To Conquer Chaos (4 page)

VII

The five wise men, Yanderman himself, and the servants who came and went with jugs of beer and plates of cheese and onions made the room crowded. The ceiling was low and the walls were rough. The layout suggested to Yanderman that this fort had been the whole of Lagwich at one time, with perhaps a mere hundred people living in crude cabins around it and taking refuge inside the stone wall when necessary; the palisade and ditch lower down the hill would have followed the expansion of the population to its present figure of eight or nine times the original number.

Six nitre-soaked torches, fizzing and spitting occasionally, were set in wall sconces among relics of past victories—not military conflicts, but struggles against
things
from the barrenland. Some of the trophies were mounted as skeletons; others were skins stretched on crude wooden frames. Even in death the ugliest of them were still frightening.

He had thought through the probable history of Lagwich with a purpose—as a sort of exercise in deduction. These five who called themselves wise men and governed the town were very ignorant even when it came to facts lying in plain sight. Like the form their town had taken. They might say, “in the time of my father’s father it was said that the palisade was smaller than it is now,” or “That
thing
on the wall was killed by so-and-so, who killed sixty-nine
things
in twenty years—they came more often then.”

In fact, Malling had said exactly that when waiting for the others to arrive. Yanderman found the words disturbing, for a reason he could not yet pin down.

So far he had confined the talk to an exchange of courtesies and some restrained boasts about the wealth of Esberg; they were true enough, but he had no wish to make the folk of Lagwich feel small. They had done well, considering their situation. Of course, they’d have done better if they hadn’t been so stupidly ignorant. How could they say what they said about change or growth, and yet not grasp the idea that things were
still
changing, even if the world seemed much as yesterday?

Now, Yanderman decided, he could introduce his main topic. Since he was the honoured guest and the centre of attention he had only to clear his throat and they instantly hushed to hear him. He said, “The barrenland seems to me a strange thing. There is nothing else like it.”

The wise men rumbled and agreed. Yanderman went on, “The
things
that come from it, also, are very strange.”

They agreed to that, too.

“Tell me,” Yanderman said, “what do you believe caused the barrenland?”

As he had expected, the question provoked a blank silence. Eventually Rost, a dried-up man on Malling’s right, gave a shrug. He said, “Caused it? It’s a thing that is, like any natural object. And to speculate on what caused things to be as they are is a futile pastime.”

The other wise men concurred, looking relieved.

“The world changes, though,” Yanderman said. “For example, did you not tell me that in the old days more
things
came from the barrenland than come nowadays?” He looked at his host.

Malling was big, and ruddy-cheeked, and Yanderman would have guessed if no one had told him that he was the senior of the five, because he was much the most conservative. He said, “I concede that is so. Nonetheless those that come are if anything more dangerous than before. And the ways of devils are not as plain as the ways of men.”

“Devils?” Yanderman said. “All the
things
I’ve seen were animals, for they could be killed. What is a devil?”

“Oh, we have seen one,” the wise men hastened to assure him. “It’s in Rost’s house, across the yard of the fort.”

Yanderman, wondering what in the world they meant, showed his interest, and Malling obtained Rost’s permission to send a servant for the “devil”.

“This one,” Rost explained, “came from the barrenland not so many years ago—ten, or twelve. It had a voice, as I myself heard, and formed some sounds like words, and for some time there was argument to and fro as to whether it was a natural being. It was weak, and could easily be restrained, though sometimes it struck out at those who went near it. In the end it was agreed by the wise men of the time—I had not been chosen then—that since it had been seen to come from the barrenland it could not be a natural creature. There it is.”

Yanderman started forward from his chair with an oath, and plucked a torch from the wall as he halted near the door. Two brawny servants were carrying through the narrow opening the “devil” that Rost had spoken of.

And it was a man.

The corpse had been desiccated to preserve it—probably by exposure to hot sun and dry wind, while shielded from flies and carrion-eaters. Now its skin was stretched drum-tight, yellow in the flickering light, over the skull and ribs. The internal organs had been removed, so that below the ribs there was a hollow, but the arms and legs also had the skin on them. The feet were nailed to a wooden platform, and thongs had been threaded into holes in its back to tie the spine to a supporting post. It was very dusty.

“But that was a man,” Yanderman said slowly. Under his breath he added, “Poor ‘devil’!”

“It was not,” insisted Rost and Malling simultaneously. “Men do not live in the barrenland. Therefore it was a devil. True, it took the semblance of a man, but perhaps that was because we had killed so many of the other monsters that it tried to disguise itself.”

Yanderman ignored their babbling. He had the mummy brought into the middle of the room and studied it minutely. Whoever this man had been, he was not of a stock that Yanderman recognised; his head was much rounder than most people’s, his cheekbones were higher and his jaw shorter.

But he was certainly human. And he had come out of the barrenland, where nothing was supposed to exist except monsters …

He turned to the wise men. “Is it not possible that he was from another village—town—close to the barrenland, and wandered into it and then out again, close to Lagwich?”

“Impossible,” Rost hastened to assure him. “For one thing, he was different in certain ways from any man we have ever seen—his build, the colour of his skin. For another, we sent to inquire of all the other towns we could, and heard no account of any such man being lost.”

So either he had come from the far side of the barrenland, or …

Yanderman checked himself, despite surging excitement. He put the torch back in its sconce and indicated that the servants could carry the gruesome trophy away.

The wise men spent the rest of the evening trying to convince him that it really was a devil, and he paid no attention.

Rather than have his party split up among lodgings all over the town, Yanderman had organised them under canvas in the yard of the fort. The townsfolk thought the visitors off their heads for planning to sleep on a stone pavement, and Malling had insisted that Yanderman at least have a proper bed. Yanderman wasn’t sure he was getting the best of the bargain; the “proper bed” was made of straw and stank of fleas.

Before turning in, he went out to the yard and found Augren and Stadham talking quietly by a small fire.

He joined them, asking how they fared and telling them about the bed he was being given; they chuckled together for a moment. Then he looked around to make sure none of the curious natives was in earshot, and addressed them in low tones.

“I suppose you’ve realised that if a town like this can be maintained so close to the barrenland, it can’t be so terrible as we once believed.”

Sensitive on that score after the episode of the luck-charm, Augren took it on himself to answer. “As a town—” he said, and spat into the darkness. “But the point’s good, sir.”

“Add this one to it, then, and carry both to Duke Paul first thing tomorrow. Did you see, borne across the yard to Malling’s house, a thing in the shape of a dried-up man?”

Augren looked blank, but Stadham nodded. “It went by when we were watering the horses,” he said. “Two of them caught its dusty scent and shied at it.”

“I heard the whinnying,” Augren said. “But I was elsewhere.”

“That was the body of a man who came dying of hunger and thirst out of the barrenland.”

They looked incredulous. Yanderman went over the story as he had heard it, emphasising the important fact that the man could not be from any of the local towns. He finished, “This must be taken to Duke Paul as soon as may be; if he’s not changed his plan, the army will camp once more and be here the day after tomorrow. Augren, you’ll ride with the news; Stadham, assign a man to go with him. Yourself, you’ll spend tomorrow riding about the nearer countryside to select a good camp-site. A permanent one, of course—when the army gets here the Duke will want to scout the whole perimeter of the barrenland, and that’ll take several days. If possible, choose a place with its own water-supply; we don’t want to antagonise the townsfolk by fouling theirs, and once it’s past here the stream they use is undrinkable, I imagine. Clear?”

They nodded, rose with him to salute, and sat down again as he moved away.

He had much trouble going to sleep—not from the fleas, or the prickly hardness of the mattress, but because of what he had learned. A man coming out of the barrenland!

For the first time Yanderman admitted to himself what must lie at the back of Duke Paul’s mind. Never a man to be satisfied with half-measures, the Duke. If a problem caught his attention, he would worry it till its back was broken, or at least till he knew it was insoluble with present resources.

Surely—and Yanderman felt a quiver of alarm—nothing would content him short of marching into the barrenland to see if there was anything there.

Legend said there had been, once. Legend was turning out far too accurate for comfort, too—what with confirmation of the former existence of vast cities, time-beaten but still rich with metal and glass, what with Granny Jassy’s uncanny fore-knowledge of the terrain they had traversed since leaving Esberg.

Suppose the remaining legends proved true, as well! The tale went that in the old days when man went to other worlds (but what
other
worlds? Where was there room for them?) they walked at last, instead of travelling in machines. And some of those “other worlds” were strange, perilous places.

He had heard descriptions from Granny Jassy, but to him the words she parroted made no more sense than they did to her. He would have left it there; Duke Paul would not.

Vaguely, however, a few consistent threads of narrative emerged. A sickness—a kind of contagious insanity. A disaster. The building of a barrier around the place from which you—walked to other worlds, too late to stop the plague from spreading. Just as Lagwich had once been merely a stone fort and no town, possibly the barrenland had been … the barrierland?

And a man had come out of it. Within living memory.

How would you move an army of two thousand men across territory without usable food or fuel, even for three or four days? How would you organise water? That was the worst problem. Water so bulky and indispensable to a marching man …

Streams, maybe. Streams in the barrenland itself. Take animals along and test the purity of the water on them. But a sickness might take days to show itself, and …

Maybe leapfrog a party across the bare ground: half the men carrying provisions, breaking off at the end of the day’s march and coming back, leaving the others to continue with the extra rations—but this would mean you’d reach your goal with a fraction of the original force to meet any challenge …

Yanderman was still wrestling with the problem when he fell asleep.

VIII

His father was still snoring on the other side of the room when Conrad woke up. One of the town’s watermen was crying in the street outside. Cautiously, wanting to try his knee before he risked hurting it again, he went down and traded half a lump of soap for a pail of fresh water. It was stupidly extravagant when he could have gone to the stream himself, as he usually did, but his leg was very painful.

Washed, he ate what was left from the night before—his father must have been too drunk to be hungry when he came in—and went with his sacks to collect the ash Idris had promised.

Her mother and brother were busy with her in the kitchen, racking the new loaves; it was not until he had filled two sacks and got dust all over himself as usual that Idris had a chance to whisper to him in a corner.

“Have you heard the news about the foreigners?”

“Who’d tell me, except you?” Conrad countered sourly.

“Why, it’s unbelievable! There’s a great army of men coming here, two thousand of them it’s said, from a city far to the south!”

“Fourteen days’ march,” Conrad muttered, thinking how close he had come to having this news direct from Yanderman.
Blast
Waygan!

“Idris!” A shrill interruption from her mother. “Are you talking to that no-good boy again? There’s work to do, have you forgotten?”

“Coming, mother! One more sack and that’ll be all!” Idris put her head close to Conrad’s again. “Won’t it be exciting? All the strangers from the south! They’re sure to visit the town while they’re camped here!”

“Idris!” her mother exclaimed. “Leave Idle Conrad to get on with it by himself—he’s quite capable.”

“But mother! Conrad’s hurt his knee!”

“That’s his lookout. You do as I tell you!”

“Go on,” Conrad urged her with a sigh. “This won’t take me long.” He gave her a smile and picked up the first sack; somehow, to prevent her feeling bad about it, he stopped himself from limping as he carried it to the door.

The news must have travelled with the speed of the wind, for as he trudged towards the gate of the town, his sacks of ash trailing behind him on a sledge of crossed branches, and paused at intervals to collect dollops of stale fat and grease from kitchen doors, he heard several people discussing the good effect the army’s visit would have on trade. Old Narl, the weaver, was less optimistic than most; Conrad heard him say grumpily to a friend, “I don’t like it! That many men could take all we have, not bothering to leave payment.”

“What could we have that they want?” the friend said cynically.

Soap made by Conrad? The presumptuous thought crossed his mind as he moved out of earshot. And yet … why not? It was good soap; men who had marched for two weeks would welcome a chance to clean up properly. If he made as much extra as this load of ash would run to, then he could salt away a little profit from selling it to the army camp, hide the cash where his father couldn’t find it and spend it on beer.

Soon he was lost so deeply in thought that he ignored Waygan’s usual mocking greeting from the gatehouse and all the shouts from the youths and girls working in the fields. It was not so warm as yesterday, and there were clouds in the west.

The moment he came in sight of his soap-vats, though, his reverie was broken.

The vats had been overturned—more: scattered. They were made of inch-thick pottery, and even when empty they were hard to lift; full, they could only be tilted on their bases of smooth round stones. Yet something had tossed them aside like so many drinking-cups. And the pans in which yesterday’s soap had set had also been broken up.

Clearly, a
thing
had come from the barrenland and wrought this havoc. It was unlikely to have gone back.

Conrad realised sickly that in his panic to get home last night before the bridge was drawn up he had abandoned his bow and arrows. He was not a good shot, but merely to have a weapon would be reassuring. Lacking anything better, he snatched up a couple of large, sharp-cornered rocks from the edge of the path and stared about him. His blood was very loud in his ears, and he cursed the fact, fancying he might be deaf to the noise of the
thing
if it approached.

But there was no sign of movement nearby.

Cautiously, he went closer to the vats. The soap had been spilled from the setting-pans before it was hard, and there were marks on the ground suggesting that the creature had walked around in it, perhaps surveying the damage, before making off. Conrad had never seen animal feet like these—the prints were of a kind of hoof forming three sides of a near-perfect square, with a short pointed projection forward from each of the closed corners. But that was small wonder. Few of the
things
which came from the barrenland resembled anything that had gone before.

The marks led away among the rocks, growing fainter. The soap was hard, which meant the trail was some hours old. His confidence oozed back.

Letting fall the rocks he had picked up, he ran to where he had left his bow and arrows. But the thing had trodden on the bow, breaking the shaft. He had six arrows intact, and nothing to fire them with.

He balanced them on his hand, irresolute. Before he tried to set up his vats again, he decided, he ought to make sure there was nothing lurking among the rocks. Two out of three
things
moved by night, but that was slim odds. Breathing hard, moving awkwardly because of his stiff knee, he began to walk in a spiral outwards from the vats.

He was on the point of giving up when he found it, lying in shadow between two rocks.

Cramming his fingers into his mouth to stifle a cry, he drew back until he was just peering over the nearer rock. It seemed to be asleep, but you could never be sure—
things
from the barrenland weren’t like ordinary animals.

It was about as long as a tall man. It had a head, domed like a melon and ridged in somewhat the same way, with a blind-looking white eye on the front of it. But below the eye was a not-quite mouth, a ring-shaped opening with a double fringe of sharp little eroding teeth, somewhat after the style of a leech. The head was set direct on the body without a neck, and green and brown skin hung about that body like an ill-fitting garment. There was a tail. There were two big limbs ending in the square-but-clawed hoofs whose prints he had seen, and two smaller ones with a sort of soft pad on which three scales glittered like metallic nails.

Conrad dodged out of sight again, heart thumping. That was a killer! The nearest he had ever come before to one of the
things
in life was when the whole town was called out to reinforce the guard—and now here he was, alone. What was he to do? The sensible thing was to return to the fields and call up an armed party to deal with it. But it would be just his luck if the
thing
awoke while he was gone and made off without a trace.

With his bow, he might have risked shooting into that bulging white eye—at ten feet he could hardly miss. But to stab it with an arrow … He dismissed the idea.

And then he thought of the sacks of ashes.

He was surprising himself all the time now, he reflected as he stole back up among the rocks with the soft sack on his shoulder. It couldn’t be bravery. It must be sheer desperation driving him.

He poised the sack on the rock overhanging the creature. A tug on the drawstring would open its neck and let down a cascade of blinding dust. The next part would be more difficult—it involved getting one of the pottery vats up here too.

He managed it somehow, though his knee hurt abominably, and several times he almost lost his footing. Each time he waited in horror for the noise to wake the
thing
and bring it over the rim of the rock, yowling and ready to kill.

He got the vat on the rock, sideways so it would roll, and steadied it with one hand. He closed his eyes and wished, opened them again, sighted, and let go.

The barrel-like vat struck fair on the domed head, making a soft revolting noise like a fist going into mud. The
thing
came awake instantly, shooting its limbs out in all directions, and the vat smashed to fragments as a convulsion tossed it aside like a pebble. The strength it had! Conrad suddenly felt he had been insane to attempt this. Mouth dry, he opened the sack of ash.

Then he fled.

At the foot of the slope he snatched up the wooden bar he used to tilt the full soap-vats. Brandishing it grimly, he waited to confront the maddened beast. It was fully ten minutes before he plucked up courage to go back and look.

He found the
thing
had lived only a few moments after the vat fell on its skull; it lay half-buried in the pile of ash, and its sucker-like mouth was choking-full of grey dust as he had intended. Runnels of brownish ichor mingled with splinters of black bone in the ruins of its head.

Conrad felt he wanted to sing. But more than that, he wanted people to know what he had done. He scrambled down to the beast’s level and tried to drag it away by its tail, but it was much too heavy for him with his bad leg.

Well … there was no chance of it waking up and going away now. It was bound to be there when he brought someone back to look at it. And even if he had to whip them here, he was going to bring the townsfolk to admire his action. He was sick of their sneers. Then afterwards he could have the hide tanned and give it to Idris, and her mother might be a little less grumpy …

His thoughts running blithely ahead of him, Conrad started back towards the town.

A cry rang out from the leading man of the party, and Stadham’s mind snapped back from consideration of this area as a possible site for their long-time camp to more immediate matters.

“What is it, Berrow?” he shouted.

“Don’t know!” the soldier called back. “My horse shied at something—and there’s a foul stink around somewhere!”

“Close in on Berrow!” Stadham ordered his other companions. “Take it slow and keep alert!”

The soldiers nodded grimly and set their guns on their saddle-bows as they urged their steeds up the rocky slope in front. They were all nervy, as Stadham knew. They’d located two or three possible camp-sites—all with drawbacks—and Stadham had decided to work through the area at least until noon before settling for one or other of them. In the men’s view,
nowhere
could be a good camp-site this close to the barrenland, and they didn’t see there was much to choose between the possibilities.

Berrow was trying to calm his horse as it attempted to back down-slope; he could coax it no further. When Stadham found his own mount balking in the same way, he swung to the ground and threw his reins to his nearest companion. Gun ready, he strode up the rise past Berrow, and came in a few moments to a place where shadow fell between two rocks.

He started and gave an oath, slapping his gun to his shoulder. But before he fired, he realised it was pointless. He gestured to Berrow to approach him.

“Here’s what scared your horse—a dead
thing
!”

The men moved closer, two or three of them dismounting because their horses also shied, and stood soberly regarding the carcase. “They breed ’em out there, don’t they?” one of them remarked in a solemn tone.

“But this one’s dead, like the one that attacked Ampier!” Stadham reminded them sharply. They exchanged glances; it was clear they didn’t like the beast much better for all that.

Stadham came to a decision. “You two!” he snapped, addressing the men whose horses had come closest without taking fright. “Get this thing on one of your mounts! I want to show it off when the army gets here and prove that the things from the barrenland aren’t invulnerable.”

The soldiers hesitated. One of them muttered something, and Stadham rounded on him.

“What was that?”

“Nothing, lieutenant.” The man’s face was pasty-pale. He got down from his horse, but looked at the carcass for a long time before bringing himself to lift it with his comrades’ help and set it on his saddle.

Thus burdened, they moved away.

And, half an hour later, Conrad stood sick and bewildered before a group of impatient, hostile meant-to-be-witnesses, wondering if the universe was conspiring against him. Because if the ground hadn’t opened and swallowed the
thing,
what else could possibly have happened to the proof of his single-handed triumph?