Rork! (7 page)

And the Guild Station did not have an unlimited supply, and its price came high.

“But you mustn’t think,” the squawman said, earnestly, “that they look upon their ‘locks just as instruments for pushing up one clan and pushing down another. When they go out to gather redweed they go out in force, full truce, and every match is lit and every eye is open for rorks. Little weed grows in these hills and so it has to be gone for into Rorkland, you see. And the toll comes high. Yes … the toll comes high. My old wife lost two cousins last year. If there’d been more ‘locks on hand to protect them, they might not have been killed. It’s a constant source of bitterness, because they know full well that they could all be supplied with arms if the Guild allowed. They are bitter, and they are proud.”

So proud that they refused to trade for the Station’s cast-off clothes, which was all the Tame Tocks wore; and made their own of skins and beaten bark.

“A few of them keep the knowledge of reading, — you know — ”

“No,” said Ran, surprised. “I didn’t.” No Tame Tock could read.

“Yes…. They can hardly afford the cost, but they do buy up bits of scrap paper when they come to trade, and they commemorate their own history, such as it is and has been. I find that touching, you know.” By reading those rude “books,” Old Guns had learned much — including details of that dreadful period, the memory of which had burned and scarred, when for long, long years not a single ship had put down on Pia 2 and the forebears of the Tocks had been alone, quite alone …

And had starved and fought and died.

“I found something curious,” Ran said, after a silence during which the two women had exchanged a smouldering glance or two. “Do you know, I think the Tame Tocks tend to, well, sort of
honor
me? Because I come from the old homeworld, from Old Earth.”

Promptly, “Well, you won’t find it so, here,” Old Guns said. “On the contrary — so keep your mouth shut about it — they’d hate you for it. They blame Old Earth for the ‘long lonesome’ which ruined things to begin with. Old Earth sent them, Old Earth didn’t protect them, Old Earth ignores them…. Some even say that the fever came from there. I don’t know, myself. Never been there. I’m a Coulter boy, though I’ll never see that system again and I don’t care.”

He looked around his black-walled house, at his disparate possessions, at his wife and daughter, at the rugged landscape misting in the light rain through the open and unglazed window.

“No …” And he said again, “I don’t care.”

• • •

He had, so to speak, broken bread with them, and afterwards Sathy began to speak to him, asking him about his family: if his mother and father were alive, if he had brothers and sisters, and such like questions. When, later on that afternoon, the camp began to stir and a number of visitors arrived, Sathy took herself off to her tasks. But Norna remained, and sat next to him on a bench off to one side of the room and spoke to him in a low voice and pointed out some chief personages.

“The Mister Dominis … directs six ‘locks and twenty pike … yeh, the big whitebeard; brings good men to the fight, good men in his country….”
Country
being the district, thinly inhabited, of which he was chief; so much had the old terms shrunk. No one had been attending to the fire and in the growing chill Lomar became conscious of the warmth of the girl next to him, and various thoughts and images began to enter his mind. He dismissed them. He wasn’t yet aware of what the local attitude towards that sort of thing might be, and had no desire to find himself pegged out beneath a redwing plant to see for himself what sort of diet the rorks
really
had.

Her long hair brushed his ears as she turned to him again. “And at his next, the Mister Hannit, directing ten ‘lock and twenty-seven pike. But he pledged two, or was it it three, ‘locks to the Mister Dominis a pair-o’-year back, and there’s be trouble there yet, you know, Ranny.”

A voice was raised in anger. “That’s our Mister’s heir-son, Jun Mallardy,” she whispered. “He’s wanted me for his woman, but I doesn’t fancy him, you know.”

Jun was rope-thin, black-bearded. “I knows it,” he said loudly, now. “We’s all knows it. Who’s it as’d rather raid than farm ‘r fish? Flinders! Who’s it goes about with’s dirty mouth to every ear, spitting talk and spitting trouble? Flinders! Muck-Hell, yes! Flinders breaks truce, Flinders is a rork’s egg — and when I s’ll be Mister here, I s’ll tell him, same. But he doesn’t lack gut, no. Says, he be’s wrong in this? No!”

Some heads nodded, others were shaken dubiously; other voices were lifted, spoke together and drowned each other out. A sullen silence fell, abruptly. Old Guns, in a calming tone, said a few words. Jun grunted, did not appear convinced, but held his peace. “I have a guest — you see him sitting next to Norna on the bench,” said Old Guns. “His name is Ran Lomar, and the Guild Misters have sent him here from Outside to see if he can get more redweed made.”

All eyes turned toward Lomar, who arose and said, “It would help all of us …”

The great white beard of the Mister Dominis was thrust forward. “Never has the Guild Misters helped us. They’s leaved our dad’s dads here to eat the dirt and feed the rorks,” he rumbled. “More redweed, says? Ha! They makes medicines with weed, but does they give it here? No! And so we perishes with fever….”

A mutter of assent went around the group.

“Be’s they going to give us guns or gunmakings for more weed?” demanded someone so young as to be still beardless, but whose close likeness to the thick-browed and hooknosed face of the Mister Hannit left little doubt that he was his son; and again there was the mutter of assent.

With intended tact, Lomar began to talk of ways that production could be increased; if the gatherers would hack off the redwing stalks as soon as they pulled the plant, then their loads would be lighter —

The men laughed scornfully. “We knows that the Tame turds as licks your dirty plates up to North hasn’t the sense to do that,” young Hannitt said. “But we has. And we does. What’s else ye has to tell us, Guildsman?”

Nonplussed, he had nothing else at that moment to tell them, and while he stood there, gaping, the Wild men turned away from him. Angered at his own incapacity and at their insolent indifference, so different from the deference which the Tame Tocks accorded, he felt his rage coloring his face. While they muttered and grunted together, he thrust aside the curtain and passed through the anteroom to the outdoors.

The camp — every Wild Tock town was called a “camp” — stood on a hilltop from which, through a break in the black cascade of cliffs to the South, the ocean could be seen, the black dot of a boat passing slowly along.

The wind was wet and cold and grew colder. Three women passed along the trail below, bent beneath their loads of firewood; a boy came out of a low-roofed hut with several small and gutted fish impaled on a stick and took them into another. Most of the houses huddled together, some almost touching. Spindly, shrill children ran along the narrow lanes; and a half-grown boy, seeing Lomar looking on, numbly, spat in his direction, and wiped his mouth on his ragged sleeve. The “Wild” Tocks! Was there anything more for him here in the rugged South than in the dull North? There did not seem to be. There did not seem to be at all.

Presently the visitors and their host emerged together from Old Guns’ house, and went down the winding path to the palisaded enclosure around the largest building in the camp — the Mister Mallardy’s. In another moment the thin feather of smoke from the main smoke hole thickened. And, as if waiting only for this signal, a white flake drifted down from the leaden skies; then another, then the air was filled with them.

Whether to see the unfamiliar sight, or whether to punish himself for his own ineptitude, or to defy the fates which were bent on defying him and all his aims, he did not know; but Lomar stayed on and stayed on and on. He had some dim notion of waiting until dark, but the recollection that day on Pia 2 was six hours longer than on Old Earth, his distant, terribly distant homeworld, worked its way up to the surface of his unhappy mind. And so, finally, cold and stiff and wet and almost past misery, he painfully made his way back the way he had come.

• • •

It was late when his host returned. He added his own damp clothing to his guest’s, drying before the stove, and changed. Then, not looking over to where Lomar sat brooding in a corner chair, he said, “You think that redwing is the main problem?”

“What?”

“You think that getting more redwing is the main problem — don’t you?”

Lomar frowned, blinked, yawned. Stretching, he asked, “It is for me, I guess. Why?” — suddenly becoming aware of the challenging and troubled tone of Old Guns’ voice — “Isn’t it?”

The elder man shook his head. Seating himself before the fire, he said, as if thinking aloud, “Suppose they could be convinced? I say,
suppose.
… What could they do? Mount an expedition and come on down here? No. No good. No good at all. No good if it could succeed, no good if it failed. Choice of evils. What then? Stay up there and wait? Keep the force fields up? For how — ”

“Guns, what are you talking about?”

A stick of wood caught fire with little gouts and gusts of flame, blue bursts at first, then an audible burning, red and orange and yellow. Old Guns’ craggy face was lit by the flickering light.

“For how long? Sooner or later they’d have to rest the generators. No…. No…. Whichever way I look at it: No.” He stood up, abruptly. “Well — ‘Come day, go day, God send Sunday,’ and every day we’ve all got to eat.
Sathy? Norna?
”

And he wouldn’t repeat what he’d been saying, or enlarge upon or explain any of it.

“Rorks,” he said, after supper, taking up a pikehead and a whetstone. “They don’t know anything about rorks up North. Down here we do. Know them as well as we know the lot at Flinders Crag. But — They can talk, boy. Listen, now. They can
talk!
I don’t mean the Flinders, I mean the rorks. Oh, laugh, if you like. I didn’t believe it either, when I first heard it. But it’s true.”

In a low voice, Ran said, “You’ve been down here too long.”

Anger flashed in Norna’s eyes at that. “And I says ye hasn’t been here long enough! They can talk! They’s been heard to! And what’s more, they has a city — ”

“Oh, come on!” he burst out, half-annoyed, half-amused. “I know better than that! I’ve seen them myself, and I’ve seen old 3Ds of them, too. A city, indeed!”

Norna’s father nodded, slowly. “To be sure, it’s hard to credit. They
have
been heard to talk. No one’s seen their city in the daytime, but its lights have been seen at night from a place called Tiggy’s Hill, far into Rorkland. Folks don’t usually venture there, but now and then they do, in gathering; and they camp out on the Hill and build guard fires all around and keep a watch and ward, you may be sure, main carefully. And at such times they have seen the windows and streets of a great city…. This place is called the Plain of Lights. And if it isn’t rorks that live there — and I’m not sure, for one — then, tell me who does? People? So great a place would require a great area of fields to feed, and would have a great population. We’ve seen no signs of such. No — don’t underestimate the rork, Ranny. Don’t underestimate them at all.”

That night, sleeping on his hard and narrow cot after waiting a long time in what he admitted was the probably foolish hope that Norna might come to him, Lomar dreamed. In his dream a huge and dun-grey rork stood a ways before and below him, its mask a bright yellow lineation; and it spoke to him in its hoarse, roaring and clicking voice. And what it said was:

“Come down … Come down … I kill! I kill!”

“These two are exempt,” Old Guns said, hefting a matchlock in his hands, and indicating for Lomar to take the other from the table.

Lomar did, looking at it with curiosity. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I made them myself, and they aren’t counted on the old man’s roster. I mean that they are exempt from war. They are hunting weapons only, and I took my oath in blood upon them that they would never be aimed at any man no matter what. I did this before all the clans at the last powwow, some years back, and so everybody knows about it. That means that I can go anywhere with them at any time and no one will think I came to fight and I can pass safely. But it also means that if anyone wants to have at me, ever if a ‘lock is pointed at me and primed and a lighted match at his touch hole, I am the same as unarmed. I can’t use either of these even to defend myself. They’re exempt, you see.”

The match was made of a punk of wood and fungus, and burnt ill. Old Guns said that he might be able to make better, but preferred to keep to tradition. Besides, he had no desire to add to the arts of war as practiced too eagerly in the Wild land. One could usually tell where an armed enemy stood in the nighttime because his need often compelled him to whirl his match and fan it rapidly to keep it alive, and the sparks thrown off gave away his position. “To say nothing of the smell,” he added, wryly.

“I make my own powder, too,” he continued, “partly at least to keep from being blown up. But I tell them, when they ask me to make it for them, that it’s only strong enough for hunt shot and couldn’t kill a man. I use none of those big slugs that go for bullets here.”

Powder “horn” (actually, a wooden flask) and shot bag were of traditional design, made by a clan craftsman who was of some small fame in such matters. On the bag was painted a rip, and the words — crude but quite legible —
I
Bites;
and the horn was engraved with the figure of a rork and the legend,
Ware.

Two long prongs folded from the heavy body of the matchlock to give it support when the ‘lockman knelt to aim and fire; in order to do so from a standing position he would have needed three hands.

With the archaic instrument on his shoulder and powder and shot in place, Lomar felt like someone from an ancient drama, the
First Men on Mars,
perhaps; or the
Revenge of Cleopatra.
“I’d wear a loincloth to match,” he said, smiling, “if it weren’t so cold.” Old Guns did not smile, however, and made him repeat the rules for safety which he’d been told earlier. Finally, he allowed that it was safe for them to start out.