by Jack Vance
Berwick made a firm dissent. “This, I believe, transcends the line I have drawn. My honor is at stake, and I can agree to no announcement which baldly states the certainty as a probability. It you choose to make a jocular reference or perhaps urge that not too many intercessors join the expedition, then all is well. A subtle germ of suspicion has been planted, you have done your duty, and my honor has not been compromised.”
“Yes, yes,” cried Blasdel. “I agree to anything! But I must hurry to the hoodwink tower. While we quibble Sklar Hast and his bandits are capturing intercessors!”
“And what is the harm there?” inquired Berwick mildly.
“You state that King Kragen has been observed from Adelvine proceeding west; hence the intercessors are in no danger and presumably will be allowed to return once Sklar Hast is assured that King Kragen is no longer a danger. Conversely, if the intercessors have betrayed Sklar Hast and and given information to King Kragen so that he waits at the far west off Sciona Float, then they deserve to die with the rest. It is justice of the most precise and exquisite balance.”
“That is the difficulty,” muttered Blasdel, trying to push past Berwick to the door. “I cannot answer for the silence of the other intercessors. Suppose one among them has notified King Kragen? Then a great tragedy ensues.”
“Interesting! So you can indeed summon King Kragen when you so desire?”
“Yes, yes, but, mind you, this is a secret, And now—“
“It follows then that you always know the whereabouts of King Kragen. How do you achieve this?”
“There is no time to explain; suffice it to say that a means is at hand.”
“Right here? In your workroom?”
“Yes indeed. Now stand aside. After I have broadcast the warning, I will make all clear. Stand aside then!”
Berwick shrugged and allowed Blasdel to run from the cottage, through the garden to the edge of the pad. Blasdel stopped short at the water’s edge. The coracle had disappeared. Where previously Apprise Float had raised its foliage and its hoodwink tower against the dusk, there was now only blank water and blank sky. The pad floated free; urged by the west wind of evening it already had left Apprise Float behind. Blasdel gave an inarticulate sound of fury and woe. He turned to find Berwick standing behind him. “What has happened?” Blasdel asked.
“It seems that while we talked, advertisermen cut through the stem of your pad. At least this is my presumption.”
“Yes, yes,” grated Blasdel. “So much is obvious. What else?”
Berwick shrugged. “It appears that, willy-nilly, whether we like it or not, we are part of the great emigration. Now that such is the case, I am relieved to know that you have a means to determine the whereabouts of King Kragen. Come. Let us make use of this device and reassure ourselves.”
Blasdel made a harsh, throaty sound. He crouched and for a moment seemed on the point of hurling himself at Phyral Berwick. From the shadows of the verdure appeared another man. Berwick pointed. “I believe Sklar Hast himself is at hand.”
“You tricked me,” groaned Barquan Blasdel between clenched teeth. “You have performed an infamous act, which you shall regret.”
“I have done no such deed, although it appears that you may well have misunderstood my position. But the time for recrimination is not now. We share a similar problem, which is how to escape the malevolence of King Kragen. I suggest that you now proceed to locate him.”
Without a word Blasdel turned, proceeded to his cottage. He entered the main room, with Berwick and Sklar Hast close behind. He crossed to the wall, lifted a panel to reveal an inner room. He brought more lights; all entered. A hole had been cut in the floor and through the pad, the spongy tissue having been painted with a black varnish to prevent its growing together. A tube fashioned from fine yellow stalk perhaps four inches in diameter led down into the water. “At the bottom,” said Blasdel curtly, “is a carefully devised horn of exact shape and quality. The end is four feet in diameter and covered with a diaphragm of seasoned and varnished pad-skin. King Kragen emits a sound to which this horn is highly sensitive.” He went to the tube, put down his ear, listened, slowly turned the tube around a vertical axis. He shook his head. “I hear nothing. This means that King Kragen is at least ten miles distant. If he is closer I can detect him. He passed to the west early today; presumably he swims somewhere near Vidmar or Leumar or Populous Equity.”
Sklar Hast laughed quietly. “Urged there by the intercessors?”
Blasdel gave a sour shrug. “As to that I have nothing to say.”
“How, then, do you summon King Kragen?”
Blasdel pointed to a rod rising from the door, the top of which terminated in a crank. “In the water below is a drum. Inside this drum fits a wheel. When the crank is turned, the wheel, working in resin, rubs against the drum and emits a signal. King Kragen can sense this sound from a great distance—once again about ten miles. Assume he is at, say, Sankston, and is needed at Bickle. The intercessor at The Bandings calls him, until the horn reveals him to be four or five miles distant, where-upon the intercessor at Quatrefoil calls him, then the Hastings intercessor, and so forth until he is within range of the intercessor at Bickle Float.”
“I see,” said Sklar Hast. “In this fashion Semm Voiderveg called King Kragen to Tranque. Whereupon King Kragen destroyed Tranque Float and killed forty-three persons.”
“That is the case.”
“And you have the hypocrisy to call us murderers!”
Blasdel once more shrugged and said nothing.
Phyral Berwick said, “Perhaps it is fortunate that Semm Voiderveg is already dead. He would have been selected to accompany the emigration, and his lot would not have been a happy one.”
“This is unreasonable!” Barquan Blasdel declared heatedly. “He was as faithful to his convictions as Sklar Hast is to his own! After all, Voiderveg did not enjoy the devastation of Tranque Float. It was his home. Many of those who were killed were his friends. He gave his faith and his trust utterly to King Kragen. And, in return, was killed.”
Sklar Hast swung around. “And what of you?”
Blasdel shook his head sadly. “I am a man who thinks at many levels.”
Sklar Hast turned away in disgust. He spoke to Berwick. “What should we do with this apparatus? Destroy it? Or preserve it?”
Berwick considered. “We might on some occasion wish to listen for King Kragen. I doubt if we will ever desire to summon him.”
Sklar Hast gave a sardonic jerk of his head. “Who knows? To his death perhaps? He turned to Blasdel. “What persons are aboard the float in addition to us?”
“My spouse—in the cottage two roofs along. Three young daughters who weave ornaments for the Star-cursing Festival. Three older daughters who prove themselves to three stalwarts. All are unaware that their pad floats on the deep ocean.” His voice quavered. “None wish to become emigrants to a strange line of floats.”
Sklar Hast said, “No more do any of the rest of us—but we were forced to choose. I feel no pity for them, or for you. There will be work for all hands. Indeed, we may formulate a new guild: the Kragen-killers. If rumor is accurate, they infest the ocean.”
He left the room and went out into the night. Blasdel stood rigid, numbed by the alteration in his circumstances. He slowly turned, cast a rancorous glare at Phyral Berwick, who stolidly returned the gaze. Blasdel gave an angry snort of sheer frustration. He went to listen once more at the detecting horn. Then he also left the room.
Berwick followed and lowered the panel. Both joined Sklar Hast at the edge of the pad, where now several coracles were tied. A dozen men stood in the garden. Sklar Hast turned to Blasdel. “Summon your spouse, your daughters, and those who test them. Explain the circumstances, and gather your belongings. The evening breeze is at hand and blows us west. We journey east.”
Blasdel departed, accompanied by Berwick. Sklar Hast and the others entered the workroom, carried everything of value or utility to the coracl
es, including the small metal relict, the sixty-one books, the listening horn, and the summoning drum. Then all embarked in the coracles, and Barquan Blasdel’s beautiful pad was left to drift solitary upon the ocean.
Chapter 10
Morning came to the ocean and with it the breeze from the west. Sails were rigged and the oarsmen rested. The floats could no longer be seen; the ocean was a ruffled blue mirror in all directions. Sklar Hast lowered Blasdel’s horn into the water, listened. Nothing could be heard. Barquan Blasdel did the same and agreed that King Kragen was nowhere near.
There were perhaps six hundred coracles in the flotilla, each carrying from three to six persons, with as much gear, household equipment, and tools as possible, together with sacks of food and water.
Two or three hours after sunrise the breeze died. The sails were lowered and oars alone propelled the coracles. At noon the sun burned brightly down, and awnings were rigged overhead to fend away the glare.
Late in the day several medium-sized floats were seen ahead and slightly to the north. The Home Floats and King Kragen were still too close at hand to make the idea of permanent habitation attractive or feasible, but as the evening breeze would soon be rising, to blow the coracles back to the west, the flotilla headed toward the floats in order to tie up and save the oarsmen the effort of rowing into the wind. After twenty-four hours in the coracles, a chance to disembark, to stretch the legs and walk back and forth would be more than welcome.
With the sun low in the west, shining over the backs of the voyagers, the coracles approached the strange floats. They were in general appearance to the Home Floats, but wild and less ordered, with vegetation rampant, so that the central spike was almost a pyramid of foliage. The breeze, blowing from the floats, brought an odor that astonished Sklar Hast. He called to Roger Kelso, who rowed in a nearby coracle.
“Do you smell what I think I smell?”
Roger Kelso tested the air, raised his eyebrows. “I’m not sure. I smell something… Perhaps just rubbish, or a dead fish.”
“Perhaps.” Sklar Hast, standing in the coracle, looked carefully through the tangle, but could see nothing. Other folk in other coracles likewise had scented the stench from the float and were likewise looking uneasily into the foliage. But nothing moved and no sounds were to be heard. The first coracle nosed up to the edge of the float; the youth in the bow jumped ashore with a stake and painter; others did likewise, and presently all the coracles were tied up, either to the float or to one another.
Not everyone alighted, and those who did remained close to the coracles. Presently one of the young men came upon the source of the odor: an area littered with refuse. Nearby was a charred area, where coals still glowed among ashes and smoldering sponge husks. The floats were inhabited.
“By whom?” whispered Meril Rohan. “Who can they be?”
Sklar Hast called out to the jungle: “Come forth! Show yourselves! We mean no harm!”
There was silence, except for the rustle of the wind in the foliage. The sun was now gone, and the afterglow began to darken over the float.
“Look here!” This was the call of a young niggler who had ventured a few hundred yards around the edge of the float. He came running back, holding an object which he gave to Phyral Berwick: a necklace, or at least a circular cord from which was suspended a number of glossy reddish chunks of metal.
Sklar Hast looked with awe toward the foliage. “Come forth! We wish to speak with you!”
He received no answer.
“Savages, probably filthy and naked,” muttered Phyral Berwick. “But they have what we don’t have—metal. Where do they get it?”
From the tangle now came a screech, a terrible quavering sound full of rage and menace, and at me same time a number of sticks came hurtling down from the sky.
“We’re not welcome,” said Sklar Hast. “This is clear. Back to our floats.”
The voyagers reembarked, with much more celerity than they had gone ashore. From the foliage came another screech, this time of exultation and mirth, and a series of mad hoots, which raised the hair on the necks, of the voyagers.
The coracles were cast off and drifted into the lee of the floats, a hundred yards offshore, In the dusk the voyagers saw a number of pallid shapes emerge from the foliage to run back and forth along the shore, prancing and capering. Their faces and physiognomy could not be discerned.
Sklar Hast rowed hist coracle a cautious few yards closer, but was greeted by a new shower of sticks and once again retreated.
Darkness fell, and the coracles waited out the evening breeze. On the float a fire was kindled, and two or three dozen manlike creatures emerged to stand in the flicker. Roger Kelso called to Sklar Hast across the water: “Somewhere I have read of a group of Second or Third folk who committed unorthodox acts and were ‘banished’—a word that well may mean ‘sent away’. If so, and if they came in this direction, these must be their descendants.”
“It is chilling to contemplate how little is the distance between us and savagery,” said Sklar Hast. “Still—they have copper, and we do not.”
“How is this?” demanded Rubal Gallager. “Where does it come from?”
No one made response, and all looked back across the dark water at the floats, now silhouetted against the sky. With the end of dusk and the coming of the constellations the wind died, and once more the flotilla proceeded east, across water calm and smooth. All night some rowed while others slept, until finally the first amber flash to the east brought with it a whisper of the welcome wind from the west. Sails were raised; into the dawn scudded the coracles, over a bright, empty sea.
The second day was like the first, with a brief rain squall halfway through the afternoon, which served to replenish the jugs. Swindlers netted various edible sea-creatures, and while the coracles carried ample food, this demonstrated ability to subsist, if necessary, from the ocean was reassuring, and there was singing and badinage between the coracles.
On the morning of the third day a small kragen was observed. It approached from the north, swimming its lunging breast-stroke, and halted a hundred yards distant to watch the flotilla pass. It twitched its vanes, darted forward, almost as if in an effort to alarm the voyagers, then sank abruptly below the surface. A moment later certain of the swindlers gazing down through a water-box saw it pass below—a great sprawling, writhing shadow. A quarter-mile to the south it surfaced and lay floating quietly, then presently disappeared.
Toward the end of the fourth day a line of floats was observed ahead, as rich and beautiful as the Home Floats, though perhaps half as numerous. From the voyagers came rapturous murmurs. Sklar Hast stood up in his coracle, signaled for a conference, and all the other coracles drew close, to form a great raft drifting and rocking on the water.
Sklar Hast said, “Here are the first floats we have encountered, aside from the floats of the savages. We move slowly. King Kragen can swim three times our speed. In a single day and night—if he so chose, and if he knew our whereabouts—he could come to find us. I feel that we should not consider landing here, but should proceed till we come to at least one other line of floats.”
Murmurs of disappointment arose, for these floats, lush and heavy with black, green, orange, and gold vegetation, after four days on the ocean, seemed an Arcadian vision.
There was discussion, a certain amount of argument, and some grumbling to the effect that King Kragen would never see fit to swim this far, either from curiosity or vindictive rage. Phyral Berwick sided with Sklar Hast, as did most of the caste-elders and guild-masters; and finally amid soft cries of regret the floats were left behind. Again the flotilla sailed out upon the empty sea.
At noon on the sixth day another line of floats was sighted, and all knew that here was to be the new home. All were now happy that the first line had been passed. These were as extensive, as spacious, and even more numerous than the Home Floats, with myriads of the prized small pads upon which a family could build and cultivate to its own ta
ste.
The flotilla landed at a large float near the center of the line. There were no evidence of occupation, by savages or otherwise. The coracles were unloaded and moved to a cove where they could not be seen from the sea. In the evening, after a festive supper, there was an informal council of the guild-masters and caste-elders.
“Our two immediate problems,” said Phyral Berwick, “aside from the inevitable toil of establishing ourselves in comfort and security, are the disposition of our hostages, and our organization. These are both problems of some complexity. The matter of organizing ourselves into a responsible group is perhaps the simplest. The problem is this: Looking around me, I see eight Master Hoodwinks, six Master Larceners, sixteen Master Advertisers, and so on. Naturally all cannot be masters. My suggestion is that the various guild-masters confer and select one of their number as grand-master, by lot, by seniority, or by any other means. Then we can function with more decisiveness. This can be a temporary arrangement at least, until we settle other of the floats.
“Secondly—what of those whom we have with us? What of them? They have served their purpose, but now what? We can’t kill them, we can’t keep them in a pen, we can’t let them return to the Home Floats—at least not yet. We must consider the matter carefully?”
All turned to look toward the group of intercessors who sat with their families somewhat to the side. The intercessors themselves evinced glumness and dissatisfaction in varying degrees. The spouses and older children appeared less concerned, while the very young, romping with others of their own age, were in the best of spirits.
Barquan Blasdel, noticing that his case was under discussion, scowled, started to rise, then thought better of it and muttered something to the Parnassus Intercessor Luke Robinet.
Roger Kelso said, “If we could trust them to leave us in peace, then there would be no problem. We could give them coracles, stores, and wish them well. But as sure as we sit here, as soon as they returned to the Home Floats, there would be plots and schemes. Blasdel, for one, would like nothing better than to bring King Kragen across the water to punish us.”
