The Chieftan

CHAPTER 1

It is odd, sometimes, how one notices little things, the way a step is splintered, the eleventh, rather at the corner, on the climb to the platform, how a cloud, over the rooftops, seen from the height of the platform, moves in the wind, like a flag, how a board is stained near a block, how the patterns of dryness and dampness, and, here and there, a bead of dew, appear on the fiber of the rope, and exactly how it hangs from the hook, slack, bent a little, not yet straight, not yet taut. One supposes such things are there to be noticed always, the lie of a pebble, the way a blade of grass bends, such things, but often one does not notice them, nor, I suppose, generally, should one. There is not much economy in doing so. Often other things are more important, much more so, the shadows cast by the great stones, the scent of a cat in the wind, the hum of an engine, far off, in the darkness. But when one has nothing much else to do, and one must choose how to spend a last handful of perceptions, one, or at least some, grow curious about little things, a splinter, a stain on a board, a drop of dew on a rope. It is surprising to realize just how meaningful, and beautiful, such things are. Too, at such a time, one sees with great vividness. At such times, life gleams.

It had been some thousands of years since the skies had come alive.

Oh, there had doubtless been sightings even before that, long before that, the detections of the scout ships, not known for what they were, and such, but records of those sightings, if, indeed, they had been made, were now lost. Some things will not be seen for what they are. One refuses to understand them. One looks upon them but refuses to see them. The defense mechanism is a familiar one, common to the rational species. And so the day the sky came alive came as a surprise to the old world, one far from this one, as it had to hundreds of other worlds before. Evidence, later clear, had been understood in terms of misleading categories of interpretation, old categories, comfortable categories, categories more acceptable. The hints had been neglected, save by some fanatics. Sometimes, of course, only the insane can see a certain form of truth, one which is beyond sanity, as it is then understood. But even so, one does not listen to the insane, and one always hopes that a truth, like some of the cats, not looked in the eye, will go away. The deep archives, later ransacked by historians, unwilling to accept the abruptness of the advent of the ships, were silent. But all that took place long ago, and much in it, even today, remains obscure.

He knelt in the deep, warm white sand.

It was late afternoon.

The sun was warm on his back and shoulders, as in the fields.

He was a large man, unusually so, particularly for one who had been raised in a festung village, one of the villages in the vicinity of a high, fortified place.

He noticed the sand, as one might on such an occasion. Light sparkled here and there among the grains, flashing from some tiny crystalline surfaces, suitably oriented to the sun. An ant, as we shall call the tiny social insect, came within his view, going about its business, trekking its awesome hills and valleys. He watched it, with interest. He had never really considered such creatures before, except to remove them from his tunic or blankets. To the ant, he supposed, this day was no different from a thousand others. He could also detect, what he had never noticed before, the shadow of the ant, moving with it, hurrying a little before it.

Many worlds, of course, had, long ago, offered resistance to the ships. The ships had not won their worlds, or many of them, with ease. In many cases steel had met steel. Had it not been the case the ships might have come centuries earlier. Sometimes the issue had been genuinely in doubt. Long ago, you see, the ships had not their reputation of invincibility, casting centuries before them their image of power and terror. There was a time when standards stood against standards. There had been the wars with the Valeii and the Torinichi, that with the system of Aurelian, those with the Genteii, and their systems, and, later, with the federation of the thousand suns, and, even later, entire galaxies became battlefields of unimaginable scope. Ships, in vistas of spinning, clashing millions, thousands of navies, wrought out the destinies of universes in silence. Armies, bred on millions of worlds, over thousands of years, beached on millions of worlds. Planets swam in blood. Boundaries extended now, it was said, beyond the territories of the former Hermidorian and Vincenzian alliances, beyond the 712th, the 808th, and the 1161st galaxies. The claiming stones of the ships, some vestige of a primitive rite, the origins of which were lost in time, had been set on innumerable worlds, the claiming beacons within a thousand galaxies. This had not taken place, of course, in a short while, not in a rotation of gigantic Cyline 7, nor even within an orbit of the Comet of Hilbreth, but it had taken place. For more than a million years the ships had left their orbits, burning forth in the quiet night of space. In the beginning, it was said, there had been only one world, a primitive world, and only a few ships, ships which could not, at that time, even traverse galactic space. Then there had been seven worlds, and then others, and others. There seemed no obvious reason why that particular world, a seemingly insignificant world, not particularly endowed with resources, not much different from millions of others, rather than any other, or any world, should have accomplished what it did. Many were the historians who sought, lengthily, unconvincingly, to penetrate the secret of its success.

To be sure, ruthless conquest had been followed by surprising consideration, bewildering the prostrate and subdued, by lenient levies and tributes, by invitations to alliances, in dozens of forms and, in some cases, eventually, and more later than before, in the extension of the citizenship itself. Much was the iron gauntlet of war feared, in all its merciless, bloody weightiness, and rightly so, but when that heavy fist opened, it held, more often than not, to the amazement, gratitude and consternation of the defeated, the branch of tolerance, of friendship. For the most part the ships left behind them not enemies but friends, grateful, loyal allies. To be sure, it was not always so. Some planets were riven to the core, even their tiniest stones atomized; others were ruined, thousands of square latimeasures burned black and desolate; in some entire planetary populations were placed in chains and transported to processing worlds, for shipment to the markets of ten thousand worlds, their world itself then itself reduced to no more than an orbiting cinder, a monitory instruction to passing ships. Such object lessons, dark and obdurate, in their subtle, unspoken delicacy, were not easily ignored. It was speculated that they had their role to play in the programs, the policies, of intergalactic power.

Kneeling in the sand, he watched the ant, the tiny, nine-legged insect, blind, the odd leg like a walking stick poking quickly about before it.

In the myths it was said the claiming stones flowed in meteor rivers as far away as the sunless worlds of Sheol, that they reached even to the lofty halls of Kragon, the long-forgotten god of war.

He watched the insect.

It was having difficulty climbing a small hill, no more than an inch in height. It slipped back, again and again.

Certain it was that they had, only a century ago, extended to the molten deserts of Saritan, first born of the yellow star, Nobius, to the plains of Gurthan, to the seas of Hysporus, to the Odonian forests, even to the remote ice mountains of tiny Durniak 11.

He was, at this point, kneeling docilely in the sand. His limbs were not encircled with bonds.

The ant, or its people, doubtless claimed all the sand within their purview. But there was a great deal of sand on this world, and even in this small provincial arena. How many grains of sand were there in this arena, or on this world? Less than there were galaxies, demonstratively. He had learned that from the teaching of the brothers. They were wise, the brothers. And the shadows of the ships fell upon worlds, and upon galaxies, more than a thousand of them. But there were other worlds, and other galaxies, surely. How vast was the domain of the ant. And how fixed, and eternal, was the Imperium, the Empire, the power of Telnaria! It was the world, or all the worlds which counted, the others not mattering. Oh, there must be other worlds, other galaxies, but they were far away, beyond comprehension, beyond belief, beyond the stones. They did not count. They could not matter. Telnaria was the world, the Empire was fixed, it was of steel, it was eternal, it was civilization. Within it was peace, outside it was nothing.

Not bound, he reached out and, with one finger, furrowed the sand, bemusedly smoothing the way for the small creature. It hurried down the track. It was not thought necessary, generally, incidentally, to bind those who had been raised in the shadow of the festungen, even those from the schizmatic festungen. That was why he was not bound at this time. To be sure, several events might have turned out differently had they not bound him later, had they left him free, as he was now, only within his own bonds, the worst and most terrible bonds, the invisible bonds which had been put on him long ago, bonds he was not, even certain he wore. Then, you see, he might have held himself, for it is quite possible he was weak enough, or strong enough, at that time, to do so. Of course, he might not have held himself. It is hard to know what would have happened. Perhaps it was wise to have had him bound, as was soon done. It is hard to say about such things. It is always difficult to know the future. Even the readers of the mystic tables, the counters of the stars, the casters of the bones knew that. It was hinted that the tables guarded their secrets jealously. Certainly they were hard to read. Few could do so. And surely they spoke darkly, in riddles and paradoxes. And it was whispered by some that the living stars, for all their fiery, savage immensity, knew no more than men, that they, too, for all their size, their ferocity and beauty, were ignorant, or indifferent. And others admitted, in their cups, that at times the bones themselves could do no more than guess. He supposed that the ant, or its people, claimed the square yard of sand about his knees. But did not every wind, every passing foot, expose them to stirrings of a nature beyond their comprehension?

He watched the ant scurry away, its path smoothed. It was the sort of thing the brothers would have wanted. He had wanted to please the brothers. The brothers were kind, and wise. He wanted to please them now, by submitting to death, if not joyfully, for his blood, a foreign blood, found that hard to understand, at least resignedly, as an intellectual matter, in deference to their teaching.

“I should not have made the way smooth for the ant,” he thought. “I should have let it go its own way. I should have let it succeed, or fail, by itself. I should not have interfered. I should not have adjusted its world. It may come to depend on such things. But they cannot be counted on.”

That was a strange thought, for one from a village in the vicinity of a festung.

But such thoughts may come to one sometimes, ancient thoughts, thoughts from lost lakes and caverns, from forgotten fields and forests, from a time when a world was new, strange thoughts,

strange understandings, that cruelty can be kindness, that kindness can be cruelty.

It was at this time that he lifted his head, that he heard the blare of the trumpets.

He has had many names, and in order that we may follow these matters rather as they developed, without anticipating, and understand them rather as men then understood them, we will call him, for the time being, by the name he bore in one of the high places, as a child, ‘Dog,’ to which he had been taken as an infant, by a warrior, or soldier, of the tents of the Heruls. The name of the warrior was Hunlaki.