The Dragon Masters

by Jack Vance

  Kergan Banbeck inspected the Weaponeer with contemptuous deliberation. In some respects, thought Kergan Banbeck, this modified and carefully inbred man resembled the sacerdotes of his own planet, notably in the clear fair skin, the strongly modeled features, the long legs and arms. Perhaps telepathy was at work, or perhaps a trace of the characteristic sour-sweet odor had been carried to him: turning his head he noticed a sacerdote standing among the rocks not fifty feet away — a man naked except for his golden torc and long brown hair blowing behind him like a pennant. By the ancient etiquette, Kergan Banbeck looked through him, pretended that he had no existence. The Weaponeer after a swift glance did likewise.

  “I demand that you release the folk of Aerlith from your ship,” said Kergan Banbeck in a flat voice.

  The Weaponeer smilingly shook his head, bent his best efforts to the task of making himself intelligible. “These persons are not under discussion; their —” he paused, seeking words “— their destiny is … parceled, quantum-type, ordained. Established. Nothing can be said more.”

  Kergan Banbeck’s smile became a cynical grimace. He stood aloof and silent while the Weaponeer croaked on. The sacerdote came slowly forward, a few steps at a time. “You will understand,” said the Weaponeer, “that a pattern for events exists. It is the function of such as myself to shape events so that they will fit the pattern.” He bent, and with a graceful sweep of arm seized a small jagged pebble. “Just as I can grind this bit of rock to fit a round aperture.”

  Kergan Banbeck reached forward, took the pebble, tossed it high over the tumbled boulders. “That bit of rock you shall never shape to fit a round hole.”

  The Weaponeer shook his head in mild deprecation. “There is always more rock.”

  “And there are always more holes,” declared Kergan Banbeck.

  “To business then,” said the Weaponeer. “I propose to shape this situation to its correct arrangement.”

  “What do you offer in exchange for the twenty-three grephs?”

  The Weaponeer gave his shoulder an uneasy shake. The ideas of this man were as wild, barbaric and arbitrary as the varnished spikes of his hair-dress. “If you desire I will give you instruction and advice, so that —”

  Kergan Banbeck made a sudden gesture. “I make three conditions.” The sacerdote now stood only ten feet away, face blind, gaze vague. “First,” said Kergan Banbeck, “a guarantee against future attacks upon the men of Aerlith. Five grephs must always remain in our custody as hostages. Second — further to secure the perpetual validity of the guarantee — you must deliver me a spaceship, equipped, energized, armed, and you must instruct me in its use.”

  The Weaponeer threw back his head, made a series of bleating sounds through his nose.

  “Third,” continued Kergan Banbeck, “you must release all the men and women presently aboard your ship.”

  The Weaponeer blinked, spoke rapid hoarse words of amazement to the Trackers. They stirred, uneasy and impatient, watching Kergan Banbeck sidelong as if he were not only savage, but mad. Overhead hovered the flyer; the Weaponeer looked up and seemed to derive encouragement from the sight. Turning back to Kergan Banbeck with a firm fresh attitude, he spoke as if the previous interchange had never occurred. “I have come to instruct you that the twenty-three Revered must be instantly released.”

  Kergan Banbeck repeated his own demands. “You must furnish me a spaceship, you must raid no more, you must release the captives. Do you agree, yes or no?”

  The Weaponeer seemed confused. “This is a peculiar situation — indefinite, unquantizable.”

  “Can you not understand me?” barked Kergan Banbeck in exasperation. He glanced at the sacerdote, an act of questionable decorum, then performed in a manner completely unconventional: “Sacerdote, how can I deal with this blockhead? He does not seem to hear me.”

  The sacerdote moved a step nearer, his face as bland and blank as before. Living by a doctrine which proscribed active or intentional interference in the affairs of other men, he could make to any question only a specific and limited answer. “He hears you, but there is no meeting of ideas between you. His thought-structure is derived from that of his masters. It is incommensurable with yours. As to how you must deal with him, I cannot say.”

  Kergan Banbeck looked back to the Weaponeer. “Have you heard what I asked of you? Did you understand my conditions for the release of the grephs?”

  “I heard you distinctly,” replied the Weaponeer. “Your words have no meaning, they are absurdities, paradoxes. Listen to me carefully. It is ordained, complete, a quantum of destiny, that you deliver to us the Revered. It is irregular, it is not ordainment that you should have a ship, or that your other demands be met.”

  Kergan Banbeck’s face became red; he half-turned toward his men but restraining his anger, spoke slowly and with careful clarity. “I have something you want. You have something I want. Let us trade.”

  For twenty seconds the two men stared eye to eye. Then the Weaponeer drew a deep breath. “I will explain in your words, so that you will comprehend. Certainties — no, not certainties: definites … Definites exist. These are units of certainty, quanta of necessity and order. Existence is the steady succession of these units, one after the other. The activity of the universe can be expressed by reference to these units. Irregularity, absurdity — these are like half a man, with half a brain, half a heart, half of all his vital organs. Neither are allowed to exist. That you hold twenty-three Revered as captives is such an absurdity: an outrage to the rational flow of the universe.”

  Kergan Banbeck threw up his hands, turned once more to the sacerdote. “How can I halt his nonsense? How can I make him see reason?”

  The sacerdote reflected. “He speaks not nonsense, but rather a language you fail to understand. You can make him understand your language by erasing all knowledge and training from his mind, and replacing it with patterns of your own.”

  Kergan Banbeck fought back an unsettling sense of frustration and unreality. In order to elicit exact answers from a sacerdote, an exact question was required; indeed it was remarkable that this sacerdote stayed to be questioned. Thinking carefully, he asked, “How do you suggest that I deal with this man?”

  “Release the twenty-three grephs.” The sacerdote touched the twin knobs at the front of his golden torc: a ritual gesture indicating that, no matter how reluctantly, he had performed an act which conceivably might alter the course of the future. Again he tapped his torc, and intoned, “Release the grephs; he will then depart.”

  Kergan Banbeck cried out in unrestrained anger. “Who then do you serve? Man or greph? Let us have the truth! Speak!”

  “By my faith, by my creed, by the truth of my tand I serve no one but myself.” The sacerdote turned his face toward the great crag of Mount Gethron and moved slowly off; the wind blew his long fine hair to the side.

  Kergan Banbeck watched him go, then with cold decisiveness turned back to the Weaponeer. “Your discussion of certainties and absurdities is interesting. I feel that you have confused the two. Here is certainty from my viewpoint! I will not release the twenty-three grephs unless you meet my terms. If you attack us further, I will cut them in half, to illustrate and realize your figure of speech, and perhaps convince you that absurdities are possible. I say no more.”

  The Weaponeer shook his head slowly, pityingly. “Listen, I will explain. Certain conditions are unthinkable, they are unquantized, un-destined —”

  “Go,” thundered Kergan Banbeck. “Otherwise you will join your twenty-three revered grephs, and I will teach you how real the unthinkable can become!”

  The Weaponeer and the two Trackers, croaking and muttering, turned, retreated from the Jambles to Banbeck Verge, descended into the valley. Over them the flyer darted, veered, fluttered, settled like a falling leaf.

  Watching from their retreat among the crags, the men of Banbeck Vale presently witnessed a remarkable scene. Half an hour after the Weaponeer had returned to the ship, he came l
eaping forth once again, dancing, cavorting. Others followed him — Weaponeers, Trackers, Heavy Troopers and eight more grephs — all jerking, jumping, running back and forth in distracted steps. The ports of the ship flashed lights of various colors, and there came a slow rising sound of tortured machinery.

  “They have gone mad!” muttered Kergan Banbeck. He hesitated an instant, then gave an order. “Assemble every man; we attack while they are helpless!”

  Down from the High Jambles rushed the men of Banbeck Vale. As they descended the cliffs, a few of the captured men and women from Sadro Valley came timidly forth from the ship and meeting no restraint fled to freedom across Banbeck Vale. Others followed — and now the Banbeck warriors reached the valley floor.

  Beside the ship the insanity had quieted; the out-worlders huddled quietly beside the hull. There came a sudden mind-shattering explosion: a blankness of yellow and white fire. The ship disintegrated. A great crater marred the valley floor; fragments of metal began to fall among the attacking Banbeck warriors.

  Kergan Banbeck stared at the scene of destruction. Slowly, his shoulders sagging, he summoned his people and led them back to their ruined valley. At the rear, marching single-file, tied together with ropes, came the twenty-three grephs, dull-eyed, pliant, already remote from their previous existence. The texture of Destiny was inevitable: the present circumstances could not apply to twenty-three of the Revered. The mechanism must therefore adjust to insure the halcyon progression of events. The twenty-three, hence, were something other than the Revered: a different order of creature entirely. If this were true, what were they? Asking each other the question in sad croaking undertones, they marched down the cliff into Banbeck Vale.

  Chapter III

  Across the long Aerlith years the fortunes of Happy Valley and Banbeck Vale fluctuated with the capabilities of the opposing Carcolos and Banbecks. Golden Banbeck, Joaz’s grandfather, was forced to release Happy Valley from clientship when Uttern Carcolo, an accomplished dragon-breeder, produced the first Fiends. Golden Banbeck, in his turn, developed the Juggers, but allowed an uneasy truce to continue.

  Further years passed; Ilden Banbeck, the son of Golden, a frail ineffectual man, was killed in a fall from a mutinous Spider. With Joaz yet an ailing child, Grode Carcolo decided to try his chances against Banbeck Vale. He failed to reckon with old Hendel Banbeck, grand-uncle to Joaz and Chief Dragon Master. The Happy Valley forces were routed on Starbreak Fell; Grode Carcolo was killed and young Ervis gored by a Murderer. For various reasons, including Hendel’s age and Joaz’s youth, the Banbeck army failed to press to a decisive advantage. Ervis Carcolo, though exhausted by loss of blood and pain, withdrew in some degree of order, and for further years a suspicious truce held between the neighboring valleys.

  Joaz matured into a saturnine young man who, if he excited no enthusiastic affection from his people, at least aroused no violent dislike. He and Ervis Carcolo were united in a mutual contempt. At the mention of Joaz’s study, with its books, scrolls, models and plans, its complicated viewing-system across Banbeck Vale (the optics furnished, it was rumored, by the sacerdotes), Carcolo would throw up his hands in disgust. “Learning? Pah! What avails all this rolling in bygone vomit? Where does it lead? He should have been born a sacerdote; he is the same sort of sour-mouthed cloud-minded weakling!”

  An itinerant, one Dae Alvonso, who combined the trades of minstrel, child-buyer, psychiatrist and chiropractor, reported Carcolo’s obloquies to Joaz, who shrugged. “Ervis Carcolo should breed himself to one of his own Juggers,” said Joaz. “He would thereby produce an impregnable creature with the Jugger’s armor and his own unflinching stupidity.”

  The remark in due course returned to Ervis Carcolo, and by coincidence, touched him in a particularly sore spot. Secretly he had been attempting an innovation at his brooders: a dragon almost as massive as the Jugger with the savage intelligence and agility of the Blue Horror. But Ervis Carcolo worked with an intuitive and over-optimistic approach, ignoring the advice of Bast Givven, his Chief Dragon Master.

  The eggs hatched; a dozen spratlings survived. Ervis Carcolo nurtured them with alternate tenderness and objurgation. Eventually the dragons matured. Carcolo’s hoped-for combination of fury and impregnability was realized in four sluggish irritable creatures, with bloated torsos, spindly legs, insatiable appetites. (“As if one can breed a dragon by commanding it: ‘Exist!’” sneered Bast Givven to his helpers, and advised them: “Be wary of the beasts; they are competent only at luring you within reach of their brachs.”)

  The time, effort, facilities and provender wasted upon the useless hybrid had weakened Carcolo’s army. Of the fecund Termagants he had no lack; there was a sufficiency of Long-horned Murderers and Striding Murderers, but the heavier and more specialized types, especially Juggers, were far from adequate to his plans. The memory of Happy Valley’s ancient glory haunted his dreams; first he would subdue Banbeck Vale, and often he planned the ceremony whereby he would reduce Joaz Banbeck to the office of apprentice barracks-boy.

  Ervis Carcolo’s ambitions were complicated by a set of basic difficulties. Happy Valley’s population had doubled but rather than extending the city by breaching new pinnacles or driving tunnels, Carcolo constructed three new dragon-brooders, a dozen barracks and an enormous training compound. The folk of the valley could choose either to cram the fetid existing tunnels or build ramshackle dwellings along the base of the cliff. Brooders, barracks, training compounds and huts encroached on Happy Valley’s already inadequate fields. Water was diverted from the pond to maintain the brooders; enormous quantities of produce went to feed dragons. The folk of Happy Valley, undernourished, sickly, miserable, shared none of Carcolo’s aspirations, and their lack of enthusiasm infuriated him.

  In any event, when the itinerant Dae Alvonso repeated Joaz Banbeck’s recommendation that Ervis Carcolo breed himself to a Jugger, Carcolo seethed with choler. “Bah! What does Joaz Banbeck know about dragon-breeding? I doubt if he understands his own dragon-talk.” He referred to the means by which orders and instructions were transmitted to the dragons: a secret jargon distinctive to every army. To learn an opponent’s dragon-talk was the prime goal of every Dragon Master, for he thereby gained a certain degree of control over his enemies’ forces. “I am a practical man, worth two of him,” Carcolo went on. “Can he design, nurture, rear and teach dragons? Can he impose discipline, teach ferocity? No. He leaves all this to his dragon masters, while he lolls on a couch eating sweetmeats, campaigning only against the patience of his minstrel-maidens. They say that by astrological divination he predicts the return of the Basics, that he walks with his neck cocked, watching the sky. Is such a man deserving of power and a prosperous life? I say no! Is Ervis Carcolo of Happy Valley such a man? I say yes, and this I will demonstrate!”

  Dae Alvonso judiciously held up his hand. “Not so fast. He is more alert than you think. His dragons are in prime condition; he visits them often. And as for the Basics —”

  “Do not speak to me of Basics,” stormed Carcolo. “I am no child to be frightened by bugbears!”

  Again Dae Alvonso held up his hand. “Listen. I am serious, and you can profit by my news. Joaz Banbeck took me into his private study —”

  “The famous study, indeed!”

  “From a cabinet he brought out a ball of crystal mounted on a black box.”

  “Aha!” jeered Carcolo. “A crystal ball!”

  Dae Alvonso went on placidly, ignoring the interruption. “I examined this globe, and indeed it seemed to hold all of space; within it floated stars and planets, all the bodies of the cluster. ‘Look well,’ said Joaz Banbeck, ‘you will never see the like of this anywhere. It was built by the olden men and brought to Aerlith when our people first arrived.’

  “‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘And what is this object?’

  “‘It is a celestial armamentarium,’ said Joaz. ‘It depicts all the nearby stars, and their positions at any time I choose to specify. Now —’ here he poi
nted ‘— see this white dot? This is our sun. See this red star? In the old almanacs it is named Coralyne. It swings near us at irregular intervals, for such is the flow of stars in this cluster. These intervals have always coincided with the attacks of the Basics.’

  “Here I expressed astonishment; Joaz assured me regarding the matter. ‘The history of men on Aerlith records six attacks by the Basics, or grephs as they were originally known. Apparently as Coralyne swings through space the Basics scour nearby worlds for hidden dens of humanity. The last of these was long ago during the time of Kergan Banbeck, with the results you know about. At that time Coralyne passed close in the heavens. For the first time since, Coralyne is once more close at hand.’ This,” Alvonso told Carcolo, “is what Joaz Banbeck told me, and this is what I saw.”

  Carcolo was impressed in spite of himself. “Do you mean to tell me,” demanded Carcolo, “that within this globe swim all the stars of space?”

  “As to that, I cannot vouch,” replied Dae Alvonso. “The globe is set in a black box, and I suspect that an inner mechanism projects images or perhaps controls luminous spots which simulate the stars. Either way it is a marvelous device, one which I would be proud to own. I offered Joaz several precious objects in exchange, but he would have none of them.”

  Carcolo curled his lip in disgust. “You and your stolen children. Have you no shame?”

  “No more than my customers,” said Dae Alvonso stoutly. “As I recall, I have dealt profitably with you on several occasions.”