Var the Stick Read online

  "I'll keep running."

  "But, Var!"

  "No!" He shook her off.

  Soli began to cry, as she always did when thwarted, and he was immediately sorry. But as usual he didn't know what to say.

  "I guess it's like fighting your father," she said after a bit. That seemed to be the end of it.

  "But we can still do everything else?" she asked wistfully, after a bit more.

  He smiled. "Everything!"

  Reconciled, they began their flight.

  By dusk they were ensconced in an unoccupied hostel twenty miles distant. "This is almost like home," Soli said. "Except that it's round. And everything's here I guess the nomads haven't raided it this week."

  Var shrugged. He was not at home in a hostel, but this had seemed better than foraging outside for supper. Alone, he would have stayed in deep forest; but with Soli "I can fix us a real underworld meal," she said. "Uh, you do known how to use knives and forks? I saw how the cooks did it. Sosa says I should always be able to do for myself, 'cause sometime I might have to. Let's see, this is a 'lectric range, and this button makes it hot"

  One word stuck in his mind as he watched her busily hauling out utensils and supplies. Sosa. That was the name of her stepmother, he knew. The little woman he had encountered underground, who had thrown him down so easily. The Master had spoken the name too. But there was something elso Sos! Bob of the mountain had called the Master Sos! And so had Tyl, earlier, he-remembered that now. As though the Nameless One had a name! And Sos would be the original husband of Sosa!

  But Sol was married to Sosa, there in the mountain. And Sos was married to Sola. How had such a transposition come about?

  And if Soil were the child of Sol and Sola was there also a Sosi, born of Sos and Sosa? If so, where?

  Var's head whirled with the complexity of such thinking.

  Somewhere in this confusion was the answer to the Master's strange wrath, be was sure. But how was be to untangle it?

  Soli was having difficulties with the repast. "I need a can opener," she said, holding up a sealed can.

  Var didn't know what a can opener was.

  "To get these tomatoes open."

  "How do you know what's in there?"

  "It says on the label. TOMATO. The crazies label everything. That is what you call them, isn't it?"

  "You mean you can read? The way the Master does?"

  "Well, not very well," she admitted. "Jim the Librarian taught me. He says all the children of Helicon should learn to read, for the time when civilization comes back. How can I open this can?

  She called the mountain Helicon, too. So many little things were different! And she knew Jim the Gun's mountain brother, not the real Jim.

  Var took the can and brought it to the weapons rack. He selected a dagger and plunged it into the flat end of the cylinder. Red juice squirted out, as though from a wound.

  He took the dripping object back to her. It was tomatoes.

  "You're smart," Soil said admiringly. It was ridiculous, but he felt proud,

  Eventually she served up the meal. Var, accustomed in childhood to scavenging for edibles in ancient buildings and in the garbage dumps of human camps, was not particularly dismayed. He crunched on the burned meat and drank the tomatoes and gnawed on the fibrous rolls and sliced the rock-hard ice-cream with the dagger. "Very good," he said, for the Master had always stressed the importance of courtesy.

  "You don't have to be sarcastic!"

  Var didn't understand the word, so he said nothing. Why was it that people so often got angry for no reason?

  After the meal Var went outside to urinate, not used to the hostel's crockery sanitary facilities. Soil took a shower and pulled down a bunk from the wall.

  "Don't turn on the television," she called as he reentered. "It's probably bugged."

  Var hadn't intended to, but he wondered at her concern.

  "Bugged?"

  "You know. The underworld has a tap so they know when someone's watching. Maybe the crazies do, too. To keep track of the nomads. We don't want anyone to know where we are."

  He remembered the Master's conversation with the mountain leader Bob, and thought he understood. Television didn't have to be meaningless. He pulled down an adjacent bunk and flopped on it.

  After a while he rolled over and looked at the television set. "Why is it so stupid?" he asked thetorically.

  "That's the way the Ancients were before the Blast," she said. "They did stupid things, and they're all on tape, and we just run it through the 'mitter and that's what's on television. Jim says it all means something, but we don't have the sound system so we can't tell for sure."

  "We?"

  "The underworld. Helicon. Jim says we have to maintain 'nology. We don't know how to make television, but we can maintain it. Until all the replacement parts wear out, anyway. The crazies know more about 'lectricity than we do. They even have computers. But we do more work."

  Var was becoming interested. "What do you do?'

  "Manufacturing. We make the weapons and the pieces for the hostels. The crazies are Service they put up the hostels and fill them with food and things. The nomads are 'sumers they don't do anything."

  This was too deep for Var, who had never heard of the underworld before this campaign and still had only the vaguest notion what the crazies were or did. "Why does the Master have to conquer the mountain, if it does so much?"

  "Bob says he's demented. Bob says he's a doublecrosser. He was supposed to end the empire, but he attacked the mountain instead. Bob's real mad."

  "The Master said the mountain was bad. He said he couldn't make the empire great until he conquered the mountain. And now he says he'll burn it all, after he kills me."

  "Maybe he is demented," she whispered.

  Var wondered, himself.

  "I'm frightened," Soil said after a pause. "Bob says If the nomads make an empire there'll be another Blast, and no one will escape. He says they're the violent 'lement of our society, and they can't have 'nology or they'll make the Blast. Again. But now"

  Var couldn't follow that either. "Who made the mountain?" he asked her.

  "Jim says he thinks it was made by post-Blast civilization," she said uncertainly. "There was radiation everywhere and they were dying, but they took their big machines and scooped a whole city into a pile and dug it out and put in 'lectricity and saved their finest scientists and fixed it so no one else could get inside. But they needed food and things, so they had to trade and some of the smart men outside had some civilization too, from somewhere, and they were the crazies, and so they traded. And everyone else, the stupid ones, just drifted and fought each other, and they were the nomads. And after a while too many men in Helicon got old and died, and 'nology was being lost, so they had to take in some others, but they had to keep it secret and the crazies wouldn't come, so they only took in the ones that came to die."

  "I don't think the Master would make another Blast," Var said. But he remembered the man's mysterious fury, his threat to destroy all the mountain, and he wasn't sure.

  Soli was discreet enough not to comment. After a time they slept.

  Twenty miles away, the Nameless One, known by some as Sos, did not sleep. He paced his tent, sick with rage at the murder of his natural child, the girl called Soil conceived in adultery but still flesh of his flesh. Since his time within the mountain he had been sterile, perhaps because of the operations the Helicon surgeon had performed on his body to make him the strongest man of the world. He carried metal under his skin and in his crotch, and hormones had made his body expand, but he could no longer sire a child. Thus Soli, legally the issue of the castrate Sol, was the only daughter he would ever beget, and though he had not seen her in six years she was more precious to him than ever. Any girl her age was precious, sympathetically. He had dreamed of reuniting with her, and with his true friend Sol, and with his own love, Sosa, the four together, some how But now such hopes were ashes. It was not a girl but an entire
foundation of ambition that had been abolished. Now the things of this world were without flavor.

  Soli perhaps she would have been like that gamin from Pan tribe, alert and bold yet tearful artfully so when balked. But he would never know, for Var had killed her.

  Var would surely die. And Heicon would be leveled, for Bob had engineered that ironic murder. No party to the event would survive-not even Sos the Weaponless, the most guilty of all concerned.

  So he paced, ruled by his despairing fury, awaiting only the dawn to begin his mission of revenge. Tyl would supervise the siege of Helicon until his own return, Tyl, at least, would enjoy being in charge.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In a month they were far beyond the Master's domains, but Var dared not rest. The Nameless One was slow but very determined, as Var had learned when they first met. He knew the local tribesmen would inform the Master of the route taken by the fugitive, so there was no escape except continued motion.

  At first Soli had hidden whenever human beings were encountered, for she was officially dead. Then they realized that she could masquerade as a boy, and even carry the sticks, and no one would know. So they traveled openly together, an ugly man and a fair boy, and no one challenged them.

  They went west, for the Master's empire was east and Soil had heard that ocean lay to the south. Extensive desert badlands forced them north. They avoided trouble, but when it came at them relentlessly, they fought. Once a foul mouthed sworder challenged Var, calling him a pederast. Var didn't understand the word, but he got the gist and realized that it was supposed to be an insult. He met the sworder in the circle and flattened his nose and cracked his head with the sticks, and it was not pretty. Another time a small tribe sought to deny them access to a hostel; Var bloodied one, Soil a second, and the rest fled. The warriors beyond the empire were inept fighters.

  In the second month they encountered so extensive a desert that they had to turn back. Fearing the Master, they took to the wilderness, avoiding the established trails.

  But foraging while traveling these bleak hills was difficult. There was not time to set snares or to wait patiently for game. Soli had to turn girl child again to enter occupied hostels for supplies, while Var skulked alone. She returned with word that the Weaponless had passed this area two or three days behind them. He was outside his empire now, but no one could mistake the whitehaired brute of a man. He spoke only to describe Var and verify his transit, and did not enter the circle. He did not seem to be concerned about Var's boy companion.

  So it was true. The Master was on his trail, leaving everything else behind. Var felt fear and regret. He had hoped that this murderous passion would fade, that the needs of the mountain campaign would summon the Nameless One back before very long. A minion might be dispatched to finish the chore, of course; but Var would have no compunction about destroying such a man in the circle. It was only the Master himself be could not bring himself to oppose not from fear, though he knew the Master would kill him but because this was, or had been, his only true friend.

  Now he knew it was not to be. The Master would never give up the pursuit..

  They veered north, moving rapidly and sleeping in the forest, the open plain, the tundra. Soil fetched supplies from the hostels, sometimes as girl, sometimes as boy.

  Yet the word spread ahead of them. When they encountered strangers accidentally they drew stares of semirecognition. "You with the mottled skin aren't you the one the juggernaut is after?" But such acquaintances usually did not interfere, for Var was said to be devastating with the sticks. And, in this region of haphazardly trained warriors, this was a true description. The few who chose to challenge him in the circle soon became limping testimony to this.

  And few suspected that his boy companion was even better at such fighting, possessing both sophisticated stick technique and weaponless ability. Only when they had to fight as a pair, against aggressive doubles, did this become evident. Soli, adept at avoiding blows, fenced around and behind Var, and the opposition was soon demolished.

  In two more months of circuitous traveling they came to the end of the crazy demesnes. The hostels stopped, and the easy trails made by the crazy tractors terminated, and the wilderness became total. And it was winter.

  Undaunted, they plunged into the snowbound unknown. It was an unkempt jungle of bareboned trees, fraught with gullies and stumbling stones hidden under the even blanket of white. At dusk the snow began to fall again, gently at first, then solidly. Soli became grim and silent, for she was unused to this. Never before had she dealt with snow; she had never emerged from the mountain above the snowline. To her it had been something white but not necessarily cold or uncomfortable. Var knew the reality exasperated her and frightened her, catching at her feet and flying in her face.

  Var excavated a pit, baring the unfrozen turf and making a circular wall of packed snow. He spread a groundsheet and pegged a low sturdy tent, letting the snow accumulate on top. He sealed it in except for a breathing tunnel and brought her Inside, where he took off her boots, poured out the accumulated water, and slapped at her feet until they began to warm. She no longer cried as freely as she had at their first meeting, and he rather wished she would, for now her misery just sat upon her and would not depart.

  That night, after they had eaten, he held her closely and tried to comfort her, and gradually she relaxed and slept.

  In the morning she would not awaken. Nervously he stripped her despite the cold, and dried her, and found the puncture mark: on the blue ankle just above the level of her unbooted foot. Something like a badlands moth had stung her, unobserved. They must have camped near a radiation fringe zone, far enough out so that his skin did not detect it, near enough for some of the typical fauna to appear. He might have recognized the area by sight, had it not been snowing. Probably there were hibernating grubs, and one had been warmed into activity by her body, and crawled and bit when disturbed.. . she was in coma.

  There was no herb he knew, in this region, in this season, that would ease her condition. She was small; if she had taken in too much of the venom, she would sleep until she died. If she had a small dose, she would recover if kept warm and dry.

  The snowstorm had abated, but he knew it would return. At night it would be really cold again. This was no suitable place for illness, regardless. He had to get her to a heated hostel.

  He struck tent, packed up everything hastily, and carried her dangling over his shoulder, swathed in bag and canvas. He stumbled through the knee deep snow, the hip deep drifts, never pawing for a rest, though his arms grew numb with the weight and his legs leaden.

  After an hour he stepped into a snow camouflaged burrow hole, stumbled, caught himself, caught Soil as she slid oil his shoulder and almost collapsed as the pain shot up his thigh. Then be went on as before, ignoring it. Until the slower pain of his swelling ankle forced him to stop and remove his boot and rub snow on it. Then, barefooted, he continued.

  After a time he had to stop again, to dispose of all superfluous weight. He hoisted Soil again and walked because he had to, no other reason. And before day was done he laid her limp body in the warm hostel, the last they had passed.

  Soil's breathing was shallow, but she had neither the fever nor the chill of a serious illness. Var began to hope that he had acted in time, and that the siege was light.

  He rested beside her, the sensation in his leg coming through with appalling intensity. The wrench would not have been serious, had he not continued to aggravate it, walking loaded. Now he heard something.

  A man was coming up the walk to the hostel, treading the frozen path the crazies had cleared. Obviously intending to night inside.

  Var had had perhaps half an hour hardly enough for strength to creep back into his limbs, more than enough to make his ankle a torment. But he dragged himself up, hastily winding a section of crazy sheet around his leg so that he could stand on it more firmly. He and Soli had remained hidden until this time, but he knew their secrecy would be go
ne if anyone saw her now. They had lost a day of travel, and the Master would be very close; any exposure could bring him here within hours.

  The approaching steps were not those of the Weaponless. They were too light, too. quick. But Var could tolerate no man inside this hostel not while Soil lay ill, not while they both were vulnerable.

  He scrambled into his heavy winter coat, pulled its hood tight around his face to conceal the discoloration above his beard, lifted his sticks, fought off the agony that threatened to collapse his leg, and pushed through the spinning door to meet the stranger outside.

  It was bright, though the day was waning; the snow amplified the angled sunlight and bounced it back and forth and across his squinting eyes. It took a moment to make out the intruder.

  The man was of medium height, fair-skinned under the parka, and well proportioned. He wore a long, large knapsack that projected behind his head. His facial features were refined, almost feminine, and his motions were oddly smooth. He seemed harmless a tourist wandering the country, broadening his mind, a loner. Var knew it was wrong to deny him lodging at the warm. hostel, especially this late in the day, but with Soli's welfare at stake there was no choice. The Master could get the word and come before she recovered, and they would be doomed. He barred the way.

  The man did not speak. He merely looked questioningly at Var.

  "My my sister is ill," Var said, aware that his words, as always with strangers, were hardly comprehensible. When he knew a person, talking became easier, partly because he was relaxed and partly.. because the other picked up his verbal distortions and learned to compensate. "I must keep her isolated."

  The traveler still was silent. He made a motion to pass Var.

  Var blocked, him again. "Sister sick. Must be alone," he enunciated carefully.

  Still mute, the man tried to pass again.

  Var lifted one stick.

  The stranger reached one hand over his shoulder and drew out a stick of his own.

  So it was to be the circle.

  Var did not want to fight this man at this time, for the other's position was reasonable. Var and Soil had fought together for their right to occupy any hostel at any time. Lacking an explanation, the other man had a right to be annoyed. And Var was in poor condition for the circle; only with difficulty did he conceal the liability of his leg. And he was quite tired generally from his day's labor. But he could not tell the whole truth, and could not risk exposure. The man would have to lodge elsewhere.