The Days of Glory Page 2

  Stormwind discovered without alarm that he had lost his men, and even Saul Slavesdream, who was never usually far from his side, had been swept away by the dissipation of the Beast charge. He contemplated dropping back to a safer position, but he was in no immediate danger. Eagle-heart and Skywolf had plunged their men deeper than he, and the bulk of the Human resistance was concentrated against them.

  Stormwind decided to exploit what cover there was available and await the battle being carried to him. He made for a low but steep bank of earth to his right, and discovered that quite a number of his followers had taken advantage of it. The nearest Human ship was some distance away, and close fighting raged around it. No one took the trouble to fire on Stormwind’s small group.

  Unfortunately for the Beasts’ assault the sun was setting. Stormwind was pleased to see it. He was thinking more of retreat than of attack, and darkness would provide cover. The setting sun, of course, was purely fortuitous: Eagle-heart had not known where he would find the Human fleet.

  Stormwind led his men around from cover to cover, not penetrating deeply into the Human camp, but doing their best to put sufficient pressure on the Humans to relieve Eagleheart’s withdrawal, which had now got under way. He cut off a large force of Humans who were manning a ridge facing outwards from their camp, which was subject to some light fire from the direction of the Beast ships. That fire was just sufficient to engage their attention so that they missed Stormwind’s flanking movement. When they finally did see him, they charged. There were a few moments of stinging retaliation, and grass all over the ridge burst into flame. The Humans outnumbered Stormwind’s group, who began to ran, but the fight was evened up by the retreating Beasts.

  Stormwind joined the retreat and the Humans disappeared from sight. Clouds blotted out the stars and the twilight died. The fight was dying with it as the Beasts ran and the Humans let them go.

  A few searchlights mounted on the Human ships probed to expose the retreating Beasts to sniper fire, but they were too few and not very powerful. They helped the Beasts more than hindered them by showing them the way home.

  Stormwind was moving quickly, but not running. Even so he stumbled badly as he crossed what he had thought to be a patch of bare ground, and at least two other bodies hit him with dull thuds. A confusion of shadows was all that was visible, but they attacked him, and Stormwind assumed that they were Humans. There was still just enough light to enable him to kill one with his sword, but the other retaliated with a flash of rifle fire. It missed the Beast lord, and it attracted a hungry searchlight. Stormwind ran away, hoping that the Human with the rifle would not be able to see him. The pool of light from the searchlight passed close by, but missed him completely. It hung around, though, and he turned to the right to get away from it.

  A man passed close by him, running, and he could hear the sound of a fight close by.

  He moved toward the sound, and then dived to duck the searchlight as it roamed in his direction again. As he got up again, the light found the fight and paused. He saw that four Lemurides and an Urside were involved in a tussle with a lone Human and a girl. What the girl was doing there, he could only guess. Superbly accurate rifle fire from fairly close by cut down two of the Lemurides. The other Beasts contrived to overpower the Human, but the girl was pulling at the shoulder of one of the Lemurides. Abruptly, he fell backwards, spouting blood from a stab wound in his back. But the Human soldier was dead by now, and the girl ran.

  She came straight into Stormwind’s arms and practically knocked herself out as their heads bumped. The searchlight had begun to move again as both the remaining Beasts had taken flight, and Stormwind simply grabbed the girl and ran.

  He was not sure why he did it. He could have offered no reasoned excuse, nor even explained his feelings.

  It was a terrible mistake.

  SOME BACKGROUND INFORMATION

  Moonglow of Amia, as he is remembered, was an old man with a wrinkled face, white hair and violet eyes.

  The universe owes him a great debt. He saw a great deal of the future, and he helped to build what he saw. Although he was never absolutely sure whether he was right to do it, he did everything in his power to implement the plan of Adam December, who conceived the galactic civilization of Beasts and Humans.

  Adam December was the Human behind the building of the Beasts. It was he who told the construct surgeons to make animals into men and mass produce colonists for the newly opened starworlds. It was he who told them which genes to use, and told the psychosurgeons what characters to infuse into the men the genetic engineers built.

  But it was Moonglow of Amia, himself a Canide, who really made the Beasts into what Adam December intended them to be. He taught them to live in the way they had been designed to live. He taught them to think in the way they had been made to think. He showed them what they were and taught them to be content with it. He captivated the Beasts with his words and ideas, and they loved him and listened to him.

  Moonglow of Amia conceived the idea of the individual reflected by his environment. He saw each person living in a world which reacted according to certain patterns whose nature and determinism was defined by the identity of the person concerned. He saw his own world as a pattern of internal stimulus and external reaction, and he identified the reactions which the world gave to his stimuli. He taught the Beasts to look for the reaction patterns to their own identities, and showed them how to live in the way which would produce the most favorable reactions. He made the Beasts recognize, acknowledge, and accept precisely how they fitted into the scheme of things devised by Adam December.

  Even the Humans listened to Moonglow of Amia. They began to study the world in the ways he had discovered. They found that they fitted Adam December’s ideal civilization as well, which demonstrated how right Adam December had been.

  Moonglow of Amia, working with Adam December’s ideas, was directly responsible for ten thousand years of peace and balance. But he knew, and so did Adam December, that it could not last forever. Genes mutate, and races evolve. Eventually there would arise men whose worldly reaction patterns did not fit the carefully designed galactic civilization. Moonglow knew that these misfits would eventually bring the era he had made to an end.

  And eventually, there was bom a misfit called Eagle-heart, and a man called Heljanita the Toymaker…

  EAGLEHEART

  Ralph Eagleheart is the wrong man at the wrong time.

  His existence is an accident of chance. It would not matter that he exists, if it were not for the fact that Heljanita also exists, and that Richard Stormwind exists, and David Starbird, and Starcastle of Home, and Mark Chaos—and probably others as well.

  But everything interacts, and so Ralph Eagleheart becomes the most important man alive. The others are necessary, but Eagleheart is the driving force behind the whole thing. Eagleheart is the man with the dream. Even Heljanita, the mover behind the scenes, the man with the crooked wheel which sends dreams to men, would be powerless without Eagleheart. The dreams of the hypnotic wheel are nowhere near as powerful as Eagleheart’s dreams.

  Ralph Eagleheart is a man concerned with the what and not the why. He is interested in positions and not relationships. He recognizes mass and shape, but not balance. He interprets, but not in any real sense. His interpretations are mystical in character: symbols and rituals, visions and likenesses. It is a dangerous combination of traits; it can make murderers and madmen. Eagleheart is a murderer, but not a madman.

  He fits the part of an important man insofar as visual appearance is a criterion. His hair is dull but very neat, his small beard quaint but dignified. His eyes are indigo, his lips thin and hawkish, his voice magnetic and inspiring. His maimer is authoritative.

  The voice and the manner give him power over other men—over Beasts at least. He has the power to alter what he sees by persuasion and command. His mystic mind distorts his values, so that certain aspects of his world are swollen out of all proportion, become obsessions. It is
no fault of his. He is not insane. It is just that the right stimuli do not produce the right reactions. He is different.

  The mark of the Beast on his hands and his neck has become the focus of his destructive urge and phantasmagorical dreams. The House of Stars has become a symbol for his hatred, an objective for conquest.

  He understands symbols, and knows how to use them. He makes a symbol out of the war, a symbol out of Storm-wind. He impresses the consciousness of the mark of the Beast, and the image of Beast unity and Human opposition on the mind of every Beast.

  He uses the war, and he will get what he wants from it. He will fulfill his dreams. But he will die soon after. He does not know people as individuals. Even those who are close to him are only pieces in his game of fantasy chess. Once he was responsible for the death of his own daughter, but he does not feel remorse. Her memory simply passed into his dreams as yet another goad to bloodshed and slaughter, another pawn of guilt and anguish.

  He will be killed, in time, by his wife, never guessing why or even asking. It is an act of retribution and hatred. It is inevitable. Ralph Eagleheart will always be a misfit: he is a destroyer and not a builder. He can tear down the House of Stars, but he can put nothing in its place.

  He applies the stimulus of death to his world, and it reacts by destroying him.

  ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE GALAXY

  Heljanita the Toy maker stared at the machine which had brought him here. It was tall and many sided, with walls of polished steel. Its base was wide and solid, and cables ran from behind it to a place in the comer of the room where they plunged away to the center of the planet.

  He looked through the machine, and saw a thousand dying suns waning dim red amid tbe leaden grey skies of a thousand dead planets whose lands were coal black with age and decay. It was his dream, the dreams of Heljanita, architect of dreams.

  He rose from his chair and walked up along spiral staircase which ended just to the right of the chair. He went right up into the roof of his castle, and looked out through the great dome of glass. It was snowing hard, and the snow collected in sheets on the outside of the curved glass. The sheets crept slowly across from right to left, propelled by the high wind, until they collected at the point where the curvature hid them from the clawing fingers of the blizzard.

  He could not see the stars; he could not even see the crags and lifeless mountains which adorned his cold world- seventh planet of an ailing sun. He was alone with the snow and his toys.

  He glanced down at the small workship where his toys were laboriously created. Once, when he had been less tired, he had made them at the rate of one a month, but it was much slower now. The construction was boring, and he was approaching the strength he needed. Also, there had been other work which required his personal attention.

  He had planned and weighed. He had planned the war between Beast and Human in far greater detail than Eagle-heart. He had none of Eagleheart’s failings, none of Chaos’s doubts, none of Starcastle’s weaknesses. He had confidence in his interpretation of the situation. He knew what would happen because he had made it happen, and he would help it on its way a little, if he thought it needed it.

  Everything which his plan required was in his hands to be balanced and juggled. The armies were bis puppets, the Beast lords and the Human lords his pawns. He played the game against chance, and perhaps against an enemy as well. So far it had gone all his own way. It would continue to do so until well after the House of Stars was conquered.

  One of his toys was ascending the staircase. It was a tall, thin creature of bright metal, shining by reflected light. It was a parody of a Human or a Beast, with long sleek limbs that had no joints but bore small, delicate metal hands and feet. Its waist tapered, and its chest was decorated with metal whorls which suggested nipples. Its eyes—which really were electronic eyes—were slanted and red. Its nose was functionless, but its ears carried an electronic auditory system. The mouth did not open any more than a few millimetres, but it was enough to permit lucid speech. The toy came up the stairs with an easy, flowing gait—more comfortable than a Human or a Beast. Even cats did not move as smoothly as that.

  Heljanita was proud of his toys.

  “Everything is ready,” said the toy in a silky, musical voice. Even songbirds had not voices as sweet as those of Heljanita’s toys.

  Heljanita descended the staircase without speaking. He passed through the workshop into another room, a smaller room with a series of slit windows, through which nothing could be seen but slanting snowflakes.

  There was a large instrument like a church organ built into the wall of the room, with power cables running away out of the room to join those of the machine. There was a screen built into the face of the instrument, a screen which showed blurs and sparks of light occasionally, like visual static.

  Heljanita sat down and watched the screen. It cleared and became a mirror, showing him a picture of a man with dark skin, eyes of the darkest possible brown, hair of pitch black. His nose was large and hooked, his cheeks drawn in tightly beneath his cheekbones. His jaw was too deep, making his face look very long. It was not a handsome face, but it was a distinguished face, an aristocratic face.

  He lifted his head a little, and the base of his neck became clearly visible. There was no crux ansata inscribed in the flesh. He did not bear the mark of the Beast.

  He moved his fingers over the keyboard of the instrument, and the image changed. There was darkness, and a twinkling as though of stars. The power cables sucked energy from the molten core of the planet as he manipulated the keys. The screen began to shift and spin. It was as though he were looking into the crooked wheel with which he built his dreams. But he was not making anything now. He was listening—listening to all the myriad messages which flicked through the galaxy in no time at all on high-omega waves. Irrespective of the frequency, he absorbed them all into his mind at one and the same time, and his entranced mind assimilated them all.

  Heljanita listened to the galaxy and planned its future.

  STORMWIND

  Vanity is the key to Stormwind. (A proud man is a man who knows the worth of his actions. A vain man is a man who thinks that all his actions are worthwhile.)

  Richard Stormwind is tall, dark-skinned and handsome, with penetrating grey eyes which seem never to relax. The eyes are always accusing, but even the man himself is never quite sure what they accuse people of, and it is probably Stormwind who is the guilty one.

  Stormwind is an introspective man, immeasurably more concerned with meanings and relationships than with material things. He is arrogant and emotional. He resents being questioned, and he resents even more being ignored. He is passionately self-assertive.

  His calloused view of the world relates to his childhood. The son of the lord of Sabella, he was raised away from his parents, on the neighboring world of Vespa. His early years were lonely, and he formed a devoted and unhealthy friendship with the son of the lord of Vespa, a younger and more delicate child named Saul Slavesdream. The friendship was too close, and became a fixation in an attempt to compensate for the absolute lack of other attachments. He developed a strange attitude to women, bom of the fact that he saw none of them until adolescence. At the first available opportunity he fell in love with one he saw only at a distance. (Even then, one of Stormwind’s most tragic faults was to fill any gap in his world as totally and as quickly as possible.) The girl he saw was Astarte of Home, the elder daughter of Starcastle. Richard Stormwind never discovered why Astarte was on Vespa at that time, and it is even possible that the girl he saw was not Astarte. He was convinced of her identity and that was all that mattered.

  The one yawning gap in his world which could not be filled for a long time, and tested his patience badly, was his ambition to return to his own world of Sabella as the Beast lord of the world. Although there was never any question, as far as any other person was concerned, that he was lord of Sabella once his father was dead, and there was never any attempt to keep him from his i
nheritance, he developed a jealous and possessive attitude toward his heritage. This later led to his defending both his position and his fragile honor with an excessive fervor which gained him a powerful reputation in the arena.

  Stormwind is always acutely conscious of what he thinks he is, and who he imagines himself to be. His biting inner need to defend himself from the most harmless criticism makes him a man to be feared, but his fastidious honesty and fighting ability make him a man to be respected and admired as well. Even so, the image of Stormwind the hero which the Beast nations adopted, and which Eagleheart later used with such great effect, is hardly justified. It is even possible to despise Richard Stormwind, for his many weaknesses. But this would be unfair. He may not be the perfect man, but he is a great one, and this is his story.

  INITIATION OF A CHAIN OF EVENTS

  An hour after the sun rose on Diadema, Ralph Eagle-heart walked slowly through the Beast camp from his own ships to those of the Ursides. He stopped beside the ship of Richard Stormwind and asked a member of the crew to fetch him.

  The lord of Sabella appeared a few moments later, and waited for the Beast commander to speak.

  “Lord Stormwind,” said Eagleheart smoothly, in a loud, clear voice which could be heard for some distance, “I believe that you have a Human aboard your ship.”

  Stormwind still remained silent, waiting for Eagleheart to say something else.

  Eagleheart was waiting as well, but when he realized that Stormwind was not going to bother with a reply, he continued. “I ask that you surrender the Human to me. You are—perhaps unwittingly—harboring an enemy of the Beast fleet.”