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 marvelous
contraptions that hung in the shafts beside the veins of coal or pockets
of diamonds, glowing with a dull penetrating radiance, had been filched
from the mines one by one over years, and now illumined the strange hall
like blue glowworms spaced around a pit.
Revel sat, uneasy, on the sward in the center, at the bottom of the
bowl; beside him were Jerran and Dawvys, the small rebel's cousin who
served 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. She
had not spoken to him since the great bang and the twin clouds, but his
mind 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 ruck
had ever disturbed. This had made the myths of rebellion very real to
him, very possible; and then Jerran had admitted to being a rebel
himself.
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 for
a square mile was level, featureless, without sign that thousands of
people, women and shopkeepers, brewers and doctors, shebeen hosts and
small craftsmen and thieves and vegetable-growers, had lived there just
this 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 had
gone home.
He had taken a squire's daughter and made love to her, love that was
returned if only for a brief time; and afterwards he had shot down
zanphs with his new-found guns and plummeted a priest to destruction.
So now where was he? Among rebels, certainly, but mentally, where did he
stand? Did he espouse the cause of the rebels? He nodded to himself. Of
course. Their cause was the ruck's, and Revel was a man of the ruck. He
had given the rebels a terrific boost with his god-killing, too. As word
went 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 could
find a place where the gods had not heard of him, so he might settle
down 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 the
new 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 me
alone."
Jerran stood up. The rebels, who had been buzzing and talking in low
tones, quieted until Revel could hear the rabbits hopping in the
underbrush beyond the amphitheater.
Jerran began to speak. He told them the whole story of the day, of the
gods' death and all. Murmurs and exclamations arose, and he hushed them
with 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 and
awful 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 like
ourselves, women like our women." He pointed to Nirea. "There's a
gentrywoman; is she different in body from our wives? Not by so much as
a mole!"
"I didn't see any moles," whispered Revel to the girl. She turned red in
the 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 have
power over us?"
* * * * *
The amphitheater roared to the angry yells of rebels. Jerran waved his
hand again. "That's been our quarrel with the established way of things
in the world. We've hoped for weapons to fight the gentry, and prayed
for 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 beings
we'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 and
guts 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 at
the 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, from
the people, as he was to come! Already he's done some of the acts the
saga-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 under
blankets of the little beasts' hides. His own hair is the shade of a
mink's pelt, as was foretold. He's as swift and deadly and cunning as
the oldest mink alive. He's slain gods and priests, and taken toll of
the gentry. I've worked beside him for years, and know his mind and
heart 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. "I
tell you I know this is the man we've waited for, us and our fathers and
their father's fathers before them! Rebels of Dolfya, I show
you--_Revel, the Mink!_"
The shouts that had come before were murmurs to the chorus of stentorian
bellows which assaulted Revel's ears now. The woman turned and said
something to him, her fine face disdainful, but the words were lost in
the tumult. A dozen men surged down and lifted him to their shoulders
and paraded him round, while hands reached up to touch him and wave
greeting to him.
It was the beginning of a celebration he had never seen the like of, a
festival occasion that included a great dinner of boar and deer meat and
stolen gentry's wine, over which much vague planning was done; and it
ended only when the last rebel had left to sneak homeward, and he and
the girl were left alone with Jerran.
"Sleep now, lad," Jerran said, grinning. "You're exhausted. It isn't
every 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 can
contradict 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 remembering
the old ballad, for by Orbs, the acts do fit!"
"That minor blasphemy begins to annoy me," said Jerran seriously. "It's
like saying 'by the man I killed yesterday.' We've got to revise our
swearing habits."
"Why not substitute _Revel_ or _Mink_ for _Orb_?" asked the girl
harshly. "Our Revel who dwells in the buttoned sky," she added, with a
malevolent sneer.
"Ah, go to sleep, both of you," said Jerran. "Tomorrow we start to
plan--really plan--to overthrow the gentry."
"And the priests," said Revel fiercely, "and the gods!" He almost
believed that somehow they could climb into the air and destroy the gods
in their red and blue buttons. He lay down, one hand vised on the
woman's wrist, and though he felt he should never sleep that night,
being far too excited, in three minutes he was snoring mightily.
* * * * *
He woke some time later with the prickling feeling of danger on his
skin. He opened his eyes and saw red, literally a red mist that obscured
the world. Then his head began to open and shut, open and shut, and he
knew he had been hit a hell of a blow on the forehead, and there was
blood 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 inch
from his right ear, was his pick. He sat up. Jerran lay a dozen feet
off, looking very dead indeed, with his thin hair matted with blackening
blood.
Instinctively he tore the pick out of the ground. It was buried so deep
that only a very strong hand could have sent it in; not the girl, he
thought, somehow relieved that she hadn't done it. No, a miner's blow
alone might have done it, for the earth was packed solid as oak's wood
by untold multitudes of rebels' feet.
Wait a minute, he said to himself: this is all wrong. That blow should
have opened my skull like a walnut. It missed me by a fraction--either
the 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 duplicate
it.
Had the enemy missed, then walloped him with another weapon and left him
for dead? Gingerly he felt the wound on his head. It was healing
already, a tap that might have laid him out for a few hours, but would
never have slain him.
He glared at the pick in his hand. Then he brought it up and in the
combined light of the blue lanterns and the dawn filtering in from the
woods, he squinted at the handle.
Where his own pick bore the crude carving of a mink (he had taken the
beast as his symbol a long time ago, another sign of his identity), this
one 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 ever
faced, he pored over the pickax, scanned the motionless form of his
friend Jerran, then goggled foolishly at nothing in particular as he
thought of his situation, stranded in a place he could not escape from
alone, with many half-formed plots in his head but no way to carry them
out. Between him and Dolfya, and the other rebels, lay miles of tangled
forest no man, be he ever so skillful at woodscraft, could penetrate
without the knowledge of a route; thousands of the ruck were depending
on 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 up
with a brilliant idea!"
And there wasn't a scheme in his head.