by Matt
"It'll cost you ten," murmured the bartender.
Ten monetary units was a day's wage for a skilled carpenter—though only a small fraction of Shane's pay for the same hours. The Aalaag rewarded their household cattle well. Too well, in the minds of most other humans. That was one of the reasons Shane moved around the world on his master's errands wearing the cheap and unremarkable robe of a pilgrim.
"Yes," he said. He reached into the pouch at the cord about his waist and brought forth his money clip. The bartender drew in his breath with a little hiss.
"Sir," he said, "you don't want to flash a wad, particularly a wad like that, in here nowadays."
"Thanks. I..." Shane lowered the money clip below bar-top level as he peeled off a bill. "Have one with me."
"Why, yes, sir," said the bartender. His eyes glinted, like the metal of the Cimbrian bull in the sunlight. "Since you can afford it..."
His thin hand reached across and swallowed the bill Shane offered him. He ducked below the counter level and came up holding two of the tall glasses, each roughly one-fifth full of a colorless liquid. Holding the glasses between his body and Shane's so that they were shielded from the view of others in the bar, he passed one to Shane.
"Happier days," he said, and tilted up his glass to empty it in a swallow. Shane imitated him, and the harsh oiliness of the liquor flamed in his throat, taking his breath away. As he had suspected, it was a raw, illegally distilled, high-proof liquid with nothing in common with the earlier aquavit but the name it shared. Even after he had downed it, it continued to sear the lining of his throat like sooty fire.
Shane reached automatically for his untouched glass of beer to lave the internal burning. The bartender had already taken back their two liquor glasses and moved away down the bar to serve another customer. Shane swallowed gratefully. The thick-bodied ale was gentle as water after the rough-edged moonshine. A warmth began slowly to spread through his body. The hard corners of his mind rounded; and on the heels of that soothing, without effort this time, came his comforting, familiar daydream of the Avenger. The Avenger, he told himself, had been there unnoticed in the square during the executions, and by now he was lying in wait in a spot from which he could ambush the Aalaag father and son, and still escape before police could be called. A small black-and-gold rod, stolen from an Aalaag arsenal, was in his hand as he stood to one side of an open window, looking down a street up which two figures in green and silver armor were riding toward him....
"Another, sir?"
It was the bartender back again. Startled, Shane glanced at his ale glass and saw that it, too, was now empty. But another shot of that liquid dynamite? Or even another glass of the ale? He could risk neither. Just as in facing Lyt Ahn an hour or so from now he must be sure not to show any sign of emotion while reporting what he had been forced to witness in the square, so neither must he show the slightest sign of any drunkenness or dissipation. These, too, were weaknesses not permitted servants of the aliens, as the alien did not permit them in himself.
"No," he said, "I've got to go."
"One drink did it for you?" The bartender inclined his head. "You're lucky, sir. Some of us don't forget that easily."
The touch of a sneer in the bitterness of the other's voice flicked at Shane's already overtight nerves. A sudden sour fury boiled up in him. What did this man know of what it was like to live with the Aalaag, to be treated always with the indifferent affection that was below contempt—the same sort of affection a human might give a clever pet animal—and all the while to witness scenes like those in the square, not once or twice a year but weekly, perhaps daily?
"Listen—," he snapped, but checked himself. Once more, he had nearly given away what he was and what he did.
"Yes, sir?" said the bartender, after a moment of watching him. "I'm listening."
Shane thought he read suspicion in the other's voice. That reading might only be the echo of his own inner turmoil, but he could not take a chance.
"Listen," he said again, dropping his voice, "why do you think I wear this outfit?"
He indicated his pilgrim's robe.
"You took a vow." The bartender's voice was dry now, remote.
"No. You don't understand "
The unaccustomed warmth of the drink in him triggered an inspiration. The image of the butterfly slid into—and blended with—his image of the Avenger. "You think it was just a bad accident, out there in the square just now? Well, it wasn't. Not just accidental, I mean—I shouldn't say anything."
"Not an accident?" The bartender frowned; but when he spoke again, his voice, like Shane's, was lowered to a more cautious note.
"Of course, the man ending on the blades—it wasn't planned to finish that way," muttered Shane, leaning toward him. "The Pilgrim—" Shane broke off. "You don't know about the Pilgrim?"
"The Pilgrim? What Pilgrim?" The bartender's face came close. Now they were both almost whispering.
"If you don't know, I shouldn't say—"
"You've said quite a lot already—"
Shane reached out and touched his six-foot staff of polished oak leaning against the bar beside him.
"This is one of the symbols of the Pilgrim," he said. "There're others. You'll see his mark one of these days and you'll know that attack on the Aalaag in the square didn't just happen by accident. That's all I can tell you."
It was a good note to leave on. Shane picked up the staff, turned quickly and went out. It was not until the door to the bar closed behind him that he relaxed. For a moment he stood breathing the cooler air of the street, letting his head clear. His hands, he saw, were trembling.
As his head cleared, sanity returned. A cold dampness began to make itself felt on his forehead in the outside air. What had gotten into him? Risking everything just to show off to some unknown bartender? Fairy tales like the one he had just hinted at could find their way back to Aalaag ears—specifically to the ears of Lyt Ahn. If the aliens suspected he knew something about a human resistance movement, they would want to know a great deal more from him; in which case death on the triple blades might turn out to be something he would long for, not dread.
And yet, there had been a great feeling during the few seconds he had shared his fantasy with the bartender, almost as if it were something real. Almost as great a feeling as the triumph he had felt on seeing the butterfly survive. For a couple of moments he had come alive almost, as part of a world holding a Pilgrim-Avenger who could defy the Aalaag. A Pilgrim who left his mark at the scene of each Aalaag crime as a promise of retribution to come. The Pilgrim, who in the end would rouse the world to overthrow its tyrannical, alien murderers.
He turned about and began to walk hurriedly toward the square again, and to the street beyond it that would take him to the airport where the Aalaag courier ship would pick him up. There was an empty feeling in his stomach at the prospect of facing Lyt Ahn, but at the same time his mind was seething. If only he had been born with a more athletic body and the insensitivity to danger that made a real resistance fighter. The Aalaag thought they had exterminated all cells of human resistance two years ago. The Pilgrim could be real. His role was a role any man really knowledgeable about the aliens could play—if he had absolutely no fear, no imagination to make him dream nights of what the Aalaag would do to him when, as they eventually must, they caught and unmasked him. Unhappily, Shane was not such a man. Even now, he woke sweating from nightmares in which the Aalaag had caught him in some small sin, and he was about to be punished. Some men and women, Shane among them, had a horror of deliberately inflicted pain He shuddered, grimly, fear and fury making an acid mix in his belly that shut out awareness of his surroundings.
This cauldron of inner feelings brewed an indifference to things around him that almost cost him his life. That and the fact that he had, on leaving the bar, automatically pulled the hood of his robe up over his head to hide his features, particularly from anyone who might later identify him as having been in a place where a barten
der had been told about someone called "the Pilgrim." He woke from his thoughts only at the faint rasp of dirt-stiff rags scuffing on cement pavement behind him.
He checked and turned quickly. Not two meters behind, a man carrying a wooden knife and a wooden club studded with glass chips, his thin body wound thick with rags for armor, was creeping up on him.
Shane turned again, to run. But now, in the suddenly tomblike silence and emptiness of the street, two more such men, armed with clubs and stones, were coming out from between buildings on either side to block his way. He was caught between the one behind and the two ahead.
His mind was suddenly icy and brilliant. He had moved in one jump through a flash of fear into something beyond fright, into a feeling tight as a strung wire, like the reaction on nerves of a massive dose of stimulant. Automatically, the last two years of training took over. He flipped back his hood so that it could not block his peripheral vision, and grasped bis staff with both hands a foot and a half apart in its middle, holding it up at a slant before him, and turning so as to try to keep them all in sight at once. The three paused.
Clearly, they were feeling they had made a mistake. Seeing him with the hood over his head and his head down, they must have taken him for a so-called "praying pilgrim," one of those who bore staff and cloak as a token of nonviolent acceptance of the sinful state of the world which had brought all people under the alien yoke. They hesitated.
"All right, pilgrim," said a tall man with reddish hair, one of the two who had come out in front of him. "Throw us your pouch and you can go."
For a second, irony was like a bright metallic taste in Shane's mouth. The pouch at the cord around a pilgrim's waist contained most of what worldly goods he might own; but the three surrounding him now were "vagabonds"—Nonservs— individuals who either could not or would not hold the job assigned them by the aliens. Under the Aalaag rule, such outcasts had nothing to lose. Faced by three like this, almost any pilgrim, praying or not, would have given up his pouch. But Shane could not. In his pouch, besides his own possessions, were official papers of the Aalaag government that he was carrying to Lyt Ann; and Lyt Ann, warrior from birth and by tradition, would neither understand nor show mercy to a servant who failed to defend property he carried. Better the clubs and stones Shane faced now than the disappointment of Lyt Ann.
"Come and get it," he said.
His voice sounded strange in his own ears. The staff he held seemed light as a bamboo pole in his grasp. Now the vagabonds were moving in on him. It was necessary to break out of the ring they were forming around him and get his back to something so that he could face them all at the same time There was a storefront to his left just beyond the short, gray-haired vagabond moving in on him from that direction.
Shane feinted at the tall, reddish-haired man to his right, then leaped left. The short-bodied vagabond struck at him with a club as Shane came close, but the staff in Shane's hand brushed it aside and the staff's lower end slammed home, low down on the body of the vagabond. He went down without a sound and lay huddled up. Shane hurdled him, reached the storefront and turned about to face the other two.
As he turned, he saw something in the air, and ducked instinctively. A rock rang against the masonry at the edge of the glass store window, and glanced off. Shane took a step sideways to put the glass behind him on both sides.
The remaining two were by the curb now, facing him, still spread out enough so that they blocked his escape. The reddish-haired man was scowling a little, tossing another rock in his hand. But the expanse of breakable glass behind Shane deterred him. A dead or battered human was nothing; but broken store windows meant an immediate automatic alarm to the Aalaag police, and the Aalaag were not merciful in their elimination of Nonservs.
"Last chance," said the reddish-haired man. "Give us the pouch—"
As he spoke, he and his companion launched a simultaneous rush at Shane. Shane leaped to his left to take the man on that side first, and get out away from the window far enough to swing his stave freely. He brought its top end down in an overhand blow that parried the club blow of the vagabond and struck the man himself to the ground, where he sat, clutching at an arm smashed between elbow and shoulder.
Shane pivoted to face the reddish-haired man, who was now on tiptoes, stretched up with his own heavy club swung back in both hands over his head for a crushing down-blow.
Reflexively, Shane whirled up the bottom end of his staff, and the tough, fire-hardened tip, traveling at eye-blurring speed, smashed into the angle where the other man's lower jaw and neck met.
The vagabond tumbled, and lay still in the street, his head now bent unnaturally sideways on his neck.
Shane whirled around, panting, staff ready. But the man whose arm he had smashed was already running off down the street in the direction from which Shane had just come. The other two were still down and showed no intention of getting up.
The street was still.
Shane stood, snorting in great gasps of air, leaning on his staff. It was incredible. He had faced three armed men— armed at least in the same sense that he, himself, was armed—and he had defeated them all. He looked at the fallen bodies and could hardly believe it. All his practice with the quarterstaff... it had been for defense; and he had hoped never to have to use it against even one opponent. Now, here had been three... and he had won.
He felt strangely warm, large and sure. Perhaps, it came to him suddenly, this was the way the Aalaag felt. If so, there could be worse feelings. It was something lung-filling and spine-straightening to know yourself a fighter and a conqueror. Perhaps it was just this feeling he had needed to have, to understand the Aalaag—he had needed to conquer, powerfully, against great odds as they did
He felt close to rejecting all the bitterness and hate that had been building in him the past two years. Perhaps might actually could make right. He went forward to examine the men he had downed.
They were both dead. Shane stood looking down at them. They had appeared thin enough, bundled in their rags, but it was not until he stood directly over them that he saw how bony and narrow they actually were. They were like claw-handed skeletons.
He stood, gazing down at the last one he had killed, and slowly the fresh warmth and pride within him began to leak out. He saw the stubbled sunken cheeks, the stringy neck, and the sharp angle of the jawbone jutting through the skin of the dead face against the concrete. These features jumped at his mind. The man must have been starving—literally starving. He looked at the other dead man and thought of the one who had run away. All of them must have been starving, for some days now.
With a rush, his sense of victory went out of him, and the sickening bile of bitterness rose once more in his throat. Here he had been dreaming of himself as a warrior. A great hero— the slayer of two armed enemies. Only the weapons carried by those enemies had been sticks and stones, and the enemies themselves were half-dead men with barely the strength to use what they carried. Not Aalaag, not the powerfully armed world conquerors challenged by his imaginary Pilgrim, but humans like himself, reduced to near animals by those who thought of these and Shane, in common, as "cattle."
The sickness flooded all through Shane. Something like a ticking time bomb in him exploded. He turned and ran for the square.
When he got there, it was still deserted. Breathing deeply, he slowed to a walk and went across it, toward the now still body on the triple blades and the other body at the foot of the wall. The fury was gone out of him now, and also the sickness. He felt empty, empty of everything—even of fear. It was a strange sensation to have fear missing—to have it all over with; all the sweats and nightmares of two years, all the trembling on the brink of the precipice of action.
He could not say exactly, even now, how he had finally come to step off that precipice at last. But it did not matter. Just as he knew that the fear was not gone for good. It would return. But that did not matter, either. Nothing mattered, even the end he must almost certainly come to,
now. The only thing that was important was that he had finally begun to act, to do something about a world he could no longer endure as it was.
Quite calmly he walked up to the wall below the blades holding the dead man. He glanced around to see if he was observed, but there was no sign of anyone either in the square or watching from the windows that overlooked it.
He reached into his pocket for the one piece of metal he was allowed to carry. It was the key to his personal living quarters in Lyt Ann's Headquarters, at Minneapolis, in what had once been known as the United States of America. It was made of some special alloy developed by the Aalaag— "warded," as all such keys had to be, so that it would not set off an alarm by disturbing the field which the Aalaag had set up over every city and hamlet to warn of unauthorized metal weapons in the possession of humans. With the tip of the key, Shane scratched a rough figure on the wall below the body: the Pilgrim and his staff.
The hard tip of the metal key bit easily through the weathered surface of the brick to the original light red color underneath. Shane turned away, putting the key back into his pouch. The shadows of late afternoon had already begun to fall from the buildings to hide what he had done. And the bodies would not be removed until sunrise—mis by Aalaag law. By the time the figure scratched on the brick was first seen by one of the aliens, he would be back among the "cattle" of Lyt Ann's household, indistinguishable among them.
