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by Gordon R. Dickson

  The plains dwellers, with their crops, their caste system, and their mud-walled cities—their monarchs and merchant class—possessed a culture too fixed and brittle to adapt. The minds of the plains people were closed and they lacked cultural vigor.

  No, said the survey, advancement on this particular world could only come from some vigorous, new culture which had no paralyzing old patterns to inhibit it from development. And the survey suggested that—working within the rules—the way to develop such a culture was to bring the hunting tribes and villages of the forests to a self-supporting agriculture. If this could be done, in time it would turn the forest warriors from raiders of the plains into a people concerned with their own land and development.

  Freed of the pressure of yearly attack from the forest people, the plains civilization would grow weak and corrupt. Eventually it would either regress, or be swept away by the new civilization building in the woods to the north; and the forest people would begin to lead the long trek upward into a civilization comparable to that of modem humanity. At which point, hopefully, humanity would have acquired anew race of friends and partners. It was a careful plan, and a long one, looking some thousands of years into the planet’s future.

  Harb was more concerned with a plan that would show results in a matter of months. The basic idea of generating a developing society out of the forest people was sound. The trick of the survey plan, however—as Cohone had found—was to get these forest warriors to consider anything as demeaning as scratching in the dirt. The Homskarters, like all the forest peoples, lived mainly by hunting; but also by what food, primarily grain, they brought back from their annual raids on the plains. Particularly, they needed the grain to survive the months of the forest winters.

  Each fall the Homskarters, like other forest tribes, gathered and pushed their canots through nearly a thousand miles of winding lakes and streams, to emerge with fire and sword upon the crops and walls of the plains’ cities; and return with food and plunder to see them through another year in their forest fastnesses.

  Sometimes, they were met by the more numerous,but less fierce, troops of the plains kingdoms and driven off; in which case there was starvation and disease among the forest dwellers that winter. More often, they conquered; and came back to spend the wintry months feasting and living high on the storable food, drink and other produce of the plains—eked out of the few primitive patches of root vegetables grown by the women they had left behind them.

  And so the balance was held between plain and forest. It was this balance Harb intended to upset.Not slowly, as recommended by the survey—not in Cohone’s way—but suddenly and dramatically. He had spent the best part of the nine months since he had taken over this sector, first studying the worlds under him for one where such a dramatic change could be effected, then studying how the change might be brought about. Cohone, in fact, was not doing that much worse than the men on the other worlds of Harb’s sector. But Cohone did have a world with a situation Harb could disrupt to his advantage.

  It had taken some months of intensive work with records and computerized game plans, but Harb had eventually come up with what he wanted. Instead of a slow development of the forest people apart from the plains culture, why not make it possible for one of the forest leaders to become a Genghis Khan who could first take over control of all the forest tribes,then sweep down to conquer and occupy the plains?

  The result would be a blending of the two cultures,with the forest people as warrior-aristocrats, and the plains people as a sub-caste of servants and slaves.From the brighter individuals of such a sub-caste,forbidden the warrior prides and occupations, could come artisans and scholars. And later on, when hybrid vigor began to manifest itself out of the cross-breeding of peoples, there would emerge true geniuses with intelligence and invention. Meanwhile, the quarrelsome warrior-aristocrats would have divided the plains into a number of competing kingdoms, so that individuals of genius could find a number of different havens and a number of different patrons.

  All that would be needed to get Harb his next promotion to Division Headquarters would be to show that this development had been fully begun by actions of his. Rajn, the so-called king of Cohone’s Homskarters, was a leader of the sort needed, and his second-in-command was, according to Cohone’s reports, no threat to such a plan. It needed only be put in Rajn’s best interests to cultivate and harvest a surplus of grain—not merely enough for winter survival, but enough more for barter—to start the juggernaut of progress rolling.

  Cohone could not do this, not only because of his attitude, but because he had come here with neither the proper plans nor equipment. Harb, on the other hand, had come with all these things. He patted the numerous, well-filled pockets of his jacket one by one, checking their contents.

  Chapter Three

  Half an hour later brought him around a final headland into a wide and sheltered bay filled with canots ranging in size up to that of fifty-foot vessels with square sails. A wharf area was built out on pilings some distance from the shore; and behind the wharf on the mounting slopes of a hillside was the palisade-enclosed cluster of wooden structures that was the "palace" of Rajn, King of the Homskarters, and the surrounding "city" of Homska. Altogether, they probably contained some twenty-five hundred native men, women, and children—which made this a forest metropolis.

  Yet, thought Harb, steering in toward an inconspicuous corner of the wharf, it would not do to underrate Rajn on account of the small numbers of his people in this one settlement. When fall came,the total raiding force in his flotilla of canots, heading plainsward, would draw from the forest tribes of nearly a million square miles of surrounding territory; and his “army” would amount to as much as ten thousand backwoods fighters. Good fighters, everyone of them—though, of course, there was no possibility of any one of them being as good as Harb himself. Not unless there was some individual equivalent of a superman among them.

  He moored the canot by a wharf, the floor of which was four feet above his head. He jumped up,caught hold of the edge of the floor above him and swung himself up on to it. In spite of his attempt to come in as unobtrusively as possible, there was a small gathering already formed to examine him, his boots, helm, shield and weapons.

  “Hey, Outlander!” said one of the foremost of these. “What happened to that hoe of yours? Looks like it got itself stuck in a sheath and turned into a sword. Is that really a blade you’ve got there? Let’s see it.”

  The Homskarter was standing directly in front of Harb. It was a matter of pushing the broad-shouldered, hard-faced, hairy native in his cloth-wrapped body and limbs—red-wrapped arms, green-wrapped legs—out of his way, or walking around him. Harb stopped. He had no time to waste fighting with ordinary members of the native populace like this one.

  “A sword it is,” he answered smoothly in flawless Homskarter, “as you say—that used to be a hoe. I’m taking it up to King Rajn to show it to him. So maybe you’ll pardon me, friend, if I don’t stop to show it to you first. The king might take it amiss if it was you I stopped to show it to, before him.”

  Their eyes met. The eyes of the Homskarter, in his round, flat, snub-nosed face, were as gray as cold dishwater. Then the native stepped aside.

  “Maybe you’re right at that, Outlander,” he said.“I wouldn’t want to be the one to keep you from King Rajn. But maybe I’ll see you again here, on your way home.”

  “That might be,” said Harb, and went on through the city, up to the palace.

  He attracted some attention going through the town and more so from the guards at the gate in the palisade surrounding the palace. But these, in spite of showing some amusement, made no attempt to bar his entry, but waved him on in. Harb had carefully studied the plan of the palace, and found his way without difficulty to the entrance of the largest building within the walls—the main hall of the king. He went up half a dozen steps to its wide doorway, passed a couple more guards, who also let him through,and walked into the main room of the h
all.

  It was a long chamber with tables down both sides at which warriors sat eating and drinking, rather in the manner of a perpetual picnic. At a small table crosswise to the others, and facing the entrance at the end of the room, sat a squarely-built Homskarter, not yet into middle age, with several others on either side of him. Even without his pre-study, Harb would have recognized the center man as the most important individual in the room—Rajn, himself.

  “Outlander!” shouted the Homskarter king, as Harb came forward between the flanking tables of the room. “What’s happened to bring you here, away from your fields and weeding? And where’d you get the war tools?” He slapped the table before him and broke into the heavy coughing that was the equivalent of laughter among his race. “I know—you’ve had a plague of insects on your crops. And you come to ask my help!”

  The whole hall broke out in coughing laughter. The king, Harb saw, was more jovial than drunk as yet, although it was mid-afternoon, and already the one heavy meal of the day would have been done—clearing the way for serious drinking and other sports such as story-telling, fighting, and brutal—if not lethal—-practical jokes played on each other.

  Harb continued walking forward until he was only half a dozen feet in front of the king’s table.

  “King,” he said, calmly, in his accentless Homskarter. “I’m not surprised you don’t recognize I’m not the outlander who tills his fields up the lake from here. To you Homskarters, I suppose, we all lookalike. My name is not Cohone, like the outlander you know—but Harb. We’re different.”

  King Rajn sobered. He leaned forward on one white cloth-wrapped elbow, and his long, gray-haired hand lay flat on the table in front of him. He looked at Harb with interest.

  “Harb . . .” he repeated. It had been a fortunate coincidence that the name was one easy for the Homskarters to pronounce. Cohone was not. Neither, for that matter, was Harb’s last name—Mallard. “Harb. . . . It’s interesting. I’ve never seen one of the Others bearing weapons. I didn’t think you outlanders had any.”

  “Some of us do,” said Harb. “But if my weapons offend you. I’ll gladly leave them outside this hall. Because I’ve come to ask a favor of you. I’d like, King Rajn, to go with you and your men on your raid this fall into the plains, in order to see for myself how the Homskarters handle such things. There’s too little fighting to be had nowadays on our outlander worlds.”

  “I believe that, after seeing your fellow scratching like a woman in the dirt, up-lake,” said Rajn. “But you aren’t seriously claiming to be a fighter?”

  “Some people might call me that,” said Harb, mildly. “But if I might add to the favor I’m asking you, O King, I’d particularly appreciate it if you’d also extend me your royal protection while I’m with you. Just so none of your men’ll challenge me to use these weapons of mine.”

  “Now, that’s a strange request,” broke out the Homskarter sitting next to the king. Like Rajn, he wore the royal cloth of white—on one arm only,instead of both arms, body, and legs. Harb identified him as Witta, Rajn’s cousin and second-in-command, by vote of the Homskarter chieftains. He could not be sitting at the royal table unless he was blood-kin to the king—and only a close relative or full brother to Rajn would have dared to speak up unbidden like this. But a full brother would have had the right to wear two limbs white-wrapped instead of only one, as Rajn himself wore white on all four.

  “Strange, indeed,” said Rajn. “You want to come along with us to see fighting, but you ask me to protect you from any fighting with men of mine. Are you that afraid of the Homskarters, that you have to have my shield raised over you? If so, why should I take such a coward on my raid into the plains?”

  “Why,” answered Harb, mildly, “I don’t think I’m any more afraid of your Homskarters than anyone else might be, whether he’s a Homskarter himself or an outlander like me. It’s true your warriors are all hard fighters; and I don’t doubt there are some fearsome men among them. But it wasn’t from fear,exactly, that I asked your protection. It’s just because I’m a poet and a storyteller. And you ought to know that making proper poems and stories takes all of a man’s attention—which can’t be had if he’s disturbed all the time by the exciting prospect of letting someone’s blood.”

  For a moment the hall was silent. Then Rajn burst out into his coughing laughter, and the whole room resounded with it once more.

  “By my sword!” Rajn shouted. “I’ve heard a lot of excuses for not fighting in my time, but I never heard an excuse like that! Poet and Outlander, you’ve got my protection! Provided you can make a poem or a story as well as you seem to think you can!”

  “King!” shouted a voice from one of the long tables behind Harb. “Let me fight the outlander once first! After that, he can spend all his time making stories if he likes! A favor, King—a favor to match the outlander’s favor! Let’s see how he uses his weapons once, first.”

  “What if he went back to his own place and told how he was so clever he won a king’s protection without ever proving himself?” interposed Witta.

  Rajn’s alien laughter slowed and stopped. He sat thinking for a while and Harb waited. Finally he nodded.

  “Now, there’s some sense in that, cousin,” he said, and looked up at Harb. “Outlander, my protection’s no light thing. You’ve got to prove yourself once anyway; to gain it. It’s my decree you fight the man who just cried out for the right to fight you. ”

  Harb shrugged.

  “If it has to be that way, O King,” he said. “Though I’d hoped not to have to reduce your following by even one worthy Homskarter warrior. But, as you say—”

  He whirled. His ears had warned him just in time of the rustle of footfalls among the soft carpet of trash and bones on the floor behind him. He was able to swing about and get his shield up just in time toward off the downswing of a sword in the hand of abroad-shouldered Homskarter, who had crept up behind him.

  Even prepared as he was with his special shield and other equipment, and trained by months of practice, Harb had not adequately anticipated the impact of that sword blow, delivered with all the native’s strength. Literally, it drove Harb to his knees; and his shield-holding arm felt as if it had been broken. If he had been fighting with weapons actually equal to the

  Homskarters’, the fight would have ended within seconds after that.

  But the warrior’s sword glanced off the metal studs set around the rim of Harb’s apparently wooden shield.The blade slipped downward, bit against the metal spike protruding from the center of Harb’s shield, and broke off short—as is likely to happen when primitive iron comes hard enough against a sophisticated steel alloy. The Homskarter warrior paused to stare at his sword in amazement; and in that moment, Harb was able to regain both his senses and his feet. By the time someone at the nearby table had tossed the warrior another sword, Harb was ready for him.

  He swung his own sword at the warrior’s legs and the Homskarter dropped his shield to catch the blow.For a moment the upper part of his body was exposed and Harb, sighting through an apparently accidental notch in the top of his own shield, pressed a metal stud holding the hand grip of his own shield.

  In the dimness of the hall, there were no eyes quick enough to see the tiny, dark metal sliver that flicked from the tiny hole in the point of Harb’s shield-spike, to penetrate the heavy leather strips wrapping the upper chest of the warrior. With a shout, Harb charged into his opponent, clashing shield against shield.

  The other reeled backward. Harb’s sudden attack, their coming together, and the involuntary step backward the other was forced to take, all masked a sudden faltering of the native’s sword arm, as the potent tranquilizer contained in the metal sliver began to act.

  The Homskarter stumbled and sat down. Harb hewed downward with his sword at the unshielded head and the razor edge of his sophisticated steel-alloy blade sliced easily through the native iron of the helm of the other, hewing through skull and neck deep into the warrior’s bod
y.

  A shout of amazement went up from the watchers at the tables in the room. Harb was forced to stand on the body to draw his sword out again. He wiped it, a little dramatically, on an edge of the dead Homskarter’s kilt.

  “That was a powerful blow, Outlander,” said the king, as Harb turned once more to face him. “Come and sit down here near the end of the long table on my right. If you can tell stories as well as you can fight, you’re worthy of my protection, beyond doubt.”

  “I thank you, King,” said Harb, moving over and taking the seat made for him on the long bench behind the table. “But I’d appreciate your excusing me from any story-telling, right now. As I said, the excitement of blood-letting’s set my own blood buzzing in my head, and I can’t properly remember the stories I’d like to tell you.” He looked about the table. “Besides, even though I’m not hungry, the exercise—” he glanced at the dead body of his late opponent, now being dragged out of the hall by its heels, “has given me a thirst powerful enough to tell my grandchildren about.”

  The king coughed again with laughter, thumped the table, and shouted to the servants.

  “Drink!” he roared. “Drink, for the fighting outlander!”

  Chapter Four

  A servant brought Harb a deep wooden bowl,filled with something over a quart of the flat, brown, ill-smelling liquid that was the local fermented grain beverage. Harb palmed into his mouth a tiny yellow pill which instantly overwhelmed his taste buds with a lemony flavor and poured half the bowl down his throat at once without either tasting or smelling what he swallowed. As the king coughed his approval, Harb emptied the bowl with another long series of swallows—and, as if this had signaled it, the day’s serious drinking began.