The Shasht War (24 page)

"I never imagined the world could be so beautiful."

"Nor did I, Father. Or that our people could be so wrong."

Filek frowned. "You must keep those opinions to yourself, my dear. Remember that the Hand will be listening to you. If they can find the slightest thing, they will put you to the questioning."

How brutal of him to remind her like this. His darling daughter who had already endured one questioning, when she'd returned from her sojourn among the aborigines. But, he was concerned that she didn't take this danger seriously enough.

"I know, Father," she said after a moment.

Filek turned away and looked past the sails, stretched taut by a good wind out of the north. Away there, ten months' sailing, according to the captain, lay the great city. They would be so surprised to see him again at the hospital! Old Klegg was in for a shock! Poor old man had been crying when Filek had last seen him. Klegg hadn't relished the thought of having to take up the administrative burden that Filek had carried.

For a moment he wondered again if Nebbeggebben hadn't sent another message, secretly, that would expose the admiral's mutiny and seizure of power. Heuze had expressed confidence that Nebbeggebben wasn't double-dealing and that he had truly forgiven them. Heuze claimed that the Scion was happy to be rid of the Gold Tops anyway. Now Nebbeggebben ruled the Red Tops more directly, through his own appointed high priests. But it was always possible that the Scion was merely biding his time before killing Heuze and Filek.

Again he shrugged. If his fate was to die on the temple pyramid, then so be it. He could only do his best. He had a serious goal: to find a cure for the plague. The machinations of Emperors were beyond his powers, as inscrutable as the wind and the rain.

Becalmed for days, the ship was surrounded by stinking water. The heat pervaded the closeness of the hold like a physical thing. Like some huge animal with fetid breath it crowded their space, sitting on their chests, cutting off the very air they struggled to breathe.

Thru Gillo awoke with a gasp. The dream faded, but the images it had brought did not.

"What did you see, Thru Gillo?" asked a voice at his side, Ter-Saab.

Thru looked at the ruined face in the dark.

"I saw a small boat carried across a great sea of darkness, and in the boat were the seeds of light and life eternal..."

The others had roused themselves to listen. They had all had such dreams, and in the darkness of their prison they clung to these shafts of light, insubstantial as they were, for in truth they had nothing else to give them hope.

"We will never return to our homeland," said Pern Glazen in his usual gloomy way.

"You cannot know that for certain." As ever Juf Goost stood up to him. They had been opponents on this issue since the beginning of their captivity aboard the
Biter
.

Bodies shifted in the fetid darkness. It was cold again. More evidence that they had gone a long way south of the equator now.

"How many new moons have we counted, twelve? We have been on this ship for a year. How do you think you would ever find your way back? The men will not take you back."

"We will find a way. Remember we have the great secret."

"Bah, so we know some of their language? So Thru Gillo taught us the meaning? It is good that we have that power and that we keep it hidden from them. Maybe it will help us escape somehow, but how will we sail a ship like this halfway around the world? There are only eleven of us."

"It doesn't matter, anyway," said Pern Glazen. "When we reach the city of men, they will kill us. They will sacrifice us to their dark God."

"Damn their God, if he exists," swore Juf Goost.

"He doesn't," said Juf Nolo. "They delude themselves with their vicious God. It gives them permission to kill and destroy."

"The great secret will come to our aid at the right time."

"So you say, Juf Goost. But we may not live to see that time. They may march us straight from the ship to the temple and kill us on the spot."

Pern Glazen had an unerring eye for the bleakest scenario...

"The men say their God gave them dominion over the world," said Jev Turn, who was much taken with questions of god and spirit. "They say that gives them their right to do whatever they want with us."

"God didn't give them the right," griped Juf Nolo. "Their strength in battle gave it to them."

"What if their God is really stronger than our Spirit?" said another voice.

"Uh-oh, there goes Jevvi again," chuckled Pern Glazen.

Jevvi Panst was not deterred. "You don't like to think about it, but it's like I've always said, what if their God is real? Then maybe this is the way God really wants it? How are we, who are only God's creatures, able to know what God wants?"

"Bah, there is no such God. The Spirit is all, unseen but felt, singing in all the corners of the world. We know the Spirit. Their God is but an illusion." Juf Nolo was a firm adherent to the orthodox position of the Land.

Thru Gillo stirred at last, and the others fell silent. With his Assenzi training, Thru was wise beyond his years.

"Juf Nolo always speaks for the true heart of our beliefs, does he not?"

No one disagreed with that.

"Our beliefs teach us to glorify the world, to accept its beauty as it is, and to reflect it in our craft. We live beside the stream, sharing it with others."

Again there was no disagreement.

"But that is not the way of Man. For Man, there is only desire and hunger. Man is a hungry ghost, who can never be filled."

He paused again.

"The men of Shasht claim their God is the Great One. They claim that he killed and ate the other gods. Do you see what this is? They give unto their God the very hunger that eats at their own hearts.

"We see the world as a treasure. They see the world as something to loot and burn. How can a God, who would be responsible for creating this very world upon which we live, how can such a God accept its destruction by his worshipers? If the world was made by their God, then he would want it to be cherished. Instead, they think of the world as something to conquer, something to kill.

"We have always been taught to treasure the world that gave birth to us, to care for it. That is the way of the Spirit. Man chooses the opposite way. He takes everything and leaves nothing in his wake. This is not the way of the Spirit. If this God of theirs exists at all, then it is nothing but some fell demon, for its works are marked only in blood and terror."

Thru paused a moment. When he spoke like this, they seemed to be lifted to a higher plane.

"For we know that the world is a gift to us. That it has taken vast aeons of time to prepare it. Out of that enormity, rising from the most humble beginnings, it has grown, turn upon turn, filling with life and the bounty of its beauty. It is our place to use that bounty and to use it wisely."

He sighed.

"But Man chooses not to follow the path of wisdom. The nature of Man is always to take, always to kill. For Man can accept no restrictions on his rule. In truth, Man is his own God.

"At Highnoth we were taught that it was greed, simple greed that destroyed the world of Man the Cruel in the long ago. Each Man wanted the whole world for himself. Each Man wanted to rule over all other men. In the end they consumed everything and poisoned the waters and then themselves."

Among the others arose a murmur, a scrap from the Book...

And the day came when no sound of Man stirred in the world... For I am the broken pig and I bear witness to those days...

Thru had fallen silent now and lay back in the darkness, listening to the sounds of the ship as it rode the waves.

"We will see their land today, that much we do know for certain," said Ter-Saab after a while.

Indeed they'd been awoken by the glad shouting of the men on deck above, some hours earlier when the first hail had come. Land had been sighted at last, the land of Shasht.

"Then, we may not live to sleep again."

"Oh, give it a rest, Pern," said Thru Bush, an older mot, who was never at the battle of Chillum but was captured from the woods outside Farnem.

"We must face whatever lies in front of us," said Pern Glazen.

"We will when we have to, until then I'm going to sing the 'Jolly Beekeeper,'" said Juf Nolo.

"That's the spirit!" rumbled Juf Goost. The two of them lifted their voices again.

"Once there was a beekeeper,
forty hives had he
and honey flowed from all the hives
and riches made for he..."
Oh, I'd be a beekeeper
If only, but for stings
Oh, I'd be a beekeeper
If only for one thing..."

After a while even Pern Glazen joined in.

They sang, even when the guards banged on the door with their spear butts and growled at them to be quiet.

But they kept singing, in quieter voices, refusing to be cowed by the proximity of death. If they were going to be sacrificed on the altars of the evil God of Shasht, then they would go proudly to their deaths, ready to spit into the faces of the priests even as they raised the knives above their chests.

Later, they were roused by the guards and driven up to the open deck for their daily ablutions. When they came on deck, they found the land of Shasht waiting for them, clear and precise in the cold, dry air.

Ocher yellow cliffs rose from the sea. A white line of foam broke along their base. They saw distant mountains, brown and grey, a world of brown rock, bare ground. A few evergreens broke the arid vista, but seemed alien to it, unwanted.

"Look," said Ter-Saab. Thru turned and saw off to the right, far away across the water another brown blur, marking the far side of the wide bay they were entering.

"This is Shasht," said Thru.

"May the Spirit protect us."

When the Master awoke, he summoned Basth as usual to help him rise from his couch.

Basth saw that the Chest of Skulls was open, and one skull, marked with a splash of red ocher, was sitting out on the table.

The Old One saw Basth glance at the skull.

"D'you know who that one was?"

"No Master."

"That was Kadawak. Sometimes I commune with his spirit."

Basth could see the ghostly outlines of a smile on the Master's lips.

"Men are blinded by their short spans, you see. For all their glory they cannot see what I see. D'you understand, Basth?"

"No, Master."

"Good. Now, help me with these slippers."

As she climbed out of the carriage, Simona shivered from the cold wind and glanced up at the awesome facade of Aeswiren III's palace. The pediment rose almost two hundred feet above her head. The pillars supporting it were twenty feet across. The steps, banked in tiers of forty, led to the great dark entrance.

Simona wore a full-length hooded black cloak and under it a double veil to ensure that her face would not be glimpsed by any man not of her family. She walked carefully up the stairs with her head bowed. To expose even a female ankle would be a grave breach of etiquette. The cold wind whipped across the staircases and tore at her cloak. Was it her imagination, or did she hear the voices of dead soldiers, calling from long-ago battlefields.

The great doors were shut against the cold. Huge men, clad in black and gold, stood on either side of a small door inset in one of the large ones. They studied her as she came close, then one of them rapped on the small door with his spear butt and it opened. Looking at the guard's brutal features for a moment, she thought of Rukkh, left behind in the new world. She supposed Rukkh would find some other woman. Probably one of a lower caste than she. They would have many children to populate the colony.

The air inside the great hall was warm and enveloped in hush. A massive black throne stood on a pedestal ten feet high, dominating the place.

During an imperial audience the Emperor sat on the black throne encased in a bulky suit of gold cloth. On his head he wore a blue turban, the color signifying Aeswiren's identification with the great Norgeeben.

The New Empire dynasty had been enormously popular because it brought to an end the ghastly madness of the final years of the previous dynasty. Norgeeben had ended the chaos, eliminated the corruption and brought back order and prosperity. However, though his successor Shmeg was a reasonable Emperor, unimaginative but steady, Shmeg's son was an idiot with a sadistic streak. Aeswiren's revolt and subsequent rise to the throne had been received with joy by the masses. Aeswiren had stood for unfettered markets in corn and wood, plus a reduction in subsidies to the priesthood. Aeswiren had brought stability and economic growth. No one had bothered raising a rebellion for more than eight years now.

Passing through the great hall again on her way to an appointment in the Emperor's private quarters, Simona recalled her first imperial audience very well. It had taken place very soon after they'd returned to Shasht, about three months before.

Then she'd trembled here on her knees beside her father while the Emperor took the message she'd delivered from the Assenzi and broke the admiral's seal.

She'd waited for the angry order to take her away and kill her. Instead there had occurred the strange miracle of the message, as Simona had thought of it ever since.

For a long time there'd been nothing but silence. The Emperor had peered at the scroll with puzzled eyes. Then the Emperor gave a strange cry and beat his hand in the air. The guards looked up at once. But there had been only that one cry, the movement of the hand, and then silence. The Emperor continued to peer at the little scroll in his hand. The guards remained immobile.

The silence lengthened. The Emperor appeared frozen. No one dared to move. After perhaps an hour the mood broke suddenly. The Emperor gave a heavy sigh, rolled the scroll up, and put it aside.

Simona had braced herself again for the death sentence. But the words she actually heard took her by surprise.