By this time, reports had gotten from the western border to Prince Gormoth’s capital that the five hundred Sastragathi, joined by a thousand more of their countrymen, were pillaging and burning, commiting all the usual atrocities and a few they seemed to have invented specially for the occasion. The spy radio reported that Gormoth had pulled a thousand troops out of the Dombra Line and ordered them west. Their column was kept under air observation, and the two envoys from Dazour were taken for a look at them and the Dombra Line. The troops on the march were not molested, but the two Dazouri saw some bombing of the Dombra Line—empty oxygen cylinders packed with blasting explosive—and were horrified at the effect.

  There was only one road across southern Nostor; about half way from Dombra Pass to the Sastragath border, it crossed a deep and narrow gorge on a wooden bridge. By the end of the second day, the Nostori column was within a few hours’ march of it, and made camp. The next morning, when they took the road again, they were under observation of several aircars, including one in which Barron had the two Dazouri diplomats.

  “We are going to show you something, now,” he told them, when the head of the column was within two hundred yards of the bridge. “Watch this.”

  Then he dived and swept over the heads of the Nostori. Before any of them could do anything, he was zooming up at the bridge, and as he did, he let go his rocket-booster. The aircar shot up to twenty thousand feet in a matter of seconds; when it was losing momentum, he turned in a wide circle and brought it down again. The bridge was blazing from one end to the other, and the road to the east of it was empty, except for a litter of discarded pikes and muskets and a few casualties who had been knocked down and trampled in the rush. Nostori soldiers, mounted and on foot, were streaming away in both directions, scattering as they went.

  “That was an army, a moment ago,” he told his passengers. “It may be an army again, but not for a couple of days.”

  “But why did you spare them?” one of the Dazouri asked. “You could have wiped them all out with the flameweapon.”

  “Oh, that would have been too horrible! We would never do a thing like that,” he assured them. “That is, not unless it were a case of national survival. If Hos-Hostigos were invaded by some overwhelming force—the only such enemy I can think of would be Hos-Harphax—we would find ourselves driven to use even worse weapons than that, of course. Beside, those are trained soldiers, though they don’t look like it at the moment. When Prince Gormoth submits and brings Nostor into Hos-Hostigos, as he will inside a month, we will want them. Now, down there; there’s the Dombra Line, again. Wait till I show you something. Here, use the binoculars. Those four big can-non, two on either side of the road. Bombards, throw three hundred pound stone balls. They’re new ones, but they’re probably the last of their kind that will be made. . .”

  “We must go home to Dazour tomorrow,” one of them said. “Prince Tabalkon must be told about this. Today, we have seen the whole world changed.”

  “I am glad,” the other said, “that I am an old man. I will not have to live long in this changed world.”

  The next morning, the two Dazouri envoys got a closer view of Prince Gormoth’s three hundred pounders. All four of them, with their mounts, were sitting in the outer enclosure of Tarr-Hostigos. The night before, Dave MacDonald and Harmakros, with two hundred of the commando force, had dropped onto the gun positions and held them until four Hostigi machine operators brought down contragravity manipulators and each snatched away one of the giant bombards. The whole operation cost three casualties and two hundred-odd rounds of rifle and pistol ammunition.

  The two Dazouri heard the story, inspected the bom-bards, and then got into the landing-craft that was to take them back to Dazour.

  Three days later, Prince Tabalkon of Dazour decided to repudiate his allegiance to Hos-Harphax and take his country into Hos-Hostigos. It took some argument to per-suade him not to have the priests at the Dazour temple tied to kegs of fire-seed and blown up. Once he could get along without them, he had wanted to indulge what had long been his real feeling toward them.

  On the way to Tarr-Hostigos from the discussions, Roger Barron detoured for another look at the Dombra Line. It was empty, marked only by the raw-earth scars of trenches and gun-emplacements. Swinging north along the road, he saw the army on the march toward Nostor. They were going to inform Prince Gormoth that the war was over.

  A couple of days later, Count Phebron and several companions rode up the pass road to Tarr-Dombra and from there were airlifted to Tarr-Hostigos. Prince Gormoth, they said, wanted admission to Hos-Hostigos on the same terms as Prince Tabalkon. He also wanted assistance in suppressing the Sastragathi brigands who were ravaging the western part of his princedom. Everybody was happy except Nancy Patterson, and she would have been except that she was convinced that the crusades were about to start. Kings and princes every-where would be taking up the sword; huge armies would be marching to crush the infidel, joined at every crossroads by fresh throngs shouting

  “Styphon wills it!” Every day of postponement would make the final catastrophe that much more catastrophic. She said as much, one after-noon, when half a dozen of them were lounging in the room at Tarr-Dombra that had been fitted up as a bar and clubroom.

  “Nancy, it isn’t going to happen,” he told her, a trifle impatiently. “Styphon’s House is finished, even in Harphax.”

  “But you can’t just wipe a religion out of existence over-night,” she objected.

  “Not a religion, no. But Styphon’s House wasn’t really one. A religion needs more than priests and temples. It needs believers with deep emotional faith, believers who love their religion as the people who followed Peter the Hermit loved theirs, and that Styphon’s House never had. Look at the way the people of Sask, and Dazour, and Nostor, turned on them. And the Prince of Balkron, south of Dazour.”

  He had been one of the more recent seceders from Hos-Harphax; to prove his sincerity, he had shipped the heads of eighteen priests of Styphon, each packed in a powder-keg full of salt, to Tarr-Hostigos. Nancy had been present when they had been opened; she grimaced at the memory.

  “Where Styphon’s House made their mistake was right at the beginning, by over-specialization. When they discovered the niter-sulphur-charcoal combination, they thought they had everything they needed, and they adopted this policy of supplying the rulers with powder in exchange for forced-levy offerings from their subjects. The people hated them, and they were stupid enough not to care. They thought they could control the people through the princes, and their only control over the princes was based on the secret of making powder and their ability to supply or withhold it. And now the secret isn’t a secret any more, and their monopoly’s busted.”

  “What I can’t see,” Almagro said, “is why King Kaiphranos hasn’t gone to war with us on his own account. He’s just sitting and watching his kingdom break up under him.”

  “That’s all he can do. With the annexation of Balkron, we now have forty five thousand troops, not counting Sastragathi. King Kaiphranos has, in the original princedom and city of Harphax, a total of fifteen thousand. The rest of the military strength of Hos-Harphax is controlled by the—put it in quotes—subject princes. That was Styphon’s House, too. They managed to keep the kingdom divided, every prince virtually independent of the Great King, and completely independent of one another. That’s why we’ve been making these princes who join Hos-Hostigos turn the bulk of their troops over to us. What we want is a national army, because Hos-Hostigos is going to be a nation, not a snake-pit. We can do that, because we’re something new and we’re making it a condition of membership. If Kaiphranos tried to do it, he’d have a civil war on his hands. I’m about half expecting him to have one, no matter what he does.”

  “The mercenary captains aren’t taking service with Kaiphranos, any more,” Reginald Fitzurse remarked. “And we have to fight them off with a club.”

  Quite a few free-companies, he had been hearing, were going down the river to take service in Hos-Rathon, in the delta country, and in Hos-Bleth, to the east along the coast. The mercenary business itself wasn’t too good, any more. Hos-Hostigos wanted no more of them. He thought of the many things, none of them good, that Machiavelli, out of long experience, had had to say about mercenaries— Theyplunder you in peace and let your enemies plunder you in war. You cannot rely upon them, for they will always aspire to their own greatness. . . .

  Maybe it would be a good plan to collect a lot of free-companies and use them in colonizing the other continents. He was turning that idea over in his mind when he became aware of what Nancy Patterson was saying:

  “Well, gosh, I won’t cry if there isn’t any crusade. Then Harmakros won’t be going off to war as soon as we’re married.”

  “Huh?” Charley Clifford almost shouted. “You mean you and Harmakros are getting married?”

  “Yes, we are, in about a week.” She rose, picked up a bottle and carefully corked it. “You say one dam’ word about him not being human and I’m going to smash this over your head!”

  Then she set the bottle down and went out. Clifford looked at it silently until she was gone.

  “I can understand her attitude, of course, but—” He shrugged. “I hope having a child by Harmakros isn’t anything she’s counting on too heavily. She won’t, you know.”

  “Do you know that, or is that just your professional opinion?”

  Having a child by him might be something important to Rylla. They hadn’t discussed it, but he suspected that it would be. The curse of overpopulation hadn’t put its mark on the Freyan mind as it had on the Terran.

  “Well, look, Roger,” Charley said. “Life here originated and evolved independently of life on Terra. We and the Freyans started from two different puddles of living slime, seven hundred light-years apart. You know the mechanism of reproduction. The sperm and the ovum are away up the structural ladder. Each contains twenty four chromosomes, with us; I don’t know how many for the Frey-ans. Each of them contains thousands of genes. Here, for a simplified example, suppose a Terran locksmith made a lock, and a locksmith here on Freya made a key, neither knowing what the other was doing. What odds would you give against the key working in the lock? Well, that’s al-most an even-money bet beside the odds against a Terran spermatozoon fertilizing a Freyan ovum, or vice versa.”

  That sounded reasonable, until he began to think about it.

  “Wait a minute, Charley. Every physical characteristic stems, originally, from the gene for it; that’s correct, isn’t it? And you, yourself, have admitted that Freyans do not possess any non-human characteristics, or lack any human ones.”

  “I see what you’re getting at, Roger.” Charley frowned. “Superficially, it sounds convincing. But, dammit, these people. . .” Then he changed the subject by shifting to the research work he intended doing once the powder mills could run themselves and he could get back to medical work. The third ship was finished. She was almost twice as big as the King Ptosphes, and had a speed of a hundred mph. Luther Smith thought that now was the time to embark the armies of Hos-Hostigos and go to Harphax to tell King Kaiphranos that he was through. Julio Almagro was re-minded of an old Spanish proverb about the converted Moor eating pork three times a day. And even if this belligerence hadn’t been so incongruous for Luther, the idea was pure nonsense. Administrative problems were already piling up faster than they could be dealt with, without creating a host of new ones. Beside, Kaiphranos would find out where he stood soon enough.

  It didn’t take him long. It was barely three weeks after Nancy’s marriage to Harmakros before a big forty-oared barge came up the river to Balkron and an embassy from King Kaiphranos journeyed overland by oukry to Tarr-Hostigos. They brought friendly greetings from their king, who wanted to enter into alliance with the Great King of Hos-Hostigos and make agreements of peace, friendship and trade. Styphon’s House, they announced, no longer existed in Hos-Harphax. The temples and farms had been seized by the Crown, and the priests expelled, but not before a number had been questioned under torture. As a result of this last, King Kaiphranos now knew how to make fire-seed for himself. Why, in the five or six centuries that Styphon’s House had been battening on the kings and princes and people of the Great River valley, this simple little idea hadn’t occurred to anybody before would be one of the perpetual mysteries. Maybe everybody had been afraid Styphon really would do something about it.

  Her father was alone at his writing-table, with piles of parchments and stacks of the soft white paper of the Terrans in front of him. For a moment, he did not hear them enter, and kept on writing. Then he raised his head and smiled at them, and picked up his poignard to strike the gong and call for wine. They sat down facing him.

  “I’m not hearing any more complaints from western Nostor about Sastragathi raids,” he said.

  “Oh, no; that’s stopped,” Roger said. “I told their chief that if it didn’t, there’d be no more ships with iron and powder, and we’d buy no more cattle and lumber from them. He accused us of being as bad as the priests of Styphon; I assured him that we were much worse. On that basis, we got along very pleasantly. Why, King Ptosphes, there is something we want to talk about.”

  “Why, of course, Roger.” He closed his eyes and massaged them gently with his palms.

  “What is it; this visit of King Kaiphranos? We will have to entertain him very lavishly, and I’m afraid he’ll find Tarr-Hostigos small and mean, by his standards. You know—”

  “Father,” she interrupted. “Roger wants to talk to you about us getting married. Why don’t you listen to him?”

  Her father didn’t seem greatly surprised. He poured wine for the three of them and picked up his own cup.

  Then he said something which horrified her.

  “You understand, Roger, that Rylla is heiress to the throne of Hos-Hostigos?”

  “Why, what a thing to mention!” she cried. “But for Roger and his friends, there would be no Hos-Hostigos. There wouldn’t even be a Hostigos, by now, and our flesh would be rotting from our bones in the ruins of this castle.”

  Her father nodded slowly, straight forward, like a Terran. “I remember it hourly, Rylla, with thankful wonder,” he said. “But Roger is a subject—a citizen—

  of the Terran Federation. Would he repudiate that?”

  Roger passed his hand across his face slowly. “I will make no claim on the throne,” he said.

  “Hos-Hostigos did not exist a quarter of a year ago; who knows what it will be when your daughter succeeds you?

  It may be all of this world by then. It may not even be a kingdom, but a Public Thing, such as we have in the Federation. There have been great changes, and none of us can guess what greater changes will come. Why talk now of things that may hap-pen in a world the very shape of which we cannot guess?”

  Her father nodded again. “Yes,” he said, and tasted his wine—it would have been warm and tasteless, except for the cold maker, no, the refrigerator, of the Terrans. Who would drink warm wine, once they had tasted it chilled? “I suppose there is nothing impossible to those who go searching among the stars. But of course; you and my daughter must marry, if that is what you both wish.”

  Then he drank more wine, while they both told him how much they wanted it.

  “And it will be a big, wonderful marriage,” she said, “and everybody will be here, all the Princes of Hos-Hostigos, and all the people, and there’ll be feasting and rejoicing and a happy time for everybody. . .”

  When the Stellex had left, everybody had been busy—the war with Nostor had still been on, and there had been the annexation of Dazour and of Nostor and the other princedoms afterward, and rebuilding the bridge they had burned in front of Gormoth’s soldiers, and airlifting a thou-sand Sastragathi to guard the northern border against the plains nomads, and finishing the Princess Rylla and building the Searcher, and Nancy’s wedding, and King Kaiphranos…

  Then, gradually, it began to be realized that the Stellex was almost a month longer gone than the estimated time to and from Yggdrasil.

  At first, nobody was much concerned; there might be delays in getting the cargo sold, and refining the potassium nitrate would take time. Then they began thinking of everything that could go wrong aboard the poor wheezy old Stellex between planets, and they began to worry. Their main telecast station was at Tarr-Dombra, and there were a dozen young Freyans of both sexes who had learned to operate the screens; one or another of them was always on watch at the activated but empty screen tuned to the ship’s wavelength. There was a button beside it to press as soon as anything came in.

  It was past two in the morning, on the hundred and thirty fifth day after the Stellex

  had broken orbit off Freya, when the girl on duty pressed it. Bells began jangling all over the castle, and some soldiers on the ramparts, who didn’t know what was happening, let off a sixty pounder and began ringing the alarm-bell.

  When he and Fitzurse and de Ruyter got to it, they found themselves looking through it into the astrodome of the spaceship, past Karl Zahanov. There was a card in front of him, lettered, “5,000,000 Miles off Planet; 30 Second Lag.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9