The Man Who Counts

IX

The northern coast of Lannach sloped in broad valleys to the Sea of Achan; and here, in game-filled forests and on grassy downs, had arisen those thorps in which the Flock’s clans customarily dwelt. Where Sagna Bay made its deep cut into the land, many such hamlets had grown together into larger units. Thus the towns came to be Ulwen and flinty Mannenach and Yo of the Carpenters.

But their doors were broken down and their roofs burned open; Drak’ho canoes lay on Sagna’s beaches, Dark’ho war-bands laired in empty Ulwen and patrolled the Anch Forest and rounded up the hornbeast herds emerging from winter sleep on Duna Brae.

Its boats sunk, its houses taken, and its hunting and fishing grounds cut off, the Flock retired into the uplands. On the quaking lava slopes of Mount Oborch or in the cold canyons of the Misty Mountains, there were a few small settlements where the poorer clans had lived. The females, the very old and the very young could be crowded into these; tents could be pitched and caves occupied. By scouring this gaunt country from Hark Heath to the Ness, and by going often hungry, the whole Flock could stay alive for a while longer.

But the heart of Lannach was the north coast, which the Drak’honai now forbade. Without it, the Flock was nothing, a starveling tribe of savages… until autumn, when Birthtime would leave them altogether helpless.

“It is not well,” said Trolwen inadequately.

He strode up a narrow trail, toward the village — what was its name now? Salmenbrok — which perched on the jagged crest above. Beyond that, dark volcanic rock still streaked with snowfields climbed dizzily upward to a crater hidden in its own vapors. The ground shivered underfoot, just a bit, and van Rijn heard a rumble in the guts of the planet.

Poor isostatic balance… to be expected under these low-density conditions… a geologic history of overly-rapid change, earthquake, eruption, flood, and new lands coughed up from the sea bottom in a mere thousand decades… hence, in spite of all the water, a catastrophically uneven climate — He wrapped the stinking fur blanket they had given him more closely around his rough-coated frame, blew on numbed hands, peered into the damp sky for a glimpse of sun, and swore.

This was no place for a man his age and girth. He should be at home, in his own deeply indented armchair, with a good cigar, a tall drink and the gardens of Jakarta flaming around him. For a moment, the remembrance of Earth was so sharp that he snuffled in self-pity. It was bitter to leave his bones in this nightmare land, when he had thought to pull Earth’s soft green turf about his weary body… Hard and cruel, yes, and every day the company must be getting deeper into the red ink without him there to oversee! That hauled him back to practicalities.

“Let me get this all clear in my head,” he requested. He found himself rather more at home in Lannachamael than he had been — even without faking — in the Drak’ho speech. Here, by chance, the grammar and the guttural noises were not too far from his mother tongue. Already he approached fluency.

“You came back from your migration and found the enemy was here waiting for you?” he continued.

Trolwen jerked his head in a harsh and painful gesture. “Yes. Hitherto we had only known vaguely of their existence; their home regions are well to the southeast of ours. We knew they had been forced to leave because suddenly the trech — the fish which are the mainstay of their diet — had altered their own habits, shifting from Draka waters to Achan. But we had no idea the Fleet was bound for our country.”

Van Rijn’s long hair swished, lank and greasy-black, the careful curls all gone out of it, as he nodded. “It is like home history. In the Middle Ages on Earth, when the herring changed their ways for some begobbled herring reason, it would change the history of maritime countries. Kings would fall, by damn, and wars would be fought over the new fishing grounds.”

“It has never been of great importance to us,” said Trolwen. “A few clans in the Sagna region have… had small dugouts, and got much of their food with hook and line. None of this beast-labor the Drakska go through, dragging those nets, even if they do pull in more fish! But for our folk generally, it was a minor thing. To be sure, we were pleased, several years ago, when the trech appeared in great numbers in the Sea of Achan. It is large and tasty, its oil and bones have many uses. But it was not such an occasion for rejoicing as if oh, as if the wild hornbeasts had doubled their herds overnight.”

His fingers closed convulsively on the handle of his tomahawk. He was, after all, quite young. “Now I see the gods sent the trech to us in anger and mockery. For the Fleet followed the trech.”

Van Rijn paused on the trail, wheezing till he drowned out the distant lava rumbles. “Whoof! Hold it there, you! Not so like a God-forgotten horse race, if you please — Ah. If the fish are not so great for you, why not let the Fleet have the Achan waters?”

It was, he knew, not a true question: only a stimulus. Trolwen delivered himself of several explosive obscenities before answering, “They attacked us the moment we came home this spring. They had already occupied our coastlands! And even had they not done so, would you let a powerful horde of… strangers whose very habits are alien and evil… would you let them dwell at your windowsill? How long could such an arrangement last?”

Van Rijn nodded again. Just suppose a nation with tyrant government and filthy personal lives were to ask for the Moon, on the grounds that they needed it and it was not of large value to Earth -

Personally, he could afford to be tolerant. In many ways, the Drak’honai were closer to the human norm than the Lannachska. Their master-serf culture was a natural consequence of economics: given only neolithic tools, a raft big enough to support several families represented an enormous capital investment. It was simply not possible for disgruntled individuals to strike out on their own; they were at the mercy of the State. In such cases, power always concentrates in the hands of aristocratic warriors and intellectual priesthoods; among the Drak’honai, those two classes had merged into one.

The Lannachska, on the other hand — more typically Diomedean — were primarily hunters. They had very few highly specialized craftsmen; the individual could survive using tools made by himself. The low calorie/area factor of a hunting economy made them spread out thin over a large region, each small group nearly independent of the rest. They exerted themselves in spasms, during the chase for instance; but they did not have to toil day after day until they nearly dropped, as the common netman or oarsman or deckhand must in the Fleet — hence there was no economic justification on Lannach for a class of bosses and overseers.

Thus, their natural political unit was the little matrilineal clan. Such semiformal blood groups, almost free of government, were rather loosely organized into the Great Flock. And the Flock’s raison d’etre — apart from minor inter-sept business at home — was simply to increase the safety of all when every Diomedean on Lannach flew south for the winter.

Or came home to war!

“It is interesting,” murmured Van Rijn, half in Anglic. “Among our peoples, like on most planets, only the agriculture folk got civilized. Here they make no farms at all: the big half-wild hornbeast herds is closest thing, nie? You hunt, berrypick, reap wild grain, fish a little — yet some of you know writing and make books; I see you have machines and houses, and weave cloth. Could be, the every-year stimulus of meeting foreigners in the tropics gives you ideas?”

“What?” asked Trolwen vaguely.

“Nothings. I just wondered, me, why — since life here is easy enough so you have time for making civilization — you do not grow so many you eat up all your game and chop down all your woods. That is what we called a successful civilization back on Earth.”

“Our numbers do not increase fast,” said Trolwen. “About three hundred years ago, a daughter Flock was formed and moved elsewhere, but the increase is very slow. We lose so many on the migrations, you see — storm, exhaustion, sickness, barbarian attack, wild animals, sometimes cold or famine—” He hunched his wings, the Diomedean equivalent of a shrug.

“Ah-ha! Natural selection. Which is all well and good, if nature is obliging to pick you for survival. Otherwise gives awful noises about tragedy.” Van Rijn stroked his goatee. The chins beneath it were getting bristly as his last application of antibeard enzyme wore off. “So. It does give one notion of what made your race get brains. Hibernate or migrate! And if you migrate, then be smart enough to meet all kinds trouble, by damn.”

He resumed his noisy walk up the trail. “But we got our troubles of now to think about, especially since they are too the troubles belonging with Nicholas van Rijn. Which is not to be stood. Hmpf! Well, now, tell me more. I gather the Fleet scrubbed its decks with you and kicked you up here where the only flat country is the map. You want home to the lowlands again. You also want to get rid of the Fleet.”

“We gave them a good fight,” said Trolwen stiffly. “We still can — and will, by my grandmother’s ghost! There were reasons why we were defeated so badly. We came tired and hungry back from ten-days of flight; one is always weak at the end of the springtime journey home. Our strongholds had already been occupied. The Draka flamethrowers set afire such other defenses as we contrived, and made it impossible for us to fight them on the water, where their real strength lies.”

His teeth snapped together in a carnivore reflex. “And we have to overcome them soon! If we don’t we are finished. And they know it!”

“I am not clear over this yet,” admitted Van Rijn. “The hurry is that all your young are born the same time, nie?”

“Yes.” Trolwen topped the rise and waited beneath the walls of Salmenbrok for his puffing guest.

Like all Lannachska settlements, it was fortified against enemies, animal or intelligent. There was no stockade — that would be pointless here where all the higher life-forms had wings. An average building was roughly in the shape of an ancient Terrestrial blockhouse. The ground floor was doorless and had mere slits for windows; entrance was through an upper story or a trap in the thatched roof. A hamlet was fortified not by outer walls but by being woven together with covered bridges and underground passages.

Up here, above timberline, the houses were of undressed stone mortared in place, rather than the logs more common among the valley clans. But this thorp was solidly made, furnished with a degree of comfort that indicated how bountiful the lowlands must be.

Van Rijn took time to admire such features as wooden locks constructed like Chinese puzzles, a wooden lathe set with a cutting edge of painstakingly fractured diamond, and a wooden saw whose teeth were of renewable volcanic glass. A communal windmill ground nuts and wild grain, as well as powering numerous smaller machines; it included a pump which filled a great stone basin in the overhanging cliff with water, and the water could be let down again to keep the mill turning when there was no wind. He even saw a tiny sail-propelled railroad, with wooden-wheeled basketwork carts running on iron-hard wooden rails. It carried flint and obsidian from the local quarries, timber from the forests, dried fish from the coast, furs and herbs from the lowlands, handicrafts from all the island. Van Rijn was delighted.

“So!” he said. “Commerce! Yea-are fundamentally capitalists. Ha, by damn, I think soon we do some business!”

Trolwen shrugged. “There is nearly always a strong wind up here. Why should we not let it take our burdens? Actually, all the apparatus you see took many lifetimes to complete — we’re not like those Drakska, wearing themselves out with labor.”

Salmenbrok’s temporary population crowded about the human, with mumbling and twittering and wing-flapping, the cubs twisting around his legs and their mothers shrieking at them to come back. “Ten thousand purple devils!” he choked. “They think maybe I am a politician to kiss their brats, ha?”

“Come this way,” said Trolwen. “Toward the Males’ Temple — females and young may not follow, they have their own.” He led the way along another path, making an elaborate salute to a small idol in a niche on the trail. From its crudity, the thing had been carved centuries ago. The Flock seemed to have only a rather incoherent polytheism for religion, and not to take that very seriously these days; but it was as strict about ritual and tradition as some classic British regiment — which, in many ways, it resembled.

Van Rijn trudged after, casting a glance behind. The females here looked little different from those in the Fleet: a bit smaller and slimmer than the males, their wings larger but without a fully developed spur. In fact, racially the two folk seemed identical.

And yet, if all that the company’s agents had learned about Diomedes was not pure gibberish, the Drak’honai represented a biological monstrousness. An impossibility!

Trolwen followed the man’s curious gaze, and sighed. “You can notice nearly half our nubile females are expecting their next cub.”

“Hm-m-m. Ja, there is your problem. Let me see if I understand it right. Your young are all born at the fall equinox—”

“Yes. Within a few days of each other; the exceptions are negligible.”

“But it is not so many ten-days thereafter you must leave for the south. Surely a new baby cannot fly?”

“Oh, no. It clings to the mother all the way; it is born with arms able to grasp hard. There is no cub from the preceding year; a nursing female does not get pregnant. Her two-year-old is strong enough to fly the distance, given rest periods in which it rides on someone’s back — though that’s the age group where we suffer the most loss. Three-year-olds and above need only be guided and guarded: their wings are quite adequate.”

“But this makes much trouble for the mother, not so?”

“She is assisted by the half-grown clan members, or the old who are past childbearing but not yet too old to survive the journey. And the males, of course, do all the hunting, scouting, fighting, and so forth.”

“So. You come to the south. I hear told it makes easy to live there, nuts and fruits and fish to scoop from the water. Why do you come back?”

“This is our home,” said Trolwen simply.

After a moment: “And, of course, the tropic islands could never support all the myriads which gather there each midwinter — twice a year, actually. By the time the migrants are ready to leave, they have eaten that country bare.”

“I see. Well, keep on. In the south, at solstice time, is when you rut.”

“Yes. The desire comes on us — but you know what I mean.”

“Of course,” said Van Rijn blandly.

“And there are festivals, and trading with the other tribes… frolic or fight—” The Lannacha sighed. “Enough. Soon after solstice, we return, arriving here sometime before equinox, when the large animals on which we chiefly depend have awoken from their winter sleep and put on a little flesh. There you have the pattern of our lives, Eart’ho.”

“It sounds like fun, if I was not too old and fat.” Van Rijn blew his nose lugubriously. “Do not get old, Trolwen. It is so lonesome. You are lucky, dying on migration when you grow feeble, you do not live wheezy and helpless with nothing but your dear memories, like me.”

“I’m not likely to get old as matters stand now,” said Trolwen.

“When your young are born, all at once in the fall ja,” mused Van Rijn, “I can see how then is time for nothing much but obstetrics. And if you have not food and shelter and such helps all ready, most of the young die—”

“They are replaceable.” said Trolwen, with a degree of casualness that showed he was, after all, not just a man winged and tailed. His tone sharpened. “But the females who bear them are more vital to our strength. A recent mother must be properly rested and fed, you understand, or she will never reach the south — and consider what a part of our total numbers are going to become mothers. It’s a question of the Flock’s survival as a nation! And those filthy Drakska, breeding all the year round like… like fish… No!”

“No indeed,” said Van Rijn. “Best we think of somethings very fast, or I grow very hungry, too.”

“I spent lives to rescue you,” said Trolwen, “because we all hoped you would think of something yourself.”

“Well,” said Van Rijn, “the problem is to get word to my own people at Thursday Landing. Then they come here quick, by damn, and I will tell them to clean up on the Fleet.”

Trolwen smiled. Even allowing for the unhuman shape of his mouth, it was a smile without warmth or humor. “No, no,” he said. “Not that easily. I dare not, cannot spare the folk, or the time and effort, in some crazy attempt to cross The Ocean… not while Drak-’ho has us by the throat. Also — forgive me — how do I know that you will be interested in helping us, once you are able to go home again?”

He looked away from his companion, toward the porticoed cave that was the Males’ Temple. Steam rolled from its mouth, there was the hiss of a geyser within.

“I myself might have decided otherwise,” he added abruptly, in a very low voice. “But I have only limited powers — any plan of mine — the Council — do you see? The Council is suspicious of three wingless monsters. It thinks… we know so little about you… our only sure hold on you is your own desperation… the Council will allow no help to be brought for you until the war is over.”

Van Rijn lifted his shoulders and spread his hands. “Confidential, Trolwen, boy, in their place I would do the same.”