The Super Barbarians (16 page)

“Someone—I don’t know who, but probably Kramer—got word of what you were doing at Pwill to Cosra at Shugurra. Shugurra Himself is well under Cosra’s thumb now.” It was Gustav who had picked up the story. “Shugurra is only just across the valley. News of the expedition Pwill plans for tomorrow has already reached him—but not the reason for it. He’s been allowed to think—and so have the other houses—that Pwill means to shift the entire population of the Acre to his own estate. He’ll stop at nothing to prevent this.”

“But,” Marijane cut in, her voice shaking with glee, “it doesn’t end there! According to what the other houses have been told, there was a conspiracy between Pwill and Shugurra to seize the Acre for themselves, which has only been held up by a petty quarrel, and ten of the other houses have heard that Pwill and Shugurra are mobilizing. As far as they know, this is for a joint coup. We’ll have to wait and see what happens. But what’s likely is that both sides will find themselves attacked from the rear.”

“Qallavarra will never be the same again,” Ken said in a somber voice. “I feel damned sorry for these poor silly fools.”

“Sorry for them?” I echoed incredulously. “After what they did to us? And not only to us, but to—”

I was on the point of telling how I had seen that mummy in a yellow spacesuit in the shaman’s house, when George’s soft voice interrupted me,

“End of the ride coming up,” he said. “Get ready to jump out when I tell you. Marijane, got that bomb?”

“Coming up,” Marijane said. She fumbled in the dark recess behind the rear seat where hand luggage was normally stowed, and produced something small but heavy in a shiny metal case. She handed this to George.

One hand steering, the other turning a knob on the metal case which clicked as it rotated, George swung the car down a narrow street.

“Acre dead ahead,” he called gaily. “Jump on the turn!”

Gustav, nearest the door, opened it and held it. The car swung; he rolled forward and out, turning head over heels on the muddy pavement. I followed unquestioning. I’d learnt how to jump from a moving vehicle without hurting myself many, many years ago. The others came after me. As I got to my feet and looked along the street after the car I saw that George also had flung himself clear, and that the twin blazing beams of the car’s lights were full on a tall, official-looking building in its path. I saw that there was a slight slope down towards this building, so that the car was gathering speed.

Out of darkness I heard Marijane say softly, “It’s one of the main city tax offices, you see.”

The car hit. One of its lights went out, the other slanted sharply upwards at the face of the building. There was the
beginning of a noise like a man crunching into a crisp slice of toast. It had happened so quickly that the rear of the car still seemed to be moving forward.

Then the car vanished in a blinding white glare, and the entire city seemed to rock with the blast.

“Into the Acre,” Ken said beside me, catching at my arm, and like rabbits diving for cover we sought the safety of the forbidden zone. I glanced back once, and saw that huge tongues of yellow and orange flame had leaped up from the wreck of the car, and that the facade of the building had split and collapsed to reveal rooms beyond with their floors and ceilings tilted at drunken angles. A few pieces of furniture, tipped towards the open side of the rooms, had started to burn in the hot updraft from the blaze on the ground.

“What you might call combining business with pleasure,” a voice said from deep shadow. It was George; I had not seen him until his white teeth flashed in a grin.

I had never seen the Acre so alive when I visited it by day as it was now in the middle of the night when the rest of the city was asleep. Rare chinks of light showed between fast-closed shutters; if you strained your ears you caught the hum of machinery and talk also, as though a thousand people were whispering behind the nearest walls. In every street we walked along at least someone besides us was walking, the same way or another way, hurrying on an urgent errand. You could have picked the excitement off the air and squeezed it in your hand like solid clay.

Stupidly, I had been expecting to be taken to Olafsson’s office at the Central Bank. Instead, my companions led me down a street I had not visited before. Between two dead-seeming buildings we halted. One of us—I could not tell in
the darkness whether it was Ken or Gustav—moved forward and went on soft feet down a flight of steps to a basement door. There was a knock and a sound of voices. The door opened. I felt myself urged forward.

Beyond the door was a low ceilinged room, with many pillars improvised out of bricks to hold up a sagging ceiling. Here men, women and children—to my startled gaze there seemed to be hundreds of them—milled about between tables and desks. There were computers here. There was electric hghting. There was a group of six radio transceivers ranged against the far wall and messages were coming and going.

And there was a Vorrish subspace transmitter, too—for talking to ships between the stars.

I was so distracted by the sight of this unexpected operations room that I had to be prodded back to awareness by an elbow in my ribs. I found myself facing Olafsson, who was beaming and holding out his hand.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve short-circuited years of work for us. The poor silly Vorra are just about to start cutting their own throats.”

Poor, silly? Not in my book! I thought of the way the face of that mummy in the shamans house had kept, even in death, a noble expression.

But before I could speak there was already another claim on Olafsson’s attention. I found my way to a corner where I would not block anybody’s movements, and sank down on a chair to think of this extraordinary paradox.

I
MUST HAVE
dozed off in my chair. Somehow this brightly lit room and all this co-ordinated activity seemed to have little to do with me. It was so far from the scheming and the violence which had involved me at the House of Pwill. I even dreamed for a little. I dreamed that I was back in the shaman’s house, confronting the mummy in the space-suit, and there was no one else present. I begged the mummy to speak to me, to tell me about itself, and I thought I saw , the dried skin of the face move, cracking and letting fall a fine rain of dust.

But although its face writhed, it was not to speak. It was to sneer at me.

I was awakened by a tug on my arm, and opened my eyes to see a little girl of ten or twelve offering me a big mug of steaming soup and a hunk of heavy brown bread. I took it and thanked her, and she went off without a word.

Looking around, I found that the night’s hectic activity had run down to an idling tempo. People—fewer than there had been when I arrived—were standing about, chatting and sipping mugs of soup like mine. Only one of the radio transceivers was in operation, although the operator seated at the subspace transmitter was droning a long message into his microphone, and I saw him finish one page of it and lift another from a very full basket beside him.

There was no sign of Marijane, nor of Ken or Gustav.

I had finished my soup, and was wiping round the inside of the mug with the last crust of the bread, when Olafsson came through a door on the side of the room opposite the
street entrance, looking very tired. Seeing me awake again, he came up to me.

“Job for you, Shaw, if you’re ready for one,” he said.

“Anything I can do,” I answered, looking for a place to put my empty mug down.

“It’s just after dawn. I need someone to take the watch-post on the highest building in the Acre. I warn you, you’ll need a smoke mask and goggles, and even so it’s a dirty job. But we’re stretched absolutely to capacity. You can see the whole of the valley from there, both the great houses, the road where we expect them to meet. You’ll have a grandstand view of the beginning of the end, if you like to look at it that way. Say no if you want to.”

“Of course I’ll do it,” I said.

“Excellent.” He turned to a girl standing nearby and gave crisp orders. She slipped away and returned in a few moments with the smoke mask and goggles, a miniature portable radio, and a bag containing a vacuum flask and two loaves of bread.

“Best I can find,” she said, indicating the bag of provisions. “Have to do.”

“It’ll do well enough. Thanks.” Olafsson looked at me. “You go out of here, go left for two blocks, cross the street You’ll see a sign advertising metalwork. Knock on the door. Someone will let you in. You’ll get the rest there. And—good luck.”

He shook my hand, and hurried away to answer someone else’s claim on him.

I made myself comfortable in my extraordinary aerie. It was a kind of sling-cradle hanging beside a tall chimney-stack; fortunately there was no smoke coming from the
chimney and none came out all day, though by the middle of the morning every other chimney in the city seemed to be smoking and it was hard to see through the murk.

I suppose I’d had something like this sling-cradle in mind when I was brought up to the roof. What I hadn’t expected was the excellent binocular telescope I found clamped against the side of the chimney under a weatherproof jacket. The mount could be extended on a sort of lazy tongs, and it could be swung through a field of three hundred degrees, giving a good command of almost the whole valley and certainly of everywhere where anything important might happen.

What I could not see clearly was the streets of the city around me, except for the very close neighborhood. All the best work of the Vorra was poured into the estates of the great houses; cities like this one grew up on an unimaginative gridiron plan, and the streets were narrow and often overhung by the upper floors of the buildings, like a medieval street on Earth. Consequently I could see only the roofs and occasional open spaces—market places, sites where old houses had collapsed and were being cleared for rebuilding and so on.

In spite of my grandstand seat, then, as Olafsson had called it, and my commanding view of these events so crucial in the history of Earth, most of the day I did not understand what was really going on, and I had to piece the truth together from talking to other people afterwards. In the underground operations room, of course, they were always in touch somehow with the important events.

What did happen, as I found it out eventually, was this.

Dawn. Gray mists clearing from the estate of the house of Pwill. Outside in the great courtyard four companies of men
in battle uniform, stamping their feet to shift the last of the night’s sluggishness, blowing on their hands against the chilly wind. In an hour the day would be warm, but now their breath wrote misty curlicues on the air before their mouths. Their sergeants moved among them, checking equipment, listening to the engines of their transport vehicles for the shake and tremor indicating bad maintenance.

Out of the tall gateway of the house, to take a place in the car heading the four-company column, Pwill Himself in magnificent furs, striped tawny and black, belted with the skin of two forelimbs from the animal killed to make the coat. With him the Over-Lady Llaq, and maids in attendance. The car, of course, was made on Earth.

The smart young officer commanding the task force leaped to attention in front of Pwill, saluted, bowed, and requested the order to proceed. It was given surlily. Pwill got into his car. The men jumped to their places on the weapons carriers and in the transport trucks, and the massive, swift, deadly procession moved off to demand satisfaction of the people in the Acre of Earth.

In the low clouds of early morning, a helicopter—Earth-built—droned overhead. The pilot reported by radio—Earth-built—to the commander of the six-company detachment of the forces of the House of Shugurra waiting to move along the highway. He said approximately, “The rumors are true. There’s a strong force moving out towards the city.”

The commander of the rival force called his men to their stations, and that deadly procession, too, moved out on the road. They did not have nearly as far to go as the forces of Pwill before they came to the place which had been selected for an ambush. That was one reason they had chosen the spot, of course.

Rolling down the highway, the car leading the first procession—that in which rode Pwill Himself—rounded a bend and had to brake. A barrier had been thrown across the road. Behind the barrier an enormous voice spoke over an amplifier—Earth-built. In the name of the House of Shugurra it gave him two minutes to reform his column facing the other way and to return to his own estate.

Overhead there was another helicopter now. It was far top high to hear the mighty amplifier shout of the man telling Pwill to go home. Its pilot reported that as far as he could tell the forces of the two greatest houses were about to link up and go down to the city.

For a while Pwill argued. Then he pulled a feint; he had his driver take his car back towards the rear of the column. Passing the command vehicle, he instructed the young officer to clear the road of the obstruction. There was nothing the young officer wanted to do more. He had been fretting and fumbling for a good two minutes already, and his patience was short. He ordered the barrier to be knocked aside with a rocket missile. That would have been built here on Qallavarra; the Vorra did not permit the building of weapons on Earth by Earthmen.

The blast made a hole in the smooth highway, but the trucks could avoid that easily enough. He gave the order to roll forward again.

In the next moment, two things happened. A murderous return fire from the six companies of the House of Shugurra lying in ambush and covering the whole of the locality raked the column of vehicles and killed a quarter of the soldiers in them. And the massed paratroops of the ten lesser houses who had been fooled into accepting the story of a conspiracy
between Pwill and Shugurra received the order to occupy the estates of those two houses.

They came from the gray sky like the first snow of winter, gracefully. Between them the ten lesser houses could muster only eight thousand men, but they were well armed and made up in efficient training what they lacked in numbers. The troops on the ground were too astonished to fire on them as they came down; each side hoped that perhaps it was being reinforced, and by the time they realized the truth they were already being shot at.