To Conquer Chaos, Page 2

  Duke Paul ran his fingers through his beard and nodded over the story. Ampier let his head sink back, closing his eyes again. Yanderman glanced around the tent, and noticed that the medical auxiliary had taken up the blood-soaked shirt he had cut from the scout’s body and was turning it over curiously in the light of the lamp.

  Yanderman moved closer to him. “What is it you see?” he inquired in low tones.

  “That, sir.” The medical auxiliary nodded downwards, holding the cloth stretched in the full beam of the lamp. Yanderman stared.

  On the crusting brown blood there was a fine blur of green—like a mould, or mildew. It was alive, for it could be seen to grow, not creeping evenly out over the cloth but seeming to seed itself half an inch or an inch distant from the main part, then to spread at a snail’s pace till the new patch rejoined the original one, then to pause, then to begin again.

  “Show the Duke,” Yanderman ordered, and the medical auxiliary did so.

  Duke Paul watched the phenomenon curiously for a while. At last he said, “Take that cloth—in a box, or sealed package—to your medical tent. Test all the strong liquids and powders on it till you find one which will check or stop its growth. And watch that the living blood from Ampier’s wound is not infected with it!”

  The medical auxiliary saluted and obeyed, vanishing into the night outside. The girl who had come back with the broth fed some of it to the injured scout; then with the help of the guard from the doorway she guided him from the tent and away to his quarters.

  Duke Paul directed Kesford to read back what Ampier had told them, to fix it firmly in his mind. Then he turned to Granny Jassy, scowling at the side of the tent.

  “Come to the couch, Granny,” he said. “Let’s find out if your strangely stocked mind holds any explanation for this thing which attacked Ampier.”

  Grumbling, Granny obeyed. The Duke drew from his pouch a length of silver chain with a crystal ball on the end, as large as a man’s thumbnail, and set it swinging before Granny’s face. Shortly her eyes closed and he was able to begin questioning her. He persisted for an hour—his patience, Yanderman sometimes thought, was inhuman—without extracting any useful information.

  The trouble with people like Granny Jassy, Yanderman reflected, was that they didn’t understand the memories which they could call up. Here now, for example, Granny was telling of strange animals, of many colours and in vast numbers, on which people rode as though they served for horses. Yet when pressed more closely, she described them as being wheeled—not animals, then, but machines! However, they went by themselves; for ignorant Granny, that made them animals, for whoever heard of a machine going by itself?

  His mind wandered. How was it possible—the invariable question—how was it possible for these tales told by Granny and with less colour and detail by several other people in Esberg to be true memories? Yet it seemed they must be. When Duke Paul decided to base experiments on some of these fantastic tales even Yanderman, whose admiration for the duke was boundless, wondered whether he was wasting his time. He was not; many useful instruments, such as the searchlights guarding the campsite, and even the guns which armed the troops, were derived from old wives’ tales. You might say, of course, that this was a subconscious fitting-together of available facts which any inventor of new devices applied more systematically. You might. The Duke didn’t.

  Encouraged, Duke Paul selected another kind of tale for investigation—the tale of a great city three days’ journey north of Esberg, with a million people in it. A ludicrous fantasy!

  Yet three days’ journey north the men he sent out came upon mounds and hillocks clothed with greenery, gnawed by time, and dug into them. And there they found, true enough, pieces of worked metal, shards of strong glass, corroded household utensils, and more objects than anyone could have imagined.

  And indeed now the proofs were beyond arguing. For ever since they set out on this greatest expedition of all, to see whether the legendary barrenland was real, Granny Jassy had been able to tell them of the terrain ahead—not as it was today, but as it might have been in the weird but consistent world of the old tales, when men lived in the gigantic cities of which the ruins had been discovered, when they flew through the air and even … no, that was imagination, surely! To fly in the air was vaguely conceivable; birds and insects did it. But to fly beyond the air, to other worlds, was ridiculous. And even that absurdity paled beside the ultimate: the story of walking to other worlds than this.

  “You look solemn, Yan!” Duke Paul boomed, and Yanderman came back from his musing with a start. Granny Jassy was getting off the couch. The crystal ball on its length of chain had vanished into the Duke’s pouch again. Kesford was going over his notes, correcting his writing so he could read it back tomorrow.

  “I am,” Yanderman agreed. “I grow confused with the mixture of certainty and fancy which confronts us—as though somehow a little nightmare had leaked into the waking world.”

  “Assuredly a beast such as attacked Ampier smacks of some playful god’s whimsy,” the Duke said. He rubbed his hands together. “Nonetheless he killed it, and lives—or will, providing that green horror on his shirt doesn’t take root in his blood. I confess I held the tales of monsters from the barrenland too lightly, or I’d not have sent out scouts singly. Tomorrow we’ll do otherwise. We’ll send a party of a dozen, fully-armed.”

  Yanderman nodded. “I do take it as heartening,” he said, “that men manage to live almost on the edge of the barrenland.”

  Duke Paul chuckled. “You noted that! Good, good! Yes, we must gain all the information we can from those best fitted to tell us. Get the exactest details of Ampier’s route, and make straight for this smudge of smoke he fancied he saw. If it proves to be other than a village, go beyond it till you find people.”

  Well, that was how one usually received orders from Duke Paul. Yanderman shrugged. “I’ll do so,” he agreed. “I’ll leave directly after dawn.”

  He paused, expecting something further. But as far as Duke Paul was concerned the matter was settled. Already he had gone back to his maps, and his head was bowed as though tilted forward by the weight of his enormous beard.

  III

  Since the army from Esberg was on a peaceful mission—so long as everyone else was willing to let them go through—and since they were also in a hurry, they moved quickly and without trying to be inconspicuous. They were a most impressive sight on the road, covering their steady three miles an hour: two thousand men with four hundred and ten animals, red and black banners flying, generally singing by companies to keep the pace up.

  It was a considerable change, Yanderman reflected, to be going out in the cold grey dawn with ten horsemen who all knew what had happened to Ampier yesterday. They were sensible and courageous men—but, after all, he himself had compared the situation facing them with a leakage of nightmare into the waking world, and a nightmare can reduce the bravest man to cold sweating.

  No matter for that now, though. The problem was simply to get ahead to the first possible village on the edge of the barrenland, and to hope against hope that it was something more than a cluster of mud huts full of apathetic peasants. What Yanderman wanted to see was a decent little town where people stood up for themselves against the terrors—of whatever kind—that strayed out of the barrenland. That would be the best kind of tonic for the worrying soldiers.

  They rode easily, but without dawdling. After the showers of yesterday the day was fine, though not very warm before the sun climbed well into the sky. Against the wishes of the medical staff Yanderman had got details of Ampier’s route from him last night before turning in. That had proved to be far-sighted, for according to this morning’s report the man’s wound had indeed been infected with the curious green mould and had started to gangrene already.

  Which wouldn’t make the troops any less nervous, Yanderman thought bitterly.

  As the miles went by, though, and there was no sign of anything stranger than country lacking
people to cultivate it, they relaxed. Yanderman kept the line strung out in couples twenty paces apart, as a matter of routine precaution, but he raised no objection when the men changed places with one another for the sake of conversation. He himself rode with his chief lieutenant, Stadham, a man promoted late in life from the ranks, and who in fact commanded the company of which Yanderman was nominally senior officer. Yanderman was no kind of a soldier, though for the purpose of the expedition he was a member of the general staff. He was a man with an inquisitive mind, who wanted to know about the same things as intrigued Duke Paul. Since the Duke was in a position to investigate, Yanderman served him willingly.

  A little before noon Yanderman looked about him at the landscape. He felt a quickening of his heart and a tightness seemed to close around his temples. Gesturing to Stadham, he gave a curt order.

  “Call ’em in. This matches the description of the place Ampier got to, and the elapsed time is just about right.”

  They were earlier here than the scout had been, of course; the fact that he would have ridden rather faster was cancelled out by the greater distance he had had to cover from the line of march.

  Stadham reached for the little brass horn hanging at his saddlebow and sounded the three shrill blasts which were the signal to regroup and confer. Yanderman shaded his eyes and stared at the terrain ahead. There was that suggestive wavering of the air—rising, perhaps, off desert-bare ground …

  He checked that line of thought and turned to address his companions, now assembled in a semicircle facing him.

  “From the description Ampier gave me, we’re almost at the limit of the trip he made. In other words, by the time we breast the next rise we should be in clear sight of the famous and legendary barrenland.”

  A couple of his men exchanged glances. One might have given an imperceptible shudder; at any rate his horse moved nervously and tossed its head.

  “It’s come to my notice,” Yanderman went on steadily, “that some of our men have been getting—ah—second thoughts now they know the barrenland really exists. They’ve been buying charms from Granny Jassy, for instance, thinking she can sell them good luck as easily as—as a measure of beer. Well!”

  He straightened sharply in his saddle and slapped his open palm on his thigh.

  “Well, I don’t care what you do with your money. But I do care what you do with your lives. You’re expensively trained soldiers, with craftsman-made weapons about you, and those are hard to come by. I don’t want any of you going a yard further thinking you can trust to Granny Jassy’s luck-charms when what you need is the same as what you always need—a cool head and a keen eye.

  “Any of you got a luck-charm about you? Speak up!”

  His gaze flashed searingly from face to face, settling finally on the man whose horse had started a few moments ago. He didn’t say anything.

  At last, shamefacedly, the man shrugged and drew a little bundle of coloured feathers from the lining of his helmet.

  “Augren, I’m surprised it was you,” Yanderman said. “Anyone else?”

  The others all shook their heads. One or two of them grinned at Augren’s discomfiture. Yanderman scowled at them, and they straightened their expressions abruptly.

  “All right, Augren,” he went on. “You can do one of two things—throw that charm away and stay with us, or trust to it and ride off on your own. I won’t have superstitious fools in my company. As far as I’m concerned the barrenland is a place like any other dangerous place—and before venturing into it I’m going to prime myself with all possible information from people who’ve seen it before. And if I do go into it I want nobody with me but a man who’ll do his own thinking rather than hire it done by an old woman.”

  Augren, his face scarlet with embarrassment now, tried to hurl the charm away from him. Like anything made of feathers, it was impossible to throw. A breeze caught it and carried it out of sight.

  “Good,” said Yanderman in a satisfied tone. “Ride on.”

  He could feel the tension mounting as the party ascended the next rise—the last, he expected, before sighting the barrenland. It was the last. He drew rein and motioned to the others to copy him.

  Now he could feel the tension leaking away as fast as it had built up. Nobody actually said, “So that’s all it is!” But they thought it.

  Just bare ground—rocks cropping out of loose, wind-tossed dust and dry, sun-baked expanses of clay. Not a devil or monster in sight. Just land—barren. What else did its name suggest?

  “See any smoke such as Ampier mentioned?” he asked Stadham, after scanning the horizon. The older man grunted and shook his head. Yanderman called to the others.

  “From here we’ll move off slowly around the rim, the same way Ampier did, keeping well together in case of emergency, and try to spot the smoke he described. A couple of you—you two—watch the sky. The rest, watch the rocks for signs of movement.”

  They wheeled their horses and proceeded cautiously. In a little while there was a whoop from Augren, who had pushed to the head of the line as a blustering compensation for his gullibility in the matter of the luck-charm. Yanderman saw him rise in his saddle and point down into a dip in the ground.

  “Keep watch,” he told Stadham, and rode forward to see what Augren had found.

  It was the animal Ampier had killed. It was exactly as he had described it, with the claw-beak and a yard of its neck lying severed from its body, except that in the night something must have come by and fed on it, for the belly was torn open and an evil smell rose from the contents. Flies swarmed on the claw-beak, presumably tempted by the blood on its tip, but with a shudder he could not repress Yanderman noted that they would not settle on the rest of the carcass. Meat that flies would not touch must indeed be different from ordinary flesh!

  Struck by a sudden thought, he bent low from his saddle to see whether the green mould had marked the carcass anywhere, but apparently it had not. He raised his head again, searching the skyline. Unless Ampier had been mistaken about the smoke—or unless it had been from a natural brush-fire—they ought to be able to see it from here …

  And yes, there it was, a thin greyish veil on the blue of the sky, rising from the other side of a nearby hill.

  The rest of his men had all come now to stare at the dead beast. He let them continue for a few moments—dead, it was less alarming than it must have been in life, and to see it lying so would stamp on their minds that it was an animal, even if monstrous, and not an invulnerable supernatural being. Then he called them back to attention, pointed out the smoke, and ordered them to ride on.

  IV

  Grey from head to foot with wood-ash, Conrad sat by the soap-vats, in one hand his knife held by the blade close up near the point, in the other a piece of excellent soap—the hardest and whitest he had ever seen set in the shallow wooden pans. That batch was all ready for carrying back to the town, but he had left it where it lay because the attraction of the idea which had come to him was irresistible. Thoughtfully, and with some difficulty because the weight of the knife’s handle caused it to swing about, he was shaping a girl’s head.

  It was meant to be a likeness of Idris, but somehow it wasn’t quite turning out like her. He was spending as much time puzzling over the lack of resemblance as he was actually carving it.

  Anyway, he had little inducement to make a move. He wouldn’t be thanked if he went home before sunset, and even then he might well have to go and beg a bite of supper at Idris’s back door, for no one would buy much soap in the next three or four days—wash-day having just come and gone.

  And there was another reason, still more compelling than those, why he preferred to stay out here a mile or more from the town when the current batch of soap was finished. It was the same reason why he preferred this dirty, monotonous job to any other the community might have offered him. If the mood came over him just to sit and think, there was no one to fling mud or stones at him with a shout of “Idle Conrad!”

  His mo
uth tightened at the memory, and he drove it down.

  It isn’t fair, he thought rebelliously. I didn’t ask for my head to be stuffed with all these crazy visions!

  And yet …

  He let the hand holding the soap carving fall to his knee, and gazed out unseeing over the sun-hot countryside. That was a question he had never been able to answer: if one of the wise men came to him one day and said, “Conrad, I can wash from your mind these troublesome visions of yours as your soap takes dirt from a man’s hand; I shall do so?”—what would he reply?

  Could he sacrifice his dreams of a world in which no one needed to be jealous of anyone else, because everything was plentiful—a world where even ash-grimed, greasy-garbed Conrad the soapmaker had incredible powers to serve his every whim?

  He didn’t know. And since the question was never likely to arise—the wise men were not that wise—there wasn’t much point in worrying about it. He returned to concentrating on his carving. He wanted desperately to make a good job of it; Idris was the only person in Lagwich who seemed to like him, the only person since the death of his mother with whom he had shared the secret of the dreams that came to him when he lay in one of his trance-like intervals and other people thought he was simply being “Idle Conrad”.