“Might not have such an easy job when you get back there,” Ryan stated, “with a few scientists short.”
“Hell, ain’t none of us loose yet. I figure we won’t be clear of the reach of the Five Barons for a while.”
“Who’re the Five Barons?”
“Now, that’s a story,” Hoyle said.
THE HISTORY Hoyle gave Ryan was concise but complete.
In the beginning there’d been a gathering of small villes along the Cific coast. Each had clung to ideals and traditions handed down from those who’d survived the nukecaust or had migrated there afterward to be near the ocean. The aquatic life in the area had been less harmed than the land-based creatures, and as Hoyle stated, a man had to eat.
The villes hadn’t gotten along well together. Each had staked out territorial claims that had been disputed over the years. Several villes had split off from the original ville. One of those had died out from an epidemic that created a natural southern boundary.
After that, things remained peaceableuntil the arrival of the barons.
“Any of them barons you ask about,” Hoyle told Ryan, “you’re going to hear a different story about how and why they came to be trapped out in the deserts the way they were. Only them and their Maker and a handful of their close sec people know the right of it.”
All of the barons, six of them at the time, had wandered in from the desert, drawn by tales they’d heard of the villes and how robbing was easy there because the people in the seven villes were too busy raising stuff to eat and fishing to worry about learning to fight.
When the barons got among the villes, greed had set in. The villes were too close to allow for expansion by each separate baron. They tried splitting them up, but none of them were men who wanted to share.
“They went to war with each other,” Hoyle went on. “Fighting, killing and sabotaging, the like of which none of the people of the seven villes had ever seen before. Oh, they’d had their scraps over the years, but it wasn’t nothing like what the barons could dish out against each other.”
“But with the barons killing one another and reducing their manpower down to something that wouldn’t allow them to stand firm against the mutie bands wandering in the desert if they had to return there, they struck a bargain.”
“Only one of the barons could comfortably run the seven villes at one time,” Hoyle said. “So they decided a competition was in order to figure out who was going to get control without killing each other. All of them were so aligned that if any one of them swore out a blood feud against another, the others would step in and stop it. A shift in the balance of power wasn’t tolerated. Jink Masten, the old sixth baron, was the only man all five of the others couldn’t stand. They killed him three years ago, and became known as the Five Barons.”
Ryan listened, knowing the savagery that had to have gone on between the barons. The history was a familiar story to him.
“They got together and created the Big Game,” Hoyle went on. “Found a place out in the desert, somewhere that held a lot of meaning to it at one time. A place where luck and chance came together, they tell me. I never seen it.”
“What do they do there?”
“Choose up teams. Kidnap folk and use them to fight for them. Control of the seven villes for the next year goes to the baron whose team wins.”
“What does the winning team get?” Ryan asked.
“Killed, mostly. Except for one man. Or woman. Or mutie. The barons ain’t particular. They don’t want anybody to get a chance at getting together an experienced team, you know.”
“So why do those people fight?”
“Don’t give them much choice at the time.”
Ryan turned the story over in his head as he walked through inches-deep water where the river had completely filled the cavern. “Which baron is in charge now, and who’s his sec boss?” Ryan asked.