Free The Last Castle by Jack Holbrook Vance Page A

Peasants? Do we serve the Birds essences and discuss with them the sheen of our Phanes?”
    “ ‘Dishonor’ then?” She jumped to her feet. “Then it is also dishonor for you to talk to me, to sit here with me, to make ridiculous suggestions!”
    “I made no suggestions!” protested Xanten. “l sit here in all decorum—”
    “Too much decorum, too much honor!” With a display of passion which astounded Xanten, Glys Meadowsweet tore the flower from her hair, buried it at the ground. “There. Hence!”
    “No,” said Xanten in sudden humility. He bent, picked up the flower, kissed it, replaced it in her hair. “I am not over-honorable. I will try my best.” He put his arms on her shoulders, but she held him away.
    “Tell me,” she inquired with a very mature severity, “do you own any of these peculiar insect-women?”
    “I? Phanes? I own no Phanes.”
    With this Glys Meadowsweet relaxed and allowed Xanten to embrace her, while the Birds clucked, guffawed and made vulgar scratching sounds with their wings.

X
    The summer waned. On June 30 Janeil and Hagedorn celebrated the Fete of Flowers, even though the dike was rising high around Janeil.
    Shortly after, Xanten flew six select Birds into Castle Janeil by night and proposed to the council that the population be evacuated by Bird-lift—as many as possible, as many who wished to leave. The council listened with stony faces and without comment passed on.
    Xanten returned to Castle Hagedorn. Using the most careful methods, speaking only to trusted comrades, Xanten enlisted thirty or forty cadets and gentlemen to his persuasion, though inevitably he could not keep the doctrinal thesis of his program secret.
    The first reaction of the traditionalists was mockery and charges of poltroonery. At Xanten’s insistence, challenges were neither issued nor accepted by his hot-blooded associates.
    On the evening of September 9 Castle Janeil fell. The news was brought to Castle Hagedorn by excited Birds who told the grim tale again and again in voices ever more hysterical.
    Hagedorn, now gaunt and weary, automatically called a council meeting; it took note of the gloomy circumstances. “We then are the last castle! The Meks cannot conceivably do us harm; they can build dikes around our castle walls for twenty years and only work themselves to distraction. We are secure; but yet it is a strange and portentous thought to realize that at last, here at Castle Hagedorn, live the last gentlemen of the race!”
    Xanten spoke in a voice strained with earnest conviction: “Twenty years—fifty years—what difference to the Meks? Once they surround us, once they deploy, we are trapped. Do you comprehend that now is our last opportunity to escape the great cage that Castle Hagedorn is to become?”
    ” ‘Escape’, Xanten? What a word! For shame!” hooted 0. Z. Garr. “Take your wretched band, escape! To steppe or swamp or tundra! Go as you like, with your poltroons, but be good enough to give over these incessant alarms!”
    “Garr, I have found conviction since I became a ‘poltroon’. Survival is good morality; I have this from the mouth of a noted savant.”
    “Bah! Such as whom?”
    “A. G. Philidor, if you must be informed of every detail.”

    0. Z. Garr clapped his hand to his forehead. “Do you refer to Philidor the Expiationist? He is of the most extreme stripe, an Expiationist to out-expiate all the rest! Xanten, be sensible, if you please!”
    “There are years ahead for all of us,” said Xanten in a wooden voice, “if we free ourselves from the castle.”
    “But the castle is our life!” declared Hagedorn. “In essence, Xanten, what would we be without the castle? Wild animals? Nomads?”
    “We would be alive.”
    0. Z. Garr gave a snort of disgust, turned away to inspect a wallhanging. Hagedorn shook his head in doubt and perplexity. Beaudry threw his hands up into the air. “Xanten, you have the effect of unnerving us all. You come in here, inflict