It took a long time in telling. Once she fell asleep but woke an hour
later, obsessed with a need to continue....
The lifeboat drifted south, its last remnant of fuel gone in a mad
effort to leap the coastal range. Water sneaked in at the seal of the
floor window, damaged in an earlier landing, and Ed Spearman talked to
himself. "Fugitives from a Sunday school--we'll live." Like a hurt boy
he said, "We'll show 'em...." When the current beyond the island swept
them toward the cliffs, he opened the door and pulled Ann into the
water, dragging her, forgetting that she was herself a strong swimmer.
Later, on the beach, he was tender, trying to comfort and reassure her
with a vision of the future abundantly real to him. They had no food,
no way to light a fire of driftwood. They would go to Vestoia, he
said, convince Lantis that they were friends, with something to offer
her empire; they would "bring her civilization."
From this beach there seemed to be no passage north. They could have
found one by climbing high into the range--Ann did so, nine years
later. But Spearman found a ledge of sorts running south: it might
take them the eighty-odd miles to the lower end of the range or give
out at any point, trapping them. It did give out twice; both times,
rather than clamber higher on the cliffs, Spearman hurled his famished
body through the breakers and swam south, aided by the current until
it was possible to continue along the rocks. Ann followed, not quite
wishing for the death the ocean could have given easily. They kept
alive with shellfish and seaweed washed ashore and small crustaceans
that hid in the tide lines and in crannies of wet rock; there were
pools of rain water and violent small streams plunging down the range.
It took them fifty days to cover the eighty miles. ("I think I spent a
hundred coming back," Ann said. "Couldn't swim, with the baby. It
would have been against the current anyway. Climbed--sometimes went
back miles from a dead end to try again.") In the afternoons the sun
pressed on them with total fury; then they could only crawl into what
shadow the rocks gave and wait for the torture to cease.
But at last there were trees. Level ground. In a few miles, a rapid
friendly river. ("Are there rivers here? I've forgotten. Nothing
prettier in the world. I let that one close over me. Ed pulled me
out--we had to go on.")
There were five more of those bright leaping coastal streams in a
journey of another fifty miles southeast through good country, where
the great range thinned out into rolling jungle and meadowland. There
were asonis and small game. Spearman made himself weapons. Ann could
remember these days almost with pleasure. They had, she said,
something the flavor of a delayed childhood, a glimpse of Eden.
Spearman was for a time simply a strong and intelligent man measuring
himself against nature for survival, master of a simple environment
with none to question his decisions and no social complexities to warp
them. ("I wished we could settle in that country, the two of us. I
even begged for it. He had to go on.")
From the remembered map, Spearman knew there was an obscure pygmy
settlement south of the end of the range, some fifty miles below
Vestoia: merely a cluster of parallel lines that had appeared in the
photographs, it might or might not be a part of the empire of Lantis.
It was near the headwaters of a seventh river, which flowed, not to
the coast, but eastward, into the deep, wide, violent outlet of Lake
Argo. ("He never told me why he was following that river so
cautiously, until we reached the villages. And history repeated
itself.")
The villages were a furtive, chronically frightened community. They
knew of Vestoia but believed, correctly, that the groping tentacles of
empire had not yet found them. Lantis' drive was mainly to the east,
where the country was easier and pygmy settlements were numerous; even
her war against Pakriaa's people had been a diversion, more a matter
of hurt pride than gainful conquest. Between these hidden villages and
Vestoia there were meadows, dangerous with omasha, and some swampland;
below the two small Vestoian lakes the current of the river Argo was
too fierce for the flimsy boats of Lantis. So the villages of the
seventh river, under a sly but feeble queen, waited like a rabbit in a
hedge. With sharply calculated drama--but smiling this time, Ann said,
like a pleased teacher at a blackboard--Ed Spearman overturned another
idol and became a god.
At the end of two years, when Spearman's goddess had borne him twin sons,
there was industry in the villages. There was an army of a thousand spears,
bladed with iron from certain small hills in the north between Vestoia and
Spearman City. These hills were dangerous with burrows, but workers of a
particular kind could be made to go there. The soldiers overcame their
distaste for the bow when they had watched the course of arrows properly
vaned and tipped with iron or bronze. They did not need to be taught how to
hate Vestoia--nevertheless they relished it when Spearman decided that
political realities demanded he should tell them an epic tale, the tale of
a war he and companion gods had waged against that place. Vengeance, divine
or human, was a thing the pygmies had understood from the first biting and
scratching of infancy.
Ann had been bewildered by that first gust of oratory against Vestoia.
Spearman had neglected to prepare her for it during the long two years
spent in teaching the pygmies a limited English and the beginnings of
industry: it might not have been clear to himself that such a move
would be necessary in order to hold his people's enthusiasm and
devotion. Ann wondered. "You had thought once of going to Vestoia----"
Spearman turned on her with an anger partly cynical humor: "They hurt
us, didn't they? Oh, I might have toyed with the idea as a choice of
evils before we found our real friends. They killed Doc, didn't they?
And Paul and Sears and those milky giant friends of ours."
"But you didn't see----"
"_What?_"
Spearman believed now that he had seen the full end of that war. Ann
got it through her head after a while. When he said that Vestoia must
be punished for past wrongs, there was a smiling half admission of
disingenuous policy. "It'll work," he said. "We can get away with it."
But the death of all the others except Dorothy had become for him
something like an article of faith, not to be examined. At this
moment, Ann said, she had begun to think of a northward journey, but
the odds were darkly against it. The twins were still nursing and
sickly; the demands of mere daily living are heavy on a goddess who
must also supervise housekeeping. There was, for instance, the endless
squabbling treachery of the household slaves. At that time also, Ann
hoped to soften or divert some changes that seemed to be taking place
in Spearman himself. ("I wonder if they were really changes....")
Spearman detested slavery, he said. But in a primitive economy how
else could you get the work done? Even in daylight, when the kaksmas
were half helpless, only the bravest soldiers would go into those
hills--not to work, but only as guards for the chained lines of
laborers, guards who could run fast if the kaksmas came out for a
day-blind attack and leave the slaves to be consumed. Bad: Spearman
was sorry such things had to be. Still, the slaves were poor or
sometimes dangerous material at best; besides that, they hated
responsibility and were therefore really happier in slavery and
received better care than they could otherwise have had. So you had to
see it as almost a eugenic, even a humanitarian measure as well as an
unavoidable transitional phase, and in any case you can't make an
omelette without breaking eggs. At the use of meat slaves for the
palace household, Spearman had to draw the line, and he instituted
laws against the custom for the rest of his little kingdom, but they
were difficult to enforce without compromising matters of greater
political importance. "Transitional" became a somewhat sacred word for
Spearman over the years, a sustaining conception when things went
badly and when his ingrained sensitivities brought from Earth were
violated by the brisk egg-breaking of a Neolithic culture.
Even the first war against Vestoia, in the third year of Spearman's
deification, was part of a transitional phase, although Spearman did
not feel that his pygmies were advanced enough to be troubled with
fine distinctions. It is better for a god to resist pressures for
explanation.
That first war was well planned, with limited objective. Six hundred
spearwomen and archers crossed the Argo below Vestoia and fell on the
city from the east, so that there was no clue to their southern
origin; they set afire a mile of the lake settlement, took three
hundred captives, and vanished--again eastward, leaving a few crippled
defenders to convey the message that they would come again. It had the
desired effect: the armies of Lantis foamed eastward like crazed
hornets, while Spearman's force slipped home across the Argo without a
trace. In the following year they struck again, again from the east,
but with a larger force, laying waste nearly a third of that part of
the city on the eastern shores of the Vestoian lakes. The palace of
Lantis, nerve center of empire, was on the west shore. Probably the
queen knew nothing of what had happened until she saw the far shore
buried in smoke, and by the time she crossed over, she would have
learned only that Spearman's army had promised to come a third time
and take Lantis herself and assume command of the empire.
They did, just six years after that lonely journey along the rocks.
Ann's twin sons were five years old, five Lucifer years. In the first
two campaigns, Spearman had not shown himself in person to the
Vestoians. In this third battle he was at the head of his army,
massive and tall; with a cold, unhappy precision, he was using a long
hardwood stick with a razor-edge semicircular blade. And this time his
legion had driven in out of the west, directly against the palace and
the temples and sacred places of the Queen of the World.
Lantis was aging then, and sick, and bewildered; she probably never
understood that it was merely a question of her own methods being used
against her. Even when her city was in flames around her and her
people were scattering into forest and swamp and lake, she could
neither yield nor destroy herself; thus it was her misfortune to be
taken alive.
A week later Ann and the children were brought by litter from Spearman
City; Spearman recognized the political advantage, almost necessity,
of their presence at the triumph. Lantis was ceremonially dragged
through the still-smoldering and stinking streets and forced to drink
an infusion of the green-flower weed that destroyed the self: this was
pygmy custom, which Spearman watched in regretful disgust, anxious
that his small sons should preserve the impassive dignity proper to
gods. "They're far from human, you know--they don't feel things as we
do...." The boys were puzzled and curious.
So far as Ann knew, however, Lantis was not eaten at the festival. "He
told me she was mercifully put away after the excitement died down,
and another meat slave was sacrificed, made up to look like
Lantis--not deception, but ritual substitution; Ed felt he'd achieved
quite a step in progress there. It showed, he said, they were
beginning to accept ritual for reality under the influence of----Oh,
the devil with it.... He moved his capital to Vestoia. The palace was
restored--modernized. I lived there--two and a half years. That's
where I bore him another son. I'll never know how I came to allow
it--a kind of madness, hate close to love--something.... He didn't
want me any more, you know. He had some ideas about--ascetic
discipline--purity--I don't know what exactly--and he didn't try to
explain it to me. I'd hated him with all my mind for years--before the
Vestoian wars--but I'm not a good hater. I even still imagined I
could influence him a little--until the baby was born and he was in
black despair because it wasn't a daughter. I had to escape. I could
feel my mind, my self, rotting away--dissolving, as the Vestoian
empire was dissolving, for that matter. He couldn't hold them. It
began to fall apart right away. They were terrified of him and of his
Spearman City bodyguards--weasels.... They simply drifted away into
the woods and didn't come back. I doubt if they've organized anywhere
else. Lantis must have had a rare sort of skill--the city was all
hers: she built it out of Stone Age villagers, and it died with her.
Ed tried everything to keep them--bribes, threats, endless spying and
public executions by his guard. Bread and circuses, meaningless
offices for favorites with fancy clothes and no duties. It didn't
work. At the time I escaped, the population was down to--he'd never
tell me, but my guess is under ten thousand for the whole city. There
was an epidemic--rather like flu. I used that as a reason to take the
baby back to Spearman City, knowing Ed would need to stay and go on
trying to hold things together. I thought he would let me take the
twins--John--David----"
"Rest awhile," said Arek. "We're going to bring them home too." Ann
could not speak. "How would you like to bathe again in our lake? I'll
hold you up. Water's warm with the sun--best part of the day----"
"I'd like it. It's so pretty. What do you call it?"
"Sears Lake."
"Sears.... What am I made of? I haven't thought or asked----"
"It was a Vestoian arrow," Wright said. "At the end he enjoyed
remembering Earth."
2
"The city is a desolation." Miniaan slipped out of shadow into the
clearing, where the others waited for her without a fire; she was shaken,
short of breath. No longer young, she had hurried on the ten-mile return
journey from Vestoia through high-noon heat of jungle. "I could not even
find the house where I was born. Oh, Pakriaa--Paul--of every ten houses,
seven are empty. The streets are dirt and rubbish. No one knew me. Well,
that's not strange. Those I met supposed I was a stranger, probably from
the east. But the ones who were suspicious did not challenge me--they
slipped into their sorry houses and stared at me through the cracks." She
sat down in weariness, wiping sweat from her scarred head and shoulder.
"Word of what I said will travel quickly. But not one followed me here. I
made sure of that."