Rocannon's world hc-1 Read online

  The voice stopped suddenly, leaving only the hiss of static.

  Rocannon looked across the room to the little Fian, who had asked to stay with him, and now sat cross-legged and silent on the floor near the casement window.

  "That was the enemy, Kyo."

  The Fian's face was very still.

  "Kyo," said Rocannon—it was the custom to address a Fian by the Angyar name of his village, since individuals of the species perhaps did and perhaps did not have individual names—"Kyo, if you tried, could you mindhear the enemies?"

  In the brief notes from his one visit to a Fian village Rocannon had commented that Species 1-B seldom answered direct questions directly; and he well remembered their smiling elusiveness. But Kyo, left desolate in the alien country of speech, answered what Rocannon asked him. "No, Lord," he said submissively.

  "Can you mindhear others of your own kind, in other villages?"

  "A little. If I lived among them, perhaps… Füa go sometimes to live in other villages than their own. It is said even that once the Füa and the Gdemiar mindspoke together as one people, but that was very long ago. It is said . . ." He stopped.

  "Your people and the Clayfolk are indeed one race, though you follow very different ways now. What more, Kyo?"

  "It is said that very long ago, hi the south, hi the high places, the gray places, lived those who mindspoke with all creatures. All thoughts they could hear, the Old Ones, the Most Ancient… But we came down from the mountains, and lived in the valleys and the caves, and have forgotten the harder way."

  Rocannon pondered a moment. There were no mountains on the continent south of Hallan. He rose to get his Handbook for Galactic Area Eight, with its maps, when the radio, still hissing on the same band, stopped him short. A voice was coming through, much fainter, remote, rising and falling on billows of static, but speaking in Galactic. "Number Six, come in. Number Six, come in. This is Foyer. Come in, Number Six." After endless repetitions and pauses it continued: "This is Friday. No, this is Friday… This is Foyer; are you there, Number Six? The FTLs are due tomorrow and I want a full report on the Seven Six sidings and the nets. Leave the staggering plan to the Eastern Detachment. Are you getting me, Number Six? We are going to be in ansible communication with Base tomorrow. Will you get me that information on the sidings at once. Seven Six sidings. Unnecessary—" A surge of starnoise swallowed the voice, and when it re-emerged it was audible only in snatches. Ten long minutes went by in static, silence, and snatches of speech, then a nearer voice cut in, speaking quickly in the unknown language used before. It went on and on; moveless, minute after minute, his hand still on the cover of his Handbook, Rocannon listened. As moveless, the Fian sat in the shadows across the room. A double pair of numbers was spoken, then repeated; the second time Rocannon caught the Cetian word for "degrees." He flipped his notebook open and scribbled the numbers down; then at last, though he still listened, he opened the Handbook to the maps of Fomalhaut II.

  The numbers he had noted were 28° 28—121° 40. If they were coordinates of latitude and longitude… He brooded over the maps a while, setting the point of his pencil down a couple of times on blank open sea. Then, trying 121 West with 28 North, he came down just south of a range of mountains, halfway down the Southwest Continent. He sat gazing at the map. The radio voice had fallen silent.

  "Starlord?"

  "I think they told me where they are. Maybe. And they've got an ansible there." He looked up at Kyo unsee-ingly, then back at the map. "If they're down there—if I could get there and wreck their game, if I could get just one message out on their ansible to the League, if I could…"

  Southwest Continent had been mapped only from the air, and nothing but the mountains and major rivers were sketched inside the coastlines: hundreds of kilometers of blank, of unknown. And a goal merely guessed at.

  "But I can't just sit here," Rocannon said. He looked up again, and met the little man's clear, uncomprehending gaze.

  He paced down the stone-floored room and back. The radio hissed and whispered.

  There was one thing in his favor: the fact that the enemy would not be expecting him. They thought they had the planet all to themselves. But it was the only thing hi his favor.

  "I'd like to use their weapons against them," he said. "I think I'll try to find them. In the land to the south… My people were killed by these strangers, like yours, Kyo. You and I are both alone, speaking a language not our own. I would rejoice in your companionship."

  He hardly knew what moved him to the suggestion.

  The shadow of a smile went across the Fian's face..He raised his hands, parallel and apart. Rushlight in sconces on the walls bowed and flickered and changed. "It was foretold that the Wanderer would choose companions," he said. "For a while."

  "The Wanderer?" Rocannon asked, but this time the Fian did not answer.

  III

  THE LADY OF THE CASTLE crossed the high hall slowly, skirts rustling over stone. Her dark skin was deepened with age to the black of an ikon; her fair hair was white. Still she kept the beauty of her lineage. Rocannon bowed and spoke a greeting in the fashion of her people: "Hail Hal-lanlady, Durhal's daughter, Haldre the Fair!"

  "Hail Rokanan, my guest," she said, looking calmly down at him. Like most Angyar women and all Angyar men she was considerably taller than he. "Tell me why you go south." She continued to pace slowly across the hall, and Rocannon walked beside her. Around them was dark air and stone, dark tapestry hung on high walls, the cool light of morning from clerestory windows slanting across the black of rafters overhead.

  "I go to find my enemy, Lady."

  "And when you have found them?"

  "I hope to enter their… their castle, and make use of their… message-sender, to tell the League they are here, on this world. They are hiding here, and there is very little chance of their being found: the worlds are thick as sand on the sea-beach. But they must be found. They have done harm here, and they would do much worse on other worlds."

  Haldre nodded her head once. "Is it true you wish to go lightly, with few men?"

  "Yes, Lady. It is a long way, and the sea must be crossed. And craft, not strength, is my only hope against their strength."

  "You will need more than craft, Starlord," said the old woman. "Well, I'll send with you four loyal midmen, if that suffices you, and two windsteeds laden and six saddled, and a piece or two of silver in case barbarians in the foreign lands want payment for lodging you, and my son Mogien."

  "Mogien will come with me? These are great gifts, Lady, but that is the greatest!"

  She looked at him a minute with her clear, sad, inexorable gaze. "I am glad it pleases you, Starlord." She resumed her slow walking, and he beside her. "Mogien desires to go, for love of you and for adventure; and you, a great lord on a very perilous mission, desire his company. So I think it is surely his way to follow. But I tell you now, this morning in the Long Hall, so that you may remember and not fear my blame if you return: I do not think he will come back with you."

  "But Lady, he is the heir of Hallan." She went in silence a while, turned at the end of the room under a time-darkened tapestry of winged giants fighting fair-haired men, and finally spoke again. "Hallan will find others heirs." Her voice was calm and bitter cold. "You Starlords are among us again, bringing new ways and wars. Reohan is dust; how long will Hallan stand? The world itself has become a grain of sand on the shore of night. All things change now. But I am certain still of one thing: that there is darkness over my lineage. My mother, whom you knew, was lost in the forests in her madness; my father was killed in battle, my husband by treachery; and when I bore a son my spirit grieved amid my joy, foreseeing his life would be short. That is no grief to him; he is an Angya, he wears the double swords. But my part of the darkness is to rule a failing domain alone, to live and live and outlive them all…"

  She was silent again a minute. "You may need more treasure than I can give you, to buy your lif
e or your way. Take this. To you I give it, Rokanan, not to Mogien. There is no darkness on it to you. Was it not yours once, in the city across the night? To us it has been only a burden and a shadow. Take it back, Starlord; use it for a ransom or a gift." She unclasped from her neck the gold and the great blue stone of the necklace that had cost her mother's life, and held it out in her hand to Rocannon. He took it, hearing almost with terror the soft, cold clash of the golden links, and lifted his eyes to Haldre. She faced him, very tall, her blue eyes dark in the dark clear air of the hall. "Now take my son with you, Starlord, and follow your way. May your enemy die without sons."

  Torchlight and smoke and hurrying shadows in the castle flightcourt, voices of beasts and men, racket and confusion, all dropped away in a few wingbeats of the striped steed Rocannon rode. Behind them now Hallan lay, a faint spot of light on the dark sweep of the hills, and there was no sound but a rushing of air as the wide half-seen wings lifted and beat down. The east was pale behind them, and the Greatstar burned like a bright crystal, heralding the sun, but it was long before daybreak. Day and night and the twilights were stately and unhurried on this planet that took thirty hours to turn. And the pace of the seasons also was large; this was the dawn of the vernal equinox, and four hundred days of spring and summer lay ahead.

  "They'll sing songs of us in the high castles," said Kyo, riding postillion behind Rocannon. "They'll sing how the Wanderer and his companions rode south across the sky in the darkness before the spring…" He laughed a little. Beneath them the hills and rich plains of Angien unfolded like a landscape painted on gray silk, brightening little by little, at last glowing vivid with colors and shadows as the lordly sun rose behind them.

  At noon they rested a couple of hours by the river whose southwest course they were following to the sea; at dusk they flew down to a little castle, on a hilltop like all Angyar castles, near a bend of the same river. There they were made welcome by the lord of the place and his household. Curiosity obviously itched in him at the sight of a Fian traveling by windsteed, along with the Lord of Hallan, four midmen, and one who spoke with a queer accent, dressed like a lord, but wore no swords and was white-faced like a midman. To be sure, there was more intermingling between the two castes, the Angyar and Olgyior, than most Angyar like to admit; there were light-skinned warriors, and gold-haired servants; but this "Wanderer" was altogether too anomalous. Wanting no further rumor of his presence on the planet, Rocannon said nothing, and their host dared ask no questions of the heir of Hallan; so if he ever found out who his strange guests had been, it was from minstrels singing the tale, years later.

  The next day passed the same for the seven travelers, riding the wind above the lovely land. They spent that night hi an Olgyior village by the river, and on the third day came over country new even to Mogien. The river, curving away to the south, lay in loops and oxbows, the hills ran out into long plains, and far ahead was a mirrored pale brightness in the sky. Late in the day they came to a castle set alone on a white bluff, beyond which lay a long reach of lagoons and gray sand, and the open sea.

  Dismounting, stiff and tired and his head ringing from wind and motion, Rocannon thought it the sorriest Angyar stronghold he had yet seen: a cluster of huts like wet chickens bunched under the wings of a squat, seedy-looking fort. Midmen, pale and short-bodied, peered at them from the straggling lanes. "They look as if they'd bred with Clayfolk," said Mogien. "This is the gate, and the place is called Tolen, if the wind hasn't carried us astray. Ho! Lords of Tolen, the guest is at your gate!" There was no sound within the castle. "The gate of Tolen swings in the wind," said Kyo, and they saw that indeed the portal of bronze-bound wood sagged on its hinges, knocking in the cold sea-wind that blew up through the town. Mogien pushed it open with his swordpoint. Inside was darkness, a scuttering rustle of wings, and a dank smell.

  "The Lords of Tolen did not wait for their guests," said Mogien. "Well, Yahan, talk to these ugly fellows and find us lodging for the night."

  The young midman turned to speak to the townsfolk who had gathered at the far end of the castle forecourt to stare. One of them got up the courage to hitch himself forward, bowing and going sideways like some seaweedy beach-creature, and spoke humbly to Yahan. Rocannon could partly follow the Olgyior dialect, and gathered that the old man was pleading that the village had no proper housing for pedanar, whatever they were. The tall midman Raho joined Yahan and spoke fiercely, but the old man only hitched and bowed and mumbled, till at last Mogien strode forward. He could not by the Angyar code speak to the serfs of a strange domain, but he unsheathed one of his swords and held it up shining in the cold sea turned and shuffled down into the darkening alleys of the village. The travelers followed, the furled wings of their steeds brushing the low reed roofs on both sides.

  "Kyo, what are pedanar?"

  The little man smiled.

  "Yahan, what is that word, pedanar?"

  The young midman, a goodnatured, candid fellow, looked uneasy. "Well, Lord, a pedan is… one who walks among men…"

  Rocannon nodded, snapping up even this scrap. While he had been a student of the species instead of its ally, he had kept seeking for their religion; they seemed to have no creeds at all. Yet they were quite credulous. They took spells, curses, and strange powers as matter of fact, and their relation to nature was intensely animistic; but they had no gods. This word, at last, smelled of the supernatural. It did not occur to him at the time that the word had been applied to himself.

  It took three of the sorry huts to lodge the seven of them, and the windsteeds, too big to fit any house of the village, had to be tied outside. The beast huddled together, ruffling their fur against the sharp sea-wind. Rocannon's striped steed scratched at the wall and complained in a mewing snarl till Kyo went out and scratched its ears. "Worse awaits him soon, poor beast," said Mogien, sitting beside Rocannon by the stove-pit that wanned the hut. "They hate water."

  "You said at Hallan that they wouldn't fly over the sea, and these villagers surely have no ships that would carry them. How are we going to cross the channel?"

  "Have you your picture of the land?" Mogien inquired. The Angyar had no maps, and Mogien was fascinated by the Geographic Survey's maps in the Handbook. Rocannon got the book out of the old leather pouch he had carried from world to world, and which contained the little equipment he had had with him in Hallan when the ship had been bombed—Handbook and notebooks, suit and gun, medical kit and radio, a Terran chass-set and a battered volume of Hainish poetry. At first he had "kept the necklace with its sapphire in with this stuff, but last night, oppressed by the value of the thing, he had sewn the sapphire pendant up in a little bag of soft barilor-hide and strung the necklace around his own neck, under his shirt and cloak, so that it looked like an amulet and could not be lost unless his head was too.

  Mogien followed with a long, hard forefinger the contours of the two Western Continents where they faced each other: the far south of Angien, with its two deep gulfs and a fat promontory between them reaching south; and across the channel, the northermost cape of the Southwest Continent, which Mogien called Fiern. "Here we are," Rocannon said, setting a fish vertebra from their supper on the tip of the promontory.

  "And here, if these cringing fish-eating yokels speak truth, is a castle called Plenot." Mogien put a second vertebra a half-inch east of the first one, and admired it. "A tower looks very like that from above. When I get back to Hallan, I'll send out a hundred men on steeds to look down on the land, and from their pictures we'll carve in stone a great picture of all Angien. Now at Plenot there will be ships—probably the ships of this place, Tolen, as well as their own. There was a feud between these two poor lords, and that's why Tolen stands now full of wind and night. So the old man told Yahan."

  "Will Plenot lend us ships?"

  "Plenot will lend us nothing. The lord of Plenot is an Errant." This meant, in the complex code of relationships among Angyar domains, a lord banned by the rest, an outlaw, not
bound by the rules of hospitality, reprisal, or restitution.

  "He has only two windsteeds," said Mogien, unbuckling his swordbelt for the night. "And his castle, they say, is built of wood."

  Next morning as they flew down the wind to that wooden castle a guard spotted them almost as they spotted the tower. The two steeds of the castle were soon aloft, circling the tower; presently they could make out little figures with bows leaning from window-slits. Clearly an Errant Lord expected no friends. Rocannon also realized now why Angyar castles were roofed over, making them cavernous and dark inside, but protecting them from an airborne enemy. Plenot was a little place, ruder even than Tolen, lacking a village of midmen, perched out on a spit of black boulders above the sea; but poor as it was, Mogien's confidence that six men could subdue it seemed excessive. Rocannon checked the thighstraps of his saddle, shifted his grip on the long air-combat lance Mogien had given him, and cursed his luck and himself. This was no place for an ethnologist of forty-three.

  Mogien, flying well ahead on his black steed, raised his lance and yelled. Rocannon's mount put down its head and beat into full flight. The black-and-gray wings flashed up and down like vans; the long, thick, light body was tense, thrumming with the powerful heartbeat. As the wind whistled past, the thatched tower of Plenot seemed to hurtle toward them, circled by two rearing gryphons. Rocannon crouched down on the windsteed's back, his long lance couched ready. A happiness, an old delight was swelling in him; he laughed a little, riding the wind. Closer and closer came the rocking tower and its two winged guards, and suddenly with a piercing falsetto shout Mogien hurled his lance, a bolt of silver through the air. It hit one rider square in the chest, breaking his thighstraps with the force of the blow, and hurled him over his steed's haunches in a clear, seemingly slow arc three hundred feet down to the breakers creaming quietly on the rocks. Mogien shot straight on past the riderless steed and opened combat with the other guard, fighting hi close, trying to get a sword-stroke past the lance which his opponent did not throw but used for jabbing and parrying. The four midmen on their white and gray mounts hovered nearby like terrible pigeons, ready to help but not interfering with their lord's duel, circling just high enough that the archers below could not pierce the steeds' leathern bellymail. But all at once all four of them, with that nerve-rending falsetto yell, closed hi on the duel. For a moment there was a knot of white wings and glittering steel hanging in midair. From the knot dropped a figure that seemed to be trying to lie down on the air, turning this way and that with loose limbs seeking comfort, till it struck the castle roof and slid to a hard bed of rock below.