Jack Vance - Big Planet

The riders deployed in a near-perfect line in front of the outcrop where the four stood, as if they had lined up to be killed. Three flickers of violet, a crackling of power. Thirteen Rebbirs lay blasted and smouldering on the ground.

A few minutes later they set off across the plain toward the line of cliffs. They rode the four strongest zipangotes; the others had been set free. The Rebbir swords, knives and metal were secure behind their saddles. They wore black cloaks and white helmets.

Nancy found little pleasure in the disguise. “The Rebbirs smell like goats.” She made a wry face. “This cloak is abominable. And the helmet is greasy inside.”

“Wipe it out,” advised Glystra. “If it gets us to Myrtlesee, it’s served its purpose…”

The land, rising in a long slope, became rocky and barren. The flat-leaved vines and creepers near the lake gave way to stunted thorns of a particularly ugly orange color. The tides of sunlight glared and dazzled, and snow on the Eyrie glittered like white fire.

The region was not without inhabitants. From time to time Glystra, glancing to the side, found white eyes in a pink wizened face staring into his from out of the thorn, and occasionally he saw them running, crouched low, bounding over the rocks.

On the morning of the second day a caravan of six freight-carriers appeared in the distance ahead, sailing swiftly down the wind. From a covert fifty yards off the trail the four travellers watched the caravan whirl past— six swift shapes swinging to the press of white cloth— then they were gone downwind, and soon out of sight toward Lake Pellitante.

On the third day, the escarpment loomed big ahead. The monoline rose in a tremendous swoop, up toward the lip of the cliff.

“That’s the way you come down from Myrtlesee,” said Glystra. He turned his head, followed the hang of the cable across the sky, up, up, and along, till it disappeared against the chalky front of the cliff. “Going up wouldn’t be so easy. That’s a long portage. But down… Remember the ride down into the Galatudanian Valley?”

Nancy shivered. “This would be worse…”

They came to the landing at the end of the monoline, where the portage must start. The trail led off to the left, slanting up over the basal detritus of crumbled boulders. Then it cut back, into a way dug out of the very side of the cliff and curbed with cemented masonry. Two hundred yards in one direction, then back, traversing— right, left, right, left—and the shoulders of the zipangotes rubbed the inner wall, so that it was necessary to sit with the inside leg looped over the pommel of the saddle. The zipangotes swept up the trail easily, gliding on six legs with no suggestion of effort.

Up, up, back, forth. The face of Big Planet dropped below, spreading wider and wider, and where an Earthly eye might expect a horizon, with a division into land and sky, there was only land, and then still more land. Lake Pellitante glanced and gleamed in the distance. A feeder river came down from the north, circling out of the Eyrie, and stained the earth yellow with its swamps. The outlet river, which they had crossed on rafts, swept broadly south-east, presently breaking into a series of exaggerated meanders, like a crumpled silver ribbon, and then vanished into the south.

Up, up. Wind drove a scud of clouds at the cliff; suddenly the trail was cloaked in damp gray twilight, and the wind swept up the mountain with the sound of a roaring torrent.

The fog glowed yellow, dispersed in trails and wisps; the sun shone full on their backs. Glystra’s beast shoved its horny face over the last hump, surged with its four hind feet, and stood on flat ground.

They halted near the edge of the cliff, with the wind pressing up over the rim. The plateau was bare limestone, scoured and free of dust. Gray-white, featureless, it stretched twenty miles flat as a sheet of cardboard; then became mottled, a region of gray shadows. The intervening area was empty except for the monoline: the standards at fifty-foot intervals and the cable dwindling to nothing like an exercise in perspective.

“Well,” said Glystra, “nothing in sight, so—”

“Look,” said Corbus in a flat voice. He pointed north, along the rim of the cliff.

Glystra slumped back into the saddle. “Rebbirs.”

They came along the verge like a column of ants, still several miles distant. Glystra estimated their number at two hundred. In a thick voice he said, “We’d better get moving… We can’t kill them all. If we ride along the monoline—not too fast—perhaps they won’t bother us”

“Let’s go!” said Corbus.

At a careless lope the caravan started east, down the copy-book perspective of the monoline. Glystra kept an anxious watch on the company to the north. “They don’t seem to be following—”

“They’re coming now,” said Corbus.

A dozen of the cavalry spurted forward out of the ranks, raced out at a slant evidently bent on interception.

Glystra clenched his teeth. “We’ve got to run for it.”

He dug his knees into the side of the zipangote. It moaned and mumbled and flung itself ahead, bony face straining against the wind.

Twenty-four heavy feet pounded back the limestone. And behind came the Rebbirs, black cloaks flapping out behind.

Nightmare flight, thought Glystra; was he asleep? Nightmare steeds, nightmare riders, the gray-white flat given depth only by the diminishing monoline: a nightmare vista permeated by fear and strangeness and pitilessness…

He broke free of the sensation, cast it away. Turning, he watched the Rebbirs over his shoulder. The whole army had streamed out, as if stimulated by the excitement of the chase. The first dozen had not gained appreciably; Glystra stroked the horny side of his mount with an emotion almost like affection. “Go to it, boy”

Miles, changeless miles: flat gray plains, thunder of pounding feet. Looking ahead, Glystra saw that they were near the region of mottled shadows—dunes of sand, white as salt, crystalline and bright as broken glass.

The Rebbirs had drawn closer, apparently able to extract the most frantic efforts from their mounts. Ahead—the dunes: sand swept off the flatland and piled in huge rounded domes.

Looking behind, Glystra saw a sight which thrilled him, one which might have been beautiful in other, less personal circumstances. The Rebbirs in the van had risen to their feet, standing in wonderful balance on the backs of their plunging mounts. And each, throwing back his cloak, fitted an arrow to a heavy black bow.

The bows bent; behind the arrows Glystra glimpsed keen faces: eagle cast to nose, forehead, chin. A chilling wonderful sight… He yelled, “Duck! They’re shooting at us!” And he crouched over the side of his beast.

Thwinggg! The shaft sang over his head. The dunes towered above. Glystra felt the feet of his mount sound with a softer thud, a scuffing, and they were coursing across white sand… The creature was laboring, breath was seizing in its throat. Very few miles left in the clogged muscles, then they would be at bay, the four of them. Their ion-shines would kill ten, fifteen, twenty, fifty— then there would be a sudden surge of hawk-faced men, a raising of swords, a chopping…

Over the dunes, down the soft round valleys, up to the milk-white crests. Then looking back to view the surge of black-cloaked riders pouring across the swells, like black surf.

The dunes ended, washed against black obsidian hills. Behind, the rumble of multitudinous feet, hoarse war-calls… Out of the dunes, into an old water-course through the flint, where possibly once or twice yearly water foamed. The zipangotes stumbled over chunks of fractured black volcanic glass with sagging necks, bent legs.