Fire Time

FIVE

Its Tassu garrison would not yield Tarhanna to siege before they had plucked the leaves of their manes and shaved the turf of their pelts to eat—and then not until they had burned what strength that last starvation ration gave them. Belike many would still try to lift ax or pike when the legionaries broke down undefended gates. Knowing this, a regiment of the Zera Victrix moved north with engines trundling among them for the demolition of walls: ballistas, trebuchets, testudo-roofed rams.

Larreka wouldn’t have ordered that, Arnanak thought in glee. He’s too wise. But Larreka had gone South-Over-Sea. His vice commandant, Wolua, was less patient, less able to foresee possible countermoves. Arnanak had hoped his enemies would seek to regain the town quickly, and laid plans for this. When he was sure, his couriers went out; drums cast word across canyons; and where they would not be seen by outland forelopers, smoke signals puffed by day and beacon fires flashed by night.

Wolua was no fool. It was merely that two or three hundred years in service seemed to have made his thinking run in deep channels, not become free-ranging like Larreka’s. As he led his force up the road, he kept a web of scouts far-flung on either side of the Esali. The Tassui had nothing to match that corps—chosen and trained for fleetness, schooled to read maps and use compasses, equipped with telescopes, portable heliographs, bottles of tiny bluesmoke bugs which were not found in Valennen, even magical voicecasters from Humanworld in the hands of a few key officers. The scouts did not simply prevent an adversary from surprising their main body; they found and killed hostile counterparts, to keep foes in the dark about their own side.

Or thus it had been until lately. Arnanak had a new response.

Small, swiftly scuttering, his dauri were not likely to be seen; if seen, they would likely be taken for animals; if a legionary who saw one chanced to know a little Tassu folklore, the most he would likely think was: “Holy Sun, those stories may be true! Maybe there are spooks in the Starklands that get down here sometimes… yes, doesn’t the legend say they come in numbers as harbingers of the thousand-yearly destruction—?”

Arnanak’s grasp of their whistling, trilling speech was not firm. Nor could they move as fast as the legionary outrunners. But they told him what he needed to learn. He knew the size and composition of the force from Port Rua, he knew day by day where it was, and on this basis he could direct his plan of battle.

He stood waiting to call the charge. Beside him was Kusarat, the Overling of Sekrusu. News of the capture of Tarhanna had decided that powerful but hitherto unsure chief, and he had lately arrived at the head of three hundred armed oathgivers. They were very welcome, as much for their example as their strength. Arnanak was willing to show their leader every sign of honor, pretend that he and he were equals. The Overling of Ulu understood it would take years to bind all households to him in such wise that they agreed he had in truth become the master of South Valennen.

“What did you do?” Kusarat asked.

“I brought half my males down out of the hills as if we were blundering blind in search of fight or plunder,”

Arnanak told him. “As I’d awaited, the legionaries struck cross-country with the idea of their larger force surprising and slaughtering us. We, ready for them, retreated in better order than they saw, drawing them upland. Meanwhile the second half of us, scattered hidden, have gathered here.”

“How could they stay hidden from yon foul-be-their-name scouts? Many of those must have gone ahead.”

“Aye. But the dauri aided our folk to know where most scouts were and whither bound. Hence they could shift about as needed.”

“Dauri—” Kusarat grimaced and made a sign.

“Word reached me a short while ago,” Arnanak went on to hearten him. “The enemy left a few soldiers to watch his war engines on the road. They had no idea that through the dauri I had means to tell the warriors in Tarhanna of this. Our males have sallied thence and slain that guard. They are pulling the engines back to town.”

Kusarat forgot his unease. He smote sword on shield and roared for joy.

“Softly, if you will, my friend,” Arnanak said. “They have no need to know in the Zera that we are not a desperate rabble brought to bay.”

From the clump of cane lia that screened them, he peered down into a dry gorge. There tramped the enemy troops, two thousand strong. Barren, the defile was more easily used, in spite of strewn boulders, than the ground above, where claw grew. The Valenneners whom they pursued had taken this way themselves. Wolua kept detachments out across the canyon sides and along the rim: plain common sense. But in these cramped quarters, his scouts were of scant use. He had no way of telling what gathered against him forward and behind. Skirmishing on the slopes, fighting a dogged rearguard action along the bottom, the Tassui blocked him off from any frontward signs and kept him too busy to think about those parts he had already passed.

A wind boomed cruelly hot. The canes where Arnanak stood rattled in its blast. It smelled of seared brush. Red and white light together cast double shadows of different lengths and colors, weirdened the whole landscape, sparse yellow shrubs, cracked gray soil above and raw-shaped ocherous crags and bluffs tumbling into the cleft beneath. A carrion ptenoid hovered far, far aloft in a heaven which seemed less blue than brazen.

There stood the True and the Demon Suns; and it was as if the first had learned wrath from the second. As summer drew nigh in Valennen, so did crimson glow to gold-white blaze. They smote the land with hammers.

Plenty bad here in his patch of shade, Arnanak thought. Soon he would have to sound the charge and lead it down into an oven.

Well, he was better outfitted than his followers, in his old legionary gear. No Tassu smith had skill to copy that, though some made clumsy tries. Most barbarians must be content with a shield for protection, or nothing. The best a wealthy male could get might be chain mail for torso and body. The underpadding it required wouldn’t let his pelt breathe or drink sunlight. Thus he weakened and began to pant; heat entered his blood; after a time he must withdraw and rest or else swoon. Therefore, many who could have afforded it chose, instead, to wear little more than a cuirass and helmet. But the Northmade helmet was merely a visor riveted to a conical top. Strapped on, it crushed leaves of the mane.

Arnanak’s was a round steel cage supported on his shoulder harness, which in turn attached to a breastplate of metal and leather. Hoops from this arched across his back from neck to hump, warding that part of his mane while giving it freedom to work for him. The breastplate did not fit snugly; yielding pads here and there were points of contact to let his whole torso absorb the force of a blow. The plates which protected his barrel were fitted likewise, curved outward to clear most of the pelt, the cinches doing small harm. Iron-studded gauntlets and steel greaves also gave air space to his limbs, while reinforced leather straps dangled across the upper portions. Everything was painted white.

The oblong shield on his left arm was not. Its steel cover had been polished to cast light into an enemy’s eyes. The boss was a beak for stabbing, the upper and lower edges were ground sharp to cut at chin or foreleg. Handy to his right arm hung sword, hatchet, and dagger.

More was needed for a rig like this than the means to buy it. A male must get legionary training in its use. Arnanak had served for an octad in the Tamburu Strider; and the years since then had often found him at practice.

The troop had pushed to within a half kilometer of him. He deemed his moment had come. Raising horn to lips, he winded the battle call, burst from the canebrake, and sped down the slope.

Stones clicked, bounced, slashed at his buskins. Heat billowed, sunshine dazzled, metal below flung star-gleams at him. He felt how muscles throbbed and beat, air whistled through his nostril, hearts slugged, mane and pelt poured stress-juices into his blood till he tasted sweetness. On his left bounded Kusarat, and left of him a standard-bearer whose green flag the Sekrusu males followed. On his right sprang Tornak, a son of his, holding on high the Ulu emblem—pole-mounted, the great horned skull of an azar from North Beronnen. Behind them came their folk.

And elsewhere, Arnanak saw in eye-flashes, elsewhere were the other bands, a wave of warriors pouring down upon the soldiers of the Gathering. They overwhelmed the outer legionary squads without stopping, hewed them into the ground and plunged onward.

Trumpets and drums called the soldiers below into close formation. Arrows, javelins, slingstones flew. Arnanak saw a male of his smitten, stumble and fall, roll flopping downward while he screamed and his veins threw gobbets over the thirsty ground. “Forth, forth!” Arnanak bawled. “Get in among them! Swordwork, axwork! For your lives and your households’—when Fire Time comes!”

After the battle, all were weary and most had suffered wounds. Fain were they to lie down and strive at naught but willing the pain out of their minds. But toil remained. Those hurts must be dressed, stitched if need be; one could not long spend heedfulness on forcing them not to bleed, at the cost of urgent tasks. The throats of hopelessly maimed legionaries must be cut, and of comrades unable to do it for themselves. What foes had not died or escaped must be hobbled and hand-bound, to be led off for enslavement unless the Gathering paid a goodly ransom. And then, although a water hole was nearby, Arnanak said they would camp at the next, an hour’s march hence.

To angry shouts he replied; “These whom we fought today, who now lie slain, fought well. If we stay here, the carrion eaters will not dare come, and thus their spirits will be trapped that much longer. We can let them have quick release, can we not? Luck follows an honorable deed.”

He himself closed the eyes of Wolua.

So the host loaded themselves and their prisoners with what they had stripped from their adversaries, and with their own dead. The latter would not be brought home; that was too big a trek. But they wouldn’t greatly mind waiting a day or two in the anguish and bewilderment of flesh, if it would be boiled off them and eaten in Tarhanna. The final service to war-friends was as noble a liberation into the after-world as when one gave that feast to one’s family. And of course their bones would travel back, to be used for conjuring oracular dreams before getting final rest in the dolmens.

Arnanak did not, in truth, share this belief. While a soldier of the Gathering, he had been initiated into the mysteries of the Triad. They made more sense to him than the raunchy gods of his people. But he held his peace about that, led the sacrifices as became an Overling, and today did what he did because it would add to his name.

The Sun had almost followed the Rover below the hills—or the True Sun had almost followed the Invader— when they reached the spring they sought. Already it lay shrunken in a ring of dried and cracked mud. But lowgrowing buff-colored lia and scrubby red-leaved yan trees hung on, a meager oasis. Arnanak noticed blue shoots here and there, the early encroachments of Starkland life. Lore, handed down from ancestors who had outlived former Fire Times, said that plants of this kind could better get along then than plants of mortal sort; they became common, and drew beasts that could feed on them, which drew dauri. In this wise the parched, burnt, storm-lashed country also became haunted.

Afterward, when the Marauder had retreated, the blue plants did, too, and their animals—save for kinds like the phoenix, which always throve in South Valennen; and folk could again beget children with hope that these would grow up.

Arnanak ordered the prisoners tethered in the best grazing the oasis offered. There was no other food. Any dried meat or fruit that anybody had brought was long since eaten; and who had strength to search for game? Free to range, he and his warriors could get something into their guts from the sparser parts of the vale.

Night fell as they plucked and cropped. The years around Fire Time were doubly strange in that each night of advancing spring was (hereabouts) longer than the last—for the Red One so moved through heaven as to share it with the True Sun about midsummer.

Stars glittered forth, Ghost Bridge, doubly lit small rock of Narvu, above shadowed steeps and pinnacles. The air stayed hot, but a breath of breeze came like a well-wisher’s hand. At last the victors could take their ease. Arnanak heard sighs go through the dimly seen mass of them as body after body dropped and chins sank down onto arms laid across forelegs. He settled himself by a low fire. Tomak lay at his side, and three more sons. Kusarat of Sekrusu asked if he might join them. “Unless you would sleep,” he added politely.

“No, I would liefer rest awake for a little,” Arnanak said.

“And I. My thoughts are still a jumble. Did I drowse off straight-away, I’d have no hope of making a good dream for myself.”

“Vu? Do you have skill in the dream art? I knew that not.”

“No, I can’t bring any forth that are worth telling,” Kusarat admitted. “But I can make them pleasant… or useful.”

Arnanak nodded. “Thus is it for me.”

“And me,” said Tornak. He laughed. “Tonight I want dreams of beer and females—not in Tarhanna nor my father’s hall, but Port Rua when we take it—that should be something!—or even Sehala.”

“Be not over-eager,” Arnanak warned him. “Those conquests lie afar in time; and we may not live to make them.”

“The more reason to dream them,” said Tornak’s half brother Igini. Their father signed them both to silence. They were young, their manners not yet honed. The other two were older, sober married males, though since neither had passed his sixty-fourth year, Arnanak’s power continued over them too.

His desire was that Kusarat be shown respect. Seemingly the latter was just as anxious to please, for he asked, “Are these lads yours, Arnanak?” and upon getting a yea: “Then you must have the rest out widely, those who’ve gotten their growth. I hear you’ve sired very many, by more different females than most of us ever get at.”

Arnanak didn’t deny it. Besides several advantageous marriages and a row of concubines, no doubt he had made fruitful a fair number of wives he borrowed on his travels. Husbands were pleased to give him that hospitality, in the hope of strong children born into their houses. Above the fame and power he had won, there was himself, huge, soft-footed, eyes as vividly green in the black face as teeth were white, the worst of the wounds he had gotten in a gale-driven life all healed without a scar.

What he did say, gravely, was: “Aye, some are raiding at sea, some bear my messages across land. But most are at home doing their work, by my orders. I never forget how thin an edge we must live on till we’ve won new homes in better countries. Even a victory like today’s means less than the garnering of what food and goods we can.”

“Ng-ng-ng… you speak like a Gathering dweller,” Kusarat murmured.

“Which I have been. Since then I’ve dealt with them here in Valennen, watched them, listened to them, always trying to learn. Why do you suppose they wield power across the whole known world? Aye, they’ve more skills than us, their heartland is more wealthy and populous than ours, true, true. But mainly, I do believe, mainly they have this habit of thinking ahead.”

“You’d make us into their image?” Kusarat asked warily.

“As far as we can gain thereby, and are able,” Arnanak said.

Kusarat regarded him for a silent while, by the flicker of spitting, shadow-weaving flames, before he replied:

“And yet you deal with the dauri… who knows with what witchcraft?”

“That question is often shot at me,” Arnanak said. “The best answer I can give is the truth.”

Kusarat erected his ears and switched tail against flank. “I listen.”

“I first met them, kyai-ai, maybe two hundred years ago when I was a youth, hardly out of cubhood, and the world not troubled by the Torchbearer. Already then its brightness cast shadows by night, and we knew it was on the way back to us. But the young do not fear a distant tomorrow and the old have no reason to. We lived well in those days—do you remember?

“My parents dwelt in Evisakuk, where Mekusak was Overling. My father was a full freeholder and had given no oath. Their house lay in the woods on Mount Fang, without close neighbors. Nevertheless, my parents thought Mekusak must have sired me, an eventide when he chanced by and got shelter from them. For I grew to be like him in size and short temper and hating to scratch the soil. We kept a niggard plot where we raised a few herbs. Mainly my father and we lads were hunters. When sent out alone. I often stayed away for days on end, and afterward tied about having had a long chase. They doubted me, since they had seen what I could do when we fared together. Thus year by year I grew more estranged, and chafed more.

“Then once by myself, on the western side of the mountain and high enough that I could see a gleam where the ocean was, I found a daur. I had glimpsed a few dauri before, though barely. They came to our parts less seldom than to most of South Valennen. Maybe it was because here was wilderness, thinly peopled by mortals; maybe because here were more of the plants they live on though we cannot; maybe they had a landmagic to work here. Who knows? I don’t, not to this day.

“But there the small uncanny thing was, trapped beneath a tree which had blown over in a storm the night before. Its arms and legs moved feebly, in ripples under a skin which, at hot noontide, had gone from purple to white. The petals on the branch—the branch where a head should have grown—the petals clenched and unclenched, as if they gasped, and the tendrils below them writhed. From the belly three eyes stared, dark as holes. But the hole itself had been punched by a sharp-ended bough; thin ichor trickled out.

“For a two-pulse beat I wanted to flee, and for another I wanted to slay. However, I held fast. And a thought came to me: We fear them, and sometimes set out offerings, because they are unknown to us. Not because they are evil; there are few stories about their doing harm, which may all be false, and there are some about their having done things jointly with mortals, which may all be true. Would it not be wonderful to have the friendship of a daur?

“I lifted the tree off him, not too heavy for me, I bore him to a cave nearby, treated his wound as best I was able, made him a bed of lia. For days thereafter I brought him water, and food of his kind. I say ‘him’ but know not if ‘her’ would be right, or ‘it,’ or what. Nor do I know if we became friends as mortals do. Who can tell what a daur thinks, deep in his belly or petals or wherever his soul abides, if he has a soul? I do know we lost shyness of each other and began to swap a few words. I could not utter his trills and squeals well, though I did better than he did at my speech. Yet we learned the meaning of certain signs and noises.

“When he was healed, he gave me no treasure or magical power as I had hoped. He only made me understand that he wished me to come back whenever I could. I went home mightily thoughtful. Of course I said naught to anybody of what had happened.

“I did return often. Most times nobody met me, but now and then I would go off with a whole little band of those beings. They used no metal, and gave me tools of stone, useless to my size and shape of hand but finely chipped and perhaps lucky to carry. For my part, I guided them around—remember, they did not live here, they just came south over the Desolation Hills and along the Worldwall on brief trips—and I helped them catch the small game which could not nourish me, and gave them bones from my larger kills to make into tools. I think that must be one thing they sought. Animals in the Starklands are all dwarf, as I would learn long afterward.

“Meanwhile I began courting a female. In rashness I boasted to her at last of my comradeship with the dauri. Less bold than I’d supposed, she fled from me in terror. Soon two of her brothers sought me out and accused me of trying to cast a spell on her. Anger kindled anger till they were stretched dead. Parents on both sides were quick to compose the quarrel, before a feud could start.

I’ve since wondered if that’s not the real reason fathers have absolute power over sons and grandsons, mothers over daughters and granddaughters, till the age of sixtyfour—not ‘upbringing,’ not ‘rightness,’ not the word of a god, whatever we believe today—but simply that before this law, too many young were getting slain.

“Regardless, my father saw he had best give me leave to depart. I went right blithely. For the next hundred years or such, there were more exciting things to do than run on Mount Fang with the dauri. I was a hunter, and brought skins to Tarhanna for trade. When I heard that the outlanders paid better for phoenix wood, I became a lumberjack. We would raft our logs down to Port Rua, and thus I got to know that town. What its soldiers, sailors, and merchants told me about South-Over-Sea fired me and I took to the water myself.

“At first I was a buccaneer. But that was a poor trade in those days. We dared raid no island that held a legionary post, and most did. Soon I shipped as a deckhand on a Sehalan freighter.

“Long I wandered the lands of the Gathering, taking what work I found, until I joined a legion. I liked that, but when my octad was over I didn’t re-enlist; for I had grown thoughtful. No, I went to Sehala itself and lived on my savings while I read books—I had learned to read; it’s not a wizard’s art, whatever you’ve heard— and hearkened to wise folk.

“You will understand. Year by year the Burner was brightening.

“They grew troubled in Sehala. Always civilization had gone under, in flood, storm, famine, breakdown, and the onset of wild people driven out of countries still more ruined. Nevertheless, they had hope. In the last two cycles, legionary organizations had saved something, more the second time than the first. Aye, several of the legions are that old, the Zera among them. They have outlived nations, and brought new ones to speedier birth and growth. Moreover, this time the humans had come, those aliens of whom you surety know rumors—

“Yes, I have met humans, though not to talk with at any length. But another evening, Kusarat. You have asked about the dauri and me.

“Legionary records showed that the Cruel Star would stand straight above Valennen, In the past, said those records, most Valenneners—belike our forebears didn’t call themselves Tassui—most had perished. Dim and broken word-things bespoke northerners who in still earlier ages, before any legions were founded, overran the Fiery Sea and parts of Beronnen. Their names are lost; their descendants are part of today’s civilization; but they themselves lived through Fire Time. They lived!

“I thought: If the Gathering keeps its might, there can be no such invasion of it now; and most of my people will die. I cared for them still. What quarrels I had had among them I saw as lovers’ quarrels.

“I thought: But the Gathering will at best be much weakened. If Valennen meanwhile is strengthened, united, knowingly led—Do you see? And before you say it, I will. Yes, of course I want to be he who shapes the whole next cycle. I want the humans to come to me while I live, not to Sehala, and deal with me in wonders, And when I am dead, I want my memory to stand, my skull enshrined for an oracle, till the next Fire Time after this, and beyond. That is no more than soldier’s pay for saving a folk.

“Therefore I came home.

“You have heard the rest: how I cleared new land at Ulu; how I built wealth and power through trade with the Gathering, and reaving of those places from which the Gathering withdrew; how lesser families who saw worsening years ahead came to me, gave oath in return for land and leadership, learned from me how to fight with the head as well as the hands. They are the bone of my strength.

“But the spirit in it—”

“Kusarat, I will say frankly, I have hunted out word about you, because you are an Overling of weight. Thus I know I can speak to you more openly than to some. You are no back-country huddler who gulps down every cackle of old wives’ gossip about the gods. When I say that our shortsighted, wrangling Tassui cannot be brought together by force alone, not to save their very fives— that only an Otherness can melt them to an ingot from which I may forge a sword—you will understand.

“I sought my dauri again.

“Long and long was that search. Yet they do make ever more treks to mortal realms, in ever greater numbers, as the Stormkindler draws nigh. Their Starklands dry out worse than our grounds do; and meanwhile, as the waxing heat kills off our kind of life, their kind—which can better take it—moves in, to nourish them. Thus in the end, it matters not how, I found me a daur. We spoke what little we could. Later I met more dauri and we spoke further.

“I do not know if he I saved was among them, nor even if they had heard that tale. I tried to find out, and failed. What I did have was a slight command of their speech and knowledge of their ways, to show I had formerly been friendly with their sort. I worked hard to add to this.

“For… in Fire Time, it is not only mortals who seek what allies they can get.

“They are leery of us. And frankly again, too much closeness might make my followers not leery enough of them. I needed a sigil, a Thing, which I could bear for a mark of their favor while they mainly kept away from the Tassui. But I could not make this clear; they are so utterly sundered from us. Or if they understood me, perhaps they did not know what would serve. After all. I myself was blind as to what there might be. A token of stone or bone was no use; I could have fashioned that myself.

“The upshot was that they took me into their homeland.

“You have heard that I went. You may have heard that I came back in mummy skin and bones a-rattle, and took a year to regain my health. But you have not heard of the quest.

“I spent three years merely readying. First the dauri took food of mine and made caches for me along the way. In the Starklands it would not rot, nor would beasts eat it. Regardless, I almost starved. They had laid down too little; the load a daur can carry is small, and I had not foreseen how grim that country is. Still nearer did I come to death by thirst. It is not a desert northward, or was not before the Red One returned. But it is dry, its life needs less water than ours does, and this too we had not allowed for.

“Yet in the end we won to certain ruins. I groped half mad among them, until a daur showed me the Thing that is full of unknown stars. I clutched it to me and sent my feet back across the land which scorned and scorched them. Somehow they bore me.

“Since, the dauri and I have grown closer. We have secrets I am not free to share. But their will toward me is good; and my will toward you is good. My friends they will help, my foes they will harm. This is enough to say. I have spoken; and you will understand.”

Later, as he drifted toward sleep, Arnanak thought:

Enough to say to him. Humans would surely pay well to hear more. What I can tell them about the dauri might buy me their abandonment of the Gathering.