The Kar-Chee Reign

II

The raft was low on one side. Whether the underbeams had been lashed wrong, or if something in the wood had caused more and sooner waterlogging, or — No one worried or cared about that any longer. It was accepted with a brute resignation, like the burning sun and the scant food and drink, the waves which lapped up and over all around and left salt encrustations which itched and stung the swollen flesh. Three people already had gone off that perilous slope — one had slipped and slid, shrieking, while the others had looked on and blinked their burning eyes and licked their cracking lips and otherwise done nothing; one had simply rolled off, a scatter of rags and flailing limbs, uttering no sound; and the third, with a pleased smile and a look of anticipation, had just walked off at a brisk pace, knee-deep before he’d plunged out of sight.

Now and then a shark circled, leisurely, and those who still had the energy to do so crawled as high as they could, as though fearing that the great cartilaginous fish might suddenly sprout legs and climb up after them. And now and then a huge sea-turtle flippered by, paying them no attention at all; some eyed it hungrily, but helplessly: the small boat in which they might have pursued it had gone in a storm uncounted time ago, and even had it remained it was doubtful if any of them now would have had the strength to man it.

Some few fishing-lines still dangled, some presently without even hooks, and none with other bait than a bit of cloth of similar counterfeit. It had been days since any of these had succeeded in catching anything — a bony, ugly thing, but the man whose line it adhered to had eaten it at once, fearful and famished and secretive and swift. Then he had vomited it all up. Then he had eaten it a second time, shameful and slow and sick.

It had been months. It seemed like months. Perhaps it was only weeks. Perhaps, by now, years. Liam would know, if anyone knew, Cerry thought. Vaguely, she considered asking Liam if he still kept up his records. But the notion soon ceased to interest her. She had too little voice left, her mouth and throat were too dry, for her to call over to him where he sat, crouching, motionless. He might be dead. But she didn’t want to face this possibility. If Liam were dead then the rest of them were as good as dead. So she made her mind consider other things.

Suppose the raft were to encounter flying fish. A whole entire school of them. Then the sail and the awning could be used as nets. Everyone would have something to eat. And then — since flying fish lived in the tropics and in the tropics it was very rainy — then it would rain, and the rain water would be caught in those same sails and awnings. All at once everyone would be better, healthy, alert, in good spirits and humor. Their luck thus once turned, obviously land would be the next thing to appear. Land!

It would be a good land, with friendly people, not savage, neither terrible nor terrified. The land and people didn’t know of hunger, and there were no dragons in that land and neither were there Kar-chee. And… and then…

Cerry wondered what was next, smiling and giving little nods. The bubble did not so much burst as simply vanish; and, the vision forgotten as though it had never begun, she wondered and fretted mildly how long they had all been on the raft. At least a month. She had had her courses just before they’d embarked — a minor discomfort and a common and regular one: odd that she should remember it against the background of that hideous time and trouble — and then, surely, she had had them again at least once since then, aboard the raft. She could not remember it having happened another time. Which meant that it had not been two months yet. Or, possibly, that her body no longer functioned as it once had. Small wonder, if this were so. But what if Liam were dead?

The fear was worse than the pain of finding out. So, slowly and so slowly, Cerry raised herself onto her painful hands and knees and began to crawl and to creep and to climb across the cant of the raft toward the figure which half-sat, half-crouched, in the splotchy shade of the tattered awning. And the gorgeous golden sun beat down unceasingly from the blazing blue of the silent sky. There was a child stretched out, face down, back moving in slight rise and fall of feeble breath. Cerry did not dare stop or try to move other than as she was moving. Neither did the woman move who croaked, “Murderers! Murderers!” as Cerry dragged herself over the child.

“Are you human beings?” the woman demanded. “Or are you dragons? Kill me, kill me, only leave my child alone…” Her, head, at least, at last, commenced to weave from side to side, but by then Cerry was past. “Help, help,” the woman croaked, striking her head with her skeletal paw of a hand. “Human beings: help, help. There are dragons on the raft…” The child gave a ghost of a whimper. “Yes, my darling,” the woman said, instantly sane. “Yes, my precious. Don’t cry, my dearest love. Mother’s coming…” She moved toward the child like a crippled snake.

A hot gust smote the sea. The torn cloth slapped and snapped. The raft shook. A wave hit it; it shook again. Something dead went floating by and someone not quite dead pointed and wept, but it was too far away. Liam had one brown eye and one blue eye and otherwise his eyes were red as blood. His sun-bleached, salt-encrusted hair moved in the light wind like clumps of dirty marsh grass. He didn’t blink or breathe as Cerry came lurching and creeping. “Liam, don’t be dead. Tell me how long it’s been,” Cerry asked. He didn’t blink or breathe. She could see the wind moving the little hairs on his chest, but she couldn’t see the chest move.

She butted his knee with her head, like a lamb forcing its dam to give down milk. He fell over on his side. “Don’t be dead, Liam,” she begged.

After minutes, hours, years, he said something. He made a sort of snoring noise. He said something. “What, Liam? What?”

She crept close. “Maybe a dream,” he said. She listened. She strained to hear. The man who had pointed to the dead thing watched them. He sat up a bit. He watched them. The mother stroked her child’s face. But her eyes did not really watch the child. Her eyes watched them. “May be a dream, Cerry,” Liam said. “But I think I did. One night… I think…”

It had not been a dream. He had. He really had. In the box with the rotting ropes and other gear and tackle, he had really, on that night he half-remembered, secretly and cautiously placed some food — then, when food had still been plentiful and all had been optimistic, for they would soon reach Gal; none had ever been to Gal but all had been sure it was only a week’s voyage away — against the possible time when, if Gal had not been reached, they might well be thankful for the food. And of course they had not in any week’s voyage reached Gal, they did not know now if it were one week or a year of weeks, if winds and currents had carried them forever past it or if Gal itself had been sunk by the Kar-chee. But the food was still there.

It lay in her hands as she brought it up to the surface for long enough for her to see that it was in a bag sewn of soft cloth, part of a dress, and by the feel of it potatoes. Small, gone soft, gone sprouty, but food. “It’s to be divided,” she warned herself softly. “It’s to be divided!” she shrieked as it was torn from her hands. The man who had pointed to the dead thing in the sea and wept because it was too far to secure it for the raft did not weep now, but gibbered and spat and clawed Cerry’s face with his left hand. The bag was torn from his right hand by the woman of the child. “It’s to be divided!” screamed Cerry.

And it was divided, though not according to the calm and rational scheme intended. Who would have thought there was still so much life left in them all? So much evil, so much greed? The dead rose up from the deck which was their grave and screamed and growled and fought. They bit the hands which held the shrunken, blackened potatoes, and clawed them up into their own hands. But the woman of the child, when the cloth of the bag ripped and the black manna fell and scattered, did not use her hands to seize. She crawled upon her hands away from the scene, her sunken cheeks full and smiling. She crawled to her child and kissed the child mouth to mouth and chewed for the child and fed it as a bird is fed. The thin, scrannel throat moved, slowly, slowly. When the child smiled at last, the woman, her own mouth now empty of all but love, said, in loving and rapturous tones, “There, my darling… There, my precious. Did you like that? Was it good?” She composed herself beside the child, carefully arranged some tatters of her dress so as to cover the small face from the shade, and then, still smiling, died.

The man who had pointed to the dead thing in the sea and had wept and then later had snatched the sacket of food wept again. Or so it seemed. Drops flowed down his face, but they were red and he lay still. And more than one looked at him and looked at each other and looked away from each other and then looked back at him. For the few and small bits of provision in the sacket were gone now, but the hunger which had been lying somewhat dulled and anesthetized was wide awake now and gnawing. And the man himself was dead now and he was not at all too far away to be reached.

“Are you human beings? Or are you dragons?” one of them had lately asked. And now it might be that none of them was at all sure.

In ravaging and in ravishing their own world for its minerals in order to make the means to abandon that world forever for newer and fresher, richer ones, the men of Earth had carried on — more or less — as they had done for the mere thousands of years in which mining had engaged the attention of their species. The holes they dug were deeper and the pits they scooped were wider and both of course were more numerous. They had left the landscape scarred and fractured, but it was, when they had done with what they were doing, still recognizably the same landscape.

But long before the Kar-chee were done with it, it was no longer so.

The Kar-chee were ten feet tall and a dull, dull black, with heads which seemed tiny in comparison to their height and perhaps particularly in comparison to the huge anterior forelimbs. In this they resembled the mantis, but in nothing else did they resemble anything else with which the scattered handfuls of infinitely wearied peoples on Earth were familiar. Kar-chee they were called, from a real or a fancied similarity to sounds which they were heard to make by those few who had come close to them, close enough to hear them, and departed whole; but what they called themselves, no man knew. There had been no dialogue between the two species. Had there ever been between men and ants?

So, the old dwellers called the incomers Kar-chee in much the manner that a child calls a dog Bow-wow—though the Kar-chee, of course, were nothing at all like dogs. The Kar-chee, in a way, were audible ants. Conquering ants. Ants which brought with them their fulcrum, and, finding a place on which to rest it, did what Archimedes never could do, and moved the Earth.

Piece by piece.

Of old, in the lost land of California, came the Americans and dug and washed the dirt for gold, and left behind great heaps of soil from which all profit was extracted. After them came the Chinese, and washed the once-washed dirt again and, counting labor and toil as nothing, extracted profit from the unprofitable, content with tiny flecks of dust where only nuggets had satisfied their predecessors. Neither of them, of course, in the least understanding the other. But understanding, at least, that there was something to understand.

This much seemed at least clear — the Kar-chee had done this before. Their movements were too practiced, their equipment too suitable, their techniques too efficient, to allow for any of it to be new to them. Scavengers of worlds beyond number they must have been, for ages beyond counting; and in those worlds throughout those ages they had developed systems of working titanic changes in oceans and in continents in order to get at and get out the veins and pockets and the merest morsels of minerals and such as were left behind by human exploiters. First they reprocessed the slag and the tailings and the cinders and the ashes and all the mountainous heaps of (to man) worthless by-products. Then they scored great trenches on land and sea and turned their contents over and over again like earthworms, digesting and redigesting. They peeled the earth like an onion. But all of this was the merest beginning…

When they had done what they wanted with a given section of land, for the present time, at least (and who knew what “time” meant for them? how long they lived? or how they died, or where, or at all?), then with inhuman efficiency and ineffable insouciance they disposed of it. They triggered the long-set charge provided by the pre-existent San Andreas Fault, and California in convulsions and hideous agonies sank shrieking into the sea. And before the waters had in the least begun to settle, they were convulsed again as the floor of the Gulf of California arose trembling and quaking and flinching from the air it had not encountered in countless ages. The Kar-chee barely waited for it to dry before they settled onto it like flies upon a carcass and commenced to suck the hidden treasures of its sands.

There must have been some plan determining which lands should live and which should die, which perish by volcanic fire and which by the overwhelming of water. But no man knew in the least what plan there was. Sometimes, though, it did seem that here a land was sunken and here a land raised up, not because of immediate particular concern for either but instead because of problems concerning the adjustment and readjustment of the weight upon the Earth’s surface. Thus Gondwanaland arose again, and lost Atlantis, and land-masses — subcontinents or great islands — were newly designed and surfaced, while the familiar terrains were often fragmented or destroyed. And all the while the vast equipages of the Kar-chee, like huge and mobile cities, alien beyond the phantasizing ability of the human mind, slowly and relentlessly roamed surfaces and sea-depths, turning and churning and extracting and processing. And the great black hulks of the Kar-chee ships came and went… endlessly… endlessly…

And — meanwhile — what of man?

At first, then, of man: nothing. What of the ants, when man had first come to occupy and to use new territory? One might step on an ant, idly encountered. If they become too intrusive, too troublesome, then one might take means to prevent their incursions. One would not, ordinarily, think too much about them; they were too small, alien, insignificant. Who considered a possible “history” of ants? Or who reflected that ants might have a “prior claim,” as it were, to any place? But if in time ants became more troublesome, then, and only then, would attention take the form of destroying ant-hills — or, ecologically, introducing natural enemies which might do the work of destroying them and allow mankind to go about its own and proper business of plundering and polluting the world man lived in.

Thus, meanwhile, that of man.

Some handfuls of them dwelt, drowsy and fatigued, in what had been called the British Isles, when the Kar-chee came. Some, out of curiosity, had investigated… intruded… had been destroyed. Others had moved away. And continued to move, as the Kar-chee and their gargantuan machinery advanced. There was no thought of fighting, of resisting. Man was too few, Kar-chee too many; the invaders too strong, the autochthones too weak, too weary, too disorganized and inexperienced. One might hypothesize a situation wherein the children-worlds became aware of Earth’s plight, and had sent help. But the children-worlds were not aware, and after the few first generations had died away, the very memory of such worlds had died away with them.

Man, in short, adjusted.

Where there were no Kar-chee, the people slowly increased in number, slowly developed new skills, new forms, new views. Where there were Kar-chee, the people either perished or retreated before them. The remnants of Earth’s wild life, where the Kar-chee did not yet venture or remain, and while man was still so few, increased as well. Once again the trees grew tall, the herbivores replenished their flocks and herds, the wild swine flourished in the marshes and masted on the nuts and acorns, the fish returned to the cleansed-again waters.

It was fortunate, providential, that the last centuries of the movement of man away from Earth had coincided with the last centuries of a cold cycle. It may well have made no difference to the Kar-chee what the climate of the northerly part of the Northern Hemisphere was, tapping as they did the molten heart of the planet for energy. But the return of a warm cycle may have made all the difference to the bands of men living there. And when Britannia proper sank beneath the waves it once had ruled, and most of Ireland with it, when a new great island was created by joining the Outer Hebrides and the Isle of Man with much of Northern Ireland — then, great though the shock was, it was the milder climate which enabled the survivors to… survive. New rivers flowed into the sea through new beds; for a while they ran brackish as the rains washed the salt from the new-formed land. Eventually the whole new land was cleansed, and, richer than the older lands now joined with it by reason of its accumulations of eons of organic matter, it benefited by the milder climate and the longer growing season, and its people benefited even more. For the Kar-chee did not come. Perhaps they had intended the changes wrought in the south. No one ever knew. What they did know was that the Kar-chee did not come, and this was of the most infinite importance.

Indeed, it might have been that what had occurred there had been done to balance what had occurred in California, when Rowan the first had fled, a sea-borne single Noah, an Aeneas fleeing fatherless across the sullen seas. None could say.

So the centuries continued to pass; there, in the Kar-chee-created (yet Kar-chee-ignored) northern land, as in the fragment of former South America which Rowan found, man rediscovered old skills and learned and developed new ones. New societies began to form, were formed, and new forms of civilization arose. A distorted memory of what had happened remained with them in both places, as in others. But for the most part a life was lived which concerned itself more with the present than with the past. And then, in a village located on the high hill which was once the Hebridean island of Benbecula, men looked out and saw, with astonished anger, the Kar-chee coming at long last.

It was different this time than the first time. The human race had recovered from its fatigue, for one thing. For another, distance and the long, blind oblivion of time had hidden from Liam and Cerry and their fellows experience of how dangerous the Kar-chee really were.

The great war-horns sounded, the alarm-drums were beaten, the farmers came running from the fields and the herdsmen from their kine, the fishing-coracles put in from sea. And while Liam and the other fighting men mustered on the palisades which topped the earthen embankments around the townlet, Cerry and the other women boiled huge earthen pots of water by dropping red-hot stones in them. Thus they had prepared themselves against attack by either local factions or pirate-raiders from across the seas; and thus, straining and pulling and pushing, they set the lumbering catapults in place and loaded them with cold charges and set the stone shot to heating in the fires. On the part of the men, then, all proceeded according to plan.

But the Kar-chee, seemingly, had other plans.

A miner takes small heed of the swarming of an ant-hill.

The men of Benbecula had no such things as surveying-instruments; they would not have recognized them even had the devices been of human manufacture. The local chief, peering through the single and ancient telescope the place afforded, saw only that enemies had engines and that these moved in direction to and fro, and when they paused a moment and seemed pointed and poised at his defenses, he waited not, but gave the signal to fire.

Probably not a single shot struck the cluster of tall and slightly stooping black figures, but the thumping and crashing of their various impacts nearby drew the attention of the Kar-chee. The tiny triangular heads whipped up from their instruments and peered around; the stout anterior arms unfolded and waved about. The Kar-chee commenced to move on. Perhaps they did so merely because it was time to move on. But the men of Benbecula did not consider this. They had fired on their enemies and their enemies were beginning to retreat. When the enemy retreats, advance. Thus, the old maxim. And, thus, shouting fierce cries of triumph and menace, waving war-clubs and making feints with their bone-tipped lances, arrows ready to be nocked on bowstrings, the levy en masse poured out of the fortified hamlet and down upon the aliens. The wind shifted and suddenly smelled no more of woodsmoke and heather and human sweat, but of something murky and pungent and strange. The shaggy ponies on which the lancers were mounted, toes gripping leather stirrups, neighed, fought, bolted for a less hateful air.

The charge, to give credit, did not stop for more than a moment. Liam, frank, said later to Cerry, “We didn’t dare retreat, for then they should have attacked us—and they had the longer legs!” Now the Kar-chee did retreat, it seemed, or most of them did. Others stayed and whipped about them with the tripods of their instruments (clumsy weapons, the men considered!), but, being to being and implement to implement, not even the superior height of the Kar-chee availed them victory. Their longer legs did not prevent their being clubbed to the ground, and if their chitinous exoskeletons protected them for a while against thrusting points, it was only a short matter to discover that this armor had unprotected under-folds. The lances entered, were pressed home, the clubs beat and threshed, soon the clickings and churfings of the aliens ceased; the alien limbs twitched but a moment more.

So, dragging bodies and booties behind them, and singing impromptu songs of victory — including several verses directed at the unhappy cavalry — the triumphant defenders returned. The postures of defense were abandoned as quickly as they had been assumed, and Benbecula plunged into a frenzy of drunken feasting and rejoicing.

But Liam did not entirely join in it.

“What’s wrong?” Cerry asked him. She had never at all made the error of thinking that because his eyes were different colors and his appearance therefore odd that there was anything at all wrong with the rest of him.

His face twisted, and he shook his head. All around him drunken shouts resounded. She put her ears to his lips. “Don’t like it,” he said. “Acting as though they’d driven off a raider-bunch from Orkland or Norland… This is more, Cerry — much, much more…”

He mumbled, shook his head, frowning, like a bothered child: another of the things which made some people think him a mere daftie. She knew better. She listened. She heard him, reconstructing from his mutterings, explain what was vexing him. That not everything the oldmothers nattered about the Kar-chee as they sat warming their dried-up feet by the fire, not all of it was or could be true: of course not, else the Kar-chee would have arrived riding upon their dragons as in the old tales, flying through the air and throwing bolts of fire. Would have picked up the land bodily and flown it away to the Northern Hell, whence the sight of the flames could be seen of nights now and then. Would have dipped it in the burning waters and burnt them off like beetles off a burning log.

Well, then? she asked. If not true — and he reasoned well that it was not — why worry, then? A merrymaker came garbling up to him, waving what seemed to be a Kar-chee’s foot, and Liam pushed him away with such force that he never came back for explanation or fight, but hunted a horn of honey-strong to soothe his bewilderment. Why worry, then? Because, clearly, not all the oldmothers’ tales had been false, either. For the existence of the Kar-chee, whom none of them had ever seen or smelled until today, was the very warp and woof and thrums of the oldmothers’ tales…

Now Cerry had the turn to frown and squint. Although sharing in the rejoicing, initially, and feeling no more misgivings than resentment at not having gotten to scald the attackers with boiling well-water, her long-felt and distinctive respect for Liam convinced her that if he thought something was wrong, then something was wrong. She tried to follow his line of thought, but it was too strange for her. So, instead, she tried to tell him what she felt for him and about him; but all that came out was the old, conventional question: “Shall I take my sheepskin and come and be a while in your cabin?”

If he had given one of the old, conventional answers — say, if only, “Take and be”—why, that would have been good and she would have been happy; if, “You may take your featherbed and come and be in my cabin forever,”—why that would have been very, very good and she would have been very, very happy.

But now instead he looked, at her straightly, one odd eye as brown as loch-water and the other as blue-green as the open sea itself; and what he said now was stranger yet: “You may take your sheepskin and follow after me, if you will, but not to lie by me as a woman lies by a man. For I fear there will be many nights upon the cold ground and many upon the cold, cold sea before ever we may think of love or bairns or houses once again.”

The words sounded as through from an old tale, sung and chanted to the background of pipe or harp or drum; yet she knew that she had never heard them before. And fast and hard upon this she knew, quite suddenly, in her heart, that the times were now come about which songs were sung and tales composed; and that Liam was and had always been destined to be one of those men, seers and doers and heroes, who figured in those tales. And, like a hand taking hold of her heart and tightening on it, she knew she would and must go with him and endure with him as long as his tale was run, come what might.

Liam got up and left the sound and sight of the feasting and the fires and went out into the chill night. And Cerry followed after him and they took their sheepskins and their sticks and their little pots of fire and their sackets of food and they walked toward the north. Thus it was that when the dragons came to Benbecula Liam and Cerry were in North Uist and when the dragons came to North Uist he and she were part-way to Ulsland. The dragons were not then in quick haste to make an end of men, and indeed it did seem that they drew out their destruction to suit their pleasure and that of the Kar-chee, to avenge whom they had come. And by the time that the dragons began to stir toward the marches of Uls, Liam and Cerry were building in haste their great raft to carry them and those who believed in Liam and his warning over the seas to Gal.

Gal, however, they never found. Nor any other place which it seemed might do for refuge. They found bleak lands, all salt and sterile, all stone or sands, or crushed stones; they found lands all smoking and burning and slag; they found lands where naked men hid behind the rocks and then rushed howling out upon them. And once they found a land of grass and trees and they gave thanks before they prepared to go ashore… but then the watcher on the masthead cried out that he saw that there were Kar-chee and dragons already in that land; and they rushed to hoist the ragged sail again and gave greater thanks than before when wind and currents carried them safely past and out, even though it were to starve and parch, to sea.

And so, finally, there was no more food and no more water and the sky and sun grew hot upon them and they looked with greedy and sickened eyes upon the body and the blood of the one who had made to steal the last of the food; and they wondered if they dared not use it as food. Cerry wept for sorrow that her hunger had been aroused once again and for joy that Liam was not dead. Liam muttered, but not to and not about Cerry; he muttered words as confused as his own mind; he muttered about maps.

Maps! The very concept drew a blank look from all but a few of his countrymen. But Liam knew what a map was, knew what a book was; had seen both. Both were, presently, pragmatically, useless, referring to and depicting things which no longer existed. But the conceptions were infinitely important, and they stirred his mind with excitement and frustration. Inside his tattered trews was a rough, ungainly copy of a map which he had once made. It was, of course, useless as a guide, showing as it did lands which no longer existed and failing to show lands which now did. He wondered, fevered, sunstricken, famished and parched, if accurate maps of any sort existed anywhere at all. Not likely. He avoided the obvious admission: not possible. So, as Cerry had dreamed of flying fish and rain, so Liam lay dreaming of an accurate map, a true chart, showing lands and currents and winds…

He saw the island as it came slowly into view and he did nothing. He watched the island change into a ship and he did nothing. He watched the one or two or three of the others on the raft who still had the semblance of strength, watched them creep and heard them croak and saw them gesture; he did nothing. The ship was not that at all, it was a whale; the whale calfed, the calf came toward the raft, men riding on it… in it… He watched his craft become the captive of the whale and he suffered himself to be carried into the belly of the whale. He did nothing. But after an age of darkness he felt wet upon his tongue. And he swallowed.

Still later, he thanked his graybeard succorer, whispering, “We would have died. We have no maps.”

“I know,” said graybeard.

“Fled… dragons… killing, tearing… Kar-chee…”

“I know. I know.”

“No land… no refuge… no rain…”

Said graybeard, “I know.”

After a long pause, he asked, “Who are you? And what is this place?”

Said graybeard: “I am the Knower. This is the Ark.”