The door opened and again he was led through and into a strange room. Without a word the two men conducted Bart down another passageway—this one narrower and lower of ceiling than the preceding one, but with softer, more yellowish lighting and deep carpeting into which his feet sank.
On the walls, here, heavy tapestries hung from metal fittings set into the wooden overhead panels, and were so close together that their separations were hidden in the folds of the hanging cloth. They were all of a thick cloth like velvet, mostly of a maroon background color and with detailed scenes of some story seeming to be worked into them in threads of gold, black, blue, green and silver. Bart watched with interest as he moved down the passage, turning his head Jo try to see both sides, for there seemed to be a different narrative going on on each side of him.
In fact, now he thought of it, the two sides were vastly different. On his right, in rich, warm colors, the cloth seemed to be laying out scenes of life in what he thought were medieval-era palaces—there were lordly men and beautiful women, eating well, listening to singers and watching jugglers, riding horses, and doing other things which seemed to date from the Europe of several centuries ago. He had no time to investigate these tapestries further, for those on his left were demanding more and more of his attention.
These tapestries had seemed at first to be of a set with the others, in style and colors; but as Bart watched them more closely, he saw that they set out the same sort of scenes of princely entertainments, but with a difference. The tapestries on that side showed a variety of cruelties—deer being tom apart by slavering hounds as mounted lords and ladies watched and laughed; hunchbacks being exhibited in chains for amusement; bears being egged into fighting each other—over and over, it seemed to Bart, the scenes were of handsome, cruelly laughing faces.
He came back to himself with a start. He had become so wrapped up in watching the walls that he had not noticed the end of the passageway approaching. But now they had arrived, the door there had opened, and he was being passed into the custody of yet another ordinary-looking man.
This one was also dressed as the others had been; but he was older, with thinning, gray hair and a wrinkled, pale face. His eyes were brown, standing out darkly under this lighting and against the paleness of his other features. Even as Bart finished noticing this, he heard the door close behind him. The man before him spoke.
“You’re new,” the man said. “You’re strong. But you don’t know anything about our ways here. So listen and do what I tell you. Only that.”
He paused, watching Bart, his head cocked slightly to his right, the dark brown eyes glinting with the lids half closed upon them. He seemed satisfied with Bart’s silence and went on.
“You’re never to speak unless ordered to,” he said. “Never move until directed. Never laugh here. In your own quarters you can laugh, but nowhere within these doors. Never scratch or fidget. Hold still when your handlers place the chair upon your back, and stand straight so as to keep the Lord as level and still as possible.”
He stopped again now, watching Bart closely. For the first time, Bart felt doubt. To continue his silence and impassivity in the face of people was a form of what had been called “dumb insolence.” This man was now beginning to recognize that. Now he was deliberately waiting for Bart to acknowledge these instructions in some way—and the rebellion inside Bart wanted to keep on disappointing that expectation.
But perhaps he was not being wise.
He reminded himself that what he needed most was information. And it would be easier come by if his captors thought him duller and weaker than he was. It was much better to sacrifice that bit of pride that was keeping him silent. By asking questions he could appear normal, even dull; and at the same time perhaps pick up some more information. . . .
“Where am I?” he asked; and he knew that only a bare instant had really passed since the other had ceased talking and begun watching him.
“Silence!” The voice of the other was louder and suddenly savage, but satisfied now. “Didn’t I just tell you never to speak unless you were told to?” And he raised a hand that now, Bart saw, held a slender rod. Before Bart had time to wonder what the other expected to do with that tiny stick, the other had touched its metal-shod end to Bart’s cheek—and it felt as if a very small horse had just kicked Bart in the head.
Bart’s head jerked back from the rod, and he heard himself give a grunt, even as he realized that the spot the rod had touched now felt as if it had been touched by red-hot metal, and the area around it tingled as if the nerves had been put to sleep and were just now waking up. He became suddenly aware that he had backed up a step and tried to bring his arms up in front of his face; only, because those arms were still bound before him, the movement had almost thrown him off-balance.
He watched the man in front of him. Yes, the other had wanted that; some excuse to use his rod so that Bart would feel its power. He heard his own breathing rasp in his throat. His eyes had begun to water and his nose to run; and, in spite of his understanding of what had happened, a grim fury had been kindled in him, along with a deep sense of his helplessness.
“I can do that to you any time,” the other man said to him.
The man’s eyes were wide as he watched Bart. His nose seemed sharper now, and the skin stretched more tightly over his cheekbones. As Bart recovered his own control, he could hear the breathing of the other man, quiet, but deep and rapid. The other either enjoyed the giving of pain, or lived in some deep fear of consequences to himself if Bart should fail to follow these orders.
Bart said nothing and made himself stand utterly still. After nearly a full minute of silence, the other slowly began to relax. His arms came back down to his sides, and the rod was tucked back into some fold of his robe, out of Bart’s sight. The man’s eyes returned to a more normal width and his head cocked slightly to one side, consideringly.
“That’s better,” he said.
He turned and pushed a button on the wall behind him, and in a moment a door opened.
Three men came through the door, all dressed in robes like that of the man before him. They were younger than the other, and two of them were carrying some sort of leather-covered device that bore a vague resemblance to a saddle—but a saddle with back and arm rests. The third man closed the door behind him and then stationed himself in front of it, taking a wide-legged stance with his arms folded across his chest. His right hand held a rod like the one that had just been used on Bart. And Bart now saw that the older man had now moved to stand before the other door, by which Bart had earlier entered the room. The other two men paused in front of Bart.
“Turn around,” one said. He was the slightest person Bart had yet seen in his place, swarthy of feature and with an accent that Bart could not place. He said nothing further, and Bart turned to face the wall behind him.
He heard movement behind him. In a moment his back was touched. He kept himself still, and felt a weight descend on his shoulders. From the comers of his eyes he could see movements, and he felt straps being tightened around his chest, fitting snugly enough to define and lodge under the elbows of the arms hidden within the leather garment. His shoulders seemed to each be held in a vise that distributed into his body the weight that had settled above his back, seemingly centered behind and above his backbone.
“Turn around,” he heard again; the command was punctuated by a light tap on his left temple area; and automatically he swiveled in that direction as he turned. He found himself looking at the four men again.
“Now follow these men,” the older one said. “I’ll be behind you.”
The fourth man opened the door opposite the one the three had come through, and the three preceded Bart through it. On the other side, as it closed, the three moved to the left and vanished through another doorway, while Bart was commanded to move ahead. Following orders from the man behind him, Bart was directed to another door, through it, and down a short hallway, until they came to a high-ceilinged, round
room. It had the usual deep carpet and very little by way of furniture; but there was a wide staircase with a heavy balustrade that curved upward to the right. At the height of four feet or so up the staircase was an elevated platform, a kind of landing that had a vertical, unrailinged side in the little alcove that was formed by the curve of the stairs.
They stopped and waited for some time, which Bart used to look about him. The room had a rich, cloth covering glued to the walls, which were themselves curved, giving the room a round, foyer look. There were six sconces topped with lit globes, set into the wall at intervals. They were made of what seemed to be ornately carved metal that was gold or gold-colored, and stood out sharply against the cream and light pink of the wall-covering.
Overhead, the walls curved to come to a point above the center of the room, very high; but the center of the ceiling was obscured by a large, crystal chandelier that seemed to shed no light of its own, but glistened and reflected in a myriad of pinpoints the light that shone from the glass globes in the sconces below and surrounding it.
They stood and waited.
chapter
seven
IN THE MOMENT of rest which had unexpectedly come upon him, Bart took time out to try and put the discomfort of the chair on his back out of his mind and examine the mental map he had been making as far as it had so far developed.
As far as he could judge, now that he had the completed, proportioned line of his journey in his mind’s eye to examine, he seemed to have come in along a straight line from the section that held the Steeds’ dormitories and other rooms such as the one where the four men had harnessed him; and then he had made a turn, a sharp right angle to another straight-line trip along a section made up entirely of these carpeted rooms and tunnels; these seemed to lie in relation to the line of the first section of rooms as the crossbar lies in relation to the vertical line of the letter T—
His thoughts were abruptly interrupted.
From somewhere out of sight on the balcony level above them, that level to which the wide, curving stairway ascended, figures had just appeared. Bart’s first reaction was that they were children in elaborate robelike costumes. Then he saw that they were a man and a woman, but both were the size of the three he remembered briefly standing over him and talking. In fact the man of the pair approaching could have been the white-bearded one of the three. He and the woman with him were a good deal less than five feet tall. The man’s head was bald except for a tuft of white hair above each ear, and his face, above the narrow shoulders, sported a wispy white beard like that grown by the very old of those human races who normally had little or no facial hair, such as Orientals or the Indians of the Americas. There was something definitely familiar about the man—and in a moment Bart was sure: the one descending the stairs was indeed one of the three who had stood over him in that momentary episode of consciousness before he woke up in the dormitory. He was the one who had pointed out the fact that evidently Bart had been escaping from the mine when he had fallen into their hands—and he had mentioned the fact as if it was a point in Bart’s favor.
Bart was suddenly, irrationally, cheered. He might not have fallen among friends, he thought, but perhaps he had fallen in with one of the lesser of his enemies. For, clearly, with the one of the three who had talked of making use of him here, he had simply exchanged one form of slavery for another.
It did not matter, he told himself now. Wherever he was, whoever held him, he would escape. The determination to do that was as much a built-in part of him as his body and mind.
But he had no time to think about that now. He was being fascinated by the other small person who was accompanying the little man down the stairs—not arm-in-arm, but close enough so that the impression of intimacy was almost the same.
The other had seemed to be a beautiful blue-eyed young girl of somewhere between nine and twelve years of age. Now it was plain that she was a mature woman, if still much younger than her companion. And whereas the man wore a rather plain, robelike costume, up close the woman’s dress was long and lacy, sweeping the carpet on the stairs behind her as she came down; and her blond hair was put up in an elaborate coiffure high on her head. The effect was rather like that of a young girl dressed up in her mother’s best party gown. Like the man the exposed parts of her—arms, neck and face—were white with the whiteness of skin that has not seen the sun in years, if ever.
It was puzzling to Bart to see someone even this young so closely partnered with someone as obviously old as the small man beside her; for their intimacy was rather that of man and wife than grandfather and granddaughter. It was only when they came to the midway point of the stairs, much closer to him, and he saw the faint lines of crow’s-feet around the outer corners of her eyes, that all at once he became aware of the cleverly applied makeup on her face, and realized that the high-piled hair on her head helped to hide the fact that her head, also, bulged. Then he began to understand.
Perhaps they were, indeed, husband and wife.
Clearly, the man and the woman with him were what Chandt had called “Lords.” But they seemed to Bart to be an almost gentle couple, although that impression was somewhat marred by the slim rod attached to the waist of the clothing of each. For the first time, Bart found himseif wondering which of the two he was supposed to carry.
“In there—the alcove.”
The whisper came from the man behind Bart, and at the same time Bart felt the end of the other’s rod—with no shock to it now—pushing him forward. He moved into the alcove mentioned, a small space of floor semi-enclosed by the curve of the staircase.
The landing was just about level with his chest—a small space of flooring larger than one of the steps that interrupted their descent at that point..
“Turn.” The whisper again.
He turned, putting his back to the landing.
“Back up.” Bart backed until he felt the edge of the landing touch his back, just above his ribs. “Stand still.”
Sure of what was coming, Bart braced himself in position.
He barely heard the soft feet of the small man and woman reach the landing and stop.
There was a moment of silence; and then he felt weight settle on his shoulders and back. Either the man or woman was now in the saddle they had fastened upon him.
There came a very light tap upon the top of his head. He heard, however, no verbal order, and so he did nothing—although he noted that unconsciously he had been resettling his body, shifting his stance to compensate for the new weight bearing on it. For the chair and the weight of whoever was in it, small though they might be, was still enough to throw him considerably off-balance backward. There was a tap on the back of his head.
“Forward!” It was the voice of the man who had guided him here.
He took a cautious step forward, and then another. It was going to be difficult until he got used to balancing the weight on him, which threatened to drag him over backward. A touch on his right temple from the rod of his rider.
“Left.”
Bart made a ninety-degree turn to his left. The rod tapped him on the left temple—and he was already turning to his right when the whisper to do so came again behind him. Another tap, another turn, another tap, and he ended up facing once more up the stairs.
The woman still stood on the landing, watching. It was the man, then, on his back.
But the two successive turns in opposite directions had disturbed his new precarious balance. He swayed—but his sway was halted by the end of the rod of the man behind him digging into his side.
This time the rod did not carry the powerful blow he had felt once before; rather, it seemed to have a sharp, pinlike point, which felt as if it sank deep into his side.
A second later that rod was knocked away by the smaller rod of his rider; and out of the comer of his eye, Bart saw the man bowing deeply before the rider.
“Ne le touche pas plus!” the words came, unexpectedly, in French from above Bart’s head, in the slightl
y hoarse tenor voice of an old man. Surprise held Bart still for a second. His rider had clearly interfered to save Bart punishment with his order to the man behind Bart not to touch him again.
Once again, as in Bart’s first remembered moment with the three standing over him, whoever it was who now rode him had shown a sort of kindness to him.
Small taps of the rider’s rod against Bart’s right temple turned him once more with his back to the staircase. He moved, wavering only slightly, and completed the turn with much more control than he had shown in that sort of movement before. His guide was still in view.
“Va t’ en!” came the rider’s voice.
Bowing repeatedly, the guide came around from behind Bart and then backed away toward the door until he had reached it. Then he turned and went out, closing the door behind him. Bart felt the weight of his rider shift on his back—he moved his own feet, widening his stance to compensate—and then the rider’s voice, speaking again in that odd, almost understandable tongue he remembered from his moment of consciousness. The pronunciation was off, he told himself, that was most of his trouble with it. If he could just hear the words spoken a little differently . . .
The woman answered, from the staircase behind them.
A light tap of the rider’s rod against the back of his skull started Bart moving. He went forward, toward the door by which he had entered and through which the man who had ordered him about had just left. As he approached, it opened in front of him. There was another tap on the back of Bart’s head, and he continued his movement along the corridor stretching before him. He was learning that the only way he could balance his rider properly was to move in a semi-hunched position that threw their mutual center of gravity forward over his legs. It was an awkward and unnatural position in which to walk, but it was the only way that would work.
The Earth Lords Page 10