Kennard shouted, “Comfortable be damned! What the mischief do you mean by keeping us here anyhow!”
The trailmen murmured, twittering, in shock and dismay, and the Personage spun on his heel in obvious offense; Kennard instantly changed his tactics. He bowed deeply.
“Forgive me. I”—he looked wildly at Larry—“I spoke in haste. We—”
Larry said, speaking the same dialect, “We have been well fed and kept out of the rain, if that is what you mean, sir.” The word he used would also have been translated “Your honor.”
“But would your very high honor condescend to explain to us why we are being taken from our road and put in this exceptionally damp and confining place at all?”
The trailman’s face was stern. He said, “Your people burn down the woods with the red-thing-that-eats-the-woods. Animals die. Trees perish. You were being watched and when you built the red-thing-that-eats-the-woods, we seized you.”
“Then will you let us go again?” Kennard asked.
The trailman slowly made a negative gesture. “We have one protection, and only one, against the red-thing-that-eats-the-woods. Whenever your people come into the country of the People of the Sky, they never leave it again. So that your people will fear coming into our world, and there will be no fear of the red-thing-that-eats-the-woods destroying more of our cities.”
Kennard, with a furious gesture, rolled back his sleeves. There were still crimson burn scars on them. “Listen, you—” he began; and with an effort, amended, “Hear me, your— your High Muchness. Just a few days ago, I and my family and my friends spent many, many days putting out a fire. It is not my kind of people who burn down woods. We are— we are running away from the evil kind of people who set fires to burn down woods.”
“Then why were you building a—you call it fire?”
“To cook our food.”
The trailman’s face was severe. “And your kind of—of man”—the word was one of inexpressible contempt on his lips—“eats of our brothers-that-have-life!”
“Ways differ and customs differ,” said Kennard doggedly, “but we will not burn down your woods. We will even promise not to build a fire while we are in your woods, if you will let us go.”
“You are of the fire-making kind. We will not let you go. I have spoken.”
He turned on his heel and walked out. Behind him, his guards stalked out, and the bolt fell into place.
“And that,” said Kennard, “is very much that.”
He sat down, chin in hands, and stared grimly into space.
Larry was also feeling despair. Obviously the trailmen would not harm them. Equally obviously, however, they seemed likely to be sitting here in this prison—well fed, well housed, but caged like alien horrid animals—until hell froze over, as far as the Personage was concerned.
He found himself thinking in terms of the trailmen’s way of life. If you depended on the woods for very life, fire was your worst fear—and evidently, to them, fire was a wild thing that could never be controlled. He remembered their triumphant dance of joy when they had managed to put out Kennard’s little cookfire.
He said thoughtfully, “You still have your flint and tinder, don’t you?”
Kennard caught him up instantly. “Right! We can burn our way out with torches, and no one will dare to come near us.”
Suddenly his face fell. “No. There is a danger that their city might catch fire. We would be wiping out a whole village of perfectly harmless creatures.”
And Larry followed his thought. Better to sit here in prison indefinitely—after all, they were being well fed and kindly treated—than risk exterminating a whole village of these absolutely harmless little people. People who would not even kill a rabbit for food. Sooner or later they would find a way out. Until then, they would not risk harming the trailmen, who had not harmed them.
They were interrupted by the entry of their guard, limping heavily, carrying a tray of their food—the nuts, the honey, and what looked like birds’ eggs. Larry made a face—raw eggs? Well, he supposed they were a treat to the trailmen, and they were at least giving their prisoner-guests of their best. But a boiled egg would be a pleasant enough meal.
Kennard was asking the trailman, by signs, how he had hurt his leg. The trailman sprang into a crouch, his head laid into a feral gesture; he actually looked like the great carnivore he was imitating. He made a brutal clawing gesture; he fell to the mossy floor of the hut, doubled up, imitating great pain; then displayed the cruelly festering wound. Larry turned sick at the sight of it; the thigh was swollen to nearly twice its size, and greenish pus was oozing from the wound. The trailman made a stoical shrug, pointed to his flint knife, gestured, struggled like a man being held down, hopped like a man with one leg, folded his hands, closed his eyes, held his breath like a man dead. He picked up the tray and hobbled out.
Kennard, his face twisting, shook his head. “I suppose you got all that? He means they’ll have to cut his leg off soon or he will die.”
“And it’s so damned unnecessary!” Larry said violently. “All it needs is lancing and antibiotics, and a little sterile care—” Suddenly, he started.
“Kennard! That pot they brought the honey in, do you still have it?”
“Yes.”
“I’m no good at making a fire with flint and tinder. But can you make one? A very small one in the pot? Enough, say, to sterilize a knife? To heat water very hot?”
“What do you—”
“I have an idea,” Larry said between his teeth, “and it just might work.” He pulled his medical kit from his pocket. “I have some antiseptic powder, and antibiotics. Not much. But probably enough, considering that the fellow must have the constitution of—of one of these trees, to live through a clawing like that and still be walking around at all.”
“Larry, if we kindle a fire they will probably kill us.”
“So we keep it in the pot, covered. The old fellow looks intelligent—the one who spoke Darkovan. If we show him that it can’t possibly get out of a clay pot—”
Kennard caught his thought. “Zandru’s hells, it just might work, Larry! But, Gods above, are you then apprenticed to be a curer-of-wounds among your people, like my cousin Dyan Ardais?”
“No. This knowledge is as common with the boys of my people as—” he sought wildly for a simile, and Kennard, following his thought as usual, supplied one: “As the knowledge of sword-play among mine?”
Larry nodded. He took over then, giving instructions: “If the chap yells, we’ll be swamped, and never have a chance to finish. So you and I will jump him and keep him from getting one squeak out. Then you sit on him while I fix up his leg. We’ll get just one chance to keep him from yelling— so don’t muff it!”
By evening their preparations were made. The light was poor, and Larry fretted; though the light from the fire-pot helped a little. They waited, breathless. Had their jailer been changed, had he died of his terrible wound? No, after a time they heard his characteristic halting step. The door opened.
He saw the pot and the fire. He opened his mouth to scream.
But the scream never got out. Kennard’s arm was across his throat, and a crude, improvised gag of a strip torn from Larry’s shirt-tail was stuffed into his mouth. Larry felt slightly sick. He knew what must be done, but had never done anything even remotely like it before. He held the knife in the fire until it glowed red-hot, then let it cool somewhat, and, setting his teeth, made a long gash in the swollen, festering leg.
There was an immediate gush of greenish, stinking matter from the wound. Larry sponged it away. It seemed there was no end to the stuff that oozed from the wound, and it was a sickening business, but finally the stuff was tinged with blood and he could see clean flesh below.
He sponged it repeatedly with the hot water heated in the second pot; when it was as clean as he could make it, he sprinkled the antibiotic powder into the wound, covered it with the cleanest piece of cloth he had—a fragment of bandage re
maining in the medical kit—and took the gag from the man’s mouth.
The man had long since ceased to struggle. He lay blinking in stuporous surprise, looking down at his leg, which now had only a clean gash. Suddenly he rose, bowed half a dozen times profoundly to the boys, and backed out of the room.
Larry slumped on the floor, exhausted. He wondered suddenly if what he had done had really endangered their lives. The trailmen’s customs were so different from theirs, there was really no way of telling; they might consider this just as evil as killing a rabbit.
After a while, at Kennard’s urging, he sat up and ate some supper. He needed it—even if he had the feeling that he might be eating his last meal. They fed the small fire with fragments of vine from the dead leaves, and toasted their mushrooms over it. For a while they felt almost festive. Much later, they heard steps, and looked at one another, with no need for words.
This is it. Life or death?
Kennard said nothing, but reached silently for Larry’s hand; he clasped it and the clasp slid up Larry’s elbow until their arms were enlaced as well as their hands. Unfamiliar as the gesture was, Larry knew it was a sign not alone of friendship but of affection and tenderness. He felt faintly embarrassed, but he said, in a low voice, “If it’s bad news—I’m sorry as hell I got you into this—but it’s been damn nice knowing you.”
An instant before the door opened, Larry saw it, a clear flash of awareness; the sight of the trailman chief, and his face was grave, but he was alone, and unweaponed. It was not, at any rate, instant death.
The trailman said, “I have seen what you did for Rhhomi. I cannot believe that you are evil men. Yet you are of the kind who make fire.” With a sort of grave dignity, he seated himself. “None is so young he cannot teach, or so old he cannot learn. Am I to learn from you, strange men?”
Kennard said swiftly, “We have told you already that we have no will to harm even the least of your people or creatures, Honorable One.”
“Yes.” But it was at Larry that the trailman chief looked. He said, irrelevantly, it seemed, “Among my folk, my title is Old One, and what is age if not wisdom? Have you wisdom for me, son of a strange land?”
Larry reached behind him for the honey pot, containing still a few glowing embers of fire. The Old One shrank, but controlled himself with an effort. Larry tried to speak his simplest Darkovan; after all, the language was strange to both himself and this alien creature.
“It is harmless here,” he said, searching for words. “See, the walls of your clay pot keep it harmless so that it cannot burn. If you feed it with— with dead twigs and little bits of dead, dry wood, it will serve you and not hurt you.”
The Old One reached out, evidently conquering an ingrained shrinking, and touched the pot. He said, “Then it can be servant and not master? And a knife made clean in this fire will heal?”
“Yes,” said Larry, bypassing the whole of germ theory, “or a wound washed with water made very hot, will heal better than a dirty wound.”
The Old One rose, bearing the firepot in his hands. He said, gravely, “For this gift, then, of healing, my people thank you. And as a sign of this, be under our protection within our woods. Wear this”— and he extended two garlands of yellow flowers— “and none of our people will harm you. But build no red-flames-to-eat-our-woods within the limits of these branches.”
Larry, sensing that the Old One spoke to him, said gravely, “You have my pledge.”
The Old One threw open the door of the hut.
“Be free to go.”
Awkwardly they settled the crowns of yellow flowers over their heads. The trailmen surged backward as the Old One came forth, bearing in his hands the pot of fire. He said ceremoniously, handing it to a woman, “I place this thing in your hands. You and your daughters and the daughters of your daughters are to feed it and bear responsibility that it does not escape.”
The scene had a grave solemnity that made Larry, for some reason— perhaps only relief— want to giggle. But he kept his gravity while they were escorted to the edge of the trailmen’s village, shown a long ladder down which they could climb, and finally, with infinite relief, set foot again on the green and solid ground.
* * *
XI
« ^ »
ALL THAT DAY they walked, through the trails of the forest. Now and again, from the corner of their eyes, they caught a glimpse of movement, but they saw not a sign of a trailman. They slept that night hearing sounds overhead, but now without fear, knowing that the yellow garlands would protect them in trailman country.
So far neither of them had spoken of their escape. There was no need for words between them now. But when, on the second day—a day clouded and sunless, with a promise of rain—they sat to eat their meal of berries and the odd fungus the trailmen had shown them, which grew plentifully along these paths, Kennard finally spoke.
“You know, of course, that there will be fires. Houses will burn. Maybe even woods will burn. They’re not human.”
“I’m not so sure,” Larry said thoughtfully. “Among the Terrans, they would be called at least humanoid. They have a culture.”
“Yet was it safe to give them fire? I would never have dared,” Kennard said, “not if we died there. For more centuries than I can count, man and nonhuman have lived together on Darkover in a certain balance. And now, with the trailmen using fire—” He shrugged, helplessly, and Larry suddenly began to see the implications of what he had done. “Still,” he said stubbornly, “they’ll learn. They’ll make mistakes, there will be mis-uses, but they will learn. Their pottery will improve as it is fired. They will, perhaps, learn to cook food. They will grow and develop. Nothing remains static,” he said. He repeated the Terran creed, “A civilization changes—or it dies.”
Kennard’s face flushed in sudden, sullen anger, and Larry, realizing that for the first time since his rescue they were conscious of being alien to one another, knew something else. Kennard was jealous. He had been the rescuer, the leader. Yet Larry had saved them, where Kennard would have given up because he feared change. Larry had taken command —and Kennard, second place.
“That is the Terran way,” Kennard said sullenly. “Change. For better or worse, but change. No matter how good a thing is—change it, just for the sake of change.”
Larry, with a growing wisdom, was silent. It was, he knew, a deeper conflict than they could ever resolve with words alone; a whole civilization based on expansion and growth, pitted against one based on tradition. He felt like saying, “Anyhow, we’re alive,” but forbore. Kennard had saved his life many times over. It hardly would become him to boast about beginning to even the score.
That evening they came to the edge of the trailmen’s rain forest and into the open foothills again—bare, trackless hills, unexplored, rocky, covered with scrubby brush and low, bunchy grass. Beyond them lay the mountain ranges, and beyond that—
“There lies the pass,” Kennard said, “and beyond it lies Hastur country, and the home of Castle Hastur. We’re within sight of home.” He sounded hopeful, even joyous, but Larry heard the trembling in his voice. Before them lay miles of canyons and gullies, without road or track or path, and beyond that lay the high mountain pass. The day was dim and sunless, the peaks in shadow, but even at this distance Larry could see that snow lay in their depths.
“How far?”
“Four days travel, perhaps, if it were open prairie or forest,” Kennard said. “Or one day’s ride on a swift horse, if any horse could travel these infernal arroyos.”
He stood frowning, gazing down into the mazelike network of canyons. “The worst of it is, the sun is clouded, and I find it hard to calculate the path we must follow. From here to the pass we must travel due westward. But with the sun in shadow—” He knelt momentarily, and Larry, wondering if he were praying, saw that instead he was examining the very faint shadow cast by the clouded sun. Finally he said, “As long as we can see the mountain peak, we need only follow it. I suppose”
—he rose, shrugging wearily—“we may as well begin.”
He set off downward into one of the canyons. Larry, envying him his show of confidence, stumbled after him. He was weary and footsore, and hungry, but he would not show himself less manly than Kennard.
All that day and all the next they stumbled and scrambled among the thorny, rocky slopes of the barren foothills. They went in no danger of hunger, for the bushes, so thorny and barren in appearance, were lush with succulent berries and ripening nuts. That evening Kennard snared several small birds who were feeding fearlessly on their abundance. They were out of trailmen country now, so that they dared to make fire; and it seemed to Larry that no festive dinner had ever tasted so good as the flesh of these nutty birds, roasted over their small fire and eaten half-raw and without salt. Kennard said, as they sat companionably munching drumsticks, “This place is a hunter’s paradise! The birds are without fear.”
“And good eating,” Larry commented, cracking a bone for the succulent marrow.
“It’s even possible that we might meet a hunting party.” Kennard said hopefully. “Perhaps some of the men from the Hastur country beyond the mountains hunt here—where the game roams in such abundance.”
But they were both silent at the corollary of that statement. If no one hunted here, where the hunting was so splendid, then the mountain pass that lay between them and safety must be fearsome indeed!
The third day was cloudier than the last, and Kennard stopped often to examine the fainter and fainter shadows and calculate the sun’s position by them. The land was rising now; the gullies were steeper and more thorny, the slopes harder to scramble up. Toward that evening a thin, fine drizzle began to fall, and even Kennard, with all his skill, could not build a fire. They gnawed cold roast meat from the night before, and dampish fruits, and slept huddled together for warmth in a rock-lined crevasse.