The Sword and the Plough (13 page)

“Shall I shoot it?” the trooper with the
Meredith queried grimly.

The horse trooper prodded Lars sharply in the
side with the toe of his boot. Lars responded with a shriek. The
man gave a start and took an involuntary step backwards.

He cursed in disgust. “What Trionian devil is
this?” he muttered.

“Hmm!” the third trooper mused. “It don’t
think it’s human.”

“By Ferdinand’s beard, if it doesn’t stop
that damn noise, I’ll burn its heart out, whatever it is,” snarled
the trooper with the pistol.

But Lars had his part to play and he
continued his howling, until a sudden boot below the ribs collapsed
him breathless, his gasping sobs real.

* * *

Lars lay on his back; his eyes shut tight,
his breath returning. What did his role demand now? He had no ready
answer.

The man with the Meredith dropped to one knee
beside him. Lars felt the still hot pistol barrel trace a slow path
down his forehead and nose. Then the hot metal circle pressed hard
into his mouth, bruising his lips and grinding against his teeth.
Lars lay still, his fingers gripped firm into the black dirt. He
opened his one good eye.

The trooper stood and the pistol motioned
Lars to do the same.

“Good!” the man said in a low voice. “Now,
very quietly tell us who you are and what you’re doing here. Do you
understand me?”

The man had spoken slowly and clearly, as if
to a child. But there was no warmth in the man’s pitiless ice blue
eyes.

Lars pitched his voice to what he hoped was
the tone of someone eager to please. He puffed out his cheeks with
a trusting grin.

“Sir, my name is Lars Kelmutt and I have come
to join your army.”

A stark silence followed. Lars filled it
quickly with what he hoped was a simpleton’s prattle.

He whined crossly about the Vegar
garrison; how the queen’s soldiers had refused to let him join
their army, how he wanted to wear a black comb morion like the
Megran troopers…how brave he would be… Somehow, from somewhere,
Lars found the words to prolong his performance.

His audience grew, a dozen or so curious
troopers. They had come sensing
blood
sport
, and now stood in a
circle round Lars with counterfeit smiles –
watching…waiting…

At last, the trooper with the pistol wearied
of the blather.

“
All right, Lars, and we want you to join
our army. We might even make you an officer.”

Lars nodded his head eagerly.

“
But, and it’s a big
but
, Lars.” Here the
trooper paused and put his arm round the young man’s shoulders. “A
Megran trooper has to know how to tame a horse.”

He extended his other arm to gather in the
heartless nods and mirthless grins from his audience. “Right
men?”

“
Right!”
the smirking spectators
chorused.

“But he’s just a simpleton,” some kinder
voice muttered, but was promptly shouted down with hoots and
hollers.

The flinty blue eyes bored in hard. “Lars
here wants to ride a horse so he can be a trooper, don’t you,
Lars?”

Lars glanced uneasily at the shining monster
with the tall tail fin and the sinister black eye of its light-bolt
cannon. Whatever they had in mind for him he knew would not be
pleasant.

“Yes s-s-sir!” he stammered, barely above a
whisper.

“What was that, Lars? We didn’t hear
you?”

“Yes sir,” Lars managed a marginal decibel
louder.

There were murmurs of approval from among the
troopers, and mouths twitched not to let the laughter show.

“By Ferdinand’s beard, you’re a good one,
Lars,” a trooper said, coming forward and shaking Lars’s hand
vigorously.

“A born trooper,” said another, clapping his
shoulder.

The horse trooper meanwhile had mounted his
machine, and the hover motors had begun to hiss, the thrust power
sending out little puffs of black dust.

The man with the ice blue eyes holstered his
pistol and held out a hand. “Come on then, Lars.” He was smiling,
but his gaze was pitiless. “Time to ride your horse.”

Two strong-armed troopers lifted Lars and set
him astride the smooth metal nose of the machine, facing the front.
Lars clenched his legs tight and locked his fingers into the finned
barrel of the light-bolt cannon. His face wore a fixed smile like
that of a novice circus stunt-rider.

“You’re going to get a good view from up
there,” someone shouted.

“Yeah, some people have all the luck,”
another voice drawled from somewhere.

The mass of troopers laughed.

The horse trooper gave a nod. As one, the
circle of spectators drew back a few paces. The tempo of the hover
motors increased to an earsplitting whine and the horse rose up on
a mushroom of dust.

“Tally-ho!” the horse trooper shouted
loudly.

The thrust motors cut in sharply and the
machine shot into forward motion. It accelerated down the track,
its engines screaming.

Lars’s fingers morphed into claws to keep his
hold. The slipstream ripped his breath away and his vision
dissolved into tears. The horse bucked and spun wildly, trying to
throw him, but he clung on. He tasted blood from his lips as his
teeth bit in hard.

“Hang in there, trooper,” he heard the horse
soldier shout as if from a great distance. The man’s laughter, too,
came from far away.

Then they were speeding low through fields of
maize, the sea of ripening cobs like an army of Lilliputians
wielding clubs. They cuffed and buffeted Lars zealously, bruising
and drawing blood. Next was a copse of trees, the machine ripping
through the lower branches and undergrowth. The horse soldier
seemed intent on riding through every bit of tough foliage he could
find.

* * *

By the time the machine returned to its
cheering onlookers, Lars’s clothing was in tatters. His face, limbs
and torso were streaked with blood from scores of cuts and grazes.
His whole body burned. His one good eye returned only misted
vision.

“Bravo Lars!” he heard them shouting.

Lars went to lift a hand in acknowledgement.
Immediately, the horse spun. He lost his grip and tumbled sideways.
Then the black wave of unconsciousness rolled over him.

* * *

“On your feet, trooper!” The black tide ebbed
and Lars returned to consciousness. He remembered the ice blue eyes
behind the voice.

Two green clad troopers gripped his arms and
hauled him to his feet. He heard the scratch of their boots on a
black grit pathway.

“Walk fool!”

Lars answered the command automatically and
lurched forward blindly. How long he had been insensible, he did
not know. Just where he was, he did not know.

“Move it. We’ve a nice little cell waiting
for you.”

The bright sunlight gave way to shadow. He
was inside a building. Blurred shapes moving by him spoke and the
men who held him laughed. He tried to focus, but the gloom
forestalled him.

He stumbled down steps and fell to his knees,
pulling down those who held him. He tried to stand, but his legs
were jelly. They kicked him hard in the ribs and he cried out at
the shock of it. They took him by the shoulders and dragged him the
rest of the way.

* * *

The two troopers halted. They dropped
their burden face down on the black stone floor. The stone was cool
to Lars’s skin, a soothing relief to the burning of his cuts and
abrasions.

“Not another one?” The voice that spoke was
harsh and complaining. “What’s your name, boy?”

The troopers hefted Lars to his knees. But
he could not speak. He struggled to focus his one working eye. A
solitary solar lamp lit a small room where two Megran guards sat at
a wooden table, their food in front of them. He saw the rough-cut
black lava walls, hewn by the primitive tools of the early
settlers, the laser axe and the adze. Keys hung from a row of
rusted spikes hammered into the stone. There was only one such
place he knew of – the dungeons of Fort Vegar.

* * *

Ninety years before, Vegar’s pioneers had
built the fort to protect themselves against the unknown perils of
the new world. They cut passageways beneath the black lava rock of
the planet, and carved out storage rooms for their weapons and
supplies. Later, when the need at last arose, they hewed out prison
cells as well…

In time, the town of Vegar had grown up
round the market place a few kilometres to the south, and the fort
had become the seat of the military alone. Lars had visited Fort
Vegar in better times as a boy and witnessed the royal garrison
parade its colours on
Renaissance Day
.

* * *

“
I asked what your name is, boy – and
I
want
an
answer.”

The man who had spoken was huge, a giant,
and enormously fat. His shaggy black hair was greasy and unkempt.
Flecks of food dribble speckled his scruffy beard and moustache.
His green uniform stretched tight about him, straining at the
seams, so that a host of worried stitches showed. Three-bar black
and yellow chevrons on his ham-like shoulders gave his sergeant’s
rank He studied Lars through small dark eyes funneled back in his
face, and munched away thoughtfully.

“What happened to him?” he said at last,
poking his fork in the direction of Lars. “Did he have his own
little war?”

The other trooper at the table now blinked
down at Lars. “Freeze the stars! Is all that blood his?” he
exclaimed. He turned away in disgust, sliding his plate of food as
far from the sight as he could.

The giant man wiped his mouth with the back
of his hand. He belched noisily, displaying a mouth of crooked
yellow teeth.

“Ugh, get him out of here,” he growled. “He’s
spoiling my dinner.”

The troopers hauled Lars to his feet. He hung
in their grip. He heard only a meaningless fog of words, as if he
were listening with his ear to a wall.

Lars fought the haze in his head. Gradually,
the grey mist lifted and the scene became clear.

“
Yeah, he’s the town fool – a right idiot.”
The ice blue eyed trooper was saying. “Came into our camp – said he
wanted to join our army. The lads there gave him a right Megran
welcome…”

The laughter that followed was cruel and
demeaning.
The mammoth
man rocked on his chair and slapped his knee in hideous
glee.

Ten out of
ten
, Lars thought
woefully.
Ten out of ten, for being a fool
.

“
He can share the same cell as
them
,” the huge man
chortled. He added a snigger. “Serve them right to have a fool for
company, damn stuck-up Trionian aristocrats.”

He reached round and flipped a key off the
third rusted spike in the row.

“
A
fool
!” His enormous body quaked with
laughter.

Lars was jerked into movement by his captors.
They followed the ponderous giant down steep stone stairs into
deeper darkness, where the air was hot and stale.

“Number three cell for you, lad,” the giant
sergeant said. “The VIP cell.” A huge grin split his porcine face
from ear to ear.

The iron bar door squeaked open on rusty
hinges.

“
Here’s a jester for your court,” the big
man bellowed through the black hole of the doorway. “A
fool
to entertain
you.”

He grabbed the prisoner from his guards by
the scruff of the neck and thrust him forward. Lars staggered into
the murk of the tiny cell and fell…

* * *

Later, back in the guardroom, the giant
Megran sergeant entered a new name into the prison records.

Lars Kelmutt: Trionian… Occupation:
fool…

“
Lars? Lars? Are you there, Lars?”

Martha Kelmutt stood in the doorway of her
son’s bedroom. She was wiping her hands on her apron.

Martha was a tall woman with golden hair and
laughing blue eyes. Her plain blue dress was of the homespun cotton
weave favoured my most Trionian farmers. The finer fabrics from
Earth or Megran were far too expensive for toilers of the land, and
lasted not half as well.

“
Ah, there you are, Lars
– I’ve been calling and
calling…”

Twelve-year-old Lars was sitting on his
bed. He too, was clad in the same rough cotton cloth – grey shirt
and dark trousers. He looked up at his mother. To Lars she was the
most beautiful woman he knew, and his apology was
sincere.

“I’m sorry Mother, I didn’t hear you.”

“Hmm, of course, absorbed in a book. What is
it you’re reading?”

“It’s a book about the planets,” the boy
explained. “It’s got some wonderful pictures. It’s amazing!
Look!”

His mother smiled and came over. “A book! You
must be one of the few people who still read, Lars, and I’m so
pleased that you do.”

“
Look Mother, Trion’s here, Megran and the
others. And here, look at Earth. It looks so beautiful with its
huge blue oceans.
Is
it beautiful, Mother?”

Martha Kelmutt looked at the Earth image
“Yes, I’ve been told that’s it’s beautiful,” she murmured, nodding.
“Very beautiful.”

“They call Earth the Mother Planet,” Lars
said. “Why do they call it that?”

“
Because we all started there, Lars –
people, that is, millions of years ago.” She put a hand on his
shoulder. “One day, maybe, we will all go and see her – see our
mother, Earth.”