Kurt threw both arms over it, coughing and choking for air.
“Hold on!” Kta snapped at him, and Kurt obediently tightened his chilled arms, looking at the nemet across the narrow bit of debris. Wind hit them, the first droplets of rain. Lightning flashed in the murky sky.
Behind them the galley was coming about. Someone on deck was pointing at them.
“Behind you,” Kurt said to Kta. “They have us in sight—for something.”
Kurt lifted himself from his face on the deck of the trireme, rose to his knees and knelt beside Kta’s sodden body. The nemet was still breathing, blood from a head wound washing as a crimson film across the rain-spattered deck. In another moment he began to try to rise, still fighting.
Kurt took him by the arm, cast a look at the Indras officer who stood among the surrounding crew. Receiving no word from him, he lifted Kta so that he could rise to his knees, and Kta wiped the blood from his eyes and leaned over on his hands, coughing.
“On your feet,” said the Indras captain.
Kta would not be helped. He shook off Kurt’s hand and completed the effort himself, braced his feet and straightened.
“Your name,” said the officer.
“Kta t’Elas u Nym.”
“T’Elas,” the man echoed with a nod of satisfaction. “Aye, I was sure we had a prize.—Put them both in irons. Then put about for Indresul.”
Kta gave Kurt a spiritless look, and in truth there was nothing to do but submit. They were taken together into the hold, the trireme having far more room belowdecks than little Tavi—and in that darkness and cold they were put into chains and left on the bare planking without so much as a blanket for comfort.
“What now?” Kurt asked, clenching his teeth against the spasms of chill.
“I do not know,” said Kta. “But it would surely have been better for us if we had drowned with the rest.”
18
Indresul the shining was set deep within a bay, a great and ancient city. Her white, triangle-arched buildings spread well beyond her high walls, permanent and secure. Warships and merchantmen were moored at her docks. The harbor and the broad streets that fanned up into the city itself were busy with traffic. In the high center of the city, at the crest of the hill around which it was built, rose a second great ring-wall, encircling large buildings of gleaming white stone, an enormous fortress-temple complex, the Indume, heart and center of Indresul. There would be the temple, the shrine that all Indras-descended revered as the very hearthfire of the universe.
“The home of my people,” said Kta as they stood on the deck waiting for their guards to take them off. “Our land, which we call on in all our prayers. I am glad that I have seen it, but I do not think we will have a long view of it, my friend.”
Kurt did not answer him. No word could improve matters. In the three days they had been chained in the hold, he had had time to speak with Kta, to talk as they once had talked in Elas, long, inconsequential talks—sometimes even to laugh, though the laughter had the taste of ashes. But the one thing Kta had never said was what was likely to happen to Kurt, only that he himself would be taken in charge by the house of Elas-in-Indresul. Kta undoubtedly did suspect and would not say. Perhaps too he knew what would likely become of a human among these most orthodox of Indras: Kurt did not want to foreknow it.
The mournful echo of sealing doors rolled through the vaulted hall, and through the haze of lamps and incense in the triangular hall burned the brighter glare of the holy fire,—the rhmeiand the phusmehaof the Indume-fortress. Kurt paused involuntarily as Kta did, confused by the light and the profusion of faces.
From some doorway hidden by the haze and the light from the hearthfire, there appeared a woman, a shadow in brocade flanked by the more massive figures of armed men.
The guards who had brought them from the trireme moved them forward with the urging of their spear shafts. The woman did not move. Her face was clearer as they drew near her: she was goddesslike, tall, willowy. The shining darkness of her hair was crowned with a headdress that fitted beside her face like the plates of a helm, and shimmered when she moved with the swaying of fine gold chains from the wide wings of it. She was nemet, and of incredible beauty: Ylith t’Erinas ev Tehal, Methi of Indresul.
Her dark eyes turned full on them, and Kta fell on his face before her, full length on the polished stone of the floor. Her gaze did not so much as flicker; this was the obeisance due her. Kurt fell to his knees also, and on his face, and did not look up.
“Nemet,” she said, “look at me.”
Kta stirred then and sat up, but did not stand.
“Your name,” she asked him. Her voice had a peculiar stillness, clear and delicate.
“Methi, I am Kta t’Elas u Nym.”
“Elas. Elas of Nephane. How fares your house there, t’Elas?”
“The Methi may have heard. I am the last.”
“What, Elas fallen?”
“So Fate and the Methi of Nephane willed it.”
“Indeed.—And how is this, that a man of Indras descent is companioned by a human?”
“He is of my house, Methi, and he is my friend.”
“You are an offense, t’Elas, an affront to my eyes and to the pure light of heaven. Let t’Elas be given to the examination of the house he has defiled, and let their recommendation be made known to rne.”
She clapped her hands: the guards moved, in a clash of metal and hauled Kta up. Kurt injudiciously flung himself to his knees, halted suddenly with the point of a spear in his side. Kta looked down at him with the face of a man who knew his fate was sealed, and then yielded and went with them.
Kurt flashed a glance at Ylith, anger swelling in his throat.
The staff of the spear across his neck brought him half stunned to the marble floor, and he expected it to be through his back in the next instant, but the blow did not come.
“Human.” There was no love in that word. “Sit up.”
Kurt moved his arms and found purchase against the floor. He did not move quickly, and one of his guards jerked him up by the arm and let him go again.
“Do you have a name, human?”
“My name,” he answered with deliberate insolence, “is Kurt Liam t’Morgan u Patrick Edward.”
Ylith’s eyes traveled over him and fixed last on his face. “Morgan. This would be your own alien house.”
He made no response. Her tone invited none.
“Never have I looked upon a living human,” Ylith said softly. “Indeed,—this seems more intelligent than the Tamurlin, is it not so, Lhe?”
“I do not believe,” said the slender man at her left, “that he is Tamurlin, Methi.”
“He is still of their blood.” A frown darkened her eyes. “It is an outrage against nature. One would take him for nemet but for that unwholesome coloration,—and until one saw his face. Have him stand. I would take a closer look at him.”
Kurt had both his arms seized, and he was pulled roughly and abruptly to his feet, his face hot with shame and anger. But if there was one act that would seal the doom of all Nephane, friends and enemies alike, it was for the friend of Elas-in-Nephane to attack this woman. He stubbornly turned his face away, until the flat of a spear blade against his cheek turned his head back and he met her eyes.
“Like one of the inim-born,” the Methi observed. “So one would imagine them, the children of the upper air,—somewhat birdlike, the madness of eye, the sharpness of features. But there is some intelligence there too. Lhe, I would save this human a little time and study him.”
“As the Methi wills it.”
“Put him under restraint, and when I find the time I will deal with the matter.” Ylith started to turn away, but paused instead for another look, as if the very reality of Kurt was incredible to her. “Keep him in reasonable comfort. He is able to understand, so let him know that he may expect less comfort if he proves troublesome.”
Reasonable comfort, as Lhe interpreted it, was austere indeed. Kurt sat against the wall on a straw-filled pallet that was the only thing between him and the bare stones of the floor, and shivered in the draft under the door. There was a rounded circlet of iron around his ankle, secured by a chain to a ringbolt in the stones of the wall, and it was beyond his strength to tear free. There was nowhere to go if he could.