The Avengers of Carrig by John Brunner Read Free Book Online

dismay of the clansmen who bore its symbol.
    Was it a good thing at all to claim kinship with a beast of prey? Saikmar had never posed the question to himself before, but now, as he remembered the children that had been killed by twywits, it arose unbidden in his mind. And this was the worst of all times to doubt the wisdom of the gods, when tomorrow not only his life but the future of Carrig depended on their whims!
    He stared at the statue of Maige, goddess of speed and the wind, trying to concentrate on her attributes, but his mind kept on wandering against his will. There had been a Clan Graat once—mentioned in
The Ballad of Red Sloin
—and this for the first time struck him as strange. Because the graat was a riding- and pack-animal, domesticated and useful, whereas the twywit, the parradile, the coshivor, the arbitz, and the rest of the clan totems were wild beasts and mostly very savage.
    Could the graat possibly have been a wild beast too, in the days when the clans first chose their totems? It was a new and disturbing idea, but it made sense.
    Saikmar shivered—not with cold, though in the high-roofed draughty temple at this dead hour of night it was far from warm, but with the impact of his unexpected insight. One did not usually think of revolutionary changes in the world. Certainly there were changes going on all the time, but they were petty: an improvement in the wing-design for gliders, novel imports from the south, shifting fashions in clothing and manners. But nothing to signify.
    When you considered that a graat might once have been a wild beast, though … And that there must have been a time when on the site of Carrig there was nothing at all, not even a cluster of clay huts …
    Suppose Belfeor did kill the king: having no clan, what would he do? Would he choose to be adopted into one of the existing clans, or would he create a new one for himself? If so, what would he choose as his clan animal?
    Angrily, Saikmar checked the line of thought again. It was ridiculous to envisage Belfeor’s success. Better to pursue the scarcely less comfortable notion that things had changed radically in the past than the terrifying likelihood of their changing in the future. He had always been studiously inclined, and he knew most of the old tales that accounted for man’s presence in the world. They varied in detail, but on basics they agreed. Once, they recounted, man had been like the gods, and dwelt in a fairer world than this, and enjoyed marvelous powers over nature. But they became arrogant. Seeing this, the gods smote the sun so that it blazed a hundred times more fiercely than usual, as a fire roars up when a poker lets air into its base. Most of the arrogant people were destroyed; only a few, by divine grace, were able to excape the sun’s fury. These had fled in a boat across some vast ocean—the sages held that the Western Ocean was referred to—and for a long while had been compelled to live in a frigid barren waste. When at last they were permitted to move to more hospitable lands, they were warned that it was only on sufferance. If they offended the gods again, they would be destroyed forever.
    It was said further that the custom of the king-hunt had been instituted by the gods as an annual reminder that man was a frail creature—that such a beast as the parradile, not being more than a beast was strong enough to kill men and cunning enough to escape their lures and traps. On the other hand, you could point to lands where no such custom existed and argue instead that the king-hunt was invented by men themselves to ensure that only the cleverest and most resourceful achieved power in Carrig, and to bestow on the reigning clan those qualities of strength and subtlety men respected in parradiles. But here the matter shaded over into magic, and magic was the exclusive province of Clan Parradile; Saikmar knew little of it.
    Whichever way you looked at it, however, one constant fact remained: this was the