There were the armed monks on the walls. A small door within the large main gates was open and people were entering the garth through it. Outside was a great crowd, more streaming to join it all the time.
"You can't take them all," I said, stating the obvious.
"That's hardly the most pressing concern." He handed me some high-magnification binoculars and gestured to the southwest. "Look toward Munchen."
More refugees. The line seemed to reach to the horizon. The fueling depot for the shuttle rocket had been demolished and was a smoking crater. But there was something else. I edited out the drifting smoke and haze. Above the straggling humans was the red ovoid of a kzin war-machine.
"They're coming." I felt some malicious satisfaction. "The refugees are drawing them to you."
Yes, but they aren't attacking the refugees."
"I suppose they want to keep their meat fresh." I saw him flinch.
"What will you do?" I pressed him. It was sheer viciousness on my part, since there was so obviously nothing to be done. "You can't flee into the mountains or the swamp. And doesn't your church disapprove of suicide?"
"It is a great sin," he said, but his voice seemed abstracted and far away. "Condemned by solemn anathema from the days of the earliest councils."
"So what will you do?"
His momentary composure was gone again. If he was no longer weeping, there were beads of sweat running down his pasty brows to his face, and his voice shook. "What Pope Leo did." I had no idea what Pope Leo did. I stood silent, staring with loathing at this fat, frightened little man who I had once thought of as a teacher and friend. There was an old paper-knife by one of the books. I reminded myself that was pointless for me to kill him when I doubted I could give him a worse death than the Kzin would, but I hoped that I might live long enough to see him die. He beckoned me back to his study.
He opened a standing closet and began to pull things from it. I smelled a musty whiff of aged fabric preservative and noted it somewhere even at that moment.
He pulled the colored fabrics over his head and around his shoulders, dressing himself in stranger clothes than I had seen him wear before, flowing multicolored robes with a vaguely horned-like hat. He groped in the closet again and brought forth a peculiar carved rod with an ornate, curved handle. "I told you I am also a bishop," he said, as though that explained everything.
"Do you expect God to intervene? He's hardly been noticeable by his presence so far."
He did when Pope Leo stopped Attila the Hun from sacking Rome."
"How did he do that?"
"He asked him not to."
"You intend to ask them?"
"We have made some progress in understanding the kzin language," he said. "It cost my friends in the government nothing to send me the reports of its work in that direction, and several of the brothers are scholars.
"I could not try to speak the Kzin's language, but I have some words of their script." He showed me a cloth on which strange marks had been made in bright colours. "I have tried to keep it short and simple," he went on. "I was going to write: 'Spare this place!' However, if there is a word for 'spare' in that sense we haven't found it. 'We ask for mercy' has the same problem-no word for 'mercy.' I hope that what this says is: "This place is sacred."
"They do have a word for 'sacred'?" I said it trying to wound.
"Yes. I think so. There are some hopes riding on our translation being correct."
"You think that will deter them?"
"Can you think of anything better?"
I said nothing.
"Come with me."
"Why?"
"I don't think Pope Leo faced Attila alone. I've seen old pictures of that confrontation. They seem to respect courage. You have obviously been injured recently and if you are seen standing with me it may have some small effect."
I followed him. The monks cleared the way at the gate for us and we stepped out to meet the advancing kzin.
"Are you afraid?" I asked him.
"Yes. I have never been so afraid… Rykermann, please, don't leave me to face them alone." I hated him more than any living creature, but I stayed. I no longer cared what happened to me, and I know part of me wanted to see him die. But there was something else, too. I couldn't leave him, whitefaced, blue lips moving in prayer, as he stood there shaking and did not run.
The kzin warcraft drew nearer, and details became plainer. It was a huge thing, now plainly the familiar combinations of wedge and ovoid, with the bulges and turrets of weapons. None of the makeshift weapons-systems that Wunderland had put together in the preceding months was even remotely comparable in size or power. How helpless and pitiful it made the fleeing humans look! It could have destroyed them, and us, like ants. But the kzin were still not firing.
It seemed to swell in size as it drew closer yet. There was no spitting of dust and gravel beneath it as there would have been with a human ground-effect car. The machine even had a certain majesty in its power and size. The ripping-cloth sound grew. We could see armoured aliens behind translucent ports. It stopped. Like a scene from old fictions of alien first contact, a ramp was lowered. A kzin in ornate clothing and with an injured arm descended, followed by others less ornately dressed. The abbot held up his sign. I recognized the kzin: It was the only living one I had ever seen closely in the light. Did it recognize me? Its huge violet eyes held mine. It thrust its sidearm into its belt and raised two objects: one was the modem from the cave-habitat that linked to the locator implant in my arm. So that was how it had found me among the scattering hordes of human ants. Had I drawn it here? The other object was something smaller that I could not make out.
It ground out a distorted human word I recognized as "cave." Then it touched the belt it wore, the one that we had dropped to it. It placed the objects it held on the ground.
If the abbot could stand so could I. And some instinct told me it was better to stand and face this creature than either fall on my knees in supplication or turn to flee. Remembering the old game of "Tiger, Man, Gun," I folded my arms and puffed out my chest. In the game that had indicated I was a man, and proud of it, though in the game the tiger ate the man. Also, it gave me something to do with my arms. I felt that however the kzin interpreted the gesture, it could not be seen as too subservient, but could not be taken as a threat. We were plainly weaponless.
"Cave," I replied.
The kzin raised its huge sidearm and fired. But the bolt smashed into a derelict, abandoned ground-car that it evidently considered was an asset humans should not possess. Its gaze passed from me to the abbot and his sign. It opened its jaws and licked its black lips with a huge tongue.
I remembered a line from The War of the Worlds: "I was on the verge of screaming; I bit my hand." It seemed a good idea.
Then it turned and reentered the vehicle, the others following.
There was a long pause as we stood there, then the ramp retracted and the great warcraft rose and turned away, back toward the city. Its guns fired two or three times, picking off vehicles and bits of machinery. We heard a confused clamoring of voices from the monastery and the crowd of refugees. "We must give thanks," said the abbot. "We have been granted a miracle." There was puzzlement more than anything else in his expression and voice. He seemed to be trying to come to terms with a completely new and strange problem. His hand fluttered to his chest. "I have been allowed to live to see a miracle."
I was not so sure. It seemed to me likely that, with the war plainly all but won, the kzin must be thinking of preserving the human population for their own purposes. I did not even think then that the kzin had sought me out specially: It had merely wanted to know where all the humans were heading for, and the monastery was the last place before the swamp and sea and mountains where they could gather. But all the same, things might have gone very differently.