Silence is Deadly (10 page)

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The forest held one inviolable rule: no fires of any kind, anywhere. Though Darzek never tested it, he got the impression that maz tree sap was as dangerously flammable as petroleum; but no fires were needed. Females and children were organized in shifts to work in a community kitchen, a mammoth stone building that served all of the work villages. It was built over a geyser that supplied hot water for bathing and laundry as well as heat for cooking. Each morning and each evening a wagon brought food and hot water from the community kitchen to all of the work villages.

The males of each village were organized into crews of four or five. Darzek was amused when he first saw the cutting tools supplied—wood saws and axes. But they proved better balanced and more efficient than any steel tools he could remember using. The prize item was an enormous saw shaped in a half circle. Even after seeing it in action he thought it wouldn’t work, but a crew of sawyers manipulating it back and forth about a gigantic tree could cut through three quarters of its girth with incredible speed to reach the one-quarter notch that the ax workers were cutting simultaneously to direct the fall.

The techniques of forestry and conservation amazed Darzek as much as the concern for diet and sanitation. Only the most mature trees were harvested, and they were cut in a planned sequence so that each fallen tree made way for the fall of the next.

Darzek’s rapid promotions pleased him and elated Sajjo, but several aspects of his position were less than satisfactory. For one, his relations with his fellow workers and his superiors puzzled him. His fellow workers were respectful enough, and in casual contacts they seemed friendly, but they avoided him as much as possible. He attributed that to jealousy over his rapid promotions. But his superiors also avoided him, though they obviously thought highly of him.

None of that bothered him as much as his failure to get near one of the office caravans that contained an electric light.

He began to take walks in the evening, in the direction of one of the caravans—with Sajjo tagging along with extreme reluctance simply because she followed him everywhere. These occasioned talk and curiosity among their neighbors; the Kammians feared the night, and one who did not was thought to be in league with the Winged Beast itself.

So Darzek had to give that up. Nor did he have any better success in approaching one of the caravans during the day. With each successive promotion he became better known, and his visit to an area where he had no proper business was likely to be noted and talked about. Fretfully he began counting the days he was wasting.

His only source of diversion was Sajjo. His promotions automatically conferred status on her, and in a comparatively short time she advanced from zero to the titular head female of the village. Females three times her age deferred to her, and she was excused from kitchen duties. The other females, who themselves had been waifs before they became wives of drudges, delighted in honoring her. When a peddler came through, they pooled a few work chits and bought hair dyes, but when they attempted to color and arrange Sajjo’s hair to reflect her new station in life, she rebelled. Her release from kitchen duties merely meant that she had more time to follow Darzek about. Now she did so even when he was at work, looking on solemnly from the distance, never in the way, but always present.

During the brief periods when Darzek was home during daylight, when he and Sajjo could see well enough to talk, he attempted to learn as much as he could about Kamm and its people.

About the Beasts, he said to her one evening.

He sensed the barrier instantly. She not only feared the Beasts; she feared any mention of them. This had to be connected somehow with the compulsive fear of the night and its creatures that seized all the Kammians when darkness fell. On the long march to the forest, his fellow workers and their families had kept to the center of the lane and shuddered visibly when a luminous night creature fluttered near. And when the procession halted for rest and food, they preferred the hard lane to a soft place in the grass nearby. Here in the forest, nothing but a work order would keep anyone out after sunset, and that unfortunate worker hurried home at a run the moment he was released. Only Darzek’s superiors seemed not to mind the dark—perhaps because their work took them out in it frequently.

Are these night creatures somehow related to the Winged Beast?
Darzek asked Sajjo.

They light the way for it,
she answered.

So the night creatures were considered harbingers of death.

These questions so disturbed her that he changed the subject. In subsequent talks he made her recite everything of note she could remember about her life—which did not take long, since it made an uneventful tale of squalor. Then he set her to telling him all of the folklore she could remember.

And still he was unable to devise an excuse for getting near one of the office caravans.

It was his fifteenth day in the forest, at dusk, when Darzek stood at a crosslane waiting for his superior to pick up the daily work report that Darzek had chalked on a piece of bark: trees felled, felled trees trimmed and ready for sectioning, standing trees with ground cleared for the morrow’s felling. A worker of Darzek’s background was not expected to be able to write numbers—probably none of his superiors could write them, either, except the scribes—so a series of marks on bark constituted his daily report.

The superior was late. When he did arrive, he was in a hurry. His fingers flipped a message at Darzek, and he rode away, urging his nabrulk to greater speed.

Darzek turned stoically and trudged along the lane. He had caught only a part of the message, and he intended to interpret it in his own way. He would take the day’s count to the office himself.

Eager as he was, he plodded. He was tired. A supervisor’s work was exhausting, for he had to lend a hand in everything his workers undertook and run from crew to crew. It would have looked suspicious if Darzek had seemed to welcome this chore of a ten-kilometer round trip at the end of the day, so he plodded.

It was already dark when he reached the office caravan. He opened the door, mounted the steps, and entered the dark interior.

There was no one there.

He felt his way the length of the room and found the strange apparatus on the scribe’s worktable. He could see nothing at all, but he remembered a lever that the scribe had pushed down at intervals to produce the light. Darzek found it and pushed it down.

The feeble gleam that resulted seemed blinding in that dark room. Darzek stared in fascination while the glow lasted. Then he looked about uneasily. The light surely would have been visible from a distance, but he had seen no one near the caravan, and he heard no one coming. He pushed the lever again and again, each time studying the contraption until the light faded.

Finally, unwilling to risk being caught there, he returned to the entrance and seated himself outside the door. When he heard footsteps approaching, he slumped comfortably and feigned sleep, and the scribe fell over him.

The scribe led him inside the caravan and to the worktable, where he worked the electric light himself. He was grinning at Darzek; the duke’s officials took no offense when their employees worked hard enough to exhaust themselves. While the scribe kept the light going, he examined Darzek’s report, asked a few questions about the day’s work, and gave Darzek a commendatory back of the hand pat on his forearm.

Darzek left for home, and while he walked, he mulled over the electric light and its generator.

It was a crude mechanical device that could have been built by any bright high school student on Earth. The lever applied tension to a leaf spring of highly resilient wood. The spring, through a simple system of wood gears, turned a generator that furnished the electricity that lit the light. Darzek detected nothing in the mechanism that he had not already encountered in Kamm’s technology. Wood springs and gears were common. Any glass blower could have produced the bulb, once he had been given the idea. The filament probably was a loop of the indestructible sponge wood. Only the use of metals was new. Kamm was supposed to employ metal only in coins.

But coins had been the source of metal in the generator! One of the strip contacts actually had the dim image of a Winged Beast still visible—incontrovertible evidence that the builder had hammered it out of a copper coin! The magnetism was provided by rough pieces of lodestone.

Darzek found his disappointment crushing. He had wasted fifteen days and probably caused the Synthesis agents an agony of worry, and all he had accomplished was to track down a mechanical contraption that any Kammian handyman could have built with a few instructions. It made an extremely poor light. A candle would have been more efficient and much more convenient, but the highly flammable maz wood prohibited the use of fire in the forest. The choice was between a poor electric light and none.

“In short,” Darzek told himself, savoring his disappointment, “that electric light is a rudimentary mechanical device that conforms with Kamm’s known technology in every particular.”

Then he halted abruptly. The device conformed with Kamm’s technology in every particular; any Kammian handyman could have built such a generator and light if he knew how—
but there was no possible way for him to know how.
That crude device was in fact a fiendishly ingenious adaptation of fantastically complex principles. Something decidedly was wrong in the forest of the Duke Lonorlk.

Moving on, Darzek felt much better about his wasted fifteen days. The inventive genius who had contrived that generator certainly knew enough about electricity to contrive any number of other things. Perhaps even a pazul.

A moment later he became aware that he was being followed. He turned; Sajjo hurried to catch up with him. She took his hand and skipped along at his side. She must have followed him all the way to the caravan, and if the night creatures, now flitting about them in hordes, were frightening her, she gave no sign of it.

* * * *

The workers received a half-day holiday every ten days. This holiday also was their payday. Officials distributed coins, and there were peddlers who came out from Northpor to help commemorate the occasion. With the second such payday, the workers had accumulated enough money to make substantial purchases. Wives and children appeared in stylish outfits, and the workers themselves began to discard their patchwork clothing in favor of practical, long-wearing outfits of dusky green.

On that second holiday, Darzek went for a relaxing walk through the forest with Sajjo. She bounded along at his side, ecstatic in her new dress, trousers, and shoes. He had exchanged his own sweep’s costume for the green of the forester, and as he strolled along he reflected that they must make a handsome couple.

Sajjo now did her own hair styling. Her first efforts had produced the impression of a gigantic bird’s nest of unknown species, but with a little practice she had become quite artistic. Her days were radiantly happy now; she kept the little caravan impeccable, and she had come to enjoy, in her quaintly quiet way, her status as the head of the superintendent’s household. Whenever she could she continued to follow Darzek about with a devotion that was sometimes embarrassing—especially when he wanted to visit the latrine.

But their forest outing had a purpose. A couple of days before, he had found an old piece of canvas-like cloth rotting on the forest floor. He put Sajjo to cleaning it, and when she finished there was an undamaged piece large enough to make an awning for their caravan home. He had performed the necessary measurements, and now he wanted to cut a couple of poles to support the awning.

He was cautious enough to ask permission. His superiors were surprised and wanted to know why. When he had explained, they were still surprised, but they matter-of-factly gave permission to cut strip saplings—strip being a bastard kind of wood that now and again got spared in the forest and crowded out the valuable maz trees. Workers were encouraged to make their caravans home-like.

Darzek found two strip saplings of the necessary size, cut them, and let Sajjo help him strip them and trim them to the proper length. With each of them carrying one, they started back through the forest toward their village.

Suddenly Sajjo froze. She literally halted in midstride, with one foot a few centimeters off the ground, and at the same instant she held up a hand to stop Darzek. He regarded her with puzzlement, and then he stared in the direction where her eyes were riveted.

A knight, clothed in the pale blue colors of the Duke Lonorlk, was crouched in the undergrowth, arm back, whip coiled for action, gaze fixed on a small forest pool. His clothing matched the forest vegetation so well that Darzek had trouble picking out his silhouette a second time even though he knew the knight was there.

Darzek remained motionless; Sajjo gradually let her foot sink to the ground, but she seemed scarcely to be breathing.

Suddenly, on the far side of the pool, one of Darzek’s workers strode into sight. His wife followed a short distance behind him, carrying their infant child. Mother and child had been wan and sickly when they arrived in the forest. Now both had bloomed and gained weight, and she and her husband were like young lovers, going everywhere hand in hand and laughing much and saying little.

As the worker strode forward, a large, spotted, long-legged forest creature leaped up, took half a dozen bounding strides, and disappeared into the forest on the far side of the clearing. The knight, who perhaps had been waiting in ambush for hours, leaped up at the same moment and snapped his whip—futilely, for it did no more than cut a red furrow on the beast’s flank as it disappeared.