The Chronocide Mission

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  So the traitor had to be one of Wiltzon’s students, Arne reasoned—a youngster of limited ability, an inept prentice making no progress at all in his craft, one who had received very little praise in his life. He would know he could never rise far above prentice status, and he would prefer the promise of a fine future as a fawning court server to a life of drudgery in Midd. Such a one would be only too susceptible to the prince’s flattery.

  Backward students sometimes were required to return to Wiltzon in the evening for extra lessons. This one must have caught a glimpse of Roszt and Kaynor—either when they arrived by way of Arne’s garden or later when they carelessly went out for a breath of fresh air before it was quite dark. The scouts from Slorn knew Wiltzon lived alone and anyway was to be trusted. It wouldn’t occur to them that the schooler might be giving a late lesson.

  Under the pretense of reviewing the progress of Wiltzon’s students—a legitimate concern of his—he asked which of them had required extra attention lately. The worst offender was Barlin, Wiltzon said—a thoroughly inept carpenter’s prentice. Wiltzon described Barlin’s problems disgustedly.

  “He has difficulty with everything, but it is numbers I have been drilling him on. Imagine—a carpenter’s prentice who can’t remember something he will need all his life. Other students his age learned their numbers sikes ago. He didn’t, so I have to give him extra lessons.”

  Arne quickly established that Barlin had been standing near the windows to recite about the time Roszt and Kaynor arrived. “That is, he was trying to recite,” Wiltzon said. “All he did was look out of a window and stammer.”

  “It is time Barlin was given a different vocation,” Arne said thoughtfully. “I will see to it at once.”

  Arne sent for Barlin, an ungainly youth of sixteen or seventeen who was already terrified. He broke down and confessed at once. The raid had shaken him; he had seen his mother in tears over the damage the prince’s guard had done to their home. The prince herself had flattered him and coaxed him until he agreed to help her. She promised unspecified rewards, but he hadn’t done it with the thought being paid. No one had ever needed his help before, and he simply couldn’t refuse his beautiful prince. He hadn’t realized what the result would be.

  It was an enormous tragedy, heightened by the fact that his father and mother were worthy people. If the Three were permitted to judge him, he would be ostracized for life. No village would receive him; no one-namer would work with him. He would have to become a herder, a solitary occupation that few one-namers cared for.

  But Arne could temper judgment with mercy. He wrote Barlin’s release from the carpenter prenticeship and sent him off at once to the husbandman of another village who needed help with his cattle.

  “No one-namer mentions a one-name secret to anyone,” Arne told him sternly. “If ever again you have the urge to do so, promise you will tell me before you tell anyone else.”

  The grateful Barlin solemnly promised. Unfortunately, there was nothing to keep the prince from quickly buying herself another traitor or trying to. Arne would have to be eternally vigilant.

  Old Marof returned early the next morning. No one had interfered with him when he approached Midlow Court from the south. He had seen the land warden at once and described the lasher raid to him, and that worthy official promised to tell the peer about it the next time he was able to talk with her.

  The lashers at the watchposts had paid no attention to Marof when he returned to Midd Village, but for two days no one was permitted to leave—not even Arne, who protested that the peer’s first server had orders from the peer herself to carry out. The village was so completely cut off from Midlow Court that Arne’s daily instructions from the wardens failed to arrive. He was left wondering whether none had been sent or whether the lashers had dared to interfere with an official messenger. Finally he told Hutter, his student surveyor, to walk to the court, avoiding roads and keeping to the forest as much as possible, and see what was going on there. Hutter reported no sign of activity at all. Meadow and forest near the court, where the peeragers rode and played, were empty. If the one-namers were confined to their village, every peerager in Midlow seemed to be confined to the court, and the court itself was wrapped in an ominous silence. Everyone knew the peer was in the final throes of a fatal illness. Perhaps the prince already had seized power.

  Or perhaps the peer was dead. One or the other must have happened. Hutter’s description was of a court gripped by fear or already in mourning.

  Then the peer’s heavy four-wheeled coach rolled into the village, drawn by her favorite team of white horses. This time Arne’s watch system worked perfectly. Everyone was alert, and the coach’s approach was reported when it was still a kilometer away. The warning set the entire village aflutter and emptied mills and factories. By the time the coach climbed the steep slope to High Street and halted before Arne’s dwelling, the street there was crowded with suspensefully-waiting villagers. They knelt around the carriage in a circle as soon as it came to a stop.

  The oddity was that it had no escort. There was no mistaking the peer’s ornately carved, fully enclosed coach, but the peer never traveled without her own mounted guard of lashers. On this day she seemed to be accompanied only by her coachman. No one knew what to make of that.

  Arne had been at work in the sawmill, in a pit beneath the machinery where a shaft had broken, and he was one of the last to hear of the coach’s arrival. With sawyers and prentices trailing after him, he hurried up the slope to High Street, picked his way through the kneeling villagers, and, brushing sawdust from his clothing, sank to his knees before the coach’s door.

  Everyone watched breathlessly as the door slowly opened— but it was only the peer’s elder brother, the old land warden, who clambered out. He was a small, elderly man, comfortably rotund but surprisingly energetic and one of the few peeragers who did any work. His office was responsible for roads, forests, pastures, and agriculture. He had run it competently when he was younger, but as he advanced in years and afflictions, Arne assumed many of his duties, for which the old peerager expressed his gratitude with surprising friendliness. Their relationship was more like that between a fussy but affectionate uncle and favorite nephew than peerager and commoner.

  They met often to discuss the peerdom’s problems, but always at court at the land warden’s garden lodge where he preferred to work. A visit to the village by a peerager was an extraordinary occasion—as unusual as the prince’s raid—and Arne knew the land warden would not make the journey merely because he had a message to deliver. In that case, a one-name server would have brought a message board or recited something carefully memorized. But perhaps the old warden had come to announce the peer’s death.

  Creakily he signaled Arne to rise.

  “Your service, Master,” Arne said.

  “The peer regrets her illness has long kept her from visiting her subjects,” the land warden announced in his thin, high-pitched voice. “She has appointed me her deputy and asked me to hold open audience today. Anyone in the village who has information that should be brought to the peer’s attention is invited to impart it to me. I also will hear complaints of injustice, and I will see that everything told to me has her full consideration.”

  So he had come as the peer’s emissary. Even in her desperate illness, she was capable of acting with wisdom and firmness, and this was the most effective way she could learn about the raid without turning the prince’s ire against the one-namers.

  Arne told Ravla to prepare a room for the audience, and he appointed three men and three women to act as the land warden’s servers. Margaya presented the written discriptions of the raid that Arne had asked her to collect, and other villagers waited patiently in line while one after another described the conduct of the prince’s lashers and answered questions.

  It was dark when the land warden finally left. Arne escorted him to the coach and opened its door for him. As the old man started to mount, he placed his hand gently on
Arne’s back and asked in a whisper, “Were you injured badly?”

  “A few cuts, Master. They will heal.”

  The land warden shook his head. “I fear the prince has inflicted wounds on herself that are beyond heeling. I have never seen the peer so angry. She has enormous power when she chooses to wield it. Midlow’s peeragers have forgotten that because she has used it so rarely. They are about to be reminded.”

  He gripped Arne’s arm in friendly fashion and boarded the carriage. It made a rapid descent to Midd Street, turned, and left the village at a sharp clip. Behind it, villagers were describing their interviews to each other, and rumors were already circulating.

  Two more days passed. Then Arne received a terse order. He, the Three, and six other villagers chosen by him were to be present at court at middae on the morrow for a happening. Every one-name village in the peerdom was being ordered to send representatives. They were to observe the happening carefully so they could describe it to other villagers when they returned.

  Arne gave the messenger his acknowledgement and immediately went to see Wiltzon.

  “What is a happening?” he asked.

  The old schooler was perplexed. “I have never heard of such a thing.”

  “I want you to be one of the six,” Arne said. “I will order a horse and wagon for those who have difficulty walking.”

  Wiltzon grinned. “That is against the rules.”

  “Not when we are using it to carry out the peer’s orders.”

  Arne called on Katin, the oldest one-namer in the peerdom. She was blind, but she was still a skilled seamster. She worked all of her waking hours, and her old fingers moved as nimbly as those of seamsters half her age.

  She welcomed Arne warmly. She had made swaddling clothes for Arjov’s father as well as for Arjov and Arne.

  “Katin, what is a happening?” Arne asked.

  “Happening?” Katin frowned. “It is just a word, isn’t it? It means when something happens.”

  “The peer’s servers use it as a word for a special event. I need to know what it is.”

  Katin thought long with her head tilted back and her sightless eyes fixed on the ceiling. “Happening,” she muttered. “Now I remember. It is some kind of court fuss. I haven’t heard of one since I was young. It has nothing to do with us.”

  “It does now,” Arne said. He told her about the message. His concern was that he, as the peer’s first server, might be expected to perform some role in it.

  Katin shook her head. “No. It is something for peeragers. One-namers weren’t allowed at those I remember. It has nothing to do with us.”

  With that Arne had to be content.

  He left for Midlow Court early the next morning, walking slowly and allowing himself plenty of time. This was his practice whenever he traveled. Along the way, he checked the condition of the roads, noted which drainage ditches needed clearing, inspected bridges, and turned aside to see whether buildings at the no-name compounds he passed needed repairs.

  Midlow Court loomed on the horizon long before he reached it. The old walled castle pointed its high stone tower skyward from the top of a tall, knobby hill that stood isolated in a broad, flower-flecked meadow. A splendid old forest, which on most days—and nights, too—echoed with the cries of peerager hunters, ringed the meadow. The forest was broken only by the court’s network of roads and by a slow-moving river—the same stream that rushed past Midd Village. Just below the castle and almost invisible behind another high wall was the present palace, a sprawling structure of wood and stone surrounded by its gardens and the buildings where the peer’s household staff lived. Crowded tiers of buildings descended in steps to the bottom of the hill, each rank secure behind another high wall. The lowest, where the court spilled out into the meadow, contained stables and storage buildings as well as accommodation for one-namers who worked and lived at the court.

  The castle had the same sturdy stone construction as the dwellings of Midd Village. The remainder of the court had evolved around it, creeping slowly but steadily down the hill in successive layers of peeragers’ dwellings. With the passage of time, wood had become more popular than stone, and the houses of each descending level were flimsier than those above but far more comfortable and more easily built. They also were more lavishly ornamented, it being easier to fashion intricate designs in wood than in stone. In contrast, the outer stone walls became thicker and higher, reflecting an increasing nervousness on the part of the peeragers. Some were apprehensive about the distant wars. Some feared a lasher revolt. Many were highly suspicious of the peerdom’s one-namers.

  Peeragers ventured from behind their walls only for play and amusement. The meadow was the site of games; the river, of bathing and water sports; the forest, of hunts and romantic trysts. One-namers learned to keep to the road and look straight ahead when approaching the court.

  The court was enveloped in the same uncanny silence Hutter had described. There were no creaking carts climbing or descending the steep roadway that spiraled from level to level all the way up to the castle. The sharp clicks of horses hoofs on the cobblestones, the clatter of one-name carpenters making repairs—the court required prodigious amounts of maintenance—the buzzing clamor of one-namers at work, the excited shouts and furious arguments of peeragers at play—all of that was missing. There was no one in sight, not even the gate guards.

  There was nothing in sight. Even the paddock where horses were exercised was empty.

  Arne wondered again whether the peer had died. The mysterious quiet was of a community dedicated to death.

  Guards stepped into view as Arne approached the gate. They saluted him as though he were a peerager, which he found disconcerting. One of the peer’s servers was waiting there. He directed Arne to the parade by the river where the peeragers held their outdoor ceremonies and riding contests.

  “What is a happening?” Arne asked him.

  “I don’t know,” the server said.

  Arne circled the hill, and soon he was able to see a small cluster of one-namers waiting at the distant end of the parade, looking awkward and uncomfortable in their holiday garb. They had been shunted aside even before the happening began. Their wagons and carts were parked just beyond, surrounded by tethered horses.

  Katin had been right: A happening was for peeragers. In some way it had to do with the welfare of one-namers, or they wouldn’t have been invited, but they were not a part of it. They were spectators.

  Resignedly they sat down to wait. Time passed, and the day became hotter and increasingly uncomfortable.

  From the castle tower high above them, a drum began to beat with mournful monotony. Arne waited for the sound of trumps to echo across the valley—an impressive feature of every peerager ceremony. The trumps were ancient, magical devices of metal that survived only in the Peerdom of Midlow. Their one-name performers were members of a single family, and they jealously guarded the secret of producing trump sounds. No one, not even the peer herself, was permitted near them when they were trumping.

  But the trumps remained silent. The drum beat continued. Peeragers began to file from the court gate, all of them dressed in black. For monts they had been making frantic demands for black cloth so they could have ceremonial clothing made for the peer’s funeral. That clothing was proving useful in a way no one had anticipated.

  The peeragers seemed as puzzled as the one-namers—as though they neither knew what to expect nor what might be expected of them. One of the wardens led the way, and another marched beside the column and spoke sharply to anyone who got out of line or dawdled. Commanders from the peer’s own guard kept a watchful eye on the procession and occasionally snapped an order. The peeragers were unaccustomed to such treatment. They glowered but said nothing.

  Arne and his one-namers got to their feet and waited respectfully. Never before had he seen all of the peeragers assembled at one time and place, but obviously all of them were going to be present at this happening—even children and babies
in arms carried by their one-name nurses. The elderly were assisted or carried in chairs. The procession seemed endless.

  It was a silent procession. Anyone who spoke was reprimanded sharply.

  Finally the peeragers formed an enormously long line that extended the entire length of the parade from the one-namers waiting suspensefully at the far end to the main road that led to the court gate. Only the peer, her family, and a few of her high advisors were missing.

  The court’s one-name servers followed, and they took their places behind the long row of peeragers. The drum continued its solemn, monotonous beat.

  Then lashers filed down from the court: the personal guards of various important peeragers, the court guard, a large group of lasher officers from the no-name compounds, and members of the peer’s own guard. They formed a line facing the peeragers.

  The peer arrived, carried in a chair and accompanied by her wardens and her younger daughter. The drummer followed, still thumping a solemn rhythm. Behind him came servers carrying a platform in box-like sections. They assembled it in front of the row of lashers, and the peer’s chair was placed on it, facing the line of peeragers. The land warden stood beside her. The other members of her party gathered around the platform.

  The land warden silenced the drum with a gesture and began to speak. His thin, high-pitched voice was barely audible where the little group of one-name spectators stood, and Arne had to lean forward and cup an ear to follow what was said.

  “At dawn six daez ago…”

  He was describing the lasher raid on Midd Village. He recounted it in enormous detail, reciting the items of property damaged or stolen, the villagers injured, the high iniquity of actually lashing the peer’s first server. This heinous conduct, he said, which was performed at the order of the Prince of Midlow, was in defiance of long-established custom, in defiance of common sense and decency, and in flagrant defiance of the peer’s explicit commands. It could neither be tolerated nor forgiven. The peer had ordered this happening so all of them could witness the punishment of those who perpetrated such monstrous acts.