But the news that Belfeor had discontinued the king-hunt, had even driven the parradiles away from the Smoking Hills: that would stir them, he felt sure!
Accordingly, that evening he did something he had not dared to do in many months: he ventured out into the city itself. He had to go alone. One by one, even his personal servants had slipped away since his father killed himself, until any service he could command was on Belfeor’s sufferance, usually backed up with the threat of an energy gun.
Oh, by the gods! How Carrig had been changed!
They had not forgotten him, as he half-hoped they might. Even the children on the streets knew him, and ran after him shouting his name and flinging mud. Before he had gone a mile he knew his purpose was defeated, and if he persisted he might well be waylaid in some dark alley and beaten to death. He turned to flee from a gang of children who were hurling not merely mud but stones also, and blinded by some ordure that had hit him in the face be ran headlong into a man emerging from a tavern.
“Steady now!” the stranger said, catching Ambrus to save him from falling. He barked at the children, telling them to give over and go home.
“But that’s Ambrus the traitor!” their leader shrilled.
The stranger detached his arm from Ambrus’ grip and caught the boy by the ear. He said, “Did you never hear the proverb, ‘Whoever durst call me accursed came off the worst’? Get you gone before I take the flat of my sword to your backside!”
Clawing dirt from his eyes, Ambrus saw that his rescuer was a big man, powerful in spite of having gray hair and a lined face. Though the gang of children included several in their teens and numbered twenty to his one, they hesitated and finally turned away. As far as the street corner they kept looking back, but the stranger outstared them and eventually they disappeared.
“I cannot thank you enough, sir,” Ambrus said humbly. “Yet I suppose they cannot be blamed. Doubtless their parents taught them to call me traitor.” The words were bitter in his mouth, but he had to utter them.
“So you’re Ambrus, are you?” the gray-haired man said. “Yes, I’ve heard such talk about you myself. But traitor’ is a hard name to call a man, and I know little of the cause for it, being a newcomer to this city who came in with one of the spring caravans. Treachery is something I’d want to see proof of before I’d join a crowd hurling stones. Yes indeed! Tell me, though—if the townsfolk think thus harshly of you, what brings you out among them alone? Are you not of a noble family, with servants and men-at-arms to protect you?”
Astonished that he was able to make such free admissions to a man he had never met before, Ambrus explained his plight.
“No king-hunt!” The gray-haired man spoke in a tone of amazement, but Ambrus could have sworn that underneath he detected an inexplicable hint of delight. Why should a man like this be pleased at the news? By his manner and clothing Ambrus guessed him to be a prosperous merchant, and he should have been dismayed at missing the chance of fat profits. There was no time, though, to speculate on this mystery; his rescuer was turning back to the tavern he had just left, insisting that Ambrus come along.
Ambrus protested feebly that if he was taken into a tavern some ruffian would certainly attack him. The other brushed his objections aside.
“Not in here, they won’t! Most of my friends who came in with the same caravan are here. They’ll protect you if you need protection. Come along!”
And he dragged Ambrus inside.
It was as he had promised. Though some of the tavern’s clients screamed with rage as they recognized the new arrival and jumped up with the intention of going for him, a signal from the gray-haired man was enough to produce for each would-be attacker two others from among the customers to discourage them. Ambrus wondered who in the world his new acquaintance might be, that so many men would unquestioningly obey his instructions.
“Up there on the table!” the gray-haired man commanded, gesturing. “Tell this company what you have just told me!”
Quaking, but determined to put a bold face on things, Ambrus complied. He made no secret of his own former allegiance to Belfeor, but claimed that he had had no intention of abetting sacrilege. He said he had taken it for granted that if the usurper had seized power legally—by killing the king—he would continue to uphold the ancient customs. Now he had learned about the parradiles being driven from the Smoking Hills; he had repented, and wanted nothing more to do with Belfeor’s gang.
A solemn hush followed his statement. It was broken by the gray-haired man, who clapped his hands and declared that they had heard an honest admission of error. Reluctant nods came from all around the tavern, and someone called down the curse of all the gods on Belfeor, provoking a roar of approval. To show his sincerity Ambrus fervently echoed the wish.
“Good!” said the gray-haired man. “But I’m afraid this won’t be the end of it for you, friend Ambrus! You’re in too deep simply to wash your hands of the dirt you’ve picked up. Still, your involvement may perhaps be turned to some advantage. Let’s take counsel as to how you may best exploit any confidence Belfeor still reposes in you.”
Puzzled, Ambrus said, “Sir, you say you’re a stranger in this city—What makes you take so keen an interest in our affairs?”
“I’m a man who hates injustice where it’s found,” the gray-haired man answered. “Sit down, have a drink, and let’s talk of what needs to be done.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“If you hadn’t got out of the way in time,” the woman Yanna said, “I swear that barbarian would have strangled you!”
“Ambrus?” Belfeor leaned back in his chair. “Ambrus is a silly little coward. Not like his father, who was in charge here when Pargetty and I first arrived. Old Sir Bavis had guts and to spare. They said a lot of dirty things about how he’d fixed the king-hunt to keep himself in his job for the previous eighteen years, but no one ever called him a coward and lived to repeat it. He even tried to give me orders—me! Of course, when he found out I wasn’t impressed by his threats of divine vengeance he chucked himself off the tower, but you can’t imagine Ambrus having even that sort of misplaced courage, can you?”
“I think you’re leading us into real trouble,” Pargetty said in a hesitant tone.
“Trouble?” Belfeor echoed sarcastically. “What trouble? Everything’s going as smooth as oil! We’re getting enough ore out to—”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Pargetty interrupted. “You may laugh at the idea of divine vengeance, but to these people it’s something absolutely real. And the way you’re flouting local superstitions—”
Belfeor snorted. “You and your damned Corps indoctrination! Next you’ll be telling me that the Corps is right to leave these barbarian worlds to their own devices.”
Pargetty flushed. He said defensively, “You know how the Corps treated me! And it was because I stood up and said what I thought about their attitude to the ZRP’s, leaving dozens of habitable worlds to the mercy of a bunch of mud-grubbing barbarians. But they’re still a factor to be reckoned with, and there’s no point in deliberately courting extra problems, is there? You’re willing enough to listen to me when I’m talking about untapped resources on this planet, but when I try and give you advice about the people you spit in my eye!”
His voice had risen to a raucous pitch. Startled at this from the normally diffident Pargetty, Belfeor shrugged.
“Okay, so tell us about the people!”
Pargetty drew a deep breath. “Look! Of course it’s true that thanks to the Corps these people have been cut off from Galactic civilization and reverted to such a primitive level you can’t really regard them as human, but even so they do have their own hopes and beliefs and ambitions and aspirations, and they have to be taken into account.”
“Hark at the preacher!” Belfeor sneered. “I never knew you cared so much about these savages, Meard!”
“Don’t use that name on this world!” Yanna broke in. It was her turn to sound nervous. She glanc
ed around as though expecting someone to have overheard.
“You stay out of this,” Belfeor snapped. “Our friend Pargetty was lecturing us about the natives. Let him finish—he hasn’t made a worthwhile point yet, and he’d better if he doesn’t want to waste my time.”
“Think about our situation!” Pargetty exclaimed. “There are a hundred and two of us in a city of seventeen thousand-odd. Already the peasants from the surrounding area are pouring in by the villageful for the spring festival. How are they going to react to your canceling the king-hunt? We’re outnumbered a hundred and seventy-to-one even without the villagers! And what about the people who’ve come with the spring caravans? They’re bound to be angry and disappointed—the king-hunt is what draws them here, and they won’t like to be cheated of their chance to trade. Haven’t you thought of all that, Belfeor?”
Belfeor negligently drew the energy gun with which he had threatened Ambrus. “There’s enough charge in one of these to fry a hundred and seventy people,” he said. “If they stand still long enough and don’t run away in panic as they’ve done up till now! Damnation, Pargetty, what’s made you change your tune like this? Were you lying when you said if I made myself legal ruler of Carrig I could run the show without opposition?”
“Didn’t you pay attention to anything I told you?” stormed Pargetty. “You made yourself ‘regent’ of Carrig, not ‘ruler’! As far as the natives are concerned, the lords of this city are only viceroys for the gods, and to prove that the gods still approve of them being in charge they have to perform various rituals and symbolic actions, like killing the parradile. They see themselves as existing in a universal nexus of divine forces, and they expect their rulers to be bound by the laws they themselves repect.”
Belfeor gazed at him coldly. “Hah! This is a far cry from what you told us while we were planning the operation, isn’t it? You insisted the scheme was foolproof; you said the natives would blindly obey anyone who went through the initial rigmarole to make things look legal!”
Pargetty slumped back in his chair. “I thought it was obvious that you couldn’t change the people’s superstitious nature overnight,” he retorted. “Don’t you understand anything about the primitive mentality?”
Yanna said slowly, “Belfeor, I think Pargetty has a very important point there. You ought to do as he says. After all, he’s been right all along the line so far.”
Belfeor slapped his open hand on the table before him. He said, “Now you listen to me! Pargetty, you asked if I’d given any thought to our situation. I’ll ask you the same question. Have you forgotten that those stupid fools aboard the Wolfshark shot down a ship? We don’t know what it was—it fell into atmosphere and burned up—but what else is it likely to have been except a Patrol cruiser, here to rotate an agent or maybe even to drop someone off to replace Heron? Sure, we can rely to some extent on the Corps’s resources being overstretched, so they probably couldn’t spare a ship to investigate immediately, but they’re bound to turn up sooner or later.
“Before that happens, I want, you want, we all want to stockpile enough radioactives to keep us in luxury the rest of our lives. That’s the purpose of the operation, isn’t it? What’s more, we need enough in hand to finance any legal fight we may get involved in if someone opens his big mouth later on and they find out where our ore-strike was actually made. That means we have to drive the natives and keep up the output from the mines. We’ve just about broken even so far; having to buy a second ship used up our first year’s profit—or hadn’t that occurred to you? Once we get clear of here, with a decent cache of radioactives in the home system that we can draw on as it suits us, we’re laughing! We can lie till we’re blue about where it’s coming from; we can live in style, and with luck we’ll even be able to afford longevity treatments. That’s what you’re after, isn’t it? You missed out on your chance to earn a century of extra life in the Corps, and this is your only way to recoup! So why in the galaxy do you want to waste time on some lunatic superstition when what we have to do is mine and ship, mine and ship, every possible minute until we’re forced to quit?”
“Fixing up the king-hunt to keep the natives happy isn’t wasting time!” Pargetty flared. “It’s—it’s insurance!”
“Go and fix it, then! You’re no use to me in your present state of dithering. Put on your little show for the locals—it’s about all you’re fit for. Though I’ve no idea where you’re going to find a parradile for the hunt. I had them cleared out of the hills; I told you.”
“You should have consulted Pargetty before you did that,” Yanna said. “What was the point of it, anyway?”
“They were such a damned nuisance!” Belfeor rapped. “They interfered with our prospectors—you could hardly walk into a cave in the hills without finding one—and what’s more they’ve been bleeding the local farmers white, eating about a fifth of their produce. Parasites would be a better name for them than parradiles!”
Pargetty looked pale and sick. “Oh, you’ve probably already cooked us,” he said, getting to his feet. “You’ve blasted local tradition wide open like the insensitive idiot you are. I’ll go and arrange a king-hunt with Sir Gurton Knole. Maybe that’ll give us a breathing-space. But I won’t make any promises. My guess is that your stupidity and incompetence have made certain of a rebellion already!”
Belfeor was so surprised at this display of spirit from the normally inoffensive Pargetty that he was still gaping wordlessly when the door of the room slammed shut.
“Good news,” Gus Langenschmidt said quietly into the communicator.
“Tell me, then,” Brzeska invited.
“I’m speaking from a tavern in Carrig that we’ve more or less taken over. Slee fixed it up for us to come in with a caravan from Dayomar. The way he organized adequate cover on short notice for the whole sixty of us was an absolute model of efficiency, and I think he deserves a merit entry on his record for it. We came in as a group of mercenary soldiers to guard the caravan; he planted a bandit-scare in Dayomar and within days it got to the point where no caravan master could have put his show on the road without an escort. Then, of course, Slee offered our services, and there we were.
“We’ve been here about twenty days now. It’s very lucky that this turned out to be a year when the spring new moon falls late; we’ve had a chance to take proper stock of the situation, and it’s just what we hoped for. I don’t know whether Belfeor realizes, though if he is relying on a failed Corps probationer for advice he damned well ought to, but he’s sitting on a ticking bomb. He’s disregarded local custom so flagrantly even the turncoats who threw in their lot with his gang have had second thoughts. The other evening I walked out of the tavern and found Ambrus being stoned by a gang of kids. Know who I mean?”
Brzeska nodded. “The renegade son of the former regent, correct?”
“That’s him. Well, he’d just had it from Belfeor’s own lips that there wasn’t going to be a king-hunt this year, and he was scared out of his wits, scared enough to come down into the city at the risk of his life to spread the news. So I put him up on a table in the tavern and made sure that the most gossipy clients heard the story right away.
“That was precisely what we needed. The city’s on the boil now. Everyone’s just waiting for the night of the new moon; then, if Belfeor doesn’t call the king-hunt as he’s meant to, they’ll go and pull him into little bits, energy guns notwithstanding. It’s going to be a bloody mess, but it means we can keep our interference to a minimum.
“Possibly it was hearing the reaction to Ambrus’ announcement which changed Belfeor’s mind—I don’t know. Anyway, a day or two later Sir Gurton Knole, the current head of Clan Parradile, was instructed to organize a king-hunt after all. But it’s too late for that. It’ll be a farce, and everyone knows it. Traditionally, the best young pilots from all the clans practice for months on end in their gliders before going out to shoot the king down with great-big pointed darts. They’re fired from a sort of crossbow arrange
ment, the bow part being fixed and the bowstrings being made of the dried elastic juice of a local tree, called kowtschook. Look into the etymology of that if you get time—it’s an interesting survival.
“After what happened last year, when Belfeor just stood on a handy hill, looking inappropriately bored, and shot down a parradile with his energy gun, the young men are understandably not enthusiastic. Instead of spending their time practicing for the hunt, they’ve preferred to plot against Belfeor—when they were allowed a rest from the mines in the Smoking Hills. For all I know, there’s a local underground resistance as well as the one we’re whipping up. In fact I’m sure there must be.
“Speaking of the mines, by the way, I managed to plant a couple of agents there, and they say there’s no doubt at all of what the gang are up to. They have crushers, grinders, sedimentation apparatus, all kinds of prospecting and mining gear, which they’ve illegally imported. They’re refining the radioactives down to about 88 percent pure and flying them out by glider to the place you told us about. I’ve been wondering whether you could locate their cache. It must be pretty close to Cyclops, probably even in their home system if they have an asteroid belt, which seems like the logical hiding place, and by this time it’s probably big enough to give a blip on a mass-detector. They’re refining about four or five tons a day, and that’s a hell of a lot of heavy elements.”