Ezzard answered: “There is not a farmer in the land who has not been guilty of the same sin. Who is to tell how many horns a cow had when it is carcass meat? I was on safe ground in condemning him.”
“And my father—he told me he obeyed your orders because it was through you he heard my mother’s voice after she was dead. Was this a trick also?”
“In part, but he heard her voice. Through another machine of our ancestors. Words are trapped on something like a ribbon, which can be cut and put together again so that the words make a message that one chooses.”
A new and terrible thought came. “My mother’s death . . .”
Lanark shook his head. “That was not our doing. We cannot control everything as was shown by Jeremy’s capture of the city. We made use of it to help bind your father to us. But it was a blow all the same, a bitter blow. It turned your half brother against you. Because of that Ezzard had to flee with you and bring you here.”
“Your plan had failed already when Jeremy took the city.”
“Not failed. We could have worked on him. He would have let you be Prince in your father’s place, thinking you a boy and powerless.”
I said angrily: “Do you think I would have taken it from his bloody hands?”
“If Ezzard had shown you a hope of revenge at the end, you would. You are a good hater.”
I knew it was true. I said:
“But it was all for nothing. Peter has the city and I am here in exile. So you have failed after all.”
Lanark shook his head. “We have lost one battle, but there will be more. While you live you are still the Prince in Waiting.”
“An empty promise,” I said, “from Spirits that do not exist.”
“Not just that,” Lanark said. “A hope also, the hope of living men.”
• • •
In the weeks that followed I learned many things. About polymufs, for instance. The word came from an older one, meaning of many shapes. Such freaks of nature had increased after the Disaster and it was thought they were caused by strange radiations from the sun, probably the same which were believed to have reawakened the earth’s deep fires. Some, like the dwarfs, bred true, but most did not. In civilized lands men had done their best to extirpate all the freaks among animals, but mothers would not let their babies be killed. So they were allowed to live, the dwarfs as a race apart, the polymufs as servants to normal men. In the savage countries, beyond the Burning Lands, there was no control and misshapenness ran riot.
I learned about the Seers. This was not the only nor the most important Sanctuary. There was another in the ruins of the great-city which had been called London. They told me it had stretched over more than six hundred square miles and eight million people had lived in it: figures so great that one could not imagine the reality. The Seers had found a place, under the rubble, where the wisdom of the ancients was stored in books, and they quarried there for knowledge.
I learned something of that knowledge myself: not much, for my mind was not equipped to grasp it. My purpose, as they told me, was different: to help create the conditions in which knowledge could be brought from hiding and the cities made safe against the sea of barbarism which lapped all round and otherwise must rise and drown them.
And I saw the machines which could do things more marvelous than anything that had been supposed to be done by the Spirits. Machines for seeing and listening at a distance, machines that could propel a carriage ten times faster than a team of horses could pull it, machines that could detect metal under the earth, that could chill meat and keep its sweetness without salting throughout a summer, that could show strange beasts living inside the smallest drop of water . . . a score and more of wonders.
And one day burly Murphy showed me something called an induction furnace. He explained how it worked, through this power that was called electricity. He said:
“It case-hardens steel. You get a hard surface such as no ordinary forge could produce.”
I nodded, partly understanding him. He said:
“You left the jeweled sword you won at the Contest behind you, Luke. But do you remember that one day I promised you a sword of the Spirits? Even though there are no Spirits, you will have the sword: we shall make it here and I promise you no sword made by dwarfs will notch it. It will shatter anything that comes against it, if your right hand is strong enough.”
“When?” I asked. “When will you make the sword?”
“When it is time.”
“But how long will that be? I am tired of living underground, with no wind, no sunlight, no day or night except what we make ourselves.”
“We are all tired of it,” Murphy said, “but we must wait. There is a moment for striking: too soon or too late and we fail. And if we fail, all hope is gone. You must learn patience, Luke.”
He clapped a hand on my shoulder and I nodded unwilling assent. I itched to be on a horse riding through the meadows beneath St. Catherine’s Hill, to see the walls of Winchester looming high before me. But he was right, and impatience was at least more easily borne than despair. The time might be long delayed, but the time would come.
Read on for a peek at the next book in the series!
THE SANCTUARY ITSELF LAY IN empty downland; ordinary men did not dare approach such a holy place. The nearest habitation was at Amesbury in the Avon Valley, three miles to the east, and it was there that the white horses were kept, on which the High Seers, when they had reason to travel abroad, would ride forth. The horses were housed in the stables of the Seer of Amesbury, who at the proper time gave orders to the grooms to have them saddled and made ready for the journey.
To the townspeople this was evidence of the magic of the Spirits which was at the Seer’s command. For how, except by magic, could the Seer of Amesbury know when the High Seers required their mounts? No messenger had come across the empty land to the west, and the Seer had no pigeons. Plainly the Spirits had brought him word in the hushed darkness of the Seance Hall where the Seer and his Acolytes conducted their devotions.
Such was the townspeople’s belief and the Seers were happy to encourage it. In fact communication was by radio. The main transmitter was underground in the Sanctuary, with a cunningly concealed wire leading to an aerial on top of one of the huge monoliths that stood in a broken circle above. The subsidiary set was in a heavily locked room in the Seer’s House to which only the Seer and his chief Acolyte had the key. Because radios, of course, were machines, and machines were forbidden by the Spirits, anyone building or using one was punishable by death. This was by the command of the Seers themselves.
My initial shock at learning the truth about the Seers had been great, but during the months in which I had lived in the Sanctuary I had grown accustomed to it. I had come there from Winchester where, following my father’s treacherous murder by the Prince of Romsey, my half-brother Peter had won back the city and claimed the title of Prince. It was I, Luke, who, though younger, had been my father’s heir, named as Prince in Waiting by the Spirits and promised great glory when the time came for me to rule. The blow of learning that the Spirits, since they did not exist, could not keep their promises had been bitter. Instead the High Seers unfolded what was, they said, a higher mission.
We lived in the ruins of a world that had once been great. Men thought our ancestors had shattered the planet with the machines which were now forbidden. This was not so. The disaster that took place had been a natural one. The earth had heaved itself up in earthquakes and volcanoes and at the same time the sun had poured forth radiations which altered the pattern of living things, creating strange plants and animals—polybeasts—and often causing men and women to be born misshapen. In civilized lands beasts and plants were destroyed if they did not breed true. Human children were permitted to live but, if they were not true men, were called dwarf or polymuf. The dwarfs were a breed apart and respected as craftsmen. Polymufs might have any manner of deformity; they lived as servants and could hold no property.