The Avengers of Carrig (11 page)

Since his arrival at the sanctuary, Saikmar had tried to act always with dignity, to behave as befitted the status of one who would now belong to the ruling clan in Carrig had he not been cheated of his rights. He had done his best to adopt a grave, mature manner modeled on that of his uncle, Sir Malan, and the—late—Sir Bavis Knole.

The excitement of first sighting, then befriending, the parradile had slashed through the veneer and exposed his true underlying nature. He was, after all, barely more than a youth and stranded without friends in an inhospitable wilderness.

Consequently, he was literally gaping when the girl sheltering under the parradile’s wing awoke with a start and sat up.

At first he had thought wildly that she must be dead—that the parradile was showing him the body as a warning, or even as an indication that it was supplied with food. There was such a corpselike look about the clothing she wore, a heavy, dull metallic garment with a big belt and a casque or hood or helmet topping it. Indeed it was not until she spoke to him that he realized her sex, so completely did it disguise her figure.

Her voice was hoarse, but pleasant. She said something first in a language he did not know, then caught herself as though dazed but recovering rapidly, and addressed him in the ordinary Carrig tongue.

“Who are you? And what’s this creature that brought me to the cave?”

Straining his eyes, Saikmar tried to discern her features through the curious transparent membrane that fronted her helmet—without success. He said, “I am Saikmar son of Corrie of the Clan Twywit in Carrig, dwelling in asylum at the sanctuary here. And this creature whose nest you share is a noble beast, a parradile.”

She gave a slow, thoughtful nod. Beside her, its wing still raised, the parradile turned its head on its flexible neck
and snuffed at her. Then it glanced back at Saikmar, seeming expectant.

“And you?” Saikmar demanded.

The girl shook her head helplessly. “I—I? …”

“What happened to you? How did you come here?”

“I—do not remember clearly. I have been faint.”

Saikmar stood gazing at her in wonder. If only the parradile could talk, he thought. What was the meaning of all this? Clearly the parradile must have brought the girl here, for all day until now the blizzard had been too thick for anyone to risk clambering along the ledges he himself had found to be the only route for access; one had to see clearly every hand—and foothold. And it had done so with some gentleness, moreover—there was not a mark on her, though one stab of those great talons could have transfixed her instantly. But if it had rescued her from the snows, that implied other questions. What was she doing here, wandering alone? Why was she so strangely clad? Could the parradile have brought her from far to the south where it had roved on its expeditions to gather material for its nest? He had never heard of such a thing. Parradiles had been accused of making off with children and young graats, but such tales always placed the event in “another country,” and it was a far cry from that, anyhow, to carrying away an adult …

With the wind howling at his back and the threat of imminent darkness, however, he dared not spare the time for questions. He said, “I must guide you to the sanctuary and find warmth and food for you. Are you well enough to move?”

She rose cautiously, first to her knees, then to her feet. She was nearly as tall as Saikmar himself. Having flexed all her joints and stretched a little, she said, “I’m weak, but the rest has done me good. I think I’ll be all right. Is there still a storm outside?”

“There was much snow earlier, but now the sky is clear. We must go quickly, though. Night will soon be upon us.”

Moving cautiously, she freed her feet from the tangled mass of the parradile’s nest and walked to the mouth of the cave. Looking down, she pointed at the shining dome of the sanctuary.

“Is that where we must go?”

“Yes,” Saikmar agreed. “The way is difficult, but you must come with me now or not at all. Today they are building the snow-wall across the sanctuary door, to seal it for the winter. There is no room on the face of this cliff for two to go together; I shall have to guide you and show you where to cling and where to step.”

The girl made no reply, but went on studying the cliff-face. Saikmar could not blame her for hesitating. The storm earlier had laid snow like whitewash across the rocks, and in the failing daylight it was scarcely possible to see any ledges or crevices at all.

He was still pondering what encouragement he could offer—or indeed, whether he should attempt to persuade her to the sanctuary after all: might she not be an emissary of the gods?—when there was a grunting and heaving from behind him and the parradile pushed its way out of the nest. It came to join them on the ledge; there was barely room for the three of them, and the creature’s huge shoulder crowded against Saikmar’s.

Almost he could have sworn that the darting gestures it was making with its head, jabbing through the air toward the sanctuary, were asking a question:
Is that where you want to go…?

Abruptly the parradile seemed to lose patience. Its wings slapped out to their full span and beat the air like thunder. Startled, nearly knocked off-balance, Saikmar pressed back against the rocky wall. Treading air as a swimmer treads water, the parradile turned ten feet from the ledge and swooped toward him, its pinions fetching it up short like air-brakes as its talons snatched at his arms.

And he was being carried like a doll over the rocky scree below.

The flight was so brief that he was too astonished to cry out; as he was gathering a deep breath to do so, he found himself deposited on level ground not far from the sanctuary, and the parradile was soaring back up the face of the cliff to fetch the girl also. Poised on one knee in the snow, Saikmar stared in amazement tinged with admiration. For it took courage to act as the girl was acting—to step to the absolute brink of the ledge before the cave and cast herself backward into the talons’ grip.

Another moment, and she had been gently set down
beside him. Hovering with the slightest waver of wings, the parradile waited to see if they were both all right before it spun so swiftly that it raised a snow-flurry and headed to its warm nest in the cliffside.

There was a strange tightness in Saikmars throat. As though bidding good-bye to a friend, he realized, he was waving at the parradile’s dwindling form. He checked himself, mindful of the snow-wall that was being built at the door of the sanctuary, helped the girl to her feet, and began without a word to lead her toward shelter.

They had almost finished the snow-wall now. It was one of the tasks demanded of the refugees in return for their keep, to prepare the great rolls of hard snow forming the body of the wall, to fetch loads of soft snow afterward and hammer them into the chinks and crevices, making the whole at last completely windproof.

As Saikmar and the girl approached, the workers paused to stare at them. They were a motley, bedraggled crew, mostly thin and wily-eyed, their hands chapped raw with the cold of the snow they had been hauling and their ears and noses nipped to red by the wind. Few of them had adequate clothes; some of the lucky ones had filched blankets and draped them about their bodies poncho-wise.

Saikmar knew that he had been expected to take part in the building of the snow-wall, though no one had formally ordered him to do so, and his heart sank as he recognized, foremost among the toilers, a man named Graddo who was a self-appointed leader of the refugees and cordially detested Saikmar, as he said, for his effeminate courtly ways. There was nothing to be done but put a bold face on things, however. Taking his companion by the arm, he led her toward the last gap in the wall, where a keystoned arch of snow-blocks breached its quarter-spherical shape.

For whatever reason, the gang of refugees was doing nothing worse than scowl, so—

And he almost walked straight into the reason. Waiting under the arch, calm-faced and as rigid as though herself frozen, was the old priestess Nyloo.

“Another mouth to feed this winter, useless one?” she said after looking Saikmar and the girl up and down.

“The woman here also claims sanctuary,” Saikmar
snapped. He had no idea whether that had been her intention, but in this barren arctic waste there was no other course for her to adopt.

“I see.” Nyloo’s eyes burned in her old face. “A woman, is it? A flesh-and-blood woman? Hah! More likely, feared that you’ll shiver in the long winter night, you conjured yourself a succubus to warm your bed. Isn’t that it?”

“I know nothing of conjuration,” Saikmar retorted, feeling his face grow hot despite the icy air. “Magic is your province and none of mine.”

“Indeed!” Nyloo answered sharply. “That is a pity—a great pity. For how, without conjuration, is food for another hungry mouth to be come by this winter? Tell me that!”

“There are seventy refugees in the sanctuary,” Saikmar said. “With one more, is the difference large?”

“It exists!” Nyloo countered.

By now, sensing that they would have official approval if they expressed resentment at the new arrival, the other refugees had abandoned their work on the snow-wall and were crowding around Saikmar menacingly. In the front rank, as well as Graddo, he recognized two men with deep and rankling grudges against the world, fathers of children growing up in the sanctuary. Like children born to pilgrims during a stay here, the offspring of the refugees were taught the mysteries and assigned to replenish the ranks of the priesthood, but whereas the pilgrims forsook their babies willingly, the refugees were compelled to do so, a very different matter.

Saikmar’s belly drew drum-tight with apprehension.

“About this woman, then!” Graddo rumbled, and clouted the girl roughly on the shoulder so that she winced, though she said nothing. “Where does she come from? From a city that has bought the right of asylum for its citizens by sending caravans hither with food for the sanctuary, as our own cities did?”

“Well spoken!” shouted another man behind him, and there was an instant chorus of agreement. The circle closed half a pace tighter on Saikmar and his companion.

“Well spoken indeed,” Nyloo nodded. “This woman, Saikmar—if she be a woman and not a succubus, which would be better since you do not have to feed spirits with
corporeal food!—why does she not speak for herself?”

“I am from Dayomar, a city of the southland,” said the girl loudly, and raised her head to look Nyloo straight in the face.

“Dayomar?” said the refugee who had put the question. He sounded disappointed. “How say you, priestess?”

“Yes, the folk of Dayomar have the right of asylum,” Nyloo admitted grudgingly. “They have maintained it over many years, though none from so far south has claimed it in living memory.”

Saikmar felt a stir of hope, and broke in at once. “Then allow us passage, old woman!”

“Not so fast now!” Graddo objected. It was clear that he was enjoying this chance to discomfit Saikmar, and hoped it might lead to something more—perhaps even to his exclusion from the sanctuary. “She only
says
she’s from Dayomar. I was in that city once myself, before my unjust accusers forced me to flee hither. And never anywhere in the southland did I see a garb like what she wears!”

“Would you expect someone trudging across snowfields to affect the same dress as southlanders strolling on a sunny beach?” Saikmar snapped back. His argument went unheeded. Fear of hunger was always in the forefront of the refugees’ minds; that, and the tacit encouragement of Nyloo, was stinging them now to a more aggressive manner.

They began to shout—“Turn her away! Turn ’em both away! He’s too stuck-up and haughty to do a hand’s turn for his keep here!”

Nyloo lifted a hand and sharply ordered silence. When it had fallen, she questioned the girl again.

“How did you come here from Dayomar?”

“I—I don’t rightly know,” the girl said after a pause.

“I found her yonder in a cave on the face of the cliff,” Saikmar exclaimed. “Where the parradile has nested—it had taken her into its nest to keep her warm.”

Half a dozen scoffing voices were raised again at that. He heard: “Rubbish! Parradiles here in the far north? They never come this way! Besides, whoever heard of them making nests? Parradiles don’t make nests! From Carrig, and he doesn’t even know the habits of parradiles—I knew he was stupid but I didn’t think anyone could be that stupid!”

Saikmar clenched his fists and rounded on them, hot words boiling to his lips. But before he could utter them, Nyloo came unexpectedly to his support.

“You! You have eyes less sharp than those of your own children! Certainly a parradile has been seen here of late—many of the youngsters have reported it to me.” There was an edge of uncertainty on her voice now.

“Saikmar!” she went on. “You say you found this woman in the parradile’s cave, unharmed?”

“I did!”

“Will you take your oath on that? An oath by the gods of your clan in Carrig, and by the parradile and the twywit?”

“Gladly!”

Puzzled, but sensing that their anticipated triumph was slipping away, the refugees shifted from foot to foot. Nyloo beckoned the girl with a bony index finger; when she timidly approached, the priestess felt the strange clothing she wore, her face drawing into a frown. At length she spoke again.

“It is a sign,” she said reluctantly. “An omen. Until we have determined its import we must admit you to the sanctuary. But I warn you!” Her voice rose. “If we discover this claim to be untrue—if you, Saikmar, have taken a false oath—we shall breach the snow-wall and drive you through it, both of you, to wander in the winter night until you die.”

She moved aside and gave a jerk of her near-bald head.

“Enter!”

Maddalena had been weak not only with tiredness and hunger but with what was much worse than either—despair. From every angle her situation had appeared hopeless
when she fell into her exhausted sleep in the parradile’s nest. Though she had been given refuge from the storm, for all she knew her safety might be only temporary. When it woke, the creature might perhaps be hungry, and attack her, or it might hold her captive for some alien purpose of its own, or …

But there comes a point in extreme depression when the slightest hint of hope acts like a single ray of light admitted to a dark room. One finger of light makes a room no longer utterly dark; one glimmer of hope had snapped Maddalena back to the point where she could think and plan to save herself.

As yet, of course, she had had no chance to act; she had had to accept passively what was done on her behalf and make the most of it. It was clear, though, that this tall young man who had found her in the parradile’s cave was prepared to befriend her. That was proved by his willingness to argue with the unpleasant old woman who had tried to bar their entry—and what a stroke of luck it had been to find that Dayomar, the southern city she had named only because it was where Slee was based, was entitled to asylum for its citizens! She hoped she would have no narrower squeak before she left the planet again.

Now: this place she had been admitted to. She had realized as soon as she saw it for the second time that when she spotted its shining metal dome from the nearby cliff-top and shouted for Langenschmidt, she had been both right and wrong: right in recognizing the chromium alloy hull of a spacecraft; wrong, in thinking that it must be the landing-craft from which she had baled out. Regardless of the name the natives applied to it, a word meaning “sanctuary” or “place of safety,” it was the ship that had brought eight hundred refugees from Zarathustra, which, as she had been told in her briefing, was now the shrine for a mystical cult.

From the glimpses she had caught as she was being hurried inside by Saikmar, she could tell that the ship had buckled badly on landing. The door through which they entered was apparently an old lifeboat-lock, and either from the force of the original crash or because the great weight of the hull had settled in the subsequent centuries it was too far off-square ever to be closed again; hence the
windproof wall of snow being piled up over and around it. Inside, the durable plastic, which coated all metal surfaces as a guard against corrosion, had been worn away by the passage of innumerable feet, and here and there the floor was marred by patches of rust. Frost was thick on the walls before they came to an internal door which still functioned; beyond, there was foetid warmth and a smell indicating long human occupation and inefficient sanitation. Maddalena shuddered.

Saikmar hurried her onward. At an intersection in the passageway they came upon half a dozen children all aged about five playing with chunks of something tough and rubbery, cut in cubes; the game was to catch them as they bounced at unpredictable angles. Their play forgotten at the sight of a stranger, all the children stared with open mouths while Saikmar led Maddalena past them and turned to the left.

Down here the crash, or subsidence, had buckled the hull-plates more severely still; there were gaps and cracks plugged with rags over which some pitchlike substance had been smeared. She guessed that this must have been crew’s quarters, for there were doors at intervals of five yards on either side of the passage—doorways, rather. The sliding panels had been either cut away or hammered back in their distorted grooves, where they had rusted fast, and now the openings were screened with panels of basketwork or animal-hides draped like curtains.

Behind some of these curtains there were sounds of movement, and she fancied that inquisitive eyes were peering at her through almost invisible gaps.

Saikmar halted at last before a doorway at the very end of the passage, and she saw that this one was more effectively closed than the others. What looked like the seven-foot-long meshmetal base of an ancient bunk had been placed across the opening and there secured by a bronze bar drilled at each end to fit pegs sunk in the wall. A rudimentary padlock weighing two or three pounds held the bar fast in the middle. Saikmar found a key to unlock it on a ring chained to his belt, lifted the barrier aside, and stood back.

“Enter,” he invited her.

She obeyed. She found herself in a four-bunk cabin, one
of the bunks having been sawed off its mountings to serve, as she had seen, in place of a door. Presumably the reason Saikmar had gone to such trouble was because he had more possessions than other refugees; the remaining three bunks were loaded with clothing, blankets, the huge handwritten books of which she had seen examples during her briefing, some metallic objects which were probably armor, and other things she did not recognize at all.

The sight reminded her painfully of how completely she was at the mercy of events without the gear she had abandoned in the landing-craft. She had no means of signaling her whereabouts, no medical supplies—which on a backward world like this might well be the deadliest lack of all—and no more clothes than what she stood up in. Also it had been made abundantly clear that her arrival was resented because of a food shortage. And with the polar winter setting in for six months, obviously there could be no provisions brought in from outside.

One stroke of luck she had had, though. Perhaps there would be others. Indeed, come to think of it, there already had been another. She glanced down at her spacesuit as she realized the fact. The orbiting ship that had fired on the Patrol cruiser proved that some power-group from another system
had
discovered Fourteen and was exploiting its resources, or its people, or both. The implication was that the death of Trader Heron and the slaughter of the king parradile at the hands of a man “wielding the lightning” referred to an off-worlder with an energy gun—not to the discovery of gunpowder, as Slee had ingeniously hypothesized. She had been half-afraid, therefore, that her spacesuit might be recognized for what it was and that she might be regarded as an enemy.

The intruders, however, must have planned to cause as little disturbance as they could—must have kept their alien origin secret, learned the local languages and disguised themselves in native costume. Unless Trader Heron’s death had been coincidence, they would have realized that the loss of a Galactic agent would attract investigators, and wished to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible.

They had been very clever, she thought bitterly. It had taken a long time for even a hint of their interference to get back to a Corps base, longer still for an agent to be
sent to check up. By shooting down the cruiser directly it emerged in real space, they had certainly gained a further respite of a year or two, unless she or Langenschmidt reached a subspace communicator. It wasn’t uncommon for a Patrol cruiser to disappear without trace. It happened perhaps three or four times a century, and there was seldom a vessel to spare to look into the disappearance immediately.

That, of course, was why the pay in the Corps was so high.

By the time another ship was sent to Fourteen, the intruders might well have gained a secure enough foothold to thumb their noses at the Corps. For there were two views current concerning the treatment of Zarathustra Refugee Planets: The long view was the one that the Corps accepted and that Langenschmidt had expounded to her: to allow these isolated worlds to develop along their own lines, free from interference by more advanced cultures. The short view was that they should be opened to trade and traffic so that the alleged benefits of Galactic civilization would be made available to them.

If the intruders dug themselves in deeply enough, the hands of the Corps would be tied; it would be impossible to root them out without force, and this in itself would be a breach of the policy of noninterference. They could secure more and still more time by appealing an order to vacate to ever higher authority in the Galactic legal hierarchy, and a final decision might be reached in—what? Ten years? Coping with two hundred and sixty planets in uneasy federation was a slow, slow process.

By that time, naturally, it wouldn’t matter which way the decision went. Irreparable harm would have been done.

She felt partly terrified, partly elated. She had made herself unpopular back at the base because all the time she was telling herself that the routine jobs she was given were too petty for her abilities. She had a superb conceit. But here she was landed with a task that posed so tremendous a challenge it was as though the universe itself had taken her at her word. It was wholly up to her whether it was accomplished.

More to the point: it was wholly up to her whether she survived or not.

There was no furniture at all in the cabin except the bunks. There were sanitary facilities, but they had probably not functioned since the ship crashed. Saikmar cleared a space for her on one of the bunks, padding the metal frame with a blanket, and indicated that she should sit down. What could have become of the mattresses that must race have been fitted here? Oh: doubtless that was how the children had obtained the chunks of rubbery stuff they were playing with.

She lowered herself to the bunk and took off her helmet gratefully, glad of the chance to sort out the tangle into which her hair had muddled itself. Saikmar watched her every move, but there was no hostility or suspicion in his face, only curiosity. She had not realized at the time when he introduced himself as coming from Carrig, that if he had recognized her as coming from space, and knew that the usurpers in his city were from space also, he would not have been so friendly.

She waited for him to speak.

Saikmar found himself at a loss now. Until Nyloo had accepted that the girl’s arrival constituted an omen, he had only half-believed the idea himself. True, he had been willing enough to regard the parradile as a divine emissary on sight, but he had, after all, been depressed enough to be contemplating suicide, and later reflection had suggested that the likeliest explanation was eviction of the parradiles from the Smoking Hills by Belfeor’s blasphemous “clan.”

This was a matter, however, in which the views of a priestess obviously carried a lot of weight. And the more he thought about it the more probable it seemed that he had indeed brushed the fringes of the supernatural. The mystery of her presence here; the way the parradile had brought them both off the cliff-face and to level ground, something unheard of—everything tied together and filled his mind with visions of divine intervention. And the strange clothes the girl wore, especially her hard helmet with its transparent faceplate …

Which she was now taking off, to reveal that her features were of more than human loveliness.

Saikmar took a deep breath and decided to go straight to the point “Are you human?” he demanded. “Or do you come from the gods?”

The girl paused awhile before answering. She said finally, “I’m human. But very strange things have happened to me.”

That was clear enough. He pursued. “You are from Dayomar, you say. How are you called?”

“Melisma, daughter of Yull and Mazia, but they are dead.” She made a sign he had seen southlanders make at the mention of a death. So far, so good.

“How did you come here from the southland, then?”

Again this pause before her answer. He wondered if she was preparing a lie, or whether she simply disbelieved some marvelous experience she had undergone. Her next words persuaded him that the second was the true reason.

“I don’t remember clearly. Perhaps the parradile brought me. It seems to me that it did.”

Then whether she was human herself or not, it had definitely been a miracle that accounted for her presence. She certainly could not have wandered this far north on her own. No caravans had come to the sanctuary this summer. It had to be the parradile that had carried her hither.

A tremendous thrill passed through his body, and he had to shut his eyes for a moment, steadying himself. He was not forsaken by the gods! Here was an inarguable omen, directed at himself, and if Nyloo tried to make out otherwise, he would take her fuddled old head from her shoulders, priestess or not.

“This place …” the girl was saying thoughtfully, looking about her. “It’s the northern sanctuary?”

“Yes.”

“And you said, I think, that you had claimed asylum here. Why? What drove you from home?”

“I am of a noble family in Carrig,” Saikmar said bitterly. “There, as you may know, the king-hunt annually decides who shall rule. I who should have slain the king for Clan Twywit was cheated of my rights by strangers from the south with evil powers. Had I not fled hither I’d be
dead, for the strangers leagued with traitors in the city—among them Ambrus son of Knole, whom may the gods swiftly destroy!—and burned down those who stood against them with magical lightning.”

The girl’s face had lit with astonishment. She said, “But then you’re the Saikmar who—!”

At that instant though, the metal frame he had propped back across the door was rudely flung aside and fell clattering. Into the cabin stepped Graddo, and behind him a score of the other refugees could be seen, menacing—women too, as well as the men who had been working on the snow-wall.

“I’ve come to tell you thieves and wastrels,” Graddo said curtly, “that though talk of omens may impress old women who’ve had their brains addled by years of dabbling in the mysteries, it cuts no ice with us. Food’s short, for your city Carrig must have stopped the summer caravans this year and kept the pickings for themselves. We’re all agreed that that’s the likely explanation. So we’re going to put you out of the sanctuary, to make your way to Carrig, if you can!”

He smiled sardonically, and behind him the others shouted their approval. Some of them, Saikmar saw with sinking heart, held clubs and knives, and all their faces were bright with malevolence.