One thing became increasingly clear. Seri had not traded with the people. They came out to Grellah with their little carts and baskets stacked high with goods; fine-woven native cloth, carved things of rare wood and great delicacy, the much-prized purple-bronze skins of the big river snakes. They were rich.
Boker said shrewdly, "Maybe he didn't take his pay in goods."
"Drugs?" said Kettrick. He knew the little people still made and used their particular narcotic, in some religious rites. They were permitted to, as long as they didn't sell it. "I wouldn't put it past him. The stuff would be worth a lot now, being so scarce. Only they certainly wouldn't have given it to him for nothing, and there isn't a sign of anything new in the village. You can tell that anyhow by the way they're trading."
Boker shrugged. "Whellan did say Seri's prices were too high. Maybe he did just have his trip for nothing." He scratched his silver mane with a grease-blackened hand and added, "But I'm damned if I see why he bothered to come at all. Seri, I mean, himself, in person. Not once, but several times. The market's hardly worth it."
That was on the morning of the fourth day. At noon Boker came to tell him that the refitting job was done.
"Take over the trading," Kettrick said.
"Where are you going?"
"To ask a couple of questions." He frowned, feeling a little foolish as he went on. "I want you to stick close, all of you. We might just want to take off in a hurry."
"Huh," said Boker. "You get it too, eh?"
"Get what?"
"I don't know," said Boker, "and that's a fact. But don't trust your little friends too far, Johnny. They've got some kind of a bee in their bonnets." He leaned closer. "Glevan says it's a sign." He grinned, but his eyes were serious. "You watch, huh?"
"I'll watch." Kettrick walked away through the fair-ground cluster of carts and little matting shelters and holiday people under Grellah's rusty bulk. Her cargo hatch was open, the lift mechanism clanking and groaning as loads went in and out. It was such a normal, peaceful scene, and the idea of being afraid of these people was so ridiculous, that he almost laughed.
"Ask a couple of questions, that's all," he thought. "And then we'll go."
Chai roused up from the trade booth's shadow and followed him.
The avenue of trees glowed in the sunlight like huge fantastic torches, white flowers massed against the red leaves. The trodden way underfoot was dusty-warm, fragrant with crushed grasses. It seemed perfectly natural that he should meet Nillaine coming toward him from the village.
"Johnny!" she cried. "I was just on my way to see you." She wore a length of peacock blue silky stuff, a present from him, draped around her, and there were flowers in her strange bright hair. "Is the trading finished?"
"Not yet," he said. "I wanted time to roam a little. It's a long while since I've been here."
Her amber eyes smiled at him. "I'll roam with you." Then she saw Chai, gray and huge in the tree shadows. "Oh Johnny, send it back, please. It frightens me."
Kettrick shrugged and spoke to Chai briefly in her own tongue. She turned obediently and went back toward the ship. Nillaine's shoulders lifted in a little shudder of relief.
"Such a great, fierce, sad creature. I cannot laugh when it's around." She took his hand. "Where shall we go?"
"Where it pleases you. After I speak with your father."
"Oh, I'm sorry, Johnny. My father has gone to the Third-Bend Village." She was referring to one on the third bend of the river, north. "He will be back before sunset. Speak to him then."
"Well," said Kettrick, "in that case, I have no choice." But he was irritated, as though Whellan had done this deliberately to avoid him. Which was foolish, of course. Whellan could not possibly have known that he would come.
They walked down the avenue of trees and Nillaine held to his hand just as she had used to, and he matched his stride to her little sandaled feet.
The village was quiet in the warm noon. There were smells of cooking. A few children played. The door of the Tall House stood open and there was nothing inside but shadow. Kettrick and Nillaine crossed the green. There was a wide dusty lane beyond. It went between meandering rows of the small thatched houses, leading eventually and without haste to a tract of semijungle and then, much farther on, to another village.
The houses seemed to Kettrick to be unusually still this day, as though many of the people were gone, or were sitting inside waiting for something. He tried to explain it by saying to himself that they were all out by the ship. Only he knew this was not so. The villagers had already done their trading, and the people around Grellah now were almost all from the more distant places.
Nillaine chattered happily. About Kettrick. About Earth, about Tananaru, about what he did there and what he was going to do.
"What will you do, Johnny?"
"What I've always done. Trade."
"But suppose they find out. The I–C. Surely you can't trust everyone as you do us, surely someone will tell them you've come back."
He laughed and did not answer.
"Suppose you meet Seri," she said. "You almost did. Will he not tell?"
"Don't you worry about it," Kettrick said, and turned aside from the main track into a narrower one. Trees pressed closer on either side, making deep shadows shot with glancing copper light that moved with the movement of the branches. Very quickly the path began to climb, toward a line of hills that thrust above the jungle.
Nillaine let go of his hand and walked a while in silence, a bright blue butterfly dancing down the shadow tunnel ahead of him.
"Seri won't tell," Kettrick said. "He's my friend, you know that."
"Oh, yes."
"I won't tell on him, either."
She paused, ever so slightly. "About what?"
"About what he does here."
Nillaine stopped and turned, standing beside a crimson-flowered vine that was slowly and beautifully strangling a tree.
She said blandly, "But Johnny, he trades. Like you."
"Not like me. Or there would have been nothing left for me."
She laughed. "That's true."
"What is it, then? Narcotics? Pretty little girls who want to see faraway worlds?"
She came close to him, her amber eyes alight. "I'm not supposed to tell."
"Oh. And what do I have to do to make you?"
"I'm greedy." She bent her head to one side and stretched out her arms. "I want to glitter and shine, and make music when I walk."
"I will deck you," said Kettrick, "as no other woman was ever decked before. I will make every girl in every village hate you."
She laughed again. "I will love that!" She caught his hand, all mischievous child again. "Come on, then. I'll show you. But you have to promise not to tell my father."
He promised, and they went on to a place where the path forked. Here Nillaine turned aside, leading the way into a narrow gorge that presently offered no path at all but the water-worn rock that floored it. The gorge climbed steeply, and widened, and then they were clambering up a broad slope with the forest thinning on it and the top of the jungle solid as a floor below them.
The sun struck hot at their shoulders, and a wind blew. Once or twice Kettrick thought he saw movement among the trees, and twice or more he thought he heard a sound, as though more than they two were on that slope. But he could not be sure.
They came at length to a high place held privately in a cup of the hills. It was very still there, walled with forest and the higher peaks on three sides so that even the wind was cut off. The floor of the cup had been made level, and paved with many-colored stones set in a kind of mosaic that seemed to have no pattern, and yet Kettrick knew there was one. Dotted about this level floor, apparently at random, were tall slim carvings of wood set upright.
Kettrick stopped at the edge of the floor.
"Why have you brought me here?" he asked.
Nillaine turned and looked at him, standing by one of the tall pillars. "You know where you are?"
"This is the Woman Place, isn't it?"
She said, "Yes," and leaned against the pillar. The pillar had arms and hands. These held a sheaf of grain between two swelling breasts.
He moved carefully back from the colored stones. "Why, Nillaine?"
"You'll have one chance, Johnny. We could not do less."
"The chance Whellan started to give me on the first night?"
Her bright head bobbed against the pillar. The wood was polished and very dark. "Whellan's a man, and trusting. He didn't realize that you were lying."
"Lying?"
"About coming back to trade. Just now I gave you a chance to tell me the truth, but you lied again." She smiled. "We know a little of the law here, we know something of how it is done."
"Very well," said Kettric. "Suppose I did lie. How could it concern you?"
"We love you, Johnny. We want you to live." The sun shone on the polished wooden breasts above her head. The fingers of the carven hands held the sheaf of grain with infinite tenderness. "Stay here with us a while. You'll be quite safe. And after it's over, you'll be free."
Kettrick said slowly, "After what is over?" And his tongue was dry in his mouth.
Angrily she cried out, "I'm grown now, I'm a woman, not a child! Don't treat me as one, because I'm smaller than you! You know. You must know. You followed Seri. You wanted me to show you what he did here. He warned us that someone might follow, he told us that men were trying to stop what is to come. Another man we would have killed outright, but you…"
The sun was hot on Kettrick's back. He could feel the sweat run, and wondering how it could be so cold on his hot skin. He shook his head and said,
"But you're wrong, Nillaine. I only asked about Seri because I was curious. And I lied about why I came back because I was afraid you might give me away without meaning to, if the I–C should happen to come." He pointed skyward. "My business is out there, at the White Sun. The same business they arrested me for, and sent me away from the Cluster. I don't care what Seri's doing. I wouldn't care if he had the Doomstar in his pocket…"
He saw her eyes flare bright as fire in the sunlight, and he hurried on, pretending not to notice.
"I'm only interested in finishing my deal. Money, Nillaine. A million credits. And then I'm gone from the Cluster forever."
"Money," she said, and laughed. "I almost believe you. Well, then, and so you don't care if Seri has the Doomstar in his pocket. Then wait, Johnny. The White Sun will wait. Everything will wait. And afterward you can go where you will and the I–C won't stop you."
She stepped toward him, away from the pillar. "Will you stay?"
She was pleading with him. Her eyes were fond and hopeful, her hands outstretched. He smiled, a stiff and sickly counterfeit, and shook his head.
"No."
He turned to walk away from the paved floor and the pillars. He did not see, behind him, what gesture she made. Perhaps the only one needed was his own gesture of departure. In any case, he stopped, because suddenly all the slopes and the edges of the woods were alive with tiny figures among the trees.
The women of the village, with flowers in their hair, and each one holding in her right hand a little shining knife.
10
They came scuddering like bright leaves on a'wind, up the slope, out from the trees. Kettrick retreated before them.
"This is not the sacrifice time," he said. Each year, he knew, the women chose a victim from among the young men and hunted him to this place and did to him what they felt was necessary, so that trees should again bear fruit and fields produce their grain. But that was in the spring, and it was now late summer, though in this golden place all seasons were much the same.
Nillaine answered, "This is not a sacrifice, not yet, though perhaps it will come to be one." She stood again by the pillar, her small face sober and pitiless. "This is something we could not trust to the men. They would think of friendship, and stay their hands."
The colored paving stones came hard beneath his feet. He was moving backward all the time toward Nillaine. He watched the women, and now he could hear the soft rustle of them treading the grass, the ripple of their draperies around their slender legs. He wanted to laugh, but he was terrified. There must have been fifty or sixty of them, their little knives all glittering.
"The men would think of friendship," he said. "What are you thinking of, Nillaine?"
"My village. My father. My husband and children. Seri promised that the Doomstar would never shine on us."
"There are other villages, other people."
"I don't know them. They are nothing to me."
"Let me go, Nillaine. I can stop Seri, so that the Doomstar will never shine for anyone."
"There are more than Seri, many more. You couldn't stop them. No, Johnny. Well be safe, and afterward we'll be strong, stronger than the Westpeople. They promised us."
"How will they make you strong?" asked Kettrick, and grasped her by the arm so quickly that she did not quite have time to get away. She sank her teeth and nails into his wrist, squealing all the while like a furious little animal. He slapped her head across the side of the head and she stopped all that. He picked her up and held her, a limp doll, across his body, and he said to the women,
"Your knives will strike her first."
They were already faltering, their eyes and mouths wide with astonishment. He imagined that it had never occurred to them that a male would commit such an act of blasphemy in this place where they were supreme. Probably no sacrifice had ever objected before.
"Chai!" he shouted. "Chai!"
The women made cat-cries of outrage. They screamed at him to put Nillaine down, and some of them rushed toward him again, waving their knives. He held Nillaine out, a kind of living buckler against the blades, and moved slowly backward, away from them.
"Chai?"
"Hroo!"
Out of the tail of his eye he saw her loping from the trees at the back of the cup. She had had to make a long swing around to keep out of sight, as he had told her to do when he had pretended to send her away. He had not really believed then that anything would happen; it was a matter of just in case. Now he backed toward her and they met beside a pillar pregnant with carved fruits.
The women stared at Chai fearfully. She looked at the women.
"Kill, John-nee?"
"Not unless you have to." The women were gabbling now, tossing their hands wildly as they argued between themselves what to do. It was a long way to the trees, a longer way to the village. Kettrick wondered if they could ever make it, and he tightened his grip on Nillaine.
"Hit?" asked Chai.
"Hit," he said. "Yes. And I don't care if you break a few of their pretty little bones."
Chai grunted. Nillaine whimpered abruptly, twisting in Kettrick's arms. He was briefly occupied in quieting her again. He heard a noise behind him, and then there was a demoniac shriek from the women and they surged forward in a body. He turned to see Chai finish uprooting the pillar.
"Big stick," she said, and swung it whistling around her head. She bounded at the women.
She was more than twice as high as they, and the pregnant pillar was eight or nine feet long. She swung it like a great flail. They screamed and fell, and ran, and scattered, screaming, and some of them lay on the ground and wept or moaned. Chai came back, breathing hard. The bulk of the women now stood in ragged clumps a long way off, looking at them in helpless rage. The bolder ones moved back to help the injured. Kettrick shouted at them.
"Let us alone, or I'll kill Nillaine!"
He raised her up and shook her at them so they would understand. Then he whispered to Chai, "For God's sake let's get out of here." They ran together for the woods, Chai with the carven fruits laid across her shoulder.
The tree shadows closed around them. Kettrick shifted Nillaine to a better position and went down hill with long strides. His heart was thundering and he felt sick, as though he had touched something unnatural.
They passed through the gorge and into the jungle. Nillaine's small body lay lightly over one shoulder, her loose hair brushing his neck. He had almost forgotten her. In the forefront of his mind was the image of the ship and the need to reach it. Apart from that he walked in the roaring blackness of nightmare, where nothing was substantial, where time and distance stretched maliciously into strange dimensions, and underneath it all was fear, the gut-twisting, breath-locking, sweat-running fear that came with a word, and the memory of a dream.
Doomstar.
Don't bother about it, Johnny. It's only a myth.
He went down the shadowy tunnel, walking so fast that he was almost running, and there wasn't any end to the damned thing, it went on forever.
Nillaine was stirring. He thought, in a distant sort of way, that he would presently have to hit her again. All his attention was ahead, where he strained to see the end of the narrow track.
Chai barked. He felt a sudden buffet across his back, mingled with a stinging pain. Nillaine cried out. "What is it?" Kettrick snarled. "What the hell is it?" He was startled and shaking. Nillaine had begun to sob, hanging over his shoulder. He put his free hand up across his back. It came away bloody.
Chai held up a small knife. "Not hurt deep," she said. "I see."
He understood then that Nillaine had drawn a hidden knife and tried to kill him, and that Chai had slapped it away in the bare nick of time. Kettrick stopped and searched Nillaine, and she lay all limp and unprotesting, sunk in misery. When he was sure she had no other weapon hidden in the blue silk he picked her up again and went on, a little sicker than before.
He came out at last into the main track. There he stopped and said to Chai, "We can't go through the village, there are too many of them. See if you can find a way around."
Chai ran on ahead. Presently she vanished. Kettrick walked more slowly now, watching ahead for any sight of someone coming from the village, watching behind lest any of the women from the place of sacrifice should try to take him in spite of his warning. He pictured himself hamstrung by a sudden blow, waiting on the ground for the little bright blades to flash down. Above him the familiar trees were as friendly as ever, showering him with fragrant petals.
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