"You don't understand," she said. "We who are descended from the Blind Kings don't lie even to save our lives."
"Damn it, I'm not asking you to be a traitor! Just play along! All right, don't lie. Avoid a direct answer. Tell Chuckswilly you'll do whatever I do. You know what my intentions are."
"That would be trickery. It's indirect lying."
"Do you want to die for nothing?"
"I don't think it's nothing," she said stiffly. "But I love you. You gave up much for me. All right, I'll do as you say."
Jack called Chuckswilly to him. "I'll join. R'li will do whatever I do."
Chuckswilly grinned and said, "She's not only beautiful, she's ambiguous. Very well. I'll untie your feet. For the moment, your hands will remain bound."
As was to be expected, Polly O'Brien had already sworn an oath to live and die for Socinia. Chuckswilly told her that he knew more about her than she thought. She was joining as an expediency, but he expected that she would remain faithful to the oath. Why not? She loved a winner, and Socinia would be victorious. Once she got to his country, she'd see that.
Polly could even practice her religion openly, since Socinia had religious toleration. However, human sacrifice was forbidden. If she knew what was good for her, and he expected that she did, she would take no part in illegal rites. Several had, and they were now in prison mines and being worked to death.
Polly's only reply was to ask for a smoke.
Jack had recovered enough to notice that the soldiers were armed with firearms of a type he had never seen before. They were made of some "plastic" material that was as strong as the rare iron. The bullets and the charges were enclosed in one package and were inserted through an opening in the breech. He asked Chuckswilly about them.
"One Socinian soldier has the firepower of ten Dyonisans and a hell of a lot more accuracy. Those round objects you see hanging from their belts are bombs three times as powerful as an equivalent Dyonisan bomb. Moreover, we can shoot them to a respectable distance with our rifles.
"If your dragon shows up, she won't stand a chance."
Jack was startled at this disclosure. But a little thought showed him that Chuckswilly had seen her tracks with those of himself and the women.
The Socinian went to R'li's brother. "I'm giving you one more chance. Your death will be for nothing. The culture of your people, of any non-Socinian, is doomed. We intend to smash the cadmi and make you horstels abandon your former mode of life. It was admirably suited for a very stable agricultural society, but it prevented technological advance. It has become a thing of the past.''
Chuckswilly turned to Jack and R'li. "Make him realize that. Socinia will not be stopped. We must become as scientifically and technologically advanced as possible in as short a time as we can. The Arra have been here twice, and they, or somebody like them, will come here again. When they do, they will find themselves facing men who can give them a bloody fight, perhaps even defeat them. Men must not become slaves again. The Arra had space ships. We'll have those, too, someday. When we do, we'll carry the fight to the Arra."
Jack became excited at this. Chuckswilly made sense. Many times he had wondered what would happen if the Arra did return. Once, he had asked Father Patrick about it. The priest had replied that the Lord would take care of them. If mankind were reduced to slavery again, man could benefit. He would be taught humility. Jack had not said so, but he had found the father's answer totally unsatisfactory.
"I won't take the slightest pleasure in killing you, Mrrn," Chuckswilly said. "In fact, it'll make me sick. But we have to be ruthless. There may not be enough time. The Arra ships could appear out of the sky today, and we'd be too late."
"I would rather be dead than live as you do. I am a Wiyr, son of the Blind King and now the Blind King himself. No!"
Chuckswilly took a short-barreled firearm from a holster on his belt. He pointed it at Mrrn's forehead. His finger tightened, and a piece of the gun rose from behind the barrel. Then it fell, and the muzzle spat fire and noise. Mrrn fell backward onto the ground with a large hole just above his right eye.
R'li screamed and began sobbing.
Chuckswilly said to Jack, "I could have forced you to prove your loyalty by asking you to execute him. But I am not inhumane. That would be too much."
Jack did not reply. He could never have killed R'li's brother or anyone under such circumstances.
R'li spoke between her sobs. "Chuckswilly, may I give my brother the rites of burial? He is the Blind King: he should not be left to rot in the open as a beast."
"That involves removing his head and burning it, doesn't it? No, I'll have no smoke. I will bury him, but you can't go through the complete ritual. It'd take too long."
The next moment, the soldiers were firing their guns. Three dragons had managed to get close to the group without being seen. Roaring, they charged out from the trees. The patrol fired point-blank, and one of the monsters went down at once, her belly blown apart. The other two, though wounded, kept coming on. Only Jack saw Mar-Kuk appear from the woods at the edge of the stream on the opposite side. The explosions of the guns, the shouts of the men, and the bellows of the dragons kept anyone from hearing the splash of her driving feet. So it was that she fell on them from behind and smashed four of the soldiers with a slash of her tail. Chuckswilly fired at her with his pistol and hit her three tunes. Jack slammed against him and knocked him to the ground. Mar-Kuk's tail swished over the space they had been occupying. By trying to put Chuckswilly out of action, Jack had also saved himself.
He was helpless now, with his hands tied behind his back, and could not prevent the man from getting to his feet again. Chuckswilly fired once more, hitting Mar-Kuk in her right arm. The hammer of his gun clicked, and he turned to run across the stream. Jack stuck out his legs and tripped him. Then Mar-Kuk picked Chuckswilly up and raised him high to hurl him against a tree.
Abruptly she collapsed. Her body made the ground quiver, and her head missed Jack by a few inches.
Only Polly and R'li were left standing, and R'li had her hands tied.
"Polly!" Jack called. "Untie me!" He struggled to his feet and looked around. All the soldiers were either dead or wounded too badly to move. Chuckswilly was unconscious. Three of the dragons were dead. Mar-Kuk still breathed; her eyes were open and looking at Jack. Blood pumped from her belly, arm, head and the soft underside of the tip of her tail.
Polly had picked up her bow and fitted an arrow to it. Now she stood undecided.
For a few seconds, she was rigid with thought. Then she shrugged and placed her bow and arrow on the ground. In three minutes, she had collected the firearms and ammunition and stacked them beneath a tree. Next she removed a belt and holster from a corpse and strapped it around her waist. She examined a hand-gun, figured out how to reload and unload it, fired it once into the air, and placed the hand-gun in the holster.
Chuckswilly had regained consciousness. Groaning, he sat with his back against Mar-Kuk's side while he watched Polly. He said, "Fortunes of war, heh? What now?"
"Just let us go on our way," Jack said. "We can't harm you now. You two do what you want to."
Polly's reply was drowned by the great bleat of the dragon.
"My thumb! Give me my thumb! I am dying!"
"I promised it to her, Polly," Jack said.
She hesitated, then shrugged and said, "Why not? The dragons have worked with us witches before. I've nothing to lose."
She opened the leather bag and removed the thumb. Mar-Kuk opened her hand to receive it, hugged it against her chest, and died a few minutes later.
By then, Chuckswilly had managed to stand up. "Let them go, Polly. They can't hurt Socinia. They'll regret not accepting my offer when we invade their hiding place. But they can have some happiness before we do that. They're last on the list."
"Your word is my law," Polly said. She untied the knots of the ropes binding the captives' hands. She backed away, keeping her eyes on them, a
nd picked up a dead soldier's canteen and drank. The waters of the stream were still pink with the blood of a dragon whose charge had carried her to the bank before she collapsed.
Jack flexed his hands to get their circulation going again. He said, "I hope you're not going to turn us loose without weapons?''
"No," she said. "I'm not as vindictive as you seem to think I am. You'll need arms going back to the cadmus just as much as you did getting here."
Jack said that he did not understand. Polly jerked a thumb at R'li. "You don't know the Wiyr very well, do you? She has to return home. Her father, brother, and uncle are dead. That means that she is now the head of her cadmi. She will be so until she dies or bears a son. It is her duty."
Jack turned to R'li. "This isn't true?"
R'li tried to speak, could not, and nodded her head.
"Damn it, R'li! There's nothing to go back to! Even if there were, you couldn't go! I left my duties behind when I left my people behind for you! You have to do the same for me!"
"As long as my father. . . uncle. . . Mrrn lived, I could go and do as I wished. I could even marry you, although my father argued a long time with me about it and said that I couldn't stay at our cadmus if I did. It would cause too much trouble with you tarrta. I had to go with you to the Thrruk.
"I could still do so as long as Mrrn was alive. But now. . ."
She broke into long, racking sobs, and only after some time did she control herself well enough to speak coherently.
"I have to. It's the custom. I can't forget them. . . my cadmus."
Chuckswilly said, "You're just beginning to find out, Jack Cage. They live by tradition and custom, and they will not deviate. They're stuck in the mud of the ages, enclosed in the stone form of their society. We Socinians intend to shatter that form."
Jack said, his voice rising, "I feel sick. Do you know how much I gave up for you, R'li?"
She nodded again, but her features hardened with a look he knew too well. Soft-voiced, soft-curved R'li could at times become granite.
"You have to go with me!" he shouted. "I'm your husband; you must obey me!"
Polly laughed and said, "Your wife is a horstel and the daughter of the Blind King."
"We might not have to stay there forever," R'li said pleadingly. "If we could get the son of an O-Reg from another cadmus to accept the kingship, I could honorably retire."
"Fat chance of that! You know that all hell may be loosed at any moment! I doubt very much if any horstel would venture this far from his cadmus at this time! Or leave it when it may need every fighting man it has!"
"Then I must go!"
Chuckswilly said, "Do you want us to force her to come along with us? In a short time, there won't be any place for her to go back to."
"No, I'll force no woman!" Jack said. He paused, struck with a frightening thought. Would Chuckswilly actually allow R'li or himself to return to Dyonisa? Chuckswilly could not take the chance that R'li might be able to inform the Dyonisan government of the threat of Socinia. He wondered what to do and in the middle of his indecision knew that he still loved R'li. Even her refusal to go with him had not changed that. Otherwise, why would he be caring whether or not she was killed?
Still, he was the man in this partnership, and she must go where he went.
As if Chuckswilly had been reading Jack's mind, he said, "If you're thinking that I will have to kill R'li to keep her from talking, forget about it. She won't get a chance to talk. Even if the humans listened to her, they wouldn't believe a siren."
There was little to say after that, but much to do. Chuckswilly showed all of them how to straighten out the little collapsible shovels the soldiers had carried and how to lock them. With these, they dug two graves, a small and a large one. The two men and Polly dragged the bodies to the shallow grave, rolled them in, and then heaped dirt over them. It took them awhile to gather enough large rocks and small boulders to pile over the dirt to keep the animals away. The dragons were left where they had fallen, except that the one that had fallen halfway into the stream was rolled out of it.
R'li insisted that she alone would dig her brother's grave. Before placing his body in it, she hacked off his head. The body was covered with dirt and rocks. Then, despite Chuckswilly's protests, she built a pyre of wood and burned the head. While the flames devoured the flesh, she prayed in child-talk and chanted in adult-talk. Afterward, she broke the half-charred skull into fragments with a stone and cast the pieces into the stream.
By then, the sun had passed the zenith. Chuckswilly had been getting more nervous with every minute. He looked at the smoke ascending, and his thoughts were plain to Jack and Polly. What enemies would be running toward them at sight of the pillar rising high for every eye in the valley?
Finally he said, "We can't wait here any longer."
He gave Jack and Polly a rifle, revolver, and bullets and showed them how to operate the guns. The extra weapons had been wrapped in leather and buried beneath a tree.
Jack gave R'li a last look. She was standing by the stream, her back to them and gazing out on the surface at the bone bits floating away or being pushed on the bottom by the current. For a second, he thought of making a last plea. But the set of her shoulders and his knowledge of her made him abandon the idea.
"Goodbye, R'li," he said softly. He walked away to follow the others.
That night, after they had made camp and eaten, Chuckswilly said, "You've probably agreed to join me because you hope to observe our secrets. Then you'll try to get out of the country and return to Dyonisa with your information. You won't get far. They won't believe a heretic, a siren-lover, any more than they would a horstel. You'd be burned at the stake after a very short trial.
"But I'm not worried about your spying. After you've been in Socinia, you'll see how hopeless the resistance of the humans and horstels would be even if they combined against us instead of slaughtering each other. You'll think about the Arra returning and how Socinia is this world's sole hope to fight them. You'll become a Socinian, if only to save your own people."
Jack heard his words but did not reflect on them. He was thinking about R'li and wondering if she were safe. He ached within himself for her; tears crept down his cheeks.
For five days, they walked the forest path. Twice they had to use the firearms. Once to repel a pack of mandrakes; a second time, to discourage dragons. Then they were at the foot of a large mountain. It took them two days to get over that, a day to travel a small valley, three days to climb another mountain. The pass near its top was about five miles long. At its end, they came upon an ancient road of the Arra.
A Socinian garrison was stationed there in a small fort. Chuckswilly identified himself and told his story. The three got into a steam-powered wagon and were driven off down the road. The speedteller on a panel indicated that they were traveling at fifty miles an hour. Jack was apprehensive at first, but then he became exhilarated. He saw a giant balloon above them, and he cried out in wonder.
The countryside had many cadmi thrusting their ivory horns from the meadows. Chuckswilly told him that most of them were deserted, that everybody lived above ground now. "We had a war of our own here," he said. "Human and the hybrid hor-man" -- he chuckled -- "against the horstel who refused to give up his way of life.''
They had to slow down, for the traffic of "steamers" began to get heavy. After several leagues' journey, they turned off to a fort. Here, Jack began his training as a soldier. He asked for and got service in the big armor-plated steamers called "bears." Those carried a cannon and several fast-firing, heavy-caliber firearms called "crankers." The operator rotated a crank that, in turn, revolved a cluster of ten barrels. As each barrel passed a certain point, a cartridge was slipped into the barrel from a disc and the ammunition was fired at the next position. It could shoot ten bullets per second.
There were many other marvels, but he did not get to see all of them. He was allowed to leave the training post only one day every fortnight. He did
learn that much of the technological progress had come about because the Socinians had been fortunate enough to find a buried library of the Arra.
Winter came. Jack went through exercises and maneuvers on ice and through snow. Spring promised. His battalion was ordered out. It traveled down the same road by which he had entered. It went through the pass and into the Argulh Valley. Here, the old Arra road, buried under the forest dirt and loam, had been uncovered. Forts had been built along the way. The dragons, mandrakes, and werewolves had either been cleaned out or chased into the remote ends of the valley.
On the border where Dyonisa ended and the holy ground of the Wiyr began, an army had set up camp.
For the first time since he had started training, he saw Chuckswilly. He wore the slashlark emblem of a colonel-general and the colors of the commanding general's staff.
Jack saluted. Chuckswilly smiled and told him to be at ease.
"You're a corporal now, heh? Congratulations. Not that I didn't know about it. I've kept an eye on you. Now, tell me truly. Are you thinking about deserting to Dyonisa?''
"No, sir."
"And why not?"
"There are many reasons, sir. You know most of them. But there's one you may not. I met a man who had been spying in Slashlark. He said that my mother and sisters and brothers had all been sent to the mines. My father left the cadmus to return to his own people. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to the stake. But he made them kill him; he broke loose and killed two of his jailers before he died.''
Chuckswilly was silent for a moment. "I'm grieved. I really am. I don't want to give you any false hopes, but I'll issue orders to have your family traced. Tomorrow, when we attack from here, several other places will be invaded. The mines are near one of them. I'll see to it that your family is taken care of."
Jack's voice was thick.
"Thank you, sir."
"I took a liking to you when I first met you, although you may not have suspected it. How would you like to be my orderly? If you do well, there'll be a sergeantcy in it for you. And you won't have to be shooting at your fellow Dyonisans, unless we get in a tight spot."
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