Creaking into motion once again, we plodded onward under the near-lethal sun, meeting no one, seeing no one, not a single living thing except for trees, bushes, other foliage, their leaves clenched tightly into little knots to resist the deadly glory overhead. Time after time, half dazed, I would move to loosen the heavy stifling robe—my body was drenched in sweat that only made the itching worse—only to have my hands pulled gently away from the fastenings. Then I would remember what the sunlight on this planet could do to human flesh.
On Sca, in addition to the gibbet, in addition to the pyre—as if the rulers here really needed another form of brutality—exposure to daylight was a third form of execution, reserved for miscreant nobility.
Within an hour, everything around us appeared to be washed out, lit only in shades of glaring white, impenetrable black, like an old, over-exposed photograph. The Lieutenant mumbled, tossed, struggled fitfully with his smothering protection. They propped him up, gave him something to drink through a small plastic tube thrust into the face of his hood. Afterward, he rested quietly. Within my own sweltering discomfort, I began to yearn for a sip from the same potion, probably the drugged one they had given me the day before, but it was never offered.
We continued southward.
Slowly, I began to have an idea about what might really be going on here. Growing up, I had been warned never to jump to a conclusion prematurely in the absence of reliable data. This is very good advice. However the human mind—mine, at least—was designed to jump reflexively, on the basis of partial information, whether its owner wants it to or not. Mine was doing that right now. Since nobody else would talk to me, I thought I would give it a chance, at least to explain.
Say that these mysterious characters were from the Church. They dressed the part. They had the Bishop’s seal. I do not believe that anybody but a monk, accustomed to long years of suffering in silence, could have endured the journey thus far as these individuals had, without so much as a sneeze, a hiccup, or a lame joke. I knew less about religion than I had about the manufacturing of weapons, but I knew a little history. The Church of Vespucci, compulsory in the nation’s schools, largely ignored by everyone in adulthood, was a transparent prop for the State. It had not always been so; in earlier times it had been active, powerful—divided into a half dozen schisms.
These hooded people might be renegades of a kind, representatives of some faction that wanted neither the Bishop nor the Baron to kill us. Perhaps they wanted our technology—not that they appeared to need it—perhaps they simply wanted to dispose of us themselves. This was not pleasant speculation, but it was the only conversation I had.
Whenever it got boring, I drifted off to sleep.
Exactly as I had done during church services in school.
Nighttime came at last, almost reluctantly, it seemed to me, as if the cruel blazing star overhead somehow enjoyed what it did to the land that lay beneath its hammer-blows. They pulled the cart off of the road again. The animals were fed, then watered lavishly from some nearby source. The Lieutenant was unbound, his vile wounds carefully tended to. His eyes actually opened for a moment. He looked at me with what might have been recognition, perhaps the same mild astonishment that I felt at still being alive, then the man lapsed once more into oblivion.
Gratefully, I unfastened the face-netting before they got to me, undid the hood, spread the robe wide open down the front. It was still breathtakingly hot. It would be several hours yet before the outside temperature dropped appreciably. Sca is lucky that its atmosphere is not thicker. Getting rid of all that insulation helped a good deal anyway.
I almost laughed at the memory of nearly freezing to death in a dungeon only day before yesterday. Now, sweat soaked my hair, ran into my eyes, dripped from the end of my nose. My body vibrated with the heat.
Somewhere over the past several hours, probably in my sleep, I had somehow regained a trace of self-respect, as well. Hooray for me, then. Feeling painfully distended below the beltline, I arose stiffly from the bed of straw, beginning to slip off the end of the cart with the idea of trying to limp over to one of the more inviting-looking shrubberies.
Firm hands restrained me.
“Look, friends,” I told them, “I have to go to the little boys’ bush!”
The two stepped back, giving me room.
I slid the rest of the way, putting weight on my bad foot. It held without much pain, but I was weak, as if my body were made of warm gelatin. Dizzy, I hobbled over to do what a man has to do, trying to ignore three pairs of unseen eyes fastened on my every move. I could not help, however, noticing how careful they were to stand upwind of me. I could not very well blame them for that, all things considered. If I could have avoided standing downwind of myself, I surely would have.
This time, the animal cart had been brought to rest close beside a shallow, sandy-bottomed stream. Attempting to reorganize the remnants of my clothing underneath the burlap robe, I began to have another idea—maybe not a very sensible one, but only the second idea I had enjoyed in a long time. I decided to savor it. However crazy it might be, it was certainly better being burned at the stake by second-string inquisitioners.
Several yards away, two of the hooded figures were at the cart, fussing with the animals. The third seemed to have been delegated to watch me, staying within a few arms’ lengths. I addressed this nearest one.
“Say, are we going to be here for a while?”
There was the very slightest of nods.
“Then how about letting me wash some of the prison out of my clothes?”
No response.
“Look here, Your Reverence, I saw what you people did to a hundred armored troopers. Believe me, I am as harmless as a man can get. I am not going any place you do not want me to go. But I have been steeping in my own filth for a solid month. More, if you count ship-time. Just consider it a last request: maybe it will help your box-office at my witch-burning!”
The swaddled form turned toward its companions at the far end of the clearing. The biggest of them nodded, although it was plainly much too far away for my voice to have carried. On the other hand, they had heard the late unlamented cavalry long before I had. Maybe they were just aliens with good ears. In any case, the nod got passed along to me.
“Thanks, I will do the same for you sometime—in the next life.”
I glanced around without being obvious about it, making certain of my surroundings in a manner I had been taught, laboriously drilled in, since earliest childhood. Especially, I made sure of the Lieutenant’s location. I had been pleased to see my personal hooded chaperone touch reflexively at its waist at the mention of the troopers it had helped massacred.
Nice of it to show me where the real power was.
I turned, stumping with only half-feigned weariness over to the streambank, making an exaggerated production of my crippled weakness. Dropping my borrowed robe onto the grassy bank, I removed my poor old rip-fringed jacket, peeled off what scraps remained of my uniform shirt, unfastened my pants. Underneath, my shorts were in worse shape than the shirt. Both garments were scarcely distinguishable from the filth, the unsloughed flesh, that seemed to be all that was holding them together. They began coming apart in the blood-warm stream the instant I attempted to rinse them. I let the rotting fragments slip away in the current, started scrubbing at my body with clean yellow sand.
And thinking.
Nakedness is an odd thing. Different people certainly react to it differently. I had been acquainted with another lieutenant once, back home on Vespucci when the Navy Reserve had been “temporarily” handling routine urban police work under martial law in one of the first of the Holdout Kingdoms we had overrun. We had been idling on the stone steps of a police station, waiting out our change-of-shift, talking about burglars.
“Corporal,” he had told me, if you ever hear a noise in the night, always take time to grab your pants before you grab your candlestick or crowbar or whatever to confront the thief. Otherwise, you will be at a severe psychological disadvantage. Nakedness equals helplessness. You will know it. The burglar will know it. You will lose. He will win.”
Or something like that.
Later on, my CPO observed wryly that an attack by a stark-naked crowbar-wielding householder might just be a perfect burglar medicine. At the least, it would startle the dickens out of the intruder, maybe even run him off, or at the least, buy you a little extra time for maneuvering.
Personally, I had agreed with the Chief. I had always thought that that lieutenant—exactly like all lieutenants everywhere—was just a little on the prissy side.
College boys!,
as the CPO often snorted with contempt. I was willing to bet, on this oppressively-religious planet, that these hooded people (if someone had thought to ask them) would be likelier to agree with that lieutenant than with my old Chief.
That would be their mistake.
I rinsed out my pants, rinsed out my jacket, enjoying the air on my clean, freshly-abraded skin. Like the Lieutenant, I was covered head to toe with ugly lesions, but they seemed to be healing already. I thought about things some more, like what to do about him. I looked around as unobtrusively as I possibly could, considering the tactical situation.
My guard appeared to be paying more attention to its comrades than to me. Its back was turned. Peripheral vision, I knew from experience, was completely blocked by those hooded robes. I stepped carefully toward the bank, avoiding any telltale splashes or ripples, keeping an eye on the other figures at the cart, as well as the one nearest me. If I could just get hold of whatever weapon had blasted that armored column ...
I put off trying to figure out where the Holy Order of the Teeth of God might have gotten such a thing. Or plastic sipping tubes. Maybe there had been a higher civilization here once, maybe the one that had exiled my poor ancestors to Vespucci. Or, for that matter, there might even have been a previous landing from some other—no, no, stupid, concentrate!
Even in the miserable condition I was in, surely I could overpower one small monk who seemed more interested in meditating on the Great Whatever than in me. I had an advantage—I was desperate. Surely, if I stayed close, they would hesitate to incinerate one of their own, if only for the second or two I needed to puzzle out how their weapon worked.
I had to keep the Lieutenant out of the line of fire.
My foot found the stream-edge where the grassy turf hung over. I glanced down. The sodden burlap on my leg had slipped. Beneath it lay something rubbery, something almost alive in appearance, silvery-gray, like the reflective underside of Scavian leaves in the harsh four-moon light.
I lifted my bad foot carefully up onto the grass, my good foot on a large rock just above the waterline. I balanced, my weight over my good leg which felt like a spring coiled beneath me. Crouching, I breathed in slowly, silently, deeply, trusting to the lifelong martial arts training I had suffered through from gradeschool to bootcamp. I had been good at it, my only “sport”, the only one they give no letter for...
I sprang! Charging across the freshly-opened grass, I threw myself into the air for a flying—then
slammed!
to the ground in shock, the breath blasting out of my lungs. I shook my battered head, looked up at my hooded guard, crouched low in a tense combat stance, hands extended, ready for more trouble any time I was foolish enough to start.
No longer hooded.
I was looking straight into the eyes—aflame with fury at the moment—of the most beautiful pale-haired blond female I had ever seen.
Window on Infinity
“Had enough, asshole?”
The weirdly lovely creature circled warily, stepping sideways, one small fist extended, one drawn back like a coiled spring, ready at her waist. Her hair tossed wildly as she moved, lashing at her shoulders like pale fire, enveloping her face, golden highlights, glints of copper, struggling for dominance in the moon-reflected glare of Sca’s primary.
I sat on the grass in the dent I had made, keeping my mouth shut.
“Don’t be too hard on him, Cilly,” another of the priests shouted suddenly, throwing back his hood. “He must have thought we were going to—”
“Stow it, Coup!” she spat, not once taking her eyes off me. They were green, with undertones of that deep bluish glow you find in the heart of a nuclear reactor. “Anybody who sneaks up behind Lucille Olson-Bear better be prepared for what he gets!
And don’t call me Cilly!”
Then to me: “How about it, jerk, ready to behave?”
I blinked, trying to absorb everything that was happening around me. To my surprise, I was feeling halfway healthy. Without thinking, I braced myself to rise—when a light sweep from a small foot kicked my hand out from under me. I was down again, liking it less every minute.
The man this Lucille Olson-Bear had called “Coup” interrupted once more, coming toward us suddenly in long unmonklike strides, abandoning the bantering tone he’d started out with, for one of warning, of command.
“Quit playing with him, Lucille, that’s an order.” He pointed a big finger at me. “We’re supposed to be on his side. He’s a customer, remember?”
This “Coup” may have been the largest man I have ever seen, with a close-cropped, nearly shaven head that could have been chiseled from a mountainside, a big ugly nose, ears that would have looked like cargo hatches on anyone else. One of his hands was the size of both of mine together.