Tylos stood against the wall bunk, his hands opening and closing as if he wanted to grab and hold what was not there. He leaned toward Naill, his pale tongue sliding back and forth across his lips.
"You musta seen somethin'—you musta! Treasure—what kinda treasure, man?"
They were all herded in the bunkhouse, the dozen off-world laborers Kosburg had. And all eleven pairs of eyes were on Naill. Only Lasja was missing, kept behind as a guide. Naill hedged.
"Lasja dug it out—the tree branch was caught. I was on the rope drag and he dug. Then he pushed me out of there and called Kosburg. I saw something shining in the dirt—that's all."
"Why—why call Kosburg?" Tylos demanded of the company at large. "Treasure—get that down to the port, and any trader'd take it off your hands for enough to buy your passage out."
"No." Hannosa, never a talkative man and one of the older laborers, shook his head. "That's where you're off course, Tylos. No trader landing on Janus would deal with one of us—he'd lose port license if he tried."
"Not the master, maybe," Tylos conceded. "But don't tell me the whole crew of every ship is gonna turn blind eye to a profitable little deal on the side. Lissen, dirt grubber, I come from Korwar—I know how much can be made outta treasure. Alien things—they bring big prices—big enough to make the cut worth while all along the line from a crewman up to the final seller in some fancy Veep place."
Hannosa continued to shake his head. "This is a matter of belief. And you know—or ought to know—that means a complete clampdown at any port. There've been five treasures found in the past three years—that we've heard about—in this district alone. Every one of them finished the same way—destroyed under careful supervision."
"Why?" Naill was the one to ask now. "Don't they realize that these finds are important?"
"To whom?" Hannosa retorted. "To the Sky Lovers their own creed and way of life is all-important. If news of such finds brings in strangers, archeologists, treasure seekers, then they would open the door to what these people came to Janus to escape: contact with other beliefs and customs. That mustn't happen, they think. As they see it, there is evil inherent in these objects—so they are destroyed."
"It ain't right!" Tylos pounded a small fist against the side of the bunk. "It purely ain't right to smash up stuff like that!"
"Go tell Kosburg that," one of the other men suggested. "Me—as long as we have to stay outta the fields till the Ceremony, I'm gonna get some rest." He stretched out on his bunk, setting an example most of the rest were quick to follow.
Tylos went to the window, though what he might be able to see from there Naill did not know. He himself lay flat and closed his eyes. But through his whole body there was a quiver of excitement so intense that he feared everyone in the room could sense it. Had he really done the impossible, kept for himself a fraction of that find? Had luck favored him that far?
When he closed his eyes, he could see vividly again that tube with its patterns, its color. And in his palm he could feel the sleekness of its substance. What was it? For what purpose had it been fashioned? Who had left it there and why? A burial hoard—loot hastily concealed? There were questions he longed to ask those about him concerning the other finds. Dared he try, without revealing to the curious that he knew more about this one than he had admitted?
If he was successful in keeping his find—then was Tylos right? Could a deal be made with some crewman? Only—how could he account for the funds afterward? Well, there would be time, plenty of time, to think that out later. It all depended on how well he had hidden the tube, whether the tree hollow would be safe.
Green and gold, red, blue—even colors he could not put name to, shades melting into one another, whirling, forming this design and that. Naill longed to have it in his grasp again, just to hold and watch for longer than the few moments he had had it after freeing it from the ground. It was beauty in itself—more than beauty: warmth. If he could take it in his two hands, bring it to Malani . . . Naill rolled over on the hard and narrow bunk, his face to the unpeeled bark on the log wall.
"Out!" That was Kosburg's order as he banged open the door. The tone of that bellow brought instant obedience from his laborers.
Naill followed Hannosa into the open, to discover the entire population of the garth was assembled in the yard. A baby or two cried protestingly in a mother's arms. Small children stood sober-faced and wondering. Kosburg himself, cap in hand, was at the head of the family line of Believers, facing a man wearing a long gray cloak over the usual dull apparel of the settlers.
The stranger was bareheaded, and his shock of uncovered hair and chest-spread of beard were as gray as his cloak, so it was difficult to see where fabric ended and hair began. Out of that forest of beard a sharp beak of nose stuck, and curiously pale red-rimmed eyes, one of which watered constantly so that those involuntary tears dribbled into the waste of hair below, shone brightly.
"Sinners!" The cracked voice was, in its way, as authoritative as Kosburg's.
A visible shiver ran along the line of Believers at that accusation.
"The Dark One has chosen to set the snare of his devising on this garth. Dark is only drawn to dark. Your Sky has been clouded."
A moan came from some of the women and two of the children began to whimper. The cloaked man lifted his head, turned his face to a sky which was indeed cloudier than it had been that morning. He began to chant words unintelligible to Naill, the whole a croaking like the rasp of an ill-set saw.
Still looking skyward, the stranger pivoted his body toward the woodlands. And then, without watching his footing, he marched in heavy strides in that direction. The Believers fell in behind him, men to the fore, and Naill joined the laborers who brought up the rear.
It was only coincidence, of course, but the clouds continued to thicken overhead, the heat of the sun was shut off, and from somewhere a chill breeze had arisen. It wrapped about them as they came into the clearing where lay the treasure cache.
Three times the Speaker marched about the glittering heap on the ground. Then he took up the ax that Lasja had earlier wielded and passed it to Kosburg. The garthmaster reversed the tool, bringing its heavy head rather than cutting blade down on the objects there, battering and breaking them into an undistinguishable mass of crushed material, while the Speaker continued to chant. As Kosburg moved aside, the old man brought from beneath his cloak an old-model blaster.
Now he did look down as he aimed at the broken bits Kosburg had battered into shapelessness. The dazzling beam of the ray shot at that target, and the spectators pushed away from the heat of the blast. When the Speaker was done, there was only blackened earth in a pit. Whatever residue of metal had remained after that fiery attack had seeped into the ground itself. The Speaker turned to Kosburg.
"You will cleanse, you will atone, you will wait."
The garthmaster nodded his shaggy head. "We will cleanse, we will atone, we will wait."
They re-formed the procession and passed back across the fields to the homestead.
Tylos was the first to ask of the old hands, "Whatta they gonna do now?"
"One thing," Brinhold, another of the veteran laborers, told him. "We go to bed with flat bellies tonight. Lasja," he asked, "why didn't you just let that mess rot there? Why get the old man started on all this cleansin' business?"
"Yes!" There was a sullen chorus from his fellows. "Now we're gonna have to fast while they try to appease the Sky."
Lasja shrugged. "You know the Rule. Better go hungry a couple of days than have a full lessonin'."
"He's right, you know," Hannosa pointed out. "It's just our bad luck we found it here. It's been about two years since Kosburg himself stumbled on that other one."
Naill looked up. "There was another found here, then?"
"Yes. Kosburg was out hunting his daughter. She was the strange one who used to go running off into the woods whenever she got free of the house. They said she wasn't right in the head." Hannosa's quiet face was shadowed by an expression Naill could not read. "Me, I'd say she was a reversion to what these people might have been before they became Believers. They used to have strange old tales on my world—a legend that there was an earlier race who had fled into the hills, gone into hiding, when invaders took over their land. And now and then the survivors of that earlier people would visit a house in which there was a newborn child and steal it away, leaving one of their own kind in its place."
"Why?" Naill asked. There was an odd feeling in him, another surge of that queer excitement that had tensed his body when he thought of the hidden tube.
"Who knows? Perhaps the blood was wearing thin and they had to have some of the new breed to mate with their own dying line. Anyway, the changeling—that was the name given to the child who was left—was alien and usually died young. Aillie was like that, unlike the rest of Kosburg's get—odd enough in her ways to be of a different race."
"Yeah, she sure was different," Lasja agreed. "Didn't have no luck neither."
"What happened to her?" Naill wanted to know.
"I told you about her—she took the Green Sick and they put her out in the forest like they always do. Only they needn't have made so big a to-do about her being a sinner! She never did no one no harm—only wanted to go her own way."
"But that is a sin here. In other places, too. No one must leave the herd—to be different is the complete and damning sin." Hannosa lay back on his bunk and closed his eyes. "Might as well relax and take it easy, boy. We don't work and we don't eat until the period of cleansing is past."
"How long?"
Hannosa smiled quietly. "That depends on how Kosburg intends to fee the Speaker. Old Hysander has quite a shrewd bargaining sense, and he knows that our worthy master wants to get those western fields cleared before the winter burning. There'll be some smart trading going on over that little matter just about now."
They had not found the tube; Naill hugged that thought to him as he lay through the hours of early evening. He had not seen it in that pile of objects destroyed. How soon dared he return to take it out of hiding? Good sense dictated a long wait for that. And yet his hands itched and twitched; he had a hunger for it as sharp as his hunger of body. Far back in his mind a small wonder stirred at this preoccupation with the alien artifact—why did it pull him so? Did it represent his chance of freedom, always providing he was able to get it to the port and make a deal with it? Or was it for itself that he wanted it so? And his wonder was tinged with a cat leap of fear.
Somehow Naill fought down that strong pull. He was physically tired, yet his mind was not lulled into any drowsiness. Instead he thought intently of small things—the leaves of the trees, the depths of the forest past the scars of the clearing, the aromatic smells, the way the wind lifted and rippled branch and bush.
He must have been asleep, for, when his eyes opened once again, it was dark. Naill stared into that dark. Overhead was the top bunk. He could hear the creak of wood, a sigh, a mumble where one of his roommates stirred unhappily. He was here, in Kosburg's garth—on a holding ripped out of Janus's forest covering by human will, hands, and stubborn determination.
But where had he been? Someplace else—someplace—right. Startled, Naill turned that impression over in his mind, tried to understand meaning through emotion. He had been elsewhere . . . that place had been right. He was here now—and it was wrong, wrong as a piece of machinery someone was trying to fit into a place where it did not belong, to do a job it could not manage.
It was hot. He was shut in, boxed, trapped. Naill moved softly, with sly pauses to listen, as an animal deep in the territory of a natural enemy might move. He wanted out—into the dark cool of the open. Then across the fields—to his tree—to what lay hidden there. His hands were shaking so much that he pressed them tight against his chest, and under them his heart beat wildly. Out—free—in the night!
His caution held until he was past the door of the bunkhouse. Then that wild exultation swept through him completely and he ran, seeming to skim across the rough surface of the field as if he were being drawn along by a tie uniting him to the waiting tree hollow. Dark here, but not the same kind of dark that had held back in the bunkhouse. Again that small part of his brain which could still wonder, was still unabsorbed by the desire that heated the rest of him, noted that he could see in this dark, that only the hearts of the deepest shadows were veiled to him.
And as he pushed into the roughly cleared land where they had been working, the wind wrapped around him softly, welcomingly. The leaves were not just set rustling by its fingers now; they sang—sang! And Naill wanted to sing, too. Only a last dying spark of caution choked that mutely in his throat.
Stench of burning . . . He skirted the spot where the Speaker had used the blaster, not realizing that his lips were set in a snarl, that his eyes blazed, that he tasted anger, an anger out of all proportion to what had happened there only a few hours ago. Then he was through the veil of bushes, reaching up. His fingers on bark, smooth, welcoming bark . . .
Why welcoming? asked the now almost quiescent questioner in him, the questioner that vanished as his fingers passed from bark to tube. Naill held that out and gave a cry of pure delight. Color—swimming color—shades combining, dancing—color from elsewhere, from the place where he was meant to be. A key . . . for the gate he must find—his own!
"Well, so that's it, boy. You did it—just like I kinda thought you did all along."
Naill spun around in a half crouch, the tube cupped in a hand tight against him. Tylos! Tylos standing there, grinning.
"Held out on 'em, Renfro? That was a right smart trick. Gonna pay off too—pay off for both of us."
"No!" Naill was only partly out of the spell that had held him since his awakening in the bunkhouse. The only decision he was certain of was that Tylos had no part, and would never have any part, of the thing he held.
"Now, you ain't gonna push me out, Renfro. All I gotta do is yell out nice and clear and you won't have no treasure left. You saw what they did to the rest of that today, didn't you?"
"If I don't have it, then you don't either." A portion of reasoning returned to Naill.
"True enough. Only I ain't gonna let you walk off with it neither. The boys back there, they said as how this is the second cache of this stuff found around here. Could be three, you know. And Sim Tylos, he's never been pushed outta no deal yet—not never by any Dipple creeper, he ain't. Give us a look."
The bole of the tree was hard at Naill's back. "No!"
"No?" Tylos's voice still held to the pitch of ordinary conversation, but his hand moved. The light of the blue-green Janusan moon picked up the sheen of the knife blade, point up and out. "These here garthmen, they don't hold with blood-lettin'—not out and open—or so the boys say. Only I ain't no Believer—nor you neither. You give me that!" The knife sliced air. Tylos, armed with naked metal, avid for what Naill held, was not the same scrounging, sly, work-dodging weakling he had been.
"So!" Shadows out of shadow: Kosburg, his son, two more of his kinsmen, coming in a hunter's circle. "So—the evil still is—the sinning is yet! Well that we watched this night. Andon, you take the small one."
A loop of rope snapped out to pin Tylos's arms to his side, effectively halting before it began any struggle he might have made.
Kosburg regarded the small laborer. "He has not touched it. Intent but not yet the full sin. Put him in keeping. He shall be lessoned—well."
Another vicious jerk took Tylos off his feet, brought a hardly coherent stream of pleas and attempted self-justification out of him, until a kick from Andon impressed upon him the wisdom of silence.
"You—" Kosburg had turned to face Naill. "You are the complete sinner, infidel! You found—you concealed. You brought down upon us Sky wrath!"
His hand shot out and up with a speed Naill had not realized him capable of, and the club he held struck numbingly on Naill's forearm with force enough to bring a choked scream out of the younger man and throw him to his knees. Yet, in spite of his pain, he watched the tube, free of his grasp, roll to the open and lie there, warm, beautiful, glowing, in the moonlight. Only for an instant was it so. Then Kosburg leaped upon it, stamping with his heavy boots, grinding it into a powder that could not be told from the silvery wood dust—all that warmth and life.
Naill cried out, threw himself at the dancing hulk of the man treading in a frenzied shuffle up and down in the mass of withered leaves and churned earth. He did not see the blow that laid him limp and helpless a moment later.
Dark again, pain in his head and dark—a musty dark, the very taste of which made a sickness come into his throat. Dark . . . Why should a fire be dark? And surely he lay in the heart of a fire from which he could not escape. The fire was in him, outside him—filled the world.
There was a long time when he awoke to the dark and the fire, to moan for water, to roll across an earth floor, tearing at his already tattered clothing, then to lapse once more into that other place, which he could never remember but which was so much more important than the dark and the fire.
Light struck in. It seared his eyes and made him cower and hold his hands before his face. He shrank away from the light, which mixed with the pain in his head and the fire that consumed him. But the light filled the world—there was no place to hide or shelter from it.
"Look at him!" Revulsion, fear—those emotions reached him even in that place where he crouched trembling.
"Green Sick! Get him out of here—he has the Green Sick!"
Then the harsh croak of another voice. "The sinner is condemned by the Sky. Let him be dealt with after the custom, garthmaster."
Ropes coming at him, all around him, fastening to drag him out into the light, which was torture to his eyes. He was prodded, pulled, hustled along, sometimes wavering on his feet, sometimes falling to be dragged across the earth. This was a nightmare he could not understand, only endure. He was like an animal on its way to the slaughter pen, hoping that it would not last long, that he could return once more to the dark.