The Enemy of My Enemy (18 page)

You swim much …
.

Cominthal had said it.

The occasion was Tonorosant’s entertainment for those somehow connected with the pro-Guardian faction — but that hardly mattered. Tonorosant had indeed swum much. But he had never observed anyone observing him. His eyes roved around the water, took in the immaculate grass and the slender, newly planted trees. No … not there. But there,
there
across the water, were three or four old trees which had grown wide as they had grown tall. Someone might easily have observed him from there … without being observed.

The only question was,
Why?

The wry thought occurred to him, as he made his way through the shacks and shanties of Greenrivers village and dodged with remembering feet the rubble and ordure, that this might well be the first time in history that anyone had ever tried to pass for Quasi! Since no precedents existed and he had no one else’s experience to guide him, he was utterly on his own. On him was his by no means best suit of clothes, and he was (standing back from himself and even admiring his own — he hoped — virtuosity in the role) trying his very best to look like someone who often tried to look both Tarnisi and invisible but who was now under no immediate necessity of looking either … yet unable to stop, completely.

He paused before each open-fronted drink shop to look in. So far, none of them seemed to be the right one, but at least no one seemed to find his curiosity objectionable, or even peculiar. Now and then a counterman, seeing him, would call out, encouragingly, “Drinkies! Girlies! Eats!” — and return to other tasks with a shrug when he passed on without entering. Often enough a woman, who might be wrinkled or ordinary or comely or barely nubile, would extend a hand or a glass towards him in invitation. Or call out, “Hey, Tulan! Bed?”

But the one who caught his attention at last neither looked up nor said anything. It was not the same place, but it seemed to be the same woman. She had on last night’s make-up and last week’s dress and she was no longer pretending to refuse a proffered drink. In fact, she was begging one from the counterman. Trying to beg one. Tonorosant put money on the counter and slanted his head. At first her attention was all on the glass and getting it down and she gave him no more than a glance from the corner of her bleared eyes. Her features were strongly Volanth and it was strange to realize that she might have spent her childhood in some distant hut or cave … and all which that implied … before being swept up by a current she probably little understood, to be deposited here, upon the dungheap of a culture which had both begotten and disowned her.

Over the second drink, which she took more slowly, she gave him a direct look and tried to smile out of her smeared mouth. The effort and its effect gave him a pang of pain. “What you looking fow, Tulan? Fun? You buy me thwee dwinks, I give you fun, cheap … .” Her look grew both impressed and puzzled. “What bwing you he’e? — because you, you cou’ pass, so easy … .” But the strain of wondering was too hard, and she dissolved it in her drink. The third one found her both cheerful and informative. Cominthal? Yes, she did know him. A sport, a spender, and a real tulan. Where he was
now?
Well … that depended.

It depended only on another drink for her and a small coin for a small boy, who led him through alleys and wastes and, it had begun to seem, might have led him on forever, if a man had not stepped out of a house somewhat sturdier than the average and said, simply, “Over here.”

There was some sort of a shop up front but in a moment a door or a screen shut out sight and sound of it. A small lamp under a tattered shade supplied all the light there was. It was stuffy and contained more smells than one would have thought possible. An old woman remarkably ugly squatted on the floor and plucked at her lips. Cominthal, looking no more sullen, no more bitter than usual, said, “I know what you’re looking for.”

“Oh … ” It was in his mouth to say that he scarcely knew himself, but all he did say was, “What?”

Cominthal reached into a curtained recess, grunted, came out with a something wrapped and tied, fumbled with it. And again Tonorosant said, “Oh … ” There, in the other’s hand, was the starter-cam of a float.

The other man’s look slid from his. “I didn’t hurt you,” he said. “I didn’t even hurt your float … just slowed you up.”

Tonoro had been right. Two men, besides himself and Stori, had come upon that melancholy scene. And one hadn’t left it alive. “Who was the dead man?” he asked.

A shrug. “Some Lord’s brother, some Guardian’s son, I suppose. I don’t care. I pimp, you know,” he said, looking into a corner and almost indifferent in his tone. “There’s nothing else for me to do. Not yet. He wanted that and he paid me to fix it up. I hired the woman. Didn’t hire the men. That happens, sometimes, you know.” He looked up now and now looked Tonoro not merely eye to eye but it seemed pupil to pupil. “You should know,” he said. Not indifferently.

“I? — I don’t know why I should. And I didn’t come about that, anyway.”

The old woman ceased pulling her lips and looked at the newcomer with a sort of loving leer. “So pwetty,” she said. “So smooth, oh so smooth. But sometimes it gwows haiwy as it gwows older … .”

“She’s brockety,” Cominthal said. “She’s been brockety for forty years.” He laid his finger against his head. “You don’t know. So. Not anything? Not a single thing?” His voice grew more interested, but did not grow more warm.

Tonoro said nothing for a moment. Then he asked, “You hid and watched me swimming. Why?”

“I didn’t know why at first. Then I thought: Something about him I must find out. What? The way he carries his head? Why? — So I hid. And I watched. But you don’t know. So — ” He said something in his throat and chest rather than his mouth. Something sounding like, “ ‘
Kh ghoroum-’akhagh —
”

There was a grunt and a shuffle. The red-figured curtain hanging before the recess was parted by what Tonoro first thought was a bundle of twigs. Behind it came a head and behind the head a body — so small, so light, it seemed scarcely human. This was not only the oldest old Volanth which he’d ever seen, it was past a doubt the oldest human being he had ever seen. He crawled forward on his twiggy fingers and hands and on his shriveled knees, and all the while his filmy eyes took in Tonoro’s appearance. His voice was, incredibly, still deep, but its echoes were curious rather than impressive. Tonoro said, “Who — ?” and stopped.

“
Gorum
. He makes go rum.” Then, impatiently, as one explains the obvious to the willfully ignorant: “He is the
gorum
man.” Faint flickerings of recollection in Tonoro’s mind. A Volanth word, one of the very, very few known to the Tarnisi despite close to a thousand and half a thousand years of proximate contact — and perhaps only because of its being mentioned in the national epic,
The Volanthani
. So —
gorum
. Religion? Medicine? Magic? Witchcraft? Hypersensual perception? Thaumaturgy? None of these, perhaps, or not quite any of these, or perhaps something a little different from all of these. But — He
makes
gorum? How are such things made?

The eyes were not so filmy, after all. A strange golden-brown, the eyes.
“Ghoroum — ’akhaghi thghasht”
the ancient voice said, rumbling and echoing. It repeated the words, or perhaps it said other words, the sound become odder and odder as it sank deeper and deeper. Tonoro listened, astonished at first, then incredulous: the old, old, very old man was no longer speaking in his throat, or even in his chest. Quite certainly the words were now coming from his withered and sunken old belly; one could see the skin and the flaccid muscles moving! And then, aghast, Tonoro heard the sound still sounding in the paunch but heard it now grow higher, higher, thinner, shriller, younger. His mouth opened upon a soundless note of infinite amazement. The muscles of his own stomach crawled to realize the voice now within it, voice now ascending to his own chest, his own throat, piping, piping, tuneless song.

Song which went on and on and on as all time ceased forever and all sight and all.

• • •

The young bloods, the levy-men, had circled the village round about, but the village did not realize it yet. It was early, quite early in the morning, gray and filmy as such times usually were, with mists curling up from the small rivers. Here and there a baby cried, was quickly taken to the breast, cried no more. An old man coughed himself awake, gurgled into silence … silence broken only by the old woman’s cracking twigs for the fire. By and by there would be something — not much — hot to drink; with luck, before the old man began to cough again. A younger woman sighed and stretched on her pallet and began to get up and set about things, was prevented by an arm from across the pallet. For a moment she resisted, then sighed again, lay back. For the while, at least, morning would wait outside. Two young boys awoke, scratched, looked at each other, and were still a moment. Then they got up and went outside and piddled.

This small pleasure was soon over and then came the question of what to do next. Even the younger was far too big to be suckled, and the other was twice his size. That there was nothing to eat in the box both knew, for each had arisen stealthily by himself in the night and gone and felt. So they fell to grubbing with their toes in a pile of mussel shells.

The bigger one tired of this first. “They’re going to get you,” he said; watched to see the result.

“No. No, they’re not … .” The small one lacked conviction. “Why?” he asked.

“Because you haven’t got a license.”

But in giving a reason he had given away his cause. The small one had ears, too. “
You
haven’t got a … a … ” His tongue faltered over the word.

“I don’t need one. I can pass. You do. You can’t. You have hair.” His filthy finger riffled the down on the small one’s skinny arm, pimpling the skin as it passed.

“So do you. You have — ”

But the bigger one grabbed for him, face scowling. “Don’t you say that!” The other hesitated. He could break and run. Or he could aim a kick at the testicles before running. Or he could just stay and take the coming blow. If he escaped it now he would only catch it later. He hunched up his shoulders, prepared to yell. Inside the shack the noises had stopped, which the boys had heard with no more reflection than if they had been snores. The woman sighed once more. The man made a satisfied noise in his chest. Then he was there, looming up above them, cocking his head, a slight smile.

“Cousins, don’t fight,” he said. “Don’t fight.”

“Uncle, I want something to eat,” the bigger boy said immediately. The small boy said nothing, but took the man’s hand. He knew the man was his father, knew the woman inside was not his mother. He knew no memory of a mother. He knew that if the man found something to eat that all would eat. He also knew that there was no food in the shack, but the look on his father’s face told him that the man knew where food was and had both hope and intention of finding it.

“Now,” the man began a sentence which was never finished. His mouth went round, his face went stiff, his hand clenched upon the hand of the child. From one side came a continuous series of sounds of a sort which the boy had never heard before — a sort of rushing noise, ending in a flat, dry clap. Again and again. In the middle of this a woman began to scream, high and shrill. A man’s voice called out something in a note of ever-rising urgency which in a moment became a baying of sheer pain. In another second this was drowned out by voices shouting — harsh and hysterical and violent. One second’s silence followed and then from all sides, like the growing hum of a swarm of insects, the village questioned from within what it had just heard from without. And then found its answer. And all the noise and all the sound became one as the people poured into the streets and the raiders poured into the village.

All the while father and son, in that swift series of seconds which were all the while, held their hands conjoined. Then the man’s grip loosened, the boy’s clasp tightened. His father bent down and said — said — did not scream, “Now you have to go and hide in that hole I showed you. You remember where it is? You go and hide there until I tell you to come out, or until it gets dark. Go, now. Run. Run.”

And because his father had spoken without urgency, so the boy began to run without urgency. He knew very well where the hole was and liked the game of hiding there. It did not occur to him at the first that he had to be afraid. Few things, though, are more contagious than fear, and of these the first is panic. And in no more than a moment the streets, the alleys, lanes and all the other open spaces were filled with people running blindly, running madly, running into each other and upon each other and over each other, and the people were filled with panic.

Behind them, before them, pouring in from all sides were the raiders of the levy. They had things in their hands and from these came the constant noise of
whoosh-whoosh — smack!
and with each
smack
a house or hovel began to smoulder and then burst into flame. In a matter of seconds only the boy saw a woman fall, screaming, beating at her clothes with frenzied hands. Then another. Then another. The populace became a mob. It ran in circles, it leaped into the air, it fell and crawled upon the ground. Nothing stopped, not the noise, not the fire, not the attack. Float after float crashed and smashed the fleeing people. The houses burned, the people burned, the very ground burned, and only blood flowed and it could not put the fire out.

The boy ran, the boy jumped, the boy crawled, rose, ran, fell, rose and hopped and ran again.

Along the edge of one of the streets was a row of ramshackle stalls from which food was hawked, and one merchant had gotten up early to prepare the fritters of plain dough which was all that most of the people would have for breakfast — if they were lucky enough to have any breakfast. He had fled with the first wave and wherever he was now he must already have learned that there was nowhere to flee, his flour and batter lay unattended and unbothered, his fire still burned and his pot of oil still boiled. The naked boy no longer knew where his hideyhole was but he still ran because he knew of nothing else to do, he was still running when the mob stampeded into the row of stalls, knocking their flimsy structures flat, he was still running when the hot oil splashed upon his naked flesh and seared it and made him open his mouth in breathless pain. He ran on and he screamed and he ran and he ran. The air was hot and still and the noises were hideous, frightening, unfamiliar; he was running, running, running, they were behind him and beside him and then they were ahead of him and his head hurt his side hurt his feet hurt, he dared not stumble, he turned aside, he no longer saw, and he ran and he ran and he
ran —