"You did nothing to control the three who did. Starve and thirst in their company-until they are dead."
"This is not fair! You do not reckon with our customs."
To the contrary. It is now I who do the baiting. When Fairo the Handsome, Ganim Thornbranch, and Black Hulanik are dead, you shall drink."
The thirsty Alula turned slowly away. Karazan intoned, "It is an ill thing which has occurred."
"You might have stopped it," said Etzwane. "You chose to do nothing."
Rising to his feet Karazan glared into the provisions locker; for a moment he seemed the Karazan of old. Then his shoulders slumped. He said, 'This is true. I gave no instructions; why worry about one death when all are doomed?"
"I happen to worry about my death," said Etzwane. "And now I am doing the baiting, and the victims are Fairo, Ganim, Hulanik."
Karazan looked toward the three named men; every eye in the room followed his gaze. The three men made defiant grimaces and glared about them.
Karazan spoke in a conciliatory voice. "Let us put aside this business; it is unnecessary and unreasonable."
"Why did you not say this while I was being baited? " demanded Etzwane in a fury. "When the three are dead you will eat and drink."
Karazan settled once more to his previous position. Time passed. At first there was an ostentatious show of solidarity with the three, then other groups formed, talking in whispers. The three huddled back between the racks, and their glass knives glittered from the shadows.
Etzwane dozed once more. He awoke, intensely aware of danger. The chamber was still. Etzwane rose to his knees and backed further into the shadows. Across the outer chamber the Alula were watching. Someone had reached the wall and now sidled inch by inch, out of Etzwane's range of vision, toward the provision locker. Who?
Karazan no longer sat by the wall.
A paralyzing roar; a vast shape filled the aperture. Etzwane pulled the trigger, more by startlement than design. He saw a star-shaped dazzle as the flame struck into a great face. The lunging man was instantly dead. His body tottered into the wall and fell over backward.
Etzwane came slowly out into the room, which was hushed in horror. He stood looking down at the corpse, wondering what Karazan had intended, for Karazan carried no weapon. He had known Karazan as a large-souled man: simple, direct, and benevolent. Karazan deserved better than his cramped, despairing fate. He looked along the silent white faces. "The responsibility is yours. You tolerated malice and now you have lost your great leader."
Among the Alula there was a furtive shifting of position, a secret interchange of glances. Change came so quickly as to numb the mind: from dazed torpor to wild, screaming activity. Etzwane stumbled back against the wall. Alula leapt through the air; there was slashing and hacking and the doing of grisly deeds; and in a moment all was finished. On the deck Fairo, Ganim Thornbranch, Black Hulanik wallowed in their own blood, and two other men as well.
Etzwane said, "Quick, before the asutra arrive. Drag the bodies into the racks. Find room on the shelves."
Dead bodies lay beside living. Etzwane broke open a sack of meal and blotted up the blood. In five minutes the slave hold was orderly and calm, if somewhat less crowded than before. A few minutes later three Ka with asutra peering from the napes of their necks passed through the hold, but did not pause.
The Alula, with hunger and thirst sated and with emotions spent, fell into a state of inertness, more stupor than sleep. Etzwane, though distrustful of the unpredictable Alula temperament, decided that vigilance would only foster a new hostility and gave himself up to sleep, first taking the precaution of tying the energy gun to a loop of his pouch.
He slept undisturbed. When at last he awoke, he realized that the ship was at rest.
CHAPTER 9
The air in the hold seemed stale; the bluish illumination had dimmed and was more depressing than ever. From overhead came the thud of footsteps and fluctuating snatches of nasal Ka warbling. Etzwane rose to his feet and went to the ramp to listen. The Alula also rose and stood looking uncertainly toward the ramp: a far cry from the swaggering warriors Etzwane had met an aeon before at a bend of the Vurush River.
A grinding hiss, a chatter of ratchets: a section of wall drew back; a wash of gray light flooded the hold, to drown the blue glow.
Etzwane pushed past the Alula, where he could look out the opening. He leaned back in dismay and shock, unable to find meaning in the welter of strange shapes and colors. He looked once more through narrowed eyes, matching the pattern-forming capabilities of his mind against the alien stuff, and aspects of the landscape shifted into mental focus. He saw steep-sided sugarloaf hills overgrown with a lustrous black, dark-green, and brown pelt of vegetation. Beyond and above spread a heavy gray overcast, under which hung pillows of black cloud and a few veils of rain. Along the lower slopes straggled lines of irregular structures, built from rough lumps of an oyster-white material. At ground level the structures formed a denser complex. Most were built of the pallid lumps; a few seemed monolithic forms of black scoriaceous slag. Passages wound between and around, slanting and curving, without apparent purpose. Certain of these were smooth and wide and carried vehicles: cage-like drays; wagons, resembling beetles with raised wings; smaller lizard-like vehicles, darting inches above the surface. At intervals posts held up enormous black rectangles, lacking marks or discernible purpose. Etzwane wondered whether the eyes of Ka and asutra distinguished colors invisible to himself. The immediate foreground was a flat, paved area surrounded by a fence of woven bronze. Etzwane, who by instinct observed and interpreted colors automatically, after the symbology of Shant, noted no purposeful use of color. Somewhere in the confusion of size, form, and proportion, he thought, symbology must exist; technical civilization was impossible without control over abstractions.
The inhabitants of the place were Ka, at least half of whom carried asutra on their necks. No gray toad-men were in evidence, nor were human beings to be seen.
Except one. Into the slave hold climbed a person tall and spare, in a shapeless, coarse-fibered cloak. Stiff gray hair lay piled above the seamed gray face like a forkful of hay; the chin was long and without hair. Etzwane saw that the person was a woman, though her aspect and conduct were asexual. She called in a loud, windy voice, The persons now awake: follow me to the ground! Smartly now, quick and easy. This is "the first thing to know; never wait for two commands. " The woman spoke a dialect barely comprehensible; she seemed bitter and wild and grim as a winter storm. She set off down the ramp. Etzwane gingerly followed, glad to win free from the detested slave hold and its nightmare memories.
The group descended to the paved area under the great black depot ship. On a walkway above stood four Ka, looming like dark statues with asutra at their necks. The woman led them into the mouth of a fenced run. "Wait here; I go to wake the sleepers."
An hour passed. The men stood hunched against the fence, glum and silent. Etzwane, clinging to his Ifness-inspired shred of faith, was able to take a melancholy interest in the surroundings. The passage of time made the circumstances no less strange. From various directions came the muffled Ka fluting, mingled with the hiss of traffic on the road immediately across the fence. Etzwane watched the eight-wheeled, segmented drays roll past. Who guided them? He could see no cab or compartment other than a small cupola at the front, and within a small dark mass: asutra… From the depot ship marched the woman followed by dazed folk who had occupied the shelves. They stumbled and limped and looked here and there in sad amazement. Etzwane noted Srenka and presently Gulshe; the erstwhile bravos hunched along as miserably, as the others. Gulshe's gaze passed across Etzwane's face; he gave no signal of recognition. At the end of the procession came Rune the Willow Wand, and she as well looked past Etzwane without interest.