The Earth Lords

by Gordon R. Dickson

  It would undoubtedly be a safe place, possibly a hidden one . . ..

  Meanwhile, Jon had brought him to the Guettrig home and a staircase-dominated room he recognized. The man who was always here and in charge when Bart was brought to his Master was not present this time, and Jon led the way up the stairs with as much aplomb as if he, himself, was a Lord.

  The top of the stairs gave on to a balcony under the high ceiling of the same room, and a number of corridors led back off through the wall behind the balcony. Jon took the second corridor to his right and led Bart down a carpeted and panelled corridor, past a number of closed doors made of some heavy, dark wood, to one which sat squarely in the wall that closed the far end of the corridor.

  At this door he stopped and scratched on its surface lightly with his fingernail.

  They waited.

  Bart had just about reached the point of suggesting to Jon that he scratch again, when the door opened itself before them. They went through it, and the door closed again behind them—once more, apparently by itself.

  They stood in a large, square room with very thick and soft carpet underfoot, and tapestries on the walls. Overhead in the ceiling, the mechanical lights that were all about the Inner World glowed in their warm, sunlight color. Along the base of the walls, panels also glowed—but redly, since they seemed to be composed of bars of heated metal which raised the temperature of the room close to the point where Bart would have found it actively uncomfortable. A scent like that of spring flowers mingled with the faint smells of carpet and hot metal, not hiding the two latter odors, but in a sense excusing them.

  The room was furnished with chairs and couches, all heavily padded and overstuffed and all built to the size of the small people who ruled this underground country.

  In two of these chairs—brown upholstered, high-backed pieces of furniture—facing each other across a small table that held something like a chess board, sat Pier Guettrig and the tiny, young-appearing woman who had been on the stairs with the Librarian the first time Bart had seen him.

  The two were now ignoring the game that had evidently been in progress between them; their eyes were fastened on Bart.

  “Lord and Lady,” said Jon in French, “here is the slave you ordered me to bring you.”

  “Yes. Wait outside, Jon,” answered the rusty voice of Pier in the same tongue. “You’ll be needed to take him back to his dormitory, after we’ve talked to him.”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  Jon backed toward the door, which opened to let him out and then closed again after he had passed through it.

  “Come here,” said Pier to Bart.

  Bart walked forward until he stood a step from their chairs, towering over them as they sat looking up at him.

  “He’d better sit,” said the woman. Her voice was as young as her superficial appearance, and had a touch of humor in it. “I’m going to get a stiff neck looking up at him.”

  “Sit down, Bart,” said Pier. His own voice was not unkindly. “You can sit cross-legged on the rug, there.”

  Bart lowered himself into the sitting position suggested. From that position he looked upward at the two and they looked down at him almost benignly, like elderly relatives.

  “Bart,” said Pier, “this is my Lady. You will address her as such, but in case some other Lord should need to ask you or speak to you about her, her name is the Lady Marta Guettrig. I am the Lord Pier Guettrig, in case no one has already told you.”

  “I understand, Lord,” said Bart.

  Pier nodded almost enthusiastically.

  “Exactly!” he said. “Of course—you’re quick to learn, Bart. But now we have to learn about you.”

  “Where were you born, Bart?” asked Marta.

  Bart had not expected to have to give any of the story about his personal background until he had had a chance to reconcile it with what was known about Lords who had gone out into the upper world and never returned. Now, he was faced with the danger of saying something that might later trip him up. Also, he had expected Pier to do the questioning; and Marta had caught him off guard—so that in spite of himself, he hesitated for just a moment before answering.

  “I don’t know exactly,” he said. “At a Cree camp, somewhere near the Red River, not far from Assiniboia.”

  “In métis country,” said Pier.

  “I am a métis,” said Bart.

  “And your father was a man named Lionel Dybig?”

  “How did you know that?” Bart turned his gaze on the old man.

  “You won’t remember it, but you were questioned at the time you were revived,” said Pier. “That’s done with all who’re brought in here . . .”

  “What was your mother’s name?” Marta asked, leaning forward.

  “It was—in French it would translate into ‘Listens to Trees,’ ” answered Bart. “Both she and her mother were said to understand the language the trees speak when the wind blows.”

  “Marta—,” began Pier.

  “Allow me, Pier,” she interrupted him. “I want to hear these things from Bart himself. Bart—what was she like?”

  “She died of a coughing sickness the winter I was five years old,” said Bart. “I hardly remember her.”

  It was true, he hardly remembered what she had looked like, how she had walked and talked. But he remembered vividly a presence that had been hers, a presence, warm and large, that had surrounded his whole life up until the time she died.

  “After she was dead, I was sent to my father,” Bart went on, remembering as he spoke. “I knew who he was, because he’d visited our camp from time to time. I liked him; but if it had been up to me, then, I’d have stayed with the camp rather than have gone to him.”

  “Tell us about him,” said Pier.

  “He wasn’t much bigger than you, Lord,” said Bart. “His arms were long for his size and he was much stronger than he looked. He lived with the métis—in fact, he was close to Louis Riel, and Riel sometimes acted on his advice. He was a small, dark man, very intense. People who didn’t know him sometimes began by taking him too lightly, at first—”

  “Ah!” said Marta unexpectedly.

  Bart looked at her.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “As I say, they’d begin by taking him lightly but once they got to know him, they found out quickly he was somebody they had to respect, either as friend or enemy. He was so much smarter than those around him, that he was almost like a man living with a pack of animals. He taught me how to speak French with several different accents. Also, other languages, and a lot about the world that the métis and the Indians didn’t know.”

  As with his mother, talking about his father had brought back to Bart the feeling of his father’s presence.

  Only, in the case of his father, Bart had sharp visual memories to go with that feeling. The one that came most often to him was the image of Lionel seated across the cabin from him, writing at a table under the bright white light of a parafin lamp in the evening as Bart sat at his own studies with another lamp at another table.

  His father’s face in that image was carved into Bart’s memories. It had been a lean, narrow face under long, straight black hair. A face with brilliant eyes, quick to expression; so unlike Bart’s own square, nearly expressionless features, that Bart had hated his own image when he saw it in the cabin mirror, thinking of himself as incredibly ugly—just as his father, to him, was the handsomest of men.

  “Tell us,” Marta was saying to him, “what life was like for you as a boy, growing up among the métis?”

  It was an odd question, Bart thought, under the present circumstances; but Pier’s wife—if “wife” had the same meaning here in the Inner World, among the Lords—seemed to be indulging some private interest; and it seemed her husband was sitting back and letting her do so.

  Bart tried, therefore, to tell them. But it was hard to pick what they might want to hear and what might not bind him too tightly to a history that could stand in the way of h
is claiming Hybrid birth later on.

  As a result, he told them—told Marta, actually—about little things. Like the schoolhouse, which he had attended because his father said that he must not seem too different; although the teacher dealt only with simple things Bart had learned early in his time with his father. In any case the other students there sensed a difference in Bart, anyway, and most of them kept their distance from him—all of them, that was, except Emma. The others did not dare pick on him because, like his father, he was strong for his size and the Indian camp had taught him early not to be afraid of a fight. But they made no effort to be close to him.

  It was the learning sessions he had had with his father that were most important in his memory. His father told him fascinating stories of a world far beyond these north woods; told him of people, places and things, taught him different languages and customs and a different historical background to the time they were now in than even Louis Riel seemed to know.

  Listening to Lionel’s words, Bart had eagerly absorbed fascinating details about Europe and North Africa, Persia and China; and also about something called the Ottoman Empire. The overall picture his father’s words built for him was of a human race made up of many different kinds of men and women, struggling, always struggling, upward toward some better form of life that they could hardly define themselves but which led them over the centuries to build and invent tools to give them dominance over the earth and even to change the face of it.

  None of these latter memories were in the account he gave Marta and Pier—and, still, he had an uneasy feeling that the two of them were reading some of his private thoughts through the bare account he gave them of his father’s life and death; and his own life after that, when he had left Riel down in the United States and made his own way here.

  Bart was first puzzled, then wary, about the wealth of detail they wanted to hear, both about himself and his life with his father. Pier, it seemed, was interested mostly in what Bart and Lionel had done and talked of, and where they had gone. Marta’s interest fastened on other elements: on how they had felt toward each other and the people around them. She seemed more interested in their joys and sorrows.

  It occurred to Bart, suddenly, that just possibly he had tapped a vein of intense curiosity in this race of strange little people who owned and spent their lives in this Inner World. A curiosity about the world of open air and sunlight above them, and curiosity about the ordinary humans who lived there. Nothing else, thought Bart, could explain the exhaustiveness of the interest Pier and Marta were showing in every detail of Bart’s former life.

  When it came to the point of his mentioning Emma and her brother, Bart touched on them only lightly. He did not want to reveal either the importance of Emma to him, or his knowledge of her presence here, until he knew more about whether it was safe to do so. He wondered uneasily whether they already knew that about him, too; but he had no choice but to put the best face he could on it all.

  Fortunately, their questions all stopped with Bart’s capture at Shunthead; and eventually—Bart was beginning to feel harried and wary—there came a slight pause. Once more Pier and Marta looked at each other.

  “Whatever you wish, my Lord,” said Marta out loud, in the French they had been speaking, with a demureness completely unlike the way she had been speaking so far to her husband. Bart gazed at her with curiosity and more of his earlier suspicion.

  “And now, Bart,” said Pier, also still in French, “stay as you are and wait. I’ll talk to the Lady privately for a moment.”

  He turned to Marta and began to speak in that oddly familiar-sounding, but barely unintelligible, private language that the Lordly class and Hybrids, sometimes, seemed to use among themselves.

  Bart sat motionless, cross-legged, with his face impassive as always; but with resentment warming inside him. He had never found it pleasant to be in a group where all the other members were speaking and understanding a language he did not understand. The suspicion that they were talking about him—aloud and in front of him but in such a way that he could not catch them at it, was emotionally inescapable. It was doubled when—as now—he actually knew himself to be the subject of the indecipherable conversation.

  . . . And yet the language they were speaking was so tantalizingly close to something he knew. Not French, not German, not Italian . . .

  Then, without warning, he suddenly found himself understanding. All at once, he could follow more than enough of the words Pier and Marta were saying—for by now the two were in animated discussion—to recognize it as a twisted version of something he had once learned. Only, these people spoke it with a totally different pronunciation, some difference of form, and a number of unknown words.

  Pier and Marta were speaking Latin.

  But it was not the classical Latin his father had painstakingly taught him. It was a Latin in which the words were mispronounced and sometimes used to mean something largely different from the meaning his father had taught him.

  Recognizing the language at last, Bart abruptly remembered something buried so deeply that it had been forgotten over the years. His father had put a great deal of emphasis on the fact that the correct speaking of a language, or the correct accent for a regional version of a language, was all-important. Latin, he had told his son, being a dead language, should never be mispronounced or misused—and if ever Bart ornamented his conversation by so much as a Latin phrase he must be sure to pronounce the words of it as they had in classical times.

  He had even, Bart remembered now, made the boy promise that he would never commit the vulgarity of speaking Latin, of all languages, incorrectly.

  “. . . But we must go very slowly and carefully,” Pier was saying to Marta at this moment. “Very slowly and carefully. The evidence must be beyond all argument before we even accept it ourselves, let alone think of showing it to others.”

  “But I hate to think of him—,” said Marta.

  “We have no choice, my love. No choice,” Pier answered. “Even as Librarian, I’m not free to do anything that might be construed as violating the Compact. . . .”

  These words he was listening to and now understanding, Bart thought, should have been obvious to him from the start as a dialect of the Latin his father had taught him.

  But there was no time for remembering now. At the moment all of his attention was needed, trying to follow the unfamiliar forms and words of the conversation about himself going on between Pier and Marta.

  “Well, I’m not that concerned about the Compact!” said Marta. “And I’m not afraid to say what I think. He’s not the usual type of slave at all! You can’t deny that after hearing what he’s been telling us—”

  What caused Bart to gamble at this point, he was never afterward able to decide. Perhaps the impulse was the result of a kindliness he seemed to feel in Pier and Marta; or perhaps it was simply that his own instincts cued him when logic would not. His original intention as far as the language spoken by the Lords was concerned had been to master it sooner or later; but he had never even speculated on the possibility of trying to speak it until he should be certain that he could use it with a fluency equal to the little people’s own, such as would astound them with his knowledge.

  He knew that in speaking now, he would be risking his plan to pass for a Hybrid. But it was as if a spark from Marta’s emotion kindled the decision in him. In his mind, he built the phrase he wished to say in classical Latin—with difficulty, for his knowledge of it had been rather a reading than a speaking knowledge—then made such changes in the pronunciation as he thought he had heard when Pier and Marta spoke it just now. He knew that it would take more than a few changes to make him sound fluent, or even completely understandable. The grammar was much simpler and words were so often used with a somewhat different meaning than they had held in the classical form. But, hopefully, Pier and Marta would follow what he was trying to say.

  Stumblingly, he spoke.

  “Give me pardon, Lordly Ones,” he sa
id, choosing the closest terms he could think of to those he had heard, “is it pleasing or not to you to know that knowledge some of language yours I have?”

  He was careful to speak slowly and clearly and make the changes in pronunciation. Having done so, he waited for their response.

  It was not until after the words were out of his mouth, and Pier and Marta had abandoned their own conversation to turn and stare wordlessly at him, that he realized the true proportions of his gamble—that by speaking out in this manner, if he failed to make the proper impression on the two before him, then he might very well have signed his death warrant, as a slave who knew something he should not.

  chapter

  ten

  THE SILENCE STRETCHED out. Pier and Marta continued to stare at him, and it occurred to Bart suddenly that perhaps his attempt to speak their dialect might have been so bad that they had not understood him.

  What he had constructed in his own mind had been, in classical Latin, the simplest form of what he wished to say; since the dialect he had been listening to seemed simpler and more direct in its grammar than classical Latin as he had been taught it by his father. Written, the words would have been “Veniam date, dominatores. Placeatne vobis cognoscere quote congnitionem aliquant linguae vestra habeo?”

  The changes in pronunciation he had picked up and used from the Lords’ dialect had primarily been the pronunciation of “w” sounds as “v” and the “c” sound before open vowels as a soft “c”—in other words, like “s” rather than like “k.”

  Accordingly, the phrase, which he would ordinarily have pronounced as “Weniam dahtay, domeenatorays. Plakeeatnay wobis kognoscoray kwoad kogneeteeownem ahleequam lingueye westreye hahbayo . . .”