Valla and Yerema took up their positions around it, sitting on high-backed, heavy chairs.
Yerema reached into the fold of his robe and produced a small, cylindrical packet of cloth. He unrolled it to reveal a small scroll of parchment, as wide as the length of his thumb. It unrolled reluctantly, and he pinned the top edge to the table with a stiletto-bladed knife. Fully extended, the strip was about thirty centimeters long. Remy had to lean forward to look at the writing upon it, and could not recognize the elaborate ideographic script. It resembled the writing of the sioconi but was not identical to it.
“What is it?” asked Remy, using the language of the clanless now.
“It is a warrant from the gods of the sky, and the spirit of the waters, and the ancestors of all men in the green paradise. Except, of course, that ‘all men’ means only ‘the er’kresha.’ It’s a sacred commission, including a promise that if the bearer is killed in attempting to obey its command he will be admitted directly to paradise with all honors that would normally be reserved for the Most High.”
Remy looked up at his host, and said, “I didn’t even know that the er’kresha were literate.”
“They’re not, in the strict sense,” said Yerema. “They don’t have much use for writing. Only their holy men can read and write. But they haven’t always been savages. When they migrated here long ago they established a civilization not much less advanced than the siocon culture that was here when the veich first came. The sioconi invaded from Omer several centuries after the er’kresha settled here, and forced them back into the northern bills and the fringes of the Syrene. Kresh oral tradition still makes a great deal out of the Golden Age of the past and the fact that they were robbed of their heritage by the evil sioconi. That’s how they justify their predatory life-style—they see it as a kind of revenge for past crimes committed against them. They also believe that their ultimate destiny is to recover all Azreon, destroying Ziarat and Tzara and all the lands those cities count as part of their empires. You wouldn’t have seen kresh script before—it’s used to decorate sacred objects of one kind or another. Calvar scholars have accumulated a good many of them, contemporary and ancient, but they’ve only recently been able to decipher it. The sioconi had taken no interest themselves—typically enough.”
Remy waited for Yerema to finish before getting back to the heart of the matter. “What does it commission its bearer to do?” he asked bluntly.
“To kill the king,” put in Valla.
“That is so,” agreed Yerema, unperturbed by her interruption. “The assassin was killed in the palace grounds, but the fact that he managed to get so far is cause for concern. It seems that there may well be others still to come.”
“Who sent him?” asked Remy. “And why?”
“There are many rumors,” replied Yerema, “and it is not easy to search out the truth within them. But when the substance of the rumors is added to what the Calvar scholars have learned about the er’kresha, a picture begins to emerge. It appears that a new prophet has emerged from one of the desert tribes—a man of the Syrene, a shaman and a visionary. Such men, it seems, arise periodically when things go badly with the er’kresha—usually in times of famine or plague. He is not merely a shaman but also a warrior, who claims the status of a demigod. The scroll gives his name as Sigor Belle Yella, but that is a title, a nom de guerre. He is winning acceptance as a leader, making claims not only upon his own tribe but upon their neighbors, and upon the er’kresha of the far north. His aim is to unite them into a great army, which will then go forth to reclaim the rightful territory of the kresh race, driving the sioconi and their off-world allies—we acquire demonic status in these stories—into the sea.”
“Why the assassins?”
“The tribes fight one another as much as they fight the sioconi. They hate one another almost as bitterly. To join them in a common cause is no easy task. They can be persuaded, because their traditions favor such periodic joinings, and promise that one such unification will, indeed, herald the fulfillment of all the kresh dreams of empire. In order to be so persuaded, however, they look for signs. They look for events that might be omens, in all the traditional places. They watch the sky for portents; they look to their shamans for significant dreams, who look in turn to their processes of divination here on the ground. Most of all, though, they wait for Belle Yella himself to produce miracles. Had the king been killed, Belle Yella would have claimed it as a sign, and the tribal chieftains would have accepted it. Of course, Belle Yella will hardly stake everything on such a dubious operation: he will be busy promoting all kinds of other possible signs as well. In the end, he will find one, and the chieftains will accept it because they want to accept it...and perhaps need to accept it. Belle Yella, I think, is a product of the times. His kind of movement is a typical response to what the er’kresh see as a universal crisis: a millennial cult whose mythology attempts to invert a sense of despair into a sense of imminent and triumphant destiny.”
“I don’t understand,” said Remy, shifting in his chair. “You say that the ultimate aim of this man is to unite the kresh tribes in order to sweep the sioconi and the veich into the sea?”
“It would probably be more correct to say that this is the aim of the er’kresha as a race.” he said, “reignited in them by the desperation of their circumstances. Belle Yella is only an instrument. He is the means by which the tribes can ritually bury their differences and accept a common cause.”
“But it’s impossible!” objected Remy. “The sioconi outnumber the er’kresha by ten to one. Thanks to the Calvars they have far better weapons, and thanks to us they have a standing army of trained mercenaries that’s several thousand strong. And that’s just Ziarat. The king could raise an army of ten thousand in the city if he had to—maybe twice as many if he conscripted men from the surrounding districts. The Calvars couldn’t arm them all, but they could arm them far better than any force of kresh tribesmen. Most of the kresh tribes have only two or three hundred able-bodied men, and they’re well off if they have a dozen guns. Even if there were five hundred tribes—which there aren’t—they couldn’t put any kind of effective fighting force in the field.”
“In fact,” said Yerema evenly, “there are some five hundred and fifty tribes, counting the desert tribes and the northern hillmen together. Your fighting has been almost exclusively with the desert tribes. The hill tribes are considerably larger, though not so well armed. It’s theoretically possible for the er’kresha to amass an army more than a hundred thousand strong, though in practical terms they’re unlikely to assemble a force one tenth as large as that. In all probability, eight thousand fighting men in a dozen different groups would represent the whole of kresh. The war that they’d fight wouldn’t really be recognizable as such by you or me. They wouldn’t adopt any particular overall strategy—they’d just sweep into the various territories that are supposedly under Ziarat’s protection—and Tzara’s, of course—killing everyone they could. It would be more a matter of casual slaughter than of warfare. The er’kresha have no attainable objectives in the military sense.”
“What you mean,” said Remy, “is that the notion of this war to reclaim Azreon is just an idea—a myth that will allow them to embark on some crazy stint of killing for the sake of killing.”
“That’s correct,” said the veir clansman. “This isn’t a war in our sense of the word; it’s a response to the fact that the er’kresha see their present situation as one of utter hopelessness. There’s nothing they can do about it in practical terms, so they’re forced to seek a transcendental solution—they’re looking to their gods and their ancestors for salvation, and Belle Yella is the intermediary.”
“And this is the way they have reacted in the distant past to things like famines and great plagues?”
“It seems so,” confirmed Yerema. “It’s a type of social response to desperate circumstances which is seen in many cultures on many worlds. There are examples in the past history of my species, and probably of yours.”
“But why now?” asked Remy. “There’s been no famine—no worse than usual, anyhow. There’s been no plague.”