Mapfabvisheen was stretched out upon the floor and snoring a sour breath. A grey-haired man was slumped on a nearby table. His head, turned to one side, exhibited the same slack-jawed look that the Ssassaror’s had, and he flung the ill-smelling gauntlet of his breath at the visitors. He held an empty bottle in one loose hand. Two other bottles lay on the stone floor, one shattered.
Besides the bottles lay the men’s Skins. Rastignac wondered why they had not crawled to the halltree and hung themselves up.
“What ails them? What is that smell?” said Mapfarity.
“I don’t know,” replied Archambaud, “but I know the visitor. He is Father Jules, priest of the Guild of Egg-stealers.”
Rastignac raised his bracket-shaped eyebrows, picked up a bottle in which there remained a slight residue, and drank.
“Mon Dieu, it is the sacrament wine!” he cried.
Mapfarity said, “Why would they be drinking that?”
“I don’t know. Wake Mapfabvisheen up, but let the good father sleep. He seems tired after his spiritual labors and doubtless deserves a rest.”
Doused with a bucket of cold water the little Ssassaror staggered to his feet. Seeing Archambaud, he embraced him. “Ah, Archambaud, old baby-abductor, my sweet goose-bagger, my ears tingle to see you again!”
They did. Red and blue sparks flew off his ear-feathers.
“What is the meaning of this?” sternly interrupted Mapfarity. He pointed at the dirt swept into the corners.
Mapfabvisheen drew himself up to his full dignity, which wasn’t much. “Good Father Jules was making his circuits,” he said. “You know he travels around the country and hears confession and sings Mass for us poor egg-stealers who have been unlucky enough to fall into the clutches of some rich and greedy and anti-social Giant who is too stingy to hire servants, but captures them instead, and who won’t allow us to leave the premises until our servitude is over . . .”
“Cut it!” thundered Mapfarity. “I can’t stand around all day, listening to the likes of you. My feet hurt too much. Anyway, you know I’ve allowed you to go into town every week-end. Why don’t you see a priest then?”
Mapfabvisheen said, “You know very well the closest town is ten kilometers away and it’s full of Pantheists. There’s not a priest to be found there.”
Rastignac groaned inwardly. Always,-it was thus. You could never hurry these people or get them to regard anything seriously:
Take the case they were wasting their breath on now. Everybody knew the Church had been outlawed a long time ago because it opposed the use of the Skins and certain other practices that went along with it. So, no sooner had that been done than the Ssassarors, anxious to establish their check-and-balance system, had made arrangements through the Minister of Ill-Will to give the Church unofficial legal recognizance.
Then, though the aborigines had belonged to that pantheistical organization known as the Sons of Good And Old Mother Nature, they had all joined the Church of the Terrans. They operated under the theory that the best way to make an institution innocuous was for everybody to sign up for it. Never persecute. That makes it thrive.
Much to the Church’s chagrin, the theory worked. How can you fight an enemy who insists on joining you and who will also agree to everything you teach him and then still worship at the other service? Supposedly driven underground, the Church counted almost every Landsman among its supporters from the Kings down.
Every now and then a priest would forget to wear his Skin out-of-doors and be arrested, then released later in an official jail-break. Those who refused to cooperate were forcibly kidnapped, taken to another town and there let loose. Nor did it do the priest any good to proclaim boldly who he was. Everybody pretended not to know he was a fugitive from justice. They insisted on calling him by his official pseudonym.
However, few priests were such martyrs. Generations of Skin-wearing had sapped the ecclesiastical vigor.
The thing that puzzled Rastignac about Father Jules was the sacrament wine. Neither he nor anybody else in L’Bawpfey, as far as he knew, had ever tasted the liquid outside of the ceremony. Indeed, except for certain of the priests, nobody even knew how to make wine.
He shook the priest awake, said, “What’s the matter, Father?”
Father Jules burst into tears. “Ah, my boy, you have caught me in my sin. I am a drunkard.”
Everybody looked blank. “What does that word drunkard mean?”
“It means a man who’s damned enough to fill his Skin with alcohol, my boy, fill it until he’s no longer a man but a beast.”
“Alcohol? What is that?”
“The stuff that’s in the wine, my boy. You don’t know what I’m talking about because the knowledge was long ago forbidden except to us of the cloth. Cloth, he says! Bah! We go around like everybody, naked except for these extra-dermal monstrosities which reveal rather than conceal, which not only serve us as clothing but as mentors, parents, censors, interpreters, and, yes, even as priests. Where’s a bottle that’s not empty? I’m thirsty.”
Rastignac stuck to the subject. “Why was the making of this alcohol forbidden?”
“How should I know?” said Father Jules. “I’m old, but not so ancient that I came with the Six Flying Stars . . . Where is that bottle?”
Rastignac was not offended by his crossness. Priests were notorious for being the most ill-tempered, obstreperous, and unstable of men. They were not at all like the clerics of Earth, whom everybody knew from legend had been sweet-tempered, meek, humble, and obedient to authority. But on L’Bawpfey these men of the Church had reason to be out of sorts. Everybody attended Mass, paid their tithes, went to confession, and did not fall asleep during sermons. Everybody believed what the priests told them and were as good as it was possible for human beings to be. So, the priests had no real incentive to work, no evil to fight.
Then why the prohibition against alcohol?
“Sacre Bleu!” groaned Father Jules. “Drink as much as I did last night, and you’ll find out. Never again, I say. Ah, there’s another bottle, hidden by a providential fate under my traveling robe. Where’s the corkscrew?”
Father Jules swallowed half of the bottle, smacked his lips, picked up his Skin from the floor, brushed off the dirt and said, “I must be going, my sons. I’ve a noon appointment with the bishop, and I’ve a good twelve kilometers to travel. Perhaps, one of you gentlemen has a car?”
Rastignac shook his head and said he was sorry, but their car was tired and had, besides, thrown a shoe. Father Jules shrugged philosophically, put on his Skin and reached out again for the bottle.
Rastignac said, “Sorry, Father. I’m keeping this bottle.”
“For what?” asked Father Jules.
“Never mind. Say I’m keeping you from temptation.”
“Bless you, my son, and may you have a big enough hangover to show you the wickedness of your ways.”
Smiling, Rastignac watched the Father walk out. He was not disappointed. The priest had no sooner reached the huge door than his Skin fell off and lay motionless upon the stone.
“Ah,” breathed Rastignac. “The same thing happened to Mapfabvisheen when he put his on. There must be something about the wine that deadens the Skins, makes them fall off.”
After the padre had left, Rastignac handed the bottle to Mapfarity. “We’re dedicated to breaking the law most illegally, brother. So I’m asking you to analyze this wine and find out how to make it.”
“Why not ask Father Jules?”
“Because priests are pledged never to reveal the secret. That was one of the original agreements whereby the Church was allowed to remain on L’Bawpfey. Or, at least that’s what my parish priest told me. He said it was a good thing, as it removed an evil from man’s temptation. He never did say why it was so evil. Maybe he didn’t know.
“That doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the Church has inadvertently given us a weapon whereby we may free Man from his bondage to the Skins and it has also given
itself once again a chance to be really persecuted and to flourish on the blood of its martyrs.”
“Blood?” said Lusine, licking her lips. “The Churchmen drink blood?”
Rastignac did not explain. He could be wrong. If so, he’d feel less like a fool if they didn’t know what he thought.
Meanwhile, there were the first steps to be taken for the unskinning of an entire planet.
IX
Later that day, the mucketeers surrounded the castle, but they made no effort to storm it. The following day one of them knocked on the huge front door and presented Mapfarity with a summons requiring them to surrender. The Giant laughed, put the document in his mouth, and ate it. The server fainted and had to be revived with a bucket of cold water before he could stagger back to report this tradition-shattering reception.
Rastignac set up his underground so it could be expanded in a hurry. He didn’t worry about the blockade because, as was well known, Giants’ castles had all sorts of subterranean tunnels and secret exits. He contacted a small number of priests who were willing to work for him. These were congenital rebels who became quite enthusiastic when he told them their activities would result in a fierce persecution of the Church.
The majority, however, clung to their Skins and said they would have nothing to do with this extradermal-less devil. They took pride and comfort in that term. The vulgar phrase for the man who refused to wear his Skin was “devil,” and, by law and logic, the Church could not be associated with a devil. As everybody knew, the priests have always been on the side of the angels.
Meanwhile, the Devil’s band slipped out of the tunnels and made raids. Their targets were Giants’ castles and government treasuries; their loot, the geese. So many raids did they make that the president of the League of Giants and the Business Agent for the Guild of Egg-stealers came to plead with them. And remained to denounce. Rastignac was delighted with their complaints, and, after listening for a while, threw them out.
Rastignac had, like all other Skin-wearers, always accepted the monetary system as a thing of reason and balance. But, without his Skin, he was able to think objectively, and he saw its weaknesses.
For some cause buried far in history, the Giants had always had control of the means for making the hexagonal golden coins called oeufs. But the Kings, wishing to get control of the golden eggs, had set up that elite branch of the Guild which specialized in abducting the half-living ‘geese.’ Whenever a thief was successful, he turned the goose over to his King. The monarch, in turn, sent a note to the robbed Giant informing him that the government intended to keep the goose to make its own currency. But even though the Giant was making counterfeit geese, the King, in his generosity, would ship to the Giant one out of every thirty eggs laid by the kidnappee.
The note was a polite and well-recognized lie. The Giants made the only genuine gold-egg-laying geese on the planet because the Giants’ League alone knew the secret. And the King gave back one-thirtieth of his loot so the Giant could accumulate enough money to buy the materials to create another goose. Which would, possibly, be stolen later on.
Rastignac, by his illegal rape of geese, was making money scarce. Peasants were hanging on to their produce and waiting to sell until prices were at their highest. The government, merchants, the league, the guild, all saw themselves impoverished.
Furthermore, the Amphibs, taking note of the situation, were making raids on their own and blaming them on Rastignac.
He did not care. He was intent on trying to find a way to reach Kataproimnoin and rescue the Earthman so he could take off in the spaceship floating in the harbor. But he knew that he would have to take things slowly, to scout out the land and plan accordingly.
Furthermore, Mapfarity had made him promise he would do his best to set up the Landsmen so they would be able to resist the Waterfolk when the day for war came.
Rastignac made his biggest raid when he and his band stole one moonless night into the capital itself to rob the big Goose House, only an egg’s throw away from the Palace and the Ministry of Ill-Will. They put the Goose House guards to sleep with little arrows smeared with dream-snake venom, filled their lead-leaf-lined bags with gold eggs, and sneaked out the back door.
As they left, Rastignac saw a cloaked figure slinking from the back door of the Ministry. On impulse, he tackled the figure. It was an Amphib-changeling. Rastignac struck the Amphib with a venomous arrow before the Water-human could cry out or stab back.
Mapfarity grabbed up the limp Amphib and they raced for the safety of the castle.
They questioned the Amphib, Pierre Pusipremnoos, in the castle. At first silent, he later began talking freely when Mapfarity got a heavy Skin from his flesh-forge and put it on the fellow. It was a Skin modeled after those worn by the Water-people, but it differed in that the Giant could control, through another Skin, the powerful neural shocks.
After a few shocks, Pierre admitted he was the foster-son of the Amphibian King and that, incidentally, Lusine was his foster-sister. He further stated he was a messenger between the Amphib King and the Ssarraror’s Ill-Will Minister.
More shocks extracted the fact that the Minister of Ill-Will, Auverpin, was an Amphib-changeling who was passing himself off as a horn Landsman. Not only that, the Human hostages among the Amphibs were about to stage a carefully planned revolt against the born Amphibs. It would kill off about half of them. The rest would then be brought under control of the Master Skin.
When the two stepped from the lab, they were attacked by Lusine, knife in hand. She gashed Rastignac in the arm before he knocked her out with an uppercut. Later, while Mapfarity applied a little jelly-like creature called a scar-jester to the wound, Rastignac complained:
“I don’t know if I can endure much more of this. I thought the way of Violence would not be hard to follow because I hated the Skins and the Amphibs so much. But it is easier to attack a faceless, hypothetical enemy, or torture him, than the individual enemy. Much easier.”
“My brother,” boomed the Giant, “if you continue to dwell upon the philosophical implications of your actions, you will end up as helpless and confused as the leg-counting centipede. Better not think. Warriors are not supposed to. They lose their keen fighting edge when they think. And you need all of that now.”
“I would suppose that thought would sharpen them.”
“When issues are simple, yes. But you must remember that the system on this planet is anything but uncomplicated. It was set up to confuse, to keep one always off balance. Just try to keep one thing in mind—the Skins are far more of an impediment to Man than they are a help. Also, that if the Skins don’t come off, the Amphibs will soon be cutting our throats. The only way to save ourselves is to kill them first. Right?”
“I suppose so,” said Rastignac. He stooped and put his hands under the unconscious Lusine’s armpits. “Help me put her in a room. We’ll keep her locked up until she cools off. Then we’ll use her to guide us when we get to Kataproimnoin. Which reminds me—how many gallons of wine have you made so far?”
X
A week later Rastignac summoned Lusine. She came in frowning and with her lower lip protruding in a pretty pout.
He said, “Day after tomorrow is the day on which the new Kings are crowned, isn’t it?”
Tonelessly, she said, “Supposedly. Actually, the present Kings will be crowned again.”
Rastignac smiled. “I know. Peculiar, isn’t it, how the ‘people’ always vote the same Kings back into power? However, that isn’t what I’m getting at. If I remember correctly, the Amphibs give their King exotic and amusing gifts on coronation day. What do you think would happen if I took a big shipload of bottles of wine and passed it out among the population just before the Amphibs begin their surprise massacre?”
Lusine had seen Mapfarity and Rastignac experimenting with the wine, and she had been frightened by the results. Nevertheless, she made a brave, attempt to hide her fear now. She spit at him and said, “You mud-footed fool! There
are priests who will know what it is! They will be in the coronation crowd.”
“Ah, not so! In the first place, you Amphibs are almost entirely Aggressive Pantheists. You have only a few priests, and you will now pay for that omission of wine-tasters. Second, Mapfarity’s concoction tastes not at all vinous and is twice as strong.”
She spat at him again and spun on her heel and walked out.
That night Rastignac’s band and Lusine went through a tunnel which brought them up through a hollow tree about two miles west of the castle. There they hopped into the Renault, which had been kept in a camouflaged garage, and drove to the little port of Marrec. Archambaud had paved their way here with golden eggs and a sloop was waiting for them.
Rastignac took the boat’s wheel. Lusine stood beside him, ready to answer the challenge of any Amphib patrol that tried to stop them. As the Amphib-King’s foster-daughter, she could get the boat through to the Amphib island without any trouble at all.
Archambaud stood behind her, a knife under his cloak, to make sure she did not try to betray them. Lusine had sworn she could be trusted. Rastignac had answered that he was sure she could be, too, as long as the knife point pricked her back to remind her.
Nobody stopped them. An hour before dawn they anchored in the harbor of Kataproimnoin. Lusine was tied hand and foot inside the cabin. Before Rastignac could scratch her with dream-snake venom, she pleaded. “You could not do this to me, Jean-Jacques, if you loved me.”
“Who said anything about loving you?”
“Well, I like that! You said so, you cheat!”
“Oh, then! Well, Lusine, you’ve had enough experience to know that such protestations of tenderness and affection are only inevitable accompaniments of the moment’s passion.”
For the first time since he had known her, he saw Lusine’s lower lip tremble and tears come in her eyes. “Do you mean you were only using me?” she sobbed.
“You forget I had good reason to think you were just using me. Remember, you’re an Amphib, Lusine. Your people can’t be trusted. You blood-drinkers are as savage as the little sea-monsters you leave in Human cradles.”