«They are burning corpses.» Ooma explained at once. «Or so I think. In my life I have never seen it done, but I have heard the old people speak of it. It is like the Yellow Death, come again to plague the Jedds. It is said to appear once in the lifetime of every man, if he lives a true and normal span.»
Blade listened carefully, silently, prompting her only when she faltered in the tale. She did not seem unduly concerned, and this he understood. Ooma was young and had never seen the Yellow Death, and so to her it meant little. Blade felt a bit differently — his prime mission was to survive and to return to Home Dimension with a report. This expedition, into a dimension so like his own, with the promise of vast treasure to be teleported one day — was especially important. Plague could kill him as surely as a knife or spear or sword.
Yet go into it he must. He and Ooma resumed their journey. She had never seen a victim of the Yellow Death, but could only tell him what she had heard. Blade, listening intently, could not escape the parallelism. He had read it all before in his history books.
The Yellow Death came suddenly and without warning. None knew whence it came and no Jedd was safe. First there were blinding headaches and a rash, then buboes — inflammations — in the armpits and groin, then bleeding from the nose and ears. All this was accompanied by a heavy jaundice that turned the victim a deep yellow color. Then death. Death always to manic laughter.
This last shook even Blade. He questioned her closely on it as they trekked deeper and deeper into the smoke.
Ooma, trotting along beside him and clinging to his arm, tried to answer all his questions. «Some call it the Laughing Death,» she said, «but most call it the Yellow Death because that is how the elders have always called it. But it is true, or so I suppose, that all begin to laugh when death is near. They cannot stop laughing, nor can anyone else stop them.»
«How long does it last, this laughter?»
Ooma shrugged her shapely naked shoulders. «I have not seen any of this, Blade, as I told you. But some laugh for hours, I have heard it said, and some for a few minutes. Some hardly at all. But of one thing I am sure, for I have heard it so often — the laughter means that death is near.»
Blade did not feel at all like laughing. Yet, as they drew near to the first charnel pit, he found some personal comfort even in the Yellow Death. The Jedds, being struck by a plague of such proportions, were all the more apt to be disorganized, off guard, and this should make it easier for him to establish himself and take charge. For that was what he meant to do. He must become head man. This was a technique for survival that he had understood since his first trip into Dimension X. It was simple, stark and true — dominate or die.
They began to pass houses now, mostly small dwellings built of stone and mud with thatched roofs. Some of the houses had a yellow mark on the door. Blade did not need Ooma's explanation of this.
Beyond the first small cluster of houses they came upon the pit. It was twenty feet deep and about one hundred feet square. Already it was half filled with corpses of women, men and children. In the distance, toward the taller buildings of Jeddia, Blade saw strings of carts bearing more bodies.
For a time he and Ooma watched, standing well concealed in a grove of melon trees. Not that anyone paid them the slightest attention. The pit attendants — Ooma called them «corpseburners" — were too engaged to mind anyone's business but their own. Their method was simple — they took the corpses from the carts and distributed them about the pit, using every inch of space. They then sprinkled some kind of oil on the fresh bodies and set fire to them. Then the same thing again, over and over, the corpseburners being careful to leave paths among the dead so they had room to move and work.
Blade studied the attendants carefully. They were big fellows, most of them, hairy and slovenly, and all wore the same uniform: long yellow breeches and a yellow vest that left their arms and chests bare. On their heads they wore a sort of yellow stocking cap. Blade began to form a plan.
Ooma, for the first time, began to show uneasiness. She tugged at his arm. «Come away, Blade. I do not like this. Come — we will go to the house of friends of mine who live not far from here. They will give us food and clothes — for now that we are in Jeddia we must have clothes. It is forbidden to go naked in the streets.»
He noted that she was averting her eyes from the corpse pit. It was beginning to sink into the girl that she too was mortal. An unusual thing, Blade thought, for the very young.
They circled the walls of the city and came to a small house that stood on a hill within a forest of melon trees. Here Blade was introduced to two older women and an enormously fat man. The women were aunts of Ooma, and the fat man, called Mok, was, so far as Blade could ascertain, the lover of both. They accepted Blade as a matter of course and with no small amount of awe at his size and appearance. He was well fed and given a shirt and breeches of rough homespun cloth that, he gathered, was made from the bark of the melon trees. This he could believe, since the clothing chafed even his toughened skin unbearably. He was also given a pair of roughly tanned sandals.
Ooma and the aunts went off into seclusion and in half an hour Blade found that Mok was a drunkard and, like all drunks, was looking for someone with whom to share his liquor and troubles. Blade, itching horribly under the rough cloth, his sores and cuts troubling him, put a good face on and pulled up at the table and began to match Mok drink for drink. The ropy brown liquor, poured liberally from a huge clay jug, was a sort of hard cider brewed from the apple-melons. The first swig nearly tore off the top of Blade's head and, though he did not let Mok see it, he was very near to spewing. Immediately his respect for Mok, at least as a toper, increased enormously. Blade set out to pump the man for every last snatch of information he might possess.
Chapter Thirteen
«The old Empress lies dying,» said Mok, pouring himself a cup of liquor. «In her tent on the pavilion in the lake she lies dying. For days now she has teen dying while the musicians play the same tune over and over again. When she dies the Child Princess Mitgu will become Jeddock in the old lady's stead. If, that is, the Child Princess ever lives to come to the throne. For there is the Wise One to consider, and the various captains, all of whom want the power of Jedd.» Mok took an enormous drink, put a fat finger alongside his nose and looked wise.
They had been drinking for hours at the table. Blade's head was buzzing and at times he felt ill, but he was still holding up well enough. Mok seemed to have, in addition to an enormous belly, a hollow leg. He was drunk, the fat man, but not drunk enough to inhibit his speech. He talked and talked and talked. Blade listened and learned and tried to make such plans as he could, considering the fact that the liquor was roaring in his belly like a storm at sea.
Now and again Ooma would peer into the room and make signs to Blade, signs of impatience. Always he dismissed her with a brusque shake of his head. He would not get another chance like this. A drunkard Mok might be, but he knew what was going on in Jedd, the country and, more important, what was at the moment transpiring in Jeddia, the city. To Blade it had an old, familiar ring — intrigue and plot and counterplot. Power and death. A situation into which he might move, and exploit it without too much peril to himself, if only he could find the right wedge and the proper moment to use it. And the more he listened to the drunken fat man, the more Blade realized that the time was here and now. Before the old Jeddock, the Empress, actually died.