by R. M. Meluch
Then someone came out of the forest and ran toward him with a drawn dagger. It was Layla. She tried to saw at his metal chains.
“Layla, I surrendered,” Alihahd said.
“I did not,” Layla said. She looked for a catch, a spring, something to release the chains. “Damn!”
Soldiers were returning. Layla yanked at the chains, gave a grunt of frustration, and scurried back to the jungle at the last possible moment, elusive as an Itiri.
Lost-looking soldiers began to reassemble on the plateau, without orders, without a camp, directionless. At least the ghost image of the Flying Dutchman had ceased to menace over the plain by then. Someone else came to Alihahd’s stake. Pony. The slender little slave sat at his master’s feet, resting his white-maned head against the post to wait until someone came to get him.
Alihahd was thirsty. There was no fresh water. He saw frightened faces among the troops licking their lips and trembling with dehydration on the dusty plateau. Pony was wilted at the bottom of the post.
General Issurish returned to the plateau, and some small confidence and hope revived in the lost men and women of the Na′id army. Issurish wiped his brow; he was hot, thirsty, and tired, but not frightened. He moved like a leader who knew what he was about. Like Musa, he was difficult to rattle, even in catastrophe. He organized a few patrols and sent them out in search of water. He sent others to deal with the grass fires, which had almost burned themselves out by then, but it gave the soldiers something to do.
From the jungle, a band of ten soldiers brought a thrashing prisoner, hogtied and gagged with his own bandana. They dropped him at General Issurish’s feet and gave the general a plastic black box they had found on the prisoner’s person.
It was a projector. Issurish turned it on.
The dim outlines of a brigantine ship began to shimmer over the trees. Issurish turned it off. “Well,” said Issurish and looked down at Harrison White Fox Hall, who was trussed and double-trussed.
“Is all this necessary?” Issurish asked his soldiers, his voice dripping with tired patience.
“Yes, sir,” said the black-and-blue sergeant with teeth marks on his arms.
Issurish looked down again. Orange eyes slid up slyly, not the least bit frightened or remorseful. Issurish drew his gun and pointed it at the handsome, wedge-shaped head.
The captive didn’t blink. Issurish guessed that his pulse hadn’t even quickened. Issurish holstered his gun. He could see the man was dangerous—confirming all that the black box implied. The kind with ice in the veins, and no heart—Issurish wouldn’t even bother trying to intimidate him. Vain gestures were a waste of his time.
“Where is your ship?” Issurish demanded.
Hall snorted a laugh behind his gag.
Issurish nodded. He’d expected that response.
Torture was yet a possibility, though Issurish had his doubts even to the efficacy of that. He ordered an organized search begun for the Marauder’s ship.
Hall was sniggering at the general’s feet.
“Don’t look so smug, Marauder,” Issurish said. “I am aware that you have the only working spaceship in the world. And while I would very much like to lay hands on it, it is not imperative. Someone will come looking for us eventually, or we will find your ship for ourselves, and your life and your smug secret will be worth sadly little then.” He watched the orange eyes for a reaction.
How could anyone smirk so while gagged?
Issurish turned away and gave orders to the soldiers who had brought him. “Put him with Shad Iliya. Guard them both closely. And take off that imbecilic gag.”
“He bites, sir.”
“Take him away.”
The guards chained Harrison Hall to the same black, charred post as Alihahd. The two exchanged looks. They’d last seen each other to say farewell.
“Captain.”
“Mr. Hall.”
“Be quiet,” a guard commanded. She chased the little slave Pony away. Pony skittered off a few yards, then hovered at a respectful distance, tail switching, watching for an opportunity to come back.
The Na′id army had given up trying to recapture their other rebel prisoners. They hadn’t the means to keep two thousand people captive. And they turned their energies to survival without prepared food, without pure water, without modern equipment. They couldn’t even make Harrison Hall divulge his secrets without the devices and drugs from their ships.
Hall was pleased with himself. He was satisfied with the smoking piles of melted metal that were the Na′id ships. “I like my plan better than yours,” he said to Alihahd.
“You have made a liar of me again,” Alihahd said. “Caused a melee, stranded all of us on this planet, possibly incited an interstellar purge, and signaled the destruction of this world.”
“And I robbed you of your neat and heroic little suicide,” Hall said, cutting to the real source of his vexation. “I told you I wanted you alive and stinging.”
“You are a devil.”
“No. Angel. Who ever heard of an avenging devil?”
“Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!”
“Nothing more eloquent than that for me?”
“No.”
“Oh, but I first met you in a spate of elegant fury, Captain.”
He still remembered Alihahd exquisitely angry: For myself, by you or by them, I will be equally dead. I don’t very much care. So, please, either shoot, talk, or go away. Or you may go to hell, where I am bound with or without you. Do you want me to repeat any of that?
“Do you know your buddy talks just like you do?” He meant Issurish.
He received only a grunt from Alihahd.
Hall grinned. “You’re glad to see me.” He curled two fingers around Alihahd’s wrist behind his back.
“Will you shut up!” a guard snarled.
Time passed slowly. Alihahd and Hall both slid down the post to sit on the ground, still chained. As evening came on, the Na′id were settling. They set up guards against sniping rebels and wild animals from the jungle. They’d built campfires and brought hundreds of animal carcasses to be skinned, gutted, and cooked. They boiled stream water and tested the palatability of jungle fruits on their remaining slaves such as Pony. Once they organized, time was on their side. Eventually, eventually, someone would come looking. The Empire simply did not lose its most famous army, a reinforcement company, and two generals, and not come investigating in time.
“We need allies,” Hall mumbled aside to Alihahd.
Alihahd knew of whom he spoke. “It is not their battle,” he said.
They both gazed up at the sky, attracted by the sight of an eagle soaring over the mountain.
Their minds ran parallel. Alihahd addressed Hall’s unspoken thought: “It would go against conscience.”
“Not mine,” Hall said.
The two guards, who were bragging to each other about their marksmanship, turned back to their captives. “I thought I told you to shut up,” said one. She was a tight-lipped, razor-lean sergeant with a pock-scarred face, hatchet features, and a slight curve to her spine. She walked with her shoulders hunched forward, her pelvis tucked under, her sharp hipbones prominent against the fabric of trousers that were too loose on her. She sneered a lot.
The other guard was a beefy young man with peppercorn hair and a walk like a turkey cock. He snarled at the captives and returned his attention to his comrade’s high claims regarding her sharpshooting.
Hall said loudly, “I was just saying: Odds say you can’t hit that eagle.”
Alihahd was horrified. “No!”
The sergeant turned her head back to them and gave a thin-lipped sneer. “Sure I can.” She lifted her gun and took aim at the distant soaring shape.
“They are sapient beings!” Alihahd cried.
The Na′id sergeant looked up from her gun
sight and regarded him queerly. It had been a nonsensical thing to say. “Alien’s an alien,” she said and returned her sights to the target. She took careful aim and fired.
The majestic eagle folded in midair and came fluttering down into the mountain jungle.
Alihahd was stunned. He rasped at Hall, “You don’t have a conscience.”
“Absolutely none.” Hall smiled. “Captain, you surprise me. I didn’t think you considered aliens to be on a level with human beings.”
“I changed my mind!”
The guard swaggered to Hall and looked down at him with a smirk. “Any more dumb bets?”
“None, ma’am,” Hall said. “That was a splendid shot.”
And from the sky came a clear, thin cry.
Ki ki ki ki.
• • •
Directly overhead the kestrel hovered, suspended on a light breeze, while in the distance droned the engines of rapidly approaching aircraft.
“What’s that?” the Na′id cried, and Na′id guns pointed toward the sky.
Issurish prowled the wide plateau, bellowing at his thousands of soldiers, “For gods’ sake, if it’s a working vehicle, don’t shoot at it!”
And the Itiri came.
The ships landed in the jungle, and in a short time the warrior-priests appeared from the trees, twelve tall alabaster godlings with sunlight hair and eyes of brilliant green. From their midst advanced a midnight figure cradling a great limp feathered body in her wiry arms. Its blood seeped onto her tunic and trousers.
She stepped to the center of the plain and spoke with a voice like brass. “This is my brother. Who hath done this? This is my battle.”
She turned slowly, a complete circuit, then stooped and gently laid the dead eagle on the yellow grass.
The kestrel was hovering above the charred post where Alihahd and Hall were bound. Roniva crossed to them. The two guards moved away at her advance, and the kestrel moved with the sergeant.
Roniva stopped, looked at Hall and Alihahd in chains, looked at the kestrel, looked at the thin, snarling sergeant, whose shoulders hunched defensively as she hugged her gun, her tiny eyes darting.
“Thou?” Roniva demanded of her without an intermediary.
The sergeant’s thin upper lip moved in spasms. She wasn’t answerable to this alien. “What the hell are you?” she sneered.
General Issurish intervened. To Roniva he said, “Madame, if you have some problem with my soldiers, you will address it to me.”
Onyx eyes shifted to him, to his general’s insignia. “Thy soldier or thy head,” Roniva said.
Issurish’s attitude immediately changed. “Is that a threat, you alien bitch?”
“I decide,” Roniva answered herself. Faster than the eye could follow, Roniva had drawn her sword and slashed the sneering sergeant’s throat open.
All at once, those Na′id soldiers with a clear shot aimed their weapons at the alien warriors, but in that same instant each Itiri had seized the nearest Na′id soldier as a shield, and no one dared shoot.
Roniva herself had caught Issurish by the back of his hair and by one thick wrist, which she twisted behind his back.
Twice her bulk, he couldn’t move.
“Thou hast come to my home like a great ape,” Roniva said. “I will have thee and thine kind gone from here.” She had looped his long hair once around the hilt of her sword, and she yanked on it for emphasis. Issurish ground his teeth in silence.
Roniva took his handgun from him, then unwound her sword hilt from his hair, still keeping hold of his wrist behind his back. She glanced aside at the dead sergeant crumpled in a pool of blood like the eagle. Then she looked to Hall and Alihahd chained to the post. She looked away as if uninterested, then suddenly screamed, swung her tungsten-plastic blade, and slashed down at the post, severing the prisoners’ chains in a single stroke. She hadn’t let go of Issurish.
Issurish nodded, nothing daunted. “We will go. We will destroy your world.”
Alihahd, chains hanging from his wrists, came to Roniva’s side. “They can do it, Fendi.”
Roniva lifted her chin, unafraid.
A deep, groaning rumble and an unfirmness to the ground way down deep like the beginnings of an earthquake unsettled the field.
A great dark mass rising from the horizon slowly eclipsed the setting sun—a leviathan rising out of the River Ocean, spilling water from its crevices—and it kept rising like a continent taking flight.
“What is that?” Issurish demanded. It was still rising.
“An intergalactic ship—what does it look like?” Roniva said. She was starting to sound like Harrison Hall. She told Alihahd, “Say to this creature he may destroy that.”
Her snowy owl blinked in above her head and alighted on her hard shoulder. It batted Issurish’s head as it folded its broad white wings.
Roniva spoke sharply to Alihahd. “Now. Say to this one.” She twisted Issurish’s wrist. “Say to him: ‘Thy Bel hath been notified. Thy people are to be picked up and leave this planet. Not to look back. A ship of the rebel kind will come to collect the fugitives littering my forest. Be gone and continue your fight far away from here.’ Am I understood?”
“Have you no concept of justice?” Issurish asked.
“Oh, yes, justice,” Roniva said. “Tell this one that we do not worship that god here.”
“I demand—”
“Art thou so stupid? Take what I give thee, or I shall give thee ash!” Roniva cried. “Another Dark Age for thy kind! A long one! Two thousand years was not enough!”
She threw Issurish away from her. To Alihahd she said, “Stay close to me, in case they shoot.”
Alihahd and Hall both drew closer. “You have a shield?” Alihahd asked.
“This creature,” she stroked her owl’s wing, “can absorb a great deal of energy. Come. I wish to be away from these beings.”
Alihahd and Hall followed Roniva into the jungle. None of the Na′id tried to stop them, or fired on any of the warrior-priests.
The intergalactic ship lifted its full bulk from the River Ocean. It now dominated the darkening sky like a close moon.
It occurred to Alihahd that Roniva could have summoned a rescue for him anytime she wanted—had she wanted to lead outsiders to Aerie. As if reading his thoughts, she said in perfect, modern Universal, “I do not like your people.”
Alihahd glared at Hall. “At this point neither do I.”
As he walked, he nearly tripped over the cut chains which dangled from his wrists. Roniva noticed his difficulty, and she cut the chains off for him and Harrison Hall, leaving them with the metal cuffs.
“And to which side belongest thou?” she asked Alihahd.
She already knew Hall’s.
“I believe both sides want to kill me, Fendi,” Alihahd said.
“I will give thee a ship of thine own,” she said.
Alihahd was too surprised even to thank her. Recent events and consequences were still rolling into his brain. His stare kept returning to the gargantuan, impossible ship in the sky. Its details were difficult to distinguish. If he stared too closely at a point, he could no longer see it, like trying to focus on a single star, and he wondered of what it was made—light?
The thing’s existence struck at the very foundation of the Na′id Empire. It represented a superior technology—superior to anything that had ever been known to humankind. The Na′id Empire was founded on the belief that God had created humankind in God’s own image to rule over all of lesser Creation. Human Supremacy and Galactic Dominion had become absurd.
Layla appeared from somewhere and pulled on Alihahd’s sleeve. “It is tottering, is it not? The Empire?”
“It’s falling,” Alihahd said.
He supposed the clues had been there for any of them to see all along—the Itiri’s tungsten-plasti
c swords, the disappearing, magical-seeming familiars, and constellations that had been given names so long ago they would have to antedate Earth’s first infant civilization—why hadn’t all that struck him as curious? Thousands of years ago, when men and women were nothing but great apes, someone had been here naming the constellations, naming them after swords, ships—and a Gateway.
He shook his head, feeling blind and stupid. He wondered aloud how the powerful Itiri could have allowed the deluded Na′id to strut and bawl like young bullies for so long, overrunning the galaxy and calling themselves supreme.
Hall’s eyes assumed their wicked hunter’s gleam. “Yes, how can such an aggressive people bear to watch and do nothing?”
“Aggressive?” Alihahd said.
“The Itiri?” Layla said. “The Itiri speak of nothing but peace.”
“Ever listen to their music? It’s not peaceful,” Hall said. “You saw the New Year’s celebration.” He took a zircon and a turquoise from his pocket and juggled them. “Constant repetition of humbleness and serenity isn’t the mark of a peaceful people. What is the need for the constant repetition if they are, in fact, so tranquil?”
Alihahd looked to Roniva. She wasn’t angry. She smiled like a master criminal caught by a master detective. “Very astute, Harrison White Fox Hall.” She turned to Alihahd. “You wonder at our constant readiness for war and wonder who is the enemy for whom we prepare. Only ourselves.”
“But you seem to have the aggressive tendencies conquered,” Alihahd said.
Roniva put her spidery hand over his knobby one. “And so do you seem.”
Alihahd smiled in rue and irony. They were as savage as he. So they could forgive him, forgive Ben, forgive the Na′id. The guilty did not presume to mete out justice.
“An ancient shame,” Alihahd said, remembering her words.
Roniva raised her chin, affirmatively. “That ship,” she pointed at the monster from the sea, “is not the one in which our forebears came. Our ancestors were stranded here with nothing. That ship you see was built with redeveloped technology after a long, long time in exile here. And when it was finally built—still a very long time ago—we sank it. We decided we did not want it. We did not want to be what we were, what brought us to this exile in the beginning. We wished to abandon that past and become someone else. You understand, Captain Alihahd? You see, we did not come here by choice, we were not pilgrims. We did not even flee here. This is a penal colony. We do not even know where home is—some place where red birds fly like geese. It could be that we came from another time as well as another galaxy. Once we passed through the Gateway, our ancestors could not know what date it was back home. They could have been millions of years in the passage. That was what our judges intended. They sent us so far away even our familiars could not find the way back.”
