The Kar-Chee Reign Page 13

  And from farthest below, a background of equally sudden and ringing silence, came awareness that the mechanical noise of repair had ceased.

  Duro and Rickar, ignoring or perhaps not even hearing Liam’s hissed warning not to stop, went almost instinctively to the edge of the ramp and looked. Below and across stood a single Kar-chee, head thrown far back and thorax visibly vibrating, and from this one came the shrill high chirr of alarm; in its foreclaws was the flayed integument of one of the dead Kar-chee. Again and again the earpiercing tocsin sounded, then it faded … and then it suddenly rang out afresh and with a different note as the Kar-chee gestured for attention with one fore-limb and with the other pointed up and over to the two who stood, as though ossified, where they had stepped — on the rim of the ramp and plain to all view.

  “Come back! Away! Come away!” Liam cried, knowing it was too late anyway.

  But still they didn’t move and still they stood there and still the dread shrill chittering and chirring of accusation and alarm stirred the close air of the great pit and beat upon the shuddering ear-drums. Swiftly flashed through Liam’s mind the possibility that the sound was intended perhaps not only to alert the Kar-chee of danger but also as a sort of auditory fascinating directed against the creature posing the danger … something instinctive and reactive, likely — and what inner Kar-chee realizations must have taken place, now, here, suddenly, now! for them for the first time thus to react to mankind or any of its deeds….

  Liam and Lors rushed forward and seized the recalcitrant pair and hustled them back and away, breaking the spell; they ran, they ran, they all ran, fleeing and sounding in swift and troubled breath full awareness of danger: but Liam and Lors, in doing what they had done, had also exposed to the enemy their own presences —

  From below arose great and shuddering, shattering sound which made the very air to tremble, as all the Kar-chee below broke into the same clamor of alarm — and, abandoning engines and machines and tools, toil and repair alike, poured up the winding ramp in pursuit.

  The men caught one glimpse of this and then dared look no more either behind or below, but tore up the incline with flying limbs and quavering breaths, not attempting to think how many more turns or how turns were to be measured before they reached the corridor which would lead them eventually to the outside and (they hoped, perhaps without much reason) to safety. Hearts swelling, bodies sweating, feet pounding, knees bent —

  “Blasphemers!” cried Gaspar.

  “Recusants! Rebels!” shouted Lej.

  And they barred the way.

  • • •

  “For the sake of our life — of all our lives! — yours, yours! — don’t stop us now!” cried Liam, seizing the old Knower and trying either to thrust him aside or to pull him along. But he stood there, fixed and firm, like stone, immovable. And so did Lej and so was Lej.

  “Father, father,” wept Rickar. “What they did to me — ! Let us go!” he implored.

  But Gaspar’s face showed no sign of joy on seeing his son among the living; it became clear to Liam, afterward, that most of the old man’s sorrow — perhaps even all of it — had been for his son’s defection and not for his actual loss. “Impious child,” he declared, shaking his head so violently that his beard and his long hair whipped about, “do those who have entered the grave seek to crawl up from it to instruct the living?”

  Shouting, “Look down there! Look! Look!” Lors threw himself upon Lej, who thrust him back so quickly and strongly that he almost lost his balance and fell into the pit.

  “Down there is nothing but deserved judgment and punishment for you!” cried Lej.

  “Deserved or not, it will be punishment for all of us,” Liam shouted, frantic at the thought that, having thus far escaped all perils, they were now in danger of perishing from this pair’s fanaticism. Previously, however absurd old Gaspar’s arguments had been, they had still been presented calmly and with some show of logic. But now the old Knower acted like one unhinged.

  “Rogues!” he shouted. “Scoundrels! Rebels! Is it not enough, the damage you have already done? As a result of your wicked resistance we suffered the crippling quakes and waves which have delayed our necessary departure. And now you wish to tempt and provoke Nature even more, and thus destroy us all!”

  Little bubbles of spittle lined his lips, and his hands clawed the air; then, abruptly, he hastened to the rim of the ramp and in a voice between a scream and a howl he cried, “Devils, Devils! Just is your rage, but direct it towards these, to them who have defied you, and not against us! We have lived virtuously all of our lives, Lej and I and the rest of us, never resisting, never — ”

  Liam lifted his hand and rushed at Lej, who tensed and pushed to parry the blow; and Liam seized him and threw him heavily to the ground. “Come on! Come on!” He darted up and away, and Lors and Duro and Tom rushed after and along with him.

  Behind they could hear Gaspar still shrieking out his insane petition. Then, abruptly, his voice dropped, and he declared, quite calmly. “Let them run; from the Manifestations of Nature there can be no escape for long…. Devils, Lej and I will step aside so as not to impede you in your pursuit: but spare the others above — or at least spare those of them who …”

  Distance, and the noise of their own running feet and the strident ululation, prevented the fugitives from hearing the rest of his comments. And then came a sound which broke their stride — and then another which brought them to a halt: Gaspar’s voice, raised in one long and incredulous vocable of protest; and overwhelming that, Lej’s voice, raised beyond a pitch they would have thought possible, in terror …

  And in pain….

  Rickar’s eyes bulged; his mouth swept back into a grim and almost skeletal grin; he half-turned. Tom and Liam grabbed him, Lors pulled, Duro pushed, and they all fled once more; and now their pace flagged never.

  IX

  WHEN THEY SAW the light of outside day, looking strange and pale, ahead through the rift in the curtain of rock, Tom-small it was who stopped to offer his first word of advice. His chest labored and shone with sweat, and his voice was faint; his gesturing hand trembled.

  “If … if … if we have a firehead … should … shouldn’t we …”

  Block off the passage behind them? — so Liam understood him. He drew a shuddering breath and shook his head. They fled on, staggering, stumbling, not daring to stop: fleeing through the dying day like animals who dare not pause to look back for sight of the hounds they can no longer hear….

  Later, long later, when they had found refuge in a blind cave whose entrance they had closed by moving boulders across its narrow opening, then Liam, when he had caught his breath, explained his reasons.

  “We don’t know that they knew that was the way we came in,” he said, throat still burning and lungs still aching. “For another thing, it wouldn’t keep them from getting out. They know other ways out. But … us? do we know any other ways in?”

  Rickar seemed not to have heard him. His head was cocked and he seemed straining to hear something else; his face still bore signs of the rictus which had seized it at the sound of what might have been his father’s death-cry. Might: then again, might not: and perhaps they all had visions of Gaspar, stripped of clothes and faith and dignity and subjected to the cruel sport of the man-ring — baited and bloody….

  Lors parted his sodden hair with his hands, too tired even to toss his head to clear his eyes. “ ‘Any other ways in?’ ” he repeated, aghast. “Are you as mad as those two were? By my mother’s milk, what could ever bring us back in again?

  Duro said, “Don’t say ‘us.’ ”

  And Tom added, “No, don’t. Not me. Never.”

  But Lors, still facing Liam, and with a rising and incredulous inflection in his voice, asked, “What do you think of going back for?”

  Liam said, his hands roaming aimlessly, nervously, among his sweaty body-hair, “I don’t know…. I don’t know that I think of — But I don’t know that I don’t.�
�� Then, less reflectively and more than a little more personally, eying each of them in turn, he declared, “And anyone who doesn’t feel up to going wherever I go is free to go — well, somewhere else…. I haven’t twisted any arms,” he concluded, resentfully.

  There was silence, broken only by their still laboring breaths. Lors broke it. “We’ve been going where you went,” he pointed out, “not because we were bound to you by oaths or had lost to you in a game of forfeits or owed you a hereditary allegiance, or any of those things … anything like that … no….

  “We went with you because you had a sound purpose in mind, so we thought … so I, at least, still am thinking. To find out more about the Devils: wasn’t that our purpose? All right, then. So suppose we just consider together and see what we’ve learned about them — before we either forswear ourselves never to go back or start getting ready to go back right now. Eh? Duro? Tom? Agreed? Well, then … Liam?”

  Liam noticed the omission of Rickar, but a swift glance at that one confirmed that he might as well be omitted, at least for the moment. Certainly it looked not only as though Gaspar’s son were not listening to what they were saying, but as though he were incapable of doing so.

  “Agreed, then,” he said. And he lifted his head, cleared his throat.

  What had they learned about the Devils?

  For one thing, they had learned that Kar-chee and dragon were not always found together; although they had seen both on the surface and in the cavern where the serpent-drills had been at work coring and sampling, they had seen only Kar-chee in the great cylindrical pit. What did this prove? Or, if it proved nothing, did it at least hint at something? That the dragons were not essential to the basic tasks of the Kar-chee and served only as, or chiefly as, a sort of army or watch-force?

  Further — they had seen the great ships with which the Kar-chee (and, one must assume, the dragons, too) rode the air … and, according to some legends, the airless spaces in between the stars. They had seen these ships damaged, whence it followed that they were damageable. And they had seen the Kar-chee at work repairing them. And what this showed was certainly more than just a possible hint —

  “You mean that they want to get away?” asked Lors.

  “I mean that they want to be able to get away! I mean that they don’t look as though they’ve come to stay,” Liam replied.

  But even as he stated this deduction so clearly and so definitely, a doubt nibbled at the edges and corners of it. The nibbling doubt went round and round, and round and round, and — curious! — try as he would, he could see no other motion to it, nor could he get it to stop so that he could look at it and see clearly what it was….

  “Anything wrong?” Lors asked, giving him an alert glance.

  Liam roused himself. “No … no … not really. Well, to go on, then — ”

  To go on, they had had confirmed by their own eyes the information which Lors could have given them from his own experience in Britland: that men at arms were capable of physically destroying Kar-chee. It now remained to be seen whether or not this destruction would be followed by immediate attack — as it had been in New North Britland from Uist to Ulst.

  “But I have the notion that it just might not be,” he said.

  Rickar muttered; they looked at him, quickly, then at each other. Duro shifted his weight from one haunch to another, asked, “Why not?”

  “Because they would have acted after our first attack on them, they would have tried to avenge the death of the first two Kar-chee we killed … or … if they weren’t sure that they were dead, wouldn’t they have tried to rescue them? Still — We haven’t learned much about them, whatever we have learned. Their notions of responsibility one to the other may not be the same as ours. On the other hand, remember how they reacted down there in the pit? Who could have predicted that? Was it only because there we were striking so close to home?”

  The cave was dark and small and smelled of bat-mould and drying sweat. It seemed a strange place to be discussing, with almost academic detachment, the psychology of an alien race … and yet the fate of this whole island and all of mankind who dwelt upon it might very well have been hanging upon this discussion.

  Liam said he wasn’t sure what the reason was, but he thought it might well be that the Kar-chee were devoting all their energies to repairing their ships so that they could get soon away. And maybe they had been roused to frenzy out of fear that the invading humans were somehow capable of further injuring the Kar-chee ships.

  “Then the ships,” said Lors, thoughtfully, “are their weak spot. Maybe their weakest….”

  “Until they get them fixed. Then they might well be their strongest.”

  Tom seemed to struggle with an unfamiliar idea; he turned to Rickar, as though forgetting that Rickar had been tacitly deemed to be outside the discussion. “The ark people … the Knowers … you can manage big ships. Do you suppose that you could manage these big Devil-ships?”

  Lors looked at him almost scornfully, Duro gave a Huh? of surprise, but Liam —

  Rickar, to everyone’s surprise, answered, “I don’t see how. Ours go by wind or oars and these have engines. Ours go on the water and these others go on the air. No … no….”

  Tom winced his disappointment. “Oh. Too bad … I was thinking that if you could, if any of us could, then we could go just anywhere at all and alert the men in every place, and then — ”

  “If we could manage their ships we might be able to wipe them out, Devils of both kinds, all by ourselves,” Lors said, impatiently.

  But Liam looked at Tom and his head slowly rose and slowly fell and, slowly, slowly, he nodded to himself.

  • • •

  As zealously as the Kar-chee had toiled to repair their own ships, so the Knowers, old and new, now toiled to repair theirs. Rickar’s appearance at first produced no disturbance in the toil and labor; some did not look up to see him, others had never known who he was, some had forgotten that he had been missing, some now merely assumed that there was no truth to the report of his having been gone, others —

  But one came forward now, with a cry of joy, her gaunt face transfigured, her worn hands raised and wavering: Mother Nor.

  “My son, my son! I knew it, my son; I knew it! Your father could not look at you and not yearn to help and save you — ah, no….” She caressed his face as he stood there before her; and now others began to gather around them — none actually leaving off the work of repair, but many pausing en route from having laid a burden down. “You were wrong, you and your friends were of course wrong: Gaspar knows that, who does not know that — but he was willing to harrow Hell for you!” Her eyes searched among the thronging people, brimming with tears and confidence. “Your father? Gaspar? Where has he gone to?” And her glance came back to her son and her face changed, suddenly, terribly.

  “What has happened to him?”

  Her voice was a scream. Rickar shuddered, his body jerked and trembled. His mouth opened but only uncouth clicks and barks came forth from it. His limbs twitched, his head sat stiffly to one side and the horrible and lipless grin returned to his face. A murmur of dismay and fright went through the crowd. And still Rickar remained incapable of coherent speech.

  And so it was left to Liam to speak for all of them. He sighed very deeply. “Mother Nor,” he said, after a moment, “things are not as you suppose. Gaspar didn’t follow us to rescue Rickar from the Devils, but to drive him back to them! Oh, Mother —

  “Is it possible for you to consider — not to accept, that may be asking too much — but just for a moment to consider the possibility that the Kar-chee have other functions besides that of being Devils in regard to sinful mankind? Just make-believe for a moment … can you do that? Make believe that the Kar-chee are living creatures like we are and that they have come here for a purpose of their own which hasn’t got anything to do with us — neither with us here nor any other men or women anywhere else. Make believe, pretend that it isn’t to punish that they�
��ve come here, but on a purpose which would be the same if we had all died long ago …”

  He had to credit her, for she did make the effort to imagine it; he could see her doing so. That something extraordinary was going on, this she realized, and so for the moment she not so much abandoned her faith but stood, as it were, a bit outside and apart from it. Her thin lips moved, she still caressed her son’s tormented face, and she asked, “And what would this pretended purpose be?”

  Liam said, “We saw them down below in a great cavern drilling into the rock and taking out parts of the rock and washing these parts after they’d been crushed; and the way in which this was done, Mother, was the same way in which I’ve seen the men called miners working the rock and soil in my old home land on those parts of it which were raised up from the sea in the old, old days when the rest of it had been sunk beneath the sea. Washing it to see if it contained metallic traces enough to justify mining on a regular scale. All over the world, from all I’ve heard, are found evidences of mining which was done on a great scale; and it might seem, metal being now so scarce and rare with us, that this whole world has been mined out. But even after a carcass has been stripped of meat and the meat eaten and even after the bones have all been gnawed, still, you know, inside the bones is the marrow.

  “And if hunger is deep enough and teeth and jaws are strong enough, the bones will be cracked and crushed and then the bones will be sucked for the marrow they contain….

  “I believe this to be true, but I ask you only to pretend that it might be true: that the Kar-chee have come here from someplace else, hungry and sharp of teeth and strong of jaw, to crack the bones of this earth of ours and to suck them dry of marrow. Only the marrow they seek is not really marrow, it is metal! Can you, if only for a moment, imagine this?”

  The crowd muttered. Mother Nor compressed her forehead. A moment passed. She said, “And therefore — ?”

  “And therefore, Mother, therefore all of these great and monstrous engines which we have seen below — ” He described them, turning to Lors and Duro and Tom for confirmation of what they had seen as well as he. “ — These things are for mining, Mother. The Kar-chee have come here to mine. They dig deeply because only in the deeps and depths are rocks worth mining to be found. The sinking of lands, the raising up of other lands, all these are for no other purpose except as they connect with mining operations. The effect of all this on mankind is coincidental; as far as the Kar-chee are concerned, mankind is beside the point. They have not come with the intention of making us suffer, but if we suffer as a result of their coming, that is no concern of theirs. If we stay, they are indifferent; if we flee, they are indifferent. On only two levels, Mother, do they take cognisance of us at all —