He emptied the weapon and reloaded it, taking his time now and not fumbling. He fired half of it the second time, then waited for the smoke .to clear. And for the few survivors, their courage broken, to flee on foot or on horse.
Lezpet had not run away. At the first explosion, her horse had reared violently and thrown her to the ground. She did not get her senses back until it was all over. When she looked around and saw the carnage, she wept.
Benoni pulled her to her feet, turned her around, and tied her hands behind her with a rope taken from the saddle on a dead horse. Docile, the fight taken from her, she submitted without a word. After tying the end of the rope to a tree, Benoni mounted his horse and went after a horse for her. It took about five minutes for him to find one of the animals that had bolted and to rope it. He returned, loosed her from the tree, and lifted her into the saddle. Holding the reins of her horse in one hand, he saw the three wagons waiting by the roadside. The drivers and about twenty soldiers were standing by them.
Seeing their ruler with her hands tied behind her, they raised a cry and began to mount their horses. Benoni did not want any witnesses left, so, reluctantly but carefully, he shot.
Not carefully enough, for one of his shots, the force, or whatever it was that was projected by the weapon, must have struck one of the wagons. And the wagon must have contained a powerful explosive of some sort. Perhaps, the cylinders stored there all went off at once.
Whatever was responsible, a tremendous cloud of smoke with a pillar of fire blossomed, and a blast roared down the road and knocked over Benoni’s horse and Lezpet’s.
Luckily; neither was hurt, beyond some bruises and deafness, and the horses managed to get back away and reveal a crater thirty feet wide on the side of the road. Of the three wagons, the teams of horses, and their riders, there was no sign.
If he had not been so stunned, he would have wept. All his dreams of burying the artifacts of the Hairy Men and of returning some day with the Eyzonuh and digging them up, all his dreams were gone. He was left with two handweapons and perhaps fifty cylinders.
“I hope you are satisfied,” said Lezpet. “Now, why don’t you kill me and complete your bloody work?”
“I have sworn an oath not to harm you,” said Benoni.
Lezpet began laughing shrilly and uncontrollably. Benoni did not find it difficult to understand her behavior; his statement seemed foolish to himself. But he had kept the literal terms of his word. He had protected her from others, and he had no intention of harming her. Besides, when she ordered her men to kill him, she had released him from his vow—as far as he was concerned.
Finally, Lezpet quit laughing. She stared at him with her great blue eyes, reddened with tears and smoke, and she said, “What do you intend to do, wild-man?”
“I can’t take you back to Kaywo,” he said. “They would kill me. So, I will take you to Fiiniks. I think that my people can use you as a hostage, a lever with which to pry some sort of treaty out of the Kaywo.”
“The journey will take many months,” she said. “I will get loose, and I will kill you.”
“No, you won’t,” he said. “I promise.”
He was as good as his word. Three months later, just as spring was beginning to melt the snows, he and Lezpet paused on the line where the plains left off and the desert began. They were on a high hill which gave them a view for miles ahead. Benoni was examining the group of horsemen about half a mile away at the bottom of the hill. From time to time, he shifted his gaze to the great cloud of dust rising some miles beyond the horsemen.
Finally, he smiled, and he said, “Those are not enemies. They are Fiiniks. Look at the flag! A scarlet fiiniks on a blue field!”
Shouting with joy, he spurred his horse down the hillside. The men below looked up alarmedly. Seeing only one man, and he without a sword in his hand, they reined in their animals to wait for him.
One of the group suddenly recognized Benoni, for he rode toward him. Benoni burst into tears. His father!
There was much confusion, shouting, and crying after that. The others crowded around him and all tried to question him at once. When order and comparative quiet was restored, his father said, “It makes me happier than I can say to see you alive, Benoni, for I had thought you were dead! But where is the scalp you were to bring back?”
Benoni flinched as if he had been struck on the cheek, but he said, “You would think I was mad, father, if I told you I have killed over a thousand men. I would not blame you. But I have a witness to that.”
There was more clamor. Finally, Benoni managed to tell them something of what had occurred. And he learned why his father was here and what the cloud of dust in the distance meant. The Eyzonuh had left their valley after a new volcano had begun forming only two miles from the city. This was a scouting party; the dust behind them was being raised by the main body: women, children, mules, horses, wagons.
“We are looking for a new land,” said Benoni’s father.
“There are many,” replied Benoni. “You will have to fight to take one and fight to hold it.”
He paused and then he said, “Tell me about Debra Awvrez. Is she back there?”
His father tightened his lips and hesitated. “Like the rest of us, she thought you were dead. She married Baw Chonz, one of the boys who went out on the warpath with you. She is carrying his child.”
He watched his son closely, waiting for the explosion. Then, he smiled as he saw Benoni shrug and heard him say, “It was to be expected. Now, I do not care. I would not have wanted her.”
His father asked for an explanation. Benoni said he would give it later. As of now, he wanted to ride back to the main group and see his mother, brothers, and sisters.
Four days later, Benoni entered the tent that had been given to Lezpet as her own. She looked coldly at him and said, “What do you want?”
“I wanted to tell you that I have been made a member of the Council of Kelbek,” he said. “It is a great honor. Never before has one my age been so honored. The Council feels that, in view of my knowledge of the land and of my experience, and also of my possession of the Hairy Men’s weapon, I should be a leader.”
“So?” she said.
“Lezpet, I know you hate me. But, I do not hate you. On the contrary, having known you, I could never be satisfied to marry a lesser woman. I intend to make you my wife. I will not force you. You will come to me willingly.”
She spat in his face. Eyes wide and blazing, she said, “I will kill myself first! Marry you, a wild-man and a traitor! You disgust me!”
“I have sworn an oath to marry no woman but you,” he said. “You and I will some day rule the Kaywo and the Eyzonuh; they will become one nation.”
He patted the weapon stuck in his belt. “I have sworn by Jehovah and by this weapon that I will marry you. And, as you know, I have never broken my oath.”
He left the tent but stood outside for a moment, listening to her rage within. Never in all his life had he felt so strongly that the world would some day be his. And that she, part of the world, would also be his.
RASTIGNAC THE DEVIL
I
After the Apocalyptic War, the decimated remnants of the French huddled in the Loire Valley were gradually squeezed between two new and growing nations. The Colossus to the north was unfriendly and obviously intended to absorb the little New France. The Colossus to the south was friendly and offered to take the weak state into its confederation of republics as a full partner.
A number of proud and independent French citizens feared that even the latter alternative meant the eventual transmutation of their tongue, religion, and nationality into those of their southern neighbor. Seeking a way of salvation, they built six huge space-ships that would hold thirty thousand people, most of whom would be in deep freeze until they reached their destination. The six vessels then set off into interstellar space to find a planet that would be as much like Earth as possible.
That was in the 22nd Century. Over thr
ee hundred and fifty years passed before Earth heard of them again. However, we are not here concerned with the home world but with the story of a man of that pioneer group who wanted to leave the New Gaul and sail again to the stars . . .
Rastignac had no Skin. He was, nevertheless, happier than he had been since the age of five.
He was as happy as a man can be who lives deep under the ground. Underground organizations are often under the ground. They are formed into cells. Cell Number One usually contains the leader of the underground.
Jean-Jacques Rastignac, chief of the Legal Underground of the Kingdom of L’Bawpfey, was literally in a cell beneath the surface of the earth. He was in jail.
For a dungeon, it wasn’t bad. He had two cells. One was deep inside the building proper, built into the wall so that he could sit in it when he wanted to retreat from the sun or the rain. The adjoining cell was at the bottom of a well whose top was covered with a grille of thin steel bars. Here, he spent most of his waking hours. Forced to look upwards if he wanted to see the sky or the stars, Rastignac suffered from a chronic stiff neck.
Several times during the day, he had visitors. They were allowed to bend over the grille and talk down to him. A guard, one of the King’s mucketeers, 1 stood by as a censor.
When night came, Rastignac ate the meal let down by ropes on a platform. Then another of the King’s mucketeers stood by with drawn epee until he had finished eating.
When the tray was pulled back up and the grille lowered and locked, the mucketeer marched off with the turnkey.
Rastignac sharpened his wit by calling a few choice insults to the night guard, then went into the cell inside the wall and lay down to take a nap. Later, he would rise and pace back and forth like a caged tiger. Now and then he would stop and look forwards, scan the stars, hunch his shoulders and resume his savage circuit of the cell. But the time would come when he would stand statue-still. Nothing moved except his head, which turned slowly.
“Some day I’ll ride to the stars with you.”
He said it as he watched the Six Flying Stars speed across the night sky—six glowing stars that moved in a direction opposite to the march of the other stars. Bright as Sirius seen from Earth, strung out one behind the other like jewels on a velvet string, they hurtled across the heavens.
They were the six ships on which the original Loire Valley Frenchmen had sailed out into space, seeking a home on a new planet. They had been put into an orbit around New Gaul and left there while their thirty thousand passengers had descended to the surface in chemical-fuel rockets. Mankind, once on the fair and fresh earth of the new planet, had never again ascended to revisit the great ships.
For three hundred years, the six ships had circled the planet known as New Gaul, nightly beacons and glowing reminders to Man that he was a stranger on this planet.
When the Earthmen landed on the new planet they had called the new land Le Beau Pays, or, as it was now pronounced, L ‘Bawpfey—The Beautiful Country. They had been delighted, entranced with the fresh new land. After the burned, war-racked Earth they had left, it was like coming to Heaven.
They found two intelligent species living on the planet, and they found that the species lived in peace and that they had no conception of war or of poverty. And they were quite willing to receive the Terrans into their society.
Provided, that is, they became integrated, or—as they phrased it—natural. The Frenchmen from Earth had been given their choice. They were told:
“You can live with the people of the Beautiful Land on our terms or else war with us or leave to seek another planet.”
The Terrans conferred. Half of them decided to stay; the other half decided to remain only long enough to mine uranium and make chemicals. Then, they would voyage onwards.
But nobody from that group of Earthmen ever again stepped into the ferry-rockets and soared up to the six ion-beam ships circling about Le Beau Pays. All succumbed to the Philosophy of the Natural. Within a few generations, a stranger landing upon the planet would not have known without previous information that the Terrans were not aboriginal.
He would have found three species. Two were warm-blooded egglayers who had evolved directly from reptiles without becoming mammals—the Ssassarors and the Amphibs. Somewhere in their dim past—like all happy nations, they had no history—they had set up their society and been very satisfied with it since.
It was a peaceful quiet world, largely peasant, where nobody had to scratch for a living and where a superb manipulation of biological forces ensured very long lives, no disease, and a social lubrication that left little to desire—from their viewpoint, anyway.
The government was, nominally, a monarchy. The Kings were a different species than the group each ruled. Ssassaror ruled Human, and vise versa, each assisted by foster-brothers and sisters of the race over which they reigned. These were the so-called Dukes and Duchesses.
The Chamber of Deputies—L’Syawp t’ Tapfuti—was half Human and half Ssassaror. The so-called Kings took turns presiding over the Chamber for forty day intervals. The Deputies were elected for ten-year terms by constituents who could not be deceived about their representatives’ purposes because of the sensitive skins which allowed them to determine their true feelings and worth.
In one custom alone did the ex-Terrans differ from their neighbors. This was in carrying arms. In the beginning, the Ssassaror had allowed the Men to wear their short rapiers, so they would feel safe even though in the midst of aliens.
As time went on, only the King’s mucketeers—and members of the official underground—were allowed to carry epees.
These men were the congenital adventurers, men who needed to swashbuckle and revel in the name of individualist.
Like the egg-stealers, they needed an institution in which they could work off antisocial steam.
From the beginning, the Amphibians had been a little separate from the Ssassaror, and when the Earthmen came they did not get any more neighborly. Nevertheless, they preserved excellent relations—for a long time—and they, too, participated in the Changeling-custom.
This Changeling-custom was another social device set up millenia ago to keep a mutual understanding between all species on the planet. It was a peculiar institution, one that the Earthmen had found hard to understand and even more difficult to adopt. Nevertheless, once the Skins had been accepted, they had changed their attitude, forgot their speculations about its origin, and thrown themselves into the custom of stealing babies—or eggs—from another race and raising the children as their own.
You rob my cradle; I’ll rob yours. Such was their motto, and it worked.
A Guild of Egg Stealers was formed. The Human branch of it guaranteed, for a price, to bring you a Ssassaror child to replace the one that had been stolen from you. Or, if you lived on the seashore, and an Amphibian had crept into your nursery and taken your baby—always under two years old, according to the rules—then the Guildsman would bring you an Amphib or, perhaps, the child of a Human Changeling reared by the Seafolk.
You raised it and loved it as your own. How could you help loving it? Your Skin told you that it was small and helpless and needed you and was, despite appearances, as Human as any of your babies. Nor did you need to worry about the one that had been abducted. It was getting just as good care as you were giving this one.
It had never occurred to anyone to quit the stealing and voluntary exchange of babies. Perhaps, that was because it would strain even the loving nature of the Skin-wearers to give away their own flesh and blood. But, once the transfer had taken place, they could adapt.
Or, perhaps, the custom was kept because tradition is stronger than law in a peasant-monarchy society and also because egg-and-baby stealing gave the more naturally aggressive and daring citizens a chance to work off anti-social behavior.
Nobody but a historian would have known, and there were no historians in The Beautiful Land.
Long ago, the Ssassaror had discovered that if they lived me
atless, they had a much easier time curbing their belligerency, obeying the Skins and remaining cooperative. So, they induced the Earthmen to put a taboo on eating flesh. The only drawback to the meatless diet was that both Ssassaror and Man became as stunted in stature as they did in aggressiveness, the former so much so that they barely came to the chins of the Humans. These, in turn, would have seemed short to a Western European.
But Rastignac, an Earthman, and his good friend, Mapfarity, the Ssassaror Giant, became taboo-breakers when they were children and played together on the beach where they first ate seafood out of curiosity, then continued because they liked it. And, due to their protein diet, the Terran had grown well over six feet in height and the Ssassaror seemed to have touched off a rocket of expansion in his body. Those Ssassarors who shared his guilt—became meateaters— became ostracized and eventually moved off to live by themselves. They were called Ssassaror-Giants and were pointed to as an object lesson to the young of the normal Ssassarors and Humans on the land.
If a stranger had landed shortly before Rastignac was born, however, he would have noticed that all was not as serene as it was supposed to be among the different species. The cause for the flaw in the former Eden might have puzzled him if he had not known the previous history of L’Bawpfey and the fact that the situation had not changed for the worst until the introduction of Human Changelings among the Amphibians.
Then it had been that blood-drinking began among them, that Amphibians began seducing Humans to come live with them by their tales of easy immortality, and that they started the system of leaving savage little carnivores in the Human nurseries.
When the Land-dwellers protested, the Amphibs replied that these things were carried out by unnaturals or outlaws, and that the Sea-King could not be held responsible. Permission was given to Chalice those caught in such behavior.
Nevertheless, the suspicion remained that the Amphib monarch had given his unofficial official blessing and that he was preparing even more disgusting and outrageous and unnatural moves. Through his control of the populace by the Master Skin, he would be able to do as he pleased with their minds.