Balefires

by David Drake

  "Gold," he murmured. Then, "Gold! There must-the others-in God's name, there are five more and perhaps all of them-"

  "Gold," Ulf grated terribly.

  Johann ran to the nearest chest and opened it one-handed. The lid sagged wetly, but frequent use had kept it from swelling tight to the side panels. "Look at this crucifix!" the priest marveled. "And the torque, it must weigh pounds. And Lord in heaven, this-"

  "Gold," the berserker repeated.

  Johann saw the axe as it started to swing. He was turning with a chalice ornamented in enamel and pink gold. It hung in the air as he darted for safety. His scream and the dull belling of the cup as the axe divided it were simultaneous, but the priest was clear and Ulf was off balance. The berserker backhanded with force enough to drive the peen of his axehead through a sapling. His strength was too great for his footing. His feet skidded, and this time his head rang on the wall of the tomb.

  Groggy, the huge berserker staggered upright. The priest was a scurrying blur against the tunnel entrance."Priest!" Ulf shouted at the suddenly empty moonlight. He thudded up the flags of the tunnel. "Priest!" he shouted again.

  The clearing was empty except for the corpse. Nearby, Ulf heard his roan whicker. He started for it, then paused. The priest-he could still be hiding in the darkness. While Ulf searched for him, he could be rifling the barrow, carrying off the gold behind his back. "Gold," Ulf said again. No one must take his gold. No one ever must find it unguarded.

  "I'll kill you!" he screamed into the night. "I'll kill you all!"

  He turned back to his barrow. At the entrance, still smoking, waited the body of what had been the troll.

  Than Curse the Darkness

  I'm an HPL fan and started my career writing for Arkham House, the publisher founded to preserve Lovecraft's stories in book form, but "Than Curse the Darkness" is my only Cthulhu Mythos story. ("Denkirch" is Lovecraftian, but its model was HPL'S early-pre-Mythos-story "Polaris.") Ramsey Campbell, the unwitting spur to me writing my first story for publication, commissioned this one for an anthology he was editing for Arkham House, New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.

  Something that'd always puzzled me about the Mythos is why the Great Old Ones had human minions, since it was explicitly stated that if the Great Old Ones returned to Earth they would blast away all present life. Why would humans serve something that in human terms was absolute evil?

  Writing a story is a very good way to focus logically on a question. I found an answer that satisfied me in human history. I set my story in the Congo Free State while it was still the personal possession of King Leopold II, but I could have picked any number of times or places. (Knowledge of history isn't an altogether cheerful accomplishment.) Things got a little better in the Congo after Leopold defaulted on a loan and the Belgian government took over the running of the colony, but only a little better.

  At about the time this story was set, my friend Manly Wade Wellman was born in Portuguese West Africa (now Angola), just south of the Congo. (His parents were medical missionaries.) Manly retained a deep interest in Africa all his life, and his library contained many volumes about the continent.

  Histories looking back at a period can explain what happened at a time and place, but contemporary works do something even more valuable (at least for a fiction writer): they explain what people at the time thought was happening. For the story's background I used books from Manly's library like Actual Africa-The Coming Continent, as well the works of missionaries protesting Belgian atrocities and modern overviews of the "development" of the Congo Basin.

  Does that sound like a lot of research for a fantasy story? Well, maybe, but it's a habit I've kept throughout my career. I think it's stood me in good stead.

  One writerly difficulty I had with the story was in deciding on the viewpoint character. I wrote about half the piece, stopped, and threw out the whole business to start again with a female scholar instead of a male adventurer as my main protagonist. Things fell into place then.

  The title, by the way, is from the motto of The Christophers, a religious society: It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

  What with the research, the rewriting, and the fact that I was working a full-time job as Assistant Town Attorney for Chapel Hill at the time, "Than Curse the Darkness" took me five months to complete. This had an unexpected but very beneficial side-effect.

  One night shortly after I'd sent the story to Ramsey, the phone rang. By "night," I mean my wife and I were asleep. The caller introduced himself as Roger Elwood (whom I knew of as an indefatigable SF/fantasy/horror anthologist but had never met or dealt with). He told me that he was now editing a line of novels, and he'd been given my name. Would I like to write novels?

  I was absolutely dumbfounded. At the time I'd only sold about ten stories and not all those had appeared in print. I blurted that I appreciated his call, but I couldn't possibly write a novel: I'd just taken five months to write a novelette. Mr. Elwood said he regretted that, because he was prepared to offer me a two-book contract right now on the phone, if I could turn the first one in six months. I repeated my refusal, and he went elsewhere.

  That's how I avoided the Laser Books debacle, which blighted (and in some cases destroyed) the careers of so many of those who took similar offers.

  I think I'd have refused the offer under any circumstances, but my recent struggle to do a good job on "Than Curse the Darkness" armored me against the thought of "easy money." Writing isn't easy if you care about the result. Laser Books taught a lot of people not to care about their work. If there's a worse lesson to learn early in your career, I don't know what it is.

  I had to wait several more years to sell a novel. I don't regret that delay.

  "What of unknown Africa?" -H. P. Lovecraft

  The trees of the rain forest lowered huge and black above the village, dwarfing it and the group of men in its center. The man being tied to the whipping post there was gray-skinned and underfed, panting with his struggles but no match for the pair of burly Forest Guards who held him. Ten more Guards, Baenga cannibals from far to the west near the mouth of the Congo, stood by with spears or Albini rifles. They joked and chattered and watched the huts hoping the villagers would burst out to try to free their fellow. Then killing would be all right…

  There was little chance of that. All the men healthy enough to work were in the forest, searching for more trees to slash in a parody of rubber gathering. The Law said that each adult male would bring four kilograms of latex a week to the agents of King Leopold; the Law did not say that the agents would teach the natives how to drain the sap without killing the trees it came from. When the trees died, the villagers would miss their quotas and die themselves, because that too was the Law-though an unwritten one.

  There were still many untouched villages further up the river.

  "If you cannot learn to be out in the forest working," said a Baenga who finished knotting the victim to the post with a jerk that itself cut flesh, "we can teach you not to lie down for many weeks."

  The Forest Guards wore no uniforms, but in the Congo Basin their good health and sneering pride marked them more surely than clothing could have. The pair who had tied the victim stepped back, nodding to their companion with the chicotte. That one grinned, twitching the wooden handle to unfurl the ten-foot lash of square-cut hippopotamus hide. He had already measured the distance.

  A naked seven-year-old slipped from the nearest hut. The askaris were turned to catch the expression on the victim's face at the first bite of the chicotte, so they did not see the boy. His father jerked upright at the whipping post and screamed, "Samba!" just as the featheryhiss-crack! of the whip opened an eight-inch cut beneath his shoulder blades.

  Samba screamed also. He was small even for a forest child, spindly and monkey-faced. He was monkey quick, too, darting among the Guards as they spun. Before anyone could grab him he had wrapped himself around the waist of the man with the whip.

  "Wau!" shouted
the Guard in surprise and chopped down with the teak whip handle. The angle was awkward. One of his companions helped with a roundhouse swing of his Albini. The steel butt-plate thudded like a mallet on a tent stake, ripping off the boy's left ear and deforming the whole side of his skull. It did not tear him loose from the man he held. Two Forest Guards edged closer, holding their spears near the heads so as not to hit their fellow when they thrust.

  The whipped man grunted. One of the chuckling riflemen turned in time to see him break away from the post. The rough cord had cut his wrists before it parted. Blood spattered as he took two steps and clubbed his hands against the whip-wielder's neck.

  The rifleman shot him through the body.

  The Albini bullet was big and slow and had the punch of a medicine ball. The father spun backward and knocked one of the Baengas down with him. Despite the wound he stood again and staggered forward toward Samba. A pink coil of intestine was wagging behind him from the bullet's exit hole. Both the remaining rifles went off. This time, when the shots had sledged him down, five of the spearmen ran to the body and began stabbing.

  The Baenga with the whip got up, leaving Samba on the ground. The boy's eyes were open and utterly empty. Lt. Trouville stepped over him to shout, "Cease, you idiots!" at the bellowing knot of spearmen. They parted immediately. Trouville wore a waxed moustache and a white linen suit that looked crisp save for the sweat stains under his arms, but the revolver at his belt was not for show. He had once pistoled a Guard who, drunk with arrogance and palm wine, had started to burn a village which was still producing rubber.

  Now the slim Belgian stared at the corpse and grimaced."Idiots," he repeated to the shame-faced Baengas. "Three bullets to account for, when there was no need at all to fire. Does the Quartermaster charge us for spear-thrusts as well as bullets?"

  The askaris looked at the ground, pretending to be solely concerned with the silent huts or with scratching their insect bites. The man with the chicotte coiled it and knelt with his dagger to cut off the dead man's right ear. A thong around his neck carried a dozen others already, brown and crinkled. They would be turned in at Boma to justify the tally of expended cartridges.

  "Take the boy's too," Trouville snapped. "He started it, after all. And we'll still be one short."

  The patrol marched off, subdued in the face of their lieutenant's wrath. Trouville was muttering, "Like children. No sense at all."After they were gone, a woman stole from the nearest hut and cradled her son. Both of them moaned softly.

  Time passed, and in the forest a drum began to beat.

  In London, Dame Alice Kilrea bent over a desk in her library and opened the book a messenger had just brought her from Vienna. Her hair was gathered in a mousy bun from which middle age had stripped all but a hint of auburn. She tugged abstractedly at an escaped lock of it as she turned pages, squinting down her prominent nose.

  In the middle of the volume she paused. The German heading gave instructions, stating that the formula there given was a means of separating death from the semblance of life. The remainder of the page and the three that followed it were in phonetic transliteration from a language few scholars would have recognized. Dame Alice did not mouth any of those phrases. A premonition of great trees and a thing greater than the trees shadowed her consciousness as she read silently down the page.

  It would be eighteen years before she spoke any part of the formula aloud.

  Sergeant Osterman drank palm wine in the shade of a baobab as usual while Baloko oversaw the weighing of the village's rubber. This time the Baenga had ordered M'fini, the chief, to wait for all the other males to be taken first. There was an ominous silence among the villagers as the wiry old man came forward to the table at which Baloko sat, flanked by his fellow Forest Guards.

  "Ho, M'fini," Baloko said jovially, "what do you bring us?"

  Without speaking, the chief handed over his gray-white sheets of latex. They were layered with plantain leaves. Baloko set the rubber on one pan of his scales, watched it easily overbalance the four-kilogram weight in the other pan. Instead of setting the rubber on the pile gathered by the other villagers and paying M'fini in brass wire, Baloko smiled."Do you remember, M'fini," the Baenga asked, "what I told you last week when you said to me that your third wife T'sini would never sleep with another man while you lived?"

  The chief was trembling. Baloko stood and with his forefinger flicked M'fini's latex out of the weighing pan to the ground."Bad rubber," he said, and grinned. "Stones, trash hidden in it to bring it to the weight. An old man like you, M'fini, must spend too much time trying to satisfy your wives when you should be finding rubber for the King."

  "I swear, I swear by the god Iwa who is death," cried M'fini, on his knees and clutching the flapping bulk of rubber as though it were his firstborn, "it is good rubber, all smooth and clean as milk itself!"

  Two of the askaris seized M'fini by the elbows and drew him upright. Baloko stepped around the weighing table, drawing his iron-bladed knife as he did so. "I will help you, M'fini, so that you will have more time to find good rubber for King Leopold."

  Sergeant Osterman ignored the first of the screams, but when they went on and on he swigged down the last of his calabash and sauntered over to the group around the scales. He was a big man, swarthy and scarred across the forehead by a Tuareg lance while serving with the French in Algeria.

  Baloko anticipated the question by grinning and pointing to M'fini. The chief writhed on the ground, his eyes screwed shut and both hands clutched to his groin. Blood welling from between his fingers streaked black the dust he thrashed over. "Him big man, bring no-good rubber," Baloko said. Osterman knew little Bantu, so communication between him and the Guards was generally in pidgin. "Me make him no-good man, bring big rubber now."

  The burly Fleming laughed. Baloko moved closer, nudged him in the ribs."Him wife T'sini, him no need more," the Baenga said."You, me, all along Guards-we make T'sini happy wife, yes?"

  Osterman scanned the encircling villagers whom curiosity had forced to watch and fear now kept from dispersing. In the line, a girl staggered and her neighbors edged away quickly as if her touch might be lethal. Her hair was wound high with brass wire in the fashion of a dignitary's wife, and her body had the slim delight of a willow shoot. Even in the lush heat of the equator, twelve-year-olds look to be girls rather than women.

  Osterman, still chuckling, moved toward T'sini. Baloko was at his side.

  Time passed. From deep in the forest came rumblings that were neither of man or of Earth.

  In a London study, the bay window was curtained against frost and the gray slush quivering over the streets. The coal fire hissed as Dame Alice Kilrea, fingers tented, dictated to her male amanuensis. Her dress was of good linen but two buttons were missing, unnoticed, from the placket, and the lace front showed signs of lunch bolted in the library… "and, thanks to your intervention, the curator of the Special Reading Room allowed me to handle Alhazred myself instead of having a steward turn the pages at my request. I opened the volume three times at random and read the passage on which my index finger fell.

  "Before, I had been concerned; now I am certain and terrified. All the lots were congruent, referring to aspects of the Messenger." She looked down at the amanuensis and said, "Capital on 'Messenger', John." He nodded.

  "Your support has been of untold help; now my need for it is doubled. Somewhere in the jungles of that dark continent the crawling chaos grows and gathers strength. I am armed against it with the formulas that Spiedel found in the library of Kloster-Neuburg just before his death; but that will do us no good unless they can be applied in time. You know, as I do, that only the most exalted influence will pass me into the zone of disruption at the crucial time. That time may yet be years to come, but they are years of the utmost significance to Mankind. Thus I beg your unstinting support not in my name or that of our kinship, but on behalf of life itself.

  "Paragraph, John. As for the rest, I am ready to act as others have act
ed in the past. Personal risk has ever been the coin paid for knowledge of the truth."

  The amanuensis wrote with quick, firm strokes. He was angry both with himself and with Dame Alice. Her letter had driven out of his mind thoughts of the boy whom he intended to seduce that evening in Kettners. He had known for some time that he would have to find another situation. The problem was not that Dame Alice was mad. All women were mad, after all. But her madness had such an insidious plausibility that he was starting to believe it himself.

  As presumably her present correspondent did. And the letter to him would be addressed to "His Royal Highness… "

  In most places the trees grew down to the water edge, denser for being able to take sunlight from the side as well as from above. The margins of the shallow backwaters spread after each rain into sheets thick with vegetable richness and as black as the skins of those who lived along them. In drier hours there were sand banks and easy expanses on which to trade with the forest folk.

  Gomes' dugout had already slid back into the slough, leaving in the sand the straight gouge of its keel centered in the blur of bare footprints. A score of natives still clustered around Kaminski's similar craft, fondling his bolts of bright-patterned cloth or chatting with his paddlers. Then the steamship swung into sight around the wooded headland.

  The trees had acted as a perfect muffler for the chuffing engine. With a haste little short of panic, the forest dwellers melted back into concealment. The swarthy Portuguese gave an angry order and his crew shipped their paddles. Emptied of its cargo, the dugout drew only a few inches of water and could, had there been enough warning, have slid up among the tree roots where the two-decked steamer could never have followed.