“What are you doing? You can’t protect me from all way over there! Here!” He slapped his tail on the floor. I quickly joined him and they took off again, me right behind, cursing my own stupidity. Daela Pram already had his doubts about my ability to guard his master, and I was doing nothing to advance my case. If Gaz Bronn lost faith, what would become of me?
I was to learn that as vice-president, Gaz Bronn worked long days with few breaks. Jhal was more than a mere city, it was closer to being a country in its own right; over three thousand years the klurath had tunneled far, wide, and deep. Not to mention that a large number of them lived in the cavern itself, including Fale Teevat, the inlama, who reportedly had a large walled estate whose gates stood eternally open. On the other hand, many of the so-called “war party” preferred to live there as well, as a reminder of their being forced from the surface millennia ago. Daela Pram was all for rounding some of them up and “putting the screws to them,” as we would have said in my day, on the subject of the attempted assassination, but Gaz Bronn forbade it. The war party leaders were too powerful to accuse without proof, lest it precipitate the very crisis Gaz Bronn was working behind the scenes to prevent.
But this was intelligence gleaned over the days, perhaps weeks, that I was to act as bodyguard. It would be difficult to tell time, of course, without the actual passage of day and night, but it seemed likely the klurath had not altered their schedules much from the days they roamed in the sun. Be they lizards or human, creatures can only work so long before they are tired, so in the absence of any other indicator, fatigue becomes the default measure of time. This, at least, I learned almost immediately by dint of escorting Gaz Bronn until Daela Pram insisted the day was over. The kinlama gave in at once; this was plainly a pattern they had developed long ago.
For my mind, I needed no more encouragement. Not only was I exhausted, but I needed to find somewhere private that I could talk to the Librarian. He had become far more than a recording device in the two decades we had spent together, and I was desperate for his counsel. This turned out to be easier than I thought when Daela Pram pointed me to a small antechamber near Gaz Bronn’s guarded quarters. It contained a bed, pegs for my clothing and gear, an a wash basin. I would soon gratefully use them all. But right now, more importantly, I was alone for the first time since I had left the surface.
The old school don stood in the center of my room almost before I remained the branch library from my pocket. I was so glad to see him I almost had to wipe away a tear. He smiled as well, but then he always did.
“It’s good to see you. I was beginning to think I was never going to be alone.”
“We do have a lot to talk about,” he said. “The klurath are going to merit an entire folder when I upload their information to the main Library. An ancient, subterranean civilization of which the Nuum know nothing. This is why I enjoy being a branch Librarian.”
His eyes actually sparkled while he talked. I have to admit, I had never seen him this way before. Usually he adopted the same demeanor as the don whose likeness he had assumed the day we met. While he had “relaxed” during the long nights we sat and talked after I had returned to the twentieth century, he had continuously exercised his main duty of data collection for the vast Library of which he was a part. He had always been interested, but detached. Observant but aloof. His new animation was so infectious that I had to ask.
“If the klurath rate a folder, what do I rate?”
This time his smile was as genuine as my own. “You, my friend, will rate a whole category.” His smile faded. “Unfortunately, that’s the best news I can give you. I haven’t been able to gather any intelligence regarding The Dark Lady’s crew.”
“I’d be surprised if you had. Our travels have been limited. Do the klurath have any kind of network, like the datasphere, that you can tap into?”
The Librarian shook his head. “I haven’t found anything that resembles the datasphere, not a surprise considering the limited space the klurath have to work with. On the other hand, their civilization is three thousand years old. For humans, not to have a ‘global’ communication network would be unthinkable. I can only deduce that the kluraths’ system operates on a completely different paradigm. I don’t know if I would be able to tap into it even if I made physical contact.”
My two main questions being answered unsatisfactorily, there was not much else to talk about, so even though I was desperate for a friendly conversation, I bid him goodnight.
The job of the vice-president of Jhal, evidently, was taking meetings. Meetings with everyone, everywhere, all the time. I eventually learned that “kinlama” translated roughly to “voice of the inlama.” After my first day, I had feared that we would be walking everywhere, but I was happily mistaken. Some of Jhal’s many subterranean levels were pedestrian, but some were vehicular, with open cars that travelled silently over magnetic tracks. I grew familiar with both types.
One thing that surprised me: On Earth, my Earth, a man as important as Gaz Bronn would receive visitors, not travel to meet them. I wondered if this was the typical way of handling political liaisons in Jhal, or whether Gaz Bronn was a klurath of the people, impressing his colleagues and constituents with his willingness to step out of his “ivory tower” and meet them on their own ground.
It was part of my job, of course, to notice everything and everyone around us. At first, the very idea made me jumpy; how could anyone monitor all of his surroundings, all the time? Even in the trenches, enemy fire came from only one direction, and when you clambered up out of them into no-man’s-land, you were too busy slogging through the mud to worry about what was going on around you. At most your eyes were peeled for the next bomb crater that you could throw yourself into in the vain hope that it would protect you.
Given some practice, however, I found it was not so difficult. Inside it was, at least, for the klurath were the least decorative people I had ever seen. Their hallways and rooms featured little in the way of adornment, which made backgrounds stark and easy to watch—any movement against them caught the eye immediately. Outside, the dim light and myriad alleys and streets made my task far more formidable. Fortunately for us both, Gaz Bronn seemed to appreciate that; at least, he appeared to me to be acting with more caution. Nevertheless, such sojourns made me nervous.
And of course, wherever we went, I was an object of curiosity—not to the klurath, but to the humans. At Gaz Bronn’s meetings, every delegate had a bodyguard, but no one paid any particular attention to me; I was, after all, merely a slave, so deigning to notice me was beneath a lizard’s dignity. The Thoran population, however, was a completely different kettle of fish.
Even before I assumed my position, I had been conscious of their eyes on me. Now that I had donned weapons, the stares were harder. I wondered if, in the three thousand years of klurath hegemony, any human had ever stood in my footprints. Had none of them ever borne arms? Come to think of it, in three thousand years there must have been a good number of attempted slave uprisings. The notion that I was being sized up as a target to steal my weapons only added to my worries, although I had no doubts of my physical superiority over any three or four of them, should matters come to a head.
In the case of my most ardent detractor, however, I had no such fears. In the most polite terms, Halgreen had no use for me, and I would lay money that he disliked me intensely. Again, I had no idea why; our initial meeting had been contentious, but I was sure I had given no cause for offense since. His role, as I learned, was the slave-equivalent of Gaz Bronn’s housekeeper; all domestic authority seemed to be invested in him, particularly in the matters of managing the household slaves. I, of course, held a unique position outside of his influence, but if that was the problem, there was little I could do about it, so I did what I could not to be seen as flaunting my independence and let it go at that.
Unfortunately, I could not avoid him. Not only did his duties bring him to Gaz Bronn on almost a daily basis to make reports and rece
ive instructions, but I took many of my meals in the slaves’ common room. I tended to eat very early or late, but slaves do not keep the ordinary businessman’s hours, and I rarely ate alone. Occasionally I saw Hargreen there, and although we took pains to be civil, we never sat at the same table.
One whose schedule did place him in the dining room late was a garrulous young fellow named Bryal. (Klurath slaves were all given but one name at birth, likely to minimize family ties and discourage bonding.) Pale even by the standards of a people who had literally not seen the sun in millennia, he had ash-blond hair and skin the color of writing paper, but his eyes were so deep a blue that they seemed almost black in comparison. He was the only person who seemed able to muster up the courage to talk to me, and I saw no reason not to ask him about it.
“It’s Hargreen,” he replied. “Everybody can see he doesn’t like you.”
“It seems not to bother you.”
He shrugged. “I’m a slave. I was born a slave and I’ll die a slave. What can he do?”
“I have to admit,” I said, “that question had already crossed my mind.”
Bryal leaned toward me. “Whatever you do, don’t trust him. There are some people who can mask their thoughts better than others. You, for example. I can’t read you at all. But people like Hargreen, they don’t hide their thoughts so much; it’s like they can lie in their thoughts, make you think they’re thinking one thing when they’re actually thinking something else.”
“You think?” I quipped, but like Hargreen, I was hiding my true feelings. “So, let me ask you a question on a completely different subject. Why does everyone stare at me all the time? I assumed because I carry a weapons but then I realized that it has going on since I came here, even before Gaz Bronn took me on as his bodyguard.”
Bryal took a moment to study me, ponderously scanning every inch of me that he could see, as if he were buying a horse at auction.
“You realize, of course, that you’re the tallest person I’ve ever seen.”
I groaned. What an idiot! Of course, all of Gaz Bronn’s slaves were Thoran. They had probably never seen a Nuum, and since I resembled a Nuum so closely as to make no practical difference, that meant they had never seen a man like me. To them I was a colossus, a Goliath. It had been the same when I first mingled with Thorans, but over time I had met had enough Nuum that I ceased to feel out of place. Since coming to Jhal, my focus had been on the strangeness of the klurath, and I simply had not thought about my own strangeness in the eyes of others.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Bryal now, “it never occurred to me. Where I come from, all the men are my size, or close to it. I guess that explains it.”
Bryal took a moment to digest this. “I’m used to being one of the tallest men around, but you make me look short.” He rose in height to my chin, in fact, which made him tall indeed for a Thoran. “We could use you on our jast-ball team.”
“Jast-ball?”
“Ah,” he said, stretching in the manner of a man about to embark on his favorite subject. “Jast-ball. Every ten days, most of us get a day off for recreation. Jast-ball is a game with three teams of twelve men who try to move a ball across a field and across one of the other teams’ end line. As long as you don’t cause any permanent damage, it’s pretty much anything goes. The first team to score leaves the field and the other two finish the game. The losing team, well, you don’t want to be on the losing team.”
“Why not? Does something happen to them?”
“What? No! Nothing like that. It’s just humiliating. Everyone goes and watches—and I mean everyone. Which means everyone knows if you’re a loser, and for the next ten days you have to live with that.” He shook his head sadly, and I guessed he had first-hand knowledge. “Even if you didn’t go to the match and know who lost, you can always tell at the next game, because they fight like cave wolves.” He gave me a sly look. “You’d be a natural. We’d just give you the ball and stand back.”
I tried to picture this. My athletic endeavors had run more toward fencing than rugby. “Three teams?” I might be twice their size, but two dozen crazed jast-ball players piling on me was not my idea of a good time.
“You think about it,” Bryal said. “We have a few days.”
I was going to think about it. Gaz Bronn had said nothing of slaves receiving any time off. If I was lucky enough to be granted a day, I could use it to explore on my own for clues to Maire’s whereabouts. I already spent my days worrying about klurath assassins—spending my time off being assaulted by my own kind was not what I called fun.
Chapter 26
Jast-ball
Somewhat to my surprise, Gaz Bronn showed no sign that my inquiry into the idea of a day off was in any way unusual, and he acquiesced without delay. When I mentioned my intent to prosecute the search for Maire, however, he was more sanguine.
“While it looks like I haven’t done anything, Keryl,” he said as we stood in his office awaiting his next appointment, a colleague who was for once coming to him, “I have been asking all of my people to keep an ear to the ground. Whoever took the crew of your ship has kept it very quiet. It makes me think the war faction is up to something, and I don’t like the sound of that any more than you do.
“You can look around if you want, but there are hundreds of thousands of klurath in Jhal, and you don’t have any idea where to look. Not to mention you’re going to stand out. I honestly don’t see what you think you can accomplish.”
His frank appraisal left me stunned. He was right on every point. Not only was Jhal far too large to be searched by one man, my wife and friends were hidden; any overt attempt to find them would be fruitless at best, fatal at worst. I could never traverse the wide bare corridors belowground without notice, and the twisting alleyways of upper Jhal could hide a hundred assassins around every corner.
Maire and Timash and Sanja and the crew of The Dark Lady were imprisoned and perhaps in mortal danger, but there was not a thing under Heaven that I could do for them.
When the tenth day came and the slaves were loosed to run about as they would, I allowed myself to be corralled and herded to the jast-ball field. There was actually a method to my madness, although seeing the raucous crowds that had gathered around the field, each surrounding its own team, the teams themselves leading their fans in a series of roaring cheers, I began to doubt that my method was a good one. As we appeared, the other two teams and their mobs began to shift back and forth, first in our direction, then feinting at each other, as if everyone there had been drafted to play, and only some invisible leash reined them and kept them from setting on each other like wolfpacks. Everyone was shouting and taunting and making what I could only assume were rude gestures, eagerly returned with redoubled ferocity by each side in turn.
This was a people who had known only slavery and restraint for untold generations given an outlet for their fear and frustration and hatred. What they could not levy on their oppressors, they would loose upon their peers. And today, first among their peers, if Bryal had his way, would be me.
Which was exactly how I needed it to be. I needed Bryal to be right, to give me the jast-ball and allow me to run it across the goal line, dragging half-a-dozen foeman in my wake. I needed to be the hero of the day, or at least a star, because none of these people knew me from Adam, but they all knew their own households as I never could. They could be my eyes and ears throughout Jhal, but I needed to give them a reason to want to help me. And I was betting—betting a mass of bruises at least—that the worship of sport had not died in the human spirit in all these centuries. If I could make these people admire me, perhaps I could implore them to help me.
That was the plan, at least.
When we reached the open space that was apparently our starting point, I was surprised to see Hargreen whooping and shouting at the top of his lungs (for some things, it seemed, required more voice than thought) while he lead the crowd in our cheers. Spying us, he set up an even louder howl, and the crowd fo
llowed suit until I fancied I could hear the echoes off the ceiling. Even more amazing, he broke off his cheerleading and came toward us, a huge incongruous grin on his face.
“Keryl! I knew Bryal could convince you to join us! The House of Bronn is going to rule the field today!”
Ah, that explained it. Hargreen might not care for me, but he cared a great deal for the honor of his master, and if I were the means to increase that honor, then he was willing to put up with me. I made a show of returning his enthusiasm with a sincerity that matched his own, both of us proving ourselves consummate actors in the process.
“It was actually my idea to draft you onto the team,” Hargreen confided. “But Bryal is in charge, so it was up to him to ask you.”
“I thought he was going to say no,” Bryal added. “But here he is!”
By now the other teams had caught wind of the fact that I was competing, not watching, and the tenor of their cheers had changed to a more muted muttering somewhere between defiance and doubt.
Bryal had noticed it too. “They’re afraid of you, that’s for sure. There’s never been a jast-ball player your size. I’m hoping it won’t occur to them to gang up on you at least until we can grab the ball.”
“They can come after me even if someone else has the ball?” My understanding of the rules of the game ranked barely above zero on any scale. I had been given to understand I only had to hold onto the ball no matter what and fight my way toward whichever goal line I was directed, but it was now becoming obvious there were nuances I should have studied.
“It’s free-for-all,” Hargreen said. “Most of the action centers around the jast-ball, because that’s how you score. But if the other teams see you as enough of a threat, they may try to neutralize you early.”
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