The Super Barbarians (17 page)

Pwill and Llaq were killed by a rocket as they struggled to get away from their car—an obvious target for the Shugurra troops, and still more obvious for the newly arrived paratroops. Who fired the rocket never became clear; presumably the man responsible was killed.

More rockets reduced the column of vehicles to a string of bonfires in the next few minutes. Deprived of both Pwill and the young hothead of an officer, and with several of their sergeants also dead; with the countryside around them sprouting unexpected death; unable to tell if their enemies were from the House of Shugurra only, or from many houses, the troops of the House of Pwill could only scatter in the hope of saving their fives, firing at anyone who fired at them. In this way they probably accounted for as many of each other as troops of other houses did. Reportedly, the shambles became incredible by an hour from dawn.

By that time the permanent weapons of the great houses were being brought into play. The last civil wars on Qallavarra had been fought in the days of ammonium nitrate explosive and solid shot fired from smooth-barreled guns; consequently the two houses on opposite sides of the bowl-like valley had never before been able to shoot directly at each
other. In fact, the attempt had never had to be made, for in those days there existed an uneasy alliance between them. Now it was different.

The first direct attack on the House of Shugurra was not made by the House of Pwill at all, it was discovered later. A detachment commander of one of the allied lesser houses wanted to silence a gun-post enfilading some ground he needed to move his men across. He had only a mortar capable of reaching the gun-post, and the mortar was not wholly accurate. Still, he set it up behind a small hillock and let fly. The bomb dropped fair on the huge glass dome crowning the house, and fell through before exploding and killing over a thousand noncombatants—women, children and sick old men—gathered there from outlying buildings.

Mad with rage, and still thinking, thanks to inadequate intelligence reports, that only the House of Pwill was ranged against him, Shugurra Himself ordered retaliation.

In emplacements on the north and south of the house there were four long-barreled cannon firing shells weighing about a thousand pounds and filled with the preferred, though highly unstable, trinitrobenzine typical of Vorrish artillery. The cannon dated from a period shortly after the last war between houses and were the last new armaments installed for local defense. But they were still perfectly efficient, although much less destructive than the weapons the Vorra had for use in space.

The gunners fired about twenty shots altogether into the House of Pwill; then an underground oil-storage tank was hit and the whole complex of buildings was swamped in a sea of orange flame and black greasy smoke. The gunners turned their attention to the townlets lying beyond.

What happened to the House of Shugurra was rather
more epic in its nature. Having seen his own house destroyed, one of the troops of the House of Pwill crawled back to the line of wrecked vehicles on which his column had set out that morning. He made his way along until he came to one of the heavy weapons carriers. Most of its armaments were out of commission, but one of the rocket launchers was still workable. He worked it. He put five rockets in a row into the House of Shugurra—the favorite type beloved by the Vorrish military for its sheer spectacle: phosphorus in magnesium casings covered with a fragmenting envelope and a tracery of cordite threads, Then the sixth blew up in the launcher.

But the facade of the House of Shugurra had a gap-toothed look, and in each of the gaps a fire was beginning to rage.

From then on the Vorra were content to fight anyone and everyone they could find. That was the way they were.

I
T WAS EARLY
afternoon, and I was wishing that the smoke would clear away from all around me because it was making it impossible to follow the confused progress of the battle, when something went past me with a noise like an angry wasp. And another. And another. And then something thunked into the side of the’ chimneystack, and a splatter of hot metal stung the back of my nearer hand.

Suddenly I was fervently wishing that the smoke would grow dense enough to swallow me completely. I had no idea where those four shots had come from, but they had passed
too close with too long an interval between them to have been accidental.

It was inevitable that sooner or later some of the confused soldiers—most likely, those of Pwill and Shugurra--would find out that Shugurra had attacked Pwill on a false assumption, and that they would then join forces to go after the blood of the people whose fault the whole thing was. Ours.

In fact, as I heard afterwards, something of the kind had happened earlier—not much later than noon, at all events. About a company and a half of mixed Pwill and Shugurra troops had salvaged what vehicles they could and tried to come into the town to spread as much havoc as possible in the Acre. The free citizens, however, had got the idea that the rumored league between Pwill and Shugurra was aimed at dominating not merely the Acre but the entire city, and although they had had confused accounts of Pwill fighting Shugurra, the arrival of the mixed force confirmed their worst fears. They had some pride of their own; if they’d wanted to swear fealty to a great house they could have done so as individuals, but they didn’t want to and they hadn’t done so.

Accordingly, the first attempt to reach the Acre was met by a horde of angry townsfolk with improvised weapons down to and including half-bricks. Under a hail of these the troops retreated, found their retreat cut off, and holed up in a block of recently built houses from which they were smoked out late in the afternoon.

The second attempt was more successful. A rather larger force in armored trucks got as far as the street next but one to the eastern boundary of the Acre. In the course of last night a party of explosives experts had mined not merely that street but half a dozen others besides, and by the time two
or three ramshackle buildings had fallen on them the trucks were unfit to move on and their occupants were in little better shape. The townfolk finished them off with rocks, empty pottery jars, and rotten vegetables.

The third attempt was organized with some care, and included men not only of Pwill and Shugurra but also some from lesser houses and a good many townsfolk who, once they got the point, were only too eager to try and level accounts with the upstart Earthmen in the Acre. It was a few minutes after my narrow escape from being shot dead in my exposed position that the houses all around the Acre seemed to shrug and cough and all fell down at once, burying most of this third attack force and making the nearby streets impassable.

I thought of the sewer that had been used to get me away from the House of Pwill, and drew a conclusion which later I found correct. Cautiously, in darkness, people had crawled along the crude sewer pipes serving this neighborhood and placed powerful mines under key points in the foundations of the houses overhead. Where necessary, extra tunnels had been drilled weeks or months earlier so that the explosive could be taken to precisely the right location.

The collapse of the surrounding houses left the outer fringes of the Acre exposed to fire. On the other hand, it also meant that anyone trying to approach the Acre had to do so across a treacherous sea of smoking rubble and also exposed himself to fire. And in the outskirts of the city the situation was so confused it was unlikely that anyone would succeed in getting heavy weapons near enough to be able to aim accurately at us. The risk remained that there might somewhere be a gunner either skilled enough to range on the Acre by dead reckoning, or crazy enough not to care whether he
hit us or the rest of the city. That was a risk we had to take. For a considerable time it looked as though it was coming off.

Meanwhile the fighting in the surrounding area was spreading. From the original point of the clash between Pwill and Shugurra it had expanded—with the arrival of the eight thousand paratroops from the lesser houses—well inside the two estates. Pwill had lost four companies, but the total muster was over sixty, plus trainees, recruits and the militia composed of active people from the metalworkers’ villages, the farmhands, and all other trades on the huge self-supporting estate. Altogether Pwill could count on a theoretical army of some twenty thousand or more.

At first they had no idea what was going on. It seemed that the world had gone mad when the storm of paratroopers fell On them and began their attack. Then came the destruction of the house itself, by fire from the House of Shugurra, and about half the total forces of the estate—having mustered on the west of the house—set out to fight their way into Shugurra territory and take revenge.

The remaining half, having mustered on the north and east, attempted to tackle the paratroops because they were there and obviously hostile. About then, the guns from Shugurra started to range on the townlets lying to the rear of the burning house, and chaos set in as the astonished troops tried to work out whom they were fighting against. Most of them apparently gave up trying soon; they were satisfied to be fighting again after too long an interval.

Something similar happened on Shugurra territory, but that was complicated by the intrusion of troops from the third house in the bowl-like valley surrounding the city. This
was normally of little significance in Vorrish affairs; it was regarded as a sort of appendage of Shugurra and usually acted in this role.

But, finding its estate invaded by hordes of maddened Shugurra troops taking a short cut to the estates of Pwill and not much caring what happened to people who got in their way, the people of this third house—its name was Geluid—mobilized its small and ill-equipped, but brave army of some nine hundred men, dusted off its few artillery pieces, and tried to drive the troops of Shugurra back on their own ground. The Shugurra troops didn’t seem to notice that they had failed to reach the estate they were making for. At least, not until later.

The situation as it had developed by late afternoon, then, was approximately this:

In the city, street fighting, rioting, and occasional outside attempts to reach the Acre. Several fires raging. The entire district surrounding the Acre laid low by mines.

At the place where fighting had started, fighting still in progress, with the paratroops fighting the great houses, the troops of the great houses fighting each other and the paratroops, and occasional attempts being made to get from there down to the city.

On each of the great estates, troops from the other house fighting their way forward against resistance by both the paratroops and the resident troops, and—by a trick of fate—with the invaders gaining ground on one wing and the defenders gaining ground on the other. Driven back on their own terrain, the attackers accordingly became defenders and fought more violently. This happened on both sides. At places the falling-back turned to rout; the attackers cheered and charged after the defenders, only to discover that they had over-extended
their communications and were easy prey to fresh defense forces brought up from the two-hundred-mile-deep back country of the estate they had invaded.

On the Geluid estate, a situation so much more confused than the above—what with Geluid artillery firing blindly at both Pwill and Shugurra and the paratroops taking Geluid troops for allies only to find themselves wrong enough to be dead—that it would probably never be correctly analyzed.

I had altogether lost hope of keeping track of the situation, and had reported the fact over my portable radio, when the trapdoor on to the roof opened and I turned in alarm.

Then I relaxed. It was Olafsson, come to see what the battle looked like in reality, I presumed.

“What is going on?” I demanded. “I can see but I can’t follow from up here!” And added belatedly, “You’d better be careful—I’ve been fired at once!”

He nodded and came along the roof to stand beside the chimneys tack and stare out over the countryside. He said, not looking at me, “It’s going well. This isn’t all of it, you know. It’s going on overseas—workers revolting on the plantations and in the mines, jealous houses snatching the chance to occupy rich territory belonging to their rivals. And on Earth as well, of course.”

“On Earth!” I echoed.

“Naturally. We made quite sure that the news of the destruction of the House of Pwill and the House of Shugurra was reported by subspace transmitter as soon as it happened.” He sounded pleased, but he looked very tired.

“And what’s happened?” I said, digesting the news slowly.

“What you’d expect. A state of considerable uncertainty! Nobody knows which way to jump or whose boots to lick. If they have any sense, they’ll lick ours, of course.”

I felt suddenly slightly faint. I said, “You mean—this is the event? The toning of the tables?”

He gave me a curious; glance. “Of course it is,” he said. “I thought you told Marijane Lee you’d got your memory back. I assumed you knew.”

“Then I didn’t get all of it back,” I said. My heart was beginning to pound so violently I thought it would shake me off the roof. “But is this enough? I grant, it’s a civil war which will probably set Qallavarra back for years, but how about the Acre when the fighting dies down? How about reprisals on Earth if they learn the truth? How about—?”

I could see he was going to cut me short, but he didn’t get the chance. What did the job for him was an explosion in the middle of the heaped rubble which now boardered the Acre—a shell, probably from one of the guns on the Shugurra estate! So that gunner whose work we’d been afraid of existed after all.

A second shell followed while we were still staring at the dust thrown up by the first, and this time it hit the edge of the Acre itself, bringing down a small house and causing its neighbors to tilt into the gap, their walls crazed.

I wanted very much to crawl down to the ground. Olafsson, though, merely frowned and seized my radio. He spoke into the microphone.

“Olafsson!” he snapped. “On the bird-perch! How many of the Shugurra guns are still firing? Because one or more of them just opened up on the Acre!”