Chapter 4: Sanctum
Phylomon felt nothing for Sanctum anymore but the vaguest sense of nostalgia. Although the starbase had been his childhood home, and he remembered it perfectly from those days, it had been vacant for so many centuries that it was but a pale shadow of what it once had been. Seen from across the plain, it glimmered like a handful of gems, even at twenty miles. When the group was half a day’s journey from the city, they began to come on herds of mammoths, great shaggy beasts that stood with dark shoulders high above the plains, painted tusks curling up and back toward their trunks. A band here, a band there.
Sometimes only a few with painted tusks, sometimes a hundred. Always the Hukm stood nearby in the shade of sprawling oaks, fingering massive clubs as they watched the strange party of humans, Pwi, the Dryad, and Hukm.
The group reached Sanctum at sunset. Only the skeleton of the city remained—eleven towers of Benbow glass forming countless beams. Two miles above the plain, the towers flared into wide platforms, each at distinct levels. The ruins of Sanctum sat on those platforms. The walls and floors had burned or rotted away, leaving only frames of incredibly thin and graceful towers, with arches hundreds of feet tall that often spilled off the platform. One could see where entire households had stood suspended above the plain.
Phylomon recalled the sense of security the city had given him as a child of six. He remembered watching from the windows as a gray storm swept over the plains below. During a tremendous lightning display, a pack of dire wolves separated a baby mammoth from its herd, and then hamstrung it. That was back when shuttles still flew between Anee and Falhalloran, their orbital space station; Phylomon had felt secure and powerful to be a Starfarer. He’d tried to imagine what it was like to be young mammoth, living on the dirty ground in a wild storm. Now he smiled at the memory. After so many hundred years living in the wild, he could not help but laugh at the naïve child he’d been.
The Hukm had gathered at Sanctum by the tens of thousands to begin their annual migration south, and upon the ruined crossbeams of the tower, young Hukm climbed and capered, hanging strips of colored cloth as pennants, hanging streamers of clam shells and painted wood chips. Many young Hukm carried small trumpets made of ox horn, and when they saw that the wagon drew close, they all sounded their horns in warning.
As the wagon came in, the Hukm gathered to sniff and bark at the humans and Neanderthals. Many Hukm had turned white, gaining their winter coats, and some swung war clubs threateningly overhead, but none dared touch Phylomon, for he was well known here. As the Hukm saw Tirilee they scurried away, for they feared the young Dryad. The cart pressed through the crowd, past stalls where Hukm traded oats and sugarcane, prunes and dried apples, rope and pumpkins. They were ushered to the tribal matriarch, Ironwood Woman, who wore a great necklace of thousands of intricately carved oak beads.
Phylomon was glad that she was willing to speak to him, for only by gaining the matriarch’s protection could his band remain safe among the wild Hukm.
She barked orders for her workers to lavish food on the party and to make up beds of leaves, instantly making Phylomon wary. He’d met Ironwood Woman several times, and she’d merely tolerated him—never had she been warm. She wanted something.
Phylomon passed through the evening as if in a dream, for he would look on the skeletons of the towers and see the shuttle port hanging in the sky as it had in his youth, see the city with its piercing lights shining silver above the plains.
When the group was fed and their beds laid, Ironwood Woman crawled to them, her wooden necklace clacking on the ground, bringing gifts of hazelnuts.
She bowed low to Phylomon, so that her snout touched the ground, then rose up and spoke in finger language.
Ironwood Woman warned him of Blade Kin outposts in the White Mountains, of the numbers of raiders patrolling each pass. She told him that there were more Blade Kin in the mountains than there had ever been before. “Sixteen thousand of us Fruit People died this summer,” Ironwood Woman told him gazing at the ground in reverence for the dead. “The traders from the south take tubes of glass from Benbow and sell them to Blade Kin. The Blade Kin make sticks of death, and kill us Fruit People.”
Phylomon shook his head at the loss. The Hukm were losing their long war. He promised, “I will go to Benbow this winter and hunt down the men who are selling rifle barrels to the Crawlies.”
Ironwood Woman warned him in finger language, “They kill us Fruit People from a long way off, but they do not see at night, so we kill them in the dark. Killing the men who sell glass is good. But we hope for more. Our legends tell of the times when you raided the strongholds of the Slave Lords.”
“That was many winters ago,” Phylomon said. “I have not raided their villages since before your grandmother was born. There are too many of them now.”
“If you lead our army, we will send fifty thousand warriors with you this winter. When ice freezes the ocean, we will cross to the islands of Bashevgo and kill the Pirate Lords in their sleep.”
Phylomon was stunned by the immensity of what she was asking. “That would be a great battle, and many slavers would die, but I fear that all your warriors would die in such an attack, too. In Bashevgo, they would all die.”
“I swear upon the bones of my foremothers,” Ironwood Woman said, “that if we do not destroy Bashevgo now, all the Fruit People will die, cowering in fear. We would rather die as hunters.”
Phylomon had seen the Hukm’s fighting tactics. They fought as they lived, wandering back and forth across the continent in caravans. They had no strongholds. They lacked military discipline. “Even if we destroy Bashevgo tomorrow,” Phylomon countered, “the lords of Craal have millions of people in the west. They would come back and fill it with men more evil than the ones we kill.”
“Bashevgo is on this side of the White Mountains,” Ironwood Woman said. “If we take Bashevgo, we will keep the east free for the Hukm and Pwi. We will capture their fire cannons. The lords of Craal could send their men to take Bashevgo, but if the free people of the Rough are there, we will destroy the armies of Craal.”
Phylomon felt astonished. Never had the Hukm fought beside humans and Pwi. Their hatred for other races was so old, so well known, that he doubted they could join such an army. Yet Ironwood Woman had made the offer. He remembered his history books from long ago. War and greed were the two legs that the industrial and technological revolutions had been founded on. For centuries he’d been trying to initiate a technological era, and here the opportunity presented itself. In Craal, technology was produced out of greed; in the Rough it grew because of the necessity of war.
“If you take the island of Bashevgo,” Phylomon said, “and you leave your Hukm to defend it, you will need food to last the winters. Also, you will need to learn to use the tools of the Slave Lords. You will need to learn how to run their generators that take power from the sea and sun. You will need to learn to maintain the fire cannons that protect their coast. You will need to learn to sail their ships. Are the Hukm ready to do this?”
“The Fruit People do not like to float on water,” Iron-wood Woman said. “We will bring food to our people when the ice freezes the ocean.”
“The ice does not freeze the ocean every year. You must learn to sail ships, just as the Pwi and the humans sail ships.”
“We do not like the water,” Ironwood Woman said.
“I won’t lead your army, unless your people learn to use the ships,” Phylomon countered, calculating how long it would take to prepare an attack. It was too late this year. Next winter at the earliest—two winters was better. Before he realized it, he was trapped. The very notion that he’d lead a raid on Bashevgo after four centuries was incredible. What had Chaa said? “If you go on this journey, you will not live three more years.” If Phylomon accepted this position, he’d set himself up to fulfill the prophecy in grand style. But it was worth it.
“We will learn to sail the ships,” Ironwood Woman said. She bent and slapped both hands on the ground, offering a Hukm oath, and the negotiations were done.
That night, Phylomon sat up with the Hukm and watched the sky. The Hukm seldom used fire, and so the night was clear. It was the season for the Festival of the Dragon—a yearly celebration of the start of winter. The hills were thick with dragons. Every night they flew high into the air, obeying a genetic impulse planted by the Starfarers long ago.
In ages past, the struggle of the upward climb killed the oldest dragons as they succumbed to weak hearts. But since the Eridani had sent their orbiting war-ships, the red drones, things had changed.
The red drones attacked the rising dragons, as if they were spaceships climbing into the sky. The drones shot the dragons down so that they dropped flaming from the sky. Ironwood Woman lay back and watched the sky, and Phylomon did too. This was sufficient cause for celebrating the Festival of the Dragon—to watch the dragons die.
One of the two warships reached its zenith at sundown and shone like a brilliant red comet. Several great-horned dragons flashed their leather wings as they soared in the moonlight. For hours the dragons climbed. Phylomon calculated that the red drones did not allow flight above fifteen thousand feet. As a dragon climbing under the cold autumn moon reached this ceiling, a finger of white light would shoot from the drone. Touched by flame, dragons fell like burning stars.
After several hours, Phylomon saw only three dragons fall. “When I was young,” he told the others, “more would die.”
“Ayaah,” Scandal said. “That’s a fact. My grandfather told me the same. The dragons don’t fly that high anymore.”
Phylomon lay and thought: if a genetically linked trait proved fatal, then it was less likely to be passed on. Someday, no dragons would ever fly above that fifteen-thousand foot ceiling. Their numbers would increase, and they would take a heavy toll on the megafauna as they foraged. The world was evolving in ways that the Starfarers had not intended.
All day, Phylomon had been considering a way to show Tull the power of Falhalloran. Now, he saw a way to show everyone. It was time to cull the dragons.
***