The Avengers of Carrig (16 page)

“They are indeed. We have a very well screened robot photo-satellite orbiting over the Great Eastern Desert. The ore comes in by gliders fitted with some sort of crude rocket-assist and a ferry lands to fetch it when the natives are safely out of sight again.” The commandant leaned back. “Now you can tell me something. How are we going to shift Belfeor without the natives guessing that there’s been outside interference?”

“The only idea we’ve come up with so far is that it
must
look to the people of Carrig as though the forces of nature—in other words, the gods—are working against Belfeor. We can certainly foment unrest in the city even if it doesn’t yet exist, and my bet is that it does. And then … Well, there are some fine healthy volcanoes in the Smoking Hills.”

Still smarting from the contempt he had read in the eyes of those who had spoken with him a few minutes before,
Ambrus—who could not call himself “son of Knote” any longer, having disowned his clan—entered the private apartments of the regent of Carrig, in the base of the high watchtower topping the fortress. Once he had come and gone here like a man with authority … and was. Had not his own father then been the lord of the city? Now he had to creep about furtively, expecting any moment that a voice from a shadow would demand what he was doing here.

The shame of it was like a knife in his vitals.

Every day that passed was making him more and more regret the decision he had taken. He had thought he was being clever and farsighted to throw in his lot with the newcomers. Did not Belfeor and his companions generate marvels as freely as a knotty torch threw out sparks? Their miraculous weapons! The awe-inspiring machines they had constructed among the Smoking Hills! He had been so certain he was right that even when his father threw himself to his death from the parapet of the tower, he had felt no guilt—only pity for a rigid old man who could not adapt to a changing world.

Now, however …

He had been hopeful an hour or two back, when it was expected the newcomers to be sensible of that great sacrifice, to make him welcome among them and shower him with gifts that might tempt others to follow his example. Instead, to a man, and to a woman, which was even worse—in Carrig a noble was not accustomed to being patronized by women!—they scorned him, ordered him out of their way, and ultimately had grown to ignore him. He was utterly alone. No one would befriend him anymore.

He had been hopeful an hour or two back, when it was reported to him that nobles of his former clan, Clan Parradile, wanted to talk to him. He thought perhaps they were relenting of their harsh treatment, willing to show mercy and take him back. Not at all. Although they had addressed him with stiff politeness, their respect was sarcastic and he could read disdain in their eyes. They would not have exchanged a word with him but for compelling necessity.

“This year,” said Sir Gurton Knole who had inherited the chieftaincy of the clan, “the first new moon of spring
falls late.” He was Ambrus’ uncle, the late Sir Bavis’ younger brother, and once they had been friends and enjoyed cousinly affection between them.

Not anymore. His manner was as cold as mountain ice.

Ambrus nodded warily. He had paid scant attention to the schooling he’d been given in the priestly business of his clan, but the humblest peasant knew that the spring new moon fell late, early or in between in a three-yearly cycle.

“We have a new ruler,” Sir Gurton said, and pulled a sour face. “Last year preparations for the king-hunt were put in hand as usual, and without even going forth in a glider he killed the king from the ground with his lightning bolts. The contest was a mockery. Still, the forms were observed after a fashion.”

Ambrus remembered that shameful occasion well. He had still been convinced of his own cleverness, though, and had laughed at the old men’s forebodings. This year, he was not so sure any longer.

“But now,” Sir Gurton resumed, “we have sent many times to Belfeor concerning the king-hunt, and we have had no reply. He has ordered the would-be contenders to work in the Smoking Hills and forget their glider-practice—which many of them had done anyway, of course, thinking that this year Belfeor will once more stand on the ground and despitefully cut the new king from the sky. Men are saying—and this, Ambrus, I must emphasize, because although you have disowned us you were born into Clan Parradile and no man can escape the obligations of his birth—men are saying that Belfeor is mocking the gods as our ancestors did before the Fall which drove us into the unkind lands of the far north. They say further, and I do not disagree, that if he goes on thus the gods will be angry and will smite the sun again, so that men will be burned from the face of the earth and this time without survivors.”

Hearing these terrifying words delivered in so grave a tone, Ambrus was alarmed. He said, “What do you want of me?”

“Go to Belfeor. Ask him what arrangements have been made for the king-hunt this year. He will not answer our inquiries, but perhaps
you”—
Sir Gurton’s voice was harsh
with contempt—“perhaps you can gain his ear.”

That was the errand on which Ambrus found himself bent.

This spring promised to be unusually warm; already all snow had gone from Carrig territory, and the first caravans had come from the south two weeks previously—half the size of the kind that Trader Heron had once brought, but he was dead, first victim of Belfeor’s rapacity. The heat, though, was not why Ambrus found himself sweating as he knocked on the wall beside the door of the regent’s private office. Once it had been his father’s.

He could hear voices behind the door, but he had to knock again more loudly before Belfeor uttered his sour invitation to come in. He stepped into the room.

With Belfeor were Pargetty, the fair, nervous man who had been his companion since the earliest days, and the woman Yanna, with her brilliant red mouth and her eyes like chips of rock, who had led the rest of Belfeor’s folk from their presumptive bandit lair in the mountains to install themselves in Carrig. Certain documents were piled on the table at which they sat, and they seemed to have been interrupted in a discussion of these.

What
is it?” Belfeor snapped. “It had better be important—we don’t like to be interrupted.”

Ambrus squared his shoulders, trying to emulate the dignity of his late father, and looked the usurper straight in the eye.

“I am sent by my former clan, that of the Parradile,” he said. “I am charged to discover what preparations you have made for the king-hunt, as law and custom require.”

“Go away and stop bothering me,” Belfeor grunted, and turned his back on Ambrus.

Nervous as always, Pargetty cleared his throat He said, “Uh—Belfeor, that’s not wise, you know. Out of deference to local tradition you really ought to …” His voice tailed away.

“There won’t be a king-hunt this year,” Belfeor said. Ambrus took half a pace forward, unable to believe his ears.

“What?” he burst out.

“You heard me,” Belfeor retorted. “What is there for anyone to hunt? Those damned parradiles were interfering with our work, so back in the fall I had every last one of them cleared out of the hills and either killed or sent packing. Go away and forget this superstitious, nonsense.

“Look out!” cried Yanna in alarm. He jerked around in his chair just in time to see Ambrus, face twisted with rage and terror, raise clawed hands to close on his throat. He jumped to his feet and snatched an energy gun from his belt.

“Out!” he barked. “Unless you want to fry like your precious parradiles!”

Utterly broken, Ambrus turned and crept from the room.

The rest of the day, his mind kept ringing like a gong with reverberations of panic. What would become of Carrig if the ordained rituals were forgotten? He was not a very intelligent person—he had taken a long while to realize that, but now he had admitted the truth of his father’s charge that he was unfit for the regency. He could not even organize his own life successfully, let alone guide the fate of a populous city. And his father had also been right to say that a man could not break free of the duties the gods imposed—was that not the very cause of his own downfall, abandoning the clan into which the gods had seen fit to have him born?

Similarly, obligations were laid upon the city as a whole, chief among which was the king-hunt. To discard them was to flout the gods. And everyone knew how mankind had been driven from a fairer world because they had been arrogant.

The gods’ vengeance might be delayed, but it was certain. He had aided and abetted Belfeor—how could he hope to escape their wrath?

He made up his mind before the evening what he was going to do. Already not only the members of the two small caravans, but also many peasants from the nearby villages, had come into Carrig for the time of festival. The peasants were simple, uneducated folk who could never quite get the calendar straight. To them, the advent of spring was a good enough measure to fix the king-hunt by,
and in years when the new moon fell late, they would turn up a week or two beforehand and be glad to pass their time idly in the city after the difficulties of winter. They had been less touched than the city-folk by Belfeor’s interference, for the common food-supply depended on their sowing and gathering. Aside from a regular quota of laborers that they also had to find for Belfeor’s mines—at Which they had merely grumbled, as they would have at a new tax—they had hardly noticed the impact of the usurpers. They were used to doing what the lords of Carrig told them. The lords of Carrig had made their life safe from bandits: soldiers from Carrig could be called on to hunt down wild beasts threatening their stock and their children, and if their lands were ruined by volcanic eruptions they could appeal to the lords of Carrig for help and housing—Why should they question the wisdom of the latest in the line?

But the news that Belfeor had discontinued the king-hunt, had even driven the parradiles away from the Smoking Hills:
that
would stir them, he felt sure!

Accordingly, that evening he did something he had not dared to do in many months: he ventured out into the city itself. He had to go alone. One by one, even his personal servants had slipped away since his father killed himself, until any service he could command was on Belfeor’s sufferance, usually backed up with the threat of an energy gun.

Oh, by the gods! How Carrig had been changed!

They had not forgotten him, as he half-hoped they might. Even the children on the streets knew him, and ran after him shouting his name and flinging mud. Before he had gone a mile he knew his purpose was defeated, and if he persisted he might well be waylaid in some dark alley and beaten to death. He turned to flee from a gang of children who were hurling not merely mud but stones also, and blinded by some ordure that had hit him in the face be ran headlong into a man emerging from a tavern.

“Steady now!” the stranger said, catching Ambrus to save him from falling. He barked at the children, telling them to give over and go home.

“But that’s Ambrus the traitor!” their leader shrilled.

The stranger detached his arm from Ambrus’ grip and
caught the boy by the ear. He said, “Did you never hear the proverb, ‘Whoever durst call me accursed came off the worst’? Get you gone before I take the flat of my sword to your backside!”

Clawing dirt from his eyes, Ambrus saw that his rescuer was a big man, powerful in spite of having gray hair and a lined face. Though the gang of children included several in their teens and numbered twenty to his one, they hesitated and finally turned away. As far as the street corner they kept looking back, but the stranger outstared them and eventually they disappeared.

“I cannot thank you enough, sir,” Ambrus said humbly. “Yet I suppose they cannot be blamed. Doubtless their parents taught them to call me traitor.” The words were bitter in his mouth, but he had to utter them.

“So you’re Ambrus, are you?” the gray-haired man said. “Yes, I’ve heard such talk about you myself. But traitor’ is a hard name to call a man, and I know little of the cause for it, being a newcomer to this city who came in with one of the spring caravans. Treachery is something I’d want to see proof of before I’d join a crowd hurling stones. Yes indeed! Tell me, though—if the townsfolk think thus harshly of you, what brings you out among them alone? Are you not of a noble family, with servants and men-at-arms to protect you?”

Astonished that he was able to make such free admissions to a man he had never met before, Ambrus explained his plight.

“No king-hunt!” The gray-haired man spoke in a tone of amazement, but Ambrus could have sworn that underneath he detected an inexplicable hint of delight. Why should a man like this be pleased at the news? By his manner and clothing Ambrus guessed him to be a prosperous merchant, and he should have been dismayed at missing the chance of fat profits. There was no time, though, to speculate on this mystery; his rescuer was turning back to the tavern he had just left, insisting that Ambrus come along.

Ambrus protested feebly that if he was taken into a tavern some ruffian would certainly attack him. The other brushed his objections aside.

“Not in here, they won’t! Most of my friends who came
in with the same caravan are here. They’ll protect you if you need protection. Come along!”

And he dragged Ambrus inside.

It was as he had promised. Though some of the tavern’s clients screamed with rage as they recognized the new arrival and jumped up with the intention of going for him, a signal from the gray-haired man was enough to produce for each would-be attacker two others from among the customers to discourage them. Ambrus wondered who in the world his new acquaintance might be, that so many men would unquestioningly obey his instructions.

“Up there on the table!” the gray-haired man commanded, gesturing. “Tell this company what you have just told me!”

Quaking, but determined to put a bold face on things, Ambrus complied. He made no secret of his own former allegiance to Belfeor, but claimed that he had had no intention of abetting sacrilege. He said he had taken it for granted that if the usurper had seized power legally—by killing the king—he would continue to uphold the ancient customs. Now he had learned about the parradiles being driven from the Smoking Hills; he had repented, and wanted nothing more to do with Belfeor’s gang.

A solemn hush followed his statement. It was broken by the gray-haired man, who clapped his hands and declared that they had heard an honest admission of error. Reluctant nods came from all around the tavern, and someone called down the curse of all the gods on Belfeor, provoking a roar of approval. To show his sincerity Ambrus fervently echoed the wish.

“Good!” said the gray-haired man. “But I’m afraid this won’t be the end of it for you, friend Ambrus! You’re in too deep simply to wash your hands of the dirt you’ve picked up. Still, your involvement may perhaps be turned to some advantage. Let’s take counsel as to how you may best exploit any confidence Belfeor still reposes in you.”