To Conquer Chaos

VII

The five wise men, Yanderman himself, and the servants who came and went with jugs of beer and plates of cheese and onions made the room crowded. The ceiling was low and the walls were rough. The layout suggested to Yanderman that this fort had been the whole of Lagwich at one time, with perhaps a mere hundred people living in crude cabins around it and taking refuge inside the stone wall when necessary; the palisade and ditch lower down the hill would have followed the expansion of the population to its present figure of eight or nine times the original number.

Six nitre-soaked torches, fizzing and spitting occasionally, were set in wall sconces among relics of past victories-not military conflicts, but struggles against things from the barrenland. Some of the trophies were mounted as skeletons; others were skins stretched on crude wooden frames. Even in death the ugliest of them were still frightening.

He had thought through the probable history of Lagwich with a purpose-as a sort of exercise in deduction. These five who called themselves wise men and governed the town were very ignorant even when it came to facts lying in plain sight. Like the form their town had taken. They might say, “in the time of my father’s father it was said that the palisade was smaller than it is now,” or “That thing on the wall was killed by so-and-so, who killed sixty-nine things in twenty years-they came more often then.”

In fact, Malling had said exactly that when waiting for the others to arrive. Yanderman found the words disturbing, for a reason he could not yet pin down.

So far he had confined the talk to an exchange of courtesies and some restrained boasts about the wealth of Esberg; they were true enough, but he had no wish to make the folk of Lagwich feel small. They had done well, considering their situation. Of course, they’d have done better if they hadn’t been so stupidly ignorant. How could they say what they said about change or growth, and yet not grasp the idea that things were still changing, even if the world seemed much as yesterday?

Now, Yanderman decided, he could introduce his main topic. Since he was the honoured guest and the centre of attention he had only to clear his throat and they instantly hushed to hear him. He said, “The barrenland seems to me a strange thing. There is nothing else like it.”

The wise men rumbled and agreed. Yanderman went on, “The things that come from it, also, are very strange.”

They agreed to that, too.

“Tell me,” Yanderman said, “what do you believe caused the barrenland?”

As he had expected, the question provoked a blank silence. Eventually Rost, a dried-up man on Malling’s right, gave a shrug. He said, “Caused it? It’s a thing that is, like any natural object. And to speculate on what caused things to be as they are is a futile pastime.”

The other wise men concurred, looking relieved.

“The world changes, though,” Yanderman said. “For example, did you not tell me that in the old days more things came from the barrenland than come nowadays?” He looked at his host.

Malling was big, and ruddy-cheeked, and Yanderman would have guessed if no one had told him that he was the senior of the five, because he was much the most conservative. He said, “I concede that is so. Nonetheless those that come are if anything more dangerous than before. And the ways of devils are not as plain as the ways of men.”

“Devils?” Yanderman said. “All the things I’ve seen were animals, for they could be killed. What is a devil?”

“Oh, we have seen one,” the wise men hastened to assure him. “It’s in Rost’s house, across the yard of the fort.”

Yanderman, wondering what in the world they meant, showed his interest, and Malling obtained Rost’s permission to send a servant for the “devil”.

“This one,” Rost explained, “came from the barrenland not so many years ago-ten, or twelve. It had a voice, as I myself heard, and formed some sounds like words, and for some time there was argument to and fro as to whether it was a natural being. It was weak, and could easily be restrained, though sometimes it struck out at those who went near it. In the end it was agreed by the wise men of the time-I had not been chosen then-that since it had been seen to come from the barrenland it could not be a natural creature. There it is.”

Yanderman started forward from his chair with an oath, and plucked a torch from the wall as he halted near the door. Two brawny servants were carrying through the narrow opening the “devil” that Rost had spoken of.

And it was a man.

The corpse had been desiccated to preserve it-probably by exposure to hot sun and dry wind, while shielded from flies and carrion-eaters. Now its skin was stretched drum-tight, yellow in the flickering light, over the skull and ribs. The internal organs had been removed, so that below the ribs there was a hollow, but the arms and legs also had the skin on them. The feet were nailed to a wooden platform, and thongs had been threaded into holes in its back to tie the spine to a supporting post. It was very dusty.

“But that was a man,” Yanderman said slowly. Under his breath he added, “Poor ‘devil’!”

“It was not,” insisted Rost and Malling simultaneously. “Men do not live in the barrenland. Therefore it was a devil. True, it took the semblance of a man, but perhaps that was because we had killed so many of the other monsters that it tried to disguise itself.”

Yanderman ignored their babbling. He had the mummy brought into the middle of the room and studied it minutely. Whoever this man had been, he was not of a stock that Yanderman recognised; his head was much rounder than most people’s, his cheekbones were higher and his jaw shorter.

But he was certainly human. And he had come out of the barrenland, where nothing was supposed to exist except monsters …

He turned to the wise men. “Is it not possible that he was from another village-town-close to the barrenland, and wandered into it and then out again, close to Lagwich?”

“Impossible,” Rost hastened to assure him. “For one thing, he was different in certain ways from any man we have ever seen-his build, the colour of his skin. For another, we sent to inquire of all the other towns we could, and heard no account of any such man being lost.”

So either he had come from the far side of the barrenland, or …

Yanderman checked himself, despite surging excitement. He put the torch back in its sconce and indicated that the servants could carry the gruesome trophy away.

The wise men spent the rest of the evening trying to convince him that it really was a devil, and he paid no attention.

Rather than have his party split up among lodgings all over the town, Yanderman had organised them under canvas in the yard of the fort. The townsfolk thought the visitors off their heads for planning to sleep on a stone pavement, and Malling had insisted that Yanderman at least have a proper bed. Yanderman wasn’t sure he was getting the best of the bargain; the “proper bed” was made of straw and stank of fleas.

Before turning in, he went out to the yard and found Augren and Stadham talking quietly by a small fire.

He joined them, asking how they fared and telling them about the bed he was being given; they chuckled together for a moment. Then he looked around to make sure none of the curious natives was in earshot, and addressed them in low tones.

“I suppose you’ve realised that if a town like this can be maintained so close to the barrenland, it can’t be so terrible as we once believed.”

Sensitive on that score after the episode of the luck-charm, Augren took it on himself to answer. “As a town-” he said, and spat into the darkness. “But the point’s good, sir.”

“Add this one to it, then, and carry both to Duke Paul first thing tomorrow. Did you see, borne across the yard to Malling’s house, a thing in the shape of a dried-up man?”

Augren looked blank, but Stadham nodded. “It went by when we were watering the horses,” he said. “Two of them caught its dusty scent and shied at it.”

“I heard the whinnying,” Augren said. “But I was elsewhere.”

“That was the body of a man who came dying of hunger and thirst out of the barrenland.”

They looked incredulous. Yanderman went over the story as he had heard it, emphasising the important fact that the man could not be from any of the local towns. He finished, “This must be taken to Duke Paul as soon as may be; if he’s not changed his plan, the army will camp once more and be here the day after tomorrow. Augren, you’ll ride with the news; Stadham, assign a man to go with him. Yourself, you’ll spend tomorrow riding about the nearer countryside to select a good camp-site. A permanent one, of course-when the army gets here the Duke will want to scout the whole perimeter of the barrenland, and that’ll take several days. If possible, choose a place with its own water-supply; we don’t want to antagonise the townsfolk by fouling theirs, and once it’s past here the stream they use is undrinkable, I imagine. Clear?”

They nodded, rose with him to salute, and sat down again as he moved away.

He had much trouble going to sleep-not from the fleas, or the prickly hardness of the mattress, but because of what he had learned. A man coming out of the barrenland!

For the first time Yanderman admitted to himself what must lie at the back of Duke Paul’s mind. Never a man to be satisfied with half-measures, the Duke. If a problem caught his attention, he would worry it till its back was broken, or at least till he knew it was insoluble with present resources.

Surely-and Yanderman felt a quiver of alarm-nothing would content him short of marching into the barrenland to see if there was anything there.

Legend said there had been, once. Legend was turning out far too accurate for comfort, too-what with confirmation of the former existence of vast cities, time-beaten but still rich with metal and glass, what with Granny Jassy’s uncanny fore-knowledge of the terrain they had traversed since leaving Esberg.

Suppose the remaining legends proved true, as well! The tale went that in the old days when man went to other worlds (but what other worlds? Where was there room for them?) they walked at last, instead of travelling in machines. And some of those “other worlds” were strange, perilous places.

He had heard descriptions from Granny Jassy, but to him the words she parroted made no more sense than they did to her. He would have left it there; Duke Paul would not.

Vaguely, however, a few consistent threads of narrative emerged. A sickness-a kind of contagious insanity. A disaster. The building of a barrier around the place from which you-walked to other worlds, too late to stop the plague from spreading. Just as Lagwich had once been merely a stone fort and no town, possibly the barrenland had been … the barrierland?

And a man had come out of it. Within living memory.

How would you move an army of two thousand men across territory without usable food or fuel, even for three or four days? How would you organise water? That was the worst problem. Water so bulky and indispensable to a marching man …

Streams, maybe. Streams in the barrenland itself. Take animals along and test the purity of the water on them. But a sickness might take days to show itself, and …

Maybe leapfrog a party across the bare ground: half the men carrying provisions, breaking off at the end of the day’s march and coming back, leaving the others to continue with the extra rations-but this would mean you’d reach your goal with a fraction of the original force to meet any challenge …

Yanderman was still wrestling with the problem when he fell asleep.