Turtledove, Harry - Anthology 07 - New Tales Of The Bronze Age - The First Heroes (with Doyle, Noreen)

by The First Heroes (anth. ) (lit)

  It would have been—but the folk did not come forth. I began to wonder if they could come forth, or if some dreadful fate had overwhelmed them. But even if they had been conquered and destroyed, whatever folk had defeated them should have been in evidence. No one was.

  "We should have brought shes with us and settled here," Nessus said one day. "We'd have the land to ourselves." "Would we?" I looked about. "It does seem so, I grant you, but something tells me we would get little joy from it."

  Oreus looked about, too, more in bewilderment than anything else. Then he said one of the few things I have ever heard him say with which I could not disagree, either then or later: "If the folk are gone out of the land, no wonder the tin's stopped coming down to the Inner Sea."

  "No wonder at all," I said. "Now, though, we have another question." Confusion flowed across his

  face until I posed it: "Why have the folk gone from this land?"

  "Sickness?" Nessus suggested. I let the word lie there, not caring to pick it up. It struck me as

  unlikely, in any case. Most folk are of sturdy constitution. We die, but we do not die easily. I had

  trouble imagining a sickness that could empty a whole countryside.

  Then Oreus said his second sensible thing in a row. Truly this was a remarkable day. "Maybe," he

  said, "maybe their gods grew angry at them, or tired of them."

  A cool breeze blew down from the north. I remember that very well. And I remember wondering whether it was but a breeze, or whether it was the breath of some god either angry or tired. "If that be so," I said, "if that be so, then we will not take tin back to the Inner Sea, and so I shall hope it is not so."

  "What if it is?" Nessus asked nervously, and I realized I was not the only one wondering if I felt a god's breath.

  I thought for a moment. With that breeze blowing, thought did not come easily, and the moment stretched longer than I wished it would have. At last, I said, "In that case, my friend, we will do well enough to go home ourselves, don't you think?"

  "Do our gods see us when we are in this far country?" Oreus asked.

  I did not know the answer to that, not with certainty. But I pointed up to the sun, which, fortunately, the clouds and mist did not altogether obscure at that moment. "He shines here, too," I replied. "Do you not think he will watch over us as he does there?"

  That should have steadied him. But such was the empty silence of that countryside that he answered only, "I hope so," in tones suggesting that, while he might hope, he did not believe.

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  Two days—or rather, two nights—later, a nuggy came into our camp. I would not have known him from a piskie or a spriggan, but a nuggy he declared himself to be. I had sentries out around our fires, but he appeared in our midst without their being any the wiser. I believe he tunneled up from under the ground.

  He looked like one who had seen much hardship in his time. I later learned from him that was the true aspect of nuggies, but he owned he had it more than most. He was ill-favored, a withered, dried-up creature with a face as hard and sharp as an outcropping of flint. In other circumstances, his tiny size might have made it hard for me to take him seriously; he was no larger in the head and torso than one of us would have been at two years, and had only little bandy legs below, though his arms were, in proportion to the rest of him, large and considerably muscled.

  His name, he said, was Bucca. I understood him with difficulty. We did not speak the same language, he and I, but our two tongues held enough words in common to let us pass meaning back and forth. His rocky face worked with some mixture of strong emotion when he came before me. "Gods be praised!" he said, or something much like that. "Old Bucca's not left all alone in the dark!" And he began to weep, a terrible thing to see.

  "Here, now. Here, now," I said. I gave him meat and bread. Had we had wine, I would have given him that as well. But for us to carry wine would have been like stags carrying fire with which to roast them once they were slain.

  He ate greedily, and without much regard for manners. Though he was so small, he put away a startling amount. Grease shone on his thin lips and his chin when he tossed aside a last bone and said, "I hoped some folk would come when the tin stopped. I prayed some folk would come. But for long and long, no folk came. I drew near to losing hope." More tears slid down the cliffsides of his cheeks.

  "Here now," I said again, wanting to embrace him yet fearing I would offend if I did. Only when he came over and clung to my foreleg did I take him up in my arms and hold his small chest against my broad one. He was warm and surprisingly hard; his arms, as they embraced me, held even more strength than I would have guessed. At last, when he seemed somewhat eased, I thought I could ask him, "Why did the tin stop?"

  He stared at me, our two faces not far apart. Moonlight and astonishment filled his pale eyes. "You know not?" he whispered. "That is the truth: I know not," I replied. "That is why I came so far, that is why we all came so far, in the Horse of Bronze—to learn why precious tin comes no more to the Inner Sea." "Why?" Bucca said. "I will tell you why. Because most of us are dead, that is why. Because where they are, we cannot live."

  I did not believe all Bucca told me. If I am to speak the whole truth here, I did not want to believe what the nuggy told me. And so, not believing, I told a party of hes to come with me so that we might see for ourselves what truth lay in his words—or rather, as I thought of it, so that we might see he was lying. "You big things are bold and brave," Bucca said as we made ready to trot away. "You will have grief of it. I am no bolder or braver than I have to be, and already I have known griefs uncounted."

  "I grieve for your grief," I told him. "I grieve for your grief, but I think things will go better for us."

  "It could be," Bucca replied. "Yes, it could be. You big things still believe in yourselves, or so it seems. We nuggies did not, not after a while. And when we did not believe, and when they did not believe . . . we died."

  "How is it that you are left alive, then?" I asked him. This question had burned in my mind since the night when he first appeared amongst us, though I had not had the heart to ask him then. Now, though, it seemed I might need the answer, if answer there was.

  But Bucca only shrugged those surprisingly broad shoulders of his. "I think I am too stubborn to know I should be dead." That, then, meant nothing to me. I have learned more since than I once knew, however. Even then, I wanted nothing more than to get away from the nuggy. And away we went, rambling east into

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  one of the more glorious mornings the gods ever made.

  It was cool. It was always cool on the Tin Isle, except when it was downright cold. A little mist clung to the hillsides. The sun had trouble burning it off. This too is a commonplace of that country. But oh! the greens in that northern clime! Yes, I say it again. Nothing round the Inner Sea can match them, especially not in summertime. And those hills were not stark and jagged, as are the hills we know, but smooth and round, some of them, as a she's breast. The plains are broad, and roll gently. Their soil puts to shame what goes by that name in our land. Yet it grew no wheat or barley, only grass. Indeed, this might have been a countryside forever without folk.

  As we trotted east, we left the hills behind us. The plain stretched out ahead, far broader than any in our own homeland. But only a cold, lonely wind sighed across it. "Plague take me if I like this place," Oreus said.

  "We need not like it," I answered. "We need but cross it."

  Though I might say such things to Oreus, before long the stillness came to oppress me, too. I began to have the feeling about this plain that one might have about a centaurs' paddock where no one happens to be at a particular time: that the folk are but gone for a moment and will soon return. About the paddock, one having such a feeling is generally right. About this plain, I thought otherwise.

  There I proved mistaken.

  I found—the entire band of hes found—I was mistaken some little while before actually realizing as much. We
hurried through the tall grass of the plain, making better time than we had before, and did not think to wonder why until Hylaeus looked down and exclaimed in sudden, foolish-sounding surprise: "We are following a trail."

  All of us stopped then, staring in surprise at the ground under our hooves. Hylaeus was quite correct, even if we had not noticed up until that time. The earth was well trodden down, the grass quite sparse, especially compared to its rich lushness elsewhere.

  Nessus asked the question uppermost in all our minds: "Who made it?"

  What he meant was, had the trail survived from the days when folk filled this land—days Bucca recalled with fond nostalgia—or was it new, the product of whatever had driven the nuggies and so many other folk to ruin? One obvious way to find the answer crossed my mind. I asked, "How long has it been since any but ourselves walked this way?"

  We studied the ground again. A trail, once formed, may last a very long time; the ground, pounded hard under feet or hooves, will keep that hardness year after year. Grass will not thrive there, not when it can find so many easier places close by to grow. And yet. . .

  "I do not think this trail is ancient," Hylaeus said. "It shows too much wear to make that likely."

  "So it also seems to me," I said, and waiting, hoping someone— anyone—would contradict me. No one did. I had to go on, then: "This means we may soon learn how much of the truth Bucca was telling."

  "It means we had better watch out," Nessus said, and who could tell him he was wrong, either?

  But for the trail, though, the land continued to seem empty of anything larger than jackdaws and rooks. It stretched on for what might have been forever, wide and green and rolling. Strange how the Tin Isle should show a broader horizon than my own home country, which, although part of the mainland, is much divided by bays and mountains and steep valleys.

  There were valleys in this country, too, but they were not like the ones I knew at home, some of which are sharp enough at the bottom to cut yourself on if you are not careful. The valleys that shaped this plain were low and gently sloping. The rivers in them ran in the summertime, when many of the streams in my part of the world go dry.

  And I will tell you something else, something even odder. While we were traveling across that plain, black clouds rolled across the sun. A cold wind from the north began to blow. Rain poured down from the sky, as if from a bucket. Yes, I tell you the truth, no matter how strange it might seem. I saw hard rain—not the drizzle and fogs we had known before—in summertime, when all around the Inner Sea a lizard will cook if it ventures out in the noonday sun. By the gods, it is so.

  Truly I was a long way from home.

  "Is it natural?" Hylaeus asked, rain dripping from his nose and the tip of his beard and the tip of

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  his tail till he flicked it about, at which point raindrops flew from it in all directions. "Can such a thing be natural?"

  "Never!" Oreus said. His tail did not flick. It lashed, back and forth, back and forth, as if it had a life of his own. "This surely must be some evil sorcery raised against us. Perhaps it is akin to whatever caused the nuggies to fail."

  "I think you may be mistaken," I told him. He glared at me—until a raindrop hit him in the eye, at which point he blinked, tossed his head, and spluttered. I went on, "Look how green the land is all around us," emphasizing my words with a broad wave of my arm. "Could it be what it is unless rain came down now and again—or more than now and again—in the summertime to keep it so?"

  Oreus only grunted. Nessus considered the greenery and said, "I think Cheiron may be right."

  "Whether he is or not, we'll be squelching through mud if this goes on much longer." As if to prove Oreus's point, his hoof splashed in a puddle—a puddle that surely had not been there before the rain began.

  The hard-packed trail helped more than somewhat, for it did not go to muck nearly so fast as the looser-soiled land to either side. We could go on, if not at our best clip, while the rain continued.

  Little by little, the steady downpour eased off to scattered showers. The wind shifted from north to east and began to blow away some of the clouds. When we forded a stream, we paused to wash ourselves. I was by then muddy almost all the way up to my belly, and my comrades no cleaner. Washing, though, proved a business that tested my hardiness, for the stream, like every stream I encountered in the Tin Isle, ran bitterly cold.

  In a halfhearted way, the sun tried to come out once more. I was glad of that. Standing under it, even if it seemed but a pale imitation of the blazing disk of light I had known around the Inner Sea, helped dry the water clinging to my coat of hair and also helped give me back at least a little warmth.

  I was, then, reluctant to leave the valley in which that stream lay, and all the more so since it was rather deeper and steeper than most of the rest in the plain. "No help for it, Cheiron," said Hylaeus, who of the other hes had the most sympathy for my weariness. "No, I suppose not," I said sadly, and set my old bones to moving once more. Some of the other centaurs went up the eastern slope of the valley at a pace no better than mine. Oreus, on the other hand, was filled with the fiery impetuosity of youth and climbed it at the next thing to a gallop. I expected him to charge across the flat land ahead and then come trotting back to mock the rest of us for a pack of lazy good-for-nothings.

  I expected that, but I was wrong. Instead, he stopped in his tracks at the very lip of the valley, which stood somewhat higher than the western slope. He stopped, he began to rear in surprise or some other strong emotion, and then he stood stock-still, as if turned to stone by a Gorgon's appalling countenance, his right arm outstretched and pointing ahead.

  "What is it?" I called grumpily. I had no great enthusiasm for rushing up there to gape at whatever had seized foolish Oreus's fancy. But he did not answer me. He simply stood where he was and kept on pointing. I slogged up the slope, resolved to kick him in the rump for making such a nuisance of himself.

  When at last I reached him, my resolve died. Before I could turn and lash out with my hind feet, my eyes followed his index finger. And then, like him, I could do nothing for long, long moments but stare and stare and stare.

  How long I stood there, I am not prepared to say. As long as the wonder ahead deserved:1 I doubt it, else I might be standing there yet.

  The great stone circle loomed up out of nothing, there on the windswept plain. Even in summertime, that wind was far from warm, but it was not the only thing that chilled me. I am not ashamed to say I was awed. I was, in fact, amazed, wondering how and why such a huge thing came to be, and what folk could have raised it.

  The sphinxes brag of the monuments they have built, there beside their great river. I have never seen them, not with my own eyes. Centaurs who have visited their country say the image of one of their own kind and the enormous stone piles nearby are astonishing. But the sphinxes, as I have said,

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  dwell in what must be the richest country any gods ever made. This . . . This stood in the middle of what I can best describe as nothing. And the sphinxes had the advantage of their river to haul stone from quarries to where they wanted it. No rivers suitable for the job here. And these blocks of stone, especially the largest in the center of the circle, the ones arranged in a pattern not much different from the outline of my hoof, were, I daresay, larger than any the sphinxes used.

  Some of this—much of this, in fact—I learned later. For the time being, I was simply stunned. So were we all, as we came up the side of the valley one after another to stare at the amazing circle. We might have been under a spell, a spell that kept us from going on and bid fair to turn us to stone ourselves.

  Brash Oreus, who had first seen the circle of standing stones, was also the one who broke that spell, if spell it was. Sounding at that moment not at all brash, he said, "I must see more." He cantered forward: an oddly stylized gait, and one that showed, I think, how truly impressed he was.

  Seeing him move helped free me from the paralysis that had s
eized me. I too went toward the stone circle, though not at Oreus's ceremonial prance.

  As I drew closer, the wind grew colder. Birds flew up from the circle, surprised and frightened that anyone should dare approach. Chaka-chaka-chak! they called, and by their cries I knew them for jackdaws.

  I do not believe I have ever seen stonework so fresh before. The uprights and the stones that topped them might have been carved only moments before. No lichen clung to them, and I had seen it mottling boulders in the plain. Hylaeus noted the same thing at almost the same time. Pointing ahead as Oreus had done before, he said, "Those stones could have gone up yesterday."

  "Yesterday," I agreed, "or surely within the past few years." And all at once, a chill colder even than the breeze pierced me to the root. That was the time in which the tin failed. Again, Hylaeus was not far behind me. "This is a new thing," he said slowly. "The passing of the folk of the Tin Isle is a new thing, too."

  Chaka-chaka-chak! the jackdaws screeched. Suddenly, they might have been to my mind carrion crows, of which I had also seen more than a few. And on what carrion had those crows, and the jackdaws, and the bare-faced rooks, and the ravens, on what c arrion had they feasted? The wind seemed colder yet, wailing out of the north as if the ice our bones remembered lay just over the horizon. But the ice I felt came as much from within me as from without.

  Oreus said, "Who made this circle, then, and why? Is it a place of magic?" Nessus laughed at that, even if the wind blew his mirth away. "Could it be anything but a place of magic? Would any folk labor so long and so hard if they expected nothing in return?"