The Second Ardath Mayhar Read online

  The procession set out with first light, under a sky that hung low, in rolls like carded wool. The weather was not, Rowall suspected, going to hold. Not all the way. But at least the rivers might be frozen a bit upstream, holding back some of the flood that had washed away more than one funeral party as it tried to cross the stream.

  The wind knifed across the moorland, wailing among the stones, shrieking around the shoulders of Keg Tor, as they drew even with its dwarfish shape. A spit of snow touched Rowall’s face, from time to time, and the moor itself seemed to dissolve into the gray light of the sky. Even the occasional tree or standing stone was ghostlike in the tenuous light, and the creak of the wagon, toiling away behind, added a shivery note to the day.

  Aln, just behind him, touched his shoulder, and he turned. The men pulling the wagon were changing shifts, fresh backs being put to the ordeal of hauling the heavy burden over the stony track. The way ran slightly uphill now, and the box holding his father’s body was, he well knew, heavy with its own weight and that of the big bones and loose flesh within it.

  He went back and took his place, bending to pull, while others alongside did the same and others pushed from behind. The effort warmed him a bit, though his feet were wet and almost frozen in the ill-made boots. They moved along, the axles groaning, the wind slicing their ears from their skulls and tossing wisps of their long hair about their faces. The day moved, too, and it was noon when they reached the worst of the streams.

  The Wend had been low enough to cross without trouble. The Pharr was a bit worse, yet passable. Now they neared the Skeg, and they could hear the roar of its waters before they arrived at the high embankment and looked down at the turbulence below. This time, Rowall knew, they must carry the coffin by hand along the water’s edge, seeking a way to cross.

  The wagon could go at the ford, but it was more likely than not to overturn in the flood. If that happened, the body would be lost, and he had no intention of letting that occur. They would bear it to a crossing, and up the other side, staggering in mud and over icy patches, almost falling back into the stream. He had been there before with the kin of those now helping him. It was a terrible burden for human flesh to accomplish.

  It was dark down in the shadow of the banks. The overcast day did nothing to lighten the shadows, and the footing was perilous. But they persevered, resting the coffin on a stone from time to time in order to catch their breaths and go on. When they found a spot studded with boulders and manhandled the casket across it, they were all weary, and Rowall felt as if he would like to join his parent in the box. His was by far the easiest task.

  The farther climb was miles high, it seemed, and the wind, when they reached the top, struck through their rough clothing to freeze the sweat of effort on their hides. But to their dismay, it was blowing snow as well. The way to the road again was covered over, and the moors lay dim and featureless before them.

  Aln stood, shoulders hunched, staring toward their goal, still miles away. Rowall knew that he was thinking with dread of the mire below Dredden Tor, which might well lie hidden beneath the light blanket of snow. It had swallowed men and beasts for generations, without returning so much as a rag or a bone of them to their owners and kin.

  He sighed. “I will go ahead and sound out the way,” he shouted above the moan of the wind. “Keep coming...there is the wagon now, just coming up from the crossing. Load him onto it, and travel onward. I will stop and wait for you if I come to the mire.”

  In some ways, it was a relief to trudge away by himself, into the teeth of the wind, and leave the wagon behind. It had reached a point at which he felt that it was his father himself groaning, instead of the axles and the men. The wind sang a cleaner note into his ears as he forged ahead.

  Rowall thought of his grandmother and Margret, worrying in the kitchen as they spun wool and knitted hose and shirts. They might be safe, but he knew they were following him every step of the way. He didn’t envy them; at least he knew what was happening when it happened. He thought with longing of his older brother, gone with a drover for a bit of coin to help them through the winter.

  He sighed, feeling the chill pull deep into his lungs. It set him to coughing, another of those troublesome fits that had been the bane of his life since fall. He stopped and leaned against a standing stone until he could breathe again. Then he went forward, half blinded by the increasing snowfall.

  Something moved in the white blur to his right. He paused and put his hands over his eyes, trying to see. A goat, he thought, or one of the moorland ponies, running from the blast.

  He put his head down and went on again, setting one foot carefully ahead of the other, stabbing at the snow with his staff to make sure of the footing. It would not do to stumble into Dredden Mire.

  The world went away for a time, as he forced himself onward. He found himself lying flat, once, and pushed himself up again, wondering how long he had been lying there. He passed a stone that he thought looked too much like the one he had leaned on, hours before. But he was strangely warm now, with effort, he supposed. Nothing troubled his mind, and he walked as if on a summer day, crossing the moors to see his Merry again, forgetting that she had been lost in Dredden Mire months before.

  Then he came suddenly to his senses. The ground trembled faintly beneath his boots, as if he stood upon a vast pudding. His breath stopped in his throat, and he clutched the staff in hands that were numb.

  He turned cautiously in his tracks. The ominous shape of Dredden Tor loomed to his left and slightly behind him.

  “God ha’ mercy!” he cried, his voice mingling with the wind.

  He turned right around and tried to see his own tracks. He could follow them out of the mire again, he thought, but the snow had covered them over, and behind him was only the regular pattern of windblown drift that lay on every hand.

  He thrust the staff at the ground. It sank too easily. He stabbed to right and left, front and back, but there was no difference at all. He stood deep in the mire. Too deep to hope for deliverance. He must have followed one of the meandering strips of solid ground that criss-crossed it aimlessly.

  Suddenly Rowall laughed aloud, the wind snatching the sound from his lips. He was relieved of this day’s duty, and if death be the price, it was cheap. Merry was gone. His life loomed ahead, labor and cold, cold and labor, until he lay down and died as his father had done.

  It was against the law of the Church to die willfully, but accident was another thing entirely. He had been delivered from his fate by his own father’s death, it seemed, and he no longer shuddered at his long trek on the Lych Road.

  He laughed harder and harder. He plumped down in the powdery snow and lifted his face to the howling sky.

  “Bishop!” he shouted, “You cannot say I must return to my own parish for burial! My bones will never be found, Bishop! And my curse upon you for bringing many well men to their deaths in serving those already dead!”

  The wind moaned about Dredden Tor, and the mire lay hidden under the snow. The men who hauled his father’s lych to its tomb would do their task and some would even grieve for him, he knew. But Rowall did not grieve for himself.

  He was growing quite warm, now. And Merry...Merry was coming through the mire in her summer dress, her hands filled with wild daisies....

  THE VEAULES

  I love inventing alien landscapes and critters. Unfortunately, my alien critters tend to be pretty wicked.

  They came out of the trees by night, hopping along the edge of the meadow like pale feather-dusters or perched on branches of the few bushes growing amid the grass. In the light of the green moon they looked eerie but harmless. By that of the silver moon they seemed spectral.

  When the scarlet moon shone, their diamond-bright eyes shone with hungry fires, and their pale plumage was tinged with red. Even their shadows, cast by that rusty light, seemed menacing, edged with purple against the gray gra
ss. We did not go outside the permaplast domes while the red moon shone.

  Catterly learned the hard way. He was a big man, afraid of nothing, curious about everything. When the sensors proclaimed this world to be livable for human beings, he charged outside, wearing his protective gear but resenting its bulk, and checked out everything in sight.

  “Nothing but birds, small creatures analogous to hares and squirrels and prairie dogs, as far as I can tell,” he panted when he was inside the shuttle again. “Some insects, but I could find no stingers or mandibles capable of inflicting painful wounds. Looks like an ideal world for colonists. We need to set up the domes as soon as possible and begin cataloguing life-forms and analyzing the soil.”

  He was looking straight at me, knowing that the final decision would be mine. As the head of Alien Ecology on this expedition, my task was to assimilate the findings of everyone else, put together the puzzle pieces, and to come up with some pattern that would guide us in our cautious assessment of this world.

  We were forbidden to damage any other world as our ancestors had done to old Earth. I had to make certain we remained within the law. Catterly, I had realized as we began our examination, was of the old breed that had ravaged Terra generations ago. Left to his own devices, he would have jumped into this new ecosystem and stamped it flat.

  “Eco-Tech Dale!” he said roughly. “Pay attention! Do we put up the domes now?”

  I stared him down. “We locate a better spot for the shuttle, farther from the trees. We examine every inch of ground before we inflate the permaplast. We take our time, Analyst Catterly, before we make any move that might damage this system.” It was all I could do to keep from calling him “Anal” Catterly, which was the term my associates coined for him.

  I heard him muttering his usual expletives aimed at female techs who had arrived at superior positions via exercises performed flat on their backs, which he knew to be false. As usual, I ignored him. This was my fourth mission, and he was my third impossible exploration and analysis tech. Somehow, that position seemed to attract a certain kind of unlikable male.

  We did the job by the book, finding a spot suitable for the shuttle, and another, very nearby, where the domes would not damage either flora or fauna. We inflated the domes with care, watching the effect of their presence upon the prevailing breeze across the meadow we chose. Catterly was beside himself with impatience before we were set up.

  The moons had been cycling, each holding the sky for many solitary days and nights, their orbits succeeding each other regularly. overlapping as they leisurely crossed the scantily starred sky. First the green, then the silver, then the scarlet moons made their transits, while we labored to locate, assess, and assign a name to every kind of plant, animal, bird, and insect we could find.

  We went down the alphabet, trying to avoid, for our own convenience, having more than two or three species listed under any single letter. By the time the green moon was again overhead, we had come to v, and the creatures we named the veaules first appeared at the edge of the forest.

  Catterly saw them first. “Yo, Dale!” he called softly from the instrument dome. “Look there, will you?”

  In the greenish glow, the veaules hopped soberly into the meadow and sat staring at us. Those in the trees huddled their heads down into their neck-feathers and stared, too. They looked like poufs of silvery-green feathers atop stilt-like legs. Their long beaks shone in the moonlight, gleaming with metallic luster.

  Only when Catterly moved toward them, despite my warning to be cautious, did I see tall crests of feathers rise along their skulls; it seemed to happen only when they were disturbed. I whistled imperatively, and the big man bumbled back to my side, cursing softly.

  “Leave them alone,” I warned him. “Analyst, we are here to assess, not to upset, the local life-forms.”

  He grumbled but obeyed. Then we were very busy indeed, cataloguing and analyzing and fitting together pieces of the puzzle that was G-307, fourth planet in the Doura System.

  It looked quite promising, by the time the silver moon came around for the second time; we had found no life-form that seemed sentient, although there were several that showed extremely sophisticated evolutionary patterns of survival. It was strictly against the rules to continue investigating, much less to colonize, any world holding an intelligent life-form.

  When we finished our work in the late evening, we usually looked out at the staring veaules, enjoying the moon-colored feathers and the glinting brightness of their eyes. Although Catterly had wanted desperately to dissect at least one of everything, so far I had withstood his pleadings. Only insects had fallen victim to his voracious scanner so far.

  I had particularly warned him not to bother the veaules. They were close to us. They had not threatened us in any way. I wanted no problem with any creature, large or small, no matter how dreadfully the colonists who would follow us might trouble them.

  The red moon appeared for the second time some fifty days after our touchdown. The Assistant Eco-techs were helping me assemble our body of data, which was about as complete as we could get it in this limited area. It was time to deflate our domes and move the shuttle to another area in a distant and climatically different part of this world.

  That was when Catterly went outside in the light of the red moon and brought down a veaule with his shock-rifle. The first I knew of it was when he stalked into the dome where I was working, a limp bundle of silvery feathers in his hand.

  Something about the veaule physique was terribly vulnerable to shock, I found when I examined the creature. It was dead, its eyes dimmed to gray, its plumage reduced to a handful of smoke-dull wisps. I was angry—so angry I drove Catterly outside with the force of my fury.

  When I heard his scream, I couldn’t imagine how he had come to grief in the bare area where the domes sat. Once I stepped outside I realized what had happened.

  There, ringing us in the red light, stood ranks of veaules, their eyes scarlet, their crests raised. Catterly lay sprawled on the grass, blood trails shining along multiple wounds in his scalp and on his neck and wrists. As I moved into view, those many beaks opened wide and clacked shut, and I saw that they were lined with saw-like edges, capable of doing the damage Catterly’s skin revealed.

  “Get him inside!” I whispered, and Jooss and Henri drew sharp breaths before following me toward our fallen companion.

  A stir moved among the veaules, as if a wind had risen. Still, they allowed us to retrieve him; fortunately, he was still breathing. As we went again into the dome, I could hear a clattering of beaks, as if the creatures were signaling among themselves. My skin goose-pimpled while I stripped back Catterly’s garments and examined his wounds.

  Antiseptic and a few stitches were all I could do, for the doctor was aboard the orbiting ship. We had to get Catterly there, for he seemed to be developing a fever. Who knew what venom or enzyme could be in those alien beaks that might be deadly to our kind?

  We could not leave the dome, even to go to the shuttle, for when we looked out again we were surrounded by veaules. Hundreds, thousands, possibly millions of the birds sat on the bushes, on the grass, even on the domes themselves, watching us with those scarlet-tinted eyes, waiting for a chance to serve us as they had served Catterly. The meadow and the treetops in the distance were a sea of veaules, shifting with red-tinted ripples as the creatures moved about.

  Jooss signaled the ship, but his message seemed to go unheard. Philippe Henri and Joan Falville and the rest of the analysts and eco-techs huddled with me in the shelter of the big dome, wondering if our besiegers would leave when daylight came again. Wondering, indeed, if we would be able to get to the orbiting ship, and even if we would be able to reach the shuttle.

  Henri kept peering out of the door-slot, watching the moon sink over the distant horizon. “They’re backing off,” he said at last, and I went to stand beside him.

 
The sky was growing pale with dawn. As the light increased, the moon set, and the waiting veaules began a slow and orderly retreat toward the trees. We had to move quickly now, or be trapped here for another night. Just as the sun rose, about half of the creatures took wing, and the sky was completely filled with flying shapes, which became a cloud as they sped away toward the west.

  We left too much of our work in the domes when we ran for the shuttle, but even then we heard an ominous rustling in the leaves behind us. We gained the port, pulled everyone inside, and sealed the craft. Even as Jooss began the ignition sequence, pale shapes composed of fluff and long, transparently fragile legs began battering themselves against the permaplast of the viewports.

  We moved upward amid a swirl of feathers and croaks and occasional splotches of coppery blood. I hoped desperately that the creatures would not find a way into the sealed domes and destroy the work of so many months. Although the location we first chose was beginning to seem unusable, surely our accumulation of data might help us with another, as far from the last as possible.

  The veaules were, after all, not intelligent, and if colonists avoided their habitat there should be no problem with them. I was busy preparing a verbal report, with suggestions for alternative sites, all the while we shot toward the signal marking the present position of the ship.

  We met the vessel inside the orbit of the green moon and locked the shuttle into its waiting socket. When the pressure seals whispered open, I felt a sense of relief that seemed too intense for the relatively slight danger we had faced below. We had, after all, only had a crew member injured by birds. We had met far worse enemies in our tour of duty.

  My superiors were not happy. “We selected your position with utmost care,” Commander Howell said in his old-maidish voice. “A forest for wood, fertile soil, plentiful small game—it was no accident that we sent you there. Catterly is not dangerously injured, as surely you must know.

  “We cannot imagine why you and your associates were so disturbed by what is a fairly normal reaction from indigenous species when some of their number come to grief at our hands.” He looked at me over the bridge of his nose, and I could almost see the glasses that were no longer used to augment sight. He had a face that needed to be garnished by frames and lenses, in order to possess any character at all.