The Chronocide Mission

9. ARNE (1)

There were many who confidently relied on Arne to take care of everything—not only in Midlow but throughout the Ten Peerdoms. One-namers everywhere were acquainted with him; peeragers, even those who had never seen him, were aware of his importance.

Only a few people—such as Inskor or Wiltzon—knew him well and had an inkling of how he had become what he was.

He had been a celebrity before he was born. The peer herself came to his naming and chose his name, which she formed by combining the names of Arjov, his father, and Lonne, his mother. Lonne was only seventeen—young for a one-name mother in Midlow. Arjov was beyond the usual age for fatherhood. He had lost his family in a fire when he was still a young man, and he had never been wived again nor wanted to be; but the peer said to him, “Arjov, I won’t command you, but I implore it. My peerdom has need of a son of yours.”

Arjov protested he had no idea how to court a wife at his age, so the peer did it for him, choosing Lonne, already a master weaver despite her youth, a pretty, intelligent girl who was liked by everyone. The son of Arjov, the peer’s first server, was the most favored one-name child in the Ten Peerdoms, just as his father was the most favored and highest ranking one-name adult. The position of first server had been invented for Arjov. The office was unknown elsewhere because no other peerdom had a one-namer capable of filling it.

Other children envied Arne—and Arne envied them their freedom to be children. One of the earliest lessons his father taught him concerned the high price that must be paid for favoritism and rank. These might be given freely, sometimes even ceremoniously, but after that they had to be earned, over and over.

From infancy, Arne was trained and educated to succeed his father. While other children were still at play, he was sternly put to his lessons by Wiltzon the schooler. Later he worked among the prentices of all of the crafters in turn.

He was only four years old when he learned the transcendent importance of his name—his one-name. West Road was being extended to the peerdom border to link up with a road the Peer of Weslon was building. In Weslon this road was called East Road, a contradiction the four-year-old boy found delightful. His father went to inspect the work force and took Arne along. It was the boy’s first close look at no-namers and their lashers.

To a four-year-old boy, the lashers looked enormous. When his father questioned crew chiefs about the work or gave them instructions, his slender frame looked so fragile beside their hefty bodies that Arne feared for his safety. But the lashers treated Arjov with immense respect, answered his questions, listened to what he said, and then, if it concerned something that needed doing, took their no-namers and did it. The no-namers plodded about their work, never tiring, never hurrying, and carved a road through the forest with brute strength and the few tools they knew how to use.

At frequent intervals, often for no apparent reason, the no-namers were lashed. A flick of the wrist, and the multi-stranded tips of the lashers’ strange whips raked a no-namer’s back, leaving a tangled network of fine lines that oozed blood. All of their backs had the viciousness of a brutal age delineated on them in scar tissue. They paid so little attention to this cruelty that Arne wondered whether they actually felt the whip at all. They certainly were incapable of thought.

Arne, who delighted in his own ability to think, was both perplexed and bewildered by this sudden encounter with non-thinking. Set to clearing tree sprouts, a no-namer would impassively jerk up one after the other until he chanced to grip a young tree too large to be pulled up by hand. He would haul on it futilely until a lasher came and, with strokes of a whip, redirected his attention to the sprouts. Then he would work until another young tree stood in his way, to be hauled at brainlessly. One no-namer attempted to pull up a tree with a trunk twelve centimeters in diameter.

The alert four-year-old wanted to know why.

“They have no minds,” Arjov said. “They can’t think for themselves, so someone must impress thoughts on them with whips.”

Arne stared up at his father with immense puzzlement. “Why do they have no minds?” he asked.

His father grinned down at him and ruffled his hair. “Aha. Do they have no minds because they are slaves, or are they slaves because they have no minds? Once long ago people worried about questions like that. Wiltzon can tell you about it. Now we struggle to keep the little knowledge we have left, and we can’t afford the time to play games with words.”

Arne’s face puckered with concern over these humans who had no minds. He wanted to know who and what and why they were and where they came from.

“They are the nameless ones.” Arjov said. “The work-humans. To the peeragers, they are just another species of animal—to be bred and trained and made use of in the most effective way possible. I suspect their life fire is the same as ours, but for some reason it doesn’t burn purely. Lashers are the numbered ones. They also are nameless, but every lasher has his own number, and they are different in other ways. They have minds of a sort, but I have always considered them far more bestial than the no-namers. Lashers practice cruelty as a workcraft. They exult in it. No animal does such a thing, and no man’s humanity can long survive that. We one-namers never speak to a lasher unless we have to.”

After that first journey, Arne frequently accompanied his father on travels about the peerdom. Wherever they went, he saw no-namers laboriously plodding through the sike with lashers expertly inscribing each day’s history on their bare backs. In Plao, the season of planting, they worked the peerdom’s farms, pulling plow and cultivation frames. In Gero, the warm season of growth, the cultivation continued, but they also worked on roads and cleared new land for farming. In Haro, the season of harvesting, they helped to gather crops. During Reso, the cold season when the land rested, the no-namers did not. Whatever rough work was needed, whenever it was needed, they did it. They dug drainage ditches, built roads, and cleared fields. They hauled rock and leveled ground. They cut ice and hauled it to deep storage where it would be available for peeragers’ hot weather refreshment. Throughout the sike they did everything that brute strength and a dead mind could handle, always with lashers standing by and flicking their whips.

The sight of them affected Arne strangely. In the Peerdom of Midlow, no-namers and lashers came from the same racial stock as the one-namers. They possessed taller, more robust bodies—the result of generations of selective breeding over the same period of time that one-namers were developing their minds and dexterity—but their appearances were similar. A no-namer seemed to feel nothing at all when a lash flecked his back, but Arne did. Arne felt the pain intensely.

The no-namers, men and women, were slaves; the lashers were their masters, and lashers also furnished peeragers with their guards and the peerdom with its army if it had one. Both lashers and no-namers were fathered on no-name women by lashers. All of the female no-namers were breeding stock. They were bred at the earliest possible age and kept pregnant throughout their short adult lives. They tended to die young, usually in childbirth. Med servers selected the larger, healthier, stronger male children to be brought up as lashers; the other males began their lives of slavery as soon as they were able to do useful work.

Arne experienced a lashing himself at a young age, and that intensified his concern for the no-namers. It happened the same year his father began to take him traveling. They went together to visit the peer. Arne had seen her before as a lofty, inaccessible figure surrounded by one-name servers and other peeragers. On this day his father’s visit was informal, and the peer received them in her private lodge with only her own family present.

It was a revelation to Arne. The peer, her consort, and her children looked no different from his father and himself except for fancy clothing that even he could see was unsuitable for any kind of work—but of course he had never seen a peerager working. He wondered if their clothing could be the reason. The only other differences he could discover were that peeragers lived in ornate dwellings surrounded by gardens and had servers standing by anxiously to wait on them. Arne’s mind gave another turn to the riddle his father had posed concerning no-namers: Were peeragers elevated above ordinary humans like his father and himself because they were somehow special, or were they special only because they were peeragers?

It was the peer’s second daughter who introduced Arne to the lash. She was far, far prettier than her older sister, the prince. He thought her a marvelous creature, so soft-looking in her long, frothy dress, so unlike the little one-name girls he knew who wore plain, practical clothing and had hands already roughened by work. She floated over the ground in a way that reminded him of the tales elderly persons told about angels that flew through the air. He wondered whether this second daughter of the peer was an angel.

While he sat waiting for his father, she invited him to play with her. He trailed after her in mute ecstasy, and she led him across the palace grounds to a small, secluded glade. His euphoria vanished when she produced a whip. “You are a no-namer,” she announced. “I am going to whip you.”

“I am not!” Arne protested indignantly.

“You are because I said so, and I am a peerling. If you don’t let me, my mother will send a lasher to do it.”

She began to lash him. Fortunately it was not a real whip but only one she had fashioned for herself with pieces of string. Even so, its strokes stung severely when his bare arms and face were touched, and Arne didn’t know what to do about it. He could only stand, smouldering with anger, and receive the blows, for a one-namer could not lift a hand against a peerager.

There was no telling how it might have ended had not the peer’s eldest daughter chanced to see what was happening. She ran for her mother, and the peer herself administered a different kind of lashing to her second daughter—with the flat of her bare hand. Arne was permitted to watch, and the girl glared venomously at him all the time the punishment was being inflicted.

“Too bad,” Arne’s father said afterward. “I am afraid the peer has made you a lifelong enemy. Never mind, it wasn’t your fault. There was nothing else you could have done. That second daughter has a vicious temperament, and she seems fated to be everyone’s enemy. Probably it doesn’t matter. Second daughters of peers aren’t very important.”

But a few years later the eldest daughter, an intelligent girl very like her mother, died of an illness, and the second daughter became Prince of Midlow and its future peer. The fact that she hated all one-namers and had spent her childhood pretending they were no-namers began to matter a great deal.

Arne never again mistook her identity. She definitely was not an angel; she much more closely resembled another strange being from the tales of the elderly, a devil.

Arne continued to work with the prentices of one crafter after another. When he had a solid grounding in every craft practiced in Midlow, he went through the entire cycle again. He was not expected to perform any of the crafts well, though his father urged him to become as proficient as possible. His object was to learn as much as he could about their problems and techniques. Evenings he continued his studies with Wiltzon. He also traveled with his father whenever Arjov thought the experience would be useful to him.

He puzzled over his father’s “work.” Arjov never seemed to do anything, but he always knew what had to be done, and how to do it, and he was able to tell others. Arne gradually came to realize his father was as unique as the peer, and that it was Arjov’s own unusual abilities that made the position of first server possible.

Suddenly his father grew old. Overniot, or so it seemed to Arne, Arjov’s hair turned white and he was unable to move about easily. More and more frequently, Arne was sent to perform his father’s work. He inspected buildings or bridges or roads requiring repairs and decided what must be done, and how to do it, and what tools or supplies were needed. Then he requisitioned crews of no-namers, or he appointed eligible one-namers to tasks that no-namers could not perform, carefully entering their names and work credits in his father’s ledger. Every adult one-namer owed a sikely debt in work credits to the peer.

One-namers were permitted to drive a wagon when their work required it, but they were forbidden to ride a horse or travel in a carriage without a special pass signed by every peerager on the peer’s council. The peer pooh-poohed that and sent his father a two-wheeled carriage and a team of horses. For a time Arjov traveled freely wherever the roads could take him, and Arne went with him; but soon the old man became too weak to ride in the carriage. Arne was the peer’s first server in all but the title before he was fifteen, with his father—now an invalid—advising him when he was able.

Arne had known about the hiding places from infancy because there was one in his own home. From time to time strangers visited Midd Village, arriving and leaving by darkness and sometimes resting there for a few daez. Several of the dwellings on High Street, the street at the top of the village, had secret rooms designed to accommodate such visitors. The dwellings were connected by underground passages, and concealed doors in their garden walls provided escape routes into the thick forest that grew just above the village.

Arne didn’t learn about the League of One-Namers until he began to act as his father’s assistant and had to meet with these mysterious visitors himself. Most of them were League messengers, and he knew without being told that the momentous secret they represented must be guarded with his life and never mentioned.

Visitors of a different sort passed through the village once or twice a sike. Sometimes there were families among them with young children. When they left, the villagers gave what they could from their surpluses to replenish the travelers’ supplies. Sometimes one or two families from Arne’s village—inconspicuous families that were unlikely to be missed—left with them. They were never mentioned again.

Arne’s father died when he was sixteen. The peer and all of her wardens attended his burying, and the following day she invited Arne to Midlow Court. In a lengthy, impressive ceremony, she invested him as peer’s first server. He felt far too young for such a responsibility, but the peer gave him her full confidence and promise of support, and the other peeragers—all except the prince—seemed friendly. The prince looked more beautiful than ever with her long, flowing blond hair, but throughout the ceremony she glowered at him as spitefully as she had on that fateful day when she lashed him.

Arne returned to the village, to the one dwelling that could ever seem like home to him, and found it empty. His father was dead; his mother had moved out. It was her simple but decisive way of informing him that he was now a man, with a man’s responsibilities, and even though he was young for it, it was time for him to be wived, to chose a mate and rear his own family. As for her, she was still young enough to make a new life for herself. Within a few monts she was wiving Kellan, a woodworker whose wife had died of an illness, and though she continued to visit Arne almost daily, she soon had another child to occupy her.

Arne buried his sorrow and loneliness in work. The responsibilities were overwhelming despite his thorough prenticeship, and his workload was staggering. He had to know where everyone was, and what everyone was doing, and why. He had to know what needed to be done today, and tomorrow, and a tenite hence, and—planning ahead—next esun, next sike, and the one after that. He had to know what to do in emergencies.

That was only the beginning. He had to tell people what to do and when to do it, and often he had to explain how to do it and why. Then he had to see that it was done. Without his father to remind him, he had to know that planking must be sawed now and put in the kiln for next Reso’s bridge repairs, or that the growing herd of cattle would require an increase in silage capacity, or that it was time for the annual inspection of window panes at the palace, or that servers of the no-name warden, the peerager in charge of no-namers, should be reminded to send work crews to plow the village garden plots for planting.

The villagers were slow to extend to Arne the trust in which they had held his father. Many refused to believe he deserved his high position. Some felt he had been favored because of his father; others, that the peer appointed him because he had promised to place the interests of peeragers above those of his own kind. Arne knew his career might depend on how he handled the first crisis he had to face. In the meantime, he tried to be himself and do his work as well as he could.

The test came early. A long-standing dream of adult one-namers throughout the Ten Peerdoms became known to Arne only when it ended in catastrophe. The families that left the village in the dead of niot were headed westward to a new peerdom beyond the reach of peers and lashers—a peerdom of one-namers, a peerdom where they could manage their own affairs, educate their children, and guarantee a full measure of freedom to all.

Weslon scouts, one-namers themselves, sometimes ranged far into the wilds beyond the Weslon frontier. On one such trek they found an easily defended, fertile valley, and over the years one-namers who could slip away without being missed made the secret journey westward, a few couples, a few families at a time with whatever they could take with them. The community seemed to be thriving. It held the promise of a place of refuge for all one-namers, and a strong one-name peerdom could have imposed a measure of control on those peers given to periodic persecutions of their one-name subjects.

That dream of a more secure future was shattered by an exhausted messenger who awakened Arne in the dead of night and sobbed out his dreadful news. A marauding band of lashers had caught the new community by surprise and inflicted an orgy of rape, arson, murder and pillage on it. The survivors were starving.

Arne took charge of the rescue efforts. He juggled his accounts to make food available, and he invented errands to cover the absence of those he sent westward to assist the fugitives. The new settlement’s survivors were brought back to the Ten Peerdoms and distributed among one-name villages from Weslon to Easlon. By the time they were settled in their new homes, one-namers of all ten peerdoms knew they could rely on Arne as they had on his father, but their dreams of security in the west were gone forever.

Arne handled problem of Egarn with the same tireless efficiency. He brought Egarn, Roszt, and Kaynor to Midlow, found a secure place for Egarn to work, helped him scrounge through Midlow’s ancient ruins for materials he needed, and took complete charge of supplying him and his helpers with food, clothing, and outside support.

He selected Egarn’s guards and assistants from one-name refugees who were drifting into the Ten Peerdoms in increasing numbers. All of them had been crafters, and between them they possessed the skills to do or make almost anything Egarn needed. Arne preferred them to the local one-namers. No one was likely to miss them, and they were happy to have a place to stay and a meaningful occupation. They didn’t understand what Egarn was doing, but they knew that he, like them, was a refugee, and that he was working for the mysterious destruction of the Peer of Lant and her armies. Assisting him gave them an opportunity to strike a blow of their own, however small and indirect, at the evil force that had wrecked their lives.

The group was so self-contained that apart from Arne, no more than three residents of Midd Villager knew the secret workroom existed. One of them was Marof, who who had been Arjov’s personal server and now served Arne in the same way. Because he was accountable to no one but Arne, he was available for outside errands or whatever additional help was needed at the ruins. Another was Wiltzon the schooler, who visited the workroom as often as he could and helped as much as he could. He was as fascinated as any historian would have been with the opportunity to watch history while it was happening. The third was Gevis, Wiltzon’s young assistant schooler.

One-namers had a strongly ingrained ethic concerning the secrecy of one-name affairs. They grew up knowing that the stranger occasionally glimpsed in their midst was never to be mentioned. Those who chanced to see Roszt or Kaynor on a visit to the schooler, or one of Egarn’s helpers sent to Arne with a message, forgot about it without really noticing it. No one had ever spoken to anyone about such a thing until now. That was why the presence of a spy in the village was so alarming.

Egarn’s revelations about the Honsun Len had troubled Arne severely. Obviously something should be done to prevent the cruel brain damage to no-namers, but he had no idea what it might be. It would take sikes to rear a generation of no-name babies with normal brains, and a tremendous program of deception to keep the project secret, and Arne feared the Ten Peerdoms’ time was running out.

Time was running even faster in the Peerdom of Midlow. Shortly after Egarn’s arrival, the peer had been stricken. Her health grew steadily worse, and for days at a time she was incapacitated both physically and mentally. This made no difference to Egarn’s work. The peer would not have been told the Great Secret in any case, and Arne obtained more by craft than she could have bestowed on them even if she had favored Egarn’s project.

The peer’s failing health diminished the significance of distant events in Lant and even those closer at hand in Weslon. While she lay dying, the prince hovered in the background like a storm about to happen. One-namers had long been aware of her intention to reduce them to slavery and transform Midlow into a tyranny. It was not merely their independence as free crafters that was threatened but their survival.

Now the storm had arrived—sooner than anyone anticipated and with the peer still living. The prince was behaving as though the power of the peerage was already hers. She hadn’t merely disobeyed her mother; she had defied her, and the peer’s own power to rule trembled in the balance. If she failed to act quickly, the prince might depose her.

Whatever the peer decided to do, the peerdom’s one-namers would lose. The prince would exact full retribution from them the moment her mother died. A revolt seemed inevitable to Arne—but so was an outside invasion, either by Lant or by some unknown force. An invasion might make the prince an ally of her one-namers while it lasted. Temporarily they would need each other. Arne wondered which would come first. Either way, the future held nothing but conflict and bloodshed.

Arne hadn’t yet made up his mind about Egarn’s plan— whether it would work, whether it would be a wise thing to do in any case. It was difficult to calmly review human history and make decisions about it when one’s own fragile world was about to crash in ruin, but he continued to support Egarn because he could think of no alternative.

To the young Arne, as to the old Egarn, it seemed that there had never been a better time and place for a conspiracy to save humanity.