The World Wreckers by Marion Zimmer Bradley Read Free Book Online Page B

began to take notice.
    He knew some of the mountain men. He'd climbed with them, in the days when he could manage to get
    away on such trips. He'd lived at the edge of the mountains all his life. He liked them, in many ways,
    better than the complacent lowland people of the Domains.
    These were mountain men of the old style: booted and wrapped in thick fur shirt-cloaks, swarthy and
    long-haired, and although some of them were young, their faces were lined with rough weather and their
    eyes wrinkled with seeing into the far distances. They looked up at Regis with the old kind of respect for the Comyn caste, a direct and simple awareness; but they were wild-eyed with fatigue and grief which
    had been sustained much longer than men are meant to bear such things. And even though they tried to
    speak with stoical calm, some hint of this showed.
    Their leader was an old man, grayed and grizzled with a profile something like one of the sharp-toothed
    crags behind the city. He addressed himself to Old Hastur, even though Regis sat in the seat of the head
    of council. "I am Daniskar of the Darriel Forst," he said briefly. "I swore thirty years ago that I'd starve to death and all my family with me before we crawled down into the lowlands to ask help of the Comyn,
    let alone the accursed Terrans. " He looked about to spit, evidently remembered in time where he was and didn't. "But we're dying , Lord. Our children are starving. Dying."
    Mine too, thought Regis, not starving but dying, and leaned forward, speaking in the mountain tongue.
    " Com ' ii , I am to blame that we have heard nothing of crop failure or famine in your hills."
    Daniskar shook his head. He said, "You don't get crops back there, Lord, there's no plowed land for
    crops. We live off the forests. And that's the problem; we're being burned out. Vai dom , do you know how many forest fires we've had just this season? You wouldn't more than half believe me if I told you.
    And nothing we can do stops them. Forest fires are nothing new; I fought them before my beard was
    grown. I know as much as any man from the Kadarin to the Wall Around the World about forest fires.
    But these—nothing we can do stops them. It's as if resin fuel had been poured on them. Our beacons fail.
    I'd say they were being set by human hands, only what living man could be so evil? Men can kill men if
    they hate them, but to harm a forest so that men who never harmed them would suffer, friend and foe
    alike?"
    Regis listened in shock and horror, seeing his own horror mirrored in other faces around the Council
    room, and his mind, trained to think on many levels at once, ran counterpoint to Daniskar's words.
    Darkover is a wooded world, and without our forests we die. No cover for beasts means no meat for
    those who eat it, no nuts for bread where grains do not grow, no furs for warmth, no fuel where the lack
    of fire means freezing and death. The death of the forest means no resin or phosphorescents for light, no fruits for wine, it means no soil, for only our forests hold the soil on the mountains with so much rain
    and snow to wash it down to the lowlands. Without forests, over half of Darkover would quickly become
    a frozen lump of dust, starving and dying.
    "You people talk fine about keeping us free of the Terran Empire," said one of the businessmen, looking up belligerently at the council members and especially, it seemed to Regis, at the two Hasturs. "And you have a right to your own politics, though I notice you're quick enough to take advantage of Terran things when you're rich enough to afford them. Like coming here by plane, under guard, instead of packing
    over the mountains on horse and by snow sled as I did! I don't even say you're all wrong; anyone who
    takes a helping hand must turn to his helper's path! But how far are you going to make us go for this
    thing you call freedom, vai dom ' ym? Must all our mountain men die before you ask the Terrans to pull us out of quicksand? We have