Exiled: Clan of the Claw, Book One Read online

  EXILED

  CLAN OF THE CLAW

  BOOK ONE

  S.M. Stirling

  Harry Turtledove

  Jody Lynn Nye

  John Ringo

  Michael Z. Williamson

  Baen

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  Exiled: Clan of the Claw

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Bill Fawcett & Associates

  Introduction Copyright © 2011 by Bill Fawcett & Associates

  “The Mrem Go West” Copyright © 2011 by Harry Turtledove

  “A Little Power” Copyright © 2011 by S.M. Stirling

  “Battle’s Tide” Copyright © 2011 by Michael Z. Williamson

  “Cata” Copyright © 2011 by John Ringo & Jody Lynn Nye

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4391-3441-2

  Cover art by Stephen Hickman

  First printing, August 2011

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Exiled : clan of the claw / Harry Turtledove…[et. al.].

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-4391-3441-2 (hc : alk. paper)

  1. Science fiction, American. 2. Bronze age—Fiction. 3. Prehistoric peoples—Fiction. 4. Evolution (Biology)—Fiction. I. Turtledove, Harry.

  PS648.S3E87 2011

  813’.087620806—dc23

  2011020951

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Midnight, Lila and Cassandra

  Introduction

  The Mrem are descended from cats, just as humans share an ancestor with apes. Which brings up the question as to why would any carnivore need intelligence. Squishy, tasty humans needed to evolve brains in order to find dinner and not be it. But with tooth and claw, why be smart too?

  The ancestors of the Mrem faced just as great a challenge as we hairless apes did. It occurred simply because there are few asteroids in their solar system. Asteroids? Huh? Going a bit astray here? Actually it is straightforward. With no asteroid hits, there would be no great extinctions and the age of reptiles would never have really ended. Given tens of millions of extra years one of the descendants of the first reptiles would have reacted to their own fierce competitiveness by very slowly developing both their own kind of intelligence and more. Other creatures, even herd animals, would too have needed to develop better defenses and had time to do so. Mammals would have evolved, too, but always under pressure from the cold-blooded, reptilian Liskash.

  The Liskash ruled unchallenged for literally millions of years. They developed a basically static society based upon local dominance by the mentally most powerful male. Then came the ice ages. In the colder northern plains, useless and ignored by the Liskash, the Mrem evolved from pack hunters to intelligence. At first the Liskash were slow to react. They saw the furry upstarts mostly as a source of slightly more superior slaves, and occasionally food. The Mrem fought back, as pack hunting cats would, forming fiercely independent clans.

  At the end of the current ice age there are hundreds of Mrem clans all competing for the same limited grazing lands. The clans rarely cooperated. The population grew much faster than the glaciers retreated. There came a time when there was not enough land to support all the clan’s herds. Clans who could not keep or take grazing land starved. The battles between clans were fierce. So vicious that some clans chose to face the Liskash, living demons, and move south.

  Then the entire world literally changed. A massive valley—picture our Mediterranean Sea as a dry basin—has sat through the now ending ice age as a warm, lush and Liskash controlled jungle. Some of the valley is hundreds of feet below sea level. Mrem tribes, the most aggressive or those driven out, have begun to also live in this valley.
Some have even emerged to the cooler steppes south of it. But as the ice melts the seas are rising and in the east the great ocean finds an opening.

  Suddenly a wall of water surges as the small width of land that had been holding the rising ocean out quickly erodes away. Within days the jungle becomes a sea. Tens of thousands of Mrem and hundreds of thousands of Liskash die. Those clans trapped south of the new sea find themselves outnumbered by Likash lords that have ruled there since beyond memory. The Clan of the Claw begins what was to be known as the Great Trek. Their only hope for survival as other than brain-dazed slaves is to march around this new sea and return to the Mrem-controlled northern steppes. Forced to cooperate, the other clans join them in the march or wait to join and assist in keeping the way open. The Trek and what the Mrem learn from it change their culture forever, starting them on the road to civilization.

  This is the story of the Great Trek.

  —Bill Fawcett

  The Mrem Go West

  HARRY TURTLEDOVE

  And the demons held fast to the Lowlands. Brother fought brother. Yet He saw their plight and spoke to Her that was the land.

  “Give back to the grasping sea that which you have taken,” Aedonniss asked. “For from that hot land they will enslave the true people.”

  “This will lessen me, so you as well,” the goddess of the earth protested.

  “So it must then,” the sky god spoke. “Many will be lost, but more will be saved. Better we are less, than every dame and kit a slave.”

  And so it was that with a trickle, then torrent, and finally as a great tide Assirra willfully sacrificed much of her domain to the sea.

  —The Book of Mrem, verse seven

  Rantan Taggah stared north across the arms of the sea—the New Water, the Clan of the Claw called it. His lips narrowed, so that the tips—well, more than the tips—of his fangs showed. Like the rest of his clansmates, the talonmaster called the New Water other things, too: things as foul as he could think of. An angry growl rumbled, down deep in his throat. The New Water was much too likely to mean death, not only for him but for all the Clan of the Claw, which meant for all the Mrem trapped south of it.

  A fly landed on the tuft atop one of his upstanding ears. The ear twitched, but the fly didn’t leave. He scratched his ear, shooting just the tips of his claws from their sheaths. The fly buzzed away. His ear twitched again, as if reminding it not to come back.

  High above the salt-smelling water, a sea bird circled, hunting. No, not a bird: the long, drooping tail said it was a flying Liskash. The leatherwing folded its wings and plummeted, striking the sea like a spearpoint. A moment later, it flew off again, a fish writhing in its toothy jaws.

  Where one hunter had luck, others might hope for more. That was a rule everywhere and for everything and everyone: leatherwings and birds, mammals and meat-eating Liskash, Liskash nobles and Mrem. A second flyer dove at the water, visions of a full belly doubtless dancing in its narrow skull.

  Something reared up out of the sea to greet it—something far bigger, far fiercer, far toothier. That enormous mouth opened and closed. Rantan Taggah stood too far away to hear the crunch of breaking bones with his body’s ears, but it was sickeningly loud in the ears of his mind. A leatherwing was far from enough to sate something that size, but snacks were always welcome.

  “Aedonniss!” Rantan Taggah muttered. “What were you thinking when you made those horrible things?”

  The sky god didn’t answer. Rantan Taggah hadn’t expected him to. Aedonniss looked for his folk to take care of themselves and not waste his time. He was a hard god…but then, it was a hard world, and getting harder all the time.

  Mrem who’d lived by the Old Water spoke of the savage reptilian monsters in the sea when they came inland to trade or to raid. Like any other inlander, Rantan Taggah listened to the tales. Why not? They were an entertaining way to make time lope by. Just because you listened to a story didn’t mean you had to believe it. He’d discounted most of what the seaside Mrem claimed.

  Now, though, he’d had the chance to see the ocean monsters for himself. The really alarming thing was how little the talespinners exaggerated.

  He snarled. No, the really alarming thing was that he’d had the chance to see the ocean monsters for himself. He hadn’t gone traveling. On the contrary—the ocean had come to him.

  Some few Mrem priestesses and learned males had always claimed the great depression by whose southern edge the Clan of the Claw dwelt was an ancient seabottom. With a great part of the world’s water tied up in sheets of ice, land advanced while the sea retreated. Now the glaciers were melting, shrinking, as if ensorceled; and, as the world warmed, water in the oceans piled higher and deeper.

  Piled higher and deeper…and sometimes spilled. For as long as the Mrem could remember (and, surely, for longer than that), the Quaxo Hills to the east had held against the Old Water, held it out of the Hollow Lands. Rantan Taggah, now a male in his prime, had just been coming out of kithood when the Quaxo Hills held no more.

  Now the Hollow Lands were vanished from maps and charts. Now the hunting clans and townsMrem who’d lived there were either fugitives from their homes or, most of them, vanished beneath waters Aedonniss only knew how many bowshots deep.

  Rantan Taggah snarled again. Few of the Mrem had much use for water or for travel across it under any circumstances. And that said nothing of the reptilian horrors like the one he’d seen, creatures that preyed on anything they could reach. The Clan of the Claw—and the handful of survivors from the drowned Hollow Lands—would not, could not, rejoin their kind by sailing across the New Water.

  The only trouble with that was, the Clan of the Claw couldn’t stay where it was, either. Rantan Taggah turned away from the New Water and toward the south: toward the Warm Lands, the lands where the Liskash flourished best. The pupils in his emerald eyes widened from slits almost to circles, as if he were confronting his folk’s foes in truth, not merely in thought.

  His clan was rich, as these things went. Peering south, he saw broad herds of horned bundor and krelprep and shambling hamsticorns. The Clan of the Claw did not lack for meat or milk or leather or hair and wool.

  But one clan, alone (or as near as made no difference), could not hope to stand against the Liskash nobles and the weaker but still dangerous reptiles the nobles could gather to fight at their side (or rather, under their feet). Not for nothing did the Mrem picture the demons who opposed Aedonniss as being formed in the image of the Liskash. Maybe it was the other way around: maybe the Liskash looked like demons. Priestesses and savants argued about that, too. Savants, of course, would argue about anything. It was part of what made them savants.

  There were times when Rantan Taggah enjoyed arguing as much as anybody else—more than most males. What the Clan of the Claw had to do now, though, was not a matter for argument. He didn’t think so, anyhow. But he was only too certain plenty of other males—and females, too—would be ready, even eager, to argue with him about that.

  * * *

  Looking at Sassin, you wouldn’t think he was a god. By the standards of the Mrem, the Liskash noble was short and spindly. He looked even scrawnier than he was, because he had no hair to fluff out his silhouette.

  Not, of course, that he would have cared even a scrap of shed skin’s worth about the opinions of a swarm of hairy vermin. Like all Liskash with wits above lizard level, he despised, hated, and feared the Mrem. If they had but a single neck, so he could slaughter them all with one great stroke…

  But, worse luck, they didn’t. He was a god—if you didn’t believe it, you had only to ask him—but he was not so powerful a god as that. No god so powerful as that had arisen among the Liskash for lo these many years.

  He thought that was a shame. A Mrem might have thought that their stupid god’s failure to destroy the Liskash was a pity. All Sassin knew about pity was what he’d heard from captured Mrem he was tormenting. He understood little of the notion. What he did understand, he thought
uncommonly foolish. He had trouble believing even the Mrem really believed in the idea. By the way they often acted, so did they.

  His tongue flicked out, tasting the air around him. Change was in the wind. Sprung from an ancient race, Sassin did not think well of change. He was not sorry when the barrier of the Quaxo Hills failed and the sea poured over them into the Hollow Lands. He was sorry it hadn’t drowned all the Mrem: that was a change he would have approved of.

  Now the ones who had survived were all astir. He knew what they would stir up, too. Trouble. It was all they were good for.

  Sassin stared out from the tower topping his castle. He could see a long way, and he was lord of all he surveyed. Were that ever to become untrue, he would find himself enslaved or slain. Such was life among the Liskash nobles. Even now, some powerful young wizard might be sneaking around out there, plotting to lay him low. Until the enemy chose to strike, he would hide himself from Sassin, lest he be struck first. Though only distantly related to poisonous serpents, the Liskash were close spiritual kin.

  Herds of meat animals ambled over the sun-baked plains. Some were scaled, others hairy; when it came to meat, Sassin liked variety. Liskash herders and enslaved Mrem kept the animals moving and didn’t let them eat any one stretch of the countryside bare. Some of the Liskash were hardly more clever than the beasts in their charge. The Mrem…

  An unhappy hiss escaped from Sassin’s throat. If he was a god, he was not divinely cheerful. He had the mental strength to rob Mrem of their surnames and hold them in thralldom. That was part of what being a god entailed. But it wasn’t easy, effortless, the way it was with most of his own breed. (The nearest Liskash he could not easily subdue, a noble named Hishash, ruled a domain about the size of his own off to the west, and was a god in his own right there.) If he didn’t keep a mental eye on the Mrem he’d enslaved, they were liable to recover some of their own personalities and either try to escape or try to stir up trouble inside his realm.