Chapter 8

For two days the party went overland, staying clear of the river. The fugitives still had some meat and Jan slipped down to refill their water bag as often as necessary, leaving no tracks to tell of his coming. Valikili walked with a makeshift crutch, Helene by his side. He was surly with pain and with shame that he had not been the one to rescue her.

Sabine Conners had discarded the name Adrian Dumezil. He told his companions that he had been on Hallam’s World during the fighting and they accepted that without further questions. Fighting had no place within the renegade group.

Jan found himself looking sideways at Conners from time to time, amazed at how thoroughly the plastic surgery had changed his appearance. Sabine did not tell them he had known Jan on Hallam and Jan was content to let it stand thus.

***

Jan and Sabine Conners were old hands at the business of living off the land under threat of an enemy force. The others were not, but Nur and Henri were strong young men and Helene and Marie were pioneer women. They stood the trek well. Valikili suffered from his wound and slowed their flight, but he was recovering. Marcel Damle Was an older man; he was doing all right while Val’s wound kept the pace slow, but he would be a burden later.

The food gave out on the third day of their trek, but they were far enough away not to fear the colonists, so they dropped down to the river, where they stripped the land as they passed, eating the few fruit pods that grew along the banks, picking the edible leaves of the greenhorn, and chewing siskal twigs for narcotic sustenance. At night they boiled siskal bark to make chota and Jan shot an occasional milik. They were eating less than their bodies were using and Jan watched with concern as their weight dropped daily.

The colonists who had gone to smelt iron and cut timber would be expecting them. They had taken a portable radio when leaving the lower colony months earlier and the lifeboat radio could reach them easily. Twenty men awaited them, armed with bows and two of the rifles.

On the nineteenth day they made camp below the upper colony and Jan took Sabine with him to go raiding. The other, younger men were no doubt surprised at Jan’s choice of partner and Jan realized that he would have to let them know more about his past if they were to remain together.

Sabine had a bow and quiver, but would rely on his blade. Jan had observed him closely during the trek and saw that his speed and strength were only marginally diminished by age.

Three days later they returned with a heavy load of frozen meat. Jan snapped when Marie asked him what had happened and spent the afternoon in a foul temper. Later Sabine took her aside and explained that the colonists would be digging two new graves, one of them for Raoul LaBarge, a man Jan had liked and respected. Jan blamed himself for that, thinking that his approach to the fortified position had been clumsy.

They left the river and cut overland to the south.

Some snow had fallen and Jan was careful to keep them to the bare rock so that they would leave no trail, though he doubted that they would be pursued. Their water gave out and they replenished it from snow. For three days they trekked south-east along the foothills, then turned up a valley into the high timber.

They made camp in a high, wooded valley where the snow was ever present. At this altitude no true melt would occur and trees lived only because they could take their moisture directly from the snow. Jan left the others in the valley and went out to hunt alone.

He left the rifle where it had fallen as he had the others. The survival of the colony depended on them.

It took only a moment to find the right key and release Helene. He had already scouted his way out and moments later a guard on the palisade fell to an unseen blow. Helene went over the palisade wall on the end of Jan’s line and into the waiting arms of Marcel and Henri.

Jan did not follow her. Instead he dragged the sentry away and bound him, then retraced his footsteps. So far he had been both careful and lucky; to go back now was sheer folly.

He slit the shutter hinges of the Chambard house where Alexandre Chambard lived with his ailing wife, his three children, and Angi Dumezil who helped with the children. Jan knew that his chances of going unheard in a household with six sleeping persons were slight, but he was determined to try.

He slipped wraithlike to the cubicle where Angi slept. It was walled off by a trihorn-hide curtain and he woke her with his hand over her mouth. She started, then relaxed, eyes wide, when she saw who it was. She put her mouth to his ear.

“What are you doing here?”

“I just broke Helene out. She is on her way to Valikili.”

“Is he all right?”

“Lame but recovering.”

“Oh, I’m so glad. Papa is mad, utterly mad.”

“I know.”

“How did you get her out without the key?”

“I had the key.” She suddenly went stiff and he reassured her, “Your papa is all right. No one was badly hurt tonight”

Angi was angry. “That’s more than you can say for last Sabbath. We have eight injured and we buried three others. I hope you’re proud!”

“It was forced upon us.”

“You still think we’re barbarians.”

“I think that has been amply demonstrated.”

“If only you had tried to reason with Papa instead of running . . . ”

“Then I would be dead!”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You little fool, how can you say that?”

Then they were both silent, for their voices had started to rise. Finally he said, “I have to go now. Will you come with me?”

“Are you mad? You can’t survive this way. Your only hope is to make peace with Papa.”

“Never!”

“Then go, and don’t expect me to follow. When the melt comes I will put siskal flowers on your grave.”

Jan jerked away and stalked to the window. Someone stirred in his sleep, but the scout paid no heed. He climbed out the window and trotted toward the palisade, unmindful of his safety, hoping that some sentry would cross his path.

Angi lay back and slipped her hands down to her lower belly. One dry sob racked her body; then she was silent.

It was true that she did not think the renegades could live, but her spoken refusal to follow Jan had been a lie. She would not go with him because of the thing beneath her fingers, deep in her body – the child she carried. Jan Andrax’s child.

*****

Of course Angi stays behind for plot reasons. Andrax’s son will be the main character in the second half of the book. But there is more to the story. Angi, like Shashi in A Fond Farewell to Dying, has a mind of her own, and doesn’t meekly agree with everything our hero does. In both cases, the main character moves on, leaving his lover behind. I didn’t find a woman to accompany the main character all the way to the finish line until Cinnabar in the Menhir series (not yet published) and she’s a handful.

Weak women bore me. more tomorrow

Marcel Dumezil, colonist, organizer, leader, a man of immense talents, immense potential for good in his community – he was so like old Daniel Andrax.

Daniel Andrax had never been captured. He would be over fifty now – no, nearly sixty. About the same age as the patriarch. For all Jan knew he might still be hiding in the mountains of Hallam, planning raids, killing or sending out younger men to kill, still secure in his beliefs.

Jan looked down at Marcel and saw his father and, seeing him, saw himself had the roads of his life branched differently.

***

Lucien Dubois was guarding the house that Helene and Valikili had shared. He had one of the double rifles in his hands and was settled in the shadows a dozen meters away with a clear field of fire. He was a very unhappy man. Though he liked Valikili well enough and had known Helene since her childhood, he could not say the same for Andrax. Lucien Dubois was not a subtle man; he understood himself well enough, for his motives were simple. He wanted Angi Dumezil; he had asked her repeatedly to marry him, but she always refused. It was clear that she wanted Andrax, but he would not have her. Why that was, Dubois had never understood.

Now he waited with orders to kill anyone who might try to rescue Helene. Normally that would have been Valikili, but Val, if he lived, was sorely wounded. The rescuer would be Jan Andrax, for no other member of the renegade party was better equipped for stealth.

Lucien wanted Angi and Andrax stood in his way; yet, he did not want to kill the scout. Dubois remembered too well his own actions in the forest above the first colony when aiding young Dumezil to cover the evidence of the murder he had committed. His hand still shook at the thought, at the guilt he had felt, at the uncertainty thereafter. Dubois would never forget the look on Andrax’s face as the scout examined Jason’s body, nor would he forget the thoughtful way he examined the bits of moss embedded in the wound.

For Angi and for his own peace of mind he wanted Andrax out of the way, yet he respected the scout. If Andrax came to rescue Helene it would be up to Lucien to kill him, but would he? Could he? Should he? Lucien loved God as much as the next man, but that didn’t make the patriarch infallible.

Dubois was still debating what he might do when Jan garroted him. His uncertainty disappeared with his consciousness.

Jan did not kill Dubois; he merely choked him into insensibility, then bound and gagged him. The scout had already done this with the other two hidden guards, men he had hunted with, had worked and built with. Together they had raised the walls that barred the herds and made human life viable on the inhospitable planet. Andrax wished them no harm.

Still, with this last one it had been harder to release the garrote in time to let him live. Jan remembered too well Jason D’Angelo’s death and was more than half convinced that Dubois, Chambard, and the dead Dumezil boy were equally responsible.

He left the rifle where it had fallen as he had the others. He could have taken them, but to do so would have jeopardized the survival of the colony. Besides, his express pistol was worth twenty rifles.

He had not been surprised to find Helene’s door unguarded. He had seen the same tactics used on Hallam for the same holy ends.

The guards at the patriarch’s door were more obvious but harder to circumvent. Marcel Dumezil’s apartment was in the second story of the town hall, with guards lounging on the catwalk before it. The two windows were shuttered and each was five meters from the ground. They would be impossible to enter – or so the guards thought.

Jan reached the roof from the rear of the building and looped a line around the chimney, then rappelled to the level of the window. He was in shadow and around the corner from the guards. As long as he remained silent, he would go undetected. He listened and was reassured by the patriarch’s heavy breathing.

The shutters were latched from within but the hinges were leather and yielded instantly to his knife. He slipped inside.

Had the patriarch been a normal man, Jan could have awakened him and threatened him for the key, but the patriarch was a man of God and therefore unpredictable. He might cry out, either thinking himself invincible or valuing his life too lightly.

However, such threats would be unnecessary. On the table beside the patriarch’s head was a ring of keys. In a settlement with fewer than a half-dozen locks, there was no doubt that the key he sought was on it. The task was proving too easy and Jan hesitated, then realized that he was giving his enemy credit for too much sophistication.

The patriarch slept on. Jan’s knife was near at hand. It would only take one move, that yawning mouth covered to silence any outcry, and the zealot would be dead. With effective leadership gone, the purge might be ended.

A shaft of light from one of Harmony’s three moons fell across old Marcel’s face. Even in sleep his features showed no relaxation. A mystery Jan had all but forgotten flashed in his mind – who had thrown the grenade? Who had killed Tom Dennison, the navigator Jan had never seen in life? Who had ordered Jason D’Angelo’s death; who had ordered the attack on Valikili when he kept liaison with Helene? Whose actions had prompted this situation, their flight, Helene’s imprisonment, Valikili’s wound?

The patriarch – Marcel Dumezil. Even those crimes he had neither committed nor ordered could be laid at his feet because of his influence.

Jan raised his knife, running his finger along the edge. He had sharpened it before the night’s mission and the leather hinges had not dulled it at all. The blade would do whatever he set it to – silently and efficiently. ‘

A vagrant breeze stirred the old man’s hair, sending a wisp to tickle his nose. He snorted, stirred, then subsided.

Marcel Dumezil, colonist, organizer, leader, a man of immense talents, immense potential for good in his community – what drove him to this purge?

He was so like old Daniel Andrax.

*****

This scene recurs in others of my novels, as well. The man (and once, the woman) who has a genuine grievance stands over his/her tormentor, and cannot drive the blade home. Sometimes it works out well; sometimes that forbearance leads to disaster. The issue is not morality, but a genuine incapacity to do the deed.

In the novel Cyan, in its first draft, Keir does drive the knife home – but it was all wrong, and deeply anticlimactic. It took me years to find Keir’s solution to the conundrum.

Two days passed. The river gate was crudely patched. The ten offworld rifles were charged and distributed and twenty men – ten rifle-armed, ten armed with bows – stood atop the palisade.

For two days there had been no sign of the renegades, but they would return. It would be months before the melt and in all the barren desert outside the palisade there was no food. Armed parties had gone upriver, then along the shore of the lake in both directions without finding either the renegades or any trace of their presence. Of course the colonists knew that Andrax was a master of his trade; he would have covered the fugitives’ tracks and there was no reason for the band to stay near water; they had merely to come down once or twice a day to drink.

But they had to have food and in all that barren waste there was none. So the colonists thought.

In fact the seven renegades were eating well enough on the dried meat that Valikili had stored against such an eventuality, nor would they have starved in any case. Along the river grew a thin fringe of siskal and lal which would have provided a meager fare; and the small, rodentlike miliks – creatures which live on the dried seedpods left behind by the herds – were available. There were few enough of these, but Jan could have trapped or shot them. In all there was enough to eat if one remained within reach of the river and stayed on the move, never exhausting the supplies of a given piece of ground.

It was fortunate for Valikili that this was not necessary, for his arrow wound, though well treated, gave him much pain. Jan had abandoned his Scout’s leathers in favor of furs in order to better blend into the community, but he had not left the uniform in his quarters. He had buried it with a bow, quiver, three knives, a twenty-liter water container, some dried siskal fruit, and medical supplies judiciously stolen from the community infirmary.

Helene remained locked in her quarters, the window now sealed shut and a newly attached padlock and hasp securing the door. The patriarch had met with his closest advisors to decide her fate, but as yet they were content to use her as bait.

Two more days passed and the colonists began to wonder what would happen. No carnivores nosed about at that time of year, and only one of the renegades seemed to have been injured. Where could they be? Surely their hunger would have driven them to some desperate move by now?

What if they had decided to abandon Helene Dumezil? What if Valikili had died and the others had gone upstream toward the mountains? There they would find game throughout the year, though it was never plentiful. Of course they would never make it to the mountains; they would starve on the journey.

***

On the fifth night Jan slipped past the sentries and found Helene. She was unhurt, she assured him through the wall, and safe enough for the moment. The patriarch had bragged to her that she was being used as bait.

Jan considered the situation. He could destroy the padlock with two shots but that would alert the guards who manned the palisade. Could he and Helene win free with the guards alerted? It was a chance he chose not to take, so he faded back into the night.

Where there was a lock, there was a key; and in a colony where one man ruled with the voice of God, that man would have the key. Jan slipped his express pistol back into its holster and drew his knife.

He had not been surprised to find Helene’s door unguarded, for he had already spotted the three hidden sentries who waited to pounce on anyone who came to rescue her. He had seen the same tactics used on Hallam for the same holy ends.

What would they do to Valikili?

Horrified, Henri shrank back into the shadows. Something had to be done, but his wits had deserted him and he could think of no plan.

He could only think of one thing – that the madness might pass. He should have tried to help Valikili, and would have but for Marie; his first duty was to his wife. He took her trembling arm and led her away from the crowd toward the south gate. They would flee to the wilderness. They could remain away from the colony and the stored food supply only so long, but in the next few days the madness might pass.

He hoped that it would, but he did not fully believe it.

Valikili was frightened for Henry Staal and cursed him for running after the colonists. Together they might have a chance to survive; divided they were in dire straits. At least Marcel Damle had remained, and Helene was close by where he could protect her.

Valikili had accepted Monism but he had not been so foolish as to assume that the Monists accepted him. He and Nur Mohammet were racially different as well as crew members. Unlike Jan he had not been schooled in small-group dynamics, but he could smell the danger in his position.

He led Marcel and Helene to his house, but paused only long enough to pick up the bundle he had prepared against such an eventuality and his bow, quiver, and blade. The rifles and ammunition were stored in “the armory,” a locked closet in the town hall. If they could get them, they could hold them for a ransom of food, for without the ten offworld rifles and Jan’s express pistol the colonists would be unable to hunt effectively during the coming melt. Levi-Stuer was working on a muzzle-loader Andrax had designed, but so far had completed only one unreliable prototype.

Marcel had shrugged off his shock and stolen a bow and quiver from the house next to Valikili’s, while Valikili had stolen a third bow and quiver for Helene. They made their way to the armory and Valikili went to work on the door with the axe he had brought for that purpose.

The colonists had also thought of the armory and a knot of them came charging around the town hall. Valikili spun around and faced them with his axe as Marcel and Helene released their arrows. Two arrows and the crowd was upon them. Valikili laid about him with the axe, his massive arms swinging in short, vicious arcs. For a moment the colonists fell back, then an arrow from the crowd struck Valikili in the thigh and he went down. Marcel stood over him with the axe he had dropped as they closed in again.

Suddenly he heard cries of fear from the colonists and they were falling back. Marcel spun to meet the new challenge behind him and found Andrax there, firing methodically. Nur, Adrian Dumezil, Henri, and Marie were behind the scout, unarmed.

Valikili felt himself lifted and carried. Through the haze of his pain he saw Nur, Henri, and Marcel. Beyond them Jan Andrax stood, pistol upraised but not firing, and Marie and Adrian Dumezil were gathering blades and bows from the blood soaked ground. Helene was nowhere in sight.

Andrax had circled around the palisade with Nur and Adrian Dumezil at his heels, intending to enter the south gate to search for the rest of the crew. There they had met Henri and Marie and the quintet had gone in search of their missing companions. Slipping from house to house toward Valikili’s quarters, they had heard the fight at the armory and arrived just in time to see Helene being dragged back into the crowd while Marcel tried to stem what would have been a final rush. Only the superior firepower afforded by the express pistol had saved them.

“Who will take a hand to purify God’s community?”

Jan looked left and right while rising to his feet with the congregation. There were two persons between him and the aisle and somewhere outside Nur Mohammet sat in ignorance, not knowing that he was marked for death.

“Who will stand with God? Who will cast out the wicked?”

Jan moved, shouting, “I will!” He shoved past the two on his left and reached the aisle. Dumezil was dumbfounded by Jan’s action; he stopped in midsentence.

Then Jan bolted for the door.

Two burly colonists had been posted to stop him.

Jan had refused the patriarch’s order to surrender his express pistol to the colony’s armory and was never without it. He wore it now, but strapped to his thigh inside his trousers. He had not dared to wear it openly to the services.

Still he was a Scout, and therefore a master of weaponless combat. He caught one colonist’s outstretched arm and hurled him down the aisle, then downed the second with a blow to the throat. A hand fell on his shoulder and spun him around. The whole congregation was on its feet and coming for him. Someone dodged past him, trying to get behind him. Jan recognized him as Adrian Dumezil, but could not reach him for fighting off those before him.

But Adrian did not attack him from behind; instead he threw open the door of the meeting house and Jan spun in instant retreat. Adrian pounded at his side.

Damle, Staal, and Valikili were in desperate danger but there was nothing Jan could do for them now. Nur would be in his own house, reading the Koran as was his custom.

As he ran, Jan ripped open his trousers and fished out his express pistol. The colonists were on his heels as he rounded the comer of Nur’s street. He fired a maximum charge at the wall of Nur’s dwelling, aiming high. It struck a log and exploded in a burst of bark and splinters. Jan and Adrian ran side by side, the colonists behind them, as Nur burst out of his house to see what was wrong.

More than anyone, Nur was prepared for what had happened. He took it all in at a glance and ran.

The main gate was closed and barred. Jan fired over Nur’s head repeatedly, each shot a maximum charge, until the gate gave way, falling outward in a cloud of debris. The trio ran through the gap and down toward the river where Jan threw himself behind a slight rise along the bank and dialed the power down. The colonists were streaming out the gate and he shot repeatedly into their packed mass. They broke ranks and retreated behind the palisade.

***

Valikili drew Helene to one side as the crowd ran after Jan and Adrian. Marcel Damle stood just outside the town hall shaking his head in shock, muttering over and over, “They did it; they really did it.” Henri Staal had run with the crowd; Valikili could not believe that he intended to join in the persecution of his shipmates and hoped that the man would not be lynched if he tried to calm the crowd.

Henri was near the back of the crowd when they poured through the palisade gate and was thrown back when they reversed themselves in the face of Jan’s fire. He pulled Marie into the shadows of a nearby hut, trying to decide a course of action. The colonists were milling about while the patriarch attempted to restore order. Some had armed themselves with clubs; others had retreated to get bows and rifles. A few of the colonists were running about trying to calm their neighbors, vainly attempting to stem the madness the patriarch had started. Levi-Stuer was running from man to man, shouting for reason, tears streaming down his face, but none would hear him.

Henri started forward, then hesitated. If they would not listen to Levi-Stuer, a colonist whom they respected, what would they do to a crewman, even if he were a Monist?

What would they do to Valikili?