Short Fiction Poul Anderson (reading a book .TXT) 📖

of what we had to teach them, that all races, however divergent, must respect each other and work together, learn it with an intensity which the merely intellectual teaching of schools and propaganda could not achieve alone⁠—or, at any rate, soon enough.

Valgolia is the great and lonely enemy, the self-appointed Devil since none of us can be angels. It is the source of challenge and adversity such as has always driven intelligence onward and upward, in spite of itself.

Sooner or later, generations hence, perhaps, all the subject worlds will have attained internal unity, forgetting their very species in a common bond of intelligence. And on that day Valgolia’s work will be done. She and her few friends, her donagangors, will seemingly capitulate without a fight and become simply part of a union of free and truly civilized planets.

And such a union will be firmer and more enduring than all the tyrant empires of the past. It will have the strength of a thousand or more races, working together in the harmony which they achieved in struggling against us.

That is the goal, but it is a long way ahead; there may be centuries needed, and meanwhile Valgolia is alone.

Barbara would understand. In time she would understand what she as yet did not even know. But first would be the hatred, the cold stark hatred that must come of knowing who and what I really am. I could only wait for that hatred to come after she learned, and then wait for it to go, slowly, slowly.⁠ ⁠…

Lines of the Earthlings were filing forward, and, with Nat Hawkins, Barbara waited for me. I walked to her and took her hand. Her head was high, as high as Levinsohn’s. She expected all of us to die, but she’d meet the relatives and friends she thought were dead.

It would be a great, a crushing humiliation, to know one’s martyrs were alive and being well treated and intensively educated by the foe, who was supporting and encouraging one’s supposedly dangerous revolution.

“It won’t be so bad as long as we’re together, darling,” I said.

She smiled, misunderstanding, and kissed me defiantly before our Valgolian guards.

The Virgin of Valkarion I

The sun was low in the west and a thin chill wind was blowing along the hills when Alfric saw Valkarion below him. He reined in his hengist and sat for a moment scouting the terrain with the hard-learned caution of many wandering years.

Save for himself, the broad highway that flung its time-raddled length down the rock slope was empty. On either hand, the harsh gullied hills stretched away to the dusky horizon, wind whispering in gray scrub and low twisted trees. Here and there, evening fires glimmered red from peasants’ huts, or the broken columns of temples in ruins these many thousand years loomed against the darkening greenish-blue. Behind him, the land faded toward the raw naked desert from which he had come. A falkh hovered on silent wings far above him, watching for a movement that might mean prey⁠—otherwise he was alone.

Still⁠—he felt uneasy. A prickling not due to the gathering cold tingled along his spine, and he had spent too much of his life in the nearness of death to ignore such warnings.

He looked ahead, down the great road. It twisted and swooped between the fantastically wind-carven crags, a dim white ribbon in the deepening twilight. The smooth stone blocks were cracked apart by ages so long that the thought made his head reel, and in places the harsh wiry vegetation had grown through and over it, but still the old Imperial Way was there. The ancients had built mightily.

Halfway down the huge slope of hillside, the road ran into Valkarion city. Below that level, the cliffs dropped sharply, white with old salt-streaks, to the dead sea-bottoms⁠—a vast depression, sand and salt and thin bitter plant-growth, reaching out to the sunset horizon.

Lights were winking on in the city. It was not far, and Alfric had no wish to sleep in the open or under some peasant’s stinking roof. So⁠—why not go ahead? The city, his goal, was there, and naught to hold him from it save⁠—

The hengist whickered and stamped its broad cloven hoofs. Its eyes rolled uneasily, and Alfric’s hand slid to his sword hilt. If the beast also sensed a watchfulness⁠—

He caught the stir in the thick brush-clump out of the corner of one eye. Only a hunter would have noticed it; only a rover at once, without stopping to think, would have struck spurs into his mount. The hengist leaped, and the dart whispered past Alfric’s face.

One scratch from the poisoned missile of the southern blowguns was enough to kill a man. Alfric yelled, and flung his hengist at the brush. The sword whined from its scabbard, flamed in his hand.

Two men slipped from the thicket as he crashed into it. They were of a race foreign even to these southlands, small and lithe and amber-skinned. They wore only loincloths; all hair had been shaved from their heads and bodies, and the iron slave-collars were about their necks. Vaguely, Alfric was aware of the brands on their foreheads, but at the moment he was only concerned with their weapons.

One skipped aside, raising the blowgun to his lips. Alfric yanked the javelin from its holster by his saddle and launched it left-handed⁠—through the slave’s belly and out his back.

Steel hissed beside him as the other swung with a scimitar. The hengist screamed as the blade cut its sleek gray hide. The forehoofs lashed out, the great hooked beak snapped, and the slave lay a bloody ruin on the Imperial Way.

Alfric reined in his prancing mount and looked around, breathing hard. An ambush⁠—by the bear of Ruho, they’d meant to kill him!

But⁠—why?

A poor solitary wanderer was no worthwhile quarry for footpads⁠—anyway, these weren’t outlaws but slaves; they must have been set here with orders to destroy some specific person. But no one in Valkarion knew Alfric⁠—he