CHAPTER XIX
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 cam
e 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.
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.
CHAPTER XX
IT 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 fighti
ng 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.