Jon-Joras, who had indeed imagined that very thing, paused in his pacing up and down the crowded and rather pungent little loft (wood, paint, varnish, breakfast, dinner, supper), looked at the old man in surprise.
“Ha!” Enjoying and prolonging the moment, the old man ignored him, sighted down his work, murmured, “Ah, what a beauty fiddle this will be. No one in Drogue can make them like I make them, mmmmm, no…”
“Explain, please, sir. Explain.”
And the violin-maker explained that, while there existed at present no active movement to overthrow the Puissant Chair and replace its occupant with another, the ranks of the Gentlemen of Drogue were by no means without those who would like to see the Chair shaken. Each shake diminished the present Chairman’s influence, and even the Board of Syndics was not entirely averse to that.
“I name no names,” said the violin-maker; “for a good reason: I don’t know any. But I know this: Your friends’ friends, they wouldn’t have gotten, not one inch, not one foot, inside the building without certain persons of influence and authority had helped them: enough said.”
“But… How does helping us escape shake the Chair?”
“‘How?’ Tchk! You get back to Peramis, you tell how the cruel Chairman arrests you on trumped-up charge, convicts you in fake trial held in camera, throws you in rotten prison, almost kills you—You—important outworlder! What, my guest, you think the Hunt Company will like that? You think the Galactic Delegatic will like it? Of course the Chair will shake. Tchk!”
As for plans to get Jon-Joras back to Peramis, he, the old violin-maker, knew nothing.
The loft lay at the top of a teetering old tenement deep in the festering slums of Old Drogue. Below, illicit wine was made from wild grapes, and unlicensed tobacco cured and sold; there was an inn—de facto, not de jure—which kept no register of those who found cheap if uncertain slumber on the rag beds of its frousty floor; an entire establishment of ladies officially if not all actually young, who failing any gainful skills above a certain level, got their living by the use of such passive skills as lay beneath it; and a number of seamstresses and tailors who lacked time and place and perhaps inclination to weave the cloths they cut and sewed, depending instead on the activities of those who preferred not to vex the original owners with the tiresome bookkeeping inseparable from purchase.
Jon-Joras had been told something of all of this. It had perhaps not sunk in sufficiently. He was perhaps too centered on his own concerns and person. At any rate, it did not occur to him, in lifting up the tattered rag of a window-blind when clamor arose in house and street, and seeing the narrow and noisome way below crowded with black uniforms decorated in red and gold, that those who wore them were present for any reason other than to affect his own capture and semi-judicial murder.
He gave an exclamation of fear and, without even waiting to discuss the matter with the old violin-maker, ran from the loft and scurried up the ladder to the rooftop. The troopers, as it happened, were only engaging in a more-or-less quarterly round-up of unlicensed trulls, in hopes of bribes and free fornication. But when they observed someone fleeing across the roof and endangering life and legs by dropping heavily to the adjacent housetop, they immediately assumed that he was not merely taking exercise.
They pursued after him, he fought back, they kicked him and beat him and, as they considerably outnumbered him, in a very few minutes had him trussed up like a bird ready for the roasting-spit.
Meanwhile, the other inhabitants of the alley, faithful to tradition, had turned out for their own share in the sport, and from windows and rooftops showered the troopers with abuse, refuse, and, as they wanned up to it, more solid tokens of social criticism.
“Look at the poor barster, tied up like that!”
“Tried to help the poor girlies, I’s‘pose—”
“Leave him go, you—”
A rotten bulk of timber came hurtling down, followed by bricks, chunks of plaster ripped from decrepit walls, pots the tinkers had given up long ago, mugs, jugs, coping-stones, firewood—
“Get the crows! Get the woodpeckers! Get ’em!”
The troops, half-leading, half-dragging their quarry, turned to head through another way. But the whole quarter was now aroused; it was astonishing how swiftly barricades had been erected—
“Take the kid! The kid! The kid! Take the kid!”
The heavy rain had begun to draw blood, black-red-gold troopers were down, now, on all sides of him. Jon-Joras felt the hands slip from his arms, started to stagger away, felt something hit his shoulder a sickening, numbing blow. Once again he seemed to hear the pounding of great, inhuman feet… once again the dark circle whirled, closed in, bore him away down a roaring tunnel. Then all sound as well as sight was gone, and he floated, cold, on the waves of an unknown sea.
The down-river packetboat wallowed heavily in the main channel. Now and then the tattered and dirty sail gave a petulant slap and the sweating passengers took brief pleasure in the sudden breath of wind. But it never lasted long enough to bring much relief. A market woman sat on her crated jars of wild honey, voluminous thighs and skirts spread out for coolness as she ate soft fruit. A smeary-faced little girl tugged at her sleeveless arm.
“Mar, Mar,” the child screamed, companionably, “what for is that man got that thing on him, Mar?”
“‘That thing,’” the mother chuckled juicily at her daughter’s clever turn of phrase. “That’s what you call it a straight-jacket, dearyme. He’s a nut-head, the poor poke.”
“But what for is he got that thing on him, Mar?”
“I told you, dearyme: he’s a nut-head. Look what he’s got his head shaved all off, huh? Because what for, otherwise he’d pull out his hair and eat it.” She shoved her neighbor, another market woman whose head had dipped in a mid-day doze, waking her abruptly. “Look a nut-head,” the first honeywife said, gesturing with her dripping morsel.
The second looked, loose, toothless mouth agape with interest and concern. “Ah, tut, the poor poke,” she observed. “I suppose somebody, what, stole his spirit, huh?”
Her neighbor shrugged. “What can you do?” she asked, rhetorically. “Some people, what they’re like.”
The child looked and looked. Then she came to a decision. “He’s a nut-head,” she screamed. The two women laughed at this perceptive remark, urged each other to eat more fruit before it spoiled. There was no telling how long the trip would take, but it was not likely that they would be bored.
There was an old man with his left leg gone at the knee, who had used up all his conversation on his near neighbors, then used up his near neighbors by running through his conversation two or three times over again. As he sat alone on the cover of the cargo hatch his attention was caught by the shrill exchange between the honey-women and the child. He looked up brightly, hoping to catch their eyes and a fresh chance at conversation, but they never looked his way. It didn’t seem as if they were ever going to, so, after a while, he sighed, dragged up his crutches, stumped down towards a niche in the bulkhead which had once held a water-barrel and now held the lunatic and a young boy.
“Going downstream?” was his first, idiot question. The boy nodded. “Thought you weres,” said the gaffer. “I say to myself, ‘They’re going downstream,’ I say… I’m going downstream myself.”
No answer was returned to these confidences. “I’m going in that direction myself. I’m going to Peramy, you may have heard of such a place, Peramy? I’m going there. My grandson’s boy, he lives in Peramy, sells fish in the market there, he sends word to me, come down and help. What for? An old bate like me, with only one hind paw? What for is that I’ve got both forepaws,” he gaped and chuckled, “so I can sit on my stool and scrape the fish, the scales, you know, scrape the scales off of them…
“What for…” he concluded, slightly discouraged at the lack of interest.
The brown waters gurgled slowly past the packet’s hull, the forest slid by on either side, league after le
ague, all the same, all the same.
“Mighty hot,” the old man said. The lunatic groaned and mumbled. The old man’s eyes rolled a bit uneasily.
For the first time the young boy spoke, saying, “He won’t hurt you, granther.”
The old man leaped to his comment like a fish to a fly. “What for he’s like that, boy? Huh?”
Rather wearily, as though tired of giving the same reply so often, the boy said, “He slept outdoors one night in the black of the moon. So.”
Wide-eyed, but utterly believing, the old man gave a long, drawn out Ooooo; nodded rapidly. “Poor poke. He must’ve let his mouth open when he slept, what for some duty person stole his soul.” And he preceded to tell an interminable anecdote incorporating several others equally interminable, about people he knew or had heard of who had suffered the same outrage. The boy’s head drooped, snapped back up, drooped again. The old man droned on. He told the story of his life, including the loss of his leg (“An afternoon, hot as this one”) to a rogue dragon long, long ago.
The boy’s sleepy eyes lit up and his lips parted. Then he closed them both again. And the old man droned on. And the lunatic drooled and moaned.
There was some discussion at the land-stage in Peramis as to whether the boy had to pay head-tax for one person or two. A reference to the dirty, dog-eared book of regulations, however, soon provided the answer.
“No… Boy’s right. Nut-heads and little kids, no head-taxes…” Absently, the official took the boy’s money.
“Estates of nut-heads got to pay land-taxes,” another official pointed out, unwilling to lose the argument absolutely.
“‘Estates,’ ‘land,’” the first one said, testily. “Estates and lands got nothing to do with us… Honey, huh. How many jars you got, woman?”
They began to count and squabble. The boy and his keeper drifted away through the crowd and out into the streets.
Presently they wandered along a refuse-strewn alley backing on a row of cookshops, entered a gaping doorway. Time passed; not much. The boy emerged again, a man with him, arm in a sling, head covered with what might have been ill-trimmed hair… or… if one looked quite closely… a wig. The man’s gaze was blank. Now and then he made a faint mewing sound.
The alley led into another which emptied onto a court, the doors and windows of its rotting tenements boarded shut. The boy studied the crude graffiti, scrawled in charcoal, mostly obscene; rapped softly on one, in an irregular rhythm.
Silence.
He rapped again. The man began to move away, was jerked back, whimpered.
There was a screech of seldom-used wooden hinges and a door opened, narrowly, boards and all, the entire frame moving in. After a second or so, it opened wider. Man and boy entered. The door closed behind him.
A bitter-faced woman said, in a harsh voice, “You’ve been long in coming.” Then, looking at the man: “He’s had black brew to drink.” He looked at her, blankly. The boy nodded. “I’ll make some white,” the woman said.
In the sole clean room of the cluttered warren she set charcoal to burning in a small brick stove, put herbs into a pot, added something fine and powdered, and water, fanned the fire with a shingle.
“I can make something to eat,” she said after a while.
“No.”
The white brew boiled, was poured off, strained, diluted With tepid water in a mug. The woman put it to his lips, he drew his face away, she jerked his chin down and poured the drink into his mouth. Much ran out but his throat bobbed and he swallowed.
“Now we’ll see,” the woman said. They both looked at him, expectantly.
He winced, shuddered. His face, his limbs, his body, began to twitch. This soon stopped. The man looked around him, confused. He licked his lips, frowned at the silent woman with the bitter face. His head turned slowly. At sight of the boy he cried out, jumped, then gave a groan of pain. He subsided in his chair.
“How did I get here?” he muttered.
Then he asked, “Why are you dressed as a boy, Lora?”
IX
Now it was her turn to frown. Perhaps it was his use of her name—although there was no reason for him not to know it by now—or not to use it.
Her voice was low, restrained, husky. She gave her head the immemorially conventional toss, forgetful that her hair was now cropped short. “We picked you up when your shoulder was hurt,” she said. “And brought you here.”
“We?”
She hesitated. “I brought you here.”
“Using the riot for your own purpose…”
Her laugh was brief, scornful. “Who do you think began the riot? Or why?”
He considered this. His shoulder and arm were throbbing. “I can’t remember… anything…”
“You were drugged. It was easier to get you out that way. Everyone thought you were a lunatic.”
“Mmm… And now I’m here…Where is ‘here’? Peramis? At last. Well… What’s to prevent my talking freely?”
He blinked when she told him; nothing prevented it. He had in fact been brought here for that reason, not any other one. There was no longer any purpose in keeping, or trying to keep secret, the work at the Kar-chee castle. It was disrupted, it was known. Another training place would have to be set up in another location, there to teach the dragons how to kill their hunters. But this could not be done in a day and a night—indeed, it was impossible to say how long it would take.
And Hue’s purpose could not be delayed, whatever advantage so far gained dared not be lost—
“You tried to have me killed,” he interrupted her.
She waved this away with her hand. “That was before we realized that there was no point in silencing you. No, we almost made a mistake there. Now we want you to talk, tell everyone, let the whole Galaxy know what we’ve been doing, why we’ve been doing it. And why we intend to keep right on doing it until we win. Maybe it will help us. It’s clear it can’t hurt us any more.
“The only thing we ask you not to talk about is this place here. It’s useful to us, and we think you owe us that.”
For a moment he reflected. Then he nodded. “All right. But answer me this: Has your father anything to do with the dragons in the Bosky? No? Curious. Well. Take me as near to Company House as you can. I won’t say a word about your hide-out here.”
Nor did he. He wasn’t even asked. Jetro Yi’s effusive and almost incredulous pleasure at seeing Jon-Joras return soon vanished on hearing what he had to say.
“Then it’s true? It is true! We’ve heard rumors, we were naturally, P.M., you understand, we were unwilling to credit them. But—Oh, that’s horrible! That’s unbelievable! But… I mean… actually training them to become rogues! That’s worse than anything I could imagine!”
His rubbery features were distended, distorted by shock. He took him to his superior, the Hunt Company’s Chief Agent in Peramis, one Wills H’vor. H’vor was a man of full flesh, he began to tremble, then to shake. Before Jon-Joras was quite finished, the Chief Agent’s heavy face and pendulous cheeks, the slack muscles of his arms revealed by the sleeveless shirt, were wobbling and quivering. His teeth clattered. With a convulsive movement, he steadied himself enough to speak.
“We—we-we-we—we might have all been killed!” he burst out. Clearly, no conceivable detail of that dreadful death was escaping his imagination. “How can we be-be-be sure?” he cried. “From now on—?”
“Whether the dragons are honestly marked or not? And rogues or not? You can’t,” Jon-Joras said. “I suppose that’s part of their purpose, the outlaw Doghunters, that is.” He felt no desire, now, to go into the morals of the matter, to blame the raging hatred of the outlaws any more than the cold, indifferent oppression of the Gentlemen. His injured arm was giving him infinite pain, he felt sick and hungry and weak. “My king’s hunt will have to be put off… canceled… or held elsewhere. It may have to be in The Bosky, Company Yi—still no? Well—” Jon-Joras shrugged, sighed.
“Please get me ConfedBa
se on the communicator,” he said. “And then… then… I think I’d better see a physician…”
Wills H’vor waved a trembling fat flipper of a hand. Jetro Yi’s instinctive and obsequious reaction lacked much of its usual fulsomeness, but he hastened to comply. Voices came and went behind the blind face of the comspeaker, Jon-Joras wearied of repeating himself over and over again only to be switched on to someone higher up—and then having to begin yet again. Finally—
“Delegate Anse on. Who is this?”
It might have been imagination, but it seemed to Jon-Joras that on his mentioning (for the tenth time, perhaps) the phrase, “… Private Man of King Por-Paulo of M.M. beta…” he heard the voice of the Galactic Delegate undergo a clear but subtle change. But he did not pause to question this, went on with what he had to say. He stumbled, repeated himself, but he kept on talking.
“All right… No more for just now,” Anse’s voice instructed, interrupting him. “We’ll finish this up together. When. Mmmm. See… Today is Thirday… You missed the ferry, won’t be another till next Firsday. I can’t take the time off just now, or I’d come up by special. Should I send a special to bring you here?”
It was decided, finally, that Jon-Joras should rest, under medical care, until the regular weekly ferry trip the following Firsday. There were special facilities at the Lodge; he should take advantage of them.
“Meanwhile,” concluded Delegate Anse, “this information had best remain uncirculated. Does anyone else… Companymen Yi and H’vor? I’ll get on to them. And you, P.M., take it smoothly. Heal well.”
Under the ministrations of Physician Tu, graduate therapist of the famous schools of Planet Maimon, Jon-Joras’s injuries soon ceased to vex him. In his quiet room at the far end of one wing of the Lodge, he lay on his couch looking out the transparent wall. Dark and green rose the wooded hills afar off, the great river flowing silvery as it bent in the middle distance. Dimly, like a picture scroll slowly unwinding, images, images passed before his eyes.
Rogue Dragon Page 9
