I am about to shake you badly, monster
, Ian thought.
Let’s see what you really think
. He said, “Broni and Eliana both are at Einsamberg, Vikter.” He waited for the explosion. When it finally came, he interrupted the stream of profanity from the Planetian. “Shouting will win you nothing. Be silent and listen to me.”
“How could you let the Voertrekkerschatz be so insubordinate?” Fontein bellowed.
What a strange one to speak of insubordination, Ian thought. Vikter Fontein was the self-appointed leader of the Planetian kraalmeisters--the most rebellious and intractable gang of cutthroats on Planet Voerster.
‘The machines that descended from the Goldenwing are performing the unloading of the shuttles automatically. I have given orders that no one is to interfere with them and no one has. The Starman is a suitable hostage against any interference by the people from the ship. That only leaves your son Eigen and his pack of delinquents. What do you intend to do about him?”
“Leave Eigen to me, Voerster.”
“Will you send a commando?”
Gratingly, angrily, “Yes. Will you do the same against the Ehrengraf?”
“Yes, by airship.”
‘Talk to your wife, Voerster,” the Kraalheer of Winter said in a tight voice. “Control the prideful bitch. If you have the balls.”
Ian Voerster’s pale cheeks flushed at the insult, but he kept himself tightly reined. “Coordinate your commando’s movements with Oberst Transkei.” He abandoned the radio. “Deal witii this highland freak, Transkei. I want Einsamberg back under control by the day after tomorrow.” The Voerster thrust the microphone against Transkei’s brass-buttoned chest, rose, turned, and marched through the narrow door of the communications center.
The lead slug struck Duncan’s thigh as he reached the ground. A flash of pain and shock jolted him and his leg collapsed. He went down like a stone.
The fisherfolk of Thalassa, engaging as they did in an occupation rife with accidents, had among them teachers of the Zen discipline, a technique used on the Great Sea of Thalassa to cleanse the mind of shock. Though Duncan had not used the Way for many years, it came unbidden as the missile imbedded itself in the muscle of his thigh.
He lay still, controlling first the bleeding and then the trauma. Pain had flared through him and then quickly vanished. But rising to his feet again was more than he could do.
Anya knelt at his side in the still-hot earth, stunned and frightened by the wound and unable, for the moment, to understand how Duncan had come by it. A second shot crashed across the valley and buckshot whined off the impervious surface of the landing sled. An answering rattle of gunfire came from the stone manor house at the head of the valley.
Duncan said tightly, “We appear to have come ashore in the middle of a battle, Anya. Take cover.”
Anya asked furiously, “What sort of savages live in this damned place? Did you bring a weapon?”
“No,” Duncan said.
From the direction of the grounded dirigible came a fusillade of shots directed at the manor. Duncan could see activity in the house grounds. A number of black men were advancing, taking cover where they could find it.
From the foot of the meadow, a single rider mounted on a large rodentlike animal galloped across the open ground in a showy feint toward the advancing kaffirs. To Duncan and Anya, he was a grotesque figure. Short, massive, with a huge chest and a bulging neck topped by a spectacularly ugly face and head. As he approached the blacks, he uttered a savage yell.
There was a shot from the house and the rider fell and lay still. His animal gave a frightened chirping cry and bolted.
Duncan heard:
“Starman! Stay where you are! We are coming! “
The cry was in the Voertrekker tongue, mostly ancient Afrikaans, and peculiarly accented.
“Damn them,” Anya said, angered and frightened by Duncan’s wound. “They ask for help and then shoot at us.”
Duncan showed his teeth with the effort of controlling the pain. “Help me get behind the skid.”
Anya helped Duncan under the sled. She watched him fighting a psychic battle with his own nervous system. “Don’t let me pass out,” he said, “or the bleeding will start again.”
The kaffirs had gone to ground. A trio of bulky men of the same breed as the fallen rider appeared from cover at the foot of the valley. They were waving a white flag.
“Well,” Duncan said. “There are some rules, after all.”
“Shit,” Anya said.
The trio retrieved the body of their comrade and returned to cover. The firing began again. It was answered from the manor house. Anya, who had served in the New Earth militia, recognized the tactic as covering fire. Two black men dressed in homespun and carrying archaic-looking rifles appeared seemingly out of nowhere. They were regular-featured men with skin the color of cocoa, wooly hair, and startling light eyes. Ethnic Voerster kaffirs. The
Nostromo
syndics had reported their appearance and passed it along with the bills of lading for what eventually became
Glory
’s cargo.
“Are you badly hurt, Mynheer?” asked one of the kaffirs.
“I can manage with some help,” Duncan said.
“Then let us go quickly.”
The second kaffir uttered a cry and the facade of the stone house sparkled with gunfire. From down the valley near the grounded airship there were shouts and curses.
Supported between Anya and one of the kaffirs, Duncan limped for the cover of a stone wall separating the house grounds from the mountain pasture of the valley. The marauders’ weapons were extremely inaccurate at long range. Heavy lead slugs left streaks of molten metal on the stones; no one was hit.
A stocky blond man appeared. He was wearing a leather sabertache. “Let me look at that wound,” he said. “I am sorry to say I know a great deal about gunshot wounds.”
He hesitated and then asked: “Are you human?”
“Only too human. This will need binding. I can’t control the bleeding alone,” Duncan said.
The man opened his kit and began winding white fabric around Duncan’s thigh. “It isn’t sterile,” he said. “I should warn you of that.”
“No matter. Infection I can prevent,” Duncan said.
The man stared at him. “My name is Tiegen Roark. I am a Healer. A physician. You understand?”
“Of course he understands, you fool,” Anya Amaya said furiously. “Let’s get him under cover.”
Tiegen Roark stared at her. He had never met a woman like this one. And she
was
a woman. Her skintight garment displayed every contour of the body beneath it. She spoke her strange-sounding Afrikaans with an authority that equalled that of a Voertrekker-born.
“And who are you, mynheera?” Tiegen demanded.
“I am Amaya, Sailing Master of the
Glory
. Shall we move my captain now or do you want to stand here babbling while he bleeds to death?”
Duncan, despite his condition, suppressed a smile. Anya had been doing some cramming on the subject of Voerster and its people. Anya bristled at the Voertrekker physician and dared him to take exception.
Roark, for all his Voertrekker peculiarities, was not an insensitive man. The woman from the Goldenwing unsettled him, but he had the sense not to be the Voertrekker aristocrat just now. One could not guess what this Amaya person’s reaction might be.
He glanced again at Duncan Kr’s tightly controlled face and realized that as a physician he, Mynheer Healer Tiegen Roark, had a very great deal to learn. There were many kinds of medical knowledge. These Goldenwing syndics had their share.
“Bring a blanket,” Roark said.
The kaffir he addressed disappeared into the house and swiftly reappeared. With some help from Anya, the Healer and the kaffir rolled Duncan onto the blanket and carried him through the massive, cast-metal door into the Great Hall of Einsamberg Kraal.
Duncan could hear more gunfire from the upper windows. The change of light made him narrow his eyes in the interior shadows of the vast, near-to-empty room.
A rotund man wearing what appeared to be an academic gown over his shoulders and a slender woman entered the hall. The light struck shining black hair, brows like dark wings, skin the color of alabaster. Duncan was struck by the woman’s presence and an overwhelming sense of empathy.
“This is the kraalheera of Einsamberg, Starman,” the academic declared. “She rules this house.”
“Gently, Cousin,” the woman admonished. To Duncan, she said, “I am Eliana Voerster. I ask your forgiveness. It is my doing that you were injured. It was I who asked that you come here.”
Having taken shelter near the bulk of the captured dirigible, Georg Fontein and his people paused to regroup. Then-plan of attack, so typical of the Highlanders, had been rudely interrupted by the sudden appearance of the skycraft. Though Georg’s acquaintanceship with space vehicles was limited to one short and badly taught course at University, he had no doubts about the strange machine resting on the churned ground of the meadow of Einsamtal. The thing had descended from the Goldenwing now orbiting Voerster, and the other droplets of light he had seen descending in the west must have also been shuttles from the starship.
How many troops could such vehicles carry, Georg Fontein wondered, and what were their weapons likely to be? The machine in the meadow was impressive enough, but hardly the overwhelming threat one might expect from a vastly more technologically advanced society than that of Voerster. What had begun as an enterprise of impatience and greed--Eigen’s desire to possess what he felt should have been his--now took on different dimensions. The Fonteins had assumed that any visitors from out there would come in strength, prepared to do what they liked with Voerster. But the shuttle had carried only one man and an all-but-naked woman.
If these people were Ian Voerster’s allies, then the Fonteins of Winter would do well to reassess all their agreements. Einsamberg was free for the taking--though it disturbed the Highlander that Eliana Ehrengraf had seen fit to arm kaffirs. He had not expected that. It wasn’t the Voertrekker way.
Georg coldly considered the body of his brother. Eigen Fontein had been a thorn in Georg’s flesh for many years. He had finally committed a capital stupidity with that senseless charge at the space machine. Georg felt nothing at his loss--except elation that he, Georg Fontein, was now the heir to Winter. But Eigen was a brother. Fontein blood had been spilled. That made this skirmish important. Georg spoke abruptly. “Bring me the airship captain.”
“Sah,” A
lumpe
ran to do as he was bid.
Sheltering in the lee of the
Volkenreiter
, the prisoners shared the picket line with the mounts. The riding animals were tethered by halters; the prisoners by cords sewn through their lower lips. Though the Fonteins did not know it, it was a method of handling captives invented by the ancient Assyrians of Earth, a folk with a temperament not unlike that of the Highlanders of the Planetia.
The
lumpen
from Winter regarded the grounded shuttle with suspicion tinged with superstition. They knew, as did all the inhabitants of Voerster, that they were not native to the planet. They had, in fact, a rich mythology about their origins in a land called variously Congo, Lesotho, or Soweto, where black kaffir empires were once available for the taking by adventurous white tribesmen. They knew, as did the mynheeren, that everyone on Voerster descended from First Landers who had come down from the sky aboard landing craft from a great starship like the one now orbiting the planet. Still, the reality of the metal-and-ceramic arrow grounded in the meadow of Einsamtal was daunting. Except for a guard of two men,
Glory
’s sled had been left alone. Eigen Fontein had intended to inspect the craft personally, but not before the matter of the unfortunately alerted occupants of Einsamberg Kraal was dealt with. So the sled stood apart from the men from Winter, an object of immense curiosity and some very real fear.
Luftkapitan Klemmer, bruised and bleeding from a gratuitous beating at the hands of the now deceased Eigen Fontein, was led into Georg Fontein’s presence at the end of a bloody tether.
“Can you speak?” Georg asked.
Klemmer glared at his captor. The airship captain was not a cowardly man, but the throbbing agony of his cruelly mistreated lower lip brought tears to his eyes.
“Cut him free,” Fontein said to the
lumpe
who had brought Klemmer into the shelter. The airshipman stood, his uniform bloody and torn, his face swollen and throbbing. His pale eyes blazed with outrage and hatred for the grotesque man sitting on a camp chair, a large single-action revolver in his hand. He had seen Fontein’s father before, in Pretoria, where the Voertrekker-Praesident had gone aboard the
Volkenreiter
to a secret meeting. The Kraalheeren of the Planetia were always on the brink of rebellion. Now the Fonteins of Winter had gone over that brink into outlawry. Klemmer was resolved to acquit himself as a Voertrekker and a Mynheer. He could see no end to this but his own death.
“Answer me,
cholo
,” Georg Fontein said. “Can you speak?”
The use of the vulgarism for a person of mixed blood was ancient. It was said that
cholo
referred to the Cape Colored of old South Africa.
Klemmer flushed. “Yes.” It was pure agony to form words. He glanced out at the wounded bulk of his beloved
Volkenreiter
and wondered if he would ever walk her gondola again, ever see the sun glisten on high clouds. It did not seem likely.
“You will carry a message for me.” Georg Fontein’s hairy face was crisscrossed by frostbite scars. A terrible man. Cruel, Klemmer thought.
“No,” he said thickly. “I carry no messages.”
“Consider the alternative,” Fontein said, pointing the revolver. “Carry my message and you will go back to your people. Refuse and I kill you.”
That was Planetian directness, thought Klemmer. One could not state the case more clearly.
Every movement of Klemmer’s savaged mouth sent spears of pain lancing across his face. He wondered, as a vain man would, what permanent damage these highland savages had done to his looks. What would his wife think of his slave lip?