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by Gordon R. Dickson

  “Did you think I wouldn’t follow you closely this night, Outlander?” said Rajn. He coughed his humor and went off at a run after his warriors, who were already pushing through the partially open gate.

  Harb turned back hastily to hunt for his shield and located it just as the light thunder of a much greater number of running feet struck his ear. Rajn must already have sent a runner back to rouse the camp.Yells and sounds of fighting were already beginning to come from within the gates, and as Harb looked, the gate-half he had pulled ajar with the wire-gun swayed and squealed further open to make a gap half a dozen men could enter abreast.

  Prudently, Harb ran to one side and watched the dark, heavy mass of the raiders, beginning to shout and howl now that there was no more reason for silence, pour past him into the city. An unbroken river of fighters was coming from the camp. No doubt in another half hour every forest warrior would be within the city. Harb took himself apart to wait for dawn and what it might show.

  What it showed was a captured city completely in the hands of forest warriors, except for a single large building that seemed to be a sort of meeting-house or town hall in the center of the city. This building was apparently crammed with several hundred of the city inhabitants; and these were only alive when the rest of the original populace lay dead, because the forest warriors had literally grown weary of killing.

  Harb went in search of Rajn. He found the Homskarter king, one of a drunken party with Witta and the other lesser chiefs. All were apparently asleep or unconscious in a shop on the same square that held the large building enclosing the remaining living city people. For a moment, Harb thought that Rajn had passed-out with the rest; but as he came close theking opened his eyes and looked at Harb with a gaze that did not show drunken at all.

  “Outlander . . .” he said loudly and thickly. “Help me outside. . . I need some air . . .”

  Harb came forward and gave the king an arm. Rajn pulled himself to his feet and leaned heavily on Harb as Harb helped him out into the silent square. Once beyond view from the doorway, however, Rajn shook himself free of Harb’s arm and walked with perfect balance around the comer of the building they had just left into a little blind alley where they were out of sight of anyone else.

  "Well, Outlander,” he said, turning to face Harb. “I’ve been waiting for you to show up. Name your price."

  “Price?” echoed Harb.

  Rajn’s eyes slitted.

  “We each know the other to be no fool, Outlander,” he said. “Don’t waste my time. You gave us an entrance to this city with an eye to your own profit in some way. I’d be no king but a fool to believe otherwise. Now I ask you what that price is.”

  Harb shrugged.

  “I’ve told you, King,” he said, “what’s to your benefit is also to mine. Now you have all the loot and food your warriors can carry. Return home with it and be happy.”

  “Happy?” Rajn coughed. “There is more than happiness in this, Outlander.”

  “Why should there be?” said Harb. “I can even tell you how to take home more than you now think you can carry.”

  Rajn looked at him.

  “Say on,” said the king.

  “You have lost a few of those you started with,” said Harb. “On the empty benches among your canots, you could carry at least two or three hundred other paddlers.”

  He paused.

  “Say on, I said,” repeated Rajn.

  “If you’d take a couple of hundred or so stout men and women from that building, there,” Harb waved in the direction of the meeting-house where the city inhabitants were waiting their doom, “they could learn to paddle, portage and carry for you. The canots could be more heavily loaded with grain, weapons and other things of worth from this city.”

  Rajn grunted a negative.

  “Those who still live must be sacrificed to the Gods who smiled on us and let us capture this city,” he said. He shot an ironic glance at Harb. “Or so my warriors would say if I should suggest what you suggest.”

  “What’s wrong with taking the prisoners home and sacrificing them there?”

  “Home? Take who home? What—who home?” grunted another voice and Witta reeled into sight around the comer of the building.

  “Cousin,” said Rajn, softly, “the outlander is pleasuring me with one of his tales.”

  “Outlander!” The hair on Witta’s shoulders erected itself in drunken rage. “Flay and gut all Outlanders—” His voice caught in his throat, his shoulder hairs wilted. For all his careful study of the natives of this planet and the Homskarters in particular, Harb was never sure of reading their expressions. But it seemed to him that shock and fear—almost a superstitious fear—at what he had just said, was visible for a moment on Witta’s face and body.

  The second-in-command of the Homskarters turned and staggered back around the comer of the cul-de-sac, out of sight.

  “You didn’t answer me, King,” said Harb, in the silence that followed. “What’s wrong with taking the prisoners home and sacrificing them there?”

  “What, indeed?” said Rajn agreeably. “A wise thought, Outlander.”

  “Good,” said Harb, relieved. “You won’t regret going home this early. In fact, I’ll promise you that this is your first step to more than you’ve ever dreamed of having.”

  Chapter Seven

  Harb headed back out of the city and found himself a safe spot in the center cargo area of Rajn’s boat, to catch up on the sleep he had lost. Nothing was absolutely sure with the natives of this world; but the overwhelming odds were that the sanctity of a king’s craft, plus his own reputation, would make him fairly safe from anyone who might consider sneaking aboard with robbery or murder in mind.Just to be on the safe side, however, he set his metal detector to wake him if anything metallic should be brought within two meters of him.

  A little later he woke to realize that the boat was being moved; but since there was no reason to suspect any danger to him in that, he merely went back to sleep again. He was more tired than he had thought and he slept heavily.

  When he did wake, it was to the boat-sway and noises that signalled that they were once more travelling. It was late afternoon when he sat up to glance about him; and he could see that the whole expedition was afloat, moving together.

  He felt a surge of pleased surprise. Rajn had evidently lost no time in turning back toward the forests.Not only that—apparently he had experienced n odeep problems in talking the other petty kings and chieftains into turning back with him. Harb sat up further and looked around for the city-dwellers that were being brought back as slaves. There were none in this boat, but that was not surprising, since Rajn’s was the command craft and any casualties among its crew had been promptly replaced from other Homskarter canots as soon as vacancies appeared.

  But, when Harb looked over at the nearby craft, he saw no city-slaves aboard them. Even taking into account the high sides of the canots, the broader-faced, shorter-haired plains dwellers would have been easily identifiable.

  Rajn certainly would not have been foolish enough to turn back without taking slaves and grain with him? Harb felt a sudden uneasy emptiness in him. Going back without slaves and grain made no sense . . .

  He checked the thought suddenly, struck by a suspicion.

  Getting up, he moved to the nearest side of the canot. Here, in the cargo-carrying midsection of the boat, there were no paddlers and he could literally hang over the side. It took a moment or two of checking the river surface for bits of floating debris far enough from the canots so that the drift of such flotsam was not affected by the swirling of the paddles—but then he saw clearly what he had feared.The canots were moving with, not against, the cur-rent, continuing downstream further into the plains country.

  The back of Harb’s neck went cold and his mouth went dry. He swallowed his anger, which would do him no good now. When he had last spoken to Rajn, the king had promised a return to the forests. . . .

  Or had he?

  H
arb was wide awake now and his mind galloped.Like all the rest of his people, the Homskarter king was adept at saying something that sounded like one thing but was actually something else. What had been Rajn’s exact words when Harb had pressed him to know what was wrong with taking the slaves and grain and heading home?

  “What, indeed?” Rajn had said.

  Now that the words were re-echoing in his head, Harb could recognize how far from an unconditional agreement to his plan they had been. With no trouble now, he understood. By Homskarter reasoning, Rajn would be a fool to turn back home just when he had discovered how useful Harb could be in opening up walled cities. Grain and slaves were useful things, something Rajn could appreciate during the long winter months. But right now, like all the other raiders, what would be glittering much more attractively in his imagination would be the metal implements, the weapons, cloths and all other such booty to be acquired from the more sophisticated civilizations of the plains cities.

  It would be only when he had his fill of these other, more luxurious items, that Rajn would turn back. Harb swore at himself. He should have realized that fact.

  Now, he gnawed his lip. The question was how much booty Rajn would want to win before he could be talked into turning back—or whether there might be a way of tricking him to forgoing some share of it. Harb left the side of the boat, moved back to its center and drank from one of the kegs of plains ale that had been brought aboard from the last conquest.It was not the best of drinks, even with his lemon-taste pills, but it washed away the sleep-dryness from his mouth. Then he moved on up to the stemcastle platform, where Rajn rested, momentarily free of companions and sprawled out on a pile of the green and grey-striped cloth that was also part of the late city’s loot.

  “King,” said Harb, from the foot of the three steps leading to the platform, “are you in a mood to talk to an outlander?”

  “Well now,” said Rajn, peering down at him over the edge of the royal drinking bowl, “you judge my mood very well. Come and talk to me, then.”

  Harb mounted the platform and sat down crosslegged on it, a little off the pile of clothes on which Rajn lay.

  “I see we are once more on the path of conquest, King,” he said.

  “I have always said, Outlander,” replied Rajn, “that your vision was of the best—considering what you are and where you come from, of course.”

  “Does the King have in mind the next place we will conquer?”

  “Perhaps ...” said Rajn. He drank from the bowl, watching Harb as he did so. “Have you ever seen a city built on a mountain, Outlander?”

  “In other places, I have indeed seen cities built alone in high places,” said Harb, cautiously. “Whether that’s what Rajn the King means, of course, I can’t say. What I’ve seen could be very like—and then it could be a great deal different.”

  “It’s probably different, Outlander,” said Rajn. “Still, someone like yourself will probably come to understand it well enough. This is a city built on a steep mountain that rises from the plains at a point where this and another river come together, so protecting the mountain on two sides. A very steep mountain it is, and a very rich city—but with very high walls and more rocks than are necessary to roll down the sides of the mountain at anyone attacking it.”

  “I . . . see,” said Harb.

  “But a wise outlander like yourself will undoubtedly have a plan for avoiding such rocks and taking the city anyway,” Rajn said. “There would certainly be no doubt about that, either. Would there?”

  Harb had to think quickly.

  “No, King,” he said. “Of course not. Naturally,

  I’d have to study this high city first, so that I could understand the differences between it and the sort of high cities I’ve been used to.”

  “Naturally,” said Rajn. “I would expect no less. By all means take half a day, or even more, to study if you wish.”

  Harb shook his head. He had reached a point where it would be wise to dig in his heels a bit.

  “The small skills and magic I possess,” he said, “would, I’m afraid, never be able to bridge such a wisdom-gap in half a day. An eight-day, possibly—”

  “An eight-day, Outlander,” said Rajn, “is too long.”

  Harb shook his head again.

  “I would hope it would take less than a week, of course,” he said, “but I would not want, either, to promise the king of the Homskarters something that would need several more days than I had promised.Perhaps I might do this in less than a week, if I was very lucky, but to promise anything less than six or seven days—”

  “One day at the outside, Outlander,” said Rajn. “What can I say?” replied Harb. “I can tell the king one day if he wishes to hear that, but certainly it can’t be done in that short a time. Six days would be the absolute least amount of time to discover a way to take such a city.”

  “Two days. That’s the most these fighting men will wait.”

  “I understand,” said Harb—and in fact he did. To hold an expedition like this one idle for more than two days, with a prize like a wealthy city in plain sight, would be for Rajn to seriously risk his authority. “But there’s no need for them to do nothing but wait while I work out a way to get past the city walls. There are some things that I have to do in any case; and other things, which if done, will help me to reach my own answers much more quickly than I would if I didn’t do them. For one thing, I need to see this city defending itself so that I can best understand how it does so. I have to see at least one attack on it—and who knows, such an attack might even succeed, thereby saving a very great deal of time and trouble.”

  “True,” said Rajn. He drank. “There is always that.”

  “To be really certain, however,” said Harb, “I should really see two attacks—”

  “Outlander,” said Rajn. He lowered his head and his voice barely reached the ears of Harb alone.“You’ll see two attacks that fail to take this city only if I am convinced beyond all doubt that in no way can a third attack fail to win it easily. Also, four days is all the time you will have—and if you’re wise you’ll count on only the first three of that four, if you have hopes of yourself, or I, or any of us from Homska, seeing sunset of that fourth day after two failed attacks.”

  Harb met the other’s eyes. They were direct and unyielding.

  “I understand, King,” he said. “How soon might we be reaching this city and the other river?”

  “Two days.”

  “I understand,” said Harb. “I promise you, therefore, this city in four days.”

  “And I accept your promise, Outlander,” said Rajn. “Now, I’m tired of talking.”

  Harb went back to the cargo area, lay down again, and closed his eyes in a pretense of sleeping. How he would go about getting into a fortified city on a mountain, he had no idea. But he had been in no position to plead an inability to do so.

  Behind closed eyelids, now, he put his mind to work, and continued to keep it at work as they continued downriver and pulled ashore at sunset to set up cooking fires and what passed among the forest dwellers as an overnight camp. Chiefly, this meant some hide tents for the kings and chieftains, and a few feet of open ground with a fur or two to wrap around each of those who were both sober and careful. Most of the expedition simply ate and drank themselves insensible, and slumbered uncovered where they fell.

  Rajn chose to sleep on board his craft. That put it off limits to everyone else, including Harb. So Harb went off away from the encampment to build himself a small security nest in a patch of tall grass.

  He was busy using his mind and memory. Before he had come, in the six months in which he had prepared for this trip, he had intensively studied a number of very good photos of the plains areas usually covered by the Homskarters and their fellow forest raiders on their summer forays. He had, in effect, memorized the territory of their possible routes on this expedition and now that memorization paid off.

  Clear to his mind’s eye came a picture of th
e city Rajn was talking about. It stood, as the king had said, at the confluence of the river they were now on and another equally as large that flowed into it almost at a right angle. The city was a high-walled, well-fortified place, certainly, but—Harb remembered now—it was somewhat of an exaggeration to say that it was sited on a mountain. Actually it occupied the top of a limestone bluff between the two rivers at the point where they joined—a limestone bluff that had had its further approach eroded away by spring flooding and some centuries of traffic, so that the city was actually perched on a steep-sided hill.

  The realities of the situation, however, did not make easy the task of sacking such a city with the kind of troops available to Rajn and no siege artillery. The north and west slopes to the city, except for the switchback road leading up to its main gates,were bristling with stones and boulders of all sizes. Some of these had perhaps weathered out of the limestone, but a good number, at least on the upper slopes, had obviously been deliberately brought in and lined up so that they could be rolled down on attackers. At first glance it looked like the kind of stronghold that would require modern human heavy weapons to take.

  Bedded down in his grass nest, with his detectors set to warn him of any unexpected approach, Harb vigorously rejected the idea that the place should be so unconquerable. Anything this primitive should not offer that much of a problem to someone like himself.

  Of course it shouldn’t. Still... he fell asleep at last that night, without having come up with the answer he so confidently expected.

  Chapter Eight

  As Rajn had promised, it was not until the second day after leaving the city they had last taken that they came to the one on the mountain. They had moved from a very flat plains area gradually into one in which the terrain was more rolling, so that the crests of soft, tan-colored hillsides on either side of the river made for close horizons. So it was that they came on the high city all at once. One moment it was not visible, and then the river made a turn around the flank of one of the soft land-rises to their left, and they caught sight of the city, clear and plain, though still some distance off, in the bright, early afternoon sunlight.