CHAPTER VI
The pretty daughter of the squire, She mourned and would not eat; The Mink he tried to tempt her With barley bread and meat.
"O no, O no, you rebel cur, I'll never eat nor drink, Till father's hall I see again! Till death has trapped the Mink!"
--Ruck's Ballad of the Mink
There were seven hundred silent men in the amphitheater of the forest,and more came in each minute, slipping from the trees without a sound,taking seats on the sloping grass. Miner's lanterns, the marvelouscontraptions that hung in the shafts beside the veins of coal or pocketsof diamonds, glowing with a dull penetrating radiance, had been filchedfrom the mines one by one over years, and now illumined the strange halllike blue glowworms spaced around a pit.
Revel sat, uneasy, on the sward in the center, at the bottom of thebowl; beside him were Jerran and Dawvys, the small rebel's cousin whoserved in the house of Ewyo the squire. There also was the Lady Nirea,dressed in a miner's plain short-sleeved shirt and unornamented pants,but looking as delectable to Revel as she had in the silver gown. Shehad not spoken to him since the great bang and the twin clouds, but hismind was so full that he didn't care.
He had killed gods. This had brought his whole world down in ruins,shaken his belief in all he had ever been taught by the priests.
He had killed gentrymen, squires whom no breath of trouble from the ruckhad ever disturbed. This had made the myths of rebellion very real tohim, very possible; and then Jerran had admitted to being a rebelhimself.
The east quarter of Dolfya had been wiped out, as Jerran had guessed;men from the town, coming in after dusk, had confirmed it. The place fora square mile was level, featureless, without sign that thousands ofpeople, women and shopkeepers, brewers and doctors, shebeen hosts andsmall craftsmen and thieves and vegetable-growers, had lived there justthis morning. They were all gone into the smoke of the double cloud.
His own mother was dead, then, and perhaps Rack, if the big red man hadgone home.
He had taken a squire's daughter and made love to her, love that wasreturned if only for a brief time; and afterwards he had shot downzanphs with his new-found guns and plummeted a priest to destruction.
So now where was he? Among rebels, certainly, but mentally, where did hestand? Did he espouse the cause of the rebels? He nodded to himself. Ofcourse. Their cause was the ruck's, and Revel was a man of the ruck. Hehad given the rebels a terrific boost with his god-killing, too. As wordwent round of it, he could see faces turn toward him, marveling,awe-struck, respectful.
And what was he to do? Become a vagabond, probably, living by night,skulking in the forest edges, passing from town to town hoping he couldfind a place where the gods had not heard of him, so he might settledown and eventually become a miner again. Mining was all he knew.
He felt for his pick, tucked into his trousers at the back. For all thenew handguns, with their ammunition that made hash of a head or a belly,he still preferred his pick. It was the weapon of a man.
He took out a gun from his belt and stared at it. Then he asked Nirea,"What is this called, the curved metal you pull to shoot?"
She glanced over haughtily. "The trigger. Any dolt knows that."
"I wish you'd be nicer. I don't mean to harm you."
"You touched me, and more. I'm dreaming of your torture. Leave mealone."
Jerran stood up. The rebels, who had been buzzing and talking in lowtones, quieted until Revel could hear the rabbits hopping in theunderbrush beyond the amphitheater.
Jerran began to speak. He told them the whole story of the day, of thegods' death and all. Murmurs and exclamations arose, and he hushed themwith a gesture.
"Many of us," he said, "though rebels, have owed allegiance to the gods.Our quarrel has been only with the gentry, whose useless existence andawful power over us are a constant irritation. They who hunt us as'foxes'--who kill us if we touch them--we have seen are only men likeourselves, women like our women." He pointed to Nirea. "There's agentrywoman; is she different in body from our wives? Not by so much asa mole!"
"I didn't see any moles," whispered Revel to the girl. She turned red inthe face and clamped her teeth together.
"Is her mind different, superior? It's eviller, cruder, more ferocious,maybe, but no whit better than our own! Why then should her kind havepower over us?"
* * * * *
The amphitheater roared to the angry yells of rebels. Jerran waved hishand again. "That's been our quarrel with the established way of thingsin the world. We've hoped for weapons to fight the gentry, and prayedfor guidance from the gods. Now we know that the gods are mortal too!They can die! Then they aren't gods, not if gods are the supreme beingswe've all been taught! They flee from a miner's pick? Then, by Orbs,they're craven cowards, not fit to be worshipped!"
A hush, then another roar.
"I said we'd waited. The biggest need was a leader, a man of brains andguts and power. We've sung of him for centuries, made up stories of him,songs about him." Jerran paused dramatically. He flung out a finger atthe mob. "Who will he be?"
The answer almost broke Revel's eardrums.
_The Mink! The Mink! The Mink! The Mink!_
"He's here! He's come, from the bowels of the ruck, from the mines, fromthe people, as he was to come! Already he's done some of the acts thesaga-makers put into the Ballad of the Mink!"
Revel frowned. Jerran hadn't told him that the Mink had come at last.The small yellow-faced man went on.
"He's the greatest trapper of mink in Dolfya--his family sleeps underblankets of the little beasts' hides. His own hair is the shade of amink's pelt, as was foretold. He's as swift and deadly and cunning asthe oldest mink alive. He's slain gods and priests, and taken toll ofthe gentry. I've worked beside him for years, and know his mind andheart have always been ours, though he lived in ignorance of us."
The light, a lurid incredible light, began to dawn on Revel.
Jerran's voice rose to a shriek as the rebels muttered stupefaction. "Itell you I know this is the man we've waited for, us and our fathers andtheir father's fathers before them! Rebels of Dolfya, I showyou--_Revel, the Mink!_"
The shouts that had come before were murmurs to the chorus of stentorianbellows which assaulted Revel's ears now. The woman turned and saidsomething to him, her fine face disdainful, but the words were lost inthe tumult. A dozen men surged down and lifted him to their shouldersand paraded him round, while hands reached up to touch him and wavegreeting to him.
It was the beginning of a celebration he had never seen the like of, afestival occasion that included a great dinner of boar and deer meat andstolen gentry's wine, over which much vague planning was done; and itended only when the last rebel had left to sneak homeward, and he andthe girl were left alone with Jerran.
"Sleep now, lad," Jerran said, grinning. "You're exhausted. It isn'tevery day a man finds himself a savior."
"But the Mink--I, the Mink?" He still had not entirely accepted it.
"I think so ... and if I care to call you the Mink, no one cancontradict me."
"All the while I was doing those things this morning," muttered Revel,"I had the feeling I'd done them before. I must have been rememberingthe old ballad, for by Orbs, the acts do fit!"
"That minor blasphemy begins to annoy me," said Jerran seriously. "It'slike saying 'by the man I killed yesterday.' We've got to revise ourswearing habits."
"Why not substitute _Revel_ or _Mink_ for _Orb_?" asked the girlharshly. "Our Revel who dwells in the buttoned sky," she added, with amalevolent sneer.
"Ah, go to sleep, both of you," said Jerran. "Tomorrow we start toplan--really plan--to overthrow the gentry."
"And the priests," said Revel fiercely, "and the gods!" He almostbelieved that somehow they could climb into the air and destroy the godsin their red and blue buttons. He lay down, one hand vised on thewoman's wrist, and though he felt he should never sleep that night,being far too excited, in three min
utes he was snoring mightily.
* * * * *
He woke some time later with the prickling feeling of danger on hisskin. He opened his eyes and saw red, literally a red mist that obscuredthe world. Then his head began to open and shut, open and shut, and heknew he had been hit a hell of a blow on the forehead, and there wasblood in his eyes.
Groping for his pick, that had lain next his left hand, he missed it;then he recalled the girl, reached out for her, found she was gone too.He drew the back of his arm over his eyes and cleared the gore a trifle."Jerran?" he said quietly. No answer.
Blinking, he saw the vast meeting place empty, lit by the blue lanterns.He rolled his head and there, its point buried deep in the sward an inchfrom his right ear, was his pick. He sat up. Jerran lay a dozen feetoff, looking very dead indeed, with his thin hair matted with blackeningblood.
Instinctively he tore the pick out of the ground. It was buried so deepthat only a very strong hand could have sent it in; not the girl, hethought, somehow relieved that she hadn't done it. No, a miner's blowalone might have done it, for the earth was packed solid as oak's woodby untold multitudes of rebels' feet.
Wait a minute, he said to himself: this is all wrong. That blow shouldhave opened my skull like a walnut. It missed me by a fraction--eitherthe aim was poor, or else damned good. I could have struck such a blow,sure to miss where I wished to, but not even many miners could duplicateit.
Had the enemy missed, then walloped him with another weapon and left himfor dead? Gingerly he felt the wound on his head. It was healingalready, a tap that might have laid him out for a few hours, but wouldnever have slain him.
He glared at the pick in his hand. Then he brought it up and in thecombined light of the blue lanterns and the dawn filtering in from thewoods, he squinted at the handle.
Where his own pick bore the crude carving of a mink (he had taken thebeast as his symbol a long time ago, another sign of his identity), thisone had a jumble of grooves meant to represent a woods lion.
This wasn't Revel's pick--it was his brother Rack's!
Caught in an appalling dream that was the hardest reality he'd everfaced, he pored over the pickax, scanned the motionless form of hisfriend Jerran, then goggled foolishly at nothing in particular as hethought of his situation, stranded in a place he could not escape fromalone, with many half-formed plots in his head but no way to carry themout. Between him and Dolfya, and the other rebels, lay miles of tangledforest no man, be he ever so skillful at woodscraft, could penetratewithout the knowledge of a route; thousands of the ruck were dependingon him to lead them, and he couldn't even lead himself home.
"If you're the Mink, Revel m'lad," he said aloud, "it's time you came upwith a brilliant idea!"
And there wasn't a scheme in his head.