Night Lamp (32 page)
Maihac thought the flames too high and the fire too wide for jumping, and drew away, only to be seized by a third girl, who took him whirling light-foot around the fire, then gave him a quick twirl, and with a whinny of mirth tried to send him stumbling into the fire. Maihac had anticipated the move. Instead of resisting, he sagged; seized her free arm and sent her reeling backward, to flounder and fall across the fire, where she lay kicking like an overturned beetle. From onlookers came a clacking sound of approval, as if they applauded an act of splendid technique. The girls screeched in excitement and danced on, hopping and strutting even more energetically than before. Again Maihac was seized up and whirled away. He did not await the girl’s convenience; during one of her strutting kicks, he grasped her leg and toppled her to the ground and kicked her head. He kicked again; cartilage crushed and she lay lax. Maihac took the knife from the sheath at her belt and dropping to his knees, waited until the next girl came to claim him. He lunged, slashed open her abdomen, then rolled to the side. The girl screamed in fury, and fell back, clutching at her entrails.
The music came to a sudden halt. The old woman called out, “The dance is at an end! Kill him with iron sticks!”
A warrior said, “Shut up, old woman! The orders were followed; he has danced with the girls and we have collected our iron. Now let him be buiskid, and we will bide our time; perhaps there will be new iron.”
The girls pushed Maihac scornfully away from the fire. Maihac fended off their blows as best he could, grateful to be alive. One of the girls yelled, “You are buiskid, the lowest of the low! You must carry water and clean slops!” Maihac went to sit by the wagon wheel. No one took any further notice of him, save a pair of imps who squatted nearby, watching him intently. After a while Maihac crawled under the wagon and tried to sleep.
So began the most desperate period of Maihac’s life. He learned that “buiskid” meant a sort of slavery. He was subjected to discomfort, pain and privation. He witnessed casual incidents of such horror that they became unreal; often he barely escaped personal participation in such events. For a time he lived minute to minute, until the minutes became days; then the days became months, during which his existence still seemed to teeter on a razor’s edge. He wondered endlessly why he had been allowed to survive. None of his theories were convincing. In the end he decided that a mistake had occurred, or it might be that the Loklor preferred him as “buiskid” than as corpse. Finally he began to feel a glimmer of hope; perhaps, through luck, vigilance, rat-like cunning, and more luck, he might survive.
Maihac’s role as “buiskid” included toil and casual abuse from anyone who felt in the mood. The acts lacked animus and were for the most part absentminded. Loklor psychology, so he discovered, was remarkably simple. Emotional linkages were unknown; they made no friends and old rancors were quickly lost in the surge of new rages and punitive fits. This was a division of the Ginko tribe, which considered itself at least the equal of the awful Strenke. They knew neither love nor hate; they gave loyalty only to their tribe. They bred their women indiscriminately; the women then went to a special camp and gave birth to a litter of imps, and shortly afterward rejoined the tribe, leaving the imps in the care of Seishanee. The Loklor bucks were irascible and fought often, in encounters of measured intensity, ranging from scuffles to events resulting in severe damage or death. A rigorous Roum quarantine had denied them energy-guns; their weapons were basic: knives, iron-tipped pikes, short-handled axes with semicircular blades. Maihac studied their techniques with care, looking for vulnerabilities which might, at need, be useful to him.
The Loklor skin was a horny integument which served as an armor, thin only down the back of the lower leg, under the chin and at the back of the neck. After some careful thought, Maihac unobtrusively fashioned himself a curious weapon: a pike four feet long, pointed at one end and at the other a thin curving blade, welded at right angles to the shaft, and looking something like a shallow hook, sharpened along its inner edge to the keenness of a razor. No one heeded his work save the two Loklor imps who had been detailed to guard him night and day, apparently to prevent him from slipping off across the steppe, though it was not clear why anyone should care. The answer, Maihac told himself, lay in the nature of the Loklor psyche. Once a process had been given momentum, it could not be altered until someone applied a contrary force, and the Loklor, if nothing else, were indolent. By now Maihac had become accustomed to their surveillance; wherever he went, no matter what his activities, he knew that somewhere near at hand the two imps would be crouched, button-black eyes fixed upon him.
An opportunity to test the weapon arose almost at once. A young buck, bested in an encounter with a stronger adversary, decided to perfect his techniques upon the person of someone useless, and so decided to kill the buiskid for practice.
Maihac noticed the purposeful approach of the young Loklor. He was well-formed, with a saffron yellow frontal carapace and nearly mature crest, which carried four two-inch, knob-headed prongs. He was taller than Maihac and more massive. He scooped up a handful of sand and tossed it at Maihac: the ritual notice of impending aggression. Maihac took up his new weapon. The Loklor halted. He uttered a screeching cry, performed a ritual pivot, tossed his axe into the air to demonstrate contempt, which was intended to discourage his opponent.
Maihac took a quick step forward, hooked the Loklor’s neck with his weapon, and pulled his head forward; the falling axe struck the startled Loklor on his slanted forehead. Maihac jerked back the handle of his weapon with a slicing motion; the blade cut through the thin sheathing and halfway through the corded neck. The Loklor sagged to the ground, twitched and lay still. The onlookers made grumbling sounds of disappointment; the fight had lacked interest.
No one would notify Maihac that he had improved his status; he must make the move for himself, and whoever wished to object might do so. Maihac immediately abandoned his old tasks. Beyond a heavy-lidded glance or two, no one paid any heed. Girls took up the work he had abandoned and thereby improved the terms of his captivity to some small degree.
A week passed and Maihac, ever-vigilant, noticed a sinister circumstance. A group of warriors of “First-fledged” quality, was planning to involve him in one of their games: probably the gauntlet, ordinarily reserved for captives from enemy tribes. If the prisoner ran the gauntlet and survived, he was free to rejoin his tribe. Often the captive refused to cooperate and stood stoically motionless, while the warriors flayed him alive, stripping away the heavy skin, leaving behind a grisly yellow-orange caricature. The captive was now declared free and allowed to shamble off across the steppe toward his own tribe.
The preparations were ominous. Among those watching was Babuja, a “Second-fledge” veteran of massive proportions: seven feet tall, broad and deep in the chest, with short spraddled legs. The prongs of his crest stood stiff and menacing, two to three inches high; his horny chest-plates were scarred and carved, the color of dried blood. He had known much vicious combat, where his enormous strength had served him well. He had never achieved “First-fledge” rank by reason of a ponderous mentality, which sufficed well enough for “Second-fledge” combat. Babuja was complacent, inflexible and like most of the Loklor, disinclined to effort.
Maihac hesitated only an instant, since his options were not good. He scooped up a handful of sand and, sidling close, he flung it into Babuja’s button-black eyes. Babuja, astounded, roared in fury and swung out his arm, to smite Maihac’s chest and send him stumbling backward. Babuja looked about to see who had flung sand. Could it be that this trivial soft-skinned Roum had challenged him? Babuja’s intellect grappled with the situation. There was no help for it; a challenge was a challenge. Meanwhile, the young bucks who had been preparing to run Maihac down a gauntlet, stood sullenly aside; Maihac had spoiled their game.
Babuja found his tongue. “Do you joke with me? It will be a painful joke. You will lose, and the girls will boil your head.”
“What if I win?”
“You will not win.”
“If I win, I take your ‘Second-fledge’ ranking.”
“Just as you like.” The concession was made indifferently, and in any event it meant little, since Loklor ignored inconvenient contracts.
The sun had set. The two moons floated low in the west over the silhouette of low hills along the horizon. To one side of the fire crouched the Loklor women, the dark red and dark blue of their pantaloons glowing in the firelight. The bucks stood apart, each stolid, alone with himself.
Babuja swaggered forward. “Come near, little fool. I will chop once; I will chop twice; then I will beat you with your own legs, until the girls come to take you to the kettle, for the boiling of your head.”
Maihac sidled warily around the great hulk. Babuja watched him contemptuously, not bothering to raise his axe.
Maihac hoped to avoid the axe-strokes, any one of which would kill him, and to dart in and out of range. If his theories were flawed, his life, with its sentience, hopes and memories, had come to an end. He moved a foot closer, gauging Babuja’s reach to the inch. Babuja must be persuaded to lunge out with the axe, when, for an instant, he might become open to counterattack. Maihac jerked a few inches closer. Too close! The axe flicked out. Maihac flinched to the side and the blade whistled close by his body. He tried to slide around the towering figure but Babuja turned, swung the axe high and struck down again. Maihac was out of reach. Babuja grunted and glared. This was not the way to conduct a combat; a proper warrior fought to the din of clashing metal and the chunk of axe-blades driving into flesh. In the end the most durable warrior hacked his opponent to pieces—but this foolish Roum was averse to proper combat. Babuja tried a clever backhanded slash which had broken open many a torso in the past. Maihac fell flat; he thrust out his weapon and hooked Babuja behind the left ankle, then heaved back and the blade sliced Babuja’s hamstring bone, leaving the foot dangling and useless. Down thudded the axe and the tip scored Maihac’s shoulder. He rolled frantically away and pulled himself to his feet. Babuja tried to stride forward, but his leg buckled; he toppled and fell in a sprawling heap. Maihac seized the axe and struck down at the burly neck—again and again, until the head rolled loose.
Maihac moved away and stood leaning on the axe-handle while he caught his breath. He held out his hand. “Bring me beer.” A woman scurried away and returned with a foaming pot. He made another signal, and the women came to tend his wounded shoulder. They washed the cut, stitched and sewed, and applied bandages. Maihac pointed to Babuja’s head and gave orders. Without protest the women took the head aside; there they set diligently to work: first cutting out bones, brains and internal processes, then soaking the skin in oil, scraping away fat and fiber and in the end producing a headpiece consisting of crest with prongs, attached to an iron nose-beak. Maihac also took Babuja’s necklace of knuckle bones and the ponderous axe. In due course the women brought Maihac the headpiece. Gingerly he fitted the folds of dark saffron leather to his own head, where they hung loosely, and assailed his nose with a sour stench. Nevertheless, Maihac thought to feel an infusion of Babuja’s mana: a heady, almost awesome, sensation, which caused him to carry himself with a different posture and move more confidently to the food troughs, where before he had always waited for the scraps. When he strode about the camp, he sensed a shift of attitude toward himself; in some degree Maihac had been assimilated into the structure of the band. Still, whenever he chanced to look off to the side, there was one or the other of the watchful imps, assessing his every move.
Maihac made himself useful by repairing motor-wagons, and no longer felt in imminent danger of capricious attack, though he was still subjected to a great deal of physical buffeting by reason of a game the young Loklor played to work off excess energy. This was a wild unstructured catch-as-catch-can wrestling, into which Maihac was often drawn for lack of better adversaries. If he tried to avoid the sport he was mercilessly kicked back and forth, until in desperation he exerted himself, which usually won him further bruises and sprains. For the sake of survival he applied himself not to avoiding the conflict, but to excelling in it, and refining techniques which he had learned during his stint with the IPCC. He soon became able not only to protect himself from the worst of the pummeling, but to inflict such damage that he was no longer dragooned into playing the game. Nevertheless, to keep his own reflexes tuned, he occasionally joined the sport, reflecting that if he ever escaped from the Tangtsang Steppe and Fader, he would never again fear confrontation with any human adversary.
The Loklor band wandered far afield, back and forth across the continent. Maihac was not sure what might happen if he tried to go his own way. He suspected that he would be hunted down and killed, for no other reason than idle malice. Now it made no great difference, since he could not hope to survive a solitary journey to Flad.
Time passed: months, a year, two years. Maihac, driven by circumstances, assimilated many of the harsh attitudes of the Loklor; he became someone whom, as his former self, he would not have recognized.
The tribe wandered north, occasionally meeting other tribes. When this occurred, there might be formal salutes, and a ritual exchange of females. Occasionally challenges might be issued, and a champion from each tribe engaged in a duel by firelight. Once, to Maihac’s surprise, the elders with saturnine humor pushed him forward to fight as the tribe’s champion.
Maihac, far quicker and more agile than his opponent, managed to win the bout, though suffered a terrible wound in the process, which the women of the tribe matter-of-factly set to rights. He was neither congratulated nor given any recognition for his victory. He had won, the drama was over, the deed was done and had no bearing upon the future.