Just how ingrained those prejudices were, she had discovered when she was first told what her cover was to be. Evidence that it was the most convenient and most reliable one available simply bounced off her frigid armor of preconception, and even as the ship closed with its destination she was having difficulty adapting to the role.
It had been suggested by the nearest of the surviving on-planet agents, Slee, whose own cover was the trade usually translated as “hetaira manager” but which a blunter age would have named “pander.” In the territory south of Carrig something resembling a cross between the Japanese geisha system and the acknowledged-mistress system of ancient Greece had evolved; high-class courtesans favored not less for their skill at music, dancing, and conversation than for their amorous talents were a regular part of a rich man’s retinue; and those who could not afford to keep a hetaira on a full-time basis were catered for by managers with several girls under contract This profession—a perfectly respectable one into which parents among the poorer classes were delighted to send their daughters for the sake of the upper-class manners they would acquire—was eminently suitable for present needs. Already Slee’s girls had established for him an extensive grapevine which brought him news and gossip from all parts of the continent; it was through them that he had been able to piece together an outline of events at Carrig far to the north.
Recently, so Slee reported, it had become fashionable in Carrig also to keep or rent hetairas. What more natural than that Maddalena should be sent to Carrig as a supposed employee of his testing the possibility of opening a branch of his business there? Moreover, there was not so much contact between Carrig and the southland that she would be unable to pass off her accent and lack of familiarity with local mores as due to her southern origin.
She had to concede the logic of the scheme eventually. But she also had to play over the psychologists’ tapes several times a day to condition her into acceptance of it.
One thing, Maddalena thought as she stood before the mirror in her cabin studying her disguise for flaws: one good thing is my hair. They had injected her scalp with trichogibberellins, and since leaving the base her hair had practically streamed back to its natural shoulder-length. Now it was tied and braided into an openwork cap of white lace. A skin-tight bodice of the same white lace and leotards of red lace—both garments oddly comfortable—clasped her body as closely as a lover; over them came a tunic and loose breeches of black embroidered with yellow and green, then a sort of cape of yellow into which a green design was woven; and for street-wear and traveling a voluminous cloak which could be caught up by a drawstring if she had to walk on muddy ground. There was a hood attached to it against rain. On her feet were red slippers, and to go with the cloak she had huge wood-and-leather overshoes lined with a sort of sponge.
It was the acquisition of this wardrobe she had suddenly acquired which had for the first time made her feel—all the way down—the resources that the Corps commanded. There had been the suggestion that she pose as a visiting hetaira, made over the subspace communicator from Fourteen by Slee, whose “employee” she was going to be. The suggestion was approved. They sent to the library. In ten minutes Langenschmidt was playing over a tape labeled “ZRP 14—South Civilized Territory—Female Costume Group 3: Leisured and Non-Artisan Classes.”
Within an hour she was trying the outfit on, and it didn’t even need alterations to make it fit her.
She turned from the mirror to review the rest of her gear. One wooden trunk of authentic native pattern—the wood was synthetic, but the grain had been checked from another recording, this time an account of the timbers used for carpentry in Fourteen’s northern subtropical zone. It would pass the closest inspection short of advanced chemical analysis. In the trunk were five or six more costumes, cosmetics, a subspace communicator hidden under a false bottom, a comprehensive medical kit disguised as a sewing-box, and a case of herbal ointments.
Plus one musical instrument, a sort of panpipe turned on its side and blown by means of a bellows. Another recording had supplied not merely blueprints of the instruments and instructions for playing it, but thirty popular tunes to be rendered on it and the words of a dozen traditional songs, all very long indeed, which she had had diligently to commit to memory under light hypnosis.
Plus a brush-pen, a cake of ink, and a booklet of coarse native paper, because a hetaira was expected to be able to compose flattering quatrains about her employers.
Plus a jeweled box—tightly locked—with religious ideograms on the lid invoking a terrible fate on anyone who opened it without permission, ostensibly containing relics of her ancestors, but in fact holding a well-charged energy gun which, if the lock were forced, would melt into a sizzling amorphous puddle of metal and plastic.
She picked up the musical instrument—it was called a “piap’r” and the name simply meant “piper,” indeed was derived from that originally—and pumped the bellows. By stopping the tubes of the panpipes she played a short plaintive melody. Halfway through, her hand began to shake so badly that she missed several notes.
She was absolutely scared stiff.
Well, there were tranquilizers to take care of that. But the tension would still be there, masked but nonetheless acute, until she was actually on the planet and had convinced herself that her fake identity was proof against the natives’ scrutiny. Every precaution had been taken, even down to analyzing the history of the Carrig clans to determine which were the most progressive and hence the likeliest to adopt the southern fashion for engaging hetairas.
Yet no matter how often she reassured herself, she was still in the grip of a sense of imminent doom.
A call from Langenschmidt interrupted her depressed brooding, asking her to go forward to the bridge of the cruiser, and she headed straight there in her native costume. On her entry the major looked up from a tape that had just reeled out of the communicators and gave an approving but absentminded nod.
“You look the part perfectly, as far as I can tell,” he said. “You even walk correctly. Well, sorry to drag you up here just before planetfall, but we received this from Slee a short time ago, and I think I ought to play it for you.”
He dropped the cassette into its slot. At once Slee, exotic in a costume almost as gaudy as Maddalena’s, looked out of the screen adjacent. Having a permanent station on Fourteen, unlike Heron, he was able to maintain a vision circuit as well as voice. He sounded worried.
“Gus, I’ve had some disturbing news. As you know, I’ve been trying for some time to get accurate news of Heron’s death. His house was burnt down, which was fortunate in that his communicator was destroyed, but a damnable nuisance in that it meant all the physical evidence was shoveled up as garbage and we have nothing to go on but what the servants recounted, and they were in a wild panic. And Carrig is too far from here for me to get more than rumors, anyway.
“Something’s come up which ties in closely with what people are saying about this stranger Belfeor who’s made himself ruler of Carrig, though. You’ll recall that he was said to have killed the king-parradile with a lightning bolt, which I interpret as meaning some sort of primitive gunpowder rocket.
“Well, according to a former servant of Heron’s who’s just been released from a bedlam where they locked him for alleged insanity after his master’s death, it was Belfeor who killed him—and what’s more, by throwing a lightning bolt at him. One can presume that Heron got wind of Belfeor’s plans, and to forestall his interfering, Belfeor set a mine or something in Heron’s house, blowing it and him up. I don’t see any other reasonable explanation. It’s the devil’s own job sorting fact from fantasy in these tales, even when you know pretty well how the natives’ minds work. We must get an agent into Carrig again, soon, to see if this is true or not. I’ve even been trying to invent a reason why I should go there myself—perhaps I ought to trek north with a caravan of pilgrims, or something, even though it’ll puzzle the hell out of my friends who take me for an incurable sceptic. I wi
sh to goodness the standard of living would rise to the level where they invent the notion of tourism!”
Langenschmidt shut the recording off. He looked at Maddalena. “Sounds as though you’re really needed down there,” he murmured. “Are you all ready to go? We’re due to break into real space soon—we’re just maneuvering out to the night-side of the planet.”
Maddalena nodded. Her throat felt terribly dry.
“Get your suit on, then, and have your gear put in the landing-craft. I’ll join you in a minute.”
“You’re taking me down yourself?”
“I’ve done it before,” Langenschmidt grunted. “Move it along!”
Seated behind him in the needle-shaped boat that would sneak them unobtrusively down to the surface of Fourteen, Maddalena struggled to get her awkward clothing organized inside her spacesuit, and listened to the exchange between Langenschmidt and the pilot of the cruiser as they ran down the preflight checklist. You didn’t go aboard a landing-craft without a spacesuit and helmet—it was far too risky.
The checks on the landing-craft completed, the pilot gave the standard all-hands warning about breaking through into real space, and they braced themselves for the peculiar shuddering-grinding sensation that always accompanied dropping out of hyperphotonic drive. One moment later the pilot was speaking again, his voice half-strangled with astonishment.
He said, “Of all the—! That’s a ship out there, in orbit around Fourteen!”
Maddalena froze. Langenschmidt snapped, “A ship? What kind of—?”
He got no further. There was a huge cracking sound followed by a rending of metal, and Maddalena’s last thought before she passed out was that she was probably going to die.
CHAPTER NINE
Saikmar son of Corrie, penniless refugee, headed down the long draughty corridor of the sanctuary toward the twisted doorway across which the wind already whined and occasionally howled. He walked with determination, as though alert for the possibility of ambush.
Indeed, as he came close to the exit, he was waylaid by the old priestess Nyloo and her constant companion, a girl-child of about seven or eight—one of those that a woman pilgrim had borne during a pious visit and left as an offering. The child’s eyes were round and prematurely wise. Saikmar was always disquieted by such children.
The old priestess said, “You’re bound outward, Saikmar son of Corrie?” She spoke the queerly accented antique dialect that he had now come to understand well. “Outside it grows cold. Not long from now to build snow-walls at the door and close the chill away.”
Saikmar had long passed the stage when he had addressed the staff of the sanctuary obsequiously. He answered in a harsh tone, “And what is it to you if I freeze out there? Will you not have one less useless mouth to stuff with food this winter?”
Nyloo looked at him steadily. She was very, very old; the skin on her skull, which was almost bald, seemed dry and crackly, like poor-grade parchment. She said, “You take complaining from your fellows too much to heart. Not I nor any other priest or priestess blames you that we lack our due this summer. For more generations than it is remembered we have served by giving asylum to those who flee injustice and tyranny, as you yourself do, hoping only that we might receive, each summer, gifts from fertile climes to fill our bellies during the long winter night. From Carrig nothing has come this year—yet how can it be the fault of a fugitive?” She gave a shrug. “The old and the weak who have used up their lives will resign themselves that the young and strong may see another summer.”
“Are you going to die this winter, granny?” said the Child, looking up at the old woman with her big round eyes. Saikmar seized his chance, flung his threadbare cloak around him, ducked his head as one does when rushing an attacker, and hurried out into the bitter afternoon.
Gasping sometimes as gusts whipped powdery dry snow off ledges and outcrops and blasted them at his face, he set himself to climb the jagged rocks surrounding the sanctuary. It had become a daily habit with him to scramble among the cavern-riddled cliffs hereabouts till he could stand at last on a crest and stare over the silvery scarred dome of the sanctuary, over the landscape that at this point in the year still showed some rock after the summer thaw, but that soon would be blank snow as far as the eye could reach—stare achingly south, toward Carrig that he perhaps would never see again.
Staring, he remembered. How Belfeor and his evil kin—men claiming to be of the southland but some of whom did not even speak the southland tongue, and women with them as arrogant as men—had claimed their right to be established as a clan and rule Carrig; how they were at first resisted, but how they, in the end, repressed all opposition through their strange magical powers; how they then set the people to unheard-of tasks among the Smoking Hills, driving diem cruelly and killing many. How Sir Bavis Knole—maddened, men said, because he had had to concede that Belfeor had come legally by his right to rule—had cast himself from the watchtower of the fortress to his death on the rocks of the citadel after his son Ambrus had taken service with Belfeor and forsworn his clan …
He shivered, standing on the cliff’s edge, and wrapped his cloak still tighter about him. The sky, even in the afternoon, was darkling at this season. Soon the night would come—the night that would last half a year. He had lived through one such night already, and had not believed it until it was upon him. The darkness! The loneliness! Outside the howling of the wind, inside the chanting of the priests as they rehearsed their charms to assure the rebirth of the sun.
Could he endure another such winter? Not for the first time he thought about following Sir Bavis’ example; a headlong plunge from this clifftop would surely break any man’s skull and give release to the spirit within. But he drove the notion firmly from his mind. Had it been his duty to seek death, he could have found it long ago, at home in Carrig, when those who most vigorously opposed Belfeor were being put to the sword.
But then they had counseled him—his mother, his uncle, and his cousins with one voice—to travel to the northern sanctuary before Belfeor’s men came for him, to preserve his life against the day when it would be possible to strike back. The sanctuary had offered asylum to fugitives since legendary times; their fee was paid by the cities entitled to such protection by pilgrims who brought barrels of dried fish, salted vegetables, and sun-dried smoked meat with them on their summer visits. Without this addition to what they could grow on their poor soil during the short summer, those at the sanctuary would doubtless starve in the winter.
Last summer, though they had been fewer than ever before, there had indeed been a handful of pilgrim caravans, and he had eagerly demanded from them news of Carrig. All the news was bad; at least, though, it was a link with his home. This summer just ending … nothing. Not one caravan had come through Carrig to the, far north.
Saikmar looked down past his feet. His mouth set in a hard line as the tempting idea of suicide returned. There was a clear fall of sixty feet to a slanting jagged scree of loose stone. One step might free him of his fate. Better that way, surely, than to become like those others he had found here at the sanctuary, the other refugees—miserable, cringing beggars skulking down the passageways, without pride, without hope. That was no fit end for Saikmar son of Corrie! A noble should confront death with defiance, before the burden of the world forced his back to bow.
Oh yes! Better silence and darkness and the age-long wait for rebirth than to suffer the winter under the resentful stare of the priests and priestesses and the terrible wise children who shared the secret of their mysteries. One step …
He squared his shoulders and threw his head back for a last look at the world, and in the darkening sky he saw an omen. For the first time in his life he was sure beyond doubt that the gods had sent him a personal sign.
There, circling and swooping in the gathering dusk, but unmistakable to a man who had spent years studying the habits of that species, was a creature that no one had ever seen so far north before. Splendid in dark blue, green, a
nd gold against the sunset, it was a young male parradile.
Shivering with awe and not with cold, Saikmar saw it hesitate, hover, and plunge. On the sheer face of the cavern-riddled cliff it touched, clung, folded its wings, and disappeared.
Early next morning—he had hardly slept for his feverish excitement—Saikmar left the sanctuary again. He had known since he saw the parradile what he must do: go to it and throw himself on its mercy and the gods’. For was the parradile not also a fugitive in these barren wastes? That it should have wandered so far north suggested that Belfeor’s sacrilege had reached unheard-of heights—he must have hunted the parradiles out of the Smoking Hills!
The creature might, of course, kill him—drive him from the mouth of its chosen cave so that he fell to his death among the rocks. What matter? It would be better for his chances of a good reincarnation than suicide. It might, on the other hand, be drowsy with the cold and ready to hibernate, in which case it would simply ignore him. At least he could greet it and make it an offering.
He felt lightheaded as he started to scramble across the cliff-face to the cave where he had seen it settle, and small wonder. Lack of sleep, and tormenting excitement, and lack of food together, accounted for that. He had eaten neither his supper last night nor the handful of parched grain and dried fruit he was given this morning. They were in a pouch at his belt as his offering to the parradile.
The task of reaching the cave was a dreadful one. The parradile had had no trouble; it could settle anywhere it had room to keep its wings spread until its feet found purchase. Saikmar had to clamber along icy ledges, sometimes chipping himself a handhold with his knife, with the wind whipping his cloak until it threatened to fill like a sail and drag him away. In many of the caves he passed he saw with dismay that last night’s frost had spread a layer of ice. How would a parradile, accustomed to the warm caves of the Smoking Hills, endure a winter here? Spring would see it a rigid corpse!