The Kar-Chee Reign

I

The big place on the old Rowan homesite had just been freshly thatched — and what a disturbance of birds, snakes, lizards, mice and spiders the removal of the previous thatch had caused — but its thick walls had stood there for generations: scarred and chipped and streaked with smoke and smeared with grease, but in all, still sturdy. The first Rowan had built well; he had not come here with his wives and children and his flocks and herds after the sinking of California, for he had had none of those. He had in fact landed with one small boat and one small dog and a determined mind and a hopeful heart, marrying a daughter of the land (that is to say, he had concluded a major treaty by the terms of which he granted use of his infinitely precious cold chisel for half a year of every year and in return was granted use for the whole of every year of an area of land for building and farming and hunting and fishing, plus a girl who had been captured almost casually from a far-off people years back and was of an age to be manned), and had put up his house according to a plan existing in his own head only — then, unprecedented; since, the standard model.

He had left behind more than a set of walls and a style in housing. His long head and long bones and wide, smiling mouth were now part of the common fabric of the people; his casual, personal turns of speech had become the way one spoke. If a problem was regarded calmly as something capable of solution instead of occasion to retreat into dreams and resigned surrender, this, too, was part of the long legacy of Rowan the first settler.

The present head of the homesite, old father and artificer, was one Ren Rowan, six generations descended from the settler on one side and seven generations removed on another; his wife’s lineage was similar, though of distant cousinship. He was all seamed and grizzled now, she — though slightly younger — only now beginning to show gray in her long hair. Her hands were deft at many tasks. It was her way to offer advice to her husband quietly and in private, it was his — usually — to take it.

“Well, we needn’t thatch this roof again for a while,” he said to her, she coming to join him on the bench more to treat him with her company than because she particularly needed rest from directing the work of feeding those who had helped with the work.

“Might think of cutting some house timbers,” she said, in her soft, slow voice. Meat sizzled and spat. There was a burst of laughter. A child stumbled and wailed, was righted and comforted with a grilled bone that filled the small mouth.

“Might,” Ren agreed. “Always might… why now?”

His eyes followed hers to where his youngest son stood in conversation with a girl on whose hip his hand rested so lightly that one might almost assume neither of them to know it was there at all. Almost; but not quite. “Mmm… That seems a flighty girl to me. I suppose she’s twitched her rump at him and now he doesn’t know whether to build a house or drag her off into the bushes… Of course, one needn’t preclude the other. Still. Flighty.”

Moma said, “Babies make good ballast. You were on the flighty side, too, recollect.”

“That was before the Devils came,” he said mildly.

“Not so long ago as that… Well. House timbers. Might think about it…”

A comfortable silence fell between them. He, his work being officially over, might have put on the loose shirt and kilt, both decoratively worked in dyed threads, which she had laid out for the purpose in their room. She, her work being officially still on, would not yet slip into the equally loose dress (only the unmarried women need endure the discomfort of tight ones), equally brightly embroidered, which hung in her corner. Both, then, were girded briefly around the waist, and wore no other clothing. The afternoon’s sun was still warm.

The moma and popa of Home Rowan looked on and about quietly and contentedly. The large, sturdy old house with its rounded ends was well- and newly-thatched; let the rains fall in due season as they surely would (forfend a drought!), it would not let by a drop. The walling palisade and gate were solid and well-set, the pens held fat stock and poultry, fields and garden were in good tilth, and the storehouses were as full as any homesite’s should be that was not niggard with its help. Neighbors, kinsmen, and even those not so allied had come to help with the work and were feeding and — depending on age — frolicking or enjoying a peaceful visit. A potbellied pupdog, descended out of the lean loins of the Settler Rowan’s lone companion on the long voyage hither, nosed along for scraps, followed by an equally potbellied grandchild. The pupdog paused, spread its legs, piddled. The child did the immediate same… Startled by the sudden laughter, he looked up, ready for tears. Seeing only Moma and Popa, he smiled proudly, and gurgled vigorously as he tottered off in pursuit of the pupdog.

It hadn’t always been a goodly scene. There had been famine, preceded by droughts; plagues of beasts and plagues of men; there was once something mightily like a little war; wild beasts had raided and attacked, and — rarely, rarely — wild men. Floods had lapped almost to the doorsills; retreating, they had left behind mud and wreckage and bloated bodies. A favored daughter had suffered of a long and painfully wasting illness before dying, and a less favored son (perhaps because of that, or for another reason none could think of) had one day walked down into the ocean and not come out. Nor had Old Ren, as he was beginning to be called, inherited the homesite peacefully. His years of enduring the usurpatous tenure of his wicked and godless uncle, Arno Half-Devil, and how he had finally wrested all away from him and sent him to die in the caves, formed the integuments of a legend which was still in formation.

And now, when the minor festivity of the thatch party ordinarily would be beginning to slow down, it received fresh life. In past the carven blue gate posts came another party of guests, their cries and gestures as they saw the new roof firmly in place already expressing a mixture of dismay and self-reproach and rueful good humor.

Old Ren said, “Jow’s people… late because they started late… started late because they didn’t think to come at all. Only coming now because Jow’s got something on his mind that came up on a sudden. Well. Got to feed them.” He rose and prepared to welcome them.

His wife said, “Won’t be enough meat. Kill or hunt?”

But he had already gestured his decision to his two younger sons, and was now waiting for Jow to bring his people and his unhappy face up to the bench to be welcomed.

Lors, Duro, four or five of young nephews and cousins to beat and help bear, and one of the just-arrived guests, uninvited, but not thereby unwelcome — trotted off, hunt-bound. Duro was still young enough to love hunting next to eating. Lors would much rather have stayed with his hand on Mia’s hip… he would much, much rather have gone with her where he could put his hand somewhere else… but his father’s expression and gesture were alike unmistakable and undeniable. Guests had to be fed, there was no ignoring it, and it was up to the popa to decide if stock were to be killed or if the huntsmen were to go out. The alternatives were equally honorable to the guests. The fields lay, for the most part, up and away from the sea. There were deer in the rainier lowlands; guanaco were to be found only in the highs, well above the fields; and now, as they came to the fork in the way, they had to decide which it was that they were to hunt.

“We’d best go down,” Lors said, trying to give his words the sound of judicious reflection. “We can get deer quicker and not delay our guests.”

Duro at once countered, seemingly innocently, “And then you can get back and away quicker, and on top of Mia.”

The younger boys laughed; the newcomer smiled. Lors wondered if he should hit his brother, decided against it for the moment. “I was thinking only of our guests,” he said with dignity. And added, “How do they call you, guest?”

“Tom-small,” said the guest, putting the boys to giggling again. He was about Lors’ own age, and a rather large young man.

“I shouldn’t like to have to share a sleeping-hammock with Tom-big, whoever he is,” said Duro. This was an acceptable excuse: Lors hit him.

“No way to talk to guests,” he said, righteously.

“He’s my uncle,” the guest said, unannoyed. “I used to be smaller than him, but the name sticks…” He looked up the fork to the right, raising his head toward Mount Tihuaca, only partly obscured by drifting clouds. “I’ve never been up there. I’ve heard… it’s said that on a clear day you can see the ocean on all sides, the whole coastline, from there…” His voice ended on a vaguely questioning note. He was a diffident, amiable one.

Duro said, “Yes, maybe, but I’ve never seen the day that was that clear. There always seems to be at least some part of the coast you can’t see.”

Lors understood what Tom-small had in mind. “We really do not have time to go that far today,” he pointed out, kindly enough. His eyes were blue-gray, his hair was long and black, his skin a light brown. “Maybe, if you stay over, we could make a special trip—” A half-smile of pleasurable, anticipating assent lit up Tom-small’s broad and open face. Lors went on, “But right now we have to get meat. So: it’s downward ho for us. Let me tell you the plan.

“There’s a spring which the deer favor. And we usually set salt there for them, as a further attraction. The boys will go ahead and around to beat them back this way — if there are any there now. I’ll show you, by and by, where we crouch for them along their trail. With three bows, we ought to have luck. Oh! Say — you’re all right for hunting, aren’t you? I mean, you haven’t touched a corpse or a cat or a fluxy female today, have you?” Tom-small shook his head. “That’s all right, then.”

But Duro wasn’t sure it was all right. “How about Mia?” he asked. “You were touching her!”

Lors had forgotten. His heart gave a thump, and the blood ran into, then away from his face. How could he have forgotten? But after a second he said, “No, I’m sure it’s all right. She knows better; she wouldn’t have let me, if — Besides, Popa saw me. He must think it’s all right, too, or he wouldn’t have sent me.”

Satisfied, they started off down the down-slope branch of the fork. Far off below, through a break in the hills, they saw the blue sea. Lors pointed. “That’s where the first Rowan landed,” he said.

Tom-small looked impressed. “Before the Devils came,” he said.

Duro, looked at him. “How could that be?” he asked. “If the Devils hadn’t come, Rowan would have stayed where he was and not come here.”

The young guest looked confused. Then, dismissing the need to figure the matter out, he said, “Well, anyway, it was a long time ago.”

It had been, indeed.

And it had all begun much further ago than that.

Earth had become like a woman who has, after a long and painful labor, given multiple birth… flat, empty, weary and bare. For the Earth was long enough over the final wave of outward, star-bound emigrants for the last trace of concern and excitement in it to have ebbed utterly away. And there was, it seemed, nothing else.

It had begun calmly enough, this move to the known hospitable worlds swimming around the distant stars. Mankind had waited long enough to be patient at first. No one could say at just exactly what point it all became a frenzy. The Earth went mad; contentedly, controlledly mad… and stayed so for centuries. For on the one hand there was instant and continual concern to solve once and for all the old problem of overpopulation. Those nations which were actually overpeopled — which was most of them — wanted to make an end at last, forever, to crush and hunger. The few that weren’t did not and could not remain aloof, for they wanted just as much an end to the fear that the overcrowded countries would spill out of their borders in war. So all worked intently. The first wave of migrants wanted just to get away. Their zeal was negative. But it was nonetheless zeal. Then came those who wanted to claim a share of what they heard was out there — land, room, opportunity, adventure. Then came those who wanted just to see for themselves what it was like… they said. The next wave went to join family and friends. Finally it became indiscriminately contagious, a roaring wind, sucking up that which lay behind as well as driving on that which lay before it. Those who toiled in sending people out were themselves caught up in it and strove to be themselves sent out. And so, finally, there were comparatively few left behind.

The long morning had been filled with noise. The long afternoon was strangely silent. The silence at first was filled with remembered echo.

Earth’s remaining people had worked themselves into an unprecedented fatigue. They had also, it seemed, finally and forever plundered their planet dry. Scarcely a trace of crude metals remained, and not even a trace of mineral fuels. The very wastes of the ancient mines had been reclaimed, reprocessed, redigested and reconsumed. In the last stages, the technicians had cannibalized their own technology, gobbling up factories and smelting down fabric and machinery to consolidate and produce the ultimate ships. The near-empty cities were at last dismantled for their bones and scrap, ruins ravaged like pigs nosing for truffles.

Finally, no more ships were built on earth and no more migrant parties sent off. For a while yet, though, the old world Earth stayed in touch with her children via out-world-built ships touching down with visitors. But there were never many of them; and as the Earth-born in the outer worlds grew old and died off, there were ever fewer. So, finally, even they ceased. There was no announcement, only that the perhaps penultimate one bore notice, in the form of so few passengers, that the children-planets had become too caught up in their own concerns to care much about the withered mother-world.

Yet no doubt habit alone might have served to keep up a communication with some semblance of regularity. The migrants had been as careful as they might to purge and to protect themselves against bringing communicable disease with them as they swarmed out to the series of worlds which later became known as The Inner Circle. But when they learned of the presence among them of the deadliest such disease of all it was too late: it had blazed up, and it was not to die down for centuries. Its name was War.

And it was then, when all the other worlds of human tenancy were so pre-empted and preoccupied that the very awareness of the Earth-Mother-world became only faint memory — less, perhaps, than the memory of Juteland was to England during her Colonial wars — it was then that the Kar-chee came. Earth-planet may have seemed sucked dry, worthless, to those who now lived or whose fathers had once lived on it… just as the rind and the pulp of a squeezed orange might. But that same would not seem worthless at all to a pig or a swarm of flies. Nor did it seem so to the Kar-chee. They left their lairs around the Ring Stars and swarmed down onto weary, exhausted, riven old Earth, to pick the bones and crack the plundered planet for its marrow.

The spring and the man-made salt-lick were well set up for hunting, the arroyo and ravine being so as to provide an almost perfect situation for ambush. Only the one narrow way led up to the water welling up at the foot of an abrupt cliff: as the deer went up, so that same way they had to come down. “Beating” was here not the most exact word — the younger boys went up to the top of the cliff-face by another and roundabout way and pelted any deer they might find below with stones and sticks. It was doubtless not sporting, but this was a conception unknown to them. They killed what they needed, and no more, and it made sense to kill as quickly and easily as possible.

Lors and Duro levered down their goat-foot crossbows and loaded them with a bolt each, Tom-small nocked an arrow into his short straight bow, and the three of them picked their hiding places among the rocks and hunkered down.

They could, if need be, maintain the position for hours. But as it turned out, they had to maintain it for something much less.

From above and ahead, faint but clear, after perhaps a quarter of an hour, the three heard a series of whistles. Duro got up, swearing. Lors shrugged. To Tom-small, who looked at them inquiringly, he said, “No game at the spring. Well, we’ll have to go all the way up there to see if there’s anything along the path… and then come all the way down again, if there is or there isn’t.”

“Oh, Devil!” said Duro, again.

And there was nothing along the path.

There was nothing along the usual beats, either — no actual game, that is. There was spoor and trace, to be sure, and these signs made them all look at each other with faces wrinkled in uncertainty.

“Upland,” Tom-small said. “Everything seems to have gone upland… Do you know why?”

The brothers didn’t. “I don’t know who’d be beating up from downland hereabouts,” Lors said. “I don’t smell any fire, either.” Automatically, at this suggestion, they all sniffed the air. As though to accommodate them at just that moment the wind shifted.

“What is that?” Duro asked, scowling.

No one knew. It was musty and pungent and utterly strange. It might be connected with the curious absence of game; it might not. “Let’s go see what it is,” said Duro.

Lors shook his head. “Popa didn’t send us out for anything but to get meat, and the meat’s all gone upland, it seems, so we just have to go upland after it. When we get back we can tell him about it, and he’ll know what to do.”

“By the time we get back with anything — if we find anything — they’ll all be hungry, anyway,” his brother pointed out. He looked windward, made as though to reload his crossbow.

“The longer we wait and gibble-gabble, the hungrier they’ll be. Up,” said the elder. And turned and started. Tom-small and the younger boys followed at once. So, after a moment, did Duro. They went upland, all of them, but they came within shot of no game. Once they stopped stock-still at the sight of three deer outlined upon the top of a ridge, heads all up. For a moment nothing moved, nothing was heard. Then, far off and below, it came… deep and distinctive and strange, and it sounded again — the deer darted off and were gone — and it seemed to have ended upon a higher, a questioning note.

“It’s no horn,” guest Tom-small said, low-voiced, evidently answering his own unspoken questioning.

But as to what it was, none had any suggestion. They nodded when Lors said, finally, “All game gone upland… nobody beating besides us, that we know of… a bad smell, a strange smell… and now a strange noise…

“My guess is that whatever made the smell is making the noise. It’s gotten late. We’d better go back and tell Popa, that’s the best thing, and we can kill stock for the guests and then we’d all better find out what this thing is.”

As they started back, Duro said, “Maybe it would be better to find out as soon as can be, even if it’s got to be done on an empty belly.” His brother grunted his agreement. The smaller boys were all silent, and kept close instead of spreading out. The sun declined away behind the mountain and the air felt chilly on their skins — and perhaps it was not just the air

They followed Lors without questioning when he picked a trail over fallen rock which would cut time off their return. And it was while the loose shale was still sliding a bit under their feet that they all stopped short with no more sound at first than the hissing intake of breath and looked down where his hand pointed and where it trembled despite all his brave effort.

Along the distant shore below, at that same shelving beach where the first Rowan had brought his tiny boat ashore, there, outlined against the wine-dark sea, they saw the forms of two utterly strange and utterly dissimilar figures stalking across the twilight landscape — one erect, though slightly stooping; the other on all four giant legs which held it high above the sand.

Slowly, fearfully, they sank down and spread themselves flat upon the shale. After an infinity of time the two strange beasts passed out of sight around a bend in the shore line. Then, crouching, sliding, trotting almost as they squatted and slid, spraddle-legged, the young hunters vanished into the safe-promising shadows. And only when the dearly familiar walls of the homesite, outlined by the vigorous fires still burning outdoors, came into view did any of them speak. It was the youngest and smallest of the boys.

“Devil,” he said. “Devil.” He was not swearing. “Devil-Devil — it was the Devil!” he chattered.

And Lors said, “Maybe… Maybe… But—which one?”