Читать книгу War Games - Brian Stableford - Страница 4

CHAPTER ONE

Remy reached into the shoulder-high recess and tugged the bell cord. His tug was a sharp flick of the wrist, and he released the cord immediately. The way that the bell sounded was a kind of signature—no two men pulled the cord in exactly the same fashion. In Ziarat, a rich man always knew who was at his door.

The door was opened by a siocon servant, who stood aside, eyes averted, to let Remy pass into the main hallway. The night air outside had been warm and heavy, carrying the scent of the night-blooming flowers that were planted throughout the district to protect the inner city from the stench that drifted on the wind from the poorer quarters which surrounded it. Inside the house, the air was cooler, and there were garlands of yellow flowers mounted on the walls, whose more delicate odor slowly overpowered the echo of the other. The hallway was lit by a chandelier containing wax candles. In most of the rooms Yerema had installed electric lighting, but he followed the habit of the Calvar merchants in maintaining an area which mimicked the ways of the siocon aristocracy. Any siocon nobleman entering Yerema’s house would feel that he, like the other aliens in their midst, was deferring to their customs and acknowledging the traditions of Ziarat. It was part of the price of tolerance, and even benefactors need to be tolerated. Ziarat owed its fortunes to the traders of the Calvar clan, and its security to Yerema’s mercenaries, but the veich were no less alien for that, and had to pay close attention to the niceties of interracial diplomacy. The same applied to Remy, but his predicament was more complex still: a human under the protection of the veich in a siocon city.

Remy didn’t wait for the servant to bolt the heavy door behind him and scuttle on ahead again. He strode forward to a room that was set aside for the reception of visitors not of the siocon species, opening and closing the door of the antechamber for himself, and then parting the screening curtains.

There was a table set for a light meal—a token of hospitality rather than a full-scale affair. Yerema was not in the room but his daughter, Valla, was waiting to receive the visitor. She touched her forefingers to his, and then touched her own forehead. He did likewise, and followed the gesture with a ritual nod of the head. They both sat down on chairs that were long in the leg, hard and straight in the back. The siocon aristocracy reveled in soft cushions, but even the Calvars, who were not a warrior clan, considered excessive indulgence in bodily comfort to be a sign of decadence and spiritual lassitude.

“You are early,” said Valla, in the language of the clans. “Yerema is still bathing.”

“He implied that it was urgent,” replied Remy, in the same tongue. He reached reflexively toward the pocket of his shirt, indicating that it held the message which had summoned him, but he did not complete the gesture.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, switching to the language of the clanless, which was the most convenient of the three tongues they had in common. The formalities were complete now, the ground for their meeting secured.

“The outer city’s rife with rumors of a gathering of the kresh tribes. Is that what Yerema wants to talk about?”

“Partly,” replied the girl. “There was an attempt to assassinate the king this noonday—by a kresh warrior.”

Remy let the surprise show in his face, and was silent for a few moments, digesting the information. He could not pursue the matter further now—Yerema would explain everything in due course. He laid the matter aside, and returned to the language of the clans in order to say to Valla, “You look beautiful.”

She smiled, in the way of her species, more with her eyes than with her mouth. The light, silvery fur that formed a mask around her eyes was silky-smooth, well-combed and groomed. She was wearing a light scent that was only just perceptible to his sense of smell, and was dressed in the kind of white robe that was conventional summer wear for all the upper-class veich in Ziarat, male and female alike. It was, of course, quite spotless—its cleanliness was the chief symbol of her status. She did not have the same air of assurance in wearing the costume that a Calvar girl would have had; as a member of a warrior clan she was habituated to more practical attire.

Remy glanced at the table. There was cold meat, salted and sliced very thin, and hard bread, likewise sliced thin. There was dry wine, sitting in a bowl of ice that had only just begun to melt, and fruit that was also chilled.

“Do you put ice on the table for your siocon visitors?” he asked. “Or would they be concerned about the fact that your refrigerators run on electricity?”

“The Calvars supply ice to the palace every day,” she said. “Ice is only solid water. A wise man simply uses it—he doesn’t bother to ask about the means by which it became solid in the late months of summer.”

His gaze wandered then to the window, which was unglazed but veiled by fine, blue-tinted muslin which somehow kept out the pervasive smell of the night-blooming flowers.

“Summer’s ending, then?” he said. “I’ve been here nearly fifteen years, and still I haven’t accustomed myself to the pattern of the seasons.”

“You can’t tell by looking at the calendar,” she said. “The signs are in the scents of the noonday and the night-dark. The veich are better at detecting such changes than humans. We are nearer in kind to the sioconi. But you have the compensation of being able to operate more comfortably in the noonday.”

“The fact that humans see better by day only balances out the fact that the veich and the sioconi see better by night,” he replied lightly. “If we have any compensation for the inadequacy of our sense of smell, it can only be the greater sensitivity of our sense of touch. You have your nose—I have my fingertips.”

She studied the tips of her fingers, which were thinner than those of a human, with a harder tegument and narrower nails. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose you’re right.”

“But it’s all a matter of degree,” added Remy. “There are humans who can discern scents as well as some veich, and veich as dexterous as many humans. It’s unrealistic to exaggerate the differences between us. We come from common stock—or so it’s said.”

“Do you believe that?” asked Valla.

“That we come from common stock? It seems so—though I wouldn’t profess to any passionate faith in the seeding theories. Insofar as we can trace our evolutionary path with any degree of accuracy, we all seem to have descended from small lemuroid creatures almost identical in kind. Ultimately, we have all come to adopt similar life-styles, though our intermediate ancestors may have had different dietary preferences and habits. Your genetic material is chemically no different from mine. It is conceivable that life everywhere follows the same pattern of chemical and physical evolution, but it seems highly unlikely compared with the thesis that life throughout the known cosmos has a common point of origin. Even if it isn’t literally true, there is still a sense in which you and I and every living cell on this world share a common heritage. We’re the products of our nucleic acids, and that common identity remains in the chemical sense whether our particular double helices can trace their ancestry back through billions of billions of chemical generations to the same molecule or not. Why do you ask?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she replied.

Remy looked at her for a few moments in puzzlement. It was not the kind of question that she had ever put to him before. As a member of a fighting clan she was by no means given to the contemplation of that kind of question. But then, clan Syroleth was by no means an ordinary warrior clan, in that it no longer had any theoretical existence and had—not counting the hundreds of clanless veich who still pledged allegiance to Yerema—only two remaining members.

Perhaps, he thought, what lay behind her question was her memory of the war. The humans and the veich had been at war now for six hundred years—since the twenty-second century, in terms of Earth’s calendar. Its beginnings had been forgotten and there seemed no prospect of an end. Yet here, in the city of Ziarat, in the continent of Azreon, on the world called Haidra, there was a space where the war no longer existed, where the veich were citizens rather than invaders, and where humans fought alongside them instead of against them. It was an anomalous situation, in terms of history...but perhaps not in terms of evolution, if there really had been seeders, and if all the lemuroid races were cousins beneath the skin. Remy didn’t think that way himself—he saw nothing in the least unnatural in cousins trying hard to exterminate one another’s bloodlines—but he could see how the question might take on the appearance of a genuine puzzle.

He was glad when the door opened and Yerema appeared through the curtains.

The father of clan Syroleth was an old man in veich terms. The color of his mask had faded to pure whiteness, and he no longer seemed as tall as he had when Remy first met him. Then he had seemed almost as tall as the human; now Remy was conscious of having to look down in order to meet his eyes. He was still strong, though, and very active. Though he wore a white robe identical to that worn by his daughter, he wore it like a fighting man, as though it was strange and ill-fitting.

Remy stood, and the two men matched palms, then touched their fingers to bowed foreheads.

“Thank you for coming so quickly,” said Yerema in the language of the clans.

“I am grateful to be received in your home,” murmured Remy, hoping that he had the inflection correct. The language of the clans was not so much a language in its own right as a set of social devices which emphasized the superiority of the clansmen over their clanless subjects, maintaining social distance very effectively. There was no way that Remy could ever master the subtleties and nuances of the tongue, but the fact that he was permitted to pretend testified to the special status he had with respect to Yerema and clan Syroleth, and he was conscientious in his attempts to gain assurance in its ways. Only thus could he expect that the Calvars would perpetuate the respect which they now gave him because of his relationship with Yerema.

They sat down at the table now and ate, exchanging only conventional remarks, entirely in the language of the clans. The ritual had always seemed to Remy to be tedious, but he appreciated its importance.

He ate lightly, and drank even more lightly. He would eat again later, at his own house, and had come to Yerema’s house only to talk. The message he had received was, by veir standards, practically a peremptory summons, and implied that there was a matter of considerable difficulty and urgency to be discussed. He let only twelve minutes pass before he signaled that he was replete. Patience was the cardinal virtue in the veir world view, but he saw no need to adopt it for himself. That fetish more than any other was responsible for the fact that the veich had lost half a hundred worlds in the last generation—including Haidra—and were now losing a war which they had once seemed virtually certain to win.

They moved away from the table through a curtained archway into a smaller room, a room without windows, designed for privacy. There was a rectangular table whose scarred surface testified that it was not intended for ornament. Remy, Valla and Yerema took up their positions around it, sitting on high-backed, heavy chairs.

Yerema reached into the fold of his robe and produced a small, cylindrical packet of cloth. He unrolled it to reveal a small scroll of parchment, as wide as the length of his thumb. It unrolled reluctantly, and he pinned the top edge to the table with a stiletto-bladed knife. Fully extended, the strip was about thirty centimeters long. Remy had to lean forward to look at the writing upon it, and could not recognize the elaborate ideographic script. It resembled the writing of the sioconi but was not identical to it.

“What is it?” asked Remy, using the language of the clanless now.

“It is a warrant from the gods of the sky, and the spirit of the waters, and the ancestors of all men in the green paradise. Except, of course, that ‘all men’ means only ‘the er’kresha.’ It’s a sacred commission, including a promise that if the bearer is killed in attempting to obey its command he will be admitted directly to paradise with all honors that would normally be reserved for the Most High.”

Remy looked up at his host, and said, “I didn’t even know that the er’kresha were literate.”

“They’re not, in the strict sense,” said Yerema. “They don’t have much use for writing. Only their holy men can read and write. But they haven’t always been savages. When they migrated here long ago they established a civilization not much less advanced than the siocon culture that was here when the veich first came. The sioconi invaded from Omer several centuries after the er’kresha settled here, and forced them back into the northern bills and the fringes of the Syrene. Kresh oral tradition still makes a great deal out of the Golden Age of the past and the fact that they were robbed of their heritage by the evil sioconi. That’s how they justify their predatory life-style—they see it as a kind of revenge for past crimes committed against them. They also believe that their ultimate destiny is to recover all Azreon, destroying Ziarat and Tzara and all the lands those cities count as part of their empires. You wouldn’t have seen kresh script before—it’s used to decorate sacred objects of one kind or another. Calvar scholars have accumulated a good many of them, contemporary and ancient, but they’ve only recently been able to decipher it. The sioconi had taken no interest themselves—typically enough.”

Remy waited for Yerema to finish before getting back to the heart of the matter. “What does it commission its bearer to do?” he asked bluntly.

“To kill the king,” put in Valla.

“That is so,” agreed Yerema, unperturbed by her interruption. “The assassin was killed in the palace grounds, but the fact that he managed to get so far is cause for concern. It seems that there may well be others still to come.”

“Who sent him?” asked Remy. “And why?”

“There are many rumors,” replied Yerema, “and it is not easy to search out the truth within them. But when the substance of the rumors is added to what the Calvar scholars have learned about the er’kresha, a picture begins to emerge. It appears that a new prophet has emerged from one of the desert tribes—a man of the Syrene, a shaman and a visionary. Such men, it seems, arise periodically when things go badly with the er’kresha—usually in times of famine or plague. He is not merely a shaman but also a warrior, who claims the status of a demigod. The scroll gives his name as Sigor Belle Yella, but that is a title, a nom de guerre. He is winning acceptance as a leader, making claims not only upon his own tribe but upon their neighbors, and upon the er’kresha of the far north. His aim is to unite them into a great army, which will then go forth to reclaim the rightful territory of the kresh race, driving the sioconi and their off-world allies—we acquire demonic status in these stories—into the sea.”

“Why the assassins?”

“The tribes fight one another as much as they fight the sioconi. They hate one another almost as bitterly. To join them in a common cause is no easy task. They can be persuaded, because their traditions favor such periodic joinings, and promise that one such unification will, indeed, herald the fulfillment of all the kresh dreams of empire. In order to be so persuaded, however, they look for signs. They look for events that might be omens, in all the traditional places. They watch the sky for portents; they look to their shamans for significant dreams, who look in turn to their processes of divination here on the ground. Most of all, though, they wait for Belle Yella himself to produce miracles. Had the king been killed, Belle Yella would have claimed it as a sign, and the tribal chieftains would have accepted it. Of course, Belle Yella will hardly stake everything on such a dubious operation: he will be busy promoting all kinds of other possible signs as well. In the end, he will find one, and the chieftains will accept it because they want to accept it...and perhaps need to accept it. Belle Yella, I think, is a product of the times. His kind of movement is a typical response to what the er’kresh see as a universal crisis: a millennial cult whose mythology attempts to invert a sense of despair into a sense of imminent and triumphant destiny.”

“I don’t understand,” said Remy, shifting in his chair. “You say that the ultimate aim of this man is to unite the kresh tribes in order to sweep the sioconi and the veich into the sea?”

“It would probably be more correct to say that this is the aim of the er’kresha as a race.” he said, “reignited in them by the desperation of their circumstances. Belle Yella is only an instrument. He is the means by which the tribes can ritually bury their differences and accept a common cause.”

“But it’s impossible!” objected Remy. “The sioconi outnumber the er’kresha by ten to one. Thanks to the Calvars they have far better weapons, and thanks to us they have a standing army of trained mercenaries that’s several thousand strong. And that’s just Ziarat. The king could raise an army of ten thousand in the city if he had to—maybe twice as many if he conscripted men from the surrounding districts. The Calvars couldn’t arm them all, but they could arm them far better than any force of kresh tribesmen. Most of the kresh tribes have only two or three hundred able-bodied men, and they’re well off if they have a dozen guns. Even if there were five hundred tribes—which there aren’t—they couldn’t put any kind of effective fighting force in the field.”

“In fact,” said Yerema evenly, “there are some five hundred and fifty tribes, counting the desert tribes and the northern hillmen together. Your fighting has been almost exclusively with the desert tribes. The hill tribes are considerably larger, though not so well armed. It’s theoretically possible for the er’kresha to amass an army more than a hundred thousand strong, though in practical terms they’re unlikely to assemble a force one tenth as large as that. In all probability, eight thousand fighting men in a dozen different groups would represent the whole of kresh. The war that they’d fight wouldn’t really be recognizable as such by you or me. They wouldn’t adopt any particular overall strategy—they’d just sweep into the various territories that are supposedly under Ziarat’s protection—and Tzara’s, of course—killing everyone they could. It would be more a matter of casual slaughter than of warfare. The er’kresha have no attainable objectives in the military sense.”

“What you mean,” said Remy, “is that the notion of this war to reclaim Azreon is just an idea—a myth that will allow them to embark on some crazy stint of killing for the sake of killing.”

“That’s correct,” said the veir clansman. “This isn’t a war in our sense of the word; it’s a response to the fact that the er’kresha see their present situation as one of utter hopelessness. There’s nothing they can do about it in practical terms, so they’re forced to seek a transcendental solution—they’re looking to their gods and their ancestors for salvation, and Belle Yella is the intermediary.”

“And this is the way they have reacted in the distant past to things like famines and great plagues?”

“It seems so,” confirmed Yerema. “It’s a type of social response to desperate circumstances which is seen in many cultures on many worlds. There are examples in the past history of my species, and probably of yours.”

“But why now?” asked Remy. “There’s been no famine—no worse than usual, anyhow. There’s been no plague.”

Yerema smiled faintly. “In a way,” he said, “what has happened is worse than that. Famines and plagues relent. But the er’kresha are gradually losing their entire way of life. For hundreds of years—probably thousands—they have lived as nomadic herdsmen and bandits. The lands where they graze their animals are the lands which were too poor for the sioconi to bother stealing. The living which they scrape from their agricultural projects, such as they are, is poor. They have always been dependent upon the sioconi for grain. They have taken grain from villages which they threatened. They have looted it from granaries. Sometimes they have bought it—but always with goods and money they have stolen from the sioconi, particularly from the caravans that use the roads between Ziarat and the coast to the south and west. The er’kresha have always lived as predators upon the sioconi, and the sioconi—despite their walled cities and their armies—were always unable to stop them.

“All that changed a generation ago. The Calvars came to Azreon from Omer, bringing with them a whole new technology. They rearmed the siocon armies and built new vehicles for the caravans. Then, when the war came to Haidra, fighting men came here. Men like you and me, Remy, who formed a new army of veich and sioconi and even humans—professional soldiers trained in the use of weapons which the Calvars would not make for the sioconi themselves. Calvar guns made the territories that were supposedly under Ziarat’s protection safe from er’kreshan raiders for the first time, and allowed whole kresh tribes to be all but destroyed. Our mercenaries now insure the security of all the roads that go from Ziarat to other towns. We brought animals especially bred for speed, and the er’kresha, whose mounts have been formed by natural selection rather than genetic engineering, could not compete. We are more mobile than they, and better equipped. That is why the er’kresha are under threat of cultural extinction. The only viable course open to them is to become absorbed into the growing body of siocon civilization—as the lowest of the low, third-class citizens despised by everyone. The warriors of the tribes cannot accept that. It is unthinkable.”

Remy shifted again in his seat, and looked hard at the scroll, which Yerema still held extended on the tabletop. He let the story run through his mind, illuminating the rumors that had reached his own ears, and perceiving the strange sense that it yielded up to analysis.

“All right,” he said, “suppose that it’s true? What can we do about it?”

“Perhaps nothing.” said the clansman. “But it’s possible that we can stop it—for now.

“We must track down Signor Belle Yella, kill him, and disperse the members of his cult.”

“Very well,” said Remy calmly. “How?”