Collected Short Fiction, page 838
“My Little Mama took care of me. My father tried to scold her for it, but she used to croon songs in me her own native tongue when she was rocking me to sleep. Songs about Anak, the noble black king, and Sheko, the white witch who murdered him. I’d almost forgotten, but it’s all coming back.”
One of the men prodded the captive back to his feet at the point of a spear, and Toron led us off the mountain. I asked where we were going.
“He tried to tell me.” Ram shrugged. “Something about Blood River. Something about slaves. Nothing I understood.”
We climbed down a hazardous stair the trilithon builders had carved into the cliffs. Toron led the way, with Ram and me ahead of his spearmen and the captive. The steps were no trouble for him or Ram, but I had to cling close to the wall, ashamed of my dread.
Trying not to look into that sickening gulf, I counted the steps. One thousand steps. I couldn’t help looking. My empty stomach roiled. Two thousand steps. I was trembling and wet with sweat. Two thousand, one hundred and eighty-eight before we got down into the green gloom of the rain forest, safe at last on solid ground. I pitied the captive moaning and staggering behind me.
The path into the forest had once been once paved with cobblestones. Most of them had been washed away or buried under mud. Twice Toron sent men ahead to hack a better way though dense undergrowth. We stopped once to rest. The men opened their packs and found bread they shared, brown pones that looked like the corndodgers my grandmother used to bake. They were hard and dry, but mine turned sweet as I gnawed it. We slept that night on a bed of fallen leaves beside the trail. Dusk was darkening next day before we reached a little river with long dugout canoe beached beside it.
A man left to guard the boat had killed a wild pig. He had it roasting on a bed of coals. I felt famished, and it was delicious. Toron let Ram and me sleep that night in the canoe, which had been carved from a single enormous log. Next morning they dragged it back into the water and paddled down the stream.
We came to shallows where the men had to wade and pull the boat, and several times we stopped to let the men forage or hunt. Toron stopped us again at a ruined shrine and had the men clear away the jungle that covered two great figures side by side on a throne, the black giant with the crown of worlds on his forehead, and his white woman companion, an altar before them.
“Anak,” Ram murmured. “And Sheko. It comes back to me now. He was the hero who brought men to the world. She was his queen. She grew jealous when he loved a human woman, and killed them both.”
The men kindled a fire on the altar. Toron had Ram stand behind it while he led his men in a chanted litany and then slashed the captive’s wrist, caught blood on a slab of bread, and burned it in the fire. Ram stood there in the smoke, his features set hard, staring off into the jungle. I saw a likeness to the figure of Anak that a chill down my spine.
Late that day we reached what must have been a city. The river ran through it in a stone-walled channel that was overhung with trees. I caught glimpses of great stone columns towering out of fallen masonry, but Toron made his men lean to their paddles. They didn’t want to stop.
On the seventh day we reached Blood River. Dyed red-brown with upstream silt, it was an inland sea, stretching flat for a mile or more to the jungle wall beyond it. The men laid their paddles down when we came into it, bowed to Ram, dipped its dark water from their cupped hands, drank to him.
Looking uncomfortable, he bowed in return and muttered his thanks.
“I’m happy they didn’t kill us.” He gave me an uneasy frown. “But I don’t like to be taken for any kind of god. I don’t want the consequences.”
I couldn’t help thinking how far we had come from our classrooms at Eastern, or wondering if we would ever get back.
The captive lay sprawled on the floor of the canoe. I think he had a fever. For a day or two he had seemed to be hallucinating, shouting, screaming, chanting in an eerie monotone, but now he was sunk into a lifeless torpor, never moving except to whimper for water. Flies buzzed around his untended wounds.
14.
Blood River was home to the men. They laid their paddles down, content to let the dugout drift with the current. I was shivering, hungry, scratching at swollen insect bites, wet and shivering from a drizzling rain, not so happy with the river.
Running fast and high, it threw me into a dismal depression. It was too vast and too strange. The endless flat bends reached on forever, twisting from jungle wall to jungle wall like a monster serpent crawling. It had cut its channel ages before the trilithons were built. It would still flow on after the last life was gone. We were helpless atoms, lost in its uncaring current.
Ram was more cheerful, or at least more stoic.
He tried to help the moaning prisoner, bringing him water when he whimpered for it, offering him a crust of bread he couldn’t eat. He found a handkerchief in his pack and tied it around the wounded arm to keep the flies away.
The rain ceased at last. A pale sun shone through to clouds. Yet still a terrible loneliness haunted me. I saw a few high birds. A fish jumped now and then. Once a gaudy butterfly perched for a time on the prow. But I saw nothing human, nothing else alive.
Ram was learning more of the language and trying to teach me. The men stared at his birthmark and whispered among themselves until Toron hushed them. He kept an uneasy silence with them, but he shared his apprehensive uncertainties with me.
“They think I’m a messiah the priests have been predicting. A son of Anak, sent to lift the curses Sheko left upon the world and set things back to right.” Gazing into a bend where high water had undercut the shore and great trees had toppled into the river, he paused for wry little shrug. “No job I ever wanted.”
The river carried us past dense stands of palms and bamboo, with taller forest inland. We saw no work of man until Toron pointed out a marble-white pyramid, far off in the jungle. It looked as vast as those at Giza. He said it was the tomb of Anak.
Ram asked if he had ever been there.
“Who would go there?” The question seemed to alarm him. “Sheko breathed death upon it. Fools have tried to enter it, and died of fevers that rotted their bones.”
He had the men paddle to keep us far across the channel from and they kept an uneasy silence until it was well behind. I wished Lupe had been here to make what she could of this folklore and myth.
The hard bread and a few scraps of dried meat had run out. My stomach growling, I rejoiced when the men threw hooks in the river and grilled their catch over charcoal on a pile of dirt in the bottom of the boat. A group went ashore and came back with bags of fruit and nuts and a straw basket filled with combs of wild honey.
We filled ourselves again and Ram huddled with Toron in the bow, learning what he could of the planet’s geography and history.
“I don’t get half of it,” he said. I don’t have the words or the background I need, but he’s literate and intelligent. He’s been to school in Periclaw. That’s the capitol, down at the mouth of the river. He’s not sure what to make of the birthmark—no more than I am. But he wants to know who we are and he likes to talk.”
“Get all you can,” I urged him. “Get us back home.”
“Worlds away, but I’ll do what I can.” He shrugged and shook his head. “I guess we’re lucky to be respected, but I didn’t come here to lead any revolution. I don’t like a game where I don’t know the stakes.”
Toron was telling him something about the planet. It had two major continents, with names Ram translated as Norlan and Hotlan. Norlan lay over the pole, most of it under an icecap. A white race lived on the fertile peninsulas that reached into warmer regions. Toron despised them.
“They’re the curse that Sheko laid upon the world. Arrogant tyrants! They think they own it. Bloated spiders, sucking our blood till they bleed us dry.”
Hotlan straddled the equator, with a chain of high mountains along the west coast. The great Blood River drained most of it, flowing toward the east. Its natives were black. Their civilization had been high when Anak ruled them, but they lived like jungle animals now, Toron said, since Sheko breathed death upon the world.
Norlan claimed it he said, and tried to rule it.
“It too big for them to swallow, but they try with a high commission based in Periclaw and gunboats on the river.” He let his fright-mask grin. “The slave masters may be fat, but in the end Sheko’s curse will rot their guts.”
Ram and I were sitting in the bow of the dugout to keep as far as we could from captive, whose untreated wounds had begun to smell. Ram glanced back at Toron, who was taking a turn at the paddle, keeping us well out in the rapid current.
“I don’t know how much truth he tells us, but he does spin a colorful tale. He says he was a slave on a cotton plantation, down on the delta. He respected his white master, or so he says, working hard to earn fair treatment. He rose to be a field boss and got transferred to the cotton gin. The master was letting him learn to read and write, to keep the gin records, when he lost his temper and knocked out an abusive mulatto overseer. He ran away to save his life and found his mother’s people in the jungle.
“He lived with them and learned their ways. He was a guide for an expedition searching the jungle for ruins of the old civilization. They found no gold. The explorer refused to pay his porters. They murdered him. White authorities captured them and auctioned them in the Periclaw market.
“I don’t know how to take him.” Ram glanced again Toron, bent over the paddle, magnificent muscles rippling under the tiger stripes. “I want to admire him for all he’s done, but life seems to have left him a cynic, with no loyalty to anybody. He’s a bounty hunter now, running down runaway slaves.”
Ram nodded at the wounded man snoring in the stem.
“That poor fellow has a price on his heard for trying to organize a slave revolt. It was crushed, and he was trying to escape through the trilithon. Hoping, Toron says, to bring back that prophesied liberator. A fool’s errand, but fools do believe the legend.”
Ram made a wry face.
“Toron knows the legend, but he’s only half convinced. Willing to treat me like that liberator, just in case it’s true. Ready to let us hang if it’s not. His main concern is to deliver his prisoner to a government outstation down the river and collect his bounty money.”
Next morning the empty loneliness of the river lay heavy on me until Toron made out a tiny puff of black smoke far ahead. We paddled into a thicker of reeds in the shallows and hid there while a small steamer crept by against the current. I made out a long-barreled gun on the flat foredeck and bales of something stacked aft.
“A government packet “Toron spoke and Ram translated. “There’s an excise duty on river traffic and a tax on slaves. They’d want to see official permits and search the boat for contraband corath beans.”
Toron grew animated when Ram asked about the beans.
“The corath is a sacred tree. He says the first were planted by Anak himself, to show his people the way to paradise. They grow only at a few spots deep in the jungle where the soil is right. He says there’s a secret brotherhood that worships the tree. They drink a wine made from the nuts that gives them sacred visions.
“A sort of narcotic, I imagine. He says a lot of whites are now addicted, users evading the taxes. Prices for the nuts are so high that they’ve become the chief currency here in the forest. The harvest is a risky business, because Sheko breathed death on the sites where they grow.”
Three days down the river we reached Hake’s Landing.
“A new deal ahead.” We were coming around a bend. Toron pointed at a dull red dot in the green wall of jungle on the bank ahead. Ram gave me a twisted grin. “Another game, with maybe our lives at stake and rules we never know.”
He had been an avid poker player, and now he seemed cheerfully eager to see our new cards as they fell. For Derek and Lupe, the new knowledge they wanted was worth any risk. For me, the game had become too strange. My own goal was becoming sheer survival, and I saw little to gain from what I saw as we came to the landing.
A little red brick fort on the point of a granite ridge that thrust into the river bend. A bright sun glint on a brass cannon on top of the fort. A gnarled oak tree on a level drill field. A stake palisade around a few buildings. The dark jungle wall beyond, with all the secrets and hazzards it hid. They had begun to prey on my imagination.
Toron had asked to see our papers. We had no papers.
“You’ll have to report to the agent,” he said. “You’ll have to register. But first I’ll ask Trader Hake to help you if he can.”
Toron beached the dugout at a wooden pier and left us there with a guard while he marched his limping prisoner to the fort. We waited, sweating under the tropic sun and slapping at stinging insects, till he came back and escorted us to a palm-thatched building inside the palisade.
Trader Hake was a tall rangy man with dose-set eyes in a long narrow face and a sharp little tuft of iron-gray beard. We found him standing behind a cluttered counter, haggling with three black men who wanted to sell him a little black carving they said was a sacred seal of Anak they had found in a hidden tomb. He studied it under a lens and sent them away.
“Made yesterday,” he told Toron. “In Periclaw. I know the tool marks.”
He listened to our story and scowled in doubt. He wanted more details, tried to question Ram and me, looked at the birthmark with his lens, and finally sent us back to the commission agent, who lived in the fort.
A black man in a stiff blue uniform stood guard with a heavy musket outside the agency door. He shouted through an open window and the agent bustled out to gape at us in annoyed surprise. He was naked to the waist, a short bald man with a stubble of beard on a fat red face and pale eyes blinking at us through thick lenses. Strong perfume failed to cover his unwashed odor.
He shook his head at the trader, squinted at the birthmark, frowned over my watch, studied my skin, finally shook his head and called through the window. A sleek black woman came out to join him, a brown-skinned baby in her arms. He had her open our packs and inspect everything we had, and finally took her aside to hear her advice.
Ram motioned Toron aside.
“We’re in an iffy fix.” He came back to give me a quizzical look. “It’s the crown of thorns that worries them. They’re afraid of me, afraid I’ll set off another slave rebellion. Hake doesn’t want anything that might wreck his business. The agent wants no problems with his bosses in Periclaw. They’d like to string the two of us up along with him.”
He nodded grimly at the solitary tree. “Toron is trying to convince them that we did come through the trilithon, the way the gods did. He’s warning them that I might be more dangerous as a martyr than I am alive. The birthmark could be a tattoo, a trick they’ve seen before. You complicate the problem with your white skin and your watch and your clothing. They don’t know what to with us.”
The agent and his woman came back to confer with the trader again, and both spoke to Toron and Ram.
“They’ve reached a sort of verdict,” Ram told me. “The agent has put us under house arrest. We’re confined to the settlement until he can report the case and get orders from his authorities down the river at the capitol.”
I asked him what he thought.
“No time for panic.” He patted my shoulder. “Our luck has run wonderfully well. We can hope it holds up.”
“That’s hard to do.”
He shrugged and gave me a thin little smile.
“Think about it, Will. We’ve made great history if we ever get back to tell it. Derek and Lupe will never be sorry we came, no matter what. We may yet stumble on some way to help them. For their sake we’ve got to hang on.”
He held out his hand and gripped mine hard when I took it.
I resolved to hang on, to trust our luck, to take each day as it came. But next day we found the rebel slave hanged from the oak on the drill field, an iron hook through his ribs. Carrion birds were already perched above him, but he was still alive, whimpering feebly. I found him hard to ignore.
To be continued.
The Half Men
Emotion is immune to reason. I met Holaine Cardish in a universal history class and fell hard for her, against her own advice. We lived together through her final semester, but she laughed when I begged her to marry me.
“You’re an idiot,” she told me at breakfast on the morning after our last night together. “I like you, Gil. I love the sex, but I have a life to live.”
The life she wanted was on the lost worlds.
“That’s where I see the lure of history.” Her eyes lit. “The conflicts of human heroism against an uncaring cosmos. Human triumph and human tragedy. Mysteries to be solved. Dramas far more exciting than sex.”
Surveys had located Earth-like planets all across the galaxy, but none entirely like our mother world. Terraforming sometimes failed. Some had malignant bioforms, or developing life worth quarantine, yet most colonies survived to link themselves into the web of interstellar civilization. Her concern was those that vanished.
“I want to know what happened to the losers,” she said. “The reason is often clear enough. Unpredicted catastrophe. Social breakdown. Migration to a better world. I want the stories of those that dropped out of history, fate unknown.”
She graduated two years ahead of me and found a job with the Galactic Survey. I tried to keep in touch. She moved into of field work, moved again into the division of search and recontact.
“Dead worlds!” she wrote. “I’m looking for ghosts!”
An exuberant message came a year later.
“Great news! I’m bound for Q845K. A Terran-type planet far out in Octant 8. Settled 1500 years ago. Once a prosperous exporter of rare metals and fine hardwoods. Out of contact the last thousand years. Can’t wait to see it! Will keep your informed.”
