Enchantress from the Stars Read online

  “No. I’m not going out; there’s a better way.” Father met my eyes with a measuring look. “Elana, are you really serious about wanting to be in on this? Can you follow directions?”

  “Yes,” I agreed, though I felt less confident all of a sudden.

  “Then step outside and let those men see you.”

  “Alone? And undisguised?” I protested incredulously. Evrek was aghast, as I was, but a look from Father silenced him.

  “It’s all right,” Father told me. “They won’t recognize you for what you are, as Imperials would. You won’t be revealing anything you shouldn’t.”

  Evrek had hold of my arm, and he didn’t release it. “You’re surely not going to let Elana make contact all by herself!”

  “We’ll be communicating, and I’ll guide her. But she must be the one to talk to them.”

  “Talk to them?” I wavered. “How can I? I don’t know their language!”

  “Use ours. The actual words you speak won’t matter; only the thought behind them.”

  “But Younglings can’t use telepathy!”

  “Not between themselves. With us, most of them can.” Abruptly, he slipped to the soundless level of communication. Don’t be frightened. That’s very important, because if you are they’ll know it.

  But what shall I say to them?

  I’ll tell you, when the time comes.

  I felt he could at least give me a little more information than that. Then I sensed an exchange between Father and Evrek and knew that they were communicating privately. At that moment, Evrek gave me an encouraging grin and dropped my arm. So that’s how it is, I thought. They’re testing me.

  Well, I had gotten myself into this, I thought grimly, and I was not going to back out now. The Andrecians were within a few paces of the hut. I could see them clearly; there were four of them, all fairly young men, wearing belted smocks and hose of a coarse brown fabric. They did not look hostile. One of them, in fact, was whistling a bright, lilting tune. Mustering all my determination, I stepped into the open doorway.

  THE OATH

  Though the Enchantress in no way resembled any woman the woodcutter’s sons had seen before, she was in her own manner quite beautiful. She was tall, as tall as Georyn himself, and she was clothed all in silvery green; and her garments were not women’s garments nor yet men’s either, but were unique. Dark and shining was her hair, and it fell not to her shoulders, but rather made a soft halo of waves around her face. And that face was a strange elfin face, yet radiant, and Georyn knew without question that whatever magic she practiced was good magic.

  “Whither do you travel, my friends?” asked the Enchantress, and though the tongue in which she spoke was unknown to them, the brothers had no doubt as to her words’ meaning. It was as if, coming from her, any language in the world would be understood; for there was a charm upon her speech.

  “We go to ask the King’s blessing, for we plan to slay the Dragon and claim the King’s reward,” Georyn replied quickly.

  “Dragon? Tell me of this!” the Enchantress exclaimed, seeming somewhat surprised.

  The eldest brother began, “It is a terrible monster, and its mere breath is fire, and many men have been lost in the attempt to kill it; yet we shall surely conquer the beast.”

  But Georyn took a step forward, asking, “Do you not already know of the Dragon, Lady, and are you not simply measuring us? For it is my guess that you know much that we have not even glimpsed.”

  The Enchantress smiled. “You have guessed truly. I have indeed heard of this Dragon; perhaps I have heard more than you would care to know. Let us speak no more of it. Tell me, what reward do you desire, if you succeed in this quest?”

  “I shall ask the King for many servants,” answered the eldest brother.

  “And I,” added the next, “shall ask for chests of gold.”

  The next brother said, “I shall ask that a fine lady may be my bride.”

  There was a pause, and turning to Georyn the Lady asked, “And you, what do you seek of the King?”

  Georyn hesitated. “I seek knowledge, that I may be the wisest man in the kingdom.” He had never admitted this openly before.

  “I must warn you,” the Enchantress told the brothers, “that if you persist in this venture, you will be in constant danger and will meet with many misfortunes; and it is likely that you will perish.”

  “That does not frighten us,” said the eldest brother, with unconcealed pride.

  “When the time comes, you will be afraid.”

  “Not so!” cried the brothers in protest. “We shall never know fear!” But Georyn knew that the Enchantress spoke truth, and he said to her, “We will be afraid, yet still we shall defeat the Dragon.”

  And thereupon the elder brothers turned to go; but Georyn did not wish to leave without knowing more of the Enchantress, for he found himself drawn to her as he had never before been drawn to any maiden. Moreover, he was sure that whatever she knew of the Dragon, he would care to know, if he was to fight the beast. “Lady,” he said boldly, “have you any advice for us, as to how the Dragon may best be overcome?”

  She paused, and her eyes were far away, as if she listened to some silent voice that no one else could hear. At length she said, “I can tell you nothing now. But I will make you a promise. If a time ever comes when you can proceed no further in this quest without aid, return to me, and I may then be able to help you. For I have knowledge of many things that are hidden from your people; and if you are indeed the ones destined to rid the world of this Dragon, that knowledge may be of greater value to you than anything the King can give.”

  The woodcutter’s sons offered their thanks to the Enchantress, but underneath they smiled, for who can balance the worth of wisdom against the wealth and power of the King? Only Georyn believed that magic is not to be scoffed at, and he said, “I will remember your promise, Lady, and I will make you one of my own: I will surely return when the proper time has come.”

  So with these words to the Lady, Georyn continued on his way; but as he went into the trees he looked back at her, and he hoped that the time would be soon.

  Just after sunset, we went out into the meadow and stood in the place where Ilura had stood, ankle-deep in the fresh green grass of Andrecia. Though the actual memorial rites would be held aboard the starship when we returned, the brief, formal words that we of the Service say on such occasions could not be left unsaid. These are resolute words, designed to close a door firmly and with haste. For in the field there is no time for mourning. You must put it out of your mind and go on with the job. Anyone who is experienced in such matters knows this; Ilura herself would have been the last one to question it. But to me it seemed cold and unfeeling, and my eyes were wet with tears that rose as much from indignation as from honest grief. Not that the others were unmoved; Evrek looked more stern and withdrawn than I had ever seen him, and I noticed that as Father spoke, he fingered the Emblem.

  Later, when we had eaten something and had set up housekeeping, so to speak, in the hut, we went outdoors again; and there, on the stony slope beside the river, we built a small fire. Dry wood was plentiful in the outskirts of the forest; Evrek and I gathered armloads in only a few minutes. Apparently few Andrecians came here. Our woodcutters must have been far from home.

  We sat down close to the warm solace of the flames. It was nearly dark now, and the woods seemed gloomy and a little forbidding. “Are we safe here?” I asked. “Won’t anyone see the fire?”

  “I doubt if the Imperials will stray this far from their camp again,” Father said. “Certainly they won’t at night. And anyway, if they do come here, our hutful of equipment is danger enough.” He did not add what I now know to be the truth, that a quick means of getting rid of the hutful of equipment was continuously at his disposal.

  “What about Andrecians?” I persisted.

  “If they find us, it won’t be a disaster.”

  For a while we didn’t talk much except to make brief, ina
ne comments on our surroundings; I guess nobody wanted to be the first to broach the subject of what lay ahead of us. Avoiding even mental contact, we concentrated on the look and feeling of the alien world. Your first night on an unfamiliar planet is always an experience in itself. I’ve been told that this is true even to those jaded by journeys to the far reaches of the universe.

  Then, abruptly, Father grinned at Evrek and at me and said cheerfully, “One tired old agent, one brand-new one on his first mission, and a trainee who isn’t even sworn! It looks like a hopeless cause, doesn’t it?”

  We laughed, sensing that that was what he wanted, though I’d been thinking in pretty much those terms with less levity. And it cleared the air a bit, enough for Father to go on. “All right. There’s a lot to talk over. We have some plans to make, and—well, an important matter to tend to, later this evening. Because tomorrow morning we’ve got to be ready to take constructive steps.”

  “What can we do without Ilura?” asked Evrek. “She was the essential link.”

  “I’ve got some ideas,” Father assured him.

  “I won’t like them if they include Elana,” Evrek commented darkly. “Can we ask now what that contact was all about?” We hadn’t discussed my adventure with the woodcutters; Father had made it plain that he preferred to wait.

  “It was just a little experiment to see how well Elana can communicate with the Andrecians,” he told us now. “That’s something I had to know.” Turning to me, he explained, “The original plan depended on Ilura’s ability to pass as Andrecian. Now we’ve got to feel our way, improvise. But that’s usually how these things end up, anyway.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand anything that’s going on,” I confessed. “I don’t even see what we’re aiming for. What can we do against all those invaders if we can’t use weapons or let them know we’re here?”

  “Elana, there’s one point you’ve got to get straight right away,” he said curtly. “We’re not against the colonists. Though we’re here to save Andrecia, we can’t do it through violence; all Younglings have equal rights to our protection.”

  “I know … but then what can we do? The Andrecians themselves haven’t a chance to repulse them, not with spears and arrows and swords against what the Imperials have.”

  “No. So the aim is to make the colonists leave of their own free will.”

  “Can we talk them into that?” I asked doubtfully. It sounded rather unlikely to me from what I had seen so far.

  “We can’t talk to Imperials at all without disclosure, you know that! And even if we could, they’d only think we were trying to claim Andrecia for ourselves.”

  This was true, and as he went on with the explanation I began to grasp it. There was absolutely nothing we could do directly. The Imperials would turn an armada against us rather than give up the “right” to claim one small planet out of the many that were open to them. They’d believe that we wished to compete with their Empire. They had undoubtedly met peoples near their own level who were trying to do just that.

  So there was only one course we could take. We’d have to give the natives power advanced enough to impress the invaders, to scare them off. But possession of that power couldn’t be allowed to disrupt the Andrecian culture; it must be made to blend so imperceptibly into the natives’ own background of beliefs that it would not even be noticed by their future historians. Neither side could ever know that there had been intervention.

  Impossible? It seemed so to me, at first. But there’s a way to handle such cases. Variations of it have been used before, I’m told, and will be used again. The chances of it working under conditions like those with which we were faced aren’t very large, but if it fails you’re really no worse off than before.

  My first reaction was, “The invaders must know as well as we do that the natives are no match for them.”

  “Because the Andrecians have no technology?” Evrek asked me.

  “Certainly.”

  Father said to me, “Elana, suppose the Imperials were to discover that the people of this world have something that they themselves don’t have—something that’s frightening because they don’t understand it?”

  “Wouldn’t they be suspicious? I mean, if it’s that far ahead of their own science, they’ll know the Andrecians couldn’t have developed it without help.”

  “Yes, but what if it were something they couldn’t identify as being ahead of their science, something they thought the natives came by naturally?”

  “Like what, for instance?”

  “Like magic.”

  I laughed. “You’re joking!”

  “No. Not at all.”

  I looked from Father to Evrek and back to Father; both of them were dead serious. Even in the dim firelight I could see that. This place is changing us, I thought; it is drawing us into its spell. We’ve come far back in time as well as in space. This is a primeval forest, and the fire’s but one of the many primitive campfires that must have burned on countless worlds where human races have been born.

  My hand rested on a small, smooth stone; I picked it up and shifted it from hand to hand, scarcely noticing what I was doing. Mystified, I began, “Here we are, with science that’s far, far ahead even of the Empire’s, and you’re saying—”

  “That we believe in magic?”

  “But we don’t! Science and magic are opposites.”

  “It depends on what you mean by magic, doesn’t it?”

  “Isn’t magic what prescientific cultures believe in? Cultures like—well, like this world’s?”

  “Exactly. That’s the point.”

  “But it’s only superstition!”

  “No. That’s a Youngling viewpoint, a very adolescent one. If you think it through, you’ll find that you know better.”

  “Wait a minute,” Evrek interrupted. “I understood the original plan. Ilura was to pose as a native and scare the daylights out of the Imperials with some spectacular feats of psychokinesis and such, which would be ‘magic’ to them, and therefore very upsetting. But we can never do it; they’ll know we’re not like the other natives, even if we can avoid revealing what we actually are.”

  “There’s another method, Evrek,” Father said slowly. “We can work through an actual native.”

  Evrek frowned. “Is that really feasible? I’ve heard of it, of course, but—well, isn’t it pretty chancy?”

  “Chancy, yes, but impossible, no. Not in a culture like this one, which is very favorably disposed toward it.”

  “Perhaps not,” Evrek said. “But I don’t envy the man we choose to throw an interstellar expedition off a non-mechanized world, single-handed. Why, even if he succeeds, he’s bound to suffer for it—”

  I turned to Father. “Do you mean to tell me that you’re going to send only one man to scare off a whole shipload of invaders? One Andrecian?”

  Father smiled. “I know it sounds pretty fantastic.”

  “But he won’t have any chance at all, no matter what weapons we give him! If he acts hostile they’ll simply kill him, won’t they, as they did Ilura?”

  “Possibly, though I doubt it. What happened this afternoon was unusual; normally they merely use stunners. I’m not saying there won’t be danger. But he will have a chance, Elana. He’ll have an advantage over them because the weapon we’re going to give him will be very frightening from their point of view. More so from theirs than from his.”

  “How can it be, when they know so much more than he does?” I demanded.

  “About some things they do,” Father said. “But you’re aware, aren’t you, that Younglings in an adolescent stage of civilization have a blind spot? They’re very powerful so far as their machines are concerned, but they know nothing at all of the powers of the mind.”

  I nodded. I’d been reading about it only that morning, back on the starship. It was hard to visualize. What would it feel like to be unable to reach anyone else’s mind? To be unable to exert any psychokinetic power over things, even if
you needed to? To have no Shield? It would indeed be like blindness; yet Younglings have none of these abilities. They do not even know what they’re missing!

  “But if psychic powers are too mature, too advanced, even for the Imperials,” I protested, “certainly no Andrecian knows anything about them.”

  “He will have an open mind, though,” Evrek told me. “He’ll be too naive to be afraid.”

  “I suppose so,” I admitted. “Especially since he’ll probably believe in magic in the first place. But we can’t just hand such things to him, as we could a physical weapon. Younglings don’t have the capacity.”

  “You’re wrong there,” said Father. “Under certain conditions they do. Our job is to set up those conditions. It won’t be easy, and we’ll have some failures. If it doesn’t work with the first man we try, we’ll have to use someone else. But it’s the only way open to us now, so we have to take it.”

  That first night, I didn’t really understand the scheme; it wasn’t till much later that I began to get a feel for it. On the surface, it didn’t look as if one man, however well equipped with “magical” power, could be a very formidable obstacle to people like the invaders. But that wasn’t the point. No obstacle can faze Imperials, for they thrive on obstacles. But here, it was their method of dealing with obstacles that was to be threatened. Those whose strength is in their machines want no part of psychokinesis. Imperial colonists would not want this planet for long once they began to suspect that its inhabitants were … different. And in the face of that suspicion they would generalize too easily; what they saw in one native, they would think to find in all, since all were alike to them. The question of deception would never enter the picture, for that which they would see could not be faked.

  Of course, carrying this off was not going to be simple. “Set up the conditions,” Father had said. But that’s easier said than done, because the conditions aren’t concrete. You can’t teach a Youngling to use his latent psychic faculties by the methods through which you yourself learned; his background isn’t the same as yours. So it depends on giving him a very elusive source of power: faith.