The Super Barbarians (11 page)

And I had brought a pound can of the stuff from Kramer.

It took a long time for that to sink in. When I at last got the point, I almost kicked myself. According to the dosage instructions I had read five to ten small doses would produce a lasting result. To give her a pound of the precious stuff implied that Kramer, or whoever gave Kramer his orders, intended Shavarri to exploit to the full her opportunity. Soaked to the gills in credulin-A, Pwill would take the wildest advice from her and be unable to question it.

Another group of people whom I now had to face hostility from was less important. Since my elevation to the confidence of both the head of the house and his heir in the matter of the coffee, nobody was eager to go on ordering me to perform my duties as steward of the household. Consequently I soon let them devolve on juniors, and since I had been industrious in organizing things my way this meant a considerable extra burden of work.

I had not realized how thoroughly I’d altered the arrangemerits
that had existed before my arrival—if you could call them arrangements. Even such a simple business as the supplying of meat and vegetables from the estate had been run on a slap-happy basis, creaking at all the joints except where it was greased with bribes. I’d contrived—by such small steps I could scarcely remember the details—to improve all that. Fresh from an Earth of scarcity and strict rationing, it had simply offended me to see such slackness.

While I was actually on the job, it had made no odds to my subordinates to run things another way. They grumbled more about my Earthly origin than about my ideas, which were good ones as anybody could see. Now they were left to themselves to cope with the entire complex of the supply problem, they began to see how much they had let themselves depend on me. They hadn’t minded letting me do so much work, of course. That was what I was there for!

But I could put up with their petty annoyance. Far worse, perhaps as dangerous as the jealousy of the various wives, was the enmity of a group of people I’d previously ignored altogether.

I’d known, in a vague way, from such hints as the image which Swallo kept in his office by the gate and took out in time of trouble to stand on the table beside his fat ledger, that there were various cults to which the lower-ranking members of he household subscribed. I’d heard the music and chanting at occasional festivals held in the townlets on the estate among different guilds of workers. The metalworkers had one strong cult; among the soldiers, another was popular, and each company maintained by subscription from their wages a sort of shaman. This kind of superstition did not seem to extend much into the higher ranks, particularly not into the family itself.

Aside from that oath—swearing by the seven gods of Casca-Olla—which I’d heard him let slip, Pwill Himself appeared to subscribe to no deities at all. Nonetheless he was obliged on occasion to conduct quite elaborate ceremonies; I’d been present at several, although I’d never been able to find any hint of an invocation to supernatural forces in what was said or sung. The ritual was structured to induce a kind of generalized awe and reverence. If anyone was worshipped in any sense, it was Pwill Himself as head of the house.

But after setting up in business as a mysterious medicine man myself—especially after the affair of Dwerri’s whip had convinced many people I knew what I was doing—I found that I had misjudged the determination with which the various shamans and cult leaders intended to hang on to their influence. Several times I found revolting charms in my room, under my pillow or nailed over the doorway in bags, and as time went by it became clear that the people responsible were willing to find something that worked more efficiently than mere charms.

Once, when I snatched down a bag that looked like just another in the long series nailed over the door, something moved inside it. Barely in time I dropped, and stamped on, a deadly poisonous quasi-reptile, a thing with four legs and a chitinous shell and inch-long hollow fangs. The day following I went the rounds of the various townlets on the estate, and as often as I could manage it unobserved I fixed a little charm of my own to the door of a shaman’s home. It consisted of the name Dwerri written in Vorrish characters on a scrap of white leather.

Simple as it was, it worked, and I had complete peace for several days.

But the peace was not to last.

It was customary, whenever something went wrong with one of the Earth-built solar-powered vehicles on the estate—and there were some hundreds of these, mostly acquired by Pwill during his tour as governor of Earth—to send to the Acre for a mechanic to fix it if the job was too complicated for one of the half-trained peasants who passed for mechanics on the estate. In the past, I’d never even taken the trouble to make the acquaintance of one of these rare visitors. Why, was another unanswerable question.

One morning I came out for a walk in the sun, and found one of the biggest trucks on the estate undergoing repairs in the open air. There were two mechanics busy on it. I saw at once that they were Earthly, and walked up to greet them. To my utter amazement, I found that one of them was Ken Lee, and the other—Marijane.

I
STOOD THERE
gaping like an idiot for a long moment before she raised her head from the works of the truck and saw me. During that moment workmen of the estate came and went, avoiding me; I noted that the two Earthly experts were being left to their own devices completely, except for the watch kept on them by a group of a half a dozen surly-faced soldiers who were obviously annoyed at being detailed to such dull work; and a blinding flash of understanding almost broke in on my mind. Almost.

Standing there in the sunlight, I could have wept with
frustration at the tricks my mind was playing on me. The sight of Ken and Marijane working by themselves; the realization that the truck was built on Earth and not here—those two facts had been about to add up into a whole so important that it would have changed my life.

And suddenly, ridiculously, it was gone from me.

Somehow I mastered myself, and realized as if I had heard an echo in my memory that Marijane, no sign of recognition on her face, had spoken to me in Vorrish. One word, made into a question with the appropriate particle suffixed to it.

“Earthman?”

I was hurt for a moment by her expression of veiled hostility and suspicion. Then I realized that it must be feigned, and recalled the way the people of the Acre thought of those they called serfs. I answered, also in Vorrish.

“Yes, and am content at your presence. What seems to be wrong with the truck?”

Now Ken Lee also looked up from the interior of the vehicle, holding a thick cable in one hand as though to keep track of where it led to, wiping his face with the other. He gave me a curt nod and went back to his work.

“An accumulator overload,” Marijane answered, still in Vorrish, and then with a switch to English so fast it took me by surprise, “What these dunderheads can’t do to machinery! I’d have said this was foolproof, but it isn’t Vorra-proof!”

Instantly I caught on. She’d dropped her voice as she changed to English, so that anyone passing would assume she had gone on talking Vorrish and he had merely lost the sense of the words. It was safe enough. No one seemed to want to come very close to the vehicle. Maybe there was a trace of superstitious awe involved.

And again: I almost had that dazzling new knowledge. I had to shake my head to clear it.

I said in Vorrish, “And it will be rectified soon? Pwill Himself is not pleased with the lack of the truck.” And copied her example in switching to English in a lower voice, to say: “I’m very glad to see you. Can you stay when that’s fixed?”

“Out of the question. Have to talk here. Have a message for you.” She glanced at the guards and raised her voice again. “There is not much wrong, but the adjustment is tricky and requires time to complete.”

Ken said something from where he was half-buried in the mechanism; she nodded and got to the ground to fetch something from a tool chest laid on a bench close by. As she handed it up to him, she addressed me again without looking at me.

“You’re not to come to the Acre again for at least some days.” She got up on the truck beside her brother. “Orders. From Judge Olafsson.”

Thunderstruck, I did a rapid mental calculation. I hadn’t been down to the Acre for more than a week now. I had no difficulty with people inquiring about my movements, but to be on the safe side I always contrived to find myself a reason to produce if asked. In fact, of course, my trips were made to secure the precious double handful of coffee beans which kept Pwill, Jr. going.

His current supply was probably almost exhausted; he and his companion Forrel had been sent on a trip to one of the overseas plantations of the house, to supervise some crucial harvesting operation, I understood. He was due back in another day or so, and he would certainly expect his supply of coffee then.

I said, “But—1” And realized. I had spoken too loudly. A
curious glance came my way from one of the guards. I covered myself with some inane remark in Vorrish, and when the moment of danger had passed, went on under my breath in English.

“That’s ridiculous!” I said. “The heir will be back and he’ll be out of coffee—there’ll be hell to pay!”

She gave me a mirthless grin.

“That’s the whole idea,” she said softly.

I was still staring, my mouth half open, when Ken Lee made a connection somewhere under the hood of the truck and the engine came to humming life. He got down, dusting his hands, and called for the chief engineer of the estate. They became involved in a technical discussion at once, and the guards, eager to escort Ken and Marijane back to the Acre, moved down towards the truck. Marijane gave me a furious glare when she saw I wasn’t moving away, and—helpless with inarticulate rage—I had to wander off as though nothing had happened.

I started to walk, not knowing where I was going, at random across the broad fields in the general direction of a military barracks village. My head was spinning like a gyroscope, except that a gyroscope keeps a constant direction of spin and I didn’t know what direction my mind was following.

To cut Pwill, Jr.’s supply of coffee? But that was crazy! The consequences would be dreadful. His father thought that he was free of the addiction; it would be impossible to hide the truth once the young man broke down again. My position would become untenable—it would immediately be clear to Pwill that I had double-crossed him—but even before that, when I had no coffee to offer him, I could expect blind
rage from the son and probably violence from the terrified Forrel.

And Pwill would not be the man to try a second time what had failed the first. He would never appeal to me. He would send me to the torturers and then disinherit Pwill Heir Apparent in favor of one of the other sons. None of them was his full brother, which meant that Llaq would afford me no further protection; she also might be deposed from the status of senior wife—executed, perhaps!

Add to this the rumors which were now spreading about the rival House of Shugurra. I’d heard these by bits and pieces over the previous several days, which meant—because I was too far removed from the rest of the people here now to get the freshest news—that they were common knowledge. It seemed that Kramer’s assessment of Cosra was correct, and that she had made less discreet use of her love potion than Shavarri. For the rumors were to the effect that Shugurra Himself was under her thumb, and that if Pwill played his cards right he could look forward to seizing the domination of Qallavarra in the near future.

Pwill had been delighted beyond measure with the change in his heir. I was certain he had been banking on overcoming Shugurra and then trusting to his son to maintain the leadership. With the young man suddenly reduced to a sniveling bag of withdrawal symptoms, the keystone of his plan would fall, and in his rage and frustration he would probably turn on the people he considered the authors of his fate: the people of the Acre of Earth.

Was Olafsson trying to cut my throat and his? Or was the so-called order which Marijane had given me an error, or a lie?

I swung round, meaning to head back the way I had come,
and challenge her regardless of consequences. But I saw that she and her brother were already almost out of sight on the road leading to the highway, the guards marching stolidly behind them. I couldn’t go after them now.

What in hell was I supposed to do? I couldn’t defy the order, if it were genuine, and go to the Acre and ask for Olafsson’s own word on it. I didn’t want to show myself cowardly and unreliable.

Wait!

For a second I had the impression that the blinding knowledge I had almost seized had come back to me. But I was disappointed once more. Still, I had seen something. I was beginning to make a sort of sense of the order from Olafsson.

Suppose the aim was to bring down the growing power of the House of Pwill. What surer way was there, risky though it might be, than induce an attack by Pwill on the Acre? It was known to everyone that the reason he had gone to Earth was in the hope of finding some mystic secret which would assure him of superiority over his rivals.

If he were to attack the Acre, all the other houses would jump to one conclusion: he had succeeded and now he was trying to insure that the other houses were denied the assistance of Earthly skills in combating him. The house to which the present governor of Earth belonged was rather small and insignificant—no match for the might of Shugurra, however weakened by Cosra’s interference.

I was still walking as I thought this through. Abruptly I was snatched back to reality by a barking voice from ahead. I looked around. I had come to the outskirts of the barracks village housing half a dozen companies of the finest soldiers the House of Pwill had to offer. Confronting me now were a group of some twenty fit young men, all armed, with two
sergeants among them. From the huts on either side curious women and children were peeping out, staring at me.

I felt suddenly very frightened. What an idiotic thing to have done to come here alone!