The World Menders

XVI

For the fourteenth time—Farrari was counting them—an ol mouthed the word, speak, and the olz fell prostrate.

Farrari watched from his usual place of concealment. He entered the cave before the olz arrived arid left after they did, and he had explored the enormous room as thoroughly as its gaping chasm permitted and selected his observation post with care. He had witnessed this identical scene from fifteen to forty times on each of six successive nights, and suddenly it occurred to him to ponder—if the olz were indeed pleading with the Dead—what the Dead might answer. He was tempted to speak himself, as an experiment, but he feared that the effect would be somewhat marred if the Dead spoke from the wrong direction.

He waited until the olz departed, and then he lit a torch and made a painstaking examination of the edge of the chasm. At one point tenuous footholds led down to a narrow ledge. Spending a night there would be acutely uncomfortable if not exceedingly dangerous, and he was willing to suffer both in a good cause.

His problem was to think of a good cause.

In his mind he began to sketch out a plan for a new chapter in the IPR Field Manual: RULES TO BE OBSERVED WHEN THE DEAD SPEAK.

Plan message carefully.

Aim at conciseness (lest the Dead appear to be unnaturally longwinded).

Make message portentous (if the Dead stir the dust of silent centuries to discuss the weather, it will seem anticlimatic).

Strive for credibility (as though anyone could know what an ol would consider credible in the way of a message from the Dead).

And what could the Dead possibly say that would in any way alleviate the suffering of the olz? “They might suggest that the afterlife isn’t all that the ol faith implies,” Farrari mused. “Enjoy life while you can; Eternal Contentment is a colossal bore.”

But it was much too late for that. The olz had long since forgotten how to enjoy anything—so much so that the ol language, or what Farrari knew of it, had no word for pleasure.

He climbed the mountain to a point far out of earshot of the village so he could practice making sepulchral sounds, and he quickly satisfied himself that he was in fine voice for forwarding a message from the Dead. But what to say?

Looking out over the valley, he saw the local durrl riding along a lane. His assistants occasionally brought supplies, but he never came near the caretakers’ village himself. Farrari glared after him for a moment and then croaked good-naturedly in Rasczian, “Bring… me… his… head!”

This thought moved him to add one more rule to his list: Make message reinforce belief not contradict it. If the Dead were to preach hatred of the durrlz and demand revenge on them, the olz would be confused and horrified. To conform with the ol religion, the Dead must not order punishment for the durrlz, but a reward.

“And under the ol religion, what is the greatest reward that one can give?” Farrari asked himself.

Death!

The cry, “Speak,” and then silence.

Crouched on his ledge, Farrari spoke one ol word, a generic sound that indicated any of the Rasczian race. Only the quick, shallow breathing of the olz ruffled a silence that seemed interminable. The ceremonies resumed, and at each subsequent invocation of the Dead Farrani patiently inserted his word—and the olz ignored him.

At dawn he crept to his hiding place for a badly needed rest, and then he descended to the village. A few olz were grouped about the fires, others were asleep, and if any thought it worth remarking on that the Dead had at last broken their long silence, they spoke out of Farrari’s hearing. For three more nights he played the role of the Dead; for another three days he prowled the village straining to overhear some reference to it. He heard nothing.

“Very well,” he told himself grimly. “When they arrive at the cave tomorrow night they’ll find a rasc corpse ready for burial and the Dead howling for it, and let’s see if they can ignore that.”

At dusk he set out for the durrl’s headquarters. He’d had a distant view of it from the mountain side—a large dwelling, several smaller ones for assistants and servants, and a ring of stone outbuildings of various sizes encircling them. In the darkness he glided wraithlike among the buildings and came, finally, to one of the smaller dwellings. Looking through a window slit, he saw a touching domestic scene: father and mother at play with two charming children. Shaken, Farrari crept away slowly and fumbled his way back to the zrilm-lined lane.

“Killing a soldier who—given half a chance—will kill me first is one thing,” he muttered. “But killing in the dark just to provide a corpse is murder. And even if I did provide the corpse, what would the olz do with it?”

They would worship it, no matter how loudly the Dead howled. He had been that route before, with Bran. Perhaps the olz wanted to die, perhaps their religion was centered on the worship of death, but the place to study its effects was not among the caretakers, the most extraordinary of all olz. He should do his experimenting at the normal villages. He also should get out of the hilngol and see how the olz lived and behaved elsewhere.

And he could start at once. He had no reason for returning to the caretakers’ village.

A gril brayed. Farrari straightened up thoughtfully. “Riding,” he told himself, “has several obvious advantages over walking, especially when one wants to cover ground quickly. The question is whether a gril sees well enough at night to avoid zrilm hedges, because the results of a highspeed, encounter could range from unpleasant to fatal. There is also the question of what might happen to an ol caught riding a gril in the daytime, and that’s likely to be much more fatal.”

He balanced his urge to be underway against the much better time he could make riding and decided to investigate the problems encountered in gril thievery. He sought the shelter of a zrilm hedge and went to sleep, and shortly before dawn he took up a position behind a gap in the foliage to see what he could learn.

Two of the durrl’s assistants appeared, dim figures in the wasting pre-dawn darkness, and a short time later they were off with narmpfz and a wagon load of the rickety wood stiles. At full dawn the durrl and another assistant rode away on grilz. The first assistants returned, unharnessed the narmpfz, and led them through a narrow gate in the zrilm at the opposite side of the clearing. They reappeared mounted on grilz The chimneys of the various dwellings began to send forth thick outpourings of oily quarm smoke. At midmorning the durrl and all of the assistants returned for a leisurely first meal, their stiles in place, their olz docilely at work, their narmpf rashers crisply toasted, and all right with the world.

Farrari’s thoughts were with the olz left in the fields: the rising sun in a clear sky that foretold a day of relentless heat; the crude, short-handled, stone-tipped tools; the length of a row of tubers as measured with bent knees and back.

He studied the complex of buildings with interest. The largest outbuilding would be a barn for grilz and narmpfz, though the animals obviously remained in their zrilm-enclosed pasture in summer. The other outbuildings would be used for various kinds of storage. He thought it odd that he had never seen a teloid of such a scene. Undoubtedly base had some—IPR was much too thorough to overlook anything this prominent—but none of the specialists had been interested enough to point them out to Farrari. That was another oddity, because the durrl and his establishment were unique. He and his assistants were the only bilingual class in Scorvif.

A sudden awareness of hunger and thirst reminded Farrari that he had not regained the fine edge of his ol conditioning. The durrl’s well was enticingly in sight and hopelessly out of reach. He shrugged off his discomfort and continued to watch.

After the men left again, the women began to spread laundry on drying racks, and Farrari reflected that at some stage in its development every civilization discovered cleanliness. Whether its obeisance was strict or casual, frequent or infrequent, the rites had to be performed by someone. In a majority of civilizations, the principal task of the female was keeping the male clean.

Through much of the morning the children played a quiet game, gravely sitting together in twos and interchanging partners in some complicated pattern, but the changes were performed at a sedate walk, and the talk was too subdued to reach him. He heard no laughter. Finally they took that game or another out of sight behind the buildings.

This was indeed the high holy day of the immaculate god, and as soon as the clothing dried it was taken down and replaced. The uninterrupted outpouring of smoke proclaimed the continuous heating of water. Another column of smoke occupied his attention for a short time, but he soon identified the small building as a smokehouse.

He grew bored, his discomfort increased, and long before dusk he was cursing himself for his stupidity. So distressed was he that when the women racked their final offering of wet clothing in the fading light he at first paid no attention. Then he perceived, dimly, a long row of the cloaks worn by the durrl’s assistants.

“It wouldn’t be healthy for an ol to be caught riding a gril,” he mused, “but why do I have to be an ol?” The hood that protected the wearer from the sun might—almost—hide his low ol forehead.

The day’s work ended, and the two assistants with the creaking wagon load of stiles were the last to appear. As the sound of their talk faded toward the dwellings Farrari crept out and followed them. He drank deeply at the well, sniffed his way into the smokehouse and ate with relish several long shreds of smoked meat, returned to the well, and then cautiously approached the laundry racks.

He found a cloak without difficulty, but he had to search for some time to locate a lower garment, and he quickly abandoned the notion of identifying undergarments in the dark. He folded up one of the lengths of cloth that constituted a woman’s robe. Back at the smokehouse he ripped a piece from it and was using it to make up a package of meat when he thought about boots. Whoever heard of a barefoot durrl’s assistant on a grit? Or anywhere else?

Common sense told him to forget it. He was rested, he had meat to eat, and he knew how to travel safely as an ol. He knew nothing at all about traveling as a durrl’s assistant, he had no plans, he still was uncertain as to where he was going—but he could not resist the alluring opportunity to get there quickly. He dressed himself in the stolen clothing and cautiously circled one of the smaller dwellings.

Again he peeped through a window slit at a touching domestic scene, but this time he was interested only in the master’s feet. Having established that a durrl’s assistant did not wear his riding boots in the house, he continued his search. In an attached shed he happened onto boots, three pair of them, and their pungent odor was reason enough for not wearing them inside. All three pair were several measures too small for him.

He felt both chagrin and alarm. He did not recall that his feet were noticeably larger than those of either rascz or olz. Was it possible that all this time the olz had been referring to him behind his back as big feet?

He moved to the next dwelling, found the shed, found four pair of boots. These were large enough, and he took the pair that seemed, in the dark, to be the most worn, and,, therefore, less likely to be missed. He put on the boots, helped himself to a harness from the peg on an outbuilding where he had seen a durrl assistant hang it, and went to see what might be involved in catching a gril at night.

Five of them came to meet him. He was an eternity in getting the harness strapped into place, and when he finally led his gril away the other followed. He left the gate open so, that it would look as though they had strayed accidentally and headed toward the nearest lane with a procession of grilz.

When he reached it he shooed the other grilz away and mounted. His gril stood motionless, waiting. Cautiously—Farrari well remembered the recklessly dashing grilz of the kru’s couriers—he shook the harness lead, bounced up and down, gently, prodded its sides with his boots, tentatively slapped its flanks. It remained motionless. He spoke certain Rasczian words that had to do with forward motion. Then he recited all the Rasczian profanity he could remember. He pulled the gril’s ears individually and collectively. He dug his heels into its ribs and slapped it smartly. It remained motionless.

Becoming angry, he jerked sharply at its harness, whereupon the gril moved forward. He quickly determined that it could either see ol smell the zrilm, for it kept to the center of the lane and moved at a steady walk. Eventually Farrari would have to learn how to make it go faster, but he would prefer to do this in daylight and in a wider lane.

As the night passed he became more confident. Shortly after dawn he came upon an ol village, but the olz had left for the fields. He watered the gril, and then he drank himself and munched smoked meat while the gril grazed. In daylight he quickly learned to manage it, but by midday the animal had him seriously worried. It would not eat. It grazed when it could, but desultorily, as though seeking something edible and not finding it. He could not bring himself to rob the scant ol stocks of grain, which meant that his movements were to be more limited than he had supposed, and more risky. Each night he would have to rob a durrl.

He rode during the hours when the rascz were unlikely to be about, raided a durrl’s headquarters when he happened upon one, and learned to carry a reserve of grain in strange, tubular grain sacks that were to be found in every durrl’s storage buildings. He also learned that a tall zrilm hedge would harbor both his gril and himself. The olz he saw averted their eyes until he had passed, and he had the good fortune not to encounter a rasc.

After riding south for three days he decided to turn west and cross the valley. The gril was plodding through the darkness, with Farrari half asleep on its back, when suddenly its hooves clicked sharply on stone. Farrari halted, dismounted, and found that he’d discovered a road. He turned the gril south, and at dawn he was moving along a straight, masterfully engineered highway built of the same kind of massive stone blocks he’d seen near Scorv. It was in much better condition than the road near the capital, probably because it had less traffic.

And he had been plodding through all the overgrown back lanes in the valley when he could have been racing along this thoroughfare! If he’d had any place to go, his dimwittedness could have had serious consequences, because he should have known that there’d be a highway. The pass at the head of the hilngol was the most vulnerable leading into Scorvif and the military post there the most important. The rascz were expert military tacticians, and this road certainly had not been built for the convenience of durrlz bringing grain to market.

He urged the gril to a faster pace and began to teach himself how to ride. As day come on he began to meet and overtake a scattering of traffic: military wagons, the rare citizen rasc bound for the garrison town at the head of the valley, a troop of cavalry sweeping along in single file. No one paid any attention to him, and he quickly decided that he was safer on the highway than in the lanes. Strangers were the rule on the highway, but in the back country a strange durrl’s assistant might be required to explain his presence.

He had to leave the highway and search for a durrl’s headquarters when he needed grain, but he made excellent progress. He was far south of Bran’s valley and approaching the lilorr—and beginning to wonder what he would do when he got there—when he found the ol.

He had made a night raid on a durrl’s headquarters and was returning to his gril when he stepped heavily on a quarm log someone had carelessly left in the lane—except that quarm logs did not moan when stepped on. With fumbling fingers he pieced together the story of what had happened: the ol was on a special errand, alone, bringing a heavy basket of seed tubers from the durrl’s headquarters for the morrow’s planting. He had collapsed under the load. A durrl’s assistant would find him at dawn by running a wagon over him, but by then he would be dead.

Farrari returned to his gril and rode slowly along the lane, searching for the flickering light and pungent odor that marked a nightfire. He found one and rode up to the circle of olz gathered for their evening meal. As he abruptly loomed over them they quickly lowered their eyes.

He spoke a single word: “Come!” And turned and rode away.

When he glanced back the entire village was on the move. One ol led the way with a burning quarm branch, and others were lightin branches and joining the procession at regular intervals. The next time Farrari looked back the lane was filled with plodding olz.

He led them to the fallen ol and stood by while some carried him away and others searched the grass for the spilled seedlings. They were headed back to their village, the last of their torches vanishing around a turning in the lane, when Farrari realized that he had not spoken to them a second time.

He sat on his gril looking after them long after their torches had disappeared. He had spoken a single word, “Come!” And the olz followed him without question. The entire vi1lage followed him.

Such was the stuff that revolutions were made on.