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The Thurkkas had made a mass drive toward a thinly-guarded stretch of open
country on
the left of Crooked River. Only the arrival of a large party from Nardavo's
Town, with the cannon from the railroad station, had stopped them; and at that
one band of several hundred had broken through and were camped on a rocky hill
inside the isthmus.
There was a mass-meeting of the Vallados to decide whether they should send
reinforcements, and whom they could spare. As he listened to the arguments, an
idea suddenly struck Dwallo.
"Will you let an outsider offer a word?" he asked. "Then, instead of trying to
wipe these Thurkkas out, why don't you bring a couple of hundred of them here,
and put them to work in your ore-pits? Feed them, and let them earn their food
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by digging ore for you.
They were probably hard workers until the drought forced them out of their
homes."
"You mean take these savages into our gang?" somebody shouted in horror.
"Certainly not! Let them form a gang of their own to work for you. Trade them
for their work under a definite contract. Furnish them tools, and give them so
much in trade for every cartload of ore they dig. And you could let them do
shovel-work around the furnaces, too. That way your own gang would be free to
do the real work at the mill and the forges."
There was silence for a moment. "Maybe it would work, at that," one of the
older men considered. "Digging ore and shoveling coal is nothing but toulth
work. Why, if we had a couple of hundred of those people in the ore-pits and
on the coal-pile, we could build another furnace and put in a couple more
hammers."
"We'd need a few of our people to show them what to do, and fire the
blasting-shots, of course
Dwallo said nothing else. His suggestion had caught the imagination of the
Vallados.
Now they'd be able to build his power-driven printing-machine, and his gang
would be trading books all around the Central Mountains.
It never occurred to him that he had just invented the wage system.
Chapter Eight
Zaithu was an apostate Puzzan priest, as Puzza himself had been a renegade
from the earlier polytheism. It was his thesis that Puzza had been an impudent
and sacrilegious pretender and that his self-styled Successors were
blasphemers and perverters of the
Sacred Truth. That truth, Zaithu held, was found only in The Books of Tisse,
and the individual, equal in the Mind of Vran with all others, must interpret
them according to his own conscience. Instead of solemn liturgies, the
religious services of Zaithu's followers consisted simply of readings from and
discussions of The Books; whenever disagreement grew too passionate over some
obscure passage, the service-leader elected by the congregation; there were no
separate priests would call for prayer and meditation.
The new religion took liberty-loving Dudak by storm, in spite of all that the
Puzzan hierarchy could do. A series of bitter religious wars blazed up; in the
end the Successor, Glavrad XXII, and his council of Archpriests, were expelled
and sought refuge at Tullon, the now-decayed seat of the ancient Empire. Freed
from the strangling toils of religious absolutism, and lacking any powerful
feudal nobility or any strong guild tradition, Dudak plunged into a cultural
and technological renaissance.
The two smaller continents of Gir-Zashon and Thurv, screened by Nimsh and
Vashtur from the Central Sea, had been discovered in the third century of the
Tissen Era; the discoverers had been pirates, interested only in a safe base
of depredations. They had made friends, and finally amalgamated with, the
natives, a barbarian race calling themselves the Hoz-Hozgaz, and had taught
them the arts of civilization. In time, the descendants of the Hoz-Hozgaz and
their pirate mentors turned from the sea and began exploiting the interior of
Gir-Zashon and exploring the neighboring continent of Thurv, forgotten by the
busy world around the Central Sea.
If they were forgotten, they were nonetheless not allowed to forget that
world.
Refugees trickled across the straits, seeking a haven from war and
persecution, bringing news. One of these refugees described the steam-turbine
engine which had been built on
Zabash. He had been foreman in a construction crew which built a few of them.
Within his lifetime, he saw hundreds of them in operation on Gir-Zashon, and
died rich and honored as a result. One of the Hoz-Hozgaz who had become
interested in this new source of power began using briquettes of charcoal
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mixed with fish-oil for fuel; another discovered a method of refining fish-oil
and invented a burner for it.
On Dudak, too, the steam-turbine found favor. There the fuel problem the
turbine is a hungry beast was solved in the dense jungles along the inner
coast, where two growing-seasons a year provided unlimited fermentable
vegetable matter. The Dudakans invented an alcohol-burner and became
distillers instead of fishermen. They also invented a steam-jet engine for
ship propulsion.
The old rigid world of feudal estates and mercantile guilds shattered like
glass all around the Central Sea. Merchants fumed, lords and kings stormed,
priests thundered anathemas but the ships of Dudak could out sail the
merchantmen and outfight the war-
galleys of Zabash and Vashtur and Nimsh. They could only be met by imitation
and improvement. And so, in every kingdom and city-state, for
self-preservation, steam-
turbines and steam-jet engines and ships of the new pattern were being built.
The search for sources of fuel became frantic. Dudak and Gvarda, now [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]