Part 2 (1/2)

Talito watched and listened curiously as this dialogue went on. It was rewarding to listen to such craftsmen as they went about solving problems. It was a pleasure to hear competent people display their competence. ”I hadn't thought of that,” he admitted. ”Thebalance would be a serious problem. But now you've thought of it and solved it all in the s.p.a.ce of time it takes a sorth to run ten lance-lengths. That is exactly what I'd like: a long iron knife counterweighted with a copper weight at the handle-end.”

”We shall go to work on it right after the storm,” the elder said. ”We'll do a model in wood first, and weight it with lead to get the right balance. That way we can see how the shape should be for the best handling. And we'll find you a nice smooth white skin to make the world-picture on.”

Talito dug into his pack and pulled out a big jar. ”Here's something else I have,” he said, taking the leather cover off. ”Look at this.”

He took out a pinch of white powder and mixed it carefully with about an equal amount of charcoal-dust. Then he sc.r.a.ped a flint along the roughened flat of his dagger to strike a spark. The mixture caught the spark about the third or fourth time he did it, and it sputtered, and then burned with a sputtery, smoky flame for four or five seconds.

”What do you think of that?” he asked.

”Will the flame catch dried gra.s.s?” a townsman asked.

”It will.”

”Amazing! Tinder that blows itself on. Talito, where did you find such stuff?”

Talito pointed with his dagger to the map. ”Down here on the Big Arrowwood River.

It's found on the walls of caves. Do you want some?”

Chwalvo picked up a hammer from beside a small anvil. ”Here, Talito, give us the weight of this, and we'll give you ten weights in worked steel: arrowheads, spear-heads, knife-blades, whatever you think you can use,” he said. ”This will be something to show people!”

”Well, don't eat any of it,” Talito advised. ”The Gobbilene Gang, who sc.r.a.pe this stuff off the cave walls and trade it, claim that if you eat it the girls will be disappointed in you for a while.”

The girl beside Talito snuggled closer. ”You haven't been eating any of it, have you, Wanderer?” she asked.

So the sword and the alphabet came to Hetaira, too. Talito's reminding-marks became ideographs; from them developed phonetic symbols. Talito's rolled skins were sc.r.a.ped down to parchments and vellums. Vegetable pulp was mashed up and spread on frames of finely-woven cloth for paper, and a variety of pens and inks were devised. And Talito's sword changed as it journeyed across Hetaira; the simple cross hilt became an elaborate basket-guard to protect the hand; and the blade a.s.sumed many different forms in different places, as the use of it and the method of handling it evolved. And then somebody added powdered sulfur to Talito's saltpeter and charcoal, and the sword became obsolete.

Chapter Six

The Bronze Age came more slowly to the Uplands of Thala.s.sa, and to the veldt beyond the High Ridge. Forests gave way to fields; flocks and herds increased. Houses of adobe and kiln-hardened brick replaced log huts, behind walls of mud and stone. The nomads came in through the gaps of the High Ridge, driving herds of cattle and riding stock and pack animals to trade for tools and weapons of bronze, or slipped in small bands into the Navvadrov country to raid. They found deposits of copper and tin in the mountains of the second range, beyond the plains, and raiders brought back kidnapped Navvadrov miners and smiths, and in the process discovered and inst.i.tutionalized slavery.

The Upland villages became towns and small cities, and the Upland tribes grew, slowly and without planning, into nations. As the nomad raids increased, permanent war- chiefs were appointed in each area, and patrols of warriors drawn from levies among the tribes. After a while the warriors were permanent also, supported by taxes paid to the war-chiefs. And so the war-chiefs became kings, and the warriors became a feudal n.o.bility, each given a small area to live in and off of. These new kings quarreled bitterly with each other. Mud-walled towns were besieged, defended, taken, and retaken. The farmers sank into peasantry and, in some areas, to serfdom. The nomad raiders, growing more numerous, and thus stronger and more impudent, raided deeper and longer into the Upland while the kings and n.o.bles fought among themselves.

Beyond the High Ridge, the nomad bands and tribes were combining, forming alliances and confederations. It remained for Krushpan the Shebb to unite them all under his leaders.h.i.+p. He skillfully played tribe loyalty against tribe loyalty, and promises of loot from the Uplands, and position in his new federation of tribes, to get all the tribal sheiks to agree to come together under his supreme leaders.h.i.+p. When he had a.s.sembled an army of twenty thousand, he led them through the pa.s.ses of the High Ridge.

The moment was propitious. The army of Liapur had just taken, and was sacking, the town of Prehipur. Falling upon Liapur in the absence of its prince and its army, Krushpan's nomads looted it and enslaved its people. Then, rus.h.i.+ng ahead of the news, his hard-riding warriors fell upon the victorious army of Liapur while it was still within the walls of Prehipur and still occupied with executing the last of Prehipur's defenders.

Krushpan captured both the city of Prehipur and the army of Liapur without a struggle, his surprise was so complete, and annihilated both.

In the three years that followed, the nomads made themselves masters of the Uplands on both sides of the Gvaru. Amarush, the now long-neglected outpost of the Sea Empire, fell with the rest.

The extinction of this foothold in the Uplands pa.s.sed almost unnoticed by the people of the coast, whose eyes had long ago turned from the hinterland of Gvarda to the new lands across the sea. For the past century their colonies had been springing up everywhere-on Zabash, and Dudak, and Nimsh, and Vashtur. There was gold and silver on Zabash, and grain and wine-fruits. There was tin on Vashtur, and an animal with great teeth of ivory. There were oil-nuts on Nimsh, and copper, and in the mountains a reddish rock from which a new metal, gray and hard, was being smelted. And on Dudak werenatives who made good slaves and were sold in herds in the markets of every city of the Empire.

The parent cities on Gvarda prospered. Their streets were paved with stone, and through them pa.s.sed carts of merchandise, and gold-flas.h.i.+ng chariots, and inlaid litters borne by slaves. The goods of every land piled the docks and crammed the warehouses.

Merchants and n.o.bles took their ease in the tapestried rooms of marble palaces, sipping the wines of Zabash and the fiery drink that the Dudak colony had learned to pot-still from the native beer. Music tinkled as harem beauties danced. Scholars in white robes sat surrounded by their disciples; statesmen met in council, and lords feasted. It was a good time; the sun of the Empire stood high.

The bright day ended with a thunderclap when twelve s.h.i.+ps of Novzol came foaming into Trashol harbor, oars stroking to the double-beat of hortators' drums, and brought the news that Novzol had fallen to an invasion of the barbarians of the Uplands. Panic raced through the streets of Trashol. Whips cracked as slaves toiled to raise earthworks.

Merchants and scribes and artisans who had never shouldered a spear or c.o.c.ked a crossbow in their lives jostled into ill-formed ranks under cursing decarians of the small professional army. Altars smoked with sacrifices in the temples of Dindash.

It was Gvazol itself, however, which fell next, before a boat-borne army from Amarush. There were soldiers in Gvazol who could fight skillfully, and citizens who fought bravely. The Emperor, Ghrazhad IX, died at the head of his troops; the High Priest of Dindash was cut down before his altar. At the last, there was a frenzied stampede to board the s.h.i.+ps in the harbor. Some of them got away, but many were capsized in the panic of the crazed fugitives. Between one hot season and the next, all the coastal cities of Gvarda were in barbarian hands. The Uplanders looted and burned them, hauled off their riches, drove the people before them in slave-yokes, and returned to the Uplands.

s.h.i.+ps, escaping from each coastal city as it fell, brought a continuing rain of bad news to the orphaned colonies. Although the Empire, by any practical standard, was still great, this blow produced a wound that would be centuries healing and would never be forgotten. For the first time in Thala.s.sa's history, a fixed system of time-reckon ing was established by mutual consent, and a standard chronology emerged from the jumble of dates marking the reigns of kings. This was henceforth known as the Year One of the Downfall.

Vashtur had been colonized and was ruled by the hierarchy of Dindash; before the end of the Year One, the theocracy was split by sectarian schisms. On Dudak, the coast tribes who had been raiding the interior for captives to sell to the slavers, turned on their former customers. There were slave insurrections in the iron mines of Nimsh; escaped slaves, taking to the hills, taught the art of iron working to the local savages, and after a while these hill tribes, armed with weapons every bit as good as the colonists', became a serious threat to the peace. And everywhere spread, as though from some malevolent cloud, misfortune, poverty, and lethargic despair.

After the conquest by Krushpan I, who had been born Krushpan the Shebb, and died Krushpan the Despoiler, the new masters of the Uplands had gradually forsaken their nomadic life, taking the towns and farmlands for their own. To the serfs and peasants, the conquest was merely an exchange of one tyrant for another. Krushpan's son, Tarask I, was a nomad sheik in a stone tent that could not be moved. His son, Krushpan II, was a king, with a brawling, disorderly n.o.bility and a slave-holding aristocracy imposed on astill-alien population. There were intrigues and feuds. When Krushpan IV embarked upon the conquest of the coastal cities, it was less for the spoils than to divert his n.o.bles from cutting each others throats and plot ting to cut his. The new prosperity which came from this grandiose brigand-raid kept the Uplands quiet through the rest of his reign and through the reign of his son, Krushpan V. Then the fratricidal bickering began again.

Within a century the Upland Empire split along the line of the Gvaru River. Rapidly, even before war could break out between the two halves, both were convulsed by internal strife, and cracked into fractional kingdoms. Rowdy bands of n.o.bles and their mercenaries burned, looted, and harried each others' lands and towns. The nomads from beyond the High Ridge-descendants of the stay-at-home cousins of Krushpan the Shebb-began raiding again. The mercenary companies, unpaid, deserted and pillaged the estates of their former employers until there was nothing left to take. Gradually peace-the peace of universal poverty and ignorance and apathy-came to the Uplands.

Slowly, the overseas colonies of the vanished Sea Empire dragged themselves up out of their dejection and began to re-build and look outward. The slave-trade from Dudak was revitalized, and s.h.i.+ps began plying among all the new states that had risen out of the debris of the Empire. With the renewal of commerce, piracy spread, and cities that had begun to trade with one another built war-fleets to protect their commerce.

In the year 783 of the Downfall, a s.h.i.+p from Tullon, on Nimsh, nosed into the silted harbor of Gvazol and found a berth beside an ancient wharf. She was one of a new cla.s.s of men-of-war; probably the finest s.h.i.+ps on the Central Sea. She had two banks of oars, and three masts with square-rigged sails, and could be sailed with reasonable confidence through the roughest weather. She had two decks, and a cargo hold below the oar- benches, and enclosed fore- and stern-castles. She had a sharp bronze ramming-prow, which was more for show than utility, and carried two big mangonels and a dozen deck- mounted catapults, constructed like giant crossbows.

Her captain went ash.o.r.e, with his first officer and a scribe and a priest, followed by fifty sailors in steel caps and quilted jackets sewn with steel plates, who carried spears, crossbows, and short swords. They clanked through empty streets, between the ruined piles of great palaces; they came across broad squares filled with brush and tumbled statues; they stood among the vast ruins of the Temple of Dindash and looked up at the mutilated idol.

”What G.o.d did these people wors.h.i.+p, Norgon?” the captain asked the priest.

”Probably the same one we do, under some other name, Zethron,” the priest replied.

”But whatever name it was is long forgotten. The G.o.ds have had so many names since the Empire fell. But under whatever name, the G.o.ds are still the G.o.ds.”

So they made a fire on the tumbled altar and burned incense, and spilled wine, as one gives disguised alms to some impoverished n.o.bleman, and went out.

Around Gvazol they found a wretched peasantry, huddled in mud huts or camped in ruined castles, scratching the ground with stone hoes. They had been citizens of the Empire once, and then slaves of the Uplanders, and now they owned themselves and their families, and some almost-useless stone tools, and nothing else. Going up river, the Tullonians found, at the mouth of a large tributary, a great mound of earth, with bits of rubble breaking through here and there, and more starving peasants. They did not know that they were looking at their world's first city, the capital in which had ruled their world's first king.Returning to Tullon, Captain Zethron reported that he had found Gvarda worthless for conquest, colonization, or trade. The Council of Twelve accepted the report, but ignored the conclusion. There was much arable land, much grazing land, and a weak and docile population. Three years later, a fleet of twenty s.h.i.+ps was fitted out, and the conquest of Gvarda was begun.

The Year 953 of the Downfall became the Year One of the Tullonian Empire. In that year, a fleet of six hundred s.h.i.+ps, built in Tullonian and Tullonian-satellite yards, and carrying fifty thousand Tullonian and Gvardan soldiers, officered by Tullonian n.o.bles, descended upon the coast of Zabash. Unlike the hordes of Krushpan I and Krushpan IV, they did not loot and burn and ma.s.sacre indiscriminately. They seized the temples and treasure-houses; they put to death the Zabashan princes and installed puppets under Tullonian Viceroys; they levied taxes and imposed tributes, and conscripted soldiers.

The city-states of Vashtur and Dudak were frightened; amba.s.sadors were exchanged and an alliance was formed. War flamed around the Central Sea; fleets of sailing-galleys smashed into one another, hurling missiles and fireb.a.l.l.s. Vashtur and Dudak made peace with the Empire, broke it, and went to war again. Vashtur was conquered; an army from Dudak invaded Gvarda.

By the fifth century of the Empire, the breakup had begun. In spite of the furious wars of the first and second centuries, the population had more than doubled. The Empire had engulfed three island-continents beside Nimsh, two of them rather large, and yet the sailing-galley and the wagon-train were still the best and most reliable means of transportation. The Empire, unable to police or protect or supply the area over which it had spread, simply began to come apart.

There was another Dudakan invasion of Gvarda; the provinces north of the Gvaru revolted and welcomed the invaders. At Tullon, an adventurer named Sarthon organized a conspiracy which resulted in the ma.s.sacre of the Council of Twelve and his own seizure of power as dictator. Immediately Zabash rebelled and set up a Council of Twelve of its own as the true authority of the Empire. All Gvarda revolted a year later, and Gvarda and Dudak began a furious undeclared war against Zabash.

By the year of the Tullonian Empire 684, the second empire was as moribund as the first.

The Year 684 in the reckoning of the Tullonian Empire would henceforth, over a large part of the inhabited globe, be counted as the Year One of The Books of Tisse”.

Tiss6 was a shoemaker at Urava, on the continent of Dudak. He was frequently in trouble with the police, and his shop was a known gathering place of the politically and socially disaffected. In addition, he was a violent dissenter from the locally established religion, and railed against the G.o.ds of Dudak and their priests, and against all polytheism and idolatry. There was but one G.o.d, Vran. Vran, and only Vran, had real existence, and all else existed only in the mind of Vran; in the memory of Vran the dead lived perpetually. One of Tisse's cronies was an unfrocked priest of Dudak. It is supposed that he contributed a great deal to this new religion. This ex-priest, Puzza, did the actual writing of The Books, taking them down as Tisse dictated, sitting on one end of the cobbler's bench while Tisse worked at the other, with a pot of beer between them.

Subsequent scholars claimed to be able to judge how nearly empty the pot was at the writing of any pa.s.sage.Although Puzza later re-wrote The Books almost completely, they remained an ill- organized ma.s.s of moral preachments and mystical balderdash, written on so high an order of abstraction as to say all things to anyone who sought within their pages for Higher Enlightenment, and very little to anyone seeking logic, order, or common sense.