The Horse Barbarians

6

With conditioned reflex Jason swung up his arm, his hand crooked and ready for the gun, before he remembered that he had been disarmed.

“Then we’ll do this the old-fashioned way!” he shouted, swinging the iron club in a whistling circle. The odds were well against him, but before he went down they would know that they had been in a fight.

They came in a tight knot, each man trying t6 be first to the kill, jostling one another and leaning far forward with outstretched lances. Jason stood ready, legs wide, waiting for the last possible instant before he moved. The shrieking riders were at the edge of the burnt area.

A muffled explosion was followed instantly by a great, roiling cloud of vapor that hid the attackers from sight. Jason lowered his club and stepped back as a tendril of the cloud twisted toward him. Only one morope made it through the gray vapor, carried along by its momentum, skidding and collapsing with a ground-shaking thud. Its rider catapulted toward Jason and even managed to crawl a short distance further, his jaw working with silent hatred, before he, too, collapsed.

When a wisp of the thinned, out gas reached Jason he sniffed, then moved quickly away. Narcogas. It worked instantly and thoroughly on any oxygen-breathing animal, producing paralysis and unconsciousness for about five hours, after which the victim recovered completely, with nothing worse than the nasty side effect of a skull-splitting headache.

What had happened? The ship had certainly gone, and there was no one else in sight. Fatigue was winning out over the effects of the stimulants and his thinking was getting muzzy. He heard the growling rumble for some seconds before he recognized the source of the sound.

It was the rocket launch from the Pugnacious. Blinking up into the clear brightness of the morning sky, he saw the high contrail stretching a white line across the sky toward him, growing larger with each passing second. The launch was first a black dot, then a growing shape, finally a flame-spouting cylinder that touched down less than a hundred meters away. The lock spun open and Meta dropped to the ground, even before the shock absorbers had damped the landing impact.

“Are you all right?” she called, running swiftly to him, the questing muzzle of her gun looking for enemies on all sides.

“Never felt better,” he said, leaning on the club so he would not fall down. ‘What kept you? I thought you had all pulled out and forgotten about me.”

“You know we wouldn’t do that.” She ran her hands over his arms, his back while she talked, as though looking for broken bones, or simply reassuring herself of his presence. “We could not stop them from taking you away, although we tried. Some of them died. An attack was launched on the ship at the same time.”

Jason could well understand the shock of battle and dogged resistance behind her matter-of-fact words. It must have been brutal.

“Come to the launch,” she said, putting his arm across her shoulders so she could bear part of his weight. He did not protest. “They must have been concealed on all sides and reinforcements kept arriving. They are very good fighters and do not ask for quarter, nor do they expect it. Kerk soon realized that there would be no end to the battle and that we could not help you by staying there. If you did succeed in escaping — which he was sure you would if you were still alive, it would have been impossible for you to reach the ship. Therefore, under cover of counterattacks, we placed a number of spyeyes and microphones, as well as planting a good store of land mines and remote-controlled gas bombs. After that we left, and the ship has set up a base somewhere in the northern mountains. I dropped off at the foothills with the launch and have been waiting ever since. I came as soon as I could. Here, into the cabin.”

“You timed it very well, thank you. I can do that myself.”

He couldn’t, but he wouldn’t aclniit it, and made believe that he had climbed the ladder instead of being boosted in by a powerful push from her feminine right arm.

Jason staggered over and dropped into the copilot’s acceleration couch while Meta sealed the lock. Once it was closed, the tension drained from her body as her gun whined back into its power holster. She hurried to his side, kneeling so she could look into his face.

“Take this filthy thing off,” she said, hurling the fur cap to the floor. She ran her fingers through his hair and touched her fingertips lightly to the bruises and frostbite marks on his face. “I thought you were dead, Jason, really I did. I never thought I would see you again.”

“Did that bother you so much?”

He was exhausted, his strength stretched well beyond the breaking point so that waves of blackness threatened to obscure his vision. He fought them away. He felt that, at this moment, he was closer to Meta than he had ever been before.

“It did, it bothered me. I don’t know why.” She kissed him suddenly, hard, forgetting the condition of his cracked and battered lips. He did not complain.

“Perhaps you are just used to having me around,” he said, far more casually than he felt.

“No, it is not that. I have had men around before.”

Oh, thanks, he thought.

“I have had two children. I am twenty-three years old. While piloting our ship, I have been to many planets. I used to think that I knew all there was to know, but now I do not believe so. You have taught me many new things. When that man, Mikah Samon, kidnapped you, I found out something I did not know about myself. I had to find you. These are very un-Pyrran things to feel, for we are taught to always think of the city first, never of other people. Now I am very mixed up. Am I wrong?”

“No,” he said, fighting back the threat of overwhelming darkness. “Quite the opposite.” He pressed his cracked and dirt-grimed fingers to the resilient warmth of her arm. “I think you are more right than any of the trigger, happy butchers in your tribe.”

“You must tell me. Why do I feel this way?”

He tried to smile, but it hurt his face.

“Do you know what marriage is, Meta?”

“I have heard of it. A social custom on some planets. I do not know what it is.”

An alarm buzzed angrily on the control board and she turned at once to it.

“You still don’t know, and maybe it’s better that way. Maybe I’ll never tell you.” He smiled, his chin touched his chest and he fell instantly asleep.

“There are more of them coming,” Meta said, switching off the alarm and glancing into the viewscreen. There was no answer. When she saw what had happened, she quickly tightened the straps to secure him in the couch, then began the takeoff procedure. She neither noticed nor cared if any attackers were under the jets when she blasted skyward.

The pressure of deceleration woke Jason as they dropped down for the landing. “Thirsty,” he said, smacking his dry lips together. “And hungry enough to eat one of those moropes raw.”

“Teca is on the way,” she told him, flipping off the switches as the launch grounded.

“If he is the same kind of sawbones his mentor, Brucco, is, he’ll put me under for recovery therapy and keep me unconscious for a week. No can do.” He turned his head, slowly, to look as the inner port opened. Teca, a brisk and authoritative young man, whose enthusiasm for medicine far exceeded his knowledge, climbed in.

“No can do,” Jason repeated. “No recovery therapy. Glucose drip, vitamin injections, artificial kidney, whatever you wish as long as I’m conscious.”

“That’s what I like about Pyrrans,” Jason said, as they carried him from the launch on a stretcher, the glucose-drip bottle swinging next to his head. “They let you go to hell in your own way.”

Meta saw to it that it took a good while for the leaders of the expedition to gather. Jason, whose eyes had closed in the middle of a grumbled complaint, spent the time in a deep, restorative sleep. He woke up when the hum of conversation began to fill the wardroom.

“Meeting will come to order,” he said in what was intended to be a firm, commanding voice. It came out as a cracked whisper. He turned to Teca. “Before the meeting begins, I would like some syrup for my throat and a shot to wake me up. Can you take care of that?”

“Of course, I can,” Teca said, opening his kit. “But I think it unwise due to the strain already imposed on your system.” However, he did not let his thoughts interfere with the swift execution of his duties.

“That’s better,” Jason said as the drugs once more wiped away the barrier of fatigue. He would pay for this, but later. The work must be done now.

“I’ve found out the answers to some of our questions,” he told them. “Not all, but enough for a beginning. I know now that, unless some profound changes are made, we are not going to be able to establish a mining settlement. And when I say ‘profound,’ I mean it. We are going to have to change the complete mores, taboos and cultural motivations of these people before we can get our mine into operation.”

“Impossible,” Kerk said.

“Perhaps. But it is better than the only other alternative, which is genocide. As things stand now, we would have to kill every one of those barbarians before we could be assured of establishing a settlement in peace.”

A depressed silence followed this statement. The Pyrrans knew what this meant because they were themselves unwilling genocide victims of their home planet.

“We will not consider genocide,” Kerk said, and the others unconsciously nodded their heads. “But your other alternative sounds too unreasonable.”

“Does it? You might recall that we are all here now because the mores, taboos and cultural motivations of your people have recently been turned upside down. What’s good enough for you is good enough for them. We bore from within, utilizing those two ancient techniques known as ‘Divide and rule’ and ‘If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em!”

“It would help us,” Rhes said, “if you explained what the mores exactly are that we are supposed to be disrupting.”

“Didn’t I tell you yet?” Jason searched his memory and realized that he hadn’t. In spite of the drugs, he was not thinking so clearly as he should. “Then let me explain. I have recently had an involuntary indoctrination into how the locals live. ‘Nastily’ is one word for it. They are broken up into tribes and clans, all of whom seem to be perpetually at war with the others. Occasionally two or more of the tribes will join together to wipe out one of the others whom they all agree needs wiping out. This is always done under the leadership of a warlord, someone smart enough to make an alliance and strong enough to keep it working. Ternuchin is the name of the chief who organized the tribes to destroy the John Company expedition. He is so good at his job that, instead of breaking up the alliance when the threat was over, he kept it going and has even added to it. The anti-city taboo appears to be one of the strongest they have, so it was easy to get recruits. He has kept his army busy ever since, consolidating more and more area under his control. When we arrived, it gave his recruiting an even bigger boost. Temuchin is our main problem. We can get nowhere so long as he is leading the tribes. The first thing we must do is to take away his reason for this holy war, and we can do that easily enough by leaving.”

“Are you sure that you are not feverish?” Meta asked.

“Thank you for the consideration, but I am fine. I mean we must convince the tribes that we have left. Another landing must be made on the same site and some sort of digging in got under way. Trouble will arrive quickly enough and we’ll have to fight them off to prove that we mean business. At the same time we will try to talk to them through loudspeakers, apparently to convince them of our peaceful intent. We’ll tell them all about the nice things we will give them if they let us alone. This will only make them fight harder. Then we will threaten to leave forever if they don’t stop. They won’t stop. So we blast off, straight up, and drop back to a hiding place in the mountains on a ballistic orbit so we won’t be seen. That is stage one.”

“I assume there is a stage two,” Kerk said with marked lack of enthusiasm, “for up to now it looks very much like a retreat.”

“That’s just the idea. In stage two we find an isolated spot in the mountains that simply cannot be reached on foot. We build a model village there to which we transplant, entirely against their will, one of the smaller tribes. They will have all the most modem sanitary conveniences, hot water, the only flush toilets on the entire planet, good food and medical aid. They will hate us for it and do everything possible to kill us and to escape. We will release them, when this affair is over. But in the meanwhile we will utilize their moropes and camachs and the rest of their barbaric devices.”

“What in the world for?” Meta asked.

“To form our own tribe, that’s what for. The fighting Pyrrans. Tougher, nastier and more faithful to the taboos than any other tribe. We’ll bore from within. We’ll be so good at the barbarian game that our chief, Kerk the Great, will be able to squeeze Temuchin out of the top job. I know you will be able to get the operation rolling before I return.”

“I did not know you were going,” Kerk said, his baffled expression mirrored by the others. ‘What are you planning to do?”

Jason plucked an invisible string in midair. “I,” he announced, “am going to become a jongleur. A wandering troubadour and spy, to sow dissent an4 prepare the way for your arrival.”