The Rebel of Rhada (2 page)

The young star king smiled back at the Vulk, recognizing the warning and the personal love that prompted it. That was the way of it. No Vulk ever answered a question directly.

But one thing was certain. Kier had never seen one of Gret’s kind dead of natural causes. He could not imagine how old Gret was. He had been Aaron’s fool, and before that Aaron’s father’s fool. The ignorant whispered that Vulks lived forever.

“Human beings die,” Gret said, plucking a string on his instrument. “Even star kings.”

Kier’s smile slowly faded. He did not need warnings to know his danger. In times past an Imperial summons might have meant a coming war, a royal commission.

But things were no longer as they had been when Glamiss ruled. Torquas commanded him to Earth “with only those of your household needful to your comfort.” In other words, without his personal troops.

Caught in a dilemma between loyalty and common sense, Kier had compromised by bringing only Gret and his personal warlock, Cavour, and a single squadron of picked warmen under command of his lieutenant-general, Nevus. Politics was the business of star kings, and politics in the second decade of the Second Stellar Empire consisted largely of staying alive.

Kier listened to the humming of the ship. His cousin Kalin was due with a position report soon. Kier, experienced in star travel, estimated that they were now less than six Earth Standard Hours from Nyor.

Once Cavour had attempted to determine by calculation the exact speed of the fifteen starships under Rhadan control. This was perilous research, for it infringed on the Holy Mysteries. A generation earlier, the inquisitors of the Order of Navigators had ordered warlocks burned for less. But Cavour was a free spirit, and he could not rest until he had attempted the puzzle. He had studied the fragments found at Station One on Astraris (the First Empire ruins there had once been an A8 facility, whatever
that
was), and after days of laborious computations he had offered Kier the incredible figure of two hundred thousand kilometers per hour. This would have been the equivalent of circumnavigating Rhada eight times in sixty minutes. The Astrari warlocks had laughed poor Cavour out of their workshops, pointing out that since a starship made the voyage from Rhada and the Rim worlds to Earth in slightly more than forty-nine hours, Cavour’s calculations would mean that the galaxy must be twelve
million,
eight hundred
thousand
kilometers in diameter. This immense figure was so patently absurd that even Cavour was shaken. He reluctantly abandoned his hypothesis and concluded that whatever meaning there was in the Golden Age fragments that turned up from time to time on Astraris, his own mathematics had somewhere gone badly astray.

Kier stood and began to pace restlessly about the compartment. Above his head, a great blank screen was dimly visible. The legends said that in the Golden Age such screens, which were everywhere in the starships, had shown the things that were happening outside the vessels.

How such a thing might be, Kier did not know, but he believed it because he knew that the men of the First Empire had been workers of miracles. Still, sin had destroyed them, bringing the darkness of the Interregnal Wars, leaving their great works everywhere shattered.

The screens--like the globes in the overheads, like the machines that freshened the air in the ships, like thousands of other artifacts whose purpose the men of this age could scarcely fathom--had not worked for thousands of years. Light came from fire, not mysterious globes. And one could see
outside
only from the forbidden chambers of the starship, places where an unconsecrated man, even a star king, could not go. Kier had never seen the stars from space. Regretfully, he knew that he never would. Only Kalin and his kind could do that.

“Gret,” he said impatiently. “Give us a song.” He went back to his seat and waited to be obeyed. “What will you hear, King?”

“Sense me. You will know.” A Vulk always knew what one wanted--sometimes better than one knew oneself.

Gret cradled his instrument and leaned his narrow back against the young star king’s chair. “Hear me, then.”

He struck a chord with his long, delicate fingers and then began to sing.

“ ‘If thou be’st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see, Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till Age snow white hairs on thee;
Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.’ “

He struck a last note, and it hung melodically in the humming air. Then silence fell.

Presently, Kier said, “Was I thinking of the Empress-Consort, then?”

Gret smiled slowly. “You were not.”

“Then?”

“Shall I guess, King? Is it Earth we are going to?”

Kier stared at the Vulk. Could one love such a baffling and contentious creature?

“Tell me,” he commanded.

“The King does not know his own mind?”

“I said, ‘Tell me,’ “ Kier said sternly.

“You were remembering a reedy girl who loved you on Karma. A great personage. The daughter of a mighty king.” The Vulk strummed another chord and let it die away.

“Ariane.”

“The very same,” Gret said.

Kier laughed. The daughter of Glamiss had been thirteen years old the year the Battle of Karma was fought and even then betrothed to the star king of Fomalhaut, a lord of the Inner Marches, old and rich in men and worlds.

But no news of an Imperial marriage had reached the Rim worlds. Mariana, the Empress-Consort, wanted no Princess Royal with the resources of twenty worlds at her back.

Where was Ariane now, Kier wondered. She would be seventeen--no, almost nineteen now.

“The song,” the warleader said. “I don’t know it.” “It was written by a man of your own race, King.”

“A Rhadan?”

“Oh, no. There were no men on Rhada in this poet’s time. Would you believe me if I told you he lived eleven thousand years ago?”

Kier smiled and shook his head. Vulks, he thought tolerantly. They spoke in parables and riddles. Everyone knew the first men were created by God 6,606 years before the founding of the First Stellar Empire.

“A man of the Golden Age, then?”

The Vulk said, “One who lived before the Golden Age, before the first human being left the Earth. His name was Donne.”

“And how do you know that, Gret?” The Vulk played a delicate tune on a single string. “What is good is remembered, King.”

Kier would have liked to hear more of this poet who Gret claimed lived so long ago, but at this moment his cousin, the Navigator Kalin, entered and saluted him.

“We will make our planetfall in five hours, cousin,” the Navigator said.

Kier made the sign of the Star and murmured, as required, “God be praised.”

“Blessed be the name of God,” Kalin responded. Then he smiled at the warleader. Kalin thoroughly approved of Kier. He was courageous, properly noble, and devout in his observances. A fit descendant of the finest of the Rhad, the beatified Emeric.

Kalin, who was a generous-minded and rather simple young man, knew himself to be a good priest-Navigator, though, he often told himself regretfully, not destined to be a great one. The Rhad family had produced one outstanding religious only, and this was Emeric, who had risen to the rank of Grand Master of Navigators a generation ago to lead the Order into a new age of enlightenment. Probably Emeric, Kalin thought, would approve of the second star king of Rhada, too.

Emeric had believed, as had Glamiss the Magnificent, that men should recover all that they had lost in the Black Age. He had even dared to suggest that the time might come when a united mankind might have to face unspecified dangers from outside the galaxy, for he believed that the men of the First Stellar Empire had established, and then lost contact with, colonies in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Such a thing seemed inconceivable to Kalin. But if Emeric had believed it, then it was not to be thought impossible.

“Gret was telling me,” Kier said to his cousin, “of a singer of songs who lived--how long ago, Gret?”

“Eleven thousand years, King. Give or take a century or two,” the Vulk said.

Kalin frowned at the Vulk. The dogma stated very clearly that life began 6,606 years before the founding of the Empire. Gret should not tell such fairy stories. They were dangerously near to heresy, though there were warlocks nowadays who disputed the dogma. It was all confusing to Kalin, who had taken only the barest requirements in theology, preferring to specialize in studies more relevant to his primary duty as Spiritual and Temporal Guide of Starships.

“Well, eleven thousand or not, Gret, it was a fine song. You shall play it tonight at dinner for our Navigator and make his shaky theology totter. But not this moment.” He addressed himself to his cousin and said, “Send an orderly to collect Cavour and Nevus. If we are to reach Nyor in five hours, we have plans to make.”

“Will there be ceremonies, Kier?” Kalin asked. “I have brought my finest robe and cowl. I thought it wise.”

Kier put an arm across his cousin’s shoulders. “I hope you have brought your largest war horse and sharpest weapons. There may be ceremonies of a sort we don’t anticipate.”

The Navigator looked perplexed. “Are we in danger?”

“I hope not, Kalin,” Kier said.

“We are, though. You think so.”

Kier half smiled. “It is the way of things in this time, cousin.”

“But we have warmen,” Kalin said, adjusting to the idea of danger.

“Only enough to hold the starship if we are attacked. More would have looked like rebellion.”

“But Kier--on
Earth?
Why would anyone trouble us? Isn’t this a state visit--?” He broke off, feeling frustratingly naive and innocent. He looked at his warrior cousin for explanation. “I mean, Kier, I know things have changed since The Magnifico’s time, but the Imperials would never dare--” He stopped, suddenly aware that he was in no way sure what, exactly, the Imperials would dare, or even why.

“Find me Cavour and Nevus,” Kier said. “Then join us here. I want you to hear what is said. A holy Navigator you may be, but you’re a Rhad, too. If there is trouble, I want you to know what to do.”

“As you command, King,” Kalin said with sudden, grave formality.

Gret’s eyeless face grew somber as the Navigator went. He began to play on the strings, making mournful and non-human melodies that only brushed the senses.

“To be so young,” he said murmuringly, “to be so innocent and to go into such danger. It is sad, King.”

Kier’s eyes narrowed. “What danger, Gret?”

“We know. Both of us know.” The music wove a strange and age-old pattern in the way of Vulk laments. “Sarissa,” the fool said. The sibilant name seemed to mingle with the dirge.

Kier laid a hand across the strings and stopped the music in midflight. “What do you know about Sarissa, Gret?”

The Vulk shrugged, a human gesture Kier would understand. But what did the motion mean to Gret, Kier wondered.

“I know what there is to know,” the Vulk said. “I know that the star kings of the Rim worlds gather there. There is talk of rebellion and war against the Empire.”

“The redress of grievances, Gret,” Kier said in a hard voice.

The Vulk shook his head in denial. “Rebellion, King. And we Vulks remember the Black Age, the time of darkness, the centuries of war and death between the Empires.” He struck a deep, resonant note. “Rebellion, King. Your father would weep.”

“How do you know of this?” Kier spoke harshly.

“Vulks know. And this, too, I know--that you are undecided and that you will try to buy relief from Torquas for Rhada with a renewed pledge of loyalty.”

“Landro, Mariana, and the Imperials are bleeding us white, Gret. Military service is all the Rhad have to offer --and it was always enough in Glamiss’s time. Now they demand goods and money we do not have. I have complained so that I’ve been summoned to answer for it.” Kier stood and held his sheathed sword in both clenched fists. “I love the Empire, Gret, as my father before me loved it. But I am a Rhad of Rhada--”

“The star king is father to his people,” Gret said with Vulk formality.

“Will Mariana accept my terms?” There was no more talk of Torquas. Both Vulk and man knew where the power lay.

“This I do not know, King. But you are putting yourself into great danger to make terms without armed men in plenty behind you.”

“I know they call me The Rebel,” the young star king said. “But I cannot call on The Magnifico’s son with an army. On Karma the Emperor was more than my general; he was like a father.” He drew the great sword halfway from its sheath and looked at the glistening blue god-metal of the blade. “I had this from his own hand, Gret.” Gently, he sheathed the blade. “No, I had no choice. I had to come alone.”

The Vulk bowed his head and struck the strings. He did not say that Kier was not alone and that, if he was taken, all aboard this starship would die. That was the way of things in this time. Everyone aboard this starship belonged to the star king. It was fitting.

He struck the strings again. “When the history of the Rhad is written, King,” he said, “and when all the battles are songs”--he lifted his blind face to the young man and smiled--”men will search time, from the age of cybs and demons to the hour we call now. And you will be remembered as the greatest of all the Rhad. Greater than Aaron the Devil, greater even than the holy Emeric. If--” He paused and suddenly drew a flurry of savage and martial sounds from the delicate heart of the lyre. “If you are alive tomorrow, King.”

--biochemical interactions to be kept rigidly within the prescribed parameters because, without exact control, the DNA molecules will be unstable and the life sequence will fail to become self-sustaining.

Extremely high-power requirements demand that any ex--

Golden Age fragment found at Sardis, Sarissa

Blood of the child, salts of the ground
Give pain with the power and listen for sound
Pray now to sin
To let life begin
A heartbeat inside
Or the old ones have lied.