Incredulously, Chandler saw that it was bound tight with a three-foot length of barbed wire, wound and twisted like a tourniquet, the blood black and congealed around it. He lifted his shocked eyes to meet the girl's. She only looked at him, with pity and understanding.
Guy patted the foot and let it go. "I didn't have any more C-clamps, people of Orphalese," he apologized, "but it looks all right at that. Well, let's see. We got to make up our minds about these two, I guess, no, wait!" He held up his hand as a murmur began. "First thing is, we ought to read a verse or two."
He opened a purple-bound volume at random, stared at a page for a moment, moving his lips, and then read: "Some of you say. It is the north wind who has woven the clothes we wear.' "And I say. Ay, it was the north wind, but shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread. "And when his work was done he laughed in the forest."
Gently he closed the book, looking thoughtfully at the wall at the back of the room. He scratched his head. "Well, people of Orphalese," he said slowly, "they're laughing in the forest all right, I guarantee, but we've got one here that may be honest in the flesh, probably is, though she was a thief in the spirit. Right? Well, do we take her in or reject her, 0 people of Orphalese?"
The audience muttered to itself and then began to call out:
"Accept! Oh, bring in the brand! Accept and drive out the imp!"
"Fine," said the teen-ager, rubbing her hands and looking at the bearded man. "Guy, let her go." He began to release her from the chair. "You, girl stranger, what's your name?"
The girl said faintly, "Ellen Braisted."
"'Meggie, my name is Ellen Braisted,' " corrected the teen-ager. "Always say the name of the person you're talkin' to in Orph'lese, that way we know it's you talkin', not a flame spirit or wanderer. Okay, go sit down."
Ellen limped wordlessly down into the audience. "Oh, and people of Orph'lese,' said Meggie, "the car's still there if we need it for anything. It didn't burn. Guy, you go on with this other fellow."
Guy stroked his beard and assessed Chandler, looking him over carefully. "Okay," he said. "People of Orphalese, the third order of business is to welcome or reject this other brand saved from the imps, as may be your pleasure."
Chandler sat up straighter now that all of them were looking at him again; but it wasn't quite his turn, at that, because there was an interruption. Guy never finished.
From the valley, far below, there was a sudden mighty thunder, rolling among the mountains. The windows blew in with a crystalline crash.
The room erupted into confusion, the audience leaping from their seats, running to the broad windows, Guy and the teen-age girl seizing rifles, everyone in motion at once.
Chandler straightened, then sat down again. The redheaded man guarding him was looking away. It would be quite possible to grab his gun, run, get away from these maniacs. Yet he had nowhere to go. They might be crazy, but they seemed to have organization.
They seemed, in fact, to have worked out, on whatever crazed foundation of philosophy, some practical methods for coping with possession. He decided to stay, wait and see.
And at once he found himself leaping for the gun.
No. Chandler didn't find himself attacking the red-headed man. He found his body doing it; Chandler had nothing to do with it. It was the helpless compulsion he had felt before, that had nearly cost him his life; his body active and urgent and his mind completely cut off from it. He felt his own muscles move in ways he had not planned, observed himself leap forward, felt his own fist strike at the back of the red-headed man's ear. The man went spinning, the gun went flying, Chandler's body leaped after it, with Chandler a prisoner in his own brain, watching, horrified and helpless. And he had the gun!
He caught it in the hand that was his own hand, though someone else was moving it; he raised it and half-turned. He was suddenly conscious of a fusillade of gunfire from the roof, and a scattered echo of guns all round the outside of the house. Part of him was surprised, another alien part was not. He started to shoot the teen-aged girl in the back of the head, silently shouting. No!
His fingers never pulled the trigger.
He caught a second's glimpse of someone just beside him, whirled and saw the girl, Ellen Braisted, limping swiftly toward him with her barbed-wire amulet loose and catching at her feet. In her hands was an axe-handle club caught up from somewhere. She struck at Chandler's head, with a face like an eagle's, impersonal and determined. The blow caught him and dazed him, and from behind someone else struck him with something else. He went down.
He heard shouts and firing, but he was stunned. He felt himself dragged and dropped. He saw a cloudy, misty girl's face hanging over him; it receded and returned. Then a frightful blistering pain in his hand startled him back into full consciousness.
It was the girl, Ellen, still there, leaning over him and, oddly, weeping. And the pain in his hand was the burning flame of a kitchen match. Ellen was doing it, his wrist in one hand, a burning match held to it with the other.
CHANDLER YELLED hoarsely, jerking his hand away. She dropped the match and jumped up, stepping on the flame and watching him. She had a butcher knife that had been caught between her elbow and her body while she burned him. Now she put her hand on the knife, waiting. "Does it hurt?" she demanded tautly.
Chandler howled, with incredulity and rage: "God damn it, yes! What did you expect?"
"I expected it to hurt," she agreed. She watched him for a moment more and then, for the first time since he had seen her, she smiled. It was a small smile, but a beginning.
A fusillade of shots from outside wiped it away at once.
"Sorry," she said. "I had to do that. Please trust me."
"Why did you have to burn my hand?"
"House rules," she said. "Keeps the flame-spirits out, you know. They don't like pain." She took her hand off the knife warily. "It still hurts, doesn't it?"
"It still does, yes," nodded Chandler bitterly, and she lost interest in him and got up, looking about the room. Three of the Orphalese were dead, or seemed to be from the casual poses in which they lay draped across a chair, on the floor. Some of the others might have been freshly wounded, though it was hard to tell the casualties from the others in view of the Orphalese custom of self-inflicted pain. There was still firing going on outside and overhead, and a shooting-gallery smell of burnt powder in the air.
The girl, Ellen Braisted, limped back with the butcher knife held carelessly in one hand. She was followed by the teen-ager, who wore a smile of triumph. Chandler noticed, for the first time, a sort of tourniquet of barbed-wire on her left forearm, the flesh puffy red around it.
"Whopped 'em," she said with glee, and pointed a .22 rifle at Chandler.
Ellen Braisted said, "Oh, he Meggie, I mean, he's all right." She pointed at his burned palm. Meg approached him with competent care, the rifle resting on her good right forearm and aimed at him as she examined his burn. She pursed her lips and looked at his face. "All right, Ellen, I guess he's clean. But you want to burn 'em deeper'n that. Never pays to go easy, just means we'll have to do something else to 'im tomorrow."
"The hell you will," thought Chandler, and all but said it; but reason stopped him. In Rome he would have to do Roman deeds. Besides, maybe their ideas worked. Besides, he had until tomorrow to make up his mind about what he wanted to do.
"Ellen, show him around," ordered the teen-ager. "I got no time myself. Shoosh! Almost got us that time, Ellen. Got to be more careful, 'cause the white handed aren't clean, you know." She strutted away, the rifle at trail. She seemed to be enjoying herself very much.