March Upcountry

“The problem is the city. It has extended its fields too far, yet that’s hardly the worst of it. Their woodcutters are not to go beyond a certain stream, and even in that stretch where they are permitted, they are only to take certain trees. That is the treaty. For that, we are to be given certain goods—iron spears and knives, cooking pots, cloth. Yet these goods have become of worse and worse quality, while the woodcutters drive deeper and deeper into the forest. They do not restrict themselves to the proper trees, and their intrusion drives out the game or kills what remains.”

He looked around again and clapped his hands.

“If we kill the woodcutters, even if they are beyond the line, it breaks the treaty. The Houses of Q’Nkok will gather their forces and attack.” He ducked his head in shame. “And we will lose. Our warriors are able, but we would have to defend the town, and we would lose.

“But if we attack Q’Nkok, without warning, we can take it by surprise as the Kranolta took Far Voitan.” He looked around the humans, and Roger was forced to recognize that a fierce look was nearly universal. “Then we feed on their hoarded grains, kill the men, enslave the women, and take the goods that are rightfully ours.”

“There is, however, a problem with this,” Delkra said, and leaned forward as he took over the thread. “We will lose many warriors even if the attack is successful, and then Dutak and Arnat will fall upon us like flin on a dead flar beast. We didn’t know which way to go, so Cord went on a spirit quest in search of a vision of guidance. If he’d seen peace in the future, it would have been peace. If he’d seen war, it would have been war.”

“What if he hadn’t come back?” Pahner asked. “He nearly didn’t.”

“War,” Delkra replied simply. “I’m in favor of it anyway. Without Cord to hold me back, we would have attacked last year. And, in all honesty, probably have been eaten by Dutak and Arnat.”

“Make peace with Dutak and Arnat,” Roger said, “and attack in concert.”

He felt O’Casey’s elbow connect with his ribs and realized what he’d just said. He supposed that advising the local barbarians to cooperate with one another in the destruction of this Q’Nkok would hardly advance the cause of civilization, and he remembered what his chief of staff had said about barbarism and infant mortality rates. On the other hand, these“barbarians” were his friends, and he didn’t particularly care for either of the possible outcomes Cord had described.

He started to glower at her, then stopped and looked down at his hands, instead. His history teachers— including Eleanora, when she’d been his tutor—had harped incessantly and unpleasantly on a ruler’s responsibility to weigh the possible impact of his decisions with exquisite care. He’d never cared for their apparent assumption that he wouldn’t have weighed such matters carefully without their pointed prodding. But now he suddenly realized just how easy it was for purely personal considerations to shape a decision without the decider’s even realizing it had happened.

He drew a deep breath, decided to keep his mouth shut, and went back to scratching his pet dog-lizard. He’d seen larger specimens around the camp, and if this one grew as large as some of the larger ones, it was going to be interesting. The biggest had been the size of a big German Shepherd, and the species seemed to fulfill the role of dogs in the camp.

Delkra, unaware of the prince’s thoughts, clapped his hands in resigned negation.

“The chiefs of both tribes are crafty. They have seen us weaken. They feel that if they just let us wither a bit more, they can take our lands and squabble over the leftovers.”

“So how can we help?” Captain Pahner asked. From his tone, Roger decided, it was pretty obvious that he knew at least one way they could help . . . and just as obvious that he was unwilling to do so.

“We don’t know,” Cord admitted. “But it’s obvious from your tools and abilities that you have great knowledge. It was our hope that if we described our quandary to you you might see some solution which has eluded us.”

Pahner and Roger turned as one to look at Eleanora.

“Oh great,” she said. “Now you want my help.”

She thought about what the two Mardukans said. And about city-state politics. And about Machiavelli.

“You have two apparently separate problems,” she said after a moment. “One on the receiving side, and one on the giving side. They might be connected, but that’s an assumption at this point.”

She spoke slowly, almost distantly, as her mind ranged back and forth over the Mardukans’ description of events, and she scratched the back of her neck while she thought.

“Have you been actively offered offense in your dealings with the rulers of the city-state?”

“No,” Cord answered definitively. “I have been to Q’Nkok twice recently to discuss the problems with the quality of the tribute and the unlawful intrusions of the woodcutters. The King has been very gracious on both occasions. The common people of the city don’t like us, nor we them, but the King has been very friendly.”

“Is wood-cutting a monopoly?” Eleanora asked. “Does one house cut all the wood? And what are these houses? How many are there, and how are they organized?”

“There are sixteen Great Houses,” Cord told her. “Plus the House of the King. There are also many smaller houses. The Great Houses sit on the Royal Council and . . . there are other rights attached to them. No single house has the right to cut wood, and the woodcutters who offend are not from a single house.”

“And the tribute? Is it supplied by the Houses or by the King?”

“It is supplied by the King through taxes on the Houses, Greater and Lesser. But it is usually conveyed by one of the Great Houses.”

“Expansion of the city-state is inevitable,” she said after a moment’s thought. “And as long as they need the wood as a resource, they’ll encroach farther and farther on your lands. Wars are usually about resources—about economics—at the base. But your concerns are certainly justified.

“I can’t know what’s going on from here. As I understand it, we’re traveling to this Q’Nkok next?” She made it a question and looked at Pahner, who gave a confirming nod and then looked at their hosts.

“I ask that you hold off on any attack until we visit the city,” the Marine said. “I ask for two reasons. One is that we need to trade for goods and animals to make our journey; Q’Nkok is the closest and most accessible source of what we need. The second is that we might be able to come up with a third option that would avoid the needless bloodshed of a war. Let us do a reconnaissance of the town, then we’ll send back word of what we find. As outsiders, we might be able to discern something that you can’t.”

Delkra and Cord looked at one another, and then the chief clapped his upper hands in agreement.

“Very well, we won’t rush to attack. When you go to the town, I will send some of my sons with you. They’ll aid you on the trip and act as messengers.” He paused, and looked around at the gathered humans, and his body language was sober. “I hope for all our sakes that you are able to find a third way. My brother is asi now, and dead to his family, but it would grieve him if his family were dead in truth.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The city-state was a larger version of the village of The People and was obviously expanding. The company had followed the river from Cord’s village downstream to its junction with a still larger river, and the city sat on a small ridge on the eastern side of the new one. The ridge was near the apex of the confluence of the two streams and more or less covered with structures. A wooden palisade surrounded the intersection, but the palisade was obviously a temporary expedience, and several sections of it had already been replaced with a high stone curtain wall. It was nearing evening as the travelers came to the cleared boundary of the city-state’s lands, and the sky over the town was gray with the smoke of the evening’s fires.

The jungle ended with knife-sharp abruptness at the border of the city-state’s territory. The stream that marked the boundary was the fourth one they’d crossed, but this crossing had significant differences from any of the earlier ones.

On the west side of the stream—the “civilized” side—there were large mounds every few hundred yards. They were surmounted by oddly constructed houses, and more mounds and houses were scattered throughout the valley of fields and orchards. The houses had no lower-floor doorways, and the upper floors extended out to