King Kobold Revived

by Christopher Stasheff

  Tuan butted in, frowning. “Doth he say that he is a blinking idiot?”

  “Hey, no, now!” Yorick held up a hand, shaking his head indignantly. “Don’t sell us short. We’re smart, you know—same size brain as you’ve got. We just can’t talk about it, that’s all—or add and subtract it either, for that matter. We can only communicate concrete things—you know—food, water, stone, fire, sex—things you can see and touch. It’s just abstractions that we can’t talk about; they require symbols. But the intelligence is there. We’re the ones who learned how to use fire—and how to chip flint into weapons. Not very good tools, maybe—but we made the big breakthrough.”

  Rod nodded. “Yeah, Tuan, don’t underestimate that. We think we’re smart because we invented the nuclea—uh…” Rod remembered that he wasn’t sup-posed to let the Gramaryans know about advanced technology. It might disrupt their entire culture. He opted for their version of the weapon that endangered civilization. “The crossbow. But taming fire was just as hard to figure out.”

  “Good man.” Yorick nodded approvingly. “You sapiens have been able to build such a complicated civilization because you had a good foundation under you before you even existed; you inherited it when you evolved. But we’re the ones who built the basement.”

  “Neanderthals had the intelligence,” Rod explained. “They just couldn’t ma-nipulate symbols—and there’s just so far you can go without ‘em.”

  Yorick nodded. “Analytical reasoning just isn’t our strong suit. We’re great on hunches, though—and we’ve got great memories.”

  “You’d have to, to remember all these standard responses that you don’t un-derstand.”

  Yorick nodded. “I can remember damn near anything that ever happened to me.”

  “How about who taught you English?”

  “Oh, sure! That’s…” Then Yorick gelled, staring. After a minute, he tried the sickly grin again. “I, uh, didn’t want to get to that, uh, quite so soon.”

  “Yes, but we did.” Rod smiled sweetly. “Who did teach you?”

  “Same guy who gave me my name,” Yorick said hopefully.

  “So he had a little education—and definitely wasn’t from a medieval culture.”

  Yorick frowned. “How’d you make so much out of just one fact?”

  “I manipulated a symbol. What’s his name?”

  “The Eagle,” Yorick sighed. “We call him that ‘cause he looks like one.”

  “What? He’s got feathers?” Rod had a sudden vision of an avian alien, direct-ing a secondhand conquest of a Terran planet.

  “No, no! He’s human, all right. He might deny it—but he is. Just got a nose like a beak, always looks a little angry, doesn’t have much hair—you know. He taught us how to farm.”

  “Yeah.” Rod frowned. “Neanderthals never got beyond a hunting-and-gathering culture, did you?”

  “Not on our own, no. But this particular bunch of Neanderthals never would’ve gotten together on their own anyway. The Eagle gathered us up, one at a time, from all over Europe and Asia.”

  Rod frowned. “Odd way to do it. Why didn’t he just take a tribe that was al-ready together?”

  “Because he didn’t want a tribe, milord. He wanted to save a bunch of inno-cent victims.”

  “Victims?” Rod frowned. “Who was picking on you?”

  “Everybody.” Yorick spread his arms. “The Flatfaces, for openers—like you, only bigger. They chipped flint into tools, same as we do—only they’re a lot bet-ter at it.”

  “The Cro-Magnons,” Rod said slowly. “Are your people the last Neander-thals?”

  “Oh, nowhere near! That was our problem, in fact—all those other Neander-thals. They’d’ve rather’d kill us than look at us.”

  Suddenly, Rod could place Yorick—he was paranoid. “I thought it worked the other way around.”

  “What—that we’d as soon kill them as look at them?”

  “No—that you’d kill them when you looked at them.”

  Yorick looked uncomfortable. “Well, yes, the Evil-Eye thing—that was the problem. I mean, you try to cover it up as best you can; you try to hide it—but sooner or later somebody’s gonna haul off and try and whack you with a club.”

  “Oh, come on! It wasn’t inevitable, was it?”

  “Haven’t lived with Neanderthals, have you?”

  “Oh.” Rod cocked his head. “Not very civilized, were you?”

  “We lived like cavemen,” Yorick confirmed.

  “Oh. Right.” Rod glanced away, embarrassed. “Sorry—I forgot.”

  “Great.” Yorick grinned. “That’s a compliment.”

  “I suppose it is,” Rod said slowly. “But how come your quarrels had to turn violent?”

  Yorick shrugged. “What can I tell you? No lawyers. Whatever the reason, we do tend to clobber—and you can’t help yourself then; you have to freeze him in his tracks.”

  “Purely in self-defense, of course.”

  “Oh yeah, purely! Most of us had sense enough not to hit back at someone who was frozen—and the ones who didn’t, couldn’t; it takes some real concen-tration to keep a man frozen. There just ain’t anything left over to hit with.”

  “Well, maybe.” Rod had his doubts. “But why would he want to kill you, when you hadn’t hurt him?”

  “That made it worse,” Yorick sighed. “I mean, if I put the freeze on you, you’re gonna feel bad enough…”

  The clanking and rustling behind Rod told him that his soldiers had come to the ready. Beside him Tuan murmured, “ ‘Ware, beastman!”

  Yorick plowed on, unmindful of them. “But if I don’t clobber you, you’re gonna read it as contempt, and hate me worse. Still, it wasn’t the person who got frozen who was the problem—it was the spectators.”

  “What’d you do—sell tickets?”

  Yorick’s mouth tightened with exasperation. “You know how hard it is to be alone in these small tribes?”

  “Yeah… I suppose that would be a problem.”

  “Problem, hell! It was murder! Who wants you around if you can do that to them? And there’s one way to make sure you won’t be around. No, we’d have to get out of the village on our own first. Usually had a lot of help…”

  “It’s a wonder any of you survived.” Then something clicked in Rod’s mind. “But you would, wouldn’t you? If anyone got too close, you could freeze him.”

  “Long enough to get away, yes. But what do you do when you’ve gotten away?”

  “Survive.” Rod stared off into the sky, imagining what it would be like. “Kind of lonely…”

  Yorick snorted. “Never tried to make it on your own in a wilderness, have you? Loneliness is the least of it. A rabbit a day keeps starvation away—but a sa-bertooth has the same notion about you. Not to mention dire wolves or cave bears.”

  Rod nodded thoughtfully. “I can see why you’d want to form a new tribe.”

  “With what?” Yorick scoffed. “We weren’t exactly over-populated, you know. It was a long way between tribes—and not very many Evil-Eye espers in any one of ‘em. You might have one in a hundred square miles—and do you know how long a hundred miles is, on foot in rough country?”

  “About two weeks.” But Rod was really thinking about Yorick’s choice of word—he’d said “esper,” not “witch” or “monster.”

  “This is where your ‘Eagle’ came in?”

  Yorick nodded. “Just in time, too. Picked us up one by one and brought us to this nice little mountain valley he’d picked out. Nice V high up, plenty of rain, nice ‘n’ cool all year ‘round…”

  “Very cool in winter—I should think.”

  “You should, ‘cause it wasn’t. Pretty far south, I suppose—’cause it never got more than brisk. ‘Course, there wasn’t enough game for the whole four thousand of us.”

  “Four thousand? A hundred miles or more apart? What’d he do—spend a lifetime finding you all?”

  Yorick started to answer, then caught himself and said ver
y carefully, “He knew how to travel fast.”

  “Very fast, I should think—at least a mile a minute.” Rod had a vision of a ground-effect car trying to climb a forty-five-degree slope. “And how did he get you up to that mountain valley? Wings?”

  “Something like that,” Yorick confessed. “And it wasn’t all that big a valley. He taught us how to use bows and arrows, and we had a whee of a time hunt-ing—but the Eagle knew that could only last just so long, so he got us busy on planting. And, just about the time game was getting scarce, our first maize crop was getting ready to harvest.”

  “Maize?” Rod gawked. “Where the hell’d he get that?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t what you think of as maize,” Yorick said quickly. “Little bitty ears, only about four inches long.”

  “In 50,000 B.C. maize was just a thickheaded kind of grass,” Rod grated, “like some parties I could mention. And it only grew in the New World. Neanderthals only grew in the Old.”

  “Who says?” Yorick snorted. “Just because we weren’t obliging enough to go around leaving fossils doesn’t mean we weren’t there.”

  “It doesn’t mean you were, either,” Rod said, tight-lipped, “and you’ve got a very neat way of not answering the question you’re asked.”

  “Yeah, don’t I?” Yorick grinned. “It takes practice, let me tell you.”

  “Do,” Rod invited. “Tell me more about this ‘Eagle’ of yours. Just where did he come from, anyway?”

  “Heaven sent him in answer to our prayers,” Yorick said piously. “Only we didn’t just call him ‘Eagle’ anymore—we called him the ‘Maize King.’ That way, we could stay cooped up in our little mountain valley and not bother anybody.”

  “A laudable ideal. What happened?”

  “A bunch of Flatfaces bumped into us,” Yorick sighed. “Pure idiot chance. They came up to the mountains to find straight fir trees for shafts, and blundered into our valley. And, being Flatfaces, they couldn’t leave without trying a little looting and pillaging.”

  “Neanderthals never do, of course.”

  Yorick shook his head. “Why bother? But they just had to try it—and most of ‘em escaped, too. Which was worse—because they came back with a whole horde behind ‘em.”

  Rod was still thinking about the “most.”

  “You’re not going to try to tell me your people were peaceful!”

  “Were,” Yorick agreed. “Definitely ‘were.’ I mean, with five hundred scream-ing Flatfaces charging down on us, even the most pacifistic suddenly saw a lot of advantages in self-defense. And the Eagle had taught us how to use bows, but the Flatfaces hadn’t figured out how to make them yet; so we mostly survived.”

  Again, “most.”

  “But the Eagle decided he hadn’t hidden you well enough?”

  “Right.” Yorick bobbed his head. “Decided we couldn’t be safe anywhere on Earth, in fact—so he brought us here. Or to Anderland, anyway.” He jerked his head toward the west. “Over that way.”

  “The mainland,” Rod translated. “Just—brought you.”

  “Right.”

  “How!?”

  “I dunno.” The Neanderthal shrugged. “He just took us to this great big square thing and marched us through, and… here we were!” He grinned. “Just like that!”

  “Just like that.” It was strange, Rod reflected, how drastically Yorick’s IQ could change when he wanted it to. From the sound of it, the Neanderthals had walked through a time machine. Dread gnawed at Rod’s belly—was this Eagle one of the futurian totalitarians who had staged the rebellion two years ago? Or one of the futurian anarchists, who had tried to stage a coup d’etat?

  Or somebody else from the future, trying to horn in on Gramarye?

  Why not? If there were two time-traveling organizations, why not a third? Or a fourth? Or a fifth? Just how many time machines were hidden away on this planet, anyway? Could Gramarye be that important?

  But it could be, he admitted silently to himself. He’d learned from a renegade Futurian that Gramarye would eventually become a democracy, and would sup-ply the telepaths that were vital to the survival of an interstellar democracy. That meant that the futurian anarchists and totalitarians were doomed to failure—unless they could subvert Gramarye into dictatorship, or anarchy. The planet was a nexus, a pivotal element in the history of humanity—and if it was the pivot, Rod was its bearing.

  The Eagle was obviously a futurian—but from which side? Rod certainly wasn’t going to find out from Yorick. He could try, of course—but the Neander-thal was likely to turn into a clam. Rod decided not to press the point—let Yorick finish talking; just sit back and listen. That way, Rod would at least learn every-thing the Neanderthal was willing to say. First get the basic information; then dig for the details. Rod forced a grin and said, “At least you were safe from Flat-faces… I mean, Cro-Magnons.”

  “We sure were. In fact, things were really hunky-dory, for a while. We chased out the dinosaurs, except for the ones who couldn’t run fast enough…”

  “How’d you handle them?”

  “With a knife and fork. Not bad, with enough seasoning. Especially if you grind ‘em up and sprinkle it on top of some cornbread, with some cheese sauce.”

  “I, uh, think we can, uh, delay that tangent.” Rod swallowed hard against a queasy stomach. “But I’m sure the regimental cook would love to hear your reci-pes.” There was a gagging sound from the soldiers behind him, and Tuan swal-lowed heavily. Rod changed the subject. “After you took care of the wildlife, I assume you cleared the underbrush?”

  “And the overbrush; made great little houses. Then we put in a crop and practiced fishing while we watched it grow.”

  “Catch anything?”

  “Just coelacanths, but they’re not half bad with a little…”

  “How about the farming?” Rod said quickly.

  “Couldn’t be better. Grew real fast, too, and real big; nice soil you’ve got here.”

  “A regular Garden of Eden,” Rod said drily. “Who was the snake?”

  “A bright-eyed boy, eager to make good.”

  Rod had been getting bored, but he suddenly gained interest. “A boy?”

  “Well, okay, so he was about forty. And the brightness in his eye was pure greed—but you couldn’t call him grown-up, really. Still couldn’t tell the differ-ence between reality and fantasy. He decided he was a magician and a priest all rolled into one, and went around telling everybody they should worship the Elder God.”

  Rod frowned. “Who is the ‘Elder God’?”

  “ ‘What’ would be more like it. Nobody’s ever seen it, mind you…”

  “That’s the way it is with most gods.”

  “Really? From all the stories I hear, it’s just the other way around. But this shaman drew pictures of him for us; it was a huge bloated grotesque thing, with snakes for hair and little fires for eyes. Called him the Kobold.” Yorick shud-dered. “Gives me the creeps, just to think about it.”

  “Not the type to inspire confidence,” Rod agreed. “And he was hoping to win converts with this thing?”

  Yorick nodded. “Didn’t get ‘em, though—at least, until his buddy Atylem got lost at sea.”

  “His buddy got lost. This made people think his god was true?”

  “No, it was because Atylem came back.”

  “Oh—the Slain and Risen One.”

  “Not really. Atylem had been out fishing, see, and he hadn’t come back. But finally he did, two weeks later—and he said he’d found a whole new land five days across the water. And it was just chock-full of Flatfaces!”

  “Oh.” Rod lifted his head slowly, eyes losing focus. “So. Your people decided the Eagle was wrong, eh?”

  “You’re quick, milord.”

  “And that meant the Kobold was right.”

  Yorick nodded. “Doesn’t really make sense, does it?”

  Rod shrugged. “That’s the way people think. I mean, we’re talking about public opinion, not logic.
”

  “Sure.” Yorick spread his hands. “Put yourself in their place. Why would the Eagle bring you so close to your old enemies if he were really powerful and wise?”

  “But they were all the way across the water,” Rod said reasonably, “a day’s journey.”

  “That’s what we all said.” Yorick nodded toward his friends. “We were Ea-gle’s leadership cadre, you see. I was his right-hand man—and Gachol over there was his left-hand.”

  “And the rest were the fingers?”

  “You got it. Anyway, we all said the Flatfaces couldn’t bother us much—not with all that water to cross. But one day we looked up, and there was a Flatface floating in the sky.”

  Rod stiffened, galvanized. Toby, on his spy mission! But hadn’t Yorick left something out? A little matter of a raid?

  But the Neanderthal plowed on. “Well! The fat was in the fire, I can tell you! That shaman—Mughorck was his name—he was out and about the village be-fore the Flatface was out of the sky, shouting about how Eagle had betrayed us and now the Flatfaces were gonna come over like a ton of devilfish and knock us all into the gizzard!”

  “Didn’t anybody argue with him?”

  “A few of us did try to point out that one Flatface does not an army make—nor a navy, for that matter. But, I mean, this Flatface was flying! Everybody was panicking. Some of them were so scared, they actually started digging them-selves holes to crawl into! I mean, they were talking magic, and they were talking sorcery—and Eagle had made a big point of telling them that he wasn’t magical, and he wasn’t a sorcerer. Not that anybody believed him, of course, but…”

  “But it laid the egg of doubt,” Rod inferred. “I should be so lucky!”

  The apeman frowned. “How’s that again?”

  “Uh, nothing,” Rod said hastily. “I take it the people began to believe him, at just the wrongest time?”

  “Right. After all, there was Mughorck the shaman, running around telling people that he was magical, and was a sorcerer—and that his god, the Kobold, could make them strong enough to defeat the Flatfaces, and, well… people don’t think too clearly when they’re scared stiff. First thing you knew, everybody was yelling and shouting that the shaman was right, and the Kobold had to be a true god, after all.”