Avram Davidson: The Kar-Chee Reign

“Well, that’s what we’ve seen the Devils doing. We’ve seen the dragons bring in men, one at a time, and the other dragons and the Kar-chee form a circle, do you see? Then begins the baiting, the sport, the play, the torture, call it whatever you want. The dragon picks up the man and tosses and worries him the way a dog might do with a rat. But the dragon is careful at first not to kill the man, as the cat is careful not to kill the mouse. It even drops the man and lets it try to escape. But there is no escape!

“The Kar-chee strike the man down when he tries to get away from the circle they’ve made around him. The Kar-chee drive the man back. And then the dragon begins to work on him again. Teeth and claw, claw and teeth… We’ve seen it; we’ve all seen it.”

Duro said, “We’ve seen it.”

Tom said, “Yes. We all saw it.”

And Rickar, in a low, low voice, grinding his teeth: “We saw it. We did see it. I saw it, too.”

The crowd groaned. Mother Nor moistened her lips. “If you all did, then there is no need for imagining or making believe, is there? But this is only another form of punishment, of the punishment the Devils inflict upon men for violating the practice of justice and equity. My husband would never say differently, of that I am sure.” She took her son by his arms. He looked at her now, his face still fixed in that dreadful grimace. “Rickar, tell me now— where is your father? ”

“In Hell,” he said.

There was a long silence. “He followed us down, he and Lej, not to help me get out, but to see that I never got out. It was better, he thought, for me to die so that he could still say that he was right all along than for me to get out and prove that he was wrong all along—”

“No, Rickar. My son, no—”

“And then they were all aroused, all the Kar-chee Devils, and they started after us all, and we fled — we fled — my friends who’d risked their lives to save me — but they didn’t flee, Father and Lej didn’t flee, no, not they. They stayed behind, you know that? They stayed behind to preach a sermon to the Devils to tell the Devils how right they were and how wrong we were and they urged the Devils on after us—

“But the Devils didn’t take us! The Devils took them! And they screamed — and they screamed— and we could hear them screaming! ”

And he threw back his head and he screamed himself, again and again and again, and then he pitched forward and fell upon his face with his eyes rolled up, and his mother knelt and gathered him in her arms and soothed him and cradled him and murmured, over and over again, “My son, my son… My son, my son…” She must have realized that she had lost her husband forever — and in his person not her husband alone but her leader, the guide of her life in its spiritual and communal aspects, the head of her people — and under circumstances the most cruel: cruel in the physical circumstances of her loss, and perhaps more cruel in that if his teachings were correct, as she had always implicitly believed, then he himself had been a sinner whom she had always deemed to be righteous, and, if his teachings had not been correct then he had lived and died in folly — and in a void and a chaos all his followers were now to find themselves.

And in the night the alarm was sounded and the cry arose. “Dragons! Dragons! Devils! Devils! Dragons! Dragons! ” The people rose up from their slumber and their beds and heaped wood upon the fire and then, confused, in terror and concern, milled around, uncertain of anything except their own fear and the very uncertainty which perhaps terrified them as much.

Liam had not lain down. He and his friends had eaten and had then talked themselves to sleep. He awoke to find his knees wet with the sweat of his face and had a confused recollection of having thus fitfully slumbered, half-sitting, half-crouching. He was afterward never altogether sure if he had seen the dragons, there, at the perimeter of the camp, upreared and immense in the firelight and the moonlight; or if the image had been nothing else than a vision of the night, a creation of the obscurity and uncertain illumination, the dream from he had been ripped, the fears which pressed in and down upon him.

But the dragons had certainly been there. And they had flung their monstrous message into the enemy camp, the camp of men, and then retreated into the mists and darks from which they had come.

Message?

Messages!

Stones flung into an ant-heap were nothing in the creation of panic and swarming and fleeing compared to this. And to wonder. Liam saw the things as they came flying through the air and thudded upon the ground and bounced and flapped and then lay still; he saw this, but did not then in that split instant of fire-flickered and moon-silvered time see clearly enough to recognize it. It was not very long, though, before the ground was clear enough of people — screaming, maddened, gone off into the darkness — for him to venture out and over. And there he saw full clearly what was there, and for the first time in all this long sequence of events he felt something as close to guilt as he ever came to it. He had not felt it in Britland, leading his followers to (as he had thought) safety and the sea; he had not felt it in the raft, not even when famine and thirst and death had laid heavy hands upon it; but he felt something like it now—

“Gaspar…” It was Tom who spoke, in a stifled, sickened tone.

And Lors, his mouth stiff, made the second identification. “Lej, too…”

Duro said nothing. Rickar began to weep. Liam looked. He knew what he was seeing, and he knew immediately why he was seeing it. It had been his idea to flay the two dead Kar-chee and use their cortices for stalking-horses. The other Kar-chee had been intent on carrying away Rickar: true. But they had certainly been aware that two of their number had been slain by men. Yet neither then nor afterward had they seemed particularly concerned. And when that dreadful and strident Kar-chee alarm had been raised by the discovering one in the great cylindrical pit, he holding the flayed integument of one of the two over the rim of the ramp so that all the others could see, and when the shrill sound had come, repeating, echoing, prolonged, from (seemingly) everyone of the other Kar-chee there — when they had abandoned their works of repairs and poured upward in pursuit—

Even then Liam had somehow assumed that it was only the death of their fellows which had aroused and concerned them, and nothing more.

But now, looking down, his heart pounding violently, his mouth filled with a sick taste and the muscles of his jaw and stomach stiffened against nausea, the sounds of panic around the camp transmuted into a clamoring buzz; now, as he gazed upon the meticulously flayed skins of Gaspar and of Lej, skins which contained no bodies — now, at last, he knew better.

What synapses had been sparked or set in motion by the Kar-chee discovery of what men had done to those two Kar-chee, what reflexes or reactions set off, what deep instincts or emotions roused, Liam did not and probably forever could not know; but he could and did know that they had been exceedingly great. Some faint hypothesis occurred to him: perhaps only by this act of his and his friends had the Kar-chee suddenly or finally been convinced that the race of mankind was an intelligent race capable of intelligent i.e. malign i.e. dangerous action; not merely any longer stinging ants or biting dogs…

But this was speculation and nothing more; it was not facts. The facts lay before them — the empty husks which had once covered Gaspar and Lej.

“This cannot go on,” someone said. “This cannot be endured. If it can be done to Gaspar and to Lej, then no one is safe.”