The World Wreckers (5 page)

thrown stones on the airstrip at Arilinn.

And there wasn't a thing he could do about it.

Far to the east of Trade cities and Terrans, the Kilghard Hills rise high, and beyond them the Hyades and the Hellers; layer on layer of mountain ridges, where men and nonmen live in the deep wooded slopes.

A man afoot could travel for months or live a lifetime, and never come to the end of the woods or the

ranges.

A gray and rainy dawn was breaking over a morning of disaster as a group of men, wrapped in tattered,

cut and smoke-scorched furs, dragged themselves downhill toward the ruins of a village. The walls of a

stone house still stood, rain-drenched and stark white, the blackened remnants of a dozen flattened

wooden houses around it. Toward this still-standing shelter they made their way.

Behind them, three miles of forest lay, a blackened horror with wisps of smoke still rising in the rain and sleet. As they came under the roof, sighing and staggering, with exhaustion, one of the men lowered the

half-burnt carcass of a deer to the floor. He motioned with his head and a worn-looking woman in a

smoke-damaged fur smock and cape came to heft it. He said wearily, "Better cook what's left of it before it spoils. Little enough meat we'll taste this winter now."

The woman nodded. She looked too tired to speak. On the floor at the far end of the stone-walled room,

a dozen young children were sleeping on furs and an odd assortment of cushions and old clothes. Some

of them raised their heads curiously as the men came in and carefully shut out the drafts, but none of

them cried out. They had all seen too much in the past two weeks.

The woman asked, "Was anything saved?"

"Half a dozen houses at the edge of Greyleaf Town. We'll be living four families to the house, but we won't freeze. There isn't a roof standing in the Naderling Forest, though."

The woman shut her eyes spasmodically and turned away. One of the men said to another, "Our

grandsire is dead, Marilla. No, he wasn't caught by fire; he
would
take a pick with the rest on the fire lines, even though I begged him not; said I'd do his share and mine. But his heart gave out and he fell

dead as he ate his supper."

The woman, hardly more than a girl, began to cry quietly. She went and picked up one of the smallest

children and automatically put it to her breast, her silent tears dropping on the small fuzzy head.

An older woman, long gray hair straggling in wisps around her face, looking as if she had been roused

from sleep three days ago and had not had a moment since to wash or comb her hair, as was in fact the

case, came and took a long spoon from a rack by the fireplace. She began ladling a rough nut porridge

into wooden bowls and handing it to the men, who dropped down and began to eat quietly. There was no

sound in the room except the sobs of the young woman and the sighs of exhausted men. A child

whimpered, sleeping, and murmured for its mother. Outside the sleet battered the wooden shutters with

an incessant hissing sound.

It was like an explosion in the quiet room when someone began to hammer on the door, with blows like

gunfire, and shouting outside. Two of the smallest children woke and began to wail with terror.

One of the men, older than the rest and with an indefinite air of command, went to the door and flung it

part way open. He demanded, "In the name of all the gods, what is this racket? After eight days of fire fighting, haven't we earned a breakfast's worth of rest?"

"You'll be glad to leave your breakfast when you hear what we have here," said the man rattling the door. His face was grim and smoke stained, eyebrows burnt away and one hand in a bandage. He jerked

a head over his shoulder. "Bring the
bre'suin
here."

Two men behind him thrust forward a struggling man in nondescript clothing, much burnt, cut,

scratched and bleeding from a dozen wounds that looked like thorn scratches. The man holding the door

open glanced quickly back at the women and children inside and thrust the door shut, but some of the

men eating breakfast put down their bowls and came crowding out. They were mostly silent, waiting

grimly to know what this was all about.

One, of the men holding the stranger said, "Father, we caught him setting light to a pile of resin-

branches at the edge of Greyleaf Forest, not four miles away. He had piled the thing like a beacon, to

blaze and catch living wood. We had an hour's work to put it out, but we stopped it—and brought
this

here to you!"

"But in the name of Sharra and all the gods at once," said the older man, staring in disbelief and horror at their prisoner, "Is the man mad? Is he crackbrained? You—what's your name?"

The prisoner did not answer, simply increased his struggles. One of his captors said roughly, "You hold still or I'll kick your ribs clear through your backbone," but he seemed not to understand, and went on madly struggling until the two men holding him kicked him quietly and methodically into

unconsciousness.

The Darkovans stared at the man on the ground, almost without believing what they had seen and heard.

In the mountains of Darkover, the only threat which will unite the fiercely anarchistic little tribes and families, riddled with blood-feud and independence, is the universal threat of forest fire. The man who

breaks the fire-truce is outlawed even from his own fireside and his mother's table. The story of Narsin, who a hundred years ago in the Kilghard Hills met his father's blood-foe on the fire line and slew him,

and was in turn hacked apart by his own brothers for breaking the fire-truce, exists in a dozen ballad

versions. The idea that a man would deliberately set a living tree ablaze was as inconceivable as the

thought of serving a festival feast of children's flesh. They stared at him and some of them made

surreptitious signs against ill-luck or madness.

The older man, an elder in the burnt out village, said in an undertone, "The women mustn't see this.

They've been through enough. Somebody get a rope."

Someone asked, "Shouldn't we try to ask him a few questions; find out why he did this?"

"Asking questions of a madman—what for? Ask the river why it floods, or the snow why it hides the

sun," one of them said; and another, "A man mad enough to set a blaze would be too mad to tell us why."

The village elder said quietly, "Any chance this is a Terran? I've heard that they do mad things."

One of the young men, one who had told the girl Marilla of their grandfather's death, said, "I've been in the Trade City, Father, and seen the Terrans when they were on Alton lands, years ago. Mad they may

be, but not like that. They have given us farseeing eye lenses, and news of new things,
chemicals
," he used the Terran Empire word, "to smother fires. They would not set a forest to burn."

"That's true," murmured one; and, "Yes. Remember when the lower Carrial Ridge burned and men came from the Trade City to help us put it out, flew here in an airship to help us."

"Not the Terrans, then," the older man said. He repeated, "Get a rope—and don't say a word to the women."

By the time the sun broke over the lower ridge, red and dripping with cloud and fog like a weeping

cyclops' eye, the man had ceased to struggle and hung limp like a black flag above the dead forest.

The villagers, breathing easier and thinking that now, perhaps, the rash of terrifying fires would cease, had no way of knowing, in the widely scattered and wild mountains, that in the thousands of miles of

forests this scene, or something very like it, had been repeated at least a dozen times in the last year.

No one knew that except the woman who called herself Andrea Closson.

"Darkover. It's a damned funny place, you know. We hold scraps of it, by compact, for trade, just as we do with planets all over the galaxy. You know the routine. We leave the governments alone. Usually,

after the people of the various worlds have seen our technologies, they start to get tired of living under hierarchies or monarchies and demand to come into the Empire of their own accord. It's almost a

mathematical formula. You can predict the thing. But Darkover doesn't. We don't quite know why, but

they say we just don't have a thing they want…"

Disgruntled Terran Empire Legate, repeating a common complaint of politicians on Darkover.

"You are to house and feed them with the best and treat them well," Danilo Syrtis repeated to the small crowd of swart mountain Darkovans. He indicated the four Terrans, uniformed with the dress of

Spaceforce. He ignored the protest he could sense and added, "It is the will of Hastur, and—" he made a ritualistic gesture, seizing the handle of his small dagger, and said, "I am authorized to say to you: an insult to one of these men will be avenged as an insult to Regis Hastur's own self."

"
Vai dom,
Syrtis; need we see the Compact outraged at our own firesides?" asked one man, and Danilo flushed and said, "No." He told the Terrans, "You won't need your weapons. Better give them to me."

One after another, reluctantly, the men surrendered their regulation shockers and Danilo turned them

over to a green and black Darkovan City Guard official, saying, "Keep them in bond until we return."

He walked, head lowered, back toward the Arilinn Tower which rose at the edge of the small airstrip.

Regis was waiting for him there, with their cousin, Lerrys Ridenow—tall, red-headed, saturnine, a man

in his early forties, long-faced and looking cynical. Lerrys gave Danilo a casual cousinly greeting, kissed Regis on the cheek, and said, "So you made it here. I thought you'd stay in your snug nest in the Terran Zone, like a worm in a bale of silk."

"More like a rabbit trapped by a weasel in his own hole," Regis said, and followed Lerrys into the Tower. He thought he had never felt such relief in his life. Inside here, at least, nothing could touch him, and he need not fear what would happen to his world or his family if an assassin's knife or bullet found

his heart. Lerrys asked, "Is it true, then? That they hold you prisoner in the Terran Zone? We heard that rumor and I told them even the Terrans could not keep you, even by force, against your own will. Have

they some new weapon against you, then?"

"No, I asked for the guard," Regis said, and took a drink from Danilo's hand. "Thanks, this is welcome.

What, not going to taste it for poison?"

Danilo looked stricken and grabbed it from Regis' hand with a look of horror. Regis struck his arm

down, laughing. "I was joking, pudding brain. Dani, I must laugh at all this or I'd curl up my toes and play dead!"

"It doesn't seem much to laugh at," said a man from the corner of the room, "that you have to treat your captors as honored guests, just to save your miserable life a little longer, Regis."

"Let him alone," Lerrys said, "and a truce to all this, Rannirl. He's had enough trouble, and he's out there on the firing line. Your neck is so worthless no one cares to set a price on it. I'm sorry, Regis, I started all this, and I only meant to ask: is it that bad in Thendara now?"

Danilo answered for him: "It's worse than you can imagine, but it isn't the Terrans doing it."

"But Spaceforce men
here?
In uniform, with shockers?"

"They're not bad people," said Regis wearily. "Think how easy it would be for them, to sit back and let someone murder us all, one by one? And it must take a special kind of heroism. They volunteered, all

four, to come here, even though they knew they'd be mocked, insulted and reviled for guarding someone

whose life doesn't matter a straw to them, personally. I can admire them sometimes."

"We all know that," Lerrys said, "I can too; I wanted to make compact with Terra years ago, myself. But I thought it was the Hasturs who were against it."

"We were and are," said Regis patiently. "And you know it as well as I do, all of you." He looked around the room: a large old room, hung with draperies in the ancient style of Darkover, paneled with

translucent light. He let his eyes move in brief greeting to the half dozen young men, and as many more

women, gathered there, most of them red-headed, Darkovan aristocrats of the telepath caste; minor

nobles all. "I came at your bidding, but why did you send for me?"

"I did that," said Danvan of Hastur, rising from where he sat and coming toward Regis, who rose and went down on one knee in the old formal gesture. The old man put his hands on his grandson's

shoulders, where they lingered a moment in deep affection. He said, "I wouldn't let them make any

decision without calling you in, Regis."

Regis met his grandfather's eyes and felt a little shock of dread. The old man looked so tired now, and so frail. He thought:
from childhood I leaned on his strength, we all did; now he is failing day by day and I
must be the rock on which my people can lean
—
and I myself stand on quicksand!

"Is it something new, Grandfather?" He rose, and the old man said, "Not very new; the same old thing; I dealt with it myself, with the help of Kennard and a Comyn Council, twenty years ago. The same old

thing—a clamor for Terran mining, manufacturing, investments, you name it. The usual people who see

only profit and forget the side effects of an industrialized world. But now there is something new, and I swear by Cassilda that I don't know what to say to them. We can deal with greed. But this—we may

have no choice but to ask for help from the Empire, Regis."

This from his grandfather, who had been the prime mover in the long struggle to keep Darkover clear of

the Terran Empire, struck a surge of ice to the young man's heart. But he tried to speak with calm.

"Let's go down, then, and listen to what they have to say to us."