“But there aren’t any Grandfathers around here,” Bill said. “At least there aren’t any in the village, or in the outlaw camp, here.”
“That’s just it!” said Anita urgently. “Nearly all of the Dilbians live up in the mountains, where there are Grandfathers, and the Grandfathers do control everything. It’s only down here in the Lowlands, where old tribal customs have started to relax their hold in the face of the different necessities of an agricultural community that there aren’t any Grandfathers to deal with.”
“But you said—” fumbled Bill, “that you had to get a Grandfather to accept your new idea before you could get the other Dilbians to accept it. If there aren’t any Grandfathers around here—”
“There aren’t any Grandfathers here,” said Anita. “But there are tiamuna-equivalent individuals. Male Dilbians, who under the proper conditions up in the mountains, or at the proper age, would be Grandfathers.”
“You mean,” said Bill, his befuddled wits finally breaking through into a glimmer of the light of understanding, “someone like More Jam—or Bone Breaker?”
“Not More Jam, of course!” she said. “Bone Breaker is right, enough. But in the village, the closest thing they have to a tiamuna-equivalent is Flat Fingers. That’s why I told you to get him on your side.”
“But More Jam—” began Bill.
“More Jam, nonsense!” Anita said energetically. “I know all the villagers have a soft spot for him, and he carries some weight as the local innkeeper, to say nothing of his former glory as Lowland champion wrestler—Dilbians are very loyal. But him and that enormous stomach of his that he pretends can’t stand anything but the daintiest of food—he’s a standing joke for miles around. Remember, a leader can never be a figure of fun—”
“Are you sure?” asked Bill doubtfully.
But she was going on without listening to him. Bill’s head was whirling. Just as he had seemed to hear a note of something incorrect in what Mula-ay had said the day before about Bill’s not being likely to feel an empathy with someone like Bone Breaker, now he had just heard the same note again, accompanying Anita’s statement about More Jam.
Chapter 18
“… I would no more consider you a subject of sana on the basis of our casual acquaintance here, than you would be likely to emphathize with—say—Bone Breaker, or any of the Dilbians …”
“… More Jam, nonsense! … He’s a standing joke for miles around. Remember a leader can never be a figure of fun—”
There was something wrong, thought Bill strongly, about both statements. If he could only connect that wrongness with his strange situation here on Dilbia, he had a feeling he might be on the track of handling that situation. Clearly there were some human machinations at work or else he would not be here at all. Clearly Anita knew nothing about them. Also, clearly, the Hemnoids in the person of Mula-ay were attempting to exploit the situation. But what none of these individuals and groups seemed to have stopped to consider was that possibly the Dilbians concerned might be grinding some axes of their own in the tangle where all this was going on.
The Dilbians—even the Hill Bluffer, in some obscure way Bill’s mind could not at the moment pin down—seemed to have a stake in Bill’s situation, of which Hemnoids and humans alike—even Anita, with her anthropological knowledge—seemed to be ignorant Without being able to prove all this in any way, Bill still felt it—as he had felt the incorrectness of Dilbian-understanding, first in Mula-ay and now in Anita. He felt it in his bones. Anita was still talking. Bill’s attention jerked abruptly back to her.
“… so forget about More Jam and concentrate on the two important figures of Bone Breaker and Flat Fingers,” she was saying. “They’re the ones that have to be moved, and I’m trying, just as much as you are, to move them. That’s why I’ve been working with the Dilbian women—in the village as well as here in the valley—the way I have. I suppose you don’t understand that, even yet?”
“Ah—no,” confessed Bill uncomfortably.
“Then let me tell you,” said Anita. “It’s because the one person that a tiamuna can listen to in the way of advice, without losing face, is his wife! That’s because he can talk things over with her privately, and then announce the results in public as if they were his own idea, and she’s not going to contradict him. And, of course, because of his physical and social superiority over the other male Dilbians, none of them are going to suggest it isn’t his own idea, either.”
“Oh,” said Bill.
“So you see,” Anita wound up, “I know what I’m doing. You don’t—and that’s why you ought to listen to me when I tell you what to do. And one of the things you shouldn’t have done was come into this valley at night, to find me and talk to me. Maybe there is something strange about the way you’ve been left alone to face things. But Lafe didn’t have anything to do with it—you can believe me!”
Bill said nothing. Anita, evidently willing to carry the point by default, paused a minute and then went on to other subjects.
“So what you do,” she said, “is get back to the village as quickly as you can and stay t her el Bone Breaker won’t come into the village after you—that’d be going too far, even for the Muddy Nosers. And even if Bone Breaker brought all his fighting men with him, there’d still be more villagers than they could handle. So as long as you stay in the village, you’re safe. Now do it, and cultivate Flat Fingers as I told you. Now I’ve got to be getting back to No Rest and the others, before they think the Cobblies have eaten me up! You aren’t going to waste any time getting out of the valley now, are you?” A thought seemed to strike her suddenly. “By the way, how did you get in here?”
“Rope,” answered Bill absently, still caught up in his new understanding, “down one of the cliffs.”
“Well, you get back to that rope and get up it as fast as you can!” said Anita. “Can I trust you to do that?”
“—What?” said Bill, coming abruptly back out of the thoughts that had been occupying him. “Oh, of course. Certainly.”
“Well, that’s good,” said Anita. He voice softened, unexpectedly. She put her hand on his arm, and he was abruptly conscious of the light touch of it there. “Please be careful, now.”
She took her hand away with that, turned about, and disappeared into the shadow. For a moment he stood staring into the darkness where she had been, strangely still feeling the touch of her hand even through the thickness of the shirt on his arm. It seemed to him that a little warmth seemed to linger where she had touched him.
Then he shook himself back to awareness. Of course, he was going to head back out of the valley as quickly as he could—but there was still something yet for him to do.
He turned and searched for the large building-shape of the mess hall. He found it and went toward it, keeping in the shadows. Five minutes later he glided up close to the front steps and paused. Here and there a gleam of light still showed between the hide curtains that covered the windows on the inside. But there were no guards standing on either side of the steps leading to the big doors—which were now closed. And the outlaw signal gong hung unguarded.
Bill came up to it and touched it. It was nothing more than a strip of bar iron, hung by a rope from one of the projecting rafter ends that supported the eaves above him. But he suddenly realized that he had made a serious mistake in boasting to the villagers that he would bring this back. For it was at least five feet long and two inches thick. It would be both too awkward and too heavy for him to carry while climbing back up the cliff by means of the rope.
He paused, baffled. If he was right about the Dilbians having their own axes to grind in the present situation, the fact that Bill should be able to produce evidence of having been in the valley this night loomed more importantly than ever. But if he could not carry the gong away with him, as he had promised, what could he do?
An inspiration struck him. He turned to the mess hall wall of peeled and weathered logs just behind the gong. His fingers, searching ove
r its surface, found what he wanted, and unhooked it from the peg that held it by a thong through a hole in one of its ends. He brought it away from the wall, out a little toward the moonlight, so he could examine it. It, like the gong, was simply a length of bar iron. But it was no more than a foot and a half long, with a hole in one end where the thong attached, and below the thong that end was wrapped with cloths to provide a grip for an outsized Dilbian hand. It was, in short, the hammer with which the gong was habitually struck, and something Bill could easily tuck in his belt and take with him back up the cliff to the village.
Tucking his prize through his belt, where the rag-wound end kept it from slipping through, Bill turned and headed back toward the now-visible notch in the moonlit cliff from which his cord, invisible at this distance, was dangling.
The moon was round and full over the valley by this time, but an intermittent cloudiness hid its face from time to time, so that light became dark. This seemed like a good omen— offering a chance for him to cross the relatively open area between the last of the buildings and the fringe of brush and trees at the base of the cliff, without any chance observer from the outlaw buildings happening to glance out and see him moving. Accordingly, when he reached the edge of the shadow of the final building, he hesitated until a cloud hid the moon, and then made a dash for the nearest place of concealment, a small hollow in the valley floor perhaps fifty yards away.
He made it, and dropped flat, just as the moon came out from behind its cloud. But as he lay hugging the earth, he stiffened suddenly in apprehension.
He was lying face downward, with his head turned to one side and his ear pressed against the still-warm earth beneath the short grass. To that ear there had come the momentary sound of thudding feet—before it abruptly ceased and silence took its place.
The cloud that was just beginning to cover the moon with its fleecy, thin, outer edge was a dark and long one. It looked fully long enough to allow Bill to make it the rest of the hundred yards to the cliff and the cover of the undergrowth at the base of the cliff. He held his breath as the dark part of the cloud began to cover the moon. The light faded abruptly—and all at once it was dark.
At once, Bill was on his feet and running for the cliff. But his ears were alert now, and as he ran he was almost certain that he could hear, in time to his own pounding feet, the thud of heavier ones behind him. Winded and panting, but still under the safe cover of darkness, he saw the deeper shadow of the brush and trees at the foot of the cliff, looming up before him. A second later, he was among them. Ducking off to his right, heedless of the branches that lashed at his face and body, he ran off from the main line of his flight for about thirty feet or so, and stopped, as still as the shadows from the moonlight about him, striving to control the panting of his oxygen-exhausted lungs.
Darkness still held the valley. But now there was no doubt about it. Now that he was stopped, Bill heard plainly the heavy sound of his running pursuer come up to and crash into the undergrowth at the base of the cliff—then stop in his turn.
Suddenly there was silence all around. Bill stood, holding his breath—and, somewhere hidden in the darkness less than twenty or thirty feet away, whoever had been following him was standing, holding his breath.
Bill was abruptly conscious of the hard length of the hammer to the valley gong beneath his belt. He backed away along the base of the cliff and looked about, trying to find his rope, or at least the cleft in the top edge of the cliff from which it hung.
However, from this angle of vision—right underneath the cliff, with the bushes and the trees close about him in the now once more brilliant moonlight, the rope seemed nowhere in sight. He hesitated, trying to decide which way he would move to look for it and then, at that moment, he heard a sound that checked him in mid-movement.
It was the sound of a bush rustling less than twenty feet from him.
His pursuer had been closer than he thought. Bill turned desperately to the cliff beside him. It was pitted enough by cracks and holes so that it was just possible he might be able to climb it. He turned to the cliff-face and began to climb.
He went up as noiselessly as he could. For the first eight or ten feet, he made swift and quiet progress. But then, he reached upward with his right leg for a foothold upon a small projection from the cliff-face—and it broke beneath his boot sole.
With a sound that seemed to Bill’s tense ears to be like the roar of an avalanche, the broken piece of rock and a few shards of cliff-face it had carried away with it, Went cascading down to the bushes below.—And with that, everything began to happen very swiftly.
He scrabbled frantically with his unsupported foot for a new resting place. But, as he did so, there was a tearing, rushing sound through the bushes below him, and something that sounded like a snarl of animal triumph. At the same time, the strain of his body weight upon his two hands and remaining foot proved too much for their precarious grasp upon the cliff-face.
The support beneath his other foot gave way suddenly, and he fell, spread-eagled backward, outward into darkness and downward toward the ground, fifteen or twenty feet below.
Chapter 19
As he fell backward through the darkness, Bill instinctively tried to roll himself about in midair as he had learned in Survival School, and land on his feet. But the distance was too short. Even as he tried to relax in expectation of a bone-shattering concussion against the hard ground at the foot of the cliff, his fall was interrupted.
He found himself, unexpectedly, caught in midair—by what appeared to be two very large and capable hands.
“So it’s you, Pick-and-Shovel!” the voice of Bone Breaker rumbled above him. “I thought it was you. Didn’t I get your promise you wouldn’t come back here, except in daylight?”
He set Bill on his feet, as the moonlight broke finally free of all clouds and they saw each other clearly. Bill looked up at the towering, coal-black Dilbian form. His mind was racing. He had never thought faster in his life.
“Well,” he said, “I wanted to talk to you privately—”
“Privately? That’s a Shorty for you!” said Bone Breaker. “Don’t you know that if anybody found out we’ve been talking together privately, anything might happen? Why, people would be likely to start guessing all sorts of things! But here you show up—”
He broke off abruptly, staring down at Bill.
“By the way,” he asked in a tone of puzzlement, “just how did you get here, anyhow? The guards in the gates didn’t let you in. And there’s no way you could get over the stockade fence in the dark.”
Bill took a deep breath and gambled that the truth would serve him better at this point than anything short of subterfuge. He pointed up the wall of the cliff alongside them.
“I climbed down there,” he said.
Bone Breaker continued to stare at him for a long moment. Then the Dilbian outlaw chief’s eyes moved slowly away from him and lifted, traveling up the sheer face of the cliff.
“You—” the words came out of him slowly with long, incredulous pauses in between, “came down that?”
“Why, certainly!” said Bill determinedly and cheerfully, “we Shorties can climb almost anything. Why, back on my own world once, I—”
“Never mind that,” rumbled Bone Breaker. His eyes came back down to focus on Bill’s face. “If you came down it, I suppose you can get back up it, again?”
“Well … yes,” said Bill, a little reluctantly, his fall of a moment before fresh in his mind. “I can climb it, all right.”
“Then you better get going,” said Bone Breaker—not so much angrily as emphatically. “You don’t know how lucky you are it was me who spotted you sneaking around the buildings, back there, instead of it being one of our regular watchmen. It’s just a happy chance for you that I like to take a stroll around myself every evening before I turn in, just to see that everything’s all right. Why, you could’ve spoiled everything!”
“Everything?” echoed Bill frowning.
“Why, certainly,” rumbled Bone Breaker reprovingly. “Why would anybody think you’d be here, except to have that duel with me? And what’s the point of having a duel at this time of night, with no real light to see by and hardly anybody around? No, no, Pick-and-Shovel. You’ve got to get this sort of thing straight in your Shorty head. Something like our duel has to be held in broad daylight. With everybody looking on, too. I want everybody up in the valley, and watching. And as many villagers as can get here, as well.” His voice took on, strange as it seemed, almost a wistful note. “It’s just too bad we can’t send runners out with the word so that anyone in the district could drop by. But, I suppose that’d be overdoing it.”
“Er—yes,” agreed Bill.
“Well, anyway,” said Bone Breaker, his voice becoming suddenly brisk, “you’d better get started. Up that cliff with you and out of sight—and remember! Whatever you do, Pick-and-Shovel, make sure it’s daylight when you come back again. Full daylight!”
“I will,” promised Bill. He turned to the cliff-face without any further hesitation and carefully began to climb. Some ten feet above the ground, he paused to look down. The moon was out from behind its clouds, and by its light he saw the outlaw chief staring up at him. As he watched, Bone Breaker shook his head a little, as if in amazement, and then turned and went off toward the buildings, just as the moon slid once more behind a cloud, and darkness covered the scene.
As soon as the face of the cliff was cloaked in. shadow, Bill ceased climbing. Cautiously, feeling his way with hands and feet in the gloom with his heart thudding, Bill climbed back down slowly onto solid ground. When at last he stood firmly upright upon it, he found his face was wet with perspiration. A single misstep on the way down could have set him falling, the way he had done once already. And this time, there would have been no Bone Breaker to catch him.