Damon Knight - Orbit 16

“I’m going to need you, Emidhin,” he said at last.

The little man had said simply there it is, and had left the sanctuary. Prince Greter, President Tremis and the other high dignitaries of the city followed him for a moment with their eyes, then turned back to the wall of metal. The Prince activated the prisoner’s organs of communication. At once a murmur, almost a moan, was heard:

“Aaaaah! Aaaaah!”

Then they told him that he was their slave.

He replied that he was a sun.

They told him that he must obey them.

He asked them to set him free so that he might continue to protect his planets.

They repeated that he was their slave.

He told them that, without him, his planets would die.

They explained to him that if he did not obey them, they would kill him and that in this case his planets would be lost forever.

He began to howl, and they lowered the volume of the loudspeaker.

The next day, the body of the little man was found at the base of the cliff that overhangs the Northern Ocean.

Is that better, child?

Yes.

Dawn has come, child. It is cold and the sun is very red, but we’ll be able to start moving.

The dune?

Yes, child, we must reach the dune.

A man was working in his field when he saw them. They were moving along the road, a little farther away. He was a brave man, but he felt the sweat chill his back under the shirt. He wondered if it was their footsteps that reverberated or the earth that groaned at their passing.

A traveler from one of the worlds of the Great Star asked who they were, and a scowling woman replied: “It’s the Golem.” He said nothing and went on his way, but he stopped singing.

A girl named Minia went to her window and listened to the noise in the village street. All the Enashins, at the same instant, turned their heads in her direction, and she saw among them the face of Yeni. Minia and Yeni were to have been married the previous autumn, according to an old custom still followed in the countries of the west. Yeni was a fisherman. One day his small boat was overtaken by a storm far out at sea. A week later, some other fishermen found his body, still alive, clinging to a piece of wreckage, but his mind was gone forever. The Enashins passed and the sound of their footsteps faded behind them. Minia was still crying when darkness fell.

Far away, elsewhere, in a country called Perihel, an old man sits at a table, close to the fire, in the Starhauler Tavern.

“I’ve seen many things, oh, I’ve seen many things!” says he to the yellow-haired stranger across the table. “I’ve seen the blue lakes of Samoth, I’ve crossed the Hacschcnischen Channel, where there’s traps that can pull you into another universe, a dream, or maybe another level, who knows. I’ve shared a meal with the pilgrims of the Green Galaxy and I’ve even fought the Enashins of Emidhin, the imprisoned god, the Golem. Ah! I was young then, and a little crazy. You have to be a little crazy to fight the Enashins. That was on my home world, Shangui-H’e, a good world, yes, a good world. I was working with my brother Elllis at the time. We had a few fields of myi and they enabled us to live in comfort. Myi is a plant that only grows on Shangui-H’e, at least as far as I know. It’s very nourishing and much wanted by us humans, the descendants of the Emigrants, but also it’s very hard to grow. At harvest time you’ve got to be very clever. The only death the myi will accept is suicide. If it realizes you’re about to kill it, it commits suicide by releasing a virulent poison into its sap, and the whole crop may be lost. To keep it from doing that, you hypnotize it by making it listen to the song of a crazy bird called the ayetl, but that bird doesn’t live in Essenin, the province where I was born, or in any other western province, either. So to reap the myi we needed the help of a Diatshin who had to imitate the song of the ayetl bird for hours and hours, until the myi was completely hypnotized and would let itself be reaped. But it’s a demanding song; one false note and you’re out of luck. Not only that, but after a while the song also hypnotizes people and can drive the singer crazy. We put wax plugs in our ears, but a Diatshin’s endurance has its limits, and of course you can only harvest a crop once.

“Yes, yes, the Enashins, I’m coming to them. Anyhow, my brother and I had a few fields of myi and we knew how to work them. Myi is a valuable commodity and we were doing quite well. Very well, in fact; but Essenin is a province that depends more or less on the city of Pharès, anyhow I won’t go into all the details, but we had to pay tribute to them every year. This tribute had been getting steadily bigger for some time because of the Merchants’ Guild of Pharès—they’re as powerful as the Prince of the city, or more so, and they always wanted more ships, wagons, spaceships. They were burning with thirst for power and wealth and they were getting harder and harder to satisfy. One year, Essenin didn’t pay all its tribute and the Merchants threatened to withhold their goods from us. Then, when we still couldn’t pay, they forbade the Diatshins to work for us. That was hard. Poverty, famine. Finally, we peaceful farmers took up arms, we banded together into a little army, oh, nothing much, two or three thousand young men, inexperienced and a little crazy, and started to march toward the province of Pharès, more than five hundred kilometers north of Essenin, to bring back the food we needed. Oh, of course, we had heard of the Enashins, but to us they were more like a legend, and we even joked about them. Yes, well, they weren’t a legend. We met them on a hill, near a little town in the south of the province of Pharès. Yes, I’ll never forget that scene. We were climbing the hill and we saw them appear on top. We all stopped and they kept on coming toward us. At first, we couldn’t make out their faces, but I remember that the wind moved their hair in a strange way. Finally they stopped not more than fifty paces off and we could count them. Two hundred Enashins. Two hundred creatures, most of them human, but there were also some foreigners from nonhuman planets, as well as some metal humanoids. (And two or three arkel birds that circled above us must have been Enashins too.) Some were in rags, others in the uniform of the guardsmen of Pharès, some were dressed like fishermen, others like peasants, still others like lenyates. And I noticed that the humans’ eyes were like those of madmen, gray and staring, not really seeing us. And each one carried a double-bitted ax in the same manner over his shoulder. Then they began to talk, and I still remember those first words. Imagine it, two hundred creatures speaking the same words all together, at the same instant, and with the same voice. They said: ‘I am Emidhin, the keeper of the gates of Pharès. Go home, brothers. I beg you.’ Then some of us tried to argue, but the Enashins only repeated in their one voice: ‘Go home, brothers. I wish you no harm, but I must obey the orders of the Prince of Pharès. I beg you, go home.’

“At that point, a few of us, no doubt a little crazier than the rest, moved toward the Enashins saying that we couldn’t retreat any more, and the rest followed. Then, of course, the fighting began. Oh, it didn’t last long. I can still see the blood that spurted. The Enashins seemed to be able to look in every direction at once, they were like the tentacles of a gigantic octopus, and they were amazingly strong. They raised their axes in both hands like woodcutters and brought them slashing down through our ranks. And they kept shouting, ‘Forgive me, brothers! Forgive me! Forgive me!’ After that, I don’t remember much. I’d had my right hand lopped off by an Enashin and I was lying on the ground thinking, ‘I must be dreaming, I must really be dreaming, this isn’t possible.’ My brother found me after the fight and brought me home. Not long afterward we left Shangui-H’e aboard a spaceship bound for the Blue-Blue-Yellow Galaxy. I had another hand made for me, and it works very well, but I’d rather have the first one. It was a good hand, yes, a good hand. Oh, I’ve seen many things, I’ve seen many things! I’ve been to a place called Roquebrune . . .”