The suns of Scorpio (22 page)

As it was, I got clear away. I belted hard for the warrens and, with the die cast, felt a great lightening of my spirits. Susheeng would no longer enter my calculations to ruin all that I was attempting. So I thought as I reentered the ghetto.

The first person I met as I ducked into the familiar hovel was Holly. She stood up as I went in and her slight figure in the rustling light from the candle sent a quick pulse of futile anger through me. She smiled. We had scarcely seen each other alone since that first greeting. Now she came toward me shyly, but with the firmness of character and resolve I knew she possessed.

“You’ve been avoiding me, Stylor!”

The incongruity of it all hit me. I gaped at her.

“Stylor! What—?”

“Holly, dear Holly. I have work to do here. The plans must go on—”

“Oh, fiddle the plans! Can’t you see—” She stopped herself. The direct approach was not, in general, Holly’s way.

Then, thankfully, Genal, Pugnarses, and Bolan stalked in. They were annoyed because a good smith had been whipped since his production of iron nails was down — because he had been forging pike heads for us.

“We will have to spread the load,” I said. “There are, after all, enough slaves to make production light enough—”

“But he was
good!
”

“All the more reason to use him carefully, Pugnarses!” I spoke sharply. Pugnarses gave me an ugly look, but I stared him down. “We are a band of brothers, Pugnarses. We must fight together, or go to the galleys together!”

“We will never do that!” flared Genal.

“Very well, then. Now, listen. We come now to the single most important weapon in our armory.” I held their attention; even Holly stood, her hands pressed into her breast, listening. I told them, then, what the sleeting hail of the arrow storm could do.

“We have a few archers,” Pugnarses said. “But few men know the bow. We can make them easily enough, and arrows.”

“That is the small straight bow,” I said. And I laughed. You who listen to these tapes will know I do not laugh lightly.

It is not exactly true to say that the long English yew bow is the peasants’ weapon. Of the famous longbows, only about one in five were made from yew, the others being mostly ash or elm or witch hazel, and only the best and most experienced archers were issued with yew bows. I wished I had the men to use those bows. Their deadly accuracy, their armor-piercing piles, would have laid low the overlords in great droves. As it was, I must make do with what a slave economy could provide.

“It takes years and years of training to make a longbow-man. You must start almost before you can walk to pull a bow, to draw it to the ear, to attain that instinctive accuracy and that uncanny speed. Do not think of the longbow, my friends, unless there are men of Loh among you.”

“We have a few — some are redheaded, most are not.”

“Good, Bolan. We will make longbows for them. But for the main archery strength I shall use crossbows.”

My wild Clansmen with their own curved compound reflex bows had some respect for the powerful crossbows of the citizens of Zenicce. I would not be making bows quite like that, not yet, here in the slave warrens of Magdag. I had handled and used the crossbows of Zenicce many times. I knew their virtues and their weaknesses.

“Crossbows?” said Bolan, wonderingly.

“Crossbows,” I said. I spoke firmly, decisively. “We will make crossbows and with them we will smash the overlords of Magdag into the dust!”

Of pikes and crossbows

The mere manufacture of crossbows and the quarrels they would shoot would not, of course, as with any other weapon, settle the overlords of Magdag.

The men who would use them must be trained.

I insisted that the training be carried out with a great deal of the efficiency and spirit of emulation and success, if without the rewards for failure, that I had applied training my guns’ crews aboard the seventy-fours and frigates that sailed other seas four hundred light-years away from Kregen. Volley shooting would be a necessity. Sufficient accuracy should be obtained from individual marksmen so that a wide swathe of the bolts would fall upon the charging overlords’ cavalry. Production was begun as soon as the first crossbow I had designed and seen through its development stages, helped by the slave and worker craftsmen without whom the venture would have been impossible, had been tested and had passed. We began with a simple hand-spanned bow. Once those whom we selected for training had grasped its essential principles, and could put a group of bolts into the targets set up in the alleys of the warrens, we progressed at a jump to bows spanned by windlasses. As a sailor I could handle the simple calculations necessary to arrive at a satisfactory ratio series. The biggest innovation, and one I felt some pride in developing, was what I called the sextet. One of the main problems with the crossbow is its slow rate of discharge. I have previously mentioned that bows do not fire their arrows or bolts. In every respect the crossbow is inferior to the expertly handled longbow. So men believe. I had so to arrange my crossbowmen as to nullify as many of the disadvantages as possible. We would be fighting from behind barricades. That was essential, as I saw it. So I took a group of six people. The sharp end was the shooter, he who actually loosed the bolt at the foe. To his rear stood or knelt the hander. He took the discharged bow from the shooter and handed him a loaded bow. To his rear were stationed two loaders. They took the spanned bows and loaded them with the bolts, ready for the hander, alternately. Finally, in the rear, were placed the spanners whose task it was to hook on the windlasses and wind like fury until the bows were spanned, when they would hand them to the loaders.

Six men would use six crossbows — and the end result of their labors would be the discharge of a single quarrel. The big difference between that and having the whole six discharge at once was that the rate of discharge could be kept up. And I would naturally place the best shots as shooters. When necessary, say at the final moment of a charge, the entire six could rise and shoot what would be a devastating broadside.

I say men — there were women and girls and young boys in the ranks of handers, loaders, and spanners. Holly, with her tenacious obduracy, insisted on being taught how to handle a bow through all its phases, and she turned into a fine shot.

With the arme blanche I felt we could not expect even a solid phalanx of pikemen to meet and beat down an overlord charge. But once the slaves and workers understood the problems they insisted that they be trained as though they would have to face the overlords in the open. Accordingly, in the inner squares and plazas of the warrens, where overlords and beast guards ventured only in overwhelming mailed strength, and that only when they chased runaway slaves, we drilled and marched and pointed and lifted pikes. The front ranks contained halberdiers on the Swiss model. When I first saw that forest of eighteen-foot long pikes moving steadily across the square I own to a pang of pride and despair and choked affection.

Those men out there, marching with a swing and a tramp through the dust, their throats parched, their lips dry, were slaves and workers, beaten men, whipped cramphs, despised and derided by the scented overlords of Magdag. And here they were marching in ranks and columns together, brothers in arms, shoulder to shoulder, disciplined and dedicated to a freedom that depended on their discipline. And once they had obtained their freedom — what of their so hardly-won and proudly-vaunted discipline then?

That was a problem for revolution, not rebellion. It must come later. It would come — I had vowed myself that — quite apart from the duty I conceived the Star Lords demanded from me.

We forged a weapon, there in the miasmic odors and the odoriferous mud of the ghetto. We drilled and trained. We built barricades from which we practiced hurling a sleeting storm of crossbow bolts. We devised tricks and traps, things like loops of rope hung between houses, balks of timber to be thrust hock-high across from door to door — for I believed we would have to call down the wrath of the overlords upon us and meet them in the confines of our warrens.

In this, I found to my surprise, I stood alone.

“Soon,” said Genal with the lust for battle kindling unpleasantly in his eyes, “Genodras will disappear. The accursed Zim will, for a short space, prevent us seeing the true light of the sky.”

I had to stand and take all this without a murmur.

“The overlords retire into their great halls during this time of the Great Death as they await the Great Birth. We workers must grovel in our shacks and hovels, condemned to the warrens. We are not permitted in the halls during their times of use, when all they stand for becomes revealed.”

“Aye!” growled the listeners, rough, bearded men, their hands horny with labor.

“Then is the time to strike!” declared Genal. “We are debarred from the great rituals of Grodno, when sacrifices are made so that Genodras, the all-mighty green sun, will reappear. We may never witness the sacred ceremonies. Then, my brothers, then is the time to rise up in our justified wrath and strike down the oppressors!”

Genal, it was clear, had been spending a lot of time with the Prophet. He had caught the intonation as well as the words.

It was a good plan, in the sense that we could sweep up into the city in a great wave of iron, steel, and bronze, and find no overlords to bar our path. I felt sure we could deal with the mercenary guards in the confident strength of our newly-won military skill. Then it would be a matter of driving from one great hall of mystery to another, routing out the occupants at their rituals and slaying them piecemeal. I had no objection in principle to this wholesale killing of the overlords of Magdag; you must remember that at that time I was, besides being very young, thoroughly steeped in the precepts of Zair who hated and detested all things of Grodno. I felt it my binding duty to the Krozairs of Zy to destroy everything green on the inner sea, no less than my more nebulous demands from the Star Lords. If I have given the impression that I am an easy person to live with, then the impression is false. I know I am an exceedingly difficult person to get along with. I know this. I have been told. Poor Holly and Genal found that out, and Mayfwy had been marvelously understanding and undemanding. My Clansmen, chief among them Hap Loder, had of course other reasons for submitting to my ill humors. Sometimes I felt a sensation I knew must be a cold terror as I contemplated what I would do to my Delia, my gentle, fierce Delia of the Blue Mountains when at last we settled down to a form of married life in distant Vallia. As far as killing the overlords of Magdag was concerned I was again brushed by that feeling of doom spreading shadowy wings over me. I had to shrug it off. Didn’t I hate everything green about the inner sea, about Magdag and its slavers? I rallied to the plan. It was good. We would catch the overlords with, as the saying goes, their pants down.

“This means we must wait even longer,” Holly pointed out.

“Yes.” Genal eyed her and, as I had noticed whenever he looked more than casually at Holly — which was almost always — he became hot and most un-Genal like in his reactions. Now he said: “We must wait just that little longer beneath the lash; old snake will cut our backs open for just that little longer. But the waiting will be more than worth the pain! For we will squeeze these Grodno forsaken overlords, we will crush them, hall by hall we will tear them apart, sweeping over them like the rashoon of Grodno himself!”

Holly looked at me. Pugnarses looked at Holly, and then swung to glare at me. Genal stared. “Well, Stylor?”

“It is a good plan,” I said. “We will wait.”

There would be more time to train my little cadre and begin to show them what tactical fighting was all about. I thought of my projected barricades with a twinge of regret, but I have always been, like the men of Segesthes, an attacking fighter except when I may gain an advantage by fighting in defense. Genal had mentioned the rashoon, the sudden treacherous storm wind that blows up on the Eye of the World, and for some reason this reminded me of Nath and Zolta, my old oar comrades. Were they even now, perhaps, battling a rashoon on the heaving decks of a swifter? I felt a stifling choking in the warrens of Magdag. How I longed to stand once more on the quarterdeck of a swifter — that huge swifter to whose command I had never reached!

Then I saw the solid phalanx of my friends, the slaves and workers of the warrens of Magdag, marching steadily across the plaza. The pikes all slanted at a single angle. They marched solidly, close-packed, yet there was about those men a swing, a lilt, almost, that lifted me back to reality again. Bolan roared a command and the pikes swung down into their hedgehog of points, neatly, swiftly, as the men had been trained. Once the philosophy of the pike has been shown a man who must fight on foot, and once he grasps the thick haft with its iron bands in his fists and stands shoulder to shoulder with his comrades, he rapidly understands why he is there packed into the pike phalanx.

Bolan’s bald head gleamed in the twin suns’ light. Some of the men had fashioned caps of leather. Most were bareheaded and their shaggy manes troubled me. Leather — there is no leather so highly prized as the leather of Sanurkazz, the Magdag efforts being quite inferior; but the Magdaggians have the knack of beautifying leather, of adorning it with stampings and colors that make it beautiful and valuable. A lucrative two-way commerce was viable, there, if the red and the green were not opposed. Sheemiff, the girl Fristle, strolled onto the plaza and stood idly watching the parade. She had, I knew, become a fast hand at loading and handing and was now training hard to become a first-class shooter. In military matters hierarchies of command and order are perhaps at their loosest in a rebellious army whose men all subscribe to the fight with everything they possess. But I had instituted ranks, for I wanted orders given in the heat of combat to be passed rapidly and to be obeyed instantly. Mind you, even then I believe I would far rather have been sitting on a sun-drenched terrace, with Delia by my side, munching a handful of palines and laughing in the fresh air.