Dragon Wing

30

Limbeck was sitting in the drafty headquarters of WUPP writing the speech he would deliver at the rally tonight. His spectacles perched precariously on his head, the Geg scribbled his words onto the paper, happily spattering ink over everything and completely oblivious of the chaos erupting around him. Haplo sat near him, the dog at his feet.

Quiet, taciturn, unobtrusive—indeed, going almost unnoticed—the Patryn lounged in a Geg chair that was too short for him. His long legs extending out in front of him, he idly watched the organized confusion. His cloth-wound hand dropped occasionally to scratch the dog on the head or to pat it reassuringly in the event that something startled it.

WUPP Headquarters in the Geg capital city of Wombe was—literally—a hole in the wall. The Kicksey-Winsey had once decided it needed to expand in a certain direction, knocked a hole in the wall of a Geg dwelling, then had apparently decided, for some unknown reason, that it didn’t want to go that way after all. The hole in the wall remained and the twenty or so Geg families who had occupied the dwelling had moved, since one could never be certain but that the Kicksey-Winsey might change its mind again.

Beyond a few minor inconveniences—such as the perpetual draft—it was, however, ideal for the establishment of WUPP Headquarters. There had been no WUPP

Headquarters in the capital of Drevlin. The High Froman and the church both held crushing power here. But after Limbeck’s triumphant return from the dead-bringing with him a god who claimed he wasn’t a god-reached Wombe via the newssingers, the Gegs clamored to know more about WUPP and its leader. Jarre herself traveled to Wombe to establish the Union, distribute pamphlets, and find a suitable building to serve both as center of operations and a place to live. Her primary, secret goal, however, was to discover if the High Froman and/or the church was going to give them trouble, Jarre hoped they would. She could almost hear the newssingers across the land warbling, “Coppers Crush Converts!” Nothing of the sort had occurred, much to Jarre’s disappointment, and Limbeck and Haplo (and the dog) were met by cheering crowds when they entered the city. Jarre hinted that this was undoubtedly a dark and subtle plot by the High Froman to ensnare them all, but Limbeck said it simply proved that Darral Longshoreman was fair and open-minded.

Now crowds of Gegs stood outside the hole in the wall, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the famous Limbeck or of his god-who-wasn’t. WUPP members rushed importantly in and out, bearing messages to or from Jarre, who was so busy running things that she didn’t have time to make speeches anymore. Jarre was in her element. She led WUPP with ruthless efficiency. Her skills in organization, her inherent knowledge of the Gegs, and her management of Limbeck had been responsible for setting the Gegs’ world aflame with anger and the call for revolution. She poked, prodded, and pummeled Limbeck into shape, shoved him forth to issue words of genius, and hauled him back When it was time to quit. Her awe of Haplo soon faded and she began to treat him the same way she treated Limbeck, telling him what to say and how long to say it. Haplo submitted to her in everything with easy, casual pliability. He was, Jarre discovered, a man of few words, but those Words had a way of searing into the heart, leaving a mark that burned long after the iron had grown cool.

“Is your speech ready for tonight, Haplo?” She paused in the act of drafting a reply to an attack that the church had made on them—an attack so simpleminded that to answer it was to give it more credence than it deserved.

“I will say what I always say, if that is agreeable to you, madam,” he replied with the quiet respect that marked all his dealings with the Gegs.

“Yes,” said Jarre, brushing her chin with the end of the feather quill. “I think that will be most satisfactory. You know that we are likely to draw our biggest crowd yet. They say that some scrifts are even talking of walking off the job—a thing absolutely unprecedented in the history of Drevlin!” Limbeck was startled enough by the tone of her voice to lift his myopic gaze from his paper and stare vaguely in her general direction. In reality, all he could see of her was a squarish blur surmounted by a lump that was her head. He couldn’t see her eyes but he knew her well enough to envision them sparkling with pleasure.

“My dear, is that wise?” he said, holding his pen poised above the paper and unconsciously allowing a large drop of ink to splat right in the center of his text. “It’s certain to anger the High Froman and the clarks—”

“I hope it does!” Jarre stated emphatically, much to Limbeck’s consternation. Nervously he set his elbow in the ink splot.

“Let him send his coppers to break up our meeting,” Jarre continued. “We’ll gain hundreds more followers!”

“But there could be trouble!” Limbeck was aghast. “Someone could get hurt!”

“All in the name of the cause.” Jarre shrugged and returned to her work. Limbeck dropped another ink blot. “But my cause has always been peace. I never meant for people to get hurt!”

Rising to her feet, Jarre cast a swift meaningful glance at Haplo, reminding Limbeck that the god-who-wasn’t was listening. Limbeck flushed and bit his lip, but shook his head stubbornly, and Jarre moved over to his side. Lifting up a rag, she wiped away a particularly large ink spot on the end of his nose.

“My dear,” she said, not unkindly, “you’ve always talked about the need for change. How did you think it would happen?”

“Gradually,” said Limbeck. “Gradually and slowly, so that everyone has time to get used to it and comes to see that it is for the best.”

“That is so like you!” sighed Jarre.

A WUPPer stuck his head through the hole in the wall, seeking to attract Jarre’s attention. She frowned at him severely and the Geg appeared slightly daunted but held his ground, waiting. Turning her back on the WUPPer, Jarre smoothed Limbeck’s wrinkled brow with a hand rough and callused from hard work.

“You want change to come about nicely and pleasantly. You want to see it just sort of slip up on people so that they don’t notice it until they wake up one morning and realize that they’re happier than they were before. Isn’t that true, Limbeck?”

Jarre answered her own question. “Of course it is. And it’s very wonderful and very thoughtful of you and it’s also very naive and very stupid.” Leaning down, she kissed him on the crown of the head, to rob her words of their sting. “And it’s just what I love about you, my dear. But haven’t you been listening to Haplo, Limbeck? Give part of your speech now, Haplo.” The WUPPer who had been waiting to see Jarre turned to shout to the crowd, “Haplo’s going to give his speech!”

The Gegs standing in the street broke into rousing cheers and as many as could possibly fit squeezed heads, arms, legs, and other body parts in through the hole in the wall. This somewhat alarming sight caused the dog to leap to its feet. Haplo patted the dog down and obligingly began to orate, speaking loudly in order to be heard above the crunch, whiz, bang of the Kicksey-Winsey.

“You Gegs know your history. You were brought here by those you call the ‘Mangers.’ In my world, they are known as the Sartan and they treated us as they did you. They enslaved you, forced you to work on this thing that you know as the Kicksey-Winsey. You consider it to be a living entity, but I tell you that it’s a machine! Nothing more! A machine kept running by your brains, your brawn, your blood!

“And where are the Sartan? Where are these so-called gods who claimed that they brought you—a gentle, peaceful people—here to protect you from the Welves? They brought you here because they knew they could take advantage of you!

“Where are the Sartan? Where are the Mangers? That is the question we must ask! No one, it seems, knows the answer. They were here and now they’re gone and they’ve left you to the mercy of the minions of the Sartan, those Welves you were taught to believe were gods! But they’re not gods, either, any more than I am a god—except for the fact that they live like gods. Live like gods because you are their slaves! And that’s how the Welves think of you!

“It’s time to rise up, throw off your chains, and take what is rightfully yours! Take what has been denied you for centuries!”

Wild applause from the Gegs peering through the hole cut off. Jarre, eyes shining, stood with clasped hands, her lips moving to the sound of the words, which she had memorized. Limbeck listened, but his eyes were downcast, his expression troubled. Though he, too, had heard Haplo’s speech often, it seemed that only now was he really hearing it for the first time. Words such as “blood,”

“rise up,”

“throw off,”

“take,” leapt up, growling, like the dog at Haplo’s feet. He had heard them, perhaps even said them himself, but they had been only words. Now he saw them as sticks and clubs and rocks, he saw Gegs lying in the streets or being herded off to prison or being made to walk the Steps of Terrel Fen.

“I never meant this!” he cried. “Any of this!” Jarre, her lips pressed tightly together, strode over and, with a vicious jerk, flung down the blanket that had been hung up over the hole in the wall. There were disappointed murmurings from the crowd whose view inside was cut off.

“Whether you did or you didn’t, Limbeck, it’s gone too far now for you to stop it!” she snapped. Seeing the harried expression on her beloved’s face, she softened her voice. “There are pain and blood and tears at every birth, my dear. The baby always cries when it leaves its safe, quiet prison. Yet if it stayed in the womb, it would never grow, never mature. It would be a parasite, feeding off another body. That’s what we are. That’s what we’ve become! Don’t you see? Can’t you understand?”

“No, my dear,” said Limbeck. The hand holding the pen was shaking. Ink drops were flying everywhere. He laid it down across the paper on which he’d been writing and slowly rose to his feet. “I think I’ll go out for a walk.”

“I wouldn’t,” said Jarre. “The crowds—” Limbeck blinked. “Oh, yes. Of course. You’re right.”

“You’re exhausted. All this traveling and excitement. Go lie down and take a nap. I’ll finish your speech. Here are your spectacles,” Jarre said briskly, plucking them from the top of Limbeck’s head and popping them onto his nose. “Up the stairs and into bed with you.”

“Yes, my dear,” said Limbeck, adjusting the spectacles that Jarre had, with well-meaning kindness, stuck on lopsided. Looking through them that way—with one eyeglass up and the other down—made him nauseous. “I ... think that would be a good idea. I do feel . . . tired.” He sighed and hung his head. “Very tired.”

Walking to the ramshackle stairs, Limbeck was startled to feel a wet tongue lick across his knuckles. It was Haplo’s dog, looking up at him, wagging its tail.

“I understand,” the animal seemed to say, its unspoken words startlingly clear in Limbeck’s mind. “I’m sorry.”

“Dog!” Haplo spoke to it sharply, calling it back.

“No, that’s all right,” said Limbeck, reaching down to give the animal’s sleek head a gingerly pat. “I don’t mind.”

“Dog! Come!” Haplo’s voice had an almost angry edge to it. The dog hurried back to its master’s side, and Limbeck retired up the stairs.

“He’s so very idealistic!” said Jarre, gazing after Limbeck in admiration mixed with exasperation. “And not at all practical. I just don’t know what to do.”

“Keep him around,” suggested Haplo. He stroked the dog’s long nose to indicate that all was forgiven and forgotten. The animal lay down, rolled over on its side, and closed its eyes. “He gives your revolution a high moral tone. You’ll need that, when blood starts to flow.”

Jarre looked worried. “You think it will come to that?”

“Inevitable,” he said, shrugging. “You said as much yourself, to Limbeck.”

“I know. It seems, as you say, that it is inevitable, that this is the natural end of what we began long ago. Yet it has seemed to me lately”—she turned her eyes to Haplo—“that we never seriously turned our thoughts to violence until you came. Sometimes I wonder if you aren’t really a god.”

“Why is that?” Haplo smiled.

“Your words have a strange power over us. I hear them and I keep hearing them, not in my head, but in my heart.” She placed her hand on her breast, pressing it as if it pained her. “And because they’re in my heart, I can’t seem to think about them rationally. I just want to react, to go out and do ... something! Make somebody pay for what we’ve suffered, what we’ve endured.” Haplo rose from the chair and came over to Jarre, kneeling down so that he put himself at eye level with the short, stocky Geg. “And why shouldn’t you?” he said softly, so softly that she couldn’t hear over the whumping, whooshing of the Kicksey-Winsey. Yet she knew what he said, and the pain in her heart increased. “Why shouldn’t you make them pay? How many of your people have lived and died down here, and all for what? To serve a machine that eats up your land, that destroys your homes, that takes your lives and gives nothing to you in return! You’ve been used, betrayed! It’s your right, your duty to strike back!”

“I will!” Jarre was caught, mesmerized by the man’s crystal blue eyes. Slowly the hand over her heart clenched into a fist.

Haplo, smiling his quiet smile, rose and stretched. “I think I’ll join our friend in a nap. It’s liable to be a long night.”

“Haplo,” called Jarre, “you said you come from below us, from a realm that we . . . that no one knows is down there.”

He did not reply, merely looked at her.

“You were slaves. You told us that. But what you haven’t told us is how you came to crash on our isle. You weren’t”—she paused and licked her lips, as if to make the words come more easily—“running away?” One corner of the man’s mouth twitched. “No, I wasn’t running. You see, Jarre, we won our fight. We are slaves no longer. I’ve been sent to free others.” The dog raised its head, turning to stare sleepily at Haplo. Seeing him leaving, the dog yawned and got up, hind end first, stretching out its front legs luxuriously. Yawning again, it rocked forward, stretching the back legs, then lazily accompanied its master up the stairs.

Jarre watched, then shook her head, and was sitting down to finish Limbeck’s speech when a thumping against the curtain recalled her to her duties. There were people to meet, pamphlets to be delivered, the hall to be inspected, parades to be organized.

The revolution just wasn’t much fun anymore.

Haplo mounted the stairs carefully, keeping to the inside against the wall. The knobwood boards were cracked and rotting. Large snaggletoothed gaps waited to snare the unwary and send them crashing down to the floor below. Once inside his room, he lay down on the bed, but not to sleep. The dog jumped up on the bed next to him and rested its head on the man’s chest, bright eyes fixed on his face.

“The woman is good, but she won’t serve our purpose. She thinks too much, as my lord would say, and that makes her dangerous. What we need in this realm to foment chaos is a fanatic. Limbeck would be ideal, but he must have that idealistic bubble of his burst. And I’ve got to leave this place, to carry on with my mission—investigate the upper realms and do what I can to prepare the way for the coming of my lord. My ship is destroyed. I have to find another. But how...how?”

Musing, he fondled the dog’s soft ears. The animal, sensing the man’s tension, remained awake, lending its small support, and slowly Haplo relaxed. Opportunity would come. He knew it. He had only to watch for it and take advantage of it. The dog closed its eyes with a contented sigh and slept, and after a few moments, so did Haplo.