The Kar-Chee Reign

V

Ren Rowan now seemed old enough to be the father of the man he had been but a few days before. The homesite already had a slovenly and half-abandoned air to it. He gazed at the newcomers blankly at first, squinted and gaped at his sons, frowned as he observed the signs of decay quickening about his yard and house. Then he said, after several starts and stops and with idiot soundings and smackings of tongue and palate and throat, “So… Came here to die… Could have died at home…” Then he looked at them with the dull, sick look with which a man painfully and irrevocably ill may reproach those who do not share his pain.

Lej’s answer was brisk. “Everyone has to die, but no one has to die just yet. This man here, he with the strange eyes, he and men and women from his country, were found by us at sea on a raft. They had despaired to do other than die, but they are, as you may see, alive and well nonetheless.”

Liam listened with wry appreciation, noting how Lej said nothing of the raft people who were not now “alive and well nonetheless.” He noted with some surprise that this seemed to be a different Lej. Aboard the ark he had apparently been in some sort of suspended animation, with nothing to do except perform his duties and listen to old Father Gaspar. Now the mantle of Gaspar, the principal knower, seemed to have devolved upon him by proxy and by right of senior age. This was not now the obedient subordinate speaking; it was the true believer, preaching to the ignorant.

“Needn’t die just yet…” Old Ren repeated the words. A very faint flicker passed over his face. It was not hope — not yet — it may have been only disagreement. But it indicated the return of some emotion other than lethargy and absolute resignation. Lors looked from Lej, smooth, utterly confident, to his father, so suddenly and prematurely bereft of hope and strength and even manhood. He did not know what Lej was about to say, but he felt at that moment that if it would restore his father to the man he had been, then, whatever it was, he, Lors, would follow and obey.

“There can be no right action without right knowledge,” Lej went on. “I see this house building, these outbuildings, these fields and groves and cattle and stock; and I observe that they do not pertain to savages nor to barbarians, nor to men who live like brutals with no inkling of the social complex. I see here a settlement of civilized people, of people who possess knowledge and the ability to know more.”

He paused to let this sink in, and turned his head to look at the others, some of whom had already begun to look up from every conceivable moribund posture. His eye seemed to draw them up, draw them out and away from the all-consuming terror which had blunted the senses. The wind blew sweet from the grasslands and woods and a bird sounded its territorial note, liquid and prideful. The trees rustled and shook a powdery shower of tiny blossoms down upon them where they lay or crouched and slumped. Already, merely by the intrusion of the stranger with his strange words, they had suddenly become aware of many things which had been forgotten.

“But I see here, too,” Lej went on, “a community which does not yet know enough… one whose knowledge has not been sufficient to save it from nearly dying of fright. Friends! Listen to me! I have very important things to say to you! Only men themselves, and women, are capable of totally arbitrary and capricious actions. But Manifest Nature is not. Manifest Nature does nothing without a cause, nothing without a purpose. The fearsome demons who have, I am told, now appeared among you, have been sent here by Nature for a purpose, and that purpose is not to destroy you, utterly. Is not!

“Only if you are foolish and sinful enough to resist is destruction certain. But if you will examine your inner selves, admit that you have done wrongfully, if you resolve to learn from the Knowers how to avoid future transgression, and if you are determined, friends, not only to learn what to do but to do it! — then salvation is possible. If you wish to learn, we will teach you. If you, having learned, having come to know and having joined the community of the Knowers, then take the next inevitable and logical step — that of leaving the land tainted by former transgressions—”

Old Ren groaned. He struck his head with his hands.

“Leave? What for? So that the Devil can follow us? If we’re to be killed, then let’s be killed here… Here! Where we were all born and where we’ve all lived…”

Lej almost smiled at him. “But, old sir and friend, that’s what we’ve come to show you: that you need not any of you be killed. Not here and not anywhere. Animals kill because they are hungry. So do sharks. But Devils are not animals, they are Devils! In their actions toward mankind the creatures of Devilkind aren’t moved by necessity of hunger. If your children do wrong, you cut a switch and you punish them. The switch is not moved by any intelligence or force of its own. The switch is moved by you! You are the one perceiving the necessity of punishment, but the switch itself perceives nothing. The child fears the switch itself only if he lacks the wit to understand that he should rather fear his father’s arm… but it takes only a little while for him to realize that if he will not misbehave he will not be punished!

“Are you beginning to see? The Double Devils are merely the implements by which we, children of Manifest Nature, are being punished. They have no mind of their own, you know. All we need do to avoid them is to cease deserving them. And if you should ask, in that case why need we build the vessels which the Knowers call arks and why should we prepare food and drink and timber and seeds and stocks of goods and select the best of our beasts and why need we venture into exile upon these arks? — why will it not suffice if we repent and begin to follow a proper course of actions right here where we already are?—”

He had either made this same address often before, Liam considered, watching Lej’s very ordinary face suffused with a confidence which seemed to lift him above self, or else he had heard it so often before that he had soaked it up and was now disgorging it word for word and point by point.

“If this is what you’re about to ask, friends, then you needn’t wait long for the answer. The exile is itself a necessary form of the punishment. Do you see it now? Of course you do. It’s so very simple, isn’t it? This land has been tainted. The appearance of the Devils proves that — if it weren’t tainted they wouldn’t be here. The land is seeped and soaked in sin; it’s running over with it. You can’t stay here; you couldn’t follow a course of genuine knowledge and proper conduct here; you must leave it and venture out upon the cleansing sea and reflect and ponder and—”

His words went on and on and on. He had an answer for everything. The Kar-chee weren’t everywhere at once; neither were the dragons. They did not move with the speed of the wind, they moved, indeed, rather slowly in their work of purifying the land from sin. It was only necessary to keep out of their way as they went about their pre-ordained and essential tasks. If they came near, then move far. And, meanwhile, let trees be selected for felling if seasoned timber enough was not available: there would be time. Oh, yes, there would be time. Haste makes waste. Knowledge is power. Meanwhile, the very palisade of the homesite itself was useful timber, and there were the beams of the houses, too. The Knowers knew how. The Knowers knew why. And when. The Knowers, in short, knew.

Skai, a pale-faced and scant-bearded man, standing next to Liam, said, “Makes sense. Makes sense. Wouldn’t you say, Liam?”

Liam said, “It makes sense of a sort. But there’s more than one sort of sense… wouldn’t you say, Skai?”

The man blinked, mumbled wordlessly. After a while, Liam noticed, he wasn’t standing next to him any longer. He was up front, crowding close, listening to Lej. And nodding… nodding… nodding.

A sheltered and concealed cove was found for the ark, and Gaspar directed her putting in to there. The vessel was warped in quite close to shore, the depth of the water there permitting it; and then Gaspar, in whom common sense was never totally obscured by either verbiage or dogma, directed that leafy branches be cut and placed over the topside of the vessel. More: he had them changed daily, as soon as they began to wilt. Perhaps he might have preferred not to tarry at all, but there were many things inducing him to stay a while. So he carefully camouflaged his vessel and began to see to those things.

Shelters were set up ashore for the ill, both of the ark- and the raft-group. (Work of proselytizing among the latter proceeded apace, a captive audience being in Gaspar’s view the best audience of all.) The ark itself was overhauled, repaired, refurbished. A part of the livestock was taken ashore, turn and turn about, to be grazed. Meat was killed and fish caught and both salted, dried, smoked — but a portion of kill and catch consumed as part of the daily rations. Ebbing supplies were renewed. The disrupted state of local society had almost destroyed the opportunity for regular trade, but the Knowers managed to procure what they wanted nevertheless.

And all the while they preached their message — vigorously, urgently, persuasively, incessantly.

And not without success.

Yet, curiously — and whether old Knower Gaspar noticed or not, it seemed to make no difference to him — his campaign seemed to be a two-edged blade. On the one hand, he drew many to him. On the other hand, he pushed many away. Some there were who had been willing to lie down and die who now arose and with all vigor engaged in scrutinizing their past deeds and prepared to repent and to migrate. Others there were who had been in the same comatose condition who now recovered and rejected not only their previous condition but the doctrinal preaching which had aroused them from it.

“What does he mean, Devils are only a switch to beat us?” demanded Jow. “Did anyone ever see a switch move around by itself? These Knowers — how many places have they moved to? So many, most of them don’t know, themselves. They ever convert any place—really convert it — so good that it stayed converted, so that no Devils ever came there? It’s plain that they didn’t.”

Jow, apparently, was going to be a hard nut to crack. If, indeed, he cracked at all.

Some of the raft-people, minds still afire with reflected memory of the destruction wrought in New North Britland, wanted nothing but to keep as far away from Kar-chee and dragon as they could. They took it for granted that Liam, having led them in on migration to safety, would certainly not stay behind after the next one. Others had second thoughts. Devils had been defeated once back in the old home land in the northern seas. Chop it and change it as one would, that fact remained. Which was reducible to a very simple formula: The Devils could be defeated. Liam, to these, was not a man who had fled from the folly of further resistance; he was the very leader of resistance, his wisdom being only further enhanced by having realized — concerning a second stand to fight back there and then — that the time had not yet been right. Liam, to these, was only waiting for the time to became ripe and right. This might be after the next migration; on the other hand, it might come right here — in which case, of course, there would be no migration… at least not for them. Let the proud-nosed old Knowers move where they pleased.

And all the while the proud-nosed old Knowers bent to their tasks, from preaching their word to pouring melted deer fat into dried deer bladders — dutiful, efficient, coordinate; and all the very while rebellion simmered below the surface. It took the form of advocating the blasphemy of resistance to Devils, but it might have taken another or other forms. Once, in ultra-ancient Byzantium, at a time when religion and chariot-racing were the national preoccupations, each faction in the church had had a corresponding faction in the hippodrome; historians had tended to believe that those who supported the chariots of the greens did so because they were Monophysites: but it might well have been that those who supported the doctrines of the Monophysites did so because they were Greens. So perhaps it was here. The younger and rebellious among the Knowers may perhaps have most resented, say, the ban on “unqualified” cohabitation — or the earnestly endless solemnities of their elders — or the fact that they themselves were tired of being reproved for levity — or, excluded from making any but the most minor decisions.

But it was not such terms that Rickar used when he and Fateem and Cerry, Lors, Liam and a few others found themselves together and unobserved one middle morning. Their official mission there was the bringing down of a supply of choice seed-corn from a granary high up above the uncultivated thickets. When people are determined to be together for any reason the events of life lose much of their casual nature and occur only either to gather or to separate them. So it was now. The mission was a chance to be free of being overlooked and overheard. It was seized upon.

The llamas would much rather have been allowed to remain loose to gambol and nuzzle and dance about, and did not submit without protest to having the panniers laden onto them. Up the trail they all went, lighter of heart than any of them might have been willing to admit.

Lors said, almost as though the words were unsafe, “We haven’t seen anything more of the Devils since you came. I think it was a lucky thing for us that you did.”

Rickar, determinedly grim, said, “It may be luckier for us… for some of us, anyway.”

“I think that Father Gaspar is right in one thing, anyway,” Liam considered. “It’s better to keep away from them, generally speaking, than not to keep away from them.”

Rickar grunted, probably annoyed to think that his father could be right in anything. Cerry was thinking that it was a relief to be away from the eternal self-righteousness of the arkfolk. She looked down to where the vessel lay harbored, but only undisturbed greenery met her eye. Gaspar had seen to the work of concealment well. She said so.

Fateem shook her head of soft, brown curls. Everything about her was small and clear and, somehow, managing to seem at the same time delicate and sturdy. “Conceal,” she said, bitterly. “Hide. Run. Preach.”

She flung up her head and looked at Rickar. “Why do we stay?” she asked. “We don’t have to. When the ark, when all the arks, are ready to leave, why don’t we just stay behind?”

He was more than startled, he was shocked. In a moment he seemed to have withdrawn, not only from what she had just said, but also from everything which he himself had said. He half-turned to look back down at where the ark was concealed, then quickly looked back, embarrassed. His eyes met no one’s. “That’s a rather big decision to make,” he said, in an uncertain, unhappy voice. Then, a satisfactory answer to her question occurring to him, he looked up and said with more assurance, “It will be a while before anything can be ready to go. That gives us a lot of time to think about it… Anyway, we’ve got this seed corn to load. It’s very different from our Serran-type of corn, isn’t it, Fateem?”

She blew out an angry breath, but made no other answer. Nor did she answer him afterward, either, until, annoyed, he switched his conversation to Cerry. “We saw no such light-haired women as you before we saw you,” he told her; “although we had heard about them. And how red your skin was from the sun! But now you look exceedingly well.”

Lors, from time to time, seemed on the point of saying something, but never did. They filled basket after basket of the thick and twisted ears of corn, so different from the thin and slender ones of the type of Serra, and dumped them into the panniers. Presently they paused to eat and drink, and Liam found himself sitting apart with Fateem under a tree. From time to time Rickar would look up at them, his face an unsuccessful mixture of anger and unconcern; then he would turn to say something to Cerry and laugh.

“These cakes are good,” Liam said. “We didn’t have this corn at all in Britland — just rye and barley and wheat… Come,” he said, “don’t stay angry at your young friend. Give him a chance to adjust to your ideas. Think what it means for him to leave all his family and friends and—”

She burst out, “It should mean no more to him than it means to me!”

“Well… there’s that.”

“He was the first to talk of this among us, and he talked the longest and the most. I was contented, before. I would probably be still contented — believing what I was taught, doing as I was told. Receiving the wise words of the ancient elders, humbly accepting everything. But I can’t, anymore — and it’s all Rickar’s doing! If he wasn’t willing to face leaving the Knowers, why — well, what did he think?” She sat up, facing Liam indignantly. “Did he think that a miracle would occur? And his father and his mother and all the others would suddenly come around to his way of thinking? — when they haven’t any of them the slightest notion in the world of the things he’s been thinking of! And now for me to find out that it was all just thinking — and all just talk!”

Again, Liam was pacific. “Be patient—” he began.

But this was what she could not be. “No. No. But it’s just as well that it’s happened. I should have known better — I will know better — than to trust a boy!” She threw a fleeting, disgusted glance at the unfortunate lad, then turned her face, alive with indignation and disdain, to Liam again. “But you,” she burst out—“you are a man!”

“True…”

But he said nothing more; after a moment, she demanded, “Then don’t tell me that you are really going to become a Knower and run meekly off with the rest of them? You’d better not tell me that! I wouldn’t believe it, but I’d hate you for lying to me!”

He took the small hand she had held out to him. “No, don’t hate me,” he said. “I can’t tell you for certain sure, Fateem, what I will do. I rather incline to doubt that good Father Gaspar will be wanting me on his next voyage. And I wouldn’t want you to make up your mind, and make it up not to change it… now… that you’ll be leaving your people so certainly — not on the chance of anything I might be going to do.”

Something like despair came into her golden brown eyes. “Oh, but I thought I might depend on you,” she said, low-voiced. She frowned, slightly. “Is it because of her? Cerry? Because…” She stopped, confused.

He rose, still holding her hand, and pulled her to her feet. “It’s not. You can talk to her as you talk to me. If you want… from me… any more than that, I’m sorry. I don’t speak of forever or for never, but for now. But this I can tell you, Fateem: as I will tell her of what my plans may be, when I have a better way of knowing what my plans may be, so I will tell you. And just as she will be, as she is now, free to decide if she will go or stay, or whatever, so, Fateem, will you.

“And now, let’s go back to our corn. Whatever happens, and wherever it happens, there must be seed to sow.”

It was on the way back that Rickar, carefully not looking toward Fateem, said, in a determined voice, “Liam, what you said about learning more of the Devils—”

And Lors, in a relieved tone: “Ah—!”

None of the party was willing to stay behind with the laden beasts; none wanted even to risk it by drawing straws. So the llamas were “deposited” in a small blind-end barranco and the narrow mouth of it plugged with stones and branches. Then, free, they followed Lors at a rapid pace which soon took them far from the main trail, and after that the pace was no longer quite so rapid. They clambered over fallen trees, scaled boulders hot from the sun, plunged through obstructive thickets; came at last to a sort of slot in the rocky face of the hill through which not more than two of them at a time could look down a long stretch of deep and narrow gorge.

A hawk rode upon the air, floating, rising, falling softly, rising again. “It would be nice if we could do the same,” Liam murmured. Then: “What’s beyond the end, there?”

Lors said, “Wait.” They waited quite a long time, looking at the stretch of empty ground beyond the farther end of the gorge. At length he clutched Liam’s arm. Something which perhaps both of them had assumed to be a tree now detached itself from a shady mass of obscurity and moved across the landscape. They could not see it at all clearly, nor could they see clearly the shapes which followed it. But they could see them move and pass and vanish. It was certain that they were large, certain that they were strange, certain that they could not be trees. Nothing more moved, down and afar off, though they waited a long time further. But at last they felt the breeze in their faces, and the breeze told them that what had been known without proof was indeed true.

Devils!

But they saw nothing more.

Cerry said, “We can’t learn very much about them at that distance, can we?”

“We can’t learn anything at all about them at that distance,” Liam said. “Except that they’re there. Or at least that some of them are there. No—

“Lors, is there a way through? A safe way? Or at least safer?”

“A safer way to what?”

It was not the words of the question which brought them up short, dismayed, nor the tone of voice in which it was asked, for the tone was mild enough. But they were so thunderstruck at seeing Gaspar, the Father Noah, up here that astonishment made them all for a moment mute.

Rickar it was who broke the short silence. “A safer way, in case one should ever be necessary, through to the coast, father… But what brings you here? Is anything—”

“Wrong? No. But it is well to look about on all sides and to know what lies behind as well as before. Indeed, is this not the very motive which inspired the question of Liam? And a good question, too. Is there an answer, Lors Rowan?”

“Not the way we have just been,” Lors said. “But it’s possible that there may be one by other ways. If we might take time out to look…?”

Gaspar stroked his beard and pursed his lips reflectively. He nodded. “Speak to Lej,” he said, after a moment. “He is this week’s Orderer of Schedules… But I see that you are all here. Where, in that case, are the animals? Not unguarded, I hope? And the seed corn? What of that? Lors Rowan’s father’s generosity should not be repaid with carelessness.”

He was somewhat appeased on being shown the effectively-blockaded animals, all comfortably sitting down and ruminating their cuds. Lors took the occasion to deliver a running lecture on the intelligence and habits of llamas, which occupied the rest of the return trip and which (they hoped) effectively prevented the old Knower from entertaining suspicions.

“Clearly,” he said, when Lors at last paused, dry-mouthed, and at a loss for further comment, having already repeated himself at least twice; “clearly, we must take a breeding stock of these intelligent and useful creatures with us.”

“There is another breed related to them that runs wild in the Uplands — guanacos. They’re smaller, but the fleece is softer.”

“We must have those, too. I will make a note of it.”

They watched him leave as they started unloading the seed-corn. They indicated neither by word nor conscious expression any fears not yet laid quite to rest. But evidently nothing more than a routine inspection of yet another aspect of the work of preparation had brought Gaspar up to look at them. It was probably fortunate that the inspection had not been made by someone with younger legs and keener eyes who might have traced them up the vantage-point and overheard what they were saying there.

Thus, as on the raft, consultation awaited the fall of night. When they were together again Lors said, “My brother — Duro, my younger brother — has an idea which might bring us to a safer way through the hills.”

But Rickar was feeling somewhat discouraged. “I did speak to Lej, but he said that three people were enough for a scouting trip. Not that the others are especially needed for anything else; it’s just the Knowers’ frugal way: if three are enough, then only three will go.”

Liam, in the darkness, felt someone settle next to him, felt an arm touch his — a smooth and not a hairy one. A woman. He reached, gently, and his hand encountered a soft mass of curls. Fateem. He patted them, and heard Rickar ask, “What now?”

Liam said, “Now we ask Lors to think of where we’ll all rendezvous… after he arranges for the rest of us to start out for the Uplands to see about those — what did you call them? Ah, yes. Guanacos. Can’t a rendezvous be set for — where is this place your brother has in mind, Lors?”

Out of the darkness Lors said, “We call it the caves…”