A Wizard In War
Christopher Stasheff
ISBN: 0-812-53649-5
1
Dicea didn’t hear the knight approaching until it was too late—even though he was laughing and joking with his men-at arms—so she was tardy turning her face to the wall, and the knight espied her. “Hola! Come here, pretty lass!” he cried, but Dicea shrank away, eyes wide. “Fetch her, Barl,” he ordered one of his men, and the soldier came, grinning and reaching out for Dicea, who cried out and tried to push herself back into the wall, forearms up to shield her torso, face down in her fists.
Anger tore through her brother, Coll. He jumped between Dicea and the soldier and cracked a fist into his jaw. The man gave one surprised grunt—after all, serfs never fought back—and slumped, eyes rolling up.
The knight turned scarlet on the instant and shouted, “Kill him!” He, too, knew that serfs couldn’t be allowed to fight back.
Four soldiers came at Coll. Panic seized him; he knew his only chance was to kill them first. He leaped on the foremost soldier and swung high, but the soldier was ready to block now, so Coll kicked his feet out from under him and seized his spear as he fell, twisting it from his grasp. He slashed with it at the soldiers. They leaped back in surprise and caution, knowing what that honed edge could do and how little use leather armor might be against it. Then they reddened and shouted, but Coll had just time enough to stab downward and kill the fallen soldier.
The knight shouted in rage, and his men echoed him, charging. Coll leaped to meet them, parrying the thrust of the soldier on the right, then stabbing him in the belly, just as though his spear were the butt of a quarterstaff. Serfs weren’t supposed to know how to fight with staves, but Coll and a few friends had practiced in secret. Now he turned on the middle soldier, stabbing upward. The man parried, beating Coll’s spear down—and Coll leaped in and cracked a fist into his chin.
The knight bellowed in anger as he saw a third man fall and spurred his horse. The charger surged forward; Coll barely managed to sidestep in time, and the rest of the soldiers came at his back.
“Behind you!” Dicea called, and Con turned just in time to dodge their charge, then slash at one of them with his spear. The knight turned his horse and came charging back, blood in his eye, intent on running Coll down.
“Flee!” his sister cried, tears in her eyes. “Oh, Coll, flee!”
Every cell in his body screamed to stay and fight, but the knight was slashing down with his sword, and sense forced its way through the haze of Colt’s rage. He leaped aside at the last second, then dodged between the peasant huts. The knight swerved to follow him, and ragged serfs stopped watching the spectacle to scramble for cover. But Coll ran a zigzag route between huts, then sprinted madly over the patch of cleared ground between the village and the woods, hearing the hooves of doom pound closer and closer behind him, imagining he could feel the charger’s hot breath on his neck. He made it into the woods ten feet ahead of the horse, though and dodged and twisted among the trees, knowing he was safe now, if not for long.
Behind him, the knight cursed as he reined in, sheering away from underbrush that was too thick for his horse. “Run, fool, run!” he bellowed. “You’ll make fine sport for the count and his knights, better than any deer! We’ll track you down and spit you like the swine you are!”
Coll ran, turning and twisting through the wood, cursing himself for a fool indeed. He had killed two soldiers, and the hunt would be on for him in earnest; the knights for miles around would gather in high spirits to track down the insolent serf who had dared strike a knight’s soldier. He had let his temper, and the anxiety that had driven him to protect his little sister, make him a dead man or, at best, an outlaw—if he managed to outsmart and outrun the knights and their hounds—and all for nothing! The knight would have Dicea after all, and would probably rape her brutally in revenge on her brother, instead of the more gentle forcing that, with men of his rank, passed for seduction—and Coll’s life was forfeit, if anyone managed to catch him.
Coll resolved to make sure they never would.
Dirk Dulaine glanced at the ship’s viewscreen in disgust. “This is how you go about choosing which planet’s people to help next? Sheer random chance?”
“Not ‘sheer.’ ” Magnus d’Armand looked up from the navigation tank across the ship’s bridge, at his friend. “I eliminated all the planets that do have firm standards of civil rights, after all.”
“Oh, fine! So you cut down the size of the pool to only those planets that do need help! And what did you do after that? Take the nearest one! Why didn’t you just throw dice, or put the names of the planets on a dart board?”
“How would you recommend I choose, then?”
“Oh, I don’t know … Maybe you could prioritize, for example?”
“An interesting thought!” Magnus stroked his chin, gazing off into space. “By what criteria should we prioritize? The degree of oppressiveness of the government?”
“Sounds good. How can you determine it?”
“A nice question. Historically, some governments have been more oppressive than others. An unchecked aristocracy, for example, tends to allow more individual exploitation than a monarchy. A king tends to keep the noblemen in check to some degree, at least, and a person wronged by his lord can apply to the Ring’s justice if he feels unjustly treated. The Roman dictatorships certainly had the potential for great abuse, but in actuality, the dictator was held in check by his fellow patricians, especially in the Senate. And the Greek tyrants, of course…”
“All right! All right! You’ve made your point!” Dirk threw up his hands. “We could debate all day and still be wrong! Any form of government could be balanced by local factors.”
“Oh, I’m not saying it wouldn’t take a lot of thought,” Magnus protested. “It would be worth it, though, if it brought us first to the ones who needed us most.”
“Yeah, but while we’re taking a year or two thrashing it out, thousands of people could be dying on the planet we finally decided to help. I see what you’re doing—better to save some now than none eventually, even if they’re not the ones who need it most.”
“Need it most? Yes, maybe we could do it that way!” Magnus clapped his hands, smiling with delight. “An index of human misery! That shouldn’t be terribly hard to compile. Herkimer, show us examples of human misery.”
An hour later, Dirk, pale and trembling, laid down his notepad and stylus. “I surrender. If my planet had had to wait for you to work your way down this list of sheer human degradation, you wouldn’t have made it to us for another five generations.”
“But your idea does have some merit to it.” Magnus looked a bit feverish himself. “There has to be some way to say which of these poor human scraps are more miserable than the others!”
“I can’t see much difference in the treatment this last dozen are getting from their lords,” Dirk contradicted. “They’re all living like animals in huts made of leftovers from the harvest, freezing in winter, soaking or parboiling in summer, and half starving all year round. They’re dying of scurvy and beriberi and half a dozen other vitamin deficiencies; their brains are only half grown due to infant malnutrition. Their lords drive them to work with whips and scourges, rape the few pretty girls they produce, and punish the slightest sign of rebellion with torturous deaths that I can’t call barbaric only because I don’t want to insult the barbarians! Just take one of them at random, Magnus, please! We’ve got to get some of these poor bastards out of their misery, or I’ll never sleep nights again!”