Robert Silverberg - Defenders of the Frontier

But these are not threatening eyes. Obviously the man had been asleep, and he is still making the journey back into wakefulness as he comes forth from his shelter, blinking, shaking his head. He is trembling, too. He is one man and we are four, and we have weapons drawn and he is unarmed, and he has been taken by surprise. It is an unfortunate way to start one’s day. I am amazed to find my anger giving way to something like pity.

He is given little time to comprehend the gravity of his situation. “Bastard!” Sergeant says, and takes three strides forward. Swiftly he thrusts his knife into the man’s belly, withdraws it, strikes again, again.

The blue eyes go wide with shock. I am shocked myself, in a different way, and the sudden cruel attack leaves me gasping with amazement. The stricken enemy staggers, clutches at his abdomen as though trying to hold back the torrent of blood, takes three or four tottering steps, and falls in a series of folding ripples. There is a convulsion or two, and then he is still, lying face downward.

Sergeant kicks the entrance of the shelter open and peers within. “See if there’s anything useful in there,” he tells us.

Still astounded, I say, “Why did you kill him so quickly?”

“We came here to kill him.”

“Perhaps. But he was unarmed. He probably would have given himself up peacefully.”

“We came here to kill him,” Sergeant says again.

“We might have interrogated him first, at least. That’s the usual procedure, isn’t it? Perhaps there are others of his kind somewhere close at hand.”

“If there were any more of them around here,” Sergeant says scornfully, “Seeker would have told us, wouldn’t he have? Wouldn’t he have, Surveyor?”

There is more that I would like to say, about how it might have been useful or at any rate interesting to discover why this man had chosen to make this risky pilgrimage to the edge of our territory. But there is no point in continuing the discussion, because Sergeant is too stupid to care what I have to say, and the man is already dead, besides.

We knock the shelter apart and search it. Nothing much there: a few tools and weapons, a copper-plated religious emblem of the kind that our enemies worship, a portrait of a flat-faced blue-eyed woman who is, I suppose, the enemy’s wife or mother. It does not seem like the equipment of a spy. Even to an old soldier like me, it is all very sad. He was a man like us, enemy though he was, and he died far from home. Yes, it has long been our task to kill these people before they can kill us. Certainly I have killed more than a few of them myself. But dying in battle is one thing; being slaughtered like a pig while still half-asleep is something else again. Especially if your only purpose had been to surrender. Why else had this solitary man, this lonely and probably desperate man, crossed this unrelenting desert, if not to give himself up to us at the fort?

I am softening with age, I suppose. Sergeant is right that it was our assignment to kill him: Captain had given us that order in the most explicit way. Bringing him back with us had never been part of the plan. We have no way of keeping prisoners at the fort. We have little enough food for ourselves, and guarding him would have posed a problem. He had had to die; his life was forfeit from the moment he ventured within the zone bordering on the fort. That he might have been lonely or desperate, that he had suffered in crossing this terrible desert and perhaps had hoped to win shelter at our fort, that he had had a wife or perhaps a mother whom he loved, all of that was irrelevant. It did not come as news to me that our enemies are human beings not all that different from us except in the color of their eyes and the texture of their skins. They are, nevertheless, our enemies. Long ago they set their hands against us in warfare, and until the day arrives when they put aside their dream of destroying what we of the Empire have built for ourselves, it is the duty of people like us to slay men like him. Sergeant had not been kind or gentle about it. But there is no kind or gentle way, really, to kill.

The days that followed were extremely quiet ones. Without so much as a discussion of what had taken place in the desert, we fell back into our routines: clean and polish this and that, repair whatever needs repair and still can be repaired, take our turns working in the fields alongside the river, wade in that shallow stream in quest of water-pigs for our table, tend the vats where we store the mash that becomes our beer, and so on, so forth, day in, day out. Of course I read a good deal, also. I have ever been a man for reading.

We have nineteen books; all the others have been read to pieces, or their bindings have fallen apart in the dry air, or the volumes have simply been misplaced somewhere about the fort and never recovered. I have read all nineteen again and again, even though five of them are technical manuals covering areas that never were part of my skills and which are irrelevant now anyway. (There is no point in knowing how to repair our vehicles when the last of our fuel supply was exhausted five years ago.) One of my favorite books is The Saga of the Kings, which I have known since childhood, the familiar account, probably wholly mythical, of the Empire’s early history, the great charismatic leaders who built it, their heroic deeds, their inordinately long lifespans. There is a religious text, too, that I value, though I have grave doubts about the existence of the gods. But for me the choice volume of our library is the one called The Register of Strange Things Beyond the Ranges, a thousand-year-old account of the natural wonders to be found in the outer reaches of the Empire’s great expanse. Only half the book remains to us now—perhaps one of my comrades ripped pages out to use as kindling, once upon a time—but I cherish that half, and read it constantly, even though I know it virtually by heart by this time.

Wendrit likes me to read to her. How much of what she hears she is capable of understanding, I have no idea: she is a simple soul, as all her people are. But I love the way she turns her big violet-hued eyes toward me as I read, and sits in total attention.

I read to her of the Gate of Ghosts, telling her of the customs shed there that spectral phantoms guard: “Ten men go out; nine men return.” I read to her of the Stones of Shao, two flat-sided slabs flanking a main highway that on a certain day every ten years would come crashing together, crushing any wayfarers who happened to be passing through just then, and of the bronze Pillars of King Mai, which hold the two stones by an incantation that forbids them ever to move again. I read to her of the Mountain of a Thousand Eyes, the granite face of which is pockmarked with glossy onyx boulders that gleam down upon passersby like stern black eyes. I tell her of the Forest of Cinnamon, and of the Grotto of Dreams, and of the Place of Galloping Clouds. Were such places real, or simply the fantasies of some ancient spinner of tall tales? How would I know, I who spent my childhood and youth at the capital, and have passed the rest of my years here at this remote desert fort, where there is nothing to be seen but sandy yellow soil, and twisted shrubs, and little scuttering scorpions that run before our feet? But the strange places described in The Register of Strange Things Beyond the Ranges have grown more real to me in these latter days than the capital itself, which has become in my mind a mere handful of vague and fragmentary impressions. So I read with conviction, and Wendrit listens in awe, and when I weary of the wonders of the Register, I put it aside and take her hand and lead her to my bed, and caress her soft pale-green skin and kiss the tips of her small round breasts, and so we pass another night.