The Last Castle

by Jack Holbrook Vance

  The Birds performed the prescribed circle, skimming the crags and pines of North Ridge. Then, setting wings aslant the upstream, they coasted away toward Far Valley.

  Over the pleasant Hagedorn domain flew the Birds and Xanten: over orchards, fields, vineyards. Peasant villages. They crossed Lake Maude with its pavilions and docks, the meadows beyond where the Hagedorn cattle and sheep grazed, and presently came to Far Valley, at the limit of Hagedorn lands.

  Xanten indicated where he wished to alight. The Birds, who would have preferred a site closer to the village where they could have watched all that transpired, grumbled and cried out in wrath and set Xanten down so roughly that had he not been alert the shock would have pitched him head over heels.

  Xanten alighted without elegance but at least remained on his feet. “Await me here!” he ordered. “Do not stray; attempt no flamboyant tricks among the lift-straps. When I return I wish to see six quiet Birds, in neat formation, lift-straps untwisted and untangled. No bickering, mind you! No loud caterwauling, to attract unfavorable comment! Let all be as I have ordered!”

  The Birds sulked, stamped their feet, ducked aside their necks, made insulting comments just under the level of Xanten’s hearing. Xanten turned with a final glare of admonition and walked down the lane which led to the village.

  The vines were heavy with ripe blackberries and a number of the girls of the village filled baskets. Among them was the girl 0. Z. Garr had thought to pre-empt for his personal use. As Xanten passed, he halted and performed a courteous salute. “We have met before, if my recollection is correct.”

  The girl smiled, a half-rueful, half-whimsical smile. “Your recollection serves you well. We met at Hagedorn, where I was taken a captive. And later, when you conveyed me here, after dark, though I could not see your face.” She extended her basket. “Are you hungry? Will you eat?”

  Xanten took several berries. In the course of the conversation he learned that the girl’s name was Glys Meadowsweet, that her parents were not known to her, but were presumably gentlefolk of Castle Hagedorn who had exceeded their birth tally. Xanten examined her even more carefully than before but could see resemblance to none of the Hagedorn families. “You might derive from Castle Delora. If there is any family resemblance I can detect, it is to the Cosanzas of Delora—a family noted for the beauty of its ladies.”

  “You are not married?” she asked artlessly.

  “No.” said Xanten, and indeed he had dissolved his relationship with Araminta only the day before. “What of you?”

  She shook her head. “I would never be gathering blackberries if I were. It is work reserved for maidens. Why do you come to Far Valley?”

  “For two reasons. The first to see you.” Xanten heard himself say this with surprise. But it was true, he realized with another small shock of surprise. “I have never spoken with you properly and I have always wondered if you were as charming and gay as you are beautiful.”

  The girl shrugged and Xanten could not be sure whether she were pleased or not, compliments from gentlemen sometimes setting the stage for a sorry aftermath. “Well, no matter. I came also to speak to Claghorn.”

  “He is yonder,” she said in a voice toneless, even cool, and pointed. “He occupies that cottage.” She returned to her blackberry picking. Xanten bowed, proceeded to that cottage the girl had indicated.

  Claghorn, wearing loose knee-length breeches of gray homespun, worked with an axe chopping faggots into stove-lengths. At the sight of Xanten he halted his toil, leaned on the axe, mopped his forehead. “Ah, Xanten. I am pleased to see you. How are the folk of Castle Hagedorn?”

  “As before. There is little to report, even had I come to bring you news.”

  “Indeed, indeed?” Claghorn leaned on the axe handle, surveyed Xanten with a bright blue gaze.

  “At our last meeting,” went on Xanten, “I agreed to question the captive Mek. After doing so I am distressed that you were not at hand to assist, so that you might have resolved certain ambiguities in the responses.”

  “Speak on,” said Claghorn. “Perhaps I shall be able to do so now.”

  “After the council meeting I descended immediately to the storeroom where the Mek was confined. It lacked nutriment; I gave it syrup and a pail of water, which it sipped sparingly, then evinced a desire for minced clams. I summoned kitchen help and sent them for this commodity and the Mek ingested several pints. As I have indicated, it was an unusual Mek, standing as tall as myself and lacking a syrup sac. I conveyed it to a different chamber, a storeroom for brown plush furniture, and ordered it to a seat.

  “I looked at the Mek and it looked at me. The quills which I removed were growing back; probably it could at least receive from Meks elsewhere. It seemed a superior beast, showing neither obsequiousness nor respect, and answered my questions without hesitation.

  “First I remarked: “The gentlefolk of the castles are astounded by the revolt of the Meks. We had assumed that your life was satisfactory. Were we wrong?’

  “ ‘Evidently.’ I am sure that this was the word signaled, though never had I suspected the Meks of wit of any sort.

  “ ‘Very well then,’ I said. In what manner?’

  “ ‘Surely it is obvious. We no longer wished to toil at your behest. We wished to conduct our lives by our own traditional standards.’

  “The response surprised me. I was unaware that the Meks possessed standards of any kind, much less traditional standards.”

  Claghorn nodded. “I have been similarly surprised by the scope of the Mek mentality.”

  “I reproached the Mek: ‘Why kill? Why destroy our lives in order to augment your own?’ As soon as I had put the question I realized that it had been unhappily phrased. The Mek, I believe, realized the same; however, in reply he signaled something very rapidly which I believe was: ‘We knew we must act with decisiveness. Your own protocol made this necessary. We might have returned to Etamin Nine, but we prefer this world Earth, and will make it our own, with our own great slipways, tubs and basking ramps.’

  “This seemed clear enough, but I sensed an adumbration extending yet beyond. I said, ‘Comprehensible. But why kill, why destroy? You might have taken yourself to a different region. We could not have molested you.’

  “ ‘Infeasible, by your own thinking. A world is too small for two competing races. You intended to send us back to Etamin Nine.’

  “‘Ridiculous!’ I said. ‘Fantasy, absurdity. Do you take me for a mooncalf?’

  “ ‘No,’ the creature insisted. ‘Two of Castle Hagedorn’s notables were seeking the highest post. One assured us that, if elected, this would become his life’s aim.’

  “ ‘A grotesque misunderstanding,’ I told him. ‘One man, a lunatic, can not speak for all men!’

  ‘“No? One Mek speaks for all Meks. We think with one mind. Are not men of a like sort?’

  “ ‘Each thinks for himself. The lunatic who assured you of this tomfoolery is an evil man. But at least matters are clear. We do not propose to send you to Etamin Nine. Will you withdraw from Janeil, take yourselves to a far land and leave us in peace?’

  “ ‘No. Affairs have proceeded too far. We will now destroy all men. The truth of the statement is clear: one world is too small for two races.’

  “ ‘Unluckily then, I must kill you,’ I told him. ‘Such acts are not to my liking, but, with opportunity, you would kill as many gentlemen as possible.’ At this the creature sprang upon me, and I killed it with an easier mind than had it sat staring.

  “Now you know all. It seems that either you or 0. Z. Garr stimulated the cataclysm. 0. Z. Garr? Unlikely. Impossible. Hence, you, Claghorn, you! have this weight upon your soul!”

  Claghorn frowned down at the axe. “Weight, yes. Guilt, no. Ingenuousness, yes; wickedness, no.”

  Xanten stood back. “Claghorn, your coolness astounds me! Before, when rancorous folk like 0. Z. Garr conceived you a lunatic—”

  “Peace, Xanten!” exclaimed Claghorn irritably.
“This extravagant breast-beating becomes maladroit. What have I done wrong? My fault is that I tried too much. Failure is tragic, but a phthisic face hanging over the cup of the future is worse. I meant to become Hagedorn, I would have sent the slaves home. I failed, the slaves revolted. So do not speak another word. I am bored with the subject. You can not imagine how your bulging eyes and your concave spine oppress me.”

  “Bored you may be,” cried Xanten. “You decry my eyes, my spine—but what of the thousands dead?”

  “How long would they live in any event? Lives are as cheap as fish in the sea. I suggest that you put by your reproaches and devote a similar energy to saving yourself. Do you realize that a means exists? You stare at me blankly. I assure you that what I say is true, but you will never learn the means from me.”

  “Claghorn,” said Xanten, “I flew to this spot intending to blow your arrogant head from your body—” But Claghorn, no longer heeding, had returned to his wood-chopping.

  “Claghorn!” cried Xanten.

  “Xanten, take your outcries elsewhere, if you please. Remonstrate with your Birds.”

  Xanten swung on his heel, marched back down the lane. The girls picking berries looked at him questioningly and moved aside. Xanten halted, looked up and down the lane." Glys Meadowsweet was nowhere to be seen. In a new fury he continued. He stopped short. On a fallen tree a hundred feet from the Birds sat Glys Meadowsweet, examining a blade of grass as if it had been an astonishing artifact of the past. The Birds for a marvel had actually obeyed him and waited in a fair semblance of order.

  Xanten looked up toward the heavens, kicked at the turf. He drew a deep breath and approached to Glys Meadowsweet. He noted that she had tucked a flower into her long loose hair.

  After a second or two she looked up and searched his face. “Why are you so angry?”

  Xanten slapped his thigh, seated himself beside her. “ ‘Angry’? No. I am out of my mind with frustration. Claghorn is as obstreperous as a sharp rock. He knows how Castle Hagedorn can be saved but he will not divulge his secret.”

  Glys Meadowsweet laughed—an easy merry sound, like nothing Xanten had ever heard at Castle Hagedorn. “Secret? When even I know it?”

  “It must be a secret,” said Xanten. “He will not tell me.”

  “Listen. If you fear the Birds will hear it, I will whisper.” She spoke a few words into his ear.

  Perhaps the sweet breath befuddled Xanten’s mind. But the explicit essence of the revelation failed to strike home into his consciousness. He made a sound of sour amusement. “No secret there. Only what the prehistoric Scythians termed ‘bathos’. Dishonor to the gentlemen! Do we dance with the Peasants? Do we serve the Birds essences and discuss with them the sheen of our Phanes?”

  “ ‘Dishonor’ then?” She jumped to her feet. “Then it is also dishonor for you to talk to me, to sit here with me, to make ridiculous suggestions!”

  “I made no suggestions!” protested Xanten. “l sit here in all decorum—”

  “Too much decorum, too much honor!” With a display of passion which astounded Xanten, Glys Meadowsweet tore the flower from her hair, buried it at the ground. “There. Hence!”

  “No,” said Xanten in sudden humility. He bent, picked up the flower, kissed it, replaced it in her hair. “I am not over-honorable. I will try my best.” He put his arms on her shoulders, but she held him away.

  “Tell me,” she inquired with a very mature severity, “do you own any of these peculiar insect-women?”

  “I? Phanes? I own no Phanes.”

  With this Glys Meadowsweet relaxed and allowed Xanten to embrace her, while the Birds clucked, guffawed and made vulgar scratching sounds with their wings.

  X

  The summer waned. On June 30 Janeil and Hagedorn celebrated the Fete of Flowers, even though the dike was rising high around Janeil.

  Shortly after, Xanten flew six select Birds into Castle Janeil by night and proposed to the council that the population be evacuated by Bird-lift—as many as possible, as many who wished to leave. The council listened with stony faces and without comment passed on.

  Xanten returned to Castle Hagedorn. Using the most careful methods, speaking only to trusted comrades, Xanten enlisted thirty or forty cadets and gentlemen to his persuasion, though inevitably he could not keep the doctrinal thesis of his program secret.

  The first reaction of the traditionalists was mockery and charges of poltroonery. At Xanten’s insistence, challenges were neither issued nor accepted by his hot-blooded associates.

  On the evening of September 9 Castle Janeil fell. The news was brought to Castle Hagedorn by excited Birds who told the grim tale again and again in voices ever more hysterical.

  Hagedorn, now gaunt and weary, automatically called a council meeting; it took note of the gloomy circumstances. “We then are the last castle! The Meks cannot conceivably do us harm; they can build dikes around our castle walls for twenty years and only work themselves to distraction. We are secure; but yet it is a strange and portentous thought to realize that at last, here at Castle Hagedorn, live the last gentlemen of the race!”

  Xanten spoke in a voice strained with earnest conviction: “Twenty years—fifty years—what difference to the Meks? Once they surround us, once they deploy, we are trapped. Do you comprehend that now is our last opportunity to escape the great cage that Castle Hagedorn is to become?”

  ” ‘Escape’, Xanten? What a word! For shame!” hooted 0. Z. Garr. “Take your wretched band, escape! To steppe or swamp or tundra! Go as you like, with your poltroons, but be good enough to give over these incessant alarms!”

  “Garr, I have found conviction since I became a ‘poltroon’. Survival is good morality; I have this from the mouth of a noted savant.”

  “Bah! Such as whom?”

  “A. G. Philidor, if you must be informed of every detail.”

  0. Z. Garr clapped his hand to his forehead. “Do you refer to Philidor the Expiationist? He is of the most extreme stripe, an Expiationist to out-expiate all the rest! Xanten, be sensible, if you please!”

  “There are years ahead for all of us,” said Xanten in a wooden voice, “if we free ourselves from the castle.”

  “But the castle is our life!” declared Hagedorn. “In essence, Xanten, what would we be without the castle? Wild animals? Nomads?”

  “We would be alive.”

  0. Z. Garr gave a snort of disgust, turned away to inspect a wallhanging. Hagedorn shook his head in doubt and perplexity. Beaudry threw his hands up into the air. “Xanten, you have the effect of unnerving us all. You come in here, inflict this dreadful sense of urgency, but why? In Castle Hagedorn we are as safe as in our mother’s arms. What do we gain by throwing aside all—honor, dignity, comfort, civilized niceties—for no other reason than to slink through the wilderness?”

  “Janeil was safe,” said Xanten. “Today where is Janeil? Death, mildewed cloth, sour wine. What we gain by ‘slinking’ is the assurance of survival. And I plan much more than simple ‘slinking’.”

  “I can conceive of a hundred occasions when death is better than life!” snapped Isseth. “Must I die in dishonor and disgrace? Why may my last years not be passed in dignity?”

  Into the room came B. F. Robarth. “Councilmen, the Meks approach Castle Hagedorn.”

  Hagedorn cast a wild look around the chamber. “Is there a consensus? What must we do?”

  Xanten threw up his hands. “Everyone must do as he thinks best! I argue no more; I am done. Hagedorn, will you adjourn the council so that we may be about our affairs? I to my ‘slinking’?”

  “Council is adjourned,” said Hagedorn, and all went up to stand on the ramparts.

  Up the avenue into the castle trooped Peasants from the surrounding countryside, packets slung over their shoulders. Across the valley, at the edge of Bartholomew Forest, was a clot of power-wagons and an amorphous browngold mass: Meks.

  Aure pointed west. “Look—there they come, up the Long Swale.” He tur
ned, peered east. “And look, there at Barn-bridge: Meks!”

  By common consent, all swung about to scan North Ridge. 0. Z. Garr pointed to a quiet line of browngold shapes. “There they wait, the vermin! They have penned us in! Well then, let them wait!” He swung away, rode the lift down to the plaza, crossed swiftly to Zumbeld House, where he worked the rest of the afternoon with his Gloriana, of whom he expected great things.

  The following day the Meks formalized the investment. Around Castle Hagedorn a great circle of Mek activity made itself apparent: sheds, warehouses, barracks. Within this periphery, just beyond the range of the energy cannon, power-wagons thrust up mounds of dirt.

  During the night these mounds lengthened toward the castle; similarly the night after. At last the purpose of the mounds became clear: they were a protective cover above passages or tunnels leading toward the crag on which Castle Hagedorn rested.

  The following day several of the mounds reached the base of the crag. Presently from the far end began to flow a succession of power-wagons loaded with rubble. They issued, dumped their loads and once again entered the tunnels.

  Eight of these above-ground tunnels had been established. From each trundled endless loads of dirt and rock, gnawed from the crag on which Castle Hagedorn sat. To the gentlefolk who crowded the parapets the meaning of the work at last became clear.

  “They make no attempt to bury us,” said Hagedorn. “They merely mine out the crag from below us!”

  On the sixth day of the siege, a great segment of the hillside shuddered, slumped, and a tall pinnacle of rock reaching almost up to the base of the walls collapsed.

  “If this continues,” muttered Beaudry, “our time will be less than that of Janeil.”

  “Come then,” called 0. Z. Garr in sudden energy. “Let us try our energy cannon. We’ll blast open their wretched tunnels, and what will the rascals do then?” He went to the nearest emplacement, shouted down for Peasants to remove the tarpaulin.