The ruckers all have heard the call
The Mink has sounded clear;
They come from near, they come from far,
To fight the squire and sphere.
He arms them all with stolen guns,
With horses, pikes, and fire;
He sends them all abroad to hunt
The savage-stallioned squire!
--Ruck's Ballad of the Mink
As night fell, Lady Nirea left her father's house by the servants' door.
She was dressed in the miner's clothes she had worn the previous day,
and carried a gigantic portmanteau, so heavy she could scarcely lift it.
In the bag were her favorite gowns, numbering sixteen; two coats she
especially loved; some bracelets set with diamonds--the rarest gem of
any, for though they were mined extensively throughout the country, the
globes took all but a very few for their own mysterious purposes--and an
antique golden chain she'd inherited from her grandmother; some personal
effects, paint for her lips and such frivolities; a trumpet-mouthed gun
with the stock unmounted, together with as much ammunition as she could
find; and lastly, four books from her father's secret chamber.
These last were all in the curious run-together printing, three of them
labelled "Ledger and Record Book" and the fourth with "God-Feeding" on
its cover. The fourth was far older than the others, indeed, the oldest
book Nirea had ever seen.
Ewyo lay drunk in a deep chair in his library; he would sleep now till
nearly the middle of the night, when he'd wake up and howl for another
bottle. Jann she had not seen for hours. The servants, being ruckers,
did not count. Her escape from the mansion was going to be simple.
In the stables, Lady Nirea ordered her second best horse, another roan
stallion, saddled and laden with the portmanteau on a special rack
attached to the rear of the cantle. The usual trappings, the fancy reins
and broidered saddlecloths, she had the stableman leave off; she didn't
want to call attention to the fact that she was Ewyo's daughter.
When the roan was ready, she mounted, and turning to the stableman, a
young rucker with shifty eyes and a shy, retiring chin, she asked
steadily, "Are you a rebel?"
"Me? No, Lady! Do I look crazy?"
"You look sneaky, but smart enough." She leaned over the saddlebow
toward him. "Tell me the truth. Don't be afraid, you fool. I am the
Lady of the Mink." It was a title she uttered proudly now. Nirea of
Dolfya had been forced to think this day, and it had changed her
greatly.
The stableman backed off a little, his pasty face writhing with tics.
"My Orb, Lady, I don't know what you're thinking of! You, Ewyo's girl,
calling yourself such a name--"
Her roan was trained to the work she now put him to; a number of times
she'd used him for it in the streets of Dolfya, just for sport, out of
boredom. Now she pricked his ribs with the point of her sharp-toed
shoes, just behind the foreleg joints, and said, "At 'em, boy!" The tall
beast reared up and danced forward, hoofs thrashing the air. The
stableman shrieked, took a step back, and threw up his arms as one
iron-shod hoof smashed into his face. Then the roan was doing a kind of
quick little hop on his body, and red blood ran out over the
packed-earth floor.
"If you were a rebel, you were too craven about it to be much good to
your people," Nirea said, looking at the body. "If you weren't, then
your mouth is shut concerning me." She wheeled the roan and trotted out
of the stable.
By the gate in the wall a tall figure waited, white in the early moon's
light.
"Jann!" said Nirea, with surprise and fear. Her older sister had always
bullied her; Nirea was unable to wholly conquer the dread of this
amber-eyed, sharp-eared woman. Jann stood with one hand on the gate, her
high breasts and lean aristocrat's profile outlined against the dark
black-green of the woods behind her. Now she turned her head to look up
at Nirea.
"What in the seven hells are you doing in that rucker's outfit? Where
are you going?"
"None of your business. Get out of my way."
Jann stepped forward and grasped the bridle at the roan's mouth. "Get
down here, you young whelp. I'm going to beat you--and then hand you
over to Ewyo to see what's to be done with you."
* * * * *
Nirea never knew, though afterwards she thought of it often, whether she
touched her horse's ribs deliberately or by accident. All she knew was
that suddenly he had thrown his forequarters up into the air, that Jann
was screaming, twisting aside, that the roan was smashing down....
[Illustration]
Jann lay on the grass, and her profile was no longer aristocratic; nor
were her breasts smooth and sleek and inviolate.
Nirea sobbed, dry-eyed, turned the roan away, leaned over to push open
the gate, and cantered off down the silent road, numb with horror, yet
conscious of a small thrill of gratification, somewhere deep in her
feral gentrywoman's soul. Nineteen years of knuckling under to Jann, of
taking insults and cuffs and belittling, were wiped out under the
flashing hoofs of her roan stallion.
Now where should she ride? She was a rebel herself, molded into one by
her father's actions and her memories of the Mink. If he were dead, that
great chocolate-haired brute, then she would simply ride straight away
from Dolfya until she found a place to live, and there plan at leisure.
But if he were alive, then she would be his woman.
She touched the horse to a gallop, and sped toward the only place she
could think of where she might get news of him: the mines.
Someone scuttled off the road before her; she reined in, peered
unsuccessfully into the darkness, and called softly, insistently, "If
you're a rucker, please come out! Please come here!"
A rustle in dry brush was her answer. She tried a bolder tack. "It's the
Lady of the Mink who commands it!"
After a moment a man stepped onto the road from a clump of bracken. Red
were his hair and beard in the moon, and the white walleye stared
blindly. Fate, chance, the gods--no, not the false, horrible globes, but
whatever gods there might be elsewhere--had crossed her path with Rack,
the giant whom she trusted more than any other rucker.
"Rack!" she called quietly. "Come here, man."
He was at her stirrup. "What are you doing, Lady?" His voice was
anxious:
"I'm joining the rebels, big man. Where can I find the Mink?"
"I don't know. Lady, are you mad? The rebels are saying that the gods
are overthrown and there will be gentry blood running all over Dolfya by
noon tomorrow. They're out of their heads."
"No, Rack, they're honest men fighting a hideous corruption." She told
him rapidly what she'd seen in her father's room. "I don't know exactly
what it means, 'but it's bad--degrading, horrible! I don't want to be a
gentrywoman any longer. I--I'm the Mink's girl. Listen," she said,
leaning over to him, "he took me two days ago, and Revel is my man, hell
or orbs notwithstanding. Now where is he?"
"I've heard he's alive," said Rack slowly. "I thought he would be; he's
too tough to kill. Where he is, no one knows."
"Do the rebels trust you?"
"No." His face turned up to hers, honest and bewildered. "I'm of two
minds.... I serve the gods, as any sane man must, but I have seen
things...."
"So have I. Rack, come with me. We must find the Mink."
He bit his lip. Then he took hold of her stirrup. She thought he was
going to pull her off, and edged her toes forward toward the signal
points of her roan; but he merely said, "I'll hang on to this and run.
Go ahead, Lady."
She tapped the horse to a canter, feeling better than she had in hours.
Rack was a servant (say rather an ally) worth four other men.
"Head for the mines," grunted Rack. Her own idea. Surely it must be
worth something. Soon they were coming into the coal valley. God-guards
shone with an eerie and now-abominable golden light at the various
entrances. "Which is Revel's?" she asked.
"Up there. He wouldn't be there, but if I can get past the guard, and
there's no reason I should be stopped, there are men on our level, the
fourth down, who might know about him. There's no other place to check.
I don't know the meeting places. I have never been a rebel." He seemed
to brood darkly for a minute, then added, "Before!"
* * * * *
They hobbled the horse in a nook of upended rocks, and she hid the
portmanteau under some brush. They walked to the mine, she now
remembering the location by certain landmarks, and Rack said, "There's
no god showing. That's strange."
"I'll go with you as far as I can. If we do meet a god, I can explain
myself mentally; after all, I'm of the gentry. I'm not in danger."
"I hope not." He helped her up the shelf, and they walked furtively into
the tunnel. No sign of anything--till Rack stumbled over the corpse of a
zanph. Bending, Nirea saw beyond it the sack and draining ichor of a
globe.
"The rebels have been here!"
"Aye." He straightened, his white eye shining in the light of a distant
lantern. "How can a god die?" he asked, in a child's puzzled tone.
"Lady, no god ever died before. They don't die--'tis in the Credo. How
can these rebels slay them?"
"Maybe no one ever tried before. Come on." She hurried to the ladders.
Blue-tinged, mouth agape and eyes upturned without sight, there lay a
priest, half over the lip of the shaft. He had been de-throated by a
pickax.
"This looks like Revel's ferocious work," said Rack. "I hope he's alive.
Yes, I do hope so."
"When I last saw him, riding off hell-for-leather on my nag, he was
extremely alive, mother-naked and covered with blood but as alive as I
am this instant." She went down the ladder hand under hand past three
levels, swung off at the fourth. Another dead man lay at her feet; this
was a squire, a youngish man in plum and scarlet, very brutally slain by
a pick-slash in the brain. It was a man she knew, and momentarily she
felt herself a traitor to her kind; then she thought of Ewyo's vices,
corruptions, and she snorted defiantly. His gun, its stock remounted and
a shell rammed home, was in her hand. She went forward, striding like a
man ... and a man who knew what he meant to do.
The end of the tunnel was illuminated vividly by many blue lanterns, and
presented to their startled eyes an horrific scene of carnage. The dead
lay in piles, in one and twos and fours, their brains splashed on the
walls, their guts smeared across the floor, their skulls cloven and
their bodies rent. Ruckers lay here, miners and gentry-servants. Squires
wallowed lifeless in pools of their highborn blood. Snake-headed zanphs
clawed in their rigor at the dead flesh of priests, of rebels, of
squires. Here and there lay the vacant sacks that had been gods. At
Nirea's feet stretched a man built like Revel, who might _be_ Revel, for
his face was gone, burnt away by the touch of the terrible orb-aura at
full strength. No, she realized even as she swayed back, it was not he,
for this man's body was unscarred, and Revel must be looking like a
skinned hare if he yet lived.
What a brawl this must have been! She was about to speak to Rack when
she heard a familiar voice, booming brazenly out in the silence of the
mine. It came from the black hole at the end of the tunnel.
"Then a whole line of them came down at us, faster than a squire can put
a horse over a hurdle, and the forest yet a good half mile away! I had
one dagger left, and my trusty small Jerran up behind me. The squires
were ashooting, but ineffectively, and the roan was carrying us well and
truly; but here came the gods, may they boil in my mother's cook-pot in
Hell!
"I looked wildly for something to beat 'em off with, for as you've seen,
a touch of their radiance burns your flesh from your bones if they wish
it so. Well! The only thing on the whole cursed nag is the scabbard in
which a squire keeps his long gun. It's a thing some three feet long or
over, of light metal, covered with satin and velvet and silk. I tore it
from its moorings, and as the globes came at me, I stood up in the
stirrups, naked as your hand, and started to swat 'em. Jerran leaning
forward past me, guiding the stallion, for his reach is not half mine."
"Brag and bounce!" said a voice that was surely Jerran's. Lady Nirea
grinned and walked toward the cavern.
"So I swatted, I beat at them, I swiped and almost fell, I did the work
of twenty men--don't shake your head, Jerran, you know 'tis not
brag!--for half a mile, and not one globe touched a hair of our heads!
They came at the last from all sides, like a swarm of angered bees, and
one burnt the horse so that he streaked even faster; which saved our
necks, for my arm was nearly dead by then.
"I tell you, there is one protection only against these things, and that
is quickness: for let one come within a few inches of you, and you are a
dead man."
Nirea stepped into the cave.
"I thought you were a dead man, Revel the Mink," she said quietly, still
with the ghost of her grin.
* * * * *
He stared at her, while the men in the place turned and sprang up and
stood uncertainly, looking from her to their leader. He was dressed in
miner's clothing again, and his skin was a perfect fright of scars and
scabs and half-closed wounds. But he was whole, barring part of an ear,
and he was smiling as only he could smile. "Here, men of the ruck, is
the woman you owe my life to. Here is--" he cocked an eyebrow
quizzically--"here is, I think I can say, the Lady of the Mink."
"Here she is," said Nirea, and was stifled and crushed in a great
bear-hug. "And here's Rack, your brother, who I think may be rebel
material."
"I think so," said Rack heavily, staring at Revel with his good eye. "If
you want me, brother."
"Gods, yes! We need every man we can get this night. Did you note the
slaughter beyond?"
"We did see a corpse or two."
"I think we kept that secret, for two of my fellows stood on the ladders
and slew the gods who tried to pass. But it will soon be discovered, and
the gods will do to this place what they did to eastern Dolfya, unless
we can fight them some way. I think I have a clue to help us. What that
is I'll show you now."
"Revel, dearest," she said, "are you all right?"
"Of course, thanks to you. Now to business."
"Rack must go to my horse above for things I brought."
"Go then, Rack. Wait--first give me that pick you've got there. I think
it's mine." Rack handed it over, a little shamefacedly, and Revel gave
him the one tucked in his own belt. "I've missed this girl.... The chest
I want to search is still here, though the gentry have carried off a
great deal from the cavern."
"Wait a minute," said Nirea fiercely. "You'd better do a few things
before you start experimenting and searching. You'd better have a plan,
and send men out to spread word of it among your people! There are
thousands of them out there, ready to pounce at your word, to rise
against the squires and priests, and take their chances of gods'
vengeance. You'd better send out the word that the Mink is leading them
to war. Otherwise, you'll have an army that's ineffectual and headless,
that can be cut to pieces in twenty-four hours. For most of them think
you're dead--the gentry spread the word."
Jerran said, quietly so that only the girl and Revel heard him, "I think
I named the wrong person. I think Lady Nirea is the Mink!"
Revel laughed grimly, "Haven't I been busy? Haven't I sent a troop for
Dawvys in his hole in the coppice, and another to say in the lanes and
shebeens that I'm alive? Here, Vorl, Sesker, and you three, get out!
Steal horses from the mansions' stables, and spread the news. We rise
tonight! Whether or not I find what I seek, we rise! If we all perish in
a god-blast, still we rise! When you've enough men, attack the gentry's
homes, beginning at Dolfya's center and spreading out. Put every horse
available on the road to Korla and Hakes Town and every village within
knowledge. If they look scared, show 'em a dead god! Take those out
there--stick 'em on the ends of pikes, carry 'em through the streets
with torches to show 'em off! Kill every globe you can reach, send the
corpses out for the ruck to see! There's our banner, our fiery cross--a
dead god on a pike!"