“Do you speak stone-cutters’ tongue?” said Daenek. The tall man glanced at him blankly, and the other grinned sheepishly.
“How about English?” he asked, switching to it. “The language they speak in the Capitol?”
No response. The tall man turned away from the bed and whispered to the other mertzer. When his companion had hurried away, the tall man sauntered lazily to the round window and gazed out of it, bored. Paying no further attention to Daenek, he took one of the shiny instruments from his coat pocket and began cleaning his fingernails with it.
A longer time passed before the door opened again. The first mertzer re-entered leading still another figure. This one was grey-haired and stoop-shouldered with age.
The old man lowered himself slowly onto the bed next to Daenek’s. He leaned forward. “How—” he spoke awkwardly in the stone-cutters’ language,—“how feel you?”
“All right, I guess,” Daenek smoothed the blanket with his hand. “Hungry, though.”
In the mertzer tongue, the old man relayed the information to the tall man, who shrugged without enthusiasm and headed for the door.
The old guy must be one of the translators, thought Daenek. That handle the negotiations in all of the villages.
“Uhh—” The old man scratched his fringe of hair as he looked at Daenek.
“Is English easier for you?” asked Daenek in that language.
“You know, the Capitol tongue?”
The old man’s expression brightened. “Really?” he said, shifting into the same vocabulary. “That’s wonderful. Very nice. I haven’t talked like this for—it seems like years.” He paused, studying Daenek. “We just assumed that you only knew stone-cutter—you babbled in it for some time while you were unconscious.”
“How long—how long was I out?”
“Let me think. This would make it, ah, three days after they found you.”
“They?” Daenek shook his head, trying to clear away the fog of lapsed memory. “Who’s they?”
“A bunch of our mechanics.” The translator rubbed his speckled chin. “When the caravans had halted to wait for the storm to pass that night, the mechanics found that one of the tread plates had come off several kilometers back. About a dozen of them went hiking after it in the rain, to fetch it before it got rusted. Lucky for you that they stumbled across you as well. Seemed just about gone when they flopped you into the infirmary here.”
Daenek hesitated, cautiously weighing his next question.
“Were there,” he spoke quietly, “any—others around?”
The translator smiled, his expression becoming conspiratorial. “Oh, a few. Some local subthane’s strongarmers, all befuddled with booze and confusion. The mechs had no trouble losing them.”
Daenek tensed. How much do they know? And if they do know I’m the thane’s son . . . what then? “Did you find out, um, why they were looking for me?”
“Faugh,” snorted the translator. “Ask a hard one. Skinny, odd-looking kid like you—gashed up like that, and why else would they be in such a storm mucking about to find you? You’re some busker that tricked a few coins out of some subthane’s pocket, and got caught at it. The fact that you know more than one language only cinches it.” The old man nodded sagely.
With a small sigh, Daenek relaxed and leaned back against the wall. “Well,” he said, smiling. “I guess you’ve found me out.”
The translator stood up. He spoke to the first mertzer, who turned and hurried down the aisle. “We’ll see if we can’t come up with some food,” said the old man over his shoulder as he followed after the other figure.
Safe, thought Daenek. The door shut and he was alone again in the room, except for the yellow disc of sunlight, now oval-shaped upon the blanket. But for how long?
Daenek swabbed the last trace of gravy from the plate, then swallowed the piece of bread in two bites. He still felt hungry, even though the food had seemed to expand inside him like a slow, comfortable explosion. He knew he probably would have eaten himself sick if he had been given more.
He laid the metal plate beside himself on the bed. With his thumb he rubbed out a spot on the rough-textured pants the old translator had brought him. Daenek’s own had been too badly shredded to save, but his shirt was on his back, carefully washed and mended by someone aboard the caravan. And his boots, scraped clean of mud, had been returned as well.
His hands flew suddenly to his throat as he re-mebered the fine-linked chain and the little square of white metal. Until now he hadn’t noticed that it was missing. A momentary surge of despair welled up inside but he quickly pushed down the feeling.
It had only been a key after all, he told himself—what did it matter if it was buried in the mud on some irretrievable hillside?
When I come to that door, he thought, I’ll find a way in. No matter what.
The door at the far end of the room opened and the translator came in again. Daenek watched the bent-shouldered figure passing between the rows of beds towards him. His mind was intent, furiously plotting out what to say and do next. Even if they kick me off, he thought, I’m still better off than I was—as long as they don’t know who I really am. But if I could get on here, stay on board for a while—
“Ready to see the captain?” said the translator.
Daenek nodded and stood up. He brushed some crumbs from his shirt, then followed the translator out of the infirmary.
Several flights of metal steps that rang under Daenek’s boots, and they emerged through a hatchway onto the caravan’s wide, level deck. Daenek blinked, looking about in the dazzling sunlight. Beyond the guardrail a dozen meters away the landscape of hills slowly crawled past. Behind the caravan, its sister machines followed, a convoy receding into the distance as they breasted the land.
The deep bass vibration of the caravan’s engines was stronger out in the open. It pulsed through Daenek’s body like a new heart. A shrill sound from above, and he looked up to see great-winged birds outlined against the sky as they glided past the struts of the towering cranes and hoists.
A group of mertzers, lounging idly around the gaping mouth of an open cargo hold, looked with mild curiosity at them.
Daenek hurried to catch up with the translator on the narrow walkway. Ahead he saw the looming mass of the caravan’s control tower, surmounted by the wide sweep of glass that was the bridge.
Daenek followed the translator into the base of the tower and up the flights of stairs leading to the bridge. He noted that here the lights and ventilation worked, in contrast to the dim, musty-smelling infirmary and other sections through which they had passed.
At the top of the stairs the translator motioned for Daenek to wait, then rapped on the rivetted metal of the door before them.
“Captain Sather was born in the Capitol and speaks the tongue, too,” whispered the old man. “So watch what you say.” The door swung open and he led Daenek into the bridge.
Through the bank of windows Daenek could see the land before the caravan, the wide stretch of brown dirt that was the roadway flowing under the prow. There were four mertzers already in the glass-walled room, three of them wearing dark blue coats and stiff caps. The fourth, a compact but solidly muscled figure standing with folded arms at the far end of the bridge, wore the usual leather jacket and battered cloth cap.
The blue-coated mertzer who had opened the door closed it behind them and then joined his companion in front of the gauges and controls that extended nearly the width of the room.