Another scream filtered through the storm, but this was above him on the hillside. He realized dimly, as if it were no longer of any importance, that the pursuers must have encircled him.
He was no longer listening for the sounds of their movements. The part that had floated free of his body sunk back down to his swollen face, as if for some final departing kiss. It fell back into the flesh, merging, and he opened his eyes to the full pressure of the storm. The rain no longer stung. And it had a voice. Is that a language, too? he wondered, marvelling. The idea enchanted him. Perhaps, if he listened as hard as he could, he would be able to understand, it would thin out and become pellucid as all the other tongues he had heard.
Motionless, he strained, listening to the compound, mingled voice. Finally, like glass dissolving—
“Traitor’s son,” the voice whispered in its own tongue.
He closed his eyes. The words changed, but what was said with them always remained the same.
“Blood of thanes. Traitor’s son.”
Soon enough, his pursuers would be standing around him, and then they would press the points of their weapons against his chest, lean their weight on them and leak the few remaining drops of his life into the mud. Their faces would be hard and shiny under the rain. The feeling of calm turned bitter under his forehead, a throb of hate and despair.
“Traitor’s son.”
He remembered the key. Reaching to his neck with one hand, he drew it out by its long fine chain from beneath his shirt, the fabric plastered right to his skin. His hand enfolded the flat square of white metal—a dull light seemed to seep from between his tightly clenched fingers. The throbbing in his head turned into a vast wave of regret as he realized that whatever door the key was meant to open would now stay closed forever.
“Traitor’s son.” Now that he understood its language, the storm’s voice wouldn’t go away. It seemed as if he had been hearing those words, in all the different tongues, all his life.
He twisted slowly on the ground.
Chapter I
The whispering followed Daenek around the marketplace, the lowered voices seeming to slide between the stalls like the grinning, stark-ribbed canines prowling for scraps on the pavement. Two old village women nodded their shawled heads, their leathery faces even more wrinkled by their mouths curling in disdain as the child passed the stall they tended. His head barely came up to the level of the racks of husk-covered vegetables, so that the women only recognized him by the dark hair, unlike that of any of the village children. “His is the blood of thanes,” whispered one crone. The other nodded in satisfaction at the sneering obscenity into which the last word was twisted.
The boy threaded his way through the market, past the rows of stalls and, behind them, faces with every variation of fear and hostility that had become familiar to him. Sometimes he squeezed past a knot of villagers clustered in the narrow passage as they fingered the vegetables or slabs of preserved meat, extracted a few coins from their sweat-darkened purses and placed their purchases in the stained cloth sacks they swung from their arms. They would look down as he passed between them, and draw away. Then the voices would start again.
“Thane’s blood.” Close-set eyes narrowed on the small figure. “Traitor’s son.”
Daenek stopped in front of one of the stalls. Behind the bins, in a small glass cabinet dangled a tiny model of the great seedships that had come from—his brows clenched as he tried to remember the world—Earth. But that was ancient history, though. Daenek stood on tiptoe and studied the little silver cylinder—he had heard that it used to move up and down inside the glass box, shooting flames from one end, but now it just hung midway on its invisible thread, useless and pathetic—until the stallkeeper scowled him away.
“A hard bunch,” said a voice behind him. He turned and saw a busker squatting behind a battered folding table at the head of one of the streets leading off the marketplace. His hands shuffled a pack of cards, the edges worn to feathers, as he winked and motioned Daenek to come closer with a tilt of his lean head. “A right hard bunch, they are.”
“I don’t like them,” said Daenek matter-of-factly. He watched the cards slither through the long fingers.
“Can’t blame you,” said the busker. “They’ve been no blessing to my pockets, either.” A sigh. “I’m right afraid I must be soon to my own village again.”
“Where’s that?”
The busker fanned the cards out on the table. “Where it is,” he said without looking up. “When I get back I’ll send a troop of my brothers out to see what good they can do with these stone-hearted stone-cutters.”
Daenek stepped away and looked down the narrow street. In front of the cramped buildings women were sitting with the tops of their coveralls spread open to reveal their pale shoulders, even though there was no sun to catch this early. Quarry-workers, too young or slack to have saved up the brideprice needed to take their choice off the street for good, sauntered in the middle of the road, jingling the coins in their pockets. Doors opened and closed with small sounds, couples going in and out of the low houses.
A priest stood in one of the marketplace’s maze-like aisles. Its heavy brown robes hung in folds over its’ tubular metal arms as it attempted to pass out its little pamphlets to the ignoring villagers. Daenek took one from the shining, oddly-jointed hand, and thought he saw the photocells in the expressionless face grow brighter beneath its cowl. THE VOICE THAT IS GREAT WITHIN YOU read the pamphlet’s outside in crudely printed letters. It fluttered to the pavement as Daenek dropped it and walked on.
At one end of the marketplace a canine crouched and giggled beneath one of the stalls. Its hairless skin was mottled with pink and liver-colored spots. The loony eyes rolled in pleasure as the boy squatted down and scratched behind its round, human-like ears.
“Hey. Git ’way from there.”
Daenek looked up and saw a man’s face, flushed and coarse-grained as a chunk of meat on one of the butchers’ racks, glaring over the edge of the stall. “You’re drivin’ everybody away,” the face growled through its thick lips.
The canine moaned in fear and ran off, its back bowed, the thin tail wrapped against its belly. Daenek stood up and backed away from the stall, watching the man behind it as he returned his sour attention to his trays of fruit. The little green spheres that had turned brown and pulpy were picked out one by one and thrown onto the ground.
Daenek turned away, bored. The crowd’s heat and the high-pitched buzzing of flies made his head ache. Maybe—he looked back into the knots of people in the marketplace, trying to spot one person in particular—maybe it was almost time to leave. He scraped a ridge of dust along the pavement with his shoe, then felt something that was both hard and wet crack against the back of his head.
He spun around—there was no one behind him. He touched the stinging spot on his skull, then looked at his hand. A tiny spot of red mingled in something sticky. At his feet was one of the rotten fruit from the stall opposite him, the hard stone visible through the shattered pulp. The stallkeeper’s eyes were bent on his own hands as they fussed over the trays.
A second passed as the boy stared at the coarse-faced man.
Suddenly, a tall woman, her face rigid with anger, appeared, striding out of the marketplace’s center. One hand clenched the silver handle of the slender black rod she used to point to the items in the stalls that she wished to buy, and to pick her way along the narrow path that led through the hills above the village. She and Daenek lived in the small house at the end of the path, and the silver-headed stick would be laid in the corner beside the door when they arrived back home, in readiness for the next trip to the marketplace. But now the stick had another purpose.