The Avengers of Carrig (14 page)

Saikmar nodded and smiled against his will. So did many of the others. You couldn’t take the intruder seriously despite its vast bulk, for it looked so woebegone: its hide dull with frost, its neck drooping, its shoulders, which could just be seen poking through the hole in the wall, shaking with the cold.

It was the friendly parradile.

There was far less wrangling over the admission of the parradile to the sanctuary than there had been over letting in Maddalena. Partly, the refugees were chastened by what had happened to Graddo; partly, with the diet synthesizer in operation, no one could justifiably argue about shortage
of food; but above all, staff and refugees alike were shaken to their mental foundations by this succession of miraculous events and were resigned to accepting them as they came. Certainly the peaceful behavior of the parradile, which most of them believed to be dangerously savage, and the affectionate way Maddalena and Saikmar treated it, suggested that strong magic had been at work.

Saikmar, who had naturally made a study of parradiles’ habits as all contenders in the king-hunt must, declared at once that it had been unable to stand the cold even with the help of its unprecedented nest, and Maddalena questioned him closely about the species. Snapped clear out of his fit of depression, Saikmar answered eagerly. What he told her was unscientific and disorganized; but it was based on close observation, and her superficial knowledge of biology and ecology enabled her to fill in some of the gaps.

One could guess just by watching parradiles that they had a fantastically high rate of metabolism. The amount of energy required to fuel a beast that in mature adulthood had a wingspread of a hundred and twenty feet, yet could take off from level ground without a run and glide a thousand miles before touchdown, beggared the imagination. Logically, parradiles had to feed very often and ate vast amounts when they did. With the coming of winter, although they were omnivorous, they could seldom find enough food to keep their bodies functioning at maximum efficiency. Consequently they, or at least the variety inhabiting the neighborhood of Carrig, went into hibernation for about four or five months. A mother with young was the only exception; she had to remain alert to protect her offspring, and would therefore stock her lair with emergency food to gulp down if trouble caused her to use up her meager resources of energy.

But such a species could not become truly torpid without suffering permanent harm, just as a man’s limb cannot be frozen without severe damage. Parradiles, therefore, were commonest in the equatorial zone. Down there, however, there were many carnivores that fancied nothing better than a helpless baby parradile. Hence the breed to which the king-parradile of Carrig belonged had taken to making winter lairs in the Smoking Hills, where the ground was always warm. In this way they protected themselves
against the risk of frostbite and economized on the food they would otherwise have to consume to keep their temperature at its normal fever-high level.

“I was astonished,” Saikmar declared, “when I saw that this parradile had made itself a nest! Such a thing had never before been heard of!” He glanced at Maddalena, standing beside the parradile and absently stroking its head. The creature seemed to like that. She had gone pale. “Is something wrong?” he demanded.

“N-nothing,” Maddalena forced out. But for the latest of several times since arriving on this planet she wanted to kick herself for overlooking the obvious. Saikmar had mentioned the unique parradile-nest before, and she had been distracted by something else preoccupying her mind—perhaps, too, she had been prevented from paying attention to it by Saikmar’s dismissal of the claim some people made concerning parradiles having learned the trick of soaring in volcanic updraughts from men in their gliders. It did indeed seem reasonable that any flying creature would discover that in the course of nature.

Inventing a nest, though…! If this beast beside her had really figured out for itself that it needed insulation against heat-loss in this bitter climate, that indicated perhaps the highest order of intelligence ever encountered in a nonhuman creature!

Briskly she pulled herself together and began to issue orders, which were obeyed mainly because everyone else was too dazed by the parradile’s arrival to question them. There would be time later for inquiries and tests; what mattered now was to find somewhere for the beast to live.

She picked on three of the refugees who had shown enough initiative to repair the snow-wall without being told, pushing the displaced blocks roughly back into place and pouring water into the gaps to make a solid mass of ice again. With their assistance she selected a cabin near the canteen, which had probably been a food-store when the ship was spaceworthy, but which had not been used for a long time because there was a crack in its external wall. She ordered a panel of basketwork to be forced into the gap and caulked with the pitchlike material customarily used for crack-sealing, then instructed one of Nyloo’s colleagues
to run a new steam pipe from the fusion reactor into this cabin. There was some objection raised to this, but she got her way. A heap of old rags, and, dug out from some remote cranny, a mattress that had escaped cutting up for children to play with, were put down for the parradile to lie on; and it seemed well pleased with that.

“Parradiles are cleanly beasts,” Saikmar warned. “They do not foul their lairs. We must arrange for that also.”

A curious feeling of unreality overcame Maddalena. She said, “Then let’s see if we can teach this one to use human sanitation.”

She would have thought that Nyloo was too old and world-weary for anything to shake her now. But when the parradile had shown that it got the idea—it had taken minutes only—they found the priestess sitting in a corner by herself, saying over and over again the same Words.

“Miracle upon miracle,” she was saying. “That I should live to see these days!”

Saikmar, pale-faced, his eyes bright and round, kept shaking his head. He too was incredulous, and his manner toward Maddalena was half-fearful, half-adoring.

“But how can a parradile behave so?” he burst out. “It has learned how to conduct itself in the space of a few hours! Even children may come close and stroke its legs! Are these the fierce beasts we have hunted in the air for who knows how long?”

Maddalena, leaning back on the bunk in his cabin where she had slept the first few days after her arrival, said quietly, “Tell me, Saikmar, have your people always hunted the parradile for a dangerous meat-eater and man-killer?”

Saikmar sat down and gave a shrug. “That, no. At least not in Carrig. Twywits—my own clan-sign—are hunted that way, because they take young graats in the fields, and sometimes they kill children or old peasant-women. To us the parradile has always been something different. The king-hunt is a formal ceremony. We respect and admire the parradile even in the act of slaying it—it seems a most noble creature. I think it may be respect that has led us
gradually to confine the king-hunt to our best and most skillful young men, as though only those who themselves are noble are fit to go forth against it.”

That, Maddalena thought, was a remarkably acute piece of social analysis for someone who could not take a detached view.

She said, “I don’t know your city, Saikmar. Would you say that the parradile is killed not because it menaces the citizens, but because by magical association its nobility comes to him who kills?”

Saikmar hesitated. At length he said, “Yes. Yes, I think that must be true. Although magic in Carrig is the prerogative of Clan Parradile, as here of the priests and priestesses, so I know little of such matters.”

“Are
parradiles a threat to human beings?”

“Well, the species that lairs in the Smoking Hills is merely the largest of several kinds of parradile. It’s believed that there are very many across the ocean to the west, in a land men have never visited—or, as the ancient legends suggest, perhaps in the land from which men were expelled for their arrogance toward the gods. And the fisherfolk who work the western seas tell of parradiles swooping on their boats and being saved only because skillful bowmen shot the creatures down. I saw the hide of one once; it was of the same shape but different coloring from ours. Also there are the species in the southland which seldom come to the Smoking Hills because the king is jealous of his rights and beats off all intruders. Or rather …”

He clenched his fists and swallowed hard. “Or rather, he
was.
I had grown up all my life with the old king that Belfeor slew; I cannot imagine any other than him. My apologies. I had been going to answer your question. Yes, the southern parradiles have been reliably reported to attack graats, and some say they have taken children. They are not regarded as sacred in the south—but of course you know that. Are there not parradiles around Dayomar?”

Were there? Maddalena was at a loss. She compromised. “Naturally I have seen them, but we don’t take the particular interest in them that you do.”

“Yes, naturally.” To her relief, he was not in a suspicious
mood; he was too excited. “But I’ve heard that they are indeed hunted down in the southland, even killed for food—is that not so?”

“Why, yes,” Maddalena agreed at random. But she wanted to dig deeper into this. It seemed important. Frowning a little, she went on, “If I’ve followed you correctly, your parradiles are the largest kind, so they must eat more than most. Yet they don’t rob your farmers?”

“Never.” Saikmar blinked at her. “On every farm there is a patch of land where parradiles may come if they wish and eat what they find; and when animals are slaughtered, offal is put out for them; and when caravans are taxed by the excise, one-twentieth part of their pickled meats and dried fish is taken as customs toll and set out among the volcanoes for the parradiles to help themselves. This is a very ancient custom, and the parradiles are well content with it, I think.”

“Does no one ever complain about having to give up food to them—perhaps in a bad year for the harvest?” Maddalena suggested. There was a tantalizing half-formed idea at the edge of her awareness; she was desperately afraid it might vanish before it became clear.

“Oh, people may grumble,” Saikmar shrugged. “But I don’t believe they would ever withhold the food. Is it not better this way than in the southland, where parradiles are likely to steal your farmstock without permission?”

“It sounds as though men and parradiles have achieved a working agreement,” Maddalena said. And here was the idea, full-blown in her mind! She almost jumped to her feet with excitement.

“Saikmar! Is there any reason why from mutual tolerance men and parradiles should not advance to being
allies?”

“What?”

“The parradile helped me—” She caught herself; her story was not that it had found her lost in the snow, but that it had carried her from the southland by divine inspiration, and she didn’t want that tale investigated too closely. She covered her slip of the tongue. “Helped you and me both, carrying us down from its lair to the sanctuary. In our turn we helped it by giving warmth, shelter, and food. Plainly this is a beast capable of high feelings
even as far as gratitude. Why should we not try and tame it completely, so that when spring comes it will carry us back to Carrig?”

Saikmar closed his eyes and swayed a little where he sat. The idea of such an enormous change was altogether outside his mental range. He said faintly, “No!”

“Why not?” Maddalena pressed.

“No! The parradile is a noble animal—to debase it to a kind of flying graat would be unworthy …”

His words tailed away.

Graat
…? Lines from
The Ballad of Red Sloin
came back to him unbidden, and he remembered his thoughts as he kept watch the night before the fatal king-hunt which saw Belfeor usurp power in Carrig. There had once, according to that ballad, been another clan, Clan Graat. He had reasoned then that since all the other clan-totems were wild and savage beasts, there might have been a time when the graat was too, before it became the standard meat- and pack-animal over the known world.

So change of that sort was at least not unprecedented. Yet he could not escape the idea that it would be degrading to the parradile. He said so.

“Has the foul Belfeor not degraded the parradile?” Maddalena countered. “Did you not say yourself that the parradile must have taken refuge here in the Arctic because Belfeor’s men had driven his kind out of the Smoking Hills?”

Saikmar nodded, his mouth working a little. Maddalena saw she had made an impression, and hurried on.

“Then why should not men and parradiles work together to regain their stolen rights?”

Saikmar sighed. He said after a pause, “When you put it like that it seems most reasonable. Yet—how? What could one fugitive man and one fugitive parradile do to overthrow Belfeor, his cronies, and those dishonorable folk in Carrig who doubtless by now have followed Ambrus into his service?”

An excellent question! To conceal the fact that as yet she had not thought so far, Maddalena countered with another.

“Is there a chance of finding other parradiles near here? How many were there in the Smoking Hills?”

“Few. Always few. Though parradiles elsewhere breed big litters and multiply rapidly, those near Carrig bear many of their young dead—why is not known. Some have claimed that parradiles too lie under a curse of the gods, but this I’ve never brought myself to believe.”

To Maddalena the reason was obvious: the high background radiation in the Smoking Hills, due to the rich deposits of high-number elements which had doubtless attracted tBelfeor. Presumably some mechanism of natural selection was at work, favoring strains with especially high resistance. Perhaps also the parradile who had befriended them was unique—a million-to-one mutation of exceptional intelligence. She would have to assume so until the facts were proved otherwise. She pondered for a while, and suddenly slapped her knee. It had become blindingly clear in an instant.

“Listen, Saikmar!” she said urgently. “I think I see a way in which even one parradile might help you to win back Carrig!”