“I’m sorry about what happened to your sister,” Bartan said. “It was a terrible thing, but you have got to think straight about it and realise it’s no reason to give up all you have worked for.”
“Who are you to tell me what I can and cannot do?” Artoonl’s flushed face expressed the kind of mistrust and hostility Bartan had encountered on first entering the commune. “What do you know about the land anyway, Mister Bead-stringer, Mister Brooch-mender?”
“I know Lue wouldn’t be offering to buy your section unless he thought it worth his while. He’s taking advantage of you.”
“Watch your tongue,” Ellder said, stepping closer to Bartan with his stubbled jaw thrust forward. “I grow more than a little weary of you, Mister—” he sought a fresh insult, eyes narrowing under the mental strain, and finally was obliged to copy Artoonl—“Bead-stringer.”
Bartan looked around the group of cowled figures, assessing the general mood, and was both shocked and saddened to realise there was a genuine possibility of violence towards him if he remained. It was another indication, contrary to all his own arguments, that the farmers had indeed degenerated since occupying the Haunt. In the year that had passed since his marriage to Sondeweere he had seen their old spirit of camaraderie eroded and replaced by a mean competitiveness, with the largest and most successful families begrudging help to their neighbours. Jop Trinchil’s mandate had been totally withdrawn from him, and—coincidentally—the loss of his authority had been accompanied by a spiritual and physical diminution. Shrunken and ill-looking, no longer able to exert a cohesive force on his flock, he was rarely seen outside the boundaries of his own family’s section. Bartan had never expected to miss the old Trinchil, with his crassness and bullying ways, but the commune seemed to have lost direction without him.
“I am no longer a bead-stringer,” Bartan said stiffly to the rainswept assembly. “More’s the pity—because with my finest needle and thread I might have fashioned a slim necklace from all your brains. A very slim necklace.”
His words drew an angry response from perhaps twenty throats. The sound was formless and blurred, like a conflict of sea waves in a narrow inlet, and yet by a trick of selective perception Bartan was able, or thought he was able, to isolate a single sentence: The fool would be better employed making a chastity belt.
“Who said that?” he shouted, almost reaching for the sword he had never worn.
The shadowed archways of several hoods turned towards each other and back to Bartan. “Who said what?” a man asked in tones of gleeful reasonableness.
“Does young Glave Trinchil still lend a hand with your chores?” another said. “If his strength ever fails I’ll be willing to take his place—I’ve been known to plough an excellent furrow in my day.”
Bartan came close to running forward and throwing himself at the last speaker, but commonsense and prudence held him in check. The peasants had won again, as they always did, because a dozen cudgels would always overcome one verbal smallsword. The same coarse cliches were ever cherished by them as something entirely original and precious, and thus their ignorance became their armour.
“I hope you will not be too distraught if I withdraw, gentlemen.” He paused, hoping the sexual innuendo might have eased some tensions, but it had gone unnoticed. “I have business at the markets.”
“I’ll travel with you, if that’s all right,” Orice Shome said, falling in at Bartan’s side as he walked away from the group. Shome was an itinerant labourer, one of the few who had recently been hired by members of the commune. He was a slightly wild-eyed young man, with most of one ear missing, but Bartan had heard no bad reports of him and was prepared to accept his company.
“Join me if you wish,” Bartan said, “but doesn’t Alrahen expect you to be at work?”
Shome held up a small kitbag. “I’m on the road again. Don’t want to stay around here.”
“I see.” Bartan pulled his oilcloth hood closer around his shoulders and climbed up to the driving seat of his wagon. The warm rain was still coming down hard, but above the western horizon was a band of pale yellow which was growing wider by the minute, and he knew the weather would soon improve. Shome sat on the bench beside him, Bartan twitched the reins and his bluehorn moved off, its rain-slicked haunches rising and descending in a steady rhythm. Inexplicably, Bartan found himself dwelling on the taunts about his wife, and to redirect his thoughts he decided to strike up a conversation with his passenger.
“You weren’t with Alrahen for long,” he said. “Was he not a good employer?”
“I’ve had worse. It’s the place I don’t like. I’m leaving because there’s something not right about the place.”
“Not another scare-monger!” Bartan gave Shome a critical glance. “You don’t look like a man who’d be given over to wild imaginings.”
“Imaginings can be a lot worse than anything that comes at you from outside. That’s probably why Artoonl’s sister killed herself. And I heard that boy of hers didn’t just disappear—I heard she slew him and buried the body.”
Bartan became angry. “You seem to have heard a lot—for somebody with only one ear.”
“There»’s no need to get touchy,” Shome said, fingering the remnant of his ear.
“I’m sorry,” Bartan said. “It’s just that all this talk of… Tell me, where are you bound for next?”
“I’m not sure. Had enough of breaking my back to make other men rich, and that’s the truth,” Shome replied, staring straight ahead. “Might try to make it as far as Prad. Work is plentiful there—clean, soft work, I mean—because of the war. Trouble is, Prad’s so far away. You’d need an…” Shome looked at Bartan with fresh interest. “Aren’t you the one who has his own airship?”
“It’s laid up,” Bartan said, seizing on the mention of the war. “What news have you? Do the invaders still persist?”
“They persist, all right—but always they are repelled.”
In Bartan’s experience itinerant workers did not identify themselves with national objectives, but there was an unmistakable note of pride in Shome’s voice.
“It’s a strange war, all the same,” Bartan said. “No armies, no battlefields…”
“Don’t know about there being no battlefield. I heard the skymen sit astride jet tubes as if they were mounted on bluehorns, and they fly out miles from their fortresses. And there aren’t any balloons—no balloons anywhere—nothing to keep you from falling to earth.” Shome gave a noisy shudder. “Glad I’m not up there—a man could get himself killed up there.”
Bartan nodded. “That’s why kings no longer lead their armies into battle.”
“Lord Toller doesn’t hold with that. You’ve heard of Lord Toller Maraquine, haven’t you?”
Bartan associated the name with the far-off events of the Migration, and was mildly surprised to hear that such an historic figure was still active. “We’re not completely cut off from civilisation, you know.”
“They say Lord Toller has spent more time up there, fighting the pestilent Landers, than any other man alive.” Speaking with patriotic fervour, Shome launched into a series of anecdotes —some of which had to be fanciful—about the heroic exploits of Lord Toller Maraquine in the interplanetary war. At times his voice thickened and shook with emotion, suggesting that he was acting out the tales in his imagination with himself as the central figure, and Bartan’s attention began to stray back to the jibes aimed at him by his former friends.