As he went, however, Bart found himself growing more familiar with the needs of his burden. He found his steps picking up a smoothness and ease that he had not thought would come to him this quickly.
The corridor led them into a series of rooms, through which Bart’s rider steered him. Bart noticed that one of the differences of this section was that all the rooms here—which like every place here underground must have been carved out of the rock—were very high-ceilinged, for no conceivable reason except the taste of those who had caused them to be made so. The doorways were also higher than necessity alone would require and their tops arched to high peaks, as in the architecture of Moorish cultures.
For the next three hours, obeying the light rod-taps of his rider, Bart roamed the corridors and rooms of what he came to realize was a vast underground establishment; and the map in his mind grew busily. Very plainly, he was not going to learn the overall layout of a place this size in one day.
Once he had discovered the trick of maintaining his balance with a rider on his back and with his hands secured in front of him, there had seemed no great work to the job of carrying the small old man about. The weight of the Lord, he estimated, could not be more than ninety pounds or so; and the chair contraption strapped onto Bart would add less than five pounds to that.
As a matter of weight to be carried, therefore, it should be nothing to someone his size. Nonetheless, as the time he spent moving around under these conditions went on, the task grew harder, the burden he bore seemed to become heavier and heavier. After all, perhaps it was as Chandt had suggested and this was really Hell.
By the end of the three hours the muscles of his shoulders and the area of his neck felt as if they were clamped in a vise of hot metal. For the first time he began to fear that the cramping would become unbearable, and he would run amok in a frantic effort to get chair and rider off him. He could feel his neck and face growing red and hot, and was unable to do anything about the sweat that occasionally trickled into an eye. More and more he longed to be able to move his arms about, to windmill them and stretch his shoulder muscles—but after these hours it was a question whether he would be able to move his arms at all when they were finally freed.
But, in spite of the growing agony of his neck and back, at all times he kept up his observation of the places through which he was directed.
These caverns seemed to extend over a sizable volume of the rock underground—much more than the extent of the mine had been. The mine that now must be either off to one side or overhead of this place where he now trudged—for unlike the mine, this place seemed to possess a number of levels.
The other people Bart and his rider encountered seemed to fall into three classes. Most of them seemed to be servants—or slaves. Invariably these were dressed either in short tunics or—if they seemed to have some authority among their own kind—somewhat longer robes. Always these robes were of solid colors, brown, gray or blue. Occasionally, they encountered a man or woman dressed in what Bart thought of as ‘city clothes,’ the kind of clothing he always thought of the people in large, eastern cities as wearing. This was the only familiar form of dress he saw; and those who wore it were treated with great respect by those of the tunic classes. In return, the city-dressed ignored those in tunics, but were polite and respectful to all the small people they met, whether they were riding a Steed like Bart, or on foot.
Like the servant or slave class, they addressed any small man or woman they encountered as “Lord” or “Lady.”
As for the Lords and Ladies, themselves, whom Bart saw busily occupied at incomprehensible tasks in a number of rooms filled with strange devices with which they tinkered, these were apparently a law unto themselves as far as clothing went. They dressed in all sorts of fashions, although the togalike garment worn by Bart’s Lord was the type most commonly seen.
Toward the end of the third hour, when Bart was beginning to think he could not last much longer, they passed briefly through a room that had to be entered past two guards holding what looked like oddly lumpy rifles—but who stood aside at the sight of Bart’s rider.
It was a strange room. To begin with, they crossed only one end of it; and it was much longer than it was wide. This distance was almost filled by great pipes, as cleanly white as if they had been freshly painted, running lengthwise through the room. Some of these pipes radiated a fierce heat, others an equal aura of icy coldness. The length of the great room was such that the farther ends of the pipes were almost out of sight. Their nearer ends, which Bart and his rider passed, plunged into the stone floor and wherever they went was also out of sight. The room must have been painstakingly carved out of the rock, itself; and all of the exposed stone surface of the walls was highly polished, as was the floor. The stone was of a pale pink color here, except for a wide vein of a darker gray material that, at this end of the room, ran down one wall, across the floor and up the other side wall.
In the far distance Bart could barely see that the pipes turned downward there as well, disappearing into the floor of the room; and somewhere beyond that point was something that caught the eye and dominated the farther wall, a thick, metallic pillar rising vertically from out of sight below, to out of sight above in a room that must be both higher and deeper than this one.
Whatever explanation there was for all this, the labor involved in what Bart now saw must have been incredible. At the direction of his rider, he passed through a farther door in the near end of the long chamber, and a short distance down another corridor found himself suddenly in the midst of a large, book-crammed library.
A tap on the left side of his head directed him down the carpeted floor between two floor-to-ceiling walls of laden bookshelves, and to a door which opened before them.
They stepped through into what was obviously a spacious office with a desk and chair scaled to the height of one of the little people. Furniture of comparable height was about the room. A man wearing city clothes—a suit of dark brown and a white shirt with brown vertical striping under a black bow tie—turned from the room’s large desk, upon which he had been arranging some papers, and came to stand before them.
A tap, for the first time, came directly on top of Bart’s head.
For a moment, he did not understand; and the tap came again.
Then, he understood. His eyes darted quickly about the room and settled on a small wooden landing stage at the right side of the room. He moved toward it and turned, backing carefully into position before it; and gratefully, with a gratitude as deep as he had ever experienced in his life, he felt the weight of his rider leave the saddle on his back. There was only one more thing he could want. The man in city clothes went around to the back of Bart and took care of that.
A second later, the weight of the chair itself disappeared from Bart’s back; and Bart straightened up to the sudden shooting agony of pains in his shoulder and back muscles, but with a blissful sense, at last, of the freedom to stand straight.
chapter
eight
BEHIND HIM, BART heard the Lord speak in the strange tongue. Again, Bart felt he almost understood it. It was something about not needing Bart any further.
The man before Bart nodded and looked at Bart almost commiseratingly.
“The Librarian says you are now to leave this office of his and . return to the Steeds’ dormitory from where you came,” he said in stiff, accented English. He toed the saddle and the thick cloth used to bind Bart’s arms in front of him. “I send one of the stack workers back with these and another one to show you how to get to the dormitory.”
“Merci,” said Bart unthinkingly, for the accent had been eastern Canadian. Behind him, the Lord spoke again; and once more Bart felt something stir in him at the words. But this time, soggy with weariness that seemed to be building up in him rapidly now that the load was off his back, he did not gather even a sense of the message behind the words.
“English only is spoken, in the work place, by those who are not Lords or L
adies,” said the man in the brown suit, still in English. “In the home, is always French.”
“Thank you,” said Bart again, numbly.
“Good. Come with me,” said the man, and led Bart out of the room into the main body of the Library again.
Beyond the ranks of bookcases, there was an open space with tables and chairs of both ordinary size and smaller. The ordinary chairs consisted of upright wooden pieces of furniture, some unpadded, but most, though much the same sort of chairs, padded and with angled backs to be more comfortable. There were also a few chairs, the smaller ones, that were luxuriously padded, and closer to the floor. Some of these were in use by Lords who were sitting in them reading.
Similarly, the padded regular chairs were some of them occupied by men or women in “city” clothes, and two of the completely unpadded chairs held women in gray short tunics. All were reading. In the center of all these chairs was an area enclosed by a circular counter, within which were several desks, at each of which tunic-clad people were working; and one other such was presently standing at the inside edge of the counter, answering in English an inquiry from a man in a dark blue suit on the outside.
“I am the Assistant Librarian,” said the man with Bart, who, perhaps because of his movements, was beginning a little to come out of his fog of weariness. “My name is Charles Mordaunt. Fm in charge of the Library here—under the Lord Guettrig’s supervision, of course.”
He pointed.
“The stacks are numbered,” the Assistant Librarian said, “beginning with number One at that end. If you go down between stacks numbers One and Two, at the end you’ll find a red door. You may have been told about these rooms with red doors before; but in any case, that’s the one for the Library. It’s a withdrawing room for slaves, with all necessary appurtenances for bodily comfort and relief. You understand?”
“The latrine,” said Bart.
“Not just that!” Mordaunt seemed very nearly offended. “There are beds and chairs in there as well . . . you’ll see. In fact, you may find yourself spending much time there, if you’re going to be bringing the Librarian to work here often—and waiting to take him home.”
“I see,” said Bart.
“Never enter a room with a gray door—that is for Hybrids, like myself. And absolutely never even pay attention to a black door, which would be for the Lords and Ladies alone.”
Bart nodded.
They had reached the circular counter now. Mordaunt leaned across it and spoke to a tunic-clad man at one of the desks.
“Find me two stack-workers,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
The man got up from his desk, went out through an opening in the counter and disappeared down the aisle between stacks One and Two.
A few minutes later, Bart was being guided back to the dormitory he had left nearly four hours earlier. The stack-worker, a slave named Jon Swenson, took a different route back to the dormitories than the one by which Bart had come to the Library. It was also, Bart was interested to note from the growing map in his mind, only about a fifth of the distance Bart had carried the Librarian, and it took only about fifteen minutes to cover it.
From Swenson, a black-haired, white-skinned young man of about twenty, who held what was apparently a common attitude among the tunic-clad workers—that the Steeds lived lives of luxury compared to themselves—Bart was able to learn a good deal.
The Librarian’s full name was Pier Guettrig, although no Steed or ordinary slave would dare address him or refer to him other than as “Lord.” Guettrig’s wife’s first name was Marta. Mordaunt, or a Hybrid who was related, might on rare occasions be permitted to call Guettrig by his name alone, rather than his title; but only by special permission and in private.
“And what’s a Hybrid?” Bart asked.
“You a Steed and not know that?” Swenson looked at him in astonishment.
“I’m a very new Steed.” said Bart drily.
“Oh.” Swenson nodded. “Just new from the dead, is that it? You do have a lot to learn, then. But you ought to be able to guess what a Hybrid is. It’s a man or woman who’s a child of one of the Lords and a slave concubine. If a Hybrid passes the inspection when he or she’s eleven years old, and another test at seventeen, they get to be officers and supervisors over the rest of us. Sometimes a Lord even invites one of them into his home for a visit. Usually, in that case, of course, the Lord’s either the father or mother of the Hybrid.”
“Do Steeds,” asked Bart, “ever get invited to a Lord’s home?”
Jon looked at him with wide eyes.
“Of course not!” said the stack-worker. “You’re slaves, just like the rest of us, after all!”
“Out of luck, then,” said Bart. “I see.”
“Oh, no—we’re very lucky, all of us; not only to have been raised again from death in the first place, but because the Lords will be destroying our own accursed race almost any time now; and only those of us who were brought back to life to be their slaves down here will be left alive to serve them.”
Bart stared at the slight young man; but obviously he was completely serious.
“Don’t talk like a crazy,” said Bart. “No one, no bunch of people can destroy the human race. It’s impossible. For one thing, you’d have to destroy the world to do it.”
“But that’s just what the Lords are going to do!” said Jon triumphantly. “Destroy the world—the surface world, that is— just like that!”
He snapped his fingers.
“And how do they think they’re going to do that?” Bart asked.
Jon, it seemed, was not quite sure. He talked a lot about mountains falling and seas drying up, and seemed to have the impression that when the moment came all the Lords would gather in a circle around a great, magical device they had called the Tectonal and, holding hands, order that the world be destroyed. Once they had done this, Jon was confident the Inner World where he, Bart and all the rest were now, would cease to be Hell. Hell would become the surface of the world; and everything alive on it would be destroyed.
Bart made a mental note to find out what kind of basis there was for Jon’s wild belief. It was ridiculous, of course, but there just might be something real behind it—on a much lesser scale, of course. After all, the Scottites had advocated an armed takeover of the Canadian government, and since their mine somehow connected with this place—perhaps these people were involved with those plans, too. There might be some kind of a plan to attack a number of governments, or some such thing.
But for the moment, he put it out of his mind; and it turned out just as well he did. Because the moment he stepped back into the dormitory, he found a new challenge waiting for him.
The dormitory was full of Steeds. More were present than Bart had seen there at any time before. Not only that, but just by the way their faces all turned to watch him as he came in, he could guess that it was his return that was the cause of their presence.
No, he corrected himself—it was not him alone they watched.
A short—as Steeds went, which made him still at least five feet eight—but very broad man, with straight black hair cut short on a round skull, turned as the others looked to the doorway. Seeing Bart, he came striding down the center aisle between the beds to stop an arm’s length away.
Of necessity, Bart stopped also. He looked into a square, hard, face with a scythe of a nose, and a chin and jaw the olive-colored skin of which was darkened even further by the roots of a close-shaved, but very black, beard. For the first time it struck Bart that he had seen no one but Lords wearing any facial hair here in this place they called the “Inner World.”
“I’m Paolo Collini,” said the broad man in a flat bass voice, “and I run this dormitory. That means I run you, too. If I tell you to do something, you jump! You understand? Or do you need instruction?”
Inside himself, Bart sighed. He was still less than his usual strength and weight from the mines, on top of that exhausted from his first day’s chai
r-carrying; and this Paolo Collini, who seemed to be the head man of the dormitory, seemed determined to settle his authority here and now.
“Suppose I just agree to that,” said Bart. “Can we let it go like that, then?”
Paolo frowned.
“What’s the matter? You don’t look like the sort of man’d run from a fight. No!” he said. “If you don’t fight me you fight Michael Bolt, who runs things here, after me.”
He took a half step closer to Bart and peered up into his face, suddenly frowning.
“What’s happened to you?” he demanded. “They take you out for your first day of carrying one of the Lords, today—and you’re just back from that?”
Bart nodded.
Paolo made a disgusted noise, as if he was about to spit.
“It’s not on for now, then,” said Paolo. “It wouldn’t prove a thing to lick you in the shape you’re in now. In fact . . .” He surveyed Bart from head to foot. “I think you’ve probably got less than the usual meat on your bones, anyway. We can settle it later. Where were you before they brought you back to life?”
“I was a slave in a mine that connects with this place,” answered Bart.
“That settles it, then!” Paolo swung around to speak to the others watching in the dormitory. “I know that mine. Some of the rest of you do, too. Hear this, all of you! This man has no rank. You hear that? When he’s well enough he can try me out, if he’s got the guts. Until then, the rest of you leave him alone! You’d probably be wise to, anyway. You hear me? Everyone leave him be!”
His voice had raised on the last two sentences. There was a general reluctant growled mutter of acknowledgment.
Bart found himself strangely touched. He was numb with physical exhaustion; but through that numbness something about Paolo’s words reached to the core of him, where the loneliness was. That loneliness which only Emma, for some strange reason, had been able to banish from him. What Paolo had just said had not altered that feeling in him, as Emma’s mere presence could, but it had held an echo of his own solitary sorrow—why, Bart could not say.
The Earth Lords Page 11