside his walls, waiting to be found—the Elephant. Ekuman rubbed his palms together in impatience.

  Having taken his book to the window for the light, Elslood had evidently located in it the passage he sought. He was reading silently now, nodding to himself like a man confirming an opinion.

  At last he cleared his throat and spoke. “It was a quotation, Lord Ekuman, nearly word for word. From this—which is either a fable or a history of the Old World, I know not which. I will translate.” Elslood put back his wizard’s hood from his bush of silvery hair, cleared his throat again, and read out in a firm voice:

  “Said Indra to the demon Namuci, I will slay thee not by day or night, neither with the staff nor with the bow, neither with the palm of the hand nor with the fist, neither with the wet nor with the dry.”

  “Indra?”

  “One of the gods, Lord. Of lightning…”

  “And of Elephants?” Sarcasm bit in Ekuman’s voice. Elephant was the name of some creature, real or mythical, of the Old World. Here in the Broken Lands depictions of this beast were to be seen in several places: stamped or painted on Old World metal, woven into a surviving scrap of Old World cloth that Ekuman had seen, and carved, probably at some less ancient time, upon a rock cliff in the Broken Mountains.

  And now, somehow, the Elephant had come to be the symbol of those who called themselves the Free Folk. Far more important, a referent of this symbol still existed in the form of some real power, hidden somewhere in this land that refused to accept Ekuman as its conqueror—so the Satrap’s wizards assured him, and so he believed. By all surface appearances the land was his, the Free Folk were only an outlaw remnant; yet all the divinings of his magicians warned him that without the Elephant under his control his rule was doomed to perish.

  Still he was not really expecting the answer that Elslood gave him:

  “Possibly, Lord, quite possibly. In at least one image that I have seen elsewhere, Indra is shown as mounted on what I believe to be an Elephant.”

  “Then read on.”

  The ominous tone was plain in Ekuman’s voice; the wizard read on quickly: “‘But he killed him in the morning twilight, by sprinkling over him the foam of the sea.’ The god Indra killed the demon Namuci, that is.”

  “Hum.” Ekuman had just noticed something: Indra–Ardneh. Namuci–Ekuman. Of course a power of magic could reside in words, but hardly in this simple transposition of syllables. The discovery of the apparent verbal trickery brought him relief rather than alarm. The old man, unable to strike back with effect, had still managed to work some subtlety into a dying threat. Subtlety was hardly substance, even in magic.

  Ekuman let himself smile faintly. “Fragile sort of demon, to die of a little sea-spray,” he commented.

  Relieved, Elslood indulged himself in a light laugh. He leafed through a few more pages of his book. “As I recall the story, Lord, this demon Namuci had kept his life, his soul, hidden in the sea-foam. Therefore was he vulnerable to it.” Elslood shook his head. “One would have thought it a fairly clever choice for a hiding place.”

  Ekuman grunted noncommittally. At the sound of a step he turned, to see Zarf entering the Presence Chamber. Zarf was younger and shorter than Elslood and also resembled far less the popular conception of a wizard. Judged by appearance, Zarf might have been a merchant or a prosperous farmer—save for the toad-familiar, which rode now under a fold of cloak at his shoulder, all but invisible save for its lidded eyes.

  “You have already finished looking at the old man’s body? It told you nothing?”

  “There is nothing to be learned from that, Lord.” Zarf tried to meet Ekuman’s gaze boldly, then looked away. “I can make a further examination later—but there is nothing.”

  In silent but obvious dissatisfaction Ekuman regarded his two magicians, who awaited his pleasure standing motionless but otherwise quite like children in their fear. It was a continual enjoyment to the Satrap to have power over people as powerful as these. Of course it was not by any innate personal strength or skill that Ekuman could dominate Elslood and Zarf. His command over them had been given to him in the East, and well they knew how effectively he might enforce it. The toad-familiar, beneath any threat of punishment, squealed shrilly in some private mirth.

  Having given the wizards time to consider the possible consequences of his wrath, Ekuman said, “Since neither of you can now tell me anything of value, you had better get to your crystals and inkpools and see what you can learn. Or has either of you some stronger method of clairvoyance to propose?”

  “No, Lord,” said Elslood, humble.

  “No, Lord.” But then Zarf dared to attempt defense. “Since this Elephant we seek is doubtless not a living creature, but some work of…engineering, science…” The absurd words still came hard to Zarf. “…then to locate it, to find out anything about it more than we know already, that it exists and is important, this may be beyond the skill of any man in divination….” And Zarf’s voice trailed off in fear as his glance returned to Ekuman’s face.

  Ekuman moved wearily across the Presence Chamber, opened a door, and set foot upon the stair that led up to his private apartments. “Find me the Elephant,” he ordered, simply and dangerously, ere he began to climb. As he went, his voice came drifting down to them: “Send me the Master of the Troops, and the Master of the Reptiles as well. I will have my power in this land made secure, and I will have it quickly!”

  “The day of his daughter’s wedding draws near,” Zarf whispered, nodding solemnly. The two men looked grimly at each other. Both knew how important it was to Ekuman that his power should be, or at least appear, seamless and perfect on the day when the Lords and Ladies from other Satrapies around appeared here at the Castle for the wedding feast.

  “I will go down,” sighed Elslood at last, “and try if I may learn something from the old one’s corpse. And I will see to it that the ones he wants are summoned. Do you stay here and endeavor again to achieve some useful vision.” Zarf, nodding in agreement, was already hurrying to the alcove where he kept his own devices; he would pour a pool of ink and gaze into it.

  On the first landing of the stair below the Presence Chamber Elslood drew aside to make room, and bowed low to the Princess Charmian, who was going up. Her beauty rose through the dim passage like a sun. She wore cloth of bronze and silver and black, and a scarf of red and black for her betrothed. Her serving-women, whom she chose for ugliness, came following in a nervous file.

  Charmian ascended past Elslood without deigning to give him a word or glance. For his part, as always, he could not keep himself from following her with his eyes until she was out of sight.

  He straightened, then, and put a hand into a secret pocket of his robe and touched the long strands of her golden hair that he kept there. Those hairs had been obtained at deadly risk, and twisted, with many a powerful incantation, into an intricate magic knot of love. And then, alas, the love-charm had proved useless to Elslood—as he had known all along, in his heart, that it would be. Any mastery of love was forbidden him, as part of the price of his great sorcerer’s power.

  And he thought now that the knot of Charmian’s golden hair would be of doubtful benefit to any man. One as utterly evil as the Princess could hardly be moved by any charm to anything like love.

  II

  Rolf

  When he came to the end of the furrow and swung the rude plow around and chanced to raise his eyes, Rolf beheld a sight both expected and terrible—the winged reptiles of the Castle were coming out to scour the countryside once again.

  May some demon devour them, if they come near our fowl today! he thought. But he was no sorcerer to have the ordering of demons. He could do nothing but stand helplessly and watch.

  At Rolf’s back, the afternoon sun was some four hours above the Western Sea, the shore being several kilometers from where Rolf stood, the land between for the most part low and marshy. Looking ahead, he could see above nearby treetops part of th
e jagged line of the Broken Mountains, half a day’s walk to the east. He could not see the Castle itself, but he knew well where it was, perched on the south side of the central pass that pierced those mountains through from east to west. The reptiles came from the Castle, and there dwelt those who had brought the reptiles to the Broken Lands—folk so evil that they seemed themselves inhuman, though they wore human form.

  Spreading westward now from the direction where the Castle lay, in Rolf’s eyes disfiguring all the fairness of the springtime sky, came a swarming formation of dots. Rolf had heard that the reptiles’ human masters sent them out to search for something more than prey, that there was something hidden that Ekuman most desperately desired to find. Whether that was true or not, the reptiles most certainly ravaged the farmers’ lands for food and sport.

  Rolf’s sixteen-year-old eyes were sharp enough to pick out now the movement of leathery wings. The flying creatures of the Castle swelled slowly in his vision, the thin and spreading cloud their hundreds made came hurtling toward him. He knew that their eyes were sharper even than his. Almost daily now the reptiles came, picking over the land already so much robbed and torn by the new masters from the East; a land that had now grown hungry despite its richness, with every month more farmers killed or robbed and driven from their soil. With villages turned into prison camps, or emptied out to give the Satrap Ekuman the slave labor that he must have to build his Castle stronger still….

  Did the foul grinning things fly ten or only five times faster than a man might run? With a big-boned hand Rolf put back a mop of his black hair, tilting back his head to watch as the vanguard of the reptiles now came nearly straight above him. A belt of rope around Rolf’s lean waist held up his trousers of good homespun; his shirt of the same stuff was open in the warmth of spring and work. He was of quite ordinary height, and spare as a knotted rope. His shoulders in their bony flatness looked wider than they were. Only his wrists and callused hands and his bare feet seemed to have been made a size or so too big to fit the rest of him.

  In the distance the reptiles had seemed to be flying in a compact formation. But now Rolf could see that they had been scattered widely by their differences of course and speed. Here and there a single flyer would pause, coasting in wide flat circles, to scan something on the earth below. Sometimes then the reptile would straighten out again into effortless speed of flight, having decided that whatever it had seen was not worth dropping for. But sometimes it would dive. Stoop. Plunge wing-folded, like a falling rock—

  Above Rolf’s home! With a shock at his heart he saw the winged predator plummeting to strike. Before it vanished below the level of the trees Rolf was running toward it, toward his home. The clearing and the little house were invisible from here, more than a kilometer away over broken, scrub-grown country.

  The reptile would be diving after the fowl in their coop, that must be it, though after the last attack Rolf’s mother had tried to hide the coop under a net of strings, woven with vines and branches to make a screen. Rolf’s father still lay abed with a crushed foot, mangled by a falling stone while he had been doing his stint of forced labor on the Castle. Small Lisa might be running out now as she had run out to challenge the last reptile, to strike with a broom or a hoe at a fanged intelligent killer who was nearly as big as she….

  Between the field where he had been working and his home, Rolf’s path lay across land made unplowable by its ravines and rocks. The familiar track wound shallowly uphill and down; it leaped and bounded under him now, with the big strides of his running. Never before had he gone over this path so fast. He kept looking ahead, and his fear kept growing, because of the strange fact that the raiding reptile had not yet risen, with prey or without.

  Someone might have defied the Castle’s law and slain the thing—but who, and how? Rolf’s father could scarcely stand up from his bed. His mother? In obedience to another Castle law, the household had already been stripped of any weapon larger than a short-bladed kitchen knife. Little Lisa—Rolf pictured her, fighting with some garden implement against those teeth and talons, and he tried to run faster yet.

  So it did not seem reasonable that the reptile should be dead. Yet neither should it be sitting at ease and unmolested, dining on some slaughtered hen. By now Rolf was close enough to his home to have heard sounds of fighting or alarm, but there was only ominous silence.

  When he ran at last into the clearing and beheld the total ruin of the simple dwelling that had been his home, it seemed to Rolf that he knew already what he must find, that he had known it from his first sight of the stooping reptile.

  And at the same time the truth was becoming unknowable. It was beyond anything that the mind could hold.

  Smoke and flames, such as he had seen in the past devouring other houses destroyed by the invader, might have made the truth before him now more credible. But the only home Rolf could remember had been simply kicked apart, knocked to pieces like a child’s play-hut, like something not worth burning. It had been a small and simple structure; no great strength had been needed to topple its thatch and poles.

  Rolf was scarcely aware of crying out. Or of the reptile, flapping up in heavy alarm from where it had been crouched over a dead fowl—one of the birds set free by the collapse of the coop when the flimsy house had been knocked down. The destruction had been done before the reptile came. By some roving party of the soldiers of the Castle—who else? No one in the Broken Lands knew when the invaders might come to him, or what might be done to him when they did.

  Digging wildly in the shabby wreckage of the little house, Rolf uncovered shapes that seemed misplaced as in a dream. He found trivial things. Here was a cooking pot, the worn place on its handle somehow startling in its familiarity. And here…

  A voice that had been shouting names, Rolf’s own voice, now fell silent. He stood looking down at something still and supine, a shape of flesh and hair and unfamiliar nakedness and blood. His mother had looked something like this thing of death. She had resembled this, this shape that now lay here amid all the other ruined things and shared all their stillness.

  Rolf had to go on looking. Here was the body of a man, clothed, with a face very like his father’s. His father’s eyes, calm and unprotesting now, were opened toward the sky. No more fear and worry and held-in anger. No more answers to give a son. No more pain and sickness from a crushed foot. No more pain, though there was blood, and Rolf saw now that his father’s open shirt revealed red-lipped, curious wounds. Why yes, Rolf thought to himself, nodding, those are the wounds that a sword must make. He had never seen the like before.

  He shouted no longer. He looked around for the reptile but it had gone. After he had searched on through what was left of the house and the few outbuildings, he came to a halt at the edge of the clearing. He realized vaguely that he was standing in an attitude of thoughtfulness, though in fact his mind was almost entirely blank. But he had to think. Lisa was not here. If she had been hiding nearby, surely all his noise would have brought her out by now.

  He was distracted by the plodding into the clearing of the work-beast he had been plowing with. The animal had developed the trick of freeing itself from the harness if he left it standing alone in the field for any reason. When it came trotting into the home clearing now it halted at once, to stand shivering and whinnying at the strangeness of what it found. Rolf without thinking spoke to the animal and walked toward it, but it turned and bolted as if thrown into panic by the very ordinariness of his behavior amid this…yes, it was strange that he could be so calm.

  His heart gave another leap and he began again a frenzied digging through the wreckage. But no, Lisa’s body was not here. He circled around the clearing, staring at everything as if to make sure of what it was. Then he began coursing in a widening circle through the surrounding woods. His mind made a motionless corpse of every fallen log. He began to call Lisa’s name again, softly. Either she had run far away, or else the soldiers had…

  It was not believable,
it was not possible that the soldiers could have come here and committed all these horrors, and he, Rolf, had remained out in the fields calmly plowing. So it had not really happened at all. Because it was not possible. And all the while he knew that it was true.

  …Or else the soldiers had taken Lisa with them. If the murders were possible, so might that be. Rolf found himself back in the clearing, averting his eyes from the nakedness of the thing that had been his mother. He did not let himself think of how her clothes had been taken from her, or why, though those also were things he knew. The men from the Castle. The soldiers. The invaders. The East.

  “Lisa!” He was out in the scrub forest again, calling more loudly for his sister. The afternoon was very warm even here in the shade of the trees. Rolf raised his arm to wipe sweat from his face with his sleeve, and saw that in his hand he was carrying the little kitchen knife, which he must have picked up from amid the ruins of the house.

  And then a little later, when his mind with a little inward jump moved another notch on its recovery from the craziness of shock, he found himself walking along the narrow rutted road that passed near what had been his home. The world around him looked strangely normal, as if this were nothing but another day. He was trudging in an easterly direction, taking the way that would bring him to a larger highway and ultimately to the Castle brooding on its height above the pass. Where did he think he was going? What was it he meant to do?

  Again a little later, the world became thin and gray before his eyes. He felt that he was fainting, and he saw down quickly in the grass beside the road. He did not faint. He did not rest either, though the muscles of his legs were quivering with exhaustion. He saw that his clothes had recently been torn in several places. He had just been running through the woods, calling Lisa’s name. But she was gone, and he was not going to be able to get her back.