It was in the third of the three dining rooms he investigated that he spotted Paolo’s bulk—as dormitory Leader, Paolo had some specific hours off, during which he was often to be found here, wearing other clothes than the rather simple uniform his owner required him to wear during work. This was convenient not only for Paolo but for Bart in this moment. Paolo was sitting in one side of a comer booth against the wall, with Lorena sitting facing him. Paolo had his back to the room, but Lorena saw and recognized Bart by the time he had crossed half the width of the room on his way toward the booth.
Bart saw, but because of the noise of the crowd, did not hear what Lorena said as she leaned forward and spoke to Paolo. In any case, Paolo did not turn his head in Bart’s direction until Bart reached the booth. Then, at last, he turned it enough to look up into Bart’s face.
“Lorena thought you might come by tonight,” Paolo said. It seemed that he almost grunted the words.
“Oh? Why?” asked Bart.
Paolo had not asked him to sit down and Bart’s constant alertness to possible danger made him suspicious now that there might be some reason for the invitation being withheld.
“Lovers’ instinct,” said Paolo, still not moving; and laughed heavily.
“Don’t let him torment you, Bart,” said a familiar voice, and Emma’s face appeared as she leaned forward and looked around Paolo’s thick body at Bart. She had been sitting back in the comer and the position of the booth, plus Paolo’s size, had effectively been hiding her from the sight of everyone else in the room, including Bart.
“Emma!” he said happily. He cupped his hand about the point of Paolo’s shoulder, with his thumb pressing into the nerve in the middle and at the very top of the arm.
“Up,” he said, “and let me sit down.”
Paolo rose suddenly, swearing softly under his breath; and Bart took off the pressure of his thumb.
“Damn you,” said Paolo between his teeth. “Where did you learn a trick like that?”
He rubbed the area of the nerve point.
“You’ve been taking lessons from that devil Chandt!” he said as he sat down on the opposite seat of the booth, beside Lorena.
“No.” Bart slipped into the space the other had vacated, sitting down beside Emma. “From a much better man than that and a long time ago. Emma—you’re all right!”
“Of course I’m all right,” said Emma. “But Bart, how are you ever going to forgive me?”
“Forgive you?” Bart stared at her. “Forgive you for what?”
“For getting you into this awful place!”
“You didn’t get me here,” Bart said, puzzled. “I came here on my own.”
“But only because you trusted me!” said Emma. “And I promised you something that wasn’t true. You remember you asked me if Arthur had anything to do with the Scottites, and I told you he didn’t—but he did. And because you trusted me, you’ve ended up here.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” growled Bart. “I was coming this way looking for my relatives, remember? I would have followed any lead. Besides, I’m always cautious, just as cautious as if I’d known that mine was run by Scottites—and it didn’t save me. They caught me in a net nobody could have dodged and chained me up anyway. Now, this is one thing you’re not going to take on yourself. I was caught in spite of myself, and I was trying to escape when I fell into an underground river and it brought me to the Inner World. So, that’s all there is to it.”
“Perhaps,” said Emma, gazing at him. “Anyway, you look all right—in fact, you’re much better looking without your beard.”
“I couldn’t have one down here if I wanted it, evidently,” Bart said. “Beards are for Lords alone. But it’s marvelous to see you. You look just the same as ever.”
“Why should I look different?” said Emma. She leaned toward him and raised a soft, small hand to touch him, fleetingly, on his right cheek. But indeed he was right. The slave tunic she wore was the only difference, shorter in the skirt and sleeves, cut lower in the neck than anything he had ever seen on her before. But the dress had no power to change her. Her blond hair was drawn back as always into a bun, her round face was as calm and unchanged as ever, except that now it was lit up by her warm smile.
She looked, thought Bart, as if not she, but everything else around her was unreal and out of place.
“No,” he said, “you wouldn’t.”
It took all his willpower, as always, to keep from putting his arms around her. Only the knowledge that she would not want him to do so, here and now, made him keep them still at his side.
“Of course, you wouldn’t be,” he repeated. “I should have known.”
“What the Lord has made me,” said Emma, “is what I am. Nothing on Earth has power to change that. Bart, you’ve lost weight.”
“I’m gaining it back,” said Bart. “Anyway, that’s not important. What’s important is you—”
He had been speaking to her automatically in her native English. Now out of the comer of his eye, he saw Paolo and Lorena, watching and listening.
“Come on with me,” he said, taking her hand and starting to get up. “We’ll go some place we can talk privately.”
“That’s right, be an idiot!” said Paolo. Bart stopped and looked at the other man.
“Don’t you know,” Paolo went on, “if you two go out across that floor, hand in hand like that there, the fact that the both of you make a pair is going to be something half the slaves in the Inner World can learn at any time by asking about either one of you. Slaves watch slaves. Anything there’s to know about some other slave may be worth selling to someone at one time or another. But go ahead, if you want to.”
“They already know we’re together here in this booth,” said Bart.
“You think so?” said Paolo. “Think again. Your Emma there came in by herself and sat down in this booth and had something to eat. Before she was done, Lorena happened by and sat down opposite her—just like for a chat. Your Emma was sitting back in the booth there, on her side of it, out of sight of everyone outside unless they came right up to it and looked in. Nobody did, because I came in about then and sat down opposite Lorena. Most of those out there know who I am and that I’m a Steed. They wouldn’t come calling on a booth where I sat without being invited, let alone on one where I was sitting with a woman. Since Emma first came in to eat, this place has filled up. Only the server on this table knows she’s here; but he knows me, too, well enough not to go talking about me and anyone with me to somebody else.”
He paused.
“Well?” he said. “I thought you two were leaving.”
“You’re right,” said Bart, settling back. “And thanks. And forgive me for moving you out of the booth that way. I owe you both a lot for finding Emma and bringing her here for me.”
“That’s better,” said Paolo. Then he grinned. “But it’s all right. Any time. I like you and Lorena likes this one of yours. You got to show me what you did to my shoulder, though.”
“I’ll do that,” said Bart. “And a few more such tricks, if you want. But right now—forgive me—I want to talk privately to Emma; and since we have to do our talking right here, we’re going to have to do it differently than I first thought.”
He turned to Emma.
“Emma,” he said in a tongue he was more than ordinarily sure neither Paolo nor Lorena could understand, “remember when we were children?”
When they had been young, in the settlement with the little school where they had met, they had concocted a need for a private language between them. One that they could expect most of their classmates and many of the adults around them could not understand. So he had taught Emma the Algonquian Cree tongue that he had learned in his first years of life with his mother’s people. Emma was intelligent and young, quick to learn, and—in a settlement dominated by métis—she had already picked up a word or two of the Indian tongues heard locally. She was soon almost as fluent in Cree as he was; and to further confuse list
eners who might know the language, they gave fanciful names to the places and people they talked about. The school teacher was ‘Woodpecker’ for his sharp nose; Bart’s father was ‘Owl’ for his wisdom and mysterious powers—and so forth.
“Yes—,” she began in that language; but he was already going on in it, himself.
“You’re really all right, though?” he was demanding. “They haven’t done anything to you?”
“What would they be likely to do to me, except put me to work?” she answered. “They’ve done that. Don’t look so fierce. It’s not a bad job, at all.”
“Oh? What is it?”
“If you give me a chance, I’ll tell you. Bart, my dear, I really am all right; and the job they’ve given me is a perfectly ordinary one. Arthur must have told them I kept the books at the store, because they’ve given me a sort of bookkeeper job. I check all kinds of figures sent in from various—I’ll have to say it in English— ‘departments’ of the Inner World. Statements of things used or needed, supplies—matters of that sort. It’s really just like being back in the store, except I do it all day long, instead of in my spare time. Poor Arthur, though.”
Somehow, Bart had known that the problem of Arthur’s difficulties would find its way into the conversation.
“What have they done to Arthur?” he asked.
“I suppose because they knew he was a storekeeper, they’ve put him to work in their supply department. He has to keep track of certain expendables, estimate how much they’ll need in time to order it shipped in before they run out, and make out the orders. He’s terribly afraid he’ll make a mistake of some kind because the other workers there have told him he could be beaten or even killed if he was wrong and the Inner World ran short of something because of his errors.”
“He’s a slave like all the rest of us, then?”
“Yes. And he was sure they were going to put him in some supervisory position. Of course, like everyone else in the upper world, even among the Scottites, he didn’t have any idea the Inner World existed, much less what it was like here. If he’d known he was going to be a slave he’d never have come. He thought he was getting a promotion to the Scottite headquarters.”
“Yes,” said Bart, “I can see how he wouldn’t like being a slave. But to bring you along with him into the same beartrap . . .” “Be fair, Bart. He didn’t know. And he could hardly leave his sister behind, alone and defenseless—”
“Defenseless!” exploded Bart. “You’ve taken care of him, instead of the other way around, ever since your baby legs were strong enough to toddle after him!”
“In some ways, perhaps,” said Emma. “But you know what I mean—a young unmarried woman living alone out here in the woods. If I didn’t get married almost immediately in self-defense, none of the decent women would have anything to do with me. Besides, it does take a man’s strength to do a certain amount of the work, running a store.”
“I suppose so,” said Bart grudgingly; he had to admit she was right on both points. An unmarried woman, living alone, and even if not particularly young anymore, had no proper place in frontier civilization. A widow, or even a wife with a husband who was away from home on long trips nearly all the time—almost anything but that immediately suspect entity, a single woman—was acceptable. But Emma, living alone, and in spite of the many people who liked her and would stand by her in face of the inevitable gossip, would not have been. Her situation would have made it difficult for her to successfully run a store, which was the only means of respectable self-support open to her. Also, she was right about there being a certain amount of fairly heavy physical labor required even in storekeeping; and Emma, though strong for her size, was smallframed.
“Anyway,” said Bart, “the point is, you’re here now. I’m going to find a way to get the two of us out of here.”
“And Arthur.”
“And Arthur. Of course.”
“But what’ve they got you doing, Bart?”
“I’m a Steed. You’ve been down here long enough to know what that is?”
Emma laughed, then sobered.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry I laughed, Bart. It was just the thought of one of those funny little men perched up on your shoulders like a child with a beard.”
“I suppose it does make a funny picture,” said Bart.
“No, it doesn’t at all,” said Emma. “It was wrong of me to laugh. Carrying someone, bent over like that with the weight of the man and the chair together, has to be painful. How you see where you’re going, I’ve no idea.”
“It’s a little hard the first day,” said Bart. “But after that it’s not bad. I’ve got to talk to you in more privacy than this, though. It turns out my rider-owner’s the Librarian, one of the three elected officials among the Lords. So we may be lucky. But how do I go about seeing you alone?”
Emma frowned.
“I don’t know if you should try,” she said. “We were talking about this, Lorena, Paolo and I, before you got here. It’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous? In what way?”
Emma turned to look across the table at the other man and switched back to English.
“Paolo, you tell Bart why it’d be dangerous for him and me to try to see each other privately.”
Paolo grunted.
“Maybe,” he said. “First, who’s this Arthur?”
“My brother,” answered Emma. “You see—”
“Look,” Bart interrupted, speaking to the dormitory Leader. “I know it’s uncomfortable having people talking in front of you in a language you don’t understand. But believe me, what we were talking about had nothing to do with—we didn’t say a word about you two. We were only talking about ourselves.”
“This Arthur,” said Paolo. “I want to know what he’s got to do with everything. I did you a favor because we had an agreement, you and I. So that brought Emma here into it. Now, all of a sudden, there’s somebody called Arthur in it, too. I’ve managed to live ail these years down here by not being a fool and I want to be sure I’m not making a fool of myself now.”
“I promise you,” said Bart, turning to look a message at Emma, “and Emma here will promise you, too, that her brother’s not going to be told a thing about any of us, by any of us.” “Emma?” Paolo looked at her.
“If Bart thinks we shouldn’t say anything to Arthur, then we won’t,” she said.
But her glance at Bart emphasized the fact that Arthur was not to be left out of their plans in the long run.
chapter
twelve
“JUST TO PUT your mind at rest,” said Bart to Paolo, “what Emma and I talked about was what had happened to the two of us down here. I told her I was a Steed and she told me she was a bookkeeper. She also told me her brother’s been put to work in Supply, wherever or whatever that is.”
“If it was just that,” said Paolo, “why didn’t you say it in plain English or plain French?”
“Paolo!” said Lorena. “Can’t you understand? No you can’t, can you? Because you’ve never been in love. People in love who haven’t seen each other for some time sometimes want to say a few things without the whole world knowing.”
Paolo grunted, plainly not convinced, but willing to let the argument go, for the present.
“Now,” said Bart, “let me ask you something. What makes you think it’d be important to anyone that Emma and I make a pair?”
“One hell of a lot of experience down here, that’s what makes me think it!” said Paolo. “You came in and landed in some kind of soft spot—just being made one of the Steeds was luck enough; but you seem to have something else going for you. I don’t know what yet, but Chandt says I’m to let you go from any exercise hour or dormitory duty you want off, when you tell me you need to be someplace else. You’ve got some line to something and I’ll find out sooner or later what it is.”
“The Librarian likes me,” said Bart. “Why, I’m not really sure myself. But he does; and he seems to have a lot of power.”
“He’s got that, all right,” said Paolo. “So that’s what’s making you so special! The Emperor’s word rides over anything else; but there’s talk the Librarian knows things no one else does and even the Emperor has to listen to him on some things. But you’re maybe going to find it’s not all gravy being a favorite of someone with that much power. Little people like us here at this table can get crushed real easy between a couple of large stones like two of the Three Who Command.”
“If the Emperor rules and the Librarian keeps the Library and knows things not even the Emperor knows, what does the Regent do?” Bart asked.
Paolo gave a short, snorted laugh.
“Nothing,” he said, “but stands there waiting to step into the Emperor’s place if anything happens to the Emperor and there’s no one else elected yet to take his place.”
He stared at Bart.
“Don’t let that make you forget not to walk softly around him, too,” Paolo said. “He’s still one of the Three Who Command and only the Emperor and the Librarian don’t have to do what he tells them.”
Bart nodded.
“All right,” he said. “Back to what I asked you before. What makes you take it so seriously that somebody might ask if Emma and I make a pair, and that someone else might tell them we do?” “Man,” said Paolo, “it’s easy to see you haven’t been reborn for more than a few days. You’re going to find out how things really are, here.”
“Tell me, then,” said Bart, “how are they?”
“I will. Count up,” said Paolo, holding up three thick fingers. “There are about three thousand full-blooded Lords and Lady Lords, counting from the youngest baby to the oldest of them. There’s maybe fifteen hundred Hybrids, because they only keep the best of the half-breeds, and of those, many work outside; and five hundred Steeds. Call it a round five thousand. But there’s fifteen thousand slaves. You got to be crazy to think the Lords never worry about the slaves making a revolt, when the slaves outnumber everyone else, including the Steeds, put together, three to one.”
The Earth Lords Page 17