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A.R.Yngve
DARC AGES
Book One
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Mechao and family

Chapter 16

Meanwhile, in Damon City, Bor Damon called off the airborne search for his son and the lost Sunray. He simply could not risk leaving his city completely without air support - with the looming threat of war between the Damons and the Paskos. He blocked out his grief and alerted the city troops, abandoning hope that Dohan would ever return from the forbidden lands to where he had escaped. Seeking comfort where he could, he rocked his mourning wife to sleep the first two nights.

Then Osanna turned increasingly remote, silently blaming Bor for the loss of her only son. Was it not he who had brought the troublemaker Darc into their city?

The people of Damon City were thrown into confusion, and flocked to the cathedral to await an explanation from high-priestess Inu: Had Darc been an impostor all the time? Was he the reincarnated King whose return she had promised, or just an enemy agent? Inu hid in her study, praying for Darc's return. She had expected the King to die again - but not this way, not so soon, so shrouded in doubt. Eveli Damon did not cease to believe in Darc. She was sure he would return, and bring her brother back safely.

As for Bor's sister and husband, no one knew their thoughts - but Bwynn was more prepared to inherit the city rule than Andon had ever been. She waited, inert but patient, for destiny to set its course.

In the city of the Paskos, the ruler's agents returned once more with urgent news...

The alliance between the Damons, the Orbes clan, and the Yotas was crumbling. Lord Fache was lying injured, unable to leave Damon City and rouse his own soldiers. And as for the Pasko-Damon alliance by marriage, it had been doomed from the start. Dohan Damon had escaped from his city, defying his own father. Darc, the man rumored to be the reincarnated Singing King, was deathly ill or dead.

Hearing all this, Sir Tharlos became exhilarated. He stalked his parents, who were still brooding over their humiliating defeat at the Joust, and made incessant demands for action; a better opportunity to wrest control of Damon City might never come. The Lepers had not appeared in the Madrivalo province since the battle of 930 A.M. - so the Pasko troops were safe to attack on foot, without risk of contamination.

The weary city lord finally gave in after enduring a whole day of his son's pleas and demands. For the first time ever, Tharlos was granted command of the troops. But Tharlos did not reveal everything to his drunken, morose father. The thin, tall young nobleman with the intense eyes had bigger plans, which he confided to his ambitious mother.

"We could be more than lords of this petty town," he told her. "I could be king - ruler of all of Madrivalo, or Espa itself ! Only the Damon alliance stood in our way, and now it is shattering. If only I was king, we could cleanse this land of The Ones Whose Very Name Brings Disease - once and for all."

Lady Tresa Pasko was pleased to hear that. Standing behind her restless son, she massaged his perpetually tense shoulders with her fingers. She said into his ear: "You are a brilliant child, so much more than your weakling brother Andon. Tell me more."

Tharlos willingly obliged: "Once Damon City has been taken, the other cities can easily be convinced to form a new alliance, under the Pasko family - the beginning of an empire. And just to make sure our forces are superior... the robot I tested during the Summer Joust was not the only one of its kind."

"My bright, beautiful boy. Did our craftsmen build it?"

"That must remain my secret. I have a source, a secret ally - far, far from here, who contacted me through a robot messenger, which also fought for me in the Joust. My secret ally will provide me with a new kind of robots, battle robots the likes of which have not been seen since the Great Wars. He has plans too - one day, he will become a threat to our rule. But we will be prepared."

Tresa kissed her son's cheek, slowly caressing his neck.

"And can we outrank the Damon scum?" she asked softly.

"According to our agents, Damon City alone can mobilize a thousand armored riflemen, and possibly three armored knights. We are forced to leave a few hundred of our fifteen hundred riflemen for city defense - but my new battle robots will compensate for that. And I have trained four new armored knights from the lower nobility. They are my loyal followers of Koban-Jem."

Tharlos stood up from his chair, and headed off for the secret shrine he had built deep in the family castle. His mother looked slightly disappointed.

"I will pray to Koban-Jem and Setan-Klaws for victory," he said as he left.

Of Tharlos's two hundred followers, nearly a hundred were waiting around the black shrine, chanting their hymn of hoarse desperation.

For there were those, even among the richest of this city, who had lost all hope in the future. For these desperate souls, the gods of greed and destruction provided a perverse kind of resort. As high-priest of this his local chapter, Tharlos was the only one who had dyed his long hair yellow. He entered the darkened room of the shrine, wearing a white silken shirt with very long, loose tails, and ascended the altar. Tharlos raised his silver knife-scepter and called for silence.

"My children... a new age is dawning! The Whore Goddess is old and weakening. Her Singing King has appeared in Damon City."

Tharlos' followers gasped in fear. He added, triumphantly: "But he, for all his power, soon fell sick, and now he is dead. Koban-Jem is stronger than ever. I - he - will lead you to true greatness. The greatness of slaying all enemies! The greatness of destroying all weakness! The greatness of annihilating all disease!"

The worshippers - a motley collection of nobles, merchants, and common thugs and criminals - responded with a mantra, repeated in chorus: "Death to all enemies! Death to all enemies!"

Tharlos smiled, then silenced them with a solemn gesture. "We shall cleanse the world. With fire, my children." Then he suddenly screamed in hysterical rage, urged on by the manic atmosphere of the audience: "Fire shall melt the Eternal Ice! Fire shall incinerate all Lepers! Fire shall create a new sun - a black sun!"

The worshippers chanted: "The Black Sun! The Black Sun!"

The Black Sun, mentioned in the ancient astronomy books, the never-seen eater of galaxies, father of shadows, was the center of the Kobanite faith. The followers believed that the only way to appease the Black Sun and protect themselves, was sacrifice - preferably that of enemies. Tharlos reveled in his power over this crowd, the closest he had ever come to being loved. His mother's caresses had never been love, at least not to him, who craved more than mere human affection.

"And now," he declared, "we serve Koban-Jem his offering, to ensure victory in our coming battle against the Damon fiends!"

The crowd murmured expectantly, their eyes glittering with a twisted desire. From behind the shrine, a woman was dragged forth to the altar. She had been picked from a tavern at night, drugged and brought to the castle - a poor prostitute, who would be missed by no one except her illicit children. Tharlos himself tied the dazed woman to the altar, where a fresh tablecloth had replaced the old bloodied one. He did not sincerely believe in human sacrifice - but he knew its effect on the crowd, and he desired that power.

The chanting increased, faster and faster - one word being repeated more and more - until only the one word was shouted by the ecstatic worshippers: "Death!"

Tharlos stabbed the woman and offered the crowd her blood. They shared it.

Just one day after he woke up from his fever, Darc was up and about - Mechao's cures and medicines had made him stronger, more vital than ever. With an intensity that surprised his host, Darc dismissed any thoughts of convalescence and began to study the machinery of Mechao's genetic laboratory.

He was introduced to Mechao's secret treasure of inherited knowledge, a knowledge that had allowed him to breed the mutated beast which Dohan had slain. Darc and Mechao spent days and nights among the DNA centrifuges, the mechanical womb, the corporeal scanner, the micro-surgical instruments, the test paper tissue which reacted to specific genetic samples - all marvels of simplified biotechnology, and yet just fragments of past wonders.

Darc admired the old witchdoctor's huge library of ancient transcripts, containing near-complete maps of 50,000-plus human genes - more than one hundred volumes in all. One proof at least, Darc thought, of a work that had survived from his own time. An enormous array of hereditary diseases was listed in the volumes, plus the exact genetic faults that caused each disease. There was no entry, however, on the dreaded Plague.

It did not take long for Darc, an accomplished biochemist from the late 20th century, to grasp the workings of Mechao's laboratory. The chimera called "Pipo" had been Mechao's biggest creation so far: a cross-breed of elephant and crocodile. Its purpose had been to scare away curious seafarers and other unwanted intruders, and it had served well - until now. Otherwise, Mechao's main work was that of being master physician of the islands - he alone possessed the technology to alter people's immune systems, something the conservative plaster-mongers of Castilia neither could nor dared to. One day, his oldest sons would take his place as keepers of the flame.

Seeing that Darc was going to live, Dohan felt satisfied; he had saved the man who might - or might not - be the Singing King.

But he remained uncertain of how they were going to get back to Castilia, and face his father's wrath. His despondence increased. On their third day on the island, Dohan grew wary of waiting. Darc was preoccupied in the laboratory with Mechao, and the inhabitants came out into the open. The natives pulled out their boats and fishing-nets, worked their plantations, maintained their camouflaged villages. Their eyes followed Dohan all day long, and he began to worry that they would sabotage the Sunray to keep their secrets from the outside world.

So he spent the third night inside the jet craft, on the watch for saboteurs or more mutated beasts. Nothing happened that night; only the crickets and seagulls disturbed his sleep. The island had scents that were like perfumes, beckoning, dizzying his senses.

His susperstitious mind began to suspect he was under a spell.

When it came to genetic creations, Mechao's clan had mostly experimented with enhanced agriculture. Some of the best-growing crops on the islands were his forefathers' creations, which withstood drought and heat. Because of this, the Mechao family ruled the islands. His convictions were strongly directed toward helping humanity, like his forefathers. However, the worldwide fear of man-made diseases and mutations had forced them to Kap Verita generations ago.

Darc soon learned that, even though genetics had developed during his years of frozen sleep, no new progress had been made in the last five hundred years. Mechao was a keeper, not a finder of knowledge. While his sharp, witty intellect and vast knowledge made Mechao a delight to work and discuss with, the white-haired time-traveler also saw how Mechao was deprived of proper awareness of the scientific process, and proper stimulation.

And it was evident, given the state of things, that the world's remaining "witchdoctors" were isolated far apart from each other. Mechao had never met one outside his clan, until Darc arrived. The vivid memory of the Castilian nobility's terrified reaction to the word "DNA" had made Darc cautious. He revealed little of his own knowledge and mostly listened to Mechao, as the man explained to him the wonders of his great genetic workshop.

The following morning, Dohan woke up and saw that the cockpit windshield was spattered with white bird-dung; he grew furious.

He fired a few laser shots at the circling birds, and beat his shield to scare them off. As a response, a bird dropping hit him on the head. Dohan threw a youthful fit, cursed the entire island, hacked at the nearest palm-tree with his sword - and from somewhere above, a female laughter echoed across the harbor. He looked frantically for the source, but saw nothing - the natives kept their activities away from the harbor ruins.

"Who is it?" he shouted in frustrated rage. "Come on, I'm not afraid to fight a woman! Where are you, coward?"

The laughter returned, and a young woman's spiteful reply echoed: "I am not afraid of you, you pale-faced brute! Only an idiot would park his ship in the middle of the birds' nesting-grounds!"

Dohan did not grasp every word of her dialect, but the meaning was clear enough. He felt foolish, so he retreated to the ship, started up the hover jets, and moved the Sunray to a higher location. Then he waited, as he had been trained - waited for the unseen enemy to strike.

From various hiding-places, Meijji had watched the pale-faced intruders ever since their arrival.

When she learned of Pipo's death, she decided that the intruders were dangerous brutes, who should be chased away or imprisoned. But her parents and the council of villages had explicitly declared that Darc and Dohan should not be harmed. Meijji cried with rage at night, swearing that she would get at them somehow. She would make her parents see how evil and unreliable the brutes were, behind their false smiles and fairy-tales of the Golden Age. And since Darc was already a trustee of her father, she went for Dohan - the most violent of the two.

Later in the fourth day, after the noon meal, a passing villager turned up his nose and made a disdainful remark to Dohan.

"Our pigs smell better!"

The young warrior had not taken a bath for days, in breach of his own upbringing, and was ashamed at the complaint. Afraid to leave the Sunray unguarded, he decided to bathe in the nearby sea, where he could see the parked ship on top of the plateau northwest of the harbor. Dohan had never been near the sea before, but he did not fear it; the Lepers avoided coastlines, and the sea was rarely a source of legends in the open plains of the inland.

In the clear sunlight, Dohan walked down to the rocky beach, undressed, and stepped into the splashing waves. The water was much warmer than he had expected. Under the surface, he could glimpse an immense variety of colorful fishes and corals... an entire new universe, waiting to be explored. Dohan treaded deeper into the water, until it reached up to his chin.

Only then he remembered: he hadn't the faintest knowledge of how to swim! There were no open lakes in Damon City, just shallow pools. He turned awkwardly back toward the beach - slipped on a rock, and fell deep under the surface, swallowing water. Instinctively, he kicked his way up to the surface, coughing and gasping for air. A big wave lifted him up, then buried his head underwater. He panicked, losing air in bursts of bubbles. The outward pull brought him deeper out to sea, and his pumping feet found no foothold.

Dohan began to drown.

It was now, on the fourth day, that Darc began to suspect there was a reason for the predominance of women on Kap Verita.

He asked Mechao, who explained without unease: "In your time, you could decide the sex of an unborn child, no? You could abort an unborn, because it was going to be of an unwanted gender, no?"

"That is true," Darc admitted uneasily. "And it caused problems in some lands, because most parents prefer sons to daughters - well, in my time they did."

Mechao nodded. "In my practice, I am regularly asked to control the gender of an unborn, by sorting the male seed into male and female tendencies."

He meant chromosomes - female, X-shaped chromosomes and male, Y-shaped chromosomes. Sorting them was a relatively simple mechanical process, since they had different weight.

Darc said: "I see. So, why do parents here choose to have daughters more often?"

"Because this is a small, peaceful, isolated island... and we desire it to remain so. We have no need for soldiers or brawlers. Our women argue thus: why need so many men, when all they do is sleep in the sun, use the crops for making beer, waste their money on gambling, get drunk and beat their families - and then leave their wives for the mainland?"

Mechao's words reminded Darc of angry female litanies from his youth; and though he himself stayed away from drinking, he knew the bitter truth of those complaints.

"But... but isn't this dangerous for the reproduction?" he objected. "What if all men eventually disappear from Kap Verita... or the risk of inbreeding?"

Mechao giggled in his peculiar way, then said with a knowing smile: "I was going to ask you and your young friend a small favor, a small repayment for my services..." He held up a set of tiny glass tubes, and winked benevolently. "Would you care to make a small donation to the island's genetic treasury?"

A strong, thin arm reached under Dohan's bearded chin, and kicking legs pulled him up to the surface, back to the pebble beach. He was barely conscious, until someone began pressing her soft, warm lips against his, blowing in air. She removed her lips - Dohan took a gasping breath, coughed up seawater, and wheezed like an old man. Then his vision cleared again, and he could see the person who had dragged him up.

She was roughly his age. Her small face had Mechao's slanting eyes and long nose - and her mother's broad cheeks. Her light-brown, soft skin glittered with drops of water, and her slim, curvy figure was showing under the wet skirt and shirt. The girl's brown hair stretched to her shoulders in thick braided dreadlocks, set with colored beads that framed her long neck. She was kneeling beside him, and he saw that she was surveying his pale body with curiosity... or fascination. He blushed, and covered his crotch.

"Who are you?" he croaked.

The young woman retreated several meters, then retorted: "I am Meijji of the Mechao. And you... are a dumb brute."

She put her hands on her hips and just stood there, as if waiting for him to get angry at her. Dohan got to his feet with some effort, and found his clothes. He rinsed them in the waves, and dressed - the sun was already burning his skin hard, and his nose had been peeling for the last few days.

"I ought to thank you for pulling me up!" he called at her.

She sat down on a rock, watching him dress.

"I should have let you drown, paleface!" she called back. "You murdered my Pipo!"

She was insane, Dohan told himself. And insane women were best left alone. Meijji thought: He is as big as he is dumb. A big, muscular paleface. Never have I seen a member as pale as his...

Against his better judgment, Dohan approached Meijji again. He disliked the idea of her running about accusing him on false grounds, so he decided to put her in her place.

"Let me just say this: I did not 'murder' your monster. He attacked me. What was I to do - let him trample the ship and hurt my friend who was inside?"

Meijji raised her small chin - a very cute angle of her face, Dohan admitted to himself - and gave him a defiant laugh.

"Pipo ate nothing but vegetables, I used to feed and wash him every day! Those front teeth were just for scaring! You think you are a brave warrior, huh?"

"I know I am," he said with a feral grin, "just as I know that you are a madwoman. And I have no more time for you. So leave me alone!"

She made a childish face, and stood up. "Fine! See if I care! I hate you!"

Meijji turned and fled, skipping over the round boulders with graceful ease - Dohan was unable to trace her way into the hills. He sighed, and thought of home. Could he ever return now, having disgraced his family and broken the oldest of all taboos? He ought to be defending his city from the Paskos now - if they weren't attacking already. And to top his miseries, he was being persecuted by a madwoman.

That last thought kept Dohan occupied for the rest of the day.

That evening Mechao and his wife, the venerable Amada, were informed about the events on the beach - the women of the island had their eyes and ears on the new visitors.

Amada laughed at this news, wrinkles spreading over her dark, smooth face.

"The Great Sea lends a hand," she told her husband as they went to sleep. "It is fickle but generous."

"We are indeed blessed." He smiled.

"Tell me, dear, will he bring us many grandchildren?"

"Many, many ones. Meijji will have five sons and five daughters."

"Four. Four sons."

"Why four?"

"Four is her lucky number."

"Woman, you are so... so..."

The word he was aiming for would have been "irrational", but it did not exist in their vocabulary. So he kissed her instead.

Darc took a break in his genetics studies, and staggered to bed for a full night's sleep. Finally, he was on his home ground - unlawful or not, he wasn't going to quit science. From outside his room, the distant music of a village feast beckoned - maybe he could do a few rock songs for them? - but sleep overcame him. Later, he told himself.

Dohan slept a little better in the ship that night, but he dreamt uneasily - about laughing, brown-skinned women who ran around him, teasing him with glimpses of naked flesh.

Meijji spent most of the night among the feasting villagers in the valley below Mechao's mansion. She stayed away from the dances, and rejected all invitations from the young men. Her friends, relatives and elders knew what was bothering her; it was futile to explain to Meijji what she would soon find out on her own. And not a few of them, also her sisters, envied her. Jealous thoughts grew in the night.

Early in the morning, Meijji traveled down the cable-way to the harbor ruins, and had a second look at the carcass of Pipo. The sight made her wince.

Birds, insects, and small animals had picked his bones clean - only the huge ribcage, the long skull and rags of scaly skin remained. Meijji was suddenly filled with disgust, seeing Pipo for what he had been - a monstrosity, a dumb animal. She felt a strange surge inside. Meijji was clueless as to why, but she craved Dohan's attention. Immediately.

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