He did not know why he felt this way. Everything went smoothly. The trading was good. The people were as friendly as ever, and Nillaine hung at his elbow like a cheerful sprite, just as she had used to. Whellan entertained them all royally each night. But he did not repeat to Kettrick his invitation to stay a while. And Kettrick did not refer to it.
One thing became increasingly clear. Seri had not traded with the people. They came out to Grellah with their little carts and baskets stacked high with goods; fine-woven native cloth, carved things of rare wood and great delicacy, the much-prized purple-bronze skins of the big river snakes. They were rich.
Boker said shrewdly, "Maybe he didn't take his pay in goods."
"Drugs?" said Kettrick. He knew the little people still made and used their particular narcotic, in some religious rites. They were permitted to, as long as they didn't sell it. "I wouldn't put it past him. The stuff would be worth a lot now, being so scarce. Only they certainly wouldn't have given it to him for nothing, and there isn't a sign of anything new in the village. You can tell that anyhow by the way they're trading."
Boker shrugged. "Whellan did say Seri's prices were too high. Maybe he did just have his trip for nothing." He scratched his silver mane with a grease-blackened hand and added, "But I'm damned if I see why he bothered to come at all. Seri, I mean, himself, in person. Not once, but several times. The market's hardly worth it."
That was on the morning of the fourth day. At noon Boker came to tell him that the refitting job was done.
"Take over the trading," Kettrick said.
"Where are you going?"
"To ask a couple of questions." He frowned, feeling a little foolish as he went on. "I want you to stick close, all of you. We might just want to take off in a hurry."
"Huh," said Boker. "You get it too, eh?"
"Get what?"
"I don't know," said Boker, "and that's a fact. But don't trust your little friends too far, Johnny. They've got some kind of a bee in their bonnets." He leaned closer. "Glevan says it's a sign." He grinned, but his eyes were serious. "You watch, huh?"
"I'll watch." Kettrick walked away through the fair-ground cluster of carts and little matting shelters and holiday people under Grellah's rusty bulk. Her cargo hatch was open, the lift mechanism clanking and groaning as loads went in and out. It was such a normal, peaceful scene, and the idea of being afraid of these people was so ridiculous, that he almost laughed.
"Ask a couple of questions, that's all," he thought. "And then we'll go."
Chai roused up from the trade booth's shadow and followed him.
The avenue of trees glowed in the sunlight like huge fantastic torches, white flowers massed against the red leaves. The trodden way underfoot was dusty-warm, fragrant with crushed grasses. It seemed perfectly natural that he should meet Nillaine coming toward him from the village.
"Johnny!" she cried. "I was just on my way to see you." She wore a length of peacock blue silky stuff, a present from him, draped around her, and there were flowers in her strange bright hair. "Is the trading finished?"
"Not yet," he said. "I wanted time to roam a little. It's a long while since I've been here."
Her amber eyes smiled at him. "I'll roam with you." Then she saw Chai, gray and huge in the tree shadows. "Oh Johnny, send it back, please. It frightens me."
Kettrick shrugged and spoke to Chai briefly in her own tongue. She turned obediently and went back toward the ship. Nillaine's shoulders lifted in a little shudder of relief.
"Such a great, fierce, sad creature. I cannot laugh when it's around." She took his hand. "Where shall we go?"
"Where it pleases you. After I speak with your father."
"Oh, I'm sorry, Johnny. My father has gone to the Third-Bend Village." She was referring to one on the third bend of the river, north. "He will be back before sunset. Speak to him then."
"Well," said Kettrick, "in that case, I have no choice." But he was irritated, as though Whellan had done this deliberately to avoid him. Which was foolish, of course. Whellan could not possibly have known that he would come.
They walked down the avenue of trees and Nillaine held to his hand just as she had used to, and he matched his stride to her little sandaled feet.
The village was quiet in the warm noon. There were smells of cooking. A few children played. The door of the Tall House stood open and there was nothing inside but shadow. Kettrick and Nillaine crossed the green. There was a wide dusty lane beyond. It went between meandering rows of the small thatched houses, leading eventually and without haste to a tract of semijungle and then, much farther on, to another village.
The houses seemed to Kettrick to be unusually still this day, as though many of the people were gone, or were sitting inside waiting for something. He tried to explain it by saying to himself that they were all out by the ship. Only he knew this was not so. The villagers had already done their trading, and the people around Grellah now were almost all from the more distant places.
Nillaine chattered happily. About Kettrick. About Earth, about Tananaru, about what he did there and what he was going to do.
"What will you do, Johnny?"
"What I've always done. Trade."
"But suppose they find out. The I–C. Surely you can't trust everyone as you do us, surely someone will tell them you've come back."
He laughed and did not answer.
"Suppose you meet Seri," she said. "You almost did. Will he not tell?"
"Don't you worry about it," Kettrick said, and turned aside from the main track into a narrower one. Trees pressed closer on either side, making deep shadows shot with glancing copper light that moved with the movement of the branches. Very quickly the path began to climb, toward a line of hills that thrust above the jungle.
Nillaine let go of his hand and walked a while in silence, a bright blue butterfly dancing down the shadow tunnel ahead of him.
"Seri won't tell," Kettrick said. "He's my friend, you know that."
"Oh, yes."
"I won't tell on him, either."
She paused, ever so slightly. "About what?"
"About what he does here."
Nillaine stopped and turned, standing beside a crimson-flowered vine that was slowly and beautifully strangling a tree.
She said blandly, "But Johnny, he trades. Like you."
"Not like me. Or there would have been nothing left for me."
She laughed. "That's true."
"What is it, then? Narcotics? Pretty little girls who want to see faraway worlds?"
She came close to him, her amber eyes alight. "I'm not supposed to tell."
"Oh. And what do I have to do to make you?"
"I'm greedy." She bent her head to one side and stretched out her arms. "I want to glitter and shine, and make music when I walk."
"I will deck you," said Kettrick, "as no other woman was ever decked before. I will make every girl in every village hate you."
She laughed again. "I will love that!" She caught his hand, all mischievous child again. "Come on, then. I'll show you. But you have to promise not to tell my father."
He promised, and they went on to a place where the path forked. Here Nillaine turned aside, leading the way into a narrow gorge that presently offered no path at all but the water-worn rock that floored it. The gorge climbed steeply, and widened, and then they were clambering up a broad slope with the forest thinning on it and the top of the jungle solid as a floor below them.
The sun struck hot at their shoulders, and a wind blew. Once or twice Kettrick thought he saw movement among the trees, and twice or more he thought he heard a sound, as though more than they two were on that slope. But he could not be sure.
They came at length to a high place held privately in a cup of the hills. It was very still there, walled with forest and the higher peaks on three sides so that even the wind was cut off. The floor of the cup had been made level, and paved with many-colored stones set in a kind of mosaic that seemed to have no pattern, and yet Kettrick knew there was one. Dotted about this level floor, apparently at random, were tall slim carvings of wood set upright.