"Right here. Everything set?"
"All set. Let's have that explosion."
He took the remaining powder and with minute care, laid a train across
the stockade to the mine. He crouched into a ball and flipped a burning
twig onto the black line that crossed the white sand floor.
The blast seemed to wake up the world. Kennedy charged out of sleep,
screaming, and a million birds woke with a squawk. Charles was conscious
more of the choking reek than the noise as he scooped up the jerked
venison and rushed through the ragged gap in the wall. A hand caught
his--a small hand.
"You're groggy," Martha's voice said, sounding far away. "Come on--fast.
_Man_, that was a great ex-plosion!"
She towed him through the woods and underbrush--fast. As long as he hung
on to her he didn't stumble or run into a tree once. Irrationally
embarrassed by his dependence on a child, he tried letting go for a
short time--very short--and was quickly battered into changing his mind.
He thought dizzily of the spearmen trying to follow through the dark and
could almost laugh again.
* * * * *
Their trek to the coast was marked by desperate speed. For twenty-four
hours, they stopped only to gnaw at their rations or snatch a drink at a
stream. Charles kept moving because it was unendurable to let a
ten-year-old girl exceed him in stamina. Both of them paid terribly for
the murderous pace they kept. The child's face became skull-like and her
eyes red; her lips dried and cracked. He gasped at her as they pulled
their way up a bramble-covered 45-degree slope: "How do you do it? Isn't
this ever going to end?"
"Ends soon," she croaked at him. "You know we dodged 'em three times?"
He could only shake his head.
She stared at him with burning red eyes. "This ain't hard," she croaked.
"You do this with a gut-full of poison, _that's_ hard."
"_Did_ you?"
She grinned crookedly and chanted something he did not understand:
"_Nine moons times thirteen is the daughter's age
When she drinks the death-cup.
Three leagues times three she must race and rage
Down hills and up_--"
She added matter-of-factly: "Last year. Prove I have the power of the
goddess. Run, climb, with your guts falling out. This year, starve for a
week and run down a deer of seven points."
He had lost track of days and nights when they stood on the brow of a
hill at dawn and looked over the sea. The girl gasped: "'Sall right now.
_She_ wouldn't let them go on. She's a bitch, but she's no fool." The
child fell in her tracks. Charles, too tired for panic, slept too.
* * * * *
Charles woke with a wonderful smell in his nostrils. He followed it
hungrily down the reverse slope of the hill to a grotto.
Martha was crouched over a fire on which rocks were heating. Beside it
was a bark pot smeared with clay. As he watched, she lifted a red-hot
rock with two green sticks and rolled it into the pot. It boiled up and
continued to boil for an astonishing number of minutes. That was the
source of the smell.
"Breakfast?" he asked unbelievingly.
"Rabbit stew," she said. "Plenty of runways, plenty of bark, plenty of
green branches. I made snares. Two tough old bucks cooking in there for
an hour."
They chewed the meat from the bones in silence. She said at last: "We
can't settle down here. Too near to the coast. And if we move further
inland, there's _her_. And others. I been thinking." She spat a string
of tough meat out. "There's England. Work our way around the coast. Make
a raft or steal a canoe and cross the water. _Then_ we could settle
down. You can't have me for three times thirteen moons yet or I'd lose
the power. But I guess we can wait. I heard about England and the
English. They have no hearts left. We can take as many slaves as we
want. They cry a lot but they don't fight. And none of their women has
the power." She looked up anxiously. "You wouldn't want one of their
women, would you? Not if you could have somebody with the power just by
waiting for her?"
He looked down the hill and said slowly: "You know that's not what I had
in mind, Martha. I have my own place with people far away. I want to get
back there. I thought--I thought you'd like it too." Her face twisted.
He couldn't bear to go on, not in words. "Look into my mind, Martha," he
said. "Maybe you'll see what it means to me."
She stared long and deep. At last she rose, her face inscrutable, and
spat into the fire. "Think I saved you for that?" she asked. "And for
_her_? Not me. Save yourself from now on, mister. I'm going to beat my
way south around the coast. England for me, and I don't want any part of
you."
She strode off down the hill, gaunt and ragged, but with arrogance in
her swinging, space-eating gait. Charles sat looking after her,
stupefied, until she had melted into the underbrush. "Think I saved you
for that? And for _her_?" She'd made some kind of mistake. He got up
stiffly and ran after her, but he could not pick up an inch of her
woods-wise trail. Charles slowly climbed to the grotto again and sat in
its shelter.
He spent the morning trying to concoct simple springs out of bark strips
and whippy branches. He got nowhere. The branches broke or wouldn't bend
far enough. The bark shredded, or wouldn't hold a knot. Without metal,
he couldn't shape the trigger to fit the bow so that it would be both
sensitive and reliable.
At noon he drank enormously from a spring and looked morosely for plants
that might be edible. He decided on something with a bulbous, onion-like
root. For a couple of hours after that he propped rocks on sticks here
and there. When he stepped back and surveyed them, he decided that any
rabbit he caught with them would be, even for a rabbit, feeble-minded.
He could think of nothing else to do.
First he felt a slight intestinal qualm and then a far from slight
nausea. Then the root he had eaten took over with drastic thoroughness.
He collapsed, retching, and only after the first spasms had passed was
he able to crawl to the grotto. The shelter it offered was mostly
psychological, but he had need of that. Under the ancient, mossy stones,
he raved with delirium until dark.
Sometimes he was back in Syndic Territory, Charles Orsino of the
two-goal handicap and the flashing smile. Sometimes he was back in the
stinking blockhouse with Kennedy spinning interminable, excruciatingly
boring strands of iridescent logic. Sometimes he was back in the
psychology laboratory with the pendulum beating, the light blinking, the
bell ringing and sense-impressions flooding him and drowning him with
lies. Sometimes he raced in panic down the streets of New Portsmouth
with sweatered Guardsmen pounding after him, their knives flashing fire.
But at last he was in the grotto again, with Martha sponging his head
and cursing him in a low, fluent undertone for being seven times seven
kinds of fool.
She said tartly as recognition came into his eyes: "Yes, for the fifth
time, I'm back. I should be making my way to England and a band of my
own, but I'm back and I don't know why. I heard you in pain and I
thought it served you right for not knowing deathroot when you see it,
but I turned around and came back."
"Don't go," he said hoarsely.
She held a bark cup to his lips and made him choke down some nauseating
brew. "Don't worry," she told him bitterly. "I won't go. I'll do
everything you want, which shows that I'm as big a fool as you are, or
bigger because I know better. I'll help you find her and take the spell
off her. And may the goddess help me because I can't help myself."
* * * * *
"... things like sawed tree-trunks, shells you call them ... a pile of
them ... he looks at them and he thinks they're going bad and they ought
to be used soon ... under a wooden roof they are ... a thin man with
death on his face and hate in his heart ... he wears blue and gold ...
he sticks the gold, you call a coat's wrist the cuff, he sticks the cuff
under the nose of a fellow and yells his hate out and the fellow feels
ready to strangle on blood ... it's about a boat that sank ... this
fellow, he's a fat little man and he kills and kills, he'd kill the man
if he could...."
A picket boat steamed by the coast twice a day, north after dawn and
south before sunset. They had to watch out for it; it swept the coast
with powerful glasses.
"... it's the man with the bellyache again but now he's sleepy ... he's
cursing the skipper ... sure there's nothing on the coast to trouble
us ... eight good men aboard and that one bastard of a skipper...."
Sometimes it jumped erratically, like an optical lever disturbed by the
weight of a hair.
"... board over the door painted with a circle, a zig-zag on its side,
an up-and-down line ... they call it office of intelligent navels ...
the lumber camp ... machine goes chug-rip, chug-rip ... and the place
where they cut metal like wood on machines that spin around ... a
deathly-sick little fellow loaded down and chained ... fell on his
face, he can't get up, his bowels are water, his muscles are stiff, like
dry branches and he's afraid ... they curse him, they beat him, they
take him to a machine that spins ... _they_ ... _they_--_they_--"
She sat bolt upright, screaming. Her eyes didn't see Charles. He drew
back one hand and slammed it across her cheek in a slap that
reverberated like a pistol shot. Her head rocked to the blow and her
eyes snapped back from infinity-focus.
She never told Charles what they had done to the sick slave in the
machine shop, and he never asked her.
Without writing equipment, for crutches, Charles doubted profoundly that
he'd be able to hang onto any of the material she supplied. He
surprised himself; his memory developed with exercise.
The shadowy ranks of the New Portsmouth personnel became solider daily
in his mind; the chronically-fatigued ordnance-man whose mainspring was
to get by with the smallest possible effort; the sex-obsessed little man
in Intelligence who lived only for the brothels where he selected older
women--women who looked like his mother; the human weasel in BuShips who
was impotent in bed and a lacerating tyrant in the office; the admiral
who knew he was dying and hated his juniors proportionately to their
youth and health.