Empire of the East Read Free Page B

but stand helplessly and watch.
    At Rolf’s back, the afternoon sun was some four hours above the Western Sea, the shore being several kilometers from where Rolf stood, the land between for the most part low and marshy. Looking ahead, he could see above nearby treetops part of the jagged line of the Broken Mountains, half a day’s walk to the east. He could not see the Castle itself, but he knew well where it was, perched on the south side of the central pass that pierced those mountains through from east to west. The reptiles came from the Castle, and there dwelt those who had brought the reptiles to the Broken Lands—folk so evil that they seemed themselves inhuman, though they wore human form.
    Spreading westward now from the direction where the Castle lay, in Rolf’s eyes disfiguring all the fairness of the springtime sky, came a swarming formation of dots. Rolf had heard that the reptiles’ human masters sent them out to search for something more than prey, that there was something hidden that Ekuman most desperately desired to find. Whether that was true or not, the reptiles most certainly ravaged the farmers’ lands for food and sport.
    Rolf’s sixteen-year-old eyes were sharp enough to pick out now the movement of leathery wings. The flying creatures of the Castle swelled slowly in his vision, the thin and spreading cloud their hundreds made came hurtling toward him. He knew that their eyes were sharper even than his. Almost daily now the reptiles came, picking over the land already so much robbed and torn by the new masters from the East; a land that had now grown hungry despite its richness, with every month more farmers killed or robbed and driven from their soil. With villages turned into prison camps, or emptied out to give the Satrap Ekuman the slave labor that he must have to build his Castle stronger still….
    Did the foul grinning things fly ten or only five times faster than a man might run? With a big-boned hand Rolf put back a mop of his black hair, tilting back his head to watch as the vanguard of the reptiles now came nearly straight above him. A belt of rope around Rolf’s lean waist held up his trousers of good homespun; his shirt of the same stuff was open in the warmth of spring and work. He was of quite ordinary height, and spare as a knotted rope. His shoulders in their bony flatness looked wider than they were. Only his wrists and callused hands and his bare feet seemed to have been made a size or so too big to fit the rest of him.
    In the distance the reptiles had seemed to be flying in a compact formation. But now Rolf could see that they had been scattered widely by their differences of course and speed. Here and there a single flyer would pause, coasting in wide flat circles, to scan something on the earth below. Sometimes then the reptile would straighten out again into effortless speed of flight, having decided that whatever it had seen was not worth dropping for. But sometimes it would dive. Stoop. Plunge wing-folded, like a falling rock—
    Above Rolf’s home! With a shock at his heart he saw the winged predator plummeting to strike. Before it vanished below the level of the trees Rolf was running toward it, toward his home. The clearing and the little house were invisible from here, more than a kilometer away over broken, scrub-grown country.
    The reptile would be diving after the fowl in their coop, that must be it, though after the last attack Rolf’s mother had tried to hide the coop under a net of strings, woven with vines and branches to make a screen. Rolf’s father still lay abed with a crushed foot, mangled by a falling stone while he had been doing his stint of forced labor on the Castle. Small Lisa might be running out now as she had run out to challenge the last reptile, to strike with a broom or a hoe at a fanged intelligent killer who was nearly as big as she….
    Between the field where he had been working and his home,