The Second Ardath Mayhar

by Ardath Mayhar

  Ela took her by her withered elbow and forced her out of the door. “The rods do not obey; they perceive need and fulfill it. They will appear when I need them and hide themselves when I do not. You have proven to me that age does not necessarily being wisdom. Even the oldest can be corrupted by the promise of power.”

  To her parents’ dismay, Ela moved from the village into a sturdy hut built near the standing stones. She snared small game and gathered herbs for food, though winters brought her down to her parents’ house. Always she returned to the height in spring. Three times, in dire need, she used the power of the rods, but always they returned to their secret place when she was done.

  In time, Ela became the Eldest. When she died the village grieved, but when they prepared to bury her body, it was missing, for it had gone back to that deep cavern where her ancestor’s spirit waited.

  THE BLUE-FIRED COW-KILLING CRAZIES

  Having been a dairy farmer during most of my young years, I found it interesting when the livestock mutilations began being discovered in the West.

  Some folks think I’m a bit timid nowadays, but I don’t really worry myself about it. Being a country doctor suits me fine, and there’s no need to be a hero for that. I don’t have to hunt stray critters, and I don’t have to sleep on the ground. Since I quit my job as a cowhand, I never, ever, camp out any more. I never told anybody why, but maybe the time has come.

  * * * *

  When the blue glare hit, I was hunting a lost cow and calf down a scrubby dry wash, cussing old Ginger every time he bashed my knees against dead junipers or rocky outcrops in the wall. I could hear the calf bellowing somewhere up ahead, but in that clutter there was NO WAY I could hurry, even though it was getting darker by the minute, and I should have been on my way to the bunkhouse long ago.

  Ginger had just walked head-on into a half-dead juniper and stopped, making me get down to untangle his ears and bridle from the stickery mess, when the whole world lit up like an explosion in a gunpowder factory. Except...there wasn’t any noise, and the explosion was bright blue.

  I had hit the dirt (mostly sharp rocks) when it started, but I rolled over and looked up into the sky in just about the same motion. There, ghosting away northward, was a round doodad with little green lights around its middle. A mighty strange thing it was, flying through the night easier than a train along a track, quiet as midnight. I could still hear that calf, so I left Ginger standing and stumbled down the wash. It was now too narrow for a horse anyway, and the calf sounded close.

  Sure enough, in the half-light I could see the little fellow standing in a round clear spot that had been hollowed out of the wash by some long-ago eddy of runoff water. There was a humped mass beside him. I went over to take a look.

  Old PieFace hadn’t been much of a cow. A pest she was, and a loner, with enough personality to have been given a name, alone out of the thousands of head on the Star7 Ranch.

  I hadn’t liked her, but I wouldn’t have wished on her the kind of end she’d come to. Somebody (way back in my mind I substituted “something” for somebody) had cut her open from forelegs to udder. They hadn’t killed her first; I could tell from the hashed up ground and the way she was lying. They’d taken part of her insides, and I knew they had cut off and taken her udder.

  Not a scrap of meat was taken; not the tongue, not a steak’s worth of flesh. The work looked as if it was incredibly precise, and I wondered at that. Being a former medical student, I could recognize good scalpel technique when I saw it.

  I went back to Ginger and got my little old lantern out of the pack I always carried with me when I was looking for lost animals. The sulfur matches were in their waxed box, and I lit the lantern and returned to the spot where PieFace lay. By the feeble light of the lantern, I could see the cuts fairly well. There was no hacking or sawing, just clean surgical cuts. Something very sharp, wielded by someone who knew what he was doing, had made those incisions, some of which were very unusual and thought-provoking.

  As I said, I was in a position to recognize the skill. I was in my third year of medical school when I got a gut full of Willingham Institute of the Sciences (founded by my grandfather, cuss him, which meant that I wasn’t allowed to go to a really good school). I cut tracks one Sunday evening and left no forwarding address. Which led to my being there in the middle of the night, with a dead cow and a lot of unanswered questions.

  I stood looking at the ground. The only visible footprints were mine, but there were some round, poddly marks all around the cow. In the middle of the clear spot was a dark ring that looked scorched. There were no ashes, just darkened sand and stones.

  I cornered the calf and picked him up. It was so easy to catch him that I realized why the mad surgeon had cornered the pair in that pocket of rock. Range cows and calves are not all that easy to catch.

  It took me half the night to get back to the ranch. I put the calf in the stock pen and turned in without seeing a soul, but the next morning I saw too much of too many wide-awake wits to suit me at all.

  I told them what had happened. First, the straw boss laughed himself sick. Then the owner, who happened to be spending a week in the big house with guests for the partridge hunting, didn’t know whether to laugh or send me to the nearest insane asylum. By then I knew nobody was going to believe me, so I just started saying we’d lost old PieFace. And that was that.

  I spent the next week building fence. They wanted to keep me under observation for a while, I think. I whistled and sweated and did my job without fuss. The week after, they’d forgotten the whole thing and turned me back to my main job, which was finding strays in the washes and gulches gashing the foothills. That suited me fine.

  I took to staying out at night, claiming I was too far out to make it worthwhile to come in. I watched the sky closer than I had since my first year in the high country. I waited. I had a hunch that whoever it was that had killed old PieFace would make another move. I intended to know it if they did.

  I didn’t really intend to be as close as I turned out to get.

  It was a moonless night. The stars were hanging like Chinese lanterns. You’d have sworn that you could see which were nearer and which were farther off, their shapes were so three-dimensional. I’d been lying in my blankets, looking off to northward, when some instinct made me turn my head. Right behind me, maybe thirty feet away, sat that round thingamajig, its green lights twinkling.

  I jerked upright, my blanket falling every which way. I found my rifle in my hand—it always lay alongside as I slept, and I blessed the fact. Too soon, as it turned out. As I raised the rifle, a thin pencil of light shot out of the hemispherical shape and paralyzed me where I stood. Not a muscle could I move. Even my eyelids were hard to blink; I could still breathe, very slowly, and that was all.

  There was finally a sound from the thing, a sort of purring, and a round section unscrewed and fell back against the side with a dull clunk. A set of steps, like a sort of ladder, slid down to hit the dirt. From the inside of the thing came hard blue light like a continuous lightning bolt, and in its glare I could see two funny shapes thump down the ladder.

  They reached the ground and stood there, making gestures and gabbling at each other. I could see their fat round hands and fat round feet, but their bodies were rather skinny. Their heads were roundish, I could see, but what their faces might be like I couldn’t see—their backs were to the light.

  Now, don’t assume I was just standing there cool and collected, observing those creatures scientifically. I was so scared I’d have wet my pants, but those muscles weren’t working, either. When you can’t move, can’t yell, can’t anything, you don’t have too much choice. So I looked.

  They weren’t any race ever born on earth, I was sure. Besides, that thing they traveled in was no balloon. No country that called itself civilized had anything remotely like it. If anyone had told me, “Will Brendan, in this year of Our L
ord 1903, you will see men from another world,” I’d have laughed as loud as the straw boss did.

  Every brain cell I owned was working overtime. I’d given them a good long rest for three or four years now. They seemed ready and eager to go to work again. The first thing they came up with was the fact that if those critters intended to do to me what they did to PieFace, I was in trouble. I had nothing to fight with—I was so rock-hard stiff I couldn’t wiggle a finger joint.

  I whipped those brain cells into a gallop. How could I get across to those things that I was a thinking, intelligent being? Not a dumb brute like that cow? I came up with one answer. The only thing I had that worked was my mind. I had to think at them!

  So I did. It stood to reason that they wouldn’t understand English. I had my doubts about Latin or German, too, so I thought in pictures. I gave them pictures of Boston, the only city I knew much about. I showed them railroads and hot air balloons and Gatling guns and every sort of mechanical device I could think of. I showed them a drop of water through a microscope, and the microscope itself. I relived one of old Anderson’s lectures on anatomy, and I found I could recall the garishly colored charts in exact detail.

  Then I looked toward the ship. The aliens were about three feet away and seemed to be studying me with much interest. One of them pointed to my chest and began a long dissertation. The other stood there with stubborn disagreement oozing from every pore (if any).

  When Number One had finished his lecture, Number Two leaned forward and tapped me on the top of the head. “Glyrht hraht!” he said. There was no room for argument in his tone.

  The other seemed a bit wilted, but after a moment he scuttled back into the ship and brought out a long case, which looked woefully like one that could hold knives and saws and all sorts of uncomfortable surgical instruments.

  I hadn’t really enjoyed wielding them in my youth, and I liked even less the idea of being on the receiving end. Desperately, I racked my imagination. What would impress them? They had gadgets that made the best my world offered look like toys. What could seem sophisticated to them?

  Then I had it. Never in my life had I been accused of being imaginative, but from some hidden place in my mind I drew forth a really wild notion. Those brain cells were in full flight now, with sheer terror nipping at their heels. They came up with the one thing that just maybe might impress those gadget-rich critters.

  What if my race was so powerful it didn’t NEED gadgets? What if I could just THINK things done, and they were done? That just might shake them up.

  I pictured myself standing on a platform, looking up into the night sky. I pointed to the moon, nodded with satisfaction, and, as light shone blindingly, my shape gave a quiver and blinked out. I hoped I had conveyed the notion that I was now on the moon, without the aid of a round ship that shot out blue fire.

  To drive the point home, I shifted the picture to the spot where I had found PieFace. Again I envisioned the light, the nod, the pointing, this time horizontally. I blinked out. Then I pictured the spot where I now stood, with myself appearing suddenly from thin air. As an afterthought, I had my pictured self look around, shrug, and snap a campfire and a bedroll into being.

  I was drenched with sweat now. Holding onto those visions, making them real while I held them, was harder than building a fence. I thanked my luck that Ginger had elected to graze at a distance tonight, for his presence might have aroused inconvenient questions in the minds of my visitors.

  By the time I finished my efforts, I knew they’d been seeing the things I conjured up. When Number Two reached out to unsnap the case, Number One spoke to him so sharply that he shook all over and scurried back into the ship with his burden.

  Number One was left alone, facing me. For a long time he studied my face, my body, my hands, the rifle, and the blankets. He walked around me and studied me from the back. He came back around and looked into my face again. I could feel, as clearly as language, the sheer frustration and puzzlement that I posed for him.

  After a long time, he turned toward the ship and began walking toward it. He stopped. I could see his shoulders slump. He seemed to draw a deep breath, and then, I’d swear on my own grave, he shrugged. A truly Gallic shrug that said as plainly as could be, “Here he is. I don’t know whether to believe him or not. There’s nobody to ask who would know. The hell with him!”

  As soon as the round ship was well aloft, I found myself able to move. I built up the fire and huddled over it until Ginger came nibbling near in the dawn light. Then I made a trail for the ranch, a train, and Boston.

  Medical school looked better than it ever had in my life, and I finished it at a gallop. Seems as if I had motivation that I’d never known before, as well as the memory of that dissected cow and their unheard-of surgical techniques. In some way, I learned a lot in my short confrontation with those critters who cut up PieFace.

  I’m not the greatest doctor in the world, but this little southern town seems to like me well enough, even if I am a bit timid. The men hooraw me when hunting season comes around and they take to the woods with guns and dogs. I really like to hunt, you know, and I miss it.

  But there it is. I don’t camp out any more. Ever.

  PURSUIT

  This began with a scene, the knife stabbing my heart, the instant reaction—writing action is much more fun than LIVING it, you better believe.

  The knife blade caught the light, a feather-shaped sliver of steel aimed at my heart. I didn’t focus on it, for there were more important things to do with my last breaths. I must try to kill Regnard, or at the very least prevent him from killing me.

  Intent upon the deadly blade, I found the great hall about me dimmed to nothingness. The torch on the wall beside the tower stair gave faint illumination: enough to see my attacker...enough, I prayed, to allow me to survive. Even as my arm rose, slowly as if in a dream, I dreaded the bite of steel in my flesh. Better in the arm than the heart! I thought, as I drove my left arm against the knife and hurled my body against Regnard’s larger and heavier frame.

  He grunted with surprise. The blade was embedded in my flesh, its scrolled haft caught in the fabric of my sleeve, but I twisted and pulled it from his grasp. At the same moment I tucked my heel behind his and pushed again, this time tripping him so that he fell backward onto the flagstones.

  I drew the blade from my arm; before I could use it I was forced to leap aside, avoiding his vicious kick at my legs. My own dagger was a gift from my brother Frederick, a toy, for he would never give me a true weapon. I did not consider drawing it from its sheath.

  Regnard was clambering to his feet again, this time regarding me with more caution. He had thought a youth who had no weapons training would be an easy target. My brother had told him so, I was certain, and probably had offered a suitably small payment for my removal.

  I almost grinned. Not even Frederick knew of the skills I learned from my elderly tutor, who had traveled far and learned strange arts. The old monk could disarm a warrior with his bare hands, at need, and had taught me to do the same.

  I sprang backward and sped up the steep flight of stairs toward my chamber in the Franciscus Tower. Its door was stout oak, barred with iron, and Regnard could not afford the noise required to break it open.

  The murder of a secondary heir to the throne is not uncommon, even in more sophisticated places than this, but it is also not supposed to be so blatant as to cast suspicion upon the ascendant heir who would benefit by it. The attendants and the Guard, here in the Rulers’ House, would not see what it might be dangerous for them to see or hear what it was unwise for them to know. Yet even they could not ignore an attack upon the younger prince by a flunky of his older brother.

  Safe for the moment, I barred the heavy door and thanked God for the sheer height of tower walls beneath my arched windows. No one could climb that way, and there was no eminence nearby from which anyone could descend by ropes t
o their level.

  Nevertheless, I knew I could not remain here forever; now that Frederick’s purpose was clear, I must flee or die. Regnard, I knew, was lurking outside my door. To go down the tower stair was to die at its foot of a broken neck.

  Behind the arras on the west wall there was a small chamber where my clothing was kept and a basin and ewer awaited my use. Dripping blood, that was the first place I visited, stripping away the blood-drenched sleeve and laying my forearm in the basin.

  The water in the ewer was cool and eased the pain somewhat as I washed the wound. That was deep but not wide, and I managed to pack it with cotton wool and bind it tightly with strips of old linen. When I had the bleeding stopped, I washed myself from head to heel and donned clean clothing. Not the fine stuffs I was required to wear about the Rulers’ House, but the practical garb used when training with Father Janvier.

  Unknown to Frederick, I had crept, nine years old and grieving, into our father’s chambers after he died, to bid a last goodbye. There I took for myself the little blade that had been his since he was a child, kept in a chest at the foot of his bed. He had shown it only to me, because Frederick cared nothing for Father’s things or, if truth be known, for Father.

  Small though it was, the blade was fine steel, the hilt decorated with engraving. I had laid it at the bottom of my clothing chest, and now I dug it out and concealed it in the garments I rolled into a blanket.

  Though it was spring and warm enough by day, I took my winter cloak and boots suitable for running as well as for riding. Who knew what pursuit Frederick would send after me?

  I was thirsty with blood loss, and I drank what remained in the ewer. Though my arm throbbed with every beat of my heart, I made a final check about my quarters.

  I must go now, I thought, feeling my body beginning to shiver. The window would be watched. But who ever knew a small boy who did not have a secret bolt-hole through which he could find his freedom, from time to time? I was still small and slender enough, despite my sixteen years, to manage the passage.