He sent his horse trotting toward the unconscious men on the ground. He alighted. Hoddan saw him happily and publicly pick the pockets of the stun-gun’s victims. He came back beaming.
“We will be famous!” he said zestfully. “Two against thirty, and some ran away!” he gloated. “And it was a good haul! We share, of course, because we are companions.”
“Is it the custom,” asked Hoddan mildly, “to loot defenseless men?”
“But of course!” said Thai. “How else can a gentleman live, if he has no chieftain to give him presents? You defeated them, so of course you take their possessions!”
“Ah, yes,” said Hoddan. “To be sure!”
He rode on. The road was a mere horse track. Presently it was loss than that. He saw a frowning, battlemented stronghold away off to the left. Thai openly hoped that somebody would come from that castle and try to charge them toll for riding over their lord’s land. After Hoddan had knocked them over with the stun-pistols, Thai would add to the heavy weight of coins already in his possession.
It did not look promising, in a way. But just before sunset, Hoddan saw three tiny bright Lights flash across the sky from west to east. They moved in formation and at identical speeds. Hoddan knew a spaceship in orbit when be saw one. He bristled, and muttered under his breath. “What’s that? asked Thai. “What did you say?”
“I said,” said Hoddan dourly, “that I’ve got to do something about Walden. When they get an idea in their heads…”
CHAPTER FOUR
ACCORDING to the fiction-tapes, the colonized worlds of the galaxy vary wildly from each other. In cold and unromantic fact, it isn’t so. Space travel is too cheap and sol-type solar systems too numerous to justify the settlement of hostile worlds. Therefore Bron Hoddan encountered no remarkable features in the landscape of Darth as he rode through the deepening night. There was grass, bushes, trees, birds, and various other commonplace living things whose ancestors had been dumped on Darth some centuries before. The ecological system had worked itself out strictly by hit-or-miss, but the result was not unusual. There was, though, the unfamiliar star-pattern. Hoddan tried to organize it in his mind. He knew where the sun had set, which would be west. He asked the latitude of the Darthian spaceport. Thai did not know it. He asked about major geographical features — seas, continents, and so on. Thai had no ideas on the subject Hoddan fumed. He hadn’t worried about such things on Walden. Of course, on Walden he’d had one friend, Derec, and believed be had a sweetheart, Nedda. There he was lonely and schemed to acquire the admiration of others. He ignored the sky. Here on Darth he had no friends, but there were a number of local citizens now recovering from stun-pistol bolts and yearning to carve him up with large knives. He did not feel lonely, but the instinct to know where he was, was again in operation.
The ground was rocky and far from level. After two hours of riding on a small and wiry horse with no built-in springs, Hoddan hurt in a great many places. He and Thai rode in an indeterminate direction with an irregular scarp of low mountains silhouetted against the unfamiliar stars. A vagrant night wind blew. Thai had said it was a three-hour ride to Don Loris’ castle. After something over two of them, he said meditatively:”
“I think that if you wish to give me a present I will take it and not make a gift in return. You could give me,” he added helpfully, “your share of the plunder from our victims.”
“Why?” demanded Hoddan. “Why should I give you a present?”
“If I accepted it,” explained Thai, “and make no gift in return, I will become your retainer. Then it will be my obligation as a Darthian gentleman to ride beside you, advise, counsel, and fight in your defense, and generally to uphold your dignity.”
“How about Don Loris? Aren’t you his retainer?” he asked suspiciously.
“Between the two of us,” said Thai, “he’s stingy. His presents are not as lavish as they could be. I can make him a return-present of part of the money we won in combat. That frees me of duty to him. Then I could accept the balance of the money from you, and become a retainer of yours.”
“Oh,” said Hoddan.
“You need a retainer badly,” said Thai. “You do not know the customs here. For example, there is enmity between Don Loris and the young Lord Ghek. If the young Lord Ghek is as enterprising as he should be, some of his retainers should be lying in wait to cut our throats as we approach Don Loris’ stronghold.”
“Hm,” said Hoddan grimly. But Thai seemed undisturbed. “This system of gifts and presents sounds complicated. Why doesn’t Don Loris simply give you so much a year, or week, or whatnot?”
Thai made a shocked sound.
That would be pay! A Darthian gentleman does not serve for pay! To offer it would be insult!” Then he said, “Listen!”
He reined in. Hoddan clumsily followed his example. After u moment or two Thai clucked to his horse and started off again.
“It was nothing,” he said regretfully. “I hoped we were riding into an ambush.”
Hoddan grunted. It could be that he was being told a tall tale. Hut back at the spaceport, the men who came after him waving large knives had seemed sincere enough.
“Why should we be ambushed?” he asked. “And why do you hope for it?”
“Your weapons would destroy our enemies,” said Thai placidly, “and the pickings would be good.” He added, “We should be ambushed because the Lady Fani refused to marry the Lord Ghek. She is Don Loris’ daughter, and to refuse to marry a man is naturally a deadly insult. So he should ravage Don Loris’ lands at every opportunity until he gets a chance to carry off the Lady Fani and marry her by force. That is the only way the insult can be wiped out.”
“I see,” said Hoddan ironically.
He didn’t. The two horses topped a rise, and far in the distance there was a yellow light, with a mist above it as of illuminated smoke.
“That is Don Loris’ stronghold,” said Thai. He sighed. “It looks like we may not be ambushed.”
They weren’t. It was very dark where the horses forged ahead through brushwood. As they moved onward, the single light became two. They were great bonfires burning in iron cages some forty feet up in the air. Those cages projected from the battlements of a massive, cut-stone wall There was no light anywhere else.
Thai rode almost under the cressets and shouted upward. A voice answered. Presently a gate clanked open and a black, cave-like opening appeared behind it. Thai rode grandly in, and Hoddan followed.
The gate clanked shut. Torches waved overhead. Hoddan found that he and Thai had ridden into a very tiny courtyard. Twenty feet above them, an inner battlemented wall offered excellent opportunities for the inhabitants of the castle to throw things down at visitors who, after admission, turned out to be undesired.
Thai shouted further identifications, including a boastful and entirely untruthful declaration that he and Hoddan, together, had slaughtered twenty men in one place and thirty in another, and left them lying in their gore.
The voices that replied sounded derisive. Somebody came down a rope and fastened the gate from the inside. With an extreme amount of creaking, an inner gate swung wide. Men came out of it and took the horses. Hoddan dismounted, and it seemed to him that he creaked as loudly as the gate. Thai swaggered, displaying coins he had picked from the pockets of the men the stun-pistols had disabled. He said splendidly to Hoddan:
“I go to announce your coming to Don Loris. These are his retainers. They will give you to drink.” He added amiably, “If you were given food, it would be disgraceful to cut your throat.”
He disappeared. Hoddan carried his shipbag and followed a man in a dirty pink shirt to a stone-walled room containing a table and a chair. He sat down, relieved. The man in the pink shirt brought him a flagon of wine. He disappeared again.